Philip Reeve

Nicol Williamson

2012-01-25T17:41:00.001Z

I'm breaking my recent blog-silence to note the sad news of the death of Nicol Williamson, a great British actor on both stage and screen. He'll be remembered for numerous roles - in Tony Richardson's Hamlet, in a legendary TV adaptation of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, and as Sherlock Holmes in The Seven Per Cent Solution. (He also crops up in the dual role of the sinister alienist and the wicked Nome King in the surpisingly dark 1985 Disney movie Return to Oz). But for me he was always Merlin, the role he played in John Boorman's Excalibur, the 1981 movie which pretty much defined my early teens and which has influenced much of what I've gone on to write - most obviously, of course, Here Lies Arthur.

A lot of the decisions I made when writing that book were designed to move my version of the legends out of the long shadow cast by earlier re-tellings, and by Excalibur in particular. As a sort of homage I opened and closed the books with images loosely based on the opening and closing moments of the film, but I tried to make everything in between as different as I could: there's no shining armour, no mediaeval trappings, no magic. But I suspect that my Merlin, the consummate story-teller and political trickster, still inevitably carries an echo of Nicol Williamson's Merlin. Younger than your average screen wizard, his head encased in a peculiar silver skull cap, ageing not a bit while Uther's generation gives way to Arthur's, swerving from stern sub-Shakespearian declamations to crap jokes and wobbly slapstick, his presence dominates the film. It divides critics too: half the people I know think it's one of the maddest performances ever to grace a major movie, while the other half think it's genius. Personally, I reckon it's both.

Here are links to the obituary on the Empire website, and to an announcement by Nicol Williamson's son Luke on his own site. Thanks to the Irish film maker Frank Kelly for drawing my attention to this news.

Microcon

2012-01-21T09:30:00.000Z

On the 25th and 26th February I'll be attending Microcon, the South West's longest-running Science Fiction and Fantasy convention. It's organised by the University of Exeter Science Fiction Society, and has been going since 1982.

Speakers this year will include:

Jasper Fforde, author of the award winning Thursday Next novels

Anneke Wills, actor and former Doctor Who companion (Saturday only)

Richard Freeman, cryptozoologist and hunter of legendary creatures from the Mongolian Death Worm to gigantic anacondas.

Steve Green, Sci Fi journalist who will be screening some of the latest short films entered for the fantasy Delta Film Awards.

Nick Walters, Doctor Who author.
And yours truly, of course: I'll be giving a talk about my books on the Saturday, and probably appearing on a panel on the Sunday; the rest of the time I'll be hanging around listening to the other speakers and generally enjoying myself, so it would be good to see you there if you're within reach of Exeter.

Entry £12 public, £10 students, £8 members

Location: JCR, Devonshire House (Saturday), Pippa Langston Suite Cornwall House (Sunday), University of Exeter, Streatham Campus.

2012: The Year of the Goblins

2012-01-01T10:06:00.001Z

I've been keeping the computer switched off over Christmas, and feeling rather better for it, so this is probably my last blog post for a while. I have a lot of writing to do, and that will be easier without the endless distractions of Twitter, Reddit and the rest. All this blogging and social networking is very enjoyable and feels quite productive, but it doesn't produce books. So my New Year's Resolution is to pull the plug on this box of tricks and fetch out notebooks and pencils. Some time in the next month or so my blog and website will be having an overhaul, and I may have a couple of school events and some other news to report, but otherwise I shall be keeping quiet until late March or early April, when my new book GOBLINS is released (you can pre-order it here).

By that time, if all goes to plan, GOBLINS 2: The Sequel will be finished, and I'll be able to take time off to blog a bit about the goblins and their world before I dive into my next writing project, Fever Crumb 4, which I made a start on some months ago and am itching to get back to.

In the summer, the original Mortal Engines quartet will finally be published again in the USA, with some snazzy new covers, and there will be new covers for the UK editions, too.

Thank you for reading this blog, and for following it if you have been. I'll still be checking my Facebook page regularly, and I'll try to reply promptly to e-mails sent to thesolitarybee@gmail.com.

2011 has been one of the most roller-coaster-y and least popular years I can remember. Here's hoping that 2012 will be an improvement in every way!

In the Bleak Midwinter

2011-12-20T17:44:00.001Z

Do they celebrate Christmas in the ramshackle world of Mortal Engines? Well, they do and they don't: there are enclaves and households where the Christian festival is still celebrated, but most of the towns and cities which roam the Hunting Ground have new gods and new religions. Winters can be long and grim, however, especially in the north, and almost everybody sets aside a day in the depths of December when lamps are lit, songs sung, gifts exchanged, and far too much food eaten. Aboard London this festival is known as Quirkemas: others call it Yule or Winterval. For most, it is simply Midwinter, and here is a short story about it. Many thanks to Sarah McIntyre for producing beautiful illustrations at astonishing speed. Actually, I probably wouldn't have written it at all if it hadn't been for Sarah's encouragement, and the closing image is entirely hers, so in a way the whole thing is a Reeve/McIntyre collaboration - the first of many, I hope.

Shrike was dead: to begin with. Dead as a doornail. The girl had known that since she first saw his stark, white, armoured face staring down at her. But thanks to the machineries and miracles the old-time folk had stuffed his carcass with, he could still move faster than her. She had to trot to keep up with him as he strode up the steep western face of the bluff. Snow lay deep there, scrunching and squeaking under her boot-heels as she stumbled along in the old Stalker’s tracks. As long as she kept setting her feet down in the deep prints he’d left she could manage; each time she strayed off his path she found herself floundering thigh-deep in drifts.

They’d been on a long trip, Shrike and the girl. They’d been hunting a fugitive named Lardy Ampersand who’d robbed a bank aboard the traction town of Twyne. Ampersand had fled into the Out Country, and the mayor of Twyne hadn’t bothered sending good men after him. He just called in Shrike, the best and most feared of all the bounty killers, and Shrike had tracked the robber half way to the Westersea, with the girl following. Now they were heading back to Twyne with Lardy’s head in a bag slung from Shrike’s belt. For the first few miles of their hike the bag had seeped and dripped, leaving red splotches like a trail of poppies on the snow. The blood had long since dried or frozen, though. Twyne had moved on, and Shrike and the girl had been following its wheel-marks for a week.

The day was fading now. A lavender twilight lay over the snowfields, and the air was sharp. Above the hill’s curve a big planet shone, or maybe it was one of those left-over space-castles from the olden times. The girl had stopped feeling her feet a long way back, but deep in her pockets her clenched hands burned cold. Her face hurt too, but then her face hurt always. It was barely a face at all, riven in two by some dreadful blow - she did not remember the circumstances - which had left her with one eye, no nose to speak of, and a twisted mouth which was having to learn new ways to eat, and drink, and make words.

The girl’s name was Hester. Shrike had found her that summer, washed up with the weed and driftwood on some Westersea beach. Nobody knew why he had taken her in, least of all Shrike himself, a stone-cold killer with weirdy old-tech whirring and glowing where his heart should be. Something about that ruined, thrown-away child had touched him. He’d untangled her from the sea-wrack and kept her with him ever since.

He reached the top of the bluff and stopped there. Hester caught up with him. She stood at his side and looked east, and there was Twyne, rumbling away from them across the frozen marshes with long black bundles of exhaust smoke blowing sideways from its stacks like lumpy pennants. It was moving slow, but not so slow that Hester could catch it without running. She sagged at the thought of running, the weariness of her long walk coming down on her like a weight.

Shrike sensed it. He turned, and the green beams from his headlamp eyes lit up her face. He was not used to thinking about anyone but himself. He forgot sometimes the girl had muscles in her legs instead of pistons. He reached out his metal hands and lifted her, setting her on his wide iron shoulders. Hester grabbed hold of the ducts and flexes on his armoured skull as he set off again, striding along at an improbable pace which made the frozen head of Ampersand go bomp, bomp, bomp against his hip. The chimneyed smudge of Twyne started to resolve itself into houses and factories; two decks, with the big, clawed, barrel wheels turning beneath. Soon Hester made out individual windows, and in each window was a warm glow and pinprick points of light a-twinkling. The glow and the lights put her in mind of something. She could not say what it was because most of her memories had spilled when her face was broken, but she stared at those lights and felt the memories brushing past her like big fish circling in the sea’s depths, just out of sight.

Shrike caught up with the town and strode into the din and dark between its rumbling wheels. No lights down here, unless you counted the slivers of furnace-glow showing through chinks in the deck-plates. But the old Stalker could see in the dark, and knew his way around the underside of towns. He found an access ladder, and Hester held on tight while he scrambled up it, punched open a locked hatch, and emerged into the streets of Twyne.

It was quiet up there. Just a few passers by to stare at the Stalker and his shadow as they went up and aft towards the Town Hall. Singing came from taverns and the temple of Peripatetia. In every window candles burned, and tinsel stars hung. In the snowy square in front of the Town Hall a whole tall pine tree stood, fresh cut, held roughly upright by four creaking guy-ropes, swaying with the town’s movements. Little electric lamps burned among its branches, and strands of glittering stuff were wrapped around it.

“Winter festival,” said Hester.

Shrike looked down at her. She didn’t often say much, and he didn’t often listen, but something had stirred his memories too. He’d been making his way among the towns and cities of the world since before towns and cities learned to move, and it hadn’t escaped his notice that some decked themselves in lights and greenery every twelvemonth. It had just never occurred to him before to wonder why.

Hester wiped frost from a window and peered in. She saw holly branches; paper chains; candles burning on a shrine to household gods. She said, “I remember when I was little... Every year... Roast chestnuts and stories by the fire. Presents too. The old Winterdad in his red coat, carryin’ his sack of presents for good children...”

And somehow Shrike remembered those things too. Snatches of memories from long ago; candles and stories, the excitement of children.

Now he stood in the snow in front of Twyne Town Hall, his old dark coat flapping around him, the stained bag weighty in his steel hand.

A door opened with a sudden crash, as if kicked. Lamplight lapped at Shrike’s toes. In the doorway stood Twyne’s mayor. Two other men stood with him, goggled and body-armoured, clutching shiny guns.

Shrike upended his sack. The robber’s head fell into the snow like a dropped cabbage. The mayor of Twyne looked down at it, and nodded.

“Nice job,” he said.

“He needs payin‘ now,” said Hester. She’d noticed that Shrike didn’t always stay around to collect the bounty once a job was done. To be fair, he hadn’t much to spend the blood-money on; he didn’t care about clothes or a place to live, and she’d never seen him eat. She hungered though; she needed clothes on her back and a roof over her. So she always made sure he got paid. “Ten gold ones,” she said, tugging her scarf up to hide her face. “That’s what you promised, for Ampersand’s head.”

“Ah...” said the mayor. Pilbeam was his name, and he at least had the decency to look ashamed. “Stuff’s changed, since I set you after Ampersand. These gents...” (He indicated the men who stood on either side of him, the tree-lights starry in their goggles.) “They work for the Shkin Corporation; a big slaving company from down south. Seems they provide fighters for the Nuevo Mayan circuses and they’re after new attractions. They’d dearly love a Stalker, so they asked if they could have a word with you when you got back here, Mr Shrike, and I said...”

“I AM NOT AN ATTRACTION,” said Shrike, in a voice like a city changing its rusty gears. His hands stayed at his sides, but his fingers all grew sharp, bright blades, like icicles. He said, “SHKIN’S MEN HAVE ASKED ME TO APPEAR IN THESE CIRCUSES BEFORE. I TOLD THEM NO.”

“Well this time we ain’t asking,” said one of the slavers, and both together raised their silvery guns and pulled the triggers.

Lightning arced across the square and crackled against Shrike’s armour. He stumbled backwards, tinselled with sparks, eyes flickering. “Now!” shouted Mayor Pilbeam. Hester looked up and saw that there were other men on the front of the town hall, perching like trainee gargoyles on ledges and gutterings. A weighted net spread as it fell, settling over the Stalker where he struggled, wrapped in electricity.

Hester had grown so used to the idea of Shrike as unstoppable that it had never occurred to her that she might one day be called upon to help him. She ran through the jerking blue light, the stuttering shadows. She drew her knife and hacked through one of the lines which held the pine tree up. The men ignored her, advancing towards Shrike, playing the blue fire of their strange guns over him. She hacked another. That was enough. The tree teetered. She pressed her small body against its outer branches and its scratchy clouds of needles; shoved.

The falling tree swept a couple of men off the front of the Town Hall. It came down hard on Mayor Pilbeam and the men with the electric guns: curses, a crackle of splintering branches, the great trunk smashing them flat. One of the guns exploded with a shear of blue light.

Shrike was recovering. He shook himself, like a wet dog shaking off water. He tore his way out of the net. One of his eyes was on the fritz, flickering and buzzing like faulty neon till he smacked himself hard on the side of the head and it righted itself. He listened for a moment to the faint groans that came from underneath the tree. He dragged out the remaining gun and crushed it. He did not thank Hester, just went into the Town Hall with her following.

The building was full of running footsteps, cries. No one was sure what happened in the square, but they all knew that the Stalker had triumphed despite those fancy electric weapons, and nobody wanted to stay and face him. As Shrike and Hester went from room to room they sometimes glimpsed people scrambling for the exits or squeezing out of windows. They found a big, dim room where a fire was burning and plates heaped with food waited on a long table. Hester tried some pie, a cake. Shrike spiked a chestnut on each of his finger-blades and stood by the fire. “ONCE UPON A TIME,” he said, “THERE WAS THIS... IT WAS... THERE WAS A GIRL WITH A DOG, AND THE DOG WAS CALLED NOODLE POODLE. AND THERE WAS... THERE WAS... ONCE...”

He was trying to tell a midwinter story, Hester realised, but he wasn’t very good at it. She crammed more pie awkwardly into her awkward mouth and said, “How about, ‘Once upon a time there was these two people, and it was a cold, hard world they lived in, so they went about together, for company. And one midwinter they found a good snug place to stay, and stuff to eat, and they were warm enough for a bit. And it was good.’”

Shrike looked at her, and the lamps of his eyes flickered ever so slightly, and from his outstretched hands there came wafting a smell of roasted chestnuts.

THE END...

...and a Merry Midwinter to us, one and all!

Illustrations © Sarah McIntyre

Christmas is Coming...

2011-12-20T11:34:00.000Z

...and in between wrapping the pressies and decorating the tree I've been busy writing a very short, mid-winter themed Mortal Engines storyette, which I'll be posting here in the next day or two.

In the meantime, if you're still looking for that last-minute Christmas present and you've already snapped up all my other recent recommendations, don't forget that Scrivener's Moon, the third Fever Crumb adventure, is available from all good bookshops. It has mammoths and armoured warfare, which I think you'll agree make it the perfect stocking-filler.

A Cold Walk on Dartmoor

2011-12-16T15:26:00.000Z

Ooiee! Me Books!

2011-12-11T15:57:00.000Z

Francis Hardinge, Jonathan Green, China Mieville, Plarchie,
Deadly Knitshade and Me.

The trouble with doing lots of events is that I don't always get time to blog about all the events I've done. By the time I arrived home from my London trip last week the internet was groaning under the weight of write-ups of Thursday night's Steampunk Christmas shindig at Blackwell's, so rather than go into detail I shall just link you to reports on Sarah McIntyre's blog (from where I pinched all these pictures, as usual) and Rhys Jones's 'Thirst For Fiction'. My signing beforehand at Foyles went well too; it was nice to meet so many Twitter and Facebook friends in real life for the first time, including Tom and Ash who'd travelled all the way from Southampton bearing first editions...

Luckily Sarah McIntyre was there to entertain the queue by doing this beautiful & flattering portrait of me.

Also present was my long-lost cousin Gareth, who kindly took this photograph of me, Sarah (left) and Rhys (right) with Foyle's Neil Jackson and his colleague Jen: thanks very much to them for organising and publicising the signing.

