day one

Only a few days to go now until the arrival of Dotty Detective, published by Harper Collins Children’s Books on May 5th.

A proud moment.

It’s the first ‘proper’ length story – the first in a series – that I’ve written myself. I didn’t know I could do it, but I had a small thread of an idea and I found my stride and my writing voice, and I kept knitting it and knitting it and stitching in more colours, and in the end it turned out that I could.

My heroine Dot, together with best pal Beans and TOP DOG McClusky, creates the Join The Dots Detectives. There is no mystery, however fiendishly tricky, that they cannot solve. There are secret codes to decipher, clues to unravel, pieces of the jigsaw to put together.

Right from the start I planned for the books to be contemporary and innovative. It’s a diary with a difference. Dot narrates in the running commentary style of texting or tweeting (indeed the majority of the diary entries are deliberately a maximum of 140 characters), in a super-present-tense. She shares her observations of life, of family, friends and school – both momentous and trivial – just as they pop into her head.

The books are bursting with doodles, lists, selfies and polaroids,

and look well-thumbed and much-loved. Which is of course what I most long for!

Tomorrow, a bit more about Dot…