Beyond beyond twilight

I drove back from Lancaster yesterday morning.  I enjoy a long drive through the British landscape providing there are no major hold-ups and the weather is not too hideous.  This particular journey was very smooth and the sun was shining most of the time.

I had driven up to Lancaster on Thursday and gone straight to Lancaster Grammar to talk to a hall filled with two or three hundred boys.  I had not slept a wink the night before and was at the end of a wretched cold so who knows if I made any sense, but they were incredibly attentive and asked very good questions at the end.  They bought quite a few books too - and that's never a bad thing.  Thanks to all of them, to the staff at the school and to SilverDell Books for providing the books and moral support.  It was my first school visit with The Dead Men Stood Together and that is always a little nerve-jangling.  Thank you to Lancaster Grammar for making it such a good start.

From there it was off to the Holiday Inn. I tried to catch a quick nap, but a fire alarm put an end to that.  I staggered about blearily until I met up with Marcus Sedgwick and Celia Rees and her husband.  I've met Celia many times and its always a pleasure.  Marcus I hadn't met before, but he is very good company.  It is endlessly fascinating to meet writers and see the different ways people get started and the variety of impulses and inspirations that move them.

At 9am the following morning we went to Lancaster University for the Beyond Twilight event - along with Sarah Singleton whom we had met at breakfast and the last of our gang, Paula Morris.  Some went in a taxi whilst Celia and I got a lift with Marcus, who was going to have to leave straight after the proceedings had come to a close.

I had been to Lancaster the year before - with Celia - for the inaugural YA Gothic event, but this was a much larger affair, incredibly well organised by Dr Catherine Spooner and Chloe Buckley of the Department of English, Creative Writing.  Chloe did a wonderful PowerPoint presentation of Mister Creecher and Celia's Blood Sinister.  As Celia said afterwards, it is really satisfying and touching to have your work taken so seriously.

Celia talked mainly about Blood Sinister and Witch Child, Marcus about White Crow and My Swordhand is Singing, Paula about Dark Souls and Ruined and Sarah about Century and The Poison Garden.  But we all talked more generally about our relationship to the Gothic, how we got into writing and so on.  Terry Lee, Bloomsbury's Area Manager for the North of England and Scotland was also on hand for the round table discussion at the end to answer questions relating to branding and marketing.  Marcus has a background in publishing and also spoke a little about the process of getting a book into print.

The audience were mainly students and sixth formers, and so it allowed for a level of detail in the analysis that made the discussions really interesting.  I think that just occasionally - too much would be distracting - it is useful to take stock like this and really think about what it is that you are trying to do in your work, over and above simply trying to entertain your reader and earn a living.

I like doing events with other authors.  It takes the pressure off me a bit, and I get to meet some very nice people.  I'm always interested to see what other people do in their author spot - as I am always very critical of what I come up with myself.  Some used PowerPoint (or Prezi in Marcus's case) to illustrate their talks. I didn't and neither did Paula.

I came away still not convinced of either route being perfect.  There is a lot to be said for having something up there on a screen - I just need to come up with some solution that works for me.  Celia made the point to me ages ago that it provides a framework and a set of visual bullet points to keep your talk on track, and I think that is undeniably true.

Also some books seem to demand images.  I did an illustrated talk for Mister Creecher because it felt like it needed it.  I had packed a lot of stuff into that book - much of it visual - and I wanted to try and get as much of it across as possible.  I'm less sure about The Dead Men Stood Together, although it would be nice to introduce kids to the illustration work of Gustave Doré and Mervyn Peake.

Being a visual artists, it may seem odd not to employ visuals, but I think it is because I'm of this that I endlessly dither about it.  In the end I usually just go back to me and a book.  Even with the images on show in Lancaster, the best thing for me about the author talks were the readings.  It was a reminder to me, never to forget to include a reading in my own talks.

What came across very strongly, however it was framed, was the enthusiasm we all had for what we were doing - an enthusiasm that had been fired by our reading (as well as film and TV watching) when we were children and teenagers.  We may not all have decided we wanted to be writers that early, but our idea of what a book can do and what it should read like, was being forged then, whether we knew it or not.  Certainly our tastes - especially, in this case, a taste for the Gothic, was being nurtured very young.

