I’m quite excited! My tenth book (ten books, in four years!) will be published this week. Orange Juice Peas is about a little girl called Jessie, her big brother Ben and a very messy teatime. And it has wonderful bright cheery pictures by Lizzie Wells.

Even though Orange Juice Peas isn’t in the shops yet (it should be available at the weekend) I already have a copy which I’ve sneakily read to a few groups of children.

Reading a new picture book out loud to children for the first time is a strange experience.  It’s not the same as reading a carefully selected cliffhanger extract from a novel to 9 year olds.  Reading a whole picture book to group of 5 year olds, especially for the first time, feels quite risky.  What if they won’t sit quiet and listen?  What if they get bored and wander off, or start picking their noses, or asking to go to the toilet, or poking the child sitting beside them?  What if they don’t like it?  (These are very small children, remember, and if they don’t like something they might not be polite about it!)

So I get quite nervous the first few times I read a picture book to an audience. It’s my first chance to see if the story works.  I do read a book out loud to myself when I’m drafting it, and to my own kids when I think it’s finished. But the book doesn’t feel real until I read it to kids I don’t know, to see what they think, to see how they react, and to find out the most important thing: will they laugh at the right bits?

I’m delighted to say that yes, the couple of times I’ve read Orange Juice Peas to kids – in Selkirk and in Falkirk – they have laughed. At the bits I hoped they’d find funny, and at other bits as well!

Also, some of them went “aww” at the right bit near the end too.  And some of them tried to count the peas on the pages where the editor, designer and I had spent hours checking the numbers of peas (so Sally and Helena, that was totally worthwhile!)

Now I am ready to take this book out into the world, because it seems to work. (Phew.) And that’s something you can never be sure of, whether it’s your first book, your third book, your tenth or your hundredth, until you actually know what the readers think of it!

Orange Juice Peas

Cute is pretty much a swearword in our house these days, both my children having grown out of thinking “well, aren’t you cute!” is a compliment.  But there are now two really cute kids around again, because I’ve seen all the finished pictures for my next picture book: Orange Juice Peas.  And the Floris 2012 catalogue is out, so I can show it to you, or the cover, at least.

The two kids in Orange Juice Peas, Jessie and Ben, are SO CUTE.  And that’s not an insult, it’s just a fact!

It was a joy watching both of them come to life in sketches, roughs and final pictures by the wonderful illustrator Lizzie Wells.  That’s the best thing about picture books.  I have the idea, I write the words and I create the story, but the illustrator brings the characters to life.  It’s nerve-wracking meeting my creations for the first time in a picture, just in case they look somehow wrong.  There are lots of ways for a character to look right, not just one way, but there are just as many ways for them to look wrong.

But this time it’s fine, lots more than fine, because Lizzie has brought Jessie and Ben (and their cat, their babysitter, and their dad’s hairy legs) to life wonderfully.

So picture books really are teamwork.  Novels are teamwork too, with the editor an essential part towards the end of the process.  But picture books are more obviously teamwork.  And if you get a great illustrator, who tells the story in expressions and movement, then the writer can back off a bit and take some words out again.

I sometimes get asked ‘Do you have your own illustrator?’  No, I don’t.  I don’t keep an artist in the cupboard, or the fridge, or under the desk.  But I think the question means: are all my books illustrated by the same person?  And no, they’re not.

Sometimes I think it would be nice to have a recognisable style to all my picture books, so that people could say, ‘oh, that’s the new Lari Don and x book.’  But it’s also good to have exactly the right artist for each book, because they are all different stories, with different characters, in different realities.

Gabby Grant’s funny cheeky polite pictures were perfect for The Big Bottom Hunt, Nicola O’Byrne’s simple panoramic style was ideal for How to Make a Heron Happy and now that I’ve seen them, I know that Lizzie Wells’ colour, energy and CUTE faces are wonderful for Orange Juice Peas.

I wonder who will illustrate my next story?  No idea.  But for now, I’ll just smile at the cover of Orange Juice Peas:

I’ve seen covers or illustrations for three of next year’s books in the last week or two, and it’s always scary.

When I get emails from editors with attachments lurking at the top, I always pause and take a deep breath before opening them.  I am excited, but also a bit nervous.

I see stories in my head when I’m writing them.  I see the tortoise crossing the savannah with determination on his face.  I see the surprise on a teenager’s face when her best friend turns up in a severe headscarf.  I see the confusion on a toddler’s face when she’s given a bowl of icecream topped with… well, I’ll not give that away.

I see their faces, I hear their voices, and I know their thoughts.  So it’s really strange to see someone else’s pictures of them. Because the characters are never exactly the way I imagined them. The pictures are usually fabulous, and bring the story to life, and that’s wonderful.  But how could they possibly be exactly how I imagine them?

