Sarra Manning's Blog, page 3

Hey!

To celebrate finally hitting the big 5000 followers on Twitter and to thank you for suffering through my many updates on Miss Betsy I’m posting a deleted scene from Unsticky.

It was written very early on and was inspired by a dinner at Bette’s in Chelsea, New York when it was the scene place to go. As I waited for the loo, I saw the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. Or ever will see. She was with a short, paunchy, obnoxious dude in a bad suit who wasn’t fit to kiss the hem of her frock. Unsticky was still in my head but that dinner and that trip to New York where I went to places frequented by investment bankers and their very stunning, very young girlfriends, really coalesced the whole trophy girlfriend/sex and money thing for me.

So, enjoy!

Sarra x

Vaughn didn’t get reservations at Butter for Saturday night. But Grace took it in her stride because Vaughn had managed to get a table at The Waverly Inn instead. Not just any table, but Graydon Carter’s own booth at the back of a tiny, amber-coloured room the size of her old bedsit. Apparently Graydon was in LA or Timbuktu. Grace didn’t much care because he wasn’t in New York and her arse was currently perched on his personal banquette as she tried to discreetly gawp at the other diners in the conveniently placed mirror so that Graydon always knew what was going on.

“You’re bouncing, Grace,” Vaughn said mildly, but a faint smile lifted up the corners of his mouth because she’d told him five minutes earlier that this was even better than getting promoted or the time he’d bought her a new Marc Jacobs bag unprompted. “Stop it.”

“I can’t help it. This is the high point of my whole existence.”

Grace wasn’t surprised when Vaughn rolled his eyes. She glanced across the room again, hoping to spot a stray Scarlett or Gwyneth. She’d even have settled for a Sienna. At a back table were a group of thirty something guys cultivating a scruffy, laidback hipster chic and the three girls who were with them may have been the three most beautiful girls Grace had ever seen in real life. But there was something wrong with the picture – one of the men was bald, one had a huge beergut and the other one had a face that even his mother must have found hard to love. And despite the heavy make-up and designer dresses, not one of the girls looked as if she was out of her teens.

“Don’t stare, Grace,” Vaughn drawled, raising his glass towards Baldie, or was it Fattie. Both of them waved back.

“How come you know them?” Grace asked, then groaned theatrically. “Don’t tell me. You charged them obscene amounts of money for some bizarre light installation.”

“Actually it was two Gavin Turks and a Banksy,” he said lightly.

“Are they, like, hedge fund managers or something?”

“They either are or they aren’t. There’s no like about and they aren’t. The three of them created a puerile college humour website and social networking platform that they sold to Google for a small fortune. I think it was about forty million dollars.”

Grace sucked in a breath. “Fucking hell!”

“My thoughts exactly,” Vaughn had been very twitchy tonight; he’d had a day of meetings that hadn’t gone well, but now he was undoing his top two buttons, which was A Good Sign.

“And who are the girls?”

Vaughn shrugged. “Standard issue MAWs. Model, actress…”

“Whatever,” Grace finished for him. “I guess forty million dollars makes even early male pattern baldness and a flabby gut look attractive.”

“If girls like them want to be with men like that, then what of it? Really, Grace, I’m not sure why this conversation is making you frown quite so ferociously.”

Neither did Grace, but her unfailing good cheer couldn’t last for ever. She sank back on her banquette and nibbled at the edge of her thumbnail. Did no one ever simply date anymore? Or was it that now she was fully inducted into the club, she was better at spotting other members? “But they’re not girlfriends, are they? They’re mistresses.”

Vaughn gave her a long, slow look. Like she’d surprised him and he was surprised that she’d surprised him. “No,” he said finally. “They’re girlfriends. Whatever reasons they may or may not have for being with men twice their age and weight, they’d all beg to differ.”

Grace rested her elbows on the table because that was all right if you’d already had you entrée and you weren’t sure if you were going to have pudding. “So if you’d just asked me out and I’d said yes and we’d started dating, and with you being older than me and, like, loaded, would I be your girlfriend or your mistress?”

Vaughn rolled his eyes again. “You’re in a very odd mood this evening. I’m not sure I like it.” He reached across the table and stroked a finger along the back of her hand and that shivery feeling she always got rippled up her spine. “It’s better this way though, Grace, don’t you think? Less confusion, less room for misunderstandings, hmmm?”

“I suppose,” Grace sighed, because her undefined thing with Vaughn was still confusing and prone to misunderstanding from the Noahs and the Lilys and all the other people who made up the outside world. Still, the Lily’s and Noah’s weren’t sitting at Graydon Carter’s personal booth, so Grace definitely had the better end of the deal. It was a struggle, but she found her happy place again. “Technically, if we were on London time, it would be Treat Sunday now so do you want to share an Apple Crisp for pudding?”

“If it’s Treat Sunday then I don’t see why we have to share.” Vaughn huffed and he was faking the outrage, but Grace didn’t know if he was trying to distract her from asking any more difficult questions or if he was really indignant about having to go halves on dessert.

Either way, she couldn’t resist punching him on the shoulder as she stood up. “Either we share or I’m skipping having waffles for brunch tomorrow,” she hissed, because sometimes her ability to withhold sugar was about the only power play she had. “I’m going to have a fag.”

