Tag: My life as an author

New Year – Bullet Journal

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New Habit for 2018

I’m known as the organised one among my friends. I’m usually the one who organises a night out. I organise my regular writing critique group. I used to have a job as Project Manager so I guess it’s my natural instinct to be organised. But sometimes my organisation goes wrong. So this year, 2018, I am trying something new. I’m keeping a bullet journal.

Now bullet journalling isn’t new. If you do an internet search you will find all sorts of YouTube videos and Pinterest boards on how to do bullet journalling. You can add fancy patterns, Washi tape, different coloured inks to your spreads … but hang on a minute. Do you know what a bullet journal is?

Bullet Journal

A bullet journal can be all or one of these things :

  • A to do List
  • A diary/journal
  • An appointment calendar
  • A planner

And anything else you want it to be.

The idea is to have one notebook where you capture everything you want to achieve and to be organised in an attempt to make you achieve those things.

There are loads of brilliant planners on the market now. Kikki K have a very nice range

Kikki K Swedish Stationers Extrordinaire

And of course Paperchase can be relied on for gorgeous stationery. They have particularly good list pads

Paperchase Lists

But the problem with commercially produced journals and list pads is that they might not have the categories that you require. So you make your own and that’s a bullet journal.

My Bullet Journal

Now I am a complete beginner at bullet journalling and although I am organised, I am also well known for having great ideas and never following them through. But I am into the second week of the year and so far I am still with it.

I’m using a Leuchtturm A5 Bullet Journal with dot grid paper. But before you dash out to buy one, I suggest you buy any notebook with dot grid paper as it wasn’t worth the extra to get the bullet journal version. There are only a couple of extra features that you can put in yourself. I would recommend a Leuchtturm notebook though, because they have numbered pages and space for an index at the front, which are useful features for a bullet journal (as well as for general notebooks).

Jo Franklin Bullet Journal

My new bullet journal

Dot grid paper is useful because you can use the dots to create boxes if you need to and it can accommodate any sized writing.

I started off setting up a year planner

Help! my year looks very empty

Then I set up a monthly spread which includes my active projects – because I have so many, I’m worried I’m going to forget one – my daily habit tracker – I’ve already realised that I am not committed to doing a seven minute workout every day. I left a space for ‘Notes’ and ‘Buy’ but I’m not sure I will bother with these in the future. That’s the great thing about bullet journals, you create the spreads yourself so you can alter them at any time

Monthly Spread

I tried to get all fancy pants with a turquoise highlighter pen, but to be honest my bullet journal is never going to be a work of art so I probably won’t bother doing that again.

In week one, I create a weekly spread but hardly used it so I modified it for week two.

This will be useful for me. As I spend so many days on my own at home, I can forget appointments which take me out of the house. Hopefully by creating my own week at a glance, I will get better keeping the shape of the week more firmly in my head.

But the main thing for me is the daily To Do List.

I run Todoist on my pc and phone which is a brilliant app by the way, but I am really bad at marking tasks complete that I haven’t really done or just constantly moving them forwards to the next day. I am going to keep Todoist going but hopefully by writing out the tasks that haven’t yet been done, I will be more mindful of what I am supposed to be doing and more importantly, what I am putting off.

The idea is that at the end of every day, I go through my list and mark off what I have done, move forward anything left outstanding and schedule longer tasks into my diary. I also have to do this in Todoist. In this case, doubling up the effort is helping me stay on track.

There are certain marks which are used in bullet journalling but of course you can make up your own ones :

.   means To Do

x   means Completed

<  indicates that the task has been scheduled so doesn’t need to be carried forward to tomorrow

>  means carry forward the task to tomorrow

You can make up other ones. For example you might want to add thoughts or other notes to your list that you transcribe to a different notebook.

Conclusion

So am I going to stick with bullet journalling for the whole of 2018? I don’t know, but I like it at the moment and I can see this habit evolving. And of course it is very satisfactory to tick off a task which has been completed. Monday Blogpost – Complete.

