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Monday, March 31, 2008
Busy busy busy busy...
...busy busy busy.
It's quarter to one in the morning (although by my poor messed-up bodyclock it's only quarter to midnight - I do not like changing the clocks). I've been sitting here with a cup of tea, emails open, plus three tabs in Firefox (Romance Divas for recreation, Abe Books for obscure secondhand books for my father-in-law, and an agent blog), one Internet Explorer window so I could do my online grocery shop, and a Word doc with the edits for Fire and Shadow. And an email to my Romance Divas mentee half written. Mariah, I haven't forgotten you!
I should see cover art soon, and all being well I'm looking at a release date of April 6th - oh, ee, is that only five days away?
Today was the last day of Sparkler's Easter holidays, and the first day of Gloworm's summer term.
We've been - yes - busy busy over the holidays. We had outings with friends and Abstract went camping and we had visitors while he was away, then the girls went for a luxury city break with their glamorous Model Auntie (the tapirs at London Zoo were one of the highlights - these glamorous models know how to show their nieces a good time) and Abstract and I celebrated our recent fifteenth wedding anniversary and his coming fortieth birthday by having two nights at a hotel in Cambridge and going on a punt on the River Cam and eating noodles at Wagamama.
Oh, and we had snow on Easter Day. How weird is that?
And now it's ten past one, and the computer is acting as if it's tired. No really, I swear. I'm going to put us both to bed.
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| Friday, March 14, 2008
I've been interviewed
I've been interviewed over at Author Interviews (which is linked to The Book Club Forum). Thank you to Michelle for the interview, and for the linked page of reviews of my books and free reads!
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| Tuesday, March 11, 2008
New business cards, with acknowledgements!
I know, I know I've shown you this before. When they came last time, though, the alignment was off. I complained to Vistaprint and they - with extraordinary quickness - issued me an apology and refund. So I ordered them again, with a couple of slight changes I decided to make - a thicker border so that if the alignment was off next time too it would matter less, and three lines of contact info.
 I resisted the temptation to have a full-colour back for an extra £9.99. I so don't need it, but it looked pretty (whine). I'll just have to buy a purple pen in case I need to write any other information on the back. Book details, for instance, or mobile phone number - the sort of information I might need to give to people but that I don't want to be on every card.
Okay, so that was a dull post, of no interest to anyone but me. Go read my reviews instead, or learn about personal pronouns. Or just look at the pretty card.
Oh! Now I remember: acknowledgements are required!
Thank you to Sparkler, who posed so I could take a picture of her to turn into the silhouette image on the card. I've changed her hair and I've given her boots and a dandelion clock, but that's basically her. I'll also mention at this point that, being eleven and three quarters, she is my precious, useful, young adult beta-reader. Thank you, Sparkler, you are One Big Help.
Mum
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The week of book reviews: Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Coraline is a book I've been meaning to read for ages. I've called it YA in one of my below posts, but it is really a children's book - a scary children's book.
I enjoyed it. Good, clear, evocative writing, a rather charming self-reliant child heroine, a truly scary villain/monster ('the other mother'), and an excellent ending.
The writing is children's-book writing, which meant it was a little too sparse for my taste. I'm used to - more texture, I guess, specially in fantasy books. But it still worked. I came down last night to get a drink of milk for Sparkler, thought inadvertently of 'the other mother' and had to exercise great self-control not to get unreasonably frightened!
I am kind of a wimp, though.
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| Sunday, March 09, 2008
The week of book reviews: The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass: On Tour
This is the fifth in a series of books (The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass, Aged 37 1/2; The Horizontal Epistles of Andromeda Veal; The Theatrical Tapes of Leonard Thynn; and TSDoAP: Christian Speaker, Aged 45 3/4).
