Ghosts of Hill Hall

Gosh, what a busy year it's been so far. Lots of work, getting a picture book draft together for my lovely agents at Bright to take to Bologna last week, and somehow finding time to play all the way through Mass Effect 3. I know, I know - I'm a very robust and determined specimen.

Anyway, there's nothing that urgently needs doing today, and it's freaking me out. A clever person would go and bask on the beach. A stupid person would stay indoors and make the first new post in living memory appear on their blog. So here it is.

These pics were commissioned by Pearson Education for a trio of books aimed at helping older children with reading difficulties, thus the text is very simple and heavily interspersed with deliberately mature, dark illustrations. I guess you could say they're half picture book, half illustrated fiction - best of both worlds, for my money.

There's something about "olden" settings which automatically makes me work in an old fashioned style, in the same way as not quite so olden settings automatically make me work in a, well, not-quite-so old fashioned style. Might make an effort to mix things up from here on, 'could be fun.