Entitlement!

Posted on 24. Jul, 2008 by susie in biscuits and lies

Ladies and Gentlemen, the votes have been counted and verified, and I can gleefully reveal that the next book (formerly known round these parts as Biscuits & Lies) from your resident scribbler Susie Day will be called…

*drumrolls*

GIRL MEETS CAKE

I love it, I love it, I love it to bits!  Mmmcake.  Cakey cakey cake.  Hee!  I may need to celebrate in an appropriate face-stuffing manner: who’s with me?

Those who have already heard a whisper about the plot will know that the Cake in question is in fact a Gingerbread Man (or boy…blimey, so complicated), and thus technically not a Cake at all.  Rather than be drawn into this ever-controversial topic, I direct you to the authoritative Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down coverage of the infamous Jaffa Cake ‘cake or biscuit?’ debate.  (Scroll to the bottom – but don’t miss the ‘Jamectomies’!)  When I worked as a college porter, I passed many an hour reading their biscuit reviews in lieu of eating any (the biscuit tin only ever had Rich Tea, a biscuit so rubbish it barely deserves the name).  Mmmbiscuits.  And cake.  Mmmmmmm.

To the kitchen, Batman!

(This is the UK title, btw: might be something else in the North American edition.  All the best books have two names, you know. :P)

Moronic Belgian Armpit

Posted on 21. Jun, 2008 by susie in Uncategorized

All hail Wordle, rocrastination tool extraordinaire.  Feed it some text, and it spits it out looking all prettified.  Here’s a chunk from the beginning of Biscuits & Lies:

I’m intrigued, and I’m writing the bloody thing.  I invite you to speculate wildly.

Then again, commentfiend Josie has worried me with her lament at my shoddy lack of updates. ‘I can only conclude‘ she says, ‘that you are a) working very, very hard, b) putting your fingers in your ears and going lalalala to the world in general or c) off in another time and space dimension with the Doctor and have forgotten that time is passing for us mere mortals.‘  You lot know me far too well, and will doubtless be able to predict the entire book just from ‘Zogpeople’.  (Obviously, it’s (c).  Though I did make sure he got me home in time to watch ‘Turn Left’, or there would’ve been trouble.  That was a bit good, wasn’t it?  And I say this as one of those people who got all sniffy about Catherine Tate last year.  ILU, Donna.  Now to endure a whole week before the next one…)

  Margery Allingham, The Beckoning Lady. Obligatory summer indulgence: reading Campion in the garden, with a very large cup of tea. It’s one of the later ones, but written as a sort of fond cover version of the early fluff: country house murder mystery starring some old familiar faces.  Tripled nostalgia.  And wondrousness such as this:

‘It’s always jolly frightening when one’s friends fall in that sort of love.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, they’re never the same again, are they?  A fusion of metals and all that.  I mean, love isn’t a cement, it’s a solvent.’

Naturally, it’s Amanda talking sense, while Albert fusses proprietorially to no effect whatsoever.  Why she and Campion don’t have the same beloved status as Lord Peter and Harriet Vane baffles me: she might not be as prone to quotation, but she’s essentially a grown-up Petrova Fossil.  Who now helps solve mysteries.  What’s not to love?

  Armpits!  Zogpeople!  Wheee!  I continue to fail mightily at plot structure, but it’ll all come out in the wash, probably.  This week, I have been mostly wielding the godlike power to revive the dead.  It’s really quite satisfying.  I’ve also managed to whittle down my plethora of Simons, but have since discovered two people called Cooper.  *rests head wearily on desk*

  Eating globe artichoke for the first time in decades, literally; failing to go on holiday; declaring ‘Stranded in the Jungle’ by The Cadets the Best Song Ever (or Best Song of 1956, at the very least).

Apples and Oranges (and Daleks)

Posted on 06. Apr, 2008 by susie in big woo, books i've been reading, doctor who, kids' books i've been reading, other writers

It’s Oxford Literary Festival time, so yesterday I put on my cunning ‘humble punter’ disguise and trundled off to see some Important Successful Writers in action. Meg Rosoff (Rose-Off, apparently: who knew?) was every bit as relaxed, witty, and insightful as you’d hope a favourite author might be in person. I say a favourite: the book she was there to talk about, What I Was, was a disappointment to me – but perhaps only because her first two, How I Live Now and Just In Case, are quite so brilliant. And I have enormous respect for her disregard for doing the expected thing, despite it presumably driving her publishers nuts. She’s a YA author here and in Canada: they’re marketing her as an adult writer in the US, and she says herself she imagines her most obvious readership to be middle-aged women. (From the front row I detected the sound of a PR person quietly expiring.) Certainly she seems brilliantly unbothered by the demands of the market to put authors in a neat convenient pigeonhole: her next two novels are an adult-sounding period romance (complete with ’sexy poacher’), and a contemporary tale of a 19-year-old God. File under: Uncategorized.

She also says she’s rubbish at plot, and recommends stealing other people’s. I too am rubbish at plot, and plan to put ‘Meg Rosoff said I could’ at the end of all future books, just in case the lawyers come knocking.

I then couldn’t resist a panel of chaps who write the current Doctor Who tie-in novels, despite never having read any of them. It wasn’t exactly earth-shattering (Do you hide behind the sofa? Yes. Which are your favourite monsters? We like Daleks. etc), but the audience was almost entirely made up of excited small children (and their excited nerdy dads), one of whom was in costume as Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, and that made me grin all day.

