The Bookette's BBC by Keren David

If you’re a British author and you find yourself getting more internet reviews in 2011 than ever before your books receive next year, it’s likely you’ve got one woman to thank. The Bookette is the alias of Becky, a school librarian from Essex, who manages to juggle a demanding job and her own writing ambitions with running one of the most popular children’s book blogs in Britain. She has nearly 500 followers on her blog - but is read by many more than that. Her reviews are always thoughtful and balanced, but she’s not scared to put the boot in when she feels she must. She’s a reviewer you can trust, and she brings her deep knowledge of children’s literature to the task of assessing new books.
She’s never satisfied with just reviewing alone though. She’s running a campaign to get Katherine Roberts’ Song Quest back in print, promoting it by organising a blog tour and a cover competition.
And her latest idea should shine a light on a lot of British books. The Bookette has launched a new meme - a feature that other bloggers sign up to - the British Books Challenge (BBC) 2011. This offers prizes and promotion to bloggers who sign up to read and review books by British authors, new and old, during 2011. The challenge is for British bloggers, who are encouraged to read 12 home-grown books; and to international bloggers who can read six for a ‘Winston Churchill’ or 12 for the full ‘Royal Family’. Read 50 British books and you qualify for a crown.
Becky has prize packs from British publishers to help promote the challenge, and she’s already signed up more than 40 bloggers for the challenge. If they all read and review an average of 10 books each, that’s 400 reviews. That’s a whole lot of internet buzz for all sorts of British authors, who can find it very difficult to get noticed at home or abroad.
So, on behalf of British authors generally - goodness, I never thought I'd be able to write that! - many thanks to Becky for the work she’s put in to organise this challenge. And thank you to all the book bloggers out there, who take time and much trouble to read and report on our efforts. You’re unpaid for all your hard work, but not unappreciated. In a world where review space in print media is ever-shrinking, your influence is growing every day.
And in the spirit of  her challenge, here are some British books I'm looking forward to reading in 2011:
The Opposite of Amber, by Gillian Philip; Jessie hearts NY by Keris Stainton, Kiss, Date, Love, Hate by Luisa Plaja, Hidden by Miriam Halahmy, Entangled by Cat Clarke,  Divine Freaks by Fiona Dunbar, A Year Without Autumn by Liz Kessler and  Sequins Stars and Spotlights by Sophia Bennett. How about you?

Initial Response: on gender and writing - Ellen Renner

A few days ago, Keren David wrote an excellent ABBA post querying why women writers sometimes choose to use their initials rather than full names. She felt that women need to stand up and be counted. It's a subject I've considered for a while without coming to a conclusion. My thoughts on reading her post were too long and complicated to fit in the comments section, so I’m returning to the topic here.

I'll start with a confession: I wanted to be published as E. L. Renner, but my then agent convinced me to use my first name. I'm still uncertain that was the right decision.

Why? Partly because initials are more anonymous. My books are about my characters, not me. I want my stories and characters to stand alone, with as little 'author-as-brand' hype as possible. As a child and teen reader I didn't want to know anything about the author of books I loved except when their next book was coming out. I wanted to experience the magic of transformation into another person, another world, another experience. Author photos were a definite turn-off: I wanted magic performed by some unknown alchemist, not a real person. Terry Prachett has the wisdom to wear a magician’s hat for his publicity stills.

Then there’s the delicate question of the critical glass ceiling. It's a perennial topic in adult fiction and it would be naive to believe that children’s books are exempt. It would also take a large dollop of willful obtuseness not to notice that male authors attract more critical attention per capita than their female counterparts. It's not a conspiracy; critics don't exercise their bias consciously any more than did the editors of the publications who recently voted for Sports Personality of the Year and neglected to put a single woman on the list.

I believe that almost all of us, however pro-female we believe ourselves to be, are so conditioned by the constant bombardment of overt and subtle messages in every aspect of our society about the relative value of the male versus the female that we subconsciously take a story written by a man more seriously than we would the same story written by a woman.

I don't think J.K. Rowling's books would have been as successful had she published them as Joanne. I doubt George Eliot would have garnered such a strong place in the canon if she had written as Mary Ann Evans. If Sylvia Townsend Warner, one of the greatest stylists and most original writers of the twentieth century, had been a man, I am convinced that her books would be much better known today. Arguably, Virginia Woolf made it into the public eye not because she had a room of her own, but because she had a publishing house of her own.

Is it, therefore, a cop-out for a woman to write under her initials, in an attempt, however feeble, to combat the anti-female bias that pervades every aspect of our culture? Possibly. It’s a difficult question and one I’ll continue to ask myself. But I also know I'll use whatever tools I can fashion to give my books and my characters, both male and female, every chance I can.

Because the larger point is that, although gender shouldn't matter in life, it does. And the only way I can see to address this issue as a writer is to attempt to be as genderless as possible – a writing androgyne. I enjoy writing both male and female characters. I don't set out to write about a girl or a boy; I choose the gender which seems to fit the story best. And the reason I write at all is because I want imaginative experience. While it's true that I can’t experience what it’s like to be a boy or man in real life, I can imagine it as a writer, and I have never felt closer to any character than I did when writing Tobias Petch in City of Thieves.

‘Only connect.’ E. M. Forster knew that books teach empathy. Between the pages of a book a reader can become another person. Boys can become girls, and girls boys. Men can see the world, however briefly, through the eyes and emotions of a woman. And understanding may result. And then, perhaps, the word ‘girly’ will no longer be a term of disdain. When that happens, this entire discussion will be irrelevant.

Earlier this year I attended a conference where a speaker advised writers to ensure their main characters were boys, trotting forth that insidious mantra of marketing, ‘boys won’t read about girl characters’.

