Lari’s Writing blog

This wolf has just turned up.  She’s not meant to be in the fourth First Aid novel, but she’s just sitting there.  Looking at me.  She won’t even turn into human form so I can argue with her.  AAAARGH.  I don’t have a quest for her.  She doesn’t have a role in this book.  But she’s here.  And I can tell she’s not going to go away.

She was exactly like this in the last book she was in.  Sylvie was meant to be fluffy and sweet and prove how wrong it was to assume all wolves are sleekit, sneaky, untrustworthy and dangerous.  Aye right.  If you read Wolf Notes, you can see how she turned out.

Now she’s here again. And I didn’t invite her.  And she’s LOOKING AT ME…

I thought it was going to be the centaur I had trouble with this time.

I put together playlists for each novel I write, not for listening to when I’m sitting and writing (I need a bit of peace and quiet then, or at least noise I can tune out) but for listening to when I’m running and thinking.  It’s usually fun finding the right songs, songs which mean the right things to me and push me in the right direction for the story.

Storm Singing’s playlist included Hurricane Drunk by Florence and the Machine, Take Me to the River by Talking Heads, This is the Sea by the Waterboys, and Closer by the Kings of Leon.  Lots of water and weather, but lots of other stuff too.

I have to like the songs on the playlist, but that’s not the most important thing – the lyrics, the words of the song, have to connect to the plot or the characters or how I feel about the book as I’m researching and writing it.

Right now I’m struggling with a playlist for First Aid Four though – mainly because it would contain almost every song on the Foo Fighters’ Wasted Light (the lyrics of a couple of songs sound exactly like Yann giving me a hard time), and almost no other songs.  So at the moment I’m just listening to the album…

But there must be appropriate songs out there – about monsters and baddies and taking over the world, injuries and healing, cliffs and waterfalls, traps and sacrifices, rescues and riddles… I’d better not say any more or I’ll give away the plot!

Any ideas, let me know.  And when I’ve written the book, I’ll let you know what songs I actually listened to and you can see if you can find any echoes of them in the book!

I was in Castlebrae High School library this afternoon, chatting to S3s for the Craigmillar Book Festival, and I mentioned that I had a new book for teenagers coming out in February. So the lovely librarian, proving that librarians are a whizz at technology, went to her computer, googled it, and said, “Look, here it is.” She’d found the cover image, on Amazon. A cover that I had not seen, at all. I didn’t even know the publisher had designed it yet.

So in full view of a room full of teenagers, I walked over to have a look. Risky thing to do. Some of my book covers have made me cry, or at least use a few rude words.

But I quite like this one. She doesn’t look like the heroine did in my head, but neither does she look so unlike her that I don’t recognise her.

So I was able to keep chatting to the pupils, while keeping glancing over at the cover, and smiling a little. It was a weird way to meet a new book, but I’m happy.

So – cover of next book. What do you think?

(I’m not as much of an IT whizz as the librarian, so if I haven’t managed to put the picture up, here’s a link to the page!)

Postscript (2 weeks later) It turns out the cover above is NOT the real cover.  I think it was created for a catalogue, and it shouldn’t really be up on Amazon.  So I wonder how it will change for publication…

Fife has grown on me. For years, Fife has been where trains from Inverness go really slowly and stop in lots of places when I just want to get home to Edinburgh. But today I got off at a station in Fife and visited a local school (they invited me, I didn’t just turn up!) and I had a wonderful time!
I met 50 pupils at Parkhill Primary, in Leven, who had all read First Aid for Fairies. They had put dragon masks up on the wall, and written news stories about fabled beasts (the centaur giving a builder a fright in a distillery caught my eye) and they had lots and lots of fabulous questions about the book.
I do enjoy answering the “what’s your favourite book?” and “why did you become an author?” questions that I get from kids who are getting a chance to meet an author, any author, but I really love the specific questions I get from kids who know my books well.
Today, we discussed whether Yann was right to use dark magic on a weasel (I thought he was right, 50 P4/5/6s disagreed with me. Fair enough) and who were our favourite characters in First Aid. Yann and Catesby came out top, with Rona and Sapphire close behind. Sadly NO-ONE voted for Helen. It’s just not cool being human…
The best fun we had was making up a story, all of us at the same time, just chucking ideas in the air. We ended up with a brilliant story about a robber trying to steal the manuscript of the fourth First Aid (which I’d taken to show them) and all the kind people of Fife helping to rescue it.
The biggest surprise of the day was finding out the Gaelic for peat-cutting tool from their teacher. (It’s tairsgeir, which happens to be essential for something else I’m writing…) So thanks Mr Morrison. Teachers do know everything.
And I ate a macaroni pie on the way home.
So, lots of reasons to love Fife.

