Sophia Bennett's Blog, page 6

Girl Crush #1

So many girl crushes to choose from, but at the moment, I’m crushing just a little bit on ………..

……..

…….

Angela Merkel.

Go Angela!

And here’s why.

1) She’s a powerful world leader who has managed to get herself re-elected in the middle of very troubled times

2) She lives in a modest flat in Berlin. No lifesize Spanish galleons in the garden for her (see the Ukraine), or fleets of unaffordable limos (see Spain), or streets being shut down for hours as she passes (see Russia), or cities being practically brought to a halt by her security (see the US). She’s an austerity role model

3) She doesn’t think it’s her job to be a fashion plate. She dresses sensibly, for the busy job she has being a WORLD LEADER. (Take note, Miley Cyrus.)

4) She grew up in East Germany, under one of the most repressive regimes in the world. This makes her fascinating, but not bitter. She really didn’t like it when the NSA bugged her phone, though, and after she survived the Stazi, you can see why.

5) She’s steered Germany through the recession with a very steady hand, despite managing a coalition government. She makes it look easy. Bet it’s not.

6) She loves football and has a sense of humour and a lovely, gentle, ready smile. (So does Obama, if you’ve noticed, and we like him too. Putin … not so much. He’s more likely to strip down to his trousers and wrestle a bear.) We’d love to spend the afternoon with her (and a translator) putting the world to rights.

7) Our male, Establishment, Eton-educated Prime Minister just a little bit wants to be her. I don’t think he’s the only leader who thinks, correctly, that she’s cooler than him.

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany since 2005, welcome to London this week. We salute you.

Feisty, bossy, or just plain leadership material?

I’ve been writing an article on female anti-heroes for Chicklish (look out for it soon, folks!) and it includes the wonderful Lucy Van Pelt from Peanuts. That girl is crabby and MEAN. I love her so much.

She got me thinking about girls who know what they want, and how they’re described, and suddenly, before I knew it, I was cross. (There’s a great article called ‘I hate Strong Female Characters’ by Sophia McDougall – no relation – in the New Statesman, by the way, that I highly recommend.)

Lucy, of course, is a born leader, but you know what will happen to her? She’ll be told, by other girls and grown-ups alike, that she’s ‘bossy’. (Which, God knows, she is.) Other girls’ mothers will roll their eyes and call her ‘feisty’. Like it’s something she ought to watch.

As she hits her self-conscious teens, she’ll feel embarrassed and excluded, and she’ll tone down her behaviour to something more appropriate for her peer group. After college, she’ll become the the sterling Number Two to the big businessman who runs the show in St Paul, Minnesota.

Because nobody ever told him he was ‘feisty’ or ‘bossy’. They just kind of did what he said.

What I said earlier …

I’ve just written a News update for my website, and as it pretty much covers everything I’m up to at the moment, I thought I’d just cheat and reproduce it here. So here is something that I made earlier … (but not with sticky-backed plastic).

Fall Collection

Recently is has been Fashion Week in London, New York, Milan and Paris. All the new collections have been on show (although they haven’t been the autumn ones, obviously, because fashion works six months ahead, so as the weather gets colder the models have been striding down the catwalk in skimpy little things for spring).

Miranda Kerr modelling a summer dress by Stella – daughter of my favourite bass guitarist …

September and October always feel like the time for starting new projects and making things happen. I’m sure it starts at school – new year, new friends, new pencil case – and you never quite lose it. This September and October have certainly been busy in the shed.

First of all, and most excitingly, I have a new agent, Jenny Savill. Hi, Jenny! *waves*. This means I can concentrate on writing books and Jenny can think about who’s going to buy and read them. We both have four children going back to school and off to university at the moment, so we’re busy at home and work, and that’s just how we like it. I’m so looking forward to lots of long coffees with Jenny while we sort out the world.

Second, I’ve just seen the cover for my new book – the one that comes out next summer – which used to be called The Power of Peta Jones in my head, and then became The Power of Zetta Jones and is now, provisionally, called The Castle. It is on this cover, anyway, and the cover is … BRILLIANT! I can’t wait to show it to you. It’s my favourite yet, and my family’s, too. (And yes, it does have a castle on it if you look closely.)

In fact, it’s so good it’s got me working even harder on the editing, to make the story as exciting as it can be, so that’s mostly what’s going on in the shed right now.

