Split Personality

I write lots of different kinds of books. Animals, aliens, fairies, monsters. And now I’m writing about… teenagers. But also writing about… penguins. And shortly pitching about… jungles.

This could end badly.

Mwa mwa mwa

The teenagers are kissing, fighting, acting, singing and dancing, dreaming of boys and girls, organising parties, painting each other like zombies. There are French exchange girls with boys on the brain, a moon with the kind of powers you don’t want to mess with and a dude in dodgy trainers. Did I mention the kissing? There’s lots of kissing.

Aim at the teenager! BOOP!

The penguins are zooming around in space, escaping from warring weirdos with too many eyes and a vast space zoo full of creatures to give Mexican bird-eating spiders nightmares as they fold up their long hairy legs and quake in the Central American undergrowth. Wham! Blam! Boop! (Intrepid pilot Rocky Waddle wishes to advise you never to peer down the barrel of a stun gun when it goes ‘Boop’.)

The jungle is enduring a cross little girl with too many opinions and absolutely no idea that she’s being followed by something large and hungry.

I have bare red knees innit

AND NONE OF THEM ARE BEING WRITTEN because I’m writing YOU. I have to concentrate or lose not just spinning plates but entire meals balanced thereon. At least one of my plates has a full roast lunch on it and gravy is going everywhere.

Where was I? Oh yes. Zombie penguins in the jungle.

*pootles off, whistling vaguely*

 

Eating One’s Words

Spot the difference. One of these is a cake. One is the cover of the book. WHICH IS WHICH?

***** suspenseful music *****

The one on the left is, of course, the cake,

made by Holly Webb!

*loud cheering*

(Or do I mean the one on the right?)

?????

I urge you to check out the rest at the Edible Book Festival over at www.playingbythebook.net. Do it now. There are 61 entries from 5 continents. Load the pictures as a slideshow. I can wait.

*checks email, makes another cup of coffee*

Seen them? Aren’t they brilliant? Holly’s should win of course, because I am entirely biased and she has caught Space Penguin Captain T. Krill to a T (Krill). Seems a shame to eat it, really. I must remind myself that this is what cakes are for.

UPDATE: Holly’s cake came second! Whoop whoop!

 

Waddle Twaddle

When you deliberately set out to follow lots of people on Twitter with the word ‘penguin’ in their Twitter address simply because you are madly promoting a series called SPACE PENGUINS – yes, that’s SPACE PENGUINS – you are guaranteed an amusing time.

Here is my assortment, amassed over the last two weeks. My colony, if you will.

1. Penguin Social (@PenguinSocial): Feel uncomfortable among your contemporaries? Suffer from fish breath, identity crises, chilblains? Pop over to Penguin Social to set your tiny penguin mind at rest.

2. Little Penguin (@OhDearPenguin): Heavily into British accents. What.

3. Awkward Penguin (@_AwkwardPenguin): Hasn’t responded to my follow, which is a little… what’s the word… difficult?

4. SpacePenguin(Spacey) (@AstroPenguin1): So out there that he has the word Space in his Twitter name twice.

5. Space Penguin (@THESpacePenguin): A little aggrieved at being alone no longer, but that’s the way the cuttlefish crumbles.

6. Space Penguin (@_SpacePenguin): A band from Bridlington. Rockhopper on!

7. Emma Dean (@spacepenguins85): Makes me think of school discos in shiny balldresses, don’t know why.

8. Leroy Penguin (@Leroy_penguin): Hip Hop rapping, eyebrow raising, tequila smashing afro penguin, 18. Too cool to follow me back.

9. Alice Sheppard (@PenguinGalaxy): MSc Astrophysicist, citizen science maniac and general dazed waffler (her words, not mine).

10. Pedro Penguin (@PedroPenguin): AN ACTUAL PENGUIN (African) at Toronto Zoo. He doesn’t tweet much. It’s more of a honking sound.

