Network News South West Round-Up, 2013-14: To Bristol – And Beyond!

Lesley Moss

Into Wonderland –
photo by Jo Thomas

Trip to the
Oxford Story Museum

A distant rumble from the Bristol and Bath area last autumn (hmm, it HAS been a long time!) informed us of many members longing to get together. All that was needed was someone brilliant, talented and awfully well organised ...  and on the spot ... step forward Jo Thomas. Professional writer, editor and children’s author Jo had no sooner joined SCBWI than she was persuaded to arrange meet-ups for a mix of published and emerging writers and illustrators, which she has done with aplomb.

Jo says: 

Since starting the Bristol group last autumn (2013), we’ve had several get-togethers and we keep each other up-to-date with any interesting book-related events through regular group emails. There are over 30 members on the mailing list now and we’ve had a good turnout at each of our meetings, with people coming from further afield as well as from Bristol and Bath. 

We’ve met in a different venue each time and tried out different ways of sharing ideas and catching up. Our first meet-up was in a café in a yurt and we had a good time telling each other about what we write and what we’d like to get out of the group. In early 2014, we met up at the Folk House for a chat and lunch and some gentle goal setting! 

Another gathering was at the end of March at Bristol Museum, where we did a short sketch/scrawl around the weird and wonderful exhibits and then had a nice catch up over coffee and cake. This sparked a plan for an outdoor walk and talk sometime over the summer, and we had the idea to organise a trip to the new Story Museum in Oxford. 

SCBWI in Narnia – photo by Jo Thomas

Bristol and Oxford SCBWI’s met up in Oxford.

Oxford Story Museum

Elen tries costume and the Story Loom – photo by Jo Thomas

At the Oxford Story Museum

And the Road Trip took place – complete with car mints!

The late Richard Masson, Undiscovered Voices winner and published author of Boonie (Hot Key Books), came up from Cornwall for the first Bristol meet-up in the yurt cafe, and it was a delight to meet him and talk about his life’s journey and his books. We are sad to lose him, but were so glad to have had the opportunity to meet him – and that he was able to bring his writing to the world, via SCBWI, UV, and Hot Key.

Meanwhile, over in Exeter, we held our very first masterclass, From First Draft To Gold, with the very lovely and skilful author/editor Lil Chase (Secrets, Lies and Locker 32, and Boys For Beginners, published by Quercus).

Lil has a wide range of editing experience with different publishers, including Working Partners, which she shared generously with us. A year later, we’re still feeling inspired ... unfortunately, some of us are still clinging to our adjectives and haven’t quite managed to let go of that vital ten per cent in our edits! But we are definitely using both sides of our brains  ... now where did I put that plot outline ...

After a cocktail-filled December Seasonal Social, Amelia Mansfield kindly arranged our next batch of Exeter write-ins for 2014, and somehow managed to fight her way through the storms to be there to host them, despite all rail links being cut off.

Our write-ins have continued to be popular, including plot discussions, publishing gossip, advice on WIP’s and even agony aunts to proffer support over rejections as a side order to the main event: writing together while consuming coffee and cake.

Recently, we have begun more focused write-ins in a new venue – with set times for silent intensive writing interspersed with coffee breaks. This is a change from our usual cafe drop-in and chat/write sessions, and we’re aiming for a combination of the two, as both have their advantages.

It’s always exciting to hear of our members’ publications and contracts, such as:

Sandra Greaves The Skull In The Woods (Chickenhouse),
Cecilia Busby’s Deep Amber (Templar),
Ellen Renner’s Tribute (Hot Key Books),
Rowena House’s The Marshalling Of Angelique’s Geese, in the War Girls anthology (Anderson Press), and 
Clare Helen Welsh’s first picture book contract, following her second place in the Greenhouse Funny Prize! So do let us know your good news so we can celebrate!

With the imminent demise of our Ning Network group, we now have our own Facebook group, SCBWI SW Chat & Info, which is great for virtual meet-ups and getting to know each other - do join us there. It’s a useful way of organising informal get-togethers – for example several Exeter members arranged to meet recently at a local YA festival. 

