The Cover Image

So I promised an insight into how the cover looks. It has been long in the making, and I was so furious to find that I've actually deleted some of the earlier jpegs of the covers! However, life goes on, and I still have a bunch of photos to show you!

The story starts with a collage which I printed, cut out and glued onto a piece of blue card. I was procrastinating actually writing by using the excuse of making the cover, though I knew full well that they would never make it to print! The images in the picture are supposed to incorporate both the spy world with the identity badge and the knife, and the normal girly teenage world in the phone, lipstick and I <3 DC (David Callas). 

A little while later, I forgot about hard copies and gluing as everything just fell apart, but kept most of the design, recreating everything on the computer using Microsoft Word! The white blackberry in the corner is actually my own which I took a photo of at a weird angle... I wrote on the lock page "Serena Penelpoe Young - Don't touch my phone." Originally Serena had a blackberry towards the end of the novel but I changed this recently. 

 

Giving up on the unprofessional and squished look of the collage style, I asked my brother Giles, an amazing artist, to design the covers for the three books. This was his first basic design on his iPad which he took from a floor-level silhouette photo and added the knife, blood and blonde hair in. We decided together to forget about girly stylistic features and leave the background colors to be girly while the content remained more striking.

Next, Giles directed me on what to do for the next stage. I asked one of my friends, Isy Currey to take a few black and white photos of my lovely friend Beatrice Ghose. She is an amazing singer and you can check her out Here. 

From the photo I drew it out onto paper and added Union Jack lines, arm, knife and gun as in the design. I also colored the hair honey blonde as I know that it isn't possible to easily get the right texture and shades in hair on photoshop or paint. I scanned this image onto the computer, and although the body is a little too small, I didn't really want to redraw it again. For some reason there is a little curvy t sign on the t-shirt... It doesn't mean anything and it doesn't need to be there, I just took my rubber and drew it out of the shaded area.

On the computer I cleaned up the smudge lines roughly and added in the text in stencil typography. The series is called the S.P.Y Files, as though they are the files of Serena, her personal diary, while my brother made up the text beneath all by himself which is great because I love it! It is now also the text at the top of my blurb. 

I filled in the color in blue for the first book, orange for the second, and purple for the last. The white was however still visible in a scratchy sort of way which I didn't like. I had to neaten it up properly. 

I kept filling in the white spots and the grey areas, having to rewrite the text if I accidentally drew over it to often. I added in the title and my pen name, trying to choose a font size that fit across the page for all three books, which have different length names. Finally I conceded that they would never be symmetrical and so across the three images each has a different size which looks interesting... I felt the color was also a little too dark and the black lettering wasn't visible once I'd removed the white outline. Therefore I made it a little lighter and tidied the lines up. As well as this, I added blood to the knife and made the gun darker so that it stood out more against the grey body. Finally I attached a copy of my old BIA emblem to complete it. 

At last I finished the image with the new, improved version of the BIA emblem and perfected the grey lines between the Union Jack colors as much as possible. You have to look hard to find the flaws but they're there! Most recently I changed the color of the background, believing the colors above to not be quite girly enough! 

This is the image you must look out for on Amazon next Friday, and later on Smashwords if you would like to read the entire novel. However I should warn you that the novel will only be available on Kindle and Kindle applications such as the iPad for the foreseeable  future. 

Personally I'm pretty proud of the finished image, but I would love to hear your views as well. Please check out Beatrice's youtube video, link above, and keep watching the site for more information about the book launch. Questions? Comment below, tweet me at J M Hart or email me at j.m.hart@gmail.com . 

Everyone Has A Book Inside Them

Who takes the time to stare around a big, old library and really count the number of books piled up within? In a library you're bound to have more than 100,000 books stashed along the walls, and that's not even 1% of the total amount of books that exist in the world today. 

Literature has been one of the world's most popular and lasting art for thousands of years, preceded only by music. Every book must have an author and there are billions of names out there attached to the literary masterpieces. Some of these names are fake, of course, and many names have long since passed away, but their works live on.

