FRESH STARTS and SECOND DRAFTS - DIANNE HOFMEYR

The period between Christmas and New Year is probably a time when most writers take a break. Right now I’m sitting on my deck with my feet up on this African Senufo bed with a view over the sea and a cup of coffee in hand contemplating 2012. Like Rosalie in her Taking Stock blog yesterday, I’m taking stock.

Last year in the run-up to Christmas when everything ground to a halt in snow-bound Britain and Heathrow had more iced-up aeroplanes on its runways than a flock of flamingos on a salt pan, I spent hours forced to slow down. My suitcase was packed, the desk cleared (as far as I’m able to clear it) and I waited. In one of those incredible long periods of more than 12 hours at a time over three days in the halls of Heathrow, I started a new novel. It was set on the coast of the place I was about to fly to, and started with a shipwreck. Perhaps I was metaphorically shipwrecked.

Now a year later I’m physically back on that coast having just flown out yesterday but this time with a completed first draft in my suitcase. It’s taken a year. (Am I the only writer who needs a year for a story to formulate?) Now begins the task of strengthening that tentative and fragile text. Time to assess.

In no particular order, I’ve come up with the following actions we can take to turn first drafts into second drafts.

Cutting out the Flack

Measuring Inner Change

Strengthening Point of View

Bridging Conflict

Freezing Moments in Time

Raising the Stakes

Developing the Protagonist

Developing the Antagonist

Discovering the True Theme

Writing the story to its Fullest Potential.

Making the story more Robust.

Deepen the Dilemma

I’m sure you can all add to this list. But with my coffee hitting the adrenalin spot, it's suddenly struck me how many of the things we do with a first draft, are things we can apply to our lives… especially when a New Year is fast approaching. This could get very psycho-analytical. I might start feeling very flawed!

And first drafts often feel flawed… particularly if you write intuitively rather than with blow by blow planning. The bundle of newly printed-out pages waiting in my unpacked suitcase, is fragile. Over-exposure to too many friends or family or even an agent, while a story has just moved from something inchoate to a more fully fledged shape with a beginning, a middle and an end, can leave any writer feeling undermined.

At the start of the New Year, I’m not going to put myself through the rigours of analytical appraisal (even though my family might think it a good idea) nor am I going to be too harsh on my first draft. I’m going to take it for what it is… a first draft… slightly flawed but with great potential!!! That list can be put on hold for a while. I'm drinking my coffee and enjoying the view hoping for a few dolphins in the Bay.

PS. Have just thought of another one for the list... Cutting a lot out!

www.diannehofmeyr.com

How to turn an author into an engineer - early December 'scenes' - Dianne Hofmeyr

THE STORY MUSEUM – Oxford
A freezing day in Oxford saw a group of authors become engineers at the stroke of a hat! You’ll recognize a few faces as we tried to interpret the spaces that will become the new Story Museum. The outing was devised by Jacky Atkinson and Kim Pickin, Director of the Story Museum, as part of the National Kids Lit Quiz day held in Oxford.

Herded across a snow-stewn courtyard by the enthusiastic Tish Francis, former director of the Oxford Playhouse, through a maze of winding passageways, rooms, halls and vast galleries of the old Oxford Telephone Exchange and finally up to the attics complete with resident spiders, peeling paint taking on the shape of unknown continents and fireplaces that must have once warmed poor starving artists… our imaginations were running wild. Towers could be added! Secret passageways! Peepholes! Escape shutes! A hoist in the courtyard was already in place to act as a gallows!The spaces are ripe to create magic in. The Story Museum won’t be so much a static ‘museum’ as a living, active place to share story and creativity. All the latent engineers can’t wait to be invited back here to be part of the action in creating a story-rich society!

http://www.storymuseum.org.uk/

THE ILLUSTRATION CUPBOARD – London

A few freezing evenings later (London didn’t quite reach the same scale of freezing as the rest of the country) the Illustration Cupboard Gallery in Bury Street, St James was ablaze with colour, light and sparkle (in the proper liquid form!) with their 15th Annual Winter Exhibition and Jane Ray was there signing her latest book out with Frances Lincoln, Ahmed and the Feather Girl … her illustrations a brilliant combination of paint and paper with individual feathers finely cut from patterned paper to create textured collage. A quick visit to the Illustration Cupboard on a dark, cold, wintery afternoon might be just the inspiration needed to get ‘someone’ to buy you a Christmas present.

