I had heard that brilliant children’s author Andrew Norriss (CRTL-Z, WOOF! UNLUCKIEST BOY IN THE WORLD) was going to attempt a rescue. I was so excited because if anyone can pull it off, the man who created Gordon Brittas for the hit 90s comedy The Brittas Empire, could do it! So imagine my distress this [...]
Archive > May 2009
French Open Starts Monday … Umm, I mean today!!!
Only two days to pick your fantasy team! Do it quick and you’ll have a chance to win my pick of the latest book releases in a genre of your choice. Open to adults and children. See how to enter in my previous post. It’s free. It’s fun. Give it a go and liven up [...]
Goals
Do you think it’s something particular about working in a so-called ‘creative’ job that means people ask writers about what they do and how they do it? Wait, that doesn’t sound right. Let me clarify. I’ll start with the first part, and explain why I put ‘creative’ in inverted commas… I’m a writer (obviously, or [...]
We can always dream…
The French Open is approaching. As we can’t actually see the action here in the cave, and can only dream of sunshine and the ‘grunt thwack, grunt thwack,’ of Maria Sharapova doing her stuff, I thought I’d create a Trapped By Monsters Dream Team mini league for a bit of fun. If you would like [...]
Running from a Russian
The more observant of you may well have noticed that I haven’t been posting much of late. There’s a very good reason for my lack of activity on here. I escaped. It started a couple of weeks back, when I was invited to go and talk to the winners of the Pushkin Prizes – a [...]
The Friendly Crocodile
I’m afraid that my scanner isn’t working at the moment, so I had to photograph this. I’ll go one slightly better than Sam, as I was six when I wrote this masterpiece. At the end of this same story book (I was seven by then) came my first epic – Arthur the Strongest Ant in [...]
You’ve got to start somewhere
Wow. Well (shuffles, blushes) following on from Ali’s previous post asking about our early efforts, there’s, um, this below, I guess. It’s called THE HAUNTED CAVE. I found it in a cupboard about ten years ago just before moving out of the house where I grew up: it’s my earliest surviving complete story. I think [...]
Have we all got one of these?
OK – it’s SHOW & TELL time. When I go into schools to talk about how I got to be an author (a long and odd tale, usually involving fresh produce, much shouting of the word ‘PLOP’ and some unfeasibly large underpants) I invariably talk about the first books I wrote. These were done between [...]
WARNING LABELS
The most difficult thing about writing a book is not to get distracted by things. Of course, down in the caves there is a lot to get distracted by – strange noises, farty smells, monsters and rabid authors. Unfortunately, I am trying to write HERO.COM 4 right next to the sole Internet computer in the [...]
Doom, Doom, Snot, Weeping and Doom
For your further edification I present the following tale of woe. Prepare yourself, gentle reader, for the grisly saga of Alexander Gordon Smith (author of the awesome FURNACE: LOCKDOWN, reviewed here) and his valiant, imaginative yet sadly doomed attempts to rescue us all from captivity. His last words as he disappeared head-first into the bucket [...]
