tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88682397757837395602024-03-14T02:20:43.158+00:00Philip ReeveThe Official, personal Blog of author Philip ReevePhilip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.comBlogger365125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-11191725115329930452015-07-12T12:00:00.002+01:002015-07-12T12:00:52.476+01:00Test postTest<br />
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<br />Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-44874348051290280542015-06-15T08:55:00.000+01:002015-06-15T08:56:57.849+01:00Reeve & McIntyre at the BBC<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Those lovely people at Scottish Book Trust took us all the way to sunny Glasgow last week to perform our <i>Cakes in Space</i> show, which BBC Scotland broadcast live online. You can <a href="http://scottishbooktrust.com/video/authors-live/sarah-mcintyre-and-philip-reeve">see a recorded version here</a>, featuring all the usual nonsense and Sarah's 'How To Draw Pilbeam' tutorial. And we've written <a href="http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/711224.html">a full account of our Scottish adventures on Sarah's blog</a>.<br />
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<br />Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-3344989858156191962015-05-25T19:14:00.001+01:002015-06-01T19:23:37.350+01:00Mad Max - Fury Road<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I wasn’t particularly interested when I first heard about <i><a href="http://www.madmaxmovie.com/">Mad Max - Fury Road</a></i>. I’ve reached that age where every other movie out of Hollywood is a remake or a reboot of something that I remember from my formative years, and almost all of them seem inferior to the originals. But it turns out that <i>Fury Road</i> is the real deal: I don’t remember enjoying a sci-fi/action movie this much since <i><a href="http://the-solitary-bee.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/aliens.html">Aliens</a></i>.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The plot would fit comfortably on a post-it note. I’ve seen a few people on Twitter saying this as if it’s a bad thing. It’s not. Most films have far more plot than they know what to do with. </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Fury Road</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> has exactly as much as it needs. Which isn’t very much at all, because it’s a demented punk hymn to speed and violence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;">Basically, post-apocalyptic warlord Immortan Joe keeps a harem of young wives in his desert citadel, until his war-rig driver Furiosa decides to help them escape: the rest of the film is one long chase sequence. The wives’ predicament, and Furiosa’s growing sympathy for them would fill the opening scenes of a lesser movie, but </span><i style="font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;">Fury Road</i><span style="font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;"> skips all that: we don’t meet the wives until they’ve already escaped, at which point Joe’s discovery of their empty room and a single line of graffiti fill in all the back-story we need.</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A few details of Furiosa’s past are sketched in later, but only in passing. Max himself, the burned-out case who ends up helping the women (although they don't seem to need a lot of help), is even sketchier: is this a sequel or a reboot? We never learn where he has come from, or who the ghosts that haunt him are. There isn’t much dialogue at all. There are certainly no long speeches, and the storyline is so stripped-down that it would work as a silent movie (like Luc Besson’s </span><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085426/" style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Le Dernier Combat</i>,</a><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> another post-apocalyptic punch-up in which one of the things lost in the fall of civilization is the power of speech). </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That said, what dialogue there is is pretty good. In <i>Beyond Thunderdome</i> Max met a gang of kids whose feral upbringing had left them talking in lines from <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddley_Walker">Riddley Walker</a></i>. It was an interesting idea, and it’s an aspect of that movie which I quite like, but it did feel a bit arch, somehow. In the new movie there’s a similar scuffed and pidgin-y feel to a lot of the lines, especially the ones spoken by Joe’s mob of Warboys, but it works much better. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The warboys are impressive in other ways, too. A motorcade of maniacs in crusty white face paint, driven by a crackpot religion which promises them entrance to Valhalla if they ‘die historic on the Fury Road’, their main role is as filmic cannon-fodder, to be flung about like broken puppets as their ramshackle pursuit vehicles crash, somersault and explode. But we see one of them, Nux in more detail, and he’s such a goofball, trying so earnestly to do the right thing according to the twisted world-view he’s been lumbered with, that we tend to assume the others are probably like that too. They’re on the wrong side, but they’re not evil, and somehow they’re not just the faceless minions most movie villains send to do their dirty work. Even Immortan Joe himself - a wrong ‘un if ever there was - is understandable; you can see how he’s built his fierce little desert kingdom, and why his boys revere him.*</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The costumes and <a href="http://vehicleshowcase.madmaxmovie.com/">vehicle designs</a> pack in all the detail which has been left out of the script. That religion I mentioned above is basically explained by the way the warboys spray their teeth with chrome paint before they start their kamikaze runs, turning their clenched teeth into radiator grilles. The whole social structure of the Citadel is explained in a couple of shots; Joe above controlling the water supply of the huddled Sebastiao Salgado masses below (some of whom look like giant caddis fly larvae under their bizarre scrap-built sun-shields).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There’s a rich seam of black humour running through the old <i>Mad Max</i> films. It’s buried deeper here, but it still breaks the surface quite often, mostly in the crazy designs - the hedgehog cars, the bendy-pole men, the bobble-head bird skull thing on the hood of Nux's vehicle. A hatchet-faced character who arrives in a sports car body attached to the top of a small tank, dressed in a judge’s wig and robes made out of bullets, is probably the funniest thing I’ve seen all year. And, of course, Joe’s warband carries its own musicians with it - a battletruck made of amplifiers, crewed by a team of drummers and a heavy metal guitarist with a flame-throwing guitar. I’m sure the film is stuffed with CGI, but the vehicles were real, as far as I could tell, and you could almost smell the oil and hot metal. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There are only a couple of bits which ring false. When the war rig and its pursuers drive into a monster sandstorm it looks incredible from the outside, like a beige tsunami. Even once they’re in the heart of it there are impressive moments, an episode of <i>Whacky Races</i> reimagined by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Martin_(painter)">John Martin</a>. But when cars start to be lifted off the ground, colliding and exploding and spilling their crews, it gets a bit computer-gamey and loses the sense of reality the film has been building. I also thought the final chase/battle was cut a bit too fast. At a point where it becomes important who is in which vehicle and where the vehicles are in relation to each other it all got a bit confusing. And I slightly missed the broad Australian accents which were such a feature of the old films - this one has a more international cast, and was shot in Namibia rather than the outback. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But the desert looks great, and so does the blue-filtered swampland where wierdoes shamble about on stilts, looking a bit like those horse-bat creatures at the end of </span></span><i style="font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;">The Dark Crystal</i><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. And it reminded me of one of the things I always liked best about the <i>Mad Max </i>movies: there's a complete absence of buildings (unless you count the caverns at the start). Most post-apocalyptic stories take us into the ruins of our cities, but </span></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;">Max</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> is much more hardcore than that - in</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> his future there is only the desert, and the only shelter is in the cabins of speeding vehicles.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">*I’m always telling people that I don’t like violent films and TV shows, but I guess what I actually object to is sadistic ones: gorily sadistic ones which linger over gratuitous shots of wounds and suffering, or casually sadistic ones like <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i> where the deaths of countless extras are treated as jolly fun for all the family. <i>Fury Road</i> doesn’t keep slipping in grisly details for the sake of it (there’s very little actual gore until the climax, when the big villains start getting their come-uppance, and even then it’s cut quickly away from, just minor details in the broad sweep of battle). And the way it treats the cannon fodder means that the carnage is never too jokey - the cars and the clothes and the exploding spears may be ridiculous, but the warboys’ deaths have weight. </span></span></div>
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Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-91146893124561995212015-05-24T22:40:00.000+01:002015-05-24T22:55:56.410+01:00Frankfurt<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Look! Seawigs have reached Germany! Here are some young rambling isles who we met last week at the European School Rhein Main in Bad Villbel, near Frankfurt.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><a href="http://www.dressler-verlag.de/index.php?id=494">Dressler</a>, our German publisher, had asked <a href="http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/">Sarah McIntyre</a> and I to go and visit some international schools to spread the word about <i>Oliver and the Seawigs</i>, or ‘<i>Schwupp und Weg</i>’ as it’s known in those parts. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Me, Stephanie, McIntyre and Mystery Guest.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Our main host was Stephanie von Selchow who is the librarian at the European School in Frankfurt. She’d arranged for us to do two sessions there, for her own students, and a visiting class from the <a href="http://www.textorschule.de/">Textorschule</a> in Sachsenhausen. A lot of the kids had already read <i>Oliver and the Seawigs</i>, so after we’d talked a bit about it we went on to cakes in Space, which has just been published in Germany as <i><a href="http://www.dressler-verlag.de/buecher/kinderbuecher/ab-8-jahren/details/titel/3-7915-1704-X/20676/10259/Autor/Philip/Reeve/Kekse_im_Kosmos.html">Kekse im Kosmos</a></i>. Most of the audience spoke good English, and it seemed to go down well - of course, some of the show needs no translation; the bit where Sarah hits me over the head with a mandolin case goes down well in any language. Ow.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That afternoon we had a quick wander around Frankfurt, and tried to draw some of the odd but attractive pollard linden trees which line the riverside. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Then it was off to the <a href="http://www.gold-mund.de/">Goldmund Restaurant</a> at the <a href="http://www.literaturhaus-frankfurt.de/">Literaturhaus</a>, where we had dinner with Stephanie and some of her colleagues from ESF and other schools. As you can see, it was very grand, and the food was lovely. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The next morning we were picked up by Manuela Rossi, who whirled us down the Autobahn to Bad Villbel, where we talked Seawigs and Cakes to some of the students of the <a href="http://www.es-rm.eu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=20&Itemid=32&lang=en">European School Rhine Main</a>. Utte, the librarian there, showed us some of the great artwork the children had produced, including this fantastic tower of houses. It looks a bit like a Traction City from my <i>Mortal Engines</i> books.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Best question of the day: "Where did you get those GIGANTIC SHOES?"</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Achtung! Gigantischeschuhen!</span></td></tr>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Then it was back on the Autobahn to yet another international school, </span><a href="http://en.school.accadis.com/" style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Accadis in Bad Homburg</a><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We’d met Samantha Malmberg and Caitlin Wetsch from the school at the previous night’s dinner, so it was good to see them in their natural surroundings, and meet their students, who were VERY EXCITED TO SEE US. Some of the classes had done whole whole projects on Oliver the Seawigs, complete with some great drawings.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Samantha Malmberg with one of the drawings we did at accadis...</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">...and the seawig Sarah drew for Caitlin.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And after that we had a little bit more time to mooch around Frankfurt, in the guise of Mitteleuropean crime-fighting duo Peek & Cloppenburg.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Strange things were going on in Frankfurt city centre. Nobody seemed to be bothered by the fact that the shopping mall was being devoured by a freak wormhole…</span></div>
