My mad week

I think there is probably a general perception that we authors get around a lot, on endless book tours and a giddy round of literary festivals and school events. "Are you coming to John O'Groats/Land's End/the Isle of Wight?" people sometimes ask me. Sadly, the answer is usually no. I don't do all that many events, and I'm always a bit amazed when another author pops up on social media saying "My two hundredth book event of the year, phew!" or some such thing. I mostly divide my time between actual writing, and messing about on social media while pretending to write (the other 10% of my time is spent letting the cat in and out of the French windows).

However, it would appear that book events are like buses; none come along for ages and then you get a clutch of them all at once. This last week has been very busy, with only one day at home (Wednesday) to frantically wash my favourite dress and check I have the right train tickets before zooming off again.

It kicked off with the brilliant Morley Arts Festival in Morley, near Leeds. I travelled down on Sunday 4th because I had an early start on Monday, and stayed in a Travelodge. There was unlimited tea and coffee but I had to go next door to the Toby Carvery for something more substantial. I'd never eaten in one of those before (my not-getting-out-much extends to not-eating-out-much too) but I can report that they have the biggest Yorkshire puddings I've ever seen in my life, which is apt, since Morley is in Yorkshire. I don't really like eating out alone either, but I took the Dexter novel I was reading along with me, and stuck my nose in that while shovelling in roast potatoes with my free hand. It was just as well I had sustained myself with a roast dinner, because Monday was a busy day.

I had two talks in the morning at Morley Academy, and two in the afternoon at Woodkirk Academy, ably shepherded about between the two by the lovely Jill Hepworth, one of the festival organisers.
Here is a picture of me signing books at Morley Academy, taken by Rory O'Connor of the excellent Orinoco Books - I must add that I don't always look as serious as that! I was probably concentrating on how to spell the recipient's name. I live in terror of spelling a name incorrectly and ruining a book, especially since another author once told me they became so glazed after a long signing session that they accidentally wrote "Happy Birthday" in one of the books...

One important observation I have about the day is that school dinners have come a long way since I was at school. I remember when I was at primary school in the 1970s, there was an urban legend going around that one of the boys had hidden a toy soldier in the leftover mashed potato to see whether there was any truth in the rumour that the dinner ladies just recycled the stuff in the "pig bins" - sure enough, the soldier turned up a few days later... 

Anyway, the school dinner at Woodkirk Academy looked like this:

That is mango salad you see there. It was completely delicious, and restaurant standard if you ask me. Very tasty and enough to make me want to go back and retake my A levels.

I got home very late on Monday night, and the following morning I was up bright and early, and off into Edinburgh for the media launch of Book Week Scotland at the Fruitmarket Gallery. I was delighted to see some familiar faces there, including author Keith Gray and blogger The Bookwitch. Amongst other speakers, we heard Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Europe and External Affairs, speak about the value of books and reading and her own childhood love of the Narnia series. 

Book Week Scotland 2015 will take place from Monday 23rd to Sunday 29th November and this year’s programme of events, projects and activities has a central theme of transformation. If you're in Scotland, do check it out as there are sure to be interesting events near you - and even if you're not in Scotland, look out for Book Week Scotland online with features such as the opportunity to #ThankBooks for what they have brought into your life! 

Like Cinderella leaving the ball, I had to slip away from the media launch a few minutes early, so that I could visit Broughton High School, where I gave an illustrated talk about the locations that have inspired my books. I was also interviewed for Teen Titles so I'm looking forward to seeing the piece when it appears in the magazine. 

Wednesday was my "free" day, although I spent most of it organising and packing for the rest of the week. On Thursday I was up early again for a long journey down to London for the launch of Hilary Freeman's new book When I Was Me. I've known Hilary for a while on Facebook, but I'd never actually met her in the flesh before. Also at the launch were a number of other people I'd only met on social media before, such as Catherine Johnson and Sophia Bennett. Altogether this made for a rather surreal experience, as though my entire Facebook Timeline had suddenly come to life!

Hilary Freeman (on the right)

Also at the event were Hilary's partner Mickael and her baby daughter Sidonie, who was beautifully behaved. I had to laugh a little at this photograph taken of me by author Jo Cotterill:

I think I look like the Bad Fairy at the christening of the Baby Princess!!! That is admiration in my eyes, honestly, in spite of the serious expression! At any rate, Sidonie doesn't seem concerned...