http://www.illustrationcupboard.com/default_flash.aspx

THE BRAND NEW V&A READING ROOM – London
Not the research rooms inside the V&A, but an off-site, stand alone wine bar/ coffee bar/ reading room/ bookshop all wrapped up into an intimate space on Exhibition Road near the South Ken Tube station that has only been open for a few weeks. It’s filled with an eclectic collection of books, not just V&A editions, and obviously has a book buyer with quirky ideas. Rediscover the delights of browsing and encounter the wonderful and obscure. This is the place to browse through books on lethally toxic plants, a few vintage bindings and graphic novels too with a good glass of Merlot or chilled Pouilly-Fuisse in hand. A bit different to having Starbucks inside your average bookshop. So while the rest of the mob are ice-skating in the cold outside the Natural History Museum, sneak away and take refuge in the new V&A Reading room.
http://www.vandashop.com/shopimages/products/thumbnails/Reading_Room_PR.pdf

http://www.diannehofmeyr.com/

A LANDSCAPE OF FROZEN ICE ­– Winter’s Child – Dianne Hofmeyr

When most children’s picture books have rabbits and bears romping around in blank space, it’s exhilarating to come across illustrations that have a sense of landscape – where a child can lose himself not just in the story but in the imagery and be transported into an unknown world that feeds imagination and builds up a sense of line, texture, colour and awareness of visual language. 

The landscape in Winter’s Child by Angela McAllister and illustrated by Grahame Baker Smith, published by Templar, had my 8-year-old granddaughter turning and looking at each page with anticipated delight before she began reading. The author and illustrator have collaborated previously on a picture book – Leon and the Place Between, was short-listed for the Kate Greenaway and Grahame Baker Smith’s picture book, FArTHER, won the award in 2011.

Winter’s Child is set in an unforgiving landscape that seems to crackle with cold. A small house stands isolated in an icy valley with sunlight bouncing off an entirely crystalized world. A ship lying frozen in ice reminds me of the ships stranded in the sands of the Namibian desert along the skeleton coast. Where are the sailors? And in Winter’s Child, where is everyone? What has happened that a boy and his mother and nana are living so isolated and alone?

Tom spends his days skating and ski-ing through a landscape that throws sharp shadows and where blue skies bristle with hoary frost. When a barefooted boy makes his appearance and invites Tom to play, they build snow horses that hang with ice manes and play chimes on icicles that hang from the trees.

But winter is taking long to disappear. In Tom’s cottage they have run out of food and nana is poorly. There is no wood left in the woodpile so Tom burns his skis and the ladder of his tree house. When the strange bare-footed boy says he has to leave, there are hints of why winter has lasted so long. My granddaughter stopped for long moments to look at the mysterious clues in the illustrations – the icy, stamping horses with their blazing emerald eyes, (or are they tourmalines?) the tossing manes and cold snorting breath.

I thought of the white horses in Roy Campbell’s poem – Horses of the Camargue.

But in a shroud of silence like the dead,
I heard a sudden harmony of hooves,
And, turning, saw afar
A hundred snowy horses unconfined,
The silver runaways of Neptune's car
Racing, spray-curled, like waves before the wind.
Sons of the Mistral, fleet
As him with whose strong gusts they love to flee,
Who shod the flying thunders on their feet
And plumed them with the snortings of the sea;
Theirs is no earthly breed
Who only haunts the verges of the earth
And only on the sea's salt herbage feed-
Surely the great white breakers gave them birth.

And I wondered if both Angela McAllister and Grahame Baker-Smith might have drawn on them too.

Frozen waterfalls and icicles melting and the first crocuses, are depicted by Grahame Baker Smith, not just in vast double-page spreads with small figures in an overwhelming frozen landscape, but in tiny, exquisite close-up vignettes reminiscent of the very best in Shaun Tan’s work.

