I found this on my drawing board this morning.
Guest Post: Jamie Rix
We’re lucky enough to have a visitor to the caves this week, in the form of Jamie Rix, author of… well, of too many books to list here. Check out the link at the bottom of this post for more info.
Jamie has been shortlisted for this year’s Roald Dahl Funny Prize, where he is up against – among others – our very own Sorrel Anderson. I managed to convince Sorrel not to attack Jamie with her slop bucket, long enough for him to write us this post.
A Message from Jamie Rix
Big week this week. My latest book The Incredible Luck of Alfie Pluck has been shortlisted for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize. This was a competition set up by Michael Rosen in 2008 to celebrate that much ignored book – the funny one! You know, the one with a pair of pants on the cover, or (if you’re Alistair Fury) the one which contains instructions on how to take revenge on your big brother using only a hungry piranha fish and your brother’s todger.
I have discovered during the twenty years I’ve been writing jokes for several publishers that finding an editor who ‘gets you’ is extremely hard. Generally funny books are looked down on as something a bit grubby. I heard Daisy Goodwin on Radio 4 this morning saying this: “Just because a book is not about a serious issue doesn’t mean the author isn’t a serious writer.”
Sometimes, from the gasps of disbelief that greet my books, it feels as if there are some in the publishing world who think ‘comedy’ is not fit for small-human consumption. Personally, I’ve yet to meet a child who isn’t engaged by a great joke about a constipated granny, or a much-maligned boy called Alistair who gets his own back on his horrid family by freeze-drying dog poo, painting it gold, attaching a ribbon and handing the Golden Medallions out as Christmas presents.
Picture the scene…Three o’clock in the afternoon, the Queen has just opened her mouth, the log fire is roaring and hanging round the families’ necks, the Golden Medallions begin their slow inexorable slide into liquidity.
I think comedy makes books memorable. It brings characters to life, injects a little light relief after some particularly gruesome torture, and has a propensity for cruelty. And I love cruel! Take Alfie Pluck, for example. He eats the luck gene and becomes the luckiest boy in the world. I could have written a perfectly ‘nice’ book about how his life is transformed through great big dollops of good luck, but instead I chose to tell the story of his misfortune. How, once he is recognised as the luckiest boy in the world, everyone wants to steal the luck gene for themselves, and the only way they can get it, is by eating his brain. Yum yum!
It’s what you would expect from the mind of someone who has written over one hundred Grizzly Tales; stories in which bad little children are taught a lesson by something unspeakably horrible happening to them.
A cheat of a girl embraces genetic engineering in order to win The Sleepy Backwater On The Mould fruit and vegetable competition, but creates a super-breed of genetically enhanced weevils that consign her to the compost heap; two brothers fight tooth and nail and start a Nuclear Wart that sucks out their life force and takes the rest of the world with them; a girl who can’t spell enlists the help of a real Queen Bee in a spelling bee and ends up with a hive for a head; a jealous brother has his hair topiarised by fairies with hedge trimmers; and Gorgeous George has her bad blood changed for pickling vinegar!
Actually, that gives me an idea for what I might do to the judges if I don’t win the Funny Prize on Wednesday…
Want to find out more about Jamie? Go check out his Amazon Page to see a selection of his books.
Witchfinder: The Complete Saga…
Hi guys!
Well, I’ve just completed the latest draft of the last Witchfinder book. There’ll be a few changes in the next month or so when I come to look at the book again with my brilliant editor Jasmine, but the central plot will remain the same: what happens to Jake Harker and his friends, the eventual fate of both humanity and demonkind, as well as HUGE revelations about… well, that would be telling! Anyway, here’s a cheeky sneak peek at the complete saga!
Within these 1,000 + pages (draft 6 of Witchfinder 1; draft 5 of Witchfinder 2; draft 2 of Witchfinder 3) all the secrets of Jacob Harker’s world are revealed. By September 2011 you too will uncover those secrets… Brace yourselves!
And in case you were wondering, The Claw was a present from David O’Callaghan and the good people of Easons, Dublin. Thank you, Dave, I knew that creepy extremity would come in useful!
ARE YOU READING TOO MUCH?
Lost in Scream Street? Cornered by Witchfinder? Frozen In Time?
Is it possible you’re just reading TOO MUCH?
Try the Trapped By Monsters Quiz and find out…
Q1. You’re plunging through Jimmy Coates: Target, gasping and driving your fingernails into the shiny cover in your excitement, when your mum calls from downstairs, telling you tea is ready. Do you:
a. Ignore her?
b. Bellow ‘In a MINUTE! In a MINUTE!’?
c. Wonder why your mother is downstairs cooking your tea when you’re a 32-year-old IT professional with your own flat?
