About Me
This is the blog of Pokapolas. My real name is Claire. Pokapolas came out of necessity for a user name on sites that required me to have one. Having been cursed with what must surely be THE most common name on this earth, I quickly realised I needed to make something up. I asked my kids for their favourite words, Holly came up with Pokemon, so POK, Matthew wanted Apoplectic, so APO and Hannah put forward Lasagna, so LAS and thus POKAPOLAS was born.
I am 34 and wife to Ade (an enigmatic amalgamation of Peter Stringfellow, Victor Meldrew, Bill Gates and Eric Idle). I am also Mam to 4 kids. My main interests are writing, reading, baking, painting, tweeting (a new one!), scouring 2nd hand shops for 50s, 60s and 70s stuff I *can* afford, salivating at pictures of iconic designer chairs that I can’t. For more about my children go to the introduction post.
About the blog
Why Potted Periodical? I really don’t know, it’s alliterative and the meaning sounded good in my head I suppose! This blog is intended as a Bio and a Log of both my identity as an aspiring children’s author and my journey as I try to achieve publication and a modest measure of success. I recently left college halfway through a degree in Early Years Education (not sure whether I’ve “ditched” it forever yet, or if I have in fact “ditched”, “left” sounds better right now!) as back problems and high blood pressure are causing me to reassess where I want to be and what I want to be doing. Pleasurable though it is, a Reception Classroom is probably not the most suitable environment at the moment.
After rediscovering a deeply rooted passion for writing, and at an age where I have the *ahem* benefit of flourished wisdom and the much more stable confidence that goes with it, (perhaps 
) I’ve decided to take the plunge, embark on a distance learning course for children’s writers and throw myself headlong into the challenge.
I may just bump my head, I may not, who knows?
I promise to try my best to be interesting and entertaining!!
But
Please feel free to comment on anything, this is all new ground to me so I will learn through you and make this more worth a read if you feedback to me, if something is good tell me. Equally if it sucks kaboodle tell me too, just do so anonymously so as not to invite a flurry of bile to your own pages (I wouldn’t really, honest!).
Oh, and don’t take my word for anything – seriously!