Blackwell's was also full of lovely people, only one of whom was a giant, man-eating squid knitted out of old carrier bags. Event organisers Anne Perry, Jared Shurin and Den Patrick had gathered a diverse crowd of guests, and lots of fans had come along to meet and mingle, many of them in elaborate costumes. There was a hint early on of the sort of serious cultural studies debate which helped to turn me off Steampunk in the first place, but it soon fizzled out amid good conversation, merriment and rum, leaving me to chat to good eggs like Major Willougby Chase of the 1st Tea Company (below left) who explained why Steampunk is so important to him: because it's FUN!

Natsworthygate

2011-12-05T16:50:00.002Z

When I posted this picture of the mossy beech trees at Natsworthy Gate on Twitter someone pointed out that 'Natsworthygate' sounds like a scandal, and I suppose it does - some dark secret in the Natsworthy family's past which I never got round to mentioning in Mortal Engines.

Walking on the moor today, in winter sunshine, a cold north west wind and showers of rain and sleet, we saw nobody else at all, and it seemed odd to think that in a day or two I'll be in London again, fighting my way through throngs of Christmas shoppers. Hopefully some of them will make their way to Foyles Bookshop on the Charing Cross Road, where I'll be signing books between 5 and 6 pm. There are more details here on the Foyles website. (The event is ticketed, but it's free, and you can come along at any point during the hour.) I might be doing some drawings, too.

Straight afterwards (at a slightly earlier time than previously advertised) is the Kitschies Steampunk Christmas event at Blackwells, only a stone's throw from Foyles (though I'm sure these two fine bookselling establishments are far too civilised to actually throw stones at each other). There I'll be joining in what looks like being a great evening, featuring China Mieville, Kim Lakin Smith and many other writers and artists.

Also in attendance will be Deadly Knitshade, whose book Knit The City I've just been recommending over on The Solitary Bee. It's the perfect size to fit in a large Christmas stocking, and if you don't have a large stocking she can probably tell you how to knit one.

See you there!

Books on the Bee

2011-12-03T12:54:00.000Z

I don't really see myself as a book reviewer, but I like recommending books when I find a good one, and that's what I've been doing lately on this blog's sister-site, The Solitary Bee. If you're seeking Christmas presents for the bookish you might want to check these out:

For fans of rollicking space opera:

For lovers of deviant Gothic sci-fi weirdness:

For grown-up comics fans:

For younger readers and them as like LARFING:

And don't forget to come and get your signed copies of my books, or just say hello, at Foyles and Blackwells next Thursday evening (8th December).

Worldbuilding in Progress!

2011-12-01T18:39:00.005Z

A carved angel on the tower at Exeter School

An excellent day today at Exeter School, talking to three different groups of pupils, answering questions and signing books. This morning I did a creative writing session with some of the Upper Fifth. Creative writing sessions aren't really my cup of tea and I've seldom done them in the past, but today I tried somethingI've never done before: a worldbuilding exercise.

I started by talking about different invented worlds - Narnia and Middle Earth, Lilliput, Oz, Burrough's and then Bradbury's Mars, the further-flung alien planets of Star Wars and Avatar, and (coughs significantly and gestures modestly to self) the future world of Mortal Engines. Then I divided the class into six groups and asked them to devise a world of their own, with some sort of internal logic, history and geography.

To be honest, this was the point at which it could all have fallen horribly apart. In the past when I've done writing exercises there have always been a few pupils who, when it's time to put pen to paper, just stare blankly and say 'I haven't got any ideas'. That's fair enough: coming up with stories isn't everybody's cup of tea, and often when it's time to put pen to paper I stare blankly and say, 'I haven't got any ideas!'. But they're made of better stuff than that at Exeter School, and all six groups instantly started coming up with very intriguing worlds.

After ten minutes or so we started trying to combine elements of each group's work into one world, which we mapped on the whiteboard. Obviously this meant a certain amount of compromise, and a lot of nice details had to be left out. But luckily many of the six worlds the students had developed had some similarities: there were a lot of underground societies, a lot of hierarchical social structures, and a lot of looming environmental catastrophes. The map was drawn very quickly, so is rather sketchy, and it was difficult to photograph. (Hopefully the yellowish cast of these instagram pictures gives it the look of Ancient Parchment. Or not...)

Anyway, here's what we ended up with. It's a world in which most people live underground, in a vast maze of passages called Underland. Only two societies live on the surface, or 'Uptop' as it's known: the people of Willow City, which is a giant tree, and the fearsome-seeming ant-folk of Moretonantstead...

Here's a closer look at Willow City, the Air Camels which hang around its outer branches, and Philbert the Wise, a wise old man who lives there. The Vertical Railway descends into Underland.

Here's one of the Air Camels...

While in the swamps which surround the vast tree's roots there lurks a hungry Jellis:

The Ant People of Moretonantstead have dug down to create their own underground burrow-city, Penzants:

The Underlanders use giant centipedes as buses, and giant woodlice as cars:

Underland is powered by a mysterious Orb which is able to erase matter, and into which the Underlanders throw their refuse, dead bodies, etc. But the Orb has begun to grow, leading to fears that the whole of Underland will soon be erased (which indeed it undoubtedly was, as soon as the next lesson started). The story's hero, Stevebob of Hrrrr, is on a quest to warn his neighbours in the other underground cities of the danger: unfortunately most of them are giant-expanding-erasey-orb deniers who only want to silence him...

Meanwhile, a ravenous and badly-drawn (by me) giant worm approaches the peaceful underground kingdom of Hrrrr:

All in all, considering that Underland was created in about forty minutes by twenty five different people, I think it's a remarkably complex and interesting fantasy world, and I hope the groups will do a bit more work on it, refining it and adding new details. They certainly have no shortage of ideas, and I thoroughly enjoyed working with them.

And the moral of all this? Wordbuilding is fun!

Exeter School in better weather...

Underland is the copyright of its creators, the students of Exeter School...

Hurstpierpoint, the Kids' Lit Quiz and the paintings of Ramsay Gibb

2011-11-28T12:18:00.000Z

The trouble with travelling around the country doing school visits and book events is that, while it gives me much more interesting material to blog about that just sitting at home would, it doesn't leave me much time to actually do so...

On the train again...

Last week I went to Hurstpierpoint in East Sussex to talk to some of the pupils of Hurstpierpoint College Prep School. The year seven pupils there study Mortal Engines in English classes, and while the present year 7s don't get to encounter my deathless prose until next term they had some interesting questions to ask about the book and how I cam to write it. Their teacher, Mrs Gordon-Stewart, showed me some of the work that previous years have done, which included writing short diaries from the point of view of Mortal Engines characters. Here's one by 'Hester Shaw', with some interesting notes-to-self on the front cover ('Kill Valentine') etc.

On my way to Hurstpierpoint I stopped off in London to buy a copy of the new comics anthology Nelson (highly recommended!) and to see the latest exhibition by the Scottish landscape painter Ramsay Gibb at the Francis Kyle gallery in Maddox Street. I used to know Ramsay when I lived in Brighton. He had been through art college there with some friends of mine, and was an excellent illustrator. It's been a huge pleasure to watch his work evolve, and he goes from strength to strength. The current show, A First Avowed Intent, focuses on the old pilgrimage sites and paths of the British Isles, and is on for another week. Catch it if you can.

Moonlight, Iona beach, by Ramsay Gibb

My second adventure last week was in Wadebridge, Cornwall for the South West regional heat of the excellent Kids' Lit Quiz. Teams from schools all over the region were competing for a chance to go forward to the national finals, and then, hopefully, to the world finals in New Zealand. It was great to meet founder and quizmaster Wayne Mills, and to see so many keen readers. The final result was extremely close, but team one from Penrice School were victorious, and will be heading to the UK final in Warwick on 2nd December. Go, Penrice!

Wayne Mills in Quizzing Hat, lower right.

Me signing books and autographs after the Quiz.

An Echo from Gloucestershire

2011-11-23T23:17:00.000Z

I've just been sent this nice piece from the Gloucestershire Echo about the students from Winchcome School who attended my event at the Cheltenham Festival back in October. Unfortunately they had to dash off to their waiting bus straight afterwards, so there was no chance to talk to them individually. It's nice to know that they enjoyed it! Thanks to Bethany Allison and Jamie Worman for this write-up.

Sci-Fi Societies, London in Cake Form and the Phoenix Rising

2011-11-19T13:23:00.000Z

I snapped this blurred, wintry sunset from a train window as I whizzed around the country this week, visiting the Nottingham University Science Fiction & Fantasy Society and the Oxford University Speculative Fiction Group to talk about my Life and Works. That basically ended up being about how I came to write Mortal Engines, and how the world of the book has developed and expanded through its various sequels and prequels.

Both societies gave me a warm welcome, and were great audiences. It reminded me that a) SF and fantasy fans are my kind of people and b) I'm getting very, very old - when I talked about the writers who'd inspired me as a student I found that barely any of my listeners had even heard of them, let alone read them. (Which is hardly surprising, since these were books and stories which were probably thirty years old when I discovered them, and that was thirty years ago. I really must start reading some more contemporary SF. )

Anyway, it was good to meet so many people who'd read Mortal Engines. The Oxford group even recreated Traction London in cake form last year, when it made it into the top ten in their list of Books They'd Want To Take With Them If They Were Cast Away On A Desert Planet. The tracks look particularly tasty...

Lyndsey Pickup was Chief Architect of the cake, and also took some photos of my Oxford event, which reminded me of something else: I really wave my hands about a lot when I talk.

The image behind me there is one of David Wyatt's covers for the old UK editions of the Mortal Engines quartet. They're still my favourite covers, and looking at them again on these Powerpoint slides I realised that there are chunks of them which have never been used: some seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time marketing decision led to them being printed on the inside of die-cut outer covers with holes in, which meant that much of the left hand side of each image was lost, like the very Germanic little city rolling ahead of Manchester in this picture for A Darkling Plain.

Then, in a seemed-like-a-terrible-idea-at-the-time-AND-STILL-DOES decision, pictorial covers were abandoned completely in favour of a more 'graphic' or 'boring' approach. My website will be getting an overhaul in the New Year and I'll try to include David's full images as downloadable wallpapers, but if you don't want to wait till then you can find them here.

One of the nice things about talking to OUSFG is that they put you up overnight in one of the university's colleges. Here's the view from my guest room in Merton.

My host Matthew Lloyd and his brother John gave me a tour of the college, which is almost ridiculously beautiful. There's a stone table in the grounds which allegedly inspired the one on which Aslan is sacrificed in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and a view through trees and rooftops to two college spires which is supposed to have inspired The Two Towers. (Both stories need to be taken with a sizeable pinch of salt, I think, but it was a nice reminder that I was on the territory of CS Lewis and Tolkien. And nowadays, of course, it's the stamping ground of Philip Pullman and the location of Harry Potter movies. Oxford was the Royalist capital during the Civil war, and in a way it's still the capital of English fantasy.)

On Thursday I went with lovely Sarah McIntyre to lunch at the offices of The Phoenix, a new comic which is being launched by the team behind the late lamented DFC. We got to see the hot-off-the-press Issue Zero, which isn't for sale, but is being away free at Waitrose supermarkets.

The Phoenix begins publication on January 7th, and if you haven't subscribed already, you can do so here. It's going to be great, and will feature all sorts of fine comics artists. (Sarah and I are also working on something for it, but more on that anon.)

Phoenix editor Ben Sharpe persuades Sarah McIntyre to subscribe in
exchange for CAKE.

And then we popped next door to David Fickling Books, one of Sarah's publishers. David Fickling was in charge at Scholastic when I first started working for them as an illustrator. He's a true champion of children's publishing, and it's always a pleasure to catch up with him, and hear about his exciting plans. Here he is with Sarah, who's holding a copy of a beautiful new chapter book by Dave Shelton, A Boy and a Bear in a Boat. It isn't published till next year, and I'll be shouting loudly about it then. The UK edition has one of the simplest and most striking covers I've ever seen.

Thanks very much to everybody at Nottingham SF&F Society and OUSFG, the Phoenix and DFB for making it such an enjoyable week!

A week of Sci Fi

2011-11-14T12:36:00.002Z

(Or Science Fiction, if you prefer. When I was a teenager, Science Fiction fans were as curmudgeonly as jazz buffs and used to think the term 'Sci Fi' a terrible insult, but I've always rather liked it; it captures the slightly hand-made, fun aspect of the genre which is what I always liked best about it. )

Anyway, this week I'm off to talk about my Life and Works to both Nottingham University Science Fiction and Fantasy Society (on Tuesday night) and the Oxford University Speculative Fiction Group (on Wednesday). And to get myself in the mood I've been reading and reviewing Gareth L Powell's novel The Recollection over on The Solitary Bee.

I've also been putting together a Powerpoint with some images of the things that inspired me, in the course of which I came across this nice still from Terry Gilliam's masterpiece, Brazil.

I saw this film for the first time when it came out in 1985 and I suspect the seeds for Mortal Engines were sown there and then. In fact it had such a profound influence on me that I'm still wearing the suit and hat, and if I could drive I'd be whizzing up to Nottingham in one of those Messerschmidt bubble cars on Tuesday. As it is, I'll have to take the train.

Eek! Goblins!

2011-10-31T12:29:00.003Z

What with it being Hallowe'en and all, I thought this might be a good day to unveil the cover artwork for my next book, GOBLINS. It won't be published until next April, but is already available for pre-order on Amazon.co.uk. where it's described thus:

A wild world of magical creatures and heroic adventure from the extraordinary imagination of Philip Reeve. The squabbling goblins who live in the great towers of Clovenstone spend their time fighting and looting. Only clever young Skarper understands that dark magic created by a vanquished sorcerer is rising again. From the lands of men come fortune-seekers - and trolls, giants, cloud-maidens, boglins, swamp monsters, tree-warriors and bloodthirsty goblins are swept into a fabulous magical conflict to thrill all fantasy fans...

It's also, hopefully, quite funny - closer in spirit to Larklight than to my Mortal Engines or Fever Crumb books. I think David Semple's goblins capture the tone beautifully.

(For some reason the Amazon listing describes GOBLINS as a hardback, but actually I think it's going to be a fancy, large-format paperback.)

Happy Hallowe'en!

Haunted Dartmoor

2011-10-31T09:28:00.000Z

To celebrate All Hallows Eve and the recent launch of the HAUNTED anthology I've written a short piece about Dartmoor and its ghosts for BookZone. It comes complete with some of Sarah's photographs, and a mysterious, spooky video... Click here to read it!

A Walk in the Sunshine

2011-10-28T16:47:00.000+01:00

This week I've been getting distracted by Instagram, which is a free app which lets you try out different filters on your iphone camera. Basically it means that my expensive and highly sophisticated 'phone can now take the same sort of pictures I used to take on a box brownie or my mum's Polaroid when I was ten - so what's not to like? Here are some of the sights I passed when I walked Frodo up the hill this afternoon, in glorious October sunshine.

Honeybag Tor

My favourite beech hedge, on the side of Hameldown

Looking towards Natsworthy...

Also this week I've been having brainstorming sessions with Sarah McIntyre about a couple of Secret Projects: here's her account, with more photographs...

BristolCon

2011-10-24T09:41:00.011+01:00

Last Saturday's BristolCon was the first Science Fiction convention I've attended since I was no higher than... well, the same height I am now, I suppose, but a lot younger.

So I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. I've heard a lot about comics conventions from Sarah McIntyre (a woman so glamorous that even her spots are named after Spanish royalty) and somehow I was assuming there would be lots of people dressed up in outrageous fantasy and sci-fi costumes, but there weren't. Sarah was outraged when I texted her with this news: here's her message to the SF fans of Bristol:

I still can't believe the sci-fi fans didn't wear costumes, what a chiz and a let-down. Get with it, sci-fi people!

