Geraldine McCaughrean's Blog

The online serialisation of a novel by award winning author Geraldine McCaughrean

I have decided to put my blog to good use and publish a book on it in instalments! Well, if it was okay for Dickens...

Free, gratis and for nothing. You won't find it on sale anywhere, I'm serving it up in bite-sized morsels, just for you.

  It's called 1000 Kinds of Ugly, and its hero is Hylas, armour-bearer to Heracles. According to Greek mythology, Hylas went with Heracles to join Jason's Argonauts on their quest to find the Golden Fleece - but got lost on a trip ashore.  Frantically Heracles searched for him, travelling far and wide, leaving countless stories in his wake.

  But what was Hylas doing meanwhile? This is the story of his efforts to rejoin his master.  It's also about the thousand kinds of ugly he meets along the way. Before long, he finds himself - against his better judgement - on an entirely different quest - one that's a threat to the gods themselves.

  I'm hoping you'll join him, here, on this blog, in a couple of days' time.

I’ve never cared that much about cars.  “Just a tin box for getting from A to B”, as my mother said of my father’s pride and joy.  I don’t drive fast.  I don’t hanker for the outside lane.  But when I passed fifty and was about to buy another replacement Fiesta, I suddenly thought, ‘I don’t have to buy sensible.  For the same money I can buy panache!’  So I got myself a 1987 Mercedes coupe.

I met up with a journalist soon after, to do an interview.  Seeing the car, he said, “Unexpected”. Yes!   Say ‘children’s author’ and for some reason people expect mumsy or childlike or elderly – the last things you want to be when you’ve just passed fifty.  My Mercedes made me feel suave and daring.

  It turns heads.  There’s something about its low, black, sleek shape that says panther.  You leave it in a supermarket car park, come out again, and think “Waah! It’s gone!” But it’s just crouching down lower than the cars around it, waiting in ambush (no doubt) for runaway trolleys to eat.

I have loved that car with a passion, lavished money and technology on it.  - It even appeared in a play, speeding onstage, me at the wheel, delivering Darkest Knight (with sword) to sing

 I'm the one in black armour , The pitiless knight

Who rides out of the sunset

To pillage the light.

Close your lids and I'm there

On my black night mare.

Have I scared you? Be scared!

For I blind all my foe:               Hello.

  You think I'm a charmer?

Damn right.

Virgin's blight.

I'm the one in black armour

I'm NIGHT!

  One day I shall have her:

The rosy princess -

I shall knot my black gloves

In the silk of her dress.

Light the wick. Have a care.

Best be quick, or I'm there,

And I don't need the stairs

To climb high… or stoop low.         Hello.

  You think I might harm her?

Damn right

I might.

I'm the one in black armour.

I'm NIGHT!

  At a meeting with illustrator Christian Birmingham, we quite forgot the job in hand when he found we both had a 300SL.  Fellow enthusiasts

Sadly, now she begins to make me feel old.  I can’t any longer hear the tick of her indicators. I struggle to clamber into the driving seat within the narrow sleeve of the garage.  I can no longer muster the four strong young men it takes to lift off the hard top and turn it ‘soft-drop-top’ for the summer.

Besides....    I want to start up a theatre company and that takes money.

So it’s time to say goodbye to my beautiful Merc, my panache-on-wheels. (If Cyrano de Bergerac had had a car, it would have been a Mercedes coupe).

Do say if, next summer, YOU want to be driving with the wind in your hair feeling the chassis flex its steel muscles under you as it eats up the road... and I’ll post more details.

I doubt I’ll be left like the Count of Monte Cristo in his prison cell, sobbing “Mercedes!  Mercedes!  Mercedes!”  After all, I’ll have the Wingspan Theatre Company guaranteeing me excitement and a garage full of props.

Went to London today to record a filmed interview with the ReadingZone crowd and then meet readers from two schools, one of them over a video link.  Mine won’t be up on the ReadingZone site for a couple of months, but you might like to check  out some that are.  All kinds of good people have done these filmed interviews. – they’re supposed to help you write better.  I’m not sure mine’s going to turn you into Garcia Marquez or J K Rowling but someone else’s might! 

