The Emperor's New Clones • Early Reader

I have a new early reader book coming out today!

The Emperor's New Clones is illustrated by Martin Chatterton  and is the second book Martin and I have done together for Egmont's Bananas early reader series, the first being Danny Dreadnought Saves the World.

The idea for book came to me when I was thinking up ideas for another book, Skyboy and other Stupendous Science Stories. As the title suggests, that book contains a collection of stories with a science theme, so I began by writing out a list of scientific fields and then tried to come up with a story idea to go with each of them. One of the fields on my list was “Genetics and Cloning”. As soon as I thought about clones, the punning title “The Emperor’s New Clones” popped into my head and I came up with idea of Robbie Remus, the reluctant boy Emperor, to fit it.

In the end, I didn’t use that story in the Skyboy collection, but I expanded the outline and offered it to Egmont for their Bananas series. Series editor Hanna Sandford liked the idea, so I wrote it up as a story and, a couple of drafts later, Egmont agreed to take it. 

One thing that was missing from the early drafts is the blasterball match at the beginning of the book. Blasterball is a futuristic sport, played in zero-gravity, in which two teams score points by firing a ball into the opposing team's black hole. Robbie is passionate about the sport, but has to give up playing it when he becomes Galactic Emperor. However he’s able to take it up again thanks to Professor Parton and his Duplitron cloning machine. Although Robbie’s love of blasterball was described in the first draft, I’d neglected to show him actually playing it. Following the classic writing rule of “show, don’t tell”, Hannah pointed out that the story would work better if we showed the reader what Robbie was missing out on. So I wrote a new opening scene that drops the reader straight into the closing minutes of a blasterball match. 

The book starts with a blasterball match. I love the "pigtail grommets" Martin drew in the girl's helmet in the foreground.

I give a lot of thought to character names and occasionally use them to sneak in little in-jokes or references that some older readers might possibly pick up on. There are a couple in this story. Miss Sourdust, the overly officious Imperial Assistant is named after Sourdust, the similarly officious Master of Ritual in Mervyn Peake’s magnificent Gormenghast books. The second reference is even more tenuous and geeky; cloning genius Professor Parton is named after Dolly Parton the country singer, who also gave her name to Dolly the sheep (the first animal to be successfully cloned from another adult).

Professor Parton (left) is named after Dolly Parton (middle), who also gave her name to Dolly the cloned sheep (right).

I really liked Martin Chatterton's illustrations for our first Banana book, Danny Dreadnought Saves the World and Martin’s energetic comic-strip-like style is a great fit for this story too. He’s really captured the excitement of the Blasterball game (see spread above) and I love the zany-looking cast of multi-species characters he’s created. 

Martin Chatterton's illustrations include some weird and wonderful alien characters.

Here's a trailer for the book.



The cloned versions of Robbie are practically identical. See if you can tell them apart on this activity sheet.

Click the image to download the activity sheet.

Visit THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLONES page on my web site

Three Ways Authors Can Get the Most Out of their Computers

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

I don't think I'd have made it as a professional author without a computer's help

A question children often ask me on school visits is “do you write with pen and paper or on a computer?”. I know there are some authors who swear by pen and paper, particularly for the first draft, and say that a computer would get between them and the story. For me it’s the other way around. I’m slightly dyslexic and doubt that I’d be able to make a living as a writer without a computer helping me to set down, shape and polish my stories.

I’ve just gone without my computer for a week, while a faulty hard-drive was replaced. This absence reminded me how much I’ve come to depend on my computer and prompted me to write this post.

Here are three ways authors can get the most out of their computers. My own computer is an Apple Mac, and I’ve included some detailed instructions for other Mac users, but these tips also apply to Windows PCs.


First and foremost …

1: Learn to touch-type

If you’re still pecking away at your keyboard with two fingers, you’re getting your ideas down on the page at a fraction of the rate you could be. Having been born in the dark ages, before computers were in every home, I taught myself to touch type on a mechanical typewriter using a Pitman typing book. These days, you can learn far more easily using typing-tutor software (you find can some recent reviews of some here. It’s never too late to learn. Touch-typing is an invaluable skill for anyone that uses a keyboard and I’ve never understood why it’s not routinely taught at an early age in UK schools.

Use ten not two! Touch typing is an invaluable skill for any author and it's never too late too learn.

