Germany!

I love German book fairs.

Every single one I've been to has been PACKED, and while that does tend to slow things down as you're trying to walk from one gigantic hall to the other, you really don't mind all that much. All these people crammed in around you are book-lovers, for god's sake. How annoyed can you actually be?

Over the weekend, I was at TWO German book fairs. The first one was in Cologne, on Friday evening, and I was up on stage with Rainer, the actor who does the German audiobooks, and Margarete, the translator. We've been doing this together for a few years now, so we're all quite comfortable with the process. The main difference between events in Germany and events everywhere else (apart from the need for a translator) is the emphasis put on the audio book. Rainer is as integral to the show as I am, and his readings make up half of our time on stage. The event in Cologne went wonderfully, and we had a really receptive audience, and I even spotted some familiar faces in the queue.

Once I'd finished signing, we went back to our hotel, where we had a very nice meal attended by the weirdest waiters I've ever encountered. One was tall, one was short, and they looked so alike that I started to suspect that they were the rejects from a batch of clones some mad professor had concocted in a dark and dingy lab. They were both wearing ill-fitting suits, both had the same type of glasses, and they both stood around and stared into space in the corners of the room while we were waiting to place our orders. So incredibly ODD.

Thankfully, we managed to escape the restaurant before they could kill us and harvest our organs to replace their own failing ones, and I got to my room and got into bed and put my head on the most deadly pillow the world has ever known. It was so big and so soft that when I put my head onto it, the whole thing folded up on either side and tried to suffocate me.

Convinced that the clone waiters were hovering outside my door, waiting for me to die, I slept without a pillow that night. I also slept sideways, because the double bed I'd been given was, in actual fact, two single beds pushed together, and I kept slipping down between them. Who knows what was waiting for me if I had slipped all the way? Scorpions? Tarantulas? Really lazy ninjas? Or maybe just a hole in the floor and a twisting slide that would deliver me to the mad professor's Experimentation Table of Doom?

I survived the night. Barely.

The next morning, we got a train to Frankfurt and then a plane to Leipzig. No attempts on my life were made during this time.

Leipzig Book Fair is half book festival and half comic convention. There are all these people dressed as Manga characters roaming around, chatting on their phones, browsing book shelves. Also, all of Germany had had a pretty bad winter, and there was piles of snow everywhere and it was pretty damn cold— and in the middle of it all you have these really cute German girls walking around in bizarre costumes that don't really cover a whole lot. They must have been FREEZING.

We did our first event, and although we only had a half an hour, it went very well. Such a huge crowd. The signing went on forever, and it was so cool seeing that many people wanting me to scrawl my signature over whatever they had.

The moment we were finished there we got in a car and drove to a graveyard. Because that's what you do once night falls, obviously.

We went to a huge sarcophagus-type place and we yapped in front of 200 people, doing our best to ignore the deep hole behind us with the old coffin. So just an average Saturday night, then...

Once that was done with, we went to dinner with a bunch of other people, including American author Maggie Stiefvater, and I sat at a big table with a bunch of people speaking German all around me. Best night EVER! Well, not quite. But Maggie is a funny lady.

Then I got back to my hotel. This time, my bed was a proper double bed, but the waiters had obviously followed me from Cologne because those damn pillows tried to drown my head again.

Sunday was my last day there. It was also Saint Patrick's Day.

(That's St PADDY'S Day, in its shortened version. Not St PATTY'S Day, as some Americans insist on calling it...)

I had an interview to do in the morning, and then I had two hours off before my event, so I went wandering through the halls. It was all so incredibly strange, and wonderfully so. It made me wish that Irish book festivals were like this. Imagine if The Mountains to the Sea festival had hundreds of teenagers walking around dressed as characters from comics and books. That would ROCK.

We did our event, signed for an enormous amount of people, and then I was whisked off to the airport to catch my first flight. I arrived back to my front door a little under eight hours later, tired but happy to be home, and looking forward to spending a night with my head on a pillow that doesn't try to kill me.

World Book Day Yay!

Okay, about to get in the car and drive to Kildare for my event with Alex Barclay, but I was checking my emails and wandered onto the Facebook site and saw this...

I hope Karina Hauge doesn't mind me posting her picture here. I just thought...

... wow...

A signed book to the first Minion who gets Skulduggery tattooed on their FACE!

