I’ve just returned from a trip to Iceland. The country was every bit as astonishingly beautiful as I’d hoped. I was there on a tour of locations from one of the best-known, best-loved and (to this day) most controversial of the Icelandic Sagas, Njals Saga. If you’ve not tried the sagas before, Njals Saga is [...]
Archive > June 2011
TARZAN COMPETITION: win a gorilla!
As part of Bristol Zoo’s WOW! Gorilla campaign (www.bristolzoo.org) and to celebrate the launch of TARZAN we are offering schools a chance to design your own colorful gorilla. The winning design will be sent a full size gorilla statute to paint up and I will be visiting your school to unveil it in true Tarzan [...]
Charity Auction!
It’s not often that I sell my artwork. I guess I’m thinking that one day I’ll have some kind of retrospective exhibition that will ease me into retirement. Meanwhile, 95% of my pictures are stored, rather too messily for my liking, in my loft. But there are exceptions to the rule. I was invited by [...]
Read To A Million Kids!
How would you like to hear (and see) me read from Scream Street 9: Terror of the Nightwatchman? All you have to do is register for an exciting new project from Renaissance Learning called Read To A Million Kids and you can do just that. Plus, you have until 30th June to submit any question [...]
Anyone for a game of hangman with a difference?
My eleven year old daughter took great delight in showing me this at the weekend and I wasn’t sure whether to be horrified, or amused. If you want to pass a few gruesome minutes, why not try to take a little ragdoll man and swing him through a series of caves like spiderman? Try not [...]
Booksurfers – ain’t ebooks fab?
Reading is all about escaping, being able to slip away for a while from the real world and into another place, another time, another world. Imagine then what it would be like if, rather than just reading a book, you could somehow transport yourself into it…. This is exactly what happens to Jake, Harriet, Ryan [...]
My bookcase has a new arrival…
Hi all! Guest blogger Laura back again! I know! I know! I said i’d post up about the book i’m illustrating, packed with ghosties, mummy’s, vamps, moving statues, gambling zombies, pond creatures, and such things as the unmentionables which dwell beneath manhole covers… but oh no, I have not done so (yet). This is becaaauuuse… [...]
Anyone for popcorn?
There’s nothing I love more than popcorn with a movie… actually that’s complete poppycock! There’s lots of things I like more than popcorn with a movie, like: clean underwear, a comfy bed, decent food on a regular basis… and a whole host of other things that I’ve not seen in the past couple of years. [...]
Get Your Crawl On
This… …is the new unabridged audio version of my book CRAWLERS. I’m delighted with it, and to celebrate its launch there’s a there’s a giveaway / competition going on right now at Spine Chills, the bloodcurdling blog of the supremely sinister Holly ‘Heart of’ Harkness. For the chance to win one of these fine items, [...]
The Biggest Problem in Publishing
I just read a blog thingy over at the Guardian that included this lovely paragraph: “…the single biggest (but rarely acknowledged) problem in publishing today: most of the biggest firms are dominated by cynics and fools. The people in control care nothing for the quality of the product and will always put short-term gain before long-term [...]
