I’m hiding away this week to finish readying my novel for – eek! – submission, so no blog posts. After that I intend to spend a few days reading a few thrillers for escapism, watching Season 4 of The Wire (I’ve been saving it), sleeping and trying not to cry at the thought of LOST ending (oops – there I go again), so there won’t be any blog posts then either. And before the 1st June (that is the arbitrary deadline I’ve set myself, for some reason), I have to have at least some kind of blurry plot outline established for Novel Number 2, so – yes, you’ve guessed it – they’re probably won’t be any blog posts until that’s done too.

But the good news is that there will be plenty of new blog posts after that; I even have a schedule, which culminates in a big reveal in September, a reveal that will either be a sort of hard-earned triumph or an embarrassment I’ll never live down. And the other good news (well, depending on how you look at it), is that I’m interviewed today on Duolit’s Self-Publishing Team blog, a self-publishing site (and service) I actually like the sound of (I’m very picky, as you know), run by the lovely Shannon and Toni who actually live in Florida.

I have one little confession to make: this morning I took time out from scribbling to listen to the last ever LOST Official Podcast.

Now imagine the sound of sobbing.

Have a happy Mousetrapped Monday everyone!

Keris Stainton is a writer, blogger and book-lover with ‘her finger firmly on the pulse of what rocks in a teenage girl’s world’. Her debut novel, Della Says: OMG! is out now and bestselling author of The Princess Diaries Meg Cabot calls it ‘a fun, delicious treat you’ll want to eat up in one bite’. One Amazon reviewer said it was  ’absolutely the best two nights I spent in bed recently’…

[Catherine interrupts blog post to run off and buy Della Says]

“Della’s over the moon when she kisses her long-standing crush at a party – but then she discovers her diary has disappeared… When scans of embarrassing pages are sent to her mobile and appear on Facebook, Della’s distraught – how can she enjoy her first proper romance when someone, somewhere, knows all her deepest, darkest secrets?”

Keris’ voice sparkles with energy and originality and who among us, regardless of how much of an adult we pretend to be now, can’t relate to the ever-present Cringe Factor that permeates teenager life? I know I, for one, have blocked out huge swathes of my teenage time, for that very reason. Moreover, I’ve kept diaries my entire life, and if as much as a paragraph of one of them escaped my bedroom, I’d have to put myself in the Witness Protection Program….

I’d been writing for years, but didn’t finish a full-length book until 2006, when I wrote a YA book called FORGET ME NOT for National Novel Writing Month. I started sending it to agents the following March and signed with my agent in May. Eventually Orchard loved it and I got a two book deal, but then they decided they didn’t want FMN to be my first book and asked me to write something else. And so I wrote DELLA SAYS: OMG! So it’s actually taken four years from signing with my agent to seeing the book on the shelves!

Q: If you can pick one, what has been the best moment so far in your published writer life?

Oh there have been so many (and it’s not even properly out yet!), but I think my favourite might have been getting my quote from Meg Cabot. I absolutely love her – she’s my favourite YA writer and she’s been such an inspiration. I was thrilled that she even agreed to read Della, let alone that I have a quote from her on the cover.

Q: The timely plot of Della Says: OMG centers on the focus of teenage life, social networking. Did you need to do any specific research or was this all just a ploy to spend more time on Twitter and call it ‘work’? (I’m desperately trying to come up with an excuse to do that myself!)

Ha! No. I didn’t do any research, I’m afraid. And I don’t think it would be possible for me to spend much more time on Twitter – I’m a Twitter-holic. The idea for the book came from my own diary disappearing when I was a teenager. Back then, the worst someone could have done was read it out at school or, at a push, photocopy the odd bit. But now with mobiles and social networking there’s the potential for huge embarrassment.

Q: Della Says: OMG is a Young Adult novel, but I see on your site you’ve just finished an adult novel as well. How different  are those writing experiences from each other and which do you prefer?

I find writing for teenagers easier. Partly because I still feel like a teenager myself – and all those teen humiliations still smart – and partly because teen books are much shorter! I did enjoy all the sex scenes in the adult book though. (But, no, I didn’t do any research for that either. Unfortunately.)

Q: What’s next?

I’m not exactly sure. There’ll be another book out with Orchard next year, but it still might not be FORGET ME NOT. I’ve finished another YA book and have a few more ideas. And hopefully someone will want to publish the adult book too. Fingers crossed.

