My new website is up and running. I'm really pleased with it. It's that new that the google spiders won't even have found it yet, but if you want to visit it now you can find it at jeremydequidt.com I hope you like it.








I’m supposed to be writing at the moment, and I am doing a lot of background reading, but I’m very prone to getting distracted. It’s probably why it takes me so long to ever write anything. This time the distraction took the form of my new Facebook account and an afternoon spent with a chocolate egg and several Lego men. If you are interested to see what I’m talking about you can find out on Facebook at

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jeremy-de-Quidt/173645262789074

Then there is the new website that is being built. It’s coming along really well and I’ll add a link in this blog when it’s up and running. There will be pages about the books, some video, a completely new blog and a hidden surprise or two.

But today in my bit of Somerset it is bright and almost sunny and though I’m tempted to go and do something else, I need to get on and do something for that next book. I’ve almost finished all the reading I have to do, and then I’ll just have to make a start.

Tomorrow, the Easter holidays begin, so have a good time wherever you are.

And if you’ve looked at that Facebook page, this picture will make sense.







It isn't often that a day starts with a tweet from space. Ok, you can say that all tweets are bounced off communication satellites so come from space in one way or another, but what about a tweet actually sent by someone floating around in zero gravity? Step up to the plate astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield, Commander of the International Space Station. He is a bit of a hero of ours is Commander Hadfield (test pilot, astronaut, commander of the present ISS mission, to name but a few of his merits). Not only does he do all that space stuff, but he finds time to tell people about it too and you can follow him on twitter. So on Sunday morning, as we were gaffer-taping a small video camera to the side of a home launched rocket, we decided to ask the good Commander for a few tips, and to our boundless joy he tweeted straight back, which is how our Sunday started off with a tweet from space. Commander Hadfield's tips for space exploration included Tip one; Force = mass x acceleration. Tip two; get hold of the biggest rocket we could find, and Tip three, stand well back. In honour of Commander Hadfield, we walked up the hill behind our house and set off our rocket. What with the camera strapped to one side, and the whole thing weighing heavier than it should, we didn't quite make it to ISS orbit. But the camera did work.



The Feathered Man has as one of its characters a tooth puller by name of Kusselmann. Kusselmann not only pulls teeth, but will replace a person's rotten tooth by fixing in its place a good tooth he has pulled from someone else's mouth. The other day when I was in a museum in Bath I was very pleased to find an eighteenth century cartoon of the very same thing actually happening in real life – poor people being paid a few pennies to have their good teeth pulled out, and rich people paying a whole lot more to have the poor persons good teeth put into their gums.



Christmas seems a very long time ago now, but I have a small, unusual reminder of it on my shelf. It was only after we had taken all the lights and decorations off the tree, and I had taken it into the garden that I found a small bird's nest amongst the branches. It had been there amongst the decoration all through Christmas, and we had never once seen it. It is a very small nest as you can see by the pound coin next to it. I've always liked bird's nests, there is something almost magical about them. I never take them from the tree, but if I ever find one blown down after a storm I will always pick it up and bring it home.



And last but not least for this blog is news of my lovely old dog, Spanner. Spanner is thirteen years old now and a bit slow off the mark, but still spritely for all that - except over the last few weeks she has gone quite deaf, which is both sad and very endearing at the same time. By far the biggest problem for us is that when we let her out at night she can't hear us calling her back in, and being a black dog we can't see where she is in the dark to go and find her. So, the other day at the vets I bought a small light for her collar – we can turn it on as we let her out and keep tabs on her in the dark. It seemed (and is) a good idea, but what I hadn't expected when I turned the thing on for the first time was for it to flash bright orange like the light on the top of a gritting lorry. But Spanner hasn't even batted an eyelid. She goes wandering aimlessly around the garden last thing at night like some small industrial vehicle. I'm not sure she's even noticed it.










It's almost the end of January now. I haven't written a thing since I finished The Feathered Man last summer, but I'm beginning to feel restless and actually want to start writing something else. If I'm honest about it, that's probably what I've really just been waiting to happen. This one I'm going to try and write more quickly, I'd like to have it best part done by the time that The Feathered Man comes out in paperback in November of this year. That at least is the plan.

Today, it is snowing again. This is the view from my window.





I sort of like snow – I like it when it's clean and white and new, and we can sledge on the hill behind the house and don't have anywhere to go because school is closed. But after it has hung around for a week or so and thawed a bit then frozen again, and is muddy and thin and wet, I just wish it would go away. I want the white garden to be green again. I think that's where I'm at now. It's not even fun throwing snowballs anymore – it's like being hit with a slush-puppie. Sledging has been good fun though. The big steep field we normally use was thick with ragwort last summer - a proper forest of the stuff - and all the hard dry stalks are still standing up in the snow. Sledging through them was a non-starter, it would have been like being whipped with sticks, so we went down a much longer, shallower, slope. It wasn't as nearly exciting but it did mean that I walked away from it at the end without having broken, strained, torn, ripped or snapped anything, and I can't help seeing that as a bonus.

Mind you, we have it easy. Just think of a Moscow winter or one in Northern Scandinavia. No wonder they have such bleak stories of spirits and demons living in the cold, bare wastes of winter. If like the Muscovites and Scadinavians you had to live through several months of real cold, and dark, and snow, Spring when it finally comes must be astonishing.

I didn't think there was much point in me having my own website while I had only one book in the shops, but now that The Toymaker and The Feathered Man are out, and there will be a third book on the stocks, I decided that it is time for me to do something about it, so I had a good look at other writer's sites and have ended up asking the man who made Phillip Reeves' site for him, to build one for me. It's in the early stages yet, but I'm very excited about it.

Apart from writing the new book, another thing that would be very nice to happen this year is getting my big, black, old car back on the road. I like old cars, I like the smell of oil and leather and petrol. Sitting in our garage is a huge old Rover we call 'Doctor Barnard' after the first man who owned him new back in 1960. The car was last on the road in 2007 and is looking very sorry for himself at the moment.





Maybe, if I say that it could happen this year, then I will find a way to make it happen.
If you look carefully at the picture you'll see a muntjac skull in a box on the bonnet. I haven't just put it there for effect. It's another of those things I keep meaning to get around to doing. I've always liked natural history and I found that skull in a field behind the house. I've got to clean it up, bleach it with peroxide – I asked a taxidermist how to do it – and then it can live on a shelf in the house somewhere. If you ever get the chance to look at a skull, take a really careful look at it. They are quite astonishing pieces of biological engineering.

Come to think of it, underneath the muntjac skull, there is a fox skull to bleach out as well. And a badger skull next to that. And then there is the roe deer skull under the rhubarb planter in the garden.

I'm going to need a very large shelf.



I have finished. Really finished. Not like the several false finishes to date, but the real thing; no more rainbows disappearing over hedges, no more rewrites to do. The proof copies have been sent out and the book will be in the shops in November.

If you're curious, this is what happens. The writer finishes the writing part, then they talk about what they have written with their editor(s) and take in any changes that come out of those talks. That might happen several times. When the writing is done and everyone is happy with the story, the book starts its journey from the writer to the printers. It is set out in double-paged proofs called 'galleys' (after the block that traditional printer's used when setting type). They look like this. These were the galleys for The Toymaker.



The writer checks these for typing errors and makes any changes he or she wants. Then the galleys go back to the publisher, and from there the book moves from the writing/editorial side of things over to the production side where the spine width, font size and style are all decided. This is the first time the story takes the form of an actual book. It's a very exciting moment – seeing what you have written as a real book, not just pages on a screen or loose pages from the printer on your desk. This is the proof of The Feathered Man.



These copies might still be full of errors that no-one has yet picked up on, and the writer might have some last minute changes they want to make –and this really is the last chance – but everyone knows that, and the publishers want to get on with the process of getting the book into the shops, so the proofs are sent out as they are (errors and all) together with press releases to bloggers and reviewers to start spreading the word that there is a new title coming out. These copies are sometimes called Advance Readers or Bound uncorrected proofs. They are the last stop before publication. You can't buy them in shops so if you ever do get your hands on one, hang onto it and keep it safely.

But for all that checking and rechecking for typing errors and mistakes, some still get through to the final book. How many times have you found a typing error, or a misplaced word in a book and you say 'they made a mistake here!'? Of course it should have been spotted by someone, but when you have read the same sentence maybe a hundred times or so, you stop seeing what is written there and start seeing what you think is written there – and the two aren't always the same. But that actually is really interesting, because that mistake you've just found in the book is a mistake the writer made as they were writing the story. It takes you right back to the very moment that they were sitting at their desk and their mind wandered, or they got up to make a cup of tea and didn't notice the mistake they'd made when they sat back down. In the old days it would have been a printer's error and you could blame them because they set the type, but now that everything is copied from the writer's original file, you know that what you have found is his or her mistake as they actually wrote the thing. It's usually things hidden at a line break that get past me.

I'm always interested in where people actually write and what they have round them when they do. I hear some writers say 'oh, I just write anywhere,' but I'm a creature of habit. I like to have the same place and the same things round me. It's only when things aren't going so well, that I'll move to somewhere else in the house – change of place, change of mind.

I sometimes write at the dining room table (my grandmother's old table – a picture of it is in the very first post on this blog) but writing there has its drawbacks. First, I can't write there when there are other people about, they are too much of a distraction and the second is –



Spanner sits next to me. And then she puts her head on my lap until I pat her. Then she will sit until I stop patting her and will put her head on my lap again. I can't type like that. So I shoo her away and she walks a long circuit around the table and puts her head on my lap from the other side.



So I work upstairs.

Which is a bit of a mess.



