THE UMBRELLA TREE
You might have noticed that I'm raising money to self-publish my story The Umbrella Tree. So what is this story? And why am I publishing it myself? It all started when I was a tiny, twenty-one-year-old person. I was living in St Ives in Cambridgeshire and I wasn't sure what to do. I knew I was a writer (I'd known that since I was seven) but wasn't sure what I should actually be doing. I definitely wanted to write for children so I volunteered to be a kind of unpaid learning support assistant in my local infant school. It was called Thorndown Infants. I went there three afternoons a week for about a year I think. My jobs included washing out paint-pots, tying up shoelaces and helping children blow their noses. My favourite bit however was story time! At the end of each day I would get to read a story on the carpet area. Sometimes with Reception. Sometimes with Y1. Sometimes with Y2. It depended what day it was. At first I would just read one of the ...