Ra Bugtown!

In preparation for this book fight coming off in August, I've just re-read Bugtown. Apart from a couple of typos, it seemed to be in English anyway. I must have given this book to twenty kids to read at least and didn't ever get a bad reaction. In fact, some of the reactions were brilliant. This probably doesn't say anything good about Bugtown. Most of the stuff punted at kids is crap.

For some reason I was thinking about Robert Louis Stevenson the other day. Treasure Island isn't a kidbook these days because most twelve and thirteen year olds I see couldn't read it.

I put Anjali Pratap into Google and this blog comes up second and third. That's a drag! She must have read Bugtown by this time. Wonder why she hasn't got back to me. Bugtown would make a great film. It's got dinosaurs, castles, aliens, bugs .... but couldn't get an agent to look at it. Ms Pratap is probably only the second or third and I finished it a couple of years ago. Kids liking books isn't any reason to publish them of course. Most kidbooks sit on the shelves and nobody wants to read them! I'm going to read Light in the Dark tomorrow. I so enjoyed writing that book. Be indecent to make money from something you liked doing so much.

But the one good thing about getting books published is that you don't have to read them again!

11:15 p.m.
You can eat stuff almost straight out the ground now. You can pull out turnips and twist the leaves off and just eat them. People might look at you if you do it a lot. But it was an especially beautiful day today. Like being somewhere that wasn't Scotland. Spain maybe. The earth has proved most fecund this year. I was in the allotment for three hours tonight. Saw a mouse. Ate a turnip. Watered the tatties. No back breaking stuff. The meditations were good without being spectacular.