every day should be a susie day

Elisabeth Sladen died yesterday, at 63, apparently after a long battle with cancer. It seems at best a bit daft to weep over someone you’ve only ever known via a fictional character, and my thoughts are with her husband, daughter and friends – but I clearly wasn’t the only old Whovian last night watching  Genesis of the Daleks with something in their eye.

Sarah Jane Smith was on telly the day I was born, wearing a woolly hat, orange wellies and a yellow pac-a-mac and getting tied up with string by Mr Potato Head.  My Doctor was that blond chap with the celery, so the first time I saw her in action was in The Five Doctors, where she zoomed gleefully about in Bessie with Jon Pertwee and made you not mind at all that Mr ‘teeth and curls’ had declined the invite. Lately, I’ve adored her on The Sarah Jane Adventures, where an older single woman and her adopted son define ‘family’ and get to save the world by being clever and brave and relying on each other. It’s the show that comes closest to the Doctor Who I watched as a kid, all cliffhangers and Lord Reith – and despite being set in Ealing, since it’s filmed in my old home town I know that attic is actually just round the corner from my old school, and with a little helpful time-travel, I could’ve been Rani or Maria.

Here’s her crowning moment in the original series, I think: reminds you what a wonderful performer she was.

I’ll give your love to Harry, and the Brigadier… *sniffs*

Excuse me for being Captain Obvious here, but: aren’t libraries amazing?

My childhood library. (That's not me in the picture. I'm not quite that old.)

This is the library I grew up in: probably the place that made me want to be a writer.   The children’s section was underground, accessed by a wrought-iron gate, a staircase coated with slippery green moss, and a dank, dripping tunnel.  Going to borrow books was like passing into the underworld – except you got to come out the other side, clutching fistfuls of Roald Dahl and Lucy M Boston.

The tunnel has been replaced by wheelchair and pushchair-friendly slopes – for which hooray, obviously: now the book-borrowing there is done by my smallest niece and nephew, who are a bit wee to appreciate a cod-gothic intro to Story Time.  My borrowing takes place in Oxford, under the amused gaze of a librarian who (correctly) suspects I am not taking out Meg Cabot on behalf of an absent teenage daughter.  But I still have the same sensation of being in a vast papery sweet shop.  There are books!  I can take them away without paying!  And if I bring them back – ok, get this, no, really – they’ll let me have some more!

My last visit did remind me of two downsides of my childhood adventures in that underworld:

I reread a lot as a kid. The instinct is still there: my hand reaches automatically for the familiar titles, because I trust them. And I didn’t know how to move on.  Downstairs the names on the spines were old friends: upstairs books were sorted by genre, and I didn’t have a clue where to start. I fell into a gap: not quite ready for Austen, and deeply scared that I might borrow something too challenging or, erm, porny by accident.  (My pre-teen brain: oh, sigh.)

And now? I’m not sure that would’ve happened.  There are SO MANY GOOD BOOKS – and so many ways to find out about them.  You kids these days, you don’t know how lucky you are, with your gigantically varied YA universe, and your well-informed librarians, and your new-fangled reviewing blogthings on your interwebs…

I take it back. That is me in the picture, and apparently I am that old. Now get off my lawn, you whippersnappers! *waves stick* *throws cat*

I started Becca Fitzpatrick’s Hush, Hush: lovingly written, and if YA paranormal romance is your bag then I suspect this is cream not milk – but it’s just not my cup of tea. Alice Kuipers’ Life on the Refridgerator Door fascinated me in a writerly way (how much of a conventional novel can you strip away without losing the fundamentals?) but I was left disappointed, mostly by the thought that we as readers probably need those conventions after all.  And then I read Anne Cassidy’s Forget Me Not, which blew me away.  The story of an missing child, which becomes the story of another missing child from almost 20 years before: multi-layered, suspenseful, all in deceptively simple prose that takes you by the hand and won’t let go.  I want to read everything she’s ever written.

I keep leaping out of bed at 2 am to write down ideas.  Then leaping out of bed at 8 to write them properly.  I’m making wrong turns, and there’s still lots to do with the opening chapters before they are on-the-nose right, but the voice is sorted, and it’s all a bit lovely, this new thing.

Raising a glass of Luigi’s finest to Gene Hunt and the Ashes To Ashes crew, who went out with a blinding finale and will be much missed (I’m still not over the departure of The Perm: this is going to be a slow break-up); ducking Lost finale spoilers (cos I’m only on S5 and that’s too many hours of having my brain broken to ruin the ‘ending’); wondering if my life will ever stop revolving around television about wonky time-travel (while watching Doctor Who, obvs).

I hear murmurings from the blogosphere that the ARC of My Invisible Boyfriend is beginning to arrive in a few US mailboxes.  For those of you who’ll have to wait till April, here’s a sneaky peek at the absurdly cute cover.

Look, pretty people!   (Don’t get too excited, European readers: this is the US edition of Girl Meets Cake, not a new book: you’ll have to wait till 2011 for one of them.  North American readers, please feel free to get as excited as is humanly possible.)

  I’ve got a copy of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go sitting next to me – yet appear to be reading Dick Francis’s Forfeit.  Eh, it’s Christmas, right?

