every day should be a susie day

Best thing about being a children’s writer?  Meeting readers – enthused, informed, very-probably-taller-than-me readers.  Second best thing?  Meeting fellow writers.  (They’re usually taller than me too.)  So the Oxford heat of the UK Kids’ Lit Quiz last week was a peachy way to spend an evening.  I got to join M.G. Harris, Linda Newbery, Dennis Hamley, Meg Harper, Mark Robson and Rachael Wing (who turns out to still be at school, doing her A2s: blimey, I bet she’s fed up of people mentioning that – but still, blimey!) on the Authors Team, up against 30 local schools.  Despite me apparently not knowing my Spiderwicks from my Snickets (oh, the shame), we managed to top the scoreboard.  But we did have 2 extra people and a combined age of, er, lots – so props to the true winners from Oxford High, and everyone who took part.  You all did scarily well, and I would like to have your brains, please.

  I’m whizzing gleefully through a sneaky preview copy of Ice Shock (gosh! ooh! no I’m not telling!), but I confess much of my week has been occupied with the Starksy & Hutch Annual 1979, which may be the best book I’ve ever read.  And I’ve read Ulysses.  Well, some of it.  If only Joyce had thought to brighten Bloomsday with bodgy drawings of men in cardigans, tips on keeping house plants, and the fact that Hutch is an Aries, I’m sure I’d have got all the way to the end.

  Lazy writer is lazy.  I’m sure all these pictures of Starsky wearing very short shorts will inspire me somehow, though.  Beloved British Editor has floated an interesting idea my way, though, which I’m quite excited about.  I shall reveal more when there is some actual ‘more’ to reveal…

Returning to my old college for a Women’s Dinner, to gossip with old friends and tutors, and delight in the fact that there are now enough women students to make such a thing possible (think there were 14 of us in my academic year?); cooking fajitas to Joe Cornish’s European Supermarket (cheers, Mr Smith); wishing the iPlayer could watch things for you, so as to save time.

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.
• 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.

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.

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!

Not as much fun as adventures with CSS, I’d reckon.

Or indeed the Go! Team, who I saw this week and are still so. much. fun live. It’s like being in an unusually kawaii school assembly run by Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem: all splitting the crowd down the middle for a singalong and prescribing the appropriate timing of one’s pogo. Gig was much enhanced by the doorman asking me for ID (and being hilariously floored when I told him my age), a bloke on the way out telling me I had ‘the best hair I’ve seen in ages. Well, six months’, and a random after-gig club with a playlist from Grandmaster Flash to the theme from Neighbours. Anyway, here’s Ladyflash for the uninitiated.

An interesting piece in the Times about how internet nerds are all girls these days, except in the world of programming. I’m depressed by the 12-year-old who thinks that girls only like the communicative fun bits and should leave the techie business to the boys (especially the day after International Women’s Day): maybe our schools need to be wallpapered again with the IT equivalent of those cheerfully grimy girls in boiler suits waving spanners to encourage us to become mechanics. (And let’s ignore the fact that I’ve been living up to my gender stereotype all weekend, harassing WordPress templates into minimal degrees of submission and wishing it was all laid out a bit more visually.) Then again, is content really a lesser species than code? Web 2.0 isn’t just about the back end being Open Source so we can fiddle with it: it’s about simple elegant interfaces which let you get on with writing. Bet that 12-year-old grows up to be a journalist…

Not a lot of B&L writing due to the aforementioned WordPress harassment (more on that soon, once there’s anything worth looking at), and scribbling some Big Woo promotional material. Imminent publication: it’s like having a proper job or something.

Watching Wales v Ireland and actually getting a bit teary (I am so proud of the boys, bless them, and now I’ve heard about the gouging I feel less cross about us earning 2 sin bins); finding out that someone very lovely is getting married, hurrah; eating pearl barley; moaning about Ashes to Ashes Alex Drake’s bra strap.