My only wish for Tom is that the flowery, Spring girl won’t be too genteel. My hope is that she will have a naughty, impish manner and that she and Tom will explore the mossy caves, catch fish with their hands, swing from trees and run as wild as Tom did with Winter’s Child.

In choosing pictures books, the deciding questions are... Will the landscape mesmerize and tease the imagination and will the illustrations be so powerful, they’ll be remembered into adulthood? How many of your own picture books do you remember not through the words, but the pictures? The magical forest that set your mind racing, the tiny details of mushroom houses… I must be careful here as I might be doing myself out of a job. But illustration and word work in tandem. Why else would I remember the words of Horses of the Camargue from my childhood? But when you find a book like Winter’s Child, you know the images will be remembered for a long, long time.

www.dainnehofmeyr.com

Dianne Hofmeyr’s latest picture book illustrated by Piet Grobler, The Magic Bojabi Tree, has been nominated for the 2014 Kate Greenaway list.

END GAME - Dianne Hofmeyr

So what is so hard about endings?

I’ve just written the last word on my first draft of a Work in Progress and have employed all the brain strain I can muster to get it right. There's no easy answer. The ending is what the reader walks away with – the resonance of the entire story. Wrap up the novel well – deepen the reading experience – and you’ll knock your readers out! But how?

Opening lines grab attention but it’s that final sentence that leaves the reader with a lasting impression. I flipped through a few last sentences of recent novels and found brilliant ending sentences harder to find than brilliant opening sentences. Maybe this sums it up. Most authors struggle.

What is it about endings? At its simplest there are only three options.

• Positive ending. Protagonist gets what he wants.
• Negative ending. Protagonist doesn’t get what he wants.
• Ambiguous ending. We don’t know if the protagonist will get what he wants.

Slight twists can turn each option into something more complex. In the positive ending the protagonist may get what he wants, but with a negative result i.o.w. at moral cost. In the negative ending he might have to give up what he wants, but gains by doing what’s right. This is often used in a ‘battle’ ending. At the end of my Egyptian novel Eye of the Moon, my hero had to give up what he’d hoped for throughout the novel… to regain the crown of Egypt… because the battle was at too great a cost. Too many lives were being lost. Not to give the protagonist his goal, is a risk for an author because readers want success but sacrifice can also be very powerful.

The ambiguous ending is sometimes the only choice. But don’t think of it as being weak. Sometimes it just ‘feels’ right and its power lies in it being able to generate discussion. What now? A good example of a powerful ambiguous ending is The Road. I won’t do the spoiler thing here.

What worked for me this time around (I’m a non plotter) – somewhere in the middle of writing the first draft I brainstormed all possible endings, however feasible or silly. Then with a list in hand I reduced them to the three strongest possibilities. And finally I found the one that felt right.

Once I had the right option there was still the business of needing to write it well. What makes an ending resonate? In my struggles, I came up with this:

• feels right for this type of story
• is not predictable and still has an element of surprise (hard one that)
• maintains tension until the last
• has some flourish
• calls not just for physical courage but moral courage as well
• has emotional appeal
• ties up most but not necessarily all loose ends in as little space as possible (the reader wants to reach the end)
• has a last sentence/ paragraph that leaves you feeling wow! like that moment of silence at the end of listening to a great piece of music.

For the first time ever on writing a first draft ending, I felt I wasn’t floundering like a drowning person. As to that final sentence… I think it can be dialogue or description. I’m not sure I’ve found mine yet. But make it ‘zing’ and if you’ve come across any great last sentences/paragraphs please share them.

www.diannehofmeyr.com

Being quietly attentive – Dianne Hofmeyr

It was lovely to be back in New York after 15 years. I was visiting my editor (for the US editions of Eye of the Moon & Eye of the Sun which were complete rewrites). The city seemed gentler and Barnes and Noble seemed to have shrunk (maybe Waterstones has just grown bigger!) but B & N covered a huge range of picturebooks. So I would say the picturebook market is flourishing in the US. I hope it bodes well for co-productions with the UK

In the Scholastic Bookshop in SoHo (yes… a publisher with its OWN bookshop and huge at that!) I found some Jon Muth’s I’d been looking for. He’s known primarily for his giant panda character Stillwater, who won him the Caldecott Honour Book with a book called Zen Shorts. Jon Muth, from the website of the Allen Spiegel Fine Arts Agency has this to say…

‘My work in children's books really grew out of a desire to explore what I was feeling as a new father. At the time, I was working in comics -- a natural forum for expressions of angst and questioning one's place in the universe. With the births of my children, there was a kind of seismic shift in where my work seemed appropriate -- it became important to say other things about the world.’

