I was working on editing some St Mallory’s Forever chapters earlier – a week or so after I promised to have them back to Charley – and I closed the document for a while.
In the meantime, I perused the internet, and when I came back to it 15 minutes later, having not left the room, I found this.
I have got absolutely no idea how this picture of Loki ended up in the document. Or why. Or… anything.
It looks like St Mall’s got Loki’d.
This is a ridiculously short post. I do apologise.
When we were discussing designs for the cover of ‘St Mallory’s Forever’, one of the main things we had to talk about was the uniform. Or, more specifically, the colours, since we’d specified in the book that they wore kilts.
Colours? I had no idea what we were going to choose. My own school has a boring grey pleated skirt – but I knew Charley had a kilt. I asked her for her colours, but she said she didn’t want it to be the same. Probably because she didn’t want teachers and students hounding her as they thought they were being portrayed unfavourably … (as Harper Lee found when inhabitants of Monroeville -sp? -, the real-life version of Maycomb, complained because they thought they were Miss Stephanie Crawford.)
So I was stumped. I looked at other schools in my area. Blue and green were pretty popular colours. I suggested this to the others.
No. We wanted something distinctive.
Red? I wasn’t keen. Helen, the character with whom I associate the most, would never stand for wearing a bright red kilt, even if it’s more traditional. Yellow? Ugh! The thought of a yellow skirt makes me want to run away to a country where they’re sensible enough to let girls wear trousers.
Red and yellow? And blue?
Okay, I said. On one condition. The blue is prominent and the colours are the highlights.
I was mainly thinking of poor Helen’s appearance, if I’m honest, but also just general aesthetics. They acquiesced and in fact, the cover ended up featuring a skirt that was blue, white and red – no yellow in sight.
Mark once joked that if Charley and I ever appeared on morning TV, doing interviews about St Mall’s, we’d have to wear the kilts. I said she could wear a kilt, I wasn’t going to - my school, as I’ve mentioned, has a boring and significantly cheaper uniform than that.
But strangely enough, I realised recently that one of the few skirts I own is coloured and patterned in the exact same way as the one on the cover of St Mall’s.
Hello everyone!
Yes, yes, I know it’s been months since either Miriam or I posted here – very very naughty of us, we know. We would love to post more, but unfortunately we are inhibited by one thing (or many things, depends how you view it.)
Exams.
Miriam is currently tackling GCSEs, while I am a year ahead getting chewed on by my AS Levels. Both of us are currently on Study Leave, doing battle with a variety of ideas that we’re supposed to know but swear we never studied. For me it’s Descartes, Polkinghorne and Anselm, and for Miriam it’s incomprehensible Physics-related squigglies that supposedly explain the behavior of various whizzy-bouncy particle thingies.
Subsequently, St Mallory’s Forever! has been somewhat neglected. It is currently sitting in my email Inbox, glaring at me malevolently and threatening to maim my brain cells the moment it comes within range.
And, with any luck, it will have its opportunity as of Thursday, when all but one of my exams will be over. The moment we get the rough draft finished – and we get out of school for the summer – we both have every intention of editing at the speed of light, shoving it through the formatters, and getting it into your hands as soon as we can.
In the meantime … a little more patience, please. Not much, just a bit. We promise.
If you feel the urge to hunt us down and persecute us further, you can find both our personal blogs here:
Live long and prosper, readers. We promise to be back soon.
Am I the only one who, almost instinctively, associates the word “jolly” with Enid Blyton or some other of her ilk? Not that that’s a bad thing – it was perfectly common language at the time, even among teenage girls – but the fact that some people still expect boarding school girls like me to whip it out every other sentence really makes me wonder.
So, today, I thought I’d take advantage of this spare time at the end of my oh-so-hectic Monday to tell you about another commonly misconstrued facet of boarding schools – straight from the horse’s mouth. Literally!
Though I’m a boarding girl, I’m really not one to talk about funny accents. In my first two years at my school, people asked me whether I was American, Australian, and once even Eastern European. My History teacher, who has taught me for three years, was also convinced I was Canadian at one stage, because I still hadn’t fully dropped the accent from the time I lived there. Nowadays, you’ll be happy to hear, my accent has calmed itself and settled into a fairly regular tone – it sounds like this. To me, of course, this sounds perfectly normal – everyone else in my little boarding bubble has a similar accent – but, as you can see from some of the comments below the recording, others think it’s hilariously posh!
