Reading is not dead. Kids are just busy doing other stuff

We authors used to moan that you kids would rather watch TV than read. But now it turns out kids would rather go online than watch TV.

“What will the world come to if kids don’t’ read?” we blub as we dunk our heads in the toilet in despair.

I beg to disagree. The fact is you guys today are more than literate – you are transliterate! You’re writing more than you ever did before the idiot box was invented. You are creating images, videos and music that you share with each other online. You can photoshop, download, upload, fade in and fade out. You are more connected than we middle-agers ever were in our heyday (the truth is, our generation was the couch potato generation – and eighties TV really sucked) !

So as an author, I think I’ve got to raise my game. If I want you guys to read my books, then I’ve got to do it at your level. Which is a really tough act to follow but I’m going to try.

So this blog is about the making of my book Volcano Child. A bit like the online production notes Peter Jackson kept when he was making King Kong.

Volcano Child features a witch, a volcano with a legend that hangs over it like a curse, a lonely girl, and a little boy trying to tunnel his way to London from the other side of the world.

A lot of it is based on true stories. I was a journalist in the Philippines and I spent a lot of time with witches (guess what – nobody would publish my witch stories because they were too weird!).

And of course there is a volcanic eruption based on a really scary volcano that blew up in 1991. The picture above was taken by Alberto Garcia, an amazing photographer colleague from my days as a magazine editor in Manila. Gives me the chills. Don’t worry they outraced the volcano – all that smoke is called a pyroclastic flow by the way and it travels at speeds up to 100mph and is more than 1,200 degrees fahrenheight. Roasts you faster than a microwave.

Every other mountain in the Philippines is a volcano because it sits on the Pacific ring of fire – the world is cracked and the crack runs over Indonesia and the Philippines all the way up to Japan, round the top of the world down the California side of the Americas – which means leaking magma, which means earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.

But more about that later.

Volcano Child is a finished manuscript. 55,460 words at the moment and I’ve rewritten it twice already and I’m probably going to rewrite it again – so you’ve got a chance to get involved in the making of this novel. I could sure use some help with plotlines and characters.

But no, it isn’t published yet. So this is where you can follow my travails as I try to sell it to agents and publishers. I’ll try not to whine too much.

And then maybe someday, if and when it's published, you'll want to read my book.