I wish I had some good sailing stories to tell you, but I don’t.  I can tell you a story about the sea, though.

The sea is my favourite place to go when I want to relax.  I don’t mind where in the world it is, or what the weather’s like – there is something about the sea that always makes me happy.

I can spend hours, days, weeks, just standing by the shore, watching the waves come and go, listening to them break upon the land. Read the rest of this entry »

Boats are so much fun to draw. I love keeping lots of little models around me. I got these boats at the National Maritime Museum’s Toy Boats exhibition, that was AWESOME.

I had fun imagining what little characters could look like, having adventures in the boats. Here’s a squid in a submarine! I love my job.

Here was the original toy I looked at: Read the rest of this entry »

Being a bit of a daydreamer is a great quality to have if you’re an author: first time it’s ever come in handy in my life. Generally speaking though, it’s not something you look for in a sailor.

I always have to start any blog posts about the sea and sailing with a caveat explaining that I’m not actually a particularly good dinghy sailor: it’s just something I love.

Oh how embarrassing then to have an entire series of eminent authors (and me) writing posts dedicated to sailing. I’m starting to feel like I’m on one of those radio confession slots now. But, dear reader, I have to admit that I am such an inadequate sailor that it nearly done for me, and another unfortunate.

I’ve blocked most of the details from my mind but suffice to say it was a summer in the 1980’s; I was trying to learn how to be a slightly-less-average sailor courtesy of a UKSA week-long course, and was dutifully tacking across Cowes harbour in a Wayfarer with some poor boy from London.

It had not been an auspicious pairing this young man and I. He was shy, I was awkward, the weather was freezing: we didn’t get off to a brilliant start. And after we’d spent 30 minutes in the mouth of Wootton creek – in the water and the pouring rain – trying (and failing) to right our capsized boat, relations were on the downhill slope.

But what do you know, come the last day the weather turned, we were a bit more confident and things started to feel much better. ‘How lovely,’ I thought to myself as I sat at the helm. It was Dinghy Week and there were lots of other boats on the water, the sun was shining. ‘Isn’t this pretty?’ I expect I was thinking to myself, possibly whilst playing a 1980s tune in my head by way of a soundtrack.

Lovely green water, clear blue sky, I wonder if I’ll get a tan today…

Until suddenly my crewmate’s hand grabbed mine angrily and tacked our Wayfarer violently. Read the rest of this entry »

Ahoy there, and a Happy New Year to ye!

Over the next 2 months, the storyblog is going to be awash(ho ho) with nautical tales - of sea, sand, salty air, and sailing!   Last week, we published A Boy and a Bear in a Boat by Dave Shelton and Heart of Stone by Melanie Welsh, and next month we’ll be releasing The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan.  Although very different, all three titles share some common ground: a journey over water, a harbour town with magical history and Selkie legend.  That’s right, all three stories take place in, on and besides the sea!   So, the DFB Storybloggers – authors and ilustrators all – will be sharing their thoughts, memories and ideas based on the seaside – these might be photos, jokes, artwork, prose…  We’ll have to wait and see.   Watch out for the first post from Linda Newbery this Thursday!

Making up locations is one of the joys of writing fiction, but sometimes you come across somewhere real that is just perfect as a setting.  And real objects can set you off on a line of storytelling that could never have started in your own brain.

It’s happened to me many times: most recently when I was writing my book Johnny Swanson.  I was investigating the early history of the disease Tuberculosis when I came across a place in Wales called Craig-y-nos.

It’s a castle built mainly in the 19^th century, and in its heyday it was the home of a great opera singer.  But the thing that caught my attention was that it had been used, from the 1920s to the 1950s, as a sanatorium: a special hospital for children with T.B.

I had to go and have a look. Fortunately, the castle was being converted into a hotel, and it was possible to stay there (albeit in a room where you could see down into a courtyard through a hole in the bathroom floor). Read the rest of this entry »

They say “worse things happen at sea”. But what if you are at sea?
What if you’re at sea in a tiny boat with a big smelly bear? And the only food you have left is a sandwich that is so old and mouldy that it glows in the moonlight? And the bear says something about sea monsters but you just don’t know whether he’s joking or not?

Yes, what then? Well, one of the things that you might not expect to come out of such a predicament is wave after wave of laughter. But Dave Shelton has managed to do just that. A Boy and a Bear in a Boat is a book like no other; a story which, in its bare bones, could be utterly bleak: a young boy is lost at sea, with no compass, no food and (seemingly) no chance. But Shelton’s masterful prose transforms this premise into a brilliantly funny and tender tale of friendship. While some of life’s problems are beyond our control, others may seem less worrisome if only you have a cup of tea, a ukulele and a bit of wishful thinking.

