Books Are Cool is back

Books Are Cool, my books and writing website – me being Stephanie Dagg – is back. It started out back in 1996 when I began my authoring career as a children’s writer in Ireland. The site was aimed at kids with online stories they could contribute to, games, colouring pages, and poems and competitions. A lot of people had a lot of fun.

 

And I certainly had fun as an author in Ireland. I visited schools and libraries, handed out awards, toured round Irish bookshops with Don Conroy and enjoyed my writing.

 

 

 

 

 

Then the life of Dagg family changed dramatically in 2006 when we moved to France. As well as leaving Ireland behind, I left my children’s authoring behind. Building our new lives and business here took a lot of energy, on top of looking after our 75 acre farm, taking care of our herd of llamas and alpacas and our three lakes of carp, renovating two very old houses. We run a gite and carp fishery and offer llama and alpaca treks. Books Are Cool, like my writing, took a back seat.

But we’re back! I’m writing for adults now. Children’s writing was fun, and I have a couple of Young Adult ideas swilling around in my head at the moment, but my main focus will be grown up books. Which I am intending to self-publish on Kindle. I bought a Kindle in January and have become hooked. Take a look at these blog entries about it from my living in France blog, Blog in France. (Kindle Thoughts, Curling up with a Good Kindle)

In my post Write Back Where I Belong I talked about getting more books with my name on the spine onto the shelves. That was pre-Kindle. I will definitely be going the electronic route, so I’ll be doing a lot of research on that and sharing my findings with you.

I’m mainly working on three books – Something Fishy, my fishing mystery, a vaguely-knitting-based mystery and my moving to France book. All are coming along well and I’ll be posting up snippets in the very near future.

As part of my preparation for my France book, working title Heads Above the Water, I’ve read a lot of books written by other ex-pats. Some have been brilliant, some have been dull, some have been downright dreadful! Anyway, I shall be including reviews of the good ones. I don’t like doing bad reviews, there doesn’t seem much point.

So join me as I get busy again at my computer!

 

8 comments

  1. Good luck Steph! I’ll add this to my list of places to stop by on a regular basis! It’s lovely to see a photo of you – in the picture I have of you in my mind no way do you have such beautiful red hair! What a surprise!

    1. How exciting to have my first comment on the Books Are Cool site. Thank you Helen! And thank you for your compliment. My red hair comes from my two red-haired grans. They say red hair skips a generation. None of my kids have it, although Benj has a strong chestnutty tinge to his hair. Time will tell if their children turn out ginger!

  2. Well done! Now added to my favourites. I’ll be stopping by regularly to see what’s going on. I didn’t picture you with red hair either! I had heard that it skips a generation.

  3. Hi Stephanie,

    My name is Siobhan Shanaghy. I am currently teaching in Co. Kildare. We have just began your book ‘Anna’s Secret Granny’ as a class novel this week. We are very excited about what the story will entail and we are already thinkin of some mad ideas about what will happen in Anna’s tale.

    We would love if maybe we could get in contact with you over the course of reading the book. Maybe we could forward on some questions to you along the way?

    All of the class enjoyed the little blurb at the beginning of your book and tomorrow we are beginning with a little character profile on you.

    After that we’ll get stuck into reading chapter 1. It has resulted in great excitement already and I’m sure the children would love it if they could get in contact with you for real! I also cannot wait to show them your llamas and other news from your blog. Keep it up!

    Hope to hear from you soon,
    Siobhan Shanaghy. 😉

    1. I’ve sent you an email, Siobhan. I’ll answer any questions the children might have and I’d love to be involved as much as you like!

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