How to use this Page

You can now spend two quid and get You Can't Eat a Princess! and You Can't Scare a Princess! as eBooks!



And they're not just pages on a screen, you can turn the whole stories into Gilbert & Sullivan style musicals!



When I was at the Reeves this weekend, 10-year-old Sam and I had a blast mucking around with the stories on Philip's iPad. This is my favourite feature of the eBooks, you can record stuff:



This is brilliant because you can record and save the story in more than one language, have different people reading it aloud, or if you're Sam and me, get busy sabotaging it, then making up stupid songs. Hurrah! This is a very UNOFFICIAL VIDEO.



I totally need to get an iPad. If you have one, head on over to the MeBooks website, download the free app, watch the intro video to see how things work, then get busy playing with the stories!



Thanks for your great work on these: Gillian Rogerson with the script, Sarah Daykin for the audio recording, and the MeBooks people for developing it! You can follow MeBooks on Twitter: @Me_Books.

Two exciting things happened on the last day of the Jubilee holiday weekend. One of them was going to Birmingham's Book Bash festival and getting to see fancy Aston Hall and meet the Lord Mayor and a bunch of other great book creators.



The other was coming back from Birmingham to lots of nice tweets, texts, e-mails and a phone call from Stuart's Auntie Barbara, saying that they'd enjoyed watching me take part in Rolf Paints on the BBC. Hurrah! I didn't get to watch it on live telly, but Stuart and I watched it later on iPlayer. If you live in the UK, you can watch it for a week here on iPlayer. And the BBC has a Rolf Paints website here showing artwork from all the different artists and gives related links. I'm not sure if I'll be allowed to keep this video up, but I've copied some of the clips showing Rolf critiquing my lino cut print, and added a bit about comics artist Steve Marchant, so you could see his work from the day more clearly.



I've had a lot of people contacting me about a commemorative plate that Rolf mentioned on the show. I don't actually know anything about buying the plate, but I've sent an e-mail to the associate producer, asking her about it, and I'll post the information if I find out. The exhibition of our work runs from today until Sunday in the Old Vic Tunnels. (Details here.)


So more festival fun at Book Bash! I was doing a pirate event for You Can't Scare a Princess! so I drew the book's Captain Waffle doing some book bashing. Well, more like eating its cover off, but it's all in the same spirit.



Oo, and look, it's Nicholas Allan, creator of fabulous book The Queen's Knickers, Cinderella's Bum and loads of other funny picture books. Nick was in the news a lot recently because some glitch at Waterstone's had them accidentally printing out The Queen's Knickers on every receipt.



Heh, this picture made me laugh. It looks like someone made a bad smell.



A lovely visitor named Angela Masterson drew a portrait of me during my event and gave it to me:



Look, it's Peppa Pig! Poor Peppa, she really ought to turn sideways, I think her profile is much more flattering than full-frontal snout.



It was fun meeting Derby-based poet, writer and illustrator Chris White. He's been to Book Bash loads of times, and from the number of kids clustered around his signing table, has a real loyal local following.



Last time I was in Birmingham, I had a total blast with librarian Jen Bakewell. I was sorry not to get more time to hang out with her, but we still had a quick lunch together and swapped over the hat. And here's cookbook writer Fi Bird, who does wonders w

Last Thursday, I gave my new-model pirate hat an outing, to Oxford Bookfeast at the Pitt Rivers Museum and University Museum of Natural History. Now, I've always wanted to visit the Pitt Rivers, ever since I heard it's where Philip Pullman based the scenes from His Dark Materials where Lyra examines the trepanned skulls. And then I started seeing friends' photos popping up of shrunken heads and, well, you can't really not look, can you?



But it somehow didn't happen; I must've gone to Oxford twenty times last year, but I was always catching later trains to miss rush hour rail ticket prices, and by the time my Oxford meetings were finished, it was always just about museum closing time. But, at last! there I was. And it was a flying visit, but look at the beautiful architecture in the Natural History Museum! The delicate ceiling structure almost looks like it's made of dinosaur bones, I felt like I was inside the rib cage of a wonderful prehistoric beast. I didn't have much time. And fortunately the guard didn't mind me running up to him and asking, Please, sir, can you tell me where to find the shrunken heads?



And the guard did better than that; he instantly sussed what kind of visitor I was and gave me a whirlwind tour of the weirder aspects of the museum. Running me past the trepanned skulls, he showed me the shrunken heads (assuring me that the people had died of natural causes first, not been killed for their heads). Then he whipped open these cabinets to show me all sorts of voodoo dolls. I think he said that the white one in the bottom shelf was a health doll, designed to help people remotely with medical conditions, not hurt them. Like acupuncture by proxy.




More shrunken heads. One of my Bookfeast helpers looked slighty wary when I mentioned these; she said that the museum is a bit sensitive about them and wants to see them repatriated and buried. But she also mentioned that illustrator Ted Dewan says they'll only get rid of them if they take his head, too. Hurrah! I want to watch the showdown. But I do hope they keep the heads.



Another wonderful curio: a witch in a bottle. The guide said that they're not sure if there really is a witch in there, but they're not going to open it to find out. I really need to spend a week looking and drawing in this museum, not just fifteen minutes running around. If I ever get stuck for story ideas, I know just where to go. What a marvelous place.



