Just over a week into using Facebook, about a week on Twitter (@OisinMcGann). I sit at my computer. My wife is in the sitting-room, reading tweets on her phone. Our eleven-year old is playing Playstation online with his mates. Our three-year-old and one-and-a-half-year-daughters wander, grimy and malnourished, dressed only in rags, scavenging for food in the ruins of our…
I did a post on the work side of my recent visit to Cologne, but I figured I’d stick something up about the time I spent off-duty. Like a proper Paddy, I landed in Dusseldorf airport with the complete clan in tow – wife, three kids and my mother. From the airport terminal, we took a monorail to the…
The lovely Sarah Webb and I will be flying by the seats of our respective pants as we hold an ‘Ideas Shop’ event for the Kilkenny Arts Festival – without the calming presence of Judi Curtin. The event takes place at 3pm on the 12th of August at the Barnstorm Theatre. In this show, we take a light-hearted approach…
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…