Archive for the ‘Getting Away With It’ Category
The hardcover of GETTING AWAY WITH IT comes out today, and I’m celebrating by announcing the winners of my ARC contest. I had well over a hundred entries, which was amazing, and I’d like to thank everyone who tweeted or blogged about the contest, and everyone who entered.
I chose three names from the list using randomly-generated numbers, and came up with:
Laurie
Sandy Goodson
Gwynneth Carter
I’ve sent emails to the winners. Congratulations ladies and I hope you enjoy the book!
Everyone who signed up should be getting an email newsletter in the next few days.
GETTING AWAY WITH IT has had a couple of reviews already. The Bookbag says it is Wonderfully woven, a powerful and cinematic story that I found very moving.
And Dot Scribbles says Julie Cohen has written a lovely book, Getting Away With It questions what you are running away from in life and to consider that everyone has struggles no matter how calm and content they appear. I would highly recommend this book.
In other news, I am dreadfully, dreadfully hung over. It was the funeral of a lovely friend yesterday, the former secretary of Reading Writers, who did so much for the group over the years. When he was planning his funeral, he’d given us strict instructions that nobody was to leave the pub after the ceremony sober. We took those instructions very much to heart, with the result that I have a sore head today. But it was drinking in a good cause, and I’d do it all again, sore head and all.
I am fighting the hangover by doing some baking. I’m making zucchini bread in the top oven, and chocolate muffins in the bottom oven. Two baking projects at the same time, at different temperatures! I think I love my new cooker. (The Evil Cooker is lurking outside the house, on the pavement, waiting for someone to come and collect it.)
It’s October, which means it’s publication month for GETTING AWAY WITH IT in hardcover. Yay!
To celebrate, I’m running a contest for all of this month.
If you sign up for my newsletter* between 1 October and 27 October, you’ll be in with a chance to win one of three advance reading copies of GETTING AWAY WITH IT. These are the copies that, like, only the cool and important people get, man.
All you have to do is one of the following. You can either:
Put your email address in a comment to the post below. (Just to be safe, you might want to replace the @ sign with the word “at”.)
or
Send me an email using the “Contact” link above. Put “contest” or something similar in the subject line, so I know it’s not spam.**
or
If you already get my newsletter, you can enter, too. All you have to do is to send me an email with “contest” or similar in the subject line.**
or
Want an extra chance to win? Tell your friends, family, neighbours and co-workers, and get them to send me an email or leave a comment, subscribing to my newsletter. If they mention your name, I’ll enter you in the draw again. So, in theory, if you tell 2453 people about my book and my contest, and they all sign up, you can be entered 2454 times. Wow!!***
This contest is open to readers worldwide.
*I send out my newsletter when I have a new book out, or I’m doing an event, or have some really big news. It’s pretty infrequent and I try to make them moderately amusing.
**You could also write me a little message if you liked. That would cheer up my day.
***Actually, I’ll be very happy if you just tell one or two people.
Still on holiday. Still alive, after, miraculously, not getting killed whilst being dragged around a lake on a tube by Kathy Love’s insane cousins.
Well. Sort of alive.
But I have to share this, the brand new cover for my brand new book, GETTING AWAY WITH IT!
Hooray!!
Getting Away With It
It’s out in hardback in October, which is really not very far away now….!
I still haven’t seen a cover yet, but my first book with Headline Review, GETTING AWAY WITH IT, has turned up on The Book Depository for pre-order.
I’m doing the proofs at the moment and the chapter headings all have lovely little butterflies on them. *squee with excitement*
(I’ve already posted a short excerpt, here.)
For the past two days I’ve been going through copy edits for my next book, GETTING AWAY WITH IT. I’ve never quite done things this way before; when I’ve written for Little Black Dress and Mills & Boon, I would get proofs of the book (ie already typeset, looking like the book itself will look, with two pages printed on one side of A4) with the copy-edits already done, and I had to look at those and make whatever changes I wanted, along with working on any queries the copy editor had. With such a tight turnaround on these shorter novels, I suppose it was easier for everyone just to do the copy edits and proofs at the same time.
But this time I received a copy of the manuscript itself, with the copy editor’s notes right on it, so I could see every change and suggestion she’d made. What a treat! For one thing, it looked like another language. Copy editors have their own special set of marks that they make, so it was like being confronted with a marvellous secret code.
But the best thing was to see my prose being improved right before my eyes. Awkward phrases smoothed out, repetition eliminated, confusion righted. It was a lovely lesson in readability and for a perfectionist like me, it was wonderful.
For example, I have a tendency to write speech as I hear it in my head, mostly with lots and lots of run-on sentences and with far too many exclamation marks. In my normal prose, I try to steer away from exclamation marks and run-ons, but in dialogue, they’re everywhere. Those little squiggles and coded annotations taught me that I need to pay a bit more attention to how my dialogue reads on the page.
