Jaspa's Mini Journal

We’ve all come across delivery men and women. These days most of them seem to drive white vans. Obviously, Venice is a white van free zone, and not even its boats can get everywhere. Many business are on canals too narrow for delivery barges, and still more don’t have direct access to the water at all. In The Prisoner of Venice, Jaspa discovers how Venetian delivery persons ensure goods get to…

I admit I’m cutting it close getting this month’s post out in time. It’s just been one of those months. Hopefully, it was worth the wait… Everywhere you go in Venice, normal daily life rubs shoulder to shoulder with dramatic history. In the following excerpt from The Prisoner of Venice, Jaspa and his friends encounter one of the best examples of this, located where the bridge called Ponte dei…

All across the world, communities have always come together for the benefit of all. During the height of the Venetian Republic, there were dozens, if not hundreds of community-based organisations, which were known as Scuole (singular Scuola, which translates as ‘school’ in modern Italian). The vast majority of Venetian Scuole were so-called Scuole Piccole, meaning ‘Small Schools’. Each was a…

Of course, nowadays mobile phone maps make finding your way around so simple, no matter where you are. And Venice is no different. But let’s say your phone battery is dead. And you don’t even have access to an old fashioned paper map, either. What then? In the following excerpts from The Prisoner of Venice, Jaspa and his friends get to grips with how to know where they are in the complicated…

On the north side of Venice is the neighbourhood (or sestiere) of Cannaregio. In The Prisoner of Venice (and its upcoming sequel, The Ses Collector of Venice), Jaspa and his friends base themselves in this part of the city, close to an area known as the Ghetto. As well as being the location of a particularly significant event in The Prisoner of Venice, the Ghetto plays an important part in the…

Like most cities in the world, Venice in Italy has a public transport system. In fact, Jaspa often makes use of it in The Prisoner of Venice (as well as its forthcoming sequel, The Ses Collector of Venice). However, the Venetian system is a little different to that found in most other places. You could go as far as to say it’s unique. In the following excerpt (text only) from The Prisoner of…

Give your strong middle grade reader the whole world for Christmas this year, through the books of the Jaspa’s Journey series… Jaspa’s adventures begin in Africa, on the Serengeti Plains where he was born, in The Great Migration. Every year over two million animals are forced to embark on a desperate, real-life, danger-fraught, 800 kilometre struggle for survival. And this year Jaspa has to join…

Don’t worry, by ‘Venetian Immersion’ I’m not suggesting you dunk your middle graders in one of Venice’s famous canals (spoiler alert: we’ll leave that to Jaspa and his brother!). Nor am I suggesting you ship them off to Italy to learn Venetian (or even Italian) in the place where people actually speak it. Because The Prisoner of Venice brings all the magnificence, mystery and excitement of…

The moment we’ve all been waiting for is here at last… The Prisoner of Venice, the 5th book in the award-winning  Jaspa’s Journey series, is now available! Synopsis: When Jaspa and his friends learn their pal Ernest (from Jaspa’s Journey 2: The Pride of London) is missing, a clue leads them to the canals of Venice in Italy. There they meet Albertee, who reveals Ernest isn’t the only one to…

Revealing a cover for a new book is a special moment for several reasons. First, it’s something you don’t get to do that often (especially at the speed I write books!). Plus, it’s exciting to see the reaction to the new design. What’s more, it means the release of the book itself is just around the corner! For all these reasons, I’ve been waiting a long time to share the finished cover for my…

You know what it’s like. You get home after a trip and straight away there’s chores to deal with. There’s unpacking, doing laundry… and facing all those emails you failed to get to while you were away. (After all, to slightly misquote Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible 2, “It wouldn’t be a vacation, if you kept on top of your emails!”) I have to admit, having arrived home from our latest trip, it…

When is the next Jaspa’s Journey book coming out?” That’s probably the thing I get asked most often these days. And it’s a fair question. After all, the last book in the series, The Hermit of Kennecott was published five years ago, in the spring of 2020. (Wow! Is it really that long ago?) Well, I can finally answer that question… I’m proud to announce that my publisher has confirmed this week…

As readers of Jaspa’s Journey will know, most of the main characters in the series are creatures collectively known as the Ses. There are countless different types of Ses, each remotely related to an animal with which we’re all familiar. Jaspa, for example, is a Giraffeses, an extremely distant cousin of the giraffe. When I’m introducing a new character, far more care goes into deciding what…

In a previous blog, I described all the proofreading and editing a manuscript needs to go through after it’s “finished”. But even when all this is complete, there’s still quite a lot that needs to be added to a manuscript before it’s a book. To begin with (literally), there are all the things that fill the first several pages of a book, the bits before the actual story begins. I call this the…

Imagine coming from a place where snow is a rarity. Now imagine having to then deal with a Canadian winter. We didn’t get much snow in the part of Wales where I grew up. Up on the surrounding Clwydian Hills, perhaps. But not so much down in the valleys, at the edge of the Cheshire Plain. Snow on the tops of the Clwydian Range (photo: BBC Weather Watcher MrP) These days I live in Ontario,…