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...while a time-loop at the caketastic <a href="http://www.cafe-im-liebieghaus.de/">Café Im Liebeighaus</a> kept generating extra Sarahs...</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But we discovered a natty German-style TARDIS and were able to save the day.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And we both found excellent covers for our forthcoming albums, should we ever find time to write and record them. Mine is going to be icy German electronica…</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Heaven knows what Sarah’s is going to sound like.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But whatever it is, it will be lovely - because some things are Better Than Perfection.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Thanks to Stephanie, and to all the students, staff and volunteers who helped to make our visit to Frankfurt so enjoyable! We were very sad to leave...</span><br />
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Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-30328240158415334342015-05-07T19:57:00.003+01:002015-05-12T11:55:10.361+01:00Political Drama<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Election day here in the UK, and I’m saying nothing about which of the dismal and despicable contenders I shall be voting for - if, indeed, any. Alwyn W Turner (whose <a href="http://philipreeve.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/crisis-what-crisis-by-alwyn-w-turner.html">book about the 1970s</a> I mentioned here recently) <a href="http://alwynturner.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/the-general-election-campaign-2015.html">sums it all up very eloquently on his excellent blog</a>. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But while I’ve been doing my best to ignore British politics, I’ve been very entertained lately by the U.S. variety - or at least by the version of it which appears in various TV dramas. So I thought I’d write about some of them instead. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We’ve just (finally) started watching <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0200276/">The West Wing</a>, </i>that every-day story of White House folk. I know it’s years and years old and a classic and everything, but I caught a bit of it when it was first broadcast and decided that it wasn’t for me. I was wrong, though, and now I’m thoroughly looking forward to watching the whole thing. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The characters are great, the pace is fast, and the wisecrack-laden dialogue fizzes in a way that reminds me of <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032599/?ref_=nv_sr_1">His Girl Friday</a></i>. Whenever they aren’t batting one-liners to and fro like tennis pros, the cast sum up the defects of each other’s characters in the sort of set-piece speech which American screenwriters do so well. </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It’s fabulous. But I can see why I turned up my nose at it all those years ago. There’s a certain amount of cynicism displayed by the aides and press officers who make up most of the cast, but the president, played by Martin Sheen, is presented as a secular saint, and about once an episode it all goes a bit soft focus and stirring music swells on the soundtrack while someone explains that America is a Beautiful Idea, or some such patriotic guff. I know that </span></span>sort<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> of thing plays well in the U.S, and not just with the right (</span></span>The<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> West Wing is achingly liberal). Over here, for some reason, we find it a bit embarrassing.</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> It's hard to imagine a British Prime Minister being portrayed with such reverence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A good example of the British view of politicians is </span></span><i style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098825/?ref_=nv_sr_2">House of Cards</a> </i><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">(1990). </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Based on the novel by Michael Dobbs MP, it tells the story of Francis Urqhart, a loyal Conservative chief whip who, when the new Prime Minister goes back on a promise to make him Foreign Secretary, accepts the snub with apparent good grace, and then calmly and coldly sets about wreaking his revenge. It’s now been </span></span><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1856010/?ref_=nv_sr_1" style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">remade by Netflix in the US</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, with the action moved to Capitol Hill and Kevin Spacey in the role made famous by Ian Richardson (he’s called Francis Underwood in the new version). </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The remake is a class act, it really is; Spacey is supremely watchable, and I enjoyed seeing him plot and scheme his way through a Washington DC which seems to have been drained of all its warmer hues, an underlit, almost submarine city of marble and brushed steel, haunted by a wintry soundtrack. But it never achieves the real cruelty of the old BBC version, which was one of the most irredeemably black-hearted TV shows I’ve ever seen. The new </span></span><i style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">House of Cards</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> has more episodes to fill, and an eye on further seasons. It can’t help humanising its anti-hero. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Also, it’s less theatrical than the original. Spacey keeps up Ian Richardson’s trick of addressing the camera as a co-conspirator, but the story seems to be trying harder to be plausible, and, as a consequence, it’s much less so - the melodramatic plot twists ring false. Added to which, as the second season wore on, I found it harder and harder to keep track of who was plotting to do what to whom, and why, and why I should care. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Worst of all, somewhere beneath the Apple-advert sheen I think there may lurk the same hope that lights </span></span><i style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">The West Wing</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> - Frank Underwood might be a wrong ‘un, but America is still a Beautiful Idea. They seem to think his </span></span>resistible<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> rise is a tragedy, when it should be a black comedy. I’ll keep watching, but I’m not convinced.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1442462/"><i>The Good Wife</i> </a>is a very different kettle of fish. I bought a box set after seeing people sing its praises on Twitter. For the first few episodes I thought I’d wasted my money - it seemed to be just a bland legal soap, starring that Julianna Margulies off of <i>ER</i> as a Chicago lawyer named Alisha Florrick, who reluctantly stands by her cheating District Attorney husband when he gets sent to prison on trumped-up charges. But it’s far more fun than it sounds. The main characters are all watchable enough, but its real strength lies in its semi-regular secondary characters, a cast of comically eccentric judges, lawyers and in-laws. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Michael J Fox is in it, playing a wonderful devious scoundrel, as is Alan Cumming, who gives the prissiest performance this side of C3PO as the political advisor fighting to rebuild hubby’s career. Zach Grenier crops up as a sly, reptilian divorce lawyer, the great Stockard Channing arrives in a later season as our heroine’s prodigal mother, and Carrie Preston is a hoot as the ditzy but brilliant Elsbeth Tascione. Archie Panjabi (from <i>Bend It Like Beckham</i>, another <i>ER </i>alumnus) is cool and charismatic as the law firm’s investigator, but the show doesn’t seem to know quite how to handle her - her storylines keep skittering off into ludicrous melodrama. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But <i>The Good Wife</i> is good enough to cope with a bit of ludicrous melodrama - there’s so much going on, and you never know whether you’re in for a comic turn, a serious chin-stroking moment about some case clunkingly based on a real-life incident, or total soap opera lunacy. It’s all over the place - the plot doesn’t just twist, it makes U-turns, generally in an effort to avoid colliding with other plots which appear suddenly out of left field - but somehow it just <i>works</i>. I’m including it this round-up because it’s at least partly about politics, with Peter Florrick campaigning to get elected again as DA and then as state governor. I can’t tell if the writers of <i>The Good Wife</i> think America is a Beautiful Idea or not, but their version of American politics is a giddy parade of attack ads, leaked e-mails, sleaze, deviousness, backstabbing, and downright lies. I know I’m not comparing like with like, but it feels far more believable than <i>House of Cards</i>.</span></span><br />
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Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-33330160917806972072015-05-07T08:10:00.000+01:002015-05-07T08:10:08.802+01:00A Prix Enfantasie for Oliver & the Seawigs<i>Oliver and the Seawigs</i> has won an award in Switzerland! It's the <a href="https://www.payot.ch/fr/selections/prix-enfantaisie">Prix Enfantasie,</a> organised by Payot bookshops and the Swiss Institute for Youth, and Sarah McIntyre and I are very pleased about it! Here's her blog, with all the details. And here's a little video we made since we couldn't get to the award ceremony. Lots of people know McIntyre for her fabulous illustrations, but did you realise she can also throw a book more than 200 miles with pinpoint accuracy?<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hjCkYmPNPxY" width="560"></iframe>Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-57743534828574942322015-05-06T10:34:00.002+01:002015-05-06T11:58:04.176+01:00Nigel Terry: Morte D'Arthur<br />
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One of my online roles seems to be as an unofficial Keeper of the Flame for John Boorman's film <i>Excalibur,</i> which I've written about <a href="http://philipreeve.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/excalibur-documentary.html">here</a>, and <a href="http://philipreeve.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/nicol-williamson.html">here</a>, and <a href="http://philipreeve.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/ireland-part-2-here-my-power-was-born.html">here</a>. So I was saddened to learn this week of the death of its star, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Terry">Nigel Terry.</a> A west country lad and a superb actor, he made a magnificent Arthur, convincing and passionate all the way from callow youth to sorrowful old age.<br />