So when I get these pictures and the editor asks for my comments I have to try very hard not to go: ‘AAAARGH but that’s not right because Ellie has freckles and her teeth are slightly squint and she wears hoop earrings and…’ Because none of that is important in the story.  It’s just how I saw her when I met her in my head.

I have to try look at the pictures not as the unique illustration of the perfect story that I saw in my head, but as one of many possible illustrations of the actual story that I managed to put on the page.  I need to check whether the pictures help tell the story, and not expect them to be a telepathic rendering of my own thoughts.

But I’ve noticed something strange about the books that have already been published.  Even though the characters on the page aren’t the characters I saw when I wrote the book, after a while, the characters in my head slide away, and are replaced by the ones that the artist has imagined and drawn.  Which is a little odd, and slightly sad, now I think about it.

Maybe that’s one reason I love the silhouette covers of my Floris novels.  They don’t give away too much.  There is plenty of space there for my idea of the character, the artist’s idea of the character and the reader’s idea of the character, all in the nice dark space inside the outline.

I should stress that all the artwork I’ve seen the last couple of weeks has been splendid, a great help in telling the stories.  Never exactly what I imagined, but if I wanted to put the pictures I imagined on the page, then I should have gone to art college.

And in the meantime, here is the actual real cover for my next book, Drawing a Veil.  The cover I saw a couple of weeks ago should apparently not have been online. I like this better anyway.  What do you think?  I think the cover girl looks like she’d make a great best friend!

(And if you want to see the excellent line drawings telling the story inside Drawing a Veil, then you’ll have to wait til next Feb!)

The Edinburgh International Book Festival is over! Aw… Now I can get back to writing! Yeah!

And I’m off to a flying start. I’ve just seen the rough pictures for my next book! It’s a picture book called Orange Juice Peas, it’s being illustrated by a French artist and the pictures look utterly fantastic! Really colourful, really funny, and full of expression on the kids’ faces. All of which is great. Because the more there is in the pictures, the more I can cut out of the words!

That’s the wonderful thing about picture books. I put the story in words, so that everyone can get started. Then the artist then tells the story in pictures, probably putting in much more than I had in the words (like the crab in the Big Bottom Hunt – that was never my idea!) and once I can see what the artist is doing, I can take some of the words back out again! (Well, me and my wonderful editor and fabulous designer, who are the ones who put it all together, and in this case count all the peas to make sure they add up at the end of the book. Why? Well, you’ll just have to wait and see…)

So! A new picture book! With a new artist! And lots of peas. What a great start to September.

Now I’d better go and take a few words out of the next picture book, and put lots more words into the next novel.

I’ve just done two of the weirdest author events ever. The libraries’ summer reading challenge this year has a circus theme, and so I was asked to talk about writing and words and general fun with books at a couple of libraries this week. That’s the sort of thing I do all the time. But this time, because it was a circus theme, I was doing the event with CLOWNS. I’ve only ever had one experience with a clown, when he decided it would be very amusing to interrupt me while I was telling a rather serious Greek myth to some P7s. Which wasn’t helpful. So I was a bit nervous about working with Oli and Gus in Hawick yesterday and Edinburgh today. But they were lovely. Really funny, very good at juggling with penguins, umbrellas, trumpets, hats, silver cups, and all sort of other oddly shaped things. They were really easy to work with too – we even discussed when it was ok to heckle. And I think I may have heckled them more than they heckled me.

We made up stories together – them juggling objects, and me making stories up about what they were juggling. And the harder, pokier, and more dangerous the objects the better!

So, that was fun. And slightly silly. But the silliest thing I did today wasn’t inventing, on the spot, a story about a cockerel whose alarm clock didn’t work, it was shouting ‘bottom’ in front of several politicians.

The event today was in a the gorgeous reference library in Edinburgh Central Library. It’s a huge room, with a massive high painted dome. I go there to research books (I did a lot of research for Rocking Horse War there, right under the dome) and it’s normally a very serious, quiet room full of students and researchers and if you drop a pencil or open a book loudly you worry that you’ve disturbed someone’s very important thought. So normally I’m very quiet there. But today, there were only me and the kids and lots of important politicians who’d come to see how the reading challenge worked. No desks, no researchers. So I stood under the dome, and I shouted ‘BOTTOM!!’

Now, I didn’t just do that for fun. Though it was fun. I did it because we were talking about our favourite words, and how to make stories and books out of them. And I’ve written a book about bottoms, and bottom is a pretty good word, so it made complete sense to shout ‘Bottom!’ in this very beautiful serious room.

And I got away with it! But I don’t know if they’ll ever let me back…

So, here are some pictures of me with the lovely, wonderful, talented, funny and utterly non-terrifying Oli and Gus.
Here also is a bit of footage from the Scottish Government website – the first time ever, I’m assured, that someone has said BOTTOM on the website about running the country. . .

(And please do go into your local library and see what fun things they’re doing for the Circus Stars Reading Challenge!)