Of holidays, fan letters and lost envelopes...

Ah, holidays. Long days of chateaux, wine-tasting, museums, the occasional bit of canoeing or Via-Ferrata-ing (not too much, though), the smells of grass and sunshine and the salty stuff they put on vineyards... Followed by long evenings of driving through the French countryside looking for a campsite, long hours of arguing about which road that 'Camping' sign was actually pointing to, and long minutes of staring at French responsables of said campsites and saying, 'How much?!'

Oh, and food. Did I mention the food? Not the restaurants so much (although I'm not complaining), but the crackle of a fresh baguette, the squeak of saucisson between your teeth, the light crumbly folds of a pain au chocolat or a croissant. Not to mention my new discovery, the Paris-Best, which is like a doughnut-shaped profiterole filled with nutty creme patissiere and topped with flaked almonds. Although all of this palls beside the way that, after a day in a not-very-cool-bag in a hot Land Rover, everything tastes of cheese. Yum.

I've been away. For a whole month, more or less. (That's one benefit of being a writer, I guess: no one notices your absence.) And now I'm back, serene and relaxed and extremely glad to be sleeping in a bed.

Not much has happened in my absence. This is both reassuring (no one's died, my agent hasn't dumped me, no one has yet discovered that I falsified my tax return* I plagiarised all my novels I was married already er-hem anything bad), and depressing (I haven't won any prizes, no one desperately wants the film rights to my books**, I haven't unexpectedly inherited a massive legacy from an anonymous reader). Oh well.

But there were a couple of things which I found in my inbox. Nice things. I love hearing from you, dear Readers, and it was lovely to get back and find you'd been in touch. I won't boast about you here (because quoting one's own fan letters is possibly as bad as quoting your own good reviews***) but thank you. You are very nice. :)

However, there is one exception to the don't-boast rule, for reasons which will hopefully become clear. I don't often get real, physical letters, especially not from outside the UK, and in this electronic age there's something particularly nice about it. (I was going to say, especially when it's a nice letter, but I suppose if it's not then you can actually literally burn it in a cathartic sort of way.) The downside, of course, is that it's not easily retrievable if something... hypothetically... happens to it. If you know what I mean.

This is the point at which you're all nodding wryly and assuming I spilt a glass of wine over it. Right? Well actually you're wrong. I am in the delightful position of being able to blame this entirely on my agent, who opened the letter and threw away the envelope before he realised what it was. Yes. He threw away the envelope. The one on which there was, presumably, a return address. This is the sort of quirk of fate that put paid to Romeo and Juliet. Hmph.

So Halleye (sorry, not sure how to do the accent here), if you're reading this, apologies for the delay and THANK YOU! And can you email me your address, please, so I can send you a proper answer? I feel like your letter definitely deserves one. :) My email address is on my 'Contact Me' page. (Then again, if you sent me a proper letter in the first place, you may not have internet access, in which case I'm talking to no one. Oh dear. Very R+J again...)

And now... back to work.


* This is for comic effect. My tax return is TOTALLY HONEST. Trust me, I'm a Quaker.
** Actually the film rights for The Traitor Game are already spoken for, but that's another story.  
*** Quoting your own bad reviews is very good form indeed. (When I'm feeling down I google a book I love and console myself with the thought that there are a lot of idiots out there.)

Help! This title isn't working!

OK, that is not an attention-grabbing metajoke about titles. My blog site is genuinely doing something weird. 'You request cannot be fulfilled', it says, when I try to type in the title bo-- oh. Wait. Maybe this is metaphorical, after all. Anyway, if I were sensible I'd stop right here and check whether this will post, in case I spend hours writing and then discover I've lost it all. But I'm not. I'm going to write it anyway. (Ever feel like you're really not trying to be metaphorical, but the bloody metaphors WON'T LEAVE YOU ALONE?)

I can't remember what I was going to blog about now. :)

Was it the Stonewall party? Yes, maybe it was the Stonewall party. Which was fabulous. I don't have any photos of the actual place, because I didn't have any pockets and therefore no camera or mobile, but I do have this:

Hmmm, it's very small. It wasn't meant to be that small (obviously today is not a good day for me and techonology*) but you can at least see that we were really overdressed and enjoying it. But then, if we are occasionally overdressed we make up for it by always being immensely overeducated...

Also, we got congratulated by the hotel staff. That was fun. If slightly awkward, in a how-do-you-explain-that-yes-you're-in-a-wedding-dress-but-actually-you-haven't-just-got-married? kind of way. 

