I grew up by the sea. From the time I was four years old until long after I’d left home, my father was a lightkeeper for the Northern Lighthouse Board, which meant that we lived all around the coast of Scotland, usually moving home every four years. While sometimes my father worked at remote lighthouses… Read More
Month: March 2013
Neverwhere
Over the past week, the BBC has been broadcasting a dramatisation of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, making this the third format in which the story has been told. First it was a 1996 TV series, from the days before the BBC had such a thing as a special effects budget; then it was a book, adapted… Read More
Folk tales and other influences
It’s very easy to be influenced by what you read – or at least, it is for me. When I started writing, I started by imitating the sort of books I liked – one of the earliest stories I can remember putting down on paper was, effectively, Willard Price fan fiction. I was probably about… Read More
Facing the Hydra
The buzz in the world of publishing this week has centred around the contracts being offered by Random House’s new digital imprints Hydra, Alibi, Flirt, and Loveswept. These contracts mark a departure for a genuine, non-vanity publisher, in that they put the costs – all the costs – of publication on the shoulders of the… Read More
Libraries
A couple of weeks ago, Terry Deary, the author of the Horrible Histories books, made an extended and vitriolic attack on the entire concept of libraries. His basic premise was that libraries give books away for free, and that’s cash money he should be putting in the bank. He seemed to miss completely the point… Read More