Moving...

To all the wonderful followers and readers of the Scribbles,

Thank you SO much for travelling with me so far in my blogging journey here at the Scribbles. I know there are a lot of you who drop by, so I hope you will stick with me when I say that, very shortly, the Scribbles are moving home.

In future, they will be on my new website! 

I will post a link here as soon as it goes live, so you can link into it easily. The blog will still be known as Squidge's Scribbles, but you'll access via the website instead of here. Blogspot has served me well for a little over 8 years, but it's time for something different. Something that gives you the whole package of me as an author, not just my musings on life and writing. 

Watch this space!

(For historical purposes, here's a link to the first ever proper post I put up on the blog...Finding My Feet, posted Jun 29th, 2013)

Get voting!

Bedazzled Ink are passionate about the books they publish - and I'm proud to be one of their authors.

They are currently applying for a FedEx Small Business Grant, and need votes.

If you've read StarMark and enjoyed it, if you like what you've heard about Kingstone (due for publication this summer) and if you'd like to support me by supporting them, please log on and vote - once every 24 hours between now and the 5th April.

Click HERE to go the voting site for the all important voting button AND what Bedazzled Ink will do with the $25,000 if they are successful...

And thank you very much in advance for your support of them - and me.

The sun has got his hat on

At long last, it feels as though Spring has sprung in the UK!

Yesterday, in glorious sunshine, we went on a family bike ride across the fields and along the river and canal. (Only slightly saddle-sore this morning!)

There were loads of people out and about - had to laugh at the fisherman on the river, who was reeling in enthusiastically as we passed by. When his catch emerged, dripping, from the water I heard him mutter 'I've caught a bag!' Then there were the students walking along the canal path, who watched us go by and were heard to mutter 'must get our bikes out.'

The canal is a whole new world...sitting at a bench opposite one of the lock houses were a couple of gents enjoying a Sunday afternoon pint - of extremely cloudy home-made something that was being poured straight from the demi-john. They were a bit more upmarket at the second lock house - a glass of white wine in the front garden there. On the canal, I'd not realised before that beside each mooring is a little shed, almost as though that section of path is being claimed for the boat. I love narrowboats - they develop a character somehow with their names and decoration. I know of at least one writer who currently lives on a narrowboat and another whose children's stories were inspired by his time travelling on one.

But I'm feeling sunny because of something else, too; the orders are beginning to trickle in for Granny Rainbow! Proof that the PayPal button on the website works (even if it does take a pretty hefty fee for managing the money side of things for me) and folk are managing to find it! Hooray! Mind you - I realised that I'd been focussing so much on the website, I'd not added Granny to the 'where I've been published' page on this blog. So I've done that, too...

Thanks to everyone who's ordered so far - I will get them all packaged up, ready to post next Monday/Tuesday.

Hope your Monday's as sunny as mine!

Granny Rainbow - taking orders!

A lot of folk have asked how they can get hold of Granny Rainbow. Well, the PayPal button on my website is now live! (I am still hopeful that Granny will one day be stocked in a bookshop too...but for now, direct selling is my only option.)

If you'd like to order a copy, please do. I will post any orders received in the next week, on or soon after the 17th March, which gives me time to formally launch Granny Rainbow first!

If, however, you live close enough to me to be able to arrange picking up a copy direct, drop me a line from the website or facebook and we can arrange something that suits us both.

Please do mail me with what you think of Granny Rainbow - feedback is always useful, even if you don't like what you read. There's not a review page on the website yet, but I'll work on it...

A website is born, a story takes shape and the last few pics are in...

Assuming all has gone according to plan...I've just launched a website! You can find it here - do have a look and let me know what you think...I've checked everything as much as I can, but there's bound to be a glitch or two somewhere, knowing my lack of teccy-ness.

And I've finally managed to put pen to paper (well, fingers to keyboard actually) for the first time this festive season to capture 400 or so words of a competition story I need to have completed by the 20th of the month. I've written a lot more than that in reality - but lists of things to do and thank you letters don't count towards wordcount...

Delighted too, that the last pictures are in for Granny Rainbow. That means I can stick them into the formatted text, get the last few tweaks done on the cover - and Granny's off to the printers! By the end of the month, I could be surrounded by rainbow-hued copies of my stories and Laura's pictures - exciting or what?

So my New Year's off and running...how about yours?

Working on a website

A website? What the heck?!

Don't panic - I know you pop in here to catch up with me and see what I've been up to and that's not going to change! Squidge's Scribbles will remain the blog of Katherine Hetzel, author, for the foreseeable future.

But I've been wondering whether to create a website as well - to act as both a direct selling platform AND be somewhere that children (assuming they like my stories and want more!) can drop by...

I've been playing on Wix and have come up with something reasonably basic that I like. It's not live yet and certainly won't be until I run it past a few more folk who know a lot more about websites than me! (Talk about a steep learning curve - I thought setting up the blog was complicated at first, but if you'd seen me trying to insert a picture onto a web page that didn't keep cropping whenever I tried to resize it... )

I've done my research - looked at lots of children's author websites and the sort of thing they offer to the browser. 'Course some of them are all-singing, all dancing and have animated pictures and games and music and everything else that I wouldn't have a clue how to add. My website's going to be a bit simple by comparison - like this blog.

And me.

So far, I've planned pages on bio, books, news and contact details - and a link to this blog of course. But I'm also wondering whether to offer samples of stories, competitions, author visits...

Thing is - do I really need it? Is a website just another thing to take up my writing time when I could (probably) add similar things to my blog? The only real advantage I can see at the moment is that as my name becomes more familiar as an author, it would be easier to find ME on the world wide web; 'Squidge's Scribbles' probably isn't the first thing you'd think of if you wanted to search out the books and writing of Katherine Hetzel.

What do you reckon? Is it worth the extra effort to advertise myself that bit more? Or should I continue to build a platform from the Scribbles?

I'd be interested to know what you think...