An Awfully Big Blog Adventure View RSS

It's reading, isn't it? 24 May 10:36 PM (5 days ago)

I was in a bookshop in England a while back, when a mother came in asking for help finding a book for her son, who was 11. He loved to read, she said, but was frequently coming from home from school with a book that his teacher wouldn't let him read. Because, the teacher said, it wasn't appropriate. 

What he liked, his mum said, was books with adventure. Horror. Monsters. But he couldn't take those to school because the teacher would stop him reading them. (I have no idea what the teacher thought was appropriate; the mother didn't say.)

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. At a time when kids are reading less and less, when lessons set aside for reading are being scrapped and book sales are declining, we have a teacher stopping a child who wants to read, from reading.

I can't remember all the books we recommended, but I do know we put a copy of The Call by Peadar o' Guilin her hands. 

I'll bet he loved it.

Taking part in an arts festival - Sue Purkiss 22 May 9:00 PM (7 days ago)

 The first bank holiday weekend in May is known in these parts for being the Chaff weekend. 'Chaff' stands for 'Cheddar Arts Fringe Festival', and it began eleven years ago, when a group of artists in Cheddar decided that it had become too expensive to take part in the county-wide arts festival, and had the notion of developing a trail in Cheddar - the idea was that people would walk from house to house, and see the artists' work and chat to them about it. There were various add-ons: one was a grant for a local willow weaver, Sophie Courtier, to create a group of goats made of willow (wild goats are endemic to the gorge) which would be placed at the bottom of the gorge. They're still there, though they need attention every few years - willow doesn't last as stone or bronze does, but it's very embelmatic of the Somerset countryside. (Pause here for a very unsubtle plug for my children's book, The Willow Man).

For the first couple of years, I offered a free writing workshop as part of the festival. In 2020, there were exciting plans for the festival to be themed around the 75th anniversary of the end of the war. I decided with my writing group to produce a book, a collection of memoirs and short stories to do with the war. We called it Encounters With War. Putting this together was a really interesting process. I particularly remember the piece written by Phyllis Goddard, a hugely valued member of the group - sadly no longer with us - who was living and working in London at the time of the Bltz, and had written in a previous collection of an encounter with General de Gaulle, and of crossing the Thames one evening when the river itself seemed to be aflame.

But of course, we all know what happened in 2020. Covid came along, and the festival that year had to be cancelled.

After that, for a few years we had a table as a writing group, to publicise it and hopefully sell a few books. But this year, I decided to take part fully as one of the artists. Of course, taking part as a writer is rather different to taking part as a visual artist. If you sell a painting, you will hopefully make a reasonable amount of money in return for your work - and you can sell cards too. If I sell a book, I will make two or three pounds' profit if I'm lucky. It's just the bizarre economics of writing, and there it is.

So I knew I wasn't going to make any money - but that wasn't why I was doing it. So why was I? Well, mostly, it was about feeling part of a bigger community. For this reason, I wanted to be in a venue with other artists. (Well, and let's be honest, I also hoped to benefit from the footfall that the artists would attract.) And this worked beautifully. I was in a venue with Ellen Watson, who is a textile artist; Gemma Lane, a painter; and Nico Mann, a sculptor of beautiful abstract shapes. It was a delight to spend three days in the company of such talented, interesting, creative, and thoroughly nice people. For more information about their work, and the work of others, please take a look at the Chaff website, which has information about all the artists and examples of their work.

The venue. My books are on the table on the left, Nico's sculptures are on the table and shelves. The hangings were done by Ellen's textiles group.

We were in a busy spot at the bottom of the gorge, so we got quite a lot of tourists coming in to see what was going on, as well as people who had come specifically to take part in the trail, and there were lots of interesting conversations to be had. I'd hoped that my forthcoming book An Ordinary War might be ready in time. That wasn't to be, but I had the cover on display and was able to chat to people about it. And there were extra treats too: friends I used to teach with back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and lots of other more recent friends whom it was lovely to catch up with. And it was specially precious to meet the remarkable Phyllis Goddard's daughter-in-law, who said how much the writing group had meant to her. I sold a small but respectable number of books too - Warrior King, which is about Alfred the Great and his daughter Aethelflaed and is mostly set on the Somerset levels not far from here, was the most popular.

But before the festival could take place, an enormous amount of work had to be put in by the committee, who were all fantastic organisers, and very patient with those of us who were at times slightly bemused by the requirements of social media communication. In partuclar, I'm thinking of potter Jo Brimble, who came up with brilliant posts on Instagram etc (and helped me to concoct some photographs of my work which weren't just book covers), and Adam Clutterbuck and Lucy James, who sorted us all out with charm and patience. 

All in all, it was an overwhelmingly positive experience. My only regret is that I wasn't able to get round and see many of the other artists' work - and there are a lot of them now: over 40 this year. Next year, perhaps!

Chips away: the new metaphor – by Rowena House 20 May 3:00 PM (10 days ago)

For years now my favourite writing metaphor has been the sand castle one. Your pour your words into a sandbox called Draft Zero or just Draft if you’re feeling optimistic, and when the box is full of story, you start shaping it into a wondrous castle for however long it takes.

This month, though, I’ve met the marble block metaphor. The idea that a story is a thing waiting to be revealed as the writer chips away at it. My process has never felt like chiselling before. Nothing was found; it’s all been built.

Why the change? Feedback on the development edit AKA Draft Gazillion of the seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress which my supervisors read (it’s a creative writing PhD novel) for the first time in April. Amid kind words, they said (in subtext) that Act 2 Part 1 was a pup. 

‘One more run through ought to do it,’ they suggested.

Then I had a good close look at what I’d sent them.

How? After YEARS working on my wordsmithing, how can I have got it so wrong? I coined a new editing acronym for the margin: CUT. Complete and Utter Tosh. [Actually, it was CUS, but this is a family-friendly blog.] So, chisel out, spit on the hands, cut, cut, polish and cut in pursuit of Draft Gazillion + One AKA Development Edit Mark 2.

The sensible editor bit of the brain said I needed a Book Map (copyright The Golden Egg Academy) or similar (copyright Book Bound UK), charting the whole thing.

But you know how some writers hate writing synopses? It’s book mapping for me. However sensible it is, I loathe it. There are at least three versions of a map for this WIP languishing in various folders, to which I dutifully added another this month, then ignored it. 

What I did instead was analyse each CUT chapter to see for myself what ailed it. Result: I think it’s a combination of slow pace, unclear progressions, and hidden rising stakes. Which are all sort of saying the same thing. Tackling them individually seemed simpler, however,

Thus, 1.5K words are gone and I’m only half way through Act 2 Part 1. I also buffed up cliff-hanger chapter endings and changed chapter breaks so they could all end at a cliff-hanger.

It’s also been good to have a run through for micro-pacing, achieved by tightening sentences and making sure, e.g., that they end on the most powerful word.

For progressions, I’m trying a sentence-based system, too, copy-and-pasting key passages, with their respective page numbers, to track my protagonist’s state of mind and make sure it is progressing in a logical way. By shuffling back and forth between them, altering phrases subtly or wholesale as I go, I think I’ve now linked them together and arrived, ta-dah! at the turning point of Act 2 part 1. Which is the chapter I’m chipping away at now.

