Charles' Cold - Joan Lennon

The common cold... indescribably dreary. Except that, in a letter to a friend in 1824, Charles Lamb did describe it. At length. See if any of his words speak to you -

Do you know what it is to succumb under an insurmountable day-mare,—"a whoreson lethargy," Falstaff calls it,—an indisposition to do anything, or to be anything,—a total deadness and distaste,—a suspension of vitality,—an indifference to locality,—a numb, soporifical, good-for-nothingness,—an ossification all over,—an oyster-like insensibility to the passing events,—a mind-stupor,—a brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience...

Oh Charles - we do know - we do -

This has been for many weeks my lot, and my excuse; my fingers drag heavily over this paper, and to my thinking it is three-and-twenty furlongs from here to the end of this demi-sheet. I have not a thing to say; nothing is of more importance than another; I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; emptier than Judge Parke's wig when the head is in it; duller than a country stage when the actors are off it; a cipher, an o! I acknowledge life at all, only by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain in the chest...

Your words touch us - tell us more of the details of your discomfort -

I am weary of the world; life is weary of me. My day is gone into twilight, and I don't think it worth the expense of candles. My wick hath a thief in it, but I can't muster courage to snuff it. I inhale suffocation; I can't distinguish veal from mutton; nothing interests me... If you told me the world will be at an end to-morrow, I should just say, "Will it?" I have not volition enough left to dot my i's, much less to comb my eyebrows; my eyes are set in my head; my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in Moorfields, and they did not say when they'd come back again; my skull is a Grub-street attic to let—not so much as a joint-stool or a crack'd jordan left in it; my hand writes, not I, from habit, as chickens run about a little, when their heads are off...

If you are find yourself being just such a chicken, feel better soon. This too will pass, believe it or not.

P.S. Taken from a History Girls blog. As it was in 1824, 2015, 2024 and onwards.

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

Carnival - by Lu Hersey

 

Carnival is a strange thing. The streets fill with crowds eager to watch the passing floats (or carts as they're known locally) and the night is filled with colour, light, booming sound and displays it's taken people all year to create. It's a great excuse for everyone to hit the street and enjoy a fantastic spectacle at a dull time of year, while helping to raise money for various charities. But how did it start?

The West Country carnival tradition began in the Somerset town of Bridgwater. The town population was staunchly protestant back in 1605, when a group of catholic conspirators plotted (unsuccessfully) to blow up the houses of parliament - 5 November has been celebrated as Guy Fawkes night in the UK ever since. But although Guy Fawkes is the best known conspirator, the actual instigator of the gunpowder plot was Robert Parsons, a Jesuit priest from Nether Stowey - a village very close to Bridgwater.

Following the uncovering of the gunpowder plot, the town folk of Bridgwater celebrated Robert Parsons' demise on 5 November each year 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. Much drinking was involved.

The processions became more elaborate over the years, adding music and costumes, until eventually the carnival procession became the main focus of the event, and the reason behind it was mostly forgotten. (The local people who dress up and take part in the even are known as Masqueraders or Features.)

The Carnival Circuits now feature a parade of up to 50 illuminated carts, mostly pulled by tractors, 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 carts are all themed - and there's no restriction on the themes from the organising committee. Mostly they're taken from popular culture, including music, films and....CHILDREN'S BOOKS! (admittedly mostly classics like Matilda, Alice in Wonderland, and Pinocchio, but even so)

With all the lights and razzamataz, I couldn't help thinking how easy it would be (for your fictional character, obviously) to escape a police chase by standing motionless on a tableau cart, or maybe pick a pocket or two in the crowd while everyone is transfixed by the spectacle in front of them...

And how wonderful would it be to see something you'd written immortalised (well, for one year at least) on a cart? After a night of being blinded by lights and deafened by sound, I'm inspired to give my next story all the in-your-face impact of Carnival, and hope to inspire a future cart display. Preferably this side of death, but I'm not fussy...

Lu Hersey

 Writing the Magic

Progress in four lessons. What a surprise! - by Rowena House

Today marks the end of a new words push, started in wonderful Chez Castillon in late September, and aided by a month-long not-NaNoWriMo organised online by Scattered Authors Society luminary, Nicola Morgan. To her and everyone else who joined in, many thanks.

My results? Six weeks of stuttering but significant progress. Hurrah! Yes, I fell short of the 12.5k new word target (8.5k) but when comparing where the story now stands with this time last year, the plot, the characters, and the themes have all come on by leaps and bounds.

