Loser!

Here are another couple of skull-related images I've been playing about with.

I developed a twinge in the small of my back yesterday and it blossomed into jarring pain by the evening as I watched the rather dull match between Barcelona and Chelsea. My back is still astonishingly painful this morning if I try to bend or swivel. And it turns out I bend and swivel quite a lot.

And children are very happy to kick a man when he's down, so I got a hard time from my son yesterday who told me that his English teacher had put up posters of the Carnegie Medal shortisted authors and because I was such a loser I wasn't there. I'd let him down, he said. 'You've let yourself down, and you've let your family down,' joked my wife.

At least I think she was joking.

I'm due to fly up to Newcastle on Thursday for the presentation (to somebody else presumably) of the North East Book Award. I'm shortlisted along with five other authors. I spent seven or eight years in Newcastle before going to art college in Manchester and my father and my sister still live there.

My sister phoned this morning and I told her that I may have to cancel if it gets worse, but I really don't want to have to. She was happily impressed by the hotel Bloomsbury have booked for me, though. As things stand, I will fly early on Thursday, get a cab across to my old house in Kenton where my dad still lives and see him and my sister. Then get over to my hotel on the Quayside and then on to the awards bash at the Centre for Life. I'll go back over to my dad's on Friday and then fly back in the evening.

I received a couple of packages from Bloomsbury today: one was a book very kindly sent by Isabel Ford called Unnacustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (a book she had mentioned during our editing session) and the other was a collection of David Roberts' roughs for Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth. They are going to be great.

Oh - and I forgot to mention that Joad Raymond ran the marathon on Sunday in, what seems to me anyway, the incredible time of 2.57.11. I watched the finishing line waiting for him, stepped out of the room to check what he was wearing and missed him! He describes the whole day on his blog ('Miles to go before I sleep' in my blog list on the left)

Frosted skull

I went to the studio today. Although the day started well, it was drizzling by the time I set off on my bike. Cold too.

It still feels odd being back in the studio and using the artistic side of my brain. I love drawing. I love just moving a pen or a pencil or a brush over a piece of paper. It has been a kind of comfort thing to me ever since I can remember. Doodling is definitely a basic need of mine.

I've been playing about with this frosty skull effect, drawing it in black ink, reversing it out then colourising it on Photoshop.

Boy-friendy

Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror failed to get onto the Carnegie Medal shortlist today. I'm not (sob) upset. Really I'm (sob) not.

IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ME! IT. . . SHOULD. . . HAVE. . . BEEN. . . MEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

Sorry about that. But whilst I am generally a 'let the best man/woman win' kind of a guy, I was troubled to see the spin put on the shortlist: namely that it was a 'boy-friendly list' of books that showed 'what it was like to be a boy'.

Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but let's face it all books with a male protagonist - whether they are gritty urban realist stories, historical fiction or out and out fantasy - (if they are to be believable) need to conjure up what it is to be a boy.

Just as there is no one boy, so there is no one 'boy's book'. When I saw Mark Walden at the Edinburgh Festival last year, we both felt that we had been writing book that had a lot to do with fathers and sons (or surrogate fathers and sons). We did not set out to write a book that tackled the issues surrounding the relationships between fathers and their sons, but we are both sons and we are both fathers. These things just come out, like it or not.

Anyway, the shortlisted authors are:

Frank Cottrell Boyce
Kevin Brooks
Eoin Colfer
Siobhan Dowd
Keith Gray
Patrick Ness
Kate Thompson

Good luck to all of them.

I'm pretty content to be propping up the bar in the Salon des Refuses commiserating with the likes of Phillip Pullman, David Almond, Mary Hoffman, Eva Ibotson, Celia Rees and Geraldine McCaughrean.

Maybe next time.

The lakes of Canada

I went into the studio for the first time in ages today. Lynette came in later and we had a coffee and caught up on each other's news. The yard where we rent studio space has been burgled twice in the last week or so and there is much activity putting in alarms and added security.

I saw Peter Kirkham for a drink this evening. We went to The Pickerel near Magdalene College. We talked about Newcastle - Peter and I went to the same school there, though at different times (he being young, I old: so very, very old) - as well as our families, comics and music.

Peter agreed with me about Heath Ledger's Joker, but we disagreed about contemporary comics. Peter is an avid purchaser of comics, but I just can't get past the prevalence of Photoshop rendering techniques and much prefer the people who are working in graphic novels (admittedly with a lot more time and control). To me comics are all about drawing and the way the panels and pages are designed to tell the story. A perfect comic for me is one in which the story and the images just melt into one another. Bad drawing and design is not improved by airbrushing and light effects. But, as I may have mentioned before - I am an old man, so what do I know.

Anyway, in amongst our chat about music, I mentioned that I have a soft spot for Sufjan Stevens. Here he is up on a roof with a banjo and a head for heights singing, not one of his songs, but The Lakes of Canada by the Innocence Mission.

The man who laughs

I went to London today to meet Helen Szirtes for lunch. It was a glorious day and we sat at the terrace cafe at Somerset House on the river in bright sunshine.

As usual, I talked too much. Writers are all probably a little too fascinated by their own story and have a tendency to blather on. Or at least that's my excuse. Although Helen is a writer too and she is no where near as bad. Perhaps - and this goes for so many things - it's just me.

Or maybe it's men.

Or maybe just me.

We talked about all kinds of things - my work (a lot), her work (a little), books in general, movies - and in particular The Dark Knight.

I watched The Dark Knight on a boy's night in with my son. We had watched Batman Begins the week before and though that movie was violent, it did not prepare either of us for The Dark Knight. How on earth did that movie get a 12? Has the world gone mad etc etc?

But that (nor Christian Bale's silly Batman voice) was not my main problem with the movie. Heath Ledger has been so lauded for his turn as the the Joker it seems something approaching sacrilege to say that I did not think he was right at all. I'm sure he gave the performance he was asked for - and I'm not faulting that performance at all - but the Joker is not a beefy, brutal thug. No, no, no.

Helen tried to convince me that this was simply a clash with my take on the Joker, but I don't think it is true. I think the strongest thing that Batman has going for him is the way that he is reinvented constantly so that he acquires the quality of a myth. But the Joker (like all Batman's enemies) is bizarre and nightmarish (and I would question the point in trying to make a 'realistic' Batman movie). He is doesn't smirk, he howls with laughter. He is demonic.

Some say (though it is hotly disputed) that Batman's creator, Bob Kane, claimed as his inspiration for The Joker, Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs. Oddly Heath Ledger uses the story of this movie as one of his explanations for his scarred face: namely that as a boy a knife was used to carve a permanent grin. . .

Los objetos malditos

I'm indebted to someone called 'Anna' (see comment on Devil's Dictionary post) for sending me a link to the cover of the Spanish edition of Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror which I hadn't seen. Not sure who the publisher is (or when it's out) off the top of my head - I'll have to check. I'm not fluent in Spanish - in that I don't really speak it at all - but I'm guessing the title roughly translates as Tales of Terror of the Evil Objects. But I stand to be corrected.

The sharper eyed among you may detect that some additional figures have appeared among the trees at the bottom right. I'm not sure David Roberts had anything to do with drawing them.

Spooky.

Stimulating fiction

So I was walking through Waterstones today and I noticed that the existentialist/dystopian table top formerly known (perhaps as a subtle and knowing reference to the doublespeak of 1984) as Feel Good Fiction is now called Discover Stimulating Fiction. I count that as a small victory for customer power. And well done to Waterstones for actually responding to comments so positively.

My only criticism would be: shouldn't all fiction be stimulating? I mean - isn't that the point of fiction? What effect do they see the rest of their stock having?