Reality check

I'm giving up on fiction. Reality's getting too peculiar for me to attempt to compete.

First up, we have Canoe Man, who in the space of two days has gone from a tragic amnesiac who resurfaced after being presumed dead for 5 years in true Cast Away fashion, to a fraudulent git who let his sons think he was dead so his wife could buy a house in Panama.

Then there's Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian woman who was kidnapped and spent 8 years living in a cupboard, who is taking the oh-so-predictable career move to become...a chatshow host. For those suspecting the ordeal might have left her adversely affected in the marbles department, her press release contains possibly the most chilling sentence ever constructed: “For a while now I have been considering the idea of coming out of the role of a passive media object and becoming proactive in creating media content.” With repartee like that, no wonder Parky's retired.

And let's not get into Beargate.

William Goldman, writer of The Princess Bride (both novel and film, each equally wondrous), points out that life's 'movie moments' are infuriating: his example in Adventures in the Screen Trade is Michael Fagan breaking into the Queen's bedroom, while the guards happened to be walking the corgis, and the lady's maids happened to be cleaning another bit of the castle (bless him: I'm fairly certain this isn't what 'lady's maids' do - but hey, he wrote 'My Name Is Inigo Montoya': he can think whatever the hell he likes), and the people monitoring her security buzzer happened to assume it was faulty. All true(ish): none of it any use to a writer, because it's so hopelessly improbable. As Goldman puts it: 'Truth is terrific, reality is even better, but believability is best of all.'

It all comes down to genre. Genre gives us parameters and security, as writers, readers, consumers in general: no axe-murderers for the under-5s, no portals at the back of the wardrobe in chicklit. Real life is just another genre: no random drunk blokes in the Queen's bedroom, and no dead dads coming back to life in a way that doesn't lead to a party. There are rules to our mundanity, and we quite like them. No wonder celebrities go bonkers, stuck in a universe so off-kilter it wouldn't even pass muster as sci-fi-fantasy. 'Sorry, Ms Lohan/Winehouse/Spears, but your reality is too cliched for us to apprehend it as reality. Move along now?'

Finally reading Louise Rennisons's 'Georgia Nicolson' series, starting with Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging. (Dying to know what the original title was, because I'd put money on it not being that.) I've been putting it off for fear of cross-contamination: when you're reading a really good writer you pick up on their style, and I didn't want to be channelling a snarky teenage diarist while writing...another one of those. Ahem. She's brilliant, though. I was all set to be 'read it for research, can tick that off' about it, and instead appear to be more on the lines of 'am hopelessly addicted now, please give me book fix soon?' 'I was all enigmatic, which is not easy in a beret.' Hee. Thank heaven there are about 8 more of them, or I would be grumpy.

I am definitely having my photograph taken next week. Cue much wardrobe anxiety (along with hoping my cold goes away, because the red nose will look a lot less festive come April).

Buying fairy lights and thus declaring it Christmas, failing to go to a Philip Pullman book-signing, watching Graham Norton interviewing Marilyn Manson and Nigella Lawson at the same time and throwing all that 'real life is a genre' crap out of the window.

Points mean Prizes

Magnificent news: fellow scribbler and dear old mate Sarah Mussi has won the Glen Dimplex New Writers' Award 2007 for her children's book, The Door of No Return. I couldn't be more thrilled, not only because she's a friend, but because Door really is something special: a book aimed squarely at teens with powerful and sensitive issues at its core (financial reparations for slavery), coupled with a cracking thriller that tears you through the pages so breathlessly that you barely notice you're being educated. It's as far from an 'issues' book as you can imagine (it's hilarious, for one thing: hero Zac is a corking example of an 'unreliable' narrator) yet doesn't flinch from telling uncomfortable truths. Stuck for a Christmas present for a teenage boy, anyone?

