Did you ever see artwork so lovely?

Violet Mackerel’s Personal Space won’t be on the shelves here in Australia until April. April! That feels like forever to me.

So until then I will have to be content with opening the file now and again, whenever I need a burst of happiness and inspiration.

One of the most interesting parts of writing a children’s book is seeing the illustrations for the first time. It is an extraordinary thing to see what your own innermost daydreams look like in the mind of another person – and not just any person, but a skilled artist.

I’ve hardly made a secret of the fact that I utterly love Sarah Davis’s illustrations for the Violet Mackerel books. (I must admit that as the books go on I particularly fancy her take on Vincent – fwor.) But Sarah’s kindred-spirit-like fondness for small things, her whole-hearted sensitivity to characters’ feelings, her inspiring appreciation of cosy family homes and private nooks and leafy outdoor places, plus her utterly hilarious sense of humour, have meant that her Mackerels are now the ones I see in my mind’s eye when I’m writing. I think I’ve been incredibly, incredibly lucky to have been paired with her.

So it was a slightly nervous-making surprise to discover that Walker Books UK had plans in place for a whole different edition of the Violet books and I did wonder a lot what it would be like to see the Mackerels in another incarnation. Usually I see things in e-copy first, but the covers for the UK edition came by snail mail. I opened the envelope and pulled out the pages, keeping one eye shut. (This is a method my sister and I used as children when watching something frightening on television, in the belief that it might halve the impact of anything scary we saw. It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now but I still do it.)

I quickly felt at liberty to open my other eye…

…and smile rather broadly.

I love them. I love Violet’s cheery-but-a-little-bit-reserved smile, her upturned nose and the liberal scatterings of buttons and beads around her. I adore the way Sam Wilson incorporates lush little fabric designs into her line drawings. I wish so much that I had Violet’s spotty trousers and stripy socks and dainty black shoes! And I like her messy morning hair on the first cover, which looks rather a lot like mine right now even though it is actually 6.24 pm. If you would like to see some more of Sam’s beautiful work you can look here. Her site is worth quite a bit of nosing around, I think. It’s gorgeous.

The fifteenth century monk and poet John Lydgate and also my mum have observed that ‘comparisons are odious’. It is unlikely that both these wise people could be wrong and perhaps they suggest a very good way to approach new editions of books. Soon I will have the American edition to show you too – and that is completely different again! I have been so grateful to my own inner circle of family and friends whose sneak previews, on seeing the different covers, have been all about considering each Violet as a new small person in her own right. That is how I’m approaching the three separate editions myself, so I have felt very appreciative of their support.

And in that same spirit, I would love to hear what you think too x

(I didn’t notice when I took the picture but if you look in the top right hand corner I think there is a sad, weary face of a woman who might also have lived her whole life without anything very nourishing or inspiring to help her along. Can anyone else see her, I wonder?)

Anyway, like Violet in the books I write, I tend to attach significance to small things and read them as signs-of-sorts. I have been thinking that in the next couple of years, during which I hope to live as a full-time-ish writer, I don’t want to be the writer-version of that plant (or that woman). So one of my plans is to take in lots and lots of inspiration and think of it as part of my job  to see beautiful things, read wonderful books, watch incredible movies and talk with fascinating people.

Since having this idea I have had several small signs that it is probably a good one. One of the first things I did was arrange to meet up with my inspiring friend Sharon and she gave a beautiful violet she crocheted for me. She is so clever.

Then I went to the Friendship Tree which is a lovely local shop of handmade things (lots of gnomes and fairies – hooray!) where I buy most of my felt and presents for people and where I seek lots of inspiration for things I make. I found this and loved it and handed it to one of the lovely women who works there so I could pay for it…

…and she handed it back to me as a gift. I think I smiled for the rest of the day.

Another day my dear friend Jo took me for a beautiful drive up to the mountains to visit a shop called Epoche (also lots of felt, fairies and gnomes!). I bought this small thing for myself because, you know, I need more little woolly things in my microscopic and already-rather-full flat.

It must have been crocheted with the tiniest, tiniest hook. I think the colours are just incredible.

So, who knows whether it’s actually due to my plan (and the small things that seem to be validating it) or to the glorious rainy beginnings of summer, or just a bit of ordinary luck. But I’m writing up a little storm just now.

***Edited to add***

One of a few of my favourite people, Sarah, read this blogpost and found the face and look what she did, using photoshop and also her great cleverness!

This is a big deal for people in my line of work. After weeks of nonstop marking-against-the-clock, frantic chasing-up-of-all-sorts-of-urgent-things and generally heading out to our offices awfully early and staying back awfully late, suddenly it’s all over. Not only that, but the sun is out and the Christmas lights are up in the city. It feels amazing.

For me it will be a bigger deal than usual this year because I’ve decided to take some extended leave to try pursuing writing and making things a little bit more seriously. So far these passions of mine have had to fit in the cracks of my ‘proper job’ and never been granted any real time or space of their own. Last week Sarah and I launched Violet Mackerel’s Natural Habitat at the Sutherland Shire Writer’s Festival in Sydney (we had so much fun meeting the children there and signing lots of books, little pieces of paper and even the odd arm!) and I ended up marking exams on the plane there and back.

So I wonder what it will be like. Having had so little free time for as long as I can remember, might I now drown in too much of it? I’m excited and scared in exactly the same moment.

This morning I saw on facebook that Pema Chodron has asked people to help in the gathering of 100,000 aspirations to form part of a stupa being created in a Buddhist centre. If you have a look at the website they’ve created, you can see new aspirations popping up every few seconds from people all over the world. ‘I aspire to love all human beings, whatever they are or have done,’, ‘I aspire to make art that is truthful and liberating,’ ‘I aspire to be a better listener’. It’s lovely to watch this project evolve, I think, and I read lots of them before adding one myself.

