At last
So I was hanging out this morning with the hellhounds. In my underwear. Not a lot of underwear. If I lean against the Aga in the cottage kitchen and am well draped with hellhounds, I can pretend that it’s MAY and WARM. I’m in a getting-going-slowly* in the mornings phase. And the hellhounds are always up/down for some supernumerary lying in drifts. I had Radio Three going. There was sunlight. There was tea. Mmmmm.
And someone knocked on the door. GAAAAH. Scramble into nearest three articles of clothing. Try not to think about hair. Hellhounds are baying: is it fun? Will it run? Can we chase it?
It was the frelling meter man. He looked at me warily.** I looked at him unenthusiastically. There are two meters, electric and gas. You can more or less get to one—the one behind the water butt. There’s usually a bag of compost or two in front of it but it’s not life-threatening or anything. The second one . . . not only is it inside the greenhouse so I have to go round and unlock the door and let the meter-reader in, but it’s behind my pot stash. All of you gardeners out there know what that means. And this is a tiny greenhouse, so every inch of space is piled several feet deep.*** GAAAAAAAAH.
So after I’d climbed over the tiered ranks of little green things and struggled through to the greenhouse and opened the door, I found the meter reader looking at a Large Cardboard Box sitting on the bags of compost in front of the outside meter. Wha’? I said intelligently, it still being early as far as I was concerned, and barely halfway through my first cup of tea. I wondered if you knew that was there, said the meter man in the kindly, soothing way you speak to brain-damaged hamsters.
No, I said, feeling like a brain-damaged hamster. You know they usually put a note through my door saying they’ve left something. . . .
This was what was in it. 
I comfort myself that it can’t have been there long because I’ve been bringing in cartons and caskets of mail-order little green things the last few days. But they could have put a note through my door.
Seriously cool, huh? It really is. † And those iridescent stripes—the cover glitters. It is soooo cool.
I don’t know how well this will show up on your computer, but the glitter is in flakes and facets, and if your screen will let you, you can see them here.
And while yes, I’m bragging, I love the way they’ve kept the design going inside too, and twiddled with the type. And the little curlicues on the cover itself are pressed or stamped, so you see their shadows on the reverse, and that’s cool too.
And look at the last page . . . 
* * *
* Frelling, frelling, frelling ME. I have to hope this isn’t just the thrice blasted dental anaesthesia or I’m in a lot of trouble about my new titanium choppers.
** I think there’s probably a note on my file about me, mornings, hellhounds, etc.
*** With stuff, okay? The plastic pots are in front of the meter—at least they’re relatively easy to move, even if the where is a problem. The clay and ceramic pots are on the other side. Then there are the piles of pot-saucers and –trays, and pot feet. Four hundred and sixty-two kinds of plant food, fertilizer, supplements, tonics, bracers, analeptics. Tools. Every tool you’ve ever imagined except the one you want when you want it. Trugs, buckets, bags, rolled-up fleece from winter^; and I’ve lately had to shove all the stuff that used to be on the shelves back to make room for seedlings. . . . If you’re a gardener, you know. If you’re not a gardener, well, gee, that’s really sad. Except for the bruises.
^ Which is OVER. Over, over, OVER.
† And it almost didn’t happen at all. We had almost no lead time and then there were extraordinary amounts of ball-dropping, I think chiefly because there was no clear chain of command for a new edition of an old book from a different imprint—and this one was, furthermore, going backwards: my books usually get published first as YA and then move on to adult. SUNSHINE started life as adult and is now being rebranded as YA^. So first it almost didn’t happen at all, and then it was rescued at the last minute . . . and given a cover that . . . um. I could see that it was sharp and cool and flashy and up to the minute and all that and I HAAAAAATED IT. It was so not SUNSHINE. SO. NOT. So I had a total hissy fit, the art department retired in confusion, and I thought that was the end of the matter. Drearily I thought this, bandaging the foot I had just shot myself in. But . . . no. I would have had to run away and live on an atoll if my book went out there into the world with that cover.
And then they came up with this one, at about a minute and a half to midnight. I’m the one suggested the bleeding letters . . . but they just pulled this entire concept out of the air somehow. And I loved it. And it’s even better in person.
^ slightly over my semi-comatose body: I know that teenagers read it, which is fine, but with the Newbery hanging permanently over my head like a large dark kidlit cloud in the shape of Miss Minchin, I am twitchy about making it clear that SUNSHINE is not for Great Aunt Gladys or your eight year old niece even if she does have a precocious vocabulary.
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