When she got back Vaughn was deep in conversation with the couple on the next table; a woman with a loud Long Island honk, which had previously made Vaughn flinch every time she opened her mouth, and her husband who did something with diamonds. Grace wasn’t sure what exactly, but she smiled politely, as she sat down.

Vaughn was swapping cards with Mr Bling then turned back to Grace. “Play your cards right and I might just hook you up with that tiara,” he said, which Grace thought was tasteless considering the conversation they’d just had. “I ordered pudding,” he added as Grace wriggled to get purchase on the leather seat in her slippy satin skirt.

Of course, Vaughn ate most of the Apple Crisp, Grace had to fight for every spoonful of vanilla gelato. Unusually, Vaughn didn’t want to linger over coffee and brandy either but asked for the bill and signed it, without even checking the final amount.

“Let’s get out of here,” Vaughn said, already helping Grace out of her chair.

“I just need to freshen up,” she said, as they came face to face with one of the couples from the back table, the man already hailing Vaughn like a long lost brother and not someone who’d stung him for marked-up graffiti art.

“This is Marisa,” Baldie said proudly, presenting his companion with a flourish.

Marisa was so stunning that all Grace could do was stare as Vaughn introduced her to Baldie with absolutely no flourish. Marisa had shiny, flicky straight hair, skin so flawless it looked airbrushed and was wearing a plunging Viktor & Rolf dress that showed a good two thirds of her breasts, which owed their awesome aerodynamics either to her barely pubescent years or a really good surgeon.

“I’ll get your coat,” Vaughn murmured, leaving Grace with Marisa, who must have needed to pee too though Grace couldn’t believe she possessed something as prosaic as a full bladder. Marisa hadn’t acknowledged Grace’s presence in any way and now she propped herself against the wall, as they waited in the narrow alcove, like her beauty weighed so heavily that she couldn’t stand up straight. It was hard not to look at her in the same way that it was hard not to look at a beautiful pair of shoes or a Narciso Rodriguez dress.

And OK, her upper lip was the tiniest bit too short but that was just clutching at ugly straws and staring at that perfect arch where her sooty eyelashes swept down or the elegant curve of her cheekbones made Grace feel like a blowsy, thrown together girl that didn’t deserve the good fortune that was currently getting her coat.

Even Marisa dropping the hauteur long enough to ask Grace if she thought that they should bang on the bathroom door and ask the current occupant what the hell they were doing, couldn’t pierce the pity bubble that Grace found herself in. Especially as Marisa decided that they should bond, which meant showing Grace pictures of the adorable spaniel puppy that “me and Archie just got from the pound.”

Vaughn had been right. Marisa expected guys to fall in love with her. Rich guys. Even if she was selling her beauty to the highest bidder, she got flourishes and puppies out of it and Grace? Well, she had a credit card, the best table at The Waverly Inn and an expiration date stamped on her forehead that was only visible to Vaughn. Because Grace wasn’t beautiful or smart or whole enough to be anyone’s long haul girl.

And when she got back to the car to find Vaughn waiting impatiently for her, he said, “For God’s sake, Grace, stop pouting. You look like you’ve had filler injected into your bottom lip.” Grace knew for a fact that Archie would never, ever say anything like that to Marisa.

It turned out that Vaughn had wanted to get back to the apartment for a midnight conference call to Beijing. He took it in the study, which left Grace free to make her own fun. Grace wasn’t sure when making her own fun, which mostly involved mentally planning her Sunday shopping expedition to Soho, became snooping.

She’d never snooped before. Not even when she’d been left on her own for days in the Hampstead house – she’d been brought up to respect other people’s privacy. But then she’d also been brought up to save herself for the man she married, never drink to excess and strive to be all that she could be; all things that she’d failed to deliver on, so having a quick rummage in Vaughn’s drawers wasn’t so terrible.

Apart from a half-eaten bar of Green & Blacks, which she bet Gustav knew nothing about, her search proved futile. There wasn’t anything incriminating in the bureau either, no porn stash under the mattress and absolutely no photos of the ex-wife or the women he’d had arrangements with before Grace. She could hear Vaughn’s tread coming down the hall and quickly arranged herself decoratively on the bed, her heart pounding, her cheeks stained with red. Vaughn didn’t notice that anything was wrong but maybe that was because Grace was on her knees, unbuckling his belt, before he had a chance to ask why she had such a guilty expression on her face.

I’ve been thinking a lot about sex and teenage girls this week.

It’s hard not to when the press have been so gleefully and salaciously reporting on all the details of the Jeremy Forrest abduction case. When the new Children’s Laureate, Malorie Blackman, has had the same papers clutching their collective pearls, at her suggestion that there needs to be more sex in YA novels, to offset the damaging messages teenagers are receiving from the prevalence of porn online.

Talking of which, there was also the Robin Thicke video for his number one single, Blurred Lines, which features three fully clothed man, several nude girls cavorting with children’s toys, having their hair brushed, smoke blown in their faces and told “I’ll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two”.

Meanwhile Jinan Younis, a seventeen year old girl who started a feminist society at her school in response to how she saw her friends suffering as a direct result of their gender was met with responses like “feminism doesn’t mean they don’t like the D, they just haven’t found one to satisfy them yet,” from her male classmates.

So, is it any wonder that I can’t stop thinking about sex and teenage girls?