EDIT

And since posting this I've received one or two messages from young and impressionable Minions who are saving up to do just that...

Don't! It was a JOKE!

Getting a tattoo is a decision that stays with you YOUR ENTIRE LIFE!

The last thing I want is to be in the middle of a signing somewhere and an angry mother hauls her son/daughter up to me and says "Look! Look at my daughter's face!"

I'll nod and smile politely, because I am a polite person, and I will say something along the lines of, "What a lovely young lady she is."

And then the mother will start shaking the poor girl. "She has. A tattoo. Of your character. ON HER FACE."

And I'll peer closer. "Is that what it is? I thought it was a freckle."

"It takes up her ENTIRE face!"

"I thought it was a big freckle. Are you going to sue me now?"

"YES!"

And that's when the ninjas attack.

I may be letting my imagination run a LITTLE bit wild, but you get the idea.

DO NOT GET ME SUED. 

World Book Day

Just to let you know that World Book Day is this Thursday (well, it is in this part of the world, anyway) and to celebrate Alex Barclay and myself will be holding two events. The first, in Kildare, is pretty much sold out, but the second one is in Easons in O'Connell Street, Dublin, at 6 PM. We'll be there, talking about... stuff... and books... and writing... and, er... annnnnyway...

Because this is somewhat last minute, I'm not expecting that many people to turn up to the Dublin event, which means it'll be a lot more casual and chatty than usual. If you're interested, get in touch with Easons to reserve a place, and we'll see you there.

Toodles.

Book Eight

And the title of Book Eight IS...

Actually hold on, we'll get to that in a moment. I have another 15 minutes before I have to post this entry, at 9 PM, and I'm going to use that 15 minutes, dammit. Because I did things today! Things that deserve to be blogged about!

Well, I did ONE thing that deserves to be blogged about. This afternoon I interviewed Steven Moffat, head of all things Doctor Who and Sherlock, on stage at Trinity College, Dublin. I'm pretty sure it wasn't recorded, though, so you're just going to have to take my word for how brilliantly it went. I've never interviewed anyone before— I'm used to being the one interviewed— so it was very interesting to sit in the other chair for a change.

Mr Moffat turned out to be everything I'd hoped he would be— he's a nice guy and he's FUNNY. It was such an informal, casual conversation that it made asking him questions a breeze. I love the shows he makes, as did everyone there, and it was so cool to be able to talk to him about them and not feel like  a total nerd.

And for those of you who are wondering, yes, I DID ask him for Karen Gillan's phone number. NO, he did not give it to me. But I think I broke him down sufficiently that all it'll take is one more chance encounter, and then wa-heyyyyy!

Ahem.


Okay, I now have seven minutes until I have to post this entry.


Oh, I'll be doing two publicity events in Ireland on March the 7th. At 10:30 AM in the Riverbank Theatre in Kildare I'll be interviewing (because I do it SO well) Alex Barclay on stage about her new book Curse of Kings.

Later that day, back in Easons in O'Connell Street at 6 PM, Alex and I will be doing... er... some sort of event. We haven't a clue WHAT we'll be doing, to be honest, but it'll be brilliant, and it'll be funny. I swear. Probably.

At both events, we'll be signing whatever you want signed.


Two minutes!


Okay then, here we go. This title has been in my head for years. EVERYTHING in the series has been leading up to Books Eight and Nine, and this is really where it all starts to build to the (hopefully epic) conclusion.

Prepare yourself for horror! Tragedy! Hilarity! Fights! Blood! Quips! Magic! Everything that makes life worth living!

Ladies and gentlemen, coming at the very end of August, I give you

Skulduggery Pleasant: Last Stand of Dead Men.

Imagine

Ah, Minions... you weirdos...

The event at the Imagine Festival in London went very well, as I thought it would. It was the second time I was on stage talking about the movies that had influenced the books— the first time was last year, at the Mountains to the Sea Festival in Dublin.

The place was packed out and the response was fantastic. Afterwards I signed for about three hours, seeing a lot of familiar (worryingly familiar) faces in the queue... It was all so much fun, and I want to thank everyone who turned up.

For those of you who couldn't make it, here are the trailers we showed... and here are the trailers— because of age restrictions— we COULDN'T show...