Q2. You’ve made the mistake of reading Sam Enthoven’s Crawlers all day and then following it with Barry Hutchison’s Invisible Fiends: Mr Mumbles until 1am. You’re now staring at a black dot on your gloomy ceiling, rigid with fear that it’s a Crawler or the wizened finger of Mr Mumbles poking through the plaster. Do you:
a. Switch the lamp on and feverishly start reading On The Road With Mavis & Marge, hoping that Niamh Sharkey’s cheery drawings will chase away the panic… and then get scared of hooves?
b. Scream loudly until someone switches on the light and sponges the black dot away?
c. Empty your bookcase of all its scary novels… and then smash it repeatedly against the ceiling until you have crushed the Crawler/Mr Mumble’s finger?
Q3. At school, you’re meant to be doing maths but are discovered surreptitiously reading Dragon Orb: Aurora under your desk. Do you: 
a. Explain that this is additional study as dragon flying and inter-dimensional velocity all have a basis in applied mathematics?
b. Screech like a banshee as the book is wrestled out of your hands and then stab your attackers with a sharpened 2B pencil?
c. Sigh, order the class to get on with Page 38 of Joy Of Maths until break time and resume Chapter 17?
Q4. On a long family drive you’re deeply ensconced in Dark Summer when you start to feel a bit car sick. Do you:
a. Try to pause in your reading for a while but find that you simply can’t because Eddie’s just got trapped in a pothole with rising water!?
b. Never take your eyes off the page; you are quite capable of vomiting into a paper bag and reading at the same time?
c. Decide that on balance, you should probably not read while driving, switch to the audio version of Dark Summer (brilliantly read by Tom Lawrence, available on www.audible.co.uk) bump back off the central reservation and drive on with both eyes on the road and family members no longer distractingly screaming ‘WE’RE GOING TO DIEEEEEE’ in your ear?
Q5. You’re two thirds of the way through Hero.com when some joker tells you the ending. Do you:
a. Lose the will to go on and never read again?
b. Bludgeon the joker into unconsciousness with Villian.net (the more appropriate of the twin books as a weapon)? 
c. Snap. Strip down to a pair of baggy underpants and run around the neighbourhood in a curly blue wig, brandishing a loudhailer and screaming out the endings of every decent book you’ve ever read so the world at large will finally understand your pain.
RESULTS
MOSTLY As.
Your responses seem perfectly normal; if anything you’re probably not reading enough.
MOSTLY Bs.
Your responses seem a little off kilter. Stabbing people with pencils or bludgeoning them with Villian.net will never work. 2B is really too soft for lasting damage and Villian.net, being a paperback, won’t carry as much clout as, say, The Goblet of Fire in hardback (with which you can knock a mule unconscious… just by reading it aloud). Re-assess your weaponry and then get back to reading. Perhaps a bit more..?
MOSTLY Cs.
You seem to have a entirely appropriate approach to reading. Audiobooks are also good and a wise alternative to wiping out your family on the M4. Why not read and listen simultaneously next time, and get your 12-year-old to drive..?
Monsters come in all shapes and sizes!
Had to show you this freaky dude! Hiding as a puddle of cornstarch solution is a clever disguise, but it doesn’t take much to get this monster to show his true form.
Autumn Leaves
Only a few weeks ago the trees outside my studio still had their warm summer clothes on. But we are well and truly into autumn now and it has to be said the leaves were starting to thin out. Then this morning, after a blowy night, they were all lined up looking, well…like poor Gerald here.
Now of course, fond of these trees as I am, I don’t go around giving them names. That would just be weird.
Release The Newts!
One of my favourite blogs, Pink Tentacle, recently posted a wondrous selection of visual interpretations of Gothic Horror classics by Japanese artist Tatsuya Morino. As I hope will happen to you if you click on the link, this amazing art has definitely inspired me to look for the stories on the list that I haven’t read yet. Check out this (below) for instance, from War With The Newts, by Karel Capek.
Don’t Look Around, Sir, I’m Speaking To You
On what’s been an otherwise bleak afternoon in the caves, the following video has been cheering me up more than somewhat.
Kidz Cool It
There are lots of great websites out there… like this one for instance. But I stumbled across one that is, well, cool. www.kidzcoolit.com is a movie review site for kids and written by kids (I think there should be a ‘z’ in there somewhere!).
Packed with news, reviews and competitions you should be checking it out right now… go on then… bye…
