Cristalnickerter - Word of the Day.

Wishing all you lovely book nutters a very happy Cristalnickerter, I have whistled up a little Christmassy scene of a hare and a bear. 

I used some really lovely French pastels that were my Dad's for the sky, with a generous dollop of watercolour that I won from an illustration competition when I was at College in 1991. Although the pans have been renewed in most of the colours, the tin is my favourite trusty one that reminds me of finding my true path in illustration.

My dear Dad died nearly 5 years ago and we had the very tough decision of finding a lovely residential care home for my Mum this autumn. That means that I have been sorting through all their worldly belongings and coming to some very resolute decisions of my own about keeping things. In amongst their stuff was the airline tickets for their honeymoon and some confetti, letters to each other while on different sides of the world and the box of dread: the file with my sister's Inquest Report and newspaper cuttings of her tragic death. This has left me with a renewed view of my whole family and an understanding of what must have been a terrible time for my parents.

So I've been thinking quite a lot about my family, past and present in the last few weeks. I'm using the artists materials that my Dad left behind for me with a real joy. He had some lovely things... old palette knives, materials from his journeys around the world, ceramic paint mixers.... and looking forward to using some of them in my next book, which incidentally I've decided to call The House on Hare Hill.

In other news, Vincent and the Vampires 2nd Edition is soon to be released. I've had the proofs through and with only one minor typo mistake now rectified, it is approved for printing. Do remember that I post copious amounts of waffle on Twitter and that my website is always open for business, 24/7!! I aim to give a Luxury Service with plenty of Glitter and Fairy Wishes.

www.scarlettinc.co.uk

So with that I will wish you a Very Happy Christmas and New Year. Wouldn't it be lovely to wake up to snow?

Jules xxx

Days From My Sketchbook

Over the past couple of years I have been keeping a visual diary in my sketchbook of days that have been interesting for one reason or another. It keeps me busy in between books. Here's a little look at a few of them.

Fairy Doors

Here are some pics from the Fairy Doors workshop at The Lord Louis Library. It was huge fun and we had lots of fabulous fairies and elves attending. Thanks to all the lovely staff at the library for making me feel so welcome. X

Flossie Bonce is on the Loose.

My fourth book, Flossie Bonce has been published and made her first appearance at the Isle of Wight Literary Festival, read in a fairy circle.

It's a story about a daft fairy who helps Father Christmas when he is poorly on Christmas Eve. But wait - what's this she's putting in the stockings... a parsnip? Find out why and what she does to put things right. For ages 3-8 years. 

It makes a great present for girls for Christmas - I can sign a special message for you in the front of the book.

Have a look on my website for more details:
www.scarlettinc.co.uk

Winging It at the Isle of Wight Literary Festival

I had such fun at the Isle of Wight Literary Festival this year. Despite my fears that I had forgotten to bring something vitally important (like glue/ books/ fairy wings) the two Flossie Bonce Fairy Workshops went brilliantly. Both were full to capacity, despite the appalling and torrential rain. Everyone liked listening to Flossie Bonce and I got laughs from the adults in all the right places. 

I think you need to write for 2 audiences when creating children's books- the child and the adult. After all, if the child loves a story, it's the grown up who has to read it a million times! It had better be entertaining!

This is the front page of our local paper's 'Weekender' with one of the fairies admiring her wonderful fairy wings that she made. 

Here's a link if you want to have a look at Flossie Bonce
http://www.scarlettinc.co.uk/flossie_bonce.html

AS and US

Sometimes being creative is about doing nothing and Tuesday was one of those days. I should say that I mean 'nothing' by my normal standards. Big fella (he's 14 now) and I went on a foresty jaunt with our other Home Ed friends to make dens, and while there we watched a very entertaining game of Fireman Horse Golf where the local firefighters where whacking a full sized plastic horse up a hill with a rather useless looking golf club. There weren't getting very far and after a while gave up, put the horse on wheels and loaded it back onto the fire engine. 

