The strange things children’s writers do – Lari Don

Yesterday, I helped dress a dragon in a car park.

The dragonmobile, at Pirniehall Primary in Edinburgh

But it’s not the strangest thing I’ve done as a children’s writer.

I've recce'd a castle, going in undercover as a tourist, to discover the best way to steal their most famous artefact.

I've interviewed a vet about how to heal a fairy’s dislocated wing, and a boat builder about how to fit a centaur on a rowing boat.

I've lost half a dozen journalists in a maze. (I guided them out again eventually. Most of them.)

I've told Celtic legends on an iron age hillfort, fairytales in an inner city woodland, and Viking myths in a cave.

And all of these things have been an integral part of my job as a children’s writer. Because writing is not just sitting at a keyboard and tapping out chapters.

The research (chatting to vets about fairy injuries and sneaking about castles) is often as much fun as the writing. And the promotion (dragon dressing and outdoor storytelling) is almost as important as the sitting at my desk imagining.

I suspect that as a children’s writer, you have to be just as imaginative in your research methods and your promotion ideas as you do in your cliffhangers and your characterisations.

But I can’t take credit for the dragon in the carpark. I did create a shiny friendly blue dragon, as one of the main characters in my Fabled Beast series. However, I had moved onto creating other characters in other stories, when my publishers decided to give the Fabled Beasts Chronicles new covers, and announced that they were going to promote the covers with a dragonflight tour.

Then the very talented marketing executive at Floris Books designed a dragon costume for her own car. And she’ll be spending most of the next fortnight driving me round beautiful bits of Scotland and the north of England (yesterday Edinburgh, today Perth, then Aberdeenshire and Penrith, as we get more confident and stretch our wings!) in a car which we dress up as a dragon in the carpark of various primary schools, then invite the children out to ooh and aah at our shiny blue dragon and her shimmering flames, before I go inside to chat with the pupils about cliff-hangers and quests.

So, this week, I’ve already learnt how to put a dragon’s jaws on at speed. And I’ve discovered that if the engine hasn’t cooled down yet, those flames coming down from the bonnet are actually warm!

Very brave Forthview Primary pupils sitting on dragon's flames!

So, yes, I do strange things. But I have fun! And I hope that my enjoyment comes across in my books, and in my author events.

I don’t think the adventures I create would be nearly as interesting without the odd conversations I have while I’m researching them, or the weird things I do to promote them.

So – what do you think? Should I just be sensible and stay indoors writing? Or is a little bit of weird now and then an effective way to make books, reading and writing more exciting for children?
 

Lari Don is the award-winning author of 22 books for all ages, including a teen thriller, fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers. 

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A Box of Delights - Anna Wilson

The village I live in has no pub, no shop - no focal point at all. Days can go by without me seeing any of my neighbours, which can make working at home rather lonely. I was musing over this with a friend one day and we came up with the romantic idea of turning the village phone box into a mini library in an effort to bring people together. Little did I know that it would take a whole year to get the project off the ground.

BT are keen to get rid of the responsibility of maintaining the old-fashioned red phone boxes, as they are costly to keep smart, and of course so few people use the phones these days, that the cost of keeping the lines open is a waste of money as well. I discovered that it was possible to 'adopt' a kiosk for the princely sum of £1. BT would then come and take the phone out, leaving me free to put up shelves and fill them with books.

Sounds easy, right? Well . . .

First I had to contact BT through their website to ask for a contract. I had to do this before I could send my £1 anywhere. For weeks I tried filling in the appropriate page on the website, only to have it crash every time. I asked other friends to try via their laptops and iPads, and they all had the same problem. I ended up Tweeting 'Trying to contact @BritishTelecom to adopt a kiosk, but website keeps crashing'. Funnily enough, I received a response within the day asking me to DM my request. Public shaming gets you fast results.

It turned out that was only the start of a set of hurdles I had to conquer. To get the contract signed and approved, I was told I had to have the signature of someone on the village committee, as the committee is a registered charity. Fine, I thought, I know a few people I can ask. However, at first no one was willing to do this, as they were worried about Public Liability Insurance in the event of anyone using the box having an accident, and the village fund could not cover the cost of this insurance. I also began to receive negative comments from some neighbours who thought that a phone box full of books would be set on fire or used as a urinal.

I was told to contact the local Parish Council to get permission to use the box as a library before anyone would sign the contract, which, to complicate matters further, is in the next-door village because our village doesn't have a church. By this stage, I felt as if I were lost in the corridors of the Circumlocution Office.

Finally I got the contract through and, with the help of my friendlier neighbours, was able to spend last weekend cleaning the box, putting up shelves and attaching stickers to the windows saying 'Village Library'. An invitation went out to everyone in the village to come along at 6pm on Sunday to have a glass of wine and fill the box with books.

And they did! It was a joyful evening, in which I discovered that our village boasts four other authors, one of whom is a naturalist who is now helping my son with his various wildlife projects. There were many conversations about people's favourite books, what people are reading in their various book clubs and which titles they would recommend. So in the end, a love of books has overcome negativity and red tape, and I have made some new friends in the process. (Sometimes it is worth battling the Parish Councils of this world, however circumlocutory they may be . . .)

(It wasn't until this photo was taken that we realised we were Team Turquoise . . .)

www.annawilson.co.uk
www.acwilsonwriter.wordpress.com

"Competing for their attention" - Clémentine Beauvais

I know I am, in many ways, in support of what in Britain would be qualified as ‘traditionalist’ educational practices in terms of literacy (and in France as ‘normal’ ones), namely the learning of poetry by heart, the imposition of reading lists, etc. However, where I differ from the French view on literacy, and perhaps from many educators in English-speaking countries too, is that I am opposed to the common hierarchy between arts or media which puts reading at the top. I don’t think there’s any reason, once literacy skills have been acquired of course (and it’s not an easy task), to enforce the notion that books are ‘better’ intrinsically than films, video games, TV series, and other visual or musical art forms and media. But they are, certainly, different ways of looking at the world. 

