Goblin Stew

Sometimes I get an idea for a book title and I like it so much that I try to think of a story to go with it, "Goblin Stew" was like this.

I was very taken with the grubby crazed-looking creatures that the illustrator Brian Froud had drawn in a pop-up book called "Goblins" and with the goblins he had subsequently created for the film "Labyrinth". I decided that I wanted to write my own goblin story and I came up with the title "Goblin Stew". However, it was nearly a year before I had a plot to go with it.

When I first came up with the title, I wasn't sure whether the goblins were going to be an ingredient of the stew, or whether they were simply going to be cooking it. A few months later, I hit upon the idea that the act of cooking the stew might summon the goblins from wherever they come from. I liked the idea of a recipe also being a spell, which could 'conjure up' magical creatures, but I couldn't get any further with it, so I put it to one side for another few months. Then I came up with the idea that the recipe was discovered inside a mysterious cookbook and I was, at last, able to start writing the story.

Once I started writing about the cookbook, the titles of the other recipes -'Serpent Soup', 'Ghostly Goulash' - immediately suggested other stories to me. And I finished writing the outlines to the next three books before I had completed writing the first.

When Emma Matthewson, the editor at Bloomsbury, looked at the first draft, she told me it was too short. It needed to be at least half as long again. She was also unhappy with the series title 'The Conjuror's Cookbook' since there was no Conjuror in the story. I was very keen to keep this title, so the second, longer, draft of the story included the letter from Great Aunt Elinor explaining how she met the Conjuror in the heart of the jungle.

In the first draft, the cookbook was just an ordinary book. But in the second draft, it became something more mysterious and magical. It's not intelligent, but it is aware of its surroundings. Most of my ideas for the book's behaviour came from "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" an interactive children's book featured in Neal Stephenson's adult science fiction novel "The Diamond Age". This sophisticated electronic book can pick up on its environment and its owner's needs and automatically presents the story's heroine with relevant information.