http://www.obrien.ie/book876.cfm

Details of Emma the Penguin are now up on the O’Brien Press website – cute cover!

More ramblings this evening – currently doing a ‘light Americanization’ of Amy Green 1. Try saying that one quickly!

Book launch details later too . . .

SarahX

Sarah’s News

(Going out by blog and Facebook – problem with newsletter mailing list, apologies!)

Happy Christmas and all the best for 2010!

My dear friends, humble apologies. I have been rubbish on the newsletter front. Facebook I don’t have a problem with – and if you’ve also been sucked in you can find me at:

http://facebook.com/sarahwebbwriter

It’s fun, honest! And especially good for lonely old writers like me who crave some human interaction when they are at their desks. OK, yes, it’s a colossal time waster too – but that’s half the fun. It feels kinda naughty.

Book News

2010 will be a bumper year on the book front with four books out and also a charity book in aid of the Hope Foundation. If that counts, it’s five!

Book 1: The Loving Kind

The LOving Kind

In February my new adult novel, The Loving Kind will hit the bookshelves. I had great fun writing it as some of the characters are pretty bonkers. Eason have just made it their Book of the Month which is rather exciting news too!

It gave me a rather frightening insight into the whole world of fillers, Botox and plastic surgery. Maybe frightening is too strong a word. Unnerving is more accurate. I can now spot a filler-enhanced cheek a mile off. It’s great craic playing spot the Botox-Queen but I think I’m boring my nearest and dearest by this stage by shouting out every time a celebrity comes on the screen:
‘Botox, mini face life, chemical peel, filler . . .’
I hate to say it but as far as I can tell, more and more celebrities are dabbling, making us normal mortals look a little creased.
I hate injections with a passion (OK, I know no-one exactly loves them, but I’ve had teeth pulled with no jab ‘cause I hate them so much), so I don’t think I’d ever go down the enhancement route. But sometimes when I look in the mirror in the morning and see a tired looking face staring back at me I am tempted.
And I can understand why telly/film stars have it done – it does ‘freshen’ up the face. But it also wipes out detail and expression. Plus what happens if years down the line they discover a link between fillers and skin cancer for eg? It’s just not worth it.
OK, rant over.

Books 2 and 3: Amy Green, Teen Agony Queen – Summer Secrets and Bridesmaid Blitz

Summer Secrets

Anyway, book 2 is Amy Green, Teen Agony Queen: Summer Secrets. Set in Dublin, West Cork and Miami, it’s the second in the Amy Green series for tweens and teens and I’m very proud of it.
If you have a girl of 10+ in your life, please do buy it for her.
Amy Green is a lovely character and I adore writing about her adventures.

So much so that there’s another Amy Green in the autumn (Amy Green book 3) – working title Bridesmaid Blitz. Set in Paris and Dublin and full of school tour shenanigans.

Book 4: Emma the Penguin

I have an early reader out with the O’Brien Press in February called Emma the Penguin, about a little girl called Emma who is a penguin in her school’s Noah’s Ark play much to her disappointment – she thinks it’s a silly animal. But she makes the most of it and by the end of the book learns that making people laugh is a real gift.

Book 5: Hope Collection

And the lovely Vanessa O’Loughlinn of Inkwell Writers Workshops is putting together a charity collection in aid of the Hope Foundation and I have a short piece in it called Hope and J K Rowling.

Other Future Book News

Candlewick have just signed up the Amy Green rights. They will be publishing all six books in the series, starting in Autumn (Fall) 2010 and it’s mega exciting.

And I’ve just signed a deal for 2 new adult books with Pan Macmillan. They will centre around a shop and an elephant tamer and more than that, I cannot divulge at present. But they are called The Shoestring Diaries.

Oh and the first Amy Green has just come out in Polish – what fun!

Other News

To be honest apart from a trip to London to talk Amy Green with Walker I haven’t really been up to all that much recently. I’ve just been writing – a lot!

Here’s a low down of my week at the moment:
7.00 – drag myself out of bed
7.30 – drag the kids out of bed and make the sambos (I hate making school lunches – is there anything more tedious!?)
8.30 – get Amy to school
9.00 – get Jago to school
9.00 to 10.00 – walk until I feel guilty and rush back to my desk
10.00 to 1.00 – write – at the moment Amy Green book 4 – my aim is 2k words a day – notice the word aim!
1.00 – collect Amy and have lunch
2.00 to 5.30 – write again – editing, website stuff, reviews and articles mainly – I keep my best hours – the morning – for my novels (sorry, editors!!!)
8.00 to 11.00 – write again – editing etc (Facebook too!)

