On the wall above Mick’s desk there’s a list of ‘Current Projects’ with about a dozen items on it.  There’s also a list titled ‘Current Ideas’ which covers about four sheets of A4.  Over the years Mick has worked out what proportion of ideas tend to actually make it into existence – a depressingly small amount, as you can imagine.  Realistically, those that suceed depend on several things - the writer’s enthusiasm for the project … him finding a way of executing it successfully … and, not least, the enthusiasm of someone else (usually an editor or producer).  It would be easy to be dispirited (he has great affection for many of these ideas – some of them, he thinks, are absolute blinders).  Then again, an idea which has been around for ages will suddenly spring into life, either because Jackson’s suddenly worked out a way of coming at it, he’s glued two projects together and now suddenly they work, or someone else reinvigorates a project.   As long as he’s being paid to work on at least one of his gigs, and the next one’s waiting to go, he really can’t complain.

Currently, Mick is working as the writer-in-residence at the Science Museum – a post which came about after the stories in ‘Junior Science’ were commissioned for Radio Four.  At the moment (autumn ’11) he goes up to the museum about once a week and wanders round the galleries, meets curators and has just started nosing around the stores.  As you can imagine, he’s having a ball.  He plans to hold writer’s surgeries for the staff in the first quarter of 2012.  By the end of this year (’11) he will have decided which projects to write as part of the residency.  The post runs until September ’12.

The rest of the time he’s working on his fourth novel.  This has been around for a while now, in various forms.  He’s probably about halfway through it.  He hopes to complete it sometime around spring ’12.

There’s also the possibility of one of his novels being adapted for film (well, two novels, come to think of it), as well as some of his short stories.  The stories would be adapted by someone else.  He’d try and adapt the novels himself.

Mick has a young son and daughter, so he’s recently been exposed to the world of children’s books.  Mick and his missus are great admirers of Shirley Hughes, John Burningham, Helen Oxenbury and Janet & Allan Ahlberg.  Some are not so great.  Inevitably, Mick now has a handful of children’s books he’d like to write.  We’ll see.