Adrian Downie got in touch yesterday. Adrian is responsible for the lovely Tales of Terror website at Bloomsbury. He was asking me about what we might do for Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth and saying that Bloomsbury have been shooting some videos for their website and putting them on YouTube.
Normally these take the form of a question and answer session with the author, but Adrian was wondering if we could do something a bit more interesting.
I'll keep you posted. . .
Saturday, 8 August 2009
Friday, 7 August 2009
The Economist
A few posts back I was talking about my life in newspapers and mentioned that I used to work for The Economist every week between 1990 and 1996. As well as doing drawings for the various sections - Europe, Asia, America etc - we illustrators would also occasionally be asked to do the cover. These are a few of mine.
When I left college I had assumed I would work in books. I really only knew about book illustration. I was taught by Tony Ross who was working on his own picture books while heading the illustration department and he used his contacts to get me my first job - illustrating Sherlock Holmes stories for the French publisher Gallimard.
This was a dream job. Gallimard had published some of my favourite authors and Sherlock Holmes was a gift to an illustrator. But I blew it. When I took my drawings in, I was told that they were 'too dark'. Whether they were literally too dark (I was fond of big areas of black ink) or whether they were too grim, I never did find out. My career as a book illustrator stalled there and never really took off again.
Instead I became an editorial illustrator, working for newspapers and magazines, though I did do the odd advert or brochure or even label for cans of beans. Deadlines are tight in this line of work and are immovable. The rubbery deadlines of the book world are still a little strange to me.
Illustration is in part about making the best use of the restrictions that are applied. It is like being asked to cook a meal with limited time and limited ingredients. What can I do in the time allowed? How can I adapt the brief so I can play to my strengths? With editorial illustration time is possibly the biggest factor. We were never given more than a day to come up with a rough (though mostly with an Economist cover, the concept was given to you) and then do the finished artwork.
Sometimes it was a lot less than a day.
Thursday, 6 August 2009
Visiting economist
We had the lovely Mardi Dungey over for dinner tonight. Mardi is on one of her visits to the university and has a punishing schedule which sees her jetting off back to Tasmania tomorrow morning.
It is always a pleasure to see Mardi. Not only is she great company, but she's also like our own personal economist. Everyone should have one.
Of course she isn't really ours.
Not to keep
It is always a pleasure to see Mardi. Not only is she great company, but she's also like our own personal economist. Everyone should have one.
Of course she isn't really ours.
Not to keep
Wednesday, 5 August 2009
Adult fiction
I spoke to Chris Riddell again today. He was inviting us up to his Norfolk retreat and as usual we ended up having a long conversation about all kinds of other stuff.
The last time we spoke I had been telling Chris that I had been contemplating doing some historical fiction and mentioned we talked about an idea I have had for a while for a book that opens with the a pretty bloody evocation of the Battle of Hastings. I started working on it for a project for Usborne that fell through. It has been buzzing about in my mind ever since. Chris was suggesting that I write the same book - but for the adult market.
I suppose I have always thought that I would write for adults. This is not because I think that writing for children is not a compelling enough thing on its own, but because there are things I would like to write that just seem to lend themselves more readily to a book for adults.
We'll see. . .
The last time we spoke I had been telling Chris that I had been contemplating doing some historical fiction and mentioned we talked about an idea I have had for a while for a book that opens with the a pretty bloody evocation of the Battle of Hastings. I started working on it for a project for Usborne that fell through. It has been buzzing about in my mind ever since. Chris was suggesting that I write the same book - but for the adult market.
I suppose I have always thought that I would write for adults. This is not because I think that writing for children is not a compelling enough thing on its own, but because there are things I would like to write that just seem to lend themselves more readily to a book for adults.
We'll see. . .
Monday, 3 August 2009
Vespa
Or should that be vespe? Having suffered a plague of flying ants recently, Cambridge is now undergoing a plague of wasps. And I hate wasps.
I still hear it regularly trotted out that wasps are fascinating creatures that won't sting you if you leave them alone. This is such nonsense. I have been stung sitting on a tube, where the first I even knew about the wasp was the sting it rammed in my neck. I was stung mowing the lawn at our house in Norfolk. A wasp dropped out of an apple tree onto my head (which was closely cropped and tonsured by time's tweezers) and stung me twice before I flicked it off.
