Rhiannon Lassiter, Mary Hoffman and your chairperson for the evening, Helena Pielichaty

I was in London again yesterday for a CWIG meeting (CWIG stands for Children’s Writers and Illustrators Group).  After the committee meeting there is a talk for members and yesterday’s was about blogging. I chaired the meeting and introduced the two speakers, Rhiannon Lassiter and Mary Hoffman. Rhiannon writes mainly for young adults and has a growing army of fans. Her titles include the chilling Bad Blood and Borderland. Mary (Rhiannon’s mum) is a well- established writer who covers all age ranges from picture books (Amazing Grace) to the popular Stravaganza series.

Both are clued up about blogging, Facebook, Twitter and all the other forms of social networking sites out there. Check out their websites and variety of blogs if you don’t believe me. They were the perfect choice of speakers, beginning with a short clip that spewed out statistics about the growth and effectiveness of such sites. They then took us through the pros and cons of blogging and so on.  One of the main points they made was that if a reader discovers your website, what is going to keep them there?  It has to be fresh and varied. I came away thinking I was half way there - since opening my blog for comments I’ve enabled readers and children I meet on school visits to write to me.  I am in the process of having an  events page and more downloads. Watch out for wallpaper of the Girls FC team and voting buttons - coming soon.

Celia Rees was at the meeting too

My version adapted for Oxford Treetops

One for budding artists out there. The Times newspaper is running a competition for children aged 7-12 to design a new cover for Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic book ‘The Secret Garden’.  The cover has to be on A4 paper without any writing - just the drawing.  Random House publishers are giving away a £100 of children’s books to the winners, £50 and £30 to the runners-up.  The deadline is July 23rd.

I’d recommend reading the book first to get the flavour of the story.  It was set in late Victorian times in a grand house in the Yorkshire countryside.

The full website address and contact details given were a bit sketchy. Try:  vintage-classics, info/thesecretgarden

creative minds at work

What better way to spend a wet Monday afternoon in March than with a group of receptive, keen and thoroughly pleasant Y7s?  Their English teacher, Ms Andrew, had invited me in as a reward to the group for raising money for charity by doing a ‘Readathon.’  I quite liked being a prize. i wasn’t quite as big a prize as the secretary thought that I was though. ‘Are you Anne Fine?’ she asked when I was signing in.

Anyway, on to the communal library where we shared the session with two older kids sent there for misbehaving in class. I have to say, they were as attentive as the rest of them. Maybe some of the enthusiasm of the group will have a lasting effect - who knows?  Good luck with the baby, Ms Andrew!

Three girls from the Woodside team participating in the ESFA football tournament

I’ve been thinking about yesterday’s tournament and how great it was to see the girls’ games being taken as seriously as the boys’ games being played alongside them.  There was no difference in the coaching and tactics being shouted by the managers from the touchlines, no difference in the level of passion from the parents or the organizers. No difference, even, in the anger and frustration displayed by a couple of the coaches during tense moments. One guy threw his hat down on the ground in disgust when his team conceded a free-kick.  Girls weren’t being patronised yesterday. They were equals.

It might seem like a silly thing to write about in 2010. You might be thinking ’so what?’  After all, women have been playing football since the late 1890s. My fictional team’s name, the Parrs, is named after Lily Parr, who played tremendous, top-flight football from from the 1920 - 1950s and is in the FA’s Football Hall of Fame.

However, when I’m going round schools talking about my books and girls playing football, there’s still a feeling that I’m breaking new ground here. That I’m having to convince people that girls’ football is not some sort of novelty act. When I ask kids who the England manager is, it’s Fabio Capello’s name that is given. People look at me blankly if I say Hope Powell. ‘You know, Hope Powell, the England Women’s manager who coached the England team to the final of Euro 2009?’

Girls who play football are seen as different from other girls, too. ‘She’s always been a bit of a tomboy,’ a mum might call her football- playing daughter.  A tomboy. What does that mean?  I really dislike that term and all its implications.

Girls should to be able to play football and cricket and rugby without being called anything with boy in the title.  It’s inaccurate for a start. Girls who play traditional boys’ sports can still be ‘girlie’ (another term I dislike). The three footballers in the picture above still take care of their hair and like boy bands JLS just like every other 9 and 10 and 11 year old. Actually, there are a lot of boys who take care of their hair and like JLS out there, too. And they’re still boys.

girls enjoying a well earned breather between matches

Late for a terribly important date…

I had a wee bit further to travel for this weeks’ regional English Schools’ FA tournament. London. The Marathon Sports Ground to be precise. Well, not that precise. There were two of them, apparently, and the one I was dropped off at wasn’t it.  Anyhow, half an hour later I was duly delivered to the correct London Marathon Sports’ Ground on Shooters Hill with no harm done.