The teenage girl is not a one-size-fits-all entity. When I was fifteen, the girls in my class were busy dealing with their newfound sexuality in different ways. Half of them channelled all these new feelings that they weren’t sure what to do with into fancying some fairly innocuous boybander. I love that there is no power mightier than thousands of girls screaming their heads off at the 02 or Manchester arenas.

Then there were the other fifteen year old girls who all dated men in their twenties because they had money and their own cars. By and large, they didn’t seem unduly threatened by having a relationship with someone older than them. On the contrary, they got off on the social cachet and would callously dump their twenty something boyfriends on a whim. Besides, have you ever spent time with a fifteen year old boy? You have? Then you’d understand why no self-respecting fifteen year old girl would want to go out with one of them. But this is why we have the age of consent to protect all the different types of teenage girls, from the shy ones who write Mrs Harry Styles on their pencil cases to the ones who seem worldly and sophisticated because they date older men, but who you wouldn’t trust to do their homework unsupervised.

When I was fifteen, I vacillated between the two camps. Most of the passion and yearning that turned me inside out on an hourly basis was directed at Morrissey from The Smiths and writing him heartfelt letters when I should have been doing GCSE coursework. But there were other times when I was made painfully aware that I existed in this strange hinterland of not quite a girl, not yet a woman but I didn’t have Britney Spears to articulate that for me.

I had the awkward fumbles at parties that are a teen rite of passage and which left me wondering what all the fuss was about. But there was also the time when I was trying on a dress in a very cool London boutique on a quiet morning when I was bunking off school. All of a sudden the changing room curtain was pulled back by the male shop assistant. Stuff happened, partly because I was curious and partly because I was suddenly in this strange situation that I didn’t have the experience or the maturity to extricate myself from. Afterwards, he let me have the dress for free and I remember walking out of the shop feeling more powerful than I think I’ve ever done in my life. It didn’t fuck me up. It didn’t ruin me. For a week or two, it lifted me up from being an overweight, self-loathing fifteen year old.

But there was another encounter with a friend’s dad in a bathroom that filled me with dread and revulsion. There were times I was flashed at. Times I was told that I might be worth a go once I was legal. Times I was groped and mauled on crowded tube trains, while I was in my school uniform. And those incidents did fuck me up and made me feel that I wasn’t in charge of my own body or what happened to it.

All this was in a time before the internet. Before Facebook. Before selfies. Before the pressure on teenage girls to look sexy without daring to be sexually active, because then you’re a slag and a slut and asking for it, was at the epidemic proportions that it is now.

Also, it was a time when the teen mag ruled supreme. We might not have had Twitter, but we had Just Seventeen. We were armed with information and knowledge. Told time and time again “to be safe, to be sussed, but sex under sixteen is illegal”.

By the time I was working on Just Seventeen in the late 90s, the amount of information and knowledge we could arm our readers with was constantly under threat. I used to hate going into work on the days that a backbench Tory MP desperate for some column inches would rail against the hot bed of vice and iniquity that were teen mags, while making it clear that they’d never actually picked up a teen mag and read it. In between fake ads for Leonardo DiCaprio commemorative plates and perfectly innocent articles on what to do to make your crush notice you, we still had problem pages, we still had articles on sexual health, we still ran real life pieces on relationships and told our readers that “to be sussed was a must but sex under sixteen is illegal”. It was very obvious to me that the main problem the Tory MPs had was our acknowledgement that teenage girls could be sexual beings and that they needed advice and support on dealing with that.

I used to sit on TMAP, the Teenage Magazine Advisory Panel, with other teen mag representatives and some genuinely well intentioned do-gooders and try to explain to them that the Department Of Health ran ads targetting our readers to inform them about sexual health issues in our magazine that we couldn’t run as editorial because the government would try to shut us down.

But now the internet and mobile phones have killed off teen magazines. What they haven’t killed off the need for teenagers to have somewhere to go to get frank, impartial information about everything from their boobs to fancying their best friends to whether they can get pregnant if they do it standing up. The internet is a big, unregulated place where it’s impossible to filter information – which is why a lot of sex education now comes from porn films – so teenagers think that pubic hair is an abomination, blow jobs are mandatory and if you’re not having multiple orgasms then you’re a freak of nature.

In the wider world, from RnB videos to the Daily Mail sidebar of shame to University Facebook pages set up to discuss how rape-able the female student body is, teenagers, boys and girls, are taught that women’s bodies are objects to be pored over, discussed, criticised, used, discarded, belittled. And I’m not going to apologise for coming across as all second wave feminism here. We are sliding dangerously back to a place that I never thought we’d get to, not after all our Take Back The Night marches and riot grrrl fanzines.

I cannot imagine a worse time to be a teenage girl. When eating disorders and self-harming are at an all-time high. When girls are under pressure to send sexy pics of themselves to their male classmates or risk being labelled frigid and tight. And when if you are raped or sexually assaulted, it was probably your fault for drinking or going for a walk with a couple of boys or wearing a short skirt. The onus is still on girls to protect themselves because boys and men are unable to prevent themselves from doing what comes naturally when confronted by the mind-melding power of a female body. It would be much simpler to send out one clear message: don’t rape people.

So, I think teenage girls are getting their rawest deal and this is why I’m so passionate and committed to writing YA novels. My characters have sex. Big whoop. They have awkward, messy teenage sex that causes awkward, messy feelings. They talk about sex. They learn that sex has emotional consequences, good and bad. And sometimes they have sex just because it feels really nice.

