Author of the Month

My new book Deep Deep Down is now out and no doubt I will be talking about it with the pupils of Wellington College, Belfast, when I visit them on December 14th. Thank you to Tanja Jennings, librarian at Wellington, who has made me the school’s author of the month.


Rebecca Cullen's winning monster.

I first visited this school to be part of the Northern Irish heat of the Kid’s Lit Quiz. As part of this competition I offered one of my own drawings as a prize to the artist producing the most exciting sea monster. You can see my drawing and find out more about the Kid’s Lit Quiz on the last entry on this blog. Above is the winning piece of art, below is the runner up. I hope the Rebecca Cullen is enjoying her prize and has maybe hung it up somewhere.


Rebecca Jones came second.

Kid’s Lit Quiz

I will be a guest at The Kids' Lit Quiz which will be held at Wellington College in Belfast on Thursday the 10th of November. It is an annual international reading quiz for students aged 10-13 years. 26 teams from 19 different schools across Northern Ireland will be competing for reading honours. I’m told that previous quizzes have had rounds on everything from “pigs, primates and publishers' logos to Harry Potter, Dr Seuss and famous first lines." All regions of the United Kingdom take part along with New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, the USA and China. The regional heat winners will compete in the UK Final at Warwick University in December. The UK champions will then travel to New Zealand to take on the International teams who will be battling it out for the coveted World Title. There are all sorts of prizes to be won and, of course, there’s the glory.



I am bringing an additional prize for the Northern Irish quiz, it is a drawing in a frame and will be presented along with one of my books. It will be awarded to the winner of a Monster drawing competition. I drew this picture when beginning to write The Badness of Ballydog. When writing I often sketch props and characters to help me get a clear idea of them in my head. This particular picture is of May looking over the side of the Sunny Buoy at a certain leatherback turtle. A turtle who turns out to be important in the story.

I look forward to partaking in the day, testing my knowledge of youth literature and seeing all the student’s artwork.

Readathon

Readathon is a scheme of sponsored reading for school kids. It aims to encourage reading among the young and, at the same time, earn money for charity. I think Readathon is a much better idea that sponsored walks we endured at school.


Everywhere Brough Girling goes, he brings cake.

Brough Girling, the founder of Readathon, was in Northern Ireland this week visiting some schools that have done particularly well in the scheme. Schools where the students read lots of books and gathered impressive amounts of money. I went with him to talk to the students about my work and life as a writer. We went to Ashfield Boys' School in Belfast and Cambridge House Grammer in Ballymena. In Ballymena I talked with my biggest group of young people ever, four-hundred and fifty.

Click here to visit the Readathon website.

Monsters in Meath

It's Children's Book Festival time and this week I visited libraries around Co. Meath. I meet lots of school groups and enjoyed it a lot. Hope they did too.


Doing my thing in Slane.


One of the school groups I meet in Ashbourne.

One thing I love about meeting young readers is the surprising angles they take on my work. Often a boy or girl will have paid extraordinarily close attention to someone I considered to be a minor character. Or they will have thought hard about some fleeting detail. This is always an eye-opener for me.

Next week for the Children's Book Festival I am the Ballyroan Library in Rathfarnham, Dublin.

Yarn in Barn

Here’s me talking to a gathering of young and not-so-young in Dublin lately. The event was held in a barn and everyone sat on hay bales.


Thanks to Aoife of Children's Books Ireland for the photograph

It reminded of when, as a boy, myself and a friend slept a night in a barn of a local farm. My friend told his parents that he was staying in my house and I told my parents that I was staying in his. We learned that, if you’re going to sleep in a hay barn, you should bring lots of water as all that straws dries out the air terribly. Our throats were dry as deserts by morning. For provisions, all we brought with us was a block of marzipan.

Dublin Events

Bookworms Invade Airfield on 14 August. Airfield is in Dundrum, Dublin. I will be having book events in the Grey Barn at 11:30am, 1:15pm and 3:00pm. The events will be suitable for 9 years and up.



There’s plenty of other things happening on the day in Airfield, click here to take a look.

Paper Monster

Top this. An origami kraken made from a single piece of paper 25 inches across. No cuts, just folds. The creator remarks (and I quote because I love the specialist terminology,) that the “sails are formed using trapezoid molecules.”


Kraken attacks!


The crease pattern shows where all the folds are.

You can see more of Brian Chan’s origami work at this link.

