Loser (continued)

Having just recovered from the face slapping of losing the Angus Book Award, I had the long walk of shame to pick up my two tree

paintings from the Royal Academy having failed to get them in to the Summer exhibition.

I had a look round the show and saw some nice things - there are always nice things at the Summer Exhibition - but I also saw a lot of horrible things (and there are always those, too, at the Summer Exhibition).  For that is the nature of the beast - what is horrible to me, is presumably work of immense charm and vitality to the judges.  Or at least I have to believe so, given that the work was preferred to mine.

The hang was even more perverse than last year with paintings inexplicably hoisted twenty feet up in the air with nothing beneath them but open wall or open door.  There seemed even more open wall than last year - but maybe that is another effect of not getting work accepted: the bare wall taunts.  Even bare wall was preferable to your dull and derivative daub, it seems to say.

I groaned inwardly when I encountered the first large photograph because photography seems to belong somewhere else somehow and there are already many opens that feature photography, but I have to say that I thought many of the best things there were photographs.

The Summer Exhibition is infuriating and exasperating and exciting and rather wonderful, simply because it doesn't quite have its finger on the pulse and is such a weird assortment in there.  But there are few places in the world where Sunday painters rub shoulders with struggling professionals and students with world renown artists and I hope it goes on and on forever.  It is a fine thing and I bear it no ill will at all for overlooking my genius this year.

There's always next year....

Angus

I have been really bad about keeping the blog up to date.  Apologies to all who came and found old posts here.  I know how frustrating I find that when I look at the blogs of other writers and artists.  I have promised in the past to try harder and I make that promise again - this time with hopefully more resolve.

There is a lot to catch up with but first I will say that I have recently returned from a trip to Scotland where I was shortlisted for the Angus Book Award for Mister Creecher.  My fellow shortlisted authors were Tim Bowler, William Osborne and Teri Terry - and it was Teri with her book, Slated (as with the North-East Book Award) who beat me to it this time.  Congratulations to her and thanks to everyone who voted for me.  I think we all know that there was some kind of terrible mistake in the counting (sob).

Everyone I mentioned the Angus Book Award to raved about it and I can see why.  It is extraordinarily well run and everyone concerned with it was friendly and enthusiastic and very supportive.  We stayed on the coast at the Carnoustie Hotel right next to the famous golf course and on the day of the event we each did two separate school visits.  I went to Webster's High School and to Brechin High School, the first a small group in the library, the second a large group of nearly a hundred, in the school hall.  Both visits went pretty well, I hope.  I certainly enjoyed them.

On the way, my chauffeur for the day, Lynn ('are your shoes...purple?') took me to see some Pictish stones.  The Serpent Stone at Aberlemno at the top of the page is the model for the award itself and it was some compensation to be seeing the original.  To be honest, it was worth it for me to come all that way and see these incredible pieces of art.  It was a chilly and overcast day, but that somehow seemed right.

The event at Arbroath High School was compered with incredible confidence and poise by two students from the school and each of the school involved in the voting process had made films about the books on the shortlist.  These two were full of wit and imagination and put many a publisher's trailer to shame.

Each of the authors did a five minute piece about their book and then Teri's name was read out and she received her award, after which we signed books (posters & scraps of paper) before going back to the hotel for a well-earned drink and some very fine chips.  A huge thanks to everyone concerned - the organisers, the staff and students of all the schools involved.  Hope to be back soon.

The next day I was driven back to Edinburgh airport with Tim Bowler.  I'd driven up with Tim and we talked about books and writing and all that kind of thing.  We shared some enthusiasms - especially for Rosemary Sutcliff, with whom Tim had amazingly exchanged letters just before she died).

Tim caught his plane back to Devon and I went into Edinburgh for a a few hours on what turned out from a very unpromising start, to be a glorious day.  I must have seen Edinburgh in sunshine before, but I can't quite remember when that would have been.

I put my bag into left luggage in Waverley Station and then mooched around, walking up to the castle and around the old town.  I made my usual pilgrimage to Greyfriar's Cemetery and generally enjoyed being in arguably Britain's most spectacular city.

The day was ruined by Easyjet of course.  My flight was, without explanation (unless you regard 'operational difficulties' an explanation) delayed from 5.30pm to 11.30pm.  We were given the option of changing planes to an earlier flight to Luton, which is what I ended up doing, incurring a massive taxi bill to get to Cambridge.

To the victor the spoils.  To the loser the spoiled travel plans.

I've had this brilliant idea....

I saw Chris Riddell for lunch the day before yesterday.  It's always great to see Chris.  He is always so generous and enthusiastic.

Inevitably, there comes a point where we talk about what we've just done, what we are doing now, and what we are about to do - or hope to do.  We talk about ideas.  We both come from a background in cartooning and so I think we both find generating ideas one of the easier parts of the job.

