Park Community School - Lyric Workshops

This week I was lucky enough to be invited back to the lovely Park Community School in Havant for a whole day of assemblies and lyrics workshops. This was my second visit to the school and everyone was so warm and welcoming, it was a brilliant day!

I started out the morning with back to back assemblies to the whole of Year 8 and Year 9 where I performed two songs from “The Songs You’ve Never Heard” and spoke to the audience about my books and music. It was so nice to be able to share live songs with the students and answer all their thoughtful questions.

After assembly, was my first lyric workshop with around 20 students in Year 8. This was my first time hosting a creative writing activity and I was so pleased to see everyone getting so involved with the tasks! We talked about multiple lyric writing techniques and all came up with song title ideas followed by four lines of original lyrics. The results were varied and brilliant, and some people even went on to expand their ideas after the session!

Later in the afternoon I gave my third and final assembly talk with Year 7 (who asked the most questions and grooved the hardest!!), followed by another lyric workshop, this time with a selected group of Year 7s. This was such a great and friendly discussion about music and songwriting and I loved hearing all the results!

I finished up my day chatting to a group of Year 11s in the library and then joined the after school book quiz where our team stormed ahead only to end up losing (sorry guys lol!)… Everyone was so funny and engaged, it was amazing to meet so many students, sign books, pose for selfies and chat about all sorts of different topics!

Thank you so much to Park’s wonderful librarian Ann-Marie for arranging the event and supporting me on the day - I’ve heard some lovely feedback from the students and teachers and I hope we’ll all get to do it again soon!

Music Youth Group Visit

This week I visited The Stacey Centre community hall in Portsmouth to give a talk to the after school music youth group that meets there weekly.

My lovely friend Gareth is a teacher for the group and it was amazing to meet so many lively, talented young people who love music and are already out busking and earning from their talent at age 16!

I gave a talk all about songwriting camps and my experiences of travelling the world and collaborating with other musicians. I also got to talk about music libraries, PRS and investing in recording equipment - I really hope the teens got something out of it, and it was great to chat with them and answer their questions.

Thanks so much for having me, it was a great evening! :)

YALC 2023

As a YALC superfan, I was very excited to be invited to YALC 2023 last weekend to help out on the Sweet Cherry stall and sign copies of The Songs You’ve Never Heard.

My husband Mat and best friend Paul came with me for the day and we had great fun chatting to people on the stall, meeting new readers and seeing all the amazing costumes from the Comic Con downstairs! I even got to meet Lumiere!!

It was so lovely to chat about mine and Ellie’s ‘booksical’ with people - I’m so excited for new readers to discover Meg, Alana, Matty and Caspar for the first time. I also got to catch up with my author friends Danielle, Nadia and Louise who I first met at The YA Book Prize, as well as Katie who was our panel interviewer in Edinburgh. It meant so much for so many people to come to the stall to say hello and to catch up with everyone!

It was also so awesome to see my author heroes wandering around the event such as Juno Dawson and Holly Bourne - I wish I’d had more time to go and see their panels, but I did get to go book shopping in the afternoon and pick up a great haul. Paul and I even got matching Pikachu Tattoos that have lasted 4 days already and show no sign of fading despite being “temporary” LOL…

I always have such a fab time at this event and I really hope I’ll get to go again next year, maybe with a brand new book to promote next time?! Watch this space… :)

(PS. Click HERE to see my reel from the day! :D)

The YA Book Prize 2023 - Edinburgh Book Festival

I was so thrilled to find out that “The Songs You’ve Never Heard” was shortlisted for The YA Book Prize 2023 and this week I got to attend the awards ceremony in beautiful Edinburgh alongside the other amazing shortlisted authors.

We started the day with a live panel interview chaired by Katie Fraser from The Bookseller who was a fantastic host. I got to chat about the themes of Songs alongside authors Danielle Jawando (When Our Worlds Collided) and Alex Wheatle (Kemosha Of The Caribbean) and we had 380 young readers in the audience! Definitely the biggest crowd I have spoken to about books so far!

Straight after the panel, we had a book signing with the schools who had attended the event and got to meet a huge crowd of readers which was just fantastic. They were all so lovely and encouraging and I absolutely loved chatting to everyone about books, music, and the day in general.

In the afternoon, more of the shortlisted authors joined us for the official Author’s Meet - I cannot tell you how lovely this group of talented people was and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know everyone a little bit better. It was also nice to have other people to share the nerves with and to be able to cheer each other on!