This is partly why I’m getting increasingly uneasy with the common claim, in author interviews, that ‘we’ authors ‘now’ have to ‘compete’ with ‘films, video games, TV series’ in order for our books to be read. I used to say this as well, and of course I understand that in the most basic sense of ‘competition’ (=available time), it is true: children and young adults ‘now’ have immediate access to a wide range of such other media, and while they’re watching films or playing games they’re not reading our books. So, in terms of time, yes, we have to ‘compete’. We also have to ‘compete’ with one another, as authors, I guess. We have to ‘compete’ with funny YouTube videos, too, but that doesn’t keep me awake at night.

No, this claim bothers me because I do not see and do not want to see other creative people and other works of art as ‘competition’. Films and video games are not our enemies. They are works that ambition to set in motion creative processes, to stimulate the imagination, to increase empathy, to entice viewers and players to take part in the elaboration of complex worlds, and that can do so in different ways and just as well as books. They are not ‘competitors’. If anything, we complement one another; we provide different ways of encouraging creative, thoughtful, witty, etc. visions of the world. 

Saying we’re in competition with them is the equivalent of saying that all these different works of art and ways of looking at the world are interchangeable. ‘Yes! I win! She’s reading my book instead of watching a film!’. To me, this is like saying, ‘Hurrah! She’s reading my book instead of talking to her grandmother!’. Both are hugely beneficial activities. They’re not the same, but they all contribute to growth, maturation, creativity and learning, in their own original ways. 
If we try to 'compete' with films or video games through similar narrative strategies, we risk making it sound like literature does not have its own specificities; like it's just a matter of being 'more entertaining' than 'other media'. This would impoverish greatly what we can do with verbal narrative, with words, which are what makes our medium unique. 

And there's worse. While we’re busy saying that other branches of the creative world are ‘competitors’, we’re not talking about those branches of the culture industry which are actually busy ‘competing’ with us - in the sense that they're waging a war on the creative spirit and critical thinking of children by promising them, for instance, that the acquisition of a toy or product or game will bring happiness; by flattening the beautiful diversity of existence into easily-packaged, formulaic tales that will generate addiction and therefore money-spending; by constructing consent for the world as it is and driving reflection out of it. That's what keeps me awake at night, to be honest.

I'm being wilfully provocative here, but let me tell you what I see as competition. 10 million iPhones 6 sold in one weekend: that’s competition. Cultural products that are only created so as to sell spin-offs and merchandise: that’s competition. Little girls being made to worry about their looks and having to spend time investigating diets and make-up techniques: that’s competition. Little boys having to be interested in porn and war rather than in creative pursuits: that’s competition. Adverts selling children and young adults a unified, unimaginative version of world where “possession = happiness”: that’s competition.

Thank goodness there are people who create enticing, challenging, thought-provoking, original pieces of work in all the arts and media; and a school system which is starting to recognise this when it encourages high-level visual literacy, film and video game analysis, encounters with media and art forms from different cultures, etc. The real competitors are the messages we receive daily (and especially children) that discourage such imaginative pursuits and critical reflection by giving easy answers to complex questions. 

_____________________________________

Clémentine Beauvais writes books in both French and English. The former are of all kinds and shapes for all ages, and the latter humour and adventure stories with Hodder and Bloomsbury. She blogs here about children's literature and academia and is on Twitter @blueclementine. 

Grammar Nazis - Lily Hyde

A couple of weeks ago I was at the Lviv Publisher’s Forum, talking about the Ukrainian translation of my novel Dream Land. This annual forum in the West Ukrainian city of Lviv fills libraries, universities, coffee houses and theatres with a bewildering array of readings, discussions, concerts and lectures. Highlights for me were an all-night poetry slam, a Crimean Tatar-Ukrainian jazz fusion performance, meeting Lviv publishers Stary Lev, and a session with authors Oksana Zabuzhko from Ukraine and Katerina Tuckova from the Czech Republic held in a fabulous, faded Baroque theatre than could have been a Hammer horror film set. 

In-between, there was time to wander the cobbled streets with their glorious central-European architecture. Over the last hundred years Lviv has changed its name four times as it has belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland, the Soviet Union and Ukraine. It’s seen its fair share of 20^th century horrors, and has a largely undeserved reputation for extreme nationalism. In fact, it feels like a city that is confident and at ease with its identity: consciously cultured; literary; tolerant; polyglot; central-European. 

This is a sign I noticed on a Lviv trolleybus window. Printed by the nationalist political party Svoboda, it is instructions in public transport etiquette: how to buy a ticket, ask the driver to stop and so on in polite, correct Ukrainian. “This may be a case when the term ‘grammar Nazi’ isn’t exactly an exaggeration,” a non-Ukrainian friend commented when he saw it. 

It made me think about the line between being proud of one’s language and heritage, and wanting to impose it on those from other heritages. Much of the publisher’s forum was about cultural exchange and translation, a celebration of how literature can bridge national divides. But this year, for the first time in 23 years, Russian publishers were not invited to attend.

