C.K. Kelly Martin's Blog, page 17

New Website: Come See About Me.com

I promise a proper blog update soon but in the meantime wanted to announce that I've created a new website for my new adult book, Come See About Me. You can read the first two sample chapters of the book there as well as download a pdf of Chapters 1 - 7. And if you haven't heard the Afghan Whigs cover of Come See About Me you should probably give it a listen right now. Intense.



Come See About Me Reviews

It means a lot to me when people take the time to write down their thoughts about my books, particularly if they really connected with the work. And because I've released Come See About Me myself after being told my twenty-year-old main character was too young for YA but not old enough for adult fiction I'm doubly grateful for the lovely reviews I've seen posted at the below blogs:
Clear Eyes, Full Shelves
Happy Owl Books - Meagan's giving away a copy too (thanks, Meagan!). Contest ends in 5 days.
Lives and Breaths Books
Seriously, if these wonderfully written, heartfelt reviews don't convince readers to buy Come See About Me, then probably nothing will! Also thanks to Courtney Summers for her very kind words about the book and for her Come See About Me Facebook/Twitter giveaway.
Come See About Me trailer:

National Botanic Gardens of Ireland & Referendum Posters

Like most national museums and galleries, Ireland's National Botanic Gardens is free to visit. We filled a gorgeous May day strolling around the outdoor gardens, arboretum and green houses (photos below). It was also interesting to see posters referring to the national referendum on the European Fiscal Compact (otherwise known as the treaty on stability or the austerity treat...depending on who you're talking to) around Dublin.

As an Irish citizen but not a resident I wasn't able to cast a vote but if I had it would have been a no as such severe restricting of spending only leads to a downward spiral for already aidling economies (Read the Guardian article on Why Europe's fiscal compact is bound to fail.). Unfortunately, the Irish electorate (the half of them who showed up at the polls) voted 60% to 40% to ratify the EU fiscal pact. I can only hope some sea change re. European austerity occurs regardless because at this point the Irish "unemployment rate has hit its highest level since the country's financial crisis began." A whopping 14.8%.

Come See About Me Out Now

I've had my nose to the grindstone since I got back from Ireland. Readying Come See About Me for publication feels like a marathon of a process but I think I finally have things under control (hope I didn't just jinx myself saying that!). As of this moment you can buy a Kindle copy of Come See About Me on Amazon, an ePub copy from Smashwords, and an actual paperback from Createspace. Apparently in 5 - 7 days the physical copies will also be available for order from Amazon.com and hopefully in time Smashwords copies will feed out to various major retailers like the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, and Kobo.

I took six months worth of desktop publishing courses while living in Ireland during the nineties and have been designing my website since 2001 so was thrilled to have the chance to design the cover for Come See About Me as well as all the material for the paperback. This book is set mostly in the town where I live—the soft place Leah falls after the devastating death of her boyfriend—and it was fantastic to be able to delve into some of its many charms.

A Come See About Me giveaway is to come (more details on that later). In the meantime I'm going to splash a bunch of my holiday photos here. I've taken so many snaps of Dublin during the past few years that this time around the only locations I captured were the Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin (they do lovely meals in their cafe so if you're ever visiting be sure to stop in there for a bite) and posters about the Irish European Fiscal Compact referendum hanging around town. Unfortunately the vote didn't go the way I wanted; what growth can ever come from austerity? Just look how austerity measures in England have pulled them back into recession...but that's a blog entry onto itself!

Anyway, most of my photographs are from our jam-packed four day jaunt to London (and a day trip to Windsor Castle, Stonehenge and Oxford), all dressed up for the Jubilee celebrations which at that point were only a week away. We were incredibly lucky to get tickets to see Misterman at the National Theatre, a one man show starring Cillian Murphy who was utterly mesmirizing as a man out of step with the world around him. Other than that one of the high points of the trip was visiting the Portobello Market in Notting Hill on a busy, sunny Saturday (they've got everything there and I scored a yummy pizza lunch for 90 pence at one of the stalls). In fact we were extremely fortunate to have gorgeous weather the entire four days and got a bit of a burn wandering around the city without sunscreen in late twenties temperatures (lesson: never skip the suncreen!). Another highlight occured just as we were leaving town, at the Heathrow Airport security scanner. My husband was setting the thing beeping and while he was more thoroughly scanned, who should be getting similar treatment next to him but our favourite Spook Tom Quinn (British actor Matthew Macfadyen) aka 2005's Mr. Darcy.