Please don’t tell that to the countless boys who read Roald Dahl’s Matilda, The BFG and The Magic Finger. Or the boys, like my son, who devour Prachett’s Tiffany Aching books (which gently poke fun at gender stereotypes through the dealings between Tiffany and the Wee Free Men). Don't tell the generations of boys who have loved Charlotte's Web and The Borrowers or those who, like my husband, read E. (!) Nesbit’s The Railway Children and fell in love with Roberta.

If boys hear the message that a book is good, they'll read it whether or not it has a girl as a main character. Who gives them that message? We do. Parents, teachers, librarians, publishers, marketing and sales departments with gender specific covers. If boys are refusing to read books where the main character is a girl, it’s because we’re telling them that they shouldn’t. We give them permission to exclude girls from their imaginative world, and that view of the female as 'other' will simply carry on into adulthood. That’s where writers need to draw the battle lines: not how gender specific an author’s name is, but the banishing of girls from the centre stage of life itself. It’s an appalling message to give to children of either sex: that girls cannot be heroes, cannot be the main characters in story or in life.

I happen to be female. That accident of genetics has shaped and coloured who I am, but it is not my primary definition as a person or as a writer. Despite my qualms that Keren may be right, and that I’m somehow betraying my ideals by using my initials, I am considering publishing my next book as E. L. Renner. It’s an older, darker book and I want to distinguish it from my younger fiction. That’s the obvious reason for switching to initials, but I know the issues I listed above will inevitably influence my decision.

The Day We Went to Bangor by Keren David

‘I didn’t know librarians had conferences,’ said my friend when I explained why I’d been to Northern Ireland this week. ‘I think of them sitting behind desks, checking out books.’

Well, had she been at the Youth Librarians’ Group Book Day in Bangor, she’d have had her ideas about librarians considerably broadened.

She'd have heard Siobhan Parkinson, the Irish Children’s Laureate (or Laureate na nOg) give an speech, in which the metaphors danced and flew as she described the importance of books and stories in a child’s journey from the early years of endless imaginative possibilities, as they move through the education that they need to prepare for adulthood. ‘Literature is the kite, literacy the string…’ she said, ‘…and the library is wonderland.’ So inspiring was her speech that the authors in the audience were quoting it to each other all day, and I spent quite some time today trying to find the  You Tube interview that she mentioned with Nobel literature prize winner JMG le Clezio.

Then  authors Gillian Cross, Geraldine McCaughrean and Paul Dowswell talked about writing historical fiction. I loved the idea floated for a book of lost chapters - for all those bits of juicy research that didn’t quite make it. How fascinating to hear them discuss the responsibility that authors have to reflect the past accurately -  ‘I’m incensed by bad history,’ said Paul Dowswell -  against the demands of the story they are telling. ‘Writing fiction is about what you can get away with,’ said Gillian, ‘it’s like being a conjuror, rather than a historian.’

Then came sessions on Ireland’s writers in Libraries Project – how sensible and enlightened to have a central body supporting author visits to schools and libraries -  and a presentation by  publishers Barrington Stoke whose books are designed and written with dyslexic readers in mind – down to the off-white page colour and the clean, clear font, without patronising the reader or sacrificing a jot of quality.

I missed the session on the Carnegie prize, because it was time for me to be interviewed alongside MG Harris, whose compelling thrillers The Joshua Files have temporarily taken over my life. Joy Court, a leading light in the YLG and one of the day’s organisers, interviewed us, asking what it’s like being women writing as teenage boys.  We tried to give convincing answers, although I suspect that underneath our fictional boys' stroppiness and testosterone, they're not all that dissimilar from MG and  me. 

The last session was devoted to the Society of Authors’ Just Read campaign, with Gillian Cross explaining the importance of introducing children to reading for pleasure -  an obvious point, one might think, but one  too often missed by an education system which feeds children extracts and phonics, so they can learn to read without ever becoming readers. . There’s a petition here  which you might want to sign.

So, a day for librarians to learn  about books, about reading and writing, about the work of  authors, new and established, about different genres, different reading levels, all sorts of ways to excite and inspire, entertain and inform children. 

The headmaster of Bangor Grammar School, where the event was held, explained how the school was being rebuilt, with the library at its centre. Here was an educator with complete understanding of the importance of books and reading In fact, so impressive was he, that I briefly wondered if we could move to Bangor to send our son to his school.

 It’s up to head teachers to protect school libraries and librarians when they look for ways to make cuts to their budgets. It’s up to local councils to keep public libraries open and continue to employ qualified librarians, rather than rely on willing but ignorant volunteers.

I was horrified the other day to hear a reporter on Radio Four’s You and Yours describe libraries as a soft target for spending cuts, ‘because all information is now available on the internet.’  Another Radio Four interviewer asked writer Malorie Blackman what ‘rental cost’ her local library charged for taking out a book. I wish they could have come along to Bangor. It might have broadened their minds about what libraries are for, how they work, what they can achieve.

  ‘Didn’t we have a lovely time, the day we went to Bangor,’ goes the song, and indeed we did. But the treats in store weren’t fun fairs or brass bands, chocolate ice and cider. Instead we celebrated words and ideas, books and stories.  Of course, they can be just as fun.
(The picture, by the way, is of my visit to Hampton Academy in south west London. A great example of a school which values and utilises the resources of the library and the wisdom of its librarian).

