Agent Party Success Story!

Pop those corks, people! Today we are celebrating not just one person's great news but the wonderful way that SCBWI can help you in your writing journey!

Andy Shepherd found her agent, Jo Williamson, through the fantastic SCBWI Agent Party that was held in November 2013 at the Frontline Club in London (organised by the amazing Michelle Newell).


Keep reading to find out how it all happened for Andy and Jo.

Andy Shepherd is a children’s writer working on middle-grade fiction and picture books. She lives near St Ives – the Fennish one, not the coastal one – with her husband, her two young sons and their Border Collie, Poppy. Growing up on the Essex coast, she spent most of her time scribbling stories and messing about in boats. Since then she’s been slightly distracted by going to college, doing a PGCE, teaching English and becoming a Campaigns Officer for Oxfam, but she has finally found her way back to writing.

She has written ‘Phoenix Fire’, a middle-grade contemporary fantasy, and a number of picture book texts, including the ‘Lizzie May’ series and is currently working on her second novel. Her main ambition is to figure out how to move Cambridge closer to the sea.

"The book I’ve written is a middle-grade contemporary fantasy called 'Phoenix Fire'. It's about 11 year old Davy who, bullied at school and isolated at home, escapes into a hidden garden where strange metallic animal sculptures come to life and he is drawn into an old woman’s obsessive quest to hatch a Phoenix egg. But will the creatures he finds – the beautiful jewelled insects, the hulking komodo dragon and the giant metallic spider, which lurks at the bottom of the garden and haunts his dreams, help or hinder him? And when all appears to be lost, will he finally find the fiery self-belief he needs to hatch the Phoenix?"

"The story is all about being true to yourself, and being able to speak up for what you believe in, no matter what other people may think. I wanted it to be the kind of book I loved to read as a kid, but with a contemporary edge."

"I did actually meet Jo at the Agents’ Party in London. In fact I very nearly didn’t as I had made my way round the room madly pitching to every agent and right at the end I realized I hadn’t spoken to Jo. It crossed my mind that I could let myself off the hook and just head home (I was shattered by then after getting the nerve up at all!) but I thought, 'no, I’ve come this far.' And I’m so glad I did! She really liked the pitch and seemed to get what I was going for with the book instantly."

"The day after the event I got my submissions out to all the agents who had shown an interest and Jo was top of the list. She was also the first one to get back to me and ask for a full. Over the next week I had 3 more requests for the full. Jo made her offer within the week and one of the other agencies asked to meet me. In the end, however, I chose to go with Jo as she really understood the book and I felt we would work very well together." 

Jo Williamson from the Antony Harwood Agency speaks very highly of both SCBWI and her new client Andy. 

"The SCWBI party is such an excellent opportunity for agents to meet dedicated, enthusiastic and talented authors and so it is always something I look forward to."

"This year, I met a huge array of writers, but Andy's pitch and her subsequent manuscript really got me hooked. For me, the author relationship is crucial so it was wonderful to have been able to meet Andy before I read her book as I just knew she would be great to work with! I could see how driven she was and how passionately she felt about the story. And what a story...

  "With allusions to books such as THE SECRET GARDEN, TOM'S MIDNIGHT GARDEN and THE PHOENIX AND THE CARPET, Andy's MG novel, PHOENIX FIRE has a classic feel to it, but contemporary issues of family breakdowns and bullying are also at its heart. Andy's writing is fluent and, boy, can she do atmosphere! I just fell in love with it and knew it was something I wanted to represent."

 "I am delighted that the SCWBI network gave me the opportunity to represent Andy and I look forward to guiding her through what I am sure will be a hugely successful publishing career." 

 Let's all raise our glasses, toast Andy and wish her all the best for the future and while we're at it let's say cheers to SCBWI BI, the extra, magic ingredient in so many success stories.

