When I was seven or eight, my favourite bit of school was at the end of each afternoon when we all sat down on the floor and the teacher read us a story - a chapter a day from a book. Well now, if you’re stuck at home because your school is closed, you can recreate the heady excitement of those reading sessions with the long lost Reeve and McIntyre story, Thatch the Moon!
One of the reasons I love working with Sarah McIntyre is that, whenever we get together and talk, lots of ideas suddenly appear that we would never have thought of on our own. We’re forever coming up with stories - far more than we can turn into books. Some of them get abandoned, and some get folded into other ideas (like our detective duo Gosh and Golightly, who eventually found a home in Kevin’s Great Escape) but a few weeks ago when I was looking through some old files I discovered an entire finished story which we'd written and forgotten about.
Thatch the Moon was inspired by a series of pictures Sarah had done long before I met her - you can read more about it on her blog - and we wrote it in our usual way, where I do the typing and show her each bit as I finish it so that I can incorporate her suggestions. I like how it starts out with a very simple premise - a girl tries to drum up some custom for her dad’s thatching business - and then gets loopier and loopier. But it doesn’t quite fit with the style of our other books - it has fewer characters, it starts off in something much more akin to Real Life, and it’s told in the first person - so it ended up being put aside.
When I read it again, the first person narration made me think of actress and playwright Amy Sutton, who was brilliant as Sika and loads of other characters in the Foundry Group production of Pugs of the Frozen North. So I got in touch with Amy, and she agreed to video herself reading it for us, and you can now see and hear the results for yourself. Sarah McIntyre has made an animated title sequence, Sarah Reeve has composed some music, and we’re releasing the whole book in five episodes on Sarah’s YouTube channel, one per day, starting today! (I've tried to split it up into satisfying chunks, but they're quite long - round about 15 minutes each - so there's nothing to stop you pausing in the middle of them if you prefer.)
If anyone is inspired to doodle some Thatch The Moon illustrations while they're watching, we’d love to see them - you can Tweet them at us on @philipreeve1 and @jabberworks, hashtag #ThatchTheMoon.
And if you’re an author or a publisher and you’re looking for a brilliant reader to record a video voice-over or audiobook, here's a link to Amy Sutton's website.
One of the reasons I love working with Sarah McIntyre is that, whenever we get together and talk, lots of ideas suddenly appear that we would never have thought of on our own. We’re forever coming up with stories - far more than we can turn into books. Some of them get abandoned, and some get folded into other ideas (like our detective duo Gosh and Golightly, who eventually found a home in Kevin’s Great Escape) but a few weeks ago when I was looking through some old files I discovered an entire finished story which we'd written and forgotten about.
Thatch the Moon was inspired by a series of pictures Sarah had done long before I met her - you can read more about it on her blog - and we wrote it in our usual way, where I do the typing and show her each bit as I finish it so that I can incorporate her suggestions. I like how it starts out with a very simple premise - a girl tries to drum up some custom for her dad’s thatching business - and then gets loopier and loopier. But it doesn’t quite fit with the style of our other books - it has fewer characters, it starts off in something much more akin to Real Life, and it’s told in the first person - so it ended up being put aside.
When I read it again, the first person narration made me think of actress and playwright Amy Sutton, who was brilliant as Sika and loads of other characters in the Foundry Group production of Pugs of the Frozen North. So I got in touch with Amy, and she agreed to video herself reading it for us, and you can now see and hear the results for yourself. Sarah McIntyre has made an animated title sequence, Sarah Reeve has composed some music, and we’re releasing the whole book in five episodes on Sarah’s YouTube channel, one per day, starting today! (I've tried to split it up into satisfying chunks, but they're quite long - round about 15 minutes each - so there's nothing to stop you pausing in the middle of them if you prefer.)
If anyone is inspired to doodle some Thatch The Moon illustrations while they're watching, we’d love to see them - you can Tweet them at us on @philipreeve1 and @jabberworks, hashtag #ThatchTheMoon.
And if you’re an author or a publisher and you’re looking for a brilliant reader to record a video voice-over or audiobook, here's a link to Amy Sutton's website.
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