It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

Christmas is approaching very quickly and we've not even written our Christmas cards yet. We will be doing that tonight and getting them in the post straight away. We have put our tree up though - we spent Monday doing our Christmas shopping and the evening putting up our tree and other decorations. 

As you can see, we've decorated it all in Red, White and Silver. It looks perfect - the pictures here really don't do it justice though. 

Over the last couple of years we've picked up a few interesting decorations from different places and each one reminds us of where we bought them and what we were doing which makes the tree feel all that more special. We bought a couple of little decorations when we visited Bourton On The Water last weekend and we also bought one from Harrod's when we visited London.

A Lovely Weekend

On Friday we drove down to Bourton On The Water in Gloucestershire - the weekend was a wedding gift from a couple of our good friends. We set off at at half ten on Friday morning and made our way through torrential rain down the motorway to the lovely little village... thankfully the rain stopped just as we arrived so we were able to have a little walk around before finding somewhere nice and cozy for tea.

A river runs through the middle of the village, with little bridges crossing from one side to the other so you can walk or drive across. It was nice and peaceful and we had a couple of perfect days wandering round the shops and sampling some of the food and drink that was on offer in the little pubs :-) ...

At night, Christmas decorations shone from the shop windows and from some of the lamp posts... but best of all was the Christmas tree that stands proudly in the river. Nice and Christmassy...

Bourton-On-The-Water

Tonight we are spending a romantic evening together at Bourton-On-The-Water... a wedding gift from some good friends who a looking after Con. Spending tomorrow all together for some festive fun...

Boofle came along for the ride - here he is enjoying a glass of pop...

Robo-Runners Clip

We've had a busy couple of weeks with one thing and another (painting and decorating at home, a trip to London, gas boiler breaking down) and yet again I've not had chance to write a blog post - despite promising fellow author Chris d'Lacey that I would write one on The Next Big Thing... Sorry Chris, I will get this done tomorrow (a week late). Chris d'Lacey is the author of lots of brilliant books - including the excellent (and best-selling) series, The Last Dragon Chronicles. To find out about the next Big Thing that Chris is working on you can visit his web diary by clicking HERE - it's exciting stuff. As well as visiting his website and reading his books, you can keep up to date with what Chris is doing on twitter @chrisdlacey

The Robo-Runners clip that was shown on BBC2 as part of Bringing Books To Life is now available on the internet and can be viewed by clicking HERE. I've been trying to embed it into my website but have been having a bit of trouble doing so.

Lots to write about in my diary so watch this space for photographs from our wedding, and photographs and news of our trip to London over the past weekend - and lots more... 

Another Busy Week

It's been a busy week. On Sunday evening I spent four and a half hours driving down to Eastcote, Middlesex so that I could spend all day on Monday visiting Newnham Junior School. I had a great time at school meeting all the wonderful staff and children and sharing stories and poems, and generally having lots of book fun. Fellow author, Mark Robson was at the school too - I haven't seen Mark for a couple of years so it was great having the chance to catch up with him. 

The rest of the week has been spent writing and painting and decorating at home. The kitchen is almost finished, but once it is it will be time to make a start on the living room. Hoping to get it all finished in time to put the Christmas decorations up.

Tomorrow I'm visiting Mountain Lane Primary School in Buckley - only a ten minute drive from home - so here's a BIG HELLO to everyone there. See you all soon...

Damian and Vicky's Wedding

I've not written anything in my diary for quite a while. You might thing that this is because nothing much has been happening recently but let me tell you - the exact opposite is true... in fact there has been so much happening recently that I've not had chance to sit down and write in my diary. 

I've been busy writing of course - have put the finishing touches to a couple of little plays (I can tell you more about those later), and I have also been messing around with some other writing work.... more about that later too.... But the biggest and most important thing of all though is that on Saturday 27th October I got married to the most beautiful Victoria Harris - now Victoria Harvey. We haven't got many photographs from the wedding yet but they will be arriving very soon. We do have a couple of lovely photographs that have bee taken by other people though, including this one taken by one of our wonderful bridesmaids Rachel Harvey. 

If you can't wait to see  more photographs then you can take a look at a Photovid of our perfect day by clicking HERE. Our superb wedding photographers, Gaynor and Steve Godfrey (Rainbow Studios) did a fantastic job and we would highly recommend them to anyone.

Bringing Books To Life

I was really excited when, a few weeks ago, I was asked if Robo Runners could be used on BBC 2 Bringing Books To Life. Of course, I said yes... The programme is described as 'A wonderful adventure into the worlds of some of the best children's books written for seven-to-ten-year-olds." Throughout the series, celebrity presenters talk about and read extracts for their favourite books - this is combined with animation to make the whole thing even more exciting. If you visit the BBC2 website you can watch the trailer for the programme, and a couple of other clips.

I was delighted to discover that Hannah England, Team GB athlete, was going to be reading an extract from Robo-Runners. 

The programme is due to be shown for the first time on Friday morning at 5AM (but hopefully parts of the programme - including the Robo Runners extract - will be shown again at other times on BBC and on CBBC). Click Robo Runners to go straight to the Robo Runners page where you can see more, and bigger pictures. As soon as the clip is available I will include it on my website... 

Other books being used in the series include, Roald Dahl's Georges Marvellous Medicine, Kenneth Graham's Wind in the Willows, Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant, Michael Morpurgo's Butterfly Lion and Philip Pullman's The Firework maker's Daughter.... so Crank and Al are in good company.