January 2026

It’s January, and it’s raining…

So… here we are in a new year, well 22 days into a new year if we’re counting. But can we really count days that never seem to get properly light? I think bears have the right idea; we did the gathering of food and stuff ready for Christmas, so now we should be hibernating and living off the stuff we gathered (or just sleeping).

So how is the book coming along?

I think the characters may have gone into hibernation after being neglected over Christmas, certainly the paint brushes had forgotten how to paint! But during these dark days of January the paint has started to flow again, the cogs of the imagination are turning slowly and the characters are coming back out to play…

 

  

Tis the season, well the season to be getting ready for the season at least

Tis the season, well the season to be getting ready for the season at least.

I have two Christmas fairs booked in and around York and will give more details nearer the time. Christmas is a big time for gifts and what better gift than a book! So it is the time of year when I gather my books and a pen, and go out into the world to encourage as many people as possible that mine are the perfect books to wrap and give this season.

And also: the picture book is still brewing, technology has not been my friend this week, and just when I thought I had the upper hand with the new scanner, it had other ideas and decided it didn’t want to send pictures to the file I wanted them in, and would much rather save in a different file type to the one I need. So I’m going to be having another play with the scanner once I’ve finished here, and get the pictures I want, where I want them…

Never a dull moment in self publishing…

 

Books don’t write themselves, they are often dragged kicking and screaming to the finish line.

 Picture book brewing!

September finds me knee deep in paint.

 

There is still a picture book brewing, and at this point I have to remind myself that
books don’t write themselves, they are often dragged kicking and screaming to the finish line. There is always a technical issue of some kind; in this case it has been a dead scanner. I battled with the old scanner to no avail, before giving in to the inevitable and buying a shiny new one.

Shiny new things can often be very nice, but in the case of technology I find that new usually means different, and that means working out how to get the new appliance to do what I want it to do, but we have now come to an agreement, and seem to be speaking the same language.

A few draft scans have been done and inserted into the text of the book, so the first draft is now taking shape and the magic of pictures and words merging together to tell a story has begun…

When spinning plates fall...

 It seems that spinning plates was not the best way forward… they all came crashing down and are now going down with the sinking ship that was my website. And why did I allow my website to sink, well, because the shop was an expensive experiment that didn’t bring in the sales I had hoped for. And so for now I’m settling back into my blogger account, where I’ve shared so many of the ups and downs over my years in writing, illustrating and self publishing.

So what is next? I have a book finish! There I’ve said it, so it will have to come true because I am nothing if not stubborn, and I have a gem of a story to tell… The characters are a little different, and consequently harder to pin down into illustrations, especially as drawing is not my first language, but they are well on the way, and now that I’m not spending so much time playing with my website, I have more time to bring this project to a finish line.

The hardest thing about self publishing is having to do everything myself, and sometimes a writer just needs to write, and draw, and paint… and figure out why the scanner no longer scans… OK that feels like more than enough to be going on with, I’ll see you all at the other end of the paint box.