Next up was the official awards ceremony hosted by S. F. Said. Every author had to give a reading or talk on their book in front of a live audience and it was so interesting and inspiring to hear everyone speak on their craft and process. I decided to read the “Doom Spiral” extract from Songs and it was amazing to hear the crowd laughing along! Here we are all lined up and excited for the night:

Danielle Jawando was crowned the winner and it was so well deserved - her book “When Our Worlds Collided” is a fantastic and powerful novel about three teenagers who are brought together when they witness a stabbing in a shopping centre. It explores very important themes on race, the media and the justice system, and hearing Danielle talk about the story and her future writing projects was really inspiring.

Straight after the awards, we were all brought to the Waterstones tent for another signing - it was so nice to chat to more readers and Nadia Mikail and I were giggling about the stress of creating the perfect author signature… I’m glad it’s not just me who overthinks it haha!

I ended the night with a lovely dinner with Danielle, Laura and our publishing teams (which is a pinch-myself sentence if ever I wrote one) - what an absolutely fab week! Thank you so much to everyone behind the scenes who made it happen and to everyone who came out to celebrate UK YA. It is definitely a day I will never forget as long as I live!

Park Community School Visit

Last week I visited Park Community School in Havant to give a talk and run a drama workshop. The event was set up by the school’s wonderful librarian Ann-Marie who is incredibly passionate about encouraging new readers and wanted an event that mixed elements of English, Music, Drama and Careers to cover multiple bases in the curriculum.

I started out with a talk to 150 students in the school’s gorgeous theatre space - this is the biggest group I’ve ever given a talk to and I was pretty nervous, but the students were so lovely and engaged that I had nothing to worry about! It was brilliant to talk to them about The Songs You’ve Never Heard and even perform ‘And What?’ and ‘Domino Effect’ live - everyone clapped and danced along!

(I am waiting for permission to post “in action” photos, but here was the theatre space that was full up!)

After the talk was a Q&A session where I was asked so many questions that we actually missed the end of lesson bell! So many students got involved, asking such thoughtful and intelligent questions and I absolutely loved chatting to them all.

After that was a book signing and photographs, followed by a drama workshop with a smaller group. We had some brilliant improvised scenes including some super bubbly Alana’s and dramatic Caspar’s! I also got to hear a rendition of “You Will Be Found” from Dear Evan Hansen that the group had been working on which was fantastic.

Thank you so much for having me and for such an enjoyable visit - everyone’s enthusiasm for Songs was so lovely and I really hope you will all enjoy reading the full story!

Burgess Hill Girls - School Visit

Last week, Ellie and I attended Burgess Hill Girls for an afternoon of The Songs You’ve Never Heard talks and workshops centred around anti-bullying and female empowerment.

We started with a careers talk in the library to a group of around 20 girls who were all interested in writing and music. It was so lovely to chat to them about the process of publishing a musical book and they asked us brilliant questions!

After this session, we took a workshop with the whole of Year 9, splitting them into lyric games with Ellie and a drama task with me. It was great to see everyone performing as Meg and Caspar, and we finished up on a big group singalong of And What? - the girls picked up the song amazingly and they even had some synchronised dance moves!

We ended the day with an assembly in front of Year 9, Year 10 and Year 11 where we gave a talk about our creative work as women in the music industry. Burgess Hill wanted us to share the message of women empowering each other and I hope we were able to bring some inspiration with our real life stories and experiences.

The visit was particularly special because we were also joined by a few sixth formers who were in our very first reading group of Songs way back in 2019! Thank you Burgess Hills for having us and for being a huge support on our journey to publication! And a huge thank you for also sharing our visit with Sussex Press!

The Theatre Workshop Visit

In October, Ellie and I took a visit to The Theatre Workshop in Brighton - a musical theatre school that helps develop amazing young singers, dancers and actors!

We held an hour workshop with four separate classes throughout the day and saw around 80 students or so in total. The first task was to create a short scene using a handful of characters from Songs and it was absolutely amazing to see what the students came up with! We had some brilliant dramatic Mums, egotistical Caspars and adorkable Mattys. We even had some really emotional friendship scenes between Meg and Alana which was so lovely to watch. Some students hadn’t read the book yet, but were still able to bring the characters and scenes completely to life!

After that we ran through “One Day At A Time” in a group and even played some song lyric games which was so much fun. Here’s a shot of me leading the singing group…!

Thank you so much to the Theatre Workshop for having us, we really hope the students enjoyed the workshop and the book and look forward to doing more in the future!

Y Theatre - Author Showcase

Last week I travelled up to Leicester to be part of the annual Sweet Cherry Author Showcase at the Y Theatre. The show was open to various schools and booksellers and featured presentations from multiple authors talking about their specialist subjects - from Jane Austen to football to a virtual Yoga session!

I did two sessions to two different age groups of children, performing songs from The Songs You’ve Never Heard and answering interview questions about the book and my writing process. It was great to sing Scripts and Maximoo on the big stage and I even had a little robot waving along with me! Definitely the first time I’ve performed a robo-duet!

