Guest Blogger Liz Kessler

Today’s guest blogger is the awesome Liz Kessler. And if that wasn’t good enough, she’s here to tell us about her NEW book. Over to you Liz!

Do Girls Heart Writing? Girls Heart Books is one of THE BEST BLOGS for girls who love to read. (Which is kind of an obvious statement really, given the title of the blog.) But I reckon that it’s also a great blog for girls who love to WRITE! Am I right? If I am, I’ve got some quite exciting news for you. It’s about two things you will really like. Thing one: a new book. By me! Yay!

Thing two: a writing competition. For you!! Yippee Yay Yay! Excited yet? If so, here’s more… My brand new book, North of Nowhere, is out this month. It was a reeeeeaaaaaaally difficult book to write, as it involves lots of quite complicated and twisty time travel manoeuvring. But it was also one of the most fun to write (and hopefully to read as well) because there’s nothing I like better in a book than some quite complicated and twisty time travel manoeuvring.

The main character, Mia, makes a new friend who she communicates with by writing letters to each other inside a diary. The only thing is, she soon discovers that the place where her new friend lives doesn’t exist! This is just the start of a series of impossible situations that Mia finds herself in – which I hope will keep your brain working hard all the way to the end. (It certainly made my brain work super-hard to write it!)

Now, this is where thing two comes in. The novel opens with Mia thinking about all the strange things that have happened. And my extremely clever publishers, Orion Children’s Books, came up with a plan. Hand these opening lines over to YOU and see what you would do with them! So that’s what we’ve done. We give you the opening lines to your story, and you continue the story however you like. It’s your story now, not mine. And together with the lovely people at Guardian Children’s Books, we’ve turned this into a writing competition with some fab fab fab prizes. You can win a digital camera AND a hundred pounds of books for your school AND get your story published on the Guardian Children’s Books’ website!! How cool is that? (Very, I think. I hope you agree.) Oh, and as well as the first prize, two runners up will win a full set of my books, all signed by me.

So. Have you got a pen at the ready? Here are the opening lines… “I need to write it all down. That’s the only way I’ll believe it’s true. Spring half term. All those incredible, impossible things. Did they really happen? I’ve tried a hundred times to tell myself that they couldn’t have done, that none of it is possible. And I’m right; none of it is possible. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is true. Everything did happen, exactly as I’m going to tell it now.”

Does it get you thinking about what might happen next? I do hope so. If so, check out http://www.guardian.co.uk/childrens-books-site for full details about how to enter the competition, and I hope that you’re inspired to give it a go. Happy reading, happy writing and happy time travelling to all! Liz x

Thanks Liz and good luck with the new book.

When you’ve checked out the competition link, come straight back to the GHB competition page, where we have three copies of North of Nowhere, to give away.