And now there is.

Girls ♥ Books is for all girls aged 8-14 who love books – all kinds of books – and our roster of daily bloggers still blows my mind. Coming up are Cathy Cassidy, Karen McCombie, Cathy Hopkins, Joanna Nadin, Leila Rasheed, Fiona Dunbar, Keris Stainton, and many more. We’re going to introduce you to some brand-new authors too (one so brand-new she can’t even tell us the title of her debut novel yet!) – plus there’ll be quizzes, polls, and competitions to enter to win books and goodies.  I’m one of the first bloggers on the roster, so please do swing by Girls ♥ Books soon: you just might find a video of me, being all lispy and petrified cos I know I’m being filmed and it’ll be on the internet *ahem* I mean, of me being super-professional and articulate while giving you a guided tour of my writing desk…

By the way, if anyone in your vicinity gets sniffy about us using ‘heart’ as a verb, you have my permission to gently bonk them on the nose with the latest edition of the OED while shouting “OMG! it is a word, FYI, you tinfoil-hat-wearing heteronormative Rotterdammer!”

(You can find the full list of words they added last month here. I love new words, especially the ones that don’t seem new at all. The fact that it has taken until 2011 to get ‘stonewash’ in the dictionary boggles my rumble-de-thumps, I can tell you.)

PS: I hope you like how the Girls ♥ Books site looks. I did that bit.

PPS: Ooh, Australian book-blogger My Girl Friday made a Heidi-themed Polyvore for Girl Meets Cake! Adorable.

Gingerbread Sherlock, and his faithful Watson

Happy Birthday! May your celebrations be worthy of fistfuls of Mrs Hudson’s soothers.

As you may have heard, that nice Mr Cable-Knit there has gone and got himself a rather significant new job. This development has been met with universal whoops of glee and hula-dancing to They’re Taking The Hobbits To Isengard, swiftly followed by a trembly lower lip at the consequences for Sherlocky fun. (Or perhaps that was just at my house.) However, since Freeman is quite perfect for both roles, I think we can all agree that there’s only one logical solution.

Sherlock: The Adventure of the Bag-End Burglar

I love books. (Duh.) I love being recommended books, and borrowing books, and being given them by lovely generous people. But once the Billys are doublestacked and the TBR pile on the beside table starts to need its own postcode, tricky decisions have to be made. What to read next? And how to avoid that awful grudging ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ sensation when you discover that you’ve picked up one that’s not really your cup of tea?

Apparently Ford Madox Ford reckoned that there was a sure test for any book: “open the book to page ninety-nine and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”

My Reader brain says: I see what you’re getting at, Ford Madox Ford.  (And while I’m here, can I just say how much I enjoyed Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, your reworking of the Twain classic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and that I really must get around to reading Parade’s End, and I really am sorry that these days you’re just a rent-a-quote guy with a funny name when you were instrumental in shaping the C20th literary canon? Also, sorry that you’re dead and everything.)

My Writer brain says: Isn’t that terrifying?

Page 1 is the one we all worry about.  The opening sentence, the first paragraph: those get fussed over, tended to,  pruned to perfection like roses. By page 99 I’m a bit busy telling the story to the people who’ve read the previous 98 pages to worry about hooking them in all over again.  But people put books down. Sometimes they don’t pick them back up. So should every page of my own writing be jampacked with amazingness, just in case the whim of the typesetter makes it #99?

Applying the Page 99 test to my own books is… interesting.  Different territories = different page numbers (ha, take that, FMF!), but I’ve stuck with the UK editions via the scientific logic known as ‘they were nearest’. So:

Girl Meets Cake: we’re faced with an IM conversation from Ludo – the sort which is all subtexty and meaningful if you know that she thinks she’s talking to Heidi’s boyfriend Ed, when actually she’s talking to Heidi – but looks inane and off-putting if you don’t.

