Eggbert

13th Feb 202113th Feb 2021 | Charlie Bown

What happens when you’re in the wrong place at the right time? The right time is now – Valentines’ Day! But the place Eggbert finds himself is the early Easter shelf, not the one covered with pink hearts and roses. How will he find his valentine now? With the stealth of an egg but the heart of a bear, Eggbert will have to be BRAVE.

Bravery is the theme for this short (very short – only 214 words) story competition I entered to write a valentine story for children. If you’ve never written to such a short and specific word count, I would highly recommend it. Mini word counts really make you hone in on what you want to say, as well as ensuring that you pace your story well. It’s no good spending 200 words introducing your character and their situation only to be left with 14 to finish the job!

The link to the competition is HERE if you would like to read the other entries but for now, let me introduce….

EGGBERT

Eggbert was in the wrong place. He was meant to be on the red shelf with the hearts but had somehow ended up here, with the early Easter eggs. Perhaps someone was having a joke he’d thought, watching all the other teddies line themselves up ready to be chosen by loved-up customers.

Then Eggbert saw his valentine – bouncing up and down in the trolley, smiling and pointing at him.

“That’s for Easter,” the little person’s big person said, “It’s too early for Easter!”

Eggbert’s heart sank into his fluffy feet. As his little person rounded the corner, Eggbert heard him howl with sadness and Eggbert knew what he had to do.

As he moved, the Easter chicks below chirped with horror – “You can’t leave the shelf! It’s too dangerous!” But Eggbert was determined; he knew where he belonged.

Teddies are not natural ninjas, especially ones as round as Eggbert, but that day Eggbert was fired up with love as he jumped over pineapples, raced along toilet paper, dived through cheese and finally caught up with his valentine at the till. With the stealth of an egg and the heart of a bear, Eggbert rolled into the trolley, straight into the arms of his valentine, who giggled and cooed, cuddling him all the way home.

To Tweet or not to Tweet

7th Feb 20217th Feb 2021 | Charlie Bown

After months of ignoring the very obvious hints, signs, massive blaring fog-horns shouting at me to join Twitter, I have finally given in and joined.

As an aspiring writer I’ve trawled the internet and read countless books about writing which, after talking about passion and creativity and you know – actually WRITING THINGS – all mention the world of social media.

In 2021 we are fully immersed in the age of social media, and have been for some time. Yet I am still living in the deep, dark internet world circa 2008. I have a Facebook account which, after clearing the friends section of ‘random people I met once on the bus’ back in my student days, I have a few hundred people I’ve actually met, or worked with, or like. It’s mostly an online photo album now and occasional stalking forum.

Other than Facebook I don’t have instagram, barely understand the concept of a tik-tok and have avoided becoming embroiled in twitter until yesterday. Why? I suppose fear of the unknown played a part. Perhaps I was worried about having yet another thing to keep me on my phone, another endless scrolling black hole of strangers. I just wasn’t sure I had the energy for it.

Then this happened:

And I really, really, really wanted to be a part of it. The catch – you can’t take part in a Twitter Picture Book Pitch, without, well – being on Twitter.

So I signed up and thought to myself, I could always have a go at this whole #PBPitch thing and if it’s a massive flop then I will just quietly sneak away and press ‘delete account’. No-one will ever have to know…

It’s been 24 hours and I am, of course, completely obsessed. It had never occurred to me how instantly the world of #childrensauthors would open up to me, with very little effort on my part. My homepage/thread/newsfeed (I’m not sure I’ve got at the Twitter-friendly vocab yet) is flooded with other children’s authors – ones like me, starting on their journeys, others who are publishing for the first time this year, right up to famous authors.

I now have access to their tweets, their thoughts, their world. And it’s not just authors – I am also following literary agents and publishers and editors. Of course, it doesn’t actually make me any closer to being published but it makes me feel like I’m a little bit closer to the playground I want to play in. It’s a community of people who are interested in, and talking about, writing for children and that is a very exciting group of which to be a part.

Of course, now I’m blogging about tweeting and tweeting about blogging – it would be very easy to get caught up in the moment and forget why I’m actually here. Between the tweets and the blog and the website and finding my feet on social media, I must remember to make time to actually be creative, to write. Despite my initial fears, I feel energised by this new-found platform, excited to share my ideas and find my wings in this new world.

@CharlieBown7

Filth

30th Jan 2021 | Charlie Bown

The mud cannot be avoided. It has been raining on-off for weeks now and all our favourite walks currently require a full outfit change (and sometimes even a shower) upon our return home.

