every day should be a susie day

Oliver Postgate has died.  Like every Brit of a certain age, his was the voice of my childhood.  Smallfilms (Postgate, animator Peter Firmin, and various handy people who were good at knitting) made telly out of bits of string in a shed at the bottom of the garden, with such obvious love and care that I feel teary just thinking about it.  His imagination contributed every bit as much of my kidly fondness for stories as Blyton and Kipling and Dahl.

So, for your nostalgic viewing pleasure, here are the singing mice from Bagpuss,  the Welshest episode of Ivor the Engine ever, soup (and the soup dragon) with The Clangers (spillage at 6.40!), a glimpse of Nogbad from Noggin the Nog, and some magnificently scary-looking pictures from Tottie (which we used to mock mercilessly, but secretly I adored it).  Oh, I am a tiny person all over again, just listening to him…  Farewell, Post, you’ll not be forgot.

  I’ve mostly been reading unpublished things, which is fun except you can’t talk about them.   Am now on Andrea Levy’s Small Island, though, which is masterful.

  Proof-correction time for Girl Meets Cake!  I love this bit: it’s so nearly a book, and those final little tweaks and checks are amusing.  Though I’m dithering over a section where my girls greet each other with the always-friendly catalogue of insults (tart, whore, that kind of thing).  I know why I wrote it like that: there are legitimate, meaningful, textual reasons for those words to be there.  But Tina Fey’s character in Mean Girls bellows ‘Y’all have to stop calling each other sluts and whores, because it just makes it OK for guys to call you sluts and whores‘, and she has a point.  Decisions, decisions…

Visiting Narnia (well, nearly: sooo pretty), nearly killing myself with undercooked chicken (I knew there was a reason I used to be veggie), continuing my helpless obsession with Gilmore Girls, despite it being all twee and goofy.

Best thing about being a children’s writer?  Meeting readers – enthused, informed, very-probably-taller-than-me readers.  Second best thing?  Meeting fellow writers.  (They’re usually taller than me too.)  So the Oxford heat of the UK Kids’ Lit Quiz last week was a peachy way to spend an evening.  I got to join M.G. Harris, Linda Newbery, Dennis Hamley, Meg Harper, Mark Robson and Rachael Wing (who turns out to still be at school, doing her A2s: blimey, I bet she’s fed up of people mentioning that – but still, blimey!) on the Authors Team, up against 30 local schools.  Despite me apparently not knowing my Spiderwicks from my Snickets (oh, the shame), we managed to top the scoreboard.  But we did have 2 extra people and a combined age of, er, lots – so props to the true winners from Oxford High, and everyone who took part.  You all did scarily well, and I would like to have your brains, please.

  I’m whizzing gleefully through a sneaky preview copy of Ice Shock (gosh! ooh! no I’m not telling!), but I confess much of my week has been occupied with the Starksy & Hutch Annual 1979, which may be the best book I’ve ever read.  And I’ve read Ulysses.  Well, some of it.  If only Joyce had thought to brighten Bloomsday with bodgy drawings of men in cardigans, tips on keeping house plants, and the fact that Hutch is an Aries, I’m sure I’d have got all the way to the end.

  Lazy writer is lazy.  I’m sure all these pictures of Starsky wearing very short shorts will inspire me somehow, though.  Beloved British Editor has floated an interesting idea my way, though, which I’m quite excited about.  I shall reveal more when there is some actual ‘more’ to reveal…

Returning to my old college for a Women’s Dinner, to gossip with old friends and tutors, and delight in the fact that there are now enough women students to make such a thing possible (think there were 14 of us in my academic year?); cooking fajitas to Joe Cornish’s European Supermarket (cheers, Mr Smith); wishing the iPlayer could watch things for you, so as to save time.

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!  THE UTTERLY TERRIFYING DALEK PUMPKIN IS COMING TO GET YOU!

I trust this has put you in a suitably spooktastic Hallowe’eny mood, people.

Speaking of things Whovian (when am I not, let’s face it), evidently we’re getting a new Time Lord in the TARDIS come 2010, after David Tennant’s done a series of ‘specials’ next year. Good on ‘im, I say: we’re getting a new Exec Prod then too (Steven Moffat of Press Gang and writing that one with the statues fame: yay!), and I think the timing’s right. I got my regeneration anxiety over and done with after the scarred-for-life childhood experience of watching lovely fluffy Peter Davison turn into companion-strangling pantobeast Colin Baker, anyway. Now that‘s how to scare the kiddies.

Since the tabloids will now be all aflutter with speculation as to who’s Who next, I’m hoisting the flag for team Chiwetel Ejiofor.  Partly because it would annoy a lot of boring people: primarily because he would be bloody brilliant.  If not him, I’ll take Damian Lewis: ginger Doctor FTW!  And of course, we all know Joanna Lumley could pull it off.  What say you lot?

  Finally getting around to reading Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, which is making me very glad not to live in the 1960s.  Although I may just have laid my hands on one of these, which might have to take priority…

  I’ve spent the last few days whizzing through the copy-edit of Girl Meets Cake, throwing in a tweak or two.  It’ll be off to the typesetters now, so they can rustle up proofs (and possibly do something deeply cunning with layouts).  I like this bit.  Probably because I don’t have to do any of it.

Flitting to Wales to catch up with Small Person, Even Smaller Person (though ‘small’ isn’t quite accurate: Fabulously Rotund Person?), and taller people, all of whom were absurdly lovely to see and none of whom were sick on me; getting cross with Raymond Blanc; painting my fingernails sparkly purple.

  Moomins!  Blissful, lovely, mental Moomins.  Finn Family Moomintroll actually made me cry, it was so full of nostalgic small-me familiarity.  (And also mock my brain’s ability to reproduce things without ever consciously realising the source: arch ‘in which the following things happen‘ chapter introductions! an obsessive collector who is distraught to realise his life’s work is complete! a completely haphazard approach to linear narrative in favour of Oh Look Here’s A New Thing!  I’d never write anything like that…)  I think I loved this book for the same reasons I loved Arthur Ransome, even if he tended to include fewer Hobgoblins, bald men in skirts and Outlandish Words with legs crawling up the walls: there’s masses of that nervous emotional childhood stuff going on (being worried that people don’t like you, that you might not fit in, that you’re being left behind), but the telling of it is just so gloriously understated and economical.  Heavenly.  Next up, Comet in Moominland: yay!

  IT’S DONE!  Girl Meets Cake, aka Biscuits & Lies, aka my next book is finished!  Again!  Well, the new draft is: I’m already thinking of extra ways I can twiddle it about to make it even shinier in the (hopefully) final edit – with the assistance of my Beloved Editors, who are already entirely responsible for the good bits.  It’s been a real beastie to wrestle into shape: I think initially I was trying so hard to make sure Heidi was nothing like Serafina that she ended up being Holden Caulfield-level annoying instead.  Also, I continue to be Quite Bad at plot structure.  But it’s gone from being That Book That Was A Good Idea Until This Half-Wit Started Writing It to That Book That I Feel Dorkily Attached To And Makes Me Smile, so, you know, progress, achievement, gold star for me.  And I’ve got this awesome idea for the next one… although there’s also this other idea…*rubs hands together evilly*

  Tragic lack of rocrastination opportunities lately, but I have plans to reacquaint myself with the outside world (October = long walks through shuffly leaves followed by hot chocolate: it’s the law), and the non-imaginary people that dwell there.  Plus maybe some sleep?

Yes, this does look like…you know what. Yay science!

Burning Mercury Thiocyanide will amaze you!

  I’m not allowed to read books at the moment, what with being a bit busy trying to write one. But I’m dangling, like a carrot before a donkey, the prospect of Moomins when I finish. I can’t even remember which ones I’ve read, but I plan to devour them all (along with a supper of pine-needles, to keep me going through the long winter months).  I’ve reread most of the books I adored as a kid, even the elusive King of the Copper Mountains by Paul Biegel – which turned out to be even weirder than I remembered, but still wonderful – but I haven’t laid eyes on the Hemulen, Too-Ticky et al since I was about ten.  Something tells me they won’t have got less odd over time…

  No, I haven’t finished revising Girl Meets Cake yet.   The deadlinefish continues to nibble at my toes nightly: I continue to stare at the sizeable chunk I still have to rewrite.  I met up with MG Harris (for lunch! I’m allowed to eat lunch!) and she shared her ‘completion anxiety‘ over finishing #3 of The Joshua Files (while simultaneously editing #2, the show-off).  I’ve got  ‘incompletion anxiety’, I reckon.  I wrote some jokes this morning, though.  I think they were funny. It’s getting hard to tell.  However, none of this will matter, as I’ve seen the cover for the UK edition, and it’s so enticingly fabulous that it probably won’t matter what’s inside.  (I didn’t say that.  Don’t quote me.  It’ll be brilliant, honest.  With jokes in it and everything.  Some of which may be funny.  What do you want, blood?)

  Inconveniently rekindling my desire to watch The Professionals all day (damn you, ITV4), failing to reply to blog comments (sorry, am rubbish), becoming obsessed with baked potatoes (Marfona, people: it’s the only way).