Upcoming events....

I thought I'd just keep you up to date with what I'm up to in the next couple of months.

The first thing is that I am signing books and talking about The Dead Men Stood Together at David's Bookshop in Letchworth on Thursday 19 September.  This will be the first event I will be doing on the back of this new book.

The following week - Thursday 26 September, I will be heading towards Lancaster to talk to Lancaster Grammar Boys school, ahead of an evening event on 27 September - Beyond Twilight - with Celia Rees, Marcus Sedgwick and Sarah Singleton, looking at the Gothic in teen fiction.  The event is organised by Dr Catherine Spooner and I did a similar event here last year with Celia.  I'm really looking forward to it - and to meeting Marcus and Sarah.  I am also being interviewed by BBC Lancashire in the afternoon of the 27th - for four minutes, anyway.

The following Wednesday - October 2 - I am doing a Booktrust librarians event in Reading where I shall again be talking about The Dead Men Stood Together.  It's always a pleasure to talk to librarians, of course.

From Reading, I will be hot-footing it over to Heathrow where I will stay the night and then hop on a plane to Prague where the Park Lane International School is opening a new campus in the old town and want me to be a guest.  I am very honoured and delighted to be returning to Prague.  I will fly out in the morning, talk to the students in the afternoon, attend the event in the evening and then fly back the following day.  Hopefully I'll see some of my Czech friends in those few short hours.

The day after I get home on 4 October, I am heading back to London on the 5th, to attend the autumn dinner of the Dracula Society as a guest and speaker.  Their Children of the Night Award (for Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth) sits on my desk and it will be a pleasure to come and talk to them.

On 9 October, I am launching The Dead Men Stood Together with an event at Heffer's Bookshop in Cambridge.  Heffer's have been hugely supportive of me - and countless other local writers - since before I even lived in Cambridge.  I'm really looking forward to that.

At the end of the month I'm doing a very exciting event.  For Halloween, I will be sharing a stage with Sally Gardner and Susan Cooper, two wonderful writers.  Susan Cooper is over from the US and I'm so pleased to be involved in one of her events.  Reading The Dark is Rising to my son was a very memorable experience - for both of us, I think.

The day, on 1 November, after that I am off to Brighton to the World Fantasy Convention where I am doing a panel event on YA fiction.  This is my first time at the Fantasy Con, so I'm intrigued

I think that's all for now - for this year anyway....

His red eyes again

I had a very enjoyable day yesterday.  Not only was it my publication day, but coincidentally I had arranged to go for lunch with Anne Clark and Greg Gormley.  Anne was my wonderful editor on Jail-breaker Jack, when she was at Hodder and is now an agent.  Greg lives in my street and is a picture book writer and illustrator.  Greg needed an agent and Anne was looking for clients.  I was very happy to put the two of them together and it seems to be working out very well indeed.

On top of all that, I received a copy of His Red Eyes Again - a book of vampire stories by various authors to celebrate forty years of the Dracula Society.  I was very touched to see my story kicks things off.  It is story called Mrs Benson.  An American archivist stumbles upon a strange story hidden away among family papers from the nineteenth century.  They are in the form of a journal...

I must set down the events of the last hours and days immediately.  If I wait too long I will begin to doubt my memory, or even my own faculties.  Certainly those who may one day read this may doubt both.  All I can say is that what you read here is the truth.  Good Lord, look at how my hand shakes as I write!

I am sitting in the wilfully misnamed Grand Hotel in Abraham.  It is late - or perhaps, more properly, it is very early.  Dawn is breaking and I have not slept.  The westbound Frisco train will soon be here, but it will leave without me.  She - and he - will board, but not I.  I will not go another mile in their company - not for all the money in the world.

They are in a room just down the hall.  That fact alone may account for my inability to sleep and I confess that I have checked the lock on my door at least four times.  You are impatient to learn, of course, why a grown man should fear a woman and child, but have a little patience: it is a short tale.

And so we learn the secret of Mrs Benson and her son.  I wrote the story at some speed and on demand for the book, but I enjoyed heading off to the American West of the 1880s and I think the story has a nice atmosphere to it.  I may set something in that world again.

Bram Stoker has an uncredited walk on part in my story as he checks into a hotel with the actor Henry Irving whom he managed and toured with.  It seemed fitting.

And speaking of The Dracula Society, I am talking to them after their autumn dinner in a few weeks time.  I don't know whether to be honoured or very, very sacred.....

Publication day

It is publication day for The Dead Men Stood Together!

I have a lot to live up to in that quote from Amanda Craig at the Times that graces what is a rather lovely cover, I think.  I would never describe myself as a master of anything, but I'm very happy to take the complement and look on it as a spur to greater things.

I shall be signing books at David's Bookshop in Letchworth next Thursday - 19 September - and talking about this book (and a few other things besides, no doubt).  If you are local, feel free to come along and say hello.

Next month I am launching the book with a get together at Heffer's Bookshop here in Cambridge on the evening of 9 October.  again I will be talking about the book and signing (hopefully!).  Heffers has been hugely supportive to me over the years and it's a real pleasure to be able to support these two great bookshops.

I have many things coming up over the next few weeks.  I'll be telling you more about them over the next few days.

Fenland

It was my birthday over the weekend and I went with my wife and son to Wicken Fen here in Cambridgeshire.  It is an area of ancient fenland owned by the National Trust and we have been there many times before.  It was rather wet underfoot after torrential rain the day before, but it was warm and bathed in sunshine.  As always with this part of the world, the sky is the main feature - huge and wide, like in a Dutch landscape painting.

Although we have been before, we had never been on the little boat trip along the lodes - the ancient transportation ditches.  The one we were on for most of the short journey was 'only' 8th Century or thereabouts, but the long, wide and straight one we turned around in was one of the many Roman lodes - in continual use since they were first dug all those centuries ago.  

Advance copies...

My box of advance copies of The Dead Men Stood Together arrived today.  Very exciting.  Only a few weeks until publication.

More illustrations searching for a story....

Another couple of experiments from the studio.  They are not for anything exactly - they are just images that popped into my head.  In fact the skull-headed woman started off with a perfectly normal head when I started the picture.

I have a lot of plans for illustrated books and I need to get myself back into a way of working that will suit those ideas.  Readability is hugely important in illustration, clearly - if it is important to the image that a figure is smiling rather than scowling, then that must be clear.  But often this clarity becomes a kind of pedantry.  That is what I'm trying to avoid.

Flexing old muscles

I have been playing around in the studio, using black and white acrylic paint on a smooth surfaced watercolour paper.  This head isn't for anything in particular - it's just me trying to get back into illustration after a bit of a sabbatical.

There will be more in due course....