The decision roused much furious debate and anxious soul-searching in literary circles. Russian and Russian-language books, publishers and bookshops have dominated the Ukrainian literary market for 23 years. A recent spate of openly anti-Ukrainian literature from mainstream Russian publishers undoubtedly influenced the forum decision. But when does pride and protectionism become chauvinism and censorship? Does wanting to protect one’s own language, and encouraging people to speak it correctly and beautifully, make someone a ‘Nazi’?

www.lilyhyde.com 

rambutanchik.wordpress.com

            

Single-tasking by Cavan Scott

When I was a kid I loved The Generation Game  and knew all the words to Life Is The Name of the Game off by heart. Still do in fact, as my daughters will testify after they've stopped cringing with embarrassment every time I sing it.

Here's a little reminder for you:

My favourite game was Spinning Plates, you know, the one where you have to keep crockery whizzing around on long poles. It always looked so easy when the expert did it, but as soon as Brucie sent in the contestants? Well, they were anything but a smashing success!

As a full-time writer, I feel like I'm always spinning plates. With so many projects on the go I often feel like one of those poor Generation Gamers, running from pillar to post to stop everything from crashing around my ears.

I've always prided myself of being a good multi-tasker. It goes back to being a magazine editor. Every day was a juggling act. But recently, I've asked myself if multi-tasking is such a good idea. It all comes from reading The Power of Less by Leo Babauta, a handy little time-management book. One concept really spoke to me - that of single-tasking.

It's something I've been trying this month. It basically involves cutting out all distractions and focusing on one thing at a time.

Usually, when I'm working on something, I have my email on, my messenger app running, twitter in the corner and a 1001 other distractions in the background. It doesn't mean I'm always checking them, but the fact they're even there can be enough to put me off what I'm doing. They're all bonging away at me, or flashing their icons, letting me know that messages are waiting.

And once I know there's a message there, I'm doomed. Even if I'm not checking my email, I'll want to check my email. If I'm leaving messenger alone, I'm wondering who's messaged. My mind isn't on the task at hand any more. After all, the message might be THE MOST IMPORTANT MESSAGE IN THE WORLD!!!!!

Ahem, sorry.

So, I've turned all the notifications off and am trying to only check emails at least once an hour, ideally even less like that. If I can, I tell myself I'm not going to check my messages for an entire morning - although I get jumpy after a couple of hours.

Some days it's got so difficult not to have a quick look that I've turned the modem off in the kitchen to stop me just firing up the app for a second. If I want to look I have to get up and wander downstairs to plug it back in again, enough time to tell myself off!

And it's worked. I'm in the middle of a hellishly busy period and I'm getting through it, task by task, all by only spinning one plate at a time.

Of course another challenge awaits today. I have a self-imposed deadline of 5pm for a task and so I'm going to post this and then not check back to see if there are any comments until after I'm done.

Am I going to manage it? Well, if you leave a comment and I reply before 5pm, I give you permission to slap me around the head with a wet kipper the next time we bump into each other.

See you at 5:01!

_________________

Cavan Scott is the author of over 60 books and audio dramas including the Sunday Times Bestseller, Who-ology: The Official Doctor Who Miscellany, co-written with Mark Wright.

He's written for Doctor Who, Skylanders, Judge Dredd, Angry Birds, Adventure Tim and Warhammer 40,000 among others. He also writes Roger the Dodger and Bananaman for The Beano as well as books for reluctant readers of all ages.

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Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red by Tamsyn Murray

I'm sure you don't need me to remind you that 2014 is the centenary anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. There are reminders everywhere, and rightly so, triggering people to contemplate all kinds of things in relation to the war, which is moving outside of living memory for the first time. One of the most striking reminders is at the Tower of London, where they have an evolving installation of ceramic poppies in the moat called Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, a poppy for every British soldier who died in the war.

I was lucky enough to be invited to the Tower of London last week, to celebrate the launch of the Historic Royal Palaces Learning Team's Why Remember schools' campaign. This campaign asks three simple questions:

• Why should we remember?
• Why is 100 years significant?
• How do you want to remember?

The idea is that we encourage children and their parents, teachers and support staff, everyone to remember WWI in a way that means something to them, rather than being told about what happened from books. By thinking about and answering the questions, they are doing more than just learning about history, they're making it part of their own experience. And it dawned on me that this generation of learners will engage with the war in a way other generations haven't: I read WWI poetry at school but I didn't understand it, couldn't visualise some of what the soldiers went through, maybe didn't even care what happened because I was young and it all seemed like an impossible thing anyway. But 2014 feels different. As I sat and listened to primary school aged pupils reading their perspective on the questions above, I realised that perhaps more than most recent generations, they understood the responsibility to remember. Someone pointed out that we need to look back on the mistakes of the past so we can learn from them and that was especially poignant when you consider WWI was meant to be 'the war to end war'.

Another thing the day brought home to me was the sheer number of soldiers who died. 888, 246 is a pretty hard number to visualise but when you start to think that every poppy planted in the moat represents a person, it gets easier. Standing on Tower Hill, gazing out at the sea of red, I began to consider the sons and husbands and fathers and uncles who went off to war and never came home as real people, rather than a number or statistics. I also learned that the Tower keeps a Roll of Honour - a list of Commonwealth military fatalities from WWI - that is read out at the close of every day. The Last Post is played at the end, another way of remembering, and simply watching some of the videos of this simple roll call made the hairs on my arms stand up.

So here are my answers to the questions above:

• We should remember because these were real people, giving their lives for the freedom of others, regardless of whether it was right or wrong.
• 100 years is significant because there is no one alive now who was there - it's our job to keep the stories of those who lived then going. 100 years is a milestone that helps us to share these stories.
• I want to remember by helping to plant the poppies and by keeping in my mind that every single one of them represents someone's son.

How about you? What are your answers?

