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Wow, the Pop Up Festival site looks AMAZING! I went today for the schools and press launch, and got to see how our COMICS BIG-TOP OF AWESOME is coming along! It's all happening this weekend, and the comics festival-within-a-festival is just Saturday, so do come along! And did I mention that it's all FREE? Details on the Pop Up Festival website. And click here for our fabulous comics creator lineup and the day's comics event schedule!



The three Central Saint Martins art students are working their tails off to turn it into a fun comic space, and I was so thrilled when I walked in. Here's the fabulous team: Isa Caruncho, Maddy Rita Faye and Chiahui Liao.



Look at these critters, aren't they brilliant?! I was trying not to get in the way of their work, but I couldn't help running around examining everything.



And check out these Story Wheels! There will be three of them, and people can spin them (like fruit machines) and combine the words to get ideas for their stories, such as a deep-sea diver giraffe in a prehistoric swamp or a mermaid London sweet shop owner. (Candy Gourlay reminded me that this was her idea when we had the first brainstorming session! And I know Emma Vieceli and Jim Medway both do similar things when they lead comics workshops.)




Here's Chiahui Liao working on the big panel you'll see when you first walk up to the Comics Big-Top of Awesome.



Maddy Rita Faye is working on the monkey logo image here.



And Isa Caruncho is painting a big interior panel.



A back story: Isa's from the Philippines and Candy Gourlay is featuring a Filipino-style fiesta, so Candy and I had a huge fight at the first meeting over who would get to work with Isa. I loved her illustrative work and she was wearing a Kate Beaton comics t-shirt and I claimed her for comics and I'm so glad I won, ha ha. (Apologies, Candy!)



Here's Production Coordinator Jessica Hudsley checking our our robot.



Writer Marcus Sedgwick has been hugely ambitious in organising a whole vampire-themed theatrical production based on his young adult novel, My Swordhand is Singing.



Rehearsals have been going for awhile, and I think it's going to be quite scary, so probably not for the younger children. But should be pretty amazing.

So I know you've already written this weekend's Pop Up Festival into your diaries...



...and I thought you'd like a peek at how the site is coming along! Here's a map of the location, Granary Square, next to Central Saint Martins art college, and about a five-minute walk across the new build area from Kings Cross and St Pancras stations. Granary Square is a huge covered area, so rain or shine, the festival will be AWESOME.



Find out details of the day's events and our comics line-up here!
And while I'm at it, here's a peek at some of the Pop Up curators, past and present. We met up last night at a social for the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators. This is a great organisation to join if you make books, comics, do school events, etc, and want to meet other like-minded people and find out more about the industry. The events are always very serious, as I'm demonstrating here with Astrosaurs creator Steve Cole and last year's Pop Up curator (the Upside-Down House!) writer Philip Ardagh. I've just spotted a meteor falling straight toward the Young Vic bar, where we met. Run, everyone!




We like to examine our work through lots of different lenses.



Writer Candy Gourlay did such an awesome job with Pop Up last year that the team have asked her to do it again! I can't wait to see her Beanbag Cinema and Filipino-style FIESTA! Here she is, chronicling the SCBWI proceedings.



That's Jackie Marchant on the left, who's just about to launch her first book with Macmillan, I'm Dougal Trump and it's Not My Fault. We all took photos with the book looking absolutely thrilled, as I'm sure we will be when we've read it. Looks good, Jackie!


Photo by Candy Gourlay

Of course, Philip can't give a straight compliment, oh no. It pains him so.



And Candy with writer, illustrator and puppeteer extraordinaire Sue Eves (who, sadly, didn't bring along her puppet dog that evening, even though lots of people were asking).



Elissa Elwick had a very dodgy photo of her with the Ardagh beard as a wig. You can find a slightly more subdued version of the photo if you trawl her lovely blog.



Writer Steve Hartley had come down from Manchester for events and came for the drinks. We aren't quite as close as this photo might suggest...

Remember that MONSTERVILLE I mentioned in earlier blog posts, the monster village I designed with Ed Vere, Neal Layton and the Discover Children's Story Centre in Stratford, east London? Well, this time the Discover gang paired me up with very tall writer Philip Ardagh, and we came up with a little interactive web story. And so did lots of other fab writers and illustrators whose work you'll probably recognise! So today was the official launch day of the StoryCloud website; the Discover centre threw a party, and the 'pull me' lever got pulled.



I wasn't quite sure who was coming to the party, other than Mr Ardagh, so I was chuffed to bits when I arrived to see him, Chris Riddell and Adam Stower already there, and I met StoryCloud illutrator Carl Pearce. We were all curious to see how our stories had turned out, and poked and prodded the iPad like excited 3-year-olds.