A really enjoyable event.  Thanks to Catherine and Chloe for looking after us so well and to all the students who came along and made the day so interesting and enjoyable.  I for one am hoping for another invitation....

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....

Early work

We went to the Courtauld Gallery in London on Monday.  I haven't seen the collection in a long time and my son had never seen it.  There is a lot of work there, but not so much that it becomes overwhelming.  Somerset House is worth the visit on its own, with its terrace overlooking the Thames (although the Embankment has robbed it of its river frontage and the river gate it once had is now redundant).  It is a reminder of the time when this stretch of the river was home to great mansions and the river was vital for transport.

More and more, when I visit galleries with a mixed collection like this, I find myself detained longest by the early work.  Admittedly, some of that interest comes from a patina accrued by age and damage, a texture and distressed surface never intended by the artist, but often I just find the imagery and the way in which the image is designed, more appealing.  I love the restraint and stillness in Renaissance - especially Northern Renaissance - portraiture.  Above all, I think I admire the clarity.  It is the opposite of what we have come to accept as 'painterly', but all that shows is how restrictive and biased that term is.

A painted ship upon a painted ocean

I often get asked what books I enjoyed when I was young and the question and the answers I give are usually confined to the literary merits of the books in question.  But this is rarely the only answer I could give.

I will often say - quite truly - that I loved the work of Rosemary Sutcliff, for instance, or Henry Treece. But whilst I did indeed love their books, it was the illustration work of Charles Keeping that first made me take them from the library shelf.

I have always sought out illustrated fiction and was (and am) an avid reader of comics.  I trained as an illustrator and was an illustrator for twenty years before I began my career as a writer.  More and more, I find myself recalling what an impact illustrations can have when paired with the right story.

My next book, The Dead Men Stood Together, is my take on Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  The poem was read to me when I was young - about eight or nine - and I think it must have been the strangest thing I had heard up to that point - with perhaps the exception of Greek myths (another minor obsession of mine when I was young).

I don't know if I was shown the famous Gustave Doré illustrations to a nineteenth century edition of poem then, or whether that came later, but it feels like they have always been linked.  I find it hard to think of the poem without thinking of his work.  Doré's incredible imagination together with his technical ability and the hallucinatory quality of the metal engraving technique, seems to be a perfect match.  He also produced extraordinary images for Dante's The Divine Comedy.

I know that for some people illustrations are an intrusion, but all I can say is that is never the case for me unless the illustrations are poor or mismatched.  Timidity in illustration is a curse, and illustrators who are over-respectful of the work they are illustrating rarely produce anything worth seeing.  'Classics' still get illustrated, but rarely by anyone with the chutzpah to take on the work and bring something fresh to it.  I don't blame the illustrators - I think this is a problem at the commissioning stage.  Books do not need to be illustrated.  They should only be illustrated if the illustrations are going to add something.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has been illustrated many times by many different illustrators, but it must have been difficult for them to escape from Doré's shadow.  The British writer and illustrator, Mervyn Peake, was one who managed this brilliantly in the twentieth century, when he illustrated an edition during the second world war.  Peake's illustrations are disturbing in a different way to Doré's, who in the main is simply visualising Coleridge's words.  Peake brings a dark, psychological edge to his work.  These illustrations seem to reflect Peake's own fragile mental state at the time.  A few years later, in 1945, he would be one of the first civilians to see the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, when he visited Belsen as a war artist.  

Doré's work seems perfect until you see Peake's.  And that's how it should be.  Each illustrator should make us look at the words again.  But how many of today's publishers would commission an artist like Peake to illustrate a classic work?

And why - and I am asked this a lot too - if I am such an admirer and proponent of illustrated fiction, do I not illustrate my own work?  Well, more and more, I am beginning to wonder about that myself....

The body of my brother's son

Next month sees the publication of The Dead Men Stood Together.  Advance copies have already gone out to reviewers and some have contacted me via Twitter.  I will be doing very well if I get a better review than the one I have just received from The Bookbag.

Although, I feel I should say that I didn't invent the character of the mariner's nephew.  There is the line in the poem:

The body of my brother's son 
Stood by me knee to knee

I tell the story from that character's viewpoint.  This allowed me to step back from the tale the mariner tells and question it.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has clearly been a special work for many people, and I hope that it will continue to intrigue and obsess younger readers.  Although poetry may seem artificial at first glance, it never feels that way to me.  At its best, it seems to reach into your subconscious and spark images and emotions as real as a memory.  It seems to operate more on the level of a dream - a shared dream.

