First Translation rights sale!

To a South Korean publisher who apparently normally goes for award-winning foreign books and has asked for all my future work to consider!

Library Information Show

This irregular blogger went there this week, exhibiting on the IPG (Independent Publishers Guild) stand in my first attempt to draw librarians into awareness of my book.
I hope that my cunning ploy of allowing them to read half the book on CD will engage them to the extent that they feel they really really must read the rest (and buy for their libraries!).
It seemed to generate a lot of interest and I was very pleased when a librarian from a London School came to tell me she had bought the book last week and had not been able to lay her hands on the book since putting it in the library because it was always being read together by a huddle of kids on the floor. Ace!
I would like to thank all those who have taken the trouble to send me reviews, but would love lots more.
Librarians please give your kids the chance to discover Curd and his friends? Come on, you Re-eads!

New reviews and apology for website glitch

Firstly, I would like to apologize to anyone who tried to post a review during the Easter Holidays. Due to a glitch on the review form’s ‘send’ button, no reviews were received.
I invite anyone who tried to re-send their reviews and I will put them up here and then move them to the ‘reader review’ set on the website by my colleague.

Here are a few new reviews:

Elizabeth
I bought 2 copies of the book as a present – but read it first and really enjoyed it – can recommend it for young and old!

Ethan
I read this book over along period of time: I don’t have four hours free in my average week. I met Alan in Waterstone’s, Tunbridge Wells on 17th April and I was just going to buy the second book in a series I have been reading and bumped into him on the second floor. He told me about the book and I decided to buy it as well as the other book.
A few days later, I have lost interest in the book I actually went in for, and have finally finished Curd the lion.
This witty tale was very confusing to me at first but I settled down to it as I read more. This is a great book. I am very happy to have a signed copy of this book, thank you.
Star rating /5 = *****- Excellent!

Penny
I thought, well, it was the best book I had ever read! The Minorbore was very funny: he looked extremely funny without his helmet on! I liked the way he tried to axe Sweeney and O'Flattery. And Curd was always puzzled!

new reviews

I have been out and about solidly doing signings for the last week: Woking, Bracknell, Basingstoke, Salisbury, Poole, Winchester and Farnham.
Here are some of my latest reader reviews:
Emily Sanders, Dorset.
The Amazing Adventures of Curd the Lion and us is fab. I can’t wait to read the story of The Ineffable Emperor. I read the book in about three hours! It is really tricky to put the book down and I can’t wait to read it again and again and again. I started last night and finshed it this morning! The day is Good Friday the tenth of April 2009.
I bought the book from Alan Gilliland himself after he had told me about the amazing story. I couldn’t wait to get home and read it. Also it sounded so fabulous that mum got my best friend called Genevieve one. I absolutely loved it. I know Genevieve will like it. I don’t know of another author that can do really great stories and illustrate their story in such a fantastic way. GET THE BOOK, IT’S GREAT!!!


Simone Gilson (student).
Your book detailing Curd’s adventures I could read again and again! The way in which it crosses the boundaries of childhood and adulthood imagination was truly inspiring – a magical tour de force through the imagination, that reminds you of what it was to dream as a child and to comprehend as an adult!
The illustrations are amazing and all who I have shared the book with have commented likewise. They captured many of the images I had in my head from the days of reading Lewis Carroll and Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree! Plus as someone attempting her own poetry and looking for new ways of reading, the linguistics used within your book were very inspirational. I have also found myself puzzling over and working out the riddles.

Juliette Stuart , 11.
I loved your Book about Curd the Lion so much! As soon as I got home I read it and I didn't stop until I had finished. I think I read it in about 4 hours flat! My favourite character was Pilgrim Crow and also King Ziggu. Please do the second book quickly. I can't wait until the second book comes out.

Kids reviews – are the best!

A personal thanks to those kids who have been kind enough to send reviews. Some you can view now on www.lovereading4kids.com where my book is being promoted this month!

And my latest – too late to appear there – here you are too!

Dear Alan Gilliland,
I am writing to you because I love your book. It was brilliant I have a couple of questions to ask you.Where do you live? and what is your favourite animal? and what your favourite food?
My favourite animal in the book is the hyena. and in real life it is a tiger My second favourite animal is a penguin.
I hope you make more books soon,
Yours sincerely,
Henry Alden (Burpham, Guildford)

Henry. In my letter back I forgot to answer your questions. Apologies.
My favourite animal is that tiger, wherever he is, who wouldn’t dream of eating me if he got the chance.
My favourite food might be the meat of the shark that never got the chance. Otherwise it could be prawns (only sometimes they give me anaphylactic shock - which could be their way of saying I shouldn’t have tried eating them). My brother got botulism poisoning from eating tinned pineapple once. I ate it too but luckily was immediate sick. And that doesn’t make you sick of the subject of food, I’ll eat my hat!
Oh, and if you ever meet that tiger, say ‘hello’ from me.