I sniggered a couple of times. I blogged here about my massive “just”-purge before submitting the manuscript, where I went through and cut as many “just”s as I possibly could. But there were at least two times when the copy editor put the “just” back in. Fair enough—or should I say just?
Of course along with this I had to reread the story, paying attention to every word, and that was fun too. I swore and cursed at this story while I was writing it, and it’s such a relief to read it and see that actually, I think it works now. And it feels even better because I know I had to sweat to make it work. It helps me with the faith that even though the rough draft of the book I’m writing might not be perfect or even close to it, eventually I’ll find solutions for the problems I’m facing.
There were two other very fun things I got to do with the manuscript this time round. When I revised the ms for my editor, I got to put in chapter headings, which was great. Interestingly, my editor chose most of those headings, lifting phrases straight from the chapters. I thought it was brilliant how you could sum up 10 or 15 pages with a single phrase from those pages. It became sort of like a treasure hunt for me—what phrase was the phrase? This time, the copy editor suggested some chapter headings for the chapters I hadn’t named, which are the ones in the heroine’s sister’s point of view. And she did the same thing, lifting phrases straight from the text. How editors learn to do this I do not know, but it’s a huge treat for me, and makes me see my own story in a different way.
The second thing I got to do was change my hero’s car, from this:
Aston Martin Vanquish
to this:
Aston Martin DBS V12
A small change, but very satisfying.
It’s April Fool’s day, and that reminds me that my next book, which is my first book for Headline Review, starts on April Fool’s day. And the very exciting thing about this next book, besides that it’s for Headline Review, which means it’ll be all glossy and beautiful and chunky like Headline Review books are, sitting there on the shelf, all delectable and gorgeous—anyway, the thing is about this next book, is that we finally have a title for it.
It’s called GETTING AWAY WITH IT, and it’s out in October this year. Which gives me something less than six months before I hold it in my little sweaty hands.
Great title, though, isn’t it? We had quite a bit of debate about this one, until we came up with something just right for the book. And I’m really happy about it.
So to celebrate that, and to celebrate April Fool’s day, I’m posting a short excerpt from chapter one of GETTING AWAY WITH IT, where the heroine Liza, who is a stunt woman, is being filmed driving a super-fast, super-expensive, Ferrari Enzo, on a mountain road winding along a sheer cliff.
***
“Slower, Liza,” said Hogan through the walkie-talkie.
The Ferrari arched gracefully around the curves. Below me, the shadows were disappearing from the desert. I was mid-descent, but still high enough so that it felt as if I pressed the throttle a little harder, I could fly. Right up into the lightening sky, among the effortless clouds.
“Happy birthday to me,” I said, my voice lost in the thunder of the engine, and I edged it faster. The car growled in appreciation. The road straightened for a short stretch, dipping downward, and I used the straight to pick up some more speed.
“Slow down, Liza,” crackled Hogan. “Now.”
“Yeah, right,” I said, though he wouldn’t be able to hear me.
A camera and crew perched near the guard rail on the bend ahead, waiting to pick up the wide shot as I passed. I’d cut it fine, kick up some gravel for them. I smiled, reached for the handbrake for the turn, and it was at that exact moment that I realised I was going faster than I’d thought.
“Shit,” I muttered, maybe I yelled it, I don’t know because the car was so loud, and I turned the wheel and engaged the handbrake and the car began its sideways slide, gravel spitting exactly as I wanted it to, all I had to do was power out and away, it would be fine. Fine.
Shit.
At times like these, everything slows. I saw Rory, that was the cameraman’s name though I didn’t know I’d known it, and Wanda beside him wound in a yellow scarf. Rory’s face was obscured by the camera but Wanda was focused on the car, smiling with her eyes screwed up. She had no idea anything was wrong. Don’t take a camera out, that’s the first rule, but the rule should be don’t take the camera crew out.
I needed the throttle or I’d plough sideways into both of them and carry them over the cliff. I punched it and the car, the amazingly responsive car, shouted and leapt as more petrol fed into its hungry engine. The front tyres gripped the tarmac and sped me away from the crew and I held tight, tried to keep it on the road but I was going too fast.
“Fuck Liza, what the fuck are you doing?” yelled the radio.
The back end of the car slid and I steered into it but there was a cliff wall ahead of me and a dropoff behind me, not quite sheer at this point, no, but enough to tumble me into the desert, and I felt the moment when the car decides it’s going to spin and there’s not a bloody thing you can do about it, nothing but ride it out and hope there’s enough room.
There wasn’t. I braced my body against the back of the seat.
I saw every last rock and scrubby bit of brush on the side of the road. A small weed, spitting pink flowers. I heard gravel flying from the tyres. I got a glimpse of Wanda’s yellow scarf far off to the left, safely out of the way, and then I felt the crunch of the guard rail against the side of the car and a sickening tilt.
April Fool, I had time to say, or maybe only to think, and then the car was flying.