I have tried to keep that hypnotic, dreamlike quality that is so much part of the Ancient Mariner, and as with Mister Creecher and Frankenstein, I hope that my book may take readers back to the source that inspired me.

German Creechers

A huge envelope full of books arrived not long after we came back from Greece - seven copies of the German edition of Mister Creecher.

The movie versions have been obsessed with the Germanic quality of the name Frankenstein, but as I have mentioned before, Victor Frankenstein - despite the name - was not German, but Swiss (albeit he was actually born in Naples).  He lived in the French-speaking city of Geneva.

Mary Shelley, like all writers, was making use of her personal knowledge, and she had been staying in a house in the grounds of Byron's Villa Diodati, on the shores of Lake Geneva, when she had the nightmare that would spawn her famous novel.

She also, with the poet Percy Shelley (Mary was still Mary Godwin then), would have sailed past Castle Frankenstein on the Rhine.  It is from this castle that Victor probably gets his German name.

But the name has been responsible for all those Germanic castles and villages that appear in the early movies - hilariously spoofed in Young Frankenstein (or should that be Fronkensteen?)

The Germanic connection is not completely spurious though.  Victor trains at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria and it is here that he develops his theories and creates his 'monster'.  But when the creature runs away after Victor rejects him, he flees to the forest and learns to speak (somewhat unbelievably) from French refugees - the De Laceys - in an isolated cottage.  By this stroke of good fortune, the creature learns the same language as his creator, and is therefore able to converse with him at length when they next meet.

Ingolstadt is sometimes described as the setting for Frankenstein, but it occupies a relatively small part of the book.  It is the setting for the creation, but the rest of the book employs Switzerland, England, Scotland and the Orkneys, as well as the Arctic as settings.  It uses the kind of big, bold, Romantic locations that Turner and Friedrich were painting at the same time.

My family and other animals

My son was reading Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals while we were in Greece - a perfect choice, I think.

I loved the book when I did it at school - because of the charm and humour of the writing, but also because it seemed very evocative of my early life, in Gibraltar.  My family were nowhere near as eccentric as Durrell's, of course, and our lives were not as chaotic.  My father was a serving soldier and was stationed there in the mid-1960s and we went with him - my mother, my two brothers, my sister and me.

I spent a good deal of the time, like the young Gerald (though with not nearly so much intensity or rigour) staring at lines of ants, watching mantids hunting, following octopus underwater, studying rock pools.  And in Greece, I felt myself going back to that world so easily.

Greece was a bug-fest.  There was lots of other wildlife too - tortoises, birds and lizards and so on - but it was the insect life that seemed most to the fore.  The cicadas - tzitzikas in Greek - made their presence felt with their incredibly loud chirping, trying to bashfully hide when spotted.  There were several species of wasps and bees, some enormous.  Hornets were very common and thrummed past with their incredible machine-like throb.  There were so many crickets and grasshopper, both in number and species.  They hopped about on the hot tarmac of the roads and among the shrubs and trees.  There were lots of butterflies too - many very large and beautiful (most of those larger ones swallowtails).  There were millipedes in the house and very large and aggressive centipedes we were warned not to handle.  And of course there were ants: long lines of them on the march, cohorts of larger ones dragging impossible loads, massive-headed soldier ants scurrying around on the hot stones.

We were not as bothered by flies as we have been in other hot places (or even in the UK) but we were bitten.  Some were no doubt mosquitos but probably not all, as the reactions seemed to differ.  Some of the bites were very painful, it has to be said.  No paradise without the snake...

And talking of snakes, we saw a couple of those too.  I saw a very fast small green snake, that shot away as I approached as we walked through the acropolis near our house in the olive farm, and we saw a pretty large one on the way back.  It was equally keen to escape.

Birdlife was the most disappointing.  We saw lots of swallows, swifts and martins.  We saw buzzards and falcons and lots of hooded crows and jays.  We saw goldfinches, greenfinches and lots of sparrows.  We even saw a little owl sitting on a roof.  But we didn't see hoopoes or bee-eaters or rollers and I was really hoping we'd see at least one of those.

Too hot, I think.  Maybe next time.