TIME WITH PATRICK & PETER

It's Saturday already. This Year Of Mouse blog's been sitting rather shamefully silent for almost a week. Where did the days go?

Part of the week was taken up with an initial meeting of an Active Learning Written and Spoken Word project at Morley Library where - despite the icy morning - teachers, librarians and a variety of writers spent a day together,

This first training day was brilliant. It was led by lecturer and storyteller Patrick Ryan, who I'd first heard years ago as one of the Company of Storytellers, and it was as good as I'd hoped. He mixed tales, riddles and story activities with theories of learning and the universality of narrative.

I was paired with a very nice young primary teacher, and we enjoyed chatting about what might work for the project's classroom visits. I feel much more excited - happily! - than I thought I'd be about this initiative and it was great to be working with other people again. As a "Book Week Visitor" I'm often out there in the school hall working alone. Good to mix with the other writers too. I'll tel you more as it happens.

So it wasn't until yesterday I had time to muse on the Mouse illustrations. They were drawn by Peter Bailey, and were just wonderful and dramatic, with the first image and the final image cleverly "bookending" one aspect of the plot.

I'd already seen Peter Bailey's work in the poet Tony Mitton's "Plum" anthology and in Philip Pullman's "I was a Rat" and welcomed the hint of Ardizzone in the dramatically "lit" black and white pen drawings. I spent a special afternoon looming through the nine pictures, and my responses are now waiting in an editorial in-box.

Spent today working on two short texts - one new, one a revision - for early reader books, hoping that the series editor and consultant will like one or other. Why not both? Because they rarely take two stories by the same author in one of the sets.

Meanwhile, it's back to working on Tome Two, struggling to get the storyline straightened out. . . Hope you're having a productive weekend too.