I can't wait to read When I Was Me, which sounds like a truly original and unusual book. Here's what it's about:

One girl, two lives. Which is real?

When Ella wakes up one Monday morning, she discovers that she is not herself and that her life is not her own. She looks different, her friends are no longer her friends and her existence has been erased from the internet. Even worse, years of her history appear to have been rewritten overnight. And yet, nobody else thinks that anything weird has happened. Desperate to cling on to her identity and to piece her life back together, Ella attempts to uncover what has happened to her. Does she have amnesia? Is she losing her mind? Or is she the victim of something more sinister?

A tense and dark psychological thriller full of unexpected twists and turns about the random events and decisions that make us who we are. If you can't trust your own memories, then who can you trust?

I'll be posting a review of the book in due course - probably on Goodreads - and I'd like to urge anyone else who reads and enjoys it to post one too (the same goes if you've read a book of mine you've liked, cough). It's always very much appreciated. 

I stayed over on Thursday night with fellow YA author Keren David, whose Amsterdam-set book This Is Not A Love Story is a YA favourite of mine. On Friday morning, Keren took me out for breakfast at The Haberdashery in Crouch End:

For a further, and probably excessive, quantity of photographs from The Haberdashery, see my Instagram account. It was probably sad of me to wander around the place snapping away with my iPod, but it's the sort of eaterie that cries out to be Instagrammed. There are vintage teacups! There's an ancient sewing machine! 

Anyway, fortified by this huge breakfast, I caught a train to Birmingham where my sister Sarah met me and whisked me away to her place. We had a few free hours together so naturally we spent it here:

Clearly, Sarah and I share quite a few tastes because we spent that evening watching the remake of Dawn of the Dead. Her husband cooked a fabulous jambalaya and their cat, Travis, curled up on my lap for a bit. I think Travis actually likes me more than our own cat, Poppy, does (she thinks I'm just there to open doors and tins of cat food).

On Saturday it was up with the lark again, to catch a train to Nottingham for the second ever UKYA Extravaganza. I'm not going to write about it at length here, because I've done a report on it that is going to appear later this week on the Bookwitch's blog. However, if you're not familiar with UKYA Extravaganza, it's an initiative by authors Emma Pass and Kerry Drewery, to set up a series of regional UKYA (UK Young Adult book) events bringing lots of authors to bloggers and readers all over Britain. I think it's a tremendous project, not least because it is genuinely democratic - there are no "star authors", all the featured authors get the same amount of coverage and time to speak, and the regional locations make the events more accessible. Do follow the Extravaganza on Twitter at @UKYAX for news of future events. 

Above: here I am with blogger Chelley Toy, another person I have known for some time on social media and finally got to meet for the first time this week! Chelley runs the blog called Tales of Yesterday. It was brilliant to meet her, and the other bloggers, readers and authors at the event. 

After the Extravaganza, I took a train back to Sarah's - I hadn't quite got my geography sorted out when I arranged the trip because her place, being on the other side of Birmingham, isn't particularly close to Nottingham(!), but it was worth it to spend some time together. I'm just glad that I wasn't flying home, since that evening she made me watch Alive, the story of the Andes survivors...

On Sunday I took three different trains back to Perthshire. I'd come down the east side of England and now I went back up the west side, passing through Wigan and Preston, etc. I was in a "quiet carriage" most of the way, although it wasn't really very quiet, as it was also occupied by a boisterous group of mature ladies who cheered very loudly when we crossed the border into Scotland! By this time I'd finished the Dexter novel I'd been reading and read most of the following one, and I'd probably consumed my own weight in sandwiches and those little tubs of mango pieces you always seem to get in the "snacks" section of the chiller cabinet. 

Trains to England always seem to charge for wifi connection so I was dying to get onto the final Scotrail train, as Scotrail usually offer free wifi. As ill luck would have it, I was on the only Scotrail train I have used in the last two or three years that didn't have wifi. Undaunted, I logged on every time we stopped at a station that did, such as Stirling, so that I could check my messages. God bless Scotrail. 

Finally, I arrived home around 8pm. Everyone seemed to have got on fine in my absence, although I noticed they had eaten most of the chocolate and oven chips and none of the apples... 

