Earlier this week, I had a party to celebrate the launch of my new book, Suzy P and the Trouble With Three. It was loads of fun! We held it at a local independent bookshop, the fabulous Mr B’s Emporium, who did an amazing job of hosting. They laid on masses of great sweets, marshmallows and even had pink lemonade, what more could anyone want?!

The book’s the sequel to Me, Suzy P, which was released last year, and this new story sees Suzy and her family, along with best friend Millie and friend of the family Isabella, off on holiday in their caravan. Two weeks in rainy Wales don’t sound fun at all! And things get worse when Millie seems to be spending all her time with the beautiful and snooty Isabella, and Suzy doesn’t know what to do about it.

At the launch I talked a bit about Suzy and how she’s always doing funny, embarrassing things – based on the funny, embarrassing things I do all the time – then I gave hints about the book by getting people to pull items out of a sleeping bag sack. There were stuffed rats, marshmallows, value baked beans and even a bra being waved around the bookshop!

Thanks so much to everyone who came along to celebrate along with me.

Here are some photos from the event, if you wanna see:

The sequel to Me, Suzy P is officially out today! *throws streamers and confetti*. Very exciting! And here’s a picture of the book sighted for the first time in the wild, in WHSmiths.

 

 

 

 

 

A very exciting package arrived at our house this week, and it looked like this:

Yes, it’s my first sightings of the finished copies of the new Suzy book, Suzy P and the Trouble With Three! It’s out on January 2nd, so not long to wait now!

Here’s a close up of the cover for you to see. Let me know what you think!

 

 

 

If you’ve followed the news lately, you’ll have heard about Typhoon Haiyan, which tore through the Philippines. There are currently a lot of fundraising operations in place to help raise money for the people that live in this area.

There’s currently a HUGE online auction taking place, called Authors for the Philippines, where hundreds of authors, agents, publishers and illustrators have donated items to bid on. There are school visits, manuscript critiques, meet the author, signed copies of books, original artwork and all sorts of other things currently being auctioned off to raise money for the British Red Cross appeal. There’s stuff for all budgets, so take a look here.

I’ve got two auctions currently happening, one to win a signed/personalised hardback copy of Baby Badger’s Wonderful Night happening here, and one to win signed/personalised copies of Me, Suzy P along with the sequel, Suzy P and the Trouble With Three, which you can see here.

Good luck with your bidding! (Just make sure you ask an adult before you bid, and ensure you can honour any bids you make).

The auction ends Wednesday 20th at 8pm. (If you have any questions, visit the FAQ section of the site.)

 

The Edinburgh Book Festival is a pretty big deal. So when they invited me to attend, I was SUPER excited. It’s the EDINBURGH FESTIVAL, people! Now all I had to do was ignore the niggle of fear  I get whenever I think about speaking in front of an audience. So I stuck my head firmly in the sand and focused on the exciting stuff.

My excitement grew as I talked to authory friends who told me things about the festival. There would be a lanyard, with my name on! (I was more excited about this than anything else. Sad, but true). And this lanyard would allow me access into that most hallowed of all places, the author’s yurt, which would be filled to bursting with incredibly famous people.  Eeps! Amazing!

My excitement grew further still when my amazing mother-in-law agreed to look after my son for the weekend, meaning my husband could come along with me, and act as my Official Entourage during the festival weekend. The hotel was booked. The train tickets were booked. The childcare was booked. What could possibly go wrong?

Weeeeellll….unfortunately my son is just as much of a disaster zone as I am, and the evening before we were due to get a train to THE OTHER END OF THE COUNTRY decided it was the perfect time to fall and cut his head open, requiring a panicked trip to A&E and many, many stitches. My nerves were in pieces! (There really was an awful lot of blood). Luckily he was fine, and we were able to leave the next day, if a little later than planned, and slightly more on edge than ideal.

One very long train journey later, we arrived in Edinburgh. It’s an amazing place to visit at the best of times, but festival time it’s something else, it’s buzzing with life and there’s loads going on wherever you look. On the way to our hotel we spotted Julia Donaldson and her husband, touting his gee-tar. Yay! Famous people!

A good night’s sleep in the lovely hotel and a mooch around town later, it was time for the scary stuff. The event! Yikes! I was doing the event with Andy Robb (to be clear, he was not a scary thing), author of Geekhood: Close Encounters of the Girl Kind and Geekhood: Mission Improbable . If you haven’t read his books, you should, they are very, very funny. Even if my husband had to explain the LOTR references to me (it was almost friendship terminated immediately when I confessed to Andy I hadn’t read the books OR seen the films).

Andy and I had talked on the phone beforehand, so I knew he was a nice guy, but we got on like a house on fire when we met official, like (in the yurt! But no famous people were there). We were gabbing away non-stop, and trying to out-do each other with who was the more nervous (official placings: a draw). Then Julia Eccleshare arrived, who was chairing our event. Julia is a Very Important Person at the Guardian, and what she doesn’t know about children’s books can be written on a postage stamp. She was very reassuring, and made us both feel a lot better about it all. And then it was time! We were miked up, and ushered off to our tent and to meet our public, dahling.

And the event was actually lots of fun. Andy is definitely the ying to my yang. I do not move around during events – for the very real reason there’s every chance I’ll fall over – whereas Andy bounces around all over the place like Tigger, telling animated stories and sitting next to audience members. We were asked questions, answered questions, discussed embarrassment and embarrassing times, and generally had a lovely time. In the blink of an eye it was over, and we were ushered to the book tent to do our book signing.  Here I met lots of audience members, including Sister Spooky, blogger extraordinaire, who I’d chatted with on Twitter. It was great to meet her in person, and also met Laura, the publicity manager from Templar, my publisher. I’m not sure I made any sense at all post-event,  I was a gibbering wreck with far too much adrenaline in my system. We all went back to the yurt after, and there was STILL a disappointing lack of famous people there. Ho hum. On my way out, I signed the guest book, and, genius that I am, managed to spell Edinburgh wrong. Will be adding that to my list of most embarrassing moments, then.

The next day saw us eat a huge brunch and have a fab catch up with my lovely lovely agent Lindsey Fraser, before getting the train home.

Using my standard ‘Was this event a success checklist’ – did I die? Vomit? Fall over? The answer to all three has to be no, so all in all, Edinburgh has been judged A SUCCESS!

Thanks so much for having me, Edinburgh Fest Peeps. I had a blast.

(You can read about Andy’s festival experience on his website, here.  And if you so wish, you can follow him on Twitter, @thatandybloke. Sister Spooky’s festival experience can be read about here, and she can be found on Twitter @sisterspooky)