Category Archives: Inspiration

Questions to make your brain whizz at Viewlands Primary School

I was recently invited to talk about writing at Viewlands Primary School in Perth as part of their programme of activities for Book Week Scotland. I spoke to four year groups (primaries 4, 5, 6, and 7) and each year group contained two classes which added up to about sixty kids at each talk. It was taxing, enlightening, but most of all it was a lot of fun. Each age group had their own ideas and their own questions.

I was asked about the work involved in writing a book, the methods I use to develop a character, I was asked why I picked the fantasy genre, what my favourite books are, and hundreds of other equally interesting questions.

On top of this some of the older children were interested in the practical elements of writing; we discussed the fast-paced first-drafting I do as a result of my connection to National Novel Writing Month. This gave me a chance to describe some of the difficulties I’ve faced in the past in regards to forward planning (or the lack of it).

I think the teachers were pleased to hear me sharing some important lessons I’ve learned about forward planning and the difficulties of redrafting rushed areas of my work that don’t contribute to the overall story (I get the feeling that planning ahead is something teachers have to remind pupils about a fair bit).

It was an exhausting and massively fulfilling experience and I’d like to thank Mr Scoogal and all of the other teachers for inviting me along on the day. I had an absolute blast and I hope the children did too.

I wanted to post about this weeks ago but I’ve been tied up in yet another bout of National Novel Writing Month (guess I’m a glutton for punishment). NaNoWriMo is once again over (I completed my word-count of 50,000) and life is finally going back to normal.

The month was tough and some things I tried in my writing turned out to be a bit of a waste of time. One activity in November definitely wasn’t a waste of time and I’m extremely grateful to all the staff and pupils for the wee injection of energy I got right smack dab in the middle of the writers equivalent of a marathon.

Thanks for popping along to read this, feel free to scroll down to see more posts on writing, and thanks again to all the staff and pupils at Viewlands for having me along, all the best, John

Where building and storytelling meet

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Let me introduce you to the Lego ideas pop up book; a proposed Lego concept designed by Grant Davis and Jason Allemann. I posted a link to this on the Facebook page a few days ago but I thought it would be worth a wee blog post too.

Lego has always given kids a chance to stretch their imaginations but the story element appeals in a way I hadn’t considered before.

With a pop-up book and Lego in one item it’s like an invitation to develop a story and step into the world of books. What’s more it’s also a refreshing step away from tie-ins with TV shows and movies.

Don’t get me wrong; my kids watch their share of TV, movies, and YouTube videos. However this doesn’t disrupt their enjoyment of a good book or an immersive hour with a box of Lego, so it’s nice to see a Lego set that takes this into account.

Lego have some amazing tie-in sets with characters from movies and TV shows (we have a few ourselves) but there’s something special about this proposed set. It’s innovative whilst feeling traditional and offers a great source of inspiration for young story tellers.

Lego ideas is a site run by Lego that lets people vote for the sets they’d like to see in stores. If you like the look of this one, and would like to be able to buy it as a set one day, you can vote for it here. (and no I’m not affiliated with the designers in any way).

What would you put in your pop-up Lego book? What type of book was your favourite as a kid?

As always thanks for reading, all the best, John

Aye!

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It looks as though there’s going to be a wee free men movie! If you haven’t encountered the NacMacFeegles/wee free men before pop over to this post to get filled in.

The wee free men and their ‘Hag’ (a young witch by the name of Tiffiny) are some of my favourite Terry Pratchett characters from the whole of the Discworld. They’re tenacious, fearless, and more than a little crazy.

The news on who’s producing the movie makes it even better. As a child of the 80s I was exposed to a huge range of Jim Henson creations from Sesame Street, to the muppets, to Fraggle Rock, to Star Wars, and the Labyrinth. Jim Henson Studios are apparently developing the movie and I can’t imagine it being in better hands.

Henson’s son Brian is producing the film and Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna will be writing the screenplay so here’s hoping both can continue their parent’s legacy.