And here's the new StoryCloud website! You'll only get to read the first story on this visit, but Discover will unlock a new story every Monday for eleven more weeks. The first one's by former children's laureate and writer Michael Rosen and illustrator Kristyna Litten. You can read a bit more about it in today's Telegraph article by Martin Chilton here.





Current children's laureate Julia Donaldson (you know, The Gruffalo and all that) gave an opening speech to start us off.



Mr Ardagh read his short story, Down the Plug Hole and I made a little picture of what was supposed to be our character, a small boy named Morris, in the bath, but which turned out to be someone else. Then the audience helped me fill up the bath with an eagle, an snake, an elephant...



Here's Malorie Blackman reading her story, Strange Things Happen while Chris Riddell draws a pegasus.



And Adam Stower did a great presentation, giving us important lessons about things one should and shouldn't stick up one's nose. You can catch a glimpse at the page Adam drew, in the background, put together by Neal Hoskins and his small team at Winged Chariot press. We had a good laugh about those pink things in the bottles which are, in fact, lungs. It's a lung shop.



One cool thing was that they mixed a few young storytellers in with the pros; here are two of the writers.

Whoo hoo! The Pop Up Festival website is now LIVE!!!



And besides the COMICS BIG-TOP OF AWESOME, look at all the other amazing things that are going on! Who are THESE people...?



...Just a couple of the fine folk taking part in the Filipino-style fiesta! And there's so much more! Here's Candy Gourlay's own Fiesta mini website. So many festivals within a festival, this is going to be TRULY AWESOME.



Please spread the word! Anyone you can think of who might like to come along, tell them about it and share the Pop Up Festival link!

If you've been following my blog, you might remember an illustrated book review I did of Geraldine McCaughrean's book, Pull Out All the Stops! Or my thrill at doing an event at the Hay Festival of Literature with Geraldine and Candy Gourlay. But if you could have gone back to 2006, just before I started blogging, you would have seen me by myself on London's South Bank, clutching a ticket to see Geraldine McCaughrean give a talk about her novel, The White Darkness. It was the only book I'd read by Geraldine, but I was completely caught up in it, and instantly a fangirl. When Candy was asked in an interview, which book she wishes she had written, she picked The White Darkness. So you can imagine how Candy and I giggled like giddy schoolgirls when we got to go visit Geraldine for lunch at her house in the Berkshire countryside.



Geraldine had this picture I'd drawn for our Hay festival event taped to her refrigerator:



Of course, we wanted to see everything and ran around the garden and into the Wendy house at the foot of it. Just like me, Geraldine very much wanted to keep a horse in a shed in the garden, so a shed with a wooden horse's head sticking out was the next best thing.






Geraldine's husband, John, obliged us by lifting a big stone cover to show us their well.



If little people have moved into the back garden, they'll have had no trouble finding somewhere to stay; we found little houses everywhere.



Here's the book I love so much, The White Darkness. She's written about a girl named Sym, who's hard-of-hearing, horribly shy, extremely introverted, but has a passion for stories about polar exploration, thanks to an uncle who's given her books on the subject since she was small. To be more precise, she's in love with Lawrence 'Titus' Oates, the member of Scott's expedition to the South Pole who realised he wasn't going to be able to go on and left the tent to die in the blizzare, with the famous words, 'I am just going outside and may be some time'.



Sym's 14, and knows she's strange for having 'an imaginary friend', but her relationship with Titus gives her courage as her situation with her uncle gets dodgier and dodgier as you realise that, for a very long while, he's been grooming her to take on a mad mission to Antarctica. I love the way Geraldine lets us watch how Sym deludes herself into believing things are all right; she's terribly intelligent and practical, but also incredibly stupid because of her horrible self-consciousness, which is exactly how I remember being as I floundered through adolescence. And I can identify with the polar exploration stuff because my dad was also a bit obsessed with mountaineering (but not in a dodgy way like Sym's uncle). Both my sister and I had to prove our 'manhood' by training to climb Mt Rainier when we turned 16, so we did lots o

Tomorrow's a BIG DAY for me because I get to spend an hour hanging out on the Starlight Stage at the Hay Festival with two of my favourite writers, Geraldine McCaughrean and Candy Gourlay! My other two events are sold out (one with Anne Cottringer and a solo event), but I think there are still a few places left if you want to come hear us talk at 4pm!



