Category Archive: Carolyn’s Blog
February 17th, 2012
I took my life in my hands holding the competition last month for a proof copy of THE BOY WHO COULD SEE DEMONS. My son saw my dedication to him in the front pages (or at least, he recognised his name) and held on to my copies for dear life. He would have slept with them if I’d let him. Bless.
Don’t be fooled by that angelic smile. You see the grip he’s got on that book? What it took for me to bribe it off him, I won’t tell you.
Anyhoo, we got ourselves a winner for the comp. I had LOADS of entries, thank you all kindly for spotting Ruen’s name, and sorry to disappoint so many, but I can only have one winner and it’s Cathy White. I’ll hold another competition closer to publication day. For now, though, purrllease make sure you check out the book trailer competition, it is awesome. In fact, please share it, won’t you? I need a great book trailer for this book! I’m counting on you!
Which reminds me: here’s a peek at the cover for the Italian edition which, unlike THE GUARDIAN ANGEL’S JOURNAL (in which almost all my foreign editions used the UK cover), is entirely different. I love it.
In other news, I have a title for my new poetry collection, which is coming along nicely. It’s MOTHERHOOD AS AN ORANGE. No cover image for that just yet, though I have a suspicion it might have an orange on it somewhere. I so loved the cover of INROADS, which featured a photograph by Jamie Baldridge. I think this one might be a bit different, though. Will keep you posted about publication details. So far, I’ve got poems from the collection coming out in The SHOp and Magma, and I’ll also be reading at the launch of the latter at the Troubadour, London, on March 5. In the area? Do come and say hello!
I’m leaving you with my Poem of the Week, right here. Nope, I didn’t write it. Helena Nelson at HappenStance Press sells be-oo-tiful poem cards (including one of my poem, ‘Yesterday, I failed‘) and she sent me this poem card as a gift. It’s stuck to my fridge so I can read it every day. Very necessary. Do purchase if you can think of someone else who might need this stuck to her fridge/stapled to her sleeve/written on her forehead.
‘Til next time!
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on February 17th, 2012
February 9th, 2012
Well?? I know I do, but unfortunately I can’t enter this particular competition because it’s about my book, The Boy Who Could See Demons (it’s out in May, don’tchaknow). Not only do you get the chance to win £100′s worth of books, but the competition gives YOU (yes, you) a chance to be involved in the book’s launch in a really cool way. Like, a book trailer kind of way. A book trailer that will be posted all over the internet to promote the book. I LOVE book trailers, so I think this is amazing. Click here to find out more!
Or, here’s the link:
http://www.piatkusbooks.net/calling-all-aspiring-film-makers/
Good luck!
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on February 9th, 2012
January 26th, 2012
Today I came across a book (or rather, a manuscript) I wrote waaay back in 1990, when I was a young ‘un. Like twelve years old. This wasn’t my first attempt at writing. I’d been hammering away at my grandparents ancient typewriter for years and was delighted to receive a brand spanking new ELECTRONIC TYPEWRITER (woooah!) for my 12th birthday. But then I started grammar school, where they had five – FIVE! – shiny Apple Mac computers – the type that looked like this -
They also had a laserjet printer. I remember thinking I’d died and gone to heaven. Or that I was in some kind of technologically advanced nirvana when I slotted in my floppy disk – you know, the new kind that wasn’t actually floppy – and opened up all seven of my manuscripts on screen. It was a very exciting time.
(My kids still look at me funny when I wax lyrical about the days of cassette tapes and black and white televisions. They must think I’m about a hundred years old.)
Anyhoo, these computers just about rocked my world. I stayed behind after school most days so I could seize upon the opportunity to write. I’m sure my friends thought I was a bit weird. My home life wasn’t awesome, either, so I killed two birds with one stone. This was one of the outcomes of that time:
I chuckled a little when I saw the computer graphics added to the text, like this one of a wine glass and some grapes – completely unrelated to the text, but Clipart was a far cry from typing on a typewriter (which involved nothing more glamourous than corrector fluid and chafed fingers…)
Next time, the novel I wrote (or typed) when I was 10, a sort of ‘Lovely Bones’ tale called ‘Teen Ghost’…
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on January 26th, 2012
January 4th, 2012
Possibly one of the best ways to be roused from one’s sickbed is the postman delivering the bound proofs of one’s second novel, titled The Boy Who Could See Demons. Look at this beauty:
Oooohhhh…….
Aaahhhh….
Did I really write a book this long? It’s much thicker than I remembered…..
Notice the graphics of dogs and cars and music and onions? Have another look:
They all refer to the plot. But THIS here’s something I’m particularly proud of:
Ignore my chipped nail polish. Ahem.
My publisher was kind enough to allow me to include my composition for a piece of music that’s mighty important to the story in the opening pages of the novel. Isn’t that cool?
So, now that I’m out of my sickbed I may as well do something useful. I know, let’s have a competition!
All you have to do is spot the name of Alex’s demon on the cover of these bound proofs and email me your contact details (and the demon’s name, of course) at my contact page. Sometime around February or March I’ll select a winner at random and send a signed copy of one of my bound proofs of The Boy Who Could See Demons to you in the post.
Good luck!
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on January 4th, 2012
January 2nd, 2012
Well a very happy 2012 to you all! I hope it has thus far been your best year yet.
I also wanted to apologise in a grovelly and not-my-fault fashion to those of you who had subscribed to my other blog, The Risk Taker’s Guide to Endorphins. It would appear that my domain subscription lapsed, and soon after sitemeter alerted me to some strange activity in distant lands a new site popped up at my old domain name, titled – rather imaginatively, don’t you think? – The Risk Taker’s Guide to Endorphins. I’m currently disputing the use of my old blog title but it would appear that this new site has binned my blog archives entirely. So I’m posting here one of the more memorable posts from that blog. Fare thee well, old blog!
Here’s a little recipe I like to share with my creative writing students:
Forget homemade cake. Betty Crocker cake mix produces the best cake in the world. No need for a flour tornado and mounds of butter: just add an egg, splash of oil and water, give it a stir, and after half an hour in the oven, you’ve got Nirvana in a dish.
Interestingly enough, there’s no need for anyone to have to add more than water, but the Betty Crocker company found that early sales were bombing. Why? People wanted to contribute to the cake. Yeah, they wanted a short cut, but not too much of a short cut. They wanted the ‘I made this’ factor. Hence, the egg. Once people could start adding an egg or two to the mix, sales rocketed. And so, nearly a century since the company started, we still have Betty Crocker on our shelves at Tesco.
There’s an important analogy for writers here: let the reader add their egg. Let them get involved, contribute, work stuff out, make their own connections. Don’t tell them too much. Give them a way to put their hands around the dough of the plot, give it a good knead, feel its texture. Let them make shapes with it before rolling it out. Don’t roll it flat for them. Let the reader pummel the dough with their own life experience, emotions, interpretations. Allow the work to breathe, expand, cool, set.
As a writer, it’s important to think of the reader. Not necessarily in the commercial sense. That comes later. But good writing involves the reader; it gives the reader a way in, a chance to contribute, a feeling that they belong.
You might say that a good piece of writing is a soft, spongey cake. Not a burnt offering.
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on January 2nd, 2012
December 18th, 2011
Hello there. Terribly sorry it’s been so long, but I’ve been attempting to write a novel over these last 7 weeks amidst a Sisyphean cycle of household illness. Nonetheless, the battle has been victorious – I have finished the first draft of my new novel, which I’m currently calling THE SCATTERING. I have yet to send it to my agent and editor, and as such am hoping they like it as much as I do.
This novel is a reworking of a previous novel I wrote way back in 2008 when I was on maternity leave with my son. I had two children under the age of 18 months and I suddenly understood the importance of my relationship with my mother-in-law. I relied on her desperately to look after my little ones when I needed a nap, or when I needed to write – a need that kicked in around 4 weeks after giving birth. So off I went, several times a week for about three hours at a time, pounding at a laptop I’d borrowed – from my mother-in-law, I might add – and writing what was my first ever novel. My practice novel, I call it, titled ‘Trial & Eire.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was about the relationship between a young woman and her mother-in-law, only the wife had been widowed, and the mother-in-law was resolutely odious.
