As one curtain rises, another descends...

# "I'm off on a rocketship, prepared for something new, I'm off on a rocketship, ecstatic with the view" # - Guster

OK, well, it's done... The unveiling of my website happened yesterday June 1st, 2006. You can find it at http://www.findthemissingreel.com/ - Twig has done a brilliant job of designing a holding page until the main homepage is set up and hopefully it provides a bit of intrigue and anticipation for whoever stumbles onto it in the meantime...

Perhaps I should say a little about Moon Crater - it's an adventure book for 8-14 year-olds, it's sci-fi but it's based in the real world, it's set in a fictional place but I take my inspirtation from my own life and experiences growing up... Cryptic enough for you?


The main thing I want to do with Moon Crater is to write something for kids that's not magical. By that I don't mean when they read it, they won't feel like it's magic in any way - I hope the whole experience is really memorable for them - but without ranting on about it too much, it seems to me that every single children's book you pick up these days has some magical or fantasy element to it. Either an ordinary kid goes off to magic school or an ordinary girl finds a secret doorway to a magical world. There's never an ordinary kid exploring his ordinary real world and finding the value in it... Moon Crater is very firmly and deliberately set in the real world, in an ordinary village with no spells, potions or witches in it. I firmly believe that there's enough "magic" in the real lives of kids, in their surroundings and the real people they meet every day, to provide exciting material for a roller-coaster read (with a little stretch of the imagination here and there, of course - that's why I'm a "fiction" writer, at the end of the day!). Perhaps my book might even inspire kids to think of the buildings and people they see in the street more, rather than trying to escape into a fantasy world of dwarves, trolls and wizards. So that's Moon Crater.

That said, I really like the stories of Rowling, Tolkein, Lewis and GP Taylor (not that I've read them all, mind) but it just seems that there are too many imitators out there nowadays, and it'd be a nice change to see something different on the market... (whether publishers agree with me will remain to be seen!)