Happy New Year 2018

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Happy New Year 2018 Fireworks in London (from BBC)

Happy New Year 2018 and thanks for dropping by.

A new year means new beginnings, resolutions and good intentions. 2017 was a very tough year for me in my personal life so I am very pleased to leave it behind and look forward to fresh horizons. As with anyone who takes a hit on the personal front, my work life has suffered over the last twelve months and I start the new year looking forward to getting back to the focus of being an author.

As I have said in other posts, being an author is not all about writing. There are a lot of other aspects to the job – including writing blog posts! So my current Open Projects List looks like this :

  • Series fiction proposals – this is my creative focus for the beginning of the year. I’d love to write and sell one of my zany series fiction ideas to a major publisher.

Move over Famous Five and Beast Quest!

  • Devise sessions for an after school club – I’m delighted to have been asked to run a creative writing club at a school in Forest Hill. I hope to be able to share some of their work later in the year.
  • Write a day course for adults. I teach creative writing part-time at The City Lit in London and I am running a course in early February so I need to put the materials together.
  • CWISL – I belong to a group of authors called CWISL – Children’s Writers and Illustrators for Stories and Literacy – we work together to deliver literary events for children. I’m joint webmaster for CWISL and I’m also jointly responsible for creating the annual literary quiz
  • Review my website (this one) and build a new one to promote my services as a literary mentor to aspiring children’s authors. So if you know anyone who would like some help then ask them to drop me a line.
  • Papers Pens Poets. Like many authors I am a stationery addict. Eighteen months ago,  I set up a website with my dear friend Anita Loughrey, exploring the way authors use stationery in their work. Papers Pens Poets includes interviews with authors and stationery reviews.

Anita at the London Stationery Show

Anita and Me – a business lunch overlooking the Thames

Sadly, Papers Pens Poets has been another victim of my difficult year so I’m determined to put that right in 2018.

So it’s a busy start to 2018. Bring it on!

Jo Franklin

Federation of Children’s Book Groups Conference 2017

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FCBG Banner

Last weekend I attended the Federation of Children’s Book Groups Conference (FCBG) near Reading, Berkshire.

What is the FCBG?

The FCBG is a UK charity bringing children and books together, encouraging reading for pleasure. Most members are librarians or teachers or ex-librarians or ex-teachers, but whatever their background they are all passionate about children’s books and nurturing a life long love of reading.
You can find out more about the FCBG here.

Authors United

I went with my great friends Anita Loughrey and Miriam Halahmy and we met fellow author Claire Barker along the way.

Anita and Miriam Anita and Claire Barker
Miriam and Anita Anita and Claire Barker

FCBG Conference 2017

The conference has great talks by authors and publishers. A publisher stand where publishers showcase their latest books. A bookshop selling copies of books by authors appearing at the conference. This year the bookshop was my all time favourite Tales on Moon Lane. It was also a great opportunity to hang out with people who love children’s books as much as I do.

Tales on Moon Lane

I particularly enjoyed the talk by the author Cas Lester, the seminar on techie stuff you can use to help get reluctant readers into reading by Bev Humphreys and the small publisher panel featuring Alanna Books, Tiny Owl and Book Island. It was also a great opportunity for me to meet Roy Johnson who is the Sales and Marketing Director of Troika Books, one of my publishers.

A great weekend of bookish awesomeness.

And there might have been one or two cocktails sampled while we were off duty.

Cocktails

 

Writers’ Forum interview with Jo Franklin

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by Jo Franklin

Jo Franklin in Writer's forum

I was totally thrilled when  Anita Loughrey  asked to interview me for Writers’ Forum magazine. As we chatted, I suddenly realised that a certain theme crops up in my work again and again. The gawky awkwardness of  not fitting in.

