The Regulars Blog Tour: Georgia Clark on her top three feminists in fiction

Today we're lucky enough to have Georgia Clark with us promoting her fantastic feminist book the Regulars. On this stop on the tour, Georgia will be sharing with us her top three feminist characters in fiction as well as a little insight into the inspiration behind the 

 For more information about Georgia see the bottom of the post. 

Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte

“Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel… It is narrow-minded to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.” You tell ‘em Jane! We don’t need no pudding piano parties! The resilient and articulate Jane paved the way for women rejecting stifling gender ideals way back in 1847. Resisting the subordination encouraged by the sexist dudes around her, Jane stuck to her guns and only married Old Blindy (aka Mr Rochester) after it was certain to be a marriage of equals. You go girl.

Jo March, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott  

Some 20 years later, the feminist canon birthed one of the greatest feisty ladies to grace the printed page, Miss Jo March. A writer and a fighter, outspoken Jo was clearly the most dynamic of the four March sisters, and was a torch song for independent ladies everywhere. When she wasn’t turning down marriage proposals or chopping off her long hair, in anticipation of the short-haired flapper revolution still decades away, Jo was exorcising her demons through her writing. “I want to do something splendid before I go into my castle--something heroic, or wonderful--that won't be forgotten after I'm dead.” You’re not forgotten Jo: we celebrate you.

Hermione Granger, Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling.

Fast forward a few centuries and we welcome to the stage the newest young lady to take the feminist crown. She’s precocious, she’s brave, she’s a know-it-all and she loves a good textbook. She is Hermione Granger, simply the most compelling character in the Potterverse. Played by one of society’s most brilliant IRL feminists, Emma Watson, Hermione was delightfully fierce and beautifully flawed, and Harry could not have survived without her. Continuing in her progressive tradition, Hermione is portrayed by black actress Noma Dumezweni in the West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (a move supported by both JK Rowling and Emma, natch). Hats off to Hermione!

Tell us about the inspiration behind your book.


Where do messages about beauty find us, how do they affect us, how do different women respond to these messages differently. What is beauty? How does a modern feminist reconcile her own empowerment with very real feelings of physical inadequacy? These thoughts and more were bubbling in the back of my brain when one night, inspiration struck. I was at home alone, working on the edits to my YA sci-fi novel, Parched, when a concept popped in my head. A serum. That turns you pretty: objectively, definitively. But only for a week at a time. ‘Hm’, I thought, putting my notes aside. ‘That’s interesting’. Less than a minute later, a scene began playing in my head, as crystal clear as a feature film. Three young women. A tiny bottle of Pretty, something from a modern fairytale. An impossible transformation, as visceral and gross as it was funny and unexpected. Someone comes home: ah, an excuse is needed! What next? Who knows… As soon as the scene stopped playing – a gift from on high, a missive from the muse – I knew, without a doubt, that was a novel. A year and a half later, I finished The Regulars.

Georgia Clark is an author, screenwriter and journalist who is widely published in women’s and lifestyle magazines, and writes for TV. She is enthusiastically vegetarian, proudly queer, definitely a city-dweller, a long-time lover and supporter of the arts and an advocate for the empowerment of young women. 

You can follow her at Twitter/ Instagram @georgialouclark
Sign up to her mailing list on her website georgiaclark.com
Or like her author page on Facebook

The Regulars is available from all good bookshops as well as online retailers such as Amazon.

The Winter Place Blog Tour: Five Writing Tips From Alexander Yates

As part of The Winter Place blog tour, I am pleased to have Alexander Yates sharing his tips for writing. 

I’ve been a creative writing teacher for about five years now, and a published author for nearly as long. In that time I’ve run courses in multiple countries, teaching both children and adults (currently I’m finishing up a class for Vietnamese university students, here in Hanoi). And in that time, I’ve realized something important: I’m not sure I know what I’m talking about. Every piece of advice I’ve ever given, I’ve also ignored. So please take the following tips with a grain of salt. Here are five things that I try, and sometimes fail, to do as a writer.

