picturebooks – Page 2

I do not like book launches anymore!

Well that was a lie. I had a monstrously good time at the launch for I DO NOT LIKE BOOKS ANYMORE! at Gosh Comics on 10th May – so many of my favourite people in one room and oh my giddy aunt THE BISCUITS!!
The biscuits were made by the completely amazing Emily Wilkinson who has been baking my books since before they were books (see previous biscuitmania). One of my favourite things was seeing photos of children clutching monster biscuits at breakfast time – very impressive of their parents to get them all the way home without even nibbling their ears (the BISCUITS’ I mean!).

I’m so hugely grateful to everyone who came and made it such a lovely evening, and to Gosh! for being grand hosts again (and just the most brilliant shop). And I was extremely touched by the things Deirdre and Lizzie, Walker Books Publisher and my Editor, said – I’m very very lucky to work with them.

Many thanks to Emma O’Donovan and Penny Dixie for the photos.

I DO NOT LIKE BOOKS ANYMORE!

I made these two gifs to celebrate the publication of my fourth picture book, I DO NOT LIKE BOOKS ANYMORE! This is Natalie and Alphonse’s second adventure, following ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO! and is all about what happens when Natalie starts learning to read, and how she and Alphonse manage to carry on enjoying books and stories in their own way.

I only started making gifs again a couple of months ago – you can find a few others on my Instagram. Alphonse in his fairy costume comes from a part of the book where he and Natalie dress up to play “stories they remembered or made up.”

If you’d like to know more about the book and how I made it, have a look at Walker Books’ Instagram which I took over for publication week. I also have a couple of events coming up soon, and am busy making window displays – this one was at Jaffe and Neale, a bookshop-cafe in Chipping Norton, and it will be moving to their Stow shop in a few weeks too.

COMING not very SOON: a book!

Apparently I am delivering my first book to its publisher tomorrow, so I thought it might be time to say I have a publisher. Walker will publish The Girl with the Parrot on her Head in 2015, which is just grand and the luckiest thing. It does not make me feel like this:
I haven’t written on here about this story since January 12th, 2012 when I handed its first incarnation in for marking as part of my MA. I re-started work on it with Walker last February and it has been dead innerestin turning it into an Actual Book. It even has endpapers – though they are of course inferior to John Burningham’s Avocado Baby masterpieces, which are my favourite ever. I am going to miss Parrot Head, especially this colour parrot red: