Slumdog Millionaire

Congratulations to screen writer Simon Beaufoy for transforming an OK Indian novel into an excellent international movie. Mr Beaufoy - if you ever decide to transform an OK Irish novel into an excellent international movie I have seven to chose from...

Housework

Full time working mothers I salute you!
Saba has gone to Eritrea on holiday - she's not seen her sons in two years - last year she had to stay in Bahrain to get her work visa renewed. So even though I'm longing to write my anti-chicklit novel I have instead been doing the housework - OMG it's so terribly time consuming, the odd hour here and there that I'd spend at my desk is now spent ironing. Or hoovering up dog hairs. Or washing the dishes. Or scrubbing the top of the kitchen cupboards (yuk!) or wiping dust from the ceiling fans.
I'm finding it impossible to think literary thoughts. Yesterday a wonderful idea popped into my head but I was too busy scrubbing a saucepan to write it down. This morning I woke and my first thought was "I have not yet cleaned the bathrooms..."

Artistic Temperament

I am cursed with artistic temperament. Either that or I'm very thick-witted. For six months I've being trying to write a frothy young novel for Little Black Dress. As you can see from the website the books are marketed at young, single women so my central character Cait was also a young single woman - an airstewardess based on a tropical island with unlimited access to sun, sand, sea and... storytelling.
Except Cait and I could not get along. No matter that she was pretty and fun, and got up all sorts of amusing antics - I thought she was boring. "Good morning you dreary girl," I would say when I dragged myself to my desk.
She'd flick her ponytail and say, "Oh pull yourself together. Aren't you getting paid to create me? You're getting paid to like me..."
But I hated and despised her so much I even killed her a couple of times; it gave me such satisfaction.
Then on Friday Little Black Dress emailed to tell me they've decided to temporarily put the imprint on hold; they will not be commissioning any more books.
"Sounds like they've sacked you," said Nick.
I know I ought to feel cheated or something but instead I'm thrilled to bits. I drop kicked Cait out of the window and immediately started to write the story I've been itching to tell for six months - the story 40 year old Jackie Diamond, the cabin crew manager at Cait's airline. Already I have the structure decided and the synopsis written. Yesterday Jacks and I went shopping together to the Sultana's Designer Clearance Sale, we both liked a stunning black evening dress with heavy beading on the bodice and clever corseting at the waistline -but Jacks said her cleavage had far too much sun damage to wear such a plunging neckline so I bought it for me instead... She's very impressed with my laser skin resurfacing treatment, she says already she can see all the open pores have gone and she might be tempted to indulge herself... In fact the only thing we disagree on his her soft spot for Commander Andrew Cunningham the senior captain at Ex-Pat Air. I think he's a randy old goat, she says "We're just good friends."
"If a man and woman say they're just friends, at least one of them is lying," I told her.

Indulgence

The Revenge of Lady Muck has gone on sale and for the past couple of days I've been indulging in a harmless fantasy - common to novelists the world over...
Should Lady Muck be made into a movie, who will I cast in the leading roles? Who will play Lord Rupert Glass - aristocratic and dapper, but with a dark side - step forward Rupert Friend, I think you were made for the part.

Help! I hate my novel!

Apologies for my failure to blog, I'm proof reading Lady Muck this week, and I don't do commitment well.
Proof reading is when an editor sends the final draft of your novel back to you, in the format it's going to be on the bookshelves. In theory the author takes a quick read and spots typos and silly mistakes. Except I've spotted an enormous faux pas - it's the name of one of the central characters - and every reference to 'Jennifer' has to be changed to 'Mummy' and it's not possible to do this by pressing a magic button on the keyboard because there's another Jennifer (her daughter Jennifer Junior) lurking in the pages...
Also I'm still suffering from the superfluous 'that' disease - and on every single page so far (I'm currently on P 245) I've identified and eliminated at least one superfluous 'that'.
Wish me luck, I'm starting to wilt, and I've another 100 pages to go