Candy's a dear friend, and I first went to hear Geraldine speak a few years ago when I fell in love with her book The White Darkness. Both books we'll be featuring, Candy's Tall Story and Geraldine's Pull Out All the Stops!, start with big natural disasters: earthquakes and flooding. There's very funny scene in Geraldine's book where the inhabitants of a rag-tag showboat entertain a family that's stuck on top of their house and recite to them a totally made-up news gazette. So I've drawn the three of us entertaining ourselves on a roof. I hope we don't get a real flood but I bought some new wellies for the festival field, just in case.

So Sunday was a fabulous day because I got to hang out at the Oxford Literary Festival with two fab friends Candy Gourlay and Philip Reeve, who had an event the same day as mine. Philip and I are bookending Candy here to illustrate the theme of her novel, Tall Story.



Making things even more fun, it all took place at a super-cool venue, the Great Hall in Christ Church college (which you may recognise as the Hogwarts dining hall in the Harry Potter films). I was appalled to discover that Philip had only just been let out of prison that morning, but he kept his ankle tag well hidden. (Shocking whom they allow into the festival Green Room these days.)



You can take a panoramic virtual tour of Christ Church here if you're curious. (Here's a peek at the actual room.) My event wasn't until late afternoon, but I caught an early train to go hear Candy and Philip give a talk with the writer Lauren St John and Blue Peter presenter Barney Harwood. Philip read from his book A Web of Air, Lauren talked about being almost squeezed to death as a child by her pet boa constrictor named Samantha, and here's Candy talking about volcanoes and giants.





Philip Reeve, Barney Harwood, Candy Gourlay, Lauren St John

The three writers' books had all been shortlisted for the Blue Peter Award. Note: If you're like me and didn't grow up in Britain, Blue Peter isn't the colder brother of the Green Man. From what I gather, it's a TV show with a lot of perky people jumping around and doing stunts and making things out of bits of scrap you can find around the house. And I hear adults talking about getting the badges like they're knighthoods, or better. This time Lauren got the Blue Peter badge for her book Dead Man's Cove. Barney pointed out a kid in the audience who was wearing his own Blue Peter badge, so I'm wondering which novel he wrote. Barney even had his own team of fan girls:



I led my When Titus Took the Train event in the Junior Commons Room, where a bunch of very young kids, their parents and I made adventure boardgames. For the game we designed and played together, they helped me come up with good and bad things that could happen on a railway journey, and the kids came up with ideas such as 'Dragon fire' and finding £100, and the adults suggested things like sicking up their lunch, strikes, and delays due to the driver exploding. Then they made their own board games and I saw one boy who had his curving track go from Japan to England, and a very small girl wound hers from a rabbit hole to the Forests of Saturn.

If someone had asked me, which writers would you like to see gathered all in one place? Wish hard! Well, yesterday at the Times Cheltenham Festival of Literature went a long way toward fulfilling my wish. On the train back, I was reading my newly purchased graphic novel by Audrey Niffenegger, The Night Bookmobile, which wraps itself around the joys and perils of finding a book heaven, and yup, that's Cheltenham. And not only were there amazing books and book creators milling about, but we got to make comics!



I was dead chuffed to see the Vern and Lettuce poster I'd designed displayed prominently all over town. I'm really proud of it.


Click on the pic or here to see an enlarged version.

I led two events, one of which was a two-hour comics workshop. We went for BOLD cover designs, based on an earlier workshop I did for HyperComics in Battersea Park. We had some great results!






I didn't manage to get many photos of it, but before the participants made their own comics, we got our stories moving with an interactive Comics Jam session. Here's one, starring a slug, that made me laugh:

Panel 1: 'Good evening, garçon, a glass of Chardonnay, please.' 'Sacré bleu! A SLUG!!'
Panel 2: 'Can I at least get takeaway?' 'And don't come back!'

Panel 3: 'Cool' [Slug World: NO PEOPLE] Panel 4: 'Mmm, tasty slime juice. Better than Chardonnay.'

I was very taken with this wine-glass chandelier at the Hotel du Vin:



The best part about these festivals are the people you meet: catching up with old friends and meeting new ones. Here's the wonderful Ben Haggarty, who works as a storyteller; despite the fact he's used to telling stories, not writing them, he came up with the text for the most magnificent book of the year (and quite possible the best one, too), Mezolith.


