Dear Unpublished Me - Anna Day

This weeks Dear Unpublished Me post comes to you from the author of one of the most anticipated books of 2018 Anna Day! Anna grew up and still lives in the North East of England. She studied Psychology at university, and worked for several years as an Assistant Psychologist. She has always loved creative writing; even as a little girl she would staple pieces of paper together and write stories for her parents to read. However, she only started writing seriously a few years ago, and was noticed by the Chicken House team when she was shortlisted for the Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition in 2015. Her greatest love is her children -- a little girl and a little boy, who provide her with constant entertainment and inspiration.

Dear Anna,

It’s autumn 2014. You’re on maternity leave with your second baby and, a few months ago, you lost your agent. You’ve printed off your novel The Gallows Dance and you want to post it to Chicken House in order to enter the Times/ Chicken House competition for unpublished authors. The deadline is tomorrow. You’ve just driven to your local post office and it’s closed. You’ve got a toddler and a baby in the car and you’re in the clutches of babydom: sleep-deprived, sore-breasted, sleep-deprived, banana down your top, and did I mention sleep-deprived? You have two options: drive to the post office in the next village, get the kids out the car, drag them into town, manage your toddler’s war-cries for chocolate, risk the baby waking up and screaming the place down and finally post your manuscript, or you can just go home.

I understand why you’re tempted by the latter option, the just going home option.

Your writing journey to this point, whilst relatively short, has not been smooth. You wrote a book whilst on maternity leave with your first baby (two books in fact, but the first one was TERRIBLE!) and managed to get an agent. She was awesome, full of life and ideas, and she really believed in you. But, not surprisingly, someone else thought she was awesome and offered her a job as an editor. Which she took. Hence, you became agentless.

She tried to help you get another agent, but The Gallows Dance was dystopia, and the blanket response, though positive about your writing, was ‘sorry, the dystopia market is saturated.’ You could not get your head around this. You LOVED dystopia, and had read every dystopian book you could get your hands on during both of your maternity leaves. It seemed people could get enough of a good thing. And now you’re left wondering if the post office’s annoyingly early closing time is a sign telling you to take the hint and give up on the dream of publication.

Another factor nagging at you while you sit in your car, massive envelope clutched in your hands, is the very realistic possibility of more rejection. Like I said, I know how tired you are, raising kids is amazing, but Christ, it’s hard work, and I remember too well those moments of fragility when reading yet another book-related email containing bad news. Could you really stomach another rejection?

I know you’re seriously considering driving home. But if you do, that may well be the end of your writing dream. You now have two children, not one. You’re back at work in a few months. Will you really find the motivation to write a whole new novel without an agent encouraging you and absolutely no guarantee of publication?

I understand why you’re tempted by the latter option, the just going home option. But here’s why you mustn’t:

The need to make sense of internal and external worlds with words, the need to connect with others through story-telling, the need to walk in someone else’s shoes entirely and share their journey, is in your blood. It’s why you became a Psychologist, and it’s why you must not give up on writing.

And when your marriage ends, you will need writing more than ever. It will give you a focus, a distraction, a way of rebuilding your self-esteem. It will model to your children that a single Mum can achieve her dreams. By doing what you love, achieving all you can be, you will show your children how to find happiness from within themselves.

It’s why you absolutely should not just drive home. It’s why you should haul the kids out of the car, drag them through town, deal with the chocolate-fuelled tantrums and the howling baby and post that manuscript if it bloody well kills you.

I promise it will be worth it.

Lots of love, 2017 Anna xxx

P.s. – You will totally crack and buy your toddler chocolate

Publisher: Chicken House

Publication Date: 4th January 2018

THE FANDOM

by Anna Day

Summary

Cosplay ready, Violet and her friends are at Comic-Con. 

They can’t wait to meet the fandom of mega movie, The Gallows Dance. What they’re not expecting is to be catapulted by freak accident into their favourite world – for real. Fuelled by love, guilt and fear, can the friends put the plot back on track and get out? The fate of the story is in their hands ...

A fast-paced, genre-flipping YA fantasy adventure from a brand new author, writing in homage to the best YA fiction. 