So, no cosplayers, but the conference-y bit of the Ramada Hotel was filled with fans, artists and authors, and there were two programmes of discussion panels running through the day, talking about subjects which ranged from the minutiae of a writer's life - copyright, reviews, and how books turn into epics (the 'Genesis' panel) - to big picture stuff about how science became the bad guy and how science fiction has failed (and sometimes succeeded) at predicting future technology (that one was subtitled, 'Dude, Where's My Jet-Pack?') There was also an art exhibition, including work by Jim Burns, who did the covers for some of the SF books I remember reading as a teen, and Bristol based comics and storyboards illustrator Simon Gurr.

I won't try to list all the writers and artists who attended, because I'm bound to leave some out (and I somehow managed to miss all three guests of honour; Jim Burns, Juliet McKenna and Justina Robson) but it was great to finally meet Alex Keller, whose novel Haywired has now a sequel, Rewired. (We both contributed to the 'Genesis' panel, which suggests there are many more Wireds... to come.

The Genesis panel (image nicked from Marjorie73's Twitter, hence its superior quality). L-R: Alex Keller, HM Castor, Some Other Bloke, MD Lachlan, Alastair Reynolds.

After the panel I did a brief reading from Scrivener's Moon, which seemed to go over all right. Kian Momtahan was in the audience, and let me take a picture of the note he made while I was reading. If only this motto could be embroidered on samplers and hung on the wall of every home in the land:

Kian's friend Tomas L. Martin is a writer who has published acclaimed short stories in a number of magazines, and also in the new collection Transtories, which was being launched at BristolCon.

Here I am with another member of the Genesis panel, author H.M. Castor, attending her first convention, and promoting VIII, a YA historical novel about Henry VIII with fantasy elements.

As you can see, my photos haven't come out very well - they were taken on my 'phone, which doesn't have a flash and didn't seem able to cope with the hotel lighting. So I don't have my own photos of the rest of the panel; Alastair Reynolds, MD Lachlan and moderator Cheryl Morgan. Nor do I have a snap of Tim Maughan, whose reading from his new collection of Cyberpunky short stories Paintwork was very impressive, and prompted me to buy it in memory-stick form (futuristic or WHAT?) I also came home with a copy of The Recollection by Gareth L. Powell.

Operating the dodgy phone-cam was Jeremy Levett, friend of the WoME and my chief military advisor and unlikely tracked vehicle consultant. Jeremy's family (who are LOVELY) live in Bristol, so I stayed at their house and took him along with me to be my minion for the day. He was such a good minion that I may have to up-grade him to henchman, and he might make it all the way to sidekick if he plays his cards right. He was wearing a red shirt, which has unfortunate connotations in sci-fi circles, being the uniform worn by those crewmen of the starship Enterprise whom the scriptwriters deemed expendable. I think we were all quite concerned for his safety, especially when he chose to sit in the front row for Mike Shevdon's talk on archery, but happily he emerged un-pincushioned.

The archery talk itself was excellent, dealing with the use of bows and arrows in fantastic literature, and revealing a lot of things I didn't know about how they work. Here's Mike demonstrating how to pull a composite recurved bow (I think).

After that we were a bit panelled-out, so retired to the bar, where I talked to lots of charming and erudite people, including Shana Worthen of the British Science Fiction Association, and writers Dolly Garland, E.J.Newman and Kim Lakin-Smith, whose new novel Cyber Circus I'm looking forward to reading. And then there was a QUIZ, which I didn't mean to enter, but somehow did, and it turned out to be Fun After All; we were lucky enough to have Iain Cairns on our team, and thanks to his startling recall of obscure SF facts we came second - and would have come first if I'd been able to identify the poster for Dark City and hadn't cast doubt on Iain's (actually quite correct) hunch that the planet Babylon 5 orbits is called Epsilon Eridani.

Anyway, it was a very good day, full of meetings with lovely and interesting people, and a triumph of organisation on the part of chair Jo Hall and the committee - Andy Bigwood, Cheryl Morgan, MEG Broadribb, Heather Ashley, Roz Clarke, Mark Robinson and Sam Pearson. If you're in the west of England on 20th October next year you should get yourself along to BristolCon 2012. I'll be there for sure. (Though you might not want me on your quiz team...)

A happy redshirt survives another day...

Manchester and Cheltenham and Goblins and Librarians...

2011-10-16T10:23:00.000+01:00

Suddenly I'm busy! I've been putting the finishing touches to GOBLINS (out next April), writing a new book for the following year, and also working on a couple of smaller projects which I shall tell you about soon. Meanwhile, I have an autumn of events lined up. Unfortunately I have so many events that I can't find time to blog about them!

It's already nearly two weeks since I went up to London to attend the School Librarian of the Year Award, in the middle of that startling October heatwave. I'm glad I was only presenting the award rather than actually judging it, because I would have found it very difficult to choose between the three finalists, all of whom run fantastic school libraries and are clearly inspiring whole armies of young readers. The winner in the end was Carol Webb from Forest Hill School in London. You can see her holding her award in the middle of this picture (taken by celebrity gatecrasher Sarah McIntyre, who later kidnapped me).

Then last week I travelled up to Salford to visit Salford City Academy, where I talked about my work and made the students do some work of their own in the form of some quick writing exercises - not the sort of thing I usually do, but it seemed to go down all right, and the students produced some very good pieces. Many thanks to librarian Debbie Wilkinson for inviting me.

Then it was on to Cheltenham, which is in the grip of its annual Literary Festival at the moment. I did an event to an audience of about 525 pupils from various schools in the area, and then hung around the Writers' Room doing some Writing and helping myself to free coffee. Here's a picture of Alex Sedgwick, my lovely publicist from Scholastic, and Jane Churchill, who organises the children's events at Cheltenham. (It's a bit out of focus 'cos I took it on my Fancy New Phone).

(I also had two pieces of good news about GOBLINS last week, but I'd better not tell you those yet, either. Here, however, is a sneak peek of just a tiny detail the brilliant cover artwork...)

And next weekend the merriment and rail travel continues when I head off to BristolCon. If you're going, I hope to meet you there. If not, tickets are still available...

A Web of Air

2011-10-01T10:16:00.001+01:00

Hello America! A WEB OF AIR, the second book in the Fever Crumb sequence, is published in the USA today!

The story follows Fever Crumb as she travels with the Persimmon's travelling theatre to Mayda, a city built in a volcanic crater somewhere off the coast of present-day Portugal. There, needless to say, she becomes embroiled in danger and intrigue. Here's the trailer that I commissioned from Ian Forster when the UK edition was published (so if you're a regular reader of this blog you'll already have seen it). You can see more of Ian's work, and get him to design blogs, websites and trailers for you, by clicking on the link to Graphic Alchemy on the side of this page.) The photos in the trailer were mostly taken by Sarah Reeve, and there's a brief glimpse of a scary-looking biomechanical tentacle thingy designed by Justin Hill, and another of some cogs and gears drawn by Sam Weber. Other images come from David Wyatt's cover artwork for the original UK edition, some of which was never actually used(!) 'Fever' is Sophia Oppel, daughter of Kenneth Oppel, the author of top-notch airship adventures for the discerning reader as well as many other things. If you haven't yet read his book Airborn and its sequels then you should; he spins a good tale, and he knows and cares how airships work, unlike certain authors we could mention, hem hem. I should point out that Sophia doesn't really have different colour eyes; Ian did that. (By magic, as far as I can understand.)

I always intended A Web of Air to be quieter and more focused on Fever herself than Fever Crumb, and in some ways it feels - and is meant to feel - very different to the other books I've written about the world of Mortal Engines. Like Predator's Gold, the second of the Mortal Engines books, it seemed a chance to turn away from the big, high-stakes, world-altering adventures of the first volume and focus in more on particular characters: for Fever the events of A Web of Air are a matter of life and death, but the vast upheavals going on in the north as London motorises and the other states and cities react to it have barely touched Mayda... yet.

A Web of Air may not be quite as disconnected from the adventures of previous books as it appears, though: as reviewer Jonathan Hunt points out in The Horn Book magazine, "The resolution sorts out the allegiance of the various players ... and sets the stage for greater things to come. It’s clear that Reeve, just as he did in the original Mortal Engines quartet, is building toward an epic, and his remarkable storytelling gifts, coupled with a trenchant understanding of human nature, make the projected volumes worth the wait."

Here's a link to A WEB OF AIR on Amazon.com.

Wiltshire, Bath, Bristol

2011-09-28T17:23:00.002+01:00

We took the pretty way to the Bath Festival of Children's Literature this year, making a long loop up into Wiltshire so that we could visit Avebury. For some reason I've never been there, although it's a place I've always wanted to see. Famously, the village is built in the middle of a complex double circle of ancient standing stones. Naturally it's been adopted by the New Age numpty fraternity, who were much in evidence when we were there, hugging stones, flogging crystals and conducting 'druid' ceremonies in one of the circles. But even for rational people Avebury has a strange and haunting atmosphere. Despite the sunshine, the hippies and all the other visitors it felt distinctly eerie, and I could see how it had inspired all those spooky books and TV dramas of my childhood like Children of the Stones and The Moon Stallion. Here, two of the stones are creeping up on an unsuspecting cottage...

After Avebury we stopped off at Silbury Hill, a huge, conical burial mound that forms part of the same sacred landscape, but isn't quite as impressive as its photographs on account of having a busy main road thundering right past it. We stayed the night at The Old Forge B&B in East Kennett, and over a very nice breakfast got talking to two ladies who were walking the Ridgeway, the long-distance footpath which stretches from nearby Overton Hill for 87 miles across the middle of England to Ivinghoe Beacon, near Tring. I've never seen myself walking the Pennine Way or Hadrian's Wall, but I've always rather fancied doing the Ridgeway. We did a tiny bit of it ourselves that morning, parking at the National Trust car-park on White Horse Hill and then tramping along the Ridgeway for a mile or so to the bronze-age barrow known as Wayland's Smithy, which was looking very lovely on a quiet and misty autumn morning. There are lots of barrows near where we live on Dartmoor, but they're all rather small compared with the Smithy, which you can actually climb inside...

White Horse Hill is so called, of course, because our long-ago ancestors carved the figure of a galloping white horse into it. Like Avebury and Wayland's Smithy, the Uffington White Horse is something that I've always wanted to see (Rosemary Sutcliff wrote a very fine, short novel about its making, Sun Horse, Moon Horse). Oddly enough, though, when you get to White Horse Hill you can't actually see the horse itself, only odd, abstract bits of it. This is part of its head and its eye...

Then off we went to Bath, making very good time until we turned off the motorway and got wedged in the massive tailback of traffic trying squeeze through the bottleneck of picturesque Georgian streets. I can never work out whether I like Bath or think its a ridiculous heritage industry theme-park, but one thing I can be sure about is that the Bath Festival of Children's Literature is BRILLIANT. It carries on for two weeks, so it's well worth checking their website - there are loads of great events still to come. I was on on Sunday morning, in conversation with festival organiser John McClay and the lovely Moira Young, whose first novel, a brutal and dusty YA dystopia called Blood Red Road, is garnering great reviews wherever it goes. Here we are preparing for our event - and, as Joseph Nixon pointed out, looking like a duo of eccentric TV crime-fighters, so if the bottom drops out of the YA fiction market we shall know what to fall back on.

But while we wait for some right-thinking producer to cast us in a remake of The Avengers, we do a pretty good YA Dystopias event, if I say so myself, and I hope we will be able to offer a repeat performance at other festivals in the future. The audience had some interesting questions, and they included several people I know from Twitter or Facebook but hadn't actually met in Real Life before. They didn't include my old friend Nick Riddle and his daughters Eve and Eloise because they were busy looking after a dog that morning, but they turned up afterwards and we went for lunch together and a hasty catching-up (I don't see nearly enough of Nick, with whom I used to write comedy sketches at college - or, rather, he used to come up with all he ideas while I giggled and wrote them down. If you've read Starcross, the cheery old music-hall song entitled 'Dearest Margaret You Are Danish And Your Dog's Not Very Well' is one of Nick's.)

Then we were on our travels again, stopping off in Bristol, where I did an event on Monday morning at Colston's School, telling 200 students there the secrets of How To Write Stuff and Drawing Gollarks. And then home, wishing we could have stayed a bit longer in Bath, and full of admiration for John and Gill McClay and all the festival staff for organising such a great series of events.

(Thanks very much to Scholastic for arranging my trip to Bath, Colston's School for their warm welcome, and to Sarah for all these photos, except the last one, which is by John McClay. )

You Can Launch a Princess

2011-09-23T08:40:00.001+01:00

Team Princess: Sarah Mcintyre & Gillian Rogerson (back row, centre)
with their editors and the Scholastic publicists.

It's a been a busy old week (so this is just a quick post) but it started well, with a great party organised by my publishers, Scholastic Children's Books, to celebrate the launch of You Can't Scare a Princess, the new picture book by writer Gillian Rogerson and illustrator Sarah McIntyre. You Can't Scare a Princess is a sequel to You Can't Eat a Princess, and both books are about the adventures of the pasta-haired Princess Spaghetti: she has a run-in with aliens in the first, and in this new one she encounters a crew of pirates. That's why there was a pirate-y theme to the goings-on on Monday night, which included a big Pirate Draw-Off - here's my attempt at a Zombie Pirate.

At a time when book sales are slumping it was great to hear how well the two Princess Spaghettis are doing. They're beautiful books, and despite being about a pink, roller-skating princess they should appeal to little boys as much as little girls (Pirates! Aliens!). It was great to meet Gillian, too, along with all sorts of people from the illustration and comics world. There are many more pictures and details over on Sarah's blog.

Cheers!

New Goodness from McQue and Poskitt

2011-09-16T18:24:00.001+01:00

Concept artist Ian McQue is one of my favourite Science Fiction illustrators, and his excellent blog has just been updated with a spectacular new digital painting "Arrival at Sky Harbour'. Ian's a Mortal Engines fan (that's his take on London, above) and this latest image reminds me of the feeling I was after when I wrote about the flying town of Airhaven - although Ian's trademark sky-ships don't need creaky old gasbags to hold them up.

Unfortunately I can't upload images from Ian's blog, but do click on the link above and have a look (if you click on the image itself you'll see a larger version). I also noticed that there will soon be a 35mm kit of one of the Skyships, the Remora - which is definitely something I want to see dangling from my study ceiling on fishing-line before too long.

In other news, Murderous Maths magnate and WoME-ish god of something-or-other Kjartan Poskitt has a new book out: read my thoughts on Agatha Parrot and the Floating Head here.

Bath Time

2011-09-11T17:56:00.000+01:00

Less than a fortnight to go until the 2011 Bath Festival of Children's Literature begins, and if you're within travelling distance of it you should definitely have a look at the programme, which features a surprising number of my favourite children's authors and illustrators. It also features me. I'll be appearing at midday on Saturday 25th to talk with Moira Young, author of the hugely acclaimed Blood Red Road: details here.

Justin Hill - His Part in my Rise to Fame!*

2011-09-03T14:39:00.006+01:00

(* All right, not really fame, but slightly less obscure obscurity.)

When I started this blog (nearly two years ago) one of the things I planned to use it for was to write about some of the artists and authors who had influenced me. But of course the people who influence us most are our families and friends, and often meeting new friends can open our eyes and ears and minds to things which we had never noticed before. So it's high time I did a blog post about my friend Justin Hill. I met Justin when we started together at St Luke's Primary School back in 1971, and he probably had as much of an influence as anyone on the World of Reeve.

