Category: Writing

What’s your resolution?

Happy new year! Let’s hope 2021 is better than 2020.

At the beginning of the first Hope Jones book, Hope makes a resolution:

The second Hope Jones is actually set a little later in the year, but at the beginning of the book, Hope makes another resolution: she is going to become a vegetarian.

Hope tries being a vegan – and tries to persuade her family to give up meat too – but ends up as a flexitarian.

If you want to know more about her journey, and the food that she eats, and what she discovers about farms, farming, and climate change, then you should read Hope Jones Will Not Eat Meat.

I hope you enjoy it!

A Dog Called Grk

I am very pleased that my first book, A Dog Called Grk, is being reissued with a new cover.

The new cover has been drawn by Garry Parsons, the illustrator of the Dragonsitter books (and many other excellent books too, as you’ll discover if you have a look at his website).

A Dog Called Grk is the story of Timothy Malt, an ordinary boy, who is walking down the street on his way home from school when he finds a lost dog….

 

The ninth Dragonsitter

The Dragonsitter’s Surprise will be published in the UK in April 2018.

Slightly to my astonishment, this will be the ninth instalment in the series. When I first wrote a small book about Eddie, Emily, and a badly-behaved dragon, I wasn’t expecting to carry on their adventures at all, let alone discover so much about their lives. But I’m very pleased that I have – and I’m delighted that readers have been enjoying them too.

As always, this book has been brilliantly illustrated by Garry Parsons.

Now I’d better go and do some work. It’s time to write the tenth in the series.

The Mighty Nose Awards

This year I was lucky enough to be one of the judges for the Mighty Nose Awards, along with Richard E Grant, actor and perfumier, and Nicky Cox, editor of First News.

I’ve judged several writing competitions, but this one was particularly enjoyable, because all the entries were focused on smell. During the judging process, we three judges were asked to award points for “originality; quality of writing; and lively depiction of smells”.

You can read more about the awards on the Marty the Mighty website – http://www.martythemightynose.org/ – and find out how to enter the 2017 awards. Anyone aged between 7 and 11 can enter, and the closing date is the end of this year.

Here’s a short film which shows the judging process and features the judges reading some of winning poems:

 

More Grk books?

A few days ago I got an email from a reader named Nico:

Hi Josh I really like your Grk series and I would be really EXCITED about more!

I wrote back to him, but my reply bounced. If you’re Nico, please do write to me again, but give me your correct email address this time.

I’ll answer Nico’s question here anyway. As you’ll know if you have read the Grk books, each of them is set in a different country. I had a dream that Grk might travel to every country in the world, although that would mean writing 196 books. And perhaps he would travel to the moon too, like his fictional ancestor Snowy, bringing the total up to 197.

But at the moment, my time is taken up with the Dragonsitter instead, so I don’t know when, or if, I will ever return to the further adventures of Tim, Grk, Max and Natascha.

Cholsey and Agatha Christie

Just around the corner from Cholsey Primary School, where I am currently the Patron of Reading, is a small and beautiful church. When I was visiting the school a couple of weeks ago – I’ll write about that visit here very soon – I nipped away at lunchtime and, rather than sitting in the staffroom, wandered through the churchyard, past mossy graves, to a heavy stone squatting in the furthest corner from the entrance. This grave belongs to Agatha Christie, who lived a couple of miles away on the outskirts of Wallingford, and attended the church.

Here is the front of the grave:

This is taken from the other side, with the church in the background:

 

And here is the entrance to Cholsey church:

 

Next time I visit Cholsey, I’m planning to walk across the fields to Christie’s home, Winterbrook House. And I’ll also ask the children at the school how much they know about their famous neighbour, and whether any of them have read or watched the exploits of Poirot and Miss Marple.