A big thank you to everyone who invited me to events, let me stay over at their place, drove me around, made me cups of tea and all the other things! Very, very much appreciated. 

Poppy the cat: "Have you been away? I thought the service levels had been poorer than usual."

UPDATE 15/10/15: My report on the UKYA Extravaganza is now live on the Bookwitch's blog: https://bookwitch.wordpress.com/2015/10/15/ukya-extravaganza-comes-to-nottingham/ - do check it out! 

A series of fortunate events...

It's been a busy time and it's going to get busier, which is why I haven't had much time to blog recently. Anyway, here I am, lurking indoors on a lovely sunny morning in time-honoured writerly fashion, with a cup of tea and my laptop powered up, all ready to catch up.

My last blog post was about this year's Crieff Arts Festival, which took place two weeks ago. I took part in an event called Writers Live, hosted by the Strathearn Artspace. Writers Live featured a number of authors local to Crieff, who read from their work and took questions from the audience. At the end of the session, there was an interactive talk about publishing by Helen Lewis-McPhee, who works for Canongate, and Gonzalo Mazzei of Grace Note Publications. Writers Live was very well-attended with an enthusiastic audience. I live-tweeted the whole five hours(!) on behalf of Crieff Arts Festival, so if you would like to see photographs etc do follow the Festival on https://twitter.com/CrieffArtsFest. I am sorry to say however that there are no photographs of me doing my bit because I was the one taking all the pictures! Writers Live was followed by Crieff Community Band performing traditional Scots music and song, with support from Nigel's All-Stars (pictured in the black and white photo). So it was altogether a lively day and lots of fun, although by the end I was gasping for a nice cup of tea...

Also in August, I went to a party at the National Museum of Scotland for ALCS, who (if you haven't heard of them) are the people who organise PLR payments, ie, every time someone borrows an author's book from the library, the author gets about 6p. PLR is a brilliant thing. Although authors get used to jokey remarks about being "the next J.K.Rowling", most of us aren't rich beyond our wildest dreams (sadly) and so PLR payments can be a very helpful and welcome windfall. I'd also like to point out that I have occasionally heard people justify downloading pirate copies of books for free on the basis that borrowing them from the library would also be free. Well, yes, free to the borrower, but actually the author does get a tiny payment. So please do support your library!

More recently, I was at a party organised at the Central Reference Library in Edinburgh by Teen Titles, the book review magazine written by and for teenagers. The event was attended by teen reviewers from ten Edinburgh secondary schools, and many YA writers including Cat Clarke and Teri Terry, pictured with me (left). Teen Titles has outlasted many other publications, and has now been running for so long that apparently its original teen reviewers must now be in their middle 30s! It was great to meet so many enthusiastic readers, and it was also lovely to meet so many other authors. Writing is a solitary business, so it is great to get out and meet people for a change...

Anyway, after the excitement of two parties in one month (which virtually never happens!), September looks a bit quiet, but I'm glad to say that in October I shall be attending the second ever UKYA Extravaganza, in Nottingham. The first Extravaganza took place last year in Birmingham and was the brainchild of YA authors Kerry Drewery and Emma Pass. The idea of holding an Extravaganza is to get lots of YA authors together in one place to meet readers and bloggers. The fab thing about the Extravaganzas is that they are (and will be) regional. Not everyone (particularly not teen readers with limited cash) can afford to travel to London for events. UKYA Extravaganza takes the authors to where their fans are. Here's the line-up for the Nottingham event, which is on October 10th, with ticket sales starting on Monday (7th September):

NB If you'd like to attend, book early, because the last Extravaganza was a sell-out!

Right. Now I think it's time for another cup of tea...

This August, expose yourself to Art!

Not long ago, I blogged about the upcoming Crieff Arts Festival 2015, which takes place on 22nd and 23rd August. The Festival will include art exhibitions, live music, literary events, arts and crafts workshops, street theatre and a display of traditional weaving. Over the last few days, a top secret squad of artists whose identities I could not possibly reveal *cough* descended on the empty Drummond Hotel and created a colourful display of butterflies (see pic) to hint at the arty delights to come.

If you're within travelling distance of Crieff and fancy coming along to join the fun, you can find the Festival programme here: programme - it's still a work-in-progress with events being added and times being amended to fit in as much as possible, so if you are interested in a specific event, do check back for updates.

