BLOG TOUR: Below Zero

I love being an author. Apart from being Han Solo, it’s pretty much the only thing I’ve ever wanted to be. And one of the really cool things about writing books for younger readers is that I spend a lot of time visiting schools, doing my best to inspire young readers. Reading is amazing; it opens up new worlds and new ways of thinking. Reading for pleasure makes people better people, (it’s true, I’ve seen science that says so) so I feel privileged to be able to play a small part in guiding young readers to stories.

Usually when I visit a school I talk to a large group. I’ll show them some embarrassing pictures of me growing up, tell them about why I write, why stories are important to me, that kind of thing. And I talk about reading for pleasure.

When I was at school, we would read a book in class. Every student had a copy of the book and we would take turns to read aloud. Paragraph by paragraph. Some students would read quickly, some would read slowly. Some had boring, monotonous voices. Some could barely read. I remember reading ‘Lord of the Flies’ that way, and what a bore it was.

When I tell students about this now, I see them nodding their heads. Yep, that’s still how they do it in some schools. In fact, some schools can’t even afford the books, so they only read photocopied extracts.

That’s not reading for pleasure. That’s reading because you have to. That’s reading for school. It’s work. It’s ‘Literacy’.

Reading for pleasure, I tell them, is when you read the first chapter of a book and decide it’s not the right book for you. Reading for pleasure is putting that book down and doing the same thing again until you find a book you DO want to read. Reading for pleasure is when you can’t wait to read the next page, you fall in love with the characters, hate the characters, cheer for the characters. Reading for pleasure is when a story stays with you forever, giving meaning to the things that happen to you. It’s that feeling you get when you think about the story. It’s when the smell of the pages lifts you to another place. Reading for pleasure is . . . pleasurable.

I sometimes worry that I may be speaking out of turn when I say these things at schools, but I often see the teachers nodding. They know it too. Where is the pleasure in stopping every few lines to discuss why this character said such-and-such, or that character did this-and-that?

I understand we need to read for school, for education, for all the boring reasons. But we also need to read for pleasure. That’s how we grow.

I LOVE it when a teacher tells me they’re reading a book in class just for the sake of reading it. No stopping, no analysis, just pure, unadulterated reading for pleasure. Hooray for those teachers! Hooray for school libraries! Hooray for school librarians!

Oh, and there’s one other thing; I have re-read Lord of the Flies, many times, and I now see it in a different light. It speaks to me in a way it didn’t speak to me when we read it and analysed it. What an amazing book.

BELOW ZERO

by Dan Smith

Twelve-year-old Zak, who has an inoperable brain tumour, is with his sister and parents when their private plane is disastrously diverted. Wrecked on a remote research outpost in the Antarctic, they find themselves in an abandoned base. Then Zak's parents disappear, and the base's equipment starts 3D-printing nightmarish spiderlike creatures. Zak's bizarre visions appear to suggest a link to something else - beneath the ice - which only he can understand...

BELOW ZERO by Dan Smith out now in paperback (£6.99, Chicken House). Find out more at chickenhousebooks.com and connect with Dan Smith @DanSmithAuthor

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Growing up, Dan Smith lived three lives: the day-to-day humdrum of boarding school, finding adventure in the padi fields of Asia and the jungles of Brazil, and in a world of his own, making up stories. 
Dan is the author of My Friend the Enemy, My Brother’s Secret,Big Game and Boy X. BELOW ZERO his fifth children’s book with Chicken House. He lives in Newcastle. 

Connect with him via twitter @dansmithauthor

In case you haven't yet had your fill of Dan and all things Below Zero check out some of the other posts he has done for the tour at the blogs below. 

GUEST POST: Nicholas Bowling

Today I have something rather awesome for you all. Today I have the lovely Nicholas Bowling, author of Witch Born talking about why it is he writes historical fiction. I hope you all enjoy this guest post, it had me from the Bowling says KFC. 

Why Historical Fantasy?

