Golden by Jade Timms
Text Publishing
Golden, Jade Timms’ debut YA novel, was shortlisted for the Text Prize. Her writing reminds me of the contemporary fiction of Melissa Keil, Cath Crowley and Claire Zorn. Protagonist Eddie’s voice grabs the reader.
Jade’s piece for PaperbarkWords below is honest and appealing. It will whet your appetite to read her novel.
Guest author post by Jade Timms about Golden for ‘Joy in Books’ at Paperbark Words
I wrote my first novel in 2006. It was a young adult fantasy novel that I followed up with more fantasy novels and then a succession of paranormal novels because it was the Twilight era. Then I wrote some more fantasy novels and then a few more.
Now, I love fantasy books—they are my first and truest love. But that’s not why I was writing them. I was writing them because I honestly believed that I wasn’t good enough to craft a story that didn’t have some fantastical elements. It’s almost as if I thought I could distract my potential readers from the fact that I wasn’t that good by mixing in a complicated magic system or a cute boy who was—surprise!—actually a fallen angel. The really sad part of the story is that I desperately wanted to write contemporary young adult stories.
I was madly in love with contemporary YA. We’re talking Graffiti Moon by Cath Crowley and Saving Francesco by Melina Marchetta and The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart. But I could never write a book like that. I could never be raw and open while still keeping readers interested. I needed dragons and vampires and maybe even a high school for paranormal rejects. I needed razzle and dazzle to distract everyone from my not-good writing. It’s embarrassing to admit how long I believed this narrative. When I did finally start writing contemporary stories, it was only because I’d hit writing rock bottom so what did it matter if I tried my hand at the thing I desperately wanted the most? It was only because I felt like I had nothing to lose that I finally gave in and let my heart run wild.
A few years ago, I forced myself to compile what I fondly refer to as my Spreadsheet of Doom. It’s a document of every writing project I’ve ever worked on, completed and uncompleted. The point of the spreadsheet was twofold: First, I wanted to shame myself into putting my writing out in the world. I thought that if I could see the cold, hard facts of how much I’ve written in the stark brutality of an Excel document, it would finally motivate me to try and achieve my dream of being an author. The second purpose of the spreadsheet was to see all my projects lined up so I could decide which ones I cared the most about. The stories I was most attached to, ended up being the contemporary YA ones, so they’re the ones I decided to try and publish.
This is a lot of baggage for my debut novel to carry.
When I received a publishing offer for Golden two years ago, the biggest emotion I experienced was shock. Not shock that I was going to be a published author—although there was definitely some of that—but shock that my debut novel was Golden. My debut was going to be a young adult contemporary novel. It was going to sit alongside all the authors I’ve loved and admired for years. It was a very overwhelming sensation.
Golden is devoid of any magic. There are no ghosts, no mysterious islands, no talking cats. Instead, you have a girl called Eddie, who is traumatised by a tragic death, and who in the aftermath, has cut herself off from her friends and family. It’s a story of a girl falling in love for the first time and finding her people. It’s about processing grief and making smoothies and learning how to run up hills.
And okay, maybe it does have a bit of magic in it, but it’s purely the metaphorical kind.
Sometimes I wish my journey to becoming an author hadn’t been so painful. It was years and years of self-doubt and withholding, only to end up in the place I most wanted to be. I wish I could have believed in myself sooner. I wish I had’ve realised there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be shelved alongside my writing idols. I wish I’d spoken my dreams out loud sooner.
But that’s not my story. My story is about someone who wrote her first fantasy novel in 2006 and then wrote a YA contemporary novel in 2018, which was published seven years later. It’s not a cute story or a neat one. It certainly isn’t a path that I would recommend to others. But it eventually got me where I wanted to be, and that’s the piece of the story that means the most to me.
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