One of the undeniably joyful things about being a parent is the fact that it is once more socially acceptable to jump in puddles and slide around in mud. Why we stop doing that as we grow up is beyond me. It’s good for the soul, if not the washing machine.

This poem was inspired by our children and their love of mud.

FILTH

Oozy, squoozy, slimy, stinky, squishy, squashy,
Mud.
On my hands and arms and face and gluing my hair together.
It’s my favourite game.
Digging, filling, pouring, mixing, splatting, slopping,
Mud.
Mum joins in. She makes mud concrete for construction toys to move.
My little sister pulls funny faces
But even she loves stamping, stomping, squelching, squashing
Mud.
Then dad looks at us and his eyes go wide,
popping, bulging, straining, craning, staring at all the
Filth.

Finding Pace

24th Jan 2021 | Charlie Bown

Last night I was sat poring over another draft of a picture book text I have been working on for over a year now. Yep, you heard right. A picture book text of less than 800 words and here I am a year later, still working on it. It’s one of my favourite story ideas but something has been sticking, niggling away at the back of my mind, keeping me awake at 4am as I try to work out what it is. Then last night, I got it.

We were listening to the music of a friend of ours. His new album arrived on Spotify yesterday (you can listen here) and after dinner, kids in bed, tea poured, we sat down to listen. My first thought was this: I don’t listen to enough classical music. It was truly beautiful and wonderfully calming.

A memory of secondary school music lessons popped into my head (quite impressive as my memory is genuinely pretty awful) – when we would sit listening to music and the teacher would ask us to think about the pace of the music and the impact it had on us as it changed.

As the music I was listening to continued, I tried to apply this technique. How did I feel? Which images did it conjure? How did the pace of the music change those images?

And then my picture book suddenly made sense. I’d been re-writing the words, sometimes in rhyme, sometimes in prose, for a year now. New words, different words, the same words in different orders. But the one thing I had been ignoring was the pace of the story.

It seems so obvious now, re-reading the most recent draft. It’s a good story but the pace doesn’t match the action. It’s a fast paced story, with non-stop action but the language was too flowery, too detailed, too slow. I had to ramp up the pace, create more tension, keep the flow of the story going – and then bring the pace back in as the story concluded.

I needed to write the story like a piece of music – preferably like the Benny Hill theme song, that level of bounce and bumble.

When I asked my husband to re-read the story (draft 1 million and 4…) his first comment afterwards was that I’d cut down the word count. I hadn’t. The word count was exactly the same as the previous version he’d read but he’d read this version with increased energy and speed thanks to the change in pace.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the words we put down – the notes of the story – but I am so grateful for the reminder to write with pace in mind and to craft a story like a piece of music, taking the reader on a journey as you write.

The Blank Piece of Paper

17th Jan 2021 | Charlie Bown

A blank piece of paper – depending on your feelings about generating new ideas for writing – can be either the most daunting or most exciting starting point for a writer.

Let’s assume for a minute it’s the most daunting. The panic of having to put something on the paper and the possibility that what you do eventually put down might be absolute rubbish is generally the reason this bit is scary – not to mention the now mounting pressure on your creative mind to come up with something, anything, because now it’s been an hour and there’s absolutely NOTHING on the paper. How will I ever be a writer when I can’t even think of the first word?

Luckily I am still very much in the ideas stage – there’s no pressure on me to come up with a new idea to meet a deadline or prove I’m not a one-trick pony. Right now I’m still looking for the first trick so I get to enjoy this bit – the ideas bit.

At the moment I am taking part in an online creative exercise called Story Storm:

Each day in January an author writes a blog post about where they go for their inspiration, how they generate ideas, where creativity stems from for them. I am 17 days in and it’s been fascinating to read and certainly inspiring to have a constant stream of ways to generate ideas trickling into my inbox.

Guess what – there is no right or wrong way to be creative. We are all capable of creativity, some of us are interested in harnessing it and taming it into some form of hobby or career, others are happy being creative as and when it is needed (my Dad is very creative with his use of duct tape to solve any household problem he comes across…)

When I teach creative writing in schools, the generating ideas part, the blank page, is often as daunting for children as it is for adults. I want children to love creating stories and to be excited about writing down their ideas – they certainly are not shy when they are first learning to tell stories. The number of stories about dragon poo I’ve listened to our four year old enthusiastically deliver could stretch to a ten part series. But once children are sitting down in a classroom with that blank piece of paper their insecurities and worries can start to block their creativity.

So how do we engage children with writing? I don’t mean the classic story mountain planning sheet or the basics of sentence structure and correct grammar. Those things are important in their own way, of course, but how do we harness that inbuilt creativity children demonstrate all the time in their play, without accidentally instilling in them the fear of a blank page?

