Very Lush New Editions

What's Up with Jody Barton? and all the Lottie Biggs books are now available with brand new lovely covers.  They also happen to be the August Book(s) of the Month on MyKindaBook.com.  This means that there'll be Biggs and Barton related content going up on that site throughout the whole of the month.  It also means that I'm going to give away a signed set.  I'll sign them for you or for whoever you like.  All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning is send me a message before the end of August with this important password in it:

Hi Hayley, nice makeover.

Send your message via the contact form on my website; you'll find it here.  Please take care to fill in your email address correctly.  One winner will be notified of their four-book-bonanza in early September.

And if you're wondering where the NEW words are from me - I promise you a great many new words next year! I've been proper busy.  On the quiet :)

Enjoy your summer.

Hayley x

Bath Time!

This is just a quick blog post to tell you that it will soon be...

Bath Time!  

Nope, that's not me reminding you to wash behind your ears - I'm talking about BATH CHILDREN'S LITERATURE FESTIVAL.  It starts September 28 and finishes October 6.  Children's Laureate, Malorie Blackman, will be there.  So will Michael Rosen and Charlie Higson.  So will Cathy Cassidy and Patrick Ness.  So too will David Almond - which is a very good thing because, this year, David's helped direct it. In fact, LOADS of writers will be there.  And on that final Sunday, I'LL be there too.

Wahey!!!

This is what Sita looks like when she's holding a
very impressive award.

You can find me at 2.30 at the Mission Theatre.  I'll be appearing with Sita Brahmachari, author of those wonderful books, Artichoke Hearts, Jasmine Skies and Kite Spirit.

More details can be found here:
Sita and me at Bath Festival

So if you live in Bath or near Bath or have some way of getting yourself to Bath, please COME ALONG and say hello to Sita and me.  We'd be delighted to say hello back :)

Hope you all had a fantastic summer!

(By the way, if you're a teacher and you're feeling ever so slightly sad about summer coming to an end, may I just remind you of the KS3 teaching packs you can download COMPLETELY FREE should you choose to introduce a bit of Lottie Biggs or Jody Barton into your classrooms.... )

I won’t lie to you…

One way or another, March has been slightly rubbish. But on the upside, at least I can look out of the window and see that Spring has sprung. My garden has started to come back to life and the other day, I even spotted Irma the Bunny having a cheeky sneaky sunbathe. So hopefully, any moment now, my brain – which has been in hibernation for quite a few months - will spring back into action too and I’ll start getting some words and ideas popping back inside my head.

Another thing which really cheers me along is the lovely emails I receive from all over the world – or, at least, wherever there is a distributor of Lottie Biggs books. This month for some reason, I’ve had quite a few emails from Canada. The picture attached to this email is a poster which Emma, from Ottawa, sent me. Emma says she goes to a French school and made this poster as part of her book review of Lottie Biggs n’est Presque pas Cinglée. (That’s Mad Lottie to English readers). Thanks Emma – je pense que t’affiche est vraiment chouette!

Also, I need to mention another Canadian. Alexandra Lavoie who lives in Quebec City emailed me with a load of questions and said that she was giving a presentation about Lottie Biggs n’est presque pas Désespérée (Desperate Lottie) in her French class. She also needed some kind of evidence for her French teacher that she had actually properly contacted me so…. HELLO ALEXE! J’espère que ton presentation est allé bien!

Next month, I’m doing a couple of public events so DO come and say hello if you live nearby. On Saturday 23rd April I’ll be signing books and chatting to people as part of the G-Day Festival at St. Gregory’s Centre for the Arts in Norwich and on Saturday 30th April, I shall be at Gainsborough Community Library in Ipswich, Suffolk. SO DO COME ALONG AND SAY HELLO IF YOU CAN.