I’ve been worrying about minions recently. I know the baddy for the next book, I’ve been working out his evil plan for a while, but I’ve been struggling with his minions. He’s a loner, you see, the only one of his kind, so he doesn’t have a ready-made band of followers or family like the Faery Queen had her footsoldiers in Wolf Notes or the Sea-through had his bloom of jellyfish in Storm Singing.

I kept thinking that I was getting stuck at an early piece of action in First Aid Four because I couldn’t see the next location (one of the dangers of a location competition – you have to wait until you’ve got the winner to write the next bit.) Now I’ve realised the problem was that I couldn’t see who or what was with the baddie, I couldn’t see who was attacking Helen and Yann. So all I have to do is find out who his army are, then the action can rattle on again.

I need some minions.

I asked the kids I met at the Wigtown Book Festival today if they could suggest any good minions, and got some truly splendid answers including fireproof snails, secret agent rabbits and haggises with fangs, which may not be perfect for a Fabled Beast adventure, but certainly got me thinking.

Mostly thinking about what makes a good minion. Sneaky? Smaller than the boss? Violent but not deadly? Daft? (Or cleverer than the boss? I think either works…) Lots of them, so you can lose a few?

And specifically, what do I want for this book? Probably creatures from Scottish myth and folklore, and preferably ones who haven’t had starring roles in too many other books.

So, if you have a perfect minion’s job description, or if you have any excellent minions you could suggest to carry out my evil plan, do let me know. Otherwise, I’ll just ask a few more kids, or else get in about my collection of Scottish folklore as soon as I get home …

I’ve just picked up a bulging yellow folder filled with entries for the Set the Scene competition (where we asked readers to suggest a Scottish location for the fourth and final Fabled Beast book) from my publishers. And it looks SO exciting. I’m flicking through it and I see maps and photos and drawings and myths and legends and first lines of suggested stories and monsters and cliffs and islands and castles and lochs and they all look WONDERFUL! Thank you all so much for sending such amazing entries!

The competition is now closed (sorry!) and the team at Floris who will be helping me pick the winner need a bit of time to read through the large number of entries, so we think it will be just over a month before we announce the winner. So please be patient!

I’m off now, to enjoy discovering lots of new bits of Scotland!

That’s not a comment on any weird weather, more a comment on my weird state of mind as a writer.
All the First Aid for Fairies books are set at particularly ‘magical’ times of year: midwinter, midsummer, autumn equinox and spring equinox. But I never seem to WRITE them at the appropriate time of year.
It’s Autumn Equinox time (half way between midsummer and midwinter, which is when Storm Singing is set), and yet I’m writing First Aid Four, which is meant to be set at the Spring Equinox.
This poses a few basic research problems, like when I go on location I have to imagine what the landscape will look like with more flowers, or fewer leaves, or different heights of grass.
But it also makes me very confused. I’ve spent a lot of this week living on the 20th of March, because counting back, that’s when the fabled beasts’ quest will have to start in order to end on the Spring Equinox. Which means when I come out of the house after writing for a day and the leaves are turning brown, I get a bit of a shock. In my head, it’s springtime; but outside my head, it’s autumn. And I was trying to explain something about flowers to one of my daughters when we were out for a walk, and I realised that I was talking complete nonsense, because I was talking about spring, and shoots, and daffodils. In September.
So, living in stories can make you a bit confused. But it also means I’m smelling flowers when everyone else is shivering in autumn gales!

