The sequel to “Spellbinder” was officially accepted by Feiwel & Friends last week.  Hooray!  The next step is copyediting, which is where incredibly detail-oriented people scour the manuscript for spelling mistakes, iffy grammar and suchlike. It’s really interesting to see how many they find, no matter how much you think you’ve checked.

The title (at the moment) is “The Queen of the Abyss,” which the US seems to like but Macmillan UK don’t.  (Groan.)  I really want this book to have the same title everywhere, so some compromise is probably in order.  For now, though, I have to get started on book three…

I have signed books!  I fretted about it all week and then everything went like clockwork.  Hooray!

I planned on arriving at Chevalier’s Books half an hour early to give myself time to set up my candy cauldrons and Parma Violets, but of course I got to Larchmont Blvd. a full hour ahead of time.  I couldn’t go in that early, so I drove around the neighborhood for thirty minutes (there are some huge houses around there). By the time  I got back, parked the car and hauled my bags and boxes into the shop I was really nervous but Norman Dixon and everyone else at Chevalier’s couldn’t have been nicer.  The table was right at the front of the shop, so I put the cauldrons next to the window where they could be seen from the street.  I wasn’t sure whether I should sit down right away, but Barbara the storyteller came and chatted and asked me to sign a copy for her granddaughter and her new puppy, so that got things off to a good start.

As soon as eleven o’clock rolled around, the people I had emailed about the event started to arrive (hooray!).  They bought books and stood around near the table, talking and laughing for the whole two hours.  At first I was concerned that the store might not like that, but Norman said it was exactly what they wanted.  My friend Judy stopped everyone who came in and told them all about the book and steered them toward the table — she even went outside and accosted people in the street, asking them if they had children and if so how old they were.  And it worked!  People came in, looked at the books, chatted…and then bought them.  One lady only came in because she saw the cauldrons.  She was impressed that I’d made the cakes and put the whole thing together and she bought a book too.  Some people bought three!

It was lots of fun and at the end of it Chevalier’s had sold all but five of their copies of Spellbinder, so I signed those for them and toddled off across the road to have lunch at Le Petit Greek (I love Greek food).

My next signing is in two weeks and you’ll never guess where.  Clue: it involves traveling by air and being really cold.

But more on that later!

My first book signing is next week!  On Halloween, appropriately enough.  For those of you who live withing hailing distance of Los Angeles, it is at Chevalier’s Books on Larchmont. The full address is 126 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90004 and the phone number is 323-465-1334. I’ll be there from 11am until 1pm, so please come — I have visions of myself sitting all alone with a stack of books!

And it won’t just be books — there will also be a big bowl of Parma Violets (Belladonna’s favourites)!  Well, there will be if I don’t eat them all between now and Halloween…

I love cooking. And even more than that, I love the history of food and cooking. And, of course, I love books. All of which means that I collect old cook books (mostly pre-1890) and read them cover to cover. Sometimes I even have a go at some of the recipes, though there’s generally quite a bit of guesswork involved in that as most of them don’t use measurements.

So the other day I was leafing through Soyer’s Modern Housewife (1851), a book of “Nearly One Thousand Receipts.” It was written by Alexis Soyer, a French chef who worked in England, primarily at the Reform Club in London (yes, the same Reform Club that features in Jules Verne’s Around the World In 80 Days). Soyer was an innovator who came up with many concepts that we now take for granted, like cooking with gas, refrigerators and ovens with adjustable temperatures. In addition to all of this, he wanted to widen the horizons of British housewives and teach them how to cook properly.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spellbinder is now officially published! I’m so excited. It’s in book shops and online both in the US and UK. The UK title is The Last Ghost and the cover is a creepy orange and black. All of which means that I can now call myself a writer and people won’t think I’m just nursing a screenplay at home (like 99.9% of the other inhabitants of Los Angeles).

I still haven’t got over the thrill of opening it at random pages and seeing my own words, though. I hope I never do — it would be a shame to become blasé about something so wonderful.

So now I’m hoping that people will like it…which is much more nerve-racking than waiting for the book itself!

Eep!

Okay, so it took me quite a while to get it together…but there is now an excerpt from Spellbinder on the site! I’m including a link on the blog as well, for ease of access. I don’t think I’ve quite finished with the layout of it yet, so please feel free to let fly with any comments or suggestions.

I included the book covers and made them rigid like a hardcover book, but I really wanted them to creak like a door on a haunted house when they opened. Sadly, the sound effect only played after the cover opened, which didn’t quite work. I also made it open into a new window so I wouldn’t have to mess around with embedding it in the main Flash site. (I know, I know…lazy!)

Of course, this is all a result of Doret’s excellent suggestion, and not my idea at all, so lots o’ thanks there!

And here is the link to the excerpt from Spellbinder. The picture of the cover in the upper right hand corner is also a link and there’s one in the left hand sidebar.

Whaddya mean “overkill”? 

