"Motorised Tower - Cool but Top-Heavy..."

What with one thing and another I find that I've lost the urge to blog lately.  Doing a drawing a day is eating into the time I used to spend updating this site, and having to produce a good chunk of the new fantasy story every two days so that I can read the next episode to Sam at bedtime is surprisingly time-consuming, too.  And I just find it hard to believe that anyone's really interested in what I get up to, so while I had an interesting and enjoyable week by my standards - champagne with Sarah MacIntyre at the launch of The House of Illustration, three events at the StarLit Festival, a visit to Rokeby School in Norbiton - I haven't come back feeling that I have to write about them, and when I tried it turned out rather like those dreary 'Wot I Did On My Hollidays' essays they made me write at school every September.   Also, I came home to find that my inbox had been swamped with an e-mail asking if it's true that Tomas Alfredson is to direct a movie of Larklight, as reported on that there internet - but I can't write about that either, since I know no more than the internet does (although I can confirm that Warner Brothers currently own the rights to Larklight, so I assume it's all official).

Anyway, it did make me go searching through my highly efficient filing system for the Larklight movie script which I was sent a few years back ( a script remarkable mainly for its total lack of resemblance to Larklight).  I didn't find it, but while I was upending cardboard boxes onto the floor I came across a very old notebook containing what I think was the first inkling of the idea for Mortal Engines.  At the time the mobile city was just going to be one element in a different story, set in an alternate Nineteenth Century where zzzzzz... Luckily the new idea was so much stronger that it soon broke free, re-established itself in the Distant Future and set about having little baby ideas of its own.  At this early stage I hadn't thought of draining the North Sea so London's travels were confined to the British Isles; the plot concerned the Lord Mayor's attempts to build a channel bridge so that it could trundle off and eat Paris.  There seem to have been a confusing number of protagonists, one of whom was called 'Charles Natsworthy(?)'.  'Hester a construction site rebel?' suggests the scrawl in the bottom right corner.  'Shame to lose A.C.' says a note on another page - though obviously I did lose A.C, and so completely that I now have no idea who or what he/she/it might have been.  Indeed, most of the thoughts I scribbled here have been so thoroughly buried by later ideas that it's hard to believe I ever had them: was there really a time when there were no Stalkers in the WoME?  When Miss Fang was Miss Xiao? (although there is a reference to another character called Septimus Fang).  And I wonder who on earth Hake and Thistlebrush were?