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Short story - Time Machine
The Well - Awards at Banf
New Twittertale - Fallen
Losing It
A new short story, published in Losing It - an anthology of short stories about losing your virginity.
It's a great selection of writers with many different angles on what is perhaps the most important rite of passage ... so to speak.
Check out the Losing It website here.
The Well Wins TWO Banff Awards
This innovative cross platform event has won no less than two Banff awards at the 2010 Televsion awards in Banff - best cross platform project and best interactive project.
Congratulations to Conker Media who devised and carried out the idea - it was a real pleasure to work with this exciting team. The idea of integrating a game with a drama is a brilliant one, adn something I'd love to do again.
The Well is still available online. You can see the show and play the game to discover the "fifth episode" - the pieces of drama hidden inside the game, that add up to a whole new story.
PLAY THE GAME, FIND THE GHOST, REVEAL THE STORY.
THE WELL was my first work for TV and online. It's a scary one. Stay away if you don't sleep well at night ...
The Well shows on four, ten minute episodes with game play online in between. You have to play the game to release the hidden story - ghosts, in a word - to find out what exactly happened last time the well was opened ... and stay a lttle ahead of the show.
See the episodes and play The Well game - it's like Resident Evil, according to Time Out - but with real ghosts ...
THE WELL - With Karen Gillan on the left, who is going to play the assistant in the new series of Dr Who currently being filmed. Don't forget - you saw her here first!
Nicholas Dane Paperback out June 3rd
This is the Penguin paperback of Nicholas Dane. Dramatic, eh? This image doesn't do justice to the flashy siilver arrows. I'm very happy with it.
I'm doing an event at the British Film Institute on the South Bank at 2 pm on June 5th for the launch. Also, I'm writing an article in the Guardian and doing an interview for the Sunday Times. Last but by no means least, Sugar magazine are using Nicholas Dane to launch their online book club - great stuff.
Win an interview with me and a signed copy of Nicholas Dane. Enter here.
Astonishingly, the BBC has just announced that at the heart of it's much heralded cut backs is a plan to completely abandon all provison for teenagers. BBC Switch and BBC Blast, the showcase cross channel provison for teenagers, are BOTH out. Is this really how the BBC plans for the future? - by abandoning youth? or is it just that they don't give a toss? As usual, the newspapers are full of stories about BBC6 (yet another music station) and give barely a mention of the fact that, once again, young people are bearing the brunt of the cuts.
DONT LET THEM GET AWAY WITH IT! Young people have no vote, no money and consequently no voice. Parents, teachers and all adults who care about our young people should put their voices in now to object to this careless dismissal of our youth, as well as teenagers themselves and children of all ages. Kids of nine or ten can look forward to turning on the telly and finding nothing for for them in a few years time when they are teens themselves.
Sign the petitions here and here.
Moan as much as possible - on Twitter (#savebbcswitch) and Facebook.. and anywhere else you can find.
And then they'll moaning about kids standing on street corners with nothing to do. If you're fourteen, fifteen or sixteen you can't watch films suitable for your age unles syou sneak in the cinema and spy on adult films, beause the age censorshop laws cut out out/ If a book comes out that adrresses the issues you think about every day everyone starts squeaking in outrage. TV only has Skins, which they don't serve up until after midnight anyway. There is virtualy no media produced for young peole in tehier teens and what there is is just about to chopped away.
Meanwhile, there is more and more pressure on teenagers to perform better at school combined with less and less free time ... education is increasingly about training and producing an easily measureable product for university and the workplace .. what is there left for them to do? Take drugs, hang yourself or go out mugging
Come on, BBC - this needs re-thinking.
Visits to India and Lithuania
Howlucky am I? This Wednesday (Feb 10th) I'm off to India for an eight visit withe the British Council as part of their LitSutra Programme - meeting with high school students, under-grad and post-grad students in Mumbai, as part of the Kala Ghoda Festival), Kolkata and Kalyani.I can;t tell you how much I'm looking forward to this - I love India. It's always great to do things with the British Council and take the opportunity of talking about books and writing in other parts of the world.
