BBC Television Centre! Where they make the television!

I was one of six finalists in the BBC Talent Children’s Fiction Prize. I’d sent in one chapter and a short synopsis, been inexplicably plucked from 4500 entries, and commanded to write the rest by early December. All six hopefuls were invited to a day’s workshop at Television Centre, to get advice from – get this, this still blows my mind – Jacqueline Wilson and Michael Rosen. They were warm and hilarious, encouraging, and very kind to a group of people who (in my case at least) very plainly had NO IDEA AT ALL how to finish a book. (Jacqueline Wilson’s face on learning that we had 3 months left before the deadline and some of us hadn’t written any of it at all? Memorable. Oh so memorable.)

We ate the BBC’s crispy prawns, failed to visit the Blue Peter garden as promised because we were too busy nattering, and left clutching a sealed brown envelope marked ‘Feedback’ and all the other finalists’ email addresses, with promises that we would stay in touch.

I met my sister J for coffee, and burst into tears all over her. 2 hours’ sleep and the first ever experience of what a sealed brown envelope marked ‘Feedback’ feels like will do that to a girl. (It was – as all early-stage critiques should be – 90% positive, with a few gentle suggestions for improvements. At the time, it felt like the end of the world.) I was definitely not going to win the prize, and all those other finalists were definitely scary people who had probably given me made-up email addresses.

The following February, I got a call saying my book was the winner. Not long after, I got on a train to Market Bosworth, and all 6 finalists ate and drank and celebrated and commiserated, and they didn’t spit in my food or poke me with bitter sticks. In fact, they were lovely! We talked about how we didn’t really know a lot about the publishing industry, or any other writers: how maybe we ought to stick together, and help each other out.

Ten years later, that BBC prize-winning book is of course out of print – but that wasn’t the real prize. One of our little band decided not to pursue writing (we miss you, Zoe!), but the rest of us have kept at it. In the last ten years, between us we’ve published seven novels: there are contracts signed for another seven, with more waiting to be inked. We’ve cheered each other on, and been brutally honest when honesty was needed. We’ve skipped over hurdles because one of us has seen them before, and knows when to jump. We’ve eaten a quite startling amount of curry. I’d have given up in despair on multiple occasions without them – and I think that goes for the lot of us.

So thank you, Sarah, Ruth, Josie and Caroline: I owe you tons. And tons. And some more tons.

Sometimes we also eat cake in our jim-jams. *waves at absent Josie*

And for those of you who are aspiring writers, and don’t have a Sarah, Ruth, Josie and Caroline to read your first draft, or your submission letter (and spot that humiliating typo on line 1), or brainstorm plot with, or give you a hug when you get a rejection, or to pontificate wildly at that special wine-based time of the evening, or comfortingly hate that book that just came out that’s a bit like that idea you had, or just tell you you’re ace at the precise moment you happen to need to hear that – I hope you find some.

And now there is.

Girls ♥ Books is for all girls aged 8-14 who love books – all kinds of books – and our roster of daily bloggers still blows my mind. Coming up are Cathy Cassidy, Karen McCombie, Cathy Hopkins, Joanna Nadin, Leila Rasheed, Fiona Dunbar, Keris Stainton, and many more. We’re going to introduce you to some brand-new authors too (one so brand-new she can’t even tell us the title of her debut novel yet!) – plus there’ll be quizzes, polls, and competitions to enter to win books and goodies.  I’m one of the first bloggers on the roster, so please do swing by Girls ♥ Books soon: you just might find a video of me, being all lispy and petrified cos I know I’m being filmed and it’ll be on the internet *ahem* I mean, of me being super-professional and articulate while giving you a guided tour of my writing desk…

By the way, if anyone in your vicinity gets sniffy about us using ‘heart’ as a verb, you have my permission to gently bonk them on the nose with the latest edition of the OED while shouting “OMG! it is a word, FYI, you tinfoil-hat-wearing heteronormative Rotterdammer!”

(You can find the full list of words they added last month here. I love new words, especially the ones that don’t seem new at all. The fact that it has taken until 2011 to get ‘stonewash’ in the dictionary boggles my rumble-de-thumps, I can tell you.)

PS: I hope you like how the Girls ♥ Books site looks. I did that bit.

PPS: Ooh, Australian book-blogger My Girl Friday made a Heidi-themed Polyvore for Girl Meets Cake! Adorable.

I’m not slacking. (Apart from that day Leverage Season 2 arrived and I ate a lot of Revels.) I’m brewing, mulling, cooking a new take on an old idea. And cooking needs fuel.

REVELS ARE DEFINITELY FUEL, K? Even if they are rubbish now they don't have peanuts in.

