Writer in Residence

Yai yai yai, so many comments. It’s 7 in the a.m. (you know the most common tautology in English has to be “It was 7 a.m. in the morning”) and I’m a bit blown away by the number of people inside this particular dog. I don’t know where to start. But thanks for the wonderful warm and generous comments about my books, especially the Tomorrow series.

It is funny though when people get the names of the books wrong… so far in this blog people have managed to call So Much to Tell You `Something to Tell You’ and `To Much to Tell You’. I used to play with sequel titles like `A Bit More to Tell You’, `Something Else I Just Thought Of’, and `One Last Thing!’

So many people call `Tomorrow, When the War Began’ `Tomorrow, When the Word Began’.

Anyway, to answer a few specific questions….

Dale Thomas, yes, I believe I have heard of him. I go for the Bulldogs, who beat the Pies the other day. Bad luck for Dale whatsit…

I was very pleased to be called a role dude person…. never been called that before.

Yes Isabella, people were mean to me when I was at school and I was mean to people. These things are so complex. I’d say that, i dunno, 80% of kids who are treated unpleasantly are contributing to their problems in some way.
Often they’re very negative in their dealings with others (which may be because of the way they’ve been treated, so it all gets circular).

er…yes… anfo does work. It’s extremely powerful and totally dangerous.

Hamlet, thanks for asking, is a novel based on the play… speaking of `opening sentences’, here’s mine, plus a bit more… yes folks, this is a world premiere!!!

‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Horatio asked him.
He was lying on Hamlet’s bed. Hamlet was sitting on the floor, in a corner. The prince was eating strawberries.
He smiled. It was the first time Horatio had seen him smile since the funeral. He traced a line on the stone with his finger. ‘I don’t believe in floors,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe in lines.’
‘But do you believe in ghosts?’
‘I don’t believe in walls or ceilings. Or pewter mugs. Or sparrows. I don’t believe in strawberries.’
‘But ghosts?’
‘I don’t believe in anything you can see or touch or taste.’
‘So you do believe in ghosts?’
Hamlet smiled again. He wriggled, on the hard floor. His eyes, his grey eyes, lifted and met Horatio. ‘My bum’s getting sore. Let’s go play football.’

Woops, 7.30, gotta dash, Johnzo

Btw, love the different modes of address i.e. Johnny, Sir, Guvna, etc etc

Yeah, well, dunno what the smile thing’s all about. But I’m feeling pretty good tonight. Life’s had some sweet moments lately. From a publishing point-of-view, the same applies: I’ve had a couple of decent offers from the USA for my new novel, Hamlet. That should help buy the dog food. Went to Assumption College Kilmore today to speak to some students - pertty nice group they were too. Well, they weren’t especially pretty…. you’ll note there’s no comma after `pretty’.

There were some serious serious writers there. Don’t they know there’s more money in dentistry? Poor misguided fools. One girl has written a script for Shaun Tan’s book The Arrival. Amazing. Another guy has been waiting for 4 years for an answer from Puffin for some stories he submitted to them. Somehow I think they’re not going to answer.

Full moon tomorrow. God I never tire of that big lemon circle hanging over the world like the eye of a god.  Shine on baby! Nite everyone.

Ok I’m sorry I’ve been RUBBISH at this game. No pics, no links, no jokes. In accepting this award, I can only thank my dog, my kids, my house, my garden, my working day, my early nights, my editor, my agent and everyone else who has kept me SO BUSY since the end of May. I thank you.It’s Wednesday and I’ve been trying to hand my homework in on time and I now have six days. I’m still labouring under the illusion that I can pull it off. Power of positive thinking and all that. Who knows if it does any good? There’s no harm in trying. This might be neutral thinking though and get me nowhere.I did a workshop a couple of weeks ago where we talked about beginnings. All the kids had these amazing ideas of things you could find to start a story off - a key to an unknown door, an ancient bowl with a strange language carved into it, a sword that gives you unimaginable powers, My second book, BROKEN SOUP starts with a girl finding a negative of a photograph. I like beginnings. They are the easiest bit.  The middle is boggy and the ending is a drowning.  Part of my problem is that I don’t know the end of a book when I start it and I just have to cross my fingers something will occur to me while I’m writing.  Every time I tell myself I’m going to PLAN next time, IN DETAIL, but it takes all the fun out of it for me, and I can’t.  It also takes all the pain out too, but you can’t have everything.Meanwhile my younger daughter just turned eight (pool party, we got the time wrong, car wouldn’t start, all turned out fine in the end).  The dog’s hair is falling out all over the place because we’ve had two and a half days of hot weather and he can’t deal with it.  I’ve got a party to go to at the publisher’s on July 1st and the Carnegie Prize bash on June 26th and I have nothing to wear (true).  On the other hand, I get to meet Michael Bond at the end of July, the man who shaped my childhood afternoons with Paddington Bear.  I hopefully won’t regress to a seven year old.  I’m sure he gets a lot of that.And it’s stopped raining.  See?  Positive thinking.  It might be working.x

