Publication day!

Today is the official publication day for The Dead of Winter! I went into Cambridge with my wife and son and we saw copies in Waterstones and Heffers and had a chat with the lovely Kate Johnson about the launch event I'm doing at Heffers in November. More about that later.

It is one of the odd things about publishing that you are inevitably promoting a book that was written many, many months previously. The Dead of Winter was delivered and edited last year and my mind has been filled with Mister Creecher ever since.

It is possible to see the Tales of Terror books as historical fiction, as they are set in a Victorian past, and The Dead of Winter has a similar nineteenth century setting. But I don't think of them in that way. The Dead of Winter and the Tales of Terror books are really set in the world of Victorian and Edwardian English ghost stories.

This world of country houses, formal gardens, stuffy morning rooms, governesses and bored children, is as rich and as established in my imagination as the deep, dark woods of folk tales. The Victorian era does throw up many story ideas and give me the opportunity to place young people in lots of different - and dangerous - situations, but it is that heightened, fictional take on the period that interests me. I would hope that I do nothing in my stories that could not believably happen in that period, but the action in most of the stories takes place in a very enclosed world. The Dead of Winter is no exception.

The novel - and it is a conventional novel this time, rather than a group of short stories - is a first person narrative about a friendless orphan, Michael Vyner, who goes to stay with his strange and troubled guardian in a remote house in the fens. The house is like an island or a ship, surrounded on all sides by flatlands of ice and snow. It is also filled with mystery and secrets.

I will tell you more in the next post. . .

The path

I was very proud to see that Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror appeared on Charlie Higson's list of his top ten horror books. Mine was the only children's book on the list and I was in some very illustrious company - Stephen King, M R James, Richard Matheson and Daphne du Maurier all getting a mention.

I was also sent a link by Mary Hoffman to a lovely Bookbag review of The Dead of Winter

And then, yesterday, I was told by Ian Lamb at Bloomsbury that Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth had been awarded the Dracula Society's Children of the Night Award. This is not - as its title may suggest - a children's book award. It is an award given by the society for the best book (fiction or non-fiction) in the previous year with a Gothic horror theme. Robert Westhall, Sarah Waters and Terry Pratchett have all been past recipients. I'm off to an awards dinner in November and I'll tell you more about it then.

And so, back to the stories in Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror. . .

The Path was one of the stories I had sketched in decades before this book was published. It went through many forms, but the Cumbrian location was always the same and many of the essentials remained unchanged as it shifted from having an adult protagonist to having a teenager as the main character. I have walked the route that Matthew takes. I know those hills very well.

Partly it is another story that plays on my fear of heights (despite my love of hill-walking), but it is far more about the idea of a sinister double. Edgar Allan Poe's wonderful William Wilson is about a doppelganger, as is the creepy German silent movie The Student of Prague. But the creature in my story is actually more of a wraith - a double that presages death. The Path is one of my own personal favourites. I have a vivid image of the thing that follows Matthew up that track. It catches me by surprise every time I read it.

I am a huge fan of cyclical stories - stories that eat their own tails, so to speak, and go round and round in a dizzying circle. A fine example of this kind of storytelling is Roman Polanski's The Tenant.

Which reminds me - I have that on DVD and haven't watched it yet. I haven't seen it for ages. What a treat. . .

Offerings

An exciting jiffy bag full of books arrived through the post yesterday. It contained the advance copies of The Dead of Winter and the paperback of Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth. Both are published at the beginning of October. More about them later.

Back to Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror. . .

The next story in the book is called Offerings and is another favourite of mine. Again, it has an East Anglian setting. Whilst I did not have any particular Suffolk village in mind when I wrote it, I did have a very clear image of a lovely medieval church with its handsome Georgian rectory. There is no shortage of either in Suffolk.

As for the story, I'm really not sure where that came from. Part of the genesis came when watching my son absorbed in playing with his toy soldiers and action figures of various kinds. I could stand and watch him and he would be totally oblivious to me, completely caught up in his imaginary world.

