Calling all fashion designers

Imagine this.

You’re aged between 11 and 16. You design your fantasy dress and enter it into a competition. It wins. (This happens sometimes. I didn’t really believe it could ever happen to me, but last year it did, when Threads won a writing competition. Sometimes people win. It’s AMAZING.)

You get all of this:

• Your dress made by the design team at Tammy (who work for Bhs, a sister store of Topshop), as well as a whole new outfit from Tammy
• Your dress featuring in a photo shoot for Bliss magazine
• A visit, with an adult of your choice (actually, probably their choice, but anyway), to London Fashion Week in February, with a behind the scenes tour
• Tea with debut (and can I just say EXTREMELY JEALOUS?) author, Sophia Bennett at the V&A
• Happiness, basically. Just pure fashion happiness

This is not a dream I had. This is an actual, real competition, with real judges (I’m one, yay!), real prizes and real competitors. I’m already getting emails from girls who are doing it. And by the way, boys are very welcome to do it too. Really. John Galliano’s a boy. So’s Christopher Kane. Think about it.

All the details are on the Threads website.

I haven’t really talked about it before because I’m still recovering from shock. Last summer I was inventing a fashion competition and making one of my characters enter it (it changed her life), and thinking how it would have been THE MOST INCREDIBLE THING EVER if I could have done such a thing when I was a teenager. And now they can. And I can see the results.

My publishers are making not only my dreams come true, but my stories come true too. Scary.

But in a good way.

Good luck!

Everyone has a book inside

To the lovely man in Oxford Street who said ‘You wrote this?’ (checks photo) ‘I was just saying to my friend that I could have written this …’

Thank you so much, but I think what you meant was ‘I wish I’d thought of this.’ And I’m very flattered. I’m glad you thought it was a neat idea for a story. I wasn’t sure while I was writing it. I knew I liked it, but I thought everyone else would think I was mad. And when you get to read the whole thing, as I hope you do, I hope you think I did justice to that story. It took me 34 drafts, and 30 years of wanting to write a story like that, and 20 years of trying really quite hard.

Which is why I enjoyed this post from Kiersten White.

I’m so excited when people tell me they want to write. It’s the most wonderful thing to try and do and, as I frequently say here, The Best Job In The World.

Write, go on, write! You know you want to. But please don’t tell me that despite your career as an interior designer/lawyer/chef you intend to run off a little something you’ve had at the back of your mind and have it published by Christmas. Because it will make me very jealous. It took me ages. And I still think I was incredibly lucky.

Having said that, I heard on the radio this week about a cookery writer who met a literary agent at a party in the sixties and said something like ‘Oh great. It’s your lucky day. I’ve got this idea for a book ..’.

The agent blanched. The process took a while. But the book was The Ipcress File. The cookery writer was Len Deighton. Sometimes, these people are right, dammit.

How to be annoyed in teen fiction

I’m spending a whole afternoon on one word. A word which has stuck out for one of my teen readers because ‘Nonie wouldn’t use it’, and which I’ve used on ten occasions in book 2. And bizarrely, without even trying, not at all in book 1.

It’s an expression of frustration and annoyance. Stronger than ‘oh dear’ and weaker than a full-on swear word. My teens don’t swear in front of me (although I’m sure they do when we’re not around) and I try not to swear in front of them. It’s an unspoken pact of politeness we have. I’m not Melvin Burgess – much as I admire him. If I was writing for an older age group, I’d use a whole gamut of expletives without a problem. But I have one enthusiastic reader who’s ten, for example, and I don’t want her mother glaring at me in the playground because her daughter’s vocab has expanded by one or two pithy expressions that aren’t exactly on the syllabus. Or simply to make the girl’s brain sting with discomfort as she reads.

Of course, I could be coy. But boy does it annoy me when Disney teens swear. Gosh, Hannah Montana, I bet Miley Cyrus would have phrased it differently. I don’t want to be dishonest about the words I use. The thing is, I’m sure my teens express annoyance, surprise and displeasure all the time without resorting to the obvious, and I can’t remember for the life of me what they say.

