Constant noise and blinding lights - by Lu Hersey

 Weirdly, it's a strangely enjoyable experience. It's just what a West Country Carnival night is like. If you've never been to one, I'd recommend making the effort, at least once in your life.

November is generally a bleak month, filled with rain and cold weather - and even though it's likely you'll have to endure this standing out on the street for hours, the onslaught of light and sound should more than compensate. Besides, the folklore calendar has gained popularity over the last few years, and Carnival deserves to be up there. It may be loud and brash, but it has roots going back over 400 years.

The tradition started in the Somerset town of Bridgwater. The population of the town was staunchly protestant back in 1605 when a group of catholic conspirators plotted to blow up the houses of parliament - the failed attempt which has been celebrated as Guy Fawkes night ever since. 

But although Guy Fawkes was a conspirator, the main instigator of the gunpowder plot was a man called Robert Parsons, a Jesuit priest from Nether Stowey - which is a village very close to Bridgwater.

Each year following the uncovering of the plot, the town folk of Bridgwater celebrated Robert Parsons' demise on 5 November by lighting a huge bonfire, built from a wooden boat filled with 100 tar barrels and anything else people found that would burn. Local groups (known as gangs) added effigies (or guys) to the fire, and processions started up as the gangs paraded their guys along the route. 

The processions became more elaborate over the years, adding music and costumes, until eventually the carnival procession became the main focus of the event (especially after over-enthusiastic locals had to be stopped from burning any boat they could pinch from the harbour). The people who dress up and take part in the event are known as Masqueraders or Features.

The Carnival Circuits now feature a parade of up to 50 illuminated carts (the local name for floats), mostly pulled by tractors or lorries, and often needing massive generators to power the fantastic light displays. Carts can cost over £40,000 to build, and local clubs spend thousands of man hours creating them over the course of the year. The aim of the carnival (one of the biggest of its kind in the world) is to raise money for local charities, but it's also a chance for everyone to enjoy a fantastic spectacle at a very dull point in the year.  

Some themed floats are based on Children's novels (classics like Alice in Wonderland or Pinocchio rather than anything contemporary) - but if you're a film maker, you stand a far better chance of seeing a tribute to your work. Although it's unpredictable. This year I expected to see a lot of variations on Wicked and possibly a few K-Pop Demon Hunters, but there was only one Wicked themed cart - instead there were several Western movie style bar fight themes, a few ghost trains, the Titanic, and a brilliant Day of the Dead cart.  The music blaring from each cart reflects the theme, which makes for a mix no DJ would ever consider - and tbh, once a year is probably enough.

Although the Carnival travels to a number of other West country towns over a period of a couple of weeks, it's only in Bridgwater itself that they keep the tradition of squibbing. A squib is a firework held up on a long wooden handle (called a cosh) by a squibber, and a hundred squibbers stand in line in Bridgwater town centre, making a brilliant, if slightly scary display. (link) 

For a quieter, but possibly more disorganised night, come to see it in on the last night of the circuit, in Glastonbury. Just ignore the timings on the website here, as in Glastonbury time, a 6.45pm start can mean 8pm if you're lucky. And don't rely on buses as they all stop an hour before the procession starts, whatever the timetable tells you.

Still worth it though. The themed carts vary enormously, so you'll never see exactly the same float two years running, and yet somehow the atmosphere is timeless. And although there's no chance your work will ever be featured on a cart, on the plus side, Carnival makes a brilliant setting for any fictional murder and mayhem you might want to write later... 

Anyway, where else can you see ghost chickens?

Lu Hersey

Perplexing Problems By Steve Way

 Several children’s stories involve the protagonists overcoming all sorts of problems and challenges, which is one reason why I wanted to share a couple of intriguing bureaucratic challenges set for my wife and I by HM Gov, in case it inspires any of you with ideas for characters who might deal with quandaries in an imaginary, rather than a real context. The second reason is because I would love to know how you would have dealt with a similar seemingly insoluble dilemma.  

My wife and I now live in France and needed to apply for a form from the UK NHS called an S1. This means that as Brits our healthcare is covered in France. After we’d made our online applications – the process of which seemed to go quite smoothly – we were told that we would be sent a unique 6-digit code that we would need to use to download the documents.

The codes duly arrived, and we logged on to the site again. We found the space allocated for typing in our unique code and were faced with the statement, ‘Now enter your 8-digit code’.

So what to do now? Take a gamble and add two 0s to the beginning of our 6-digit number… or at the ending? Maybe one at the beginning and one at the end?

Instead of taking a gamble, we found a need help section and hoped we could communicate our problem to the powers that be.