2: Have your computer read aloud to you

It’s good practice for any writer to read their work aloud, but it’s essential for picture book authors, as picture books are often read aloud to children by adults. Although I still read text aloud, I use my computer to do this most of the time. I'm not sure if this is linked to my dyslexia, but when I read something I've written aloud, my brain often glosses over errors and I read what I'd meant to type instead of what I've actually typed. However when I listen to the computer reading the same passage, the errors are far more conspicuous.

Having your computer read aloud is particularly useful when writing rhyming texts. Reading aloud is the only way to check that a rhyming text scans well, but if you’ve written the text yourself, you will have preconceptions as to the rhythm of a line and which words need emphasis. Someone reading the text for the first time won't share these preconceptions so you want to make sure that a rhyming text will still read well without them. One way around this is to ask someone else to read your text back to you, but their patience may begin to wear thin if you keep asking them to re-read the same lines, with minor variations, again and again. And after a few readings they'll begin to develop preconceptions of their own. A computer has infinite patience and is incapable of forming such preconceptions. It will give consistently impartial readings with even rhythm and emphasis, putting in appropriate pauses for commas and other punctuation. Standard computer speech used to be very flat and American sounding, but has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years. Macs now come with a range of English Language voices pre-installed with yet more available as free downloads (go to System Preferences>Dictations and Speech>Text to Speech and click “customise” to find them). You can find instructions on how to use a Mac’s Text to Speech function here.

Macs can speak English in a variety of voices and accents, including Australian, Indian, Irish, Scottish and South African.

It’s worth taking the time to choose a voice you like and to adjust the speed. My favourite is “Serena”, who speaks with an English accent. You can use the player below to hear what she sounds like reading the opening lines of The Silver Serpent Cup. The software makes the occasional mistake, (its pronunciation of 'noisy' in the passage below is slightly out) and it can slip up with homonyms. However it can cope surprisingly well with made-up words and generally does a remarkably good job.

Today the town of Furryville’s a very noisy place,
Crammed with crowds of creatures getting ready for a race.
The air is filled with honking horns and engines revving up,
As racers take their places for THE SILVER SERPENT CUP.

3. Use software that suits the way you work

Most of the publishers I work with expect manuscripts to be sent to them as Microsoft Word files and when I first became a writer, I used to write directly into Word. However as the years have gone by, Word has become increasingly unwieldy to use, with half of it’s functions hidden away in a bewildering array of sub menus. There are now lots of cheaper applications available, some of which are far better suited to writing a book. About 9 years ago I started using Scrivener, an application designed specifically for authors. It provides a far cleaner, simpler interface than Word and allows authors to access and organise the myriad files, documents and web pages relating to their project through a single window instead of cluttering up the screen with half a dozen windows from various applications. And once you’ve finished a project, you can export it as a MS Word file to send to your publisher.

The Silver Serpent Cup in Scrivener. Scrivener allows you to open multiple text documents, pdfs, web pages
and images within a single application window. One of Ed Eaves' concept sketches is shown on the right.

I hope the tips above have proved useful. If you have any other computer tips for writers (perhaps you can tell Windows users how to get their computer reading aloud), please post them in the comments box below.

Children's Book Week • Notts TV 630 Show appearance

Last week was Children's Book Week and my local TV station Notts TV marked it by having me as a guest on their 630 Show along with Tim Ryan, one of the organisers of Nottingham's wonderful Telling Tales Festival. Notts TV didn't know it when they invited us, but Tim and I are old friends; we both came to Nottingham to study architecture at the University and went on to work side by side in the same Nottingham practice for a couple years.

I'd originally been invited on to the show to talk about my own books, but I offered to recommend a couple of recent favourites by other authors and illustrators. And then I realised that I ought to take the opportunity to promote the Summer Reading Challenge which was launching the following day. So in the end I didn't have time to talk about any of my own books, but there's an image of one of them, The Silver Serpent Cup, on the screen behind me.

The show went out live and the half hour seemed to fly by. Before I knew it we were finishing with a great performance from Rich Howell of Nottingham music collective RJMarks.  Thanks to Notts TV and 630 Show presenter Nicola Beswick (who's a big fan of kids' books) for having us on.

The books I recommended on the show were:

The Silly Book of Side-Splitting Stuff written by Andy Seed illustrated by Scott Garrett

The Sleeper and the Spindle written by Neil Gaiman illustrated by Chris Riddell

The Telling Tales Festival is on 10 October 2015. You can find out more about it at nottinghamtellingtales.org.uk.

