UNEXPECTED SPORT

(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. :D

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.

Do Not Adjust Your Set

Thank heaven the writers' strike is over. Listed as in 'active development' by Production Weekly:

TOUCHED BY A SUPERMODEL
Producer: Tyra Banks. After being electrocuted to death on the runway, a leggy model finds she can't enter Heaven without first returning to Earth and doing good deeds to earn her way in.

Is it wrong that I really, really want to see that? (Also: I should pitch 'Zinnia Zmith: Googlenurse' to the CW. They are on the special medication.)

Paul Cornell (he of 'writing some Doctor Who I adore and some I despise' fame - not that that singles him out particularly) says British telly needs the US system of writers' rooms. I suspect he's right - nicking the 'showrunner' concept without the 'other people, also possessing good ideas' to go with it is like recruiting Hannibal without the A-Team, and your plan's never going to come together when there's no one to fly the helicopter/be a manwhore/pity any fools in the vicinity - but it's still a concept that breaks my brain. I talk all the time while I'm writing: bits of dialogue, bits of backstory, bits of me shouting 'shut up and type you arsewit', the works. But that's the sort of conversation probably best had with oneself, no? Or is a writers' room full of people doing that all at once, in a super-efficient time-saving fashion, with free biscuits? That, I could learn to love.

The End of Mr Y, Scarlett Thomas: will babble properly when I've finished, but basically it's your average Coraline meets Heidegger via Samuel Butler and a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Brilliance.

Frankly pathetic progress on B&L. But I've been having some pleasingly daft thoughts about Big Woo-related shenanigans and shiny author websites...

Compulsive Prison Breakery (T, it seems ungrateful, but I feel I must share this with you); smirking at the zen calm of Garfield Minus Garfield; discovering the sprouting lentil; wondering if Ewan McGregor can possibly have needed the money quite this much.

fumbly, mumbly, little bit stumbly

In trying to nail a new character voice, I've realised my productive vocabulary is miniscule. But my fantasy vocabulary is thriving.

Channel 4's Shrink Rap is a 'dumbly and unpleasantly titled series', said A.A. Gill in yesterday's Times. Which is true, but apparently open to misinterpretation: pronounce the 'b' in dumbly and voila! you have a whole new word for a sort of plodding doughy ordinariness, with just a hint of a twinkly-eyed wizarding headmaster to make it forgiveable.

(I'm trying to ignore the rest of the review, where Gill declares that the most morally unsettling aspect of Pamela Connolly (nee Stephenson, of Not the Nine O'Clock News/married to Billy/qualified shrink fame) interviewing Chris Langham (of Not the Nine O'Clock News/sacked from The Muppets/imprisoned for viewing images of kiddie porn notoriety) is her haircut. There were interesting things to say here about the responsibility of documentary producers, and the nature of our confessional culture: instead we get a middle-aged man feeling affronted by a middle-aged woman daring to not look dowdy. He also seems to have some difficulty with Dawn French who is, apparently (wait for it)...fat. Heavens. However is he to survive under this onslaught of imperfect, not under-25 women, poor lamb?)

Back to words: I spent much of my childhood indulging in accidental neologisms due to not wanting to look thick before my brainy family, and thus never asking what anything meant. I'm not sure it's done me any harm, though. How much more fun is life when a terpsichore is a medieval musical instrument, or a heliotrope is a da Vinci-era prototype helicopter?


Ways to Live Forever, Sally Nicholls (YA, contemporary fiction, first novel). 11-year-old Sam is dying of leukemia, and we already know how this story ends. So far, so miserable, no? But this really is a beautiful book: wistful and filled with I-appear-to-have-something-in-my-eye moments, certainly (especially whenever Sam details, calmly and without commentary, the words of his agonised, awkward parents), but still studded with hope and wit. I met the author for a millisecond the other day (she's a Scholastic stablemate: they've been raving about her forever, now I know why), and she is scarily young and clearly lovely. Only 23 when she wrote it, says the blurb: blimey. One to watch out for, I'd reckon. Also whizzed through Penelope Lively's Ghost of Thomas Kempe. They don't make them like that no more - or rather, they don't publish them. Dated, but there's a lovely subtext about history and where one fits into it.

Correcting the galley proofs for the UK edition of Big Woo, at speed as we're on the most insane schedule. I love proofs: it's the first time you start to really feel it's a book, not a manuscript. They also allow you to pretend to be a proper writer: 'Sorry, darling, will call you back when I've finished with the proofs for my new novel' is one of those sentences you dream about saying, just a little bit.

Watching Babel (genuinely excellent, though it emphasises the fragility of our little lives too acutely for comfort); yoga class (I'm so rubbish at this time of year: ow); Buffy and Torchwood and Farscape and can you tell I'm supposed to have been writing this weekend?

Take off shoes, Take off socks, Lift foot and hope

Happy New Year, etc.

