Oh Lorde,

Dear dear, everything is ever such a rush. 

I'm back in Manchester at the moment, and have been for about 28 hours after feeling like I had to rush across London in order to get my train, and felt like I had barely got on to the train before I was getting off in Manchester Piccadilly. I was trundling down Market Street with my suitcase in tow to get back to my mother's house. 

I felt like I had been running around like a crazy person the night before and that morning in order to make sure that I have everything with me. It's a flying visit, as ever, but being away from my home makes me anxious. Being away from my PC, my notebooks and my library (well, the half that isn't under my bed up here) makes me incredibly anxious. Much as the train journey between the two places is really quick, the flitting back and forward isn't overly simple and I always end up looking like Queen of the Bag Ladies - especially when I'm heading back home! 

It's been good so far though, because I'm not having to cook or worry too much about anything. It's nice to be able to have a little time to relax, because it feels like I have been working somewhat solidly since the day I finished university and I've been a little bit 
knackered. 

Anyway, it's lovely to be able to spend some time with friends and share graduation memories (which have not long since passed) and spend a lovely Christmas with the family. 

Merry Christmas to all, and remember - your present is still on Amazon if you haven't yet downloaded a copy of Fairies. :)

Not Feeling Awesome,

I'm at that point in the year where I'm getting ready to travel back to my mother's house for a family Christmas and, quite frankly, I'm finding it difficult, because at the moment I'm feeling a little bit crappy. 

It's been at least a year since I broke my Kindle, and I've only just got around to replacing it, and it's just taken me hours to set it up, but I realised that I don't want to be carting loads of books and notebooks back up on the train - it makes it much more simple if I can take the Kindle and the iPad and have done with it there. And before anyone kindly points it out, I have the Kindle app on my iPad; it is not the same. 

Two weeks ago today, I graduated from university and was skipping around the room on a Prosecco buzz pretty much yelling 'fluffing finally' because this has been a long time coming. That day, I felt shiny. I was on the receiving end of a few peculiar glances of the Kensington public as I strutted around in a Ted Baker dress, stiletto heels, a man cap and a funny hat, but it was wonderful. Since then it has slightly had the sheen taken off it with my apparent inability to find myself new employment, but I'm doing what I can, and I'll get there. I have a few possibly exciting irons in the fire, so we'll see where they lead to. 

To round this off, it's been far too long since the last free promotion of my book, so it's on it again from Christmas Eve until the 28th. Please note that this is based on a KDP American time zone that I believe is EST but I'm not certain, so if you want to download it, I would advise doing so ASAP! 

Merry fluffing Christmas to those of you who celebrate and to all others, the happiest of Happy Holidays! 

That's Kind of Gross,

This whole thing with finding horse meat in Beef Lasagne makes me really glad that I don't eat meat anymore. Also, just so that you guys are aware when I get really grumpy - and it will happen - my intention for Lent this year is to be a proper vegetarian (Oh yeah, I'm going to become one of those annoying as packet readers!!) and to attempt to spend a week being vegan. I don't know how well it will go, and it definitely won't stick because I Love cheese and milk and eggs too much, but perhaps I can manage a week?

We'll see.

Also, I figure I should let you guys know the date of this, because it is what I am working towards. 7.3.2013 will mark the two year mark from when the CharliesWrite blog started (originally over on webs, before I realised this was infinitely better). I'm intending that day to be celebrated by the release of Yours, onto Kindle and also - possibly - into print. It all just depends on how all the editting and such goes, but keep your fingers crossed. Since Kindle Select gives you the option of five days free out of every three months, I think it might launch with a couple of days being free on the Kindle, but we'll just have to see about that one. :) I'm actually a little be excited. The problem with sorting out the print version is going to be writing the dedication, I feel. There are two different ones I want to write and I don't know which to choose! Argh. As the Platypus says, deal with it. (The Platypus is, of course, SpoonThePlatypus aka Sophie Greene)

Now I'm off to look into buying some of the new make-up I want from Illamasqua. Why is everything that is so beautiful, also so expensive?


P.s. Started writing the sequel to Fairies. This is going to be fun!

On Tone of Voice,

One of the things which people always comment on about my writing is that I apparently have a strong narrative voice. I do have a list of habits as long as my arm, including (my very favourite) a tendency to describe the mundane, but here's the reason. You know all that time we spent talking about how English teachers make too much of what an author  meant by something? This sort of idea: 

 I've found that they can, to a certain extent anyway, be right. 

If you ever decided, for what reason I don't know :P, to read Insanity Breaks then you'd see that throughout the book the character explains different things to do with her smoking habit. The same is true of Iris' (the main character from the soon to be released novel Yours, - more details coming soon) love of drinking tea, but here's the thing - when I write, I'm writing what is pretty much a dramatic monologue of a characters life, so the things which have importance in their lives will be included, and the things which don't will be left out. Pretty simple, right? If I've put it on the page, there is generally a reason, and granted that reason is sometimes just a vast description which some might call unnecessary, but mostly there is a reason. 

