Silly me..

I was so excited about the Young Minds longlist thing that I forgot to announce the winner of the signed copy of Girl Aloud by Emily Gale. The winner is Rhoda - congratulations - I think you have your book already. I'm sure you'll enjoy it. Thanks to everyone for entering, and why not have a go at winning a fabulous signed copy of Luisa Plaja's Swapped by a Kiss? All you have to do is comment on the post below - and follow if you're not already following.

Swapped by a Kiss giveaway - and some news

Meg Cabot, queen of teen rom coms called Luisa Plaja's Split by a Kiss 'cute,sweet and funny' and the sequel 'Swapped by a Kiss' has all the same ingredients.
American Rachel - the spiky unpredictable one in Split is in England and by some magic swaps bodies with her English friend Jo. And Rachel's boyfriend David is kissing Jo! I've only just started reading it (so this giveaway competition will be on for as long as it takes me) but already I'm hooked by the pace and humour. When I read Split I was really intrigued by Rachel, so it's great to get inside her head (even when it's inside someone else's body)
Luisa has been kind enough to donate a signed copy, so this is your chance to win!
Same rules as before - you need to follow the blog and comment to be entered, but this time I'll add that if you retweet the comp on twitter or mention it on your blog you can have two entries.
And a little bit of news of my own. When I Was Joe has been longlisted for the 2010 Young Minds Book Award. Young Minds is the UK's only national charity committed to improving the mental health and emotional well-being of all children and young people, and its annual Book Award 'seeks to raise awareness and create understanding of mental health needs of children and young people. Books such as those submitted for the award can help break the isolation experienced by young people and demonstrate that their feelings and problems are not unique.'
There are twelve books on the longlist, which will be considered for a shortlist of six. The books are: Dear Dylan, by Siobhan Curham (Authorhouse, Desperate Measures, by Laura Summers (Piccadilly,Ember Fury, by Cathy Brett (Headline,
Ice Lolly, by Jean Ure (Harper Collins Children’s Books,Inside, by J A Jarman (Andersen),Lottie Biggs is Not Desperate by Hayley Long (Macmillan Children’s Books,
No Way To Go, by Bernard Ashley, (Hachette), Running on the Cracks, by Julia Donaldson (Egmont, Them and Us, by Bali Rai (Barrington Stoke),The Truth about Leo, by David Yelland (Penguin, When I was Joe, by Keren David (Frances Lincoln Children’s Books)and Zelah Green, Queen of Clean, by Vanessa Curtis (Egmont)

Past winners include the amazing Tabitha Suzuma and the Canadian writer Miriam Toews.

Remembering Nick and Marcin

A mother's account of life on the streets of London for teenage boys in The Times. "We all react in different ways: some keep their teenagers locked up or supervised, others let them out with spare money in their pockets, just in case."
She talks about two recent deaths in London. Nick Pearton, 16 was chased through a park in Sydenham and stabbed. He ran to a local fast food shop (pictured) where his mother cradled him in her arms, but paramedics could not save his life.
Marcin Bilaszewski was attacked after getting off a bus at Finsbury Park station - my local tube station.
If mothers are scared for their sons on the streets of London, how do the boys themselves react? How do you grow up and become independent - and keep danger in proportion - when you read about Nick and Marcin?

