Paint Your Dragon!

The clockwork dragon in the book isn't the only one getting a new look. 

One of the books I have coming out next year is The Clockwork Dragon. This is a new version of the story originally published in 2008 as Tom's Clockwork Dragon. Unfortunately the original version didn't sell particularly well and so went out of print quite soon after publication. Fortunately Oxford University Press thought that the story deserved a second chance and are publishing a revamped, redrafted version with new illustrations by Weasels and Nuts in Space creator Elys Dolan.

The original Clockwork Dragon picture book illustrated by Mark Oliver and the new version illustrated by Elys Dolan.

Although I'm still very fond of Mark Oliver's illustrations for the original version, I love the fresh new spin that Elys has put on the story. Her illustrations expand the world that the story's set in and are filled with the engaging comical details that she excels at. Here's a sneak peek of a couple of the spreads. You can see more in this post on Elys's blog.

Shortly after the original version of the book was published local artist Obediar Madziva made a scrap metal sculpture of the clockwork dragon for our back garden. The sculpture was made out of offcuts of galvanised steel and was very shiny when first finished.

The dragon sculpture with its creator Obediar Madziva

However, as the years have gone by the welding has rusted over.

Since the book is to come out with a very different new look I decided it was a good time to give Obediar's sculpture a makeover as well. So, after giving it a good wash and scrub down and a coat of red primer …

… I painted the whole thing, from head to tail, in copper coloured Hammerite paint.

The whole process took about a day, but here's a time lapse video that shows it in just under a minute.

The new version of The Clockwork Dragon is published

by Oxford University Press on 1 February 2015

Click here to pre-order a copy from amazon

Visit Obediar Madziva's website to see more of his work

Aptly ever after

This post was originally published on Picture Book Den, a blog about picture books by picture book authors and illustrators.

Back in April, Natascha Biebow wrote a Picture Book Den post about picture book openings and why it’s important to get them right. I think endings are equally important, so I thought I’d write a post about them.

When I was reading picture books with my own children we were always disappointed by stories that ended inappropriately. Perhaps most disappointing of all were picture books that seemed to have no proper ending at all. We’d turn the page, expecting to discover how the story finished only to find that it was already over and we were at the back of the book. I think there needs to be a satisfying sense of conclusion when one reaches the end of a picture book, whether the story winds down gently or ends with a spectacular flourish or unexpected twist.

Some of the best children’s storytelling in recent years has come from Pixar, the animation studio that created the Toy Story trilogy and several other modern classics. While Pixar’s films are always visually impressive, the company attributes its phenomenal success to its motto – “Story is King”. Here’s one of Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling that’s also a great piece of advice for picture book authors.

Rule 7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

I’m a great believer in writing an outline before writing a story – even a short story like a picture book’s – and that means coming up with an ending before starting the first draft. I know that some authors dismiss outlines as limiting, claiming that they like to ‘discover’ the story as they are writing it. That might be true if the outline were a fixed document but, like most authors that use them, I’m constantly tinkering with the outline as I write the story. If a better ending occurs to me, I see if I can rework the outline to accommodate it. Writing a story with an outline is like going for a walk in the country with a map. You have an idea of what’s coming up, but you can always opt to take a different route and end up somewhere else if it takes your fancy. With a map, a walker is less likely to end their walk stranded in the middle of nowhere; with an outline an author is less likely to end up with an unsatisfactory ending.

I don’t know whether the authors of the following picture books use outlines or not, but here are three stories that all have satisfying endings that feel just right. I’ve done my best to avoid spoilers, but if you haven’t read any of the stories mentioned below and want to avoid any hints as to how they end, you might want to skip over that paragraph.

The Great Dog Bottom Swap

Peter Bently

Illustrated by Mei Matsuoka

This is the tale of a Dog’s Summer Ball that starts well, but ends in disaster. It’s a farcically funny story, deftly written with lots of amusing incidents throughout. And – as if that weren’t enough – the text on the final spread reveals a twist that makes the reader see the whole plot in an amusing new light.

Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose

Dr. Seuss

I can’t think of another picture book ending that made me and my children laugh quite so much as this one when we first read it. The story concerns Thidwick, a kindly moose whose generosity is exploited by a collection of creatures who set up home in his antlers. When a group of hunters arrive, the overburdened Thidwick’s chances of survival look slim. The image on the last page gives the story an incredibly funny, totally unexpected and somewhat shocking ending.

