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Showing posts from 2011

Happy Winter Solstice!

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sunrise at Stonehenge Here in the northern hemisphere today is the winter solstice... midwinter, the shortest day of the year... and it’s time to celebrate! For this is the darkest hour. From now until midsummer, the days will get longer and the nights shorter, which means you’ll soon have more sunshine (well, daylight anyway) to frolic with your loved ones, which can only be good thing. The solstice actually happens at a set time that varies slightly according to your human calendar. This year it happened at 5.30am this morning, but I had to poke my author with my horn to get her out of bed to post this for me... and you know how long it takes authors to wake up and smell the coffee, let alone write anything half decent… but she's up now, so here are a few interesting solstice-y things the unicorn has unearthed.  Newgrange, Ireland  If you’re in Ireland, you might be celebrating the solstice at Newgrange, which is an ancient celtic tomb that my author has been inside

Books... the last chapter? No, it’s the sequel!

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I was just about to turn off the TV and curl up in my warm unicorn stable last night, when an Imagine programme called “Books - The Last Chapter?” came on, which you can watch on the BBC's iplayer HERE . That title made half the glitter fall off my horn, I can tell you! I immediately started worrying for my poor author, and what she’s going to do for the next 20 years of her working life if books are truly about to close and never open again. my author rescuing old books at Hay-on-Wye In keeping with the doom-laden title, there were depressing pictures of large, boarded-up bookshops, followed by three representatives of the publishing industry gloomily discussing their roles in the digital age. You can look up their names, but let’s call them Bigwig Publisher, Bigwig Agent, and Bigwig Author. All three looked worried, even when the author declared that authors would still need publishers in the digital age (“and agents!” shot Bigwig Agent in a telling moment of sheer terror).

Warrior Princesses

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What is a unicorn to do? I just can't seem to stop my author writing on other people's blogs these days! Remember Xena? Well, my author used to be glued to the TV when this series came on, which might be why she wanted to be a warrior princess... meet some more girls with swords, including a very special heroine for 2012 over on The History Girls . And don't forget to vote for paper or ebooks on the right of this blog... voting closes 31st December!

RIP Anne McCaffrey

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At the start of this year, I signed up for the Anne McCaffrey reading challenge proposed by Caroline at Portrait of a Woman to bring some wonderful fantasy books to a new readership. Little did any of us know then that the great author would no longer be with us by the end of the challenge... the great Anne McCaffrey  died at her home in Ireland last week , aged 85. I was reading one of the collaborative novels she published ("Acorna", written with Margaret Ball), but not enjoying it as much as her earlier books. So rather than review that one for the final quarter of this challenge, I’d like to highlight again some of the Anne McCaffrey originals I fell in love with as a teenager. Upon hearing the sad news, I immediately cast down my current bedtime read ("Eclipse" where Bella gets seriously irritating trying to choose between her vampire and werewolf boyfriends), and ran to my bookshelf for some nostalgia. I straight away grabbed “The Crystal Singer”, which I

The Unicorn's First Blog Award!

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Sometimes it seems blogs are all hard work and no play, but occasionally something happens that reminds you why you do it, and the lovely Jenny Alexander who writes in the House of Dreams has sent me a blog award! Liebster is a German word meaning "dearest", and the award is given to up-and-coming bloggers with less than 200 followers, which means the unicorn qualifies unless 161 people suddenly follow him before he's finished this blog post. According to Jenny, these are the things you should do if you receive the award: 1. Thank the giver and link back to the blogger who gave it to you (tick). 2. Reveal your top 5 picks and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog (the unicorn might bend this rule slightly... see below!). 3. Copy and paste the award on your blog (tick). 4. Hope that the people you’ve sent the award to forward it to their five favourite bloggers (the unicorn is going to modify this rule and suggest UP TO five since he's already ben

HOUSES, HILLTOPS AND HOT AIR BALLOONS by Pauline Fisk

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Today the unicorn welcomes author  Pauline Fisk , who tells us how she came to write her Smarties Prize winning novel MIDNIGHT BLUE, now relaunched just in time for Christmas as an e-book for Kindle... over to you, Pauline! The house stood on the hilltop above my village. In the morning when the sun came up, its windows turned to gold and you could see them shining for miles around. When I first knew it, the house was lived in. But even after its tenants moved out, the farmer who owned it insisting on not replacing them, leaving it to fall down, I always reckoned it was the best house in the county. It wasn’t just its stooping old beams and quarry-tiled floors that made it special, or its inglenook fireplaces and jumble of never-ending rooms, corridors and staircases. It was the view. Hampton Haze stood above Rea Valley, with the hills of Shropshire in front of it - including the rocky Stiperstones - and Wales at its back door. It caught all weathers, which was why, left to its own

Coming on Sunday...

