Tag Archives | other writers

Paris, je t’aime

By on January 14, 2009 in biscuits and lies, books i've been reading, films, girl meets cake, holidays, other writers, telly

Paris 7/1/09

Surefire way to avoid the post-Christmas blues: go on holiday. OK, so the part where it was -7°C wasn't entirely part of the plan, but Paris in the snow turns out to be absurdly lovely. And it gives one an excellent excuse to drink the utterly decadent hot chocolate at Angelina while thawing...

 

book_mini  Georgette Heyer, wheeee! And Russell T. Davies' A Writer's Tale, which (being about both writing and Doctor Who) was clearly cooked up in the 'things which exist purely to please Susie' cauldron. TARDISes aside, Davies has been responsible for some of the most cheerfully thought-provoking telly of the last 10 years – and he's every bit as entertaining and insightful on the page as you'd hope. I'm finding his reluctant commitment to prevarication until utter terror forces him to start working deeply reassuring, though he's emphatically wary about assuming any writer's method as a template. Always have an ending in mind! Only write in the mornings! In pencil, on the backs of envelopes, while drinking nothing but squid ink! He's right: we all want to have our hands held, to believe there's a secret trick to it, but sometimes the best advice really is to ignore whatever anyone tells you and just get on with it. Though of course you'll have to take my word for that...

 

pencil_mini  Next Book* is at the vertiginous decision-making stage. There are so many ways to write this story: whether it works depends entirely on me picking the right one. Actually, that's rubbish. No decisions are final: sometimes you have to write it 'wrong' before you can see how to write it 'right'. (If you're me, anyway.) It does help if you can spot the 'right' early on, though: Girl Meets Cake got to 55,000 words of Mostly Wrong, which was a bit wearing to sort out. Speaking of which: look! OK, so you still can't have it until April – but magnificent cover, no?

* Next Book (ie not the Next Book for you lot, the one I haven't written yet but hopefully might come out in 2010) needs a 'Biscuits & Lies'-style working title.  It's got a working working title, but that tells you the whole plot in one go, so we can't have that.  Hmm...bear with me?

 

rocrastination_mini  Drinking gallons of tea from my Christmas Blake's 7 mug; seeing in the New Year with Spaniards and grapes (twelve of 'em); pondering the many ways in which The Other Boleyn Girl is terrible; plotting a Prisoner marathon in honour of the *sniffles* late, great McGoohan.

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Pshhhht’cooff

By on December 9, 2008 in books i've been reading, cooking, girl meets cake, other writers, telly

Bagpuss

Oliver Postgate has died.  Like every Brit of a certain age, his was the voice of my childhood.  Smallfilms (Postgate, animator Peter Firmin, and various handy people who were good at knitting) made telly out of bits of string in a shed at the bottom of the garden, with such obvious love and care that I feel teary just thinking about it.  His imagination contributed every bit as much of my kidly fondness for stories as Blyton and Kipling and Dahl.

So, for your nostalgic viewing pleasure, here are the singing mice from Bagpuss,  the Welshest episode of Ivor the Engine ever, soup (and the soup dragon) with The Clangers (spillage at 6.40!), a glimpse of Nogbad from Noggin the Nog, and some magnificently scary-looking pictures from Tottie (which we used to mock mercilessly, but secretly I adored it).  Oh, I am a tiny person all over again, just listening to him…  Farewell, Post, you’ll not be forgot.

book_mini  I’ve mostly been reading unpublished things, which is fun except you can’t talk about them. :)   Am now on Andrea Levy’s Small Island, though, which is masterful.

pencil_mini  Proof-correction time for Girl Meets Cake!  I love this bit: it’s so nearly a book, and those final little tweaks and checks are amusing.  Though I’m dithering over a section where my girls greet each other with the always-friendly catalogue of insults (tart, whore, that kind of thing).  I know why I wrote it like that: there are legitimate, meaningful, textual reasons for those words to be there.  But Tina Fey’s character in Mean Girls bellows ‘Y’all have to stop calling each other sluts and whores, because it just makes it OK for guys to call you sluts and whores‘, and she has a point.  Decisions, decisions…

rocrastination_mini Visiting Narnia (well, nearly: sooo pretty), nearly killing myself with undercooked chicken (I knew there was a reason I used to be veggie), continuing my helpless obsession with Gilmore Girls, despite it being all twee and goofy.