Wasps are evil. They may rid the garden of pests and pollinate orchards. They may read stories to old people in hospitals and save baby seals from fur trappers for all I know, but they are coming between me and my peaches and they need to be stopped.
Stopped, I tell you!
Well - all right, perhaps I don't actually hate them. I find all animal life fascinating to a varying degree and wasps, like ants, do have a particular weird intensity about them. I suppose its just that whilst you can watch a bee going about its business safe in the knowledge that it is more interested in pollen than you, wasps have that drunken 'Who are you looking at?' unpredictability about them.
And then there are the numbers. When there are a couple of wasps it doesn't seem quite so bad (though even one determined wasp can spoil a picnic) but at the moment there are thousands of them. I walked into our tiny back garden the other day and heard a rasping sound I took to be something - a mouse say - gnawing away at something. But it turned out to be a dozen or so wasps rasping away at the wooden fence, gathering their materials for a bout of nest-building. I don't want to hear wasps chewing. It's wrong and bit scary.
I still hear it regularly trotted out that wasps are fascinating creatures that won't sting you if you leave them alone. This is such nonsense. I have been stung sitting on a tube, where the first I even knew about the wasp was the sting it rammed in my neck. I was stung mowing the lawn at our house in Norfolk. A wasp dropped out of an apple tree onto my head (which was closely cropped and tonsured by time's tweezers) and stung me twice before I flicked it off.
Wasps are evil. They may rid the garden of pests and pollinate orchards. They may read stories to old people in hospitals and save baby seals from fur trappers for all I know, but they are coming between me and my peaches and they need to be stopped.
Stopped, I tell you!
Well - all right, perhaps I don't actually hate them. I find all animal life fascinating to a varying degree and wasps, like ants, do have a particular weird intensity about them. I suppose its just that whilst you can watch a bee going about its business safe in the knowledge that it is more interested in pollen than you, wasps have that drunken 'Who are you looking at?' unpredictability about them.
And then there are the numbers. When there are a couple of wasps it doesn't seem quite so bad (though even one determined wasp can spoil a picnic) but at the moment there are thousands of them. I walked into our tiny back garden the other day and heard a rasping sound I took to be something - a mouse say - gnawing away at something. But it turned out to be a dozen or so wasps rasping away at the wooden fence, gathering their materials for a bout of nest-building. I don't want to hear wasps chewing. It's wrong and bit scary.
Sunday, 2 August 2009
Repetition
I am busy working through Helen Szirtes amendments to The Dead of Winter. When I wrote the book, Helen sent me a set of questions and suggestions. These were big issues about plot and character and continuity and so on. These present amendments are to that second draft that resulted from those initial editing suggestions.
We are at a the fine tuning stage now. Helen has repeatedly written 'rep' for repetition. Repetition is my most common crime and in conversations with other writers I have discovered that am not alone in this. It is incredible how many times I can use the same word in the same paragraph. It is some kind of skill.
Some kind of incredibly useless skill.
We are at a the fine tuning stage now. Helen has repeatedly written 'rep' for repetition. Repetition is my most common crime and in conversations with other writers I have discovered that am not alone in this. It is incredible how many times I can use the same word in the same paragraph. It is some kind of skill.
Some kind of incredibly useless skill.
Saturday, 1 August 2009
Safe
We had dinner with Joad Raymond yesterday. It was good to see him as always and we always get well fed - Joad is a very good cook.
When I saw Paul yesterday we talked about the issue of the government register for visiting authors. This controversy blew up just before I headed off to the Lakes. I was interested to hear what Paul had to say, given that he is a teacher as well as an author.
Paul's view was - and I hope I'm not misrepresenting him here - that it seems unreasonable to expect other people working with children to be checked and not authors. As you may have read, Philip Pullman led the charge of authors outraged that they were having to pay to prove that they were not paedophiles. I have sympathy with both points of view.
I have been a governor at two primary schools here in the UK and there is a requirement that governors are CRB checked - basically a police check to make sure you do not have a criminal record. If I remember rightly, the school pays for this check.
Governors actually have little or no unsupervised access to children, but you can imagine the outcry if it turned out that a person with a precious conviction for a sex crime had been accepted onto a school governing body. It seems only prudent to check. Ditto with parent helpers (who do have significant access to children) and those who work in the kitchens or school office or as caretakers.
