Thanks for the great guest post, Harriet!
The Hex Factor by Harriet Goodwin
Publisher: Stripes Publishing
Release date: August 1st 2012
Ages: 9+
Xanthe Fox can't wait
to turn thirteen, but as the big day arrives her world starts to fall
apart. Set-up at school for something she didn't do, it seems her
age-old enemy, Kelly, is making trouble for her...and as things
escalate, even her best friend Saul starts to doubt her innocence. With
the school threatening to expel her, and mysterious glowing Xs appearing
in front of her eyes, Xanthe turns to Grandma Alice for help. But what
the old lady tells her will change Xanthe's life for ever...
Guest Post: Author Harriet Goodwin on her Writing Inspirations!
Whenever I go into a school to talk to
students about my books, there is one question I am always asked: what inspires
me?
Well, one thing I can definitely say: inspiration
never comes when I am looking for it. It arrives when least expected, when I am
in the bath or washing my hair or drifting off to sleep. These days ideas pop
into my head all the time, hijacking my brain and forcing me to reach for the
nearest pad and pencil...but it hasn’t always been this way. Up until a few
years ago I had never written a thing.
It all started with a dream. One night,
two weeks after the birth of my fourth child, I dreamt in vivid technicolour
about a boy who joyrode his mother’s car over the Yorkshire
moors, crashed it and fell down a deep tunnel, ringed with golden ladders and
peppered with luminous green algae. The tunnel was called an Exit, a connecting
place between the worlds of the living and the dead, and the boy in my dream
landed in a strange Underworld, populated by a colourful collection of ghostly
characters. Perhaps I had been eating smelly cheese the previous evening –
certainly something had sparked my imagination! In the morning I remembered the
dream and became convinced that I should turn it into a story. And that was how
The Boy Who Fell Down Exit 43 was born. If I hadn’t had the dream I don’t think
I would be a writer today. It quite simply unlocked a creativity in me that I
didn’t know I possessed.
My
second book, Gravenhunger, was inspired by an archaeology paper I sat at
university on the Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo, near Woodbridge
in Suffolk. I
loved the idea of writing a children’s novel in which the uncovering of long-buried
truths went hand-in-hand with the unearthing of long-buried treasure. If you go
to Sutton Hoo today and stand on the famous burial mound, you will be guaranteed
to soak up the atmosphere of the place in seconds. It is impossible not to feel
inspired!
Then came my third novel, The Hex Factor.
This book was sparked by something altogether different. My family and I are
pretty stoneage and don’t have a TV, but a friend phoned me one day and told me
to watch on youtube the moment that Susan Boyle “got her own back” at the
judges on The X Factor. As she took to the stage, I thought to myself, “What if
the contestants could stare those judges out and reverse all their bad expectations?”...and
of course Susan Boyle opened her mouth and did exactly that! Two weeks later I
was standing in the bathroom under a light bulb, waiting for my bath to run (I
have since been told that it was a true “light bulb moment”) when I realised I
had both a title and a concept for my third book: it would be called The Hex
Factor, and would be about a schoolgirl called Xanthe Fox who discovers she has
special powers: as a True Witch she is able to reverse the evil doings of
Hexing Witches – and accept her thirteen-year-old self in the process.
There is no conventional witchcraft in The Hex
Factor. There’s not even the faintest whiff of a cauldron or a spell-book or a
broomstick. It is rather a story about being brave enough to embrace whoever we
are...and about daring to be different.
I am now working on the sequel...and
enjoying it immensely! This time the stakes are higher and the story in played
out on a much bigger stage. Oh, and there is more than a passing reference to
the witches in Macbeth. I just couldn’t resist it!
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