Hi everyone!

Julia blogging from London today. And sitting opposite me right now is Sarah, who’s spending a few days here catching up with all things UK. This is the view from my desk. I like it!

Sunday was the best kind of winter’s day: cold, dry and blue.  And I spent much of it sitting outside a café in South London with a cold nose, a big cup of tea and my good friend, Leah Thaxton.

Leah is Publisher at Egmont Books in the UK. She’s got great taste, having acquired Andy Stanton (MR GUM), Julia Golding (THE DIAMOND OF DRURY LANE), Michael Grant (GONE) and Emily Bearn (TUMTUM AND NUTMEG): all among my favourite new children’s book writers.

In Summer ’09 Leah and I spoke together at the Bournemouth Literary Festival. And on the train home, making our way through National Rail shortbread and yet more tea, we came up with the idea of a joint enterprise: BookCamp.

We wanted to create a masterclass on writing for children and the children’s book business, with a 360 degree perspective. At Bournemouth we’d realized there’s such a hunger for advice and information about the art of writing and the business of books. So toasting each other with a plastic cup, and looking out over the Dorset coastline, we decided that we would be the people to deliver it.

BookCamp has got two main aims: to help new authors grow in their craft, and to provide a behind-the-scenes insight into the children’s book industry. 

At BookCamp events I’ll be sharing my twenty top tips on writing for children, and asking attendees a few of the questions that I ask myself when reading a manuscript. Does your main character have an emotional arc as well as an outer journey? Does your story have a focus and are the stakes being raised chapter on chapter? Is there enough conflict in your story? Does your story start in-scene with dynamism and originality? What is ‘show, don’t tell’ and why does it matter? Who is your reader and what feeling will the book leave them with? And is there a secret to writing that submission letter? Maybe – almost every author I’ve taken on had an initial approach that made me sit up and press ‘print’. We’re looking for focus, clarity and intent – and I’ll be talking through exactly what that means.

At the Greenhouse we know that getting published is the dream – the first book on the shelf of your local bookshop, the first Amazon review, the first batch of fan mail. But what actually takes place once a book has been sold? Leah’s going to answer that question. She’s going to talk about how the publishing process works from acquisition through to publication, what drives her buying decisions and how she goes about building classics of the future.

And just in case we don’t cover all bases, we’ll be taking questions from the floor about everything you’ve ever wanted to ask an agent or publisher.

To all our US readers, I regret to say that BookCamp is UK based. Our first deployment will take place at the Oxford Literary Festival on March 27th. I think we’re almost sold out but more dates in the UK will follow so keep checking the website if you fancy coming along.

And from one exciting Greenhouse development to another. This week we started our Facebook fan site! So if you’re on Facebook, click here to become a fan. We’ve got a competition to win a US proof of THE REPLACEMENT by Greenhouse author, Brenna Yovanoff (published by Razorbill in the US this Fall and Simon and Schuster in the UK in early 2011).  To enter, click on the discussion tab and tell us what you think we should speak about at upcoming conferences and writer’s events. We’re also asking writers to share their top writing tips – be it on overcoming a block, self-editing or maybe just a quote or thought that inspires you. It would be great to hear your advice.

Delighted to be guest posting on Sarah’s blog this week. Thanks Sarah! And hope to see some of our UK blog readers at a BookCamp event soon!

Agenting has a lot in common with the Olympics.  A sometimes cold and hostile environment, other times boiling heat; a lot of standing around, then you’re off – slaloming your way around poles in the fog or belting round the short track on one skate.  There’s the leaping around with shining delight at the foot of the piste – and sometimes the slow, quiet trudge back to the dressing room to take a break, nurse a wound, and have a lie down in private. But most of all there’s the constant effort and application, keeping the focus, waiting to perform the triple-toe loop at just the right moment.

Things have always moved fast in the agenting world, but after just two years in this business (as opposed to more than 25 years on the other side of the desk) I would say it’s speeded up even more in the past few months. It’s common now to receive a submission on a Friday, read it by the Monday – and hear that the writer has already received an offer of representation. There’s a lot of us out there looking for you, and of course you don’t necessarily submit to all your chosen agents at the same time.  So I’m getting down on bended knee here and asking – can you please send out all your submissions on one day? OR BETTER STILL, JUST SUBMIT EVERYTHING TO ME AND ONLY ME?

