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Hi guys! It's been a while since the last post, but the ball's rolling soon, so let me begin with The Heart of Stone Blog Tour! Today's the final day of the tour, and I'm pleased to have Melanie Welsh with me, author of the Mistress of the Storm and its sequel, Heart of Stone! Both are magical books I'm sure younger teens will enjoy!
Welcome, Melanie!
This month sees the publication of my
second children’s novel, Heart of Stone,
the follow-up to Mistress of the Storm.
Both books are adventure-mysteries, and both feature a young girl called Verity
Gallant and her friends.
For each book my editors, Bella and Hannah,
were always very keen to emphasise that one of the most important things to aim
for as a writer is creating a strong ‘sense of place’. In other words they
wanted a world that was accurately described, so the reader found it believable
and felt satisfied they could see it in their own mind.
My solution to this – in part – was to set
both Mistress of the Storm and Heart of Stone in a fictional version of
Ventnor, a remote town on the south coast of the Isle of Wight. Although I
actually grew up in Cowes, which is on the north coast of the Island, I always had
a fascination with Ventnor. It’s such a quaint town with a lot of privately
owned shops but it’s also very striking: with steep tree-covered cliffs that
tower over the houses. It felt like the perfect setting for an old-fashioned
adventure story.
Using the south coast of the Island for
Verity and Henry to sail around also meant that I stood a better chance of
making my descriptions of their racing more accurate. I’m not a strong sailor
at all, it’s just something I love, so knowing how the tides work and what the
coast is like made me feel more confident that everything would hang together
realistically.
I think if you get down to the nitty-gritty
of why I chose the Isle of Wight in particular, then it’s probably also because,
when I first started, I’d recently moved from London to Suffolk with my husband
and was feeling very homesick. Writing the Verity stories gave me an excuse to
at least be on the Island in my head.
Perhaps as a consequence Wellow is a very
vivid place in my imagination, and it’s lovely when people tell me they feel
like they can see the town and the coast themselves. I think possibly the
ingredient that made this possible was that – to me – there’s something quite
magical about the southern Island. I
took a trip back there earlier this year to make notes on the places I was
writing about and it was incredibly inspiring. There are so many hidden spaces,
mysterious buildings and atmospheric places – all the story elements I used to
love when I was a child. I’ve tried to fit as many of them as I could into
these two books. And I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing
them.
This
is the last of Melanie’s blog tour posts to promote the hardback publication of
Heart of Stone. If you’d like to
know more about her first two books or ask her a question about writing go to
www.veritygallant.co.uk
