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Leicester earthlings got a surprise last week when my co-author Philip Reeve and I teleported in with our Cakes in Space roadshow! We drew a picture of ourselves, in case we couldn't be seen because our costumes were so blindingly shiny:



We were thrilled to take part in Leicester Author Week, and this is the first time there that I've been able to do a double-act presentation. Which was a lot of fun! The Two Steves have been doing this double act thing for years, here we are with them (Steve Skidmore and Steve Barlow) and writer Andy Briggs, who all worked with their own groups of kids on the day. And we got to see a lot of kids! Over the two days, I got to work with over 800 Leicester school children on the city's innovative scheme, Whatever It Takes to get kids reading.

**Philip Reeve has blogged (magnificently) about our Cakes in Space day over on his website**, so pop over there for a read! (You can print out Cakes in Space drawing resources from my website.) I think one of my favourite things about the day was watching all these kids at the end of the session, rushing up to give Philip big hugs. I don't think he got hugged quite so much when he was doing his Mortal Engines talks. :)



So... JAMPIRES DAY! I spent quite awhile talking about my co-author on this picture book, the excellent David O'Connell, and drawing, of course.



A teacher took this photo with the kids from her class, who were very appropriately dressed in jammy red school jumpers.



The team that run Leicester Author Week is what makes it great; they manage to combine a warm, fun atmosphere with total professionalism. The equipment always works, the planning is very straightforward, and every kid gets a book at the end of the day. Big thanks to technician Mark Lambell, multi-lingual storyteller Jyoti Shanghavi and head organiser Kate Drurey (with jam pot).




We started with a big stage event and I read JAMPIRES to the kids and teachers, talked a bit about how I made it, took questions and we sang the Jampires song. Then we all moved over to the workshop tables, and I led them in drawing their own Jampires. (Hey look, there's Philip drawing a Jampire on the following day!)



We talked about how foods can inspire characters, which can, in turn inspire stories. So we all wrote down our favourite foods and came up with a character who's obsessed with that particular food. The kids helped me come up with Peter the Pizzapire. Then they drew their own, and we started creating a world for their character, a place where the story could happen. Check out Icy the Icecreampire....



...and Pommy the Popcornpire! I hope the kids were able to take away their characters and settings and turn them into full stories.



Another fun thing about Leicester Author Week is getting to see lovely colleagues. Here are lovely writers Bali Rai and John Dougherty. (John helped me last year in Leicester to come up with the tune for my There's a Shark in the Bath song, with lyrics by Philip Reeve! It's fun being able to work together.)



I mentioned to the kids that they can knit their own Jampire if they like, and the pattern's available, along with lots of other creative resources, on the fab website David O'Connell designed, jampires.com.



Since every kid gets a book, and there are over 800 kids, that means a LOT of book signing! Luckily I got to sign both sets of books the day before, so I didn't have to rush too much. Here are the boxes of JAMPIRES books that met me when I first got to the hotel. Quite late in the evening, I was joined by John Dougherty, who had only just flown in from the Emirates Lit Fest in Dubai! (I did that last year, going straight from Dubai to Leicester without time to drop off stuff at home. Stuart rescued me by coming with a fresh suitcase of clothes and I had a dramatic and chaotic repacking session in corner of Gatwick Airport. An elderly lady was sitting on a bench nearby, and shaking with laughter as my suitcase kept popping with tentacles, massive petticoats and pirate gear.) Despite his travels, John remembered to bring a full range of pen colours.



Our Leicester hotel was nice and quite quirky. Check out the unexplained portraits of 'Wills' in the restaurant. And the stairway that led to nowhere except a big porcelain dog, marked 'The Kennel'.



I don't usually get any time to explore Leicester, but this time my hotel was right near leafy New Walk, which gave me a whole different impression of the city.



I even popped quickly into the New Walk Museum, which is well worth visiting if you're in the area: cool Victorian paintings, dinosaur skeletons, mummies, and a collection of German Expressionist paintings and illustrations, among other things.



And we even got to join our Leicester friends Selina Lock and Jay Eales and Steve's wife Ali for a curry, hurrah! Huge thanks to the Leicester team, including Juliet Martin, Dan Routledge, Sandy Gibbons, Nicole Dishington (here with Andy Briggs) and everyone who made it happen! You can follow Whatever It Takes on Twitter as @LeicesterWiT.

So I went straight from Gatwick Airport to Leicester and thought I was going to crash from tiredness, but it was fun! These guys helped a lot, I always perk up when I see writers John Dougherty and Bali Rai.



I had two days of working with kids for Leicester Author Week - 800 kids in total!! - focusing with half of them on Oliver and the Seawigs and the other half on There's a Shark in the Bath. Even though Seawigs isn't a comic, the session had a comics focus and in the workshop half of the event, I led them in a big Sea Monkey Comics Jam. Here you can see one kid working on the last comics panel.



Take that, you shark guts! ...Take that, you poo poo head! Ha ha, it's so much fun reading the stuff kids write. I also managed to pop into a shop near the Tigers Rugby Club, where we were meeting, and buy a few fun odds and ends, including a blue hair, a Cleopatra headdress and an inflatable shark. You never know when you might need an inflatable shark.



For the younger kids (5-7), I led them in drawing a shark. I love seeing all the variations on my drawing; all these sharks have such unique character.







I got to meet writer Andy Briggs, whom I'd met once before. I've done Leicester Author Week for the Whatever It Takes programme for quite a few years, and I always look out for storyteller Jyoti Shanghavi (on the right). This time I also got to meet storyteller Anita Kumari (left), and found out that, combined, the two women are able to speak TEN languages!!!



For my Shark in the Bath workshop, I had kids think of something scary that they could put in a bathtub, but then draw a picture of it looking silly, like the moustachioed shark in my book. Here's a bath full of snakes:



I think it's a great way to address a fear of something: draw it so it's obviously totally absurd and have a laugh about it. (And some kids just had fun loading up their bathtubs with cool stuff.)



I'll post a bunch of their drawings, some of them are very funny and some have surprisingly good design elements about them.

















After two very full days of events, that was it, I was ready to go HOME. Here's fab Juliet Martin, who was so good at helping work with the large groups of kids. Thanks for being awesome, Ellen Lee, Katie Little and the rest of the Leicester Whatever-it-Takes team!



It was strange waking up to this view after being in Dubai for a week. And I retired my white boots, they don't really last more than 15 wearings or so without being irredeemably shabby.



And there was even time to catch up with friends! John Dougherty came along for a curry with Leicester locals (and comics people) Jay Eales, Selina Lock and Rachael Smith. I'd only met Rachel once at Thought Bubble comics festival in Leeds, so it was great getting the chance to talk more. Thanks for meeting up, guys!

First thing, Library Mice has posted a list of my Top Five Comics Crossover Picture Books. I get really excited about the ever-blurring boundaries between comics and picture books, and here are some of what I see as trailblazers. Go over to the Library Mice book blog and read what I have to say about them!



Now a little story. Sometimes I get frustrated doing events, that they're taking me away from drawing things for my books. But other times, when I see how the kids (and adults) relate to the books, I think it's when I really discover how the books work and notice which elements get the kids excited, sometimes not the things I would have predicted. And often something special happens that makes it all feel totally worthwhile.

While I was in Leicester a couple weeks ago, I had a bit of time while I was standing in front of the audience, but I hadn't yet been introduced and a few people were still wandering in. So I thought I'd do a warm-up drawing and asked a very small child in front if I could borrow his toy monkey to draw it. No way! Give up my monkey? The kid looked terrified. Oops, I thought. So I took as close a look at the monkey as I could, doing my best not to look like a monkey-snatcher, and made a little drawing of the monkey for everyone. Later on, I had the kids help me design a character to drive the train I was drawing, and they wanted me to draw the monkey again. The little kid with the monkey held it close, still looking very wary. I could see it in his eyes: That lady's going to steal my monkey, I just know it. Toward the end, he got downright teary, and I thought, oh dear, this kid has not enjoyed himself one bit. So I gave his mother the drawing of the monkey and thought, okay, next time, don't try to borrow anyone's toys. Especially if they are very young. Lesson learned.

But that evening, I got the most lovely e-mail from his mother:

I just wanted to send you a note to say a huge thank you :x lovestruck for the event you held at Leicester central library today. My son Archie was the little boy with the monkey you drew as part of your story. He was absolutely thrilled with the whole event and we'll both remember it for a long time. We came because Morris the Mankiest Monster is his absolute favourite book, and we came away with so much more. We will certainly be going out to buy more of your animated masterpieces.
Thank you also for letting us take home the fab picture you drew of Monkey, which will now have pride of place in Archie's room for many years to come.

I asked her for permission to post it here on my blog, and a week later she wrote back:

Of course not, it would be our pleasure. He's still telling everyone 'lady drew monkey'!



Aw... *blushes happily* So here's a little drawing for Archie, with Monkey and my favourite pirate from my latest book, You Can't Scare a Princess. Archie, you can colour it in if you like (and anyone else who fancies a go at it. Click on the image for a larger version.) And, of course, there's a lot more to colour, cut and paste on my web page for the book, here.

Look at the fabulous Summer Reading Challenge team I got to work with in Leicester on Wednesday! I know marvellous multilingual storyteller Jyoti Shanghavi from previous visits (blogged here and here) and Farida Mohammed, the fiery one on the right, was assigned to look after me all day and had me in absolute stitches with the funny things she'd come out with.



And we made board games! The book of mine we read, When Titus Took the Train kind of reads like an adventure board game, and making games is such a fun, easy way to get even very small children creating stories. Basically, they choose a starting point (a railways station? their house? a dark cave? the inside of a stinky shoe?) and finishing point (where do they want to go?) on their big paper, draw a curvy railroad track between them and make lots of exciting and disastrous things happen between the two points. ...Ta-dah! A story.



We had some stories set in Candyland, some in space, some at sea, even a game charting someone's fashion development. I didn't manage to get any photos at the event at Leicester Central Library, but here's the team, including some fab volunteers, at Rushey Mead Library. (The paper in front is the downloadable Titus board game I made, that we gave kids to take away at the end.)



I think this board game ended in heaven.



This one was made by a great father-daughter team.



Here's a close-up of a board game that ended in a forest in Uganda. How cool is that? When I asked the kids about trips they'd taken, we had a long run of kids saying 'India'. Farida told me the local Gujarati population call themselves 'Gujjus' for short.



One little girl's lovely mermaid. (You get to go forward two spaces when you land on the mermaid's square.)



And this guy very creatively used stars instead of a railway track, going from Waterworld to Fireland.



Lunch time was funny, I had some lovely company and was plied with loads of food and drink, but no one could actually eat with me because it was Ramadan. (Two of the ladies said they do Lent as well!) Then Farida found out that I'd been raving about a Gujurati restaurant called Bobby's, which I'd visited last year with my friends Selina Lock and Jay Eales, and said we had to pop in. Sadly, the owner I'd met on the first visit had died; he was a real pillar of Leicester business, but the manager was very welcoming.



He even gave us free Indian sweets. Score!



Indian sweets are so beautiful, but you can't eat too many because, wow, they are SWEET.