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

The whole Indiana Jones series has been a huge inspiration to me (except perhaps the fourth film.. ahem...) in terms of sheer fun and adventure and character. Jones is a perfect hero because, bizarrely, he rarely succeeds... Look at the first film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and count how many times he messes up. He loses the idol, he loses Marian, he loses the Ark, he loses Marian (again), his bluff is called, he's captured... The guy never wins. But he NEVER gives up. And that's what makes him a hero.

I said none of this to Steven Spielberg when I met him, of course. I just started grinning.

But for the first book, this is exactly the kind of vibe I was going for. Fun, fantastic, and faintly frightening.

Another film that influenced the first book, and the series as a whole, is this one...

Big Trouble in Little China was a film that confused the hell out of me when I first saw it as a kid. I saw Kurt Russell and thought, okay, here we have the big strong American hero who has all the tough guy lines... and then he proceeds to bumble his way through the entire film. This is a guy who fights the bad guys at the end, totally unaware that he has lipstick smeared over his mouth.

It was only when I saw it again, years later, that I got the joke and I realised just how fantastic this film really is.

Playing With Fire is my monster movie. The Grotesquery, made up of parts of so many other creatures, is my Frankenstein's monster.

Every Saturday night I'd stay up after my folks had gone to bed, and I'd watch the old black and white Universal horrors, all the stuff from RKO... I don't know why I loved horror movies from such a young age, don't know what it was about me that responded so well, but I ABSORBED these things.

The Faceless Ones, I always say, is my whodunnit- it's my mystery book. Batu, after all, is the man behind the scenes, pulling all the strings. But this is also the first time we see the Faceless Ones themselves, which were inspired by the Cthulu stories by HP Lovecraft. The wonderful Hellboy comic is inspired by Lovecraft also, as you can see in the trailer for the movie adaptation...

(Oh, and also? Hellboy 2? They KIND of stole something from Skulduggery. Check out the poster and see if anything seems... familiar...)

(Ahem. Moving on...)

Dark Days is my revenge flick. You can't beat a good revenge flick, you really can't, and I jammed so much into this book. We have Tanith torture, we have Moloch and his vampires, we have Scapegrace becoming a zombie, we have the first real mention of Darquesse (even though she'd been in my plans from the very start) and we have the chapter entitled "Mid-Afternoon of the Dead".

Now, I could show the trailer to Night of the Living Dead, or Dawn of the Dead, or Day of the Dead, or the first two Evil Dead movies... but instead I'll show the trailer to Army of Darkness, the third Evil Dead film by Sam Raimi, and one of my favourite movies of all time...

Mortal Coil is my Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. It's my The Thing. It's the book where the Remnants run wild, and you can't trust the people you know, because they may not be the people you know anymore... Behold the glory of the hairstyles of the 1970s, and one of the most terrifying films I'd ever seen...

The Thing is the second John Carpenter/Kurt Russell film on my list, and it's here because it deserves to be. A masterclass in tension. If you're old enough, watch it... and watch it ALONE.

And in the chapter "By The Sword", we get one of my many nods to wonderful movies such as The Princess Bride. This one is pretty blatant. See if you can spot it in the middle of this, one of the greatest sword fights ever put onto celluloid...

Death Bringer is my superhero story. Between this and KOTW, the whole secret identity thing really starts to become a major issue, and this is the first book where we have a fight between two people who are powerful enough to punch each other through buildings... just like in Superman 2...

And this is also the book where Val gets attacked by that guy in her house. For me, this is the book where I switched from "realistic martial arts" to "realistic fighting", both in my writing and my own training. Take a look at my darling Gina Carano in Haywire...

And now we arrive at Kingdom of the Wicked, my science fiction story, where we have unsuspecting teenagers suddenly gifted with amazing powers, and we watch as it corrupts them. For this, Akira was a huge influence.

And it was also an influence on Chronicle, the trailer we showed at the festival. I THOROUGHLY recommend this movie.

And because it was science fiction, I felt completely justified in slipping in a nod to a certain Doctor...

We ALSO have a werewolf scene, which I did my best to link to the transformation in An American Werewolf in London. I'm not going to show that clip here, because it contains some brief nudity, but if one or two of you were to search for it, you would find that changing into a werewolf is a lot more painful than it appears in Twilight...

And SPEAKING of Twilight, how could I forget the debt I owe it for certain aspects of Death Bringer? So here we are, the trailer. Oh, be warned- one case of swearing at the very beginning.

And to top it all off, a massive influence on my writing...

