Author event by Skype

So, I just visited America, for an hour, to do a school visit, by Skype.

The photo shows students from Gilbert H Hood Middle School, in Derry, New Hampshire.

This is the first time I've done an event by Skype - it was the idea of librarian Kathy Lane, and it was enormous fun. As I sat in my writing shed as dusk fell in England, I spoke to the students in Derry, about writing in general and about Revolver in particular.

The picture was great throughout, and with the aid of a roving mic I was able to hear the students' questions. Though I would normally use powerpoint to do an event, I was able to wave various things at the students that related to their questions - my notebook, the shell case that inspired Revolver in the first place, and so on. It was a very different, exciting kind of event, and I got to speak to students I would normally never be able to.

A taste of the future, and a very enjoyable one at that. Thanks to Kathy Lane, Mr Keeley, and all the students of the PACE group at Gilbert H Hood Middle School. Great fun to talk to you.

The only sad thing, maybe, was that I couldn't sign a book for anyone :-(

(Though there's even a machine that can do that now - they have one Waterstones Bookshop, Picadilly, London...)

The Cave - Mervyn Peake

Last night I went to see a performance of The Cave by Mervyn Peake, in  its world premiere run at the Blue Elephant Theatre.

In attendance, and in conversation afterwards with Neil Norman, was Peake's eldest child, Sebastian, who explained how after the death of their mother, he came into the possession of a suitcase of his father's effects. Understandably sorrowful after losing his mother, he didn't feel like rummaging around in the case. It was therefore over ten years later that he properly investigated its contents, and discovered bundles of unpublished writing by his father, including ten plays.

The Cave is the first of these plays to receive a production, selected as much as anything we were told, because it would suit the forces of the Blue Elephant Theatre. It's a short but powerful piece about a family across thousands of years, and deals with many things - conformity, rebellion, belief, love, I could go on here. I won't.

I really enjoyed it, the end in particular was genuinely chilling,  and it's exciting to think there is more 'new' Peake material coming, for all the plays will be published by Methuen over the next three years. What was as fascinating for me, however, was the discussion afterwards.

Peake has always remained something of an acquired taste, on the fringes, a cult writer perhaps, maybe a writer's writer. I've got my own ideas why this may be, but last night I got the chance to ask Sebastian if he had an explanation for why his father, unlike his contemporary Tolkein say, never achieved the fame, success and to be blunt, money, that his work deserved. Sebastian's answer was the one his father's publisher once gave to the same question; he was too good.

He finished with a lovely quote I would like to reproduce here: It was once said that the difference between Tolkein and Peake is this: Tolkein stood on the top of the mountain, and he directed his forces from there. Peake was down in the valley, alongside his troops.

If you think of the difference between the Lord of the Rings and Gormenghast, I think that's true, and that unsettling, uncomfortable feeling you sometimes get when reading Peake is maybe another explanation for why he never fully entered the mainstream.

The Raven Mysteries - Book V - Magic and Mayhem

Book five of the Raven Mysteries series is not published until next Spring, but I've just received a full set of layouts with illustrations now in place, and I thought it would be nice to give a shout out to the wonderful man who makes the pictures for the words - Pete Williamson. Have a look at his wonderful website.

I'm not going to give too much away at this stage, but since I don't often mention the Raven Mysteries here, I just want to say that I think this is going to be the best one yet, largely due to the depiction of hundreds of little white bunnies and thousands of large green cabbages. And also the depiction of the deadly, yes, deadly, combination of the two.

Witness poor Edgar here, just imagining what it would be like to have his tail feathers accosted by just one small, but determined bunny.

In the words of Solstice; "I love bunnies. They're so uncool, they're cool."

Super Fanboy Geek Attack

Yesterday I had the enormously wonderful privilege of speaking at Eltham College. This was not only because it is a very nice school to visit, but also because it happens to be where Mervyn Peake went to school.

That's him, second from the left in the back row of the 1928/1929 Rugby team. I was told he didn't make much of a player, well not compared to Eric Liddell who had recently passed through the school too, but that even then he was drawing drawing drawing all the time, even all over his English books.