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I’ll have a P please, Bob

By on November 19, 2008 in books i've been reading, cooking, kids' books i've been reading, music, other writers, telly

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.

book_mini  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.

pencil_mini  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…

rocrastination_mini 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.

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Oh FFS

By on August 22, 2008 in biscuits and lies, books i've been reading, other writers

Dame Jacqueline Wilson’s children’s book My Sister Jodie is apparently having an ‘offensive’ term removed from all future editions, on the basis of one person’s complaint to a supermarket. ONE. One person, who overrules the author, the editor, the multiple people who will have already discussed whether that word can be included before publication of a book that’s sold 28,000 copies in Asda alone, prior to that ONE complaint. What an excellent lesson to teach young readers on the logic and fairness of the adult world.

The term in question can be amended to ‘twit’ with the adjustment of a single letter, so no prizes for figuring it out. I wouldn’t want to repeat it here, naturally, what with it being so very filthy – though I’m amused that the two are supposedly interchangeable. Roald Dahl’s The Twits has taken on a whole new meaning – a book which, incidentally contains worm-eating, the cruel misuse of superglue, and ‘bare bottoms winking in the sun’, a phrase which has stayed with me across decades.  Won’t somebody think of the children?

I happen to think swearing is both big and clever – when you do it right. There’s a single magnificent use of the ‘c’ word in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (crossover, true, but absolutely something I’d give to a bright 10-year-old) which made the book for me.  Christopher’s Asperger’s syndrome denies him emotional articulacy, but the casually brutal adults around him have no such excuse: it’s a powerful moment, cementing our sympathy and understanding of his actually very reasonable incomprehension of our world. Wilson puts ‘tw*t’ (honestly, how hilarious does that look?) into the mouth of an unpleasant, unempathetic antagonist. Humbert Humbert’s a great big perv.  Raskolnikov kills.  It’s called characterisation. Or is children’s literature not allowed to have that particular grown-up toy?

book_mini  Holiday = books!  Oh, I’ve missed you.  Selected to be as unrelated to Girl Meets Cake as possible, and thus the fabulously eclectic mix of Silence by Josie Henley-Einion (debut literary thriller from a dear old mate, and a cracking read: pacy page-turner, challenging erotica, and above all a truly compelling character study of one woman searching for a coherent social, racial, gendered identity across decades), Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov (recommended by M the Wonderagent with typical wisdom: dark, funny, gorgeously economical prose, killer ending, and A PENGUIN), and Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (your common-or-garden Calvino mindmelt: a musing on the nature of stories, and storytellers, beautiful and strange).

pencil_mini  Girl Meets Cake might currently be titled Woman Meets Caffeine.  I look forward to the forthcoming Writer Meets Deadline more than you can possibly know.

rocrastination_mini  Trucking around Pompeii in the blazing sunshine; discovering my niece has proven her super-brainiac status for good; becoming an auntie x 6 (Writer Meets Nephew next week!); realising that solo holidays are only fun until you’ve found a snack product with the face of Rolf Harris, and you have no one with whom to share him.

rolf

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Contains Mild Peril

By on June 4, 2008 in big woo, biscuits and lies, books i've been reading, films, internet, kids' books i've been reading, other writers

The kidlit world is getting its undies in a right old knot over publishers’ plans to include age guidance on children’s books. Those against include, well, probably every children’s writer you’ve ever heard of. Except for Meg Rosoff who, in typical fashion, is swimming against the tide, and thinks it might be quite handy for the humble book-buying punter.

Me? I’m with Mighty Meg.

Books aren’t unpackaged and unmediated. They come with covers carefully designed to target a specific audience: cupcakes and faces for girlies, logos for boys, artsy graphics for ‘serious’. (Foil and shiny bits for everyone: we’re all magpies, apparently.) Even the author’s name is retooled for the market where possible. Betcha I wouldn’t be ‘Susie’ if I wrote action thrillers for 10-year-old boys.