This progress only became clear, however, after I compared where-I-am-now in terms of process with the benchmark of where-I-was-then, most especially which lessons learnt from last year’s not-NaNoWriMo, discussed here last December, had stood the test of time.

Lesson One, for me, therefore is this: understanding progress is a subset of understanding process and how it evolves. New words are great but if story is what it’s all about, quality trumps quantity. 

It's not "get it writ, then get it right" it's "get something writ to get it right".

Lesson Two: don't expect to learn something, remember it, and apply it. 

This may seem silly to people whose memory is great, but I’d forgotten where I was back in Nov/Dec 2023 to the extent that I’ve been describing current scenes as Draft Zero as a way to lessen the anxieties around a blank page, when, in reality, the story is very much WIP 2.0.

For example, looking back to last year's ABBA post, I was genuinely shocked how radical the changes have been since then. The dual narrative is gone. The young woman whose real-life execution for witchcraft inspired the story in the first place is now a minor character.

Both losses were hard won, which leads on to Lesson Three: writing something out of a story might be as necessary as writing something else in. 

Let me explain.

Sorrow and anger at the execution of a young woman four hundred years ago made me feel, like many feminist historical fiction writers do, that giving back a voice to women silenced in the past is a moral imperative, something a story ought to do. Now, though, for good or ill, this 'character' has her moment on the page and will only appear once more as a vision. How and when did this happen?

It happened after 2023’s Not-NaNoWriMo, during which I wrote her trial and that of the other accused with as much skill and dedication as I could muster, chapters which were subsequently critiqued (gently but clearly) as over-long and departing from the main story.

It was very hard to hear this at the time, but also good advice. How do I know? Because the WIP made better progress after I edited these chapters to include more story and less history.

Last December, I ruminated on these trial chapters thus: “Despite my conscious efforts to follow The Plan [to focus the story on my hero], what came out was an undirected recreation of the past, liberated from my conscious control by the diktat of a daily word count. In it I honoured the witches’ memories, creating agency for them in mini histories of each trial.”

Yet, in truth, these ‘witches’ were victims. It does them a disservice to pretend otherwise. What voice they have in my telling of their tales is fiction. An attempted erasure, even, of historical shame. No one knows how the accused defended themselves. They were written out of their own histories. “The record” is what a male pamphleteer reported of the male prosecutor’s evidence and what the male judge and jury did with it. That is the history I’m writing about.

I now think I had to over-write the witch trials, and over-imagine what the accused could have said, to overcome sorrow, anger and guilt about the past. A past which, in making the pamphleteer my protagonist, I perpetuate. Yet that is the creative choice I made. Logic and story form dictate I stick with it, even if the inner writer had to acknowledge past suffering to the best of my ability before I could move on.

Maybe those spiked chapters were like wishes and prayers written on pieces of paper which are then hung on sacred trees to let wind and time take them. Or, as we did once at a wonderful oral storytelling festival, written hopes and dreams burnt like offerings.

Writing as ritual, then. Or, perhaps, like neurotic demons, we must acknowledge an obstacle fully before we can get past it.

Back in the practical realm of word counts and progress...

I discovered (and then validated) Lessons Two and Three while drafting this post yesterday. It led to Eureka! moment when I realised that I had gone through exactly the same process with the dual narrative point-of-view characters, Beth, as I had with the witches.

I have spent years researching Beth’s life, writing synopses for her, drafting and editing her early chapters. Then, back in July, I spiked the lot following (yet again) negative feedback from my PhD supervisors.

This feedback hurt like hell at the time - worse than their trial chapters critique - but again it was entirely justified. How do I know? Again, because the story made so much progress since then. [Like I said, just because I discover something once about my process, that self-knowledge isn’t a handy tool lying around for when you need it next. It has to be learnt over and over.]

Which leads to Lesson Four: the inner critic doesn’t necessarily break through the barrier between conscious and subconscious intentions when the subconscious is defending something important, in this case having at least one strong female voice in the story. It seems I have to write it down, then release it to the elements. Maybe a story tree or a bonfire would be fun.

PS Sorry no pictures. Uploaded several to the computer but Google frozen on something about cookies and I've got to dash.

I’m still on the nastier social media, though Blue Sky and Substack nudging at my knee.

@HouseRowena on Musk’s disinformation machine

Rowena House Author on Zukerberg’s nosey money-maker

The Series Factor -- Old Friends by Sheena Wilkinson

I love a good book series. Doesn’t everyone? There’s something so comforting about finding a fictional world to retreat to, and when there’s more than one story set in that world it’s even better. 