And since then... well. Work goes on. It went quickly for a while and now it's going slowly again. As I explained to a friend of mine, it's like watching a video on youtube - if you fast forward you have to wait for it to catch up with you before you can go on watching it. So while I'm not actually stuck, I'm wading a little bit. Although I'm generally quite excited about the book, and I'm not complaining. It's going to be long, though. I'm on 80,000 words and only two-thirds of the way through. 

Anyway, I'll keep you posted. If this posts. Here goes...

* Or typing. 

Stonewall Writer of the Year - Shortlisting...

That is possibly the most unimaginative title for a blogpost ever, but I am feeling excited to the point of incoherence.

I have been shortlisted for Stonewall Writer of the Year!

No, really, I have.

This means that someone at Stonewall knows who I am. That is pretty cool in itself. Also, I think (I hope) I get to go to the party, which is at the V&A and actually costs real money to go to if you buy a ticket. ('Do they know you're not gay?' my mother asked me. 'Should you pretend you are?' To which I replied, 'Mum, if Stonewall don't think you should be allowed to love who you want, the world is a sad and hopeless place.' Or would have done, if I'd thought of it. I think actually I burbled something about, 'Er... no, does it matter?')

The news came yesterday, totally out of the blue. As far as I'm concerned, the symptoms of being a Proper Writer include your heart sinking when you see your publishers' or agent's number coming up on your phone, so it came as a complete shock that my agent wasn't just ringing to ask me where the new book is.* I was so taken aback that it was good news that I didn't hear the word 'Stonewall' and thought he was talking about an in-house Bloomsbury Writer of the Year or something... (Luckily I think just having been shortlisted for something means you can be a bit more of an idiot than usual without your agents frowning and idly crossing you off the list of writers on their desks. Hopefully.)

Then: the V&A, he said.

Oh, I thought. That sounds... posh.

Sarah Waters won it a few times, he said.

Oh, I thought again. She's... well, a proper writer.

Stonewall, he said.

Stonewall? I thought. Stonewall?! What, like the - like really, Stonewall?!

I must have sounded utterly punchdrunk. Maybe he did absent-mindedly black out the letters of my name, after all.

But seriously, as well as being honoured and excited and all that (also, did I mention that my agent said he didn't think any other YA writers had ever been shortlisted? That was cool), I feel really proud. Because - as those of you who follow this blog might remember - Love in Revolution had a bit of a rough ride. Could I, my editor asked me - after the book had been accepted - change the love affair to, well, a "passionate friendship"? Because, you know, it's difficult, teenage fiction is really bought by the gatekeepers, the parents and librarians, and, well, we don't want to put anyone off... No one actually said, AND SOME PEOPLE WHO MIGHT OTHERWISE BUY THIS BOOK DON'T LIKE LESBIANS, but really they might as well have done.

I said no. I just said no. (I have said no on other occasions to my editor, but I'm not sure it's ever stayed no.) Bollocks to sales, I thought.** I mean, imagine calling a book Best Friends in Revolution.

And kudos to my editor, who respected that decision entirely - and indeed foregrounded the love story in the blurb, with no fudging or blurring of pronouns so that people might not notice the characters were both girls. Kudos to the cover designer, for making it look romantic. Kudos to my publishers for going with it and not putting pressure on me.

Right now I feel really proud of them, too.



* Still being buggered about with, and probably will be for some time, but that's another story.
** No change there, then. :)

A quick update.

This may not mean anything to anyone who didn't follow the original soul-searching about Come The Revolution a while ago, but to anyone who did and remembers vaguely what I was on about - I seem to have won the fight. Give or take a few explicit details in the sex-scenes, which I can live with. I love my editor.

I thought about making this post less mysterious, but if I did that I would have to kill you. And the Internet is a very populous place...

In other news, I am in She Stoops To Conquer at my local theatre next week (wigs, corsets, West Country accents, lots and lots of knob gags), am recovering (I hope) from a cold, doing well on my New Year's Resolutions (except for the one about punctuation), and haven't read Fifty Shades of Grey yet. (One of my friends is going to lend it to me. I suspect that as a big fan of The Story of O I will be disappointed. But watch this space. It strikes me as the sort of thing I might want to blog about.)

Anyway. Right now, my main feeling is: hurrah!

I'm back!

So, it turns out that the slightly valedictory tone of my previous post might have been a little bit histrionic, as I did, in fact, survive the flights to and from Qatar. (Without getting too nervous, as well, which was nice.) Not to mention the conference itself.

