every day should be a susie day

Writers are a funny bunch. Half the time we think we’re chocolate: we have to, to believe we can fill up that big blank page,  that we have something to say, a story to tell that we can tell better than anyone else.  The other half we spend in a state of eye-poking misery, staring at the no-longer blank page full of adverbs and ‘just’ and that character we put in because nothing had happened for a few paragraphs, wondering why we ever thought we could do this.  The inner critic is a necessary beast, of course – but how do we tell whether it’s biting because it should, or just because we’re having a histrionic artiste moment?

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.

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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!

My sister once sent a fan letter to Anne McCaffrey. She received, to her amazement, a typed reply (and I mean typed, with awkward spacing and ribbon smudge: this must’ve been ~1985) answering each of her 20 questions in turn, clearly from Anne herself. I remember being impressed, jealous, but mostly confused. I liked books, not the people who wrote them.  If I could’ve written to Lucie Pevensie or Mrs Twit, I could see the point, but writers were probably waffly old ladies who’d tell you to eat your greens and pull your socks up and – most worryingly of all – might tell you to sod off and stop bothering them, thus ruining their books by associated disappointment for eternity.

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?

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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

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.

How lucky am I?  Not only do I get to write books about cake, but this week I got to have afternoon tea with one of the people who reads them!   The utterly lovely Paige won the Mizz magazine ‘Tea with Susie’ star prize, and she and her family joined me and a few of the divine Scholastic ladies at the Wallace Collection in London.  Much tea, cake, book-talk and giggling was had – not to mention cartwheels in the sunshine (confession: I left that bit to Paige).  Keep up the dancing, Paige, and I hope you’re all having a lovely summer holiday this week!

  Judy Blume, Meg Cabot, and, um, Margery Allingham.  Plus Justine Larbalastier’s original version of this blog post, expressing her frustration at Bloomsbury’s choice of a shockingly disingenous cover for her YA novel Liar.  I’m thrilled to see that sanity has prevailed – and have the utmost respect for her courage in speaking out.

  Ooh!  Aah!  I shall have to be infuriatingly vague (since at the moment it’s still at the back-of-an-envelope stage and I haven’t even decided on the main character’s name yet), but I’m about to start my next book.  (Well, I’m about to go on holiday and do no work on it at all, actually – but after that, workiness will ensue, I promise.)  For the ultra-curious: think Groundhog Year.  Hmm… *plots*

  Frolicking around the Tower of London; building slightly less impressive towers for baby M to knock over; having pretty pictures taken for the My Invisible Boyfriend jacket by my super-talented friend Justa Mili; practising putting up my tent!