(We saw a real one too, but I didn’t hug it.)

Other things I learned on my holidays:

* The free copy of the Daily Mail they give you on the plane makes an excellent firelighter, and can also clean plates when it’s too cold to stand doing it with water. That’s two more uses than I’d ever imagined.

* When they say weather in the Canadian Rockies is ‘changeable’, they mean IT WILL SNOW ON YOU A LOT EVEN THOUGH IT IS AUGUST.

* When it isn’t snowing, Canada is often an improbable colour.

See: so educational. I had a lovely time, and ate quite a large amount of cake, mostly for breakfast. Mmmmmmcake.

Now to kick the jetlag properly so I can read the ever-so-shiny copy of Mockingjay that seemed to find its way into my luggage at Calgary airport…

If I were a useful sort of person, here is where I would shout TA-DA! and unveil my solution in a Paul Daniels stylee.  Unfortunately, I seem to be sorely lacking in Debbie McGees – because if I knew the answer, I probably wouldn’t be in the process of junking 40,000 words of book that didn’t work.  And before you all go Awww or Oh no! (or even Ha, she deserves such a fate for invoking Paul Daniels) , I’m utterly delighted.  Now I’m going to start writing a new flipped-about slapped-on-the-bum version of the very same idea, and I’m giddy and excited and skipping about at the prospect.  And while the 40,000 words that came before made me grin every now and then, I’m not sure they ever made me skip.

So: from now on, I’m only going to write skippable things, I think. If you see me out and about with both feet firmly on the ground, tell me to take a few days off from the manuscript. That way, I might notice when it’s not working a bit quicker.

The book formerly known around these parts as Project Poppy shall henceforth be known as Project Bluebell.  I hope it will make you skip too. :D

*

Since I’ve been so hopeless about updating lately, I’ve read lots of things and can’t remember what any of them are. I think this means I didn’t like them very much, so that’s probably ideal. Oh, and I read one fantastic book which made me sob repeatedly on a  train (WHY am I always on a train with the weepifying ones?) but it isn’t out till January, so I will wibble about it then when you can actually get your mitts on it. (Then cry. On a train.)  I am planning the annual bookapalooza known as ‘Going On Holiday’ soon, though, and after happily paddling in kidlit and YA for months I’ll be dipping a toe in the grown-up pool. Planned reading list: The Summer Book, Tove Jansson; One Day by David Nicholls (who for ages I thought was David Mitchell: stop having Ls in your names, people called David); and some Borges short stories. That should keep my tent contented.

Completely unrelated to the above, I’m whizzing my way towards the end of a first draft of Super Sekrit Project #93, aka, um… hang on, it’s so secret I haven’t given it a secret name…er… The Jovial Adventures of Some Herring. (It’s not about herring. Although now I sort of wish it was. Herring herring herring.)  This one is making me skip rather a lot.

Playing tour guide (ie taking lovely visiting people to the Pitt-Rivers and then out for French Onion soup); watching a very wet, very wonderful Midsummer Night’s Dream in my old office, aka the Bodleian Quad; breaking my laptop; getting pathetically overexcited about my impending holiday – Canada, bears, possible airport strikes, oh my!

Now that I am writer, I know that we love to be bothered by readers.  Sometimes you say heartskippingly kind things that we remember when it all seems a bit pointless and impossible.  Even when you don’t, replying to you means we can put that niggly bit of  Chapter 7 off for another ten minutes.  And of course we’re all infinitely more accessible in the post-typewriter age. Publishers expect their charges to have a website, a blog, an online presence, well before their first book ever touches shelf – and swathes of us already tweet and blog our writerly woes, because that niggly bit of Chapter 7? It’s still there.

I’m struck lately, however, that I’m meeting more and more writers online (and occasionally in person: lucky me!) before reading their books – which means I’m often sitting down with a pristine new tome, and the eeriest sense that the writer is sitting opposite me: watching, poised, hopeful, waiting to footnote any pause or lip-squinch as I go, and glowing whenever I smile, or cry, or (let’s not get too demanding) fail to throw it out of the window.   What does that do to the reading experience, exactly?  And do other readers do that too, now that we’re so much more likely to have a face to put to the name on the book?

What do you think?

