every day should be a susie day

I’ve less than no idea how it got to be March, but apparently time does this ‘moving forwards’ thing while you aren’t looking.  Who knew?  I’ve also heard it rumoured that if you just sit completely still all through March, this thing called ‘April’ (like the girls’ name: crazy, huh?) rocks up to replace it, and with April comes the publication day of GIRL MEETS CAKE!  (And probably some rain and stuff too.  Sorry about that.  Still, GIRL MEETS CAKE!  Eeeee!  Woooo!  Noises!)

It’s your average everyday story of love, lies, and gingerbread boyfriends – and I hope it makes you giggle.  Coo, it’s so pretty.  Every time I look at it, I want to snap off a chunk and eat it.  (Don’t consider that an author-recommended tactic, by the way: reading is definitely the way to go with this baby.)  And it’s going to be in actual shops from April 6th, so please begin making fluttery eyes at whoever buys the books in your house ASAP.

New book means you’ll be seeing a few changes around the site over the next few weeks, so do check back to see www.susieday.com after her makeover.  If you’d like to lay your hands on a free copy of Girl Meets Cake (not to mention a yummy basket of cupcakes!), then hurry on over to this fab Scholastic competition.  UK girlies, keep an eye out for Mizz magazine, for another competition with a rather exciting prize (for me as well as you!)…

  Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer: classic kidlit which I intended to reread for The Book That Never Was.  I recall adoring it when I was 11 or so: partly because I knew I was supposed to like this sort of thing (it’s all a bit Blue Peter), partly because the heroine’s last name is Makepeace, like her in Dempsey & Makepeace, which I loved with a flamey burny love.  To grown-up-me, it’s both brilliant and maddening: a clever tale of a time-slip, where two girls switch places between 1918 and 1960 and cope with fabulous phlegm – but also a missed opportunity, since the 1960s girl seems so Edwardian to the modern reader that the contrast in the two girls’ lives gets lost.  Sigh.  Still, the nostalgia made me giddy: a round bedpost that unscrews to reveal a hidden hiding place, monkey puzzle trees, ‘snubs to you and utterly squash’… *flails*  Also: Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Framed, a tale of thrilling juvenile art theft in North Wales which is beguiling, hilarious, and adorable all at once and should be read as soon as you can plausibly find a bookshop. Oh, and at last I can blether about M.G. Harris‘s Ice Shock, the second in her Joshua Files series, which manages to take everything you liked about the first one and then turn it up to 11…proper review next time, I promise!

  Surreally enough, I’m currently rewriting bits of Girl Meets Cake for the US edition – which will be called My Invisible Boyfriend, and available sometime in 2010.  Not Americanifying it: just tinkering with a thing or two to make the whole thing even more delicious (I hope!).  It’s a bit odd, being able to check different drafts against an actual proper book-shaped version, but I’m having fun dipping a toe back into Finchworld and reacquainting myself with geeky Heidi, and Mysterious E, and the endless references to cake…

  Baking blueberry muffins; eating scones with chestnut jam (yummy!) while watching Wales playing atrocious rugby; marvelling at how epically late 70s/early 80s telly fails even when it’s trying really hard to be feminist (Blake’s 7, I’m looking at you).

If by ‘Deadline’ we mean ‘arbitrary date several weeks after the proper deadline’, and by ‘Meets’ we mean ‘constructs vaguely comprehensible draft that is embarrassingly shoddy in places and needs to be at least 36% more funny’.  Come to think of it, ‘Girl’ is pushing it too.  Writer Writes Writing?

In any case, Girl Meets Cake has graduated from Floaty Amorphous Headstuffs to Actual Legible Existence, which as any writer will tell you is a rather important stage of the process, so woo, yay, etc.  It’s still rather a long way from what will actually appear on a shelf next year, but definitely closer than it was before I’d written any of it.  Well, hopefully.  Now to find out if my epic mountain of notes on Bits That Desperately Need Rewriting And/Or Throwing Away Completely matches up with my editors’.  It’s a bit like waiting for your exam results to arrive, while knowing in advance that you’ll have to resit.  If they were voluntary exams which you got paid to sit, and the questions mostly asked you to write jokes, and you were positively encouraged to cheat and look the answers up on the internet.  Erm.  Still, anything above a C is a passing grade, right?

