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Sunday 1 January 2012

New Year, New Book

I stumbled out in the late afternoon today with Barney. The ground in the Pennines is water-logged after what seems like weeks of rain. We walked half way up the hill behind the house and down to a quiet little valley where the stream was roaring with water. Barney, as usual, paid no attention to the grim weather, continually chasing his mangled ball into the stream and bringing it back proudly for me. He lives in a constant state of optimism.

New Year's Day is traditionally full of hope, cold and crisp. But today, the weeks of poor weather and indoor living had got the better of me and all I could create in my head was the miserable premise for an adult short story that mirrors the pessimistic economic climate. Barney fetched the ball and wagged his tail and got excited about repeating the same game. Then the sky cleared in the west, the direction in which K had driven after lunch to see her mum. The clouds were stained with orange and it reminded me of a scene at the end of my new children's book, The Court Painter's Apprentice (Catnip, mid-January).

"They stood there for a long time in comfortable silence, as the sunlight slowly dripped beyond the horizon like syrup. And each knew that the other was composing a new painting in his head."

In the hour since I'd left the house with Barney, everything had conspired to make me optimistic, to send me back to my desk to write. I remembered why writing for a young audience is such a challenge. Without ignoring the difficulties and hardships that everyone endures, children's books need a sense of hopefulness. Often adult literature can be at the same time brilliant yet leave you feeling despondent. And that's no way to be. One of my favourite adult books is the relentlessly bleak 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, but even in that difficult book, the orange boiler suit at the end is for me a symbolic image of hope.

So, the weather, an animal and an hour of solitude and reflection did the trick, on an arbitrary day when you're supposed to buck your ideas up. And when I got home I found a lovely review by a reader who really "got" the ideas in the book. So now I'm really smiling . . .