A Young Adult manuscript I've been working on, The Book of Whispers, takes as is premise the idea that the First Crusade (year 1098) was inspired by demons who wanted to get a holy book of their own to Jerusalem. It tells the story of Luca, a young Italian knight who is one of the only people who can see demons, and Suzan, who is the last speaker of the dying language the book is written in.
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| page from The Book of Whispers notebook |
Readers often ask where writers
gets their ideas from? The answer is everywhere--but a more interesting—well,
to me, anyway—question is what do writers keep their ideas in? The answer is, a
notebook! It's not quite the same thing as a journal. I have one of those, too, that I mainly write in when I'm traveling.
But for each manuscript I have a notebook that's a book of ideas. The Book of Whispers has been created alongside my favourite ever
notebook. I've got postcards and printouts and sketches pasted into a large
soft Moleskin notebook, along with notes about my research and ideas about settings and characters and plot and, for this novel, about the world of demons.
More than anything else I've written, this story required lots of fun research... I started with a trip to Turkey! And at home, I read about demons and medieval relics, and if course, the crusades! So I've posted a couple of pages from my notebook (many containing details I've subsequently changed or omitted... a notebook is always a work in progress).
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| page from The Book of Whispers notebook |
1 comment:
thanks I was interested to see what inspired you and the process of winning the prize.
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