The Waiting Game - Liz Kessler

Over the last couple of weeks, I’m pretty sure I have developed a few new grey hairs. My nails have been bitten down into messy, spiky shards and my heart has been beating a tiny bit faster whenever a new email pings into my inbox.

Why?

Because I’m suffering from a state that most authors will recognise: a classic case of ‘I Have Sent My New Book To My Editor And Will Be Hearing Back From Her Any Day Now-Itis’. Or IHSMNBTMEAWBHBFHADNI for short.

Interesting things happen during an outbreak of IHSMNBTMEAWBHBFHADNI. One of them is that you look around your study and realise that it doesn’t look much like a study.

You know on those cop dramas when the police suspect a criminal of hiding drugs or stolen goods or something and they go round to the criminal’s home and ransack the place? Drawers pulled out, clothes strewn around the room, photo frames knocked over, shelves upended, piles of paperwork flung across the floor. Yeah, that’s kinda what your study looks like.

I once heard the wonderful poet and author Jackie Kay talk about writing a first draft. She described it as being similar to organising a huge dinner party – but without doing any cleaning up along the way. After the party, when everyone’s gone home, you look around the kitchen and don’t even know where to start. 

NB This is a random picture downloaded from the internet, not actual Jackie Kay's kitchen after a dinner party.

I think she nailed it.

My study is a scene of devastation, filled with long trails of things that I have been ignoring/avoiding/not noticing for weeks. In those last few days of the first draft, where I’m working flat out every daylight hour - and a few of the pre-dawn ones, too - I put on my blinkers as I enter my study, carve a very careful path along the narrow channel that is not filled with paperwork glaring expectantly at me, sit down in my chair and start tapping away, noticing only the screen in front of me. And the continually-replaced cup of tea by my side. Actually, if I’m honest, in those last few days, when I’m working into the evening, it’s just as likely to be a bottle of beer by my side.

And then there is that magical moment. With a tiny tear in the corner of your eye that you’re never quite sure if you should really have (I mean, crying at your own book – is that even allowed?) you type, ‘the end’. The euphoria doubles as you write an over-emotional (you’re on your second beer of the evening) email to your editor, attach your baby – aka the manuscript that has taken over the last eight months of your life – and hit ‘send’.

Obviously, you don’t do anything much for the rest of that day. A good friend and special writer-buddy of mine, Lee Weatherly, once told me that you have to have a bottle of champagne when you finish a draft of your book. It’s virtually the law. And I don’t like breaking the law. Champagne, beer, whatever. Bring it on. This moment has been nearly a year coming. It's time to celebrate!

So let’s skip to the next morning. You know you have a fortnight or so before you’ll hear back from your editor. Actually, on this occasion, we're on a really tight schedule so it's more like ten days. Either way, it's time to mop up the mess.

For at least the last month, you’ve told yourself that this is the point when you will attack the email inbox, fill in the forms, sign the contracts, send off the tax stuff, return those shoes you should never have bought. Maybe even, I dunno, clean the house? Ten whole days. Your life is going to be SO sorted by the time you hear back from your editor. You're practically going to be a Stepford Wife.

I love good intentions. Don’t you?

Here’s what I’ve spent the last ten days doing.

• Having lie ins.
• Letting the dog on the bed so she won’t nag me for walkies.
• Mooching around the house in my PJs vaguely thinking about getting the vacuum cleaner out. Ha! As if.
• Meeting up with friends for coffees in the morning. In the morning!
• Watching Dragon’s Den recordings with my lunch. With my lunch!!!
• Reading multiple copies of The Bookseller and Practical Photography which have been arriving and being ignored every week for the last three months.
• Wandering around the garden with my new macro lens, taking photos of spiders, wasps and flowers.

Plenty more where this came from. If you want to see them, just ask.

• And yes, just to make sure I feel I’ve achieved something this week, replying to at least two thirds of the emails that have been patiently waiting for me whilst I was busy getting my half-girl half-mermaid heroine out of trouble.

And then, before you know it, it happens. The email. Ping. Fourteen pages of notes. Bam.

A very deep breath. And back in we dive.

Who wants to live in a tidy house with clothes all put away in drawers, receipts filed away in envelopes and email inboxes sparse and empty, anyway?

Not me, it seems. Someone pass me a beer. I’m going in.

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A book launch and a blog launch: Sue Purkiss

As I was thinking about what I might write about today, I remembered that it’s Somerset Art Week (or fortnight). You probably have something similar in your neck of the woods: artists open up their houses and studios to show their work. And that led to thinking vaguely about buying pictures for presents, and that led to thinking about my friend Sara Parsons.

Sara is an artist and a potter and a dog walker. In the days when we had a dog too, she and I often used to walk up the hill together, generously putting the world to rights and congratulating ourselves on how lucky we are to live in such a lovely part of the country, where you tumble out of your back door and ten minutes later you're gazing across a mist-ribbonned valley towards Glastonbury or admiring the year's first cowslip or orchid or wild daffodil.

One day, some years ago, I was telling her about a bit of a quandary I had. My first longer novel for children – The Willow Man – was about to be published. It’s about three children, two of whom have a disability – one of which is very obvious, and the other of which is not. Anyway, It was something of a labour of love, this book (well, they all are, but this one particularly so), and I thought I would like to mark publication by having some sort of launch. But I’m the world’s worst person as far as organising parties goes, and I couldn’t think where to have it or how to do it.

On a scale of 1-20 when it comes to spontaneity, I would be about 2 and Sara would come in somewhere around 18. “Easy,” she said breezily. “You can have it in the studio.”