When I’m not in the shed, or having coffee with Jenny, or ringing up Rachel at Chicken House to tell her how GREAT the new cover is, my other project is the bass guitar. This is a left-over side effect of You Don’t Know Me. Having written about the fabulousness of playing and singing in a band, I watched my husband’s guitar teacher actually do it with his band, The Mustangs, and decided I had to give it a try.

The bass guitar seemed like the easiest instrument to pick, with the fewest strings and the fewest notes to play, and it’s also funky, which is what I like. I can now play along to Cream, and Queen and The Beatles (Paul McCartney is one of the top bass guitarists ever. Who knew? Actually, loads of people, but not me, although I’ve idolised him since I was six.) Afterwards, Alex and I can play blues together. Honestly, if you don’t play in a band with your friends or family, you should. Try it today! You don’t have to be good, but will change your life, I promise.

Other things … The Look comes out in Germany today (as Der Look), so Happy Birthday, little book! In a couple of weeks, I’ll be off to the Wood Green Literary Festival with Holly Smale and CJ Daugherty – two YA writers I’ve been dying to meet for ages – so if you’re around North London on Sunday 13th October, come along in the afternoon and say hi. We’ll be waving, signing, chatting, answering questions and judging a short story competition. Loads to do! and lots of other great writers will be there.

That seems enough to be going on with. So for now, it’s back to the shed …

The day I get to be Nicole …

Next weekend, I get to be a judge on a panel with the fab YA authors Holly Smale (Geek Girl) and CJ Daugherty (Night School). I’ve wanted to meet them both for ages, and now I get to sit at a table with them, at the Wood Green Literary Festival, and judge stuff. Woo! We’ve been tweeting about it and have decided I get to be Nicole. (Holly wants to be Simon Cowell.) I’m putting on my wig and practising my dance moves now.

The theme of the Festival is London: a celebration of the capital. There’s a choice of fab prizes for the winner. (It’s a short story competition, by the way.) Mine is the offer to name a character after the lucky boy or girl in my next book. More info here … WoodGreenLitFest.

 

Bye Bye Elmore (care of Girls Heart Books)

As it’s the 21st, I’ve been on Girls Heart Books today. You’ll find my post about his 10 rules of writing here.

Must you obey them? (Clue: no.) Are they useful? Well, just possibly ….

Thank you, Miley

I want to say thank you, Miley Cyrus, for putting me on to the ‘How to twerk’ video on YouTube, which has just added a new move to my exercise regime. Unfortunately I – like you – don’t really have the shape for it, or Shakira’s hips, so it is something I shall merely be showing my husband, when he asks for details on the VMA news story (I don’t want him to sound like that Sixties judge … “And what, pray, is twerking?”), and my children when they need a laugh.

I do not agree with viral blogger mom, who cheerfully told her daughter that she would duct tape her mouth shut rather than let her use her tongue the way you did that night.

You’re trying to break out from your sweet, pre-watershed Disney image and you got the big reaction you wanted. You’re thrilled about the number of tweets per minute you generated and that’s great. So maybe most of them were echoing the shocked, ‘Please make it stop’ expressions on the Smith family’s faces, but numbers are numbers. And maybe Justin Timberlake got much better artistic reviews than you, but pictures of your tongue and latex-clad bottom outdid even his reunion with N’Sync.

What makes me sad for you right now is not what you did. It made my children sigh a little for you, but it didn’t make them dash out to buy a nude bikini and repeat your signature moves in front of older men in nightclubs. If anything, it will have put them off doing all of the above, for which I’m grateful. (And it gave rise to this meme of your cartoon body twerking on various famous paintings through history, which is both cultural and funny, so again, thanks.)

No, what makes me sad is what you didn’t do.

A couple of days after the VMAs you released some pictures celebrating the release of your new album, Bangerz. The papers and online media have had a field day with the ones of you showing your boobs through a mesh top, clutching your crotch and doing the other things that other performers in their twenties do when they want a lot of attention. But among them, there was this one, and I love it.

What makes me sad, Miley, is that any girl in her twenties in a free country can put on a latex bikini and twerk her little butt off. Lady Gaga performed that night in a shell bikini and nobody blinked. But  not every girl – in fact, almost no girl but you – can look so ethereal, vulnerable, strong, familiar and unusual, dressed in a suit jacket and carrying a bunch of roses. Taylor Swift is too knowing. Selena Gomez is too sexy. Actually, Gaga could do it, but right now she’s in a nearly-naked place and seems comfortable there.

