Neil Pickup said:
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Looking back on that, it's a pretty downright awful effort of a match report. Almost unrecognisable from the way I'm writing now, and only three and a half years ago.James said:and none of it mentioned in Neil's match report
That's fantastic then. Keep it up, Neil! I'm really looking forward to reading the finished version.Neil Pickup said:After we decided to add a girl to the story (which, in the interests of representing reality, we really had to as most primary school cricket team do have girls in - there are even some tournaments that insist on having mixed sides), we had two options - one, make her reasonably useful or two, have her stand around being female and doing little else. Which there really wouldn't be much point in. Her character is quite central to the development of a few of the others, such as her 'little' brother, Scott.
We don't have any massively stereotypical nationalities in the book - no West Indians, no Indians, no Aussies, so I'm not sure where you've picked that up from. I don't think I can consciously say that any of the children are based on anything other than huge composites of multiple different real characters - well, except Tim, who's a parody of myself aged eleven but less dislikeable.
The coach/teacher, Mr Heath, is in his mid-twenties, and I'm not intending on mentioning his cricketing abilities anywhere in the book as I don't think it will add anything.
@ Archie: Does your 12 year old fancy reading the whole thing? I can reasonably easily get hold of kids (8-12 is the target audience) in the UK to see what they think of it, but if we're going to try publishing it internationally (hey, why not?!) I need to know whether I cross the cultural barrier/divide/chasm () down under.
Well my 10yo cousin, who incidentally thinks what you've put up is pretty good, got in a bit of a mood yesterday and ran down to the bottom of the garden, sat down for a bit, then took some unnecessarily hard football shots, before coming back because he was cold.Neil Pickup said:
Yeah I was in the same house with three ten year olds and two of them got in a bit of an argument. They basically refused to talk to each other and put on a very over the top angry facade, but after one of them was forced to apologise to the other they went right back to being friendsNeil Pickup said:
That sounds exactly like how I reacted after Exeter lost to York last February, except substituting "ran" with "trudged", "garden" for "yard", "he was cold" with "the oven was ready" and "football shots" with "drop kicks of an empty lemonade bottle".The Baconator said:
Ah, spot on Hoggy! And 'Hooker Knight' was the captainHoggy31 said:
