Philip Reeve's Blog

This is my first post for quite a while. There are various reasons for that, but the main one is that this website had to be shut down for a time as it was infected with malware. Hopefully the problem is sorted by now, thanks to Crediton-based internet security expert Chris Underhill. If you’re reading this, it’s thanks to Chris, and if you ever run into similar problems with your own site, he’s the man to turn to – he’s been endlessly patient and helpful.

So the blog is (hopefully) back in action, but I don’t have much to post on it. I’m not writing anything at the moment, and the only publication in the forseeable future is the next Reeve & McIntyre Kevin book in late August – more about that nearer the time.

The recent half-term holiday saw the first performances of the Pugs of the Frozen North stage show, co-written and directed by Brian Mitchell, and performed by him and Amy Sutton and Joshua Crisp (of the Bard & Troubador theatre troupe). The cast are brilliant, Brian’s songs are superb, the friendly audiences made very enthusiastic pugs, and the show has been a great success, selling out venues in Sussex, Yorkshire and Devon. Here’s Sarah McIntyre’s account. We hope there will more dates around the country later in the year – more about that nearer the time, too.

Sarah McIntyre and I will be doing our own event at this year’s Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday 4th April, and later the same day I’ll be in conversation with authors Philip Womack and Frances Hardinge. I’ll be talking about Station Zero and the rest of the Railhead trilogy, and Frances will be focusing on her latest, Deeplight, which is a fantastic book and highly recommended for all lovers of fantasy or just good writing. Philip Womack is the chair, or referee, or whatever you call it (I’ve forgotten!) but I hope he’ll tell us something about his own novels, like the excellently eerie Darkening Path trilogy or the eagerly awaited Arrow of Apollo. I know the country is currently cursed with floods, plagues, and rail-replacement bus services but if you can make it to Oxford, it would be good to see you!

Finally, I’ve had to disable comments on the blog because I was getting too much spam, so if you do want to get in touch, Twitter or Facebook are the best places to find me.

Pugs of the Frozen North, the book what I wrote with Sarah McIntyre back in 2015, has been one of our most popular titles (indeed, it’s probably outsold anything I’ve written apart from Mortal Engines – go Pugs!). This Christmas it’s been chosen for the Winter Reading Challenge in UK libraries, which you can read more about here.

I can also now EXCLUSIVELY REVEAL that I’ve been working with the playwright and composer Brian Mitchell (The Ministry of Biscuits, Those Magnificent Men) on a Pugs of the Frozen North STAGE PLAY, which will start touring next year.

Wait… A STAGE PLAY?!? you ask. But… HOW?!??!

Well, Brian specialises in small, touring productions in which a tiny cast of actors play a huge cast of characters and a few everyday objects provide all the sets, so he was undaunted by the prospect of staging a sled race to the North Pole involving pugs, polar bears, noodle-crazed yetis and a giant, marauding kraken. It’s essentially the same story as the book, although we’ve had to adapt it slightly because we can’t have more than three characters on stage at once (and in some of the small venues the show will play in there wouldn’t be room for them all even if we could). Also, highly-trained thespians though they are, the cast can’t really portray 66 excitable pugs, so the plan is to have the audience play those.

Brian is currently busy writing songs and incidental music, and the first production will be on Sunday, 16th Feb 2020 at the Exeter St Hall in Hove, and the wonderful Book Nook children’s bookshop will be helping out with publicity and selling tickets. (Tickets will also be available online nearer the time.) Sarah and I are planning to be there for the premiere, but if you can’t join there’s another performance at the same venue the following Sunday (23rd Feb).

After that the Pugs will be yipping their way up and down the country. We already have dates in Yorkshire and Devon (TBC), and hopefully there will be lots more to follow – watch this space, or my Twitter account, or The Foundry Group (Brian’s production company) for further details.

Pugs of the Frozen North is published in the UK by Oxford University Press, and available from all good bookshops.

You can find pug drawing guides, classroom notes, and even a knitting pattern here.

And finally, here’s Brian in a small but hard-hitting acting role as a farmer inconvenienced by Kevin, the Roly Poly Flying Pony.

Today on Twitter Sarah McIntyre and I unveiled the cover for our next joint book – the second title in our Roly Poly Flying Pony series. We had planned to call it KEVIN GOES POP since it’s about our endomorphic equine getting involved in adventures with a pop star. But our editors at Oxford University Press thought that might alarm readers, so we settled on KEVIN’S GREAT ESCAPE instead.

The book will be out in September, and we will be making our usual song and dance about it then.

Last weekend we were in Dun Laoghaire, where we were making a song and dance about the first Kevin book at the brilliant Mountains to Sea Festival. Here’s Sarah’s blog about it all, complete with footage of us on Irish telly.

There’s very sad news this spring for friends of children’s author Tommy Donbavand (which means basically anyone who’s ever met or interacted with him, Tommy being one of the book world’s best people). He has been suffering from cancer for three years, and has recently been given just “weeks or months” to live.

A group of Tommy’s friends has set up an auction site to help raise funds for him and his family. It’s well worth having a look at all the lots listed – as the organisers say, ‘Many of them are one-of-a-kind items and experiences which cannot be found anywhere else. You could bag yourself a piece of history, end up in a book, or just grab some signed copies of titles from your favourite authors. And, more importantly, help a good man cope with a terrible situation.’ Every penny raised through the auction will go to Tommy and his family.

I’ve donated a complete set of the four Mortal Engines and three Fever Crumb novels to the auction – the new UK paperback editions with Ian McQue’s wonderful cover illustrations – you can bid on those here.

Also, Sarah McIntyre and I are offering a small but memorable cameo role in the third Roly Poly Flying Pony book (due to be published in September 2020). In the course of the story Kevin the titular flying flying pony will have an unfortunate accident which will land on the head of someone standing below. You could be that person! As the designated poo-ee, your name will appear in the book along with a brief description of the incident and a Sarah McIntyre vignette illustration, which we’ll send you a print of (along with a signed copy of the book, when it’s published.) That one is proving surprisingly popular, but if you’re feeling flush you can still put in a bid here.

Kevin in all his airborne majesty. Watch out below…

And if you’re a writer yourself, my Oxford University Press editor Liz Cross is offering a written critique of and follow-up conversation about your children’s book manuscript. Back at the end of the nineties Liz was the unfortunate editor on whose desk the original, unsolicited manuscript of Mortal Engines first landed, and her written critique and the follow-up conversations did much to shape it and make it publishable. (I also worked with her on the Railhead trilogy, and the Reeve and McIntyre books).

The auction runs for the rest of the month, and I’ll look forward to mailing out books and writing poo-related cameos as soon as the final bids are in. Happy things in a sad cause.

…for the Carnegie Medal! I don’t normally bother getting too excited about longlists – there are a lot of other contenders, and they’re all excellent (read them!)  – but the Carnegie is a very good longlist to be longlisted on, and it’s nice to have a chance to shout about Station Zero, which I think got a bit drowned out last year by the various  Mortal Engines spin-offs. Nice, too, despite what the Guardian calls  a ‘trend for gritty children’s books‘ to see the Carnegie recognising genre titles (the Railhead trilogy is more unashamedly sci-fi than anything else I’ve done). Thank you, everyone who nominated it!

You can see the full longlist here.

Last year Scholastic released new covers for the Mortal Engines Quartet in the UK, with beautiful artwork by Ian McQue. Now Ian has created new cover art for the Fever Crumb series too. The Fever Crumb books are prequels to Mortal Engines, set around 500 years earlier, when the Nomad Empires rule, and the motorisation of London is just getting under way). The new editions will be available in bookshops from 7th March.

London. Just before elevenses. The Ministry of Biscuits casts its sinister shadow over every tea-time and coffee break in the land. Established to “control biscuits, and to control the idea of biscuits,” it prohibits decadent sweetmeats, such as the Gypsy Cream. But when Cedric Hobson, a junior designer, falls in love and designs a biscuit to “shake confectionery to its very foundations,” his world – and the ministry – are turned upside down…

MiniBic fan art by Sarah McIntyre

The Ministry of Biscuits, the musical comedy I co-wrote with Brian Mitchell, will be coming to London for a short run in late January and early February. It’s the same production which was on tour all last year, performed by Brian, Amy Sutton, Murray Simon, and Dave Mounfield. And it’s a joy, so if you can, please go and see it!

It’s at the Barons Court Theatre, London, W14 9HR from Tuesday, 29th January to Sunday, 10th February 2019, at 7.30pm (with a Saturday Matinee at 2.30pm). Box office: 020 8932 4747, or book online here.

Happy New Year! I’ve been taking a break from the internet over Christmas, and it looks likely to continue while I try to get some new stories written, so apologies if you’ve been tweeting or messaging me and never got a reply.

Meanwhile, Sarah McIntyre has been busy drawing this fantastic Railhead picture. It’s inspired by Mithila art from the Madhubani district of India, though very much filtered through Sarah’s own style. It shows the train Damask Rose travelling through some symbolic K-gates, accompanied by some figures who Sarah says, ‘are a mix of Flex’s drawings – sort of come to life in the K-gates – and the station angels (which I know look more like praying mantises than angels, but I still love the name). And I guess they could be Guardians, too.’

I love it, and it seems like a good way to kick off 2019. (Extra points if you spot the drone.)

A reminder that if you’re buying The Legend of Kevin for someone this Christmas – or if you already have it – my co-author Sarah McIntyre has some free, downloadable Kevin activities over on her website. Sarah does activity sheets like this for all the books she works on, which just one of the reasons why I count myself so lucky to be working with her…

Sarah McIntyre

One thing I didn’t foresee when I started making books with Sarah was how hard it would be to get ourselves recognised as a double act. We come up with these stories together, so the credit on the covers is ‘by Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre’, but even now, after six books together, people get in touch on social media to say how much they or their children or their class have enjoyed the books, and they leave Sarah out; even some reviews refer to the books as ‘Philip Reeve’s’. Since Sarah’s name comes second people ignore the ‘and’ and assume she’s ‘only’ the illustrator.

It’s a sad fact of life in the book world that illustrators – the people who help to make our books so appealing to young readers (often before they even can read) just aren’t valued as much as writers. Perhaps there’s an unconscious, lingering class divide left over from the days when illustration and graphic design were classed as ‘commercial art’. Writing is seen as a noble activity for educated people, but the poor schmo who provides the illustrations is just a tradesperson, like the printer, or the bloke who lugs the books around the warehouse. Writers (usually) earn a royalty from sales of their books; illustrators often just get a flat fee. Writers (generally) get to discuss and hone their text with an editor; illustrators draw what they’re told to, by publishers who sometimes seem to see nothing wrong in making changes to the final artwork without their approval (easily done now artwork is supplied digitally) and then don’t even include them in the data they supply to online booksellers. I still see some publishers and authors proudly showing off their new book covers without bothering to mention or link to the artists who created them. I still see a lot of heavily illustrated books listed online and in the press end-of-year-round-ups without the illustrator being mentioned. Some newspapers (and yes, I’m looking at you, the more-ethical-than-thou Guardian) even reprint illustrations from said books to decorate those round-ups and still don’t credit their creators.

It’s to try and combat this attitude that Sarah founded the Pictures Mean Business campaign, which has had some success in drawing attention to the issue. She’s done a lot of research: there’s an excellent thread here about how book data works, and why it needs fixing: I knew nothing about this stuff. And in the current issue of The Bookseller Sarah is one of the book world figures giving predictions about what the year ahead holds. Being a sunnily optimistic sort, she argues that 2019 will be the year that publishers realise it’s in everyone’s interests to properly credit illustrators.

I really hope she’s right.

Here’s a surprise addition to my recent list of Philip Reeve books you can buy. I wasn’t expecting this new UK cover for Larklight to be in the shops until next year, but it’s been brought forward and should be available now. It’s published by Bloomsbury and the artwork is by the amazing David Wyatt, who also did the superb illustrations inside. I wrote a bit about the story and how I came to write it here.