I don't tend to lean towards hero worshipping generally, but yesterday I ignored that fact, and became the teenager I once was, obsessed by his writing: it reminded me how wonderfully strange Gormenghast was the first time I read it, and it reminded me why to be strange and unusual is a good thing in writing, much more fascinating than the mundane and the commonplace. Well, for my money anyway.

Thanks to my Dad for introducing me to Peake in the first place, and thanks to Stephanie Fearn of Eltham College for the invitation to visit the home of, yes, a hero.

So, about that book I was writing...

A while ago, I posted some words on My New Book...

That was at the front end of the summer I think, and back then, it was all going along really well. I'd done ten thousand words fairly speedily (and it's aways been my belief that fast writing is good writing, because it shows that it's all flowing properly) so I was quite content.

Then, this thing happened. Namely, I went off to Sweden for a month or so, in order to finish the book. In fact, two things happened. Firstly, I wrote not a single word of the book while I was away. Secondly, and of even greater concern to my and my editor's sanity, was that I didn't want to write any more of it either.

I'm not entirely sure why this was, but let's just say that I didn't feel it. Not really. So I threw away the ten thousand words. That will teach me to blog about word counts...
And hence the long silence about the book.

However, thanks to the gods of writing, another idea popped into my head one day as I cycled round the island I was living on, an idea so exciting and weird that I knew I wanted that to be my next book. And the idea was not only almost fully formed, I knew I could write it very quickly.

So after a few weeks home, I went back to the island, and started to write. 37 days later, I have it. Pretty much done.

To say I'm relieved is an understatement of the highest order, but I'm also excited. I know there will be LOTS to do in rewriting, since it's all happened so fast, but I'm excited about it, and that has to be the main thing.

And if I'm wrong about that, well, somebody show me the exit...

Marcus Sedgwick - School Report 1986

In the words of my headmaster, back in 1986:

"I said last year that Marcus needs to show more ambition. The remark still stands."

Well, today, I wrote six thousand words of my new novel, yesterday I wrote a three thousand word early reader, tomorrow I'm flying to New York to finish writing a contracted screenplay with my brother, so reaching out across the years to 1986, I have only one (printable) thing to say to Howell Griffiths, and that is this....
Actually, that's unprintable too.

Sigh. There were somemore favourable comments to be found, way back at the end of Easter term, 1986, such as this from my lovely form tutor, Mr Burgoyne: "He seems to have a sound analytical mind." Note the use of the word 'seems' in there. Mr Burgoyne was the teacher I wanted to have for all subjects, not just History, but he's probably the reason there's so much historical stuff in my novels.

And not so many Maths-based plot lines: Some accurate comments from Mr Neeve: "Marcus is not a gifted Mathematician." Shame I was doing two Maths A-levels, then.

Still, my other Maths teacher had this to say "His written work, although not always neat, is well documented, and it is easy to follow his train of thought." As one would that of any simple creature of the forest, perhaps.

Why am I telling you this? Because I just found the offending article in a drawer while looking for my passport and it made me chuckle.

In an almost entirely good way.

Edinburgh and beyond

I have just slept for three and a half days. This may be an exaggeration but it certainly feels like it. Having had a delayed flight back from Sweden, I got two hours' sleep before flying to Edinburgh for the book festival. After four events in three days there, I then came home to organize a small but fun film festival in the village where I live.






















All good fun, and three successful things; words written in Sweden, events went well in Edinburgh, with Mal Peet, Ian Beck and Philip Reeve, and a small but satisfied crowd for each of the two nights of our film festival.

On the first night we showed the wonderful A Matter of Life and Death, which was timely because it's providing inspiration for the screenplay my brother and I are writing just now. This is another project which is going well at the moment, and brings me to my next trip: we're off to NYC on Saturday to scout some locations for some scenes of the film.

Including this one, the only active cemetery left in Manhattan.


















New York is one of those cities that cemeteries don't seem to belong in to me. I know this is illogical but maybe it's because it's just so full of life...

New York, that is, not the cemetery.