Mike Klassenn addresses the problem here. Sadly, he refers to a blog discussing the subject and doesn’t link to it. I want to see that blog! Most writers – in America anyway – seem to agree that if you’re writing for 13 and up, you need to use swear words sometimes to be realistic, and they won’t be anything your readership hasn’t seen before. But what if, like me, you’re thrilled if a 9 or 10 year-old is reading ahead of their age, and you’re writing a story you want to be as accessible to them as it can be?

I can avoid this word. After a few hours’ work (oh God, I could have written 2 chapters by now), I’ve come up with alternatives for every instance of it. But it had a certain rhythm to it, which I miss. And it was only four letters (no, not that one. Or that one) and every alternative is at least a sentence. Sometimes four. Yes, four sentences!

I want to use the expressions that teens use when they’re self-censoring to appease an adult or young kids audience. I want to find the YA author chat rooms that must be devoted to this subject, or ideally a few literate teens blogging authoritatively about it for the rest of us. Are you out there? Talk to me! What do you say?

 

This much I know

• Going to New York with teenagers is infinitely more fun than going by yourself.
• Even if you end up going on the Staten Island Ferry by mistake (because you got Staten Island and Ellis Island confused, you tourist-woman), it’s still a wonderful journey, even in the rain.
• Ground Zero may be a building site, but the 9/11 Memorial Preview Site up the road on Vesey Street is well worth a visit. And surprisingly low-key and dignified after the whole Iraq thing.
• If a designer-guru who has worked with Hussein Chalayan and Matthew Williamson recommends places to go and be inspired in SoHo, GO THERE. Pearl River is the most perfect place to go for Chinese clothing and imaginative stocking fillers. And De Vera has, without any shadow of a doubt, THE BEST EARRINGS IN THE WORLD. I dream about those earrings. Ruby droplets. Slivers of diamonds. Pearl and Sardinian coral (that’s probably very bad for the environment, but boy were they pretty). And most of them cheaper than a Marc Jacobs pret-a-porter dress. Some of them, anyway. But you don’t need to buy them. You can just look at them and dream.
• If you can possibly spend a whole week in SoHo, among the boutiquey shops and little cafes and trees and incognito famous people, do. But an afternoon is better than nothing.
• Everyone who works for Scholastic is adorable. They obviously have an ‘only adorable people’ recruitment policy. And when your editor is wearing Louboutins in your honour, and has arranged fizz and cupcakes, you know you’re in for a good time.
• Boy can it rain a lot in New York when it wants to.
• There’s a reason for that queue outside Abercrombie & Fitch on Fifth Avenue. It’s so you feel you’ve just got into the VIP section of a nightclub and you are therefore cool and amazing and worth spending a lot of money on. It works.
• Some of the rooms at the Waldorf Astoria (cheap deal, long story) have BOUDOIRS. Actual BOUDOIRS – like a room with mirrors that’s bigger than your bathroom and where you can pose about and put stuff that won’t fit in your bedroom. They are, as it turns out, essential. Every hotel room should have one.
• Starbucks chocolate and banana smoothie has to be tasted to be believed.
• There’s a reason for that queue outside the Empire State Building. Too many people want to visit it. Go early. Or just admire it wistfully from Bryant Park, like we did. But going early is probably better.
• The best and biggest Zara is on 34th Street, near Macy’s, and is a reasonable way of cheering yourself up after you flunked the queue for the Empire State Building.
• Never try and catch a cab from Fifth Avenue to Times Square in the rain. Unless you want to see a lot of New York cab drivers laughing.
• Bear in mind that a rainy day (or two – did I mention it rained?) may alter Oliver Stone’s filming schedule. Which will naturally mean that the rising star you were hoping to see is stuck in the Adirondacks when she should be having coffee with you in SoHo. But you knew this. You were prepared. And there’s always email.
• Before you go to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum (which by the way holds over 45,000 costumes including Chanel’s Little Black Dress), check that there IS a Costume Institute that week. There wasn’t when we went. No exhibition. No permanent display. Zip. Niente. Nada. How can they DO that? I’m a big big fan of the Met, as are the other 4 million people who visit each year, but somebody needs to start a petition. The V&A can manage it. Good grief.
• FAO Schwarz is as good as they say. Lots of toys. Lots of space for wandering around and admiring toys (not as crowded as Hamleys). How we got out with only some Lego and a stuffed Elmer the Elephant, I’ll never know. (Note – this polar bear was more photogenic than Elmer. And reminded us of the real thing over the road in Central Park. Yes, really. They have polar bears in Central Park. That global warming …)
• Burger Heaven does what it says on the tin.
• MoMa is divine. Especially with teenagers soaking up all the 20th century American art like a sponge. And no finer moment can any stepmother have than when her 13 year-old stepdaughter casually recognises a Cy Twombly from across the room (thank you, Tate Modern last year). And the courtyard, with the pink and orange sculptures and the Picasso goat, is the nicest possible place to go and take the weight off your feet after too much window shopping along Fifth Avenue.
• A visit to Tiffany can be pretty much ruined by a grumpy man in the lift: ‘5th floor? There is no 5th floor’ – meaning ‘there is one, I can see the button for it too, but the likes of you are not allowed to go there. You meant the 4th floor, you tourist-woman’. Even if you weren’t going to buy anything anyway. I bet they never did that to Audrey Hepburn.
• But even rain and grumpy lift attendants can’t stop New York from being one of my favourite destinations. Oh, and when the sun finally comes out on your last day and the blue sky goes ta-DAH between the buildings, the city is GORGEOUS.

