Bugger - I Didn't Win The Booker...

Well, not that I expected to of course, not being short-listed or even long-listed or even in contention at any stage or anything because I'm not even a smidgen literary. However, I was very chuffed when one of those intense and scary-looking telly arts' commentators said that this year's winner - Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question - was a comic novel and indicated a move away from serious to humorous, from high-brow to middle-brow. Oooh, I thought - one more brow down and there's hope for me and the rest of the Rom-Commers yet. But, sadly, it seems not...

Now, I haven't read The Finkler Question (I've never read anything either long or short listed for the Booker because I'm a pleb), but the little bit I heard being read out last night didn't make me chortle. I actually didn't really understand it... which means, I suppose, that it must be really, really good. And Howard Jacobson showed a great sense of fun (I thought) when he said he'd spend the £50,000 (gulp) prize money on a handbag for his wife with a wry "have you seen the price of handbags?".

However, while I was having a little happy moment about The Man Booker sliding ever so slowly towards people of my limited brain-power, Andrew Motion (chair of judges) sodded it up by describing The Finkler Question as "laugh-out-loud funny but so nearly adjacent to tragedy" and "very sad, melancholic, laughter in the dark..." and then Mr Jacobson himself compounded my deepest fears by saying his novel wasn't "easy-peasy and middle-brow because it's comic. It's much cleverer and more complicated and about much more difficult things..."

Ah, well - many congrats to Howard Jacobson - but I have a feeling that Brian from the kebab van and Maisie the Useless Medium won't be troubling the Booker judges for a while yet...

And - while on the subject of literary fiction - I listened to the first ever Radio 2 Book Club reviews on Monday evening. This time the book chosen was Mr Chartwell - a first-time novel about depression and Winston Churchill and a widowed librarian set over 5 days in the summer of 1964. Mr Chartwell - who has a massive viewpoint role apparently (haven't read this one either because I'm a pleb) - is a giant black dog (black dog equalling depression which is the theme of the novel)... Ooooh, I thought, how many times have I been told that having an animal narrator is a huge no-no - things must be soooo different in Lit Fic Land. The author sounded very young and very happy and has been given a very pleasing advance - which is wonderful for her - but several reviewers said while they loved her descriptions they couldn't understand some of her complex sentences and had to re-read them several times to get the gist... Now, in Commercial Fiction Land that would earn you a sharp editorial rap on the knuckles and a severe editing session...

Oh, well - it's back to the keyboard and baby-easy sentences and Brian from the kebab van and words of one syllable for me...

Oh - and while out yesterday, I saw this notice in the window of The Eight 'til Late:
"Fitzharry's Am Dram Society proudly present Rebbecca by Daphne Du Maurier, unabridged, for three nights, in the Scout Hut".

The burning of Manderley???? The scenes in the south of France??? The costume ball??? Rebecca's boat on stormy seas???? In the Scout Hut?????

I've bought tickets.

Champagne at 38,000 Feet

Last Sunday it was my birthday (I'm now VERY old) - and thank you so much to everyone who sent greetings and then obviously thought I was a mardy mare for not replying - but I was celebrating it with champagne and The Toyboy Trucker and 300+ other people somewhere dizzily high in the sky above the Alps en route to Cyprus. How decadent was that??? Actually, it was just wonderful. Perfect. I cried with happiness (I cry VERY easily) when I found out about it. Cyprus was my surprise birthday present from TTT, Elle and The Doctor and I LOVED it. Had never been before and will go back as soon as poss. We left the UK early on my birthday morning with temperatures in single figures and a cutting northerly wind howling across a bleak sky - and landed 4 hours later in 35+ degrees of non-stop sunshine. It was one of the most blissful weeks of my life...

But now I'm back, feet firmly on the ground, shivering and WORKING. Well, I'm trying. The new book (Never Can Say Goodbye) is still going okay. It seems to be like Going the Distance and Hubble Bubble in the way it's kind of unfolding itself easily as I go along. Strangely (because I still have absolutely no idea how my books ever come into being, or how I write them, or why it seems natural to me to have this entire cast of REAL people living inside my head) my books don't follow the same pattern. Some like this one (so far) sort of write themselves, others need a lot more concentration and - er - work.

My early Orion books seemed to gush out with no problems (but then I was still all starry-eyed about being published and everything was all lovely and shiny and new), then the HarperCollins ones were much bigger and more complex and layered and therefore took longer and I had to make sure that all the ends tied up and all the sub-plots reached a conclusion as well as the main story thread. And since then, the Piatkus/Little,Brown ones have been a mix of the two. Love Potions gave me all sorts of headaches (mainly because when the title was changed from Flower Power {considered too hippie} I realised I hadn't actually got any love potions in it and had to go back and slot them in); Heaven Sent was far too short but I'd told the story and anything else would have been padding; Happy Birthday was too long (in my opinion) and probably should have been two books...

And The Way To A Woman's Heart....??? Well, once I'd stopped being a diva-bitch-from-hell author and got over it no longer being called Midnight Feast, and accepted that Sunny (heroine) was now called Ella, and that it had to be a longer, meatier story (sorry, bit of a pun as it's about cookery) with a bigger cast of characters, less obvious practical magic and more grounded reality but still series-linked to the previous books - oh, and amusing, I finally knuckled down and just did it.

I suppose, as a writer, that's what it's all about really - just doing it. No-one else is going to. Sadly, it's taken me years to realise that! Much as there were many, many mornings when I'd switch on the computer and hope that the Tailor of Gloucester's mice had written several thousand words of The Way To A Woman's Heart overnight, eventually I accepted that if I didn't do it then it would never be finished. Weird though how the changing of the title and the heroine's name made it the most difficult book I've ever written. Still, it's done, I'm happy with it - and hopefully the slog/sweat/angst/difficult-author-tantrums won't show...

Never Can Say Goodbye (and that is going to be the title - they've had the discussion about maybe changing it to something else and happily decided to stick with my "let's get away from the cutesy magicky titles" title - so that's one hurdle - um - hurdled) is developing into a completely different book. The magic is slightly more - um - spooky. The characters are more eccentric (as in Brian from the kebab van and Maisie the Useless Medium). The situations more down-to-earth - well, in a sort of off-the-wall way. And much as I thought that after actually having to "work" on The Way To A Woman's Heart (I really hate work!) I'd never find my mo-jo or my writing joi-de-vivre again, so far I'm having fun with it. Which is just as well as it has to be finished by Christmas. Erk!

Blimey! This post is almost writerly. Still, the next one won't be as I've got to blog about total rubbish. Even more total rubbish than usual because our local council has just ventured into the multi-wheely-bin-refuse-disposal-system and you wouldn't believe the uproar this has caused in the terrace... FIVE wheely bins, all different colours, all for different things, all collected on different days... It's causing anarchy here, I can tell you. Anarchy.

Oh, and tonight I'm going to the theatre again with The Toyboy Trucker - but this time to see Frankie Boyle - so probably this is not going to be a repeat of the erudite cerebral Stephen Fry experience... Can't wait!

Why Can't I Be Stephen Fry???????

We went to see Stephen Fry on Saturday. That is we went to see him at the theatre - we didn't pop round to his for tea or anything. I like Stephen Fry: I love him on QI, he's a great actor, a clever mimic, and I am in awe of his brain, his wealth of knowledge and his wonderful use of words. This theatre performance was to promo part two of his autobiography - so it was Stephen talking about the early and middle chunk of his life. Did I enjoy it? Yes, most of it - although being honest, some of it was way too elitist for me - but then I'm definitely a pleb. Stephen was warm and garrulous and rambling and told several lengthy and intricate tales about how he was a lost cause in his youth and sort of stumbled into stardom. Sadly, because I'm the aforementioned pleb, some of it was just a touch too luvvie for me. However, the man is without doubt a genius.