The Gruffalo

Julia Donaldson

Illustrated by Axel Scheffler

I know that The Gruffalo has had plenty of praise heaped on it already, but that’s because it’s such an exemplary piece of picture book writing. After the mouse’s death-defying adventure, Donaldson ends the story calmly and quietly. Having repeatedly escaped being eaten himself, the mouse (and the story) comes to a stop as the mouse sits down to enjoy a meal.






What are your favourite picture book endings? Let me know in the comments box below.

OUT FOR THE COUNT: Why are publishers becoming averse to longer picture book texts?

This post was originally published on Picture Book Den, a blog about picture books by picture book authors and illustrators.

One of the most insightful articles written about picture books in recent years is Anita Silvey’s Make Way for Stories published in the School Library Journal in 2011. In it Silvey, a children’s author and former publisher, highlighted a trend towards shorter picture book texts.

Bemoaning the lack of substantial stories in contemporary picture books she observed that:

“So much of what we see, no matter how clever it is, can be described as a joke book. Some are very good jokes, but once you’ve read the text, you don’t really need to read it hundreds of times. Words have been pared down to a bare minimum; writers sometimes are told to use no more than 500. You can tell a great story with less than 500 words—think of Where the Wild Things Are (338 words) and The Carrot Seed (101 words)—but you may have to be a genius to do so!”

Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is a masterpiece of minimalist writing, but is less ALWAYS more when it comes to picture book texts?

Silvey goes on to say that

“With long texts, often over 2,000 words, a parent only has to read one bedtime story. At 500 words a book, the same parent might have to read four contemporary picture books to get the same satisfaction—or even get the child to nod off. So is it any wonder that parents have started to veer away from contemporary picture books when their children are four or five? If they want a long story, they’re forced to move to chapter books and older material.”

A recent Publishers Weekly blog post by children’s author and bookseller Elizabeth Bluemle on a similar theme, prompted me to go back and re-read Silvey’s piece. Silvey was writing about US picture books, but the trend she describes is just as evident in UK picture book publishing.

When I first started working in children’s publishing 19 years ago the rule of thumb was that picture book texts should not exceed 1,000 words. These days many publishers are reluctant to take anything over 500. As Silvey commented, you can still tell a great story in 500 words, but richer more complex storytelling is often better suited to a longer word count. And, rightly or wrongly, many parents equate age appropriateness with word count and believe that if a picture book only takes five minutes to read instead of ten or fifteen, it’s time to move a child along to something more “challenging”. The irony is that, as well as being more richly illustrated, picture books often contain richer language than chapter fiction. On several occasions I’ve taken a text that I wrote as a picture book and adapted it for publication as chapter fiction and - while the word count can go up - the level of language often has to go down. The reason for this is that picture books are often read to a child by an adult, who can cope with more complex sentence structures and explain unfamiliar words where necessary. Whereas it’s generally assumed that chapter fiction will be read by a child on their own, so the language level has to drop to reflect this.

Pigs Might Fly, my picture book with illustrator Steve Cox, received the most votes from young readers in the “Younger Children” category of the 2006 Red House Children’s Book Awards despite running to 1,114 words. Have young readers become averse to longer texts since then – or just publishers?

Although chapter fiction is often illustrated, few chapter fiction books are as lavishly illustrated as picture books. Appealing illustrations help to draw readers into a story. Where has that character suddenly appeared from? What are they saying? The only way to find out is to read the text! This is a powerful incentive, so it’s a shame that children are expected to do without it if they wish to read longer, more complex stories.

Of course there are some perfectly valid reasons for reducing word count. One of the basic principles of picture book writing is that one does not have to describe in the text what can be shown in the illustrations. Pacing is also important and sometimes the best way to maintain a reader’s interest is to cut to the chase. However reducing word count often means cutting jokes and entertaining elaborations or even omitting entire scenes, characters and plot threads that contribute to a story’s overall appeal.

More words on each page does mean less space for illustration, but it can also mean a child spends more time studying the illustrator’s work. When an adult reads a picture book to a child, the story is paced by the amount of text on each page. If there is only a few words on the page, illustrations are either passed over quickly (so that the reader can find out what happens on the next page) or the storytelling has to be put on pause while the illustration is pored over. So if words have been cut to enhance the pace of the story it can end up having the opposite effect, with storytelling having to stop and start intermittently.