AMAZON UK |AMAZON US | WATERSTONES | 
BOOK DEPOSITORY

Dear Unpublished Me - James Nicol

This weeks Dear Unpublished Me post comes to you from my local celebirty James Nicol! James is the author of the best selling MG novel The Apprentice Witch and the muchly anticipated second novel A Witch Alone. 
James Nicol has loved books and stories his whole life. As a child he spent hours absorbed in novels, watching epic 1980s cartoons or adventuring in the wood at the bottom of the garden searching for dragons and witches. He has worked in bookshops and libraries and now spends all his spare time writing! He lives on the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens in a house with too many books and too many musical instruments with his partner and a black and white cockapoo called Bonnie. 

Dear Unpublished Me . . .

First of all, this is not some sort of ‘ghost of Christmas past’ moment. I’m not about to recount hundreds of things you’ve done wrong with your life in hope of changing you – it’s all good!

So, I’m hoping this letter finds you through the mists of time (cue swirly mists and strange music) somewhere at the point where you have just started to write the first draft of The Apprentice Witch, which at that point was called The Apprentice Witches Handbook. (spoiler number one, the title of the book changes – as does quite a lot of the book itself – you’ll get over it!) But at this point the big question on your mind is simply, “Can I finish writing a whole novel?”

Well yes you can – so whatever you do don’t give up or based on my Doctor Who and Star Trek watching that could make things really sticky for me at this end of things!

It will be tricky fitting it all in with work and everything else and sometimes you will feel entirely lost but KEEP GOING, you will always find your way back. There are such exacting times ahead of you that you wouldn’t ever imagine, new places to visit, new adventures and experiences awaiting you and all for the story that is slowly forming in your mind. Oh, and just a quick tip – give up now trying to do that first draft straight onto the computer it’s like torture. Get a nice notebook and a mechanical pencil and go for it – it took me half a year of staring helplessly at the laptop screen to work that out!

You’ll soon meet a bunch of wonderful children’s and YA writers through the Golden Egg Academy many of whom will become some of your closest and dearest friends, you don’t have to go on this journey alone and they will be great support through the years ahead. You’ll also get to work with some of the very best editors in the country as a result and you don’t need to worry that you don’t know what you are doing or that people will laugh or think you are stupid or have no business writing a children’s book! No one else will doubt you so try not to doubt yourself so much either.

You are going to LOVE the editing process far more than you can ever imagine, it is a much more creative part of writing a book than how you are imagining it to be, so stop worrying about that. Editors aren’t scary and you will work with some really fantastic people over the coming years who will all care about your story and character as much as you do.

OK – major spoiler alert now. Your story will find a home with an amazing publisher, one you have long admired since your days as a children’s bookseller. This will be in a rather unexpected way (I don’t want to spoil the surprise though!) You’ll be well supported by friends old and new through all of this and find a wonderful agent, someone you meet through Golden Egg and who you think highly of and trust implicitly.

There are a thousand and more wonderful experiences waiting ahead, seeing your book rolling off the conveyor belt at the printers, holding the finished book in your hands for the first time and getting to give a copy to Nana on her 95^th Birthday.

Seeing the response to the book from bloggers and reviewers will be great but it will be the experience of readers that will be the best experience, children presenting well-thumbed copies of your book over to be signed and talking to you about Arianwyn and Salle and Colin will be the very best part of the whole thing.

Of all the advice I can offer, I would simply say this, enjoy every part of it, the hard work will pay off and the people you will meet along the way will be fantastic, there will be lots of support for you and the book, there may even be a few (major) prize nominations and perhaps even a little review in the New York Times. . . but maybe I’ve said too much now.

Well off you go, that book (and the 2^nd and 3^rd in the series – whoops – more spoiler!) wont write themselves!

Love from

future you

J 

THE APPRENTICE WITCH

by James Nicol

Publisher: Chicken House

Publication Date: 7th July 2016

ISBN13: 9781910655153

Summary

Arianwyn has fluffed her witch’s evaluation test.

Awarded the dull bronze disc and continuing as an apprentice – to the glee of her arch-rival, mean girl Gimma – she’s sent to protect the remote, dreary town of Lull. 

