Spaghetti Head Press Release

PRESS RELEASE

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“Nobody has ever refused the Award, and given the importance
of the task ahead as a race, you need to know we may have to
review your status if you are not pregnant by your thirty-seventh
birthday in eighteen months’ time.”

Journalist Nell Greene is intelligent, beautiful and quirky – but a failure at relationships, thanks to her untrusting and disruptive inner voice. She has received The Award, and refusing to help repopulate the earth can seriously complicate your life: it is time for Nell to change.

In a world where greed, war, and an environmental disaster have massively reduced the population, survivors have introduced a new system of governance - led by women but delivered by robots, and designed to promote peace and remove opportunities for abuse of power. Or at least that was the intention…

Will Nell overcome the challenges of life in a post-apocalyptic world to find happiness, or will the System win?

Spaghetti Head is Sarah Tyley's debut novel that addresses issues of modern womanhood, environmental devastation and the impact of technological advances on our freedom, relationships and mental health.

Spaghetti Head will be available as an ebook on Amazon from 20 March 2018; and as a paperback via Amazon and www.sarahtyley.co.uk from June 2018. 

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About Sarah Tyley

Sarah Tyley grew up on a dairy farm in Somerset, England, where she developed an unwavering love for cows. After various adventures around the world as a young adult, she went on to study sustainable agriculture and worked for nine years in overseas agricultural economics. These days she cares for gardens and plays tennis in South West France.

Spaghetti Head is her first novel – inspired in part by the female peanut farmers in Mali whom she worked with for three years, and who encouraged her to believe that maybe, one day, women will govern the planet.

www.sarahtyley.co.uk

Twitter: @sarah_tyley
Facebook: @SarahTyleyAuthor

For more information and review copies:

Please contact Becky Slack at Slack Communications on becky@slackcommunications.co.uk or on +44 (0)7854221568

Poetry

I looked out of so many bus, train and car windows during my travelling years, getting all my inspiration for poetry and stories.  There were sights, colours, smells and feelings that I'd never experienced before.  Many of my poems will appear in blogs on here.  They all told a story about where I was and what I was seeing - words flowed effortlessly out of me onto the page.

But after I'd hung up my skin-coloured money belt and settled a while, life started to become very 'normal', and poetry became harder to write.

Oh poetry, poetry, where have you gone?
You've abandoned me, deserted, moved on.
Two lines and it's finished,
my inspiration diminished,
words once flowing, have now flowed on along.

A writer's life

I’m disciplined, so forming a writing routine was easy.  I’m also self-employed, so I can keep at least one day a week free to write.  I write either in my office, surrounded by photos, pendulums, pictures and post-its, or in my caravan out in the garden – depending on the weather!  My cat is never far from me, and neither is a cup of coffee. 

I sit down to start writing at around 10am, trying not to get side-tracked by social media.  I’ll write solidly until lunch, and then do another hour before going out for a walk. It does me good to clear my head – and I’m never more inspired than when I’m sweating out in the fresh air!

Once I have an idea, I just need to get it out, so I could probably write 3,000 to 5,000 words in a day.  Once I have the initial idea onto screen, I then start the process of editing.  In a previous life as an overseas development worker, I wrote many many reports, and so developed a logical approach to managing a lot of words.  When I received feedback on Spaghetti Head, from my first wave of readers, I felt overwhelmed by having to figure out how to make changes to 85,000 words without losing track.  I sat down in front of the manuscript and stared at it, and stared at it, until I figured out the most logical approach.

I never write at weekends.

I find writing therapeutic – so I’m never happier than when I’m tapping away on my laptop.

How did I know I was a writer?

How did I know I was a writer? 

That’s an interesting question, and one I thought I would never be answering on a blog.

I have never (until recently) thought of myself as a writer, even though I have written for most of my life.  I have kept a diary every year since I was eleven, and written poetry since I was seventeen.  None of which I shared, none of which I put forward for publishing - so I didn't think I was a writer.  But then, a few years ago, I was asking myself what I really love doing, and the one thing I kept coming back to was 'writing'.  As I said: I have always written.  So, that must make me a writer, yes?

In 2006, I wrote 90,000 words in 30 days as part of Nanowrimo, and there I had my first draft of Spaghetti Head.  It was at that moment I realised there was a huge leap I needed to take - from writer to author.  I can be a writer and nobody will ever read it.  If I'm an author, the whole point is for someone else to read it.  To me, that was a very scary prospect. But the story needed to be written.

Am I a good writer, or a bad writer?  I'm just a writer - it's what I love to do.  Good or bad.  Being an author is a totally different thing - that takes hour and hours, years even, of re-writing, editing, formatting, perfecting the same piece of writing.

I do not judge myself as a writer, as I do as an author. I am a writer when I am scribbling how I feel about something in my diary.  I am a writer when something inspires me to make up a poem.  Freeing my emotions through my pen is always what has kept me sane, so I will always be a writer. 

Bumble goes to France

Bumble - my mini, Tracey and I, set off on our big french adventure, with a tape player/radio on the dashboard: a tent, which, we discovered at 11pm one evening in the middle of nowhere, had no pegs: a bottle of cider, and not a lot else.  We sang Lilac Wine by Elkie Brooks into the antenna of the radio, and braved narrow mountain passes that terrified both of us. 

We were nineteen, it was our first adventure together, and it was when my mind started to really thrive on the inflow of sights, sounds and smells.  Somehow I needed to capture all of it - and so my usual diary-writing routine moved up a gear, and I added poetry into the mix.  We started our trip grape-picking in the Loire, and this is a poem I wrote whilst there:

GRAPES

Little green ones,
little red ones.
Big green ones,
big red ones.
Mouldy green ones,
mouldy red ones,
all for me to pick
and squash
and cut my bloody finger
and get bloody back ache
and bloody dirty hands.
But, oh, how I love you, Grapes.