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Sunday 10 March 2024

All aboard for Book Week!

I spent just fifteen minutes with my author hat on in school this week, but I spent many, many hours engaging with children and teachers and books. The reason: the Wallace Hall Primary Book Festival.

 

For the past couple of years I’ve been working a couple of days a week as a learning assistant. Schools are very good at making use of the talents and enthusiasms of their staff, so it didn’t take WHP long to realise that I am the woman to talk to about children’s books. Last year, I was away the week of World Book Day, when the school runs a literacy week (but I was on a writing retreat). This year, one of the teachers and I planned a week-long school Book Festival based around the Questioneers picture book series by Andrea Beaty illustrated by David Roberts. 

 


Each class took one of the books, which feature a scientist, an illustrator, an illustrator, an engineer, a teacher and an activist, and their class teacher based class activities around that book. P7 were off on their residential trip for half the week so they missed this part.

 

Each day of the week we held book-related activities:

 

On Monday, we had shared reading, with children from higher up the school going into lower classes to read with children.

 


On Tuesday, we had Speed Book Sharing, where the class sat in two lines facing each other and each child had 30 seconds to share a book they loved with their partner before moving on to the next person. We also ran a sponsored read on this day with children collecting money for time spent reading, proceeds to go to new books for the library.

 

On Wednesday, we had a Dress a Potato as a book character competition. Children were wildly enthusiastic about this and we had some amazingly creative entries. In the afternoon there was a parent open day, so parents came in to share classroom activities with children and view the competition entries.

 


Thursday – actually World Book Day – I wasn’t at school (and I needed the day off after all the running around!). Classes visited the local library for storytime.

 



On Friday we had an all-school IDL activity inspired by Andrea Beaty’s characters Rosie Revere, Engineer, and Iggy Peck, Architect. Small groups of mixed-age children were given missions to design and build for different fictional characters, such as a hot air balloon to carry Goldilocks out of the forest, a waterproof boat to carry the Gingerbread Man across the river and a wolf-proof house for the Three Little Pigs.

 

Running alongside all this, in the corridor there was competition in the corridor to match teachers to their favourite children’s books. Tricky, but lots of fun!

 


And my 15 author minutes? I spoke to one of the classes about how to plan a story. Always a good one.

 

So now we have to plan next year’s Book Festival. I don’t know how we’re going to live up to this one!

Thursday 8 February 2024

February resolution update

Following on from last months' resolution, here's a brief summary of how it's going so far.


Books read last month: 9

Rearead from my shelves: 3

Loaned by other people: 2

Audiobook from library: 1

Bought secondhand: 1 (last year so I'm not counting this as a cost)

Gifts: 2

Total spent: 0


Clothing items bought: 0

Clothing items mended: 1 (though it wasn't actually mine)



Clothing items sewn: 0

Total spent: 0


Gardening items bought: 0

Times I went in the garden and did anything that could be called gardening: 0

Total spent: 0


Friday 5 January 2024

Happy new resolution...

 


Targets are in frustratingly short supply when most of the work you do is for yourself. But I like targets and so I set them for myself. I predict and record the amount of time I spend on different pieces of work; I set schedules and generally stick to them; I write lists with little checkboxes next to them, weekly ones and monthly ones. I may, in fact, like targets too much.

 

So it will come as no surprise that I like resolutions. A resolution is a just a target by another name: I will do this, I will not do this, I will achieve this quantity of something, I will reach this position.

 

I prefer resolutions that are measurable. In the past I have resolved to:

 

·      write 500 words a day for a year (twice, achieved both times)

·      run 1,000 km in a year (twice, but didn’t make it in 2023 because of hideous lurgy)

·      make a new recipe once a week for a year (this was great, really turned me back onto cooking after too many years of cooking dull food that children would eat)

·      not buy any books (interesting, lots of rereading and started using the library again – and allowed myself an exception for the books of friends)

 

This year’s resolution is less easy to measure. I am resolved to ‘tread more lightly’. I have probably put that in quotes because even to me it sounds a bit airy-fairy. What do I mean by it? I mean that I intend to think more carefully about everything I buy, use and consume in order that my presence here on the planet has a smaller impact than it did previously. This isn’t a new thing. We’ve been considering our diet for a long time, we have an electric car and a green energy supplier. Although I’ll be trying to consider every aspect of our lives, I’m going to focus on three areas where I know I’ll be tempted by lovely shiny new things.