As befits this festive time of year, I am feeling a bit too full of crisps to construct much in the way of sense. Thankfully, amongst my many fine gifties was a desk calendar offering me daily suggestions, nay requirements, for procrastination. It’s like having a proper job, only without the annoying need to not be in pyjamas, or that pesky salary. As a result, despite having spent much of the last week doing an impersonation of a drowsy limpet stuck to a pillow, mental muscles have still been flexed. It’s like a pencil-and-paper Facebook. Two days into 08 and already I have joined some dots, decided whether Morecambe or Wise is best (not really a fair fight, alas), and concluded that To make best use of the resources we have, all old car tyres will now be used to make…polomints for our Iron Man overlords, naturally. And what have you achieved, eh?

The only difficulty is restraining oneself from skipping ahead. Already I’ve sneaked a peek, and tomorrow I get to write a play in four lines and draw a fake Andy Warhol, all while pretending to be working. Genius!

Dick Francis, because my brain is cabbaged. Also Oliver Burkeman’s rather endearing end-of-year summation of Web 2.0. I feel quite fortunate to be part of that bridging generation that feels securely part of both worlds, pre- and post-internet. I may occasionally still talk about ‘albums’ like a decrepit old bat, but I’ll weather that if it means I can retain a little Spielbergian sparkle about what we thirtysomethings like to call ‘modern technology’. I remember when Virtual Reality was putting on a hat that made you look like Predator and having to float in a billion-dollar duckpond, and now there’s a Wii next to your telly and Bob’s your relative - which I appreciate all the more for knowing that WiiPlay Air Hockey is basically Pong with more flailing and a faint subtext of lightsabres. Internet, you are my fifth limb at the very least. Don’t go changing. Except to be more shiny and filled with silly toys, naturally.

This is slightly humiliating, but I appear to have accessorized myself in the style of my new heroine. Or rather, I bought two bracelets today in the sales, which are currently savaging chunks out of my laptop but which seem to be encouraging my brain in useful, thinky-type directions. I’ve done talking to myself in character, and leaping about the room to test out dialogue and scene-length, but dressing up is a new one. Trust me to do it with someone who thus far appears to model themselves on Vince Noir’s Camden Leisure Pirate…

Being annoyed by most of the Christmas telly (except Ballet Shoes, which was adorable); seeing in the New Year in the company of The Professionals instead of real, non-1970s people due to poorliness; preparing for a challenging speaking role; eating very much too much for too long oh god where is the gym again?

Shiny!

Yes, this year I am holding Christmas in a gay roller disco.

Note the unpleasant minty-green wall which is standing in for 'tree under which to put this sort of thing'. Note also the complete absence of labels indicating which present is which. Have I cleverly colour-coded the sparkly ribbon so I can tell who gets what? Have I bollards. This could get...interesting.

Off to battle my way onto a train. May your turkeys all be golden, and my apologies if you are one of the long list of people whose Christmas cards are sitting on top of the fridge. I do love you, just apparently not enough to have ever worked out where you live.

Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, which is reminding me it's been a while since I've read anything genuinely 'literary'. You are the reader, reading Italo Calvino's book, which turns out to be the opening chapters of someone else's book, misprinted, which you then seek to read more of, only to discover that it too has been misrepresented, in the course of which you read another misidentified opening chapter of yet another novel, and so on, all while you slowly find yourself becoming not reader but character, narrative, plot. Extraordinarily clever, although I'm wondering if it can sustain itself for another 150 pages. That's the trouble with post-modernism: sometimes the idea is more fun than the execution.

Signatures on contracts and resignation letters. (They say you shouldn't give up your day job just because you have a book deal. 'They' don't also work nights. :P) And notes, notes, notes.

Feeling poorly because now I am on holiday and that's just bloody inevitable; ripping bits of Supernatural onto ye iPod for travel distraction purposes (tiny Dean!); wishing the Spice Girls would stop trying to act and/or sell me things; watching The Children of Green Knowe and feeling impossibly nostalgic.

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.

I tend to view this nation Through the condensation

on a dirty glass...

I have conjunctivitis, and thus am bespectacled, instead of being becontact-lensed. Grr, I say. I've had contacts for decades now, after suffering through many youthful years of Jarvis Cockeresque NHS frames. (Due to not being a Sheffield-based indie-electro nerd-poet, but a stumpy Welsh schoolgirl, the potentially chic qualities in these babies - girlish pink version, natch - were somewhat lost.) The frames may have improved over the years, but I see they still haven't invented ones that don't mist up when you open the oven to see how burnt your dinner is. :(

Finished Good Omens, which is an odd mix: half-brilliance (Crowley and Aziraphale), half what-why-what-who-are-these-boring-people? (the Them), and a pay-off that just about rescues the wobbliest non-structure imaginable. Given that it was written by two people, it's tempting to wonder if the good bits are attributable to one and the, er, other bits to the other. Very funny, though. Now on Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech, which came up in conversation with Beloved British Editor. I read Love That Dog a while back and liked it a lot, although it owes a lot to the likes of Beverley Cleary: this is more along the lines of 'proper novel', and although it's heading for a reveal you can see a mile off, it knows it, and is just holding your hand, touchingly tightly, along the way.

