Climb not

One of the most common questions a writer gets asked is 'Where do you get your ideas from?' Sometimes there is a clear answer to this question and sometimes not. The fact is that writers absorb the same fairly random cocktail of news, stories, movies and so on as everyone else, and have similar trials and tribulations, triumphs and tragedies, in their own personal lives.

The only real difference is that writers are given to dramatising (or over-dramatising) their personal lives and that a writer's reading and viewing may (though not always!) be more selective, with a particular project in mind, and that a writer has the ability to process all this information and make new sense of it. All art (writing, painting, photography, film-making) is about editing. It's as much about what you discard as about what you collect.

I wrote Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror after writing quite a lot of historical fiction (and non-fiction). I wrote historical fiction because that is what I enjoyed writers of historical fiction as a child - Rosemary Sutcliff, Henry Treece, Leon Garfield and so on. On the face of it the switch to writing horror looks like a change of direction, but that is not strictly true.

In fact many of the books I have written have an element of horror in them. My Tom Marlowe series for Random House - Death and the Arrow, The White Rider and Redwulf's Curse - all have a kind of Gothic aspect to the story. In fact had they been marketed as supernatural thrillers rather than historical adventures, they may have sold more copies. Even in my non-fiction output, I wrote a book called Witch Hunt about the Salem witch trials. I have always had a love of strange tales of one kind or another.

Long before I had anything published for children, I kept notebooks in which I would sketch out the plots of short stories - stories of a macabre bent. I was - and still am - an avid reader of this kind of story. There is a rich tradition of this kind of fiction in the British Isles (although not in any way confined to these shores) and it always felt very natural to me. Some of the stories I mapped out in those notebooks would find themselves in the Tales of Terror series.

Enjoying macabre stories is one thing - writing them is something else. I was determined right from the start that I did not want to write obvious horror - a story in which horror is the punchline. That kind of horror has its place, just as slapstick has its place - but for me it is more satisfying as a cinematic type of horror.

But I still wanted my stories to be scary.

An obvious place to start seemed to be with my own fears. Climb Not - the first story in Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror - plays on my fear of heights. It would certainly be a nightmare scenario for me, to be at the top of a very high tree and to be pursued with nowhere to go. . .

As I mentioned in my previous post, another inspiration for Climb Not was M R James' story, The Ash Tree. When I wrote Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror we were living in Norfolk and we had a very old ash tree at the back of the house - one that had a mysterious hole in it. The tree had been pollarded and so it's branches did not touch the house, as in M R James' story. Thank goodness.

We were also lucky enough to have a giant elm tree standing over the boundary wall that ran along our drive. Its crown used to shake like a lion's mane and it sounded like the ocean on windy nights. On still nights owls would screech from its branches.

The idea of objects being hammered into the bark came from a half-remembered documentary about this being done in Ireland to ancient, sacred trees. On our recent visit to Wales, we visited Portmeirion and saw trees with coins hammered into the bark. These were clearly not ancient, but it was still fantastic to see.

Uncle M R James

One of the strange things about being a writer is that you end up doing events, talking about a book that is at least a year old. Very soon, I will be going up and down the country promoting The Dead of Winter, a novel I submitted to Bloomsbury in the summer of 2009. I have already submitted the 1st draft of my next novel - Mr Creecher - but that will not be published until October 2011.

This autumn is even more confused because Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror has been chosen for the Booked Up list, as I mentioned in the last post. So, before I get involved in The Dead of Winter, I though I'd talk a little bit about how Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror came about and what inspired the stories therein.


I suppose I should start by talking about M R James, as Uncle Montague is named for Montague Rhodes James. M R James has a strong association with Cambridge, where I know live - he was an undergraduate here, and was Provost of King's College between 1905 and 1918. He is best known for writing a number of classic and very English ghost stories.

But my love of M R James had nothing to do with Cambridge and began many years ago, when I was in my teens. When I first came across his stories, I lived in a large council estate on the west side of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a world far removed from that of M R James and his stories. Added to which, I did not read the stories at all - or at least not at first.

