every day should be a susie day

Hardbacks!  Pink hardbacks!  Pink hardbacks that when piled resemble some kind of delicious mutant xylophone made from boiled sugar!  OK, maybe that’s just me having gone a bit wonk-eyed from staring at them lovingly.  But honestly, has a pile of books ever looked quite that lickable?  How handy that I have a nice three-letter word for a last name so it can fit tidily on the spine, too.  (Well done, father: impressive planning ahead there.)

For those at the back, this would be the US/Canada edition of Big Woo, which (as you might just be able to spot) is titled serafina67 *urgently requires life*.  Innit shiny?  In theory it’s released on August 1st, but the blogverse informs me it’s already been sighted on the shop floor: yay!  I get to be excited all over again, without even having to write another one.  Cunning, eh?

*toasts pile o’ books with glass of pink wine in their honour*

  Train timetables, mostly.  Though I am sneaking small doses of Douglas Coupland’s JPod every now and then, because the writerly No Books Diet is like all other diets: all I want is books, tasty books, naughty sinful calorific distracting books…

  Biscuits & Lies is whizzing along at breakneck speed, almost as if there were an impending deadline snapping at my heels and the prospect of going to Italy as a reward after I’ve finished it.  Or something.  I’m having a lovely time doing devious things to my poor characters and telling crap jokes, anyway, even if on occasion I’m doing it in fast forward and missing some of the best lines.  Despite it not being remotely finished, we’re in the process of settling on a title, so prepare for an exciting exclusive reveal.  (Unless we decide to call it Biscuits & Lies, in which case…um…you heard it here first?)

  Alas, precious little rocrastination time – except for the wedding of the inestimable Rarg (regular commenter and ridiculously dear old friend) to the equally lovely Mrs Rarg, which managed to cram several weeks’ worth of cheery fun into a day. ‘Wedstock’ fused marriage with the entire live music scene of Bristol, in the most apt celebration of two people’s relationship I can imagine – not to mention the whole roast pig, the flowing cocktails, and me catching up with an old school crowd I’ve not clapped eyes on in well over a decade.  I confess I was eating pig during some of the bands, but I urge you to check out North Sea Navigator (think early PJ Harvey, Levitation, a shoutier Auteurs) and Rose Kemp, who has the kind of startlingly pure voice that demands you stand utterly still and listen, pig or no pig.  And, of course, rarg‘s alter ego as one quarter of Smokehand, who seem to be expanding their ‘Scott Walker sings Tom Waits’ repertoire in the obvious direction of ska-tinged fairground klezmer.  So predictable, those boys.   Highlight, however, was the performance by rarg (with smokehand!Adam on vocals) of a special song for his new missus, which reduced the entire place to sniffly rubble.  Have a glorious honeymoon, you fabulous pair.

I humbly apologise for the shoddy lack of regular updates lately.  Alas, the part of my brain that I use to form sentences is the size of a peanut (the rest is all pictures of kittens, misheard song lyrics, and dialogue from Firefly), and can only produce a peanut-sized quantity of them per day before start I like Yoda typing.

So in lieu of a proper post, here’s the best news story ever written, containing as it does the holy trinity of local news: underwear, a small furry creature in peril, and just enough wild implausibility to make you believe it’s true.  The peanut, he is envious.

All hail Wordle, rocrastination tool extraordinaire.  Feed it some text, and it spits it out looking all prettified.  Here’s a chunk from the beginning of Biscuits & Lies:

I’m intrigued, and I’m writing the bloody thing.  I invite you to speculate wildly.

Then again, commentfiend Josie has worried me with her lament at my shoddy lack of updates. ‘I can only conclude‘ she says, ‘that you are a) working very, very hard, b) putting your fingers in your ears and going lalalala to the world in general or c) off in another time and space dimension with the Doctor and have forgotten that time is passing for us mere mortals.‘  You lot know me far too well, and will doubtless be able to predict the entire book just from ‘Zogpeople’.  (Obviously, it’s (c).  Though I did make sure he got me home in time to watch ‘Turn Left’, or there would’ve been trouble.  That was a bit good, wasn’t it?  And I say this as one of those people who got all sniffy about Catherine Tate last year.  ILU, Donna.  Now to endure a whole week before the next one…)

  Margery Allingham, The Beckoning Lady. Obligatory summer indulgence: reading Campion in the garden, with a very large cup of tea. It’s one of the later ones, but written as a sort of fond cover version of the early fluff: country house murder mystery starring some old familiar faces.  Tripled nostalgia.  And wondrousness such as this:

‘It’s always jolly frightening when one’s friends fall in that sort of love.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, they’re never the same again, are they?  A fusion of metals and all that.  I mean, love isn’t a cement, it’s a solvent.’