But all of these are inexplicit devices, and on occasion quite subtle ones. (I’ve not heard it stated aloud, but I’m fairly sure the colour scheme of the US edition of serafina67 doesn’t quietly evoke Lauren Myracle’s ttyl by accident.) The No To Age Banding posse point out that kids study these tricks of the trade in school. True: I’ve taught that lesson (and it’s gold: nothing gets a book-deprived disinterested class engaged better than getting them to redesign The Hobbit, even if it might end up a bit gorier than you remember, with considerably more grenades and rocket launchers). But it’s not kids who hand over the cash in the bookshop. And as a grown-up who reads kidlit avidly, I still find myself at nephew-birthday time wondering if I’m about to cause family meltdown with a gift that includes oral sex under its Spiderman wrapping paper.

Let’s get this clear: no 9-year-old booknut is going to be arrested for possession of an 11+ rated novel. Alarms will not sound throughout the local library, sending masked men with AK47s to shoot dead gay Dumbledore out of Little Johnny’s hands. If we can credit young readers with understanding book covers as marketing devices, we can also grant them the wit to interpret age banding in exactly the same way: as information which serves a specific purpose, and can be ignored and discarded if you think you know better. Meanwhile us crumbly types can be reassured that by buying a book we aren’t effectively taking a 7-year-old to a 12A film, only to have to carry them out, sobbing uncontrollably, after the ninth beheading.

Timing means everything in literature. I firmly believe that every copy of The Catcher In The Rye should come stamped with ‘not to be read if over 18: may cause nausea’. Martin Amis’s early works should explode off one’s bookshelf after the age of 25 in case you’re tempted to revisit, and discover that what seemed ‘like totally postmodern man, whoa’ back in the day now feels a bit studenty and crap. No kid is going to be heinously scarred by reading outside what is designated ‘age-appropriate’ – but I fail to see how they’ll suffer from a little guidance. We’re in a second Golden Age of children’s writing. Magnificent new books get published every day. A little help finding the ones you’ll get the most out of is no bad thing.

book_mini The Last of the Warrior Kings, Sarah Mussi (YA, 12+, contemporary thriller). Regular readers will know Sarah is an old mate, who despite being an award-winning and nominated-for-more-award-winning author, still deigns to associate with the likes of me. :) Much as I’d love to annoy her with a bad review, the bloody woman continues to write such uniquely funny, brainy, pacy stuff that I’m stuck with the usual effusions of dribbly praise. If you’ve read her Door of No Return, you’ll know to expect movie-worthy action and thrills, bonkers plot twists, heartbreakingly accurate teenage characters, and a serious dose of education on African issues. Last of the Warrior Kings manages to revisit the same territory while feeling utterly fresh, largely thanks to hero Max, whose endearingly hapless efforts to save the day and win the unattainable girl (all while keeping his expensive trainers pristine) can’t help but draw you in. It seems cheeky to highlight the sillier side of a story that has genuine darkness at its heart: Sarah’s not naive about her own South London, and the harsh realities of gang warfare now are accompanied by the no less grim history of C19th British intervention in Nigeria. But this is a fundamentally uplifting book about finding a way to live your life well no matter what hand fate has dealt you, with plenty of daft gags along the way and an ending that will really linger in the mind. Quite infuriatingly good. Stop making the rest of us look inadequate, dammit!

pencil_mini Had a typically spectacular weekend with my writing group (the evil Mussi included), who kindly held my hand through a bit of Biscuits & Lies structural paranoia, and, as always, fed me till I was barrel-like. I’m now back to too much thinking and not enough typing. And the realisation that I now have three separate characters called Simon. This is going to be an interesting editing experience…

rocrastination_mini Mourning the loss of Lovely Lucinda from The Apprentice; finding new things to hate about Indy IV (while coveting Lego Indy); playing Prince of Persia on someone’s PS2 (this is what old-skool looks like now? gosh); staring, open-mouthed, at this…er…unusual cover version of Rihanna’s Umbrella (T: isn’t that Arbruzzi in a wig?).

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