We must be silly. We must be playful. We must be active.

And we must never be afraid of demonstrating our own creativity and thought processes when it comes to writing. Show them a blank page and show them that there’s nothing to be afraid of. One of my favourite activities in the classroom with younger writers was to ask them to shout out the first word which popped into their heads – even if that meant saying the name of something they could see in the room, or their own name, there was no wrong answer. Then bung some of them up on the board and start filling in your own blank page.

Now our page isn’t blank anymore and we can start generating ideas. Let’s imagine the words on the board are DINOSAUR, TOILET (There’s always one kid who says toilet…), CHAIR, LIGHT, SANDWICH – I might say something like this,

Wow! This is a brilliant story you’ve written. Look – There’s a dinosaur who eats chairs. He loves eating chairs so much that soon no-one has anywhere to sit. You’ll never guess what – everyone has to sit on the lights instead. Well, hang off them really. All the children hang off the lights at lunchtime trying to eat their sandwiches. When the dinosaur runs out of chairs to eat in the school he starts looking for other places people sit down. Uhoh, you got it – he starts eating all the toilets!

OK, it’s not Shakespeare but if done well it should have the desired effect of relaxing the anxieties around generating ideas and normally has the children in fits of giggles. As they get used to the idea, they start coming up with their own story ideas for the words they’ve generated on the board.

So what did we learn? It’s okay to be silly and make up ‘a load of rubbish’ because writing should be fun and silly and some of the best authors for children tap into this world and capture children’s imaginations by doing exactly that. So go now and write it – write some rubbish down on a blank piece of paper and then have fun trying to turn it into something silly.

My Mum Always Knows

3rd Jan 20213rd Jan 2021 | Charlie Bown

As a child I was occasionally prone to lying. Little lies, like when I told my year 6 teacher that it wasn’t me who’d thrown their cycling proficiency leaflets in the bin. Full disclosure: it was. Come to think of it I also lied to my University tutor about why I missed my library induction. The actual reason, I didn’t know where the library was, was too embarrassing to admit. Still to this day I think about these lies when I enter a library or ride a bike.

There was, of course, one person who always saw right through me. It’s what mums do. Now I’m a mum this gift has been passed down to me. Watch out kids…! This writing prompt photograph from the Creative Writing Ink competition inspired me to write this poem.

https://creativewritingink.co.uk/competitions/writing-prompt-competition/ – if you fancy a go too!

My Mum Always Knows

My mum always knows
when what I say’s not true.
And when I tell the smallest lie,
She even knows then too.

Like once I said I didn’t eat
the biscuits from the tin.
But she looked into my eyes
and said, “Lying is a sin.”

I felt guilty then and wasn’t sure
what I was meant to say.
Apologise and I’d get caught,
that dreaded biscuit day.

So I said, “No, really mum,
it really wasn’t me.
I knew the rules and never would
have biscuits before tea.”

She looked at me so sadly,
disappointment filled her eyes.
And as she looked at me like that,
the lie inside me died.

“Ok, Mum. I’m really sorry
In fact it was probably me,
I think I might have stolen
some biscuits before tea.

I really am quite sorry,
I never should have lied.”
But she just walked away,
shook her head, tutted and sighed.

Forwards and Backwards

31st Dec 2020 | Charlie Bown

When I met my half-Danish husband eleven years ago, he introduced me to Danish culture. Denmark isn’t somewhere I’d been before or knew very much about – I was more of an Ikea girl, myself. Fast forward a few years and a huge explosion and celebration of all things Danish happened in the UK and suddenly everyone was talking about Hygge and candles and a seemingly endless list of reasons to bring out more food and drink, and all the other things I’d been hearing about since 2009. If only I’d realised how big Denmark would suddenly be over here, I’d have written the damn book myself. Hindsight, as they say, is a wonderful thing. I didn’t write a book about Hygge and share this secret Danish cosiness with the world, but hats off to those who did.

Besides Hygge, a favourite Danish insight my husband introduced me to is the saying, “frem og tilbage er lige langt”, the sentiment doesn’t translate exactly, but in our house we refer to it as simply this, “Forwards and backwards is the same distance.” Often it crops up on long journeys when we’ve taken a wrong turn and have to retrace our steps. It makes sense literally, if you take a step forwards it is the same distance as if you take a step backwards, but I mostly enjoy the sense of acceptance and calm which it brings. It doesn’t matter which direction you’re going in, rather that you simply are going.

