The shop is open! Ta da!

So that is the technical bit done, or almost anyway, and now to tackle how to convert the visitors to my website, into readers of my books…

But where to start?

Let’s start with the books; after all they are what the website is all about.

Doodle Mayhem:  a story written when I was inspirited, by reading that you shouldn’t let your characters take over. Well why not? I found the concept of a character taking over irresistible, and so the seed was sewn in my imagination, and the character of Iver No-Idea emerged, slowly at first, but soon gathering momentum. The story grew out of dialog, characters speaking to each other. Even the name Iver No-Idea grew out of a conversation in the early part of the book, it came out of nowhere, but soon became the obvious name.

I knew I had something special when I read an early draft of Doodle Mayhem to a group of primary school children, and soon realised that a hush had fallen over the group, and I had the full attention of every one of them, as we all became part of the story. There’s a magic to reading aloud, to sharing a story and being transported to a world of imagination and possibilities.

Eric is the main character in Doodle Mayhem, despite Iver No-Idea’s constant attempts to steal the limelight. Eric is naturally better at drawing than writing a story, but his drawings come to life and start sabotaging his attempts not to draw attention to himself. At first he gives in to Iver No-Idea’s constant demands, it is hard after all, to ignore someone who pulling the letters off the page of your school book and throwing them at you. I had a lot of fun exploring the possibilities of the interactions between doodles and the real world, and the book ended up as a series of three books (so far). Of course Iver No-Idea doesn’t get all his own way, or not by the end of the book at least, but I can’t give everything away here – it’s all in the book.