Allsorts, really.

Lots going on, people. This is just a quick and poorly conceived post to replace 'An Open Letter to Chuck Hogan', which, like 'The Click', has vanished because I had second thoughts about its preponderance of snide. Instead, the me typing this is jovial and chatty.

So what's happening? Well - The Poison Boy is out. It's finally available in shops. Unless those shops are ones in which I've actually physically been. In which case it hasn't. Yes, I'm talking about you, Waterstones Deansgate, with your flaccid excuse about ordering it but it not turning up.

What else? It's had some lovely reviews! What's that? You want proof, you say? Well OK then, buster. Check these bad boys out:

The Booktrust Review ("Readers will be gripped from the opening pages of this richly-imagined story")

The Books for Keeps Review ("I wouldn't be surprised if The Posion Boy makes it onto other prize shortlists too.")

The Bookwitch review ("this is close to being a perfect book")

The Bookbag review ("a rich and exciting story from a prize-winning author")

The Love Reading 4 Kids Review (April 2013 Debut of the Month)

The Mr Ripley's Enchanted Books Review ("One of the best original books that Chicken House has published in some time")

The Times Review ("Bravo!")

...aaaand The Sweet Review, which is in many ways my fave since its author is ten years old. ("I give this five stars!")

So. In other news, I've been lucky enough to be asked to get involved in a really wonderful and exciting project called Author Allsorts - check it out; there's some really great writers and illustrators involved, including the brilliant Emma Pass and the talented Dan Smith amongst others. Emma interviewed me on publication day; you can read that here.

And finally for now, I'm working on another couple of books. Early stages. Not a word's been written yet. One's a Highlions book, set in the same world as The Poison Boy. The other isn't. In the next week or so, I should have a clearer idea if either is any damn good.

Here's hoping.

The Calm before the Calm

The past is another country and all that. Thing is - when you’re in that other country for the very last time, dawdling at the border, you don’t know it. Like the last time I rode a BMX. Or the last time I spent a whole day in a library just studying. Or the last time I went out, childless and fancy-free, to South for beer and dancing. I didn’t know these were the final times these things would ever happen. I didn’t lavish on them any fitting or reverential last rites; I just never did them again. It makes me wonder what it might have been like if my future self had been able to magically materialise and let me know. “Enjoy that” it would say to the kid version of me as I hauled the busted bike over the jumps. “It’ll be the last time you ever do it.”

There are other moments, though, when you know things are about to change and you’ve had fair warning. You have in fact been counting down the days. April 1^st is one such day – The Poisonboy comes out – at least according to Amazon it does and, with a bit of good fortune and the wind behind me, I’m hoping life will never be quite the same again.

And yet, speaking to other published authors at the Big Breakfast, the excellent London launch that my publishers Chicken House put on, it became very obvious that this period is not the calm before the storm, but the calm before the calm. There are no fanfares, skywriting biplanes or tickertape parades, and lots of people have told me so in no uncertain terms. Nothing happens. You just get on with life. Start work on the next book.

Despite this, I’m hoping for something pseudo-supernatural to happen. A sign or symbol. A shift in the temperature of the universe. Anything which nudges me closer to the writing life will do; I’m not fussy.

And you’ll be gratified to know you can help. For just five English pounds, ladies and gents, you can make this miracle happen! I may not get a storm after all this calm, but a slight breeze wouldn’t go amiss, eh?

Repeat Readings Part Three

Try to convince someone of an author’s control and intention, and they’ll often raise a suspicious eyebrow. Yeah right, their face says. That pattern of images is coincidence. You’re reading too much into it. Teaching, you get this a lot. You might be discussing “…patter out their hasty orisons” in a poem by Wilfred Owen, for example, and drawing attention to the poet’s use of sound. It’s like a machine gun, see? Yeah right, go the faces. You’re not seriously saying he meant that?  They write it down, but they don’t buy it.

However. The editing process has given me a little bit of fresh insight into this one. I’ve read and adjusted Poisonboy seven times now. (Previous posts with this title – there’s two, I think – have told little stories about re-reading. Poisonboy is now my most read book, beating this, which is more than a little narcissistic for my liking.) Anyway, here’s a pretty exact account of what happened with one image as I re-read and re-wrote.


It started with the antagonist whose face, torn by dogs and healed ugly, is raked by scars. He only has one eye. When he blinks in the half dark of a shadowy room it looks like a peeled egg. Level of intention here – currently zero. I just like the idea. My boy Dalton Fly is our protag. He has a Lucky Jack; a playing card he believes serves as some sort of protecting influence. On re-read two, I notice the Lucky Jack has only one eye because, well, Jacks do, don’t they? And the single eye ‘stares impassively at him’ or some such line. It’s a neat link between goodie and baddie so I keep it in and forget about it.

Later on in the book, one character has a toy rabbit, a throw-back to their childhood, as a pet. It has no eyes and it's called Hoppy. I added the detail early on with no sense that it might link to anything. My daughter has a toy rabbit called Hoppy and it has a missing eye, so it was a little reference to that. On re-read three and four, I’ve now got the eye image stored away somewhere in my mind and the level of intention starts to rise. Following a dose of Belladonna, Dalton can’t see properly; his vision buckles and distorts. It’s a straightforward symptom of the poisoning, but I play it up a bit more than I would have. Later, I fiddle with a fight scene in which the lad takes a beating and comes round, face swollen, with one working eye. By re-read five, I have to describe the hot pellet of a bullet, so it becomes a ‘metal eye’. For another character, cleaning spectacles and being able to see properly is important - he never can; his lenses are always grime-encrusted. 

What does all this mean?

I’m not entirely sure; I’ve made a dodgy pattern and I don’t know why. Except that the story is a bit about seeing the world, and seeing it in a new way, maybe. Yeah, that. I write all this because it might look, just a little bit, and just occasionally, like I know what I'm doing.

Rest assured friends. I don't.