In my previous blog post about the Festival, I mentioned the author event at Strathearn Artspace, and I'm now able to give a few more details about this. The event title is Writers Live. It kicks off at 10am with John Bray and his children's book Jack Reusen and the Spark of Dreams. John will be followed by local authors Peggy Hewitt and Margaret Bennett. After a break for lunch, Hazel Buchan Cameron will read from her new book Just go in: from council estate to country estate. Hazel will be followed by poet Patricia Ace. I have attended one of Patricia's previous events and can say that it was excellent!
I am scheduled to appear at 1.45pm to read from my Forbidden Spaces trilogy of urbex thrillers set in Flanders.

The final item in the Writers Live event is the talk about publishing that I mentioned in my previous blog post about the Festival. This is the bit that should interest anyone who has an unpublished manuscript sitting in a drawer at home, and is wondering what to do with it. I was originally intending to do this talk myself, but the amazing Helen Lewis McPhee has offered to speak on the topic so I am very happy to be in the audience instead. Helen Lewis McPhee has worked with Stirling Centre for International Publishing and Communications, and, currently, Canongate Books and Gonzalo Menez, so she has lots of professional experience and expertise to offer. This is your chance to come and ask questions, so don't miss it!!

You can drop in to hear specific authors at Writers Live, or you can stay for the whole event, which is expected to finish at 3.15pm. If you then fancy relaxing and listening to some live music, Writers Live is followed at 3.30pm by a concert by Crieff Community Band offering traditional Scots music and song, with support from Nigel's All-Stars.

Above: the Festival programme on display on the Drummond Arms, 

newly decorated with butterflies!

Sinister Sweden

This summer, we went to Sweden for our holidays.

Before we went, I have to admit that I knew very little about Sweden, and what I did know was mostly gleaned from the books of John Ajvide Linqvist (Let the Right One In, Handling the Undead) and the TV series The Bridge, both of which tend to suggest that Sweden is a country littered with corpses as opposed to interesting tourist attractions. There was also M.R.James' fabulously scary story Count Magnus, about the unfortunate fate of unwary antiquarian traveller Mr. Wraxall.

Rosemary Pardoe, editor of Ghosts and Scholars, the M.R.James journal, wrote a very interesting article in 2001 titled Who was Count Magnus? which you can read online here. It includes some discussion of the possible location of the story, seemingly somewhere in southern Sweden, although M.R.James muddied the waters very much by naming his fictional estate Råbäck after a real-life one he had visited, and then saying that this was not the real name of the place! At any rate, my travels this time did not take me to Varnhem, Skara or Råbäck. I did however take an interest in the environment and landscape in general, and in Swedish churches in particular, hoping to soak up a bit of Jamesian atmosphere along the way.

Family holidays (especially for families who are weary from office work and exams) are not the ideal situation for antiquarian exploring. So I decided that I would have to be selective about the places I visited, to avoid trespassing on the patience and goodwill of everyone else too much. I wanted to see an older church - preferably mediaeval - and for preference, something a little like the church in M.R.James's story, which had white walls, a copper roof and an onion shaped dome on the mausoleum adjoining it. A little research on Google turned up Slättåkra church (pictured above) which has the white walls and copper roof and surrounding trees; there was no adjoining mausoleum but the tower had a vaguely dome-shaped apex!

In the ghost stories of M.R.James there is often a handy sacristan or other useful local person about to give directions or let the hero into the church. Luckily for me, this actually happened at Slättåkra. I did not realise until afterwards, when I read a friend's blog posts about her attempts to visit some churches in that same part of Sweden, that the majority are kept locked, so the most you can expect to get on a casual visit is photographs of the outside. When we rolled up at Slättåkra and tried the church door, it was indeed locked, but there was a gardener working in the graveyard, and she very kindly agreed to let us in.

