Blog - Jubilee
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whistle while you work
I wrote to a musical accompaniment this week. It rarely happens, because I seem to be very aurally distractible (as well as distractible in any number of other ways), so generally speaking my writing room remains a quiet place. Occasionally I’ll break that rule; if one of my characters is listening to a piece of music (read more)
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in which i start a twitter trend
Yesterday began badly. I woke up with a cold, and knackered to boot. Then I found two terrible reviews of Jubilee on Amazon. Normally, this would not faze me unduly; I’m a voracious reader, and passionate about my right – and everyone else’s – to love or hate any book we damn well want. I (read more)
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Richard and Judy (in which i react to good news )
It’s just been announced that Jubilee is a Richard and Judy Book Club choice for Summer 2012. This is incredible / amazing / gobsmacking / brilliant / wonderful – delete as applicable. (No! Don’t delete anything! They’re all applicable!) These are the things I did when Orion’s Fiction head, Susan Lamb, rang to give me (read more)
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Book at Bedtime
I am utterly thrilled to announce that Jubilee has been chosen as a Book at Bedtime on Radio 4, airing from Monday, May 28th. For me this is a piece of particularly good news, because Radio 4 and I have a very close personal relationship; it’s been going on for years. Several places at my (read more)
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cover story
When I told people that Jubilee was going to be published, the first thing they asked was: ‘Do you have a cover design?’ or – in a variation on the theme – ‘Do you get to design the cover?’ I’ll deal with the latter question first. No, I do not design my own covers. If (read more)
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let the commas breathe
I spent much of Tuesday holed up in a bunker studio in Clerkenwell, watching the enjoyable – but undeniably surreal – process of Jubilee becoming an audio book. Before W & N chose the actor to read it, they’d asked me: ‘What does Jubilee sound like? Whose voice is it narrated in?’ The real answer (read more)
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ain’t gonna work for you no more
There’s been a fair amount of guff talked over the past week about the monarchy and its relationship with Britain. It comes, of course, as the Queen celebrates her Diamond Jubilee and – to someone well-versed in the rhetoric of the 1977 Silver Jubilee – it sometimes seems that little has changed in the last (read more)
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good enough
Liz Fenwick has written very generously here about Jubilee, about pushing herself as a writer, and about the necessity of pressing your skills beyond the point of ‘good’, to reach ‘superb’. She’s no slouch at that, as it happens, landing a two-book deal with Orion (The Cornish House is out in May). At the end (read more)
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In which I show you pictures of my launch party
What a cracking night it was! And the best thing about it was all the lovely, lovely people who came to celebrate with me. I wanted the party to be packed with friends, family, and those who have helped Jubilee on its way over the *mutters a large figure* years it took to write and (read more)
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glamorous
In a recent tweeted exchange, author Kate Mayfield and I identified the two topics guaranteed to spark interest in Twitter’s community of readers and writers . Was it, perhaps, the essential skill of redrafting? It was not. Was it the magpie process of story-making, filching from here and there to bastardise into a narrative? Nope. Was (read more)
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Really Good Salted Caramels
I’ve been spending some time on the comfy sofa at Jen Campbell’s blog discussing Jubilee, photography, and really good salted caramels. Jen’s a kind of literary multi-tasker; she’s a prolific blogger on all things bookish as well as a poet who, in a recent feat of endurance, wrote 100 poems in a single weekend, raising thousands (read more)
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Happy and Baffled
How does it feel to have your debut novel published? Bizarrely, after all the emotions I have had to capture in words – yearning, love, fear and joy– this is one of the harder things I’ve had to express. I wrote something about it for this blog yesterday. It was terribly erudite, referencing Peter Pan and (read more)
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