SC Ransom: Small Blue Thing

From Small Blue Thing by SC Ransom

I was inspired to write Small Blue Thing after reading some of my daughter's books during my daily commute. She loved romantic fantasy stories, but I was interested that they were all set in the US and seemed to me to have little relevance to her life. How much better would it be to have a book which was full of the places and the people which she knew?

I decided to write a novel for her for her birthday, and instead of reading on the train into London, I started to write. I worked out the plot for the whole book, jotting down my thoughts in a little notebook. But I realised that to meet my deadline, I had to use the commuting time to write the book itself. I had just got myself a touch-screen BlackBerry, so every day I tapped away and, as the train pulled in into Waterloo, I emailed myself the file. During the evenings and at the weekend I pieced the whole thing together on my laptop. I found the writing pretty straightforward: I always had my target audience in mind, and at every point I could ask myself what she would think.

I got two copies printed and bound for my daughter's birthday. She loved the book, and so did her friends, and I was persuaded to send it off for a professional opinion. A colleague at work had recently met Kate Wilson, and suggested that she would be an excellent judge of whether it was publishable. So I sent her the synopsis and the first three chapters, and within a day she had come back to me to ask to read the rest. I was terribly excited, and waited for news. While I was waiting, I was rejected by an agent I had previously approached and began to lose heart. But when Kate and I met in early January last year, she told me that she loved my book. We discussed the plot, and the ideas which I had had for continuing the story into a trilogy, and I was delighted when she told me that not only was it publishable, but that she wanted to publish it! She explained that she had been thinking about leaving publishing completely, and getting my manuscript had inspired her to stay in the industry but on her own terms, and Nosy Crow, a new independent publisher of children's books, was born.

Kate convinced me that I should write the other two books, and I signed Nosy Crow's first contract. We've worked hard together over the last year to get the first book ready for publication. As debut author I had no idea it took so much time and effort, with editing, proofing, cover designs, jewellery design (we commissioned the bracelet to go on the cover!), marketing and speaker visits to arrange, as well as the small matter of writing the second and third books. But Small Blue Thing was published a year and a day after our very first meeting, and it is a fantastic thrill to be able to see it on the shelves of bookshops and supermarkets and to see it reviewed in the press and online, next to authors I really admire. I still can't believe my luck!