Robin Stevens's Blog, page 13

December Video: Festive Gift Guide!

Hello detectives! For my last video of this year, I decided to make a whistle-stop tour through some of my favourite books of the year, to help you with all your book gifting needs! I hope you enjoy it – and enjoy the holidays!

I’ll be back with more videos next year – thank you so much for watching, everyone!

Writing Prompt Mondays: Prompt 25

First of all, huge congratulations to everyone who attempted last month’s NaNoWriMo challenge! Whether or not you met your writing goal or not (and I know a lot of you did – incredible work!), just taking part was a big step – and this year especially, anything you managed to write should be celebrated as a big win!

I was really impressed with all of the writing samples you posted. I particularly liked Edith’s Hunger Games fanfiction (completed lower down in the comments!), Elise’s evocative music-box doll story, Lucy B’s boarding school story and Inaya’s story about a British soldier in India, but you are all winners in my book!

This month’s prompt is the 25th, and the last of 2020. I first started these prompts in the spring, during the first lockdown in the UK. It’s been such a strange, hard year, and I feel so proud of everyone who’s taken part over the last eight months. You’ve supported each other so wonderfully, and it’s been such a joy to see your skill and creativity grow with each story you post.

The first prompt of 2020 was all about history, and so I think it’s fitting that the last should be about the opposite. I’d like you to write about the future.

As usual, you can interpret this in any way you want. You can write about your ideal (or nightmare!) future, you can write about what you imagine will happen in six months or in six hundred years, you can write about a future very different to today or one that is almost the same. You can write fanfiction, you can write a poem, you can write a song or a play script – whatever you want!

The rules, one last time for 2020:

It can be as long or as short as you like, and take you as much or as little time as you want.It can be any genre (type) of story you want. If you have an idea for something that I haven’t mentioned, don’t wait for my permission – just go for it! This is your creativity working!You are not allowed to worry about grammar or spelling.You are not allowed to worry if it isn’t perfect, or criticise yourself as you’re writing.You are encouraged to make a plan before you begin, to make it easier for you to get to the end of the story. This can be two words or a whole page! But if you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to.Get to the end of the story without stopping to go back and fix bits you don’t like. Once you’ve finished, read it through again. If you still don’t like those bits, you can edit them now!If you want (and only if you want!) you’re allowed to post the first 500 words of your story in the comments below. I have to moderate the comments so it may take a while for them to show up – please be patient. I don’t want to see you apologising for your story or minimising what you’ve done when you post – writing a story is a triumph and you should be proud!Please do not use your full name when you comment – first names are fine, or you can make up a username that you like! Also remember to stay safe online and not get into private discussions with anyone you don’t know in real life without telling an adult first.If you like someone else’s story, you are allowed to comment to say so! If you’d like to give them ideas that might make their story even stronger, that’s OK, but please be kind and remember how deeply we all care about our writing. A good format for feedback might be something like: ‘I loved ****! Have you thought of ****? I think it might make your story even better!’ I will delete any comment if I feel it’s critical without being constructive.I can’t promise to give feedback on any individual stories – I’m not marking them!This isn’t a competition, and there will be no winners and no prizes, though I may choose a story or two to highlight in future posts.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the end of these prompts. I’ll be back in the second week of January 2021 (a bit later that usual because I won’t be back from my Christmas break on Monday 4th yet!) to give you your first prompt of the new year. Stay safe and happy, wherever you are, and enjoy whatever holiday (if any!) you’re celebrating. And thank you again for making these prompts so much fun to post!

Happy Mistletoe and Murder season, Detectives!

It’s the first of December – which means that it’s finally the perfect time of year to read Hazel and Daisy’s most festive adventure!

It’s also, of course, the time when you might be looking for present ideas for yourself and your loved ones. I’m going to create a festive gift guide for you soon, but for now you might enjoy my top five children’s books of 2020, or my story about the best book I was given for Christmas as a child.

And remember that if you want to order a signed and personalised copy of any of my books, just head to the Round Table Books website!

Enjoy this month, Detectives, wherever you are!

Signed and Personalised Copies of all of my books available from Round Table!

I’m very pleased to end the week by sharing something that’s been in the works for a long time: I’ve partnered up with Round Table Books in Brixton to offer fans anywhere in the world the chance to buy signed and personalised copies of every single one of my books!

I’m hoping that this offer will carry on for a while, but if there’s something you specifically want to give as a Christmas or Hannukah gift, please order as soon as possible, as international postage deadlines are coming up in a few weeks. If you can’t see your country of residence on the order menu, don’t worry – this is just an oversight, rather than an exclusion. Get in touch with Round Table to let them know, and they’ll sort it out as soon as possible. And if you have any other queries – you’ve ordered the book to the wrong person, for example, or you’re struggling to find the thing you want – ask Round Table for help and they’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

You’ll also see a signed edition of Once Upon a Crime available – please be aware that you can pre-order that now, but it won’t arrive with you until the book publishes in August 2021!