My other cool sighting while away was two seals off the coast of Shankill beach while out walking with my friend and her dog. The seals were so close to shore that we could've swum out to meet them. In fact, another couple were out there with their Labrador retriever playing fetch in the water. The lab kept spotting the nearest seal and trying to swim out to it only for the seal to duck underwater again and leave the dog paddling in circles. My friend and I stood there quite awhile watching the scene.

What else? I've been meaning to go on the Blitz - London at War walk for twenty-two years and finally managed to do it. Each of the London Walks I've been on over the years have been amazing and I can't recommend them highly enough. We got some cool (and cheap) antique prints from favourite childhood—books Babar, Tintin and Winnie the Pooh—at a stall in Portobello Market. I'll try to post a photo of them once I have them framed and hung on my wall. And we went to see Prometheus last Friday at the biggest theatre in Dublin's Savoy (I would see every movie in the Savoy one if I could!) and loved it just as much as Roger Ebert did. I remember the days when movie releases were months behind across the pond and now it seems that sometimes they're getting them first.

Now on to the photos:



London all dolled up, ready to celebrate.

Jubilee goodies.

By the Thames: double-decker buses on the Waterloo Bridge.

St. Paul's Cathedral.

There were tons of cool Britannia shop windows in the run up to the Jubilee.






Selfridges, Oxford Street

Windsor Castle, supposedly the Queen's favourite castle.




Stonehenge.



On the South Bank, London Eye, Big Ben and Parliament in the background.



More Jubilee goodies!

Oxford.

Harrods food hall.

Oxford.



Hanging out with the bears in Harrods.



Oxford.

Royal family Lego display in Hamley's toy store, Regent Street
Portobello Market.

Portobello Market snacks.

Selfridges, Oxford Street

Portobello Market: collectable cameras for sale.

Oxford.

Oxford.

Picturesque Kensington.

Oxford.


Their YA section.

Oxford.




Dublin's Botanic Garden photos to follow over the weekend!

Across the Pond & Musings on NA

I'm heading off to Ireland at the end of the week where I'll be largely without Internet and so won't be posting again until I'm back in June. Generally the Irish are just as addicted to their Internet connections as anyone but it happens that my in-laws are sans connection. To be honest, I think every year that we visit it gets a little harder for me to say goodbye to our free-flowing home Internet connection. It's begun to feel more and more like drinkable water, like something surely everyone has on tap which I realize is a pretty darn overprivileged sentiment because not everyone actually has constant access to things like clean water, Internet, or health care.
And yet here I am wondering how uncomfortable it will be to spend just over two weeks without ready access...that's not right on multiple levels. So, yeah, I think I need to start spending less time on the net. It's a world of information but then, so is the actual world!

Before I get busy packing and stuff I want to thank everyone who has expressed an interest in Come See About Me. It's going through copy-editing at the moment and I can't wait to get it out into the world. It's been very cool to see NA Alley, a blog devoted to New Adult fiction, spring up recently. A couple of days ago they posted a terrific entry explaining that the new adult category is a response to agents, editors and publishers who routinely turn down novels (or request aging characters up or down) with main characters deemed too young for adult but too old for YA.

It does seem that if we left the fate of books with twenty-year-old main characters solely in the hands of traditional publishing there would be precious few. So while I can understand people not warming up to the idea of an NA category because it may seem like pigeonholing, I think the pigeonholing has already happened around new adult fiction, leaving a gap. Can that gap be filled without putting a label on it when YA and adult fiction seem to already have been strictly defined to omit characters nineteen through their early twenties or would eschewing the label just mean those characters continue to be a rarity in traditional publishing?

In any case I'm happy to see writers taking matters into their own hands and releasing stories about young characters that neither fall under the heading of YA nor adult. Slán go fóill.

Royal Botanical Gardens

It seems that most years around this time I mention that May's my favourite month (see May 8,2011 and May 1, 2009) and post a ton of pretty flower and tree photos to my blog. May is so gorgeous that I can't help myself; I go a bit ga-ga. This year I'm using Amy Black, my editor at Random House Canada, as an excuse because she recently said that she'd hope I'd snapped a few of the cherry blossoms just as they start to fall. So, Amy, the cherry blossoms here are for you!
Burlington's Royal Botanical Gardens' Rock Garden site is such a vision of loveliness these days and this past Saturday was a perfect day for tiptoeing through the tulips. I was sure the flowers pictured below were the finest thing I was going to see all weekend but, as it happened, today when I slipped out to join Paddy in the garden area of our condo, there was a fox stretched out on the lawn, savouring the sun. The fox didn't seem disturbed by our presence in the distance, but he did raise his head to eye a few noisy birds now and then before adjusting his position.
We could see several of our neighbours getting a kick out of the fox too, staring down at him with binoculars from their balconies. Though the condo is close to natural lands this is very much the burbs so a fox isn't something you see in your yard every day. At first I thought it must have been someone's dog! Alas, I have no photos of the fox, but if you're looking for pictures of some of May's blossoming treasures, this is a good place to be.