Ideas fall into a number of categories for me.  There are the ones I'm happy to share and there are ones I want to keep to myself for a while.  There are ones I want to try out on someone just to see a reaction, and there are ones I feel nervous about.  The ones I feel nervous about are probably the best ones - they are the ones I care about.

It's tricky talking to other writers about ideas in any case.  Writers find it hard not to take the idea and run with it.  If I mention an idea to Chris he always, without fail, goes off at a complete tangent to the book I intend to write.

But one thing I have learned over the years, is that ideas are as much of a distraction as they are a recipe for success.  It is good to have ideas.  Of course it is.  I'd rather have lots than none.  But ideas are seductive.

The trouble is, an idea is not a book, any more than an idea is a painting or a building.  I have dozens of ideas at any given time.  And that's not counting the ones that I have jotted down in past notebooks or have filed away on my computer.

Any one of these ideas may become my next book, in theory - but in reality many of those ideas will never get further than a sentence or two.  Now some of that is down to the fact that I have far more ideas than I can ever convert to finished books, but it is also because many of those ideas, whilst appearing to be great ideas when said quickly, simply won't support the weight of a book.

Ideas have to be tested.  Even in the plot-dominated world of children's books, a successful novel still has to be about so much more.  It has to be about character for one thing.  And whilst you might have a great idea for a character, that character has to come alive in the writing.

Because any idea could be given to a dozen different writers or artists and each one would take it somewhere different.

Ideas can be beautiful things when they are still in your head or in your notebook, but just saying them out loud can sometimes be enough to unmask them as impostors.  Sometimes they last longer.  These are the worst kind - the kind that lead you on for weeks, up and down mountains until you end up trapped in a jungle or alone on a deserted beach, sobbing quietly to yourself.  Metaphorically, I mean.  Apart from the sobbing bit.

Be wary of ideas.  Appreciate them for what they are.  Work on the basis that you are always going to come up with more and don't cache them for later.  The great thing about a book like Philip Pullman's Northern Lights or Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines, is that they are stuffed full of great ideas.

There is no shortcut to the doing bit of a book.  Sooner or later you need to get writing and see what happens.  Most writers I know - me included - hate writing synopses.  One of the reasons I think we hate them is because we know that a synopsis might kill an idea that we had been cradling for months.

Having said all that, you need to be careful with ideas too.  Don't mention the good ones too early.  Don't send them out ill-formed.  Don't think that voicing an idea casually will trick people into liking it. There are no casual conversations about books with editors or agents.  If you care about an idea, treat it with respect.

And don't ask people what they think of your idea until you know what you think.

What's been going on?

I have been fairly busy in the last few weeks, one way and another.

I queued up with an expectant gaggle of other painters to submit my two works for consideration by the selection committee for the the Royal Academy Summer Show.  I dithered about what to put in, and the paint was barely dry before I bubble-wrapped them and took them down on the train.  Above are two (poor) mobile phone shots of the paintings.

Having got in last year, I will feel doubly disappointed if I'm not chosen this year.  It is such a thrill to see your work on those walls.  I went to see the Manet show while I was there and exhibiting in the same space used for Manet is quite exciting.  We hear in May.  Fingers crossed.

I was lucky enough to be asked to sit in a seminar panel at the London Book Fair with Matt Haig (who chaired it ) and Brenda Gardner from Piccadilly Press.  The event was entitled Writing Outside of the Box, and was meant to be about attitudes to genre-writing in children's publishing.  But to be honest, the debate wandered about a little.  We needed to have a clearer point of focus and panellists with more divergent views.  Perhaps we should have had a marketing person, or someone from retail or a writer for adults - someone to add another point of view.  It needed a fight, basically.

I had a chance to see friends and fellow authors like Anne Rooney and Teri Terry.  I saw my agent Philippa Milnes-Smith for lunch and finally meet Maurice Lyon, my editor at Bloomsbury.  Maurice has been covering Ellie Fountain's maternity leave and I was beginning to think I wouldn't get to see him before she returned.  He turned out to be every bit as nice a chap as I had been told to expect.

I bumped into old (in the sense of previous) editors:  Sarah Odedina, who is now at the helm at Hot Key, and Annie Eaton from Random House who published my very first book, Dog Magic! under the Young Corgi imprint at Transworld.  I actually felt like a knew quite a lot of people there.  Maybe I've been around too long.

The London Book Fair is a rather airless hangar full of stands with books on shelves and groups of people sitting around in rapt conversation.  I went upstairs out of curiosity and saw the translation rights area, laid out like a huge exam room or Soviet era interrogation centre.  It was a little bit scary.

I came back to the fair a couple of days later for a Booktrust reception.  Booktrust is such a wonderful organisation and it was good to hear their news, put faces to email address and chat to the likes of Wendy Cooling, Sarah Macintyre and Babette Cole.

