What am I celebrating this week?
It's the weekend!
The website for young adult author Kate Larkindale. A place for her musings on writing, publishing and a day job in the arts sector.
I didn't get as much writing done over the weekend as I had hoped to. I did a little on Saturday, but I've basically been sick all weekend means I've done very little of the stuff I intended to do. On the plus side, I did read a couple of books. It's been a long time since I've sat down and read a whole book in a day.
Standing too Close released and it looks like it's doing pretty well. Weirdly, Amazon has it listed under a whole bunch of really weird tags - Fantasy, Sci Fi, Royalty? I've asked my publisher to look into it because those are clearly not right. But I guess I can be happy that it's sitting at #35 in any category?
The film festival starts on Thursday, so I won't be getting much writing done for the next couple of weeks. Guess it's good - gives my CPs time to catch up.
Going to be stupid busy at work the next week or so too because I only have another week and a half before I finish up there. And we go on sale with Jazz Festival in that time. I also have a LOT of funding applications to get in, and I need to train up the woman who is replacing me. Plus, this week is new release week at the gym and I'm teaching five classes.
So, a very busy, busy time!
My goal is to just get through it all. What do you want to achieve this week?
It's the first Wednesday of the month, so it's time for the Insecure writers Support Group.
The awesome co-hosts for the August 6 posting of the IWSG are Ronel Janse van Vuuren, Natalie Aguirre, Sarah - The Faux Fountain Pen, and Olga Godim.
This month's question is intriguing:I didn't get any writing done over the weekend, at least, not on my book. I had too many other things I had to do - mainly gym stuff. So this week, I need to get some writing done. I'm pretty close to finishing the first draft of this book. And it's only been a few months too. Not bad for a not-NaNo draft.
Standing too Close is out at the end of the week, so I need to keep the publicity going. I have a blog tour booked and the last time I did a tour with this company (for My Murder Year) I got a lot of reviews through it too, so fingers crossed it's the same this time. I've also started following a content calendar for August so I have something to post every day, even if it isn't necessarily about Standing too Close. Finding things to talk about every day on social media is always tough for me.
I'm going to be super busy at work for the next couple of weeks because I have a lot to finish for them before I leave. And with only having a couple of days between the two, I'm not going to get the break I would have liked to have had.
Plus, the Film Festival starts next week and I have films booked every night for 10 days and I'm doing an extra shift at the gym for two months while one of the other instructors is away. Ack!
What are your goals for this week?
I got another lovely early review for Standing Too Close. Maybe I was being too doom and gloom about this one - I was certain the reviews would be...controversial.
And in other exciting news, I have a new job. On 25 August I will be starting a new role with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (and no, I won't be playing an instrument). I'm sad to be leaving my current job because I really like the culture and the people there, but this is a more senior role and has a more senior salary to go with it. Plus, I'll get to do some traveling.
I have a pretty busy weekend ahead of me. Lots of gym stuff. I have to refresh my memory on a new class to teach next week, and we have tuition on Sunday for the new release that goes into rotation in a couple of weeks. Hoping to claw some writing time out too, but that might be a little hard. Maybe some reading instead.
And that's about it for this week.
There's still time to sign up to be part of the blog tour for Standing Too Close! If you'd like to take part, you can join here.
What are you celebrating this week?
I've read a few of Kevin Wilson's books and have always found them to be both hilarious and slightly odd. So when I found this one in a second-hand bookstore, I bought it right away.
And while I did enjoy it to a point, it certainly doesn't have the same weirdness or sense of humor that so captivated me in his later books.
It's about an experiment in family, where a professor brings together ten sets of parents with babies born around the same time to bring their families up as a collective. The main character is a young woman called Izzy, the only single parent in the group. Funded by an unusually hands-off billionaire, the project has all the resource it needs, a beautiful campus on which the families live and enough money to pay research assistants and servants.
Initially planned to run for ten years, the families move into their "perfect little world" and surrender their children to a nursery where they are kept. Called the Infinite Family Project,each parent plays a role in every child's life, but the children don't really have any idea which set of parents is their own. They are collectively loved and collectively cared for.
And at first, the perfect little world is exactly what is sets out to be. But as time goes on, personalities, ideologies and feelings clash, making things within the Infinite Family Project more challenging. And for Izzy, the only member of the family without a partner, things grow more complicated when she realizes she has feelings for Dr. Preston Grind, the man whose idea the compound was. How can she continue to take part in his experiments when she's aching to take him into her bed?