Join Keris tomorrow on the next stop on her virtual tour at http://iwanttoreadthat.blogspot.com/ or see all stops here.

Read her fantabulous blog, follow Keris on Twitter for a daily dose of the giggles or buy Della Says: OMG! now.

The person was Alyssa Martino who has started a fab series on her blog, Writers on Writing. Every Wednesday there’ll be a new interview and as we all know – no matter what the answers – we all love to hear how writers work, hoping that some small grain of wisdom will land in our creativity allotment and grow a three book deal. (Um… well, you get the idea.)

Today I got to be the first subject and you can read the full interview here. I talk about my usual fare: the Ebola virus, why I self-published, Starbucks, quitting your job and clicky pens.

Thanks so much Alyssa – it was so much fun and the best bit, I think, was that you called me a writer. x

UPDATE: Link to interview corrected. Doh!

Last summer I was doing my weekly walk through Waterstones looking for the 3 in my 3 for 2 when I spotted a book entitled We Can’t All Be Astronauts. Being space-mad, I picked it up, only to discover that it was about a subject even closer to my heart: harboring an unwavering yet possibly deluded dream of being a published writer.

“It wasn’t a bedroom. It was a dream factory. Hunched in front of a desk, I was alone with my future. The only sound in the room was the whirr of a computer fan, the only smell the aroma of instant coffee and, occasionally, my own eggy flatulence. It was late. I was working on my book. The Book… Over the years I had chosen to stake everything – my self-esteem, my career prospects, my independence, everything – on becoming suddenly and meteorically successful as an author… [In reality] I was a twenty-six year old guy who still lived with his parents. I slept in late and spent most of my time playing video games. I was single. I was jobless. I had no social life. Sometimes just leaving the house made me nervous and dizzy. It hadn’t always been this way…”

Apart from the gender, the video games, the flatulence and the instant coffee (we all know I don’t do instant), it could have been about me. I was twenty-six, I was living with my parents, I was writing in the postage stamp-sized room I’d grown up in, I’d just handed in my notice so I could quit my job and do it full time, I liked sleeping and I had pressed the Pause button on my life so I could, officially, give this Writing a Book thing a chance and, unofficially, prepare for my new life as professional novelist-columnist-talk show subject-sunbather-shopper-sleeper.

Since childhood, Tim Clare had it all figured out – step 1: Grow up. Step 2: Write a novel that is hailed a critical and commercial success mere hours after its publication. Step 3: Enjoy life as a Famous Young Writer. Step 4: Never have to do anything else. When We Can’t All Be Astronauts begins, Clare is 26 but the other three have failed to materialize. He’s living with his parents, plucking away at a suspect piece of fantasy fiction and drowning in the depths of his own mediocrity.

Even more unfortunately, his plan has worked fantastically well for what seems like all of his friends, AKA the Most Talented Literary Peer Group Since 2004 – one of them has publishers fighting to pay a fat advance for his debut novel while another snags a book deal based on a single sheet of A4. In his desperation to make the same thing happen for himself, Clare agrees to embarrass himself in front of Jeffery Archer, stalk agents at the Hay Festival (on camera) and even talks his way into a meeting with Amanda Ross, ‘The Most Powerful Woman in Publishing’.

While his dream is lived out by everyone around him, Tim Clare, Friend to Bright Young Literary Things, becomes more and more despondent and starts, for the first time, to question his unwavering belief in his future as Tim Clare, Best Selling Author.

I absolutely loved this book. It was funny, poignant and gut-wrenchingly honest and any of you who harbor dreams, quietly or otherwise, about that glitzy book launch, signings that require crowd control or Dave Eggers knowing our name, will love it too. I once read somewhere that the best books tell us things about ourselves that we already knew but couldn’t verbalize and that’s how I felt about We Can’t All Be Astronauts.

(I didn’t want to know most of them but, hey, the dream lives on. I can’t be swayed.)

Tim kindly agreed to a mild interrogation for the purposes of pleasing you, loyal blog readers. As well as writing We Can’t All Be Astronauts – which won Best Biography/Memoir at the East Anglian Book Awards 2009 –  Tim is also a stand-up poet, musician and blogger. You can follow Tim on Twitter here.

What prompted you to write We Can’t All Be Astronauts?

