My Next Big Thing...

I'm not sure if the Next Big Thing blog hop refers to new authors or new books, but it's meant to help connect indie authors to readers, and I'm delighted to have been passed the torch  by Ms Martha Emms, author of A Portrait of Our Marriage, so please follow the links and find out more about her. Meanwhile, thank you Martha for “tagging” me.


The rules of the blog hop are simple: Answer ten questions about your WIP (Work in Progress) and tag five more writers/bloggers to do the same. A chain of links will lead you, dear reader, to a forest of wonderful writers all busy creating new books just for you… or so I'm told. So here's my contribution to the chain.
 

What is the working title of your book?
Infinite Sum

Where did the idea come from for the book?
It’s actually a combination of my first grown-up novel (I’m ignoring high school and below) and characters from my first published novel (Divide by Zero, which just came out). One of the characters “read” my first novel and demanded to tell her own story in a similar style.

What genre does your book fall under?
Contemporary drama I think. It's dark but I don't think it's crime drama. It's about a woman, but I'm not sure that really makes it women's fiction. And I’d like to believe it’s literary but I’m told you have to let readers or agents decide for themselves.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
I’m so bad at names. I’d need more than one to play the main character. Small girl, teenager and young mom. D’you have any suggestions. She’s an artist if that helps.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Sometimes the hardest person to forgive is yourself, and the toughest memories are the ones you forgot long ago.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
It’s under contract to Stonegarden.net, the publishers of Divide by Zero.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
The first draft took one month. I was doing a pretend NanoWriMo in October since November’s way too busy. But I spent a lot of time thinking about it beforehand—talking with my character as I wandered around the green (and hoping no-one but the dog was listening). The story’s been through lots more drafts since then and I’m re-editing now.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
I might compare it with How to Be Lost by Amanda Eyre Ward or The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, or… there are just so many books out there.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?
I’m tempted to say one of my characters inspired me, though the protagonist of that first unpublished novel has a lot to do with it too. Divide by Zero grew out of a set of short stories and the plot arose when one of the stories went in an unexpected direction, leaving me wondering how things got from here to there. By the end of the novel I still wasn’t sure how one of the characters got from here to there. It wasn’t her story though so that was fine, but she kind of insisted I had to write her book too.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
What piques my interest is the character’s search for identity and her problems with duty, love, guilt and forgiveness. After all, her story got me interested enough to want to write it, and I hope these  issues might pique other readers' interest too.



You can find the first book, Divide by Zero, on the shelves in our local Powells, or at:


And you can follow the Next Big Thing blog tour by looking next Wednesday for the next Next Big Thing posts by these excellent writers--or look today and see what they're writing about now!


Comments

Dawn Wilson said…
Hi Sheila. Your book sounds very interesting. It's so interesting when a character insists that his/her story be told in the next book. That's kinda what happened with mine; a character wanted to deal with an issue from Book One in Book Two. Thanks for including me in your blog hop. I'll get my post up soon. Take care and good luck!

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