REVELATIONS AND REVELRY

Well, what a busy few days! It’s been my husband’s birthday, from which we emerged tired and hungover. Obviously.  From there I went straight into a day of visiting bookshops and finalising launch plans at La Place, which involved a bottle of wine. Obviously. Which meant that my meetings went very, very well indeed. Obviously. In all seriousness – I had a fantastic day on Friday. Waterstones in Winchester were very accommodating, took me very seriously and I was thrilled with the outcome. Subject to them liking the book (emphasis on THE, I’ll explain in a minute) they are going to stock it for me, display it prominently, put it in several different sections and organise a signing for me – for which they anticipate needing 50-75 books. That seems like a wild amount to me! So a good result all in all.

However on Friday I could have done with 50-75 books; I went to Winchester for the express purpose of taking the book around several different places for people to see it. Bookshop managers are always keen to physically hold the book, I have learned. There are no conversations to be had unless they are literally able to have it in their hands – I presume this is to make sure that you haven’t glued it together yourself or something. So I in my wisdom took only one copy of the book with me to Winchester. I consider myself a veteran of selling my book to managers and I have never needed more than one copy. You will already know where this is going. Waterstones was the very first bookshop that I went into, I had a terrifically exciting conversation with the manager (lovely chap but I don’t think he made eye contact with me once; he stared at a space somewhere above my right shoulder for the duration) and at some point the sentence “….will give the book to our fiction buyer, who will read it to see if she likes it…..” was uttered. Swiftly followed by “Do you have a copy that I could keep?” Let’s think about that for a second – can I spare a copy of my book to give to the fiction buyer for Waterstones in Winchester? That would be a YES. What could I do? Possibly something other than what I did actually do; I said “Yes of course, do keep that copy,” and watched my plans for the day slide down into a sad little heap. My fault of course, I should have brought more. So I thanked him, looked longingly at my book and walked out of the shop, essentially thinking “Oh bloody hell, what do I do now?” I hadn’t taken anything else. No posters, no flyers and definitely no more books. I stood outside Waterstones for about a minute before I realised that I really had made a major error. So I swivelled around on my very high (and painful) heels, sort of slunk back into the shop, sidled up to the counter – of course the manager had vanished – and had to say “Well yes, I’m Sarah Haynes, I just left my book for the fiction buyer but could I possibly have it back?” Great start Sarah, well done.

From there I went to the next bookshop, also a major chain, and again asked to see the manager. There were muttered discussions about where he might be and it eventually transpired that he was in his Office. Which was spoken in tones that suggested the word ‘Oval’ should be in front of it. I was solemnly led upstairs and told to wait while they fetched this great person from The Office, so I did and looked at books while I waited. About ten minutes later this man appeared. He was just about a man anyway, he couldn’t possibly have been more than twenty, and he also looked like he’d been in a major car accident. One eye was black and swollen, the actual white of his eye was deep red, his eyebrow was being held together by a steri-strip, his cheek was bruised black and puffy and his arm was in a cast. It was a forlorn picture.

“Oh my goodness,” I gasped. “What on earth have you done?” It was an accident of some sort, the question was how severe and whether anyone else had died.

“Oh – I got into a fight at the weekend,” he said, and from that point my words deserted me. I was all ready with sympathy, etc. but you can’t sympathise about a fight. So I settled for just looking at him for a second, at a bit of a loss, and then launching into “I’m Sarah Haynes, a local author…..” Incidentally, when I’d said the same line in the previous shop the manager had immediately responded with “By local, do you actually mean Winchester?” To which I replied “Yes” because “No” would have been the wrong answer. And then had a fleeting panic whilst I tried to recall the addresses of friends in case the conversation became more specific.

After the bookshops I went to La Place and drank some wine. Obviously. Whilst finalising plans for the launch. It was initially going to be held downstairs in the bar area but now we are upstairs because the numbers attending suggest that this is a better idea. It has the potential to get very crowded, very quickly and upstairs will give us more space, a table for signing books and most importantly a free rein over music. I am so terribly excited that I can hardly bear to think about it. And I liked La Place so much that I went back on Saturday for a bit more wine. I do love Winchester.

I can also reveal that the newest member of the Haynes household has arrived! No, I haven’t had the world’s quickest and most secret pregnancy, our new addition is a fish called Octopus. Some time ago three year old Alice decided that she wanted a fish after seeing a pink, princess tank in a shop. My sister Kim (to whom Things He Never Knew is dedicated) is Aquatics manager at a pet shop so she obtained the tank for us and we withheld it until Alice had reached the required behaviour levels that would entitle her to it. This she has done and so we told her that yes, she could now have her tank and some fish. We were unprepared for the question: “And some sea?” But for as long as she believes that the sea comes out of our bathroom taps, that’s fine. However the next request was “And an octopus please.” Ah. Bit more tricky. And we didn’t like the tantrums when we answered in the negative so we quickly settled on calling her pet fish Octopus. Everyone’s happy.

Apart from me, because there’s still no sign of Boris.

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.