The ideas behind the experiment were intriguing and I was interested to see how they played out. The communal living and communal caring brought to mind a feral hippy commune, but without the drugs and free love. I thought it might turn into some kind of cult, but Dr. Grind was never that kind of leader. And the children were always so well cared for, had such structure to their lives, there was no risk of them turning feral.
In fact, far more than the children, it was the adults who turned dangerous, unable to maintain the kind of rigor expected of them by the Doctor. Which is, I suspect, the problem with experiments of this type. You may be able to control a lot, but people are unpredictable, and being placed into an environment like this may not be the right choice for everyone. Or, anyone.
So, while I'm not raving to the rafters about this one, I did enjoy reading it. And if you're someone who's interested in social experiments, you might be too.
But don't just listen to me. Here's the blurb:
When Isabelle Poole meets Dr. Preston Grind, she’s fresh out of high school, pregnant with her art teacher's baby, and totally on her own. Izzy knows she can be a good mother but without any money or relatives to help, she’s left searching.Dr. Grind, an awkwardly charming child psychologist, has spent his life studying family, even after tragedy struck his own. Now, with the help of an eccentric billionaire, he has the chance to create a “perfect little world”—to study what would happen when ten children are raised collectively, without knowing who their biological parents are. He calls it The Infinite Family Project and he wants Izzy and her son to join.I got some writing done yesterday, which was good. I'm at that annoying point in the book where there are a whole bunch of different directions I could go in, and I'm not entirely sure which one I should take. I know where I want to end up, but there are a few different ways I could get there. So, I'm trying one, and we'll see where we get to.
I may end up having to go back and re-write, but I'll need to do that anyway for some other parts.
Tried out a new version of my query and got the fastest rejection ever - less than eight hours. Not sure if that's the query or just the agent having something very specific she's looking for, which isn't A Stranger to Kindness.
So this week, my goal is to keep writing and see where it takes me. Arlo's been pretty good at guiding me this far, so I'll trust him. It's Devon who took me the places that made things tricky.
I may have something exciting to share soon, so keep checking in. And it's less than two weeks until Standing Too Close releases.
I got more writing done over the weekend than I thought I would, which was good. I got through all of Devon's diary entries and am back with Arlo now. I think I may have made a wrong turn in Devon's part, but I'm not sure. I'll leave things as they are right now, but I suspect I may need to go back and rewrite some stuff later.
My goal for this week is to keep up the momentum and keep writing. I'm at just over 45K now, and I don't foresee this being a super long book - 60Kish, I imagine - so I'm not too far from the end. I do have quite a busy week ahead of me, but the weekend is looking very chill. I was going to be doing some entertaining, but that's fallen through.
I need to figure out some more (and better) social media promo for the new book, but I'm really just not that good at it. I'm trying to only post about the book once a week or so, and spend the rest of the time interacting with people on various platforms and sharing stuff that's interesting. I don't much enjoy social media though...
I've been doing some beta reading for a couple of authors which has been fun. Having some new voices to read for and to read my stuff is interesting. My regular critique group and beta readers are amazing (huge shout outs to Breanna, Bill, Kim & Jeanne), but getting perspectives from people who aren't familiar with my style has been good too.
And that's really it for this week. What are your goals?
In a world where books are being removed from libraries and various groups of right-wingers are advocating for laws that will remove books from bookstores, this was a particularly relevant read.
Big-city girl, Noor, is uprooted from her life when her father walks out on the family and her mother decides to re-group in a quieter small town. This would be disruptive enough for someone only months from finishing high school, without the small town having only one other Muslim family living in it.
When, on her first day at her new school, Noor discovers a large number of books have been removed from the school library and are being challenged by a small group of parents, she's outraged. especially since most of the challenged books are by authors of color or those in the LGBTQIA+ community.
Despite her mother warning her to just keep her head down and graduate, Noor can't ignore something that goes so far against her personal beliefs. She and a couple of friends start a reading group - off campus to avoid angering the school administration - and read aloud from these challenged books. Other students soon join in and before long it has become a movement within the school community.
But everyone knows Noor is the instigator, and that puts a giant target on her back. Especially when the school's administration cracks down hard, punishing all the students, not just those who joined the subversive group. As things get heated, and more dangerous by the day, Noor must decide how far she's willing to go for a cause that's important to her, even if it puts herself and those she cares about in danger.
It's a brave thing for an author to take such a hot-button topic and face off with it. I imagine this is a book that instantly rocketed to the top of the "challenged book" list the text objects to. And I object to it too. I believe strongly that books can change lives, can save lives. So many people feel alone in this world, certain they are the only ones feeling a certain way, but if they can see themselves and the challenges they face in a book, they can know they're not alone. And that can be enough to save a life.
