EMILIA. I will be hang’d, if some eternal villain, Some busy and insinuating rogue, Some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office, Have not devis’d this slander; I’ll be hang’d else. IAGO. Fie, there is no such man; it is impossible. Othello, Act IV, Scene 2 Last night we went to the Leicester showing of… Read More
Author: John
I first encountered Philip Reeve’s work with Mortal Engines, the first of the series of four books of the same name – a dark far-future adventure tale of huge mobile cities (including London) that roamed the post-apocalyptic landscape, devouring everything in their path. It quickly became one of my favourite children’s books, both for the… Read More
Different languages
I was watching The Eagle on DVD the other evening. It’s the 2011 film adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic 1954 children’s novel, The Eagle of the Ninth, the story of Marcus Flavius Aquila, a young Roman officer, driven by duty and honour, both of Rome and his family, to travel to the north of Britain,… Read More
How to Train Your Dragon is the first in Cressida Cowell’s series of books about Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, a young Viking destined to be a great hero – the greatest Viking hero that ever lived – not that you can tell from his inauspicious beginnings. It’s also a film by Dreamworks that bears a… Read More
The Great Galloon is an enormous galleon suspended from a huge balloon – a skygoing vessel the size of a small town, captained by the larger-than-life, heroic, but melancholic Captain Meredith Anstruther, a giant of a man who commands supreme loyalty from his bizarre crew. Chief amongst the inhabitants of the galloon is Stanley Crumplehorn,… Read More
The first book I read by Michelle Paver was the Arctic spine-tingler Dark Matter – a stunning work, creepy and claustrophobic, a modern entry in the long and illustrious tradition of ghost stories. Wolf Brother is a completely different beast – both in terms of subject matter, and in terms of audience. Dark Matter is… Read More
Self-publishing without the actual publishing
On Tuesday this week, I completed the first draft of book zero of my Chimney Rabbit series – the prequel story, Tales of the Ancient Rabbits. This is my third completed novel, but the first to be restricted to what seems to be the standard Middle Grade length – it clocks in at just a… Read More
When inspiration strikes
When I plan out a novel, I plan in broad strokes. Before I start writing, I usually know where the story starts, where it ends, who the characters are, and all of the major incidents or locations along the way. There are some exceptions – when I was writing The Chimney Rabbit, the whole sequence… Read More
Talking animals
It should come as no surprise that I write a lot about talking animals – after all, the titles of my first three books are The Chimney Rabbit, The Chimney Rabbit and the Underground Mice, and Tales of the Ancient Rabbits. There’s a great tradition in children’s literature of talking, anthropomorphic animals – think of… Read More
String length addendum
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the length of children’s fiction, and about the mixed messages that I’ve received, with some agents giving quite gnomic advice, and other places providing hard and fast word counts. In the past week I received a rejection from an agent, and one of the reasons she cited (along… Read More