  Mr Big by Ed Vere, in which a nice but huge gorilla discovers music may be the way to acceptance.  Lovely artwork, and it prompted Small Person (aged 2 and a half) to ask the eternal question ‘Where is the jazz?’, which made me laugh for about a day.  (Rarg, any suggestions?)  Also finally finished Douglas Coupland’s JPod, which is even less plot-driven than Microserfs, but still larky fun.  You’ll never look at Ronald McDonald the same way again (and I’m guessing the way you were looking at him before wasn’t exactly replete with the cosy warmth reserved for puppies, Stephen Fry, etc).

  A book!  A whole book!

  Post-deadline celebration has included acquainting myself with Smallest Person (babies! they’re so brilliant), building sandcastles on Barry Island beach, watching Starsky & Hutch, and having whole conversations with people who are a) not fictional and b) don’t work at Co-Op.  Oh, and I made some really good pea soup earlier.  Never let it be said I don’t know how to let my hair down.

Best way to start one’s week: on a train to Balamory Tenby, implausibly picturesque jewel of the Pembrokeshire coast. I last hit West Wales on a post-A Levels holiday, to enjoy those final bits of intimacy with school friends before we all buggered off to university (we went to a very classy nightclub in Saundersfoot, and got chatted up by a bloke who claimed he was Griff Rhys Jones’s nephew: such are pulling techniques of the Welsh schoolboy), but generally when I head for the homeland I get stuck at Cardiff. Which is lovely, of course, but provides fewer opportunities for building sandcastles.

Pembrokeshire has so many castles of the non-sandy variety they have no truck with Stonehenge-esque fencing, and are quite content for you to meander all over them. Carew is good: Manorbier even better (not least because their costumed mannequins are Madame Tussaud’s cast-offs: marvel at medieval J.R. Ewing! fling rotten tomatoes at Brezhnev in the stocks!). Highlight of the holiday, however, was the company. Apparently, you can hire a paparazzo to follow you around all day to make you feel like a star. I recommend obtaining a small niece instead, who will be similarly mesmerised by your every nose-blowingly mundane act (Auntie Susie has socks on! Auntie Susie has muesli! Auntie Susie HAS EYES!). Comes with free hugs. Sometimes the hugs include jam. Could anyone ask for more?

From Head To Toe, Eric Carle; Cockatoos, Quentin Blake; Kipper, Mick Inkpen. Two-year-olds have all the best books.

I need to get better at writing on trains. Curse you, iPod, distractor of the masses! Although should you find yourself on a 5 hour train journey that has just become a 7 hour train journey thanks to a 4-minute delay making you miss your connection – just to pluck an example from thin air, natch – you could always pass the time listening to me (and other more amusing people) blethering away about narrative point of view, Sex & the City, and chocolate plungers on last week’s Litopia podcast (iTunes or streaming). Otherwise, I’ve been contemplating Chekhov’s Gun (not to be confused with Chekov’s Gun). I suspect I’ve got an entire armoury strapped to the wall in the opening chapter of Biscuits & Lies: might need to discard a crossbow or two…

Being entertained by The Last Shadow Puppets (they sound like The Walker Brothers channelling Viv Stanshall: basically Gretschen Hofner with a bigger production budget, which can only be a good thing); watching M*A*S*H (the Henry/Trapper/Frank Burns era: oh Radar, I do love you so); being hugely impressed as usual by the ginormous brain of Alex von Tunzelmann, whose Indian Summer makes even a kidlit junkie like me get excited about grown-up non-fiction; eating magnificent fish & chips from Ficci’s in Tenby, who have been frying since 1935 – accept no substitutes!

(For those living under a rock/on the wrong continent, that’s Ryan Jones, Captain of the Welsh rugby team, celebrating our glorious grand slam in the Six Nations. He looks quite happy, y?)

Sport is mostly a dull thing to me. I was your typical specs ‘n’ textbook brainiac in school, and PE lessons rolled around on the timetable like a twice-weekly Room 101, performed in bri-nylon hotpants. The only time I ever threw a javelin, it went backwards. Hurdles, being at the approximate height of my armpits, were a bit of a challenge. I did make the school hockey team, but as goalie, a position where the only skill involved is intimidating the opposition by wearing really enormous clown shoes. Watching sport therefore tends to reduce me to a pimply-legged shivering 14-year-old, attempting to do cross-country half-naked through the streets of my home town to the sonorous hooting of passing cars.

