Monthly Archives: July 2012

On… emailing

Sometimes I send out an email update. It is an extremely exclusive email list. If you’d like to receive it, just email me with ‘Email me!’ in the title. Yep, that’s the admissions process.
Warning: it is not, ever, as monthly as I say it will be, and it is usually a lot of drivel. But it’s charming drivel. Maybe. Or maybe it’s not. I don’t know. (Bites finger, looks confused.)

This was the email I sent out this week:

Bonjour, mes petites!

That’s totes French, ladykats. (I am dangerously close to saying ‘totes’ without irony. And how deeply typical of me to start an email to you all and have already segued into a totally pointless aside. Sometimes I don’t know how to end parentheses. I get all carried away with the talking-behind-my-hand mystery of it all. Okay. Enough already. Hanging up…. Now. No, I really am. Now.) (Psych! No, okay, I really am.)

This is just a quick note as I’m on the home stretch to finish the second book in my upcoming book series. The first two books in the series will be published by St Martins Press in 2013. You probably know it as Union Street, and you might know we’ve been thinking about alternative titles for a while. (God, I hate thinking of titles almost more than names. Rick in The Dating Detox was called JJ for a long time, then Leo, and then finally Rick. Dave was called Felix and then James and then finally Dave. Anyway, I digress. Again.)

BUT! I am 95% sure that we’ll call it The Best Of Anything. I LOVE that title. It’s a play on The Best Of Everything by Rona Jaffe, one of the books that inspired me to start the series (it’s about young women working in New York in the 50s – think Mad Men, but set in publishing, it’s wonderful). I’ll announce it formally on the ol’ blog when it’s certain, but that’s what we’re thinking. (Everyone else will now probably want to change to something like Sextards! And you’ll be like, goddamnit, Gemma is a liar.)

Apart from writing, I’ve been travelling, doing family stuff and, erm, writing more… books and screenplays and magazine articles, oh my. That’s seriously about it. So if you emailed me lately and I haven’t replied yet, I promise my reply is coming. I’ve just gotta bash out the last 15,000 words of the second book in the series, and do one more draft of this other thing and maybe tweak one other thing. And then it’s emailgasms all round, baby. (Ew.)

God, I’m boring. So let’s talk about something else. What TV are you watching lately? I wake at 4am or 5am to write (I know, but trust me, it actually works) so come 8pm I’m toast and can no longer type. At that point, even reading is too hard. But television is my beheffeff.

So Fox and I have just started watching Revenge, which is basically The Count Of Monte Cristo with a female protagonist and set in the Hamptons. And it is AWESOME. Fox keeps saying ‘this is NOT awesome’ and then I start watching the next episode without him and he gets all antsy. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Mad Men, True Blood, Community, Bored to Death, The Good Wife, New Girl (love love love this show the most, I want to marry it and have its Schmidtty little babies)… these are my usual suspects. I want to watch the new Mandy Kaling show. I like the cut of her jib. I want to watch Smash, too. I avoided it as it sounded too Glee-like, but everyone says it’s funny as hell. I watched Glee for one season, loved it, tuned back in for the first episode of the second season and said ‘was this show always so [DELETED] lame?’ (See what I did there? I censored my own swearword. Just in case it gets you into trouble if you gave me your work email. That’s just the kind of gal I am.)

So there we have it, folks. A long email, basically about television.

Gem x

On… good dirty books

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Everyone is talking about Fifty Shades of Fucking Grey (that was the original title, you know).

I only read the first chapter. I couldn’t bear to continue, it’s so poorly written and edited. The dialogue is pathetic. The girl is such a loser. I’m not surprised that the dude wants to beat her senseless, after just a few pages I wanted to give her a good slap, too.

But like I said, everyone is talking about it. Everyone is reading it. So the reason must be that everyone is after a bit of woo-woo, and by ‘woo-woo’ I mean ‘banging’. Hey! No judgments here. We’ve all got fun bits, we may as well play with them.

Anyway.

After thinking about it, I decided that the people who are wriggling with delight at the descriptions of banging in FSOFG have never read any other dirty books. Ever. Because there’s a lot of them out there, dudes, and just about all of them are better than that. Even the shit is better than that.

Fanny Hill aka Memoirs Of A Woman Of Pleasure. Think Jane Austen meets Fifty Shades Of Grey. A story about a girl who accidentally becomes a prostitute and all the sexcapades she gets up to.

Judith Krantz. I was reading Jude, as I call her, long before I even had my first kiss, which is kind of fucked up now that I think about it. But damn, she writes a good sex scene. Try Princess Daisy, or Scruples. You can get all of these in the US, but for some reason they’re out of print in the UK – probably because the UK publishing industry has, by all accounts, decided to stop actually publishing books apart from FSOFG – but the wondrous Book Depository has the US editions and will deliver worldwide for free.

Shirley Conran. Lace. I don’t remember much about this book, I have a feeling it’s terrible. But I remember some deeply unhygienic and kinky shit with a goldfish.

The StoryOf O. Very famous, very weird book. It all gets a bit intense and if someone ever tried those moves with me they’d get a swift kick to the nuts, but everyone else in the world is clearly gagging to get beaten senseless by a stalker billionaire. So what the fuck do I know.

Jilly Cooper writes very funny sex scenes. Lines like ‘he dived into her bush as joyfully as an otter into a garden stream’ come to mind. (Bush! Awesome word.) Funny as hell, but probably won’t juice your orange, if you know what I mean. You should read Riders if you feel like laughing out loud.

