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How to sew a skirt without failing
Ok, this post is for the ones that know how to sew, but not necessarily know how to sew a skirt and think it would definitely be way to difficult to do. I have found this great mum who does amazing stuff on her youtube channel. “Made Everyday.” And I’ve tried it and it works. It’s easy, it’s fast. Everything that I personally, love. So here is the link. Click here. And to prove that I did make a skirt, here are the two skirts I did for my daughter. We went to the shop to buy the fabric and the elastic, and she chose what she wanted. As you…
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Walk around the quarter la Défense
If you live in Paris, but in the west, La Défense is for you a business district where you get lost going out of the subway. So, yes, it is a business district, and you, or rather, I get lost every time I get out of the Subway station, mais it’s not just that. There are also a lot of modern art to discover. So, I give you that it may sound a bit hypster to say “oh, how about seeing some modern art”, but, in truth, no. Because those modern pieces are crazy enough for the kids to seize them and transform them into slides or climbing walls. In…
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Illustration, follow up
It’s been nearly two months that I’ve started working with my illustrator. I have to admit that the process is as exhilarating as it is stressing. Exhilarting because suddenly you see your words developping in front of your eyes and that’s a really strong feeling. Even more when the illustrations are beautiful. Stressing, because you’re the one in charge et you have to lead your illustrator in the direction you deem the best without crushing her creativity. I have to confess that sometimes I have found it difficult to know my place. Even more because I don’t know much, or to be completely honest, nothing about illustrations. But I do…
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wearing two caps
Being an indie means wearing many caps. I know that of course. But it isn’t as easy as it seems. A concrete example. In my training as a picture book writer, I have been told over and over not to give art notes, to let the illustrator’s creativity freedom to express itself. Except, that when as an indie you’re hiring someone. You basically become the editor, and an editor will work closely with the illustrator to reach what they think is best for the book. It’s been quite a journey to be able to differentiate the two. Here are a few tips to talk to an illustrator. In the first…
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creating a company
So I’ve started a company!!! Hippie. If it’s not clear, the above logo is the one from my little company! I built it from scratch, though I’m only the associate. But it will help me publish my books. For anyone living in France, you will know that actually overcoming the red tape in this country is an achievement in itself. So here’s what I did to create a SASU. There are numerous sites that will tell you what to do. And more often than not, they’ll tell you lies. Well, not lies exactly, but they will ommit a few things. To create a SASU you must have a capital stored…
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Choosing an illustrator
There are lots of posts about how to choose an illustrator. The only thing I’ll do here is to tell you how I did it. Tell you about my failures and my success in the hope it’ll help you make the best-informed decision for you. So I’ve written three picture books. They’ve been professionally edited. So I know my text is the best it can be. Now I don’t know how to draw to save my life. I’ve stopped my capacities at about the age of nine. I’m the queen of stick characters but not much better. When I thought about hiring an illustrator, an option opened itself to me.…
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Formating a manuscript
When writing a manuscript, I must confess I concentrated a first on the story the characters and the setting. But as the deadline to send my dissertation for my Master was coming closer I realised there was something had grossly over looked: The formatting. I’m not talking about typos, because those have a way of creeping behind your back. And so I believe that you need to have someone else read your manuscript to try and erase as much as you can because when you read a text you know, your brain does a silly thing and corrects the letters as you read, so you basically cannot spot any typos…
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Editing or the emotional rollercoaster
Why use a metaphor? Editing is not a roller coaster. It is a cold straightforward process, whereby an editor or your agent read your text and makes comments, suggests cuts and changes. From an outsiders point of view it does not seem so terrible. Not so terrible. This is what I thought. I had heard my tutor, Catherine Fox, say that one of her book had been edited by 25%. A that time, I was shocked, because having a quarter of the pages you have written thrown down the gutter sounded terribly brutal. But I sort of discarded that because I knew in the end she had a great book…
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Interview with Lucinda Nettleton
Tell us a little bit about your stories and how you came to take part in that project? The writing opportunity came through The Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. Senior Lecturer Dr Amna Khan advertised for a writer to fictionalize oral histories of gift-giving traditions spanning three generations of Pakistan, Bengal and Gujarat. Initially, I only completed the Pakistani account but Dr Khan and the Gift of Togetherness team enjoyed my work so commissioned me to complete the Gujarati and Bengali accounts too. Tell us about this gift giving tradition in the stories, The Gift of Togetherness Project, from which the stories stem, is centralized around Asian gift giving…
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Jesobel Jones Blog Tour
How did you come up with the idea of Jesobel Jones? In the first few weeks of my Creative Writing MA, we were set the task of writing from the point of view of someone who had a disability. Being overweight was given as an option. It seemed to me more interesting to write about someone who didn’t seem that being overweight was a problem for her, just a problem for other people. I wrote a short piece and received lots of compliments about the voice in the exercise. She soon had a name, at this point Alyssa, the name Jesobel came along much later in the process, and she…