Farewell Agent Yeeles

 First of all, apologies for my deathly silence on this blog.  I was finishing my manuscript off and I got so completely IN to what I was doing that I let things slip.  Things like eating lunch.  And going to bed at a normal hour.  And switching my head off and going to sleep once I got there.  And writing blogs.  But now I’ve actually got my manuscript finished - give or take a bit of tidying up.  And I’m totally back on top of things.

And this month, I have to say GOODBYE and a big fat massive THANK YOU to Hayley Yeeles, my (ex) agent at Pollinger Ltd, who has looked after me for the last four years.  As well as sorting out contracts and explaining to me what CONSUMER FACING means and nagging me to have multiple social network accounts and a BIGGER INTERNET PRESENCE,  Agent Yeeles - aka Yeelesy - has been a key player in the production of all four of the novels I’ve written in the last four years.  She’s been one of my top cheerleaders and has frequently chipped in with useful suggestions and helpful advice about what the YOUTH are into.  (In this area, she’s been particularly handy because – although she doesn’t acknowledge it - she’s still practically a baby herself.)  And thanks to Yeelesy, I now know a lot of useful things that I never knew before. Stuff like:-

1. There is a Dutch band from Kortrijk called Goose.
2. The Hunger Games is actually a really good book.
3. JLS put their faces on all sorts of interesting consumer products.
4. The Cittie of Yorke in Holborn is an AMAZING old Victorian gin palace.  That bad photo is us having a drink in one of the snug drinking booths last week.  I’m on the left looking old and fat and Yeelesy is on the right looking like a cartoon character.  (Her words, to be fair.)  In real life, she actually looks NOTHING AT ALL like this.

But sometimes, Yeelesy has made me feel like the baby.  After writing three Lottie Biggs books, Yeelesy talked me out of several panic attacks and calmly told me I was quite capable of writing something different.  As usual, she was bang on DEAD RIGHT because I totally have actually.

The reason we’re now parting company is because Yeelesy has decided she’s had enough of being freezing cold and she’s heading off to Australia.  I shall miss her.  I’ll even sort of miss that bit where we stood around in dodgy doorways of Holborn or King’s Cross while she stopped to have a fag.

Yeelesy, you’ve been a tremendous amount of FUN and tremendously PATIENT and tremendously HELPFUL and tremendously GENEROUS with your time.

THANKS KID AND HAVE A FAB TIME IN AUSTRALIA.

Right.  Sentimental mush over.  I’m still represented by Pollinger Literary Agency and my new agent is Joanna Devereux – who I met last week and who is very lovely and who seems quite happy enough with this cold chilly island that is Britain.  So onwards to 2012. 

HAVE A GOOD CHRISTMAS AND SEE YOU ALL IN THE NEW YEAR.

May Blog

This month I’m going to talk about driving.  I like driving.  Even though I know it’s a non-environmentally friendly thing to say, I have to admit that I like it better than sitting on a train.  Don’t get me wrong, I like trains too but only if I’m travelling through somewhere interesting - like the Austrian Alps or Siberia.  And only if I’m with someone else so that I don’t have to sit next to a random stranger and only if I’m in First Class.  And as I’m rarely – if ever – going anywhere more interesting than Norwich to London and as I’m often by myself and as I can’t actually afford First Class unless it’s a weekend upgrade for a tenner, I prefer to sit in my car and drive.  It’s less boring.  And I can do things I can’t do on a train.  Like talk to myself and sing out loud and chain-chew endless Starbursts without feeling that anyone is giving me looks of disgust.  (This is only safely possible though if all the wrappers are removed before travelling  in fifth gear down the outside lane of the M11 – otherwise it’s very dangerous.)

But the other day, I should have taken the train.  I was travelling down to Surrey for the first ever Surrey Heath Literary Festival.  It was a lovely event, held over a few days in Camberley, and it was especially interesting for me because I’d never been to that part of the world before - aside from Heathrow airport I suppose, but that’s probably not representative of the wider area. And once I was there I had a very lovely time - but getting there was like the plot of some really terrible comedy road novel thingy.  With me as the fed-up, frustrated, frocked-off central character.

It took me five and a half hours to travel 180 miles!!!

If the wind was blowing in the right direction I could have got to New York quicker!

So first up, there I was whizzing down the A11 feeling pleased with myself for having a good head-start on the rush hour and then I realised the fast-approaching slow-moving traffic ahead of me was actually not moving at all.   After slamming on my brakes, I was then stuck in a traffic queue for over an hour which was taking me on a diversion away from the direction I wanted.  Apparently my direction was not possible because a lorry had shed its load of turkey livers all over the dual carriageway.  This kind of thing only ever happens in East Anglia.

Eventually I picked up the right route again and was once again happily munching Starbursts and singing along to Random Play-all.  And then I hit the M25.  It was about five o’clock.  I’ve driven on the M25 loads of times but I think it must always have been at a different time of the day.

It took me about 3 hours to go about 47 miles!

What’s the point of that?

I’m not sure that I got out of second gear once.

My Starbursts were all gone.  My head was aching.  I was starting to need the loo.  And then Nancy Sinatra started singing ‘Bang Bang, I shot you down, Bang Bang, you hit the ground…’  It was a very bleak moment in my car.  I had to shuffle Nancy on and look for something more cheerful.  There aren’t many occasions these days that I want to listen to Technotronic but that was one of them.

Anyway, I have a plan to reduce traffic on the M25.  Apart from emergency service vehicles, I think only black cars should be allowed to use it.  This means that London taxis can still use it and hearses and statesmen like Barack Obama in his armour-plated ‘Beast’ and also me.  Cars of other colours should be made to choose another route.  M25 congestion problem solved.

I did get to Camberley eventually – feeling totally frazzled but was much cheered by a Thai curry in the lovely company of my agent, Agent Yeelesy of Pollinger, and her friend Nicky and Lesley Polinger herself.  So thanks you three for unfrazzling me!

One last M25 related thought though.  There’s a big flyover somewhere between the M4 turn-off and the Cambridge turn-off and someone has sprayed across it in massive letters GIVE PEAS A CHANCE.

Why?

How?

Please email me if it was you. I won’t tell the police or anything I’m just interested.

(By the way, I didn’t take that photo – that would have been as dangerous as unwrapping Starbursts. I’ve shared it from the internet. There’d be a million times more cars in the picture if I’d taken it.)

Hello this month to the kids at Collingwood College who I met in Camberley and also thanks once again to everyone who has sent me an email in the last month.  If I haven’t replied to you yet I will.

P.S I’ve changed the picture of me on my home page to acknowledge the fact that I’ve got three years older.

Rabbit Riches!!!!

Last Friday, clutching a copy of my latest manuscript in my hands, I caught the train to London to talk about some serious WRITER STUFF over a lovely lunch. My lunch meeting was with Emma - the editor I am working with from Pan Macmillan - and Agent Yeelesy who looks after me from Pollinger Literary Agency. Neither Agent Yeelesy nor me had actually ever met Emma before and we were both very happy to discover that she is extremely sweet and lovely and actually even HALF FRENCH!

After Emma left us, Agent Yeelesy and I enjoyed a nice drink in the sunshine. Feeling lucky, I was suddenly overcome by the urge to gamble an entire pound on a scratch card. Everyone knows that scratch cards are for fools and this is probably why I feel comfortable with them. I won five pounds! Immediately, I swapped my winning card for five more scratch cards called RABBIT RICHES and this time, I had two winning cards!!! For one pound each!!! So I’ve kept one and Agent Yeelesy has the other one and hopefully one or other or both of us will swap it for a card which will win us heaps of money so we can run away and live in the sun.

In other rabbit news, Bunny Irma is malting heavily at the moment and it is impossible to pick her up without breathing in clouds of fluff – which is not nice.

Later this week, I’m off to Cardiff to do some writing workshops with the kids there and I’m very much looking forward to seeing my old friends and having a mooch around one of my favourite places on the planet J

This month I’m saying HELLO to my English students at Paston College, Norfolk who all did so marvellously in their A Levels and also a big HI to Clair in Llanishen and SALUT to Anaïs in Belgium.