Noor is a brave protagonist, but not without flaws and that's what makes her the perfect narrator for this story. She's grappling with some difficult things in both her homelife and her new school, so she could easily be excused from taking on a difficult social issue, especially since it makes her stand out even more than she already does in her predominantly white school. But Noor's sense of justice is well honed and her personality is such that she can't just stand by and watch injustice unfold before her eyes.
So, I'd recommend this one. It's not perfect and does occasionally lean too hard into the message to the detriment of the actual story, but it's an important topic and one that anyone who reads should be 100% behind.
But don't just listen to me. Here's the blurb:
From the New York Times bestselling author of Internment comes a timely and gripping social-suspense novel about book banning, activism, and standing up for what you believe.I meant to do this at the beginning of July and now it's halfway through... But better late than never, right? Her's my (late) mid-year check in on how I'm tracking on my goals for 2025.
Dear Me,
I did pretty well with 2024's goals, so here's to doing as well in 2025.
Despite having got absolutely no traction so far in querying Guide Us, I will keep persevering with it. I know this is a good book and I'm really weirded out that it hasn't had any requests. The last book I queried was the same, but at least with that one, I knew there was something in it that might prove difficult for agents and/or publishers even if I didn't advertise it in the query. With Guide Us, I don't think there's anything too controversial in there... I guess religion could be controversial though. Especially questioning it.
I haven't done this. I decided I'd be better off holding onto this one in case I got an agent for the next book and they wanted to see something else. So I'm sitting on Guide Us for the moment. We'll see what happens. I probably need to publish a girl POV book next, so maybe this will be the one.
I have a book - Standing Too Close - coming out sometime later in the year; I'm still waiting for a date for that. Hopefully I'll find out soon because I'd like to be able to start things rolling as far as publicity goes as soon as possible. I'm also waiting on edits for that one and would like to get through those before I dive into revisions and editing on A Stranger to Kindness. They're both boy narrator books but the voices are very, very different.
It's coming out 8 August, so I'm deep in publicity mode now, having done edits and all that. It's available for pre-sale if you haven't already clicked to that...
And talking about A Stranger to Kindness, the plan for that is to get it revised and ready to query before the end of the year. I feel like that's going to be a tough one because I love this book so much and if it winds up getting the same response as Guide Us, it's going to be somewhat devastating. I need to mentally prepare for that.
Done this too and have the rejections to prove it. Keeping on keeping on with the querying and hoping one sticks eventually...
Luckily, by the second half of the year my work will have ramped right up so I will probably be far too busy to get too upset. Here's hoping anyway...
Nope. I'm busy and it still hurts.
And as far as non-writing goals go, I suppose they're much the same as they have been for the last few years. To keep exercising, to keep reading as much as possible and to see films at the cinema least every two weeks.
Doing this. Not hard. It's part of my routine.
The exercising should be easy enough since I'm now an instructor at the gym and I'm hoping to pick up a couple more regular classes this year. I've been teaching only 30 minute spin classes, but I'm starting to learn the hour-long ones now too, so will probably pick up some of those classes in the next little while.
So far no regular one-hour classes, but I do a bit of covering for other instructors.
I've lowered my reading target for 2025 to 110 books since I've failed to meet my goal the last two years running. I've been reading more adult books than YA recently and they tend to be both longer and more complex than my usual YA reads, so they take me longer to get through. Here's hoping the large number of books I got through during my holiday last week - the weather was not great so there was a lot of time to read - kickstarts things well.
I'm behind on my reading goal but that's primarily because I've been writing a lot this year. I didn't expect to dive right into a new novel as soon as I finished revising A Stranger to Kindness, but I did. Two new novels, in fact... Yeah, I'm insane.
There are a lot of films opening the next few weeks that I want to see, so I should be able to keep up my film-going at least in the early part of the year. Things might get a little more challenging once the Award Season movies dry up, but by then the Film Society should have started up again.
I finally managed to (sort of) break my nail biting habit in 2024, so I will endeavor to keep my nails nice in 2025 too. Preferably without having to pay for expensive manicures every few weeks. I do like having my nails done properly, but it does become expensive.
Not biting them, but still getting them done semi-regularly. They're just stronger and better that way. When I leave them natural for too long, they get ragged and then I pick and bite at them to smooth them out. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!
What are your goals for the New Year?
Those dark, late night hours when everyone else is asleep can be a sanctuary and this book really leans into that idea.