  Project Poppy has been speeding along very happily, and has now careened into a wall and fallen down a plothole.  Grr.  Now have to decide whether to skip over the hole and fill it in later, or spend a few days with pen and paper scribbling metaphorical ladders. Hrmmm…

Listening to R4′s Shelved on how abandoned or banned episodes of Doctor Who and The Professionals reveal that people who made TV in the 1970s were, um, bonkers (a shock, I know); discovering my Christmas lights are borked; finally getting around to watching Inkheart and LOVING IT TO PIECES, OOH! – really must get round to reading the other 2 books.

I’ve wanted a hammock since the summer after my GCSEs, when I spent an entire week at a French campsite refusing to budge out of one, while reading Dune.  (Truly, there cannot be more compelling evidence of the comfortableness of hammocks.  Sorry, sci-nerds, but that’s a 750-page turd of a book.)

Today the sun shone, I read the weekend Guardian cover to cover, and there were raspberries, and much tea.   Bliss.

  Nomnomnombooks. Lately I’ve read Scarlett Thomas’ PopCo, which is marginally less weird than The End of Mr Y, despite being about commercial globalisation, treasure-hunting, and complex mathematical formulae. Brilliant, though: the ideas are magnificent but it’s the characters I still miss, weeks later. Then Nicola Upson’s An Expert In Murder: faux 30s detective fiction, starring actual 30s detective fiction author Josephine Tey (do you see what she did there?), who gets embroiled in a series of murders connected to her play about Richard III.  Being a Tey geek, I adore the concept more than is reasonable, but the execution is a disappointment: in lieu of narrative urgency the point of view wanders from character to character, including to the killer – who conveniently happens not to be thinking “hmm, wish I hadn’t committed that murder” at the time – and Tey is barely in it. I’d go and read Brat Farrar instead if I were you (or Allingham’s Dancers in Mourning, for genuine Golden Age theatreland intrigue). I’ve also finally read a Jaclyn Moriarty, Becoming Bindy McKenzie (YA), which I adored with the queasy reservations of one who recognises bits of her teenage self in the (profoundly unlovely) heroine. The denouement is bonkers, but there’s so much brilliance before that you don’t mind at all. It’s the 3rd of her Ashbury books, and I plan to eat the others as soon as the library lets me.

  I have proofs!  One last pass over the insides of My Invisible Boyfriend (the US title for Girl Meets Cake), which is going to look beautiful.  And I’m playing with a new Sooper Sekrit Project: only a few thousand words in, but I’m getting a wee bit excited.  If I can juuust get the voice right…

Becoming enthralled by the televisual loveliness that is Chuck; watching Don Juan De Marco (Johnny Depp is so young! Marlon Brando is so… many other things); being dead chuffed about Anthony Browne being the new children’s laureate; eating lasagne; still loving RebelliousPixels’ Buffy vs Twilight satire vid (just in case you missed it); wondering if I can bring the hammock indoors at the end of the summer so I don’t have to contemplate life without it…

I have no idea at what point the Fabulous Bake-A-Boy Challenge turned into the Fabulous Bake-the-entire-cast-of-Blake’s-7 Challenge, but I suspect Heidi from GIRL MEETS CAKE would approve.  And they are rather adorable…

Clockwise from the left: Cally, Avon, Vila, Jenna, Servalan, Gan, with Blake in the middle.  Before hordes of fellow nerds beat me over the head – yes, I know Servalan isn’t actually one of the 7, but Gingerbread Orac was beyond even my skills.  Vila is a bit rubbish, alas, but I am terribly proud of Blake – and Gan was sort of accidental, but actually the resemblance is uncanny.  (Here’s the real Team Blake demonstrating what sleeves will be like in The Future: personally, I can’t wait.)  I still have a few distressingly naked gingerbread men left in the kitchen, so I may have to make Tarrant and Dayna and Soolin.  Or possibly a nice crickety Fifth Doctor…?

And yes, this is a perfectly sensible way to spend one’s time.  Ahem.  Feel free to join in, anyway: the Bake-a-Boy gallery needs more gingerbready lovemuppets!

  I’ve just finished Luisa Plaja’s brand-spanking-new Extreme Kissing, which I’m happy to report is every bit as sweet, funny and clever as Split By A Kiss.  Bethany and Carlota are best friends, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have secrets from each other.  Bets is terrified she might be pregnant, while Carlota’s not quite the girl everyone assumes – and their day of ‘Extreme Travelling’ (every move dictated by the random pages of a magazine) isn’t the escape from their troubles they’d hoped for.  The story whizzes along, alternately narrated by ‘good girl’ Bets and ‘wild child’ Lots, and even if you have a sneaking suspicion you’ve worked out Carlota’s secret, there might just be another one underneath… This is Plaja’s real gift: there’s a sense of absolute authenticity about her characters, whose lives (family, school, friends, boyfriends, past relationships, future hopes and fears) are so convincingly fleshed out that you really do end up caring about their multiple worries – and their triumphs too.  And of course, the whole thing feels effortlessly witty: Carlota’s ‘Reverse Goth’ fashion crusade, her tendency to knit under stress, the numerous moments where the girls completely misunderstand one another.  Perfect for Louise Rennison fans who like a little angst in with their teenage escapades!

  It’s publication day!  Girl Meets Cake is properly out in UK shops.  I’m celebrating by eating leftover cake from yesterday’s tea party while writing notes for The Becky Book (which isn’t called The Becky Book at all, obviously, but it’ll do for the minute).  Nom nom *pause for typing* nom.

  baking, baking, looking at pictures of Blake’s 7 costumes, baking…