Monday 29 February 2016

Boycott or not? - John Dougherty

Hanging out in one of the hotel bars
Some of you may have read about the Think Twice campaign, asking authors to boycott the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai, which starts this week. The campaign's objections are to the festival sponsor, Emirates Airline, which is owned by the government of the UAE, a government with a less than enviable record on human rights.

Now, before weighing into the debate, I guess I should declare an interest of sorts. I went to the festival last year, and had a great time.   The organisers treated us tremendously well; the other authors were fantastic company; and all in all, it was as good as a holiday. So - as per the photographic illustrations to this piece - I have some very good memories of and feelings about the festival which may well compromise my objectivity.

Meeting a hawk in the desert
I should also say that I've got no objection to a decent boycott. I haven't knowingly bought a Nestlé product in years, probably decades.

Young Bond author Steve Cole on a camel
 But my feelings about Think Twice's proposed boycott sway between undecided and uneasy, and I'm not entirely sure why. In part, at least, I think it's the idea of targeting a festival solely on the grounds of its sponsorship that troubles me.

Leaping about in the desert with Steve
& photographer Lou Abercrombie
(there with her husband,
 YA author Joe)
The thing is, there are a number of festivals whose sponsors I have serious issues with. There's the Times & Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, a festival I'm proud to have spoken at more than once, but whose main sponsor is owned by Rupert Murdoch, a man who I believe has done immense damage to political discourse in this country and who holds disproportionate influence in the corridors of power. Or the Hay Festival, sponsored by the Telegraph, whose owners are allegedly no friends of democracy.

Now, if Murdoch or the Barclays tried to censor the festivals which which they're respectively associated, I think that would almost certainly be grounds for a boycott. As far as I know, they haven't. But as far as I know, there is no reason to believe that either Emirates Airline or the government of the UAE have tried to influence festival policy, let alone impose censorship.

Lunching with Steve & illustrator
extraordinaire David Tazzymen
I really don't want to downgrade the importance of the human rights argument. But Think Twice isn't calling for a boycott of every festival held in a territory with a poor human rights record; only this one. So I suppose my question is this: should the nature of their chief sponsor mean that Emirates Airline Festival of Literature should be held responsible for the UAE government's human rights record? 

I'm not sure it should. The organisers are not connected with the government; they're simply book enthusiasts who have worked hard to get a literature festival off the ground, and who have sought sponsorship from a local company with a lot of money. And I'm not sure it seems fair to try to close down their festival as a way of protesting against the sponsor. If the boycott is successful, the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature will be no more. Emirates Airline, and the UAE government, will continue exactly as before.

What do you think?


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John's Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face series, illustrated by David Tazzyman, is published by OUP.


His new books in 2016 will include the next two Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face titles, his first poetry collection - Dinosaurs & Dinner-Ladies, illustrated by Tom Morgan-Jones and published by Otter-Barry Books  - and several readers for schools.










Sunday 28 February 2016

Corporal punishment in children's literature - Clementine Beauvais

Over coffee, I was talking to a colleague who is a professor in educational psychology. The conversation drifted towards the subject of corporal punishment in schools: he had given a public talk the day before, about how to help troubled pupils, and a heckler had stood up to say that children are too sensitive nowadays; in the good old days, a clip round the ear, etc. 

This reminded me, for some reason, of the numerous casual representations of corporal punishment in children’s literature. For most British people, Dickens is the first writer to spring to mind when corporal punishment is mentioned; to Germans, Struwwelpeter is an obvious contender. For French people, the most memorable example of corporal punishment in children’s literature is likely to be an episode from the Comtesse de Ségur’s book A Good Little Devil (Un bon petit diable), published in 1865 and still popular (though less than other books by the Comtesse). In the story, the young protagonist Charles, brought up by the horrible, cantankerous and superstitious Mrs MacMiche, keeps getting into situations that lead to him getting spanked by the old witch. One day, with the help of his friend, the servant Betty, he glues to his bumcheeks two demonic faces made of cardboard, which terrify Madame MacMiche when she pulls down Charles’ pants to beat him up. So iconic is this episode that it is often chosen to illustrate the cover of Un bon petit diable in its various editions.












Corporal punishment, isolations in penitence cabinets, and humiliations of all kinds abound in the Comtesse de Ségur’s work, but so do revenges, transgressions and subversions of those punishments.

