This time of year is always crazily busy. It’s literary festival season and the start of the new school year so children’s authors are dashing about the countryside. At least I had had a bit of a calm before the storm, as I had most of August at home writing two novels for Walker Books, designed to inspire ocean-love in their readers (more about these soon). But once I hit the road everything was more than usually busy.
In the last few weeks I’ve run a writing course and signed books with my friend Jackie Morris (her new ones The Quiet Music of the Gently Falling Snow and White Fox are STUNNING)
done several different literary festivals
, Crickhowell, Cheltenham, and Turn the Page in Totnes. And, as I’ve had a lot of different books to tell people about, it’s been a slightly schizophrenic existence.
The first are three books published by Graffeg and illustrated by an extraordinarily talented young illustrator called Abbie Cameron. All three are about animals (durr, of course they are they’re by me) but they are also about playing with words, because they are all in rhyme. I love writing in rhyme; you can use the aural echo rhyme creates to punch home a point, you can make new information fun 
and accessible and rhyme immediately makes everyone happy, and ready to join in. I’m not usually allowed to work in rhyme as the perception is that it gives translators a problem and makes foreign r
ights sales difficult for publishers (though I’m not sure how much of an obstacle to success this has been for Julia Donaldson and Axel Shaffer). Having these rhyming texts to work with in schools and at literary festivals gives me something that is instantly an interactive performance. I’ve already had lots of fun with them and look forward to using them for years to come (and Abbie and I will be doing three more books together). You can see a video about these here
The next two, The White Hare and Mother Carys Butterknife are also published by Graffeg and also use the talents of new illustrators
and Anastasia Izlesou, Anja Uhren respectively. These short stories are the first in a series of six folk tales – invented by me or retold and adapted from traditional stories. They have that fairy tale feel and a touch of darkness, enhanced by the illustration.
Anyone can read them – I wrote them to be accessible for any age- and imagined that they could be books to slip into a coat pocket and read in one sitting on a journey. Graffeg have done a beautiful job and the books look wonderful, and very distinctive. I can’t wait for the next two to be published and to have some space in my life to write the
last two stories in the series. In truth I hope they aren’t the last, I could write these stories forever. They are wonderful to tell and live audiences seem to love them.
Last and very definitely not least ‘A First Book of Animals’ was published on October 6th and is now out in the world. I was so lucky to 
be able to work with author and illustrator Petr Horacek on this book. It’s a collection of poems and prose poems, each one about a particular animal and each one embodying some aspect of its appearance, behaviour or ecology.
I wanted each poem to be a fresh and clear as possible – so that readers would be captivated by creatures they’d never heard of before and see familiar animals in a new way. And I wanted everything about the writing of this book to be enjoyable, so I didn’t worry about making choices about which animals to include. I chose my favourites, and animals that I remembered getting excited about when I was little. As a child,I was lit up by the blackbirds and frogs and hedgehogs in our back garden; animals far away, that I read about or saw on the TV, gleamed and glittered in my imagination. The wonderful thing about Petr’s illustrations, is that they all glow with that heart-shine – they aren’t simply beautiful images they are full of emotion and reflect what animals look like inside me where they are the stars of my heart.
Petr and I have been doing events together and its worked so well – it’s great fun being on stage together and the audiences get to see Petr painting live which is incredibly exciting.
T
The bigger message of A First Book of Animals is to communicate the wonder and value of nature’s variety. I have two more books
coming out in the next year that do this job (more about this soon too) but each one will work for a different sort of audience, which means I’ll have a way of talking to almost anyone about the most important subject there is BIODIVERSITY and how to save it. I’ll be going to the World Land Trust symposium in Mexico all next week and meeting conservationists from all over the world. I’ll be sharing with them some of the pages of these books and showing one of the ways in which we can create the conservationists of the future.