But the brain needs feeding as well, so I’m stuffing myself with artistic nutrition. Last week I saw Frankenstein at the Olivier in London. The run is sold out (though you might yet snare a ticket for an NTLive cinema showing – on Thursday in the UK, varying dates internationally – which will be the exact production I saw: I’m going, can’t wait to see how it translates onscreen). I went for purely intellectual reasons, of course, and in no way to stare at Benedict ‘Sherlock’ Cumberbatch in a series of extremely well-tailored coats – but I left incoherent with adulation, at a familiar story told afresh with the perfect mix of respect and inspiration. Hard not to walk away with a piqued curiosity about what makes us alive, human, worthy, and a perked sense of love for storytelling.

I’ve watched Cabaret again (can anyone get through Tomorrow Belongs To Me without sobbing?); I’ve been part of the giddy crowd led by skiffle kings The Severed Limb in a Drunken Sailor singalong. I feel surrounded by slightly skewiff people, pursuing the thing they love to do whether it makes sense to the rest of the world or not.  Granted, it didn’t work out all that well for Victor Frankenstein – but I think writing a book, you’re more Creature than Mad Scientist: stumbling from rejection to rejection, fumbling for language, striving towards some comforting apprehension of your place in the universe (and very possibly discovering you don’t have one).

So why do we keep doing it? In refuelling mode, everything resonates. I watched Serenity for the millionth time this weekend too, and this might just nail it.

Shiny.

*

Wintergirls, by Laurie Halse Anderson. Another phenomenal, important YA read from the author of Speak, this time tackling anorexia.  Outstanding stuff, beautifully written – but I urge you, especially if you’re a teen reader or have any ED history:  Take care of yourself while you read this book. Be kind to yourself. Talk about it afterwards.

Not a whole stack of tangible wordage from me, then – but oh my golly, it’s been an exciting week. I’m thrilled to say that Authors For Japan raised just shy of £11,000 for the Red Cross Japan Tsunami Appeal, and thanks to her generosity I will now have the privilege of mentoring aspiring children’s writer Michelle Newell for the next 6 months. (Do read AL Kennedy’s brilliant piece on the exact sort of handholding I’m hoping to provide.) Thank you so much to everyone who made a bid! And if you missed out, it’s not too late: do check out Kidlit for Japan and Genre for Japan, which are still open with many amazing items on offer.

Failing to quell my inexplicable desire to eat gyoza for every meal; hanging with marvellous old mates who know how to put fish to sleep and how to wake them up again and much more besides (it’s all in the clove oil, apparently); deciding that all things considered, I am not meant to have a fringe.

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]]> http://www.susieday.com/2011/03/23/fuel/feed/ 7 http://www.susieday.com/2010/09/29/page-99/ http://www.susieday.com/2010/09/29/page-99/#comments Wed, 29 Sep 2010 08:30:08 +0000 susie http://www.susieday.com/?p=784

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…

If I were a useful sort of person, here is where I would shout TA-DA! and unveil my solution in a Paul Daniels stylee.  Unfortunately, I seem to be sorely lacking in Debbie McGees – because if I knew the answer, I probably wouldn’t be in the process of junking 40,000 words of book that didn’t work.  And before you all go Awww or Oh no! (or even Ha, she deserves such a fate for invoking Paul Daniels) , I’m utterly delighted.  Now I’m going to start writing a new flipped-about slapped-on-the-bum version of the very same idea, and I’m giddy and excited and skipping about at the prospect.  And while the 40,000 words that came before made me grin every now and then, I’m not sure they ever made me skip.

So: from now on, I’m only going to write skippable things, I think. If you see me out and about with both feet firmly on the ground, tell me to take a few days off from the manuscript. That way, I might notice when it’s not working a bit quicker.

The book formerly known around these parts as Project Poppy shall henceforth be known as Project Bluebell.  I hope it will make you skip too.

*

Since I’ve been so hopeless about updating lately, I’ve read lots of things and can’t remember what any of them are. I think this means I didn’t like them very much, so that’s probably ideal. Oh, and I read one fantastic book which made me sob repeatedly on a  train (WHY am I always on a train with the weepifying ones?) but it isn’t out till January, so I will wibble about it then when you can actually get your mitts on it. (Then cry. On a train.)  I am planning the annual bookapalooza known as ‘Going On Holiday’ soon, though, and after happily paddling in kidlit and YA for months I’ll be dipping a toe in the grown-up pool. Planned reading list: The Summer Book, Tove Jansson; One Day by David Nicholls (who for ages I thought was David Mitchell: stop having Ls in your names, people called David); and some Borges short stories. That should keep my tent contented.

Completely unrelated to the above, I’m whizzing my way towards the end of a first draft of Super Sekrit Project #93, aka, um… hang on, it’s so secret I haven’t given it a secret name…er… The Jovial Adventures of Some Herring. (It’s not about herring. Although now I sort of wish it was. Herring herring herring.)  This one is making me skip rather a lot.

Playing tour guide (ie taking lovely visiting people to the Pitt-Rivers and then out for French Onion soup); watching a very wet, very wonderful Midsummer Night’s Dream in my old office, aka the Bodleian Quad; breaking my laptop; getting pathetically overexcited about my impending holiday – Canada, bears, possible airport strikes, oh my!