The title is (obviously) a spin on the Adrian Mole Diaries, which were the literary humour du jour when I was in my teens, in the eighties, and which I have to admit to reading with complete seriousness, never actually getting any of the humour. Looking back, I think I read them for the romance - a sad disappointment because, being humorous and satirical, they were never going to give me much of a happy ever after.
Anyway, the Adrian Plass books, unlike the Adrian Mole books, are light Christian humour, written very much for the niche audience of evangelical English Christians. Bunches of jokes that anyone outside that particular sub-denomination wouldn't get.
And they're nice. They're mildly funny, with some fun caricatures of evangelical-Christian-English-white-middleclass stereotypes. The humour is less vicious than the Adrian Mole books - the author, I think, like me, appreciates happy endings. And, of course, being Christian, the books have a central message of 'God is with us and everything will be all right in the end, even if it's pretty horrible getting there'. Which, again, is nice.
The characters, too, are sympathetic - even the ones who start out as caricatures. The relationship between the narrator-diarist and his son, Gerald, becomes particularly touching throughout the books.
They're way too preachy for anyone outside the 'club' of the Christian church. The author has a few characters who, at points, seem to set their individual personalities aside in order to become mouthpieces for the author's own religious views. And although the religious views are often ones I agree with, there's always something a little embarrassing about characters stepping out of character, as it were, to address the audience.
Also, for someone like me, who is outside the sub-denomination they're written for and about, there's sometimes an odd discordance when I run up against what seems like an authorial blind spot.
For instance, when Gerald, as an adult in TSDoAP: Christian Speaker, says he's going to go for training as a Church of England priest, it's clear that - although not a problem, exactly (his parents are very relieved he hasn't confessed to being gay or getting anyone pregnant), this decision is so unexpected and unconventional as to be quite alarming.
It's also clear that there are going to be church members who will 'attack [him] with specially sharpened chunks of scripture'. When I first read this, I was bewildered by it, and am still very surprised at the idea of a Christian Protestant denomination that would have problems with accepting one of their number becoming a minister in another Christian Protestant denomination.
But these are critiques of the series as a whole. With TSDoAP: On Tour, I enjoyed reading it, mostly because it's nice to catch up with some of the regular characters. It doesn't seem as satisfying as the other books - a less clearly defined plot, shallower characterisation, maybe? I also found one of the new characters, Angels (sic), desperately unlikely. And another of the new characters - this one a caricature of the 'the whole Bible is absolutely correct in every respect and Christians ought to do nothing but try and convert others all the time' - didn't get anything like enough of a 'journey', to my mind.
Only two things really jarred. At one point, I was irritated to read something close to my own strongly-held and well-reasoned view of Hell being described (by a character in role as 'author's mouthpiece') as 'a cheerful little distortion of scripture' and 'dangerous nonsense' that anyone with any sense ought to disagree with. Please, by all means, disagree with my theology - and yes, if you think it's dangerous, by all means say so. But don't dismiss my views as rose-coloured nonsense, as if I hold them just because it makes me happy.
The other thing was a consistent misuse of the personal pronoun. Which I see all over the place, sadly, often from people whose grammar is, in other respects, pretty darn good. Let me explain:
The personal pronoun I is used when it's the grammatical subject of the sentence, similarly to he and she and they and we.
I kissed him.
The personal pronoun me is used when it's the grammatical object of the sentence, similarly to him and her and them and us.
He kissed me.
This doesn't change even when you add another person to the sentence.
Correct:
I kissed my children.
He kissed his children.
therefore also correct:
Abstract and I kissed our children.
He and I kissed our children.
Incorrect:
Me kissed my children.
Him kissed his children.
therefore also incorrect:
Abstract and me kissed our children.
Him and me kissed our children.
So far, so good. The problem comes when people get that set of uses, governing personal pronoun as subject, in their heads and apply them to personal pronoun as object.
Correct:
My children kissed me.
His children kissed him.
therefore also correct:
Our children kissed Abstract and me.
Our children kissed him and me.
Incorrect:
My children kissed I.
