Sunday 9 March 2008

The Scattered Authors Society and Time Travel

In my ceaseless quest to meet famous children's authors, I accepted an invite to speak to the Scattered Authors Society (about websites, of course. I would have nothing to tell them about getting published!).

"Scatty authors?" my husband said. "You would be perfectly at home with them."

But the SAS see themselves as more, well, special forces than scatty.

Anyway, one of the famous people I met was Sue Price, winner of the Carnegie Medal in 1987 for her book The Ghost Drum. When I got home from the conference, I Googled 'Sue Price' and found this:

She doesn't look like that in real life, I assure you. Here is Sue's website. Go there. Buy her books.

We got to talking about time-travelling, as one does at conferences like this (my favourite stories as a young girl had to do with either time travel or amnesia. Don't ask). Two of Sue's books, The Sterkarm Handshake and A Sterkarm Kiss, had to do with time travel.

"Where would you go," Sue asked. "If you had a time machine?"

I was about to say something corny like I love where I am now when I realised that there was a time that I would love to revisit. Here's what I said:
I'd love to go back to my late twenties when I was just starting to have babies. I would tell myself to get on with writing. I had no idea at the time that it would take so long to get published
"So you think you would meet your younger self?" Sue asked. Famous authors are like that. They ask follow up questions.

The mind, at that point, boggled.

What would my younger self say if she ran into me as I was time travelling?

cartoon by Candy Gourlay
Thank you to the Scattered Authors Society for the warm welcome!

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