And here's my pirate event! Bookfeast really packed in the kids, I think there were at least six schools represented. I read them You Can't Scare a Princess! (with lots of communal ARRR-ing) and showed them how I go about turning three sheets of paper with typed-out words on it into an illustrated book. Then we all together drew a picture of Captain Waffle, and then I set the kids off designing their own pirates, who are looking for their own unique versions of treasure. I do hope they go away and make stories about their pirates.


Photo by Liz Cross

Thanks so much to Blackw

Wow, yesterday was a BIG day! I'm still feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all, but in a good way. I led three storming pirate events for the IMAGINE Children's Festival at the Royal Festival Hall on the Southbank. It's running for another week, so if you're around London, do have a peek at their great line-up! Here's a picture I drew just before my first workshop event:



And then there was a huge stage event! It was PACKED! At least 500 kids and their families. It's one of those times when I think, wow, when I decided I wanted to make children's books, I never even dreamed this would be part of the job.


Photo by Lauren O'Farrell

And it was great having some familiar faces in the audience. Here are fellow tweeters, my studio mate @deadlyknitshade and @_MissLWS. Oh, and the festival hashtag is #ImagineFest.



When I do smaller events, I tend to let the kids direct me in what I draw, but since there were just so many people, I thought I'd try doing a step-by-step drawing with them, of Captain Waffle from You Can't Scare a Princess!. I was amazed how well even the youngest of the kids seemed to keep up with me, and I was thrilled at the end, when I had people hold up their drawings to show me, and there was a sea of pirates, all slightly different and funny and quirky, but all totally AWESOME.



Photo by Lauren O'Farrell



A lot of the kids came and showed me their pirates when I was doing the signing and I'm sad I didn't get photos of more of their drawings. But here are a couple (ooh, those two look familiar again!):



Here's our pirate from the first workshop, that the kids helped me draw before designing their own pirates. Meet Cap'n Fish-hat Pong! He's eating bogey-covered chicken on toast, and no, that wasn't my idea, the kids get full credit for that one.


Photo by Catherine Stokes

Just a note, if anyone wants more of the activity sheets from the event, I have free, downloadable, printable activity sheets for each of my books over on my website, just click on the book cover to find the sheets for each book.



Scholastic UK have this great way of mixing round publicists, editors, marketing people, etc at events. So it's not uncommon to get an editor coming along with me instead of a publicist, and it's gr

Thanks, Molly Bruton, for this excellent drawing of Captain Waffle from my picture book You Can't Scare a Pricess! (You might recognise Molly's name from her comic reviews on the FPI blog.) Poor Molly just fell off a trampoline, broke her arm in two places and had to have surgery to put pins in it, so send her lots of sympathy. (She drew this before the fateful bounce.)



There are lots of ways to draw the pirate captain, but I thought I'd rustle up a quick guide, if you want to give it a try. Feel free to leave links to your drawings in the comments if you like! It's always fun to see the variations. And what's Waffle wearing underneath? Hmm...

Okay, the endless supply of lobster is not the only reason I love Wigtown Book Festival. But it is one of the reasons.



Last Friday, Stuart and took the train to Carlisle, then hired a car and drove over to beautiful Wigtown in southwest Scotland. Even thought it's a fairly small town, it has something like 20 indie bookshops and is a wonderful, cosy sort of place even when the wind is whipping down the high street.



We always stay with the excellent Mary and Angus MacIlwraith, and Stuart and Angus have been friends for 25 years. Here's a picture I drew (fairly quickly) of their farmhouse.




I think they were quite surprised when I came to breakfast in full pirate costume, and here we are, posing with Suzy the border terrier in their back garden. Thanks so much to writer Geraldine McCaughrean for lending me her Captain Hook hat! Geraldine wrote the authorised sequel to Peter Pan, called Peter Pan in Scarlet and has been working with the Peter Pan Moat Brae Trust, not far from Wigtown, to create a JM Barrie centre in a lovely old house where Peter Pan took it shape. The Moat Brae Trust and Geraldine are hosting a tea party at the Wigtown festival on Thursday at 4pm and I'm very sorry to miss it!



I was very excited to meet writer and illustrator Debi Gliori for the first time and, besides doing our own events, we both gave talks together twice in front of 300 schoolkids. 600 kids is a lot of people when the town's population is only about 1200! And we were both very chuffed to see writer and illustrator Shoo Rayner, who does more school events than almost anyone I know, and has posted hundreds of how-to-draw videos on You Tube (or Shoo Tube, as he calls his channel). We spent a couple hours chatting up in the Writer's Retreat, a beautiful room above Wigtown's most central bookshop, and we got a bit silly. Here's the evidence... (not a video for children, really; sorry about that...)



Here's the actor Celia Imrie with Shoo in an oh-please-take-this-or-my-wife-will-never-believe-it shot.



Lately it's seemed that the first person I've walked into at every festival has been the tweedy besuited Stuart Kelly. I think he moderated something like 14 events at the Edinburgh Book Festival. So I couldn't help laughing when there he was, first person I saw, in the Writers' Retreat. Poor Stuart, I think he thinks I'm a bit nuts, swanning noisily into the room in my various pirate costumes. He inhabits the, ahem, very serious world of books for adults.



But enough of that. Ahoy! Jolly pirates!



Last time I was in Wigtown I met fabulous storyteller Renita Boyle, who can do absolutely anything with a guitar and silly voices, that woman is totally fearless. Here she is, leading the crew in a galloping rendition of I Know an Old Lady W