Well, I’m happy.
Finished this month’s edition of the magazine (early). Got to the good old Women’s Bookshop and finally picked up Jeanette Winterson’s kids’ book, Tanglewreck, and Sarah Waters’ Night Watch, which I can claim is research since I’m now onto writing my second in the WW2/Blitz series.
I growled like a lion so loudly at little girl at the bus stop, I’ve nearly lost my voice. She laughed so much she fell over. I mustn’t have looked very fearsome.
Then went to the library for college-related reasons and they actually had the books I needed (miracle #1) and even allowed me to borrow them (miracle #2) so to celebrate I also got out an old Leon Garfield collection and Sally Gardner’s I Coriander, which I’ve been meaning to read for ages.
Now I have three weeks of blissful writing time stretching ahead of me. Three! (That’s miracle #3.) I’m going to get stuck into my Spanish Inquisition project. Or possibly Vikings.
And in a few hours time I will have finished all my course work – for this week, anyway. I’ll pretend to myself at least for a few days that there isn’t another great brain-sucking time-consuming slab of work lying just ahead.
And there’s a full moon. A harvest moon in winter. A Thomas Hardy moon. I saw it through a high window yesterday morning before I was properly awake. I saw it rise over the sea last night from the ferry.
O wondrous days.
I might just eat chocolate as well. Go crazy.

Relax. According to The Guardian, a survey of over 2,000 adults carried out in the UK has found that books play a crucial role in influencing our opinions of strangers. Well, sure, but:

Half of those asked admitted that they would look again or smile at someone on the basis of what they were reading.
And it gets better… A third of those surveyed said that they “would consider flirting with someone based on their choice of literature”.

My mind is utterly boggled at the idea of actually asking grown-up people these kinds of questions – and why – but let’s just put that to one side. In fact, let’s not think about that at all. Ever. Because what would we have to blog about if it wasn’t for the latest stupid survey findings? But I digress.
The really good news is this:

The genre most likely to help you pull – the itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny yellow polka dot bikini of the books world – is the classics, followed by biography and modern literary fiction (think Zadie Smith and Sebastian Faulks, rather than Dan Brown and Martina Cole). Forget the gym: if you want to raise your dating game, head down to your local library and start borrowing.

Now, perhaps if you were an extrovert, it might occur to you to start chatting or possibly flirting, even though the person next to you is clearly engrossed in a book. For an introvert, such behaviour is unimaginable. But let’s face it, market researchers are extroverts and unlikely to consider any alternative scenarios, like someone scowling or blushing or losing her place on the page.
Most normal polite people only chat if you aren’t doing anything – except on long plane flights, when no amount of engrossed activity or even pretending to sleep will deter some.
I have to admit at this point that nobody ever talks or smiles at me when I’m reading anything vaguely of interest to me, and I would scowl at them if they interrupted anyway.
But when I had the misfortune to be stuck in an airport in the middle of the night with nothing but Dan bloody Brown, about a million people – well, men – came up and told me that Da Vinci Code was the best book they’d ever read. Until I innocently asked one what other books he had read and he couldn’t think of any.
I scowled.

It’s late. I shouldn’t be doing this. I can hardly see. Slits for eyes. Been staring at a computer for what seems like years.
The days when I’m working at my day job start at 6.30am (cup of tea delivered to the bedside, thank you very much). Catch the ferry at 8, office by 9, ready for the second cup of coffee by 10 – usually ready for lunch by about 10.15.
Home on the 6.30 ferry. Dark. Wet. Cold. I hate winter.
Tonight: homework. Who ever knew there was so much to consider about picture books? I’ve stared at Max in Where the Wild Things Are for so long I want to slap him and put him to bed early.
I wish I could play on the monkey bars with Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge or go on a bear hunt with Helen Oxenbury. Today I was at the Children’s Bookshop in Ponsonby and someone very small was chanting rather loudly in amongst all the books: “Oh no! We can’t go under it. We can’t go over it…”
There are worse things to have to do, I know. People look at you very strangely on the ferry when they are reading the latest Dan Brown and you are reading the latest Anthony Browne. And laughing.
But now my eyeballs are falling out of my skull so I must stop.
That’s all by way of a long-winded explanation of why I can’t think or blog about anything else this week.
Although I do love this exchange from the John Irving/Stephen King/JK Rowling session in New York, which inevitably focused on poor old Harry and his imminent or otherwise demise:

King recalled that when he had a character kick a dog to death in his novel Dead Zone he received more letters of complaint than ever, to his surprise.
“You want to be nice and say ‘I’m sorry you didn’t like that’, but I’m thinking to myself number one, he was a dog not a person, and number two, the dog wasn’t even real,” he said.
“I made that dog up, it was a fake dog, it was a fictional dog, but people get very, very involved,” King said.
Rowling noted that Irving had killed off many more characters than she had.
“When fans accuse me of sadism, which doesn’t happen that often, I feel I’m toughening them up to go on and read John and Stephen’s books,” she said.
“I think they’ve got to be toughened up somehow. It’s a cruel literary world out there.”

I love to read kids’ reviews of books – my book, or anyone else’s for that matter. It’s fascinating to hear what elements they pick up on, and how they see the world you’ve created.
Here’s a lovely review by Callum from Laingholm Primary School, published on LeafSalon:

This book has more action than a movie and is absolutely brilliant! My favourite character was Lily Swann. I liked her because she was taken as a slave by pirates and managed to take a ship from the pirates without fighting. She then became a queen among the pirates.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so?
The smell of roses, you think? No, mouldering books.
~ Andre Sinyavsky

Dina Rabinovitch takes on the “anti-readers”, with a brief overview of the kidlit scene in the UK, a sprinkling of smart reviews, and a few hints to parents about how to engage kids with books and authors:

It is one of the many mini-miracles of the great flourishing of children’s writing that children’s literature should be so strong in a country where the anti-readers hold sway … The groundswell in children’s literature has been child-led; it’s been playground word-of-mouth success first, with the adult critics running along behind.