Shout it Loud by Keren David

I recently wrote an article for a newspaper, about my horror that a school had moved into a brand new £25million building with ('in an advance on tradition') no school library.
I showed the draft article to my husband, before sending it to the editor.'It's no good,' he said. 'You have to spell out the benefits of a school library.'
He was right of course, and so I did, but it felt like a very strange thing to do. Surely anyone with a brain, anyone who cares about children and their education, can see the benefit of a school library. A place where children can access books and information, learn to research, to browse. A place to meet writers, and hear them talk about books and writing. A place to do homework, shelter from the playground bullies, stretch yourself intellectually, or catch up with your peers. A well-run school library is all these and much more. A good school librarian changes lives.
Sadly it seems that the benefits of a school library are lost on many in influential positions. Some are dazzled by technology, others just want to save money. 'Architects don't like books,' a school librarian told me the other day, 'They don't look good on their plans.' Her school -  one of the first academies - was planned without a library. Then a couple of classrooms were put together at the back of the building. She insisted that the light airy atrium at the front of the building should be cut in half.'The children need to see us right at the front of the school. That's more important than vast open space.'
That same day I went from her school to another one nearby.Halfway through my talk, the librarian stopped me, and gave a quick summary, drawing a mindmap of what I'd said so far, to demonstrate to her pupils how they should take notes.'I simply can't believe that the national curriculum contains no study skills,' she told me.'So I always do this, to teach them how to learn.'
The next weekend, a friend introduced me to her grandson. 'He loves your book,' she told me.'He didn't even know I knew you. His school librarian recommended it.'
According to a recent survey by the Times Educational Supplement, 600,000 children in the UK have not got a school library service. This is truly shameful. I am completely certain that no member of the government would dream of sending their child to a school without a library. Why is it acceptable for other people's children?
A new campaign started this week. The Association of Senior Children’s and Education Librarians (ASCEL), the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) and the School Library Association (SLA)  -  yes, people who traditionally ask you to hush -  want people to shout about school libraries, to make sure young people have access to libraries and librarians n their schools.
Gillian Harris, Chair of ASCEL said, “Teachers need a wide range of stimulating, up-to-date and relevant learning resources to deliver an exciting and vibrant curriculum. ... Schools Library Services are an amazing cost-effective way for schools to make sure children of all abilities have the best quality materials in the classroom to inspire their learning.  Add to this the professional support, advice and books Schools Library Services can provide to those wanting to build a reading culture and an excellent library, then they should be at the top of every school’s list to buy in.“If anyone should be shouting about school libraries, it's children's authors. We visit them, we meet librarians, we hear about their successes, we see their value. I've been to one school so far with no library (just a Learning Resource Centre full of computers). There were four shelves of books to borrow in an English classroom. It was the only school I've been to where a boy boasted to me that he never read 'books with words.'
Go out and shout!

It's a crime by Keren David

Anne Cassidy's fingerprints are all over this plan

Crime pays – if you’re writing for adults, that is. Take a glance at any list of bestsellers and you’ll find it’s dominated by murders, kidnaps, blackmail and assaults. Crime is international, time-travelling and ever popular.

But somehow crime writing for children doesn’t get the same attention. Look around any children’s bookshop and you might find sections dedicated to dark romance and action adventure...but you’d need a very large magnifying glass to identify a shelf of teen crime novels.  It seems that the publishing industry doesn't quite realise the value of crime writing for younger readers -  male and female - the satisfaction in unravelling a whodunnit, the fascination with extreme situations and emotions, the variety of ways in which stories about crime can be told.

So, the Godmother of the British teen crime mafia has come up with a cunning plan. Anne Cassidy - mastermind of this blog and author of many great crime novels for teen readers, including Looking for JJ and,most recently, Guilt Trip  - has pulled together the usual suspects (Scottish bruisers Gillian Philip, Linda Strachan and me, the new wet-behind-the-ears recruit) to create a blog, somewhere to shine a light on crime books new and old, and discuss news, clues and criminal connections. We’ve already recruited some hardened criminal writers as contributors, and now we’re looking to widen our network.

The blog is set up and will be going live some time in the next month. You can find it here. Contact us if you’re a writer who wants to have their say - and please sign up as a follower if you enjoy reading crime novels. The plot - we hope - is about to thicken.

(Apologies - this post is shorter and later than planned. This is because the police knocked at my door while I was writing it.)

Tinker, tailor, soldier..nurse? by Keren David

One of the many services for young people that has fallen victim to the government’s spending cuts is the careers service. Head teachers have warned that millions of pupils will lack proper advice, as the Connexions service has been axed, before a replacement put in its place.


My daughter’s school, for example, used to have a careers adviser based in the library. Her office is now empty. It’s far from clear where pupils will go in order to get guidance on qualifications, courses, apprenticeships and jobs.

I did a school visit last year to a school in Manchester. Housed in a brand new award-winning building, the school Learning Resource Centre has banks of computers - and that’s all. Four shelves of books in a classroom could be borrowed, the school’s leaders clearly thought that its pupils didn’t have much need of them.

Quite often on school visits pupils wait until after my talk to ask for advice about becoming a writer. This school was no exception. But after I’d given some writing tips, one girl still lingered. ‘Please Miss,’ she said. ‘I want to be a nurse or a midwife. Can you tell me what I need to do?’

