every day should be a susie day

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…

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...

  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...

  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?

  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.

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.

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!

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…

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?).

I’m giving up on fiction. Reality’s getting too peculiar for me to attempt to compete.

First up, we have Canoe Man, who in the space of two days has gone from a tragic amnesiac who resurfaced after being presumed dead for 5 years in true Cast Away fashion, to a fraudulent git who let his sons think he was dead so his wife could buy a house in Panama.

Then there’s Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian woman who was kidnapped and spent 8 years living in a cupboard, who is taking the oh-so-predictable career move to become…a chatshow host. For those suspecting the ordeal might have left her adversely affected in the marbles department, her press release contains possibly the most chilling sentence ever constructed: “For a while now I have been considering the idea of coming out of the role of a passive media object and becoming proactive in creating media content.” With repartee like that, no wonder Parky’s retired.

And let’s not get into Beargate.

William Goldman, writer of The Princess Bride (both novel and film, each equally wondrous), points out that life’s ‘movie moments’ are infuriating: his example in Adventures in the Screen Trade is Michael Fagan breaking into the Queen’s bedroom, while the guards happened to be walking the corgis, and the lady’s maids happened to be cleaning another bit of the castle (bless him: I’m fairly certain this isn’t what ‘lady’s maids’ do – but hey, he wrote ‘My Name Is Inigo Montoya’: he can think whatever the hell he likes), and the people monitoring her security buzzer happened to assume it was faulty. All true(ish): none of it any use to a writer, because it’s so hopelessly improbable. As Goldman puts it: ‘Truth is terrific, reality is even better, but believability is best of all.’

It all comes down to genre. Genre gives us parameters and security, as writers, readers, consumers in general: no axe-murderers for the under-5s, no portals at the back of the wardrobe in chicklit. Real life is just another genre: no random drunk blokes in the Queen’s bedroom, and no dead dads coming back to life in a way that doesn’t lead to a party. There are rules to our mundanity, and we quite like them. No wonder celebrities go bonkers, stuck in a universe so off-kilter it wouldn’t even pass muster as sci-fi-fantasy. ‘Sorry, Ms Lohan/Winehouse/Spears, but your reality is too cliched for us to apprehend it as reality. Move along now?’

Finally reading Louise Rennisons’s ‘Georgia Nicolson’ series, starting with Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging. (Dying to know what the original title was, because I’d put money on it not being that.) I’ve been putting it off for fear of cross-contamination: when you’re reading a really good writer you pick up on their style, and I didn’t want to be channelling a snarky teenage diarist while writing…another one of those. Ahem. She’s brilliant, though. I was all set to be ‘read it for research, can tick that off’ about it, and instead appear to be more on the lines of ‘am hopelessly addicted now, please give me book fix soon?’ ‘I was all enigmatic, which is not easy in a beret.’ Hee. Thank heaven there are about 8 more of them, or I would be grumpy.

I am definitely having my photograph taken next week. Cue much wardrobe anxiety (along with hoping my cold goes away, because the red nose will look a lot less festive come April).

Buying fairy lights and thus declaring it Christmas, failing to go to a Philip Pullman book-signing, watching Graham Norton interviewing Marilyn Manson and Nigella Lawson at the same time and throwing all that ‘real life is a genre’ crap out of the window.

Magnificent news: fellow scribbler and dear old mate Sarah Mussi has won the Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award 2007 for her children’s book, The Door of No Return. I couldn’t be more thrilled, not only because she’s a friend, but because Door really is something special: a book aimed squarely at teens with powerful and sensitive issues at its core (financial reparations for slavery), coupled with a cracking thriller that tears you through the pages so breathlessly that you barely notice you’re being educated. It’s as far from an ‘issues’ book as you can imagine (it’s hilarious, for one thing: hero Zac is a corking example of an ‘unreliable’ narrator) yet doesn’t flinch from telling uncomfortable truths. Stuck for a Christmas present for a teenage boy, anyone?

This is the first time I’ve really known someone else’s book from ‘I’ve got this idea’ to it being an actual object with pages and a cover and an ISBN. It’s quite terrifying to imagine that every single novel you see on a bookshop shelf has gone through all those sticky moments in between: the second-guessing of the plot, the second-guessing of the very premise, all those rewrites, then the merry dance of finding agents and/or publishers, more rewrites, then the whirligig of promotion and whether you’re in a 3-for-2, all observed by friends and family and enthusiastic writing groups, by which time you’re on to the next one anyway because it’s taken 2-3 years to get to this point (assuming if you write quite quickly)… I know all these things already, but for some reason it feels more real when it’s happening to someone else. Watching the unfolding narrative of my own book-gets-published saga is participatory: I’m too much of a character, too closely involved. With someone else’s I get to sit back like Hercules Poirot, observing the scene, my little grey cells all a-fizz with glee as it unfolds exactly as I would have hoped. Cheers to you, Sarah: first of many well-deserved accolades, I don’t doubt.

Aaand the internet crazy just keeps on coming. Old story, newly in the mainstream media, of a 13-year-old girl who committed suicide: Making Light has an excellent round-up of the sequence of events, plus the obvious-yet-apparently-not statement of the week: What happens online is real.

Copyedits a-go-go. Sometimes WTF should be wtf. No, I don’t always know why. Also: Dear Copyeditor, I’m very sorry for writing the prizewinner of Least Possible To CopyEdit 2007.

Trying that thing where you stir-fry sprouts with bacon instead of just boiling them (not half bad); being on trains and buses and feet; locking myself out of my flat bumbumbum; wondering when lazy-bastard Lovefilm are going to send me the next bit of Prison Break; almost being in Paris. This last makes me happy. When I was little I had some knickers with ‘A Weekend In Paris’ written on them. Clearly they were formative.