I’ve had a tumblr since long before the first idea for this book entered my mind, so I’ve been collecting images, quotes and songs which remind me of the story from the very beginning – the first post dates back to 2011.
You can look through the nineteen pages here, and see the story develop from a very broad concept to the final book it became. Here’s a moodboard made of my favourite of the images I’ve collected over the years:
(While not technically art, this guinea pig photoshoot taken by my mum is too cute not to include.)
I recently commissioned this banner for my website from Alice Oseman as an introduction to who I am as an author. It’s got all of my favourite things on it, so if you’re new to me and my writing, it’ll help you get to know me a bit better.
The Loneliest Girl In The Universe
Can you fall in love with someone you’ve never met, never even spoken to – someone who is light years away?
Romy Silvers is the only surviving crew-member of a spaceship travelling to a new planet, on a mission to establish a second home for humanity. Alone in space, she is the loneliest girl in the universe until she hears about a new ship which has launched from Earth with a single passenger on board. A boy called J.
Their only communication is via email and due to the distance between them, their messages take months to transmit. And yet Romy finds herself falling in love.
But what does Romy really know about J? And what do the mysterious messages which have started arriving from Earth really mean?
Sometimes, there’s something worse than being alone…
“Gripping psychological thriller with a very relatable heroine” ~ The Bookseller
“Black Mirror-esque. A fantastic slow-build drama.” ~ SFX
The Loneliest Girl In The Universe is the third novel by Lauren James. It is a psychological thriller set in space and will be published by Walker Books in the UK and Australia on 7th September 2017, and Harperteen in July 2018. You can add it on Goodreads or subscribe to my mailing list for updates.
You can read Chapter 1 here or listen to me read it here. This is the first video of me reading my writing aloud I’ve put online – so I’ve been a little nervous about it! I hope you like it.
Sign up to be notified when the US edition of The Loneliest Girl in the Universe is published and ARC copies are available for request.
If you leave a review of the book on a retail site like Amazon, Waterstones or Barnes & Noble, I will send you a signed, personalised bookplate. Fill out this form to claim your bookplate.
My tumblr posts about The Loneliest Girl In The Universe are all collectedhere. Here are some links to get you started:
In the book, Romy writes fic for her favourite TV show, a fantasy detective show about a selkie and a banshee. Even though she’s unaware of it, Romy’s experiences throughout the book are reflected in her writing, showing us more about her as a person than about the TV show Loch & Ness.
A lot of teenage girls use online fandoms as a safe space to develop their sexualities, without fear of pressure from peers to move at a pace they aren’t ready for. I thought that a reliance on online resources would be even more amplified for a girl isolated from human contact. Romy uses fanfics to explore her own feelings, in a way that I hope will resonate with a lot of teenagers today. It’s also a source of instant, feel-good joy,which helps her deal with her stressful day-to-day life.
I’ve posted all of Romy’s fics about Loch & Ness on Wattpad here, including a lot which aren’t included in the book.
Competition Launch
There are lots of references in my books – adding them in is one of my favourite parts of writing! Here’s the one in The Last Beginning about Romy:
There is also one other easter egg about Romy hidden in a book – but I’m not going to tell you where it is, because I want you to find it yourself. My friend Alice is also a writer, and she was writing her book Radio Silence while I wrote Romy’s story, so we decided to put references to each other’s writing in our books. In Radio Silence, there’s a hidden reference to The Loneliest Girl, and in The Loneliest Girl, there’s a reference to Radio Silence.
Now that both books are published, Alice and I are going to hold a competition to win signed copies of any of our books of your choice, to someone who finds the easter eggs.
The Loneliest Girl In The Universe
Can you fall in love with someone you’ve never met, never even spoken to – someone who is light years away?
Romy Silvers is the only surviving crew-member of a spaceship travelling to a new planet, on a mission to establish a second home for humanity. Alone in space, she is the loneliest girl in the universe until she hears about a new ship which has launched from Earth with a single passenger on board. A boy called J.