We found a page that required our details, beginning with our surname. Well, my surname is Way, so obviously I started by typing in a W. As soon as I did so a message popped up below the box which said, ‘Must be a least 5 characters’.

In a 3-letter name? What do we do this time? Add two # marks? Two extra Ys as though someone had stood on my toe while saying my name? To add to the irony of the situation, we couldn’t even give my wife’s maiden name as it’s Bell. 

Could it be that those of us with 3-letter or 4-letter long surnames make the most complaints and this is the authority’s way to filtering us out? Could this be another one for the conspiracy theorists?

Answers on a postcard please. PS No more than three million characters!

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

Recently published, “Spell Binding Stories UKS2” contains stories, sketches and poems to support the learning of spelling for juniors age 9 – 11

ISBN 979-8297102361

My Book of Classic Nursery Tales, by James Mayhew, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

 

    This beautiful new book is my book of choice to welcome my new wee grandson to the world, and I hope it will accompany him through his life as a joy and comfort. I suspect that these images of the classic tales, and the voice telling them, will be the ones that always feel to the be the only right ones for him forever! 

    James Mayhew has both written and illustrated this collection of eight stories, seven very familiar, one new to me. We have Goldilocks, the Gingerbread Man, The Enormous Turnip, The Tortoise and the Hare, and more. These stories come to life with lively and beautiful collage artwork.

    And then there's the one story which is new to me. The Vain Little Mouse is of Spanish origin, a sweet story of a foolish mouse who thinks she wants more than kind Senor Perez mouse for a husband ... until he rescues her from the toothy jaws of the cat she was flirting with. 'So they got married at once, by the light of the moon, dressed all in ribbons and lace.' James tells these stories with a lovely storytelling voice, drawing his audience in. 

    

A very special book. 

Better late than never

I have realised that it is the 13th at the very last minute, and am very sorry for being late, so just wanted to post something quickly. Tonight I was out at a rehearsal for 'A Christmas Carol,' an amateur dramatic production we are putting on to raise money for our local village church. My husband and I play Mr Cheerly and Mr Heartly, the charity collectors who try unsuccessfully to get money from Scrooge in the first half of the play, and then, as Mr Cheerly, I benefit in the last part, from Scrooge's changed attitude, and a big donation to my charity. It's been a lot of fun rehearsing and watching the others play their parts, and sadly the message of 'A Christmas Carol' feels more relevant than ever - greed is not the way to reach happiness and is really messing up the world. However, what I love about Scrooge is that he DOES change and the predicted terrible  future does not happen. As I say as number one narrator at the end , 'Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more: and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father.'  Before I went to rehearsal tonight I was feeling a bit panicked and depressed by world news, but a dramatised work of fiction has cheered me up and lessened despair. We don't have to repeat old stories and we don't have to be manipulated by societal  scripts written by people with vested interests - we CAN be kind and we can look after each other and change predicted pessimistic outcomes - and I think, as writers for children, we are very lucky to have the chance to write stories which bring hope. So as Tiny Tim says, 'God bless us, every one,' and Good luck to all who write to make the world better.

Pliosaurs vs. AI (Anne Rooney)

 

Do you like my pliosaur? 

I've posted several times here about AI and how it is making work as a children's author increasingly difficult. I also have a book on AI and its social impact coming out this month. The book was written a year ago — that's publishing lead times for you — so I was not particularly impacted by the relentless flood of AI slop at that point. But now I am. It's harder to find reliable information and, particularly, reliable images to gives to illustrators. The bits of consultancy I do for publishers on other authors' books are getting harder because I can't assume authors have used sound sources. This is all aside from the threat of wannabe writers submitted AI-generated trash to publishers, the pillaging of our corpus by AI developers, and the slow decay of once-nurtured and cherished resources such as the websites of NASA and USGS, now eroding under US policy. 

 

Is it time to get out? Possibly. Maybe it will all settle down and there will be good ways of producing books in five years' time, or maybe this is the start of something terminal for well-researched and illustrated children's non-fiction.

 

 

 

 

 

I can write in ways AI can't and won't for a long time, if ever. It's about seeing connections that will speak to young readers, and knowing what will be funny or fascinating not because it's been done before but because I am human and they are human. 

 

 

 

But it's not just the writing. If the research and picture sourcing become harder, the work takes longer and becomes less and less viable. Publishers aren't about to start paying writers more. So maybe it's time to move on, after 25 or so good years making a living from this thing that I love. Or at least time to diversify further.

