Things and Stuff #21

Things and Stuff is a grab-bag of things that've been on my mind this week. In this edition: things, people, hair, Zimmer, Bologna. 

Thing 1: 100 things
Last week was Things and Stuff #20. Here are the first hundred Things!

1: a painless edit (it was The Last Apprentice 3: The Painted War!)
2: Iron Man 3
3: this blog
4: Alexandra Palace's lottery funding
5: ironic Blogger spellcheck issues
6: The World's End trailer
7: Liz Lemon
8: trying to move house
9: Clara's role in Doctor Who
10: Empire (the magazine)'s Cannes Videblogisodes
11: prop-making for Empire (the LARP)
12: Karen Ball's Guardian sewing blog
13: Skulk edits
14: martial arts and fatness
15: The Name of the Doctor
16: what makes a bestseller
17: CEFC on The One Show
18: The Iron Price nailvarnish
19: gay girls in Gunnerkrigg Court
20: Crystal Palace get into the Premier League
21: Malorie Blackman, Children's Laureate
22: the Red Wedding
23: CEFC Coronation concert
24: bad blogging
25: kids' toy-based TV
26: exposition
27: Once
28: spooky dreams
29: prop-making for Odyssey (badly)
30: a picture of a fox
31: a skulk
32: a rabble
33: a conspiracy
34: a horde
35: a cluster
36: no editing
37: Much Ado About Joss Whedon's Garden
38: Cleolinda's Hannibal recaps
39: penthouses
40: Skulk artwork secrets (it was the logo!)

Thing #40 (c) me, technically, because Strange Chemistry very kindly let me have the rights to use the Skulk and Rabble artwork when they went under. <3 

41: Final Fantasy VII
42: Beren and Luthien
43: rereading 2013's Nano novel
44: Elle me Dit
45: too hot
46: The Drowned Man
47: alcohol
48: ARCs
49: moving out of London
50: Welcome to Night Vale
51: Skulk blog tour
52: Game of Thrones soundtracks
53: quoth the raven
54: Netgalley recommended Skulk and called Meg 'superb'!
55: JL8
56: more Skulk blog tour
57: lost my voice
58: Skulk reviews
59: the Great British Bake Off
60: my copies of Skulk failing to be delivered
61: fetching my copies of Skulk from the delivery place
62: Skulk launch party
63: geek wedding
64: more Skulk blog tour
65: Meryl Streep in a tree
66: finally moving house
67: the first draft of Rabble
68: very bad blogging
69: KITTENS

Thing #69 aka Midnight (c) me

70: graffiti herons
71: the end of Strange Chemistry
72: Disney songs in their native languages
73: Wimbledon and the World Cup
74: Victorian research (aka Hetero Interlude)
75: my cats are really cute
76: Colditz tabletop
77: secret writing clues
77: Carmen
79: writing-spot reviews
80: Spotify
81: a secret (I can exclusively reveal this was A BOOK COVER! Cannot reveal what book it was, though.)
82: CEFC Rachmaninov Vespers
83: Hannibal
84: researching a villain
85: Morning Pages
86: Undiscovered Voices 2016 opens
87: Sense8
88: 50 Shades of Flashheart
89: Pride
90: TOO HOT
91: Only Ever Yours
92: reading
93: glassblowing
94: everything is flammable
95: MsTabularasa's Shut Up And Dance vid
96: more secrets, more clues
97: Instagram
98: Bury Your Gays
99: UV2016 launches

100: Sanjay's Super Hero Squad

Thing 2: The People I Meet On The Way To Work
Apropos of absolutely nothing except that I noticed there were a lot of them, I made a photo album of some of the names I encounter when I walk to the WP office from the station. 

Thing 3: NEW HAIR
It's actually not this colour any more - after a couple of washes the light purple has faded into a lovely kind of pastel blue colour. I love it so much. I need to win the lottery and/or strike a deep vein of book royalties so I can change it even more often. Cosmic karma make that happen for me please. Cheers.