On the work front I have been working through the proofs of The Dead Men Stood Together.  I have been reading through them aloud.  I do this at the first draft stage, before I send it in to my publisher, and I do it again at the proof stage.  It may seem like an affectation but it is very practical.

Whilst not all books are designed to be read aloud, all books are read aloud, in effect.  They are read aloud (if you see what I mean) in the reader's head.  It may not seem important for sentences to sound right, but it is.  If they sound right, they probably are right.

Even if it wasn't, reading the words aloud is the surest way I know of catching any mistakes - particularly in punctuation.  Commas that need to be full stops, sentences that need a missing comma - it all becomes much clearer when you read aloud, as, of course, do any repetitions or confusions.  I had 'scene' and 'seen' in the same sentence, for instance.  It looked fine on the written page, but read aloud it was just plain odd.

Helen Szirtes and Isabel Ford, who together have worked on every one of my Bloomsbury books, have both read through the proofs and the next thing will be for us all to compare notes before it goes off to the printers.  It is a book I am very proud of.  It is published in September.  More news nearer the time, of course. . .

As I have said many times, writers are rarely working on one book.  As well as being at the proof stage with The Dead Men Stood Together, having had my idea approved by Bloomsbury, I am now writing Marley's Ghost, a story linked to Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  That book will be published next year and will form a trilogy of books based on works that had a particular impact on me when young:  Mister Creecher/Frankenstein, The Dead Men Stood Together/The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Marley's Ghost/A Christmas Carol.

Some rules for writing.

1. Don't pretend there are rules for writing.  At best there are rules for your writing, but even then, they are probably just rules for writing the book you have just finished.
2. Don't think that writing fiction makes you a guru.  Just because you can tell a story doesn't qualify you to pepper the internet with platitudes and aphorisms and lists.
3. Don't take credit for your book jacket unless you did it yourself.  The designer doesn't take credit for your prose.
4. Don't bang on about what a terrible job it is to be a writer.  You sound like an idiot.  Many of your readers would sell their souls to get a book published, or to even have written something worth publishing.
5. Write every book as though it were your last.  Otherwise it might be.
6. Don't take pleasure in bad books.  A bad book doesn't make your book any better.  
7. Don't dismiss bad reviews because they are bad.  Not all bad reviews are wrong.
8. Don't set limits on your achievements.  
9. Don't set yourself goals.  Goals are just another kind of limitation.
10. Be jealous of the achievements of others, but don't resent them.  It's not personal.  They aren't selling books to spite you.  They don't know who you are.
11. Don't be a jerk.  
12. Don't listen to other writers.  They lie for a living.
13. Believe in yourself, but stop well short of worship.
14. Don't tell complete strangers how many words you've written that day.  The postman doesn't tell you how many letters he's delivered.  No one cares.
15. Don't tell everyone you work every day including Christmas Day and think anyone is going to believe you.
16. Don't go on about how J K Rowling isn't a very good writer, because it gets on my nerves (see 10).
17. Don't make an enemy of your editor or your agent.
18. Don't wear your lack of sales as a badge of pride.  Low sales do not necessarily mean that your work is an under-appreciated work of genius.
19. Trust your own judgement.  But not too much (see 11).
20. Listen to other writers.  They tell the truth for a living.

The undead book

I've just had a royalty statement for a book I wrote some years ago.  It is called Witch Hunt and was published by Hodder.  It is a piece of narrative non-fiction about the Salem witch trials.  It is, I firmly believe, a very good book.  It is also out of print.

Royalty statements are a bit of a mystery to everyone outside the publishing industry and, to be honest, they can be pretty confusing even if you see them every six months.  They are the kind of documents that seems designed to make the information they contain as hard to ingest as possible.

The writer of a book receives a share of the sale price, agreed on contract.  Royalty statements are sent to writers from their publisher and detail the sales of books and the money due - if any - to the writer.

I say 'if any' because royalty statements can just as easily show a negative figure as a positive one.  This is because when the writer signs a contract with their publisher, they will almost certainly be paid an 'advance'.  This advance - the amount of which varies from publisher to publisher, writer to writer - will have to be 'earned out' before the writer will receive any royalties.

The bigger the advance, the harder it is to pay off.  But because a writer cannot control the sales of a book - although they can obviously help, by attending events, promoting themselves online an so on - most writers (and their agents) will want to try and get the best advance they can.

However, most writers will also want to 'earn out' their advance.  Not just because they want to earn royalties, but because if you don't pay off that advance, you will be in a weaker position the next time you negotiate with your publisher.  But more than that - books that don't earn out their advance drag behind you like the links on Jacob Marley's chains.

Good writers don't just churn books out (and yes I am saying I am a good writer).  We have to balance our artistic needs with the requirement to pay bills, but mostly, I have a real emotional commitment to anything I write.

When a book does not sell it hurts.  I mean it really hurts.  It may be a disappointment to your publisher, but it is often far more than just a financial disappointment to the author.  When a book that you put your heart and soul into does not sell, it can be really upsetting - and unsettling.

