When I plan out a novel, I plan in broad strokes. Before I start writing, I usually know where the story starts, where it ends, who the characters are, and all of the major incidents or locations along the way. There are some exceptions – when I was writing The Chimney Rabbit, the whole sequence… Read More
Month: July 2013
Talking animals
It should come as no surprise that I write a lot about talking animals – after all, the titles of my first three books are The Chimney Rabbit, The Chimney Rabbit and the Underground Mice, and Tales of the Ancient Rabbits. There’s a great tradition in children’s literature of talking, anthropomorphic animals – think of… Read More
String length addendum
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the length of children’s fiction, and about the mixed messages that I’ve received, with some agents giving quite gnomic advice, and other places providing hard and fast word counts. In the past week I received a rejection from an agent, and one of the reasons she cited (along… Read More