Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Troubled Bridges Over Water

It's a busy week this one. 4 schools in 3 days, followed by signings at two bookshops on the same day.

This is all, of course, because on Thursday it's World Book Day, something which I'm sure authors are meant to get excited about. For all kinds of reasons, which I won't go into now, I find it an uncomfortable reminder of the complacency, laziness and lack of creativity of most of the major publishers.

I love that teachers and librarians put so much into it though. There'll be a lot of author visits at schools all over the country this week, with kids dressing up as book characters, story readings in every class, readathons and all kinds of shennanigans.

I was in Bristol today, at Redland Green School, where I heard another story about an angry killer chicken and an army of man eating alien cows. That old chesnut. And Jimmy Coates' old nemesis popped up again - the psycho ninja granny. Year 7 came out with some cracking ideas very quickly today. Must be the special Bristol rain feeding the imagination.

Tomorrow I'm popping up the road to Greig City Academy in Hornsey, then on World Book Day itself I'll be splitting my day between Pardes House School in Finchley (very, very near to the location of Viggo's fictional Turkish Restaurant in Jimmy Coates: Killer) and Barrow Hill Junior School in St John's Wood.

By Friday I'll be in a very odd mood indeed - just in time for some signings at the Brent Cross branches of WHSmiths and Borders on Saturday. Come along if you're around!

Meanwhile, here's a worrying stat for you that I read this week: 27.1% of bridges in the USA are "structurally deficient" - they could fall down any minute! That's 160,000 bridges!

Scary.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That statistic is going to give me nightmares.