Audio-Go have announced they are going to release ALL their titles for download worldwide.  This is very good news, since my 20 audio books have only ever been stocked by libraries, not bookshops. Unabridged audio books take up so much space and cost so much money that bookshops only tend to stock a few abridged books.  And authors don’t receive any payment at all when audio books are borrowed from libraries.

    Unabridged is best!  Of course it is.  If authors could have written the book they wanted to write to a quarter of the length, they could have saved themselves blood, sweat and months.  And now unabridged will be affordable and easily come by.

  I’ve been blessed, over the years, with terrific.  (They don’t come any better than Andrew Sachs and Anton Lesser.)   And today, I have to say, sees one of the highlights of my life.  Because today I received my copy of  The Positively Last Performance  audio book read by Ailsa Joy.  My own daughter reading one of my own books.  She has recorded a couple as birthday presents for me, but now it’s the real deal.  Proud Mum or what!

If you live in the Oxford area, I hope you bump into the Learning Through Stories project organised by – well, dozens of kind people, including the exceptional Story Museum.  It’s going to be pedalling, to schools in the Oxford area, ‘Story’ in every shape and form so long as it’s fun and enticing.

I’'ve been paid in flowers, potted plants and once a tree, but never with a great box of delicious assorted chocolate – and all for the difficult task of judging some rather good poetry.  This year I got the chance to  help judge  the Divine Chocolate annual poetry competition which operates in association with Christian Aid.  So three of us sat down  – one from Divine, one from Christian Aid and me – to pick winners for the three age categories.  (It’s so nice that there’s an adult category for a change.)

  The important thinking behind it is to get across the importance of Fair Trade – not just in the chocolate industry but all respects of farming - and to judge by the entries it certainly achieves that.  You can see the winners being read

 – as all poems should be, if possibly not by me –

on http://www.divinechocolate.com/poetry

I so wish  it was that easy to share the chocolate with you.  Mmmmmm.

But I can’t. 

Cos I ate it.

  Just back from the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai – a splash of scalding sunshine in this interminable icy swim through winter.  What luxury!  I know it was all about the books, but what luxury!  Hummus and salmon and lobster and strawberries... Yes, I know it’s all about the books, but oh! limousines and camel rides and swimming pools and garden parties...  Actually I couldn’t help knowing it was all about the books, because every author you’ve ever heard of seemed to be there, basking in the sunshine and hospitality.   (Sorry about any name-dropping, but it was a very glitzy do.) And every day of the Festival was packed with paying, enthusiastic members of the public hungry for books.

Opening ceremony:

   All the authors had to do an educational event – which you’d expect for the children’s writers but which must be rare for some of the celebrity adult authors and scholarly recluses.  Some little part of me hoped the grandees of Literature would taste the (often) humiliating experience of school visits, where no one has read your book, knows who you are, or can see the point in you existing at all....  But the young people of Dubai (as far as I could judge) are 100% friendly, enthusiastic, attentive and charming, so Education Day was no hardship for anyone.

    I’m sure the children’s authors had the most fun over all.  At mealtimes we bunched together – not intentionally, but like iron filings drawn to the same magnet – and we always seemed to be doing more laughing than the other tables.  Beardy Ardagh was there, of course, like the centre pole holding up a circus tent.

And Korky Paul, recruiting us to help spoil his artwork with our messy contributions. 

John Connelly (The Book of Lost Things + loads of adult stuff) was there; and Roger McGough, so much softer spoken and gentler than the rest of us hooligans. Debi Gliori brought her fiddle along – (who knew she played the fiddle)

– and it turned out that she and Barry Cunningham (famed discoverer of J K Rowling) had the exact same taste in music.  And humour.  We all seemed to have the same sense of humour. 

  Maybe children’s authors don’t take life as seriously as adult ones, but no, that can’t be right.

  Maybe we don’t take our work so seriously?  No, that’s definitely not so.

  We could be better at partying, but I can personally guarantee not, or do less of it (altogether likely).

  Perhaps in our business we don’t have to impress the world with how sensible we are, because our readers don’t have much time for ‘sensible’.

