Try Delilah

So the second book for children under my pseudonym Evie Glass has just gone online – Delilah Dark and the Teacup of Doom.

As in the first Delilah Dark novel, the sarcastic child-psychic has to take on the evil corporation BigCorp.

This time, it’s all about the entertainment industry.  There’s a game called Infinite Quest which is so addictive it could actually kill you (yes, that is an allusion to David Foster-Wallace’s Infinite Jest.)  There’s also a show called Global Pop Puppet, presided over by the arrogant figure of Piers Down, who appears to be turning the contestants into an army of drones (the Simon Cowell biography came out when I was writing this, which was enormously helpful!)  Delilah Dark discovers she has new powers – she can heal and read tea-leaves.  But with the cups full of bad omens, are BigCorp just too powerful to stop?

Here’s the cover (courtesy, as ever, of my husband Richard):

In order to promote the series, I’m running a little ‘Try Delilah’ promotion, and from tomorrow (the 24^th May) the first book – The Discoveries of Delilah Dark – is going to be free for three days.  Do download a copy for your children or yourself – it’s aimed at 9+ but if you’re the kind of adult who likes Pixar films there should be plenty to amuse you.  If you’d like to pay me in some way, a review would be really appreciated (or you can buy ‘Teacup’…)

I’m still in two minds about self-publishing. The relentless self-promotion makes me feel a bit grimy and, lacking an editor, I found some typos slipped through into the first book which I now hope I’ve corrected – apologies to those who downloaded early copies. It’s quite nice that you can correct stuff as soon as you notice it, but feels a bit slovenly! Anyway, my mum has proof-read ‘Teacup’ so hopefully it will be a bit more professional…

On the plus side, it’s exciting to be finally be a ‘novelist’ and there’s been an encouraging response to my cynical heroine. Teaching a schools Arvon course at Lumb Bank, I gave my first ever fiction-reading, and was hugely relieved when it went down well (one girl started to write The Conundrums of Cassandra Clarke!)  I also feel I’ve had a crash-course in contemporary publishing through this experiment, learning about TOCs, mobi.files, Smashwords, Authonomy, Twitter and book-bloggers.  As a teacher of creative writing, it’s been good to get my hands dirty and find out how e-publishing really works.

Writing for children is really liberating – you get to spend all day making up cheesy puns and having wild adventures and chuckling over your laptop – so I’m still having fun, and plan to finish the trilogy this year with book three: ‘Delilah vs. Destiny’…

In other news: for those thinking about assembling their first pamphlet, you may find the workshops I’ve written for Mslexia’s Pamphlet Competition useful.  And a big shout-out for the anthology Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam, edited by Todd Swift and Kim Lockwood. Was pleased to feature in this – it’s for a very good cause and has some gorgeous poems. So far I’ve particularly enjoyed Abigail Parry’s ‘Craneflies’, Hannah Lowe’s ‘Fist’, and Luke Kennard’s ‘Some Svengali You Turned Out To Be’, and have only just started dipping in…