My blog is on fire! (Now I have that Kings of Leon song stuck in my head)

The lovely Hart Johnson Gave me the Blog on Fire Award. I'm super happy, because Hart's blog inspired me to start my own after I met her on the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award forum. I got this award a few months ago, but this time it comes with a new meme, which is pretty cool. So here we go!

1)  Are you a rutabaga? I had to Google this to find out what it was. To be honest, if I'm going to be a root vegetable I'd rather be a carrot. Doesn't sound very fancy, but makes great soup.

2) Who is your current crush? I'm holding on to James McAvoy, even though he kind of reminded me of a bumbling David Cameron in the X-Men prequel. Hopefully that was a one time blip, because David Cameron does not a leading man make.

3) Upload a heartwarming picture that makes you smile.

These pictures are of my Labrador Roxie when she was just twelve weeks old. When she was this size I carried her to other peoples houses in my handbag because she wasn't completely vaccinated, and couldn't touch ground that other non-vaccinated dogs could have walked on. She's now seventeen months old, sixty pounds, and carrying her anywhere would involve a wheelie suitcase and a back injury. I love her to bits, and these pictures makes me smile in that goofy way that parents do when they're looking at pictures of their newborn. Yes, I'm one of those dog owners. 

4) When was the last time you ate a vine-ripened tomato?

Probably the last time I ate in my mother in law's house. She buys vine ripened cherry tomatoes because they're the only kind her tortoise will eat. True story.

5) Name one habit that causes other people to plot your demise?

Probably my absent-mindedness. I can tell you the names of prominent nineteenth century physicians, but will forget where I put vital things and to do things you specifically asked me to do. Despite frequent reminders. I have a planner, post it notes, flash cards, Google reminders, and to-do lists but I still manage to forget almost everything important.

6) What is the weirdest, most-disgusting job you've ever had to do?  

I haven't had any weird, disgusting jobs (yet), but the worst job I've had was as a telephone market researcher. I had to ring people and ask them lots of questions on behalf of big companies. My worst day was when I was ringing on behalf of an Irish bank, I rang a woman and asked to speak to her husband. She told me that he had passed away a few weeks ago. I apologised, and said it was nothing important, just a customer satisfaction survey about his account with said bank. She said that he hadn't had an account with that bank, and got quite upset. I felt awful after the call. I'd just informed a grieving woman that her husband had a secret bank account. She didn't need to hear that, especially not then. Other bad days involved ringing people at 10am on Saturday mornings, and a woman who was convinced that I wasn't ringing from a call-centre, but was in fact her husband's mistress. Fun times.

8) What author introduced you to your genre?

Young adult urban fantasy: Richelle Mead. I love all her books. Women's contemporary fiction: Marian Keyes and Sophie Kinsella.

9) Describe yourself using obscure Latin words.

Sorry, I'm not going to even attempt this. My father and husband both learned Latin, and will pull me up if my declensions are wrong. 

That's it! Hope everyone is having a more productive writing day than me, I have a cold that is making my life (and that of my husband) miserable. Hope it passes quickly.

'It's Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday...

...Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend.'

Say what you like about that song, it's seriously catchy. Anyway, every Friday the nice people at Paper Hangover give a blog prompt. This week's prompt is your five best summer reads.

Summer reads conjures up visions of lying on a beach, under a baking hot sun. That's a far way from the weather here which, even for an Irish summer, is disappointing. We've had thunder and lightening this week (twice), hailstones (twice) and rain every day. Still, here are the books I'd recommend for summer.

1.Sophie Kinsella Can You Keep A Secret?


This book is really good fun, and laugh out loud funny. It follows Emma Corrigan, a woman who goes on an airoplane and, thinking that some mid-flight turbulence means that she's going to die, she tells a stranger beside sitting next to her all her secrets. When she survives, she goes into work to find out that the stranger was in fact her boss and he now knows all the things that she keeps secret, like her tactics for skiving off work. Emma goes into damage limitation mode, and ends up tying herself up in more knots. Sophie Kinsella is a fantastic writer, and this is one of my go-to feel-good books.

