My Writing Process Blog Tour

I was surprised and proud to receive an email from the lovely Pauline from A Frog at Large recently, asking me to participate in a blog tour about my writing process. Pauline’s blog is one of the very first ones I found when I started Franglaise Mummy, and I highly recommend it. Pauline is French but moved to the UK at the end of her teens, so is Franglaise too, but the other way round to me, and she blogs about her experiences of parenting in the UK with her French/English outlook.

This year has seen me take a bit of a turn in the things that I do and what I’m working on, as I laid out in a new year’s blog post, and I now class myself as a writer as well as a blogger.

So what does this writing process blog tour involve? Well, I need to answer the four questions below to share my writing process with you……

1) What am I working on?

I am currently working on several things at the same time, which means I’m quite a crap friend/family member at the moment as all my non-working, waking hours seem to be taken with these projects. So apologies everyone!

Bilingual children’s stories called “The adventures of Elodie/Les aventures d’Elodie”

Elodie is half English and half French, she lives in London with her French Dad, English Mum and older brother, Xavier. She loves climbing trees and making dens. She has two best friends, Harry and Lily, who are both English.

Every day after school Elodie, Harry and Lily go to their local park, to their favourite tree, and have adventures where they travel through time and space meeting pirates, dinosaurs, soldiers, kings, queens and more, before the beep-beep-beep of the alarm on Elodie’s watch signals that it’s time to go home.

Children's book illustration - pirates. www.FranglaiseMummy.com

A rough illustration from “The adventures of Elodie: Pirates”

The adventures of Elodie can be read in one language or two, and there is an audio recording to accompany the book, offering the story in either English, French, or in both languages.

There is a teachers’ guide and a parents’ guide at the back of the book to help children get the most out of the stories with adult help.

The first Elodie adventure – Pirates – will be available to buy in September, whilst the second book – Dinosaurs – should be out by the end of the year.

Kids’ Outings in the London Area: Insider Tips

I have just finished an ebook which will be free for my blog subscribers (I will be launching blog subscription very soon). This book is a cumulation of 4 years of outings as a family in the London area, and is somewhere for me to share my tips of times to avoid going to certain places, things you need to take, and how buggy-friendly certain London outings are (or not). Watch this space for how to get the book….
(A French version will be available to buy via Amazon France this autumn.)

Kids outings in London: Insider tips. www.FranglaiseMummy.com

Cover illustration for “Kids’ Outings in the London Area: Insider tips”

Franglaise Cooking Cookbook

Hubs and I set up a food blog 6 months ago, Franglaise Cooking, which we’ve had a great deal of success with (including being shortlisted for a BiBs award in the Food category when the blog was just 3 months old), so we are now launching a cookbook to group together our best French/English recipes, along with some previously unseen dishes. This will be available to buy in September, as an ebook and a traditional paper book; a French version will then be released on Amazon France before the end of the year.

Blogging

Aside from the writing projects mentioned above, I also blog here at Franglaise Mummy and with hubs over at Franglaise Cooking.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

As far as the writing projects go, it differs in that there are very few bilingual children’s books out there; my aim initially was to write these stories for our girls, and then various friends said they’d be interested for their children and the idea grew.

The insider tips book was something I wish we’d had when we moved to the UK and wanted to go on outings – there are many websites and books about where to go, but not so much information on how accessible it is for buggies, how long it’ll entertain your kids for, and what age range might appreciate it.

Finally for our cookbook – the idea of our blog came about when we saw that most French food you can find online is haute cuisine and not everyday family food, so our blog and the cookbook are all about us sharing Hubs’s family recipes and dishes with families outside of France, no matter what their level of cooking is.

3) Why do I write what I do?

I write what I want to read. And I enjoy writing. And reading. It’s a simple as that.

4) How does my writing process work?

I tend to write in my head, whilst walking, whilst doing the washing-up, whilst lying in bed trying to sleep, so that when I actually get to sit at my computer the words just come. I rarely re-write blog posts, but I do edit and re-write my books. Hubs has his own office, away from the hubbub of the house and the kids, I, however, have a laptop, which I use on my lap, on our sofa, with the footrest flipped up, surrounded by the crazy mess of our kids’ toys!

Computer on lap with toys all around. www.FranglaiseMummy.com

My “office”.

I’m lucky enough that Hubs is around to help with the kids at the end of the day, I also have 1-2 hours in the middle of the day when any babies in the house are napping so I can write, and just recently C has started going to nursery on Fridays so I get about 10 hours of solid writing done then 🙂

I’m delighted to announce the next person in the writing process blog tour is Helen from Actually Mummy. Helen writes in the voice of her 8 year old daughter, GG, on her blog Actually Mummy (and sometimes as herself or her younger son); the subjects on her blog vary from the light-hearted – Helen is behind the Wot so Funee linky – to the more controversial, such as her recent post on feminism. As well as being the pen behind Actually Mummy, Helen is also a professional blog and copy writer for several websites.

If you would like to know anything more about any of my writing mentioned above, don’t hesitate to drop me a line: FranglaiseMummy@gmail.com

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7 Responses

  1. Thank you so much for the tag. Now I’d best get writing!

  2. Love this tour of your writing brain! Like you I tend to ‘write’ when I’m doing other things and I’ve had to pop a pad and pen in the car to jot down ideas when inspiration strikes as otherwise it’s lost in the chaos of mummyhood whenever I arrive at my destination. So excited about your various book projects too – woo hoo for you!

    • Franglaise Mummy says:

      That’s what smartphones are for – writing our scrambled thoughts down into. Getting quite excited here now too about our various projects.

  3. Very interesting, it makes us smile that us mummy’s can manage to work amongst the kids and the chaos! Mich x
    Michelle Twin Mum recently posted…Handmade in JulyMy Profile

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