Sarah Pinborough

Another week, another book to launch…this week it’s Mayhem! You can read the first three chapters, with lovely page-turning sound effects here:

http://www.quercusbooks.co.uk/mayhem/

Enjoy!

Over at the Gollancz blog you can read the first chapter of Poison and enter a fun competition to win one of five signed first edition (now sold out) copies.

So, what are you still doing here? Shoo!

http://www.gollancz.co.uk/2013/04/poison-chapter-one/

It’s a me, me, me post…

I’m 41 as of ten minutes ago…man, that’s about half-way, isn’t it? How fabulous to have made it this far. I insist you all take a day to enjoy your lives, the people in them, and plan adventures for the next year. That’s what I’ll be doing…

Live is for living..do it, dudes. That’s an order.

me xx

I don’t know if it’s just my twitter feed that I need to shake up, but it seems to me that my world has been filled with the opinions of columnists of late. I’m sure they’re making valid points about something, but it’s all becoming point-scoring white noise in my head. Sometimes I wonder if anything is about anything any more other than being heard the loudest. Or using the right phrase. Or being ripped apart for using the slightly wrong phrase regardless of context. 

 Sometimes it all makes me laugh so hard I want to cry. People so keen to ascertain their ‘working class credentials’ (what does that mean anyway? So someone born into one set of circumstances has an immediate validity over someone born into another set of circumstances regardless of personal intelligence/emotional intelligence/personality? Oh fuck off..)  while coming across as so middle-class smug. As I grit my teeth and read I’m reminded of my own middle-class smugness and I hate them all the more for that and their endless battles of semantics. 

Like anyone real actually cares.

I love words. Words are my business. Yet I hate the acid reflux of words that seem to fill my feed. The importance so many people attach to these weekly outpouring of words – then the twitter reactions that sometimes makes me imagine these women – nearly menopausal in their expensively bohemian cardigans and clutching wine at three in the afternoon and despairing of how they were simply trying to point out the ‘right’ way to the rest of us – when really, in the most part, it’s just whimsy. It doesn’t matter. It’s here and gone. A puff of hot air. 

Most people do not browse columns on the web all day. Most people are juggling families and jobs and shopping and marriages and keeping their heads above water. Some are out there (very few- most of us are filled with the 21st century ennuie that thinks that if we talk/write/bitch about the world’s problems for long enough then we’ll solve them) are out there doing something about making other people’s lives better.

But mainly, the people who think they’re changing things are actually sitting at home writing columns and getting paid to voice an opinion. Good luck to them. Sometimes they’re entertaining. Occasionally they make a valid point. But man, am I bored of the smug self-importance that comes with clicking so many of the links.

There are a thousand types of feminist – each of my female friends has a different view to me on the subject, and I to them. That’s as it should be. There’s no one way to be a woman. You just have to be happy in your way of doing it. Each to her own. That’s my view anyway. It bothers me that my instinct to rebel makes me read so many many column inches and think – you know nothing of my feminism. And stop sounding so goddamn self-righteous. I know girls who had babies at 15 while trying to do their GCSE’s and sharing rooms with several siblings.  I’d take advice from them. Middle-class, middle-aged liberals-and-dont-you-forget-it-cos-they’ll-fight-you-over-the-unintentional-use-of word-if-you-let-them. Not so much.

I guess I just need to vent an irrational anger I have.  Even as I write I’m trying to figure out what it is that makes me grit my teeth and make me want to laugh or cry. Maybe it’s because my heart is in the gutter. Where you can taste the earth, gritty and real. Maybe it’s just the sense of the over-importance of words. I love words. I love the shape of them. I love reading them. I love the sound of them from the mouth of someone I love.

But they’re just words. Breaths of air. Here. Gone. Skimmed. Deleted. Sometimes I wish everyone would shut the fuck up and get out there and do something if they care so much.

And then sometimes I remember, you’ve just got to laugh…

SP x

When I was a little girl I spent a lot of time looking in the backs of cupboards for Narnia. Sometimes, if no one’s looking and the cupboard looks right, I still do. I don’t even know why.  I guess, when I was little and at boarding school, I was unhappy a lot of the time. Looking for escape. Where better to escape to than somewhere with a lamp post in the snow, and adventures at every turn. A different world. No lights out. No kid taking my pocket money every week. No being locked in a room for talking after lights out and being forgotten for hours. No long haul between one trip home and the next. I really wanted to find that world on the other side of the old wooden back behind the crush of clothes and coats.

I can understand why I did it as a child. But as an adult?

Why do we think another world would be more magical than our own? As if somewhere else can hold more adventure than our own lives? It’s silly really. But we all want it, I guess. Something magical. Something different.

Last night a friend took me to my first ever red carpet premiere. Even though I know that it’s all just a bright gloss over life, I laughed and ooh’d and aah’d every time a new famous face came into the bar and was like a child a christmas. Not my normal Monday night. A strange but wonderful peek into a world that seems so very different from my own. If not a step through the cupboard, then a cold breeze and the hint of hooves scurrying through the snow.

It was freezing last night but Leicester Square was filled with people wanting autographs and photos (not of me, obviously – damned philistines;-)), and as my friend did his work charming someone with a baby, a lady in a wheelchair told me she’d been there for hours. HOURS in the cold, waiting for Tom Cruise and other sparkly beautiful people to smile at her, say a few words and sign something. Maybe get a picture.

Sometimes I think movies are the magic for grown-ups. There is a light about them and those who work under their spotlight. It’s easy to think that they have charmed lives. Magical lives. They don’t, of course. People are just people. Lives are just lives. We all just try and make sense of shit as it happens whoever we are. Bad things happen. Good things happen. If you’re lucky then the latter outweigh the former, but it’s all just random.

But movies…stories make sense in movies. In movies the hero is never just in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets pushed onto a subway track and no one pulls them out in the long and terrifying thirty seconds before the train comes. In movies, scary or otherwise, there is a point to everyone’s story. A logic. The boy gets the girl. Or doesn’t, but loses her nobly. The bad guy gets his comeuppance. Something is learned at at the end.

When we’re little, we think when we grow up it will all make sense. We’ll have the answers. Then comes the lonely moment when you realise there aren’t any answers, you’re just older, wiser, more cynical and still wanting just a moment of magic. A moment of something making sense. Of a random encounter that becomes an adventure. A moment where anything could happen and it could be breath-takingingly wonderful.

But life so often isn’t like that, because we settle into it, forgetting just how short it can be. How little time we have to get it right. To have our adventures. Now I’m a grown up, I escape through the metaphorical cupboard to worlds of my own make-believe and I’m lucky enough to get paid for it. Mostly those worlds are pretty dark though.

I like adventures. I like happy endings.

I’m not so good at the real world.

Thank god for the movies…I love their magic.

SP x