Buy the Book at Wheelers!

Exciting news! A couple of weeks ago, I emailed details of Custard and Carriages to several NZ booksellers to ask if they would consider including my book in their range. Yesterday I received a reply from Wheelers Books (New Zealand's largest online new book supplier to Schools & Libraries with over 11.0 million books to choose from) to say that they would be happy to sell my book.
So, you can go to this website to see it. At present there is no image of the cover, but hopefully they will be able to load the jpeg image soon.

I've just had about a week off from working on my next picture book. Sometimes, I find that my creative impulses and motivation hits a hard patch and I can't seem to simply put my head down and push through it. Instead I need to step away from the project for a bit, get busy on something else, and hope that the creative juices will begin to flow again eventually.

This time, I spent the week teaching. My three younger brothers are all home-educated, so I decided to take over their lessons and free mum up to work on other areas for a while. The mornings were busy with numerous subjects and I got to reaquaint myself with math problems that I'd been quite relieved to leave behind many years ago. Anyway, all three boys really worked well and I enjoyed being able to teach them. As this week began, though, I was delighted to discover that my mind felt refreshed and ready to grapple with story number two again.

The illustration that will appear on the last page of the completed book, is proving to be very difficult, though. I knew it would be. It's the face (well specifically the child's right eye) that is causing some many problems. Currently, the child looks like a washed out sort of zombie - not the style I was aiming for.  I know that I will need to redraw the eyes another few times before I get the look I want. That's part of the reason I like working with pastels - the fact that they can be smudged out and drawn over fairly easily!

Writing Advice

I came across this piece of advice for aspiring authors by Laurie Halse Anderson a few years ago, and just dug it out of my drawer yesterday. I appreciate these points and can relate to many of them!

1. Learn to live frugally and don't get into debt.
2. Write what you want, not what you think "the market" wants.
3. Turn off the television.
4. Don't major in Creative Writing in college. Chances are it will drain the life out of your creativity.
5. Never, ever criticize yourself during the first draft.
6. Have the courage to revise your work.
7. Read every night before you go to sleep.
8. Do not pressure yourself by saying "I have to get this published by the time I am 20 (or 30, or 40, or 80, etc.).
9. Write the story in your heart.
10. Pay attention to William Faulkner's wise words. He said, "Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing."

Early Drawings

This morning I was looking through some of my old drawing notebooks and came across a number of pictures that I'd drawn when I was 8 or 9 years old. There was quite a selection of random pictures - some of them were completely made up cartoon types, but the majority were copied from other illustrations in books or were sketches of household objects. Pretty much all of them were free-hand drawings. The earliest picture I found in the notebooks was this one, drawn in 1995, when I was 8.

Comic book characters seemed to feature quite a lot in the notebooks. Another one that was done, at age 9, was this picture of the character Tintin. The drawing was copied from the comic book 'Tintin in America'. I'm still a huge fan of all the Tintin adventures.

Although these two pictures are in colour, most of the drawings that fill the notebooks are only black and white pencil sketches. Here is an early example of me trying to get a realistic drawing of my bike. I remember getting that bike as a birthday present and being so proud of it as I rode it to primary school!

It's fascinating to see how my style and attention to detail change over the years. Sometimes I'm asked how I know what to draw next on a piece - and I always have to answer that I just follow what the picture says. I don't know how it works. There is a lot of practice, patience and providence - but other than that, I can't explain how it happens!

Last Page Quandary

Yesterday I spent part of the morning working on the dummy book, attempting to write a complete text to accompany the pictures. In my mind, I know where I want the story to go, but it can be so difficult to transfer those thoughts onto paper. I managed to write text for twelve of the thirteen pages. However, the last page proved to be very elusive.

When writing children's picture books, I have found that every word is gold - each word has to be useful and carry the story along, or it just pulls everything down. I don't usually have my audience (children) consciously in mind when I'm working on the text. Instead, I gravitate towards stories that interest, inspire and satisfy me. Without the help and advice of Vivienne, a wonderful manuscript assessor, though, the text wouldn't be as well polished as it could be. I need an outside eye to guide the writing process and to advise on how to craft the words to sound the best.

But before I can present a manuscript to an assessor, I need to actually finished the text! I can see that the last page will take a while to emerge. I have almost finished the illustration for that page - only the facial features and background details to fill in. Hopefully it will be done by the end of this month.

Dummy Book

I've been working on my second picture book since late last year and I've decided that its time for me to get started on making a dummy-book so that I can see where the project's going. As I find it easier to draw the illustrations first and then concentrate on the text when the pictures are finished - or almost finished - I haven't really spent much time on the words yet. Over the past few months, I've attempted putting words together and trying to get a story-line sorted out, but its still got a long way to go. So far I think I've written parts of it out about four times - and I haven't even made it to the end yet!
Anyway, here are some pics:

This is just after I've glued the pages together - a tiny blank book that I've got to try to fill with appealing pictures and creative text...

I printed out some of my finished illustrations this morning and stuck them into the dummy-book. This time round, I'm making the book portait orientation instead of landscape like Cuastard and Carriages.

 And here is another page of the book. So far I've completed 7 illustrations and have another two in progress. For the finished book, I will need thirteen illustrations - I'm slowly getting closer!

Wonderful Book

This is a brilliant book! I was given it as a present last year and I love it. I haven't read it all through yet, but I'm slowly getting there. It is full of inspiring biographies of children's book authors and illustrators - I find it fascinating to read about the lives of others who have worked in this area.

The author of this hefty book, Anita Silvey, has a great website which you should take a look at: http://www.anitasilvey.com/ Of particular interest is the part of the site 'Children's Book-A-Day Almanac' which features a different book each day and also includes other interesting or significant events for that day.