My new book is on its way!

Yesterday, I received the first set of edits from my editor for my next book, Our Beautiful Child. Yay!!

You may or may not know that my publisher, Vagabondage Press, are American. So, the hardest part of the whole process is changing all my beautiful British spellings into American. In Cat and The Dreamer, the first book they published, my spellings were preserved which I was surprised - and happy - about, but policy has obviously changed.

I love British spellings, but after a while I started to accept the changes that involved 'u's, and the replacement of draught with draft. But then I hit the word omelette which doesn't have the te in the American spelling. After publishing my short story Omelette in That Sadie Thing I'm rather attached to the spelling, and currently I've overlooked it. It's very possible I will change it to chicken pie or better still pasty just to avoid dealing with it!

The other thing I hadn't fully appreciated before is how many commas American's use. They are everywhere - the British style (or maybe just my style, I'm not entirely sure) seems to have simplified the use of commas. But my editor would have put one after the but at the beginning of this sentence. In the end I've just gone with it, otherwise I would have ended up unediting all the editing she'd done... Not a good way to conduct a professional relationship!

On the plus side, she has added a couple of semi-colons, and by now you should all be aware of my addiction to them!

UPDATE: I thought I'd email my editor, just to double-double check, and I can keep my British spellings. D'oh. If I'd emailed her before this post, I wouldn't have had to write it! Now I'm going through the ms again.

What do you think about American v British spellings?

Do you have an opinion?

How are you today?

A couple of tags

Elizabeth at Use Your Words... tagged me in the Next Big Thing thing a couple of weeks ago, so I thought I'd give it a go:

1. Working Title? Our Beautiful Child and other stories

2. Where did idea come from for the book? There are three novella length stories in the collection. The first one I wrote is The Traveller, which contains my most favourite character ever. The second one Ella's Story wasn't supposed to be connected to The Traveller, but I noticed I'd set the story in a similar town, with similar landmarks. And then, eventually, I decided to write a a third based in the same town, because the idea of a trilogy felt right by then. Although some of the characters overlap a little bit, they are completely separate and can be read as individual stories.

3. What genre does it fall under? Contemporary alternative paranormal-ish romance!

4. One sentence synopsis? (Cheating: one sentence for each story!!)

• Ella's Story - a recurring dream about her own death sends Ella into turmoil, especially when elements of her dream start to come true.
• The Traveller - a stranger in town captivates most of the women, but he has his eyes on just one.
• Our Beautiful Child - Rona is chosen by the local ghosts as a channel between their two worlds when a fake medium tries to hold a seance in the local pub.

5.Self-published or agented or what? Hopefully published by Vagabondage Press, my publisher for Cat and The Dreamer.

6. How long did it take to write first draft? The Traveller - the first story - started life in 1999 I think, but there were big gaps between writing stories. The final story took the longest, because I just couldn't grasp all the elements of the story - I was thinking about it for a couple of years - and now it's my favourite.

7. What actors would you choose to play your characters? Erm... I'm going to pass on this one because I can't think of anyone who could play them. My favourite character is based on two real people, so only they could play him - but I don't think either of them are actors!

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Next, Teresa at The Wittering Woman tagged me in Seven Things About Me. I've done a lot of tags where I've had to share seven, or more, things so I'm not sure I can come up with anything new. I'll give it a go...

1. I had two imaginary friends when I was little, called Iccance and Occance. (The spelling might not be entirely right!)
2. I got so nervous on my wedding day that I couldn't eat until about nine o'clock in the evening. I hated being the centre of attention! (It was a long time ago, I'm much better now.)
3. I've just sat here for five minutes thinking of a number 3, and I'll probably take the same length of time to think of a number 4.
4. I'm very bad at singing, playing Trivial Pursuit and playing any kind of sport which involves hitting a ball with something.
5. But I'm quite good at making omelette!
6. I wave at train drivers.
7. I own the DangerMouse complete box set.

Phew, I did it! 

I'm not going to pass this on to anyone specifically, but if you'd like to take part, especially with the Next Big Thing if you have something to talk about, then consider yourself tagged!