There is an upside to having been woken up at 6am on a Sunday morning: while grumpily lying in bed, unable to get back to sleep, a rhyming couplet came into my head. It’s embarrassingly bad and just what I was looking for to kick off the sequel to Isabella, Rotten Speller.

I have been thinking about the story-line for this sequel for months (since before I finished Isabella), but have been struggling to find a way in. By 7am, despite my sleep-deprived state, I had written the first draft for the book’s opening sequence. Hurrah!

And it looks like I have a 7 year old co-author on this one. Having listened to what I’d written so far, she took my pen from me and finished the line I was working on. She then drew this rather lovely picture of Isabella’s sister (name matter of some dispute):

So quite a productive early morning in our house today. On balance though, I would have preferred a bit more sleep!