That to me is a healthy, important message for my readers. I doubt very much that reading one of my novels has ever forced a teenage girl to go out and have sex but I absolutely know for certain that when they did finally get round to going out and having sex, what they’d read in my novels helped a little bit. And yes, I’ve had reviewers describe the sex in my last YA novel, Adorkable as “gross” and “nasty”. But the gross comment came from a thirteen year old girl and if she thinks sex is gross then I’m happy about that as she isn’t going to be having it anytime soon. The “nasty’ came from a woman in America and says more about her attitude to sex, than it does to my decision to write about two teenagers above the age of consent establishing clear boundaries before they got down to it.

There’s a lot of reactionary nonsense talked about sex in YA novels, but I’m far more worried about the teenagers who don’t read books and what they’re getting up to than the ones who are.

So, what I wish teenage girls knew is that their value and worth isn’t intrinsically tied in to how they look, That’s it’s all right to want to have sex. It’s all right if they don’t want to. But both camps should know how to put on a condom and why getting vaccinated against HPV is non-negotiable. Wider society should be there to provide advice and support and to give teenage girls the space and freedom to realise that their sexuality doesn’t belong to anyone else. It’s their own to do with what they will, at a time that’s right for them.

© Copyright Sarra Manning 2013

Say howdy!

Hope you are all good. I have just delivered by brand spanking new YA novel, The Worst Girlfriend In The World to Atom. My favourite line in the whole book? “Girl, you be knowing shit about sexual politics.” It’s not out until May next year but I’m excited about it.

I am also very excited to tell you that my grown-up books are now available on Kindle and print-on-demand in the States. (I hope you liked my seamless segue there.) They have different covers that I sort-of-designed myself.

Pretty, no? Even better, Unsticky and You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me are currently a bargainous $2.99 on Kindle. Not sure if those links work because I have a UK computer, which is insistent about defaulting to Amazon UK.

Because I’ve cut out actually having a US publisher, this means that the books have all the Britishisms (WAG, thermal vest, Marks & Spencer) preserved as well as the British spelling, which is good or bad, depending on your politics.

On the YA front, I now have a distribution deal for Adorkable in the States, so it’s available as ebook and as an actual paper book that you can buy in actual stores. Hallelujah! Same lovely cover as the UK edition. (I also think that the newly reissued Diary Of A Crush trilogy is available as an ebook, but I’m not 100% sure. It gets very hard to keep track of these things.)

I would appreciate it ever so much if you’re in the US and you bought and liked my books to give me a review on Amazon. It helps in all sorts of ways. If you didn’t like them, let’s just keep it between the two of us.

Oh, America, you are a hard nut to crack, but your TV shows and big cities are excellent.

Live on

Sarra x

Holla!

Well, it’s been years in the making but today, the Diary Of A Crush trilogy is available as ebooks.

And the ‘sort-of sequel’ Diary Of A Grace, which will only be available as an e-novella.

The print books will be out on May 30th.

If you’re rereading, hope they live up to the memory and if you’re reading them for the first time, I hope you fall in love with Edie and Dylan, just like I did.

Live on

Sarra x

Hallo lovers

My goodness, I’ve been sitting on this news, like a clucky hen sitting on eggs, for months and can not wait to share it with you.

For years, people have been asking me when Diary Of A Crush will be available as ebooks or just as regular books, because it’s been out of print for so long and I’ve been all like, yeah, whevs… Not because I didn’t care but because due to really boring and complicated legal issue, the matter was beyond my control. Well, not anymore.

I am thrilled, THRILLED, SO BLOODY THRILLED to tell you that the Diary Of A Crush trilogy will be available for download from April 30th.

That’s not all. Oh no! The books will be back in print too from May 30th, all with spiffy new covers.

FRENCH KISS

New town, new college, new people, Edie’s feeling overwhelmed. What if nobody wants to be her friend? But then something happens that turns her life upside down: Edie spots Dylan. Messy-haired, pouty, frustratingly elusive Dylan. . .

Fast forward to the college trip to Paris and things are really heating up. In between the shopping, the clubbing, the kissing and the making up, something happens between Edie and Dylan that changes both their lives for ever. But do boys like Dylan ever play for keeps?

PRE-ORDER THE BOOK: Diary of a Crush: French Kiss

PRE-ORDER THE KINDLE EDITION: Diary of a Crush: French Kiss

KISS AND MAKE UP

Edie’s having major boy issues. Trying to get over Dylan is hard, but snogging new boy Carter isn’t hurting. . .

When everyone heads off to a summer festival, Edie wants to forget her troubles and try and have fun. But she didn’t count on her leftover feelings for Dylan and now she’s all churned up again. Edie’s got some big decisions to make, but is she ready to kiss and make up?

PRE-ORDER THE BOOK: Diary of a Crush: Kiss and Make Up

PRE-ORDER THE KINDLE EDITION: Diary of a Crush: Kiss and Make Up

SEALED WITH A KISS

Edie and Dylan have been dreaming about their road trip across America for ever. But nine weeks in a car together is going to be a huge test for them. They’re crazy in love, but what if that’s not enough?

Trailer parks, diners, motels and glitzy casinos are the backdrop for an adventure that threatens the whole future of their relationship. Will Edie and Dylan be able to go the distance?

