Describe the place where you write/draw

I can’t work at a desk! I will work anywhere in my house, usually in my dining room or on the sofa. I have to be relaxed and comfortable to be able to be creative. I have various sketchbooks and my laptop scattered around the house.

What is your most treasured possession?

 I can’t be specific on this either as I have too many things I can’t live without! Some of my favourite possessions are books signed by fellow authors and illustrators, I have quite a nice collection now. I did an event recently with Marc Boutavant – the amazingly talented french illustrator and he signed a ‘Mouk’ book for me. He spent ages doing a beautiful drawing on the title page, in fact he spent so long doing the drawing he didn’t get to eat much of his dinner before we went on stage.

What times of the day do you work? All day, every day. I do stop sometimes but I don’t have a strict routine! Once I worked until dawn to try and meet a deadline, needless to say I wasn’t very productive the next day so now I do try to be sensible and have lots of bourbon biscuit breaks.

What distracts you?

Twitter, tea, my family, random ideas for stories, things in the fridge. I live on a busy residential street and there are always people to spy on out the window if I’m bored!

What is your favourite smell?

Damp leaves in the wood after it has rained…. ooh and grass cuttings.

Cat or dog?

Dog, I have one and we do dog agility together (the thing they do at Crufts with jumps, obstacles and tunnels, except we’re not quite to competition standard!). Here is a picture of him in the sea, he loves to swim too.

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Describe the place where you write.

I write in libraries.  I love them: they’ve got everything I need.  I would be totally lost without libraries.

Heart-breakingly, my favourite library is about to be shut down.  It’s the saddest thing in the world when something you love stops existing.

I wanted to put a nice picture of it here, but this is the only one I’ve got, taken a few years ago.  It’s strange; it looks so ghostly, as if it’s already dissolving away.  Maybe the camera knew what was going to happen?

What times of the day do you work?

There isn’t a set time.  Usually I give myself a goal for the day – say, writing 1,000 words, or editing a couple of chapters – and when it’s done, I’m free.

What distracts you?

Everything.  It’s so much easier to be distracted than it is to concentrate – and that’s why I love libraries, because there are no distractions there!

But my favourite distraction, as I’ve mentioned before, is photography.  I’ve just started using a wooden box camera from the 1930s, and I can’t stop making pictures like this:

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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.

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I know we’ve been asked to blog about something we’ve experienced in order to write about or draw it. But I’m going to be cheeky and write about something I DIDN’T experience, and was hugely aware of not experiencing.

It was Dagenham. 1973.

Remember England in the ’70s? …Well, I don’t. I’m American and I was only born in 1975. But just while I was in the middle of a crazy deadline for a picture book, a bunch of friends from The DFC days (remember that fine comic? I DO!) decided to undertake a huge comics project, involving more than 50 creators. And my task was to draw a day in the life of the book’s main character, with that day set in 1973 Dagenham. I knew I’d be tapping into a lot of nostalgia British people had for that era, and since I couldn’t time travel, and didn’t have a lot of time to research it, I was a bit nervous. But the project was too fabulous to say no. And the proceeds would all be going to support Shelter charity.

So I tapped into my experience from my DFC days, when I was writing Vern and Lettuce. Whenever I got stuck with that comic, I would ‘phone a friend’ on the team for help. And often that friend was Woodrow Phoenix (creator of the DFC’s Donny Digits, Horse of a Different Colour). And as luck would have it, my two editors on the project were none other than two DFC buddies, Woodrow and Rob Davis, who’d come up with the concept while chatting on Twitter. They’d both lived in Britain in the ’70s and are generally good at period detail. Read the rest of this entry »

After reading the topic for this round of blogs, I was at a bit of a loss because i was sure that everyone would come out with loads of really interesting stories about real world experiences they’ve had which inspired them to write something that is extraordinarily brilliant.

I usually come up with ideas by drawing out a character or landscape, and then thinking about why they are there and what they are doing…and this can develop into a happy story, a sad story, a complicated story etc.

Most of what influences me is subliminal, and predominately from film or television, as the worlds i like to create contain things that I haven’t had the chance to see first hand, or they just don’t exist at all.

Occasionally, however i see something that influences me to the point that I notice it, and notice the change in my work that it creates.

One such example was the series ‘Planet Earth’ by the BBC. (image below)

From the first time I saw the wide shots of the Earth’s largest waterfall,  the slow panning of the peaks of the Himalayas,  to the solitary polar bear navigating its way through the great expanse of the Arctic; I was hooked. I thought, ‘this looks amazing I want to draw it!’. I even made a book at university which was set in the Arctic (illustration below).

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If you’ve read any of the blurb about Mistress of the Storm, or its follow-up, Heart of Stone, (out in January book fans) then you’ll know the mysterious town of Wellow is a fictional version of Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. I actually grew up in Cowes which is on the north side of the Island but I always loved Ventnor which is very remote and all the more magical for it.

