First Chapter - Dead Bunnies Make All Eight Of Me Cry

Chapter 1. All eight of me.

It was Uncle David who first decided to take me to therapy.

I’ve been to heaps of shrinks, tried so many different treatments and medications in my thirty-six years. Some work for a while, pushing the shadows aside for a time. But they always come back.

The drugs are just like sticking a band aid over the wound of a severed limb. The ones that do ‘work,’ leave me numb. I can’t function. I can’t hold a conversation or a job or a memory. I’m a tree without leaves in the autumn – I’m alive, but not.

‘I’m taking you to see a really nice lady, okay Suzie Q?’ Uncle David said to me as he took me by the hand.

I was seven.

By that time, I had been caught sleepwalking or been brought home by Jason (the young fella whose yard Violet seemed to prefer) so many times. It affected my aunt and uncle so badly that sometimes no one in the house slept but me.

He kept smiling at me the entire drive to the kiddie shrink. But his eyes weren’t smiling. Even as a small child I could see his worry. I took out my little black feather and stroked it against my face.

The doctor’s office was fake cheerful. It had partitions of kid’s paintings and cute little murals on the walls, a corner with used toys for us to play with and bright yellow curtains with happy little clowns performing all over them. But I could see through it. Under all the bright colours, it was just like the foster home. Sterile and shadowy.

Uncle David walked in to the office with me. I held onto his hand. I didn’t want him to go, but something in me just knew that the doctor was going to say that he had to.

The doctor stood at the door, holding it open for us as we passed through. She was very tall for a woman, taller than my uncle and wiry. Her office smelled like cleaning products and stale jellybeans. She had several bean bags in a corner and a bookshelf full of colourful figurines. They were all different shapes and sizes. There was music playing in the background, I recognised the nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep.

‘Hello, Mr O’Brien, my name is Dr Kerry Sonson.’ The doctor held out her hand to shake my uncle’s. He took it and she shook his hand with vigour, placing her other hand over the top of his. ‘And this must be little Suzie,’ she said, knelling down to me. ‘You can call me Kerry, okay?’

She stood back up and said quietly to my uncle, ‘It’s … necessary for the guardian to leave the room in my treatments. I apologise if this is not suitable for you, but … it’s the way I work.’

Uncle David nodded and smiled weakly. He bent down to me. He looked into my eyes, like he was searching for something. ‘I’ll just be out here, okay Suzie Q?’ He held my hand tightly.

Dr Kerry bent down too. ‘I have some toys over here that I want to show you. Would you like to come have a look?’ She held out her hand to me.

I turned away from her and flung myself into my uncle’s arms. He laughed nervously.

‘It’s okay, Suzie Q. I’ll just be on the other side of that door. I promise I’m not leaving you. Okay?’ He started to pry me off his body. Pushing me away from him hesitantly. The doctor took me gently by the hand and began to lead me towards the big bookshelf full of toys and I watched as my uncle stood up and exited the room, never taking his eyes off me.

I looked up at the seemingly giant bookcase. Figurines filling every shelf, all set out and evenly spaced. ‘Suzie, I would like you to pick out some toys to play with? Pick as many as you want. If you can’t reach one that you want, just tell me and I will get it down for you,’ said the doctor.

I picked out several toys, mostly from the top three shelves that I couldn’t reach. Dr Kerry showed me over to a sandbox that was on the opposite side of her room. She climbed into the sand, first flicking off her modest heels and placing her stockinged toes in the white sand.

‘Take off your shoes and come in, Suzie,’ she said holding a hand out to me. I looked at the sandpit. My mum had never let me go in them. She had always told me they were dirty.

I slipped off my shoes. I looked at the doctor’s outstretched hand and took it, stepping into the sand with the caution of someone stepping into a pit of fire.

‘Do you not like the sand, Suzie?’ the doctor asked.

‘Mum always told me that sandpits are dirty. She said cats … poop in them,’ I said, whispering the last bit.

The doctor laughed a kind, light-hearted chuckle. ‘I can promise you that no cats have pooped in this sandpit,’ she said.

I sat down in the sand and dumped all my toys onto its surface. ‘What do you want to play?’ I asked.

‘I want you to play whatever you want to play,’ she said.

I looked down at my choices and started to play. Making the toys interact with one another.

After a while, the doctor spoke. ‘Who’s this, under here?’ she said, pointing to a toy buried under the sand.

‘My mum,’ I said and continued to play.

‘And who are these three?’ she asked, pointing to some toys that sat atop a castle I had made.

‘Em and Aunt Miriam and Uncle David,’ I said, not straying from my play.