Aged thirteen – so, old enough to know better – I wrote a history essay in which I tried to claim that the Bayeux Tapestry was a fake, because I had spotted a KFC family bucket among the legs of the charging Norman cavalry. To this day, I don’t know what it was that I had actually seen. I still somehow managed to get 14/20, thanks to the patience and indulgence – or perhaps genuine credence? – of good old Mr Neal.

Let the record show: I am not a historian. It’s perhaps a surprise, then, that I have found myself writing historical fiction, or, more accurately, historical fantasy.

Or perhaps it’s not (a surprise). Other, more articulate, more intelligent writers have put it better than me (if you haven’t listened to Hilary Mantel’s Reith Lectures, go do it, now), but suffice to say, history and fiction are not such strange bedfellows. It’s no coincidence that “history” is just “story” with a couple of extra letters, and I’ve always liked, and been quite good at, telling stories – particularly those at the stranger and more imaginative end of the spectrum (c.f. William the Conqueror and his bucket of chicken).

But why historical fantasy, as opposed to “pure” fantasy, or magic realism, or any other type of story for that matter?

In the Early and Pre-Modern Eras, most of the things that we would term “the stuff of fantasy” were vividly, frighteningly real. For us, “fantasy” books and films are thought experiments in which we can play out not just stories around us, but the stories we tell ourselves, in our heads – our dreams and fears and desires. Pre-enlightenment, though, these fears and phantoms could not be rationally explained away as the product of the subconscious or the imagination. The great thing about historical fantasy is that it can take those monsters conjured by the Early or Pre-Modern mind and make them as real as they seemed to the imaginer.

And this is not just bringing to life the superstitions of the uneducated. In the 16^th and 17^th centuries, magic, science and religion had not yet been comfortably categorised, and there was a good deal of handwringing (and occasionally bloodshed) when definitions were unclear, or misunderstood. A man like Doctor John Dee, who appears as a character in Witchborn, is a perfect embodiment of this. He was an alchemist, magician, astrologer, who claimed he spoke with both the dead and the angels; but he was also a talented mathematician, navigator, and counsellor to the Queen herself.

The prevalence and acceptance of the fantastical in a particular historical period also presents a functional solution to a writer of fantasy fiction. I am realising, as I write this, that this will probably just going to come across as laziness on my part. But here goes. World-building is hard to do right, and so often the choices made in creating a fictional world seem essentially arbitrary. (What do I call this town? Blenwyth? Blythven? Blythvenville? Belyhythhhg? Why? Because it sounds a bit Welsh, and hence sounds a bit like Tolkien? Oh.)

The restrictions of a ready-made historical period, you find, are not restrictions at all, but in fact the opposite: they free you to explore human drama in a world already replete with mystery and otherness. It’s a little like writing poetry – the strictures of rhyme and metre, the rules of the poem, create something far more interesting than anything in sprawling free-verse.

Besides, if there are no rules, you don’t get the fun of breaking them.

Find out more at www.chickenhousebooks.com and @thenickbowling

WITCH BORN

by Nicholas Bowling

Pages: 368

Publisher: Chicken House

Publication Date: November 2nd 2017

It's 1577. Queen Elizabeth I has imprisoned scheming Mary Queen of Scots, and Alyce's mother is burned at the stake for witchcraft. Alyce kills the witchfinder and flees to London - but the chase isn't over yet. As she discovers her own dark magic, powerful political forces are on her trail. She can't help but wonder: why is she so important? Soon she finds herself deep in a secret battle between rival queens, the fate of England resting on her shoulders...

Nicholas Bowling

Nick Bowling is an author, stand-up comic, musician and Latin teacher from London. He graduated from Oxford University in 2007 with a BA in Classics and English, and again in 2010 with a Masters in Greek and Latin Language and Literature, before moving to his first teaching job at Trinity School, Croydon. While writing Witchborn, he has also performed a solo show at the Edinburgh festival, and has co-written, recorded and released an album and two EPs with soul-folk singer Mary Erskine, Me For Queen. Witchborn is his debut novel.

