Reading aloud

Today I am having a last run through the proofs of The Dead of Winter. I am reading the book out loud like a madman in my office. I have said - many times - that this is the only way I know to catch those stupid clanging errors or ugly phrases that make you want to pull your own head off and do keepy-uppies with it when you come to read it out loud on publication.

And I don't just read it like a speak-your-weight machine. That wouldn't work. I try to read it well, with all the intended drama and force. I feel I have to do this because, if I can't read it to sound as I would want it to sound, then I probably haven't written it like that either.

I would recommend this method for another reason. I think that when you read your work out loud it can surprise you. I find sad scenes that I have written difficult to read, for example. I know what's coming and yet I still get that flutter and catch in my voice.

An Education

My wife and I went to see An Education this afternoon at the Picturehouse cinema here in Cambridge. We hardly ever go to the cinema it seems and here we are again. It's only a week since we came to see Fantastic Mr Fox with my son.

An Education was a lovely film with a fantastic performance by Carey Mulligan in the lead role. But everyone was good. Even Emma Thompson's cameo as the headmistress was spot on.

Having said all that, it wasn't an especially cinematic experience. I don't mean that there were no car chases or whatever. I mean that British movies often look like television, don't they. In fact maybe they always look like television. Or at least they have for many years.

I'm not really sure why this is or even whether it matters. I enjoyed An Education a lot and I'm not criticising that film at all really. But it would be nice to see a British movie where you knew - really knew - that you were at the movies.

What about me????

The Carnegie and Kate Greenaway longlists are out. Good to see Mary Hoffman and Philip Reeve on the Carnegie longlist. And Kevin Crossly-Holland. But there seems to have been some sort of mistake because - sob - I don't appear at all.

Chris Riddell is nominated twice for the Kate Greenaway - once for his work for Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book and the other for Don Quixote, another of his Walker Books spectaculars. Chris has already won the award twice - in 2001 and 2004.

Give someone else a go!!

David Roberts, who has done such brilliant job illustrating my books has been nominated for Julia Donaldson's The Troll and Paul Fleischman's Dunderheads. Dave McKean is nominated as is my old illustration tutor Tony Ross. Good luck to them all.

Pleased as I am for David Roberts, it would have been nice for him to have been nominated for his work on my book - not just because I think it is some of his best work, but because, selfishly, it would mean more exposure for me.

Me, me, me, me, me.

Still-born in the USA

I realised that I never did answer questions about the American edition of Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth. Well, sadly, the fact is there will not be one. The first two Tales of Terror books were published by Bloomsbury's American arm. Though the books have done well on this side of the Atlantic, they have obviously underperformed on that side.

It is hugely disappointing - both that readers have not taken to the books in the USA, and that there will not be an American edition of Tunnel's Mouth - but there you go. The British edition of Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth will be available in the States in the spring I'm told.

It makes me all the more appreciative of the efforts of Bloomsbury in the UK. I have been very lucky in the way Bloomsbury has decided to put resources behind the books and get them in shops and noticed.

When the book is finished and it's the very best you can make it and you've corrected the proofs - as I have just done with The Dead of Winter - then the publisher takes over. Writers may take the credit from successful books (and the blame for unsuccessful ones), but so much of what happens next is to do with the marketing and publicity departments (and budgets).

And luck of course.

My precious. . .

And talking of rings - I lost my wedding ring a year ago tonight. My son and I went to the annual firework display here in Cambridge and later I realised my ring was gone. I have few things that are truly irreplaceable, but that was one of them. Every day, I hate that its gone.

We didn't go to the fireworks this year. Thursday night is football training night and my son opted for that instead. Not that it really matters. Cambridge is firework crazy. There is a massive display every other week.

I drove over to Bottisham to pick my laptop up from Kevin, my new computer support guy. He has had all kinds of nonsense with Dell, of course. An angry letter will ensue. If only I had bought a Mac!

On the way over there I caught a bit of Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 doing a 'Top Ten Bedtime Stories' thing with Michael Rosen. By a spooky coincidence they - and Bea Campbell - were extolling the virtues of Each Peach Pear Plum. Although the whole enterprise was partly derailed by Jeremy Vine's weirdly creepy reading of the book at the end. It frightened the life out of me.

Michael Rosen was great, though. As I have already mentioned, live radio can be daunting, but Rosen was so incredibly articulate and generous about the books mentioned. He is a national treasure.

I watched the first part of my old friend and boss (and national treasure) Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain on BBC iPlayer. It was great. Andrew is just one of the cleverest people on the planet. There isn't much he doesn't know an awful lot about and, more importantly, he he has that rare gift of making that knowledge accessible without making it simple or easy. The sad state of history teaching in this country is a bit of a thing with me at the moment. This programme shows why it is so important.

Although I wasn't sure about Andrew's George Bernard Shaw accent. It sounded a bit like Dudley Moore.

Ring around the moon

There was a ring around the moon last night. It was really magical. Cambridge is very badly lit. This can make cycling rather more exciting than it is perhaps meant to be, as pedestrians loom out startlingly from the surrounding murk, but it does have the benefit of allowing us to see the night sky.

It is lovely to be able to see the stars while cycling across my local park, and better still to be able to step out of my front door and see a bright moon, a little smudged by mist, with a great glowing ring around it.

I gather that it is an effect caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. That may explain it, but it does not contain it somehow. It was weirdly moving. I stood for some time in the middle of the road just gazing up at it. Tap 'ring around the moon' into Google images. There are lots of photos. It will give you a little glimpse of what it looked like.

But it won't give you the magic.

All saints

All Hallows or All Saints depending on you preference. I had a friend at school when I was about nine years old who was inordinately proud of being born on All Saints Day. Robert Turnbull his name was. Where are you now, Robert, I wonder?

My son played and lost a game of football in the pouring rain this morning, bless him. Bad enough to play in driving wind and a cold shower without getting thumped 4-1. Ordinarily I would have been on the sidelines berating him, but my friend Ian Farnan (whose son also plays for the team) was good enough to take him there and back for me.

The day got better though because he managed to sell some of his old toys to a neighbour. Not only did he make some money but he had the satisfaction of knowing his cherished toys will be enjoyed by children he knows and is fond of.

Certain toys have such a sentimental aura about them. It was what the Toy Story films tapped into so brilliantly. Some toys doggedly refuse to have a life of their own, but others will seem to embody a whole period of a child's (and so by extension, their parents') life. They may not be sentient, but they do come alive in play.

It is the same with books of course. Picture books - favourite picture books - get read over and over again. If they are really good - and so few picture books are - then they become something else by that repetition. Something is created in the air - a mixture of you and the way you read and the voices you adopt for characters, the strange bedroom twilight, the hush, the expectant, listening child, the pictures, the words: they all become more than their parts. They are ingredients in a recipe. It won't work for everyone every time, but when it does work, it is perhaps the most magical book experience of all - for reader and listener.

I never bored of Janet and Alan Ahlberg's Each Peach Pear Plum for instance. It remains, in my opinion, one of the cleverest children's books ever.

Of any kind.