This ability children have to be utterly absorbed in the moment is something I am nostalgically jealous of. Mostly, of course, this play is benign, but children also have the capacity to be cruel. I wanted to explore the idea that a bored boy could become distracted by something deeply unpleasant. In that it owes something to Saki, I think.

My own son (like me) is an animal nut - a lover of wildlife and fascinated by nature. I think I was perhaps thinking of that and what might be the most transgressive thing imaginable when it came to finally revealing what Robert was up to with his hammer and nails in that rectory garden.

I also think there was a memory of (an atypically surreal, it has to be said) Alan Clarke directed, David Rudkin penned, Play for Today called Penda's Fen about a vicar's son who falls under the influence of all kinds of weird visitations. I remember finding it very disturbing indeed. I have never seen it since, although I think it may now be available on DVD.

I wonder if I dare take another look. . .

Uncle M R James

One of the strange things about being a writer is that you end up doing events, talking about a book that is at least a year old. Very soon, I will be going up and down the country promoting The Dead of Winter, a novel I submitted to Bloomsbury in the summer of 2009. I have already submitted the 1st draft of my next novel - Mr Creecher - but that will not be published until October 2011.

This autumn is even more confused because Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror has been chosen for the Booked Up list, as I mentioned in the last post. So, before I get involved in The Dead of Winter, I though I'd talk a little bit about how Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror came about and what inspired the stories therein.


I suppose I should start by talking about M R James, as Uncle Montague is named for Montague Rhodes James. M R James has a strong association with Cambridge, where I know live - he was an undergraduate here, and was Provost of King's College between 1905 and 1918. He is best known for writing a number of classic and very English ghost stories.

But my love of M R James had nothing to do with Cambridge and began many years ago, when I was in my teens. When I first came across his stories, I lived in a large council estate on the west side of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a world far removed from that of M R James and his stories. Added to which, I did not read the stories at all - or at least not at first.

M R James told his ghost stories in his candlelit rooms at Kings as a Christmas Eve treat for friends and favourite students. The BBC decided to give us all a similar treat in the mid 1970s, by adapting M R James' stories for television. I watched Lost Hearts and A Warning to the Curious absolutely spellbound and it was only later that I noticed the name 'M R James' on the credits and sought out his stories in print. Television is not always a terrible influence.

When I thought about having a character telling the creepy tales, it seemed only fitting to make a small acknowledgment to the one of the masters of the genre by having them share a first name. The very first story he tells in my book - Climb Not - was to some extent inspired by M R James' The Ash Tree - one of the stories the BBC adapted.

Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror owes a lot to both M R James and to the BBC adaptations of his stories, but their were many more influences at work. In the next few posts I'll talk about some of those. . .

Swedish tunnel

I had some more good news on the foreign rights front today. My Swedish publisher - Raben and Sjogren - are taking Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth. I'm hoping this means that the other two have done reasonably well.

And Thailand is taking The Dead of Winter. It's always exciting to sell foreign rights to a book before its even been published here. I wrote a little about bound proofs for the Writers and Artists website recently and this shows their importance.

Publishing still moves very slowly and bound proofs prevent us from having to wait until a book is published before it can be shown to booksellers, reviewers and foreign publishers. And the more foreign sales, the faster you are going to pay off the publishers advance and start earning some money in royalties.

Independent booksellers

I am back at my desk after a swift visit to London. I was speaking at the Independent Booksellers Dinner at the Hotel Russell on Sunday evening and stayed the night in the hotel (which was clearly very grand once, and still is in places).

I traveled up on Sunday afternoon and checked in. I used the time I had before the pre-dinner drinks to get spruced up and to go through what I wanted to say in my speech. I had written something before I left, but this was more a statement of intent than a speech. There is a great temptation to write a speech - I am a writer after all - and read it out, but it just doesn't feel right to me. If it isn't going down well, you have nowhere to go. Reading it seems dull and if you try and remember it, you run the risk of drying up.

My technique - if I can use such a word - is to have half a dozen things I want to say and an order in which I plan to say them. And that is about it. Things will occur to me as I speak and sections will grow or shrink depending on how interested the audience seems with what I'm saying.

