• This morning… my desk is clear! I have a huge new project about to start and I’m looking for ways to put it off for another day. It’s been in the pipeline for over two years now. I’ve reached the point when I have to get down to it. (In case you are wondering, it’s another eight book early reader series.)

    But my desk isn’t clear, not in a practical sense. In fact it is a complete mess and needs tidying up in a big way – that should waste some time after I’ve finished wasting time writing this. My intray is piled high – I’m sure there is a lot to attend to there. My son will probably need picking up from school later, I can pick up some brownie points if I volunteer.

    Maybe my website needs tinkering with? Shame my mother’s hospital appointment is tomorrow, that would have broken up the day, guilt free.

    Many of my FaceBook friends are writers. When I visit the site, I’m always amazed at how much they post about the work they are about to do – in the next five minutes – when they have just finished doing something mundane first. If they spent half the time they spend on FaceBook on actually writing, they would achieve so much. I think this, smile smugly to myself and then go and look for something to waste a bit more of my own time on. I’m sure my website needs tinkering with.

    I’ve just now remembered that A friend of mine and I talked about doing a book on displacement activity – unfortunately we found lots of other things to do instead. I just found the file we drew up of 100 things to do instead of work. So, rather than get on with some real work, I emailed her about it. Will she let me post the list on my blog? There that’s something to waste a few moments thinking about. Maybe I could waste a few moments finding a photo to make this entry a bit more interesting. that would waste a few minutes.

    escapePerfect! I found this scrawled on a desk in the Imperial College lecture theatre. Someone wasn’t paying attention when they drew this!

    Well, I really should get on with it now. Maybe I’ll go and make another cup of coffee first.

  • Oh dear, I’ve been hoping that this would all go away and we would come to our senses, but it seems that I’m going to have to get myself a certificate to prove I’m not a paedophile so that I can still visit schools.

    Looking at the the ISA website I found the glaring loophole within thirty seconds.

    Apparently, children in schools need protecting from children’s authors, who are accompanied at all times and work with groups of up to 300 at a time.

    Those who actually want to harm children do not need to register – indeed it is in their interest not to. If they have a dodgy past they will become a barred person and then will break the law by entering Specific Places and carrying out Specific Activities. However, if they are not checked, they are free to enter private and domestic places and employment with impunity.

    Where does 99% of all the damage to children occur? In the home of course, in domestic environments. So the overpaid, quango nonsense is powerless in the one place that real harm to children occurs. The scheme is nothing but a cash-raising enterprise – certainly in the case of visiting authors and those who would pass on their experience and expertise. It’s a tax on those who work with children. Sit back and watch as volunteers disappear. It is totally demeaning to go cap in hand to a faceless organisation and ask to be proved a nice person. Where will the youth workers, Arkelas and Brown Owls come from now?

    And what message are we teaching our children? Everyone is a paedophile until proven innocent. This has turned the whole basis of our legal system upside down.

    Watch the world of children and adults move further apart. Parents will soon be excluded from entering school premises. They pretty well are already, dropping their children off at the barbed wire security gates under the watchful eye of the surveillance camera. Parents only ever need to talk to schools through the gate intercom. No wonder they never turn up for parent’s evenings.

    When do adults and children ever meet? How are children supposed to know what they are meant to grow up to be, if all the good people stay away from them in fear of being smeared. Children now are to be feared.

    Who now would help a lost child? The irony is that most of us now would stand back and let a kidnapper take a child because we think we would be accused of something if we stepped in to help.

    I was asked for a certificate a couple of years ago by a museum. I said I didn’t have one and didn’t see the point as I’d be on public show all day and all the children would be chaperoned by their parents. They hummed and hah-ed but in the end said okay. When I arrived, the two Gents toilets had been reassigned as one for Men and one for Boys! Nothing was said, but what message does that give? The organisers, of course, will come out with the usual guff about insurance and covering themselves, but what they were really saying is that all men and me in particular are a danger to boys, in particular. Notice that it was okay for women to take boys and girls into the toilets with them…

    …Oh dear, didn’t we just have a case of arrests of a nursery nurse up to no good? Wasn’t she a woman? She would have been checked too. Fat lot of good that did! Anyone wanting to harm children will do so. Checks and laws won’t stop them. The laws will only create division in society. Except that children don’t count as society. They are just a nuisance that have to be put up with and hidden away until they are old enough to enter adult society.

    I guess I’ll have to bite the bullet and pay – I’m fixed up to do loads of visits next year.

    I’m not being a good blogger! All this came about from an article in Guardian. It’s great that Philip Pullman stand sup for us like this. Most children’s authors earn below the minimum wage from their writing, so school visiting is often the major part of their income. They will meekly sign up and be done with it.

    I’m so used to being treated with suspicion in schools now that it comes as a surprise to be trusted. Last year I went to a school where I was met and showed around the school, visiting all the classes one by one, by two children. The school were so friendly and relaxed, that I mentioned it to them as being unusual. “But, you’re our honoured guest!” they said in surprise. “We invited you!”

  • crab2One more spread to go on my Crab story, Nip! Nip!

    My very first books were only fourteen sentences long. Nip! Nip! is only 41 words long. When my first books came out, I was often told how clever I was to be able to write such short stories. I’d not thought that was supposed to be difficult. In those days I suppose I thought that you start small and learn to write longer. Many people think that you write children’s books and then grow up to write adult books. (It doesn’t work like that.)

    catndog
    When I was told that it was hard to write short, I found I couldn’t do it anymore. Only in the last four years have I got back into the swing through a book I did called Cat and Dog, that had no words at all. Then I did a couple of stories that fitted into a Phonics regime, so I only had a few letters of the alphabet to play with – S A T P I N M D – for example. Writing a story like that is a bit like doing a sudoku puzzle or carving a walrus tusk. The story is in there already, you have to work at it until you find it.

    Now that I’m older and wiser, also know that waiting around for inspiration is a waste of time. The secret is to just get down and do the work. Working hard at a problem gives inspiration a chance to drop by. Sitting on the beach drinking beer only gives you sunburn and a hangover. There is no substitute for getting out a pencil and paper and working out a problem.