In a Hole in the Ground there lived a...

...hobbit.

The legend is that this first line popped fully formed into the mind of Professor JRR Tolkien. From it he built one of the most successful, most loved books of all time, like finding a beautiful, shiny doorknob, and basing a whole (hole) house around it. You can even get the t-shirt.


The same thing happened to me. It was quite surprising. It formed the origin of the next story I'm going to publish.

The line is 'There's only one Digger Bongo.' Go figure. Where did it come from? I have no idea. The line popped into my head while I was walking to work one morning. It stayed there for the entire day, and by the time I went home Digger Bongo had built himself up a character, an obsession, and a background.

Digger is a character in a children's story, that was quickly obvious. I haven't published stories for younger children before, and I know that you think of me as a YA writer, but I hope you'll have a look at Digger when he appears, or point younger friends and relatives in his direction. The first novel I ever wrote is for kids. In lots of ways I think its still my best, and hopefully Digger and his adventures will be the first step along the way to getting that first ever novel out and on Amazon.

 It didn't take much longer for me to realise Digger has a lot to do with digging holes. His family took a bit more time to assemble, until I remembered this...

The Family from One End Street, by Eve Garnett, that I loved when I was a little boy. We never owned it, but I borrowed it repeatedly from the library. It's about the Ruggles family, Mum, Dad, and seven children. Every child is a unique little character, and though their lives are ordinary, with that many people in the house there is always something going on.

Unsurprisingly Digger has 6 siblings, and every one is very, very different. I'll write a bit more about him, and them, in a couple of days. I'm on vacation now, so there's more time for blogging, I promise.

In the meantime, this is where I am. Very cool, don't you think?

Merry Christmas!

I'm Back

The date at the top of each post is like I've personally been blog shamed.
Honestly I've been busy, though. Not busy writing or selling books, unfortunately. Just busy with life and travels. Here are some of the places I've been.

 Dubai. The tallest building in the world. Dubai is a made up city, like the trade city where Luke and Obi-wan go in the first star wars film. My hotel was filled with Europeans (in an Arab country) but boasted a Phillipino nightclub on the 2nd floor. Just... because.

The fountain show at the Dubai Mall is off the hook. That's all.

 Muscat. Too hot. Even as the sun sets on the Persian gulf. Here I met a cricket-playing Arab, who learned it from hanging out with all his Indian friends.

Casablanca. A mosque on a promotory by the sea. The sea road fills with thousands of people gathering there to see the sunset.

And here's Casablanca Soukh. A rambling maze of white painted lanes, where you can buy almost everything AND get your hair braided.

This gets me to the end of May. But it already shows, I think, that truth is way stranger than fiction, the world is an amazing place, and I shouldn't waste so much energy trying to make stuff up, when what's already there is way weirder and cooler than anything I could come up with.

SEVEN INTERNET GEMS FOR READERS, including: Cassandra Claire's NEW SERIES, Spritz, Lestat, Book Boyfriends.

I haven't blogged for an age, and there's two main reasons for that. One is a vacation in Oman, the other is the end of the financial year. I'll be telling you more about one of those next week (guess which one). In the meantime, I was thinking how quality news about books and reading is kind of scattered across the web, so I decided to concentrate some of it, the things I've been looking at, here for you...

1. Our favourite fictional characters are never simple, and seldom entirely good. This article claims that a whole bunch of the best loved authorial inventions are much worse, they're bad to the bone PSYCHOS.

2. Do you want to read faster? I'm not sure what I think about this. I don't like the idea that reading novels, or anything for enjoyment, could be some kind of race. Maybe work reading, or research? But to me one of the joys of books is taking your time, going over things twice, or speeding along if you want to. See what you think?

3) Most of the readers of this blog are, well, readers, but still, you might need to persuade somebody else. Here are a stack of quotes saying why reading is the best.

4) Before Twilight, before The Mortal Instruments I first learned the possibilities of the contemporary paranormal from Anne Rice's Lestat, or more accurately, the Tom Cruise/Brad Pitt movie, which led me to the book. The news? Lestat's  ON HIS WAY BACK.

5) Speaking of the Mortal Instruments, everybody knows that there's a 3rd series on it's way, to make TMI and ID ending a little better. The news is that there's  FOURTH series, set in the same kind of era as ID. Cassandra Claire is a WRITING MACHINE.

6) Still speaking of the Mortal Instruments, every day is a little bit better because it's a bit closer to the next book. Getting to the last book in a series is terrible. This article describes the process. How far along are you?

7) And finally, more from Huffpost. We all have our favourite book boyfriends. Apart from maybe possibly they aren't as perfect as we think. Check to see if your flawed 'BBF' is on this list.

True Adventures of a Part Time Writer. The Sea of Galilee.

I sat here, at this table, in a state of slight disbelief. In the distance was the Sea of Galilee, the town I was in was Roman, and the restaurant had been built in a beautiful black and yellow stone Ottoman mansion.

Where was I?

The view south from the restaurant is like this, five miles of Roman temples, theatres, stores, and baths. In the bright November sun (yes, November) lizards sunbathed on blocks of stone, then sprinted away if you came too near, legs lifted high on each side.

The place is called Um Qais. It's in northern Jordan, the slice of pale water in the distance is the Sea of Galilee, now in Israel. The nearer hills are in Syria and Palestine, and the valley is that of the river Jordan.

The Roman town was called Gadara, most of it is now buried beneath olive groves, but it was once part of the Decapolis, the network of cities that ruled the area. It is the site of a biblical story about a herd of swine being chased into the water. When I was there it was also the site of an owl trying to sleep in a tree and a flock of sparrows determined not to let it.

