An Author's Life. By Keren David

It's been a busy month and a bit. Since 2016 started, I've done a little bit of everything that my life as an author involves.

• I delivered the second draft of my latest book, Cuckoo to my editor (she liked it, hurray!), discussed the draft cover (I liked it, hurray!) and talked about publicity for when it is launched in August.
• While my editor was working on Cuckoo, I went back to my historical novel, the one I've been working on for three years in between other books. I'm up to chapter 8 of what I hope will be the final redraft.
• I also worked on the script for what I hope will be the final redraft of the musical version of my book Lia's Guide to Winning the Lottery. 
• I'm a Visiting Lecturer at City University, working on the Creative Writing and Publishing MA. I've been setting up mentoring sessions with students and reading early versions of their major projects.
• YA writer Sophia Bennett and I are teaching an evening class in Writing for Teens at City Lit. I've taught two sessions so far, on characterisation and voice.
• As Patron of Reading at Highgate Wood School, I talked to our wonderful local bookshop, Pickled Pepper books last year and persuaded them to let the students design and make a window for the first ever Highgate Wood Book Award. Librarian Kate Ereira put it all into action, and I went to the school to look at the amazing designs, and then along to the shop to see the window created. Every time I go past I feel incredibly proud, of the school and the students and of being part of the Patron of reading scheme.
• My book Salvage was up for two awards, which meant two ceremonies -  the Red Book Award in Falkirk and the Southern Schools Book Award in Brighton. It didn't win either, but I had a great time at both events -  and at the SSBA, Chris Riddell drew me, and Aidan from Salvage.
• I spoke at Nottingham High School and signed lots of books.
• Juno Dawson and I did an event for LGBT History month at a day for schools and families organised by Sue Sanders at the Museum of London. We talked about our books This is Not a Love Story and All of the Above, and writing diversity from inside and outside.
• I filed my tax return.

When I was first published, in January 2010, I had no idea that my life would expand to include all of this. I had no idea that an author's life would be so varied, involve meeting so many  people, and travelling as well. 

 The battle, as always, is to make all this work pay. The bonus is that I enjoy all of it. Except the taxes.

I do wonder though -  is it unusual to have so many things going on, all at once? Do other writers stick to one project at a time? And could this be why I feel exhausted all the time? 

Creating the window at Pickled Pepper Books. 

I'm so excited (and I just can't hide it) - Liz Kessler

I’m very, very excited today (so excited, in fact, that I have saved the blog I was going to post today for another time so I could share this instead!) Here’s why…

Waterstones Hampstead have just – today – made the announcement that they are holding a public launch event for my first YA novel, Read Me Like A Book.

Regular followers of this blog will know what this book means to me. For those who don’t, you could have a quick catch up by checking out this blog…or just read on.

Read Me Like A Book was the first novel I wrote. But somewhere in the middle of writing it, I also started thinking up a children’s story about a girl who becomes a mermaid when she goes in water. The girl was Emily Windsnap, and her series is swimming nicely in waters all around the world. On the other hand, nobody wanted to publish Read Me Like A Book. The book was about a seventeen-year-old girl coming out, and LGBT issues were not de rigueur back then. A nasty little law known as Section 28 was still in place, and many people – publishers, teachers, librarians etc etc – were kept firmly in place by its instruction not to ‘promote homosexuality.’

But let’s not dwell on that right now, because today we’re EXCITED. So let’s skip forward a decade or so and briefly glance at my mobile phone from a day in November 2013. I’ve just had a very special lunch where my wonderful agent has told my lovely publisher that we want to publish the book. Too many things had been happening that had made me want to stop sitting idly by, and instead want be part of the movement that was telling young people it is OK to be whoever you are. 

Following the meeting, my phone beeps. It’s my publisher. The text says: ‘Looking forward to reading the manuscript again. Times have changed and we are ready to move with them.’

That text pretty much kept me warm all winter.

