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 »

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Every time we get a new topic for the storyblog I try and find something from my own experience or something I have already produced to use for my entry. Unfortunately, I haven’t really been on a boat recently and the only image I had of the sea and a boat was from one of my Robinson Crusoe illustrations, which I have already used on here, so I decided I would try and sketch something to do with the A Boy and  Bear in a Boat.

I haven’t yet read the book (but I really like the cover), so I thought I would literally take the title and illustrate that. I kind of had in mind that I wanted to do it more as a character sketch. I have a photo of myself (taken in Scotland a couple of years back) which I always thought looked like someone peering into the distance from the mast of a ship, So I decided to do the character in that pose, only from the front.

Read the rest of this entry »

I desparately attempted to beg off posting anything this month, claiming to be horribly busy with this comic I’m working on, and also to be possibly the least nautically-minded person in this entire island nation. I think port is left, and I gather that ropes are involved, and that is literally the sum total of my knowledge of or interest in boats.

However, thankfully for us all the indefatigable Tilda at DFB reminded me that, hey, that comic I’m claiming to be so busy working on, has  A LOT OF BOATS IN.

And this is true.

However, and this is quite crucial here, the boats in question make it about three pages into the story before they’re out of that boring old ’sea’ nonsense, and into a milieu I’m much more comfortable with: riding around on the backs of dinosaurs. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, Tilda, you’ve forced me to write about a book I wrote for Another Publisher. Sorry. But sailing it is.

In a previous post, I wrote about doing my research after writing the book; I did the same thing, though while the novel was still in draft form, for THE SANDFATHER (to be reissued this year by A.N.Other, with a striking new cover). The story is set in a fictitious seaside resort called Ryton-on-Sea, which bears an uncanny resemblance to Littlehampton, on the Sussex coast. Hal, my main character, is in all sorts of trouble, having been excluded from school and sent to stay with a great-aunt he hardly knows (by a plot contrivance I won’t go into here). I wanted him to have the chance to try something new and do it well, and that something is sailing.

Well, I’d never so much as set foot on a sailing yacht in my life, and didn’t know a bowsprit from a half-hitch. And I knew that it would be very easy indeed to get things wrong. So I decided it was time for some hands-on experience, and found a company called Firstaway that offered sailing courses for all levels of incompetence.

February wouldn’t have been my ideal time of year, but I had a deadline to meet, so I set off for Southampton into bitingly cold winds and sub-zero temperatures. I’d packed my Goretex walking clothes, which were quickly dismissed as inadequate: instead I was kitted out in a sort of padded boiler suit, which made me feel like Michelin Man. There were five of us on the thirty-foot yacht, and I turned out to be the only novice. Still, it suited my fictional purpose perfectly, because Hal in the story was never going to be an expert: he was having his first experience, just as I was.

We set off towards Portsmouth Harbour and I followed instructions about pulling in fenders, slackening sheets (I bet I’m getting it all wrong – this was a few years ago now … ) and did some tacking and jibing. All very exciting. Even more excitingly, once we headed out into the Solent, I was allowed to take the helm, while the yacht heeled over at 45 degrees and other people saw to the jibing and the tacking. I managed to steer into Cowes Marina without mishap.

We slept on the yacht, mooring at Hamble on the second night, and going up the Beaulieu river to Buckler’s Hard. Here I lost points for becoming so interested in the birdlife sheltering along the shores that I asked someone else to steer, while I gazed out with binoculars. This was definitely disapproved of by my otherwise tolerant instructors. 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 »

Well! I never expected that one of the best stories of 2011 would come out of The Archers.

Should there be anyone out there who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, The Archers is a Radio 4 soap opera (‘an everyday story of countyfolk’) that has been running since 1951.

The Archers moves at a snail’s pace.  Only those of us who have devoted most of our lives to listening regularly can detect the crucial lines in each episode – and yet you can miss the programme for weeks and still pick up the threads.  We love some of the characters, but the programme’s real contribution to the welfare of the nation is the way in which it provides a safe place for us to hate.  I could never dislike anyone as much as I dislike Helen Archer.  In a curious way, by sucking away at my store of bile, she (and other infuriating characters, such as the vet’s father, Jim Lloyd) make me better able to cope with people I find irritating in real life. Read the rest of this entry »

If ‘favourite story from the year’ means ‘book that came out in 2011’ then I’d have to agree with Conrad: Moon Pie is an excellent read, touching and funny and sad. It does that trick of following a harrowing series of events through the eyes of a child who does not fully understand what is happening to her family. The reader (who is allowed to get it just a bit before the child) watches first with a feeling of helplessness as the child makes her discovery, and then in awe at the natural human courage with which she faces it. And I can say that without fear or favour because Simon’s not my editor.