I'm not an especially nervous speaker. I don't know why that is. I absolutely hated having to speak in class at school and would do anything to avoid it. I certainly never put myself forward for plays or performances of any kind. Maybe I just don't like reciting things. Hence my reluctance to read a prepared speech.

Having said that, this event was far more nerve-jangling than I had envisaged. It was much bigger for a start. There were lots of people seated around many tables with candelabras in the centre of them. It had the appearance of a large wedding reception.

Added to that, Howard Jacobson was the other speaker and he went first. He was very funny indeed. He went for the prepared speech with lots of gags and I started to seriously doubt my technique as his talk went on. It started to seem like knowing exactly what you were about to say was the only way to go and that I was going to fall flat on my face. I felt a little sick.

I also hate microphones and lecterns and this gig had both - plus spotlights. I hate spotlights. But as I am aware through my writing, much of terror is in the anticipation, and once I was up there it was fine. I think I was reasonably coherent and said most of what I had intended to say.

I spoke for ten minutes or so. I talked a little about my influences and about my take on writing horror fiction. I won't go into too much detail here because I intend to write a few posts about that quite soon. I also plugged The Dead of Winter of course. This was a room full of booksellers after all.

I was quite happy to return to my table and to the lemon tart my talk had been delaying (we were talking between courses). My part was over. People had laughed. People had clapped. I had not disgraced myself. I could relax now and just enjoy the company and the conversation.

Increasingly writers are expected to be effective speakers and spokesmen (and women) for their books. We still have the opportunity to say no, but it is really part of the job now, I think. It all helps to make a personal connection with those people who will sell or buy your books. There is no reason why someone who is good at writing should necessarily be any good at talking, but its a skill that can be acquired like any other. And it improves with practice.

Shiny new jacket

I received some very exciting post today - a set of covers for The Dead of Winter from Kate Clarke of Bloomsbury Children's Books design department. I had seen versions of this before, but not the finished thing. I have taken a photograph rather than scanned it in so that you can see that it has a foil effect to accentuate the frosty feel.

Covers are a source of frequent complaint by authors and I've spoken about this before. Everyone understands how important a cover is and obviously authors want something that does justice to their book. Often they can feel a little powerless to intervene in the process. It can be soul-destroying to put so much effort into the writing of a book and then see it go out into the world with a lackluster jacket.

My take on covers has always been that - without misrepresenting the book - they should stand on their own as a piece of design whose function is not to illustrate the story (though it can do that as well) but to sell the book - to make the book desirable. Increasingly that means producing something powerful enough that it will catch a potential reader's eye at the size of an Amazon thumbnail. I am clearly biased as I did the image, but I think this is a very strong cover.

Of course, none of this will matter if the book does not capture the reader's imagination. But getting someone to choose your book from the myriad of others out there is half - maybe more than half - of the battle.

The Dead of Winter is out in October.

Uncorrected proofs

Two copies of the uncorrected proofs of The Dead of Winter arrived today. It is very exciting to see it in book form for the first time.

What have I been up to?

I still intend to talk about movies, but I ought perhaps to tell you what I've been up to in the last week or so.

Well, I have been trying to build up a head of steam with the next book - Mister Creecher. The book is so vivid in my mind that I want to get the bulk of it written as soon as possible. My art teacher at school used to encourage us to 'cover the paper with paint' early on and then work in the details and I have a similar view of writing. I want to get to the end so that I can see the shape of the book. I'm not really content until the whole thing is out of my head. I don't mean the 'whole thing' as in the finished book. I just need to get the story down and see where all the scenes that I have had playing in my head are going to fit into it. I know how my book will start and I know how it will end. But I don't know in advance whether the scenes I have in my head will work. I won't know that until I write it. And if they don't, however important they seemed when I wrote the synopsis, they will get dumped.

last Wednesday I went to the Bloomsbury sales conference in London. I had been asked to give a ten minute talk about me and my books, but particularly The Dead of Winter as that is the one we will be promoting next. Ian Lamb, who handles publicity for my books at Bloomsbury, had asked me to come early just in case things moved more quickly than expected. No sooner had I arrived than Ian showed me through a door and there was a round of applause and I was on! It was a bit intimidating, but they were a supportive crowd and I had Sarah Odedina giving me encouraging looks from the front row.