See – pretty thrilling isn’t it? Not!!!

Sometimes I take an hour or two off to walk with the lovely Martina Devlin or meet Vanessa O’Loughlinn for coffee. And I have the odd meeting with my Irish publishers or festival bods which get me out of the house (and my pyjamas).

And if I get my word count done by Friday – 8,000 words – I take Friday off. In theory. Recently I went to the Munch exhibition on my ‘day off’, sometimes I just mooch around the shops or go to the cinema in the afternoon (my guilty pleasure – I love an empty cinema). Laughed my way through New Moon last week – ‘Bella, will you marry me.’ Hilarious stuff! So swooney, great escapism but utterly mad. But who wouldn’t a great big wolf and a vampire fighting over them – especially if you were quite mopey and didn’t smile much – Bella is one lucky girl!

Writing for a living requires a lot of discipline. It also requires a thick skin and self confidence, the willingness to continue on writing in the face of a lot of knock backs.

I’m still at the learning stage in this writing game, but my favourite part of each and every day is sitting at my desk in the morning, jumping back into my fictional world, all my ‘real’ worries pushed to the back of my mind.

It’s a glorious thing when it all comes together.

Christmas Chez Webb/Cooke

Ben is cooking Christmas dinner with his dad. I am avoiding all responsibility! I will make soup and generally help out by ‘tasting’ and stuffing myself.
I’m hoping for books and book tokens for Christmas – fingers crossed! Speaking of which . . .

Books

I’ve been reading a lot of children’s books recently. I find them far more fun than a lot of adult novels, well plotted, fast paced and funny.

But I did enjoy The Brightest Star by Marian Keyes
Not as much as This Charming Man which was my favourite book of the year last year. But it’s still a cracking good read. Ideal for curling up with on cold days (or any day really).

I also loved Would You Rather by Chris Higgins, a teen writer I hadn’t tested out – shame on me! She’s good, very good. If your teen likes Cathy Cassidy, she’ll love Higgins too.

And The Help is brilliant – a book about black maids in the Southern states of America in the 1960s. A great read – funny, smart, fascinating and easy to read – I’d highly recommend it. By Kathryn Stockett

I’m also loving The American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld – about a President’s wife. A real sweeping novel to get your teeth stuck into. Highly recommended.

Hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and New Year and talk to you again in February.

Much love,

Sarah XXXX

I’ve been suffering from writer’s fatigue this week – I’m plain old tired basically. Ben’s away in Chicago and he’s usually very hands on. We share the mornings – the kids can get up pretty early and I hate the pre-school dash – making the sambos makes me scream, which is funny as I’m generally quite a calm person.
So I’m a bit on edge this week – stiff neck, slow moving, generally not shiny and happy.

But I’m still writing. So how does how a writer is feeling effect/affect their work – hang on, just grab my dictionary – I can never remember which is it – I need Martina Devlin’s amazingly brilliant grammar help – OK – effect is the noun . . . affect their work. (Sorry, told you I was tired!).

Well it slows it down, that’s for sure. But sometimes I try to go with my mood – if I’m grouchy I write a grouchy scene. If I’m emotional, I write an emotional scene (often making myself cry buckets in the process), if I’m in a lively mood I write a lively scene. Doesn’t always work – and my teen books don’t have all that many really sad scenes – but it’s useful when it does.

Often once I start writing, I write myself out of a bad mood – it’s great therapy. I’ve never sat down at my desk and not been able to write a thing – but I’m pretty stubborn that way – I won’t let myself get up until I’ve at least got a few words down.

Hope you can write through your own bad moods. And even if you are too wrecked to physically write, keep the story in your head and think about what your characters are up to in the scene you are about to approach next. Always keep them in your head.

Agatha Christie said she did her best plotting while washing the dishes – she must have had a lot of clean dirty dishes – her plots are fab!

Yours in writing,
SarahX

Amy Green Book 2

Ta da! Here is a sneak preview of the cover of Amy Green book 2 – Summer Secrets – which will be published in Feb 2010. The butterflies are silver and the green is metallic. I love it!
Do hope you like it too!

