Station Zero

  My first two Adventuremice books with  Sarah McIntyre , based on her brilliant mouse paintings, are in the (UK) bookshops now. Otter Chaos introduces Pedro and the rest of the daring crew, and Mermouse Mystery sends them off on an underwater quest to return a baby mermouse to his subaqueous home.  But there’s MORE. A wintry story, Mice on the Ice , will be coming out in early September. There’s a long lead team on these books so Sarah completed the artwork for this one back in the spring - it looks absolutely gorgeous. And at the moment she’s busy painting the illustrations for the fourth book, which will come out early next year. In a break with the usual nautical theme we’re sending our mousey adventurers into SPAAAAAAAACE. Here’s Mice on the Moon ! And here’s Sarah in her studio with the original artwork. (Original artwork for the earlier titles is available to buy in her online shop.) The Adventuremice series is published by David Fickling Books and can be bought...

  Utterly Dark and the Tides of Time is on its way! The third book in the Utterly Dark trilogy begins on Utterly’s home island of Wildsea, in the spring of 1812. It begins with her keeping the promise she made in Utterly Dark and the Heart of the Wild to rejoin the Gorm in the depths of the sea. But the Gorm’s power extends not just throughout the oceans but through time too, and pretty soon Utterly finds herself in trouble in the strange, futuristic Wildsea of the year 1971. Meanwhile, back in the Regency era, her friends have troubles of their own. Cover art and interior illustrations are by Paddy Donnelly, and the book will be published in September. But it’s available for pre-order now, online or from you local bookshop. Please pre-order if you can: plenty of advance sales and sales in the week of publication make a big difference to a book’s chances. And please pick up Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep and Utterly Dark and the Heart of the Wild if you haven’t already. The...

The Bookery in Crediton is one of the best bookshops in this country, and you don’t have to take my word for it - they were literally voted Best Independent Bookshop and Best Children’s Bookshop at the British Book Awards last year. They organise fantastic events with local schools, and have arranged lots of school visits for me over the years, with and without co-author Sarah McIntyre. This year they’re marking their tenth anniversary, and have just unveiled a whole newly-built event space, which links the shop itself to the meeting room and Hub workspace areas out back, and has allowed for a rearrangement of the shop itself and an expansion of the children’s section (yay!). If you’re ever in that part of Devon (just north of Exeter) do drop in and have a look around - it’s a fantastic place, and they have loads of great events with visiting authors .  To celebrate the anniversary, the new space, and the start of Independent Bookshop Week , the Bookery threw a big party yesterday...

It was December 2021 when I announced my half-baked to make my own Arthurian film , inspired by all the other Arthurian films I’d been watching for this blog. Now it’s May 2023, and the project is very nearly finished. Here’s the poster for Gwenevere , with artwork by top shield designer and location catering whizz Sarah McIntyre. I’ve also cut together a short trailer for the film, which you can see here on YouTube . 

I’ve been at work on editing our Arthurian movie Gwenevere since the beginning of the year, and it’s very nearly finished now. The last thing we needed to get was some flashbacks to Gwenevere’s love affair with Lancelot, which will crop up as brief montages at a couple of points in the story. We didn’t have time to shoot these in our main blocks of filming back in the autumn, so it seemed to make sense to leave them till spring - they’re meant to be taking place in a different time to the rest of the film.  We also needed a different setting - the film is about Gwenevere’s journey through the wilds, and it’s all shot on Dartmoor. So we thought a beach would make a nice change of scene, and since Laura Frances Martin , who plays Gwenevere, comes from north Cornwall we decided to find somewhere near her to film. That’s how we ended up in Bude, just down the coast from Tintagel. There are some lovely beaches there, and there’s also a handy castle called The Castle . It isn’t an actua...

Strangely moving scenes in the village churchyard yesterday, were the people of this valley gathered in the twilight among the gravestones of their ancestors to watch fireworks marking the coronation. I don’t know how many of them are ardent royalists. I know at least a few are proud republicans. Some, who hold their farms on lease from the Duchy of Cornwall, had the former Prince Charles as their landlord for decades, and may have more reason to grumble about him than most. But they weren’t there to celebrate Charles’s enthronement. They were coming together as a community to mark a national moment, which is also of course a local moment, and a personal moment. I tend to feel that having strong opinions either way on the subject of the monarchy is the sure sign of a crank. Royal fans and ardent republicans, like Brexit enthusiasts or people with #FBPE in their Twitter handle, are best edged away from at parties. I suppose if you’d asked me when I was twenty I would have said, ‘down wi...

One of the stories in this collection is Leaf by Niggle, an allegorical tale about an artist in which Tolkien is plainly expressing his anxiety that his work of creating Middle Earth will never be finished and that what fragments he does manage to produce will be ignored by most people and eventually forgotten altogether. It’s quite affecting, and I suppose he never did finish it, but there seems little danger of it being forgotten, since all his notes and half-finished stories are now available as pricey books. This one, Tales from the Perilous Realm , comes with a beautiful Alan Lee painting of a hero confronting a dragon on the front, perhaps designed to nudge the unwary purchaser into thinking they’re buying something Lord of the Rings related. What they’ll actually be taking home is an anthology of short tales which were mostly available as separate small volumes when I was a young ‘un, bulked out with Tolkien’s essay On Fairy Tales . Farmer Giles of Ham is the central story, ...