The cake

Sara lives on a farm, and she and her family had recently converted an old stone barn into a lovely space for her to use for her painting and pottery classes. It would be perfect. So, I talked to our local

Ottakars (now Waterstones), who agreed to come and sell books, I talked to Walker Books, who agreed to contribute generously towards wine, and whose sales rep, Tim Howard, came along to help, and I talked to my sister, who made a beautiful cake and generally advised about food.

As the event drew nearer, the butterflies began to do a samba in my stomach. Would there be enough to eat? Could I cope with being the centre of attention? Wasn’t this all a bit big-headed and show-offy? Would anyone actually come? When should we start to get the studio ready? “Bit busy this week,” said Sara vaguely. “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.”

Sara,s drawing - well, most of it.

On the morning of the launch, we stood looking at the vast space. “Hm,” said Sara. “Think I’ll do a picture. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?”

It was more than nice. She did a magnificent charcoal sketch depicting the Willow Man (the one who stands beside the M5 near Bridgwater. He used to be magnificently obvious, but now he’s surrounded by supermarket depots and housing estates, so he's less easy to see.) Beside him she wrote, in her beautiful calligraphic script, the line from the cover: In his great form, power lay coiled. By the time evening came, Sara’s panache had transformed the place with fairy lights, textiles, pictures and pots. Lots of people came and it was lovely, and I’m not sure if I ever thanked Sara enough – so here’s a great big belated thank you right now!

Sara on the left, me in the middle and Tim Howard at the bottom of the stairs.

That's a while ago now. But in a couple of weeks, I’ve got another launch coming up. It’s not a book launch this time; it’s a blog launch. I’ve contributed to ABBA off and on, to its sister site, ABBA Reviews, and to the History Girls group blog for quite some time, but now I’m going to have a blog of my own. It’s called A Fool On A Hill – because I do a lot of thinking while walking up on the hill. (At least I used to, when we had our much-missed dog Jessie, and I hope before long I’ll be up there again with another, as yet unchosen dog.)

It’s going to be mostly reviews. I hope eventually people will send me new children’s books to review, but I will also write about some of my other reading. But my first post – on 7^th October – will be about the wonderful Linda Newbery’s first book for adults, Quarter Past Two On A Wednesday Afternoon.

I hope very much to see you there – but in the meantime, I have a review today on ABBA Reviews. It’s about a very good and very funny book by John Dougherty, and I hope you’ll take a look at that too!

Emotional imagination

Sometimes, I can't seem to write fiction. I blame the fact that I've been writing almost only non-fiction for a couple of years - and have just agreed to do some more. When I try to get back into writing fiction, something feels dead inside. My brain feels like an imagination-free zone. And that is a desolate thing, like a moonscape without the moonbeams.

In October, I am going to write fiction. I am. For a long time now I have had that month set firmly aside, event-free, non-fiction-free. I've put in place all sorts of mechanisms to make this happen. I've told lots of people that I'm doing it. I've told my agent that I'm doing it. I've turned down paid work and told people that they cannot give me a deadline which involves me doing anything for them in October. At all.

And yet (or perhaps therefore) I'm very afraid that my imagination won't wake up, won't do its job, won't show me moonbeams.

Or I was until this morning.

A daughter phoned. My daughters may be in their twenties but a daughter (or son, presumably) is never too old to cause instant fear in a parent's heart when her number comes up on your phone. Especially at one of those times of day when daughters aren't prone to phone for a general chat.

Instantly, even before I heard her voice, my imagination was running riot. In that split second, this imagination had no words - it was all a rush of adrenaline and cortisol and raw, nameless dread. Emotion. Then her voice, "Don't worry, I'm fine." OMG, she's not fine. You don't randomly say you're fine unless you are about to say something not fine. And in the few seconds it took her to explain what the thing was, my imagination had, quite literally, taken me through visions of death, illness, job loss, burglary, injury (including actual details involving a bone), and a complicated combination of emergency services.

And after all this had calmed down (because she was, in actual fact, fine) I realised the key to imagination: emotion.

So, my October - and any time I or you want to write fiction - has to allow and encourage and nurture and conjure emotion. Maybe I'll read a poem each morning before I write; maybe I'll read the news - there's enough emotion in the human stories there; maybe I'll read a chapter of the best fiction I can find. Maybe I'll brainstorm sad words or angry words or whatever words I need to make it happen. Maybe I'll play anthemic, emotional music to waken my heart.

But I'll draw the line at asking a daughter to phone in the morning. Mind you, it's her birthday today, so I may just phone her...

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Nicola Morgan writes novels. Oh yes, she does. She also writes non-fiction about the teenage brain and stress. BUT NOT IN OCTOBER. www.nicolamorgan.com

Writer's Guilt…. Or Have I Done Enough? by Megan Rix / Ruth Symes

What I love most about writing, and thought I would love most even before I was published, is the freedom it gives you. Freedom to write when you want and where you want, about what you want and how you want to.

For a few years I probably averaged a 1,000 published words a year (this was when I used to spend 6 months in the UK and 6 months travelling round the world). Now my average is more like 1,000 words a day. (I try not to work weekends unless I’m really behind on a deadline or so desperate to tell a story that it just can’t wait. I’m writing this on Saturday though - so I probably write more often at weekends than not.) If I've written a 1,000 words in a day I stick a sticker on my annual wall chart. I like seeing the stickers build up only... only there never seems to be enough. Not every day’s got a sticker and I want to write more. I always think I could do more, if I was more focused more, more disciplined yaddah yaddah yaddah.

I call it writer's guilt but really an average of a 1,000 words a day is good.... isn't it? I’ve won two children’s books of the year this year (Stockton and Shrewsbury) and will have had 3 novels out this year in 10 days time.