But not rugby. It’s not a sport in Wales, not really: it’s a fandom. You buy the shirt; you argue about the team selection, favourites, past glories; you bellow like a loon at the telly, as if volume alone can spur your heroes on to glory, and then dissect and revisit and delight. It’s like Doctor Who, only with really muscular thighs.

For me, too, there’s a whopping chunk of nostalgia: going into Cardiff on match days to mooch round the shops and soak up the atmosphere, then home to line up on the sofa and holler (with a half-time cake to soothe nerves). The real joy is that I grew up watching the 80s, when we were mostly crap. And now? Well, look at Ryan’s face.

I keep failing to babble properly about Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr Y – partly because I’m not sure I can describe it. It’s a university novel: Ariel, impoverished student, is writing a PhD on ‘thought experiments’ in philosophy and literature while conducting an inappropriate affair and trying not to starve to death. It’s a book within a book: The End of Mr Y is a deeply obscure Victorian novel, said to curse anyone who reads it. It’s a sci-fi fantasy with bonus time-travel: the cursed novel isn’t fiction, but a key to a parallel world. It’s a thriller with evil agents and death threats, a romance, a genuinely complex and thought-provoking reflection on relationships, on time, on selfhood. It’s twelve books at once, and yet it never for a moment feels muddled or overstretched. Fascinating, intelligent, witty, brain-breaking – all the good things. I loved it. (I’m told by several that her PopCo is equally good: one for the Big List Of Things To Get Round To Reading.)

Biscuits & Lies progresses in lurches rather than leaps and bounds, but progress is progress. I’m still having fun with it, anyway (it’s reached the ‘Susie makes herself get some work done by coming up with stupid jokes’ stage, which is quite fundamental to my working routine). Publication of Big Woo (April 7th! That’s actually quite soon!) continues to impend. I’m still working on The Website, but all will be unveiled once there’s some ‘all’ to unveil. In the meantime, the US bound proof (a pre-publication version they send out to drum up interest) has already got a few bloggers Stateside talking, and in glowing terms too. Woo!

Suspecting my house is trying to kill me (ceilings falling down, microwaves on fire: Coming Soon: LOCUSTS!); watching Sunshine (an interesting take on the ‘people trapped inside a spaceship’ genre – but what the hell is the glittery gold spacesuit all about? Did no one tell the costume guys that the official colours of space travel are white and silver?); painting my fingernails Incredible Hulk green.

Not as much fun as adventures with CSS, I’d reckon.

Or indeed the Go! Team, who I saw this week and are still so. much. fun live. It’s like being in an unusually kawaii school assembly run by Dr Teeth and the Electric Mayhem: all splitting the crowd down the middle for a singalong and prescribing the appropriate timing of one’s pogo. Gig was much enhanced by the doorman asking me for ID (and being hilariously floored when I told him my age), a bloke on the way out telling me I had ‘the best hair I’ve seen in ages. Well, six months’, and a random after-gig club with a playlist from Grandmaster Flash to the theme from Neighbours. Anyway, here’s Ladyflash for the uninitiated.

An interesting piece in the Times about how internet nerds are all girls these days, except in the world of programming. I’m depressed by the 12-year-old who thinks that girls only like the communicative fun bits and should leave the techie business to the boys (especially the day after International Women’s Day): maybe our schools need to be wallpapered again with the IT equivalent of those cheerfully grimy girls in boiler suits waving spanners to encourage us to become mechanics. (And let’s ignore the fact that I’ve been living up to my gender stereotype all weekend, harassing WordPress templates into minimal degrees of submission and wishing it was all laid out a bit more visually.) Then again, is content really a lesser species than code? Web 2.0 isn’t just about the back end being Open Source so we can fiddle with it: it’s about simple elegant interfaces which let you get on with writing. Bet that 12-year-old grows up to be a journalist…

Not a lot of B&L writing due to the aforementioned WordPress harassment (more on that soon, once there’s anything worth looking at), and scribbling some Big Woo promotional material. Imminent publication: it’s like having a proper job or something.

Watching Wales v Ireland and actually getting a bit teary (I am so proud of the boys, bless them, and now I’ve heard about the gouging I feel less cross about us earning 2 sin bins); finding out that someone very lovely is getting married, hurrah; eating pearl barley; moaning about Ashes to Ashes Alex Drake’s bra strap.