Now I am an adult, I experience that horrible feeling when I go to a party and I don’t know anyone and even worse, I don’t know what to say to them.  I get overwhelmed by thoughts of What am I doing here? I am convinced that no one will be interested in me because I don’t belong.

As a child, that feeling was amplified. It wasn’t just a party I didn’t fit into. It was the whole world.

“I didn’t feel that I belonged. I didn’t know who I was. I had lots to say but no one around me was listening so I felt very isolated.”

A working title of Help I’m an Alien was “Alien/Misfit *delete as appropriate” which pretty much sums up how I felt growing up and continue to feel as an adult. I write about misfits because I am one!

“I’m not sure I ever fully grew up, so being a children’s writer is the perfect job for me.”

You can read the full article in Writers’ Forum magazine.

 

 

Help! I’m in the News Visiting Peckham Library

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by Jo Franklin

I recently visited Peckham Library to talk about the importance of reading and libraries to their Chatterbooks group. Southwark News came along to take my picture and to write up the event.

Libraries are such an important resource for the community. Not only are they stuffed full of brilliant books, but they also provide much needed study space for students and authors. I wrote Help I’m an Alien in Peckham Library and I am thrilled that they now stock my book.

Here is the page from my scrap book with their report

Jo Franklin scrap book

Me at Peckham Library courtesy of Southwark News

And this is the online article of the same event.

Peckham author comes full circle as she talks to kids at library where she wrote book

Juggling Children’s Author

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by Jo Franklin

Being a children’s author is really hard work. I thought it was going to be all about writing books and living the life of an eccentric recluse in a hobbit hole or writing shack. But I was so wrong. I am juggling so many things and I don’t think I am always successful.

Here are some of the things that I have to do every day :

Write my books – This is the best bit of my author life. I’d love to be doing it all day every day, but that is totally unrealistic. It takes me a year to write most of my books. That is partly because I have to do all the other things listed below, but it is also because the space between actually writing is as important as the writing itself.  I like to leave gaps in between writing my drafts so that I can look at my work with fresh eyes and come up with important improvements to the text. The non-writing spaces in my working day are also important. It’s amazing how I often find the answer to a problem in my writing in a pile of dirty laundry.

me-writing-snipped

Jo Franklin at work

Website Design – In case you didn’t realise, this website was designed by me. I hope you like it. The problem with having a website is that I need to keep it fresh so my visitors (you!) don’t get bored and keep coming back to see what I am up to.
I feel I am failing at this. I have to keep reminding myself that I do more on my website than some authors but not as much as others (Pop over to Candy Gourlay’s website if you want to see some awesome content) . And now someone has emailed me telling me that a link doesn’t work and I don’t know how to fix it. Gah!

School Visits – Not only do I have to develop great school visits, I also have to go out there and deliver them. Yes I do school visits and author appearances at libraries and festivals. Here are the details.  Meeting readers is the second best bit of being a children’s author (after writing the books in the place) but the downside is that it is very tiring and normally wipes me out for a day afterwards which stops.

Author Talks St Alphege

Jo Franklin visiting St Alphege school in Solihull

Provide Extra Content – Either on my website or to schools I have visited or will be visiting soon. This means colouring sheets, wordsearches, teacher’s resources, craft activities to go with my books. I have totally failed at this one but it is on my To Do List – honest.

Twitter – I’m on Twitter – @Jofranklin2 – but I need to be better at it. I think I should be engaging in lively conversations with the right people (authors, publishers, librarians, bookshops and teachers) without engaging with the wrong people (trolls and spammers for certain, but also an sort of time suckers that don’t lead me anywhere) while promoting myself, my book and my author appearances (children’s authors need to do many author events and school visits)  without being a promotion bore which upsets people (especially me).

Acronyms and How to Use Them – SEO, HTML, CSS and probably a hundred more that I don’t even know exist at the moment. I am having a go at this but I’m still an amateur which probably shows. Part of the problem is that SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is such a black art that it is easy to upset Google by mistake.