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This Sunday the unicorn will bring you an exclusive guest post by Smarties Prize winning author Pauline Fisk, talking about the magical house she lived in while she was writing her book "Midnight Blue". Curious? Then be sure to visit again next week and leave Pauline a comment!

Winter Warmers

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I know, I know... nothing new posted here for two weeks! What has the unicorn been up to? Well, I do have an excuse. I'm helping my author write her third Pendragon book about King Arthur's daughter , and my poor little unicorn brain can only think about creating one piece of writing at any one time. Bowed horn. But since it's now officially winter, and you humans have been messing around with the clocks so that it gets dark at 5pm, I thought you might like to revisit these lovely posts guaranteed to make you feel warmer: http://reclusivemuse.blogspot.com/2011/02/muse-monday-nis-by-katherine-langrish.html http://authorselectric.blogspot.com/2011/10/trail-of-tale-joan-lennon.html There. Don't you feel warmer already?

Tricks and Treats in Unicorn Wood

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As Katherine’s muse, I naturally have a lot of influence over her work. This week I’d like to point my glittery horn towards her second novel Spellfall , which features a whole herd of unicorns as well as a haunted wood, an old lodge, a mysterious standing stone, an evil Spell Lord, and – since it's set at Halloween – plenty of tricks and treats! This is the only one of Katherine’s books that starts in a supermarket car park in the rain, but strange things are happening the week before Halloween and it’s not long before our heroine Natalie is drawn into a sinister magical plot: Natalie saw the first spell in the supermarket car park. It was floating in a puddle near the recycling bins, glimmering bronze and green in the October drizzle. At first she thought it was a leaf, but as she drew closer it began to look more like a crumpled sweet wrapper – a very interesting sweet wrapper. Pick me up, it seemed to say. Surely I’m worth a closer look? Not everyone sees spells in su

The Mystery of Unicorns

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It didn’t take Katherine’s new publisher Templar very long to find out about me. I suppose an author’s muse is quite important, since without muses where would our poor human authors be? They would just be writing their old stories over and over again… which is only good if their last story happens to be something like Harry Potter. Anyway, Templar wanted a biography of Katherine to go on the last page of her new book – you know, the sort of thing that makes authors appear to lead incredibly exciting lives jumping out of aeroplanes and saving the rainforest etc., accompanied by a photo that makes them look like a beautiful princess or (if they’re men) moody and interesting? The Muse suspects half this stuff is as inventive as the words in their novels, since an author actually leads a very boring life hunched over their computer writing about people jumping out of aeroplanes and saving the rainforest - because if they were doing all of that themselves, they wouldn't have time

The Unicorn’s Great Dream

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What do authors do on their days off? I followed mine when she sneaked away from her computer last weekend and tracked her down at Interrogate! the UK’s first ever festival of social justice, held at the lovely Dartington Hall. This festival used a mixture of debate, dance, and drawing (the artistic kind, not the “hung, drawn and quartered” kind) to interrogate income inequality, which is something Katherine has blogged about , but occurs in all sections of society and not just among authors. Wherever there’s income inequality, they tell us, there’s unhappiness… things got quite heated, and bankers were mentioned a few times (in “hung, drawn and quartered” terms, I have to admit). At this point, judging the audience to be a rather miserable crowd and not noticing my glittery horn at the back, the new Minister for Happiness told us all the secret of being happy… apparently, all you need is a GREAT DREAM. Janet Street-Porter (famous on TV for being a Grumpy Old Woman) has alread

Song Quest cover winner!

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One for Shi Two for Kashe Three for Rialle Four for Kherron Five for the Silver Shore Six for a golden cover… ...and seven for a secret now revealed! Here is the winning Song Quest cover as chosen by YOU (with 54% of the vote, so it was very close). It was designed by Mandy Norman   and drawn by  Johanna Basford , and will be published by Catnip in February 2012, when you’ll be able to read the book and decode the unicorn's changes to the magpie rhyme above (if you haven't already guessed them). And why did a magpie rhyme pop into the unicorn's head today? Well, as every muse knows, magpies like to collect shiny things that take their eye. This might be just a bit of silver foil, but they have been known to whisk away really valuable items to their nests. "Song Quest" caught Catnip’s eye as being the pick of Katherine's backlist titles (because it won an award), so it gets the golden treatment in paperback, while the rest of her backlist is coming out

Song Quest cover vote!

