Lara Sleath - A Day in This Writer's Life
Every day while my kids
are at school, I get from 10am – 2pm to write. That's four whole hours of
writing time, a decadent amount of time. I always set myself a daily target of
10 pages or about 4,000 words.
Each
morning I sit down at my computer open up my document. But I also find myself
opening up the internet. Somehow my fingers have clicked on the Internet
Explorer icon. I pause and glance out of the window. Are they more clouds in
the sky than before? Fall is coming. I really should get a new pair of rain
boots.
So I
jump onto a cool website in California. Should I go calf length or knee length?
Write. I tell myself. Just write. You must write for ten minutes
before you're allowed to look at the internet.
I yawn.
Then I yawn again. Perhaps a cup of tea might wake me up. I am British after
all. We Brits have tea in our blood stream. So I go across the kitchen and put
on the kettle, stopping to pet one of the cats along the way. I come back to my
computer, tea in hand. The cursor is still flashing on the screen waiting for
me to type the next word.
Maybe I
need an umbrella to match the rain boots. But is there any point buying an
umbrella when I always leave them in taxis? Still, there's no harm in just looking.
This
pattern goes on until midday then I start to panic. By noon, I've usually only
written two pages. I begin to write. To really write. And this is when the
so-called magic happens. The words flow through me. It feels like everything is
being dictated to me by a voice in my head. The characters tell me things that
I hadn't mapped out. Genius snippets of description come to me (some of which
I'll later delete.) This is high that
I've been chasing. It's an elixir that's way better than the buzz of the
strongest espresso.
By two
pm, I always make it. I get a ten good pages down. At this point, I want to
keep writing forever. I no longer care about rain boots or about matching
umbrellas.
***
FOR
HER SISTER
by Lara Sleath
YA
Paranormal Suspense
Evernight
Teen Publishing / 61,000 words
Eighteen-year-old
Bresha blames herself for her younger sister's death. She knew that Arlene was
gullible and fragile. Yet she still let her tone-deaf sister meet with Saul Sanderstorm, a record company mogul whose
charisma is as big as his temper.
When Arlene is found floating
in Camden Lock canal, the police call it suicide. But Bresha knows different.
She knows that sleazy Saul is somehow to blame. And so does Arlene's ghost. Why
else would she fog up mirrors and trace the letter S for Saul through the
condensation on the glass? Now, Bresha has to find a way to prove that Saul's
guilty.
When Bresha discovers that
Saul is getting a kick out of mentally breaking singers, she wonders if this
happened to Arlene. The truth has to be ugly and shocking. Because why else
would Saul be prepared to do anything to conceal it?
Bresha faces a choice. Risk
her life to unearth the facts. Or drop the case and be forever tormented by her
sister's ghost.
Someone was
screaming. She realized that it was her. She found herself on her feet. She
took off down the path, her breath jagged, her shoes pounding over the gravel.
Fire flashed against her legs, as the nettles stung her.
She ran a
few more steps. She had to be faster than him. Surely, she was faster. He was
paunchy old man. Her feet hit a boulder and she stumbled. She felt his hands on
her back. Slam. He pushed her down. A burning pain shot across
her cheek, as her face smashed into the gravel.
She
scrambled up and ran on. He sprang on her from behind. Again, he brought her
down. She twisted around. He threw himself on top of her, his weight crushing
her. She reached up and tried to claw his face, but he caught her hands and
pinned them down by her sides onto the path.
“You
will not to do this to me,” he snarled. “You will not ruin
me.”
Bresha tried
to speak, but her tongue was frozen. She gazed into his eyes, hoping to reason
with him on an unspoken level, human to human. She’d read somewhere that eyes
were supposed to be the view point into people’s souls. Now she saw his soul.
It looked like the photograph of a cancerous organ on the side of a cigarette
packet, black and festering.
He brought
his head toward her lips. Was he going to kiss her like he might have been
trying to do that day on the couch? She turned her head away, pushing one side
of her face into the grit. He’d never kiss her. She’d die before he kissed her.
She felt him
bite into her neck. He was giving her a love bite, the sick pig. She screamed
as he drew blood.
***
British born
Lara Sleath has been writing stories - on paper and in her head - for as long
as she can remember. But gave up on the idea of becoming a writer because she
believed that the idea was too far-fetched. Instead she took the only slightly
more sensible option of working in the music industry.
But even that
proved too dull for Lara. In her mid-twenties, she set off from London with her
boyfriend in a battered VW van. Their aim was to drive to India. They arrived a
quarter of a year after adventures with warlords and after having seen many
mind-blowing sights.
Today, the
boyfriend in the beaten-up VW van is Lara's husband. She lives with him and
their two children in Vancouver, Canada close to the ocean and the mountains.
Lara writes every day surrounded by an army of cats. For Her Sister is
her debut novel.
Giveaway: $10 Evernight Teen Gift Card
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