Oh dear. It has been a long time since I’ve updated this website. My excuse is that I’ve been trying to get ‘Tell Me The Truth About Love’ into a readable state, so you guys can get your hands on it as quickly as possible. I’m working on the third draft at the moment, and there have been all sorts of problems with it – sections which are too long or too short, pace which is too slow or too fast, boring bits, repetative bits, not-funny-enough bits, bits that made even me go ‘eugh’.

I’m working very hard to correct all of these problems, and can promise you that most of them have been fixed. I’ve now just found a whole lot more which need correcting.

One thing I’ve decided to do for draft three is add a cat. There was a cat in ‘Ways to Live Forever’, and I liked it. Cats are friendly, and very comforting in times of distress.

My request to you lot is: can you help me find a name for this cat? Put suggestions for cat names in the comments, and I’ll choose my favourite. The winning cat namer will be acknowledged IN THE FINISHED BOOK (if Scholastic agree to publish it). I’ll announce the winner on my website when I’ve finished doing my edits.

In other news, ‘Ways to Live Forever’ has been doing well for itself. It won the Bolton Book Award (hurrah!), the Calderdale Book of the Year (yippee!) and the North East Book Award (which made me very happy as a North Easterner myself). It was also shortlisted for the Branford Board Award, the Lancashire Book of the Year, the UKLA Award and the Redbridge Book Award. I am feeling a little miffed that I never got to be involved in any local awards as a child, so I am very much enjoying going along to all of these ones instead. Many, many thanks to the organisers most of whom do this on top of their full-time jobs.

And I’m still blogging away at http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com, for those of you who are impatient with my very infrequent updates. Scroll down the labels on the right-hand side and click on ‘Sally Nicholls’ to find  posts written by me. Or read some of the posts by other authors. They’re worth it.