March 2006
Twelve pages so far this month. If I print it very large,
with wide margins.
February 2006
The good news is that the Piggies movie option has
been renewed again, and everybody still sounds very positive
about the project. One day!
The new book's a hard slog, though. Having back-tracked
all the way to chapter three in order to revive a character
I had somewhat prematurely killed off, I've been having second
thoughts... No! This is the route to madness. I will persist.
I've written another four pages.
January 2006
Phew! Promoting books can be an exhausting business, but
worth it. I've been touring the country doing readings and
talks and signing lots of copies of my new book, Erased.
At one reading there were 38 people in the audience. That
may not sound a lot, but it's actually pretty good, and considering
that this was in a village that boasts one bookshop and 34
(or 35) residents, it's pretty impressive! The '34 (or 35)'
is because the actual figure all depends on whether Mrs Pearson
is out on day release or not, apparently.
Anyway... Erased is out, and the early
feedback is very promising, including one phonecall from a
friend who demanded to know what I was playing at, putting
some of her worst fears into a book and not even warning her
before she read it. The reviews have been good: the Sunday
Express called me the "king of children's horror".
December 2005
Tis the season to be jolly! And to spend lots of money, eat
too much, panic-send cards to people you'd forgotten to send
cards to and spend lots of money. Ho ho ho.
No, I'm not really a Christmas grump. Honest! I quite like
the eating too much bit! And another thing I like about this
time of year is that it means I have another book out soon.
In the post this morning was a box full of my copies of the
new one, Erased, due out on 5 January. Seeing a stack
of books like this is a lovely moment: it's a real book. Real
books!
I'm taking a break from the current work in progress,
having added another twelve pages this month, and deleted
none of them. Time off to do a book tour to promote Erased
- I may very well be coming to a bookshop near you to read
from the book and sign copies. It's a hectic schedule, but
it includes Wisbech Children's Bookshop, the Caister-on-Sea
branch of Waterstone's, WH Smith in Orford and my local Ottakar's
in Frinton, among others. There are posters up in all the
bookshops I'm visiting. My publicists at Puffin assure me
that this is the kind of high profile tour they take their
top authors on: Roald Dahl and Madonna visited most of the
same shops on their joint tour last summer, for instance.
I'm looking forward to it.
But before that: eating too much. Was that the
sound of the letterbox? Oh no... more cards from people I
forgot to send them to this year...
November 2005
Oh dear.
And just when it was all going so well! Only
one page added to the new novel last month (but it was a very
good page), then in the first week of this month I
seemed to get a second wind. Just like the marathon runner
who hits the twenty-mile mark and realises he only has six
and a bit more miles to go, and suddenly it seems much easier
again. Or, at least, not quite so painfully, exhaustingly,
hard. You don't get so many blisters writing, either. And
you don't have to wear a number on your running vest. Come
to think of it, that wasn't a very good comparison at all,
but I'll stick with it...
So... I'm running my marathon, I've just passed
the twenty-mile mark and, while the end isn't quite in sight,
it's certainly a lot closer than the start. I have a few blisters
on my feet, my legs are aching, but I know I can finish. I
just need to stick with it.
And then I realise I took a wrong turn way back
somewhere in the first mile or so. (Hey - this metaphor is
starting to work again!)
Well, that's where I am with the new book.
Murder's never a good idea. I think we can say
that quite safely, and without fear that some know-it-all
is going to pop up and say, "Well, actually, as a matter of
fact..."
It's particularly not a good idea if you're a
writer who has killed off a character in chapter three, who
then hits chapter twenty-nine and suddenly realises you need
that character - yes, the one you killed off to liven up a
(okay, I'll admit it) rather dull passage.
You need to backtrack. All the way back to the
place where you killed off that character (he didn't seem
important at the time!). And then you start again.
Having said all that, I'm making pretty good
progress again. I've just written another four pages.
Of chapter four...
October 2005
Time to start thinking about the next book due out: Erased.
I'm excited about this one, and keen to see what people will
make of it. It's not a straight horror story this time, but
more of a thriller, full of mind games and general weirdness.
People have told me there are some scary bits in it,
though, so it looks like I can't give up old habits that easily!
Erased is due out on 5 January, just in
time to spend those Christmas book tokens. As usual, I'll
be putting lots of material related to the book up on this
website a bit closer to publication date. This one's set in
and around an old military research base on the Suffolk coast
and I have lots of interesting photos from my research trips,
some of which will appear here.
The novel after that? Still very much a work
in progress. I've only written one more page since last month,
but it's a good one. I'm only just starting to realise that
I'm barely into the story at all yet. This one's going to
be big...
September 2005
I'm wondering when this one will finish now. I'm still slogging
away at the first draft of the new novel - hit 432 pages today,
and there's still plenty to do. I'll get there in the end.
Other news: I received my copy of Higher
Ground, the tsunami charity anthology which includes a
story of mine.
August 2005
Okay, so I was a bit optimistic last month. The novel turns
out to be longer than I'd thought. I'm still going. Hit 380
pages yesterday. The end really is in sight now, though!
July 2005
Still working on the new novel. Just passed the 200 page
mark, but the end's in sight. Only a few more days to go.
June 2005
Working. Writing the new novel. Must stop for a break some
time. Food. Water. Toilet...
May 2005
So ... where are we now? If it's May then I should be well
under way with the book after next, shouldn't I? But the weather's
been good, and I've been out a lot, and I've been wrecking
our kitchen. Er, I mean, re-decorating the kitchen. Which
just happens to have involved removing everything apart from
the sink (most of the plaster on one wall was held in place
by wallpaper, for example) and then wondering what to do next.