1) Just get to the end! 
When writing a longer project (like a novel, or even a novella) you’re always better off setting revision aside in the early stages so that you can focus on completing a full draft. After all, it’s only when you have a complete manuscript that you’ll truly understand what this project is meant to be. Also, doing this will keep you from falling into the trap of endlessly writing and re-writing a chapter that’s destined to wind up on the cutting room floor.
Or… at least that’s how it works in theory. I’m currently on my 4th full rewrite of the opening chapters of my next novel. So I see this as similar to advice about eating right—just because I believe it to be important, doesn’t mean I always do it.

2) “Inspiration” is not a thing you wait for.
Waiting for your muse to strike? Well, why not help your muse out a bit by opening up that story you’ve been working on? The unexpected flash of inspiration that arrives unbidden while you’re chopping onions, or going for a jog, happens more often in bad movies than it does in real life. There is no substitute for time at the keys.
(Note: This is not to say you shouldn’t jog. Jogging is also important.)

3) Don’t beat yourself up for slow days.
Even when you diligently make time for your writing, that doesn’t always mean you’ll actually feel productive. Sometimes you’ll feel slow, or foggy. Sometimes you’ll do nothing but re-work the same lousy paragraph for hours on end. It’s important to realize that slow days like this aren’t only inevitable, they’re also part of the bargain.
Here is my bare-bones definition of an acceptable writing day: I opened up the document. I didn’t escape to facebook, or anywhere else online. That’s it.

4) When in doubt, a description!
When I don’t know what should happen in a given scene, I jump into a detailed description. Whether it’s about an object, a vista, or an article of clothing one of my characters is wearing; description always gives me a way to move forward. But this particular piece of advice could just as well read: “When in doubt, some witty repartee!” or, “When in doubt, go to your strengths!” Description happens to be mine. Find the thing you do best (this is generally also the thing you most enjoy doing) in your writing, and you can use it to get out of almost any problem.
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5) There is nothing you love that isn’t worthy of being written about.
Even if what you love seems silly to other people. Even if what you love sometimes seems silly to you. The fact that you love it is all that counts. After all, you’re going to need that love to get you through all the slow days.

For more information on Alexander Yates, you can visit his website or follow @TheOtherYates on twitter. The Winter Place is his first novel for younger readers and is published in October 2015

Countdown to 7th of May: Guest Post: Kiera O'Brien

Millie Versus the Machines and boarding schools

I’m pretty sure everyone in the whole world has at some point read a boarding school book. Even if there are still people who haven’t read Harry Potter (and there aren’t), there are also Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers and the Twins at St Clare’s, the (criminally underrated) Trebizon books and more recently Robin Stevens’ Wells & Wong series. As a child going to boarding school was my absolute dream. The appeal for young readers seems to be down to a) no parents b) hanging out with your friends all day while c) either learning magic, solving mysteries, playing overly elaborate pranks on teachers or beating the everloving crap out of each other at hockey.

I chose to set my debut novel Millie Versus The Machines in a boarding school in 2099 because the main character, Millie, needed to be isolated from the rest of society as she starts to wonder if the robots, or units, that cook for and clean up after all the pupils, are plotting something. In London, the units rights act is about to be passed, granting unit workers the same rights as humans, and when Millie’s friends start disappearing from their dormitories overnight she becomes convinced the units plan to rise up against the humans. Millie’s boarding school, Oaktree, is run by the Company, which her parents work for, and is home to the children of the most privileged executives. As pupils, they’re being educated and trained to take over the same roles at the Company when they reach adulthood.

Despite being set in the future, it seemed natural that Oaktree would have been created in the image of all those Blyton classics- the pupils sleep in dorms, they play lacrosse and they (pretend to) revise for hours in the library. But as it’s set nearly 100 years in the future there are also a lot of opportunities to play around with the traditional setting. Units aside, all the pupils have access to social media through their embedded IndexChips (I swear, I wrote it before Google Glass became a thing). They can also download live feeds from their brains and share them with others. Instead of midnight feasts, all the pupils eat mudge, designed to give them exactly the right amount of nutrients, and every day their intelligent wardrobes produce brand new, custom-sized clothes for them.

Millie’s school is a safe haven and a paradise for any thirteen-year-old. So when that security and safety is threatened by the presence of the units, she starts to question her whole world inside its boundaries.