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. :)

Good news!

Well. Day... er... 4 of NaNoWriMo. And I'm at 6000-and-something words, hoping to be more by the end of the day. So far it's going well - more fun than anything I've written for a while, mainly because I feel liberated from the pressure of wanting it to be good. Although obviously I would prefer it to be good...

Then again, my writing buddies are dangerously close to getting ahead of me, if they aren't already. So there is that pressure to counterbalance the whole freedom-from-quality-control thing. Never mind. Hopefully they will have a big stumble over the weekend and drop horribly behind. :)

But one of the other nice things about NaNoWriMo is that procrastination is acknowledged as part of the writing experience. Which meant that I spent twenty minutes this morning burning CDs for the Great NaNoWriMo CD swap without feeling guilty. Well, not too guilty. It's almost the same as writing, right? And I'm so excited about getting some back...

Anyway. I didn't mean to blog about NaNoWriMo, mainly because I don't have very much to say - but I wanted to procrastinate some more share some good news with you: Tyme's End has been longlisted for the Carnegie Medal! I'm very pleased. Any mention in a long or indeed short list is great, but the Carnegie is particularly special. And doesn't require your characters to die, necessarily.

So. Back to the grind.

Writeordie, by the way, is feeling a bit hardcore for me right now. Maybe I should create a similar program called writeorhaveacupofcoffee.com...

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.