Not the reaction I expected but just what I needed. I could not have written Half Bad without his support and quiet encouragement.
After that I became a little bolder and confided in a couple of friends, who then had to bear the brunt of my tedious conversations about writing. Lisa and Alex were (and still are) amazingly good listeners, never yawned to my face and always managed to say, ‘Really?’ in the right places (and were early readers of my manuscripts).
Thanks as well to my other readers. I’m so grateful for their time and honesty. David gave me lots of advice on my original novel. Mollie was the first teenager to read Half Bad – that she chose to spend her time with Nathan I take as the perfect compliment. My Open University buddies, Gillian and Fiona, have been stars, giving me full and frank feedback.
I sent Half Bad to Claire Wilson at Rogers, Coleridge and White in January 2013, hoping she would be interested in acting as my agent. She was. She has championed Half Bad wonderfully and advised and guided me through the strange world of publishing. Claire had rejected my first novel, saying it wasn’t edgy enough, and I am so grateful as without that kick Half Bad would not have been written.
I have an impressive array of people working with me at Puffin, all of whom have been a joy. Ben Horslen, my editor, should win an award for enthusiasm (and tact) and with him are a great bunch of people: junior editor Laura Squire; Tania Vian-Smith and Gemma Green and the Marketing and Publicity departments; designer Jacqui McDonough; and Zosia Knopp and her fantastic Rights team (along with The Map). Thanks to everyone at Puffin.
I also feel incredibly privileged to have Ken Wright as my editor at Viking in the United States, along with his associate editor Leila Sales. He also has a great team of people but in particular I have to thank Deborah Kaplan and her designers for the gorgeous cover art.
While writing Half Bad I revisited some of the literature from my teenage years (before Young Adult was invented), notably Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which reassured me that Nathan’s time in the cage was bearable.
The someone who said, ‘The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them,’ was Ernest Hemingway.
I was searching for a name to give the Fairborn and was inspired by the Fairbairn–Sykes knife, information about which I found on Wikipedia.
I haven’t seen the film Lawrence of Arabia for years, but the scene with the matches is one of the many that have stayed in my head.
As for Hamlet – well, if I’m honest I read it many years ago and have never seen the play on stage (I have watched a film version), but the line ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’ was a key element in the forming of my story. While Shakespeare hasn’t taken up a huge amount of my time over the last ten years, being a mother has, and I often watched my son and pondered the nature vs nurture question: ‘Why does he do that?’ ‘What makes him, him?’ ‘What makes any of us the way we are?’ These questions undoubtedly influenced my writing.
The mountains of north Wales were an inspiration as I scrambled up, down and around them, as were the Sandstone Trail in England and the L?tschental valley in Switzerland. If you saw a woman walking there, muttering to herself (and sometimes a luckless friend) about fains and three gifts it might have been me.