Raising stakes is proving trickier. For this WIP, I’ve used a hierarchy of needs system adapted from John Truby’s Anatomy of Story which in turn borrowed from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. (I might have got Truby’s title wrong. Anatomy of Stories? The Story? Sorry, in a rush today.)

Tom, my protagonist, starts in survival mode, protecting his physiological needs: shelter & his livelihood. He then tries to catch a criminal, then faces incrementally-rising moral jeopardy until he finally challenges institutional corruption.

For me, the rising stakes are inherent in this pattern and therefore readable in the subtext. That’s where my instinct says they should stay. If the reader knows from Act 1 that Tom is out on his ear if he messes up the Inciting Incident task that’s been set him, why repeat it in Act 2? And isn’t moral jeopardy by definition a higher stake than keeping your job?

My very clever beta readers didn’t seem to think so. Thus, it’s hammer and chisel to the fore, hoping they’ll be able to see it once I’ve chipped away at more of the dross.

WHERE THE HELL IS MY AGENT? - by Lu Hersey 18 May 4:00 PM (12 days ago)

 In case you didn't realise, I hacked the title from Raye's song, WHERE IS MY HUSBAND? The point of song being she doesn't actually have one, but she's ready and waiting for one, so where the hell is he? 

And that's how I feel about my agent.

I did have one once. I learnt many useful things from him. Like how to cook simple Italian dishes, and where to find great fossils on British beaches. Basically he was fun to hang out with as a friend, but being an agent really wasn't his priority. He spent far more time diving with sharks.

He genuinely couldn't cope with the increasing pressures of the publishing world. In the end he disappeared in a cloud of mental health problems, leaving his entire business behind. He'd definitely chosen the wrong career path for someone with chronic anxiety, and I hope one day he'll resurface as a marine biologist or something he'd really enjoy. He's certainly clever enough.

But meanwhile, what about me?? 

What have I done about finding another agent? 

Not a lot, to be honest. I tentatively tried a couple I liked the sound of, and they were very kind and gave me positive feedback, but sadly... (Another thing I learnt from my last agent is that they have to not only really love your work, but believe they can sell it. Which they didn't.)

I also tried a couple of publishers, whose websites informed me I didn't need an agent to be considered. Result? They simply ghosted me like they were online dating or something. Which seems unnecessarily rude when it's easy to email back a standard rejection from a template, but sadly that seems to be the publishing industry's attitude towards writers. We're all totally dispensable. I ended up feeling like a piece of used clothing, destined for the charity shop. 

I guess all publishers need to see the potential for commercial success in your writing - unless you're celebrity so they know your books will sell anyway (they can always find a ghost writer to actually write the books). Publishing is an increasingly competitive market - and getting worse. Don't even get me started on books being written by AI...

However, once a writer, always a writer. I told myself I simply needed to change direction for a while. So I've been writing a non-fiction book about Somerset dragons, which will come out sometime before Christmas. Seems there's not so much stigma attached to self publishing local books, as no agent or traditional publisher would consider the project anyway. It's kept me busy and I love research...

But unfortunately, what I like writing best is teen fiction. And any writing for children involves gatekeepers like parents and teachers, who need to know the book is good (preferably traditionally published and well reviewed) before they buy. Which means you still need the publishing industry to back you. 

And for any publisher to even consider your book, you need an agent to present it to them - practically no publisher takes unsolicited manuscripts. (Ignore all those stories like JK Rowling's sending out to zillion publishers and how it only takes one, blah blah - that simply doesn't happen any more.)

So I'm stuck with a hole in my bucket syndrome and there's only one way out... 

WHERE THE HELL IS MY AGENT?

Lu Hersey

https://www.lu-hersey.com/

Taxing times with ALCS By Steve Way 16 May 7:30 PM (13 days ago)

 I imagine most of you reading this are registered with ALCS (Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society) – membership is free for members of the Society of Authors. Like the SoA, ALCS is a wonderful organisation supporting writers, in their case collecting funds for use of our work that’s not paid for through royalties.

If you have published work of any kind and you aren’t registered with ALCS, I highly recommend that you do so. On one memorable occasion my (usually annual) payment from ALCS arrived more or less at the same time as my six-monthly royalty payment and both were almost equal in amount. It was a good month! As I understand it, which explained the fairly generous pay out, a teacher training college was photocopying all or part of my science story books for schools for their students – possibly because the stories also came with associated lesson plans. Occasionally, if they have collected sufficient funds, ALCS pay out twice a year. The first time I received this payment was a pleasant surprise. It wasn’t a huge amount, but it paid that month’s council tax during a lean month, so was particularly appreciated as I didn’t need to steal as much from Peter to pay Paul.

Just over ten years ago we moved to rural France, but of course that didn’t prevent ALCS still making annual payments – the peak interest in the story books had waned though not disappeared! However, although the first one or two payments arrived in my UK bank account as usual, I received an apologetic letter from the accountant at ALCS explaining that unless appropriate permissions were given, due to me living abroad, ALCS were obliged to deduct 20% tax from my payments.

Of course, as intimated above, 20% of the total they’d kindly collected for me at that time, didn’t amount to a great deal. Certainly not really enough to warrant my time and energy during a period when I had enough on my plate learning the ropes in a new country etc. But now we’re ten years on and as they say in Scotland ‘many a mickle maks a muckle’. Gradually, with each passing year, it grated a little more that I was effectively only receiving 80% of what was due to me. Finally, I spent some time looking into the issue and discovered that if I sent HMRC the appropriate form, then both gaining permission to receive the full payment from now on and claiming back past payment should be straightforward.

The first stage was to send the form to my local tax office, so that they could stamp it and thereby confirm that I am registered as a taxpayer in France. They did so quickly and efficiently, so the next job was to send the form to HMRC.

Just as I believe you can  order and download stamps in the UK, you can do the same here via ‘La Poste’ in France. I ordered a ‘tracked international’ stamp and duely sent the form on its way. This was early in January. Well, I could track the form but as it turns out ‘international’ tracking means ‘only to the border’. So, all I know, and still know, is that the form reached the UK border. I know nothing more because here we are in May and I’ve had no response from HMRC.

It didn’t take me until now to lose patience waiting for news, so about six weeks after sending my first letter to HMRC, I sent copies of the form and an apologetic covering letter (‘So sorry if you’ve already received my form…’) to them. Once again I ordered an online ‘internationally’ tracked letter. This time however, the most I know, is that La Poste seem to have let me down somehow. All that the tracking section of the website is able to tell me about that package is that the stamp has been downloaded. Well obviously I know that because it was me who downloaded it. However, I posted the form only minutes later. My main guess is that they managed to lose the letter somehow.

Undeterred I came up with Plan C. I’ve mentioned before the kindness of family and friends who, like the Red Cross in times of war, bring us supplies of a brand of tea associated with the north of England. (It is available here but it would possibly be cheaper to buy bags of gold leaves rather than tea leaves.) Two of our wonderful friends not only brought over supplies just as things were getting desperate in the beverage department but they kindly agreed to take a second copy of the original form back to the UK with them and send it to HMRC by signed for recorded delivery.