‘And these guys over here?’ she asked, pointing to a circle of toys.

‘That’s me,’ I said.

‘Okay, and this one?’ she singled out one of the toys in the circle.

‘That one’s me too,’ I said.

‘I thought you said that this one was you?’ she asked, pointing to the first.

‘They’re all me,’ I said.

I had begun sleep walking when I was six years old.

I still remember the first time they found me. I sat in a chair in the Police station, with no memory of what had happened previously, swinging my legs above the ground and clutching my pillow. There was a young man standing in front of me talking to an officer. The officer nodded seriously and wrote everything down. The young man had found me and brought me there.

I heard the slip slap of thongs on running feet. ‘Suzie!’ Uncle David had yelled.

I looked up to see him running towards me, dodging the rows of seats in the police waiting room. ‘Uncle David!’ I had never been so happy to see him in my entire life. I jumped off the chair and ran to him, hugging his legs.

The young man and the police officer looked at Uncle David with surprise and both walked over to him. The policeman was the first to talk. ‘Is this your niece?’

‘Yes, we woke up this morning and she was just gone.’ He bent down to me and looked me over. At this point I got scared. What if he was angry with me? ‘Are you okay? Where did you go?’

I started to cry and just hugged him again. I didn’t want him to be mad with me. And I honestly didn’t know where I had gone.

The young man stepped forward and cleared his throat. ‘She was asleep in my front yard this morning. My name’s Jason, by the way,’ he said, holding out his hand for Uncle David to shake. Uncle David looked at him suspiciously, but said nothing, shaking his hand anyway. ‘I woke her up to see where she had come from and at first she seemed fine. She told me her name was Violet and she had stopped to sleep under my tree, told me that she liked the funny mushrooms that were growing under it.’

Uncle David looked at me, waiting for an explanation.

‘I asked her if she had touched or eaten the mushrooms,’ Jason said, turning to the policeman. ‘Because they’re those poisonous red ones with the white spots, and she went strange, kinda off in her own world. Then she started freaking out, not knowing where she was or how she got there. Told me her name was Suzie Hugo. So I brought her here, I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘Where are the girl’s parents, Mr..?’ asked the policeman.

‘David O’Brien,’ he said as he picked me up. He turned me away from the officer and whispered. ‘I’m her guardian. Her mother’s dead. Come on, Suzie, let’s get you home.’

Uncle David walked out of the station and put me in the car. He watched me in the rear-view mirror as we drove around looking for Aunt Miriam and Emily. I stared out the window and said nothing. Later that day he bought a chain to fit to the front door.

Read the rest of Dead Bunnies. Also available for free on Wattpad. 

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Sorry for the lazy blog,

Hugs 

AMC xxx

Fire, Water, Burn ...

Just a heads up I might be taking a break from the blog for a while. I am currently living in a hotel. There was a fire in my house and the damage has rendered the house unlivable. We have lost a lot of our belongings, but everyone is safe. I am so lucky.
Hugs
AMC xxx

Back into the Fae - a conversation with Holly Black the Faerie Queen

On the drive to Hachette Publishing in Sydney, I was skittish to say the least.

We read books and admire the authors that write them, so strongly, so fiercely, that in our heads the magic of celebrity takes over and makes them out to be otherworldly beings. But as one of my good friends said to me while I was mid-panic attack that morning, “Holly Black has two hands and two feet. She is a person like you and me.”

Although, when Holly walked into the room I was beginning to doubt my friend. With her turquoise pixie-cut hair and plum stained lips, Mrs Black looked as if she could have stepped right out of one of her books. A woman made of ink and pages and magic.

Straight away Holly asked, “Are you okay?”

Whoops. My anxiety was showing. Better tuck that back in Adelise.

“I’m just nervous,” I replied.

She laughed a little and smiled a warm generous smile. “You can’t be nervous!” she said. “… Don’t be nervous.”

We were taken back to a far room in the depths of Hachette’s office space where it was dark bar the lights of the traffic crawling across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, shimmering red and white like strung up Christmas lights. It was a beautiful view and the perfect place to sit with someone that had never been to Australia before.

I got straight to it and asked the all-important question that every Aussie fan is wondering. “Have you tried Vegemite or Tim Tams yet?”

She said no but assured me that she had been given a big box of Tim Tams to try.

Ashleigh from Hachette walked in and turned on the lights and handed Holly a coffee. I rather sheepishly passed Holly a small package with the famous Aussie Choky Bickies inside. “Oh! This is great,” said Holly, to my delight. “You can teach me to do the thing,” referring of course to the Tim Tam Slam.