The festival is over and the marquees are coming down and it’s back to the quiet sleepy life we knew before.  Except I have a book to hand in in two weeks.  I’ll say that again.   A book.  In two weeks.  Oh dear.  I was never good at handing my homework in on time either.  I’m not saying it’s going to be late, I just see a lot of coffee and late nights and panic moments between now and the middle of June.  That’s actually less than two weeks isn’t it.  Who’s got advice for me about last minute deadlines?  I bet some of you know how to deal with them.  I can’t say the dog ate my book by the way.  It won’t go down well.  The book so far is fine.  I like what I’ve done, it’s just not enough.  It’s called THE ANT COLONY.  It’s about a sixteen year old boy who’s run away from home and an eleven year old girl with a useless mother.  They live in different parts of the same house in a street I used to know in London.  The boy has come to London from the country and the city feels like an ant colony to him.  Today I was researching more interesting things about ants.  Anyone have any?  I bet you’ve got some giants over there. Did you know that the weight of all the ants in the world is more than the weight of all the humans?  Two things I like about that - one it’s amazing and two how did someone work that out?  I read in the paper that they might have found a previously undiscovered tribe (of people) in Brazil last week. A plane flew over and freaked them all out and took pictures.  Apparently there are still thousands of undiscovered ant colonies and super colonies out there.  I wonder if the same person who weighed them all told us that fact too.  And if they are undiscovered, how do we know they exist?  Another thing. Ants are farmers like us.  They herd aphids like we herd cattle and they milk them for some nectar like substance that they’re partial to.  They also have nursery education for their young.  And armies.  Today the more I read the more I felt like an ant.  I wonder if ants have deadlines too.

Ok first things first. Hello Nikkola, nice to meet another writer. We’re all aspiring by the way. That’s how you learn and get better at stuff isn’t it? I’m afraid I’m not much help on the how-to-get-published lines of enquiry because I’m sure half the battle is the how-to-even-get-noticed question and that part was easy for me. I knew someone who knew someone who read Violet Park and made sure it got put on the right desk. It was a bit too easy. Saying that, of course it had to be good enough for them to like. And also you do have to be a bit ruthless on that hidden art called editing. The someone that I knew told me to take a fifth out and I did and I tried not to be precious about it or miss anything when it was gone. And once an agent took me on, and then Harper Collins offered me a deal, there was still a lot of cutting and changing to do. I’m always amazed by how different a book is once its been through that process. Like a wild and shaggy hedge that’s been clipped into a poodle or a peacock (only better because I’m not sure about those hedges. What’s the word for that?) The Guardian Newspaper, who sponsor the Hay Festival, asked me to do a blog yesterday for their website. I thought you might like to see it but I’m too inept to find the link so I’m going to copy it onto here for you. I’m sorry if I repeat myself but I’ve been working so hard in the shop, I’m practically dreaming about rice, quiche, salad, pizza, soup and customers and frankly you should be impressed I can even speak. Day off tomorrow though so I’m bound to be more interesting after that.Here goes, word for word as it appears on the Guardian website:It starts around the end of March, or that’s when I notice it. Activity in the field known as Five Wells; people walking with clipboards, metal frames going up, then white tents. The people from the Festival office work in Hay all year round, and they regularly come in to our shop for lunch. But now they are busier, they take less time choosing, they have to take phone calls. The Festival is coming.

I’ve been coming to Hay Festival for maybe 15 of its 21 years. I remember Maya Angelou singing in St Mary’s Church. That was my first one. This year has been a little different for me and my family. Look up in the index under V and you’ll find Valentine:Alex and Valentine:Jenny, two local residents thrilled to be part of this extraordinary event.

My husband Alex is a singer songwriter. He played on the first Saturday, in the Cafe Direct cafe, as part of Hay’s music programme. They piped his gig into their office. He’s already booked to play again. Today he sang on Hay on Sky with Mariella Frostrup and Kathleen Turner. It’s nothing more than his talent deserves, but boy how life can change from week to week.

I had two events this year, and singing backing vocals at Alex’s gig (properly terrifying) meant I wasn’t nervous for either of them. Speaking is a hell of a lot easier than singing. My first event was with Louise Rennison. She is a very funny woman. She was busy making everyone laugh and then Claire Armistead changed the subject and said “So Jenny, your books are both about death” I think I handled that one ok, but I felt like the straight guy. It was great to meet Louise, and Claire again after last year’s Guardian Prize.

The next day Julia Eccleshare and 150 kids interviewed me at the (soon to be submerged) Segovia stage. There were some great questions. I met a lovely lady and her daughter at the signing and we talked about bereavement and the gap that gets filled after someone is gone. She was brave and open about her own loss and I felt very privileged that she would share that with me because of something I had written.

Today in the shop (Alex and I run a wholefood shop and deli in Hay) several people came in and asked me if I was jenny Valentine. All our events are done now and life is back to normal, if a little busier. My response was “Yes I am. Would you like salad with that?”

It’s been a great year at Hay. Again. The highlight? For kids, Andy Stanton on his harmonica. For adults, Peter Florence giving John Bolton a thorough grilling.

Roll on Hay 2009.

We’re going somewhere secret tonight with our kids. Can’t tell you until tomorrow just in case they find out. I’ll tell you tomorrow if you want to know.x.

Jerilderie is a lovely word. And even though I don’t live in the next town I can still answer your question Emmet…. I started writing by reading LOADS and I did that for years… and then I wrote Violet Park. You get support when you’re starting out from friends and family - if you want it. I kept a little bit quiet about it to begin with. I find it hard to talk about a book when I’m writing it, mainly because I have no idea what’s going to happen next and someone is bound to ask me. But the truth is, writing is a solitary business and you have to be quite good at being on your own and asking yourself questions. Of course I got a lot of help when the book was taken up by an agent and a publisher. Things are very different then and you’re allowed to ask questions.

Bill Clinton called Hay festival “A Woodstock for the mind”. It’s a pretty cool thing and there are loads of people here, into books and reading and thinking. And they are all drenched to the bone and shivering and muddy and STILL having a wonderful time. Hay (on Wye - Emmet please don’t feel silly!) is doing what it usually does in the so called summer and flooding… I’ve ironed a shirt which I never do because I have an event in about an hour’s time and I’m finding ways to distract myself from being nervous. I’ve done a few talks in schools before but nothing like this. Today I’m on a panel with Louise Rennison (funny lady - I’m sure you’ve read the Georgia Nichols diaries?) and a man called Brian who wrote a TV show here on Channel 4 called SKINS. It’s all about impossibly beautiful teens and their glamourous problems. I just spent the whole afternoon with the blinds down watching it, another way to forget that I’m nervous. It was brilliant. I was only going to watch one but I watched four. Actually I’m not nearly as nervous as I normally get and I’ll tell you why. On Saturday night i told you my husband Alex was going to sing. I can understand how he has the guts to get up and do that in front of people because it’s what he’s good at. But it has always been my idea of hell, to have to sing to others. So…. he had me singing(!) At home I often sing harmony on something he wrote called THE WIDOW SWAN (swans mate for life, and there’s a widow here on the river because her partner got hit by a car… that started him off). To cut a long story short, now I’ve actually sung (and not out of tune) to a crowd at Hay Festival, I suddenly realise talking about books isn’t going to be so hard. Maybe I should start jumping out of planes or hot air ballooning or something. What am I scared of?