Me (in blue) in a workshop led by the wonderful Zeinab Mobarak 

But "survive" isn't quite the word. The conference was brilliant. I loved it. It's been a long time since I've spent three days with such interesting, intelligent, amusing, warm people - even if the conversation was so unrelenting well-informed and incisive that I had to resist an urge to lower the tone. ("Revolution in Egypt?! Has there been a revolution in Egypt? Why wasn't it in Hello! magazine?") As a translation conference, it was probably always going to attract clever, open-minded people with a heightened awareness of international affairs - but honestly, it was so high-powered it was verging on the ridiculous... And yet no one made me feel like an impostor, despite my lack of any relevant expertise (when people asked me whether I was a delegate I always said, 'Who, me? No, no, I'm only an author.'). The speeches and workshops were stimulating, everyone seemed to talk to everyone - and immediately cut to the chase about things that mattered, rather than, you know, accommodation or the weather or how long our flights were - and, to cap it all, with careful planning you could eat five meals a day. I felt exhilarated and privileged to be part of it.*

And the place was pretty amazing too. The photo on the left is of the Doha skyline, taken from a courtyard at the Museum of Islamic Art, which is itself an astonishing building (think halfway between a modern mosque and the National Theatre, but with an incredible austerity and grace). There's not much that's old in Doha, as far as I could tell, but the architecture is varied and energetic and really exciting. (On the whole. Our bus did drive past a derelict-ish apartment block, half boarded up and half just falling down, with a helpful facade claiming that it was "VERSAILLES". But I didn't have my camera that day.)  

I would also add a photo of my hotel room, because it was far too good for the likes of me, but there are levels of smugness to which even I will not sink.

I got back yesterday and am still recovering after not going to bed for 32 hours, so I'm not going to go on raving about what a lovely time I had. (Also I am running out of adjectives, and Roget's is in the other room.) I will just leave you with my favourite photo of all. Yes. It's a watermelon. But not any old watermelon. This is a Faberge watermelon. There were others, actually. But this one was the best.

Strangely enough, one of the keynote speeches was the great Daniel Hahn talking about his translation (or was it? well, it's funny you should ask that - what is a translation, anyway?) of a picture book called Happiness Is A Watermelon On Your Head*** (or as the Amazon web address puts it, with a certain threatening terseness: "happiness - watermelon - your head"). Which made me feel that this picture was particularly appropriate.

And now back to real life. And rain. And work.****

But any more invitations are welcome...


* Note to any British Council readers: is this enough, or should I lay it on a bit thicker? I do want those "expenses"... **

** This is a joke. I am actually deadly serious about all of the paragraph above.

*** It is an odd and wonderful book. Buy it. In English.

**** Or should I say, back to good intentions scuppered by the World Snooker Championships? Somehow I know today, at least, is going to be a dead loss. But that's OK. Maybe one day I'll write a book about daytime television, and it will all have been worthwhile.)

A glimpse into the glamorous life of an author...

...i.e, me.

On Tuesday I had a launch party for The Broken Road (I know, I know, only two months late) at my local Waterstone's. It was a fantastic evening - I saw so many of my friends there that I started to feel like I was at my own wake (in a good way) - but the best thing about it was: the CAKE.

As an incentive, I had promised everyone in the publicity that there would be CAKE. (Yes, in capitals. It's just not the same when it's in lower case. Believe me. I am now stuck in an eternal caps lock that is specific to the word CAKE. I am going to have to avoid the topic entirely in my next novel or face major problems with my copy-editor.) And that the aforesaid CAKE would have a sugarcraft lynch-mob on it.

The CAKE was not a lie.

And... for those of a squeamish disposition, look away now. (Or rather - sorry, you should have looked away a few seconds ago. Oops.)

Yes. A sugarcraft medieval lynch-mob. Don't you wish you'd been there? Made, I hasten to add, not by me but by a great artist of CAKES called Jackie Grover.

And here, if that photo wasn't enough, is a close-up - just in case you didn't catch their expressions...

I could add more pictures. There are a few of me cutting it, and probably a few blurred ones of me reading, or brandishing a glass of wine and grinning like an idiot. (Or maybe, on second thoughts, after all that wine it wasn't the world that was blurred...)

Anyway. I had a fantastic evening. I read and talked about myself and signed copies of my book and generally had a lovely time.

But really, I just wanted to show you the CAKE...

On a lighter note...