This is the second selfie I've taken and put on here, this is very strange to me, I normally don't go in for selfies very much but like how could I not show this off? It's PURPLE (c) me

Thing 4: Hans Zimmer Live
I'm going on tour with Hans Zimmer next week, nbd.

Lol jk it is a huge deal. 

I am in this video! Back row second sop from the left. You can't really miss me because there are only 24 people in the choir. That's NOT VERY MANY FYI. (c) Hans Zimmer Live

I'm so excited. Some of my favourite music ever from some of my favourite movies, some of my favourite people (Hans, it turns out, is a really nice dude) and based on the gigs we did in Hammersmith Apollo a couple of years ago, some of the most fun/and challenging performing experiences I've ever had. There is a click track. There is strobe lighting. There are hundreds of bars of 7/8, a couple of top D sharps, chord progressions to make you lie down on the ground and weep with joy. And it's all the sweeter given that for a while I thought I wasn't going to be able to do these ones. That's how it goes, sometimes - but I am beyond chuffed that in fact, in this instance, this is how it's going instead.

The tour is epic and Europe-spanning and I'm doing two of the dates, with a tiny number of other Crouch End Festival Chorus singers - Wembley Arena (eee) on the 6th of April and Birmingham Barclaycard Arena on the 12th. If you are there, you will see me! I'll be the one in the middle of the sops with the violet hair trying not to weep.

Thing 5: #BCBF16
The Bologna Children's Book Fair is next week! Here's hoping that all of the publishers, rights people, agents etc survive all their meetings, sell all their books, drink a silly amount of Prosecco.

Things and Stuff #20

Things and Stuff is a grab-bag of things that've been on my mind this week. In this edition: secrets, Instagram, endings, UV16, Pixar

Thing 1: [redacted]
I am a woman of many secrets at the moment.

I have been sent a thing to read. I have been sent things to watch. I have been told about a thing I might get to sing. I have written things and sent them off to be read and/or sold.

Once again, I find myself either explicitly forbidden to talk about the things or uncertain about whether it's politic to talk about the things, so let's play another round of Rosie's Cryptic Clues! (And... no, I still can't do the reveal on any of the previous clues, so don't ask.)

In no particular order (ie not the order I listed them above, ooh I'm sneaky):

 

Aliens (C) James Cameron, angels (c) William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905), meme (c) The Internet, lights (c) the Internet

Thing 2: I hadn't actually logged on to Instagram in about three years
But now I have! I am rosiejbest over there and am using If This Then That (which is mostly working) to repost pics to Twitter and Facebook so now you can enjoy pictures of my cats in triplicate all over your internet. You are welcome.

And also the odd - very odd - selfie (c) me

Thing 3: these two articles about lesbian and bisexual women on television
Warning: this one is a little depressing, especially if you are LGBTQ and you like television. It's also inherently spoilery, so don't click if you're averse to hearing about character death. Lots and lots of character death.

In response to yet another dead lesbian on TV recently, Autostraddle compiled these two lists: 29 TV lesbians who got happy endings and 143 TV lesbians who were killed off.

I was talking to a straight friend who was thinking about writing a lesbian romance just the other month. She asked me for advice. My one and only piece of serious advice: please, whatever you do, don't kill off your lesbians. She seemed surprised that this was a Thing. So let me just put this out there for anyone else who may have missed this: Bury Your Gays IS A THING.

By the current Autostraddle reckoning (though they keep updating it, both numbers have been going up) I'm going to need about a hundred more happy endings before I'll accept another death without major side-eye.

Get on that, TV writers.

Thing 4: Undiscovered Voices 2016
Another SCBWI Undiscovered Voices anthology has just been released, hopefully launching the careers of another twelve writers and nine illustrators! I know we have agent news from at least four of the writers, and the winning illustrations were featured on the Guardian website.

Congratulations to all the winners, all the longlisters, and all the organisers - it was another brilliant year for undiscovered talent, here's hoping that you all get discovered very soon if you haven't been already! I know there are several of these books I am dying to read.