We can also check out who else is going to national SCBWI events, such as the Conference or Masterclasses and arrange to meet there or travel together.

Newsflash: Another new group: a critique group has begun in Marlborough, Wiltshire, run by Wendy Allen. Contact us on the email below for information.

I think that is all for now – if you are a South West SCBWI_BI member, do get in touch at southwest@britishscbwi.org and let us know if you have any questions, or any news and events to be included in the next South West round-up! 

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Lesley Moss is the joint SW network organiser.

Jo Thomas, writer and editor,  is currently coordinating

meetings for Bristol and Bath

@jotwriting   

My Little Hut

As part of our celebrations for the fiftieth birthday of Charlie and Chocolate Factory, Sandra Greaves takes a peek into Roald Dahl’s famous writing hut. 

The places where writers write are often intriguing. Roald Dahl’s writing hut is downright irresistible. With two tiny rooms, it was only just big enough for the 6ft 5’ giant of a man and a handful of furniture. Yet it was his workplace for 30 years.

Roald Dahl in his writing hut, circa 1990 © Jan Baldwin

Dahl had visited Dylan Thomas’s writing shed at Laugharne in the 1950s, and it inspired him to build his own in the orchard of Gipsy Cottage, his house at Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire. The little hut gave him a private space to work, and an escape from childcare when his Hollywood actress wife Pat was away. ‘There’s no doubt that babies are charming,’ he told his agent’s assistant, Sheila St Lawrence, ‘but they do bugger up the quiet and routine necessary for work.’

Dahl adored his hut and wrote in its back room for four hours every day – two in the morning before lunch (Norwegian prawns, half a lettuce and a Kit Kat) and two following his afternoon nap. ‘When I am in this little place, it’s lovely, and you can lose yourself in your work,’ he said. ‘It is my little nest, my womb.’ A former fighter pilot, he also compared it to the cockpit of a Hurricane – a place where his mind had the freedom to soar.

Once inside the hut, Dahl would sharpen his six pencils for the day, draw the curtains and sit in his wing-backed armchair – hollowed out to accommodate a spinal injury from his flying days – with a blanket over him and his feet in a sleeping bag when it was cold. An Anglepoise lamp shone a little light onto his writing board. Ensconced there, he would slip into the world of the imagination. ‘I go down to my little hut, where it’s tight and dark and warm,’ he told his biographer, Donald Sturrock, ‘and within minutes I can go back to being six or seven or eight again.’

The front room stored Dahl’s papers in two wooden cabinets, one of them with a grisly handle made out of a steel prosthesis from an unsuccessful hip operation.

The front room stored Dahl’s papers in two wooden cabinets, one of them with a grisly handle made out of a steel prosthesis from an unsuccessful hip operation. In the back room, Dahl kept his favourite pencils, his lined yellow US legal pads for writing, and a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ that included shavings of his spine floating in a glass vial, fragments of Babylonian pottery and a metal ball he had made out of the wrappers of hundreds of chocolate bars. Donald Sturrock describes everything as ‘yellow with nicotine and reeking of tobacco’, with ‘a carpet of pencil sharpenings and cigarette ash’ covering the linoleum floor.

Mostly Dahl was left to himself in his hut. He discouraged the children from visiting by telling them it was inhabited by wolves, though his granddaughter, Sophie Dahl, remembers occasionally being allowed to bring him a gin and tonic and stand outside on the step as he drank it. There were other visitors too – in the early days of the hut, Dahl described the cows ‘licking the windowpanes from time to time and eating the curtains if the windows were open’.

Amazingly, it’s all still there. After Dahl’s death in 1990, the hut was saved for new generations of fans and reconstructed in the nearby Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden. You can see it online or in its wood and polystyrene flesh - including cigarette butts in the ashtray and Dahl’s beloved ball of chocolate wrappers. How whizzpoppingly awesome is that?