But the whole thing was ruined because I got the nutter sitting next to me...

You know how you always get them on a bus or a train? It isn't just me, is it? Oh, right... Well, anyway, on Saturday night I got the theatre equivalent. There was one empty seat next to me in a sell-out full house. And, just before curtain up, in he came. Bustling along the row, treading on toes, all multi-patterned jumper, cagoule, and haversack. As the lights dimmed, he dumped the haversack and rushed down to the front of the stalls, stood on tiptoe and peered on to the stage. Then he cantered back, threw himself down beside me and said excitedly "I can see him in the wings! He's ready to come on!"

I smiled weakly and edged further away - difficult in theatre seats. He leaned towards me. "I saw him in Cambridge last night and Norwich the night before and tomorrow I'll see him in London!"

Oh, great. I'd got a Stephen Fry groupie...

Fortunately, Stephen made his entrance then, and Mr Groupie was on his feet whooping and hollering. I shrank down in my seat as everyone turned to stare at us. The Toyboy Trucker, safely out of the spotlight on the other side of me, laughed. A lot. Anyway, once Stephen got going, Mr Groupie, who clearly hadn't wasted his time on the tour, loudly spoke every line along with him, albeit slightly out of sync. It was like having a slightly bizarre echo. Mercifully this came to an end when Mr Groupie burrowed into his haversack and brought out his sandwiches and flask of coffee. Generously he offered me a sardine and tomato. I declined. And by this time The Toyboy Trucker was, naturally, doubled up...

Maybe it was the stench of the sardine sandwiches, but I was getting pretty tetchy. So, when Stephen said that as a writer he was arrogant because all writers are arrogant I wanted to yell WRONG! I was absolutely itching to leap up and say WRONG, WRONG, WRONG - but, given that thanks to Mr Groupie our row was already the centre of attention and The Toyboy Trucker was giving me One Of Those Looks, I didn't. I just sat and simmered and tried to ignore the pungency of the sardines.

Then, just to add to my irritation, Stephen announced that the entire tour had been organised by his publishers (Penguin) to promote his latest book - and that after his hour and a half on stage he'd be doing a book selling-and-signing session in the theatre.

Well! Fancy that! Stephen Fry gets a publisher-paid tour of theatres - a sell-out nationwide tour of theatres seating thousands - and I get the local book shop if I'm lucky. Stephen Fry has queues and queues of hundreds of people winding for miles round our major cities, I get a few friends and people sheltering from the rain or waiting for the next bus to Kingston Dapple. Now I wonder why that is? And why, oh why, can't I be Stephen Fry?

Sadly, my book-signings always remind me of the days when I travelled with my Dad, the fairground organ and traction engine to do shows in remote rural locations. I've lost count of the times that Dad used to peer out on a bleak field with the rain falling horizontally in a force ten gale and say (in pre-PC days) - "good crowd tonight - three paraplegics and a daft bloke with a dog"... because it seemed that at every country fayre we attended, all the minders used to dump their charges in front of the organ with a cheerful "Never mind a bit of rain...let's park you here! Oooh, look at the pretty lights! Listen to the pretty music!" before sodding off to the beer tent...

And then I'd trundle on and dance the can-can in a monsoon to a less-than-impressed audience. Actually, it's funny with hindsight, just how much of my early life could have been lifted straight out of Cher's Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves...

Anyway, those less-than-packed performance days are EXACTLY like my book signings - except of course that I don't dance the can-can any more - maybe I should....

So - the picture at the top of the post is Stephen's very crowded book-signing and this one is mine.... Spot the difference???????????????

Sweet Dreams

This is my dream bedroom. Sadly, it isn't how my real bedroom looks. It isn't how my real bedroom has ever (or will ever) look because The Toyboy Trucker would leave me. It is, however, exactly how my new heroine's bedroom looks and I'm dead jealous. New heroine (Francesca, known as Frankie) in Never Can Say Goodbye, is a girl after my own heart who loves colour and clutter and all things retro - which is why she's running a vintage frock shop and dresses like a bag-lady and has a tart's boudoir bedroom... I can only claim one of these...