I plodded on at the novel for about 5 months without any plan of where it was going, bumping into characters as I went, following my main character and antagonist around and generally enjoying their antics. At the end of it, I had 100,000 words of tangled fragments of something I felt was generally unsatisfactory. I sent off the first 50 pages to a couple of independent publishers, both of which pressed me to send them the rest of the novel, but I felt there was no real novel. There was just a jumbled collection of notes. And of course, when the idea for The Guardian Angel’s Journal struck in May 2009, ‘Trial & Eire’ was plonked in a bottom drawer.
Interestingly enough, I had intended T&E to stay in the bottom drawer for keeps. I really believed it was unfixable, too chaotic to rework. But roll forward a few of years, and my mother-in-law – who read the first draft of the book and absolutely loved it – is still harping on at me to finish it. She goes on about it so much – and to everyone who will listen – that I roll my eyes when she brings it up and wish she’d forget about it. It was a practice novel, I tell her. It was 100,000 words of cutting my teeth, so to speak. But the voices of the widow and her mother-in-law never left me. Their characters were so strong that I felt I knew them, and – weird as it sounds – I started to miss them. So when NaNoWriMo rolled around this year, I had a think about what I could do to fix T&E. After all, I had deemed it unfixable. I returned to the previous draft and, with a gap of over 3 years and 2 other completed novels by which to glean a different perspective, began to see the wood for the trees. I saw where I had gone wrong as clear as day – I had taken the premise and smothered it with too much other stuff. Too many characters, too many plots. Too much happening and not enough focus on the central idea, the relationship between the widow and her mother-in-law. I think I had lacked the confidence to develop this relationship, believing instead that I had to pepper the story with a myriad of plotlines worthy of Eastenders. It’s interesting to look back on early material like this – I wonder how many budding writers receive countless rejection letters because their novel suffers from the same flaw.
THE SCATTERING is a work I’m happy with because it does what T&E did not – it explores my characters, mines their relationship for the plot instead of circulating a plot around the characters. Revisiting my characters was just fabulous – once I worked out what was going to happen at the end I just let them get on with it. At one point we all ended up in Dresden – not literally, of course – and it was so surprising and intriguing to write in this way, to create a flexible plot structure that retained my focus on the outcome but allowed the characters to develop organically.
But had anyone told me a year ago that I would rewrite T&E, I would have told them – absolutely not. Don’t you know that book’s unfixable? How many unfinished drafts do YOU have that you think are unfixable? Unfixable, really? I wonder.
Merry Christmas!! I hope it’s your best one yet. x
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on December 18th, 2011
November 19th, 2011
Well, we’re 19 days into NaNoWriMo – there are many of us fallen by the wayside, no doubt, but many still plowing on and, if you’re like me, extending your deadline a little. I’m sitting at just under 30k, but am aiming to complete a first draft of around 80k by Christmas.
I’m really enjoying writing my novel, BUT – and there is a huge BUT here – it has been haaaarrrrrrdddd…. At times the 2000 words a day regime has felt like a logistical impossibility. At the beginning of the month I was like, ’2000 words a day? Pah! A mere 2-hour trot!’ Now, having faced the onslaught of days that just get busier and busier, nights with a screaming child that render me soggy-brained and incapable of spelling ‘apple’ the following day, I have respect for 2000 words. RE-SPECT.
Still, I AM enjoying what I write, what is half the battle. I have toyed with the notion of writing the words ‘it doesn’t matter if it’s rubbish’ in black marker on my laptop, because sometimes that’s the only kind of mantra that enables those 2000 words to get out of my head and to the screen. And often, what I expected to be drivel is surprisingly decent – or, at the very least, fixable.
And – the sword of NaNoWriMo – I’m constantly writing ideas in a notebook. Those little scribbles are like seed bombs, exploding into scenes and character development that ultimately push my word count forward.
