Work has started on my new book project I spoke about earlier, or perhaps I should say our new book project. It is in fact going to be a family project and something very new and experimental for all of us. I had a vague idea I wanted to write about and my husband Tony (an English teacher) helped me to shape the idea into a story. Gradually he added bits, new ideas, this interchange of ideas went back and forth, back and forth until it was difficult to remember how we arrived at the final version!
We submitted the completed text (without illustration) to a couple of publishers who very politely said “no thanks”. The text then languished in a drawer for months until our son James took it out and made it into an audio book as part of his final years studies in music technology. The addition of music and sound effects really brought the story to life and we were all very pleased with the result.
Fast forward another twelve months and we are on the threshold of our new venture, the work will be published as a multi-media children’s book application for the Apple iPod, iPhone, iPad, and other audio platforms. It will have fourteen illustrations, a scrolling text, music and sound effects and narration which can be overwritten by another voice, for example a parent or child can choose to record themselves reading the story. It is going to be available in English and German. The book also has a title “The bird with the rainbow tail”
The very sad magpie drawing is work in progress; all the illustrations start as pen and ink drawings in black and white with colour added digitally so it will be a mixture of old and new technologies. I hope the world will always be full of traditional children’s books, they played an important role in my life, my children’s life and now my grandchild’s life but we see this as an addition, the sort of thing that you can take on a journey without then need to carry heavy books around. I hope to explain more later; in the meantime I will leave you with one very sad magpie in the making.
