I had a great time this morning with year five at Whitchurch Primary School near Ross on Wye. I’ll be working with them over the next few weeks.

I’ve decided to make Dark Claw available under the creative commons. We are going to do some extended work writing, illustrating and possibly animating stories based on the characters and scenarios from the Dark Claw stories, which are now out of print.

You can read the stories online here. I’ve made the books available as flick the page ebooks for free. It’s also an experiment to see what can be done with a different publishing model. Times are changing and authors are going to have to find new ways of exploiting their work. Like musicians we may have to rely more on tshirt sales that the books themselves!

At eleven o’clock the school made a huge circle and held hands in the playground. I had a year six girl on one hand and a year one girl on the other. I realised how much I work on my own. When I do meet people it is only for the day, and then I move on. It was good to feel part of a larger community on this day.

I’m looking forward to getting to know year five a lot better too. There are some interesting characters! Not being a teacher, I probably approach the job in hand differently. We made some interesting observations which I’ll think about a blog about later.

I’ve got some lovely pictures of drawings we did today. We are just checking that everyone is okay about me posting the,. As soon as I know I’ll put them up here.