Friday's the day!

This Friday, I'll be taking delivery of 300 copies of More Granny Rainbow! Hooray!

I ordered fewer copies this time - mainly because my spare room's not big enough to store another eight boxes of books on top of the three I've still got left of Granny Rainbow. Of course, for the self-pubber, that means a slight increase in price per copy; unfortunately it also means an increase in the price I charge the reader. BUT if you buy direct from me, you'll still be paying less than if you buy via a shop.

I will make sure there's a pre-order button (and offer!) up on the website by the end of this week, with copies posted to arrive at the beginning of May.

A Tentative Launch Date...

More Granny Rainbow is still at the printers at the moment... but I am hopeful the books will be ready by the end of the Easter holidays or soon after.

That being so, I've tentatively booked a launch date, the 25th April. Stick the date in your diaries, as there's going to be another party! I've asked Delice Deli to host it again, as although there are some accessibility issues (we use the upstairs room), the Delice team are so good and, I found out recently, going to stock Panda Eyes books!

This means that there is going to be a shop in Loughborough selling both Granny Rainbow and More Granny Rainbow! *squeee!* As well as lots of local history books, too - that's actually Panda Eyes' speciality... I'm a bit of oddity for them, really.

I'll be sending out invites once I've confirmed the books will be ready in time; if you fancy coming, do drop me a line. For those who can't get, I'll be posting a Paypal button over on the website soon, so you'll be able to pre-order books which I will mail out on the Monday/Tuesday after the launch. (Some special people will get theirs pre-launch...)

Exciting stuff!

Now all I need to do is sort out food, activities, helpers...

Deleting Problems...

So, for the first time, I've decided to delete a blog post. If you've been following the Scribbles for a while, you might remember it - all about the baubles I was knitting before Christmas.

For some reason, this post has attracted a heck of a lot of spam interest. About shoes.

I have no idea why.

Was it the title that triggered something? ('A Strange Addiction' - later changed to 'A Strange Compulsion')

Was there something embedded in it that created spambots to select it? If so, I have no idea what or how, because I'm not teccy enough to work that out.

Was I just unlucky?

Either way, it's that post that led me to (unwillingly) add a filter to the comments, to avoid the plague of spam comments that was clogging up my inbox.

Thing is, it doesn't seem to have made a difference to how many times the spambots are trying to hit the post. As a result, I've seen my hit-rate climb, but it leaves me with a sense of frustration because the hits aren't genuine. I would rather have tens of hits a day of genuine readers than apparently high numbers generated by a machine. The Scribbles is not about number-crunching - never has been. It's about engaging with you, the reader.

Hence the blog post has been deleted. I've kept a copy of it, but you won't be able to see it any more.

Whether it's enough to stop the robots, I've no idea. They might just pick on another post instead...but I'll deal with that when - if? - it happens.

Storytelling - Part 3

Remember the storytelling course I did? Blogged about it  here (part 1) and here (part 2).

Today, I put it into practise.

I wasn't going to, in spite of the fact I'd prepared a story. In fact, if Tahlita hadn't mailed me on Sunday evening, I never would have done it at all. Y'see, I was chickening out. Doing a story - of my own - without a book to hide behind was just too flippin' scary. But it was only a ten minute slot after all and I didn't want to let Tahlita down, so I said yes.

The daft thing is, I still had to write the story 'properly' on paper first - remember that whole 'embedding' issue? I used notes to remind me of the storyline during the actual telling - which, I hasten to add, got simpler and simpler as I went on because I simply couldn't remember everything!

The lovely thing about the session itself was that, of the five storytellers, only one had not been on the storytelling course with me; I was among familiar faces. It was a privilege to see how everyone else worked, using props and actions and involving the children. I was concentrating so hard on the story, I forgot all that! The kids just got me...and a story about The Story Bird.

I didn't even resort to the comfort of a storytelling chair - and at the moment, there's a TALKING LADYBIRD CHAIR in the Charnwood Museum as part of the Ladybird Books Centenary celebrations! Think I might have had to fight the kids for the privilege of sitting in it, now I think about it...

I came away feeling more confident, but with things to improve on, like involving the children more with actions and rhymes. Perhaps 'finishing' the story better to leave the listener to guess at what happens next rather than tying it off nicely? (Jury's still out on that one - part of me can see a place to cut it and leave the listener guessing, but part of me wants a happy ending.) And props - can I use them at all without them overpowering the story? (I also came away with what I assume is a lovely legend of how the man got into the moon...might be able to do something with that.)

I also realised that you don't have to make up the story you're telling each time - you can use traditional fairytales or legends. You just have to put your own spin on them and tell them the way you can, rather than in the way you can't.

