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Writing Rascals

Prairie Rascals poster by Sarah McIntyre This post contains some minor SPOILERS about Prairie Rascals , so you may want to watch the film first. You can find it here. WAGONS ROLL When Sarah Reeve and I started making our little films here at Bonehill, it wasn't because I was eager to get into screenwriting. I'm much more interested in the other bits of film making, like finding costumes and locations, working with the actors, and editing. But before you can get to those parts of the process you do need a screenplay, and since I'm the cheapest writer available, I write those myself. Writing a screenplay - at least for the sort of micro-budget productions we're making - is not like writing a book. With a novel the problem is that there a thousand different paths the story could take. With a screenplay,  998 of those paths are blocked by large signs that say YOU CAN'T AFFORD THIS, so in a way it becomes much easier: your choices are made for you. * When I set out to wr...
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Prairie Rascals

  The time has come to release Prairie Rascals on an unsuspecting world. Bonehill Films' Cream Tea Western has gone down well at a few local screenings, so I've decided to make it free to watch on YouTube, at least for a month or two. If you've had a chance to catch our previous film, Gwenevere , you'll know roughly what to expect - we work at an absurd speed, with a tiny budget which almost all goes on costumes and catering. But I think the story is sound, Sarah Reeve's photography is lovely, and we have some great actors.    You can see for yourself on the Bonehill Films YouTube channel. As with Gwenevere , the story was very much dictated by what we could afford and what locations were available. We've ended up with a tale of a young widow setting out to find some buried treasure before the bandits who did her husband in can get their hands on it. Her adventures eventually intertwine with those of a rich and naive young man from back east who has come to see...
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Bridge of Storms cover art by Ian McQue

    Bridge of Storms , the sequel to Thunder City , will be published in the UK and US in February 2026, and once again Ian McQue has done us proud with some striking cover art... It should be possible to pre-order Bridge of Storms now from your local bookshop or online, so please do... Shops that have a few advance customer orders for the book are more likely to take a few copies for stock too, so it really helps to get the word out that, among next year's avalanche of new titles, there lurks a brand new Mortal Engines story. 2026 will also be the 25th anniversary of Mortal Engines , so I expect I'll be banging on about it quite a bit over the coming months.
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Mousehole to the Centre of the Earth

The seventh Adventuremice title is available from British and Irish bookshops now! In Mousehole to the Centre of the Earth the team board an ill-advised tunelling machine and travel into the depths of the earth, where they find a whole lost world inhabited by cavemice, ptiny pterosaurs, and the terrifying* Hamstersaurus rex. (It's inspired by Jules Verne, of course, and by shabby old sci-fi films like At The Earth's Core .)   My excellent co-author Sarah McIntyre's watercolour illustrations are going from strength to strength, and her pictures for this new book are wonderful. You can check them out in her online shop , and even buy some originals if you fancy. ( Adventuremice Christmas cards are also available.) I like to think the books are going from strength to strength too. It can be a little frustrating writing a series, because after the first book you're almost never eligible for awards, and seldom get noticed by reviewers. I'm told that The Bookseller , t...
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Bridge of Storms

  Eagle-eyed visitors to Amazon may have noticed that there's a new Mortal Engines story in the offing . Bridge of Storms is a sequel to last year's Thunder City , and it will be published by Scholastic in the UK and US on 12th February 2026.  The story picks up a few months after Thunder City ended, and involves Tamzin and her friends helping a small university city called Museion across the wilds of Europe. Since Tamzin's era of the Mortal Engines world is slightly more genteel than what comes later, Museion is actually hoping to be eaten by London. But it's not that genteel, so in order to reach London's hunting grounds Museion will have to evade a band of motorised nomads and a very sinister suburb, while Tamzin gets to confront an old enemy. The text was finished a while ago, since I was  under the impression that it would be published this year, so I've already had time to write a third book in the series, which I hope will appear in 2027. More on Brid...
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Prairie Rascals Trailer

Happy New Year, and apologies for a long silence: I've been busy with the next Mortal Engines book, of which I'll be able to say more soon, I hope. Meanwhile, Cream Tea Western Prairie Rascals is creeping towards completion: we have a rough cut, and are amassing the music and sound effects we need to finish it. I've also put together a brief trailer which you can watch here. It's a tricky project to trailer-ise because a lot of scenes won't mean much without their context, and I also don't want to give too much away. But hopefully this hints at the sort of thing you can expect: stand-offs, stare-outs, sudden outbursts of violence, and the wide open spaces of the Old West*. The music is by Nick Riddle (an arrangement of the cheery folk song Death Came A-Knockin' ) and the vocal is by Rosanna Lambert. *For budgetary reason, the wide-open spaces of the Old West are represented by my garden, and bits of Dartmoor not too far from car-parks.
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Thunder City First Impressions

Thunder City has been out in the world for a week now. Here's a nice review by Sam Creighton .  And here's another from Through the Bookshelf .  If you've read the book and like it, please do add a review on Amazon or whichever social media site you prefer. (If you've read the book and didn't like it, please don't!) Meanwhile, I've been on the Adventuremice trail with Sarah McIntyre, who has blogged about our adventures in Marlborough and Bath . 
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