You can read the anthology here, and get your fix of news from the #UV2016 hashtag on Twitter!

Thing 5: this Pixar short made me cry, twice

Things and Stuff #19

Things and Stuff is a grab-bag of things that've been on my mind this week. In this edition: utter loathing, a silver lining, and three random nice things

Thing 1: I hated Only Ever Yours, and here is why

[Trigger warning, and spoiler for what I'm about to say: fictional sexual and emotional abuse, but mostly self-image problems and fatshaming, so much fatshaming I can barely breathe, so much I swear it has given me an actual crick in my neck from spending so much time recently feeling furious and upset.]

Only Ever Yours is The Handmaid's Tale for teenagers, so you know it's going to be pretty grim. And it is: this is a universe in which terrible, terrible things are completely normal. This is a universe where girls are groomed literally their entire lives to be perfect, submissive, blank slates. When they turn 16 they will become either wives who are killed at 30, or sex slaves who last less long than that, or sexless teachers who impose these same things on younger girls until they drop dead...

And the absolute worst thing the main character or anyone else in this world can imagine happening to them is to end up looking like me.

KILL IT WITH FIRE (c) Louise O'Neill. This is presented out of context by necessity, but also I think reading it out of context may be the closest you can get to experiencing it the way I did...

I understand that the book is meant to be condemning this attitude, making it so extreme as to be ridiculous, mirroring the thoughts of an anorexic person onto an entire culture to show how absurd the whole thing is. I understand that it's a dystopia and in that context of course the main character would feel like that. I understand.

But excuse me if I don't care. Excuse me if I can't quite focus on the worldbuilding while reading the point of view of a character who believes I am so disgusting I do not deserve to live.

This is not theoretical. When it's as constant as this, it just stops being about the context. I don't care what the author was trying to do. What she actually did was write phrases like 'nobody will ever love a fat girl' over and over and over again. What she did was have her main character be so obsessed with her weight that she does herself an injury, and violently humiliate girls who put on a few pounds (leaving me wondering what the hell these people would do if they saw me - quite possibly have a heart attack and die, which would be fine by me). 

You are god damn right I'm taking this personally. 

I think the real problem is that when it comes to this aspect of the book, this is not some wild dystopian fantasy she's presenting here. This is what people really think.

If you are not fat, you might not know this, or might not care. But this is exactly what people think about people like me. And it's not just airbrushed supermodels in all the magazines and hateful scum on the internet: in a Yougov survey I took recently, about 70% of respondents agreed that people like me should be refused medical care until they lost weight.

Refused. Medical. Care.

I respect people, especially other fat people, who can read this book and simply see its obsession with how disgusting we are as a cautionary tale of where society could go. I totally respect people who can be disturbed by the book as a whole, and tut, and say how awful, we should feel sympathy for these girls because they are victims.

I am not that person. I hated this book and I hated all the characters, and it was a reaction of pure self-preservation, because they hated me first. If I had bought it in paperback instead of ebook I would probably burn it, not because it was a bad book that nobody should ever read, but because I feel the need to exorcise it from my life.

(I really didn't need the abrupt and shallow gay panic section either - yet another example of 'oooooh look at my fancy subtext' without anything to back it up - or the utter lack of any redeeming features in any of the female characters who we actually get to spend any time with, that is until the one good boy comes along and shows the painfully stupid main character the error of her bitchy ways. To be honest, the nihilism of it all struck me as profoundly unfeminist in places. But y'know, mostly the fat thing.)

Thing 2: the silver lining

I've read more in the couple of weeks since I finished Only Ever Yours than I have in ages. I don't know if it's because my day job and my sideline both involve so much written fiction, or what, but reading for pleasure had started to feel a bit of a chore. But in the last week I devoured The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman, which I adored and which made me cry in the good way, and I'm a good chunk into Wake by Anna Hope, which is also really great so far. I think that Only Ever Yours has reset the bar for books I read so incredibly low that I'm finding a whole new joy in it now.