Their only communication is via email and due to the distance between them, their messages take months to transmit. And yet Romy finds herself falling in love.
But what does Romy really know about J? And what do the mysterious messages which have started arriving from Earth really mean?
Sometimes, there’s something worse than being alone…
“Gripping psychological thriller with a very relatable heroine” ~ The Bookseller
“Black Mirror-esque. A fantastic slow-build drama.” ~ SFX
The Loneliest Girl In The Universe is the third novel by Lauren James. It is a psychological thriller set in space and will be published by Walker Books in the UK and Australia on 7th September 2017, and Harperteen in July 2018. You can add it on Goodreads or subscribe to my mailing list for updates.
You can read Chapter 1 here or listen to me read it here. This is the first video of me reading my writing aloud I’ve put online – so I’ve been a little nervous about it! I hope you like it.
Sign up to be notified when the US edition of The Loneliest Girl in the Universe is published and ARC copies are available for request.
If you leave a review of the book on a retail site like Amazon, Waterstones or Barnes & Noble, I will send you a signed, personalised bookplate. Fill out this form to claim your bookplate.
My tumblr posts about The Loneliest Girl In The Universe are all collectedhere. Here are some links to get you started:
My third book, The Loneliest Girl in the Universe, is now finally out in the UK and Australia. It’s been an incredible journey getting to publication day – it was the bestselling title at the Young Adult Literature Convention 2017, sold out at Edinburgh Book Festival, is being published by HarperCollins (the stuff that dreams are made of) and was reprinted before it was even published. I’m so excited for everything still to come for Commander Romy Silvers.
Over the next few days I’m going to be releasing a series of blogs as a guide to everything related to the book – coming up is a bumper series full of extra content: fancasts of the characters, a book playlist, deleted scenes, book recommendations and more.
Please share them with anyone who you think will love the book – and if you’ve read it, please share on social media. Your support really helps boost the book. I’m so proud of this story, and I think it’s the best thing I’ve written to date. I hope you do too!
I’m thrilled with this trailer for my book, made by the team at Engine House (@EngineHouseVFX). Doesn’t it just bring the cover to life? It gave me shivers when I saw it!
First up, I’m going to be discussing the inspiration for the book. The nugget of an idea for this story first started with a question from some Physics coursework at university. The question was about special relativity, and went something like this:
An astronaut travels in a spaceship to a new planet. After a few years, a newer faster ship is developed and launched, which overtakes the first ship. How old are the two astronauts when they each arrive on the planet?
I started thinking about what it would be like to be that first astronaut, and dedicate years to travelling alone in space, only for your ship to be overtaken by a faster one before you even arrive. What would that feel like? What kind of relationship would you have with the person on the faster ship? From that, the story of Romy Silvers was born.
I knew that if I was writing a whole book where there was only really one person in isolation, I would need to create a character who would keep the reader’s attention and loyalty. It was a big challenge, but I fell totally in love with Romy while I was writing about her, and I hope everyone reading The Loneliest Girl in the Universe does too.
Romy is powerless, easily influenced, subject to frequent panic attacks, sensitive and lacks self confidence. She’s weak in almost every way you can name: emotionally, mentally and physically. Despite that, she’s the strongest female character I’ve ever written – because she’s the most realistic of all of my characters.
I really wanted to make a flawed character, because every woman is worth reading about, as long as they are human: with whatever strengths and weaknesses that includes. They don’t have to be likeable and admirable and special to be deserving of attention. Romy is a direct answer to the cliché of the ‘strong female character’ trope – she is weak and scared at times, but that doesn’t stop her being a strong and well-developed character. Strong doesn’t mean ‘physically skilled’, it means ‘three-dimensional’.
The tone of the book was inspired by lots of books, which are listed below in more detail, but I just want to highlight one film which influenced the tone of the book more than any other – Stoker.
What do you want from me?
To be friends.
We don’t need to be friends. We’re family.