This book is rather different from anything we have published before. It is over three hundred pages long and Dave has illustrated it throughout, with several pages of beautiful full colour.

The unique humour of the story also meant that it was tricky coming up with the right cover look. Read the rest of this entry »

DFB Story Blog whip-cracker Tilda (pictured right) has requested us Storybloggers to write about our favourite stories of the year.

Well that’s a really tough call for this author who’s read (and LOVED) gazillions of stories this year.

So I thought ’twas more like the season to wax nostalgic for all those stories I have adored in Christmases past.

This past year there has been some controversy about school reading schemes vs ‘Real Books’ … but growing up in the Philippines at a time when there was hardly any local publishing for children, I discovered many of my favourite stories in reading schemes. These were imported from the United States and so featured no Filipino characters whatsoever (but that’s another story) … so it was all fantasy to me.

My Christmas favourite was a short story that never failed to bring a tear to my eye called A Tree for Nick by Mary Lou Brown (originally published in 1959).

A Tree for Nick was about a brother and sister decorating a tree for a Christmas tree competition. Except they couldn’t help thinking about their eight year old brother Nick, who was blind.

So they left out the shiny, sharp edged foil stars and the electric lights that burned Nick’s hand when he accidentally touched them last year. Instead, on went the soft fuzzy sheep and candy canes and the old horn that hooted when you blew it and the old tinkling music box. The tree they ended up with wasn’t pretty – but you could feel and taste and hear it.

‘Wheee!’ breathed Nick, his face shining with happiness. ‘This is the prettiest tree I’ve ever seen!’ Read the rest of this entry »

 Anything new by Aidan Chambers is always a treat, so I was delighted to be sent a new collection of short stories, and honoured to find myself quoted on the back cover: “Chambers is a searching, provocative, fiercely intelligent writer.”  I think that comes from a review of what remains my favourite of his novels, THE TOLL BRIDGE.

I found it fascinating to see several of Aidan Chambers’ preoccupations appearing here in shorter form: frustration for the questioning son of well-meaning but dim-witted parents, sexual ambivalence, the search for meaning in life, and toska, described by Nabokov, the almost pleasurable pain of yearning for something unidentifiable.

Some of the stories are of conventional length, while others are “flash fictions”, snatches of conversation, sometimes represented as play-script.  For me, the most satisfying story is “A Handful of Wheat”, a moving account by the teenage Chambers of his grandfather’s death, showing a prodigious early talent, and also, surely, the influence of D H Lawrence – I’ve often heard Chambers mention “Sons and Lovers” as one of his formative books.

In 2012, readers can look forward to “This is not Forgiveness”, by the always-reliable Celia Rees, another deservedly acclaimed writer for young adults. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, a news story concerning the unearthing of a witch’s cottage caught my eye.

According to reports, it was clearly a witch’s cottage because it had a mummified cat bricked up in the walls, and was found in Pendle, the scene of a notorious outbreak of maleficence in the early 17th century. Ten people were hanged as witches due to a tragic tangle of religious intolerance, familial rivalry and superstition.
Whether or not this particular dwelling played host to all manner of frightful witchery will be doubtless be pondered upon by historians and people (like me) with over-active imaginations. I’ve always loved old buildings – they act as a focal point for history and legends; they are like batteries generating stories, some down-to-earth and some fanciful. Read the rest of this entry »

When I finished writing The Outlaw Varjak Paw, I knew very little about my next book.  I was sure of only two things.  First, it would not be a Varjak Paw book; I wanted to do something completely different.  Second, I had an idea for a story about someone who goes on an epic journey to the end of the world.  But I had no idea who this person would be, or what it would feel like to do such a thing.

While writing my books, I’d also been working as a film journalist.  My favourite film of all time is Atanarjuat The Fast Runner.  That incredible image above is a still from it, and believe me, the film is even better than the still!  It was made in 2001 in the Canadian Arctic by Inuit film-makers, based on oral legends thousands of years of old, and it completely blew me away.  I got to know the makers when I interviewed them, and they kindly invited me to visit them the next time they made a film.

So in 2005, just after finishing Outlaw, I went up to the Arctic.  Specifically to a place called Igloolik, on the edge of the frozen sea, in the Baffin Island region of Canada.  That’s where they live, and I stayed with them while they shot their second film, The Journals Of Knud Rasmussen.

Read the rest of this entry »