(Additional note: To any “Demyx Time” fans that may one day be in the audience … Vexen voice, anyone?)
But, strangely, though the accent is a fine part of the boarding school mystery (not to mention an essential part of any half-decent imitation!), it’s not the first thing that people think of when they pretend to “talk boarder” as it were. It’s more words like “jolly”, “horrid”, “awfully”, and “I say!” used in copious amounts that tend to point out that one is a boarder, right?
Wrong.
Well, sort of. While we may be more prone to use of the sort of language you’d expect from Dad’s Army or a contemporary World War One play, for the most part we boarders talk just like everybody else – including all those floral four and five letter words usually reserved for occasions when one’s hip connects in that especially painful way with the edge of a desk. We use common text contractions (well, I don’t, but that’s my inner Grammar Nazi talking), we say “like” in that awful teenage manner, and we even – horror of horrors! – call our parents the normal “Mum and Dad”. Get all those thoughts of “Mumsie” and “Daddy dearest” out of your head this minute!
However, in order not to sound like a total killjoy, I’ll let you know the posh part of our speech too. Where I’m stationed, out in the woolies of Dorset, we’re not terribly up-to-date on the latest teen phrases. If someone said “peng” to me, I’d wonder if I’d wandered into a Star Trek convention, but – according to The Telegraph anyway – every other “average teen” in the country would know immediately it’s slang for “pretty”. There are other phrases like this, but as I’ve yet to go into an area where they’d be used, I can’t tell you what they are. Drop me a comment and see if I can guess the word’s meaning, make a game of it! Hehe.
…. And, alright, we do say “jolly”. Not often, not usually in public, but we do.
Are you happy now?
We’ve got something exciting and exclusive on the blog today! That’s right. St Mallory’s’ humble home in cyberspace (this blog) is today hosting a sneak preview of the cover!
Now, Mark wanted this over at MWi, but when I pointed out that, being the Official Blog and everything, we should have it first, he quickly agreed.
I’ll admit that Charley and I were very over excited during discussions about this – all cool and professional on the outside, but inside we’re just going, we have a COVER DESIGNER! We’re, like, real authors now!
And here it is. The cover.
What do you think?
The school? Somewhere near Brighton, although don’t ask me why.
The (still unfinished!) manuscript? Somewhere in my email archives, waiting for me to dig it out and start work on it as I promised about a week and a half ago.
That’s the problem with having two teen writers as a major part of a collaborative writing team. We’re just so busy. While Charley has CCF (Combined Cadet Forces), karate, and A-Levels to distract her, I’m juggling ballet, two instruments, and GCSE Art. Never mind the other eleven subjects – Art is the one that takes the time.
Even as I write this post I’m waiting for a page I’ve been prepping in my sketchbook to dry, and I’m supposed to be working on a history essay, but instead have been filming and editing a YouTube video that I’m now uploading.
St Mallory’s Forever was originally due for release in late November or early December 2011, and I remember when we first started remarking to the other two that at this rate, it should be easy enough to finish it by the end of October, which would allow time for editing.
Erm, didn’t happen.
We pushed the date to the end of November. Nothing at all happened on it in that month, since Charley and I were both going for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) again, and both trying to cope with the pressures of school. December, perhaps? Nope, I had mocks for the first two weeks, and then fell ill and had to retire to my bed. I also had a deadline to edit a novel of my own, so ended up doing that with my laptop on my pillow. That was hard work, without trying to balance St Mallory’s as well.
Now that we’ve settled on April as a release date, the pressure is on us as well. In February, April seemed like such a long way away, but now that we’ve moved into March it’s beginning to look all too close!
Pushing the date back isn’t going to help us any more. The biggest exams of my school life so far are coming up in May and although all of my Art coursework has to be done by the end of the April (believe me, I’m freaking out about that), these months are still going to be the best months for me to write until July or August.
When I finish writing this blog post, I’ll put on some good music (Shostakovich, probably, or one of my many writing playlists) and finish my history essay. Well, I’ll start it first. Then I’ll finish it. And after I’ve done that, I’ll put aside the other work I’ve got, dig out St Mall’s, and write a couple of chapters. Nothing major, just enough to get the ball rolling again. I’ll save it and do some more of my homework, and then work on another one.
After that, I’ll pass it back to Charley and Mark, and it’s up to them where they want to take it next.