Having a bit of a sit down at the Rock Garden:






I'm afraid of bees but managed to stick my camera down here
next to this one for journalistic purposes.

So You Want to Read YA

Today I'm over at the Stacked Books blog sharing my picks for their "So you want to read YA?" series. Thanks, Kelly, for giving me the chance to rave about some of my favourite young adult books! Some of them you may have already heard about and/or read but there are way too many cool YA books out there that don't get the hype they deserve.

There's such a neat mixture of novels that have been mentioned so far in the series that you might want to catch up with earlier guest blog entries if you haven't had a chance to check them out yet:

Susan Adrian
Julie Cross Janssen Bradshaw Laura Arnold

Speaking of hype, I also want to point people toward author Tara Kelly's recent blog post on an Amplified Sequel. I'm a big fan of Tara's books and in this entry she makes excellent points that some readers may not be aware of, like how tough it can be for quiet/midlist-ish authors to get a publishing deal for their next novel and how important that makes it that readers are loud about the books they like. So if you love a book, particularly if it's one that's not raking in the cash, not one that you see mentioned one every second book blog or not one that's attracting Hollywood option offers, go public with your fondness for it.

Yesterday

Teaser trailer! Full trailer coming in August.

Come See About Me sample chapters

I just posted the first two chapters of Come See About Me here on my website and plan to have the ebook available for the end of June. One of the things I loved about writing this novel is that it's set where I live so I had the chance to explore some of Oakville's charms (not that the main character, who is in a fragile emotional state for much of the book, really notices them as such). But honestly, Oakville has pretty much spoiled me for other places. There are few things I love more than a walk by the lake and Oakville's compact downtown area is so charming that every time I'm strolling there it feels like a holiday. I mean, do places this cute exist in real life? Did I conjure this town up with my imagination? It feels that way sometimes.
Before 2000 I'd never even been to Oakville but in the late 90s a co-worker used to rave about the place (she lived here) and when my husband and I moved back to Canada at the start of the 21st century we gravitated here. Anyway, main character twenty-year-old Leah Fischer (from Burnaby, British Columbia) moves to Oakville in 2012. Late June, to be exact. The move's not really a choice on her part but after her boyfriend Bastien has died and she's flunked out of college and pretty much stopped functioning Bastien's aunt offers her a rent-free place to stay—a soft place to fall.
You can find out a bit more about Come See About Me here and if you read the sample chapters you'll notice there are some brief Liam sightings in Chapter One but it's awhile before Leah's in the headspace to really notice him and even when she does...well, it's infinitely complicated. Grief isn't linear. Relationships aren't linear.
If you've read any of my YA books you've probably noticed that I like writing about gray areas but I do think there's alot of light in this book too and I thoroughly enjoyed writing about a character who, though still quite young, doesn't fit in the YA category. Like I talked about a few weeks ago, I wish traditional publishers would release more books about characters in their late teens and early twenties. I don't think readers interest in young characters ends when they turn nineteen or finish high school. However, it's great to be writing in a time when you can bring a story to readers without depending on traditional channels and if traditional publishers continue to avoid books about 'new adults' I have high hopes that the void will be filled by other means!

Rock the Drop

In honour of Support Teen Lit Day I left some signed copies of my books around the town of Oakville to ROCK THE DROP. I Know It's Over is at the bus station, waiting to catch a bus.


One Lonely Degree's hanging out in the sun at Lakeside Park (incidentally, this is the park—a stone's throw from Lake Ontario—where I envisioned Nick Severson watching the little girl with the English accent).

The Lighter Side of Life and Death's lounging around on a bench outside the public library. You'll notice from the next picture that the library is in the middle of a book sale so I'll be going back later to pick up more books (only $1.25/lb, what a steal)!


Luckily it's a gorgeous spring day out there, the kind where books can bask outside for hours with no fear of rain and the kind that usually makes me reach for my camera. Today's no exception and I couldn't resist the budding greenery

and the most glorious tree that I'll likely see all day. An apple blossom that smelled like heaven and sprinkled me with confetti-sized blossom bits as I passed under it.

Happy Reading and Happy Spring!