Happy Halloween, bookish fiends! I hope you’ve been ghoulish tonight. I have most definitely been ghoulish… I’ve got the worst lurgy ever, so I’m pretty green and hacking up phlegm for days. If that’t not chilling, I don’t know what is! That meant my halloween celebrations were done from my cosy bed surrounded by tissues, strepsils and panadol.

A few things have happened since my last update, the first of which was the reveal of my forthcoming YA novel, TEETH IN THE MIST . The response has been absolutely wonderful—thank you!

I also received a box of ARCs in the mail, which was a fantastic day!

I completed pass pages as well as pass page proof queries, and last but not least: TEETH IN THE MIST sold to Russia! Slava!

I went on my writing retreat to Geneva with two other writers, and it was fantastic! The retreat was run by Marcus Sedgwick (author of Ghosts of Heaven, Midwinterblood and more) and Maureen Hansmann. Marcus and I sat down separately to chat to Mark Stay of The Bestseller Experiment to chat about it (Mark and Marcus had their chat in the outdoor hot-tub!). You can listen to that here.

Dawn Kurtagich, Holly, Mark Stay, Marcus Sedgwick. Geneva, September 2018

The book I most recently blurbed, hree Strikes, was published, with stories from Kat Ellis, Lucy Christopher and Rhian Ivory, and it has been getting some well-deserved press and attention! If you haven’t picked it up yet, there’s still time to enjoy it over a roaring fire with a cup of cocoa this fall.

My dear friend, Kat Ellis, was finally able to announce her book deal for Harrow Lake, coming from Penguin Random House in 2020. You guys. THIS BOOK. I love it. I read it ages ago, and was lucky enough to chat to Kat about it many a time over coffee and cake, and it is SO FREAKING GOOD. It’s going to creep you guys out! More on that over the coming months. In celebration, my friend Jennielyreads and I threw her a surprise celebratory film night to celebrate! It was a lot of laughs and Kat deserves way, way more.

Now that TEETH is all done and dusted, I’ve been throwing myself into new projects. Three different ideas, one of which will be my fourth novel, have been keeping my attention, but I’ve also been finishing up my adult novel (which I refer to as my Orange Book—OB for short). OB has been such fun! I absolutely love the voice and the story, and it’s been wanting to be completed since 2010 when I wrote the first draft (the first and only time I wrote 93,000 words in a month!—By the way, I don’t recommend this method of writing. I had burn-out for weeks). That being said, I am going to sort-of Nano it… a bit. We’ll see. No pressure. (Ha. Haaaaa).

OB is a story of obsession, and I’m a little bit (ahem) obsessed with it, if truth be told. I’m aiming to have it finished and to my agents this month (I am very, very close), at which point the wait begins for edits… Publishing is a long slog! :D While waiting for those edits, I’ll return to those other three YA ideas…

November is nearly upon us, and so is my birthday! WOOP! I’m thinking it’s about time I do a giveaway of one of the TEETH IN THE MIST ARCs… look for that soon over on my instagram and twitter. TEETH is also available to add to your Goodreads TBR, and I’ve just learned it’s also available for pre-order!

Onto reading. A recent 5* read:

(GO BUY THIS BOOK NOW IT WAS AMAZEBALLS). Alice Feeney is an author I’m going to watch. She is subtle, but her narrative blows a punch that was breathtaking. More of this, please.

Current Read: NIGHT FILM by Marisha Pessl