Keep going! I’ll see you on the other side. x
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on November 19th, 2011
November 1st, 2011
It’s National Novel Writing Month, hooray!! I’m very excited about it this year as it’s the first time I’m able to commit to it in any realistic sense of the word. Every other November I’ve been gainfully employed, which is of course no bad thing, but it generally meant that I had a run-up-to-Christmas workload that cancelled out the possibility of participating in ‘NaNoWriMo‘. Having said that, this month I do have edits for the US version of THE BOY WHO COULD SEE DEMONS to finish as well as the UK proofs but I’m sure I’ll still be able to write 3000 words a day, 6 days a week… *nervous laugh*
Yes, it is a little daunting to conceive of writing a novel in a month. But I believe a writing ‘binge’ is the best way to let the subconscious flow freely on to the page. Given too much time I tend to sit around chewing my fingernails off in worry and hovering over every word I type lest it be the wrong word out of bazillions of possibilities… So I’m all for this NaNoWriMo malarky, and I’m going in prepared.
The trick is this: NOTEBOOKS. What’s worked for me in the past is scribbling ideas in a notebook as they come to me so that I never approach the 3000-word-writing-day without an idea of what I’ll be writing. A seed, a tiny hook – both are found in those scribbles, and without either I tend to waste a lot of time updating my Twitter status. For me, the blank page or screen can seem impenetrable without some prior meditation on what might happen next. It was the only way I could have produced The Guardian Angel’s Journal in such a tight space of time (most of it in 11 days); every time I wrapped up my writing for the day I usually had a millions ideas still galloping in my head for where the story was going next. Had I not jotted these down in a notebook I am certain that I would have opened up my macbook the day after and thought blankly, ‘now, where were we?’
Notebooks are saviours. I have stuff in my notebooks that I have no memory of writing – the only proof is my illegible scrawl…
So, what are you waiting for? Get cracking!
And good luck!
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on November 1st, 2011
October 26th, 2011
Recently I went back to my old grammar school in Belfast and spoke to the English A-level class about writing. It had been over 14 years since I last stepped inside the doors of my old school and it was a wonderful and slightly surreal experience. My visit made me realise how lucky I was to have had such a great school to go to, and how much my seven years there shaped so much about my life now.
Such as writing. I wanted to gush at length about my former English and Latin teachers in the acknowledgments of INROADS, but for fear of the acknowledgements section being longer than the actual book I restricted my thanks to people who had directly assisted in some way. In short, while I absolutely hated the whole concept of school – I generally loathe rules which are not of my own making, and so the notion of school uniforms and all that studying malarky was far from my personal idea of fun – I adored English and Latin. I adored learning about the War poets, about Ovid and Virgil. I couldn’t tell you a thing about what I learned in physics, chemistry, and am fairly sure that my grade ‘B’ in maths GCSE was a token of sympathy, but the stories and insights into poetic form I learned in English and Latin have been imprinted on my psyche.
So I wanted to go back and attempt to impress on the students how important these stressing-about-UCAS years really are. The 11 GCSEs and 3 A levels I sat during my school years don’t even feature on my CV anymore. What has stuck with me is a love of literature, which in turn has shaped my entire career.
It was a great day, and I even took away with me the plastic owl above – the school crest features an owl – which was very kind. With the national school curriculum creating endless meaningless targets and fostering less and less creativity, I think it’s important to encourage students to draw upon their own imaginative resources and to regard creativity as something enjoyable and vital to their future.
Look! It lights up and everything!
In other news…
Our kitten got lost recently. For 24 hours my heart sat in my mouth as we wracked our brains as to where she could have got to. Eventually it emerged that she must have darted out the front door in the half-minute it had been opened at 6am, and was found the following morning clinging to the tree in the front garden. Bless her little paws. Anyway, I wrote a poem as a result. Here’s a draft:
Absurd
People would think it absurd
if I admitted
how much I love my cat but
the fact is
I really do
love the way she’ll creep around the rim
of the bath while I soak
risking a wet fright and maybe drowning
just to be near me
that she’ll lean in to my face
and give a cat-like kiss
that she’ll make play of a sock
an odd slipper a big toe
that she waits for me to come home
and sleeps in a happy coil by my head
People would laugh and think
I’m daft
so this will go no further
and you and I will stay the only ones
who know
it is not what you love
but that the thing you love
is the small hole you have found
in the daily grind
that reaches right into
paradise
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on October 26th, 2011
October 12th, 2011
My Twitter pal Keris Stainton (and author of Della Says: OMG! and Jessie Hearts NYC) blogged recently and I thought I’d do something similar. So this week I’ve been mostly
Listening… to a free audio-book sent to my old academic address from The British Library. It’s a series of interviews with writers on…well, writing. Hilary Mantel’s advice is just amazing: ‘just get out of the way of your own book.’ To me, it means to put aside your doubts, fears, ego, premonitions about what the critics will say etc. Just write.