Split by a Kiss, by Luisa Playa (10+, contemporary, girls). Josephine, new Brit arrival at an American high school, snogs the cutest boy in the school, and finds herself split in two: cool Josie, who wears the right clothes and hangs with the popular girls; and Jo the nerd, trying to remain true to herself while also struggling to fit in with the ‘alt’ kids. It’s Mean Girls meets Sliding Doors – except that Playa cleverly manages to keep both versions sympathetic, no matter which one reflects your own teenage status. (And on the nerdy writer front, I was really struck by how what sounds like a tricksy complicated structure is perfectly easy to follow: she makes it look effortless, and I’ll bet it wasn’t.) Throw in oodles of Buffy references, a genuinely touching sub-plot involving Jo’s mum, and a simply lickable love interest, and you have a gem that’s pitched absolutely perfectly at the target audience. If you know teens that eat up Louise Rennison, Jacqueline Wilson’s teen books, Joanna Nadin et al, they will consume this with equal glee. (And if they’re looking for further inspiration, they’ll find plenty at www.chicklish.co.uk, Luisa Playa’s own website, which is stacked with that sort of thing. You might come across a rather fabulous review of a certain Big Woo while you’re there, too…)

Publication Day! Well, it will be tomorrow. And actually Big Woo appears to be available EVERYWHERE already: I keep spotting it on tables in bookshops. (Possibly this is because I’ve been going into bookshops to look for it. Ahem.) I ought to do something special to mark the Official Release, I know, but I’ll just be having my usual Monday: being taken out for lunch in old London Town, and buying myself some posh underwear. *sighs theatrically*

Chuckling over the Guardian Apprentice blog, which is still every bit as entertaining as Siralan and co; continuing to marvel at eclectic DJs (China Crisis followed by Outkast, anyone?); boggling at the wacky snow ‘n’ sunshine thing happening outside.

Brand Names: 50% More Amusing!

Posted on 21. Nov, 2007 by susie in Uncategorized

I’m going through the US copyedit of serafina67 (as she’ll be known over there), and giggling. Spending one’s day AmericaniZing Noel Edmonds is a corking way to earn a living. (Still stumped on that one. The kicker is finding a US-translatable personality that a UK-based person might feasibly reference – which is the problem throughout: yeah, I know what a parking lot is, but that doesn’t mean I’m ever going to use the phrase. See also: ass, fries, butt. I’m so highbrow.)

In the process I have discovered a universal comic truth: specific is funny. Tesco > Supermarket. Lemsip > Decongestant. Vicars > Priests. (Priests doesn’t rhyme with Knickers, for one thing. Fortunately we have Nuns as a stand-in. Not much is funnier than Nuns.) Sadly, incomprehensible references aren’t funny at all, which is why Mr Tesco has to take a hike. Though god bless my poor dear copy-editor for translating ‘I have icing on my top’ as ‘dandruff’.

My American cousins, some assistance please? What are the inevitable set texts you have to study during your teens? I’m trying to translate Siegfried Sassoon (WW1 poet, force-fed to all): are Salinger and Steinbeck a bit old hat these days?

This genius example of how endlessly scary Internetland is. Every time I find one of these, it is odder than the last. *takes notes*

Get your butt under that comforter, smartass!

Fangirling vampires and teaboys, making spicy parsnip soup (twice because it was REALLY nice), plotting going to Canada and pretending that the words ‘Benton’ and ‘Fraser’ have nothing to do with the appeal of this concept.

I am Loaf Man, observe my sandwiches

Posted on 10. Nov, 2007 by susie in Uncategorized

I’ve realised the most annoying thing about Facebook isn’t being told that someone I dimly recall from college has a cold, twice, because the first time they spelt it wrong. It’s not the hours I’ve wasted on Scrabble, either, because that was educational and I keep winning. It’s the trundling mundanity of it all, in the face of the day-glo potential daftitude of a social-networking platform.

As this wonderfully earnest to-do list amply demonstrates, half the charm of being online is coming up with a pseudonym: your alter ego, your avatar, the other, more interesting you. A name, like that of a first pet, which will echo through time to ennoble or humiliate you in later years.* Futuristic space children wearing x-ray specs will perch on your knee and ask ‘What did you call yourself during Web 2.0, Grandma?’: imagine how disappointing it will be to answer ‘I was Wendy JonesformerlyBooth‘, when the likes of malevolent_crumpet were available to you.

Except that’s supposedly Facebook’s USP, where one may not ‘impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent yourself’. Yawn, boo, etc. (And aren’t all those people who keep ninja-ing me misrepresenting themselves, or do I just not know my friends very well?)

Obsessing over screennames is something I got quite familiar with over the summer, when Beloved British Ed, myself, and everyone who dared to come near me had to try to rustle up an alternative one for Big Woo’s central character.That’s me, evidently paperless, tattooed with (mostly awful and hopefully illegible) suggestions. After weeks of pondering why she wasn’t a julie_madly_deeply or a cinnamongirl, we gave up and went back to what we started with. In the process I discovered that virtually every ridiculous thing I came up with already existed on MySpace. Alas, young to-do lister, there are probably multiple SonOfBitches out there already. I bet he ended up deciding Loaf Man wasn’t so silly after all…

* Starsky remains a perfectly sensible name for a goldfish. And I still applaud whoever it was who named their cat Graham ‘because it was grey’.

Good to see AA Gill saying what surely everyone must think about Poliakoff. Tragically rich people, family secrets, a big posh house: time to delve back into the Big Box of Ideas, maybe?

It was a butterfly. :D Started Book Two last night. So far, it appears to be almost entirely about biscuits. And lies. I shall call it Biscuits & Lies, for I am the Mike Leigh of YA fiction.

Flailing at West Wing season 7, nearly making gingerbread men, realising that the only thing in my kitchen which would allow me to do so is a gingerbread man-shaped cutter, eating jelly babies instead. I really need to stop having such exciting weekends.