 

 

 

That's where the pliosaur comes in. I want to do something that brings together different parts of my life and interests and that can't be taken over by AI. I think I've found it. So — stained glass made using medieval methods (I was a medievalist before I was a children's writer) and depicting the extinct animals and other scientific things I have been writing about for the last couple of decades. If I can't trust children to read, or be able to read, at least — like the stained glass workers of the Middle Ages — I can show them with pictures some of the wonders of the world. 

 

Maybe I'll never make it work as a job, but I'll have fun trying. 

 

Anne Rooney

Out this month: The Essential Book of AI, Arcturus, 2025

 

 

USING COLOUR IN CHILDREN'S BOOKS - GREEN By Sharon Tregenza

 

GREEN

The colour green is associated with nature, healing and balance. It's often used in children's books to represent forests, meadows and all things natural.

It invites a sense of calm and connects text to the natural world - plants and trees. Illustrators will also use it to subtly embed environmental themes. When a child reads a book where the colour green is prominent their subconscious is already primed for themes of nature and calm.

Here are three books that illustrate how well green works in picture books:

In 'The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo' by Judy Blume the colour green here signifies "difference". The green kangaroo becomes  a symbol of finding one's place. It's used here not just for nature but for identity.

Laura Vaccaro Seeger pays homage to the colour green and invites children to notice just how many greens there are - jade green, pea green and forest green for instance. Because this book focuses on just one colour it supports visual literacy as well as encouraging connections to the natural world.

In Dr Seuss's famous book the colour green is in the food. The choice of green here is deliberate and meaningful - it's used to denote novelty.

Because it's unexpected it creates something for children to be curious about. The use of green for eggs is playful and memorable. 

www.sharontregenza.com

sharontregenza@gmail.com

Members' News

Welcome to our latest news update from members. If you'd like anything included in the December post, please send the details to me, Claire Fayers by the end of November.

Congratulations to Sophie Kirtley on the publication of Swanfall from Bloomsbury on November 6th.

Pip lives with Mum in their isolated cottage on the wetlands. Pip struggles to feel like he fits in at school. But at home, amongst nature, he truly feels he can be himself.
Just like every winter, Pip is waiting for the swanfall – when the flock of majestic Arctic swans return from Siberia on their annual migration. He knows every swan by their unique markings, and he loves to help Mum record the flock as they soar, shining through the sky, to their home. But this December, Pip's favourite three swans haven't appeared. Instead, Pip notices strange footprints in the snow, whispers on the wind and the sense that someone is watching him.

A thrilling new adventure story inspired by Irish folklore from Sophie Kirtley, author of The Wild Way Home. Perfect for fans of Sophie Anderson's The House with Chicken Legs, Amy Wilson's A Girl Called Owl and Aisha Bushby's A Pocketful of Stars.

Something mysterious is afoot, and the adventure to discover the truth leads Pip to follow clues to an ancient curse that he had always believed was simply a fairytale.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/swanfall-9781526642820/

Anna Bowles, well-known to many of us for her reports from Ukraine, has a pamphlet of poems about her experiences coming out from Mica Press on November 17th. Cover art is by Mariia Pronina, an IDP artist from Donetsk now living in Kyiv. Contact Anna for details.

You can read one of Anna's poems here: https://magmapoetry.com/archive/magma-90/poems/landscape-with-mines/

Miriam Halahmy's  MG book  Pomegranates For Peace, Zuntold Books, comes out on November 20th, World Children's Day.  What can you do for Peace? The book shines a spotlight on the 160 grassroot Peace Organisations in Israel, with partners on the West Bank and in Gaza. 

Set in November/December 2023, following the terrible atrocities by Hamas in Israel and the outbreak of the Israel Gaza war, the book follows Tamara Cohen, a 12yr old Jewish girl   and her Jewish and non Jewish friends in their  London High School. With antisemitism rising and polarisation at school, things become very heated. Tamara finds a swastika on her locker one morning. Then her cousin Gidi, from Israel, staying with the family, talks in school about his club, Pomegranates For Peace,  bringing Israeli Jews and Muslims together. Gradually he begins to make a difference. 

https://www.zuntold.com/book-store/25

25 Years Later by Paul May

I got an email from my cousin in Australia a couple of weeks ago. Her 9-year-old granddaughter had started playing football and was becoming a little obsessed. My cousin remembered that I'd written books about football and she'd looked for them in Australia but been unable to find them. I had to tell her that those books were published about 25 years ago and she wouldn't find them in this country either. Not new ones anyway.