And you can find out more about this year's Record Breakers Summer Reading Challenge at summerreadingchallenge.org.uk

WOLVES AND APPLES Children's Writers Event • Leicester, Saturday 3rd October

I'm going to be doing a couple of events at this year's Wolves and Apples Children's Writers Event in Leicester on Saturday 3rd October.

Wolves & Apples is an annual event where established authors, agents and producers from a variety of mediums offer practical advice and guidance on how to write for a younger audience.

I will be talking about writing picture books and taking part in a panel event.

The lineup is still being finalised, but confirmed speakers include novelist and 2015 Carnegie Medal winner Tanya Landman, TV writer and Wolfblood creator Debbie Moon  and theatre director and dramaturg Juliet Forster.

The event is taking place at the College Court Hotel and Conference Centre in Leicester and there is a General Admission price of £25 (yes, that is extremely good value!) for the whole day.

You can find out more about the event at http://www.red-lighthouse.org.uk/wolves-and-apples/

CLICK HERE to book a ticket online

Two heads are better than one: The benefits of early author-illustrator collaboration

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

I mentioned in a post earlier this year that, although people often assume that picture book authors and illustrators work closely together, it’s not unusual for the author and illustrator to have no direct contact, with the book’s creation being co-ordinated via the publisher.

One of my Dutch publishers told me that Dutch authors and illustrators regularly get together with the publisher during a picture book’s production to discuss how the project is progressing. However, if my own experience is anything to go by, regular meetings like this are not the norm in the UK. I’d been writing picture books for ten years before a publisher, Puffin, invited me to get together with illustrator Steve Cox to look at some of Steve’s initial concept sketches for our picture book Pigs Might Fly and discuss how it might be illustrated. Before then, I’d only met two illustrators I’d done a book with and spoken to a couple more on the phone, and this was always after the project was completed.

One reason for this lack of direct contact is that many picture book publishers like to moderate all communication between a book's author and illustrator. In the conventional UK set-up, an author gives any comments or ideas they might have regarding the illustrations to an editor, who then (if they agree with them) passes them on to the illustrator (sometimes via the book's designer). This is obviously a rather slow method of communication and and misinterpretations can occur as the message is passed along the chain. Another disadvantage of the conventional set-up is that while the author has some influence over how the book is illustrated, the illustrator has relatively little influence over how the book is written, the story having been largely hammered out before they are on board.

The line of communication between author and illustrator is often indirect.
(Image taken from my "How a book is Made" school presentations)

When I first started creating picture books I'd intended to both write and illustrate and was in the habit of developing ideas simultaneously in both text and illustration. Although my illustration has largely fallen by the wayside, I still think of stories visually as much as verbally. I'll often get a story idea from looking at an image or conceive a story outline as a series of illustrations. So I've always thought that the conventional set-up, with its lack of direct interaction between author and illustrator, is less than ideal. Fortunately, I've been able to team up with several sympathetic illustrators who have been happy to exchange ideas at an early stage and several of my more recent picture books have been developed in a far more collaborative way.

After Mark Oliver had illustrated my text for Tom’s Clockwork Dragon, he and I were both keen to do another picture book together. So rather than leave it to chance, I asked Mark if there was anything he’d particularly like to illustrate. Mark sent me a list of ideas, one of which – a mechanical monster manual – became Monsters: An Owner’s Guide. We developed the idea between us and when we had a draft of the text and some concept art that we were both happy with, we offered it as a joint project to publishers. Thankfully, Macmillan accepted it and subsequently took Aliens: An Owner’s Guide as a follow-up.

Some of Mark Oliver's early concept art for Monsters: An Owner's Guide

Since then, I’ve worked on several stories where the illustrator has been involved from the initial concept stage and has often provided the initial inspiration. The Treasure of Captain Claw was written in answer to Steve Cox’s wish to illustrate a submarine story and my latest picture book, The Silver Serpent Cup, was written in response to a set of outlandish vehicle models that Ed Eaves had offered as a possible source of inspiration. 

The Silver Serpent Cup and some of the outlandish vehicle models, made by Ed Eaves, that inspired it.

Not all of the author-illustrator collaborations I’ve worked on have made it into print – I wrote two unpublished stories with the late Vanessa Cabban – but I’ve always enjoyed working with the illustrator to create them. And I suspect that, having helped shape the initial concept, the illustrators I’ve created these books with have felt a little more attached to these projects and may have been prepared to lavish a little extra care and attention on them.