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When I first saw the film I imagined he would go on to star in dozens of other big movies, but although he was a fine <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravaggio_(1986_film)">Caravaggio </a>a few years later in the Derek Jarman film, I lost track of him for many years after that, until the 1990s, when he began turning up from time to time on TV. He was Svidrigailov in a BBC adaptation of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307734/reviews">Crime and Punishment</a> and Mr Boldwood in ITV's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0157616/">Far From The Madding Crowd</a>, where he appeared alongside actor-turned-excellent-YA-author <a href="http://theandyrobbsite.co.uk/">Andy Robb </a>(who wrote on Facebook yesterday that he was 'one of the funniest men I've ever met - and possibly the most miserable bastard to walk the earth'. (He also turned up in a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doctor%27s_Daughter">Dr Who episode</a> - I must have missed that one.) And, although he seems to have been quite a private and reclusive man, he appeared along with the rest of the <i>Excalibur</i> cast in the <a href="http://philipreeve.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/behind-sword-in-stone-premiere.html">Behind the Sword in the Stone</a> documentary (which I wish I could link to, but it's still in search of a distribution deal).<br />
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Anyway, he was a fine actor, and he will always be King Arthur to me.<br />
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Here is a link to the <i>Guardian's</i> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/may/03/nigel-terry">obituary</a>.<br />
<br />Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-62845501709435365312015-05-04T09:40:00.000+01:002015-05-05T12:26:43.639+01:00Generation X-WingI've often used this blog to write about the books, films and TV shows which inspire my own stories, but last week, watching all the excitement about the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCc2v7izk8w">trailer for <i>The Force Awakens</i></a>, I realised that I've never really got round one of the biggest inspirations of them all...<br />
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The first time I heard about <i>Star Wars </i>was also the first time I went to the cinema on my own. It was August 1977, I was eleven, and I had taken myself off to the Odeon on Brighton seafront to watch <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076716/"><i>Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger</i>.</a> Before it started, up came a trailer for a new film. I've looked for it on YouTube, but I'm pretty sure <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP_1T4ilm8M">the one on there </a>isn't the one I saw (I'm guessing there was an alternative trailer for the British market). For one thing, I distinctly remember a different cheesy tag line - "A Boy, a Girl, and a Galaxy of Adventure!" More importantly, the YouTube version starts off (rather oddly), 'Somewhere in space, this may all be happening Right Now...' but the most striking thing for me about the <i>Star Wars</i> trailer was that it <i>wasn't</i> happening 'right now', it was set, 'A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...'<br />
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Until that precise moment, I'd never liked Science Fiction. I was an anxious child, and SF stories seemed to be full of alien invasions, plagues, atomic wars and other Scary Stuff Which Might Actually Happen - I always carefully avoided them*. But if <i>Star Wars</i> was happening long ago and far away, I knew it was safe - as safe as the fantasy and history stories which I loved. So, watching the intriguing flurry of images flash by, I already knew that this was the film for me.<br />
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It wasn't for me yet, of course, because it didn't open in the UK until Christmas. But one wet Sunday that autumn I found this 'collector's edition' magazine in the news agent's at the end of Queen's Park Road<br />
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Heaven knows how I was able to afford it, since it cost 95 whole p, but somehow I found the money, and hurried home to pore over its collection of grainy stills and behind-the-scenes interviews. I particularly remember the <a href="http://all-that-is-interesting.com/ralph-mcquarrie-star-wars">Ralph McQuarrie production paintings</a>, so beautiful and so oddly different from the final film, the gap between them hinting at the vast amounts of design effort which had gone into the models and costumes.<br />
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I also learned what the story was all about - it had been a complete mystery until then. By the time I actually got to see the film (February '78 - I think it was a birthday outing) I knew exactly what was going to happen, but I don't remember that spoiling my enjoyment. I was just delighted to see all the stuff I'd read about and seen in stills and drawings actually moving. <br />
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Like <i><a href="http://philipreeve.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/this-is-tolkien-poster-i-had-on-my.html">The Lord of the Rings,</a> Star Wars </i>created a whole world, and packed it with so much detail that it felt real. I was fascinated by the costumes and sets - by the Jawas' rusty sand crawler and the weird aliens half-glimpsed in the cantina. I was enough of a history geek even then to recognise some of the references in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mollo">John Mollo's</a> costume designs.**<br />
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My favourites were the Stormtroopers.Whose idea was it to make their plastic armour white? It seemed so un-military, but it worked. They looked like an army of skeletons, and their helmets - part gas mask, part <i>stahlhelm</i>, - are superb. The sequels and prequels kept throwing new stormtroopers into the mix, and the <i>Force Awakens</i> trailer shows some cool updated ones, but they're still not as cool or up-to-date as the originals, which I reckon are unimprovable.<br />
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It was also the classiest fantasy movie I'd ever seen. I was too young to spot the references to John Ford and Kurosawa, but I loved the lush Holst and Wagner borrowings of the John Williams score, and even I could see that Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing were in a different league to the rest of the cast. (Peter Cushing is a superb villain: I missed him in the second film, and when the Emperor himself turned up in the third, he wasn't remotely as impressive; he needed to be played by Vincent Price or Christopher Lee.)<br />
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Best of all were the desert landscapes of the film's opening half hour. Here was an imaginary world as spectacular as the ones which books conjured in my imagination. I loved the widescreen vistas of Tatooine, with its double sunsets and mud-brick spaceport. I always felt a bit sad when the Millennium Falcon finally blasts off into orbit. The grey colour palettes of the Death Star work well all the time they are being intercut with the browns and yellows of the desert scenes, but once the whole story move there something is lost; it turns into a lot of running around in corridors, and a certain desperation creeps into the action sequences (why <i>does</i> a brand new space station have a garbage compactor full of rusty metal where an actual underwater monster lives?). It picks up again afterwards, with the rebel base in the jungle temple and the final battle, but my favourite bit was always the desert.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">More Ralph McQuarrie concept art.</span></td></tr>
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<i>Star Wars</i> was the first thing I'd ever liked that <a href="http://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-in-ihe-uk-1977-the-first-star-wars-christmas">other people were into as well</a>. I knew a few people who had read Tolkein, my previous obsession, but at my school they were rare breeds, and Middle Earth didn't really seem like part of mainstream culture in those days. But <i>Star Wars</i> was so popular that it's UK opening was featured on the TV news.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Queuing for <i>Star Wars</i>. Photo from <a href="http://flashbak.com/waiting-in-line-to-see-star-wars-1977-2000-26505/">flashbak.com</a></td></tr>
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<i>Star Wars</i> was everywhere, and you could buy jigsaws and stickers and comics and pencil cases (which I promptly did). You could collect <a href="http://kcent247.hubpages.com/hub/Star-Wars-Vintage-Trading-Cards-A-Collectors-Guide"><i>Star Wars </i>bubble gum cards</a>. It was so popular that it even put an end to World War 2. Before <i>Star Wars,</i> schoolboys played Brits vs Germans in the playground, watched <i>Colditz</i> and <i>Where Eagles Dare</i>, and made model kits of Spitfires and Messerschmidt 109s. After it, we played rebels vs stormtroopers and watched <i>Blake's Seven</i> and <i>Battlestar Galactica</i>. (I had grown out of model kits by then, but if I hadn't, I would undoubtedly have been gluing together wonky X-wing and TIE fighters.)<br />
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Later that year I was on a beach in Guernsey, making a den out of bits of driftwood while my mum and dad sunbathed. I found a long strand of thick, frayed rope. As I dragged it across the sand to where my construction was taking shape, I looked down at it, and then up at the rocky cliffs, and imagined that it was the tail of one of those creatures which the Sand People in <i>Star Wars</i> use, and that I was riding one across the wastes of Tatooine. I had just turned twelve. It's the last time I can remember playing make-believe like that.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">Guernsey, 1978</span></td></tr>
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I was growing up. Inspired by <i>Star Wars</i>, I was reading and watching all the Science Fiction I could get my hands on. Perhaps that's why the later films had nothing like the same effect on me. When <i>The Empire Strikes Back </i>came out in 1980 I thought it was OK, but Luke and Leia turning out to be siblings struck me as creaky even then - <a href="http://philipreeve.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/the-black-angel.html">I was more impressed by the supporting feature</a>. By the time <i>Return of the Jedi</i> was released I was at sixth form and immensely sophisticated: I enjoyed it in a nostalgic way, as a reminder of something I'd loved when I was young.<br />
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And after that, I sort of forgot about Luke Skywalker and co. But years later, when I started trying to write my own sci-fi/fantasy story, that <i>Star Wars</i> feeling was one of the things I was aiming for.<br />
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<a href="http://scifibulletin.com/books/science-fiction/feature-what-star-wars-means-to-me/"><i>No sooner had I finished writing this than I noticed that Gareth Powell has also been inspired to write down his own </i>Star Wars<i> memories - you can find them here.</i></a><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">*The big SF movies of the 'seventies before <i>Star Wars</i> included things like <i>Rollerball, Death Race 2000, Logan's Run, Damnation Alley</i> and the<i> Planet of the Apes</i> sequels - not exactly sunny visions of the future.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">**The historical reference points helped <i>Star Wars</i> to age much better than films which tried to look purely futuristic. When I caught it on TV in the mid-nineties the only things which had really dated were the men's hairstyles, and even they have probably been back in fashion since.</span><br />
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Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-74767702560847830122015-04-13T13:14:00.002+01:002015-04-13T13:14:21.932+01:00Railhead Updates<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It seems like DAYS since I posted the lovely <i><a href="http://philipreeve.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/railhead-unveiled.html">Railhead</a></i> cover, so here you go:<br />
