The year 2023 was remarkably kind to me as an author. It was a year full of lit fests, school visits, and, most importantly, new stories! UncontrollableWhat can I say about Uncontrollable, my first verse novel?'Addictive.''Unputdownable.''Ambitious and original.'I keep going back and reading all these heart-warming emails I've received about it.Yes, it is ambitious. It is a middle-grade fantasy in verse. In November 2023, I was shortlisted for the Neev Literature Festival fellowship. During the interview, I met six children's literature experts, and they mentioned how they'd hunted for other examples of fantasy written in verse ... and had drawn a blank.They thought of Odder by Katherine Applegate, but it isn't really fantasy; the protagonist is an animal, but the book is realistic fiction nonetheless.So maybe, Uncontrollable is really one of its kind. It's both terrifying and … [Read more...]
My Year in Writing
Being a writer is never easy. Things take too long, and there's little to show for it. Long silences, endless waiting and wondering, a general feeling of isolation ... Yet, the highs are so high that they make everything worth it.In 2019, among the biggest highs for me was the discovery of warm, supportive groups on social media. I didn't even know that this was something part of me needed, simply because I'm so used to the feeling of submitting stories into the void and never hearing back from editors and publishers. Rejection, too, is equally normal. Form rejections are terrible, but silence is worse.Then, I discovered that people set targets for themselves - of how many rejections they will get each year. A hundred rejections - that's a normal target.And this was new to me. It opened my eyes to wonderful new possibilities. Instead of agonising over perfection, why not send … [Read more...]
Catching Up – Writing
It's that time again, when I've postponed blogging for so long that I don't know where to begin. I keep saying that I intend to do monthly roundups and that never happens. I'm now planning to do a series of posts, catching up with what's gone by, though.In terms of writing, I'm working on multiple things, and that's a wonderful place to be. I just had a poem published by Scoop - a UK-based children's magazine that has published writers like Neil Gaiman, John Agard and Jacqueline Wilson. If I don't count the poems that were published when I was a child, this is my first poem to be published - the first of many, I hope!My poem is called "Making a Clone", and it's about two girls who come up with a wonderful plan - they'll make a clone out of ketchup and potato peels.I also had a travel story published by Inside Himalayas - the first bit of non-fiction in a while.My … [Read more...]