The facilities, it has to be said, were an improvement on the ones the previous week in Nottingham. The loos were nearer. The tea tasted better. If only the weather had held it would have been a hat-trick.  No chance. Rain. Rain. And, just in time for the medal ceremony, chucking-it-down-I-really-mean-it-rain.

It was exciting stuff though. Ten teams participated, all county champions, all keen as mustard. I didn’t manage to watch as many games this time because parents, God bless ‘em every one, were buying books so I was on book signing duty.

I watched a couple of games including this fast-paced one…

Woodside (in claret) take on St Vincent’s

But eventually the knock-out stages were played and it was time to hand out the medals to the runner-ups ahead of the final.

Some took defeat better than others!

The final match between St Vincent’s and Parkland was so exciting. It went to extra time, then penalties!

The St Vincent’s keeper was under pressure…

The winners were….

South East Finals U11 Girls Champions 2010: Parkland, Eastbourne

Well done to all the teams: Woodside, Moss Bury, Upton, St Vincent’s, Stanley, Parkland, Breckland, Sheringham, Bedgrave and Stillness. Reaching the finals today was a brilliant achievement.

A room full of readers!

Here’s a sight to gladden the heart. I gave an assembly at Barnby Road Primary School in Newark this morning and asked ‘How many of you like reading?’  The response was fabulous. I think nearly every hand was raised.  It is not always the case when I go into schools, believe me.  Mr Barbuti, one of the teachers, was recently praised by Ofsted inspectors for encouraging reading in the school and raising standards. May you live long and prosper, Mr Barbuti - we need inspirational teachers like you.

early example of editing c. 1988. This was the first draft of a short story for teenagers called ‘The Bogs.’

One of the hardest things for the novice writer is learning how to edit. Often, the person is reluctant to change a thing.  This is understandable when you have spent weeks, months or even years on something but it is also unwise.

Editing what you’ve written is as important as the writing itself.

I quite enjoy it. Its a bit like when you’ve let your bedroom become a tip. You leave it and leave it until one Sunday when you are bored and there’s nothing on the telly, you decide to give it a thorough tidy. Not just a pulling the duvet over the bed and kicking the socks under the chair tidy. A proper one, with Windolene and dusters and a trip downstairs to lug Henry out of the utility room version of tidy.

The best time to edit something is after it has been left in a drawer for a few weeks. You can then read through it with a cold, calm eye and assess where the story drags, which sentences need pruning and which paragraphs and chapters need to be vanquished forever.

Various writers use various methods for this. When I was learning, I literally took a pair of scissors and cut up my work, slotting some sentences higher or lower down the page, as taught by the legend who is Gwen Grant (left). Now, of course, I have Word and Windows and I cut and paste using the tool bar icons.

However, that’s just the first stage, where you are patting the story into a solid lumpen being.

Next comes the polishing.  That means reading it out loud to see how it sounds. Inevitably it sounds rubbish and leads to more cutting - this time paring sentences and paragraphs for pace and tone.

You know when the tone is wrong when it jars. Did I really want my character to come across as such a pompous prat?  Would she really use that phrase?  Usually a subtle twist here, a slight change of phrasing there, is all that’s needed to get it right.

After that comes the detail. Checking for over-used words and repetitions. I am terrible at sprinkling sentences with ‘very’ and ‘just’ - words that don’t add anything to the sentence and detract from the content but seem perfectly OK at the time.

Finally comes the ‘printing off for the final read-through’ stage. The part where you think ‘this is the copy I’d send to the editor.’ Only it never works out like that. Today for example, I got stuck on page 11. I’d see one word I wasn’t happy with, change it, print it off. Further down the page I spotted something else.  Back to the printer. Then a further thing somewhere else…  How come I didn’t see these individual typos and wordy sentences before? Good question! If only!  Six page 11s were printed before I was satisfied. Don’t even get me started on page 12….  Editing. It can take a while.

Saturday Girl, the book formerly known as Getting Rid of Karenna that started out as The Bogs (above). Still in print. Still a classic. £5.99 OUP. Bargain.

The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler by Gene Kemp

I began teacher training college in 1972. Yikes!  Believe it or not, English wasn’t my main subject, it was Environmental Studies. However, because I was training as a primary school teacher, we all had to do in-depth courses in English and maths.  I remember very early on in the first term one of the lecturers reading us an extract from The Midnight Fox by Betsy Byars to demonstrate how giving a reading should be done. Our task the following week was to choose an extract from any children’s work of fiction and read it out loud to the group because reading out loud to a class, and reading out loud well, was seen as the most valuable thing a teacher could do in the classroom.  I still believe that’s true.

