A first novel is built on the foundations of previous projects that didn’t make it, so thanks to everyone who fuelled my belief that trying to write for publication wasn’t crazy long before the ideas behind Sugar and Snails took form. Foremost among them, my sister Clare Burgess, my first and most loyal reader, and Jane and Pete who bought me a chunky Roget’s Thesaurus for my twenty-first birthday many moons ago. More recently, I owe a debt of gratitude to the editors of the various anthologies and literary magazines who have furnished my short fiction with a home.
Thanks to friends and colleagues who more than tolerated my pretensions, especially Val Francis for directing me towards my first ever writing course, Mair Thomas for accompanying me on a “research” walk around some of these settings I drew upon for Sugar and Snails and Teresa Wall whose response to my queries about aversion therapy for adolescents I promptly forgot.
Thanks to Lynne Patrick for recognising the potential in my tentative first draft of Sugar and Snails, and to Shelley Weiner for convincing me to silence the voices of the parents and rewrite the story solely from Di’s point of view. Another boost was being longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Writing Competition, 2013.
Thanks to the speakers, teachers, students and other brands of fellow writers at the various online and off-line courses, critique groups, blogs and fora whose wisdom I’ve drawn on over the years. Special mentions to Jane Rogers and Martyn Bedford for believing in the viability of my characters more than I did at an Arvon course on second drafts and to Sally-Ann Lomas, Geoff LePard and Steffanie Edward for a fruitful follow-up weekend in Suffolk. A thundering round of applause for Safia Moore for such pointed feedback on the early chapters on the peer-review website YouWriteOn and to Geoff LePard, Juliet O’Callaghan and Shelley Purchon for ploughing through previous drafts in their entirety. Thanks also to manuscript assessors at The Literary Consultancy for repeatedly highlighting what I was doing wrong.
I couldn’t have wished for a better reception for Sugar and Snails at Inspired Quill, exemplified by Sara Slack whose ruthless approach to the unnecessaries combined with exuberance about the better bits has rendered the editing process sheer joy. Thanks to Vince Haig for the cover design, a beautiful package for my words.
Although I’ve worked as a professional psychologist, I claim no expertise regarding adolescent development. Di’s Ph.D. research is a total fiction, albeit building on my limited reading around the subject. The ingenious two-jars methodology is borrowed from a genuine research paper:
Huq SF, Garety PA, Hemsley DR (1988) Probabilistic judgements in deluded and non-deluded subjects. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 40, 801-812.
A huge cheer for the two people who have kept me relatively sane through my writing journey, without (yet) reading a word of my novel: my husband, Terry Anderson, and That Woman, as he calls my therapist.
Finally, I thank you, the reader, the last but most important link in the chain. I hope you find my words worthy of your time. (Although not finally at all as, in that way writers have of continually borrowing from each other, what I thought was an original idea when I wrote the acknowledgements for the book, I suspect I unconsciously borrowed from the back of Kate Evans’s debut novel, The Art of the Imperfect).
For the extra curious, I’ve listed some of the texts I drew upon in forming and extending my thinking on attachment, gender and adolescence. Because some of these might constitute spoilers I suggest you follow the link only after you’ve finished the novel.
Thanks to friends and colleagues who more than tolerated my pretensions, especially Val Francis for directing me towards my first ever writing course, Mair Thomas for accompanying me on a “research” walk around some of these settings I drew upon for Sugar and Snails and Teresa Wall whose response to my queries about aversion therapy for adolescents I promptly forgot.
Thanks to Lynne Patrick for recognising the potential in my tentative first draft of Sugar and Snails, and to Shelley Weiner for convincing me to silence the voices of the parents and rewrite the story solely from Di’s point of view. Another boost was being longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Writing Competition, 2013.
Thanks to the speakers, teachers, students and other brands of fellow writers at the various online and off-line courses, critique groups, blogs and fora whose wisdom I’ve drawn on over the years. Special mentions to Jane Rogers and Martyn Bedford for believing in the viability of my characters more than I did at an Arvon course on second drafts and to Sally-Ann Lomas, Geoff LePard and Steffanie Edward for a fruitful follow-up weekend in Suffolk. A thundering round of applause for Safia Moore for such pointed feedback on the early chapters on the peer-review website YouWriteOn and to Geoff LePard, Juliet O’Callaghan and Shelley Purchon for ploughing through previous drafts in their entirety. Thanks also to manuscript assessors at The Literary Consultancy for repeatedly highlighting what I was doing wrong.
I couldn’t have wished for a better reception for Sugar and Snails at Inspired Quill, exemplified by Sara Slack whose ruthless approach to the unnecessaries combined with exuberance about the better bits has rendered the editing process sheer joy. Thanks to Vince Haig for the cover design, a beautiful package for my words.
Although I’ve worked as a professional psychologist, I claim no expertise regarding adolescent development. Di’s Ph.D. research is a total fiction, albeit building on my limited reading around the subject. The ingenious two-jars methodology is borrowed from a genuine research paper:
Huq SF, Garety PA, Hemsley DR (1988) Probabilistic judgements in deluded and non-deluded subjects. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 40, 801-812.
A huge cheer for the two people who have kept me relatively sane through my writing journey, without (yet) reading a word of my novel: my husband, Terry Anderson, and That Woman, as he calls my therapist.
Finally, I thank you, the reader, the last but most important link in the chain. I hope you find my words worthy of your time. (Although not finally at all as, in that way writers have of continually borrowing from each other, what I thought was an original idea when I wrote the acknowledgements for the book, I suspect I unconsciously borrowed from the back of Kate Evans’s debut novel, The Art of the Imperfect).
For the extra curious, I’ve listed some of the texts I drew upon in forming and extending my thinking on attachment, gender and adolescence. Because some of these might constitute spoilers I suggest you follow the link only after you’ve finished the novel.