Blog Posts, New Books

Gorilla Dreams Promo Tour

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Baby GorillaI’ve been wearing a gorilla mask a lot lately – in Waterstone’s, at shows and in school halls. And this morning in my living room, to see how practical it is to do an on-the-spot gorilla dance without falling on my large rubbery nostrils. The GORILLA DREAMS promo tour has been crazy, hectic fun, and with a competition encouraging kids to be creative, it’s not over yet.

I haven’t created animal characters before – unless you count Oops the ongalong and Nimmo the mobe along with a small dragon called Mayerling (“Maya, Maya, can’t breathe fire!”). They’re complete fantasy; sometimes reality and magic intersect. Of course I did research on gorillas.

Did you know a male gorilla has an arm span of up to 2.6 metres?!! They have unique fingerprints like us and they’re desperately endangered. It was all really fascinating background but I knew my gorillas at gorilla school would be at least a little like kids. So there’s Gertie the Scrabble champion who uses long words like finesse but doesn’t actually have any.

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Alopecia UK, Blog Posts

Alopecia UK London Awareness

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Alopecia UK logoI went to the Alopecia UK London Awareness Event recently, and gave a little speech over lunch introducing myself as ambassador for a small charity doing wonderful work.

I was also there with books and a display about what I can offer as an author with alopecia visiting a school where a pupil has alopecia too. That’s a small but important word: too. Being among 200 other alopecians was a new experience and I loved it.

There’s something great about people who’ve lost their hair, young or old, male or female, whether or not they’ll vote Green like me or share my passion for George Eliot or peanut butter. I love getting to know their stories, all of them different. Every conversation I had was an education.

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Blog Posts, New Books

Identity

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Sue HamptonNot long ago I went to a London exhibition about identity and it was a mind-boggling cross-science mix. I was especially interested in the twin studies and the nature/nurture question. How alike are twins who aren’t raised together? Is blood really thicker than water – or thinner?

In my new YA novel published by Candy Jar, Fizzy and Kim aren’t twins but by the end that’s how they feel. The starting point of this story was a news item I saw a few years ago about a mistake in a Russian hospital, and that’s why I’ve dedicated the book to those real-life girls who have bonded through the melodrama. My characters are fictional of course, and the idea was to create two girls whose lives have been completely different up to the point when the truth is uncovered – and whose personalities and attitudes are very different too. Yet their growing bond has to hold the narrative together in the midst of a series of emotional earthquakes!

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Blog Posts

My New Blog

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Children's author Sue HamptonI’m a technophobe who once scorned Facebook, thought blogging was for nerds and declined to tweet when Candy Jar said I should.

Now I’m a social network eco-warrior. And I’m blogging because, as my lovely Magic Oxygen publishers pointed out, it makes sense. I love words. They can work in different spaces and in different ways. So here’s the first blog, about words.

They can hurt. Once in the playground when I was eleven, a friend waited for me to join her and then said, “Your legs are like tree trunks.” She was skinny and pretty but I’m sure she’s learned empathy now. A few careless words can have a huge impact. Maybe I wouldn’t have been picked up from college to be fed at home without them. But maybe without them I couldn’t have written about bullying, or low self-esteem – or the destructive power of words!

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Children's Author