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by Addy Farmer
About two minutes ago, the Summer Holidays stretched out like this ...
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| not a computer in sight |
There were delicious plans afoot: After a suitable number of days lolling in bed followed by jumping about in the garden, me and my family would go on holiday, read masses, get into all sorts of scrapes, rescue anything that stood in the way and actually climb a mountain. Not only that but I would have loads and loads of time to WRITE.
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| Moominpapa could write whenever he wanted to |
Inevitably, it didn't turn out like that. I will not bore you, dear reader, with the list of what got in the way of my perfectly reasonable expectations but it was mostly to do with
not living in the 1950s. I did write, in snatches, but it was mostly editing and revising. It's good to have the quiet head-space for that full-on flowing and original story writing.
Never mind because in the end reading is the stuff of writing.
The media would have us think that Summer is a time for reading and I did read alot although not on the beach. But I don't think that I read anymore than I do the rest of the year. Radio 4 even had a brief say about how summer reading was no different to winter
reading on the daily commute, really. Most of my summer reading has been a writer new to me,
Frances Hardinge. I whipped through the brilliant, '
Verdigris Deep' and
'The Lie Tree' and '
Cuckoo Song'. I've just started,
'A Face of Glass'. These are cracking good stories and that is what I like to read any time of the year.
But I do like Winter and stories set in winter time. So, let's just conveniently forget the intervening hufflepuff-like season of Autumn and spring to contemplation of Winter stories. Is there a difference between these and those set in Summer? Perhaps, we might personify them. Summer is perky with arms-wide and smiling where Winter is dark, hunched and dour. One camps outdoors, one skulks inside. One looks out at the world, the other looks inwards ... well, you get the idea.
Winter is coming (say it like a cinema trailer announcement). Put that way, it sounds scary which to my mind is not a bad thing. Traditionally, Winter is associated with death and hibernation. It is when the flowers fold and the garden hides. The cold makes your fingers freeze and your bones ache; it requires effort to keep warm and keep moving.
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| Hope you're wearing a vest, Gandalf |
So, let's look at the coming of Winter another way. 'Winter is coming!' Woo-hoo. The days will be short and the nights will be long and the fire will be flickering and there are stories to be told and there will be
SNOW!
Winter Time by Robert Louis Stevenson
Close by the jolly fire I sit
To warm my frozen bones a bit;
Or with a reindeer-sled, explore
The colder countries round the door.
When to go out, my nurse doth wrap
Me in my comforter and cap;
The cold wind burns my face, and blows
Its frosty pepper up my nose.
Black are my steps on silver sod;
Thick blows my frosty breath abroad;
And tree and house, and hill and lake,
Are frosted like a wedding cake.
Here, in
A Child's Garden of Verses, Stevenson sums up all the good stuff I used to love as a child about Winter. it could be the comfort of playing outside on a snapping-cold day, then the glorious comfort of warming yourself, not to mention the breath-taking beauty of a landscape transformed by SNOW.
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| Where the dickens did all this snow come from?! |
Snow. I can't say it enough. Who cannot love a fresh fall of snow? To read
Dickens you'd think it was as deep and regular as the seasons themselves. But frozen winters with frost fairs were a thing of the medieval past. It seems that Dickens was being nostalgic, looking back to a time when snow was more likely in winter. Snow was very much part of his winter story,
A Christmas Carol. It made Victorian London almost cosy and charming.
" The darkness and the mist had vanished with it, for it was a clear, cold winter day, with snow upon the ground ... the quick wheels dashing the hoar-frost and snow from off the dark leaves of the evergreens like spray"
I like that C.S Lewis added a touch of Victorian London to Narnia. Not only that but the snow makes it beautiful. I want to go there. The snow plays a more sinister role here; it is seen as stilling time and freezes life to its essentials. The land waits for Winter to end (spoiler - it does).
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Guess where this is
Snow can blanket and muffle and make the world a silent place. Time stands still and you are the only person in this white world.
"Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards." Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales |
Snow can bring danger from creatures which form part of a wild and distant past.