Potted blog biog: part three – schooldays fondly remembered

Upon my recovery after several months, the residual cranial weakness (I am left with, as I recently discovered a half- by one-inch hole in my skull, covered only by scar-tissue) condemned me, at my next, private, public school, to excel at sport only in the swimming pool. What torture!
You might think me cynical, given my amphibious upbringing – not so. The outdoor pool, the exclusive preserve in the early season of the swimming squad, had no heating and we started training soon after ice-melt, it seemed to us. On the other hand, in high summer we were positively Germanic in our determination to bagsy with our towels the sunniest out-of-wind poolside spots on which we recovered between aqueous exertions while watching the sun traverse the heavens, beating off any sweaty cricketers who dared tread upon our preserve.
And so blissful years passed, swimming in summer and avoiding rugby in winter. It seemed the school was unaware of my frailty and only my instinct for self-preservation kept me on the wing in the lower leagues, avoiding the clumsy embraces of oafish forwards with darting runs, sometimes to the try-line even, but not so often that I be promoted.
A new joy discovered was the game of fives (Rugby, not Eton) in which one hit a leather-covered golf-ball around a concrete court with one’s gloved hands. Both hands are used, the rules are crudely similar to squash, the ball travels very fast, and one’s hands feel the size of boxing gloves for several weeks at the season’s start.
My first disgrace was to, after passing through the CCF (army cadets) qualifications with distinction, refusing to join the Cadre, the officer-training squad from which most school monitors (prefects) were eventually drawn, and joining the engineering section where we could build rope bridges and suchlike rather than endlessly drilling. My punishment was to be placed at front of class in the French lessons, directly in the firing line of the spluttering Colonel Bourne, head of the CCF.
After the routine of collecting O’levels like postage-stamps and discarding, like a torn stamp, Latin, I finally reached the pinnacle of my academic career, achieved by only a handful, if that, of all the boys passing through the halls of this educational system of ours: I was expelled for revising for my Art A’level exam.
To be expelled for taking a day off lessons to revise for the next morning’s exam may seem illogical to those of you not brought up in the Great Tradition of the English Public School, but let me assure you there was a greater force at work here: discipline.
It was not that I had taken the day off lessons to revise (this exam was a month ahead of the main batch, during which all time between exams was set aside for revision); it was that I had been intemperate enough to go to my headmaster and ask permission to take a day off to revise; permission denied. My headmaster may not have been privy to my knowledge that the circumstance was indeed extenuating, to wit, that, having done no serious work up to that point, at least one day’s strenuous effort was imperative to avoid total failure.
But this calling into play of an appeal to common sense, arguing that revising was essential to my success and the school’s reputation, counted for nothing beside the unforgivable breach of discipline in the act of ‘deliberately going against the express order of your headmaster.’
So ended my academic ambition, with my one-day-art-history dragging my A-grade down to a B, expelled and reinstated but disillusioned, I stuttered on through awful Maths and Physics to the prospect of Art School.
After an acceptance by two top London Art Schools was stymied by my local authority’s insistence on a pre-diploma year at their own local academy first, I went to study Photography and Film in London having been granted, on presentation of my portfolio, an exemption from that pre-diploma year by the same local college!
After a year of photography, it was movie-time! I launched with enthusiasm into the prospect of producing unadulterated fiction. I co-directed and edited a short film, ‘Mummy, mummy,’ with a fellow-student, John Beech. This film won the Southampton student film festival in its category, was honourably mentioned at the Mons Film Festival, France, I am told, and won both the Don Quixote and Best Foreign Short Film categories at the Cracow Film Festival in Poland.
I then gained the singular accolade of writing, producing and directing the only film commissioned by the infant Race Relations Board to be banned by the Race Relations Board (something to do with a mismatch of humours, I am told).
My venture into fictional film making was cut short at the end of the year by my failure in the film chemistry exam and my refusal to retake it; a decision partially influenced by that fact that I had also lost my folio of potential scripts for the final year in a Wimpy Bar – that was the burger bar that had an apparently ‘addictive’ tomato ketchup.
(next week… ketchup, sauce of embarrassment)
To the odd reader who may mark my words – a week can be an awfully long time here.

Potted Blog Biog: Part two – off to Merrie England!

