I’m still trying to find time to get ‘The Vile Desire to Scream’ finished. My editor has sent back the manuscript and I keep promising myself I’ll settle down to the fine-tuning in the next few days, but those few days keep getting filled up with other stuff. 
In the meantime, here’s a sneak preview of the cover.
Random House kindly supplied the type and the original version of the frame, the rest I did with a mixture of photos and painting, all put together and played around with in Photoshop. If you want to know what that thing is swallowing the woman, you’ll just have to download the book (when I’ve stuck it online, of course).
Since the last update on my schedule, I’ve been to three different schools. I was in St Kevin’s College in Clondalkin to talk to 1st, 2nd and 3rd years and visit their excellent JCSP library. The Junior Certificate Schools Programme is a brilliant project that many more schools should be allowed to benefit from.
On Wednesday, I visited Delgany National School to talk to . . . well, the whole school, actually. Some of the kids there were, quite frankly, a bit mental and I had a great time in the sessions. I got to see coloured-in Mad Grandad drawings hung all the way across the senior infants room and was stalked out of the school by two girls who shrieked and waved as a I drove away.
On Friday, I made my way down to Gorey – but not before discovering I had a flat tyre and having to change the wheel in the dark at six in the morning. Ah, the glamorous life of an author! I visited the Educate Together school just outside Gorey, where they are still getting used to their spanking new building. They have the best equipped staff toilet I have ever seen in a school.
They had had a brief brush with swine flu the week before and some kids had been kept out of school by wary parents, but everyone there looked very healthy to me, including Sarah Webb, who was also visiting. Sarah’s one of those people who seems very airy and laid back but is in fact a hardcore professional – if you work in children’s books, you’ll bump into her all over the place.
I’ve been reading Eoin Colfer’s book ‘And Another Thing’, where he has, with balls of steel, taken on the challenge of writing a sixth book in ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ series. And has done a damn fine job of it so far as I can see. It’s been over a decade since I read the original series, but ‘Hitchhiker’s’ was the one of the first novels ever to make me laugh out loud. Eoin is one of very few people who could write with the same mixture of passion and irreverence in the sci-fi genre and still maintain the humour and pace. I’m about halfway through and really enjoying it.
I have also been listening to ‘My Man Jeeves’ by PG Wodehouse on audio-book. Warm, delicate whimsical short stories that have lightened some long drives. Don’t know if I’d actually want to get any more of these books, given how much stuff I have to keep up with, but it’s been on my list for years and has been a gentle pleasure to listen to.
I start on ‘Mad Grandad’s Doppelganger’ artwork in earnest this week. I’ve a lot of catching up to do between now and Christmas.