I am not a great one for rehearsing speeches or reading from notes and so I think its fair to say that my talks do not have the consistency of some authors I have come across who have clearly practiced their lines and honed their act. I like to think that this gives my talks a spontaneity, but it can mean they drift off piste occasionally. I just hate it when I find myself trotting out the same phrases or anecdotes. It has to taste fresh in my mouth, if you see what I mean.

It seemed to work well this time and it was great to hear such enthusiasm for the books. Authors can seem very self-assured when they talk about how they write, but we are a fragile lot actually, and it does no harm at all to hear that people respect and enjoy what we do.

I have also decided to enter a couple of open exhibitions. It is all a little last minute, but I have applied for entry forms for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and for the Eastern Open, which is held at the King's Lynn Arts Centre in Norfolk. It is a long time since I have entered either. I have been accepted and rejected by both, so it will be interesting to see what happens.

I have entered some landscape paintings based on the nearby riverside area called Sheeps Green here in Cambridge. I have painted and repainted those pictures over the course of the last year or two and I have decided that it is perhaps time to get them finished and move on. Before I send them in I'll get them photographed and hopefully show them on the blog.

More Dutch tales.

Further to yesterday's post, Bloomsbury got in touch yesterday to say that Pimento, my Dutch publisher, wants to take Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth. Which is great.

I have also been asked to talk at the Bloomsbury sales conference next week. I get ten minutes or so to sell myself and my books to the sales people. It's very nice to be asked, if a little daunting.

I will probably still put a word in for the Tales of Terror books, because they are still very much out there. Tunnel's Mouth is out in paperback in October and all three are going to be repackaged at some point (more about that nearer the time).

But of course, this year's book is The Dead of Winter, which is coming out in October (twinned with the Tunnel's Mouth paperback). It will be good to get back to that book, having been caught in between promoting Tunnel's Mouth and writing next years book.

Done

I went through the proofs of The Dead of Winter with Talya Baker at Bloomsbury. We went through the book page by page and flagged up the various issues we had found. These were either resolved immediately or I put them aside and got back to her later. Talya added to my reading out loud tip by suggesting that you place something under the line you are reading to isolate it and stop the eye from wandering. Good idea, I think. I'll be doing that next time.

This is always such a massive stage in the life of a book. This is the very last time that anything can be done. Well - until the paperback tweaks. But essentially this is the book as it is going to be read by the punters who buy it. Bestseller or landfiller, it's done.

Next please. . .

Reading aloud

Today I am having a last run through the proofs of The Dead of Winter. I am reading the book out loud like a madman in my office. I have said - many times - that this is the only way I know to catch those stupid clanging errors or ugly phrases that make you want to pull your own head off and do keepy-uppies with it when you come to read it out loud on publication.

And I don't just read it like a speak-your-weight machine. That wouldn't work. I try to read it well, with all the intended drama and force. I feel I have to do this because, if I can't read it to sound as I would want it to sound, then I probably haven't written it like that either.

I would recommend this method for another reason. I think that when you read your work out loud it can surprise you. I find sad scenes that I have written difficult to read, for example. I know what's coming and yet I still get that flutter and catch in my voice.

Death of death ray

I was very saddened to get an email the other day announcing the death of the excellent Death Ray magazine (or at least its lapse into a coma). Shame on you all for not buying it. Death Ray have been good to me. I was to have appeared in its November issue. They were to run a story and a Q&A I did via email.

The straw that broke the camel's back obviously.

Proofs of The Dead of Winter arrived by jiffy bag. The book is edging ever closer to its publishing form. I'm actually looking forward to sitting down and reading it again.

That may seem odd - and I was actually asked once on a school visit, 'Have you read all of your books?' - but if you put the book aside for long enough, it is possible to read it with some degree of freshness. It is still yours, obviously. But it has also - hopefully - taken on a life of its own.

