Hello! I’m back with a new book!
I have taken a sabbatical from blogging for a few months while I got on with the crucial task of actually writing another book, and I’m delighted to announce that it’s just about ready and I could not be more excited about it! It’s called The Dog Who Saved The World, and this is the […]
My new website!
Well, this is it! It’s a very personal thing, a website, I have discovered. I am almost as nervous about launching this as I am about a new book.
Yay! I won an award!
Oh God, is he boasting about that award? You’d think he’d won the Nobel Prize. No, not the Nobel Prize, but the Awesome Book Award, voted for by children in 46 schools across England’s southeast, and I couldn’t be happier that Time Travelling With A Hamster won. Apart from anything else, it was a fun evening. Each […]
Leo Baxendale, and how I nearly became a cartoonist
When I do school visits, the Q&A often includes the question: “If you had not been a writer, what would you have been” The answer, usually, is “a cartoonist”. (More accurately, I suppose, a cartoonist is what I would have liked to have been, rather than what I would have been.) The inspiration for this is Leo […]
World Book Day and the nicest school I have ever visited
I have now done two World Book Days as an author, and I always think back to the ones when my own two children (now 14) would dress up for school as a favourite book character. We did, among others, Angelina Ballerina (a fairly easy costume, that one, largely achieved with face-paint and a […]
Lost ‘Two Ronnies’ sketch
Well, by “lost” I mean “not on Youtube” which, I realise, is a different thing altogether, but I’d love to see it again. It’s one of their wonderful songs: they are street sweepers and that’s about all I can remember, other than it was hilarious. Every now and then I check to see if someone […]
The first copy!
Exactly a year ago, I was eagerly awaiting the appearance of Time Travelling With A Hamster in the shops. If you had asked me if there would be another book in a year’s time, I’d have said, “I hope so,” with little idea of what that would entail. In fact, I knew there would be another: I […]
Book number 2: thank God for that!
I’ll be honest – there were times when I thought, fleetingly, that perhaps I was destined to write only one book. That Time Travelling With A Hamster would have its brief moment in the limelight and then gracefully move along the bookshelf to make room for books by other, more prolific and successful authors. I would tell myself […]
“Let’s talk about adverbs,” he said, swiftly
A couple of posts ago, I mentioned Stephen King’s splendid book On Writing, and referenced his personal ban – which I think he’d like extended – on adverbs. “The adverb is not your friend” he said, adding, “the road to hell is paved with adverbs and I will shout it from the rooftops.” Loudly, no doubt. […]
A gem on every page
Fifteen years ago I was holiday with my then-girlfriend (now wife) in Zahara de los Atunes in southern Spain. Three things are especially memorable. Mrs W told me she was pregnant; Islamist psychos flew aeroplanes into the Twin Towers in New York (the horror of which we watched unfold on a television in a village bar); […]
