We're very happy to welcome Marcus Sedgwick to Chicklish. His latest book, White Crow, is his first to feature female main characters, and he has written a fabulous guest post for us on this subject.
ONE FOR THE GIRLS.....
Guest Post by Marcus Segwick
As the ideas for my new book, White Crow, were growing in the propagator in the writing shed, I started to realise that I wanted to write about the friendship between two (teen) female protagonists. My editor, being the shrewd woman that she is, pointed out that I have never been a teenage girl, and asked me if I could do it, especially as one of the two is written as a first person narrative. My answer was that it is, after all, the job of an author to imagine, and that I wanted to give it a go. Besides which, my deadline was looming and nothing else in the propagator was ready to pick... So I set off.
Whether I've succeeded or not is for other people to judge, but I have to say that I really enjoyed the process. The book features the third person account of Becky, a girl brought by her father and rather against her will to the strange, decaying coastal village of Winterfold. It's here she meets the odd, elfin Ferelith, whose narrative is told first person. Of the two, I actually found Ferelith easier to write - once I could hear this girl in my head (please don't call my psychiatrist - it's what writers do) it was a relatively easy, and certainly fun job to set down her thoughts on life, love, and... above all, the afterlife.
For it's here that Ferelith's musings collide with the ancient secret of the village; the terrible experiments being conducted, by a mad scientist, and a mad priest, into the world beyond death... Which meant that the balance of the sexes was restored slightly, since the third and final narrative in the book consists of the diary entries of the priest, whose sections of the book were also (perhaps worryingly, given his hobbies) quite easy to write.
Meanwhile, back in the modern world, if you would like to know more about what life is like inside Ferelith's head, and you have Spotify, you can listen to the playlist on her iPod (these song names are also, incidentally, the titles of the chapters narrated by her):
http://tinyurl.com/35o4edl
Marcus Sedgwick, 2010
Read a summary of White Crow by Marcus Sedgwick below:
It's summer. Rebecca is an unwilling visitor to Winterfold - taken from the buzz of London and her friends and what she thinks is the start of a promising romance.
Ferelith already lives in Winterfold - it's a place that doesn't like to let you go, and she knows it inside out - the beach, the crumbling cliff paths, the village streets, the woods, the deserted churches and ruined graveyards, year by year being swallowed by the sea.
Against her better judgement, Rebecca and Ferelith become friends, and during that long, hot, claustrophobic summer they discover more about each other and about Winterfold than either of them really want to, uncovering frightening secrets that would be best left long forgotten.
Interwoven with Rebecca and Ferelith's stories is that of the seventeenth century Rector and Dr Barrieux, master of Winterfold Hall, whose bizarre and bloody experiments into the after-life might make angels weep, and the devil crow.
