The very last #ReadItTorial is saved for something that may worry those of you whose kids are getting to the point of eschewing their bedtime book reading session with you, in favour of doinking around on their mobile phones or catching up with a bit of late night telly, or any other number of distractions that mean they're no longer the starry-eyed little would-be reader that you used to cuddle on your lap when reading them the latest Julia Donaldson book.

One thing I've observed, even with a near-teen in the house, is that kids never get tired of stories.

They still crave them, in fact. Though stories may take different forms, their tastes are ever evolving after all, stories to kids can mean any number of things.

Sometimes it can be as simple as rediscovering a book you thought they'd grown out of (and one of the reasons we don't clear out our collection even more savagely than we already have) is because that cycle of rediscovery is a constant delight and one we secretly encourage.

Sometimes it may be seeking stories in different forms. C is currently obsessed with the 'storification' of some of her other interests. Developing her own narratives and a real 'plot' to Scratch games she writes, or inventing potted biographies for her Animal Crossing characters still shows signs of an interest in storytelling.

Mostly though it's the discovery that, as clued up as you are on books, sometimes one will come along that feels instantly new, original and fresh - like nothing you've ever read before, and thankfully we've managed to pick up a few books recently in our glorious local indie bookstore that have breathed new life into C's interest in upper middle grade novels, something I feared was wavering somewhat under a slew of very samey books hitting the bookstore shelves.

As this book rides off into the sunset, there's a comforting word for anyone who may feel that they're too wondering how long they've got left in book blogging, or bedtime reading, or just that brilliant connection that you can develop with your kids over the love of books and stories. The answer is "a lifetime" - it may change, may evolve but thankfully it will never disappear entirely.

Stay safe, keep reading and the biggest love to all of you who put in the hours and the effort to share stories with their kids.

Today's #Readitorial is more of a brain fart really. I'd been thinking a lot about an exercise I undertake from time to time, where I try desperately to 'read outside my comfort zone' - picking books that normally I wouldn't touch with a 50 ft barge pole. For one reason or another I'd picked up something cheap for my kindle on a whim, and despite finding it well written and the subject matter really engaging, I just couldn't finish it (though I'm determined that I'm going to give it another go).

Other books were distracting me. As book lovers will tell you, you'll always have half a dozen or more books vying for your attention and sometimes even stuff you've read before is preferable to something that's way outside your preferred genres or writing styles.

So it seems travelogues aren't for me. Some might enjoy the thrill of vicariously living a wonderful travelling life through someone else's eyes but like watching sport, I can't be doing with any of that 'distance enjoyment' - I'd much rather go to those countries (or in some cases play those sports) myself.

ANYWAY back on track. The #Booky100Keepers articles made me think about the conscious and unconscious influence both my wife and I might have had on our daughter throughout her reading journey. It's glaringly obvious from the articles that we've introduced her to books we loved as kids, and it's also glaringly obvious that - from book of the week choices - those books have steered C's reading tastes in certain directions.

Sometimes I worry that things might have been entirely different if we hadn't done this. To be fair, C always got to choose her own books from the library when we first started out on the blog but as the blog evolved over the last ten years, I'd slip in comic recommendations or steer C towards books that usually had fantasy or sci-fi as central themes, and she would gobble them up greedily on her reading pile whereas I'd often find that stuff authors / illustrators were writing more with her in mind were often left neglected.

There's a weird perception in kidlit that marketers, publishers and child well-being experts know exactly what a child of a particular age, gender and reading ability *should* like and be reading, which is usually in complete contrast to what a child will tell you they enjoy reading if you, y'know, actually ask them - and again this feels like an area where adults try to steer kids in specific directions to suit some bizarre narrowly defined pigeonholing system that makes absolutely no sense, either from a development or even from an economic perspective.

I believe that parents do exert the most influence on their kids development (you'd hope) with school / teachers probably coming up a very close second.

The thing that also occurs to me is that parents (well, adults) are who children's books are heavily marketed at, and that goes some way to explain the whole 'moral gatekeeper' thing that publishers love to do (which drives me absolutely crazy if I'm honest), ensuring their books are wholesome and follow themes that you'd hope would lead to kids developing a strong sense of good and evil, right and wrong and all the other stuff you'd want a child to learn in their personal development.

When I asked C about this directly, she acknowledged that now she's heading towards her teens, the biggest frustration for her is that all the publishing marketing still works on the basis of pushing books at the parents rather than at her directly. I don't quite agree with this but for her age group, the wilderness years between 8-12 I think she might actually have something, it's only when books move towards the umbrella of YA that they begin to be marketed directly at their target audience, and the biggest influencers on that market are social media platforms. Publishers know this which is why bookstagrammers / booktubers / booktiktokers are leading the charge in pumping new life into the YA market.

Back to the parental influence thing and again wisdom from C. Her point of view now is that mum and dad's tastes might not cut it any more, so when she goes into a bookshop she may still retain some vestiges of specific book tastes from us, but almost goes out of her way to 'rebel' and pick stuff that has developed from her own tastes and influences (a lot of influence creeps in from friends and social media more at 12, so again this feels like the beginnings of the whole YA influencer sphere I mentioned above).

One thing above all else though, even if you do feel like you're influencing your kid's reading taste, if you're a parent who is actively engaged in reading to your kid, encouraging them to love books, and perhaps even encouraging them to break out of their comfort zone now and again (which I wish I'd done more of, if I'm honest), then you're doing a brilliant job and it will pay dividends for your kid throughout their school and later life. Keep up the excellent work!

Today's #ReaditTorial goes off on a tangent a bit so apologies in advance if you don't make it all the way through to the end. I've been reading "Dear NHS: 100 Stories to say Thank You" by Adam Kay and it's the sort of book that (obviously) makes you incredibly thankful for this amazing service, but also makes you angry that there are folk out there (mostly those plenty rich enough to afford oodles of private healthcare for their overfed gigantic ego-driven hides) who want to put it in the bin.

Reading through the stories from well known and not-so-well-known celebrities, authors, presenters and poets who have contributed to the 100 stories here reminded me of my own recent reasons to be extremely thankful for the NHS.

In fact Jaqueline Wilson's story in this book felt closest to my own experiences. For the first 52 years of my life I've had minor brushes with being in hospital myself, a couple of childhood things, a rather fetching scar on my chin from trying to balance on a football at school after watching "Gerry Cottle's Circus" - that sort of thing. Most of the time I had reason to go into hospital was to visit family or friends who were in there. The NHS saved my little brother from kidney failure and I remember the selfish feeling of hating hospitals and never wanting to visit them, but wanting to go in there to see him, spoil him rotten and make sure he was OK (which he was). The same went for my mum when she had a hysterectomy, and of course I went in to watch my daughter being born (again a story in the book struck a chord - Charlie Brooker, you're not the only one who took a terrible, terrible bad quality photo of your newborn but it's still the best photo you've ever taken and your most treasured).

My wife has had epilepsy since she was a teen, and I've been in with her several times - for scans and tests, and for a week's worth of monitoring. Like everyone else, taking all this stuff for granted, that it will just happen, it's just there, it's just provided. Grateful but strangely detached from it all.

They say that it takes something actually happening to you to really give you some perspective. We've seen this with the COVID-19 stuff, those self-obsessed individuals blithely refusing to wear masks, fetching up at the beach for a day of peeing everyone off with their disposable barbecues and poo-filled burger containers, claiming that the whole thing is some government hoax and that it's not nearly as serious as everyone makes out, full of ridiculous bravado until a friend or relative or close family member ends up with the Coronavirus and ends up gravely ill (or worse).

A month and a half ago I got up for work as normal. I'd recently been diagnosed with gallstones and had had one or two painful nights where those sharp little buggers had decided to have a disco in my guts. After a morning of work I was in the middle of making lunch when I suddenly felt pain like I'd never experienced before. Pain swiftly followed by vomiting and a feeling that any minute I was going to hit the floor hard.

I started howling - and I do mean howling, that's how bad the pain was. My poor wife and daughter were in the house and my wife phoned 999. Within minutes an ambulance arrived and two paramedics were there - two complete heroes who I never got the chance to properly thank. They took me to hospital, dosing me up with much needed pain relief, soothing talk, and all the things you need when all you can think about is how you feel like you've swallowed a tiger and it's trying to escape through your stomach wall.

