Submissions on Show #4

October 2020 UK Picture Book Submission

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope this year will be a good one for you all.

Although December seemed to go ever so quickly (as always), it feels as though I published the previous post in this series ages ago – which is all the more reason to get straight into putting another of my submissions on show.

(You can read a comprehensive introduction to this series here).

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Just a quick aside to say THANK YOU to everyone who’s subscribed so far. If you enjoy reading my work, please consider a paid subscription to access everything. An annual subscription works out at about £0.69 per week (for that, you get a free signed copy of one of my books), and a monthly subscription cost less than a very cheap pint/good slice of cake (and if you’re still a monthly subscriber after 10 months, I’ll send a book your way too).

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Submission #3: October 2020 UK Picture Book Submission

This submission was a bit of a bumper one, consisting of 10 – yes, 10! – picture book texts.

Sam Won’t Eat Greens – a silly and surreal rhyming story, with a message about healthy eating, sort of.

Headwear, instruments, rubbish trucks, buildings, planets: Sam (spurred on by his sister) eats EVERYTHING and ANYTHING. Except, of course, his greens. Desperate, his parents enlist the help of Sam’s scary Great Aunt Pam, who discovers Sam really will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid eating greens…

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Where the Cat Sat – another surreal rhyming story with lots of wordplay, in which a cat tries to find a place to sit and make their own. I wrote this shortly after my cat, Hokey, arrived in my life, with my inspiration coming from watching her explore my flat, and laughing at the different, often bizarre, spots in which, after much deliberation, she’d finally decide to settle.

I liked it at the time. Reading it back, it does little for me. The (weak) narrative feels contrived to serve the rhymes – although, to be fair, the wordplay and rhymes were kind of the whole point. I can think of a few fairly-recently-published books that rely heavy on wordplay but which achieve more than what I managed to with this text (such as Em Lynas’s The Cat and the Rat and the Hat/The Goat and the Stoat and the Boat).

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New Dog, Old Sock – a family gets a new and excitable dog, who proceeds to cause chaos by chewing everything in sight (starting with an old sock), before running away when scared off by a loud admonishment. Thrilling, right?!

This was my attempt to write a very simple, very short and sparse text for the board book/youngest end of the picture book market. I managed that in a sense: the story is only 30 words.

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The Knights in Tights – a humorous and heartfelt rhyming story to challenge gender stereotypes, roles and expectations.

It’s lengthy at 950 words, which might count against it, but I still like this text and think it’s strong.

And, given the current rifeness of toxic masculinity, I think it’s never been so important to encourage and set up boys from a young age to be kind, gentle, considerate and brave enough to think for themselves and not simply conform to entrenched but pernicious ideas about what it means to be male.

Here’s the manuscript for you – because I’d love to know what you think of it (and the follow-up one, too). Let me know in the comments.

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Queen Claudine – I wrote this