every day should be a susie day

Generally, I like to stay at home with a nice cup of tea and my laptop, attempting to think literary thoughts while watching Gilmore Girls reruns.  But once in a while I like to sleep in a tent, build a campfire, and locate a hill to yomp up (or down: down is nice) – and since my sister T likes to do that sort of thing too, off we went.  Zion, Bryce, Grand Canyon (plus a little Las Vegas on the side for, erm, sleeping in, mostly).  2 small Welsh ladies with great big backpacks.  109°F.  Rucksack-eating squirrels.  Thunderstorms and tent floods.  Possibly my summer holiday this year involved more lizards, pit latrines, heat exhaustion and Barry Manilow than the average, but – I’ve hiked the Grand Canyon.  Lifetime ambition achieved.  Blimey.

Sincerely, it’s taken me so long to update because it’s hard to stop myself evangelising: the extraordinary, almost dusty-seeming night sky in canyon; the sobering effect of being in a place where humans are so plainly ill-equipped interlopers; the sense of pushing yourself absolutely to the edge of what you think you’re capable of.  It makes it sound like torture, but it was the best holiday ever.

Of course, I maintained my usual devastating commitment to style while I did it.  Mhmm.  Foxy, no?

All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy, because it seemed appropriately sweaty and knackered.  Stupendous – plus my copy is now shredded mess of unpeeling pages, which I’ll forever remember reading at Phantom Ranch, ankle-deep in the creek, as the mule train passed in pink cowboy hats and sunburn.  Now I’m back to rain and Blighty, it’s Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair (I literally woke myself up with wanting to reread it), which is even more well-written than I remembered.

I am PLANNING.  Please give me a gold star, because I’m usually repulsively lazy when it comes to this bit – but what I have in mind needs to be a lovely tightly-knotted unfurlable thing. I’m already ridiculously excited about it all.  It’s like Heathers with ice-cream.  And, um, fewer murders.  OK, it’s not at all like Heathers.  ICE-CREAM, though!  Evil ice-cream.  Oh yes.

Lying on the floor while my back decides to conk out; having a glorious time eating fry-ups with my writing group and plotting Italian shenanigans; loving District 9.

In honour of Heidi’s imaginary boyfriend in GIRL MEETS CAKE, here’s a challenge for you: why not make your own yummy gingerbread boyfriend? (Or girlfriend, or entirely platonic buddy who you might have a bit of a crush on…) Bake yourself a boy, decorate him in suitably delicious fashion, and send me a photo of the results – I’ll be putting up a gallery of your tastiest creations! Personally, I’m planning to make a Gingerbread Avon at my Publication Day tea party this weekend. Silver balls and black food colouring at the ready! Although now I think of it, a gingerbread Tenth Doctor might be quite cute…

Here’s my favourite Gingerbread Men recipe to get you started: they’re soft and bready, so cook them for a few extra minutes if you like them super-crunchy!

125g butter
100g brown sugar
125ml (half a cup) golden syrup (or half syrup, half black treacle)
1 egg yolk
375g plain flour
1-2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Also needed: gingerbread man cookie cutter (or other shapes), rolling pin (I use a wine bottle!), baking sheets, wire rack for cooling – and whatever you’d like to use for decoration: icing, chocolate buttons, etc

• preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F
• beat butter and sugar together until pale and creamy
• add the syrup and the egg yolk, and beat together
• with a wooden spoon, stir in the flour, ginger, spice, and bicarb: then turn it onto a floured surface and knead until smooth
• roll out until about 7mm thick, then place on a greased baking tray
• cook for 7 minutes for soft gingerbread men, 10 minutes for dunk-them-in-tea-or-they’ll-break-your-teeth ones
• cool on a wire rack
• decorate! and don’t forget to snap a photo before he disappears! Email your photos to me here: susie at susieday.com

   I’m actually re-reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando at the moment, which is covered in my studenty scribbles – but I didn’t get the chance to babble about MG Harris’ second Joshua Files book Ice Shock when I read the proof, and now it’s out! If you’ve been blinded by a neon yellow book cover lately, that’ll be the one – and the inside is every bit as striking. The first book, Invisible City, threw Josh into some uncomfy situations, but this time the sense of peril is relentless. After some very hairy moments locked in a cellar, Josh ends up hiding out back in Mexico with the magnificently unimpressable Ixchel, where he discovers that he might not just be in danger from the present, but the past as well. From night-time pursuits through freezing Oxford rivers to Lara Croft-style rock-hopping in a Mayan temple, all the way to the heartstopping ‘ice shock’ at the end, this is a top-notch thriller that is absolutely impossible to put down. Loved it!

