Glittering prizes

I can now reveal, after two weeks of keeping it to myself, that Troubadour has been shortlisted in the children category of the Costa Award. (Full details on News page). I don't think it will win but it's one of only four books chosen, so I'm honoured. I did enjoy winning that prize in France and wouldn't mind having that feeling again!

My team wasn't allowed to win a prize at the Kids' Lit Quiz Regional Final in Northants last Friday, but we did all get nice certificates. (It's for the children, really, you see). I'm going to the Final in Oxford along with about another 30 authors. Should be fun.

I've been busy Skyping - a new joy - and trying to use Google Wave.

Chapter 20 of the adult novel will be finished tomorrow.

I finished The Graveyard Book, which has just won the Booktrust Teenage Prize, and read The Traitor Game and shall blog about them both over at The Book Maven (www.bookmavenmary.blogspot.com).

And I read most of another long short story by Vitaliano Brancati, Il Vecchio con gli Stivali (The old man in boots)for our assessed discussion in Italian.

We've now finished watching all of The Return of the King, which we had to do in tranches, the last of which was last night. Now on to all the extras.

The jacket of City of Ships came today and looks very exciting. I'll try to post it on this website next month.

A Writer's Week

I checked the copy-edits on City of Ships in the first two days of this week, having had a scare that my copy-editor had taken them into the Labour Ward with her (she practically did!). As always, I had been working on another book since so it was strange to see it again. But satisfying.

On Wednesday I finished chapter 11 of the adult novel I'm currently writing and used Thursday and Friday for chapter 12. But I couldn't have done this without the planning work I did on the Oxford Tube on the way into London at the end of last week. I re-titled all the chapters and worked out how to distribute the plot over the second half of the book. I'm now in hope of writing six more chapters before we go to Athens in just over three weeks.

There won't be much time to work on the weekends as tomorrow we have a family birthday get-together and next Sunday a naming ceremony for my two little nephews. And last week my niece in New Yor had a baby girl, making me a Great Aunt for the first time; that sounds extremely dignified and grown-up. I hope I can live up to it.

Among the fanmails I answered this week was one from a woman in America whose brother I had dedicated a book to once and who was now about to become a father! I remembered him well.

Troubadour got a nice review in the Times from Amanda Craig today. So, editing one book, writing another, reading reviews of a third and answering e-mails about others - that's a writer's life.

I've been reading a book on the credit crunch and read the text of Jerusalem but must now do reviews for the Guardian of three books in two weeks and they haven't arrived yet!

Publication Day!

This post is going to be mainly about the production of As You Like It at Stratford, but I couldn't let today pass - 3rd August 2009 - without mentioning that it is publication day for Troubadour! UK jacket shown on left, It comes out in the US in a couple of weeks with a different look.

If you aren't a writer reading this, you probably think publication days are full of flowers and parties but it isn't like that. I did whinge a bit on Facebook and then got sent lots of congratulatory messages and even an electronic card with virtual champagne and balloons but the day itself has been much like any other.

I have wasted too much time on Social Networking sites, tried to dislodge cats from my lap and reinstate the laptop, written and received e-mails and done the shopping. Oh and I had a swim first thing but that's a Monday morning ritual not a publication day one. My lovely agent DID remember and send an e-mail though, as did one of my dedicatees.

It's funny: you have this date in your mind for so long, in relation to edits, copy edits, blurbs, press releases etc and then, by the time it actually comes along, you can't believe that no-one but you, your family, agent and publisher, have seen it till now. And by then you have written another book - two in my case - and are working on yet another.

Now, As You Like It. We went to the RSC production at Stratford, directed by Michael Boyd, who is RSC Director and mastermind of the marvellous Histories that domianted last year and much of the year before. Katy Stephens was a very good Rosalind, especially as Ganymede, and Richard Katz (Touchstone) and Forbes Masson (Jacques) were ourstanding in parts that often suffer from our over-familiarity with them.

Masson in particularly, who made quite an impression on us in the Histories, proved able to sing in an eery falsetto. But JonJo O'Neill was very disappointing as Orlando (and he's a great actor) and the production itself was distracting and annoying.

They started off in Elizabethan dress - puzzingly in inky black at the court, since no-one had died - then transmuted to more and more modern clothes in the "Forest" of Arden, ending up with Audrey in a white mini-skirt and four inch heels for her wedding. There was not a twig or leaf to suggest Arden - only an incongruous heap of straw.

I had been warned about the rabbit-skinning and -beheading business between Corin and Touchstone at the beginning of the second half, so used the handy A4 sized programme to hide behind.