© The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre

Celebrated SCBWI sheds

SCBWI South West organiser Lesley Moss is another fan of sheds – she’s worked in one for the last three years. ‘It’s like a beach hut!’ she says. ‘In the garden! Through the window I see trees and telegraph poles, coppery leaves, clouds. A twisty hazel twirls in front of the door - the sound of rain pattering on the roof makes me feel I’m in my own magic world: I’m outside in the garden, but inside my den too.’

So what does Lesley think about fellow shed writers?

‘Authors who work in sheds are lucky, whether yours be a shack, hut, or a palace of delights. And I think for children’s authors it’s especially appropriate, because the very act of entering your outdoor space instantly transports you back to the sheer fun of childhood den building, and how exciting that felt, and all the imaginary worlds and adventures that exist and start there. So you access your own childhood mind.’

Since moving to The Shed, Lesley has extracted her WIPs from the writhing clutter of the kitchen table, and they are so grateful to be rescued, they are practically writing themselves. She’s hoping they’ll edit and submit themselves too while they’re about it. Read her blog here.

Exterior of Lesley's Shed

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@sandra_greaves

Sandra Greaves is one of the winners of SCBWI’s Undiscovered Voices 2012. Her first novel, The Skull in the Wood, was nominated for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2014.

Blazing a Trail

Sandra Greaves 

Book trailers are increasingly important marketing tools for authors. So how do you go about making one? Sam Hepburn chose 15-year-old film student George O’Regan to create the trailer for her latest YA crime novel, Chasing the Dark. Sandra Greaves talks to them both about the fine art of trailer-making. 

‘Publishers really like trailers,’ says Sam Hepburn (who also writes as Sam Osman). ‘And if you go into schools and talk to reluctant boy readers, having a video really helps.’ That’s especially true if the video happens to be made by a teenage boy. Sam and George now even get asked to do double-act talks on the book and the trailer together.

The collaboration began out of pure chance. ‘The front cover of my book has a picture of a running boy on it, and by coincidence he’s the double of my son, Murdo,’ says Sam. ‘Murdo had a friend, George, who was at school with him but who’s now at the Brit School studying film, and they said they’d make me a trailer using my son as the running boy, and George doing the filming.’ 

It helped that Sam has a television background as both director and executive producer – there’s not much she doesn’t know about film-making. So why didn’t she make her trailer herself? 

‘I’m old school,’ she laughs. ‘I don’t shoot myself – I’m used to having a crew and telling them what to do. I’m not technical at all. So I was really pleased that they wanted to do it because I wanted something that appealed to people of their age.’ 

The process 

Sam wrote the script and then she and George discussed the shape of the film together, with George making minor changes of his own. ‘I didn’t want to tell the story,’ said Sam. ‘That’s where a lot of people fall down. You want to get a sense of the tone, enough to draw people in.’ 

‘Sam was great,’ says George, ‘easy to work with and not too formal. We talked a lot about what she was looking for, and she’s very good at getting ideas across.’ 

Sam chose to be there throughout the two nights of filming too, though motherly fears may have played a role there. ‘I took them down to the mean streets of Raynes Park because I didn’t think it was a good idea to have them wandering round London with camera equipment on their own at night,’ she says. 

Despite being made on a shoestring, the film is technically innovative, with high production values. The moving shots were achieved by a technique invented by George on the day, using longboards – a longer version of a skateboard. ‘I’d decided I wanted to be able to follow Murdo running but without loads of equipment,’ says George. ‘Just before filming I thought, “Why don’t I jump on my longboard?”

George and another friend, Luke, took it in turns to ride the board with the camera while the other steered. ‘We added “walk stabiliser” afterwards,’ says George. ‘I was really chuffed with the effect.’ 

Other impressive effects in the trailer turn out to be surprisingly low-tech. ‘There’s a shot of bright lights with words underneath and George literally did that by waving a torch around at night in the garden,’ says Sam. The film also includes still images Sam had collected for research in the course of writing the book. ‘It’s a very layered piece of work,’ she says. 

