Lynne Kelly’s Launch for Chained!
Posted By Vonna on May 14, 2012
Saturday we got to celebrate the long awaited launch of Lynne Kelly’s debut novel CHAINED with the good people at Blue Willow Bookshop. Lynne started off telling us a bit about the evolution of this story which started life as a picture book, and the first version is one that, thankfully (she says), no one 
else ever saw. Lynne took it to a critique group where Charles Trevino suggested it should be a novel. She said she thought, wow, a novel—that’s a lot of words!
Lynne said she started writing one chapter at a time, not knowing what was going to happen in the next chapter. She says she did know how it would end though, sort of. She joined a critique group and says they didn’t run her off, so she stayed and wrote the book. Uma Krishnaswami gave her an early critique, then gave it a final read before publishing to make sure it was all culturally correct. Revision took the storyline from three years to one and a half years to one year. CHAINED sold 
to Macmillan two years ago this month.
The publisher asked Lynne to suggest illustrators for the cover, so she researched book covers she loved and came up with some suggestions. One book, Elephant Bill, became the mentor’s backstory. She brought a poster to show the process the cover went through. Varsha Bajaj brought Lynne two 
carved Ganesh figures from a recent trip to India which worked their way into the story as Hastin’s father’s occupation as woodcarver.
Just before we all got in line for the signings, we had a little time for questions from the audience:
Q. After doing all that research, do you want to go to India?
Lynne: I do! It would be a fascinating place to visit.
Q. How many revisions did you do from when you started in 2006 until the end of your copy edits?
Lynne: So many! I don’t know. It’s been through a huge evolution.
Q. Did you focus only on writing this or did you work on other things at the same time?
Lynne: Around 2008 or 2009, after I started querying, I started work on other things. It was refreshing to work on something different.
Q. Did you ever throw in the towel?
Lynne: No, but I don’t know why. I guess I had enough little encouragements to keep me going and I found I really liked writing.
Note: I wrote the questions and answers as fast as I could, but I’m afraid everything still got a bit shortened. But you can probably find all the answers 
in full on these posts from Lynne’s blog tour:
May 7: Naughty Book Kitties
May 8: I Like These Books
May 9: Lisa the Nerd
May 10: A Good Addiction
May 11: Lost for Words
May 12: Larkin’s Book Bloggers
And if you haven’t gotten your copy of CHAINED yet, 
you can read the first chapter here!
Congratulations, Lynne! And best wishes to CHAINED!
(And may I just add, best cakeballs ever!)
