Friday, April 29, 2016

Extended Interview with Sarah Alexander, Author of THE ART OF NOT BREATHING



This is an extended version of the interview I did for The Swanky 17s Debut Club

Caroline Leech interviewed fellow Brit, Sarah Alexander, about her YA debut, THE ART OF NOT BREATHING, a contemporary novel about loss and grieving, just published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the USA and by Usborne in the UK.

About the Novel
Five years after the drowning of her twin brother, Scottish sixteen-year-old Elsie Main confronts tempestuous seas – and her family’s tragic past – as she tries to remember what really happened that fateful day on the beach. One minute Eddie was there, and the next he was gone. Seventeen-year-old Tay McKenzie is a cute and mysterious boy that Elsie meets in her favorite boathouse hangout. When Tay introduces Elsie to the world of freediving, she vows to find the answers she seeks at the bottom of the sea. A young adult debut that will appeal to fans of E. Lockhart’s WE WERE LIARS and Jandy Nelson’s I’LL GIVE YOU THE SUN.



About the author
Sarah Alexander grew up in London with dreams of exploring the world and writing stories. After spending several years wandering the globe and getting into all sorts of scrapes, she returned to London to complete a Master's degree in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College in 2013. She works in publishing and lives with her husband and two chickens. THE ART OF NOT BREATHING is her first novel.









So, Sarah, tell us about the art of writing and THE ART OF NOT BREATHING

Caroline: What came to you first – freediving or Elsie?

Sarah: Elsie and her mum came to me together, almost fully formed. I always wanted to write about loss and grief, and also about an interesting mother/daughter relationship, so they came as a package. Originally I wanted Elsie to be quite down, not really knowing what to do with herself or with her life. She was just keeping her head down and getting on with it, but then I realized that she needed to find a passion. I had the seaside setting in my mind, but it took longer for the freediving to emerge. In the end, the themes of suffocation, isolation and escape combined with the seaside setting led me to the underwater world.

Caroline: So are you a swimmer or freediver yourself?
Sarah: I’m actually a scuba diver, rather than a freediver, because I like to breathe when I’m underwater! I have tried freediving though I don’t go very deep because that’s really scary, but I like to go a bit beneath the surface to see what is down there. I love the water, especially having that space to myself where no one can speak to me and interrupt my thoughts.

I qualified as a scuba diver in 2004 in Thailand and though I’ve not dived in Scottish waters, I’ve dived all over South East Asia, the east and west coasts of Australia, South Africa, the Red Sea, Egypt, Jordan, and the Galapagos. In Brazil, I even dived in an underground lake. To get to it, I had to rappel 300ft into a cave, and then the scuba gear came down on the rope. Once I’d had a scuba around, I then had to rappel myself back up.

from Chanonry Point, near Fortrose, on the Black Isle

Caroline: You and I have both written books set on the Black Isle in Scotland. What was it that drew you to let Elsie live in Fortrose?
Sarah: The idea for the setting came to me when I visited there. I have spent lots of time in Scotland because that’s where my father is from and I’ve other family up there, so I’ve spent lots of family holidays on Scottish beaches being whipped by the wind. To me, Scotland always felt like an idyllic family place but also the weather was perfect for my setting because I wanted somewhere windy and cold, with long dark winters and balmy summers. Interestingly when I did go on my research trip to the Black Isle, it was July and we had the most incredible weather, like being in Turkey. That was a bit weird, but I loved the long twilights, when you think it’s about to get dark, but an hour later it’s still the same, and that gave me such an eerie setting.

I also wanted somewhere that had some British wildlife, so the dolphins and the otters are in there, and obviously very cold water.

Caroline: There are several serious issues addressed in the book – bereavement, parental separation, fat-shaming and eating disorders. Did you set out to make them part of the book?
Sarah: It was always going to be a story about loss and grief, and all the characters have their own way of dealing with it. Elsie discovers freediving, her mum Celia drinks and stays out, her dad is absent. And I always wanted to write about male eating disorders. I didn’t know it would be in this book, but it just came with Dillon. I realized that there was a real physical connection between starving your body of oxygen and starving your body of food. So though the issues weren’t really at the forefront, as I got to know the characters they each told me how much pain they were in.

Caroline: Elsie smokes, drinks, steals, skips school and generally disobeys every instruction anyone gives her, yet we still know she is a decent person at heart. How did you know you could maintain Elsie’s good soul amid all the “naughty” stuff she does?
Sarah: I’m not sure whether I knew that I could or not. I just knew that she had all of these amazing qualities that no one else saw, and she was really the one that held her family together. She does all the caring, she looks after her mum, she keeps any eye on Dillon and also on Eddie when he was alive, so for me that was always at the core of her. And the badass stuff was her being a typical teenager and thinking, “What can I get away with?” She just tries things. I think that’s what drove her character forward. She doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, and that’s what I love about her.

