‘Secrets’ Is Winning So Far

As I’m writing this, I’m trying to edit Chapter 9 of Dark Side of the Moon in the Jocasta Lizzbeth Moonshadow series (the JLM Series tag refers to this). As soon as I’ve finished editing it, I plan to send it to literary agents. It’s an urban fiction piece of work in the older YA literature section; so I’ll start doing my research on the appropriate literary agents when I’m nearing the end of my edits. You’ll probably know when that is because I’ll start getting excited on here. In case you were wondering about it, this is the blurb I mocked up:

[Dark Side of the Moon is the first in the series of books following Jocasta Lizzbeth Moonshadow]

Jocasta always wanted to be a normal witch like her sisters, but she was hunted down with her father and younger brother by the Necromancer when she was just a child. Jo managed to survive and was hidden away, but why did the Necromancer want them dead…?

Now she’s back home and about to start at Lark Hall High. Suddenly her eyes begin changing colour. How can she start school like this? What will people say?

And then her gaze locks with Salem Sarandon…

Once more, her world is turned upside down. Strange things start happening and Jo doesn’t know what to do. Is the Necromancer still after her?

What makes her so special…?

If you want to read the starter excerpts of it, then they can be found here for the time being: Dark Side of the Moon. They hopefully won’t be there too long, though, because of the imminent site change. Still, if you’re wanting to read them, you can get as far as Chapter 3. I haven’t released any more onto the web so there’s no point in looking for it anywhere. I just hope you enjoy it, but any feedback is welcomed.

The main reason for putting it there was so that if any literary agents happened to stumble across it then they might taking a liking to it. It’s probably a very long shot, but as the Tesco’s tagline goes: every little helps.

IN OTHER NEWS…

I’m thinking quite seriously of getting a mini fridge. Earlier, my delightful brother decided that he would eat the stuff I’d bought for my pack up again. It irritates me so much. Maybe it’s just me, but I get overly annoyed with people who take my stuff. I think it actually goes back to when I was younger and I had a beautiful set of absolutely lovely colouring pencils. There was about a hundred of them and they shaded and blended so nicely. I was really proud of them. One day, somebody on my school table goaded me into sharing them with the rest of the table for one exercise. I ended up with less than fifty pencils left. Guess who refused point blank to share her stationary ever again?

Yep. That’s right. Me.

I’m a stickler for stationary. I’m happier buying new pens and paper than I am when I get chocolate. Fibre tipped pens are my favourite. They write so smoothly that you want to scribe random words just so that you can use the pen. I don’t think I can really describe the kick I get from new pens. It’s probably the kick that most women get from a pair of shoes. Shoes don’t really do it for me. Shoes are just a necessity. Maureen Johnson commented on twitter earlier about some guy having over a hundred pairs of unworn shoes. I guess I’d understand if he owned a shoe museum… but, personally, I think that’s way more than just excessive. Firstly, you don’t need that many shoes and, secondly, there’s no point in them if you can’t wear them! And so endeth the rant on unnecessary collections.

I’ve just read the seventh chapter of the last book in Kelley Armstrong’s Darkest Powers Series. The book isn’t out yet, but Kelley is releasing chapters free to read online while we lead up to the publication date. When it’s published I will be buying it. I have the first two books in this YA series and I’m working on collecting her adult urban fantasy books. I have to admit that she’s one of my favourite authors of all time. I picked up No Humans Involved on the off chance because the cover and the blurb appealed to me. It was stacked on the small supernatural bookcase in Waterstones. I didn’t think that it would hook me quite as much as it did. It was real and, yet, so unreal at the same time. It was the first time I’d been excited by a new book in ages. There seems to be this strange passage between junior school and the end of secondary school where the kind of fantasy books you want to read are not always available. Either they’re too grown up or they’re not grown up enough or they’re just not the kind of genre you want to spend your time on. Maybe you disagree, but that was what I found. The only books I really had were the Harry Potter books, but I found it hard to identify with a kid whose only problem seemed to be certain death most of the time.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the HP books, but Harry and Hermione always really annoyed me. Harry annoyed me because things that were practically smacking him in the face were just ignored until the end when Hermione would have to spell it out for him like he was learning his ABC. And Hermione annoyed me because she was so damned OCD and anal about everything. I don’t think I know anybody quite as anal as her, and I know quite a lot of people who are obsessive bookworms. The whole mortal enemies thing with Draco was quite irritating, too. I don’t know anybody who has a mortal enemy like that.

What can I say? It was real… but not to the extent that I, as a teenager, needed it to be to help me get through everything that I was dealing with. That, I think, is one of the problems with so many YA writers. They write brilliantly, but they aren’t teenagers any more. They can’t see it from the point of view of somebody in that world or with that state of mind. They may get really close, but the problem is that most of them are now the adults looking at the teenagers and assuming that most of them are slapped with ASBOs and community service and whatnot for heinous crimes that they committed whilst wearing hoodies.

I started Dark Side of the Moon when I was fifteen. I’ve edited it since then, but I’ve saved most of the dialogue and thought processes that I wrote down in it because my main character was supposed to be fifteen at the time. The old adage is that you write what you know. That’s what I did and I hope that it really has made everything my MC (Jocasta) was going through seem more true to her level of maturity. I think it does. Nevertheless, that is just my opinion. Other people may have an entirely different view on it. I can only hope that that isn’t the case.