Sound Effects
The sounds I made when I was young. And how little has changed.
Mental Examinations
Today, the exam silly season got started again. It’s exactly twenty years since I did my Leaving – twenty-two since my Inter (what they used to call the Junior Cert). People in the media are offering a lot of advice on how to handle the ordeal, trying to reassure everyone who’s heading into those exams. But with the best…
An Open Letter to the Government
This letter has been sent to my local representatives, to the Minister for Education and Skills, to the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs. I am writing to you to protest at the potential loss of an absolutely vital programme for young people, not through cuts but through simple inaction. The Junior Cert Support…
Fingerprinting Kids
My Weird-Wide News posts are normally aimed at my younger readers. So I’m going to try and keep this simple, even though it is one of the weirdest posts I’ve done. But it is real. And yet it’s hardly made the normal news at all. I got it from the UK newspaper, ‘The Telegraph’. Britain has a much better…
73% of Kids Own Their Own Books, 86% Own a Mobile Phone
I picked this one off David Maybury’s blog the other day. Research done by the National Literacy Trust in the UK has discovered that more kids over there own a mobile phone (86%) than own a book (73%). All the more reason to produce books that can be read on phones, don’t you think? I can’t say I was…
What Were the Wild Things At?
We were in Portlaoise last weekend, and I took my daughter to a playground in a small town park, while her mum and brother were off watching a football match. She was too young to watch the game and too old – and too mad – to sit still on our laps. The playground was a decent one; the…
How To Make Ebooks and Influence People
For anyone who’s wondering what the process of creating ‘The Vile Desire to Scream’ was like, I’ve written an article on it for the Irish Publishing News blog. There’s been some great feedback on the book, and I’d like to give a big thanks to the hundreds of people who’ve downloaded it so far. Please feel free to hand…
Nurturing the Seed
It’s taken me a few days to get round to posting this, but I was at the Children’s Books Ireland Conference in the National Gallery last weekend, where I got to hear some excellent talks. The conference was kicked off with a thoughtful and inspiring inaugural speech by our new Children’s Laureate, Siobhan Parkinson, who hailed the great success…
The High Cost of Living
Maybe it’s because of the fact that I put my back out recently. Or it might be because I did a talk on (and drawing of) Dorian Gray in Ballymun Library, and in an attempt to engage the minds of those cagey teenagers, I spoke about how we age and how, even in our teens, life has already left…
New World Order . . . ing System
I was tempted to start this post with ‘And so it begins . . .’, but that would be wrong. Because Google’s leviathan-like surfacing in the book market has been a long time coming. Google Editions, the company’s new online bookstore, is due to start selling this summer. I have mixed feelings about Google’s strategy. On one hand, I’ve…