'Mezolith', published by David Fickling Books in the DFC Library series. Storyteller Ben Haggarty with his partner Katie


YouTube link

For weeks I'd been looking forward to dinner the night before events, with people from my fab David Fickling and Scholastic team, and with Martin Brown (whom I'd met for the first time at the Edinburgh lit fest) and Damian Kelleher, who's done a bunch of graphic design work with me. In theory, it's an easy journey to Cheltenham Spa from Birmingham (where I'd done a signing at the British International Comics Show). But I hadn't reckoned with the abyss of failure that is Birmingham New Street station. When I realised I was

Today the Chinese chestnut collectors gave me a lot of smiles and 'good morning' wishes, which was rather lovely. And it kept me from getting grumpy about wind blowing huge splodges of rainwater onto my paper, which kept turning the pencil line to greasy clay.



Hey, everyone, the British branch of the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators has a blog now! It's an excellent organisation, where I've met lots of people and learn a great deal about making books, so join it if you haven't already. A big thanks to amazing writer Candy Gourlay for editing and posting this video she took at my talk with David Fickling on 'The Makings of Morris the Mankiest Monster'. I'd forgotten a lot of what we'd said, and I was a bit flustered at the time because the pub didn't have a connector cable for the Powerpoint, so I had to show everyone the slides on a laptop screen. But it's the only time David and I have really hashed through the process of what it was like to come up with the character, and talk about the editorial process. (Please look past the fact that the rather terrible camera angle makes me look suspiciously like a beached whale, hehe.) David is a fab publisher, he really pushed me on this book. Although I must add, it's not even near as hard as he's pushing me on the book Dave O'Connell and I are making with him now. (Morris website and downloadable activity sheets here.)


The Makings of Morris YouTube link

And have you read Candy's book, Tall Story? If not, why not? It will knock your socks off, such a brilliant read! I'm really looking forward to sharing a room with Candy at the SCBWI Winter Conference in Winchester. She's my best roomie, we'll be up all night talking if we're not careful. And if I drift off to sleep, I can almost guarantee that if I suddenly wake up at 3am, it will be to the clack of her keyboard as she sitting up against the headboard, writing her next novel. Come to the conference! It's 13-14 Nov, featuring fab speakers such as Mini Grey, Marcus Sedgwick, David Fickling, Lucy Coats, and loads others. Candy and I are both on a couple panels, mine are How to sell your book and Social Networking: a blessing or a curse?.

Have you seen that Viviane Schwarz has posted an open invite to her launch of The are No Cats in this Book? Meeting Viv is a real treat, be sure to pop along and get a signed copy. Even better, get her to draw cats in it. Review Bookshop, Peckham, 15 Oct, 6:30pm, more details here. It's a brilliant follow-up to There are Cats in this Book, which I think was by far the most cleverly designed and illustrated book of the year, and which was nominated for a Kate Greenaway award.

Derek the Sheep and Vern star in this month's Stitch London newsletter! Subscribe here to keep an eye on what my fab studio mate and her mind-bending, yarn-loving gang get up to.



A great review of When Titus Took the Train by The Book

Look, my fab writer friend Candy Gourlay just came out with a trailer video for her soon-to-be-launched book, Tall Story!


YouTube Link

Candy said it was made by her little brother in the Philippines and the rather posh voiceover at the end is her next-door neighbour, a barrister named Andrew. Read more about the makings of the video here. Candy's great at pulling in the whole neighbourhood to make videos, I've loved watching other ones she's made and edited herself. Go, Candy!
(Here's my earlier Tall Story fan art.)

Last night I got together upstairs at the Savoy Tup with a bunch of writers from our Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators and BBC journalist Claire Bolderson gave us a fascinating workshop on handling media interviews. Here's event organiser and writer Candy Gourlay and Claire (who is very tall).


The event was a new development in SCBWI's offerings, in that SCBWI used to be a group of people who were mostly unpublished, and our events were about breaking into the industry. But it worked! And now loads of us are launching new books, so we're having to change the focus to take in both newbies and people who are already being published and want to explore what to do next. So the newly forming series is called SCBWI Pulse and will address these new needs. SCBWI gave me a massive boost when I first started trying to get published. If you make children's books and live in Britain, I highly recommend joining SCBWI, and chip in your ideas for exactly what you want to happen here.

I got everyone who had one of their books handy to pose for a photo:

Fiona Dunbar, Lucy Coates, Candy Gourlay, Woofie the dog on the arm of Sue Eves, Sarwat Chadda and Tabitha Suzuma


Candy just got her printed copy of her amazing novel Tall Story (I blogged about it and made fan art here.) So we all went delightedly nuts over it:




(Click on the pic or here to read a close-up of the jacket flap.)

