Tag: snow
Twisted Winter
There is something eerie about the onset of winter that cannot be fully explained even by the longer nights, the stark trees or the chill. Winter is more than just an absence of light, life and heat. It has its own presence and mystery. Humanity withdraws to its little pools of warmth and illumination, and dark, ancient forces walk abroad…
Today sees the publication of Twisted Winter, a collection of creepy winter stories edited by Catherine Butler. One of the seven tales is mine, and I am lucky enough to share the anthology with six very talented authors – Katherine Langrish (the Trollfell trilogy), Catherine Butler (Teaching Children’s Fiction), Frances Thomas (I Found Your Diary and The Blindfold Track), my writing buddy Rhiannon Lassiter (Ghost of a Chance and Bad Blood), Liz Williams (the Inspector Chen series) and the legendary Susan Cooper (The Dark is Rising series).
Before you ask, no, this isn’t a tinselly gaggle of twee Christmas ghost stories. Every story handles wintry menace in a different way.
A teenage boy creeps out at night, for no ordinary delinquency. On the darkening marshes, a bully goes too far. A young girl makes an eerie journey of the spirit and imagination in her quest to understand her dead father. Complacent and greedy adults hold a Halloween party, and are visited by ancient forces. The discoloured light from street lamps bathes a graveyard encounter. A teenage girl reaches a fateful agreement with a snow-pure visitor. Persephone slips away from her summer abode, back to the lands of the dead.
On a personal note, Susan Cooper is a writer I have admired since I was nine years old. When my father captivated us by reading aloud the entirety of the Dark is Rising series, I never imagined that one day I would find myself writing for the same anthology as the author.
My current feelings are best summarised as follows:
School visits in Hammersmith and Hoddesdon
On Tuesday 19th April, I visited Latymer Preparatory School, which already had a number of impressive projects on display.
The discussion at the end of my talk covered the unnatural pallour of people living underground, alternative forms of technology (kitepunk!), etc. Finally I signed a stack of books supplied by the Lion and Unicorn Bookshop.
A week later, on Tuesday 22nd March, I ventured into snowbound Hertfordshire for two events organised by Books@Hoddesdon.
The first took place at The John Warner School in Hoddesdon, where I talked to two hundred members of Year 7.
A Memorable Question:
Q. Does being an author change the way you read books, and has it made you analyse them more?
A. My degree was in English, so I already tended to be a bit analytical as a reader. But yes, I am now more likely to sympathise with what an author is trying to do. I’m also much more likely to read a really good part and think, drat, I wish I’d written that…
There seemed to be a lot of keen readers, including a young contest winner who had read 60 books since September, excluding all the books she had read at home…
After lunch I visted the impressive campus of Haileybury School to talk to groups from Year 7 of the Lower School.
A Memorable Question:
Q: Do you ever brag to your friends about the books you’re writing?
A: I didn’t used to like talking about them at all. When people asked me sign books I used to hide under tables. But now a certain sort of ‘bragging about my books’ is part of my job. It’s called ‘self-promotion’.
I then signed a small mountain of books – some dedicated to ‘Brancombeast’ and ‘Manstrangler’…