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| RUN! |
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| Mad as a box of frogs |
Snow can be a truly scary person, The White Queen in Narnia or The Snow Queen. In the story of Kay and Gerda we see how the snow forces Gerda to be astonishingly brave as she searches for her friend across a harsh, frozen landscape. The weather provides the obstacle to be overcome. It tests her friendship. The Snow Queen becomes Winter personified and is defeated by the warmth of Gerda's love.
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| She looks almost cuddly |
Marcus Sedgewick seems very fond of setting his novels in places where snow is a given. They are places of vampires and bears and treacherous ice. If you stay outside too long you will die and not only from the cold.
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do not cuddle this bear |
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| The best cover in the world |
Revolver is like a snow dome: a taut thriller trapped in a world of cold. A perfect snow storm.
In
After the Snow, by
S.D Crockett the snow provides the dystopian landscape where everything has gone wrong. Where the odds against our hero are already stacked high and made worse by the deep snow she finds herself wading through. Here the snow is bleak and unforgiving.
I'm gonna sit here in my place on the hill behind the house. Waiting. And watching. Ain't nothing moving down there. The valley look pretty bare in the snow. Just the house grey and lonely down by the river all frozen.
The snow can force you inside and send you mad or make you see things that might or might not be there. It is the perfect setting for a ghost story as
Dark Matter by Michele Paver so brilliantly and shiveringly demonstrates. The snow blinds the hero, Jack. “How odd, that light should prevent one from seeing.” he says. The snow controls his movements and eventually his mind and makes him see what should not be there. In the end, the snow subdues him.
Ah, but it's not all teen-angst gloom and doom. At the younger end, there are so many ways for snow to be the cheery, comforting, exciting and playful.
Summer fading, winter comes
Frosty mornings, tingling thumbs,
Window robins, winter rooks,
And the picture story-books.
Picture Books in Winter by Robert Louis Stevenson
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| Come in! It's lovely and warm inside! |
The Finn Family Moomintroll sensibly hibernates during the
Winter but when Moomintroll awakes during their long sleep, he finds a beautiful, alien world. It is silent and dark and scary to be alone but soon he meets Little My and Too-ticky and the snowy fun begins. But the Moomins being the Moomins this wintry world remains a haunting and challenging place.
Bear and Hare:Snow! by Emily Gravett celebrates the joy to be had with friends in the snow.  |
| We've all done it |
One of my favourite friendships is that of Melrose and Croc by Emma Chichester. Here is the cold of no friends ...
.... before the warmth of friendship found and all wrapped up in Christmas - lovely.
I leave the obvious to last and I'll whisper it, Christmas. It seems that no Christmas is complete without snow. I agree. I want Christmas to have deep and crisp and even snow ...so we can make snowmen.
So never mind that it's the end of Summer, Winter is coming and it brings ...
STORIES!
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By:
Emma Barnes,
on 5/16/2014
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I’ve just come back from a visit to Santa Barbara. It was wonderful to revisit old haunts – the Daily Grind coffee shop, Chaucer Books – and to spend time watching the dolphins and pelicans from Arroyo Burro beach, smell the roses near the Mission, and most of all, bask in California sunshine after a long, cold, Yorkshire winter.
It also made me think about the relationship between writing and place.
It was while I was in Santa Barbara I got a message saying that my book Wolfie had won a Fantastic Book Award (voted for by children across Lancashire). This seemed fitting, as it was actually while I was staying in Santa Barbara, five years ago, that I wrote Wolfie. And that made me think how odd it was that a book about wolves and deep winter woods (so atmospherically brought to life in Emma Chichester Clark’s illustrations) should have been created in such a completely different environment.
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| cover: Emma Chichester Clark |
I remember the process well. I’d walk my daughter to preschool – passing rows of jacaranda trees, an open air swimming pool and banks of creeping rosemary. Then I’d go home and open my laptop and plunge into a world where a wolf appears in an ordinary British neighbourhood, and takes the heroine into a snow-filled world of adventure. Maybe it was the contrast itself that got my imagination going? I was certainly driven: tapping away intently, working against the clock until pick-up time.  |
| illustration: Emma Chichester Clark |
Of course many writers are inspired by their particular environment and its familiarity. But I wonder how often writers are inspired to write about a setting precisely because it isn’t there? Quite often, I suspect. In some cases, this might be tinged with homesickness, or nostalgia for a place and time lost.