It doesn’t sound like there’s an expected date for release yet but fingers crossed they get it out to us soon.

Are you a Pratchett fan? What other Pratchett characters do you think deserve big screen treatment (keeping in mind the Sky TV creations from a few years back)?

As always thanks for reading, all the best, John

*Information for this post came from an article in the Independent.

Welcoming the autumn

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Image of Lady Mary’s Walk, Crieff from europealacarte.co.uk

Cooler crisper days. Longer nights. A time to read and a time to write.

I can’t say I’m sorry to see autumn looming. With autumn evenings on the horizon we’re moving into the weirder part of the year, and it seems no coincidence that Halloween is this season’s big event.

I set the Fey Flame at the tail end of Autumn as it seems the most believable time for a tear between our world and something very different.

Because of this my writing feels most at home right now. I can’t wait to grab a warm mug of tea and my old beaten-up netbook and make the most of it.

Is there a time of year (or a time of day even) when you feel most productive? Are you mourning the loss of summer or are you happy to see the nights draw in?

As always thanks for reading, all the best, John

Fitting in (Crieff Writer’s evening/ literary open mic night)

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It doesn’t matter how confident we are, sometimes we will inevitably feel like a round peg in a square hole (or a square peg in a round hole even). It’s a simple fact that we are all individuals and that even where a number of us find common ground someone will feel excluded.

Odly the barriers we hit aren’t always what we expect. Back when I was working on my MPhil thesis I came accross a study on second generation Portuguese immigrants in Paris who faced an unusual barrier.

When speaking French they sounded hip, urbane, youthful, and cultured. They spoke to contemporaries in Paris in this way and seemed to fit in comfortably.

However, their experiences of Portugal appeared so different that they sounded like genuinely different people.

You see, the Portuguese they knew came from their parents who spoke a rural and provincial dialect. This meant that their behaviour and speech in Portuguese simply couldn’t match the way they behaved when speaking French. Without the urbane, inner-city language they became very different and found it difficult to act like ‘themselves’ in Portugal.

What binds us can vary drastically, we might think that our tastes arethe simplest connection to share but sometimes we instead find kinship in our behaviours and aspirations. I found that last Saturday.

I had just completed a day of talking about the Jack Reusen books along at Fun Junction and remembered that there was a literary open mic night in the Strathearn Artspace 9as part of Crieff Arts Festival).

As a student I made it along to plenty musical open mic nights but I had never come across a literary one. To be honest it left me expecting something pretentious and a little clique-ish. I know Crieff already has a solid writers community so I couldn’t help worry whether I would fit in.

The atmosphere was extremely laid back, and the overall attitude from the audience was open-minded and welcoming. It meant that those reading for us were relaxed too and showed their work at its best.

The work itself was eclectic, including readings/performances of music, poetry, prose, and biography. I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to and the only negative I could take from the night was a slight annoyance that I hadn’t prepared something to read.

I genuinely think we could make a monthly event of this (and not just because I’m itching for a chance to get up). I don’t know how we would go about it but I’d love to hear from others who might be interested.

Have you found a place that you fit in in surprising ways? Do you think creative environments are typically inclusive, or have you encountered clique-ishness in such groups?

As always thanks for reading, it means a lot to have people pop by to read these posts. All the best, John

Filling in the shadows

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Being immersed in a book is very different to a movie; as events unfold right inside your head, they can elicit much more visceral responses. There’s something so weird (considering you’re just looking at some shapes on a page) but also something completely amazing about the whole process.

However, I’ve always run into problems when it comes to thrillers and/or horror stories. On a recent camping holiday where all tech stopped, I decided to pick up a wee collection of short stories based around ghost tales of Scotland.

During the day it was an enjoyable read and it helped fuel some ideas for the darker elements of future books. Then night fell, and the family went to sleep, and with wind howling around the tent I made the mistake of jumping back in. The horrors in the stories bled out of the pages and into the inky black night outside the tent. I jumped at the slightest sound. At one point the sound of an inconsiderate passing sheep mutated and left me gulping back bile.

