...and a Groundhog came to visit

Phew! What a month April was! *presses back of hand on forehead* A to Z blogs every day! All that nostalgia! I've really enjoyed the memories but, goodness, the schedule was gruelling, a two-week stint of flu, and right in the middle of it all I had an unusual visitor...



A groundhog came to stay!

Phyllis is a friendly little groundhog and she'd travelled all the way from the US to be with me. This was part of her world tour and to find out where else she's been click on the World Tour Badge. Having travelled so widely, Phyllis was very keen to see what Leicester was like so...

I took her for a drive round our lovely City...

We stopped at Victoria Park but I was surprised when she refused to go for a walk.
      "It's going to storm," she said. "We'd better go home."

Knowing Phyllis as well as I do, I believed her and sure enough, as soon as we got home...

To find out more about Phyllis and her uncanny weather-forecasting skills which come to light in her latest book April Fool, Phyllis! pop along to Susanna Leonard Hill's website. It's where Phyllis lives.

As for me, Phyllis has gone home, the A to Z is over and I'm going to get back to my work-in-progress. It's been badly neglected. I might even blog about it some time soon.

Ducks

I do love ducks. In fact, I think they’re becoming something of an obsession. 

These are my top three ‘Things About Ducks That I Love.’

1.  I love the way they appear to glide across the water with very little effort and yet you can see their feet pedalling manically beneath the surface.

2.  I love the way their quacks sound like hilarious laughter. Whenever I hear them I have to smile.

3.  I love their beautiful markings, especially the ones with the petrol green/blue heads.

My favourite cartoon duck is Donald Duck. My son can do an amazing impersonation of him. Quacks me up every time! [Sorry]

And I love writing about ducks too.

Several years ago I had a picture book shortlisted in The Little Tiger Press' Picture Book Competition. The story was called A Day on Duck Park. After the competition was over I submitted my story for publication with more than my usual amount of optimism. It went out to sixteen publishers and was rejected sixteen times. Apparently it’s not ‘strong enough to make it in the present competitive market’. *sigh*

I have now written two new duck picture book stories. The duck characters are lively. I think they’re funny. I’ve done all I can to make the storylines ‘strong enough to make in in the present competitive market’ and they’re about to be submitted. So, with webbed feet crossed, here's hoping they have more luck than my first duck story.

My words through an artist’s eyes

I’m trying something new with my writing. I’m working with an illustrator. I suspect a couple of sharp-eyed followers will already have noticed a contradiction. Two posts ago I wrote of my dislike for change and now I’m about to embrace it. But when it comes to writing, I’m always keen to explore different styles and if I ever stop trying to improve my work then it’ll be time to hang up the keyboard.

Sue Hague

I have my writing group to thank for this idea, yet again. [They’re lovely, are my writing group!] We all belong to a children’s book group which meets once a month to read and discuss children’s books... and to have lunch, of course! One of the members is an artist. Her name is Sue Hague and whenever we have a meeting at her house we are in awe of her artwork, especially the finely detailed flower paintings. She is passionate about observing and recording all those tiny details in the world around us, the details that most people don’t notice... the same details that I, as a writer, try to record with words, whereas Sue uses a mixture of acrylic, watercolour and soft pencil.

Last week Sue ran an art workshop for us writers. We’ve never done anything like this as a group before. It was an amazing experience if a little messy... 

Our first task was to rub oil paint onto an acetate sheet and scratch a picture onto paper which had been placed over the top of the paint. My result was a little smudgy but the activity had been satisfying and absorbing in a compulsive sort of a way.

Alex Gutteridge (left), me in the middle and Debbie White who I suspect had prior art training! 

Pippa Goodhart

We worked with materials that I never thought could go together... like a pen, some bleach and a sheet of soft coloured paper. The effect appears gradually. It’s another fascinating process. This isn’t my attempt. It’s Pippa's.

I didn’t produce anything that would hang on my walls but then that wasn't the aim of the morning. What I did come away with was a lot of inspiration, especially when it comes to looking at those finer details of life that are all around us... but there was more. I had a chat with Sue about the art of illustrating and it was then that we planned our collaboration. I have a number of children’s picture book manuscripts, words only, with written illustration guidelines where relevant. I have a rough idea of what the pictures might look like but I was interested to see if Sue’s expert input would add another dimension to my work.

As soon as I got home I emailed a manuscript to her. She came straight back to me with ideas that were already ‘running through her head’. Changes began to happen, improvements began to emerge, as she suggested some fine tuning to my story line, things that I wouldn’t have thought about on my own. She’s now working on some rough drafts and we’ll be meeting up very soon to merge our ideas. We’re hoping to make a joint submission and although we both know that it could well join my list of rejections, it’s been extremely useful to look at my words through an artist’s eyes... and who knows, it might even be accepted!

    

A new story idea...

... but will it appeal to a foreign ear?

Before I launch into my tirade about UK picture books, I’d like to thank everyone for all your kind messages and queries regarding the many health issues that we’ve been struggling with lately. I’ve included an update at the bottom of this post.

And now for my tirade... I love it when a new story idea appears. It’s hard to say where they come from and sometimes it’s best not to analyse it but somehow, amid all the worry over Mum, I have just completed a new children’s picture book. My critique group loved it. I love it. It’s about to be brave and venture into the big scary world of UK picture book editors. They may not love it as much as we do. This could possibly be because they view picture book manuscripts in terms of income potential. In other words, will it appeal to foreign publishers?

I’d like to think that my writing could be loved worldwide but I’m afraid that a lot of it contains humour and it would seem that humour does not travel well. To make matters worse, I recently read a report saying that a number of countries are now favouring home-grown writers over foreign ones. You can’t blame them but why can’t we do the same? I know that publishers have to make money and money is made from foreign sales but it would be refreshing if we were encouraged to write for UK kids in a style sympathetic to our humour, our interests and our culture and not have to worry about worldwide markets.

Health Issues Updates: 

I have made an official complaint to the Chief Executive of the Leicester NHS Trust regarding the negligence experienced by my mother while she was in the Leicester General Hospital. I have asked for changes to be made and for me to be kept informed of these changes. If you have a personal interest in this issue and would like me to keep you updated then please contact me here. 

 Mum is about to start five days of radiotherapy. It’s palliative. Each session will be for only two minutes but they’re hoping that this will be enough to shrink the tumour. We hope so too. 

Rod’s resistance is still very low even though it’s now six months since he had his stem cell transplant. In the last two weeks he’s picked up a nasty stomach bug and a chesty/sore throat bug. He’s hoping that very soon he’ll be well enough to potter in the garden. I hope so too! 

Important point: I’d like to add that over the last few years both Rod and Mum have received first class care and treatment from all the staff at the Leicester Royal Infirmary Oncology Department. They truly are an excellent team of professionals.

  

A time to rhyme

There’s something satisfying about reading an old, familiar poem, even (especially) if you almost know it by heart.

What is this life if full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare...

(Leisure by W. H. Davies)

 

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you...

(If... by Rudyard Kipling)

Poetry can be a great comfort when times are hard. Mum is very ill. It’s cancer of the oesophagus. My life has returned to the routine of daily hospital visits and bags of washing.

At times like this I can’t concentrate on novels so I thought I’d revisit Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled in which he explains the processes of poetry writing. I love reading Stephen Fry. He writes as he talks and it’s like having him sitting next to me but this book has beaten me. I never knew that poetry could be SO complicated with its anapaest, dactyl, molasses... It makes my attempts at poetry writing look embarrassingly naive. [My Little Nut Tree]

But does that matter? I enjoy it so I’m issuing a warning! I’m going to carry on writing it however naive it may be.

Our love of rhythm and rhyme is nurtured from when we’re very young through nursery rhymes and simple songs. My favourite picture books are the rhyming ones which brings me to a major gripe. I understand:

• that publishers need to watch the pennies
• that picture books are expensive to produce.
• that they need to get foreign rights to cover the cost
• that rhyming texts make translation more difficult

 ...but I can’t be the only person who loves rhyming picture books. If we all love them and the children all love them, isn’t it a shame that most publishers state quite clearly in their submission guidelines ‘No rhyming texts’. Come on publishers. Give us more of what we want!

What’s your favourite ‘almost recite by heart’ poem?

  

A Different Kind of Day

I knew as soon as I got up this morning that I wouldn’t be going to the shops.

And there seemed to be little point in finishing off my current picture book manuscript. Editors are too busy with holiday matters right now and anyway the post boxes are full to overflowing. So I decided to do something scarily different. I decided to bake some cakes.

For me cake baking is close to magic. If I don’t wave my wand... sorry, wooden spoon in quite the right way, it’ll be a disaster. So I spent some time consulting the book of spells... I mean, cookbook [lent to me by a very good friend] and I set to work measuring, mixing...

...baking and *abracadabra*...

I’ve only gone and magicked up a lemon drizzle cake! (It’s quite easy this baking business.)

Encouraged by my success I try a second cake. It’s a tad more complicated and so Mr A is called in to help with the decorative bits.

This goes into the oven and *izzy wizzy*...

...we have a Danish Apple Cake. There's only one thing left to do. As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Delicious!

Talking of yummy food, I’d like to send a great big THANK YOU to one of my Twitter friends, Keris Stainton, for the lovely box of chocolates which is in the post to me as I type. I won her recent blog competition and the prize was a box of Hotel Chocolates from the Chocolate Tasting Club. I can recommend a visit to her blog post of a hilarious Strictly Come Dancing extract. [And yes, I'm still missing Strictly.]

  

What exactly is sparkle anyway?

I arrived home from the shops yesterday to the sound of hammering. It made me smile. Rod was repairing a stool. In the afternoon, while he pottered in his potting shed, I settled down to work on some picture books. Life is slowly returning to some sort of normality.

It’s quite some time since I worked on picture book fiction so I dug out some of my guideline notes from way back. In amongst all the bumf about double-line spacing etc it said to make sure the story had lots of sparkle. I had no doubt faithfully written this from a book I was reading or a talk I attended but I don’t think I stopped to analyse it. I mean, what exactly is sparkle anyway? And never mind getting sparkle into picture books. If it’s so important, then I need to know how I can get sparkle into my life.

In my last blog post I talked about how we felt about ourselves on a scale of one to ten, ten being fantastic. I can’t remember the last time I was a ten. A number of you said the same in your comments. If we could work out how to get sparkle into our lives would it increase our scores? An eight would be good.

As far as writing picture books is concerned I reckon that the way we can add sparkle is to write with an easy-to-read rhythm, to include a fine sprinkling of alliteration and inner rhymes, and to feed the illustrators with many and varied spreads so they can add sparkle too....

Hang on a minute! Maybe I can do the same with my life. Maybe it’s all about an easy-to-live rhythm or maybe I have an inner illustrator who needs to be fed? Now there’s a thought.

p.s. I tried to take a photograph of the sun sparkling on the frosty grass but it wouldn't show. However many times I tried and whatever setting I put the camera on, the grass and frost were there but the sparkle wasn't. Sparkle is elusive - official!