From left we go: big rolled-up print of the cover of The Feathered Man that Jim Kay did for me, (I'll get it framed when the book is in the shops and not a day before.) then; big stack of paper that is all the drafts of The Feathered Man; then smaller stack of paper that is the drafts of The Toymaker; and on the far right a pile of ideas on scraps of paper. Lying sideways on the shelf below is a pencil sketch Jim Kay did of Lutsmann and Anna-Maria characters from the The Toymaker. That is going to get framed when the other cover gets done. It looks like this.



What I particularly like about it, is that when you turn it over and look at the back, you can see where Jim started to draw Anna-Maria, then decided that he didn't like what he'd done so turned over and started again. It's one of those connections to the moment the person made/wrote the thing.



The thing that looks like a half eaten roll on the shelf below is actually a fossil in a lump of flint that I found while I was a labourer on a building site years ago. One glorious summer I worked as a brickie's mate. The builders were putting an extension on a school out on the Norfolk Broads. Day after day the skies were cloudless and blue. There was the day that my brickie took the pneumatic drill from me and saying 'not like that!' promptly put it through a buried drainpipe. And the day the oldest labourer, long past retirement but kept on all the same, put salt instead of sugar in the morning tea, and the day when one of the younger brickies brought in a long bow to shoot it on the school field but put an arrow though the outside toilet instead. Oh, and of course the day I found a fossil in a lump of flint that now sits on the shelf in my room as I write.

If you are curious as to what any of the other things are, just ask.

And now the summer lies before us. It is a very wet one here in Somerset. The other day the village flooded. We are on the top of a hill and are always safe from harm, but the people down by the river got flooded out. It was very miserable for them.



This is what he road out of the village looked like once the rain had stopped.



School is about to end for the year, so have a good holiday whatever you do.





Finishing The Feathered Man is for me becoming like trying to reach the end of a rainbow. Each time I think that I've got there, the end of it recedes over the hedge into the middle of another field.

This is how it happened.

Have you ever read a book, or watched a film and at the end of it thought to yourself 'I really liked that bit where they were (for example) on the train (or the boat, or up the mountain, or locked in the haunted house, or being chased by the wolves/dragons/bears).' And then you say to yourself 'I wish there'd been a bit more of that.'

Well, that's what happened.

We had an editorial meeting to talk about what I had hoped was the final version of The Feathered Man, and David Fickling said ‘I really liked that bit where they were on the train. I wish there'd been a bit more of that.’

Not that there are actually trains in The Feathered Man, but you get the picture. So, as a writer I had a choice, I could have said 'No! They are exactly the right length of time on that train and I'm not going to change it one jot!' Or I could have thought (as I did) 'You know, if I did write a bit more about when they are on the train, then this or that could happen, and they could do this, and that would make that happen and then it might even be better story.'

But of course writing doesn't happen instantly (well, it doesn't for me) and with that comment and that thought, the end of the rainbow disappeared again over the hedge and into the middle of the next field. But, unlike the end of rainbows, the end of books do eventually get reached. I have until the 15th April to come up with that extra bit on the train, and if I manage that, The Feathered Man will be in the shops on 7th November of this year. If I don't manage it, then the book won't hit the shops until some time in 2013. Publishers have lots of books all queued up in their lists, and if you miss your slot, what happens next isn't always straightforward.

So, there we are.

Today it is very rainy and grey and I have 53 days and counting to write the new bits and finish the story. But, if that makes me feel a bit glum I have two things I can think about. The first is the fortitude of that small, found, lead soldier who stands on my table as I write (see post of 18th February last year) and the second, is the certainty that on or about the 6th of April I shall see the first swallow of the Spring, and on that day I will clap my hands and dance whatever distance I happen to be from the end of that rainbow. That first swallow always gets a big cheer in our house. It is the promise of sunny days to come, of ice creams and holidays and lying on the grass in the garden.

And maybe this year it will be the promise of a book finished and in the shops for November the 7th.

Oh, how I do hope so.




Here we are in January 2012. Not even just in January 2012, but almost two weeks into it. Blink and the time has gone. So fast.

But I suppose it largely depends on what you are doing - does time go faster when you are happy and more slowly when you are sad? If it does it is a cruel trick, and it should be the other way around. Sadness should fly past and happiness take forever.

That shall be my resolution for the year, and I recommend it to you. Make happy things last and sad things be brief.

Now, if you have read any of this blog before you may have come across our Christmas mice. I am delighted to report that they came back again this year. A few day before Christmas Jack complained of hearing scratchings from beneath his floorboards. I should add that the complaint was made after waking me up at one o'clock in the morning. So, next morning I lifted the floorboards (easy, there is no carpet) and my parting comment to Jack next night was not to bother to wake me up just to tell me that he could hear a mouse in the trap – it could wait until morning. But when Jack did wake me in the middle of the night I couldn't complain. Not only were there three mice running around in his room, but when he put his torch on, Mouse Fella Number1 was actually sitting on a table looking at him.

This I had to see.

True enough there were tails and back ends of mice disappearing under, round and through things all over the room. Jack asked if they would get into his bed and I said that if he was in it I thought it unlikely. He told me that wasn't quite the resounding 'no' answer he'd actually been hoping for, so between us we carried his mattress and sheets downstairs and he slept the rest of the night on the floor in front of the fire.

Suffice to say the final score of mice apprehended, carried up the hill, and turfed out of the trap was four, and the damage done was one entire chocolate reindeer eaten (probably Mouse Fella Number 1) and the foil and bottom quarter of a chocolate Santa nibbled clean away.

I like our mice. The traps have failed to produce anyone more to evict, so that looks like it for another year, but I'm already looking forward to them coming back for the next round.

I finished the rewrite of 'The Feathered Man' on the 20th December. I think it is with the copy editor at the moment. It's going to be published on the 7th June.

So, for the moment I am not writing and am twiddling my thumbs instead. I shall have to dig out the list of things I meant to do when I'd finished and work my way through it. Last time, it included learning how to do a back somersault, which I am pleased to report I did thanks to the wonderful Willie Ramsey, Head Coach at the Wookey Hole Circus School. I can do one from a standing jump on a trampoline, and just need to polish up doing the same off the hard floor. Funnily enough the trampoline doesn't add any 'boing' when you do a standing jump, but it does make for a softer landing - the hard ground is pretty unforgiving. Having learnt how to do it I can say it's brilliant fun to do, if a bit giddy making until you get the hang of it.



And this morning's post brought a box kite and 1000m of kite string. I've already got a really, really small camera so, if it's windy, guess what I'm going to try and do tomorrow.









So, how was it going back to school? It probably feels now as though you haven't been away at all, and that the summer happened a hundred years ago. That's how it feels for me (not the school bit, mercifully) but the rest of it does. Maybe because a lot has happened in the de Quidt house, the biggest bit of which was our son, Jack, going off to university. That has left a huge Jack shaped hole in the house, and I reckon it's what it must be like for lots of people at the moment whose brothers and sisters have gone away, and you miss them and feel a bit glum (even though you can use their things without complaint and might even have got a bigger bedroom). But if you are feeling glum, let me tell you that it gets better. Least, it gets manageable, and that is almost as good.

One of the odd things I forgot to mention about my summer was that I came across an egg vending machine in France - just like a snack machine, but selling fresh eggs. It's the only one I have ever seen. It was so unusual a sight that I had to take a picture of it. It looked like this. You put in your money and it gave you a box of eggs.



Why?

I even looked it up on French Google. I think it's the only one. They have a picture of it in the snow.

It was my birthday the other day – I like birthdays - and with some money I was given, I've treated myself to two prints (not originals as they cost an arm and a leg, but only copies which cost a whole lot less). They are from a children's alphabet book by the woodcut artist William Nicholson. I've always liked that alphabet book because although quite cheery in places ('M is for milkmaid') it is also very dark in others, and the two prints I bought were 'U is for Urchin' and 'V is for villain' both off which sort of fall nicely into the kind of stories I write.





I had thought that 'M' was for murderer' but it isn't and that must just have been my dark imagination playing tricks on itself. 'M' really is just for milkmaid- or maybe she isn't quite all that she seems because you can do an awful lot of damage with one of those milk pails.

And I was given a present that made me really pleased. If you have read this blog before, you might have seen that I love old photographs. Well, I was given a book of photos of Lost London 1870 to 1945. There is going to be so much in that to see, so many shop windows to look at and imagine buying things from, half open doors to wonder what was behind. I can hardly wait. I shall have to ration myself to one picture each lunchtime. It shall be my reward for getting on and doing the things I'm supposed to be doing. Like finishing the final re-write of The Feathered Man.

Which I really should be doing now…

Oh, and I haven't forgotten about the circus and back somersaulting. That is coming on, and I shall have to write about it next time.



It is almost the end of the summer. School starts again at the end of this week and our house has that half sadness, half not knowing what to do'ness that descends on us (and I expect lots of houses) at this time of year. It has been a nice long summer, but now we have got to pick up everything normal and start over again. I think on the whole I like different better than I like normal. Different is always much more fun.

The Feathered Man is in the lists for publication in May of next year, but it has occurred to us all that it could be an even tighter story with a few changes to the last quarter. So, back to the drawing board and to some very focused rewriting.

This however is the real Feathered Man, least the one that gave me the idea.



He was made years ago by Netta, a friend of ours, and a while back, wanting to make a bit more room in her house, she gave it to Alice. It's a life size wire mould of a kneeling man, the wire completely threaded with white feathers. Alice fixed him to her bedroom wall and every night when I went in to say 'goodnight' to her I'd look at him in the half dark and think 'there's a story there'. Which is how it all began in my head.

The summer has seen the view from my window change. There was a self seeded hazel tree growing happily behind the swing, but our neighbours came and pointed out that it was pushing part of their wall down, so sadly it had to go. But I'm not a big fan of cutting trees down, even scruffy old hazels.

So this is the before.



And this the after.



