Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

It's that time of year when we've all been looking backwards at the highs and lows of 2014 and forwards to the great year we're all going to have in 2015, kind of a time to put things into perspective.

It's been a big year for me with lots of firsts, lots of travelling and a significant birthday so lots of celebrations. I've also, as you'll know if you read this blog regularly, had a big setback in the form of a monster case of RSI which has certainly been challenging. Plenty to reflect on.

But, you know, I got to thinking about my special moments of this past year and although some of the big ones were pretty spectacular – watching shooting stars from the top of a sand dune in the Sahara was very cool and watching my daughter at her first red carpet premiere in LA was really special – those kind of experiences are the exception, rather than the rule. Life is generally made up of smaller moments, crossing something off that to-do list, having a meal out with friends, remembering to exercise (always a challenge, that one!) And, bearing in mind what the trek to Everest Base Camp taught me, acknowledging and enjoying those is really living life to the full.

The start of a squeaky New Year is full of possibilities that we can achieve in these coming months what we didn't manage to last year – it's an exciting time! So, I'm looking backwards to go forwards,  building on the parts of my work in progress I didn't mess up, revising and editing like mad currently. I may not actually have said the words 'my New Year's resolution is . . .' but it amounts to the same thing and it means I can dip into my chocolate drawer without feeling guilty.

BOSFOK

So I started a blog post which went like this:

I've posted a lot lately about inspiration and passion and dedication. But what happens when you don't feel any of that? What if it's all just going wrong?

I'm currently halfway through getting comments back from test readers on my work in progress. This has been a real Frankenstein of a book and I know that in the words of one of my testers "there's a great book in there" but right now it's hiding itself quite successfully. I know exactly how this has happened – I conceived the book as one thing but, for one reason and another, was persuaded to write something else so the plot became too unwieldy and convoluted. Cue rewriting the second half of the story and the first edit spent trying to stitch them both together. I'm still having plot problems and trying to force square pegs into round holes and it's been making me miserable. Inspiration and passion are nowhere. Instead I've had to fall back on sheer stubbornness and shouting BOSFOK at myself – that's quite therapeutic! It isn't actually swearing, it stands for "bum on seat, fingers on keyboard" (pen in hand while editing actually, but BOSPIN doesn't give quite the same punch).

I know this funk is temporary. I'm right on the cusp of making it all work again, I just have to put in the hours to make it so. That's where being a Taurean and stubborn as hell is my strength!

And the great thing is that from when I drafted that I had a lightbulb moment: I got out of my own way and let the story flow and let the main character show herself how she really is and not how I was trying to portray her. Lesson learned in a very painful way! Now I'm really excited to rewrite the book, the only slight issue I have is that I have a very tight deadline in which to get it done. But I can do this (down time at Christmas, totally over-rated. . .) and am so excited to see this story exactly how it should be told.

Wishing on a comet

Unless you've been on a comet yourself over the last few days, you can't have failed to notice that the European Space Agency has landed a robotic probe on a comet some 300 million miles away from the Earth. This is pretty special for me because, in my day job, I work in the department where the British team who built the Ptolemy instrument (the one designed to analyse what the comet is made of in a bid to see if the commentary water is the same as that on earth) are based and it was amazing and brilliant to see them celebrating what, for some, has been 20+ years work with a successful landing. The best analogy for their attempt that I saw yesterday was that it was like 'launching a hammer from London to hit a nail in Delhi', although 'trying to land a fly on a bullet' was pretty good too.

You cannot fail to have been moved by Professor Monica Grady's overjoyed reaction when she hugged BBC's David Shukman (currently here if you haven't seen it http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30022765). This is true passion and dedication again – I seem to have been surrounded by a lot of it lately! It takes all that and more to get a space mission off the ground [pun intended :) ] and it takes an extraordinary amount of patience. Rosetta was initially due to be launched on the second Ariane rocket back in 2002 but when the first one exploded on the launch pad, it took two further years to ensure the second rocket wouldn't suffer the same fate before Rosetta could even leave the Earth.

Yesterday was truly inspiring and a huge achievement for mankind - the resultant leap forward in our technological prowess from this mission has been translated into areas such as healthcare and water quality. Our individual dreams might be smaller in scope but they may feel just as impossible sometimes. What's important is that for each knock back we get up and try again, from each setback we learn and hone our talent because then success has to be practically guaranteed.

'They' said what?

Following on from my ‘at the top of their game’ post, I thought I'd share with you this inspiring list.

Albert Einstein didn't speak until he was almost 4 years old and his teachers said he would "never amount to much." (despite the fact that his first words were "The soup is too hot." Greatly relieved that he had finally spoken, his parents then asked why he had never said a word before. Albert replied, "Because up to now everything was in order.")

The American basketball player, Michael Jordan, was dropped from his high school basketball team and went home, locked himself in his room, and cried.

Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper for "lacking imagination" and "having no original ideas".

Steve Jobs was left devastated and depressed aged 30 when he was unceremoniously removed from the company he started.

Oprah Winfrey was demoted from her job as a news anchor because "she wasn't fit for television".

The Beatles were rejected by Decca Recording Studios, who said "we don't like their sound – they have no future in show business."

Knowing what we know about those people now, those kind of facts are funny, aren't they? But at the time for each of these ’superstars’, the rejection must have been devastating (except maybe when you're four years old and not that interested in what your teachers are saying about you). How much easier would it have been for them to have dropped their dream and tried something else?