The Revenge of Lady Muck

At the front of books by Little Black Dress the author writes five things about herself. Here are my five things:
1. Anne helped with the sheep farming in Ireland when she was growing up. Nowadays she prefers her lamb served in a stew, with mint sauce.
2. In a karate competition Anne once fought the coach of the British team. He punched her on the nose; she kicked him in the head. She won a full point off him and a big hug.
3. Anne can say “Tea or coffee?” in a dozen languages. She’s also pretty fluent in “Chicken or fish?” and “Please fasten your seat belt.”
4. In Africa Anne learnt that shining a torch into the eyes of a lion will make it run away. She has never had an opportunity to try this.
5. Anne is a huge fan of the cloak-like black abaya worn by women in the Middle East. She wears one when ever she can, with her pyjamas under it, on the school run.

Christmas Present

Im very proud to announce that The Revenge of Lady Muck is on the front page of popular fiction website Chick-lit Club and has been mentioned in dispatches on Trashionista. You can't pay for this sort of publicity.

The Revenge of Lady Muck

Due for international release on St. Patrick's Day 2010 - are those shamrocks I see on the cover?

Chase Me Charlie

This is the first sentence of my new novel -
It was just another gymkhana. There was clear round jumping the main arena and fornication in the horse boxes parked up in military rows in the big front field at Kinelvin.

A Spoonful of Sugar...

Oh, golly my editor at Little Black Dress is a princess! She has sent me her list of line edits for The Revenge of Lady Muck - and in addition to the changes she wants, she has highlighted the things she especially likes - eg
Page 74: I love this first paragraph
Page 112: I love the way this chapter ends
It's so pleasant to get the odd thumbs up in the middle of all the question marks!

Pass!

This sweet little email came floating through at half past eight last night:
Hello Anne,
I’ve now read and hugely enjoyed THE REVENGE OF LADY MUCK. I had hoped to get my notes to you today and I’d nearly finished them, but I’ve just heard that, very frustratingly, they’re closing down our computer network for the weekend in about 5 minutes (!) so I’m afraid it’s going to be Monday morning now.
I am sorry about that, but I’m pretty positive you’ll have them at the beginning of next week. Have a lovely weekend, etc
Yes, indeed I will have a lovely weekend, now I know the editor has passed my novel.

The Revenge of Lady Muck

So today I'm a bag of nerves because my editor at Little Black Dress is marking my novel. It's worse than waiting for exam results. I'm wondering how long it will take her to read 77,500 frivilous light hearted words, composed into sentences and chapters - a great deal less time than it took to write them! Will she like sensible Sarah the sexually repressed school mistress? Will she fancy Lord Rupert Glass, the presenter of Good Evening Ireland? (I fancied the pants off him, but that's not the point - the reader must also fancy him.)
And most important of all - will she believe they can be together?

Heaven

I got this email last night from my publishers:
Hi, Anne,
Would you be interested in contributing to the Question of the Week for HQ Magazine, the Herald's Thursday lifestyle magazine?
The question is; "Do you believe in heaven, and can you describe it?"
Answers can be 20 words maximum, and as always the deadline is ASAP - she will need your answer by tomorrow morning - Irish time.
Thanks
Heaven is just like earth only better. It's kinder and cleaner; no-one is sick. People say 'good morning' and mean it.

Cheap Plug

Just to say Enchanting Alice has gone on sale in paperback. It's in bookshops only in Ireland, you can also buy it on Amazon.
Farming, babies, sex, eccentricity: Jane was seventeen when Michael whisked her away to the wetlands of rural Ireland to share a farmhouse and their marriage with his mother who sleepwalks, his father who snores and an unmarried sister who hates her. It was never going to work. Jane pulls on her wellies and keeps walking till she reaches street lighting, pavements and independence. She moves into Stove Pipe Town. Michael stays and continues to farm his cows will always come first. Their children are born and Jane stops missing him. Then she goes to a rock concert. Dressed to kill in her black halter-neck frock, Jane catches the eye of the lead singer who smoulders from every poster on every lamppost in Ireland. He invites her up on the stage to dance ...

It's Over!

