Authors Electric

                                                              R.I.P.  THE CLUCKET PRESS I have a very poor sense of time passing – no good to ask me ‘when was that?’ because I won’t have a clue. I usually end up saying’ some time ago’ and I’m always surprised when someone tells me exactly when it was. So recently, when I opened a copy of The Mud Maid and saw that we brought it out in 2005, I was astounded. Fourteen years since we launched the Clucket Press with it, our first DIY book.   Now that we are winding the dear old Clucket Press down and I’m looking for other ways to fill my time constructively and creatively (no golf, no Bridge, thanks) I realise how much...

So, after twelve up-and-down (mostly up) years, the Clucket Press is winding down. This year, we will re-publish The Silkie with beautiful new illustrations by Anne-Marie Perks, using PoD. That will fulfil a promise I made to myself a long time ago. We also plan to bring out Rainbow! A colour-it-yourself picture book with glorious pictures by Bee Willey, and that will be it.   The other surplus books have already gone to Book Aid International and I can now walk round my workroom again. Hooray!  What now, then? Scary freedom... I may have mentioned before (ahem!) that I’ve always had a yen to be a poet. When I did mention it, and my shortcomings, someone responded that they thought poets were born rather than made. Gloom! Was I doomed, then? Wrong genes? Also, I’d once sent a tentative poem to a friend who is a well-known poet and her response was ‘Your gift is other.’ Boo hoo. But lately, thinking about it, what we are born with or without isn’t the be-all and en...

We are moving towards the year’s turning. Time to look back – and forward. I don’t want to dwell on world events in 2016 or I might sink into irrecoverable gloom, so I’ll keep it personal and writing-focussed.      I’m still surprised to find that Including my first, Tattybogle, I’ve written 14 picture books and 7 storybooks. That’s over 21 years, though, so not exactly a fast production line. It’s been a lot of fun, with occasional bumps along the way.      The first (bump) was the icy reception by the Andersen Press team at the Carnegie/Greenaway awards, when Tattybogle was shortlisted. By the most incredible and unfortunate coincidence, another Sandra Horn had just produced a book. Andersen   had an option on my next book and they thought I had violated it. I had no idea what they were talking about until I went into Waterstones and saw ‘Kofi and the Butterflies’ by Sandra Horn. A lovely story, although not one I would have written...