 

1.     BOOKS

Of course books. It is so easy to spend money on books. And it’s my job. I can always justify spending money on them. But. I can borrow, form other people and from libraries (though the libraries where I live are sorely under-resourced). I can buy second-hand (mostly from WOB who give authors a (very small) royalty on second-hand sales). If I buy new books I can consider audio or digital in order to save on paper, particularly if it’s something I’m never going to read again. 

 

Last year’s spend on books (not including presents for other people): £391.76

 

2.     CLOTHES

Nothing like new clothes to make you feel good about yourself. I buy fewer clothes than I used to and I wash them less frequently and mend them more. But this year I will aim not to buy any new clothes unless I can’t see how to do without them or obtain them in any other way. I’ll look at buying second hand though I’m not sure about shoes. I probably don’t need any shoes anyway. I expect I’ll still be buying underwear and tights. I’ll finish the sewing project I have hardly started and I’ll alter the things I made recently that I haven’t been happy about. There’s no point in having clothes I don’t or can’t wear. To this end I’ll also look through and see if I have other things that could be altered. If I can master putting pockets in, that’ll bring several pocketless garments back into circulation. I will not buy any more patterns or fabric or wool until I’ve finished the things I’ve already got! Some mending is going to be difficult – my coat has frayed sleeves – but I’ll try with mending before I give up and get a new one.

 

Last year’s spend on clothes: £636.12

 

3.     GARDEN

I could easily not buy more plants. I could grow most things from seed and work out how to propagate from what I have already. But you don’t just want to have the same things everywhere in the garden and the new pond area (when we get round to it) will need entirely different plants. So I should find an alternative source of plants grown locally and without peat, like church fetes. I don’t know what to do about compost though. I feel I need it to grow seeds. I can’t make enough of my own and it’s not fine enough for seeds. Is there another way to get it rather than in plastic bags from the garden centre?. I’ll stop getting Gardener’s World magazine too, because although it costs me nothing with Tesco clubcard points, I look at a couple of articles and the special offers, then take out the free seeds before I throw it away. Definitely a waste of paper.

 

Last year’s spend on garden: unknown because up to now I’ve lumped it in with the house spend.

 

The way to measure all this is probably to keep a note of what I consume in these areas and how I consume it – did it cost money, did I make it myself, did I borrow it, was it second hand? (Oh good! More spreadsheets…)

Wednesday 22 February 2023

The Great Roald Dahl Debate

 

Roald Dahl is in the news. Even people who generally have no interest at all in children’s books have noticed. Just in case this has passed you by or you’re reading some time in the future when the whole five-minute furore is in the past, here’s a quick summary:

Roald Dahl’s books are being rereleased with edits intended to make them more acceptable to a modern audience. The reactions – from all sorts of people, including Philip Pullman and the Prime Minister – have varied from ‘You must never touch a word of a writer’s published work’ to ‘Fantastic, now children will not be exposed to Dahl's racism, body-shaming, misogyny, etc’ and ‘Couldn’t they just publish the originals with footnotes and an introduction?’ There has also been ‘Why bother? There’s nothing special about Dahl.’

Should they meddle with an author’s work? I see no reason why not. The author is dead so has nothing to say about it. His estate is perfectly happy with the changes (and the financial reward). It’s nothing new. Children’s books have been published in updated versions forever. Netflix has acquired the rights to Dahl’s work. Of course they want to make money from the books. Their press-release called the books ‘Timeless Tales’. It’s probably impossible to make a book timeless, but here they are, making them up-to-date.

I enjoyed Dahl’s books as a child. My now grown-up children liked Dahl. The BFG is my favourite. They liked Danny the Champion of the World and Matilda. They adored The Enormous Crocodile. I do not remember finding anything particularly uncomfortable in Dahl as a child. It fitted with the cartoons and sitcoms I watched on TV. But the world has moved on. We do not offer children cruelty and othering and call it humour. (Well mostly we don’t.) Toning down these aspects of Dahl will make his work fit our twenty-first century children’s book model better.