Now I know I often go on about how much I hate it when celebrities come out with this or that book... For God's sake, who wants to read Justin Bieber's autobiography? I mean he's eighteen. Nothing's happened in his life yet worth noting! However for the most part, intellectual celebrities like Stephen Fry and David Attenborough come out with very interesting and entertaining books. Therefore, I shouldn't generalize celebrities into such a large category as many are educated and intelligent individuals who have the potential to write a startling and intriguing book. 

To be honest, anyone who has a story inside of them, who wants to write for the right reasons, who HAS to write for their own sanity should grab a laptop or a pad of paper and set to it. Everyone has two sides of the brain, the creative side and the logical side. Certainly there are people out there who neglect to use their logical side, but everyone has the means to produce a great art. Everyone has a book inside of them.

Candace Bushnell said that 'A writer must be fearless. A writer has to be like a clawed animal', and of course that is the same for anything you want to do in life. You have to fight for what you believe in, so you can't just sit back and imagine that if you dream about the possibility for long enough the story will write itself. You need to make your dream a reality. 

I've heard a lot of people say that they'd love to write a book, that they have the idea for something big, and a lot of the time I agree with them. Therefore I don't understand why they don't just go for it. Maybe its just not the right time at the moment; they're trying to get a new job, they have young kids, they're moving house, going on holiday, snowed under with work... The list is endless. To that I say 'enough'. If you work really hard, you can get about 700 words in half an hour. That's all it takes! If you're really dedicated to your ideas and you feel the need to write, then set aside half an hour a day for that. By the time you reach your 100th day, your manuscript can be considered a novella, and after that you just keep on trucking until it's done. 

One of my favorite quotes about writers is this: 

I spoke fire, laughed smoke,and madness

spilled forth from my inspiration.

Arthur Holitscher

In other news, I found this amazing clip on Youtube, which has absolutely nothing to do with writing or novels at all, but it touched my heart so deeply, and I've watched it about twenty times. It makes me really think about life, which is so rare in today's crazy society. I decided I just have to share this with you, so tell me what you think!

       The Greatest Speech Ever Made

I'm listening to it again now... 

Where Do These Influences Come From?

I've been reading about people; their behavior, personality, accent. We are continually changing, continually improving ourselves. There is so much about us that we control, but how are influences involved? 

Our parents have a role in influencing us, and our families and the places we are from. Our friends give us feedback and our teachers help us to learn new information. Our character is built around the things we learn from the world around us, but it is also influenced these days by media, particularly books. 

As a first glance, this doesn't seem so bad. Having the inspiration of different authors with different points of view is great! We have a better understanding of others if we can accept their views and learn their ways. If a character is clever, hard working, kind, this can be a good influence on young people. This is generally the reason parents read bedtime stories with their children. 

I recently read a story to my little cousins called 'Grunter: The Story Of A Pig With Attitude' and it was about a malicious, selfish and overbearing pig who was not popular with the other animals on the farm. In fact, they hated him so much that on his birthday they blew him into outer space with a stick of TNT! These sorts of books are very good for teaching small children the difference between good traits and bad traits, particularly since no child wants to explode on their birthday. 

However, it is more difficult to find the bad traits in non-children's fiction. The boundaries aren't quite as clear  in adult fiction, and to emulate some characters would be downright dangerous. For example, to follow the interests of a certain Christian Grey or the tyrannical President Snow of the Capitol would make for a difficult life in our society. Even valiant Robin Hood is a hazardous influence. He's become a symbol of modern justice, a snub to the ruling class and a celebration of independence and fair play, but he is still a liar and a thief.

Fictional characters out of novels and folktales can also be troubling. The vast popularity of the Frankenstein story may well have triggered scientific horrors such as human experiments and mutations within concentration camps and prisons. However, it also may have inspired such medical advances as organ transplants, cardiac defibrillation and reattachment of severed limbs, saving millions of lives. 