I’ve promised to tell a Roman myth next week to a group of school kids, but I don’t know any Roman myths which I love enough to share!

I always tell myths in my author sessions, because I use mythological beasts in my adventure books, and this class particularly requested a Roman myth to link with their project on the Romans. So I said yes, no problem, even though most of the myths I love are Greek or Viking or Sumerian. I didn’t think it was a rash promise, because I have a tatty old illustrated hardback book called “Roman Mythology.”

Having started twittering yesterday, I thought I’d get back to paper and ink basics this morning, so I opened Roman Mythology, and found a lot of history, a fair amount of archaeology, dozens of pictures of statues and a few oblique mentions of myths, but no actual stories. Nothing with a beginning, a middle and an end. No monsters defeated, no heroes or heroines created.

Leaving me with only a few Roman possibilities: the wolf suckling the twins (which doesn’t take that long to tell), Horatio on the bridge (which glorifies very stupid bravery) and the loss of the Ninth Legion in the mists of Scotland (which is apparently not true any more, even though it was true when I was wee). So have you got any better ones? Any genuinely exciting and surprising Roman myths?

The Romans did nick most of their gods, goddesses and myths from the people they conquered. So getting ideas from everyone out there seems rather appropriate. And I won’t even have to invade …

Nope. Blogging is not enough apparently.

I was at a brilliant Society of Authors in Scotland conference yesterday in Edinburgh, all about how writers need to embrace e-books, and build an online platform for themselves. It was quite terrifying actually, with branding wheels, and landing pages, and hash tags, and publishers looking nervous, and some writers looking empowered and other writers (me mostly) looking a bit inadequate.

So. Blogging once in a wee while is not enough. I need to twitter. I need to join online forums. I need to be on Linkedin. (Actually, I am on Linkedin, but I have no idea how to work it or what to do with it, so I need to practise being me online.)

And I need to put multimedia stuff up on this blog. The occasional photo is not enough. I should be doing audio and video and links. (So, that’s a whole new set of skills I have to learn…)

The only problem is, I WANT TO WRITE A BOOK! I went to the first likely location for First Aid Four last weekend. I have a whole shelf of research books now, and lots of bits of coloured paper sticking out of the most exciting pages. I have more baddies than I can cope with (so I’ll be needing a lot of help from Yann this time round). So I really can’t be bothered creating an online me, when I’d rather be creating cliffhangers.

But, apparently, to be a writer these days, you also have to spend time “being a writer.” If you don’t get out there and shout about your books, no-one will read them. And then there would be no point in writing them.

So – would you like to follow me on Twitter, or would you prefer to like me on Facebook? Do you have the foggiest idea what Linkedin is for? Are there any good online forums about kids’ books or fantasy or myths and legends you think I’d enjoy? Or would you rather I just got on with writing…? Do let me know!

The Edinburgh International Book Festival is over! Aw… Now I can get back to writing! Yeah!

And I’m off to a flying start. I’ve just seen the rough pictures for my next book! It’s a picture book called Orange Juice Peas, it’s being illustrated by a French artist and the pictures look utterly fantastic! Really colourful, really funny, and full of expression on the kids’ faces. All of which is great. Because the more there is in the pictures, the more I can cut out of the words!

That’s the wonderful thing about picture books. I put the story in words, so that everyone can get started. Then the artist then tells the story in pictures, probably putting in much more than I had in the words (like the crab in the Big Bottom Hunt – that was never my idea!) and once I can see what the artist is doing, I can take some of the words back out again! (Well, me and my wonderful editor and fabulous designer, who are the ones who put it all together, and in this case count all the peas to make sure they add up at the end of the book. Why? Well, you’ll just have to wait and see…)

So! A new picture book! With a new artist! And lots of peas. What a great start to September.

Now I’d better go and take a few words out of the next picture book, and put lots more words into the next novel.