I’ve thought about her since, and wondered if I was able to help her at all, with my garbled advice about biology GCSE and googling the Royal College of  Nursing. It seemed almost old-fashioned to meet a girl who wanted to be a nurse, not a celebrity.
I remembered some books that I loved when I was growing up. The Sue Barton series, written by Helen Dore Boyleston between 1936 and 1952 follows Sue through her career as a nurse - from student, in hospitals, urban New York, rural New Hampshire. She grows up through the course of the book, marries (naturally) a doctor, has children. But the focus of the books is always her professional life (ignore that drippy cover, Sue was much more likely to be sewing up a nasty wound or splinting a broken leg than canoodling in a corridor). Even though I was the most squeamish girl ever – I loved them.
(My sister,  just as squeamish, loved them even more than I did. I do not feel it is entirely coincidental that she married a doctor)
I can’t imagine a series like Sue Barton being published nowadays. You can find out about careers in entertainment or fashion, sport and drama in today’s fiction. But how about nursing, journalism, science or the army? Where’s the fiction which talks about what it’s like going to university – and whether it’s worth it?  You can watch Casualty, of course, but that's different from stories which concentrate on career development.
I was talking to a girl the other day who was a school drop out. Her dyslexia was undiagnosed, she could hardly read, she fell in with a bad crowd and spent her time truanting and drinking. Hair-dressing saved her, she told me (she was doing my highlights at the time). Her aunt got her a part-time job at Toni and Guy, she liked earning money, she broke with the waster friends. The part-time job led to an apprenticeship and now she's got a good job that she enjoys.
But then she read a book -  'One of those misery lit books.'' For the first time in her life she felt a real connection with what she was reading. She's gone back to evening classes, is taking GCSEs She has a new ambition, to be a social worker. She inspired by the stories she's been reading to try and make a real difference to abused children
Young people have taken a disproportionate hit in our new age of austerity. Many don't seem to feel they have a satisfying future to look forward to. Nothing can take the place of a personal, informed careers service, but is there anything children's authors can do to inform and inspire?  Can we help young people  see that they don't need to win X Factor to be a success? Where’s the Sue Barton of today?

New term, New book by Keren David

It’s a big day today. First day of a new school year for my son (my daughter goes back for one measly hour tomorrow). He’s half excited, half nervous, looking forward to seeing his friends, being right at the top of primary school. Wondering what his new teacher will be like, and if there will be any new kids in his class.
It’s a big day for me as well. My second book is published today. Watching a book go out into the world is a little bit like watching one's child start a new school. Will it make any friends? Will it be successful?
My new book Almost True is a sequel to my first one, When I Was Joe. So it’s got a big brother, if you like, to help it along. But, just like children, you want the younger one to make their own way, be judged on their own merits. They’re together, yet separate. And getting more independent of me - the mother/author - all the time.
Parents/authors tend to worry about their offspring/books in the early days to the extent that they forget that any other child/book exists. But once they’re at school/on sale you realise that your child/book is one amongst many. Each has their own talents and gifts. Each finds its own way. Some might hang out in that popular paranormal crowd. Some make it onto a team/series. Others are stand-alone loners. When your baby/book is conceived you often don’t know quite which way it’s heading.
Sometimes your child/book does amazing things all on its own. It wins prizes, perhaps, or makes lots and lots of friends. It passes all those tests and examinations set by reviewers, librarians and booksellers.
But perhaps it might make mistakes, or offend and upset people. Or fail to attract people's attention, never quite reaching its potential. How responsible are you, the parent/author? How much can you blame or thank the teachers/publishers and all the other people who influence your child/book.
So, if you see my boy…errr...book…think of me, the anxious mum sitting at home. I'll be wondering how things are going. Have I done my work well? Is it ready to face the world without me?

The Reading List by Keren David

Just a few weeks from now my son starts at secondary school. He’s got the blazer and his house tie (blue and green stripes). I’ve ironed name tapes into his new sports kit. We’ve bought a pencil case, a scientific calculator and a mouth guard for rugby. We’ve even met the kids and parents from his new class at a picnic in the park.



But the main intellectual introduction to this new educational adventure is a reading list of 25 books. Five each from the genres Fantasy/Adventure; Around the World; Real Life; Humour and Historical, they include a graphic novel (Maus by Art Spiegelman) and a novel in verse (Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust). They have a chart to map their reading, and they can add their own choices too. They’re expected to read at least one book from each genre.

The list came with a letter from the English department. ‘We think reading is interesting, fun and the best way to improve your English,…wherever you like to read best - on the beach, on the bus, on the lawn, in your bed, in the park, in the bath - please record your reading experience. You will have opportunities to share your favourite reading experiences of the summer with other students!’

I’m not sure how long the school has used the same list, but most of the books on it seem to be about ten years old. He hadn’t read  any of them -  and I'd only read two - although he did know authors such as Michael Morpurgo (Across a Wide Wide Sea) and Gillian Cross (Dark Ground). The ‘Real Life’ and ‘Around the World’ sections weight the list towards ‘issues’ books, and as a whole the list is serious. At least three are about refugees (Benjamin Zephaniah’s Refugee Boy; Beverley Naidoo’s The Other Side of Truth and Ally Kennan’s Bedlam) and two about the Holocaust (John Boyne’s The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas and the afore-mentioned Maus).
There are books set in Afghanistan (The Breadwinner, Deborah Ellis), South Africa (Gaby Halberstamm’s Blue Sky Freedom), France (Sally Gardner’s The Red Necklace) and Israel (Crusade by Elizabeth Laird). There are ghosts (Eva Ibbotson’s Dial a Ghost), wolves (Michelle Paver’s Wolf Brother) and Mer-people (Ingo by Helen Dunmore).  It's totally shaken up his reading habits, which had recently become dominated by the Glory Gardens series about a fictional cricket team by Bob Cattell.

Michael Gove wants to introduce a reading list for schoolchildren, and in general I’d support the idea, although - as always with our Education Secretary - the devil is in the detail. It’s best if schools can pick better pick their own lists and take into account the school demographics and the availability of books. That's the biggest problem with a list like this -  how to get one's hands on them exactly when you need them.

Buying 25 new books was beyond our purse, so we’ve borrowed some, bought others second hand and will be visiting the library for others. Almost every book on these lists is available on Amazon for one penny plus postage - so even buying second hand, with nothing going to the author or publisher, to buy the whole list costs nearly £60. I feel guilty buying second hand - and worried – the 1p Amazon thing drastically shortens any book’s shelf life. In mitigation, the list has already inspired me to buy one sequel (Maus 2) and one prequel (Ice Maiden by Sally Prue, prequel to the stunning fantasy Cold Tom). It also showed me - me, champion of libraries – how normal it’s become for me to look for books by sitting at my computer and logging onto Amazon.