I spent a week and a half in hospital being scanned, tested and tended to (Emilia Clarke's "Fish in white sauce" anecdote from the book made me smile, it was about the only meal I had the entire time - for the rest of the time I was on a drip only allowed to occasionally sip black tea). I had one of the most painful procedures possible for someone who is already in pain (an endoscopic scan which took 2 hours and left me feeling like I'd been mugged), and since then I've been back to hospital several times for followups. Acute gall bladder disease / pancreatitis was the diagnosis and it scared the living piss out of me. I dropped two stone (when I came out of hospital I couldn't even recognise my own reflection in the mirror nor the shape of my body, which began as a bloated sort of pear shape but rapidly shrank down until I looked like Jack Skellington on a slimfast diet).

All the care I received, all the things that you think are insignificant while you're lying in a hospital bed, all the staff that it takes to maintain a ward under normal circumstances, and all the staff it now takes to deal with the same ward under the current COVID-19 crisis, all of that stuff is what's at stake from a government that plays the sly fox card of pretending to care about the NHS, throwing token amounts of money at it, but always with an eye on how they could dismantle the whole thing and leave those on limited means literally dying because they can't afford private health insurance or coverage.

We clapped, we support them, but somehow it still feels like the NHS is living on borrowed time, but we will all fight - we (me, my family, everyone I know) and those who contributed to this wonderful book and the many millions and millions in the country who have stories to tell like mine.

2020 might well be remembered as the 'year of the virus' but it's also going to be remembered as the year that an entire nation stood up to a stupid shredded-wheat haired President and shouted "enough is enough".

One thing I wasn't really prepared for was how angry Twitter would make me while #BlackLivesMatter protesters the world over mobilised and began to make their voices heard (not anger at them of course, but anger at the way they were being portrayed).

Some of the sources of annoyance were obvious, for example our own trash-fire political system slyly trying to brush its chief advisor's blatant ignorance of the COVID-19 lockdown to serve his own ends, while simultaneously readying itself to blame the inevitable 2nd wave of COVID-19 infections on the protests that have been taking place in major cities here.

The other annoyance was the disgusting "bowing and scraping" going on from the publishing industry. Suddenly every agent or commissioning editor seemed to be crawling out of the woodwork to offer black creatives all sorts of tantalising deals, almost a free run at the submissions process so that they could tell their stories, make themselves heard. Silently in the background listening to the "Ka-CHING!" from book sales of fast-tracked titles pushed out to serve a public who now, more than ever, want to make sure their kids know what's going on and are kept well informed from an early age.

It's laudable, of course it is but I'm horribly cynical about this stuff, just as I was horribly cynical about the tidal wave of eco-cash-in books that arrived when Greta Thunberg's plaintive globe-saving messages began to come to public attention, or the many books that pull the same stuff with women's rights.

If there's a buck to be made, it seems, the industry knows no shame.

As it says in the header of this article, true diversity and representation of black talent in children's books isn't some gaudy little brooch to pin to your publishing house, wearing it around to impress your friends and notch up a few extra book sales.

Simultaneously to the hideous (and quite rightly pilloried) guilt-assuaging going on was a Twitter thread about the money that authors are paid as advances by their publishers. The UK figures told the same old story they always do. UK authors and illustrators get a pitiful sum compared to their US counterparts, and of course the more famous you are, the bigger the loot grab from writing or illustratng (well, that is common sense). But then there's the whole question of the whopping great big advances paid to celebrity authors who (in most cases) will inevitably end up with their well-meaning books clustered like flies at the bottom of the bargain bin in factory clearance outlets like "The Works".

Back to #BlackLivesMatter though, and the simple fact that some publishers - independent and still sadly considered 'non mainstream' really know how to promote and encourage black talent, in fact world talent from a rich and diverse set of cultures stretching right across our planet. As much as the UK children's publishing industry seems locked in a litany of producing and publishing the same tired old moral messages and themes year in year out, publishers such as Tiny Owl and Lantana are quietly, without pomp or ceremony, producing some of the best diverse books on the planet by some of the most awesome black authors and illustrators.

Some Twitter folk have been, quite rightly, rounding on those who have been making advances to them, pointing out that the rather empty gesture won't be sustained. The UK Children's publishing industry is still an industry that systematically fails to consider the rich diversity of our country, and still seems to think it's fine to parade the inclusion of a minor black character in a book like it's some new amazing pioneering thing they've just discovered, when really all kids want to see in a book is themselves, their lives, and the way they look and feel about things being treated as it always should be, as the norm not the exception.

