New Books

I hope you're enjoying the half term holidays... I've had a busy time since Christmas and things are just going to get busier so I thought I' d take this chance to write a little bit in my diary.

My two latest little books were published by the wonderful people at Franklin Watts a couple of days ago. Meerkat's Marathon and Hippo's High Dive. Both of the books form part of a little six book series themed around animals in the Olympic Games - two books are written by me and the other four have been written by other authors... There are only around 200 words in each of the books so they are quite short but the illustrations are great and I think they are a lot of fun.

Meerkat's Marathon has been illustrated by a brilliant new illustrator called Steve Brown. This was only Steve's second book but I think you will agree he's made a brilliant job of it. I'm delighted that Steve is illustrating another one of my stories at the moment (more about that later)... I think he's going to be a really big name in the children's book world in the future so it's great to have the chance to work with him. You can find out more about Steve by visiting his website HERE.

You can find out more about Meerkat's Marathon and Hippo's High Dive by clicking HERE... you can also print off some fun things to do.

I had a great time last week with everyone at Hadnall Primary School near Shrewsbury - followed by a long drive down to Edgware where I spent a day at The Orion Primary School for part of their wonderful Word Up Festival. I hope everyone enjoyed the day as much as I did...

After leaving The Orion Primary School I had a short drive (though it took ages) down to Wimbledon ready to visit the Ursuline Preparatory School for Girls.

It was fantastic meeting everyone and coming up with story ideas... lots of great questions and I even got to see a fox snoozing in the sun. You can see him at the top of the page...

New Book Covers

Just a very quick post here to let you see the covers of three new books that will be coming out for young readers early next year... it's always exciting when new books are going to be published.

To coincide with the 2016 Olympic Games there are two Animal Olympic stories: Meerkat's Marathon and Hippo's High Dive. 
Meerkat's Marathon has been wonderfully illustrated by Steve Brown, and Hippo's High Dive by Andrew Painter. Both of the artists have great individual styles which suit the stories very well and give them both a different, fun feel which I love. 

I have added web pages for both of the Animal Olympic titles to my site which include information about each book and some fun things to do like crosswords, word searches and colouring sheets. Click on HERE to go there now.

The third new book is called Just Like Me! a very short story with around 50 words. So far I have seen the cover and some of the rough artwork... but it's already looking like a lot of fun. This is still being illustrated by two illustrators - Federica Muccio and Roberta Vottero at the moment so the web page isn't quite ready. It's interesting that there are two people working together to do the illustrations but then the story itself was created by me and my wife Vicky... so it's taken 4 people to make this little book...