As a child, I read voraciously, and some of my favourite books – and the ones I’ve gone on to collect as adults – have been in series. Back then, I don’t think I ever managed to read a series in order. Most of my books came from the library, so it depended very much on what happened to be on the shelves. The few books I owned tended to be presents bought by grandparents and they were more likely to be worthy classics than the Malory Towers or Five Find-Outers titles I craved.

One of the longest series ever written is Elinor M Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School series, with 59 in the original hardbacks series. Published between 1925 and 1970 the quality is variable, with most fans agreeing that the last twenty or so book are formulaic, heavy on incident but light on character development. By then of course, it doesn’t matter so much – you’ve been well and truly hooked and you read on anyway. If the current term’s adventures aren’t up to much, there’s always the chance of gleaning some news of old girls. It’s rather like keeping in touch with an old friend: you might not have much in common; you find her rather dull, but just occasionally you share a joke that reminds you what attracted you to each other all those years ago.

Now I have all the Chalet School books and when I reread them, which I do perhaps once a decade, I always read them in order. But that’s very far from how I encountered them. Back in the seventies and eighties you took what you could find, and as the whole series was never in print at one time, and the paperbacks were published out of order, with the final ones not appearing until the nineties, I grew accustomed to meeting the main character Jo as a twelve-year-old, then as a prefect, then as the mother of eleven, then a fifteen-year-old, then a young bride... It was disconcerting, I suppose, and there were a lot of spoilers. When a young Dr Maynard appeared in the cast, I already knew, because I had read the later books, that he would marry Jo and sire those eleven children.  Still, that was just part of the experience, and all I remember is the joy of finding another Chalet book – any Chalet book. Only on the back of some of the less-easy-to-find hardbacks was there a list of all the titles, so for years I didn’t even know how long the series was.

And it was exciting, all that uncertainty: the jeopardy of book collecting.

As an adult, less of my reading is in series, which means that every time you open a book, even by a well-loved author, there’s a certain anxiety: what if I don’t like it? what if I can’t get into it? With the series factor, you eliminate that. One genre which works well in series is the mystery, whether golden age or modern, hard-boiled or cosy. You get a good mystery every time but you also hope to keep pace with the life and sometimes loves of the main characters. 

For ages people have been recommending the Dr Ruth Galloway mysteries by Elly Griffiths, about a forensic archaeologist who helps the police, most particularly the disturbingly attractive detective Nelson with their enquiries. I had read so much about these books that one day, about a month ago, I downloaded the first one, The Crossing Places,  on my kindle. On page one I smiled. On page two I winced in recognition. By page three I had not only laughed aloud twice but I knew, as certainly as I knew my name, that not only would I enjoy this book, but that I would read the fourteen which followed. In order.

I discovered these delightful, smart, funny, immersive books at the perfect time. Not only was the world a scary place and my own life full of stresses (the usual trigger for a Chalet School reread) but, more pleasantly, I was about to go on holiday. The kind of holiday which would involve a lot of lying on a sunbed reading. I had got to book 6, when my kindle flashed up a message: You have read 6 of 15 books. Do you want to buy the others?

Well, yes, I did. And all week, as soon as one murder was solved, there was the next one waiting for me. I didn’t have to think, what am I going to read? I didn’t have to worry that I wouldn’t like it. And if the first chapter seemed to be about a random, unappealing character, I knew I need not fear – soon Ruth and Nelson would be on the scene, and all would be right with the world. At least with the fictional world.

I avoid Covid books but I loved The Locked Room, book 14 in the series, because by then I knew and cared for the characters so much that I wanted to see how they coped in lockdown. 

As the series drew to an end, I was bereft, but comforted by the fact that there were seven Brighton mysteries by the same author, set in the fifties and sixties. There’s even a school story series for younger readers. I’m not young, but I’ll be buying that too.

Soon I will have exhausted all those books, and it will be time to look for, and enjoy excellent standalone books again, but for now I am just loving my discovery of a reliably enjoyable author, and the luxury of being able to read my way through her stories in order. 

I know I will feel bereft when I finish, but luckily, in the middle of all this binge-reading, the wonderful Rachel Ward published her most recent Supermarket Mystery, The Missing Heirloom Mystery. So once again I know I can rely on excellent writing, a satisfying mystery, a compellingly-drawn setting and characters who feel like old friends. 