It’s safe to say that my imagination likes to run with things at night. As a child reading famous five books the wind rustling leaves in the garden below could be nothing but lurking smugglers or other ne’er-do-wells. In my teens I read alien conspiracy stories and watched the faces of prowling cats distort in midnight lights to become malicious grey aliens preparing to abduct me (or had they already abducted me and wiped my memory?).

It took till adulthood for me to realise that a good night’s sleep would not be mine if I read this style of book. All the same I still forget sometimes and once again my mind will reel as the shadows take form and watch me, always behind my shoulder or just at the peripherals of my vision. Slowly creeping closer whenever my attention lapses.

I thought I’d be safe when I started reading the next book in Lari Don’s ‘Mythical creatures’ series, but no. There is one component perfectly crafted to leave children uneasy but to creep parents out to their core.

Don uses the old myths of celtic ‘Faerie folk’ (also used as part of the inspiration for the Fey folk of my books). However, Don stays closer to the legends as these faeries are far from benevolent; they are notorious stealers of children. Their technique is the worst bit; not only do they take your sleeping child from their bed but they replace them with a ‘changeling’ or ‘glimmer’ enchanted to look identical to the missing child. Your child is gone but you don’t notice, you walk into their room in the morning to find them unresponsive and clearly unwell, then over the next few days this replacement will either ‘die’ or disappear themselves.

What’s more is that by now it’s too late for you to claim your child back, as they have now been sentenced to a life in the land of the faerie folk; by eating their food they are doomed to never be able to eat human food again. Even if you somehow found your child and took them home the first bite of human food would turn them to dust. So..yeh…that’s some nightmares for parents right there.

The creepiest bit of ‘Wolf Notes’ (Don’s second ‘mythical beasts’ book) so far has got to be a wee boy’s little sister telling her mum that the boy in her arms in not her son but is instead a ‘doll’, a copy of her big brother. Somehow this got me worse than anything I’ve read by Stephen King.

Does horror in books get to you worse than horror in movies/on TV? What hides in the shadows in your house?

Feel free to share in the comments below. As always, thanks for reading, all the best, John

What do you want to be when you grow up?

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It was my youngest son’s first day of school today. He is absolutely over the moon and seems to have really enjoyed it. As his wee treat after school (set up in case he hadn’t enjoyed it) we went for a swim.

Hazel (my wife) is a swimming instructor and she played a game with him to distract him a bit as she improved his swimming; he had to jump into the pool and tell her what he wanted to be when he grew up.

Being in the swimming pool he quickly decided that he wanted to be a scuba diver when he grew up. However, being a five year old he has also recently told us that he wanted to be a farmer, a writer, a train driver, and a bear. It’s pretty clear that the aspirations of five year olds are quite transient.

His big brother is a whole different kettle of fish. For well over a year he has consistently told us that he wants to be an animator. The only thing that’s changed has been the medium; sometimes it’s claymation (after watching Shaun the sheep), sometimes stop motion lego (after a bit of Tim and Ralph, and if you haven’t seen these you should really check them out [season 1] [season 2], Michael Hicox is brilliant).

We typically start to get quite fixed ideas about what we want to do with our lives from an early age. Sometimes these stick and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes we attain the job of our dreams and sometimes we don’t.

I always wanted to be a writer, from the day I realised that my favourite stories were written by people and didn’t just appear from thin air I desperately wanted to understand how they manipulated language to do such astounding and remarkable things. It’s not like my full time job yet but I do feel closer to it now thanks to Jack and his friends.

There were kids in my class who wanted to be inventors (some of them are now engineers), there were kids who wanted to be firemen (and some of them are), we all had a small picture of what was available to us but we still seemed to have an inkling of what sort of thing we wanted to do with ourselves as adults.