Justin only lived a few streets away from me, but I don't recall us being particularly friendly until we were both nine or ten. I can't even remember what it was that first drew us together, although it may well have been drawing; we were both keen would-be cartoonists, and I can remember poring over Asterix books with him as well as playing with Action Men and riding around Queen's park on our bikes (Justin had a Raleigh Chopper, the quintessential 1970s bike, stylish but unstable...). When we were twelve Justin's mum and dad moved to Ovingdean, a village on the outskirts of Brighton, and we ended up going to different secondary schools; Justin to Longhill, me to Stanley Deason. (Stanley Deason has since closed down: Googling it just now, I noticed that the picture book author & illustrator Emily Gravett also went there, a few years after me. You can imagine how delighted I was to learn that I'm not even the most successful author to come out of Stanley Deason.)

Anyway, that's the point when I suppose Justin and I might have lost touch, because I've always been wretchedly bad at keeping up with absent friends. Luckily Justin wasn't, and we stayed in contact right through our secondary school years. I didn't see much of him in term time, but in the school holidays he would often to come to stay at my house for a few days, or I'd go to his place in Ovingdean, from where we could take long rambly walks up over the Downs to Rottingdean and the sea. I was making little low-budget movies by then, and Justin was a reliable and daring stunt-man (all those years spent tumbling off the back of a Chopper having inured him to physical pain). We were quite different types, because Justin's image was developing along these sorts of lines...

...while mine was always more like this...

(only not so sporty). Somehow, however, we got along very well, and I remember staying up long into the night doing drawings and paintings, and trying to imitate the work of illustrators and comic book artists we admired. Justin's musical tastes were always way ahead of mine (he went on to become a musician, playing guitar and keyboards in various different bands over the years) and he introduced me to a lot of music. Typically, I'd go to his house and he'd say, "You have to hear to this!" and put on something that I'd think sounded like a dreadful racket... but after a couple of listens I'd secretly start to quite like it, and within a few weeks I'd be off to buy my own copy from the second-hand record shop in Sydney Street. This happened with Blondie, and then a little later with David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (And I still remember watching the video for Ashes to Ashes for the first time on the big TV in Justin's living room: it felt like seeing the future arrive).

There must have been loads more: Kate Bush, OMD, Adam and the Ants, Mozart - Justin was nothing if not eclectic, although I never managed to follow him very far down the heavy metal/prog rock road: I'm afraid the Ian Gillan Band and Marillion still sound like a dreadful racket to me, although thanks to Justin's patient explanations I do know how clever all the big guitar solos are. (Years later I swiped the name of one of Gillan's albums - Clear Air Turbulence, with the big stripey Chris Foss spaceship on the front - for an airship in Predator's Gold).

In return for all this musical education I guess I led Justin to a few things, too: naturally I dragged him off to see Excalibur (on the day of Charles and Diana's wedding, I remember), and when I got an invitation to go and meet my illustration hero Brian Froud at the flat in Hampstead where he was living while he designed Labyrinth, it was Justin I took with me to offer moral support and prevent a complete fan-boy meltdown. I think I was also the first of us to discover the Pre-Raphaelites, although it was Justin who noticed that Rottingdean Church had stained glass windows by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. I remember us making a sort of pilgrimage there together to look at them one beautiful October evening in autumn half term. Justin went back recently and took some photos...

I was also was a big fan of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy back when it was still just a radio programme, and when the records eventually came out (available only at the scary, cave-like Virgin shop on Queen's Road) we spent hours listening to them. Here's Justin rocking the Zaphod Beeblebrox look in my back garden, circa 1980...

...and here we are doing some sort of hilarious Monty Python tribute on Combestone Tor, the year I came on holiday to Devon with Justin and his parents. (It's one of the very few pictures that exists of me as a teenager - I was acne-ridden and camera-shy).

That was in 1982, and that autumn we ended up together again for a bit at Varndean Sixth Form College. After that we went to different art colleges, and saw each other less and less (my fault - I'm bad at keeping at touch, remember?) although at some stage a couple of my drawings were used as posters for Justin's band, and a few years later I prevailed on Justin and his friend Jon Van Doorn to do the score for a movie I'd made, Tupilek (which I must see about digitising and putting on YouTube one day).

After that we drifted right apart for a while, until he e-mailed me a few years ago to say that he was living in Thailand, where he's married to the lovely Bim, taking spectacular photographs, and still drawing cartoons - both drawings and photos pop up on mugs, T-Shirts and greeting cards at his Zazzle stores. Some of them, I'm pleased to see, still feature Wilf, a big-nosed character who Justin first started drawing when we were still at school together. ..

The autumn before last Justin was in Devon again with his parents, and they came to visit us here at Bonehill: it was quite touching to see him teaching Sam to draw Wilfs of his own. Here we all are outside the back door on the day they left...

...and here I am with Justin in Brighton, a couple of weeks ago.

I hope we'll stay in touch for at least another forty years.

NB: The guitar god photo I've used above isn't actually of Justin: it's an image by Catch 2232 from Wikipedia. Fotherington-Thomas (He sa, Hello Flowers! Hello Trees! he is uterly wet & a wede) is one of the great Ronald Searle's illustrations from the Molesworth books.

HAUNTED

2011-09-01T17:25:00.000+01:00

"A face in the mirror... Howling in the night... A Black Dog at your door... Cold hands dragging you down..."

I've never published a short story before, and I don't believe in ghosts, but when those nice people at Andersen Press asked if I'd like to contribute a story to their new anthology HAUNTED I thought I ought to give it a go. I came up with a tale called The Ghost Wood, about a boy on holiday in a place very like Dartmoor, who brings home a stone from a wood very like Wistman's Wood; a place which is supposed to be haunted by the spectre of a dreadful black hound... It's not meant to be too scary (as I hated being scared when I was a child and don't really want to terrify today's children) but I hope spooky, and full of the feel of woods and autumn. It's the first time I've used the out-and-out supernatural in a serious story, but it won't be the last. It's also the first time I've used present-day Dartmoor in any of my fiction (although bits of Here Lies Arthur were set on the Moor, at least in my mind's eye).

There are lots of other stories in haunted too, by some great writers: Susan Cooper, Joseph Delaney, Berlie Doherty, Jamila Gavin, Matt Haig, Robin Jarvis, Derek Landy, Sam Llewellyn, Mal Peet and Eleanor Updale (and I expect some of them just love terrifying today's children). For a good spine-chilling read now that the nights are drawing in and Hallowe'en is approaching, look no further!

Haunted is available from all good bookshops, and on the Andersen Press Website.

A Kiwi Traction City

2011-08-30T17:28:00.000+01:00

It's always nice when someone goes to the trouble of building their own traction city (like this, or this.) Here's a model based on London in Mortal Engines, constructed by Meg, Vanessa and Sarah who are in Year 7 at St Margaret's College, 'Quakey' Christchurch, New Zealand.

Poskitt vs McIntyre!

2011-08-25T19:45:00.000+01:00

Look! Two of my favourite people in one photograph! More on Sarah's blog here.

Duplo Dystopias

2011-08-24T09:45:00.001+01:00

When I was in Brighton last week I picked up one of these Duplo firemen sets for Brian Mitchell's lovely little boy Henry. It's a nice set, and the suspension on Duplo vehicles has certainly improved since Sam was a toddler. But both Brian and I were struck by the same thought: this fireman has no hose or fire-extinguisher, and in fact carries some fire with him. Therefore, he is clearly meant to be one of the book-burning firemen from the great Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (or perhaps from François Truffaut's movie version), arriving by quad-bike to set fire to a box of books, and grinning happily while they burn. What a great way to introduce kiddies to classic sci-fi and the films of the nouvelle vague!

Naturally it got us thinking about other '60s and '70s dystopias around which Lego and Duplo could base their sets. Lego Logan's Run? Lego THX1138? Duplo Soylent Green? Personally, I'm looking forward to building the giant floaty head from Lego Zardoz.

What I Did On My Summer Holidays

2011-08-23T13:00:00.002+01:00

Art!

Not much blogging lately, partly because I'm between books and have nothing much to blog about, and partly because I've been busy with summertime things - going for walks and to beaches with Sam and Sarah, and trying to curb the garden's ambition to turn into a jungle. Last week we headed over to Brighton to catch up with old friends.

Here's Sam with the illustrator Jo Moore, whom I met when we were both on the Foundation course at Brighton Art College back in 1984, and with whom I shared a flat for a few years. It was lovely to catch up with her again, and we spent a happy hour or so going through Jo's massive archive of old photographs and wondering at how we ever looked that young. In the evening I met an even older friend: Justin Hill, who I've known since we started together at St Luke's Primary School, aged 5. We've both changed quite a bit since then...

Justin lives in Thailand now, but is back in Blighty for a while, drawing Christmas cards for his Zazzle shop. After we'd eaten we wandered back along the sea-front, past the huge anchor of the cargo ship Athena B, which we went to gawp at when it ran aground on Brighton beach back in 1980. Justin was such an important part of my formative years that he deserves a whole blog post to himself, and I'll try do one very soon.

I also caught up with not one but two former co-writers. Leon Robinson, the co-creator of many a comedy show and no-budget action movie during my Brighton years, now lives in Scotland, and it was a total surprise to meet him at Jo's flat. Brian Mitchell, whose plays (written with Joseph Nixon) I've sometimes mentioned here, was in good form too when we met him, his wife Lou and their son Henry at the park. (Brian and Joseph's play Those Magnificent Men is currently attracting some excellent reviews for its Edinburgh Festival run).

On Thursday we went our separate ways, with Sarah and Sam heading off to meet some friends at the Sea Life Centre (verdict; pricey) while I went up to London to meet Sarah McIntyre (who is such a regular feature of this blog that she probably needs no introduction, but here's a link to her website just in case). We walked around Greenwich together, past some of the huge, Arthur Rackham-y chestnut trees which Sarah sometimes draws, and peeked at the remains of the Cutty Sark, where she was once Illustrator-in-Residence. I stopped the night with Sarah and her husband Stuart - golly, they know how to flambé a steak, it's a wonder they have an eyebrow left between them - and on Friday Sam and my Sarah arrived and we went to Sarah's studio - that's Sarah McIntyre's studio, The Fleece Station - where we met comics artist Ellen Lindner, knitting supremo Lauren O'Farrell, and Gary Northfield who wrote and drew the Derek the Sheep strip for the Beano. (We got to peek at the pencil roughs of Gary's new project; I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about it yet, so I won't, but it looks fantastic, and May Contain Dinosaurs.) Then Ho! for the nearby Horniman Museum (well, nearby-ish. Sam was very impressed that London is so big you can take two trains and still be in London). There we encountered an overstuffed walrus, Reeve's Pheasant, a room so full of musical instruments that it looks like the Hoots homeworld on The Clangers, and some welcome ice-creams, which we ate in the afternoon sunshine on the lawn outside the Horniman's fantastic Victorian glasshouse.

Oh, and on the way home via Shoreham and Charmouth we finally persuaded Sam to do some proper swimming in the actual sea.

Crikey, it was cold.

Dark Futures

2011-08-02T16:36:00.000+01:00

I've written a short piece for School Library Journal on the current trend for dystopian futures in Young Adult fiction, which you can find here.

On the whole, I like a bit of a dystopia, but it's become so prevalent in books for older children and young adults that I can't help feeling that this is what we authors are saying to them:

Cartoon by Dan Piraro, via I'd Rather Be Killing Monsters

Mortal Engines on Kindle!

2011-07-29T20:28:00.000+01:00

Following the news that Mortal Engines, Predator's Gold, Infernal Devices and A Darkling Plain are now available as e-books, I can announce that the Kindle versions are now available from Amazon. Here's a link to them on Amazon.co.uk. For U.S. readers who want to download it from Amazon.com I should point out that, like the e-books, these are the UK editions - but that just means they have quaint ol' English style spellings and Grike is called Shrike; they're otherwise pretty much identical to the U.S editions, which will be released in paper and electronic formats sometime next year.

Well it won't be in colour, obviously,
but this makes a better illustration...

Oddly enough, the Philip Reeve Kindle page on Amazon.com features the Larklight books, the Mortal Engines books, Fever Crumb and... China's Guilin, Guangxi and Beyond by Simon Forster. I have no idea why. But it's a good enough excuse to link to Sarah McIntyre's travel comic of her recent trip to China.

My Toby Frost Interview, and a Gnomadic Librarian

2011-07-20T17:59:00.001+01:00

My other blog, The Solitary Bee, has stirred from its near-permanent hibernation to host a conversation between myself and Toby Frost, author of the Space Captain Smith books, which combine interstellar high adventure with Very Silly Jokes. Read more HERE...

Also, although I never, never, never Google my own name or read reviews, I just accidentally discovered that New Zealand blogger The Gnomadic Librarian is promising to do a short series of posts about the Mortal Engines books. She seems to like them so far, touch wood...

News of the WOME*

2011-07-14T13:10:00.002+01:00

*or 'World Of Mortal Engines'

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you may already know this, but e-book versions of the first four Mortal Engines books are now available, at least in the UK (U.S editions and a Kindle version are still being prepared). Here's a link to them on the Waterstones website.

U.S actor and friend of the WOME Jeffrey Lamar has sent me a link to his page on Audiobook Creation Exchange, where he reads the opening of Mortal Engines as one of his sample pieces. I hate listening to my own stuff, but I enjoyed Jeffrey's dramatic take on it, and I think his American accent rather suits it. If you're an author or publisher looking for someone to voice an audiobook, take note!

It's good to see that Julia Zhuvleva's superb Mortal Engines animation has now had over 1000 views on YouTube - partly, I think, because my recent post about it was picked up by my favourite SF/Fantasy/horror/comics/RPG blog HeroPress. HeroPress has since died and regenerated Dr Who style as I'd Rather Be Killing Monsters. Long may it thrive in its new incarnation.

Mortal Engines Moves!

2011-07-05T15:36:00.001+01:00

Thanks to Alex Wilkinson for alerting me to this treasure from YouTube: an animated version of the opening sequence of Mortal Engines. It's all the work of Julia Zhuravleva who is currently studying at the Russian State Institute of Cinematography (aka VGIK). I hesitate to call it 'fan art', but I must stress that this was done as a personal project for part of her course: it has no commercial element, and is nothing to do with the long-rumoured Mortal Engines movie... but until there is an official Mortal Engines movie, this will do very nicely. I was startled to see that it's Julia's first attempt at animation. The characters' gestures and Tom's facial expressions are beautifully observed, and the story unfolds clearly and simply without a single line of dialogue. It will leave you wishing there was more! (It's worthing watching full screen, or at least on YouTube, where it's slightly bigger).

Julia's Deviantart portfolio contains several 'explications': storyboard-like sequences which illustrate some of the key scenes in the book and give a tantalising idea of what a straight adaptation of the story would look like. It's all done in a very clean and uncluttered style that's miles away from my own, yet somehow these simple, straightforward images come uncannily close to what I imagined. Julia must know the book like the back of her hand. She has Valentine and Miss Fang to a 'T', and although hypothetical-movie-Hester isn't as ugly as book-Hester (nobody would want to watch it if she was) there is something right about her just the same. Meanwhile, the scenes of Shrike wading through the sunken town, the balloon leaving Airhaven, the pirates fleeing Tunbridge Wheels, and Tom looking down on Batmunkh Gompa are just how I saw them while I was writing. All right, so Chrysler Peavey's monkey seems to have turned into a cat, but who cares? Part of the pleasure of encountering other people's images of the book is they give me a chance to see it through new eyes. These make me feel as if I've just discovered the world of Mortal Engines all over again...

Ahhhh!

Eeeek!

Wooooohooo!

All images and video © Julia Zhuravleva

Mortal Engines Drawings

2011-07-04T21:27:00.003+01:00

Add caption

It's always nice to learn that one of my books has inspired somebody to draw or make something of their own, so I'm planning to post some Mortal Engines inspired work here over the next few days. To begin with, here are some drawings which arrived from Oisín Hennessy last week. They look a bit like conceptual drawings for a movie. I was particularly taken with the detailed imaginings of MEDUSA and ODIN and their respective control panels.