Jumping on the banned wagon — Anne Rooney

 

It's hard to know how to start this. I've had books banned in the USA in the past because people with fragile sensibilities don't want their children exposed to facts that conflict with religious beliefs. This book on democracy, written in response to the events of Jan 2020, might be next to be banned in certain (additional) territories. I'm writing a book at the moment that I know can't be sold into China, and indeed can't even be printed in China. Markets are shrinking. But it's not the financial aspect that's the worry.

I'm not expecting the coming new regime in the USA to welcome my books, which are mostly about science. My books don't endorse or even respect the views of many of those who will be making policy, or pushing local-level reshaping of communities and education. The coming years might be a hard time for publishing about science, and a harder time for children who want to read about science. And the decades after will be a hard time for American science and technology if that's the case. I want to talk about two concerns here. They are not party political. You will find nothing intended to offend you if you are right-leaning, but I hope you will consider them because I'm concerned about children, knowledge, the fate of humanity, and truth.

One is fragility and openness. Suppose you sincerely believe that evolution is a lie, climate change a hoax, the Moon landings were faked, Covid was deliberattely engineered or non-existent and/or that vaccines do untold harm, and you want your children to believe that too. My books will not be on your preferred reading list. Not for yourself, not for your children, and not for your school. But they should be, in particular for your school. Books should be available for children to choose, and books you or they disagree with are as important, or more important, than books that reinforce your views.

A child might choose a book about evolution, or they might choose a book about Noah. I wouldn't ban books about Noah as I don't find it threatening, and knowledge of many types is useful. I consider the story of the Flood a myth. As the story appears in different forms around the world, it quite possibly has some roots in a long-ago tsunami or similar event. Aside from potential geological connections, it is important to know this story because the Abrahamic religions permeate Western and Middle Eastern culture. We can't understand the art that surrounds us if we don't know the stories our culture is rooted in. We can't understand the people who surround us if we make no attempt to know the culture they come from and what they might believe.

If you want someone to believe something, you need to be able to defend your position. You need to be able to say why you are right and other people are wrong. If you shield children from counter-arguments, you don't give them the resources they need to defend their view, either to themselves or to others. Why would you ban books? Don't you trust children to weigh up arguments and make a choice? Don't you think your view *can* be rigorously defended? (in which case you might like to reconsider it.) Why do you think your views and your children are so fragile? This is not an assualt; it's an invitation to learn how to strengthen your position if it is genuinely viable.

If our ideas are good and strong and well-founded, they can be tested against dissent and will stand up to the challenge. I can defend the science of climate change and of evolution precisely because I can counter the claims against it. Listening to arguments and considering if a position remains valid makes that position stronger, not weaker. It's not, ultimately, about teaching your child that either Noah or evolution is true. It's about teaching your child to work with evidence, to learn how to think, to come to the right conclusion, whatever that is. 

When I was a student, I went with some friends to a rally by the evangelist Billy Graham. None of us was Christian, or certainly not of the BG persuasion. We went because we wanted to hear how he made his case, to see whether it would persuade us. We were open to challenge. It also showed us in action a methodology of persuasion that was new to us, and therefore interesting in itself. We were not persuaded; it was impressive in its way.

 About five years ago, I was at a college dinner (this is in Cambridge, UK). Some students cornered the head of the college and protested that he was allowing a visitor they disagreed with to speak to students. I no longer remember what the topic or objection was, only that it was a speaker whose views I personally disagreed with, but it was an issue of politics and not about personal offence. It would now be couched in terms of de-platforming. The head of the college told them the visitor held legal views that he was free to express and students were free to listen or not listen as they chose. Were they so insecure or so incapable of rational thought that they couldn't countenance challenge? He made it clear that their perception of their own weakness, or the weakness of their view, was not a reason for expecting people with different convictions or opinons to be silenced. I agreed with him. We need to hear dissenting views and respond to the challenge, even if only internally. Children need to learn to do this. It is a crucial life skill. It is ironic that it is the right wing that loudly proclaims the value of freedom of expression, yet is most eager to ban books that offer different views of the world.

The second point I want to make is about the future of the USA and its world-leading science. There is massive cognitive dissonance at the heart of a regime that denies and limits scientific education and information on the one hand, yet hopes to succeed in a world that is increasingly dependent on science and technology. And in an administration that attempts a forced marriage between science-deniers and technocrats in office. I have no respect for Elon Musk, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't think Earth was created in six days or the Moon landings were faked. 

