So can now get back to publishing, and we have just received copies of the story on CD in Russian from the printers. Very exciting. Russian was the first language into which the story was translated and recorded.

In between her studies, our friend Tanya translated the story for us. Steve (husband & partner in this mad venture) and Digital Village (in Cambridge - thanks, guys!) between them kitted me out with good quality recording euqipment. When Tanya was visiting England one Christmas (seems a long time ago now) we recorded the story at her in-laws house, as our house is too noisy. Between the telephone, the barking dog, passing cars, trains and various other 'noises off', fits of the giggles at the bizarre stuff going on, we got through the story.

Much later, listening to the edited story, Tanya decreed that it sounded like a translation from English, didn't flow well in Russian, and that she wasn't happy with it at all. Back to the drawing board.

The Bologna Children's Book Fair has a new 'World Directory of Children’s Book Translators', in which we found Evgeniya Tinowitskaya. She lives in Moscow, where Tanya and David were also based by now. Following the new translation, Tanya e-mailed across a couple of studio websites with samples of speaking voices, and organised the recording in a Moscow studio.

There were one or two other little tasks to finish off the project, like the booklet/inlay/on body artwork, each of which had to be put together in Coreldraw as my computer is too cluttered to install Adobe InDesign, and Pagemaker will not export sufficiently high resolution .pdfs ........ but now it is all done.

Now ~ to tell the world!