All images © Oisín Hennessy

Gollarks at MCS, Luncheon at the Jam Factory

2011-07-01T17:32:00.003+01:00

It's been a funny old week, so this is a rather late account of my adventures in Oxford on Monday, where I'd been invited to take part in Magdalen College School's annual Literary Festival.

Here is an Eager Throng clutching its tickets and waiting for the event to begin...

...and here is Alex, who introduced me in splendid style. I read a bit from Mortal Engines and Scrivener's Moon, talked about where the ideas came from, and then tried out reading something which I'd written on the train up that very morning, and which I hope will turn out to be the opening pages of a new book - more on this in future blogs.

And this is me, doodling a Traction City before the audience arrived. I've started doing more drawings in my events lately, but most of them tend to be done at high speed and a bit sketchy, so I took some advice from top illustratrix Sarah McIntyre and knocked out something a bit more finished first so that if the school wanted to keep it I wouldn't be too ashamed to think of it hanging on their library wall.

There were lots of books to sign afterwards, and about half way through someone asked me if I'd draw a Gollark in their copy of Mortal Engines. (If you don't know what a Gollark is you need to read some of Kjartan Poskitt's cracking Murderous Maths books: lots of my audience at MCS had, and good for them.) Anyway, that opened a veritable floodgate of Gollarks, and the book collectors of the future are going to be very perplexed as to why so many copies of Mortal Engines and Scrivener's Moon have portraits of chaps like this one on the title page...

It was a great event, and at a lovely venue, so many thanks to librarian Deborah Gordon and all the MCS staff who helped to organise it and made me feel so welcome. Afterwards, I met my friends George and Jen for Thai curry (which seemed appropriate, as Oxford was about as hot as Bangkok on Monday evening). Then on Tuesday Sarah McIntyre herself arrived, along with her Scottish Auntie, and we went for lunch at the Jam Factory. Despite its name, there was no actual jam to be found there, but the food was very nice and any lingering disappointment at this lack of fruity preserves was more than made up for by the arrival of our favourite writer, Geraldine McCaughrean. Geraldine was telling us about a five hour (!) storytelling event which she'll be doing at the Pop-Up Festival in London's Coram Fields this coming Sunday: the programme is full of things I'd like to see (there are Moomins!) so if you're in the Great Metrop. this weekend it should be well worth a look.

Meanwhile, here's a picture of me with two of my favourite people in the Whole Wide World. Hooray for Oxford!

Twittering Again

2011-06-25T12:52:00.001+01:00

I tried out Twitter last year, but abandoned it because it was too distracting. Now I've decided to give it another go: you can find me there as philipreeve1. I'm pathetically grateful to anyone who bothers following me, but in order to keep the dreaded blue bird from distracting me from the day job again I've resolved that this time I'm only going to use it for flagging up new blog posts and tumblr sketches, so my tweets will basically consist of lots of links to things like this...

Now I must iron some shirts and things ready for my trip to Oxford on Monday, which I think will be my last public event before the summer holidays. If you're in the Oxford area, do come and say hello!

Who'll Buy Our Fine Fleeces?

2011-06-15T10:11:00.000+01:00

Our two alpacas, Iggy and Alfie, aren't a money-making concern - rather the opposite, in fact - but they'll be being sheared (or is it shorn?) this week, and it seems a shame to let all that fine alpaca wool go to waste. So the Incomparable Sarah McIntyre has done this lovely advert for them; details here.

Return to Oxford

2011-06-15T10:03:00.000+01:00

Oxford may have thought that it had seen the back of me after my event at the Literary Festival in March, but I shall be returning later this month. I'm doing a talk at Magdalene College School, which is running its own Arts Festival from Friday 24th June to Saturday 2nd July, including all manner of events and an impressive line-up of visiting speakers (and me). My event will be open to the public, and takes place on Monday 27th June at 4.30pm in the MCS Marquee. Tickets are £6 adult or £4 concessions. I'll be talking about all my books, reading from a few of them, answering questions and maybe doing a drawing or two, and there will be a book signing afterwards. So if you're in the Oxford area next week, it would be great to meet you there!

Doctor Hooey

2011-06-07T12:08:00.008+01:00

Dr Who is an odd beast, isn't it? I've never really been a fan, although I quite enjoyed watching last year's series with Sam. The current one, which reached a 'mid-season climax' last Saturday, is much harder to like.

A few years ago, when the second Pirates of the Caribbean film came out, I realised that Hollywood producers have now discovered how to make an action movie without any actual story at all, just a series of spectacular set-pieces designed by the stunt men and the special effects team and linked together by something that looks vaguely like a narrative. Dr Who seems to have taken this approach a step further by cutting out the spectacular set-pieces as well so that all that remains are jokes (often quite good ones, admittedly), sentimental death scenes (at least one per episode as a rule), and odd little sound bites, which I suppose are designed to become catch-phrases or memes or something - the effect is of a huge room at the BBC full of underpaid writers desperately trying to come up with their own version of, 'Hasta la vista, Baby' or 'Do you feel lucky, Punk?".

Saturday's episode - A Good Man Goes To War - began with Rory, one of the Doctor's duo of companions, striding into a Cyberman spaceship in the middle of a huge Cyberman space fleet and insisting, since they apparently monitor all communications in the region, that they tell him where his missing missus is. The Cybermen - who were legendary bad-asses in the old Dr Who but seem a bit pants in the new version - are reluctant to tell him, and draw a variety of big space guns. The rest of the fleet then explodes behind Rory in an expensive (but not quite expensive enough) effects shot, and he says, "Shall I Repeat The Question?" - the first of the episode's sound-bites.

Just shoot him!

So how did he get there? Well, apparently we don't need to know. Fair enough. But how does he blow up an entire space fleet? How does he get away again afterwards? Why don't the Cybermen just blast him to bits, winning themselves the undying gratitude of viewers everywhere?

Who knows. That's just the pre-title sequence and the whole thing has been forgotten by the time the credits have finished, although presumably the Cyber-numpties did furnish him with the information he needed because the Doctor is now busily assembling an army of Trusted Old Friends We've Never Even Heard Of Before to spring Mrs Rory from some kind of secret space base full of fascist clerics. Among the Doctor's allies, though not revealed until the attack is under way, is a small squadron of Spitfires from one of last year's episodes, who swoop by to knock out a communications array.

So where had they come from? How did they get from Earth in 1940 to a distant corner of space in the year 9 Zillion? Had the doctor carried them there in his TARDIS? How do you get a Spitfire into the TARDIS? What happened to them after the battle? Did they survive? Will he take them home again? All these questions could be easily covered by a line or two of dialogue, but the scriptwriters completely ignored them*. And I could go on - there were dozens of similar moments in this series.

Of course it isn't always necessary to explain everything in a story: often we don't need to know how the murderer got in or how the hero travelled from A to B. Of course it's allowable to include the odd scene or pre-credit hook that doesn't strictly make sense, so long as it's funny or cool. And of course it's possible to pick holes in any plot if you can be bothered, though it's a fairly pointless pastime. My problem with Dr Who is that more often than not it seems to be made of plot-holes. I don't think this is because the writers or producers are incompetent: I think it's because they have an utter contempt for the audience. Who watches this stuff after all? Children and fanboys. So them soundbites and Spitfires, they won't notice that it doesn't make sense.

And the sad thing is that all this money, all this stuff, all these fine actors and pretty costumes could have been used to make a good programme instead. Buried in all this nonsense there are some lovely bits of dialogue and some great ideas. Who wouldn't want to watch the story about the sword-wielding Victorian lizard lady detective and her cross-dressing cockney girlfriend? But Dr Who doesn't really do stories any more, so she's just marginalia, her character compressed into a few lines which you have to strain to catch behind the thundering incidental music.

Speak up a bit, love...

When Terry Pratchett wrote about Dr Who last year he suggested that it should move to Sunday nights since the Doctor was increasingly being portrayed as a sort of replacement Jesus in a bow tie. Actually, having seen the play Big Daddy versus Giant Haystacks recently, I think the show belongs on Saturday afternoons after all. In episode after episode we get the same thing: a Baddy appears and does something Bad, or captures one of the Doctor's companions. The Baddy explains that this time the Doctor is going to meet his doom; he may have won all those other times but this time will be different; this time he's going down. The companion then gets a speech that goes, "Ooh, just you wait, he's a good man, and he's coming to get you and you can't hide and he'll sort you out all right!" Then the Doctor arrives. There is a brief and dissapointing confrontation, during which it looks at one point as if our hero will be defeated. But then he wins.

Dr Who isn't drama at all. It's the 21st century version of wrestling.

*EDIT: Oops - I'm told that actually there was some reference to the Spitfires, so perhaps I just failed to catch it. (I made it through five seasons of The Wire without turning the subtitles on, but I often find it nearly impossible to hear what people are saying in Dr Who.) I'm quite sure the opening scene was never explained, though, and there were plenty of other examples.

If campy British sci-fi with good jokes is your thing, you could do worse than check out Toby Frost's Space Captain Smith books: the first one is reviewed here on The Solitary Bee: the second is even better.

A Walk to Wistman's Wood with MSU.

2011-06-03T16:01:00.001+01:00

Joyce Herbeck of Montana State University's Children's and Young Adult Literature Course got in touch a few months back to say that she was bringing some students on a field trip to England, and ask if we could meet up. Well of course we could: I dare say Philip Pullman and chaps like that get sick and tired of having coach loads of readers turning up to quiz them about their books, but it's never happened to me before, so the more the merrier, I say. Joyce's group have a packed schedule - since arriving last week they've been to the Lake District, Bath and Tintagel among other places, and today they were heading from Cornwall to London via Stonehenge, with a brief stop on Dartmoor. It would have been nice to have lead them out into the wilds, but there simply wasn't time, so instead I took them to the most Dartmoor-y place I could think of that's within easy walking distance of a proper road; the old oaks of Wistman's Wood, beneath whose gnarled roots the Devil (or Dewer, to give him his Dartmoor name) is supposed to kennel his spectral Wish Hounds.

There were no Wish Hounds in evidence today - it was much too hot and sunny for spectres of any sort to be hanging around - but I think our guests enjoyed the walk, and a chance to explore the wood. they'd been reading Here Lies Arthur as part of their course, and had interesting questions to ask. Frodo and Sam came along and enjoyed being made a fuss of, while Sarah took photos. Then back to the Two Bridges Hotel for coffee and chat and some excellent, fresh-from-the-oven cookies. I signed a few books, and Sam even drew a tractor in one. All in all it was a lovely morning, and I hope the students enjoyed it as much as we did. Many thanks to Joyce and her colleagues Kim and Judi for setting this up. I'll look forward to hearing how the rest of their trip goes...

Quirke Almighty!

2011-06-02T18:07:00.002+01:00

We had a visitation from the great Quirke himself yesterday. Nick Quirke is best known for his work with Brighton's Festival Shakespeare Company (he directed their production of As You Like It, which was one of the highlights of this year's festival). In years gone by he was a stalwart performer in many of the no-budget theatre and movie productions I worked on before I turned to illustration. By way of thanks I decided to make him a god in the world of Mortal Engines, which is why, in moments of stress, characters tend to say things like "Quirke Almighty!" and "For Quirke's sake!" Frodo's frisbee made a useful halo.

Bexhill Pictures

2011-05-29T14:58:00.000+01:00

Caroline Mortlock, who helped to organise my event at Bexhill High School on Friday, has sent me a few pictures. It's a new school with a very impressive lecture theatre, in which about three hundred pupils came to hear me talk. I mostly concentrated on Mortal Engines, since that's the book they've been reading in class. You can see Christian Bravery's painting of London on the wall behind me here - it's been oddly squished into a vertical format, but it still captures the sheer scale of London better than most I've seen...

I did a few drawings while I was talking: here I am trying to explain Shrike...

And at the end I signed books and autographs for anyone who wanted them.

All in all, it felt like a really good event, so thanks again to everyone at Bexhill who made it possible, and to all the students, who asked some very good questions.

Brighton and Bexhill

2011-05-28T13:02:00.002+01:00

Well, this week has gone by in a whirl. Our visit from Sarah and Stuart last week left us in a happy sort of daze ("If I had three wishes, my first wish would be that they could have stayed a bit longer," said Sam, and so say all of us) and we had to do a bit of tidying up after the Treasure Hunt we held here for the Friends of Widecombe School on Sunday afternoon. On Tuesday and Wednesday I tried to write things but didn't get very far - I'm in that odd gap between projects at the moment, with Clovenstone/Goblins more-or-less finished and my next move not decided - and then on Thursday I was off on my travels again. I visited Brighton for just long enough to catch Brian Mitchell and Joseph Nixon's latest play, Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks (read my full review here), stopped the night at David Mounfield's house in Lewes and then whizzed off to Bexhill-on-Sea, where I talked about my life & work to some of the pupils at Bexhill High School, and had a tour of their very fancy new school building, which is all learning pods and heart spaces, but still has a library - hooray!

Many thanks to Karen Randall for organising my visit (and giving me a lift from Lewes) and to all the other members of staff who showed me around, and had obviously worked hard to organise things. The children have been working on Mortal Engines in class (sorry, 'pod') and had some good questions to ask; there were some nice model traction cities laid about, too. If I can get some photos of the event I'll post them soon. Meanwhile, here's one from the illustration workshop I did with Sarah McIntyre at Sam's school last week.

Tall Tales & Short Stories

2011-05-23T09:47:00.001+01:00

A lovely busy weekend, walking and drawing on the moor with Sarah McIntyre: here we are sketching in the drizzle at Leather Tor Bridge while long-suffering spouses, son and dog hung around waiting.

In other news, I've done an interview Tracy Ann Baines for her blog Tall Tales and Short Stories. Tracy asks some very good questions, so hopefully there are some things here which I haven't covered in previous interviews; even if I have, her blog is well worth following anyway as it's a treasure-trove of interviews and advice for anyone who likes reading or writing children's and YA fiction.

At Home with the Reeves

2011-05-21T23:45:00.002+01:00

Visitors!

2011-05-20T18:00:00.001+01:00

We've been invaded this week by Sarah McIntyre and her husband Stuart. She did an event yesterday at Sam's school, which I'll post a full account of here as soon as I have the photos uploaded. Sam came home all inspired, and has been busy drawing comics ever since...

Yesterday we walked up to Bonehill Rocks and over to Holwell Lawn to see the Bluebells...

Today we took a longer walk up the valley to Natsworthy and then back over Hameldown. Along the way we stopped to do drawings of King Tor. Here's Sarah's:

And here's mine:

Sci Fi in Cambridge

2011-05-13T18:56:00.005+01:00

It was strange to return to Cambridge on Wednesday. I spent two and a half years there, from Sept 1985 to the summer of 1988, while I was studying illustration at CCAT (which has now taken to calling itself Anglia Ruskin University, possibly in an attempt to throw off its association with the likes of me). Anyway, I stepped off the train expecting to be assailed by old memories, but oddly enough nothing felt that familiar. Its not just that all the shops have changed, as shops do; it's simply that very little about the place actually impressed itself on my memory. I remember being vaguely miserable for two and a half years and then fleeing to Brighton in Andrew MacCallum's Morris Minor, Boris. At that point I think I deleted the Cambridge Years from my memory banks. I wandered around like a tourist for a bit, then took refuge in the Pickerel Inn with That Sarah McIntyre, her friend Bridget, Edge Chroniclers Chris Riddell and Paul Stewart, Manga queen Emma Viecelli, and Dave Shelton, an alumnus of the same CCAT course as me and a much better illustrator (check out his comic Good Dog Bad Dog - it's one of Sam's favourites).