• The Chinese food at JFK departures is yummy.

Foxy lady

Now, there’s a picture of a lady on a bike with a fox round her shoulders on Scott Shuman’s SartoriaList blog at the moment (and when I say ‘fox’, I don’t mean ‘fox fur stole’, I mean ‘fox’. Dead. But definitely the whole fox) and it has 126 comments, not surprisingly.

What is surprising, though, is that as you read through the comments there’s an emerging consensus that she looks great, and as long as the fox is vintage, that’s OK. Nobody’s pretending it’s not REALLY CONTROVERSIAL, but the sort of people who read Scott’s blog tend to think that’s a good thing, and she’s carried it off well, and please don’t throw paint at her.

Most fascinatingly, one of the commentators – one of the few to state she’s a vegetarian and disapproves in principle – actually likes the fact that the animal still has its head and feet (which many others don’t), because it’s sort of respectful to the fox: it shows it was once an animal, and not just a piece of fabric-in-waiting.

My own feelings about fur are mixed. I loathe being out in cities where fur is unnecessary, but everyone has the latest mink because the button positioning changed last season (you know who you are, Milan). But I don’t have the slightest problem with Siberian women dressing in it from head to toe. And I have a secret yearning to be allowed to like vintage. But can I? According to this blog, I can, but I’m still not sure.

Some things are more certain, though. The lady in question is not exactly skeletal. In fact, she’s nicely upholstered, as PG Wodehouse would say. And that’s getting the thumbs-up too. This is unquestionably a Good Thing.

Everybody, by the way, loves the bike.

Fancy that

Today will go down in Bennett history as a great Halloween.

This is largely because I really don’t like Halloween – or rather what it’s become, with merchandising opportunities, orange everywhere (ew), too many sweets and scary children wandering around the streets, high on E numbers, looking for trouble. But this year the eight year-old is away and I’m left with two children who are too old and sophisticated to care and one who is too young to know better (and will blame me later for all the chances he missed, but hey, that’s later and now is now).

AND tonight, for the first time ever on Halloween, my husband and I have been invited to a party, and better still, the hosts are Americans and know how to do these things properly and it’s a FANCY DRESS party. I LOVE fancy dress parties. Most of the British people I know are too cool and repressed to do fancy dress properly, but if asked nicely by Americans, I have a feeling they will make an effort, as will we.

My husband, who is six foot five, is going as a vampire, and has described his black-jacketed-white-open-necked-shirted-with-a-trickle-of-blood outfit to me and he will be gorgeous. I get the chance to wear my new sparkly Abercrombie tee-shirt and my very old Jasper Conran dinner jacket from Debenhams, and Morticia Addams hair, and I can’t wait.

So come this evening, the children will be at home watching X-Factor and the grown-ups will be out on the streets, in their fancy dress, off to a party. This is Halloween as it should be. Happy days.

Good news, bad news

First the good news.

Vogue and 10 have decided to mention the Threads hardback, with its Giles Deacon cover design, on their websites.