A picture book with a thousand words costs no more to produce than one with one hundred. So why don’t we relax the word count and let some longer, richer storytelling come through? We might find that children will keep reading picture books to an older age if we do.

Sometimes less is more, but often less is just … LESS!



There are lots of comments from picture book authors, illustrators and readers beneath the original Picture Book Den version of this post which you can READ HERE.

The Lauralympics and 'Real Life Cluedo'

My daughter Laura turned thirteen a couple of weeks ago and to mark the occasion we had a party-cum-sporting-contest called the Lauralympics. There were five events – Table football, Playstation Dance Mat, Beaker Knockdown, Kerplunk and Quickfire Quiz – with gold, silver and bronze medals being awarded for each event.

A couple of weeks before the party, the guests divided themselves into three teams. Each team was asked to come up with a team name, a team anthem (to be sung by the winning team at each event’s medal ceremony) and a team flag (to be hoisted as the anthem was sung). After some deliberation, the teams decided to call themselves the Teacup Turtles, the Mighty Morphing Unicorns and the Rainbow Poopin’ Rabbits.

We made t-shirts for each team using iron-on transfers, bought some plastic medals, and improvised a winners’ rostrum and a flagpole out of some plastic crates and the handle of a fruit-picker.

Here are some photos of this momentous sporting occasion.

"If you build it, they will come." The competition venue awaits

Each team made their own flag.

The Mighty Morphing Unicorns take on the Teacup Turtles at table football.

The girls had not used a dance mat before, so my wife gave them a tutorial.

My daughter proudly hoists the Rainbow Poopin' Rabbits Flag during a medals ceremony

It's only a matter of time before Kerplunk is included in the real Olympics.

You don't want to get between this girl and her stack of beakers!

Everything to play for in the final Quickfire Quiz event.

The Teacup Turtles

The Mighty Morphing Unicorns

The Rainbow Poopin' Rabbits

Real Life Cluedo

To add some extra fun to the proceedings we played a special Lauralympics version of Real Life Cluedo throughout the party.

Loosely based on the Cluedo board game, Real Life Cluedo is a great game to play if you’re staying with friends or family for a weekend. In the regular version of the game all the players are given three small pieces of paper. Each player writes their name on the first, an object that can be found around the house on the second and a room in the house on the third. Each of the three pieces of paper is folded and put into one of three bowls along with the other players pieces. The contents of the bowls are mixed up and then each player takes a piece of paper from each bowl. If a player draws their own name from the first bowl, they simply put it back and draw another. It doesn’t matter if a player picks out the same object or room that they put into the bowl.

Each player will now have a secret murder mission consisting of the name of another player, an object and a room. To win the game a player has to survive being "murdered", while murdering as many of the other players as possible, starting with the name they've just drawn.

For example, David has picked “Josie”, “Book” and “Kitchen” out of the bowls. David will have "murdered" Josie if she accepts or picks up a book while she’s in the kitchen. Josie must accept or pick up the book of her own accord - David can’t drop it into her lap or force it upon her in any other way. Once Josie has been murdered, she’s out of the game, but she passes on her own murder mission to David. If David completes Josie’s murder mission, he has to carry out the next victim’s mission and so on. If someone murders David, his murderer picks up David’s mission at that time.

If David murders a player who has a mission to murder him, he becomes a survivor and can stop playing. Depending on how the game plays out, a player may be able to murder all of the other players, but the game often results in a draw if two or more survivors succeed in murdering whoever is trying to murder them.

The regular version of the game described above can take days to play out and the Lauralympics only lasted a few hours. So to speed things up, I wrote the murder missions in advance and combined the objects and rooms on one piece of paper, choosing objects that would definitely be found in those rooms. To make it even easier, there was a choice of two rooms for each mission.

The murder missions we used for our simplified version of the game.

This simplified version of the game worked really well. One of the girls went on a killing spree, murdering six other players during the party before being murdered herself in the final half hour and we ended up with two survivors just before the party finished.

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What gets me up in the morning

This post was originally published on CREATING FOCUS, the web site of occupational psychologist Sarah Dale. Occupational psychology is concerned with applying the science of psychology to work and this is one of a series of informal guest posts on Sarah's blog in which people from a range of professions talk about what motivates them in their work. You can follow Sarah on twitter on @creatingfocus.