Mine is a cliche. I think it might even be a self-help book title. I’m sure it is found on mugs and calendars, in fortune cookies and teenaged girls’ diaries the world over. Whatever.

Here it is, stuck (while we’re talking about cliches) on my mirror.

I’ll start clearing our my office shortly and then this how I aspire to live for a while.

What is your aspiration just now?

I have lots of favourite parts of Sarah Davis‘s eye-wateringly lovely illustrations in this book (I’m still spotting things I haven’t spotted before in the details of her beautiful drawings) but if you happen to have a copy, my honourable mention for this particular five minutes goes to pages 30-31, because Violet’s fennel patch didn’t even look this beautiful in my imagination

At the very first meeting I ever had with the lovely people at Walker Books Australia (back when 2011 sounded like a year in a science fiction film and I was not even sure there would still be such a thing as books when this one was due to come out) I mentioned how much I’d love it if the little motifs in each story could be featured on the spines of the books. Then I got all flustered from having expressed such a premature wish to such important people. But look…

…there they are. I think it only goes to show that wishes should be made and expressed, at least now and then.

And then there are things I didn’t even get as far as wishing for, like Violet’s beautiful bronze sticker which has since been upgraded to an even more beautiful silver one…

…giving the book something special in common with one of my very favourite children’s books of all time, Leaf, by Stephen Michael King…

…which I never mentioned loving at any meeting as far as I remember.

And yet here is the new Violet book, as green and as leafy as they come.

But I needn’t have been even slightly shy! I had the best fun ever! The children were just amazing. I had hoped a few of them might have read about Violet but I had no idea they would all know the story inside out and have such interesting ideas about it! They knew all about Violet’s Theory of Finding Small Things and told me all about the crystals, seedpods and jewels they had found. They asked lots of brilliant questions: how Sarah and I work together when we live in different cities, how long it takes to write a book, how many copies have been printed (I didn’t know the answer to that one!) and where writers actually do their writing. They each opened their violet envelopes and shared wonderful ideas and theories about what they found inside.

When your new book comes out, Walker Books Australia actually designs your own personal ‘publication day’ card based on the cover of your book…

…and then they send it to you signed by everyone at Walker with all their lovely thoughts about your work!

It’s soul destroying stuff.

I went Neville-spotting this morning and I found him at Dymocks on Collins St in Melbourne. Hooray! He looked very happy next to Violet, I thought. Hopefully they’ll get on splendidly.

Could you let me know if you spot him anywhere else? I would absolutely love to know.

I LOVE some of their ideas, especially the girl who would like to run her own ballet studio and the plot to invent an ‘easy farming machine’. At 5.22 there is also a wonderfully clever picture of some underwater swimming by someone who is plotting a trip to Hawaii.

So that little discovery just about made my week.

The next thing is that I have updated my website a little bit. If you look at the ‘my books’ section, you will see two new titles and some updated blurbs. Neither Neville No-Phone nor Violet Mackerel’s Natural Habitat are out just yet, but excitingly it isn’t long now.

And finally, a doll I made a while ago but never really photographed properly has a new home in some branches I keep wired together in a sort of vase. Plus she has acquired a small book.

Her head and hands are made of polymer clay and I made little holes through her wrists and neck so that I could connect up the rest of her body with pipecleaners. Then I wrapped the pipe cleaners round and round in bits of leftover wool that were too short to make anything with (quite chuffed to have found a use for those, actually).

I made her jacket from wool felt, her skirt from linen and her shirt (which is cheating because it’s really just the parts you can see around her sleeves, neck and middle) was scrap fabric. I was especially pleased with her stockings which I made from a recycled sock.

Her hair was a bit tricky. I didn’t think hard enough at the polymer clay stage! But it worked out well enough in the end. I cut lots of pieces of wool and laid them all on top of each other and tied them in a knot. Then I glued the knot to her head. It wasn’t very secure, but I wrapped velvet ribbon round her head and the knot twice and glued that too (it stuck much better than the wool). That meant I could stitch the knot to the ribbon and now it’s all unbudgable.

Hope you’re all set for a lovely weekend and that perhaps it might include some peaceful reading in a tree (if that’s the sort of thing you like) x

I found Violet at Dymocks on the weekend, newly resplendent with her (truthfully bronze coloured) shiny sticker, and it would seem that my insufferable goody-goody showoff inner seven-year-old is alive and well and saying things like ‘I got a gold star. It’s quite a big one, don’t you think? And shiny?’ etc etc.

A. has the patience of a saint and he needed it this weekend, obligingly agreeing that it is a very nice sort of sticker and it does go rather beautifully with Sarah’s gorgeous cover, that the CBCA logo of the child reading the book is indeed a very fine one and roundish stickers are by far the best sort, and never saying FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE ANNA PUT IT AWAY, LUNCH IS GETTING COLD.

So anyway, like him, I thought you might like to see the sticker from a few different angles.

This is how it looks when viewed from the right.

And this is how it looks if you hold the book and just tilt it slightly away from you. (It’s not every sticker that looks so good from so many angles, is it?)

And just in case you can’t make it out from any of these photos the text on that beautiful shiny sticker says, The Children’s Book Council of Australia Short-Listed Book - hooray!

Hooray! It is my advance copy of Violet Mackerel’s Remarkable Recovery!

Now tell me this…

Is Sarah or is Sarah not UTTERLY a legend??