The publication date for “Spellbinder” is September 29, so things are beginning to ramp up a little (eek!). I’ve no idea what to expect, really, but I want to do everything I can to help, so my publisher here in the US suggested that I visit local book shops and introduce myself. They even sent me some advance copies and a stack of “Spellbinder” bookmarks. (The Bookmarks are great, they are “lenticular” and the ghosts of Belladonna’s parents appear and disappear. Here’s a pic of the front.)

So, taking Lady Macbeth’s advice, I “screw my courage to the sticking point” and set off for Vroman’s in Pasadena. So far, so good. Except once I get there I have to sort of talk to someone. In normal circumstances I have no problem talking at all. Truth be told, shutting up is more of an issue. But just marching up to someone I don’t know and introducing myself is much more daunting, so I spent about 45 minutes just wandering around the children’s section trying to get up the nerve. I looked at the picture books, examined every shelf of middle grade fiction, read most of “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” and thought about just going home. Fortunately, Vroman’s is far enough from my house that the idea of driving all the way there just to chicken out was a complete non-starter.

I took a deep breath and went up to a guy called Steve, said hello and told him about the book. He was very friendly and told me that I really needed to speak to Kris but that she wasn’t in that day. He suggested that I call her and set a time to go in. So I went home.

That may not sound lilke much of a result, but it really did break the ice. Of course, now I would have to pick up the phone and essentially cold-call someone. It took me the best part of a week to do that. And, of course, when I spoke to Kris she was perfectly lovely and we set a time for me to pop by.

Can I make a song and dance out of the simplest things, or what?

Anyway, I decided to visit a couple of other stores at the same time and visited The Village Book Shop in Glendora and Once Upon a Time Books in Montrose. Deborah at The Village Book Shop was really nice and terribly encouraging. The book shop itself was large and airy with lots of comfortable chairs and couches – it looked like a lovely place to sit and read. Once Upon a Time was more in the tradition of the small maze o’ books, which is also great. They both promised to read the book, so I left them each an advance copy and some bookmarks and continued on my way. By the time I reached Vroman’s I was positively bubbling. Kris and Steve were both there and it turned out Kris had already placed an order for the book! She hadn’t read it, though, so I left a copy with them and headed home.

Last week I hit three more book shops and dropped off more books and bookmarks. I am so on a roll now! Next week I’m driving out to the ocean to visit shops in Santa Monica and Venice. Of course, I still feel really nervous each time and have to wander around for a bit first, but I have discovered that, unlike the record company A&R people I used to have to meet when I managed the band, book shop people are not at all like Simon Cowell, are really nice and genuinely love books.

Yay! More news soon…

Is it just me or has the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland always seemed like a strange choice? Yes, I know, there’s plenty of strange stuff in the Alice books and when you consider that Lewis Carroll also came up with a mock turtle and a bunch of talking clams it might not seem so strange.

But it is. Most of the other characters have some grounding in the England of his day (mock turtle soup was very popular and was made from cow heads as actual turtle was prohibitively expensive for all but the richest diners), but the White Rabbit never really fell into that group. And it was a white rabbit, not a wild cottontail.

Well, I think I may have stumbled on the answer, which is…phantom white rabbits.

Yes, you read that right: phantom white rabbits. England is positively awash in stories of these creatures, most of which are harbingers of death, though a few are regarded as the departed spirits of actual people.

Take Thetford in Norfolk, for example, where there is an old story of a ghost called “The White Rabbit” which haunted the countryside. It was supposed to have large flaming eyes and could run very fast. (I’ve no idea why country people should have found this worthy of mention. Running fast would seem to be one of the main features of a rabbit – along with long ears and fecundity!) And in Staffordshire at Kidsgrove there was a spectral white rabbit that could be seen crossing the road to Clough Hall. This rabbit was said to predict a death in the family of anyone who saw it. There were also stories in County Durham of shape shifting creatures that could appear as white cats, horses or white rabbits.

These rabbits fall into the category of “bogey beasts,” of which the most common is the huge phantom black dog (black dog legends are found all over England as well as most of Europe), but there are also stories in which the rabbit is thought to be the ghost of a human being. In Etruria, Staffordhire, for example, there is the “White Rabbit of Etruria” which would appear in a clearing of the forest. It generally manifested after sundown when a piercing cry for help would be heard, after which the rabbit would slowly lope across the clearing. This creature terrified the local inhabitants and was thought to be the ghost of fourteen year-old John Holdcraft who had been murdered in 1834 by a friend after a gambling dispute. Similar stories can be found in Lancashire, Lincolnshire and Bedfordshire.

It might seem odd for people to be frightened of anything so ordinary and unthreatening as a white bunny, but the mind can play tricks when you’re out on a lonely road in the middle of the night, and anything incongruous can take on a dark meaning.

Of course, it wasn’t all death and haunting – in many parts of England, shouting “White rabbits!” on the first of the month before you say anything else is thought to bring good luck.

And we could all use a bit of that