Happy Book Week!

It's Book Week Scotland and how great to find EXODUS in The Guardian's Top Ten Scottish children's book quotes among brilliant company, such as JK Rowling, Robert Louis Stevenson, JM Barrie and Debi Gliori. It's almost impossible to pick a favourite quote, but if I absolutely had to it would be this one:

'To try to be brave is to be brave.'

That's from a beautiful classic - George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind.

At the end of the week, I'm off to the Tarbert Book Festival. Tarbert is really beautiful and it's also next door to Carradale, the setting for one of my early books, SOUNDTRACK, so I'll be doing a reading from that, as well as taking my young audience on...

'... an exciting journey through some of the biggest ideas of our time (climate change, the future of humanity, the wonders of the universe and mind-bending new science). I'll be exploring and debating these hugely topical and powerful ideas through my own books for young readers - the award-winning EXODUS trilogy, my graphic novel EARTH-PLANET, UNIVERSE on the world's first environmentalist, Scotland's John Muir, and the book I've just written, A GIRL MADE OF STARS.' (Oban Times)

Happy Book Week, wherever you are!

Once upon a time there was a world...

On a brief skive from the last great heave on AURORA, I clicked on a Guardian podcast on 'climate change books' and heard the lovely Sarah Crown from the Guardian books blog saying very nice things about Exodus and Zenith (about 23 mins in). It was a little gift from the ether. Moments before, I'd hit a Friday afternoon slump, telling myself I'd get somebody to slap me if I ever had the urge to write an epic trilogy ever again. I really just needed a Kitkat.

The podcast is worth a listen as there are a number of good books discussed - some of my own favourites like Cormac MCarthy's The Road, poetry from Don Paterson and Sean O'Brien, Earth From The Air. Sarah finishes with a great quote from Philip Pullman about 'Thou shalt not' reaching the head, but what touches the heart is 'once upon a time' - the very words, as it happens, that Exodus opens with and Aurora ends on.

The podcast and booklist is HERE.

A few more links I've been too busy to put up before: THE BOOK SMUGGLERS on YA apocalyptic-dystopian fiction. And HERE. Some Glasgow Dystopia. And I loved the look of IN SEARCH OF GIANTS.

Next blog, a moving Once Upon A Time...

And from Edith to Simone (a much easier leap)

Edith Wharton and Simone de Beauvoir: New Yorker and Parisian, yet definitely two of a kind. Both were huge inspirations to me, as a fledgling writer in my twenties, when I felt stuck and angry with myself for lacking courage and taking the wrong, easy path in life and ending up thoroughly lost in the woods. I'd just spent four years at university studying books mostly written by men - and I'd loved it. But in a kind of desperate instinct to find my way back to myself, I began a journey into books written by women. I read everything by Edith and Simone and many other ground-breaking women writers. The most important thing I learned was that the 'easy' road is always the hardest in the end. But there is always a way back to yourself.

And, if you want to write, you pick up a pen.

So when I read this about Simone de Beauvoir in today's Guardian by Zoe Williams, it made me laugh:

"Ollivier includes small pull-out sections on French Girls We Love and has the brass neck, ladies, to include Simone de Beauvoir, who is apparently "known as one of the 20th-century's most interesting and important women. Her memoirs reveal an independent, self-defined woman who made conscious (if existentialist!) choices regarding love and work ..."

I don't even know where to start with that, but at random, let's start here: can you imagine what De Beauvoir would have said about being called a girl? About being included in a book whose next chapter explains why it's important to buy your walking shoes in Prada, because you can never be too well dressed? About being name-checked by a person who doesn't just not know the meaning of the word existentialist, but can't even be arsed to look it up before committing it to a paperback? Can you imagine? She would have had a cow.

... surely there's more to being a French woman than not eating a whole portion of anything and knowing who Simone de Beauvoir is, even if you do not, strictly speaking, know anything she ever said."

Wonderful, Zoe.

A bit about that ('existentialist!') girl Simone here.

PS - problems with the comments section here and my website email. Things are not getting through. Apologies if you think you are being ignored. Will be sorted asap!