Holly’s latest book, The Darkest Part of the Forest is, in short, about a horned boy in an unbreakable crystal coffin and the celebrity that entails in our modern world. About how we put famous people up on these pedestals and how easy it is to forget that you don’t really know who they are because we only see them through glass. But when the glass is no longer there we can see them for who they really are. Human.

Or in the case of the horned boy in The Darkest Part of the Forest. Dangerous.

How long did it take you to write The Darkest Part of the Forest

and can you explain a little bit about your process?

It took me about a year and a half. It was a very difficult book for me to write. There were a couple of different structural puzzles in it. I spent a lot of that year and a half really panicked and writing and ripping out what I wrote.

I try to write about a thousand words a day. My goal for next year is to try and figure out how to get that to two thousand words a day. I feel like I could be faster.

I’m a very nervous and uncomfortable first drafter and I’m a very quick editor. I really love “big” editing stuff, like ripping out a chapter and redoing it. I love making big changes. That is the times where I feel confident, where I enjoy doing it and I’m really fast. But just getting that first draft is like a plotting slog because I have this great idea for a book in my head and as I am writing it I can just feel the fact that I am not getting it to where it needs to be.  

I was swimming in this pond near my house and it was really cold and I know that if you go in and you stay there, your body adjusts and you can swim. And some of my friends were getting in and then they would get cold and they would get out. But then they would want to get in again, then they would get cold and get out again. And I looked at them and thought, “that’s how I write! That’s my first drafting process.” I start drafting. I find it painful. I stop. I do something else. I come back and try it again. What I need to do is figure out how to be the person to live in the discomfort long enough to be able to be okay with it... 

What was the thing that sparked your love of the Fae?
Brian Froud and Alan Lee’s book Faeries. My mum is a painter and she

had it in the house when I was nine or ten. And it is obviously not a kid’s book and it is kind of terrifying. I remember just paging again and again and again through the illustrations and reading all the little bits of weird folklore and strange facts. That is the thing that set me on the path of reading more folklore and seeking out books with faeries in them. 

Do you ever miss your characters or think about them? Particularly when writing standalone novel.
Absolutely. There is a lot of great things about writing standalones. You can plot out the whole thing right there. You get to put everything in, you don’t have to save anything for the way back cause there is no way back. This is it! But the downside is that, I really feel like by the end of a first book in a series that is when your characters cement. And then over the course of editing a standalone you get to know those characters and then you’re like “Great to meet you. Goodbye!” and that is really hard. 
One of the reasons why I just sold a series is because I was actually starting to feel that I just didn’t want to meet any new people! I want to meet some people that can hang around for a while and that can be here for more than a single book. 
There are definitely people [characters] that I would like to go back and find out what they are doing and there are others that I feel like “Okay, you guys are fine.” One of the interesting things about going back is how easy it is, in a way that writing something new isn’t easy, because you just remember what it is like to write those people and you know who they are and what their stuff is and you just don’t know that going into a first book. One of the things that messed me up with The Darkest Part of the Forest was that I felt that Hazel had a secret but I didn’t know what it was.

What is your favourite part of writing, besides editing?
It is fun to make something up right? Like you do when you’re a kid and you’re playing with dolls and you’re making up a story. You get to tell the story that you wish that someone had written, something that you want to read. You get to make up the story that is customised for your very specific tastes.

Can you give me a bit of a rundown on your process?
Sure, but it is stupid and terrible! Anyone reading this please don’t do what I do!
I often have a couple of things I want to do. Maybe I have a character or a premise. With The Darkest Part of the Forest I knew that I wanted to tell a story of a town called Fairfold in which they believed in faeries and that there were faeries around there and there was this sleeping prince in a glass coffin. They were a tourist stop. Kids would go out and party by the coffin. That is what I knew about the town. And I knew that I wanted to tell the story of a brother and sister and I wanted them to be in love with this sleeping prince.
Then I write a little bit to figure out more and to let the characters breathe and to see how they would behave and to see if I liked the way that they behaved. Then I start to try and plan it out and then I’ll write a little bit more. I’ll try to talk it out with friends, ask them if this sounds good and what they think should happen. Then I will go off and write a chapter and then go back and edit it extensively and then write another chapter. Then I will go back and edit the chapter before, then I’ll write a third chapter and then go back again to the first chapter to edit … it is such a terrible process, but it is often what I will do. And by the time I am done, I’ll have incredibly polished early chapters that descend into complete incomprehensibility.