It’s not a case of schoolwork taking priority, or St Mall’s taking priority. They’re both important for different reasons and both of them need my time. It’s a case of balancing them.
Charley feels the same way, I’m sure. So, I’m back walking that tightrope again. I’m not going to fall off – on either side. You’ll see St Mallory’s published before I walk into my Music exam (the first on my timetable), but I’ll still have done my revision.
Watch me.
Boarding school (definition): an education centre, usually in the form of an old manor house or castle, where students live all year round. Most of their time is taken up with practical jokes, driving the matron batty and chasing each other around lacrosse pitches. Common phraseology from the students inclues “rather” “awfully” and “jolly”.
Alright, who let you lot at the Enid Blyton?
Strange, really, that here in the UK – where we have a relatively large concentration of boarding schools, relative to some other countries – there are so many bizarre myths persisting about boarding schools. To be fair, I only started boarding five years ago and, before that, the only experience of boarding school that I had was the stories my Dad used to tell me about his boyhood – most of them concerning evil teachers, playing rugby in “sandpaper shorts” and the truly stomach-churning school dinners.
So, lovely charitable person that I am, I’m going to make my first post to this blog by dispelling some of the mystery and letting you in on what really goes on at boarding schools like St Mallory’s.
Now, let’s get started shall we?
Myth Number One: All boarding schools are out in the countryside.
False – though many are indeed set out of towns, many more are very much within cities and towns themselves – my own school is a prime example, we’re a massive landmark in the village, and the much older boys’ school is spread out over the place so much you can hardly tell where it starts and stops!
Myth Number Two: Only rich people go to boarding school.
False, false and false again! This is one of the myths that really irks me, simply because of the bad impression it often gives people of us. While most boarding schools are independent, and thus have high fees, there are plenty of scholarships and bursaries to be had – and it’s a tooth-and-nail battle to get them too, I tell you! Some of my friends’ parents have had to take out loans to pay for the fees, while plenty more have chip-ins from the extended family to take the bite off. Forces brats like me are also in abundance, as half of our fees are paid by the M.O.D as compensation for dragging us all around the planet and, subsequently, making a wonderful mess of our primary school level education.
Myth Number Three: Everybody sleeps in communal dorms.
Not exactly false, but probably not true in the sense you’re imagining. Though dorm layout varies from school to school, you can be absolutely sure that, nowadays, all those stories about twelve girls living in one room with only a bed, a curtain and a chest of drawers to themselves is a big fat lie. We do get some privacy, and even in relatively small schools like mine, communal dorms only have about five or six occupants maximum. Cubicles on corridors, like those you’ll see in St Mallory’s, are also a popular method of squishing as many sardines … sorry, I mean students, into a smaller space, while at the same time preventing us re-enacting Lord of the Flies after a particularly stressful weekend.
Myth Number Four: Everyone plays lacrosse.
A bit of a generalisation, this. True, lacrosse is a popular sport at several boarding schools, there are a good many that don’t play it, and certainly not everyone participates. I know because I’m one of the lucky few that don’t *coughI’mhopelesscough*. And it’s not all we play either – tell that to our hockey, polo, netball, archery, cross-country, swimming, squash and tennis teams!
Myth Number Five: “Girls’ school” is an alternative word for nunnery.
Bahahahaha, I think not! True, while interacting with members of the opposite gender is a little more difficult in a single-sex school, there are plenty of opportunities for interaction. Some schools, like mine, have both a boys’ and girls’ school in close proximity, and even those that don’t usually have weekly or bi-weekly discos or some other form of outing that allows for a little socialising.
Myth Number Six: Younger girls are made to do duties for the older ones.
Tom Brown’s School Days strikes again! Hehe, don’t worry all, this practice – known as “fagging” at the time – died a death several decades ago. On the matter of duties though, there tends to be some sort of setup regarding jobs for different year groups. Of course, this varies from school to school, but in the majority, the Sixth Form (years 12 and 13, to all you normal people) have duties that may include: prep (homework) supervision, putting everyone to bed in the evenings, supervising activities, taking registers at breakfast, organising house events … you get the idea. Oh, and yes, we do have prefects. I know because I am one! 
Myth Number Seven: It’s all midnight feasts and pranks!
