Arbitrary Photos and a Point

Here is a photo of a kitten.

What a wonderful way to start off a post, eh? I'm going a little nuts here, all this snow is sending me a little bit around the proverbial bend. I'm doing a little work, although not TOO much on the run up to Christmas. I'm way ahead of schedule, though, and having a blast.

I managed to get all my Christmas shopping done, too. Well, most of it. Laura's present is being shipped over from the UK tomorrow, hopefully- that is, if the weather doesn't close the airports again. That's the only worry I have this year.

Every Christmas Eve, Laura and her sister Katie come over and we all sit at the kitchen table and they babble on in this weird sister-talk thing of half-finished sentences and references to things I know nothing about, and then we exchange presents. My presents to them are always AWESOME. Their presents to me usually consist of a jar of boiled sweets.

Oh look, here's one of my doggies!

Where was I?

Oh yes, Laura and Katie. So that's the tradition, that's what we've been doing for the past few years. I have Katie's present already bought and ready to hand over, so I'm just hoping that Laura's gets here in time. Also being shipped over are the presents for my mother and my sisters, but it's Laura who's the important one. The others will understand if their gifts arrive late. Laura is the only one who will look at me with those eyes...

Speaking of eyes, look at this! I'm fairly certain a reader in Australia (or possibly New Zealand) brought these to one of my events back in... in... well, whenever I was over there.

Check it out! It's Skulduggery and the Grotesquery!

Which reminds me- I'm going to read ten pieces of fan fiction this Christmas, just to spoil myself. So if you have any favourites out there, let me know- and yes, you may suggest your OWN fan fiction, it's not as arrogant as it sounds...

These pieces would, preferably, be on the shorter side. Obviously, I'm not going to be reading huge multi-part stories, because that would mean I'd have to miss Doctor Who on Christmas Day, and that is NOT going to happen AGAIN.

And look! Another picture! This time of a some truly odd people dressed as Skulduggery characters!

And LEGO SKULDUGGERY AND VALKYRIE!

How are you guys going to be spending Christmas, by the way? We're doing some of our visiting on Christmas Eve, then the second half of visiting Christmas Day, and then mmmmmmm dinner...

After which, my cousins will be coming over to my parents' place, and we'll all play a game and eat turkey sandwiches. It's my job to pick a new game every year. We started off with poker, then decided that was clearly too grown-up for us, so this year we'll be playing Pictionary- the game of kings.

And these three little ladies will be joining the Landy clan for their first ever Christmas. The twins are dressed as the most coolest character EVER in the world (and being held on the knees of people I have never seen before), and little Sophie is dressed as some kind of... er... pumpkin... thing...

These pictures were obviously taken at Halloween.

My sisters do NOT dress their children like this normally.


Honest.


If I don't post again by Saturday, then a big Merry Christmas to all my Minions, my Munchkin Army, and my Ninja Leprechauns. For those of you who don't celebrate Christmas, you all get a big cheery wave and a slightly awkward expression.

I will write again soon, if only to tell you what astonishingly disappointing present I get from my sisters this year...

No Movie News

Sorry for the title of this post, I just wanted to make sure that none of you start believing a story that's been reported in the papers saying that Johnny Depp is going to play Skulduggery. This is, to say the least, not true. The movie rights are back with me for the moment- meaning they aren't attached to any studio. Basically, I'm far too busy with Book 6 to even consider a Skulduggery movie right now. But who knows when I'll have news for you?

(And just to make sure, that was NOT a sly way of hinting at upcoming news, because there IS no news! None!)

The List

Okay then, here is the LONG list of UK cinemas in which the book trailer will be appearing. It’ll be shown in the pre-film adverts- so it won’t be part of the movie trailer section- at selected showings of Harry Potter and the new Narnia. We can’t give specific performance times or dates, unfortunately, so all you can do is HOPE that you pick a screening over the next two weeks where it’ll be shown...

For those of you who won’t get a chance to see it on the big screen, you have my commiserations. If it makes you feel any better- even I won’t be able to see it in a cinema. How much does THAT suck?

But for those of you who DO get to see it, come back here and tell me how it looks, okay?

