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!