As for my son, he’s already read and reviewed seven books - not bad for someone who loves to be active and sees holidays as a time for cricket and swimming and football and hanging out with his mates. Real Life is his favourite category, and Bedlam and Maus his favourite books so far. Humour is the most disappointing category – ‘This book was good - it just wasn’t funny!’. Cold Tom, his only fantasy book so far confused him at first (‘What is he? Why doesn’t the author tell me?) but won him over. (And it bowled me over -  I've read it three times in the last fortnight)  And, after reading and enjoying Crusade, he’d like to tell authors everywhere that they should be careful not to make character names too similar.

He’s hoping to read 24 books out of the 25 – I vetoed one, on the basis that I’ve heard bad things about the author (no, I’m not telling!). Having a list has given him powerful motivation to try new authors, subjects and forms and - even more importantly - find time in his busy life to read. I hope that the English teachers at his new school will make him feel that the effort was worthwhile. His sister had a similar list to work through before she started Year 7 at a different school. ‘We never heard anything about it again.’

Last word to the boy himself: ‘I think the list is a good idea because it encourages people to read. Most of them are good. The best one so far is Bedlam by Ally Kennan because it was very real and it had some good jokes in it.’

In the beginning... by Savita Kalhan

The opening few lines of a book are probably the most important the writer writes. They represent the key to the door, the invitation for the reader to step through and enter the story. Openings are the hook. Obviously the rest of the story must live up to the opening, but without the hook of the beginning, the rest of the story might not get a look in.

Opening lines may set the scene, the tone, the style, the action; they are a unique hook individual to the author, and running through them will be the voice that defines the author – and if you like that author’s voice you come back for more, for more stories by that author. As a reader, if I love one book by a particular writer, I’ll want to read everything else by that writer. “...there's one thing I'm sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.” Stephen King

I have an odd habit of writing opening lines, opening paragraphs, and occasionally opening chapters. I’ll work on them when I’m in between books and projects, rewriting them, refining them; I’ll add to the collection too if I’m feeling inspired. I’ve got a whole file of them, full of ideas for stories in a variety of genres, full of characters and a world of voices. I’ll use some of them in creative writing workshops, allowing the pupils to choose an opening paragraph to continue a story. Often I’ll use them myself. I’ve been doing it for a long time. It’s the way I find my next book, the next voice. Having them on the back burner feels very much like having a safety blanket. I don’t really plot a book, I’m not a plotter but a panster, who lets the opening paragraph take me on a journey. The back burner simmers away until one of the openings reaches out and grabs me, ripe and ready to become something more. I used to think that this habit was peculiar to me, until I talked to a few other writers, and recently I read that Stephen King agonises over his opening lines. So maybe I’m not that odd after all! I bet many other writers share the agony over the opening lines... 

Here are a couple of mine: “It’s tough being the new kid, but when you’re not the only one it’s not so bad. The problem was Sam was always the new kid and always the only one...” The Long Weekend 
“I sat staring into space. It was empty, the way space should be, vast, endless, and empty. Except it wasn’t vast and endless. There were four walls and a small window. I was lucky to have a cell with a window...” The Poet, A short story. 

 Here are just a few of my favourite opening lines:
 “Once upon a time...” 
 “Kidnapping children is never a good idea; all the same, sometimes it has to be done...” Island of the Aunts by Eva Ibbotson 
 “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.” The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman 
 “Where’s Papa going with that ax?” Charlotte’s Web by E B White 
 “If you’re interested in stories with happy endings, you’d be better off reading some other book.” The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket. 
 “Against the white cliffs, the girl in the red dress was as vivid as a drop of blood.” Cruel Summer by James Dawson. 
 “They come to kill me early in the morning. At 6 am when the sky is pink and misty grey, the seagulls are crying overhead and the beach is empty.” Almost True by Keren David 
 “When Ben got home from school, he found something good, something bad and something worse...” The Catkin by Nick Green 
 “My life might have been so different had I not been known as the girl whose grandmother exploded...” The Vanishing of Katherina Linden by Helen Grant 

Here’s a link to a fun first lines quiz from The Guardian to mull over while you’re having a break: http://www.theguardian.com/books/quiz/2010/mar/24/first-lines-quiz

 What are your favourite first lines?