FYI – I never mean to upset anyone but it does happen sometimes so if that’s you – I’m sorry!

Video Artist – It’s all about YouTube these days. In fact it’s getting to the point that no one is ever going to get a contract for a children’s book ever again unless they have a YouTube channel and a gazillion subscribers. I currently have two videos on my YouTube channel (as of 10th October 2016) and I will make more but they are so time consuming to make and then I have the added responsibility of making sure that I don’t accidentally post them with obscene words in the subtitles. Don’t ask! I leaned this the hard way.

Photographer – So that I have an unlimited stream of visual publicity material. This is one of my latest efforts. In fairness, I had to enlist the help of my daughter Eleanor because taking a selfie while sitting on a grave is very difficult

jo-looking-wistful-snipped

Jo Franklin pretending to be wistful in Nunhead Cemetery

Ideas Factory – I need to be able to come up with new concepts at the drop of a hat so when my agent lets me know about a new opportunity for some commissioned work I am able to respond instantly. I did this the other week and …. yippee! Sorry it’s secret squirrels for now but it seems to have paid off this time.

Juggling all of the above – The hardest thing of all is that I have to juggle everything. Switching between tasks is very bad for my writing. I am trying to be more disciplined about ring fencing my writing time, but it is difficult because if I get an email from my agent or from a librarian trying to organise a school visit, I have to respond immediately.

So next time you ask yourself the question ‘What does an author do all day?’ think of me juggling all these tasks and more.

 

Goodbye Lovely Friend

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by Jo Franklin, children’s author

This week I turned my full focus on a new project. It’s one that has been bubbling away in the background for a while, in a couple of different guises, but as I sent my latest wip (work in progress) off to my agent for what will hopefully be her final comments, the time had come to throw myself into something new. I felt totally invincible as I do every time I start something new. The publishing world were going to love this book. What’s not to like? It isn’t even written yet. There can be no bad words in it.  So I began. It was great.

And then I received the terrible news that a lovely friend of mine had died.

Sue Hyams

Sue Hyams

Thank you Sue Eves for this rare photo.

I guess it wasn’t totally unexpected. Cancer is like that. It creeps up silently, screams aggressively right in your face and then dares you to strike back. The doctors have a powerful array of weapons but they are something of a blunt instrument and nearly wipe out the whole person, not just the unwelcome visitor.

Once Sue had come to terms with the diagnosis – Stage 4 Ovarian Cancer – she got on with it. The prognosis wasn’t good, I can’t remember the exact figure she told me but it was something like only a 20% chance of survival. I can do the maths. It meant that there was an 80% chance she wouldn’t make it. But we never talked about the 80% and concentrated on the 20% instead. Grueling treatment followed and some serious surgery followed by more treatment. She also turned to alternative treatments to supplement the traditional and I believe this was a major factor in her being able to reclaim her health for a while.

She was a great friend to me during this time. I was cracking up and she didn’t bat an eyelid about my more bizarre behaviour. In fact she was probably the only person who could see exactly how unbalanced I was. She didn’t judge. We talked about stuff. Old and new and we both got better.

Of course, I wasn’t the only person in her life and she shared with me her excitement for her daughter’s progress through the various ups and downs of being a budding actress. She told me about her sister who lives in Wales with a gaggle of horses. Somewhere in the mix her mother died so there was lots to deal with there. All the time we were both writing. Sometimes the output was better than others. That’s the writer’s lot.

And then the cancer came back. More treatment and I knew my friend was slipping away. On Thursday 8th September 2016 her suffering came to an end. She was 56.

It’s been a tough few days. I had to tell our friends. Share my grief. Hear theirs. I am sad that my lovely friend was taken away too soon. But I am also grateful to have known her. We had a laugh and shared all sorts of knocks and bumps along the way.

My life goes on now and although she isn’t with me physically, she is in my heart and I hold her enthusiasm for my own writing very close. I’m going to go back to my new project with renewed gusto, because I’m writing it for you, Sue. With a massive thank you for being my friend.