Anyway, one of the changes which has befallen the city is that the Heffers chain of bookshops, which used to bestride it like a collossus (and where I worked for a few months, in the Paperbacks and Video dept, which was regarded as worryingly cutting-edge in the '80s) has dwindled to a single shop on Trinity Street. Luckily it's a very big and well-stocked bookshop, and on Wednesday night its excellent staff hosted an event so jam-packed with sci-fi and fantasy writin' talent that, as Miss Mcintyre says, it might as well have been a whole festival. Unfortunately I never had a chance to speak to most of these luminaries, but that was for the very good reason that there were lots of readers to talk to (always a relief, for I still remember some of the early signings I did when it was Just Me). But I did manage to talk briefly to Alex Scarrow of Time Riders fame, Australian fantasy goddess and Geraldine McCaughrean look-alike Trudi Canavan (who was stopping in Cambridge on the first leg of a lengthy European book tour) and new Scholastic author Moira Young, whose debut novel Blood Red Road is already attracting some dazzling reviews. I also met Ian Whates, whose space opera The Noise Within I've just started reading, and Sophia McDougall, whose modern-day Roman Empire novel Romanitas I've been meaning to read for ages (a copy is on order now). Sarah has already read it, and was quite overcome to discover she was sitting next to its authoress at dinner...

China Mieville came over to say hello, and was totally charming, despite looking like the sort of chap you'd usually see giving Mad Max a hard time. I suppose if you're a science fiction writer it's a good thing to look as if you come from the future. (Needless to say, I still look as if I'm running for the last tram in 1929.) I'll definitely be ordering up some of China's books as well, particularly his latest, Embassytown.

We all took turns to talk about our work and read a bit, and when we weren't busy doing that we were signing and chatting to... is fans the word? It seems a bit dismissive, somehow. I was very pleased to meet a few Facebook friends ; Joseph Hammett, Dana McConkey and Natasha Footman, who were all LOVELY. And towards the end of the evening someone I do remember from my student days arrived, in the form of Helen Patterson, who once had to stand on a chair with a teapot on her head as part of some Z-grade comedy sketch what I wrote (but she claims to have forgiven me...).

So in the end a very nice time was had by all, and maybe I won't let another twenty three years go by before I return to Cambridge.

(You can read more on this whole thing over at Sarah McIntyre's blog, which is where I pinched all these nice pictures from.)

Scrivener's Moon Wordled

2011-05-09T14:29:00.000+01:00

Wordle is a toy that creates decorative 'word clouds' out of chunks of text which you provide, and is an invaluable resource for idle writers looking for new ways to waste time when they should be working. Here's what it made of the first two chapters of the latest Fever Crumb adventure, Scrivener's Moon...

Bluebell Time

2011-05-09T09:10:00.001+01:00

The bluebells are out on Dartmoor, and they don't just grow in the shade of the woods, bout in great swathes on open hillsides, which I don't recall ever seeing in other parts of the country. Holwell Lawn, not far from our house, is crammed with bluebell-spotters at the moment. We managed to get it to ourselves this weekend just long enough for Sarah to take these pictures...

Science Fiction and Fantasy Evening at Heffers

2011-05-08T10:15:00.000+01:00

Just a quick update about the Science Fiction and Fantasy event I'll be taking part in at Heffers Bookshop, Trinity Street, Cambridge this coming Wednesday (11th May). Doors open at 6.30pm, and I'll be doing a short talk about Mortal Engines, Scrivener's Moon etc at 7pm. I'll then be staying till 9pm to meet readers and sign books. The other authors attending will also be giving talks through the course of the evening, and the timetable should run something like this:

6.30 pm: Ian Whates, (The Noise Within and The Noise Revealed).

6.45 pm: Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell (The Edge Chronicles, Wyrmweald, etc).

7.00 pm: Philip Reeve (Who he?)

7.15 pm: Alex Scarrow (Time Riders)

7.30 pm: Peter F. Hamilton (The Void trilogy)

7.45 pm: Trudi Canavan (The Black Magicians trilogy)

8.00 pm: Moira Young (Her debut novel, Blood Red Road, will be published by Scholastic later this year.)

8.15 pm: Jasper Kent (The Danilov Quintet).

8.30 pm: Stephen Erikson (The Malazan Book of the Fallen).

9.00 pm: China Mieville (UnLun Dun, The City & The City, Arthur C Clarke Award magnet).

Hope to see you there!

BristolCon 2011

2011-05-05T12:45:00.003+01:00

When I was a teenager in Brighton the 'EasterCon' science fiction convention was held at the Hotel Metropole a couple of times, and I went along with my best friend Justin Hill. We had a great time oohing and aahing over illustrations in the art show, watching movies, and mingling with proper grown-up writers and artists. What with one thing and another (mainly me being too snooty to admit to liking sci-fi in my twenties) I haven't been to a convention since, but all that is about to change: I've just signed up for BristolCon '11, a one day event to be held in Bristol (the clue is in the name) on October 22nd. I've always heard good things about BristolCon, so I'm looking forward to seeing it for myself. Hopefully I'll be sitting in on some panel discussions, and selling and signing some books.

More details as they become available, but if you're interested you can learn more about BristolCon on the official website, or on the Facebook page. Membership is just £15 until 31st May (rising to £20 thereafter and £25 on the door).

Scrivener's Moon and The Twilight of the Poo Goblins

2011-05-05T12:23:00.003+01:00

Scrivener's Moon has been picking some very good reviews. Many thanks to Julia Eccleshare at Lovereading 4kids ("A fabulous new adventure..."),Rhys Jones at Thirst For Fiction ("probably the novel closest to the original Mortal Engines series we’ve had from the prequel series so far") and Tim Knight at HeroPress, who has got hold of the idea that Scrivener's Moon is the last we'll be seeing of Fever Crumb and her adventures - though he seems to think it's a pretty good farewell.

I hope Tim won't be disappointed to learn that Fever will be back for at least one more book. It was always my intention that there would be four Fever books, because it seemed important that if you placed them on one end of a seesaw and the original Mortal Engines quartet on the other, they would balance each other.

However, Tim's right to suppose that I'm working on other stories and other worlds too: this morning I delivered a final draft of my fantasy novel to Scholastic, who will be publishing it next spring. Its title at the moment is Clovenstone, and ancient and mythically resonant name which I stole off the destination board of an Edinburgh bus - but the publishing industry is always looking for more marketable titles these days, so by the the time it hits the shelves it will probably be called Twilight of the Poo Goblins or something. I'll keep you posted.

Oh, and I keep forgetting to put the 'other' Scrivener's Moon cover on here: the funky non-illustrative one which adorns the large-format paperback. So here it is:

A Prize-Winning Larklight Letter by George Fernandes

2011-05-01T12:48:00.000+01:00

10-year-old George Fernandes has been in touch to tell me about the Royal Mail Young Letter Writers Competition which he won with a letter based on my Larklight books. You can read more about George here, and this is the text of his winning entry:

Dear Daddy,

Since leaving Earth to go to my outerspace pen pal’s party I have been on a perilous adventure which took all my courage and cunning. What was my adventure? Well, on my way to my pen pal’s party my ship crashlanded on a desolate planet. I was the sole survivor. At first I thought I was going to die but these people and aliens rescued me. On board their ship I asked them what they were doing. They told me that their mission was to track down a gigantic Galaxian Bull Worm which was destroying the universe. After explaining their mission they asked me if I wanted to help them. I said yes, but on one condition, that they fix my ship. “Agreed,” they said, and we set off.

On the way we stopped at some planets and asked if the worm had been seen but nobdody had. We finally reached the last planet in the quadrant. Mushroom-like aliens told us that they saw the worm flying around a nearby asteroid. As quick as lightning we set off to fight the worm. As we approached the asteroid a long silhouette passed in front of it. We knew it was the worm. The asteroid was a wasteland, nothing in sight but rocks. Suddenly out of nowhere the giant worm lunged at us, but it just missed. The atmosphere was tense, everybody was waiting for the worm to return. Aggressively the worm tried to snatch us. Its teeth were knives glistening in the pale light. The roar of gun fire filled the air. As the worm passed me I clung on to its silky skin and hauled myself onto its neck where I sliced through its throat.

The worm came crashing down, dead. I jumped to safety and my crewmates gathered around me singing in joy. Within minutes the whole universe knew and celebrated wildly. My ship was repaired and sadly I said goodbye to my new friends. Now I am returning home and am looking forwards to seeing you and Mum. Unfortunately I missed my pen pal’s party, but there’s always next year!

Love from George.

Illustration: David Wyatt

Event at Heffers in Cambridge.

2011-04-29T11:56:00.001+01:00

Years and years ago, when I first left art college, I worked for a short time at Heffers, the famous Cambridge bookshop. I'll be going back there on 11th May to take part in a Science Fiction and Fantasy Evening which they're hosting. It will also be a chance to meet China Mieville, Steven Erikson, Trudi Canavan, Peter F. Hamilton, Paul Stewart & Chris Riddell, Alex Scarrow, Moira Young, Ian Whates and Jasper Kent. Tickets are £5 for adults (or just £2.50 if you're under 16). Bargain! So if you're in the Cambridge area please come along - it will be embarrassing if I'm the only one without a signing queue. There are more details here.

Fever's World

2011-04-21T18:41:00.001+01:00

This is the map which appears in the front of Scrivener's Moon, showing the UK and bits of western Europe as they appear in the era of the Fever Crumb books. It should serve for the Mortal Engines books too, although the ice sheets expands and contracts a bit over the centuries, and by the time of Mortal Engines all the cities marked here will have rolled away or been eaten. I pushed my amateur photoshop skills to the limit this afternoon piling on various souvenirs of Fever's Scrivener's Moon journey, including an ominous BLOODSTAIN... but whose blood is it? (Quite a lot of the stuff is spilled or sprayed about in Scrivener's Moon, so there are several possible candidates!)

Click on the map for a full-size version.

Fever Crumb Audiobook

2011-04-20T16:27:00.003+01:00

The Audiobook of Fever Crumb which I recorded last autumn is available now: here are links to the CD version on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com (although other booksellers are available, and I see that Amazon UK are quoting 'one to two months' as a dispatch estimate - surely some mistake?). It can also be downloaded from such places as the i-tunes store, which might be rather quicker.

Anyway, whether you plump for the CD or some sort of databurp you get the whole book, complete and unabridged, and I put all my college comedy experience to good use by coming up with voices for the various characters (Bagman Creech was particularly hard on the voice box). The Audiobook of A Web of Air is currently being recorded too - and by someone who will read it rather better than I could; more on this soon, I hope.

Luddite versus Levett

2011-04-17T15:12:00.003+01:00

There was an interesting article about the rise of e-books in Publishers Weekly last week; interesting partly for it's abject feeble-mindedness (yes, there are people in the publishing industry who are still wandering around whimpering, "I don't like these new-fangled e-reader thingies; they'll never catch on,") but mainly for the ease and elegance with which friend-of- the-WoME Jeremy Levett obliterates it in the 'comments' section. Actually, Jeremy's tightly-argued demolition job made me feel quite sorry for the hapless PW hack - it's like watching an angry caveman taken out by laser-guided missiles. You can read the whole thing here.

Big Daddy versus Giant Haystacks

2011-04-16T16:50:00.002+01:00

If you're anywhere Brighton on Thursday 26th - Sat 28th of May, you'll definitely want to get yourself along to The Old Courtroom to watch the premiere of this new work by my favourite playwrights, Brian Mitchell and Joseph Nixon.
At 4pm every Saturday, from 1976 to 1988, millions of Britons were in the grip of an extraordinary sports phenomenon: watching two fat men pretend to fight each other. This is their story...

The Story Museum

2011-04-06T10:21:00.001+01:00

Oxford has a better claim than most cities to be the home of English children's fiction. Here Lewis Carrol wrote Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Tolkien dreamed up Middle Earth, CS Lewis invented Narnia and and Philip Pullman devised His Dark Materials. So it seems fitting that a building within stone's throw of Lewis Carroll's old rooms at Christchurch College will soon be home to the Story Museum, full of exhibitions and events which will celebrate and trace the history of children's stories.

The Story Museum won't be opening until 2014, but co-director Kim Pickin very kindly invited Sarah McIntyre and myself to have a look around the site after our events at the Oxford Festival last Sunday.

From outside in Pembroke Street the future museum looks quite small. There is a 'shop window', displaying such useful objects as Borrower Traps and Invisibility Cloak Repair Kits (sadly for sale only to 'Oxford's fictional community' as yet) and a street door with this curious lamp above it...

...and some hungry looking door-bells.

Once inside, however, you find yourself in a labyrinth, for the building connects with others behind it, surrounding a central courtyard (well, when I say 'courtyard' I mean 'car park'. But I'm sure it will be a courtyard quite soon.) There are vaults and garrets and a confusing number of stairways, and an abandoned staff canteen on the top floor. The whole complex used to house Oxford's first telephone exchange (so quite a few stories have been heard there already) and you can read more about its history here. While I rather liked it in its present state of picturesque decay, it was exciting to hear Kim describe the plans which are afoot to turn these empty, paint-peeling rooms into magical spaces where tales will be told and plays performed. I think it's going to be a wonderful place, and I hope whole generations of children will be able to visit and come away inspired to read and to tell stories of their own.

Here are some photos that we took while Kim was showing us around. I'm already looking forward to going back in 2014 to see it all transformed...

In the garret...

Eek! A Dinosaur!

Kim and Sarah

Doing Time in Oxford.

2011-04-04T17:37:00.004+01:00

Me, Candy Gourlay, and Sarah McIntyre. It has been SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN
that Book Festivals are 87% More Fun when McIntyre is there. She also took most
of the photos on this post. (Not this one, though. This one was taken by Alice Swan.)

Well, I never thought writing children's books would land me in PRISON, but that's where I ended up on Saturday night in Oxford. Luckily it wasn't a working prison but a decommissioned one which has been transformed into the snazzy Malmaison Hotel, with top-notch accommodation behind every cell door. The main hall, however, still retains something of that Porridge vibe, though I don't think Officer McKay would approve of all that carpet and the fancy little sofas.

I was in Oxford to do a Blue Peter event at the Sunday Times Literary Festival. A Web of Air was on the shortlist for this year's Blue Peter book prize, along with Candy Gourlay's Tall Story and Deadmans Cove by Lauren St John (which wasn't just shortlisted - it won!). So the three of us were summoned to the hall of Christchurch college (as seen in the Harry Potter films, apparently), to talk about our books, read extracts, and answer questions from the audience. Blue Peter presenter Barney Harwood was there to keep us in line, and of course I completely forgot to ask him for his autograph, so I'm in Sam's black books now. On the other hand I did remember to ask whether there will be another series of Bear Behaving Badly now that Barney's been elevated to the rank of BP presenter, and apparently there will, so that's a relief.

Anyway, we all did our little bits: Candy had anecdotes about earthquakes and Lauren talked about nearly being strangled by a python, and there was clearly no way I could compete with any of that so I just read my little bit of A Web of Air. Then there were lots of good questions from the floor, and some book-signing, and that was that. Like all the best events it seemed to have lasted about 0.3 seconds.

The panel in ~~Hogwarts~~ Christchurch Hall (Alice Swan again).

Barney Harwood looks on while I cleverly obscure my fellow authors.

I do some signing while Candy ponders where to go for lunch...

Afterwards I got to have lunch with Candy and family (I've been looking forward to meeting her for ages) and then I sat in on Sarah McIntyre's event, which was built around one of the picture books she illustrated, When Titus Took The Train, and kept a crowd of small children entertained for a whole hour, which is a long time if you're a small child. She had them making up board games based on train journeys, with some spectacular results - my favourite one started in a rabbit hole and finished at 'The Forests of Saturn'.

Then there was gin & tonic in the green room (you see how sophisticated we authors are?), after which Sarah led me across the road to the mysterious Oxford Story Museum, where Kim Pickin was waiting to show us round. More about what we found there in my next post...