Still, there’s nothing, of course, actually funny about corporal punishment, and the images that abounded in the books and comics I read as a young child - from the Katzenjammer Kids to Tintin - of adults enthusiastically spanking children would never go past an editor today. It seems difficult now to imagine that normal human beings, otherwise happy in their lives and balanced human beings, might have hit children quite violently as a matter of course in the past. There’s something abject now about the notion of an adult hitting a child, and children’s literature doesn’t display those images in the light-hearted way it used to. Even Dahl doesn’t show adults hitting children, preferring cartoonish punishments - swirling them by their plaits - or indirect physical punishment - a Trunchbullesque transformation of the Iron Maiden, an Augustus-Gloop-Hoover. When realistic corporal punishment appears in children’s literature, it’s now in ‘issue books’ - dark, serious, social realistic stories. 


Yet of course, adult violence against children continues, and children’s literature continues to depict it. Harry Potter’s punishment by various teachers is particularly interesting. Dolores Umbridge is the most obvious torturer of the saga. Harry’s I must not tell lies, drowning his hand in blood, is perhaps the most vivid literalisation in children’s literature of the core principle of corporal punishment: getting the mind to obey by stamping the body with the mark of compliance. But Harry, arguably, is also physically tortured by Snape and even by Lupin, whose secret sessions of ‘training’ - against Dementors, and against mind-reading - often border on the physically unbearable. In those sessions, the educational and the sado-masochistic are constantly interwoven. One moment Lupin gives Harry chocolate to make him feel better; the next, he ‘[taps] Harry hard on the face’ to wake him up. And in the midst of Harry’s intense suffering, Harry himself can’t help wanting to face the Dementor again, to hear his parents’ voices.

As to Harry’s sessions with Snape, there’s no need to be a great hermeneut of suspicion to find interesting, to say the least, the dynamics of penetration and resistance that the educational process involves. Since education is intrinsically dangerous at Hogwarts - every mistake can turn into mauling, hurting, burning or Splinching - the frontier between teaching and beating, and ‘making a mistake’ and ‘being punished’, is very slim indeed. But again, Harry is never physically touched by any of these teachers; it is as if he were tortured and punished once-removed, by invisible agents - including, symbolically, himself. The notion of ‘clean’ corporal punishment reaches it pinnacle with one of the most poignant, asphyxiating moments in children’s literature: the almost-successful severing of Lyra from Pantalaimon, in the sanitized environment of a clinic in His Dark Materials.

Does that mean that children’s literature, following the old Foucauldian mantra, has slid from obvious spectacles of spankings and bloodiness to a kind of mechanized, hands-free repression? Maybe corporal punishment is being displaced in its representations, through eclipsing actual physical contact, or transforming corporal into psychological and emotional violence (which of course, had always existed too). But this claim suffers many caveats. First, unlike public executions, which simply don’t take place anymore, old children’s books, fairy tales and nursery rhymes that depict physical violence against children are still available - and still read, told and sung. Secondly, as with Harry Potter, blood and suffering are by no means absent from punishment in children’s literature. They tend, perhaps, to become disconnected from obvious physical contact between adult and child, but violence has not become solely psychological. We’re not just talking about surveillance; we’re still seeing physical damage. 

And there’s still a weird erotic to corporal punishment. Without taking it into account, I don’t think we can comprehend the deep, fond, almost nostalgic affection that some people seem to nurture for it. ‘In the old days, we were beaten up if we didn’t behave correctly!’, to quote our heckler the other night. Why do they seem to relish the thought so much? some adults seem to secretly enjoy the concept of violence against children - or, at the very least, they enjoy the concept of punishing the younger generations. For those who wish for the return of corporal punishment, it verges on the pathological. But after all, many others, like you and me, enjoy Hitchcock’s Birds, and the old classic film Forbidden Planet. And those are, essentially, stories about the materialisation of parents’ wishes that their children - admittedly young adults by then - be brutally maimed.
 
At least in those stories the parents are punished; and the stories end well (ish).

Outside fiction, of course, they don't.

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Clementine Beauvais writes in French and English. She blogs here about children's literature and academia.

Saturday 27 February 2016

Woodland Wonders, by Lynn Huggins-Cooper


Lately I’ve been out in the woods, even when I have been writing. I am preparing a project called Words from the Woods, for BBC Get Creative Day on April 2nd 2016.
The idea behind the day is to celebrate the creative things that are done quietly, everywhere, by everyday people like you and I – and to get more people involved. We are launching our new project that day, which asks people to take a walk in the woods and to collect ‘treasure’ from the forest floor, as you do - sticks, leaves, seeds etc – but to take along a notebook and collect the words that appear in your head as you walk, too. You then take the 'treasure' and the words home to make art with them.  I love using the forest (360 hectares of it!) that surrounds me as inspiration.