I think I'll just have to plant another one, making sure it isn't anywhere near the wall.

We went on holiday, which was great fun and included such wonderful daily games as attracting the attention of the small dog across the road. We'd give a little whistle from our upstairs window and he would start up by his gate as though someone had given him an electric shock, trying desperately to work out where the noise had come from. He never caught on. He was the kind of little dog that everyone should have living across the road from them.



And the place we stayed in had the largest ironing board we'd ever seen. It was actually bigger than Bea.



And the journey to it took us past what was described as 'Woinic. Le plus grand Sanglier du monde' – (Woinic the largest boar in the world). It is one of those works of art that I look at and the question 'why?' comes slowly lumbering over the horizon towards me.



Now, I don't usually scour bookshops for a copy of my own book, but finding myself in Germany for the day, I couldn't help but just take a tiny look. There was The Toymaker – Finster Herz – on a bookshelf in Freiburg. I did a little capering leap and punched the air, and the woman sitting a few feet away quietly got up and sat somewhere else. But my warmest thanks go out to Buchhandlung Rombach for being so kind as to stock it on their shelves.



Which brings us nearly to the end of the summer. One last picture though, of a mirror in Dunster Castle – a house we visited the other day. I love old mirrors, all the things they have seen. Stories by the yard there if you want to write one. Just go up to an old mirror and look very hard right into it, at the smudge of the room behind you, and you won't be short of ideas.



Good luck to everyone going back to school, and starting anywhere new. And remember, different is always more exciting.





I'm going to run away to the circus.

Well, maybe not actually run away to join it, but I am going to go to the circus and not just to watch. That list of things I wanted to do when I finished writing the book included learning how to do a backflip – you know, one of those standing jumps that sees you go backwards in a circle all the way head over and land with your two feet back on the ground just where you started. So, good to my word, I thought that if I was really going to do it, the only way to do it properly would be to ask a real acrobat to teach me, which is how it is that I'm on my way to a circus. I'm lucky living where I do that I'm really close to a proper one. I'll keep you posted as to how I get on. I'm really very excited about it.

Until today I hadn't put pen to paper since I finished three weeks ago, but the time has come for me to get on with the final re-write. There are a few things I'd wanted to change anyway, and now one or two things that my editors at DFB have suggested I think about, so all in all it's about time I did it. The plan is to have all the writing done by the end of June, and hopefully the book in the shops next May. That sounds a long time off, but not when you think that there have got to be maybe twenty illustrations done, the cover designed, the whole text double checked and everything printed, then pre-publication publicity set in hand and all before the story can even so much as see a bookshop shelf. It all has to start with me getting the words finished and that's what I began doing today. I might even have a title – The Feathered Man – but we shall have to see. It will be a great relief to have a second book in the shops alongside The Toymaker. Writing this one has been a hard slog and there are times when it didn't feel as though it would ever happen. It was certainly harder to do than The Toymaker, and I've learned a lot about writing and perseverance from it.

I haven't really done yet many of the things I have been saving up to do. I have been mostly wandering around like a stunned fly. But I was invited to visit Midsomer Norton School, which was very good fun - their book group had been reading The Toymaker – and I have been for several walks, on one of which I found this.



It is quite the most remarkably fragile nest I have ever seen. It is made entirely out of horsehair and feathers. I've been trying to work out whether it's the whole nest or just the lining (as in the saying 'feathering your nest') and I reckon it's actually the whole thing. There are no scraps of twig or anything else caught on the outside to suggest it was inside something. We've had some very high winds round here of late and it must have been blown down. It was just lying on the track as I walked past.

I've spent a lot of time playing on Jack's Xbox. Poor him, he's having to revise for exams still. My heartfelt sympathy goes out to everyone who does. I still occasionally have nightmares about them – in them I'm usually having to take an exam I haven't the first clue about.

And I've been to the cinema and watched films including the latest Pirates of the Carribean. I thought the appearance of the first mermaid was so still and composed. Exactly how I always imagined a mermaid would be.

But now I must get on writing again. And, learning how to do a backflip. Mustn't forget that.



I have finished.

Really. I have.

Well, finished, as in the sense that I have finished the first draft and met with David and Bella and Simon at DFB to agree what needs to be done to it to finish it off completely. That's what editors do – they spot the things the writer might not have noticed, suggest ways that the story might be sharpened up. A writer tends to have so clear a picture of the thing in their heads as they write it that they can miss or just be so far into the trees that they don't see something that is not so clear to someone reading it for the first time. Thankfully there isn't that much for me to change or tighten, just enough to bring me out in a cold sweat at the thought of doing it.

But if you have ever wondered what finishing a book looks like, it looks like this.



This is my desk as I finished. I was so pleased to have finally got there after all those years (literally) of writing it, ripping it up and starting all over again, that I stepped back and took this picture. This is just after six o'clock on Saturday 7th May. I might have missed finishing the story in time for the arrival of the first swallows (Bea saw them on the 2nd April this year) but I finished it just in time for the arrival of the swifts. They were screeching round the outside of the house as I sat and wrote.

So, what now?

I want to have a few days before I start the rewrite, but to be honest I'm rather twiddling my thumbs. I made a list of things I wanted to do, and I suppose I should do some of them. But it almost feels like they only made any sense while I was writing and didn't actually have any time to do them. Maybe that is just the way it is when you have been so consumed by doing something. It takes time to put it down. But I shall do them, and I shall make a start before I begin the last bit of writing.

Alice finished her atlas on the wall. This is what the final things looks like.



She and Jack and just starting their exams, GCSEs and A levels between them. This is Jack and Alice at Easter, pruning around before the awfulness of exams had arrived.



Only Bea is free of it. It is her birthday tomorrow. Hurray! We are going to have ice creams after school. I'll post a picture of that too if it isn't too horrible to see.

One of the friends coming for ice cream is Liberty. She and her family bought me a pair of Turkish slippers a while back. They were going on holiday to Istanbul and I asked whether, if they saw some, they could get them for me. And they did. Slippers, all the way from Constantinople. How wonderful.



A few weeks ago Bea and I found a small thin coin in our garden. When we washed it clean, it turned out to be a jetton (a little gaming coin from the 1500's). We were excited as a pair of puppies. It was made in Germany all those years ago, and if how it came to be here in Somerset isn't enough for a story, someone had put a hole through it so that it could be hung round their neck. It was a touch piece – a lucky coin. So, why was it lucky, and how did they come to lose it? Story there if you would but write it.

Me? I won't for the moment. I've got Klaus and Liesel and Markus to think about.

But, it will nice to have two books out. The Toymaker, and whatever this next one is going to be called. I haven't got a title. My mind just goes a fuzzy sort of blank each time I try to think of one. But I'm sure I'll get there, in the end.





I always have my eye open for curious things, and the other day I came across this.



He is a small kilted drummer, cast in lead. Nothing curious about that, you might say, and you would be right. But this drummer has great fortitude. You see, he was found in a field by a man with a metal detector.

Bit more curious, eh?

So how did he come to get there (the drummer not the man with the metal detector) and how long has he been there. It's easy to put personalities to inanimate things, people have been doing it for countless thousands of years, statues, totems and the like (in fact we do it in our house all the time – we actually call our washing machine 'Albert') but I can't help thinking of this chap being lost, and simply patiently waiting there in the field through the snows of winter and suns of summer, never knowing whether he would ever be found again. So, now he is going to sit on my desk while I write, and every time I think glum thoughts, or think that things aren't going right for me, I shall simply remember him and his fortitude.

Actually there is a whole raft of stories that can be written about things being lost and found, and the consequences for everybody. You should give it a go. If it were me, I'd probably go with the idea of finding something that had some bad luck attached to it, and the things that would bring.

The other day, I did my bit for keeping libraries open. I don't know if you know it, but loads of them are to be closed. It's all to do with saving money. Together with some other writers I went along to a Shepton Mallet Library event here in Somerset and read to some very, very small children, most of whom it seemed were armed with large pink balloons which they used to bash me with while I was reading to them. They were all too young for The Toymaker so I read them 'The Tiger Who Came to Tea', 'Dogger', 'Seventeen kings and Forty Two Elephants', 'Green Eggs and Ham', and an Edward Lear Alphabet, but they still bashed me with the balloons all the same. It was very good fun. In fact, it was such good fun that everyone said we should do it again next year, and if the library is still there (which I certainly hope it will be) we probably will. It was fun too pulling all those old books down from my shelves – books I hadn't read since my own children were small. Books like 'The Hidden House' and 'Peter and Cat'.

Speaking of libraries, I had some very nice mail from Chicago. The city library there has just published its 'Best of The Best' list for 2011. There were two days of events where schools and librarians and booksellers and teachers and publishers from across the State came and listened to people talk about the books on the list, and to my very great pleasure, The Toymaker was one of the books on it. Chicago is six hours behind us, so with a bit of mental juggling I kept track of what was happening there while I was going about what was happening here. It was all very exciting really. That's one of the wonderful things about stories – they are not stuck to one place. Here I am in Somerset, and there they are in America, and the story is the same. It's nice to think of The Toymaker on shelves and tables in homes and places that I will never see, some of them on the other side of the world.

Monday was my daughter Alice's birthday, and in celebration we have a big bunch of daffodils on the table, proof if any was needed that Spring and better days are just around the corner. This was her birthday cake. One year we put an indoor firework on her cake, it made a column of sparkling fire at least three feet tall. This year we were less ambitious.



The magpies are back looking at the nest in the garden (the nest I put the ladder up the tree to look into). They make an awful racket in the morning, but it isn't as bad as the road being dug up, and I'm pleased to see them again.