Dear Unpublished Me - Keris Stainton

This weeks Unpublished Me post comes to you from the lovely Keris Stainton, author of novels such as One Italian Summer & The Hearts books!! This is an extra special Dear Unpublished Me as it doesn't just have Keris' beautiful letter but also the COVER REVEAL of her newest book. 

This letter is penned to a Keris before she decided to be a writer and the fact I get to share not just this but also all the details about her 2018 release feels very fitting. This post will take you from the start of her publishing journey right up to the present day. 

Dear Me 

You've just realised you should write a book. In fact, you didn't even realise, did you? Your husband suggested it in response to your descriptions of your, um, eccentric work colleagues. But it was, as Oprah would say, an 'Aha! Moment!' 

Of course you should write a book! Didn't you used to write all the time? Didn't you used to take fanfic (before it was called fanfic) requests from your friends? Haven't you been desperately trying to work out what you should do with your life? Well, guess what? This is it. It really is! 

But. It's going to take a while. It'll be seven years before you actually finish a first draft. And it'll be much too short (but it'll have a beginning, middle and end, so you're totally going to count it). And then it'll be another couple of years before you finish one that you think is good enough to send out to an agent. (It'll be Young Adult. You probably don't know what that is right now, but you're gonna love it, I promise.) 

You'll get a lovely agent. And then it'll take another year before a publisher is interested. But a publisher will be interested. And you'll go down to London for a meeting and the people you meet will be lovely and they'll want to buy your book and you'll get the train home grinning and giggling to yourself (and people will stare, but you won't care). And then your publisher will ask you to write a different book instead. I know. But it's fine. It's going to be fine. 

So eventually you'll finish a book, and your publisher will love it, and publish it (but it'll get put back a year - you should probably just accept now that everything in publishing takes much much longer than you expect), and people will like it (not, like, loads of people, but enough). And then you'll write a couple more (you'll get to go to LA to research one of them and it will be the best trip ever). And then you'll move to a different publisher. And then you'll get a different (lovely) agent. And another different publisher. And another. You get the gist. 

It won't be as straightforward as you hope. And I'm sorry to have to tell you that you're not going to be super rich (at least not yet, it could still happen!). But what I can tell you is you're going to have a lot of fun. You're going to make amazing friends. You're going to be on the cover of a magazine (no really). You're going to be on TV (it will be a disaster, but still). You're going to interview Judy Blume! And best of all, you're going to get emails from readers who've read your books over and over and who say they never really loved books at all until they discovered one of yours. 

And you'll never really believe it - one day you'll sit down to write a letter to your unpublished self and you'll end up crying because it's all just so overwhelming - but it's true. Lucky you. 

Love 

Me 

NEW BOOK ALERT

You'll have noticed with all the Dear Unpublished Me posts I have included a book feature but as I mentioned above, today we have something extra special. 

I can exclusively reveal the cover of Keris' next book My Heart Goes Bang is hitting shelves June 28th 2018 and it is absolutely stunning!!!! 

Summary

Gemma, Lou, Issey, Liane and Paige are determined to make the most of this second year at uni. They want to have fun, but they want to focus on work. There's no time for relationships. Except with each other. And even that's not guaranteed. Gemma and Lou have always been close, but there's tension between Issey and Liane, and none of them even knows Paige all that well. 

But when Gemma finds a magazine article with a list of men they should date before they're 21 (someone who's been on TV? Check; someone with tattoos? Check;) they vow to complete the list before finishing university and set about it with a lot more enthusiasm than they do their studies ... but will any of them end up with a full house? And when a secret from their first year comes out, it looks as if some of them might not be completing university, never mind the list ... 

MY HEART GOES BANG is about lectures, essays, hangovers, and flatmates; it's about found families, finding yourself, and falling in love with people you never expected to fall in love with. 

COMING JUNE 28TH 2018

FROM HOT KEY BOOKS