A book generally has a limited window of opportunity to sell - or two, if it has a hardback release initially.  In a perfect world, there will be a sales and marketing budget behind your hardback book and it will appear on tabletops in Waterstones and get reviewed in a couple of national papers and those (hopefully positive) reviews will decorate the jacket of your paperback.  Maybe you'll be nominated for an award.  Or even win one.

Your book needs to sell whilst this wind is in its sails.  It needs your other books to sell too.  You need to elbow yourself some room on the shelves.  The book's life - or half-life - will be extended on Amazon, and maybe it will get another chance if your next book sells well.  But maybe it will - gulp - go out of print.

Meanwhile those royalty statements keep coming, reminding you of that failure, telling you exactly how little a dent you have made in that advance.  Its a pain that cannot be cured, because the book, if it out of print, cannot sell any more copies.  I think many writers feel guilty about this.  They feel as though they have let the publisher down.  They feel they've let themselves down.  But that's not necessarily the case.

We all want to believe that quality will out, but experience tells us this is not the case.  We see it in our own work, and we see it in the work of others.  Good books (movies, plays, whatever) do not always do well.  Bad books (movies, plays, whatever) often do very well indeed.  Part of this is explained by the subjectivity of the term 'good', I should add.

So what do I think went wrong with Witch Hunt?  I'll start with what I think is right with it.  I think it's well written (well I would say that., wouldn't I) and was well edited by Anne Clark (who is now an agent).  The subject matter is a strong one - there is a perennial interest in witches and in the Salem witch trial.  It also links to the Communist witch hunt of the 1950s and to Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

What, in retrospect, may not have worked was the idea of narrative non-fiction.  It is a very successful genre in books for adults, but is perhaps confusing for children's booksellers.  The cover - which I actually quite like - is designed to look like fiction, I think, but the girl's face effectively rules out boy readers.  It could have been a bit less tasteful too.

Add to that the fact that the budgets for educational books are relatively small, and it becomes harder to promote the book.  It did get reviewed and had a couple of really nice ones as I remember.  But the fact remains that a book like this has a very small chance to get noticed before it sinks - as this one sadly did.  I remember seeing it in only one bookshop - and when I did, it was in the fiction section.

It is humbling to accept, that the success of your book may have as much, if not more, to do with the quality of the cover, the publicity, or of the sales or marketing budget, than about the quality of the prose.  But unless the audience know its there, the book cannot sell.  It is really as simple as that.  And so the writer can feel the book did not sell because the publisher did not back it with sufficient zeal.  The writer can grow bitter.  But who is to tell where the blame - if that's even the right word - lays.  There is always the possibility - however unlikely it seems - that the book you wrote, the book you loved and devoted so many hours to, was actually a bit dull, a bit derivative - not very good.

These undead books that come back to haunt us are reminders of something that went wrong in the mix of writing, editing, design, sales, marketing, publicity, but unfortunately they don't tell us which specific aspect failed.  As dispiriting as it may be to have a book that refused to sell, as a writer all you can really do is put it down to experience and go on and write the very best book you can - every time.

Crying over unsold books is the silliest of all writerly self-indulgences.  Let it go.

And the loser is....

I had a very good morning in Tooting yesterday at the Wandsworth FAB book awards, marred only by the fact that I didn't win.  Alexander Gordon Smith was the only other author there of the seven who were shortlisted.  We looked on nervously as the books were listed in ascending order, breathing a sigh of relief when ours did not appear in seventh place (he finished second and I finished third, by the way).  Blood Read Road by Moira Young was the winner.

It was fascinating as always to talk to the young people who came along to the event and to hear a little about why they had enjoyed Mister Creecher (they were far too polite to tell me if they hadn't enjoyed it) and to get a chance to ask them about what they liked to read and why.

What was really heartening for me was the fact that they talked about Mister Creecher they really picked up on the friendship aspect of the book.  The possibilities and limitations of Billy's relationship to Creecher were at the heart of all my thinking when I was writing that book.

In many ways I saw both characters as teenagers.  Although Creecher is a giant physically, he is a boy emotionally and psychologically.  He has been rejected by his 'father' and is looking for love, just as Billy, hurt and scarred by his life, is also looking for love.  They want love but neither know how to give it.  Both are wary and suspicious.

I think the relationships between teenage boys can be complicated even without such damaged individuals.  Teenage boys are very conscious of their maleness and are hyper-sensitive to how they are perceived by others.  Boys are full of questions they dare not ask for fear of revealing their ignorance and appearing to be inexperienced - which they are, most of the time.

Neither Billy nor Creecher know as much as they pretend to.  None of their experience is of any use to them in gaining the lives they dream of having.  Their friendship is a dangerous one, shot through with lies and suspicion and resentment.

Portuguese ships

A couple of Portuguese editions of Tales of Terror from the Black Ship turned up in the post yesterday.