I keep saying it (and it really is true), but I am really so near to finishing the next story. I reckon maybe four more chapters will do it. I am that close that I have even begun making a long list of things I will do when I have finished - all those things I have been wanting to do for ages, but haven't been able to because I have had to be writing. I have heard it said, and now find it true, that writing the second book is harder than the first. This one has certainly been harder to write than The Toymaker was. But we are nearly there, and maybe I will have it done by the time the first swallow arrives. That would be a very good thing indeed. We have kept a drawing on the wall for some 15 years and marked on it where and when we see the first swallow each year. It's always a day we celebrate and is usually around the 6th of April. So you see, it isn't far off at all.



My camera is mended but sadly wasn't to hand when I travelled down to Brighton last Friday for the Southern Schools Book Award. Bea very kindly lent me hers but all I managed were very blurred snaps of everyone, so I will have to wait until some of the pictures that were taken by others find their way to me, and then I'll post those for you to see.

The Toymaker was shortlisted along with Stolen by Lucy Christopher, Bloodchild by Tim Bowler, Saving Rafael by Leslie Wilson and Grass by Cathy MacPhail. We each read to the audience a bit from our books and said something about how we write. It was very interesting for me to listen to the others – to hear how they go about things – and I just wanted Cathy MacPhail and Leslie Wilson to carry on reading. Lucy was about as excited as a puppy in a sack when she learned that she'd won, and we were all very pleased for her. We each received a glass paperweight and mine is sitting on my table.

Then, afterwards, we sat down and had the chance to sign books and meet the children who had reviewed them and voted. There were loads of schools and loads of children and I had a great time, I really like doing that. I'm only sorry I made such a hash of the pictures.

The whole thing was organized by several schools and their librarians and finally put together by the wonderful Mandy Rutter and Sue Blood, and I think they are brilliant.

Have a look if you can at the other books that were on the shortlist along with The Toymaker, they are all very exciting, moving, and Saving Rafael is deeply thought provoking too.

Here is a picture of the sea, as was, at Brighton on Saturday morning. It's about the only one I managed to get in focus.



They have finished digging up the road outside my house. A thousand cheers. I'm not sure which was the worst – the drills, the stone cutting saw or the 'pound- poundy' 'rolly-rolly' things that flattened it all out after they had dug it all up and filled it in again. But it is done, until the next time.



Monday was a bit of a difficult day after all the doings and excitement of Brighton, and I managed not a single thing, but today has been different. The sun is out, the french windows are open and Spanner is snoring on the floor under the table. Not that it will mean anything yet, but I have just written the bit where Markus climbs the staircase. I think I will keep that in.

But what he finds at the top, I am not going to say.





Today, as they have for the last week, they are digging up the street outside my house. The noise is awful. I have closed all the windows, but frankly it hasn't made a bit of difference. The street is closed while they repair the pipes that take the rainwater away. It's a lost cause. Each time it rains here, the water scours all the mud and grit off the hillside above the house, dumps it in the drains like cement and then goes on its own merry way like a river. You can sail paper boats on it come a good downpour. They might as well save their time and effort, and then I wouldn't have to go around with balls of cotton wool in each ear. And whatever they try, come the next downpour we'll still be able to sail boats.

The New Year is here and everything is creeping towards lighter days. I like winter, but once Christmas is done, I just want the Spring to arrive. On New Years Eve we filled a metal dustbin with wood and had the biggest fire we could make in the garden. It was brilliant, and if the rest of the year turns out to be half as nice as sitting next to that fire at one o'clock in the morning, it won't be bad at all. This is Jack, Alice and Bea by the fire.

I did finish Alice's crown, and here is the proof.

But one casualty of this Christmas was my camera. Bea leant me hers to take a photo of the crown. Mine, I dropped. It was still in its case, and it only fell a few inches but neatly hit the hard pointed edge of a paint palette and now it is in a shop for repair. At least it can be repaired, so I must be grateful for that.

I'm going to build a rocket.

A real one.

Not a very big one, but big enough to take a small camera. If I'm lucky I might get it up several hundred feet, and the pictures from there would be amazing. I've worked it all out, parachute and all. And if that fails, I'm going to put a camera on a kite and get that up as high as I can.

Can you detect a theme here?

I've just found a camera on the internet that takes video and stills, is only a couple of inches long and weighs just 20g. That's barely anything.

Plans like that are the sort of thing I have to do WHEN THEY ARE DIGGING UP THE STREET OUTSIDE MY WINDOW AND I CAN'T HEAR MYSELF THINK.

Next week will be different. Happy New Year.



And it did snow. Actually, it still is snowing.

Above the house, the greenways between the fields are thick with snow and criss -crossed with fox, rabbit and hare tracks.



I do these walks most weeks and I generally have a camera in my pocket. Over time I"ve built up a string of pictures of the same places through different seasons and times of day. These two are of the same place, early October, and last Saturday.




Inside the house it has been pretty cold too. The mug of water Jack put by his bed froze solid the other night.



And we have been sledging, though I have only watched so far rather than done. I think I'm saving getting crocked until after Christmas.

Coming back from sledging yesterday, Bea slipped and let go of the string of her sledge. The sledge slid away sweet as a nut, picked up speed and disappeared straight into the river at the bottom of the slope. It took a quick sprint along the road, a precarious balance and a long hooked branch in order to head it off before it, and the river, disappeared beneath the bridge and into old the mill culvert.

There is a sad and grisly story to tell about that culvert in Victorian times, but that can wait until another day.



It's the shortest day of the year tomorrow. We'll light a huge fire in the grate and feel the lurch of the year as it swings away from the dark and back towards the summer. I always imagine huge counter weights, and brass cogs and wheels all cranking into motion at midnight and setting the whole thing back in train. It does the same thing come mid - summer, only the other way.

I was wondering the other day where the first swallow I'll see in the spring actually is at the very moment. Egypt? Reed beds along the Nile? Cape Town? It's there somewhere. It just all seems a very far prospect today with the snow so still lying thick on the ground.

And I'm trying hard to tell myself that I need to do a bit more writing before Christmas, but there it is already mid day and there is so much going on in the house now, and so much snow outside, and so many other things to do, that I'm not sure it's going to happen.

And there are still those bananas and cherries and orange and pineapple to paint and fix on Alice's crown.

Somehow, I think that it's all the other things that are going to be the ones that get done.





It is cold and damp today, and I haven’t really got started. 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.





Things move slowly in the de Quidt household 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.

You can also read this post on the DFB blog.



I have been very neglectful of these pages this last month, and the truth of it is that I am hiding myself away, answering no telephones and reading no mails, trying very hard to finish the book I have in hand. I'm working on the principle that if something is important I will get to hear about it soon enough, and the rest can wait. I only hope I'm right. In several respects though, I'm finding it rather a relief.

That is not to say that I haven't been out of the house at all. We went to a village fete the other day and Jack and Alice decided upon a game. They are dangerous when they gang up like that. The object of the game was to get to wear a complete stranger's sunglasses for ten seconds. The only rules were that the glasses had to be loaned and not yanked from an unsuspecting nose. We were not allowed to say that we wanted them for a bet or a game, and we weren't allowed to repeat a method anyone else had successfully used. When that version of the game proved to be a huge success we branched out into hats. This was just as much fun as it was a hot day and village fetes tend to be full of extraordinary hats. I heard Alice shamelessly accosting a friendly faced woman with the words ‘What a lovely hat! I've always wondered if that sort would suit me? Could I try it on?’

Last week was half term, and I miss everyone very much when school starts again. It is bad enough finding myself in an empty house again after the usual weekends, but Mondays after a week of everyone being round comes like a stone into my heart. This half term Alice asked if she could paint a large map of the world on a wall. We took a look to see what wall we could spare and decided on the kitchen. It hasn't seen lick of paint for years so it can only be an improvement. Drawing the grid so that we could enlarge a smaller version proved to be easier said than done, but we managed it in the end, and here is Alice ready to embark. I will keep you posted every now and then as to how the masterpiece progresses.



But for now, it's back on with the book. There's only one way to get a story written and that's actually to write it.




I went up to London the other day. Never mind that I had to set off early and didn't arrive back until the small hours of the next morning, I like days out. I like the unexpected stuff that happens – like the pigeon on the tube in February – and the certainty that if I do something different and stop thinking about one thing for long enough, I can guarantee that I will think about it in a different light when I come back to it again.

The unexpected stuff this time was the two lads carrying the huge purple elephant on Willesden Junction train station, and the other was walking around Kew Gardens, completely deserted, just before they closed for the day. I have no explanation for the elephant, but it was too good a picture to miss.



I aimed to turn up early to the place I was going to, and a good job I did, because I got out at completely the wrong train station. Which is how I came to be wandering round Kew Gardens at the end of the day. If you have ever wondered what it must feel like to find the world suddenly deserted, then go to Kew in the last minutes before it closes. It was the most peculiar sensation. All the lawns and flowerbeds neatly trimmed and tended, the paths raked and tidy, but not a soul to be seen. I don't mean only a few people, I mean none. It was as though the world had stopped. There wasn't even so much as a breeze. For one brief moment I could hear a couple talking as they walked the other side to me of a high hedge, but I never saw them and for all I know, had I looked over they might not have even been there at all. I sat on the steps in front of the great glass Palm House, and day dreamed about what kind of calamity could do a thing like this? I couldn't help thinking of The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. If you haven't read it, it is a good read and you will see what I mean.



As to the thinking about things differently stuff, the bit that struck home this time was this - if you have written it, you can change it. Don't worry about things not going exactly how you had in mind, if you need to, you can change them.

The difficult thing with that advice, even to myself, is that sometimes it's hard to see what needs to be changed, and the temptation is to leave in the bit I like most or I'm most pleased with, when actually that is the bit that needs to go.

