Thanks to J for the excellent suggestion - special offer! While The White Road and Other Stories is out of stock everywhere, which I am assured will be remedied next week, I still have a number of copies that I am happy to (sign and) send to anyone around the world.

Email me at tania(at)thewhiteroadandotherstories.com and we can discuss costs etc..!

Alternatively, the Where to Buy page on the book's website lists other ways of ordering the book, although there might be a little delay. Sorry about that. I believe there are copies in various libraries, the "green" alternative (although don't let my publishers know I'm saying that!).

Thanks and happy new year of reading.

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I feel under pressure to perform right now as this is my first official blog. Like a debutante's entry into society, this 'coming out' is just as nerve-wracking. But I'm delighted to be here and I'm grateful to you for stopping by to read and of course for any comments you may have.

Let me first of all tell you a bit about myself. I'm Gillian, and for the last ten and a half years I've been working as a newspaper journalist. The most exciting person I've interviewed so far is Uri Geller. Whilst chatting to him, my yoghurt spoon bent. I've also stood beside the Queen (royal, not Freddie) and Hillary Clinton (at separate events) and I've had my picture taken with Adele from Big Brother 3. I've been on the box a few times too and I've produced a short documentary on a pet cemetery which made the Daily Mirror telly critic cry. The most daring thing I've done in my writing career so far is dispose of a used cocktail stick inside an antique vase in the drawing room of the Secretary of State's residence Hillsborough Castle (there was no bin, and I'd no pockets).



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“Exactly £25 in two pees. What are the chances of that?” For an hour, Sue had been counting her way through the small mountain of copper and silver that had come out of four collecting boxes. The mingled heap of coins was now in neat piles and rows and waiting to be bagged up into bank-friendly denominations.

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Chicklish is delighted to interview Vanessa Curtis, author of Zelah Green, Queen of Clean (reviewed by us here).

Hi Vanessa. Please could you tell our readers a little about Zelah, the character? And what inspired her unusual first name?
Zelah's name came from a signpost as I was driving down to Cornwall. I'd seen it many times before, but on this occasion I decided to tuck it away in my head and use it for the name of a character later on. Zelah is as unusual as her name, because she has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a condition that has pretty much taken over her entire life. She's also a very feisty and self-effacing sort of character with a dry sense of humour.

Your book touches on OCD, depression and anorexia, among other disorders, in teenagers. What inspired you to write about this topic, and can you tell us anything about the research you did for your characters?

I watched a documentary some years ago about adults who suffered from OCD and it really affected me. There was a woman who was frightened of touching anything glittery and another who could only touch other people if she wrapped her hand in a tissue first. When I came to write Zelah I still had these images in my head, so I decided to explore what it might be like for a far younger person to do battle with the condition. I researched Zelah in various ways - by reading personal stories on internet forums and also by reading a memoir written by a sixteen-year-old boy who suffers from OCD and had similar rituals to Zelah - touching things a certain number of times, checking obsessively and tapping certain objects in a certain way. I also researched some of the other conditions explored in the book (anorexia, self-harm etc) in similar ways, but I think it's important to say that this isn't a novel about issues, it's a book about an unusual character (Zelah) and how she finds her way in life.

Do you have a website where readers can contact you?
My website address is vanessacurtis.com ...

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As you might imagine, during these times I am coming up against quite a lot of anti-Israel sentiment and feel - as many of us do - compelled to try and provide counterarguments to at least balance things out, directing people towards sources of reading that might provide information that their own media don't. That kind of thing. (In case you're wondering, this blog post isn't going to be about politics or war, it just raised something interesting for me in terms of writing.) So, anyway, today I stumbled upon a Facebook discussion about the situation here and I realised something: the one person who was attempting to persuade the rest of Israel's point of view was doing it with facts and figures: this is how long X has been going on, this is how many rockets Y has fired etc... Yet, the others were expressing how they felt about the situation, about how many people had been killed....


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Three men in high-vis jackets and the municipal cherry picker signalled the end of Christmas. I saw them in the High Street, late on Sunday evening, dismantling the lights and coiling the cables away. Two days were yet to pass until twelfth night. Not so much the Grinch that stole Christmas but the pinch of recession perhaps? Let’s hope some contemporary magi weren’t relying on festive lighting to illuminate their way to the bin store of the Travel Lodge.


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I’ll soon get fed up with ten minutes crushed into standing room only, and not very much of that, en route to London Bridge from Lewisham. Still, it’s my New Year Resolution to do three days a week. I must remember to take out my book in good time, as once on the train it’s impossible to reach the bag wedged between my feet.



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I've often thought it would be fun to volunteer as a slush-pile reader for a day. When I say fun, I've no doubt I'd lose the will to live after about three manuscripts, but I do like the idea of gaining an insight into how publishers and agents feel about unsolicited submissions. Are 90% of them really crap, or is that just an urban myth? Are 90% of them actually pretty good, now that writers have internet communities on which to share advice, research markets and get feedback on their chapters?

Though I sympathise with the common lament that agents reject work without reading it, I must admit that even if I started out giving careful consideration to everything, this wouldn't last beyond the first covering email that said: “This is teh next harry potter. Tell me how much u r going 2 pay me lol.”


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Temporarily plucked the straw and seaweed out of my hair so that I could pass undetected among the commuters onto the London train this morning. Ah, London - a fabulous city - but why is everyone always in a rush? It makes me feel that I've been missed off the invitation list for a really exciting, life-changing - nay, seismic - event, a bit like always being the last one to be picked for the class netball team. Though admittedly I was / am crap at netball and indeed all sports involving implements.



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In my house there are many bookshelves. Two of these will feature in this post.

The first is a rather exciting and lovely one, where all the books written by people I know live. The second is in my office, and on that sit my favourite books. Inspirational ones. Good ones. Ones I love. Glancing at it now I can see Hemingway, Keret, Sebold, Bender, Gaiman, Creech, McGregor, Salway, a book about The Clash, a book on local hauntings (forgot about that one!) my book, The Writers' and Artists' Yearbook. You get the picture.

Recently though I've faced a bit of a dilemma, because I've not been sure where to place some books - they're from people I know AND I love them, find them inspirational, think they're literature worth learning from.

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