Two More Birthday Top Picks!

Have I made inroads into the next WIP? No - I've been too wrapped up in The Great British Sewing Bee but that's another story...

Did everyone have a fabulous World Book Day? Or week even? I'm into children's classics at the moment. On #WBD I finished Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time - a psychadelic adventure in time and space to search for a missing father and started E. Nesbit's, The Enchanted Castle, where a group of children find a mischievous girl who accidentally turns herself invisible with a magic ring - sound familiar?


Stig, Paul's tribute illustration
So for the first of this week's two top picks for our Birthday Month it's another children's classic.

1st June 2013 was the 50th anniversary of the publication of Stig of the Dump and on the day, in spite of a cyber attack on server in Sarajevo which brought W&P down for a lot of that Saturday, we posted Paul Morton's beautiful retrospective on Stig, his author Clive King and illustrator Edward Ardizzone.


Anna Violet's illustration for 19th Dec.
The second is a whole month of posts. Can you bear a quick look back to Christmas on this sunny March bird-singing Sunday in the UK? Another of Paul's triumphs, he gathered and organised the fantastic illustrators who made our first Words & Pictures Advent Calendar. The illustrations were inspirational - especially for a wonderful group of writers who commented with their tweetable micro fiction - 140 characters or less - here: #W8PAdvent.


Last week Nick and Katrina reported on the event of the year - The Undiscovered Voices Launch Party which was closely followed by Katrina's announcement that she's signed with Agent Gemma Cooper! Brilliant news for which we'll be hanging out the flags very soon here on W&P!

Nick struggled with what to have for lunch while, yet again, picking a marvellous blog selection, news was from Southampton (yay) and we celebrated Sandra Greave's fantastic shortlisting for The Waterstone's Children's Book Prize. We welcomed new illustration features writer Margaret Sturton with a great report on her experience at Cambridge School of Art's Summer School last year. She has some very useful tips  for anyone thinking about booking this year. And we also had a wonderful introduction to our new column Ask a Picture Book Editor with our very own RA Natascha Biebow and Little Tiger Press' Ellie Farmer. This is going to be great - questions for them to get their teeth into - a splendid image - to writers@britishscbwi.org please, or leave a comment on the post.

Next week we have birthday inspiration from Philippa, another in the Proofreading Tips series from Catriona and Paul is back with some Photoshop tips for illustrators.

Having sent the UV winners on their way hopefully to agent signings and book deals we'd like to spotlight the oh so nearly there honorary mentions next Saturday. If' you're a UV honorary mention send me editor@britishscbwi.org a link to your UV excerpt and I'll post that with a roll of honour and your book title.

Hope UK SCBWIs are enjoying the sunshine!


Jan Carr



Jan Carr is the editor of Words & Pictures. Her fiction is all over the place, she blogs occasionally and loves to write in magenta. You can contact her at editor@britishscbwi.org.

5 comments:

  1. I am reading another E. Nesbitt, the one with the children and IT, about making wishes that keep going wrong. I read The Enchanted Castle and it took me a while to get used to the style. Kids surely didn't talk like that, but it was a good adventure anyway. Love A Wrinkle in Time, it's still one of my favorite books and series of all time!

    Congrats on signing with Gemma Cooper!

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  2. Thanks Colleen - we're all really pleased for Katrina and Gemma!

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  3. Both Gemma and Katrina made a great choice :-)

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  4. Looking forward to reading UV14.Thanks for putting up the link.

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