The anti-readers, she says, are “the people – many are parents, some are teachers or classroom assistants – who simply do not know what it is to read, to handle books for the pleasure of their feel, to savour words, stories and pictures with no endgame in sight at all.”
I just can’t imagine what that’s like, but it sounds terribly bleak.

The second Swashbuckler book, The Pirate’s Revenge, goes to the printer tomorrow apparently.
I do hope it’s all right.
It’ll be out next month.

Somewhere in the blogosphere, a contentious kidlit enthusiast has been compiling a list of the 200 “coolest girls” in children’s books.
Here’s her (and her readers’) top ten:
1 Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
2 Lyra from the His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman
3 Jo March from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
4 Laura Ingalls from the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder
5 Harriet M. Welch from Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
6 Hermione Granger from Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling
7 Turtle from The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
8 Arrietty from The Borrowers series by Mary Norton
9 Meg from A Wrinkle in Time (and sequels) by Madeleine L’Engle
10 Nancy Blackett from Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

We’ll accept that these poor US-based people have not yet had the pleasure of reading the Swashbuckler trilogy, or, obviously, Lily Swann would have been number one.
But who’d like to explain to me how Anne of those infernally boring green gables is cool?
I’m happy to accept that her lesser-know fictional colleague, Emily of New Moon by Montgomery is pretty cool. But Anne’s a wuss. A dull, wimpy, uninteresting wuss.
Give me, any day, the obnoxious Mary Lennox of The Secret Garden, Katy doing what she did, or indeed the mischievous Jo March.
Lyra? Yes. She’s way cool.
I’m glad Hermione got a run, although Harry and Ron would snort pumpkin juice out their noses at the idea of her being cool. I have high hopes of Hermione.
It’s an hilariously dated list, reflecting the respondents own childhood reading of the Victorian classics, in which, we’d have to admit, cool was normally not an attribute of female protagonists. For God’s sake, that goody-two-shoes Sara Crewe from A Little Princess made number 18. Not a cool bone in her body. And don’t start me on Fancy Nancy Pantsy Drew.
Where’s Kit from Cue for Treason? Eloise, surely the coolest child that ever ordered room service? Olivia?
I vote for the scalliwags and swashbucklers, like Nancy Blackett. The black sheep. The girls who swam against the current of their times. The heroines who made their readers believe that anything was possible – even writing children’s books.

I don’t see why I’m not in Africa. I ought to be in Africa. I planned to be in Africa. I really meant to be in Africa.
But I’m not.
Not this year.
The story is too dull to tell, but the point is that I really haven’t been anywhere far far away for months and everyone in this house is getting itchy feet.
Morocco was supposed to be next on the list, after we’d been to southern Africa. We’ve bought lots of books about it, but not the tickets.
I keep meaning to get to Uzbekistan too. I have wanted to stand in the Registan like Robert Byron for as long as I can remember. The turquoise tiles. The dry hills. The textiles and mud walls and mutton stew.
I have to go to London at some point this year for research purposes. It’s a very good idea, I’ve found, to set one’s books in distant places, because then you have to go do the research in person. And really, while you’re in London, you may as well travel around and look at some gardens and boats and castles and swords. Maybe buy a book or two. That kind of thing.
And then again, there’s not much point going all that way and not going to Ireland as well. Or Wales. Or both.
The next book is, very cleverly I think, set in Amsterdam, Venice and Seville.
But then again I still haven’t been to Russia. Or Portugal.
Or Broome.
Or …

Well, I’m home. Or not, as the case may be. Anyone who says “home is where the heart is” hasn’t ever left it, clearly. The heart can be in more than one place at a time.
Flew out of Melbourne (which is home, where you get woken by kookaburras, and the ghost gums lurk in the fog) to Auckland (which is also home – where I live, with my partner, in what has recently been dubbed a little gingerbread house, on an island).
In between I suffered my usual airport confusion, not knowing where I was going or leaving. Looked for the Bar Coluzzi cafe which is actually at Sydney airport. At least I didn’t go searching for Charlie’s, which is in Dubai.
But, finally, here I am. We’re not rushing into anything today. Late breakfast. Now it’s 4pm and I just dragged myself out of my pyjamas. Spent the afternoon so far with face under a mudpack while tearing recipes out of old food magazines.
I’m recovering from a week of frantic school readings on top of the usual family events (four basketball games, many meals, school drop-offs and pick ups, birthday celebrations for a ten-year-old, maybe the odd antique shop, and one or two cups of coffee). Saw Pirates of the Caribbean, Ice Age 2, most of the old BBC version of Pride and Prejudice on DVD, and an awful lot of NBA 2006 on Playstation over my nephew’s shoulder. And study and work and … now I need a holiday.
On the plane on the way over I re-read Edith Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers, which I hadn’t read since I was ten or so.

I have often thought, writes her young narrator Oswald, that if the people who write books for children knew a little more it would be better. I shall not tell you anything about us except what I should like to know about if I was reading the story and you were writing it. Albert’s uncle says I ought to have put this in the preface, but I never read prefaces, and it is not much good writing things just for people to skip. I wonder other authors have never thought of this.

Ha!