‘ Zen Shorts came from wondering, "What it would be like to live down the street from a Zen master... who happened to be a Giant Panda?" My stories often come from questions, "Why is this so?"... "If this, then why not that?"... and of course, "What if...?" Sometimes words come first and sometimes an image will prod a story out into the open.’

Stillwater, the giant panda, tells stories about peace and love and taking the moment as it comes and not letting insults get you down. He suggests that adversity turns around when you are quietly attentive and aware of your surroundings. Stillwater has dark panda eyes that show no expression. Yet they somehow do… as I page through the book I feel he is imbued with the presence I need.

I picked up Zen Ghosts too which at first appears to be a book based on Halloween. But Muth is full of surprises and he weaves into it a story that was recorded long ago by Buddhist monks about duality. He says he offers it to children because at a very young age children come to recognize that the ‘me’ they are with their friends, is different to the ‘me’ they are with their mother. It poses the question who are they when they are with both their friends and their mother? Do they act differently?

There is a wonderful stillness to Muth’s illustrations that almost begs you to slow down as you are looking at them. The quiet calmness of them manages to echo not just the story but the cadence of the story. There are no right or wrong answer to these ancient Chinese questionings. One of his books is called The Three Questions, is based on a story by Leo Tolstoy. Another, for younger readers, City Dog and Country Frog, depicts friendship and loss.

Perhaps why I’m writing about him so specifically is because I’m trying to be still and in the moment and accept that even though he was suggested as a possibility to do one of my stories, it all fell away through complications when an editor was made redundant. So I’m being quietly attentive of my surroundings.

www.diannehofmeyr.com

TEA WITH A TIGER – Dianne Hofmeyr

A train trip to Newcastle-on-Tyne became more than a journey into uncharted territory but an unexpected chance to have Tea with a Tiger and a cuddle with a cat of slightly smaller proportions, called Mog. To prove it, here are Penny Dolan and I with our smiley tiger.

Where are we? Not at the zoo but in the wonderful building that houses Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children’s Books in Newcastle-on-Tyne... a  building that stretches over seven floors and whose attic houses the most marvellous installation of books about to be eaten by Henry – The Incredible Book Eating Boy, who might suffer a severe stomach ache if he ate all the books his creator, Oliver Jeffers, has strung from the rafters for him.

Oliver Jeffers who was resident storyteller at Seven Stories a while back can be seen working with a group of children putting together the installation on the U-tube link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6azoJrFVkY

But why were we having this exciting visit? It was part of a Society of Authors event, which coincided, with the current exhibitions of two major children’s authors – Judith Kerr, who has given her entire archive of work to Seven Stories, and Enid Blyton, whose collection was acquired at a nail-biting auction. Both are utterly marvellous.

The Enid Blyton display covers a multitude of facets in her life – not just the ideas behind Noddy Goes to Toyland, first published n 1949, but also the first artist’s roughs of what the characters might look like, down to her minute gardening diaries filled with miniscule writing and her original typewriter used when she lived at Green Hedges, and then of course all those covers both old and new of stories many of us knew so well. I was given a new Famous Five for every holiday train journey I went on, to what was then Southern Rhodesia, and passed the hours rocking up on my top bunk pretending I was George setting off on an adventure in my boat. Pirate coves and tiny islands in a rainy climate seemed far more exciting than any African landscape.

What immediately sprung to mind when I saw Judith Kerr’s display which spans 70 years, and includes childhood paintings, drawings from her student days, and finished artwork for most of her published books, including The Tiger Who Came to Tea, is that from her very earliest drawings done as a child, there is a strong sense of movement and body space, people drawn in profile busily involved in selling hotdogs and balloons, a girl diving off a diving board. In one of the rooms, for those of you small enough to fit into a tiny cat-suit, you can curl up in a basket and get some grown-up to read you a Mog story which is exactly what was happening on the day I went… a mum and her toddler were having a snug story-cuddle.

