every day should be a susie day

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The tunnel has been replaced by wheelchair and pushchair-friendly slopes – for which hooray, obviously: now the book-borrowing there is done by my smallest niece and nephew, who are a bit wee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).

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.

…champagne and lovely lunch and boooooooooooooooooks! Oh, glee. It’s not in the shops till April, so until then you’ll just have to make do with a rubbish cameraphone picture which in no way conveys the sheer SHININESS of the beautiful wee thing. And the inside looks even more pretty. I love it to bits, I do.

I might be convinced to part with one or two – mainly to stop me from spending the next six weeks in a giddy stupor, unable to stop just gazing lovingly at its shiny woo-some self. You’ll have to be very persuasive, though. I am open to all forms of bribery involving either tea or cake. Let the bidding commence!

Broken Soup by Jenny Valentine (YA 12+, contemporary fiction). I loved her debut last year, Finding Violet Park, and we’re in similar territory here, with another teenage hero struggling with the responsibility of taking on an adult role within a family. FVP‘s Lucas was trying to become his missing father while searching for him: Broken Soup‘s Rowan has to play parent to both her little sister and her ailing Mum, in the absence of her dynamic big brother. There’s romance too, and a puzzle to solve – but unlike her first book, precious few laughs. Yet however much I found myself missing Lucas’s sly little asides, there’s really no place for them in this heartbreaking story. Any reservations I had about the meandering plot and the slow place were crushed by the latter half of the novel, in which difficult subject matter and a slightly creaky plot twist are handled with such skill that there is not one false emotional note. Not fun, exactly, but absolutely worth the work. (Contrast Anne Kelley’s The Bower Bird, winner of the 2007 Children’s Costa and the last in my trio of ‘books about kids at death’s door’, which I will be kind enough not to pass comment on. If you can’t say anything nice…)

Writing? I have no time for writing! I am too busy meeting sales reps and being taken out for lunch by my editor!

Compulsively listening to the Moldy Peaches and Kimya Dawson (baa baa, yes, I know); being in Wales; ice-skating (which apparently is a Thing I Can Do now: how odd); becoming strangely obsessed with Masterchef (though if Emily doesn’t win, this will lead to sulking).