I’ve just double checked royalmail.com to make sure this missive is as up to date as possible. The only tracking history that’s recorded is that the letter was posted on Saturday 18^th April at 11.18 at Brenchley Post Office. In other words, nearly a month ago. The only other thing it can tell me is,

‘Your item has been posted at a Post Office. As you've used our Royal Mail Signed For service, the next update you'll see is after we've attempted to deliver to the recipient.’

I can’t believe that Royal Mail would take more than a month to attempt to deliver a letter. Have the HMRC offices become completely impenetrable? Do any of you have any suggestions for a Plan D attempt to get through to them? Do any of you live in or near the BX9 postcode? Perhaps you could knock on their door for me, provided it’s not, as it seems, locked up and fortified?

I’ve wondered about approaching ACLS directly, maybe they have a secret tunnel under HMRC’s fortifications and could deliver the missive on my behalf. What do you think?

This is in danger of becoming a boring and bureaucratic version of an epic tale of frustrated enterprise … which I suppose is at least ironic given the circumstances…

Wishbound, by Clemency Brown, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart 14 May 3:30 PM (16 days ago)

I thoroughly enjoyed this book about magic, friendship, families and bravery.

Do art, stay young - Anne Rooney 13 May 1:09 AM (17 days ago)

Most recent piece: medieval fish

Looking back through some ABBA posts, I'm struck by how many of us not only write or illustrate but also make other things, whether knitting, collage, or gardens, and spend time viewing art in galleries, museums, theatres and concerts. It's not surprising, perhaps, that those who create for a living also enjoy other creative endeavours, but now it seems it's really good for us. 

A study which has gained some publicity this week reveals that engaging in artistic activity at least once a week slows the ageing process up to four per cent compared with people who don't engage with the arts. That's as much as the benefit of exercise and, in one of the ways of measuring, twice as good as exercise. You could gain both benefits by running to an art gallery, I suppose. I could stop getting the bus to my stained glass classes and cycle. (I would if it weren't for the dangerous potholes, but currently cycling seems more likely to shorten my healthy life.)

With this added benefit of enjoying the arts, there should be even more pressure on schools to make sure art, drama, and music lessons are given the support and funding they need. Yes, it's a long time before today's kids will reap this particular benefit of the arts. (It's most noticeable over 40, when age-related decay starts to set in.) But we need them to grow up to be arts practitioners so that the rest of us can gain this extra bit of happy life, seeing new art and drama and listening to new music. 

This isn't about adding years to your lifespan but to your healthspan — the time when you are in good health. So encouraging engagement with the arts from a young age, and careers in the arts, will save the health service money and us all the pain and despondency of age-related decline. All good, surely? And the kids will likely enjoy it. It's a win-win situation.

Work in progress: Ediacaran animals

All that said, I'm likely decreasing my healthspan with all that exposure to lead and sharp glass. But no matter, it makes me happy!

  

Anne Rooney
website

Coming soon: How Big Is the Universe, Arcturus, September 2026; illustrated by Darcie Olley

  

  

WRITING VILLAINS by Sharon Tregenza 8 May 4:00 PM (22 days ago)

I have more trouble writing villains than I do heroes. It's difficult to get that mix right. It seems they can't be just EVIL, BAD, HORRIBLE folk they need a little back story - a little understanding. It made me think about the popular villains in children's literature and why they work so well.


First we have Miss Trenchbull from "Matilda".

Members' News May 6 May 10:00 PM (23 days ago)

 Welcome to the May round-up of members' news. 

Congratulations to Paula Harrison on the publication of her latest Kitty book: KITTY AND THE MOONFLOWER MYSTERY, from OUP.

 The purrrfect series for newly confident readers, beautifully illustrated by Waterstones Children's Book Prize winner, Jenny Løvlie, and written by bestselling author, Paula Harrison. Kitty is a superhero-in-training with feline superpowers. She dreams of being just like her superhero mum one day, but she's still got a lot to learn.

Join her for a series of enchanting adventures by the light of the moon. It's night-time at the Botanical Gardens. Kitty and her cat crew are there to catch a glimpse of the new rare flowers exhibition.

But someone has stolen the prize exhibit: the exotic moonflower, with its beautiful glowing petals that shine like the moon! If it isn't found soon it might not survive, so Kitty must use her cat-like powers to find the thief and save the moonflower just in the nick of time. Kitty and the Moonflower Mystery is the seventeenth book in the Kitty series, featuring a charming main character, cat-packed exploits, and striking two-colour art on every page. 

https://global.oup.com/education/content/children/series/kitty/

 

The Story of Cat Patrol by Paul May 3 May 9:00 PM (26 days ago)

Books sometimes need input from many different people as they make the journey from idea to reality. I am tempted to begin this piece with the words Once upon a time . . . 

It was 1974, and I was a student at UEA in Norwich, but living in a shared house in the town of Hingham, about 12 miles from the city. More than 100 Puritans emigrated from Hingham in 1638, among them one Samuel Lincoln, the ancestor of Abraham Lincoln. This has nothing to do with the story I'm about to tell, though it did mean that we'd quite often meet people from the USA wandering around looking lost. Hingham was once a market town and has a marketplace surrounded by fine Georgian houses, but now feels more like a village.

One summer afternoon we returned home to find a small bird fluttering in the bushes of our small and unkempt back garden (it was a student house, remember). I managed to catch hold of the bird, took it into an open area and let it go. It flew across the garden, crashed into the bushes, and tried to flap its way over the grass. We put it in a box with a bowl of water and wondered what to do with it. We couldn't think of an answer, so we went to the pub. We told the landlord about the bird and he laughed. 'That's a swift,' he said. 'You take that up on the roof and let it go. That'll fly, you'll see.'

So that's what we did. Back home, I took the bird out of its box and climbed out of an upstairs window onto the flat roof of the kitchen extension. I threw the bird into the air and it was gone. We all felt a little stupid, because one of our favourite activities that summer had been lying on the roof in the early evenings watching the aerobatic displays of the swifts as they fed on insects above the rooftops of the town. We didn't know then that swifts almost never land on the ground and that they feed and sleep on the wing.

Fast forward 20 years or so and I was sitting thinking about stories that might make a good picture book when I remembered the incident of the swift. I very quickly scribbled down a couple of paragraphs describing a small boy sitting in a garden as a bird crashes into bushes, the boy picking up the bird and his mum (I think) telling him to throw it into the air. There were some very quiet picture books around at the time, and I thought that with the right illustrations it might work, so I sent it off to my agent. She got some positive feedback (ie polite rejections) from editors, along with the suggestion that it might be a bit slight for a picture book, but could maybe be expanded into a short chapter book.

Some things stayed the same from beginning to end. Apart from the first two lines the rest of the page is unchanged from the first hastily written text.