Anyway, because I've been obsessed by bedrooms lately, I thought I'd mention Frankie's and blog about mine. It's still not finished. It's been well over a month now and it still looks like a shed... Why, in the name of all that's holy, we ever got into this mess, I still can't quite understand.

It all started when The Toyboy Trucker decided he'd like a telly in the bedroom. I'm anti telly-in-the-bedroom for all sorts of reasons - main one being The Toyboy Trucker falling asleep with something loud and violent blaring out and me having to stuff my ears from the explosions and screams and avert my eyes from the blood and gore and eventually having to stumble from the cosiness of the bed to switch the damn thing off. The Toyboy Trucker convinced me that we've moved on technologically since 1987 and he'd have a remote control and headphones and I'd never notice it...

So, I gave in, and said okay - we'll have a telly in the bedroom... The Toyboy Trucker excitedly bought one - all flat-screen and DVD-playing-and-recording etc etc - and that's honestly where it all started. Because we quickly discovered we actually hadn't got anywhere to put a telly. We had one socket and a bedroom full of old brown furniture - lots of dressing tables and chests - that had belonged to my Nan. And none of them were in the right place for a telly, and they were all crumbly and rickety and decrepit to boot. And the walls wouldn't support a bracket because they were covered in pictures and lots of disintegrating 1970s wardrobes... So, it was decided - all for the sake of a damn telly - that we'd have a bedroom make-over. We'd ditch the mis-matched clutter and, despite my private yearning for a purple and pink girly glory-hole, have something pale and plain and pristine.

It all sounded so easy. We measured the room. Men from the furniture shop measured the room. All the measurements tallied. We chose an entire range of pale beech furniture, hand-built, and made-to-measure. In Germany. We were going to have a bank of wardrobes at one end of the room, including a walk-in, and lots of new matching chests, and one of those over-the-bed-and down-the-sides contraptions incorporating masses of cupboards and shelves and little twinkly hidden lights. Men-in-shorts were brought in to remove all the old stuff and decorate the room in a nice tasteful cream and rewire the bedroom to enable us to have a telly.

The new furniture arrived. Thirty boxes of it. The delivery men chuckled as they hefted it upstairs. As soon as they'd left I understood why. Most of it was self-assembly, very little of it was labelled, and the instructions were in German...

I'll gloss over the August Bank Holiday weekend. Tempers, it must be said, were frayed... By the Monday night we were no longer speaking but we'd got two-and-half wardrobes built; the walk-in wasn't built or even slightly walk-in because we had two left sides and no right one (it's going to take another 6 weeks to get a replacement); the drawers didn't fit the chests - and funniest of all (okay, not at the time - but with hindsight....) was the fact that the over-the-bed contraption didn't fit bloody anywhere... The measurements had been taken across the middle of the room. No-one had taken into account that a) there were big chunky skirting boards at the bottom and b) this house is 70 years old and the walls aren't exactly even...

Men-in-shorts were recalled to do what they could. Suffice it to say they had to remove part of a wall. It took three days to burrow through plaster and bricks and breeze blocks. The upstairs looked like Beirut, we were all coughing and spluttering and sort of permanently grey, and the lovely fresh cream decor was covered in dust and rubble... Oh, and we'd got a kind of knock-through effect into the spare room. Still, the over-the-bed thing eventually fitted - even if we're now sleeping at a rather odd angle, the bookshelves slope like they're starring in the final throes of the Titanic, and the little twinkly lights are somewhat intermittent.

Of course, because the wardrobe cluster (that's how it was described - honest) isn't finished owing to the lack of right-side-of-walk-in, most of our clothes are in bin liners and suitcases. I'm still picking brick rubble out of the cats and from between my toes. The bedroom looks like a bomb site - albeit a nice cream one.

