Tell it to the Bees has become a film! I sat in the audience and watched the characters I’d thought up, and named, and imagined into being on the page, brought to life on the huge cinema screen in Toronto’s Winter Garden Theatre. So exciting! The film is beautiful, with some lovely performances. Some things …
Very excited that Tell it to the Bees is going to Cannes: longing to see all that’s been made out of my story!
Out now, and looking very handsome. I’m delighted with it. More about it here.
Last week I climbed four flights of narrow stairs to a small room at (nearly) the top of a tatty building off Oxford Circus. At a large desk in front of the window: two screens and all the techie stuff for film editing. Against a side wall: lines of thumbnail photos, a short caption to …
It’s so exciting to get hands on a real book-shaped object finally, after the years of grind, and the sheaves of paper, and the months in front of a screen. This is what it’s come to, these pages all bound and shiny. I had a great time in Oxford at my publisher, David Fickling Books, …
Forget the director, the DP, the script, the crew, the sets, the camera, the catering lorry, costumes, make-up, portaloos, SFX. Forget the actors even. I know now: films get made on gaffer tape! After five weeks, they ‘wrapped’ the filming of Tell it to the Bees last Saturday. It was an extraordinary experience, for me, …
…see the Bookseller here. Exciting, and so nearly real now!
Borders have never been more fiercely debated, defended, contested, climbed over, tunnelled under, drawn and redrawn than they are today. So there is no better time or place for a short story competition on that theme than right here and now. So if you have an idea, a spark, an image for a short story …
So next week they begin filming Tell it to the Bees, somewhere north of Glasgow. I am VERY excited, and slightly weirded out. It’s a very odd experience. My fiction, and now also somebody else’s interpretation of my fiction. The two female leads are to be played by Anna Paquin and Holliday Grainger. And the part of …
I spent the best part of January 2016 in spectacular Hawthornden Castle (see earlier post for photo), Lasswade, Scotland: the writers’ retreat set up by Mrs Drue Heinz, that offers month-long residencies to writers: uninterrupted time to write. Snow on the ground, a hot water bottle on my lap while I wrote, ancient stones, deer …