In short, I feel that we our to each make our own decisions. With each novel I read I take in the character with a pinch of salt. If the author is not perfect, then how can his characters be? It is impossible not to be influenced by the goings on around us, but at the same time we should try to find the good rather than the bad in each aspect we build of ourselves. 

Novels in Today's Society

The art of reading is dying out. People would rather flick through a trashy magazine than pick up a book or a kindle and read a good story. To be honest, I do like a quick look in those stupid magazines myself, but the interest I find in them is similar to slowing down the car to see if anyone died in the car crash on the side of the road. Personally I find this grotesque interest to be abhorrent, but nearly everyone does it. It all stems back to the roman times, when people used to go to the Circus Maximus to watch people die on the race track and be torn into pieces by lions. 

Unfortunately, we are humans, and this is human nature. Now that murder for entertainment is illegal, people have turned to watching celebrities being torn apart by the press for the smallest problem. Of course this would be absolutely fine, except that it is such a waste of time! We shouldn't give a crap about other people's fashion sense or hairstyle. It's just not worth it!

Instead we should be using our brains. With every interesting story we read, with every illustrative word, our minds learn something. People who read a lot of books are usually more intelligent, and it opens a lot of doors when you have an extensive vocabulary. Sometimes a craze catches on and everyone reads a certain book, but this happens maybe once every few years. Society needs to read all the time. Rather than watching soaps and chat shows on the television, do something meaningful and read a book instead!

Reading is an art; it shows you have a deeper comprehension of the world and its languages. Any story will help you learn a little something, whether a different culture, the extent of an author's imagination or a window into the past. In addition, the thought of a fictional tale sets your creative cogs turning. Some people have a very small imagination, but even just viewing a piece of art, a novel, a painting, a song... These all help to inspire your imagination.

I first started reading books at the age of five, and I still remember my first 'proper' book, the Borrowers by Mary Norton. Since then I've read so many I can't even begin to count them, but I know I've read every novel at home and most of the school library books! Nowadays I wake up in the middle of the night a couple of times, thinking that things I've dreamed are real. Sometimes in the mornings I walk around confused because I think that what I dreamed actually happened, and this occurs a lot more than I'm proud of!

I'm not trying to say that imagination is a nuisance. That's not my aim. I love creativity actually because I can  think of pretty inventive ideas for not handing in my homework or forgetting a duty... The fact is that most employers look for someone with a big imagination, not a dreamer who will stare out of the window all day, but someone overflowing with ideas who can help the company to flourish. This is the ultimate ideal that you should be aiming for. 

In our secular society where all we care about is money and the employment ladder, isn't this perfect for helping you achieve your goal? Therefore my advice to you is to close the magazine, turn off the television,  and find a book. There are billions out there, and all of them will help you to become a more interesting and educated person. 

The BIA

The BIA is the secret government agency that Serena works at. The BIA stands for the British Intelligence Agency, and is one of the most secretive organisations in the world. Only when the United Kingdoms fully trust an allied country do they allow the secret knowledge of this agency to be known.

While the purpose MI5 is to protect the UK at home and MI6 abroad, the BIA protects other countries from their riotous civilians, such as a rich and violent crazy person. When these civilians go on the run from the UK security services, they tend to go to large countries such as Russia, America and China where agents will have to follow them, usually undercover, to arrest them and bring them home; a similar task to Interpol. However at the same time, if the security services fail to convict civilians while still in the UK, the BIA will go undercover to reveal the illegal activity. These sorts of missions usually include drug cartels, human trafficking and heavily armed fights.

The BIA was the first secret service to involve a teen sector, which started in the 1970's after a series of drug rings throughout schools where it was necessary to engage a group of well-trained teenagers. A shining student is watched throughout primary school and prep school, and if they show potential, they are given a scholarship to a secondary school such as St Aloysius School in Hastings, a school built to integrate young spies with the outside world. After a few weeks, the student is asked into the headmaster's office, where they will be interviewed by the Head of the BIA himself. The parents of the child will never be involved.