Persistence, that keeping on getting up when you get knocked back, that is the real definition of success. 

At the top of their game

I've been really lucky this week to have seen three people at the top of their game. Last Friday I went to London to see Matthew Bourne's production of Lord of the Flies and the show was preceded by a discussion led by The Daily Telegraph's arts critic between Matthew Bourne and Judy Carver, the daughter of William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies. The production featured some professional dancers but the project's aims were to work with guys who had little or no experience of dance and performance. It was fascinating to hear the rationale behind the project and the changes that Matthew Bourne made to the story, not least of which was changing its location from a desert island to an abandoned theatre. This reimagining was really powerful and I was really struck by how he was able to take something that had been just words and make it so visual. Judy Carver's recollection of her father's manuscript thudding back through the letterbox each time it was rejected by a publisher is definitely something I could relate to – it was somehow comforting to hear that the author of one of the classic British novels struggled to become successful in much the same way that many authors do today.

On Saturday I saw Hans Zimmer Revealed which has to be one of the best things I've ever seen (and I was in the audience for Jean Michel Jarre’s Docklands concerts!). I adore Hans Zimmer's music – it's mostly what I listen to while I write, the soundtrack of Inception is my go-to when I'm stuck and Time is my all-time favourite piece of music ever. He showed so much passion on the stage for music and the people playing alongside him, all so ridiculously talented, it was mind-boggling. It was quite something imagining him starting to compose a movie soundtrack, tinkering around with a few notes that become the theme that's interwoven throughout the whole film, growing from a melody of single notes to a piece of music so complex it takes a whole orchestra to produce it. The audience as one gave him two thunderous standing ovations and, yet, when he played the last few chords of Time, the silence was as absolute as if he was in a studio by himself. Epic, epic music and quite an emotional experience – according to Twitter, I wasn't the only one who cried!

Last night I was off to London again to attend a ‘posh publishing party’ to celebrate my friend Carole Matthews’ amazing achievement of her 25th novel being published. In a beautiful five-star hotel we toasted this extraordinary achievement in an industry that has certainly seen some changes since she started 18 years ago.

So, as you can see, I've had quite a week! But each event, as different as they were, reinforced the fact that Matthew Bourne, Hans Zimmer and Carole Matthews, are all at the top of their game not by accident. They are all incredibly passionate about what they do and about sharing it with others. They work extremely hard, going that extra mile every time, and give their all to achieve their respective dreams. Matthew Bourne talked about being bullied for choosing to dance and I know that Carole used to tie her leg to the desk to make herself sit there and write every evening at 9 o'clock after a full-on day at work.

Dedication and passion, they have it in spades. And if your dream is important enough to you, you do too.

Am I nearly there yet?

This week is the Frankfurt Book Fair. For those not in the know it's a huge event in the publishing calendar – probably the biggest. It's a place where all the individual cogs that make up the publishing machine get together and a week when books and authors make headlines with stories of deals and advances and the launching of new talent.

I had a mini-moment of excitement connected with the FBF when my agent told me in the middle of the day that my book, The Only, was being pitched right at that moment to German publishers ahead of the Fair and that it was "going down a storm" - those publishers properly heard my shriek of excitement all the way from Milton Keynes.

Sadly, frustratingly, they decided not to take the book on until a UK publisher did and they all decided I'd missed the boat with the genre. This was one of those creative industry rollercoaster slumps. So, back to the beginning for me, write another book.

Scarily that was three years ago. At the time I really thought that was it for me, I’d got there (wherever there was). That particular route, at that particular time, wasn't to be for me. However, that story got me representation by my lovely agent who believed in it and believes in me as a writer. Thinking about the statistics there where averagely successful agents receive 150+ unsolicited manuscripts a week and only take on a handful of clients a year, if any at all, reminds me that is no small feat. 

Carol Matthews, a hugely successful author and a friend of mine, suggested I put The Only up on Amazon, rather than leaving it in a drawer. So I did. And what a brilliant idea that was because it has brought me readers who love my story, which surely is the measure of success for any writer.

Phew!

Those of you who have read this blog before know that I have been working on a new book. On Friday, after real hard slog, I typed the immortal words "the end".

Although this has felt like the hardest book yet, I've actually written it faster any of the others (and have to remind myself that thanks to a mega-bout of RSI there were six weeks I couldn't touch a keyboard at all). I guess the most important thing is that I love it and can't wait for it to get out into the world properly :)

It's such an odd feeling, reaching that point when writing a book. It's not quite ‘the end’ of it for me as once I have comments back from the test readers, my agent, I'm sure, will have comments too. So the great news is I get to spend more time with these characters, and I think, when you get to meet them, you'll be glad to as well. But in the meantime the time pressure to be sitting at my desk 24/7 isn't quite as strong as usual, I may catch up with all the series on the sky box before the system deletes them for me, I'm off out twice next week on a school night (!), I could get used to this!

Having spent the last hour clearing my desk which, it turns out, is oak-coloured –who knew!?! - I now need to pack my bag for my day job tomorrow. That wouldn't be a lever arch file of editing sneaking in there, would it? Of course it is, back to the sequel of The Only tomorrow, I just can't help myself!

All ready for the next book . . .