Some time later there was a lunch with editors and my agent and we got to talking about this. I can't now remember whose idea the cat was, but I do know that without that lunch, without the collaboration, Cat Patrol would never have existed. The 'something else' that was needed to make the story work had its origin in that meeting, in the idea that the boy wanted to protect the birds from the new neighbours' cat, but there was still a very long way to go before we had a complete text. There are about 2,000 words in the book's five chapters and those 2,000 words took me as long to write as a full-length novel.

Peter Bailey did the lovely black-and-white illustrations which fit the story perfectly, but the publishers weren't happy with his cover and asked another illustrator to have a go. There was some back and forth about the next version but in the end that was rejected too, and the final cover was drawn by a third illustrator, Guy Parker-Rees. The funny thing about it is that Guy Parker-Rees's cover depicts a cat and a bird who seem to be in a kind of 'Tom and Jerry' relationship rather than the life-and-death one which appears between the covers. As Ben says in the book, 'Cats kill birds. You know they do.'

Ben was right. Cats kill up to 55 million birds a year in the UK. The cat is, in fact, the villain of this story. The new neighbours introduce Ben to their pedigree Siamese, Samuel Pennyfeather Lexington Star the Third, or Sammy for short:

'Ben was horrified. Sammy was a cat - the most enormous cat he had ever seen. It stared at him through the wire of its basket. Its eyes were cold and blue. It yawned, and its teeth were like razors.' 

It's a lovely cover, but it has nothing much to do with the story.

Robin collecting food for young. Maybe male . . . maybe not.

One of the difficult things about writing this book was the pronouns. Ben calls the cat 'it', though his sister, who doesn't believe the cat is dangerous, calls it 'he'. But then there was the bird. From the moment he sees it, Ben calls the bird 'he', and everyone else in the story takes their cue from him. I considered using 'it' for the bird but 'he' seemed the most natural thing for an 8-year-old boy to say. And, in case you're wondering, male and female swifts look exactly the same as each other. And, as I'm handing out information here, male and female robins also look identical. I say that because I've met many people who just assume that the male robin is the only one they ever see. The adolescent Robin is a very different thing!

Young Robin

 

Anyway, I'm telling this story just to indicate that books don't just appear out of nowhere and that often the input of an editor is crucial. I would add that when an editor or an agent tells you, 'this needs work', they don't mean, 'you're a terrible writer and it would be best to give up.' A friend of mine who wrote plays sent some work to a Radio 3 producer a lot of years ago and they INVITED HIM TO LUNCH! Then they told him they liked the play but IT NEEDED WORK. Being who he is, he took this to mean that he was wasting his time and his play was rubbish.

If my agent hadn't seen the potential in those early paragraphs and sent them out they'd probably still be sitting in my drawer today.

  

Stash Tidying - Joan Lennon 2 May 4:30 PM (28 days ago)

 

(Public Domain Pictures)

I've been stash tidying. It's a spring thing. (Yes, cleaning is supposed to be the spring thing, but...) I've been going through stashes of wool from dozens of projects over 40 or so years. I've joined a Facebook page called Sew, Knit, Crochet for the NHS and using up yarn to make twiddle mitts*, newborn hats, bonding squares** and syringe driver bags.*** 

We're not talking Shetland lace here - I've been choosing the simplest possible patterns because if I don't have to think about the stitches, I find I can usefully think about bits of my writing.

Which is the other stash I'm going through. Files and files of stories, poems, novels - some half-finished, some complete. What is resurrectable? What was just an interesting experiment that I'd forgotten all about? What could I finish? What can I tweak and finesse and get out into the world for somebody to read? 

Stashes tidied can become twiddle mitts, baby hats, bonding squares, syringe driver bags, and books, and we can make a connection with people we never meet. We don't know the when, the how or the who but does that make it not real? It's a kind of invisible community. 

And when I've done tidying stashes, THEN I'll get on with cleaning...

(You may already know these things, but they were new to me:

*twiddle mitts - for dementia patients, to soothe and warm restless hands. 

**bonding squares - for premature babies in ICU. Small matched squares help mothers and babies connect when the tubes and incubators get in the way. The mother wears one square next to her skin and the baby has theirs with them, and then the squares are swapped every 12 hours. The scent of the mother comforts the baby, and the scent of the baby encourages the mother's milk production.

***syringe driver bags - for palliative care patients, allowing freedom of movement while keeping up medicine and pain relief.

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

PLANTS AND PLANTING ON THE FIRST OF MAY by Penny Dolan 30 Apr 4:21 PM (last month)

The first of May today: a lovely time in the garden, with flowers and blossoms and green leaves everywhere.

However, the horticultural package that arrived last week was not at all lovely. The cover had been warped and damaged in the post and inside lay a moulded frame of miniscule plastic pots, an oozing mess of soft mud, broken stems and a few small soggy leaves. Not one plant in the pack was the length of my thumb nail and the etiolated stems suggested no great rush into growth once their roots met any kind of soil. Burial in our mini-compost-bin seemed the kindest ending right then.

Five Writers Walked into a Wool Shop ... by Sheena Wilkinson 28 Apr 9:00 PM (last month)

The problem is, I have been instructing myself to FINISH TA  for  months now, and said novel is proving, even by my standards, a recalcitrant beast. There's a murder (a first for me) and I knew who the baddy was, and why she was the baddy, but I didn't know how to make it all come together at the end.

At a retreat in Bath at the end of March, I slowly but surely wrote myself into the neglected book. For the first time in months, helped by being in a quiet house full of writer friends, with nothing else to worry about, the words started to -- not exactly flow, but trickle. I still didn't know what the ending would be, but at least I was writing. 

I normally go on rural retreats, where long country walks are part of the routine -- which, actually, they are at home anyway, and of course there are lovely canal and riverwalks in Bath. But there are also shops, and one day five of us writers went to a local wool shop. 

Who doesn't love a wool shop? Colourful as a sweet shop without the calories, and with the added joy of its wares being soft and squishy and, well, woolly. I have been a keen crocheter for decades. Every room in my house is full of crocheted blankets; my dearest friends have all been given crocheted blankets. Did I really need another one? Did anyone? Why not try something different?

Why not knit? suggested one of my companions, Emma Pass, who is a brilliant knitter as well as a wonderful writer. Why not indeed?  I had learned to knit as a child and, though I have never been able to follow a knitting pattern, my dolls were always stylishly dressed in my home knits. I would knit a jumper! Everyone assured me that I would easily follow a pattern and that if I could crochet blankets, hats and tea cosies, I could surely knit a jumper. 

Emma Pass and I knitting in Bath

Reader, I did try to follow a pattern. But, as has always been the case, something about the combination of instructions and numbers made my brain switch off. Never mind; it's the 21st century: everyone reassured me that, if I struggled to read a pattern all I had to do was look on YouTube and there would be videos galore. And there are, but it turns out I'm not good at learning things from videos either. 

BUT! I can measure, and I can work things out, and I did invent all those dolls' clothes as a child. True, this was on a bigger scale, but the principle was the same. And I thought about all the books I have written -- eleven published so far. I didn't have patterns for them either; I did plan them to greater or lesser extent, and, having been a reader all my life, I have a deep-rooted understanding of how stories work, but there was no blueprint to follow, no guaranteed 'do this step and then this one and you will have a finished book'.

So I followed the same principle for my knitting project. I used an old jumper for measurements and off I went. Of course I made mistakes, and the finished product isn't perfect, but it is a recognisable jumper. 

starting to look like a jumper

The experience of doing something creative, but not with words, something difficult enough to tax a different part of my brain, but repetitive and intuitive enough for me to do sometimes on autopilot was very freeing. I found myself thinking about my jumper at odd times, working things out in my head. 

out in the real world wearing a real jumper!

So -- is the point of this post that the challenge of doing something both old and new to me unlocked something in my brain and allowed me to finish the novel? Well, the novel is still unfinished. BUT I now know how it's going to end. 

And I'm halfway through my next jumper. 

The more you think about it, the less well you do it. 24 Apr 9:00 PM (last month)

Jonathan Carroll wrote one of my favourite books: The Land of Laughs. A fantasy set in the modern world and like no other story I've ever read. The reason for this month's entry, though, is not to recommend the book - although I do, unreservedly - but to offer this quote from Carroll about the writing process. I find a lot of truth in it.

Part of the act of creating is letting go. I remember very vividly when writing The Land of Laughs I reached the part in the story where the dog speaks for the first time. I wrote the passage and stopped. I thought— the *dog* just spoke— that’s crazy. But a moment later I said okay, let’s just see where that goes. 

In an essential way it was the turning point of all writing I have done since then. My paradigm moment came about because I simply let go, accepted the nutty for fact, and kept moving. The Germans have a nice phrase about trust in romance— ‘fall back and I’ll catch you.’ The same could be applied to writing or any art, as far as I can see: If you believe you have it in you, create whatever it is you want and stop thinking about approaches or limitations or or or… Just *write* it. Clear your mind of hesitation and everything other than the sentence you are trying to write and do it. Then write the next one. 

The more you think about it, the less well you do it. Start with a phrase or a character you like or who intrigues you. Then begin to spin a spider’s web out from that center point. But don’t *think* about it. Very often when I begin a book or story, I only have a single line or image which I put down and then think—who is this? What are they like? ‘Haden was in trouble again’ is the beginning of Glass Soup only because I liked that line. After writing it I thought— who’s this Haden? He’s a handsome asshole. Okay, what does he do? He’s a tour guide. Where does he do it? Etcetera. Don’t think about it— just be a spider and spin the web only you can design.

'Sit still, and they will come to you.' - Sue Purkiss 22 Apr 8:00 PM (last month)

 

This is one from the archives - I wrote it a few years ago. But I think it can take a second outing. Hope you agree... (The title, incidentally, is an echo of the title of a ghost story by M R James, 'Whistle and I'll come to you.')

 I live on a hill in Somerset - one of the Mendips - and often walk our dog there. I tend to amble along slowly, throwing the ball for Nessie (because after all, that is the entire purpose of a walk), and gazing round, taking in what's going on - what's changed, what's appeared - and taking the occasional photograph.

At the moment, the limestone hill is covered in a thick profusion of all kinds of wild flowers. I used to think that spring, with its bluebells, cowslips, and early pink orchids, was the best time - and it is very special, coming as it does after a long, dull winter; but spring looks positively sparse compared with what's going on now. There are yellow rock roses, pink centaury, yellow and amber bird's foot trefoil, purple thistles, large white daisies, bright mauve thyme, and many others whose names I do not know - plus many different kinds of flowering grasses with their delicately etched heads that droop and sway in the breeze. Looking up from the ground, there are pink and white wild roses and blackberry blossoms.

And because there are all these flowers, there are also masses of insects and butterflies, particularly when it's sunny, as it has been over the past few days. I'm not at all good on the names of moths and butterflies. Last week, I noticed lots of little chocolate coloured butterflies darting around among the grasses, and wondered what they were. It was impossible to get a photo - very inconsiderately, they just wouldn't stay still, and I only had my phone. I do have a camera with a reasonable zoom, but it's so fiddly to focus that by the time I've sorted it out, even if a butterfly had settled, it would be long gone before I managed to get a picture.

More in hope than expectation, I put a picture of the flowers on Instagram and asked if anyone knew what my chocolate butterflies might be. There's someone on there called the Early Birder, who takes truly beautiful photographs and can identify just about anything - but even he said regretfully that without a picture, there was no chance.

Hm, I thought. Perhaps a video? The other day, I went up again. This time, the chocolate ones were joined by masses of medium sized white ones, with beautiful black marbled markings (am tentatively guessing Marbled Whites?) They were even worse for never settling. I have a video, but all it shows is a small white speck flitting happily through the grasses, moving further and further away.

As I walked on, I puzzled as to how I could get this elusive picture. And then I remembered something my husband had told me a few days before. He's a keen birdwatcher, and volunteers for the RSPB on a reserve on the Somerset Levels, where he's got to know a friend, John, who practically lives down there, is incredibly knowledgeable, and takes wonderful pictures of birds. John doesn't spend hours walking round the reserve. He stays put: he stays still. "Sit still," he says, "and they will come to you."

So I think that's what I need to do. Go up on the hill, sit still, wait for the butterflies to come - and just watch them.

And that thought led to another one. My writing - of books, I mean - has pretty much stalled at the moment. There are a number of reasons for this. I can't do very much about most of them, and I know all too well that there are many things which are infinitely more important than whether I write another book or not. But all the same, I hate it when I'm not writing. I try not to think about it too much, but it's an itch I can't scratch, a stone I keep stubbing my toe on.

There are all sorts of things you can do to try and kickstart your writing, I know that. People have written about them recently on this blog, and come up with some really useful strategies.

But maybe sometimes, you just have to sit still and be quiet. And hope the ideas will come to you, fluttering through the long grass, beautiful but elusive.

Well, it's a thought. I'll keep you posted.

Hurrah! A milestone passed - by Rowena House 20 Apr 3:30 PM (last month)

Hurrah! On April 7th I got to type The End at the end of an 87k-word development edit of my witch trial work-in-progress. That is, a year and a day after I finished the first full draft and (whisper it) six years after starting this project.

Actually, it's cheating to say it’s done as the new subplot still needs developing, but it was a big enough milestone to warrant a series of pub dinners with my other half, culminating (tonight as I type this) in a family dinner in a local restaurant with fantastic views over the south Devon coast.

A huge thank you to my wonderful son and his lovely partner for arranging it.

So, what’s next?

A six-week cooling off period for the manuscript before the subplot development edit and whole manuscript line edit during which I’ll edit down nineteen thousand words of codswallop written last year and nominally entitled a PhD critical commentary on the novel.







Luckily, my faithful Elements of Reasoning, a gift from my dad in the 1980s, is already suggesting a logical structure to this commentary that might – might – help massage the codswallop into something less rambling. And it’s always better to edit than stare at a blank screen. Isn’t it?

Meanwhile, I treated myself to Richard Cohen's journey into writerly minds as an escape from depressing academic histories of witch trials. Happily, Cohen flagged up something I hadn’t realised: both plotlines for the WIP turned into ‘rebirth’ stories in Christopher Booker’s schema of seven basic plots.