At Forest House Press, we will be running group sessions and classes during the year to build a collection of Words from the Woods which will be used for an exhibition next year. If you'd like to be part of the project, drop me a line.


Friday 26 February 2016

Creativity. Fun or Failure? Eloise Williams


I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity these past few days.

 


At the beginning of the year I went on a course to learn about how to be more creative in the classroom with Arts Council Wales. I’m lucky enough to run workshops for them to improve literacy through their Lead Creative Schools Scheme and this was a chance to meet up with other artists (of all kinds) and discuss what creativity meant to us and how we use it.
 

Firstly, let me assure you that not everyone turned up swathed in scarves, flouncing about telling people how brilliantly wonderful they were and calling everyone darling, love and sweet pea whilst demanding only orange Smarties in their dressing rooms. Nor did anyone turn up in a Rolls Royce, a Lamborghini, or a Winnebago though I think there were a few jalopy / banger drivers like myself.

Neither did anyone spend the whole time trying to sell their wares or bemoaning how little financial help is given to the arts (though I’ll have a moan here and say it isn’t enough by a long way!). It was a time for celebration, for thinking outside the box, no, I’ll correct that, it was a time for thinking as if the box didn’t even exist.        
        

I start my new job tomorrow working with a school in Swansea and even though I’ve been running workshops with young people for more than twenty years I am still nervous. A friend of mine recently asked if they could see one of my workshop plans and I had to admit that I don’t have any. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t that I don’t plan before a workshop, of course I do! I’d be an idiot to wing it, but every workshop is an adventure for me and I like to push my own creative boundaries so I always start with a clean slate. Of course I remember some things that worked well and also some things that didn’t – I’ve had a few absolute disasters over the years where young people have eyed me with disgust, amusement, suspicion, or even patted me on the arm and told me it’s okay – and I use lots of games and exercises repeatedly, but I also like to ask the question ‘What if?’
 


What if I tried this?


 
What if we made that?



What if it fails?
 

 
Fear of failure is a terrible stunt to Creativity. You have to fail. It’s part of it. How can you find out what works for you if you don’t find out what doesn’t?

 

It should be fun but if you can’t fall then you can’t fly.

Remember taking the stabilisers off your bike for the first time?  Remember the scratched knees? Remember the feeling of achievement? Freedom? Success? Sit down and think about things that mean a lot to you. Are they the things that came easily? Are they the things where you took a risk? Where you stretched yourself? Where you had to really work hard? For me it is a mixture of all types of things. Some came easier than others.

I don’t regret failing at things - though I will never be the angelic flautist I thought I would be.
 

The things I do regret are the opportunities I DIDN’T take because I was afraid of failing.

 

I want to learn to be more creative. Some people might think that by the ancient age of forty three and three-quarters I’d be done with learning. Not a bit of it. I learn all the time.

One of the best creative experiences I’ve had recently was in my kitchen filming these two, my husband and my niece, making a silly film.

They won’t thank me for sharing this picture but it was FUN and I learned that creativity just doesn’t happen without fun. It also doesn’t happen without failure. Their first nine or ten attempts at a film were quite a bit rubbish but they absolutely didn’t care. It was the creation that they took enjoyment in.   
 

 

And so my whimsical wonderings end here with the summation that creativity has to be a combination of fun and failure. It has to be. Doesn’t it? Does it? What do YOU think?

 

 

Thursday 25 February 2016

WBD Burn Out by Tamsyn Murray

It's the week before World Book Day. For a lot of children's authors, this is the calm before the storm. Perhaps, like me, you've got a few visits booked in this week to warm you up for the main event; a full on marathon run of back-to-back school visits all week. It sounds crazy to think in those terms: warm up, marathon etc but I've recently come to realise that it's not a bad idea to think of the coming week as something you can nurture yourself through. School visits are hard work, although a lot of fun they're exhausting too, and those of use who are booked for the whole week (and for days either side too) should remember to look after ourselves, perhaps the way an athlete might.