M R James told his ghost stories in his candlelit rooms at Kings as a Christmas Eve treat for friends and favourite students. The BBC decided to give us all a similar treat in the mid 1970s, by adapting M R James' stories for television. I watched Lost Hearts and A Warning to the Curious absolutely spellbound and it was only later that I noticed the name 'M R James' on the credits and sought out his stories in print. Television is not always a terrible influence.

When I thought about having a character telling the creepy tales, it seemed only fitting to make a small acknowledgment to the one of the masters of the genre by having them share a first name. The very first story he tells in my book - Climb Not - was to some extent inspired by M R James' The Ash Tree - one of the stories the BBC adapted.

Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror owes a lot to both M R James and to the BBC adaptations of his stories, but their were many more influences at work. In the next few posts I'll talk about some of those. . .

Pick me!

It was is son's first day back at school today. He would have started yesterday but we had an additional 'training day' added onto the school holidays and we took advantage by heading off up to Norfolk on what turned out to be a really beautiful day. Many blackberries were picked.

Even though I have not had a break this summer, my writing discipline definitely wavers over the summer. My work schedule tends to revolve around my son's school schedule and when he is on holiday everything seems to go a little fuzzy at the edges.

The beginning of the school year here in the UK is exciting for me this year because I am very pleased to say that Uncle Montague's Tales of Terrors has been included in this year's Booked Up list. As I explained some time ago, Booked Up is a scheme whereby all children beginning their secondary school life at eleven years old, get to choose one free book from a set list - a list that this year includes books by Philip Reeve, Mary Hooper, Alan Gibbons and Michael Rosen, among others.

The website is now up and running so take a look. I mentioned a while back that I had to go in and do a short piece to camera and that the experience had left me feeling drained and miserable for days. I had a chance to look at the film today and though I wasn't embarrassing (which would have been worse, admittedly) I certainly wasn't at the top of my game. I don't look as excited as I should be by my own work. But maybe there's an explanation.

Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror is a creepy book. It didn't suit being under those bright studio lights. It is a book that rarely comes out of the shadows. It is a book that would ideally be read in a leather wing-backed arm chair, next to a roaring fire in an isolated cottage with a winter wind blowing rattling the windows.

But perhaps you don't have access to such a location. Never mind. That's OK. Luckily Uncle Montague lives in just such a house and he brings the location with him. All you have to do is snuggle up in the glow of your bedside light (first making sure that the wardrobe door is tightly shut and there is nothing under the bed that shouldn't be there), and read.

If you like scary stories that is. . .

Thai tales

I received copies of the Thai editions of Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror and Tales of Terror from the Black Ship through the post the other day. They are published by Tawan.

Most foreign editions of the Tales of Terror book have gone with David Roberts' illustrations - both on the cover and inside. The Thai editions are unusual - to say the least - because they have gone with the same images, but have redrawn the illustrations throughout. I was not involved in this process, so I have no idea how or why this happened, but it is certainly very odd.

Mister Creecher

Before I can get on to talking about the cover of Mister Creecher, I need to tell you a little bit about what the book is actually about.You may remember, if you visit this blog regularly, that I wrote a few posts about my interest in Frankenstein and the Shelleys and so on. Authors are regularly asked where their ideas come from and often the answer is necessarily vague - because ideas have a life of their own, and are the result of a lifetimes observing and reading and experience - but occasionally it is possible to point to an actual, specific place. This is one of those occasions.

The idea for Mr Creecher came directly from Chapter 19 of Frankenstein which begins with the words, 'London was our present point of rest.' The 'our' in that sentence refers to Victor Frankenstein and his friend Henry Clerval. In the novel, Frankenstein and Clerval visit England, going to London and Oxford before heading north to Matlock and Cumbria and eventually heading on to Scotland. Unbeknown to poor, doomed Clerval, Frankenstein has built a huge humanoid creature and he has promised this creature a mate. Although there is no mention of the creature until Frankenstein reaches Orkney (where he will build and destroy the mate), it is clear that he must have been tracking him the whole way.