And the winner is. . .

I am delighted to be able to tell you that Mister Creecher has won the BASH 2013 yesterday!

BASH stands for Book Award St Helen's and is voted on by the young people of St Helen's, Merseyside.  I was in very good company on the shortlist and I am very proud and pleased that Mister Creecher was voted the winner.

I want to thank all those voters and the organisers of the award.  I was sadly unable to attend the ceremony due to other commitments, but maybe I'll get a chance to come up there and meet some of those involved before too long.

The mask

The Mask was the original title for Through Dead Eyes, and for good reason - the whole story hinges on an antique mask that Alex buys when walking round Amsterdam with Angelien.

The mask I had in mind was a wooden Japanese noh theatre mask.  Hanna's father was a Dutch merchant with trading links to Japan and brings it back with him.  Through Alex, it returns to the house he lived in with his daughter - the house that is now the hotel in which Alex is staying with his father.  It is via the mask that Alex makes contact with Hanna - and she with him.

Whether the mask was cursed before Hanna wore it, I will let you decide when you read it.

Publication day

Through Dead Eyes is now published by Bloomsbury.  I have had copies of the book for a while now and I have already moved on in my mind, editing the next book and writing the one after that.  But publication day is still very exciting.  Any writer who doesn't find it exciting is possibly in the wrong business.

So what is Through Dead Eyes about?  I have already said a little about how and why I came to write it, but I have said very little about the plot.

The story concerns a teenage boy - Alex - who visits Amsterdam with his father.  His father is a writer and in the city hoping to get his history of Amsterdam during the Second World War made into a documentary series.  But we quickly learn that there are complications.

Alex's parents have separated and Alex has not adapted well.  He has had some trouble at school and he and his father are doing their best to avoid talking about it.  Added to which his father's editor in Amsterdam - Saskia - is an old girlfriend from his university days.  Saskia's daughter, Angelien is roped into being Alex's guide whilst Saskia and Alex's father talk business.

Angelien is older than Alex, intelligent and attractive.  They become closer as they start to investigate the mystery behind a strange Japanese mask Alex feels compelled to buy at an antiques market, and Alex starts to fall for her - despite the attentions of her aggressive boyfriend.

The mask has something to do with Alex's sense that he is not alone in his hotel room.  When he puts it on he sees the world as it was in the seventeenth century.  More than that, he sees the world through the eyes of the girl who used to wear it - a girl called Hanna.

And it is a very dark world indeed. . .

Good news, and bad...

Yesterday I was very pleased to learn that Mister Creecher had been shortlisted for the UKLA Book Award.  I know I say this every time, but there are so many books out there, so many really strong writers, that it is a real honour to be singled out in this way.  A big thank you to all those involved in choosing it.

I was still glowing from this news when I heard, today, that once again I have failed to make it from longlist to shortlist for the Carnegie Medal.  I am hugely disappointed, of course - but I don't intend to stop writing any time soon, so I just have to hope my time is yet to come.  This was the third time one of my books had reached the longlist, and that in itself is very gratifying.  Good luck to those who have made it onto the shortlist.

World book day

I did a World Book Day event yesterday, at the Cambridge International School just down the road from me.  If you are reading this outside of the UK and Ireland you will be confused.  We decided against having World Book Day on April 23 when everyone else celebrates it, despite it being a UNESCO idea.  I'm not really sure we have much of a claim to calling it World Book Day, but it is such a good cause that no one ever seems to complain.  It does miss the point of the whole world joining in, though.  The reasons seem to revolve around the idea that schools may be closed because of the shifting nature of the Easter school holidays and the fact that it is St George's Day.

I'm not sure why St George's Day is incompatible with World Book Day and April 23 is also cited as the anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, which seems to make the day more suitable, not less.

Anyway, my World Book Day event was fun.  I arrived to watch teachers in costume recommend books to their students, who were also in costume - and that is rare in a secondary school.  We had some readings and even a little acting, and then I had eight minutes or so to sum up my career, explain the plot of my latest book, do a reading and take questions from the audience.  It was all a bit of a blur and then I was back in the car and back home.

Through dead eyes

A package of advance copies of Through Dead Eyes arrived in the post the other day ahead of the publication day on March 14.  I thought I'd tell you a little more about why I wrote it.

The first and most obvious thing about the book is that it is the first book I have done for Bloomsbury that has a contemporary setting.  Why?

Well, much as I love writing books that have a period setting - and I have no intention of stopping doing that - I know that for some young people (possibly many young people) the period setting is a turn off.  A Victorian setting requires a certain language level to make it believable, it requires descriptions of things that no longer exist and of which the reader may have no prior knowledge.  It is inevitably 'old-fashioned' - it has to be.  For some children, that is enough to put them off.

I am not saying that I am chasing readers.  That way madness lies.  many young people will never read a horror book, whatever the setting.  But it is also interesting for me, as a writer, to see if I can create the same atmosphere without recourse to a period setting.