Don't get me wrong, there is no one I am less likely to be compared to than an actual athlete. But it occurred to me this year, for the first time ever, that this intensive week of school visits might pose a risk to my health. A friend was saying that she'd deliberately taken on fewer WBD week bookings this year because she became ill in 2015 (not solely because of school visits, I'm sure) and she didn't want to make herself unwell again by doing too much. Abie Longstaffe was telling me she'd given herself permission not to write for the duration of her events, because the school visits would tire her out. And it occurred to me that using all my energy on school visits might be overdoing it. This probably sounds crazy (not to  mention obvious) but I'd simply never thought of it that way.

I can't afford the time to be ill; not when it could be avoided. So I'm going to make a special effort to be kind to myself over the next ten days. I'm going to make sure I eat properly and drink lots of water. I'm going to avoid working late into the night to catch up on work missed while I was at a school; I'm getting some early nights. I'm going to recognise that school visits are mentally and physically demanding and I am going to respect them by looking after myself. As Abie Longstaffe said, 'for the next few weeks I won't be a writer, I'll be someone who visits schools.'

So I thought I'd write this blog post to remind all us writerly athletes, limbering up for the marathon of WBD week, to take care of ourselves. To give ourselves permission to say no to other commitments that might drain us further and leave us susceptible to ill health. To avoid the kind of burn out that might cause us health problems later on. To cut ourselves some slack during the crazy busy time. Who's with me?

Wednesday 24 February 2016

The Making of a Cover by Keren David

I often get asked about the covers of my books. Readers are amazed to hear that we authors have little or no input into the designs, only seeing the cover once it is nearly complete and with limited chance to make comments. 
It's a scary moment, opening the email attachment which contains a new cover. It's the time when you either feel excited that the publisher really gets your intentions, or disappointed and let down and somehow misunderstood and misrepresented. 
Luckily for me, I have been blessed with great covers. And I love my new one  so much, that I thought it'd be interesting to ask the designer, Jack Smyth about the process of creating it.
The book is about a young actor, Jake, who loses his role on a soap, falls out with his parents and starts sofa-surfing, semi-homeless, spending nights at friends' houses and anywhere he can find somewhere to sleep.  My editor, Sarah Castleton briefed the design department at Little,Brown Books, explaining the story and the character of Jake. She did this brilliantly, as the book wasn't even written yet. 
Then, as Jack explains below, he, photographer Rebecca Naen and Jack's flatmate James (who is actually 25!) created the striking cover. I think they did a fabulous job, and it's given me added energy as I tackle the final edits, to make a book that lives up to its cover. 

Over to Jack:

I’d love to tell you about the process, as I’ve never worked on a cover this way before:
Firstly, Sarah is the BEST at briefing books to the design dept. Thanks to her, I knew EXACTLY what I wanted to do for Cuckoo!
I got a really strong sense of Jake’s personality and felt that the time he spends couch surfing is really an interesting time of turmoil for him.
I quickly sketched out a rough little version of what I thought we should do -  a photographic bird’s eye view of Jake curled up, asleep on a floor, in the middle of his journey. 
After spending quite some time searching for an apt image, I realised such an image did not exist, so I called upon my good friend & photographer Rebecca Naen  for some help.
I know Becca from back home in Ireland and have been itching for the right project to work on with her. I then called my very youthful looking housemate James to play the part of Jake, and
then on one Sunday morning in January, we cleared the living room of our house of furniture, exposing the floorboards. We set up a ladder, which Becca championed, got James comfortable on the cold floor and started shooting.
After a few hours, too much coffee and lots of photos, we felt we had what we needed. We originally had a lot of props in the shot – an old camera, some clothes, books, a notebook, but in the end, 
it was the image of Jake on his own, upside down in that curled up position that was obviously the way to go.

The type came later when I was at my desk going through Becca’s wonderful shots.
I wanted the title to be colourful and strong, and wrote out the shout line  to give some personality.

It was the kind of image that is all about Jake, and with the type, I really tried to just let him be! 

 Cuckoo will be published by Atom Books in August. 


Tuesday 23 February 2016

Who Stole My Childhood? by Steve Gladwin

Many years ago I attended a psychosynthesis course in Glastonbury in Somerset. It was an intense introduction over a week to what is essentially the only psychotherapy with a spiritual dimension. At one point we were all asked to do an exercise where we met with our much younger selves. I was taken immediately to the bedroom of my childhood at 29, Gloucester Avenue, Grimsby - all there as I remembered it with its bright striped curtains, Thunderbirds wallpaper and the shelves of books behind my bed.



Thunderbirds are go!