 www.savitakalhan.com Twitter @savitakalhan

Home Alone by Keren David

I am home alone. I can hardly remember the last time this happened. It may have been before my daughter was born, 14 years ago. It certainly feels that way.
I have evicted the family. ‘Just give me three full days,’ I begged, ‘and I can finish this book.’
They went off yesterday, and I could feel my head clear as they left. I had no one to talk to, except my characters. They played up a bit, but without the constant interruptions and distractions that come with normal family life, it was so much easier to listen to the people in my head, to think about their needs, their quirks, their interweaving stories.
It was wonderful to be able to think for more than ten minutes at a time. It was incredible to be still working and thinking at 6pm.
For the next three days I’m borrowing an absent friend’s house to work in during the day, so there will be no telephone (the mobile gets switched off), no neighbourly chats, no internet, no housework. I’ve got nine chapters sketched out, and with uninterrupted silence I think they can be written.
And yet, I would hate to give the impression that my family are nothing but a hindrance, even though I’ve been a grumpy nightmare of a wife and mother for the last few weeks, growling and moaning about deadlines, noise and interruptions.
My children give me constant ideas, lines, drama and help. They tell me about their lives, their friends, their teachers. They squabble and make up, joke and play, laugh and cry. Sometimes I think I could just write down their conversations and I’d have an instant novel. They are instant fact-checkers for anything to do with schools and teens.
My husband tells me his memories of childhood and adolescence. He talks to me about people, about ideas. I’m an intellectual butterfly, flitting from idea to idea, gathering little bits of knowledge about a lot of things. He’s got an incredible store of facts about all sorts of things, which he can retrieve without looking anything up.
Not once has my teenage daughter complained about the embarrassment of her mum writing about a teenage boy’s sex life. My son boasted to the children in his class that his mum had written a book, ‘But it’s too old for us, we’ll have to wait to read it.’
Yesterday The Guardian ran a fascinating feature on writers and their families. Frank Cottrell Boyce, who has seven children, wrote about how his family helps and enhances his writing. ‘It's very powerful to be surrounded by people who love you for something other than your work,’ he wrote. I liked the comment from Julie Myerson: I think a person is actually more creative when they are up against it: the more you have to push, the more you have to work to carve out time and concentration, the better.
Well, this week is my carved-out time. I’d better find out if she's correct.

Video Interview with Keren David and Fiona Dunbar

Self-respect by Keren David

Anne Hathaway as Emma Morley in One Day. Not quite as I imagined her

David Nicholls' best-selling romance One Day is an enjoyable read -  the story of  Dexter and Emma who meet at university, revisited on the same day every year as their lives unfold. Nicholls is great at the period details that make us 40-somethings wince - the books that Emma reads in the 1980s, the clothes that Dexter wears in the 1990s , the recall is (almost) pitch perfect. I'm looking forward to the movie, despite the weird casting of Anne Hathaway as down-to-earth Northern Emma.
But there was one section of the book that brought a tear to my eye -  and it's not the bit you might imagine.. Emma Morley, my favourite character (much too good for feckless Dexter), becomes a successful writer for teenage girls. Yay! She makes an unlikely amount of money really, really quickly from these books. Good for Emma (suspend disbelief)!
But is she proud of her work? Emma is not. 'It's just a silly kid's book,' she tells Dexter (not too sure that her punctuation is spot on there, but I'm quoting verbatim from the Kindle edition). It's entirely in character for Emma to play down her achievements when she's talking to Dexter, but she even does it in her own thoughts. 'The city of Sartre and De Beauvoir, Beckett and Proust  and here she was too, writing teenage fiction albeit with considerable commercial success.'  Hear that internal sneer.
Later on she tells Dexter: 'I love it. But I'd like to write a grown-up book one day. That's what I always wanted to write, this great, angry, state-of-the-nation novel, something wild and timeless that reveals the human soul, not a lot of silly stuff about snogging French boys at discos.'
Hmm. I almost threw my Kindle at the wall.  It's all very well for well-meaning strangers to ask whether you'll write a proper book one day (although actually they're a lot more likely to chortle on about how you'll probably be the next J K Rowling). But it's something else completely when one of our own starts doing it. Emma lost all my sympathy right there and then. As I was 78 per cent through the book (one of the joys of a Kindle is knowing exactly what percent of the book has been read before it starts annoying or boring the reader), I finished it, but the magic had gone. When Emma - no, I won't spoil it if you haven't read it - but I didn't care much. She'd let the side down.
Now in real life I haven't come across any Emmas. The YA writers I know  love their work, wouldn't want to do anything else, they respect their readers and their peers and they strive to create the best book possible, whether it's gritty crime, sparkling romance or wild fantasy. They don't diss their own work, because they know it would be rude to readers and fellow writers alike, not to mention the publishers who risk money on their books.
And then I read this article. Two YA writers, Katie Crouch and Grady Hendrix who are writing YA books and think it's just fine to sneer at the genre. They obviously don't read it -  they seem to think that Twilight includes explicit sex scenes (as if!). They describe themselves as literary predators, they produce shoddy work, they assume their readers won't notice or care as: 'Readers in Y.A. don't care about rumination. They don't want you to pore over your sentences trying to find the perfect turn of phrase that evokes the exact color of the shag carpeting in your living room when your dad walked out on your mom one autumn afternoon in 1973. They want you to tell a story. In YA you write two or three drafts of a chapter, not eight. When kids like one book, they want the next one. Now. You need to deliver.'
They're comparing their churn- it-out world of YA  with literary fiction...'And literary fiction readers are tough,' they say. Teens, one infers, are not tough critics, but will happily lap up any old rubbish.
Katie Crouch and Grady Hendrix, I hope the comments under your article will make you pause for thought. If you think so little of YA fiction, go and do something else. Read the last 20 per cent of One Day, see what happens to Emma Morley and reflect. And then get on your bike...

The Break-through Book by Keren David

Learning to read is a strange process. So much work, so much to remember. As a parent it can be torture, watching your child stumble and strain, worrying that they hate the process so much that they'll never find out all the wonderful things that books can bring.
And then - ta-ra!- the breakthrough book. The book which comes easily, the book which motivates them to read for themselves. The book they read all the way through, all by themselves, and then turn to the beginning and start again. The book which sends them back to the library or the bookshop looking for more of the same.
Six or seven is about the right age for the breakthrough book. For me, it was Enid Blyton and the adventures of the Secret Seven. For my daughter it was Michaela Morgan's Sausage books, discovered in the exceptionally well-stocked library at her primary school. It was one of the great moments of motherhood for me, watching her laugh and laugh at these half-cartoon, half text stories.Seven years later I treasure the memory.

