Today I am excited to be taking part in day two of the UK blog tour for The Rain by Virginia Bergin. The Rain releases in two days, July 17th via Macmillan. I had the pleasure of reading an ARC of the book last month and I really enjoyed it. My review will up on release day :) This blog tour is a unique tour with fun and inventive posts and props goes to Macmillian for coming up with the awesome idea. I hope you enjoy the post and will check out The Rain this summer. #TheRainIsComing
THE LIFE CYCLE OF THE RAIN
We all remember learning about the water cycle at school don’t we? How the sun heats the water, and the water evaporates and… blah blah blah. The Water Cycle was never a topic that set our school books on fire BUT maybe if Ruby Morris had paid more attention to her Geography teacher then she’d know exactly which clouds might kill her! So we’re here to educate you, because don’t forget, just one drop will kill you. From the writing process to publication, join us for a blog tour with a difference, as we learn about a FAR more interesting cycle – The Life Cycle of The Rain by Virginia Bergin.
The sun heats the ocean i.e. Virginia Bergin gets an excellent
idea
Prevailing winds pick up the manuscript and deliver it to the
Agent Louise Lamont
Pressure (also known as excitement)
begins to build within the publishing cloud of Macmillan with Editor
Rachel Petty
Virginia Bergin is as high as a cirrocumulus cloud as her book
begins to form
Storm clouds gather over Frankfurt and Bologna – Right A
downpour of marketing and publicity support
Take shelter in your local bookshop – Totnes Bookshop
Prevailing Winds: blog tour
part two by Louise Lamont
When Macmillan told me that they
wanted to model THE RAIN’s blog tour on the water cycle, I was ALL IN. Nothing
in my life since has ever been as beautiful as the water cycle diagrams I
coloured in (skillz) for Miss Wilmshurst in 3rd Form Geography; this
blog tour was a chance to recapture that glory, to use words like
‘precipitation’ and genuinely mean it.
Then I read Virginia’s blog about
the months of terror I put her through (that’s a blog-tour preview for you) and
I thought ‘Wait. As a responsible agent, I should probably address this issue
of the months of terror I put her through.’ It’s true that every step of the
publishing process can throw up a new kind of torment for authors, and in a way
our role as their agents is to be the John Cusack to their Jeremy Piven:
And look how well Jeremy Piven
has done since! See, it all works out for the best.
Anyway, my part of THE RAIN’s
cycle began last September, when a friend of Virginia’s suggested to her that
she might need an agent and suggested she get in touch with me. I liked the
gumption of Virginia’s approach – saving up her time and money to see once and
for all whether she could actually write a novel – but I was sceptical that a really
good novel could have come of the process. I was very wrong. It was very good.
I knew this when I found myself putting it down only to press my nose against
the window of my flat and watch all the people in the street trying to find
shelter from a sudden bout of precipitation.
‘Doomed,’ I whispered sadly.
‘You’re all going to die now.’
Overnight I sent Virginia a few
editorial notes (mostly along the lines of ‘ewwww why did you ewwww?’ because
it turns out I’m quite squeamish); unfazed by her future agent’s lily-livered
suggestions, she agreed to sign up as a client and just like that we were ready
to make like a monsoon and shower this town with submissions.
The submission process for THE
RAIN (or H20 as it was known back in the day) was complex. It was intense like
a cloudburst and pressured like an isobar; at one point it featured a roomful
of upturned umbrellas (ellas, ellas) and a gruesome snow globe. It ended with
me waving a laptop around a Paris apartment, trying to find enough internet to
bring a four-way auction to a close. There is nothing quite like that moment of
knowing your author is going to the best possible home on the best possible
terms.
And now here we are, scudding
towards publication, and I’m amazed that I still represent Virginia Bergin,
because it’s taken me all this time to pronounce her surname properly (‘berg-in
as in iceberg, not ber-gin as in alcohol. COME ON, Lamont, you can get this’).
I also once told her to meet me at the wrong station at the wrong time when we
were visiting prospective publishers, but she may have forgotten all about that
15 minute potentially-life-altering trauma so let’s not bring it up now. May
you all enjoy reading THE RAIN as much as I did, but may you not then shy away
from water for quite as long.
Virginia Bergin learned to roller-skate with the children of eminent physicists. She grew up in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, and went on to study psychology, but ruined her own career when, dabbling in fine art at Central Saint Martins, she rediscovered creative writing. Since then she has written poetry, short stories, film and TV scripts. Most recently she has been working in online education, creating interactive courses for The Open University.
She currently lives on a council estate in Bristol and has taken to feeding the birds in between writing the sequel to The Rain.
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