Authors Electric

Writing Children’s Fiction  by Yvonne Coppard and Linda Newbery  (Bloomsbury) ISBN 978 1 408 15687 2 Yvonne Coppard and Linda Newbery interviewed by Dennis Hamley When, a few month ago, I was asked to interview Yvonne and Linda for Armadillo, the on-line children's book magazine,  about their new book I was both pleased and slightly daunted. Yvonne and    Linda (herself once an AE blogger) are authors of high achievement and real quality - and also very different.  I knew there would be so much in this book and in the space of an 1800 word interview we were only going to scratch the surface.  However, just three days ago, on Wednesday September 11, Julia Jones wrote a superb review of Writing Children's Fiction on Eclectic Electric and, if you haven't yet seen the book itself but want a good taster before tackling this interview, you can't do better than to turn back to it. Don't go to Writing Children's Fiction thinking it's ...

'Now' is where it's at (or rather when it's at). 'Now' is the moving blade that chops our lives, over and over again, into past, future and that infinitesimal but overwhelmingly significant instant we call 'now'. Prague Astronomical Clock OK, so I was lying in bed musing on what to blog about this month, trying to force myself to think about e-books. Nothing wrong with e-books, of course, but my brain sometimes refuses to think about them to order. Now if I was the kind of organised person who posts my blogs up here months in advance (respect, to those of you who do), I might find it easier to 'focus', as my English teacher used to say. But I don't, and instead of being organised, I sense one of Douglas Adams's infamous deadlines about to whoosh up behind me, whirl me round in a storm of panic and then hurl me onto the jagged rocks of midnight on the 25/26th, with no time left to write this month's post (see below for a disc...