At DFB, we love stories – and who better to tell them than our award-winning writers and illustrators?  That’s right, our new storyblog is going to be jam-packed full of writing, photos and exclusive artwork posted by over 30 DFB storytellers.  We’re really excited about this new project, where you can follow posts by your very favourite writers and artists, as well as meeting new DFB debutants!

Our group of DFB bloggers will take it in turns to post on a different question or topic, brought to mind by our new DFB titles.  For this first wave of storyblogs, they’re thinking about I DON’T BELIEVE IT ARCHIE!, and the unlikely situations and rib-tickling predicaments that Archie ends up in. You see, due to his incredible luck – and a fair few misunderstandings and bizarre coincidences! – Archie never quite ends up where he plans to..  Our bloggers will be sharing their silliest, funniest and most embarrassing stories with us – so you can expect a new post every couple of days, direct from the DFB authors themselves. So, enough from me - look below for the first post from author Candy Gourlay!

‘I Don’t Believe it Archie!’ is written by Andrew Norriss and illustrated by Hannah Shaw.

If you’re a fan of either Linda Newbery or Monica Edwards, or interested in pony books, click here to read Linda’s guest blog on the website Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.  Linda talks about two of her favourite childhood books and the effect they had on her as both a reader and writer. Great stuff – and straight from the horse’s mouth!  If you look further, you’ll be able to spot Linda elsewhere on the site too..  Happy Reading!

We’re pleased as punch to introduce our second author blog – by award-winning Canadian writer, Kenneth Oppel.

There’s a scene in my new book, Half Brother, that some people have found very uncomfortable. I won’t tell you what it is; you’ll have to read the book to find out – and maybe you won’t find it uncomfortable at all. But it’s made me think about how differently people can respond to the same material – and most importantly, how much I’ve come to appreciate those moments – in a movie, or a book, or simply watching Ricky Gervais host an awards show – that have pushed me beyond my comfort zone, or violated my expectations in some way.

Because it’s inevitably these moments that stay with me the longest. It might be something as simple as the scenes in the movie Castaway where Tom Hanks names and starts talking to the volleyball – annoyingly absurd I thought at the outset, but then realized how brilliant and moving it was – a man so lonely and desperate to cling to sanity, he finds companionship however he can. Or the scene in Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Frankenstein where, having birthed the creature, he’s unable to lift its giant frame from the floor, and staggers and slips about for a prolonged period in a slick of “amniotic” fluid – at first it seemed farcical and gratuitously slimy, but then in my mind it became brilliantly primal, and a metaphorical wrestling with the boundaries of science and morality. Or it might be the literal ringing of bells in heaven when the heroine is “martyred” at the end of Breaking the Waves – a moment which several of my friends said utterly ruined the entire movie for them, but which I think is brilliant.

At their best, uncomfortable moments aren’t just shocking and interesting; they can challenge our convictions. As readers, viewers, citizens, we tend to prefer the same menu. There’s a comfort in it, a sense of security, but sometimes also an almost self-righteous complacency: See, everyone thinks exactly the same thing as me! But what I think is so valuable about a work of art is how it can confront you with a new opinion, a new moral or political idea, that you’d never considered. Novels as disparate as Never Let Me Go, Cider House Rules, Feed, Frankenstein, and Wolf Hall have introduced me to new and uncomfortable ideas, and forced me to think about life in different ways – and while my personal reactions and reflections might not have been those intended by the author –perhaps quite the opposite in some cases – the important thing is the process: an opening to ideas rather than a closing.

So, long live uncomfortable scenes!

Ken Oppel

Review of HALF BROTHER, published Jan 2011:

Oppel is pleasingly unafraid to ask awkward questions, often right at the point where readers might have made up their minds. What a particular joy for a teenage reader, to be challenged rather than instructed. Parents might be surprised at the passionate discussions Half Brother ends up inspiring, along with a healthy new respect for our closest genetic cousins. – Patrick Ness in The Guardian, 22.1.11 

So I thought I would do this instead…

First, I have a promise to redeem. Lili, who has posted two questions on the blog, asked after my dog, and I told her I would include a picture for her the next time I put a post on the page. So here, for Lili, is a picture of Spanner.

