steepholm

http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2025/07/red-by-sharon-tregenza.html

RED 

When I first started writing children's books, many years ago now, I was interested in the idea of using colour to create certain emotions and responses. There's a whole psychology involved and it's fascinating.

RED is an interesting one. It attracts attention and is often used to depict danger, anger or excitement so should be used sparingly unless that's the emotion you want to evoke, but conversely, this colour can be used to convey love and warmth.

Here are some examples of authors using the colour red to add energy and emotion to children's books.

Red: A Crayon's Story by Michael Hall is a funny colourful story about being true to yourself. Here red is used emotionally and symbolically.

http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2025/07/red-by-sharon-tregenza.html

http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2025/07/rights-reversion-by-paul-may.html

About six months ago I decided that it was time I did something about getting back the rights to the books I published back in the early years of this century. Most of them remained technically 'in print', though in practice they were 'print on demand' and available as ebooks, and as I hadn't received any cash for any of them for at least ten years there seemed little point in their presence on the colourful Penguin Books website.  

I asked the Society of Authors how to go about getting the rights back and they told me to write to the publishers. I thought I'd ask the agency which did the deals for those books who to contact, and they were happy to do the job themselves, so now I have the rights to my work back, and I'm wondering what to do with the books. Of course, they shouldn't really still be there on the Penguin website. Another job to do.

I'm not interested in making them into ebooks, so that simplifies things a little, and it looks to me as if, for a relatively small investment, I could produce paperback books for a reasonable price. I wouldn't need to sell very many books to make more from them than I have done in the last ten years from the traditionally published versions.

I'd got that far in my thinking when it occurred to me that I don't have any digital files of those books. Well, only of one of them, and that is the book I somehow managed not to put on the list for rights reversion. So if I want to publish them I'll have to type them all out again. That's not the end of the world. I could do that, and fix a few things at the same time. But then there's the question of the illustrations. Four of the books are heavily illustrated, if that's the right phrase, and I suspect it wouldn't be straightforward to use the illustrations. But I can look into that, contact the illustrators, and if necessary the books could be re-illustrated. I have a candidate in mind!

There's a lot to think about. Being me, I'd want to do as much of the design and layout as possible myself. I'd need the right software and I'd need to learn how to use it. A quick look around on the internet suggests that this is one of those situations where, even though you only want to do a relatively simple task, you need to have a vast and powerful piece of software like Indesign in order to output a print-ready document of a quality you're happy with. Let's hope I'm wrong about that. 

However, none of these things really matter if I don't think the books are worth re-publishing, and about two of them I have serious doubts. My first book, Troublemakers, went through a lot of changes that I've written about before and it certainly isn't the book I originally set out to write. It was meant to be a tough but funny story about racism and misogyny and contained some splendidly vile baddies, but in the editing process everything got toned down. I understood why, but although racism and misogyny have not yet been banished from football I don't think I'd want to republish this one.

I also think it's interesting that I've seen very little discussion lately of something that was central to my original conception of the book. Having seen that the fittest pupil in the school where I was working was a girl (AND she had Type1Diabetes, AND she was great at football) I wondered how good a female footballer would have to be before a top football club like, say, Barcelona or Liverpool, would want to challenge the structure of world football and sign her on. I still wonder that. And, by a strange piece of serendipity, I was looking through some old photos yesterday and noticed this picture which I must include, especially after Penny Dolan's post about notebooks the other day. This is the very moment I had the idea for what became that first book. The dream noted underneath has something to do with being a school governor at the time!

The other book I have doubts about is called Nice One, Smithy!, and the trouble with this book is that it has dated because of the contemporary football references. The class guinea pig called Ronaldo I might just about still get away with, but the references to the  Brazilian style of football are probably at least 40 years out of date, and as for Michael Owen . . . On the other hand, I can easily update those references, and if I'm publishing it myself I guess I can update them as often as necessary. So that one goes on the 'possible' list.

I wrote a second football novel, Defenders, which still seems fresh to me. Again, a few footballers' names need changing and I think some of the characters will need mobile phones. The landline phone in the hallway was on its way to being a thing of the past even back when I wrote the book. Luckily 'The Magic of the FA Cup,' is still a thing. And, as a small sidetrack, How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won The FA Cup by JL Carr is a hugely entertaining read.

Then I have two Norfolk novels which I definitely want to republish. Green Fingers has lovely illustrations by Sîan Bailey, but as three of them are on my wall, specially altered for me by Sîan I think it's unlikely I'll be able to use them. In any case, as the book contains a character based on my daughter, and is dedicated to her, it might be fun to get her to illustrate it. 

The other Norfolk book is Rain, and I'd love to have a new edition of this if only to change the cover, which I've always disliked (sorry, designers). Both Rain and Green Fingers may need a little adjustment to the phone/tech aspects, but luckily Rain's mother, Max, is a New Age Traveller who wants nothing to do with tech.