You might make the mistake of thinking I had eaten poisonous mushrooms from the forest floor prior to the firemen turning up, but I can assure you that I didn't and it really happened. Ask around. There were witnesses.

Can we please just play football next time?

I don't think I've mentioned here before that we Home Ed our eldest son. There are many reasons, one of which is that he was the last year to go to Middle School before the Isle of Wight disbanded them and went to a two tier system. There are many stories attached to this period in our lives that make me want to eat copious doughnuts, so I try not to think about it.

We have the pleasure of being a 50% Aspergers household and school just didn't fit. Home schooling is much better for us all and has given our son a good grounding in 'college style' education, that is, if you don't know and you need to find out, go and FIND OUT! (with assistance when required). He often does his GCSE work in his PJs of with his t shirt on back to front, which simply wouldn't have been acceptable at school. My feeling is that his education is the most important thing and that all the other stuff will get learnt when he's ready to learn it. 

We do a lot of functional skills - shopping, cooking, generally looking after oneself, and he reads for hours and hours. He also loves Minecraft, Sonic and Mario games and finds he can 'be one of the guys' when he plays with others. We don't allow any fighting games as my philosophy is that what goes in has got to come out. 

People often say to me "Ooh, I could never educate a child, I'm not clever enough" but that is a cock eyed way to look at it. You don't have to be an expert on every subject that your child wants to learn, you have to be resourceful and facilitating. You have to allow your child space and time to develop and give them the opportunity to do the things they like to do and float away from the things they don't. For example, our son wanted to do a timeline from the Stone Age. He literally wanted to know it all... every king, queen and event. We got up to the Tudors before he said he didn't want to do History any more. I think that's quite a feat. He knows every what every King/Queen died of from Ethelred the Unready onward. We're currently revisiting a bit though, with a look at the current Royal Family and any quirky facts he can find.

Here are a few of the things that we've done:

Proved that the Apollo Space Mission was faked. And then decided we could be wrong (in the style of Stephen Hawking & his Doctorate work)

iGCSE in Chemistry (grade B)

Made a giant (5ft) Roman hurling catapult thing for the Learning Zone Home Ed film

Trampolining Swimming and walking

Listen to every episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage

Watch QI & Dara O'Briain's school of Hard Sums

Read read read! Including all of the Chronicles of Narnia, all of the Harry Potter books inc. the weird little spin offs, The Faraway Tree et al, Roald Dahl in every form, The Worlds Stupidest Signs/laws/Headlines, everything by Jeremy Strong and all of the Womble books, science books, joke books and Michael Morpurgo books. And zillions of instruction manuals. Methinks this is an engineer in the making.

This year we're having a go at 4 more iGCSEs and learning how to run a bath so it isn't stone cold when you get in it. 

Never a dull moment.

The waiting is over!

This week my Flossie Bonce proofs arrived. After last week's trauma of not being able to upload the artwork to my Printer's Dropbox, I received the proof copy on Thursday. 

The front cover isn't quite right; the Isle of Wight sticker is in the bleed area and not printed out, but they are fixing that and then we are good to go with printing.(My fault, not the printer's.)

Here they are.

And this is my favourite spread of the whole book! It's the front endpage.

If you'd like to pre-order a Flossie Bonce, you can do so HERE.

Really looking forward to showing Flossie off at the Isle of Wight Literary Festival. I'm doing two fairy workshops on Sunday 20th October 2013. If you want to book tickets, you can do so HERE and go to the bottom of the page to find my bit.

Thanks for reading! Bright blessings!!

I'm waiting.......still waiting.

I'm not very good at waiting. There's a lot of toe tapping and huffing going on at the moment because I'm waiting for the proof of Flossie Bonce to come through my letterbox. I've got a digital copy, but it's not the same. You can't tell if the colours are right and I reckon I read text differently on screen. It's easier to slip a typo or spelling mistake into somehing on screen. Case in point. 

So Flossie is nearly ready for print and I have been whiling away the days cutting out fairy wings for the workshops that I'm doing at the Isle of Wight Literary Festival. 

I'm doing 2 FAIRY WORKSHOPS on Sunday 20th Oct, where we will be making the wings look gorgeous! Come dressed as a fairy if you like. Whilst they wings are drying I will read, for the first time ever, Flossie Bonce. Books will be on sale at the pop up Waterstones shop at the entrance to Northwood House and I can sign any that come my way. Check the link for lots of interesting stuff going on that weekend. Every time I look at the website, more authors have been added. It's like the Magic Porridge Pot!!

In other news, the dogs are in a foul mood because I washed their blankets yesterday and made them smell of apples and daisies (according to the Comfort bottle) and they think it is an abomination. The keep giving me withering looks of disapproval. Ho hum. You live in MY house, you've got to SMELL nice.

www.isleofwightliteraryfestival.org

Me and my School

I've been thinking about my school teachers of late. Strangely I can't really remember anyone from my Primary school apart from the Head, Miss Shepherd and the song we used to sing in assembly which went "I am The Lord of the Dance Settee". Never worked out what that was.

Mr Draper

At my middle school there were two classes for each year. Although I wasn't in his class, Mr Draper took us all for Drama. I was in the after school club too and I have him to thank for the beginning of my journey into story making. He had such a friendly face and a beard that you could have hidden a small gnome in. Hello Mr Draper!

Mrs Fenton was my class teacher in the Second Year. She was incredibly glamorous and for the first half of the year she looked like Farah Fawcett in Charlie's Angels. Her hair was huge and curly and she wore fabulous clothes and lots of lip gloss.

Mrs Fenton aka Farah

Then one day she came in with brown straightened hair, in the days when such a thing had to be done by a professional with CHEMICALS! We barely recognised her; she now looked like Agneta from Abba with her fringe flicking up at the sides and the rest of it dropping straight down like a sheet of shiny paper.

Mrs Fenton aka Agneta

Most of the teachers who made an impact on me were from my Secondary School. I went to the country's first Ecumenical school, where we had both Anglican and Catholic upbringing. For this I can truly thank for my subsequent and wholehearted interest in Buddhism. Miss Jackson was the Head of my first year there (confusingly called The Second Year) in the Annexe away from the big kids in the Big School. She really did look like this. 

Miss Jackson

My Mum objected to me playing hockey because my sister had her teeth bashed in by a hockey stick in a rough game and Miss Jackson's response was that I'd be better at hockey than say, Netball, because at 4ft something, I was closer to the ball. We had a lot of names for her, none of them repeatable.

Mr Cooper

Mr Cooper taught us English. He looked like how I imagine Heathcliffe, handsomely scruffy, hair in his eyes, broody. Us 13 year old girls found it difficult to concentrate on anything at all whilst he was in the room. 

Mrs Woodcock

At about this age my Mum taught me to sew. I thought it was going to be my career for some time, until I discovered that Fashion didn't like me, but prior to this illumination, Margaret Woodcock taught me Dress Making right thought to A level. 

Me and Mrs Woodcock had a rather nice friendship and I was always pleased to see her and go to her lessons. She left about 6 months before I took my A level to have a baby. I only saw her once after that, when I took her a present for her newborn, but I shall never forget her. She was a star.


I had some wonderful art teachers; Mr White, who must have been named after the colour of his hair; Mrs Groves who reminded me of an ancient Oak, gnarled but grandly fantastic.

But the two teachers who I have to thank mostly for some richly fantastic lessons, brilliant shows and the foundations on which my work now stands - Geoff Sayers and Susie Gibbons.

Right from Mr Draper's drama club, I loved performing. I'm not saying I was much good at it, my timing was all wrong, I kept corpsing and I found it hard to BE someone else. But I still loved it.

Geoff Sayers was, as one might say, a confirmed bachelor and gosh, didn't we all know it. It was so refreshing to know someone like him who didn't conform and wasn't like the other teachers. 