Could the publishers have added footnotes and an introduction instead? Of course they could have. And if parents or teachers were reading the books to children, these things would have been discussed, no doubt, though quite probably a parent or teacher might have commented or changed words and ideas that troubled them as they read the old versions. But here’s the thing: most children would not read footnotes or an introduction. And if they did, they would be drawn out of the story, which is something you really don’t want to do to child readers.

The good thing about Dahl is that children want to read his books. The books have bold, lively heroes and memorable baddies, shocking disasters and soaring triumphs. Children are dying to turn the pages and find out what happens. When they’ve finished one of Dahl’s books, they feel satisfied by the story and they want to pick up another. This is how children develop reading fluency – by finding books that they don’t want to put down. When my eldest daughter was six, she brought home from the school bookfair two of the Rainbow Fairy books. She wasn’t a fluent reader at the time so I read the first one to her. The second one she read a page and then I read a page. She loved those books. I found them plodding and predictable. So when I discovered that she’d bought a pack of five of them with a book token I refused to read them. She took a week to read the next one on her own. Then two days for the next one. Then one a day until she’d read them all. I’m not going to argue for the Rainbow Fairy books’ place in the canon of children’s literature, but they have a purpose and they serve it well. They can turn children into readers. And so can Dahl.

But here’s the thing. So can many other books. New books, books with modern ideas, diverse characters, current language. Books that take place in a world today’s children recognise and engage with problems, ideas and circumstances that concern them. And no, I don’t just mean issue-driven books set in a contemporary world. Fantasy, historical, sci-fi, humour – all sorts of stories are different today.

That’s not to say that children shouldn’t read children’s books from the past. I would never say that! So many wonderful, brilliant books full of amazing stories exist for children to find and adults to share with them. Children need choice just like adults do – more so, because they’re still working out what types of books suit them.

The problem with children’s books is – as it ever was – that the books are bought by adults on the whole. Adults who don’t know anything about children’s books will go for the easy option – the book they recognise from their childhood, the book by that famous bloke off the TV. And the marketing people recognise this, so they push those books. It’s an obvious win. You own a property. There’s an easy market for it. The cost to the publisher is minimal. You just change the covers, print a bunch more and there they are on the shelf looking fresh and new. If you wander into WHSmith you won’t see a shelf full of books by a single author that are 40, 50 or 60 years old in the adult section. But there in the children’s section is a whole shelf of Dahl … and another of Enid Blyton (who has undergone her own modernisation more than once). And it’s not just bookshops. A lot of school libraries rely heavily on books donated when children have grown out of them. Their shelves are groaning under the weight of Dahl.

So here’s what I think. If we have to have Dahl, let’s have updated Dahl. But let’s have lots of exciting new books front and centre too. Please, marketing people, think about how you are serving the children who learning to be readers when you constantly cash in on old books. Concentrate instead on what would serve them best in their journey to becoming readers and then work out how to market those books to the adults who buy books. Give children choice.


*Please note that this piece is my personal view.



While you're here, do take a look at my gorgeous book, Snippets.



For a taster tale, you can read a Snippets story that's not in the book here.

You can get a copy of Snippets on Amazon or if you’d like a signed copy send me a message on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook


Wednesday 28 September 2022

Writing Diary: September 2022

 


I’ve been writing a time-travel story.

Ah! you say. Science fiction.

But is it?


I’d say there’s not so very much distance between the type of world-building I’m doing around time travel in this book and the world-building I did when I was writing about a family of witches.

It’s about creating a system that the reader can believe in.

I did spend some time reading some science about time travel. It’s very complicated and my understanding is totally superficial, but what I gleaned is this: time travel is probably impossible and even if it were possible (which would take unfathomable amounts of energy), you’d only be able to travel into the past and you couldn’t return.