Finally the voiceover was done by George himself – he’d originally intended to use an actor, but Sam liked the raw tone of his guide track so much that she decided to keep it. 

‘He edited it all really well,’ she says. ‘He treated me like a client – he sent me rough cuts and we discussed the shots, and he did a very professional job. I was impressed by the way he worked.’ 

Sam and George’s trailer-making top tips:

1. Don’t tell the story - go for atmosphere. 

2. Make it a bit different from everyone else’s. 

3. Don’t aim for a mini-drama and don’t show the face of the protagonist. ‘The reader has an idea of what the protagonist should look like and it’s not the same for everyone,’ says George. 

4. Be as clear as you can and do a storyboard so you won’t be disappointed. 

5. Try to get really high production values. 

6. Do a recce beforehand. 

7. Prepare everything in advance, from parking spaces to luggage, and ask people’s permission (for example if shooting in front of someone’s shop) 

8. Bring lots of carbohydrates! ‘It’s amazing how everyone’s blood sugar goes down,’ says Sam. ‘In two hours, everyone’s starving. Kids especially are going to get tired and ratty.’ 

9. Split the tracks so you don’t mix sound and music. ‘If you get a foreign deal, you can just hand them the trailer and get them to revoice it,’ says Sam. 

10. Be nice! ‘Don’t force your ideas on directors,’ says George. ‘Sam had her ideas but she let me make my own interpretation of them. She was there for the filming, but the shots were down to me.’

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Chasing the Dark, published by Chicken House, is a crime mystery about a 14-year-old boy who turns detective when his mother is killed in a car crash. Click here to watch Sam’s video. For more background on how the film was shot, take a look at George’s behind-the-scenes footage from around 1:35 here. 

Sandra Greaves’s trailer for her Dartmoor-based ghost story The Skull in the Wood was made by a friend, TV and film director Ita FitzGerald. 

Ita’s top tip is: ‘Don't try and tell your story, just create a mood. It’s like a moving front cover - something that invites you in. Don't try to be literal. A challenge for authors, perhaps, having spent so long getting every word right.’

Watch Sandra's trailer here. 

Contact a director:

George O’Regan can be contacted on oregangeorge@yahoo.co.uk(available in the summer holidays)

Ita FitzGerald can be contacted on www.gotofig2.com/ita

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The Skull in the Wood shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize!

Get ready to dig into a big fat slice of cake this week, as we celebrate with Sandra Greaves, author of the chilling contemporary ghost story The Skull in the Wood, which has been shortlisted for the Waterstone's Children’s Book Prize 2014. 




We first celebrated Sandra's book launch in September. And we asked her to tell us a little more about her journey to publication....

@sandra_greaves 

Sandra tells us: "The Skull in the Wood would probably have never come to life if I hadn’t slipped on black ice back in 2010 and broken my ankle in three places. Suddenly I couldn’t do anything except watch daytime TV or write, and thankfully I chose the writing option. Grim though the accident was, I’m very grateful. My first draft emerged very fast and I was accepted onto the Apprenticeships in Fiction mentoring programme for a year where my mentor, the author Catherine Johnson, helped me knock out the bad bits and hone the good bits. Just when I’d got the novel as far as I could, Undiscovered Voices asked for submissions – and I ended up one of the winners of UV 2012. The fantastic exposure from UV netted me an agent (Anna Power from Johnson & Alcock) and then a publisher – Chicken House. The Skull in the Wood finally came out in September last year and was shortlisted for Shrewsbury Bookfest. And now, unbelievably, it’s been nominated for the Waterstone's Children’s Book Prize as well – to be judged on 3 April. Two other SCBWI writers are also shortlisted – Piers Torday and Gemma Merino. No matter what the outcome is, it feels brilliant. But now I really do have to get on with book number two…."