This fascinated me when I first read it. I loved the fact that the creature had come here, to England - and not only that, he comes in the Regency period, just after the death of Jane Austen and just prior to the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley. He comes to the England of Constable and Turner. John Keats makes a very similar journey in the year that Frankenstein is published, 1818 - heading north with his friend Charles Brown, visiting the Lakes and going on to Scotland where Keats will fall ill.

And so I wondered, might it not be possible for Frankenstein's creature to meet a boy - a damaged, unloved teenage thief - on the streets of London and begin a mutually dependent relationship with him. The creature is huge and terrifying. He can only move at night and even then with difficulty. The boy will be his eyes and ears as he gets him to make sure that Frankenstein is keeping his promise. The boy sees the giant as a powerful ally. Although the relationship will begin as pure expediency, a bond will develop between these two misfits.

So to the cover.

I sent Kate Clarke, the designer at Bloomsbury, a kind of mood board - a whole bunch of images, many of which I had close to hand during the book's writing, pinned to my notice board, or as a rolling set of screensavers. Some of these were contemporary paintings, some were anatomical engravings. One of the latter showed a heart and we explored that avenue for a while. But in the end it proved a dead end and we moved on to portraying the characters in the book.

I produced three roughs. One showing the boy - Billy - and Mister Creecher walking together, one with the two of them standing together and one showing Mister Creecher on his own. The background is a steal from Bride of Frankenstein by the way.

Covers are a committee decision involving sales and marketing as well as editorial and design. I was a little surprised that they went for the one of Mister Creecher on his own, but pleased, because I was concerned that the fact that Mister Creecher was a giant could make the teenage Billy look like a small child and put off older readers.

I then sent a more detailed rough to give an idea of how I saw the finished thing looking. It is a pen drawing scanned in and coloured in Photoshop. They liked it and I raced to get the finished thing done so that Kate had time to get a jacket designed for inclusion in the Bloomsbury catalogue.


That finished image is at the top of this post, but it doesn't quite end there. Kate had mocked up some gravestones in her jacket design and I said that I would draw some so that she could place them around Mister Creecher but also continue them round on the back of the jacket.

So there you have it - the edited highlights in the story of a cover. When Kate has the finished thing sorted out I will of course show you. That's that for the cover of Mister Creecher for now. I now have some rewrites to do on the book before I am reunited with Helen Szirtes whom I am delighted to say is going to be editing for me again on this one. And I also have the edits to do on The Teacher's Tales of Terror, my World Book Day book.

Busy, busy, busy. . .

Thursday

As I mentioned in the previous post, I had tried to incorporate a month at the end of my writing time to finely tune Mister Creecher, my latest book. I am not the most organised of writers. I have a definite sense that over-planning is not a good thing. I think meticulous planning is OK for non-fiction, but not for fiction. A book needs to be a bit wild. Or the books I want to write (or read) need to be anyway.

But in any case, my dreams of finally producing a book at a calm and measured pace were scuppered by completely unforeseen distractions. . .

The first of these distractions were the additional stories to the reissues of the Tales of Terror books. They are being published in March with new jackets and I agreed to write an additional story for each. Each story needed its own little scene-setter and before I knew where I was I was writing another 13,000 words or so. The cover for the new Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror is at the top of the post with the inside cover showing the other two beneath.

And no - it wasn't a Guardian Top 100 Book (I don't even think such a list exists - though there is one for authors) - it is a mistake I hope will be rectified by the time the book actually goes to print.

As if that was not enough, I then discovered - at a rather late date, for reasons I shall not go into - that I was to do a World Book Day flipbook with Philip Reeve. I have sung the praises of Philip Reeve many times in this blog, and so it will come as no surprise to hear that I was delighted, not only by the honour of being asked to provide a book for World Book Day, but also to be sharing that book with an author I admire.

