An Interview with Charlie Halfhide, Mae Gaynor, and Layla Cray: the team who wrote and self-published YA novel ‘Seven Wonders’ - by Tillie Holmes
Cover artwork by Lily Stock
‘Seven Wonders’ is a young adult fiction novel, due to be published on 11.12.2020. Written by Charlie Halfhide and Mae Gaynor, and edited by Layla Cray, the novel came to life as part of the ‘Collaborative Projects’ module on the Creative Writing course at Falmouth University. I asked the group about the process of working on the book, in order to find out just how a class project turns into a self-published novel.
Q – What’s the book about?
Seven Wonders is a young adult novel about six friends who take a last-hurrah road-trip the summer before they part ways before university. It's dual perspective, following both Iris and Artie. Iris is nervous about the big changes that come with moving to university and leaving your friends and family behind. On the other hand, Artie fails to get into his dream university and is feeling unsure about his future. It's happy, sad, silly, and full of all the summer magic that has been so desperately missed this year especially!
Q - Can you describe the roles each team member fulfilled?
Charlie: Mae and I co-wrote the novel. We’ve been doing everything from implementing Layla’s suggested edits, to sourcing sensitivity and beta readers, commissioning a cover artist, someone to make promotional material for us, and are about to start our marketing campaign.
Layla: I was brought in as the editor after the first draft had been completed, so it’s been my job to go through and make a note of any areas where the plot isn’t quite working out, or where a line could be rearranged or reworded to better convey the meaning. Once we’re at a place where we’re happy with the actual content of the novel, I’ll also be doing copy edits to check for things like spelling and grammar.
Q - Can you describe the process of co-writing a book?
Charlie: It’s been 20 months since we began the project. We started it at the end of first year, so looking back, it’s really hard to decipher who came up with what. I think the actual ‘seven wonders of the world, but it’s just set in the slightly-less-epic UK’ idea came from me. I’d wanted to write a road trip book for a long time, but I’m not very well travelled! We both love a dual-perspective book so we decided on a vague plot, and just got to writing alternating chapters. The best thing about working with Mae is that, well, she’s one of my very best friends. I can just say a word to her, and she knows exactly what I mean. It’s something we’ve been told shows in our writing together, and it’s one of the few compliments I’ll take willingly!
Mae: Every week we’d meet up to plan the next ‘chapter’ together - we’d plan the next section of the book in regards to both points of view that we’d be writing, so each ‘chapter’ would be made up of two points of view. Then we’d write our respective pieces and then read each other’s before our next meeting so if we had anything about the other persons that we wanted to change or add, then we’d discuss that first, before planning the next section. We wanted to make sure that it wasn’t a case of ‘I’ve written half the book and these are my characters and Charlie’s written the other half and those are his characters’, we wanted to make sure that both our voices were well-incorporated into the whole book and that both had influences over all the characters. The more we wrote, the easier this got, which was definitely helped by the fact that we’re such good friends and work well together when planning/writing.
Q - Is Seven Wonders your first complete work? What have each of you written individually before this project?
Mae: In terms of fully written, edited, and published, yes. However, I have two other novels written that I’m in the process of editing - one YA fantasy and one YA contemporary - with the hopes of being able to publish them traditionally at some point in the future.
Charlie: I’ve had a few articles and such published before, and a bit of poetry, but this is my first complete fiction work. I’ve never done something on this great a scale before.
Q - What issues have you had to overcome?
Mae: Personally, I’ve had to learn how to be more patient, both with myself and others. I have a habit of overworking myself, especially when I get excited about a project such as this one, so I’ve had to learn when to listen to my body when it’s telling me to rest. Similarly, I’m a person who likes to make a plan and stick to it, so I’ve had to learn to take things as it comes in regards to changes in our schedule or commitments that may take priority.
Layla: For me, the biggest challenge was figuring out how to actually be an editor. I’ve never had to look at someone else’s work through unbiased editorial eyes before, so it was a little hard at the beginning to figure out the appropriate level of professionalism to have when in Editor Mode.
Q - Is there a reason you've opted for self-publishing as opposed to traditional?
Charlie: There are so many reasons that made self-publishing make more sense to us. Firstly, and probably the main reason, just the time constraints on the project. We only had 3 months to re-write, edit, get feedback, format, publish, market and advertise, etc. Self-publishing meant we had the control to set our own targets and deadlines without having to give over so much control to someone else. Ultimately, the work stayed in our hands, which I think as we were already co-writing made everything a lot easier. It also meant we had creative control over things like the cover art, which you usually wouldn’t with traditional publishing. It made the project feel more ours.
Q - What are your long-term hopes for this project? Can you see yourselves continuing it in any way?
Mae: Charlie and I have discussed writing another book together - while this has been stressful at times, it’s also been really fun so I would love to try our hand at writing another book together one day. Other than that, I would love for this to open up opportunities for me to be able to write other books, whether I self-publish or publish traditionally, to add to my repertoire.
Charlie: Mae and I have talked about writing another book together, theoretically, and I think it’s both something that we’re open to. It’s been stressful at times but ultimately it has been a really amazing experience, and none of us can wait to see the end result.
Written by Tillie Holmes
Edited by Kate Whittington