The Mash-up Approach to Settings

If you've read When I Was Joe (and if not, why not?) then you'll know that a park and the playground equipment in it play an important part in the plot. Supposedly the park is in Hackney, near the homes of Ty and his friend Arron. It's a little patch of green in a deprived neighbourhood, a place to play that becomes a place of fear and horror when a killing takes place there.
Only two readers so far have spotted that the park actually exists, but it's not in Hackney. It's actually in leafier Crouch End, very near where I live. I suppose I could have spent ages researching Hackney parks, working out where Ty lived, and how he’d got in and out of the park. Instead I magically transferred my local park south and east, filled in the geography around it - the High Street where Ty lives to the south, Arron’s estate to the east - and found it easy to remember what went where when I wrote those scenes.
Similarly I suppose I could have found an actual high street for Ty to live in, and spent time describing the shops there. I didn’t. I had in mind various busy London streets – Stroud Green Road in Finsbury Park; the Lower Clapton Road. But really Ty’s home is based mainly on my experiences of living in a very different shopping street. CornelisSchuytstraat where we lived in Amsterdam is an exceptionally chi-chi boutiquey kind of street, where cardigans cost 200€ and the local food store only sells organic produce. But we lived above a shop - a travel agent - and from that I know how one makes friends with the shopkeepers, and lives with the smells and noise of their businesses. How as a parent one is more likely to leave children temporarily unattended - because they’re not really home alone when there’s an office full of adults in the same building. And how a street that is busy and bustling during the day is eerily empty at night.
The small town where Ty goes to live is deliberately bland and dull - in contrast to the multi-cultural kaleidoscope of London. Although geographically it’s further north, the small-town feel was definitely informed by the towns where I grew up and went to school, Welwyn Garden City and Hatfield. However the geography of the town was roughly based on Crouch End where I live - or at least on my daughter’s walk to school, just to help me remember whether the hills went up or down and where the High Street was in relation to Joe's home and school. The layout of Joe and Michelle's safe house however, came from the semi that my husband grew up in, in north Manchester.
So, I move houses and parks around. I merge streets and towns. Sometimes I home in on an actual place and try and describe it - the area around Finsbury Park station, for example, with its bowling alley and its mobile phone shops and gum-splattered pavements. At other times I’m deliberately vague and generic. To Ty, ‘outside London’ is a much blurrier fuzzier place than his home town.
Author Karen McCombie set her popular Ally's World series around Crouch End. Some readers make special trips to our area to see the clock tower, Alexandra Palace and other exciting features of the neighbourhood. My daughter was a big fan, and when we moved back to Crouch End from Amsterdam we did quite a few drives around trying to work out exactly where everyone lived. When I met Karen I was under orders to ask her for exact addresses. Of course they don’t exist….Ally’s world is a little addition to Crouch End’s existing streets.
Gillian Philip, author of the fabulous Crossing the Line and Bad Faith sets the latter, a dystopia about fundamentalist religion, in an unnamed Scotland. Her anonymous city setting powerfully reminded me of the tenement flat I used to own in Glasgow. Later Gillian and I became friends and I told her how much her book made me think of the Govanhill area of Glasgow. She was impressed as she’d based that aspect of the novel on her grandmother’s flat which was - yes! - in Govanhill. We checked further. I used to live one street away from Gillian’s granny.
Many authors write about actual real-life places and their work is enriched by a strong sense of place. Others delight in creating made-up worlds. My approach is a bit of a mash-up.
Anyway the fort in the park is falling apart. There's a consultation meeting to decide what happens to it. I'm hoping it'll be restored, just as it is. After all, it's in a book!

A winner!

Congratulations to Rhoda, winner of the signed copy of Girl Aloud whose name was plucked from a hat this morning. Just email your address to almosttrue@hotmail.co.uk
Stand by for more signed book competitions very soon.

Girl Aloud Giveaway!

One of the most wonderful things about getting published has been meeting lots of YA and children's authors.
If you're embarking on a new career you couldn't pick a more welcoming bunch of people. They are - collectively - warm, funny, friendly, encouraging, knowledgable, entertaining and big-hearted.
Some have become friends to meet for coffee or lunch, ask for advice and discuss how best we can promote our books. It turned out that I knew one of them already - Kaye Umansky, creator of Pongwiffy the witch - lives three doors away from me. Others live many miles away but feel like neighbours, they're Twitter pals or Facebook friends or both - available for chats and banter all hours of day and night.
To celebrate the general wonderfulness of the YA and children's writing world I'm going to have the occasional signed book giveaway on the blog. To enter you need to be a follower of the blog - just leave a comment under this post if you'd like to win and I'll pull a winner from a hat in a few weeks.
The first giveaway is Girl Aloud by Emily Gale. This is an incredibly rare item in the Northern hemisphere - it'll probably be worth a fortune one day - because Emily lives in Melbourne, which makes her a Twitter/Facebooky friend. She's written an all-English book though, the story of Kass whose dad is desperate for her to shine and enters her for X Factor although she can't sing for toffee and has no interest at all in being famous. I loved the way the characters slowly reveal themselves to us, and the plot refuses to conform to stereotypes.
Girl Aloud came out in the UK in September but has only recently been published in Australia. At Emily's launch party she gave away a pile of signed YA books by Australian and British authors. When I was packing up a copy of When I Was Joe to send halfway around the world I had the idea for this blog feature. I'm hoping it will become a regular thing so spread the word!

