every day should be a susie day

On the heels of this week’s other ten-year anniversary, I’ve been hesitating to share this – but real life’s a disorderly thing. It goes on. So, ten years ago today, still shell-shocked by the news from the US of what wasn’t yet called 9/11 (and reeling from 2 hours’ sleep after a very delayed flight home from a holiday in Tunisia) I turned out to have the most important, life-changing, amazing day of my life.

BBC Television Centre! Where they make the television!

I was one of six finalists in the BBC Talent Children’s Fiction Prize. I’d sent in one chapter and a short synopsis, been inexplicably plucked from 4500 entries, and commanded to write the rest by early December. All six hopefuls were invited to a day’s workshop at Television Centre, to get advice from – get this, this still blows my mind – Jacqueline Wilson and Michael Rosen. They were warm and hilarious, encouraging, and very kind to a group of people who (in my case at least) very plainly had NO IDEA AT ALL how to finish a book. (Jacqueline Wilson’s face on learning that we had 3 months left before the deadline and some of us hadn’t written any of it at all? Memorable. Oh so memorable.)

We ate the BBC’s crispy prawns, failed to visit the Blue Peter garden as promised because we were too busy nattering, and left clutching a sealed brown envelope marked ‘Feedback’ and all the other finalists’ email addresses, with promises that we would stay in touch.

I met my sister J for coffee, and burst into tears all over her. 2 hours’ sleep and the first ever experience of what a sealed brown envelope marked ‘Feedback’ feels like will do that to a girl. (It was – as all early-stage critiques should be – 90% positive, with a few gentle suggestions for improvements. At the time, it felt like the end of the world.) I was definitely not going to win the prize, and all those other finalists were definitely scary people who had probably given me made-up email addresses.

The following February, I got a call saying my book was the winner. Not long after, I got on a train to Market Bosworth, and all 6 finalists ate and drank and celebrated and commiserated, and they didn’t spit in my food or poke me with bitter sticks. In fact, they were lovely! We talked about how we didn’t really know a lot about the publishing industry, or any other writers: how maybe we ought to stick together, and help each other out.

Ten years later, that BBC prize-winning book is of course out of print – but that wasn’t the real prize. One of our little band decided not to pursue writing (we miss you, Zoe!), but the rest of us have kept at it. In the last ten years, between us we’ve published seven novels: there are contracts signed for another seven, with more waiting to be inked. We’ve cheered each other on, and been brutally honest when honesty was needed. We’ve skipped over hurdles because one of us has seen them before, and knows when to jump. We’ve eaten a quite startling amount of curry. I’d have given up in despair on multiple occasions without them – and I think that goes for the lot of us.

So thank you, Sarah, Ruth, Josie and Caroline: I owe you tons. And tons. And some more tons.

Sometimes we also eat cake in our jim-jams. *waves at absent Josie*

And for those of you who are aspiring writers, and don’t have a Sarah, Ruth, Josie and Caroline to read your first draft, or your submission letter (and spot that humiliating typo on line 1), or brainstorm plot with, or give you a hug when you get a rejection, or to pontificate wildly at that special wine-based time of the evening, or comfortingly hate that book that just came out that’s a bit like that idea you had, or just tell you you’re ace at the precise moment you happen to need to hear that – I hope you find some.

Honestly? I am almost as excited to unveil this little beauty as I would be about a new book. You see, there are loads of brilliant individual children’s writer blogs out there. The Scattered Authors Society has been running a daily kidlit blog at An Awfully Big Blog Adventure for ages. There’s Crime Central, an author-run blog to celebrate crime fiction for teens. But lovely Jo Cotterill (who, as well as being a fellow Random House author, handily lives just down the road and thus I get to eat her cakes) thought one day, hang on: why isn’t there a group blog, aimed at readers, written by authors, just for girls?

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.

Like most Brits, I’ve been filling in my census form this week. (What is your job title? WRITER. Briefly describe what you do (did) in your main job. WRITING.)  I dithered more over the ‘how many hours a week do you work in this employment?’ question. In the last two weeks, I’ve written barely 500 words of Project Bluebell.

I’m not slacking. (Apart from that day Leverage Season 2 arrived and I ate a lot of Revels.) I’m brewing, mulling, cooking a new take on an old idea. And cooking needs fuel.

REVELS ARE DEFINITELY FUEL, K? Even if they are rubbish now they don't have peanuts in.

But the brain needs feeding as well, so I’m stuffing myself with artistic nutrition. Last week I saw Frankenstein at the Olivier in London. The run is sold out (though you might yet snare a ticket for an NTLive cinema showing – on Thursday in the UK, varying dates internationally – which will be the exact production I saw: I’m going, can’t wait to see how it translates onscreen). I went for purely intellectual reasons, of course, and in no way to stare at Benedict ‘Sherlock’ Cumberbatch in a series of extremely well-tailored coats – but I left incoherent with adulation, at a familiar story told afresh with the perfect mix of respect and inspiration. Hard not to walk away with a piqued curiosity about what makes us alive, human, worthy, and a perked sense of love for storytelling.

I’ve watched Cabaret again (can anyone get through Tomorrow Belongs To Me without sobbing?); I’ve been part of the giddy crowd led by skiffle kings The Severed Limb in a Drunken Sailor singalong. I feel surrounded by slightly skewiff people, pursuing the thing they love to do whether it makes sense to the rest of the world or not.  Granted, it didn’t work out all that well for Victor Frankenstein – but I think writing a book, you’re more Creature than Mad Scientist: stumbling from rejection to rejection, fumbling for language, striving towards some comforting apprehension of your place in the universe (and very possibly discovering you don’t have one).

So why do we keep doing it? In refuelling mode, everything resonates. I watched Serenity for the millionth time this weekend too, and this might just nail it.

Shiny.

*

Wintergirls, by Laurie Halse Anderson. Another phenomenal, important YA read from the author of Speak, this time tackling anorexia.  Outstanding stuff, beautifully written – but I urge you, especially if you’re a teen reader or have any ED history:  Take care of yourself while you read this book. Be kind to yourself. Talk about it afterwards.

Not a whole stack of tangible wordage from me, then – but oh my golly, it’s been an exciting week. I’m thrilled to say that Authors For Japan raised just shy of £11,000 for the Red Cross Japan Tsunami Appeal, and thanks to her generosity I will now have the privilege of mentoring aspiring children’s writer Michelle Newell for the next 6 months. (Do read AL Kennedy’s brilliant piece on the exact sort of handholding I’m hoping to provide.) Thank you so much to everyone who made a bid! And if you missed out, it’s not too late: do check out Kidlit for Japan and Genre for Japan, which are still open with many amazing items on offer.

Failing to quell my inexplicable desire to eat gyoza for every meal; hanging with marvellous old mates who know how to put fish to sleep and how to wake them up again and much more besides (it’s all in the clove oil, apparently); deciding that all things considered, I am not meant to have a fringe.

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?

*

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