Meet My Character Blog Hop + Giveaway Prezzies

Hi again, and happy holidays!

Yes, I know – this is the time of year we tend to go a little crazy.  School events, work events, family events, friends events…  All the Events.  In amongst this, I’ve been working with my amazing editors to prepare Every Move for publication.  And we’ve done it!!  I mailed back the final passes today.  There will be final-final passes, and other fiddly bits, but Sophie is putting all the changes and little corrections through now (Sophie – respect), in time to send it off to the printer.  Which means we’ll have a Real Live Book in our hands very early in the new year!

But today I wanted to say hi to crime writer friends, with the Meet My Character blog hop.  This tour was kicked off by the lovely Sandi Wallace, who launched Tell Me Why just recently.  I was invited to participate by Angela Savage, whose most recent book in the addictive Jane Keeney series is The Dying Beach.  Angela is a good friend, a righteous woman, and a great writer – she launched Every Word for me in June, and I was delighted to accept her invite for the blog hop, answering a few questions about Rachel Watts and Every Move.

For the next stop on the blog hop, I’ve invited Nansi Kunze and Candice Fox to join us – they’ll be posting up their answers on their own blogs here and here by Thursday 18 December.

Nansi Kunze is a mate – I’ve interviewed her once already here on the blog.  Nansi grew up surrounded by books in Australia and the UK. After studying languages and ancient history at university, she spent several years teaching overseas-trained doctors how to pronounce rude words and teenagers how to mummify each other, while cultivating a taste for manga and video games in her spare time.  Kill the Music is her third novel, following on the success of her previous two, Mishaps and Dangerously Placed. Nansi lives on a small farm overlooking the Victorian Alps with her husband and son, and is currently hard at work on her next YA book (assuming that ‘hard at work' is synonymous with ‘researching glamorous locations on the internet').

Candice Fox is the middle child of a large, eccentric family from Sydney's western suburbs composed of half-, adopted and pseudo siblings. The daughter of a parole officer and an enthusiastic foster-carer, Candice was constantly in trouble for reading Anne Rice in church and scaring her friends with tales from Australia's wealth of true crime writers.  Bankstown born and bred, she failed to conform to military life in a brief stint as an officer in the Royal Australian Navy at age eighteen. At twenty, she turned her hand to academia, and taught high school through two undergraduate and two postgraduate degrees. Candice lectures in writing at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney, while undertaking a PhD in literary censorship and terrorism. Hades is her first novel – it won the Ned Kelly Award for best debut in 2014. Eden, its sequel, was published in December this year.

Now on with the blog questions!

1/ What is your character’s name?

Rachel Maree Watts

2/ Is your character fictional or historical?

Definitely fictional – although she and I share a deep appreciation for flannie shirts and hot, intelligent men.

3/ When and where is your story set?

Every Move is contemporary – ie. set in the present day – and the characters travel from deepest darkest North Coburg to the Mallee area near Ouyen.  It’s the final book in the Every series; the first book, Every Breath, kicked off Rachel’s adventures in Melbourne, and the second book, Every Word, saw her travel overseas for the first time, to London, where she and her BF, Mycroft, investigated a murder and got into a whole lot of trouble.

4/ What should we know about Rachel?

Rachel grew up on an isolated sheep farm in the Mallee, and being raised a country girl has made her pretty physically tough and enduring.  She has a lot of practical skills – running a pump, driving a ute, shooting a rifle, climbing onto the roof to clean the gutters of dead possums…that sort of thing.  Her personal style runs to jeans, boots and t-shirts/flannies, and she generally ties her brown hair in a knot to keep it out of the way when she’s working.

She’s a fighter.  She’s also incredibly stubborn (what? Another character trait I share?  Certainly not - I’m not like that at all…) and her other defining personality quirk is that she’s fiercely loyal, and has a strong sense of family.

Rachel turned seventeen near the start of the first book, Every Breath.  Another important fact about her: she’s in love, with a certain dark-curly-haired, Sherlock-wannabe called James Mycroft.  Being involved with Mycroft has drawn Rachel into some hair-raising situations - murder, mystery and mayhem, not to mention the disapproval of her parents - but Rachel’s pragmatism and cool head in a crisis have generally seen her through.

5/ What are Rachel’s personal goals?

To keep her family together, and safe from Mycroft’s personal nemesis ‘Mr Wild’.  To recover from the trauma she endured in London – although she’s not sure how to do that.  To work out what’s going on with herself and Mycroft.  To discover who she really is and where she fits in. To pass her Year Twelve exams!

6/ What’s the name of the book, and can we read more about it?

Every Move is the title, and you certainly can!  It’s coming very soon. 

7/ When is it published?

1 March 2015 through Allen and Unwin.

If you haven’t checked them out already, you can catch up with the previous books Every Breath and Every Word here.  Hope you enjoyed this stop on the blog hop, and please do go and check out the other wonderful authors at their stops!

Giveaway

Now – in the spirit of holiday cheer, I’ve decided to give some stuff away.  And here’s the stuff!

Prize 1 is the North American edition of Every Breath

Prize 2 is a two-book set of Every Breath and Every Word

Prize 3 is a hot-off-the-press ARC of Every Word from Tundra (this prize only available to North American/Philippines readers).

If you’d like to win one of these prizes, please comment here on the blog, or on Facebook, @elliemarney on Twitter, or @elliemarney on Instagram.  Tell me what is your personal goal for 2015 (do you want to pass your Year Twelve exams, like Rachel?) and which prize pack you’d like to win.  My son will pick a name out of a hat I’ll choose a winner next week, and let people know before Christmas.  All prizes will be mailed out in January 2015.