It's about two damaged kids, dealing with family trauma who wind up living across the street from one another and sharing their secrets in those night-quiet midnight hours. Deedee is an only child whose over-protective mother smothers her on the one hand, and ignores her on the other. Nothing she does is ever good enough and her mother never misses an opportunity to remind her of this. She just tells her the Filipino ghost stories she grew up with but never explains to Deedee what they are supposed to mean or how they relate to their life the America.
Jay moves in across the street with his mother and sister. Deedee quickly notices that he too spends time awake after midnight. It is inevitable that their paths will cross while each tries to enjoy their solitude. Deedee's mother won't let her learn to drive and Jay practically lives in his car. When he offers to teach Deedee, in secret, she jumps at the chance.
And little by little the barriers each of them have erected to protect themselves from the people and the world that insist on hurting them, begin to fall and the pair begin to rely on one another, and maybe even to fall in love.
There was a lot to like about this book. The characters felt, for the most part, real and their problems were real-life problems that kids, especially the kids of relatively recent immigrant families might face. There' s a real sense of the disconnect between the generations, one of which grew up immersed in a different culture to the one the current generation has been brought up in. The difference in expectations and behaviours.
That said, I wasn't 100% convinced by Deedee's mother as a character. She was just too awful too much of the time - and to everyone. Even the most evil of people have moments of compassion and humanity, and by the time Deedee, and therefore us, get to see this side of her, it was really too late.
But there was enough else to like about this book that I didn't let one cartoonish character ruin it for me.
So, I'll recommend it. It's not perfect, but I definitely enjoyed reading it.
But don't just listen to me. Here's the blurb:
Two high school seniors with family trauma keeping them up at night fall in love over a series of secret late-night driving lessons.I had a pretty busy weekend, so while I did some writing related stuff on Saturday, I didn't actually get any writing done. So this week needs to be about writing. I'm just over 40K into the new book, which is probably around two thirds of the way in. I know how it ends, but I'm just not quite sure what happens between now and then. There are a couple of different directions I could go and I suspect I need to write them both to figure out what needs to happen.
This is a downside of my chaotic writing process. I often need to a write a lot of stuff that doesn't go anywhere before I find the right direction.
Other than that, I don't have much planned for the week. The film festival progamme is launched tonight, so I will need to spend some time picking out my films for this year, but that doesn't usually take me too long. I'm excited! The film festival is always among the best two weeks of the year for me.
What are your goals this week?
It's the first Wednesday in July, so it's time for the Insecure Writers Support Group.
I got some writing done over the weekend, but not as much as I would have liked. There just aren't enough hours in the day to do everything I need to do at the moment. It's my ideal situation to have one book about to release, one I'm trying to sell, and one I'm working on, but it does create a lot of work.
I'm busy contacting reviewers and doing marketing stuff for the one about to release, querying the one I'm trying to sell, and attempting to find time to write the one I'm working on. It's a lot.
And this week is more of the same.
I only had one more rejection for A Stranger to Kindness over the weekend, so that's good. And I've had three reviewers say they'd like to review Standing Too Close so far.
So this week, my goal is to just keep it up. Work on the new book, write to reviewers and send out a query or two each time a rejection comes in. I've been playing with different versions of the query again, seeing if I can make a better one by mashing together a couple of different ones.
What are your goals this week?
I shouldn't have said anything about not getting rejections on Friday. I got three in a single day over the weekend. So I sent out a handful more yesterday. I think I may need to tweak the query again because this one really doesn't seem to be doing the trick. Just not sure what else I need to add.
Made some progress with the new book over the weekend and tested my idea about the diary pages blowing away with one of my CPs, and she thought it was a great idea. So I'm going to write a couple more random entries that can go in between where I left off and where the next big thing happens, and then I can start writing the meatier stuff.
I have a writing day ahead of me today, so I'm hoping to get a good chunk done. I also have to decide if I want one of the things I thought I might write in Devon's section to happen. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it's the right choice for the story.
I have a busy week ahead with a lot of film-related stuff to do, so probably won't get a chance to write much again until next weekend, so I had better get some real work done today.
With Standing Too Close on pre-sale, I'm going to try and ramp up social media a bit to get it out there. I've sent all the materials to the publicist doing a little book tour for me around the release week, and I will start reaching out to reviewers who have enjoyed my books previously to see if they'd like a crack at this one too. I have ARCs, if you'd like to review it. Just shoot me an email.
What are your goals this week?
I picked this book up at the library because it sounded like it could be a fun read. I mean, Hollywood in the 1970s? Kind of right up my alley, right?
