I’m just catching back up on work after returning from Germany last Sunday, so I finally have some time to do a post on the trip. I was in Cologne for the annual Children’s Literature Festival run by Uschi Schröter and her fantastic team at SK Stiftung Kultur. Every year, they feature writers from a different country and this…
The deadline for entering the Merciless Reason Competition has now passed! A big thanks to everyone who entered! The winner of the competition will appear as a character in my next book, and will be announced on the 15th of July. There will be three runners-up who will receive inscribed copies of all three Wildenstern books. Thanks again to…
I’ll make this quick – it’s been a long day and the whole family’s got to be up at 4am to catch a plane to Germany. And I’m already a bit knackered. I’m taking part in Irischen Kinder- und Jugendbuchwochen 2012 (don’t ask me to pronounce that), a big children’s book festival in Cologne. It celebrates the writing of…
One of the challenges of being self-employed is maintaining all the stuff you have to manage day-to-day, while still making time to stand back and take stock, planning for the future. I’ve been doing a lot of reacting to stuff lately, and getting pretty wound up about it, so I needed to stop and catch my breath a bit….
Congratulations to Niamh Sharkey, on becoming our new Children’s Laureate. The announcement was made by President Michael D Higgins at a ceremony in the headquarters of the Arts Council this morning. To my great disappointment, I couldn’t attend because I did my back in over the weekend, and am currently walking around like some lop-sided zombie, but I wish…
Here are a few really useful articles I’ve come across in the last couple of weeks, all of which have to do with developments in the business. I’ll stick them in here in the order of the events they refer to: Eoin Purcell’s written an interesting article on who he sees as the winners and losers in the ongoing…
If you do anything online, this issue needs your immediate attention. Right now, the US is poised to pass a new law that would permit US intelligence services to spy on almost everything we do online. It’s called the ‘Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act‘. This may be a US law, but it effects everyone else, because companies that…
To celebrate the release of ‘Merciless Reason’, the third book in the Wildenstern Saga, we are offering one reader the chance to make an appearance as a character in my next novel.* Like a walk-on part in a film, except you won’t have to walk. To enter, you need to do two things: 1. Simply answer this question: In…
So, I didn’t win the Mordus du Polar Award in France (goddamnit). That honour went to Marie-Aude Murail for ‘Le Tueur a la Cravate’ – congratulations Marie-Aude. While I’m on, there are a few things I thought worth spreading word about: I did a recent guest post on a blog called Pivot Dublin, which is devoted to design issues…
Well, ‘Merciless Reason’, the third Wildenstern novel, is well and truly out in the shops (and libraries, of course). There are a lot of up and coming authors out there (though I still count myself as ‘up and coming’) who focus all their efforts on getting published for the first time – which is natural enough. But I thought…