I’ll have to re-read his tome – or rather, the relevant chapter/s – after being disappointed to find on first reading (in circa 2021) that I didn’t seem to be writing one of his universal stories. It’s comforting to think my witch suspects unconsciously wandered back into that fold as, tbh, I still find it difficult to be certain I’ve written a story, rather than storified history, albeit with extra bits of herstory.





Then in May, I’m off on an Arvon course at Lumb Bank about getting published in 2026 which I’m hoping will lift the gloom that squats over the whole business of querying and submissions etc. In my dreams, there’s a friendly little independent publisher somewhere that still does hardbacks.

Anyway, sorry this is another short diary entry. It’s laundry time if I’m going to have anything clean to wear tonight. And we’re out of bread and milk. And it turns out to be lunch time. Breakfast? Oh, well. 

Happy writing life, one and all.

I'm still raging over on Twitter @HouseRowena. As Rowena House Author, you'll find me playing with photos on Instagram and diarising the WIP on Facebook

Creating a new (very small) world - by Lu Hersey 18 Apr 4:00 PM (last month)

 It all started with the house leeks. Or maybe it was when I bought that bowl in a charity shop. the kind of thing my mother would have considered unbelievably tasteless but my grandmother would have loved. In fact, maybe it all started over half a century ago, and I can blame it on my grandmother.

Back in the time before she came to live with us, among many wonderful treasures in her bungalow, (my mother's opinion of them differed) she had a potted cactus garden which I absolutely loved. Hidden between the cacti there was a tiny ceramic bridge over a mirror pond, and a tiny ceramic Chinese pagoda nearby. I always wished there were tiny people to go with it. Maybe that's what makes us start writing, creating fantasy lands in stories, like capsule worlds we can control. Unlike the news.

Anyway, because of the bowl, the house leeks or my grandmother, I strayed into a whole new universe. Turns out there must be countless others out there, like me, creating fantasy worlds, whether it's for model trains, mini dinosaur parks, or tiny tanks and soldiers for war games. We start sensibly in places like ebay and etsy, then tumble right down into a snake pit called Temu. Beware! Temu can suck sensible people into rabbit holes it's hard to escape from. There is literally no end to the fascinating awfulness that Temu can produce.

And even as I worried somewhere at the back of my mind about the poor Chinese people who work creating bizarre stuff no one needs and which will inevitably lead to the collapse of Western civilisation, I found it almost impossible to stop searching for tiny objects to put in my new fairy bowl universe. 

Fortunately I was saved by the cat, demanding second breakfast. She started yowling loudly and consistently, just as I was about to hit PAY on Temu. 

As I grumbled downstairs to appease the beast, it suddenly occurred to me - I already had everything I needed! I'd only needed to leave the Temuverse for a moment to remember. Even better, I realised what I had was much classier (in my opinion - others might disagree) than anything my online search had come up with. 

A quick hunt after feeding the cat unearthed some glow in the dark forest spirits from Princess Mononoke which had been lurking under a money plant downstairs for so long, they'd almost vanished into the compost. They look very happy to be rescued.

Even better, I remembered a magical Christmas present, handmade for me by my friend Dandelion and buried somewhere behind a pile of notebooks on my desk. It's perfect. (If you like it, he sells all kinds of wonders in his Glastonbury shop, Dandelion Dreamz, which are also available online),

It might need a bit of tweaking (and occasional watering) but I'm quite proud of my new, Temu-free, magical universe.

And having finished procrastinating, suppose it's time to actually go and write something...

Dandelion at work

Lu Hersey

web: https://www.lu-hersey.com/

Floating a few more ideas By Steve Way 16 Apr 7:30 PM (last month)

 Hi all, Suddenly it's my day to post again and I've been up to my eyeballs this month, so I hope you don't mind, I thought I'd share a few more daft signs I've thought up since last time, plus a comment inspired by a statement regarding sunken ships...

Welcome to DERRY Sorry, there’s been a misunderstanding. Yes, you can get milk here but much more besides.	Welcome to LONDONDERRY Where we like to keep a record of events about what’s happening in London.
Welcome to BELFAST So, we can’t ring it unfortunately.	Welcome to The Isle of Mull Where we like to think things over carefully.
Welcome to BOLTON Though we don’t know why we’re running… and what from…	Welcome to STOCKPORT It’s a delicious rich, fruity drink, which why we recommend keeping plenty of it.
Welcome to GLOUCESTER We suggest not coming here when it’s raining, particularly if you are in the medical profession.	Welcome to ST IVES A town in which many people share the same surname and where cats are mollycoddled.
Welcome to The Mull of Kintyre Where we also like to spend our time thinking things over, though it can be fatiguing for your family.	You are now leaving MIDDLESBROUGH Why not visit FIRSTBORNBROUGH or Always-been-the-baby-of-the-family-even-though-he’s-in-his-40s-now-brough?
PAR IS The goal of most amateur golfers.	Welcome to ROME Feel free to wander through our city. (Superb mobile signal by the way.)
MOS COW She stood still in the rain to often…	U KRAINE Me dumper truck
BARCE LONA Available from Barce Financial Services.	S PAIN The extraordinary allergy to the letter S.
I TALY You call out the numbers.	CORN WALL A surprisingly good building material.
PO LAND Jokes about bears we can live with, but toilet jokes not appreciated.	FIN LAND Though we’re wider than you’d think…
CANA DA Not at that price anyway. But if you make me a better offer?	HO LLAND Pst… Forget Lapland… Father Christmas comes from here really…
BRAZ IL Who would have thought an item of clothing could become unwell?	See our Non-sunk submarines Famous for being able to ‘float’ near the bottom of the sea…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

'It started like this. A Mrs Jones lived next door to Mrs Jones.'
A study of the absurdity of runaway consumerism. Mrs G Jones continuously competes to outdo her neighbour Mrs J Jones. Firstly it's furniture, clothing, then it's exotic pets, cars, extensions, holidays, cosmetic surgery... meanwhile their children are forgotten and run wild and their husbands work 24 hours a day to pay the bills... finally Mrs GJ actually commissions a white elephant while Mrs JJ builds an ivory tower*. Not surprisingly it ends in disaster.
*Actually made out of marble, so it's not all bad.

Available on Amazon Kindle

ASIN: B0GGXTQQXV  (The 0 is a zero)

Tiger, Tom & Tinkle, by David Wood, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart 14 Apr 3:30 PM (last month)

 

        I couldn't resist ordering through Waterstones this book about three of my favourite children's book creating women; Judith Kerr, Philippa Pearce, and Kathleen Hale. David Wood is a brilliant adapter of children's books for the stage, so this book is the result of his working with those three creators towards theatrical and animated performances for child audiences over several decades. 

