REVELATIONS AND REVELRY

Sarah Haynes is pleased to announce the arrival of her brand new laptop! Oh yes. No more putting up with my inebriated computer:  unexplained overheating/shutting down apropos of nothing every two minutes/the screen freezing/untold amounts of faults necessitating the immediate shutdown of Google Chrome and the consequent loss of important work (not to mention the loss of important Facebook conversations). I woke up on Tuesday morning and, as is my wont,  thought – right, enough is enough. I cannot work like this. I cannot be a highly successful author with such a ridiculous piece of machinery. My husband disagreed and saw no real problem with the situation; in fact I would go so far as to say that he didn’t listen to a word I said.  So I had no choice but to ignore him and buy a new one and I LOVE IT!! There will be lots of writing and emailing and Twitter-ing and Facebook-ing and Skype-ing going on with it. It’s an HP one and a sort of burgundy colour. I wanted a pink one but it was about £300 more and the proverbial foot went down.  Pretty hard.  Anyway so that’s quite exciting in itself, but what is more exciting is that I have organised my first ever, ever, ever book-signing!! After the raw excitement of receiving my books and then business cards, the excitement for book-signing went off the scale to a level that my brain didn’t recognise and I felt sort of……numb. Like it isn’t true and won’t really be happening to me. That said actually, I’m not sure that a great deal will be happening to me. As a completely unknown debut author I don’t imagine that people will be flocking in their droves to visit me. But just in case you live near me and fancy coming along, it’s at Waterstones in Fareham on Saturday 16^th October. All day. And I would love to see you. So do come along and witness me doing my first ever day’s work! Shamefully that is not an exaggeration.

AND I am very pleased that www.chicklitreviews.com have agreed to review Things He Never Knew. I love the website, their reviews are honest and straightforward and provide good parameters by which to judge a book – she says with some trepidation……I just hope they like mine. But that’s part of the appeal of the site; honest reviews.  But just in case my excitement levels were dropping off, this bit of news served to perk them right up again. Honestly, Christmas is going to seem such a let-down after all of this.

So – I was going to write about my characters this time and how I create them. Having given it a lot of thought,  the answer is that I don’t really. I decide on a basic plan, for example, I am going to have a 2.4 family, the father will be called William, the mother Mary and the children will be Daisy and Michael and I will have an idea of how William, Mary, Daisy and Michael are going to interact and why. I then sketch out the rest of the plot, pretty thinly as I tend to find it twists and turns as I write it, and then I get going. I am very, very bad at planning individual chapters. I wish I weren’t because it would make my job a lot easier but I’m always too impatient to throw myself into the actual writing. So I do. And then William and Mary and whoever will come to life as I write. Just like Enid Blyton described, I watch my characters and listen to them. I don’t decide what words they’re going to say, I just write down what they do say. This often leads to me being surprised at what’s happening, and if it’s too absurd then I will change it, or if I find they’re going off in the wrong direction, like wayward children. I can’t have William and Mary misbehaving. Obviously at some subconscious level I am deciding what my characters will do, and this is where outside influence comes in. I will often hear things that anger/amuse/outrage/fascinate me and these get stored away for me to use on specific occasions. For example, in my new manuscript there’s a line where a parent is describing the terrible conditions of rooms at their child’s school and she says “Oh goodness – they’re practically third world!” which a friend of mine did actually say to me and I’m  pretty sure she doesn’t mind me repeating it (never mind publishing it…) and which I then filed for future use and created a scene where I could use it because it amused and interested me so much, for lots of different reasons. That’s an easy example. More difficult to pinpoint are the smaller elements that I draw in, as I said in my previous post, the colour of someone’s hair, little mannerisms, modes of speech, those sorts of things that make a person who they are. I must have quite a collection in my mind now and I suppose I just pluck a few out at random and try them for size on my characters. There’s no doubt though that they make themselves, I just help shape them.  And then clothe them, because that’s important.