'The Hero Pup' is written under my Megan Rix pseudonym and being published by Puffin. It follows an assistance dog puppy from his birth until his graduation as a fully-fledged Helper Dog. Anyone who knows me knows how close this book is to my heart and I'm very much looking forward to working with guide dogs, medical alert dogs and PAT dogs on the book tour.

But not only do I have ‘The Hero Pup’ coming out under my Megan Rix pseudonym on the 1st of October I also have the first in a new series of books about the Secret Animal Society coming out under my Ruth Symes name. 'Cornflake the Dragon' is being published by Piccadilly. It’s about a school lizard that turns into a dragon when it’s taken home for the holidays.

How many words do other writers write each day? I don't know. They probably all do much more or maybe they do less but every word they write is pure gold.

And what about the thinking time? You've got to have thinking time, or I have. I like to mull over the story for a month or so these days. Not forcing it to come. Just researching and thinking about characters until I know, absolutely KNOW it's the story I want to tell. I don’t get a sticker for thinking but it’s just as valuable.

Then it comes to the talks at schools and festivals – meeting your target audience. In the past year I've spoken at 16 schools and 5 festivals - an average of little over one a mouth. Is it enough? It feels like the right amount for me but I know of other writers who do lots more. Should I be doing lots more? I don’t know.

And that's what comes with having a career where you choose so much for yourself. There's so many choices that it's hard to know if you've made the right one. But better to make the mistake yourself than be living someone else’s mistake. Maybe there shouldn't be writer's guilt or writer's goals maybe we should just have the aim of improving every day.

Chris Rock (excuse the swearing) has a very funny sketch about the difference between a job or a career His main point, and I agree with him, is if it's a career there's never enough time for all you want to do to advance it but if it’s a job there is always far too much time and you can’t wait for it to be over. Writing is definitely a career and I wouldn't have it any other way :)


My website's are: www.meganrix.com and www.ruthsymes.com.

What Charlotte Did - Joan Lennon

I've just finished reading a wonderful blog by Penny Dolan over on The History Girls, about a series of connections that lead her from a randomly-chosen book from her shelves, right through a whole string of 19th century names, fictional characters and relationships, all linked by a wooden-legged chap called W.E. Henley.  Which made me think of Charlotte Bronte.  Recently, she's been my W.E. Henley. 

It started with a Facebook post - which sent me to the Harvard Library online site where they have been working on restoring the tiny books Charlotte and Branwell Bronte made when they were children - which led to my own History Girl post Tiny Bronte Books.  (Please, if you go to have a look, scroll down to the bottom and watch the Brontesaurus video - you won't regret it.)

I'm in the midst of editing an anthology of East Perthshire writers called Place Settings and was delighted to read in one of the entries the author's interest in the Brontes, and how "... every night, the sisters paraded round the table reading aloud from their day's writings."

Then I got involved in a project run by 26, the writers' collective, in which writers were paired with design studios taking part in this year's London Design Show, and asked to write a response to one of their objects.  I was given Dare Studio who were putting forward, among other lovely things, a new design - the Bronte Alcove.

The alcove is meant to be a private space within public places, blocking out the surrounding bustle and noise.  Which made me think of bonnets.  Which led me back to the internet, which led me, by way of images of hats, to the passage below, written by Elizabeth Gaskell on her visit to Charlotte at the parsonage:

I asked her whether she had ever taken opium, as the description given of its effects in Villette was so exactly like what I had experienced, - vivid and exaggerated presence of objects, of which the outlines were indistinct, or lost in golden mist, etc. She replied, that she had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, but that she had followed the process she always adopted when she had to describe anything which had not fallen within her own experience; she had thought intently on it for many and many a night before falling to sleep, - wondering what it was like, or how it would be, - till at length, sometimes after the progress of her story had been arrested at this one point for weeks, she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, word for word, as it had happened. I cannot account for this psychologically; I only am sure that it was so, because she said it.

Which led me to wonder ... my own practice has always been to try not to think about work when I'm courting sleep.  And I have rarely, if ever, walked round my table of an evening, reading aloud from my day's work.  But have I been losing out here?  Do you do as Charlotte did?  I would be most interested to know.

Meantime, I wait for the next popping up of my very own W.E. Henley.


Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.

Marking a Day of History - A Call to Write: Lucy Coats

It is hard to know what to write today - because I am writing this in the past. Today's landscape may be very different from yesterday's. Are we a nation irrevocably divided or a nation still hanging together by a thread? You, reading this, will know if Scotland is still with us. I do not yet.

It is a rare thing to realise, in advance, that a day of history is happening. Normally we can only look back and see with hindsight that it was so. Sometimes it's a small thing - a pebble which rolls a little way, almost unnoticed, and then sets off an avalanche of global proportions. Sometimes it's something so epic, so inconceivable, that it is itself the avalanche.

As writers and readers, I think we have a responsibility to mark days of history, even if only for ourselves. So I ask this of all of you reading this, writers or not: will you write today, please? Whichever side of the debate you have been on, - yes, no, or none - will you write down your experience of it so that future generations can know how you felt today? Whether you choose fiction or fact doesn't matter, whether you publish or keep it private doesn't matter. What matters is that it's there, a body of evidence for future generations if they want to read it. I will come back later today and write down my own reactions below. It will probably be a very emotional addendum, whatever the result. I am a Scot, after all.