Look how nervous I am in this photograph! This is me before I went to give my amusing and motivational speech at my old grammar school Prize Day. It was very formal and solemn. The teaching staff wore robes. I was on spotlit stage with an audience of 500 in front of me, and a big screen to one side showing a close up of my (heavily made-up, terrified) face. I was introduced as "Miss Dunlop, the author."
When I got up to speak the chairman of the board of governors whispered, "Just remember, you're among friends."
I think it's the nicest thing anybody has ever said to me.
My voice stopped shaking after the first couple of minutes.

Speech day

I spent yesterday in Belfast preparing for tonight's amusing and motivation speech. I did this by having a makeover at the MAC Counter in Debenhams. I said to the lovely woman painting my face: "What on earth am I going to talk about? None of my career choices have ever been academic and the grammar school I went to is very academic..."
And she said, "What you have to remember is that not everybody wants to be a doctor or a lawyer when they grow up. I have a degree in fine art, but I happen to like painting people's faces. A good education is easily carried and nobody can take it away from you."
Thank you MAC! You have given me the closing paragraph of my speech.
"I have a degree in Agricultural Science (!) but I happen to like writing popular fiction - and they say it's not work if you love it..."

Gestation

The Revenge of Lady Muck will be my seventh published novel. And I'm just as excited about it as I was with the birth of the first. Perhaps even more excited for Amazon preorder didn't exist when The Pineapple Tart was a baby. Lady Muck is due (out) on 29 April 2010.

Experience

Regular readers of this blog will know my latest 'work in progress' is about a randy vet called Charlie whose long suffering wife despairs of finding sexy lingerie (not her own) in their horsebox. It's all fights and fornication round horses, don't you know? I'm still at the research stage of writing so I'm rereading James Herriot's veterinary memoirs, and I watched the showjumping on Sky Sports yesterday.
To my utter surprise I recognised many of the competitors - there was Nick Skelton who holds the world record for the high jump - 7'7" he jumped on a stunning grey horse called Lastic, in 1978. I remember watching when they did it. And there was Robert Smith, son of Harvey, and doesn't he look like his dad? I wonder does he use the same colourful language when he's leaping a jump as large as a motor car?
These plucky fellows now have grey hair and middle aged, weather beaten faces. They are old enough to have sired the fillies they are competing against!
"Doesn't experience count for anything anymore?" asked my grey haired, middle aged husband in a huffy voice.

Luna

I admit it quite freely, I'm not a dedicated Harry Potter fan. Today when I took the older tartlets to watch the movie of the Half Blood Prince it was only to catch up with vague eccentric Luna Lovegood and the luminous Evanna Lynch who plays her. I have a special affection for the vague and the eccentric - I was branded both, growing up. Even now my husband tells me I float away inside my head, when I'm writing a novel...

Enchanting Alice

Northern Irish author Sharon Owens was invited onto Arts Extra, BBC Radio Ulster this evening to talk about her choice of summer reading. She chose Enchanting Alice -the story of Jane Costello a seventeen year city girl who marries a shy farmer, Michael. The piece Sharon read describes their wedding:

The wedding reception was at the grandest hotel in Derry. There was free drink and after a couple of quick ones Michael stood up and spontaneously announced he was the happiest man alive.
"That's the drink talking!" Cecily (his mother) muttered but she had the grace to twist her cross little face into an approximation of a smile for the photographs.
Cecily had good reason to feel sour for it was the rural tradition in Ireland that the newly weds move into the farmhouse and live with the old pair. From now on Jane would sleep in Michael's bedroom, she would be welcome to sit in the parlour; she'd have part of a shelf in the scullery to store her own food. Jane was marrying Michael but the reality was she would be living with his mother.
Nobody asked Cecily or Jane if they objected to this claustraphobic set-up, as intimate as marriage but with none of its compensations. Nobody asked if they felt they could tolerate each other in sickness and in health, for better, for worse, until death parted them. This was the rural Irish tradition. If you didn't like it, you didn't marry a farmer.
The Costello women, town people born and bred, loudly voiced their objection to wee Jane being made to move in with her mother-in-law.
"A young couple need their own house."
"Nonsense!" said Old Dave. "Temple is big enough for everybody."
"I give it three months," said Kathleen.