Yes. Believe the hype. It’s that good. Three of the most fundamental elements of any story are character, setting and the problem that forms the basis of your plot. Having to teach this on courses (particularly to children) has really forced me to tackle the defining of these elements in simple terms. You must to able to separate them…
It’s a necessary quality in any writer that they be curious. It’s a circular thing really; you’re curious about life, so you write about it to help you sort it out in your own head and communicate those thought processes to others. And once you’re in the habit of writing, you look for more things to write about. But…
I’ve long been a fan of Pixar, and when we first start seeing hints that ‘Toy Story 3’ was on its way, I was really, really hoping they were going to stay true to form. Last weekend, Maedhbh and I dropped the baby into her granny and took our football/computer game fanatic to the cinema, equipped with 3D glasses…
Last week, I joined a bunch of writers and illustrators to have a lunch with Children’s Laureate, Siobhan Parkinson. The location was Airfield in Dundrum, which has nothing to do with airplanes, but is in fact a farm in the suburbs of Dublin which has a small cafe/restaurant, a farm shop and a vintage car collection, among other things….
Every author dreams of producing the kind of book that can maintain its freshness, its sheer entertainment value for fifty years. One such book is ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, by Harper Lee. Irish Publishing News featured an article from The Guardian last week, discussing the book’s enduring popularity (that’s another phrase authors dream of: enduring popularity). It is the…
I was down in Kilkenny on Monday, for a session in Stone House Books in the MacDonagh Junction shopping centre. It’s a lovely bookshop, independently owned, and I had a really good time chatting to the kids there. The shop is running a book club over the summer – with discounts on the books they discuss – and their…
I found this piece of video – ‘Big Bang Big Boom’ by Blu – on David Maybury’s blog. It’s a really clever combination of live action film taken in some inner city sites, along with animation using all sorts of different techniques, to describe the birth of the universe and the evolution of mankind (sort of). It’s full of…
From today, until the 28th of August, you can see some of my original artwork at the Garter Lane Arts Centre on O’Connell Street in Waterford. I’m taking part in a children’s book illustration exhibition, entitled ‘Enchanted’, along with Niamh Sharkey, Adrienne Geoghan, Annie West and Bruce Ingman. Adrienne is also doing a couple of workshops there on the…
I mentioned missing llamas in a post a while back, but it seems some other wild creatures have been let loose on the world over the last few days. You’ve got to love this first one. A group of fifteen monkeys being used by a lab in Japan, escaped the other day from a high-security research center at Kyoto…
Clearly, I need to get out more. I was in my local Super Valu today, and I noticed a high concentration of teenagers hanging around. It is not normally a teenage hang-out, it being a supermarket, so I wondered what had attracted them in. I also noticed that a lot of the girls were wearing wellies. Colourful, designery wellies,…