I’m not much of a psychic but I do foresee that my life is going to get very, very busy over the next two weeks and beyond. Actually, that reminds me, I have three different web ‘areas’ for want of a better word ( and I’m sure there is one); here, my website and my facebook author page and information is liberally sprinkled over all three. Yet I’ve noticed that people ask me the same question time and time again, and that’s “When is the book being released?” This both amuses and confuses me; it’s a fairly major detail but obviously one that people just don’t take on board. Interesting. Anyway, so back to being busy – and I really will be. I already have a litany of tasks mapped out to be achieved and not enough days in which to do them. This could be interesting. However I always make time for the truly important things, which should come as a relief to some. And I tell you what, having a laptop that I don’t have to keep re-starting and giving little breaks to should make a world of difference.  Honestly, it was like taking an elderly relative out for a stroll and stopping to have little rests and cups of tea to make sure that they don’t keel over completely. And watching with a keen eye to prevent any unorthodox behaviour. But no more, my newborn laptop is working brilliantly, if confusingly (I am not clever with computers) and on that note I’m off to check progress on my facebook fan page (135 last time I checked) and twitter (100 followers!), so just think – assuming some overlap there are still in all probability over 200 people willing to listen to what I have to say on a regular basis. I must email my husband and tell him immediately.

I appreciate that planning a book launch sounds like it’s a wonderfully glamorous activity, but it truly isn’t. It probably would be if I had access to approximately five thousand disposable pounds and about the same number of friends. No, I jest, I’m aspiring for my book launch to be a low-key, elite affair, not a scrum of people queueing four deep at the bar to drink Aftershock.

The Venue for my book launch

So I have a venue, this is the first thing. It is going to be held at La Place, a very lovely French restaurant in Winchester where I unexpectedly ate fish with bones in it for the first time. It was quite a step up from fishfingers, I can tell you. And the worst bit was that I was with someone who didn’t know that I had never eaten fish with bones in it before (I’m sure there’s a proper term for fish with bones in it) and I was keen to both keep this from him and simultaneously maintain my dignified air, which meant that I had to contain my shock when I discovered the bones. Swiftly followed by wondering how on earth I was going to remove them effectively and discreetly. It was my fault; I’d asked for the wretched fish specifically. There wasn’t anything on the menu that fitted my ideal so my friend asked if something could be found for me that was ideal – which it was, along with several hundred minute bones. But suffice to say that I managed with my dignity intact (I hope) and the fish was tremendous. I thoroughly recommend it. And bone debacle aside, La Place is the perfect venue for my book launch. It’s quite small which lends a nice, cosy air, the owners are French and therefore utterly charming and very accommodating, it has a fabulously well-stocked bar and there’s just an air of…..je ne sais quois about it. It has to be visited to be truly appreciated.

Having decided on the venue, the issue of cost became a concern. Some sums were mentioned during conversation between myself and my friend; I nodded and smiled to indicate ‘yes’ and only I knew that I meant ‘absolutely NOT’. If I thought it would make an important difference to the event I wouldn’t mind spending thousands of pounds on the evening (my husband probably would) but I genuinely don’t think it will. Ideally, what I envisage for my guests is to be able to come along for as long or as short a time as they wish, I want them to be comfortable, i.e. something to eat (and I promise there will be no unexpected bones) and more importantly something to drink. I want a relaxed, convivial atmosphere with my book being the focus of the evening, and I think a nice venue, French fare and a few bottles of wine are the way to achieve this.

My husband has come up with a staggeringly awful idea for the occasion, and this is that I should do a reading from my book. Apparently this is de rigueur for these events. And, perhaps, if I’d written a book about some amazing achievement like sailing a yacht single-handedly around the world or swimming in almost sub-zero temperatures up on Everest (just trust me on that one) then it might be nice to hear a particularly exciting excerpt read aloud. I can safely say this because the idea of me doing either of those things is so implausible as to be ridiculous. But my book is not about intrepid adventures. It’ll be bad enough that my guests will have no choice about buying it; I can’t imagine that they want to be forced to listen to it all evening as well.

