Category Archives: Books

LarkLitFest

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Just what is the point of having a stepson if he can’t even let you know about a literary festival happening at his own school under his very nose?

“Did you know about the Larkmead Literary Festival?”

“The what?”

“It’ll be launching an anthology of short stories written by Larkmead students, put together by your writer-in-residence.”

“We have a writer-in-residence?”

And so forth.

And it does sound to have been a Jolly Good Idea: respect to all involved. Mostly Books has a report, as does the Abingdon Herald, so that’s all points covered, though there may be the slightest sliver of bias in the Herald’s reporting. As well as P. Pullman coming along to help launch the anthology, it reports:

“The visitors included authors M.G. Harris and Julie Hearn, illustrator David Melling, Paul Mayhew Archer, television scriptwriter for The Vicar of Dibley, and Mark Edwards, sports editor of the Herald’s sister newspaper, the Oxford Mail.”

If Pullman and the Oxford Mail’s sports editor represent two ends of a spectrum, I know which end I’m closer to, which gives me all sorts of hope.

My only criticism of reports I’ve read is that apparently proceedings went on until 8.30pm, which surely is far too late for Year 13s to be up.

10% off

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Looking for a good read to while away the summer break? The lovely folk at Lulu.com are offering 10% off Jeapes Japes, the collected short works of y.t. with added value editorial. They advise:
“Use coupon code SUMMERREAD305 at checkout and receive 10% off Jeapes Japes. Maximum savings with this promotion is $10. You can only use the code once per account, and you can’t use this coupon in combination with other coupon codes.”
I have no way of confirming this because self-purchases aren’t eligible but I have no reason to doubt it works …

So totally not Twilight

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I’m interested to see that my good friend Sebastian Rook’s Vampire Plagues series has apparently been repackaged as Vampire Dusk. This is quite a coincidence because there is already a quite successful series for children, also about vampires, currently available and named for a time of day. In fact, a time of day when the sun isn’t quite shining. I’m sure that the merest possibility of any kind of association has never at any point crossed the mind of anyone at Scholastic.

Suspicion of bandwagon-jumping recedes further with even a cursory examination of the covers, which have gone from this:

… to this.

(Having a passing acquaintance with the text, I’m curious to know what happened to the second boy. The three heroes stick to the magic Harry-Ron-Hermione formula for pre-teen adventures of 2 boys to 1 girl [though there is a guest extra girl in the second book]. This is because boys only want to read about boys whereas girls will read about either gender: so, you get a boy for the boys, a girl for the girls, and another boy to make up for the girl. Sad but true.

Maybe he’s on the back.)

To continue with the covers for the books I wrote the first three written by Sebastian:


Not only will you will discern a total absence of fruit, chess pieces and the like, but while the Twilight covers go out of their way to hide the fact that they are about a boy and a girl who have the dead hots for each other, Vampire Dusk advertises the total absence of sexual frisson by showing a couple of complete strangers who were photographed in the same room together one day, coincidentally whilst wearing sort of Victorian clothes. Also, by miniscule fractions, the boy’s expression changes. A bit. So, really, about as far from Twilight as you can get.