Fellow Corker, Robin Mellom scores 2 book deal with Disney-Hyperion!

Exciting news is going on in the Corker world. You don't know what the Corkers are, do you.

Literary Agent Extraordinaire Jill Corcoran has provided a forum for all of her clients to mingle and meet each other, commiserate on harships such as, oh, the writing process and celebrate fun and joy such as, oh, the writing process and also celebrate each others successes.

Enter, success.

Robin Mellom's debut DITCHED, pitched as THE HANGOVER for teens, in which a girl finds herself lying in a ditch the morning after her prom with no memory of the last twelve hours which includes a disappearing prom date, a Tinkerbell tattoo, and a dog-swapping escapade, to Christian Trimmer at Disney-Hyperion, in a very nice deal, in a two-book deal, for publication in Winter 2012, by Jill Corcoran at The Herman Agency.

There have been other success stories among the Corkers lately and I am stoked for everyone, but I only just thought of sharing the stokedness with the world, um, today.

And how great does Ditched sound? I reckon it will be hilarious. :D

Congratulations Robin! And Jill and yay for Christian Trimmer at Disney-Hyperion, as it sounds like he has awesome taste. :D

More later. You know, when I have the internet again and am not borrowing it all the time,

Sairz

Cool names for my characters - suggestions?

Soooo, my work in progress is about 80% done. I don't know exactly how done it is, because I can already tell it's going to surpass my aimed for wordcount, and this other thing.

See, I can picture some scenes. Some scenes are totally easy and fun to write, like this one at the start was cool - and that whole big crab story toward the end? Fabulous. Turned out great. But sometimes I wind up a scene and I don't know what comes next, like straight after it.

So this would be Writers Block, I imagine.

But I don't just stop writing, well, most of the time I don't. Instead, if I know what happens in another scene later, I'll just write that, and connect the dots later.

So the reason I think I'm sort of 80% done with my first draft? I have lots of dots to connect, all throughout the book. And I haven't written the big "Oh my God, THAT HAPPENED?!" climax yet.

So yeah. 80%ish.

ANYWAY. The point of this blog is that I sent the first two chapters of my WIP to my wonderful agent Jill Corcoran the other day, because she didn't know how it was coming along, and frankly I wanted some reassurance that I wasn't writing a heaping pile of doodoo.

So I emailed it and spent the next 24 hours bemoaning the fact that she hadn't replied, and was sitting at her computer, Kindle, Iphone, at a SCREEN in LA thinking: "Oh, wow. Okay, um, so, how do I tell her it's the heaping pile of doodoo she's scared it is?"

She didn't write that. And I am such a freak - 24 hours is super quick turn around time. I mean, I have seen her email inbox. I stood behind her in her hotel room (not like a stalker, I promise, she knew I was there) and watched as every other second a new query or email from another client would appear in her inbox. And Jill's quick at replying to all my emails anyway.

Wow I'm good at rambling today.

ANYWAY. She said it was great. (You hear that, brain? NOT doodoo!) But she did pose a question about my character names.

See, I'm writing about young teens. And parents these days are getting, well they're getting creative with naming their children and in some of my characters I was wanting to reflect that.

But by doing so, in some instances, she couldn't tell who were boys and who were girls. Which I'm thinking is bad.

So, what are some good character names for 12-14 year olds? Give me all sorts of nationalities, girls and boys. I'm mostly having issues with boy names at the moment.

One of the boys is the love interest (ooh la la!) so he needs to have a good sturdy name.

And one, a girl getting a new name has a twin brother named Lachie, so it would be something parents who named one kid Lachie, would name the girl that popped out right after him. Or before him. Hmm. Maybe that's something I should know.

I would love your input.

I leave you with a photo that made me laugh.

aaaaaww....

Ciao for now,

Sairz