You can read Candy Gourlay's account of all this mularkey one her own blog, here, and Sarah's version of events is here.

Questions, questions...

2011-03-30T15:02:00.002+01:00

Cristy Zinn

South African writer and blogger Cristy Zinn got in touch a few weeks back via thesolitarybee@gmail.com. I've enjoyed my correspondence with her, and I've ended up doing an interview for her newly re-vamped website.

I also went up to Exeter yesterday and spent a very jolly morning talking to Tina, Gill and Abi on The Mighty Book, a monthly books programme on Exeter's community radion station, Phonic FM. Hopefully I'll be able to get my hands on a recording and make it available here. Likewise the Skype interview I did last week with Bruno Accioly of the Steampunk Council of Brazil, to mark the publication of the Brazilian edition of Mortal Engines.

I enjoy doing interviews, but the trouble is that I keep finding myself saying the same things. I haven't lead a very eventful life, and people who have read more than a few interviews with me will probably be sick of hearing about how I don't plan my stories out in advance and how I've been influenced by Geraldine McCaughrean and Asterix and Tolkein and Excalibur and Noggin the Nog... The only solutions I can see are either to actually do something new which I can talk about in future interviews (Bungee jumping? Ballet? Learning to drive?) or just lying, which, as a writer, I'm quite good at. So perhaps in future interviews I'll reveal how I wrote Mortal Engines while sleeping rough on a beach in the Gilbert Islands, and how I spent the Eighties climbing all the most difficult bits of the Andes.

I might try out this new technique on Sunday next, when I shall be appearing with Candy Gourlay and Lauren St John at the Oxford Literary Festival.

Scrivener's Moon 'Better Than Pancakes' - Official.

2011-03-24T22:06:00.002Z

Ooh, look: Sarah McIntyre and friend have been tucking into an advance copy of Scrivener's Moon...

...actually I'm not at all sure that dog looks convinced, but since when were Shiba Inus part of my target demographic?

You can read the full review on Sarah's blog here.

Shiny!

2011-03-18T16:52:00.000Z

Fever Crumb has just been released in paperback in the United States. Here's the new cover design, which I think is rather fantastic. A Web of Air will follow as a hardback in October.

Hello America

2011-03-17T17:33:00.006Z

I did a question and answer session last week with pupils at Leesburg, Virginia - my first school event in the USA. And I didn't even have to leave my own office.

It was all thanks to the internet and the wonder of Skype, which I'd vaguely heard of but didn't realise was something I could actually do until Renee Kelahan, the librarian at Loudon County Day School, got in touch to ask if I 'skyped'. Well, I didn't, but it turned out that with a bit of help from her and Sarah McIntyre it was quite easy.

Lucky Loudon County students listen to my words of wisdom and wonder if there's anything better on another channel...

The students had been reading Fever Crumb and also doing some tie-in work on genetics in their science lessons - which means they probably know far about both subjects than I do (now that I'm two books further on, it's quite hard to think back to all the things that happened in Fever Crumb.) It was a bit strange at first to be talking to a picture on a screen, and I kept looking at them instead of into the little camera above my monitor, but I think it went well - at least, the students asked some good questions; whether I gave them good answers or not, you'd have to ask them. A couple of people wanted to know why I'd killed off certain characters, and I got the impression that they wished I hadn't, which is interesting (though I'm unrepentant).

Anyway, don't all rush at once, but I guess I am now available for Skype sessions: all enquiries to thesolitarybee@gmail.com

Authors for Japan

2011-03-14T23:55:00.005Z

There are some people (e.g. me) who sit and watch the footage of horrible catastrophes on telly and the internet and go, "Ooh, isn't it terrible, if only I could do something..." and there are others who actually go forth and do it. In the latter camp we find the writer Keris Stainton, who has organised (with extraordinary speed) an online auction, Authors for Japan, all proceeds from which will go to the British Red Cross Japan Tsunami Appeal.

The auction begins at 8a.m. GMT on Tuesday 15th March, and closes at 8p.m. on Sunday, 20th March. Last time I checked it featured 150 different lots. One of them is a signed copy of my new book Scrivener's Moon, which I'll also be happy to personalise and do a drawing in if the buyer would like me to. There are also all manner of other good things - not just books but also proofs, artwork dedications and offers of mentoring and advice, donated by both adult and children's authors, so it's well worth browsing through the whole list. Please take a look. Questions about how to bid and who to pay are answered here.

I didn't want to illustrate this post with another swiped news photo of sea-wrack in the streets of Sendai, so here's something nice from Japan: the cover of the Japanese edition of Mortal Engines, published by Tokyo Sogensha Co. Ltd. It features a fantastic looking London, and some snazzy outfits (one of the original inspirations for Mortal Engines were the drawings of the French artist Moebius, which are full of hats like these, so I think they're quite appropriate). The illustrator has also taken an interesting symbolic approach to Hester's scar (much better than just drawing her straight - she's horrible!)

Guest Post: A Completely Unbiased Review of 'Scrivener's Moon' by Sarah Reeve

2011-03-05T16:56:00.000Z

In book three in the series featuring Fever Crumb, we are once again plunged into a world that is strange and yet all too familiar. A world full of superstition, nomads, genetic anomalies, old tech, ‘bloggers’ and best of all...mammoths! How I would love to ride one of these splendid creatures... mind you I wouldn’t fancy being squashed by New London. As always, by about page five, I have forgotten that I am reading the result of hours of keyboard pounding coming from Philip’s room, and am swept away into the story. Beautifully created characters, an exciting plot with twists and turns, never predictable, always vivid and surprising... and utterly believable.

Sarah.

More World Book Day Fun

2011-03-04T17:29:00.005Z

I don't know about World Book Day; it's been World Book Week here. On Monday I polished off an article for Telegraph Online about the whole shebang. On Tuesday I dropped into Sam's school to give a talk to his year and the year above - about twenty children in all. Not many of them will have read my books, so I thought I'd focus on drawing and illustration for a change; I did a few drawings for them, and then asked them to design their own covers for their favourite book or a book they'd made up. There were some really good results, and I think they all enjoyed it.

The only disappointment was that I'd loaded a whole bunch of my drawings and pictures by my favourite illustrators onto a specially created blog here on Blogger, thinking it would be quicker to just call that up on the class white-board than go to all the trouble of creating a powerpoint thingy. And it was: it was very easy to do, and looked great. Unfortunately, when we tried to access it from the school we found that it was barred by the filtering system. The Local Education Authority, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that no blog on Blogger is suitable for school pupils, and so it's impossible to open them on school computers in the south west. I presume they bar other popular blogging sites like LiveJournal and Wordpress too: they certainly don't permit access to anything on YouTube. It's infuriating to think of all us chuldren's authors merrily blogging away while the children who should be our readers are unable to even see our sites. Obviously I would expect to find some sort of filtering system on school computers - the internet can be a strange and dangerous place - but I was astonished that the teachers aren't allowed to bypass it when they want to show a particular site or blog to their class. It seems that only faceless busybodies in county hall can be trusted to decide what's suitable. At a time of so much cutting and belt-tightening it seems bizarre that valuable free educational resources can be deliberately banned from our schools in this way. If you are a children's author with a blog or website it might be worth checking to see whether your LEA operates a similar policy of blanket censorship.

On Wednesday I went up to London, and was all busy all day on Thursday with World Book Day events. In the morning there was a big one in Kingston which I had been supposed to do jointly with Chris Priestley. Unfortunately Chris is still recuperating after his recent stroke, but happily Philip Womack was able to step in at the last minute, and we talked about my books, Chris's and his own in front of a large audience drawn from several local schools. Philip's books, like Chris Priestley's, tend towards the supernatural end of the fantasy spectrum, so I think they made a good contrast with my more nuts-and-bolts, sci-fi influenced outings. Although I've been aware of him as an author and journalist for some years I've never had much of a chance to talk to Philip, so it was good to chat with him on the lo-o-o-n-g taxi journey to Kingston. If you like classic children's fantasy and haven't already read his novel The Liberators you should track down a copy at once.

Before the event all the children had been asked to propose a title for a scary book, and Philip and I had to pick the two we thought best. The ones we chose were They Are Coming, suggested by Rhiannon Davies, and The Corner of My Eye by Jenna McMorrow, both of which are quietly sinister and wouldn't look out of place on a bookshelf: I hope they write the stories to go with them one day. We also found some other suggestions which we really liked: Midnight Predators in the City of Beast (by Emiliya Gyuleva), The Fear of the Faceless Gnome by William Potter, The Saliva Spitting Caws from Cawkland by Nabeel, and Frankie Atkinson's The Reeking Death of Interior Doom. Those might look a bit out of place on a bookshelf, but most of them would make perfectly passable titles for a Hawkwind album.

Back to central London for lunch, and then ho! for St Peter's Eaton Square Primary School, where I basically just did a Q&A session with a schoolful of lovely children who had some very good questions. They also had some very good outfits: many schools go in for dressing-up-as-your-favourite-character on WBD, which in our house tends to mean a fake beard, an old hat and a tenuous claim that Sam is Mr Gum. The children at St Peter's had taken it to a whole new level; among others I met I met a Heidi, a mummified Pharoah, Pippi Longstocking, Skullduggery Pleasant, and Miss Flyte out of Bleak House. There was even one tasteful fellow who had come as Jack Aubrey.

Borough Market

And after that I was free, and did what Reeves do when left to their own devices in the great metrop., namely, went to find Sarah McIntyre. McIntyre Goodness is available in double portions at the moment, since Sarah's sister Mary is in town, and I met them in a pub in Clennam Street, which is the shortest street in London, apparently. (It's so short that it isn't really a street at all, it's just that one pub and a building opposite). Later, the lovely Alyx from Scholastic joined us, and the sisters M led us on a bracing walk in search of dinner: we passed Borough Market, a very Mortal Engines-ish location where everything seems to be made of hefty-yet-elegant 19th Century ironwork. Trains rattled on viaducts above the cobbled streets, and the lights of aircraft glowed overhead, the planes themselves hidden by low cloud, which made them look huge and mysterious.

Photo: Jonathan Game

Nearby stands the Shard, a vast new skyscraper, half completed and covered in cranes and worklamps, bizarrely like the half-built London I've been imagining for the past year while I wrote Scrivener's Moon (only narrower). Once it's finished it will be wrapped in glass and will probably house the London offices of the Tyrell Corporation. More Human Than Human was their motto, I seem to recall, and that's a pretty good description of Sarah and Mary too: Alyx and I had to scamper to keep up with their tireless American legs as they strode along the South Bank. Eventually we reached Le Pain Quotidien, where Pain was consumed (and possibly some Quotidiens as well - French was never my strong point) and laughter was laughed and this photo was taken, showing me bookended by McIntyres. Mary is great, and also a very fine painter, as you can see for yourselves here.

And finally, here's a World Book Day video of me reading the first two chapters of Traction City in a Spooky Treehouse.

Traction City from WorldBookDay's StoryTimeOnline on Vimeo.

Traction City Reactions

2011-03-01T16:42:00.007Z

My World Book Day book Traction City is available in UK bookshops now, price £1 (for which you also get some excellent Chris Priestley stories, since the book is split 50/50 between the two of us.) As I've said before, this is very much a stand alone story which had to introduce the Mortal Engines world afresh for young readers who may not have encountered it: I couldn't include any startling new revelations for existing fans because I'm still not sure how widely available this book will be outside the UK. However, I was pleased to find some favourable comments from friends of the WoME over on Facebook.

Steve Ryland says: "...it was great to read a new story set in the time of the original books. It is a good introduction to the WoME but as someone very familiar with that world it was still interesting, for me, and good to see a side to London I hadn't really seen before. It also acted as a slight tease for Scrivener's Moon and beyond possibly I thought. A pleasure to read all round!"

..and Hester Shaw (who she?) says: "I enjoyed it a lot too. It would be very interesting to read more stories in this time period and more about Anna Fang as well."

So that's good! The only carping comes from a Mr J. Levett, who has unkind things to say about the distinctive pus-and-ketchup cover design.

I'd quite like to read more stories about Anna Fang too: it was nice to run into her again, and I was sorry it was for such a brief appearance. So maybe one day... But first I must finish off the Fever Crumb saga. My main project at the moment is my fantasy novel Clovenstone, but I have scribbled a few pages of something called Fever 4, which begins with a young castaway being washed ashore on a South American beach...

It's Alive!

2011-02-27T12:00:00.004Z

If you're one of the tasteful individuals who 'likes' the Philip Reeve page on Facebook you might already have seen this, but it's something I should have posted here long ago, so here it is anyway: an impressive mini-movie of everyone's favourite unstoppable killing machine, which also features all-too brief glimpses of Hester and what I take to be the control console of the Jenny Haniver. It's creator, 'Wraithsmith' writes:

The animatronics, hard costume elements and shrike's prosthetics are my work, (I am also the unfortunate soul who got to play Shrike.) The rest of shrike's costume was produced by Jenni Munday. The actress playing the other character, (Hester Shaw,) is Alyssa Burnett, whose Prosthetic and costume were made by Isabelle Riley. The interior set and cockpit was designed by Louise Hewson with the structure designed by Thomas Antony Lowthian. This footage was filmed by Oliver Lloyd.

Mr Shrike will be returning for a tiny but hard-hitting cameo in Scrivener's Moon.

Scrivener's Moon

2011-02-23T13:13:00.002Z

Yes folks, the time has come to talk of Scrivener's Moon, the third Fever Crumb book, which is officially published in the UK in April, but will probably start to appear in bookshops from about the middle of March. (I think I can avoid giving away too much about the story, but if you haven't yet read Fever Crumb or A Web of Air then what follows may contain ever so slight spoilers...)

Picking up pretty much where A Web of Air left off, Scrivener's Moon covers a longer span of time than any of the previous books set in the world of Mortal Engines (or WoME to its friends) - unless you count the last chapter of A Darkling Plain, of course. Fever returns to London to find it in the process of being demolished and reconstructed as a Traction City, and for some months, despite her doubts about the whole idea, she does her best to help: then adventure rears its head again, with news from the north about a mysterious black pyramid which Fever's unpredictable mother believes may hold valuable secrets. So, like the four books in the original quartet, but unlike the previous Fever Crumb titles, this book becomes the story of a journey.

It's also a bit of a war story, since the nomad empires of the north are starting to worry about the new London, and their worries are focused by Cluny Morvish, the daughter of a minor nobleman of the Arkangelsk Empire, who has started to have terrifying dreams about an all-devouring mobile London. The Arkangelsk technomancer Tharp promotes her as a prophet, and with her help all the disparate, warring empires of the north begin uniting to march on London.

The Arkangelsk are presumably the ancestors of the people who build Arkangel, one of the more fearsome predator cities of the WoME, but in this era they seem quite a jolly bunch. They are hairy warrior types who live in ramshackle convoys of traction forts. landships and mobile homesteads, following the migrations of their reindeer and mammoth herds. Their hobbies include crushing their enemies, seeing them driven before them, and hearing the lamentation of their women. Like their spiritual cousins, Vikings and Klingons, they probably spend a lot of their downtime quaffing flagons of foaming ale and going, "HA HA HA HA!" although I don't think we actually get to see much of that happening in this story; they're too worried about the threat from London to do any serious quaffing or HAing. Even so, if you wanted to make a movie of Scrivener's Moon you might want to start by e-mailing Brian Blessed's agent...

Cluny Morvish is probably the most important new character I've introduced in this book: here's a doodle of her that I did on the cover of the manuscript, although I think she's bigger-boned than this. She's a sort of anti-Fever; a good-natured, friendly, physical, huntin', shootin' and fishin' sort of nomad girl who believes fairly unquestioningly in magic and ancestor worship and all sorts of things that Fever would dismiss as stupid. It would be nice to think that she'll go on to feature in future volumes, but battle looms in the final chapters, and there's no telling who will survive, for this is also one of my more grim and bloodthirsty visits to the WoME: characters die, there are disasters and betrayals, and it's all quite gloomy really, although there are glimmers of hope too, and while Fever loses a lot, she gains new friends and discovers a bit more about her world, and how it came to be the way it is.

