Ch..ch..ch..changes

I am working on the my new book for Bloomsbury. I have been calling it Ghosts in old blog posts and then changed that to The Secrets of Hawton Mere. I am wondering if that is going to be the title when it goes onto print. Titles are strange things. They are either there from the start - sometimes before the start - or they they just loom out at you one day.

I see nothing wrong with this. It would be a problem if the nature of the novel was in a state of flux and the title tinkering reflected this indecision. But a title needs to be right. And the only way you know if it is right is when you hear it.

I have spoken at length to Helen Szirtes about the various issues she has with the book and the issues I might have with those issues and so on. But surely this means I am a terrible writer. Surely I should be able to do it all on my own. Why do I need help? I am a failure etc etc. . .

Well not really. The editor/writer relationship is one of constant negotiation. Certainly a writer who gives in to every suggestion probably doesn't know what they are doing. A writer who refuses to accept any suggestion is probably insecure. And a writer who refuses to consider good suggestions - especially when they are coming from someone as intelligent and insightful as Helen - is just plain stupid.

For a lot of the time I was an illustrator I would do anything to avoid using someones suggestion. I felt like it was my job to come up with the ideas and I had failed if someone else did it. I would reject perfectly good ideas just so that I could hang on to the notion that it was all my work.

I think working in newspapers changed that. In newspapers you are usually dealing with an editor rather than a designer and they are used to talking things through with journalists - that's the way they work. Journalists tend to have an annoying desire to have every word in the article portrayed in the illustration, but at least they know what they are talking about when it comes to the article you are supposed to illustrate or the concept you are dealing with in your cartoon. At the Independent I had Matt Hoffman on the comment pages and he was no more going to let a lame cartoon of mine through, than he was a lame column. And quite right too.

I still don't take advice easily. I still want to do everything myself. But with writing I think I'm more willing to accept that what I've done might not be the only way to go. I want everything I do to be better than the last thing I did. I want everything I do to be the best it can possibly be and if someone can see a route to that better than I can, then I'm not going to deliberately walk the other way just to be bloody minded.

Philippa Milnes-Smith got in touch having read Helen's suggestions and gave me some more, just as thoughtful as Helen's. I won't be incorporating them all. In fact some of the detail will become irrelevant as I work and areas are discarded or added to and characters dropped and introduced. But Helen and Philippa's comments will help me decide what to keep and what to lose.

Isabel Ford sent the proofs of Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth today. It is a general rule of thumb that publishing deadlines are drawn to each other as if by some kind of gravitational force. So I need to get this book sorted out and back to Bloomsbury and then I need to get the proofs read and sent back. It is going to be a busy few weeks.

Adverts

There are two brilliant adverts being shown on British TV. Both feature children, but are very, very different.

The first is a road safety ad. It shows a man haunted by the broken body of the child he had run over. It is not only a horribly effective advert, it is a brilliantly creepy piece of film making. It is a model of restraint, and shows that you can get pack a jolt and a shudder into a very short time frame if you know what you are doing. It's the banality of the locations that make it so horrible. It is shocking, in the best sense of the work.

The new Cadbury's Dairy Milk ad by contrast is hilarious. It is also a wonderful piece of film making and is also, in its way, a model of restraint. The performances by the kids are brilliant. How anyone came up with the notion of children waggling their eyebrows to a a dance track as a way of advertising chocolate I cannot imagine.

But I'm very glad they did.

Snowflakes are falling

Snow finally came to Cambridge today - and indeed most of the UK. It was pretty deep by the end of the day. I walked my son to school only to find that the school was closed and had not been added to the list on the local BBC radio. Still, it gave us a chance to see what Cambridge looked like under a crisp clean layer of snow. And it looked beautiful if course.

Later in the day we went out to Grantchester Meadows which looked magical and was all but deserted. The snow was relatively untouched and stretched away to the horizon, blending into the blank sky. The river was black and a large hunk of grey ice floated by on a strong current.

One of the many advantages of working from home is that it means you get a chance to have a snowball fight with your son (though I shouldn't be saying this as my publisher/agent may read this and wonder why I am not nose to the keyboard.

But this was perfect snowball snow and we must have had a snowball fight every chance we've had since he was able to throw one.

But it may be time to stop. His aim is getting too good.

Tea? Coffee? Frostbite?

I opened the curtains today and groaned. There was no sign of the sharp frost we had been promised and that meant that I would have to go to football with my son and not only that, I would have to stand on the sidelines serving teas and coffees in a freezing cold wind.

