Boys For Beginners - Launch Party & Launch Of A Career

Earlier in the week I attended the launch party for Lil Chase's debut novel, Boys For Beginners. It was held at Daunts bookshop in Holland Park. The Daunt bookshops are gorgeous. One of my first jobs was round the corner from Daunts on Marylebone High Street, and I used to wander around there, dreaming of the travel books I might one day buy for the holidays I might one day be able to afford.

I love the above photo of Lil signing copies, taken from the open doorway of the shop. It's a picture to warm the heart of any aspiring writer. This is the doorway you may one day walk through to sign copies of your debut novel beneath gently glowing lamps. I also like that Lil is slightly isolated in this captured moment. Well wishers crowded around her all evening, but the author experience can be very isolating - even in the midst of excitement like this.

Lil's story is one I know she won't mind me sharing and it's a salutary one. Boys For Beginner's has been in her life and mind ever since she wrote the first draft as a child. Some kind parent kept that draft and it still exists today. Who knew that so many years later it would become an actual, real book! Though the journey wasn't easy. Lil was lucky to have a brilliant agent, Julia Churchill of Greenhouse, on her side and to encounter an innovative publisher in Quercus.

Quercus - announced publisher of the year in 2011 - have been busy setting up a new children's list. I think that whoever commissioned Lil Chase is a very clever person indeed. New children's list in need of a quality writer of humorous fiction? Lil's your woman. She's no one hit wonder, either. A reviewer suggested that Lil might be the new Louise Rennison. I believe that with the right guiding hand from a forward-thinking publisher, this reviewer could be spot on. Lil is the type of author a publisher wants to invest in. 

I also really like that Quercus took on a humorous novel that I know would have left other commissioning editors twitching. It's funny. It has a female protagonist. It's about football. I can just HEAR some of the conversations going around some tables in some publishing houses. Girls don't do football - or that can be the dangerous concensus. Quercus were brave enough to ignore these silly rules of publishing, and they have a fabulous book and author because of it.

One last thing. I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about humorous fiction. It's often overlooked. People think it's easy. People think it's easy because they don't understand it. There are many, many crafts that can be learnt on the writing journey. How to be funny? You can either do it or you can't. It's that simple and that mysterious. I adore humour for its deep 'unknowability'. Oh, and the fact that it puts a smile on my face whilst reading. Smiling - it's not a complex emotional reaction, and I think that's another reason people can be snobs about humour. The emotion it provokes is not complex enough for people to think it's important. But where would we all be without a good laugh or friends that make us laugh? Hanging from the rafters, that's where!

So. I've claimed humour can't be learned and isn't about craft. But you can see the utter levels of discipline and craft in Lil's writing. Hers isn't the breezy first person narrative, casually tossing familiar jokes to the reader because, 'Look! I'm whacky, me!' This is an extremely carefully crafted novel. The jokes are clever and placed with precision. Lil thinks hard about her writing and it shows.

Lil didn't just make me smile. She made me think, 'I could never do this.' 

I look forward to watching the rest of her career!