We've had a lot to say on this subject for quite some time, and have always championed diversity here. Racism is an antiquated concept that has held the world back for far too long, it's about time it got in the bin.

https://readitdaddy.blogspot.com/search?q=diverse

Over the last few days we've been feverishly going through our old books from one end our shelves to the other. It's the "Stay at home" equivalent of running a marathon in your back yard, or climbing mount everest by measuring the amount of times you can go up and down stairs, only in literary form.

The whole point of our #Booky100Keepers articles was to describe some of the reasons we began the book blog in the first place, why we fell hopelessly in love with books (and writing about books) and all those intricate little stories and moments that emerged from encountering these for the first time, and again some years later.

Most folk aren't really interested in other people's retrospectives and if we're totally honest with ourselves, these articles are our swansong, our way of bowing out gracefully with one last collection of the truly awesome books that have led us to this point.

Nostalgia is addictive. Most people will hear a particular song and like a jump-cut in a movie, be thrown back to the place and time in their lives where they first heard it, or where they kissed someone while it played in the background, or it was played at someone's funeral, or on their car stereo during a road trip. Some people will get the same jump cut from watching their favourite movies, and we have most definitely been getting it from reading these books.

As you'll see as the 100 days count down to August, there's a lot of love for the books and the folk who have created them in these articles, and we hope that above all else that comes across in what we're writing. There's also that other part of the addiction of nostalgia, the hope that folk will read these retrospectives and dash out and want to read / own these books themselves, to share with their own kids, or (in some cases) to read themselves.

Our world has changed, is changing, will change but the powerful draw of nostalgia will never alter, and we truly hope you're enjoying these. Though work is busy I'll try and tweet about the articles (the automation stuff will tweet about them for me anyway but it does a bit of a half arsed job) and also don't forget that there'll be articles during the weekend too, we really are pulling out all the books - and all the stops - and we've got a lot to get through so thank you if you're joining us on this journey, and give yourself a huge pat on the back if you fall in love with any of these books, you have exquisite taste!

When I was a kid, I hated the spring and summer. The sunny weather, and the fresh air were always the precursors to parental and grandparental nagging to "get outside, climb some trees, go get some Vitamin D into your skin" and it took a long time (well, adulthood really) before I began to crave being outdoors.

Under the current craziness, the near lockdown of the country and folk being urged to stay at home (obviously super-effective as a strategy because, from my window, I can see a couple of hairnetted old dears merrily having a chat outside my window, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they - in the highest risk group - could literally be talking their last) it feels like something's changed in terms of writing a book blog.

Now I'm working from home, the day job currently involves supporting a whole metric ton of other workers who are similarly working on creaky old computer equipment, trying to look like they're capably doing their work as efficiently as they would be if they were sitting in an office. That, of course, still relies on them having a strong work ethic, and buckling down to adapting to what is the new norm (don't you just hate that cheesy cliche and every time someone uses it? I know I do, I think I got tired of it a fortnight ago).

For book blogging, amazingly thanks to our awesome postal service and a lot of hard working PRs out there who are still kicking arse, the books are still arriving and I'm dutifully adding them to our review schedule.

The tough part is getting excited about them. I mean they're wonderful books, but it's so damned hard to focus and concentrate on something you love, when the world is filled with all the things you hate.

People's anger, people's selfishness, an inept government assuming that folk are going to be fine and dandy with staying in all day every day as the sun shines overhead, who won't mind being rounded up and told off by their local coppers if they're seen more than twice in one day. The way certain things just don't work any more, and the saddest of all, if you are crazy enough to venture out of your house - all those local shops and businesses you were once proud of being in a permanent state of lights off / no one home, with sad little printed posters up in their windows apologising to their customers in that typically English way we do when we're apologising for something that's not our fault - with eloquence and politeness edged with sarcasm and annoyance.

All these distractions, and also staying largely away from Twitter (because god, I really am sorry, but I don't need the constant moany grumpiness of the place laced with cheery folk playing ukuleles and singing John Lennon songs, on balance I can't decide which is worse).

As a family unit we are spending more time together (we don't live in a gigantic mansion, we kind of have to!) but the book stuff is suffering, and I don't honestly know what's going to happen over the next few weeks as I increasingly struggle to find time to write up our reviews.

We're still reading the books, still enjoying them but a troubled mind isn't one that lends itself well to focusing on nice things like kidlit. That's really pissing me off more than anything else at the moment.

I honestly can't tell you why I've always been attracted to dystopian fiction. From an early age I remember reading the works of "The Three Johns" (John Gordon, John Christopher and John Wyndham) when I started to cut my teeth on chapter books, and each of them were past masters at describing the end of the world.

In Wyndham's case, "The Day of the Triffids" came fairly close to describing what is going on in the world in the wake of the outbreak of COVID-19, in particular people's selfishness coming to the fore rather than their 'blitz spirit'

Sure there are good people in the world, but there are seemingly more people in the world who will panic buy toilet roll, then sell it on whatever online retail platform they can war-profiteer on for ludicrous amounts of cash (a 12 pack of cushelle being openly advertised on (spit) Amazon for £94.99 by one particular seller just made me laugh, then grimace, then made me extremely angry that Amazon were facilitating this, but then again they're not the only ones seeing an opportunity for huge economic growth in Q1 of this year).

No one really wrote about panic buying or shortages of bog roll in any of the books I grew up with. No one ever wrote about the truly awful measures most employers would stoop to in order to ensure their workforce stay put, stay in work, and in most cases stay in danger of enabling the spread of the virus.

In Stephen King's "The Stand" - a book that dealt with a worldwide pandemic of a virulent killer flu, and the lives of survivors on both sides of good and evil, the breakdown of society was more or less immediate - it almost felt like the novel wanted to get to the nitty gritty of 'what comes after' rather than concentrate on the bits where society unravels like a poorly knitted sweater for want of a couple of packs of dried pasta.

One other thing that most of these books missed was the truly evil depths that news agencies would stoop to as the pandemic grew worse. It's almost as if Randall Flagg (the main evil protagonist in "The Stand") has been granted free reign to incite panic and irresponsible behaviour almost at will.

Max Brooks' sublime "World War Z" did a better job of picking at those details, as things started to really become grim, there were harrowing passage in the book that described a ragtag band of humans trying to make their way to a non-existent sanctuary, banding together but still with the element of self-preservation driving them more than anything else. One passage about 'a bowl of stew' just about finished me off. Let's hope we never get to that stage, though I guess I'm corn-fed so I'll probably taste great, just saying.

For the majority of folk waking up to the news every morning, and wishing they could just go back to bed, it feels like I'm almost coming at this from the perspective of Henry (Hank) Palace in "The Last Policeman" - probably the best piece of 'end of the world' fiction I've read in my grown-up years.

Carrying on as if the world isn't burning around us, dutifully setting off to work every morning (for how much longer, I really can't say - Universities are shutting up shop and moving into online / virtual environments day on day - and in the particular area of work I cover in my day job it's almost like the loo roll in terms of watching people practically knifing each other to grab a piece of online workspace for themselves as cloud services begin to falter and fail globally, completely unable to keep up with the demand).

There have been several folk musing over what children's publishing may look like in a year or more's time, when those first inspired authors begin to spin up their own grand stories about pandemics, dystopias and abject misery at the end of civilisation.

So many launches and events are getting cancelled that it feels like the creative industry is getting a royal kicking, but we so need it - we really do.

If we're all still here once the dust settles and the mania subsides (of course we will be, I hope!) I think I'll have had enough of the world as we know it by then, and may even have to give up my filthy dystopian reading habits and look for happy shiny joyful books instead. So if you're digging into your manuscript pile digging out all those unfinished dystopian novels, shuffle them to one side and look for the happy, positive stuff instead. I have a feeling that's going to end up being what people will want to read, need to read.

After last week's moanfest about celebrity books, and a real "5 rounds rapid" rant prepared for next week's ReadItTorial I thought it was time to pen something more positive - particularly as today is World Book Day, and the nation's lucky kids get to go to school dressed as their favourite book characters.

Sometimes it's easy to get trapped in an endless loop of seeing the children's publishing industry in a bad light, but kidlit folk are pretty much the best type of folk you could ever hope to meet (though we don't get to meet nearly as many as we'd like - there are still plenty of folk out there that are on our blog 'bucket list' that we'd dearly love to chat to in 'real' life).

