Yes folks, the summer is nearly over (okay, so that’s not great), and everyone is back to work (again, not so good). But hey, it’s not all bad. The sun is still shining – well, kinda, we’ve still got some kind of tan (again, kinda), so let’s put on our dancing shoes (or strange clothing for two), and get to it. There are books to read, stories to write and pictures to be made. Happy New (school) Year!

Hey guys!

A couple of weeks ago I achieved the impossible – I escaped from the caves!!! I won’t bore you with the intricacies of my escape plan – all I’ll say is it included a dark ritual that required 3 fingers from a writer’s hand. I’d like to thank Jon, Barry, and Sam for volunteering a finger each… Well, I say ‘volunteer’… [evil cackle] 

Anyhoo, I gained my freedom, scurried off to the nearest airport, and jumped on the first plane out of the UK. Luckily for me, it was a flight to Sri Lanka where my good friends Kasun and Dinali were getting married! They had a beautiful wedding on the beach, and I was asked to do a reading at the ceremony. I considered reading the infamous decapitation scene from Witchfinder 1, but thought that it might not go down too well with all the aunts and grannies in attendance! After the wedding a group of us headed off to explore Sri Lanka – a truly breathtaking country.

Now here’s the funny thing: I thought I’d successfully escaped all things monstrous… but I was wrong. Imagine my surprise when we visited the Pinnawela elephant orphanage and I saw a beastie from the UK taking a bath with the elephants. Yup, the Loch Ness Monster seemed to have hitched a ride over to Sri Lanka for her summer holidays, and here’s the picture to prove it…

See her there, taking a drink on the far bank?

I was really excited, until it was pointed out to me that ‘Nessie’ was in fact an old coconut tree that had been washed up when the river flooded. Oh, how they all laughed at my gullibility! Everyone knows there is no such thing as monsters! But we know better, don’t we, TBM fans? And on my return to Heathrow Airport the proof was waiting for me. The monsters from the cave had crowded into the arrivals lounge, each holding a large sign, the letters etched in blood:

WELCOME HOME, WILLIAM!!!

I thought you might like to see the cover for the next Clumsies book, the Clumsies make a mess of the BIG show! So here it is. I have my name in lights, finally. This book will be published in January 2011, which sounds a long time away but isn’t really. Sadly, we can’t get popcorn down here in the cave but now I need some. I MUST HAVE POPCORN.

What did you do on your summer holiday?  Something exciting, I bet?  Or maybe relaxing.  Time to put your feet up and relax…

That’s what I wanted to do.  Really.  I thought I’d treat myself to a nice drive around America.  What could go wrong with that?  My first stop was the beach, ready for a refreshing swim. But I was put off because the water was a tad too cold and a little, um, sharky…

So instead I continued driving.  The roads became emptier, houses started to dwindle and I became hungry.  I passed a few remote towns… then encountered this rather unusual sign. Nothing too weird, right? Until I noticed how many people live there…

Deciding I would rather gnaw my own toes off than stop, I pressed on and turned onto an unfamilar highway…

Famish, and optimistic that nothing could possibly go wrong, I stopped at the lovely town called Rachel.  Actually, it’s more of a trailer park. There I found a delightful place to eat.

After a sumptuous meal and sinister warnings of “don’t stray off the path” I promptly strayed off the path and was startled to discover I had wandered into the mysterious, and notorious, AREA 51 – the top secret military testing ground where, it is claimed, the US Government house and fly captured UFOs.  The Government claim the base does not exist. Which was worrying because I was there.

Balderdash! I declared.  Who would believe that?

Then I was promptly chased across the desert by the sinister security guys, known only as The Cammo Dudes, who had been watching my every step.

After a paranoid getaway, I promptly returned to the Little Al’Le’Inn for a good night’s sleep, safe in the knowledge that there couldn’t possibly be alien technology housed behind the sinister mountain ridge…

Yes, that’s me. As a Pontin’s Bluecoat, 25 years ago. And spookily, this weekend I’m off to Pontin’s Pakefield camp, near Lowestoft, Suffolk, again - a quarter of a century later.

And all because of Frozen In Time. It’s funny how being an author suddenly brings up stuff from your past. After FIT won the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award back in March one of the national papers ran a story on it with the headline ‘FORMER PONTIN’S BLUECOAT WIN’S BLUE PETER BOOK AWARD’. And yes, there is a fleeting reference to my early career tucked away on my website, but this still made me chortle. It was so unexpected.