Stark desperation, really. I’d been working on the same Fantasy novel for over 4 years, and the strain had driven me round the twist. ‘Round the twist’ is a glib, folksy way of saying ‘to a nervous breakdown’. I guess I wanted to write down some of my frustrations mostly for catharsis at first – but then it took on a momentum of its own, and became an epic displacement activity that helped distract me from the rather unglamorous reality of my life as lived.

Pre-publication Tim seems to think – just like the rest of us – that a book deal will solve some if not all of his problems. How has getting published changed your life?

I’d love to be all smug and say ‘well, y’know, actually it wasn’t very significant, and in the end all you need is good friends’, but if I’m honest, getting published was immensely important to me. It’s something I’d wanted ever since I was in a little kid – you know, to be a proper writer, to have a book. Finally achieving that difficult goal really boosted my flimsy self-esteem. Perhaps that’s rather shallow of me, but whenever I see my book and remember that, with the help of my very supportive family and friends, I did that, a little part of me goes: YEAH!

In Astronauts you talk a lot about the achievements of your friends and the concerns of your family. Were you worried at all about how they would respond to being immortalized in print? How did they react?

That was the most nerve-wracking part of the whole experience. I didn’t write about anyone I don’t like and respect, so I hoped everyone would be happy with how I’d portrayed them, but at the same time, I felt it was rather presumptuous of me to have declared myself spokesperson for a whole plethora of shared experiences. Also I was pretty honest about my feelings – owning up to both jealousy and big admiration made me feel a bit vulnerable. And then, of course, there’s my dad, and that scene… I dropped lots of hints before he read it, so I think he largely knew what to expect. Also, one of the main thrusts of the book is how awesome my parents are, so I felt confident that once he’d read the whole thing he’d see that, and understand why I had to balance out the praise with a bit of affectionate mickey-taking. All of which is a long-winded way of saying, yes, I was nervous, I ran all the bits past the relevant parties before it went to print, and nobody asked me to change anything, which I took to mean they were okay with it. They’re still all returning my calls!

I know that after I read Astronauts I thought, ‘He’s just like me!’ and convinced you’d want to know this, e-mailed you immediately. I couldn’t have been the only one. (I hope I wasn’t…!) What has the response been like?

The common factor linking all the men who’ve written to me was that they tell me the ending made them cry. Maybe the women who read it cried too, but just didn’t find it noteworthy enough to mention. I didn’t expect the response to be split down gender lines in that way, and I can’t really speculate on why that should be. I guess the other slightly peculiar thing is that all these people now have a fairly thorough knowledge of my life thus far – it’s as if I’ve drunkenly cornered them at a party then spent four hours spilling my deepest secrets. So, often when people write to me or meet me at a performance they’ll volunteer lots of personal information and stuff about their life, and the first couple of times I thought: ‘Why are strangers suddenly opening up to me about their lives?’ Then I figured out that from their perspective they were just continuing a conversation that I’d started – from then on, it felt pretty nice.

Tell us a little bit about how you write, i.e. do you have a routine, etc.?

No. I just stumble through work like someone sleepwalking through a minefield. Depending on what phase certain projects are in, I might be pulling an all-nighter to finish the first draft of a bit for performance, or editing a pitch, or just getting all my ideas out of my head and down onto paper before I forget them. At the moment there’s a lot of finicky topiary going on, as stuff gets finalized, and that makes me itch to be producing big, ugly slabs of first draft stuff again. I spend an awful lot of time playing video games as a way of letting ideas sort of purl and drop into place. I guess it looks suspiciously like procrastinating, but without something like that to distract my conscious mind, I go a bit loopy. I’ve got quite a few irons in the fire at the moment, and I feel excited about them all in a way that can only presage crushing disappointment and several sessions of bitter self-recrimination. Until then, hooray!

What advice would you give to writers aspiring to/dreaming of/obsessed with publication?

I wouldn’t presume to give anyone advice, because I don’t think I have a history of exercising very good judgment in this (or any) area. Also, whenever I read anyone else doling out wisdom about writing or getting publishing, I almost invariably feel like slapping them round their stupid, opinionated chops. I’m pretty sure that’s how most writers, aspiring or otherwise, feel when I start offering my twopenneth worth. I’m not very good at advice – I just gripe publicly in an uncharitable way.

Can you tell us about what you’re working on now? Is a sequel to Astronauts anywhere on the horizon?