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Lorraine Gregory has been writing fantasy adventure books aimed at middle-grade boys for the last three years. She's been a chef and a restaurant manager and now works from home as an Antenatal Teacher. She belongs to the Words & Pictures Team and helps Tania to bring joy to our Saturday Celebrations' posts

Picture Book Basics - Graphic Design

After the artwork is created the next stage to consider is the text and the design layout. For a commissioned title this might all be handled by your publisher. Nevertheless, it's important to know some of the processes involved. This essay in Book Basics has been entirely put together by book creator and independent publisher Gillian McClure in consultation with her graphic designer Lisa Kirkham, experts in the process of designing and laying out books for publication. 

GRIDS

When you start work on the images for a picture book you will need to have grids to work from in order to make sure your layouts fit precisely the dimension of the page. A book/typographic designer can create these using a page layout program such as Indesign. The type then needs to be added to the layouts on the grid and adjusted to fit the area allocated to it. For this you will benefit from having a good knowledge of typographic design and fonts, or working with a typographic designer. Here is a grid of the front and back cover for a picture book 220x 270 with flaps allowing for an extra 1mm width and 6mm height. 

TYPOGRAPHIC DEFINITIONS 

Font. Traditionally speaking, a font refers to a type of one particular face and size. More commonly now it is used to mean any type. 

Typeface refers to a family of fonts: the roman, italic and bold of a particular design. When choosing a typeface you must consider the bolds and italics as well as the roman. It may be that while the roman is perfect for you, the italic looks wrong, or the bold may be too heavy. 

Serif font. Put simply, a serif font is one that has a small line attached to the end of a stroke of a letterform. For example, Times.

Sans serif is a font that does not have such a line, for example, Helvetica.

FONTS 

Here are examples of fonts used in some of my books: 

Stone Informal in Prickly Pig 1976. This typeface has been very popular for use in children’s books because it had an ‘infant’ (or single-story) ‘a’ which is often believed to be easier for children to read.

Nara – Lisa Kirkham’s own typeface. It is delicate and fits the gentle style of illustration and story of The Little White Sprite

and also the text frames at 70% opacity in Zoe’s Boat

Compendio used in We’re Going to Build a Dam. This was chosen because of its irregular line, which blends with the strong black ink line of the illustrations and the messy work of damming a stream 

Sabon is more traditional – good for a fable like Flood but still with a modern feel. It has a relatively high ‘x’ and therefore looks open and easy to read. Some fonts have a small ‘x’ height in relation to the whole letter.

Bully Girl was used for the title of Flood

TYPOGRAPHIC DESIGN 

Sara Fanelli was one of the first illustrators to create her own lettering, making type an integral part of the illustration.

Mythological Monsters. © Copyright Walker Books

Illustrators like Emily Gravett have followed in that tradition and had a lot of fun making the lettering part of the narrative as in Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears.

© Copyright Macmillan.

If possible, work closely with a typographic designer at the earliest planning stages of a picture book. Then, if the word count of your story is not big, the typeface, text and illustrations can become integral to the narrative.

 Rabbityness by Jo Empson. © Copyright Child’s Play.

It might not always be possible to do this when working for a traditional publisher with in-house designers but it can be really helpful if you are going down the self publishing route. Look for a typographic designer who specialises in picture book design and has an awareness of the reading eye movement so you can place the text correctly in your layouts without any confusion over the flow of the words. If possible, choose a typographic designer whose work seems compatible with your own and who you find inspiring to work with. Ideally you will be passing roughs and layouts to and fro until the typography and images all harmonise and feed seamlessly into the narrative. What you are trying to avoid is a typeface that is just for effect, gimmicky, or in-your-face. Here is a good example of typographic design that fits in well with the narrative and page design. 

Harry and the Jaggedy Daggers by Jan Fearnley. Copyright Egmont Press

SCANNING ARTWORK 

Once the artwork is completed, it will need to be scanned. This will all be done by the publisher’s designer. If you are self publishing your picture book, you will have to get it scanned yourself at a resolution of no lower than 300 dpi CMYK. You will need an A3 scanner or pay to have it done professionally. If you do your own scanning, you will also have to know how to do colour correction in photoshop to match up the colours of the scanned image with the original artwork. This can be tricky as RGB colours on the screen do not necessarily look the same as CMYK printed colours. So if your book is going to be printed overseas (which is much cheaper than in the UK) it’s advisable to ask a local printer to do some colour proofs to match with the artwork before the press-ready file is sent off as couriering back proof copies will be an extra cost and any changes made at proof stage, expensive. A sample of three different coloured spreads is usually sufficient to see if the colours of the book are true. 

Once you are happy with the colour balance of the scanned spreads, the typographic designer will drop in the typeface (according to the original grid design). Because you can create separate files at this stage – with or without type – there is the opportunity to be creatively free with type colour and design without causing too much added cost or problems with translation into other languages. 

 

COPYRIGHT PAGE

Here you will need: Copyright details, date, where the book is printed, Publisher’s logo and details, ISBN – bought and registered with Nielsens via Pub Web.  Hopefully there will be reprints of your books. You can add a way of telling which print run a book belongs to by adding a sequence of numbers that can easily be altered before each reprint. For example, 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. For your second print run, you just remove the number 1, and so on. 

BACK COVER & FLAPS 

You will need to buy a barcode. You can add a ‘shout’ sentence on the back cover – a review if you can get one at this stage  


Also reference to other books on the front and back cover flaps if your book has flaps. 

PROOF READING 

 It is vital to get a proof reader to check all the text before your book goes to print. If there’s a missed typo, there’s nothing you can do until a new edition is printed! 

PRESS READY FILES 

Once you have the press-ready file completed, it will be sent electronically to the printer according to a previously arranged schedule. Here is an example of one from a Chinese printer: 
PO with us ----- Feb 27

Payment in full with us ----- Mar 13

All files with us ----- Mar 13

Plotter out ----- Mar 20

All okay to print ----- Mar 27

Complete shipping instruction with us ----- Apr 7 

Bulk ex-works ----- Apr 24

ETA UK around ----- June 5 

TYPOGRAPHIC RIGHTS 

Finally, it’s worth remembering that if you want to self publish an out-of-print picture book where the rights have reverted to you, this does not include the typographic design rights. Your original publisher still holds these. So you will have to get your story re-typeset. This happened with Selkie. We used the same typeface Garamond but made changes to the line length; shortening it on this page to make it easier for a child’s eye to read. We were also able to improve on the colour making it closer to the original. 

 Doubleday edition 

Plaister Press edition

----------------------------------------------------------

 Gillian McClure is the creator of dozens of picture books for children, and former member of the Society of Authors CWIG committee. See her website here, and blog here. 

Network News: Mixed-genre critiquing in the North-West

By Gill James 

The events room at Waterstone’s is even more mysterious than usual. There’s just about enough room to set out a long table for the six of us. We can’t find the light switch. The sky is grey, which isn’t unusual for Manchester. Screens block the little light that comes through. The room feels chilly.
We realise that we’re tripping over furniture that’s had its day and has been replaced by better in the café.
And then some magic happens.
The lights snap on.
And we start to critique.

This critique group is slightly unusual in that anyone in the North West network can come along and it is not genre specific. Every meeting is different and has a varied mix of people. We send work in advance but this time only one person has submitted.

“Bring work along on the day,” says Steph, our network co-ordinator. “We’ll still meet and we can have a bit of a social.”

She’s quite right: members asked for more meetings, we’ve booked the space and it’s good for writers to socialise.

As it happens we have three pieces of work to look at.

A unique selling point

We discuss the beginning of a story that has characters we’ve met before. The writing is lively. There is a disabled person in it but the story is not about disability. We think this is a good selling point. We debate who might be the target reader. The characters are 16-17. The story is light-hearted. We decide it’s aimed at younger teen girls. That’s about right; children / young people like to read “up” about people who are going through the next stage of growing-up. We point out a few tiny typos and grammatical mistakes.

Less is more

Next we look at a picture book text we’ve seen before. The writer has cut back. It’s another case of less is more. It works so much better now, we think. There are plenty of anthropomorphic animals, plenty of that repetition so enjoyed by young children and a sound but simple story. The rhythms and rhymes are becoming much more polished. There are just a few weaker parts that now need tweaking. We’re fascinated by the writer’s hard copy – it’s absolutely covered in notes in all different colours. That’s what I call serious editing. Also, perhaps this is proof of how hard picture book texts are to write.

Finding the third way

I bring along excerpts of a novel that has been seen by this group before and that now has a publisher. Edits came back the day before. I have agreed with 70% of what the editor said. I want some more opinions on the rest. The group agree with the editor that all the letters in the third strand of the story should be no longer than a page each but that they should still contain a mixture of domestic information and examples of how World War II is impacting on some German teen girls. And yes, the reference to the black SS uniform should stay but the editor is right; it is clumsily expressed here. Collectively, we rephrase.
On the same page we notice that one word is used three times. This is after the author has edited eighteen times and the editor twice. Agatha Christie, research tells us, says everything three times. The rule of three rules. Is this why? Or is this a sign that we never finish but merely abandon?

Useful cross-fertilization 

I actually like the cross-fertilization that happens at these meetings. I write mainly for young adults but looking at a book for younger teens reminds me about pace and character development and looking at a picture book text helps me to work out how to write tightly.

We chat easily at the end of the session and we don’t notice the Manchester greyness anymore. Only as we step outside into the warmth of the shop do we remember that the events room was a little cool. We’ve all benefitted from sharing ideas about writing.

A good way to spend a Sunday afternoon 

Waterstone’s has a buzz about it on a Sunday afternoon. Yes, it’s a big chain and it’s hard to get and maintain shelf-space in there but it is a book shop and they are incredibly generous in allowing us to use their events room.

I have to have a look around before I go home, though I refrain from buying two books I see – I have over fifty at home waiting to be read. All in all, good use of a Sunday afternoon

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Gill James writes fiction for children and young adults. She lectures in English and Creative Writing at the University of Salford. Her novel, The House on Schellberg Street, will be published by Crooked Cat in Spring 2014.  

The Yuk Factor

By Celia J Anderson

Let me explain. The Yuk Factor is a term we use in my Year Five and Six reading groups for any sort of writing that oversteps their soppiness mark. The kissy bits. The luuuuurve angle. The parts that make them shudder. 

To tie in with our February theme of passion, I’ve been thinking about how the pre-teen age group feel when they’re reading a great story and it suddenly goes all mushy on them. The books that sparked this train of thought were Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay, which completely dominated my Christmas holiday reading. While everyone else in the house was chain-eating chocolates and seeing how much stilton they could fit on a small oatcake, I was curled up in front of the fire devouring the books one after the other – thank goodness for Kindles and the instant gratification of Amazon. 

One of the elements that kept me hooked was the tense, passionate but strangely innocent relationships that developed between the heroine Katniss and her two male best friends Peeta and Gale. Would Gale’s smouldering sensuality and dare devil character win through or would she pick steady, loving Peeta? 

Here’s a taster, as Katniss (with Peeta at the time) battles with her feelings for Peeta and Gale in the first of the trilogy, The Hunger Games: 

‘I want to tell him that he’s not being fair. That we were strangers. That I can’t explain how things are with me and Gale because I don’t know myself. That it’s no good loving me because I’m never going to get married anyway and he’d just end up hating me later rather than sooner. That if I do have feelings for him it doesn’t matter because I’ll never be able to afford the kind of love that leads to a family, to children. And how can he? How can he after what we’ve just been through?’ 

I swayed from one choice to the other as the story hurtled on – the author cleverly makes the reader wait right until the end to see which way the wind blows; no spoilers here though! 

