Fife has grown on me. For years, Fife has been where trains from Inverness go really slowly and stop in lots of places when I just want to get home to Edinburgh. But today I got off at a station in Fife and visited a local school (they invited me, I didn’t just turn up!) and I had a wonderful time!
I met 50 pupils at Parkhill Primary, in Leven, who had all read First Aid for Fairies. They had put dragon masks up on the wall, and written news stories about fabled beasts (the centaur giving a builder a fright in a distillery caught my eye) and they had lots and lots of fabulous questions about the book.
I do enjoy answering the “what’s your favourite book?” and “why did you become an author?” questions that I get from kids who are getting a chance to meet an author, any author, but I really love the specific questions I get from kids who know my books well.
Today, we discussed whether Yann was right to use dark magic on a weasel (I thought he was right, 50 P4/5/6s disagreed with me. Fair enough) and who were our favourite characters in First Aid. Yann and Catesby came out top, with Rona and Sapphire close behind. Sadly NO-ONE voted for Helen. It’s just not cool being human…
The best fun we had was making up a story, all of us at the same time, just chucking ideas in the air. We ended up with a brilliant story about a robber trying to steal the manuscript of the fourth First Aid (which I’d taken to show them) and all the kind people of Fife helping to rescue it.
The biggest surprise of the day was finding out the Gaelic for peat-cutting tool from their teacher. (It’s tairsgeir, which happens to be essential for something else I’m writing…) So thanks Mr Morrison. Teachers do know everything.
And I ate a macaroni pie on the way home.
So, lots of reasons to love Fife.

The North West corner of Sutherland is the least populated part of Western Europe, which makes it a great place for fabled beasts to explore undetected, but a pretty risky place to do book events, because I could end up just reading to myself. So I was very impressed at how many people, locals and visitors, turned up to hear about Storm Singing. I did author events in Smoo Cave (and it was just as much fun telling a Viking legend in the cave as I’d hoped, and even more fun reading the scene set in the cave…) and in a community centre in Bettyhill, and in both cases 19 kids turned up and they all brought adults with them too. (19 is very exact, but we counted. I could say about 20, but it would sound like I was guessing, and I’m not!)

So, I was pretty impressed that for a place with a tiny and very scattered population, I managed to chat to 38 readers in a couple of days, about mermaids, sea monsters, cliff hangers and setting scenes in caves.

In between the events I was meant to be on holiday, so I did spend a bit of time having fun on beaches too, slithering on wet rocks, teetering on loose stones, slipping on seaweed, and being constantly reminded of Yann falling in rock pools on the first page of Storm Singing. So I kept apologising to him for putting him in such dangerous and undignified positions. And then I planned even more dangerous situations for him for the next book (which I was making long, scribbly, slightly damp notes about most of the holiday too!)

So now I’m back home, I’m getting ready for the Edinburgh Book Festival (I’m doing an event on the last Saturday, 27th August, so I have plenty of time to enjoy seeing other authors first!) but I’m also getting seriously into planning research trips and plot complications for First Aid Four. (It has no title yet, but plenty of baddies…)

(I’ll put a photo of the event in the cave up as soon as I’ve unpacked the camera!)