How do you go tackling family life and professional writing and keeping those two worlds balanced?
I have a two year old, so it’s new and I’m still trying to figure out how to do it. I think that one of the great advantages that I have as a writer that does this for a living is that I get to be home a lot. I get to make my own schedule, so we can go and do something, or I can get up with him in the middle of the night and I get to do all that stuff.
The disadvantages are that I travel. 
My son is adopted and obviously we knew that we were going to adopt him (there is some paper work involved!) but when we found out that we were going to have him, we had a call on a Tuesday and we had a baby by Friday. So, it was a lot of “oh my god, how am I gonna do this!” My husband stays home with him, so it was fine, but I was travelling a lot. And that is hard! It is hard because I miss them so much, it is hard to be away, but that is a problem that every parent has. 
I think the problem is working out when it works for you to write; when does it work for you to be home? A lot of the time I write at night … like, really late at night. So, if my son has any problems or if he needs anything in the middle of the night then I’m the one who is awake so I can go upstairs and sort him out, but I’m not sure if that is a sustainable system. It definitely makes you become more focused when you’re working. I can’t mess around on the internet as much.
I didn’t know what to expect when having a family but it is truly so much fun! And it is good for getting me out of my own head. There us so much about writing that forces you down into the deep recesses of your own feelings and your own desires and your own fears and getting yourself out of your own mind to focus on another person is so good. 

As a female writer and especially one that doesn’t hide behind a pseudonym have you ever felt discriminated against?
There are ways that we [women] are seen differently in the industry that are systemic. I don’t think that I personally have felt discriminated against, but mostly the way I have felt is the systemic sense that the work that I do is probably romance, or is not necessarily for boys or men, or is not necessarily serious in the way that it would be taken seriously if I were a man. And that is something that is very difficult to change because it is such a pervasive thing. Then there is writing for kids, so when I go into writing adult science fiction and fantasy I know people are going to take me less seriously yet again.
You can see the ways in which your work isn’t read the same.

I read online that you have a secret library! Is this true?
It’s true! It’s not so much a secret library as a hidden door. So when you come down the stairs to my basement there is a bookshelf and if you push the bookshelf you go into the library.

Have you thought any further into making a sequel to The Coldest Girl in Coldtown?
I have not only thought about it, I have actually outlined it. However, I think my publisher right not would like me to do these faerie books first. I was going to try to stick the Coldtown sequel in the middle of them, but they thought that seemed weird. So, two faerie books, Coldtown sequel and then third faerie book.

And then fit the Magisterium series in there somewhere too?
Oh yeah! We are actually finishing up the third book this week.

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
Read everything. Read in a lot of different genres. Read broadly. Read deeply. Write a lot. Revise a lot. 
It takes a long time to find your voice. So it is going to mean writing and writing and writing. And I think the thing that could help a lot of people, it may not help everyone but I know it helped me, is to find a critique partner. Someone who likes the same kind of writing as you. And someone who likes your writing and whose writing you like and keep each other honest. Keep each other on deadline. 
My first critique partner was Steve Berman and I don’t think I would’ve finished Tithe if it wasn’t for him. He made me … (Laughing) format it properly. He would say, “you said you were going to have the chapter finished this weekend. Where is it?” And not only that but being a reader of his work taught me to be better by seeing and learning to be a better critiquer. When I was a better critiquer of his work I was a better critiquer of my own. 
I think having that is motivating because it is easy to get pulled back into your regular life. Before you have a deadline that is enforceable by contract it is easy to just think “I’ll fit this in when I can.” Having a critique partner creates a feeling of obligation to another person of getting the work done. That person can tell you what’s good and what’s not.

Do you have any hobbies other than writing?
I like to do a little crafting. When the last few books came out I made some things to send out with the ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies). For some bloggers and reviewers I made a vampire hunting kit with little stakes that we hand carved and a little mirror to go out with Coldtown. And we made walnuts that we cut open and left a message inside them for The Darkest Part of the Forest. I like making little weird things. I’m not great necessarily, but I really enjoy it. 

What’s your favourite word?
Capricious.

What’s your least favourite word?
… Pus.

What sort of books turn you on?
I love when characters make a bad choice. I love a bad choice. I have a thing I call the “Ecstatic Fall.” It’s the moment where the character deliberately does the terrible thing. They just know it’s going to go badly, but they don’t care anymore. It is like a *#@! Me. *#@! You. *#@! Everything moment.

If your world, let’s say Fairfold, existed and you woke up there tomorrow morning, what would you do?
Go to the café. I’d go take a selfie! I’d buy some over price merchandise.

If you would like to hear the interview please comment below or contact me via social media and I will post it. 

Hugs

AMC xxx