The book is told through the eyes of Bea Dupont, a New York rebel who wound up in LA after a stint is an exclusive Swiss boarding school and a failed attempt at college. Making a living as a photographer, Bea is part of the downtown LA scene because of her profession, but isn't wholly a part of it. her position behind the lens gives her a unique perspective and it from this viewpoint we meet the rich and famous characters that populate her world.
There's Evra, the daughter of Hollywood royalty who has turned her back on movies and makes her living by clothing the elite and famous from her iconic store, Sunset on Sunset. She parties with models and rock stars and sleeps beside the hottest up and coming screenwriter in Hollywood, Kai de la Faire.
Bea is Kai's oldest friend, having been to school with him in Switzerland. He wa the subject of her first great photograph and she's harbored a crush on him since she was fifteen.
When Theodora Leigh steps into Sunset one day, returning costumes from the Paramount lot, she catches everyone's eye. Not only is she strikingly beautiful, but she speaks perfect mandarin and ushers through a $30K sale in Evra's store without blinking an eye.
Before long, she's a part of the crowd, using every connection and invitation to advance her dream of producing a movie. It's not until the group reach the Riviera and the Cannes Film Festival that the truth starts to be revealed and Theodora's facade begins to come down.
This was a fast-paced book full of intrigue and jealousy. Theodora was a delightful villain, the depth of her ruthlessness and ambition revealed little by little as the pages turn. And this is a rarified world few of us ever get to experience, so it was fun to get taken to these glamorous places and events, and to brush shoulders with the rich and privileged.
I do have to say, I wasn't a huge fan of the ending. I was there until they left Cannes and the delightful series of reveals that sent Theodora's facade crashing, but everything after that didn't quite ring true to me. And after watching Bea hang on the fringes for so long, I really wanted her to get her moment in the sun.
But, if you liked Daisy Jones and the Six, this is a pretty good comp title for that, and you'll probably enjoy it too.
But don't just listen to me. Here's the blurb:
I had a pretty busy, social weekend this week, so didn't get a ton of writing done. I did add about 2K to the MS though and started writing Devon's parts for later in the book. I figure she'll take control for about 20K in total, so we'll see how I do there. I have a 4-day weekend this week, so hope to get a lot done over those days. The Monday is a bonus day off, so I'll go and do a full day at the library writing.
Had one more rejection for A Stranger to Kindness. Disappointing because that agent's MSWL sounded like she really wanted that book. Still have quite a few out there, but a couple are reaching that "no reply means no" kind of length of time, so might be written off.
So the goals this week are to write, write, write. And to send out another small handful of queries.
What are your goals this week?
I picked this book up at the library without really looking at what it was about, partly because I enjoyed Young Mungo and partly because the cover said something to me. And boy am I glad I did! This book could have been written for me.
It's about two boys in the foster system in Glasgow. Finlay is 18 now, and out of care. He's just starting a nursing degree at university and is struggling to balance coursework, a placement and the job he needs to keep himself fed. He's always been shy and finds connecting with people both difficult and terrifying, yet he needs a support network in this new environment. He's just not sure he can have it. Not with Akash, the handsome medical student he hasn't seen since primary school, or with the two girls who seem determined to make him part of their group.
Banjo is a year younger and still at high school. He's just been placed with a new family and has started a new school. He wants desperately to stay here until he ages out, but is so filled with hurt and anger, he finds it difficult to contain and keeps getting himself into trouble. He meets an enticing girl at his new job and is quickly brought into her warm circle of family and friends, but even this isn't enough to keep him from seeking out violence to calm the rage blazing inside him.
Three years earlier, Banjo and Finlay were roommates at a care home and developed a bond that still ties them together, even though they haven't spoken in three years and both think their relationship has been damaged beyond repair.
If these two boys are going to be able to move on, to love new people, they need to forgive each other and themselves.
Set against the grim background of Glasgow's working class, this book talked to my heart. Both Finlay and Banjo are the kind of beautiful, broken boy I love to read about and, indeed, to write. They have huge hearts, but have been so beaten up by life, it's hard for them to let them show. There are definitely some massive parallels between this book and A Stranger to Kindness. I understood these kids in a deep and powerful way.
It's a story about love and connection on so many levels. Not a romance (but there are elements of that in there) it's really what I would call a true love story, a story examining all the different kinds of love that exist in the world. And the power all those different loves haave to heal even the deepest of wounds.
So, I strongly recommend this one. It's heartbreaking in all the best ways and will likely bring a tear to your eye more than once.
But don't just listen to me. Here's the blurb:
A striking debut exploring the power of identity, community and the Scottish working class. This coming-of-age story is an incisive look at young masculinity and the way even the most fraught childhood is not without hope.