But what was really disappointing was that Boyd seemed to equate pastoral with jolly idyllic romps and had determined to discover the "dark side" of the play by setting it in the bleak mid-winter. Couldn't he trust his source a bit more than that? Long-headed fellow that W. Shakespeare.

Talking of the dark side, I've started reading Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels. And have just finished Guantanamo Boy, which I'm reviewing for Armadillo.

Green shoots

Sorry for the silence. Everything seems to have been HARD and slow. First the big snow and all the attendant travel problems. Then youngest daughter's car being smashed into while stationary outside her boyfriend's house. (It was technically a write-off but is now being repaired). Of course the perpetrator left no details.

Then, much worse, she slipped on the ice, broke some ribs and got a chest infection.

I had to do another round of Troubadour edits on the page proofs. Self, husband, copy editor and proof reader all picked up different things. Thank goodness for having several sets of eyes on it.

And the London Library came up trumps with a new book on the Occitan War, which I'm working my way through.

My Ships are sailing slowly into port.

I had a writer friend to stay for a while in half term and we worked on our laptops and had coffee breaks together. We also went to the Ultimate Book Guide party at the Groucho Club where I met lots of old friends I hadn't seen for a while, like Kaye Umansky and Jan Pienkowski.

Then to Zilli's Bar, where Aldo Zilli was INCREDIBLY loud and intrusive with his wife and friends.

There have been some good things to set against the woes - baby Viola was born on February 5th, our surrogate granddaughter and we saw her a week later. She is so tiny and perfect (born 2 weeks early by Ceasarean). And we celebrated oldest daughter's birthday today, with Bellinis and a home-made Middle Eastern meal, which middle daughter helped to cook.

I went to a Italian Day School yesterday on literature and culture and rather wished I hadn't. Too many of the lecturers thought they would just give a gallop through a long list of books (or films) and illustrate each with a sentence or two.

I heard the Diabelli Variations and Opus 127 (the first of the late quartets) last week when Beethoven was Composer of the Week - a very good alternative to You and Yours. It's been Bartok this week, also a good swap.

Am still reading off and on The Audacity of Hope but must admit to skipping some bits. And we are continuing to read The Garden of the the Finzi-Continis in Italian. But I've also read Mary Ann Schaffer's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which I loved. Her only book, published last year when she was 74, and then she died. Sad for her family but I don't think se would have written another; this was it.

My insomnia has been horrible of late but I'm cheered by all the snowdrops, crocuses and primroses in the garden now the snow has retreated. I shall try to get lots of sunshine into my head and improve my circadian rhythms.

Bath in Bath

Well, it was a bit of an underestimate that the "copyedits" for Troubadour would take a "bit of time". It was a second full=scale edit, more extensive than the one two months ago and arriving three weeks before Christmas, with a two-week deadline! And that six months after submission!

I was so angry and poor City of Ships had to go n ice but, by dint of cancelling all social engagements and working every hour including weekends that wasn't already committed, I have done it. And feel a real sense of achievement, even though it's only got me back to square one.

We had a hugely useful meeting at Frances Lincoln on the big book I'm doing with Ros Asquith. And then a team from Coventry education authority came to film me answering questions from children. The cameraman fell in love with the cats and sent lots of pictures to me.

And we had a wonderful visit to the mosaicist Robert Field in Dorset. And I bought far too much of his work, not in terms of regret (since they are all lovely) but space, since we are running out of walls!

This week I've spent useful time in the Bodleian and taylorian libraries - what wonderful resources! I feel lucky to live near Oxford.

I saw Otello in Oxford but felt all the time how inferior it was to Shakespeare's.It seemed to me that Verdi had taken a tragedy and turned it into a melodrama. And the singer who layed the title role was so short and tubby it was hard to believe in him; Desdemona was lovely though.

We also saw a new play "Carthage must be Destroyed" back in Bath (can't keep away). It was about real subjects like political power and war as a way of manipulating markets and public opinion and took place in Rome. The violence in the second half was hard to take and I don't think it was a total success but it was always interesting and intelligent. The first half was set in a bath-house and all four actors - one old, one middle-aged, two young - got naked at some point. And one of the young ones was very beautiful.

We watched the last omnibus edition of Little Dorrit last night and thought Andrew Davies had been very muddly about the denouement; it didn't help that much of the exposition was given to Andy Serkis' incomprehensible Rigaud. It is much clearer in the book!I'd better make it the next thing I read.

I finished The Well of Lost Plots and read Twilight by Stephenie [sic] Meyer, to see what all the fuss was about.I found it surprisingly accomplished though I don't want to read any more of them.Good on her for coming up with a really strong USP and then delivering on it.