Doh, I didn’t think you’d go for that one, but worth a shot, eh? Oh yes, we love exclusives and referrals, and when we get either we move like Apolo Ohno!

At Greenhouse we generally respond quite quickly to all queries, but if we get as far as reading your full manuscript we do like to have a good think (and ideally read a manuscript more than once) before making the big commitment of representation.  And for me that means that reading once on Kindle and then printing the manuscript out, putting my feet up on the desk, grabbing my Post-It notes and pencil, and studying the work in the old-fashioned way. How would we work on this? How would I pitch it? Which editors would like it? I don’t always have this kind of leisure - if there are other agents in the picture – so I’m welded to Blackberry and Kindle at all times. Best example of this was a few weeks ago, coming home to DC from New York on the Acela train. The BB flashed to say I had a new message. I read it instantly and found it was from a writer I’d been in touch with nearly a year ago – she’d done a revision and it was attached.  Whoopee! I instantly sent it to my Kindle and had read most of the manuscript by the time I arrived at Union Station.

Several new clients have joined us recently, which is exciting – all very different, and a wide spectrum of writing, from the young and delightfully funny, to bleak and edgy young adult.  At this point I won’t mention any names because all are in different stages of revision, and I think it’s less pressured for new writers to work in peace without their name being ‘out there’ as they labour with edits. But it’s really exciting to see these debut authors coming on, enjoying their writing, and challenging themselves to develop their stories in bold new ways. They’re on their way to their first Olympics, they are medal contenders against a tough field, and it’s the work done day by day over the next weeks and months that’s going to count. Work those muscles, stretch and bend, push yourself to the limit!
The pace is hotting up in other ways too.  Just back from a great conference at lovely Asilomar, Monterey, where I made lots of new friends among both writers and faculty (see photo; I’m in yellow, pontificating as usual). Ari Lewin of Hyperion, Tracy Gates of Viking, AnneMarie Anderson of Scholastic among the publishers, and fellow agent Ken Wright of Writers House (not a bad double act!). Writers Gary Schmidt (who gave a fabulous talk), Liza Ketchum (www.lizaketchum.com) and Ellen Klages (www.ellenklages.com) added all kinds of great insights. And then, of course, there was funny Greg Pincus, social-networking expert. Oh, and lots more great people. If you were at Asilomar and are dropping into my blog, a big hello and thanks from me; do leave me a comment!

Sometimes there are big upsets at the Olympics, and the little guy can triumph unexpectedly.  Greenhouse came up from nowhere and has muscled its way into the running, so we believe in start-ups and small beginnings. In which spirit, do take a look at brand-new British indie children’s publisher Nosy Crow.  www.nosycrow.com.  Made up of four of my former London colleagues/friends, Nosy Crow has just opened its doors for business over in the UK and I wish them all the very best under their powerhouse leader, Kate Wilson.  I’m willing to bet we’ll be seeing a lot of their titles on sale in the US in the coming years, and it’s great to have a bold new independent player on the scene. Do drop in on their site; you can say I sent you!  I know they’d really appreciate your encouragement as they enter what is only their second week in business.

So now it’s full steam ahead through the spring.  Bologna is looming – both SCBWI conference and trade fair – and I’ve got a full conference schedule coming up after that: New England in May, Montana in September, then Miami, Atlanta and Seattle in the first quarter of 2011.  Do you live in any of those areas? If so, I hope to meet you.

The Olympics are tough stuff. If you want to be a medal-winning agent you need to work harder, respond faster and care one hundred per cent.  You know why? 

Because in the agenting Olympics, if you snooze, you luge*.

(*Which is, I know, exceedingly lame.)

Snow! Ice! Madness and mayhem! 

A-P-O-C-A-L-Y-P-S-E!

Welcome to the past 10 days in Washington DC/Northern Virginia. A land of snowbanks four feet high, whipping whiteout winds, strange gnarly icicles hanging like sharpened troll’s teeth. And the slow sliding trudge back and forth down skating-rink streets where only the sound of snowblowers breaks the silence.