Charley Shallow, the apprentice Scriven-hunter from Fever Crumb, returns in this book, gradually making a name for himself in the new London; it's been quite interesting to see how he develops. One character who doesn't reappear is Arlo Thursday: there was so much going on with London and the nomads that it proved impossible to flit off to other parts of the world to see how he was getting on. However, Fever hasn't forgotten him, and nor have I: I woke up the other morning with the first few chapters of a new book in my head, which are about what becomes of Arlo after A Web of Air.

Anyway, that's enough from me: here's what Scholastic have to say about Scrivener's Moon in the blurb on the back cover: they always make it sound so much more exciting:

Cover illustration by David Wyatt.

World Book Day

2011-02-22T16:36:00.000Z

Hip, Hip, Hoorah; next Thursday, 3rd March, is World Book Day. (At least, it is in the UK and Ireland; perplexingly, everybody else has a different World Book Day some time in April.)

Anyway, pupils at participating schools will be given free £1 book tokens, and a number of £1 books are being published specially for the occasion. All of them feature the work of two different authors. Here's mine, Traction City...

...and if you turn it over it also contains Teacher's Tales of Terror by Chris Priestley. Value for money, see?

Chris and I were supposed to be doing an event together on WBD itself, but unfortunately he's been seriously ill recently. While I was in hospital moaning on about my silly little kidney stones he was busy having a stroke. Thankfully he seems to be recovering well, and has been writing about the experience on his blog, but apparently if there's one thing that recuperating stroke sufferers need to steer clear of it's mingling with Reeves at WBD events, so I shall be on my own, unless another top-notch author can be persuaded to join me. More on this soon.

Anyway, Traction City is a bit of a departure for me, in that I hardly ever write short fiction, and this is the first time I've written anything to order. The brief was fairly tight: I was asked to do a 10,000 word story set in the London of Mortal Engines, with boy and girl protagonists. That sounds simple enough at first, but when I thought about I realised it was going to be quite tricky, since whatever happened in the story would have to be interesting enough to make people want to read 10,000 words about it, but not so interesting that the characters in Mortal Engines would have mentioned it.

In the end, I settled on a story which takes place twenty five or thirty years before Mortal Engines opens. It's set on London's lower tiers, where Mortal Engines barely ventures, and tells of how the sleepy routine of Airdock Green police station is disrupted, first by the arrival of a young aviatrix who may or may not be an Anti-Tractionist saboteur, and then by the news of something nasty lurking in the abandoned district called The Wombs.

If you haven't read any of the Mortal Engines books this should serve as a sort of introduction to that world, and will hopefully make you want to read on. If you have, you won't find any startling new revelations in Traction City, although I enjoyed retro-fitting London with a few names from the prequels (there is a Crumb Street, and a statue of Charlie Shallow), and fans of Anna Fang may be pleased to hear that she is the young aviatrix in question, aged about sixteen and choc full o' Anti-Tractionist rage, having only recently escaped from the slave-holds of Arkangel.

I've also had a go at a few illustrations: here are two of them.

There is also going to be an e-book version of the story, which will hopefully be released on World Book Day and should retail at around 60p. I'll add some details about that, and a link to where you can get it, as soon as it's ready. It will be the first bit of the Mortal Engines saga to be available for download, and I think it will be Scholastic UK's first e-book: to be followed later in the year by the rest of the series.

All This And World War Two...

2011-02-17T13:19:00.000Z

I was back in hospital last weekend for more kidney-stone related merriment. I shall spare you the details, since it was all most unsavoury, my deres, but the doctors and nurses were all wonderful, as before, and again I found myself enjoying the odd camaraderie of the urology ward. Mr W-, the gentleman in the bed next to mine, was 97 years old; a former milkman from Birmingham who had moved down to Devon to start a new life as a market gardener in 1966, the year I was born.

He was a bit hard of hearing, so conversation was difficult, but I was happy to listen while he talked. He told me how, in his twenties, he'd driven trucks full of tank fuel around the Western Desert for (I think) 22 Armoured Division, until he was captured by the Germans at the fall of Tobruk. From there he'd been sent to a prison camp in Italy, and then moved on overcrowded cattle trucks through Austria to another camp not far from Berlin. As the war ended his guards, who had fought against the Russians on the Eastern Front and presumably didn't fancy meeting them again, marched him and his fellow inmates west to meet the advancing Americans.

I don't think I've ever actually heard an account like this first hand before. My own grandfathers were too old for active duty during the war, and my parents were only children at the time, so their memories are all of life on the home front. It felt very strange to be lying there in bed in Torbay Hospital and seeing through Mr W's words the battles in North Africa and the fall of Germany nearly seventy years ago. He told me how he had eked out his POW rations by trading the contents of his Red Cross parcels on the black market (one bar of chocolate = five loaves of bread); how, on the march to meet the Americans, his column had been shepherded along by Allied aircraft which returned each day, waggling their wings to encourage the POWS, before zooming off to attack German military convoys further up the road. He described what it was like to drive trucks across the desert, and how an 88mm shell sounds when it passes just over your head.

He seemed at first glance like a tiny little old fellow, and was very funny and good natured (the hospital staff all made a great fuss of him) but as he talked, I started to see that he had actually been a very big man, tall, broad shouldered, and presumably very tough mentally as well as physically. He had a big family living locally, and several little great-grandchildren came in to visit him while I was there. I hope they get to hear his stories too when they are old enough to understand them, and pass his memories on.

I tried to do a drawing of Mr W, but it made him look rather cadaverous and miserable and helpless, none of which was true. So I'll just leave this here un-illustrated, as a record of a meeting with a remarkable man.

Nero

2011-02-05T19:57:00.002Z

Nero (Actual Size)

This is Nero, the dog we had when I was growing up. My parents bought him when I was about 10. They chose a chihuahua because they didn't want anything that would interfere with their camping, boating or hill-walking holidays, and he was small enough to fit easily into a dinghy or a VW camper van. And they chose a long-haired chihuahua because, let's face it, short-haired chihuahuas are just weird.

Nero was rather anti-social, and had a deep mistrust of anyone outside our immediate family unit. (Who could he have picked that up from?) He eventually came to accept my grandparents, my best friend Justin, and maybe one or two of my sister's friends, but everybody else was viewed with deep suspicion. This was a pity, since he was a very pretty dog, and people used to come up and try to stroke him, only to retreat hastily when he started snarling and barking at them. All other dogs were his enemies. When he wasn't on holiday he liked to sit in the sun in the porch of our house (14 Tower Road, Brighton) and growl at them as they went past on their way to Queen's Park.

I think the original idea was that when Mum and Dad were out on some twenty mile hike and his little legs got tired he could be popped into a back-carrier, hastily converted by Dad from an old baby carrier which must have been lying about in the loft since my sister was small. But Nero's little legs never did get tired: he loved walking, and he loved the hills, and most of the mountains which I reached the top of as a boy had Nero standing proudly on the summit cairn like the Monarch of the Glen. Other hikers we met would almost always say; "I bet his legs were longer when he started out!" It was quite funny the first few times.

My sister, my mum, Nero, and me, half way up Ben Mor on Mull in 1977. I appear to have sat on a thistle.

He used to get very excited when he sensed a holiday was about to happen, and sit patiently in his little carrying-box all the way up the motorway. (It was a long way from Brighton to the Lake District or Scotland, especially in a camper van, and especially in a camper van towing a dinghy, which I seem to recall meant we couldn't go over 50 miles per hour). He never seemed to mind the journey: I suppose he knew that we were going to end up somewhere like this...

Summer of '77. The Reeve encampment on Mull in 'Not Raining' Shock.

He was a good dog.

Hot off the Press...

2011-02-05T11:19:00.001Z

Coo-er! The first copy of Scrivener's Moon arrived in yesterday's post. This is an advance copy; it's not actually published until April, although it will probably be in the shops from around the middle of March. Anyway, David Wyatt's cover artwork looks fantastic on this hardback, and Sarah has started reading it, so we'll see what she thinks.

There will also be a large format paperback published at the same time, which will have one of these funky modern covers that I don't understand. This one has quite a jolly red and yellow colour scheme, though, and features a mysterious blue bird*.

More on what lurks within these pretty covers soon...

*Actual book may not contain blue birds.

Oxford Literary Festival.

2011-02-04T14:16:00.002Z

I haven't had much luck on my last two visits to the Oxford Literary Festival. It always falls at that just that time of year when I go, "Oho, clever me, I've made it all the way through the winter without catching the 'flu, thanks to taking all that echinacea and avoiding even the most basic forms of social interaction." I then promptly catch the 'flu, and end up wandering about among the dreaming spires feeling like death warmed up. It's also that period of springtime which I think of as the Tweed/Linen Gap, when the clothes which it seems sensible to wear when I leave Dartmoor turn out to have become suddenly unseasonal by the time I arrive at Oxford.

Anyway, I'm going to give it a go again this year, so if you're in the Oxford area on Sunday, 3rd April you might like to pop along and see whether I'm stewing in wool serge or shivering in cotton twill, and what interesting upper respiratory tract infections I've brought along to share with my fans.

Excitingly, it's a Blue Peter event, so proper authors like Lauren St John and Candy Gourlay will also be present, and the master of ceremonies will be Blue Peter Presenter Barney Harwood, which means I've finally managed to impress Sam ("What, you'll actually be meeting Barney!?").

Further details, and tickets, are available at the Festival Website.

One I Made Earlier: Blue Peter Favourite Stories
Location: Christ Church: Hall

The three shortlisted authors for the Blue Peter Book Award Favourite Stories category are gathered in the very hall that was filmed as Hogwarts Great Hall to tell you about their fabulous chosen books: Candy Gourlay, with Tall Story, the tale of a basketball-mad London girl and her giant brother from the Philippines, Philip Reeve with his futuristic/historical fantasy about unlocking the secrets of flight, A Web of Air, and Lauren St John with her mystery adventure, Dead Man's Cove. The event will be chaired by Blue Peter presenter Barney Harwood. Four special treats for the price of one. Free to Blue Peter badge holders accompanied by a paying adult.

Bee meets Firefly

2011-01-21T16:21:00.004Z

Clovenstone seems to be going OK - I'm about half way through and I'm starting to get an idea of where it might be headed - so, since the sun has been shining, I gave myself a day off this week and walked over to Heathercombe and back, stopping to do some drawings along the way. It's good to be out for a whole day again, and although I was pretty tired afterwards it felt nice to have tired legs instead of just tired eyes and bot from sitting in front of a computer all day (for Clovenstone has reached the stage where it's mostly come out of notebooks and is being typed). Heathercombe was a big tin mining area until the middle of last century, and although nature has reclaimed it it's still full of ruins, so I was able to tell myself that noodling around over there all day was actually good research for writing about the ruinous world of Clovenstone.

I'm also trying to think of things to do to mark the forthcoming publication of Scrivener's Moon. A Web of Air, with its smaller scale and seaside setting, lent itself quite well to a video trailer, but a Scrivener's Moon trailer would need an almighty budget. I might just try to come up with a series of blog posts about some of the themes of the book, and perhaps some drawings of the main characters.

And I finally got round to writing a piece about one of my all-time favourite TV shows, Firefly, on The Solitary Bee. It was great fun to do and wasted far too much time, so please do have a read. When did we start thinking of TV programmes as 'shows' and series as 'seasons', I wonder? Oh, I remember, it was around the time that British telly became unwatchable and we all had to start buying boxed sets of superior US product...

2011 News and Blues.

2011-01-10T14:36:00.002Z

2011 has been a bit bleurgh so far. The weather has turned horrible in a wet way rather than snow and ice (which is more disruptive but, at least for those of us who work from home, more fun). I've done nothing of note except update The Solitary Bee with a random movie review and video about the Excalibur Estate in Catford which I nicked from Sarah McIntyre, and make arrangements for my regular January mugging by the Inland Revenue (ain't they heard of the Laffer Curve?). This year's publications - Scrivener's Moon for April and my World Book Day short Traction City - are both finished and at the printers, and I'm looking forward to the U.S publication of A Web of Air. (Scholastic have some lovely new covers for the US editions of Web and Fever Crumb, which I hope to share here soon. Electronic versions of all the Mortal Engines titles will be available soon too, and I shall be posting news of those here as soon as I have it.)

Meanwhile, I'm busy trying to finish the fantasy story which I started last year. It's currently called Clovenstone, after the destination board on a bus I saw in Edinburgh. Clovenstone is the name of a suburb of that city, but obviously it ought to be the name of a sprawling otherwordly castle smothered in ivy and gargoyles and full of strange creatures, which is precisely the setting for the new book. I'm trying to get some sense and structure into the loopy, rambling adventure I wrote last year to read to Sam, but without losing its sense of fun. (Sam, of course, isn't really into castles and goblins any more, and probably wishes I was writing about tractors.) This illustration by the fabulous Paul Bonner kind of captures the feel I'm after, except that none of my characters will be wolfmen or grumpy-lookin' elves. (I quite fancy one of those flying ring-tailed lemur/fox/hawk things, though.)

"Grrr! Arrrgh!" etc.

Anyway, to cheer myself up, and in the absence of anything else to write about, I thought I'd start the new year off with a few links to other sites I've been enjoying recently. U.S illustrator Eric Fortune paints strange, dreamlike images, and gets lovely effects with acrylic on watercolour paper. Chipper New York art student Rose Wong is developing a lovely, decorative, 1970s/art-nouveau-ish style - I'd like to see her broaden her subject matter a bit, but I love her line, and her attitude. (She also posts work-in-progress and stuff she likes on her Tumblr blog, and recently included one of David Wyatt's Starcross illustrations, so she's clearly a woman of taste.)

Rose Wong takes a line for a walk.

If 'steampunk' still floats your boat you should probably check out the website of Lia Keyes, and even if it doesn't you ought to take a look at Cory Gross's Voyages Extraordinaire, which is really more about Scientific Romance and is always worth a read. The blog Unhappy Hipsters pokes fun at trendy post-modern types by adding its own mordant little captions to pictures of their painfully stylish houses - a useful public service, I feel.

Finally, I notice that the number of Followers of this blog finally reached 100 over Christmas. People are always telling me that the number of people who take the trouble to 'follow' in no way reflects the number of actual visits the blog gets, but it's certainly encouraging to see you all there, so thank you very much!

Philip.

The Year in Pictures

2010-12-29T16:41:00.000Z

'Tis the season when bloggers everywhere sit down to do a round-up of their favourite books, people, movies & moments of the Year Gone By. Only I can't be bothered, so here's a montage of some of the more memorable bits of my year (or, at least, the ones that I have photos of)...

......including: snow; America; Dublin; volcanoes; kidney stones; drawing; Powerscourt waterfall; reading The Lord of the Rings to Sam, re-reading Patrick O'Brian to myself; my favourite book, film*, DVD, and comic of the year, the Warhammer craze; the tractor craze; the arrival of Frodo; a visit from Jeremy; the Legend that is Sarah McIntyre. And lots of snow. And a couple of books what I wrote.

(The links above are almost all to old posts on this blog or The Solitary Bee, so unless you're a newcomer - in which case, Welcome! - you may have read them before.)

It's been a pretty good year on the whole, though frankly I could have done without the kidney stones and the volcano and I wish we could have kept our lovely and much-missed next-door neighbours, Sam, Tam and Ian.

I hope you've all enjoyed 2010 too. Here's hoping for a happy, peaceful, and prosperous New Year all round.

*Avatar scrapes in by default because it was the only one I saw at the cinema.