Taxing times with ALCS By Steve Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wishbound, by Clemency Brown, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

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

The story is set in a world where children who show magical powers are taken from their parents by the sinister Wishmaker Institute to be tamed and trained ready for Matching. Being sold and Matched, aged twelve, to a rich child in our world, the Wishmaker child is then the instrument of that master; a means for them to get all they wish for. Our main character, nine-year-old Leonie, is fighting against this fate, determined to escape. After hold-your-breath failures, she does escape with the help of bodyguard Jackson, and they set up a happy home in a remote place. For three years Leonie has a happy life establishing strong best frienship with Cress, a bright girl with hearing loss. But that idyl doesn't last as Leonie's twelfth birthday looms ... And that's when the real drama and magic and desperation and determination kick in.  

A truly exciting book that pitches Leonie's freedom against the life of protector Jackson and her precious friendship with Cress. A cast that includes wicked baddies and others wanting to do the right thing but are trapped by magical powers, as well as rebellious Leonie and clever Cress, makes this a story the reader absolutely cares about. It moves fast, sweeping us onwards to a very satisfying end. I would have adored it as a junior school age child. More stories are to follow, and I'm very glad of that.

NB This book isn't published until June 4th. I had a preview copy from the Federation of Children's Book Groups conference. If you fancy getting your hands on preview copies of books, as well as attending interesting and important panels and presentations about children's books by authors, illustrators, publishers, librarians, educator and more, then here's the FCBG website where information about next year's conference will appear in due course - https://fcbg.org.uk/

Do art, stay young - Anne Rooney

Most recent piece: medieval
fish

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

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

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

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

Work in progress: Ediacaran
animals

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

  

Anne Rooney
website

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

  

  

WRITING VILLAINS by Sharon Tregenza

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


First we have Miss Trenchbull from "Matilda".

I think she's unforgettable because she stands for adult power. She's truly scary and unpredictable which is how adults can come across to children. But she's also very funny. Her over the top personality is ridiculous which is entertaining as well as frightening. Roald Dahl got it just right.


The next one that comes to mind is Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter series.

He grows with the series. He starts off as simply dangerous and mysterious but becomes more complex as the books go on. He creates great emotional tension by engendering the possibility that Harry could actually lose against him.


And my third choice would be The White Witch from "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe".

She actually controls the atmosphere of the whole book. Icy landscapes, frozen creatures all metaphors for her nature - cold heartedness. This contrasted with her elegance makes her especially memorable from my childhood. I found her a fascinating character.


So I think the secret is to try to create strong emotional reactions in young readers but to also make my villains entertaining. Not easy. 😊


www.sharontregenza.com

sharontregenza@gmail.com

Members' News May

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Congratulations also to Barbara Henderson for ENTER EDDIE SHAKESPEARE, a thrilling historical adventure published by Luarth Press.

Enter Eddie Shakespeare invites young readers into the bustling world of Elizabethan theatre through the eyes of 11-year-old Eddie. Dreaming of stardom, he runs away to London, eager to revive his family’s honour under the guidance of his older brother, the promising playwright Will. However, when Eddie discovers a sinister plot to sabotage Will’s big break, he finds himself facing a villain worthy of the stage! Will Eddie’s story end in tragedy, or can he turn the tide?

https://luath.co.uk/products/enter-eddie-shakespeare

If you're a member of the Scattered Authors and have any news you'd like to share - books, awards, events etc, send the details to Claire Fayers

The Story of Cat Patrol by Paul May

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Young Robin

 

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

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

  

Stash Tidying - Joan Lennon

 

(Public Domain Pictures)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram