Recently, I was thinking about some of the books that influenced me when I was younger. In particular, I was thinking about The Hill of the Red Fox, by Allan Campbell McLean, which I re-read a while back when I picked up a second-hand copy on my trip to Hay-on-Wye – it’s a book that has… Read More
Registration for the Nosy Crow “How to Write Children’s Fiction” Masterclass was due to start at 9:30. To make sure I wasn’t late, I booked train tickets leaving Leicester at 7am. To make sure I didn’t miss the train, I booked a taxi for 6:20am. To make sure I didn’t miss the taxi, I set… Read More
Five Children on the Western Front, by Kate Saunders, is a modern sequel to the Psammead books by E. Nesbit, which began with the classic Five Children and It. It moves time on a few years from the original books; it is now the beginning of the Great War, and the children, some of whom… Read More
New Year Status Report 2015
I did one of these status reports on each of my projects last year, and I think it’s a useful thing for me to evaluate my progress (or lack thereof!) on an annual basis. The Chimney Rabbit My first completed book. After being sent to 27 agents and publishers, it received just one request from… Read More
This is the third and final part of my round-up of the books I’ve enjoyed most in 2014. See my posts on the best comics and best children’s books for the first two parts. As with children’s books this year, I’ve read an awful lot of great general fiction. But after a lot of careful… Read More
I’ve already covered my best comics of 2014, so next on the agenda is my list of the best children’s books of 2014. Last year, in my round-up of the best children’s books I read in 2013, I had a hard time whittling the list down to just five, and in the end I ended… Read More
It’s December, so that means it’s time to fill up column inches with “best of” articles. I did it last year, and if nothing else, it was a welcome opportunity for me to look back on the year. 2013 was a bad year made better by some good books, while 2014 has been a much… Read More
Dave Shelton’s previous book, A Boy and a Bear in a Boat, was a masterpiece of the absurd. His latest book, Thirteen Chairs, is a completely different kettle of fish – it’s a compilation of creepy tales, contained in a framework where Jack, a curious boy, listens to twelve ghostly figures tell stories of death… Read More
Shortlisted
I have no idea how to write this post! For once I’m at a loss for words. My First World War book, The Wreck of the Argyll, has been shortlisted for the Great War Dundee Children’s Book Prize, a competition run by Dundee Libraries in association with Cargo Publishing. The brief was quite specific – to write… Read More
Let’s get one thing out of the way, before we start the review proper. It is almost completely impossible to write a review of Archie Greene and the Magician’s Secret without using the words “Harry” or “Potter”. The titular character is an orphan who has grown up in the care of a relative who does… Read More