The last couple of times I blogged, it was a bit angsty. The problem hasn't gone away, but I'm determined not to worry about it until it raises its ugly head again, so for the moment all is relatively serene in the Collins household. (Unless someone asks me how the writing is going, in which case they are almost literally knocked backwards by a gale of ranting. But people are rapidly learning not to ask...)

And yesterday I spoke to my lovely hopefully-soon-to-be-agent (don't worry if you're getting confused about how many agents/editors I have - it doesn't really make any difference to this story) and she really made me laugh. Partly because of what she was telling me about my book - I was making notes, and one of them says, and I am not making this up, 'try to write good prose' - and partly because she said, 'You know that Mitchell and Webb sketch, where one of them is an editor and keeps saying, "How about doing like this? Well, not like this, obviously, but maybe a bit like this - well, not really like this, but..."?' 

But mainly because she said that when her assistant put Edward Leigh onto her Kindle to read it, she accidentally loaded the Word document with tracked changes.

Now. I didn't know this. But apparently when that happens the Kindle isn't equipped to deal with it. So it loads everything, original and final versions combined - so all the deleted bits, all the new bits, all the comments - without any kind of formatting or signposting... I.e., in this case, all the cut 10,000 words and the new 15,000 words. Not to mention the occasional moment where I'd lost my temper and put in a note-to-self like (and I quote) 'Yes, but where the hell is the PLOT?!'. 

Apparently, the assistant, when asked her opinion, said, 'I'm enjoying it, but the narrator does seem to do a lot of things... well, twice.'

It reminded me of the time I listened to Mozart's Requiem for the first time*. It was on vinyl, and I put the turntable on the wrong speed. I told my parents I thought it was brilliant but... maybe a bit high-pitched. 

* I am not going to tell you how old I was. Suffice it to say that I was at secondary school - old enough, you might think, to realise that the music was over in roughly 3/4 of the time one might have anticipated.

Done. Almost.

I thought about just leaving this blog post as the title on its own, because it just about sums up everything I have to say. But that seemed a bit... stingy. Oh, by the way, I haven't had much sleep. So don't expect the right words in the right places or anything. (Or rather, as I typed that originally, "don't expect the right words inntb eh righy placex". Which, coincidentally, is one of my favourite Basque proverbs.)

I don't know if you've seen the film 28 Days Later. It's not one of my top ten... but there's a moment when the hero's making his way through the apocalypse-torn, disease-ridden world and he goes into a church and up some stairs, and the camera focuses on some graffiti: NIGH, it says, in huge spray-painted letters. And then the shot pans up, and it says above that, FUCKING. And then EXTREMELY. It takes longer than you think to get to THE END IS...

So my edits were - OK, are, so much for having finished, I've got to start again at the beginning now - a bit like that. Last week I worked really bloody hard (up at six, worked till four, started again after dinner, till midnight) thinking that that day I would get there. It wasn't till yesterday this morning, at ten past three, that I finally wrote the last sentence. I was too tired even to feel particularly triumphant. But now I have a new draft. Not the final draft. Probably not even close. But those problems, which seemed like a brick wall, did have handholds, after all. I'm not sure that, having climbed up, I won't have to inch my way painstakingly back down again and find another route - but right now I can take a breather, hoping I'm on the right track.

Sleep. Read. Do some laundry.

I did tell my agent that she'd have the MS by the end of the week, though. So tomorrow I will be back to work. No doubt, this time tomorrow, I will be staring helplessly at my computer screen and wondering if I could just cut straight to the middle of the book. Actually - there's a thought...

That last sentence probably won't be the real, final, actual last sentence. But the end is extremely fucking nigh.

The glamorous life of a writer...

I was a little bit fragile last time I posted... I won't apologise, though, as I feel like it's important to share these things. Mainly because when I'm having a crisis of confidence it cheers me up no end to know that someone else is feeling bad. Hopefully that works for you, my lovely readers, as well - meaning that moaning and whining are in fact providing a useful public service. Wait, what do you mean, that's just me? :)

However. Thankfully things are looking up. (Or, as I mistyped that initially, "looking yup". I rather like that.)

So, NaNoWriMo, plays, love affairs, and books all end. But hey. Here is something which will always, always cheer me up. Yes, that's right. Lunch.

Especially lunch at someone else's expense. And especially lunch at my agent's expense.

In this case, wood-pigeon, twice-baked goat's cheese and thyme souffle, white chocolate and chestnut tart, and coffee. And wine, of course. Although not too much of it because I had to catch the train home and didn't want to doze off and wake up in Hastings. (I have nothing against Hastings but it's right at the end of the train line.)

