NaNoWriMo Deferred by Savita Kalhan

I wrote in my last blog about the pressures of being a children’s writer today, all the hats we have to wear, the endless publicity we have to do, and the social media platforms we should engage with. All of that remains true. I ended with the point that the main focus of being a writer must always be the next story that needs to be written. It’s November, which means it is NaNoWriMo at the moment. Sadly, I know that, because of all of the non-writing activities I've mentioned and editing the current book, I won’t be able to spend the time I would like on writing the next book.

So I am deferring NaNoWriMo until January. Taking a hiatus from social media will feel strange to begin with, I am sure, and I will inevitably have to scratch that itch occasionally, but I intend to limit it to a few minutes now and then, hopeful optimist that I am.

 

In the meantime, there are lots of wonderful things going on with my book, and it is beginning to reach readers far and wide, which is an amazing feeling. My book is on an international blog tour at the moment, which means that it is being reviewed by YA bloggers from India, Canada, the US, UK, Romania and the Philippines.

The reviews from the past couple of days have reminded me why I write, and I actually got quite emotional reading them - Reading through Infinity, The Cursed Books blog

I have also been immensely lucky to have been paired up with some great schools and librarians as part of the #BookPenPals scheme on Twitter, the brainchild of @KateScottwiter and @Saramoohead. One of the school librarians in the scheme has just been awarded The School Librarian of 2018 award, so huge congratulations to Emma Suffield for winning it, and to all the inspiring librarians around the world for caring about reading and sharing their passion for books with children!

Emma asked me what libraries meant to me. When I was growing up, my parents  couldn’t afford to buy me books, so I practically lived in the library. But how to put into a few words how much they have meant to me, and why they are so important for every child.

Here’s what I wrote for her school –

Go cosmic and take a space ship to the moon,

Fly a hot-air balloon around the world,

Sail to the islands at the end of everything,

Board a train to Hogwarts,

Whoosh through universes on the Great Network,

Walk through a wardrobe to a world of snow,

Dive down a rabbit hole, play Noughts and Crosses,

Learn to fly a dragon, but never laugh at a live one,

Wherever you go, whatever portal you use, the keys are in your library.

The library is where all your adventures begin...

...It’s where all mine began.

And if anyone is up for NaNoWriMo in January, let me know!

Happy writing and stay safe if you’re venturing out to the fireworks tonight!

PS The Carnegie Medal nominations have just been announced and I am so chuffed that The Girl in the Broken Mirror has been nominated! Congratulations to all my fellow nominees! Happy Monday!
Savita's website

Savita on Twitter @savitakalhan

This is Me Not Shouting - Savita Kalhan

When my book, The Girl in the Broken Mirror, was published this year I had no idea that I would be

spending so much time and energy on all things not Work-in-Progress.

Publicising your book while not shouting about it is an art, I’ve realised. Clearly many authors with bigger publishing houses benefit from publicity departments setting up events, festivals, school visits, blogger events, blog tours etc. But those of us with smaller publishing houses are largely on our own, unless we can afford to hire a publicity person. 

When you see your peers invited to speak at various events, appearing at literary festivals, and so on, you do feel a certain amount of pressure. Shouldn’t you be doing those things too? Networking, blogging, tweeting, instagramming etc. How else will readers be aware of your book? Will your book ‘disappear’, unnoticed, unread, if you don’t step up?

Hiring someone to do the PR isn't an option for most writers, for obvious financial reasons. But the amount of work involved in being your own PR person can be immense, particularly if you are editing another book and trying to work on a WIP, and trying to have a life too...

Some of those non-WIP-writing things involve sending out hundreds of emails to bloggers to create interest in your book, and then organising your own blog tour, then follow up emails, arranging the dates, the guest posts etc. Writing guest posts for blog tours can take up a lot of time, depending on how long the blog tour is.

For me, the blog tours are well worth it. There are some amazing book bloggers out there and I was very lucky to have come across some champions of my book. I have an an international blog tour starting on November 1st with another group of YA bloggers.