The audience seemed to really enjoy it and it was great to finally meet many of the Sweet Cherry team in person and celebrate the success of Songs together.

Fingers crossed to be back on a theatre stage again soon!

UK YA Summer Shorts Interview

Last night I was interviewed by the amazing YA author Kat Ellis as part of the UK YA Summer Shorts series on Instagram Live.

Fellow YA debut author Attiya Khan and I were asked 5 questions each against the clock for a burst of 20 minute bookish fun! It was so great to chat with these amazing ladies and I love the fact both Attiya and I had to research ice cream/frozen yoghurt shops for our books!

To watch the playback interview - Click here!

Portsmouth Book Event (Lord John Russell's)

On 16th July it was so nice to host a music event in promotion for The Songs You’ve Never Heard - we hired out the Lord John Russell in Southsea for the afternoon and the place was packed with friends, family and brand new readers which was absolutely brilliant!

The night was more focused on the music side of our novel and filled with fantastic live music performances. First up was Nellie Fraser who played a half hour set of acoustic cover songs. She had such a beautiful voice and I loved hearing unusual covers such as Hounds Of Love and Softly by Arlo Parks.

As ‘Songs’ is about teenage musicians it was fantastic to have a real life teen singer/songwriter as part of the evening. I am excited to see where Nellie goes next in her music career!

Next up was a selection of book songs as performed by myself and Megan Tuck. We sang a whole range of Meg and Alana songs from the book, including some Lost Girls duets.

It was amazing to hear Megan singing “Didn’t I” live for the first time and I also got to sing “Maximoo” for the first time ever which went down a storm. Apparently people really love cat puns in their lyrics which is something to note for all future songwriting sessions.

We ended the night with my friends from the Southsea-based band Hometown Show doing an incredible last-minute set complete with violin and harmonica. Unfortunately our original support had come down with Covid so I was so grateful for Hometown Show to step in, especially when they had already played two gigs that day! Sadly I didn’t get any photos because I was too busy book signing! We made lots of sales on the night which was a pleasant surprise for a music-based event. Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who bought a copy, every single sale is such a huge help and it’s all hugely appreciated!

My friend Emily got this picture of me laughing and happy on stage - a nice snap to end on! Looking forward to the next show already!

YALC 2022

Last weekend, Ellie and I went to YALC at Olympia as part of the Sweet Cherry stall - this was my fourth YALC attendance but my very first as an author and it was so amazing to experience the weekend from the other side!

On the Friday, Ellie and I hosted a workshop on creating our music-themed book where we had group discussions about favourite songs, a Q&A discussion, live song performances and a song title writing competition. We had so many AMAZING song title suggestions including “VIP(squared)”, “Sacramento Moonlight”, “She’s Boring And In Love”, “Mega Pint Of Slay” and “Witchcraft On The Prairie”. I loved how creative everyone was and it was so much fun to meet fellow music lovers and writers!

It was so much fun being on the Sweet Cherry stall for the rest of the weekend - we met so many cool, interesting people (including some Insta friends!), signed lots of books and asked everyone passing by to add their current favourite song to our Ultimate YALC Playlist. People are LIFE AND DEATH about their song choices and I absolutely love it! My friend Katie was also around to help, we have YALC-ed together for the last few years so it was really nice to share the experience together on the stand!

On the Saturday I also got the opportunity to sing live in between author panels and throughout the day I got up and spontaneously performed around 5 songs from The Songs You’ve Never Heard. It was INCREDIBLY NERVEWRACKING, but I am so glad I did it because so many people commented how live music lifted the day! Thank you all for being so lovely and supportive! I hope you enjoyed hearing the songs (and I hope the authors weren’t too annoyed at me delayed their panels hahaha)…

By the Sunday we had SOLD OUT of Songs which was absolutely incredible and completely exceeded all our expectations! There was also only one copy left at the Waterstones stand (and can I just say that having our book ON DISPLAY AT WATERSTONES was pretty bloody cool). We so appreciate the support of every single person who bought a copy and we really hope you enjoy the story!

The other amazing thing about the weekend was getting to meet so many of my favourite authors! I saw Alice Oseman in the green room and nearly had a heart attack… I also met Beth Reekles, Simon James Green and Dean Atta backstage who were all absolutely lovely. At official signings I got to meet Juno Dawson and Holly Bourne who held my copy of the book up to me and told me “No one can take this away from you”. When I say I had A MOMENT, I am not even kidding…

I also got to briefly meet the literary queen that is Jacqueline Wilson and hear her panel talk which was just simply inspirational! I asked everyone I met if they would sign my copy of Songs and I now have a beautiful front page filled with all my favourite people. I shall treasure this until the day I die!