And the thing that started all this? The telly? Still in its box until such time as the bedroom is finished, which, as far as I can tell, *might* just be before the start of the 2012 Olympics...

Unaccustomed As I Am....

Just back from staying at Swanwick Summer Writing School where I was an after-dinner speaker! That was a first for me - well, two firsts really. I've never been to Swanwick before and I've certainly never been an after-dinner speaker. Think they were VERY brave to ask me...

Swanwick is amazing! What a fabulous place! What elegant surroundings! What incredible food and hospitality! And such fantastic, enthusiastic and completely crazy people... THANK YOU to everyone - especially Xanthe and Joyce and Fiona and Ann and Roy who invited me and looked after me brilliantly and made me laugh all the time, and to Fliss and Jan for suggesting I'd be a good speaker (are you insane???), and to Della for everything, and to everyone else who made me feel as though I belonged from the moment I arrived and who will now always be good friends.

Mind you, if I'd known that the after-dinner speaking involved being in a theatre, on stage, with a microphone and an audience of hundreds I'd have turned tail and fled back down the motorway - but as it was, like the proverbial lamb, I trotted happily into it without having a clue what I was doing. Par for the course, I know.

I'd written a speech. I'd practised it over and over again to the Toyboy Trucker and the cats who were all fairly unimpressed. It lasted 30 minutes. I had an hour - a whole HOUR - on stage... And, I'd torn my speech up because it was rubbish and just had a few scribbled notes... Still, I thought as I gazed nervously at my cheerfully expectant audience, I'll never have to see any of them again...

In my new-from-the-market long frock and B-I-G ear-rings I took a deep breath and trying not to meet anyone's eyes in case I spotted boredom, sleep or even death, I just launched myself into the story of how I started writing, the ups and downs, the ins and outs, the good times and the bad. Oh, and I told everyone about my life, and about the neighbours and about the cats and just anything else I could trawl from the depths of what was left of my brain.

Mercifully, they were a brilliant audience and they laughed at the first sentence and carried on laughing, and the more they laughed the more indiscreet I became until they were chuckling all the time and I'd convinced myself that a career as a stand-up beckoned. The hour simply flew by. I answered all sorts of questions and told more tall tales (actually true stories, but even to me some parts of my life sound pretty impossible) and incredibly got a standing ovation.

Now, I'm ashamed to say, this all went to my head a bit. Afterwards, having signed and sold loads and loads of books and been congratulated on being funny a lot, I practically preened and flounced. I was an inch away from snapping my fingers and throwing back my hair and demanding roast swan and the finest champagne. Happily, because I'm a vegetarian and only drink beer, it didn't quite come to that. But almost. As I clutched my pint and my cigarette and skipped round Swanwick's glorious grounds in the moonlight, I was very nearly getting above myself.

Thankfully The Toyboy Trucker brought me down to earth with a "your bra straps are showing, you've got lipstick on your teeth, your hair looks all funny and you've lost an ear-ring - you look like you've been in a brawl".

Now I'm home again, all diva-ness forgotten, and as is the way of my life, the TWTAWH proofs have arrived in Pdf format and have to be done online and returned by Thursday and we're having the bedroom renovated (posh way of saying the 1970s built-in crap wardrobes are being pulled out and the one measly electric socket is being - er - extended and the funny little wash-basin thing in the corner is being turned into something altogether more swish) which means intermittent electricity so I really ought to get on with them... Have to say that even after severe editing, TWTAWH is still standing at 455 pages!!! 455!!! That's almost War and Peace! I've got to proof-read War and Peace!!!! Aaargh!!!!

A Month Of Madness

Having got wildly excited over finishing this - THE WAY TO A WOMAN'S HEART (note my huge self control in not even mentioning Midnight Feast...) - I have unashamedly skived for the last month. Well, sort of...









I've actually been here for a few days and given a talk or two at the Lit Fest and had a truly brilliant time - what an amazingly friendly city Middlesbrough is! Thank you to everyone who came along and was so lovely....








And here for the weekend... (I do so love a gut-quivering jet engine roar or twenty...)



And here... where I also gave a talk (and giggled a lot) and met up with my lovely, glamorous and really good friend Jane and had a wonderful evening even if the local paper managed to get ALL the facts wrong!


And here with The Toyboy Trucker for some much needed R&R - not to mention alcohol and food and far, far too much ice-cream...






Oh, and here because my recurring conjunctivitis isn't - it's blepharitis which is totally different and has a completely different treatment and I'm really happy now because I can see!!!




And most excitingly of all - here....
And this was like walking on to a film set! Having seen the pictures and heard all about Debs' fabulous shed for so long, to actually be there was almost overwhelming. It's amazing! And gorgeous! And pretty! And I WANT ONE!!!! Thanks so much Debs (and Grumpy, for allowing me over the portals) - it was simply brilliant.



I've also written five short stories - and sent them...



And I've started The New Book - which I've called NEVER CAN SAY GOODBYE in an attempt to find my own "let's get away from the cutesy magicky titles" title.


And today is Jonah's 15th birthday. He's celebrated well with chicken breast and steamed fish. As we were told he would be lucky if he survived to his 3rd birthday we're really proud of him. But not half as proud as he is of himself! Showing-off, swaggering and preening all seem to come very naturally to him.


Other less pictorial catch-up stuff from previous posts - one-eyed Maddy is absolutely fantastic now, although she has turned into a bit of a prima-donna with all the earlier attention, but is managing to live with her restricted vision with no problems at all. Elle and The Doctor's ill-fated Carlton Epsom handmade bed eventually arrived - damaged and in the wrong colour... back to the drawing board for that one, then. Sigh.... It is now fifteen months since we spoke to the outlaws after the no-show wedding fiasco. Feel that it is too long to even try for a reconciliation. Shame...

Sooo, now I'm back with bum-on-seat and fingers-on-keyboard and after my month of skiving madness will try really, really hard to be A Good Blogger in future. I think...

Ta-ra Tramuntana

Sorry blog - I've been ignoring you - AGAIN. But there's been a really, really good reason - honest. I mean, as well as doing the TWTAWH edits - I've also skived off and been here. That's the place in the picture, blog, in case you're not following my drift...

The Toyboy Trucker and I have been to the Tramuntana Mountains and it was BLISS. Yes, I left unfinished edits behind which makes me a Bad Writer, but we'd planned to have the hol at the end of May/beginning of June ages ago in those halcyon days when I was convinced TWTAWH would have been delivered/edited/all over and be nothing but a blurred memory and I'd be well into The Next One by April. Of course, this was a mistake - but the hol was booked and paid for - so, off we went.


Did I fret about the un-done edits? Did I hell! Sorry - Bad Writer moment again. No, we joyously embraced the non-stop Mediterranean sunshine and the crystal-clear turquoise sea and the wall-to-wall tapas and the sheer gorgeousness of the laid-back way of life. We whizzed up and down the mountains (amazing hairpin roads - felt like something off Top Gear!) in little wooden trains and through citrus groves in rattling wooden trams and stayed in an old-fashioned hotel that was exactly like something out of a lavish Agatha Christie adaptation. Oh, the absolute decadence of eating late, strolling beneath the palms and pines at the foot of the mountains in the moonlight, and then returning to the hotel to sit in cushioned wicker chairs on the vast tiled and candlelit-terrace with a jug of sangria and people-watch...


And now we're back, and The Toyboy Trucker is embroiled with lorries and parcels again, and TWTAWH is FINISHED!!!! I ignored everything else (except the cats, of course) when I returned and spent about 16 hours a day, every day, on the edits and rewrites and sent it yesterday! It's DONE! Phew!!!!


Sooo - it's ta-ra to TWTAWH and to the Tramuntana. I hope the former will never need to be revisited - but the latter, oh, yes - we (in the words of Arnie) will be back...