Skip forward again. To early-ish this year. The book is due out in May. Proofs are out and about. People are talking about it. A couple of HUGE names in the book world have read it and given me quotes for the cover. The Bookseller's Charlotte Eyre mentions it in passing on Radio Four's Open Book! People are TALKING ABOUT IT!

Even though this is going to be my fifteenth book to be published, I feel like a debut author. And in a way, I am. Because this was – and always will be – the first novel I wrote. It is also the first YA book I have published. Perhaps it is the first big risk I’ve taken in my career. It’s certainly the first time I have put something out there that feels quite so important and personal for me. See, the mermaids and the fairies and the time travel books – they came from me, they have things in them that are deeply important to me. They are like my babies, all of them. But to write a book about a girl discovering her lesbian identity, when you have recently come out publicly yourself – that takes the excitement, the risk, the nerves to a WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOLE new level!

So let’s get to the point. 

The point is that today, Waterstones in Hampstead have announced the event that they are hosting to launch my special baby out into the world. It is a public event, which means a) it is open to anyone and everyone and b) it is ticketed. Tickets are £5 (or £3 with a Waterstones card). However, I think they’re quite good value, because as well as listening to me talk about the book, you also get a glass of Prosecco and £2 off the book on the night!

And if all of this wasn’t exciting enough (it isn’t. Read on) we have got the most wonderful special guest taking part.

Ruth Hunt, Chief Executive of the incredible LGBT campaigning group Stonewall, is my guest speaker!!!

I don’t know about you, but I am practically hyperventilating with excitement about all of this. (OK, some of it is nerves – but mostly excitement. And I am probably more excited than you are, to be fair.)

The date of the launch (and publication of the book) is May 14^th. It's at 6.45 pm. And you are ALL INVITED!!!! If you want to come, get in touch with Yael Tishchler from Waterstones, who is organising the event. Here’s how you can do that:

Call her on: 0207 794 1098

Tweet her via @WaterstonesNW3 or @TischforTat

Or use some other old-fangled way of getting in touch with her at Waterstones Hampstead.

Hope to see you there - and thank you for letting me shout about this today. (I might have burst otherwise.)

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A confession of my own - John Dougherty

It's my view that Liz Kessler's post of the 27th November is one of the most important we've ever published.

It's certainly been among the most popular; within hours of posting our stats page was showing it as one of the ten most-viewed pages on the site in its five-year history, and within a couple of days it had made its way up to the number four slot. Meanwhile, 92 comments were left, which is probably a record, and all of them were positive. As Liz says, as a society we've come a long way.

Which is why it feels appropriate this morning to make a confession of my own. You see, I used to be a bigot.

Is 'bigot' quite the right word? I'm not sure. My dictionary defines a bigot as someone who has 'an obstinate belief in the superiority of one's own opinions', and actually it was other people's opinions I held to be superior: God's, mostly, or at least the people who claimed to know what he thought. And apparently in God's book gay people were Very, Very Bad, and so were you if you disagreed with him. This chimed with what I'd been taught in the playground - gays were weird; gays were different; gays were to be cast out and mocked and despised; gays were you if you didn't conform or if the kid at the top of the pecking order didn't like your face.

Essentially, as so many things are, it was about stories. The stories told us that being gay was a choice; that it was a sin; that it only happened to people who were Not Like Us and who we'd probably never meet as long as we continued to be Good and Normal and stayed out of trouble.

What changed my mind? Stories. First and foremost, the stories of a friend who'd been told the same stories that I had, and found they weren't true; who found that he had no choice about being gay; who found that that no matter how hard he tried to be straight, he just wasn't; who did all the things prescribed by the People Who Know What God Thinks and found that the more he did them, the more messed-up his life became.

I wish I'd heard stories like that sooner. I wish that, when I was younger, there had been stories about people who happened to be gay without 'gay' being the whole point of who they are, who were gay without being ridiculous caricatures like Mr Humphries, who could have been my uncle or my friend's mum. Of course in those days even the hint of a gay character in a children's book would have been enough to have the Daily Mail and the Sun thundering BAN THIS EVIL BOOK! But I can't help wondering if perhaps the publishing industry should have been brave enough to try.