We studies Equus on the quiet: I have no idea if anyone else knew about that, but it made a change from Shakespeare. We looked at Chekov and at A Taste of Honey and Dostoyevski. I was a fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream and sang loud and flat while Puck was played by none other than Michael Greco aka Beppe from Eastenders.

Geoff Sayers

At some point during my O level in Drama, Geoff's mother became very ill and he took some time off to look after her. He shipped in his good friend Susie Gibbons, who became known as Susie Gubbins to us. What twits we were. She was like a little woodland pixie, short hair, small frame, gorgeous. She came into the room like a tornado and filled us all with a special sort of energy that only some teachers have the ability to give. I would love to meet her again.

Susie Gibbons

She was in charge when I took my O level and by some fluke I passed it. Although I am nothing of an actor, it gave me something that I use these days when I am reading my books to children. I guess you'd call it Luvviness.

Thanks to all you lovely teachers for shaping my future and for putting up with us 'orrible teenagers!!

SCARLETT INC WEBSITE

VERY EXCITING NEWS ALERT!!

My new website is up and running. There are illustrations to look at, books to boggle at and fun stuff to download and doodle. You can buy direct and email me for specific messages in the front of your book.

http://www.scarlettinc.co.uk/

I'd like to say a MASSIVE thanks to James who built the site. He's a genius!!
Here is a link to his website.
http://www.jameslorddesign.co.uk/

Cake and Earfluff seeds.

The last spread of Flossie Bonce is driving me CRAZEEEEE.

Everything else is looking great: front and back cover - done; endpages - done; dedications - done. Last and final spread of the book - ahhhhhh. Not done. That's not to say I haven't been trying. It just isn't going according to plan at the moment.

At times like this I find it best to eat vast quantities of chocolate cake and think about something else. I have every faith that it will come to me.

In other news, Maisie chihuahua has taken up a new hobby - collecting seeds in her earfluff. I think our garden must have produced more seeds than last year, possibly due to the significantly better weather. She likes those little round ones that are like the sticky side of velcro and she just LOVES getting them tied up in as much fluff as she can.

Wally has cracked 'The Case of the Interesting Smell'. Maisie has been hiding her doggie biscuits in his bed and he has found them. Clever Wally.

The next month is going to be a busy one. I am in Waterstones on Friday 16th Aug doing a book signing and the Lord Louis Library in Newport on Tuesday 20th as part of their Spooky House Reading Challenge, from 2.30. If you see me, come and say Hi!

Today....

Today will be very much about attacking the last 3 spreads of Flossie Bonce. 
And the endpages. 
And the front cover.

Journey to the Centre of Publishing...

I've been reading a bit about the pros and cons of Self or Indie publishing recently. Some of it useful, some of it twaddle. My own journey into publishing independently has been like crossing the Himalayas using a map of the Isle of Wight. Unexpectedly bumpy.

I see my career in two distinct eras. BC and AC. Before Children, the world of publishing was as it had been for a couple of hundred years. You take your idea/ portfolio to a publisher and they publish your book, or more likely, say nice things about your work and then DON'T publish your book. There was also the slightly distasteful world of Vanity Publishing, which I quickly concluded I did not need in my life. It meant ordering 10,000 copies of the book and then somehow selling them. I didn't have a clue how to do this and didn't want to spend my time trailing around shops hoping they'd take some of the huge amount of stock I'd have in my sitting room so that I could make a tunnel to the kitchen.

After Children, things had changed. Traditional publishers were no longer the only route - there was another option; Print on Demand. It seemed like an option worth looking at. I chose to do my first book with CreateSpace because the process was easy to understand and follow. They are an offshoot of Amazon, and this meant my book goes straight onto Amazon with one tick of a box. CreateSpace do everything else, so when someone orders Vincent and the Vampires, they print one and send it off. Simple. Print on Demand.

