It might be an “excellent tale” but The Window Seat Reporter is a bloody peculiar one. I think my weird brain was at the height of its weirdness when I wrote this aged 14… #authorsofinstagram #amwriting #childhoodwriting #stories

Found lots of my old school stories yesterday. It seems I’ve always had a problem with switching between tenses in my stories… #writing #stories #tenses

Rediscovered today, tucked inside the @ladybirdbooks Birds of Prey, possibly my first ever story, written c. aged 6. .
This is the story of John and Alfonse and the first two cards were dictated by me to my Dad, and the third was written by me with suspect phonetic spelling… .
#earlyworks #stories #authorsofinstagram

Regular observers of this feed will know that I write. You might not know that I am part of a family of writers… #imaginaryfriends #dragons???? #buttons #greekmyths #norsemythology #amwriting #amreading #TEShepherd #AndyShepherd #DeborahShepherd #books #storytelling #stories

Oxford’s Story Museum: a place where creativity and imagination lives and unfolds… @thestorymuseum #stories #imagination #dreams #nofilter

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

Whilst Lemony Snicket took the approach that:

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”

Whichever way you look at it, I have always been, and cannot imagine a time when I won’t be, a bookaholic. I live to consume stories. When I was little a book was the first thing I turned to in the morning, and the last thing I went to at night. Whilst with the pressures of the adult, working life, might have pushed out the former, the latter is still a habit that I just can’t live without.

My wife has long since resigned herself to the inevitable fact that we live in a small library – 1,723 books at the last count… But the truth is I love stories, and stories love me.

What was the first novel you read? 

That’s easy. It was Swallows & Amazons – much to my Mum’s disappointment as she was looking forward to reading the next chapter to me but I had already read ahead.

I’ve always read, and making up stories. I wrote my first ‘novel’ aged 9 – The Fantasy World of Ioleme – and I still have it somewhere. When I was younger, and by younger I mean anything pre-30 I think, I wasn’t good at discussing my reading with people. Blogs, online journals, Facebook, and Twitter are great places for that, and for that reason I’ve decided to connect my writing, and my reading, with other people’s reading (that’s any reading, not just the reading of my books!) in the T E Shepherd Reading Café. Why not come along and take part?

A little bit about how #stories are born… #books???? #amreading #thenightcircus???? @erinmorgenstern

If, nine years ago, you had told me that my second published book would be about a man who marries his imaginary friend then I think I would have laughed. If you had gone on to say that the idea for this story would have come from a misunderstanding in the car on the way to just another day at the office, then I would have teased you mercilessly. But that, in short is the story of how my Mr Tumnal came about.

A little after 7.30am on Wednesday 9 August 2006 I had just collected my friend Caroline for the car-share to work. It was one of those beautiful summer mornings but with a slight crispness to the air. Some of the leaves had just started turning and the hedgerows were beginning to fill with berries.

I can still remember starting off a conversation and being (understandably, I think…) confused when Caroline replied by asking who Mr Tumnal was! And I was really confused because all I’d said was, ‘It’s a bit autumnal today’. But that little misunderstanding got us both wondering – about whom exactly Mr Tumnal really was. Certain facts came immediately: he was an English teacher, he loved photography, he wore corduroys and a jacket with patches on the elbows, he was old before his time… and a bit of a loner.

It being the summer holidays, we were spared the traffic chaos of the school run, and the commute took exactly 45 minutes and we had the character fleshed out. Another 45 minutes on the return journey and we had the beginnings of what his story was. I obsessed over the character for two days, and after a visit to the fish’n’chips shop on Friday came up with some early first pages – scenes that never even made the first draft of the book, but did see the appearance of his daughter’s friend Caz.

At the time I remember thinking that there might not be a full novel in his story, but certainly a novella. But I was busy writing the final chapters of Blood & Fire (the book that became The End Of All Worlds and my first novel) and so Mr Tumnal went to rest in my notebook for three years until I started writing it on my honeymoon in Scotland.

Even when I finished writing that second novel in the summer of 2013 (in a thunderstorm in the garden if I remember rightly…) Mr Tumnal’s story was only ever going to be a standalone adventure. It’s only in the last few months that the characters of the book have demanded I write two more stories based in his world. I never thought that would happen nine years ago today!

Here’s to mishearings and car shares! Cheers, Louis Tumnal!

If you had heard me correctly then we may never have spent the next 45 minute commute discovering who Mr Tumnal was… And then, a further 45 minutes in the afternoon working out what his story is. Thank you.

READ MR TUMNAL FOR FREE FOR ONE DAY ONLY

To celebrate Mr Tumnal’s 9th anniversary, you can download and read the eBook for free for one day only today, Sunday 9 August 2015!

READ MR TUMNAL FOR FREE FOR ONE DAY ONLY

Then we had lunch on the quay before driving north up the coast to my all time favourite childhood haunt of Covehithe. St Andrew’s Church at Covehithe is the tiniest parish church you’ll ever find with the biggest, most out of proportion tower attached – its built in the ruins of an older church. The church never needed to be the size it was, but was built large and grand to show the status and wealth of its benefactor. Now, it sits perilously close to a crumbling cliff edge, and we’re told the latest estimates is that it only has until 2068 before it is swallowed up by the sea along with the manor house and cottages that surround it.

It used to be that you could either park at the church and walk down to Covehithe Broad, or drive on down the road and park up just before a barrier and talk along the cliffs to Benacre Broad. Now there is only one option, to park by the church and walk down through fields of pigs to the beach, and double-back (so long as the tide allows) for a 2 mile walk down the beach to get to Benacre. With a threatening sky, and the fear of less tide time than we thought, we saw sandmartins nesting in the cliffs, a WW2 bunker falling out the cliffs, and driftwood in the making from trees from the woodland above as they slipped onto the beach. 

I have also come up with a new idea for a story based on Covehithe church. This one is a dark tale set 60 years from now. It’s not post-apocolyptic but it is a world where there are energy shortages, and electricity is rationed. Not everyone has cars anymore, dual carriageways have become spacious boulevards, and using The Internet is something you can only do at The Library (unless you are very well off), and the church of protagonists childhood is living on the borrowed time on the cliff edge as another storm is coming in from the sea.

This is a must read for anyone and everyone who loves Fairy Tale. Published as one of Oxford University Press’ brilliant and incredible Short Introduction series of books and written by one of the world’s authorities on the subject this is a book to keep with you as companion to everything you read, and everywhere you go.

It’s one of those books that makes you want to quote from it on just about every, single, page. Its incredibly insightful, and very, very readable. I’ve learnt a lot, and I’ve also added a ton of stories and books and documentaries to my To Read/Watch/Listen to pile.