It’s the end of 2020. What a year. Go backwards 365 days and imagine being told what your year would be like. Back then, it was just a great piece of fiction – I’d read it. I’d watched it in countless post-apocalyptic films (another passion my husband introduced me to). I have to say I’ve enjoyed candles and good food much more than apes and space travel, but that’s probably for another discussion. Now skip forwards 365 days. Suddenly making New Year’s resolutions (as a list lover this is a favourite past time of mine) seems daunting…futile… or perhaps we are just worried about tempting fate again? Who started 2020 announcing that “this will be my year” – how on earth do we begin planning for the next one?

Yet plan we do. Something must keep us going and plodding on or we would just end up standing still. So I have duly taken out one of my favourite notebooks and written 2021 at the top. What do I want to achieve in 2021? So much of this year has felt like adapting, responding, damage limitation, survival – for some, these are feelings which might have sparked creativity and passion and energy, for others they have caused anxiety, worry, confusion and the rest of us, perhaps, have muddled along somewhere in the middle.

For me, I had grandiose ideas about becoming a published author in 2020. Back in January I thought a year was generous, a safety net of 365 days but how long do these things really take? Much like the rest of my ideas about 2020, I was wrong.

I have made my own website, approached literary agents and publishers, joined writing forums, shared my writing with other writers, been awarded an honourable mention, got to the semi-finals of a major writing competition and most importantly, I’ve written. Not every day and not always consistently, but I have produced stories and poems and blog posts of which I am proud, which have kept me motivated during the harder parts of 2020 and created hope that one day this is something I will be able to call a career and not just a hobby. Perhaps a year to be published was too ambitious? Perhaps in this particular year, even more so, just because it didn’t happen in 2020 doesn’t mean it will never happen.

We’ve heard so much this year about hope and kindness and generosity and how much good can stem from so much sadness. I think at their core, New Year’s Resolutions are about being hopeful and optimistic which is probably why I have always loved writing them. I’ve never lost the two stone I write down on the list every year but that doesn’t stop me writing it down and starting the year eating healthily and off the booze. Maybe 2021 is the year I have a healthy BMI and a published story and maybe it’s not, but I don’t want to give up trying and hoping and working towards my goals because I’m scared I might not meet them.

After all, if forwards and backwards are the same distance then it doesn’t really matter where you end up, as long as you keep moving.

Honourable Mention

16th Nov 2020 | Charlie Bown

Back sometime near the beginning of 2020 I entered a writing competition. Full disclosure – I didn’t win.

I did, however, get an “Honourable Mention” from the judges which pinged through on an email back in October. I told a few people, not many, and some suggested writing a post about it.

I’ve been avoiding writing said post for a while now and I expect that it’s mostly down to misplaced embarrassment. Who dances around because they got an honourable mention? I wasn’t even a finalist. There was the winner, the people shortlisted and then at the bottom of the pile the HMs. To be honest I felt a bit silly being excited about it.

It doesn’t help that the phrase “honourable mention” is imprinted on my brain as the award Monica and Ross receive in their eighth grade school talent show’s brother-sister dance category, with their famous performance of “The Routine”. If you don’t know what I’m referring to then we are probably on very different life paths. Go watch Season 6, episode 10 of Friends immediately and then get back to me.

They are so proud of their achievement – which of course creates that wonderful humour which stems from dramatic irony. How many brother-sister acts actually entered the eighth grade talent show after all? Yet they are so proud of their HM in what we can only assume was a very limited pool of contestants.

I guess, to my shame, I was worried that my HM announcement might be received in the same way and I really didn’t want to be doing “The Routine” on a blog post and leaving myself vulnerable.

Then I read an article by a lady who has been writing (unpublished) for 20 years. Imagine that. Other writers popped up in the comments; 5 years, 7 years, 10 years until they had a positive reply from an agent or publisher. And here I am in year 1 of actively pursuing my goal of being published. Who am I to laugh at an honourable mention? It’s a start and I am only at the beginning after all.

The main advice the other authors gave about keeping yourself motivated on the (potentially) long road to publication was this – celebrate every small step; shout about every little win; be proud of the HMs and the long lists and the almosts and the not bads and the maybes and actually be proud of this fact – you entered the competition in the first place and you put yourself out there and said hey, this is my writing, World.

Look – there’s even a link. Scroll down and my name is really there – with all the other amazing Honourable Mentions.

https://literarytaxidermy.com/news.html

Next step, the podium at Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin Eve to show everyone that yes it’s a small step to get an HM but it’s still a step and that’s worth dancing about.

And just for fun, here’s two of our best friends performing ‘The Routine’ like absolute lockdown legends…