Frosty skull

I had an email from Sarah Odedina today saying that Bloomsbury are going to go with the frosty skull cover idea I came up with many months ago for The Dead of Winter. I'm really pleased - both that they are going with an image I came up with, but also that they are going with something so bold.

I like Charlie Brooker in the Guardian. This latest piece about Apple evangelists is great. I don't hate Apple. I have an iPod. I like my iPod (even though it has a battery life of about ten minutes now). I download things using iTunes. I can see myself having a Macbook (as long as I don't have to call it that). But if I have to listen to another Apple cult member wandering towards me like a zombie saying, 'One of us, one of us,' and telling me what a rubbish program Word is or how terrible Windows is. I don't care. Shut up. Shut. Up. And that especially means you Stephen Fry. All new technology is the work of Satan. All of it.

And are Apple computers so great? I mean they are white and everything, with slightly rounded corners. But is that great design? White with rounded corners. Is that it? I loved those iMacs with the see-through coloured plastic backs. They were great. They were fun. But ever since they have simply churned out white 1960s retro space-age stuff. It's not ugly. But is it really so fantastic as a piece of design? White with tiny, wee keyboards.

And do they really work better? They are certainly more expensive. Contrary to what Appleoids will tell you, they are always having problems - all Appleoids have an Apple man (or priest, if you will) to come and sort these problems out. Constantly.

I do not feel the need to promote Windows in the way that Appleoids need to blart on about Apple, but Word works well enough for what I ask it to do. It's become far too complicated lately, I will say that (and the compatibility issue between Vista and XP is ridiculous). But when an Apple fan tells you Word is an awful program you do need to remember that they a) have never used it, or b) have the weird Mickey Mouse version that Macs use.

Last week I noticed in the Technology section of the Guardian that there is a bit of a problem with the preposterously named Snow Leopard operating system on Macs. In some 'unlucky' instances, all of the photos stored in iPhoto are deleted or overwritten when you upgrade. All your photos gone. Poof!

iCaramba!

Cover to cover

I had a long telephone conversation with Helen Szirtes today about the amendments to The Dead of Winter. We were doing the last bit of tweaking before it goes off to be proofed. As I have said before - this is such an important stage in the life of a book. It is vital to have a good working relationship with your editor and vital also that you take this part seriously.

Inevitably we occasionally wandered off piste and during one such diversion I was pointing out that we seem to me to be in a real high point of paperback book jacket design in this country - which was certainly not the case a few years ago. I could chose lots of publishers to illustrate this, but I am going to pick on Vintage (part of the Random House empire).


Look at the wit and spark these covers have. Doesn't it make you want to buy the lot? More importantly, doesn't it make you want to read the lot? Go into a book shop and browse the fiction section and you will see jackets as good as these or better.

But you will need to be in the adult fiction section.

I know that these books would not work for children. They are too knowing of their subjects. They are almost in jokes, relying on the purchaser to have some prior knowledge of the book. They are books designed to be re-read. The Frankenstein cover for instance would be baffling to anyone who thinks they know the story but have not actually read the book.

But isn't the wit and the ingenuity of design transferable? Do children's books have to be quite so obvious?

Repetition

I am busy working through Helen Szirtes amendments to The Dead of Winter. When I wrote the book, Helen sent me a set of questions and suggestions. These were big issues about plot and character and continuity and so on. These present amendments are to that second draft that resulted from those initial editing suggestions.

We are at a the fine tuning stage now. Helen has repeatedly written 'rep' for repetition. Repetition is my most common crime and in conversations with other writers I have discovered that am not alone in this. It is incredible how many times I can use the same word in the same paragraph. It is some kind of skill.

Some kind of incredibly useless skill.

Prehumous fame

Josh Lacey got in touch today. Good to hear from him and I hope to meet up with him when I get back from the Lakes.

Malcolm Hardy brought the manuscript of his book round yesterday evening. There is a great deal of trepidation on both sides during the exchange of a manuscript. It is a tough thing for a writer to give up the work. But it has to be done, of course. You can't be a writer without a reader. Unless you die and have all that posthumous fame. But do you want posthumous fame, or do you want, er, prehumous?