YAY YAY YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I simply can’t believe that, when I sat in my little library making all this stuff up last year (OK – doing lots and lots of research … but basically making up a fairy story about fashion that I wished I could have read when I was about 14) it would one day end up being talked about by Vogue. And that 10 would be inspired enough to make up their own version of Giles’s design (he’s just Giles to us, dah-lings), featuring his face. It’s beyond strange. You write a fairy tale and your own fairy tale comes true right in front of your eyes.

And I’ve just been talking to Ann Ceprynski at Matthew Williamson, and she likes book 2! And she recommended hot fashion places to visit in New York. Where I’m going next week!!!

OK, enough good news. Now for the not-so-good news.

Not doing my talk at the Hay Festival’s London weekend after all. Great shame, but these things happen. Not me pulling out and doing a diva strop, though, I promise. And won’t be at Hatchards this time. Sigh.

BUT

I will still be at Harrods, on Saturday, at 3 pm, armed with pink signing pens and wearing my neon pink tights, so if you want your very own copy of Threads with its Giles Deacon cover, AS RECOMMENDED BY VOGUE AND 10, and you don’t live on the other side of the world (sorry, Emily and Sean and FiL), and you don’t want to buy it online or at your nearest bookshop, I’d love to see you.

An Education

Nothing is more boring than when an author says ‘Oh, you should see what goes on in real life. I’ve only hinted at it in my (extremely over the top) fiction, but doing my research I discovered it’s MUCH better/worse/more depraved/whatever.’

However.

I decided to write about a twelve year-old who’s really good at something and becomes a recognised star in her field. And as the series develops, another character also gets a go at becoming an overnight sensation. It’s fiction. I’m totally making it up as I go along, because that’s what I do for a living and it’s really, really fun. But a reviewer recently said that you have to ’suspend a certain amount of disbelief’ and actually, the more I look into it, the more I’m coming to the conclusion that actually, you don’t. (I noticed that the same reviewer had just described Eoin Colfer’s newest addition to the Hitchiker’s Guide ‘trilogy’ which, if I’m not mistaken, includes VOGONS and TWIN-HEADED BETELGEUSIANS. No mention of disbelief suspension there. But I digress.)

I went to the London premiere of An Education this week – as you do, dah-ling – and saw Carey Mulligan give the performance that has got everyone in the film world calling her the new Audrey Hepburn (rightly), and has marked the start of what will be a stratospheric film career. Go and see her in this one, if you possibly can, but don’t worry if you can’t. She’ll be in Wall Street 2 next year, and every other movie they can shoehorn her into for the foreseeable future. And you won’t be disappointed.

Carey is 24 now, but was 22 when she made An Education, playing a 16 year-old schoolgirl attracted by the lifestyle of a shady older man. Before that, her claims to fame were Kitty in Pride and Prejudice, parts in Bleak House and Doctor Who, and Nina in The Seagull on Broadway last year. OK, that was pretty incredible and probably her biggest highlight so far, but it was a long way away, and not many of us got to see it.

She’s in every scene of An Education, acting alongside Dominic Cooper being sexy, Rosamund Pike being breathtakingly beautiful, Emma Thompson being sharp, mature, brittle and kind, and Alfred Molina being bluff, angry and frustrated. And in every scene you’re looking at Carey, at her knowing eyes and mobile, sardonic lips, and wondering what she’s going to think next, and wanting more.

I’d have enjoyed the film anyway. It’s got the early sixties, when my parents were growing up, getting married and having me. It’s got VERY BEAUTIFUL CLOTHES, especially when worn by Rosamund Pike or Carey, and I never have a problem with that. It’s got girls wanting to go to Oxford, then not wanting to go, then wondering why they should or shouldn’t go, and wanting to go to Paris, wear black, become an existentialist and say nothing. It’s got funny bits. It’s got characters with layer after layer of vulnerability and hope and regret. And did I mention the clothes?

But more than anything, it’s got a girl you won’t remember seeing before becoming a bona fide movie star in front of your very eyes.

I watched her afterwards, when the crowds had gone, walking back through a half-deserted Leicester Square with her friends (who by the way adore her because on top of everything else she’s a Very Nice Girl), in her designer frock and heels, and nobody was looking, apart from me. They were just a group of girls, going out together, laughing.