It’s been a strange old time, I can tell you.  And even stranger if you’re a British émigré, used to cries of ARMAGEDDON over nothing more than one inch of the white stuff. Face pressed against the glass I watched as inexorably it rose – 12 inches, 20 inches, 26 inches, 32 inches; a brief respite then 11 inches more. . . .  Like a white invader – snapping the pole of our housemartin residence, trickling into the walls with ominous sibilance, sliced like a two-foot shining wedding cake along the driveway. Outside, the modest crossroads have become the mountains of the moon – our very own Alaska. And somewhere in the whiteness you’ll find Wee Man [see earlier posts], hurling his curly ice-balled self into snowdrifts, as plucky and up-for-it as a deranged (and miniature) husky.

So a lot of work has been done in the past 10 days – the rush from desk to window, Kindle to shovel, camera to pencil – as I’ve snowplowed my way through manuscript critiques for Asilomar, against-the-clock edits on several manuscripts (I never like to keep expectant authors waiting long), speech preparation, submissions, reading, finance bits and bobs, another about-to-be-confirmed German deal - and much more.  Do you want to know how hard agents work? Well, I’d better not mention the hours that are standard for me, but you can probably take a guess. Nothing comes from nothing in this business and if you want to make a mark, you can expect to work like a dog (no offence to the Wee Man).

I’ve also been thinking about communication during this period. I’m terrible at being shut in; I’m a chatty/mingling/convivial kind of person, and having my way barred by roads my Mini can’t traverse is profoundly frustrating. I get cross, I get antsy, I want to bust out.  So I’ve been profoundly grateful for the companionship of the internet and all its sociable delights and distractions.

One of the questions people always ask at conferences and in interviews is: how important is social networking, blogging, tweeting etc?  Is it vital to a new writer? Should I have a web presence? WHAT SHOULD I BE DOING AND AM I NOT DOING SOMETHING I SHOULD BE DOING AND AM I THEREFORE DOOOOOMED???

What I want to say is . . . . calm down. As Dame Julian of Norwich (an English medieval mystic lady) said, ‘All things will be well.’ And it’s true.  If you have a great concept, if you write strongly and with passion, if you have a grasp of structure, character and pace . . . . then an agent on red alert will find you, whether or not your name has ever appeared in cyberspace. It’s true that not every agent will feel a conviction about your work (unless you’re one of the few), it’s true that some will miss you because they couldn’t get there in time, but if you approach submission with thoughtful diligence you will make it, tweet or no tweet.

My personal view is that until you have a deal it doesn’t matter too much whether you have a website or not, though I know some may disagree with that and it does depend on a) how great the site is b) how gifted a self-promoter you are and c) whether you’re prepared to invest time, care and money before you have any guarantee of an actual audience. There are some benefits to NOT having an online presence before you have the deal - because post deal you can exactly target your site to the correct audience, rather than doing a tricky about shift from addressing your peer-group writers to addressing an actual readership of kids. And that’s something important to bear in mind – your readers/visitors are going to be completely different after the deal than before.  After the deal you want a colourful, fun, informative, possibly interactive site that will lure young people who’ve enjoyed your book – plus you can use it to post school visits, new books, interviews/reviews, etc etc.

I think the online mantra should always be: Who is my audience? Am I catering to that audience as well as I possibly can?

I guess I’m ambivalent about social networking.  Basically, if you’re a published author (or soon to be published), anything that builds your fanbase is a good idea and strongly recommended. And, of course, it’s good to be savvy and informed about the industry you aspire to join. However, I’m not sure there is necessarily huge pre-deal promotional worth in Facebooking, tweeting, blogging et al – it’s fun, it’s useful if you get widely picked up/followed/read, but reading posts by an aspiring author has never changed my decision about taking someone on as a client. 

For me, it all comes down to the writing because that’s where the rubber hits the road.  I want authors who first and foremost work energetically on their craft, glory in language, take joy in a fabulous story well told.  The rest – the promotional stuff – can be put in place after we get you a deal.

I always look at links that writers include in queries – they can be very interesting and revealing. In a blog-filled world I love to see writing that is fresh, funny, moving or just plain interesting; writing that complements your fiction skills and underscores just how standout you really are. Again, it wouldn’t change my decision about you, but be wary of enumerating your rejections, documenting the endless struggle – you are out there in cyberspace for posterity, and any agent or editor you query is almost certainly going to drop in if you include a link. Is this the face you most want to present?

You know what? I don’t tweet. I blog because I love to write, and because I want to tell you a bit about what lies behind Greenhouse. But everything I really want to say requires a lot more words than the hiccup of a tweet. Julia tweets useful tips and quotes from this site (look left!), but she and I have always been very clear that Greenhouse tweeting should give you inspirational good value – a word of wisdom; a writerly ‘thought for the day’.  Do you want banality from us? I think not.

This may be an unexpected thing to say in 2010, but I shall say it anyway.  Are you ready for my heresy? OK, here it is:

There are so many random words flying around cyberspace. We are in an eternal babble so loud we can hardly hear ourselves think.  There is a frenzy of chatter assaulting our inner ears. Where is the still, small voice?  Because just possibly the essence of creativity lies in that small pure sound if we can only hear it.

There are icicles outside my window. Strong, strange and mesmerizing. Drip by drip, night by frozen night, they have grown – crystalline, sharp and beautiful as a razor. It took time, it was hard to see it happen, but when I looked today they were bigger still.
How do we grow as writers? How do we become all we long to be? How do we take ourselves and our words into the world?

Could there be more in a drip than a tweet?

Weekly inspirational blog post: Not written.

Reason:  Insanely busy. See below.

So this photo: Irrelevant, but ain’t it cool!

Submissions: Cascading. More so than ever before. Will we always be open to general submissions? Yes in UK. Don’t know about USA - we’re hanging in there for now. Narrowly.

What would make that easier:  a) certain individuals not inundating me and b) knocking off the 15% (wild guess) who send completely irrelevant and wrongly targeted material that wastes ridiculous amounts of my time.

Courtesy levels: We try, we try.

Deals: Yes!  UK deal for Harriet Goodwin’s HEX FACTOR.  US deal about to be announced for . . . .  No, you’ll have to be patient.

Foreign: Yes! Great German auction for Brenna Yovanoff’s THE REPLACEMENT. Sold to Loewe Verlag.

Manuscripts: Getting through them. Kindle red hot.

Tax year: Ending soon. Just visited Joe, my number 1 dude (aka US accountant).

Number 2 dude: Eduardo, computer magician. Just set up whizzy Asus EEE netbook (14-hour battery life). Now I can work ANYWHERE (like I didn’t before???).

Number 1, 2 and 3 dudesses (female dudes): Mel, Nikki, Grace – who do money. And stuff.

Coffee:  A lot

New York: Tomorrow. SCBWI Winter Conference VIP cocktail party.

Conference: February. Asilomar. California.

Critiques: Look, I’ll get them done, OK.

Italy: March. Bologna book fair. Scheduling. Deciding who to invite to dinner.

Criteria: Cool industry people who we like.

Music currently in Mini CD player: Bach. Brandenburg Concertos.

Why: Lofty. Also soothing.

Sleep: Not enough.

Good news: Everywhere. Greenhouse is blooming!

Weather: Sunny.

Message to writers: Voice. Voice, voice, voice. And plot.

Now: Lunch.

What: Tortilla. Cheese.

Afternoon: Logging off to read and edit.

Reason: Care, precision and thoughtfulness are everything.

Finally: See you soon!

Tens of thousands were wiped out in Haiti last week, and because of that you may have missed one other quiet, dignified passing.

Miep Gies, aged 100, died on Monday in a nursing home in the Netherlands.

I have kept half an eye open for that announcement for some years – ever since I met Miep, already an elderly woman, in 1995. [I have decided to call her by her first name here because Ms Gies feels wrong, and because I think she would have comfortable with that informal friendliness.] She was part of an extraordinary period of my life, both personal and professional, and I will never forget it.

You may well know this already, but . . .

Miep Gies, along with her husband Jan, worked for Anne Frank’s father Otto, after the Frank family moved from Germany to the Netherlands in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution of the Jews. From its new base on Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht, Otto’s company – Opekta – sold pectin for jam-making, later diversifying into herbs and spices.