Most of our kitchen is currently spread out in the dining
room, while the kitchen itself is, well, empty. We're
starting to move things back in now, and when we've finished
it'll be a lot better than it was before. Probably around
November, I reckon...
We've been very good, though. We're trying to
be as green as possible, and are using restored and recycled
equipment and furniture wherever we can. I've even recycled
some of the old kitchen cupboards to make a chicken run in
the garden. As of a couple of days ago, we have living in
the garden: six guinea pigs (it can be hard to tell the males
from the females, you know, although the guinea pigs themselves
don't seem to have that problem); two hens (I'm hoping they're
hens and not cockerels, or our neighbours aren't going to
be impressed by the dawn chorus); and, of course, Flopsy,
Harker and Mr Lugosi, the fruit bats; there are frogs in the
pond, too, plus lots of tadpoles (the frogs don't seem to
have any problem with the male/female thing, either).
It's a crowded garden.
I'm not usually so easily side-tracked, but for
some reason, this year I am. But I'm getting back on track
with the next-but-one book. I'm working through pages and
pages of notes now. This is a three-fold task: (1) try to
read my own, very scrappy, handwriting; (2) try to make sense
of what I've actually written; (3) work out if that particular
note actually has anything to contribute to the story I'm
working on or is just another dead-end.
I'm getting there. Even if the route's an interesting
and rather indirect one!
April 2005
As is the way with these things, next year's novel will appear
with a different title to the one I'd planned. Publishers
like to do things like this just to keep authors on their
toes. And anyway, I'd always had a sneaking feeling that my
title, Nameless, wouldn't stick - a bit too mysterious,
and it doesn't say enough about what kind of story it is.
So just to be prepared, I had a couple of alternatives in
mind. Sure enough, Puffin suggested that Nameless wasn't
a good name, so we've renamed Nameless. The new title
is Erased, which fits rather well, as the story's about
a boy whose life is, step by step, being wiped away. So, wherever
I've referred to Nameless before, just mentally delete
that and replace it with Erased.
March 2005
Snow's becoming a bit of a theme here, isn't it? Last month
I was able to tell you about just how cold and wet I was prepared
to get when researching the next book. I seem to remember
that was very cold and wet.
The start of this month has been busy. For World
Book Day I went up to Oldham to do a couple of sessions in
The Blue Coat School with fellow authors Eric Brown and Tony
Ballantyne (or Mr Ballantyne as he's better known at
Blue Coat, where he also teaches). Unfortunately Tony was
ill, so it was down to me and Eric. A lunchtime questions
and answers sessions was well-attended, and there were lots
of great questions. Then in the afternoon we did a session
on how to create a convincing alien character to use in a
story. The aliens created ranged from all kinds of scary ones
to sparkly pink party aliens.
The snow? Oh yes, the snow. I drove up to Oldham
the night before the school visit, starting off in blizzards
and high winds. Finally, all I had to do was cross the Pennines,
but all the roads were closed by snow, so I had to make a
lengthy detour before I finally arrived at the Ballantynes'
house. Fortunately, even though I was horribly late, they'd
saved my share of a very fine curry.
Heading back down from Oldham the next day, I
spent a few hours at home before setting off again for Exeter,
where I was one of the writer guests at the Microcon science
fiction convention. Another great trip, an enjoyable event,
and lots more miles covered. I'm aiming to make the rest of
the month a very quiet one. And I'm certainly not planning
to go out in the snow and hail again.
February 2005
Incubus hit the shops this month. The reviews
I've had so far have been good, and the feedback from trusted
readers has been pretty much unanimous in the view that this
one's the best I've managed - I just hope the real readers
agree!
Of course, as I've said here before, the publishing
process tends to lag quite a long way behind the real world.
This month I've been working on the final edit of next year's
novel, Nameless, and I'm in the early stages of the
one after that, The Improbable Girth of Fireaway Farty.
Fireaway is set in an off-season seaside town, and
I've been wandering around east coast resorts trying to get
my brain working along the right lines. This month I was up
at Cromer and Sheringham on the north Norfolk coast, one of
my favourite parts of the country. I spent a very wet and
cold day there. The wind howled in from the North Sea (next
landfall in that direction would be somewhere in the Arctic
Circle) and sometimes it was sunny. But a lot of the time
it was snowing. Oh yes, there was sleet, too. And hail. At
one point I was walking into a bitterly cold gale, with hail
coming in horizontally and pinging off my cheeks. I hope you
appreciate this. These are the lengths we writers go to in
order to make our work authentic.
Here are some photos I took from the car at Weybourne:
See? It was dry and sunny at least some of the time, although
you can see the storm coming in from the North Sea.
The storm begins.
...and continues.
You'll appreciate that these photos were taken from inside
my car. But it was like this all day, and I spent a large
part of the day outdoors. Getting cold and wet, and getting
stung by hailstorms. All for you.
Did I mention the cold? And the snow? And the
hail?
 January
2005
So, another year over, a new one just begun, as some song
or other says. And here I am, sitting at my desk with a streaming
cold and sinusitis, all made worse by the fact that it's a
weekend and I'll no doubt be better in time to go to work.
A couple of things to report this time round.
The movie people are making positive sounds
about filming Piggies this year, which is encouraging.
And look what turned up in the post yesterday:
this is the moment when I suddenly believe that it's true
and they weren't all just winding me up - they've printed
lots of copies of my book!
Older bits
Lots more entries available in Nick's
Old World!
|