To my often-voiced disappointment I don’t live on the Island any more. And what with small children, work, life etc. I realised that I hadn’t spent any proper time walking around the places I was describing for too long.

So earlier this year I decided to fit in some time on my own between school visits to remind myself what my lovely homeland looks like. It was wonderful I’m ashamed to report (it all felt horribly indulgent). After I’d visited Somerton and Solent Middle Schools in Cowes I drove straight to Ventnor to take in the view. You can just about make out the real Spyglass Inn in the distance here:

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It was 1975.  I was 8 years old, and I lived in the middle of London.  I’d never seen a rabbit in real life; I thought they were silly, to be honest, and I certainly didn’t care about them.  So when my mum gave me a book with a rabbit on the cover, I just laughed.  “I’m not reading that!” I said.  “Trust me,” she replied.  “I’ve read it myself, and it’s brilliant.  Read the first page.  If you don’t like it, you can stop, but try one page and see for yourself…”

So I did.  And from that first page, I was plunged into the world of those rabbits.  And their world was so much darker and scarier than I’d imagined.  Because everything in it was bigger than them, and it was all out to get them.  Just to survive, those rabbits had to be so much braver and stronger than they ever thought they could be…

Sometimes it was terrifying, sometimes it was sad, sometimes it was funny – but at all times, it was completely compelling.  I could not stop reading that book, and as I read it, I remember thinking, “I will never forget this, as long as I live…”  And I haven’t.  Read the rest of this entry »

I have never tried to rewrite or adapt a classic book, but characters from classic stories and nursery rhymes have certainly made many a guest appearance in my picture book work. Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Bears, the Big Bad Wolf, the Three Little Pigs and others, have all had walk-on parts. Their presence has leant these stories a certain familiarity and made it seem as if all these nursery characters, whether mine or somebody else’s creation, inhabit their own, real world where new stories may be happening all the time; much as the cartoon characters inhabit Toon Town, in the film Roger Rabbit. I find that idea quite reassuring. One only has to enter that world to discover a completely new adventure.

It sometimes takes a long time for a book to worm its way into my heart. I have to re-read it and flick through its pages again and again, savouring sentences and studying illustrations, seeing how the ink sits on the page. Then it becomes like an old and trusted friend.

One of my favourite classic books is Treasure Island, but I didn’t fully appreciate its brilliance until the right edition came along and everything clicked. I first became familiar with Treasure Island through the film starring Robert Newton who, with his greasy beard and rheumy eye, created the archetypal screen pirate. ‘Arrr, Jim lad!’

When I did eventually turn to the book, I was a bit disappointed. I have the same problem with music – it takes me years, sometimes, to appreciate what many people seem to get straight away! Anyway, the book didn’t quite work for me, until I found an edition that I fell in love with.

This was illustrated by one of my heroes, Mervyn Peake, where everything seemed to be right – the design and layout, the quality of the paper and, of course, Peake’s wonderful illustrations. Here was a pirate that enhanced the character on the page, and surpassed the screen version, which now began to look rather cartoony. Peake’s Long John Silver is so real you can almost smell the salt and sweat on his clothes. Read the rest of this entry »

I love story retellings because they’re a great excuse to play fan girl AND make a comic! When I was a teenager, I had a terrible crush on Cyrano de Bergerac, the French film version played by Gerard Depardieu, and also related to him entirely, having no success in my own little love life. I saw the film three times in the cinema and I still often play the soundtrack when I’m making books in my studio (in fact, I’m listening to it right now!)

So when I got back into making comics, it was not much of a leap of the imagination to write myself into the story. I play Sister Marthe, the little nun near the end who tries to feed the wounded and exhausted Cyrano some soup. It was a comic I wrote and drew in a couple hours, then posted on my blog. I had no idea where it would go when I started, but making it was so incredibly entertaining.

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I could not possibly disagree with either Linda or Melanie.

Well, yes I could. On one little little point. Linda’s title for her post “Thieving Magpies” was no doubt intended to be provocative. I am duly provoked :)

‘Theft’ implies property. The thing that is stolen belongs to someone else. But to whom does a work like Jane Eyre belong? Or The Turn of the Screw or The Silver Chair? Of course the law may allow heirs and corporations to own rights over past works. But that seems a bit like allowing the descendant of some Victorian collector to own treasures that his ancestor looted from the tombs of the Pharoahs.

The big, old, much-loved stories belong to everyone. They get retold and retold, in many forms. Not a year goes by without another Jane Austen TV serialisation or film re-make. Now, it would be a brave writer who actually tried to re-write Pride and Predjudice, but shift it to another century, put it in different clothes, call it Bridget Jones’ Diary and it works. Who’s the poorer? Read the rest of this entry »