So having found my venue and approved a menu I must now decide upon a guest list. I have a number in my head that I’m working to, considering the size of the bar, and I must allocate spaces carefully. If you are wildly influential or I particularly like you then you will probably be invited. If not, then the other thing I would suggest is just popping into Winchester on the evening of the 29^th September because the idea of this thing is that people can wander in off the street; there will be plenty of publicity posters up to engender interest and you’ll be guaranteed a glass of the one of the splendid wines at La Place.

And finally, I am very grateful to everyone who makes the effort to come and read my blog and if you haven’t already then click ‘Like’ on my facebook page, www.facebook.com/Sarahhaynes.Author and you’ll be notified instantly when a new blog is posted. Alternatively follow me on Twitter @SH_Writes and become my sixth follower! There will be a prize for the tenth. You can also ‘Like’ La Place on facebook – you’ll find the link on my facebook author page.

Next time: I SHOULD have received my review copies which means I can step up a promotion gear and start begging and pleading for shops to stock my book and to be allowed to come in and sign them for people. Time for my most charming self to make an appearance….

This will only be a short post and actually I’m doing well to post it at all, because in direct contrast to last Sunday I find myself this week with almost no time to write. This is not because I am busy, in fact the direct opposite, but by staying at my mother’s house in Berkshire I have effectively moved back to the Dark Ages, with my mother being the enforcer of this. By Dark Ages I mean that things like watching television, using mobile phones and especially LAPTOPS are frowned upon. Anything involving modern technology is not popular in this household. If she could make us all go to bed when the sun goes down and use candles she would do. I got a new phone yesterday (pink Samsung Tocco Lite) and the only reason that I’ve been able to look at facebook, email, etc. is because she hasn’t realised yet that I can access the internet on it.

Despite this, I am managing to keep on top of the various publishing commitments that are arising; I have now seen a pdf file of the official promotion poster and I like it! It’s only tremendously exciting if you’re me, though. And there is one mistake on it which needs to be rectified which is unfortunate because they’ve all been printed already. The initial print run for my book looks like being around 1000 copies which seems quite a lot to me. I’m also not sure how they have arrived at this figure, especially seeing as the original number I was given was 500-600, but there must be a method.

I’m beginning to feel quite productive towards my next manuscript. It started well but I seem to have written myself into a dead end which, as any writer will know, is a nightmare. It usually requires a complete overhaul of the entire thing and possible restructuring. Unfortunately I know where I’m going wrong, and remedying it does indeed require many and various changes. Which is not really possible in this house where doing any writing has the guilty feel of an adulterous affair about it – snatched moments when I can sneak onto my computer and type a couple of sentences before my mother passes through the kitchen and says “What are you doing on there?”. Obviously the possibilities in her mind are endless. I’ve batted away any potential conflict quite swiftly so far with much talk of publishers and emails and deliberately asking her opinion on the various issues I’ve been dealing with, but I can see her getting suspicious before long.

Plus it’s very difficult to have the space and peace to be creative here. It’s a large house with quite a few rooms but each one seems to be occupied by one or more of my four brothers at any given time, not to mention my own children and the assortment of pets here. There are: two dogs, a handful of chickens, a tank of tropical fish, a tortoise and a pygmy hedgehog. This last is particularly annoying because it’s in a tank in the room that I’m sleeping in and for those of you not in the know about captive hedgehogs, they like to recreate their outdoor freedom by running fifteen miles a night – in a squeaky wheel. And I can tell you that listening to fifteen miles of squeaking per night becomes very tiresome.

But other than that, it’s quite peaceful here. The Aga is still switched on and therefore chucking out gallons of heat which is completely unnecessary, but at least the fire isn’t being lit every night. And there’s lots of wine to drink; that’s always appreciated. However, due to unforeseen circumstances we will not be attending the Burlesque night so there will be no talk of stockings I’m afraid. Well, I could talk about my own but I don’t think it would be the same.

Next time: to be confirmed!