Another book that’s been on my reading list lately is Girl with a White Dog by Anne Booth - it doesn’t come out until March 1st (I got hold of the first proof copy in the bidding for Authors for the Phillipines) but it shows a different, gentler side of young relationships. (Find out more here) 

‘I hadn’t realised his eyes were so green and smiley, or how his hair flopped forward. I could feel myself getting redder and I was glad we had just been jumping about so it might not be obvious I was blushing.’ 

Anne Booth

The tentative friendship between Jessie and Ben is only a small part of the story but it’s beautifully woven into the themes of wartime atrocities, the pain of getting old and confused, of fear and family issues and the growing understanding of a worried young girl. 

Even Harry Potter falls prey to The Yuk factor sometimes – I remember reading the books as they were published and wondering what his fans were thinking as he fell in love for the first time and eventually ended up with the girl I wanted for him. At what age do children appreciate the realities of boy/girl antics, for want of a better word? 

With this in mind, I talked to our lovely Year Six class about The Yuk factor. Here are some of their feelings about times when the action begins to get kissy. They even drew me a couple of pictures. 

Sophia: I don’t like in when they describe the characters being in love in too much detail, it makes me uncomfortable. It’s like when you’ve got something on your shoe that you can’t get off. 

Saoirshe: I just get lost if there’s too much of that sort of detail. 

Luke: If it’s right at the beginning I won’t read any more but if it’s half way through I’m fine with that if I like the book. 

Ben: It’s a bit like if you ask somebody a question and they give you too much information. Like somebody telling you why they’re going to the toilet. (more detail was given here but I’ve spared you that, as you might be eating...) 

Ella: The Hunger Games was sometimes a bit too kissy but because I wanted to know who she’d choose I kept going and anyway it wasn’t like that all the way through. 

Klara: And it was good enough to keep you reading. 

Harrison: Sometimes you feel like ‘Aaah, that’s nice’ if it’s a strong story and if the romance is in the ending then it doesn’t feel ‘yuk’. 

Joe: It might put you off if the rest of the book isn’t good. I just skip to the next page. 

So what’s your opinion? How did you feel about the mushy stuff when you were eleven? Have you got children with strong views on the subject? Answers on a postcard. Or failing that, in the space below. 

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@CeliaAnderson1

When she’s not marking children’s work, or writing stories involving pants, Celia spends far too much time on Facebook and does a lot of walking to counteract the cooking, eating and drinking which form another of her hobbies. She's a Romaniac  and you can also find her on her own website. Usually sea-starved in the depths of the Midlands, she can often be found wandering happily around Brighton visiting her two daughters pretending to collect ideas for her next book.

Ten-Minute Blog Break - 4th February

I'm sure you've been on tenterhooks since last week, wondering what happened to that enormous boil on Maureen Lynas's bum? Well, you can either find out here or you can read on for some blog posts that don't sound like an episode of Embarrassing Bodies...

Amanda Lillywhite hasn't blogged for ages, so it's great to see her joining in Hourly Comic Day with a comic strip all about her life on the 1st February 2014. As a special bonus, Sarah McIntyre also contributes her own graphical slice of life.

Mark Jones is someone else I haven't featured for a while, but his latest post about Resketch Books caught my eye. These are a terrific idea, sketchbooks made from paper that has been recycled simply by turning it over! So you get all kinds of random text and architectural diagrams on different grades of paper, interspersed with blank spaces for you to dream up your own ideas. As someone who suffers greatly from the tyranny of the blank page, I strongly approve.

Space on the Bookshelf have found space for Karen Ball this week, who undergoes a rigorous Q&A from Nicki Thornton all about the Book Bound Retreat that Karen and others are running in May. If you're really serious about getting your book published and you think you've got the writing craft part sorted out, this initiative could be for you.