It makes you wonder if we somehow have natural aptitudes. I’ve done a lot of different jobs in my life from handyman, to busker, to retail, to more corporate, and more academic work. Alongside all of this I’ve always written. I have books that I’ve been working on since my early twenties, and I have books that started in the planning stage just weeks ago. It feels right for me to write.

My son is completely shattered, he seems to have enjoyed his first day of school, part of me would love a day back in the simplicity of primary one but to be honest I’m pretty happy up here in my early thirties too.

Do you have a skill that feels ‘right’ to you? Is there something that has always stood out to you as ‘your thing’?

Are you lucky enough to be what you wanted to be back when you were five?

Feel free to let us know in the comments below. As always, thanks for reeding, All the best, John

The Yuletide Thieves (A Christmas Adventure)

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Happy Christmas Eve everyone, or as people in Iceland call it ‘Jolabokaflod’ (or “The Christmas Book Flood”) where people give each other books as presents and you spend the rest of the day reading.

This sounded so great that I decided that today was the perfect day to publish “The Yuletide Thieves (A Fey Adventure)”. It’s based on characters designed by local children in the ‘design a Jack Reusen Character’ competition this summer. Here’s a link to the new book on Amazon (just click this link).

We follow a girl called Summer who loses something important to her on Christmas eve. What’s more, she’s not the only one losing special things. With the help of an ice dragon (called Jenny), an Elf (called Grace), and a strange boy called Sandy, Summer sets out to reunite everyone with what’s special to them at Christmas.

There isn’t print edition at the moment but I’ll be giving all profits from the sale of the Kindle book to Crieff Primary School.

You can also sign up for a free trial of ‘Kindle Unlimited’ (click here) which will give you free access to a heap of different books AND you can read Kindle books on almost any device with apps and software available here. (Don’t forget that the other Jack Reusen books are currently available for Kindle and both a free for Kindle Unlimited members 🙂 )

Happy Jolabokaflod everyone, all the best, and Merry Christmas, from John

(Image credit for the cover image goes to http://s9.photobucket.com/user/Kassiah/media/SwoonyBoys/Christmas-Tree-Books-1.jpg.html)

Thea’s Quest

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11703059_507851296031556_3727381389049552295_n Yep, the beginning of Thea’s story is already taking shape. The fifth book set in the world of Fey now has five (very rough) chapters and it’s surprisingly different from Jack’s books. This month also marks the one year anniversary of the very beginning of Jack’s (and Thea’s) adventures. I still can’t believe how quickly this year has flown by and I’m really thankful for the reception the books have had so far.

Thea is such a different character to write about. I now have a character that instantly understands all of the basic things about Fey, she’s a lot less surprised by magical creatures and events than Jack was and I’m really enjoying the fact that I can just let odd things happen and then drive the story forward. It was always fun to share Jack’s awe as a new world unfolded around him but there’s something really liberating about just taking that magic for granted now.

The new book series will be released more slowly than the first as I now realise just how demanding it is to do all of the additional stuff required of a book. First there’s editing, then there’s talking about the books (because otherwise how would people hear about them), and alongside all of this I need to go over cover designs etc. with Karen but to be honest the bulk of the work there is on Karen (she knows her stuff so well, I barely need to go into any detail with her, she just gets it).

Talking about the books is definitely the most fun of the two ‘non-writing’ jobs associated with writing, I’ve been for school visits, held an in-store book launch, joined in with an authors event to do a book talk at the Crieff arts festival, not to mention a steady stream of communication with readers through this blog and the social media profiles I set up for the books over on facebook and twitter.

The big bad EDITING job is never a thrill and it’s this that has prompted me to spread out my book releases a little. I’d rather be able to spend more time chatting about the books and doing a wee bit of editing each week than be locked to the computer almost every day desperately trying to catch up with editing. At least for the foreseeable future I think we’ll be on about two book releases a year. I just don’t think I’ll be able to do four in one year again for a while.

