Bookshelf Snooping - Emily Gee

1. Your childhood favourite
Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree books and her boarding school stories, and the Biggles books by Capt W.E. Johns. I still have all my old copies – boxes of them – and reread them from time to time because I love them so much!

2. Your current favourite
Most of my favourites have been favourites for years, like The Magicians of Caprona, by Diana Wynne Jones, and Faro’s Daughter by Georgette Heyer, and A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold, and Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie.

3. Your top five authors
Georgette Heyer (Regency and Georgian novels)
Lois McMaster Bujold (Vorkosigan series)
Jennifer Crusie
Diana Wynne Jones (Chrestomanci books)
My father, Maurice Gee

4. Book(s) you’re reading now
I’m rereading a number of Georgette Heyer’s regencies. Also have just started A Short History Of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.

5. Book(s) you’ve pretended to read
I can’t think of one. I used to read every book I started, even if I didn’t like it; now I stop reading if a book doesn’t grab me.

6. Book(s) you’ve bought for the cover 
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. 

7. Book you’re a champion for
Welcome To Temptation by Jennifer Crusie. I keep telling my friends to read it, but not everyone gets the humour and loves it as much as I do.

8. Book that changed your life
The Naughtiest Girl In The School, by Enid Blyton. I was given this at age 7. Until then reading had been a chore, but once I read this book I was hooked and became a voracious reader!

9. Book you most want to read again for the first time
A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold and Welcome To Temptation by Jennifer Crusie. Both are fabulous – clever and funny and just plain brilliant.

10. Book you turn to for comfort 
Anything by my favourite authors.

11. Favourite line from a book
I absolutely love the final lines of The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer:

‘Charles!’ uttered Sophy, shocked. ‘You cannot love me!’
Mr Rivenhall pulled the door to behind them, and in a very rough fashion jerked her into his arms, and kissed her. ‘I don’t: I dislike you excessively!’ 

(If you haven’t read The Grand Sophy, read it – it’s fabulous fun!)

All About Editing - Emily Gee

I first came across Emily's book in a random browsing session on Amazon, but since then I have bought all her fantasy books, and absolutely love them, so today's post is all the more exciting for me. 

Here is Emily's post:

Do you love editing, or hate it, or somewhere in the middle?
I wouldn't say that I *adore* editing, Dolly, but I do enjoy it. There's a lot of satisfaction in tinkering with paragraphs and sentences--moving them around, cutting a bit here, adding a bit there--until they read the best they possibly can. (Can you tell I'm a word geek? )

Do you edit as you go? Or do you start only after the first draft?
I edit as I go. For my latest book, I tried not to edit at all during the first draft (i.e. the Fast Draft method), in the hope that it would help me write faster, but the end result was that I was much slower! It took many, many more passes through the book to pull it all together and to get some spark on the pages. So I've gone back to editing as I write. Yes, the first draft takes longer, but on the flip side, it's pretty polished and doesn't need a huge amount of editing.

Any tips you've learned from your experience? Different methods work for different people. Some writers swear by the Fast Draft method (i.e. don't edit at all while writing the first draft), others (like me) work best by editing as they go. My advice would be to experiment. Discover what works best for you. Don't stick with one method just because other people have said it's the best one!




My only editing tip would be to print out your work. You see so much more when you're holding the pages in your hands than you ever do when you're reading on screen. Yes, it uses more paper and ink, but the end result is a much better book!