And no, I don’t write sex scenes. It’s just not my bag, baby. If I did, I’d probably write something like ‘his cock was so angry I felt like giving it a cuddle and a cup of tea before continuing’ or ‘I came like a train, annoyingly late and not without a fair amount of stop-and-starts along the way’ or something like that. And that wouldn’t fry anyone’s burger, now, would it?

Anyone got any other recommendations?

EDIT: This is the funniest thing I have read in a long, long time. Thank you Lisa for sending it to me…

On… summer in France

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So, at the end of June we spent a week in Barcelona for a family wedding. Wow. I heart that city. Why the sweet hell didn’t I go there before I got hitched and knocked up and had a delicious-but-demanding baby in tow? I had a blast. That city was made to lose 48 hours in.

Then we drove to France, to Autignac, yes, village in A Girl Like You, and also, yes, the village my parents have a place in real life. (I used a fake village for the first few drafts, then I thought, fuck it, I’m thinking of Autignac, may as well be honest.)

So far, so classic family holiday…. the day starts with croissants and ends with rose, in between we take little trips to nearby towns and lovely lazy lunches. Well, I am not having that much rose, alas. I am drinking a lot of coffee and writing writing writing every moment the baby is sleeping. (No, writers don’t really get vacations. Someone once described it as constant homework, a nagging I-Should-Be-Writing feeling. One day I will take a month off. Maybe.)

My parents are besotted with Errol. First grandchild syndrome. They may try to get him bronzed. Errol ate anchovies for the first time and has never loved anything so much. Foxy was loudly horrified. (Foxy is generally loud, by the way. We have been asked to keep it down in restaurants all over the world. For a long time he convinced me that he was only loud because he was partially deaf in one ear, but he’s not. He’s just from a big family and knows how to get attention: be the loudest. I find a gentle ‘inside voices, darling’ helps. It’s so deliciously patronizing, too.)

What else have I done? I cried about Nora Ephron, then told myself I had no right to be so upset as I didn’t even know her, and then cried again anyway. I went through all my childhood books and picked out my favourites to keep forever. (Anne Of Green Gables, comment je t’aime.) I contemplated cutting my hair, which is insanely stupidly long at the moment, but then I decided to just put it in braids after the shower and enjoy a sort of Splash-Daryl-Hannah thing the rest of the time. I cut the sleeves off all my tshirts and flannel shirts and am utterly delighted with the results. There’s a touch of The Outsiders about it, a touch of Rob Lowe in St Elmo’s Fire, and I get to show off my baby-honed guns. (You want guns, my friends, pick up and put down a 10-kg 10-month-old baby eighty times a day. Incidentally, why did I waste so much time at the gym in my 20s? I swear it actually made me fatter as I was just so damn hungry all the time.)

Rob Lowe in St Elmo’s Fire. By the way I have watched this film about 80 times.

The Outsiders poster. Look at Tom Cruise trying to buff his guns. Hah. Dork.

Let’s see, what else… I just finished The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John LeCarre. I am totally digging the whole spy thang right now. I also just read Restless by WilliamBoyd and The Expats by Chris Pavone. I decided to go through a spy phase, as it’s so different to anything I would ever write and I thought it might teach me a bit about plotting, but I think I might be already over it. They were great books, particularly the LeCarre, they just lacked a certain something that I like in my novels… (If you have a favourite spy novel, by the way, please let me know. I’m still in the market for them.) Right now I’m reading The Star Machine by Jeanine Basinger, because I like me some Old Hollywood stories and I love her informal, witty tone of voice. And I’m about to start Paris In Love by Eloisa James which looks delicious. (All of those links take you to the Book Depository, by the way, a website that sends books anywhere in the world for free. It rocks. And no, I’m not being paid by them, I’m just tired of paying exorbitant delivery fees for things. Although, while we’re on the subject, if anyone wants to pay me to mention their brand in my books or blog, I’m down with that. Yes. I am a total whore.)

ANYWAY. I could blather on for hours like this, my friends, but I am sure you have better things to do. I know I should pick a topic and blog on it, you know, have opinions and shit, but honestly, sometimes I’d rather just have a chat.

Here are some photos of Autignac, taken this morning as we went to get bread, croissants and coffee. Just in case you’d like to see what it looks like. (I’m a terrible photographer. Good at spelling, though.)

(Do you like the totally arty croissant? Yeah. Thought you would.)

And in case you’d like to see us, here’s Errol and Fox and me in the pool. In black and white, because we thought it looked cool.

And Errol and me, alone. Sorry for the horrific hat. I bought it from some dude on the street in New York. It rolls up flat in a little cone. It’s my grandma hat.

Read more about French pharmacy stuff here. I am currently trialling a bunch of products so I will report back to you guys in a few days on more French Pharmacy Must Haves. God, I love me some French pharmacies.

PS: Edit. I read Paris In Love and my friends, I do not recommend it. The writing is fussy and self-indulgent. Every sentence is crafted to be as irritatingly long and flowery as possible. The tone of voice attempts arch and witty but is actually snide and superior. All in all, a cold book that is more in love with the idea of itself than Paris. I got to halfway through, the writer used the word ‘behoove’ and I thought ‘this is a joke’ and put it down. I don’t normally post negative reviews of books, as I know that it is so upsetting to the writer. But this book has had so many bizarre rave reviews, and this woman has such a high opinion of herself, that my little narky one won’t matter.