SarahX

PS any comments to sarah@sarahwebb.ie as posts still swamped with junk after hols

I was at the lovely Fighting Words centre today in Dublin city, helping with a class of 5th and 6th year boys. They made up a story with the help of fab Jen, their storyteller.

Anyway, I met several most interesting women who were also helping out, 3 of whom are writing and are very interested in the whole creative process. I told one of them I was editing my latest adult book (sorry folks, more about the darned editing – which I should be doing right at this moment in fact – but it’s important) – and she asked ‘What do you mean by ‘editing’ exactly?

Interesting question.

The way I see it there are many, many different stages to an ‘edit’ and some are not ‘editing’ at all.

I’ll go through it step by step just to freak out all those people out there who think a book is finished once the first draft is done and dusted.

Here’s what happens to my novels in a nutshell (the non fiction books are a little different):

1/Finish first draft – now I don’t rewrite much as I go along – so it’s a messy first draft and needs a lot of work.

2/ Print out the whole thing – I can’t edit on screen – I need to scribble – and read through the whole thing – A4 pad by my side, to write on and insert extra scribbled pages into the manuscript as necessary.
I delete scenes/chapters that don’t work, plotlines that go nowhere, delete a lot of descriptive passages and rewrite them in a sentence or two. Work on making each character stronger.

3/ I type in all the changes, print out and start editing on the pages again.
I might do this 3, 4 or 5 times until I’m happy that my editor won’t laugh me out of it.

4/ I email the book to my editors (at the moment I have 2 who work as a team) and now, my agents.
My previous agent didn’t actually read my manuscripts, but my new ones do – I have 1 who deals with the kids books, 1, the adult books. To get feedback from so many experts is fabber than fab. I’m very lucky.

5/ They all send me their notes – or I chat to them on the phone about the book. I make my own notes on the changes to be made.

6/ I mull over these changes for a few days, making more notes.

7/ I print out the manuscript again and scribble the changes on to the pages. Sometimes if I have to rewrite a long scene or add a new one, I’ll type straight onto my laptop.

8/ Then I type the changes in.

9/ Then I print the whole thing out again, read it again, and make more changes, type in.
And I haven’t gone near the actual writing yet – this is all mainly plot and character stuff!

10/ Once I’m happy with the actual story and characters, I send it to my editor again and she sends me a ‘line edit’ – a more detailed, line by line edit of smaller, but important changes.

11/ So I make those changes – this usually only takes 1 or 2 print, scribble on pages, type ins. And then I send it back to her, and if she’s happy she passes it to the copyeditor.

12/ The copyeditor does what Joe public thinks ‘editing’ is – correcting typos, suggesting word changes for repeated words; smaller changes, additions for clarity and deletion of unnecessary words.

13/ When I get those notes, I make those changes (usually on screen at that stage) start tweaking the language – taking any any unnecessary words, tightening up the dialogue, making sure each chapter starts and ends as crisply and with as much impact as possible.

14/ Then once I’m happy with that (after printing out and reading one more time!), I’ll send it back to the copy editor and once she’s happy and the manuscript is ‘clean’ – free of any mistakes – she passes it on to the typesetter – who puts it into the book’s format – with the chapter headings, page numbers, prelims etc.

15/ Final stage (thank God!) – I get sent the ‘galleys’ or the proof pages to check through – which I do carefully, every single word – small mistakes pop up even at that stage that have been missed (and it’s the author’s duty to double check for these I feel – no one cares as much about your book as you do).

16/ The book is printed.

Oh, and I’m usually half way through a new book (let’s call it book 2) when the edits for book 1 hit – so I have to stop writing book 2, edit book 1 – send book 1 back to my editor – get back to writing book 2 – get the edits for book 1 back – work on the edits for book 1 again – send them off – back to book 2 – etc etc.

OK, hold it there, you’re saying – isn’t that a lot of work?
YES!
But are all books written like that?
No, some are published with a lot less editorial attention – on the publishers and/or the authors’ part. And some books require less work for some reason. My first Amy Green book was a joy to write – just flew out of me – but the 2nd one needed more work as I was trying to do too much – I needed to pare it back, make it simpler, concentrate on what I was really trying to say.

So there you go – now you probably know far too much about my editing process. Sorry if I’ve scared you.