Oooh, it’s been an interesting month. So let’s see. Finished A’ level marking, nagged my sixth-formers to within an inch of their lives, planted potatoes in vegetable patch, took Bunny to the vets for her annual health check-up and booster jabs, watched all six episodes of Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy in ‘Pride and Prejudice’, read a book about Stevie Wonder, wrote a review about it, wrote an essay about the Brontë sisters, tried and failed to get fit… oooh, and FINISHED THE FIRST (GOOD) DRAFT OF MY THIRD LOTTIE BOOK.

So then I took it to London and handed a copy over to Agent Yeeles and the lovely peeps at Macmillan. And those very same lovely people at Macmillan GAVE ME A T-SHIRT WITH A CHINCHILLA ON IT.

Because they are blatantly stylish.

And in an effort to show them that it fits, I’ve just gone upstairs, stood in front of my bedroom mirror and taken a photo of myself. Please excuse the messy hair and the tired expression but I’ve just got home from my teaching job. Also, I’m getting old and the cracks are beginning to show….

On another exciting note, Lottie Biggs is Not Desperate has been long-listed for the Young Minds Book Award and I am WELL CHUFFED. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed that me and Lottie can sneak on to that short list… because if anyone should be on a short list it’s me. (5ft 1)

Oh, and if you’re under 18 and reading this, don’t forget to help me out by nominating me in the Queen of Teen awards.
http://www.queenofteen.co.uk/

WIN A SIGNED SKETCH FROM ONE OF MY LOTTIE BIGGS BOOKS by checking out The Beaucoup Review here.

Ta. Nice one. That’d do lovely ;-)

At last, I’ve made it to the end of my way massive pile of A Level marking and now I’m just racing against the clock to get my Lottie 3 book up to scratch before I hand it over. I’m nearly there – just giving it the final dust-down. In the middle of all this, I did find some time for a break though. I took my mum with me to Yorkshire so that I could have a walk around the house where the Brontë family lived and where Charlotte, Emily and Anne dreamed up their plotlines filled with love and ghosts and mad women locked up in the attic. I was hoping some of their genius might somehow rub off on to me but sadly I don’t think it has. Then we went shopping in Leeds and used the hand-cream in the loos at Harvey Nicholls.

And now I’m back in Norwich and waiting to hear what the world thinks of Lottie 2 (Lottie Biggs is not Desperate). It’s officially available from May 7 but last week, I got a nice surprise when I saw a whole stack of them on the shelf in WH Smiths. I looked at them for a minute or two and then I gently tickled their spines and sloped away before anyone could accuse me of being weird.

Don’t forget to help me conquer the world and vote for me in the Queen of Teen elections.
http://www.queenofteen.co.uk/

Thanks :)

It’s all takin’ and no givin’...

Maybe for you, Dolly, but for the rest of us, it’s give, give give. I’m knackered! And it’s only January! I don’t think much of 2010 so far. The sun never shines, I’m so freezing cold that my fingers are falling off and I HAVE SO MUCH STUFF TO DO that I can barely breathe. Stuff like extracting A Level coursework from my students. Then marking it. And editing and organising a creative writing magazine for them. And reading entries for a writing competition. And reading over the page proofs of Lottie Biggs is Not Desperate. And eating. And somewhere…. Somehow… I need to FINISH ANOTHER NOVEL.

Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Although, I have to say, that Lottie 3 is on its way. Definitely on its way.

However, in all of this frantic hectic schedule, January provided me with one moment of relief. I managed to pull myself away from the computer / coursework / Wii for a day and finally got to meet Inkymole – aka Sarah – who draws the covers of my Lottie books. She’s the same age as me and as she, too, spends a lot of time in her house I thought we’d have a few things in common. As my train made its way to Leicester, I was a bit nervous though. You read about these kind of email meetings all the time, don’t you. What if I arrived at Leicester station and Inkymole turned out to be a 65 year old Texan cowboy who wanted to marry me???

But it was all fine. I knew immediately we’d get on. And sure enough, we were soon eating chips in ‘Crusty’s’ and discussing our shared love of jeggings and Ugg boots.

