Leicester Teen Readers Expo

Lovely to meet you all !Sorry to the ones who had to read out chocolate fudge recipes/ perculiar lists
and thanks to my PA for the day, Abdee!

Visit to Stanchester Community School

I had a very enjoyable visit to this school last week. We had a good session, with some excellent creative writing coming out of my rather haphazard workshop.. (who won the prize??) Also, thanks chaps for the suggestions for the title of my new book. I'll post on here if one is used instead of 'SPARKS'

Keep reading! And I hope you enjoy the Carnegie Shadowing.

SPRING WORD FRENZY

I'm about to attempt to write 50,000 words in a month again. The idea is to get a first draft nice and quickly, and hopefully create a few ideas worth saving, and get lots of dead ends out of the way early on. Personally inspired by NANOWRIMO, I'm doing this with a small community of like minded lunatics I mean writers... Starting tomorrow....oh no, not again....

SPARKS

I have just delivered a book SPARKS for ages 8+ to my publishers. If they like it I think it might be published in April '10... Now to crack on planning the next one before the editing begins.. next event SLG Conference in Peterborough on 4th April

LAUNCH PARTY

I'm very late posting this... but we had a launch party in Bristol at the Folk House in January to launch BEDLAM and my mate, Elen Caldecott's HOW KIRSTY JENKINS STOLE THE ELEPHANT.

We had the fabulous Phantom Limb play for us http://www.myspace.com/phantomlimbrobot

They are awesome! I would have been very happy to forget the rest of the launch and just listen to them... however, next we had a question and answer session, where I asked Elen questions and vice versa, we read from our new books and took questions from the floor.

Thanks to everyone who came and supported us. Foolishly I forgot about photographs, so there are only one or two....

Bedlam news

BEDLAM was reviewed by Mal Peet in last Saturday's Guardian
See review below.
http://www.achuka.co.uk/achockablog/archives/2009/01/guardian-review-11.html

And also in the latest Waterstone's Books Quarterly by John Lloyd.


Bedlam is currently being translated into Norweigen by Stian Omland, who also translated Beast and Berserk.

Fact for the day: Kos in Norweigen means 'Cuddle...'

Oh yes, finished the second draft of 'Sparks'....

BEDLAM OUT TODAY!!!! BEDLAM OUT TODAY!!!

Bedlam is published today in the UK and should be in all good book shops.
I'm having a launch party this Thursday in Bristol, together with my mate, the highly talented Elen Caldecott - author of 'How Kirsty Jenkins Stole the Elephant' also out today!

I shall be lurking in bookshops, re-positioning the book to the front of the best seller charts and turning it face out on the shelves, heh heh heh

I've also finished the first draft of my new book... working title... Sparks...due to be published April 2010...