Bits and pieces!
Scorchio! (Part 1)
Flippin’ heck, but it’s been hot here in the UK recently! The Newark Book Festival saw temperatures well into the high twenties - which for a Brit, is pretty hot. We don’t get any nice sea breezes in the middle of the country, and our market places rarely have trees to shelter under, but we had plenty of cover in the Literature Village.
I shared a stall with a friend of mine, Mark, who was selling his fab collection of steampunk short stories, Colossus of the Thames. We had two great days, talking to fellow authors and readers, and trying to keep the fabulous bubbles from the bubbleman from bursting all over the books! In addition to the vast array of books available to buy, there was music and singing and Little John and Maid Marian and a mechanical dragon!
While we were there, I was chatting to Mark about how I wanted to publish a collection of short stories, but was rather lacking in inspiration at the moment. So Mark, who is VERY good at coming up with titles and using them as prompts for his own writing, gave me a good half dozen titles to be getting on with. (I’m pleased to say I’ve already mapped out two shorts as a result, and the idea for a collection is really beginning to take shape as a result…)
Back to school…
Then there was an author visit to Halam C of E Primary School the following week as part of the Newark Book Festival’s School’s Programme. The day started off less than brilliantly, when Sparky (our electric car) suffered a stone chip to the windscreen, but I arrived, met Catherine (who was Festival photographer for the day) and spent the rest of the day working with the pupils on various creative writing projects.
Now, you know I always say I love working with the children because their imaginations simply fly on days like these AND because some of the children produce work that they (and me and their teachers) are really proud of. Well, this day was no exception.
Class Oak did ‘What’s in the bottle?’ We had spider gloves, worn by a cow (as in sucky Spiderman-like gloves) which meant that the cow could go off on adventures with its spider friend. Goblin snot, used by a mermaid to get rid of a pirate who was pestering her.
Class Cherry made up a Granny Rainbow story as a group. I can honestly say I’ve never worked with such an enthusiastic class before. Here’s the outline of the story we came up with; Granny Rainbow and the Volcano Villain!
Basically, the story is…
Peter Piper sees people arguing, and tries to sort it out. Villtner (the villain) gets even crosser, and dangles Peter over a volcano. Granny Rainbow is watching all the villains on her interactive CCTV, sees what’s happening and designs a potion to make the volcano cool and solidify, thus saving Peter from a lava-y end. Oh - and she gets there by helicopter.
Now, as we were running through this story, the children began to notice various problems. It was pointed out that Peter had nothing to dangle from. So a crane was introduced. And when Granny cut the rope, wouldn’t Peter be hurt when he landed on all the spiky solidified lava? So Granny had to provide a mattress, bouncy castle, or trampoline so that when he fell, Peter would just bounce up. And THEN there was a discussion about what should happen to Villtner, too. Gunned down? Sent to jail? Be left at the top of the volcano to walk all the way home? I loved it!!! This was story development at its most basic, self-editing in its earliest stages - and the children were doing it without any prompting from me!
We decided that the children would draw the story rather than write it, and their pictures are the most brilliant things I’ve ever seen. Here are a few of them - look out for Granny Rainbow’s jet plane, her multicoloured potion, cranes a-plenty, various trampolines and mattresses, and the ‘before and after’ pics. Plus a few random dragons and dinosaurs that crept in…
After lunch, it was off to Class Maple, with my bag of objects for ‘Three Things’. We worked through one example, then picked out two more sets of three for the children to choose which they’d like to use. They could have elephant, tiara, baked beans; dragon, police car and old fashioned hooter; or shell, rocket, and a bag of money. Once again, there were some incredible ideas coming out of the children’s heads. We shared some of them at the end of the session - and a couple of them stuck with me. One was about an elephant princess with a sapphire tiara that had baked beans spilled on it and took the princess to another dimension. The other was the detail in a story about a rocket that took 34 hours to get to its destination, but 50 hours to return when it was loaded with money. Just a little detail, but it meant the young author had thought about the impact of the action. The children also mapped out their stories using pictures, mind maps, and wiggly ‘storylines’. But this one, pictured below, was my favourite. Written by a young man who didn’t like writing, whose spelling is best read phonetically, and was the most he’d written in a long time… All about Money Man and his shell sheeld (sic - shield)
And then there was a bookstall at the end of the day…
Scorchio! (Part 2)
And then it got to silly temperatures here in the UK. Mr Squidge bought a paddling pool, which we dabbled our toes in on the Monday (max temp 38 degrees) in the shade of our pear tree. On the Tuesday, Mr Squidge and I took a trip to Birmingham to fetch a new car, because Sooty (our trusty diesel estate) was not well at all and Squidgeling T - who has been borrowing Sooty - needed wheels to get him to various gigs over the following week. Being stuck on the motorway in stationary traffic while the external temperature was 36 degrees at 11 am was…an experience. And it only got hotter when we got home. 40 degrees! We retrested inside the house, closed all the curtains and the windows, and managed to keep at a (relatively) cool 25 degrees.
My poor garden is scorched brown…we used the paddling pool water to refill the water barrels in an attempt to keep our beans and tomatoes alive, but everything else is suffering terribly. Only the blackberries seem to like the heat…they’re going mad on the bramble. We’ve had a little rain, but we could do with more.
And finally…
If you are anywhere near Southwell on the 13th August, do pop into the Cathedral Gardens for a Pop-up Book Festival which includes a Teenage Market. I’ll be there with my books - come and say hi!