Mr Boot, the headmaster of St Aloysius, was one of the first teen sector spies of the first team, and chose to leave the espionage business, but not the BIA. He continues to help his ex-employers by keeping an eye on the current spies. St Aloysius is one of eighteen schools across southern England which has been created for the BIA, but to most people these are simply ordinary public secondary schools. However, each of these schools will contain no more than ten teen spies at one time.

As far as Serena knows, the BIA is the only secret service in the world to use teenagers as assets, and therefore prides herself on being very select and special. Each spy tends to have their own unique skill which makes them invaluable to the BIA, such as Serena's ability to read people's body language and tone of voice to understand them and to read lies.

Please note that the BIA is not a real secret service, at least not to my knowledge, and the information on this page is fully of my own imagining. The BIA was once the Border and Immigration Agency for the UK but is now defunct.

The Origin of the S.P.Y Files

When I was nine years old, I woke up in the middle of the night, and crept through the dark of my bedroom to find a piece of scrap paper, and I wrote down a few words before dropping back to sleep again. A few weeks later the piece of paper got lost among the other junk hanging around in my cupboard. However, the words were forever imbued into my head. Four weeks ago, my little brother found that scrap of paper as he was going through some old photos. 

For years I didn't tell anyone about this idea I had formed in my head. There was too much else going on! When I was eleven, I wrote a short story about cat mutants wreaking havoc on London. That only turned out to be thirteen A4 pages when I was done with it, and it truly sucked but I told my friends about it and their support was really amazing! 

A few months after trashing "The Cats of Shishkaboo" I turned my mind back to this idea of a spy story. I came up with the idea of the BIA, British Intelligence Agency, whose emblem you can see on the backdrop. It was over two years later that I realized that it was a copy of the CIA, but to be honest, I didn't really want to change it. By that time I was completely attached to my plans. Fact about the emblem: I drew its shape using one of the school cups as a tracer! That's why it has curvy edges. 

When I was thirteen I started to draw my first impressions of the characters and glue them into a school exercise book. By this time my main character's name had evolved from Safira Peytil Yester to Sophia, although nowadays she is known as Serena Penelope Young. Unfortunately I lost this little book and ignored the ideas for a few months. 

However, my mind became more and more preoccupied with my spies, and eventually, sitting in the car on the way home from spending New Year's Day of 2010 at my grandparents, I couldn't take it anymore. I picked up my iPod touch and started writing out the introduction that I had been perfecting for five years. That same first paragraph is still the opening of my novel. I still feel so attached to my iPod, because I wrote the entire first draft of the book, 64,000 words, on it, emailing it to myself chapter by chapter. There was a point where I almost gave up writing after I accidentally pressed the delete button rather than the send button on chapter seven, and really didn't want to rewrite it...

Fortunately my friends spurred me on, and if it hadn't been for them, I would never have finished. There is a small part of each of my friends in the story, whether they wrote a paragraph, created a character or did something stupid to inspire me. I would like to proudly say that chapter twenty was inspired by my school, so if you want to hear the crazy, you'll have to keep reading my posts. 

One of my friends, who I was sharing a dorm with during the first part of my writing stayed up late with me for weeks and we brainstormed the entire series. I'm not altogether sure where the titles of the novels came from but they sort of appeared one morning!

• Live by the Knife
• Work by the Bomb
• Fight by the Bullet

Finally the evolution of my own pseudonym came around. I don't know why I want one, and I don't know why it should matter, but I do, so don't ask. When I first decided I wanted to hide my name, my first choice was Millie Hartie, and there it stayed for about two years due to my nickname Harty. Then I played around with MJM Hart and JesM Hart, and finally decided to go with J M Hart, after my middle names. 

To be honest, when I was younger I never really fitted in and I wanted to write stories at first just to escape. For me it was about being in control of something, where I could be myself and not have to hide. These days I am absolutely content with who I am! Being able to have the independence of my own goals, to show off my efforts to the world and share my stories makes me who I am today. When I was six, my teacher, Mrs Wells, told my mother I was going to be a writer. My mother told me that this summer.