I was rudely inducted into the native (as opposed to colonial) English way of life when, having arrived after a six-week voyage round the Cape of Good Hope (Suez Crisis) with my tan wan from Yellow Fever, post-recovery I was packed off to another boarding school near Battle, East Sussex.
Here I discovered, among other things, the meaning of the cane and the other use for the cricket bat, before settling into a routine of overt compliance with the many regulations that ensure the smooth running of an hundred or more boys.
Loyalty to one’s ‘House’ was instilled by naming them after the warring city-tribes of ancient Greece and tested on the playing fields below. I was a Corinthian, blue, and certainly more elevated (we had our own columns, after all) than the warlike Spartans (red) or wet Athenians (green).
Naturally, we learned Greek as well as Latin, the better to learn English and for the sheer discipline, through good offices of our Latin, and Head-, Master, the redoubtable Mr. “Shere” Kahn (correct – not Khan) and a well-aimed chalk or board rubber.
There the obligatory midnight feasts under the floorboards of the gym were hosted by those Epicurians whose fathers smuggled bottled chicken and pickles in the boots of their Bentleys to instil in their offspring early the art of entrepreneurial domination through largesse and favouritism. In the weekly tuck-shop grab we all queued eagerly craning our necks to see as our lockers containing a half-term’s supply were opened, one by one, under the eagle eye of the moustachioed Matron Crabtree, and their rationed treasures extracted, followed by the inevitable bartering sessions in which we discovered the relative value of different confections and altered our holiday orders to secure the maximum exchange-rate-benefits the following term.
Whether officially sanctioned or not, I fail to remember, but we boys brought to school mementoes of our, or other, former lives and other cultural treasures, for many and varied were our origins. My collection included World War One German field-glasses (later cunningly disassembled by my brother to access the lenses and prisms), my grandfather’s World War One brass army compass, a parang (Malay jungle knife), Kukri (Ghurka knife), Kris (Malay ceremonial execution knife) and a jungle saw (two loops and a sawed wire which one tensed across a knotched stick bent over like a bow) to complete the ‘jungle-shelter’ building equipment for use on ‘frees’ deep in the four hundred acre woods. But my pride was the six-foot long Semang (or Sakai, I forget which of the indigenous peoples gave this to my father) blowpipe with its bamboo darts that could penetrate solid wood.
Our inspirational Maths master, the (seemly) eighty-year-old Colonel “Pepperpot” Pearson, with his shiny freckled pate and white Nietzschean moustache tinged with tobacco-juices, and his “have a Mintoe, boy” response to every correct answer, could often be seen out of school hours galloping full pelt across field and hedge on his huge cavalry charger.
I learned to run (faster), to play rugger (rougher), and cricket (harder) and I was all set on a career as a leg spin bowler (tested by bowling onto an hand-kerchief, moved ever further from the stumps) for the second eleven when an unfortunate accident put paid to my joining the lower ranks of that elite band of demi-gods, the sporting heroes.
It was the Easter of my final year there when a group of doughty lads set out to climb a local chalk quarry under the vigilant gaze of my neighbour, a doctor. (Easter and accidents go together in my life: apart from this accident, it was Easter when, after leaving the Daily Telegraph, I collapsed with a catastrophic bacterial spinal infection; it was Easter when my unfortunate mother conceived a baby who shocked her, after being extracted with a pair of tongs, with its tadpole-like long body and large head, flat on one side, a facet explained away by the doctor as merely a consequence of my cork-like extraction.)
I succeeded in climbing the walls of this quarry and descending again first. I was busy minding my own business, gloating at my prowess, some ten feet away from and with my back to the base of the cliff while watching the barbecue preparations and waiting for the sluggard above to complete his ascent, when, as if reading my thoughts, the swine triggered an avalanche of pebbles skittering down the face.
One particularly large and athletic rock outleaped his fellows and bounced, with a dull squelch, upon my skulltop. I watched him leap away in triumph as I felt a slick stickiness where my smooth hair used to be, followed by trickling sensation down my left temple and a queer heaving sensation in my stomach.
Walking slowly, whether casually or groggily I don’t remember, over to the doctor in charge, I unnecessarily showed him my bloody hand. Taking stock of the wound, he took out a pocket-handkerchief (before tissues became common), laid it upon my head and tied it gently under my chin.
In this disguise (a Russian peasant-girl) I sat and waited patiently in the car as the barbecue party got under way, ran its course, sputtered out and packed itself away, kicking out its embers some three hours later. I sat and waited as our troop drove happily home. I sat and waited as the doctor’s mother made to swab my cut before sending me across the fence, home.
My sudden attempt to disappear under the kitchen table alerted the doctor to new possibilities in my wound and we set off for the local hospital, 15 miles away, for an x-ray. My being sick all over the dashboard confirmed his tentative diagnosis, and I passed through the x-ray room straight into an ambulance for the fifty-mile dash to the Atkinson-Morley Head hospital in Wimbledon.
I arrived just in time to wave hello to Stirling Moss, who beat me to Casualty by minutes after his big Easter crash at Goodwood, and goodbye to my blood, most of which seemed to have deserted me, prefering the starched white covers of the ambulance bed.
My next memory of this Easter was that of the voice of a swarthy matron, “Be quiet! Stop making such a fuss. You’re disturbing the other patients.” After drifting between coma and complaint for several m and sucking hot Bovril through a straw while laid on my good side, it was finally time for a dressing change.
Whimpering as she unbuckled the nappy-pin with which my voluminous head-bandages were fastened, I selfish made more noise as she placed her hand on my head and tugged, drawing the hefty pin through the layers of bandages sandwiching my right ear. With the sudden flowering of that pink rose it dawned on her that she had been forcing me to sleep on my pierced ear!
(next week - more boarding, more boredom)