Loving & loathing

It's the last day of May, can you believe it! And I think June's supposed to be the first month of summer, right? So, tomorrow's forecast of rain and a high of just 14 °C is clearly wrong...

In honour of a new month and a new season, I'm going to write my first "loving & loathing" post. I see a lot of these kinda posts on other blogs and feel like I just gotta get on board!

IN:

• Coffee-flavoured Bailey's. Totally delish over ice.
• Bank holidays. Can't beat a three-day weekend to chill out!
• Inglot. A Polish cosmetics brand with an awesome store in Westfield mall. They are great value and loads of fun! I will def be going back. Pity they have a crap website with MUSIC! I can't stand websites with sound.

OUT:

• Writer's block. I've been struggling to move forward with In Finding for the last few weeks. Hating every word I write. It's this one scene - I need to get it right before I can go on. Gah!
  
• Being in the UK right now. All my family are together in NZ! My brother & his wife & in-laws have flown there for a holiday and I wish I was there too.
• Folk music on TV ads. Okay I admit, this isn't a "dislike right now", it's a "dislike all the time". I'm so OVER cutesy folksy music on advertisements. I blame the bouncy ball ad for starting it all.

Greenwich on a Sunday

It's a bank holiday weekend! I looove 3-day weekends. Today I went out to Greenwich with some buddies.

The view from the place where time began:


And my loot from Greenwich markets:

• Nigerian vegetable stew and bean stew with rice.
• Chorizo.
• Fat olives stuffed with pimentos.
• Honey crusted almonds.
• Lemon herbs & sprices marinade.
• Freshly ground irish whiskey coffee (this smelled so amazing, the whole market smelled of it, I had to get some!)
• And a bottle of Bordeaux red wine I picked up on the way home

Yum!

Book cover design

Today at lunchtime, I found a few blogs about book cover design. I've known for a while that authors get no say in how their books look -- which I understand but still think sucks -- but I never knew that even publishers can get their selected designs overturned by the big time booksellers!

Thinking about that, I wonder how wickedly cool cover designs even get out there in the first plase - e.g., Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

Are there marketing departments in publishing houses that just stamp their feet and refuse to back down? Are there any authors that do get a say - JK Rowling, Stephen King?

I wonder how a publisher might choose to illustrate the story I'm writing at the moment, In Finding. It's a paranormal chick-lit. So. Some kind of wistful woman on a beach and scrawly handwriting for the title? haha, my poor story. Actually, the book I've just finished reading is Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger and you know what? Kind of paranormal chick-lit-y... kind of... but no headless pink ladies on that cover. Instead its cover is dark, and the title suggests darkness too. I thought it wasn't.

Here's what I browsed through today:

• Guardian books blog: "Judge a cover by its book - the conservative tastes of over-mighty retailers have resulted in generic jackets that say nothing about their contents."
• The Book Design Review blog - favourite covers of 2009. Vote for your favourite! (Mine is Columbine).
• A list of Smashing Magazine's faves - includes some beaten up, old school style covers.

11th book of 2010

Wastelands
Sories of the apocalypse
by multiple authors

Love! I love love love apocalypse stories and this is one big ole book full of em!

There's stories from authors including Octavia E Butler, Orson Scott Card, Elizabeth Bear, Stephen King and Gene Wolfe...

My favourites were:

The People of Sand and Slag by Paolo Bacigalupi. Vivid, a grey and grainy feel, terrifically sad in this brilliant way where the narrator and characters are not but you, as the reader, your heart breaks a little.

Never Despair by Jack McDevitt. Because it has Churchill and he's painted so very neatly. A quiet character study in a ruined world.

Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus by Neal Barrett, Jr. Rockingly rowdy and fun approach to the apocalypse, flavours of Tank Girl and Mad Max, as Ginny drives around with her companions selling sex, tacos & dangerous drugs. Great stuff.

Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers by John Langan. The last story in the anthology and the best by far, in this huge way, this engrossing phenomenal story way. From the construction of the words, to the characters and how they are forced to change in mere moments, from the crazy fucked up world that he's invented here - roaving savage beasts and people turning into flowers - it's all amazing. I feel like I could read this story over and over again and get more out of it every time.

If you like post-apocalyptic stories then you should check out this book!

One day I will write my own version(s). I think you can write as many shorts as you want but you only get one novel (Don't ask me where that rule came from. It just appeared!) So, as much as I desperately want to write a sprawling post-apocalypse novel, I'm going to let it simmer in my brain for a while until I have the best kind of skills to write it well, to write it the way it deserves.