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Children's author, illustrator, screenwriter

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Rampage of the Goblins by Tommy Donbavand

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I rarely get much time to read these days – if I’m not writing I’m drawing, and if I’m not doing those I’m probably sleeping or looking after my daughter. Crikey, where did all the time go?! But over the past few weeks I’ve been running a lot of workshops within schools, so there’s been a bit of travelling. Travelling on trains means free time, which means I read a book!

I hadn’t read a Scream Street book before, but i loved the concept: a road/town where loads of monsters live side by side, separate to normal humans, getting on with life and getting into scrapes. A bit like Stella Street (watch out for a bit of swearing on that link), but with an A-List of monsters rather than superstars.

So, Rampage of the Goblins, the 10th in the series, involves the search for a lost mummy and a whole host of farting goblins that are out to cause trouble. I really like the goblins. I mean, what’s not to like about creatures that guff all the time? And then there’s the cutest bloodsucking leech you’ve ever met.

What Tommy Donbavand manages to achieve is a rollercoaster ride of an adventure, that’s both silly and scary in equal measures. It jumps from one set piece to the next with such gusto that you never really question how the characters stay in one piece, or how Rhesus the Vampire manages to keep all the useful plot devices tucked under his cape.

It’s a blast from start to finish, and there are more thrills and laughs than you can shake a decomposing zombie at. I like!

PS. Number 11 in the series features a yeti. What more do I need to say?

Big Ears’ house has a few design flaws

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My daughter was given a few Noddy board books recently. They taste nice, apparently, but they do also have pretty pictures. While looking at these, it becomes apparent that many of the Toyland buildings are impractical. I’m not usually one with much of an architectural opinion, but I feel compelled to comment.

First up is Noddy’s house, which is built solely with toy building blocks, and lacking any form of mortar. Anyone with any experience of toy building blocks will know they spend most of their time toppling to the ground – a strong wind and Noddy’s house would fall apart.

But second, and much worse than that is Big Ears’ house, built inside a very chunky mushroom. It looks like a nice place to live, but building a home in a mushroom would have one serious consequence: it would be a very short-term let. You’d have a few days, at best, before your roof curled up and shrivelled away. And seriously, why fill the mushroom stem with a staircase? I mean, you could have had an external spiral staircase, and used the stem as a downstairs loo with a cupboard for storage space.

Those Toyland designers need to watch Grand Designs.

Christmas in a castle, New Year on my sofa

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So I was lucky enough to spend Christmas in a wonderful castle. Never before have I seen such a tall Christmas tree, and never before have I sung Wichita Lineman around a piano at midnight. There’s a first for everything.

The excitement of an amazing christmas was tempered somewhat by spending new year on my sofa with a takeaway curry. However, I must admit to finding this one of the most preferable ways of spending new year. And if you ever hear someone discussing what wine you should drink when eating Indian food, bubbles works a treat.

And so it’s 2011, I’m deep into editing my third yeti book, and I really should be back at it. So three cheers for the new year and snotty noses.

The Terror of the Deep surfaces

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I’ll be celebrating on 6 December as my fifth book will have been published. Five books seems like an extraordinary number to me. I’m no Barbara Cartland, knocking out ten books a year (or whatever), but it does mean that I’ve dealt with all the issues and complications that arise from making one book, five times over, since 2007. That’s a point worth celebrating right there!

The Terror of the Deep, the second of the Mythical 9th Division series is probably my favourite of all of the five, simply because it’s the one where the art is really starting to work with the text as I’d always hoped it would. Everything takes time to evolve and grow up, and I’m finally feeling more confident about my illustration. I’ll never be Tenniel, but I may just one day be Alex Milway.

And so enough about that.

This blog is now live, and the one where I’ll be posting from now on. It’ll take a while to look right, and I’ll twiddle a few setting till I’m happy, but I might even try to compete with Sarah McIntyre for frequency (NAH! Who am I trying to kid!?). And while I’m there I should say that her marvellous Morris The Mankiest Monster deserves to win every award going, not just the Sheffield Children’s Book Award that it won yesterday. Fabulous news!

And so, as a parting gift, here’s a hamster carrying a lunchbox.