For my son, it was a cover that first sparked his interest -  the sparkly blue of Jenny Nimmo's second Charlie Bone book. He insisted that we bought it, in a bookshop in Sydney, even though it was way beyond his reading ability. About a year later he was ready to read it. The book more than lived up to its cover. He was instantly captivated and no wonder - I don't think I've ever read such exciting stories, there's a cliffhanger on virtually every page.
Earlier this year I wrote to my MP about the cut in funding for Bookstart. I received a reply this week, boasting about the government's plans to introduce a phonics check for six year olds. 'We are determined to ensure that every child can experience the joy of reading for pleasure,' wrote Schools Minister Sarah Teather, 'and reap the educational benefits that it brings.'  I suspect that ensuring that children have access to inviting libraries where they can be guided towards their very own breakthrough book might be a little more useful and pleasurable than an external decoding test at six.
Sue Perkiss wrote a fascinating post on this blog yesterday about books for this age group. I wish they were celebrated more - and I wonder how many children never get started with reading because they never find their very own special book. Do you remember your breakthrough book?

The Next Big Thing by Keren David

Trend-setter

Dystopia is the new paranormal. So says The Bookseller magazine, reporting on the Bologna Children’s Book Fair.  Publishers’ stands were still full of vampires, angels and ghosts, but agents and publishers were haggling over rights for Young Adult books about imagined worlds and deadly disasters. 

Publishers' Weekly quoted Random House UK’s Becky Stradwick: “I literally had six dystopian novels land on my desk a week before the fair. People are feeling the need to create a feeding frenzy, a ‘book of the fair.’

The trend started with the deserved success of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, in which the government of Pan-em, an imagined America, makes teens fight to the death on television.  Big advances, film rights and a lot of hype followed for several other writers of high concept dystopian tales. Their books will be heading up publishers lists, getting the biggest share of marketing spend and prominent placement on bookshop shelves next year.

Woo! Exciting! Shelve that sexy vampire story and start dreaming up a world with no energy sources. A planet without water? A regime in which half the population is imprisoned by a tiny elite? Dystopia gives writers a great opportunity to take a premise wherever they want to, to tackle contemporary and universal issues in a futuristic setting.

But wait. Dystopia is already on the wane. According to The Bookseller article spring 2012 is already saturated with apocalyptic tales. Francesca Dow, managing director of Penguin Children's, said there had been a wave of dystopian trilogies from the US, ‘and we are being very selective.’

The glut of dystopia books coming next year won't start the next fashion. That’ll be reserved for some other book that slipped through the net and got published even though its chances were severely limited by not being on-trend. Publishers' Weekly runs through a few ideas for the next Next Big Thing. Books for younger readers! Time travel (the anti-dystopia, apparently) And I'm glad to say that there's even hope for the realistic novel. PW spoke to another Random House editor, Beverly Horowitz who said “Everyone’s asking if I think the realistic novel is coming back. ‘It’s never gone away,’ I tell them. These books are still selling, they’re just not getting the same attention.”

 My imagined world -  my utopia -  is one where the world of publishing isn’t so quick to follow  one best-seller with more of the same. Where story, characters, plot and writing matters more than genre. Where publishers say things such as ‘Readers need a wide range of books about all sorts of subjects.’ And ‘We value originality more than anything else.’ And ‘We judge every book on its own merits, not on its similarity to books by other authors.’  There are editors, sales and marketing people, booksellers who believe this and act accordingly. And those people start trends rather than follow them.

The London Book Fair starts today. Good luck to all those YA dystopian writers. And even better luck, this year, to everyone else. 

War Stories by Keren David

How do children learn about war? Some learn from experience, of course, from being caught up in terrible events - as victims, refugees, child soldiers. My parents were both wartime children. My mother was evacuated from her London home and attended nine primary schools. My dad grew up in South Wales, taught by his Home Guard father how to make basic explosives. If the Germans invaded he was to kill his mother and brothers, then take to the woods and try and kill as many of the enemy as possible.
My generation, and those born after me were luckier by far. We got to learn about war from books. History books told us the dry facts (although in the 1970s, history meant Tudors and Stuarts, not the recent past) but novels taught us how it might have felt to be part of those events. Books like Carrie's War by Nina Bawden and Ian Serraillier's A Silver Sword shaped our understanding of the world we had been born into.
These are just two of the books featured in a new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London which opens on February 11. Once Upon a Wartime: Classic War Stories for Children  uses life-size sets, scale models and interactive displays to engage children with books set in wartime. The other books featured  are Michael Morpurgo's War Horse, Little Soldier by Bernard Ashley and The Machine Gunners by Robert Westall.   Little Soldier is about an African child refugee, starting a new life in London, desperate to avenge his slaughtered family; a far cry from the trench warfare of the First World War captured so evocatively in Morpurgo's book. Putting these books together will encourage children to make links and spot differences, to examine the way that war stories are told and the many things we can learn from them.
The exhibition will show children how the author built a work of fiction, displaying notebooks, manuscripts and photographs, and also put the text in a historical context, with  artefacts including evacuee letters and labels, and the fin of a German incendiary bomb. Michael Morpurgo is writing a short story to mark the opening of the exhibition. Other wartime books will also be featured, and in August a children's war literature festival will be held at the museum with lectures, workshops and discussions led by authors.

Judah, my 11-year-old son loved War Horse, and has read the book and seen the play. His dad took him to the Imperial War Museum to find out more about trench warfare, and we've also visited First World War cemeteries. Judah didn't just learn about the war from these experiences -  although he did learn a great deal. He thought a lot about the differences between a book and a play, and the difficulties involved in staging a play about a horse. Who knows what extra insights this exhibition will give him? Bravo to the Imperial War Museum for celebrating children's literature in this way, and I hope that many schools will be able to afford to take their pupils to see it.

