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 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...

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...

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.

Stranger Things and Other Things

Last week, as you might remember if you follow this blog, I had the UK premiere of my first full-length film, Stranger Things, at the Raindance Film Festival. Which was amazing and bizarre in equal measure. Try seeing your own face, very close up, on a big screen when you're only sitting in the second row... I'd imagined it was going to be like watching the DVD only bigger (logical enough, when you think about it) but actually the whole experience was different and weird. Mainly good but also... odd. It hadn't occurred to me to be nervous beforehand, but so many people asked me if I was that by the time I went into the cinema I was feeling very jumpy indeed. And of course watching that first scene with the zombies didn't relax me much...

The really nice thing, though, was that I found myself forgetting that it was me onscreen, and just letting the film tell me its story. Sometimes I think that story-telling is really the thing I love best about acting (or possibly about everything) - and in film you don't get to do it yourself, you're only providing the raw material for someone else to do it. So seeing it all put together and looking beautiful is a lovely eureka moment. Oh I see, I said to myself. I understand now...

On a less thoughtful note, I hope and pray that I am better-looking in real life. Several of my friends assured me I was. But then, they're my friends... Maybe I should ask an enemy.

Anyway - so that was Friday. Then on Saturday, just as I was going to bed (a little bit addled from my father's birthday dinner)* I had a phone call from Ron, one of the directors, saying we'd won Best UK Film! I had to check on the Internet the next morning in case I'd dreamt it... Very exciting. And it also won an award for Best Direction at a different festival the day after. Honestly, Ron and Eleanor (the other director) are so successful it would be unbearable if they weren't so nice.

So I radiated glory and triumph for about two hours yesterday morning before I had to go to rehearsal for King Lear. And had a splendid time forgetting my five lines and being restfully dead. I'm loving rehearsals at the moment.

Oh, and did I mention I sent Mazecheat to my editor? So it's Liberty Hall chez moi at the moment, as I'm not exactly sure what to work on. Slash novel? Historical novel? More blog?

Time for writeordie, I think.


* I had scallops with pancetta and chillies, calf's liver with fig sauce, semi-freddo and coffee. Since you ask.

OK, so three princesses walk into a bar...

(c) Di Byers, 2011

Did I mention that I was (am, am going to be) in King Lear? Well, I expect I did, but here anyway to prove it is a photo of me with some of the other actors. I'm the one in the white dress, looking stern in an I'm-taking-myself-terribly-seriously kind of way... Yes, Cordelia, how did you guess?

I am also playing the Fool, which is fun too. I get to make lots of rather dirty jokes, not to mention do a brilliant impression of a horse eating buttered hay. (Confused at first, then dubious, then won over by the idea and thoroughly over-excited, since you ask. All in an unmistakeably equine fashion. It'll be worth seeing the play just for that... Promise.)

So today I was going to blog about the Internet and the fact that it's a Good Thing, after all... but I started and then realised it was going to take longer than I'd planned to write it. So I thought, nah, put that on hold, something with a picture would be better. And since pretty much all my time is taken up with rehearsals at the moment, King Lear sprang to mind.

This photo was posed, I hasten to add. For the local paper. Which hopefully will go some way to explaining why it looks so... odd. And why Lear's court has mysteriously been transformed to a cave. (Possibly a mystic cave.)

Never trust a man in a fur jerkin, that's my motto.

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.

Stranger Things at Raindance

Stranger Things is my first feature-length film. It's a touching study of a young woman touched by grief (played by me - see fig. 1, left, I am the one who doesn't have a beard) who strikes up an unusual friendship with a vagrant who breaks into her dead mother's house. It's beautifully shot and scripted, and the film is a subtle and poignant story about loss, vulnerability and healing.

And if that doesn't grab you, and you're more of an action-movie fan, let me just say that although there aren't any car chases, there is a section where I flail around uselessly in a field with a stick.

I worked on it a long time ago, so it feels weird (and nostalgic) that it's only just having its London premiere (although it's done the rounds in the US and South America, picking up lots of awards on the way, including Best Narrative Feature at Slamdance and Woodstock). But it is!

At 9 pm on the 7th of October, Stranger Things will be shown at the Apollo Cinema, Piccadilly, as part of the Raindance festival. Everyone is more than welcome...