If you get stuck with what you are writing, take out what looks like the bit you most want to keep and see what it all looks like without it. Sometimes it will look a whole lot better. You needn't lose that good bit, put it to one side and maybe you can use it somewhere else. I have a file on my desktop called 'Lost the Plot' and it is filled with all the bits like that I have taken out. Some I do use again, but it's funny, when I look at most of them again, they don't look anywhere near as good as I thought they were the first time, and taking them out was exactly the right thing to do.







I read a Victorian morality tale once, about a Bishop who'd lost his gold and diamond signet ring. Convinced it had been stolen, he roundly cursed the thief so that nothing but misfortune and unhappiness would fall on him until the ring was returned. No one came forward for several days then at last, a single wretched, miserable, blind and exhausted magpie walked into the Bishop's palace and dropped the ring from its beak onto the ground by the Bishop's purple slippered foot.

I must have been about eight when I read that, and even then the moral of it struck me as a bit suspect. But if I taught me one thing (and it probably wasn't the one that the author had in mind) it was that magpies stole gold and diamond rings. Leastways, bright and sparkly things. Jackdaws are supposed to do the same thing too. So it was this week that I stuck our longest extending ladder up against the hawthorn tree in the garden, and with more than disinterested gold and diamond curiosity set off towards the nest a pair of magpies had built right in the top of the tree last summer.

I like going up high things. It scares the living daylights out of me, but maybe that's why I do it. Anyone I know who has had scaffolding up round their house (and over the years several people that I didn't know either) have had me knocking on their doors asking if I could climb to the top and have a look. Even familiar places look quite different when seen from above.

I'd watched the magpies all last summer, and even though I know that people don't generally leave gold and diamond rings lying about, I couldn't help wondering whether they might just not have picked up something and left it there in the nest. What if there was? The magpies haven't come back this spring, so I thought I'd have a look before anything else moved in.

I almost didn't mind that there was nothing there when I finally got to the top of the ladder - having to stand precariously on the very last rung and hang on to a branch in order to see into the nest made up for that. But there could have been something, and it might not have been what I'd expected. Story there if you wanted to write it.



Another thing about high places is that people hardly ever look up. They can pass right beneath you and not even notice that you are there – just like my daughter Alice did. I was watching her from a high wall the other day as she ran beneath me. I tried to take a picture of her as she ran past, but I was too slow and all I got was a photo her shadow.



But that was interesting in itself. It made me think again of that school photo from last week, of the ghost child in the picture. What if you took a picture and there, where there wasn't actually a person at all, was the shadow of a girl. And in the next picture you took, there she was again. There's a whole heap of story to be had there, scary as you want to make it too. Why don't you give it a go?





I've come a bit unstuck this fortnight. There was a quiet voice whispering in the back of my head that something I'd written just didn't stand up to scrutiny, and before I knew it, there I was pulling at the lose threads and watching a whole chapter unravel in my hand. This time though, pulling at the threads was the right thing to do, and though I haven't quite got it all knitted together again, I have a vague idea of what needs to be done, even if the doing of it is going to be quite another matter.

But it has not all been gloom. This last week was redeemed by a visit to the Royal High School in Bath to talk to years 7 & 8. Like most writers I spend a lot of time on my own - if I'm seeing people I'm not writing, and if I'm writing I don't get to see people - so going out to a school is a real treat, and the Royal High were very enthusiastic and good fun which says a great deal for them as my visit was last thing on a wet Tuesday afternoon. But more than that, going out and doing something else broke the chain of thought I'd got myself into, and I had different ideas by the time I sat back down and started again. Which just goes to show that sometimes the best thing to do is just stop for a while.

Visiting the school made me think of school photos, not class ones or ones where it is just you, but the ones where the whole year or the whole school are stood up on benches and the camera pans round. I'm not sure if it is still possible, but with the old motor driven cameras if you were quick enough it was said to be possible to let the camera pan past you then jump down off the bench, leg it along the back of the row and climb back into shot further down before the camera got there. Someone once told me they'd managed to get into the same school photo three times in three different places. I really hope it was true.

But I thought about the school photo because the Royal High has a wonderfully old gothic building, and my train of thought went along the lines of 'what if there was a whole school picture here, except when you looked at the final photograph there was a strange pale faced child standing next to you in the picture. Only the strange child was just in your copy of the photo and not in anyone else's, and was dressed in Victorian clothes?' Good start for a ghost story in an old gothic school building. Why not have a go at writing it?

I love old photographs. I can spend ages looking at books of them. I'll often take one down while I'm having my lunch. Last week I dug out a book of pictures of London taken from along the Thames. The photos date right from the early 1850's up to the 1960's. Oh, for the chance to step back into one of them and look around even if only for a day.

Here is just the sort of picture I like. It comes from the house of friends of mine. They don't know what it is about, which is a shame because it is such an interesting photograph.



The picture has been taken in the garden of a house, but it is not a grand house at all. It is summer. The style of the fancy dress and the crown on the top of the decorated poles makes me think that maybe it was part of the celebrations for Queen Victoria's jubilee, with Britannia at the top and people representing the Empire below her. I say 'her', but they are all men. So who were they, and where was this taken? The sun is almost overhead by the looks of the shadows, so it must have been midday or thereabouts. And as with all pictures, I can't help wondering what happened in the moments before it was taken and the moments after. And if you look at the house behind them, one of the windows at the top is open. So, what was that room like, and what would you have seen if you'd stood at the window watching and listening to the scene below? What then, if you'd turned round and walked out of the room and down the stairs?

Oh, how I would love to know.





This has been a good fortnight, I'm happy with what I've written, and the sun has shone. In fact the only blot in any of it was the water coming through the bathroom ceiling this morning. I'm usually very good at hearing when the bath has filled almost to the top - the sound changes. It must be something to do with there being less room for it to resonate – and that change generally works its way into my head what ever I'm doing, and I go and turn off the water. But today I was completely fixed on something, and it was only as I heard the water cascading through the ceiling into the room below that I realized what was what.

But these things happen. More often it seems in my house than in others. In fact, we are as a family so bad at letting baths overflow, that I don't even bother putting the plaster back in the ceiling anymore. Now, like a river finding its old channel, when one of us forgets, the water simply drops through the hole and onto the floor below, which is very old linoleum and doesn't seem to mind too much.

But the reason I was distracted this morning was because I was looking at this.



This is the cover to the German version of The Toymaker. It has been drawn by a German illustrator called Betina Gotzen-Beek. The title has been changed too. It will be called Finster Herz over there, which I think means 'Dark Heart'. I'm very excited about it coming out in Germany. I've never been there, and maybe now I should go.

The book comes out in America too, in August, and they will have a different cover again, but this one was drawn by a British illustrator called Jim Kay. I like his work very much. This is what his cover looks like, you won't find it in the shops over here, but you can see other examples of his work on his website.



In looking at Jim's website again just now, I see that he has drawn a number of Alice in Wonderland characters, which puts me in mind of the ticket. Actually, the ticket has been in my mind for a number of days, what with the new film version of Alice coming out.

'What ticket?' You ask?

Why, this ticket.



On Boxing Day, Christmas 1888, someone went to the theatre. It was a Wednesday. Maybe it was a Christmas present or a Christmas treat, but they took their seat and the gaslights went down (no electricity then) and from the darkness the orchestra struck up and the play began. Alice in Wonderland. Not the original version, this was a later restaging of it, but I think this Boxing Day performance was the first night of the new show.

And this very ticket was in that person’s pocket those one hundred and twenty one odd years ago. Or their wallet, or their purse, or wherever they kept things like that. This ticket heard every word, every note of music, every gasp and laugh of the audience, and at the end of it all, it heard the applause too.

Wouldn’t it be a fine thing if you could just hold the ticket and go back. See the show.

But there would already be someone sitting in your seat in the stalls – because remember, they would have exactly the same ticket too. So what would you do then? What would you do if you dropped your ticket in the theatre and couldn’t get back. And what if it was dark and the streets were foggy outside, and you walked out into the dark of the gaslit street with the carriages and horses half seen in the fog and you got lost.

What would you do?

There is, as they say, a story in that ticket. And if you have read these pages before, you will know exactly what I am going to say next.

So why don’t you?







There is a horrible kind of panic that descends on our house when it dawns on someone that the homework they'd put off for a couple of weeks, is actually due in tomorrow.

So it was last night.

Between the hours of five and ten we managed to make a motte and bailey castle, Bea and me on cardboard and plastercast, Alice on paint and hairdryer.

Why do we always leave things to the very last minute?

But we got it done, and out of the house this morning in a pelting hail storm. Actually, I can't complain. I like making things. If you have ever struggled to make something, here is my tip – plastercast. The same stuff they wrap round your leg if you break it. It's brilliant. You just make the sort of shape you want from wire, or card and gaffer tape, then cover the thing over with plastercast and paint it. Bingo. It's cheap, easy and you can make just about anything. Every other Christmas I make a crown out of it for Jack Alice and Bea. We've had Christmas puddings, Roman helmets, the Snow Queen's crown from The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe. This is a galleon for Jack from a couple of years ago.



This year the snow got in the way of everything. The paint I ordered through the post (makes things look like real gold) didn't get here until after Christmas because the delivery warehouse was snowed in. So, I have yet to finish the big bowl of fruit for Alice, the bell tower for Bea or the tree for Jack. This is how far the bowl of fruit crown has got.



I could get them done if I just got on with it, but it's that thing of leaving it all to the last minute again. Besides, and perhaps more importantly, I am trying to get on with the story I am writing now. I had 40,000 words of it done by the beginning of December (that is about two thirds), and then somehow it started to unravel. That is a dangerous time for a writer, when you start pulling apart something that you should really leave alone, and like some thread hanging out of your jumper, you pull at it and before you know what you have done, the whole thing is coming apart in your hands. It is a writing lesson hard in the learning and I can't give any advice other than, there are times when you need to pull something apart and start again, and there are others when you need to leave well alone and keep going. The difficult thing is recognizing which is which, and that only comes from having sometimes got it wrong and sometimes having got it right.