With the occupation of the Netherlands, life became increasingly difficult for Jews in general, and the Franks in particular. Desperate to save his company from confiscation, Otto made Opekta over to Jan Gies. But in 1942, the thing the Franks most feared finally happened – Margot, Anne’s sixteen-year-old sister - was summoned for deportation.

Now the Franks went into hiding in the famous Secret Annex behind the bookcase. And as Anne diligently, painstakingly poured out her heart to ‘Dear Kitty’, and as her famous Diary took shape over the next two years of captivity, Miep and a small group of fellow employees risked their lives to help the Franks and their friends, Fritz Pfeffer and the van Pelses.

Miep risked exposure and death on a daily basis as she struggled to bring the food, reading materials, clothes, and news that the Franks needed to survive. But she did even more than that. When the Franks were betrayed and the Annex raided on August 4, 1944, it was Miep who picked up the pages of Anne’s Diary which had been thrown on the floor and abandoned after their arrest. It was many years before she read that Diary, and she handed the pages intact to Otto Frank on his return after the war to the news of his murdered family – his girls taken by typhus in Bergen Belsen days before its liberation; his wife starved in Auschwitz.

So what is my connection to Miep Gies and the dreadful, inspiring story of Anne Frank?

In 1994, newly arrived as Editor at Macmillan Children’s Books in London, I was put in charge of publishing a new edition of the Diary which had languished untouched on the list until our red-hot, crazy-obsessed new team arrived to remake MCB. Full of fervour for the book and its power, we set to work, rejacketing it with a full-cover, haunting image of Anne Frank, and adding a searing new prologue by Rabbi Hugo Gryn, himself an Auschwitz survivor and beloved broadcaster on inter-faith issues in Britain.  Forget Hollywood celebs – I was awestruck by this man who had seen so much, suffered so much.

Lunch with Rabbi Gryn was a publishing experience of a whole new kind. What we were doing wasn’t just about sales or marketing – it was about what really mattered: justice, the truth of history, both remembering genocide and calling attention to it today. The Diary of Anne Frank had, and still has, the power to open eyes to all that.

At events in London to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II (co-sponsored by Macmillan), I met Elfriede ‘Fritzi’ Frank, Otto’s second wife, who with her daughter Eva had lived opposite the Franks in Merwedeplain, Amsterdam, before they too had gone into hiding and followed the same route to Auschwitz. In the devastation of the camps after the Nazis fled, Otto stumbled upon Elfriede again – and Eva subsequently became, in effect, stepsister to Anne.  Eva lived not far from me in north London; we met a number of times and became quite friendly.

In the flickering candlelight of the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, I shed a few secret tears as we remembered the life and death of Anne Frank. At Rabbi Gryn’s invitation I was possibly the only Gentile at an event commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – mesmerized as I heard a jack-booted Russian general tell how he had been first into the camp, and what he saw. Shutting my eyes in the darkness as hundreds of people around me chanted the Kaddish, the haunting prayer for the dead.

Then a special reception in honour of Anne Frank, where I met Buddy Elias, Anne’s much-loved cousin and only surviving relative (still living, I think, in Switzerland).

And then meeting Miep Gies. Shaking the hand of this quiet, elderly lady without whom there would have been no knowledge of Anne Frank, no Diary. A woman of such courage and forebearance. It was always said that she knew the identity of the Franks’ betrayer, but she never disclosed it or capitalized on it. Instead, every August 4 – the anniversary of the Franks’ arrest – she would stay alone in her house with the curtains drawn, remembering. And, she said, never a day went by in her subsequent life when she did not think about what had happened.

In the years that followed, I kept my connection to Anne Frank’s enduring legacy. In Amsterdam I went on a solo ‘pilgrimage’ to find Anne’s school and the family’s apartment on the Merwedeplein (now, I believe, restored and protected in perpetuity so that persecuted writers can work there). Visiting the House, I picked up The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank – published by Random House – and took it back to Macmillan, where we published it for a UK/Commonwealth audience. It was never going to sell a million, but it was important that it should be read, and kudos to Macmillan for supporting that. Several years later we published a photographic memorial to Anne’s life and times, full of newly released family pictures.

