Lottie’s Locket Update

Mariajauthor/ September 21, 2020/ Author Journey/ 0 comments

Hey everyone!

Hope you’re all keeping safe and well. Today’s blog post contains an exciting update – just today I signed off on the final amendments for my MG (Middle Grade, meaning 9-12 year olds) Fantasy novel, Lottie’s Locket. I’m hoping it might come out in the next couple of months, but I’m just now waiting to hear from Olympia about a provisional publication date.

Last week I signed off on the front cover, too – the picture on my left is not the front cover, but an image from Pixabay I’ve used as an ‘unofficial’ front cover so far when talking about the novel.

Here’s a blurb for a flavour of the novel:

Lottie is a ten-year-old girl who has to stay with her Aunt Susan, while her parents visit her older sister. Lottie hates the idea of staying in her aunt’s creepy old barn in rural Yorkshire, not least because it means her parents missing her eleventh birthday. A few days later, she opens a present from her mother on her birthday to discover it is a beautiful gold locket with mysterious etchings. The next thing she knows, Lottie is transported to the magical ream of Orovand, otherwise known as the Gold Dimension.

Lottie enjoys her new adventure in Orovand and making new friends, but the morning after an important ceremony, Lottie discovers her locket has been stolen. Not only that, but someone in the palace has been murdered! Could the thief and the murderer be working together, or could they even be the same person? Believing the theft of her locket and the murder to be connected, Lottie and her new friends, Zara and Andri, decide to try to solve the case. Can Lottie discover the murderer and get her locket back, in time to go back home?

Lottie’s Locket has been such a fun journey. It started out as my first ever NanoWrimo project, back in 2018. You’ve probably heard me banging on about this for a while now, but it’s an online competition where participants try to write a 1600 odd words every day, aiming to have a 50k novel by the end of November. I did my first round of edits in April as part of Camp NanoWrimo, a more flexible version of the November event that runs in April and July. I then did some more editing in December 2019.

I knew I was still far away from finishing my 3rd historical fiction novel (it feels as though editing has taken forever!, Although I’ve been excited at making some good progress in the last couple of months!), so I’d asked them if they would be interested in a different genre. They said they were and I signed the contract for Lottie’s Locket with them.

January feels such a long time ago now, especially with the virus and lockdown thrown in, but I knew Olympia’s team would be making progress. During the summer I had some proofreading to do to check through their suggested changes (as always, I edit my novel as much as I possibly can and it still comes back in red! It shows how valuable professional editing is, whatever your path to publication is!).

I have to do a shout out to my mum here who also cast her eyes over my manuscript. She used to be a pharmacist technician, which involved spotting mistakes on prescriptions. It makes her a rather excellent natural proofreader. Thanks, Mum! 😀

Now that the final changes to the manuscript are done – and I signed off on the front cover last week – I’m hoping Lottie’s Locket will be out there soon! I cannot wait. The feeling of holding your own book in your hands is still absolutely wonderful.

I’ll let you know once I have heard a provisional publication date from Olympia. In the meantime I’ve just signed up for MailerLite and am about to start figuring out the process of writing a newsletter. I’m planning to include a special free preview for Lottie’s Locket, so I’ll let you know more soon!

Till next time,

Maria.

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