As with so many of my books and stories, Through Dead Eyes was sparked by my response to things created by other people - things that affected me deeply and stayed with me.

When I was at school we had an English text book called Voices - a very eclectic mix of drawings and photographs, poetry and prose.  I have a memory - although I do not have the book to prove it - that in one of the Voices editions there was a detail from Bruegel's Children's Games which focused in on the strange mask in the window at the top left of the picture.  I found - still find - that image disturbing, every time I revisit that painting.

I also have a very strong memory of watching the BBC adaptation of Schalken the Painter from the late 1970s.  The whole thing seemed to exist in deep shadow and carried with it the strange otherworldly atmosphere of so many interiors and portraits of the Dutch Golden Age.

Then there is movie Don't Look Now of course.  The canals of Amsterdam are blacker than the canals of Venice on a dull day.  Although the layout of the town is not so maze-like as Venice, Amsterdam is still a perfect location for a ghost story, full of atmosphere and history.  There is a little homage to Don't Look Now in the book, for those who know the movie.

So I knew I wanted to set it in Amsterdam and I knew I wanted it to have a link to the seventeenth century - the Dutch Golden Age - and those black-clad merchants who stare out from the paintings in the Rijksmuseum.

But I also knew that I wanted to deal with a boy's awkward attempts at relating to the opposite sex.  I wanted everything to be in a state of flux - I wanted him to have no solid ground at all.  This is common in psychological chillers for adults, but I wanted to try and put some of that emotional confusion into a book for teenagers.

Copying

I was drawing in a café in Manchester, when I was a student there, many years ago.  A girl of about eight or nine wandered up and looked at what I was doing.  She looked at my hand drawing and she looked at the people I was drawing at the other side of the small basement cafe.

'Can't you draw without copying?' she asked.

That has stayed with me ever since.  For her - like most children - drawing was all about sitting and retreating into a private world - of trying to make your imagination come alive through drawing.  My own son would spend hours at a similar age, drawing complex battle scenes or fiendishly complicated plans of imaginary houses.  Very little thought was given to how well rendered these things were.  They were simply ways of recording the thoughts in his head.  They were functional.

Of course, I didn't see objective drawing as 'copying', even though - in a way - it is.  The subject matter is given to you.  It's one of the things that appeals to me about it - the freedom from invention.  Freed from the pressure to invent, I can just relax and enjoy the accidental arrangements that occur in real life - the way one object partially conceals another, the way hair falls, or clothing creases.

I used to carry my sketchbook everywhere, sketching friends, the corners of rooms - whatever was in front of me at the time.  Over time, as my illustration career and painterly pretentions kicked in, I decided that sketching was all a bit blasé.  I became more and more dissatisfied with the drawings I did and more and more sceptical of the reasons for doing them at all.  Real artists didn't sit about sketching, for goodness sake!

Looking through some sketchbooks from college, I was struck most of all by how thankful I was to have done them and to have these reminders of those I loved and of the places we lived and worked.  But I was conscious too that I had lost some of the confidence I showed in those drawings.  It had been replaced with a doubt - a doubt I think I persuaded myself was the authentic sign of a true artist.

When I write, I am interested in what makes the character I am writing about specifically that character and not another.  I am very, very concerned about setting - about the particularities of the locations that I choose.  I will often set a story in a very specific location.  Even when I have not named it, I still usually know in my head where it is.

When I write, I invent the plot but use actual locations, historical detail and observations of the world around me to make that invention real for the reader.  I think I need to do something similar when I paint and illustrate.

And I think I need to get back to the joy of drawing for pleasure.

The turn of the screw

I went to see the The Turn of the Screw at the Almeida the other day.  As I mentioned a long time ago, we are trying to get a play based on one of my books - Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth - off the ground, and so it was a research trip as much as anything.

It was fascinating to see.  There is a trend at the moment for this kind of effects-based theatre, full of appearances and disappearances, sound effects and thrills.  This was the first I had seen and by all accounts it is not as strong as The Woman in Black production, for instance.

I know the story reasonably well - and was encouraged to revisit it on the way home on my Kindle.  I know it best through Jack Clayton's 1960s movie The Innocents, which improves, in my opinion, on the book.  Film allowed for a much more naturalistic performance from the young actors and also allowed them to be genuinely young.  Miles is ten in the story, but was much older here, with a man's voice.  It was understandable, given how much of the story they have to carry, but it did detract.  It was harder to imagine Miles as the beautiful innocent, corrupted by Quint.

The effects were good, in the main.  But it did inevitably become all about the effects, with people craning their necks to see where the next appearance was coming from.  The set revolves so much in the second act that it is in effect a roundabout.

