Barry's Books
The Darkest Corners
The concluding part of this darkly funny, horror series Darren Shan called... read more
The 13th Horseman
Drake is surprised to find three Horsemen of the Apocalypse playing snakes and... read more
Doc Mortis
The fourth thrilling book in this darkly funny horror series Darren Shan called... read more
Raggy Maggie
The second book in the award-winning Invisible Fiends series. Billy is the... read more
Monthly Archives: May 2008
Further confusion
After finding a comment from children’s author Philip Ardagh on one of my earlier posts, I popped by his site to take a look. Not literally, obviously. I don’t live inside the internet, despite what my immediate family may suspect. For those of you who don’t know, Philip is the author of – among others – the Eddie Dickens Trilogy. I quite recently read Awful End, the first in the trilogy, and really enjoyed it. Perhaps even more marginally less impressively, Philip …
Confusion reigns and/or rains
Although I’m 100% sure I’ve mentioned the fact before, for the purposes of completeness let me mention again that I have a son who recently turned six. He is in his first year of primary education, and has been doing fantastically well. In particular, he is excelling at reading and writing, desipte the fact that the English language makes ABSOLUTELY NO LOGICAL SENSE WHATSOEVER. I’d heard people mention before how difficult spelling in English is, but I’ve dismissed them with …
A Letter to Skeletor
Long, long ago I wrote the letter below for another website I ran. The site was called RandomRant, and recently I was forced to take it down due to hacker/not having enough time issues. Anyway, I’ve saved all the content. Much of it isn’t … erm … suitable to go on here. Other stuff is. Over the next while I’m going to post some of the stuff which is reasonably safe for a family audience. Today we start with my …
Indiana Jones and the spanking new glasses
I find myself sitting in the sunshine with half an hour to spare, and it feels like blog posting time. The last week has been filled with writing, parents evenings, cinema visits and the purchasing of spectacles. And more writing. Business first – I finished off the first draft of my top secret and unbelievably cool children’s novel for Egmont. Submitted it last night, so now have a tortous two weeks to wait for feedback. I’m pleased with the draft, but that …
Just one last thing …
I feel like Columbo with that title up there. But without the crumpled overcoat, obviously. Or the skelly eyes. Anyway, the point of the post is that I got the proof through of my Wow! 366 story from Scholastic today. Everything seemed okay, aside from a glaring error in the spelling of my name, which I’m assured will be corrected. It appears that my story is going to be number 364 of 366. I’d convinced myself this is because they …
Ch-ch-ch-changes
It’s been a couple of weeks since my last posting. Sorry about that. While I haven’t been posting, I have been making a few changes to the site. Not big changes, or that, but changes all the same. Before the changes I had it plastered all over the pages that I was a children’s author. Which I suppose is fair enough, since I am, in fact, a children’s author. But I’m not just a children’s author. I ain’t no one …
Evil marketing genius
Yesterday, while browsing the aisles of one of the many branches of Tesco supermarket in Inverness, I was handed this leaflet, promoting cut price cooked chickens: Which is fair enough if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m not going to get into the whole free range vs intensively reared debate, or how anyone can possibly sell a chicken – cooked or otherwise – for just two pounds. What I want to discuss instead is the ‘person’ who handed me …