If you want to support the economics of fossil fuel use, of course you deny climate change. But where will future American scienists come from if they aren't taught science or if an inquisitive and exploratory pattern of mind isn't encouraged in young people? Decent scientists aren't going to move into the USA under the conditions that are coming. I know several scientists who have moved out of the USA in recent years because, whatever the funding opportunities for research (about to go down), they don't want to bring their children up there. They don't want to have only six weeks off work when their babies are born. They don't want to send them to schools where they have to consider the possibility of a shooter. They are human beings before they are scientists. So if America wants a future generation of Elon Musks and their ilk, they will have to be home-grown, and that means teaching some science.

Who says science is scary?

A few years ago, the Chinese Communist Party realised that Chinese scientists were not innovative. They were good at copying and even perfecting things thought of in the West, but they were not good at coming up with new ideas. One reason, it appeared, was because Western scientists had grown up reading science fiction. Science fiction plays with possibilities, it encourages dreaming in scientific and technological landscapes. A very large number of the technologies we enjoy now had their genesis in fiction and were later realised by readers who had grown up wanting the stuff in the stories they had read and the movies and TV shows they had seen. So it's not even just books about actual science that children need access to. They need books that spark their imagination and desires, books (or movies, or computer games) that raise possibilities.

Finally: when Copernicus published his model of Earth going around the Sun in 1543, he left it until he was dying because he anticipated trouble from the Church. (Plus ça change...) But the Church did not ban the heliocentric model of the solar system then. They allowed and even used it because it was a helpful mathematical model that gave results no worse than those they already had. It might not be true (they still thought the Sun went around Earth), but it was mathematically valid. Could America at least do this with science? Use the models that show us how to limit climate damage, improve food supplies, combat diseases, even if you see them as imperfect representations of how the world actually is? (Science is likely always going to be such an imperfect representation — all we disagree about is precisely how imperfect.) Then American children can operate within a framework that the rest of the world recognises and uses, they can grow up to continue to make scientific discoveries that will improve lives, the USA will not slump to the bottom of the world league in a mire of science-denial and fear. Banning useful things because of ideology never leads to a good place. Seeking to understand them gives you power, even if you take the view of "knowing your enemy". Science doesn't care if you believe in it. It will get you anyway, so you might as well see what's coming. You might as well be equipped to partake in the future.

Anne Rooney

Out now: Weird and Wonderful Animal Facts, Arcturus, September 2024; illustrated by Ro Ledesma

Apocalypse and Labyrinth by Paul May

The 2023 Carnegie winner was The Blue Book of Nebo by Manon Steffan Ros. This novel was originally written in Welsh and then 'adapted from the Welsh' by its author. When it won the Carnegie I saw it described as the first 'novel in translation' to have won the award, but that's not really accurate because, when she came to create an English language version of her story, Manon Steffan Ros found herself compelled to change important parts of the book. In an interview with Gary Raymond for Wales Art Review she describes why she had to do this. 

In the original, a mother and her son are isolated survivors in a post-apocalyptic world. Each of them records their thoughts on the blank pages of a book they find in an abandoned house, a book Dylan calls The Blue Book of Nebo. In the book Dylan, the son, records what he remembers of their life together since 'The End' and his mother, Rowenna, talks about the time before 'The End' and about her own experience since. They agree not to read each other's accounts.

Through these accounts we gradually piece together what has happened, how the bombs fell and how these two, and Rowenna's baby daughter Mona have survived, and in Mona's case how she came to be at all. I really wish I could read a direct translation from the Welsh, or indeed that I could read Welsh, and I'm a bit puzzled by the need for such radical changes, because if a different person had translated the work this wouldn't have happened. It's certainly a curious thing, but it's clearly the case that The Blue Book of Nebo, 'adapted from the Welsh' is not the same book as Llyfr Glas Nebo.

This is not a translation, then, and it's also not, as it has often been called, a dystopian novel. Post-apocalyptic, yes, but Rowenna and Dylan learn how to survive in their isolation. Dystopia implies a malfunctioning or unjust society, but here there is no society to be dystopian, just these two people and the baby Mona. It's a novel about survival and growth, about the things we really need and the things we can do without, and in this English version very much a book about language and identity. Here's Manon Steffan Ros:

 'I felt, okay, naturally, these characters would be writing in Welsh, they will be communicating in Welsh. But now they're not I need to come up with the reason they're writing in English. And that sort of became a theme that they're doing that because if anyone was to find it down the line this testimony will be more useful to people who would understand it if it was written in English. And why was that? Taking that theme of finding the Welsh language and trying to make these characters own their own mother tongue, that's a completely different theme in the English translation that simply isn't there in the original.'