Thing 3, 4 and 5: three things to cheer me up after I've made myself tense and sad writing about this

I had some really good related news last week and also this video is really pretty and soothing (c) Bandana Glassworks

Good advice, Mister J (c) via alias-milamber on Tumblr, I don't know who made the image but the cosplayer is Anthony Misiano

Pure joy (c) Walk The Moon, too many movies to list and MsTabularasa on Youtube

Things and Stuff #14

House, Rabble, what?, kittens, herons

Thing 1: Moving, just keep moving

I moved house two days before Christmas. This was definitely better than moving two days after Christmas would have been, but quite stressful and weird all the same.

My house is awesome. It has stairs. And a fireplace. That you can put fire in. And working wifi, and doors, and a dishwasher which has changed my life pretty much beyond recognition, and a garden although not really plants yet, and a shed, and a table you can actually sit at, and nowhere near enough bookshelves. It's pretty wonderful.

Thing 2: The Rabble first draft is in!
It was hard work and there is a lot more hard work to come, but it is done and I have done it. I have been celebrating by finally tidying my living room and spending a lot more time on Twitter.

Oh, and showing off the beautiful cover. (C) Strange Chemistry 

And just doing this whenever I look at it or anyone mentions it or I remember that it exists (C) Disney

Thing 3: Wait, are we just pretending you haven't vanished from the blogosphere for like six months?

Sorry, did you say something? You'll have to speak up, I can't hear you over the sound of me pretending I didn't vanish from the blogosphere. 

Thing 4: KITTENS!

We adopted a very beautiful, very timid pair of kittens, Misty and Midnight, from the local RSPCA. They are getting bigger and less timid every day and it's a joy to watch.

Misty (top) and Midnight (bottom) being beautiful (C) me

I wrote most of Rabble sitting in their room and getting distracted by their wonderousness so if at any point the first draft suddenly says something like:

'But we have to get the Cluster stone because OMG Midnight you are the cutest look at you licking your sister,' I said, and spontaneously turned into a butterfly from sheer joy.

that will be why.

Thing 5: A siege (or 'sedge' but Rule of Cool means I'm going with 'siege') of graffiti herons
Spotted along my bus route to the station over the last couple of months. There are at least five of these, most of which I haven't got pictures of, because moving bus + photo tends to come out like this:

Yeah, no. There is a graffiti heron in this picture I promise. (C) me

But I did manage to grab a picture of this one:

Awesomeness (C) me/the graffiti artist

And my favourite:

EXTREME awesomeness (C) me/the graffiti artist

Things and Stuff #10

Things and Stuff is a grab-bag of things that've been on my mind this week. In this edition: theatre, drinking, ARCs, home and Night Vale.


Thing 1: The Drowned Man

Jessie and I went to see Punchdrunk Theatre's new London production The Drowned Man. It was several weeks ago, and I'm still processing the experience. It was like being in a dream, more literally than I can really express. We were surrounded by mysteries. We walked through strange places and found ourselves in even stranger places. We saw things, and we missed other things, and we were moved and incredibly creeped out and got seperated and found each other again. We imagined that things would happen that didn't happen, and had several what the hell just happened moments. We were told that there was a bar, where we could take our masks off and sit for a moment... and we never actually found it. 

One of the things we did see, (C) Punchdrunk Theatre

I would love to literally walk you through everything that happened and everything we saw and felt and thought. But I won't do that, because some of you might want to go, and for the rest of you it'll be like someone telling you in detail about this weird dream they had last night... 

Thing 2: alcohol
I also saw The World's End last week. I have to admit, I don't think I loved it the same way I adore Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. I really did enjoy it, but what with the Gary King character and the way the whole thing is based on nostalgia and wasted lives and the concept of a good life not necessarily being what you think it is, and death and friendship and, y'know, some really self-destructive alcoholism... it was a lot of fun in places and soared past the six laughs rule, probably on the music choices alone, but at the same time it was really, really melancholy. Much more so than either Shaun or Fuzz. I think that fight in the final pub is going to stick with me for quite a long time. 

Also, today I am rather hungover as last night we said our WP goodbyes to Karen Ball, Commissioning Editor extraordinaire who is tragically leaving us to become Publisher at Little, Brown and Atom books. I think we all needed to drown our sorrows a little, because we don't know what on earth we're going to do without her... 

Thing 3: ARCs
The advance reader copies of Skulk have gone out! And when I say they've gone out, I mean apparently there were enough requests that every single copy is accounted for. I'm officially on the edge of my seat, hoping that anyone who reads it and likes it will say so loudly and often and those who hate it will never tell me... 

Thing 4: maybe it's because I'm a Londoner
Some unexpected househunting developments this last week have left me thinking about London and whether I'll even know who I am any more if I move away. 

I was actually born in Holland, though my parents are both English, but I've been a Londoner for at least twenty one years. Whether it's North, South or East (West London is the only compass point I've not lived in), London is London. Whatever you want, whatever kind of entertainment or culture or food or shopping or anything, it's about an hour away on the Tube. I've spent probably more hours of my life on the Tube than doing almost any other thing. There are places in London I've never seen and other places that feel like coming home every single time I go there. 

I just don't quite know how people live outside London, and not in an obnoxious 'oh how can you bear it' way - more in a 'I don't know how busses work or what it's like to live more than seven minutes walk from a supermarket' kind of way. It's silly, really, but being a Londoner is a big part of my identity. I don't think I'll ever stop being a Londoner, even when I don't live here any more. 

Thing 5: Carlos' perfect hair
Welcome to Night Vale is a very strange, very wonderful podcast about a sleepy desert town and its everyday problems, such as strange pyramids appearing out of nowhere, PTA meetings being interrupted by an invasion of pterodactyls, all wheat and wheat by-products turning into snakes, and Desert Bluffs' underhanded attempts to win at football. Also, the weather segment is unexpectedly brilliant. Here is some beautiful fan art: 

As made by the rather absurdly talented alackoforder on Tumblr

You can download the episodes on iTunes or from Commonplace Books' website.

Things and Stuff #3

Things and Stuff is a grab-bag of things that've been on my mind this week. In this edition: LARP, Karen, edits, belt, Trenzalore

Thing 1: Empire
Not the magazine, this time - the roleplaying game. Jessie is, right now, in a field pretending to be a lizard-person and I hope having a marvellous time. It's been on my mind this week because I've been making some props for her, part of which I wrote about on Tuesday.

My favourite one - also the most complicated one and the last one, which meant I finished it around 2am on Wednesday. I still feel sleep deprived. But kind of proud. (C) me

I love making props for LARP, and I enjoy talking about LARP and hearing other people talk about it and watching Jessie write plots for Odyssey. It all seems really fun. But when I actually think about carrying heavy rucksacks out into a muddy field, to put on complicated costumes that I then have to store somewhere in my house when it's already full of Jessie's kit, and then sleeping in a tent for the weekend in between attempting to stay in character and remembering the rules and actually talking to people... I feel a bit like this:

Neil Gaiman being truthy as usual, (C) Craig Ferguson and the internet

Thing 2: Karen from WP has her own Guardian fashion blog!
Karen's run an amazing sewing blog, Did You Make That, for ages, and now she's going to be giving out awesome stitching wisdom on the Guardian site as well. Hooray Karen!

Thing 3: Edits.
The edits are here. I am equal parts excited and scared out of my wits. As with most actual writing work there's not a lot else I can say about it right now but I'll keep you posted.

Me (C) the internet

Thing 4: my new white belt, although I mostly ended up talking about being fat - if you don't want to read about that, you can skip to thing 5, it's got a brilliant Doctor Who joke in it
As someone who's been fat for the majority of my life I am distinctly leery of ever talking about food or anything I may do with my body, up to and including things like going for a walk or buying clothes, because people feel entitled to judge people like me, no matter what we're doing. Eating a burger? Fatso. Eating a salad? Thank god she's on a diet, she's such a fatso. Lying on the sofa? You will die alone and have to be winched out of your house. Doing some exercise? Haha look at that delusional sweaty face, she thinks she's Jessica Ennis or something.

Nobody actually says those things to me - except me, all the time, every day forever. But nobody has to say them for me to want to minimise people's opportunity to think them. The culture I live in reinforces these things, and even if it didn't I learned it at school and it's stuck with me just like quadratic equations haven't. I wish I could say that in the decade since leaving school nobody has said mean things to me at all, but unfortunately that's not true - I still get mocked in the street, not regularly, but not never. And let's not forget this is the internet: for every body positive blog there are fifty Youtube comments and a hundred adverts for 'simple tricks' to turn your disgusting flabby body into something more socially acceptable.

I swear, if I could reach through the screen and punch the person who invented those adverts in the mouth, I absolutely would.

And I'd try to keep my wrist straight, push from my back foot so the power comes from my torso, and keep my elbow up. Because I've joined a local martial arts school. Because... I thought I would. They had to specially order me a uniform big enough, but I've got a belt. It's white. I love it. I've been to two classes and I really enjoyed them, so there.

Thing 5: We've gone to Trenzalore by mistake!

Perfect observation is perfect (C) ThetaSigma8

The Doctor Who finale was brilliant. I was so relieved.

Things and Stuff #1

Helloooooooo interwebs.

Well. This is certainly a blog.

I have to admit to a little bit of stage fright about actually writing more honest-to-god blog posts. But there's very little point in having a blog if I don't put things on it, and I do love lists! So every Friday I'm going to do a little post about the things and stuff that have been on my mind this week.

Sometimes it'll be writing, editing or publishing based. Sometimes it'll be about music, or nerd stuff. Sometimes I might have a really boring week and just list fruits or something. More often it'll be a mixture of all of the above.

For instance...

Thing 1: A painless edit is the greatest thing ever
This week I handed in ('handed in' sounds a bit primary school, doesn't it? Let's go with) delivered the second draft of a book I'm freelance ghosting for Working Partners.

Not what a WP edit looks like, but funny (C) Eve Corbel

Sometimes, even with the detailed and specific edits you get on a WP project, editing can be a pain, in terms of time and in terms of emotional input. I have found that I need to do one sweep of the comments all the way through and just allow my ego to go wild. 'Nope', I say, sometimes out loud. 'No', 'not doing that', 'yes well if you'd read it properly you'd know what I meant'. You have to get those out of your system, because I've very rarely met an edit that wasn't bang on 100% correct once I'd done the 'nope' pass and moved on to the 'how do I fix it?' pass.

On this one, the 'nope' pass was more of a 'yep' pass, and it was so wonderful. 'Yep', 'I see what I did wrong there', 'ooh that's a great idea', 'yes we can cut that', and also - because WP editors are the best - a bit of 'aww, thank you!'. I love it when an edit comes together, and I loved doing my editing this week.

Thing 2: Iron Man 3
OH MY GOD HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BECAUSE YOU SHOULD.

I have to say I was slightly dreading this film because I loved Iron Man very much and found Iron Man 2 to be fluffily entertaining, but... 'The Mandarin', seriously? Of all Iron Man and Marvel villains you could've picked, you decided that The Mandarin was the one you wanted to give screen time to? And he's being played by Ben Kingsley of all people? I was braced for so much horrible Hollywood racism.

But something amazing happened. The racism did not appear! The film turned around and lampshaded and contextualised the racism and it was the best day ever. After that, it was basically all fun and games and snappy dialogue and explosions and Rhodey and Pepper and passing the Bechdel Test (barely, but brilliantly) and really well depicted anxiety attacks and the dodgy disability stuff is in some ways not as dodgy as it could be. And if you saw Avengers, stay for the post-credits sequence. I made this face:

Seriously, it was this exact face (C)  Disney/The Internet

Also there is a joke about Croydon, which got the biggest laugh of the entire film.

