Announcing Martha Wells!

Our family is growing once again! Today we are delighted to announce that Martha Wells, incredibly talented fantasy author, is joining the Strange Chemistry team. She has been signed in a two book deal, negotiated between Amanda Rutter and Jennifer Jackson of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. The first of these novels is called EMILIE AND THE HOLLOW WORLD and will be released in Summer 2013!

About EMILIE AND THE HOLLOW WORLD: While running away from home for reasons that are eminently defensible, Emilie’s plans to stow away on the steamship Merry Bell and reach her cousin in the big city go awry, landing her on the wrong ship and at the beginning of a fantastic adventure. Taken under the protection of Lady Marlende, Emilie learns that the crew hopes to use the aether currents and an experimental engine, and with the assistance of Lord Engal, journey to the interior of the planet in search of Marlende’s missing father. With the ship damaged on arrival, they attempt to traverse the strange lands on their quest. But when evidence points to sabotage and they encounter the treacherous Lord Ivers, along with the strange race of the sea-lands, Emilie has to make some challenging decisions and take daring action if they are ever to reach the surface world again.

EMILIE AND THE HOLLOW WORLD is an extraordinary adventure story with hints of Victoriana and steampunk. It brings to mind such classic tales as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Lost World, while featuring a spunky young heroine that we know you will love.

About MARTHA WELLS: She was born in 1964 in Fort Worth, Texas, and graduated from Texas A&M University with a B.A. in Anthropology. She is the author of thirteen novels, including the Nebula-nominated The Death of the Necromancer, as well as a number of short stories and nonfiction articles. Her books have been published in seven languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Dutch.

Her first novel, The Element of Fire, was published by Tor in hardcover in July 1993 and was a finalist for the 1993 Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Award and a runner-up for the 1994 Crawford Award. The French edition, Le feu primordial, was a 2003 Imaginales Award nominee.

Her third novel The Death of the Necromancer (Avon Eos) was a 1998 Nebula Award Nominee and the French edition was a 2002 Imaginales Award nominee.

Her other books include City of Bones (Tor, 1995), Wheel of the Infinite (HarperCollins Eos, 2000), and The Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy, published by HarperCollins Eos – The Wizard Hunters (2003), The Ships of Air (2004), and The Gate of Gods (2005) – set in the same world as The Element of Fire and The Death of the Necromancer.

Her newest fantasy novels are The Cloud Roads (Night Shade Books, March 2011), and the sequels, The Serpent Sea (Night Shade Books, January 2012) and The Siren Depths (forthcoming from Night Shade Books in December 2012).

Martha can be found on her website and on Twitter.

Martha says: “I’m so glad Emilie and the Hollow World will be published by Strange Chemistry. I started writing it in July of 2009 and finished it around December of that year, so it’s had a long road to get here. I’m thrilled it’s going to be published and I think it’s found the best possible home.”

Amanda says: “I am a massive fan of Martha’s previously published work and am honoured that she has chosen Strange Chemistry to be the home of Emilie’s story. I think that this novel is fantastic fun and will bring Martha to a whole new audience.”

Our final 2012 Cover!

You’ve now seen four out of the five covers for the books we are releasing in 2012.

As a special treat, we’re thrilled to showcase the fifth. This is for Katya’s World by Jonathan L Howard and we would LOVE to hear your thoughts!

Artwork by Lee Gibbons

What does this cover say to you?

Where does a Writer Write?

A guest post by Laura Lam.

I try to write every day, even if it’s just a few hundred words.

That doesn’t always happen—sometimes life gets in the way or I’m too burned out, but even so, I think about things for a bit before I fall asleep.

I always ambitiously set my alarm for 6 in the morning, but a lot of the time I ignore it and fall back to sleep. When I do manage to haul myself out of bed and blearily make myself a strong cup of coffee, I can usually bust out 800 words or so before going into work.

Most of my writing is done in cafés, which is proving to be a horribly expensive habit. But I find it easier to get into the mentality of “I am here to work.” It’s also a nice change of scenery, and I go with my husband, who also writes. It might be strange dates to sit across a table and tap away on our keyboards, but hey, it works.

I’ve several favourite haunts about my city. There’s a Starbucks 5 minutes’ walk from my work, which is where I go most often. Sometimes we’ll mix it up and go to the other Starbucks, or the café where our friend works. On Saturday, I go to the little independent café around the corner from my house, which I love. I don’t even have to go up to the counter and order tea anymore—they know me well enough to just bring it to me. They know I’ve written a good chunk of my first book there, and they always ask how writing is going. It’s a cozy café, and I have a preferred table right in front of the window, so when I’m stuck I can people watch.

Plus, their milk dispensers for tea are little cows. How cute!

Photo courtesy of the Clover Café Facebook Page

On a good day, I wake up at 6, write 800 words before work, and go to the café after work from 5 to 6.30 and write another 800 words. On a Saturday at the café, a good day is 2000 words. I’ve never written more than 2,500 words on the same novel in a day. I’m always in awe of people who can write 4,000 or more words in a day, but I can’t do it.

I don’t like working in a vacuum. I’ve stolen character descriptions from people who happened to be sitting in the café that day, which sounds a bit creepy. Sometimes I’ll overhear snippets of conversation and watch people’s body language as they speak to each other. Writing is about people, and I find it comforting to be surrounded by them as I work.

That’s it from our Laura! Writers, where do you write? Are you cafe writers as well?

