This is my seventh year of writing up the status of my books – see 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. After my retirement from writing children’s books last year, this was (not unexpectedly) a quiet year. In August, my short story “The Whisperer” was included in the Best of British Science Fiction 2018, which… Read More
Author: John
This is my sixth year of writing up the status of my books – see 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. In February, my first novel, the WWI spy adventure The Wreck of the Argyll, was re-released by Cranachan, who’d previously published my Pictish adventure The Beast on the Broch. In June, my sci-fi short story “The Whisperer”… Read More
Yesterday I attended the Historical Novel Society Conference in Cumbernauld to talk about children’s historical fiction. My fellow Cranachan author Barbara Henderson shared the session with me, and it was great to hear about her experience and advice for writing historical novels for children. We decided we’d give a short presentation on how we wrote… Read More
I’m delighted to announce that Under the Mountain and Other Stories, my collaboration with artist Anh Diep, is now available from Amazon. This is a collection of eight science fiction and fantasy short stories, including all three of my previously-published stories, along with five never-before-seen tales. Complementing the stories are illustrations by my friend Anh. He’s… Read More
Back in January I entered three of my short stories for the Leicester Writes short story competition. Leicester Writes is a local literature development project; they run workshops, a writing group, competitions, and a literature festival, and are enthusiastic about supporting writers in Leicester and beyond. The competition was open to all writers across the… Read More
It’s the release day for the new edition of my WWI spy thriller The Wreck of the Argyll. This is the book that won the Great War Dundee Children’s Book Prize in 2015, and was initially published by Cargo, before being fostered by Freight for a year before the rights reverted to me. My lovely publishers… Read More
This is my fifth year of writing up the status of my books – see 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017. The Beast on the Broch The Beast on the Broch is still out there. It’s not selling particularly well (sometimes the Amazon sales chart shows two-month gaps between single copies being sold!) but it’s still out… Read More
I am extremely pleased to announce that my first novel, The Wreck of the Argyll, is going to be reissued by Cranachan Publishing in early 2018. A WWI spy thriller for children based on the real-life wreck of HMS Argyll on the Bell Rock Lighthouse, The Wreck of the Argyll won the Great War Dundee Children’s… Read More
Punch by Barbara Henderson is the story of Phineas, or Phin for short, who lives and works in Victorian Inverness with his “Uncle” Ewan, a cruel man with “hands the size of spades” who treats Phin like a slave. When Phin is sent to the market after hours to fetch some sausages from the ice… Read More
Back in May of this year, Sandra and I watched Children of the Stones, a children’s TV series from 1977. It’s a truly excellent piece of TV, by turns creepy and exciting, with an excellent cast of young actors ably backed up by such TV stars as Gareth Thomas (best known to me as Blake… Read More