Rain, thunder, wind, cold.
Time to anchor The Temporary Hedonist and pile into my luxury cabin's bed with all the blankets. That's right, I get *all* the blankets on the ship. If you have a problem with that you'll just have to bundle in too.
Last night I saw Anthony Browne last night, he's a famous children's book author. His most well known books are Gorilla, Piggybook and the Will the Wimp series. I really like his work so it was quite exciting to see him and he really was charming to listen to.
He talked about how in his early work, he had no confidence in his textual storytelling, so he packed the backgrounds of the pictures with weird surreal stuff going on. (e.g. Santa kicking a plum pudding like a soccer ball, walls with ears, man walking a pig.) People asked him why he put them in there, and he didn't want to tell the truth so he said it was a sort of echo of childhood imaginary worlds...
I got him to sign two books for me Look What I've Got! which is the first book of his that I fell in love with, and The Shape Game which is one of his picture books about fine art. He drew pictures in the books, like Neil Gaiman does! I got a gorilla in the first book and a shape in the second one. The Shape Game is a game you play with a friend, one person draws a random shape, a squiggle or whatever, and then passes it to the second person. The second person makes the shape into a picture. Anthony asked me if I'd ever played the game and I said 'yes' so he gave me a shape.
Thing is, I can't do anything with it, because that would ruin the autograph....oh, what to do...I'm actually thinking of making a photocopy of it and playing around...
The best thing about meeting him last night was I didn't do my usual "OMG! I'm meeting a famous published author!" freakout. I was quite cool and calm (possibly because I had to wait in line so long) and I told him the story about how I know Look What I've got! and he chuckled and said it was a nice story and when he finished he said it was nice to meet me.
*bliss*
Posted by jenni at June 16, 2006 01:09 PM