Pen to Paper: 5 Things You Didn't Know About ... Janet Edwards

5 Things You Didn't Know About... is a weekly Pen to Paper original feature, where each week, a different author will tell us five things we didn't previously know about them (and sometimes about their characters too!).
You can find previous 5 Things You Didn't Know About... posts by clicking HERE.

Introducing ... Janet Edwards

Janet Edwards lives in England. As a child, she read everything she could get her hands on, including a huge amount of science fiction and fantasy. She studied Maths at Oxford, and went on to suffer years of writing unbearably complicated technical documents before deciding to write something that was fun for a change. She has a husband, a son, a lot of books, and an aversion to housework.

Janet’s debut novel, EARTH GIRL, was chosen by both Amazon and Kobo as one of their best Young Adult books of 2012. The sequel, EARTH STAR, is also available now, and the final book in the trilogy, EARTH FLIGHT, will be published in August 2014.

I signed up for flying lessons as an attempt to cure my fear of heights. And if you think that’s stupid, I should point out I know someone who signed up for the paratroopers for the same reason.

My handwriting is terrible. Seriously, I have to do all my writing directly on the computer because I can’t read my own handwriting.

The main character in Earth Girl is allergic to other planets. I’m allergic to some things on this one.

My husband reads my books to help me spot typos. By the time they’ve been through first draft, edits, copyedits and proofs, he’s read them about ten times, and he still laughs at the jokes.

The first short story I wrote ended up being broadcast on BBC local radio, and they sent me a CD of it. I’ve kept the envelope on display to inspire my writing ever since. It has BBC on it in large letters!

Earth Girl

Series: Earth Girl #1
Pages: 358
Publisher: HarperVoyager (UK)
Release date: August 16th 2012
Buy: Book Depository | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Waterstones

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Goodreads synopsis:

A sensational YA science fiction debut from an exciting new British author. Jarra is stuck on Earth while the rest of humanity portals around the universe. But can she prove to the norms that she’s more than just an Earth Girl?

2788. Only the handicapped live on Earth. While everyone else portals between worlds, 18-year-old Jarra is among the one in a thousand people born with an immune system that cannot survive on other planets. Sent to Earth at birth to save her life, she has been abandoned by her parents. She can’t travel to other worlds, but she can watch their vids, and she knows all the jokes they make. She’s an ‘ape’, a ‘throwback’, but this is one ape girl who won’t give in.

Jarra invents a fake background for herself – as a normal child of Military parents – and joins a class of norms that is on Earth to excavate the ruins of the old cities. When an ancient skyscraper collapses, burying another research team, Jarra’s role in their rescue puts her in the spotlight. No hiding at back of class now. To make life more complicated, she finds herself falling in love with one of her classmates – a norm from another planet. Somehow, she has to keep the deception going.

A freak solar storm strikes the atmosphere, and the class is ordered to portal off-world for safety – no problem for a real child of military parents, but fatal for Jarra. The storm is so bad that the crews of the orbiting solar arrays have to escape to planet below: the first landing from space in 600 years. And one is on collision course with their shelter.

5 Things You Didn't Know About ... Jarra

Jarra was raised as a ward of Hospital Earth. When she was 3, one of the nurses threatened to burn her best friend’s most beloved toy, a strange purple object called Whoopiz the Zen. Jarra retaliated by locking the nurse in the linen store room. She got in a lot of trouble for it, but Whoopiz the Zen was saved!

Jarra had a bad habit of lecturing her eight closest friends in the Hospital Earth residences about historical facts that she thought were fascinating but bored them to tears. They once tried to break her of the habit by wearing ear plugs for three days. It didn’t work.

When Jarra was 15, she went with the history club to spend a week at the ruins of Athens. They spent most of the time spray painting the Parthenon with preservative.

Before leaving school, Jarra was forced to spend two weeks doing work experience in a Hospital Earth Nursery. She organized all the 3 year olds to excavate a flower bed with their sand pit shovels and they found two 21st century coins and an old shoe.

Jarra’s darkest secret is the fact she nearly gave up learning to fly after the lesson where she messed up a landing and crashed the plane. Actually, I feel quite traitorous mentioning that. Don’t tell anyone or Jarra will kill me!