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<span style="color: #3d85c6;">Railhead: The Sequel</span></h3>
It's still six months until it will be published, but I'm very happy to announce that my next project will be RAILHEAD 2. I introduce a big new world in the first book, and of course there wasn't really space to explore a lot of the background details, so I'm delighted that OUP are giving me a chance to revisit the Network Empire in a second book, continuing the stories of some of the characters, and introducing new ones.<br />
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(The October publication date is for the UK, by the way. I hope to have news of a US date soon.)<br />
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I don't think I've mentioned here that the film rights to RAILHEAD were acquired last year by Warner Brothers. I believe the director currently associated with it is <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0510731/">Doug Liman,</a> who made <a href="http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/edge-of-tomorrow-2014">Edge of Tomorrow</a>, one of my favourite SF movies of recent years, so it's in very good hands. As anyone who's been waiting for a <i>Mortal Engines</i> adaptation will know, selling the rights is no guarantee that a movie will actually be made anytime soon, or even at all, but it's still better than <i>not</i> selling the rights, so fingers crossed...<br />
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Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-69687016535104884182015-04-11T13:01:00.001+01:002015-04-11T13:55:02.478+01:00Crisis, What Crisis? by Alwyn W. Turner<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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It turns out that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagon_Wheels">Wagon Wheels</a>, men's shirt collars, and the sales of fondue sets weren't the only things that were bigger when I was growing up in the 1970s. Watching the antics of the unsavoury characters who are trying to persuade us to vote for them in next month's General Election, I can't help noticing that they are minnows compared with the great monsters who dominated British politics in my childhood.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #3d85c6;">1977 Reeve, blissfully unaware of the economic crisis.</span></td></tr>
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Of course, being a child, I didn't have much idea who Margaret Thatcher, Antony Wedgewood Benn and the rest were, or why they were always on the telly. Their names and mannerisms gradually became familiar via <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Yarwood">Mike Yarwood's</a> impersonations, their faces from the puzzling but intriguing cartoons in the newspapers, but what they actually stood for, what they were <i>doing</i>, remained a mystery, and not one to which I gave much thought. The first time I began to understand the issues behind a political event was in the 1979 General election, when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. (My parents voted for her, I think. So, more tellingly, did my grandad, who had been a staunch union man and diehard labour supporter since the 1920s.)<br />
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Anyway, I've been looking for an accessible history book that would fill in a bit of the background detail of those years, and I found one in <a href="http://alwynwturner.com/">Alwyn W Turner's</a> <i>Crisis, What Crisis?</i> It's a well-written, non-partisan overview of the decade, focusing on the politics and big events, but with an engaging way of using pop culture to cast light on their effects. <i>Rising Damp, The Sweeney</i> and Ziggy Stardust are all roped in to illustrate changing attitudes. (Mr Turner has also written a biography of <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/terry-nation/alwyn-w-turner/9781781310410">Terry Nation</a>, which maybe explains why <i>Dr Who</i> looms large, and why the Winter of Discontent and the rise of Thatcherism are seen partly through the sci-fi prisms of <i>Quatermass </i>and <i>Blake's Seven.</i> )<br />
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So what did I learn? Well, I'm now much clearer on the details behind things which I already vaguely knew, like the Jeremy Thorpe scandal, or why I used to come home from school to candlelight, cold dinners and No Telly in the winter of '74.<br />
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The things which struck me most powerfully were just how viciously divided the Labour Party was throughout the decade (I'd assumed their suicidal in-fighting only really got started after their defeat in '79), and how completely the issue of Europe has crossed the political spectrum. Nowadays, Euroscepticism is usually portrayed as the preserve of knuckle headed right-wing dinosaurs, but in the 1970s it was (broadly speaking) Conservatives who wanted closer ties with the Common Market, while the unions and the left wing of the Labour party saw it as a capitalist plot (the referendum in 1975 was one of the things which helped to split the party). The reversal of attitudes didn't really take place until the end of the 1980s (so to find out why it happened you'll need to read the next book in this series, <i>Rejoice, Rejoice)</i> but it helps to lend an odd, through-the-looking-glass feel to the events which Mr Turner describes in this volume - a sense that the Britain of the 70's really was a different country.<br />
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Not completely different, however. Again and again, the problems which face the beleaguered British in <i>Crisis, What Crisis?</i> are the problems which still face us today; austerity, terrorism, environmental worries. In some ways it's strangely reassuring. There were our parents and grandparents, worrying about inflation and unemployment and the cost of living and overpopulation and the Cold War, but it all turned out all right, or, at least, the world failed to end, and here we are four decades later worrying about the same things. I hope that, come the 2050s, Alwyn W. Turner will write a book which puts this decade in perspective. In the meantime, his <a href="http://alwynturner.blogspot.co.uk/">blog posts</a> about the current election make for interesting reading.<br />
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<i>Crisis, What Crisis: Britain in the 1970s</i> is published by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/aurumpressbooks">Aurum Press</a>. So is <i>Rejoice, Rejoice: Britain in the 1990s</i>, which is equally good. (There is a third volume, <i>A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s</i>, which I haven't read yet.)<br />
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The image at the top of this page is the cover of the edition I read; I assume the others are from older editions.Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-79893036837529191822015-04-02T15:59:00.005+01:002015-04-04T19:19:27.927+01:00Review: The Broken King, by Philip Womack<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--J9_fwncXuc/VR1YoluG1UI/AAAAAAAAFh8/UeCzOTgXsZI/s1600/Picture%2B19.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--J9_fwncXuc/VR1YoluG1UI/AAAAAAAAFh8/UeCzOTgXsZI/s1600/Picture%2B19.png" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://philipwomack.blogspot.co.uk/">Philip Womack</a> is one of the best contemporary writers of children's fantasy, but it's been a while since he published a novel (<a href="http://philipreeve.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/liberators_23.html">The Liberators</a>, back in 2010). So it's good to see him return with <i><a href="http://www.troikabooks.com/book-one-the-broken-king.html">The Broken King</a></i>, the first volume in a new trilogy called <i>The Darkening Path</i>.<br />
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<i>The Broken King</i> is about Simon and his quest his to find and rescue his younger sister Anna, who has been kidnapped by otherworldly forces. Philip Womack is <a href="http://philipwomack.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/article-on-mythology-for-books-for-keeps.html">well-versed in myth and literature</a>, and I know he can trace this idea of the abducted child back to roots deep in the mists of folklore. I'm not nearly so knowledgeable, so, off the top of my head, I can only trace it back as far as<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_(film)"> </a><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_(film)">Labyrinth</a>. </i>That film, you may recall, showed us that if you are lumbered with looking after your baby brother you have only to call three times upon the goblins and David Bowie will arrive in startling trousers to spirit the rugrat away to his Goblin Kingdom.<br />
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When left in charge of his sister, Simon devises a similar plan of outsourcing the job to a supernatural monarch. Since Anna is an older and altogether more annoying child, and probably too much of a handful for mere goblins, he calls instead upon the mysterious Broken King. Anna vanishes instantly, carried off to a nightmarish realm which we see only fleetingly in this volume, although its minions find their way into our world to menace Simon as he sets out, full of remorse, to win his sister back.<br />
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He is aided by Flora, who has made a similar deal with the Broken King, and by a strange, disquieting boy named Pike, who seems helpful, but may not be entirely human. There are benign supernatural forces lined up on his side - shining figures who ride on winged stags - but they're just as cryptic and unhelpful as you'd expect. There are also some mercurial beings who pose as a pop trio called Raven and the Flames when travelling in our world. Driving around London in their-open topped car, Raven and her band seem to have come straight from the 1960s, and so, in many ways, does <i>The Broken King. </i>It reminds me agreeably of the Susan Cooper and Alan Garner books I lapped up as a lad. There are ambushes and adventures, riddles, secret passages, a lost temple to Mithras beneath the streets of London, a grisly secret map, and all manner of sudden twists and reversals. There's a real sense of deepening menace, but enough good and kindly characters are met along the way to stop it feeling <i>too</i> remorseless. I think it will please any young fantasy fan.<br />
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The only downside is that it made me eager to know more about the Broken King and his strange otherworld, about which we get only hints and glimpses. But part two, <a href="http://www.troikabooks.com/book-two-the-kings-shadow.html">The King's Shadow</a>, is published on the 7th of May, with the final volume to follow in 2016. I look forward to finding out what Philip Womack has in store for us.<br />
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<i>The Broken King </i>and <i>The King's Shadow</i> are published by <a href="http://www.troikabooks.com/philip-womack.html">Troika Books</a><br />