Big Woo: possibly my favourite scene in the entire book: where Serafina narrates her failed first date in the style of a film script, where squirrels throw nuts and a bird poos on her dress which means she cannot even take it back to Topshop.

Whump!…in which Bill falls 632 miles down a manhole (my first, now out-of-print, book: 8-12/MG) : a hilariously overwritten scene in which the hero is kidnapped and taken to the Land Of Too Many Adjectives.

Hmm.

As you can see, Pterry is devastated.

What conclusion do those 3 completely disparate results lead me to – other than blimey, Slowly the hushed voices built up again to a steady hum is a horrible sentence? Well, obviously good old FMF was onto something. Cover design and blurb can’t do it all: some things – tone of voice, sense of humour – are so aligned to personal taste that the text itself must be the clincher.  (Terry Pratchett falls into this category for me. In theory, I should love Discworld. In practice: eh.) If you are immune to the charm of books which reference the internet or include email, IMs, blogging in CAPSLOCK, imaginary squirrels etc, then my teen stuff won’t be your thing – so a sniff of page 99 will help you to steer clear. Alternatively, if you are a tech-comfy reader, happy with screen-styled interaction appearing on a printed page, maybe you already approach the text as something to be read as if onscreen – to be skimmed, saved for later, dipped into instead of treated like a traditional novel.

To me, it still feels like cheating: a funny sort of disregard for the rules, no different from skipping to the end to see Whodunnit or reading plot spoilers (though I understand plenty of UTTERLY BEWILDERING AND ODD people do both).  There’s a reason publishers tend to put Chapter 1 of future titles online or at the end of another novel, as a teaser. Chapter 1 is the beginning of the story.  Reading the middle first is like trying to be 17 before you’ve been 7: not likely to help you learn how to drive.

That said, whichever page number gets randomly assigned to my words, my job as a writer is to write as well as  personally possible. Even allowing for the necessary peaks and troughs of plotlines and emotional journeys, every page should be jampacked with amazingness – even if it’s the sort of amazingness that isn’t apparent to a casual page-99 drive-by reader: something that looks amusing/disastrous/kind but we know for that character that it isn’t; a pay-off to an earlier set-up, Chekov’s gun coming off the wall; a line that rattles in your head because it’s honest and true and you thought you were the only one. Or an imaginary squirrel.

Time to prune the roses…

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.

IFFATH, for her magnificent Gingerbread Susie!

Look! It's me, only gingerbready!

I have it on good authority that there was an iced version of those green Converse, but it went the way of all gingerbread before it could be photographed.    Congratulations, Iffath – signed books and gingerbread goodies will be on their way to you soon!  And since she’s apparently multi-talented, the rest of you can cheer yourself up by visiting Iffath’s brilliant YA book blog, LoveReadingX.

Am running out of creative ways to wedge books into my overflowing bookshelves, so I’m back in local library mode – which means my choices are down to serendipity (and how many I can fit in my handbag).  Just finishing Madeleine L’Engle’s classic A Wrinkle In Time, which has the best opening few chapters imaginable.  I could live without the unicorns and the bits where I get told how Jesus is a bit like Rembrandt – but there’s Proper Science, a heartfelt quest for a missing mathematical genius parent, and kids who are weird and brainy and that’s presented as really quite handy.  Hooray!

Writing group met this weekend.  We interspersed our usual curry and wailing with masses of practical stuff, and much constructive hand-holding.  How people carry on writing without that sort of support, I’ll never know.  They giggled at the appropriate moments in my chapter, anyway – and reminded me of several abandoned projects of mine I’d completely forgotten.  They say when you finish a manuscript, you should put it in a drawer, so you can gain some distance.  YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO TAKE IT OUT AGAIN THOUGH.  Brain, please take note.

Wishing daytime telly still meant Utter Bobbins, and not Chuck reruns and Project Runway; attempting to explain the British electoral system to a 16-year-old Kazakh student (apparently I should’ve said ‘we don’t have one’, sigh); becoming oddly obsessed with ham.