Hummingbird,

A few years ago I promised to bring my parents Harrods cupcakes, however, I have never delivered on this promise. They were down in London this weekend and following a lovely meal in South Kensington we walked past the branch of the Hummingbird Bakery that is up there, and curiosity killed the diet.

Places like The Hummingbird have achieved such a reputation that I get nothing short of dubious walking through the door because how can live up to that expectation. I'd say I'm like that with writers too. 

One of the things I discuss a lot with my writers' group, and anyone else who looks vaguely interested in books, is obviously popular fiction, what's good about it, what sucks, who's overrated and those who are deadly ignored despite being somewhat geniuses. I find that if someone has told me about a book that they love, it can make me a little bit reluctant to read it purely because I'm expecting a lot out of it. 

When I first read An Abundance of Katherine's I wasn't expecting That. As a novelist/novel lover and part time maths geek it was essentially my idea of heaven in book form. I have never, even been so excited to see footnotes in a book - they have graphs in and everything!!! If I had been more aware of the brilliance of John Green before reading the first few of novels I may not have loved them quite so much, because I would have already been expecting greatness. 

In the same way, (and I will point out again I read this because I was told to!) if I hadn't heard that Fifty Shades of Grey (and everything connected to it) were atrocious I would probably have stopped reading half way through the first chapter whilst I was losing the will to live, but knowing it was bad meant that I could read it and expect that an cope with. Like movies where you need to know that it's not serious before starting. I made that mistake with Dr. Strangelove.

Reputations a big thing, but Hummingbird lived up to theirs. I need sleep. 

Catch you later.

Hmm,

One of my favourite writers of all time, since the glorious age of 17, has been John Green. I wish I had some big semi-romantic story of how I fell across his books in a small independent book store in the Northern Quarter, and that the movie of The Fault in Our Stars broke my heart because it was, in parts, such a deviation from the book, but that would be an utter falsehood, hocum story. 

I was told to buy Paper Town by a friend of mine named J, who is beautifully obsessed by it. She would have lent me her's, but the idea of letting out of her sight was too much. I understand that more completely than most people do. To her mind, it is the most perfect of John Green's books. Though I enjoyed it immensely, it is not mine. For me, The Fault in Our Stars was like suffering loss at the hands of a paperback, and the only more perfect version of that loss was the very rare occasion where a film is somehow on par with a book. Taking out one almost insignificant character made that film beyond anything I could ever imagine. Who am I kidding, I was a mess before it even started! Still, not my favourite. No book he can write will ever be what An Abundance of Katherines is to me.

I'm currently sat watching Paper Towns, and wondering why they decided to make this book into a flipping movie. I'm over half way through and I'm not as enthralled as I was with the book, however having the actor who played Gus in there even for less than thirty seconds did make me die a little bit on the inside. In a good way. 

My biggest fear now is that they will try and find a way of making An Abundance of Katherines into a movie, but part of me wants to see that. Part of me wants to see the part when the graphs are sketched in chalk across the screen with the film still playing in the background slightly out of focus, I want to see what they make of Katherine the Many. I want to see them bring it to life and tell the story in a whole new way, so I can fall in love with it all over again. But I don't want them to destroy something that made sense to me with so much ease.

I owe a lot to Paper Towns. It was the emotional band aid that made it okay when my life fell apart and I couldn't make it fall back together. Because some people need tears and Malteasers the way I need books. The film, I know, would not have been enough. 

On Tone of Voice,

One of the things which people always comment on about my writing is that I apparently have a strong narrative voice. I do have a list of habits as long as my arm, including (my very favourite) a tendency to describe the mundane, but here's the reason. You know all that time we spent talking about how English teachers make too much of what an author  meant by something? This sort of idea: 

 I've found that they can, to a certain extent anyway, be right. 

If you ever decided, for what reason I don't know :P, to read Insanity Breaks then you'd see that throughout the book the character explains different things to do with her smoking habit. The same is true of Iris' (the main character from the soon to be released novel Yours, - more details coming soon) love of drinking tea, but here's the thing - when I write, I'm writing what is pretty much a dramatic monologue of a characters life, so the things which have importance in their lives will be included, and the things which don't will be left out. Pretty simple, right? If I've put it on the page, there is generally a reason, and granted that reason is sometimes just a vast description which some might call unnecessary, but mostly there is a reason. 

I will just point out that until midnight on 10/2/13 PST (8am 11/2/13 GMT) Insanity Breaks is available to be downloaded completely FREE onto Kindle or any Kindle app compatible device. For those who don't know what it is, it's the first novel I ever finish (Fairies was just the first I had the balls guts to self publish) and from start to finish it took me about 9 months. Fairies was written in one month and Yours, was written in 20 days. Those three, plus a monstrosity named As Yet Untitled (which went straight into my computer's recycle bin!) which took a month to finish, represent my four NaNoWriMo years. :D Useless piece of trivia...

Back to what I was saying about voice: I write what I know, from the perspective I know. All my characters are different, they do have different attitudes, different beliefs, different experiences, but their fundamental nature, THEIR VERY EXISTENCE, comes from the noise in my head. I would agree that my characters often speak from a very similar perspective - they tend to be lower middle class, reasonably well educate women who are either on their way to university or have been to university, they're normally some form of creative and they pretty much always believe in love. Now, I don't see this as a bad thing, because the fact is that most authors do it. Nicholas Sparks makes millions from writing pretty much the same novel over and over with different characters, in a different city and with a slightly different ending. His lead male tends to be a poor boy, with intelligence, but the girl's parents always see him as a whim, because he's sexy and from the wrong side of the tracks. The women are always beautiful and unobtainable creatures, but they have a young summer romance anyway -Yeah, this is the trash I read in the bath :) - and then they get separated. John Green (maybe I'm just a reflection of a teen cliche but I do love his writing at the moment) tends to write from the perspective of a fringe dwelling, witty teenage male (except A Fault in Our Stars, which pretty much made me cry all through it, but then the difference is only that the character is female...) My point is simply, if you like one of the novels, you're likely to like all by the same author, because it's from a perspective you can understand or relate to. Is that so bad? 

I will say one thing, author's voices develop and change over time. Our narrative voices are shaped by our experiences just the same way that we are. Things which seem of an immense amount of importance in what we write when we are sixteen (Insanity Breaks) will look quite different from the things we write at nearly twenty (Yours,) and everything that comes after will be different because every day that we open up our senses to the world, we see a little something we never saw before, or we hear something, or we feel or understand something in a different way and it's important for that to happen, because otherwise, we're not learning anything and if we're not learning anything, what do we really have left to say?