Children’s Book Week Day 2

Kid-Lit-Giveaway-Hop-Button-May-2013-draft-2

Read any good children’s books recently? Stuck for ideas?  Well, this week is your big chance to hop around the world in search of good reads for kids.  You may even win copies, too!   Children’s Book Week is a celebration of the best books for children. 

Every day this week I’ll be posting here, talking about my books, my characters and other books that inspired me.   There will also be some extra activities and on every post there will be a link to my Giveaway.  You can enter some of the options every day you visit.

Guinea pigs and eating

All the characters in my books, The Princelings of the East and the rest of the series, are guinea pigs.  They have a complex world, live in castles and other communities and have work, school and all the usual things ‘people’ do. They are based on my real guinea pigs, the first of whom were Fred and George.

Fred sometimes found it hard to resist the vegetables next to the run!

Real guinea pigs are very interested in their food, and Fred and George (the real ones) enjoyed all sorts of different vegetables,  herbs and wildplants too.  I grew a lot of different things in my garden for them. I was careful not to let them try things known to be poisonous, but a lot just isn’t known, and I felt I could trust Fred, in particular, to know what was good to eat and what was not.  I can’t do that with my latest additions, Dylan and Dougall!

In the books, though, there are all sorts of interesting concoctions that a gourmet guinea pig might enjoy.  Real guinea pigs don’t eat ice-cream, but Fred gets an inspiration watching the lights reflecting in a lavender sorbet (a lavender-flavoured water-ice).  My Fred adored lavender! They do get lots of opportunities for mixed dishes of salad food or vegetables, and one type of dish is called a melange , which is French for mixture.

When I write about drinks, I used the terms that you might understand for a type of drink.  Guinea pigs would not drink cola, or any type of soda, or beer, or wine, or tea or coffee.  But I like to think of them enjoying a few luxuries, and so Hugo (Lord Mariusz) has a business brewing and selling Wozna cola.  The inn serves ale, soft drinks, and sometimes something a little stronger.  I imagine all these drinks made from fruits and herbs and vegetables, much like a country person might make wine from the hedgerows – elderflower champagne, anyone?  I also invented a coffee drink subsitute called an espressimenta – it’s a mint drink made like an espresso!

Do you remember what Ratty brought out of his picnic basket when he took Moley out in his boat? It’s much the same in my guinea pig world.

In tomorrow’s post I’ll talk about George and his interest in engineering and flying machines!

Things to do

Did you print out yesterday’s picture to colour in?  How many different types of fruit and vegetables could you see? The answers are below the Linky List.

Enter my Giveaway

KL Giveaway

Thanks to Mother Daughter Book Reviews and Youth Literature Reviews I’m taking part in a worldwide promotion, the Kid Lit Giveaway Hop. My Giveaway is part of that.

The prizes are:

  • one copy of the Princelings Trilogy (paperback) to a winner in the EU (plus Norway and Switzerland)
  • a bundle of the first three ebooks (as pictured) for a winner elsewhere in the world.
  • one copy of my latest ebook The Talent Seekers (or another of the series if preferred) to a winner (worldwide)

It’s open now and it will close at midnight 19th May (New York time). Click the Kid Lit Giveaway button above to enter – and you can enter every day!

Even more – you can go to other blogs with more books and competitions! Let’s go hopping…

Click here to find more participants and view this Linky Tools list.

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Answers: You should have seen carrot, bell pepper, melon (it could be interpreted as a banana), apple, cucumber and the leaves and flower at the front are dandelion. Six items in all.

Children’s Book Week starts TODAY

Kid Lit Giveaway Hop - Button - May 2013 - FINALRead any good children’s books recently? Stuck for ideas?  Well, this week is your big chance to hop around the world in search of good reads for kids.  You may even win copies, too!   Children’s Book Week is a celebration of the best books for children. 

Every day this week I’ll be posting here, talking about my books, my characters and other books that inspired me.   There will also be some extra activities like a downloadable colour-in picture, especially for the under-10s, since my books are probably best for 10 and over (although they can be read to younger people).  And on every post there will be a link to my Giveaway.  You can enter some of the options every day you visit.

My Stories

My books are The Princelings of the East series.  They star Fred and George, the princelings in the title, and they, along with everyone else in the books, are guinea pigs.  I was inspired to write the books based on the characters of my pets, and if you’d like to find out more about the animals themselves, you can read their blog.

I think of them experiencing all their adventures in much the same way as Moley and Ratty in The Wind in the Willows.  They live in their own world with its own rules, and rulers, and petty squabbles, and interesting people (like Badger) and selfish ones (like Mr Toad) too.  The first three books are written as a trilogy.  Each has its own main story, but there is a thread of a wider story running through them which is concluded in the third book.  The rest of the series is set in the same world, and we meet the same characters from time to time, but the other books are complete stories of their own.  Events in the Princelings’ world (also known as The Realms) do follow on from each other though.  Everything is working towards an end point in my head!

In tomorrow’s post I’ll talk about all the food you find in the stories and why it’s just slightly different from what you or I might eat!

Things to doF and G Dinner sketch

If you’d like to colour a picture of Princelings Fred and George at dinner, right-click it to ‘save image’ and download the picture file to your own device.  I’m afraid you’ll have to print it out yourself. It should print full size on letter paper or A4.

Enter my Giveaway

KL Giveaway

Thanks to Mother Daughter Book Reviews and Youth Literature Reviews I’m taking part in a worldwide promotion, the Kid Lit Giveaway Hop.   My Giveaway is part of that.

The prizes are:

  • one copy of the Princelings Trilogy (paperback) to a winner in the EU (plus Norway and Switzerland)
  • a bundle of the first three ebooks (as pictured) for a winner elsewhere in the world.
  • one copy of my latest ebook The Talent Seekers (or another of the series if preferred) to a winner (worldwide)

It’s open now and it will close at midnight 19th May (New York time).  Click the Kid Lit Giveaway button above to enter – and you can enter every day!

Even more – you can go to other blogs with more books and competitions!  Let’s go hopping…

Click here to find more participants and view this Linky Tools list.

Powered by Linky Tools