Before I read Malcolm's tome, however, I will have to read the revised manuscript of The Dead of Winter, which came in the post today. Helen Szirtes has cast her beady eye over it and I need to see what she has to say. It's always worth hearing.

The editing process on a book is a tricky thing, as I've said on more than one occasion. You can look at your own work too long, and simply lose the ability to read it naturally or with any enthusiasm. I find it best to have a break and come back to it afresh. So when it goes away to be scoured, I do not look at it at all. I try not to think about it even.

Luckily I have such a terrible memory, this is not a problem for me.

Father's Day

Father's Day today and my son brought me a cup of tea in bed, followed by The Observer and even went a long way towards making me blueberry pancakes with maple syrup (and helped me do quite a lot of the eating).

Then I was taken to Audley End. I had never been there before. What an amazing house. It is Jacobean with corner turrets and gold weather vanes, and is stuffed full of the usual expensive but tasteless clash of styles and ornament that is the mark of the English stately home. It has some nice paintings, but they are hung so bizarrely - often twenty feet up in the air - that it is impossible to appreciate them as art. The grounds were amazing though, with gigantic trees (possibly planted by Capability Brown when he landscaped the place) and there were terrific clipped yews that bubbled up like a great green amoeba.

We had a picnic on the field overlooking the pond in the vast grounds, while every now and then a First or Second World War aircraft would growl past, very low, on its way to Duxford. There was something vaguely disturbing about being buzzed by a Messerschmidt.

Parts of Audley End was so very like the image I had in my mind's eye for Hawton Mere, the house in The Dead of Winter, that I would have taken lots of photos had I been allowed. The only place I could manage this was the working area of the house - the kitchen, dairy and so on. These rooms were fascinating and peopled by actors in costume, flitting among the visitors like ghosts.

After Audley End we went to Saffron Walden to visit the Fry Gallery. The Fry Gallery contains an archive of work connected with the brilliant artist, illustrator and designer, Edward Bawden and his circle. The catalogue is edited by Martin Salisbury from Anglia Ruskin here in Cambridge. Martin is a big fan of that period of English illustration (as am I) and very knowledgeable.

The gallery is very small and so some of the work is hung just as bizarrely as the paintings in Audley End; some of them so high that stepladders would be needed to see them properly. They have some nice things though. There was a particularly good Bawden painting done in Sicily (that I think I have in a book somewhere) and a big linocut of Liverpool Street Station.

Sadly, there is a room given over to exhibitions and the exhibition at the moment is John Bellany and contains some of the worst paintings I have seen in a long time. I have never been a fan of Bellany, but even by his standards these are eye-wateringly garish. What they are doing here, sitting like an old drunk in a clown's outfit, next to the tasteful restraint of Bawden and Ravilious, heaven only knows.

The dead of winter

One of the reasons I downloaded Windows Live Writer is because I was trying to copy and paste some large pieces of text into Blogger and it just did not like it.

After doing a little bit of Googling I found someone who was recommending Windows Live Writer as a solution. Blogger is full of all sorts of strange glitches, so it will be interesting to see if this makes life easier when it comes to writing and editing my posts.

I thought that I might share some of the work that I have been talking about on the blog but has not as yet been published. Here is the beginning of The Dead of Winter. As I have mentioned before, it is set in Victorian England and is the story of an orphaned boy who goes to stay with his strange guardian in a moated manor house in the flatlands of East Anglia during a cold and snowy Christmas. Just as they are approaching the house at night, the boy sees a woman loom out of the darkness towards the carriage. . .

We are still at the final edit stage, so this is not necessarily the exact version that will appear in print. It may even have the odd spelling mistake or grammatical error in it. It will be published in 2010 by Bloomsbury. Hopefully this won’t put you off buying it!

Prologue

My name is Michael: Michael Vyner. I am going to tell you something of my life and of the strange events that have brought me to where I now sit, pen in hand, my heartbeat hastening at their recollection.

I hope that in the writing down of these things I will grow to understand my own story a little better and perhaps bring some comforting light to the still-dark, whispering recesses of my memory.

