Herewith a couple of quick pics from today’s brilliant visit to Hassenbrook School, in Stanford-le-Hope, Essex (UK).

First up, a Spaghetti Western-style widescreen shot to give you a flavour…!

And this (below) which shows pretty clearly how the warm welcome that I received there made me feel…! 😀

This visit was a lot of fun. The Year 7 and Year 8 students in all three sessions asked excellent questions and I had some great chats while signing in the library at lunchtime. A giant monster thank you to Ms Brockwell for inviting me (and taking these pics). Thanks, too, to everyone I met and spoke to, but especially to Ricky for helping out (and listening so politely to all three talks!) and to Jordan for suggesting some fabulous possible book titles!

Tomorrow I’m off to the awesome Crystal Palace Children’s Book Festival! I’ll be in The Bookseller Crow bookshop from about 2pm, so if you’re in the area do drop by.

Maybe, one day, I’ll be the kind of author who takes it all in their stride — and who /doesn’t/ get absurdly, cacklingly, arm-wagglingly, doing-a-weird-little-dance-in-the-carpark excited whenever they see things like this:

…Nah. 😀

My thanks to Justin and Yen for inviting me and looking after me so well, and to everyone I met and spoke to over the course of the afternoon. I’d ESPECIALLY like to thank Oliver and Alan, two thoroughly inspiring and spectacularly imaginative young blokes with whom I spent a very happy hour or so kicking awesome story ideas around. Volcanoes! Aliens! Dinosaurs! Acid blood! Exploding satellites! Portals to other dimensions!

Heh. I love this job. 😉

PS: Note that Tim is sharing the window with the brilliant Scream Street: Fang of the Vampire by fellow monster kidnappee Tommy Donbavand.

Briefly, here are some more pics just in of the wonderful Tim and Black Tat art that students at Amersham School created for my visit there the other day. Their stunning work has gone up in a special display at the local branch of UK chain bookstore Waterstone’s!

You see it there? Just to the right of the main entrance, in full view of EVERYBODY??

Another HUGE thank you to Amersham’s Year 8 students for their hospitality, and to Ms Shapland for sending me these pics. They have put an enormous cheesy grin on my face. Hee hee hee! 😀

Meanwhile, for more monster art of a medievally menacing kind, check Trapped By Monsters, here.

Here’s a pic of me doing my stuff during yesterday’s brilliant visit to Amersham School, in Buckinghamshire:

See that display in the background? Take a closer look…!

Aren’t these spectacular?? This fantastic display of Tim and Black Tat art was created especially for my visit by students in Amersham’s Year 8. Their work is going up for the world to wonder at in the window of the Amersham branch of Waterstone’s.

This was my first school visit for a while, and it was a CORKER. My gleeful thanks and best wishes to Ms Shapland for inviting me, but also to all of Amersham’s Year 8, who were a terrific audience: I hope you got something out of listening to me(!) because after talking to you I returned to the cave refreshed, reinvigorated, reinspired, and (best of all) reminded of what this writing-for-young-people caper’s really all about.

Thank you! 😀

My thanks to EILEEN ARMSTRONG and everyone else I met there for a fantastic evening at the North East Teenage Book Awards last Friday. My fellow prisoner Tommy Donbavand has written a fine account of the nicer parts of the night, so hit the link to take a look. But…

Sigh. If only the rest of the weekend had gone as smoothly. I have spent the last forty-eight hours strapped upside-down in a bucket of unspeakable monster fluids. That’s not something I do for fun, I hasten to add. No: this was a PUNISHMENT, administered to me by my captors, for the “crime” of recording and smuggling out the following frantic message:

I’m only writing this now because the monsters are insisting that I make a full and public apology. Well, you know what? I’M NOT GOING TO! You monsters are holding us here against our will! We’ve got every right to try to contact the outside world in any way we can, without fear of censorship, or repression, or, or – No! DON’T PUT ME BACK IN THE BUCKET! NOOOlplplplpchokehacksplutterbubblebubble ominous silence.

The good news, first. To my utter amazement and glee and delight The Black Tattoo has been shortlisted for another prize here in the UK, namely the North East Teenage Book Award. As you’ll see if you hit the link, the other titles in the running are:

BROKEN SOUP, by Jenny Valentine

ANGEL, by Cliff McNish

THE FALCONER’S KNOT, by Mary Hoffman

SLAM, by Nick Hornby

-and my personal favourite-

THE KNIFE THAT KILLED ME, by Anthony McGowan.

This award is such a big deal that the monsters have grudgingly granted both Tommy AND myself permission to leave the cave to attend Friday’s presentation ceremony. However, any faint hope that we might use this as an opportunity to escape was quickly crushed by our captors.

To stop us working out exactly where we’re being held, Tommy and I will be blindfolded before being stuffed into the spare tyre compartments of two separate unmarked vans and whisked to our destination, Newcastle.