However, I was beginning to realise that people often wanted to buy a book from an author they could see and have a conversation with. There's something quite special about having a book signed to you from the author, rather than arriving in Amazon packaging. I knew I needed to do some book events and have my own copies with me for sale. I knew I needed to go to schools and read to children. I took a very very deep breath. Then I accidentally hyperventilated.

With my second and third books, Royal Fleas and Wally and Bert, BFF's I bought my own ISBNs, employed a printer and did the whole shabang myself. I now have a trading relationship with Waterstones which couldn't happen when I was Printing on Demand. Luckily I have found a printer who will print short runs, so I have several boxes of books, but also a house to live in.

So, what are the pros?

• You can go at your own pace. No deadlines, other than the ones you give yourself.
• You can earn more royalty per book as you don't have to split the profit with anyone.
• You can do exactly what you want (so long as it's legal). I'll come back to this.
• You will learn lots of new skills and become very adept at doing boring things quickly. 
• When you have finished, you can be ridiculously smug and proud of the book you have made.

And the cons?

• As you aren't printing a huge quantity, the cost per book is higher. This can be a problem when supplying stores like Waterstones.
• You might need to find a bit of space to store a few hundred copies, but at least it isn't 10,000.
• You need to know your way around a computer, or find the time to learn. I had to learn how to use In Design (Adobe) to lay the book out. MS Word WILL NOT DO!! 
• You need to know what a good page looks like and be ruthless about work that isn't quite up to standard.
• You several somebodies to copy edit everything. And don't rely on the spellchecker!!

As I said in the Pros, you can do whatever you want, although you won't make many friends if you write something inciting violence or nasty in other ways. This does, however, mean that you can make a complete pigs ear of things if you're not careful. I was shown a particularly shoddy book that had been printed on demand and was on sale in a local bookshop. The author had made a poor choice of cover photo, the typography was unattractive and the copy was laid out badly. I made a mental note not to make those mistakes. 

I am grateful that I studied Graphic Design at Uni, and although I would never suggest I was brilliant at designing a super page, I did know what looked right. Visual Literacy, my old tutor called it. I've always tried hard to make the pages exciting to look at and do the job required.

At present, I spend more time than I would like doing marketing type things... Trying to figure out how to sell more books online, filling in my tax return, or application forms or risk assessments. When I am rich and famous, I will employ someone to do that stuff for me while I paint all day but the reality is that until my stories start to sell themselves, I am the skipper of their tug.

The journey has led me down paths of learning that I didn't know I needed to know -  how to fill in the dreaded US tax identification number form (for selling on Amazon.com), getting shipping costs right so that I don't end up out of pocket, how to write a press release, how not to look like I just swallowed a wasp when being photographed, how to control nerves when on the radio (no TV as yet) and most importantly how to draw like me.

Today I have been working on page 18/19 of my next book Flossie Bonce. It's been a really good day because I've been painting a lot, so here's a quick preview, minus the text. Don't want to give everything away yet!!

My books can be purchased via my online shop etsy.com/julesmarriner. This is a better way than Amazon as I can sign and leave a personal message in them.

Sneaky look at Flossie

It's taken me almost a week and it's not finished yet, but here's a look at the 'Toy Store' spread from Flossie Bonce.

The problem I had was with the right hand shelf. It is too big to go in my A4 scanner, so I had to create it in 2 parts. The mismatched anomoly won't show as it's in the spine of the book. I still have some more toys to make, so watch this space.

Everyone gets stuff stuck in their EARFLUFF!

Something from my sketchbook

 Last weekend as the Isle of Wight festival began.

 

The day the wind blew and lots of people slept outside on the Saturday of the IOW festival.

Tuesday's Science Club.

Oooh, hello Flossie Bonce.

I've just been tinkering with my second spread of Flossie Bonce. Flossie and Evie are two fairies, helping out the big man FC on his busiest day of the year. Here is some of it... What do you think?

How I spent Saturday

From my sketchbook.

