Witchfield

Katie Peridot quite likes being ordinary. Unfortunately, some very out-of-the-ordinary things have been happening. On top of that her best friend, Mayuri, isn’t her best friend anymore, a sinister sponsorship programme is taking over her school, her mother is acting more crazy than usual and the only person who really seems to understand her is a peculiar cleaning lady. Then she teams up with Themba, the cleverest (and most unpopular) boy at school, and together their investigation takes them deep into the town’s abandoned mine.

What they find there is more terrible than they could have imagined. Can they save Witchfield before it’s too late?

The title definitely formed first: a town that seemed ordinary and boring, but was not. Then the characters came, rushing, filling that space. A sensible girl who liked rationality and just wanted to fit in. A mother who stood out. The ups and downs of their relationship. The friends around the girl. A lonely boy with big glasses who had his sights set high above the limitations of the everyday. A mysterious mountain. Unwanted magic. A villain with a nefarious plot (of course). And a cat (there had to be a cat).

And so the ideas swirled around me, finally settling into a coherent plot that I could then work on. Which I did. A lot. Deleting and cutting and rewriting. And giving-up and starting again. And giving-up and... Let's just summarise and say it took a long time.

I've always been fascinated by unconventional parent-child relationships and Katie and her mother gave me the opportunity to play around with this idea through their delightful, frustrating, bohemian ways. What I also really longed for in the story were the familiar contours of the South African landscape; a setting that reaffirmed that South African children's lives existed in books too. Having said that though, this was not the point of the story. It was never created to fill a literary gap. I  wrote it because these characters arrived insistently in my mind and had to be brave and go on an adventure. That's what drove the writing process, and if South African children smile because they recognise a little bit of themselves and their lives in Katie and Themba and Mayuri,  I certainly will be delighted too.

I wrote a book

I wrote a book.

(I may or may not have also written a whole heap of other things regardless of the fact that nothing is ever published. In this regard, writing is like a bad, slightly embarrassing habit that I can't seem to stop. I write quietly, perhaps a little secretively, in the extreme margins of my days. There's not much space, not much time, but somehow, it's been enough.)

But this book.

I knew there was something special about it when I started writing it ten years ago. The name. The characters that rushed at me so eagerly that I felt swamped. I haven't actually been writing it for ten whole years; for much of that time it was pushed aside, abandoned, banished, forgotten, rejected, hidden. Life happened. But it wouldn't go away; eventually, I pulled it out and faced it again. And again. And again.

So, here it is.

My book in my hands. It's been a long, long journey and the feel of its pages beneath my fingers is a kind of homecoming for me.

That seems all I'm capable of for now. I shall write something more useful soon, like what it's about, how I did it, what happens next and what I plan to do with it.

xx

(And by the way, if anyone is wondering whose magic created this beautiful cover, I was very lucky to find the amazing, extraordinary Cristy Zinn. Find more of her work here.)