This time, I put everything down and have only just really picked it up again. But during the time of leaving it alone, it has been quietly working away in the back of my mind. And by sheer coincidence I found in a book I was given for Christmas, a whole chapter on a nineteenth century debate that makes a complete backdrop to my story. So the crowns will have to wait a little longer as I wind all that new stuff in. Not that it will make any sense to you now, but I have just rewritten the bit where Markus realises that Professor Karolus knows who the dead man on the dissecting table is.

The thing about having a house as untidy as mine is that I lose things around it, and then find them again when I've stopped looking. This one wasn't lost, just got covered up.



It is a nineteenth century ginger jar from China. But the thing about this particular ginger jar is that it has never been opened.

Ever.

It was one of two that I found in a junk shop, maybe fifteen years ago. The other one was just the same, only broken. The inside of it was filled with a hard ooze that smelt wonderful, not like ginger at all, more like syrup and vanilla, but ginger it was. I can close my eyes now and smell it still. The two jars had come from the house of an old lady whose husband, long dead, had been a tea merchant.

Curious as to how old the jars were, I took them to The British Museum. They told me about them, how they had been made in a province of China in about 1860, and I gave the broken one to them to keep. I couldn't quite bring myself to part with the unopened one.

So it still sits in my house, and inside that jar is the dark, unopened quiet memory of the day more than a hundred years ago when it was sealed shut - the strange sounds of the voices of the people talking as they did it, the daylight that was outside.

And I can't help asking myself, is it really just ginger that's in it? Or is there something else waiting inside?

There is, as they say, a story there - 'The Ginger Jar'.

Why don't you write it?







Not all things you hope for, happen.

Sitting on a castle loo proved to be one of them.

The sky was iron grey and the rain was going sideways and the very kind person taking care of me for the day looked out of the car window at the torrent and then looked at me, and her face was saying 'Please, no. Not the castle.'

How could I?

So we didn't.

But I had a good day all the same, and I enjoyed visiting Chepstow School and St John's-on-the-Hill School.

Last Wednesday saw the announcement of the winner of the Waterstone's Children's Book of the Year prize. I went up to London for the ceremony and stood heart thumping in my chest as they got to the bit where they announced the winner, but sadly I didn't win. There are some great stories on the shortlist. If you haven't seen them yet, have a look for them. You are bound to find one that you like the sound of.

Have you ever done something like that - stood in a line waiting to be picked for something you really want to do, or want to happen to you? Inside you are going 'pick me, pick me, please pick me.'

And then they don't.

Well, that was a bit how it felt for me too, but no one is ever disappointed for very long, especially if a pigeon gets on the train you are on, travels one stop, and then gets off at the next station.



But that business of standing in a line, wanting to be picked makes me think of two things:

There were times when the people who ran factories, and organized docks, only needed to hire their workmen by the day. There were always more men than jobs, and each and every one of those men desperately needed that day's work because they had families to keep. If they weren't picked, they and their family didn't eat. So they must have got to the factory gates early as they could and stood in line trying to make themselves stand out as much as they could, praying that they were going to be picked that day. Sometimes, they'd even fight each other for the chance to stand closer to the front. What do you do if you weren't picked?

Then, there were other lines more sinister than those, where people stood and prayed that they or their family weren't one of the ones who were going to be chosen, trying to make themselves as small as possible, invisible, because everyone knew that the ones who were chosen were the ones who were going to die. What on earth would you do then?

There are, as ever, stories to be written about both of those. Why don't you give it a try?





Tomorrow I am going to visit a couple of schools in Chepstow, South Wales.

Which reminds me that when I was small I used to stand on my bed and lift both legs up at the same time. I'd seen them do it in cartoons. In cartoons they'd lift both legs up and then stay in the air for a moment before they dropped. Same as running out over the edge of a cliff. They could carry on running and only when they realized they were in thin air would they stop, hang in the air for a moment and then drop. Sometimes they could even run back onto the cliff. If them, why not me? My plan was to lift one leg and then very slowly and carefully lift the other until I'd got it right and stayed there poised in mid air. But somehow it never worked out. I tried doing it slowly, quickly, eyes shut, eyes open. Same result. Sometimes I thought I nearly had it, but I never did.

It was the same with doors, especially old ones. Just like a carpet walked on all the time gets thin and threadbare, I thought that might be true about the space between the door posts – all those people day after day, year after year going backwards and forwards through the same patch of air. Stood to reason. So I would swing back and forward through the door trying to wear it even thinner so that I could see through to whatever was there when you wore air away to nothing. That didn't work either.

But I've never forgotten trying, and sometimes I just wish it were true, especially the bit about the space in between doors wearing so thin you can see through to what used to be there a long time ago. I still do think about it when I am in an old house, or in a castle.

Which is why going to Chepstow tomorrow reminded me about standing on one leg and swinging through doors. Chepstow has an old castle. I know a fair bit about castles, I studied them once. I know about the architecture, the defences, who did what and where, what all the bits are called, and you know which is my favourite? The battlements? The keep? The moat?

No.

The loos.

Not the ones by in the café or in the gift shop that sells little wooden swords. No. The real ones, somewhere up in the walls near the top. Usually it is a simple bare ragged hole in the stonework and a great thumping drop down to the ground below.

And I like them because someone sat on that same place six hundred odd years ago and did exactly what we do each day now. Off he or she went and did their business. And I can't help wondering what were they thinking, apart from the obvious? What were they going to do next, what was going through their mind? All that everydayness of their lives, all gone, and the only thing left of it is the hole in the stone. Somehow sitting on it is like touching the past.

So, tomorrow if I get time, in between going to the schools I'm going to go to the castle and find the loo.

And then I'm going to sit on it.





As you can see, the snow has gone.



This last week has been unsettling. Thursday came and with it the shortlist for the Waterstone's Children's Book of the Year Award 2010. The Toymaker is one of the nine books chosen for the shortlist. That is a very big thing to have happen. I went into my local Waterstone's who are a good lot and have had posters of the book up since the day it was launched, and we all grinned at each other and took a picture. This is Helen.



The winner is announced at an award ceremony in London on the 10th Feb.

But, back to other things. Namely, that diary of Lizzy Ashbond. The more I look at it the more interesting it becomes. I had wondered why an unused diary might have hung about for so long before it came to Lizzy, but having looked at it more carefully, it dawns on me that it had been used before. There are several pages cut out – you can see the snip- snip-snip line made by small scissors along the paper's edge. I thought that maybe Lizzy had done that, taken out things she regretted writing, but then I found one small entry in pencil, in another hand, reminding the person who wrote it to talk to someone about something.

Of course, it had been used before.

Someone gave the diary to Lizzy for her to use, maybe her Mistress – an old diary no use to her anymore – and what would she have done before handing it over, she would have cut out the pages where things had already been written. Couldn't have Lizzy reading them, could she?

Simple.

So here is a new life to the diary, quite different from it having been unused. That life has in it a conversation between Lizzy and whoever gave the book to her, and it has the scissors and the snipping out of the pages – and I can't help wondering what was written on them?

There is, as they say, a story there. You could write it.

I have a lovely old pocket watch. It is silver, and was made in London in 1788. The inside is a wonder of engraving, minute wheels and cogs. I have taken it into a couple of schools I have visited, wound it up and held it to each person's ear so that they could hear what it would have sounded like ticking away on that day in 1788 when it was first bought, and the new owner put the key in and wound it.

It was only when I took Lizzy's diary off my shelf that I realized that the watch was made in the same year as the diary

And I have a silver shilling of 1787.

Why had I never thought of that before? So I put them all down together, and it felt most odd to do it – these three separate things from another time – all gathered together now. Where was that coin the day the watch was sold, brand new, to some London gentleman? And where was he, on the 1st of January 1788 when the diary began?



Which made me think of my own pocket book and where that might be in 300 years. Most writers keep a book to jot ideas in. In fact, if you've ever had a writer in your school I bet they said you should keep a book to put ideas in.

This is mine. It is battered, falling apart and so nearly full that I will have to get another one in a few days. The first page is open on a bit about The Toymaker, notes I took when I met my editor, Bella Pearson, in a tearoom at Stourhead. It shows what an editor does. They don't tell a writer what to write, but they see the story with a fresh, critical pair of eyes and suggest where it seems weak to them and why. Then the writer goes off, thinks about it, and might rewrite or change some bits. That's what I did after that meeting.



The second page is just the sort of stuff it also gets filled with. One part explains how to get several wolves and geese across a river in one boat without them eating each other in the boat, or on the river bank. It is a very old puzzle and I was so pleased with myself after I had worked it out using little bits of paper that I wrote the solution down. Then there is a shopping list made in a Spanish supermarket, and notes on that amazing firework display at the start of the 2008 Olympics – the huge burning footsteps in the sky.



I shall miss this book. I use it all the time, it goes everywhere with me, which is why it is so beaten up now. I'm forever looking back through it and reminding myself of things I'd forgotten. Looking at it now I found this, which I had forgotten – we were driving back from that holiday in Spain last year. My son Jack said ‘I think Dad is just looking forward to going back to a country where he understands what is going on.’ To which my dangerous daughter, Alice, replied ’Which country is that then?'’

They are like that to me.





This was the view from my window when I woke up this morning, but this is probably the last of our snow. I"m not sorry. I have always been a reckless sort of person when it comes to sledges and things like that, and if this latest snow has taught me anything (and I never learn), it is that running flat out across a snowy field after a sledge is both a foolish and painful mistake.



But it puts me in mind of two things, and both are to do with writing.