So I don’t mean to offend but I thought Mr Thomas was going to be something more interesting than just erm good looking. Never mind. We don’t get a lot of Aussie rules football round here but I’m sure he’s a genius at it. I like to think that everybody is completely brilliant at something - football, film making, talking people of the rooves of high things, boiling an egg. You just have to find what your thing is and be satisfied with it.It’s way too early right now and I have to go into the shop and cook twelve salads and three quiches and too many brownies. The Hay Festival is truly up and running. Ken Dodd was not scary at all. (I don’t meet people who scare me now by the way, but it happens when you’re a kid for no good reason. My daughter used to be unhappy about beards.) He was funny in a very old fashioned, my grandad would’ve died laughing if he was alive kind of way. Last night we went to see a Saharan band of musicians called Tinawaren. They danced like long winged birds flying over the desert (not dessert). It was quite something. And now I’m tired. And awake.Tonight Alex Valentine, a singer songwriter who happens to be my husband, is playing at Hay. You should look him up. He’s some word that means really incredibly good that I’m far too old to use, like fawsome(?) He wants me to sing and I’m very honoured but it’s also going to ruin my day because nerves will start to eat me early on. Like I said - Everyone has one thing they are good at.Oh and your question about writing tips… Some people say you’ve got to write everyday and be disciplined and all that, but it doesn’t work for me. The thing I did without fail since I was a kid? Read. And I didn’t write a thing until Violet Park, not really. So I think all the books I read and re-read and still read are the best training.See you tomorrow.Jx

Ok. first thing. Who is Dale Thomas? I’m sorry you’ll have to fill me in on that one. But Sarah, give me the short version.I just got back from the Leeds Book award. One hundred kids, five writers and one very funny poet. This guy was called Craig Bradley and he was brilliantly unshy (? is that a word? you know, not timid…) He made us cry with laughter dancing like parents do. I’m someone’s child and someone’s parent so I was laughing on the outside and cringing on the quiet. I met the TUNNELS people - Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams. Who’s read that book? And the second one, DEEPER. They’re going to make a film so we’ve got to hurry up and read them first. Who’s seen a film that’s better than the book it’s based on. I haven’t. But I’m happy to be corrected if you have.So I did some writing on the train and listened to other people’s conversations. I like to do that. You get a lot of ideas that way. So be careful what you say on trains and make sure it’s interesting.Tomorrow I’m working in the shop and listening to more conversations. Always listening.And tomorrow the festival starts. I’m going to see a comedian called Ken Dodd who is probably very old and used to scare me witless when I was a child. I hope I don’t have nightmares. I’ll write more tomorrow. With pictures. Fingers crossed.x

I’ll say Good Morning except it’s half eight at night where I’m sitting , already in my pyjamas because I’m about to watch Brokeback Mountain again and that takes a while. The first time I saw it was on a bad DVD and it was black and white so I’m enjoying the colour.My name is Jenny Valentine. I’m older than I feel and I’m here because I happen to write for (some of) my living. I’ve never done a blog before so it’s bound to start off a little lame and hopefully end up with pictures and everything.I wanted to show you a picture of my study right now so you can see what a mess my head is in. You’ll see. The mess is not unusual.As well as playing with words I also work in a wholefood shop in a little town on the English/Welsh border called Hay on Wye. The shop is a lot tidier than my study is.Hay on Wye is a famous-ish place because of books. In the sixties a man called Richard Booth decided it was going to be a book town and I guess he was the kind of man that decides things and then they happen because it is. A book town. Second hand and rare books mostly. Hay is also famous for the Hay Literary Festival which is a big deal and about to happen… For ten days in May and June, the place fills up with people, and writers come from all over the place to talk out loud about writing. It’s a cool thing. Partly because this sleepy town suddenly looks like a wide awake, clever piece of London (where I’m from, and which I miss). Partly because writers you love, talking out loud, can sometimes be an extraordinary thing. But tomorrow (May 20th) I’m going to Leeds for a regional book award. I’ll go to a school and meet some other writers and loads of kids and teachers and we’ll all talk out loud about writing. I haven’t been to one before so I’ll let you know how it is.And I’ll get that picture of my study taken.And I’ll tell you more about the Hay Festival which starts this Thursday.And a load of other stuff you may or may not be interested in.Like I said, I’m a beginner.Goodnight!Jenny