Currently viewing:  August 2010

things that I can’t part with even though it’s probably bad feng shui, part 2

My old friend. My office dictionary. You can see how much preferential treatment it’s had over the years. It drops dried spine glue over everything, but I don’t have the heart to retire it.

On Another Matter! Simmone Howell – who will be back home soon – hooray – after a glittering glamorous tour of world literary festivals – and carrying a big chunk of a new work in progress – more hoorays – invited me to do a guest post over at post-teen trauma, and you can see it here.

the colour of rain

this is fabulousness

Boy oh boy. Girl oh girl. Wolfboy and Wildgirl. (howl of appreciation) I’m not reviewing books on this blog, so this is a recommendation. I adored Leanne Hall‘s romantic, dystopic fairytale ‘This is Shyness’. It is as sweet and tart as a pink acid drop. It’s a can’t-put-down invitation into the darkly beguiling land of Shyness, a place inhabited by memories, sugar-addicted Kidds and an insistent hope that pulls Wildgirl and Wolfboy together through a night of adventure. You really need to read it.

sky

Sky staring is in the writer job description, like daytime sleeping is in the teenager job description. It’s a key selection criteria. Also horizon staring. Actually any distant gazing. It’s one of the things you do to open the idea portal. Things float in when you stop focusing. And when you’re asleep. A couple of weeks ago I wrote some ideas on an index card the moment I woke up. I found that card in my bag yesterday. Yes! Hooray! My great idea. An entire book distilled on one little index card. I’d forgotten all about you! I read it. It was crap. What happened? Portal malfunction. I need to get the portal guy in. Again. Sigh. But that’s not what I’m writing about. I’m writing about this sky, above. I think this is how weird white settler land use must have looked to the indigenous population way back then. What do you think?

two lovely reviews, petty theft & chicken soup books

Here are two reviews of Six Impossible Things – at ‘bean there, read that’ here, and at ‘Food for Silverfish’ right here.

This is a new, strange and wonderful experience – sending a book out into the world and finding… readers there. I know, seems obvious, yes, must have been in my mind when I wrote the book. Of course you hope your manuscript will be published, and that it will be read. And yet the feeling that someone has read what you wrote and connected with it is amazing.

Silverfish mentions beautiful Anne with an ‘e’, and it reminded me that when I was in year 12, I borrowed the school library’s fossilised copy of ‘Anne of the Island’ And Never Returned It!
I was only the other day telling some people that I wasn’t a kid who ever stole stuff. Conveniently forgetting about this shameful incident. Okay – worse – I didn’t even feel ashamed. It was falling to bits; it had to be on the deaccession list, didn’t it? Surely I was ‘rescuing’ it? No one ever sent me an overdue notice… And the reason I kept it is that it was such a comfort read.

Yes, even when I was a terribly mature year 12 person reading weighty texts and enjoying them – this was a snuggle book. It’s the one (spoiler alert) in which Anne and Gilbert finally get together. Rereading it in year 12 was the equivalent of chicken soup. Healing, soothing, yummy. I haven’t looked at it for years, but this afternoon I opened it at a random point about three quarters of the way through, and I was howling within a page. Very satisfying. (nb have edited this post – had reference to ‘sex’ re Anne and Gilbert, and it felt so wrong, like talking about ‘lifestyle’ in relation to Jane Austen…)

What are your favourite comfort books? Your sooky rereads?