I’ve been working on a project for a long time now. It’s never got beyond the first 10,000 words, and it keeps changing, but I SO want it to work. A few months ago, I got in touch with Cathy Brett, who is a super, super illustrator, and asked her if she’d be interested in working on it with me. She said yes, hurray! So we did some thinking and some planning and then I wrote some of the book all over again and she did some wonderful drawings – and then we said to each other, ‘Should we perhaps show this to someone before we do all this work?’ Because if a publisher doesn’t want it, it would be a terrible waste of time.
Luckily we both have the same agent – the wonderful Penny Holroyde. So today I drove over to Cathy’s house and she and I and Penny spent some time thrashing out The Plan for the book. I’m having to start again, but I don’t mind because it feels very solid now and I think I can feel it. That probably sounds strange, but when I’m writing a book, it’s very important for me to be able to feel its shape and its centre; its soul if you like. And now I do. So that’s great.
While I was at Cathy’s house, I met her ‘flatmates’ (AHAHAHAHAHA!!) life-size cardboard cutouts of her characters Verity Fibbs, Scarlett Dedd and Ember Fury.
And towards the end of the meeting, we all got hung up on the TITLE of the book (which is a VERY hard thing to come up with), and so smartphones and tablets came out as we tried to google everything around the general theme…
I was sorry that I had to leave in order to miss the rush hour on the M25! But it was a great meeting and just shows how useful it can be to get people round the table, face to face, when it’s a case of creative brainstorming. The internet is all well and good, but you can’t beat a good face-to-face 🙂 Especially when there’s home-made bread! Thanks, Cathy!
Jo Cotterill 