You didn’t seem comfy in your latex bikini. Your tongue gave you away. It was as if you were using it like a shield of irony around your performance. The thing is, Miley, we’re all talking about you because of all the stuff you did ages ago that you’re trying to distance yourself from, and which you were supremely good at, and we miss that. Nobody’s taken your place as the Disney princess since then. And we miss you.

By all means, please distance yourself from Disney and its lawyers and image consultants and PR people as much as you like. Show us who you really are. But you didn’t convince us that night that the real Miley is Robin Thicke’s dream blow-up doll. Have another go.

There are other ways of being, Miley. This is what we’re trying to tell our daughters. Hell-for-leather sexiness works for some people. It sells a lot of records and a few movies. But it’s not everything, not all the time. You happen to be exceptionally talented at a bunch of the other stuff. Happiness. Comedy. Country music. Girls need a bit of that, too, when they’re recovering from a busy twerk-out session, or trying to work out why Blurred Lines, while genius as a dance song, makes them feel vaguely uncomfortable, and why they keep being approached by pervs in nightclubs who now think it’s OK to mouth ‘I know you want it’ and wink. We’re  hoping that you find your way back before it’s too late, and do some more great stuff with your tongue safely back inside, where it looks better, promise, and your clothes on.

No duct tape required.

Writer’s block

For years I thought it was like a bad unicorn – unpleasant, and invented, until I tried to write my last book.

Today I’m sharing my thoughts on writer’s block as my regular post on the Girls Heart Books blog, illustrated by one of my favourite postcards from the mood board in the shed. Click on the picture to find out what happened, and what John Green has to say on the subject:

Mary’s hair

It was a joy to see Professor Mary Beard back on our TV screens last week, talking about Caligula. Mary is the only person I know who can stand in front of an ancient tombstone, in a museum, and make it look fresh and exciting. She also almost made me feel sorry for ‘Little Boots’ – although I shall always picture him as Joaquin Phoenix playing Commodus in Gladiator, and not even Mary can elicit much sympathy from me there.

I’ve written about Professor Beard on another blog, comparing her (favourably) with Coco Rocha, the model. I know she read my comments, because she politely replied to them. Which made me feel guilty because although I was complimentary about her in many ways, I was critical in one – Mary’s hair – and that of course is the one she responded to. Even brilliant Cambridge Classics professors are human. They are also, in Mary’s case, vocal and brave. They don’t sit there and take criticism in silence. They make you think.

Since then, inspired by that guilt, I’ve been thinking about Mary a lot. And I have come to the conclusion that her hair is even more important than I thought it was.

Mary is a busy academic, Times columnist and public figure, who is changing not only our appreciation of Roman culture but also our appreciation of women past childbearing age in public life – and I’m sure she has better things to think about than her ‘do’. I, however, am fascinated. But not from a hairdressing point of view.

Like Mary, I went to Cambridge, where I researched my PhD in Modern Languages. One of my favourite topics was semiotics. It’s the study of signs and their meaning, not only in words, but in objects and behaviour. I’m especially interested in the latter two, because we accord meaning to the things around us in a very profound and subconscious way.

Take, let us say, for example, women’s hair. We know it’s a big deal, because hundreds of millions of girls and women around the world cover theirs, and have done for centuries. For those of us who don’t, paying to have it cut, coloured, curled or straightened, conditioned, extended and styled can be a significant part of our budget.

I recently spent an absolute fortune on mine for the first time ever and the sad truth is, it works. It makes you look different. People notice. Your style says a lot about who you are and the person you choose to be. In The Look, the key scene describes two girls having their heads shaved. It’s a seminal moment for both of them, and an empowering one. Teenage cancer victims often fear losing their hair through chemotherapy more than any of the other side effects, despite the fact that it’s reversible. Hair matters to us: that’s just how it is.

When I first wrote about Mary’s hair last year, what I said was a massive oversimplification, looking back, and I’d like to clarify that now – especially if she’s listening. I do, and always have, liked and admired Mary’s hair. It’s thick and abundant, a beautiful colour (her natural grey), and she’s lucky to have it. What I didn’t like, at the time, was her haircut. Or the lack of it.

I felt, and still feel, that people presenting programmes on TV are inviting themselves into my home and I like them to look smart. On the whole, they do. I didn’t like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s shaggy locks; Jeremy Clarkson looked a lot better after Trinny and Susannah pleaded with him to make an effort.

