The Travels of Silver Skin
It's been a busy fortnight for Silver Skin!
Four packed sessions with students at Blairgowrie High School last week, doing creative writing workshops based on the novel - building up tension in a scene, using creepiness arcs and liberal applications of blurring agents (maybe you had to be there ...)
AND Silver Skin has arrived in Indonesia! Okay, so it was just one copy, but it was a birthday present for Astrid Kusumawardhani that had gone astray for weeks and weeks and weeks, so I was SO RELIEVED it finally got there!
(There it is, in Jakarta!)
AND a librarian in Honiton (in Devon) said nice things (to read more go to Honiton Library's Facebook page).
AND, for your delectation, there's an entire conversation about Silver Skin with Susan Price* on her Nennius Blog - we had so much fun talking! (Our chat will be there for a week and then it goes over to the A Conversation With ... section.)
Quite a time!
* Susan Price - Carnegie-medal winner, winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, writer of the Sterkarm trilogy (yes, the third book is nearly here!), tons of other books and scary Archer Woman.
The Boys Meet the Great Outdoors
The kittens are teenage cats now, and whether or not the great outdoors is ready for them, they are ready for it. (Don't be fooled by the apparent calm of these photos - there was shivering and twitching and paw shaking and dashes back to the open door aplenty, but oh boy did they lap it up. And chew on it. And pounce on it. And run circles around it ... Wahoo!)
Anthologies, Photography and Diving Giraffes
This week it's been pulling together the anthology Points in Time, product of a summer's creativity from Kirkmichael Primary School, two Time to Write adult groups and the art students of Blairgowrie High School. This is the layout stage, just before the cats came in to help ...
The launch is on Saturday 3 October 11:30 - 12:30 at the Royal Hotel in Blairgowrie, as part of the third annual BOOKMARK Book Festival - the event's free and you're all welcome! (And the anthology will be in ONE piece, I promise.)
I've been on The History Girls blog enthusing about, among other things, Victorian photography - and if you haven't had enough giraffes in your day, I can fix that for you over on Girls Heart Books. Though really, as far as giraffes go, I don't think I've ever had "enough".
Off the Rails Arthouse Collaboration
This afternoon I'm off to visit the artist Sheila Page as part of a collaboration of artists and poets based at the Off the Rails Arthouse - a studio/exhibition space that makes use of some of the empty buildings on the Ladybank train station platform. Sheila's subject matter is "the secret sheds of Ladybank" and here is one of the images she has created using pastel and charcoal -
There will be more on this anon - I love collaborating - this is going to be fun!