And it was lovely. The food, obviously (see above) but also the company (my hopefully-soon-adult-book-agent*) and the conversation (about me)... We were talking about my grown-up novel, The Two Lives of Edward Leigh, which I sent off months ago and managed to forget about - only to get an email a few weeks ago which said that she was really excited about it and could we meet for lunch? Cue great jubilation in the Collins household. And added to that, the agent in question worked with me on The Traitor Game before it went out on submission and was a wonderful, incisive, tactful editor - so I was (and am) really pleased that she's interested in Edward Leigh. Now I just have to redraft it...  

That was Wednesday. And on Thursday I was at the Bloomsbury Christmas party - Quality Street, pretzels, satsumas, wine - chatting to my editor and copy-editor and lots of other nice people. (The big names included N. M. Browne, Celia Rees, Mary Hooper, Mary Hoffman, Mark Walden, Gareth Jones... and possibly lots of other lovely writers whom I met too late in the evening to remember clearly. My apologies if you're one of them. You were lovely, anyway.) It was fantastic. I came home on Thursday night feeling very glamorous and exuberant. Just those two occasions made up for many long weeks of slaving away alone over a hot computer.

And I'm not, contrary to appearances, just saying that because of the free food.


* Fingers crossed. If I manage to implement all her terribly sensible suggestions. Watch this space... :)

Bookdrum profile for Gamerunner...

Well, so NaNoWriMo has started, and with the help of writeordie.com I am off the mark. And slightly ahead of target, which is probably just as well, given that I'm highly unlikely to carry on being so self-disciplined...

But I really only wanted to share a new exciting thing about Gamerunner - it has a new profile on bookdrum, a website which creates and shares "guides" to books - i.e. images, research, background, plus lots of interesting other things. If you're interested in a book, bookdrum is the perfect place to find out more...

So here it is. Created by the wonderful Victoria Hooper, to whom I am extremely grateful.

Enjoy.

UKLA Longlisting for Tyme's End!

Er. Well. The title says it all, really...

So, I had a vague idea that the UKLA longlisting was coming up, but I didn't know exactly when. And this morning one of my friends had linked to the list on facebook, but since no one had told me about it I assumed that Tyme's End hadn't made it.

So I wasn't going to look (I mean, honestly, why would I be interested in other people getting accolades? You must be mad) but then I told myself I was being a little bit pathetic, and I should gird my loins and grit my teeth (or possibly vice versa) and see who the lucky people were who'd managed to be SO MUCH BETTER THAN ME even though I DIDN'T WANT TO BE LONGLISTED ANYWAY-

(- I hope you're getting the tone of this - )

- only to find that in fact I was on it.

Cue big grins and sheepish laughter. And this blog post, naturally.

At Last

So. It's finished.

I wanted to find a picture of a limp rag - wrung-out and dripping - to express exactly how I feel, but I couldn't muster the energy to look for one.

That said, if you can imagine a limp rag with a quiet feeling of inner triumph, that would be even closer to what I'm trying to evoke.

It's been a long hard slog. But on Sunday - after a weekend when I wrote frantically, because it felt like if I didn't finish soon I'd go mad - I finally did it. The last sentence is - no, wait, I don't want to give too much away... the last word is "rain". It's a good last word, I think. And I was very, very glad to write it.

Now I'm going to take a (short) holiday. I've got books reserved for me at the library, a room to clean, laundry to do, lines to learn for King Lear, sleep to catch up on, and errands to run. I've got a new book to think about - and I can think about it now, without feeling guilty, like I'm peeking at the bottom tray of a box of chocolates before I've eaten the last couple of toffees on the top layer... Paradise.

And then - oh, did I mention the edits? I've got a whole page of them already, so many that there are major continuity issues in the book where I changed my mind half way through and didn't go back to update the beginning. It's going to be quite a lot of work, I think - although right now, in my haze of fatigue and euphoria, I'm sure that once I've done it Mazecheat's going to be brilliant... But it can wait, at least for a few days. 

I might even start that next book, if I'm feeling self-indulgent.

One of the nicer things this week...

Good reviews are nice. They really are. It's lovely to have someone be nice about your books, especially when it's someone brilliant (coughMalPeetcough) in a national newspaper... You can quote them on the cover and everything. It's great. I've been lucky with reviews, on the whole, and I'll always be grateful.

But a few days ago I came across something on the Internet that gave me more pure, lasting, disinterested pleasure than a review ever has.

Fanfiction.

