Showing Signs of Stross
Charles Stross’s blog and the discussion about how to make a living in the new world of digital publishing.
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Scottish Serendipity
‘Strangled Silence’, the ‘The Goblin of Tara’ and ‘The Evil Eye’ audiobooks and the Scottish Connection.
Snap, Crackle and Pop into Hughes & Hughes
This is a first for me. One of my books is now available in your local shop or supermarket – in the breakfast cereal section. With boxes of Rice Krispies. ‘Mad Grandad and the Mutant River’ is part of a promotion from Kelloggs, along with Hughes & Hughes bookshops and the O’Brien Press, to sell cereal and reading material…
Death of a Sales Outlet
I was reading Eoin Purcell’s post on the problem bookshops are faced with as they lose more and more customers to online booksellers, both for print and digital books. Actually, he was passing on a point made by another blogger, Seth Godin (Is this all we do in blogs now – talk about other people’s blogs?), but it amounts…
A Very Slippy Christmas
It wasn’t so much a White Christmas as an Ice Christmas. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. As a country, we’re obviously not very used to dealing with serious ice, but what I saw on the 23rd and 24th of Christmas was bordering on farce. Circumstances had brought the family and I to Navan for bit of last…
A Crackers Warning
Okay, it’s true. You can’t take chances with explosives. In the wrong hands they can be, you know . . . dangerous. But this sign was spotted by a Weird-Wide News roving reporter on a shelf in Marks & Spencers today. The shop says it’s illegal for them to sell Christmas crackers to children because of a law that…
Taking Over the World, One Garden at a Time
Suspicious robotic gardener and plant activity.
Back to Mad Grandadding
He has become an old friend. And though I can sometimes stumble or struggle when I first go back to an illustration style I haven’t used in a while, it doesn’t happen as much with Mad Grandad. Perhaps it’s because I’ve drawn him hundreds, if not thousands of times, both for the books and in sessions. Interesting then, that…
A Brave New WexWorld
Sometimes I look back over my week (or for the purposes of this blog, the last twelve days) and I find it hard to remember what filled all that time. I know I had a couple of really good sessions with kids and parents in Clara Library in Offaly on the 18th. The rest of that week is a…
Hard Times
The National Campaign for the Arts, CBI’s Digital Publishing Seminar and Waterstones and the discount war.