News.

 

What is the Perfect Pong? on sale now.

 

'What is the Perfect Pong?' a children's photo story book aimed at pre-readers to five year olds is now on sale (see www.perfectpong.co.uk).

It's a collaboration with photographer Eleanor Bentall (see www.eleanorbentall.com) a Daily Telegraph regular, and is about a dog's pursuit of the world's best smell. The book is being launched with a promotion in Dogs Today magazine and 25p from each copy will go direct to the Dogs Trust.

Although I wrote the words, the 'author' is a terrier called Hoover. Eleanor and I spent a day pretty much following his nose. If he sniffed something, she took a picture. If he didn't, but we thought it was something interesting or fun, the contents of a Tesco ham sandwich were used as bribery.

We road tested the end result on three classes of 5-6 year olds -a terrifying ninety children- and gave readings at the library in Ashford Kent, and the town's branch of Waterstones, so know it won't bore it's target audience to death!

If you want to see Hoover in the fur, there's a video dog blog on his website. More Pong-related news soon.

 

Blog!

I've made a video blog tied in with 'Write On!' for a website called 'Meet the Author.'

It's a series of interviews with people aged between 9 and 81 about their literary likes and dislikes, and isn't entirely serious.

If you've a few minutes to spare have a look at:

http://www.meettheauthor.co.uk/bookbites/1528.html

The site has about 1,300 author clips from writers as diverse as Iain Banks, Roy Hattersely and Deborah Moggach, together with some good archive interviews with people like Eric Newby, so it's well worth a look.

 

 

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