PRE-ORDER THE BOOK: Diary of a Crush Sealed With a Kiss

PRE-ORDER THE KINDLE EDITION: Diary of a Crush: Sealed With a Kiss

I have done a little tweaking and updating (I mean, Blazing Squad?!) but it’s the Diary Of A Crush that you know and love. And if you don’t know it then I’m going all out and calling it the iconic UK YA series that follows the torturous relationship of Edie Wheeler, vintage queen, diary keeper and crusher and Dylan, her tousle-haired art boy crushee. Set in Manchester, our intrepid pair fall in love, snog a lot and fall out of love in Paris, at a festival and even on a epic roadtrip across the States.

Diary Of A Crush changed my life. I learned how to write fiction as I wrote this series for J17 magazine. I got my first proper publishing deal for Guitar Girl, rafter my first editor, Emily, Thomas, read the Diary Of A Crush columns. And though they’re probably my poorest selling books, I get more messages about Diary Of A Crush than any of my other books.

I’m not quite done yet. You know how I refuse to write a sequel? Well, that’s still the case and I explain why in the end notes of book three, but for the first time since they appeared in J17, the year’s worth of columns featuring Poppy’s little sister, Grace, will be available too. Diary Of A Grace will be an e-novella, but if you wait until May 30th when the print books are reissued, you’ll find it at the end of Sealed With a Kiss.

Grace is in love with pink guitars, Harry Styles, dark-chocolate Tunnock’s teacakes, Audrey Hepburn and a boy called Jack (well, maybe not quite in love) . . .

PRE-ORDER THE E-NOVELLA Diary of a Grace: The sort of sequel to the Diary Of Crush trilogy

(Remember, Diary Of A Grace will also be included in the Sealed With A Kiss paperback.)

It has taken a long, long, long time to make this happen. I hope you fall in love with Edie and Dylan all over again, or read them for the first time and then fall in love with them. There’s also a few little extras included in these reissues so now you can possess everything Diary Of A Crush that there ever has been. All for you. I give you all my Diary Of A Crush. Hurrah!

I am so excited that I wanted to write this whole post in shouty caps with lots of exclamation points but I’ve managed to restrain myself. Still, hurrah!

Live on

Sarra x

And, no, before you ask, I’m never writing a proper sequel!

I am really sorry, gutted in fact, to have to tell you that IT FELT LIKE A KISS has been put back to early 2014. No exact date as yet, no matter what it says on Amazon.

There’s nothing wrong with the insides of the book (I hope not!) but we weren’t happy with the cover and times are so tough that it’s important to make sure that we get everything right with the book. So my publishers have taken the brave decision to put the book back while we work on making sure the whole package is as strong and awesome as it can be.

The reason that it’s been put back by so many months is that we’ve now missed the slots to sell in to shops for summer and as you know I don’t write the traditional beach reads and it’s definitely not a Christmas-themed novel, so early next year was our only option.

Again, I can’t tell you how sad I am that you have such a long wait. Please bear with me. And if you’re a fan of my YA books, I am going to have the most SCREAM-worthy news to tell you at the end of the week, which I hope might make up for it.

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Live on

Sarra x

Hey!

I am so pleased that finally, finally, finally I can share the synopsis for my new adult novel, It Felt Like A Kiss, with you.

Are you ready? Like, really ready?

Meet Ellie Cohen, one of the most perfect girls in London.

Ellie manages a swank Mayfair gallery, but it’s her life that’s a real work of art. Great job, really good hair, loyal friends, loving family. It’s only her succession of lame duck boyfriends that ruin the picture.

Oh, and the world-famous rock-star father she’s never met, who won’t even acknowledge her existence.

Then Ellie’s perfect life is smashed to pieces when her secret is sold to the highest bidder and her name, face (and pictures of her bottom) are splashed across the tabloids. Suddenly everyone thinks she’s a gold-digging, sex-crazy, famewhore.

Enter David Gold. Charming and handsome David Gold. On paper he’s even more perfect than Ellie, if only he wasn’t her father’s ruthlessly ambitious lawyer whose job is to manage the crisis – and her. He certainly doesn’t think that Ellie’s the innocent party and she doesn’t trust him at all. So why is it that every time they’re alone together, damage limitation is the last thing on their minds?

I hope that’s got your intrigue on. It’s out on May 9th. It Felt Like a Kiss – paperback pre-order. It will be available for Kindle too. I’ll let you know the pre-order deets. And as soon as I have a finished cover, I’ll hook you up. *taps nose*

Live on,

Sarra x

I don’t have many skills in life. I can bang out a novel and if you give me a full freezer and a huge beef joint that was half price in Sainsbury’s, I will magically make room in the full freezer for it, and I can make chicken soup.

I’m not even going to be modest about it. My chicken soup is awesome. It cures colds, heals hurt hearts, I don’t doubt that it could bring about world peace. It really is that good. People who don’t even like me that much will vouch for it. Originally, it was my mother’s recipe and before that it was my grandmother’s recipe and I’ve honed it over the years, added to it, taken away until I got it just right. Now I’m sharing it with you because it’s snowing outside and I’m quite a nice person.

Be warned, this is quite labour intensive, not anything on Heston Blumenthal, but it’s definitely a slow cook. Ideally, you want to make it a day in advance.

