Hello!

I’ve starting writing these post in advance (aiming for two a day!) so that when I go to South America you’ll get a post every day while I’m gone! I’ve just got to hope that people actually check my blog without me tweeting about it, but I’ll worry about that later.

I’ve been writing a post every single day for 176 days (let’s not talk about the April fools day post that I forgot, I’ve written enough posts for every day!) and I’ve mentioned writing and the fact I have written a book in a lot of them but I’ve never actually talked about the book and how it came to be!

Disclaimer: the book in the photo is a printed copy, not a published copy – if I was a published author I’d talk about it a lot more!

The idea sparked when I watched the film ‘Zombieland’ with Jesse Eisenberg and Emma Stone – I wanted to write about zombies and I’ve always thought that there are very few, maybe no, zombie apocalypse books that think about survival and living after. Now that I think about it, ‘Warm Bodies’ kind of does but my book is really, really different to warm bodies.

So I knew I wanted to write about zombies and somewhere along the lines I decided I wanted six characters that were all really different and shouldn’t get on. I wrote six character descriptions and then, sort of, waited for the names to hit me – most of the characters have chosen names to cover their identity and I’m so happy with the names I did choose because I love my characters so much.

In my head, I’ve already cast who would play some of them in the film version of my book. It helps me characterise and picture them better when I’m writing.

The idea then evolved into something so that you can barely recognise that it has any connection to ‘Zombieland’ at all – it’s got zombies in it but it focuses on post-apocalyptic survival in a more long-term perspective as well as not being killed by flesh eating zombies.

It’s hard to explain without completely spoiling it and I still have really high hopes for this book so, if one day it is published, I don’t want to have ruined the whole plot by explaining it here.

The picture on the cover was actually drawn by my friend who I used to do all my writing with – I don’t mean she co-wrote the book, I mean she’s also a writer and we used to motivate each other and talk about plot and characters; I’m really lucky to have had a friend like that because I can guarantee that this book would not have been written without someone to guide and support me through it.

Now the exciting bit – I wrote this book in six weeks. I’m still really proud of that.

I’ve talked about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in a few videos on my YouTube channel and probably on here, but it’s an online challenge where a community of people try to write a 50,000 word novel inside the month of November. I started a little bit early – two weeks to plan and whatnot so when November 1st came around I already had 10,000 words and a very solid plan.

This was back in 2012, so I had two weeks of mock exams for my GCSEs on top of trying to write 1667 words a day and it worked – I did it. By achieving the actual 50,000 words I was entitled to a variety of perks from NaNoWriMo.com, including getting 5 free physical copies of my book.

I gave one to a really close friend at the time, Darren – he asked me to sign it for him and everything, it was brilliant. I may have given one to my nan, maybe my mum – there are copies floating around and I can’t remember who has copies to be honest but I know I have one on my book shelf and it might just be my proudest achievement to date.

This post ended up being a lot longer than I anticipated, but if you have any questions about writing or my book, leave them in the comments and maybe I’ll write another post! Or maybe I’ll actually start redrafting the book, it’s been over two and a half years since I wrote the first draft!

Thank you for reading,

Sophie xx




That’s where you’ll find me:
My GoFundMe Page for my trip to Ecuador: http://gofundme.com/iwz21w
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-3CmMYbZuSV5eSvGgkW5Cg
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sophiealuckett
Tumblr: http://lost-in-a-nebula.tumblr.com/
Instagram: http://instagram.com/sophiealuckett
Snapchat: @SophieALuckett