What's happening?

Well, I'm home alone at the moment, the family being away enjoying the rain-soaked pleasures of the West Country. I am just going through the last of the comments about Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth sent to me by Sarah Odedina at Bloomsbury. There isn't a huge amount to do, but somehow it always seems to take longer than you think to change a word here, and swap a phrase there.

As soon as those changes are in I will crack on with Ghosts, my new book. It will be good to get to grips with a long novel again and I hope to get that done by the end of the year for publication early in 2010. But of course, things are not quite finished with Tunnel's Mouth. The copy editing will go into much greater detail. It only seems five minutes ago I was doing the final edit on Tales of Terror from the Black Ship.

And I forgot to mention that the US copies of the Black Ship came in a week or so ago. Here is a spread showing David Robert's rather fine illustrations to a story called Irezumi, about a tattoo that. . .Well, I think I'll let you find out what happens with that tattoo when the book comes out in October.


And in a very short amount of time I'm flying up to Edinburgh to appear at the Book Festival there. I'm doing my thing at 11.30 on Sunday 17 August at the RBS Corner Theatre, so if you happen to be passing, drop in. I'll be the sweaty one up on stage.

I haven't been to Edinburgh for years and have never been when the festival was on. I'm looking forward to it. You can get a masterclass in illustration from David Roberts at the RBS Workshop Tent between 5.30 and 7pm on Saturday 16 August.

All that you know is at an end. . .

The phone rang today and when I put it to my ear a fog horn bellowed out and there may have been the sound of gulls and a voice said 'This is your captain speaking. . .' It was a little disconcerting. It went on to tell me that I had free tickets waiting for me if I just answered a few questions. The first one was going to be 'Are you a gullible sap?' presumably, but I put the phone down before I found out.

A couple of weeks ago my son stuck his head through the doorway to my office and announced in a solemn voice, 'All that you know is at an end.' Again - this was a little disconcerting given that I am specialising in spooky children at the moment. Then I remembered that we'd been watching 'Fantastic Four - Rise of the Silver Surfer' and the Silver One delivers that particular line in the movie.

I have been meaning to show some more of Susan Harvey's work on the blog. So here it is. The link will take you to her Flickr site but if you are just too lazy to bother, here are a couple of examples. Her work will be featured in the mixed show at Cambridge Contemporary Art in Trinity Street here in Cambridge. The show started on Saturday and runs for a couple of months. I popped in today and so far her stuff was not on the walls. But it will be at some point.

Brown hawker

The dragonflies have started to take over. This one came into the house yesterday - twice. It is one of the most beautiful insects I have ever seen in this country. In case you are wondering, he's sitting on a sweeping brush that was used to give him a perch to sit on whilst I persuaded him to go and hunt outside.

Brown Hawker just does not seem to do justice to something so dazzling - something that is over 10cm from head to tail-tip and shimmering with flashes of brilliant blue with wings that seem to have been made out of fine copper wire.

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.