THE BEST CHICKEN SOUP IN THE WORLD

INGREDIENTS

One large red onion

Five good sized cloves of garlic

One whole, skinned chicken, ideally a bowling fowl, but a roaster will do, or you can use chicken quarters/thighs, but you want it on the bone. Removing the skin is a faff, and don’t worry about doing it perfectly (the wings are a bugger) but it needs to come off, otherwise the soup is WAY too fatty and spoils the flavour. You also need to remove the fat around the top cavity.

Leeks – 500 grammes

Four carrots

The inner stalks and heart of a bunch of celery (DO NOT MISS THIS OUT!)

3 Telma Chicken Stock Cubes (available from Amazon or the kosher section of the supermarket)

White wine

Two sachets of bouquet garni

Salt

Mixed herbs – dried is fine

Sugar

Chicken stock – optional (I always have chicken stock in the fridge or the freezer, but that’s me for you! It doesn’t matter if you don’t.)

One really bigass saucepan!

* Lightly sauté the onion and garlic in olive oil in your big, old pan.

• Then add the chicken, turning it so it browns.

• Meanwhile start chopping up all your veggies, adding them gradually so they have a chance to reduce down before you add some more.

* Then add some white wine, a good sized third of a bottle of whatever you have in the fridge! And chicken stock if you have it.

• Add boiling hot water, enough to completely cover everything. You must keep this water level topped up.

• Then add the bouquet garni (I put one inside the chicken too) and the crushed stock cubes.

• Add a teaspoon of sugar. Don’t ask why, just do it and then a good whack of salt. *

* Leave the pan on a slow simmer for two hours (pressure cookers are for pussies,) making sure to skim the fat off the top every thirty minutes. (Some people don’t bother and put the finished soup in the fridge overnight so it’s easier to remove the fat in the morning, but I prefer to skim as I go, because the unctuous fat masks the flavour of the soup.)

* Keep adding water and salt as needed. You might need to add more wine, stock cubes or bouquet garni at your own discretion. You’re aiming for a salty, savoury, clear but quite dark broth. Umami, if you will!

* It’s done once the chicken starts sliding off the bones.

There’s enough here for at least ten bowls of soup that should be a full meal in themselves. Only decant exactly what you need each time and heat it up in a smaller pan with a bit of extra water and salt, if needed. And it freezes beautifully.

When I want something thicker and more rustic, I add mushrooms and barley.

Now if you’re me, you’ll take the discarded chicken fat, render it down into schmaltz and make either kneidlach or a savoury lokshen pudding to go with the soup. But you’re not me so some vermicelli, or angel hair pasta, or even some thick posh pasta will do.

If you do want a really good Jewish cookbook, bypass Claudia Roden and buy The New International Jewish Cookbook by Evelyn Rose A lot of the Jewish food I make are from recipes I learned in the kitchen on a Friday afternoon, but anything I’ve forgotten, I can always trust Evelyn Rose to nudge my memory.

So, that’s my chicken soup. But it is hard work and I do have a quicker alternative that isn’t the same for sheer love and flavour but it will do at a pinch.

CHEAT’S CHICKEN SOUP

INGREDIENTS

Leftover roast chicken

Packet of kosher chicken soup. Has to be kosher. Only Jewish peeps can make a decent chicken packet soup. I prefer Osem Chicken Noodle soup but it’s very hard to get hold of. Telma Chicken Soup Mix or Telma Chicken Noodle Soup Mix will do at a pinch.

Make the soup as per the directions.

Add leftover chicken.

Eat, enjoy! What do you mean, you’re not hungry? You must be hungry…

Self-pity is a beautiful well to repeatedly dip in and find more reasons not to live, more reasons not to cheer. And the well is an illusion until the well runs dry and then you’re ready for a different song.” Robert Forster, liner notes for Rock And Roll Friend, The Go-Betweens.

Dad and niecelet

There’s no way to sugarcoat it, 2012 was the worst year of my life. It made the other worse years I’ve experienced get down and kiss its hem. It was toxic. It was calamitous. I stumbled through the months and weeks and days shrouded in a veil of sadness. It pained me that 2012 also touched a lot of people I love in the same way; through serious illness or by having hurt and heartache that they didn’t deserve heaped upon them. But above all, 2012 will always be the year that I lost my darling Dad. I miss him every day. I dread the memory of him, his voice, his laugh, even his smell, growing distant. I still can’t quite imagine my life without him in it.

But just as other people I knew had the best year of their lives; they fell in love, got married, had babies, had professional and personal success, something amazing happened to me this year too. Six days after my Dad died, after years of dithering and scanning rescue centre websites when I should have been working, Blossom scampered into my life on four bandy legs.

I agreed to foster a Staffordshire Bull terrier for two weeks. She was picked up as a stray after she’d been thrown out, though she’d delivered her third or fourth litter of puppies so recently that she was lactating and still looked pregnant. She had hormonal alopecia. She would hold her pee for up to two days at a time and when I’d praise her and stroke her for finally deigning to go, she’d cower back like I was going to hit her. After worrying about my Dad for so long, I really needed to be needed again. Within a day, I told the rescue charity that I’d adopt her.

This is what she looked like back in early July.

It’s now six months later and I love Miss Betsy (she was having nothing to do with the name Blossom) without rhyme or reason. She’s gone from being uber submissive to very naughty. She loves mange touts, cherry tomatoes, TV panel shows, belly rubs and protecting me from imaginary mice. We both find her weekly obedience class very traumatic. She’s destroyed many things I held dear like my Sunday morning lie-ins and my favourite slippers and she won’t go for her first walk in the morning until I’ve cuddled her for at least five minutes.

