And as midsummer flashes by, here’s a quick update of what’s been happening here in the Shed (and out of it). A POCKETFUL OF CROWS has an illustrator – Bonnie Helen Hawkins, whose work I came across by chance when she wrote to me after hearing my TEDx talk of a couple of years ago. I realized at once that she and I had certain ideas in common; I loved her art, and she’s now working hard (and to a tight deadline) to illustrate my book, which suddenly seems much less far away than it did a few weeks ago. If you want to check out Bonnie’s work, her website is right here – http://www.bonniehelenhawkins.com/ and you can see examples of her black-and-white work, which I particularly love. With her help, the book should look great – and it’s coming out in October, just in time for Hallowe’en…

It’s been a month of illustrators. Last week I was in Skye, celebrating the birthday of Charles Vess, who’s going to be illustrating HONEYCOMB – we had a long talk about how I envisaged the book, but I’m really quite happy for Charles just to do his thing. It is a Good Thing (even though we who await it are getting quietly impatient to actually see the Thing.)

Meanwhile, the band and I have been working on new songs for #Storytime, including one to go with A POCKETFUL OF CROWS and the Twitter story from which it grew. Here we are at Lowdham, as part of the literary festival there – the venue was a beautiful little 12-century church, and although the space was a little challenging (I had to stand in the pulpit!), the welcome was great, the audience was enthusiastic, and it sounded terrific.

Most disappointingly, Buxton Litfest has cancelled our July event, due to the inability of the organizers to arrange sufficient time to get into the venue and set up. I’m hoping we can arrange something else for July, but if not, please watch this space for more gig dates in autumn…