I love to read about how a book that I'm reading came into being. What made the writer write this particular book? What are some of those little stories the reader knows nothing about?And that's why I've written a post like this for three of my books:Sisters at New DawnDragonflies, Jigsaws and SeashellsThe Clockwala's CluesNow, it's time for Uncontrollable, which has rather unconventional beginnings. Why did I write a fantasy in verse? What was I thinking?The answer is that it didn't start off in verse at all. I wrote it in prose, probably sometime in 2018, and I started pitching it in 2019. I'm a rewriter much more than a writer, and here's how Uncontrollable became what it is. I first pitched The Machine of Kallua (as it was then called) on 7 May 2019. Yes, I have a spreadsheet to keep track of submissions. Publisher One held on to for quite a while, … [Read more...]
My Year in Writing: 2023
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...]