So how much of all the non-WIP-writing and PR work is actually worth the time? Personally, I would say that most of it has been worth the extra effort. Maybe it will become easier if I’m lucky enough to have another book published. I just have to be a little bit more organised and also not bite off more than I can chew. It’s about working out how much I want to do and how much I can physically and mentally achieve without over-stretching myself.

September was great for non-WIP-writing events. I was in the Waterstones tent at Berkofest on Saturday 8th September, with Tamsyn Murray. I got to meet lots of adult authors too and hear Erin Kelly talking about her next psychological thriller.

I loved the YA Lit Cardiff event on 29th September! I was on a panel discussing identity in our books with Tracy Darnton and Katherine Webber (more on these events in my next blog in November). It's a new event organised by Karen Bultiauw and Claire Fayers, and it's set to be a great addition to the YA scene.




I was also invited to a school in Paris for an Erasmus Plus event, which included talks and workshops on my book with students from several countries across Europe,

I'm juggling hats - every writer has to do this - because book sales are important. I'm still trying to keep it fun.  

But, above all, there are stories I want to tell, and this is what I'm trying to remember - to make time to write.

Savita's website

@savitakalhan

The Girl in the Broken Mirror by Savita Kalhan, pub by Troika Books, 2018

When the Blog Tour Ends... by Savita Kalhan

If you have ever organised a blog tour for your book then you will know that it can require months of work, researching book blogs, finding the blogs that a relevant to your area/age group, sending out enquiries to those bloggers, waiting for responses, (wondering whether anyone will ever get around to responding...). I was very lucky that fourteen bloggers wanted to be part of the blog tour and several others wanted to review the book on their blog. And that's only phase one.

Phase two involved organising the schedule, the dates, the blog tour banner, collecting the bloggers’ addresses, making sure review copies were sent to each of them ahead of time. This is not even taking into account the content I had to write for each guest post of the blog tour. 

But it was amazing. It was like stepping on a roller-coaster – each day it went somewhere else, spreading the word about my book, which was a fantastic feeling. I have a lot of respect for YA bloggers – they read voraciously, they review the books, they tweet and instagram them and spread the word about books they love. Some of them spend a lot of time on graphics like these photos by OLIVIA SAVANNAH 

So when it all comes to an end, what do you do? I decided to get away. First stop was a remote hilltop in Shropshire - and working out an internet connection for the live Twitter chat on my new book THE GIRL IN THE BROKEN MIRROR for #OHYABOOKCLUB hosted by the most enthusiastic school librarian Lucas Maxwell. Connection sorted, I spent an amazing hour answering questions on the book on Twitter. 

Okay, so 'getting away' from social media had to be deferred until the Friday!

A rainy day dawned, so a long hill walk was out of the question. A stroll around Bishops Castle was much more inviting, and here I fell in love with this beautiful metal work warrior fairy. The place outside which she was walking was closed, so I'm working finding her origins. 

I stepped further back into time and went on walking tour in and around Aberystwyth, where I went to Uni, with a reunion thrown in too. And I discovered things there that I could not believe I had missed out on doing as a student. I had never been on the Vale of Rheidol, a narrow steam guage train between Aberystwyth and Devil’s Bridge, so I did that. It’s a stunning one hour train journey that takes you along a track cut into the steep banks of the hillsides.

Devil’s Bridge is the setting for an episode of Hinterland – a brooding, dark and disturbing episode!

I had also never heard of the Hafod Estate, out near Devil’s Bridge. If you are ever in want of inspiration it is the place to go. It is a stunningly beautiful place. The mansion that once sat on the acres of land has long since gone, but the walks remain. 

You can choose from easier short trails, such as the 3.64 km Lady’s Walk, to the more challenging 6 km walk, The Gentleman’s Walk, which we did, where the distance is not the strenuous factor but the narrow, steep paths that wind around the hills, across rope bridges and waterfalls, and tracks that have you teetering on the edge of long drops down to the gorge!

Entrance to an old mine shaft

Robbers Cave

Cascade Falls from inside Robbers Cave

Where ever you are on the estate, the beauty of Hafod will take your breath away. 

