The Writing Experience

Writing is a very strange thing and I don’t mean writing a blog, or even, in my experience, writing a script. The writing I find the oddest is writing a novel.

I’m sure that the process is very different for everyone but for me, it feels very much like the back part of my brain is the writer and to be able to engage that part I have to shut the front part of my brain up (this is, of course, not in the least bit scientific). Usually I do this by using headphones to listen to music very loudly, it drowns out my day-to-day brain, you know, the part that wonders if there’s enough cheese in the house or how long the washing has been left in the machine. I discovered the other day that if I’m exceptionally tired that part of my brain shuts itself down and I run on pure back-up or, as I see it, ‘the back bit of brain’.

I don’t know why writing a novel is different, when I write dialogue I find my front brain more engaged and I find myself aware of what I’m writing but when I’m typing away at a story I can, quite literally, write 5,000 words, finish and not have a clue what I wrote. I find myself reading through my book and continually going, “huh, did not know that was there” and I have read my work over and over and I was the one who originally put those words there. It’s a little frightening – a sort of creative fugue state.

It’s also inconvenient. Ideas come in the middle of the night, when your boss is yelling at you or when you’re pretending to listen to someones dreary explanation of their weekend where they downed 20 shots and then danced naked on a bar in Dubai, got arrested, sentenced to life imprisonment but were let off because their father was brokering a $500m deal with the government. When these things are happening suddenly the BBB (back bit of brain) kicks in all shiny and wonderful, telling you about this great idea it had whilst the rest of you was distracted Netflix and Chilling and no matter what you’re doing, if you don’t write it down IN THAT SECOND, it’ll be gone forever. It’s a plague. A scourge. But, it is also a beautiful, wonderful thing that I have no control over and honestly, when Rebellion is out, I’m worried people will ask me questions and I won’t know the answers because even though I wrote it… it wasn’t really me.

On that note, I’ve been researching the best time to release Rebellion and apparently December is a terrible month to release (too many ‘novelty’ books etc being pushed) and so I’m looking at January 2016. It’s currently going through a line-by-line edit with the brilliant Cressida Downing and I have the book cover ready to release to you very soon (I can’t wait – it’s so good). But, for now, here is the blurb:

Auria was the last nation in Europe to be occupied by the Global Defence Organisation, the same organisation that promised to bring peace when riots spread rapidly across the continent. Now governing all of Old Europe, the GDO’s control over Auria begins to increase and their tactics to dominate the population become more violent; 17-year-old Cassia Fortis decides that she’s had enough of being repressed and chooses to take matters into her own hands.

With her loyal friend Luca, Cassia joins the GDO army, in the hope that she can find a way to free her Dad from prison and reunite her parents. What she doesn’t account for is the measures she will have to take to prove her loyalty to the regime and the devastating path her best friend Jake will take.