ALCS

An Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society focus meeting was held in Cambridge last week. Barbara Hayes (in the photo) and her team wanted authors’ views on the organisation that collects and distributes our monies from photocopying and overseas PLR. It was an hour’s meeting followed by a light lunch at Cambridge Central Library. A dozen authors were present.

I must say, my view of ALCS was changed for ever by the end of the meeting. What had been a puzzling acronym sending out puzzling royalty statements suddenly became an organisation all authors should know about. ALCS is helpful and friendly and is looking after our interests. They even offer authors the use of a room at The Writers’ House (between Aldgate and Tower Hill) where tea and coffee are served, where a laptop is available and where there’s a sofa. It sounds as good as having a London club. I’m definitely going to try it out.

UNAPPEALING MAIN CHARACTERS

“You can't have your little girl main character losing her temper and going off to sea without her dear old dog.” So said an editor on seeing the first draft of Zoe's Boat years ago.

So I duly changed it and, in this draft which incidentally was all in dialogue, had the dog recalcitrant and Zoe sad he wouldn’t go with her.  

But do you always have to have a faultlessly appealing main character for a picture book to sell?

David Fickling, in the case of Zoe's Boat, didn't think so. He said Zoe getting cross with her dog and leaving him behind felt true. (I do remember once leaving the family dog behind in a lay-by after stopping on a long journey because a child was travel sick, but that was a terrible accident and thankfully the dog was still there when we returned an hour later.)

 Relieved, I reverted to the first draft for, in toning everything down in order to make Zoe more appealing, I’d inadvertently toned down the dynamic in the narrative and lessened the crisis needed at this point to break up the long build up to the main crisis point. Being asked to change the emotion a little had upset the fine tuning of the whole structure of the story. This is the problem with picture book texts - they're not that straight forward - alter one small thing and something bigger goes wrong.

FOREST SCHOOLS

When I visited a Nursery school in quite a deprived area near Kettering this March, I did my workshop based on The Little White Sprite, which starts with me drawing an old hollow tree, and I was surprised at the children's vocabulary. I've done this workshop with older, less deprived children - Reception and Year 1 and they often struggle with words like 'twig' and 'bark.'

But these very young children, some only three years old, knew all about trees. Not just that, they were very receptive to the idea there might be a mysterious world inside an old hollow tree and magical creatures living there. I discovered the reason for this was they'd all participated in one of the
Forest Schools. These schools aim to 'develop a love of the natural world' and, more interestingly, to encourage an ‘understanding when to take risks and when to take responsibility.’ So my story, where a child goes through a hole in a hollow tree and plays the little white sprite inside, but then has to decide to return safely back home again, really struck a chord.

THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF THE BOOK

This event was organised by the History Department at Essex University where I'm one of the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellows. It was part of the Essex Literary Festival.

     I was interested in Nigel Cochrane's thoughts about e books. As an academic librarian, he sees them as here to stay but at the moment they are expensive; there’s VAT to be paid on e books unlike volume books and publishers are charging academic libraries very high prices for e books and then making them re-buy, having imposed a limited license.  

     The categories, it was agreed, that are unlikely to succumb completely to e books are cookery books (nobody wants their kindle covered in grease) and children’s picture books. There was a discussion as to whether very young children can retain information from a screen in the same way they can from a book.

     I firmly believe, from my observations at Waterstones signings, that there are enough discerning parents looking to foster a love of reading in their very young children for there always to be a niche market for high quality picture books.

WORLD BOOK DAY 2012

World Book Day and a new book and a new workshop.

I spent an afternoon with years 3, 4, 5 and 6 at Seaford College in West Sussex. We thought up a sequel to Zoe’s Boat - Zoe and the Dog going off in search of the cuddly crocodile, seen on this page swimming away when a big wave hits the little boat.

The children did a single page of the narrative in picture frames using black felt tips. Getting away from pencils, rubbers and rulers and working on A3 sheets of paper made them work more quickly and freely. It was a lot of fun. Here are three examples of their work:

THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER'S LUNCH

Last week I visited an lovely Infant School in Eastbourne. At the end of the day I was allowed to do a signing in the hall and a lady picking up her grandson came over to buy a book. It turned out to be Rhonda Armitage who, with her husband, David, back in the early seventies, did The Lighthouse Keeper's Lunch , a book that has never gone out of print. We had so much to catch up on - hard to do at a signing - we were both Andre Deutsch authors in the seventies and eighties with the same wonderful editor, Pam Royds, whom we've kept in touch with all these years.
    Quite coincidentally my grown up son happened to take my old copy of The Lighthouse Keeper's Lunch off the shelf the last time he visited me. He said he remembered it was the food that had interested him when he was a little boy. Now, he could see it was more than just that; the Armitages concocted a wonderfully funny and original story around all that food - all good ingredients for a perennial book.

WHAT THE DICKENS

The launch of What the Dickens was held at the House of Commons on 7 February – the bicentenary of Charles Dickens’s birth. It’s a programme to encourage creative writing in schools and an awareness of the importance of copyright.

At the launch, authors were asked to lobby MPs and voice their concerns about the proposal to expand free-use of copyrighted works in educational establishments.

Dickens would have approved of all this, having been a great campaigner for copyright himself. He met with a lot of hostility when he objected to his works being copied without his permission and without remuneration.

 I like this edition of The Old Curiosity Shop because one of the illustrators is Cattermole, an ancestor of a next-door-neighbour of mine.