This week we've been rapping with one particular author whose book, rather nattily, is published today. An awesome wordsmith who writes just the type of stuff we both really love (you know who you are! I think we've gushed on enough about your books!)

It just struck me that, despite the many things that an author could be negative about (pay, awful celebrity book deals, annoying expectations around promotion of your work etc), you have genuinely nice folk out there using their amazing talents to tell us their stories.

There are of course also folk out there who have an equally amazing talent in illustration, others who excel at making brilliant comics and graphic novels, and in a lot of cases, in mastering the intricacies of face-to-face events where they get to meet their young audiences.

On the rare occasions we've met book folk, particularly those who know who we are (which still amazes us and fills us with joy) and know what we do here on the blog, we've been overwhelmed by people's friendliness and approachability. Sometimes we feel we're probably taking up way too much of their time, but in most cases their enthusiasm and joy in doing what they do is completely infectious and we always come away glad to be a part of that world even in the fairly 'part time' way we currently are.

It goes for other bloggers and fab folk who work in libraries and book stores. Talking about books with lovely folk is almost as addictive and fun as reading the books in the first place.

And then there's Twitter. Again, it's very easy to be negative about the place - after all it does bring out the very worst in some people, but book folk on Twitter form such a strong community - and are brilliant to talk to or get book recommendations to, or share a moan with when the opportunity arises.

I've talked a bit in the past about social anxiety and what it sometimes feels like when you sum up all the courage you can to get to a book launch or an event. It can be really difficult to describe how hard it is for someone like me to have a toe-to-toe fight with my anxiety before I take myself to one side, have a serious word with myself, and go to an event. Even when you're in a room with amazing booky folk and do feel like a fish out of water, you can normally bet someone will come over for a chat - or you'll meet someone you've been chatting to online on Twitter who likes what you do as much as you like and admire what they do.

If you're starting out in book blogging with your own kids, I almost envy you. Even if you feel a bit like me, a bit shy of meeting other people, perhaps petrified of being in a room full of booky folk, pause for a moment and consider this.

Ahead of you is an amazing world of possibilities to share something amazing with your kids - and instil in them a love of books that will pay dividends by the bucketload, not just bonding time over something you mutually love, but all those experiences that emerge from amazing stories and illustrations, or opportunities to see amazing inspirational people talking about their work.

I guarantee you and your kids will remember all those moments too. You may find other interests, experience that strong streak of independence that descends on your kids as they enter their early teens, but you'll never move on from books, books are for life!

Couldn't you just ping him on his annoying little nose?

3 years ago we wrote a thinkpiece about emerging trends, and even back then we talked about how we were getting more than a bit tired of kid detectives.

It's now 2020, and in middle grade fiction, kid detectives are flippin' everywhere - and they're just as annoying and smug as they were back in 2017. 9 times out of ten we crack open a new parcel of middle grade books only to find that most books are based around a nosy over-privileged kid who has nothing better to do with their time than get in the way of grown-up law enforcement agencies, treading all over the evidence in crime scenes while trying to big up their own natural curiosity as some sort of detective insight.

We exaggerate of course - and as usual kid authors usually do a fantastic job of taking a well-worn trope and putting their own spin on it. We've seen kid detectives who carry out their sleuthing in hospitals their mums work at. We've seen kid detectives working their magic in creepy old hotels, and we've seen kid detectives scraping together a crime-solving gang of BFFs to bring miscreant criminals to justice in some of the great examples where the detective storyline plays out in a new and innovative way. So some detective books still make it into our "Book of the Week" slot despite us being pretty grumpy about JAKDBs in general.

But what is behind this trend? Do authors have a fondness for certain books from their own childhoods and certain detective heroes that they want to transpose into their own stories and situations?

One thing we're beginning to notice is that there's a change in the wind. My oldest and bestest genre buddy, Science Fiction, is once again becoming a rich fertile and inspirational ground for middle grade fiction authors looking to break away from "another nosy kid" books into something that - to me at least - offers a more exciting place to daydream in.

The future? Many possible futures in fact, and not all of them bright and rosy.

When I was struggling with the content of a middle grade writing course just over a year ago, I was told in no uncertain terms that science fiction / dystopia was 'a dead duck' in middle grade. No point in writing any, no one will give it a second glance.