Thing 3: This blog
I started a blog. It was sort of an accident. So that has been on my mind somewhat this week.

Thing 4: Ally Pally's lottery money
Incredibly exciting, but possibly irrelevant to people who've never lived in North London: Alexandra Palace has been promised £16m from the National Lottery! This is huge. I grew up just around the corner from Ally Pally and it's incredibly important. It's a beautiful building, it's historically and culturally significant, it's the original home of the BBC, it has several massive halls and a lovely park with views across all of London and a theatre and an ice rink, and the Doctor climbed it in order to use the BBC to save Muswell Hill from Maureen Lipman which may be the most North London sentence ever written.

The BBC, (C) The BBC

Unfortunately, it's also been destroyed by fire, not once but twice, so it's this huge building with huge potential that's been sitting half-empty for thirty years. The idea that it might finally get the funding it needs to be properly regenerated makes me very, very happy.

Thing 5: Blogger's post-editor spellcheck does not recognise the following words - 
Blog
Blogger
Blogspot
Spellcheck

Undiscovered Places

This is a blog for the 2014 Undiscovered Voices anthology blog tour! Undiscovered Voices is a bi-annual competition for unagented, unpublished writers run by the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. Without UV or SCBWI, I'm not sure I would ever have finished Skulk, let alone found the brilliant Catherine Pellegrino or Strange Chemistry to take it on. 

And now, here are six stories from six London locations, each of which played a fairly major role in Skulk and my Undiscovered Voices story... 

Dramatic reconstruction (C) Marijn Kampf

Tavistock Square Gardens

Picture the scene: it’s mid-November and you’re enjoying a chilly afternoon stroll in one of London’s tiny squares. All of them are pretty much the same – spiky iron railings, enormous trees, wooden benches, pigeons. This particular one is Tavistock Square, just off the Euston Road. You’re enjoying a quiet moment to yourself when all of a sudden thirty nerds in big coats descend, chatting about character and plot, clutching notebooks and laptops.

They settle down on the benches and begin scribbling. Their fingers quickly turn blue from cold, but they don’t stop until their leader announces time to pack up and move on, even though they’re being distracted by the single most persistent and fearless squirrel known to man, which is literally climbing up the benches as if to say ‘So, what’s your novel about?’ 

This was Nanorilla 2011, the guerrilla writing crawl held by the London chapter of Nanowrimo. I love Nanowrimo, and I’ve taken part every year since 2008, even though I rarely finish a book during the month. The Nano London group is the best in the whole world, no arguments. It’d be wrong of me not to also mention the Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green, where I and a group of equally crazy writers gathered to write through the night. We finally stumbled out, coffee-blind and slightly hysterical, at 6am, before anything was open except the McDonald’s – which is why one scene in Skulk takes place in a 24-hour Mc-D’s. 

Stables under the Westway (C) Giles Smith

The Westway Flyover

Some places are beautiful, and some places are interesting. The Westway Flyover is definitely interesting. I used to cross it on a fairly regular basis on the Oxford Tube (which, despite the name, is a bus), and it became just familiar enough that I feel like I know it despite never having set foot on the ground there.

There are some strange things going on at the Westway Flyover. Like the way that you pass the Hilton and the city just seems to stop. On this side, Notting Hill Gate, Hyde Park, leafy crescents, bespoke cheese shops, houses with areas. On that side, nothing but motorway and suburb and the blocky behemoth of Westfield Shopping Centre. Not a bush or a shepherd in sight.

But the most fascinating thing is that the space underneath the flyover is far from empty – there’s a sports centre there with its own stables, a junk yard that used to have an amazing junk sculpture over the gate, and a caravan park where traveller kids could be seen riding their bikes round and round in tight circles and chasing escaping footballs down the street.

There’s a lot of life going on underneath the Westway Flyover. It seemed an appropriate place for Addie to have made her home.

