The Cutprice Guignol

To round up this week of positivity (and thanks to all for your support over the past few days!), and to precede getting back to our regularly scheduled snarkgramming, I wanted to talk a little about success.

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I sat down to write my very first book when I was seven years old.

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When I was a kid, my mum (hi Mum! Pet the dog for me) helped me pull a sickie to get off school to I could go see Eoin Colfer talk at a local theatre. I still remember sitting there, hiding out deep in the stands, listening to him spin these long, involved yarns – scary, funny, utterly unique, delivered in a soft Irish brogue that could snap into various characters at will – about growing up in Ireland, about his stories, about what drove him to write. He was meant to be signing books afterwards – once the queue of people who actually had copies of his latest release had dissipated, my mum approached with a page torn out of the back of her crossword puzzle book. Even though he was only meant to be signing his books, he happily scrawled down a signature on the paper, chatting with my mother about something that I was too awestruck to take in. Because this was the man who’d written the coolest books I’d ever read in my life.

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