What next?

How does a writer decide what to write next? Do you stick to the same genre and style as your previous book(s) or strike out in a new direction?

The question was posed by Anne M Leone (one of the Undiscovered Voices winners), after I blogged about my latest book. She wrote: I was wondering how similar you imagine the new book will be to your previous novels about Ty. I've been thinking a lot lately about what one writes after one's first book/series. Did you keep the same setting? Same type of genre/age group? Same themes? Or did you not make any conscious decisions at all, but just write the next idea you had?

I’m very new to writing fiction. Just over two years ago my only experience of creative writing as an adult was failing the Open University Writing Fiction short course, because I couldn’t get my head around the short story form. When I started writing When I Was Joe I was most interested to see if I could actually write a whole book. I didn’t think much beyond that.
When I finished writing Joe I wanted to try writing in two voices. I started work on something about twin boys. I wrote about 15 chapters, then the story fizzled out - mainly because I had no idea where it was meant to be going. I showed it to my writing group. They weren’t keen. Later I showed it to my agent. She didn’t like it. So that one was abandoned…although I’m still perversely fond of it and I might revisit it one day.
Then one day I woke up with a killer first sentence for a sequel to Joe, plus ideas for the first three chapters, and a great chapter ending. I sat down and wrote it, even though I know it was complete madness and a total waste of time to write a sequel when I didn’t even have an agent, let alone a book deal. But I couldn’t stop writing it (and rewriting huge swathes after my writing group had their say). I’d written about a third of Almost True by the time I got a deal for Joe, and my editor at Frances Lincoln read it and offered for that too.
I finished the first draft of Almost True in October 2009, and had made all the major structural changes by the end of the month.
Then I madly signed up to write a novel in a month. I had a vague dystopia idea knocking around my head. I started writing…and hated it. My narrator felt insipid, the plot was turgid. Clearly I needed time to clear my head, move on from Ty, spend a bit of time thinking up a killer idea.
But it didn’t work like that. Halfway through November I was reading a news story about a big lottery win and wham! I had my new idea. I had the same feeling that I’d had with witness protection. This is a subject I can write about. This is a subject with depth.
So, what stays the same? The setting is London, and it’s contemporary. It’s told in the first person. It’s aimed at teenagers, boys and girls. It’s based on a news story, and I’m researching it much as I would a newspaper or magazine feature. At the heart of it there’s a teenager faced with a life-changing event. I try and build believable rounded characters, I try and keep the pace reasonably fast-moving. I try and create a protagonist who is human and flawed yet sympathetic.
And what’s different? The narrator is a girl, not a boy. I’m finding that more difficult - but that’s possibly because Ty’s voice is still strong in my head. The themes are completely different. The main character is older than Ty, the language she uses is a little more complicated. It’s not a thriller. It’s got more romance and it’s more obviously funny. It’s written in the past tense, which is messing with my mind - I hate it - but it does work for the story and it makes me feel it’s very different from When I Was Joe.
I’ve seen very successful authors labelled by their genre, under pressure to come up with the same formula again and again. I’ve seen some talented writers actually come up with pretty much the same book again and again. I'd love their success, but until I have it I want to develop my range. I’m still learning to write fiction. I’d rather attempt to build a reputation as a writer who can do different things than as a writer of ‘dark’ and ‘gritty’ crime novels.
Having said all that, nagging away at the back of my mind is a third book about Ty. I’m not sure whether that's where it'll stay.