Blog

9 May 2008

Did a very fun Brighton event with Walker author Katy Moran at the Brighton Festival. It was called 'So You Want to Write For Children?' and was filled with serious, bright people, many of who carried notepads. God knows if I said anything worth writing down, but they asked smart questions and the evening flew by.

I'm a bit of a nervous reader. To confess, I really don't like being read to, so I always assume that nobody else does either (I'm wrong about this) but it means that I tend to read really, really fast. So this time I just picked an exciting, fast bit of the book and went to town. Good fun, and if they only caught every other word, then at least they got the spirit of it...

7 May 2008

The second podcast of Knife is up on iTunes! This is the first of the chapter extracts read by Michael Jenn, who did an absolutely fantastic job with the voice of Todd. And there's very little of me talking on it, so that's a plus! Definitely worth a listen, if only for Michael's performance.

Listen to the podcast here (note that you will need to download iTunes if you don't have it installed already):
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=279773538

6 May 2008

Launch party! Always a fun thing. It was suddenly hot weather, so the room was quite warm (why was I wearing a jumper the whole evening? Because it looked good, that's why), but there was a very nice, relaxed vibe. And what better way to celebrate your new book than to be surrounded by your friends?

I signed about 80 copies of the book for various people, and that's the hardest part of the evening: trying to think of 80 separately witty and personal things to say. I know, I know, it's exactly as difficult as going down a mine or fighting a house fire. Honestly, the things we writers complain about...

5 May 2008

It's the official publication day of The Knife of Never Letting Go and even though authors pretend to be blasé about these things, I went to as many bookstores as I could find to see if it was on the shelf. Not to demand that it be sold or anything, just to see it there and feel amazed that something I wrote was on the shelves with people I'd actually read. I think if you ever lose that feeling, it's probably time to stop writing books.

I signed a few for my local branch, where the bookseller said people had already been buying it, which is also nice to hear! A very busy week ahead: launch party tomorrow, Brighton festival on Friday, and possibly an interview and a book-signing in between.

That's the thing about publishing a book – it leaves you hardly any time to write another one.