Diary Twaddle part 4

Saturday 

I spent the evening trying to figure out where my maths had gone wrong. My mobile phone just wasn't up to the job and I kept accidentally calling O2. In the end I gave up and spent a restless night snoozing in the chair. It was hard to tell when it was morning because guess what- it was still dark outside. How do aliens ever know when to get up?

Wally was watching something out of the window. I peered over his shoulder and was surprised to see the participants of the Tour de France; Mark Cavendish waved as he whizzed by.

And then something amazing happened. My hero Beardy Branson came to the rescue.

"Do you need a tow?" he asked.

I had never been so relieved to see a white haired millionnaire!

The tow rope shot out from the Dreamliner and docked with our hook and we were soon on our way home.

Back home, not much had changed. The slugs were still eating the plants and the birds were still letting them get away with it. We waved to Beardy as he jettisoned us off as he headed back toward his secret air base north of London on the M1.

Maisie was relieved to see Wally safe and sound as she'd had no one to harrass lately. And of course, glad to see me, because she had been unable to reach her special doggy biscuits with her short stubby arms.

 

I decided next time I had one of my fabulous ideas, I'd do a bit more planning. I couldn't bear to think what would have happened if Mr Beardy hadn't come to my rescue. I took out my Notebook of Exciting Things to Do and crossed off 'Astronaut'.

Now, what's next, I wondered to myself.

Twaddle and Nonsense: Things to do part 3.

After enjoying a second slice of cake and wondering which of us had been foolish enough to forget the custard, we noticed that all was not well.

Instead of falling back to Earth as I had imagined, we seemed to be slowing down. According to my copy of Astronautism from Scratch; How to Build An Escape to Space When We've Used Up the Earths Resources and are About to Become Extinct, I may have made a mathematical error. It seems our slingshot past Venus had been a bit vigorous and we had missed the Earths atmosphere by 15cm.

What did this mean? It meant we'd eventually run out of cake. We'd be fine for air for months because being in charge of making the rocket feel homely meant Wally had brought his favourite Spider Plant. He has quite a collection of them and his basket at home looks like the Garden of Eden crossed with a dog fur recycling centre.

But if we did have to stay on the rocket for longer than anticipated, we MIGHT run out of water. I looked at the fifteen thousand 4 litre bottles of water that stood in the corner and decided not to worry about it at the moment.

Maisie was very flustered. Back at home, she had been staring up at the sky since the rocket had taken off and had given herself a stiff neck. She was beginning to think something had gone wrong and there was only one thing to do.

Go and get in her basket and hide under the blanket.

To be continued....

Diary; More things to do before I get old.

Friday..


It was remarkably easy to take off. Our Wallace & Gromit style automatic match-striking device worked a treat as it lit the tank of lighter fluid. Wally was a bit worried about our house & garden shrinking as we shot off up into the atmosphere, but I was too busy to explain about things getting smaller as you move away from them. 

 

It took an awfully long time to get into ACTUAL space. I managed to make three cups of tea and Wally ate fifteen doggy biscuits. Space was pretty weird. They say that in space, no one can hear you scream, but has anyone tried singing Land of Hope and Glory?

Earth looked tiny a blue from so far up. We switch on Wally's iPhone and googled Commander Chris Hadfield 

so that we could look at his photos and compare them to what we could see. He had worked on the International Space Station as a photographer and pop star and recently returned home. If anyone knew which direction to go in, it'd be Cmdr Chris!

We looked at the Isle of Wight. 



Being in space wasn't like I'd imagined. Floating got a bit annoying after a while because playing Twister was IMPOSSIBLE!! and when we had a go at Cluedo, the murder weapons kept disappearing. We decided to do a flypast of Venus and then head back home.

We were surprised to see Beardy Branson testing out the new Dreamliner. It looked as though he was giving someone a lift home, but we couldn't be sure.

We saw Saturn from a distance.
It was very beautiful.

Then we aimed our rocket nose towards the Wighty and settled back with a nice cup of tea and a slice of chocky cake.

to be continued....