    I found the correspondence between David and Judith Kerr concerning turning that absolute classic picture book, The Tiger Who Came To Tea, into an hour-long show the most fascinating part of this book. The real understanding of what engages and appeals in that story, milking the anticipation of the moment that all are waiting for - the arrival of the Tiger! - by having other characters ringing the doorbell before we get to him, is brilliant! As is the magic employed to let that huge but friendly Tiger seem to actually eat all that food, and the water from the tap. And the Tiger is played by the actor of Dad. Humour, music, excitement, all there with adults playing children and props made large to fit those proportions.

    Unsurprisingly, Judith Kerr comes across as delightful and really interesting, as do Philippa Pearce and Kathleen Hale. I found the quantity of correspondence between them and David Wood published here a bit repetitive, losing my interest enough to make me skip a bit over the many pages of similar stuff. 

    But, for those who love these creator characters, and are interested in how book stories are adapted for stage and screen, I suggest this is a book to ask your library to order in. It's self-published so not stocked as generally as a traditionally published book would be.  

Back to basics (1): I am not a robot — Anne Rooney 13 Apr 1:38 AM (last month)

 

Last month, Hachette pulled Shy Girl by Mia Ballard, the first case of a major publisher cancelling a book because the author used gernerative AI in its creation. Last month, also, the Society of Authors launched its Human Authored initiative, a scheme to allow authors and publishers to declare that a book has a human author.* There are other marks and schemes that also aim to protect and recognise the value of human creativity. It's very sad that this is needed, and that we can't instead get AI-generated content labelled as such, but that's the world we are in right now and this is better than nothing.

Most contracts that an author signs with a respectable publisher  require a declaration that AI hasn't been used to produce the book. There is a huge debate to be had about what constitutes using AI to produce a book, with some people saying they 'only' use it for plot problems, suggesting names or places, correcting grammar, or any other isolated (or not so isolated) task in the whole process. My view is that you shouldn't be using it for anything. If you can't work out a plot and write grammatically, you're not up to being a professional writer yet, so go learn. But there are a wide range of views, and I'm not here to argue the case. The point here is that if you have signed a contract that says you won't use AI, or even adopted a mark that claims you haven't used AI, what happens if you are asked to prove you wrote the whole thing yourself? What if Mia Ballard were wrongly accused? (I'm not suggesting she was, by the way.) How do writers protect themselves from the accusation that because they use em dashes or triplets or some other spurious bit of 'proof', that they 'obviously' used AI to write their books? It's a question that has been clogging up writers' spaces on the web for a while now. 

Drafts — you worked to improve it!

One obvious thing you can do is to keep drafts. These are dated and show the slow build-up of your book over time. Another is to note all your sources. My drafts are heavily footnoted with sources for everything that isn't such common knowledge that it doesn't need to be verified. 

I usually write non-fiction, but when I write fiction I also footnote anything that comes from research. Originally, this was so that I could check facts, or deal with queries from editors and translators (and sometimes readers), but now it serves a useful additional purpose in proving I did actually do the research and the sources do exist, unlike those invented by ChatGPT and other LLMs. 

Books — show where you got the info

 

 Sources are often books, with page numbers included in the reference; I don't see LLMs being able to do that accurately, even if they tried. If it's a book I have, I don't include edition details. If it's a book in the library, the footnote includes the library classmark so I can get the same copy back if necessary. All these footnotes are deleted when I send the MS to the publisher, but I have them if I need them.

 

Cards — very analogue, very niche

Another thing I've started doing recently is making more handwritten notes and plans. I'm currently working on a proposal for a book on extinct animals and, after many years of duplicating the same research, I've decided I need my own card index (not a database on the computer — a physical object) of organisms through time. It will have everything I need for the animals that might be in this book and I can add to it later for other books. It's on the computer as well, but I print out the entries and stick them to cards. They're easy to shuffle, sort, annotate and pick out for different purposes. 

I keep too many notebooks, so scraps for different books tend to be spread around, but I'm going to start at least colour-coding them so I can hook them out if needed. I have a proper paper trail, in the original sense of the term. I'm also occasionally posting to Bluesky and Instagram photos of ongoing work and commenting on where I've got to with things. This, too, will be evidence that I didn't knock up a book with a few crafty prompts one rainy afternoon.

I hope none of this will ever be needed, but if it is, it's there and hard to contest. I suppose I could have gone to the trouble of getting AI to do all this and then cutting it up or writing it out by hand and doing all this over a period of many months, but it would be more work than just writing the book (and would produce a rubbish book). I hope other writers, worried about this, are doing similar things. Please share your tips in the comments. And it's honestly nice to return to a less digital way of doing things. Cut and paste with scissors and a glue stick, just like the old days. (Though it was Spraymount and a scalpel when I was last being paid to do cut-and-paste, back in the dark ages.)

 

* The SoA scheme does allow limited use of AI in preparatory work, but not in generation of the text or images, following the precedent set by the Writers' Guild

Anne Rooney

Website
Bluesky
Instagram

Out now:

 

For adults; Arcturus, December 2025

 

 

For children; The Magnificent Book of Microscopic Creatures, February 2025 (I like the French cover better than the UK/US cover, but you can also get it in English! 

Hard Streets by Jacqueline Riding review by Lynda Waterhouse 11 Apr 6:50 AM (last month)

 

 A few days ago, I went to The Cinema Museum for the book launch of ‘Hard Streets, Working-Class lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London,’ by Dr Jacqueline Riding.

The Cinema Museum is housed in what once was the Lambeth Workhouse where Chaplin had been placed as a child. It is an atmospheric place that’s well worth a visit. https://cinemamuseum.org.uk/

The event began with a screening of some archive footage of Charlie Chaplin in the 1950s as he revisited some of his childhood haunts and where he strolled mostly unrecognised in a bleak post-war landscape.

On the film I spotted Charlie in West Square, where he had lived as a child in relative comfort before his circumstances changed for the worse.  As part of my community project, ‘Capturing memories before the Elephant Forgets’, I’d heard accounts of life in West Square at this time so it was fascinating to glimpse some footage. It’s also close to where I live so this book has a particular resonance for me. I walk these streets every day.

Chaplin’s childhood experiences of poverty were central to his work for the rest of his life and this can be seen in his creation of the iconic figure of the ‘Little Tramp’ and in the evocation of place seen in films such as ‘The Kid.’  

The book also tells the story of another local lad, George Tinworth, whose unpublished handwritten autobiography Riding discovered in Southwark Archives.  George Tinworth, a neighbour of Chaplin’s grandparents and mother, started life a poor wheelwright and became a renowned sculptor, ceramic artist and modeller at the royal Doulton Factory at Lambeth. His talent was nurtured by the Lambeth School of Art which had been established in 1854.

Riding also provides a fascinating account of the Settlement Movement, particularly the Browning Settlement founded in Walworth in 1895 with its Christian socialist principles, and links to the newly formed Labour Party.

Alongside the many instances of poverty and suffering the book also illustrates the resilience and sheer hard work put in by both Tinworth and Chaplin in order to take advantage of the opportunities that were to be found in the area. With hard work and a sprinkle of luck you could survive and succeed. A career in the performing arts or attending an art college, could provide a good life.

This book highlights both the impact of poverty and the importance of the arts in shaping meaningful lives, something I hope the current Labour movement is paying attention to.