Some of Vanessa Cabban's "Clara and Bertie" character sketches from an unpublished project we developed together.

There’s a synergy when text and illustration work well together in a picture book. This happens naturally when the same person is both writing and illustrating, but if the author and illustrator are two different people, such a synergy can be a lot easier to achieve if they get together early on to exchange ideas. I’d certainly recommend it!

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My latest collaborative picture book is The Silver Serpent Cup illustrated by Ed Eaves and published by Oxford University Press.

THE SILVER SERPENT CUP Top Trumps card game and colouring sheets

 

To mark the publication of Fast and Furry Racers: The Silver Serpent Cup, I’ve created a Top Trumps style card game featuring all twenty-four of the vehicles from the book.

You can download the full set of cards along with a rules envelope to store them in HERE.

In the last post I mentioned how impressed I was with Ed Eave’s vehicle design sketches when I first saw them. Ed has kindly agreed to make these available as a set of colouring sheets which you can download HERE.

Find out more about The Silver Serpent Cup on my web site

The Silver Serpent Cup • New Paperback

I have a new paperback picture book coming out today! Fast and Furry Racers: The Silver Serpent Cup is illustrated by Ed Eaves and published by Oxford University Press. It's a high-speed, adrenaline-fuelled rhyming romp of a story that we hope will be the first of a series of Fast and Furry Racers books.

Today the town of Furryville’s a very noisy place,
Crammed with crowds of creatures getting ready for a race.
The air is filled with honking horns and engines revving up,
As racers take their places for THE SILVER SERPENT CUP!

The initial inspiration for book came from illustrator Ed Eaves. Ed and I had previously done a couple of pop-up books together. We’d got on well and were hoping to work together again some time. About a year after we’d finished the second pop-up book, Ed sent me some photos of a set of cardboard models that he’d made for his illustration degree over a decade earlier. The models were of animals driving outrageously souped-up cars and planes, many of which were armed with enormous weapons. Ed had thought about doing a picture book along similar lines, but hadn’t been able to come up with a suitable story, so he’d sent them to me to see if they would “spark an idea.”

Some of the vehicle models that Ed Eaves made for his illustration degree show.

I found the models very appealing and an idea for a no-holds-barred race story, featuring a motley assortment of creatures and vehicles immediately sprang into my mind. However, I couldn’t get the story to work straight away and was tinkering with it, off and on, for more than a year before I went back to Ed with a draft. Most of Ed’s models were of aeroplanes and having already written a picture book about an air race, Pigs Might Fly, I decided that the race in this story needed to be distinctly different. So I extended the range of vehicles to include cars, boats, submarines, a steam train and a tunnelling machine. I’m always arguing that we need more picture books that can match the appeal of children’s TV, film and video games and one of the biggest inspirations for the story was the Wacky Races cartoon series which was a childhood favourite of mine. Another more contemporary influence was the Mario Kart video games. My kids love playing these and I wanted to see if we could create a similar sense of action-packed, adrenaline-fuelled excitement in a picture book. In Mario Kart, racers fire a variety of bullets, bombs and shells to sabotage other vehicles. I borrowed this idea for a scene towards the end of the book where villainous alligator Al McNasty tries to win the race by firing rockets at the other racers’ vehicles.

Ed and I wanted the book to have a similar appeal to TV show Wacky Races (left) and video game Mario Kart (right).

Luckily Ed liked the draft I sent him, so we sent it out to publishers, along with the photos of Ed’s models. We were delighted when Peter Marley at Oxford University Press accepted it!

Only seven of the racers are directly referred to in the story, but the text makes it clear that a lot more are taking part in the race. Ed decided that there would be twenty four vehicles in all and designed all of them before he began work on the illustrations. I was blown away by these design sketches when I first saw them. Each of the vehicles looks distinctly different, partly because Ed made many of them look like the animals that drove them. You can see that Ed’s given a lot of thought to the design of each and every one of them.

Ed designed many of the vehicles to look like their drivers.

All twenty four vehicles lined up on the starting grid. 

Ed illustrations also draw on Wacky Races and Mario Kart for inspiration and this really comes across in his action-packed, dynamic final artwork. This submarine spread where octopus Ollie Octllini takes the lead among the underwater racers, is one of my favourites.

Here's a trailer I made for the book.

As you can probably tell, this book has been a pleasure to work on. I only hope children will enjoy reading it as much as Ed and I enjoyed making it!

Visit The Silver Serpent Cup's page on my web site