Authors Electric

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the pleasures and pains of handing one’s work over to someone else. I’ve enjoyed writing for performance ever since I was a child. We lived in a cul-de-sac   then, and the blind end had a street lamp over it which made the perfect evening performance space.   I can’t remember much about the scripts, although one play involved costumes made of raffia knotted round string to make ‘hula hula skirts.’ I wrote and directed them and carried on doing that through school, devising my own versions of My Fair Lady, Snow White, and a something Shakespearean with someone playing a recorder, for which I wrote the music. I can’t write music. When the hapless player asked me what key it was in, I said, ‘C’ because it didn’t have sharps or flats (what?) She gave me a funny look. Maybe I had/have a control-freak streak, but I knew how I wanted the parts to be played, my words to be spoken. I've gone on doing it intermittently ever since. Writing f...

I’ve always loved working with small children. From nursery age up through early primary school years, when their world is expanding rapidly and they are working at making sense of it, talking with them is a delight. They vary so much in the conceptual   paths they take along the way. For every child who is sad when the autumn gales destroy Tattybogle , there are several more who ‘love the part where he gets blown all to pieces’! While most children accept that, in The Moon Thieves , the cat, the rat, the boy and his Gran don’t know what the moon is when they first see it, I remember one solemn little boy saying, rather anxiously, ‘But surely the Gran would know?’ We write the stories, the readers make of it what they will. Excellent. I have sometimes asked a class what they would think the moon was if they didn’t know it was the moon. It’s a question Jean Piaget would have said they couldn’t answer, but in any class of 5 and 6-year-olds, there will be one or two wh...

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...

          Twenty years ago, I wrote my first picture book text, Tattybogle . It was published in 1995 and is still providing me with opportunities such as school visits, and a modest amount of income.           When Andersen let it go out of print, I bought a print run from them because I needed to keep the supply of books going. It is basically a simple story of a happy scarecrow, but it has elements of the seasons and the cycle of birth, death and - rebirth? I've been challenged about this by a vicar and it is or was on the RI curriculum in some schools to form the basis of a discussion about the differences between reincarnation and resurrection.           I've also been asked for a copy by a mother preparing her children for the death of a cousin, and it is used in hospices for children and adults.Who'd have thought? Well, I would, for one,...