MIDLANDS

Birmingham VUE

Birmingham AMC Broadway Plaza

Birmingham (Erdington) Showcase

Birmingham Empire

Coventry Showcase

Dudley Showcase

Walsall Showcase

LONDON

Thurrock VUE

 Acton VUE

Watford VUE

Harrow VUE

North Finchley VUE

Dagenham VUE

Finchley Road VUE

Shepherd’s Bush VUE

Staines VUE

Croydon (Grants) VUE

Islington VUE

Fulham Broadway VUE

Romford VUE

Wood Green VUE

Westfield VUE

London Piccadilly Apollo

Wimbledon HMV Curzon

Chelsea Cinema

Bluewater Showcase

Newham Showcase

Bromley Empire

London Leicester Square Empire

Sutton Empire

YORKSHIRE

Doncaster VUE

Sheffield VUE

Leeds (Kirstall Road/Cardigan) VUE

Leeds (THE LIGHT) Showcase

Leeds (BIRSTALL) Showcase

NORTH EAST

Hartlepool VUE

Stockton (TEESIDE) Showcase

Newcastle Empire

Sunderland Empire

LANCASHIRE

Bolton VUE

Birkenhead VUE

Cheshire Oaks VUE

Manchester (South Quays) VUE (Red Cinema)

Southport VUE

Bury (The Rock) VUE

Altrincham Apollo

Liverpool Showcase

Wigan Empire

WALES AND WEST

Bristol Cribs VUE

Bristol Longwell Green VUE

Bristol Orpheus

Bristol (AVON MEADS) Showcase

Bristol (CABOT CIRCUS) Cine de Lux

Cardiff VUE

Cardiff (NANTGAWR) Showcase

Swansea VUE

Merthyr Tydfil VUE

Cwmbran VUE

Port Talbot Apollo

CENTRAL SCOTLAND

Edinburgh (OMNI) VUE

Edinburgh (OCEAN) VUE

Livingstone VUE

Glasgow East Showcase

Glasgow (PAISLEY)

Clydebank Empire

Book Trailer

Remember that little Book Trailer competition we launched a few months ago, with our friends at Waterstone's? Remember, we were looking for a minute-long ad to play in UK cinemas, promoting the books?

If you remember that, you may also remember the fact that we chose not one, but TWO winners- Liam Fitzpatrick and Danielle Drew- and combined their ideas to make the Best Thing Ever In The World ™.
Remember all that? Oh I AM glad. Because, drum roll please, the trailer is ready.

The reason that this was a “UK only” competition, and the reason the trailer will only be shown in UK cinemas (take a look on the blog tomorrow and there'll be a list), is simply because Waterstone's UK came to us with the proposal. But does that mean you minions living outside of the UK will never be able to see it? Pfffft. How unfair would THAT be? The fact is, we’re putting it online FIRST so that you, my faithful minions, will be able to devour it like the insatiable little zombie-readers that you are.

You’re going to need a bucket as you watch this, because your brain WILL melt. That’s an official health warning.




If you’re having trouble viewing from the blog, click here

Word Count

Ahem.

Just a brief note to update you on how the work is progressing. So far, every book has been longer than the one before. The first book was about 75,000 words, and Mortal Coil was over 100,000. With Book 6, I'm planning on continuing that trend, but I don't know by how much.

I've been working away at the first section of the story, the first quarter of the book, dipping in an out of scenes and chapters... Even though, officially, I started this book on November 6th, a lot of things have been taking up my time, so I've really only been able to seriously write in the past week. And in the past week I've written almost 20,000 words. That's roughly a fifth of the book, and I've done it in six days.

I am on a ROLL.

Praise be to me!

PICTURES!

And we have a winner...!

On Thursday night, I accepted the award for Best Children's Book of the Year (Senior) for Mortal Coil, to rapturous applause from everyone who loves me. Yes, fine, that means I was applauding myself as I made my way to the stage, but it still counts, dammit...

Here is the beautiful award on my mantlepiece...

I also picked up a SECOND award, for I am THAT brilliant- this time it was for the Book of the Decade thing I won a few months back. Here are BOTH awards on my mantlepiece...

Yes. I have a cool house.

Thanks to everyone who voted- it's because of you, my Minions, that the Skulduggery books do so well at things like this. And I just LOVE getting up on stage and making fun of everyone. Makes me so happy...

And, now that I've remembered how to post photos, I'll add a few random ones...

These are home-made jackets worn by two girls who came to signings a few months ago, one in the UK and one in Germany... Sweeeeet.

And here are two pictures of kittens I used to have, before I found good homes for them...!

Most Popular Author Question EVER

“Where do you get your ideas?” is probably the most asked question a writer is ever going to hear. And it’s a completely understandable one. How did Stephen King come up with Christine, a homicidal car that kills its owners? How did JK Rowling come up with Harry Potter, a kid who goes to a school for wizards? How did Stan Lee come up with Spider-Man, Bob Kane come up with Batman, Shuster and Siegel come up with Superman?

And, more importantly, how did they take those ideas and turn them into a story?