Shedunnit podcast – Death on the Nile and Death Sets Sail!

I’m very excited to have been asked back on the Shedunnit show (a podcast all about Golden Age detective fiction) to talk about Death Sets Sail, Death on the Nile and the enduring appeal of Egypt as a location for murder mysteries.

I loved talking to Caroline (even though we recorded the episode during the fourth day of the US election last week when I was running on very little sleep and very high anxiety – you’ll hear me forget the words ‘Abu Simbel’ and that’s why!), and I hope you enjoy listening to us too.

Just to let you know that although we do discuss plots, there are NO SPOILERS for the solutions of either Death on the Nile or Death Sets Sail. Also, although I would say that this episode is perfect for my fans of any age, the show itself is created with adult listeners in mind and so it’s possible that not every episode will be as universally appropriate.

You can listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts – happy listening!

Schools: join me in my Puffin author webinar on the 4th of December!

This week I’m doing a series of virtual visits with schools in Scotland, as part of the Scottish Friendly Children’s Book Tour. If your school is one of those meeting me, I really hope you enjoy it! And if you don’t go to school in Scotland, or you missed out on this tour, I have good news for you: there’s going to be one more chance for school groups to meet me this year!

I’m partnering with my publisher Puffin and the At Home with 4 Indies group to bring you a very special FREE event centred around Death Sets Sail on the 4th December at 10:30am. You can watch with your school group of any size, or as a home educator – and if you send in questions by the 2nd of December you’ll have a chance that I’ll answer yours live on air!

Sign up here – I’m really looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible!

New Book Announcement: Once Upon a Crime is coming in 2021!

Ever since Mistletoe and Murder published in 2016, fans have been asking me whether I was ever going to write a story about Uncle Felix and Aunt Lucy’s wedding. And ever since Death Sets Sail published in August, fans have been asking me whether that book really was the end for the Detective Society, or whether I might return to Hazel and Daisy’s world with short stories about them to bridge the gap between Death Sets Sail and my new series set during WW2, The Ministry of Unladylike Activity.

I haven’t been able to answer either of those questions … until today, when I can finally reveal that, even though the first book in The Ministry of Unladylike Activity series won’t publish until 2022, I have a brand-new book of short stories about the Detective Society and their friends publishing in August 2021!

Once Upon a Crime is a mix of old favourites and new stories. It collects up The Case of the Missing Treasure and The Case of the Drowned Pearl for readers who haven’t been able to get hold of them yet (Pearl, in particular, hasn’t been available outside the UK and Ireland, and I know that readers in Australia, New Zealand and America have been desperate to read it – so here it is for you at last!).

You’ll also find four stories that haven’t ever been published before. There’s The Case of the Uninvited Guest, the account of exactly what happened at Uncle Felix and Aunt Lucy’s wedding. I actually first wrote this story in 2017 – and I’m very excited that you’ll finally get to read it!

Then there’s The Case of the Second Scream, a story that I also plotted way back in 2017 but never wrote out in full until this year. A few of you may have played through the online quiz based on it, when A Spoonful of Murder first published, but I liked it so much that I thought it should be properly told – and it now comes with a brand new beginning and ending that you definitely don’t want to miss if you’re wondering what happened to your favourite detectives after Death Sets Sail …

George and Alexander get their very own story in The Hound of Weston School, with a plot inspired by my favourite Sherlock Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles. I wrote this story in the middle of the first UK lockdown, in spring this year, just a few weeks before we got our little hound, Howl …

And finally, if you want to hear more from May Wong before she appears as one of the three main characters in The Ministry of Unladylike Activity in 2022, you’ll get your chance in May Wong and the Deadly Flat. It’s 1939 and Britain has just declared war on Germany … and May is convinced that she’s discovered a murder in Uncle Felix and Aunt Lucy’s block of flats …

I’m really proud of these stories, and so excited for you to read them. You can pre-order Once Upon a Crime now from Amazon, Blackwell’s, Eason or Waterstones – or direct from your local independent bookstore!

We’ll have more announcements early next year about the cover colour, and the final cover – as always, it’s going to be illustrated by Nina Tara – so stay tuned for that. But please do start sharing your excitement here – I’m so pleased to finally be able to tell you that I will have a new book for you next year after all!

Some Wonderful News for The Book of Hopes!

Way back during the first lockdown here in the UK I was asked by fellow children’s author Katherine Rundell to contribute to a project she was calling The Book of Hopes. I wrote a short piece called ‘The Comfort of Crime Fiction’, and I became one of 133 contributors to the anthology, both authors and illustrators.

