Madison Lane and the Wand of Rasputin
After seven years, Madison Lane and the Wand of Rasputin now has an updated cover design with the series branding in place. I’ve also revised the story slightly to add some explanation to a few cryptic references that were only going play out in later books, and I’ve finally fixed a characterisation inconsistency that was a hangover from the very first draft of what was originally a very different book. I’m really pleased with the result.
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The Nicest Girl in the School
Forty years before Enid Blyton was carving out her children’s book empire, the queen of the girls’ boarding school story was Angela Brazil. Unfortunately she’s been largely forgotten now, mainly because the vocabulary of her books is not commonly used nowadays, which is fine for university-level literary study, but makes it difficult to keep the interest of the children the books are meant for. So I’ve applied my editing skills to this story, to make it more readable, faster paced, the protagonist more rounded, the point of view more focused. And I’ve changed many of the character names, which were just too unintentionally comical – names like Horace and Muriel, Phyllis and Avis 😆 The vocabulary is still very advanced, but are words we actually use currently and with more context for understanding.
The original version is still freely available, of course. My edition is just an adaptation to bring Angela Brazil’s stories and her depictions of Edwardian England to a new generation of potential fans.
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Elle Carter Neal is the author of the middle-grade chapter book The Convoluted Key, picture book I Own All the Blue, and teen science-fantasy novel Madison Lane and the Wand of Rasputin. She has been telling stories for as long as she can remember, holding childhood slumber-party audiences entranced until the early hours of the morning. Elle decided to be an author the day she discovered that real people wrote books and that writing books was a real job.