We hear a lot about the benefits of SCBWI writing critique groups, but what about drawing critique? Shana Nieberg-Suschitzky posts at Big Little Tales with a fascinating example of before and after picture book drawings that have been improved by group feedback. And she even receives further useful feedback in the comments for her blog post. That's SCBWI in action, people!

Nick.

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Nick Cross is a children's writer, blogger and all-round techno-ninja. In 2010 he was a winner of Undiscovered Voices with his zombie comedy Back from the Dead and currently writes short fiction for Stew Magazine, an event that was recently celebrated on this site.

Trust Your Subconscious by Beverley Birch

Try a web search on ‘subconscious mind’. You’ll find a surfeit: definitions, exploring it, connecting subconscious and conscious to expand creativity. And so on. 

And a lot on making conscious effort to tap into that vast personal repository of memory, perceptions, knowledge, emotions.




A familiar one is mind mapping - freeing thoughts to take off in any direction, develop extensions and connections not originally conceived. Many writers use it to throw up ideas on anything from plot and character traits to book and chapter titles - words, ideas, images, links, subsequently harnessed, pointing directions or usefully organised into a firm structure. 

It struck me, though, that for us – fiction writers – awareness of our subconscious is a part of life - a constant travelling companion. And it further struck me that in my parallel life as editor and mentor to other writers, new and established, I’ve registered a tide gathering momentum – one that we need to stem. 

The issue for us (writers) is not so much learning to tap into our subconscious, but keeping confidence in it; having the courage not to treat it as an unwanted intruder and try to shut it out, but give it nurturing space. 

In the unforgiving publishing climate of now, market pressures mitigate against the time, resources, and editorial backing to explore and play with your writing, to try different things or break new ground. It requires considerable determination to face it, and dare to take it on. 

For writers new and experienced, the stress is all on planning and plotting carefully, being clear in pitch and focus, readership, market, on how to ‘sell’ your idea so an editor will see how to ‘sell’ it to their publisher. 

All important, and true. 

Yet also untrue, if these pressures dominate at the wrong point of the imaginative journey from which a story springs. Control can extinguish the spark that propelled you forward with something fresh, something that is YOU. 

Originality and a story worth telling don’t come from thinking harder, planning harder, learning the components and ingredients that make a good book. They come from the uniqueness of each of us, experiences, perceptions, anxieties, emerging from and played upon by everything we see, hear, smell, read, watch, perceive.

All this buries itself in our subconscious, rising to the surface in dreams, reactions, emotions, and even stray thoughts, ideas, images that can float to mind when we are doing something mundane, having a bath, peeling potatoes, staring out of the window on a train. Yet how often do we think – Go Away! That’s not what I need to think about now! Come on, focus! 

We disregard these wisps, because they don’t fit, they’re not part of the current game-plan.

I was once asked to write a picture book text for a particular artist. I duly put aside the current work-in-progress novel, had a think, then another think, reread my ideas notebooks, did mind map after mind map … I pounded away at the problem, increasingly frustrated. 

Blank. A month later - still blank. No story, or even the shadow of one. I owned up, suggested the commissioning editor approach someone else. 

The whole thing disappeared from my mind. I sank back into writing my novel. Went to bed one night – had what I recall as an entirely dreamless sleep, was just drifting into full consciousness next morning, to find opening words, rhythms, then a full story-line of a picture book galloping through my head. I grabbed a notebook and wrote it down, just as I ‘heard’ it. 

The weirdest thing was that it had a setting I’d never been to, childhood fears I don’t remember having, found a resolution in something I’d never done. I’ve not the slightest idea where it came from or how it shaped itself so completely in my head. But it came from me, and it came because I’d stopped looking for it. 

I tidied it, but it changed only in precision of words, not theme or story; I showed the editor – who contracted it immediately for publication. 

A different example from my editor life. An author had delivered a book. Classy writer, impressive backlist, but increasingly anxious about keeping up with changing ‘market’, sliding into that slough of waning confidence. Ideas in the book had enormous potential. It had a crop of interesting characters. But it felt rather run of the mill, nothing really surprising was happening. And it lacked her spark. 