This is my all time favourite film, described as “Alfred Hitchcock psychological thriller meets Tim Burton coming-of-age freak-out” by the Telegraph. The eerie, tense, richly visual tone of the film was something I referred to frequently when writing The Loneliest Girl in the Universe. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it – perhaps after you finish reading my book!*
Can you fall in love with someone you’ve never met, never even spoken to – someone who is light years away?
Romy Silvers is the only surviving crew-member of a spaceship travelling to a new planet, on a mission to establish a second home for humanity. Alone in space, she is the loneliest girl in the universe until she hears about a new ship which has launched from Earth with a single passenger on board. A boy called J.
Their only communication is via email and due to the distance between them, their messages take months to transmit. And yet Romy finds herself falling in love.
But what does Romy really know about J? And what do the mysterious messages which have started arriving from Earth really mean?
Sometimes, there’s something worse than being alone…
“Gripping psychological thriller with a very relatable heroine” ~ The Bookseller
“Black Mirror-esque. A fantastic slow-build drama.” ~ SFX
The Loneliest Girl In The Universe is the third novel by Lauren James. It is a psychological thriller set in space and will be published by Walker Books in the UK and Australia on 7th September 2017, and Harperteen in July 2018. You can add it on Goodreads or subscribe to my mailing list for updates.
You can read Chapter 1 here or listen to me read it here. This is the first video of me reading my writing aloud I’ve put online – so I’ve been a little nervous about it! I hope you like it.
Sign up to be notified when the US edition of The Loneliest Girl in the Universe is published and ARC copies are available for request.
If you leave a review of the book on a retail site like Amazon, Waterstones or Barnes & Noble, I will send you a signed, personalised bookplate. Fill out this form to claim your bookplate.
My tumblr posts about The Loneliest Girl In The Universe are all collectedhere. Here are some links to get you started:
That’s right: The Loneliest Girl in the Universe is being published in America by HarperCollins.
HarperCollins. That’s the stuff that dreams are made of.
It’s going to be out in July 2018 in hardback, eBook and audiobook (my first English-language audiobook!).
This deal happened in May last year, so I’ve been keeping it a secret for 16 months (the publishing industry is slow, slow, slow.) I’ve nearly exploded with the excitement of it several times, especially when I want to shout about my wonderful US editor, Emilia Rhodes, and I’ve not been able to!
However, the long wait does mean that we’re quite far along in the publication process. I’ve already seen the cover, and it is very different from the UK cover – in the best way. It’s minimalist and art deco and so beautiful I want it as a poster. I asked for a cover similar to the cover for We Are Okay, and they definitely came through. I can’t wait to share it with you all.
Plus, this means that Alice Oseman and I have the same publisher! If you’ve seen the covers for her Harperteen titles, you know that I am in very good hands indeed.
Basically this whole thing is my longest yeah boy ever.
The US edition is already up for preorder: Amazon US | Barnes & Noble.If you can’t wait until July 2018, you can get the UK edition from next week internationally with free shipping from Book Depository.
If you’re a blogger, you can sign up to be notified when the US edition of The Loneliest Girl in the Universe is published and ARC copies are available for request.
The full first chapter of The Loneliest Girl in the Universe is also up on Wattpad.
In other news: I had the most wonderful time at Edinburgh Book Festival this week. I spoke with Philip Reeve and Joy Court in front of 500+ students! Total career highlight, I feel like I’m dreaming. Thank you to everyone who came!
I came home to the wonderful news that The Loneliest Girl is already on its second printing – and it’s not even published yet.
This happens when bookshops/trade/book clubs etc order more copies than are available from the first print run. They order a number of copies based on how many they think they can sell, because otherwise they have to return them. It’s an incredible sign of their trust in this book that they’ve ordered so many that it outnumbers what even my publisher anticipated.
This is a great sign of the future booksellers see for this book and I’m very excited to see what happens next. If you want to make sure you get a first edition, you should probably preorder now though!
It’s now only one week until The Loneliest Girl in the Universe releases in the UK and Australia. I’m holding a giveaway over on Instagram here.
Can you fall in love with someone you’ve never met, never even spoken to – someone who is light years away?
Romy Silvers is the only surviving crew-member of a spaceship travelling to a new planet, on a mission to establish a second home for humanity. Alone in space, she is the loneliest girl in the universe until she hears about a new ship which has launched from Earth with a single passenger on board. A boy called J.
Their only communication is via email and due to the distance between them, their messages take months to transmit. And yet Romy finds herself falling in love.
But what does Romy really know about J? And what do the mysterious messages which have started arriving from Earth really mean?
Sometimes, there’s something worse than being alone…
“Gripping psychological thriller with a very relatable heroine” ~ The Bookseller
“Black Mirror-esque. A fantastic slow-build drama.” ~ SFX
The Loneliest Girl In The Universe is the third novel by Lauren James. It is a psychological thriller set in space and will be published by Walker Books in the UK and Australia on 7th September 2017, and Harperteen in July 2018. You can add it on Goodreads or subscribe to my mailing list for updates.
My tumblr posts about The Loneliest Girl In The Universe are all collectedhere. Here are some links to get you started:
On this blog I used to do writing progress updates, and enough has been happening recently that I thought it was about time to dust off the old blog and give you an update.
This series is specifically about a speculative, un-contracted manuscript I’m writing under the codename #ghosthouse. You can read parts one and two first, if you wish, which cover January 2016 – December 2016.
So, I haven’t done much work on the story recently. I’ve spent the last four months writing my next contracted book for Walker, #lowrie, on a really tight deadline. It was challenging to write a first draft so fact (the first draft of ghost house took a year, from start to finish) but I’m really proud that I did it in three months. While I’m a bit nervous that my edits will be quite large, I’m overall very happy with the result. It was such a fast and intense drafting process that I didn’t really blog about it, but I might do a discussion post about it when I get my structural edit notes, if that’s something people are interested in.
But now that book is done and with my editors, I can take another look at ghost house!
I sent the first draft to my agent in December, and I haven’t looked at the manuscript since then – eight months ago. Because it’s been so long since I looked at it, and because the reaction to it has been quite muted so far, I’d kind of accepted that it wasn’t going anywhere. I was kind of thinking that while it was a good writing opportunity, it probably wasn’t going to be published. Walker had said they’d prefer my books to be science fiction, so it didn’t seem like it would fit with them, and I love Walker a lot, so wasn’t really prepared to consider going elsewhere with it.
However, my agent recently read it and said that she really liked it, and thought it was very cinematic, warm and funny. She thought that with some edits we’d have no problem finding a home for it – and she’s really excited to work on it. Hurrah! The manuscript (and this blog series) has been resurrected from the ashes.
She gave me some changes to make, which I’m going to go over in general terms, to show you the kind of things authors might do with their agent before the book gets anywhere near a publisher.
My agent already gave me feedback on the partial 30,000 word manuscript, which I edited with her notes. So technically, this is the second set of edits for this book, even though it’s only the first draft.
She recommended that one of the minor points of view be promoted to a dual protagonist, and become more of a main character. She also wanted me to increase the stakes from the very beginning and make it clear what the dangers and risks of things going wrong are. She wanted a critical scene at the end to be foreshadowed more strongly, so it doesn’t come out of nowhere, and asked for the characters’ individual goals clearer.
So there’s quite a lot to do there – but none of it is really plot things. It’s more about building up the intensity of what’s already there – making subtle things clearer, and trying to make the readers feel the things for the characters which I do, as the author.
I’m really excited to dive back into this book and work on it again. I think the long break will really help in getting a fresh perspective on it – and it’s going to make it so much stronger.
This book was the most fun and enjoyable writing experience I’ve ever had, so I can’t wait to spend more time with my silly ghosts. It was more challenging than anything I’d ever written before too, because it has an ensemble cast who are all point of view characters, and the plot is very complicated and character-driven.
I learnt so much writing it (which is why it took nearly a year!) and it really pushed me as a writer. It has a lot of flaws, but in the eight months since I wrote it, one manuscript later, I think I’ve developed enough as a writer to tackle them and make this the book it is in my head.