I will just point out that until midnight on 10/2/13 PST (8am 11/2/13 GMT) Insanity Breaks is available to be downloaded completely FREE onto Kindle or any Kindle app compatible device. For those who don't know what it is, it's the first novel I ever finish (Fairies was just the first I had the balls guts to self publish) and from start to finish it took me about 9 months. Fairies was written in one month and Yours, was written in 20 days. Those three, plus a monstrosity named As Yet Untitled (which went straight into my computer's recycle bin!) which took a month to finish, represent my four NaNoWriMo years. :D Useless piece of trivia...

Back to what I was saying about voice: I write what I know, from the perspective I know. All my characters are different, they do have different attitudes, different beliefs, different experiences, but their fundamental nature, THEIR VERY EXISTENCE, comes from the noise in my head. I would agree that my characters often speak from a very similar perspective - they tend to be lower middle class, reasonably well educate women who are either on their way to university or have been to university, they're normally some form of creative and they pretty much always believe in love. Now, I don't see this as a bad thing, because the fact is that most authors do it. Nicholas Sparks makes millions from writing pretty much the same novel over and over with different characters, in a different city and with a slightly different ending. His lead male tends to be a poor boy, with intelligence, but the girl's parents always see him as a whim, because he's sexy and from the wrong side of the tracks. The women are always beautiful and unobtainable creatures, but they have a young summer romance anyway -Yeah, this is the trash I read in the bath :) - and then they get separated. John Green (maybe I'm just a reflection of a teen cliche but I do love his writing at the moment) tends to write from the perspective of a fringe dwelling, witty teenage male (except A Fault in Our Stars, which pretty much made me cry all through it, but then the difference is only that the character is female...) My point is simply, if you like one of the novels, you're likely to like all by the same author, because it's from a perspective you can understand or relate to. Is that so bad? 

I will say one thing, author's voices develop and change over time. Our narrative voices are shaped by our experiences just the same way that we are. Things which seem of an immense amount of importance in what we write when we are sixteen (Insanity Breaks) will look quite different from the things we write at nearly twenty (Yours,) and everything that comes after will be different because every day that we open up our senses to the world, we see a little something we never saw before, or we hear something, or we feel or understand something in a different way and it's important for that to happen, because otherwise, we're not learning anything and if we're not learning anything, what do we really have left to say?

FREE Stuff!

I think that the end of NaNo is a little bit devious. It sort of hides itself in this idea of long hours in bed doing nothing and the idea that your novel will - if you so wish - be published in some form with no other amount of work from yourself. Sit back, relax, it's over and it's done. 

THAT IS NOT HOW IT WORKS, unfortunately.

Of course it's not. There's editing and formatting and more editing and then design work for the cover and then a whole lot of online forms to get even access to the proof. After that you get the joys of it arriving in the mail all bright and shinny and telling you it loves you because you created it!!, then you go through it with a fine tooth come because you want it to be just PERFECT, or as close to as possible. So the proof gets passed on to a friend or a colleague or a general waster with some time to kill (otherwise known as other students :P - kidding) and it comes back a big dog eared and with post it notes all over it where people have suggested changes. I can guarantee that people will tell you to change the same bit in at least four different ways before you're done. 

Well, when you're through with all that, and the new baby arrives in the post and you think yeah, this is it, this is as close as it gets, you put it forward for sale - is now time to chum up with your pillows and have a long, well deserved hibernate? Not quite my lovely,or at least not if you want to actually sell some of them. 

Here's the part where you post it all over Twitter, Facebook and blogs. You might ask your friends to cover it on similar channels just to spread to a larger base. If you've got a spare fifty quid in your pocket (first off, share, I'm a poor student) you can pay to get a few printed and send free copies to the local newspapers and pray someone gets the runs and that they take it into the bathroom with them. (Bathroom reading material can say a lot about a person). 

This here is the part where people are going to get sick of you, because for people to know about something, you have to tell them, and tell them a few times over. You need to email them links, plug it into their news feeds and throw business cards around like you're a flower girl sprinkling confetti. Your job now is to get your novel out of it's little corner of the massive online book store, because the chances of someone falling over it and picking it up are VERY VERY SLIM!

You're going to have to give it your time, maybe throw some money at it and you're definitely going to need to think. If you wrote a kids book, offer to go into a couple of schools and do a few free readings or something. Donate copies to your local library. Whatever you do just find your book a place in the world, because it's an inanimate object. It only moves when you move it, it only speaks when you turn the pages. You are the game master, you are in control. Put ass in gear and get this thing GOING. Whatever you do, don't just curl up into a ball and let your genius be forgotten - you wrote a novel for Christ's sake. 

So in the spirit of putting ass into gear, Yours, is going to be edited for the first time in the next few days. This makes me both really nervous and ridiculously excited. Also, the Kindle version of Fairies is available FREE tomorrow, so download it and have a click through it if you've got a spare few hours.

Anyway, since sleep is being evasive (one hour sleep in the last forty eight - healthy) again, I'm going to finish my mug of Sunshine Grey tea (Earl Grey with lemon, no milk) and get on editing. 

Charlie x 

:D