Naturally, it’s Amanda talking sense, while Albert fusses proprietorially to no effect whatsoever.  Why she and Campion don’t have the same beloved status as Lord Peter and Harriet Vane baffles me: she might not be as prone to quotation, but she’s essentially a grown-up Petrova Fossil.  Who now helps solve mysteries.  What’s not to love?

  Armpits!  Zogpeople!  Wheee!  I continue to fail mightily at plot structure, but it’ll all come out in the wash, probably.  This week, I have been mostly wielding the godlike power to revive the dead.  It’s really quite satisfying.  I’ve also managed to whittle down my plethora of Simons, but have since discovered two people called Cooper.  *rests head wearily on desk*

  Eating globe artichoke for the first time in decades, literally; failing to go on holiday; declaring ‘Stranded in the Jungle’ by The Cadets the Best Song Ever (or Best Song of 1956, at the very least).

The kidlit world is getting its undies in a right old knot over publishers’ plans to include age guidance on children’s books. Those against include, well, probably every children’s writer you’ve ever heard of. Except for Meg Rosoff who, in typical fashion, is swimming against the tide, and thinks it might be quite handy for the humble book-buying punter.

Me? I’m with Mighty Meg.

Books aren’t unpackaged and unmediated. They come with covers carefully designed to target a specific audience: cupcakes and faces for girlies, logos for boys, artsy graphics for ‘serious’. (Foil and shiny bits for everyone: we’re all magpies, apparently.) Even the author’s name is retooled for the market where possible. Betcha I wouldn’t be ‘Susie’ if I wrote action thrillers for 10-year-old boys.

But all of these are inexplicit devices, and on occasion quite subtle ones. (I’ve not heard it stated aloud, but I’m fairly sure the colour scheme of the US edition of serafina67 doesn’t quietly evoke Lauren Myracle’s ttyl by accident.) The No To Age Banding posse point out that kids study these tricks of the trade in school. True: I’ve taught that lesson (and it’s gold: nothing gets a book-deprived disinterested class engaged better than getting them to redesign The Hobbit, even if it might end up a bit gorier than you remember, with considerably more grenades and rocket launchers). But it’s not kids who hand over the cash in the bookshop. And as a grown-up who reads kidlit avidly, I still find myself at nephew-birthday time wondering if I’m about to cause family meltdown with a gift that includes oral sex under its Spiderman wrapping paper.

Let’s get this clear: no 9-year-old booknut is going to be arrested for possession of an 11+ rated novel. Alarms will not sound throughout the local library, sending masked men with AK47s to shoot dead gay Dumbledore out of Little Johnny’s hands. If we can credit young readers with understanding book covers as marketing devices, we can also grant them the wit to interpret age banding in exactly the same way: as information which serves a specific purpose, and can be ignored and discarded if you think you know better. Meanwhile us crumbly types can be reassured that by buying a book we aren’t effectively taking a 7-year-old to a 12A film, only to have to carry them out, sobbing uncontrollably, after the ninth beheading.

Timing means everything in literature. I firmly believe that every copy of The Catcher In The Rye should come stamped with ‘not to be read if over 18: may cause nausea’. Martin Amis’s early works should explode off one’s bookshelf after the age of 25 in case you’re tempted to revisit, and discover that what seemed ‘like totally postmodern man, whoa’ back in the day now feels a bit studenty and crap. No kid is going to be heinously scarred by reading outside what is designated ‘age-appropriate’ – but I fail to see how they’ll suffer from a little guidance. We’re in a second Golden Age of children’s writing. Magnificent new books get published every day. A little help finding the ones you’ll get the most out of is no bad thing.