Mary wore a wonderful red coat during her series Meet The Romans, which made her stand out beautifully against the ruins, but I felt the whole shaggy hair thing let her down a bit, which was a shame. I didn’t, by the way, mind at all that she doesn’t often wear visible makeup either. She has one of those strong faces that looks equally good with or without it. Again, she’s lucky that way.

By now, she’d got me thinking about what it was that I expected of a TV presenter, I started looking at them more closely. For the blokes, it’s pretty simple: an outfit of shirt and trousers, generally, that’s washed and pressed and suits them, a decent haircut and teeth that don’t look hideously snaggled or startlingly white, like something out of a Jerry Bruckheim movie. The more they look like David Attenborough or Michael Palin, the happier I am.

For women, it took about 24 hours to realise that actually … well, actually, there is almost no woman presenting on TV, apart from Joan Rivers, whose style I truly admire because, unlike Mary, they’re all trying to look like the same super-thin, big-haired, tightly-dressed, massively-lipglossed doll – regardless of the incisive comments they may have to bring to their subject – and it’s really, really depressing.

They look smart, yes. Go them. They made the effort. They made the effort and then they just kept going with that effort until I have no idea, no idea at all, what they’re really like when they’re kicking off their shoes and being themselves. They look ‘TV’. Clare Balding used to be an honourable exception to the rule, presenting the racing, but since she became super-famous at the Olympics she’s doing it too. The hair’s changed. The lips are … lippier. I miss the old Clare, I really do.

None of them, by the way, have grey hair. Oh no. Grey hair would be death to their careers. They’re almost all about my age, a bit younger or a bit older and therefore by definition, starting to go grey or nearly there, but you’d never know. We must not, as a nation, admit that older women are in positions of power and influence. Or … something terrible will happen. I don’t know what, but the high-ups in the big TV companies seem very, very scared of it. So does Mary’s fellow Times columnist, AA Gill.

So I got to thinking about grey hair. Jamie Lee-Curtis does it beautifully. So does Judi Dench. Very short, above a beautiful, pixie face. Gamine. Still sexy. Did I say short? Yes, short, dammit. Barely there.

Short grey hair can be cool on the older woman, but why not long? What is so off-putting about long grey hair in public? Why is Mary Beard the only person who dares have any since, quite probably, Sister Wendy, but hers was covered (see above). Why does it make me think of sandals and sunset-ceremonies, and homemade doilies? What’s wrong with it?

Mary’s comment to me was ‘Coat is good; hair is me’. My guess is that she’s worn it that way since her undergraduate days at Newnham. She just never got the memo that she was supposed to start hating it, dyeing it and/or cutting most of it off when she hit her mid to late forties. She was supposed to stop being her vigorous, romantic, inner self and admit to the world that it was time to start playing games: make it younger, or make it disappear.

When I recently had my own hair highlighted – the first time I’d fiddled with the colour since my student days – the otherwise lovely hairdresser tried to tell me that my natural grey colour ‘wouldn’t suit my skin tone’ and I would increasingly need to dye it as I grew older. This is, as I hope we all know, bullshit. Oh, the things women say to other women to make them spend money and I wish they’d stop.

But beyond the fact that it keeps hair colourists out of profit, there is something about long, grey hair that is … OK, let me just come out and say it: witch-like. Yeah, that’s what’s wrong with it. It makes you look like a witch. And they’re the baddies in every fairytale, as we know.

Another M B, Martha Beck, a stalwart of Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine, has said that women fall into four categories: the ones who gave up family for career, and worry about it; the ones who gave up career for family, and worry about it; the ones who chose both, and worry about it ; and the mystics – women who came from all the other three categories but had somehow found peace with themselves, and “had discovered and come to trust an intensely personal inner voice”.

In Medieval times, men would have called these mystics witches. Sure, they might have known all the best herbs and been able to deliver live babies, but they were self-sufficient and … you know … creepy. In the olden days, they pronounced them them wicked and ducked them; in the twenty-first century, they troll them on Twitter. Sic semper erat, as Mary might say.

Perhaps I instinctively didn’t warm to her hair on The Romans because it reminded me of a witch, and I was concerned and sorry for her – sorry that she’d be marginalised and abused and not taken seriously. But I needn’t have worried. Yes, she’s had bomb threats and death threats on Twitter. Yes, she scares misogynist men, who don’t like confident, articulate women participating in public debates, but she’s a tough cookie. She’s taken on the power. With that long, thick hair that she doesn’t seem to think about and which is a sign of her vitality and matters so much, she’s a shining example of twenty-first century feminism.

