How to use this Page

If you follow my blog, you might have noticed that I'd been at the Hay Festival in Wales last weekend to do a comic event for adults. Well, I went back! This time it was all about mucking in with the kids. And nothing goes down better than a storming pirate session. My big new hat is working even better than I could have hoped.



We had some great pirate drawings come out of the session. Everyone drew Captain Waffle from You Can't Scare a Princess! with me, then everyone did a freestyle pirate. Check out this girl Alice's! Her name is Beauty Bibble Bops and the front of her pirate dress reads, Here Be Toilet Roll. She does not say ARRR like Waffle, rather, Hmph. Most excellent!



I had way too much fun swanning about the festival in over-the-top outfits. Radio presenter James Naughtie (pronounced 'nockety', people, not naughty) told me I looked 'magnificent', which pleased me to no end and gave me a good excuse to nab him for a quick photo. When I first moved to Britain and didn't know anyone, I learned a lot of what I know about the country from BBC Radio 4, so I've heard a lot from this Jim chappie.



Oh, and look, there is Horrible Histories' lead illustrator Martin Brown, and why is he about to fall off the stage? This I do not know, because I was busy drawing a giant comic at the time and only saw it later in the photo.



For our joint event, Martin, Philip Reeve and I introduced ourselves with silly drawings, took suggestions from the audience, then started to build up characters, based on their suggestions, into a story. And gosh, does it take some lightning-fast drawing reflexes to whip together a three-way comic in front of a huge group of onlookers! Fortunately the crowd was amazingly friendly and helpful and didn't mind that we were bashing out pictures and words at the kind of speed that didn't let us draw the way we would for our own books. And the ideas were flying thick and fast, and it was terribly silly, and it was LOADS OF FUN. Here's our final comic strip!



Funnily enough, Philip drew just as fast as Martin and me, but somehow his work managed to look weirdly polished. Which amused us to no end, and it was hard to focus on my own drawing when I kept wanting to watch the other two!




Yup, you'd never believe this panel was drawn in, like, two minutes. And by the one of us who claims not to be an illustrator anymore. Whatever. Philip also used to draw for Horrible Histories, which must be an awfully good training ground. And funnily enough, the guy I did an event with the previous weekend at Hay, Rob Davis, also draws those books! There's a bit of a theme going on there.



A brown-haired kid in the audience had the idea of drawing a cheetah with wings, so I took on that character. Martin took the zombie suggestion, and Philip drew a space dog. And since ki

Hurrah! We got comics into this year's Hay Festival! Here are our two fabulous editors (and fellow contributors!) Woodrow Phoenix and Rob Davis, holding a lovely copy of our graphic novel, NELSON.



If you follow my blog, you will have seen loads about NELSON and our launch events already, but if not, here's a little peek:



NELSON's a comic book for adults, in which 54 of Britain's top creators each took a day in the year of a woman's life and, basically, we created a person. I got 1973, when Nel was five years old. So Rob Davis had taken 1968, the year Nel (and her brother, Sonny) were born, and made a comic, then Woodrow Phoenix took 1969, my studio mate Ellen Lindner took 1970, Jamie Smart took 1971, and another of my studio mates, Gary Northfield, took 1972. I read all of their comics, then decided what would happen in the next year of Nel's life, and created three pages of comics about her first day at school, in 1973. The book continues like that, with creators each taking a year until 2011, when Rob, who's initial idea it was, brings it back to a close.



Here we are on Hay's Starlight Stage - me, Woodrow, Rob and Kristyna Baczynski talking with actor and journalist Lisa Dwan.



There was already lots going on at Hay when we arrived! We met up with Oliver Jeffers in the Green Room, who urged us to come along and paint on his Jumpers wall. We saw MP Tom Watson and got him to come along and paint with us.


Oliver Jeffers, Lisa Dwan, Woodrow Phoenix, Kristyna Baczynski, Tom Waton, Sarah McIntyre, Rob Davis


It was funny, because we'd been having a big debate in the van about the way Oliver always puts matchstick legs on his characters, even the big hefty ones, like a bear. Our camp was very divided on whether we liked that schtick or not. Rob didn't know Oliver's work, so when he looked it up his website on his phone, he laughed to see the very first image was Oliver's book, Stuck, which we all decided was the past tense of having stick legs.



The idea was that everyone would paint a jumper on one of the little bean characters, then sign at the bottom. Here's a Gruffalo jumper by Axel Scheffler, who was just leaving when we arrived. And you can spot a few signatures below, including Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie.



Kristyna (whose name I learned is pronounced "kriss-TEN-ah", like the number ten), Lisa and Rob having a go at painting:



And Oliver drawing up a few new characters for us to paint. I didn't quite hear the directions, that we were only supposed to paint a jumper, so I gave mine a bi

From New Zealand’s lively children’s book community, today we feature two great resources. At Bookrapt, brainchild of the Bay of Plenty Children’s Literature Association, you’ll find a great list of resources for writers and aspiring writers: competitions, publishers, advice, awards, literary organizations, industry news and more. If you’re feeling rejected (or just have those northern hemisphere winter blues), check out their list of prominent writers and the number of rejections each received getting a book deal. It’s sure to bring a little sunshine into any writer’s or aspiring writer’s life!

And Storylines, the Kiwi IBBY site, is such rich territory that the rest of this post is littered with links. The annual Storylines Festival in June connects children and families with writers and illustrators. Four literary-related prizes are awared annually. The national Mahy Award in March and the Gilderdale Award in October recognize outstanding contributions to children’s literature. The Gaelyn Gordon Award is for a much-loved book that hasn’t yet won a major award. Support for developing and unpublished writers come in the Tom Fitzgibbon Award for a chapter book and the Joy Cowley Award for a picture book.

Storylines also recommends lists of books (not all New Zealand-published) for children. Their annual Notable Books List this year is of books for and about children with disabilities.