  Or, what say, you actually need a sense of the absurd to write well for children?  Maybe you need a sense of the absurd to be any kind of a good writer, because Life’s seriously absurd.

  Come to think of it, authors for YA/children weren’t the only ones to end up giggling in the ‘circus tent’.  There were their partners, for one thing.   Mark Cockram, bookbinder extraordinary, has such a dry sense of humour you could wipe the dishes with him.  And Ben Miller – no, but really, Ben Miller of Armstrong & Miller and Murder in Paradise and The Ladykillers... well, I suppose he would see the funny side, wouldn’t he...  So maybe it wasn’t our line of work so much as a mutual failure to see the importance of being earnest.

  Dubai was certainly the oddest Lit Fest I’ve ever been to, in that everything seemed geared to giving the authors a good time, whereas normally it’s geared towards the public. 

Fire: an unintentional excitement at the spectacular Emirates Lit Fest

Head teachers make much of ‘Individuality’ – nurturing ‘the fully rounded individual’.  But the whole point of a national curriculum is that everyone is doing the same thing in the same way at the same time with the same ends in mind.  The last thing it aims for is individualism. That’s not a complaint, just a fact.

So it is down to extra curricula activities to do the rounding out/off.  A library is the ultimate extra curricula opportunity.  In a school library children can make their own discoveries about what interests them, what delights them, what scintillates them – the kind of discoveries that make you a distinct and unique person.

Put a child into a national curriculum and you are – to some extent – putting him into a cage and feeding him pre-digested pellets of selected knowledge washed down with a drop of exam technique. 

Put a child into a library and you are introducing her to self-enlightenment – the sum total of the world’s efforts to enlighten its young.  ...Or if that’s a bit overstated, at least the chance to develop their own tastes and pursue their own private passions.

You might argue that parents will shape the mental landscapes of their children – turn them into little individuals.  But parents are designed to replicate themselves:  It’s human nature.  No, free-range free reading is what liberates a child from the opinions of others – even his all-powerful peer group who think they know exactly what he should think and get up to.

We hear a lot about the selling off of school playing fields.  Replacing your child’s intellectual playground with a bank of computers and calling it an Information Centre is every bit as dire and it’s happening on a much wider scale. 

A paltry shelf of books in a classroom is no substitute for the Library as a physical entity.         Yes, it’s a bolt hole for the quiet reflective child who can, elsewhere in the school, find himself a social pariah.

Yes, it’s a bolt hold for the free thinker – the dissident, the dissenter, the true original who elsewhere gets called a pain in the academic backside.

Yes, it’s the haven of the nerd.

But for EVERYONE it is a place where knowledge is theirs to do with as they like.

Librarians don’t have an agenda.  They are there to help, not dictate.  It gives them an extraordinary, priceless status in a school.  I’ve come across School Librarians who are confessor, counsellor, life coach, ally, sounding-board, co-conspirator... Crucially the librarian is the one with the spade: the spade for digging an escape tunnel from the hard labour and mundanity of school and life in general.

A major reason why schools embrace the idea of shedding their libraries is to shed the cost of a librarian.  (The books are there; they aren’t costing anything.)  But the trained librarian is every bit as important an asset to preserve as the books.

And bear in mind that the Schools Library Services won’t be there to paste over the deficiency: those are being disbanded faster than you can blink.

  Unfortunately, when it comes to literature in particular, the current rigid exam structure is proving to have one tiny down-side.  It has put a whole generation off literature. 

They get told exactly what to think about a handful of books, poems and plays, what to say about them when asked, using which precise words.  Not quite the original purpose of literature or drama.  In fact correct me if I’m wrong, but the entirely opposite purpose of literature and drama.

But find your way into a library, and there it all is – literature – well, story, words, pictures, newspapers – STUFF.  And it comes without a price tag.  No one is going to test you on it, tell you what to think about it, set homework relating to it. It is just there to enjoy,  to explore, to dip into, to swallow or spit out.  Lo and behold – personal opinion, individual tastes and preferences, worlds of the imagination, visual stimulation, a happier relationship with words, doorways to fantasy – even (though don’t say it out loud) freedom of thought.

