Sally Murphy's on Tour!

Today I'm delighted to welcome Sally Murphy as guest blogger at Spinning Pearls. Sally's on tour with her brand new verse novel, the cleverly-titled "Pearl Verses the World".

Here's what Sally has to say.

Thanks for having me here, Sally.

Today is a special day for me, because it marks the release of my first verse novel, Pearl Verses the World, a verse novel aimed at primary aged children, about a girl dealing with isolation at school, and with her grandma’s illness at home.

As someone who loves to laugh, I didn’t expect to ever sit down and write a book dealing with loneliness, death and grief. But one night as I was getting into bed a poem came to me, speaking of loneliness and isolation. I wrote it down, and left it alone. Soon afterwards, other poems came to me, and I realised I had a story about a girl who was very sad and very lonely. There was a story which needed to be told and I needed to sit down and be the teller.

Pearl’s story was easy to write in many ways. It was almost as if Pearl was channelling through me – she told me her tale, and whenever I felt that I didn’t know what was going to happen next, I stopped writing and waited for it to come to me. And come to me it did; often when I was in the shower, or lying in bed, or doing something totally removed from writing. I gradually worked out why Pearl was sad, and why she felt lonely. She was watching her beloved grandmother fade away, and her grief had forced her apart from her classmates.

Having said that, Pearl’s story was in other ways terribly hard to write. When I wrote the scenes dealing with Granny’s death I experienced grief. A grief so real that I had to stop writing, curl into a ball and howl. Even long into the editing process I still cried. I also had to consider whether the book was too sad for child readers. Did I want children to cry as I had cried? The eventual answer was yes, I did need to share this story with children. They may cry when they read it – but hopefully they will also smile and even, perhaps, laugh out loud. Above all, I hope they will see that although they may experience loss or grief in their lives, life does go on and there is always hope. I also hope they will know it is okay to grieve, in their own way and in their own time.

I hope that readers – young and old - will smile with Pearl.

Thanks, Sally! I feel it in my bones that Pearl Verses the World is going to storm into the world and take it over... by storm. And I'm sure many writers who read Sally's account of the writing of "Pearl" are nodding with sympathy. Some books are just books, but some books, authors LIVE, even if they have never experienced the situations themselves.

Follow the tour!

May 1st - Here at Spinning Pearls. http://spinningpearls.blogspot.com
May 2nd - BJ Cullen - The Writing Life at http://bjcullen.blogspot.com
May 3rd - Tips 4Young Writers at www.tips4youngwriters.wordpress.com
May 4th - Persnickety Snark at http://persnicketysnark.blogspot.com/
May 5th - Let's Have Words at http://www.letshavewords.blogspot.com
May 6th - to be announced
May 7th - to be announced
May 8th - Write and Read with Dale at http://www.livejournal.com/users/orangedale
May 9th - Tales I Tell at http://belka37.blogspot.com
May 10th - Robyn Opie's Writing Children's Books at http://www.robynopie.blogspot.com