Certainly, one of the most evocative children’s books that I know, in terms of creating a setting, is Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising – part of the famous fantasy series of the same title. This book is set in rural Berkshire near Windsor, and Will’s house, the village, the manor and the surrounding landscape are brilliantly portrayed: so real, so immediate, but also echoing with the years of history that lie behind. When Will sets out into the woods he may meet a Smith from centuries past, or a tramp who has travelled through time, or the mythical Herne the Hunter: somehow the place can contain them all. This capturing of landscape is also a feature of Cooper’s other books – the mountains of Wales in The Grey King, and a Cornish village in Greenwitch.
These books capture perfectly a British place and time (and I say time because I suspect the “present day” Berkshire that Cooper portrays has probably now been lost as totally as her Medieval or Dark Age versions, under the pressures of modern development). Yet they were written when Cooper was far from her original home, living on the East Coast of the US. In interviews, she has described how she was cross country skiing (a thoroughly un-British activity) when the idea of The Dark Is Rising came to her.
I’m certainly grateful for my time in California. Towards the end of my stay I also went to the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference, which was stimulating in a different way. And I enjoyed happy hours running on the beach. But mainly those months were a warm, calm, interlude: a bubble in which I managed to write a book.
Maybe one cold, winteryYorkshire morning I will sit down and find myself writing a tale of sunshine, sand and dolphins…
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
Emma's new book,
Wild Thing, about the naughtiest little sister ever (and her bottom-biting ways), is out now from Scholastic. It is the first of a series for readers 8+.
"Hilarious and heart-warming" The Scotsman
"Charming modern version of My Naughty Little Sister" Armadillo Mag
Wolfie is published by Strident.
Sometimes a Girl’s Best Friend is…a Wolf. Winner of 2014 Fantastic Book Award
"A real cracker of a book"
Armadillo "Funny, clever and satisfying...thoroughly recommended"
Books for Keeps"This delightful story is an ideal mix of love and loyalty, stirred together with a little magic and fantasy"
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Facebook FanpageEmma on Twitter - @EmmaBarnesWrite
Welcome one and all to Playing by the book’s International Edible Book Festival!
As befits any gallery opening, there are drinks and nibbles on offer (albeit virtually) 
To enter the gallery, click on the scissors below to snip the ribbon and view the astonishing entries. I’m sure you’ll agree with me there are lots of very creative entries, and really, every one is a winner!
The Gallery is open for public viewing all this week. Mélanie, from Library Mice, will be choosing her top 10 Edible Books, before passing on the shortlisted entries to our Festival Patron, Emma Chichester Clark, who’s wonderful Lulu and the Best Cake Ever was the inspiration behind the entire festival.
Emma will choose her top three Edible Books from the shortlist, and the winner will be announced on Monday 26 March, here on the blog. You’ll also be able to learn more about the different Edible Books that day – everyone is invited to link up to blog posts, facebook pages, etc that they’ve written about their entry.
Once you’ve visited the gallery, please do return here to leave a comment. Which cake made you smile the most? Which cake do you think deserves to win? Which cake would you like to eat?
Roll up! Roll up!
Wherever you are in the world, you are cordially invited to join us in celebrating all things bookish and delicious by taking part in the inaugural Playing By The Book International Edible Book Festival!
Edible book festivals have been taking place around the world since 1999, but as there are none near me I have decided to host an online festival for all of us who can’t get to a local edible book festival.
I am honoured and utterly delighted to announce that none other than Emma Chichester Clark, one of Britain’s most distinguished illustrators, is this year’s Festival Patron! I invited Emma to be the festival’s patron after reading her wonderful new book, Lulu and the Best Cake Ever (which I reviewed recently). If you love great children’s books and cake in equal measure, this book will be right up your street!
The Edible Book I made having read Lulu and the Best Cake Ever
Entry information
To enter the festival you should create an edible book, take two photos of it and email them to me, [email protected] by Friday March 16 2012 (please feel free to email me your pictures any time before then – it would be helpful if you didn’t leave it until March the 16th if possible).
NB One of your photos should include something that “time dates” the photo eg a newspaper, your computer monitor with this page in the background etc. This is to ensure that no-one submits photos of cakes they have simply found on the web. Your second photo should be the best photo you can take of your cake. I will use this photo in an online gallery of all submitted cakes.
