I went to London and all I got was...

...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).

Vitamins, incoming!

Step 903 on The Path To Conceding One's Undeniable Oldness: cancelling the dvd delivery subscription in favour of an organic veg box. It's like the moment I finally switched off Radio 1 for good, and decided to wake up to John Humphreys badgering politicans of a morning like the grown-ups do. (Apart from the bit where I just rent my dvds from somewhere else now.)

Anna Pickard's 'oh bloody hell, what am I supposed to do with THIS weird vegetable?' blog has been quite the godsend during the initiation period.

But now I've got one of these. Roughly the size of my own head. I like mashed swede as much as the next unusually-
fond-of-root-vegetables person, but there's a limit. Suggestions? Otherwise it's going to end up in my fennel risotto, and that's probably a bit too experimental...


Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. Teen romance which has spawned two equally successful sequels, there's a movie in the works, everyone and his dog has read it, etc. So far it appears to be Buffy, minus the jokes and the feminism. Because those weren't in any way integral to making Buffy brilliant. *sighs* Possibly I've been ruined for this sort of thing by Diana Wynne Jones' The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which has left me with a certain disdain for any character whose eye colour sometimes flashes to symbolic black, or whose hair is in improbably metallic. ('Bronze'? Really?) And waiting till page 120 for her to realise he's a vampire, when the blurb told us that? But perhaps the heroine will suddenly start hitting things or having witty, characterful friends or something.

Layouts and edits and advances, oh my! The UK page layout of Big Woo is shaping up very beautifully indeed (despite today's discussion of possible changes taking place on a malfunctioning speakerphone at their end, with much juggling of coffee and banana chunks across a windswept quadrangle at mine). US bound proofs should be done in a couple of weeks. And I met up with my writing group at the weekend, who were their usual gloriously inspiring and encouraging selves regarding Biscuits & Lies. Nothing puts me in positive writing mode so well as curry and fireside chat with that lot.

Prison Break S1 (still only on episode 11, but gosh, yay, etc), and lots of carrot scraping.