Well, an awful lot of what I do involves live performance – I trot out a mix of stand-up, verse and ukulele songs. I’ll be debuting my first full-length solo show this year. It’s called Death Drive, and, as you’ve probably guessed from the title, it draws on Astronauts for some of its material! It’s about my journey from cynical loser to happy failure, via all six Rocky movies, Freud, nightmare neighbours, a corpse and a psychic horse. It’s all true, too. I’m taking it up to the Edinburgh Fringe in August, which is exciting. Aside from that, um, well, shhh… don’t tell anyone, but I’m having a go at another novel. You know, actual fiction. Given the mess the last one got me into, I’m a little cautious, but I can feel myself getting sucked in…

When it comes to getting published, how important would you say it is for aspiring writers to subscribe to Catherine, Caffeinated? (a) Important, (b) Very important or (c)  It’s pretty much a requisite even though Catherine is unpublished, delusional and offers mainly caffeine-induced unfocused ramblings about LOST, pancakes and procrastination?

I would say none of these answers do justice to the true value of subscribing to this pageant of luminous wonder. Aspiring writers who do so will find every aspect of their lives transformed beyond recognition.

Thanks so much to Tim Clare for subjecting himself to my questions.

Purchase We Can’t All be Astronauts: Your Friends are Successes. You’re a Failure. One Last Chance to Reach for the Stars…: Your Friends Are Successes. … One Last Chance to Follow Your Dreams… on Amazon co.uk.

I loathe those, by the way. I don’t see the point, especially since mine would look something like this:

But anyway, I digress. Back to the Top 5. So far this week we’ve had How To Write Books books that were either funny and practical, or reassuring and practical, or comforting and funny. My No. 1 pick is all of those things and more. But before I tell you what it is, we need a radio-DJ style countdown. (I’m assuming you haven’t ruined the surprise by reading this post’s title.)

“At number 5 we had How Not To Write a Novel: 200 Mistakes to Avoid At All Costs Should You Ever Want To Get Published…”

“In at number 4, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need…”

“Number 3: The Maeve Binchy Writers’ Club…”

“Just missing out on the top spot at Number 2, The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers. And now, Catherine’s Number 1 How To Write a Book Book-”

[Drum roll, please...]

Wannabe a Writer? by Jane Wenham-Jones!

(Imagine streamers and party poppers and champagne corks and stuff.)

This book is 258 pages of pure and utter joy and if you only buy one How To Write a Book book – or in fact, any book at all – let it be this one. Having read it all in one sitting – well, not counting coffee breaks, of course – I felt comforted, informed and totally motivated to write. Also, my face was streaked with red and puffy as I tend to cry when I laugh, and I had an overwhelming craving for a bag of kettle crisps. Jane is like the Dr. Phil of writing (only a lot more attractive); she tells it like it is.

“I have heard so many authors tell the story… of how they first got into print. Typically, they woke up one morning with this little idea that they might write a novel. So they dashed one off over the course of a few rainy weekends, found an agent on the Monday, were in a frenzied auction with ten top publishers by Tuesday and banked their six-figure cheque on Friday just before they flew off to the States to discuss the screenplay. They seem touchingly bewildered by their own success. But not as bewildered as I am when I have known for a fact that the author… had written three previous novels before the one that made it and had burst into tears at the Writers’ Circle Christmas party when the twenty-seventh agent had written to suggest she stuck to crossword puzzles instead.”

And so Jane vowed as a much-rejected wannabe that when that dreamy day of publication came, she would tell the truth about the long and difficult road that led to it. With chapters on everything from The Benefits of Alcohol to Richard and Judy, Jane paints a realistic but not disheartening picture of the life of a wannabe novelist in a way that, to my knowledge – and remember, I’ve basically done nothing but read these kinds of books for the last ten years – no other book ever has.

Let me put it this way: have you ever read a How To Write a Book book that had both a hangover cure AND tips on how to avoid Writer’s Bottom?

I didn’t think so.

There is also oodles of practical writing advice, including an extensive section on my favourite problem, plotting, as well as things like grammar, layout and punctuation, or as Jane calls them, ‘The Tedious Bits.’ There’s input from best-selling authors, literary agents and major publishing houses and the story of how Jane went about getting herself her agent will make you laugh so much your family/spouse/neighbours will wonder if you’ve been possessed.

