This month, I’ve been invited to meet the winners of The Voice Made By History Competition, an annual essay competition for 9-14 year olds in its 5th year, run by The Voice newspaper. I find that the hardest part of writing is coming up with the idea in the first place. Thankfully I’ve had a great little idea for a new crime story this month that I’ll work on, and I’ve got high hopes of it actually being a completed classic worthy of publication. 11-15 Nov is #AntiBullyingWeek, and The Scruffapillar of course is campaigning to spread the message to schoolchildren that bullying is wrong. I’m always honoured whenever a school invites me to visit them, and this month my team have been busy diarising the author visits well into 2020. I’m working with the illustrator Cristiana Rodrigues on a masterpiece of a story about a crow, its now at the character design stage and the perfect voice actor for the role has been pencilled in. Beetle Reich continues to do well for KS2 children. They especially ‘get’ the historical concept. Proof once again that the medium of a graphic novel is so much more accessible to a wider audience and it enables complex, gritty subject matter to be visualised and understood. Long live comics!
Writer, Author