Green Man envy

I have lived in Cambridge for a year and a half now and there is still so much of it that is a complete mystery to me. So much of the life of the city revolves around the university and unless you are involved in university life - which I am not - you feel a little shut out.

So getting a chance to go into a college - as I did today to see our friend Lauren Kassell - is always very exciting. Lauren is an expert on alchemy and magic (and wouldn't you love to be able to say that) and has the most fantastically appropriate rooms in Pembroke College. She even has her very own Green Man carvings - how cool is that? My copy of Pevsner says that her wood panelling is 17th Century and comes from the old hall they ripped down in the 19th Century. I want a wood panelled writing room. It's not fair!

Eager to take any opportunity to poke my nose into the academic world I had accepted and invitation to a formal dinner at Newnham College as a guest of another academic friend of ours - Mardi Dungey - but it has been cancelled. And I was looking forward to having chance to wear my tuxedo. All of it.

I bought my tux when my book Death and the Arrow was up for an Edgar award in New York a couple of years back. My editor there - the wonderful Nancy Hinkel - came to pick me up from my hotel just as I discovered that I had forgotten to pack the trousers. Luckily I had another suit.

Brazil

I checked my junk mail today and found a message from the British School in Rio asking if I might be interested in being involved in their library week this March/April. The message had come in on the 13th but ended up in my junk mail because after a spate of spam from Brazil a year or so back, I blocked all messages with the br. international coding.

There has been talk of a trip to Brazil for a while. John Clarke - who I share a studio with - has a sister living there and she has expressed a desire to get me over there to her English language bookshop - the Jamer Bookshop in Rio. I was very excited for a while, but nothing came of it and so I had forgotten all about it. Perhaps it is back on the cards. I certainly hope so.

Builders

I have been cursed by builders. The house opposite is having an extension built and all this week, builders have been yelling and laughing and jabbering on their mobile phones and throwing bricks and goodness knows what else into a trailer because the street is too narrow to get a skip lorry down. I even heard a wolf whistle the other day - I have not heard a wolf whistle in years. I decided it would be a good time to begin the slow process of tidying my office.


So I can now actually see the top of my desk - well some of it at least. Now there are only a couple of notebooks, a sketchbook, the phone, two of those Penguin book cover mugs - Vile Bodies and Frankenstein. And I can almost get to the window without standing on piles of paper. It is a work in progress.

Boo!

It was a wonderfully foggy day in Cambridge yesterday. It did not lift all day and even the pinnacles on top of King's College were hidden from view as if a rather smudgy charcoal drawing was in the process of being rubbed out.

Fog is very spooky - undeniably spooky I would say. And spookiness has been on my mind a lot over the last year or two. When I began writing the stories that form Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror - some of which I had roughed out many, many years ago - I set out deliberately to create an atmosphere of creepiness or spookiness; to unnerve rather than jolt or revolt. Movies do a very good job with the Boo! kind of fright. That is harder to achieve with a book.

What books are very good at doing is taking you to places you would not willingly go to. There is no shutting your eyes or hiding behind a pillow when you read a book. The process of reading is - or can be - very intimate, and there is a vulnerability there that a good writer can exploit.

I love the stories of M R James and of Saki, and of a host of other writers who have specialised or dabbled in the supernatural - writers who skillfully make your flesh creep. But I also like writers who produce something more weird and nightmarish - writers like Edgar Allen Poe or Franz Kafka. Someone once said to me, 'The trouble with you is that you read too much Kafka.' But you see the trouble with him was he didn't read enough.

Of course, the other thing that books can do is pile on the vileness in terms of revolting detail. I have been reading a book by a writer who shall remain nameless but writes gory teenage horror. It made me want to have my eyeballs decontaminated, but instead I picked up a copy of Coraline by Neil Gaimain. Two pages in and my faith in writing was restored. It is genuinely scary and unsettling in a Kafkaesque way, but more to the point it is just plain well written. And the fantastic Dave McKean illustrations are the icing on a very weird cake.

Today is tomorrow's yesterday

A big part of my output so far as an author has been historical fiction and this is no doubt due in part to my enjoyment as a child of the work of Rosemary Sutcliffe and Henry Treece and of their illustrator, Charles Keeping. And I still enjoy historical fiction - as a writer and a reader (and a movie-goer).

Historical fiction is a strange genre though. In children's fiction there always seems to be an element of worthiness about it - as if somehow you are not only getting the children to read a novel, but also getting some historical facts down them by stealth. And now there seesm to be a spate of writers of historical non-fiction turning to novels.

For me, historical fiction is fiction, first and foremost. It has to work as a story, regardless of any percieved benefit in terms of helping to understand WWII or the Romans. That is not to say that I do not spend a lot of time on research and that I think I have a responsibility to get things right, but just that I am not convinced that we can really get an insight into another age through historical fiction.

Historical fiction often seems to say as much about the time it was written as when it is set. It is a little like science fiction in that regard. Just as the various future worlds of science fiction are often commentaries on the world of the writer, so historical fiction reflects the contemporary world by all the differences (and similiarities) to it.

The problem with historical fiction is that it can pretend to be 'true', or at least take upon itself a mantel of added authenticity because of the factual details. But it can only ever be partially true. I write historical fiction because the past, and the way we relate to it, fascinates me. Setting is important to me, and for children's books, a historical setting throws up all kinds of possibilities in terms of the narrative. I think it can also help to personalise an historical event or era and make it seem more real. It can also bring a valuable new perspective to the present.

But history is more complex and our knowledge of it more full of holes than fiction - certainly children's fiction - easily allows for. At the end of the day it is the author's job to make the story compelling. Historical or not, it is still fiction. And there is nothing wrong with that.

More on Stephen King

I think I should have pointed out a few blogs back, that before I read On Writing I had never actually read a Stephen King book. I had a friend at college who always seemed to have a Stephen King on the go and I can see myself giving him a withering, pitying look as I worked my way through Satre's Roads to Freedom trilogy. The fact is, I had - and still do have - an aversion to gold embossed lettering and airbrushed illustration. Plus I am not a joiner and Stephen King seemed like a club; a cult even. OK - I was a snob.

But however much of a snob I may have been about his books, I had enjoyed his stories as screenplays: Carrie, Stand By Me, The Shining, Misery. I suppose that is why I read On Writing. Someone who tells such good stories must have something worthwhile to say about writing. After all, you can't judge a writer by his covers. And there is nothing wrong with being popular. Dickens was popular. In fact now I do the job myself, being popular seems strangely appealing.

On Writing was so interesting (and well written) - and I liked Stephen King so much by the end - that I went out and bought Misery (a story which King says he dreamt in its entirety on a flight to England). But I am afraid it did not make me a convert, despite being a very nicely packaged edition devoid of embossing or cheesy illustration. The movie had spoiled it for me, I think. I preferred the paired down screenplay to the novel, even though I could appreciate Stephen King's gift as a writer. And because of that I will certainly give him another try. Not that I suspect he cares one way or the other.

Hands

Here is another page from my current sketchbook.