The Moray Firth from Chanonry Point
Caroline: So how did you, as a writer, get to this point?
Sarah: Luck! No, that’s not entirely true. A lot of it is to do with luck, and the rest is just bloody-mindedness. It took me two years to write this book. I started it when I was doing my creative writing MA. I wrote a chapter for a class that I was taking, and to my surprise, everyone loved and said, “you’ve got something there”. So I went with it. It took me a couple of months more to get the story straight in my head, and then I spent about six months faffing about with the first ten thousand words. I then realized it was never going to get finished, so I gave myself a deadline of when it had to be done and stuck to it.  Fortunately, an agent loved it too, although she made me do endless revisions until she thought it was ready to go out on submission.

Caroline: And what is your writing process – every day or weekend binges?
Sarah: Both. Sometimes I block out all Saturday and Sunday, and write all day and all evening, and then other times, I’ll just do half an hour before work, half an hour at lunchtime and again after work, and that’s enough. And then I’ll spend a day bringing all those bits together. I didn’t really have a plan with THE ART OF NOT BREATHING, I just had an end-goal in mind, and knew I had to get it finished by a deadline I set myself.

Caroline: So what’s next? Another book?
Sarah: Yes, it’s work in progress… in my head and partly on paper… and in my phone… and on post-it notes… and on the back of my hand. It’s a standalone contemporary about fear. Fear in terms of being afraid, and also about not being afraid of anything.

Caroline: You are having an almost simultaneous UK/US publication, so how are you dealing with that transatlantic split personality?
Sarah: It is like having two different books. The US has different lead-times to the UK, so the draft of the US version was done months before the final draft of the UK version. That meant that every time I was doing a round of edits, I was making them in two different places, not to mention the process of Americanizing something when you don’t really understand American. I shared that task with an editor, though there was a fair bit of going back and forth. They changed the spellings, and they’d flag up something that they didn’t understand and ask me to ‘translate’ it, which was interesting. I’ve no plans for a US book tour yet, but hopefully one day.


SPEED ROUND

Happy ending or realistic ending?
Realistic, even if it’s painful. This is really hard because, as a reader, I want realistic endings, but I also hate being unhappy and I like resolution. But as a writer, I want to tell the story the way it should be. I want to acknowledge that in life, stories don’t end when we think they end. So it’s a battle between my own needs and a reader’s needs, and hopefully I manage to get a balance between it being realistic, with a little bit of hope, but leaving it open because who knows what might happen next?

How’s your diet – caffeine and sugar or herbal and fiber?
Depends on my mood and whether it’s a day ending in a Y.  My favorite writing snack is carrot sticks… with wine. But if someone brings me a cake, I won’t say no.

Playlist or peace and quiet?
Usually peace and quiet.

What are you reading right now?
REBEL OF THE SANDS by Alwyn Hamilton which was recently published. She’s awesome.

What’s the best word to describe how cold the waters of the Moray Firth are?
Bloody freezing! Or Ball-achingly cold!

And the big question: do you consider yourself Scottish or English?
British! I don’t think I can consider myself Scottish because I’ve always lived in London, but if anyone asks, I do tell them that I’ve got Scots blood in me. I suppose that I’d break myself down to 25% Scottish, 25% Welsh, 50% London!


You can order Sarah’s book in the USA in hardback, e-book and on audiobook from your local bookstore, or from Indiebound, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-million, or on Amazon.


GIVEAWAY TIME!

To celebrate the release of THE ART OF NOT BREATHING, Caroline and Sarah are giving away two copies of the book - one to a reader in the United States and one to a reader in the United Kingdom. For five different chances to win, use the Rafflecopter entry forms below for either the US or the UK, depending on where you live. Deadline for entries, midnight on May 6th, 2016.


a Rafflecopter giveaway a Rafflecopter giveaway

Friday, April 22, 2016

Texas Library Association - my first time!

I had a great time yesterday at my first Texas Library Association Annual Conference, which is taking place at Houston's huge convention center this week, and I thought I'd share some of my day with you.


 I visited the Harper Collins booth, which was certainly one of the biggest, and ogled all the wonderful Young Adult covers on the shelves...


... these are books that have already been published ...








...and these are books which will be coming out very soon...



This shelf was full of Advanced Reader Copies, or ARCs, which are the almost final versions sent out to reviewers, bookstores and librarians so that there is already some interest and excitement about the books before the publication date. At conferences like TLA, the publishers give away ARCs, and have their authors there to sign them too, so some ARCs are treated like gold dust within the reading community. I was lucky to get my hands on several - see below! 


Just think, this time next year, WAIT FOR ME, might be up there among the great and the good of the Harper Teen display!

I also walked around the other publishers' booths, and was excited to see Sarah Alexander's THE ART OF NOT BREATHING among the new releases on the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt stand. If you haven't yet entered my GIVEAWAY of this fantastic new YA book, please click here to have five chances to enter!


And I also met other authors - so many other authors! 

