Lari’s Writing blog

Do you think children’s writers just sit at a desk and write? It’s much more fun and much dafter than that!
If you read my blog regularly, you’ll already know that children’s authors have to do some fairly strange things. But recently, my life has been getting even weirder. You can now find me on YouTube, flicking peas off the top of melting ice-cream, right across my own kitchen.
I spent a whole day with Chani and Benedicte from my publishers Floris, filming peas floating in glasses of orange juice and peas sitting on top of ice-cream… Why? Because they thought it would be fun for people to see me act out the story of Orange Juice Peas, my new picture book.
I’m used to reading the story out loud, but I’m usually in a classroom, library or theatre, so I don’t often have a fridge, a freezer and a bag of peas handy. But we thought that if we filmed it in my kitchen, we could do the whole thing for real. So we did. And it was very odd, and huge fun, and I suggest you have a look and let me know what you think!
But that may not be the oddest thing I’ve done while researching, writing or promoting my books. I’ve also:

– allowed a fairy to guide me through a maze;
– let the BBC get me lost in the very same maze;
– told a Viking legend in a cave;
– walked sunwise round a small hill in the Eildons looking for a magic door, on the same day that I’d been threatened by the Faery Queen on Twitter;
– shouted “Bottom!” loudly in the poshest, quietest bit of the Edinburgh Central Library;
– read from Wolf Notes in the gardens of a castle, rather than indoors, because the staff were a little nervous that the relevant chapters were about breaking in and stealing from their castle;
– phoned up a university to find a vet who could tell me how to heal an injured dragon;
– contacted a tropical fish society to ask about mermaids’ tails;
– tried out some exotic herbs and spices to find out what a witch would use to flavour the children she was going to eat;
– clambered along a clifftop in a howling gale;
– timed a frond of bracken travelling down seven waterfalls, in the Pentlands, on Christmas Eve;
– waggled my bottom at children on a regular basis, which may be why many infants now call me The Big Bottom Lady (because of the book title, obviously, not the size of my bottom!)
– learnt how to read (some) cuneiform writing, and invented my own Sumerian monsters;
– run down the same hill as Tam O’Shanter, like I was being chased by witches, when in fact I was being watched by puzzled American tourists.

Those are some of the daft and dangerous things I’ve done so far as a writer. I wonder what I’ll do now, to research my next book?