I wish I could remember the extract I chose back then but I can’t. I do remember  standing up in front of my peers and reading, full of confidence, enjoying every moment. I was told to slow down my delivery but other than that I was OK. OK?  Excuse me, let’s have a bit more respect for my Eureka moment please, chaps. OK? I was brilliant!

Reading books to my classes became the thing I loved above all else.  I once found an interview by Micheal Morpurgo, another ex-teacher, and he said the same thing.  Maybe its showmanship. Maybe its that magical moment when you read something from something so well crafted and fast paced and you know that your whole class is gripped. And I mean the whole class, not just the bookworms but the ones who are usually the pains in the neck with the attention span of a gnat. Nothing, nothing beats that connection between a good book, a good reader and a keen audience.

The first class reader that worked for me (I began teaching Y7s) was one I found in the store cupboard called Run for Your Life by David Line.  It was about a young boy called Soldier who witnesses a murder. Only  Woolcott, a reluctant ally, believes him. It’s a nail biting thriller full of narrow escapes and dashes across the bleak Norfolk countryside. The fact that the enemies were Hungarian allowed me to put on a dreadful Eastern European accent.

This was followed by a little light relief with Helen Cresswell’s Bagthorpe Saga then back to war time with The Machine Gunners by Robert Westall.  My class was so engrossed with The Machine Gunners, I used it, appropriately enough, as a weapon. Wind me up, you guys, and no story. It never failed.

In my second teaching post, a middle school for 8-12 year olds near Oxford, I discovered Bernard Ashley’s books. His novel, The Trouble With Donavon Croft, about a 10 year old black boy who was so traumatised in his foster home he became an elective mute, was groundbreaking. Equally as profound was The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler (pictured).  The kids loved the fact that every chapter began with a joke. In fact, the entire book was that perfect combination of humour and pathos. Not only that, it had a perfect twist at the end. Classic.  By the way, while teaching in Oxford I met this guy - a fellow head of English at a nearby school - who was putting a poetry anthology together. What was his name now? Philip… Philip…  Philip Pullman. That’s it.  What a spooky little world we live in.

Another Oxford memory is of reading Judy Blume’s Superfudge and Beverley Cleary’s Ramona Quimby stories in the launderette on Friday evenings. I used to laugh out loud - not recommended in such serious establishments.

In 1981 I moved to Sheffield and, despite my primary school training, ended up in a secondary school. The book I remember from my time there was Sue Townsend’s refreshing and original The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾. Loaned to me by a Y10 girl, I used to read it on the bus going into work, tears streaming down my face. Happy days.  Plays always went down well in Sheffield. Willy Russell’s Our Day Out was brilliant for reading round the class and Barry Hines’ The Price of Coal was popular too.

After that, my career became a little bitty. I had children and stopped teaching full time. I did several maternity covers and part-time posts instead. I used The Demon Headmaster by Gillian Cross a few  times because the pupils enjoyed working out the puzzles and Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce always went down well. Towards the end of my teaching career I was even brave enough to try supply teaching. Having a good poetry collection to hand or a short story in my bag helped me get through many rough days in tough schools. A good book is an instant ice breaker.  Anne Fine’s Diary of a Killer Cat was like the horse whisperer for cover lessons. It calmed and soothed and made kids chuckle. Similarly anything by Michael Rosen.  Bellowing Your dad’s fatter than my dad at a class of Y4s is a great attention grabber.

Girl Reading by Jessie Willcox Smith

You know how sometimes someone says something and you can’t let it go?  You keep going over and over the conversation in your head, getting more and more wound up?   In the end you tell yourself to stop being silly and to get a grip but the words are still rankling?  That’s happening to me today.

It’s silly really. On Saturday, when I was at the football tournament, a young girl came bounding up to the gazebo where my Girls FC books were becoming as damp and despondent as the rest of us. The girl - maybe 10 years old - was really keen to buy one of the books. ‘Please,’ she kept saying to her mum and pointing to ‘Do Goalkeepers Wear Tiaras?’ ‘Please buy it for me.’

Mum picked up one of the other titles, her eyebrows arched. ‘They’re not very thick are they?’ she pointed out. ‘You’ll have finished it before we get home.’

‘Please,’ the girl repeated, shivering in her football strip as the wind blew through the gazebo.