However, an author visit is very different. Schools are completely in control of how much access a visiting author has to the children. In most visits they are talking to a large group - sometimes very large indeed. Even then, there are staff present. On the odd occasions I have been left alone with children, there have always been a large group of them. And in any case, most authors - and I am certainly one of them - would ideally rather never be left alone with children. I prefer my visits to be about exciting an interest in writing and illustration and this is best done if teachers do the disciplining. If a school does not want a visitor to have unsupervised access to its children, then they are perfectly well able to prevent it.
The only one-to-one access I ever have with children is during a book signing when some children will take the opportunity to have a chat while you sign their book. This is one of the joys of going into a school because let's face it, if you don't like children you shouldn't be writing for them and hearing what they have to say is not only fun but vital, I think. But this is invariably in a crowded hall and the child I am speaking to is in (hopefully) a long line and there are staff around and a table between us.
Actually, there is one other one-to-one scenario. Often - almost every time in fact - when I go to a school, a child will wander over to me as the event is breaking up and the children are leaving and tell me about something they are doing. It might be about a story they are writing, but it might just as easily be about a band they are in or a movie they've just scene. These brief - and they are always brief - conversations are a big part of why I go into schools.
Paul is perhaps right that it seems inevitable that all visitors to schools will have to be checked in future. But will that include builders working on site - it certainly didn't when I was a governor. Will this list make children any safer? No it won't. Not one tiny little bit. Making the wearing of cycle helmets compulsory - that would make children safer.
I agree with Philip Pullman that there isn't something odious about having to prove yourself innocent - particularly of such a vile crime and one that seems so utterly at odds with the urge to write for children. When I watched the news and heard a parent saying, 'If they haven't got anything to hide, then why are they bothered?' I agreed with him even more. If all of this results in fewer authors visiting schools it will be a tragedy.
When I saw Paul yesterday we talked about the issue of the government register for visiting authors. This controversy blew up just before I headed off to the Lakes. I was interested to hear what Paul had to say, given that he is a teacher as well as an author.
Paul's view was - and I hope I'm not misrepresenting him here - that it seems unreasonable to expect other people working with children to be checked and not authors. As you may have read, Philip Pullman led the charge of authors outraged that they were having to pay to prove that they were not paedophiles. I have sympathy with both points of view.
I have been a governor at two primary schools here in the UK and there is a requirement that governors are CRB checked - basically a police check to make sure you do not have a criminal record. If I remember rightly, the school pays for this check.
Governors actually have little or no unsupervised access to children, but you can imagine the outcry if it turned out that a person with a precious conviction for a sex crime had been accepted onto a school governing body. It seems only prudent to check. Ditto with parent helpers (who do have significant access to children) and those who work in the kitchens or school office or as caretakers.
However, an author visit is very different. Schools are completely in control of how much access a visiting author has to the children. In most visits they are talking to a large group - sometimes very large indeed. Even then, there are staff present. On the odd occasions I have been left alone with children, there have always been a large group of them. And in any case, most authors - and I am certainly one of them - would ideally rather never be left alone with children. I prefer my visits to be about exciting an interest in writing and illustration and this is best done if teachers do the disciplining. If a school does not want a visitor to have unsupervised access to its children, then they are perfectly well able to prevent it.
The only one-to-one access I ever have with children is during a book signing when some children will take the opportunity to have a chat while you sign their book. This is one of the joys of going into a school because let's face it, if you don't like children you shouldn't be writing for them and hearing what they have to say is not only fun but vital, I think. But this is invariably in a crowded hall and the child I am speaking to is in (hopefully) a long line and there are staff around and a table between us.
Actually, there is one other one-to-one scenario. Often - almost every time in fact - when I go to a school, a child will wander over to me as the event is breaking up and the children are leaving and tell me about something they are doing. It might be about a story they are writing, but it might just as easily be about a band they are in or a movie they've just scene. These brief - and they are always brief - conversations are a big part of why I go into schools.
Paul is perhaps right that it seems inevitable that all visitors to schools will have to be checked in future. But will that include builders working on site - it certainly didn't when I was a governor. Will this list make children any safer? No it won't. Not one tiny little bit. Making the wearing of cycle helmets compulsory - that would make children safer.
I agree with Philip Pullman that there isn't something odious about having to prove yourself innocent - particularly of such a vile crime and one that seems so utterly at odds with the urge to write for children. When I watched the news and heard a parent saying, 'If they haven't got anything to hide, then why are they bothered?' I agreed with him even more. If all of this results in fewer authors visiting schools it will be a tragedy.
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