<a href="http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.blogger.com%2Fblogger.g%3FblogID%3D8868239775783739560%23editor%2Ftarget%3Dpost%3BpostID%3D7989303683752919182%3BonPublishedMenu%3Dposts%3BonClosedMenu%3Dposts%3BpostNum%3D0%3Bsrc%3Dlink&media=https%3A%2F%2Fimages-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com%2Fgadgets%2Fproxy%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252F2.bp.blogspot.com%252F-bVz4SfBQUpk%252FVR1YvZFxZRI%252FAAAAAAAAFiE%252Fqxnnq2j68k0%252Fs1600%252FPicture%25252B17.png%26container%3Dblogger%26gadget%3Da%26rewriteMime%3Dimage%252F*&xm=h&xv=sa1.35&description=" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: url(data:image/png; border: none; cursor: pointer; display: none; height: 20px; left: 240px; opacity: 0.85; position: absolute; top: 1055px; width: 40px; z-index: 8675309;"></a><a href="http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.blogger.com%2Fblogger.g%3FblogID%3D8868239775783739560%23editor%2Ftarget%3Dpost%3BpostID%3D7989303683752919182%3BonPublishedMenu%3Dposts%3BonClosedMenu%3Dposts%3BpostNum%3D0%3Bsrc%3Dlink&media=https%3A%2F%2Fimages-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com%2Fgadgets%2Fproxy%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252F2.bp.blogspot.com%252F-bVz4SfBQUpk%252FVR1YvZFxZRI%252FAAAAAAAAFiE%252Fqxnnq2j68k0%252Fs1600%252FPicture%25252B17.png%26container%3Dblogger%26gadget%3Da%26rewriteMime%3Dimage%252F*&xm=h&xv=sa1.35&description=" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: url(data:image/png; border: none; cursor: pointer; display: none; height: 20px; left: 240px; opacity: 0.85; position: absolute; top: 1055px; width: 40px; z-index: 8675309;"></a>Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-83101874648617791752015-04-01T18:13:00.000+01:002015-04-01T18:14:21.166+01:00RAILHEAD in BolognaA big thank you to everyone who Tweeted, blogged, or shared the <a href="http://philipreeve.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/railhead-unveiled.html">RAILHEAD cover </a>on Facebook. I know it seems a bit early to be making all this song and dance about it (the book won't be published till October), but it's important to let booksellers and reviewers know it's coming, as well as giving advance warning to readers. The OUP rights team are at the Children's Book fair in Bologna this week, where they'll working their socks off trying to sell the rights to publishers from other countries. <i>Tom Gates</i> author <a href="http://lizpichon.com/">Liz Pichon</a> spotted the big RAILHEAD banner on the OUP stand at the fair...<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7s2tWOVNrLQ/VRwkJBk7GrI/AAAAAAAAFhU/8LRvx8nBaU8/s1600/11024789_10155416761780287_6479738459311351882_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7s2tWOVNrLQ/VRwkJBk7GrI/AAAAAAAAFhU/8LRvx8nBaU8/s1600/11024789_10155416761780287_6479738459311351882_n.jpg" height="640" width="480" /></a></div>
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Also a banner for <i>Pugs of the Frozen North</i>, my latest project with Sarah McIntyre. (Check out Liz's amazing, hand-drawn <i>Tom Gates</i> dress!)<br />
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Sarah has written an interesting piece for her blog about foreign publication deals, and some of the tricks she uses as a picture book illustrator to make the books translatable. <a href="http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/700030.html">It's well worth reading</a>.<br />
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I'm still waiting for the results of OUP's Twitter competition to select 'RAILHEAD Ambassadors'. McIntyre clearly thinks she's in with a chance, and has designed a special ambassadoring hat for herself (plus Ferrero Rocher pin).<br />
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Hmmm.<br />
<br />Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-91026697782497663592015-03-30T09:00:00.000+01:002015-03-30T09:00:42.716+01:00RAILHEAD Unveiled!<br />
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Here it is! The cover for my new novel <i>RAILHEAD</i>, created by Holly Fulbrook, Jo Cameron and the design team at OUP.<br />
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I'm very pleased with the the way it's turned out. Usually I like a nice picture on a book cover, but <i>RAILHEAD</i> is set on a dozen different planets, and features thieves and androids, exiles and emperors, insects and intelligent trains. That's a lot to sum up in a single image, so I think this approach makes much more sense.<br />
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'RAILHEAD' is a word which jumped out of the text at me while I was writing and demanded to be the title, so it's great to finally see it written in large, friendly letters on the cover. After four or five years of work, it's starting to feel like a Real Book.<br />
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<span style="color: #232323; font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">HOW YOU CAN HELP...</span></h3>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If you have a Twitter account and you'd like to help spread the word about <i>RAILHEAD</i>, all you need to do is:</span></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>1.Tweet an image of the cover and also change your avatar to the cover.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>2. Tag your tweet #RAILHEAD</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>3. Tag @OUPChildrens</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Everyone taking part will be in with a chance of becoming a 'Railhead Ambassador,' (!) and winning an invitation to an exclusive London event where I'll be giving the first public reading from the new book.</span></div>
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<b style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></b>
<b style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To download the cover on PC, right click the image and select 'Save Image As'.</span></b></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">On a Mac, hold 'ctrl' and click the image, and select 'Save Image As'.</span></b></span></div>
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<i>RAILHEAD will be published in the UK in October 2015. </i><br />
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<br />Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-59166046827963245472015-03-27T12:55:00.000+00:002015-03-27T12:55:46.221+00:00YA Book Prize - the Winner (and some personal favourites).<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-N7zTCpcvg0o/VRVQ4r97BJI/AAAAAAAAFgY/3uG5Jm_DeaE/s1600/af6928dd.ya-book-prize.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-N7zTCpcvg0o/VRVQ4r97BJI/AAAAAAAAFgY/3uG5Jm_DeaE/s1600/af6928dd.ya-book-prize.png" /></a></div>
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Congratulations to <a href="http://www.thebookseller.com/news/louise-oneill-wins-inaugural-ya-book-prize">Louise O'Neill, whose debut novel <i>Only Ever Yours</i> has won the first ever Bookseller YA Book Prize</a>. It was a clear favourite with a majority of my fellow judges. Unfortunately I was in Ireland and couldn't attend the ceremony last week, but I've being a part of this first YA Book Prize. Only Ever Yours was part of a very strong shortlist, which was (mostly) a pleasure to read.<br />
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Here are a few of my favourites...<br />
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<b>Say Her Name</b> by James Dawson<br />
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I've never liked horror or ghost stories, so you can imagine my delight when I realised I was going to have to read one - I was prepared to be both frightened and bored. But <i>Say Her Name</i> turned out to be a cracking book. The story of a vengeful ghost who is summoned by saying her name three times while looking in a mirror may be a familiar one (possibly not if you're fourteen) but James Dawson uses it as the bass for a highly atmospheric page-turner. The girl's school setting was well-drawn, the mystery was intriguing, and there were frequent scares and cliff-hangers which made it hard to stop reading. Above all, the characters were great; I cared about them, which is probably what makes it work.<br />
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<b>A Song For Ella Grey</b> by David Almond<br />
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A modern-day reworking of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, David Almond's latest is a remarkably beautiful piece of writing, and a remarkably beautiful book, with some bold illustrations by Karen Radford (uncredited on the cover) and a whole section of reversed-out white-on-black pages for the descent into the underworld. I say it's a 'modern-day reworking', but it's not really concerned with the details of daily life - a mobile phone plays a key part in the story, but the internet doesn't seem to intrude into the lives of these young people; it could be happening in any year since about 1960. The place is very specific, though; Newcastle, and the beaches and sand-dunes of the north-east coast, all drawn in clear, spare prose. It's about love, and death, and art, and being young, and it is masterful.<br />
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<b>The Ghosts of Heaven</b> by Marcus Sedgwick<br />
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<i>The Ghosts of Heaven</i> is made up of four long-ish short stories.<br />
The first is about<br />
stone-age people<br />
and is told<br />
entirely<br />
in blank verse.<br />
Then there's a tale of a 17th Century witch-hunter in northern England, one set in an American lunatic asylum in the 1920s, and the final story takes place on a spaceship where most of the passengers are in cryogenic suspension a la <i>Cakes in Space</i> - though of course the influences here aren't Reeve and McIntyre but <i>Moon </i>and <i>2001</i> (the sole waking crewman is called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keir_Dullea">Kier Bowman</a>). <br />
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Linking all four stories is the recurring image of the spiral, seen in everything from snail's shells and the flight of hawks to the whole of the galaxy. You're supposed to be able to read the four stories in any order, but I'm not sure why you would want to - the order they're arranged in has an arc to it which would be lacking if you went backwards. It's all a bit portentous - if the other books on the shortlist were pop songs, this one would be a prog rock concept album with a gatefold sleeve and a ten minute drum solo - but at least it assumes YA readers will be interested in big, strange, philosophical ideas. If I was a Young Adult rather than an Old Adult, this would have been my favourite.<br />
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It also has the best cover. (Not the best cover on the shortlist - the best cover <i>ever</i>.)<br />
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<b>Salvage</b> by Keren David<br />
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This is another book which I wasn't looking forward to reading. Four of the books on the shortlist were written in my least-favourite form, in which the narrative is split between two first-person narrators. Why this should be so popular, I can't imagine: I can't think of a better way to throw the reader out of the story every couple of pages. Admittedly, most of the shortlisted books were well enough written that I eventually overcame my irritation, but when I picked up <i>Salvage</i> and found that it was broken into chunks subtitled Cass and Aidan, I nearly didn't bother reading on.<br />
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I'm very glad I did, though, because it's absolutely flippin' brilliant. Cass and Aidan are brother and sister, but have parted company in childhood when Cass is adopted by a Conservative MP and his cosy upper-middle class family, while Aidan is left to struggle through the care system and various disastrous foster placements. By the time the book starts he's living with his older girlfriend in a flat above an architectural salvage shop in London, clinging onto a job by his fingertips. Cass, meanwhile, has her own troubles. Her foster-father, like every other Tory MP in modern UK fiction ever, has been having an affair. When news of this hits the tabloid press it's seen by Aidan, who recognises his sister's photo and contacts her via Facebook. Cass, caught in the crossfire of her foster parents' divorce, agrees to meet him, and the rest of the book details their uneasy attempts to get to know one another again. <br />
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The book has great generosity of spirit. There is a villain of sorts - a hard case called Neil, resurfacing out of Aidan's murky past with a bad attitude and a Chehkovian gun - but in almost all the other characters Keren David uncovers some core of decency; they don't always behave well, but they always have their reasons. Aidan is trouble, and quite unpleasant in some ways, but we care about him, and come to understand why he is the way he is. Cass and Aidan's mother has her own story too; even Cass's foster father is doing his best (<i>unlike</i> every other Tory MP in modern UK fiction ever). The he said/she said format is used to advantage here, contrasting Cass's considered, past-tense narrative with Aidan's much rawer, present tense account, which feels as if being spoken rather than written. And it somehow manages to deliver an ending which feels happy and satisfying while leaving almost all the central relationships unresolved. It's a wonderful achievement.Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-65778344220605277962015-03-24T12:49:00.001+00:002015-03-24T12:56:28.740+00:00Mountains to Sea 2015I used to travel light when I went to festivals, but nowadays I have quite a lot to cram into my suitcase...<br />