I'm glad it's different now. I'm glad there are books, however few, like Morris Gleitzman's wonderful Two Weeks With The Queen. I'm glad that Liz's publishers now feel the market is ready for her forthcoming Read Me Like A Book. And I'm glad that my friend no longer has to hide who he is. But I wish I'd made friends like him earlier, in the safety of the pages of a book, so that when I first met him I'd have understood him already.

______________________________________________________________________

John's next book:  

 Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face and the Badness of Badgers, illustrated by David Tazzyman & published by OUP in January 2014

Let’s Get This Out There…Liz Kessler

Last month, two things happened to make me realise how much the world has changed. The first was that I got married.

Why would that make me think the world has changed? Well, because I married a woman.

OK, officially, I got Civil Partnered. What I actually did was stand up in front of a room full of my beloved friends and family and make a legally binding commitment to my partner of six years. So, yeah, I married a woman.

Twenty two years ago, I went to my brother’s wedding. It was a beautiful and emotional day. I remember looking round at everyone in the room and feeling overwhelmed by the love and support for my brother and his new wife, and I remember being so happy for them. And then I remember having a fleeting feeling of sadness as I realised that I would never have that. It never occurred to me that one day it might be possible. And last month, I proved my younger self wrong as I found myself at the centre of a room of my favourite people and felt wrapped up in love and happiness as two families became one.

The second thing that happened last month that made me realise how much the world has changed was that my publisher offered me a new contract. A very special new contract, and one that is close to my heart – especially this year. It is for a book that I wrote over ten years ago and which has waited patiently for its time to come. The novel is about a teenage girl learning about love and life – and coming out as gay. Ten years ago, none of us could really see how we could publish this book. It felt like a risk in all sorts of ways and my publisher, my agent and I were all happy to put it to one side and get on with writing and publishing all the other books that I’ve worked on since then.

But in the last couple of years, all sorts of things have made me start thinking again about this book. Incidents of gay youngsters committing suicide after unbearable bullying hit the news in the states. Violence against gay people increased in Russia after anti-gay laws were passed.

Amongst the campaigning against homophobic bullying, a wonderful song was released last year by a group called the L Project which I played over and over again. It’s called It Does Get Better and ever since I heard the song, I knew that I wanted to be part of a movement that was telling young people that it didn’t matter who or what they were. They were OK and they would get through it.

So I looked at my book again. I dusted it down, polished it up and sent it back to my agent. This time, when she sent it on to my publisher, the answer came back very quickly. ‘Times have changed, and we are ready to move with them,’ was the reply. My publisher not only wanted the book but the whole team was ready to support it, celebrate it and get it out into the world with enthusiasm.

Read Me Like A Book will be published in the spring of 2015 – and I can’t wait. It’s been a long time coming and, in many ways, it is the most important book I’ve written. But I’m also quite nervous of what this might mean for me, personally as well as professionally and commercially. I write books that are mostly read by girls aged between eight and fourteen. I like to think that my books have strong underlying messages about family and friendship and love and loyalty. These things are close to my heart and judging by some of the letters and emails I get, they are close to the hearts of many of my readers and their parents, too. But people sometimes have different ideas about what they mean by these values, and publishing such a different book could possibly create difficulties for me. Maybe it won’t – I have no way of knowing.

But in the year that my partner had very serious major surgery that made both of us think about the fragility of life, and the year that I took a legally binding vow to love, cherish, honour, respect and be faithful to her, I think that it’s time for me to stop letting fear dictate what I am prepared to do publicly. And it’s time for me to tell anyone who needs to hear it, for whatever reason, that it is OK to love whoever you love.

After all, if Ashleigh, the seventeen-year-old main character of my new book can do it, then it’s about time I did, too.

Follow Liz on Twitter
Check out Liz's Website
Find out more about the L Project and their work here
Watch the video of It Does Get Better
All photographs by Mark Noall. Check out his website here