By the way, this month’s photo is of Leicester’s number one tourist attraction – Gary Linekar’s dad’s fruit and veg stall on Leicester market. Apologies for the poor picture quality – this is what happens when you sulkily demand to be shown the cheapest thing in the shop.

And this month’s hello is going to Clotilde in Montreal who provided me WITH ACTUAL HARD EVIDENCE THAT SOMEONE OTHER THAN MY MUM READS THIS.

Nice one. Salut Clotilde et merci.

Sneeze Cough Sniff

Oh…oh… I’m a bit slow as usual but I’d like to wish anyone reading this a fantastic new year and I hope too that you had a fab Christmas.  I had a lovely time beating my brother at Wii skydiving and wakeboarding and then I let him win at archery so that he didn’t get too sulky.  After that it all went massively downhill because I got flu and felt as ill as the illest person in the whole of Illinois.  Totally rubbish.  But Lottie Biggs will be keeping me busy in 2010 - I’ve still got a third Biggsy book to finish and a second Lottie book, Lottie Biggs is Not Desperate, IN SHOPS IN MAY!

And my first ‘hello’ of 2010 goes to Catherine in France who wrote about Lottie Biggs n’est presque pas Cinglée in her French classes and tested my own dodgy French with her cheerful emails and questions.  Et maintenant, je peux parler comme une ado francaise, chouette ou quoi?

In WH Smiths I was nineteen....n-n-n-n-n-n-nineteen

And this month’s blog is a good one because it’s holiday time! To celebrate my freedom, I whizzed off to South Wales in my bumpy new car and picked up my friend Lynda for a girly drive around Cymru. En route, I stopped at a service station on the M6 to see if Lottie Biggs was available in the shop and was pleased to see that she had crept into the top 20 of kids’ / teen fiction at number 19. I was so chuffed I took a sneaky photo. 19 is loads better than 20.

Once I’d collected Lynda, we drove over some hills and by some ruined abbeys and reservoirs until we got to Aberystwyth and then we knocked on Gwen’s door and asked to borrow the keys to her caravan. Luckily she said yes because she’s generous and kind and then all three of us drove to the middle of nowhere and ate fish and chips and I drove my car around the world’s scariest uphill sheer-drop hair-pin bend back to the caravan and, thankfully, we all lived to tell the tale.

Then when we’d said bye to Gwen, me and Lynda drove northwards until we were up in the mountains and Lynda took loads of photos of the landscape so that she could paint it and I took loads of photos of sheep because I felt like it and then we drove back to South Wales and ate some more fish and chips and then I drove home back to Norwich.

Then, me and my husband flew off to Budapest and he spoke lots of Hungarian because he’s such a clever-clogs and I read some books and swam around in a lake and then we had a quick visit to Vienna and then we came home.So it’s been good! But before I go, I’d just like to mention Griffri in Aberystwyth who is so completely cool that he read Lottie Biggs IN PUBLIC – even though he’s blatantly a boy. And Meg who sent me a couple of very entertaining emails. And Vanessa from Manchester who chatted to me about the Twilight books while we were both on a bus to Vienna. And Melissa who did such a fab job of looking after Irma bunny while I was gone.

More in a month…

Blog Launch

…And FINALLY I’ve sat myself down and had a go at writing a blog. I should just warn you I’ve never done a blog before. Or a diary. Or a journal. So I’m not really sure quite how this is going to turn out. But what I do know is that it’s been an interesting month so far. I’ve skulked around town seeing which shops have put Lottie Biggs is Not Mad on special promotions, watched the entire dvd box set of Life on Mars, grown a whole year older (nooooooo!) and finished the twenty-eighth draft of my next novel Lottie Biggs is Not Desperate. Oh, and I’ve also been digging up my fine crop of back garden potatoes and listening to a lot of Adam and the Ants.

And today I heard that the lovely people in Norway are going to translate Lottie into Norwegian!!!! I reckon it was all those references to Edvard Munch that did it for them…

Now I need to start thinking about what I’m going to write next. Which means a trip to Aberystwyth for SOME SERIOUS THINKING TIME is in order!