Speaking of editing the next two books are on their way but it is taking a while. Though it’s less work this time through (I’m definitely learning from my mistakes), it’s still work. I’m going to try and get Jack Reusen and the Children of Fate’ away to the printers in the next couple of weeks (should be printed by the start of December) and ‘Jack Reusen and the Christmas Fox’ should arrive a week or so later (it’s a Christmas story so definitely want to get a rush on that).

In the mean time I can share a wee bit about Thea’s Quest (though it probably won’t be out until next summer). In Thea’s first book we find that the polar-bear girl has discovered some pretty impressive powers (even more impressive than turning into a polar bear). She is struggling to understand them though and she’s having an even harder time learning to control them. Her quest will take her to parts of Fey she’s only ever heard of in stories and her journey will teach her a lot about herself and her friends. Where the Jack Reusen books introduced us to a strange other world, Thea’s books will take us on a voyage steeped in ancient magic and even older stories.

I’m really enjoying the research for these books, I started looking ahead to some of the places Thea might visit earlier this year, I even posted a few sample pictures on the Jack Reusen facebook page. I desperately want to get the third and fourth books out before Christmas so I probably won’t be blogging a whole lot over the next few weeks. Every spare minute I have this November is going to be spent on books. Hope it all works out, wish me luck. As always, thanks for reading, all the best, John

And the winner is….

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Last weekend, in conjunction with Fun Junction (and to tie in with the Crieff Arts Festival and the mini book festival that ran within it titled ‘Writers Live‘), I ran a ‘Design a Jack Reusen Character’ competition. All the entries had to be in by the end of the weekend and I’ve had a tricky job on my hands ever since.

Basically I liked so many of the entries I received that I decided to have three winners. The fourth book will be out in November, it’s a condensed chapter story set at Christmas time, and I’ve left space for a short story to fit in along side it. I’ll be starting work on the short story tonight but in the meantime I thought I’d share the winners’ artwork.

Congratulations to Jenny, who’s already had a wee mention in the Acknowledgements in ‘Spark of Dreams’. Jenny even submitted a character description along with her picture so here it is:

“Name: Stormfly
What is it: Dragon
Qualities: Friendly, cold dragon. She breathes ice straight up into the sky to make snow storm clouds and tail whacks the ground and is as strong as an earthquake.”

I’m looking forward to seeing what ‘Stormfly’ gets up to in the story (though I may have to ask Jenny if I can give her a different name as she shares her name with Astrid’s dragon in ‘How to train Your Dragon’). I have to confess that I’ve been hunting for an excuse to put a dragon into Fey to see what happens, so thank you Jenny, I’m really excited about this one.

Next, congratulations to Summer. Summer’s character didn’t have a name but I absolutely loved the atmosphere of the picture. I’m not sure how well this will come across in the image here but basically almost every part of this picture sparkles. The twinkling black sky and the girl in the shimmering party dress already have me setting out a wee starting scene on a frosty night in Fey. Thank you Summer.

Finally congratulations to Grace for her ’10 eyed monster’. I’ve a feeling that this guy is going to have an interesting role to play in the story. My first thoughts picture him living deep in a cave. He comes across as scary and I don’t want to lose that so I’ll need to think hard about what he’ll be up to, in what will basically be a Christmas story. Every good story needs some conflict and I think the ten eyed monster will be just the ticket. Thank you Grace.

It’s going to take me a wee while to get this story drafted up but I’ll be sure to post it on here when it’s ready and it will also be available in print in November. Of course it wouldn’t be fair to ask the contributors to buy a copy so I’ll be sure to set aside a free copy for each of them that they can get hold of before they appear on the shelves.

I’ll contact the winners shortly and will hopefully have their story ready for them in the next few weeks but in the meantime I’d like to ask people to give them a big social media round of applause with likes or favourites on their pictures (you can find them by clicking this link for facebook and this, this, and this link for twitter). As always thanks for reading, all the best, John

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