Cuddling… my children. And Angelina, our kitten.
Just wook at the widdle kidden…. 
Drinking… Too much Diet Coke and too many hot chocolates. I generally begin the week with the announcement, ‘Today I give up Diet Coke and hot chocolate and replace them with wheatgrass and spirulina smoothies.’ By about Wednesday my nocturnal daughter has worn me into a quivering wreck in dire need of caffeine and sugar. And it helps my Muse. Ahem.
Wearing… these earrings from Monsoon. I just adore them. The fact that they were marked down by 70% (and therefore cost less than a newspaper) makes me beam with frugal pride. 
Wanting… more sleep. It’s become an obsession in the wake (ha! get it?) of my 16-month-old’s recent tendency to wake at around 1am and stay awake until about 5am, then take a catnap at 9am by which time I’m too wired or busy to nap with her. I’m a lightweight as it is, so her nocturnal habits are reducing me to a drooling zombie. I’m sure it’s just a phase…*hopeful laugh*
Visiting…Roseberry Park mental health development in Middlesbrough, for which I was commissioned to write half a mile’s worth of a poem that would take the form of a meandering ribbon of corten steel throughout the ground of the complex. I visited the site a year and a half ago but was recently invited by the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Trust to come down for the official unveiling (and to have lunch with the Duke of Gloucester, no less), which was all very nice indeed.
This is the board at the entrance of the hospital, and the wavy brown thing in the middle of the board is a map of one of two pathways that my poem takes. You can see it had to have loads of diversions, forking all over the place and generally very tricky to write. But it was lovely to see again. You can read more about it here.
Reading…submissions for some poetry and fiction competitions I’ve been filter judging. It has been a real eye-opener, actually, reading so much unpolished (and of course, unpublished) work and generally gleaning insight into how publishers and agents must feel when they wade through a wall of pages: I want to find work that excites me. I want to keep reading, even when I’m pressed for time - I want something to force me to stay up late just because the writing is that good. And what makes the difference between good work and the submissions that hit my ‘NO’ pile is the voice. It isn’t the genre or the subject. Of the fiction submissions, yes, there were certainly a lot of crime stories, but the work that was strong made me suddenly care about subjects that I otherwise have no interest in. For instance, I have no personal investment in 11th-century Switzerland, but there was a story in the pile that suddenly had me intrigued, simply because of the strength of the writing. Of the poems, those pieces which used language carefully and exactly, which were pruned of the trite, the vague, and the inauthentic were the ones that got my vote.
I’ve also been reading books, believe it or not: A. D. Miller’s Snowdrops and Bella Pollen’s The Summer of the Bear, both of which I can’t praise enough. My Twitter friend Liz Kessler sent me a copy of her book A Year Without Autumn, which I cannot wait to devour.
Thinking… about e-books. About how the publishing industry needs to catch up with the media industries. How e-books need to become like DVDs – lots of additional content for the reader to interact with, much more than a pdf. How I agree with everyone this man says. How the good news is that authors can do a lot of this themselves and – even better – social media is free.
Watching… I don’t really watch TV (when have I got the time??) but I have been glancing over the top of my laptop at the X-factor. Good grief, this one has been dramatic.
Last but not least, I’ve been
Celebrating… as my second novel, The Boy Who Could See Demons, has just been picked up by Bantam Dell at Random House in the US, squeeee!!! I am just over the moon about this – no, not just over the moon. I am so crazily excited that I shall be henceforth be referred to Carolyn Too-Delighted-For-Words Jess-Cooke.
Will update on its publication date soon.
Posted in: Carolyn's Blog by Carolyn Jess-Cooke on October 12th, 2011
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