Postscriptum: 8.30am 19th September 2014 written as events unfolded:

"I wake all at once, dumped rudely out of sleep, ears full of the morning twittering of the blackbird in the apple tree. He is louder than usual, his song urgent, a reveille.
Get up get up get up! 
Then I remember.
My heart gives a great bang, and my inner workings tingle, small jolts of nerve lightning tugging at and twitching my muscles. My belly is uneasy, empty yet clenching, surging upwards.
It is today.
I want to know. And yet, I don't.
I lie there, warm, until I can't any more, then I open the shutters. The sudden flood of grey light makes me squint, screw up my blind mole eyes. There are more fallen apples today, and a crow flies away into the dim mist. Am I looking out on a world quite changed from yesterday?

I went to bed before midnight, unable to bear the vapid maundering on the BBC. At the bottom of everything then lay the one fact: "We don't know anything, and we're going to tell you so over and over in a myriad ways." The news pundits on Twitter though - they thought differently. Most had already called it for the No camp.
But will it be?
I can't bear to turn on the radio or TV yet. Because when I do it will be real - whatever 'it' is. It can't be undone. I won't be able to go back to nervous ignorance. You may wonder why I'm making such a fuss. It's hard to explain. I tried writing a love letter to Scotland earlier in the week. It goes some way to telling you how important this vote is to me. Right now, though, the memory I have which comes closest to the way I feel now is 17 January 1991 when I watched the first planes go into Iraq and wondered, as I laid hands on my three-month-pregnant belly, what sort of world I was bringing my child into. I have the same sense that the world is about to shift under my feet.
It's time.
I can't be a coward any longer.
The stairs creak under my feet in the empty house.
My fingers slide and stumble on the small round buttons.
Oh God! Anticlimax. It's the weather. Hurry up, woman! I want to know now, get it over. Oh, please. I don't care about muggy nights and chilly in rural areas...cloudy, murky, dawn bright over Scotland, the words tumble past, meaningless.
No 55%
Yes 45%
The figures flash up on the screen, red and green. Suddenly I'm not sure how I feel as the politicians witter on and on to BBC Hugh.
Am I happy we're still together?
Yes. I wanted that. I believe in our Union.
Am I proud?
Yes. Immensely. This is democracy at work. People - old ones and young ones and all in between - have voted in millions. An 86% turnout? There's a tightening in my throat and a prickling in my nose. That's amazing, humbling.
But although we are still together, those Scots, my soul brothers and sisters, my family, have changed the landscape of the (still) United Kingdom together and forever through the power of the ballot box.
Their voices cannot be ignored, and I find myself on my feet and cheering that.
It is time and past time for change.
So thank you, beloved Scotland, both the passionate Ayes and the passionate Noes. You have done us all a service. We just don't know the shape of it yet.

Millions more words of witness will be written to mark this day of history. These are mine."

New dates announced for Lucy's Guardian Masterclass on 'How to Write for Children' Why not book now?

Captain Beastlie's Pirate Party is now out from Nosy Crow!

"If you’re going to select only one revolting, repulsive pirate book, this is arrrr-guably the best." Kirkus

"What right-minded child could resist his allure?" Books for Keeps

"A rollicking story and a quite gloriously disgusting book that children (especially boys) will adore!" Parents In Touch magazine

Atticus the Storyteller's 100 Greek Myths is available from Orion Children's Books.

"A splendid reminder of the wonder of the oldest of stories…should be in every home and classroom" The Bookseller

Website and blog

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Lucy is represented by Sophie Hicks at The Sophie Hicks Agency

Yes, No, Maybe? Decisions are the stuff of life.

Today, the 18th of September 2014, is the day Scotland goes to the polls to decide whether to become and independent country or to stay within the United Kingdom and much of the world is looking on.

Living and working in Scotland it would be difficult to ignore what is going on all around me and it is too important.  But this is not a blog about the Referendum, because votes are being cast as you read this, the decision is already being made and the outcome will be something we will all have to live, with whatever our own thoughts are.

Decisions are sometimes easy and at other times much more difficult so I wanted to look at the decisions we make as we write.

As I have said before, I am not a planner, so when I am starting to write a new book an idea pops into my head and I start to write about it, often with no idea what the story is or where it is going.
I need to try it out, run with it and see where it takes me.  It is a very exciting stage.

When I started writing Dead Boy Talking I was on a train coming back from visiting a school and with a notebook open in front of me I was thinking about what my next YA novel would be.

The title DEAD BOY TALKING was the first thing I wrote down, followed by the first line...

                       'In 25 minutes I will be dead.'


I had a picture in my head of a boy sitting on a pavement bleeding from a knife wound and it was cold, but most of all he was alone.
I was wondering how desperate that would be, how scared I would be if it was me. I started to write but it was his voice I could hear.

The first page of the book hardly changed from the words I scribbled in my notebook that day...

  'The knife slipped into my body a bright, sharp edge of death, a thief.  It sliced easily through leather, skin and flesh. Hot, red blood coating it's blade, warming the icy metal with a precious searing heat....  '

I was imagining how it might feel to be stabbed, scared and all alone.  But then I started wondering if the reader would be thinking that this was another book where the main character is dead before it starts. Almost without making a conscious decision,  the boy's voice intruded on my thoughts again. I feel it is instinctive at this stage and I try not to over-think it.

  'No, this is not some  dead person talking from the grave. It's just me, Josh, You know me.
  I'm not scared.
  I'm not!
  Who am I kidding?
  It can't really be happening to me, can it?'

There - I knew his name now!
But I still knew very little about Josh or why he was in that situation and what had happened to him that led to this.  Also one of the crucial things I didn't know was whether his statement about having 25 minutes to live was right or not. Would I have him alive or dead at the end of the book?

Many of the decisions are made as the story progresses and I get to know the characters better.  If I know them well enough I know how they would act in any situation and as long as I am true to their character the reader will find it credible.  But sometimes the decision is about whether the character will do something completely at odds with their normal behaviour.
That is a decision that often shows how multifaceted the character is. We are all complex human beings so if I decide he has to act contrary to his nature there has to be a strong driving force that leads him to do that, otherwise it will not be believable.

How often have you seen someone act in a way that surprises you? It just shows that we can never fully know another person but if they do act out of character there will be a reason behind it.

The decision about whether he would survive or not was a difficult one, it could go either way.  Much the same as in ordinary life, we cannot know if someone will survive a knife wound. In the end I went with my gut feeling about what was right for the story but somewhere in the back of my mind is always the reader, so whatever the outcome there has to be, in my  opinion, a sense of hope. They need to know that whatever happens, life will go on.


There were also other things to find out about Josh. What was his family like, who are his friends, what was the pivotal thing in his life that changed everything. In this case it was his older brother running away from home, and never coming back.  Josh's life changed that day because everyone around him was focussed on his brother, and he felt lost and betrayed but there was nothing he could do about any of it.

 A writer has to make many decisions as a story progresses but perhaps the most important are how it begins and how it ends.
If the beginning does not draw the reader in they might not bother reading on.  I always feel that when you get to the end of a book you should feel satisfied, like having had a good meal, not too much or too little but a sense that you have come to the end of a journey.

What decisions are you most aware of when you start writing?

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Linda Strachan is the author of over 60 books for all ages from picture books to teenage novels and the writing handbook Writing For Children  

She has written 10 Hamish McHaggis books illustrated by Sally J. Collins who also illustrated Linda's retelling of Greyfriars Bobby

Linda's latest YA novel is Don't Judge Me  

Linda  is  Patron of Reading to Liberton High School, Edinburgh 

website:  www.lindastrachan.com
blog:  Bookwords 

A Tale of Two Book Festivals: from Leeds to Edinburgh - by Emma Barnes

After speaking to 350 children at Edinburgh International Book Festival

It’s easy to get depressed in the worlds of children’s books: whether it’s the ongoing closure of public libraries, the fact that writers are earning less and less or the dismal statistic that over 1 in 4 British children don't own a single book.  But, if you haven’t abandoned me already, there ARE bright spots.  One of these positive trends is the amazing growth of literary festivals.

Big festivals are growing.  Small festivals are mushrooming. 

This summer I witnessed both ends of this spectrum, doing events at one of the newest festivals and  one of the most long established. 

Leeds Big Book End - Children's Programme

The Leeds Big Bookend has been set up by a bunch of enthusiastic and dynamic people in the city where I live, Leeds, who felt that with virtually everywhere else around us boasting a festival – Ilkley, Harrogate, Morley, Wakefield (I could go on) Leeds should have one too.  Entirely run by volunteers, it’s obviously been immensely hard work.

The children’s venue was rather tucked away above a health food shop…and yet inside the organizers had built a wonderful story-telling yurt, to which every child in the place immediately gravitated.  It was lovely.  And still small enough and intimate enough that I probably had chat with every child there.

Fellow author Kate Pankhurst in the Leeds yurt: Photo credit - Coronita Coronado

Then, at the end of August, I was off to one of the biggest and most well-established of festivals – the EdinburghInternational Book Festival (EIBF), where I was taking part in the Schools Gala Day.  The EIBF is a major event in the literary world, where probably the highlight of a packed children's programme this year was an appearance by Malala Yousafzai, introduced by JK Rowling.

Edinburgh is my original home town and I’ve been to the book festival there for years.  I remember sitting in small tents, sometimes with a handful of people, listening to the speakers organized by Scottish Book Trust.   Now the programme has grown hugely and the marquees in Charlotte Square are a hub bub of activity, with enormous queues, packed out events, famous faces passing in the crowd and a whole lot of people eating ice cream and sunning themselves on the grass  (well, Edinburgh weather permitting).

Of course, I’ve heard critics say that this growth in festivals only affects a few people – the book-buying public, and the families who encourage their children to read anyway.   In other words, festivals are the past-time of a literary elite.

Not so.  My own first event was for an audience of around 350 children who had traveled to the Festival with their schools – seven different primaries from across Scotland.  And in the afternoon, I did another school event in a local library – part of the Festival’s Outreach Programme, that takes writers and illustrators to meet children who most likely wouldn’t have the chance to come to the Festival.  And this year Edinburgh also ran a Writer in Residence scheme – enabling a writer to go in and work with children in a school over an extended period, creating their own picture books.

Questions prepared by the children at my EIBF outreach event

Edinburgh isn’t alone in this.  Many literary festivals run programmes of school visits, bringing together teachers, children, writers and illustrators.

When I was growing up, I never met an author or illustrator.  I was fascinated by books, but I never thought that writing them was something that living, breathing people did.  (I knew Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl were dead…I reckoned the rest probably were too.)

Now, many children are meeting authors, and that has a lot to do with book festivals.

Did I inspire any of the children I met this year?  I don’t know.  I know they laughed a lot.  I know they had lots of questions.  And I know when a bunch of those 350 children came up onto the stage and acted out their own story about my character, Wild Thing (where she and her sister visited Edinburgh Castle and accidentally set off the One O’clock Gun) they certainly inspired me.

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Emma's new series for 8+ Wild Thing about the naughtiest little sister ever (and her bottom-biting ways) is out now from Scholastic. 
"Hilarious and heart-warming" The Scotsman

 Wolfie is published by Strident.   Sometimes a Girl’s Best Friend is…a Wolf. 
"A real cracker of a book" Armadillo 
"Funny, clever and satisfying...thoroughly recommended" Books for Keeps


Emma's Website
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