But Tilda lets us roam more widely. ‘Books, films, news stories and all,‘ she says, and so begs the very large and interesting question of what really is a story, and what isn’t. Because when you start to look at it, pretty well everything’s a story in one way or another. Stories are the way we make sense of our world. We take our perceptions and fit them into a pattern. That’s a story.

(I say ‘sense’, but I don’t necessarily mean sense. Tony’s story of the invasion of sheep reminded me of a story my Dad used to tell us on long car journeys, which began with an invasion of ferocious steel-woolled sheep from Mars who were paranoid about a prophecy that they would Get Knitted. It made no sense at all but it was a very funny story.)

Of all the stories, fact and fiction, that came my way in 2011 I’d have to pick the one about the News of the World. Not through Schadenfreude but because of its shape. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the nicest things about being an author is that for some reason it seems to give you license to get in touch with other writers and say hello. Or maybe I just think it does. Anyway, that’s how I became friends with Ben Johncock; writer, Guardian journalist, hilarious tweeter, Literary Death Match Pugilist and fellow resident of darkest Suffolk.

So I was quite excited when the DFB blog asked me to write about my favourite short story of the year, because Ben had written it. And you don’t need to worry about personal bias either, well, not too much: look it got a lovely review from the venerable Scott Pack (who likes the Isle of Wight so he must be a man of taste, no bias there either).

Like all my favourite writing, the ideas The Rocket Man played with stayed in my thoughts long after I’d read it. Because in this story the sun is dying: these are mankind’s last days on earth.

It’s a haunting premise with good pacing right up to the ‘exquisite reveal’ that Scott quite rightly pinpointed. And it has an ending that leaves you shivering slightly and running to give your children a cuddle. The writing style is lovely too. It reminded me, in this instance, a little of John Wyndham. But whether you agree with that or not, Ben always has a very elegant way of putting things.

Now, this is technically a short story for grown ups, literary fiction no less, told through the eyes of a child. But I have a bit of a thing about not getting hung up on categories. The library I went to when I was growing up wasn’t very big, so I learnt to like an alarming range of things from Hardy, through books about engineering to Daphne du Maurier, which I don’t think did me any noticeable harm [cue nervous tick]. Read the rest of this entry »

Well I said I’d do a blog over Xmas and I’ve left it a bit late so I’m feeling a bit sheepish about that. Apt, really, as this blog is about sheep. Yes, the real ones, the woolly bleaters. 

This autumn just gone I was up on a High Fell Farm in Cumberland, the Lake District. I’d gone there with my wife for a couple of week’s walking. Good for the back, good for the mind, the spirit, the whatnot…. etc. Generally good. Healthy. Wholesome. Hearty. You name it. 

The story I’m going to tell is less of a story and more of an amusing or surreal anecdote. I dote on anecdotes, as you may know. I am the ultimate anec-doter, you could say. Though you may prefer not to. No hard feelings. 

Well, the missus and me were warmly and drily ensconced in our rustic cot (cottage to the uninstructed). The weather those weeks was wet. You can’t get more alliterative than that and you couldn’t get wetter than we’d been on our wild, wet walks. Webbing was growing between our toes. Moss was forming in places I couldn’t mention in a children’s book zone. 

But, for the moment, we were in the dry, warm cottage and I was sitting in an armchair by the fire, gazing out at the gauze of rain drifting up in swathes from the bottom of the valley and past the farmyard to the High Fells. 

Suddenly I was interrupted from my Wordsworthian revery by a thundering sound from the steep slope behind me. I should have mentioned that the back of the cottage er….. backed onto (the very phrase!) a steep fellside (hillside to the uninitiated), so that the view from that window was less of a landscape or skyscape as a ‘grassscape’ (how many ‘s’ s in that, eh?). 

For a stomach churning moment I thought, “Avalanche! This is IT. End of life about to happen! Won’t have to cure my bad back after all….. Can I embrace death with a willing and positive spirit….? 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 »