REVELATIONS AND REVELRY

Outside the studio

Triangles have three sides. There. That is the official “Sarah Haynes theorem on triangles”. I don’t think Pythagoras has a rival in me just yet. It’s possible that from this you would think that I don’t have the wherewithal to write a book, but I promise you I do. And not only that but one book is rapidly turning into two! I have written a few thousand more words of my second manuscript and I am ever so pleased and excited with how it’s coming along. Such a great feeling to watch a manuscript unfold as it’s supposed to. I am also working on my chick-lit/lit-fic blog, which interestingly was something that came up both in my radio interview yesterday morning and at the book-signing.

First of all – book signing! Thank you very much to everyone who came along. It was a great experience and a rapid learning curve. It felt a bit surreal at first to be sitting there surrounded by copies of my book and knowing that they were just waiting to be signed by me. But I very quickly got the hang of it; the shop was quite quiet for a couple of hours so I had plenty of time to people-spot, which I LOVE. Just trying to guess from the way they look and what they’re doing what their job might be, are they married or single, happy or sad in life? It fascinates me to watch people drifting by because I am so incurably nosy. I also got the chance to read some of Mrs Fry’s Diary which I quickly realised was a bad idea because it made me laugh so much I was shaking, which is just not a good look at your own book-signing. I imagine for anyone glancing over at me then I looked like a bit of a lunatic. But when I was reading things like “…We told Stephen Junior that he was adopted tonight. He isn’t, but there was nothing on TV.” I really couldn’t help it. Great book, very funny. And I am now consumed by curiosity as to who Mrs Stephen Fry is. More about that later.

I didn’t have an easy start to the signing; the first chap who came up to talk to me spent a long time looking at the back of the book before saying to me “I can’t read, you know,” – to which I didn’t really know what to say. Short of offering to read him the entire thing I didn’t see that there was a lot that I could do. I suggested audiobooks, but he told me that he preferred to attend talks and get his information that way, so that was that. And then the second lady who came up picked up Things He Never Knew, looked at it suspiciously and said “It’s not chick-lit is it?” in tones that suggested that she equates chick-lit with pornography. Obviously I didn’t know quite what to say, as the answer is probably yes, if I’m brutally honest. To the chick-lit bit, not pornography. It’s certainly on the chick-lit scale, but as quickly as she had said that she announced that she liked the sound of it and could I sign it for her? I was quick to reassure her that it is slightly more cerebral than some of the books out there, and that I had in fact written it myself. It was interesting to watch people react to me – some stuck like glue to the shelves so that they didn’t have to come near me and some people came straight over the minute I caught their eye and smiled. I was particularly interested in why people picked up Things He Never Knew, I asked one girl and she said it was the colour of the front cover, which is nice, I’m glad I got the cover right.

And in the bits when I wasn’t signing books or chatting to people I was able to look around the shop and see all the books that I don’t have time to read, e.g. The Distant Hours by Kate Morton. She is one of my absolute all-time favourite authors and I’ve been waiting for her latest book to be released for ages. But I simply don’t have the time to dedicate to reading it and I don’t want to read it in fits and starts so I have forced myself to delay buying it. The other thing that I noticed as I glanced around the shop was the calendar stand – and I was astonished. The first one that caught my eye was a 2011 calendar entitled “Beautiful Sheep”. BEAUTIFUL SHEEP???? Swiftly followed by “Girls on Chairs” – which has a slightly kinky ring to it if you ask me. Which probably no-one will after this. What extraordinary things to do calendars on. Whatever happened to naked WI members and Chesney Hawkes?

However I didn’t have time to think about it because I then had to get home and go to sleep essentially, to be up at 6:30am to read the Sunday papers ahead of being on the Nick Girdler show on BBC Radio Solent. Or I thought I had to be up at 6:30am, my mother had different ideas – she texted me from America at 5:38am and woke me up, thereby ensuring that I lost almost an hours sleep. But no matter, the interview went very well and it was lovely to meet Nick, he’s so nice. I didn’t dare listen to the show for about twelve hours in case I sounded awful, but I don’t. I don’t even sound as nervous as I was. I chose to comment on stories about fraudulent benefit claims (which nearly gave my husband a heart attack as we had agreed that I would steer clear of politics), overly thin women which I think are becoming a serious issue in terms of role models for young girls, and then the recently revived rumours that Prince William and Kate are getting married. Again. I hope they do – I think they will – it would be absolutely lovely. And Kate must be getting fed up of waiting by now. And then to my absolute delight I found a story on page 11 of the Mail on Sunday about Boris! Dear old Boris, who, according to the paper, is no longer sleeping at his family home but instead in a flat 100 yards away. But why is this????? How can Marina bear those 100 yards?????? I’m glad he is though because it meant that I was able to mention him on the radio, ending my contribution perfectly.

So all in all it was a thoroughly good weekend full of firsts for me. Oh – I was going to talk about Mrs Fry’s Diary. As I said, I read it on Saturday and that evening I sent Mrs Stephen Fry herself a tweet saying how funny I’d found it. The next thing I knew ‘she’ had replied to me and re-tweeted it and my number of followers leapt by thirty in a matter of hours! Including a follow by Mrs Stephen Fry which I’m pleased about seeing as ‘she’ has over 71,000 followers and follows less than 3,000 ‘herself’. I feel ridiculous saying ‘her’ because I’m sure it’s not. And I’m so curious now as to whom it actually is. I’m delighted to have so many new followers though; I look forward to hearing from them all.