11. Pittsburgh Penguins (@penguins): Ice hockey team. Given to incomprehensibilities like “X played 4 years with #Canes, tallying 53G-54A=107 in 286 reg-season games!”

12. The Penguin Press (@penguinpress): Not literally a press for squeezing penguins, I’m guessing? Though possibly not unlike those apple presses owned by cool people in the country with their own orchards.

13. Team Penguin (@TeamPeng): For all your RuneScape Penguin Distraction & Diversion Means! which explains them perfectly if you are fluent in geek.

14. Penguin Magic (@penguinmagic): Much in demand for children’s parties in Antarctica.

15. Penguin Books UK (@PenguinUKBooks): Why call yourself Penguin Books UK and yet tweet most confusingly as @PenguinUKBooks? Just a thought. (They don’t publish me.)

SPACE PENGUINS are out now. Finally. Buy them all please, for me and lovely illustrator James Davies. One for all and all for FISH!

Swimming Along

So there I was, head held out of the water like a poodle fresh from the salon, when it struck me that several classic examples of LIFE were there in the pool with me in the form of my  fellow swimmers.

SWIMMER #1: long, slow strokes, cutting through the water so carefully that he didn’t make a single splash. His hands were knives. His feet were scimitars. He swam on his front, then turned on to his back, seal-like, all the while as silent as a ghost in slippers.

SWIMMER #2: faster, this one, with a red swimming cap and fierce boggly goggles, she drove grimly on, splashing a bit but always pushing forward, relentless, never pausing for breath, doing that splashy crawl designed to impress but always with a hint of human flailing.

Paddling perfection

SWIMMER #3: With her nose clip and her sudden pause at the deep end, she sank as I watched. A silent back flip beneath the surface, then back into the world. A handstand next, pointing toes beneath me, hands holding down the bottom of the pool lest it explode upwards in an unaccountable fountain of blue tiles. Handstands again at the shallow end, big white legs straight and firm. Carefree. Encouragingly strange.

I swam until my legs trembled: envying swimmer #1, admiring swimmer #2, dreaming of a life as swimmer #3.  Then a hot shower and away into the chill outside.

Library Love

I had a tremendous time on National Libraries Day at Fleet Library last weekend, reading to a lovely audience about the odd assortment of animals and characters in my book KOALA CRAZY: specifically scary girl Cazza (“OK in a strangely terrifying way, with her death motif badges, regular detentions and insanely illegal school shoes”), dappy Taya (“If my plans to be an actress stroke fashion designer stroke singer don’t work out, perhaps I’ll be a teacher or a politician or some other kind of person who talks a lot and impresses people because I’m pretty good at it”), Taya’s sci-fi obsessed, spiky twin sister Tori (“K9  as robot dog – fine and actually pretty funny. 2thi as human person – not fine and about as funny as measles. Spelling stuff in stupid ways is just really annoying”) and confused kangaroo Caramel, who has no quotes because she’s a kangaroo and can’t talk. The atmosphere was relaxed, the room was airy, the children were attentive, the parents didn’t fidget too much, and everyone wanted to know what happened next because–

chapter 3 ended on a cliffhanger. *sly smile*

Ah, la Lumley

I also got to share a paragraph about it with Joanna Lumley in the Bookseller.  Ha!

All of which makes me doubly sad that a well-known author like Terry Deary should attack libraries and the important community work that they do.

Possibly he was saying it for effect. I understand that he enjoys taking a combative stance on things, which doubtless serves him well in his taekwondo classes, knife-throwing target practice and Special Forces training, but isn’t much help to these precious, endangered public spaces with their free reading material, free WiFi, cheap coffee, computer desks, e-book lending, knowledgable staff, toddler music sessions, rainproof roofs, blessed silence (except, admittedly, during said toddler sessions) and warm all-ages-welcome human environment. Humanity needs just as much investment as fibre-optic technologies, pork bellies and wind farms. More actually.