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But not as much as <a href="http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/">that Sarah McIntyre</a> crams into hers...<br />
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She even carries three changes of gloves/gauntlets!<br />
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We were off to Ireland, where we'd been invited to perform the <i><a href="http://www.jabberworks.co.uk/cakes-in-space/">Cakes in Space</a></i> show at one of our favourite book festivals, <a href="http://www.mountainstosea.ie/">Mountains to Sea</a> in Dun Laoghaire. It was in full swing when we arrived last Thursday, with lots of great children's authors already doing their stuff. Here we are being Serious Writers with <a href="https://twitter.com/shanehegarty">Shane Hegarty,</a> <a href="http://dereklandy.blogspot.co.uk/">Derek Landy</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/holsmale">Holly Smale</a> (Photo by David O'Callaghan from Irish booksellers <a href="http://www.easons.com/">Eason</a>s.)<br />
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It was also a chance to catch up with Mark Wright of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mossy-Hare-Productions/280398927019">Mossy Hare Productions</a> and his partner Kathleen, who drove up from Wicklow to meet us on Thursday night. Mossy Hare were behind the Excalibur documentary which I did my best to help fund and publicise<a href="http://philipreeve.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/behind-sword-in-stone-premiere.html"> a few years back</a>. It's finished now, but finishing a film is the easy bit - getting it shown/distributed is a whole other story. Mark's still in talks with TV companies about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1CS8WOKq08"><i>Behind the Sword in the Stone</i>,</a> and working on some new projects too.<br />
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Our first event was on Friday morning. It's always nice when we get to do our thing in a proper theatre, and Dun Laoghaire has a great one, the <a href="http://www.paviliontheatre.ie/">Pavilion</a>. It has proper dressing rooms with lightbulbs round the mirrors and everything...<br />
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This next picture makes it look as if we didn't get much of an audience, but this was just the sound check. As you can see, I've gone prematurely blue.<br />
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Fifteen minutes later the place was full of local schoolchildren, and I think the show was one of our best.<br />
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Sarah always shows the audience how to draw Pilbeam, the robot from our book, and I showed them how I'd draw a killer cake. Here's just one of the results. (If you want to try drawing Pilbeam, there are <a href="http://www.jabberworks.co.uk/cakesinspace/cakes_draw_pilbeam_sheet.pdf">instructions here</a>.)<br />
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Afterwards, we walked down the seafront to Sandycove, and the <a href="http://jamesjoycetower.com/">Martello tower in which James Joyce</a> once lived. McIntyre stood on the top to give passing ships a view of her latest fascinator.<br />
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Then it was back to work. We were on a panel about writing for children with Young James Bond author <a href="http://www.stevecolebooks.co.uk/">Steve Cole</a> and top Irish children's author <a href="http://www.judicurtin.com/">Judi Curtin</a>, with the <a href="http://www.storymuseum.org.uk/">Oxford Story Museum's</a> <a href="http://tomdonegan.org/">Tom Donegan</a> (left) to keep us in line.<br />
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Sarah was trying out her latest hat, which she'd made in her hotel room out of bits of another hat and a sprig of artificial flowers which she bought that afternoon at <a href="http://www.meadowsandbyrne.com/">Meadows & Byrne</a> on the seafront. We were a bit worried that it would blow away or get entangled in chandeliers...<br />
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...but all was well, and she looked splendid in her flowery antlers, like the Monarch of the Glen.<br />
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We saw Judi again on Saturday morning. She's a good friend of author <a href="http://www.sarahwebb.info/">Sarah Webb</a>, who is also the organiser of the Mountains to Sea children's programme, and they did a great event together about their books and how they came to be writers. <br />
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Sarah Webb talked about how she had wanted to be a ballerina when she was a girl, but how she never got any very good roles. Here she is demonstrating the costume she had to wear when she played the part of a brush in Cinderella.<br />
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That afternoon we had another <i>Cakes in Space</i> show to perform, for the public rather than schools this time. Since Friday's show had gone so well were pretty relaxed about doing it again. In fact, we were TOO relaxed. As we waited in the wings for Sarah Webb to introduce us, I suddenly realised that I'd left the ALL IMPORTANT SPORK in the dressing room. The ALL IMPORTANT SPORK is the one prop we can't do without; it's introduced early in the proceedings, and then forms the pay-off to a sketch we do towards the end. So no sooner had we got on stage than I had to make my excuses and hurry off again, leaving my co-author to hold the fort. Still, at least I HAD a co-author to hold the fort - you can't do that when you're doing a solo event. <br />
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And it turned out that we had a Very Special Guest in the audience - <i>Cakes in Space</i> fan Oscar had come dressed as his favourite character, the Nameless Horror, a scary-looking space blob which turns out to be (SPOILERS!) quite sweet really. Here's Oscar showing off his tentacles, while his mum shows off his Pilbeam drawing.<br />
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The rest of the show went well, and afterwards we signed a load of books. Book sales at the festival were handled by Bob and Marta from the brilliant<a href="http://gutterbookshop.com/"> Gutter Bookshop</a> in Dublin and Dalkey, which is one of the finalists for the <a href="http://www.thebookseller.com/news/customers-encouraged-tweet-support-winning-indies">Bookseller Industry Awards Independent Bookseller of the Year</a>. Here's owner Bob Johnston, in tweedy mood.<br />
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Other authors were still arriving. <a href="http://www.davidalmond.com/">David Almond </a>was there, with his editor <a href="http://brightgroupinternational.com/bright-agency/the-insider-anne-mcneil">Anne McNeil</a>, his agent <a href="https://www.writersandartists.co.uk/writers/advice/89/preparing-for-submission/interviews-with-the-experts/advice-from-catherine-clarke">Catherine Clarke</a> and his very fine hat. (David's most recent book, <i>A Song For Ella Grey,</i> was one of the titles I had to read for the YA Book Prize, and it's superb; I'll try to post a brief review later this week.)<br />
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Cottrell_Boyce">Frank Cottrell-Boyce</a> arrived to talk about his new book <i>Broccoli Boy</i>, and <a href="http://www.francescasimon.com/">Francesca Simon</a> and <a href="http://www.stevenbutlerbooks.com/page1/page1.html">Stephen Butler </a>were also there; we didn't get a picture of them at dinner on Saturday night, but here they are on Sunday, doing a rowdy event where Francesca's <i>Horrid Henry</i> and Stephen's <i>Dennis the Menace</i> go head-to-head. Which of the schoolboy sociopaths would the audience declare the winner? (It was kind of a tie in the end!)<br />
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Just along the seafront from the Pavilion Theatre is Dun Laoghaire's brand new library, the <a href="http://libraries.dlrcoco.ie/using-your-library/find-your-library/dlr-lexicon">dlrLexicon</a>, an impressive modern structure which slots in among the older buildings like a book on as shelf. (It also has a lovely water-garden and EXCELLENT CAKE.)<br />
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That's where we ended up on Sunday morning, for an event about Sarah's picture book <a href="http://www.jabberworks.co.uk/theres-a-shark-in-the-bath/">There's a Shark in the Bath</a>. I didn't have anything to do with writing that one, but I did write the lyrics for the Shark in the Bath song (music by <a href="http://www.visitingauthor.com/Home.html">John Dougherty</a>) because all books must have theme tunes, oh yes. So I helped out with a bit of reading and some interpretative dance, and enjoyed watching McIntyre keep a room full of three, four and five year olds completely enthralled for a whole hour. They drew some great sharks, too! (You can learn how to draw your own shark <a href="http://www.jabberworks.co.uk/shark/mcintyre_shark_draw_a_shark2.pdf">here</a>.)<br />
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Also in the audience were writer <a href="http://www.oisinmcgann.com/">Oisin McGann</a>, his wife Maeve, and his Thoughtful Gorilla T-shirt. (Their children were there too, but I don't think we have a picture of them.)<br />
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Afterwards, we nipped downstairs and were able to catch the end of a talk by <a href="http://www.chrisjudge.com/">Chris Judge</a>, creator of the <i>Lonely Beast </i>and illustrator of the very funny <i>Danger is Everywhere</i>.<br />
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I don't know how Ireland got it's reputation as a place where it always rains - I've been to Mountains to Sea twice now, and each time Dun Laoghaire looked like the French Riviera. We walked in baking sunshine along the pier, making long detours around the queues which snaked from the ice cream vans. (McIntyre managed to avoid falling off the sea wall and becoming a danger to shipping.)<br />
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Sarah had to head back to London that afternoon; my flight to Exeter wasn't till next morning, so I was able to enjoy another evening of M2C hospitality, and sit in on one of the adult book talks - a very funny and illuminating interview with drag queen & gay rights activist <a href="http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/rory-panti-bliss-oneill-the-day-i-had-my-childhood-epiphany-in-knock-30710188.html">Rory O'Neill</a>, which was the closing event of this year's festival. I'd had a wonderful few days in Dun Laoghaire, and I hope I'll be back with McIntyre in future years. Huge thanks to the organisers, the volunteers, and the unflappable technical crew at the Pavilion Theatre.<br />