I like old, curious things. One of the small curiosities on my shelf waiting for the time to be looked at properly is a little, red leather bound diary. It looks a little like a thin purse. It"s a diary for the New Year beginning January 1788. What made me think of it now, is that I remembered that it contains a page of useful advice on walking London streets including the following -

In frofty weather it is advifable to walk in the coach-ways which are not as flippery as the foot-paths: and to bind a piece of cloth around one of your fhoes.

Had I bound a piece of cloth around one of my shoes I might not be walking with as painful a limp as I am at the moment. But here is the writing bit, the first is about getting hurt.

In The Toymaker, and in the book I"m writing at the moment, characters get badly hurt. Getting hurt changes things. There I was running across a field and the next moment I was barely able to walk. Now, for me that wasn"t and isn"t a problem, but it isn"t hard to imagine a place where it would be. Say you had to get away. And then your Dad, or your Mum, or you, gets hurt. Some simple, stupid, accident, something that takes only a moment to happen, but changes everything. Now, instead of being able to run, you can barely even walk. What do you do? What do the people round you do? It isn"t just the stuff of stories, that same thing must have happened for real a thousand times over the years. Sometimes it would have cost someone their life, or worse still cost someone they loved their life.

So, what would you do?

Second thing is that little red diary itself. At some point in its history it was given to a servant girl called Lizzy Ashbond and on 29th October 1831 she started writing in it. She begins -

I left home for the first time in the year 1828 my first starting from home came fifty miles from home and I lived in my place for three years.

Things like this little book are as good as time machines. I"m thinking about trying to put together a radio programme about it - following the girl and the places, setting the historical background to it. There are even two threads to the story, the one is Lizzy"s, and the other all the diary reveals about life in that new year of 1788.



Next time, I"ll find some things from it for you.





This is where I write. I get home from taking my children to school, clear away the breakfast things then start. I sit at the dinner table looking out of the windows and at the garden. My laptop is bottom right in the photo.



The thing at the other end of the table is our dog"s lead. If you look carefully at the mess on the mantelpiece you can see the top part of a proof of the cover to The Toymaker. It must have come in the day or so before I took this photo. I took it to send to an American writer friend as we were arguing about whose house was the messiest.

The table belonged to my Grandma. It survived the London Blitz. She used to keep things on the little shelves beneath it, and I remember being very small, sitting under the table and taking all the things out to look at them. My own children used to put a blanket over it and make a cave. Now I write at it.

The Toymaker is my first book. I was asked to go into Wells Central Junior School and tell a story to fill in two of their slots each week. I began a story about a bear to show them what they could do, and then the next week a new one that began 'Do you know Fraussistrasse?' I had no idea where the story was going, it was just fun to tell the class a new chapter each week. That story became The Toymaker. By a wonderful and very roundabout route DFB came to hear of it and it was published.

I love going into schools and reading to a live audience. There is a quality of quiet when people are really listening.

I didn't plan the Toymaker at all. I just wrote each chapter as I went along, and after a while it had a life of its own. There is a secret in the story, I hadn"t any idea what that was going to be either, I just hoped that something would dawn on me by the time I needed to explain what it was. I think the advantage of not planning is that I have complete freedom to change the story and go off in any direction I want, when I want. If I plan, then I feel shoehorned into sticking to that plan, which to be honest I find a bit of a dull thing to do.

I tried doing that for the story I am writing now. I spent several months sticking to a plan then finally realised that I just can't do it that way. So I scrapped that story completely, sat down at my laptop and wrote the first thing that came into my head and now I'm happy. I go into The Blue School in Wells every Tuesday and read the new chapter as I write it. It is simply what I like doing best. I take a two hundred year old dictionary with me as well and we pick four new eighteenth century words each week that everyone has to use in everyday conversation.

Gary Blythe illustrated The Toymaker for me. He was very patient when I asked for something he had drawn to be changed. He even had to change finished artwork, which he did so cleverly that unless you know what you are looking for, you won't even know he did it. But look carefully at Valter and Koenig fighting and you might just see something.

I live old, curious things. Old photographs are amongst my favourite. It is the everyday detail in the background that is best. I keep a magnifying glass in my pocket so that I can see it.

And I love snatches of overheard conversations. Here are a few I wrote down – real ones.

'But what are we going to do with the wig?'

'Of course, you'd need a really big snorkel.'

'I don't use it much, but when I do use it…'

I am always listening, always watching. Always thinking.

It is what writers do.

Jeremy

Hello Ellie,
I had a lovely day with you all at Homewood, and I'm glad you're enjoying the story. The Feathered Man is out in just over three weeks and I'm getting really excited about seeing it in the shops. My desk is covered in blue feathers at the moment - the publicity people at Random House sent them to me, and every time someone opens the door the feathers blow everywhere!

Jeremy

Hello Jeremy, I would just like to say I am reading you book at the moment, after being in an interview with you at Home wood school. I would like to say so far I am enjoying your book so much it is drawing me in by the minute I would love to get in touch with you some more I can not wait till you next book comes out.

Hello Max,

I've just got back from holiday to find your mail waiting for me. Thanks for writing. It's about eight weeks or so before The Feathered Man is out in the shops, so I'm pleased you've got your hands on an advance copy. I'm even more pleased that you're enjoying it!

At the moment I'm trying very hard to stop thinking about Liesel and Klaus, and start thinking about the next story, but it's hard to do. I've narrowed it down to a choice between two, but can't decide which of them it's to be. Every time I think I've decided on one story, I start thinking about the other one. Or maybe I'm procrastinating, and just need to choose one and get on with it.

Have you seen Jim Kay's cover for the final version of The Feathered Man? I really like it.

Jeremy

Jeremy

Hi Mr.De Quidt, My name is Max and I thought I would e-mail you to tell you how much I loved the toymaker. It'sthe stangest book I've ever read and that's why I loved it. I am also reading the proof of the feathered man for waterstones and am loving it.

Thanks for reading,
Max Blair

Hello Jordan,

I'm glad you liked it, especially that ending.

Yes, I'm working on a new story at the moment, but no, it isn't a sequel to The Toymaker. It's going to be called The Feathered Man and should be in the shops here next May (but November for you if you are writing from America!) It's another dark tale. I'm putting the finishing touches to it at the moment and should you ever read it, then you'll know that the day I wrote to you, I had just redone the bit of the story that happens the second time in Professor Karolus's House.

I think that it's probably a scarier story than The Toymaker, but I shall just have to see what people make of it.

Out of my window at the moment, I can see an autumn day and a grey covered sky. I shall treat this message to you as my break, shall have a chocolate, biscuit, and then carry on.

kind regards
Jeremy

Hi,

My name is Jordan and I'm 11 years old. I really loved the toymaker and I think it has the best ending of all the books that I've ever read. I was wondering, are you making a sequel
to the toymaker or are you currently
working on anything?

Kind regards,
Jordan

Hello again Hollie!

Today is a good day - I've just sent off to DFB the re-draft of the next book, and am breathing a sigh of relief. I hope it's been a good one for you too!

Jeremy.

Hello again!



I haven't posted a comment for a while, but I accidentally pressed this site on my favourites and thought I'd say hi again! So I'm not really sure why I'm commenting, but hello again! And hello Lili, you post so freuqently I almost feel like I know you :)



Hollie (from Portishead) ;)

Hello Lili,

I see a whole load of trouble heading your way!

But that said I met a python in a park once. Well, actually, I met its owner who had brought it outside to bask in the sun (it was a very sunny day) Anyway, this python was huge, and the most amazing thing about it was that its scales acted like small prisms and gave its skin the most wonderful rainbow hue. I never knew that snake skin did that. If I moved my head, I could see the line of rainbow colours running along its side. It was a Reticulated Python (which means net patterned) and they grow to an enormous size and can eat whole deer at a single sitting. Your dad might not be too impressed with one of those, and you must not to tell him that it will only grow a little and could live under your bed...

Jeremy.

Thanks! I'll take that in mind! But the only reason I want a snake is because of its cool stuff!! My dad is considering!
Now what shall I call it?.... Got any snake name ideas?!

My pleasure, Damian. I enjoyed it very much too. Please pass my thanks to all the children for being brilliant, especially Mr Kaye's reading group.

Jeremy.

Jeremy, thanks so much for coming in to the school today. The children loved it!
Best wishes,
Damian

Hello Lili,

Snakes are curious things. I've never understood how a snake can lie about for weeks digesting something, then be fit and strong enough to catch something else. If we were to lie about for a couple of weeks our muscles would be flabby by the end, but not a snake's. So why not? What makes snake muscles different? And that is before we even start on venom, and how mind numbingly complicated a thing that is. I once saw an exhibition in the reptile house at London Zoo all about snake venom and snake venom is very, very scary stuff. If I were you I'd stick with a Dave (or a Fred).

Knowing twitch, he acts like he's the king of the rabbits! also, he doesn't get on with other rabbits so I'm not sure Henry would like twitch that much!!! And he certainly wouldn't get on with Spanner!!! The pet I've really wanted though is a bearded dragon lizard, my cousin , Kieran hes one of those called "Dave" (Or was it Fred?I can't remember!)and i love it sooo much. Although... a snake sounds good!

Thank you Edna. I have had a look and very interesting it is too!

For those of you who might be wondering what this about, I met Edna at a library event the other day, and her son is an expert on dinosaurs. Really, he is. This is his web site, and if like me you are at all interested in fossils and dinosaurs, then it is worth looking at.

The proper address for the site is archosaurmusings.wordpress.com

Jeremy

The address I gave you last Sat was in correct ,it should have been archosa musings.wordpress.com any pro

blems the author is dwe @ yahoo.com who is off to China again for 3 weeks

edna





roblems dwehone @ yahoo.com

Hello Lili,

We have one small goldfish, but Spanner and Henry are really quite enough. They get on very well. We have a large piece of a second world war flying bomb in one corner of the kitchen, the bomb fell by a railway line in Sussex during the war. It is bent and crumpled like a piece of blanket, which is no mean thing in a sheet of metal as thick as it is made from, and when Henry comes into the house (which he often does) he spends most of his time sitting beneath it. I think that he thinks it's some kind of burrow, which is somehow a fitting end for the thing. But I'm not sure that Twitch would fit beneath it if he is as fat as you say.

