Mostly I blog about one or all of the following:

1. My daughter, aka the menace, and her habits of singing about dead sheep / demanding a recap of the facts of life.
2. My mother, aka Mrs Nadin snr, and her habit of refusing to allow anyone a second biscuit / to drink potentially staining fluids in a carpeted area.
3. Snogging.

But just this once, and because the people at the Bath Kids Lit Fest asked so nicely, I am going to blog a story. It’s a chapter of an ongoing, wait-for-two-days-to-see-what’s-happening-next kind of story, written by all sorts of weird and wonderful people from Catherine Bruton (wonderful) to Barry Hutchison (weird, very weird, but in a good way).

You can read back over all the other chapters by kicking off here: http://bathkidslitfest.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/the-big-blog-story/

But to bring you vaguely up to speed, the moon (sort of Sylvia Plath crossed with Sad Ed i.e. moany with weight issues) has fallen out of the sky and into the sea, and a small furry blue mute boy called Scribble is trying to save her, along with a fisherman who can build a yellow submarine in less than three lines, and a mermaid called Moby Doris. The moon meanwhile is trying to save herself, but there are mean girl issues down at the bottom of the sea (imagine the school common room, but with French fish and twin water nymphs instead of Lindsay Lohan) and they are too busy bitching at each other to get anything sorted. Then, in a sort of Tales of the Unexpected / Eastenders-at-its-most-ludicrous twist, Scribble turned out to be one of the twin nymphs (the tattooed evil one, called Minnaloushe)…

“You have GOT to be KIDDING me,” thought Minnaloushe, as she bored of the mating krakens and turned to see a crazed fisherman heading toward her full pelt with courage and honour strapped to his belt with no more than Sellotape and faith.

And these were the same seven words that ran through Catch’s mind as he floored the tattoed legend, only to find that what he held in his fingers was no more than a suit of inked skin, sloughed off like a giant and slightly odd-shaped mamba, as the nymph revealed her latest guise, a cheerleader with braces and a birthmark on her thigh in the shape of Belgium. Who in turn unzipped her short-skirted and perpetually-smiling suit to reveal a postman with fat hands and a glass eye. Who, with fumbling and ill-focused difficulty, slipped off his bag and shorts to become a monkey who could juggle tins of mandarins. Who was really a Mexican dog called Frankie. Who was hiding a tulip grower from Delft. Who was actually concealing a can-can dancer called Kitty Sometimes.

“No, seriously,” shouted Catch, to no-one in particular, as Kitty slipped off her heels and high kicks to let out the German Chancellor. “You have GOT to be kidding.”

“Oh, yes, actually I am,” intoned a disembodied voice that echoed round the tin submarine with all the gravitas of a Saturday night game show host.

“And just who the hell are you?’ asked Catch and the German Chancellor.

“The Writer. Like, DUH,” said no-one in particular, who turned out to be someone after all. “I mean, you didn’t think all this was down to your choice, or fate, or runes did you?”

“Well…” began Catch.

“Oh, bless,” said The Writer. “So sweet. So trusting. So… foolish. It’s all down to me, my little pawns. I could throw in a first kiss, a terminal disease and an orc with a deathwish right now if I fancied.”

“Oooh, could you?” asked the Chancellor, who was down on her luck in the first kiss, and orc stakes.

‘I could…. But I shan’t,” said The Writer. “Truth is I’m rather tired of this tale. That French fish was amusing. But the blue fur was a big mistake. Far too Disney. In fact I’m minded to make Cynthia wake up and realise it’s all been a very bad dream…” She paused for dramatic effect, which was wasted because Catch and the Chancellor were busy trying to remember where the hell the French fish had come into anything.

 “Oh for heaven’s sake,” snapped The Writer sulkily. “As if I’d resort to lazy cliché anyway. Instead I shall just use a sneaky plot device to move the entire action to Scotland immediately.”

“What plot device?” asked Catch. But the words dissolved into a gurgle as he, and the German Chancellor, and the submarine, and the mating krakens, and a packet of digestive biscuits that the Writer had been thinking about all afternoon, and a herd of sheep that she had thrown in for comedy effect, and a box of fireworks double-wrapped in plastic to stop them going soggy got caught in the whirlpools and eddies of The Writer’s imagination and spat out unceremoniously onto the shores of Loch Ness…

You can find out what happens next (ooh!) when LA Weatherly takes over on October 14^th back at the main Bath Kids Lit Fest blog: http://bathkidslitfest.wordpress.com/

But, mark my words, if the moon does not end the story by performing ‘Santa Baby’ in close harmony and fishnets with the German Chancellor and Moby Doris I shall be utterly disappointed.