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THE STORY OF THE BOOK . A first novel is always exciting, and the unicorn was kicking up his heels in joy twelve years ago when “Song Quest” first got published in hardback by Element Books. Here’s the original 1999 cover. Katherine was kicking up her heels in joy, too, when she walked into Waterstone’s in Piccadilly and saw 150 copies of her book displayed around the top shelf of the foyer… though I can’t show you a picture to prove it, because that was back in the days before authors could afford digital cameras. In fact Katherine got lost on her way to the book signing after getting off the train at the wrong tube station, and had to run across half of London in her posh boots, which wore a hole in the soles so she had to spend her advance on a new pair... but I digress. The following summer, Song Quest won the very first Branford Boase Award , awarded to the best debut novel for children published that year, and shared between the author and her editor. Here’s my author and So

Seven Fabulous Wonders Competition Update

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Hello, it’s the unicorn again! I apologise for my long absence from my own blog, but slave driver Katherine Roberts has had me chained to her desk finishing Book 2 of the Pendragon Legacy  for delivery to her editor, who will be the first person in the entire world to read it apart from me. Meanwhile Mati the Tygrine cat has been here holding the enchanted mists open for me, and he’s told me you are all wondering what I’ve been up to... Well, apart from working on the new book, I’ve been talking to my author about the reviewing competition she is running for her Seven Fabulous Wonders e-books. As you will know if you’ve been following this blog, the paperbacks are now out of print, but she is re-launching the whole series as e-books between now and February -  details here . ( If you are VERY quick, you might still be able to get the first book The Cleopatra Curse for the bargain price of 86p… this price will rise on 1st September .) So far there has been one brilliant review pos

Exclusive interview with the Tygrine Cat!

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The unicorn would like to introduce you to Mati, the Tygrine Cat, who has come over to this blog today to give his first ever interview… that’s him on the cover of his book, glowing a little (he does that sometimes). As you can probably tell, Mati is no ordinary cat. He is of an ancient bloodline that dates back to a legendary Egyptian queen who gave birth to two magical kittens. The spotted Sa and the red-coated Abyssinian Tygrine have been at each other’s throats ever since, and Mati is the last of his kind. Sent across the sea to England by his mother as a young catling for his own safety, he finds a home of sorts at Cressida Lock market with a gang of feral cats and wise old Sparrow. He also makes a friend of nervous stray Jess, who used to live with a human (called a ‘hind’) but cannot find her way home. The feral cats are wary of any cat who is different from them, and when the marketplace is flooded they blame Mati, even though it was the work of the Sa assassin sent to kill

MUSE MONDAY - Italy "the leg-shaped country" by Mary Hoffman

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This Monday the unicorn is delighted to welcome Mary Hoffman, prize-winning author of over 90 books - that's a LOT of writing! Here she talks about her muse and the inspiration for her latest novel David . Over to you,  Mary... I never thought of myself as having a Muse at all until Katherine's unicorn gave me the opportunity to visit his blog on a Monday. And I was asked to talk to Mariella Frostrup on Radio 4's Open Book recently, with another writer, about the muses of Renaissance artists. That got me thinking. My muse is not an animal, real or mythical, nor yet is it a human source of inspiration like those 19th century women that were were models for the Pre-Raphaelite painters, like Elizabeth Siddall. My muse is a country.  "The leg-shaped country" It began as a youthful crush when I was fourteen and met my Muse for the first time, matured into a full-blown love affair when I was twenty, and has been going strong for decades since. Il

Summer Glitter Madness – 7 books for the price of 1!

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Yes, I thought the sun had gone to my author’s head, too… but it seems she’s just being nice for the summer holidays. She’s making her Seven Fabulous Wonders series re-available as e-books and would like you, loyal unicorn fans and friends, to have the chance to buy them at summer glitter prices. So here’s how it works. On the 1 st of each month, from now until January 2012, one of these titles will be published as an e-book for Kindle at the very special price of 86p in the UK (99 cents in the US). And as a special Xmas gift you'll get the final two books together at the offer price until the end of January. That’s quite a bit less than you’d pay for a birthday card, and you’ll be getting your hands on a professionally edited book that took several years to research and write. Of course my author will be on starvation rations while her books are selling at this price. So for each title this special offer will run for one month only , after which the price of that title will i