But then I remembered that one of the things on my 'to do' list is republishing the books myself, now that I have the rights back. I took a quick look at Troublemakers, the first book I wrote, and decided that there were too many things about it that I wasn't completely happy with. Many of my original intentions to do with challenging racism and sexism in the world of football had been diluted in the process of publishing, so that now it seems a little lightweight to me, though it is an entertaining read. Nice One, Smithy! is a shorter chapter book aimed at younger children, but it's heavily illustrated and thus presents a much bigger challenge to a self-publisher. And then there was Defenders.

Defenders is the book I wrote immediately after Troublemakers at a time when the publishers were still optimistic about developing a football-based section within their Corgi Yearling imprint. I like this book very much. It was inspired by watching my (then) eight-year-old son's Sunday League football team where the role of striker was always the glamorous one. I thought there ought to be a book for the un-glamorous defenders and so I wrote one.

It's an interesting book because, although it has a central character, Chris, for whom pretty much the only good thing in his life is scoring goals for the school football team, and who definitely does not want to be the defender his coach asks him to be, the character who really makes the book for me is Ian Rawson. Ian is an ex-Premier League defender who's been forced to retire through injury and who's helping out with the local team, who are on a miraculous run in the FA Cup. Ian will try to get on the pitch at any opportunity, even though he knows that another injury to his knee could put him in serious trouble. Luckily for me I knew an ex-First Division footballer, Phil Hoadley, who had retired after a knee injury, and then ran my local pub and coached my son at Norwich City holiday sessions. Definitely worth re-publishing. 

There's one little problem, though. This was written on an electric typewriter, saved on floppy discs that I threw away long ago (mistake!), printed out and sent to the publishers. I once had a couple of large boxes of typescripts and proofs and stuff like that, but I chucked all that away too. Then it occurred to me that my scanner software has Optical Character Recognition (OCR) built in. It's not unusual to find cheap editions of books on Amazon that have been scanned in this way. They are almost always full of errors and weird misprints, and that's how it was with the sample text that I scanned. I quickly realised that if I wanted clean, error-free text I was going to have to type it all out again. While it might be possible to produce a print-ready PDF from the scanned text it would be much harder to make sure it was clean enough for conversion to an ebook and it would be mad to have to do all this work twice.

There was a considerable amount to learn here, and if you're already an expert on this self-publishing stuff you might want to look away. The first necessity was to get to grips with MS Word. I've used Word for a long time, and used to be able to find my way around quite well, but each new update brings subtle changes and added complexity and I haven't really kept up. Most of the time I just want to start typing. Anyway, there's plenty of help on the Internet and I've figured out what I need to know and it may seem like a lot of work (and expense) in order to supply a book to my cousin's grandchild, but luckily I quite enjoy this kind of thing. Well, up to a point. Software never seems to do quite what you expect and it can take a stupid amount of time to make it do what you want!

There a lot of companies out there nowadays who will print your book for you without even turning to Amazon (who, sadly, are the cheapest). 50 copies of this book would cost me about £250 with subsequent copies coming in at just over £3. This is not a huge amount of money, and I'd be quite prepared to spend it just in order to see if I can do it, and without a view to selling the books. I reckon I could easily give them away to the grandchildren of friends and relations.

I mentioned that Amazon is cheap. In fact, it's free to publish your book there, but there are many reasons, too many to go into here, why you might not want to do that. There are many other options available. The one I just mentioned involves considerable economies of scale, as in printing just one copy would cost £100 and 25 copies about £180. The company I use for photo books, Blurb, produce very high quality books, but they are expensive and if you lay out your book using their free (and very good) software, you are stuck with a limited number of formats. (They print trade books too). On the other hand if like me you think you're only likely to really need a few copies you can do that with Blurb for around £10 each, and as you get a high quality PDF when you order you could always use that to print in bulk from another source if you were suddenly deluged with orders. This will probably be the route I take in the end.

But back to Defenders.  Before I upload it, first I have to type it out. And that in itself is an interesting experience, examining every word and sentence that I wrote 25 years ago. The kids don't have their own phones! Do I need to update it? No, best to leave it alone. Best to just type the whole thing out exactly as it is in the original edition. It's been edited after all, by professionals. It also seems to have been written by a professional! It's very strange, at times like reading something written by someone else, someone who actually knew what they were doing, which is not how it felt 25 years ago.

So it's back to the keyboard, and there is one thing I learnt to do back then that is one of my top pieces of advice to new writers. I learnt to touch type using all my fingers. It didn't take long and it wasn't hard to do and I've been reaping the benefit ever since.

Sadly, Phil Hoadley, who I mentioned earlier, died last year at the age of 72. He was, as he would have said, a lovely geezer.