My aim as a writer is to always be pushing myself to write new and more difficult things. I don’t want to write lots of similar books in my comfort zone. I want every book to feel like this one did – like I need to work harder and harder to become skilled enough to create the book I can envision. I’m not quite there yet, but I’m working on it.
This book could so easily have ended up disappearing into a drawer – it nearly was – and I’m so, so glad it has come back out into the light. I can’t wait to get started!
I’m going to be working on it quite slowly, as the priority for the next few months is going to be editing #lowrie for release in 2018. There might not be another update on this book until 2018, depending on how much time I find to work on it. Once I’ve made the changes suggested above, I’ll update you on the next part of the process – getting it published!
In other news:
I’m still offering editorial critiques at the introductory prices here.
I’m thrilled to bits with this stunning SFX magazine review of #theloneliestgirl.
They’ve basically given me the best 25th birthday present ever. 😍
‘Black Mirror-esque’ is truly a blurb to die for.
The Loneliest Girl was also the bestselling title at YALC this year, where it sold out in a few hours (twice!). I am so grateful & overwhelmed & crying a bit. I’ve had the best weekend of my life! Thank you, thank you, thank you, every single one of you at YALC. Here’s some pics of the event:
I finally received the lovely US hardback of The Next Together!
I ran outside earlier to do a quick sunset photoshoot with this beautiful new arrival,the US hardback of The Next Together by @skyponypresspic.twitter.com/7KT73xXcno
My events schedule is filling up! Over the next few months I’m coming to Edinburgh, Bath, Dublin and LOTS more Northern cities to be announced. I’m so excited to meet more of you!
There’s also been some cool fan stuff come out already:
New weekly blog is up! This week it’s guest-starring Alice Oseman burrito-ing herself in a blanket, dog ball catching talent and my driving (because I gotta show off my hard earned skills somehow 💪).
The pink font here was 100% inspired by Sofia Coppola, because we went to see The Beguiled and it was EXCELLENT.
I’m very excited to announce a project I’ve been working on for a while now – I’m going to be offering editorial services.
I’ve been doing this for years for my friends and I really enjoy it and want to do more!
If you have a story you’re working on, and would like some VERY friendly and kind feedback, then get in touch.
There’s no pressure & I’ll be very nice. My experience, testimonials & packages are on my website.
This is an introductory rate which will increase when I’ve been running for a while. So if this is something you’re interested in but aren’t quite ready, let me know and we can book you in for a few months off!
So who would like to see more of Clove and Ella? What about Clove and Ella pulling off a heist? And revealing why Ella was really in Carlisle? THEN I’VE GOT SOME GOOD NEWS 4 U BUDDIES.
As of right now, you can read a free novella by me on Amazon Kindle, or any other eBook retailer, which includes not just one but ALL OF THOSE THINGS.
Kate and Matt got their own short story in Another Together, so I had to give Clove and Ella one too! It’s about Clove and Ella pulling off a heist in 1745. It’s pretty fun.
Here’s some more information. Enjoy!
A short story set in the world of Lauren James’ Next Together series.
Featuring the much-loved protagonists Clove and Ella, Another Beginning is a companion story to The Last Beginning, set during the siege of Carlisle in 1745.
“Elenore Walker, ancient literature thief. It makes an odd sort of sense, actually,” Clove said.
Clove is working as a maid in the Finchley household while she spies on Katherine Finchley and Matthew Galloway. But her mission is briefly interrupted when fellow maid Ella persuades her to help steal a valuable historical document from the main defence in the city – the castle. The two girls embark on a risky adventure involving scaling castle walls and hiding in the most unlikely of places!
A fast-paced and fun read, perfect for Lauren James’s existing fans, and readers who enjoy historical fiction and romance.
Includes the first chapter of Lauren James’s third novel, The Loneliest Girl in the Universe.
I’ve been playing with Goodreads features, and I’ve compiled lists of the top ten books I’ve read for each of the last five years. So here’s (quite a lot!) of book recommendations.
A short story set in the world of Lauren James’ Next Together series.
Wren James 