MARCH 2010

There will be blood! The first batch of covers for The Radleys are here. And I think they are rather lovely. In order of appearance, they are for the UK, the US, Germany and Australia.

Plus, I have just finished writing my next children's book, How To Be a Cat. It's about a boy who turns into a cat. But really it's a book about courage, Wizard of Oz style. And I've started writing another screenplay, with a little help from the UK Film Council.

I took Lucas to the cinema to see The Princess and the Frog. First time he's sat through a film to the end. He liked the crocodile who played the trumpet, and got through a very large bucket of pop-pop (popcorn, if we're being pedantic). Sleep, though, is still something he and his sister consider to be vastly overrated. Not that I'm against singing Baa Baa Black Sheep at 3 in the morning lying on a carpet with a bad back and high anxiety.

Read Christopher Reid's brilliant book of poetry, A Scattering. Plus the new film books by Peter Biskind (on Warren Beatty) and Mark Kermode (on Mark Kermode). And finally got around to seeing The Hurt Locker. To me it's a film about masculinity and addiction, just like Bygelow's neo-cowboy vampire classic Near Dark, and it works because if you are addicted to war the external damage matches the internal damage. Loved it.

JANUARY 2010

I have a cough. I am coughing as I type this, in fact. I've had this thing for a week now, and have infected Andrea with it, as well as Lucas and Pearl. And we've just discovered that cough medicine is banned for under 6s. Since last July, apparently. The coughing classes and their mad legislation! Tixylix is now a Class A drug sold with crystal meth in brown paper bags under the table in seedy pubs called The Turk's Head. WTF! as youths like to say these days.

Anyway, between coughs I am happy because:

Heard some exciting stuff about The Radleys just before Christmas. It is going to be published by Free Press in America. The publication date will be December 2010.

It will be published in France as well. Albin Michel will be my publisher there and it will be published later this year.

Denmark and Norway, too, will be publishing the book. The publishers will be Poltikens and Tiden.

Also, and this is something I'm really excited about, Canongate have joined forces with the children's publisher Walker Books, and they are forming a new imprint, Walker Canongate, which will publish certain Canongate titles for the young adult market. Anyway, the first four books they're doing will be The Life of Pi, Niccolo Ammaniti's I'm Not Scared, Kelly Link's absolutely mindblowing collection of spooky short stories Pretty Monsters and The Radleys. I feel honoured my book is hanging around such highly esteemed company and am excited because it means two editions will be published simultaneously in the UK - one for young adults and one for, erm, old adults.

Went to a place called Courmayeur in December. It's an Italian ski resort on the foot of Mont Blanc and I was there for a Noir Festival, as in film noir and Raymond Chandler and stuff like that. And I was there on a big serious panel to talk about my book The Last Family in England, which is an update of Henry IV Part One narrated by a Labrador. Think they'd got me mistaken for Harlan Coben or something. But very nice mountains.

NOVEMBER 2009

Quite a busy November so far.

The Radleys is taking off in ways I would have never dared expect. Within a month of being embraced by Canongate, it has now found wonderful homes in Germany with Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Italy (Einaudi), Spain (Random House Mondadori), Canada (Harper Collins), Brazil (Record), Australia (Text), Russia (Corpus) and Iceland (Bjartur).

The interest in The Radleys movie and my screenplay is also gaining a bit of heat out there but I'm not going to jinx anything by talking about that right now.

Okay other stuff:

The Last Family in England has published in Italy this month, translated as Il patto dei Labrador.

I was amazed to go home with the Achievement in the Arts award at the Yorkshire Young Achievers awards on 12th November (probably the first and last time I'll win something the Kaiser Chiefs have won).

Been invited to the Courmayeur Noir Festival in Italy, which is meant to be a mindblowing gathering at the foot of Mont Blanc taking place 10th-13th December. Can't wait.

Also heading off to Fontainebleu in France at the end of the month, to appear at an event organised by the English bookstore Reelbooks (the event is on 29th November at 4pm).

But most importantly of all, my six-month-old daughter Pearl is now eating proper food and has broken the British and Commonwealth record for eating a bowl of stewed apple in less than sixty seconds.

OCTOBER 2009

I have been walking around with a radioactive Ready Brek glow for the last week because I have found out that the legendary Canongate are going to be publishing my next novel, The Radleys. Canongate are my dream publisher, because they publish the most brilliant books with canyon-sized passion. They are the Miramax, the HBO, or the Rough Trade of publishing. The jewels on my bookshelves - like Michel Faber, Geoff Dyer, Scarlett Thomas, Steven Hall, Yann Martel, Nick Cave, Dan Rhodes, David 'The Wire' Simon and a lesser known talent called Barack Obama (big in America apparently) all have the magic logo on their spine. That my tale of a family of middle class, abstaining vampires is being so enthusiastically backed by Jamie Byng, and my new editor Francis Bickmore, is the icing on an already very delectable cake.

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