REVELATIONS AND REVELRY

Well as the title says I am run off my feet here. I’m not sure how those of you who have been working twenty years plus manage it at all; on current form I’m not sure I’ll be able to manage twenty days. I feel like the proverbial dog chasing its own tail; no matter how hard you try, you’re not going to make it. Of course I will make it and probably sooner than I think, I am wading through my list gradually. That is a point actually, it would help if I had a list. But I don’t. I just hold all the relevant details in my head and constantly go over them to check that there’s nothing I’ve forgotten, which leads to unnecessary stress. But by the time I’ve deliberated whether I should handwrite or type a list, and if handwrite then in which notebook I’m most likely to remember to check and update it, it seems more productive just to get on with doing the tasks I’m procrastinating about writing down. You see? I make things unnecessarily difficult.

The invitations for my book launch have been consuming a lot of my time over the last few days. It’s very important to get them right, and I know this. They will be going out to Very Important People and it’s vital that they convey the right image. I want them to say: good book and Bright Young Thing basically. Not quite in the Evelyn Waugh/Stephen Fry way, I can’t have alcohol and scandal tarnishing my reputation, but similar. Ish. And I won’t be able to call myself ‘young’ for much longer, so I’d better do it while I can. Anyway, a friend of mine alerted me to the idea that people will perceive me in a certain way (before that I’d thought they would concentrate on the book) by commenting on my intended outfit for the book launch. “So,” he said, “you’re going for the young, sexy, author look are you?” I must be honest – until that point I hadn’t even been aware that such a thing existed. I certainly haven’t seen it as a fancy dress option anywhere before. But that aside, it was vital that I spent time making sure that my invitations were right. I want them to be classy, clear and – well – inviting. And I started off with all good intentions but then when I was in the offices of the printing place and being offered lots of different designs and choices – most of which I didn’t understand because they related to the size and thickness of the card used – frankly it sounded as though the proprietor were speaking in code. And I felt my attention begin to slip away onto more interesting things. I’d drag it back and focus and before I knew it, it was sliding away again and taking my eyes with it. Luckily the appointment ended fairly soon after that with the promise of a proof image via email within the hour. It arrived and I deliberated over it for a lot of hours – without actually managing to appraise it effectively at all. The sensible part of me (0.4%) knew that I should spend time making sure it was perfect, but the rest (can’t do maths) was screaming ‘it’s fine, just say yes’. But I didn’t! I listened to sense, and also someone else, and forced myself to make sure it was as perfect as it could be before I gave the go-ahead to print them. Just to clarify: it isn’t laziness/disinterest that prevents me from taking a proper interest in things, it’s the fact that I have So Much Stuff to focus on at the moment I feel guilty for prioritising one thing. It’s like trying not to favour a child, except inanimate objects really don’t listen to reason. So my mind flicks back and forth continually with other thoughts crowding out the one I’m actually trying to progress….. If anyone says a book release is easy, they are lying.

However, my eldest daughter went back to school yesterday, and my younger one went today.  Which should, in theory, give me a lot more free time in which to be productive. Yesterday it didn’t work out like that, I got sidetracked by a coffee morning and conversations. This is more important than it sounds because my new manuscript is largely reliant on these conversations – they will be its lifeblood if I get the stuff I’m looking for. To give you an example I heard one such conversation today – it was a serious conversation – and it ran like this (between two American women):

A:“You know, I’m so used to my kids being the only white-blondes around that I struggle to identify them here. I used to say ‘there’s mine’ and now I’m like ‘oh – I’m not so sure’”.

B: “I totally know what you mean, it was like that when we lived in Japan. It was easy finding my kids because they were the whitest ones there.”

A: “Guess it’s going to be more difficult here, huh?”

B: “Totally.”

For those not in the know, this not a normal school-gate conversation. Not a lot of people have previously lived in Japan, but even less rely on their children’s hair and skin colour to identify them in a crowd. I have no problems identifying my eldest daughter at the moment however, she’ll be the child scratching her head. Oh yes, the Nits Are Back. I discovered this at bedtime the night before school started – nightmare. But the nits paid for it. After I combed them all out onto kitchen paper we lit a little nit bonfire outside and I was immensely satisfied to watch them burn. Hideous things.

So to re-cap: I am very busy and also quite stressed. This is a new emotion to me, nothing has ever stressed me before; GCSEs, A-Levels, Uni, childbirth, motherhood….I’ve been quite relaxed about it all. But not this and I don’t know why. I suppose it might have something to do with finally achieving a really important goal and wanting to make sure that everything goes to plan…..but let’s just say that my stress-relievers are definitely in demand at the moment. And they go by the names of Chablis, Sancerre, Meursault, Pinot Grigio and Chardonnay. This last is a wine and not a child, just to be clear. I don’t know if you’ve met them? But yesterday I found myself in an alcohol-free house! This was purely by accident I hasten to add. Mere oversight by my stressed and tired brain. My in-laws live nearby (who am I kidding? They live next door) and I considered crawling round there and begging for a bottle of wine, but this is NOT a good look and my pride prevented me. I decided to root through the kitchen cupboards for the meths instead. Clearly I am verging on true bona fide, alcoholic, scandalous, Bright Young Thing territory.

Subsequent to the laptop, I am pleased to make a further announcement and this is that Things He Never Knew is now available to pre-order at www.amazon.co.uk! Oh God…..it’s real…..this is all really, actually, truly happening……….

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.