A Very Special Guest Blogger!

A Teenager

<– We have this teenager (She doesn’t always scowl) who has been an avid reader since, well since before she could read really! … When I was pregnant with our second child and suffering from exhaustion she would sit on the bed with me at 18 months young and tell me the stories from The Large Family Collection.

Since then she has read almost every book she could get her hands on and munched them up like a hungry book worm. So when we came across brand new, soon-to-be-published, teen-fiction author Tamsyn Murray on Twitter, we were very interested.

To cut a long story short – Gemma was fifteen this week and when Tamsyn found out about the forthcoming birthday she posted a signed copy out to us in record time. What a hero!

Now as a kind of a thank you and because Gemma was so impressed we thought a mini-review would be the decent thing to do.

Over to Gemma . . .

Ok, I’m going to keep this short and sweet. As for the plot, I’m not giving anything away, I have friends who want to read the book and obviously I don’t want to spoil it for them (or I just can’t be bothered to write a massive long essay..)
Just finished My So-Called Afterlife.. It was very good indeed. Honestly, I haven’t stayed up that late at night to read a book since Twilight. That’s got to be something. It hooked me in, like a … hooky thing – I was on chapter eight within about half an hour of starting.
Anyway, all the clichés you hear on the backs of books like “it’ll make you laugh and cry“.. and “You won’t be able to put it down”… COMPLETELY TRUE.
You have genuine proof from my mum (ask her, she’ll tell you) that I laughed out SEVERAL times (a tramp stuffing biscuits down the toilet? Genius.) and I definitely would have cried at several points near the end… if I wasn’t so ‘ard.
As for the un-put-down-able-ness, have you ever tried putting your pyjamas on with an ipod in one hand and a book in the other? Yes, really. I couldn’t stop reading it.
I really couldn’t find much fault with it at all!
Oh, except that the girl on the cover isn’t wearing Ugg boots.

Gemma Carter, 4th February 2010. Aged 15 and a day

My So-Called Afterlife by Tamsyn Murray. Available at all booksellers with any sense.

Thanks very much to Tamsyn (read more here) who now needs to learn to write faster!

Can I just add that I’m trying to talk Gemma into setting up a teen-fiction book review blog (or a book review blog aimed at teenagers!) please add a comment if you agree that she should!

I don’t want a Poem …

I don’t want a poem
That has me reaching
For my Thesaurus, my dictionary
My iPod for some light relief
A bundle of words tumbling
Over each other that sometimes
Rhyme. Sometimes there is
Rhythm. Sometimes there is
Neither. So what are we
To make of it?
If we can’t understand
Complicated words

My thoughts at 9:30 this morning.
I thought about getting Judy Dench to read it – what d’you reckon?

soap

this year’s Christmas soaps
stand in line along the bath
shiny and unused

3rd Jan

cold hands cold feet
through the window the sun
heating my hair

1st January

an open fire
crackles in the grate unheard
above household noise

1st December

sycamore leaf
cartwheels in the wind and rain
brown and shiny

How to be a Writer

(A215 Activity 8.6 Writing in the Second Person. Part 2)
Instructions in the second person about how to be a writer (intimidating or satirical)

1. Write before you have woken up. You must do this even if you are paralysed. You cannot be a writer if you do not do ‘Morning Pages’.

2. Do an observation of your surroundings Do not check emails, listen to the news, eat or use the toilet. Ignore human functions and the outside world. You cannot be a writer if you do not do an observation of your surroundings

3. Read. Read a whole book every day. Tolstoy, Dickens, Jane Austin, Nelson Demille, Jilly Cooper, Barbara Cartland, Katie Price AKA Jordan. Read some good stuff and some bad stuff and always go to bed with a book. Do not have a relationship with your partner. You cannot be a writer unless you read constantly.

4. Do a haiku every day. You cannot be a writer unless you do a haiku every day

5. Do a mind map and/or a freewrite before you start writing seriously. Whatever you do, if you get a good idea, don’t go with it. Stop. Make yourself do a freewrite on the topic and then go mad. Draw out all the most painful and awful parts of your life – your filthiest secret desires, most painful bereavements, most embarassing secrets and let free your wildest and most murderous thoughts. Don’t stick to the point. Lose the plot. If you have a constant theme you’re doing it wrong. Share share share your basest, dirty, rotting, necrophiliac, debauched, immoral cravings and your weirdest obsessive, compulsive habits with your tutors and your publishers and your editors! They want your innermost debauchery and phobias, your traumas and your criminal minds!!! Now write your short story in exactly 2,200 (and stick to it) words based on your freewrite. You cannot be a writer if you can’t learn to follow rules and word restrictions.

6. Shut yourself away and listen to the voices in your head. Turn off the radio and the TV. Ignore your family and do not be influenced by real life and conventionality. This will not make good reading. You cannot be a writer if you are conventional.

Whoo-oo-oo

child’s lone bicycle
takes a ghostly solo trip
in a howling gale

Sunday Morning

coffee aromas
as soap trails take leave clockwise
to Archers theme tune

Can you tell what it is yet?

cream and russet flash
as fluffy-tailed lithe shape
slinks under gate