I attended the prize-giving party for the Waterstone's Children's Book Prize on Wednesday. The event took place in their flagship store in Piccadilly and all eight of the shortlisted authors were there, together with various publishers, agents, press people and friends/family. The venue was hot! That's not a compliment - it really was hot, in an airless, gasping-for-fresh-air sort of way. Mercifully I a) had sussed out the joint earlier that day so could amend my intended clothing for the event into full summer mode and b)I ended up standing by a window. It was also very, very noisy. Imagine more than a hundred buzzy excited people all talking in a cocktail bar not very much bigger than your average lounge, and you might have some idea of the noise. It was also very dim - I liked that, because I'd been up since 5.30am. I was very pleased to be there - in fact I've been pleased for several months after hearing I was on the shortlist - but it turned out to be one of those occasions which seems far more enjoyable in retrospect. For whatever reason, I found it hard to live in the moment - it all seemed dream-like, overly-intense and high-speed - the effect was curiously similar to being on speed. I already knew that I hadn't won (glum phone call from nice editor earlier in the day) so in some ways I was more relaxed, knowing I wouldn't have to give a speech. The winner did give a nice speech, but most of us couldn't hear it, the Waterstones personnel for some reason failing to switch on the very large microphone that stood on the tiny stage. One of the other shortlisted authors proudly informed me that she had come 'second'. Eh? From where I was standing, this seemed an oddly inappropriate thing to both know and to mention. Sadly there wasn't enough time or breath left to speak (or shout) to many of the authors on the shortlist - that was a shame, because of course most of us won't get the chance again. But reflecting after the event, despite it's strangeness and the unfortunately coincidental onset of one of the the worst bouts of acid reflux I've ever had (Canape, Madam? No thanks. Wine? No thanks. Water? Thank God), it still felt very good to have been asked along, and to have written a book that somehow captured the imagination of a few people I don't know. I'll always remember it.

Q: What do you call a lorry with wheels of treacle and a cargo of sloths driven by a somnambulant?

A: The vehicle that’s always in front of me when I’m late



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'This is the life that I treasure,
Writing poems for pleasure ...'



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The violets explode inside me
When I meet your eyes
Then I'm spinning
And I'm diving
Like a cloud
Of starlings
Darling, Is this love?

This lyric from the opening track, Starlings, of the Mercury prize winning Elbow album, The Seldom Seen Kid, is the perfect description of romantic love for me. Lyrics have always been the stand-out part of a song for me, perhaps because I am a writer. My musician partner hears the guitars before the lyrics.

Writing about relationships invariably means writing about things going astoundingly well, like in the Elbow lyrics, or love gone wrong. I don't think there's much of a market for stories where nothing happens! Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end and some conflict happens and is sometimes resolved by the end, sometimes not. The history of storytelling is ancient and a well trodden path in academia, from Greek legends to fairy stories, and much has been written about these enduring stories being a kind of moral backbone and a metaphorical blueprint for behaviour.

As a writer and psychologist, I have an insight into what brings conflict into people's lives. My rationale for writing my series of novels was to situate the knowledge I had attained from a study I conducted into women's life narratives into stories about lives. Each of my novels is based on a dialectical finding from the study.


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Morwenna Thistlethwaite.

She’s a real person. I came across her in an artist’s catalogue and instantly wanted to include her name in a novel. Gamine, wistful and floaty – inclined to cheesecloth and batting enormous lashes – she’d be a pastie-baking girl from a vast Cornish mining family and the inn-o-cent object of an evil pirate’s passion. A pirate called…

Rex Frothichops. See, I can’t help it. A writing friend anagrammed her husband’s name and came up with this, my all-time favourite. He’s so …nineteenth century. But wait – I can also see him at the beginning of time, a rock-dinosaur with rabies – T.Rex Frothichops.
Sorry. Getting carried away there.

Names are so more-ish, don’t you find? And a good name – or rather the right name – is often hard to find.
There are many name-researching websites on the net, and I’ve just been a-sampling. There are the baby names sites, where you can choose a name according to its popularity in any given year; sites giving the meanings behind names (did you know that Harry means Army Power? The poor lad was predestined for the job), There’s a site where you can generate a name in any language – I asked for a female name in Esperanto and a male name in Bulgarian (‘My Gott –‘ Valentin Boyko’s voice roughened with desire. ‘Glorinda Katida, vot are you doink to me?’ ) And, best of all, there are sites where you can enter details of your character and a name is randomly generated to suit. I put in: ‘oozing, slimy, disgusting, putrid’ and got ‘Vilescum’. Count Vilescum, of Totterdown Towers, who only comes out at night and spends his days floating ominously in dirty bathwater…



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Here's a thing. You've got a complete manuscript of a novel. You're hiking it around the bazaars. It's double-spaced on A4 pages, according to the rules for subbing to agents and publishers. You've looked at it onscreen for months, maybe years. You've printed it off and read it through and through. If you're anything like me, by this point you're losing all perspective on it as a book. It's become A Manuscript. You can't read it quickly because you can't hold it in your hands like a published novel. You can't get comfy with it, crease the spine, fit it to the shape of your palm the way you do with a printed book. It's a tome of a thing, takes forever to print off, doesn't look anything like anyone's favourite book. You're starting to wonder if it ever will. Well, wait.

What if I was to tell you that for ten pounds you could turn your Word document into a paperback book, printed in trade size on decent-ish paper, perfect-bound, private to you?

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Googling analogies. 17200 results in search of a simile for hissing like… something less cliched than snakes. Found some interesting comparisons.

Hissing like:

Liberals / a cat / a banshee / an ex-wife / a rabid dog / a mother / a can of spray paint / a bad connection / hedgehogs / a live wire / angry goose / deflating inner tube / soil leaking through a coffin lid / a gas leak / a wild man / a bewildered orchestra / a steam valve / ...

[more]

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This post was going to be a confessional, of sorts. It was going to be me telling you that I'm an unreliable reader. That I feel guilty. See, there are lots of books I want to read. I buy loads, I get sent some, and I want to read them all. But something happens. I know exactly what it is - it's a complete lack of time coupled with my being cautious of what I read while I'm writing (and I'm writing most of the time). So what ends up happening is many, many books get added to the To-Read pile, and they're often there for a long time.

But sometimes something strange happens. I don't know if it's me thinking sod it or just chance - but I'll buy a book and read it straight away. It's not planned, it's not that I fancy it more than the others that are waiting - it just happens (can you see why I'd feel guilty?).

But I'm not going to tell you (any more) about that. Because I have just finished one of the best books I've read, the reading of which, it just so happens, was precisely one of those jump-to-the-front-of-the-queue-without-reason occurrences. (And I hope that is more interesting than telling you what I haven't read.)

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'The trivial round, the common task,
Should furnish all we ought to ask'



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As promised, here is the new cover for the second Changeling book, Dark Moon.


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