The book was first available for free online – it’s now also been published as a gorgeous hardback edition. And in the last few weeks we’ve been given some amazing pieces of news about it.

First of all, it’s going to be released as an audiobook, read by Stephen Fry, Helena Bonham Carter and Ben Bailey Smith. My essay is read by Helena Bonham Carter, which just feels incredible to be able to say.

And we’ve just heard that The Book of Hopes has been shortlisted for the Waterstones Book of the Year 2020, along with authors like Bolu Babalola, David Olusoga and Dara McAnulty. It’s such an amazing honour, and I’m so proud of everyone involved in the project, especially Katherine Rundell and the whole team at Bloomsbury.

I hope that if you have read it, it’s helped fill you with resolve and joy. It can feel like there’s not much to go around this year, but I promise you that it’s still there if you go looking for it.

Writing Prompt Mondays: Prompt 24, NaNoWriMo edition!

I can’t believe it’s November already, Detectives! This year seems to be going very slowly but also incredibly fast. Wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing, I hope you’re safe and well – and still enjoying these prompts!

I loved reading last month’s monster stories – they were all so wonderfully dark and inventive! I particularly enjoyed Edith’s Miss Peregrine fanfic, Astrophysics’ story about Analee lost in space, Grace’s clever poem about the monsters in all of us, Bella123’s dystopian story and Mapenzi’s creepy monster island story.

For this month, I’m going to ask you to do something a bit different. You’ll have noticed that I’ve posted this on a Sunday, instead of on a Monday as usual – and also that the title of this post isn’t quite like all of the others.

That’s because for this month I’m not going to give you a topic to write about. Instead, I’m going to give you a challenge: participate in NaNoWriMo!

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month (National refers to the USA, though it’s now a worldwide challenge). Every November, writers all over the world try to write 50,000 words of a book in 30 days. Back in 2010, I entered NaNoWriMo with a book idea that I was calling A Most Unladylike Murder. I was working full-time in Blackwell’s Bookstore in Oxford, so I had to make up the daily wordcount in lunch breaks, evenings and early mornings. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I found trying to write 1,667 words every single day really scary and stressful. I was used to being given as much time as I wanted to finish a story, and used to polishing every sentence until it was perfect before I went onto the next one.

But! At the end of the month I had 50,025 words of a book – pretty bad words, but words that I was able to edit over the next few years into much better ones. And of course, that book became Murder Most Unladylike, and that’s the reason why you’re on this website in 2020! NaNoWriMo taught me to write fast, it taught me that it’s OK for the the first draft to be ugly and it taught me how to push on even when I don’t feel particularly inspired.

Now, I’m not asking you to write 50,000 words! You’re busy with school or college, and 50,000 words is a lot. But these days NaNoWriMo has a program for young writers that allows you to input your own word count goals. You can choose how many days of the month you want to be writing (so you don’t get stressed trying to balance school work with writing), and how many words you want to write every day. If you’re under 13 you need to work with an adult to set up your profile – and even if you’re over 13 I’d suggest talking with an adult to choose your target, so they know what you’re doing and can support you as you write! If you’re in Grade 6 (which I think is Year 7 in the UK) they’re suggesting a top goal of 5,000 words for the whole month – my advice is to be hopeful but realistic. It’s better to win with a shorter goal than set yourself an impossible target!

Please remember, as always, to stay safe online – don’t get into private discussions with anyone you don’t know in real life, and talk to safe adults about what you’re doing and what sites you’re visiting.

So my challenge to you this month is to win NaNoWriMo by writing a story about anything you want, with a total wordcount that you’ve chosen for yourself! Your wordcount can be anything from 500 words to 50,000 – no one will give you marks for writing more words, so choose something achievable rather than something impressive if you’re worried you might not finish. I’m hoping that you’ll be able to use all the skills you’ve learnt over the past months, and I’m hoping that finishing a project will make you feel prouder than ever of your writing.

You can use prompt ideas I gave you in previous prompts, but you cannot use a story you’ve already written. You have to start fresh!

Once you’ve hit your target, come back here and post the first 500 words of your story so we can all read it, and congratulate you on your win! And if you don’t get to your target by the end of the month, that’s OK. You’ve still learned something about yourself and your writing, and you’ll be able to get further next time you try.

So good luck, Detectives! I’m cheering you on!

October update video: How I Research!

My October update video is here – and it’s all about Ministry of Unladylike Activity research! I share some of the books that I’ve found helpful so far, and explain the kinds of resources that you should be looking for in your research.

Enjoy – and make sure you’re watching this website next month, as I’ll have a very exciting announcement for you!