That’s all from me for a while, folks.  We’re heading off on our annual family camping trip the day after Christmas, so I won’t be back online until January.  Many thanks for reading, and for keeping me company this year – it’s been a blast!  Lots of love and hopes that you all have a lovely Christmas and holiday season (may you receive many books!), and all the best for the New Year

See you in 2015!

Xx Ellie

Fanning flames, and the Blog Hop

Summer is kind of a stressful time around here.  It’s not that’s it’s not lovely to have a change from the long and freezing months of winter – it is, totally – but seasonal weather in this part of the country always seem to swerve from one extreme to the other.  Winter is about snow on your car, frozen pipes, sleet in your face and whether you’ve got enough firewood to last until October.  Summer involves heat so intense it could kill you if you sat in your car with the windows up, keeping water supplies up to the animals, monitoring the dam level, and bushfires.

The past month we’ve had three evacuation scares near where we live – one was literally down the road, when a 20 acre grassfire looked like it might threaten us depending on the wind change.  Check out the pic of smoke haze near our washing line – nice, huh?  (I’m being ironic, it’s nerve-wracking)

We’ve high-tailed it to Melbourne twice, when the heat got too crazy for the kids – it’s hard to sleep when your bed feels like it’s baking you.  Most nights have involved a quick moonlight skinny-dip in the dam (watch out for the leeches!) to cool us all down enough to sleep.    We don’t have air-con, so we just swelter, and turn the fans up high, and spray ourselves down with water bottles when it gets too sweaty.

Working in the heat has been difficult, you might say, but I’ve had my head down a lot over the past month, putting the final touches on Every Word.  I’m happy to say that it went to typesetting last week. Phew and yay! The timeline for this second book has been rather tight, but I’ve been in a unique position to release this book quickly, as I wrote Every Word soon after finishing Every Breath.  It was a very pleasant feeling, to be able to hand my editor a complete manuscript for book 2 while the ink was still drying on the pages of book 1.  Of course, I wasn’t doing as much other work then as I am now.  I hope I can stay ahead of deadline for every book I write – it’s a much more comfortable place to be than writing under pressure – but I guess we’ll wait and see…

Lots of you have written to me, asking about the publication date for Every Word.  I’m going to give you an update on that in my next post, which will happen within a few days (a ‘double event’ this week, to coin Jack the Ripper terminology).

In the meantime, I’ve been asked to join in this Writing Process Blog Hop, answering a few questions about process below.  My lovely mate, Kathryn Ledson (Rough Diamond, Monkey Business) is a writer of adult romantic crime fiction, and she tapped me on the shoulder to jump aboard.  Kathryn's up on FB and on Twitter @kathrynledson.  You can read Kathryn’s responses to the same questions here, and before her, the hop started with Jennifer Scoullar here.

So here we go…

1     What am I working on?

Currently multi-tasking – doing final touches for proofread/typeset of the second book in the Every series, Every Word. Also writing the first draft of Every Move, the third book. Also, getting lots of ideas for a new book (working title: The Circle Game) which I’m jotting down when they come - longing to get into that.

2    How does my work differ from others in its genre?

Well, there’s not loads of YA crime out there, although I have a sense it’s picking up.  I guess, in comparison to other local (Australian) YA crime, my work is kind of gritty – I don’t really pull too many punches with descriptions of blood and the processes of autopsy and death. The characters focus on forensic detail during the investigation of the mystery, which I hadn’t really seen done before – forensic procedurals for YA, with a lot of humour and action and romance to balance out the grit!

3    Why do I write what I do?

Um, why do birds fly? The characters start developing personalities and talking, and I just write it down.

I guess…I did make a conscious decision to write YA crime.  I had been looking for it in libraries and bookstores, and I realised it was in short supply.  So I knew there was a niche there. But I already had the characters in my head by then, I think I still would have written it regardless.  I’ve written in other genres, and the process is the same – these weird people start talking in your head, and you begin jotting it down just to shut them up!  They could be part of a crime novel, or a lit fiction piece, or a space opera…the genre and plot and setting begin to take shape as the dialogue emerges.

4    How does my writing process work?

I get up and make a big cup (or thermos) of tea, take it into the study at about 5.30am, and then I just sit there and read through what happened yesterday – or the day before, or whatever – and then I put my fingers on the keyboard and kind of force myself to start typing.  After a little while, I lose the feeling that it’s an effort.  And on good days, I have to force myself to stop, so I can go get everyone ready for school.

But it’s not all dreamy-muse stuff.  Sometimes I HAVE to finish a scene or I’m struggling with something. Then you need to have a stock of the old writer’s remedy that Stephen King heartily recommends – bum glue. Screw your bum to the sticking place and just keep typing until you’ve got something down, and worry about whether it works later.  You can craft it later – the grammar, the poetry of it – but you have to get the material out of your head first.

I keep a series of notebooks, little school exercise books, where I jot down scraps of dialogue, or phrases, or beautiful words – things I try to incorporate during the writing, or later when I edit and pretty things up.  I’m a big fan of rewriting.  Some of my best work comes in the rewriting!

And that's the end of the Blog Hop!  I’m passing the Blog Hop baton to Nansi Kunze, another YA writer and all-round cool chick – check out her responses to the questions on her blog very soon.

Can I say a big thanks, at this point, to everyone who’s encouraged me to keep going with the Every series – all of you who’ve emailed/texted/tweeted/FB’ed me to say how you loved Every Breath, and can’t wait for Every Word.  It’s made working in this heat much more bearable!

Now that the weather is starting to change, things are looking up - keep tuned for Every Word release date info very soon!  Stay cool, and stay safe this summer.

Xx Ellie