The interior of the church was very charming. It did indeed have a "handsome old organ, gaily painted, and with silver pipes" (although not as old as the one in the story would have been; this is only about sixty years old in its current format!):

The ceiling was painted, although not with a "strange and hideous ‘Last Judgement'" as in the story; instead there were more peaceful scenes such as this one of the Ascension, a rather droll depiction showing only the legs of Jesus vanishing into the clouds:

The story also says that "the pulpit was like a doll’s-house covered with little painted wooden cherubs and saints" and the one in Slättåkra church was certainly very much like that:

There was no mausoleum adjoining the church, although there was this strange little building near the churchyard gate:

I had a peep through one of those side windows, although I wasn't expecting to see "fine marble effigies and sarcophagi of copper, and a wealth of armorial ornament" in anything so modern. Inside there was a bier, clearly for the storage of coffins prior to burial. The bier was not in use(!) but all the same I didn't wait around to see if there would be any mysterious clangs, nor did I chant “Are you awake, Count Magnus? Are you asleep, Count Magnus?” under my breath...

As a codicil to this church visit, a day or two later we went to the open air museum in nearby Halmstad. The museum is located on the Galgberget or "gallows hill" and comprises a number of very old buildings including a windmill and a nineteenth century schoolhouse. We toured these, and inside the schoolhouse we saw this, a monk's costume:

I was irresistibly reminded of the cloaked figure who haunts poor Mr. Wraxall in Count Magnus, sometimes appearing as a traveller in a dark cloak, sometimes taken for a Catholic priest in a cassock.  Perhaps Count Magnus was pursuing me after all...

With kind thanks to Ing-Marie Abrahamsson and Ann Giles. 

Ghosts in an Oxford college

I was ferreting about amongst some of my papers today (yes, I do still have papers, even in this digital world) and realised that I have just passed the tenth anniversary of the publication of my very first piece of fiction. It wasn't a novel (the first of those wasn't published until 2009); it was a ghost story, Nathair Dhubh, and it appeared in the 39th issue of the now defunct All Hallows magazine.

Nathair Dhubh means "black serpent" in Gaelic, and the story is about a notorious mountain crag of the same name. Shortly before World War Two, a couple of friends decide to ascend the "serpent" in spite of its having such an evil reputation that locals will not even look directly at it. Of course, this is not setting things up to end well...

That story is still in print, in my collection The Sea Change & Other Stories, published in 2013 by Dublin-based Swan River Press. Although the majority of my published work takes the form of YA novels, I've continued to write ghost stories over the years. Seven of them appeared in The Sea Change and I have written at least as many others. Most recently, my story The Dove, inspired by the real-life history of Kinkell Bridge, was published in Terror Tales of the Scottish Highlands from Gray Friar Press, and my Jamesian sequel The Third Time appeared in Salt Publishing's Best British Horror 2015. 

I'm pleased to say that the new issue of the long-running Supernatural Tales also features a story of mine. It's a special issue, because it's the thirtieth, and it is a testament to the dedication and hard work of editor David Longhorn that the magazine continues to flourish. As thirty is a significant number, David invited a number of authors whose work had previously appeared in Supernatural Tales to contribute something. So there are stories by Lynda E. Rucker, Michael Kelly, Steve Duffy and Adam Golaski as well as myself. In addition, there is a tale by Mark Valentine which is a tribute to the late Joel Lane. All in all, a very fine line-up, and although I wouldn't dare comment on my own story, I can say that the other contributions are all very good indeed.

Because I had a bit of advance warning, I decided that I would write a story on the theme of "thirty". So I spent quite a lot of time toying with ideas involving people who expected something particularly nasty to happen to them on their thirtieth birthday, etc. Eventually I came up with a room number 30, which has a pernicious effect on anyone who spends the night in it. I'm not wedded to the idea of the "traditional" ghost story - one of my others was set in the modern world of sub-aqua diving, for example - so as the story developed, I was surprised at how very traditional the setting of 30 ended up!

The action takes place in an Oxford College, which I gave the fictitious name of Old College. I could of course have used a real college name, but I hit upon Old's as a tribute to one of my favourite creepy stories, the brilliant Lot 249 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, set in "what we will call Old College in Oxford". I had a bit of fun with some of the other names in my story, too: Drummond is a local name here in Perthshire, where I now live; Longhorn is, of course, the surname of Supernatural Tales' editor, Duffy is the surname of one of the other contributors, and Bond is the surname of a whole host of my relatives.

Supernatural Tales 30 (and its predecessors) can be purchased online from the Supernatural Tales website or if you prefer, it is available in a kindle edition, which can be purchased here. The kindle price is a very modest 99p for nearly 80 pages of thrills, creeps and scares!

Above: Supernatural Tales 30 - I dare you to read it by candlelight!