Dr Who - The Roots of Evil
This year is the fiftieth anniversary of Dr Who, and Puffin Books are marking it by publishing a short Dr Who e-book each month until November, when all the stories will be collected as a paperback anthology. I've been asked to contribute a story about the Fourth Doctor (as played by the magnificent Tom Baker). The e-book version will be available on 23rd April. Further details here.
Goblins vs Dwarves
If you're reading this in the UK then the latest Goblins book, Goblins vs Dwarves, is OUT NOW, and available from all good bookshops (and possibly even some bad ones, I'm not fussy). Picking up where Goblins left off, it tells of how Clovenstone comes under attack from pesky, tunnelling Dwarves, and the difficulties that hanwyn, Skarper and co. encounter as they try to find someone to help them defeat this beardy menace. (You can read about it in the goblins own words on my blog.) And - good news! - I've signed a contract with Scholastic for a third goblins title, which will be published next spring (so I'd better get writing).
For US readers, the original Goblins book will be published in September by Scholastic .
Predator Cities return to the U.S.A!
For the past couple of years, Mortal Engines, Predator's Gold, Infernal Devices and A Darkling Plain have been sadly unavailable in the U.S.A. Now Scholastic are launching new editions, with new cover art. They also have a new series title: Predator Cities (they were previously known in the U.S. as 'The Hungry Cities Chronicles'). The first book can be read on its own - I didn't intend it to be part of a quartet when I started - but taken together, the four volumes cover twenty turbulent years in the history of the Traction Era, a far-future epoch of mobile cities and high adventure. They're available from all good bookstores and the usual internet booksellers. It's good to think they'll be on American bookshelves again soon!
Four New Books by McIntyre & Reeve!…
When I first bumped into Sarah McIntyre at the Edinburgh Festival a couple of years ago, I little realised that she was going to become one of my very best friends. And I certainly never imagined that we would end up working together. We have very different personalities and views on things, and there seems little common ground between her lovely comics and picture books and my novels.
But what do you know? As we nattered away to each other, both in real life and on the internet, all sorts of mad ideas started to pop out. It turns out that it's actually quite a good idea to collaborate with someone whose work is completely different from your own, because it forces both of you to try new things.
So it was only a matter of time before some McIntyre ⁄ Reeve collaborations appeared. You may have read the Mortal Engines Christmas story which Sarah illustrated on my blog, and I've already mentioned the four-page comic story we're working on for the Phoenix. Now I'm very happy to announce that we've signed with Oxford University Press to produce four illustrated books, the first of which, Seawigs, will be published in the autumn of 2013.
Seawigs will be very different from my other books. It's a lot shorter, for one thing, because a lot of the work of building the atmosphere and describing how things look will be done by Sarah's pictures as much as my words. I did most of the writing, but its completely influenced by Sarah's ideas and sense of humour, which was great - instead of staring blankly out of the window whenever I got stuck, I just 'phoned her up and asked what would happen next, and she'd suggest things. Most of the things she suggested were as mad as pants, but they all found their way into the plot somehow. It's the most fun I've ever had writing a book!
Sarah will be getting busy on the illustrations for Seawigs later this year, and we'll also be thinking about our next book together, which won't be Seawigs 2, but a completely different story. And after that well, frankly, I have no idea where our adventures will lead us. But that, of course, it what makes it so exciting!
Here's a link to Sarah's blog, with her take on the OUP announcement.