Tip: don’t read this book in a library. You’ll be asked not to come back.

Wannabe a Writer? will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about getting your book published, and a lot of stuff you didn’t. The New Writer called it ‘a must-have book’ and the National Association of Writers’ Groups said it was ‘as refreshing as a fizzing Alka-Seltzer after a big night out.’

This is, in summary, my ultimate How To Write a Book book. Aspiring authors, go and buy it now.

(Well, not right now. Read to the end of this post first.)

Jane has published three novels – One Glass is Never Enough, Perfect Alibis and Raising the Roof - and in honour of this, um, honour, I asked her very nicely (with smiley faces) if she would answer a few questions for us. Being lovely as well as hilarious, she kindly agreed – I didn’t even have to resort to my usual tactics of chocolate-related bribery.

What was your motivation for writing Wannabe a Writer?

I’d been doing my Writing Magazine column – a sort of agony aunt affair called ‘Talk it Over’ – for a couple of years and readers seemed to like it (apart from one particular gentlemen who was outraged when I suggested a good stiff drink to help the inspiration along). My thinking went like this: 24 columns at 1000 words each equals – a quarter of a book! (I’m always looking for short cuts!). In the end, of course, only the odd snippet from my columns made it into the final manuscript but it was the vision of all that material I had already that got me started. Also, I find so many of the existing writing books rather bossy. I wanted to say that it doesn’t matter how you do it – personally I would rather eat own leg than make index cards for each character – as long as you do, and mention the things that nobody else has seemed to, like the knotty problem of Writer’s Bottom and the fact that one can become insanely jealous of other writers getting published when one is being horribly rejected oneself. Stuff like that.

In your book you reveal that you didn’t always want to be a writer but instead toyed with several career options including ‘being Business Woman of the Year with a large desk, two telephones and a young male secretary [you] could send out on errands of a personal nature’. Who or what planted the idea of writing a novel in your head?

A writing aunt/tales of six figures sums and deals for screen rights (HA!)/being largely unemployable doing anything else.

Tell us a bit about your writing method. From what I can gather, it involves Post-It notes, a lot of alcohol – Wannabe a Writer? is the only How To book on my list that includes a (very useful) hangover cure – and eating kettle crisps…?

You’ve summed it up beautifully. Plus there’s the considerable amount of weeping and wailing when it’s not going well. I am trying to become more organized as I get older and (supposedly) more experienced. I try to do that planning thing. I dream of a single sheet of paper containing a grand design. In reality I am still surrounded by notes, lists, folders of cuttings that need to be incorporated somewhere…

Those of us who dream of publication believe (whether or not we admit it) that getting published will change our life, fill the hole in our soul, land us on Richard & Judy, etc. How has it changed yours?

Life is more fun; I am more neurotic. Never made Richard and Judy (though did spend an hour on stage with the lovely Richard Madeley, interviewing him for the Guilford Book Festival a couple of years ago) but have done lots of daft TV and radio programmes that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t had some books published. I’ve made lots of lovely friends and  have the perfect excuse to wear pyjamas all day.

If you had to sum up your advice to aspiring authors in two sentences and we assumed that ‘Buy copies of Wannabe a Writer? for you and all your friends’ was one, what would the other be?

Marry someone rich.

What are you working on now? I heard through the magical interwebs that a sequel is in the works…

Yes – Wannabe a Writer We’ve Heard Of? comes out in October. (Just the small matter of finishing it first….)

Is being awarded the accolade of Catherine’s No. 1 How To Write Books Book the highlight of your entire writing career so far? Please tick as appropriate: (a) Yes, (b) Absolutely or (c) Without a doubt.

All three – am touched, thrilled, delighted and – hey – any excuse to break open the fizz. Thank you!!

———————————–

Click here to buy Wannabe a Writer? on Amazon.co.uk:

Wannabe a Writer?

Click here to read a glowing review of Wannabe a Writer? by Trashionista.

Click here for Jane Wenham-Jone’s official website and here for her Wannabe a Writer? Twitter account. You need to follow Jane on Twitter. Just look at this gem:

Thanks so much Jane for writing Wannabe a Writer? and for taking the time to appear on my blog. You’re a Starbar.

And so concludes my Top 5 How To Write Books Books. (What the bubbles am I supposed to write about next week?!) Click here to read all the posts or click here to shop for all my favourite How To Write Books Books.