Me, I’ve worrited over it as a pernicious influence (not least because I can think of one writer whose online interactions have made me firmly decide never to read his books, and for all I know they’re wonderful).  But you know what? In my experience, writers tend towards the lovely. If you encounter them on Twitter, or their own blog, or someone else’s, you can probably gauge whether they’re the type of lovely you’d want to invite round for tea and nonsense, and if they are then you might want to read a book by them too.  All this online interaction is like an extra, perpetually updating, ultra-nuanced, personalised, everchanging book cover.  And that writer you’ve seen online, who is now sitting, ghostlike, across from you waiting for you to start reading the book you hold in your hands with their name on it?  They’re not frowning or tutting or squinching their lips.  I like to think they’re reading the book to you.  And who doesn’t love a bedtime story?

*

WOW. I’ve found my Catcher in the Rye.  I thought Frank Portman’s King Dork might be it, because it’s almost exactly the dry witty sincere hip-not-hipster late teen novel I wanted to read when I was 17 – but now I’ve found Simmone Howell’s Notes on the Teenage Underground, and that, my friends, is the real shiny deal right there.  It’s not only that it’s ‘girls and films’ instead of King Dork’s ‘guys and bands’ (though I’m sure that’s a chunk of it: all hail Gem, a female protagonist who is beset by all the standard friends/virginity/absent dad/what next? trauma of a teen era ending, but who gets the most empowered line of any teen girl in the history of teens and girls without it feeling for an instant like a cliche or a reach or a lecture). Make no mistake: this is a bible of cool AND an emotionally honest, enticing, snort-your-cola funny read.  All those how-to guides that tell you to focus on ‘voice’ when you write?  This is what they mean.  I’m rereading bits already. (I met Simmone a few weeks back, and when reading I can entirely see her impishly grinning from the pages. She’s @postteen on Twitter, and her website is here: go fangirl at her, she’s aces.)

I’m…writing.  I don’t even know what I’m writing, or if any of you will ever see it, but I am writing.  It is a mite worrying how many words I can wring out of describing the Tower of London gift shop in lieu of plot, mind.

Realising that a British barbecue is actually amazingly delicious and involves none of the trad food poisoning/burnage when you put a Galician in charge;  getting very flaily indeed at the prospect of going to Canada in 5 weeks (hooray! oh no, bears! but hooray!); inventing a new approach to cooking which involves making normal food and then putting peas in it.  I do like peas.  They are a bit weird in a bacon sarnie though.

Luisa, Keris, Sarra and Simmone

What better way to celebrate 4 glorious years of Chicklish, the UK’s very first teen/YA book blog, than with a celebration of books by its founders and friends?  Luisa Plaja, Keris Stainton, Sarra Manning and Simmone Howell treated Dulwich to readings, a Q&A, and signings (thanks to the indie bookshop Tales on Moon Lane, who also kindly gave me directions to the event as I am an utter donkey who apparently likes to get to these things 30 minutes late looking like a sweaty beetroot).  The discussion ranged from sources of inspiration (the whole panel confessed to being developmentally stuck circa age 15/16: oh, how I relate), to plan or not to plan (Sarra: YES! Everyone else: NO!) and their varied routes into writing for teens.

What stuck out most of all, though, was the fondness and respect there is for Chicklish, and all the YA book bloggers who have followed here in the UK, and worldwide. Those of us who write contemporary fiction for teenage girls don’t tend to snag award nominations or broadsheet reviews: instead we’re reviewed by our readers, online, because they love books and want to share them. All hail them. And lucky us.

Cheers, ladies, for a fabulous evening! (And to the just-as-fabulous Sophia Bennett, who cooked me dinner and walked me to my train after more booky nattering.)  Can we do it all again next year?

I broke my usual ‘no non-fiction unless I get to write an essay about it later’ rule for Libby Brooks’ The Story of Childhood, profiles of 12 children and young adults living in modern Britain. I should break that rule more often: it’s well-written, thought-provoking stuff, prodding at our strange cultural doublethink of over-protective child-panic, and the demonisation of the feral teen.  Also Gayle Forman’s If I Stay, which is one of those oddities where I can tell objectively that I’m reading a ‘good’ book without really connecting with it (though it reduced me to a sniffly weepy mess several times with perfect efficiency). Now galloping through Nicola Morgan’s Wasted, which turns on such a brilliant premise that it starts to creep into your brain, and leave you standing in the Co-Op, holding carrots in one hand and crisps in the other, wondering if this decision might be about more than my dipping-things-in-houmous choices, and how I’ll never ever know…