In your submission email please include the title/author/illustrator of the book on which your edible book is based, and a sentence or two about what in particular inspired your edible book.
Children can enter, families can enter, bakers can enter. Even authors and illustrators can enter (maybe you’ll create an edible version of one of your printed books 
). Do you run a children’s bookshop? Or library? Your customers (and you!) could enter… Are you a teacher? Maybe your pupils would like to enter?
Entries are welcome from all over the world, based on children’s books in any language. The only people who aren’t eligible to enter this competition are Mélanie (one of the competition judges – see below) and myself.
Each family may enter up to two edible books to the festival.
What is an edible book?
Your creation can be anything as long as it
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By: Zoe,
on 11/3/2010
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Ella Bella Ballerina and Swan Lake by James Mayhew was published less than a month ago and couldn’t have arrived at a better time for us - Ella Bella Ballerina and Swan Lake turns out to be the perfect book to introduce this amazing ballet to the youngest of children
Ella Bella is a young girl (I imagine her to be 6 or 7) who takes ballet classes in a gorgeous old theatre with the grand but kind Madame Rosa. At this particular class Madame Rosa introduces her students to the music of Swan Lake, telling them some of the key elements of the ballet’s storyline whilst they dance to music created by Madame Rosa’s wind-up musical box (complete with a spinning ballerina). When the class ends Ella Bella is so entranced by the music and the fairytale that she continues in her own reverie, dancing and imagining herself alongside Princess Odette as the story of Swan Lake plays out: when the prince is deceived by Odile, Ella Bella tries to warn him and when Odette flees the palace Ella Bella helps the prince to fine Odette.
Creating an illustration for Ella Bella Ballerina and Swan Lake. Image: James Mayhew
Ella Bella’s daydream ends just as the prince and his princess find each other and live happily ever after; Ella Bella’s mother is waiting for her and, having been utterly transported, this budding ballerina splashes “in the puddles all the way home, just like a baby swan.”
This story worked so well for us: it showed the girls how Swan Lake is not just a tale, but a ballet; it appealed to so many little girls’ idea of heaven – dressing up and being a ballerina, it put Ella Bella (and by extension my own girls listening to the story) at the heart of the action making is seem alive, and it showed how listening to music can sweep you up and take you to new and wonderful worlds. All these facets added up to making this book a great stimulus for imaginative play and really listening to the music.
[In fishing for words I seem to have caught rather a lot - this is quite a long post so please enjoy with a nice cup of tea or coffee!]
Photo: kasperbs
M has been learning to read at school since November. It’s been a delight and a source of amazement to me to see her skill unfold and now with just a week left till the summer holidays begin I’ve been looking for different ways to support her reading whilst school’s out. She’s not what I would call an enthusiastic reader at the moment – yes, she loves to listen to stories and can spend a long time taking in every detail of illustrations, but reading by herself hasn’t yet become something she does for the sheer pleasure of it.
I’ve wondered if this might be partly because she’s had such a rich diet of books already – fantastic picture books with great stories and delicious illustrations, or audiobooks and bedtime chapter books with engaging stories of real literary merit that whisk her away to wonderful worlds where she can spend hours and hours, and swapping all of this for simple, cheaply illustrated early readers is asking a lot.
I know that I find it hard to go from The Secret Garden (our current bedtime book), How to train your dragon and all the other stories in that series (M’s favourite audiobooks at the moment) and picture books like One Smart Fish, The Tale of the Firebird or Nothing to Do to things like Ron Rabbit’s Big Day (even if it is written by Julia Donaldson) or A Cat in the Tree.
So with the summer holidays almost upon us I’ve been looking for ways to keep her reading and to bolster her enjoyment. One complaint she explicitly makes about the books she brings home from school is their length. So in thinking how to overcome the lack of motivation when it comes to reading I’ve been looking at … dictionaries.
Perhaps not the most obvious choice when it comes to texts for early readers, especially as I wasn’t looking at them to boost her vocabulary, or to help with her spelling (although this may come later on) but rather as a source of short texts that we could dip in an out of, perhaps a few times a day, rather than sitting down for a “long” reading session (almost an impossibility with a younger sibling around anyway!)