This is the first time I've really known someone else's book from 'I've got this idea' to it being an actual object with pages and a cover and an ISBN. It's quite terrifying to imagine that every single novel you see on a bookshop shelf has gone through all those sticky moments in between: the second-guessing of the plot, the second-guessing of the very premise, all those rewrites, then the merry dance of finding agents and/or publishers, more rewrites, then the whirligig of promotion and whether you're in a 3-for-2, all observed by friends and family and enthusiastic writing groups, by which time you're on to the next one anyway because it's taken 2-3 years to get to this point (assuming if you write quite quickly)... I know all these things already, but for some reason it feels more real when it's happening to someone else. Watching the unfolding narrative of my own book-gets-published saga is participatory: I'm too much of a character, too closely involved. With someone else's I get to sit back like Hercules Poirot, observing the scene, my little grey cells all a-fizz with glee as it unfolds exactly as I would have hoped. Cheers to you, Sarah: first of many well-deserved accolades, I don't doubt.

Aaand the internet crazy just keeps on coming. Old story, newly in the mainstream media, of a 13-year-old girl who committed suicide: Making Light has an excellent round-up of the sequence of events, plus the obvious-yet-apparently-not statement of the week: What happens online is real.

Copyedits a-go-go. Sometimes WTF should be wtf. No, I don't always know why. Also: Dear Copyeditor, I'm very sorry for writing the prizewinner of Least Possible To CopyEdit 2007.

Trying that thing where you stir-fry sprouts with bacon instead of just boiling them (not half bad); being on trains and buses and feet; locking myself out of my flat bumbumbum; wondering when lazy-bastard Lovefilm are going to send me the next bit of Prison Break; almost being in Paris. This last makes me happy. When I was little I had some knickers with 'A Weekend In Paris' written on them. Clearly they were formative. :)

Adventures in Freecycling

Alas, poor Freecycle. No one wants my broken telly, but they aren't too shy to ask for a non-broken one.

The Freecycle Yahoo group works on a charmingly simple principle: Person A has some crap they will have to put in a skip; Person B would clamber into the skip if they knew where it was because that crap is exactly what they need; Magical Internet C circumvents both skip and clambering, and the crap of the world is recycled. Hurrah!

That's how it used to work, anyway. There are still noble souls providing everything from the prosaic bookshelves, bedheads and baby clothes to '12 slim maternity pads from Mothercare (unused)'. There's even a nice-sounding lady terribly keen not to let a 'half-used can of squirty cream' go to waste. (There's a subtext in there somewhere.) But one couple just moving into their new home have requested '*Dining table & chairs (4-6 pref)*Toaster*Kettle*Coffee table*Microwave*Wardrobe (pref flatpacked due to narrow stairs!!)*Small under-counter freezer*Most kitchen stuff minus pots & pans*Curtains*Lamps.' Apparently I was mistaken about that principle: actually it's 'Please deliver your skip of crap to my house, and come to think of it I'd rather nothing in it was crap, and you can make me a cup of tea while you're at it, two sugars, where's my biscuit?' Except without the 'Please'.

The 'we've just moved house' handwringing is the crucial change here, though. It's not enough these days to simply post a mild bit of begging: an X Factor-style 'I'm doing it for me dead mum, Sharon' is the only way to ensure only quality crap comes your way. That's how I know that C wants some size 10 clothes for her young daughter, whose weight problem is preventing her from buying childrenswear; that L's asking for a Christmas Tree outfit for an 8-month-old because her husband's in Iraq and she'd like to send him a photo; that ‘Wanted: To see my son’ is in fact a plea for a bicycle to help a newly-separated dad travel to see his toddler. TMI. It's like online dating, except the punters hope the fleeting attention of strangers will lead not to romance, but some shelves. I blame Facebook. Web 2.0 really has eaten that supposed British reticence, hasn't it?

(And if I sound unsympathetic, do bear in mind that a suitable bike, clothes and enough kitchenware to restock Ikea were 'offered' on the site during the week, if the 'wanted' crowd could have been arsed to look.)

Margery Allingham's Look to the Lady. 'My dear fellow,' said Mr Campion with affable idiocy, 'I have buttered my bun and now I must lie on it. And you, my beautiful, will stand meekly by.' Like a cup of tea and a hug, in paperback.

The Editathon is over! Apart from the last three pages. They aren't important, are they? I have (re)discovered that I like editing books the least of all the writerish things there are, which means I feel quite skippy and gleeful at the prospect of writing something fresh and new. Presumably this is how things are supposed to work.

Obsessively reading Freecycle pages (apparently), buying a new telly (delightedly), sleeping (fire-alarm-interruptedly).