I got to know Gillian Walnes, the inestimable director of the Anne Frank Trust in London (http://www.annefrank.org.uk/), which does so much to expose and prevent persecution in all its forms today, in part through its travelling Anne Frank in the World exhibit. I met young people whose families had been slaughtered in Bosnia; elderly people who had been on the Kindertransports out of Germany during the war (often never seeing their parents again). And I met prisoners whose lives had been changed by the example of Anne Frank as they helped to host the exhibit in their jails.

Very excitingly, one of my sons – a chorister at Westminster Abbey at that time – sung at the Anne Frank Awards for Moral Courage which are given annually to young people who are shining examples of strength and bravery in adversity. 

So why is all this so important to us as writers and aspiring writers?

Well, it all comes down to that famous Diary – and to the spirit of Anne Frank, which blazed so strongly in her prose despite the privations and anxiety of her years of confinement. She was, quite simply, a great writer.  Not just a great TEENAGE writer, but a great writer. Period.  She was ruthlessly honest with herself; in her writing she spoke as she saw. She expressed herself strongly and effectively, and her zest for life shines through. Hearing a radio broadcast about the need for war diaries to be published, she set about readying her work for publication – her instincts married the commerciality of someone who saw her future as an author, with a deep belief in the integrity of what she was doing as a writer.

On my bookshelf is a copy of the Diary of Anne Frank, crudely wrapped for protection.  In the prelims are the signatures of Elfriede Frank, Eva Schloss, Buddy Elias, and Rabbi Hugo Gryn. I think I was too awestruck to ask Miep Gies for her autograph.

I knew I was touching history back in 1995 and that before long many of those names would have passed away. Indeed, Rabbi Gryn died in 1996, and Elfriede Frank in 1998.

I still receive a Christmas card every year from the management and staff of the Anne Frank House, and as I write, Otto Frank smiles over his shoulder at me from this year’s card. One day I will get in touch with the House again and see what they are doing over here in the USA.

How can we forget Anne Frank and the way her Diary affected us, touching our view of the past and our own present, and making us ask – what might we be capable of? Because of Anne’s shining spirit, acute observations and extraordinary writing skills, great humanitarian work is being done around the world, decades later, in her name.

As Anne said: ‘I want to go on living after my death! And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that’s inside me! When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that’s a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?’

Anne Frank, you were the best. And thank you, Miep Gies, for everything. We owe you.

Deep beneath Westminster, in the heart of London, is a complex of rooms that were a hidden secret for many years. They are the Cabinet War Rooms from where Winston Churchill and his team masterminded Britain’s response to the Nazi threat of World War II. From here, in austere, uncomfortable rooms full of pin-holed maps, Bakelite telephones and drab utility furniture, Britain was saved from the brink of invasion and D-Day was plotted.

Seventy years on, in a world of GPS, 24-hour news coverage, i-phone apps and Twitter, it is awe-inspiring that a vast and desperate war was fought from these drab rooms by ingenuity, intelligence and a fair bit of bluffing . One of the very first transatlantic telephones – on which Churchill spoke to Roosevelt – is here, in a cupboard disguised as a toilet. The losses on a pivotal day of the Battle of Britain are scratched on a simple chalkboard, and a sign announces that a klaxon will sound in the event of a direct bomb hit (workers down here were told the place was bomb-proof, but it absolutely wasn’t). By our standards it all looks so primitive, but what emanated from these rooms – not least some of Churchill’s most iconic speeches – was staggeringly powerful.

The spirit of one man permeates these corridors – Winston Churchill. Larger than life, working 18-hour days, puffing on his ever-present cigar, Churchill was a fascinating giant of a character. Exacting (often frighteningly so), constantly bursting with ideas, he demanded everything of himself and expected the same commitment of others. Walk through into the exhibition of his life, and your picture of this man fills out. Consistently voted the Greatest Brit Who Ever Lived (though he was half American, on his mom’s side), he was complex and flawed, brilliant and prescient, passionate and difficult – a true maverick before that word became a political gimmick. In our time of managed soundbites, ruthless control and spin, Churchill would probably never have got off political first base, but thank heaven that destiny threw him up when it did.

So what do I admire about Winston Churchill, and what made him such a brilliant war-time prime minister?

