Ever since I started writing, people have compared my writing to that of others. Perhaps the most frequent comparison has been to the writing of an American author, Tamora Pierce, and in particular to this Quartet – The Song of the Lioness. Until my escape into the US in August I’d never read any of her work, but I came across all four books in shop in Key West and couldn’t resist. Five days later I had read all four books. They are exactly the sort of fantasy I loved most when I was in my teens.

Song of the Lioness has a wonderful female hero in Alanna, the daughter of a nobleman. She has dreams and ambitions of becoming a knight and travelling the world having adventures. I can now understand why readers of my Imperial books in particular have compared them to this series.

Unlike my Imperial books, however, Tamora includes a very high magical element in her stories. There are some great villains and the gutsy Alanna, who dresses as a boy in order to be accepted into training, has to go through a great deal of pain and anguish, first as a Page, then a Squire, before she eventually reveals her true identity when she finally achieves her dream of becoming a Knight of the Realm of Tortall.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this series and recommend it to any who have enjoyed reading my books – particularly to fans of The Darkweaver and Imperial books. Great stuff, Tamora.

Monsters. What would we do without them, eh? They entertain us, they fascinate us, they look after us so, erm, nicely in this cave. We think we know them so well, but does the relationship get stale? Of course not. Because monster know just how to keep things fresh. It’s like a good marriage. Monsters can still surprise us by crawling up out of a lake in Panama and attacking small children.

Check out this latest news on the exploits of Mefanwey, the brother of one of my excellent monster chums here in the cave. And when I say ‘chums’, I do of course mean tormentors. And when I say ‘excellent’, I’m sure you realise I mean the old sense of the word, which roughly translates as ‘cruel, sadistic, disgusting and devoid of any moral sense’.

Anyway, here’s the news story.

 And here’s what poor old Mefanwey looked like after the children had stoned him to death and thrown his body back into the lake, then he’d been washed up on the shore again and picked apart by buzzards: 

Now I think about it, surely that’s the real story: humans discover an amazing new creature that  nobody’s ever seen before, so we immediately stone it to death and throw it back into a lake. Sounds about right.

Here is my attempt at Count Olaf, the wonderfully malevolent character from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, of course.

The original (and great), book illustrations by Brett Helquist, together with the film, have probably influenced the way I approached this drawing. It’s always difficult for an illustrator to tackle a familiar subject already immortalised and celebrated by the masses.

I’m not sure how I would feel at being asked to illustrate Alice In Wonderland, for example.

The monsters are letting me out of the caves to battle HIVE author, Mark Walden, this Sunday at the BATH FESTIVAL OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE!  Of course, they’re doing it just so I can handout some exclusive TRAPPED BY MONSTER author cards – so come along and claim yours!

Between 4-5 pm  I’ll be fighting Mark onstage, arguing (and proving!) why HERO.COM has the best superheroes in the world – but it’s up to the audience… and the monsters lurking in disguise… to decide who will win.

Check out more details here: www.bathkidslitfest.co.uk and set me free!

A flurry of concern in the caves today, at the news (via Boing Boing) that Bernard managed to blunder out of the wrong lake at the wrong time and got himself caught on camera.

Honestly. With buffoons like Bernard about, it’s amazing that sightings of monsters by humans occur as infrequently as they do.

Following on from David’s pic below, here’s another coincidentally facial-hair-related post… ;p

Today is the birthday of a truly amazing author, H.G. Wells. Not only did he sport a fantastic moustache, he also wrote some of the most thrilling books I’ve ever read.

Did you like Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film version of The War of the Worlds? If so (and I know I did) then read the book: you’ll find that, despite the fact it was published one hundred and eleven years ago, Spielberg and the film’s scriptwriters hardly changed the original story at all. It’s a first person account of an alien invasion. The journalistic style Wells adopted for the book makes it feel snappy, modern and alarmingly convincing. And once you realise how influential War of the Worlds has been (particularly on games) you can start to see why people call Wells “the father of Science Fiction.”

