Night Sky/Scuffing Clouds/Craggy Rocks: Midnight Blue E-Book Update

My work on the book is coming on.  My Midnight Blue twentieth anniversary e-book version, that is, not any new book, oh no.  Once you develop an online presence - blogging, engaging with other people’s blogs and reading sites and, more importantly in my case, working to re-publish your first novel in electronic book form - there ends up being precious little room for orginal new writing.

Once I’d be up early every day, down to my computer before I’d even rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, bits of story emerging like mountain tops from my dreams.  The first writing of the day would be like the cream on top of the milk, rich and good and waiting for me every day.

Nowdays though I’m more likely to be down in my filing cabinet digging out old reviews to go onto the back of the book or, if I am on my computer, answering emails, sending them out, checking Facebook, checking Twitter and then starting the process of preparing my Midnight Blue Word document to download onto Kindle, which I’m discovering isn’t as tricky as I’d thought, just a matter [I hope] of making sure I haven’t accidentally left page numbers behind from the old text, or got my paragraph headings wrong or not given the right breaks at the ends of chapters.

[In case you're interested, by the way, here are a couple of those reviews I've just found. How could I ever have forgotten them, but I had!

‘Reading this extraordinary first novel, I found myself recalling my first meeting with the work of Philippa Pearce…  The story is, in every sense, marvellous… Pauline Fisk has a poet’s feeling for the importance of words and she uses them with great precision and a sharp awareness of their meaning and music.  Literally every page of this novel has an example of great felicity in evoking a scene, a season or a person.  Here is an important novel, one in which adults and children will find a shared and profound experience, one that is as moving as it is richly enjoyable.’   Junior Bookshelf 

‘A lovely book… Pauline Fisk is a fine writer and her story is not only exciting and mysterious, but makes a strong emotional point and is wonderfully rich in every detail.’ The Guardian

 ‘I have just read and reviewed Midnight Blue with equal delight and admiration.  During a long life of reading and writing about children’s books I find that just a couple of handsfull of books stand out as utterly memorable among the many thousands that have come my way.  I feel confident that Midnight Blue is going to be one of that select and precious few.’  Marcus Crouch – Librarian/reviewer/commentator on children’s books]

Soon I'll be ready to start converting from Word.  This is the bit that really scares me. I can't emphasize enough what a beginner I am to all of this.  Everything seems such a big deal.  After it's all been done, hopefully I'll look back and laugh about how easy it was. At the moment I'm worried that I haven’t been able to check that any of what I’ve done so far will work in Kindle format because I haven't been able to persuade the Kindle Previewer to download onto my computer.  I’ll keep you posted on this! The next stage in my e-book adventure is going to be interesting.

In the meantime, I’m waiting for cover artwork to arrive, and am very excited about it. Everybody who’s seen it so far agrees that it’s the best Midnight Blue cover yet [and there have been a lot of them; Midnight Blue's been translated right across the world].  As befits a book called Midnight Blue it’s, well, pretty damn blue.  It shows a night sky, scuffing clouds, the dark silhouette of what could equally be a city skyline or the craggy outline of a wild and rocky hilltop - both of which feature in Midnight Blue - and a massive full moon, which features in the book, too, and on this cover creates the impression at first glance of a hot air balloon.  Which is as it should be, of course, because Midnight Blue’s about a magical balloon flight which takes my heroine Bonnie through the boundary of a peeled-back sky to a strange mirror-image world on the other side.

Here’s how it happens:  ‘As they rose, the sun rose with them as if they were racing for the top of the sky. Its warmth welcomed them, turning the dark skin of the fiery balloon a beautiful midnight blue. They flew straight up. Above them, the sweet, clear music of the lonely pipe, the only sound left in the whole world, drew them on until they prepared to hit the very roof-top of the sky itself. Then the smooth sky puckered into cloth-of-blue and drew aside for them, like curtains parting. The music called again, and they passed straight through.’