So, a bit of a high spot in a horribly windy, yet beautifully sunny and dreadfully hailly day.

Getting arty...

When I want a break from writing, I often turn to a bit of knitting...or sewing...or drawing...or whatever other arty fancy that's caught my attention and is flavour of the month in the Squidge house.

Currently, it's colouring in.

Yep - you did read that right.

Colouring in.

I saw Johanna Basford's Secret Garden in Waterstones and fell in love with the gorgeous illustrations. Want is a strong word, but I wanted that book...so I dropped heavy hints about it just before Mothering Sunday. Surprise, surprise; I got a copy! It's described as 'An Inky Treasure Hunt and Colouring Book', and it is the most fun you can have with a fineliner and some coloured pencils or  felt pens.

Now for those who've never heard of Johanna, she's a pen-and-ink artist. Her website is full of the most amazing artwork (she used to hand draw wallpapers! Literally hung lining paper on the wall and drew onto it while standing on a ladder...) and her first book, Secret Garden, has sold over a million copies. The second book, Enchanted Forest, has recently been published; that might have to feature on my birthday wish list...

I thought I'd share with you my first few pages. I'm hopping around the book, doing what I fancy, but trying to work on just one colour page and one black and white at a time. Because it's not just colouring in that you get to do; some of the pages have outlines for you to add 'inky details' to. My own preference is to keep these pages monochrome so that the detail is not lost - and black and white has its own special beauty.

Pre-printed page on the left, my inky details on the right...

Other pages have flowering vines or branches for you to add birds, butterflies, bees or snails to. There are mazes to follow, hidden frogs, bugs and other creatures to find (I found the squirrel already!). And then there's tons of colouring in...

I've already had to buy some more green watercolour pencils, because my range of greens was a little limited for so many lovely leafy pictures. And I am being challenged to blend the colours to give the pictures depth, making the details really stand out on the page.

Ol' Blue Eyes...

Water of Life...

The pictures take - literally - hours to complete. I have to keep the pencils really sharp as there are lots of very fine details, and I've learned that coloured fineliners can show through the page if you're not careful - but pressing on hard with the pencils marks blank spaces on the page underneath, so I have to work with a spare piece of paper underneath the page I'm colouring.

I think I'm going to be challenged by the pages where there are blank spaces for you to add something of your own - such as the page with a hole that needs to be filled with whatever the padlock is keeping safe...not sure I'm that much of an artist to do the page justice. We shall see.

In the meantime, I'm having loads of fun and probably not doing lots of things I ought to be doing because of it...

Granny Rainbow's Workshop

Ever wondered what Granny Rainbow's workshop looks like?

'Her workroom was just inside the front door. It was a small room, brightly lit and lined with hundreds of narrow shelves. The shelves were filled with bottles... and the bottles were crammed with coloured powders. Old Tom stared in amazement and tried to name them all in his head... turquoise, cerise, vermillion, citrine, ochre, sapphire, ruby, lime, primrose, russet... In the end, he ran out of words to describe them all - he couldn't believe so many colours existed!'

I was playing on google images today, searching for shelves of coloured powders, and came across a photo on the Old Holland Classic Colours website - they have been manufacturing artists' pigments for something like three centuries.

It's exactly how I pictured Granny's workshop...

What do you think? And funnily enough, in More Granny Rainbow, Granny has a case for carrying small bottles of powders, just like the one in the bottom right hand corner... 

For the third book, I think Granny's going travelling...

A Monty Python Moment: Spam!

So, just in case anyone wants to leave comments on the Scribbles in future, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to do something for me; I have finally turned on word verification. 

I realise this is a pain in the proverbial - and some of you will automatically not leave a comment because of it. But I've been fairly heavily spammed recently - mainly about shoes, though goodness knows why - and it's getting to be a bit problematic for both my inbox and the blog, in spite of the usual filters.

Maybe I'll be able to turn it off again soon, when the spammers get tired...because, in the words of Monty Python...

Interior: cheap café. All the customers are Vikings. Mr and Mrs Bun enter—downwards (on wires).

Mr. Bun:

Morning.

Waitress:

Morning.

Mr. Bun:

What have you got, then?

Waitress:

Well there's egg and bacon; egg, sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg, bacon and spam; egg, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam; spam, spam, spam, egg and spam; spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam; or lobster thermidor aux crevettes, with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle paté, brandy and a fried egg on top and spam.

Mrs. Bun:

Have you got anything without spam in it?

Waitress:

Well, there's spam, egg, sausage and spam. That's not got MUCH spam in it.

Mrs. Bun:

I don't want ANY spam.