Blog Nine: Mysteries and Excitements

Seems to me that you have to go down to the bottom of the blogs and start from there, otherwise everything is in the wrong order. Well, never mind. You are all clever, you can manage that.

Anyway, we have some news. The paperback of LIONBOY: THE TRUTH is about to come out, on February 2. You may think it is very exciting for a writer when a book comes out but actually very little happens - except you get to feel a bit special all day. When the hardback comes out for the first time you get reviews in the papers and interviews and maybe you go on the radio, and you have a party, and that of course is a lot of fun. People make speeches about how wonderful you are, and you want to hide under the table, while at the same time kind of loving it.

Then if it comes out in other countries you might get to go there, which is rather wonderful. Because you're dealing with people from the country, it's not like being on holiday - you're working, doing interviews and so on, but you're a guest too, and everyone is nice to you and takes you around. It's a great way to be involved with a country. We've been to Thailand and Japan, Argentina, Spain, Holland, the USA, Germany and Austria. I'll do a blog about that soon, and put up some pictures...

By the time the paperback of the third book of a trilogy comes out no-one's giving you parties any more, and anyway you are writing something new, and your whole mind is on that. However - for the reader, it's different. Now The Truth is in paperback, it's cheap! So everyone can get their own copy.

In fact, we are now writing a new new thing. We have our Mystery Book, about the boy theif and the strange book and the tiny little dragons, which I will tell you more about in due course, coming out next February (only a year to go now, Ryan!); but we also have our even more mystery NEW PROJECT, which is such a brilliant idea that we can't tell you anything about it at all. Except that it is completely brilliant and has five kids in it, called Toni, Fig, Sophia, Zed and Treva. Treva is Japanese. There is no talking to cats. It's nothing like Lionboy (except in its brilliance).



I don't think that's giving too much away....



Oh, and the publishers don't even know about it yet. Haha - now we will find out if they read the ZizouBlog!


Other news: Young Zizou is learning to play the guitar. Old Zizou has a bad arm from too much excited typing. Zizou the lizard is hibernating. We had a leaky loo and the next thing the floorboards were up, the loo was in the hall and the basin was in the front garden. Bit of a shock.


And there's a new interview with us in National Geographic Kids magazine. You can find it on http://www.ngkids.co.uk/ngkids/stories/lion-boy/


Right - better go and write a book. Cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeers.

Norwegian hanging fish kebab having a kip...

And here it is... grass on the roof.

Blog Seven: They did have grass on the roof...

... in Norway, and it was covered in daisies, and very nice too. And they had a museum made entirely of little wooden houses that they had brought by lorry from all over Norway and put up again in the special museum field in Oslo. All the houses looked as if they would have little old ladies living in them who would eat you at the drop of a hat, and they had little built-in wooden beds by the stove, and wooden verandahs, and carved rooves with dragon heads, and they were very beautiful. But the best thing we saw was a very small dog. It was so small it couldn't climb the kerb. Its owner had to pick it up. Isabel thought that perhaps it was a guinea pig in disguise.

Other Norwegian things:
1 Norwegian Italian restaurants. We had a kebab on a skewer and they hung the skewer from a hook so our dinner was upright. This was a little confusing.
2 Water busses: If you live on the other side of the bay from the main bit of Oslo you can go to work on a boat. You get on and off at boat stops, which are like bus stops only for boats, and with water where the road might be. This reminded us of when Rafi arrived in Venice. There's a famous story about a journalist arriving in Venice and not knowing what to expect sent a telegram back to his boss saying 'Streets full of water. please advise'.
3 Really nice ribbons. One day a year they all wear national dress, which is very woolly and warm, and involves knee breeches and blouses and pinafores with full skirts and ribbons sewn on. The ribbons can be very fancy and very beautiful. We bought some to make into bracelets. So far Isabel has made four and I have made one. We cut some ribbon to the length of a wrist, plus a bit; sew some felt on to the back, then sew a popper on the end. Then it is a bracelet.
4 A statue of a lion outside the publishers' office. We sat on it to have our photo taken. We thought it would be quite funny if all the photographers had the same idea and we would appear in all the Norwegian papers and magazines sitting on the same lion. Photographers are peculiar. They always want you to do something new and often it involves lying on the floor.