My younger self was sitting on my bed in his signature brown and white t shirt and brown shorts. Feeling very grown up I tried to talk to him. What soon became apparent was that it was he who wanted to talk to me. He was far more confident than I’d expected and wanted to be called Stephen rather than Steve. He was also a bit annoyed that I believed him to be shy, upset or miserable. He told me he was the opposite.  

It was a strangely unsettling experience to meet my younger self. However one of the things I remember with most delight was being reconnected with my eight years old book collection. There they all were - the adventures of Jennings and Derbyshire at Linbury Court Preparatory School, (thank you Charney quiz!) and Billy Bunter, the ‘fat owl’ of the remove at Greyfriars. Further down were a great many Enid Blytons including the Seven, The Five, The Five and Dog and my favourites  - the ‘of Adventure series.’ It was still some time before many of these would be edged out by a huge inpouring of Dennis Wheatley books which a kind former baby sitter would later pass on when she invested in the official leather bound edition!

Like most people I can remember my adventures with books beginning with particular favourites. It was our other baby sitter Olwen - a rather old fashioned head mistress of a local school who went to church dressed in an array of formidable looking flower pot hats - who first introduced my sister and I to the chronicles of Narnia when she read us The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. The snow enchanted kingdom forever in the thrall of the white queen quickly entranced me, along with a wardrobe full of fur coats, an overburdened fawn with an umbrella, and the haunting beauty of that name, Caer Paravel.


Harry Potter long before he was ever invented!


Similarly it was landscape which first grabbed me when my mum gave me the first of her collection of Enid Blytons - “If you like it you can have more’, she assured me. It was a hardback copy of Five Go To Smugglers Top’. Although by then it had lost its colourful jacket, there was something equally thrilling about its dark red brick hardness. Within no time at all I was lost deep in a tale of smugglers and hidden passages.

A few years ago I asked my partner to buy me a second hand copy for Christmas. I struggled with its awkward old fashioned style, and to my surprise, there was little of the excitement of the sea I remembered. I must have combined it with the Kirrin Island books in my memory, but I always preferred the Island of Adventure anyway!

After that I remember it all - the thrill of the books we were read at school and the adaptations of Rosemary Sutclifffe and Alan Garner we watched on that huge TV. There were books as gifts, books from the library and those we chose to buy. There was plenty of children’s TV too like my all time favourite The Flashing Blade with its terrible dubbing that I never noticed in those days, There was Captain Zepos, The White Horses Belle and Sebastian but my favourite were Tales from Europe with their oddly compelling and even more oddly tinted adaptations of Snow White and the Tinder Box. Years later I can still hum along to the dwarves song and see that witch in the oak tree. Don’t trust her soldier!

The most famous of all the Tales From Europe was of course The Singing Ringing Tree - one of the oddest ever imports from eastern Europe and worth a blog all on its own!



Portrait of the author as a young geek!


Yet somehow we are led to believe that all of this stops - that we are no longer allowed to enjoy these things of childhood and should somehow put them away as it we are merely awaiting the moment when we pass these hidden away treasures to our own children. Perhaps it is because I have never had children that my own inner child remains so strong, and insists on being regularly exercised. I remember how annoyed I was when the Harry Potter books were given their two covers with a ‘let’s save your embarrassment’ one for the adults. I have always read and enjoyed children’s books, (although the unfortunate few on last year's Charney and Folly Farm quiz teams might wish to dispute that). I also realise that I am both preaching to the converted and that I live in an age where books for children are no longer minimised and where one of them can win the Costa of Costas.

There is a strange figure in Celtic myth called the Mabon. In the old Welsh tale of Culwch and Olwen, one of the hero’s impossible tasks is to rescue a prisoner - this Mabon son of Modron, who was stolen from his mother when only a few nights old. His lamentation can be heard, we are told, coming from the walls of Gloucester Castle, (Caer Lowy). A similar wailing song is also mentioned in one of the strangest and most impenetrable of ancient poems, the Preiddeu Annwn, (Spoils of Annwn), attributed to Taliesin.

If you dig deep you will find variants of this figure of the magical child/prisoner throughout world myth. However there may be more in celtic myth than anywhere else, for not only Mabon but Gwri, Gwion/Taliesin, Amairgen, and most significantly King Arthur himself, are taken away and educated before being returned from the otherworld. There may of course be no connection - Maybe Mabon is an ancient sun deity and therefore his going away is a seasonal myth in the same manner as Balder or Persephone.

