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As June turned to July I was in the north of Scotland  just south of Inverness for a week,  at Moniack Mhor the Arvon Foundation residential writing centre.

I was there with  my good friend and co-tutor Cathy MaPhail, a great writer with an amazing sense of humour which kept us all smiling all week long.

But Cathy is also an inspiration when she talks about the way she writes, often a very different process from the way I  write.

GRASS is one of her latest books.

The course was about Writing for Children  of all ages, from picture books to teenage and YA, and we had  16  enthusiastic adult emergent writers. who worked incredibly hard.  They were lovely and talented people.  Mid week the guest speaker was an agent, in fact my own agent Kathryn Ross from Fraser Ross Associates  and she was well grilled by the students! It was sad to leave at the end of the week it is such a lovely place and feels as if it is so far from the rest of the world .

You can read more about the week and see some pictures on my blog Bookwords

While I was away my Writer’s Choice appeared on Normblog where I write about a favourite book.  My choice was Laurie Lee’s The Firstborn.

With the recent launch of Dead Boy Talking I have also been doing a bit of a blog tour and keeping a lookout for reviews of the book, too.

There is a guest post on The Bookette and I will be following it up later this week on Scottish Book Trust’s blog and Wondrous Reads. There are some great reviews of the book, and  for now you can find the links on my Bookwords blog but soon I will be putting them up on this website, too.

Platimun Pages Publication Promoters (PPPP)

from North Berwick High School with English teacher Susan Conway (3rd from right at the back) and Linda Strachan, showing off their 1st edition signed copies of the book

The afternoon launch was held for the entire 3rd year group at the school and featured a drama based on a scene from the book.  I was interviewed by Neil Wilson, one of the PPPP organisers,  and this was followed by  a talk about real life knife crime by Superintendent John Hawkins of Lothian and Borders Police.

The evening book launch was also completely organised by the teenagers  from PPPP from designing and distributing invitations and posters, to the layout of the room.

When they arrived the invited guests were welcomed by members of the PPPP and refreshments were served.  The drama was performed and I was interviewed and spoke a bit about the book and the characters.

And there was cake!

and a chance to get books signed.

Thanks to the wonderful teenagers from Platinum Pages Print Promoters the evening was a great success. See their blog Deadboytalking.blogsop.com

Out of a list of 23 great teenage and YA novel a shortlist of three has been chosen for the Catalyst Book Award. The 3 shortlisted novels are Auslander by Paul Dowswell, Bloodchild by Tim Bowler and my own Spider. The award is voted on by the young readers themselves, which is great! They can start voting from September, giving them time to read all three books.