TV And Me

I STILL don't like this new-look Blogger. I haven't figured out how to sort out the comments section- I can't even READ your comments after the first 200, but I'll have to do something soon... grrrr...

Anyway...

I got a call just before 6 PM yesterday- my publicist, wanting to know if I could POSSIBLY make it onto a plane the next day to go to London to appear on the Alan Titchmarsh Show on ITV. Me, being the true professional that I am, eventually stopped crying and said absolutely, no problem. Never mind the fact that I'm writing a book. Never mind the fact that my deadline is approaching. Never mind all those little details. I'd be delighted to get up early and get on a plane and go to London and sit around for a few hours and appear on air for FIVE MINUTES... and then get on another plane and fly home, waving goodbye to a full day of work... Sigh. Such is the life of a  super-genius.

As it turned out, though, I had a lot of fun. Yes, the traveling and the waiting was as boring as ever, and yes I did have to miss a day of writing, but I was on the show with John Barrowman, from Dr Who and Torchwood- awesome! He's a lovely guy, and his sister was equally lovely, and I had a really funny five minutes on stage with them, being interviewed. They've written a book for young people called Hollow Earth, and it actually sounds pretty cool. John is everything you'd expect- charming, funny, friendly and engaging- so I wasn't at all disappointed. He was just like Captain Jack Harkness, in fact. Which obviously poses a problem, since if I ever get to meet David Tennant or Matt Smith I'll be expecting them to be wonderfully intelligent people with the ability to time travel. Hmmm.

Matt Cardle was also there, but he's not much of a "book-person". Nice chap, though.

But now I'm home, and I might actually try and get some work done. The book is going well, I'm sure you'll be happy to know. 60,000 words and counting. Whether or not it'll continue the tradition of every book being longer than the one before, I don't know. Hopefully it will, because I like giving readers more pages for their money every time, but a book's length is a book's length, and the story itself will dictate how long it'll be.

I also have a possible title... that I can't tell you about just yet! My agent loves it, my editor loves it, I'm pretty sure the marketing people love it... It's completely different to the style of titles I've been using up until now, which is what I'm after. I'm sure I'll be able to tell you what it is soon enough, and then we'll show you the cover closer to September, just to torture you even more.

But for now, I'm concentrating on writing the thing, fully conscious that The End Of The World is out on March 1st. You guys have caused such a storm with this, actually, because thousands of you have pre-ordered it on Amazon UK, and apparently that has never happened for a World Book Day book before. I've heard that Amazon were a tad stunned...

Well done, Minions. You stunned Amazon.

Be proud of yourselves.