ISBN 9781800818644

Profile Books

Members' News April 6 Apr 10:00 PM (last month)

Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates. Spring is finally here! March was a whirlwind month of school events for many people. I think (I hope!) we all survived. And thousands more children are now reading books thanks to in-person visits, which is definitely worth celebrating.

On to April and a few belated congratulations.

Kelly McKain's Unbridled, was published in February.

Bethany Wheeler's How Not to Kiss a Prince was published last November. (Welcome to the Sassies, Bethany).

And last, but not least. Congratulation, Savita Kalhan, whose latest book deal was announced in the Bookseller.

Let me have your news for the next round-up. 

The Map That Came to Life by Paul May 3 Apr 9:00 PM (last month)

I've always loved maps. W G Hoskins, who wrote a wonderful book entitled The Making of the English Landscape, sums it up very well:

'There are certain sheets of the one-inch Ordnance Survey maps which one can sit down and read like a book for an hour on end, with growing pleasure and imaginative excitement.'

Hoskins writes in some detail about one particular OS map that shows the area around the Wash. I have a 1934 edition of that map, so here's a small part of it. One of the notable features is a complete lack of contour lines. This part of England really is very flat. 

When I was still at school I travelled all over the UK by hitch-hiking. Just imagine! My mother dropped me off at the beginning of the summer holidays at Junction 6 of the M1. I was with my mate, Chris, and we thought we'd go and look at Wales. This was 1968 and our parents were quite happy for us to be travelling around the country in this way, with no particular destination in mind. We just had a Youth Hostel handbook and a road map. And it was the road map (without contour lines) that gave us the idea in the first place.

One of the things I love about maps is that they tell you enough, but not too much. Nowadays you can use Google maps and street view to see just about anywhere you want to go before you go there, which, for me, takes away half the fun of travelling. A road map tells you almost nothing about the countryside and the towns and cities you're about to see. You know there is a town, you can see rivers and the sea, but only a certain scarcity of roads indicates the presence of open moorland or mountains. For cycling, my favourite maps always used to be the Bartholomew's Half Inch series. The older versions of these were revised with the assistance of the Cyclists' Touring Club and they remained in production almost throughout the twentieth century, although from 1975 onwards they were rebranded and published at a scale of 1:100,000. Maps of the most popular areas were still in production until 1999.

Map owned by Mary Yellowlees CTC 1909

My very favourite Bartholomew's maps, of the ones that I own, were once the property of one Mary Yellowlees of the Cyclists Touring Club. The earliest of these is dated 1909 and shows the Fort William district. On these early maps the high ground was coloured in shades of brown, the darker the brown, the higher the mountain. Maps with brown bits on were always exciting to me, and the more brown the better. This map of Fort William is almost entirely brown, where it isn't blue for the lochs and the sea. I hope that Mary Yellowlees found all that brown as exciting as I did, and still do. Back in 1909 roads were not like they are today. The road through Glen Coe for example was graded in places 'indifferent' but 'passable'. And bicycles were still in their infancy. They had only settled into their modern form with a diamond frame and pneumatic tyres in the final decade of the previous century. Mary would probably have been riding a heavy bike (compared to modern ones) with no gears, or at most two or three. 

In the 1970s and 1980s I always used the Bartholomew National Series, the half-inch maps reprinted at the 1:100,000 scale. I have one here of Skye and Loch Torridon which has just about survived repeated soakings on the handlebars of my bike. The one problem with these maps was that the contours were at 50 metre intervals, so you could hit a fairly substantial hill without realising it was coming.  And of course maps never warn you about the weather. 

My much-soaked map of Skye and Torridon. The updated maps have land over 900m coloured a kind of blue/grey. I prefer the old style.

I learnt about contour lines in geography lessons at school, but I could equally well have learnt about them from The Map That Came to Life. It's possible to view a PDF of this remarkable book online. When I first saw it a few years ago the thing that most struck me was how cleverly it integrated the drawings of landscape and the features on the map. The illustrator, Ronald Lampitt, had worked in RAF Intelligence during WW2, creating drawings for pilots and navigators from aerial photographs, and he put this skill to brilliant use in this book. The story, 'described by H J Deverson',  is straightforward: two children are staying with their uncle and aunt on their farm and after their uncle teaches them about the One Inch Ordnance Survey map and its symbols, they set off to walk into the nearby town. Each double-page spread contains text, a small section of map, and a detailed illustration of the area shown on the map. This may not be quite as good as taking a map and going out into the real world but it does a great job of, for example, showing how a small section of map represents a large area on the ground. We learn about many map symbols, and about contour lines, about footpaths and roads, canals and rivers. But there's another way in which this isn't the real world.

This book was published in 1948, just three years after the end of the war in Europe. As I was growing up in the 1950s there were still plenty of bomb sites in London and I can remember seeing barrage balloons flying. I doubted myself about this, but on checking I discovered that they were still used for training purposes until the end of the decade. The world of The Map That Came to Life shows no trace of war and, as others have noticed, this is an English landscape that probably never really existed. The roads in the book are beautifully signposted, so you'd never know that tens of thousands of signposts were removed during the war to avoid helping potential invaders, and many weren't put back for years, if at all. 

Very many children's books of this era were set in a world that never actually existed. Think of Enid Blyton or Richmal Crompton or even Arthur Ransome. William Brown's rambles through the woods and fields around Hadleigh could easily have happened in the world of The Map That Came to Life. It's a world where friendly farmers provide cake and glasses of milk, and friendly vergers show you round the parish church. But although it is an idealised and unreal world it has real similarities to the world I grew up in. I grew up just down the road from where Enid Blyton and Alison Uttley lived, and after all this time I find it hard to distinguish between my real memories and the memories of places and events I read about in books. I must have been very young when I read Alison Uttley's Sam Pig stories, but they remain incredibly vivid in my mind, perhaps because they are set in a countryside that was so familiar to me.

Fourteen years after they wrote The Map That Came to Life, in 1962, Deverson and Lampitt wrote a kind of follow-up called The Open Road. This book is a paean to the motor car, praising its ability to transport everyone through the open countryside. In the book, the same Uncle George  transports the same children on an adventure in a Hillman Minx convertible. They even travel in style up the brand-new M1 Motorway, the same bit of road where me and my friend, Chris, started our own adventure a few years later. It really was a different world.

If you want a copy of Reading the Carnegie, my illustrated compilation of posts about Carnegie winners, I have copies available. You can order them via my web page here. A PDF of the book is free.

Free-wheeling and Unfettered - Joan Lennon 2 Apr 4:30 PM (last month)

Let me share with you some structures, made by a child, before the tidiness and homogeneity of the world's expectations have come in and said, NO! That's NOT how you do it! It won't be long before the flamboyance is lost and the complete and untrammelled ignoring of physics and general laws of architecture are suppressed.

APRIL & NATIONAL POETRY WRITING MONTH by Penny Dolan 31 Mar 3:00 PM (2 months ago)

Today, April 1st, is the start of National Poetry Writing Month, which celebrates its twenty-fifth birthday this year. Hooray and well done!