And we have a winner!

I’ll be beta reading the first 3k words of…

Very Bad Things by Jon Bradburn

I’ll shoot you an email now.

And because it’s even closer to Christmassy Christmas now, I’ve chosen four other winners who I’ll read the first 500 words for too : )

Cordelia Dinsmore – Shelter Dogs

Ladonna Watkins – Sabre

Adam Sifre – I’ve been deader

Kip Rechea – The Girl Who Slept in the Poet’s Ear

Emails on the way to you four as well.

Thanks to everyone for taking part. It’s been fun! In fact, it’s been so much fun that I’m going to hold a query crit contest in January. I loves me a query. I’ll post details of that in the new year.

In the meantime have a Merry Christmas lovely blog readers.   

Quick contest to say Merry Christmas!

The contest is now closed. Thanks to everyone for participating :) Winner(s) posted above!


In the Christmassy spirit of Christmas I thought I'd throw a little contest and offer to beta read the first 3,000 words of your manuscript. 

All you need to do to enter is write your name, the title and genre of your ms and your email address in the comments section. The contest will close at 7pm GMT 24th December when I'll pick a winner. I'll read the first 3k words and get them back to you in a week : ) 

RULES:
1) This is for unagented writers.
 
Um, yeah, that's the only rule (see Christmassy Christmas spirit - I’m doing this to help.) It can be a finished ms, or a WiP.  

I'm not going to insist that you follow my blog to enter, though I'd love it if you did. I'm not going to insist you post it on your own blog to let other writers know or tweet this post either but I'd love it if you did :D 

Now here's a pic of something cute while you polish up your 3k words for me to get my hands on.

Happy and bittersweet birthdays

Tomorrow it's boy 3's birthday. And since what I gave him for his 3rd birthday was girl, it's also girl's birthday (don't worry, I got him other things that kids actually like too.)

This week I've been stockpiling dessicated coconut, pink sprinkles, magical edible gold dust stuff and mini-marshmallows. I even bought a piping bag for the icing, so let's not talk about how it might possibly maybe have been cheaper to buy a cake. Instead let's look at the pleasing result of a stupid amount of time used by me today.

Girl's girly coconut and raspberry cup cakes

Boy 3's chocolate cup cakes. As manly as a cup cake gets.

I sent my baby to bed tonight a two year old, and tomorrow she'll be three and I'll never have a two year old again.

Highlights of this year with her?

• A few months ago she made up her first story while we were in the supermarket. 'A man had a peach, then he dropped the peach, then he got the peach back.' Beginning, middle, resolution. It's the perfect story. WHY CAN'T I DO THIS?
• She accused her brothers of being miscreants. Gotta hand it to vocab like that.
• I can't count the number of times she's smiled at me, kissed me, snuggled up to me, wanted me over all other people, called me her best friend and smashed my heart to bits with how much I love her.
• She makes me laugh every day, and what she wants most for Christmas is butterfly wings and a pink screwdriver.

Why did I start this? Every day is a highlight!

Boy 3. Soon to be six whole years old. He writes me sweet notes to tell me he loves me and because he loves writing and because he gets self-conscious about saying it : )

He's thoughtful and sensitive and intense and fun. He's smart and beautiful.

Comedy photo-face.

 
So there you have it. Mother loves her children. Ground-breaking, right?

It's Christmas, I'm editing, and I read some good books. My head is busy, so welcome to a mish-mash post

I cleverly decided that having two of my children in December, and on the same day no less, was a really good idea, so you will more than likely be subjected to pictures of birthday cupcakes next week.


But for now, this book is great, but you probably already knew that: Divergent by Veronica Roth

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Read it now.



View all my reviews

Also, I read this book and I loved it for lots of reasons, but one of them is because it's British and I was, unbeknownst to myself, drowning in America/Canadian YA. There should be many more books where teenagers get pissed in the park amongst other things because there really aren't enough. I'm hoping to remedy this in part myself. Sometime soon. Entangled by Cat Clarke

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Yes, a book with pubs. British pubs. Go and buy it.



View all my reviews

As for me, I'm mid-way through the second revision clever Agent Julia and I have decided on. At the moment I am adding new material, which makes me happy but is also slower going than writing a first draft because I know the point in the old material that the new material needs to link up to. Weird. But who doesn't like a rising word count, right?

And just because I can, here's a pic of my advent calendar.

Old school non-chocolate picture calendar! Yes, I'm perfectly aware of how old I am.

With great power comes great responsibility

Ok, maybe that's a teensy bit melodramatic, but still. Remember my lovely pink post-it note plot plan extraordinaire from last week? (still hidden in wardrobe due to covetous hands of small daughter.) Well it gave the girl-child ideas. Ideas that meant I had to hand over post-its and that involved some plotting two-year-old style.

Edgy YA? Possibly

Boy three was less show and more tell when he announced 'I want to write books like mom when I grow up'. So this week I am feeling somewhat proud that my kids want to be like me and somewhat aware of the responsibility of having kids in the first place (not that this is news to me. I've had kids a looooong time), and somewhat delighted/horrified that my agent, my awesome writer's circle (whose blogs you can find here, Amaleen Ison, here, J.D. Field, here Kristine Goodfellow and here Rebecca Hart) and hopefully swathes of random strangers are not going to be the only people that read my book. Mr S is going to read it! My KIDS are going to read it!

This makes me feel funny inside. How do you feel about other people reading your work?