When I first arrived in Cambridge at 17 years old, I already wrote fiction in French, but I never thought I’d ever write in English. Those were days when I merrily got ‘pass out’ and ‘pass away’ mixed up (try it: great way to freak out all your friends). But then I started writing essays, reading more widely in English, and eventually felt like trying out writing fiction in English for a change. That’s when I realised that writing in a different language makes you a different person.

English and French couldn’t be more different. French is structured, rigorous, elegant, poised, inflexible – you can build endless sentences, attaching words together with cohorts of that and which and whose and whom. The subtleties of the syntax and conjugation can turn sentences into grandiose, intricately patterned works of linguistic architecture. Many words retain the length, fibrousness and complexity of their Latin ancestors. Writing in French forces you to be a rational, logical, methodical person. All the fun, the beauty and the craziness have to be grafted onto that grid of grammatical rigour.

English is the complete opposite. It’s a language of noises, lights, colours, smells, full of wacky alliterations and tiny words, completely anarchic, almost free from conjugation, blissfully unaware of its own grammar. You turn nouns into verbs and adjectives into first names, you let them trip over themselves, you throw commas and hyphens in to help them hold on to each other. It’s a flying trapeze act – unpredictable, colourful, and just choreographed enough that things don’t go crashing into the audience too much. Writing in English forces you to be a zany juggler with an ear for music.

So I’m not just writing different stories, I’m also writing different versions of myself into those stories. And of course I’m more in control when I write in French – but then I find out more when I write in English. For example, I discovered, thanks to my editor, that my English is riddled with Americanisms – but because I probably owe them mostly to one of my best friends who’s American, it makes them a special part of my developing identity as an English speaker. The mistakes and clumsiness of my English all have a story to tell beyond the story I’m trying to tell.

And just as I know there will never be a satisfactory French equivalent for ‘glistening’, and that there will never be a satisfactory English equivalent for ‘démesure’, I know that my ‘I’ will never be quite the same as my ‘je’.

Clem

Et voilà! first post on my new English author blog. I’ve never had an author blog in English before, because I’ve never been an author in English before – so my only author blog until now was in French, like my published children’s books. And like myself (it happens to the best of us).

But sacrebleu, last year to keep myself busy I knitted a little novel-looking sort of story with the finest English wool, with characters in it and a bit of blue and green background to make it look all geek chic on windy winter days, and lo and behold, the curiousest thing has happened that has made it absolutely completely necessary and tremendously compulsory for me to start an author blog in English: a book deal. I know, I wasn’t sure they existed either. But there you go, here it is, it’s with Hodder Children’s Books, and it’s a fairly good excuse for a first blog post, I think.

And this fairly good excuse is called Sesame Seade! (though bizarrely her parents are convinced that she’s really called Sophie). Sesame is an eleven-year-old roller-skating self-made superheroine with as many connections in her brain as there are stars in the universe. She’d quite like a pet duck. Her parents aren’t keen (they won’t even consider a duckling). Professor Seade (Mum) is a Pharmacologist and Reverend Seade (Dad) is a Chaplain, and both of them are ever so slightly baffled by their wunderkind. Especially when she turns super-sleuth to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Jenna Jenkins…

And all this happens in quite a nice little corner of the world called Cambridge (which I vaguely know, I looked it up on Wikipedia once), and it’s a series of humour, mystery and adventure (all at the same time) featuring happy ducks, a yellow boat, a flock of ballet dancers, a notable absence of tangy tangerine strings, strange professors, sleepy students, and above all a hyperactive heroine with two best friends and a sometimes dangerous cat.

The first book in the series will be published in April 2013! It’s mainly for fun-loving kids who blew out eight, nine, ten or eleven candles at their last birthday party – but I’m fairly sure that reading it won’t kill anyone with better- or less-well-lit celebratory cakes.

More soon! but I promise this won’t be a blog about solely Myself and Sesame Seade. Just like my French blog, there will be A Lot More about Children’s Literature In General. Because that’s what I love.