Until teacher training includes an obligatory module on children’s literature, young teachers are likely to prove just as clueless as their pupils about what’s out there to read.  They’re likely to say (if the subject of books comes up) that they don’t have time to read (which is entirely possible!)

The librarian, on the other hand, is likely to ask, “Got time for a trip to Mars?”    “What do you think of black-and-red?”  “Have you got the nerve for the First World War? This one’s pretty harrowing.” “Did you enjoy Millions?  Thought you would.”      “Like comics?  Some of the best illustrators do graphic novels, look.”       “Monsters?  Yeah!  Give Gilgamesh a go.”   “Have you read the latest Mal Peet? I thought it was terrific.” “You’re into grisly angst, aren’t you?  Are you up for Tender Morsels?”

I know that, as an author of fiction, I’m horribly biased, but fiction is particularly  ill-served by the Nat Curriculum.  And fiction is an invaluable resourceto any poor, benighted kid trapped inside one small, unsatisfactory, slightly scary, regimented life: i.e. any schoolchild.  A shelf of fiction represents a whole range of alternative lives, experiences and places to go.  Just there.  All you have to do is reach out and take down a book to put on another man’s shoes and walk a mile with him, to see the world through another person’s eyes. (And the art of identifying/empathising with another person is crucial to developing a moral capacity.)

And if all that sounds a bit airy fairy for the modern thrusting world of league tables and value-adding facilities, then:

Universities will always be looking for candidates who are widely read and show some spark of original thought: it stands to reason they will.  How else can they possibly select entrants from a procession of identical cerebella stuffed with the identical contents of a standardised curriculum?

And academia aside?  Industry is forever saying it needs people who can think outside the box.  School libraries are the key for getting you out of the box and starting you thinking. 

So a school library and a good librarian are the best value-adding facilities money can buy.

If you disband a library it cannot be re-assembled later, when times look up or when you think better of it.  It is probably an asset that has been growing ever since the school opened, paid for out of decades of school budgets.  Once gone, it’s gone.  I would say to any Head Teacher eager to open young minds to the sunlight: closing down your library is about as sound as trepanning.

The Great Library at Alexandria probably burned down by accident – collateral damage Caesar would have said.  Unfortunate collateral damage. 

Preparing the sky-blue story box

Who wouldn’t pay good money to find themselves sandwiched between Michael Rosen and Philip Ardagh?  It has its drawbacks, though, as I discovered at the Pop-Up Story Festival this weekend. 

  Heroine of the piece, "Sleeping Super Princess"

Villain of the piece, "Jack Ginautibus"

I had been given a circus tent to mind for six hours and to fill up with story and children.    I’ve never done anything like it before, and arrived in fear and trembling.  As the crowd poured in on a glorious sunny Sunday, and the  Pop-Up team transformed my empty tent into a cosy myth-making opportunity (complete with sound effects) the noise built up and up.  Rock and poetry and hilarity from Michael’s tent on my left; oos and aahs from Philip’s tent on my right.

  Michael is the consummate showman.  Philip’s tent was an illusory world of Victoriana boasting an upside-down room, a ferocious growwow in a cave, a magician, a hall of mirrors…. What chance did I stand?  For an hour  nobody set foot in my tent.  Then Beardy Ardagh lent me his walking hedge – I mean, who can resist a topiary that talks to you? – and the first brave souls were lured inside.  Others followed, and by midday storming along towards a new made-in-a-day myth.

 Shadows of their former sleves

It was a glorious summer day – a park full of people (not to mention walking hedges); parades and dancers, an igloo, face-painting and a wonderful bookshop.  But the three-day weekend event in Coram Fields, Bloomsbury, was only the kink in the tail of an astonishing tiger.  87 school evens had already taken place in venues all over London.  It has to be the most ambitious undertaking I have ever come across and it was really good to have been part of the very first Pop-Up Festival.

 Hanging the villain out to dry

I thought one tent was a challenge.  Head honcho Dylan Calder had a tent the size of London and not just six hours to fill but six week.  Rather him than me…

  Still, I hope he pulls it off again next year.

  (Oh, and thank you to the hedge, wherever you have put down root.)