Imagination

Be Yourself

Surrey Schools Visits

Last week I was lucky enough to spend time with kids from St Paul's School and Furzefield School, Surrey, designing characters and discussing story-planning. Two lovely folks from Surrey Libraries escorted me to the schools, fed me, and watched supportively while I jabbered, doodled and signed books (huge thank you to Tom and Jenny!).

In Miss Booker's Year 4 class at Furzefield, the children played some facial-expression games, before launching into designing their own expressive animal characters. We then pretended to interview the drawings, asking them why they felt so angry/ joyful/ dismal, to spark ideas for stories. Here are a few examples of the kids' fantastic creations...

 Fighting the temptation to get this eagle printed onto a t-shirt! Absolutely love him.

What a conundrum! Eat your only friend, or starve?!

 Nigel the Bat. A gizmo-obsessed Rambo-type, with a most excellent name.

  

"She found something sparkly!"

 

 

Well done, Furzefield. Gorgeous, hilarious, inspiring work!

A Teeny Taste of Book Three...

Things are ticking along for my ginger-tabby queen, and book three's now well underway. I've been playing with cover ideas (pic) and am coming to the end of my first draft. It still seems unbelievable that, later this year, I'll have a three book series under my belt, when it seems I was pondering the first story such a short time ago. Still, there's plenty to be done before I get there, including much KITTEN SKETCHING!!! WOOOOHOOOOOO!!! Oh, how I suffer...

Queen Sardine and Princess Persia

Book two is on the shelves! As of this month, the second in my Queen Sardine series is available to buy in paper format and digital. A couple of new characters are thrown into the Kipper Street mix (which - now I write it - sounds like some weird kind of cat food), along with plenty of daftness and cattitude.

And, hey! There's a word for irritating words like 'cattitude' (sorry - I can't help myself) and (even worse) 'chillax' (yes, that nanky old chestnut)... these are portmanteau words, apparently. 'Portmanteau' as in the suitcase in two halves. Two words schmushed together... kind of makes sense. Anyhow, that's the educational content of this blog covered for the next decade or so. Now, back to drawing cats...

The Queen's in the Hive!

Kinda.

Queen Sardine? Queen bee? OK, fine, it was a dubious play on words... What I'm trying to say is a big THANK YOU to hive.co.uk for choosing me as a 'rising writer' for June.

Yay!

A Review From My Muse

My main (human) character, Ivy, went through some tweaks and changes as I worked on developing her character into that of a believable 8 year old. And who better to look to for inspiration than my young friend, Isis (then 8, now 9)?! She helped me remember how wonderfully frenetic kids' thinking can be. Thank you, Isis! And thanks also for your fantastic review...


Queen Sardine: Book Review

This book is about friendship and bravery. I was engrossed when I had it read to me. I loved the main characters, Queen Sardine and Ivy, because of their personalities. And I felt that little sprout was very cute. Some of the pictures made me laugh. I would like to be friends with Ivy and I hope in the next book she gets her own back on Fabian (the bully boy)! - Isis, aged 8