Live webchat with Francesca 'Horrid Henry' Simon, author of The Sleeping Army, Tuesday 29 May, 1pm

I have nothing to do with the cartoons, and the few I've seen do not, to my mind, reflect the humour or the spirit of Horrid Henry.

No question just a BIG THANK YOU to francesca-my ds has learning difficultes and struggles with reading. The horrid henry books are one of the few fiction books that he will sit and try and read without too much nagging on my part

Thank you :) The agent has just ditched it, sadly, so I'm back to square 1. It's very, very difficult.

Frizz-Ease and I are best friends .

It took me a year to get published after a lot of rejections. It's always been extremely hard to get published, but my agent continued sending my book to publishers and then eventually MacMillan accepted it. But if you have an agent, you're already doing well, so good luck!

Am I too late???

My son adores the books and younger dd is very much drawn to the cartoons on television:

My question is what do you think of the cartoon adaptations and do you get much input into those?

I am hard at work on a sequel and I envisage one more book (so that totals three books). It started as a one-off book, but it just grew too big for one story. I never, ever plan to write more than one book at a time.

No-one knows how the chessmen came to be buried on Uig beach, which adds to their mystery. I fell in love with the chessmen when I first saw them in the British Museum in the late '70s and I used to have a poster of them in my university room. What intrigued me most was why they look so miserable, and I've always wondered what their story was, so it's an idea I've had in the back of my head for many, many years.

The chessmen are very mysterious, and they're comical as well as being dour, and that's just an irresistible combination!

(cont'd) I actually think it's great when parents read Horrid Henry to their children and they can laugh as a family about the rivalries and I also think it's a way of a parent saying to their child, I know sometimes you hate your brother and you hate me, but I can cope with this. And there's something very forgiving in that acceptance.

Thank you for replying to me.

Horrid Henry gives the illusion of great wickedness, but in fact he does nothing that every child in the world hasn't done. I would love to meet the siblings who have never called each other names, hit each other, tried to get one another into trouble, fought over the TV remote, etc. What Henry does though is provide a cathartic outlet for this kind of behaviour, and like all literature you get the fun of behaving badly without any of the consequences. So it is a chance to release your inner imp without being punished.

Peter is so extreme that I don't think you could really say his behaviour is good. And one of the things that very much surprised me when I started writing the books, was how much parents disliked Peter. He is absolutely not the child they wished they had. Peter's main motivation is to show up his brother.

Thank you for answering my question. It's very interesting isn't it, this labelling of children as "the good one" or the bad one, or even "the creative one", "the brainy one" "the scientific one". I've never given it much thought before, but of course, it happens all the time. Thanks for giving me brain food!
Horrid Henry is great, by the way... I have a lot of admiration for you. And your hair. :o

Hi Francesca,

How did you manage to get your first book published? I'm writing picture books and am finding it very difficult. I do get agents and publishers interested but it never lasts.

Thank you very much! My books have always appealed equally to girls and to boys. It may have helped me that I've always been a huge reader and my own son was much more of a typical boy, ie he loved non-fiction and hated anything too descriptive, so you may have noticed that there's not much description in Horrid Henry.

Hello Francesca, big fans of your books here and my kids were brought up on Horrid Henry. I've heard some parents say they won't read the books to their children because they encourage bad behaviour and make good behaviour look uncool. What do you say tot hat?

@Posey

Hi there! My son was a HUGE Horrid Henry fan, and now 9, was very excited to receive a completely new book you have written. He has read it to himself, so I am unable to pass any opinion on it at all! He has read some of it every night for the past week or so and is currently about 2/3 of the way through. He was very enthusiastic to start with and it threw up no end of questions, the answers for which I had to get him to look up online Around the middle of the book, he found it a little slow-going, but has now regained his enthusiasm and I have just had to prise it off him and get the light out! Thank you for providing my son with something to get his teeth into, and which has reignited his inner bookworm

I used to get asked all the time by children who were just leaving Horrid Henry, 'Are you writing a book for older kids?' I've really enjoyed remaining in contact with my readers and extending my readership. I enjoy the image of you wrestling the book out of your child's hand! Very flattered.

Thank you so much for your lovely comments. I am writing the sequel as we speak, but this time it's the Gods who come to Earth.

It's not a pretentious, wanky question, it's an interesting question. Henry's parents don't hate him, they just can't cope with him. In my experience, many parents divide their children into the good child and the bad child, and everyone knows who is playing which part, so I think the Horrid Henry books take a potentially sad situation and play it for laughs. Henry's parents are an extreme version of me at my most critical, because sometimes I think parents can spend their whole day telling off their children.

I don't pity Henry because he is so indomitable, and I admire his boldness and his resilience. Henry appeals to the rebel in everybody. It also happens to be true that parents always blame the 'bad child'.

My inspiration for Horrid Henry comes from being the eldest of four children, and from having a niece and nephew who fought all the time. The way I get my ideas is to think of all the ordinary situations that parents and children have, and ask myself, what would Horrid Henry do? I use myself much more than I use children: I only have one child. But Horrid Henry and Perfect Peter are two sides of everyone.

Thanks for replying to him. He is beside himself don't think I will get any more sense out of him now!

Hello back! I don't know that my son would say wow...

Francesca

My son is 14 now, but he has pretty much every one of your books on his shelves from years gone by, and I'd like to say a big thank you for writing books that are great for keeping boys interested in reading, as well as girls. That's quite a talent you have there!

Hello back!

Snot has become my favourite character, but he almost got cut from the book because he never said anything except 'Rawwwwr!' and he was just completely silent, so I made a decision that if he didn't start talking soon, I was going to abandon him. But luckily, he did start speaking and he became my favourite character, and in fact he is most people's favourite character. Snot really is a girl's name in Icelandic, and it's pronounced 'snote' but I obviously mispronounced it.

"Wow!" is what my son just said when I told him Francesca Simon is right there waiting for questions. He wants to say "Hello Francesca".