A BRILLIANT REVIEW

I hate Mondays, I really do. It's a throwback to when I was bullied at school and I knew that with Monday morning would come fresh humiliation at the hand of the class bullies. I take forever to start writing, wishing it was still Sunday so I could go to a car boot sale or a film at the National Media Museum. So the following review for my latest picture book, PATRICK PAINTS A PICTURE, cheered me up no end. It appeared in the influential American magazine Kirkus Review.



PATRICK PAINTS A PICTURE
Author: Pirotta, Saviour
Publisher:Frances Lincoln
Pages: 28
Price (hardback): $16.95
ISBN: 978-1-84507-296-4
ISBN (hardback): 978-1-84507-296-4
In this unique and extremely helpful look at colors, Pirotta tells the story of Patrick and his aunt, out in a field, painting pictures. Each double spread establishes a new color through the addition of creatures seen by the painting duo. Each time an animal is presented, Aunt Emily asks Patrick what color they will need to paint the object, then adding that color to their palette. The end of the book shows a number of color combinations and how artists can arrive at them. The chart starts with the three primary colors on top with the additions necessary to make colors such as orange, pink, purple and so on. West's illustrations are child-friendly, jolly and colorful. The pages on the right are positively drenched in color, while the left pages that feature text use a large font for the color being introduced on each spread. This is one of those books where one wonders why it has not been done before: It is a non-didactic, festive introduction to primary colors and the colors created by combining them. A must for every library serving toddlers and teachers. (Picture book. 3-7)

Music and mobile phones

I did a school visit in London yesterday and came back home to Yorkshire absolutely shattered. Tiredeness is a perfect excuse for taking the day off as far as I'm concerned, so I went into Leeds where the council is putting on free opera events all through this week. Singers from Opera North put on a lunchtime concert in the atruim of The Light shopping complex, followed by duets from Verdi at the Tiled Hall in Leeds Museum.

A smartly dressed woman at The Light continued making calls on her mobile phone through the first two duets.

'Do you mind?" I hissed, 'we want to hear the music?'

'You're listening to the music,' she echoed, incredulous.

'That's why I'm here,' I beamed back, giving her my brightest mediterranean smile.

She continued her call for a few minutes longer, then picked up her diaries and phone books. As she swept past me, she tried to salvage her dignity with a hiss of her own. 'I suggest you see a hearing specialist.'

'First thing tomorrow,'I wanted to say but I couldn't be bothered. The chorus had burst into a very loud rendition of 'Libiam....'

Nights of the literary vampire

I've been working through the night these last few days, mainly because the Saltaire arts festival is on and I've been helping out with setting up the various rooms in Victoria Hall, which I see us our ultra-posh community centre. On Thursday we had a ball, a black-tie do with lots of salmon and champagne. It's my first time in a black tie outfit since losing nearly six stones at Slimmer's World so it felt really good. On Sunday there was a table-top sale in the main hall and yesterday an opera party.

Afterwards I was helping to clean up in another room where some poets had been doing a public reading. One guy who'd been boasting he wrote political poems couldn't even be bothered to move his butt one centimetre while I was shifting chairs. So much for political and literary integrity!

It's A Mad World

I wish I could report that I've been writing round the clock, pausing only every few hours or so for a cup of coffee and a healthy apple. But no! My nearly-spanking-brand-new colour laser jet printer packed up on Saturday. Since I have no idea where I put the paperwork and can't even remember which online shop I bought it from I was stuck with nothing to print on. I tried rescuing an old jet-printer from the depths of the basement, where lurks a graveyard of broken down PCs. Great! It seemed like it was working alright. The test printout looked faded probably because the ink in the cartridge had dried out. And I even managed to find the installation disk in a box of old cds. So off I traipsed to PC world in Bradford for a replacement ink cartridge. They had their own brand for it too, which is always so much cheaper than the company's own with the fancy packaging. But guess what? The printout was faded not because the ink had dried in the cartridge or ran out. It was because the printer is broken. That's twenty quid down the drain. And I spent all day yesterday lugging a new mono [this time] laser printer home. I was so knackered by the time I didn't even have the energy to unpack it. I did that this morning, so now I'm motoring again. In the evening I lost my mobile phone at the Pictureville cinema in the National Media Museum. I left it under the seat where I'd put it after switching it off so it didn't ring half way through The Dam Busters, which is one of my all-time favourite films. That meant I had to return to Bradford to retrieve it, and then I stopped at Costa for a coffee and a chat with mates. Before I knew it it was time to water the plants and fiddle around with itunes. But I promise tomorrow is going to be different. It's going to be 500 words an hour no slacking, with only short breaks for coffee and apples. Hold on, aren't they showing The Wall at the National Media Museum? Can't miss that. Pink Floyd are a MAJOR influence on my pysche. The day after then....

Meat and potato pie and sticky toffee pudding

I was meant to be working on a new version of Cinderella for one of my publishers on Friday but the sun was shining for once and I needed a break from finishing the proposal for the horror novel I'm doing. So I turned the mac off and took my friend Pam to lunch at Bettys in Ilkley. {The missing apostrophe there isn't a typing mistake, by the way. Bettys might do parkins and fish and chips and they bake their own bread on the premises but they don't do apostrophes. Why? According to the staff in the York outlet it's because the company is Swiss. Bemused? So was I.]

On the train in Ilkley I spied a giant pie on a seat. I'm not kidding. There was a huge pie with a very elaborate lattice-work crust sitting on a teacloth on a seat. It turned out to be the property of a man called Glyn Watkins who was sitting on the seat opposite, guarding it. Mr Watkins is a great fan of the Bradford-born author J.B. Priestley who wrote a clutch of incredible plays and one of my favourite books ever, Bright Day. [I bet Mr. Priestley wouldn't leave the apostrophe out of Bettys even if he were Swiss instead of a Yorkshireman.]

Apparently Mr Priestley made a BBC broadcast in September 1940 in which he mentioned seeing a little shop in Bradford which had in its shop window 'a giant, almost superhuman, meat and potato pie..out of that pie there came at any and every hour when the shop was doing business, a fine rich appetising steam.]

Priestley thought that the shop had been destroyed in an air raid so imagine his delight when he realised his fears were, in fact, unfounded and saw the pie again in the same shop. He describe the incident with glee..every puff and jet of steam defied Hitler, Goering and the whole gang of them. It was glorious.' He described the incident in his book Postcripts, published by Heinemann in 1941.

Mr Watkins had baked the pie in honour of his hero. Or got someone to make it for him anyway. I didn't have time to ask him beacuse he was off selling tickets for a J.B. Priestley night at the The Yorkshire Deli in Ilkley. It's to celebrate the great writer's birthday, and there are going to be readings from his work as well as a pie for supper, with ale and sticky toffee pudding for afters.

I am a huge fan of J.B. Priestley myself. We did Time and the Conways at school and I was blown away by the fact that he played around with the timeline so that you knew what was going to happen to the characters in the future. I went on to read all the plays of his available at my local library in Valletta, Malta and when I moved to England I managed to see a lot of them performed. So I hope there are some tickets left for Mr. Watkin's celebration in Ilkley.

The Kids Are Alrright

Went to see the KIDS ARE ALRIGHT at the National Media Museum in Bradford this evening. I was really looking forward to it but once in my seat I found my mind kept wandering back to the story I'm writing at the moment. I'm only meant to be doing a detailed synopsis for my agent for now but whole sections of dialogue keep drifting into my mind and I get held up writing them out in case I forget them. Twice tonight I had to sneak out of the cinema and into the toilet with my notebook. The staff at the museum must think I suffer from chronic diorhea.

Writers all have different ways of working. For me, the process starts with an idea that I might not do anything about for years. It's like I'm standing at a shut window and I know there' a story taking place outside it. I need to open the shutters to see what's happening. Once I do, I can see it all so clearly it sort of acts itself out infront of me and all I have to do is take notes. But opening the window takes courage and I often pass by a few times before I do. It's a complicated process, more like a burglar trying to get inside a safe than a hotel waiter flinging the shutters open in a bedroom suite. And, sometimes when I do open the window, it's only to discover that there is no story out there, just a minor incident if you like which is not worth describing. Or the story has been told before, probably by someone much more gifted than yours truly. Still, I can't help opening that window. And sometimes, when I am really tired and the right words won't come, I get the awful sensation that I am walking down a long corridor with hundreds of windows on either side of me. No matter how many I open, I will never have time to tell all the stories...which means I need to stop blogging and get back to work, even though it's gone past eleven at night. Who was it that said you're not really a writer until you get to know your milkman on a first name basis?

Working out

I haven't posted anything since Saturday because I've been hard at work on my new book. Writing is a bit like working out at the gym. If you leave it for a few weeks or, in my case, even a few days, it's really difficult to get back into the old rhythm. I've been away in Amsterdam and London and I didn't have time to switch the laptop on, let alone concentrate on some writing. I filled a small notebook with ideas but I haven't even had time to transfer those into the mac either. I must do it before I lose to notebook; I'm a great for one for mislaying things. Anyway, now I'm back into the swing of things and writing again, so I must make myself a cup of coffee and open Word...

What, no telly?

It's Saturday afternoon and, guess what? It's raining again, heavily. I usually don't mind the drizzle and the grey skies because they keep me indoors at my computer, working instead of frittering the time away in garden centres or antique shops which I seem to be addicted to. I'm a great one for pottering around city centres too, sitting in coffee bars kidding myself that I'm working on a plot in my head when I'm not really, or only half trying to.

Today, however, I desperately wanted to go to Howath on the old steam train. I want to have a scene in the book that I'm working on at the moment where the main character gets trapped on a steam train in India. So I'd like to find out what it feels like travelling on one, even if it's only a short distance. Howath [see picture], by the way, is where the Bronte sisters lived. The station in Keightely has been as a location for The railway Children, Yanks and Alan Parker's film version of Pink Floyd's The Wall. There's a fantastic high street with old-fashioned teashops and an antiquarian bookshop where you can get second-hand Folio Society books in very good condition.

Most of my friends are busy this weekend, or abroad on their annual holiday, so there's no one to hang around with. And since I gave up watching telly last Christmas I can't slump down semi-comatose on the sofa either.

When I tell children during school visits that I have no telly, their jaw drops. 'How do you live?' I get asked. 'Don't you get bored?'

I don't have time to get bored. In my spare time I bake, I cook, I read, I listen to music on my ipod and I go for long walks with my camera.

'What else don't you have?' is usually the next question after the telly one.

Let's now. I don't have a helicopter, I don't have a dishwasher and I don't have a microwave.'

That gets them too. 'But how do you cook?'

'I use a normal oven?' I answer. Some like at me as if they're not sure if I'm having them on.

'Do you have a car?'

As a matter of fact, I don't. I hate the stupid things, and not just because they wreak havoc on the environment. When I was a kid I used to get car sick all the time and had to travel with a plastic bowl on my lap, just in case. How embarrassing was that?

So now, I don't have a car.

Old Projects

I was looking through my files for an old contract this afternoon and found the artist's roughs for the cover of this book. It was my first success in the United States where it won a major award. It didn't do so well in Britain but it is still available in paperback and I have seen it in a lot of schools. I've got a photo of a giant turtle that some kids made after reading the book somewhere. I'll post it here when I find it. Someone in the film industry suggested I turn the story into a film script but I never had time to. That's the problem with being a jobbing writer, you have to keep producing work in order to pay the bills and so you end up going for the projects you know will come to fruition. For me at the moment that means adapting fairy tales which I enjoy doing enormously.

Ready, Steady, Write

I'm starting this blog mainly because children keep nagging me to do it. I was even reproached by a gang of young girls in Amsterdam recently. "We found your books on Amazon but you don't have your own site." I always thought it enough to appear on my publishers' official websites but how twentieth century could you get? Everyone has their own site nowadays, including my mother's best friend who does nothing more exciting than collect snails for a local restaurant [I kid you not].

Of course, now that I've gone to the trouble of setting up this site, I have no idea what to put on it. Information about my new books would be an obvious thing, and I've already put in details about the agency that books me for school visits. Perhaps I'll include links to friends' pages, and also reviews of books that I read. Hey, I've only been blogging for a couple of hours [well, five if you include the time it took me to choose the right template and download two pics] and I'm starting to like it. Know how to download a visitor counter, anyone?