Category Archive

Wednesday 8th August:  Day of shortlist announcement for the Greenhouse Funny Prize 6:15am Husband’s alarm goes off stupidly early.  No movement from said husband. 6:25am No movement from husband. 6:33am Still no movement from husband.  Consider divorce for waking me so early. 6:36am Starting to think husband might be dead and glad as this will be much more profitable for …

  I’m really chuffed to find out that I’m the picture book winner of the Tamarind Books ‘Aspiring Authors’ competition.  Of course it’s all down to my son who was the inspiration behind ‘Don’t Eat That, Phoenix’. After today’s two-hour exhaustive hunt throughout the house and finally discovering the whereabouts of five missing Lego pieces and the batteries for the …

The first day of March for the past fifteen years has marked the day children come together and celebrate books.  Obviously I was far too cool in my mid-teens to dress up as my favourite character or have a bake-for-books sale to rejoice the day but I certainly remember hours daydreaming my time away, lost in moments with my heroes …

My procrastination has taken me away from my current YA work-in-progress and has led me to children’s publisher Hot Key Books.  In a bid to convince author John Green to publish his books with them, they’re wooing the American this week by inviting other authors who have been rejected by publishers to suggest suitable castigations to be made public in …

My Year Five teacher introduced me to New Year resolutions.  I suspect now, after a heavy couple of weeks of partying the Christmas school holidays away, he gave us the cop-out assignment so he could sleep off his hangover in a pile of PE bags in the adjacent storeroom.  It was Spring term’s equivalent of the first day of Autumn …

See you all in 2012!

I was sent a copy of ‘The Unforgotten Coat’ by Frank Cottrell Boyce from the Southbank Centre.  Unfortunately, thanks to the plague ridden two-year-old who had used my son as a hanky, I wasn’t able to attend Frank Cottrell Boyce’s talk at the Southbank but I was completely captivated by his latest read.  In fact I have read it twice …

I’ve just finished reading ‘Dark Lord: The Teenage Years’ by Jamie Thomson.  This is an absolutely hilarious and completely bonkers novel about the Dark Lord and how he comes to be trapped in the body of a teenager, having been banished to the earth by his archenemy.  He is taken in by the Purejoies family and begins life as thirteen-year-old …

I recently sent my manuscript off to a publisher. I heard it can take up to six months to hear something (if anything) back. I’ve also heard the best way to stop incessant inbox-checking for a reply or constant curtain twitching for the postman is to start a new project. I was quite sure that I had enough self-restraint for …