Five of us got to sit in the hot seat and do a practice radio interview about our latest book with Claire. Sarwat was a master of blending fascinating answers with information about his book, Devil's Kiss, and Tabitha was worried she said 'um' a lot, but then we all got so interested in what she was saying about her teen book on incest, Forbidden, that no one cared about ums. Sue Eves was nervous, but as soon as her puppet dog came out, we were instantly charmed, and could see how it could work even in a non-visual radio format.


Sarwat Chadda and Fiona Dunbar

I learned a lot from my time in the hot seat, particularly about keeping things short and tight, because I was so interested in what Claire was asking me about kids and the magic of comics that I barely managed to mention Vern and Lettuce in the three minutes. I suppose it was a mix of thinking that if we get more British kids reading comics, they'll naturally gravitate toward reading mine, and also that I'm more used to giving talks on comics panels, where I get at least ten minutes, with projected images to keep me thinking about my own book. But I was sitting next to my good friend

After my visit on Tuesday to see Francesca Cassavetti, I went for lunch at beautiful Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath and geeked out about books with the amazing novelist Candy Gourlay. She's one to watch, her book Tall Story comes out this June with David Fickling Books and is SUCH a great read! (Go have a look at the book's website!)

When I found out David Fickling was publishing my friend's novel, I went into a total excited fit, and when David asked if I knew Candy, I blurted out, 'Yes! We've even slept together!' He and my editor looked so shocked that it amused me hugely, so I just left it at that. In fact, we did share a bed when we went to the Bologna book fair in 2008. I just remember being almost ill with tiredness when we came back from a full day at the fair and carousing at the Pink Bar, and when I woke up at 3 in the morning, Candy was sitting up in bed with her laptop, working on her novel. I swear, that woman never stops.

Candy also organises loads of stuff for the British branch of the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators, which was really helpful in teaching me about the industry, helping me get a foot in the door, and introducing me to lots of other writers and illustrators. SCBWI used to be an organisation mostly for people who were trying to get published, but we've had so many success stories that we're having to shift our focus a bit to help people who are already getting published.

So after our Hampstead lunch, we went for a power walk to Camden, where we had ice cream at Marine Ices in Camden. I'd never been there, but Candy says it's The famous ice cream place in north London. (And it was yummy. My other favourite place is just a few doors down Chalk Farm Road, called Inhabitation and they do the best milkshakes ever. I am trying to avoid them because they are too good, especially the lime milkshakes.)

I'm off soon from the studio to meet my fab publicist Alexandra, to go up to Stratford for two days of events at the Stratford-upon-Avon Literary Festival, really looking forward to it. (I even just get excited about staying in a hotel, hehe.)

Thanks, Geek Syndicate for the Morris the Mankiest Monster mention on the review of Hi-Ex (another very friendly comics festival!).

Don't miss Forbidden Planet International's review of David O'Connell's third installment of Tozo. I popped into Gosh! Comics last week and saw all three booklets proudly on display, they looked smashing.

Congratulations to Darryl Cunningham, whose amazing graphic novel Psychiatric Tales just came back from the printer! Go look over here on his blog! (He's tallguywrites.) I can't wait to get my copy. It's a great read a

Last week I threw propriety to the wind and begged a Random House publicist named Corinne to get me a copy of Candy Gourlay's as-yet unpublished novel, Tall Story. Candy is such a funny, witty, up-for-anything friend that I suspected the book was going to be good, but I was thrilled to find out it was MORE than good, I was absolutely riveted from the second I sat down with it. And read it. And read it again. And then read it a third time. So here's my little bit of fan art.


You can read more about it over on Candy's website, and also find lots of great tips about writing and the world of publishing on her blog, Notes from the Slushpile.


The one I'm holding isn't the real cover, the painted one's how it's going to look, at least in Britain.

I love the dynamics of having someone very, very tall in the story. I once went to Hawaii with a group of 20 Taiwanese architects and their families, and being the only non-Taiwanese person and six feet tall, I can tell you, I felt like a giant. At a recent book launch I went to, there was this other woman there named Hayley Campbell, who also has a good view of the top of people's heads, and we totally eyed each other up from across the room, then had a chat and compared notes on being tall, as you do. We both feel a mixture of solidarity and a bit of competitiveness, when we suddenly find ourselves standing up much straighter next to each other. But our tallness is nothing compared to this Filipino kid in Candy's book. You totally have to read it when it comes out in here in June. It doesn't come out until next year in the States, but if you're clever, you'll order it from here online and get to make your way through all those funny British spellings. (You can pre-order it here.)

Oh, and one other thing, our DFC team photo got into The Bookseller, whee! (Original Mezolith party blog post here.)