But is there something else they’re missing? Is there a point in life as well as myth where the child is supposed to go away and return ‘changed’? Are their then magics and skills that we have forgotten, or even whole senses we no longer know how to use?



One thing’s for certain - no-one’s taking the rest of it away from me without a struggle. How about you? 






http://www.gwales.com/



'It dances beautifully between the solidly real and the otherworldly, wakefulness and dream, practicality and magic, belief and disbelief. In the best manner of British storytelling since history began.'

Professor Ronald Hutton
Bristol University

Monday 22 February 2016

Heart? Head? heart? Head? - by Nicola Morgan

Both, is my answer. Only if we’re (exceptionally) lucky can we earn a living following only our heart. If we’re sensible, we keep our head firmly where it’s supposed to be, checking that the heart doesn’t get out of control.

Stephen King, in On Writing, talks of writing the first draft with the door closed, listening to no one but our own heart (I paraphrase) and the second draft with the door open, listening to our professional knowledge of what needs to be in the book in order for it to be published and for people to buy it.

So, balancing head and heart and not letting one get out of control for too long (though a bit of wildness is allowed!) seems a valid way for a writer to go about the business of being a writer.

But there’s another eminently right-headed way of being a creative person: to do some projects where you mostly follow your heart and others where you get your head down and do stuff that people want to pay for, even if your heart sits in a huff in the corner of the room, ignored and pissed off.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, not least during a discussion on Facebook after I'd praised this piece by Andrew Crofts, provocatively titled, Struggling as an author? Stop writing only what you want to write. Now, I didn’t enjoy all of it but what I do agree with are these ideas that I took from it: that the world does not owe us publication just because we want to write something; that we owe a great deal to readers and sometimes we ought to compromise in order to give them at least something of what they want; and that it is perfectly legitimate and sensible to write some things for purely commercial reasons and others for the heartsong.

Last week, something happened to my family which provides an example. Some of you know what’s coming. A couple of years ago, my younger daughter and a friend, Caroline Bartleet, who were working for a film production company, decided to crowdfund and create a short film, from an idea of Caroline's, inspired by her hearing a 999 call while researching for her day job.. Caroline would be the writer and director; Rebecca would be the producer. They got a team together, all in the industry, many of them working for love or favours; they raised the money they needed through Kickstarter; and, after months and countless hours of planning, filmed it over one weekend last year. The resulting short film was Operator.

Meanwhile, of course, they carried on working in their jobs. Because you have to pay your bills. Operator went into post-production and was ready last summer. They started submitting to festivals, with no expectation of anything.

It was picked up by many festivals, most excitingly the London Film Festival, where it had its UK premiere. Just before the news of LFF came, Rebecca went freelance, with a leap of faith and bravery.

Then, astonishingly, it was nominated for a BAFTA. We knew it was good, because we’d seen it and we’d seen it with other audiences and witnessed their reaction. But a BAFTA??

Incredibly, they won. An actual BAFTA. She has her very heavy golden trophy to prove it. (She's on the left in the pic.) Personally, I think it should stay in our house – so much safer. I would polish it, too. 

They followed their hearts, gambled with their time and immense effort, and the generous help of all their Kickstarter supporters, and they won. Beyond their dreams. Huge luck, of course, but nothing venture, nothing gain, and that was down to hard work and skill.

(The link to their website, with a clip, is here. They haven’t had time to update the news yet! There's a Skype interview here. And the official You-Tube clip and interview with Zoe Ball. Matt Damon may feature...)

My point is only this: that sometimes you must follow your heart. Sometimes that’s how to feel alive. And sometimes you have to follow your head, because that’s the only way to eat - and stay alive. So, Rebecca is back at her uncertain freelance jobs, where she may be a BAFTA-winning Producer but she’s still at the coalface doing jobs that may be below producer level, jobs that she hasn’t initiated, jobs where her heart may not always be. But it's still film production, just as ghost-writing (etc) is still writing. Heart and head.

I know other young people who have started bands, for example, with just the same mentality: this is where our hearts are; the heads are paying the bills. And maybe one day the two will come together.

Do what you can, do what you have to, do what you want, do what works. Just say yes. Head, heart, head, heart? Whichever you can. Just don’t feel demeaned on those occasions when you follow your head instead of your heart. Heads are good. But they don’t work without hearts. And vice versa.


Nicola Morgan still needs to practise what she preaches. One day. Oh yes, one day.