For anyone who’s interested, I’m running an online course on Writing for Children with Creative Writing Ink from the 19th of July. The course will cover the basics of storytelling and some specific aspects of writing for children and young adults – including: how to generate ideas; how to use observation; describing characters and setting; using dialogue and ensuring…
Anyone who knows me or follows this blog will know that I am all for using technology to improve our quality of life, and to make our increasingly complicated lives more manageable. But technology should be used for our benefit. I have a major problem with the way customers of all ages are being treated by the businesses we…
It’s a constant refrain of mine that there’s a problem with the way boys read. Girls have their own problems too (and delight in discussing those and many other problems at length). But when it comes to reading across the full range of fiction, lads are bit, well . . . squeamish. This is a particular problem as boys…
Some time ago, Weird Wide News alerted the public to a fiendish crime – the disappearance of five llamas (and three goats) from a circus in Meath. I wondered if it could be the work of the Kleptoes, who had been spotted in Galway, headed east. Lo and behold, one of our roving reporters (our shortest one, in fact)…
Much more of this and I’m going to start sounding like a conspiracy nut. All right, most people would have to admit that the school library fingerprinting kids was a bit creepy. And my piece on Google a while back was not wholly paranoid, given that they have flaunted copyright laws and it has taken numerous countries and one…
This is a Weird-Wide News post about a weird way of presenting the news. The Japanese read more newspapers than we do in the West, but like our kids, the Japanese kids are reading much less news than their parents. The response to this has been to launch newspapers in a Manga style. One of the points I make…
The sounds I made when I was young. And how little has changed.
Today, the exam silly season got started again. It’s exactly twenty years since I did my Leaving – twenty-two since my Inter (what they used to call the Junior Cert). People in the media are offering a lot of advice on how to handle the ordeal, trying to reassure everyone who’s heading into those exams. But with the best…
This letter has been sent to my local representatives, to the Minister for Education and Skills, to the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs. I am writing to you to protest at the potential loss of an absolutely vital programme for young people, not through cuts but through simple inaction. The Junior Cert Support…
My Weird-Wide News posts are normally aimed at my younger readers. So I’m going to try and keep this simple, even though it is one of the weirdest posts I’ve done. But it is real. And yet it’s hardly made the normal news at all. I got it from the UK newspaper, ‘The Telegraph’. Britain has a much better…