Time to move on

The school year is winding down here. Private schools have already broken up, but the state school are still going, if only for a couple more days. We have had the end of year production of Grease, with 11 year-olds looking frighteningly like teenagers in their faux leather jackets and a sports day under glowering skies.


It is a right of passage for children and parents alike. Some have sibling further down the school and so the parents will retain their contact with the primary school. For the rest of us, it is the end of an era of parental involvement. No more standing in the playground chatting to other parents. We have only been in Cambridge for two years, but we have been very lucky making friends with other parents; friendships that will definitely survive the upheaval of changing schools. Some parents and children are leaving Cambridge, but likewise, I hope our friendships will survive regardless.

For me it is the end of teaching the Art Club I run. I won't miss the shouty person I so often became in my attempts to control things, but I will miss some very talented children. I have been a parent helper, been involved in the PTA, run a creative writing club, been a governor (and briefly chair of governors), visited his schools as an author and illustrator and run the art club. I've done my bit, I think. Time to move on.

So, just the music concert on Monday and the leaver's assembly on Tuesday and then that's it until September. . .

Still a bit tense

Philippa, my agent, phoned today to tell me how much she had enjoyed Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth. And it is always good to hear that!

I saw John Clark the day before yesterday and he asked me if I'd sent the book off yet and I said I had. He was puzzled by my lack of enthusiasm. Was that not a huge relief? he asked. And I said it was in a way, but until you hear something back it is always a bit tense.

The UKLA Children's Book Award - for which Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror was shortlisted - was supposed to be announced last weekend, but there is no news. I'm guessing I haven't won as Bloomsbury have not heard anything, but on a Google search I discovered instead that Uncle Monty has been longlisted for the Lincolnshire Young People's Book Award, which was a nice surprise, and is also on a list of suggested titles for Staffordshire's Young Teen Fiction Award.

Laptop

My new laptop arrived today. Or am I supposed to call it a notebook? Anyway - it arrived and I looked at it and was basically too nervous - having never had one before - to actually even plug it in.

The idea is that I will become a bit more mobile in terms of where I can write. I may even write at my studio sometimes. It is actually pretty quiet there. The second-hand furniture trade occupying much of the yard is not exactly booming.

I do have a kind of perfect writing environment in my head - a lovely office, lined with book and a view out onto. . .Well, I'm less sure of that. Unfortunately you tend to get the writing space you deserve - in that it inevitably becomes a reflection of your personality and creative process.

Mine is a mess.

Stop fiddling about

I finally sent Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth off to Sarah Odedina at Bloomsbury today. It is always a nervous moment because the fact is you can always fiddle about a bit more - and a bit more - and a bit more. . .

But at some point you have to let it go.

I sent it to Sarah because Helen Szirtes, my editor on the two previous books, has left Bloomsbury to enter the perilous world of freelancing. I'm hoping she might edit Tunnel's Mouth on a freelance basis, but these things are out of my control.

I also sent the book to my agent, Philippa Milnes-Smith at LAW Ltd.

Now I just have to wait and see what they all think. . .

Susan Harvey

Our very good friend Susan Harvey came to stay with us today. Susan is a very talented painter and has an exhibition at the Cambridge Contemporary Art Gallery in a couple of weeks time and we are storing (and delivering) her paintings to the gallery for her.

Susan works in oil, tempera and watercolour and I am a really big fan of her work. She is such a thoughtful painter. I often tie myself in knots with my own work, questioning what I'm doing and why, and Susan somehow is able to produce these seemingly effortless works of calmness and beauty.

Here is a lovely example. She is planning to do a website and I'll put a link to it when it happens.

The first of the first drafts

The whole family was down with sore throats and colds today. I was desperately trying to resolve a few final things with Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth so that I can send it off on Monday.

My books go through several stages once they have been assembled into a book-like entity. The very first stage is something that is in a constant state of flux, widening and contracting, bubbling up in one section and buttoning down in another. This is a kind of plate-spinning exercise - trying to keep all the component parts up and working and looking like a single creation.

This stage results in the first draft. Actually it is more like the pre-first draft, because it is a draft that will never leave my writing room. This draft is for me - a draft for me to see just how many problems I have shied away from resolving over the preceding months. It is a way of making those problems more tangible and that makes them easier to solve somehow.

I go through this draft making notes and then refer back to the copy on my hard drive and make another version. This draft is the real first draft, because it is the first I am willing to let anyone else see. This draft is read by my wife who is hopefully going to tell me if there is something that simply does not make sense and whilst she would feel awkward telling me something I had written was rubbish - she tells me a lot by what she chooses to pick out for praise. She is also very good at spotting spelling mistakes.

I then use these observations to go back and produce another draft - the first draft to leave the house. It is this draft - a draft that is hopefully true to the sense of what I want the book to be and as free from mistakes as I can make it - that will go to my publisher and agent. This draft is really the true start of the book as a book and not as a file on my computer.

Bats in the attic

I read an interview with the TV writer Paul Abbot today which, as well as telling me about his extraordinary early life and extended family, also mentioned visiting a hypnotist to get him to stop coming up with ideas. I don't know whether he was joking or not, but I think there is something underpinning it that I relate to.

It is seen as such an objectively good thing to come up with lots of ideas - particularly by those who find it difficult - that no one really talks about the problems. And there are problems.

There is no point to have loads of ideas you are not in a position to act upon. Ideas can be incredibly distracting. I have loads racing round my head at any given time and a lot of the discipline of writing (or illustration or cartooning or painting) is to shut the extraneous ideas out.

Part of why I started writing was in order to fix some of the ideas I had buzzing round in my head. Why was I plotting stories and inventing characters and coming up with dialogue on the train and as I fell asleep at night? It was all a bit crazy. Calling myself a writer seemed to validate this behaviour.

The trick to working - and knowing this does not in any way mean that I have perfected the practice - is to grab every good idea and use it then and there. Only then do you find out whether it really was so good after all. If you don't they flap around in your head like bats in the attic.