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If you're in Ireland, Sarah McIntyre will be doing her <i>Shark In The Bath</i> show at the <a href="http://www.towersandtales.ie/">Towers and Tales Story Festival</a> at Lismore Castle on 18th April.Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-26863227185114576482015-03-16T10:34:00.000+00:002015-03-16T13:49:36.652+00:00Leicester Author Week<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My friend and co-author <b>Sarah McIntyre </b>is <a href="http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/545925.html">an old hand </a>at Leicester Author Week. In fact, round Leicester way, they know for sure that Author Week is upon them again only when they see her latest hat disembarking from the train. But I’ve never been before, so I was very pleased to have a chance to go along and see what was happening, and why McIntyre always vanishes Leicesterwards in the second week of March.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Author Week is a five day festival of Children’s reading organised as part of the city's <a href="http://www.whatever-it-takes.org.uk/teachers/about-wit">Whatever It Takes initiative</a>. All week, parties of children from local schools are delivered by the coachload to Leicester Tigers rugby club, where visiting authors talk about their work and run workshops. I arrived a day early, on Monday morning, so I got to see Sarah wowing some little ones with </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><a href="http://www.jampires.com/">Jampires</a></i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, the book she created with <a href="http://scribblehound.com/">David O’Connell</a>. She even had an actual Jampire with her!</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Having told them the tale of these stripey-jumpered creatures, who arrive by night to suck all the jam from the doughnuts of the unwary, she led a workshop where the kids got to draw their own food-stealing creations - Lasagnepires, Pizzapires and IceCreampires among others. </span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">They had a great time, and went off promising to turn their ideas into comics. I went off too, promising to find myself a nice cup of coffee and buy McIntyre some dry shampoo (without which our Reeve & McIntyre stage shows would be lank and uninteresting). When I got back to the Rugby Club she was in the middle of another show and another workshop, telling more kids about the jampires. You can see more of their drawings on <a href="http://www.whatever-it-takes.org.uk/teachers/about-wit">Sarah's own blog </a>- this is one of hers...</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After which, we signed four hundred copies of <i>Cakes in Space</i>, ready for our shows the next day. One of the great things about Author Week is that the organisers buy a book for each child who attends. Sarah had already signed and doodled in four hundred copies of Jampires, which her audiences on the first day got to take home with them. It’s nice to do an event knowing that all the kids who are watching you will be reading the book. (Or maybe they’ll just use it to prop up wobbly tables, or throw at their sisters - but that’s up to them. At least they’ll have the <i>opportunity</i> to read it.) </span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Naturally, after all that signing, we were in need of Sustenance, and hightailed it to <a href="http://www.paddysmarteninn.co.uk/">Paddy's Marten Inn</a>, which sounds as if it ought to be an Irish pub, but is actually one of Leicester’s many fine Indian's restaurants. We were joined by some local friends of Sarah’s - <a href="https://twitter.com/SignorFurioso">Jay Eales</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/selinalock">Selina Lock,</a> Steve Barlow, and Steve Skidmore and his wife Ali. I’ve been hearing about The Two Steves for years; they’re legendary on the circuit for their brilliant school and festival shows, so it was excellent to finally meet them. They’re the ones in the viking helmets in the photo below, and on the right is <i>Tarzan</i> author <a href="http://www.andybriggs.co.uk/">Andy Briggs.</a> (Don’t worry, we weren’t dressed like this at the restaurant, this picture was taken the next day.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">One of our favourite things about doing festivals is getting to meet up with other authors. This year we also bumped into top YA author <a href="http://www.balirai.co.uk/page3.htm">Bali Rai,</a> local story-teller Jyoti Shanghavi, and <i><a href="http://philipreeve.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/the-badness-of-badgers.html">Stinkbomb and Ketchup Face</a></i> </span>writer<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> <a href="http://www.visitingauthor.com/Author.html">John Dougherty</a> (here he is, just back from the Dubai Festival, signing his own pile o' books). </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Tuesday found us clad in teflon and back at the Rugby Club, where we did our <a href="http://www.jabberworks.co.uk/cakes-in-space/"><i>Cakes in Space</i> </a>event, followed by a workshop (in which I left most of the actual work to Sarah and the children). Since <i>Cakes in Space</i> is about a food-making machine which goes wrong and produces MUTANT CAKES, we asked them to imagine other sorts of mutant food, and to start creating a comic about it. These are some drawings I did to give them the general idea:</span><br />
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...and here's one of the children's pictures.<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After that, there was a bit of a wait for the coaches to arrive, so we entertained them with more drawing - I got to doodle a Jampire...</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Then we fetched our ukeleles and led rousing singalongs of the Jampires Song and the Sea Monkeys Song. We’d probably have gone on to do </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Help, Help, There’s a <a href="http://storysnug.com/2014/02/theres-shark-bath/">Shark in the Bath</a></i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> and even the as-yet-untested </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Theme from <a href="http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/672844.html">Dinosaur Police</a></i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, but the coaches had arrived by then (at least, they </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">said</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> that’s why they were all hurrying for the exits).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And then we had to do it all again! But that was OK, because the children were great, and so were the Leicester Author Week helpers and organisers - many thanks to Juliet Martin, Dan Routledge, Sandy Gibbons, Nicole Dishington, Kate Drurey, and the rest of the team!</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We were pretty tired when we got back to London, and had to stop at the St Pancras hotel, where we continued our ongoing quest to find The Most Expensive G&T in London. It was even more expensive than our previous Most Expensive G&T at Waterstones Wine Bar, but the ceiling was LOVELY. </span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Not as lovely, however, as the time we’d had in Leicester. Thank you so much for inviting us, Leicester Author Week! </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br />
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Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-60815207640505837462015-03-05T10:15:00.000+00:002015-03-05T10:15:54.923+00:00A Black Tentacle for McIntyre!The <a href="http://www.thekitschies.com/">Kitschies</a> awards are a prize for 'progressive, intelligent and entertaining literature with a speculative element', and last night they awarded their Red Tentacle for Best Novel of 2014 to <a href="http://www.thekitschies.com/awards/red-tentacle/">Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith</a>, while the <a href="http://www.thekitschies.com/awards/golden-tentacle/">Golden Tentacle for Best Debut</a> went to Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre. But they also dish out an annual Black Tentacle for special achievements, and this year they have wisely awarded it to international celebrity hatstand <a href="http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/696372.html">Sarah McIntyre</a> for 'her outstanding support of genre literature and her fellow artists ... <span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">McIntyre has worked to elevate the conversation around genre literature; she also recently started the <a href="http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/690102.html">#NonIdentikit challenge</a>, in which she encourages other illustrators to present more diverse faces in their work.' </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">She's also been working hard recently to help ensure that illustrators (and designers, and translators) get the credit they're due.</span></span><br />
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There's a notable unfairness in the way that illustrated books are listed on Amazon, in newspapers, and on awards shortlists: they are always credited to the writer, but seldom to the illustrator. This led to a ridiculous situation last year when <i>Oliver and the Seawigs</i> was longlisted for an award and, despite the fact that we created it together and both our names on the cover, it was referred to in their listings as 'by Philip Reeve'. </div>
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Sarah was able to persuade them to look again at their policy, but it's a problem that keeps cropping up with other books and other illustrators. It's not just about hurt pride; it's bad for business if illustrators names are left off listings, and it costs them book sales if people can't use an illustrator's name to search for their other books on sites like Amazon and Waterstones. But where I would just grumble and shrug, McIntyre has leapt into action, drawing attention to the problem and sniffing out the <a href="http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/691786.html">underlying reason</a> why it keeps on happening (because of <a href="http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/694787.html">metadata</a>, apparently).</div>
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So I'm very proud of my co-author, and very pleased that our <a href="http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/688957.html">Dartmoor Pegasus</a> has become the fat, flying poster-pony for #PicturesMeanBusiness.<br />
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Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-15739392085627910292015-03-04T17:15:00.001+00:002015-03-04T17:15:17.069+00:00Mal Peet<br />
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I was very sad to learn yesterday of the death of <a href="http://www.thebookseller.com/news/mal-peet-dies">Mal Peet.</a> People in the publishing world always seem to refer to each other as lovely, kind, beautiful human beings - at least in public. In Mal's case it really was true; I've never heard a bad word said about him. I didn't know him very well, but he lived here in Devon, so I bumped into him a few times on trains to London or planes to the Edinburgh Book Festival. He was always wonderfully friendly, and great company.<br />
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He was so well-known and so highly regarded in the book world that I always assumed he was one of those elder statesmen who had been writing for decades, but in fact he only published his first novel in 2003 (although he had been working on educational titles with his wife, Elspeth Graham, for some years before that). He produced more fine books in the last twelve years than most of us will manage in a lifetime: <i><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview3">Keeper,</a> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/oct/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview26">Tamar,</a> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/dec/30/featuresreviews.guardianreview12">The Penalty</a>, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/11/life-exploded-diagram-mal-peet-review">Life: An Exploded Diagram.</a>..</i> I saw several people online yesterday refer to him as one of our best YA authors, and that's certainly true, but Mal defied genres and categories, so it's probably fairer just to say that he was one of our best authors.Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-36566099710012950072015-02-27T18:59:00.001+00:002015-02-27T19:00:51.037+00:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Now that spring is here, I'm tuning my ukelele, dusting off my space-suit, and heading out to do more author events with <a href="http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/">That Sarah McIntyre</a>. We'll be in exotic Walthamstow on Monday and in Leicester next week, doing big events for local schools. Then at the end of the month (18th - 22nd March) we've been invited to bring our <i>Cakes in Space</i> caketacular to the <a href="http://www.mountainstosea.ie/">Mountains to Sea Festival</a> in Dun Laoghaire. I love visiting Ireland, and we had a great time <a href="http://philipreeve.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/mountains-to-sea.html">last time we did Mountains to Sea</a>. If you're in the area, we'll be <a href="http://www.mountainstosea.ie/2015-Family/tips-from-the-top.html">talking about writing and illustrating children's books</a> with <a href="http://www.stevecolebooks.co.uk/">Steve Cole</a> and <a href="http://tomdonegan.org/">Tom Donegan</a> on Friday and <a href="http://www.mountainstosea.ie/2015-Family/the-cakes-in-space-show.html">doing the full <i>Cakes</i> show on Saturday afternoon</a>, and we'd love to see you there.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Photo: Sarah McIntyre</span></td></tr>