BY LUDWIG BEMELMANS via Chris Beetles
And while visiting Chris Beetles see
Quentin Blake and Friends at Nunnington Hall
Cindy Lord asked for a Benny update - so here's a picture of His Royal Cuteness:
He's quite a little character. We're still working on the whole house training thing - he manages to get onto the peepee pad about 50% of the time. My family room carpet is in serious need of a serious professional cleaning, but I'm going to wait till he's totally trained before I do it. He mostly sleeps through the night - sometimes if he wakes up I play some music on my iphone and he goes back to sleep. The problem is he wakes up at 5:30 and wants to pee and then party. Argh.
We start puppy school on Monday night. Wish us luck!
Meanwhile, I thought I'd seen the last of the Evil Furby but the other day my printer was out of paper and when I opened the cupboard door to get some more paper....
(please ignore my messy cupboard)
I blame the Webmeister.
Do you think Furbycide is included in the Puppy School curriculum?
or it will, when Benny wakes up...
The kids and I spent the weekend chez ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
the_webmeister up in Beantown. Saw the 3D Sun film at the Museum of Science, which was fascinating. Then we took the kids to the Planetarium to see the Laser Magic show. That was a huge success with everyone - now I want to take the kids back to see Laser Beatles and Pink Floyd and U2 and Led Zeppelin - in other words, all my favorite high school bands.
Now I knew The Webmeister was a techno-geek, but what I didn't know was that he's been holding out on me all this time - he actually has a laser thingie (I'll let him tell you the technical term in the comments) of his very own. So when we got home, he let Daughter play with it. I got to choose the CD - and of course I chose the greatest and potentially most laser-friendly album of all time, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Daughter has a bright future as a Laserist - she did a fantastic job creating effects.
Unfortunately The Webmeister is (or should I say "was") in possession of another, more unsavory form of technology. The Dark Side of Technology, one might say. I shall explain.
As a children's book author, I probably shouldn't admit this in a public forum, but I have a history of Furbicide. Many years ago, my former mother-in-law gave my children the most annoying evil toy ever invented - The Furby. Not just one Furby. One for Each Child. I hated the freaking things. They would start talking at the most bizarre and inappropriate times, and you had to go through some elaborate ritual to make the @$#&& things go to sleep.
One night the Furbies started talking at 1am and I'd had it. I wanted to take the batteries out but couldn't find the screwdriver. (It was 1am, after all.) So in an Anthony Perkins-esque move, I took a large kitchen knife and (cue the Psycho shower scene music) stabbed the Furbies until they were silent.
They ended up buried at the bottom of the kitchen garbage bag, never to be heard from again.
But alas...this weekend the kids were going through the Webmeister's basket of dog toys and what should they find at the bottom - yep, one of those F-words. Number 2 of Reasons NOT to Love the Webmeister (a much shorter list than the reasons TO love the Webmeister): he put batteries in the damn thing.
When we were leaving his house this afternoon, I went to put my laptop in my briefcase, and what did I find in it...The Furby. I put it back on his shelf. I got into the car and what was on my seat? The Furby. I told the Webmeister to take it back.
Then, after we left TWM's house, I stopped at Dunkin' Donuts to caffienate myself for the journey home. I opened my bag to pay and this is what I saw:
AAAAAAAAAH! My son, laughing hysterically, told me that the Furby was haunting me for murdering his relatives all those years ago.
We get home, I put on a load of laundry, go up to my room, turn on the light and:
DOUBLE AAAAAAAAAH!
Will Sarah Ever Escape The Curse of the Furby? Stay tuned....
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2 Comments on Stories in Tune – Swan Lake – Part 1, last added: 11/5/2010
Oo, am I the first through the door?
Elli recently posted..Going Up the Hill
Thanks for the wonderful round up. Lots of lovely entries. One small thing though. When I click on any of the images, the only image that enlarges is “The Hobbit” and then I cannot go through the “next” or “Prev” button. Looks like a browser issue, I am using Firefox.
BongMom recently posted..LadyBug Pancakes for Edible Book Festival
wow!
wow
wow
wow
that is about all I can say!
jojoebi recently posted..first and last….