Loser continued, continued. . .

So Tales of Terror from the Black Ship has floundered and the Booktrust Teenage Prize shortlist has sailed on without her. I must admit I was very honoured to be considered, but the Black Ship doesn't strike me as a 'teenage book'. It does not have 'knife' or 'knickers' in the title and features no snogging at all.

Actually, neither do any of the books on the shortlist.

I notice at my local Borders there is a very amusing 'Teen Gothic' stand where all the books covers are black with the occasional splash of read and feature sulky-looking teenagers who seem really miffed about, like, totally being a vampire and stuff.

Maybe Black Ship fits here, I thought. But I can hear all those books saying, 'Yeah, right,' and sneering out from under their floppy fringes.

Whatever.

Is that a pangolin on your head, ma'am?

I have been looking at Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonte quite a bit recently. Ernst had the brilliantly simple idea of cutting and pasting together sections of found engravings and putting them together into a kind of crazy narrative. He has been enthusiastically ripped off by illustrators ever since.

The unexpected juxtaposition so loved by surrealists (and embraced by illustrators and advertisers) can be a bit wearing, I find. But here it really works. It is a brilliant, weird, and surprisingly naughty book at times, at turns funny and nightmarish. Edward Gorey acknowledged it as an influence on his work and it clearly informs the work of Andrzej Klimowski.

Nobody tosses a dwarf!

I was channel-hopping and caught a bit of The Fellowship of the Ring on TV. There is something a bit hilarious about the whole exercise. The script is pretty silly - 'Nobody tosses a dwarf!' being one of my favourites. Those stick-on, sticky out ears are distracting, particularly on Cate Blanchett where they look like they are going to start fluttering like butterfly wings. That strange collection of accents - Middle Earth seems to be located halfway between Yorkshire and Los Angeles. We have the whole trilogy in a boxed sets and I remember getting bed sores watching them in all their directors cut, extended (!) glory when we lived in Norfolk.

I have to confess to being fairly immune to Tolkien. I don't really know why. I ought to love it. But there is something about the word 'elf' that sets my teeth on edge. The boys who read Tolkien at my school listened to Genesis and Yes and though I can't really hold Tolkien personally responsible for that, it is just too painful a memory to get past.

Peter Jackson did do a great job on the look of the movie though. He is like one of those great nineteenth century painters, but working in film instead of paint. Obviously the landscape of New Zealand plays a huge part, but you still have to find the locations, pick the day and frame the shots. He definitely has a painters eye.

Death ray

Ian Lamb was in touch to tell me that Death Ray magazine are going to give me a mention in the November edition. Ian has given them a short story called The Merchandise and they have sent a list of questions for me to answer by way of an interview. Death Ray (in spite if their scary name) have been really supportive of me, I have to say.

I've also been in touch with Adrian Downie about doing something for the Tales of Terror website to mark the publication of Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth. We haven't quite come up with anything definitive yet, but I'll keep you posted. Adrian is a bit of whiz at these things and we are both keen to do something a little bit different.

247 tales

I took this photo over the weekend when it was still beautifully sunny in Cambridge. This chap has taken up residence across our front door, ready to catch anyone foolish enough to try and visit.

Actually we had Ross and Mardi and kids over on Saturday night, all the way from Tasmania. Sort of. They are over from Tasmania, though it's not strictly true that they came specifically for our cooking alone.

A big box of books arrived from Bloomsbury: my advance copies of Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth and the paperbacks of Tales of Terror from the Black Ship. They will be in the shops any day now.

I had a reminder from Ian Lamb, who has worked (brilliantly) as publicist on the Tales of Terror books, that I promised to write a contribution to his excellent 247tales scheme at Bloomsbury. The aim is to get young people to contribute their own stories on a monthly theme (mine being Ghosts) with a restriction of 247 as a word length - (hopefully) inspired by a Bloomsbury author writing their own 247 tale.

Follow the link if you want to see some of the existing contributions. If you are between 8 and 16, why not have a go? You might win £75 worth of Bloomsbury books and get your work up on the 247tales website.

Go on.

Painting heads

For the last couple of days I have been trying to get back into painting and did these three author portraits - Poe, Stevenson and Kafka. They are doodles really, although they are doodles in acrylic on small (smaller than A4) canvas. Poe is probably the most successful - but that might simply be that his face was already the better image.

Tunnel's mouth

More exciting post today. The first copies of Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth arrived. The hardback and paperback editions of the tales of terror books leapfrog each other. The hardback of Tunnel's Mouth comes out at the beginning of October at the same time as the paperback of Tales of Terror from the Black Ship.

It's great to see the whole set out and it is always good to see the very first hardback editions, handsome in their dust jackets and lovely David Roberts cover (who has illustrated the book as usual).