LIES! LIES I TELL YOU! Though, for once, it’s a lie I wish was true. Forget raiding the pantry at midnight to celebrate a birthday – we’d be put on detention for a week if we were caught out of bed at that hour – we hardly have time for cake eating! Boarding school schedules usually involve a longer day than day schools, as we don’t have parents complaining that they have to come so late to pick us up and they feel they need to “keep us entertained”. We all work our butts off just as much as everyone else, and we don’t find it any easier than the next student. We’ll tease the teachers on occasion, and I will confess to once being involved in a plot involving a whoopie cushion, but all those ingenious wangles like inflatable jackets, popping coins and imprints of “Allo” on the French mistress’ bottom are, regrettably, mere fiction.
Phew! That’s all I’ve got for now – my poor brain still hasn’t quite got over the fever that’s been persecuting me this past week. I hope I’ve covered some good bases up there, but if there’s anything you feel I’ve missed, feel free to drop a comment with your question and I’ll do my best to answer it to your satisfaction.
In the meantime, farewell all, live long and prosper!
- Charley
“I’m not a pyschopath, Anderson, I’m a high functioning sociopath. Do your research.”
~ Sherlock, “A Study In Pink”, BBC (2010)
Always do your research. Otherwise you’ll find yourself being snapped at by Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and that would, obviously, be tragic. Although, I wouldn’t mind that much. I mean, fictional characters TALKING to me? Who spiked my drink and where do you get that stuff from?
As everybody knows, the key to writing a realistic and generally more interesting novel is to do research. It doesn’t matter whether your novel is a modern crime novel or a historical romance: you’re going to have something you need to look up. By the way, what is the difference between an Inspector and a Detective Inspector? Anyone who knows, leave a comment.
But I digress.
Research is very important, from world building to clothing to social hierarchies, and when I was asked to join in with St Mallory’s Forever I knew I was going to have to do some work. I had several issues to investigate:
The first was relatively easy to solve. I asked Charley lots and lots of questions.
Actually, I didn’t have to ask her all that many, because when I first found out she was at a boarding school I interrogated her quite thoroughly, until she gave me a rough timetable and everything, just to shut me up (so, nothing’s changed…*grin*). I was also so intrigued I went on her school website and read up on it. That’s not stalkerish, because she went on mine too.
In addition to this, I’d been doing some research into vocational ballet training, such as the Royal Ballet School or the English National Ballet School. The RBS in particular has some really great information in their ‘documentation’ on the website, including approximate timetables, rules, and details of rooms. This was very helpful for getting an alternative perspective.
More recently, I was on a course with the Royal Artillery Band and while hanging out in the rest area of the band block, I was perusing the stacks of army-related magazines and found one entitled “The Service Parent’s Guide To Boarding Schools”. Although this didn’t give me particular information that I didn’t already know, it was very useful to look at what army families would want in a school, and what activities there were relating to that sort of world within schools. Since boarding schools are very often populated by a lot of ‘army brats’ (Charley’s words, not mine), this seemed like something to remember when working on St Mallory’s, as students whose parents are soldiers are quite likely to be at the school and should be mentioned.
So, the first one was pretty much nailed. I knew about timetables, uniforms, rules and regulations, dormitory layouts, House arrangements, sports activities, grades and Ofsted reports, and Forces discounts.
Next we had my lack of mystery reading / crime reading / detective stories etc. Easily solved. Work on St Mallory’s resumed right in the middle of my Sherlock obsession, just after series two of the BBC series had finished and I was consoling myself by reading all of the books, one after the other in totally the wrong order. I knew how detectives worked, obviously. We were doing well.
As for writing as blog posts, although my own are very rarely narratives, one of the blogs I read has some really good examples. The blog is My Pajama Days and she often writes her posts as mini stories almost, with dialogue and description. This was a really interesting style to study when considering how to work on this project. There are other blogs I could name, but to share them all would be to reveal what an odd combination of interests I have… ha ha!
It’s also something you learn by doing. I write for a blog. In fact, I write for three blogs – four if you count the guest posts I sometimes do for Mark Williams International. My own blog is A Farewell To Sanity, but I also have a book blog, Books – Lost and Found, and then there’s this. My blogging style now is very different from how it was when I started, so I’m developing a ‘voice’ that I hope comes through (although not too much!) in the characters we write.
Research can be anything, though. When writing one of my novels (still a WIP, after two years), I was constantly referring to ‘A Guide To Irish Mythology’. Another novel needed much highlighting of passages in ‘The Pagan Celts’, a great resource. I wrote tonnes of notes on old Celtic legends from several websites, too.