Then there are two more books, both of which, it seems to me, work as well today as they did when I wrote them. Cat Patrol is very short, about 2000 words, and was illustrated by Peter Bailey. Again, I have some of these illustrations on my wall, and I think it may well be too complicated to use them. The original cover by Guy Parker-Rees was, I think, the publishers' third attempt to find something they were happy with. I guess there will now be a fourth. 

Finally there's the book I wrote about a few months ago, Billy and the Seagulls. This had the same illustrator, Kate Sheppard, as Nice One, Smithy, and it would be fun to have new editions of these with the same pics, but who knows? 

In all this I take heart from the example of the above-mentioned JL Carr who made a habit of buying back the rights to his books, along with as many copies as remained in warehouses, and published his two final novels himself. The Quince Tree Press, which he founded, is still going, and publishes its own very fine editions of all Carr's novels.

http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2025/07/rights-reversion-by-paul-may.html

http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2025/06/chocolate-nation-sue-purkiss.html

 Belgium is well-known for a number of things: beautiful old cities, waffles, moules et frites, the European Commission, Tintin - and, of course, chocolate. So when earlier this week my grandson Casper suggested visiting a chocolate museum in Antwerp (my son and his family live in Brussels, and I was visiting them), I certainly wasn't going to say no.

We went by train to Antwerp - whose station, incidentally, is quite incredible: immensely tall, with a beautifully decorated ceiling and an extraordinarily ornate clock. The museum, which is only a few years old, is just a couple of minutes'walk from the station, and if you're a chocolate lover, it's a must. (If you're not, then probably best stay away.)

It's an extraordinary piece of design and technology. You're only allowed in a very few people at a time: the doors to each of the first four rooms open to let you in, then swing closed behind you. And these four rooms take you on the journey of the cocoa pod, from the trees where it grows in South America to its eventual transformation in Belgium into delicious chocolate. The whole experience is really clever: light and sound and heaven knows what else combine to show you each stage of the process. It's beautiful, but it's also very informative: you learn without realising you're learning. 

After these four rooms, you go first into a sort of virtual restaurant, where you sit down in front of a plate and watch as tiny people zoom around in front of you - to be honest, I'm not quite sure what they were doing, but it was all very pretty and entertaining.

And then you go into a room with a slightly more conventional layout, where you learn about the history of chocolate making in Belgium, and the people involved. I was intigued to learn about Guylian - those chocolate seashells that are in every supermarket. They were developed in 1958, by a young couple named Guy and Liliane. Guy was a passionate chocolate maker. He spotted a gap in the market. Chocolate tended to be more of a winter thing - but what if you could create something that evoked summer? On holiday at the Belgian seaside, the couple hit on the idea of creating chocolate seashells filled with praline. Guy's responsibility was creating the chocolate and praline, and Liliane's job was the all-important design. Guylian was born, and now their chocolates are sold all over the world.

Innovation continues. A few years ago, someone discovered that if you combined certain types of cocoa beans, the chocolate that emerged was pink, with a taste that's creamy, but also fruity - and completely natural.

By this time, I was beginning to wonder if we were going to get to actually taste some of this deliciousness. The next room concerned the people who actually grow the trees and harvest the pods, and the initiatives which have been created to help them succeed and imrove their conditions and outcomes. Then, passing this beautiful castle, made entirely, of course, out of chocolate, we finally came to the tasting room, where we judiciously sampled around ten different strengths of liquid chocolate - "Hm, not sure whether I prefer this one or the one back at the beginning - maybe better have another taste, just to be sure..."

And of course, there was a shop.

It's a fascinating museum - not just because of the pervading chocolatiness, but also because of the innovative ways in which it tells its stories. Very well worth a visit - and Antwerp too is lovely, though we only had time for a quick hike round to the old town and the river.

http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2025/06/chocolate-nation-sue-purkiss.html

http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2025/06/memory-and-writing-by-claire-fayers.html

 Casting about for a topic for this month's post, I happened to hear the latest episode of Curious Cases  on BBC Sounds. It's a lightweight science show where listeners send in their questions. This week's was on the subject of memory, specifically could it ever be possible to take a memory from one person's head and transplant it into another person's.

There's already a way to do that, I wanted to say. It's called writing. It's not quite the same thing, but as a way of storing and transferring memories, it's pretty efficient.

The discussion led to a lot of interesting questions about the relationship between memory and imagination and the way we remember the gist of an event and fill in the details with created details. Which seems to be exactly what happens when someone reads.

Anyway, it's an interesting programme and well worth a listen. Enjoy the sunshine while it lasts!

Claire

http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2025/06/memory-and-writing-by-claire-fayers.html