So, I have been neglecting my blogging duties a bit (and turning in some slightly lacklustre entries, if I’m honest). I blame hectic schedules and the juggling of projects, but it’s not good enough, and I’m trying hard to rectifiy the situation.

So, we start with the Chinese cover for 0.4, and another great interpretation of the filaments from the book. Me, I really like it. There’s a softness and naturalness to them that just works. But tell me what you think.

Next up is just a huge thank you to the organisers of the awards events I have been to of late (but I’d like to extend that, actually, to all awards committees and organisers who work tirelessly to reward fiction that children are reading) who have been amazing. I have meet some wonderful people on my travels – both organisers and kids – who have shown me that there is still a passion for and love of books that renders the horror stories we hear, about how our children no longer care about reading, utterly redundant. They not only care, they formulate detailed and analytic responses, they engage with the books and their themes, they recommend them to friends and family, and they feed back their thoughts to the writers when given the chance.

I feel lucky to have met some true champions for reading over the last few weeks and my heart-felt thanks go out to every one of you. It’s funny. I sit behind my desk and create these books, with little thought to the life they gain when they get published. It’s kind of beautiful to think that my books gain a life of their own when they fly from my office. Out there in the world they spread out along paths that cannot be plotted on graphs, that take them into schools and readers’ hearts, that can take them to the far corners of the globe, where the ideas find new owners, new imaginations, new people to care about the characters and their predicaments.

It’s the magic of books. They connect with people. They fuel people’s need for stories. They are adapted into mental movies every time they are read, movies where budget is no constraint because the imagination is – let’s face it – limitless. They find people and become  a part of them. It’s as good as it gets for a writer: to find that his/her books matter.

Book networking sites become a lively place for review and discussion, with people proudly displaying the books they have read for all to see, and the secret life of my books carries on spreading, little ripples forming larger tides.

People gloomily predict the end of paper, but I don’t see that: I see people using technology as well as paper to augment their reading, rather than to limit it. When I’m signing books, and see people walking away with the book clasped to their chests, I fail to see that paper books are becoming lessened in any way by the digital revolution.

A book is the perfect data storage unit. And it really CAN reprogram the human brain. It’s fuel for the imagination, that most powerful of human gifts that can put people on the moon and find answers to the questions we ask as living beings.

Going out in the world, visiting schools and awards ceremonies, allows me to see how lucky I am to be a part of the process.