There are no photographs of the WP Quiet Room (C) Kosmos

The Quiet Room

This sounds quite exciting, like an art installation, but actually it’s just a spare office upstairs at Working Partners. The main office is a big open-plan cluster of desks, so the upstairs office room is generally reserved for people who need space and quiet to get stuck into a tricky edit – but it can also be a handy place to sneak a private phone conversation or writing sprint over your lunch hour.

For such an unassuming room, it’s played a surprisingly big part in the story of Skulk. This was where I regularly came to hammer out a few hundred words over a bacon sandwich, but it’s also where I heard I was going to be in the Undiscovered Voices 2012 anthology! And even better, it’s where I snuck off to to take the phone call from Catherine Pellegrino saying that she loved Skulk and wanted to offer me representation. I’ve been so happy in this odd little room that my knees actually went weak, and also so stressed that I considered escape by leaping out of the window onto the Hammersmith and City line. Not bad for a spare office full of boxes of German copies of My Secret Unicorn.

It actually looks quite nice here, (C) Urban75

 The Princess Diana Memorial Fountain

This fountain is the focus of simply one of my favourite and most self-indulgent lines in the whole book. They say kill your darlings, and they’re not wrong – but sometimes they get a stay of execution. If you opened the book of Skulk and on page one it had this line, and the rest was blank, I’d be quite happy.

Of course, since the line actually comes in about halfway through, you’ll have to read the book to find out what it is…

Classic badly lit backstage corridor photo (C) Capital FM

Backstage – and on stage – at the O2 Arena

I’ve sung at the O2 a good four or five times now, almost all as backing to the great – if relentlessly populist – tenor Andrea Bocelli. This was a Crouch End Festival Chorus gig pretty much like any other. Uncomfortable black shoes, Nessun Dorma and Funiculi Funicula (which is an insanely catchy song about an Italian cable car), security wristband, brilliantly goofy percussionists, the tantalising possibility that there may be free tea and biscuits in the dressing rooms.

I realise I’m hugely privileged to think of all this as ‘normal’…

Except that I’d been told that Skulk was going to acquisitions at Strange Chemistry that day.

I checked my email about eight times between the escalator at North Greenwich tube and the backstage area, and indeed, the first email I got came just as I was waiting for the security man to find my name on the performers list and let me through. But it didn’t say ‘yes’, and it didn’t say ‘no’. What it said was, ‘Amanda Rutter, editor at Strange Chemistry, is now following you on Twitter’.

Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhh.

What did it mean? Was it another one of those incredibly nice ‘no’s? Was this like a pity follow, or a ‘we don’t want this but let’s see what she does in the future’ follow?

Or… could it possibly mean… could it…?

About ten minutes later, when we were lining up to go on stage for the soundcheck and rehearsal, I got the email from Catherine. It could. It did mean. Amanda did want to buy Skulk. I had a little jump up and down in the backstage corridor, and broke one of my own rules – no texting in rehearsals – to alert Jessie, my best friend and my Mum.

And when we got to the huge, exhilarating encore of Nessun Dorma later that night, nobody was singing that Gloria with more feeling than me.

Vertigo (C) The Telegraph

The View from The Shard

This place is hugely important to the ending of Skulk, and I’ve never visited it. That’s because when I started writing Skulk, it didn’t exist yet.

I don’t know why I fell so much in love with the Shard before it was even built. One of my favourite procrastination methods from writing Skulk was to go to the architecture nerd forums and skim through the photos of the core as it rose up over the London skyline.

I have no idea if the Shard is a good thing for the economy, but I think it’s beautiful and iconic and a little bit scary. I need to go up there soon – despite the slightly chilling £25 a head to go up to the viewing level.  I need to see whether my wild guesses at the layout are even vaguely accurate!

One thing I’m pretty sure I got right, though: it’s a very long way down. 

Submissions for the 2014 anthology open on the first of July! You can find out all about Undiscovered Voices at http://www.undiscoveredvoices.com/