I dreaded saying so. 

What emerged in our discussion was that, really, at heart, she knew this, and each effort to improve it made it worse. 

But also that she’d been having what she called a daydream, a persisting one, of the story as a film with a rather bizarre scene with two new characters. It didn’t fit with her original storyline … 

I told her she could have more time, a lot more, and sent her away to follow the trail where it took her. Barely a month later, an unusual and exciting story arrived on my desk. She’d unlocked the telling and the story was fraught with delicious dramatic tension throughout.

Simple. Easy to forget. Easy to bury it beneath that craft-based struggle with plotting, tightening, shaping.

Easy to forget that the process of refinement and clarity is a stage superimposed after the essentially instinctive flow of word after word after word, idea after idea, image after image through your head. 

Equally easy also to struggle on with a problem, not realising that if you look away from it, do something else, invariably your subconscious will present you with some kind of direction through. Interesting writing doesn’t spring from just making words behave properly. If that’s all there is, it loses its energy, originality and power. Interesting writing, stories that open doors for readers, spring from a messy mix of exploration, trial and error – drawing deep from each writer’s unique subconscious. 

So – my message is, trust your subconscious. It’s a bottomless mine that throws up gems.

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@bevbirchauthor

Beverley Birch is an author and editor. Her own books have been nominated for the Carnegie medal and shortlisted for awards here and abroad, and range from picture books and novels to biographies, retellings of classic works, and collaborations with photographer Nick Birch. As editor, she’s been three times shortlisted for the Branford Boase Award in recognition of the editor’s role in nurturing new talent. She stepped down from her fiction commissioning role at Hodder Children’s Books a year ago to concentrate on her author life and on giving workshops for promising writers as part of Imogen Cooper’s Golden Egg Academy. [www.goldeneggacademy.co.uk, or follow Golden Egg Workshops for Children's Writers on Facebook.] Beverley also continues selectively to provide editorial consultancy for publishers.

In the flow...

Welcome to February and I think we're in the flow. There's been talk about voice in the SCBWI ether over the last week or so. We've had Nicky Schmidt's epiphany and Maureen Lynas' boil on the bum incident - if that won't make you click over to Nick's blog break, don't know what will!

Thanks for coming back!

It's Valentine's month and here on Words & Pictures, we also have a month of passion - with maybe just a sparge* of romance. (Did Catriona inspire you to embiggen your vocabulary too?) Passion and voice, like chips and tomato sauce, not sure you can have one without the other.

Today is the last day to send in your entries for the Slush Pile Challenge...

If you haven't already, today is the last day to send in your entries for the Slush Pile Challenge to be in with the chance of winning a wonderful afternoon of opportunity at OUP. Opportunities abound here on Words & Pictures - Gemma and Molly have been giving some more invaluable feedback on two readers' queries. Send in your questions and queries for Sally Anne Sweeney, next month's Ask an Agent.

Sally Kindberg is our new featured Illustrator and it's great to have some more comic fun. There's lots to read, learn and laugh about on Sally's post and gallery. We're in the flow here too, because yesterday was…. could well be in danger of stealing Nick's Blog Break thunder here so I'll leave you guessing. But congratulations again to Sam Zuppardi and Julie-Anne Graham whose picture book successes we also celebrated yesterday. 

Next week we're delighted to welcome Beverly Birch with some excellent voice related insights - why we should trust  our subconscious.  We have some graphic design 'Book Basics' from Gillian McClure and Lisa Kirkham and the first sparge of romance from Celia Anderson and her year 5s who give us their views on 'The Yuk Factor' - I love this focus group!

Hope it's a great week!

Jan Carr

*metaphorically speaking

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Jan Carr is the editor of Words & Pictures. Her fiction is older middle grade, she blogs occasionally and loves to write in magenta. You can contact her at editor@britishscbwi.org.