Horrors loom out of those shadows and my mind recoils at their approach. My God, I can still see that face – that terrible face. Those eyes! My hand clenches my pen with such fearful strength I fear it will snap under the strain. It will take every ounce of willpower I possess to tell this tale. But tell it I must.

I had known much hardship in my short life, but I had never before seen the horrible blackness of a soul purged of all that is good, shaped by resentment and hatred into something utterly vile and loveless. I had never known evil.

The story I am to recount may seem like the product of some fevered imagination. But the truth is the truth and all I can do is set it down as best I can, within the limits of my ability and ask that you read it with an open mind.

If after that, you turn away in disbelief, then I can do naught but smile and wish you well; and wish too, that I could so easily free myself of the terrifying spectres that haunt the events I am about to relate.

So come with me now. We will walk back through time and as the fog of the passing years rolls away, we will find ourselves among the chill and weathered headstones of a large and well stocked cemetery.

All about us are stone angels, granite obelisks and marble urns. A sleeping stone lion guards the grave of an old soldier, a praying angel that of a beloved child. Everywhere there are the inscriptions of remembrance; of love curdled into grief.

Grand tombs and mausoleums line a curving cobbled roadway, shaded beneath tall cypress trees. A hearse stands nearby, its black-plumed horses growing impatient. It is December and the air is as damp and cold as the graves beneath our feet. The morning mist is yet to clear. Fallen leaves litter the cobbles.

A blackbird sings gaily, oblivious to the macabre surroundings; the sound ringing round the silent cemetery, sharp and clear in the misty vagueness. Jackdaws fly overhead and seem to call back in answer. Some way off a new grave coldly gapes and the tiny group of mourners are walking away leaving a boy standing alone.

The boy has cried so much over the last few days that he thinks his tears must surely have dried up for ever. Yet as he stares down at that awful wooden box in its frightful pit, the tears come again.

There are few things sadder than a poorly attended funeral. When that funeral is in honour of a dear and beloved mother, then that sadness is all the more sharply felt and bitter-tasting.

As I am sure by now you have guessed; the lonesome boy by that open grave is none other than the narrator of this story.

Files and folders

I spoke to Chris Riddell today. He and Paul Stewart have returned from their UK tour. Chris is always full of enthusiasm for what he is doing and always eager to know what I'm up to. Usually, a lot less than he is.

So what is the next stage of a book - what comes after thoughts and notebooks? Anything half decent from the notebooks quickly becomes a file on my computer. There is a file titled The Jet Brooch (see last post). These files cluster together into folders. There was (and still is) an Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror folder. The same for the Black Ship and Tunnel's Mouth.

In these folders are more stories than I ever use in the books. There are stories that for one reason or another I just felt needed to be bedded down for a little longer. If I have a story that I like I want it to be the best I can make it or I would rather wait until I can fix whatever bothers me about it. And so there is a Tales of Terror 4 folder filled with these spare stories that need a tweak of some kind.

The story that provides the setting for each of the Tales of Terror books has been the one I have most enjoyed writing. This is because it really develops as the book develops. The short stories have characters that make fleeting appearances, but Uncle Montague and Edgar, Ethan and Cathy in the Black Ship and Robert in Tunnel's Mouth are more rounded characters that hopefully grow as you read the book and get to know them. It is vital to me that the device of having a narrator and a storyteller does not become simply a contrivance. I want that story to be just as strong as the others.

This wraparound story is the key to the book and it is this plus a couple of the other stories that I showed to Bloomsbury to give an idea of how the book would end up. With Uncle Montague I more or less wrote the whole thing first, but because there is a format now, I can write the rest of the book under contract (and the accompanying deadline of course).

This process of thought-notebook-file-folder is the same in a novel like The Dead of Winter. It is just that whereas I was writing notes about individual stories, the notes where more to do with the solving the problems of a sustained narrative, so there were notes about characters and locations and what I would call the stand-out scenes - the ones that move the story on and need to be spot on. These scenes are the ones you hope are going to stick in your reader's mind.