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. I needed to take a look around at where I was and figure out what was coming next.
As it happened, I ended up with some time to kill in Edinburgh. I was over there for a meeting of the panel deciding the shortlist for the Scottish Children’s Book Awards; I was helping pick the contenders among the books for 12-16 year-olds. The gang at the Scottish Book Trust haven’t released the shortlists yet, so my lips are zipped for the moment. This trip did mean I missed the CBI Book Awards Ceremony, but I still (heavy, reluctant sigh) managed to enjoy my visit to Edinburgh. Big congrats to Celine Kiernan on her win, for her novel ‘Into the Grey’. It also won the Junior Jury prize, so a popular choice all round. Congrats also to Paula Leyden, Mark O’Sullivan, Oliver Jeffers (again!), and our former Laureate na nÓg, Siobhán Parkinson, for scooping the category awards.
Edinburgh is a fantastic city. It’s the third time I’ve been, although they’ve all been short visits. It was hot when I arrived on Sunday, walking through the streets in the final hours of a big marathon event. This was actually quite handy, as my back’s been a bit dodgy lately, but now I wasn’t the only one in the crowd walking like I’d two wooden legs. They all had a better excuse, that’s all. And they had t-shirts with ‘Marathon’ on them to make that excuse clear. Fair play to them, it must have been some struggle in that heat.
The meeting took slightly less than two hours on Monday morning, so I had Sunday afternoon and evening and Monday afternoon to kick about town. 
Walking actually helped my loosen up my back, so I spent a fair bit of time on my feet.
Normally, when I’m away, I’ll do a lot of work in the notebook in the downtime, or sometimes bring my laptop. Instead, I tried to take my brain out of gear for a while, and figure out where I was going next.
I’m working on a couple of new things, including a kind of online prequel for my next novel Rat-Runners. I’ve just come back to the editing on Rat-Runners too – we’re on the copy edits now, and the cover design is well underway. I’ve started planning the next novel too. But there have been a load of other bits and pieces demanding my time lately, and I’ve found myself reacting constantly, rather than planning any particular path – and that’s no way to go about things.
I’m not great at relaxing, but you just can’t push things all the time. I spent nearly three hours on Monday sitting in a park near the railway station in Edinburgh, making the odd note in my notebook, reading a bit, but mostly just looking around and thinking, letting my thoughts wander. When it came time to make my way towards the bus for the airport, I felt my thoughts were more ordered, I was a little more focused. I’m in Listowel for a few days later this week. I haven’t done any hillwalking in a long time, what with the kids and the workload, but I think I’ll try and get one in while I’m down there. I need to clear my head of all the complicated rubbish, and get some proper ground under my feet.
If you want to get an idea of the kind of stuff that’s been occupying my mind lately, check out my guest blog for Listowel Writers’ Week. I’ve written a longer article for Inis magazine on the topic, which will be in the November issue. I also came across a couple of other interesting titbits, one an ‘infographic’ on how a book is born (cynical, but pretty accurate) and a post on the ongoing push-and-pull between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction, and how those lines are blurring. Catch you later.
Good article, Oisin. Looking forward to reading the unabridged version in Inis. As far as I can see there’s always been a disconnect between what is recommended for children and what they actually want to read (if they want to read at all). There is a tendency for parents, teachers, etc to favour the type of books they themselves loved as children. This is natural as adults want young readers to experience the same feelings they did all those years ago, but I don’t think it’s the right approach, especially when you’re dealing with reluctant or non-readers. As long as they are reading anything at all I think it’s a good thing; whether its the wrong type of book in terms of age, too scatalogical or gory or whatever, doesn’t really matter in my opinion.
The difficulty is, as you said, that people who are book lovers, and probably had to have books pried from their hands when young, are the ones doing the encouraging and selling and, as such, it can be like a gaelgoir trying to persuade someone who has no love of the language that Irish is the only way to go. On the positive side, Celine Kiernan won both the jury prize and the children’s choice award (and from what I’ve heard of in some schools the shadowing scheme works well at getting reluctant readers involved).
Thanks for the comment, Kieran. Yes, I agree that getting them to read anything is where we’ve got to start. We can worry about creating book-lovers later (if at all). It was good to see Celine win both the jury and children’s awards – a great reflection on the book. Having just taken part in the shortlist process for the Scottish Children’s Book Awards (where kids pick the final winner), I think that including kids’ opinions in children’s book awards is increasingly important. And treating books as consumer products rather than educational aids or works of art wouldn’t hurt either.