The Ottoman village dates to when the Turks were in charge, but they left long ago, when their empire fell in upon itself. Local farmers took it over, but they too have gone.

The restaurant serves beautiful lamb stews, to the sound of haunting Lebanese guitar music. The day I was there, though, there were two other noises. The first was a weird trilling, like distant birds. I looked everywhere for them, until I spotted them high over head. Arrow head formations of broad winged, long legged cranes, migrating from the Russian Steppe to Africa for the winter.

The other noise was more distant, and more sinister. The muffled thump of artillery in Syria. Damascus is only just beyond the first range of hills, the infamous Golan heights. The whole area is scarred by millennia of wars. In the springtime the hillside is a riot of wildflowers, and filled with exiled Palestinians who throng there to see where they once lived.

There are stories everywhere, and some places few of them are happy. All we strive for is an end to this one, and as soon as possible.

Who I see when I think of a story, Aisling Loftus, Mr. Selfridge, Levels 4, Idylls of Merlin.

Aisling Loftus (pronounced Ashling), to me, is one of the greatest actresses of her generation (it's the younger generation, so far there's not a ton of competition).

I'm editing Levels 4 now (it doubles as Book One in the Idylls of Merlin) and there's one character, Madeleine Bride, who's becoming very complicated indeed. For three books she's been the POV character (except for a brief meltdown in Lullaby of Lies, when she wasn't strong enough to carry the story).

Now, though, she's one of an ensemble, and for much of the story - particularly the start, she's not even the lead. She has to play a mature, balancing role, when new players are charging in and making a mess of things. Aisling Loftus does complexity, balance, and imbalance with ease.



She also does swimming costumes, which is important. Anybody who knows Levels, knows that Madeleine has a love-hate relationship with her swimsuit. She doesn't swim as much as usual in The Walled Lake, because she needs to organise the future saviour of the world, but Aisling Loftus could do that too.

The main reason why Aisling Loftus would be a great Madeleine Bride is that she does an amazing job of hinting at vast inner resource. She can act surface fragility AND inner strength at the same time. I know this because I've been watching her in Mr. Selfridge. It's a great series, and she's the best thing in it. I haven't included a clip of it here, though, because her hair is all wrong. 1908 hair is splendid but it's not very Levels at all.

In Mr. Selfridge she's the naive, starting at the bottom shop girl who turns out - surprise! - to be graced with vast talent and oodles of charm.

Watch it! You can get DVDs for one dinar each in a shop near my place...

Ukraine 2014: Massive Dramatic Story, Good against Evil, Giant Super Hero takes on Grotesque Villain.

The bright colours and sunny pictures of my friends facebook profile pictures are disappearing. They are being eaten up and replaced, one by one, with this.

Nothing. Mourning. The long dark night before the dawn. My friends are Ukrainians, or people who, like me, have lived in Ukraine.

You didn't know that, did you?

I lived in Ukraine for three years. It's where I had my first proper job (the company sent somebody to the airport with a SIGN to pick me up). I had the first apartment all to myself (the windows were taped shut, and the water out the tap was hot enough to make coffee with). My first real relationship was in Kyiv. Ukraine is an awesome country. It is the biggest nation entirely within Europe. The people are spectacular. They party with a joy that is rarely seen, though their history is astonishingly harsh. One after another powerful neighbours have rampaged across their great expanses of undefendable, beautiful grassland. In the 1930s the Soviet Union engineered slaughter by starvation that saw corpses piled in the streets. 

Then there was Chernobyl.

It is that history, which gives authenticity to the other things that are so great about Ukraine. In the west are the mountains and forests of the Carpathians, haunted by wolves and bears. Lviv is an ancient city with hundreds-of-years old churches from a dozen different forms of Christianity, some of them rare, and tiny, and hailing from far away. 

In the east the steppes roll away towards the Caspian sea, much as they did when Cossacks galloped across them.

Kyiv, the capital, is a beautiful city, rolling over seven hills, from river beaches...

...to mysterious wooded graveyards that feel they are the edge of a 1000 acre forest. 

There are markets heaped with fruit, and a metro so deep the escalator takes 10 minutes to ride. In the winter it can be 20 below, in the summer people cram into beautiful parks, late into the evening. 

And now it is racked and ruined. You might have seen. I won’t go into the politics. You can find that elsewhere. All I want to say is that this is a beautiful, European capital, where young people are fighting for their futures.

Fortunately they’ve got this guy on their side, and he’s used to fighting. This is a time for heroes, and it may be that Ukraine has one.

The Black Square on people’s Facebook page was also the signature artwork of Kazimir Malevich, one of the founders of modern art, who was… drumroll… Ukrainian.

Not many people know that, much as they know little about Ukraine in general. It’s worth finding out, though. Much of this blog is about how YA paranormal and fantasy is not really that fantastic, because real life - if you are adventurous and look hard - is much more extraordinary. (examples here, here, here, and here) It is the fantastic things I have experienced in places like Ukraine that have informed my writing. 

It's worth finding out about Ukraine. I did, and I never looked back.

Happy New Year King Arthur Survey!

Hello everybody. I hope you had a fabulous holiday. Mine was mainly about the food, and a bit about Transylvania... I'll write more about it as soon as I'm sufficiently recovered...

In the meantime, though, I thought I'd remind you about a fun little survey I first released 2 years ago. It's about modern perceptions of King Arthur. Have a go, it'll take you a couple of minutes, and I'll compile your responses into an article for when Levels 4 comes out...

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CQYTVKH