And then sun came out for the weekend. Ynyslas beach, a couple of miles north of Aberystwyth is a huge stretch of sand and sand dunes. What could be more perfect?

Whether it’s a break you need, or inspiration, or a place to go to walk and write and think, a place of natural beauty is where I would go. Where would you go?

THE GIRL IN THE BROKEN MIRROR by Savita Kalhan was published by Troika Books on 1st May 2018

Savita's Website

@savitakalhan

The Girl in the Broken Mirror is out! by Savita Kalhan

My book, The Girl in the Broken Mirror, was published by Troika Books on Tuesday 1st May! 

It’s such an exciting time, and a very busy one too. But of course it’s also a nervous time - the book is being read, which means that it’s being reviewed, which means that I’m getting feedback. Luckily, most of the feedback has been very good, and some of it has been amazing. The different views and takes on the book have been interesting too. 

One of the things that has really surprised me is how the bloggers have really enjoyed the relationship between Jay, the 15 year old protagonist in the book, and her mother. There seems to be a general feeling that parent/teen relationships are too absent from teen and YA books.

I’m in the middle of a fourteen-stop blog tour at the moment with UKYA book bloggers. The blog tour started on 30th April. So I have had to write fourteen separate guest blog posts, ranging from a soundtrack for the book, a blog about my favourite authors, three Q&As, a couple of extracts from the book, a blog about writing tips, another one about what inspired the book, and two in-depth interviews!

The big publishing houses have a publicity team who contact and arrange the blog tour for their new book. My publisher is a smaller independent publisher, so I decided to arrange it myself. It definitely requires a fair amount of work and lots and lots of emails – and that’s not even taking into account the time needed to write all the guests posts.

I was also very lucky to be interviewed by The Asian Writer. You can read the interview here THE ASIAN WRITER

And then I found out that The Girl in the Broken Mirror is Love Reading 4 Kids YA Book of the Month for May, which is thrilling. If you’d like to read the review, it’s here – LOVE READING 4 KIDS

Here’s my blog tour banner:

If you would like to read any of the posts, they’re all there, and on Twitter and my Facebook page. Hope you enjoy them!

Savita's Website

Twitter @savitakalhan

Facebook Savita Kalhan Author page

The Girl in the Broken Mirror by Savita kalhan

 It’s not often that I get to share good news – good book news – with the world. But today is one of those precious days! I have a book being published on May 1st by Troika Books. 

Yes there was a lot of singing and dancing and generally making an idiot of myself – but it was okay as no one else was at home when the package from my publisher came through the letter box and landed on my door mat. I knew exactly what was inside: the first review copy of my book – so I took my time tearing open the package, well, all of about three seconds flat!

So here’s a picture of the very same book.

And here’s one of me flicking through it, with added sparkles. If the video doesn't work, then follow this link to The Girl in the Broken Mirror

So what is The Girl in the Broken Mirror about? It’s about Jay, a fifteen year old British Asian girl, who is struggling with a major culture clash after she and her mum are forced to move in with distant relatives. The relatives are extremely strict – strict about Indian girls, what they can and can’t do, how they should dress, how they should behave, who their friends should be. Boys get to do what they like, which Jay thinks is so unfair. And then she is raped.

I started writing the book about twelve years ago, before I wrote The Long Weekend, and then I set it aside to write The Long Weekend. I came back to it many times and it went through several titles and rewritings over the years, but the main core scenes of the book remained untouched. 

Rape and sexual abuse are difficult to write about – and even more difficult to write about for teenagers and young adults.

I know of three other books that deal with the subject of rape, all very different, all excellent:

No Virgin by Anne Cassidy

Asking for it by Louise O’Neill

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

I think it’s important that these are books out there, particularly when you look at the horrific rape stats for rapes and sexual abuse reported by under eighteen year olds. I think it’s also important for teenagers to know that there is help out there for them, that they are not alone, that there is light at the end of the darkness.

SAVITA'S WEBSITE

@savitakalhan