I’m not a person that suffers from depression, but there have been times this year that I don’t know how I’d have got out of bed, much less got through the day, without Betsy. And I’m sure you know how I feel about mawkish sentiment, but there is a truth to the cliche that you don’t rescue a dog, they rescue you. I also think it’s kind of ironic that I wrote about a tan and white Staffie with issues in You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me and I’ve ended up sharing my sofa with one.

So, even though I approach 2013 with extreme wariness as there are still aftershocks from 2012 that need to be dealt with, I’m ready for the new year. I don’t have much in the way of resolutions; I’d like to be a more receptive to new experiences and new people, but mostly I want to write the novel that I’ve always hoped I was capable of writing.

Talking of books, there’s only one new release from me this year. My next adult book, It Felt Like a Kiss, will be out in May. I’ll post more details as soon as I have them. I am writing a YA novel at the moment, The Worst Girlfriend in the World but there’ll be no new YA release this year. However, I have some really exciting news about old books that I hope to share with you very soon.

And also US readers, hi! My three adult books will be available as Kindle Direct releases on Amazon.com imminently and I will also give you details of them as soon as I have them. I’ve pretty much self-published under the auspices of Curtis Brown, my agents, and Amazon and am thrilled that I’ll be able release the books as they’re meant to be and not with a multitude of changes to make them less British. Man meets woman meets rock meets hard place is a universal language that we all speak, right? Right!

So, enough about me. I hope that your 2013 is everything you would want it to be and if sometimes it gets hard, I hope you all find your own personal Betsy’s to pull you towards the light.

Betsy in her most usual pose

Live on,

Sarra x

PS: I adopted Betsy from All Dogs Matter who are based in North London and Norfolk. They have a lot of dogs looking for homes, both foster and forever, so if you are thinking about getting a dog, I would love if it you’d consider a rescue dog. I would also love it you’d consider a Staffie who, despite their reputation, are one of the most people-friendly breeds around.

Tis here! My second annual Chrismukkah Gift Guide, plus a little reading list at the end for your book tooken.

FOR TEENS (SULKY AND OTHERWISE)

A compilation of all the best bits from Rookiemag.com’s (founded by the eye-wateringly awesome Tavi Gevinson) first year, Rookie Yearbook One will change your life, if you let it.

Yeah, it has Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning in it but that’s no reason to buy The Runaways DVD. The reason to buy it is because it’s a biopic of this amazing all girl 70′s rock band, The Runaways, who rocked hard, harder, hardest even as they were completely exploited by The Man, man. Without The Runaways, we’d have no Joan Jett and Joan Jett rules!

After your teen has become completely inspired by watching The Runaways (see above) you can then buy them this What Would Joan Jett Do? t-shirt

I always think that teenage girls are like Marmite. You either love or hate them depending on what mood they’re in when you last encountered them. I think this adorable, limited edition gold jar of the stuff would make a great stocking filler for a teenage girl if she actually likes the stuff. It even changes the yeasty paste to a gold colour because Jubilee, Olympics, innit?

Diane Von Fursternberg earphones – who wouldn’t want a pair of these? A fool, that’s who.

I’m a firm believer that a good skincare habit should be started at an early age and I wish I’d known about Dr Hauschka back when I was suffering spots, oiliness and blackheads that could be see from space. This little skincare starter kit for dry and sensitive skin is not ruinously expensive but is also sleek and aspirational and they also do one for oily skin too.

FOR LADIES WHO LOVE LAZY SUNDAY AFTERNOONS

Do you need a new TV show to love and binge watch while you eat turkey sandwiches, mince pies and root around the Quality Street tin for the green triangles? You do? Then let it be the Gilmore Girls – Complete Season 1-7. Endlessly repeated on TV but entirely deserving to be watched in its entirety as you thrill to the really fast-talking Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, mother and daughter, and residents of Star’s Hollow, the kind of perfect, sleepy East Coast town full of strange eccentrics, that you only find in really good TV shows.

Drink Champagne And Dance On The Table cushion

Words to live by, am I right?

A vital ingredient for a lazy Sunday afternoon is a hot drink in a lovely mug like this one from Little Walton Bank. Just the right size for a decent hit of caffeine.

You have to keep your energy levels up when you’re reading and like books, it’s sometimes best to go with a classic. I recently discovered Tunnocks Dark Chocolate Teacakes and I knew right away that I was living in extraordinary times.

FOR BIBLIOPHILES

I’m a big fan of novels set or written between the wars and I’m also a big fan of independent publishers, which is why I adore Persephone Books. Their The Persephone Book Of The Month club would make a lovely present for a friend or even you if you like novels written mostly between the wars by ladies of a certain age, then published with sleek grey covers, and bookmarks and endpapers (endpapers!) that feature a pattern from a textile created the year the novel was written. I mean, who wouldn’t?

It’s going to be all about The Great Gatsby next year when Baz Luhrman’s film of F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic tale of the nihilism that underpinned the roaring Twenties. Of course, you’ve read The Great Gatsby but you probably don’t have this stylish Great Gatsby Mug, which is so pleasing to the eye. Tea drinking was never so literary.