Girl Meets Cake is officially out on Monday, wheee! So I’ve been rather busy giving susieday.com a cakey makeover (look! innit pretty!), and adding some new stuff for you lovely readery people. You’ll also see interviews with me popping up on a few YA sites soon (or you will, if I can whittle my answer to ‘What is your favourite cake?’ down to just the one paragraph). And in the meantime, I’m feeling increasingly gleeful about New Book, which is still just some ideas on a few bits of paper, but, you know, I think they might be good ideas…

watching Blake’s 7 (only the final episode to go, oh no!); inventing a new sandwich by accident (blue cheese on a cinnamon raisin bagel: somehow both disgusting and nice at the same time); loving In Bruges much more than I expected, and hating Watchmen much more than I expected; missing people who are far away.

Surefire way to avoid the post-Christmas blues: go on holiday. OK, so the part where it was -7°C wasn't entirely part of the plan, but Paris in the snow turns out to be absurdly lovely. And it gives one an excellent excuse to drink the utterly decadent hot chocolate at Angelina while thawing...

  Georgette Heyer, wheeee! And Russell T. Davies' A Writer's Tale, which (being about both writing and Doctor Who) was clearly cooked up in the 'things which exist purely to please Susie' cauldron. TARDISes aside, Davies has been responsible for some of the most cheerfully thought-provoking telly of the last 10 years – and he's every bit as entertaining and insightful on the page as you'd hope. I'm finding his reluctant commitment to prevarication until utter terror forces him to start working deeply reassuring, though he's emphatically wary about assuming any writer's method as a template. Always have an ending in mind! Only write in the mornings! In pencil, on the backs of envelopes, while drinking nothing but squid ink! He's right: we all want to have our hands held, to believe there's a secret trick to it, but sometimes the best advice really is to ignore whatever anyone tells you and just get on with it. Though of course you'll have to take my word for that...

  Next Book* is at the vertiginous decision-making stage. There are so many ways to write this story: whether it works depends entirely on me picking the right one. Actually, that's rubbish. No decisions are final: sometimes you have to write it 'wrong' before you can see how to write it 'right'. (If you're me, anyway.) It does help if you can spot the 'right' early on, though: Girl Meets Cake got to 55,000 words of Mostly Wrong, which was a bit wearing to sort out. Speaking of which: look! OK, so you still can't have it until April – but magnificent cover, no?

* Next Book (ie not the Next Book for you lot, the one I haven't written yet but hopefully might come out in 2010) needs a 'Biscuits & Lies'-style working title.  It's got a working working title, but that tells you the whole plot in one go, so we can't have that.  Hmm...bear with me?

  Drinking gallons of tea from my Christmas Blake's 7 mug; seeing in the New Year with Spaniards and grapes (twelve of 'em); pondering the many ways in which The Other Boleyn Girl is terrible; plotting a Prisoner marathon in honour of the *sniffles* late, great McGoohan.

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?).

Or possibly just mumble a bit in a slightly incoherent fashion. I have the grand privilege of guesting on the Litopia After Dark podcast on Friday evening, and promise to do my level best to be thrillingly audible. (I could aim for debonair and sparkling but, you know, it’s been a long week: let’s not get ambitious.) Full details on how to listen (even for the technowary, or ‘Mum’, as I like to call her) at the above link – and do pop by the chatroom if you happen to be online at the right moment: I hear it gets quite racy in there…

I’ve gone on a deranged Dick Francis spree, and have been gobbling up the Sid Halley ones with abandon – including the fourth, Under Orders, which I thought I’d read and hadn’t (and quite want to copy-edit, as Sid should really be investigating the mysterious theft of multiple commas). I read a review somewhere that declared the charm of his affable, mild-mannered, stoic heroes is that we secretly all think we’re like that. Alarmingly correct, I fear.

See all those brackets up there? YOU HAVE NO IDEA. They’re like a plague, I tell you. As serafina67 is to CAPSLOCK, Heidi is to parenthetical asides. (I may need to get stern in the edit.)

Being overexcited about Indy 4 even though the rumour mill says turkey; being overexcited about the Dollhouse trailer even though YouTube won’t let me see the bloody thing (T, it’s the new Joss Whedon thingy); being overexcited about having a laptop that actually, you know, works; sighing at BBCW’s knicker-knotting over Doctor Who knitting patterns.