Author Visits – What can they bring to schools?

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By Jo Franklin, Children’s Author

Author visits can be a great way to give reading and writing a boost in any school. A 2013 survey by the Society of Authors confirmed that author visits can promote reading for pleasure, wider reading for all abilities and inspire creative writing.

Check out the full article here – Author Visits in Schools Survey

I’m an author but I’m not a trained teacher. I don’t know what the restrictions of the literacy curriculum are. I certainly don’t know what a subordinated fronted adverbial preposition is. But I do have a passion for words and stories, especially my own, and I find that my enthusiasm rubs off on classes of confident and reluctant readers.

Author Talks St Alphege

A visit to St Alphege school in Solihull

Children see published authors as celebrities. As someone who has never appeared on television or spoken on the radio. I find it totally amazing that having a name printed on a book cover is enough to give an author kudos in today’s celebrity led culture. Supplement that with a website and maybe even a video or two and any author can be come a celebrity for the day.

Children take notices of celebrities, so listening to an author talk passionately about how they became a writer, were inspired to write a particular book, how many words they write in a day or books they have read in a year or how many unpublished manuscripts they have under their bed will inspire and enthuse their young audience.

In the Society of Authors report above, Malorie Blackman says

Author visits by Malorie Blackman

Malorie Blackman

‘With over two decades of first-hand experience regarding school visits, I have seen and learnt for myself just how much of a difference author and illustrator visits can truly make. Such visits inspire not just reading and writing, but also fire a child’s imagination and lead to previously reluctant readers actively seeking out stories.’

I love to talk to my readers in schools, libraries and festivals. If you would like me to visit your literary community then please get in touch.

 

Back to School – What do you keep in your pencil case?

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by Jo Franklin, Children’s Author

It’s back to school week in this household and that means sewing on name tapes – Boo!  and stuffing new pencil cases with new stationery – Yay! But my children are not the only ones to be obsessed with stationery in this house. I am a total stationery addict.

I have my own collection of pencil cases that I use when I leave the house.

This is my favourite. The Kokuyo NeoCritz Transformer Pencil Case

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It is neat and practical as it transforms into a pen holder. It’s the perfect size to fit a couple of pens, a pencil, a highlighter, a data stick and a rubber. It also has a small pocket for storing spare ink cartridges and I slip a few paperclips in for good measure, yet it is the right size to fit in a rucksack or workbag.

My lovely friend and Papers Pens Poets co-conspirator, Anita Loughrey, bought me a very posh pen case as a gift to celebrate the launch of Help I’m am Alien. She knows me so well! I now keep the Lamy fountain pen and pencil I bought with my first advance for Help I’m an Alien in it. I stroke it and my special pens regularly when I need to be reminded about how lucky I am to be a published author or how I better get on and write if I am ever to have another book published.

Jo Franklin's posh pen holder

Jo Franklin’s posh pen holder

Jo Franklin's posh pen case 2

Jo Franklin’s posh pen case with posh pens in it

These days I spend a lot of time writing at home and my desk is kitted out with even more stationery. There’s my pen pots which also give away my preference for jasmine tea and Hotel Chocolate Amaretto Soaked Sultanas (something else that Anita introduced me too).

Jo Franklin's pen pots

Recycled Pen Pots

I have one pot for fountain pens, one for highlighters and calligraphy nibbed felt tips and one for my regular Uniball Vision Elite rollerballs.

Then there’s my set of acrylic drawers which my pc monitor sits on.

Jo Franklin's post it note drawer

Post-it note drawer

Jo Franklin's tabs

Tabs in a drawer

Jo Franklin's Misc Stationery

Miscellaneous Stationery in a drawer

And this is the overall effect

Jo Franklin's stationery drawers

Stationery Drawers in Action

As an author who is also a mum, back to school also means back to work for me. My pencil cases and desk are ready. And so am I.