Well, Mrs Wells, you must be a fortune teller. 

Spies: The Action We Want In On

Many novels in the Spy fiction genre have been adapted for films, including works by John le Carré, Robert Ludlum and John Buchan. These are old classics, interpreting the imagination of the authors to the viewers through sound and colour. Popular demand caused these films to be made, their producers seeing an enormous gap in the film industry.

These films have sparked the beginning of a new era of Spy fiction. Nowadays there are thousands of novels which have been adapted into film, such as the James Bond and Alex Rider Series, as well as the Cherub and Henderson's Boys books. At the same time, action thriller films began to spring up, now filling almost 15% of the total film market. Famous films include Johnny English, Austin Powers and Charlie's Angels. 

However, today most contemporary Spy stories have trended away from spectacular fantasies and terrifying situations in favor of realism. The gadgets and private planes have been swapped for guns and secret identities, hiding and running rather than openly pursuing the opposition. This trend can be seen in the Bourne films, the latest Bond films and most films headlining Jason Statham. 

Offering a combination of technological thrills, exciting escapism and action-packed adventures, the generic spy film combines the science fiction and action genres that audiences just can't get enough of. The dream of one day being caught up in a twisting tale of corruption and lies is similar to that of one day living on the moon, but we watch it incessantly anyway. 

Personally I love Spy stories. The secretive and bad-ass attitude is so different from my own that its easy to be caught up in the plot line and forget myself as I read through their adventures. Perhaps I have a predisposition for spies because I once wanted to be one desperately. Fortunately, rather than pursuing that route, I found that I possessed a skill for writing, and now narrate the exploits of my own fictional spy characters into a series of novels. 

In the coming weeks I will tell you more about my novels, and eventually post the chapters up on this blog. I hope you enjoy it, and in the meantime, my question to you is: Do you prefer reading about spies, or watching them in action?

Why are Spies and Vampires so Popular?

Which types of books do you find the most interesting? Are the Hunger Games your thing, or do you prefer the Gallagher Girls? Perhaps you prefer more intellectual classical works such as Alice and Wonderland and Treasure Island. Most young adults don't read at all, but sometimes there are huge crazes and entire communities become engrossed in one particular series. 

Once this was Harry Potter, which captivated the hearts of billions through its magical and visionary setting. The quest that we were lead on through the novels was full of mystery and excitement, and most importantly, plenty of unexpected twists. 

A few years ago the craze was the Twilight Series, incorporating dark myths and humankind's perverse interest in bloodshed and macabre romance. The tangled love triangle and complicated secrets which entrap Bella fascinate us while we read, eager to know what could happen in this distorted reality.

James Bond has always been the epitome of cool, and whenever someone mentions spies, this is the idea that your mind will spring to. The author once a spy himself, Fleming was able to create a cryptic and furtive character who will remain forever in literary history. The excitement of a life that none of us will ever be able to lead is the reason that spy novels are so popular!

Essentially it all comes down to seven basic story types that each and every tale must include to be able to lift itself off the ground.  The unrealistic nature of these archetypes are enjoyable as they create an idea which no one could expect in their own day to day lives. These include:

• Rags to Riches
• Hero with a Fatal Flaw
• A Debt that Must be Paid
• Love triangle
• Tragic Romance
• Spider and the Fly
• The Gift that is Taken Away

My question to you is: can you find a story line that doesn't in some way implicate one or more of these basic types? 

What I am basically trying to say here is that Spies and Vampires are so popular in modern culture because they signify a reality that can remain only a dream to us in real life. The element of vibrancy that we experience through these novels just cannot be replicated in real life. Therefore we are encouraged to dream on and imagine, pretend that life could be different. Fictional stories appeal to our imaginative senses simply because we get bored with out own lives. That's just the thing, no matter how much you have already, humans still want more.