“The wild moor is the perfect place for this atmospheric tale. Sandra Greaves builds the tension masterfully, winding in the children’s anger with each other and with the world, hints at family enmity, hints at the old tales of the land on which they’re living, building the emotions – and the creep factor – into an edge-of-the-seat tale. Can the two children outrun this ancient hunt? Can they outrun their own hurt? Can they step back into Old Scratch Woods, where the Gabbleratchet resides, and bury the enmity for good?” Isabel Popple, Waterstone's review 

The Skull in the Wood is published by Chicken House for 10+ readers and is Sandra’s first novel. Born in Edinburgh and now living in Devon, she keeps several badly-behaved chickens on a smallholding midway between the moor and the sea. 

So let's wish Sandra the best of luck for April. You can catch up with her on her website, sandragreaves.com or her Facebook page.

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Tania Tay is an ex-advertising copywriter and has been published in Sable LitMag. She is currently writing a YA romantic thriller, is a member of The Golden Egg Academy and is on the editorial team at Words & Pictures.

Hooray for Undiscovered Voices winner Sandra Greaves!

@sandra_greaves

This week, we’re cracking open the champers for SCBWI debut author and Undiscovered Voices 2012 winner Sandra Greaves. Her novel, The Skull in the Wood, a contemporary ghost story for 10+ was published by Chicken House on 5th September. And being such lovely publishers they turned out in force to her launch in Totnes, together with a whole clutch of Scoobies....

You can watch the atmospheric trailer for The Skull in the Wood here. 

In Old Scratch Wood on Dartmoor, quarrelling cousins Matt and Tilda find a buried skull. And from that moment, dark things begin to happen. Birds and animals turn bad, and there are rumours of the return of an ancient curse known as the gabbleratchet. But what can Matt and Tilda do to stop it...? 

Rachel Leyshon, Sandra’s editor at Chicken House, says: “Sandra was a dream to work with – a wonderful mix of creativity, child-focused writing, and professionalism. Give Sandra a deadline, and she’d make it every time – nothing was too much trouble. But her sunny personality masks a dark and dangerous imagination! Editing The Skull in the Wood made me remember childhood fear all too clearly…” 

A wonderful introduction to Sandra's launch from
Chicken House publisher Barry Cunningham

Sandra Greaves was born in Edinburgh and lives in Devon. The Skull in the Wood, is her first novel. She was formerly in journalism, TV and communications and now works as a copywriter, as well as being a poet. Sandra and her partner keep several badly-behaved chickens on a smallholding midway between the moor and the sea. 

Sandra says: "Winning Undiscovered Voices 2012 was an amazing turning point for me. Suddenly I had a lovely agent in Anna Power of Johnson & Alcock – and then my book was bought by Chicken House. It all happened very quickly and felt totally surreal. My friends have been so brilliant about the book that I wanted to have a bit of a party! And it’s such a big milestone, I felt I had to mark it in some way. I bit my nails a lot beforehand, but when it came to it, the launch was great fun. Publisher Barry Cunningham did a wonderful introduction. Some friends from SCBWI South West generously made the trek over to Totnes to give me support. And my local bookshop – The Totnes Bookshop – was bowled over by the number of books they sold!"

So grab a glass of something fizzy and enjoy some photos of the evening, taken by our roving reporter, Rowena House. Here's to Sandra and we wish her every success with The Skull in the Wood!

SCBWI southwest joint coordinator Ellen Renner with Sandra Greaves,
Barry Cunningham, and SCBWI members Yona Wiseman and Amelia Mansfield

The Chicken House team: Eileen Lohf from their German office,
PR supremo Tina Waller and Sandra's editor Rachel Leyshon

SCBWI member Rowena House puts down her camera and celebrates
with Sandra and Barry Cunningham

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Tania Tay is an ex-advertising copywriter and has been published in Sable LitMag. She is currently writing a YA romantic thriller, and is on the editorial team at Words & Pictures.

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Rowena House is a journalist, mum and dog-walker as well as a wannabe novelist. She’s currently working on an edgy love story for teens set in east Africa as part of the MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University.