But, delighted though I was, that book still had to be written and written at great speed. It made sense to do another Tales of Terror compilation and so I wrote three more stories with a linking thread. The conceit is that the stories are being told to a group of school children on a Victorian dressing up event for World Book Day - hence, The Teacher's Tales of Terror. A strange supply/substitute teacher arrives and tells them three creepy stories. But the creepiness doesn't end there of course. . .

I was very pleased with all these stories and it was especially nice to return to the original Tales of Terror and to those characters. But I realised when I totted it all up that after writing those additional tales and the World Book Day stories (again about 13000 words), I had effectively written another book - an unplanned 53,000 word book - completely additional to my schedule. So instead of writing one book between April and July, I actually wrote two. The additional stories alone add up to the wordage of any one of the Tales of Terror books.

I do thrive on pressure, though I never used to. At school I hated exams - or even being asked to read. I hated being put on the spot. But after years of working as a newspaper illustrator and cartoonist, I do get a perverse - and it is perverse - pleasure at showing that I can take whatever is thrown at me.

But this was all probably too much. There is an episode of the wonderful Police Squad featuring a boxer who gets pummeled. The ref holds his hand in front of his face and says, 'How many fingers do you see?'. 'Thursday,' says the boxer. That was me I think, by the end of July.

But that wasn't the end of the distractions of course. As I have already mentioned I also had the cover for Mister Creecher to resolve. But I think that needs a post of its own.

Previously. . .

I have been very neglectful of the blog in the last few weeks. I have been in a kind of whirl since the beginning of July and I will now attempt to fill you in on what I've been up to.

Every weekend in July I made my way to my studio for the Cambridge Open Studios. My studio mate, John Clark, and I were exhibiting in a room next to our grotty workspace and we had to be there from 11 o'clock in the morning to 6 o'clock in the evening. It was a long day enlivened by long philosophical debates, visits from family and friends, as well as a reasonably steady stream of people clutching the Cambridge Open Studio catalogue. We both sold paintings too, which was nice - John doing particularly well. I sold four out of a possible sixteen, so I was reasonably pleased.

As far as sales went, though, we only really needed to be open the first two weekends, because though we still had a steady stream of visitors, they did not buy over those last two weekends. The number of artists coming round seemed to increase, and John and I realised we had made a mistake in not factoring in any time for us to go and see other work around Cambridge.

On the last two weekends I was also trying to get the cover of Mister Creecher done. Although this novel does not come out until October 2011, there was a panic about getting a cover image for the Bloomsbury catalogue. More of that another time.

The German edition of Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror also turned up in the post. Onkel Montagues Schauergeschichten has been out in Germany for a while but I hadn't seen an actual copy. It is published by Bloomsbury in Germany, translated by Beatrice Howeg.

On 19 July I went to the House of Commons for the launch of the Reading Agency's Summer Reading Challenge. We had to stand in blistering sunshine for half an hour waiting to be checked by security, but I'm glad I went. The Summer Reading Challenge is a great scheme here in the UK where children are set the challenge of reading six from a set list of books from their local library. It seems a particularly good cause to support when libraries are under threat everywhere. It was also good to hear Michale Rosen ticking government ministers off about the lack of a stated support for reading for pleasure.

I have been booking myself in for various events up and down the country. I am speaking to the Youth Libraries Group in Cardiff in September and October involves trips to Cheltenham, Dublin, Halifax, Liverpool and Amsterdam. More about all of those nearer the time.

Mainly, though, I have been writing. I had a a July delivery deadline on Mister Creecher and I was determined that I would not go over even if I delivered on the last day of July (which turned out to be the case). I think I had planned my timing on this more meticulously than with any other book I had written, building in a month where I would simply read and re-read it, honing it to perfection. I was even thinking of booking a phone/TV/internet-free cottage somewhere just for that purpose.

But of course it didn't work out like that. I'll talk about why in the next post. . .