No one has yet settled on one definition of science fiction (or indeed any other genre) but most interested parties agree that the science involved should be a possible development of actual known science and that you can’t ignore established science unless you can work out how to explain it. By these parameters, my book is far from science fiction.

I read a LOT of time travel in preparation for writing this book. There are books which are very sciency; there are books that are not sciency at all; there are books somewhere in between. I love them all. The idea of time travel thrills me.

If I were forced to pigeonhole my book, I’d say it is fantasy. Can I call it science fantasy?


So.

Time-travel world-building turns out to be very complicated.

You need a means of time travel: a machine or a portal. It could be something that’s been created for the purpose (or for another purpose with time travel as a side-effect) – that’s a more sciency sort of time travel. Or it could be some mysterious or magic process – that’s fantasy.


Then there are the rules:

How does time spent in the past or future relate to time in the present? Are they equivalent?

Is it possible to communicate with people from your own time?

Can you change the past? What happens if you do?

If you can’t change the past, how does it feel to be in it?

Can you meet yourself in a different time?

What happens if you die in the past?

Can you bring objects from one time to another?

How does it feel to time travel? What happens to your body?

Is it a secret? Why? Whose secret is it? What will happen if people find out?


In a well-written time travel story, in fact in any well-written story with complex world-building, information and rules are fed into the story at such a pace as not to overwhelm the reader. But writing complex worlds is a different matter. There are so many questions to be answered, so many decisions to be made, and it’s really useful to have the majority of them sorted at a very early stage.


But in the end, you also have to keep in mind that however elaborate and fascinating your world-building is, no matter how key it is to the plot, it’s never going to satisfy your readers without a great human story at the heart of your novel.




My new book, Snippets, is available now.



For a taster tale, you can read a Snippets story that's not in the book here.

You can get a copy of Snippets on Amazon or if you’d like a signed copy send me a message on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook

Go to https://ko-fi.com/clairewatts to read a new Snippets story every month. It’s free, but you can support me with a donation if you like.


Sunday 31 July 2022

Writing Diary: July

 


This month I left my agent. We’ve done some good work together but the relationship didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere, so it’s time to find a new champion.

Submitting to agents is one of the less fun parts of being a writer but I think I’m better at it than I was. For one thing, I have more knowledge about what an agent is looking for, which helps me to shape my approach letter. Secondly, I feel more in charge than I used to. True, an agent is one of those ‘gatekeepers’ that the industry talks about all the time. You (mostly) need one to get your book on the road to being published. But agents need authors. They need books, they need ideas, they need talent. A great agent may be looking for specific books that they know they can sell, but they’re also going to be keeping an eye out for an idea that comes at them from out of the blue. Some agent out there is looking for me.

So I write my letters. I read up on various agents to find ones who seem to be interested in books like mine, who have profiles that appeal to me, whose Twitter feed I enjoy, who I’ve come across personally or know of through friends. I tailor my submissions to whatever their particular format is (they’re all different: 3 chapters/5,000 words/10 pages; attachment/body of email; synopsis of 1 page/500 words/300 words; blurb; list of published works). I think carefully about why I’ve picked this particular agent and craft a charming sentence at the end to make it personal.

It's kind of like internet dating…

So now I’m thinking, if it’s like dating, I ought to be compiling my own list of what I’m looking for in an agent. So here it is:

1. Someone who is a champion of my work, who loves what I’ve written and is certain that publishers and readers will love it too.

2. Someone who is interested in my whole career, not just this one book:

• who will consider all the manuscripts I have written and discuss with me whether they’re worth spending more time on.
• who will guide me when I start out on a new project.
• who will bring me ideas that they think would be sellable.

3. Someone who will take on both my fiction and my nonfiction.

4. Someone who will give me brilliant editorial feedback that will help me improve my work.

5. Someone who will reply to messages from me promptly and check in on me regularly.

6. Someone who knows how to read what’s going on in the industry and how to get the best deal for me (and themselves).

7. Someone who is professional and but also feels like a supportive friend.

So now I wait. Between 4 and 16 weeks, so the submissions pages on their websites say. I could do more submissions but I think I’ll wait and see what comes of this batch of five. Maybe I’ll decide my letters need tweaking. Or my synopsis. Maybe all five will want to see my book. That would be interesting. Maybe I’ll have a meeting with more than one agent and I can use my list to interview them for the job of Best Possible Agent for Me.

