• My book, Noah’s ABC is now available to read on the wonderful, new Magicblox.com website. You can easily get a month’s free viewing to see what this innovative new online ebook reading system is like – just use the coupon code BLOX5K.

    Have fun!

  • It’s always a strange moment drawing the last illustration for a book and even more so for a series.

    I’ve been living with Axel Storm in my head since March 2007, and probably before, in different guises. He came together at Bristol airport, while my Flight was delayed on the way up to Scotland. I could probably hunt down the original sketch of the idea if someone asks me to in the comments below!

    He’s all boy and the stories are all adventure. I managed to achieve what I set out to do. Have no girls, except for his nannying mum! This really is an adventure series for boys and I hope they will take to Axel and read them all.

    So, the end of a series. Eight books, eight stories, many rewrites, eight layouts, eight sets of pencil sketches, Eight covers to be designed and painted, about five hundred black and white drawings and now it’s all over bar a bit of final editing for the last two books.

    What am I going to do now? Work up some ideas that are busting to get out of my head and then it’s onto my next eight book series! What’s it going to be? At the moment it’s called Olympia, but that might change. It’s about a boy who wants to be an Olympic Champion in ancient Greece. Oh, is the Olympics going to be in london an a couple of years time? I hadn’t spotted that one!

    The first four Axel Storm Books are now available in hardback.

  • Looking through my website statistics, I see someone has come to my site, through Google or another search engine, having searched for, “measurable outcomes from an author visit.”

    The real outcomes of school visits by anyone, will never be known by those that arrange them. Quite often the penny drops many years later when the students have moved on.

    I remember school visits from a deep sea diver, a weapons expert, the Royal Navy search and rescue and a glass harmonica expert in particular. All of them have contributed inspiration for my stories and all of them showed me what I didn’t want to be!

    In finding your true purpose in life, you have to try on a variety of personas to see if they fit. That’s what growing up is all about. Along the way we discard lifestyles and vocations that don’t fit us, but in casting them off we find ourselves one step closer to finding what it is that suits us best for this life.

    So you could say that the measurable outcome of an author’s visit is to make it clear to mathematicians that they are not going to be writers of fiction. That is as important as inspiring the writers in the audience to see the possibility of a future for them.

    These things are not measurable and never will be. The true value of education, the stuff that really helps children grow up to be useful and happy adults is never checked or measured. It comes from the hours spent learning hierarchy in the playground, the quiet words of advice after class, those odd moments of connection between teacher and pupil.

    The measurable stuff is the white fluffy bread that fills up the day of the school sandwich. Spread thinly in between is the home made jam that can’t be measured – but it is the best part of education.

    What do you think?