And now I'm going to watch Ronda Rousey defend her UFC title against Liz Carmouche, in the FIRST women's event the UFC has ever held. In Ronda's own words, it is on like Donkey Kong...

Up For Air

84,726 words.

And that's the PLOT written.

Now I go back to the very start and write the STORY. The story is different from the plot. The plot is everything that has to happen at certain points— the plot is the writer inflicting his will on the book. The story, however, is how we get to the plot. The story is what drives the characters forward. The story is what captivates US, the reader.

Naturally, there's a whole heap of overlap between the two. A lot of the time, plot is story and story is plot. But not ALL the time. And for this one, the war book, I needed to get the plot hammered into shape before I start to lather on the story.

Now I get to spend time with Val and her family. Now I get to write about Scapegrace and Thrasher. Now I get to have fun and make jokes.

If there's one thing I don't want, is to have a less-funny Skulduggery book. I like it when they're funny. The danger, as Val gets older and the books get darker, is that they lose their humour. I haven't read the first few books in a while, but I'd imagine there are a lot more jokes per page in the early ones than the later ones. I expected this, but there is still a certain ratio I have to keep. Even though you Minions respond to the emotional beats of these stories as they get more mature, no one is really wishing for a joke-free book, are they? Where's the fun in that? So now I go back and make sure that no matter how grim things get (and they DO get grim) or how dire the situation becomes (and it DOES become dire), we have enough jokes and laughing-in-the-face-of-death to see us through the darkness and out the other side.

Curse of Kings

It took me ages to get into fantasy books.

For most of my life, I had no interest. I didn't want to read about some made-up place that never existed and people running around with swords and elves and trolls and dragons and whatnot. I wanted stories set in reality, in the modern day. Fantasy films were fine, but I only had to spend two hours watching those. Reading a fantasy book was altogether different.

I never read The Lord Of The Rings. My brother did, and whenever he spoke about it I could sense the frustration in his voice whenever he talked about the endless songs and silliness. I liked the movies, of course. Well, I liked the parts in the movies where they focussed on the humans. Hobbits I could do without.

And then I read a review of a book called The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. The review said this book had blistering action and fascinating characters and the whole thing was held together by acerbic wit. And that was the thing. Wit. Humour. For me, fantasy books just seemed so incredibly po-faced, like they took themselves way too seriously.

So I picked up The Blade Itself, and I loved it. I loved everything about it. I loved every single thing about this book and it was fantasy, so I asked myself— what else have I been missing out on? And the series that was recommended by quite simply everyone was George RR Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice— which later became known as the Game of Thrones books, thanks to the TV show. So I read that, and I loved it. I read the next one and the next one and the next one. I loved them all.

All this is a (very) roundabout way of introducing Curse of Kings, by Alex Barclay.

Alex is a friend of mine. She's a crime writer by day, and has recently become a fantasy author by night. I love her crime novels. I never know what the hell is going on until the final few pages, and I am technically in love with her main character, Ren Bryce. Ren Bryce is the most awesome woman in the world, and I don't care that she doesn't actually exist. She exists for me, and that's what matters.

Alex's crime novels are thoroughly modern and laced with one-liners and sarcastic asides, so when she told me she was writing a fantasy novel for younger readers, I was thrilled.

(Unless she's reading this blog. If you're reading this, Alex, I wasn't thrilled. I was the opposite of thrilled. I was un-thrilled. I was de-thrilled. It takes a lot more than YOU to thrill ME ands that's no mistake. Damn right. Darn tootin'. I'm going to stop talking about this now. Hell yeah.)

Curse of Kings has it all. It has kingdoms and heroes and villains and secrets and mysteries and swords and killing and monsters and monsters and monsters. Did I mention it has monsters? It does. Lots of them. And they're all... weird. Oh, and the book also has lamprey eels. Do yourself a favour. Search Google Images for lamprey eels. Go on, I'll wait. Just type it in and take a look... go on...


Yes. There are things THAT disgusting in real life.

I'm not going to go into detail about the Big Mystery in Curse of Kings, because even mentioning what the mystery hinges on could spoil it for you, and I wouldn't want to do that. Hopefully it'll take you as much by surprise as it did me.

And if all that doesn't convince you, take a look at  one of the coolest book trailers I've seen in a long time. And pay attention to the man whose quote they use on the cover. He sounds like he knows what he's talking about.