every day should be a susie day

My antic disposition

Posted on 09. Aug, 2008 by susie in books i've been reading, doctor who, kids' books i've been reading, music

Dear Reader, behold: the above represents a fleeting glimpse at the contents of my head.  *shudders*  For every blog post that appears here, there are dozens of others that I intend to write, and decide not to due to knackeration/distractedness/the realisation that probably no one else is all that interested in which bit of my ceiling will fall down next.  Give infinite monkeys an infinite number of blogposts, and they’ll plan to write Shakespeare, right after they’ve shown you this picture of a kitten with stuff written on it.

In the spirit of brevity, I shall thus give you the sonic drive-by version of all the things I meant to say lately but ran out of time/brain/ability to stand upright:

• I saw David Tennant being Hamlet!  In the previews, too, allowing much smugness at seeing the reviews roll in a week later (many thanks to T for ticket wizardry).  I had quibbles, sure (interval too late so ending feels comparatively flat, Laertes is AWFUL) but I was hopelessly delighted: an honestly likeable, endearing, funny Hamlet of the kind I’ve not seen before (I missed the 60s: shoot me), plus Patrick Stewart bringing epic chills to the ghost, and Oliver Ford Davies as a definitively comic Polonius.  Having admired Tennant since his TV debut in Takin’ Over The Asylum (astonishing 6-part drama by Donna Franceschild, watch it now, go on, shoo), I felt moderately fangirly, but mostly for Shakespeare.  He could do with a decent editor, but gosh, that bloke can write. :)
• Ned’s Atomic Dustbin.  Musical inspiration, with the added bonus of making me feel about 15 again. I seem to remember listening to ‘Up’ compulsively while doing my GCSE art coursework (a charming still life of a Leopard Lily named Colin, FYI).  Weird to realise I still know ALL the words.
• To spell or not to spell, etc.  Man named Ken says ‘oh sod it, ’speach’ will do, who cares?‘  The Spelling Society are…unexpectedly not very into spelling.  I am retro yet down with the young people: in other words, I’m rather fond of this spelling system we’ve had since, ooh, 1755 – but there are contexts in which correct spelling is laborious and irrelevant.  The context is the important bit, though, surely?  There’s something very meaningful in intentionally spelling something wrong (I muck about with that a fair bit in Big Woo/serafina67, after all).  No rules means less jokes.  Sorry, fewer jokes.  See, spelling isn’t everything. :P
• The Gingerbread Man, who you shall be hearing more of in due course…  Girl Meets Cake continues apace, and will be much enhanced by its author being somewhere warm and replete with really nice pizza next week, while editing.
• No good can come of the sentence ’so I called the emergency plumber…’
• Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn (ie the 4th, and final, of her series of sparkly vampire romances).  I confess I haven’t read it: struggled through Twilight, but it is officially not my cup of tea.  Yet the series seems to be being eviscerated not only by the mainstream reviewers (jumping aboard the ‘new Potter’ in time for the film of the first book), but by its own fanbase now.  She’s a millionaire author who is selling books by the kajillion and will continue to do so, yet is despised and derided (loudly, in detail) by multitudes.  We’re witnessing not the standard carping that JKR received, but the turning of the fanbase upon the creator.  Count me into the ‘I think the book sounds horrible, but I still feel terribly awkward for her as a human being’ camp, k?
• Deep Heat!  It’s not pictured, but you can imagine that after that complex juggling routine, Hamlet is going to slap a mountain of the stuff on Claudius’ shoulders, oh yes.  For it hurts, the Deep Heat. It might prompt a confession.  But it’s also the only thing that has allowed me any sleep at all for the last three days, and for that, I snog its creator, despite me now smelling quite odd.  I assume Mr Deep Heat Creating Man will be OK with that.

  NOT Breaking Dawn, sorry.

  To-do lists for holiday.

  Buying new shoes with little cakes on, failing to see Batman still, genuinely being excited about being able to stand up.

Do Fish Have Ears?

Posted on 23. May, 2008 by susie in biscuits and lies, books i've been reading, doctor who, kids' books i've been reading, music, other writers, telly, the rugby isn't it

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!

Hear me roar!

Posted on 15. May, 2008 by susie in biscuits and lies, books i've been reading, doctor who, films, internet

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.

NOT fish fingers a la Portuguese

Posted on 15. Apr, 2008 by susie in big woo, biscuits and lies, books i've been reading, cooking, doctor who, kids' books i've been reading, other writers, telly

Fellow kid-novelista MG’s been torturing me all week with beachside Blackberry-blogging from Brazil, so when my Brazilian buddy Be pined loudly for the Bossa Nostra bistro in Brighton, I said ‘brilliant’ and booked a B&B. When the alphabet is that freakishly persistent, I say roll with it.

I’ll concede that Maracajau probably had the edge on the weather, but even in an April weathermunge (blue sky, sunshine, high winds, bloody freezing) I love Brighton: tacky seaside town reeking of chips, hipster bohemia, party town, shady underworld where Pinky might pop up with a knife and do you in down some Art Deco alleyway. Where else could you find a retro arcade on the prom, complete with genuine 1920s end-of-the-pier peepshow viewers, hand-cranked and run on George IV pennies? But the highlight was undeniably the food. I’d no idea what to expect of Brazilian cuisine – and being a somewhat gigantic country, there’s plenty of regional variation. But the national dish is Feijoada, and if you know anyone who can make it, equip your kitchen with manacles and kidnap them immediately. Black bean stew with beef and pork might not sound all that thrilling, but I would gladly make it my last meal on death row. Yep, even above bacon sandwiches.

Feijoada: traditionally served with rice, farofa (ground manioc – a bit like maize), couve (fried greens), and a slice of orange (said to counteract the fat content: I do not entirely believe this bit). I’ll be trying to recreate it: anyone likely to come for dinner, be warned, you may be experimented upon…

* ‘Fish fingers a la Portuguese’ was what my Dad always threatened to cook us for tea if my Mum was otherwise engaged. I still have no idea what they might be. He does a good sprat, though.

Brighton’s North Laine has some nifty secondhand shops (not least Snoopers’ Paradise, which I very nearly left with a Man from UNCLE annual, several dozen plastic Lando Calrissians, and a top hat). Instead I wound up with some well-thumbed Dick Francis, and Knights of the Cardboard Castle by Elizabeth Beresford (of Womble-creating fame) which I remember loving. I don’t remember it being filled with people called Dickie, Ginger, and Mr Trumpet, though. It makes me wonder growing up in a second Golden Age of kidlit is depriving this generation of certain skills: I read so much Blyton, C.S.Lewis and Ransome that I developed an automatic socio-historical context filter, and contemporary characters who weren’t hopelessly gender-stereotyped and prone to adventuring parentless with gypsies and ginger beer were the aberrations. But Blyton still sells a million books a year worldwide, albeit under painfully misleading chicklit covers. I’m guessing the filter just comes naturally, the same way you know after a sentence or two whether something is literature, or just ‘pleasantly readable’.

As well as Brazilian food, Brighton also possesses a bakery in the Lanes that produces cupcakes to die for. These were necessary for important book research. Expect multiple loving descriptions in Biscuits & Lies (though, you know, I might have to go back just to clarify). In other news, there’s a rather spiffy micro-site accompanying a competition to win signed Big Woos over at MyKindaPlace. They’re giving away chocolate with the books: think I might have to enter myself…

Eating my words about Catherine Tate on Doctor Who (where do I sign up to the Donna Noble fanclub?); missing the old Skins cast already, even though they’re dead right to reshuffle; rediscovering the route to the gym at long last (feijoada, cupcakes: not exactly diet food); playing ancient PJ Harvey very very loudly indeed.

Apples and Oranges (and Daleks)

Posted on 06. Apr, 2008 by susie in big woo, books i've been reading, doctor who, kids' books i've been reading, other writers

It’s Oxford Literary Festival time, so yesterday I put on my cunning ‘humble punter’ disguise and trundled off to see some Important Successful Writers in action. Meg Rosoff (Rose-Off, apparently: who knew?) was every bit as relaxed, witty, and insightful as you’d hope a favourite author might be in person. I say a favourite: the book she was there to talk about, What I Was, was a disappointment to me – but perhaps only because her first two, How I Live Now and Just In Case, are quite so brilliant. And I have enormous respect for her disregard for doing the expected thing, despite it presumably driving her publishers nuts. She’s a YA author here and in Canada: they’re marketing her as an adult writer in the US, and she says herself she imagines her most obvious readership to be middle-aged women. (From the front row I detected the sound of a PR person quietly expiring.) Certainly she seems brilliantly unbothered by the demands of the market to put authors in a neat convenient pigeonhole: her next two novels are an adult-sounding period romance (complete with ’sexy poacher’), and a contemporary tale of a 19-year-old God. File under: Uncategorized.

She also says she’s rubbish at plot, and recommends stealing other people’s. I too am rubbish at plot, and plan to put ‘Meg Rosoff said I could’ at the end of all future books, just in case the lawyers come knocking.

I then couldn’t resist a panel of chaps who write the current Doctor Who tie-in novels, despite never having read any of them. It wasn’t exactly earth-shattering (Do you hide behind the sofa? Yes. Which are your favourite monsters? We like Daleks. etc), but the audience was almost entirely made up of excited small children (and their excited nerdy dads), one of whom was in costume as Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, and that made me grin all day.

Split by a Kiss, by Luisa Playa (10+, contemporary, girls). Josephine, new Brit arrival at an American high school, snogs the cutest boy in the school, and finds herself split in two: cool Josie, who wears the right clothes and hangs with the popular girls; and Jo the nerd, trying to remain true to herself while also struggling to fit in with the ‘alt’ kids. It’s Mean Girls meets Sliding Doors – except that Playa cleverly manages to keep both versions sympathetic, no matter which one reflects your own teenage status. (And on the nerdy writer front, I was really struck by how what sounds like a tricksy complicated structure is perfectly easy to follow: she makes it look effortless, and I’ll bet it wasn’t.) Throw in oodles of Buffy references, a genuinely touching sub-plot involving Jo’s mum, and a simply lickable love interest, and you have a gem that’s pitched absolutely perfectly at the target audience. If you know teens that eat up Louise Rennison, Jacqueline Wilson’s teen books, Joanna Nadin et al, they will consume this with equal glee. (And if they’re looking for further inspiration, they’ll find plenty at www.chicklish.co.uk, Luisa Playa’s own website, which is stacked with that sort of thing. You might come across a rather fabulous review of a certain Big Woo while you’re there, too…)

Publication Day! Well, it will be tomorrow. And actually Big Woo appears to be available EVERYWHERE already: I keep spotting it on tables in bookshops. (Possibly this is because I’ve been going into bookshops to look for it. Ahem.) I ought to do something special to mark the Official Release, I know, but I’ll just be having my usual Monday: being taken out for lunch in old London Town, and buying myself some posh underwear. *sighs theatrically*

Chuckling over the Guardian Apprentice blog, which is still every bit as entertaining as Siralan and co; continuing to marvel at eclectic DJs (China Crisis followed by Outkast, anyone?); boggling at the wacky snow ‘n’ sunshine thing happening outside.