I’ve had conversations with ex policemen on NaNoWriMo forums about how the Force works, discussions with fencers and kick boxers about what it would be like to be a modern day knight and how much they’d have to train. I’ve read blogs and magazines in army barracks and the websites of private schools. I’ve badgered friends and strangers to tell me everything they know on a subject.
Yeah, it can make people think you’re weird, and yeah, your search engine history may get you arrested by the end of it (especially if you’re writing a crime or murder mystery novel), but research is important.
Next time you’re reading a blog that seems irrelevant, remember it might be useful as research in the future. When people have an interesting background or hobby, ask questions – even if you’re not writing about it at the moment! You never know. Either it’ll be stored in your mind palace (aaaand there goes another Sherlock reference. But it’s too awesome not to share) for later, or it’ll spark off an idea that’s so amazing you have to write it NOW.
When you’ve finished researching it, that is.
What’s the most difficult thing you’ve had to research, and how did you go about it? Do you like this stage of planning or does it hold you back? And can you please answer my Inspector/Detective Inspector question? It’s getting on my nerves.
I’ve told my side of the story – now it’s time to hear it from Charley. We decided the best way to do this would be to do an interview, although we may have got slightly sidetracked at times! This interview took place on the eleventh of February, via Facebook. I apologise that the line breaks are so un-line-breaky, but I can’t make them behave. *sigh*
Miriam Joy
Charley R
The Journey So Far
How did four writers from different places in the world – Grimsby, London, Dorset and West Africa – and of different ages end up collaborating on a YA novel set in a boarding school? It’s a good question. I’m now going to attempt to summarise the journey from my point of view.
Just a quick note, if you want to know more about any of us then just click the ‘Meet The Authors’ tab in the top right corner
I think I can take some credit, because it was on my blog that the seed which later germinated into St Mallory’s forever was planted, in a comment from Mark (one half of the Saffina Desforges writing team). The post was here, but the particular comment was, “I can’t wait til Ms Spook writes her own version of Malory Towers and the Chalet School series. I’m guessing there would be a big market for well-told YA set in a modern girls’ boarding school. Come on.Ms Spook! The world is waiting. Jolly hockey sticks and all that!”
Just a few weeks later, Spook – who now goes by her given name of Charley – sent me a Facebook message saying that Mark wanted the two of us to collaborate with ‘Saffina Desforges’ to write this novel, and would I like to?
I wasn’t sure. I’d not read or written any mysteries, I knew nothing about boarding schools, and an aversion to plotting, outlines and coherent sentences has always made serious collaboration tricky (though I’ve done some fun collaborative Doctor Who fan-fics). I wasn’t about to let Charley get all the glory of publication without me, though, and I’m always up for a challenge, so I said yes.
This was some time in July or August, I think, and we initially planned to release it in time for Christmas, which was a little optimistic. After a few enthusiastic weeks (I also take the credit for writing the first chapter, which then got chopped up by the other two, mashed around, and some of it stayed in and some turned up later and some disappeared into the ether), it fizzled out, and between late October and mid January there was no activity on St Mall’s at all.
And then my grandma died. I needed to distract myself, to occupy my brain, and I didn’t feel like writing my own novel – it’s always had a strong autobiographical content. I dug out the draft, read the whole thing through, and ended up adding a few thousand words to the end of it.
That was enough to get the ball rolling again: since then, a week hasn’t gone by without one of us adding to it, and sometimes two of us will write five chapters over just a couple of days, much refreshed after our long break!
(Reading the Sherlock Holmes short stories and some of the longer ones in the meantime almost certainly helped me understand the ‘mystery’ idea better, even if it did lead to way too many Sherlock references in there. I can’t speak for the others, but I think they were definitely necessary.)
It’ll be a little while until it’s finished. Meanwhile, cover designs are going ahead, and we’re planning promos and videos. I’m writing chapters, sending them to Charley, and having them back in my inbox the next morning with more added, a speed at which we never worked before.
It’ll be good to have you, who will perhaps be our future readers, on this journey with us. Five months or more may already have gone, but there’s still a long way to go.
With your support, St Mallory’s Forever will never again languish on an email server for three months. We’ll get it finished, and you’ll be there every step of the way.
Does that sound like an idea?
Then now would be the time to put your email address into that gorgeous little box on the right. I’ll see you next time!
~ Miriam Joy