I got together with the wonderful Kayla Olson, who like me is a Swanky 17 with her debut YA novel, THE SANDCASTLE EMPIRE, coming out next summer also with Harper Teen. Excitingly, the movie rights to her book have already been bought by Leonardo di Caprio's production company. This one's going to be HUGE!


Then we met Lindsay Eager, a Sweet 16 debut author, whose middle grade novel HOUR OF THE BEES came out in March, 

And Hannah West, another Sweet 16, whose YA debut KINGDOM OF ASH AND BRIARS comes out this September.

 And I was excited to meet too other authors such as Kwame Alexander, Sean Patrick Flanery, Samantha Mabry and SCBWI friends Sara Joiner, Joy Preble, as well as...

... Newbery Award winner, Kathi Appelt, who mentored me for a year as my prize in the Joan Lowery Nixon Contest 2014. Kathi doesn't live in Houston, so this was the first time I was able to thank her in person, and what a kind and generous person she is. I am so honored that she has been so involved in my writing career. 

Kathi was speaking at at TLA and signing copies of her new book, MAYBE A FOX.
Winning Kathi's mentoring was a prize at the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Houston conference in 2014. Being a member of SCBWI has had a huge influence on my writing life so far, and so I was delighted to be able to join the team staffing the SCBWI Texas booth for a couple of hours. So many interesting librarians and writers came to call and to win copies of books by Texas authors, I had a great time.


And here's the treasure trove of new releases, ARCs, and even an audiobook, I came home with. My summer of reading is suddenly looking very bright. 



Sunday, April 17, 2016

BOOK GIVEAWAY! - The Art of Not Breathing by Sarah Alexander

I am very excited to be offering my very first GIVEAWAY, especially since I will be giving away a fantastic new book by another British author. And to keep everyone happy, there will be not one, but TWO copies on offer – one for UK readers and one for US readers.

THE ART OF NOT BREATHING by Sarah Alexander is a contemporary story for teenagers about loss and grieving, set on the Black Isle in the north of  Scotland . It will be published by Usborne Books in the UK on April on April 1st, and by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the USA on April 26th. 

To coincide with the American launch, my interview with Sweet 16s member, Sarah Alexander, will be featured on The Swanky Seventeens website on April 29th, and you will be able to read an extended version of the interview on my blog too.

To enter the competition, please go to the Rafflecopter entry forms below – make sure you are entering the right one for the country in which you live – UK or US – and follow one or more of the options.  On May 6th, one winner in each country will be picked at random and I will let you know if you have won. The winners’ names will be announced on this blog, Facebook and Twitter.

About THE ART OF NOT BREATHING
Five years after the drowning of her twin brother, Scottish sixteen-year-old Elsie Main confronts tempestuous seas – and her family’s tragic past – as she tries to remember what really happened that fateful day on the beach. One minute Eddie was there, and the next he was gone. Seventeen-year-old Tay McKenzie is a cute and mysterious boy that Elsie meets in her favorite boathouse hangout. When Tay introduces Elsie to the world of freediving, she vows to find the answers she seeks at the bottom of the sea. A young adult debut that will appeal to fans of E. Lockhart’s WE WERE LIARS and Jandy Nelson’s I’LL GIVE YOU THE SUN.

About SARAH ALEXANDER
Sarah Alexander grew up in London with dreams of exploring the world and writing stories. After spending several years wandering the globe and getting into all sorts of scrapes, she returned to London to complete a Master's degree in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College in 2013. She works in publishing and lives with her husband and two chickens. THE ART OF NOT BREATHING is her first novel.




Closing date – Friday May 6th

There are several ways to enter the GIVEAWAY, via Rafflecopter, so please see below:

PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU ENTER EITHER THE UK OR THE USA, NOT BOTH.


a Rafflecopter giveaway a Rafflecopter giveaway

Monday, April 11, 2016

National Library Week - a lifetime of celebration


It's National Library Week this week, and that's given me a chance to look back on the libraries that have been part of my life as I've moved around the world. 

As a kid, my wonderful parents took me to one of the excellent Edinburgh City Libraries - Corstorphine and Blackhall branches, usually - every couple of weeks, and I had a great school library at the Mary Erskine School to borrow all sorts of books from. As a teen, I raided the music library in Edinburgh's Central Library for endless piles of sheet music to indulge my (not very realistic) ambitions to be a singer. 

When I moved to London to work at the Arts Council, there was a branch of the Westminster Library just round the corner from my office which had a fantastic stack of paperback novels, just perfect to read on a bus or train during my commute each day. When we moved to Wales a few years later, Penarth Library had a great storytime session down in the children's library every week when my kids were little. 

Now, I'm in Houston, I indulge myself with downloading from the amazing number of digital audiobooks on offer through the Houston Area Digital Media Catalog, as well as CDs and books I can order from the Houston Public Library website. 

So I am delighted to join in the celebration of libraries all over the world, not just during National Library Week, but every single day of my life!

For more information about how you can join in the celebration, visit the I Love Libraries facebook page or follow the #NationalLibraryWeek chat on Twitter.