Church of Multiple Projects

I’m experimenting. I’m writing two novels at once and so far it’s toddling along okay. I’m editing ‘The Poisoned Apple’ and have started work on my next book ‘Church of the Vacant Lot’ and it’s my first YA – I’m kind of excited about that fact. Or rather, it’s my first intentional YA. My beta reader for ‘Theatre of Curious Acts’ thought it would work well as a YA and I’m thinking they may be right. At the moment ‘Theatre’ is out on query, I’ve had a partial request and if I don’t get a full request I might think about marketing it as a YA, it would certainly help the naff word length. Of course if I did try the agent approach with ‘Theatre’, I may find myself deleted from an awful lot of inboxes – I think it may be just a touch too bizarre.

Anyway, here is a first draft excerpt from ‘Church of the Vacant Lot’.


“The angels fell on a Sunday.

The angels fell when Christina Helene Banks sat on her bedroom floor surrounded by a dozen t-shirts. In the moment before thick clouds scurried across the sky only two things concerned her – whether she should go back to college in the autumn and Gregory Cooper. She picked a blue t-shirt illustrated with, ironically, a crooked halo above a cartoon stickman. It picked out the blue of her eyes and the blue of her mascara. She stood in front of the mirror and worried that the colour would remind Gregory of the Ice Queen, the girlfriend he had ditched a fortnight before. The thought resurrected an old fear – was she moving too fast? She had let the thought hinder her advance when he had split from Weeping Brooke Kendall and then she’d had to wait six months, two days, eleven hours for winter to defrost and go bad. The blue would have to do.”