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I've also been busy reading the shortlist for <a href="http://www.thebookseller.com/ya-book-prize/">the YA Book Prize</a>. It's been a pleasure, because it's a very strong list, and I'm very impressed by the quality of books being published for young people at the moment. There are at least five which I'd be quite happy to see win when the award is announced on 19th March. (I'll blog about all my favourites afterwards.)<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bthVjR-qegI/VPC4Jz0IrII/AAAAAAAAFWE/-4wlno_iFls/s1600/B4BebKiCYAAyXC9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bthVjR-qegI/VPC4Jz0IrII/AAAAAAAAFWE/-4wlno_iFls/s1600/B4BebKiCYAAyXC9.jpg" height="400" width="302" /></a></div>
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And finally, it's just been announced that <i>Cakes in Space</i> is one of the titles selected for this year's <a href="http://readingagency.org.uk/children/news/record-breakers-announced-as-2015-summer-reading-challenge-theme.html">Summer Reading Challenge</a>, a brilliant initiative which gets thousands of kids reading through the summer holidays every year (Sarah M did the illustrations for it last year). We're very pleased that <i>Cakes in Space</i> is going to be a part of it, and OUP have just revealed the slightly simplified cover design for the paperback edition, which will be released this summer.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Artwork by Sarah McIntyre</span></td></tr>
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<br />Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-49098215417366799122015-02-12T18:22:00.000+00:002015-02-12T18:22:05.973+00:00Reeve & McIntyre 3: Pugs of the Frozen North<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
Just back from the Oxford University Press sales conference, where I was talking about <i><a href="http://philipreeve.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/railhead.html">Railhead</a></i>, and also about the new Reeve and McIntyre book, which will be called...</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sarah McIntyre</td></tr>
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It's an everyday story of two children and a team of sixty-son a race to the North Pole, and I think it's going to be pug-tastic. The basic idea was Sarah's, and we came up with the story together, as usual. Here's the back cover...</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sarah McIntyre</td></tr>
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If you pop over to <a href="http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/692546.html">McIntyre's blog you can see some of the lovely interior artwork</a>, which she's busy working on as we speak. The pugs will be arriving at a bookshop near you this September.<br />
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As for <i>Railhead</i>, the cover is still a SECRET, but I read a bit, and it seemed to go down well...<br />
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There's lots of other good stuff on the OUP list for this autumn. I particularly liked the look of <a href="http://www.mattylong.com/118150/2561983/pictures/super-happy-magic-forest">SUPER HAPPY MAGIC FOREST</a>, by <a href="http://mattylongillustration.blogspot.co.uk/">Matty Long</a>. It's a sort of picture-book fantasy quest parody, a full of elaborate, joke-packed pictures like this...<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Matty Long</td></tr>
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And I also found that Matty Long has drawn a <i>Mortal Engines</i> picture!<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Matty Long</td></tr>
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<a href="http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.blogger.com%2Fblogger.g%3FblogID%3D8868239775783739560%23editor%2Ftarget%3Dpost%3BpostID%3D4909821541736679912%3BonPublishedMenu%3Dposts%3BonClosedMenu%3Dposts%3BpostNum%3D0%3Bsrc%3Dlink&media=https%3A%2F%2Fimages-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com%2Fgadgets%2Fproxy%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252F4.bp.blogspot.com%252F-DIjpL-vC1PQ%252FVNwoLq5BEbI%252FAAAAAAAAFUY%252FUYg7gr0CplM%252Fs1600%252Fpugs_amazonfile_zps7c3a6536.jpg%26container%3Dblogger%26gadget%3Da%26rewriteMime%3Dimage%252F*&xm=h&xv=sa1.35&description=" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: url(data:image/png; border: none; cursor: pointer; display: none; height: 20px; left: 177px; opacity: 0.85; position: absolute; top: 78px; width: 40px; z-index: 8675309;"></a><a href="http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.blogger.com%2Fblogger.g%3FblogID%3D8868239775783739560%23editor%2Ftarget%3Dpost%3BpostID%3D4909821541736679912%3BonPublishedMenu%3Dposts%3BonClosedMenu%3Dposts%3BpostNum%3D0%3Bsrc%3Dlink&media=https%3A%2F%2Fimages-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com%2Fgadgets%2Fproxy%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252F4.bp.blogspot.com%252F-DIjpL-vC1PQ%252FVNwoLq5BEbI%252FAAAAAAAAFUY%252FUYg7gr0CplM%252Fs1600%252Fpugs_amazonfile_zps7c3a6536.jpg%26container%3Dblogger%26gadget%3Da%26rewriteMime%3Dimage%252F*&xm=h&xv=sa1.35&description=" style="background-color: transparent; background-image: url(data:image/png; border: none; cursor: pointer; display: none; height: 20px; left: 177px; opacity: 0.85; position: absolute; top: 78px; width: 40px; z-index: 8675309;"></a>Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-26179663622707139032015-01-17T10:10:00.001+00:002015-01-17T10:10:22.974+00:00The Complete Dartmoor Pegasus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FSfDql65wxI/VLo0ulCXIfI/AAAAAAAAFUI/CRbwIJYJ_4k/s1600/dartmoor_pegasus_story1b_zps2acf0f34.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FSfDql65wxI/VLo0ulCXIfI/AAAAAAAAFUI/CRbwIJYJ_4k/s1600/dartmoor_pegasus_story1b_zps2acf0f34.gif" height="640" width="547" /></a></div>
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Well, that's the first story of the year finished, and very easy it was too: I wrote it on my 'phone one night when I couldn't sleep, and then Sarah McIntyre slaved away for hours and hours turning it into <a href="http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/688957.html">twelve beautifully illustrated episodes. You can read the whole thing on her blog</a> (and she's also written about the pony books she loved as a child, and included many photos of her small equestrian self).<br />
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We had a lot of fun coming up with this! Hopefully it won't be the last we'll see of Kevin - we're just taking a breather while we decide what his next adventure should involve.Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-29928711743543977412015-01-14T12:29:00.001+00:002015-01-14T12:29:51.531+00:00Reeve & McIntyre at the SOAOn 5th February Sarah McIntyre and I will be doing an event at the <a href="http://www.societyofauthors.org/">Society of Authors</a> in London, chaired by <a href="http://www.shoorayner.com/">Shoo Rayner</a>. <br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;"><i>Writer Philip Reeve and illustrator Sarah McIntyre will talk about their collaborative partnership and how they have worked with other writers and illustrators. Do publishers help or hinder artistic relationships by keeping writers and illustrators apart? Are suggestions, from either side of the fence, ever welcome?</i></span><br />
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Tickets are £10 online or £12 offline for members of the SOA, and £15/£18 for non-members. <a href="http://www.societyofauthors.org/events/sarah-mcintyre-philip-reeve-author-illustrator-partnerships-thursday-5-february-2015">Full details here.</a><br />
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And don't forget to keep checking Sarah's blog for (almost) daily updates on <a href="http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/tag/dartmoor_pegasus">the adventures of Kevin, the Dartmoor Pegasus</a> - he's been having a terrible time.</div>
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Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-13427647310916722972015-01-05T17:45:00.000+00:002015-01-05T18:01:26.084+00:00Maleficent<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I would never have watched <i>Maleficent</i> if Sarah McIntyre hadn't recommended it - <a href="http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/673429.html">she watched it while she had the flu, and said it was wonderful</a>. Then I started noticing terrible reviews online which said it was one of the worst movies of 2014... Maybe McIntyre only liked it because she was delirious? But it was too late - the DVD had already arrived, so we gave it a look.</div>
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Phew, it turns out Sarah was right as usual. <i>Maleficent</i> is a live-action and loadsa-CGI retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story. It's based on the classic Disney animation, but told from the point of view of the evil fairy. In this version she is as much sinned against as sinning, and the real villain turns out to be Sleeping Beauty's father, King Stefan. The twists it makes to the traditional tale work rather well for the most part (though the wall of thorns is a bit under-used). The middle section, in which she secretly watches over the development of the child she has cursed, becomes the heart of the story: the hundred years' sleep turns into little more than a heavy nap (which was a pity, I felt) the three fairies charged with Princess Aurora's upbringing are comically inept, and the handsome prince is a weedy Justin Bieber lookalike who spends much of his screen-time unconscious and being levitated around by Maleficent. It really is her movie, and Angelina Jolie is tremendous. I can't think offhand of any recent fantasy film which revolves around such a powerful and unorthodox female lead.<br />
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I think I can imagine why some people didn't like it - it's too dark for small children, too light for grimdark fantasy fans, and maybe it annoys people with fond memories of the original <i>Sleeping Beauty</i> (I have none; I recall seeing the clip where the prince fights the dragon on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_Test">Michael Rodd's Screen Test </a>a lot, but that's about it.)<br />
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But it looks beautiful, in a lush, Pre-Raphaelites-on-laudanum way. The CGI is sometimes a bit intrusive (there are some fairy creatures which would be better as <i>Dark Crystal</i> style puppets) but often it's used very well. There's a shot early on where a trapped raven is transformed into a man which is fantastically strange and spooky, and some great scenes of Maleficent in flight which reminded me of both <i>Brazil</i> and <i>Avatar</i> (director Robert Stromberg was an art director on <i>Avatar</i>). It also reminded me of <i>Excalibur</i> - not just the obvious references in its fire-and-iron battle scenes, but the economy of the storytelling, the way that years whisk by in seconds, the way it trusts its audience to enter into its mythic, fairy-tale spirit and accept it's dreamlike logic.<br />
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And, unlike certain recent fantasy movies we could mention, <i>Maleficent</i> is <i>short</i>; it does its job and rolls the credits after 97 minutes, and it's all the better for it.<br />
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<br />Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8868239775783739560.post-24798554863734063782015-01-02T17:06:00.000+00:002015-01-02T17:06:01.136+00:00The Dartmoor Pegasus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I don't usually like to have my own pictures on display, but this little fat Pegasus which I painted on a bit of Brighton driftwood sometime in the late 1980s has been on the wall of every house I've lived in since; it's above the kitchen door here at Bonehill...<br />
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This Christmas I made a clay version of it for Sarah, and when Sarah McIntyre saw it, she thought it would be a good thing to base some drawings on.<br />
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So we've written a short story together, which will be appearing in installments over the next few weeks: just <a href="http://jabberworks.livejournal.com/">keep an eye on McIntyre's blog</a>, or follow @jabberworks on <a href="https://twitter.com/jabberworks">Twitter</a> or <a href="http://instagram.com/jabberworks">Instagram</a> for updates. Here's the first installment:<br />
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<br />Philip Reevehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03018599033534369153noreply@blogger.com0