The Traitor Game has not one but at least two people writing fanfic. Possibly even more. I can't express how delighted I was - am - to have found that out. It feels like such a privilege. Is that crazy? I had to restrain myself, with difficulty, from commenting. (I was only going to thank them and say I thought it was really cool, but all the same I decided not to, because I don't want them to feel I'm looking over their shoulders, or that I imagine I have some kind of right over what they write. The same goes for positive Internet reviews, as it happens. Every so often I can't resist, but in general I feel that the author should keep in the background, so that people can say what they want without it getting personal.) But I was just... so pleased.

Fanfic is a weird thing. I've never written it; I only really heard of it after I wrote The Traitor Game, because someone wondered whether I'd been influenced by slash...* Fanfic is subversive, in a way; there are stories about authors and producers getting antsy about other people writing about "their" characters. But as long as no one's making money out of it, I don't understand the problem. And yes, I used those quotation marks advisedly. Michael and Francis aren't really "my" characters: any more than - oh, I dunno, let's say Takeo and Shigeru, or Fitz and the Fool, or (and I've read a really good piece of slash about these two) Sparrowhawk and Jasper aren't "mine". I'm a reader: those characters live in my head, independently of their authors. And they go on living. That's what reading is. I've never written fanfic, but I recognise that experience - you read a book, you love the characters, and you rewrite them again and again, you get to know them, you live their lives... That's normal, isn't it? And it's a huge compliment to the author. I'm amazed and thrilled that people care enough about Michael and Francis, that they want them to go on living, that they want them to have a happy ending.

So thank you, whoever you are. I'd give you my blessing if it didn't sound patronising. Hope people go to read your stuff here. And here.

And yes, I always thought Michael and Francis would get together eventually too.

*This is an interesting question, and one which I fully intend to muse on at more length. But not now.

These Foolish Things

I very rarely feel famous. But now and then I see my book in a bookshop, or read a review, or someone says something that gives me a great rush of excitement. And this, I say to myself, is why I like being a writer...

I mention this because I had a lovely moment last week, in the pub. (The pub bit is incidental, but it adds local colour.) I was having a drink with an old friend, and she was telling me what she thought of Gamerunner. That was nice in itself, actually, because she'd really enjoyed it. But then she added something which I thought was amazing.

She'd bought it in WHSmith in Victoria Station.

Yes. That's right. In WHSmith, in Victoria Station. It's been a long time since I've been to Victoria, but I like to imagine that the WHSmith there is pretty small, with an extremely select array of books. I closed my eyes and imagined my book, on their shelves. I felt great.

Then I opened my eyes again to order a drink. And just as I was about to speak, the barmaid said to me, 'Wait - aren't you the writer-girl?'

I blinked, and said, 'Er... yes...? Should I know you...?'

'We met a few weeks ago,' she said, and mentioned the friend who'd introduced me to her. 'And my sister read one of your books and she absolutely loved it. She thought it was brilliant.'

It was possibly the best five minutes of my week.

Branford Boase high jinks...

Last night was the Branford Boase Award party, which, as one of the judges and last year's winner, I had to go to. But that was OK, because I would've gone anyway. It's a really nice occasion, very informal and friendly, which was just as well as I had to do the Judges' Summing Up ('let me put it to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury...') and was quite nervous. When you win it's not as bad, because no one minds what you say, they just smile at you benevolently, like you've just given birth to your first child. I suppose, in a way, you have...

Anyway, it all went fairly smoothly, apart from my nearly knocking over a massive vase of flowers that some IDIOT had put on a plinth right next to the platform... (Flowers? FLOWERS? Clearly an embarrassment hazard. Where were Health & Safety when I needed them?) And I got to announce the winner, which was fun (if a little bit nerve-wracking, as I was afraid I'd have a sudden brainstorm and announce the wrong person).

Which brings me to the important bit: the winner of the award was - dum dum DUM - Lucy Christopher, for her book Stolen. And I'm really glad it's been announced, because now I can rave about the book without giving away any secret information... Stolen is a wonderful, chilling, quietly subversive book about a kidnap and the relationship between the kidnappee and kidnapper. It's beautifully, economically and vividly written - the setting, the Australian outback, is brilliant, almost a character in its own right - and really remarkable, original and assured. READ IT! (And Lucy is lovely, too. But we didn't know that when we chose the book.)

The shortlist was also brilliant - I particularly liked Numbers (Rachel Ward) and Life, Interrupted (Damien Kelleher). But I would be very surprised indeed if all the writers didn't go on producing fantastic books...