Our Pinterest Board

We like to embrace social media (as you might have been able to tell by all the nattering we do on Twitter!) and so we have ventured into the wonderful world of Pinterest.

First stop? To pin all our beautiful book covers. Here is the link to the four we have out so far: http://pinterest.com/strangechem/strangechem-book-covers/

We would love you to take a look!

How about telling us which of the covers you like the best? (and, look, a sneaky peek at the new and updated and GORGEOUS Poltergeeks cover!)

A Day in the Life of Kim Curran

OK, let’s start with what my absolute dream day would look like.

7am: Awake refreshed after a long sleep, get up, do yoga and have breakfast.
8.30am – 11.30am: sit at desk and write. 2,500 words.
11.30 – 12.30pm: go for a 4k run around the park.
12.30 –1.30pm: have lunch / maybe meet with friends.
1.30pm – 3.00pm: Back at desk to write 1,500 words.
3.00pm – 5.30pm: Read.
5.30pm: greet husband and chat about day. Dinner and bed.

Just look at it. How perfect would that be? How perfect would I be? If every working day were like that one, I would glow with smugness like the vegan in Scott Pilgrim.

But I’ll be honest, days like that don’t happen often. If ever. I haven’t done yoga in six months. Or gone for a run in three. So before I get too annoyed with myself, let’s quickly move on to what an actual day in my life looks like, shall we?

I have two typical working days. Or let’s call them ideal days. Because things don’t always go to plan.

The first is when I’m freelancing as a copywriter – my ‘real’ job. That means for eight+ hours of the day I belong to my clients and all my creative energy goes into their projects. Even then, I try and I squeeze some ‘me’ writing in. If I have to work on site, I use my commuting time to scribble away. In fact, most of the first draft of SHIFT was written on the number 243 bus between Waterloo and Shoreditch, where my old agency is based. I find something soothing about the distraction of the noise of the bus and the freedom of writing by hand. It switches off the voice in my head that has a tendency to mutter everything I write is rubbish. When the words are scrawled in spidery ink on a page, of course it’s rubbish. It’s just a first draft and the knowledge that I can fix it all later is immensely freeing for me. So much so that sometimes, even when I don’t have to commute, I hop on a bus to nowhere, just for a change of scene.

If I’m working for my clients from home, I aim to split my day up into chunks. I start work at 8.30am, work till 11.30am, then I do about two hours personal writing, before getting back to work and finishing whatever it is I’m being paid to write.

My other typical day, and these are the days I love the most, is when I’m writing just for me.

I still approach writing as a job. I get up at the same time, grab a coffee and head to my desk, which is in the back room of my flat, and I start writing. OK, so I do a bit of email checking, twittering and what have you, but mostly, when it’s all going well, I write.

I aim for at least 2,000 words a day. And when things are really going my way, I can crank that up to about 4,000.

I write very, very rough and loose drafts, focusing on the key scenes I have planned out, jumping forward in the story if something isn’t flowing easily. I don’t edit as I go, as that would be death to me. I’d only look at what I’d written, see how bad it is, and want to give up. So instead, my first ‘vomit’ draft, if you will, is like a sprint to the end. It’s mostly made up of dialogue between characters, with the odd action sequence thrown in here or there, as I love to write them. And I go back and fill in the important details later.

These drafts are filled with lines that look like this:

XXXX Describe building and his emotional turmoil here. XXXX

Or this

XXXX Add in scene where he finds out what the bad guys are up to XXXX

I’ve been told it’s a weird way to operate, but it seems to work for me.

My first draft will usually be about 20,000 if not 30,000 words short of its eventual word count. I view them as building the skeleton that I can later go over and add meat and muscle to: deepening characters and highlighting themes. It helps me to have a sense of the whole story before I start to try mould it into shape.

When re-drafting, I start by identifying the gaps in the story, by hunting out all those XXXs in the WIP. I sometimes bring the book from Word into Scrivener, which makes seeing the holes easier. And then I go over it layer by layer, till I have something I think might just be approaching a genuine first draft.

Then I send the file to my Kindle and read the whole thing through, making notes as I go. Another pass of the book and then it’s out to my beta readers.

Then re-write. And re-write some more.

I work best in the mornings, and find the afternoons are better used for plotting or researching or writing blog posts. I seriously can’t work past 7pm. My brain just shuts down and won’t give anymore no matter how much coffee I feed it.

I try not to work on the weekends, to give both my husband and myself a break. But I might grab a notebook and scribble a thought as it comes to me.

The one bit of the process I need to get better at making time for is the staring into space time. This is an absolutely essential part of the process. I have a tendency to dive in and start typing, as though if I’m not racking up that word count somehow I’m not really working. And frankly, as anyone who writes or creates anything knows, that’s just stupid. The really important bit happens while you’re lying in the bath, or going for long walks, or watching something on TV you don’t really care about. And that’s hard to schedule.

I’m still trying to work out my process, and I think it will change as I get more used to this writing malarkey. Maybe even one day I’ll start to have more and more of those dream days. And wouldn’t that be grand?

Our Open Door period is now open!

Don’t forget – if you are an unagented author with a completed YA science fiction, fantasy or horror novel, we’d love to see it – but you only have 2 weeks in which to send it to us.

Starting April 16th, until the end of the month, we are accepting submissions for Youg Adult genre novels (standalone books and series).

This page contains everything you need to know, and a magic uploady button (apologies for the tech-speak) will appear shortly.

Good luck!