Sensitive Cyclops

If you’re doodling a monster there is one quick way to ensure the viewer knows it’s a genuine out-of-the-subconscious monstrous creation and not just a badly drawn crocodile. Give your creature only one eye. Much of the animal life on earth tends towards symmetry in the arrangement of sense organs. A one-eyed life form seems to contradict some fundamental principle, causing unease. The viewer knows this beast is built to a completely different design than the rest of us. An entirely different form of life that sees the world in a wholly different manner. It is an alien. It is a monster.


Ray Harryhausen’s Cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, 1958.

All the one-eyed creatures of today are probably descended from the Cyclops, one of the cast of the ancient Greek myths. It is a lumbering giant that is outwitted by Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. This image of the Cyclops as brutal, dumb and fond of violence has been its stereotype ever since. The Cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad could not even speak, it just lurched about and roared. I can think of only one exception to this sort of Cyclops in art, this painting by Odilon Redon.


The Cyclops. Oil on cardboard mounted on panel, 64 × 51 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum, Holland. Painted sometime between 1898 and 1900.

What kind of Cyclops is this? Peeking shyly at a sleeping figure in what feels like a misty Garden of Eden. One does not feel the sleeping figure is in any danger. This Cyclops just wants a friend. A constant problem for those attempting to depict the Cyclops is what to do with its nose? The artist sometimes plants the eye in the middle of the forehead, retaining a normal human nose with two weird patches of skin either side. Or they forcefully squash the nose down, like in the movie version above. Redon avoids the problem by simply withholding the nose. He makes his Cyclops a smooth faced creature, not some warped aberration. This helps make it seem childlike, innocent as a lamb. Painting the creature without a nose sidesteps blunt questions of anatomy. Such questions would ruin the soft magic of the image. This Cyclops is made seem even more harmless by the absence of its right shoulder. Where does the far shoulder go? It is just about feasible that it is curved out of view. It matters little, the effect is to make this Cyclops seem dainty and meek. This is Odilon Redon's vision of the Cyclops, at home in a dreamscape.

Monster Monks

It has been a while since we’ve had a Japanese monster, so here’s one now. David Maybury of Children’s Books Ireland drew my attention to this modern take on an ancient spectre, it is the first image below. The beast is the Umibōzu. Or if you prefer 海坊主, a name that combines the character for sea with the character for Buddhist monk.


The illustrator is Shigeru Mizuki and the image is from the Yōkai Jiten, an encyclopaedia of traditional monsters published in 1981.

These spirits live in the sea and if you happen to come close to one your best defence is to look away and pretend not to see it. The Umibōzu are peaceable enough if you don’t hassle them. The worst thing you can do is try and chat with one. That will result in it sinking you and your vessel.

Some say the Umibōzu are drowned holy men, they have the shaven heads of a monk and when seen at sea they often appear to be praying. I read that they are sometimes described as having serpentine limbs like tentacles. These limbs, their big eyes and smooth heads make me wonder if the idea of the Umibōzu may be based on sightings of the Giant Squid. Such squid are rarely seen near the surface but this rarity might have made their appearances all the more frightening.


I got this image of a Giant Squid from here.


This well-known 19th century image of the Umibōzu was created by the wood block artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

Dead or Alive

Newfoundland is in North-East Canada. I have a friend from there and he recently sent me a copy of this poster. It could be found pinned up in Newfoundland towns in the 1980s.


Wanted! Big squid.

It was a serious attempt by a biologist called Frederick Aldrich to gather samples of the giant squid, Architeuthis dux. The chances of a live squid trashing around a coastline like in this picture are pretty slim, although it does make for an exciting poster. It was more likely that Newfoundlanders would find giant squid corpses or parts of corpses washed up on shore. A while ago on this blog I wrote about a different kind of big squid, the colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis Hamiltoni. We knew about that creature for decades before one was seen alive or even in one piece. That was because parts of its distinctive tentacles were occasionally washed up on beaches, biologists looked at them and knew that there had to be an undiscovered species out there.

Newfoundland has a long history with the giant squid. In 1873 the first complete specimen of a giant squid ever seen came ashore there and was photographed in the bathtub of the local reverend.


Giant squid found in Newfoundland in 1873, hung above the bathtub.

In the 1870’s many giant squid washed up on the shores of Newfoundland. No one knows why those years were a particularly busy time for strandings but many scientists believe that they happen in regular cycles and are therefore predictable. The length of time between mass strandings is not known, but Frederick Aldrich suggested it might be 90 years. Aldrich correctly predicted another group of strandings that occurred in the 1960s.