The Last of the Warrior Kings, Sarah Mussi (YA, 12+, contemporary thriller). Regular readers will know Sarah is an old mate, who despite being an award-winning and nominated-for-more-award-winning author, still deigns to associate with the likes of me. Much as I’d love to annoy her with a bad review, the bloody woman continues to write such uniquely funny, brainy, pacy stuff that I’m stuck with the usual effusions of dribbly praise. If you’ve read her Door of No Return, you’ll know to expect movie-worthy action and thrills, bonkers plot twists, heartbreakingly accurate teenage characters, and a serious dose of education on African issues. Last of the Warrior Kings manages to revisit the same territory while feeling utterly fresh, largely thanks to hero Max, whose endearingly hapless efforts to save the day and win the unattainable girl (all while keeping his expensive trainers pristine) can’t help but draw you in. It seems cheeky to highlight the sillier side of a story that has genuine darkness at its heart: Sarah’s not naive about her own South London, and the harsh realities of gang warfare now are accompanied by the no less grim history of C19th British intervention in Nigeria. But this is a fundamentally uplifting book about finding a way to live your life well no matter what hand fate has dealt you, with plenty of daft gags along the way and an ending that will really linger in the mind. Quite infuriatingly good. Stop making the rest of us look inadequate, dammit!

Had a typically spectacular weekend with my writing group (the evil Mussi included), who kindly held my hand through a bit of Biscuits & Lies structural paranoia, and, as always, fed me till I was barrel-like. I’m now back to too much thinking and not enough typing. And the realisation that I now have three separate characters called Simon. This is going to be an interesting editing experience…

Mourning the loss of Lovely Lucinda from The Apprentice; finding new things to hate about Indy IV (while coveting Lego Indy); playing Prince of Persia on someone’s PS2 (this is what old-skool looks like now? gosh); staring, open-mouthed, at this…er…unusual cover version of Rihanna’s Umbrella (T: isn’t that Arbruzzi in a wig?).

Best way to start one’s week: on a train to Balamory Tenby, implausibly picturesque jewel of the Pembrokeshire coast. I last hit West Wales on a post-A Levels holiday, to enjoy those final bits of intimacy with school friends before we all buggered off to university (we went to a very classy nightclub in Saundersfoot, and got chatted up by a bloke who claimed he was Griff Rhys Jones’s nephew: such are pulling techniques of the Welsh schoolboy), but generally when I head for the homeland I get stuck at Cardiff. Which is lovely, of course, but provides fewer opportunities for building sandcastles.

Pembrokeshire has so many castles of the non-sandy variety they have no truck with Stonehenge-esque fencing, and are quite content for you to meander all over them. Carew is good: Manorbier even better (not least because their costumed mannequins are Madame Tussaud’s cast-offs: marvel at medieval J.R. Ewing! fling rotten tomatoes at Brezhnev in the stocks!). Highlight of the holiday, however, was the company. Apparently, you can hire a paparazzo to follow you around all day to make you feel like a star. I recommend obtaining a small niece instead, who will be similarly mesmerised by your every nose-blowingly mundane act (Auntie Susie has socks on! Auntie Susie has muesli! Auntie Susie HAS EYES!). Comes with free hugs. Sometimes the hugs include jam. Could anyone ask for more?

From Head To Toe, Eric Carle; Cockatoos, Quentin Blake; Kipper, Mick Inkpen. Two-year-olds have all the best books.

I need to get better at writing on trains. Curse you, iPod, distractor of the masses! Although should you find yourself on a 5 hour train journey that has just become a 7 hour train journey thanks to a 4-minute delay making you miss your connection – just to pluck an example from thin air, natch – you could always pass the time listening to me (and other more amusing people) blethering away about narrative point of view, Sex & the City, and chocolate plungers on last week’s Litopia podcast (iTunes or streaming). Otherwise, I’ve been contemplating Chekhov’s Gun (not to be confused with Chekov’s Gun). I suspect I’ve got an entire armoury strapped to the wall in the opening chapter of Biscuits & Lies: might need to discard a crossbow or two…

Being entertained by The Last Shadow Puppets (they sound like The Walker Brothers channelling Viv Stanshall: basically Gretschen Hofner with a bigger production budget, which can only be a good thing); watching M*A*S*H (the Henry/Trapper/Frank Burns era: oh Radar, I do love you so); being hugely impressed as usual by the ginormous brain of Alex von Tunzelmann, whose Indian Summer makes even a kidlit junkie like me get excited about grown-up non-fiction; eating magnificent fish & chips from Ficci’s in Tenby, who have been frying since 1935 – accept no substitutes!