I have a Kindle and I see the value of e-books. I also spend an inordinate amount of time on my computer. But I try not to forget that we are still people in need of comfort, communication, kinship and communal spaces where these needs can be met. There is nothing sentimental about that, nor about the PLR money hard-pressed authors earn from library lending, not to mention the important publicity following library appearances like my own last weekend.

Perhaps Mr Deary will give away his PLR earnings this year. Perhaps he’s been stealthily doing so for years?

Drawing a Blank

I have a white board! I’d love to wax lyrical about this exciting development in my writing life but essentially it’s white and it’s a board and not even I can find much else to say about it at the moment. BUT, as Bob Hale would say, NOT FOR LONG!

You see, I have written myself into a computerised corner with my new project and have discovered an urgent need for a PLANNING TOOL that I can see without opening tabs (not on cans of beer though that is tempting) and flipping from screen to screen in a WHAT AM I DOING I’LL HAVE A BISCUIT AND THINK ABOUT IT HOPELESSLY kind of way. It’s a little embarrassing, to find myself at this juncture 30,000 words in. Also ironic, as I spend much of my editorial time urging other authors to plan BEFORE they start. Quite.

Unlike my usual projects, which have word counts ranging from 6,000 to 35,000 words, this honey needs to weigh in at around 80,000 words, and my usual habit of holding plot arcs in my head like a host of imaginary spinning plates is presently letting me down with lots of similarly imaginary crunching noises and illusory ceramic splinters up my fingernails. So, a white board it is.

Look! I’ve got a title and everything!

Brilliant! Why haven’t I thought of this before? I want 40 chapters, each around 2,000 words long. Lots of little boxes then, with different-coloured arrows from one to the next. Off I go!

Good. Yes. Well. This could take longer than anticipated.

Biscuit.

Camels and Bowler Hats

The latest tragedy in Pakistan makes me very sad. Sadness doesn’t fit very well with me, so I shall endeavour to cheer myself – and you – with a rather different vision of the place as it was just over eighty years ago.

My grandfather was a journalist and intrepid airman who flew to India in 1932 with a chap called Neville Stack, on one of the earliest flights to make the distance. One of their many refuelling stops was at Gwadar on the coast of Balochistan, of which Quetta is the provincial capital. Here’s what he said about the place.

 Baluchistan, on the edge of the desert, is the abode of quiet, friendly, peaceful people. There is a telephone at the block house which is all that is to be found at the aerodrome. It was possible to telephone to the village for both fuel supplies and food.

 

By 7pm two camels richly laden with choice viands and cool wine arrived for us. The riders astride them habited in Baluchi flowing robes looked very solemn and not a little droll in bowler hats of antique period. These they raised gravely to us in western salute. Then without speaking they descended, barracked the camels, laid out tables and chairs they had brought, spotless tablecloth and table napery, laid a first-class meal, waited on us with perfect manners, and when it was all over packed everything away back on the camels and tendered the bill as if we had been at Quaglino’s. Mounting their camels and with another grave doffing of bowlers in parting salutation they rode silently and mysteriously away.

 

We were alone with the desert. I had seen much of deserts and had slept beneath desert stars and desert moons for three or four years of the War. I am always fascinated by the prospect. 

 

My grandfather William Courtenay, third from left

It was still unbearably hot even in the cool of evening. We all managed to bathe in the plentiful supply of water brought out to us, and remained smoking and yarning till far into the night with our shirts hanging outside our shorts, Eastern fashion, for coolness. Stack regaled us with songs on his ukelele, and the situation was rather incongruous as the pale moon cast her light on the scene below and music from the ukelele to the strains of the ‘Persian Kitten’ floated over the desert.

 After midnight we turned in to enjoy delightful sleep on the hard desert beneath the wings of the monoplane which protected us from the heavy dew of the night. The desert can lull you beautifully to sleep.

 

***

 

I don’t presume to understand the difficulties modern Pakistan has faced to get where it is today. 1932 was a colonial aeon ago, I know. But humour me on this sad day. Close your eyes and smell the desert winds and picture the bowler hats and send positive thoughts to a land in mourning.