Siobhan Curham - Finding Cherokee Brown

Title page

Copyright Finding Cherokee Brown Published 2013 by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN Text copyright © 2013 Siobhan Curham The moral rights of the author have been asserted ISBN 978 1 4052 6038 1 eISBN 978 1 7803 1265 1 www.electricmonkeybooks.co.uk www.egmont.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library 50042/1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Please Note: Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont cannot take responsibility for any third party content or advertising. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet. EGMONT Our story began over a century ago, when seventeen-year-old Egmont Harald Petersen found a coin in the street. He was on his way to buy a flyswatter, a small hand-operated printing machine that he then set up in his tiny apartment. The coin brought him such good luck that today Egmont has offices in over 30 countries around the world. And that lucky coin is still kept at the company’s head offices in Denmark.

Dedication For Jack Phillips and Katie Bird – may your souls forever be fearless

Prologue Prologue I’ve decided to write a novel. If I don’t write a novel I will kill somebody. And then I will go to jail and, knowing my lousy luck, end up sharing a cell with a shaven-headed she-he called Jeff who smokes roll-ups and thinks it’s cool to keep a fifteen-year-old girl as a slave. But if I write a novel I can kill as many people as I like with my words and never have to be anyone’s slave. It was Agatha Dashwood who first put the idea of writing a book into my head. Last Saturday afternoon I’d gone down to the Southbank – again – and I was browsing through the tables of second-hand books – again – and there it was, stuffed in between a biography of Princess Diana and A Complete History of Piston Engines : So You Want to Write a Novel? by Agatha Dashwood. There was a photo on the cover of this fierce old lady glaring over her glasses like some kind of psycho librarian. But that didn’t put me off, because the first thing I thought when I read the title was, Yes – I do . Which was a bit random because I’d never thought of writing a novel before. So I picked the book up and did my usual page 123 test. I do this whenever I’m deciding whether to buy a book. I don’t bother reading the blurb on the back, or the first page – the writer’s obviously going to be trying their hardest there, aren’t they? It’s how they’re getting on by page 123 that’s the real test. If they’re rubbish at writing or bored with their story then you can bet they won’t be making any effort at all by that point. So I flicked through the yellowing pages, trying not to be put off by the musty smell, and this is what it said at the top of page 123: ‘ The Authentic Novelist Writes About What They Know. Aspiring novelist, if you want your writing to ring true – for your words to echo around your reader’s head with passion and clarity, like church bells calling worshippers to mass – then you have to write about what you know.’ I know the church bells and worshippers stuff sounds a bit nuts, but the rest of it made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. I snapped the book shut and took it over to pay. With Agatha Dashwood’s help I was going to write a novel about my crappy life but, unlike my crappy life, it wouldn’t be dictated by my mum or Alan or the brain-deads at school or any of my stupid teachers. It would be my story. Told my way.

NOTEBOOK EXTRACT

Character Questionnaire No. 1

Chapter One

Chapter Two

NOTEBOOK EXTRACT

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

NOTEBOOK EXTRACT

Character Questionnaire No. 2

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

NOTEBOOK EXTRACT

Character Questionnaire No. 3

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

NOTEBOOK EXTRACT

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

NOTEBOOK EXTRACT

Character Questionnaire No. 4

Epilogue

Finding Cherokee Brown Playlist

Acknowledgements

I’ve decided to write a novel. If I don’t write a novel I will kill somebody. And then I will go to jail and, knowing my lousy luck, end up sharing a cell with a shaven-headed she-he called Jeff who smokes roll-ups and thinks it’s cool to keep a fifteen-year-old girl as a slave. But if I write a novel I can kill as many people as I like with my words and never have to be anyone’s slave.

It was Agatha Dashwood who first put the idea of writing a book into my head. Last Saturday afternoon I’d gone down to the Southbank – again – and I was browsing through the tables of second-hand books – again – and there it was, stuffed in between a biography of Princess Diana and A Complete History of Piston Engines :

So You Want to Write a Novel? by Agatha Dashwood.

There was a photo on the cover of this fierce old lady glaring over her glasses like some kind of psycho librarian. But that didn’t put me off, because the first thing I thought when I read the title was, Yes – I do . Which was a bit random because I’d never thought of writing a novel before. So I picked the book up and did my usual page 123 test. I do this whenever I’m deciding whether to buy a book. I don’t bother reading the blurb on the back, or the first page – the writer’s obviously going to be trying their hardest there, aren’t they? It’s how they’re getting on by page 123 that’s the real test. If they’re rubbish at writing or bored with their story then you can bet they won’t be making any effort at all by that point. So I flicked through the yellowing pages, trying not to be put off by the musty smell, and this is what it said at the top of page 123:

‘ The Authentic Novelist Writes About What They Know.

Aspiring novelist, if you want your writing to ring true – for your words to echo around your reader’s head with passion and clarity, like church bells calling worshippers to mass – then you have to write about what you know.’

I know the church bells and worshippers stuff sounds a bit nuts, but the rest of it made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. I snapped the book shut and took it over to pay. With Agatha Dashwood’s help I was going to write a novel about my crappy life but, unlike my crappy life, it wouldn’t be dictated by my mum or Alan or the brain-deads at school or any of my stupid teachers. It would be my story. Told my way.

Character Questionnaire No. 1

‘When I started out in my writing career, many years ago, writing short stories and serials for The Respected Lady magazine, the Character Questionnaire became my most cherished friend. Use the template below before you start your story to get to know your own characters even better than you know yourself.’