The Franklin Watts party was great fun! Here are fellow authors Jill Atkins and Liss Norton (top), Lynne Benton and Kath Langrish (bottom)

 

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  Check out this fab little you tube film of one of the songs on the CD to go with the soon-to-be published music book START WITH A STORY - DRAGONS AND DINOSAURS

I have been with Usborne since they started their fiction range of books. This interview formed part of their 5-year celebrations. I was asked all sorts of writing related questions and answered them as best I could! USBORNE INTERVIEW

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Happy New Year!

This is the view from my office window. Inspirational! I'm in a very creative phase but getting stuff accepted is another matter! I'm now realising how lucky I've been to have commission after commission for the last several years! Right now I have 5 different things on the go, and this term is going to be very busy with several school visits. 

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START WITH A STORY........

4 BRAND NEW BOOKS:

I have 4 music/drama/story books coming out next march called 'Start With a Story.....' because that's exactly what they do! These are books to be used in Early Years Settings for music/drama/movement/literacy learning. I have integrated the music with lots of generic activities to make the books as user friendly as possible. They  each have a fab CD with all the songs and lots of activities on them to preclude the necessity to play piano or to be at all musical in fact!
The themes are:
SEASONS
MYSELF
DRAGONS AND DINOSUARS 
TRADITIONAL TALES

 Here I am recording for the CDs with my helpers, Melissa, Ellie and Annie (left to right)

 

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FACT ABOUT ME!

Every Wednesday during term time, I meet up with my lovely friends Alex and Carolyn and we talk Italian. Alex, being bilingual keeps Carolyn and myself on track.  The three of us have become the best of friends over the years and treasure our time together.

 

ME, ALEX AND CAROLYN  

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 It's always great to meet up with fellow authors, so lunch with Val Wilding, Jill Atkins and Sue Reid was good fun! Waterloo is the most central place, though poor Jill had a longer than usual journey with train delays and cancellations. We exchanged our writers' news and also our lack of it! We had a competition to see who could make the waitress smile - Jill won(!) - and we covered all sorts of serious and definitely not serious topics. Those 3 ladies all publish the historical MY STORY series for scholastic, amongst other things. So I was the odd one out!

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