As I write this Spanner is asleep and snoring. Her snoring can be something of a distraction and I fear it is getting more pronounced the older she gets.

It’s only a week now before school ends for the term, and I can’t wait. Getting up and getting everyone out in the morning is horrid at this time of year – the mornings are so dark, and everyone is so fed up and has colds and just wants the end of term to come. But, we haven’t got long to wait. We’ve only got to get through next week.

The Christmas crowns that I abandoned last year have been picked up again. I’ve nearly finished the bell tower, and this weekend I’ll try to assemble the bowl of fruit, though how I’m going to do that I don’t know, as I seem to remember there was a really complicated way of putting it all together, and I’ve forgotten what it was.

A nice treat early in the New Year will be a trip to Brighton. The Toymaker has been short listed for The Southern School’s Book Award, and there is to be a presentation on the 14th, so whatever the outcome, I’m looking forward to that – a nice long train journey down to the south coast. I love travelling on trains. I like looking out of the windows and watching the world slip by, all those corners and hedgerows, back gardens and swings, people caught just in the moment of letting the dog out or crossing the street with their shopping. And then there are the special things to sometimes see, like a hare sitting in a field. I watch it all. And I’ll enjoy meeting everyone down there too. It will be fun.

But today, I need get on, because next week everything of a writing kind is going to have to grind to a halt, as there will be shopping to do and secrets to keep, and a house to get ready.

And a pineapple, a bunch of grapes, a banana, two cherries, an apple and a pear to somehow stick onto a crown.

And, probably, a mouse or two to evict. They should have got back by then.

……Introducing our first author blog on the DFB website! Jeremy de Quidt, author of the  fantastical, blood-curdling debut novel The Toymaker has posted for you all below -  the first in a series of guest blogs from DFB writers and illustrators. Hurrah! This sparkling post really tickled me, as they always do (if you haven’t read Jeremy’s previous posts, take a look at his author page). From now on, we’ll be asking a different author every month to post a blog on our website – so keep an eye out for glimpses of your favourite illustrators and storytellers!

…then all of a sudden they zip past. I looked out of the window yesterday and realized that it was almost Christmas. Actually, it wasn’t so much the looking out of the window that did it, it was the annual arrival of the mice.

Each year at about this time, we start to get mice in the house. Where they come from I don’t know, but I think they’re here for the presents and chocolate. One year they neatly trimmed off the gold paper wrapping from all the chocolate coins and took tooth size scrapes out of each one. Another year they chewed through an electricity cable and left us without lights for ages while we tried to track down where the damage had been done. We eventually found the culprit turned victim beneath the floorboards, its teeth, in death as in life, firmly clamped into the power cable.

But I’m soft hearted when it comes to mice. They’re just doing their best.

So when Alice announced that she’d heard one under her bed the other day, we laid out the trusty and well tried traps – not the ‘put your head here and it gets chopped off by a steel spring’ variety, but the ‘catch you in a box and let you go somewhere else’ variety. I’m convinced that the mice we let go are the same ones as come back, but there you go. The way these traps work best is for you to wait until morning, and if the trap is closed, you lift it to your ear and listen very carefully for the scratching sounds inside. What you don’t do is what Alice did. You don’t get up in the pitch dark and armed with a torch open the trap to see if there’s a mouse inside. If you do that the mouse pegs it for all it’s worth and you don’t catch it again for days.

But we did get him in the end, and he is probably even now slowly making his way back. I reckon another week and we’ll have to evict him again.

So, the year has moved on, and this is the view from my window as I look out today.

Alice has been getting on with the world atlas across the kitchen wall, but it has come to halt recently what with exams and school plays and the like. This is where she has got to.

And the post brought the original artwork of the German cover to The Toymaker. The artist, Betina Gotzen-Beek, very kindly sent it to me as a present, along with sketches to show how she had started, which was really nice of her. This is it propped up on my laptop.

All of which brings me to now – summer has been and gone, Christmas is in the offing, and at long last I have nearly finished the next story. Maybe by the end of the year I will have it done.

Now, that would be very nice. I might even read it to the mice.