Book of the month

I had a very exciting email from Sarah Odedina at Bloomsbury yesterday telling me that Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror and Tales of Terror from the Black Ship are to be made Waterstone's Book of the Month for this coming October.

And I finally found out that Philip Reeve won the UKLA Children's Book Award. Congratulations to him for that. I don't know Philip and I haven't read Here Lies Arthur, the book of his that won, but I have read all his Mortal Engines books and they are brilliantly sustained pieces of fantasy fiction. He is a proper writer, full of great ideas.

Time stands still

The tiny courtyard garden at the back of our house has suddenly become a nature reserve. Immature dragonflies have decided it is the perfect place to bask. Having just emerged, presumably they are very trusting of their camouflage (they are very hard to spot it is true) and will just sit there letting you get very close indeed.

They are (I think) - from top to bottom - an immature darter of some kind, maybe a Ruddy Darter, a Migrant Hawker and a Southern Hawker.

I read Gerald Durrell's My Families and Other Animals to my son recently and it evoked such memories of my own childhood in Gibraltar, where I would spend hours watching lines of ants or a praying mantis hunting for flies.

As I grow older I just accept that life moves faster for me than it does for my son. This is undeniably true, but looking at these dragonflies slowed time right down for me again. Maybe Peter Kirkham - see previous entries - has discovered this secret already with his moth-watching.

E-books

There has been a lot of press about e-books lately and Philippa, my agent, contacted me about them on Friday in relation to Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror. I'm not really sure what I think about them. I suppose my overwhelming feeling is that there is a feeling of inevitability about it, whether personally I embrace it or not.

Will it be good for writers or not? I don't know. I certainly don't see why it should necessarily be bad. Owning an iPod has definitely rekindled my love of music, not diminished it. It has changed the way I listen and the way I buy, it's true, but so what?

I love books - the feel of them, the look of them, the smell of them. I can't see me giving them up for a lump of plastic, but there is something very appealing about having a machine that could house all the books I need for research or a few novels for long trips. As I say - it is going to happen, come what may. As a writer, the issue is how (and how much) will we be paid?

I suppose one result might be that it will be harder for reading crazes - like Harry Potter - to happen. That relies on everyone knowing what you are reading. It requires visibility. That needs book jackets.

And speaking of book jackets, of course - e-books aren't great news for graphic designers are they? I bought a brilliant book called Seven Hundred Penguins recently - a survey of Penguin book jackets. It saddens me to think that the book jacket might become a thing of the past.

Fiction rules

There was an article about 'reader's block' today in the Guardian. This is the notion that we find it difficult to start or finish a book. It even listed a top ten of books that readers most often abandoned. Ulysses was in there of course, but so, a little strangely, was Crime and Punishment. This happens to be one of the best books I have ever read, so I can't really sympathise with someone abandoning it halfway. It's riveting. What's the matter with you?

There was the usual rent-a-crowd of talking eggheads to tell us ways to overcome this problem. Except for Germaine Greer. She doesn't see the point of fiction, apparently. She thinks its a waste of time. Or at least she does this week. Who knows what she will say next week. It must be so tiring to be controversial to order. If there was a world in which there could only be either Germaine Greer's books or Dostoevsky's, I know which I would choose. I trust fiction more than I trust non-fiction. Good fiction will always be true.

That said, I must say I'm suffering a bit from readers block at the moment. I never seem to find time to read enough of a book in one go to really get into it. I also have an unfortunate habit now that when I read, I start to lose concentration and go off on my own tangents, exploring plot routes the author never took but might have done. It's an occupational hazard I suppose.

After weeks of foul weather and moaning about how cold it was, the sun has come out and everyone is moaning about how hot it is. We walked along the Cam to Grantchester watching dragonflies and little fish flitting about and passing Judith and John and kids out punting. There were far too many people for it to be exactly a peaceful walk, but that river and the meadows around it are special. I hope they always stay that way.

Hadrian

I went to London today with my son, to go and see the excellent new Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum. We walked a long stretch of Hadrian's Wall last year and my son, like many 11 year-old boys (and their fathers), is fascinated by the Roman Empire.

I got back to see an email from Sarah Odedina from Bloomsbury saying how much she had enjoyed Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth. That means I can now relax a little before starting on the inevitable changes that will we asked for and that will occur to me once I read it through again. And then it will be time to start on the next book. . .

So what is next? Well, I am about to start on a more conventional novel -rather than the portmanteau novels I have been doing lately. The book is provisionally entitled Ghosts and will have a similar Victorian Gothic setting.

More of that another time. . .

End of term

My son played piano at his school concert yesterday after refusing to practice sufficiently. He played his piece beautifully, undermining the speech I had intended to give about the consequences of not listening to your parents. Children are so annoying.

He also received his SATs results and despite refusing to accept any help from his parents and do any real work for them, he did very well - making my speech about the importance of preparation utterly redundant. Children are so annoying.

I went to the studio later and did a bit of painting. For once I actually liked what I did. I liked one painting so much I almost decided it was finished and was going to bring it home. But then I looked at it again and thought that maybe I had become a little giddy. Maybe it needed just a bit more work. . .

And today it was the last day of term and the last day of primary school for my son, a fact we celebrated with a trip to the movies to see Wall-E, which was OK (though not as amazing as reviews had suggested). The look of the film while they were on the rubbish strewn Earth was great, but it went rapidly downhill when it reached the spaceship full of inflatable humans.

Pixar can do rust and chrome and grass and fur and dust and smoke and laser beams, but they can't do flesh. Give me Jungle Book-era Disney any day.

Why oh why?

I have been going through the programs on my laptop today sighing inside at how every single program I know has been tinkered with in some way. Windows Vista seems to the same as Windows XP only slightly more irritating. Well done.

I have Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 on my laptop too. I have never invested in the full Photoshop program because I have never really needed it. But Photoshop Elements 6 seems designed to push me over the edge. Whereas Elements 4.0 was designed to look exactly like Photoshop, 6.0 is a horrible, confused, tacky looking thing. Why? Why oh why oh why?

I have a webcam too. I made the mistake of turning it on and seeing myself looking back from the screen. Eeww. I wo't make that mistake again.