Watch this space.




My new book, Snippets, is available now.



For a taster tale, you can read a Snippets story that's not in the book here.

You can get a copy of Snippets on Amazon or if you’d like a signed copy send me a message on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook

Go to https://ko-fi.com/clairewatts to read a new Snippets story every month. It’s free, but you can support me with a donation if you like.


Tuesday 12 July 2022

I dream of ... a library

 

I was recently doing a writing exercise about things I hoped and dreamed about when I was a child and how I felt about those hopes and dreams now. One dream was that I wanted to be a writer. Tick, done that. I dreamed of having a dog. Yup, done that, and I was right – it’s the best. I dreamed of owning a huge gothic house with a morning room and a drawing room and secret passages and servants’ quarters and many bedrooms called things like ‘the rose room’ and ‘the lilac room’. I don’t think that would suit me particularly now – too much cleaning, too many decisions about decorating and I bet the plumbing would be no good. Oh how the practicality of middle age stomps upon the fantasies of childhood!

One dream I held onto longer than most was the dream of having a library. You know, one of those that you see in movies, with books around every wall and a library ladder (I adored the scene in Bednobs and Broomsticks when Miss Price is up the library ladder looking for a particular magic book and the guy – forget his name – is pushing her around and singing). I was entranced by the idea of floor to ceiling bookshelves packed with books, ideally all hardback because if you could, why wouldn’t you? There’d be big comfortable chairs everywhere, the kind you can curl up in, one by a wide light window at one end and another by a grand fireplace. A sofa too, long enough to lie down on, not too firm. There’d be a table or a desk. Nowadays, I’d have to add in good reading lights all over the place, of course. I loved it when I visited grand houses open to the public and went into a library where books with leather covers and gold writing were housed behind glass doors. Yes, I thought. That’s the dream.

And now? I have a lot of books in my house. Being surrounded by books makes me comfortable. When we first moved here, for years some of my books were in boxes and I can honestly say that I never felt more at home than when at last we had enough bookshelves for all my books. There are bookshelves in every room here apart from the bathrooms. Some of the books I have had for a long time. Some are just passing through. When I finish reading a book, sometimes I find a place for it on the shelf, sometimes I put it straight in a bag for charity. It’s not necessarily about whether I’m going to read it again or whether I’m going to lend it to anyone. I keep books because they’re beautiful, because they were given to me by particular people, because I think they have some kind of importance, because they’re part of a set. If the decision’s not clearcut, I keep them. They may go in a cull later on.

A cull? Yes. In an ideal world, my bookshelves would not be packed floor to ceiling. There’d be a little room here and there, a space to welcome more. And to achieve that, not only do I give away the books I’m not going to read again, but I also have to be ruthless about weeding. It’s those ones I wasn’t sure about in the first place that go first, along with the ones my husband hasn’t actually thought about (he wants to keep everything, as though our bookshelves were infinitely expanding). Then I have to think about the rest. Sometimes something I’ve kept for years suddenly becomes dispensable. Occasionally I discover a space where I can fit new bookshelves and then, for a while, all the books can breathe and settle because there’ll be no need to cull for a while.

So would I like to have a library? Yes. I love the idea of a big room – both light and cosy – where I would be surrounded by books. It would be full of books I value for one reason or another and I would know just where to lay my hands on any particular book. But they wouldn’t be packed tight; there would always be space for more. The more I think about it, the more I think that it wouldn’t just be a library, this room. It would have to be my living room because why would you want to go anywhere else? (Do I put a TV in this fantasy library? Depends on how many other rooms I’ve got in the fantasy house.)





My new book, Snippets, is available now.



For a taster tale, you can read a Snippets story that's not in the book here.

You can get a copy of Snippets on Amazon or if you’d like a signed copy send me a message on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook

Go to https://ko-fi.com/clairewatts to read a new Snippets story every month. It’s free, but you can support me with a donation if you like.