It was also a strange atmosphere.  A little like a pantomime for grown-ups, with people coming for a good time.  And The Turn of the Screw is quite a serious plot to house that kind of fun.  As Gemma Jones as the housekeeper described Quint's depravity, the man next to me chuckled loudly - and he wasn't alone.  The script seemed to have become a connecting device to prepare us for the next jolt.  I don't really know what to make of it, except that it simply did not carry the psychological threat and menace that the story should have.  There was no ratcheting up of tension as there should have been.

Interestingly, it was pointed out to me that although The Turn of the Screw begins with the story being told to house guests and then read to them from a manuscript of the tale told by the governess, we never return to that wraparound story.

This is quite odd.  The man who tells the story was clearly in love with the governess at the centre of the story and when he meets her she is a governess at another house and apparently completely normal. We don't hear what the storyteller thinks of her after he reads the manuscript, nor do we hear what the guests think of it.

Creecher confusion

I just wanted to talk a little bit about Mister Creecher.  The book has been out for a while now and I'm very pleased to say that it has garnered lots of nice reviews and quite a few award nominations.

But nice though the reviews are, time and again the same errors keep cropping up.  I wanted to try and clear some of these things up before I attend some of those award ceremonies.

Firstly, Mister Creecher is not a Victorian-set book.  I actually state the date at the very beginning.  The book opens on New Year's Day 1818, which is the day Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was first published.  Queen Victoria wasn't even born at that point and it will be almost twenty years before she comes to the throne.

So why do so many reviewers wax lyrical about the Victorian setting?  Well, some of this is down to the stepping stone nature of historical knowledge.  We are more sure of the Victorian period and so reviewers tend to assume if we are talking about foggy London streets and horses and carriages, then we must be in a generic 'Victorian' world (which is actually just as often Edwardian).

This is the Regency period.  Jane Austen has just died.  If you want to people the streets of London in Mister Creecher, a Jane Austen film or television adaptation would be a better guide than a Dickens adaptation.  We are also in the age of the Romantics, so Jane Campion's film Bright Star (about John Keats) is an exact match - and it is a lovely movie too.  Percy and Mary Shelley did indeed live for a while in Great Russell Street, before they left for Italy.  Keats really was at that stone circle in Cumbria that summer.

The confusion about the era is also - I think - to do with the ending of the book.  I don't want to go into too much detail or it will spoil it for those who haven't read it, but what I will say is that Charles Dickens was five when Frankenstein was published.  He was already a published author before Queen Victoria came to throne in 1837, Oliver Twist being serialised in monthly instalments during that same year, when Dickens was only twenty-five.

There is also a continued insistence - particularly I find - among American reviewers to call Victor Frankenstein a doctor.  There is no Dr Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's book or mine.  Neither was Victor Frankenstein a medical student.

I met up with Pierre Fournier who writes the Frankensteinia blog and who knows just about all there is to know about Frankenstein and we talked about this.  We also talked about the fact that whilst everyone assumes the creature - my Mister Creecher - is made up of stitched together body parts, Mary Shelley herself makes no reference to this at all.  She says that Victor Frankenstein frequented charnel houses as part of his research, but makes it clear that he was studying decay, seemingly in an attempt to learn how to reverse it.

Frankenstein is a pro to-scientist - possibly the very image of a mad scientist - but he is also obsessed with alchemy and magic.  The creature seems to have been born out of some meeting of science and alchemy.  The crude scars and stitches that cover the faces of the cinematic creatures are there to frighten us.  They are there to make the  creature seem more horrific.

Mary's original concept of the creature, with its huge build, like a Romantic giant, the workings of his anatomy visible through his wrinkled translucent skin, is far more disturbing and it is the one that I tried to keep in my mind at all times.

Prague, day 3

For my last day in Prague I had nothing to do but wander round the city revisiting some of the things I had seen with Richard and Petra and taking lots of photographs.  My flight wasn't until the evening so I had the whole day to myself.

The first thing I did was to go and have breakfast in Cafe Slavia, which Petra had pointed out to me the day before.  It doesn't really look much from the outside but it has an incredibly evocative interior. From there I walked back across the Legii bridge to the Lesser Town and walked up towards the castle,   stopping to look in the sumptuous Church of St Nicholas.

I reached the castle via Nerudova Street, which is very pretty and very steep, cobbled and lined with shops and restaurants, still sporting their old signs - most of them in painted plaster set into the walls.

The castle was much busier than it had been the evening before and for the first time I felt like a tourist, in among all the other tourists.  The castle isn't really like an English castle, but instead it is a complex of buildings - many of them huge - including the famous St Vitus's Cathedral that appears in almost every view of Prague.

I bought a 'quick visit' ticket that allowed me access to the cathedral (although I discovered I had to pay extra to take photos).  It doesn't quite live up to the exterior but it has lots of quirky details, huge flying silver angels above the tomb of St John Nepomuk and some very nice stained glass, some of which is my Alphonse Mucha.

The castle also houses a beautiful Romanesque church - St George's Basilica.  This was so so restful after the extravegances of the Baroque churches.  The interior is lovely with some nice frescos.

The castle also houses the famous Golden Lane, once home to alchemists and, for a while, Franz Kafka.  The tiny houses are little museums and shops now, each a different colour.  It is a magnet for tourists of course.  I had been asked several times to take photo of couples - I think having a large camera round my neck makes me look like I know what I'm doing - so I wasn't surprised when two Japanese schoolgirls asked if it was OK to take a photograph.  I happily agreed, only to discover that they didn't want me to take a photo of them, they wanted to take a photo of one of them standing with me.  I think the fact that I was wearing a black suit and coat, a tie and black trilby hat was enough.

After looking at the view, I walked down the Old Castle Steps, across Nánusûv bridge and into the Jewish Quarter - the Josefov.  I had been here already with Petra but I was determined to see the Jewish Cemetery if nothing else.

 I bought a ticket allowing me into all the synagogues and the cemetery and after looking in the Ceremonial Hall and the Klausen Synagogue, I wandered over to the famous Staranova Synagoga - the Old-New Synagogue - which must have the most unprepossessing doorway ever.  I walked past it twice and when I did finally open it, it creaked and scraped the ground as though it hadn't been used in a century.

The Old-New Synagogue is a lovely building.  It is very old and reminded me of St George's Basilica at the Castle.  This may be explained by the fact that it was built for the Jews by gentiles.  It is in effect Gothic, with ribbed vaulting and so on - but it is also a very different kind of space with a totally different layout.

I had a long talk to a guide at the synagogue, and she told me all about the building of the synagogue and about the history and details.  I mentioned the Golem and she told me about Rabbi Löw and the genizah - the storeroom above the synagogue where items of religious significance are kept when they are old or damaged.  Because of their sacred nature they cannot simply be thrown away - instead they are periodically gathered together and buried.  After the Velvet Revolution many treasures were found, forgotten about in the genizah of the various synagogues in Prague.

The Golem was still supposed to be in the genizah of the Old-New Synagogue - though of course many have looked (including, according to Richard, Terry Pratchett when he visited Prague).  The guide at the synagogue said she had a theory about the Golem and I was expecting to hear that she thought it was a story that was meant to be more symbolic, when she told me that she thought that the Golem would have been broken and forgotten about in the genizah, then buried in one of the periodic clear-outs.  She thought the Golem was buried in the Jewish Cemetery.

And indeed, from there I went to the Jewish Cemetery, which was a rather wonderful place, crammed full of headstones, many of which were beautifully carved from different shades of stone, some green with moss.  Rabbi Löw's grave is here, small pebbles left on his headstone.  As with so many cemeteries, the Jewish Cemetery seemed to be separate from the rest of its surroundings, quieter, and with a wholly different atmosphere - not simply melancholy, but peaceful and calm.  I like the idea of the Golem being buried here.

I had a late lunch in Bakehouse Praha on V. Kolkovné near the fittingly odd Franz Kafka monument, and very good it was too.  I had not been inundated with either fruit nor vegetables since I arrived in Prague and it was nice to have a salad.

After lunch I visited the Spanish Synagogue, which is as different from the Old-New Synagogue as it is possible to be.  It was built in the 1850s and seems like the equivelant of one of those English opulent Victorian Gothic churches, with every surface covered in pattern.  It is a spectacular interior, for sure, but I preferred the quietude of the Old-New Synagogue

I set off back to the Old Town and found myself at the clock tower as the hour was about to strike.  I joined the rest of the tourists as rain began to fall and watched the show for the second time.  Light was fading and I proceeded to lose all sense of direction and actually ended up walking in a complete circle, ending up back in the Old Town Square when I was sure I was heading for the river.

I just had enough time to have a browse in the wonderful secondhand bookshop I'd been into with Richard before heading back to my hotel. On the way back I heard shouting and watched with other bemused passers by as a woman strode along the wet pavements, shouting at the top of her voice.  What she was shouting about, I couldn't say.

At the pedestrian crossing by Cafe Slavia - the crossings tick in Prague, rather than bleep, by the way - I set off across the road to see a car turning right across into the stream of pedestrians.  It paused momentarily and then floored the accelerator, the tyres spinning on the wet cobbles, before racing away along the riverside.  It was pure luck that it didn't kill someone.  It was the only display of aggression I had seen in Prague.

It was dark now, and raining.  I checked out of my hotel and David Kočár arrived to drive me to the airport.  He was the partner of one of the cast and it was incredibly kind of him, given that the airport is not exactly close and he told me in the car that this had been his second trip there that day, having driven his mother there in the morning.  David was yet another young, clever, witty, creative type - a filmmaker this time - and again spoke fluent English.

I saw a lot while I was in Prague, but it was the people I met there who made it such a great experience.  I want to thank them all and wish them well in all their endeavours.  I hope to be back one day soon.