Authors Electric

I've always thought about things in terms of colours - the days of the week came up technicolour even as a child - Saturday was white, Sunday pink, Monday a kind of dirty beige, Tuesday blue, Wednesday green, Thursday grey and Friday black. When I was very small, four or five, I used to have nightmares that were all colour and sound.  Purple was a particularly awful screech that went straight through every nerve like finger nails on glass.  I've never been able to stand purple since. Words, like sounds, have colours too, mostly - though not always - associated with their meanings and images.  The word 'home' comes up a kind of warm pink (psychologists please don't bother to comment!), 'trunk' is brown unless it belongs to an elephant, 'harmony' is blue - a kind of lavender blue - 'excitement' a kind of electric blue, and if you just said 'velvet' to me without qualifying the noun I'd hear a rich medieval red. The ul...

This week, I had a second picture book app - MORE - published by utales. It's a re-telling of the traditional story about a magic bowl which must be properly used, and the misfortunes of the greedy person who steals it. I've set my story in India, with a hungry small boy, a beggar woman who turns into a goddess, and a fat and greedy maharajah (it occurs to me that one could do a similar re-telling using a contemporary setting and a greedy banker). Setting it in India is the excuse for using all those wonderful Indian colours and patterns, and my illustrator, Claudia Fehr-Levin, has really gone to town on these. If you'd like to take a look at a sample, you can find it here.  Speaking of colour and all its delights, we went to the David Hockney exhibition yesterday, and I was gobsmacked - no, eye -smacked. The opening paintings didn't impress me so much (I've always preferred his drawings) but when we went further into the show and found ourselves drowning in...