Month: November 2010

More excitement on the Kids Lit Quiz and Booked Up front. Last week I joined the author’s team at the Oxfordshire & Berkshire heat of the Kids Lit Quiz, only to miss an historic finale because I had to swoosh off to That London for a Booked Up launch party.

(I love the swooshing to That London. It sounds very glam and so it is! Whizzing off on a train to some distant part of the capital to drink wine, eat canapes and meet lovely children’s authors and the movers and shakers in the Book Trust, who do so much for kids literacy in the UK that it’s not funny to imagine life without them.)

Anyway, the author team starred the inimitable Lucy Coats, the adorable Mark Robson, the quietly brilliant Susie Day, the Next Big Thing in teen historical fiction, Marie-Louise Jensen (yep, the former editorial director at Scholastic told me that), and a new friend, Joanne Kenrick, who I know from FaceBook and the kids lit world, but met for the first time that night.

Normally the combined intellect of Susie, Mark and Lucy alone would be fine to win the heat, beat all the kids, pah, see THAT?!

But not that night. It was an historic night, destined to bring the highest number of teams ever to participate in a heat (42), as well as the highest ever score in the KLQ (97.5).

The author’s did not get the highest score, nope. The winners did – Oxford High, those brilliant girls. Joshua Files fans too, good on ’em!

(ahem – added belatedly. Apparently I’m wrong, the author’s team did win, by half a point. But their score flashed past in a moment onscreen and we never mention it when the authors win…)

However, the photo shows not the winning team (who for my money may go on to win the UK Championship next week). Instead, it shows the 3rd placed team from St Gregory the Great – the school of which I’m a governor. It’s only the second time we’ve fielded a team, and these guys had to beat former heat winners Cherwell in a tie-break for the 3rd position.

So three cheers for the Saints! And what an achievement by Oxford High – 1st and 2nd place, as well as a record-breaking score!

I missed all the excitement, alas. Still, I had big fun in London, met the lovely people on the selection panel who so kindly included Invisible City in the Booked Up list for 2010. Met Chris Priestly, whose amazing Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror helped me to give our daughter such a great Halloween. And Steve Cole, author of so many hit kids titles (Astrosaurs and Z-Rex, to name only two) that he makes me feel like a slacker.

Turns out that Steve Cole and I share a teenage passion for Blake’s 7. Oh the geekiness in the air as we quoted favourite episodes… Then I had to rush off to catch a train. I didn’t get round to telling Steve Cole how much Blake’s 7 fan fiction I’d written. Just as well. Sometimes I get all silly and start pressing it on fellow B7 fans. Never wise…

Steve Cole blogged about the Booked Up party too. And I may have mentioned Blake’s 7 before.

Some kind of publicist’s witchy magic must have been operating last week because Scholastic’s dynamite team of Alyx’n’Alex (suggest a HipHop name for the duo?) managed to coordinate three events into a one week visit.

I was over in Derry officially to launch the Northern Ireland pilot of the Booktrust’s BookedUp programme by which youngsters starting their secondary school careers are given a FREE book from a list of 19 titles. Hooray for Joshua – Invisible City was picked as one of the BookedUp titles for 2010.

The wonderful staff of Derry Central Library, including Eugene Martin and Trisha were on hand, as well as Liz Canning of Booktrust, Hannah Pegg and Caroline Wright of BookedUp. Poor things, they had to sit through my Event (it’s a thing!) twice as classes of Yr8 kids from four different schools were brought in to hear all about Joshua, my visits to the land of the Maya as a teenager, etc. A spectacular lunch of fresh sandwiches and delicious traybakes was on hand to entertain us all. I was particularly impressed at the reach of the Booktrust when two ladies from the regional Education Boards were brought in, and then at the end, a TV crew from the BBC! Trisha, Liz and I then dashed off to talk to local BBC station Radio Foyle before I was whisked off to Bangor by Scholastic Book Fairs dynamo Jenny Duncan.

Where, in Bangor, I dined in slap-up style with established authors like Gillian Cross, Paul Dowswell, Geraldine McCaughrean, as well as leading lights of the UK Youth Libraries Group, Joy Court, Margaret Pemberton and Lesley Martin. And another newish author, Keren David…who also writes about a teenage boy.

Now that, for the record, is a Very Exciting Author Day. You have to write something pretty darn amazing on a writing day to match that.

The following day was a one-day conference, another first, the Youth Libraries Group in Northern Ireland. I was joined in a two-handed event by Keren David, author of two deliciousy angsty teen-boy novels, When I Was Joe and the sequel, Almost True. I’d spent the previous Friday and Saturday immersed in the world of Keren’s lead character Tyler, a 14-year old whose family life is hit by a bolt of lightning when he’s forced into the Witness Protection Scheme. So it was a very happy hour indeed that I spent discussing Tyler and Joshua with Keren, lead by Joy Court of YLG. I suspect the convivial atmosphere that Joy succeeded in encouraging may have led to some revelations that I didn’t plan to make, but hey-ho. I’m sure they won’t go further than the gathered audience of librarians…

(Keren David has blogged about the YLG conference in her post The day we went to Bangor.)

The conference was no sooner drawing to a close when Carol Martin of Scholastic Book Fairs popped me into a car and it was off to Belfast for a whirlwind tour of schools and the Northern Ireland heat of the Kids Lit Quiz.

Quizmaster Wayne Mills blogged about the N.I. 2010 regional heat on his KidsLitQuiz blog.

Carol and I achieved an unprecedented level of book sales at Victoria College in Belfast when Carol unveiled a stash of now-rare, brand new neon sleeved copies of Invisible City and Zero Moment. I’ve spotted Ice Shock with the neon sleeve in shops, but mainly the PVC sleeved versions of the books are now out of stock. So the youngsters fair jumped on the books that carol brought along. I even had a couple of kids asking for signed, lined and dated copies to sell on ebay. ‘After I’ve read it’, they assured me…

At the KLQ, Wellington College, Belfast, was throwing a birthday party for the event’s 5th anniversary. Students of the school played songs from famous children’s movies (The Little Mermaid, Oliver), there was cake and balloons. And Coleraine High School won the regional heat, so go on to the UK Lids Lit Quiz Final in Oxford!

On the Friday morning I’d been prepared for a lie-in or a walk around town, but at the last minute Jenny Duncan pulled one last school visit out of the bag – Fort Hill Primary School in Lisburn. What enthusiatic Joshua readers they turned out to be! We had to finish the event a little earlier than usual so that I could sign all the Joshua books that the students had snapped up. It turns out to be a devastating combination – the Scholastic Book Fair+author event! (schools get a 60% commission for books sold, redeemable against books/teaching materials – pretty good deal huh?

The week I spent in Northern Ireland was a fascinating glimpse into a part of the UK with a different state education system (post-11 selection on academic grounds), and a history of sectarianism that still creeps into everyday conversation. It’s not so much that you see evidence of the Catholic/Protestant divide everywhere (you do, it’s in all the language, there are Catholic and Protestant parts of town), but that the idea that people can talk openly about differences between people; as in, they can acknowledge it frankly in conversation and in their societal structures.

After all the years I’ve as a school governor when I’ve been immersed in the often politically correct environment of education, it’s actually pretty refreshing. Or maybe that is a naive view…