At last!

Here it is - my book. I got my first advance copy on Thursday. I ordered some extra copies because my author copies won't be arriving for a couple of weeks. Yesterday I handed out a few copies to those students who had helped me early in the year. to their history teachers and to a friend on staff, then took some home for my mother and sister.

But there was no excitement quite like that I felt coming home on Thursday, finding the envelope and ripping it open. The students at my school have been sharing the excitement of the process. They got the first look at potential covers. I have to say, this is not the one most of them chose, but they have been pleased to share the process with me, asking now and then how it was going, when it would be out, could they read it when it did.

I'm hoping to do a school-based launch, if I can do it before all the end-of-year stuff catches up. Exams, assemblies, end-of-year activities... We'll see. If I can't do it now, I will have a belated one first thing next year, but I'm hoping not to lose the impetus.

It doesn't matter how many books you've done (this is my tenth if you don't count the manuscript I did for that small publisher who then informed all her writers that she couldn't publish because the Canadians didn't have the money to give her, but that's another story). It's always, always exciting to see the finished product for the first time. You never get used to it. Well, I don't.

Oh, joy!

Copyedit Done!

My novel, first called Bisclavret, now to come out in December as Wolfborn, is getting to the final stages. Cover design done, complete with something called a 'shoutline" and cover blurb, copyedit complete as of today. I was surprised to see some things "corrected" when they weren't wrong, but this was to fit in with the company style manual. I also found some bits that I had got wrong ages ago and somehow missed, in all the writing and re-writing I've done.

Strange, really. This is my tenth book - eleventh if you count the one I wrote last year for a very small publisher who will never get any work from me again ... but that's another matter. Anyway - I have been through the editing/copyediting/proofing stages many times and somehow this feels different, probably because all but two of those books were non-fiction. And the two fiction pieces were children's chapter books, only the length of a short story. You learn so much.

In the past, because it was non-fiction and each chapter told a different story, I could write my book and send it in chapter by chapter, working with an editor as i went along. This one started with a complete manuscript and comments were made on the book as a whole.

That makes for a very different experience.

Still - it's very exciting now that it's really, really happening. I think I might have a very emotional moment when I see my first advance copy. :-)

At last!

I've finally sold my first novel. Eleven books, but only one novel as such. I wrote it some years ago and nearly - nearly! - sold it several time. And each time, I got comments and re-wrote on the basis of those comments and sent it somewhere else and almost sold it.

This time it has happened. Leonie Tyle, who used to work for UQP, knows me because I actually sent her the first three chapters some years ago and she rang me - rang Melbourne from Queensland! - to say that she liked it a lot, but they didn't publish this genre and did I have anything else? I wrote something else, but it didn't work out.

Now, I got a totally unexpected email from her saying she had heard I had a novel and could she look at it? Is the Pope Catholic?!? ;-) She heard because of an as-yet unpublished interview in Magpies magazine, by Edwina Harvey, meant to promote Crime Time: Australians behaving badly, which Magpies had reviewed favourably in 2009. Apparently, she had a hole in her schedule due to a novel that had had to be put back to 2011.

Only a few days after that interview, the thing has gone through the acquisitions committee and it will be out later this year. It does need re-writes, but hell, I'd stand on my head to get this one out! I cared about it when I was writing it and had planned to get it out and re-work yet again and see if I could sell it this time.

Who would have thought the publisher would approach ME?

And just for the record, after all I have said about fantasy novels, this one is a fantasy novel, a YA werewolf tale. But it's not fat and it's not part of a trilogy! And it's inspired by a mediaeval romance. Yay!