She’s not going to have that for much longer. She’s already papped in New York on a regular basis as she travels around with her new boyfriend, Shia LeBoef. Soon it will be worldwide. Especially after the magazine shoots she’s booked for, the Anna Wintour thumbs up, and the other movies she’s got coming out soon.

Six years ago, she was a boarder at Woldingham school, applying to drama school and getting turned down. It may take slightly longer than it does in my books, but it can happen. I’ll always remember when I stood in Leicester Square and watched that moment when it was about to start.

Saying of the day

Robbie Williams at the Roundhouse, introducing Feel:

‘It was my auntie’s favourite song and I’m sure she’s looking down on us now.’

Audience: ‘Aaaaaah.’

Robbie: ‘She’s not dead, she’s just really, really condescending.’

Go Robbie! Good to have you back!

For the full review in the Guardian, go here.

This week I am loving …

Things that make me smile a happy smile

• Reviewing Danyl Johnson’s first X-Factor audition on YouTube. Actually, it makes me cry, but it’s happy crying. That microphone bit, when he throws it from hand to hand … The bit when he bounces back to the spot he’s supposed to be standing on and grins. He’s enjoying everything about that audition. Love, love, love it. (Didn’t like his latest performance, by the way, but hey, 8 million views on YouTube can’t be wrong about that first one.)
• Charlie Brooker’s response in the Guardian to Jan Moir’s article on Stephen Gately in the Mail. Sometimes you just have to stop prejudice and innuendo in its tracks and call it what it is. If you can be relatively funny at the same time, it helps.
• The zine that Tavi Gevinson made for the pop up shop at Colette. (I’m so old I still call them maga-zines! Get me!) That girl is depressingly talented, but hey, I have a novel out so I can afford to be gracious.
• Emily Gale’s kitchen. She posted a photo to show how tidy it is, pre-her temporary housework ban so she can concentrate on writing. However, the photo merely reveals how gorgeous it is. I will now post a photo of my kitchen, so readers can compare and understand why I WANT Emily’s. (And no, I haven’t been doing a housework ban. Mine is just like this. But it does include my husband emptying the dishwasher WITHOUT BEING ASKED, so maybe I get extra points for that.)
• Strange connections. Who would guess that an ex-pupil at my son’s school would turn out to be friends with an about-to-be-Oscar-nominated actress, who is completely fabulous, is Anna Wintour’s new favourite person and is off to the London premiere of her film tonight … AS AM I!!! As research! Go my job!
• Girls and (their mothers) who write via the Threadsthebook website to say how much they’ve enjoyed the book. Go you!
• MY NEW SHED. Emily Gale may have a kitchen to die for, but I have a shed. I’ve had it for a little while, but we only managed to get the desk into it over the weekend. It is FREEZING COLD in there, because we haven’t got round to heating it yet, but it is GORGEOUS. It’s got my pens, and my books, and my papers, and my Danielle Scutt Barbie, and a view of the garden, and peace and quiet (apart from the sound of the squirrels overhead), and no wifi yet, so I can’t get distracted by blogging. (I’m doing this in the dining room.) That big, empty space at the back is where my MOOD BOARD is going to be. Not that I’m excited or anything. Roald Dahl, eat your heart out. Virginia Woolf, it is a room of my own and you would be proud of me. OK, so it’s also storage for the lawn mower and my husband’s power tool collection, but most of it is MINE. All I have to do now is sell about fifty million novels to pay for it.
• On the subject of homes, this table, which my brother made (and went on sale today at Purves & Purves. Oh wow). Yes, really. My brother is super-cool. Anyone who’s read Threads will suddenly be going ‘Aha!’. And you’re right.
• Things beginning with ‘H’. On Saturday, I’m talking at the Hay Festival event in London, then signing books in Hatchards and Harrods. I feel like a song from My Fair Lady. Please come and say hello, and tell me which are your favourite bits of the book. And whether or not you’re going to enter the competition to go to London Fashion Week and see your dress made by Tammy. And your ideas for making the world a better place.

Oh, and if you can persuade a friend to buy a book, that would be wonderful. Donations to Save The Children (hardback) or the Sophia Bennett Shed Benevolent Fund (paperback). You choose.