Worse yet, today we were both injected with a slow-acting poison of the monsters’ own fiendish devising. We will receive the antidote only when we return to the secret pick-up point after the party, exactly as we’ve been instructed. If we do not, and the potion is allowed to run its course, sensitive parts of our anatomies (very sensitive parts, let’s just say) will begin to turn black, swell up painfully, then explode.

Finally, as if all of that wasn’t enough, the monsters have been making dire threats about what might happen to our loved ones at home should Tommy and I even try to ask anyone for help. For the last few days we’ve been forced to wear identical t-shirts with the following simple, chilling message:

‘Nice,’ I said weakly, when I first saw them. ‘Where did you get those?’

‘Here,’ grunted the nearest monster, before noisily blowing his nose on my last clean pair of boxer shorts.

It’s going to be a long couple of days.

Here are a couple of pics from this week’s events, which were my last for a while. This (below) is from Wood Green School, in Witney, Oxfordshire, which I visited on Tuesday. I gave talks to two excellent groups of students there, who asked all sorts of great questions.

…And this (below) is from this morning’s talk and signing with a terrific group from Alexandra Primary School, surrounded as we were by the full festive finery of The Big Green Bookshop!

All three talks seemed to go pretty well. This was much to my relief, you can imagine, as right now I’ve got an ‘orrible COLD – coughing, sneezing, nose dripping like a tap, the works (ew). An unholy mixture of medicines and good old-fashioned caffeine abuse got me through all right, but I think I was probably even more manic than usual! 😉

That’s it, now, for events from me for the rest of this year – until April ’09, in fact. My awesome agents Penny and Gina (Hello, Penny and Gina!) made me promise not to take on any more bookings before then, because I need to focus on PHASE THREE of my SINISTER MASTERPLAN TO CONQUER THE UNIVERSE [MOOHOOHAHA!! um, ‘scuse me ;)] For the same reason, it’s possible that this blog may become somewhat sporadic again for a while. So now seems like a good minute to express my enormous gratitude to everyone I met and spoke to at all my events this year:

THANK YOU! 😀

I enjoyed every single gig. And I’m already looking forward to the ones to come. Hee hee hee!

I’m waving my arms about and grinning – yes, even more than usual – because last Friday I was presented with THIS:

Yep, it’s an award! For one of my books! As voted for by young readers from Wigan! HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE! 😀

Ahem. ‘Scuse me, I’m rather excited. 😉

This is Wigan’s Explore Book Award. It’s a brand new award – in fact this is the very first year it has been given! And Black Tat won the Teen category. It’s an enormous honour to have my name on the prize in its inaugural year, one I’ll do my best to live up to for the rest of my writing life.

The awards ceremony was held at St Edmund Arrowsmith High School: I’d spoken to some students from there when I visited Wigan back in April. On that same visit I happened to mention a certain anecdote from when I was writing Black Tat: for the five years it took I was pretty short of cash, living basically off instant noodles and whatever past-its-best veg produce was being sold off knock-down cheap at the supermarket. One night (I was writing the Akachash at the time!) I opened the fridge door and realized I had nothing left to eat except PARNSIPS. This story must have made an impression, because once I’d received the above award (and said a few words of thanks) I was then suddenly presented with a second, namely… THIS:

Yep: it’s a GOLDEN PARSNIP!

A GARGANTUAN THANK YOU to the readers of Wigan who voted for Black Tat, and to the whole team at the Wigan School Libraries Service for organising what I’m certain will become one of the UK’s most prestigious awards for young people’s literature (that’s, erm, the Explore Book Award, not the Parsnip – but I guess you never know! ;p) I’d especially like to thank KATHY WILLIAMS and ROB SANDERSON for their kindness, hospitality and all-round awesomeness. I’ll treasure BOTH these awards, always. 🙂

Hi. Just a brief post with a few quick pics from this…!

Yep: for two days in a row this week I’ve been touring around schools as part of the Swindon Youth Festival of Literature. And IT WAS BRILLIANT!

The above pic was taken at the end of the second of two excellent sessions at Churchfields School. My thanks to everyone I met there, but especially to Samurai Librarian Graham Small for his hospitality (and excellent jokes! ;p) The third of Thursday’s events was a gleeful return visit to Swindon Academy, where (as long-term followers of this blog might remember) I first came and did my stuff as part of my Wiltshire Whirlwind Tour back in March. Huzzah! 🙂

On Friday morning I gave two talks in the main hall (above) at Dorcan Technology College. A big thank you to Fiona Harcastle for lunch, and for keeping my caffeine levels topped up! 😉 Then in the afternoon it was off to spectacular Nova Hreod for a fine final session in their LRC (below).

This was a fantastic festival. The organisers had obviously worked incredibly hard, and it was particularly heartening to see that effort supported by Swindon’s community radio and local press. I was thrilled and honoured to be involved. YAY! 🙂