I am thrilled to kick off the blog tour for this exceptional book! Diary style books are so popular with young readers and Bea, the Accidental Witch has shared a few other titles that might be of interest!
Thank you so much for inviting us on to talk about the experience of writing a diary series. We thought it was only fair to pass this one over to the author herself…!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR*
Bea Black is eleven years old and has recently moved to Little Spellshire where she lives with her dad, a weather scientist. She has no pets, but has been on class frog rota this half-term. Her lifelong dream is to get a puppy. This is Bea’s first diary.
*With a bit of help from Perdita and Honor Cargill!
Special extract from ‘the author’s’ diary:
Monday 20th August
7:30am Home
Must get up. Am A Very Important Author with deadline to write blog piece. I’ll just snooze for five minutes more…
10:21am
Overslept. Again.
10:43am
Eaten one ten fluffmallows for inspiration.
11:24am
Still looking for inspiration. Have eaten the rest of the packet of fluffmallows.
Midday
Found inspiration and am writing a list of my favourite things about writing this diary:
· It is VERY SECRET and CONFIDENTIAL which means that if anyone does read it, I shall be allowed to turn them into a toad (or possibly a newt). This is v. important because one of the tricky things about accidentally ending up at witch school is that I have a lot of secrets to keep.
· It’s MY diary so nobody can complain if it’s full of entries about food (food is very important to me).
· Also frogs. There’s a lot about frogs in my diary.
· I like writing small bits at a time (which is also one of the things I enjoy about reading diary books, especially because I am very busy what with being a witch and an author*).
1:56pm
Just got off the phone to P and H. They wanted to know if I’ve finished writing the blog piece. I said “nearly”. They said I mustn’t forget to include the worst things about writing a diary book and I said that’s a stupid idea.
2:35pm
The hardest things about writing diary books are not messing up the timeline and TENSES.
3:24pm
Thinking about tenses has made me stress-eat a whole packet of fizzy skullsquigglers.
4:44pm
P and H just called to check whether I’d finished the blog piece yet. I said I would have finished it ages ago if it wasn’t for them interrupting me.
5:30pm
Making a pile of some of my favourite diary books for extra inspiration:
· The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole 13 ¾ by Sue Townsend. Dad says it’s a classic – I just say it’s funny.
· The Brilliant World of Tom Gates by Liz Pichon AND Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney because these books are a very good mixture of doodles and hilaree hill funny disasters.
· The Accidental Diary of B.U.G. by Jen Carney because I sympathise with anyone who has accidentally ended up doing anything and because it is very funny and Billie is quite right about biscuits.
8:56pm
Will finish writing this blog piece after I’ve read a chapter of Diary of a Killer Cat by Anne Fine…
10:56pm
Oh dear. I think I’m going to miss the deadline…
· Honor here – That’s also one of my favourite things about diary books. I’m dyslexic so reading broken-up text is easier for me and the more illustrated the better. One of
the nicest things about this project is that this has turned out to be exactly the sort of book I used to love reading.
My Shelves Are Full 