WALLACE'S BED LAUNCHER
Sadly, I don't have a contraption like this to get me up in the morning; I have to rely on low-tech self-motivation

As a self-employed author who works from home, I’m often asked how I’m able to motivate myself. I’ve been a professional children’s author and pop-up designer for almost twenty years now. I love my work and consider myself extremely fortunate to be able to make a living out of it and this sense of “precarious good fortune” is the main thing that gets me out of bed and sitting at my desk every morning.

I have bad days when the story I’m working on feels clunky and awkward or I run up against what seems like an insurmountable obstacle in the plot. If this goes on for more than a few days, I usually put that story aside and work on something else for a while. Then, when I go back to it, I can often see it from a fresh angle that enables me to resolve the problem.

Pop-up design is different. If I haven’t got a pop-up working properly by the end of the day, my mind usually stays focussed on the problem and I want to keep going back to it until I’ve found a solution. Motivation is rarely an issue with pop-up design and an unproductive day often spurs me to redouble my efforts the following day.

People sometimes assume that once an author has a couple of successful books under their belt, everything they subsequently write is automatically accepted for publication. This may be the case for a few big names, but for many professional authors their tenth book can be as difficult to get published as their first. When I’m not writing, a lot of my time is spent trying to persuade publishers to take my work. Despite this effort, most of the stories I write are never published!

I often joke that being a children’s author is preferable to having a “proper job” but, while I can’t claim to have gone into the profession for anything other than selfish reasons, I think children’s authors can make a real difference to people’s lives. Good children’s literature is essential for the development of children’s literacy and good literacy is the key to wider academic achievement. If one can engage a child’s enthusiasm for literature at an early age, they’ll have a head start for life.

The problem is many young children, particularly boys, can’t find books that appeal to them as much as other children’s media currently do. The picture book industry’s current standards of age-appropriateness are more conservative than those of children’s films, TV and video games and this has resulted in many children coming to regard the former as being a lot less “cool” and appealing than the latter. I believe that this difference in standards is linked to a lack of gender balance in the world of picture books, where female gatekeepers hugely outnumber males. About eighteen months ago I decided to devote some of my time to raising awareness of the issue and set up a site called COOLnotCUTE.com to try to start a debate. It’s a contentious campaign and – as well as being a reason for me getting up in the morning – it’s also been a reason for me losing sleep in the night.

I’m not a natural campaigner, but in the last few years I’ve found myself taking a more proactive approach to change and, instead of waiting for someone else to highlight an issue or organise something, I’ve become more inclined to do it myself.

Another side project I’ve recently embarked on is virtualauthors.co.uk, a web directory of children’s authors and illustrators available for free Skype visits to UK schools. Skype visits are a great way for authors to connect with young readers and are already very popular in the US. I’m hoping that virtualauthors.co.uk will help to make Skype visits equally popular in the UK.

So right now I have no shortage of things that make it worth getting up in the morning – and I haven’t even mentioned my family! Long may it continue.

VirtualAuthors.co.uk - a new web site for virtual author visits for UK schools.

It was World Book Day last week and like many authors I visited a school to read my books and talk to the children. School visits are a great way for authors and illustrators to connect directly with young readers and are usually inspiring experiences for both.

Like most authors I charge a fee for my school visits that covers the time spent preparing my sessions as well as the time spent at the school. Unfortunately, with budgets being tight in most state schools, such fees deter many schools from booking author visits. The problem is particularly acute for small schools in rural communities where the cost of the visit on a per child basis can be three or four times that for a child attending a larger urban school.

My own school visits have been further restricted in recent years by my decision to limit them to schools in my local East Midlands area. My family have kept a household carbon budget since 2005, set slightly below the national household average. As well as forgoing air travel for our family holidays, we try to curb our long-distance travel generally which has meant me declining invitations to visit schools that are further afield.

You might think that with this tightening of both schools’ financial budgets and my own carbon budget, the number of school visits I do must be dwindling. In fact, I've visited more schools and in more far flung places in the last year than I have in any previous year, thanks to the internet.

Eighteen months ago, two US school children emailed me to ask if I’d Skype with their elementary class in North Carolina to read my picture book The Princess and the Pig and answer some of the class's questions about it. I was aware that many US authors offered Skype visits and had already been considering offering them myself, so I said I'd be happy to give it a go. The visit went so well that I've been virtually visiting schools, mostly in the US, ever since. Some of the schools I've visited have not had an author visit of any kind before and every school has been very appreciative. Teachers often follow up with classroom activities and schools have sent me letters, drawings and even an ebook the children created in response to my visit.

My virtual visits to schools in Vermont and Atlanta

The growth of virtual author visits in the US has been helped by the “Authors who Skype” page set up by Kate Messner and the Skype an Author site run by Mona Kerby and Sarah Chauncy, which include directories of authors and illustrators available to Skype with US schools. So I’ve decided to set up a similar directory site for authors and illustrators willing to Skype with UK schools at virtualauthors.co.uk.

For the time being, I’m following Kate Messner’s example and only listing authors that offer free 15-20 minute visits (although listed authors and illustrators might also offer longer, paid-for visits in addition to these). While I’m generally wary of the notion that authors and illustrators should work for free, a short virtual visit needs little preparation, the overheads are minimal (providing you already have a computer with a broadband connection) and there are no travel or accommodation expenses. In practice, it can take no more time to virtually visit a whole class of children than it takes to respond to a letter or email from a single child - and I don’t charge a fee to do that! Nevertheless, I still need to earn a living, so I limit my virtual visits to one a week and I only do them on Wednesdays. Even if an author or illustrator can only spare the time to do one free virtual visit a month during term time, that's still 10 schools a year, some of which may never have been visited by an author or illustrator before.

If you’re an author or illustrator that would like to be listed in the directory you can fill out the form on the "Authors and Illustrators" page of the site. If you've never done a Skype visit, there is some advice on getting started and some graphics you can download on the same page. There is no charge for being listed in the directory.

At present I’m restricting the directory to authors and illustrators who currently have at least one traditionally published book in print in the UK (not at the author or illustrator's expense and not only as print-on-demand/ebook). However I’m happy to list authors and illustrators from outside the UK providing they are able to offer free visits to UK schools during regular school hours.

So far, most of my virtual visits have been to US schools, but I have visited a couple of schools in the UK. Here’s what they had to say about the experience.

"The skype session was fantastic and the children really enjoyed it. It was great to be able to get the children to write questions and then have answers to them. I would certainly recommend it to other teachers. The parents all heard about it when their children got home from school and it certainly impressed them." 

Cossington C of E Primary School, Leicestershire, UK

“We thought the session was fantastic - just what we needed, a real life author to give out the messages we continually say … It is a brilliant opportunity to speak with you virtually and move into the 21st century! … The session was very clear and just the right time for year 3.” 

Corrie Primary School, Manchester, UK 

I’m hoping that virtualauthors.co.uk will encourage more schools to invite authors and illustrators into their classrooms. And who knows, once they’ve seen the benefits of a brief virtual visit, they might book a few more actual author and illustrator visits too!

Visit VirtualAuthors.co.uk

Visit the virtual visits page on my own web site

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UPDATE March 2017: The Virtual Authors site now lists authors who are available to Skype for a fee in addition to those offering free sessions. 

UPDATE September 2020: The Virtual Authors site now lists authors who are available to use software other than Skype, such as Zoom, FaceTime, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams. 

THE PRINCESS AND THE PIG is my most borrowed book from UK libraries

The Princess and the Pig
was my most borrowed book

I recently received last year's UK library loans figures for my books, courtesy of the Public Lending Right (PLR) organisation.

There's been quite a shakeup among my most borrowed books, with three books appearing in the top 5 for the first time, including The Princess and the Pig, which knocked last year's most borrowed book Bringing Down the Moon, off the top spot.

My latest Mole and Friends picture book, A Secret Worth Sharing and piratical picture book, The Treasure of Captain Claw, also made it into the top 5 for the first time.

The PLR figures show that my books were borrowed from UK libraries a total of 208,308 times last year, slightly up from 204,491 loans the previous year.

Here are my top 5 most borrowed books.

Position	Book Title	Nº of Loans
1	The Princess and the Pig	17,330	↑
2	Bringing Down the Moon	14,922	↓
3	A Secret Worth Sharing	13,868	↑
4	The Treasure of Captain Claw	13,388	↑
5	The Pig’s Knickers	13,183	↓

  

The PLR organisation also publishes a list of the UK's Most Borrowed Authors and I've crept up 9 places in this to 171st place. The top 3 remain the same this year with US crime writer James Patterson in first place,  "Daisy Meadows" (the pseudonym used by a collection of authors who write the Rainbow Magic series) in second place and Julia Donaldson in third.