[The above pic is taken from a comics adaptation of WotW by Edginton and D'Israeli, as published by Dark Horse Comics. That's also well worth checking out by the way, as is the rest of Edginton and D'Israeli's work.]

The War of the Worlds is a terrific book. Wells’ short stories are brilliant, too. But my personal favourite thing of his is The Island of Doctor Moreau: click here and scroll down for something I wrote about it on my LibraryThing Review Page.

Meanwhile, a very happy one hundred and forty-third birthday, Mr Wells!

I enjoyed drawing that witch the other day for Roald Dahl Day so much that I thought I’d see what happened when I had a go at Mr Twit.

One of the things I’ve been most keen to do since beginning my full time career as an author is to encourage young people (and particularly boys) to read more. As such, I have long been a fan of the Barrington Stoke titles, written for less able and more reluctant readers. I hadn’t realised that Tommy was writing a title for them. Typically, his chosen subject was zombies … but you could probably have guessed it would be something like that, I’m sure.

As with Tommy’s Scream Street books, Zombie wonderfully crosses the horror genre with the comic, this time in even more straightforward language (but without losing any of the pace and humour – how does he do it?). The moment this book arrived, I devoured it in about 20 minutes. It’s a delightful story that will be of particular interest to schools and parents that are looking to encourage their reluctant boy readers to enjoy a whole book (without it being a chore). I have to say that until I started reading Tommy Donbavand’s books, I’d never considered things like losing a leg to be a laughing matter. Somehow, though, Tommy has a way of making the gruesome into the comic in a way that will delight young lads and have them coming back to the library for more and more. Another fantastic story.

As I’m sure you’d expect, I read a lot of children’s books (in fact, whatever there is on the monsters’ shelves) – and it’s about time I paid homage to two of the best series out there: Astrosaurs and Astrosaurs Academy by Steve Cole.

The initial Astrosaurs series takes the simple idea of dinosaurs in space (I’m not really kicking myself that I didn’t think of it first…) and builds an entire universe around it.  While some people believe that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor strike on the Earth millions of years ago, the truth is that the creatures had discovered space travel and vacated the planet long before the big pebble hit us.  Now, the Dinosaur Space Service works hard to protect the peace-loving herbivore side of the galaxy safe from attack by the far nastier carnivores.

My favourite book in the Astrosaurs series is the first adventure – Riddle of the Raptors – in which Captain Teggs Horatio Stegosaur is finally given his own ship – the DSS Sauropod – and sets off to transport elite athletes to the Dinosaur Games.  However, when two head-butting stars are kidnapped then easily rescued, it’s up to Teggs and his crew to find out what the wicked raptors are up to…

While Teggs continues to boldy go about his adventures in deep space, author Steve Cole next takes us back to his roots as a young cadet at the Astrosaurs Academy – with a new group of friends, and new baddies to face!  The most enjoyable tale in this series, in my opinion, is Jungle Horror.  In this adventure, Colonel Gruff and his staff mysteriously disappear, and a new group of teachers arrive to force feed mis-information about the galaxy to the eager cadets.  However, Teggs soon begins to suspect that something is amiss and he sets off with his friends to track down their former tutors and expose a wicked plot to train a generation of useless Astrosaurs!

But that’s not the limit to Steve Cole’s abilities…  His hilarious series for the same age group, Cows In Action, follows a herd of time-travelling bovines; he writes for Thunderbirds annuals and Doctor Who books (Jealous?  Me?) and his latest hardback – The Hunting book 1: Z. Rex – has possibly one of the best covers I’ve seen in years!  I can’t wait to read it…

So, whether you’re into dinosaurs, space, or none of the above and just fancy a good giggle – you won’t go far wrong with Astrosaurs.

Tommy

Awesome independent booksellers The Big Green Bookshop are currently running a rather wonderful poll. What (they ask) are your five favourite books of all time? Anyone who answers has the chance to win a brilliant prize: twenty books of their choice from whatever ends up in the Big Green Top Fifty when the results are tallied.

Click here for all the details, and click here to find out about my top five — or top thirteen, depending on how you count ‘em!