THE GREAT STORM - and a little book...

I am writing this twenty years after the Great Storm. I take it you recall the devasation left in the wake of 110 mph winds over night on 16 October 1987? I was living in a flat at the time and I can remember waking up to an England that had the feeling of a post-apocolyptic meltdown!

There was no power, no phones, roads blocked with hundreds of fallen trees, over-turned and crushed cars and a veritable blizzard of fallen roof tiles. I couldn't get to work that day and the damage was rife throughout the South/South East. It is only now, two decades on, with all the media attention marking the anniversary of it, that you can really see how catasrophic it was for these islands! Small-fry to be sure to the likes of Florida who live with the constant threat of Hurricanes. But it was huge to us because such destructive forces of weather are so rarely seen here.

The funny thing today is that last night, I slept through torrential rain and didn't actually wake up until the alarm went off at 6am! That's unusal for me; I normally wake up at least once a night, often around 3.30am and then find it is the one time of day that my brain goes into active overdrive thus preventing a return to sleep for at least a further hour! But severeal people have said this morning that they'd been woken in the night by the rain so I must have been completely out of it!

You might be interested to know that the demons have been lain and the brand new second book is finally finished. I know now what went wrong. It is a shame it took me eight months of blood, sweat and tears to realise it. I made a mistake right from the start. Because the first book is a story told through poems I naturally thought I should tackle the second book the same way. Disaster! I sat down on Sunday night and wrote it in prose in two and a half hours! Understood then that the second book didn't want to be poems, it wanted to be a story! Now that the first draft is written (in fact it is about the eighth draft but it is the first draft of it as a story), I just need to go through it, tidy it up and finish it off and I can finally send it through to Sarah the Publisher. Thank God - because I almost had a fit the other day when I went onto Amazon and saw that the proposed publication dates for books 2 and 3 in the series is February 2008!

Have finally had some media response to the arrival of the first book. Ashley the Illustrator and I were photographed yesterday by one of the local papers who want to run a story on it in this Friday's issue. A second local paper finally acknowledged they'd received the Press Pack and are supposed to be calling me today to let me know if they want to feature it. I have also sent the Press Pack out to various TV shows and a couple of the national papers. I will keep at them until one of them picks it up. This book is a milestone in children's fiction! It raises environment awareness which is just so, so 'in' at the moment. To my knowledge there are only three of four other books that tackle green issues for children and that this is possibly the first to tackle it for children this young.

At least Candis magazine is featuring it in the December issue as this year's MUST-BUY Christmas stocking filler. I must admit the e-format looks pretty good. We received our copy on Monday. I printed it off (on recycled paper) and secured it with a slide-binder. I actually have a book now; my book. It will be even better when it is produced as a paperback but this is good enough for me at this moment in time because, after over forty years, I was holding my own book in my own hands!

It really was quite the most delicious moment!