As some of you will have seen from facebook and twitter, I have a very quiet week ahead of me this week. My eldest daughter is in Portugal and my husband is away on a course. Rather delightfully this means I can eat what I want, watch what I want on TV, go to bed when I want, get up when I want and also spend hours and hours crafting my new manuscript – which is a thrilling thought. Lucky me!

Fareham book-signing

According to the countdown on my blog site I have just one day and one hour to go until my first-ever book signing! It’s clever of it to know that because I haven’t confirmed with Waterstones what time I’m starting yet. I’m sure they said 9am but I personally think that 10am would be a much more sensible time. Those customers who are in at 9am will want to ease into their day gently by browsing shelves and not talking much, it will take until the people who have stayed in bed so long that they didn’t make it in till 10am arrive before anyone begins to engage with me. I’m sure. And also I don’t like getting up early. No, I’m joking. I do quite like getting up early actually. I think it’s because it takes me a long time to wake up in the morning, I’m not one of those people who can bounce out of bed at 8am and start earnestly discussing Pythagoras’ theorem over a cup of tea. To be brutally honest I’m not sure that I could discuss Pythagoras’ theorem at any time of the day or night. Is it something to do with triangles? It fascinates and slightly horrifies me that anyone could be so interested in triangles that they come up with a theory about them. Can you imagine how bored you would have to be? I find maths in its entirety frighteningly boring. But at least it’s easy to date Pythagoras’ theorem – it simply must have been before the days of Sky + and Coronation Street. I wonder how many new theories are developed these days? Not many, I’ll bet. Everyone’s too busy watching Come Dine With Me and Michael Macintyre’s Comedy Roadshow.

Anyway, that’s why I like getting up early so I can have a good long time to properly wake up before I need to be coherent. But don’t worry, I shall be fully awake and coherent by the time I start signing books tomorrow. I am going to spend today flexing my book-signing muscles and deciding what pen to use. I normally use a fountain pen but I’m not too sure how good an idea this is; it certainly looks very nice but the ink can be unreliable sometimes and there’s nothing worse than signing a book for someone and having to go over the words again. I know because it happened at the launch but luckily it was someone I knew. I think if a person buys a book tomorrow and I sign it they have a right to expect a decent, legible signature. Not something that looks like someone’s old aunt has signed it. Mind you, if someone’s old aunt starts signing my books in Waterstones her signature will be the least of my worries.

And talking about getting up early it’s a good job that I don’t mind doing it because on Sunday I shall have to be up and about super-early to be on the radio! I don’t mind admitting that it’s something I’m mildly nervous about, simply because I’ve never done it before. Fear of the unknown and all that. But everybody that I’ve spoken to has said there’s nothing to it and it’s just like having a conversation with someone. Let’s hope so……..! For those who don’t know, I am going to be a guest on the Nick Girdler Show on BBC Radio Solent between 9:30-9:50am. With that and my book signing this is a real weekend of ‘firsts’ for me. It’s certainly the first time I’ve ever turned down an invitation for Saturday night in favour of going to bed early and getting a good night’s sleep.

And finally, some of you will be pleased to hear that progress on Manuscript Number 2 is well under way. I’d already written a few thousand words (20,000 to be precise) but they needed heavy editing which is nearly completed. I’ve taken bits out, simplified some of my characters and generally made it as good as it can be – and I’m very pleased. As an author you know when you’ve got it right because as you read your own words a sense of excitement sort of fizzes up inside you and you think – yes! I’ve done it! I have the basis of a very good book and I am excited about writing the rest of it. It’s going to be a fun thing to write. I need to do more planning which I find terribly dull and frustrating, I don’t want to be planning what will happen, I want to be writing it, creating it, bringing it all to life and seeing what happens next. Because a lot of the time the characters write themselves and I’m sometimes surprised with what they say and how they behave. I censor them occasionally, they can’t be allowed to run amok, but I have a good collection of characters this time which is nice to work with.

I shall leave it here for today as I have several thousand things to do and nowhere near enough time to do them all. I would like to say a massive THANK YOU for all the feedback I’ve been getting. It’s both rewarding and useful to know what people are thinking about me and my book. And I’m so pleased that so many people are reacting to Steph in the way that they are meant to, it means that my writing has worked.

The countdown on my blog site now reads just twenty two hours to go, so you can all see how long it has taken me to write this! What can I say……I’ve been so distracted by developing my new theorem for triangles that I couldn’t concentrate properly on writing this. If there is sufficient interest then I shall publish the results of my theorem next time; it can form the first sentence of my blog.

Title: Local Author Christmas Extravaganza! @ Waterstones WestQuay Shopping Centre
Location: Westquay Shopping Centre, Southampton
Link out: Click here
Description: Local Author Christmas Extravaganza!

Waterstone’s Southampton West

18/11/2010

Get your Christmas shopping off to a stress-free start by dropping in on our local author evening. Meet the finest of our local talent including fiction author Sarah Haynes, whose book ‘Things He Never Knew’ is the perfect gift for any ‘chick-lit-a-holic!’
Start Time: 17:30
Date: 2010-11-18
End Time: 19:30