SarahX
PS Sorry trees for all the printing – I’m green in other ways, promise!

After another edit of Amy Green, mark 2 this morning (called Summer Secrets and out next spring), I now know the book almost off by heart. But I’m very happy with the way it’s come together (thanks to my two brilliant editors) and the end is in sight.

I’m now moving on to re-write The Loving Kind, my adult book for next spring. A writer’s work is never done!
But I do love it.

I’ve just finished reading the 30 shortlisted finalists for the Londis ‘Write Up My Street’ writing competition which ran recently. The winning entry is – actually I can’t tell you yet – all top secret! But it’s a great piece altogether – more anon.

But I can say this – the moment I started to read it, I knew it was the one. It has real heart, it’s beautifully written (not over written or flowery, just right), and the writer has clearly done her or his (can’t say yet!) homework – thinking carefully about the theme (community) and approaching it in a clever, left of centre way.

I was tres impressed. The future of Irish writing is rainbow bright.

Happy Bloomsday!

SarahX

I’m currently editing Amy Green book 2 for the 6th time – and I’d say there will be 1 or 2 more edits to go. It’s a 50,000 word book (ah, well it started off at 63,000 but it needed to be tightened up) so that’s a lot of work.
But it’s worth it.

I’m thinking of posting some deleted scenes on my amy green website – little snippets that I’ve taken out – like deleted scenes on dvds.
Maybe not. They were cut for a reason!

I have over ten year’s worth of editorial notes and letters and it’s interesting to see how my writing has changed and progressed over that time.

My writing is much tighter now, I use more dialogue, but less dialogue tags, more condensed descriptive passages and my characters are stronger and more rounded (I hope!). And these days I put a lot more thought into the little things – the small details that make all the difference.

When I’m working on a book it’s in my head all the time – waking, sleeping, driving, walking. I literally live in another world.

Recently I’ve been thinking about what I write – and why. And I think I write about romance, family, relationship because that’s the world I like to inhabit in my head.

But one thing I have learned over the years: writing begets writing. Words beget words. Best way to write is to immerse yourself in it if you can and write as often as you can.

I’m lucky to have the time and space to do this. Writing full time is a joy and a privilege.

I wish you all some good writing time.

SarahX

I have a rather special birthday on Sunday so Ben is whisking me off to Paris to celebrate. I worked in Paris for four months one summer when I was a student and adored it. I worked in McDonald’s – and it was hot, hot, hot making those chips – but I survived!

I haven’t been back since and I can’t wait. This time I’ll actually have a wee bit of money so it will be a very different experience.

We are staying in a small townhouse hotel in Montmartre, right next to the Moulin Rouge, just in case we fancy a spot of can-canning.

I’ll tell you all about it next week, promise!

SarahX

A couple of bits of good news for those of the writerly persuasion.

Libraries are reporting a rise in demand for ‘chick lit’ as ‘readers try to escape the gloom’. And a highly respected literary editor also told me yesterday that ‘feel-good’ books are all the rage at the moment.

And people, let me tell you, that is good news for us ‘chick litters’, and popular fiction writers in general. Our star shineth brightly.

Second piece of news comes c/o The Bookseller.

‘Hodder snaps up novels 3 and 4 by Geraghty’

Hodder has acquired world rights to 2 novels by new Irish chick-lit writer Ciara Geraghty for ‘a significant six-figure sum.’ This deal is for Ciara’s 3rd and 4th books. So huge congrats to Ciara – her first book, Saving Grace, is certainly worth reading – very funny, with a great, warm, independent main character. Something a bit different. If you like Marian Keyes or Clare Dowling, you’ll enjoy it too.

Some good news for Thursday. To go along with the sun!

SarahX

Remember the Noah’s Ark play I was telling you about – the one I wrote for my daughter’s school? Anyway it was on this week and I went with Amy to see it.

The young actors were fab and it was so weird to see them saying the words I’d written. What I was most proud of was this – I gave each of Noah’s sons and daughters a very different character – for example Ada-Darling was a cheerleader type, interested in her nails and her hair and married to the sporty brother. This worked really well – as each of the actors really used this to bring their part alive.

In fact it made me realise how important strong, larger than life characters are, both on stage and on the page. Characters make a story.

So if you are writing fiction, make sure your characters jump off the page.

SarahX