Famous by association

So today in my Child and the Book class we had Stuart Hill come in and talk to us. Of course, I had no idea who Stuart Hill was, but it turns out that he wrote a fantasy-type novel called The Cry of the Icemark, and it has done alright for itself here in the UK. I guess it's doing okay in the US as well, because he says he gets quite a few letters from American teenagers, but not so many from British teenagers: "Because I think maybe American teenagers are just a bit more forthright, whereas British teenagers are probably just picking their noses or something." So now they're publishing a 2nd installment and he's writing the 3rd now. Because trilogies are good things, unless you're talking about things like Austen Powers. The idea that anyone thought two more Austen Powers movies belonged in the world just proves that any day now the earth is going to burst into flames. Feel free to argue with me--I have no problem with you being wrong.

So Stuart Hill is a pretty cool-seeming guy. He said he wrote stuff for 31 years before anything got published, and told us great stories about different jobs he had during that time, like the just-out-of-high-school job in a car manufacturing plant that didn't have bathrooms or running water, so employees had to pee out the windows. That made him decide to go to college. Then he became an archaeologist, so he had lots of cool stories to tell us about anthrax pits and contaminated wells with horse skeletons and chamber pots in them (which, you know, could have been the problem).

Also he said that he spent years and years "reading the market," which is what all the How to Get Published books said to do. So when crime fiction was in, he wrote crime fiction, etc. But it wasn't until he just chucked it all and wrote a book that he wanted to read that things happened. Which I thought was good advice, really.

Stuart Hill said his favorite comfort read is King Solomon's Mines, which I, um, had never heard of before. It reminds him of his favorite teacher, who used to read the classics to them. He asked us what our comfort reads are, and my mind went blank. Because when I hear "comfort reads" I think "comfort food," which makes me immediately think of beef stroganoff, and then all I want to do is eat vat after creamy fattening vat of the stuff.

But then once I thought about it I would have to say mine are A Little Princess or any the first five books of the Anne of Green Gables series (Books 6-8 are about Anne's obnoxious kids, and I so don't care about them and their smarmy "mummy dearwums" rubbish). Also the Little House on the Prairie series, because I read them over and over again in elementary school and used to daydream about what it would be like to live on the frontier and battle the elements and get all excited about getting 1 whole piece of candy for Christmas. Only then I moved to Alaska and found out that battling the elements is crap, and that when you're battling the elements you'd better have truckloads of candy and beef stroganoff, because otherwise you have to eat your sled dogs.

I still like the books, though.

Posted in: England