Ideas are everywhere, and ideas are- generally speaking- nothing special. Everyone has them. Quite often, when it comes to writing, people have the SAME idea, at the same time. Why do you think Hollywood comes out with two volcano movies in the same season, or two giant asteroid movies, or two earthquake movies? Ideas float around, just waiting to be plucked from the air and developed into something special- and it’s this development that decides how good it’s going to be.

I could have thought of Skulduggery Pleasant, after all, and set it in a world OF talking skeletons, where everything is magic and the fantasy overtakes the reality. Who knows, it might even have been good- but it wouldn’t have been the Skulduggery we all know today.

So the important thing, the really important thing, is what you do with the idea once you have it.

BUT- that’s not what I’m going to be talking about today. I’m here to talk about the ideas themselves, and where they come from.

Clive Barker once described the inside of his head as an attic. And in this attic, the walls are covered with posters. These are posters of every movie he’s ever seen, every book and comic he’s ever read, every song he’s ever heard. There are posters from history, from legend, from fairyales and from dreams. There are posters from his own life, his own experiences. His attic is FILLED with these posters, and they’re plastered on top of each other and beside each other, layer upon layer upon layer.

And here and there, some of the posters get torn, and frayed. Posters get ripped. And when that happens, he gets to see part of the poster underneath, and a little of the poster underneath that. And so suddenly he’s looking at a book he once read when he was twelve on top of a movie he’s just seen, combined with a dream he once had about a song he once heard.

And THAT is where ideas come from.

Different elements of different things combine to make something new. Skulduggery Pleasant is not the first walking skeleton in fiction, after all. Off the top of my head, there is Ghost Rider, Jack Skellington, Death (from the Terry Pratchett novels), and a character from a video game called Grim Fandango. I was aware of all of these things when Skulduggery came to me, but the idea of him didn’t come from ANY of these things. The idea of him came from his name, which told me who and what he was. The name Skulduggery Pleasant told me he was a skeleton detective- I didn’t come up with a skeleton detective and then look around for a name.

Of course, the books have a lot more ideas in them than good old Skulduggery, and some of them I even know EXACTLY where the idea came from. Serpine’s hand, for example, came from the Nick Cave song “Red Right Hand”, one of the coolest songs ever written. Other ideas come into existence out of sheer necessity.

Valkyrie’s reflection, for example. I started writing the book, way back in 2005, and the reflection wasn’t a part of it. I was writing a story about a 12 year old girl who sneaks out of her house and ditches school in order to spend time with a skeleton and find out who killed her uncle. She was getting into trouble in school, and she was having arguments with her parents. Every time she returned home, they’d have another argument- and that’s not what I wanted at all.

I wanted her home life to be warm, and fun, and funny. I wanted her parents to be crazy in love, and a little bit crazy. But I could write about none of that, because they were all spending their time arguing.

So I got to roughly halfway through, and I realised this wasn’t working. I needed to do something. The first thing I did was to have this story all happen during the summer holidays, when Valkyrie wouldn’t have to go to school. This cut down on SOME of the arguments, but not all. I needed something else, something bigger. I needed her parents to NOT miss her when she was gone. I needed a stand-in, perhaps, I needed a... a reflection.

The moment I thought of her reflection taking over her life when she was gone, my problems were over. Now she could be gone for days on end, and no one would know. I came up with the rule that she absorbs the reflection’s memories because I didn’t want her to miss out on school-work, and also because it was an entirely logical move to make.

Not only did the reflection solve a load of problems, it also offered up LOADS of story opportunities. It changed the course of the series, as you have all seen. The reflection is changing- it is growing. I know plenty of you have your own theories about what will happen to the reflection and I totally understand why you would think that. So far, you’re all WRONG, but I totally understand why you’d come to that conclusion...

Heh.

Now, when you get to the sixth book in a series, coming up with ideas is totally different to writing the FIRST book. Most of the elements are already there- they already exist. But you still need new ones.

Such as the whole Death Bringer thing. I’ve had that in mind for YEARS, and over that time, it’s changed. The more I wrote about Necromancers, the more I examined their powers, the deeper I got into their philosophy, the more I changed who and what the Death Bringer was. I needed certain things to happen to certain people in certain ways, and the ideas flowed from that.

Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. If you truly NEED something, you WILL find a creative way to do it.

Er, hopefully.

The honest truth is, there is no satisfactory answer to the most popular author question ever- and I don’t think there needs to be. People ask me it all the time, like they’re waiting to hear the secret, like once they KNOW where the good ideas come from, they’ll be able to write that amazing book they know they’re capable of.

But the idea isn’t the important thing. The important thing is the work, and the effort, and how you take that simple little idea and turn it into something special. And all THAT will only happen when you actually sit down and write the thing.