Everything he did was based on experience: As a young man, despite the aristocratic blood running through his veins, he fought in the Boer War, escaping from a train and, with a price on his head, got himself back to Britain. As an officer in the trenches in World War I he led from the front – his men admired him because he only asked them to do what he was prepared to do himself, and he was cool under fire. He didn’t just talk the talk; he’d waded through the mud with bullets blasting at him.

He was accountable and he took calculated risks: The world has always been full of pundits and pontificators, but it’s harder to find leaders who will take responsibility for huge decisions.  At a desperate moment in history, Churchill stepped up to the plate. He wasn’t always right, but he got it right more often than not.

He worked like a man possessed, but he did it HIS way: He worked in his pyjamas in bed most mornings, he took a nap every afternoon for an hour, and he was still going at 1am. He pushed himself endlessly because he knew the vital importance of what he was doing.
He had ideas – and he thought outside the envelope:  Not all his ideas came off, sometimes people laughed at him, but frequently he was right and his ideas proved pivotal. He thought in fresh ways, he never stopped imagining and looking for new ways to find an advantage over the enemy. He had great mental agility – born in an age of cavalry charges, in his later life he foresaw the dangers of nuclear proliferation.

He was a wonderful communicator: As a speaker he was sonorous, inspiring and memorable. But he was also fabulously witty. Read some of his many sayings and you’ll see what I mean – he was verbally dextrous, sharp as a knife, and very, very funny. No situation was so bad that he couldn’t illuminate it with his often acid wit. He ploughed his own linguistic furrow – no modern, sloppy vernacular for him!

He bounced back from failure: Churchill knew the ‘black dog’ of depression. Blamed for the mess of Gallipoli, he said, ‘I’m finished’. But he wasn’t – he came back to lead his country. Losing the election before VJ Day, he was devastated, but went on to have huge input into the debates of his time. He wouldn’t be put down and he wouldn’t be silenced.

He was tough, even ruthless, but always humane. He drove his team mad – but they wouldn’t have worked for anyone else. He growled and grumped; he pretended to be deaf when he didn’t want to hear something; he lit up a room.

He never stopped being himself: He always ate three substantial meals per day. He loved port and Stilton. He started a trend for bizarre fuzzy ‘romper suits’. He could be fantastically rude, but he was also endearing.

So, why I on earth am going on about Winston Churchill when I’m a children’s literary agent sitting at a desk in the USA?  Have I gone completely mad? Well, maybe – but you see, I believe the whole of life is joined up and that the things we discover about ourselves and the world permeate seamlessly into all areas of our life. And that includes writing, and the often perplexing business of books.

As we head into the (metaphorical) U-boat convoys of 2010, I salute the spirit of Winston Churchill, and I dare to put my little feet in his massive footprints. I also commend him to you. We may not be fighting a world war, but we fight other wars – often within ourselves. Wars of despondency, anxiety, defeat. Narrowness of vision. Inflexibility. Self-pity. Conformity – forgetting who we really are. Willingness to accept the second rate.  Whether we are writers, agents or publishers, Churchill challenges us to get up, get going, tough it out – and live our lives in the brightest and boldest of colours. We may not always win, we may discover harsh truths about ourselves, but we can bounce back, fighting.

Finally, there are just two more – very important - things I want to tell you about Churchill.

Married to Clementine Hozier, his life-long love, he said, ‘I lived happily ever after’. His Clemmie told him the truth, and they gave each other mutual support all their lives. Who is the colleague/animal/friend/partner/spouse who is the Clemmie in YOUR life? Who can celebrate with you, hold you up when it all goes wrong, and remind you that there are even bigger things in the world than your writing ambitions?

Churchill was a wonderful painter in oils.  He could have been a professional. When it all got too much, he took himself off with his old hat, palette and easel. Before his death he said he’d like to spend the first million years of the afterlife painting.  What fills YOU with joy and helps you keep life in perspective? In a business with few predictable outcomes, we all need that antidote.

In this first week of 2010, a new picture hangs on the Greenhouse wall – of those 1940s airmen staring at the sky. ‘Never was so much owed by so many to so few.’

So true. Rest in peace, Sir Winston. And to all of us, a courageous, productive and Stilton-filled new year.