Dim's Write Stuff

To throw the reader immediately into the action is a writing pre-requisite we authors often hear or try to adhere to. Doing so creates an immediacy that snags attention in the snap of just a few lines. Accomplished children’s writer of historical fiction, Pamela Rushby, achieves all this and more in each and every one of her novels. The Mud Puddlers is no exception. Oozing with atmosphere, animated characters and a fascinating glimpse into London’s not so distant history, this middle grade fiction beckons kids to believe in the possibility of time slipping. Twelve-year-old Nina is relegated to spend a year in London while her parents head to Antarctica on a research mission. Although she and Aunt Bee are close, Nina succumbs to a state of insubordinate gloom. Nothing Aunt Bee does or says can shake Nina out of her blue funk resentment at being left behind. Not even the adventure of living on her aunt’s converted barge on the river Thames is enough to enthuse. Nor the fact that her a...

What follows is a recent post of mine some of you may have read in last week's Pass It On e-zine by Jackie Hosking . It attempted to lift the lid on the curly question of 'Do books need a rating? ' As predicted this is an absorbing topic for debate, one that I'm probably not fully qualified to adjudicate but am fascinated by. Ben Marshall raised some interesting and salient points in his response (thanks Ben) in this week's PIO issue 415 . He argued 'that censoring books is a form of lying'; that young people can in fact enact their own form of censorship merely by closing the book; and that exposure to the warts and all darker bits of life through the written word is a good way to prepare them for if. I tend to agree with him. From an author's point of view, rigorous and formal censorship would only create another loop through which writers, publishers and agents alike would all have to jump, further frustrating the actual production of a book f...