I’ve saved the best for last. Although the archive is housed in another building, on the day we went, an archivist brought material out for us to view… glorious and detailed Edward Ardizzone illustrations... (note the white gloves for handling) that we pored over, the detail of line and texture too amazing...

and Harold Jones – the Harold Jones illustrations so familiar that they, rather than the words, seemed to be the very essence of the stories I once read. 

The expressions on Helena Pielechatty and Nicola Morgan’s faces say it all. 

So Tea with a Tiger and a cuddle with Mog, what more are you waiting for? The Seven Stories in Newcastle-on-Tyne is the place to be. And there’s a jolly fine coffee shop and bookshop too. THANK YOU to all the staff for making our day there, wonderful!

DO YOU DRAW? - Dianne Hofmeyr

The best gift I ever received as a child was a box of Faber Castell coloured pencil crayons from my father. It was a tin box and if you pressed the back corners the lid popped open to reveal a layer of crinkly tissue paper and 24 crayons each sharpened to perfection, laid out in a rainbow that gave me my first introduction to names like rose madder, cadmium yellow, burnt ochre, raw umber and burnt sienna… the last two, long before I’d ever heard of the colours of Italian earth. They all had numbers and were faceted with sides of gold that alternated with the colour of the pencil. I know this because I still have the white one… least used and was kept because I read somewhere as a teenager that I should whiten the underside of my nails with a white crayon!

So why the digitally enhanced artwork heading up a writer’s blog on drawing? Firstly it’s the cover of a book I co-authored with Louisa Sherman on Print-making at GCSE level and secondly because there’s been a lot of right and left brain talk recently. Most say pencil and paper wins over digital but with technology so superb that can enable Richard Hamilton to produce this intense portrait of fellow artist Dieter Roth, then all is not lost.

As a former art teacher, pencil and paper are still for me the most direct form of story telling. That’s all any child is doing when they’re drawing. With those very first ‘head-feet’ representations, they’re telling: This is me with my large head and big smiling mouth with teeth and eyes, I eat and I see and (probably no nose…) I don’t care about smell just yet. I’ve arms and lots of fingers (possibly even looking like overgrown tarantulas) because I’m a tactile being and I'm so dexterous I can pick up the tiniest speck. I stand on my own legs (though they’re probably still floating aimlessly on the page or they might just look like one leg to you) because there’s nothing more important than me— its just me, me, ME in this world.

All this the child tells us in a few random but amazing marks he makes on paper. It's his first story.

Cavemen knew something when they were drawing their stories. Not only did they use the cave walls as story boards but they turned story telling into a multi-sound-visual event with dance, music and drumming with firelight and the odd lightning bolt too, adding atmospheric lighting affects. True story-telling and showmanship! In fact they were far closer to the idea of visual story-telling as in film or video than a lot of civilizations who came after them.

After Celia put a post up on notebooks, I went back to mine at random to see if I was trying to tell a story while I drew. I didn’t find any of my really early ‘head-feet’ representations but I found a conte crayon self-portrait done a few weeks before my twentieth birthday. The others are from more recent notebooks.

The giraffe page became my story of Zeraffa. The date on the page in this notebook is 1999. The book will be come out in 2013. Some stories take longer to infuse than others! But from the notebooks I discovered why I’m a writer rather than an illustrator. I’m an observer. Critical observation is the worst form of editor. It takes away the playfulness and stifles the way I want the story to grow and be ‘more’ than what I see. It seems easier to evoke this magic with words. It doesn’t mean to say I won’t be sitting with scissors and coloured paper like Matissse one day and telling stories of snails and blue dancing ladies when I’m ancient and can’t see too well.

So where is this blog meandering? Do you draw? is the question I began with and how I’ll end. Matisse has been quoted as saying later in life when he took up paper collage... Freedom is really the impossibility of following the same road as everybody else: freedom means taking the path your talents make you take.

