Twenty-seven years ago today, on May 8th 1997, I was sitting in a car, babysitting a young cousin who was asleep in the back, when I had an idea for a book about a young boy who runs into a vampire at a circus and ends up reluctantly becoming his assistant as a creature of the night. A few days later I began writing the first draft of the book that I had decided to call... Cirque Du Freak!!

I had no idea at the time that this would change my life forever. I'd been writing full-time for a couple of years, and had written lots of books, all intended for adult readers. I was making a bit of headway with them, and assumed they would be my bread-and-butter if I was going to be able to make a career out of this writing lark. Cirque Du Freak was a side-project. I didn't think there was any money to be made writing for children, and I wasn't sure if I'd be any good at it -- I thought it would be difficult to rein in the darkness of my adult work. But, what the hell, I thought I could have some fun with it, so I went ahead and wrote it regardless!

When I'd finished my first draft, I asked my agent if he'd like to have a look at it. He said he would, and he really enjoyed it. He saw commercial potential that I hadn't seen, and submitted it to twenty different publishers in the UK, hoping to start a bidding war for the rights... only for all twenty of them to reject it!! It looked like my experiment in books for children had been a huge failure, and commonsense told me to push it aside and focus on my books for adults again.

But I'd already written the first draft of the second book (I worked FAST back in those days!), and Chris didn't want to let it drop, as he still believed in its potential. So he set up meetings for me with three of the publishers who'd rejected it, to chat about what they had liked ot hadn't liked, and if they might be interested in other work from me. One of those editors, a lady called Domenica De Rosa, re-read the manuscript ahead of our meeting, to refresh herself with the material, and second time round it snagged her interest. She made a few very helpful suggestions -- such as making early mention of Darren's love of spiders, which didn't appear in the first draft until he was at the Cirque Du Freak and saw Madam Octa.

Buoyed by this, I went away and did a re-write, and Domenica ended up commissioning it for HarperCollins. She then went off to have twins and never returned, and her replacement didn't like the book and tried to sell the rights back to us! But Chris stood firm and insisted they go ahead and publish it, and although they sat on it for a couple of years, they did put it out eventually, and... well... it did OK when it started appearing on bookshelves of shops, didn't it?!?

Happy birthday, Cirque Du Freak. Thanks for bringing so much dark joy into the lives of millions of readers around the world, and giving me a fairytale kind of life that I couldn't even have imagined in my wildest dreams back in 1997, when I was drawing unemployment benefits and living with my parents.