One Apple Tasted – Josa Young

(Note to reader: I’ve TWO COPIES of ‘One Apple Tasted’ to giveaway and all details can be found at the end of this long (but very interesting) post)

Dora Jerusalem has had a sheltered upbringing. She is fresh out of Cambridge with a head full of Victorian novels and romantic dreams when she lands the most perfect job at Modern Woman magazine. It’s clear that Dora can’t believe her luck.

Enter Guy Boleyn, an art dealer with very dubious morals. Inevitably Dora falls completely in love with him, but, as is the case with all good stories, there is a long-buried secret waiting to booby-trap any attempt at happiness.

‘One Apple Tasted’ twists and turns and reveals. The plot is complex, but controlled with finesse. The shifts through decades, the elegant movements to altered settings and the unravelling of the buried secret are all clever. The writing is stylish, the characters are believable and the story skillful.

A jolly good read for these cold Autumn nights.

Asking Josa:

I love to hear all about a writer’s journey into publication. Can you tell me yours? Did you submit your writing elsewhere? Were you ever rejected? How did ‘One Apple Tasted’ come to be published? We were living in my parents-in-law’s house in Bayswater in the 1990s while our home was done up. My mother had died recently and I had two small children, and a nice reliable au pair. In order to get some space from this rather crazy set up to deal with my grief, I spent a week on an Arvon course with Beryl Bainbridge and Nicholas Shakespeare in Devon. From it I emerged much encouraged in my primary desire to write fiction. At that time I specialised in covering maternity leaves and short contracts at senior editorial level for mags like Country Living, and also for the Times.

An unexpected gap of four weeks appeared between two contracts, and I used the time – as I had childcare – to write out an idea I had had, and was invited to use the freezing, empty library of the Royal Society of Literature: just down the road in those days. I bought a word processor, and bashed out 100,000 words – undistracted (no internet in those days) and very chilly. When I had finished, I threw it on the floor, and muddled it into some kind of order. Then I went back to work on a complete high.

One evening not long afterwards, I bumped into an acquaintance at the theatre. He mentioned he had left a major publishing house and was now an agent, I told him what I had just done and he asked to see it. Two weeks later he rang, said he loved it and would have no trouble selling it. Well, you can see from the time lapse that it didn’t work. After only six months I asked him to stop and forgot about my dreams. The rejection letters felt like burrs under my saddle.

This is an extract: ‘I’ve now had a look at the ms and have mixed feelings about it. For a commercial novel it’s terribly slow, has far too much detail and has too autobiographical a feel to it.’

Odd that because apart from the setting, there are few or no autobiographical elements. One reason why there is a lot of detail, is that I explored commercial women’s fiction at the time (having been much inspired by Marika Cobbold’s exceptional Guppies for Tea as well as reading a lot of Virago Modern Classics), and found a lot of it rather thin and unsatisfying. Things have changed since with a lot of clever, funny stuff now emerging.

So many people read the MS and liked it that I kept a tiny flame burning, and sent it to various potential agents and publishers over the years myself, but always with the same results. While working on a contract at a magazine, I did a piece on publishing and self-publishing, and was offered a free trial by self-publishing people Authorhouse. BTW I would NEVER recommend self-publishing a novel – self-publishing is good for niche projects with guaranteed small audiences only – and would never have done this without the chance offer.

When the galleys came back by email, I could see at once that an enormous edit was needed. Another gap between contracts gave me the time, and off I went. Uploaded it again to Authorhouse, felt better about it, but then just left it. Until Lorne Forsyth took me out to lunch recently to pick my brains about websites (which is the other thing I do). In the course of our conversation, he asked about my writing and I mentioned the proof sitting on the website. He explained he was relaunching a small publishing house, and would like to see it. I gave him the password, and he was in touch soon afterwards to say he would like One Apple Tasted for E&T Books’ first list.

I was delighted, but had to wait while he appointed publisher Mark Searle to head the new company, but as soon as he was there, I was called in to find my proof printed out with editorial marks all over it. We had a lovely meeting in January this year, where my internet experience was much appreciated, and I almost skipped through the streets of Bloomsbury afterwards, hardly believing it was happening.

Some very late nights of editing followed. Then it was all accepted and ready to go. Being a small house, there was no colossal marketing budget to pay for prominence in major bookstores, or tours of the country for signings, but I didn’t expect that. Instead I created a website, and we did a great deal of fun stuff on the internet. All I can say is that the publisher is pleased, so we can’t be doing too badly on a wing and a prayer. And the lovely feedback from some of the writers who inspired me to think I would like to write in the first place, such as Marika Cobbold, Julie Myerson, Katie Fford and Elizabeth Buchan have been more than worth it.

Where did you find your initial seed of an idea to write this novel? What if? (as it is for so many writers) was the initial seed. Then the characters completely got away from me, and behaved in all kinds of appalling ways that I had no control over at all.

How long did ‘One Apple Tasted’ take to write? The first draft took five weeks.

From the blank piece of paper to finally holding your book and then beyond? Which part of the process did you most enjoy and which did you find most difficult?These days there is never really a blank sheet of paper, even though I wrote this on a screen the size of a modest mobile phone. The most enjoyable thing was how the book just poured out, as if it had been dammed up inside me. The most difficult was initially thinking that my time as a jobbing hack was over and I would be able to do this lovely thing over and over again, and then finding it wasn’t and I couldn’t.

Who do you feel would be your ideal reader? That is a very tricky question. OAT has been enjoyed by a retired Scots vicar and a teenage boy; I would like to think that all kinds of people with open minds would get something out of it. Not just the classic female readership.

What do you plan to write next? Apart from journalism and blogging, I am writing a novel called Sail Upon the Land.

What is the single most important piece of advice that you would give to an aspiring author? Try an Arvon course tutored by writers you admire.

What are you currently reading?I am having a Dorothy Sayers jag, because it is very different from what I am writing. I am always so aware of leakage from what I am reading. And Stig of the Dump for the eight-year-old every night.

And, finally, (with the skillful smoothness of the finest of interviewers) do you in any way know Simon Cowell? I do not. And I was somewhat repulsed by the tale of the reverse stripper at his party, who dressed herself – but didn’t actually have anything visible with her when she went on stage. And all in front of his mother.

You can buy ‘One Apple Tasted’ by Josa Young here.

And the lovely people at E&T have agreed that I can give away TWO COPIES of ‘One Apple Tasted’. All you have to do is leave a ‘please pick me’ comment by 3pm (GMT) November 13, then I’ll pop all names in a mug and ask a small child to select two winners. This competition is open to all.

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About the author: Josa Young was born in Kent, the fourth of five children, into a family that had lost its way a bit. When she was seven, things fell apart, and she was sent away to boarding school, returning to find her parents living in a completely different part of the country where there was no one to play with at all. They had also neglected to provide her with a bedroom. Books have been an enduring passion, and she got through difficult experiences simply by burying herself in them. Early passions included dinosaurs and Tutankhamen, and Puffin Books cheered and illuminated her childhood in a way real people didn’t. At the age of 25, she met Kay Webb, the inspired Puffin editor, and burst into tears. She read English at Newnham College, Cambridge, and did the Vogue Talent Contest in her last year, becoming a finalist. This led to a job, and a career in glossy magazines, newspapers, and now the more literary end of the internet. Currently she creates websites for fellow writers, and is writing her second novel, Sail Upon the Land, while promoting One Apple Tasted. She loves cooking, walking and reading, is married with three children and lives in West London. She can be found online HERE and HERE.