The parents take it in turns to serve refreshments at the matches and today it was my turn. It was bitterly cold and my son still belligerently refuses to score a goal. Why can't he play table tennis or badminton something indoors, where parents could take it in turns to serve cocktails and finger food?

One of the important parts of serving refreshments is that the kids get squash and biscuits at half time. Of course I screwed that up and though Will and Jane Hill (their son goes to the same school as mine and has recently joined the team - and has already scored!) stepped in to help me, it arrived just as the second half was starting.

I am an utter failure as a soccer dad.

You're Michael Palin

I went to London today and on strolling out of Leicester Square tube station I found myself walking next to someone. I tried to overtake and he did the same so we continued to walk parallel to one another. I glanced sideways and saw that it was Michael Palin.

'I have an overwhelming urge to tell you that you're Michal Palin,' I said. 'But you probably already know that.'

'Yes, indeed,' he said with a smile, downing his espresso.

He was as charming and as forgiving of irritants like me as you you would expect.

Later in the day I went to see my good friends Chris Riddell and Dave Simonds at the new Guardian offices on York Way near King's Cross station. I used to see them every week for years, and though I do not in any way miss the work we used to plough through at the Economist, I certainly miss that contact and the laughs we used to have (between bouts of impotent rage and soul-crushing despair). Dave still works there, and probably has a better time of it without me having a hissy fit every week.

Dave and I actually still work on the same publication - the New Statesman - but the wonders of modern technology mean that I do not have to physically go to the offices and send my strip as an email attachment.

Christopher Hibbert

I called Helen Szirtes today to talk about her notes on my latest book. Helen has been great to work with on my Bloomsbury books and I'm very happy to be working with her again on this one. Now I need to knuckle down and get on with the changes.

I was very sorry to read of the death of Christopher Hibbert. The challenge in writing historical fiction is to feel comfortable in the period in which you are setting the book. For this to be the case you need lots of information about the details of life: what do people wear, what do they eat, how do they eat and so on. If I have a character stepping into a street, I want to be able to visualise that street, the buildings, the people, the animals, the smells and sounds. The more convinced I am of these things, the more convincingly I will describe them in my book.

There are certain writers who bring certain periods or places or peoples to life. N A M Rodgers' books on the British navy are fantastic. I am constantly delving into Liza Picard's books about London. More than anything you need to feel secure in the historian's knowledge, and I trusted Christopher Hibbert's expertise completely.

Hibbert wrote really well about the eighteenth century, a period I have explored a few times, with my Tom Marlowe adventures for Random House and with Jail-breaker Jack, my non-fiction book about Jack Sheppard. It was Hibbert, together with Roy Porter, who helped me to get a feel for this extraordinary period in British history.

Hibbert wrote a wonderful book about Jack Sheppard called The Road to Tyburn, which was reissued a while ago as a Penguin Classic History. It is not only a fascinating piece of social history, it is also a very fine piece of writing.

Being too human

I watched Being Human last night on BBC3. Oooh it could have been good. But it wasn't. Not really. . .

The opening section had promise. I really liked the idea that the vampire character was first bitten in WWI. It was wonderfully random. But the 'laughs' are weak. The section where Russell Tovey rushes around a wood searching for a place to transform, constantly bumping into other people was just embarrassing. And the use of music is awful - like Scooby-Doo, but worse.

The lead actors are good. The leader of the vampires is particularly good because he does not conform to the usual goth stereotype. Aidan Turner as the vampire and Russell Tovey as the werewolf are fine - Turner is weirdly more lupine than Tovey, but Tovey's perfect because he looks like a puppy. Lenora Crichlow as the ghost isn't great, but that's not her fault.

I realise that the BBC probably spent its entire special effects budget on the werewolf transformation sequence (and incidentally, isn't it about time someone came up with a new spin on this? American Werewolf in London was a long, long time ago) but is she a ghost or not. If she is a ghost how is she sweeping the floor and making cups of tea. We can see her, but if we couldn't, would we see a cup floating about? How does Tovey hug her? Is she solid? Because if she can move things around and be touched then isn't she actually just a flatmate?

She's a ghost. I want to see through her! I want her to walk through walls!

Production values are always going to be a problem in a programme like this. It was never going to have the gloss of Heroes. But that can be a good thing. Heroes has ended up chasing its own CGI tail. It can be all about the writing.

Strangely this concept echoes something I have had on my computer for a while. My idea was better (of course) and rather than put me off, it strikes me that perhaps I ought to have another look at that. . .