Angela Young, who came to TLC for an assessment of an early draft of a debut novel that would later be published by Beautiful Books as Speaking of Love, has returned with a second book, The Dance of Love. In an article for independent magazine Shiny New Books, she describes the tricky process of combining fact with fiction; the book is based in part on her great-grandmother, Noël Rothes, who survived the sinking of the Titanic. The trick, she says, is to find ‘synergy’. Several drafts of the book stalled, and she found herself frustrated by the process of editing and re-editing with a sense that something fundamental wasn’t working. Following a TLC assessment in which the reader identified the Titanic strand as problematic, she realised that she had been trying too hard to be faithful to fact instead of emotional truth; the heart of the novel she needed to write. A subsequent edit resulted in her agent Heather Holden-Brown selling the book to Buried River Press, a new paperback imprint of Robert Hale. It is due for release in July 2014.
To read more about Angela’s process and journey to publication, you can read the full article here.
