Busy Week

Last week was frantic.  There’s no other word that quite fits.  Monday - Chorleywood and a visit to St Clement Danes School.  Nice crowd.  :-)  The downside was it meant that the drive to Glasgow was longer than ever.  :-(  Still, I made good time and enjoyed a pleasant evening chatting with an old friend with whom I was to stay for the next two nights.

 The next day was Hillpark Secondary School.  A slightly tougher crowd, but some of the young writers showed a lot of potential in the workshops.  I felt a bit jaded by the evening, and in trepidation of the long day to follow.  Wednesday I was to visit Govan High School.  Small groups, but hard work.  Again, some great writing from the young people, but I found myself increasingly looking out of the window at the rain and dreading the drive back to Daventry … with good reason.  The UEFA Cup final was being held in Glasgow that day.  The traffic and weather were atrocious.  I rapidly developed a stinking headache during the seven hour drive home. 

 Some light relief along the way was found in the form of a side trip to Arnside where I met up with Geoff Taylor, the artist who painted the wonderful covers of my books.  I’d never met him before - what a delightful man.  I hope I can persuade Simon & Schuster to continue using him to produce the artwork for my covers.  We enjoyed a drink and a bite to eat in the Albion Hotel down by the estuary before I was forced to hit the road again.  I arrived home at about 11.30pm and fell into bed only to get up early the next day in order to drive to Cardiff.

 Cardiff was the venue for my audition, along with fellow authors Charles Butler and Linda Strachan (who writes books about the delightful Hamish McHaggis), for Codex - the TV game show hosted by Tony Robinson in the British Museum.  We all seemed to score quite highly on the history quiz, and none of us were camera shy (one bonus of the profession) so we came away feeling positive.  Whether we get chosen as a team to feature on the show remains to be seen.  I’ll report back sometime over the next week.  Whatever happens, however, it was a fun experience and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting up with my fellow SAS (Scattered Authors Society) members.

Friday was spent at Weston Favell Junior High, where I was running workshops based around creating Shakespearian style characters in a European setting and on writing European Conflict based pieces from multiple viewpoints.  It was something of a challenge, but then life would be dull if everything was easy.  To finish the week off I drove to Reading on Saturday to speak to a group from ACW (The Association of Christian Writers) and to run a short story writing workshop in the afternoon.  I’d like to think I’ve earned a rest, but there’s to be little respite, as I’ve another three school visits this week.  Whoever said life as an author involved sitting in a shed at the end of a garden writing on endless reams of paper?