My children kissed he.
therefore also incorrect:
Our children kissed Abstract and I.
Our children kissed he and I.
I know, I know, those last two examples sound correct. But they only sound correct if you associate them with the correct use of I as in 'He and I went shopping'. This sentence is correct, not because using I is always correct, but because in 'He and I went shopping' he and I are being used as grammatical subjects.
If you associate them with the rules governing grammatical objects, you'll see that, as 'Our children kissed I' and 'Our children kissed he' is incorrect, so is 'Our children kissed he and I'.
Basically, if you can take out the extra person and the sentence still sounds right, it is right.
Our children kissed [Abstract and] me.
Our children kissed [Immi and] him.
[Abstract and] I sent you a letter.
Please send your letter to [Abstract and] me.
I don't know what it says about me that this incorrect grammar jarred and irritated me just as much as the dismissal of my theological views.
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| Saturday, March 08, 2008
The week of book reviews: The Marlow books by Antonia Forest
Getting big fat book parcels is a fabulous and wonderful thing. Being a bloody speed-reader so I can't control how fast I get through them is not so wonderful.
So far, of my ten birthday books, I've read The Marlows and their Maker, The Ready-Made Family, The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass: On Tour, Violet by Design, Coraline, and am halfway through Wicked Lovely.
So this week is the week of mini book reviews.
The Marlow family books by Antonia Forest are nothing like as well known as they ought to be. A lot of them are now out of print - although I think they're all in the process of being republished by Girls Gone By Publishers - but they are well worth seeking out. If you grew up reading Enid Blyton's Malory Towers series, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer's Chalet School, or any other English boarding school stories (Angela Brazil is one of the authors I remember) then you really should, in justice to the genre, read Antonia Forest's books. They are just excellently written.
They're also worth reading if you want a masterclass in characterisation and the understated conveying of emotion.
The books are:
Autumn Term,
The Marlows and the Traitor,
Falconer's Lure,
End of Term,
Peter's Room,
The Thuggery Affair,
The Ready-Made Family,
The Cricket Term,
Attic Term,
Run Away Home.
The 'term' stories (the ones set at the girls' boarding school) are the easiest to find. Seriously, read them, and then buy The Marlows and their Maker for a fascinating commentary on the books and their author.
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I had a birthday
It was my birthday on Monday the 3rd. So what I did was wait in for the gas man - who eventually arrived on Tuesday.
However, I also chatted to Margarita, who was staying with us for a few days, read the two books she'd given me, and then she babysat so Abstract and I could go out for dinner. Where I ate spicy chicken chimichangas with sour cream, salsa, salad and mexican rice, and drank white wine and an Irish coffee. Yay! Happy!
Oh, and I also spent £40 on books from Amazon. And they've been arriving this week. I went out on Thursday, and when I came home there were three parcels waiting for me (they arrived separately because I used some of the secondhand Amazon sellers, too, and made my birthday money stretttttttttttttttttch). Plus a brown A4 sae, which made me spend some time wondering what on earth I could be being rejected for until I realised it must be my first copy of the RNA magazine, Romance Matters. And then, oh the happiness of opening three book parcels and finding two magazine issues in the envelope!
So, I now have, either lying around the house, waiting enticingly on the kitchen windowsill, or coming through the post, these books:
The Marlows and their Maker by Anne Heazlewood.
The Ready-Made Family by Antonia Forest (the 'maker' of the Marlow family stories, as referenced above).
The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass: Aged 37 3/4 by Adrian Plass.
The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass: On Tour by Adrian Plass.
Violet by Design by Melissa Walker.
Coraline by Neil Gaiman.
Stardust by Neil Gaiman.
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.
Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr.
Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences by Ursula le Guin.
So, literary commentary on YA, YA, Christian, Christian, YA, YA fantasy, YA fantasy, YA, YA fantasy, fantasy. I think it's clear where my tastes lie.
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