By Sunday I was absolutely exhausted but my heart was absolutely full! What an amazing weekend that I shall never forget for as long as I live. Here’s to doing it all over again next year! :D

Kemptown Bookshop Event

On Saturday 2nd July we had our second ever bookshop event for The Songs You’ve Never Heard - hosted by the lovely Kemptown Bookshop in Brighton.

It was a lovely crowd in the upstairs space and we really enjoyed sharing readings and songs from the book with everyone. This was the first time I got to sing live with Megan Tuck who plays Alana and it was so brilliant to duet and bring Lost Girls to life!

We had some brilliant questions asked in our Q&A and got to meet all sorts of people during the book signing. One of the amazing Kemptown booksellers had finished the book the night before and I loved hearing her thoughts on the story. We also had Brighton author Ericka Waller in the audience and it was so lovely for her to come along and support us!

Thank you to everyone who attended and who shared their current favourite songs for our playlist! It was a lovely afternoon and we are so grateful for all the local support - we also visited City Books and the Book Nook to sign copies whilst I was in the area. It is so amazing to see Meg and Alana in so many shop windows, woop woop! THANK YOU GUYS!! :)

Blue Bear Book Shop - The Songs You've Never Heard Launch

On Thursday 23rd June, the beautiful Blue Bear Bookshop in Farnham hosted the official book launch for The Songs You’ve Never Heard. We were so happy to have our very first event in such a gorgeous shop filled with amazing ornaments and art pieces, and of course lots of gorgeous books!

We were so touched at how many people showed up for us on the night, from friends and family to brand new readers. Sadly, Megan Tuck who plays our character Alana couldn’t make the night due to Covid, but I performed “Scripts”, “Second First Impression” and “And What?” as Meg, and we had a performance of “My Shadow” from Matt Harrison as Caspar. In between the songs, Ellie read sections of the book and the blend of fiction and music completely brought our book and music vision to life!

After the performances we did a Q&A session where we were asked some AMAZING questions about writing, music and even what we would say to our 12 year old selves now. I actually felt quite emotional at how supportive and engaged everyone was and I had to shut my eyes during Scripts so I didn’t cry!

Next we signed books for everyone who came, as well as a big pile for promotional giveaways and for the book shop. We had a whole production chain which was so funny and a real “wow I’m an author” moment! We also got to chat to new people who had come along, many of which were super creative. We talked to another writer, a podcaster and a girl called Alisha from Lishaslabels who made us beautiful bookmarks with our song lyrics on them. So amazing!

The night was also our first time meeting our fabulous publishing team Sweet Cherry for the first time in person - they made the drive down from Leicester and it was so special to share the launch with them and to chat plans for the future. We also got to see our agent Gill for the first time in ages and she gave such a lovely speech to kick off the night!

It was the perfect launch for our book and hopefully the first of many exciting events to come! Thank you to Blue Bear for being wonderful hosts and to everyone who helped make the night such a success… We even started the first ever book shop dance party to Domino Effect! How cool is that?!

Looking forward to the next stop during The Summer Of The Songs You’ve Never Heard!

Portchester School Visit

On the launch day for The Songs You’ve Never Heard I visited Portchester School to give a presentation to a lovely class of Year 9 students. They were all partway through reading the book and one girl had even finished the whole story!

We had a great class discussion about themes in the book such as defining success and body image in the media. I also read part of Chapter 26 where Meg and Alana write ‘Domino Effect’ then played them the real life song! There were a lot of musicians in the group and it was great to chat about what gets us into a creative headspace.

Thank you so much to my friend Tom for having me and for promoting the book all over the school - being able to sign student copies and answer questions for the school newsletter was my first real “omg I’m an author!” moment - hope to come back again in the new term!

Priory School Visit

At the end of May, my good friend Chris Ricketts invited me to Priory School to give four presentations about The Songs You’ve Never Heard to his Music and English students. This is the first time I’ve been in an actual real life school in, oh let’s just say, 20 years or so… Needless to say I was VERY VERY NERVOUS!!

However, the students were so lovely and welcoming so I had nothing to worry about! I spoke to Year 8, Year 9, Year 10 and another Year 8 class, and even performed And What? and Firework Display live and acoustic to each class! This was the first time I had performed these songs in front of an audience and it was amazing to share them and get the student’s reactions. Some of them were even singing along with me by the final chorus!

As well as doing a book reading, I talked a lot about music and my songwriting background and got everyone to share their Top 3 Current Favourite songs with me. Priory School has IMPECCABLE taste! I had plenty of musical questions after each class from budding songwriters, and one student was very impressed I loved Orla Gartland as much as she did!

It has been such a confidence boost to start my journey with school visits and by the fourth presentation, I was definitely on a roll! Thanks so much for having me Chris and for being my guitarist for the morning. Hopefully the first of many successful book events to come! :)