As you say, Mary, your hair is you. It doesn’t ‘clash with your skin tone’, it emphasises your inner strength. You are the Samson of our struggle, and a true mystic. Don’t let John Frieda anywhere near it.

Letting go at the end

The BBC has recently announced that its new Reith lecturer will be Grayson Perry – the wonderful, cross-dressing, Turner Prize-winning potter and emerging national treasure.

Photograph: Julian Makey/Rex Features

I’m a big fan. I don’t know his pottery that well, but he has a gift for describing the creative process and bringing it to life. I remember listening to his Radio 4 programme from 2010. I was in the kitchen, cooking lunch, and in interview after interview, Grayson managed to bring to life how difficult it is – and at times how unsatisfying – to create new things.

Yes. Unsatisfying. It was wonderful to hear someone who was passionate about the arts talking about how painful it is to make them. Because they’re never quite what you expected, or what you had in your head when you started. Making something creative is an organic process. It changes as you go along. The work becomes a conversation with the artist: you do something, it reacts, it suggests new possibilities, you go in new directions, and if it’s working well, you never end up exactly where you intended.

This is the glorious thing and the sad thing about writing, painting, making films, making a garden … and all the other arts. You can’t win. If you do exactly what you first intended to do, the process can feel flat and uninspired. But if you don’t do what you first intended – if you have that conversation – you can’t be sure while you’re writing, or painting, or editing, or planting, that it will take you to a better place.

Sometimes you know. Those moments are probably the ones that keep us going for the years and years that we struggle with what we do. They’re liberating and life enhancing and joyful and wonderful. But mostly you don’t. You’re inching your way forwards, often in the grip of self doubt, certain that what you’re doing is not as perfect as the original image in your head, fairly sure in fact that it might quite possibly be rubbish, that noone will like it, and yet on you go.

The end, or nearly the end, can be the worst part. Because you’ve ‘done’ it – you’ve made your story, or painting, or film, or landscape – but what you see in front of you isn’t what you saw inside you. It never can be, and it never will be. You’ll always find things you want to change. At some stage, though, you simply have to let it go, as Rose Tremain said so honestly to Grayson Perry in his programme.

This feeling has nothing to do with how good or bad the work is, by the way. You might go back to it later and realise it was really rather fabulous. Or you might remain convinced it’s terrible, but the public loves it. By the end of the process it’s simply impossible to look at it objectively any more, and anyway, artists can never be sure what will grab the public’s attention, unless they’ve reached the ‘anything by you, regardless of quality’ level.

So I’ve finished my new book. The sixth, if you don’t include the unpublished ones before Threads. And it covers all the themes I wanted to talk about, and includes all the scenes I wanted to describe, and I have a new world of people in my head. It has an ending, which I’m very pleased with, but it doesn’t feel ‘done’. I have put in on pause. I’m waiting for feedback and edits, when the process will happen all over again. Not so much ‘writing a book and cracking open the champagne’: more exploring, developing, and finally … letting go.

Touring, walking and repeating

So, next week and the week after, I’ll be touring the country, talking to Years 7-9 about being a writer. I’ve posted a piece about it on my website, here, and to avoid repeating myself too much, it’s easier to give you the link.

I shall also be continuing to tour the internet with the You Don’t Know Me UK blog tour, and the links to my first three posts are on the website too. They’re about where I get my ideas from, the playlist for the book and talent shows, and I promise you will love them. Check them out.

And at the weekend, in between the physical tours and the blog tour, I’ll be walking round London for the Moonwalk. Guess where I wrote about that? Yep – on the website.

This is a problem. Where should I post my news? I currently have a Facebook fan page, the website news section and this blog. I use them all for slightly different things, but maintaining all three is complicated, and I’m never sure where people are going to look for updates.

What do you think? Are blogs still the way to go? I don’t really have time for many long posts anymore, but sometimes it’s nice to have the space to meditate about something – like reaching the end of the bookshelf. Those posts are increasingly few and far between, though, as I focus on getting the new book done and publicising the last one. Is a blog worth keeping up if it’s so sporadic? Facebook is great for short, sharp updates, but not everybody likes it. The website’s great too, but people mostly use it to find out about the books specifically, if my site stats are anything to go by.

It’s a conundrum. One I know many writer friends are struggling with too. The internet is changing weekly, especially as sites like Facebook keep changing how they’re used. We want to share  news, ideas and comments, but not to bash people over the head with ‘me me me’ advertising. How do you like to use the web? All comments welcome on this one. xxx