UK press samplers arrived today, so I now have a glimpse of the cover for Big Woo (minus shiny/glossy effects): very fetch. US version is in the post, but Beloved US Editor warns that the 'shocking' pink has turned out not so much Punk as Pepto-Bismol. Apparently the real thing will be less likely to invoke thoughts of indigestion. Like Jacqueline Wilson's recent overseas editions, there'll be a glossary in the back of the US one to explain what the likes of fish and chips are, which is...bonkers. No clarification for 'WTF', but 'biscuit' needs a paragraph or two? Better that than I am forcibly required to send all my characters to the Dairy Queen of an evening, though. (That's where y'all hang out, yo?) I foresee some transatlantic cackling, anyway: apparently the handful of US-based characters I've included are all a bit too 'I say, Father, might one invite Perkins for tiffin after cricket prac on Sunday?' for comfort. Got to love an editor who can mock you and make you grin in the same sentence.

Utterly failing to make progress on Book 2, but there's the ghost of an idea flying around my head. Am now waiting to swat it, and see if it's a butterfly or a gnat. Quite fun, while the deadlines are still mistily distant. (Possibly that's just my glasses. Bugger.)

Watching Stardust (oh, clingworthy film of loveliness, truly you do deserve the crown of 'A Bit Like The Princess Bride'), watching Davison-era Doctor Who (Time-Flight: just watch it with the commentary where they take the piss, or it's unendurable), watching Steven Poliakoff's Joe's Palace (umm...it was ok? But could he possibly write something that isn't set in an outrageously posh person's house where an outsider comes in and reveals the hollow heart of it all?)

Anemone Kitson: Undercover Mermaid

The very best four words I've written today. It's been a doozy. (C'mon, I'd watch it! I bet when NBC cancel The Bionic Woman they come knocking at my door.)

I am cross with myself, as I managed to miss both Flight of the Conchords and Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe last night, due to them being

a) on BBC4
b) do you need more than that?

For fear of missing more vital televisual delights, I have carefully scoured today's Radio Times online, and found no equivalent peaches. This afternoon Five (not Channel Five, just Five) offered up Robin Cook's Terminal, which I thought was in rather poor taste until I remembered that he's already dead. (Is that worse, maybe?). BBC3 this evening has
Help Me Anthea, I'm Infested, which, rather pleasingly, suggests that the realisation 'Oh no, my home is being invaded by a plague of vile soulless creeping things' will inexorably be followed by a whoop of 'ANTHEA TURNER!' The sole highlight of the evening is ITV4's offering of an episode of The Professionals, which according to the RT is a documentary. In which Doyle gets shot by some Chinese people. I am reminded of all those times my heart leapt when I saw University Challenge: The Professionals listed, and truly believed that my dream of Ultimate Crossover Television had come true at last...

In the absence of better (oh, who am I kidding, I am absolutely going to end up watching The Professionals), here are the Conchords demonstrating why they are undubitably the inventors of rap. There ain't no party like my nana's tea party...




interviews with Billie Piper about Belle du Jour: brace yourselves, Who fandom is about to explode

Mermaids!

Cooking some kind of vegetably tomatoey thing in an effort to nourish myself. Man cannot live by bread and Haribo alone, no, nor woman neither.

Sarah Jaaaaaaaane, that is her naaaaaaame

Aaaaand she iiiis, reeeally gooood, ooo-eee-ooooooo...

OK, so it doesn't have the same theme music (which is a shame, as the one it does have would make Delia Darbyshire cry), but The Sarah Jane Adventures is basically old skool Doctor Who with money thrown at it. Which makes it a very very wonderful thing indeed. 2-part stories so we get a cliffhanger! An older person hero who is brainy and a bit mental! Actual skience! AND I used to walk past her house on the way home from school every day, which makes me practically her companion. (Ahem.)

They have traded in the eggbox spaceships and chromakey in favour of prettier explosions and people who can act, which is a touch radical. And it suffers a little from forelock-tugging to New Who (not to mention prop-borrowing, which is presumably the sole reason for the return of the still-not-at-all-interesting-or-funny Slitheen). But there remains something relentlessly uplifting about the mere existence of a kids' show which centres on a MILF who saves the world by being quite clever.

When I am a lady of a certain age, I would like to have a big attic full of space junk, a computer for a husband, and to fight crime. I'll pass on the tin dog, though.

Of course, this is not Sarah Jane's first foray into spin-off land, so for your delectation here's the opening credits for K9 and Company (scroll ahead to 3.52, unless you want to sit through an awful lot of diddly-dums). Warning: unintentional hilarity within.



the three Rs:

Philip Reeve's Larklight. Victorian space pirates ahoy!

editing, editing, editing

Scrabbling around YouTube looking for Garth Marenghi's Darkplace clips. Can't imagine what put it into my mind...