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,…
The Wildenstern Saga is being published in France by Mango Jeunesse, translated by Patrick Imbert. They’ve just sent me the cover for ‘Ancient Appetites’, or ‘Voraces’, and I have to say, it’s pretty cool. I saw an earlier version last week and asked for a minor change to the back cover and they actually took that on board, which…
Honestly, the stuff people get up to. I was sent a link the other day to this piece featured on the BBC News site, about a guy named Mark Suppes, who has built a nuclear reactor in a warehouse in New York. That’s right . . . he’s built himself his own little nuclear reactor. And he’s not alone….
For anyone who’s interested, I’m running an online course on Writing for Children with Creative Writing Ink from the 19th of July. The course will cover the basics of storytelling and some specific aspects of writing for children and young adults – including: how to generate ideas; how to use observation; describing characters and setting; using dialogue and ensuring…
Anyone who knows me or follows this blog will know that I am all for using technology to improve our quality of life, and to make our increasingly complicated lives more manageable. But technology should be used for our benefit. I have a major problem with the way customers of all ages are being treated by the businesses we…
It’s a constant refrain of mine that there’s a problem with the way boys read. Girls have their own problems too (and delight in discussing those and many other problems at length). But when it comes to reading across the full range of fiction, lads are bit, well . . . squeamish. This is a particular problem as boys…
Some time ago, Weird Wide News alerted the public to a fiendish crime – the disappearance of five llamas (and three goats) from a circus in Meath. I wondered if it could be the work of the Kleptoes, who had been spotted in Galway, headed east. Lo and behold, one of our roving reporters (our shortest one, in fact)…
Much more of this and I’m going to start sounding like a conspiracy nut. All right, most people would have to admit that the school library fingerprinting kids was a bit creepy. And my piece on Google a while back was not wholly paranoid, given that they have flaunted copyright laws and it has taken numerous countries and one…