2. Marian Keyes This Charming Man

Marian Keyes is my favourite women's fiction author, and this is in my opinion her best book. It has her trademark wit throughout, yet deals with a very dark theme in a sympathetic way. I've loved her books ever since I read Rachel's Holiday when I was thirteen. This story is told from multiple points of view, including in an abrupt diary-style from Lola's POV, which you either love or you hate. Can't recommend this book enough.

3. Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper


This isn't quite as light as the other's, but it's a great book. I love the way Picoult manages to put over multiple sides of the same story, and can make you see where all her character's are coming from in amazingly difficult situations. Plus, her style of writing is so beautiful it makes me want to cry with envy. Sigh!







4. Richelle Mead Succubus Blues (Georgina Kincaid Series)


I love Richelle Mead. She writes really witty urban fantasy that keeps you reading late into the night to see what happens. Five of the six books in this series have been released, and the sixth book is coming out in August. The premise is that the heroine, Georgina, is a succubus who falls in love with a mortal man. Unfortunately, she can't touch him in case she takes away his soul. Add in some adventure and danger, and you have a great series.

5. Richelle Mead Vampire Academy Series


This is Mead's YA series, and it's excellent. The protagonist has a lot of conflict going on but, unlike some other YA novels, has ambitions outside of her love life which I really like. I have read most of these books in one sitting, they are totally escapist and this series inspired me to write my own YA novels.







What about you, have you any summer book recommendations? Hope everybody has a great weekend :)

E is for...Eireann

Ok, I'm slightly changing the rules here, because Eireann is an Irish word, not an English one. But then again, who said that the words had to be in English.

Eireann means Ireland, and it's the country where I was born and I've lived here all my life. I love it. Not in a republican, nationalistic sense, but in a more familial way. Yes it has bad points. Yes it's tiny. Yes it rains most of the time. Yes we have hit the international headlines this past year for all the wrong reasons. But it's home.

I like the landscape, I like the people and I like the way we have an ability to laugh at ourselves. I even, God help me, like the rain. But what I'm proudest of, is the fact that despite being a poor nation for most of our existence, and despite having a small population, we have produced a lot of great literature. From Joyce and Wilde to Yeats and Shaw. A lot of our current female writers, Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes, Cecelia Ahern and Cathy Kelly sell copies of their books worldwide.

Dublin City, where I live, is a UNESCO City of Literature. And amid all the recessionary doom and gloom, the unemployment, our national debt, I think that is something to be proud of.

B is for Books!

I'm starting to feel a little like I'm on Sesame Street. You know, 'This blog post has been brought to you today by the letter B.' Or something.

Anyway, as I'd rather read a book than do just about anything else, I decided to list the books that have had the biggest impact on my life.

Number Five: Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes

I love this book. Not only does it talk about drug addiction and recovery, but manages to do so in a way that is funny but doesn't take away from the seriousness of the topic. It always makes me laugh, and it shows that women's fiction isn't all handbags and cocktails (though I do love both).

Number Four: Mallory Towers Series by Enid Blyton

In fact, I liked all of Blyton's British Boarding School books. I was enchanted by it, probably because I was an only child at the time, and used to read them in bed, pretending that my bed was part of a dormitory and that I was at boarding school, waiting for the lights to go out so I could steal off with my school friends and have a midnight feast. Of course, I'm a complete home bird who would have cried my entire way through boarding school, but that's another matter.

Number Three: The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath

I love this book. I wish she had written more books, but I reread this every so often. I love the imagery, and the way she manages to convey the sense of entrapment through her sentence structure. I think every woman should read this book.

Number Two: Vampire Academy, by Richelle Mead

Confession: I love young adult novels. The teenage years are so exciting, your character is starting to form, you're beginning to make decisions for yourself, and your future could go literally anywhere. I liked how Mead too real vampire mythology and wove it into her books, and it made me think that maybe I could do the same with my historical knowledge, use it to form a supernatural but realistic society. So I did, and I wrote Ravensborough.

Number One: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

All right, so strictly these are two novels, but my Dad gave them to me together so I could compare two types of dystopian worlds and ideologies. He asked me to decide which society I'd rather live in, one that was repressive or one in which everyone was programmed to believe they were happy. That was ten years ago, and I still haven't made up my mind.