Jeremy

I know what you mean!
do you have any other pets?

Jerejmy

I'm a member of WCH (injured at present!), helping to organise an event in Shepton in support of LOL (Love our Library) day - see www.shepton.org - Sat 5th Feb: 10-1. Would you be interested in coming along, doing a 'meet the author' spot, a bit of storytelling etc? Please advise ASAP as we'd like to advertise. Would be great to have you along. There will be others - we're doing what we can to make this a fun, attractive event in short space of time but then may make this an annual feature of Shepton Mallet Events calendar! Look forward to hearing from you. Sue

Hello Hollie,

I've looked at a map, and you need to be waving in a generally south easterly direction, and I need to be waving in a generally north westerly one.

We are always told that it is the taking part that is the important thing, not the winning, and funnily it feels like that in book prizes. It was so nice to make the list, and even nicer to get to meet everyone in Brighton. So, yes, winning would have been the cherry on the cake, but the rest of the cake wasn't that bad at all.

Valentine's day is a special one in the de Quidt house. It is my daughter Alice's birthday (she of the wall atlas), and in celebration is the first day that we are allowed daffodils in the house. We have a plain table from Christmas until then, then come the 14th the biggest vase we can manage.

Jeremy

Hello again!



My Christmas was lovely, and I hope yours was too!!



Congratulations in being shortlisted for that book award - you (and your book!!) truely deserve it! Its such a shame you didn't win, I think you should have! I'll check out those other books, they sound good too.



Happy Valentine's Day (a few weeks early!!)!



Thank you for waving at me, I am waving at you now even though I have no idea in which direction I should be waving!!!



Thank you for replying to my first message.



Hollie (from Portishead)

He is called Henry, and has not a brain cell in his head.

how adorable!!! whats he called???

Hello Lili.

Fat rabbits I know about. I have only to walk to the bottom of the garden where our own black and white version lives.

Jeremy

I wish i could post a picture of twitch onto here 2 show you the fatness of him!!!!

ahhh Spanner sounds really cute!I've got a giant and I mean giant! lion-head rabbit called Twitch!!

Hello Hollie from Portishead.

Well now, that isn't so very far from where I am. I've just stopped for the morning - there is a dog to walk and sticks to collect - and when I arrive at the top of the hill above the house, I shall give a wave in a general Portishead direction. So, consider yourself waved at.

I like the gruesome bits as well, and I agree, I think they add more than they take away.

The present story has its fair share of the gruesome, and I hope you won't be disappointed that it isn't a next instalment of The Toymaker. That debate really is still raging in the back of my head. I'm just not decided whether Katta and Mathias aren't best left where they are, with all those unanswered questions still unanswered. The trouble is that there are a whole shedful of other stories I'd like to write, and going back to The Toymaker just now might feel like too much like only telling the one.

But we shall see. Let's get this second story done and out of the way, and then I'll have another think.

Have a good Christmas, because that really is only eleven days away now, and there is snow forecast for us this Friday.

Jeremy

I love The Toymaker so much! I think its so amazing! Its a bit gruesome but I think that adds to the mystery and the adventure, and I love the cliffhanger ending.

I'm so glad to hear that you're writing another book - I'll look forward to it!

Hollie
(from Portishead

Hello Hannah,

Because I read the story out loud to a class each week as I wrote it, maybe that dictated the way I chose to end each chapter - I wanted to be able to close the papers and say 'but what happens next, you'll have to wait until next week to see.'

I think the story I'm writing at the moment is very much in the same vein. I hope you will like that one as much.

Jeremy

Dear Jeremy de Quidt



i have been reading your book and i was hooked on the first chapter. the story plot is so inventive and the cliff hangers make me want to read on. it is a great book and you should be proud that you can write such a book.

Hello Lili.

My dog is a large black labrador called 'Spanner'. She will be eleven years old in January, and is beginning to go grey around her muzzle. She usually sits on the floor next to my chair while I write. When I next post an entry on the blog I'll include a picture of her for you.

As to the title, that's tricky. After not knowing what to call it, I did think of one, but then Ulla Hoefker who translated the Toymaker into German reminded me that there are already other books (and a film) with the same name, which is a shame because it would have fitted the story really well. So I'm back to the drawing board, but I will think of something. I haven't thought of any chapter titles yet either. But that is something that will be fun to do at the very end. When I finished the Toymaker I spent best part of a whole day on them. It felt like a bit of a reward for having finished. I think it will be the same this time, and I suspect the title is going have to wait until I then as well.

So, we are both going to have to wait a little longer yet, but hopefully not too long.

Jeremy

whats your dog callled?
and whats the next book called??

Hello Lili.

Well, there we are. You liked the book and Martha didn't. It would be a strange, and dare I say it, a dull world if we all had to agree the whole time. But I am very glad you liked the story as much as you did. I am still finishing the next, and if you do get to read that one as well, let me tell you that I have just written this morning the bit where Karolus leads Markus through the darkened house. You will be able to look at it and say 'Ha! He wrote that the same day he wrote to me.'

It is frrrreeeeezing cold here today, (-5). It is lunch time and I have just taken my dog for a walk and collected sticks from the hill above the house so that we can have a fire tonight. This afternoon I plan to write the next bit, but if I tell you what that is, it will be giving too much of the story away.

Jeremy.

the toymaker is very accuratley decribed and amazingly produced into this stunning book i definatley without a doubt would love to read your next masterpice!!!

Happy Birthday to you too, Jenny!!!

We shall have to start a 28th September club.

Jeremy

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!



GREAT BOOK AND IT WAS GOOD TO SEE YOU ALL IN AUGUST

Hello Martha. The Toymaker is an adventure story, but one in which dark, bleak things do happen. In so far as is possible in a tale where the central conceit is an impossibility, I wrote not what I thought deliberately inappropriate or gratuitously violent but what I thought plausible in the given circumstance - what would this particular character do in this particular situation. Often, as with life, it is not nice.

This appears to be a story that provokes polarised views across a very wide range of ages and in that it is proof of the old adage that you can't please all of the people all of the time.

Age banding of books is a current and in places hotly debated issue. My own view is that if a story survives the test of time it will settle into its own range of readership perhaps contrary to the somewhat artificial range into which it was originally banded. That your library placed it in one section where you are firmly of the view that it should be in another is surely part of that process.

Jeremy de Quidt

This book should NOT be in the juvenile section of library where I found it. Inappropriately gruesome, dark, graphic gratuitous violence, depressing, likely to cause nightmares in kids under 11. No problem with it if filed under Horror Fiction. How much misery can one protagonist endure?? How many of his co-protagonists can one maim or kill off? No pun intended, but this was overkill. I read to see how it would go but was disappointed at the misery visited throughout without much hope except on the last page. Bleak, bleak, bleak.

Hello Melanie. At the moment I really like having left all those questions unanswered. The ones that I am most interested in concern Katta. Will she grow old? Will she and Mathias stay together? What would happen to her if she broke? I think I am going to leave all that going quietly around in my head, and see what happens in due course. And there is always Valter - what has become of all the cogs and wheels that filled him?

The story I am writing at the moment feels just as exciting as The Toymaker did. I hope it turns out that way. There will be a girl and boy in that one too. The girl is called Liesel and the boy Klaus, but the person you really, really won't want to meet is the boarding house owner, Frau Liesen. I hope you enjoy that one as well when it comes out. Best wishes, Jeremy

I loved this book and found it hard to put it down. it's full of suspense ans suprises which i like.

I am wondering if you are going to develope the book further into a series, it has fantastic characters in the book that i would want to find out more, is mathias's friend the girl ever going to change back into a human, is the man that helped mathias going to stay alive? there are many quetions that need answers. the last page was the page that intrigued me the most i didn't expect such ending and felt that there was more to come from this book in the future.

from your book fan

melanie.

Hello Jeremy,



I am unable to locate a contact email for you so hoping this will reach you soon.



I am the organiser of the Southern Schools Book Award and I am happy to tell you that The Toymaker has been short listed for the 2010 award.



Other books in the short list are Bloodchild by Tim Bowler, Grass Cathy McPhail, Saving Rafael Leslie Wilson and Stolen Lucy Christopher.



I hope to hear from you soon and I will give you more details about the SSBA and the presentation evening. I would also be grateful if you could let me have a contact name and email for David Fickling |Books so that I can let them know too.



Many thanks

Mandy

Thank you, Clare. What heart warming things to be told. We have a map of the world on the wall upstairs, and I stood there this morning looking at Australia and thinking of the story having arrived there.

I hope very much that you enjoy the next one just as much as you did The Toymaker.

What a fantastic read is The Toymaker! I found it incredibly hard to put down, and read it in just a couple of sessions, which is rare for me. Quite a page-turner. Such a wonderfully constrained and concise use of language. The writing was so good it became invisible! Only the story remained, alive and vibrant and haunting.

You are a wonderfully gifted writer, and I very much look forward to reading your future work.

Regards and many thanks, from an adult reader in Australia.

Hello Janet. I was wondering about that choice of words! I'm very glad you liked the story, and thank you for spreading the word. The best part of writing is being able to leave a new story and all its characters in other people's heads - the more heads the better!

Hmm - I'm not sure enchanting is the right word, actually. Gripping might be more apt!

I have just finished The Toymaker. What an utterly enchanting book! I've posted about it on www.bookclubforum in the hope that I can spread the word!

Regards

Janet (age 43 and three quarters!)