In both the 1870s and the 1960s most of the beached squid were dead by the time they were discovered. There was one massive exception. One giant squid was struggling in the shallows when fishermen came across it in 1878. I assume this discovery is the scene illustrated in the poster. They managed to hook the dying beast with a grapnel and stopped it from washing back out to sea. They measured it at seven metres or about twenty feet long. It might have been the biggest giant squid ever captured. We don’t know for sure because then, unfortunately, the fishermen chopped the creature up. They used it for dog food. Frederick Aldrich may have been worrying about this possibility when he offered a reward.

A Bit Deep

Deep Deep Down will be published in the UK later this year. We have been working on the cover image recently. Once again Jonny Duddle has been doing a fine job. As a taster, this is just a little chunk.


The cover art for Deep Deep Down is by Jonny Duddle.

World Book Day

The World Book Day, the 5th of March, I will be appearing with Colin Bateman at the Waterfront Hall, here in Belfast. We're one between 2 and 3pm. The tickets are 2 pounds, I hope we're worth it.

Sea Creatures from Queens

Hello to everyone I got to meet during my events in a couple of Queens libraries this month. Some drawing was done and I include a selection of the creations below.


The Hydra Tooth.


Bell Jelly Monster.


Red Rose Rooted Monster.


I didn't catch any name for this, the stringy shark maybe?


The Monster of the Broken Heart.


Broomfish.


After this beast has eaten its fill it stores spare meat for later consumption. It stores it by sticking in onto one of those black hooks along its rear section.


The Hell Spike Fish.


I like the delicacy of this one. Didn't catch its name though.


The Red-Handed Looker has many eyes. It catches you red-handed, hence the name.


The Many-Mouthed Beast.


The Hand-Feet Beast maybe?

The Truth about Lighthouses

Last week I meet with students in both secondary and a primary school. The secondary was Methodist College, Belfast. This school is more commonly known as Methody. Hello to everyone there.


May on her boat.

The next day I visited Crumlin Integrated Primary. The students there had done some drawings of Ballydog. I was particularly taken with these impressions of May, throwing fish fingers from the Sunny Buoy to her friend below.


Ballydog's lighthouse.

Quite a few drawings featured the lighthouse and I asked one boy why he, and everyone else, had given the lighthouse red and white stripes. “Because that’s how it is on the cover of the book,” he replied without hesitation. He was right of course, I had forgotten the illustrator had painted the lighthouse on the cover of The Badness of Ballydog in that way. I had asked the question because in reality Irish lighthouses are simply painted white from top to bottom. They are never red and white.


Sticks of Rock, also known as Candy Cane, and a barber's Pole. Sadly, lighthouses don't get painted this way.


Apart from the lighthouse, I also really like the big smoke filling the top of this drawing.

The young artist behind one of these drawings took the stripes one step further. The red and white bands have been thrown to 45 degrees. I wonder was the image of a barber’s pole mingling in her/his mind. Or maybe the sticks of rock sold at the seaside. I have definitely never seen a lighthouse painted like that in reality … although I’d love to.

Make Mine a Monster

This is what I got for Christmas. It’s a wonderful monster kit. These kits are created by the knitting ninja Donna Wilson and it encourages, in fact requires, you to use your imagination. There is very little in the way of instruction or direction. Every kit is made up of a different selection of materials and threads. You use the bits and pieces to make your own original monster.


1.


2.

This central piece is pre-made and comes with the kit. Turn it inside out and stuff it (stuffing supplied) via the single opening. I did not like the shiny pink side that mine came with, preferring the carpet-like darker side. But this did give me an idea. The pink side would be my beast’s sensitive underbelly. The creature would be a crawler. Or, better still, a swimmer.


3.

I gave it flippers at each corner. Then some nasty teeth. My kit came with several red pieces. A tongue! Let’s call it the Big-Tongued Platy-Beast, distant relation of the Australian platypus (the platypus is in fact a very small monster that has evolved a shy temperament in the last four million years. Not many people know that).


4.

Eyes, fins, eyebrows … Done! But hang on … I still have a few pieces of red material left.


5.

Now I’m done. The Three-Tongued Platy-Beast. On the box Donna Wilson suggests you take a digital photo of your monster, email it to her and she’ll put it on her website. I wonder if she'll like it.