Zitat des Tages von Ransom Riggs:
Woodcuts have a really timeless sort of feel, and they feel like a book that's a couple hundred years old.
Every snapshot collector has obsessions. Some only collect photos of cars. Others like World War II, or babies, or old-timey girls in old-timey swimsuits. I happen to collect the weird stuff: photos that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up a little. The uncanny.
It was at a big swap meet that I discovered you could buy other people's old discarded family photos and vacation pictures for pretty cheap - a quarter, 50 cents, five bucks for a really nice one.
I think my background in film taught me that a great book adaptation is not always slavishly faithful to the source material.
It was painful, but I really wanted to get 'Hollow City' right, and I'm glad I put in the time because I'm really proud of it.
My happy place is 40 feet out in the Gulf of Mexico, sitting on a sandbar in 80-degree water, watching clouds crawl by. Absolute heaven.
In 'Hollow City,' I'm taking all the characters out of the lives they've been secure in for years and plunging them into the unknown. That's how you really get to know them.
I'm getting a lot of mail from readers, and I'd say 90% seem to be from adults, which amazes me. But then again, I can only write what I imagine I'd like to read, and I'm an adult, so maybe it's not so surprising after all.
I'd always wanted to write a novel, but after attending film school, I'd spent five years knocking on Hollywood's door and had put that idea aside.
Pine View was a great school for me - it made it safe to be a nerd. It was okay to really care about doing your homework and doing well in school.
'The Tales' are an important part of 'Hollow City,' when the kids discover secrets encoded in them that end up saving their lives. I wrote two tales as part of 'Hollow City,' and spent the next couple of years finishing the trilogy but itching to write more tales.
I try to imagine the scenes as I'm writing them as if I were watching them play like a film.
You'll find a lot of rich detail in people's personal histories - diaries and journals and things of the era.
Ghost stories and Sherlock Holmes mysteries were great. And I had a major soft spot for those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books.
I went to film school, trained as a director, have made a lot of movies, and taken a lot of photographs, so I tend to envision things spatially. As I'm working, I need to have a map of the space. I need to know what's happening in all corners simultaneously.
Some days, I would find what seemed like entire family trees, torn from once-treasured albums and dumped in disorganized bins, selling 10 for a dollar. I wondered how people could give up pictures of their great-grandparents for complete strangers to paw through - or why complete strangers would want them.
I wanted to create characters who could do fantastic things but who weren't exactly superheros - characters who exist on sort of a spectrum from super-ability to disability.
The end of 'Hollow City' left the peculiar children in a very precarious spot, and that's just where 'Library of Souls' begins.
I have an unusual hobby: I collect pictures of people I don't know. It started when I was a kid growing up in South Florida, the land of junk stores, garage sales, and flea markets, as a kind of coping mechanism.
For a 12-year-old with a hyperactive imagination who liked to dream of dreary gothic castles, suburban Florida felt a little stifling.
Just keep saying yes to everything - until you can afford to say no.
Creepy is better than just plain scary because you can't look away from creepy - you want to know the truth!
I just can't fathom this fame thing; I'm a total newbie.
I fell in love with London and one particular era in London.
Fairy tales and folk tales are part of the DNA of all stories and great fun to write.
My creativity thrives with limitations.
When you're looking through bins of thousands of random, unsorted photos, every hundredth one or so will have some writing on it.
I love building out the worlds of my fiction with fictional books.