And then Pontin’s head office got in touch and said COME BACK! For a weekend. And – yeah – bring the family… So I will be revisiting my past at the site of one of my first seriously fun jobs. The monsters are leading me through the tunnels and up out through one of the the old east coast war fortifications and there I’ll be!

Talking a bit about it on BBC Radio Suffolk tomorrow between 1.30 and 2pm  (go HERE to listen live or later on iPlayer) and the Eastern Daily Press is covering it too. Doing an author session instead of a cabaret set will be seriously peculiar… talk about two worlds colliding! Go on. Talk about it. Guys! Has this sort of thing happened to any of you yet? Back to your old school or something..?

Yes. It’s true. I was given a pass recently by the monsters for good behaviour (writing a nice monster into my next book – he’s a veloceraptor called Nipper!) for a couple of weeks in the sun with my family. We went to the Algarve in Portugal, but even there I could not escape the eyes of the monsters. They were everywhere. Take a look at these chaps lurking in the sand…

I’d be a bit disturbed if this spider turned up in my bath…

Sand Spider

And this dragon looks pretty mean, too…

Sand Dragon

And as for the dinosaurs… *shudders*

Sand Dinosaurs

So in comes Maggotwump on Tuesday morning with my breakfast bowl of toenails (not bad; a little like Special K) and he’s wearing a kilt. (It’s wearing a kilt, I mean. I’m never entirely sure about Maggotwump.)

‘Today you go Embra Inter-int-imber- ah, Big Bok Festival. Sign boks.’

Reader, I kissed him. When I recovered consciousness, I found myself on a Scotrail Express. Ah, it was so good to breathe the open air, scented with Scotrail coffee and bad bananas and that funny loo with the oddly revolving door.

It’s lovely, that Edinburgh International Book Festival. Luckily Charlotte Square Gardens has the magical ability, in August, to expand to accommodate as many tents and people as you could wish for. (I never did find the Olympic-sized swimming pool but I think it’s on the third floor down.) It’s a fabulous place and full of wonderful authors – though on my day off I saw more politicians and journalists than writers, and why (may I ask) don’t monsters kidnap them instead of decent respectable children’s authors? You must go, and if you can’t go this year then clear a two-week space in next year’s calendar.

I was extra-super-well-behaved, so after my day’s trial the monsters say I can go back next week for a whole week. There was only one tiny hiccup, when someone-who-shall-be-nameless at the Society of Authors AGM referred to children’s writers as ‘BWAs’ (‘Bunny Wabbit Authors’). However, I showed him this darling little girl, and he ran, screaming.

Lately I’ve had a lot of messages (from kids & adults) asking for advice about writing.
I have lots of serious advice. Much of it is on my website, which I must update now that it seems more people are interested.
Advice about stories, about creativity, about the process…
But there are also a few things I wish more people knew – writers above all. And this is aimed mainly at the adults. Kids have a good excuse.
So here are a few things I can’t say to aspiring writers when they want advice, but which I hope they will at some point come to know.

- the difference between ‘disinterested’ and ‘uninterested’

- that ‘enormousness’ and ‘enormity’ are both good words but they mean very different things

- that there is never (or hardly ever) any need to use the word ‘ominous’

- that there is definitely no need to ever use the word ‘ominously’

- that to split an infinitive is fine, sometimes necessary and often the most elegant way of saying what you need to say

- that using ‘less’ when you need ‘fewer’ can drastically change the meaning of a sentence

- that it’s OK to use an apostrophe for the plural of initials and numbers, such as, “There were very few DVD’s in the 1940′s.”

- to use a singular verb after ‘none’, as in, ‘None of us is perfect.’

Sometimes I’m tempted to say some of those things out loud, in an email or in a facebook message. Those are times when I must remember that it’s the story that matters.

But of the 100′s of people who commit these enormities, none of them is going to easily overcome the enormousness of the task of making me anything but uninterested. Are less educated writers getting touch with me, or are fewer educated writers getting in touch with me? Either way, it’s ominous.

Ok, so maybe it was a bit foolish to go exploring the caves without the proper equipment. I only wanted to see if I could spot some of the monsters described in the Acme Monster Book of Monster Spotting I got given last Christmas. Look what they’ve done to me. LOOK. I shall be writing to my MP about this, oh yes *SHAKES FIST*