An Extract and a Reading Roundup
I can FINALLY show you some of the book!
Hello my loves and happy first Friday. What does first Friday mean? FREE NEWSLETTER, that’s what it means. Excitingly, this month I can share an extract from my new book, Things We Lose In Waves, out in early November.
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The month in reading (and watching and listening)
I went to Northern Ireland on holiday this week and actually managed to READ SOME BOOKS. What a concept, I know! I read -
Things We Do For Our Friends by Heather Darwent - deliciously dark romp through student Edinburgh, packed full of secrets and lies. A kind of updated British Secret History. A midpoint twist that made me SCREAM.
Death of a Bookseller by Alice Slater - funny and evocative view into bookselling. Just SO much fun, and very tense and grippy. As an author I found this genuinely informative (I’ve only worked in secondhand bookselling) about the inner politics of a bookshop.
Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood - after reading The Love Hypothesis on my last holiday I was eager to plunge into more sexy, will-they-won’t-they shenanigans set in science academia. It’s a tight niche but I love it and she does it well. Smashing contemporary romance. The vibe is very much that feminists like sexy romps with muscly broody men too. Which is true!
The month in writing
Through August I was trying to focus on consistency - 500 words per day, every day, no matter how much marking I had to do. I did pretty well, coming in at 9,508 words for the month. This isn’t a terrible figure - it includes a fair amount of deletions - but it still makes me feel kind of itchy. I still deep down believe that to be productive is to be valuable, to be good, and to write loads and loads of words makes me productive. But actually, I don’t need to work on productivity. If I say so myself, I’m bloody amazing at it. What I need to work on is deeper thinking and reading around my area, whether that’s comparison titles or research.
I remember when I was eight months pregnant and it was lockdown and I was climbing the walls, I sent a draft to my editor. And the draft was all scattered and itchy, because I was. And she sent me a reading list, and a kind email and told me to slow down. Just have my baby. Read. Breathe. Bloody GREAT advice. Hard to follow. But we persist.
WRITING TIP - this is an extended version of my favourite exercise to set students. Find five comparison titles for the project you have in mind - books that might be sold alongside yours, that share some kind of commonality with them, that share a genre. You can have one wildcard, which is a little different to yours - maybe something written a long time ago, or wildly out of genre. Read them all. Go on! Do it! Reading is writing! The best way how to understand an audience is to be an audience! I mean it! I’ll do it too - let’s meet back here next month to discuss. Mine will be -
The American Agent by Jaqueline Winspear
Miss Aldridge Regrets by Louise Hare
A Fatal Crossing by Tom Hindle
In Memoriam by Alice Winn
Fabulosa by Paul Baker (wildcard)
The other thing that’s been happening in writing for me this month is that the publicity is really ramping up for my next book (Things We Lose In Waves, out November 2). Yesterday I worked up a list of talking points around the book, today I’m sharing a beautiful cover reveal animation on insta and visiting all 5 of Oxford’s bookshops to hand deliver advance copies to the booksellers. Very FUN. Very much what I thought being an author would be like (I was very sad to learn about all the tedious sitting around writing it actually involves). And right now, I can share the opening extract!!
CORRASION: Spring 2020
Jenny had been staring blankly out of the window of Chris’s cab. The stretches of grass, the squat grey houses, the sharp drop down to the sea. She wasn’t expecting to see this land- scape again until summer, at least. Christmas, if she was honest. She hadn’t been coming back a lot, but there wasn’t time to feel guilty about that now. There were things to do. This coastline was as familiar to her as anything else in life, and much more so than the shine and hard lines of London. She barely even registered it, eyes skating over the white dots of caravans, the looming hulk of the ruined hotel, the brown crumble of the cliffs, until she saw the road.
‘Stop!’
It used to be a road. Now there was just a jutting of pipes and wires into air where there should be solid land. Where she was sure there used to be solid land.
He didn’t look round, but Jenny could practically hear Chris rolling his eyes.
‘What?’
And he was heading straight for it. Not checking his speed, not showing any indication that his plan was to do anything other than drive straight off the cliff.
Jenny let herself picture it – the full force of forward thrust, the moment of weightlessness, of soaring, gliding, before the fall. Smash and crush onto the beach below. It happened to the caravans, sometimes, and you never got used to the shock of seeing them down there, their insides spilled and churned by the force of the impact.
She swallowed.
‘Nothing.’
He swerved right without indicating, and they lurched down the coastal road – which, now she’d had a chance to think, she remembered was the main way into the village now – that he’d taken her down when she came home for Christmas. This road was far too close to the shoreline for comfort, but it undeniably existed.
‘You not seen a wrecked road before?’
Jenny chewed her lip beneath her face mask. Chris wasn’t wearing one, and he’d given her a proper dirty look when she’d got in the back of his cab. She’d tried to tell herself that it was just because he didn’t recognise her with the mask, but of course he did. Like it or not, they’d never not know each other.
‘It’s further back, isn’t it?’
Surely there’d been more road last time she’d lived here.
Surely it hadn’t just stopped like that.
‘It’s a metre a year.’
Jenny rolled her eyes. A level geography and being driven around by Chris Blower. It was like sixth form all over again. ‘Yeah. I know.’
‘So how long have you been away? Fifteen years, right? Fifteen metres. It in’t rocket science.’
Jenny sighed. ‘Yeah, yeah. All right.’
There’d been a time when she would never have sighed at Chris. She simply wouldn’t have dared. For all of her teenage years, she’d lived in fear of a cutting word or a hard look from him. It seemed laughable now, but there was a time when him calling her a geek could have ruined a whole term for her.
Such a lovely idea, that that was the worst thing that could possibly happen.
He caught her eye in the rear-view mirror.
‘I aren’t about to drive you off the cliff, you know,’ he said, voice soft for once.
And the two of them looked at each other. Except they didn’t. They were both just looking at the mirror.
‘Yeah. I know,’ she said. But she wondered.
You can read a little bit more on the Dialogue website, and you can preorder here (or from your bookshop of choice).
Next week, for paid subscribers, I’ll show you four previous drafts, and how I arrived at this first page.
The month in life
Okay I’ve run out of room and (I feel) your patience so I will be brief. August was great. We went to Yorkshire, we went to Belfast, we saw family, I held a gecko at a petting zoo. The new chickens have started laying, and I’m making it to the gym a few times a week. All is well. I hope with you too?
Until next month (if you want to stay on the free list) or next week (if you want to support my work and earn my undying gratitude, plus weekly newsletters about writing and 20% off all my editorial services), much love,
L