Whether you draw with words, or with Faber Castell crayons, or through the lens of a camera, or through digital wizardry, its still story and as long as you do, is all that matters… if we lose the power to use our imagination and to create story we’ll lose what it means to be human. Let’s use all we have… digital and paper, bells and whistles, drums and dance!

www.diannehofmeyr.com

The Bath Kidlitfest Big Blog Story: Chapter 14

We were  thrilled to be invited to take part in Bath Festival of Children's Literature's newest project - The Big Blog Story, a rolling adventure written by all sorts of different people on all sorts of different blogs. You can follow the story up till now in order by clicking on the links - it's got some fascinating twists and turns!

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8

Chapter 9
Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

And now, our very own Awfully Big Blog offering. We hope you'll enjoy this joint contribution from (in order of appearance) Joan Lennon, Linda Strachan, Dianne Hofmeyr and Lucy Coats (there's a different picture to show you where each author begins and ends!)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was a cryptic haiku.

Look! Firework display
in the sky – a brave new moon
ignites jealousy.

    “Blimey. Enigmatic or what?!” scribbled Scribbler. But Mr Catch had lived longer in the world than the blue boy and he knew a thing or two about a thing or two.
     “Did I ever tell you the story of my gap year?” he said. “Some time ago now, of course. ButI’ll never forget my experiences teaching English to the Forgotten Tribes of Zing. Mornings we worked on the difference between fewer and less, and afternoons we worked on building fireworks …”
    Scribble wrote, “?”
    Mr Catch was grinning now, all over his wrinkled old face. “I’ll bet my bottom drawer that this coral’s luminescence is the result of a phosphorus component – and this rope is made of Himalayan hemp – and there are emergency flares in the locker here …”
    A smashed coral, unravelled rope and dismantled emergency flare later, and Mr Catch stood up in triumph.
    “There’s more than one way to make a moon launch,” he cried as he reached for the controls …

Meanwhile deep in the dark murky depths of the ocean Cynthia had made a decision. She was tired of being everyone’s prawn.

 She yearned to get back up into the deep velvet of the night sky and bask in the solar winds, while the tides pulled to and fro at her whim.
    She realised (not that she would tell him this), that Breton was right. Even if part of her longed for a knight in shining…blue fur??... to come to her rescue, she was more of a ‘go get it’ kind of girl. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t do it. All she needed was a little help from her friend Luna, but it had been a long time and would Luna hear her call. And if she did, would she help Cynthia?

    A long way off in the town square all the townspeople people were still gathered around the statue of the mysterious stone lady with long flowing hair. Despite shivering in their nightclothes, they stayed because they were too scared to go home.
    A strange cracking and crunching echoed about the square, shattering the quiet of the night.
    “Look!” said a little girl, pointing at the statue “Luna is smiling!” It was true, and as they watched the statue began to glow with a ghostly moonlight-coloured brightness.
    In the dark depths of the ocean Cynthia was thrilled. “She heard me! Luna heard me. I’ll be home soon.”
    She was so delighted that she didn’t hear poor Egeria squeal….

   

   “Move over twin sister. You’re out of your depth!”
    "Minnaloushe! I thought Doris banned you to the Depths of Sirod?”
    "Hah! Doris Boris… that dried up piece of seaweed with her lack-lustre pearl eyes and her Capetown kelp hair… she doesn’t scare me!"

    "But…?" Egeria shook her head. No light shimmered out from the stars in her hair.
    “Why do you think it’s suddenly so squid-ink black down here?”
    “Moon has sunk below…”
    “Air egg!”
    “Air egg?”
    “That’s what your name spells backward. Air ege! Doris should’ve drowned you at birth. Who do you think snapped out the underwater glow? It was ME.”
    “You?”
    "Yes. Moon has seen her dark side forever. She’s on her way down. I squeezed every bit of light out of her silly little minions. No more phosphorus.”
    “Her minions? You mean you killed the plankton?”
    “Every single one of them.”
    “But Minnaloushe, their phosphorus keeps the world alive. They’re the bottom of the food chain.”
    “Well they’re at the bottom of the ocean now. All dead.”
    “Why?”
    “I was tired of Moon waxing and waning. Every time she turned her dark side she took the light out of my eyes. Moon couldn’t stay constant. I lost interest in her.”