‘She’s reading Twilight,’ the mother said, as if to explain her reluctance to part with £4. Once again she leafed through the book while I talked to the girl about the Twilight books and films. She’d read all the titles and seen all the films apart from New Moon. The mother, meanwhile, continued to fan through the paltry fare in front of her. It took all her self-restraint not to sniff dismissively at my clearly feeble efforts. Four quid for this? she was thinking. On yer bike. ‘Come on,’ she said to her crest-fallen daughter after her final plea fell on stony ground, ‘let’s go.’

Where can I start with how strange that entire episode was?  Aside from Meyer’s sagas not being age appropriate for starters, that is.  I wouldn’t mind so much if I’d been doing the hard-sell. I’d spent most of the day, in the rain, watching the matches. I chatted to parents and teachers not about the books but the football. There was no pressure to buy.  The books were there if anyone was interested, away from the pitch, away from the officials recording the results, away from the burger bar. In other words, not cynically or even centrally positioned, despite my publisher sponsoring the U11s Girls competition.

Anyway, the girl came to the book stall on her own, at a quiet time between matches. She clearly wanted a book.  She said so enough times. Had that been my daughter, I’d have been delighted that she wanted me to buy her something so brilliant and worthwhile as a book.  Something that wasn’t full of sugar, salt, batteries or e-numbers. But there was no shifting the mum’s position.  She was resolute.

Afterwards, I wondered about this adult’s criteria for book buying. How she thought it had to be thick or it wasn’t value for money. Statistically, Twilight by Stephanie Meyer is three times the width of Do Goalkeepers Wear Tiaras. Its spine is 2.2 cms wide compared to my meagre 0.9 cm.  Page for page, Twilight wins, no doubt about it. Other titles that are equally poor fare, width wise, include:

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis (0.9 cm)

The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler by Gene Kemp (0.7 cm)

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (0.5 cm)

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitzyn (1.0 cm)

The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer (0.4 cm)

The Prime of Miss Jean Brody by Muriel Spark (0.6 cm)

…point made, methinks.

The other thing I wondered was whether the mum intends to apply that same fiscal model to other aspects of her daughter’s life.  Imagine when the poor girl takes home her ‘Edward.’ ‘He’s a bit on the skinny side, isn’t he?’ Her mum might point out.

‘Yes, Mum, but he’s really nice.’

‘Never mind that. Dump him. Find someone with a bit of meat on them. Somebody thicker.‘

‘Yes Mum.’

You know what I wish I’d done now? I wish I’d given the girl a book. Just given her it as a present to take away and read.  So what if she’s finished it by the time she got home?  It doesn’t matter, does it?  As long as she enjoyed it.

Thomas Jolyffe Primary School, Warwickshire U11s winners of the Midlands regional finals

Walker Books have sponsored the English Schools’ FA U11s Girls’ competition. As part of that sponsorship, I get to watch the regional finals. This week’s was the Midlands heat, held in Nottingham.

It was windy. It was wet. It was seven miles to the toilet block. None of that mattered in the end - not to Thomas Jolyffe Primary School’s Girls’ U11s anyway.  After a gruelling tournament at Grove Farm Sports Ground lasting over 4 hours (not to mention all the qualifying rounds) they were the eventual winners.  TJs were just too much for Willow Brook Primary, the other finalists, who’d qualified in the semis after extra time and must have used all their energy up doing so.  Hard lines, you blues. Thomas Jolyffe now go to the Final on May 1st where they’ll play the group winners from the three other regions.

I watched as many games as I could. People often think that the football is going to be pretty crude at this level but they’re wrong. There was some lovely passing going on today, some excellent ball control in difficult conditions and a lot of positional awareness. The referees helped by allowing minor infringements to pass in order to allow the games to flow, which is just as it should be.  Eve and Annalie from Walker Books, were impressed by how friendly and helpful everyone organizing the event was, something I guess I take for granted, being local!

Danesholme Juniors U11s

Lyndon Green v Willow Brook

Just like watching the Parrs! Red Hill Field Primary Leicestershire

presenting the medals

solid refereeing

What was really strange but wonderful for me, too, was that watching the girls play was like having my characters come alive in front of me. This was especially true when parents shouted names like ‘Megan’ and ‘Lucy’. In fact one girl from Thomas Jolyffe could have been Lucy - she looked exactly like her!

The full list of teams taking place were: Group A: St Lawrence Primary, Shropshire, St John’s Middle School, Worcs., Red Hill Primary, Leicestershire, Cavendish Primary, Humberside, St Botolph’s Priamry, Lincs.

Group B: Danesholme Juniors, Northants., Thomas Jolyffe, Warwicks., Lyndon Green Juniors, West Midlands and Willow Brook, Notts.

Well done all of you - girls, parents, teachers, ESFA representatives (especially the unruffled field-officer Kevin Wilbur). Girls’ footy rules!