Eoin Colfer, Stand Up Author and Charmer of Little Women

I discovered another New Reality for children's authors the other day.

Authors have to write books, yes. They have to market themselves online, yes. They have to do school visits, yes. And now they have to be stand up comics.

It's all the fault of Artemus Fowl creator Eoin Colfer (pronounced 'Oh - when' - as in "OH? And WHEN am I supposed to find the time to get acting classes?") who packs in the crowds everywhere he tours.

I caught Colfer's show at the South Bank's Imagine Children's Literature Festival with four nine year old girls yesterday. Only one of the girls had ever read a Colfer book but by the time we left, each had an autographed copy of the The Wish List (the only Colfer book with a female - human - protagonist).

In the audience was a legion of little boys (all named Ben it transpired during the Q & A) - indeed Colfer's show was srongly targeted at boys and Dads with such themes as: "Reading Books with Explosives and Motorbikes on the Cover is Okay" and "When You Have the House to Yourself Do Not Hesitate to Build Ramps on Which to Practice Flying Your Bike Even If The Brakes Do Not Work". The girls and mums laughed like drains too.

I was inspired to see many heads bowed over books before and after the show.

We foolishly booked at the last minute so we only got seats at the back which were still great seats given that it was the Royal Festival Hall. But this meant we were the last people out and the end of the queue for Colfer's autograph.

Still the Festival organisers followed all the Rules To Make People Enjoy Queuing:


Rule 1. Provide children with an opportunity to deface something. This was the graffiti wall which the girls covered with jokes and, rather precociously, CND slogans.


Rule 2. After the children deface the wall, they can Blu-Tac random items to a blank wall, here, the kids stuck up some paper plates.


Rule 3. Provide technology to keep everyone amused. These were the special seats that told non-stop jokes.

We were still smiling when we reached the top of the queue.

Amazingly, so was Eoin Colfer, who had been exercising his autograph arm for 30 solid minutes.


He charmed the girls by asking them who the leader of their little group was and didn't even ask why one of them was dressed like a sherpa.

Once we'd extracted autographs we headed out to Giraffe where we rewarded ourselves with massive ice creams and a terrific view of the Thames.


This is the sort of total experience that readers expect of us.

I was terrified. But the Rocky Road Ice Cream tasted good anyway.

The Elegance of Punctuation !#*%!

Here's a lovely New York Times article waxing lyrical on the joys of the semi-colon and the elegance of correct punctuation. The piece is marred only by the correction that appears at the bottom:

An article in some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit employee’s deft use of the semicolon in a public service placard was less deft in its punctuation of the title of a book by Lynne Truss, who called the placard a “lovely example” of proper punctuation. The title of the book is “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” — not “Eats Shoots & Leaves.” (The subtitle of Ms. Truss’s book is “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”)

YA Readers Are So Worth Writing For

I once attended a talk by Meg Rosoff (How I Live Now) at which a middle aged lady raised her hand and expressed surprise that Rosoff was wasting her time writing for younger people – at least, that was the gist of what I remember, it was a while ago now.

Now comes the hoo ha over this New York Times review by Dave Itzkoff.

To paraphrase Itzkoff’s rather wordy controversial statement: Itzkoff declared that there was “no self-respect”, no “artistic satisfaction” or “dignity” in writing for younger readers. Here is what he said in full:

As someone whose subway rides tend to resemble scenes from an “Evil Dead” movie, in which I am Bruce Campbell dodging zombies who have had all traces of their humanity sucked out of them by a sinister book — not the “Necronomicon,” but “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” — I sometimes wonder how any self-respecting author of speculative fiction can find fulfillment in writing novels for young readers. I suppose J. K. Rowling could give me 1.12 billion reasons in favor of it: get your formula just right and you can enjoy worldwide sales, film and television options, vibrating-toy-broom licensing fees, Chinese-language bootlegs of your work, a kind of limited immortality (L. Frank Baum who?) and — finally — genuine grown-up readers. But where’s the artistic satisfaction? Where’s the dignity?

I had to read it twice because having declared YA an undeserving audience, Itzkoff proceeded to lavish praise on two YA books (Un Lun Dun by China Miéville and Interworld by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reeves).

Itzkoff was impressed that the authors didn’t “sugar-coat” their stories for their young readers. Here’s what he says about Un Lun Dun:

When its disheveled characters are sent on exactingly prescribed quests, you can be sure these heroes will cut corners or otherwise fail to fulfill their missions; when prophecies are invoked, they generally don’t come true; and any character complacent enough to believe he or she is some sort of Chosen One is all but guaranteed not to save the day

Well deserved praise for Miéville but hey it’s rather obvious this guy hasn’t read any YA recently if he is so astonished that YA can produce edgy, intelligent novels that twist and turn and surprise.

Author Shannon Hale (her Book of a Thousand Days just won the Cybil for YA fantasy) wrote in her blog:

He must just be speaking outrageously to garner attention--his attitude is so Victorian, so narrow-minded to the point of melodrama. But I have met this attitude so many times--the goal for any real, self-respecting writer must be to have "grown-up readers." Writing for children is less than.

Even Neil Gaiman weighs in:

It's an odd review -- I think that rule number one for book reviewers should probably be Don't Spend The First Paragraph Slagging Off The Genre. Just don't. Don't start a review of romance books by saying that all romance books are rubbish but these are good (or just as bad as the rest). Don't start a review of SF by saying that you hate all off-planet tales or things set in the future and you don't like way SF writers do characters. Don't start a review of a University Adultery novel by explaining that mostly books about English professors having panicky academic sex bore you to tears but. Just don't. Any more than a restaurant reviewer would spend a paragraph explaining that she didn't normally like or eat -- or understand why other people would like or eat -- Chinese food, or French, or barbeque. It just makes people think you're not a very good reviewer.

Me? I write YA because young people delight and surprise and excite and inspire and challenge me – and as Scott Westerfeld said in a recent interview when he was asked, "Were you worried about being pigeonholed by having your novels called Young Adult?”

Young adults are far more universal readers ... politically and all sorts of other ways, kids are more open to things ... they are less narrow.