If, like me, you know someone who still kicks it old skool and doesn’t have one of those new fangled e book readers (I don’t because the sheer number of my real world, treeware to-be-reads are overwhelming and if I started adding to them electronically, then I would drown under a weight on unread wordage) then they probably use a bookmark. If they don’t use a bookmark, then they probably fold the corners over to keep their place, which is a crime and why they need this You Are Here Bookmark Pad.

This I love books top is just the right kind of thing to wear when you’re curled up with your favourite novel.

FOR ART BOYS AND GIRLS

I don’t even know why Pelikan Bottled Highlighter Ink Yellow exists in a world full of fluorescent highlighter pens but I’m glad it does.

Le Audio Cassette Notebook by Moleskine“>Who doesn’t love a Moleskine notebook especially when they come disguised as an old fashioned cassette tape?

I may not be an art girl but I want this comedians’ catchphrases print from Rockett St George so badly it’s starting to hurt.

OK, it’s not published until the end of January but anyone with a love for art and design has to love the beautiful typography, graphics and images that London Undreground has given us over the years. London Underground By Design by Mark Ovenden gathers them all together.

Talking of which, The Great Bear by Simon Patterson is the London Underground map, but with a difference. All the lines and stations have had their names changed. The Circle Line stations are now philosophers. Italian artists have become Victoria Line stations and the Docklands Light Railway are Sinologues. I have a framed print of this hanging above my desk, it was my leaving present from J17, and it inspires me every day.

FOR FOODIES

If I could be anyone I would be Rachel Khoo because she is adorable but the kind of girl you could imagine going down the pub with and I yearn to run away to Paris, study at the Cordon Bleu Institute and then cook up amusing amuse bouche at the witty salons I’d host in my tiny Parisian Hausmann apartment. The closest I’ll ever get to being Rachel Khoo though is rocking a bold lip and making shepherds pie in Little Paris Kitchen-inspired enamel ware

I also yearn to bake, but never do because it requires precision and lots of ingredients that means you always end up lacking some vital component when you’re up to your elbows in a mixing bowl. I still have lots of wannabe baker kit including these Measuring Cup Matroyshkas So, if I did decide to knock up some rock cakes, at least me weighing skillz would be mad.

(I also have the Matroyshka Measuring Spoons because they are adorable, even if I have never used them.

Yotam Ottolenghi salt caramel and chocolate brittle – no brainer.

A perfect present for someone who watches too much Masterchef and longs to make those funny little spheres from bits of rhubard or do something involving liquid nitrogen. The Molecular Gastronomy Kit is the grown-up foodie equivalent of a chemistry set.

AND BOOKS, GOT TO HAVE SOME BOOKS, THERE MUST ALWAYS BE BOOKS

I did a lot of comfort reading this year and some of that was devouring the four books in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles. A series that none of my friends who’d read and loved it told me about because they all assumed that I’d already read and loved it. Well, I hadn’t and this sweeping family saga of posh folk falling in love, being unfaithful and pursuing artistic endeavours and doomed relationships set against the destructive backdrop of World War 2 is the kind of book I would eat up with a spoon if I was able to liquidise it. (I’ve linked to a set with the first three books in it; Light Years, Confusion and Marking Time. You can buy the last book, Casting Off,

separately )

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels, which fill that gap once you realise that Jane Austen really didn’t write that many books. I was lucky enough to inherit an almost full set from my mother, but lots of people on the Twitter ask me where’s a good place to start if you’re new to Heyer. Well, the first one I read was Regency Buck and I think it’s a great introduction to Heyer. Maybe it doesn’t have the depth of her later books but you have an impetuous, flighty heiress and a sardonic, titled guardian who’s known as a rakehell thrown together very unwillingly and, quite frankly, that pushes all of my Regency romance buttons.

The Diary Of A Provincial Lady by E M Delafield is my go-to-get happy book. I have read the four Provincial Lady novels again and again and they always give me cheer. I think sometimes people believe that books written long ago (in the 1930′s as is the case here) say nothing about our modern lives; are impossible to relate to. It’s simply not the case. I mean: “November 22nd.–Cissie Crabbe leaves. Begs me in the kindest way to stay with her in Norwich (where she has already told me that she lives in a bed-sitting-room with two cats, and cooks her own lentils on a gas-ring). I say Yes, I should love to. We part effusively.”

The other books I’ve really gorged on this year are Noel Streatfeild’s adult romance novels written under the name Susan Scarlett. They’re not as dark as her ‘proper’ adult novels, like but I’ve loved books like Peter and Paul with its fashion company setting and two twins, one beautiful and one good, in competition for the attentions of the dashing man who owns the fashion company. Sometimes the Susan Scarlett novels make my third wave feminist self bristle but mostly I love them for the 1930′s YA novels that they kind of are.

I also read a lot of non-fiction. Again, mostly concerning the between the wars years and World War 2. I also love a good juicy biography, especially a literary biography and when you add all those elements together than you get The Mitford Girls by Mary S Lovell. I love Nancy Mitford’s novels, adore the fact that Jessica Mitford eloped with her cousin to fights fascists in Spain and I absolutely do NOT love Unity Mitford and Diana Mitford, who were unapologetic fascists. But the six sisters (there was also Debo, the only surviving Mitford, now the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire and Pam, always overshadowed by her siblings) lived through extraordinary times and contributed to those times and the headlines of the day. Everything you could ever want in a biography.