The Nut Press is at the Guardian Hay Festival this weekend and, hopefully, it will look pretty much like it does in the picture while I’m there.
The Nut Press is at the Guardian Hay Festival this weekend and, hopefully, it will look pretty much like it does in the picture while I’m there.
Today’s guest is the very lovely Keris Stainton whose debut YA novel Della Says: OMG! was published earlier this month. You can read my review here. Keris is currently on a Blog Tour to raise awareness of Della Says: OMG! and she was kind enough to answer my questions about the book and writing, including NaNoWriMo.
Do you ever find yourself drawn to something – a person or an object or an event – like, oh I don’t know, say, a bee to honey? It happens to me a lot. After having recently read Wasted by Nicola Morgan, I no longer know if this is my own gut instinct or some other higher power moving me around the chess board of life, but I’m happy for it to continue – irrespective of what’s driving it. It usually works out well.
Wasted is the latest YA novel by author Nicola Morgan, who has around 90 books published. Nicola is on a a Blog Tour during May to promote Wasted and today she’s here at The Nut Press and was generous enough to answer some questions about the book and her writing process.
Chance. Luck. Fate. Destiny. Choices. Reactions. Timing. Much like Jack’s coin, my head is still spinning days after reading Nicola Morgan’s excellent Wasted. But this is a good thing. The book throws up a lot of questions and ideas and it’s made me look at some of these with fresh perspective.
I always thought one of the benefits of becoming proficient in a foreign language would be that I’d be able to read another country’s literature in the original language, rather than in translation. (In fact, if I chose the language wisely, I’d be able to read that of more than one country.) I never thought for a moment that it would enable me to read a novel set in England, originally written in English by an English author but which has, so far, only been published in translation.
She walks. She talks. She writes. She dances. Meet the Jane Austen Action Figure!
Please see pic for Exhibit ‘A’ – Della Says: OMG! – a book that I would not normally pick up to read the blurb on the back cover, let alone buy and read cover-to-cover in one sitting. Why? We-ell, there’s shocking pink and fluorescent green on the front cover, for starters, the book title contains text speak (even though, yes, I use it myself. Guilty as charged) and it’s a book aimed at the teen market.
I’m hoping that Bernhard Schlink’s thought-provoking novel The Reader doesn’t become a footnote to Kate Winslet’s Oscar success in the film adaptation. It is a book that deserves far more that the sorry footnote of simply becoming the book of the film.
I don’t know about you but I’ve always wished there was a little bit more magic and some of that ever-so-helpful fairy dust in my life from time to time. But Catherine Ryan Howard had bigger dreams than this.