Interview #6: Gillian Rogerson



Gillian Rogerson

Gillian Rogerson loves being a writer. Her passion is infectious and inspiring. She's also extremely modest.

While she might not shout from the rooftops about her achievements, let me do so on her behalf.

She has published three picture books in the past seven years, Happy Birthday Santa, The Teddy Bear Scare and The Smallest Hero, a non-fiction title, Children's History of Leeds, and two titles in a series of Scholastic children's books about Princess Spaghetti,  You Can't Eat a Princess and You Can't Scare A Princess.
TV and film people are circling Princess Spaghetti, perhaps sensing the next big thing. The character is already a runaway success with young readers.

She always wanted to be a writer - Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree books were her favourite as a child.

Yet it took Gillian a long time to believe she could be a writer. She thought it was something other people did.

Her attitude began to change after a chance encounter.

Gillian, who works as a teaching assistant and lives in Leeds with teenage daughters Rosie and Eve, said: "I once saw Terry Pratchett from afar in a Leeds bookshop about 20 years ago and I thought, he looks just like an ordinary person. If he can write a book, then so can I.

So, when IS Santa's birthday?

"I'd always imagined famous authors to be superhuman and ten feet tall."

She always wanted to write, but because she believed it was an "impossible dream" she didn't pursue it. She forgot about it and went to work in insurance and sold children's shoes.

It was only when she became a mother that she began to think that, yes, she could try to write a book. This was 15 years ago, when her elder daughter was two and she loved sharing picture books with her.

She had a go herself and found that she absolutely loved it. She found she had a gift for storytelling. Her mind proved adept at sparking idea after idea, triggered by the famous writing provocation - 'what if?'.

Over the next five years she wrote and sent off picture book ideas to publishers, without success.

But she was learning her craft and wrote more than 200 in the process.

She would take a simple thought like 'when is Santa's birthday?' and explore it logically until she had fleshed out the idea into a picture book. That particular one became Happy Birthday, Santa!

Her other method of working (and which she still uses) was to deploy a 'story bag'. She would pull out a random character type - a princess, say - along with a random setting - outer space - and put the two together to, hopefully, come up with something fresh. That particular combination resulted in the first Princess Spaghetti book.

"I met Curtis Jobling at a Leeds comic festival last year. And he told me that he uses story dice. Each face of the dice has a different word, like 'volcano', to help you come up with ideas for your story," she said.

Let's hope Princess Spaghetti is soon a major TV series

After toiling hard at her craft, Gillian was signed up for two picture books by Gullane Books. "Like buses, you wait for one for ages then two come along at once!" she laughed.
It was on the strength of this that Gillian was taken on by agent Eve White.

"It was the same time that Eve was considering signing up Andy Stanton, author of the Mr Gum books. Lucky that she decided to go ahead, isn't it?" she laughed.

Gillian can't speak highly enough of the support Eve has shown her. Indeed, she is thrilled with all her collaborators in the publishing industry. She's been lucky enough to have her picture books illustrated by such great artists as Sarah McIntyre and Ingela Peterson.

She harbours ambitions to illustrate her own work. Indeed, she has turned some of her rejected picture book ideas into Kindle e-books, accompanied by her own drawings.

So, with so much going on at the moment, does Gillian have any other writing ambitions?

"I'd love to write a murder mystery. Not a gory one, something more like Agatha Christie," she confides.

I suspect that whatever Gillian Rogerson turns her hand to will be a success.

* Thanks to Gillian for being such a lovely interviewee (and fellow Laurel and Hardy fan, too - it's always great to meet a kindred spirit).

Her website is here. Her page on Eve White's website is here.

Interview #5: Kara Lebihan

Kara Lebihan's Mrs Vickers' Knickers helping a sailing boat win first place. Thanks to Deborah Allwright for allowing us this early peek at one of her illustrations from the forthcoming book

If there was an award for dedication to a writing dream and never giving up, then Kara Lebihan would walk it.

Success has been a long time coming, but it’s nearly here.

Her first book, Mrs Vickers' Knickers will be published next year by the mighty Egmont. The picture book for young children is fewer than 200 words, but a lifetime of striving and working hard at her craft is woven into every sentence.

The illustrations have been done by the brilliant Deborah Allwright, best known for The Night Pirates.

Kara Lebihan

Kara spoke to me on the phone from her parents’ home in the north east during her first visit to the UK since she, her husband and seven-year-old son Hugh moved to China a year ago.

She is the deputy head teacher of the British School in Beijing. They moved, she says, because they were looking for adventure.

They love living out there.

Writing has always been a part of Kara’s life.

“It’s that cliché – I remember saying as a child ‘I want to be a writer’.

“I’ve got some novels I wrote as a child in storage in Manchester (where they were living before they moved east).

“After that I went to secondary school and the writing went dead, but it was still in my mind. I went to university in Newcastle and then trained to be a teacher and in 1994 I started to take it a bit more seriously.”

She and her husband lived in the Far East for a number of years. She remembers sitting on a bus in Singapore writing some notes for a story on the back of her ticket.

She got the idea for a picture book – Jumper for Zak – about a grandmother knitting themed jumpers for members of the family, such as the librarian mum and gardener dad, but not having an idea of what to knit for Zak, before finding the solution and knitting all through the night.

Kara paid an Australian editor to read a variety of her work.

“She basically tore it apart but liked Zak. She suggested I work up a portfolio of three or four picture book ideas to send out to publishers.

A long, arduous road of creativity and disappointment now lay before Kara for the next few years.

She sent ideas to every agent in the Writers and Artists Handbook and every one came back rejected.

Kara persisted, buying each new W&A Handbook as it was published annually. One year there was a new agent’s name in the list: Eve White.

Kara sent her work to Eve. And waited.

Eventually, among all the rejections came a call from Eve who phoned to say she liked an idea of Kara’s called Mrs Butler's Frog about a family who can hear a frog croaking in their house and hunt high and low for it.

“Eve said if I changed the ending she would have a think about it. I did, but she didn’t think the new ending was funny enough.”

She eventually came up with a conclusion that satisfied Eve.

Many people assume that once an agent takes you on, publication, fame and fortune will naturally follow. Not so, says Kara.

Kara was taken on by Eve in 2006 and her first picture book – Mrs Vickers' Knickers - should be published next year. That's a long time to wait for your dream to come true. But persistence is the hallmark of success.

Inspiration for the book came when she was pushing Hugh in his pram around Hale, near Altrincham, where they were living. She spotted a sock lying on the pavement and wondered why it was that stray pieces of people's clothing were often to be found lying in the street or in a tree or draped over a gate or railing.

Agent Eve told her it was good to be rude, so Kara changed the sock into a pair of knickers - Mrs Vickers' to be precise.

Once she'd had that spark of an idea, Kara tried to imagine the journey the knickers had been on. She pictured all kinds of crazy scenarios before the knickers wound up coming back to their owner.

"Apparently rude is in these days," laughed Kara, though she should hardly be surprised given that Roald Dahl, the master of bad taste, was the biggest influence on her as a child.

In an exclusive for Bookengine, the picture at the top of this blogpost is Deborah Allwright's gorgeous interpretation of Mrs Vickers' knickers winning a boat race.

"The knickers are taking the boat into first place in place of a sail," said Kara.

Kara Lebihan now deserves to sail into the forefront of picture book authors.

* My thanks to Kara for speaking to Bookengine. Thanks also to Deborah Allwright and Egmont for allowing me to reproduce the illustration from Mrs Vickers' Knickers.

You can visit Kara's author's page at Eve White's website here. 
Visit Deborah Allwright's website here. And Egmont's website is here.