Being a Real Person Sheena Wilkinson

I’ve just become Ireland’s first Patron of Reading. Trinity Comprehensive School, Ballymun, is a north Dublin school in an area which was, in the past, a byword for deprivation. In recent years, Ballymun has been the subject of a huge regeneration programme, and it’s a place where I have been welcomed since I did my very first school visit there four years ago.

This was drawn by the principal, Ms Fran Neary.

where it all started 

In 2011, my first novel, Taking Flight, had just come out, and I’d only done a few local visits in Belfast schools. I was a fulltime teacher so I wasn’t nervous about talking to teenagers, but when the invitation from Trinity Comprehensive came in, it felt different. It was the first time I realised that readers outside Northern Ireland would connect with my characters. Joe Kelly, Trinity’s wonderful librarian, assured me that his pupils had liked Taking Flight‘because it seemed so real to them.’

That was the first of many visits to the school. I’ve done lots of talks and workshops in the library which is, like all good school libraries, central to the school, promoting literacy in its widest sense. I think I kept being invited back because I’m unpretentious and realistic. Earlier this year Joe and I decided to formalise the relationship by designating me Trinity’s Patron of Reading. I’m sure readers of this blog are familiar with the PoR scheme. It’s an excellent way for schools to connect with writers, and for writers to connect with readers. When I attended a ceremony in Trinity last month to mark becoming its Patron, one of the things I promised to do was to use my December ABBA post to celebrate being Ireland’s first PoR.

me on a school visit -- unglamorous but real 

In the last week, however, my thoughts have also been exercised by the furore over ghost-writing, transparency, and celebrity culture. There’s been a lot of nonsense in the media, as well as a lot of good common sense – not least here on ABBA: thank you, Keren David.

How does this link with the PoR scheme, and with school visits in general? I think the most important thing about authors visiting schools is that they make things real for the pupils. As a child, I had little concept of my favourite writers as actual people. The books just sort of appeared in the library, as if by magic, though I gleaned every little snippet of biographical information I could from the dust flap. When I wrote to Antonia Forest and she wrote back it felt like the most exciting thing that had ever happened anyone – to have a letter written by the same hand that had written the Marlow novels. (And I should point out that I was 23 and a PhD student at the time.)

the book that drove me mad

What I always emphasise on school visits is that writing is a process, and often a fairly torturous one. I don’t pretend to write quickly and easily. I show the pupils the whole journey of a novel, from notebooks with rough planning, through printed-out and much scribbled over drafts, to the final book. I’m not precious – I tell them about the times when it’s been hard; I show them a six-page critique of an early draft of Taking Flight, and point out that there is a short paragraph of ‘Positives’ followed by five and half pages of ‘Issues to Consider’. I tell them about going to an editorial meeting to discuss Still Falling, and how my editors spent five minutes telling me what they liked about the novel and 55 minutes telling me what wasn’t working.

I’m not trying to put kids off. I always emphasise that making things up is magical, and seeing your ideas develop into actual stories that people read is the best thing in the world. But I do let them see that it involves a lot of hard work.

Nowadays I think that’s even more important. I once shared a platform with two children who had self-published. It was a ridiculous, uncomfortable event: there I was talking about hard work and rejection and editing and how hard it is to get published, and there were these two little pre-teen moppets with their shiny books. The primary school audience, who won’t have known the difference between self-publishing and commercial publishing, probably thought I was some kind of slow learner. But I least I told them the truth.

Honesty. I think we need more of it. I’m so proud to be Ireland’s first Patron of Reading, and I intend to keep on being honest about writing as a magical, but difficult craft.

Trinity Comprehensive School, Ballymun.

It's Our Turn Now! Celebrating Project #UKYA - Lucy Coats

If you haven't already heard about it, I'd like to introduce you to Project UKYA, set up in September 2013 by Lucy Powrie, a teenage Force for Good, and a manic bibliophile. Essentially, Lucy has come up with the brilliant idea of blowing the trumpet loudly and publicly for UK Young Adult authors and their books, with a different 'project' happening each month. Right now there's a marvellously wide-ranging series of chats going on on Twitter under the hashtag #ukyachat. People are sharing books they love, and talking about different aspects of UKYA. Next month a new longterm project launches - a monthly (to begin with) 'livechat' on YouTube, talking about the latest UKYA releases, discussing UKYA books and much more, including special guests and author Q and As.

Why does this matter? It matters because YA from the US has held the balance of power in the public perception of YA for far too long. While the likes of Twilight, The Hunger Games and The Mortal Instruments have all sold millions of copies and had films made in a relatively short time after publication, UK YA authors have been lagging behind in terms both of sales and of international recognition. We need to try and change that, because the pool of UK writing talent is immense, and yes, I'm going to say it, just as good if not better than anything coming out of America. All of us who care about books and reading need to work together to get the word out there to YA readers about just how good British books are at the moment.

This is absolutely not to denigrate US writers - I'm very excited currently about Laini Taylor and Sarah J Maas's forthcoming titles, among others. It's just that I'm equally excited - or more so - about Clare Furniss's Year of the Rat, Keren David's Salvage, Teri Terry's Shattered, Claire McFall's Bombmaker, Ruth Warburton's Witchfinder, Gillian Philip's Icefall, Ellen Renner's Tribute, James Dawson's Cruel Summer, Candy Gourlay's Shine and the new film of Anthony McGowan's The Knife that Killed Me. And that's just touching the surface of what's out there right now. I could spend the rest of this post just making a list of great UKYA books and writers (don't worry, I won't).

So, really what I'm asking you to do here is to support Project UKYA. Follow it on Twitter and take part in the chat, join its Facebook page, read and comment on the blog - but above all, spread the word about its existence to everyone you know who loves good books. UKYA books and authors deserve to be known and celebrated all over the world - let's be the pebbles which start the avalanche.