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Welcome, finally, to my website. Here's info on me, my books and other writings, what I'm up to, and the inevitable deeply self-absorbed blog. Visit, graze, leave a comment, then go out into the sunshine and read.
November 2008 Archives
Just a quick reminder that I'll be in the Manchester area tomorrow (Saturday, 29th) at Bury Central Library at 1pm for the Big Science Read event there. It is free, but you do need tickets, so if you want to check for last-minute seats, try 0161 253 5871.
Hidden tracks are the enemy of the iPod EP. You know what I mean; you've listened to four minutes of a song and, instead of a quick shuffle to the next tune, there's two full minutes of silence before a "secret" "hidden" track starts. Painful, but here's an iPod EP of songs where you just wish you could edit out everything that comes before...
Calendars And Clocks (Best Laid Plans) by the Coral - a chirpy bit of psychedelic whimsy for 3:40, two minutes of silence exactly, then six full minutes of stoner-noodling about time travel.
Slide Show (Saturday Evening) by Travis - Fran Healy as his most throttlingly sensitive, and then after a break, the hardest, hottest, best song Travis ever did. They even did it as an encore when I saw them live once.
Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (Possession acoustic) by Sarah McLachlan - I've always made fun of Sarah McLachlan for singing songs so boring she falls asleep halfway through, but she does have a beautiful voice and after some anonymous doodling that eventually spawned Dido, this one turns into a piano-only version of one of her best songs. Lovely.
Valentine (Adam Ant Is Unwell) by Jim Moray - Off Jim Moray's great latest album Low Culture, this one ends with a heartfelt and wholly sympathetic tribute to Adam Ant when he was having his troubles.
Go West (Postcript) by Pet Shop Boys - Five minutes of melancholy camp disco at its most brilliant, three minutes of silence, then 75 seconds of gorgeous benediction. Really, thank God for Pet Shop Boys, eh?
Happy Thanksgiving! I'm celebrating by going to see Noises Off, the funniest play ever written.
There's a profile of me in today's Times (that's the Times of London to all you international readers (but no one, not one person, in the UK calls it that)). It's about The Knife of Never Letting Go winning the BookTrust Teenage Prize as you might imagine, and includes an oddly moody photo that makes me look a bit craggy and leonine. These are not self-inflicted compliments, by the way. I tend to run screaming from photos of myself, no matter how nice or professional (and this photographer was a super-nice guy, by the by).
More non-book related diary entries coming soon, I promise.
Well, holy crap! To my absolutely delighted astonishment, I've just won the BookTrust Teenage Prize for The Knife of Never Letting Go. I was dead certain that I wouldn't win (Tanya Landman's Apache is particularly fine and also on the shortlist), so I gave a nicely incoherent speech and smiled like an idiot.
But very nice indeed, I must say, especially as I get my very first coverage on the BBC ever. A fine day, though one in which I understandably haven't got much writing done. I've said it before, I'll say it again: Nifty.
It's all been sort of pushy singing-my-own-praises here lately, hasn't it? Sorry, but I've been super-busy (still am) and then others keep doing nice things for me.
Like the Independent making The Knife of Never Letting Go one of their 50 Best Winter Reads, along with people like Edith Wharton and Ian Rankin. See what I mean? Isn't that nice?
I also just got the first edition of my Spanish translation, El Cuchillo en la Mano, or "The Knife in the Hand", so all you Spanish speakers out there can see if the Independent is right.
Tangentially, I've started to seriously fund-raise for London Marathon, which I'm running in April, so why not sponsor me? Lots of people have already started, it's for a good cause, and every little helps...
So I'm back from lovely Cornwall, just in time to spend yesterday in Portsmouth, speaking to a very bright and engaged group of students, most of whom on the Master's in Creative Writing course. I got to be pompous and pontificable for two hours; bliss for any writer.
I've also been getting a lot of queries asking after Book Two of Chaos Walking (i.e., the sequel to The Knife of Never Letting Go). It's called The Ask and the Answer, comes out in May in the UK (June in Australia, Sept in America), and is remarkably already available for pre-order from amazon, bless them.
In fact, we just finalised the cover for it this past week, and it's a corker. If you liked the Knife cover, you're gonna love this.
It's a busy week with appearances (see the Events page for details) and the BookTrust Teenage Prize, which is announced at a ceremony on Tuesday. Quality problems, I know, but I do have a third book to write...
The Cornish writer's break keeps getting interrupted with news on The Knife of Never Letting Go, but it's all good, so I can hardly complain.
After the niceness of the being one of Amazon.com's Best Books of 2008 and the additional pleasure of being on the Carnegie Medal longlist, you can now watch a video-taped interview of me on Borders Books television!
Yes, actual video footage! Thrill as you listen to my tortured Greg Rusedski accent! Swoon as you can see just exactly where I'm going to have a double chin in ten years! Vividly imagine the lengthy interval when we were interrupted by a genial drunken Welshman!
Apparently, I really look like this.
Still in Cornwall and in haste, just to say that The Knife of Never Letting Go has been longlisted for the Carnegie Medal, which is a heckuva big honour. It's the one chosen exclusively by Children's Librarians, so people who really know and believe in their stuff. It's a long longlist and the shortlist isn't until April, but a nice thing, yesiree.
I write from beautiful Cornwall on Election Day, but I won't write about either. Nor will I write about the tinnitus that is turning the entire world into a low, vibrating hum. Weird.
Instead, I write with the lovely and surprising news (I didn't even know they did this) that the good people at Amazon.com (the US version, that is) have made The Knife of Never Letting Go one of its Best Books of 2008. Which, I must say, is pretty nifty.
It's one of the top ten teen books of the year as well as being on their top 100 books overall. Excellent stuff, very pleasing, I must say, all the more so for being unexpected. But then, you can always trust a Seattle company...