That wide-ranging and very interesting interview is here. Remarkably Ros says she feels more free when writing for Young Adults than she does when writing adult fiction, which is in complete contrast to the things I've seen both Elizabeth Acevedo and Jason Reynolds say, both of them suggesting they were more careful of their younger readers. For a much more in-depth review of this book I refer you to Berlie Doherty's website.

And so to the most recent Carnegie winner, The Boy Lost in the Maze by Joseph Coelho. Way back in 1967 Alan Garner won the Carnegie with The Owl Service, a book in which a series of events from a story in The Mabinogion is lived out by successive generations in a remote Welsh valley. The Mabinogion makes its appearance in The Blue Book of Nebo, too, and Alan Garner felt the need to learn Welsh in order to write The Owl Service, but that's not why I mention him here. I think Joseph Coelho is probably the first winner since Garner to use myth in this way to structure and amplify a modern-day story, though Coelho's technique is very different from Garner's. As time went by Garner buried the mythic basis of his stories ever deeper, so that it would take a very switched-on reader indeed to  notice that the story of Tam Lin is the basis to Red Shift, the novel that eventually followed The Owl Service. 

In The Boy Lost in the Maze we have a modern-day teenager searching for his absent father through the mazes of the Internet and the streets of London, while at the same time creating a series of poems for a school project exploring the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. So the book is about how Theo relates to the myth, how the myth acts as a metaphor for his own search and how it helps him to understand himself.

I remember reading how, on being asked to illustrate The God Beneath the Sea, the 1970 Carnegie winner, Charles Keeping, was initially reluctant because he found the myths 'completely disgusting at first. Completely devoid of any love. This is all lust, rape, revenge and violence . . .' Keeping came around to the idea that there were some 'basic human passions' he could work with, and the illustrations he came up with were truly terrifying, but I've always felt the same way as he did about those Greek myths.

But Joseph Coelho changes the story of Theseus. Instead of simply slaying the bandits who are in his way Theseus, as Coelho says in his afterword, 'goes on a journey and changes and is changed by it. The bandits are not just targets to be mown down, they are flawed humans with their own histories and their own labyrinths to weave.'

There are other changes, too, that address that deficit which Keeping observed in the myths—the lack of love. But even so this novel is fairly dark in tone. Theo has a hard time, and though he is persistent in his search for his father and he is a terrific and totally believable character, I never quite felt for him the same buzz I felt with Elizabeth Acevedo's poet, Xiomara. Also, I found that I did need to refer to Robert Graves's The Greek Myths a few times, just to keep track of what was going on.

 Carnegie winners with mythic structure are rare, but Carnegie winning novels written in verse seem to be becoming common. This is the third verse novel in recent years to win the Carnegie and I've enjoyed all of them. 

I notice that the covers of these two most recent winners are very quiet. I was in Foyles bookshop the other day and I felt I needed dark glasses on when I walked into the children's book section. On the display tables every book cover seemed to be a dazzling confusion of primary colours. I couldn't help wondering, looking at these two latest Carnegie winners, whether their downbeat, low-key covers are meant to mark them out as 'serious' fiction for young people. 

And that's it. I've read them all now. Have I learnt anything? Well, maybe. I’ll let you know next time.

Animation Day by Sharon Tregenza

 

I did a day's course on animation for writers today. Of course in such a short time we could only learn the absolute basics but I've been thinking about how it may have helped with my writing process generally. Here's what I came up with.

Visual storytelling:

It made me think about how scenes could come alive not only with dialogue but with movement too.

Marketing:

It's no secret that book trailers etc can help sell books and as a children's author, animation seems like the obvious choice to grab  attention in an interesting way.

Character Development:

It was also interesting to think about visual cues to character like body language, facial expressions and even colour.

Collaboration:

Most writers work alone so needing someone else to help with relevant software, placing and creating the end product was a useful experience.

Learning new skills:

Always a good thing to do something outside your comfort zone. I can't draw so this was a challenge but knowing that simplicity is often the key helped.

Conclusion:

It was a good experience. Stretching ideas and using a totally different format to create a micro story was thought provoking. It is a whole different way of looking at story and this was just a small taster of the potential. I may well take a online course to extend the tiny bit of knowledge I gained and, at the very least, it was fun. :)

www.sharontregenza.com

sharontregenza@gmail.com