I've found the project quite a challenge, but exciting too, because it will be the only one of its kind on the market. If all goes well with the rights clearances there will be stories or extracts from Michael Hardcastle, Jan Mark, Malorie Blackman, Jacqueline Wilson, P G Wodehouse, Thomas Hughes, Walter Dean Myers, Ring Lardner and many more. I've contributed one story and am currently working on a retelling of the funeral games from the Iliad. It's a real mixed bag, as you can see. I'd just come back from a trip to the Orkneys on the Readiscovery book bus and my head was full of all the Viking stuff I'd seen there.
Religion is a theme that many children's writers seem wary of tackling.
But in the story just mentioned, and of course in THE GOOD BOOK, you push it to the fore. Religion has been a preoccupation throughout my writing life. I don't come from a religious background, but I started singing in a church choir at the age of nine or ten and most of my closest friends as a teenager were connected with the youth group attached to a number of churches in the area where I grew up. I've always believed in God, but my faith has fluctuated in intensity over the years. Whether or not there's an after-life and what form it might take is the most persistent thorn in my flesh.