Ahhh, writing: sometimes it’s awesome and lovely and you’ve just written the funniest cleverest most emotionally gobsmacking sentence  OF YOUR ENTIRE WRITING LIFE, and sometimes you hate everything you do.  Mostly the reality is actually a wiggly line between those two – but not always, and sometimes the ‘oh dear, this book is bobbins, argh help flail’ feeling takes root for good reasons.  Which is a long way of saying I think like I’ve got a lot of rewriting to do on Project Poppy, so you might not see it for a little while.  Have gone from quivery meep-mode to a cheering sense that this makes me a Proper Writer type – Sophia Bennett told me she wrote 32 drafts of Threads (which is brilliant, by the way: high fashion and child soldiers in Uganda, and funnyfunnyfunny) before it was done. THIRTY-TWO.  I’m such a slacker – all the way to feeling a  bit excited, as I’ve got the loveliest idea for how to rewrite it…

Skipping around the New Forest with sister and family, where ponies stand in the middle of the road looking imperiously at cars and Bournemouth beach makes me ultra-freckly (or ’spotty’, as Small Person would have it); hanging out with old college mates in old college pubs, and feeling cheered by how people’s lives work out (mine included); loving Matt Smith’s Doctor Who (and Amy, and Rory, and everything in it at all ever) like a big ninny.

My holiday picnic spot: lighthouse at Hurst Castle

Yep, that is me blethering away there in the background.  (Even the Mycroft Christie bits.)  That’s my special ‘oh no, I’m talking to myself, let’s try to get this over and done with as quickly as possible’ voice.

MY INVISIBLE BOYFRIEND has now been read by lots of people who aren’t my Mum, including the lovely ABA, who’ve picked it for the Kids’ Indie Next List Summer 2010. (I’m rubbing shoulders with Diana Wynne Jones, David Almond, Mark Haddon, David Levithan… mind officially blown, tyvm.)

And here’s what some other people (who also aren’t my Mum, unless she’s been very busy) thought:

‘quirky, hilarious, and entertaining… Heidi is an unforgettable protagonist that will not fail to make readers laugh with her LOL-worthy shenanigans and escapades’ – The Undercover Book Lover

‘a strong first-person narrative voice that reminds me a little of Georgia in Louise Rennison’s series (Angus, Thongs, and Full-frontal Snogging, etc.)… very funny’ – Book Aunt

‘one darlin’ book that I simply couldn’t get enough of’ – Lauren’s Crammed Bookshelf

‘very, very funny… Every single secondary character (Dai, Ludo, Teddy and Fili especially) comes to life on the page, and I want to be friends with all of them’ – Wondrous Reads (on GIRL MEETS CAKE, the UK/World edition)

‘I just really fell for Heidi and her friends… cute and entertaining, and if you like Brit humor the way I do, like fun romantic comedy-type stories, or like books with a funky and diverse cast of characters, you’ll really get a kick out of it’ – Forever Young

Just in case you were, you know, wondering if it was your cup of tea… :)   I think what’s really stuck out in all the reviews so far is how very British people have found it.  I’m still wondering exactly what that means.  Blog on the subject will ensue, once I’ve pondered some more…

I’m reading a book about faeries – and loving it to pieces (despite being a cynical git who tends to find straight fantasy and ‘magick’ a bit of a stretch) because it’s just that good.  It’s R.J. Anderson’s Knife (published in the US as Faery Rebels: Spell Hunter), which so far is reminding me of The Borrowers: an enticing doll’s house world of tiny furniture and monstrous humans (who might turn out to be allies, after all), and a tough bored girl who wants to see the big wide world.  The prose is glorious too.  Zippy clever stuff for 9+ girls.

Still puttering away at the opening chapters of Exciting New Secret Book Thingy, juggling a few scenes around to get the best fit.  It’s like a jigsaw with a piece missing at the moment (sorry, peanut-butter-in-bra story I borrowed from Girl Scout camp, not sure you’re quite good enough) – but I’m itching to get to the next bit.  Plus coffee with agent, shop-talky dinner with an old mate who’s now commissioning teen lit for a living (small small world), and oceans of tea with awesome writer-buddy Sarah Mussi. That all counts as work, right?

Going out for dinner and ending up dancing to random 60s girl groups in an awesomely manky student nightclub; discovering that the Marylebone Oxfam Bookshop is where Scholastic mock-ups go to die (I found a Philip Pullman with a Big Woo cover, and an Ally Kennen which was Girl Meets Cake on the inside: utterly surreal); eating a lot of peas.  Mmm, peas.