Egeria had never felt such rage. Her shock and fear at her twin’s sudden appearance had quite disappeared. How dare Minnaloushe darken Cynthia’s precious light? How dare she threaten the world’s existence on a whim? How dare she make fun of the beautiful name the moon had given her? She remembered something Moby Doris had told her long ago:
    “Anger is power, nymph girl, and it can be shaped.”
    So Egeria drew on her rage, shaped it into a gigantic angler-fish, and set it on her twin. She just had time to see Minnaloushe’s eyes widen with terror, and then the monster swallowed her whole. With a shimmering flick of its tail, the angler-fish drifted off, bubbling screams of rage coming from its belly.
    “Let me out! Let me out!” yelled Minnaloushe. “It’s all slimy in here and it stinks!”
    “Not until you give back the light you stole,” said Egeria.
    “I can’t,” mumbled Minnaloushe in her sulkiest voice. “At least not all of it. My spell ate most of it up. There’s only enough left to power a crescent moon now.”
    “Then that must do,” came a weakened voice from the ink-dark depths.
    “Give it up NOW, Minnaloushe, or stay fishfood forever!”
    “Oh, very well!” Suddenly the angler-fish’s lantern blazed with a fierce pearly light, which shot downwards, hitting Cynthia squarely in her Sea of Serpents. She hissed with pain, as less than a quarter of her began to glow. Saving herself would be more difficult now. Luna had better reach her soon, or the blue boy would be her only hope....           

Joan Lennon's Website

Linda Strachan's Website

Dianne Hofmeyr's Website

Lucy Coats's Website

The story will be continued on 6th October by Kate Maryon at http://katemaryon.co.uk/index.php/blog/

It all happened at the Open Book Festival Cape Town – Dianne Hofmeyr

Forget the Edinburgh Festival… I’ve discovered the Open Book Festival, Cape Town… organised for its third consecutive year by the indie Cape Town bookshop, The Book Lounge. The city was awash with authors from around the world – NoViolet Bulawayo, who found out the day before the start that she was the first black African woman to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, André Brink (Philida), Patrick DeWitt (Sisters Brothers) Athol Fugard (Master Harold and the Boys), Ian Rankin (Standing in Another Man’s Grave) and Gilian Slovo (An Honourable Man). Ingrid Mennen and Sally Partridge were some of the local children's authors while Polly Dunbar and I came across from the UK.

As part of the build-up, Open Book and Cape Town City Library attempted to break the record for the longest book domino chain and 2 528 books were knocked down. It’s broken the Guinness World record for 2 131 books currently held by the Seattle Public Library in the USA. Here it is on uTube:

http://www.dontparty.co.za/design/books/cape-town-open-book-festival-central-library-cape-town-break-guinness-world-record/

Cape Town City Library is one of the busiest libraries I’ve ever been into and on the Saturday when illustrator, Polly Dunbar and I were there ‘doing our stuff’ the children’s section was crowded. It’s a very beautiful space with spiral staircases and floating floors and a lovely ‘guardian librarian’, Tracey Muir, seen here below with illustrator Niki Daly...

with books against a backdrop of huge murals done by picture book illustrator, Marjorie Van Heerden 

Everywhere I went I found libraries were celebrated places – jam-packed with children, books and artwork.  

The smile on the door that welcomes you into the library of librarian, Hayley-Ann Powell, at

Parkhurst Primary in Mitchell's Plein.

Hevette Le Grange from NB Books and librarian, Jacqui Rodgers, on the stairs, leading to the Library at Tamboerskloof Primary, which were painted by one of the mothers.

A mural on the walls of Auckland Park Primary painted by an ex teacher, Clare Miller. 

Some of my events couldn’t always fit into the school libraries because of the numbers and I found myself ‘preforming’ in vast quadrangles out in the blazing sun with a librarian holding an umbrella over my head if I stood still for long enough...  I’ve never thought to pack sunblock in my box of tricks to take to a school event.

So next time you’re considering a Book Festival… forget Edinburgh, try the Open Book Festival, Cape Town, where books and libraries are celebrated with vibrant energy and where writers and illustrators of children’s books are received with abundant enthusiasm. Just come prepared for all eventualities.

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