Then off to Vilnius in Lithuania, where I'm doing some publicity for my publishers over there, Alma Litera. You can see the work they publish for young people here and some of the covers here.
I've been to Vilnius before, had a great time. The young people there are so radical - interested and curiouis about everythingm adn prepared to take a chance on anything. It's the only town in the world where they have a moument ot Frank Zappa. So it's me and Frankie!
I'm blogging about all this - read my TRAVEL DIARY. I'm been in Mumbai, Kolkat and Delhi, and now I'm in Vilnius, capital of Lituania, for the Book fair ..
One of my most recent works - a memoir of my teenage years - has been dropepd by the publisher becaue of fears of litigation. Read about it in The Guardian here. Read my response here.
Fallen
Jonson had had enough. He'd had enough of working long hours for scant reward, of having no talent, no gifts, no special skills. All his life he'd been sat on the sofa watching beautiful people doing interesting things, while he was ugly and his life dull. He was fed up with his friends, who were all like him - uglier and even more boring, if anything. But the thing he was most fed up with of all, was that all the women in his life were shrews.
His mother had nagged him out of the womb, out of the house and in the end, out of her life. By the time he was forty, he had no idea whether she was alive or dead. His first girlfriend had complained about the places he took her to, the conversation he made with her, and how he kissed. His wife, when he found her, complained about almost everything - his interests, his habits, the work he did, the money he earned. She complained about the look, size, taste and performance of his penis. When she left him for a better looking, richer, and more talented man, he could hardly blame her; he would have left himself if he could.
His daughter was the same. Nothing he ever did was right. She always claimed she loved him, but somehow, she always said it as if she was doing him a favor.
It was a favor he could do without.
The flat Jonson lived in was twenty stories high - more than adequate. Once he'd made up his mind, he wasted no time with nonsense like suicide notes, or calls to the Samaritans. He simply climbed out onto the balcony and jumped.
Never a good traveler, her felt nauseous almost at once. He had spent too much of his life feeling nauseous, or jealous, or angry, or disappointed. Now, he was feeling all of the at the same time, but at least this time he knew it wasn't going to last more than a few seconds.
It was at that point that his fall began to bend.
It was the most sickening feeling he'd ever had. Gravity had alway been so reliable - it was straight down, there were simply no other options. Suddenly he was trapped in a hellish circle of the stuff. What on earth was going on?
It was then that God spoke to Jonson.
"I gave you all this," she said. "Life, a mind, eyes and ears. I gave you a planet to frolic on, a universe to wonder at. I gave you a love and beauty and hope and daring and curiosity. And what do I get in return? Moan moan moan. Whinge whinge whinge. Well, I've had enough of it. I'm off. I'm leaving you to it."
"Wait," begged Jonson. But it was too late. She was gone.
He continued to fall, and fall and fall and fall, and his fall curved, and curved and curved. On he went, forever downwards, trapped within a divinely beautiful, never ending parabolic arc into all eternity.
Something to wonder at.
To be continued
Previous Twittertales.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre
Censorship against teenage readers
An interesting report from the US about the spread of censorship against teenage writers - read it here. I wonder how much this kind of thing is happening over here as well? I know some bookshiops have not been stocking my own books becaue of complaints. How many peole I wonder ....? The usual one or two, I suspect ...
Any reports of this kind of thing over here? I'll be happy to post them ...
Journalism
My top ten teenage books - read it here on the Guardian online - top ten teen books
What's wrong with families - appeared inThe Guardian fmaily section, Saturday 13th June
Events
I did an interesting event recently at Manchester Deansgate Waterstones with William Nicholson, talking about love and sex in teen fiction. Bill Nicholson is a fine writer and his new book, Rich and Mad is a great exploration of a first sexual encounter.
Read this write up of the event from the Bookwitch. Many thanks to Ann Giles for covering it.
SHORT STORIES
Get the latest installment of the current story, How to Murder a Troll
You can catch up with past Twittertales on the blog.
Read an interview with me about the Twittertales on Candy Gourlay's blog - Notes from the Slushpile.
Follow me on TWITTER.