But her new life is far from boring. Turns out Gimma is the pompous mayor’s favourite niece – and worse, she opens a magical rift in the nearby Great Wood. As Arianwyn struggles with her spells, a mysterious darkness begins to haunt her – and it’s soon clear there’s much more than her pride at stake …

AMAZON UK |AMAZON US | WATERSTONES | 
BOOK DEPOSITORY

Dear Unpublished Me - Keris Stainton

This weeks Unpublished Me post comes to you from the lovely Keris Stainton, author of novels such as One Italian Summer & The Hearts books!! This is an extra special Dear Unpublished Me as it doesn't just have Keris' beautiful letter but also the COVER REVEAL of her newest book. 

This letter is penned to a Keris before she decided to be a writer and the fact I get to share not just this but also all the details about her 2018 release feels very fitting. This post will take you from the start of her publishing journey right up to the present day. 

Dear Me 

You've just realised you should write a book. In fact, you didn't even realise, did you? Your husband suggested it in response to your descriptions of your, um, eccentric work colleagues. But it was, as Oprah would say, an 'Aha! Moment!' 

Of course you should write a book! Didn't you used to write all the time? Didn't you used to take fanfic (before it was called fanfic) requests from your friends? Haven't you been desperately trying to work out what you should do with your life? Well, guess what? This is it. It really is! 

But. It's going to take a while. It'll be seven years before you actually finish a first draft. And it'll be much too short (but it'll have a beginning, middle and end, so you're totally going to count it). And then it'll be another couple of years before you finish one that you think is good enough to send out to an agent. (It'll be Young Adult. You probably don't know what that is right now, but you're gonna love it, I promise.) 

You'll get a lovely agent. And then it'll take another year before a publisher is interested. But a publisher will be interested. And you'll go down to London for a meeting and the people you meet will be lovely and they'll want to buy your book and you'll get the train home grinning and giggling to yourself (and people will stare, but you won't care). And then your publisher will ask you to write a different book instead. I know. But it's fine. It's going to be fine. 

So eventually you'll finish a book, and your publisher will love it, and publish it (but it'll get put back a year - you should probably just accept now that everything in publishing takes much much longer than you expect), and people will like it (not, like, loads of people, but enough). And then you'll write a couple more (you'll get to go to LA to research one of them and it will be the best trip ever). And then you'll move to a different publisher. And then you'll get a different (lovely) agent. And another different publisher. And another. You get the gist. 

It won't be as straightforward as you hope. And I'm sorry to have to tell you that you're not going to be super rich (at least not yet, it could still happen!). But what I can tell you is you're going to have a lot of fun. You're going to make amazing friends. You're going to be on the cover of a magazine (no really). You're going to be on TV (it will be a disaster, but still). You're going to interview Judy Blume! And best of all, you're going to get emails from readers who've read your books over and over and who say they never really loved books at all until they discovered one of yours. 

And you'll never really believe it - one day you'll sit down to write a letter to your unpublished self and you'll end up crying because it's all just so overwhelming - but it's true. Lucky you. 

Love 

Me 

NEW BOOK ALERT

You'll have noticed with all the Dear Unpublished Me posts I have included a book feature but as I mentioned above, today we have something extra special. 

I can exclusively reveal the cover of Keris' next book My Heart Goes Bang is hitting shelves June 28th 2018 and it is absolutely stunning!!!! 

Summary

Gemma, Lou, Issey, Liane and Paige are determined to make the most of this second year at uni. They want to have fun, but they want to focus on work. There's no time for relationships. Except with each other. And even that's not guaranteed. Gemma and Lou have always been close, but there's tension between Issey and Liane, and none of them even knows Paige all that well. 

But when Gemma finds a magazine article with a list of men they should date before they're 21 (someone who's been on TV? Check; someone with tattoos? Check;) they vow to complete the list before finishing university and set about it with a lot more enthusiasm than they do their studies ... but will any of them end up with a full house? And when a secret from their first year comes out, it looks as if some of them might not be completing university, never mind the list ... 

MY HEART GOES BANG is about lectures, essays, hangovers, and flatmates; it's about found families, finding yourself, and falling in love with people you never expected to fall in love with. 

COMING JUNE 28TH 2018

FROM HOT KEY BOOKS