Yet here we are in 2020 - when the idea of a dystopic setting has radically changed away from "This will never happen, but what if it did" towards "This is probably going to happen tomorrow, and here's how it'll play out".

This year, in particular, we've seen a whole brace of new science fiction / dystopia books in the middle grade market that are absolutely incredible. So much so in fact that it's becoming very difficult to pick "Chapter Book of the Week" winners each week, trying to balance out a decent set of content from the blog that doesn't go completely overboard and merely favour these books because we both like reading science fiction and dystopic stuff. No, these are great books regardless of their genre, beautifully written with breathtaking scene-setting and characters that feel relatable and believable even when you're talking about books that deal with some pretty far-out subjects, such as the colonization of other planets, or the rise and rise of AI and robotics.

To me, Science Fiction has always been about the impossible made possible, the far-off brought a bit nearer, and the terribly climactic apocalyptic made into a place where you want to spend your reading time. A neat trick if you can pull it off.

Science fiction allows you to get away with almost anything. In middle grade terms, this does not translate to being able to easily pull the wool over kids' eyes though, and your sparkly new sci fi middle grade novel will fall as flat as a well-worn-out detective novel if you treat kids like they're idiots, and don't show your working for the fantasy worlds and characters you're devising.

Now more than ever, kids are switched on to science - so in some ways you have a tougher job of writing middle grade sci fi. Your plot has to be bomb-proof. Your tech can be crazy and unimaginable but still needs to be relatable and feel like something that kids can picture in their own minds as 'working'.

But it's exciting stuff nonetheless. One thing we always try (and fail) to do when it comes to plotting book trends is to wonder what might come next, and I have a sneaky suspicion that kid detectives will still be around when we write a follow-up article to this in 3 years time (if indeed this blog still exists) but I'd love to see the rise and stellar rise of sci fi too, that's for sure.

Noseying into yet another Twitter conversation as the inspiration for this week's ReadItTorial, I read an exchange between two noted comic creatives who were musing on the concept of celebrating their own successes, and how caustic the reaction can be when you do so on social media.

Ah, the British. We are a nation that, on the one hand, are fiercely proud of our heritage (despite most of it coming from abroad), almost to a fault. We also seem to have an inbuilt pathological dislike of success, partly justified when people who regularly 'fail upwards' here seem to reap amazing rewards despite being utterly hopeless.

BUT we are also very quick to kick people when they're down, extracting some twisted sense of deep joy when someone fails so spectacularly that they make the news, or become a meme, or whatever the modern equivalent of 'ending up in the stocks pelted with rotten fruit' is.

When I see creatives talking about being shy about celebrating their successes, or perhaps even talking about some nice thing they've purchased for themselves off the back of their hard-earned endeavours in kidlit, comics or art, I can't help thinking we've all got it completely wrong here. Why do we feel the need to chastise folk who describe how a book advance has helped them realise their dream of going on a smashing holiday, doing up their crumbling house, hell - even purchasing a flashy new gadget to further their creative efforts? Yet here we are.

This topic dovetails neatly with another that I keep meaning to drag onto our ReadItTorial slot, the thorny subject of due reward when it comes to creative effort. Many times we've discussed the class divide in children's publishing, and that extends out into other forms of creative and non-creative writing. Let's face it, to make a career in writing you need to have at least another (quite often non-creative) career that pays your bills - possibly for a very long time - before you can lop that off and just concentrate your efforts on the creative stuff.

Long ago I completely gave up on taking my meagre art training forwards into anything either in furthering my education or trying to build a freelance or paid gig career from it. Not just because (truthfully) I'm not very good, but mostly because I know I can earn enough to support a family and own a house from working in the soul-crushing hate-filled abcess of a job known as "IT". In a world where you either work your bollocks off to make a living, or you're born with a silver spoon jammed firmly between the lips you never kiss with, you could probably count huge moneyspinning creative career professionals you know or converse with on the fingers and toes you possess, possibly with a few left over.

I really wish it wasn't that way. I would love to be paid to write, I really would. Writing is something I can do, at great speed, in great volume, but I've never seen anything I could move sideways into, writing wise, that could possibly compete with my current gig in terms of a solid monthly pay packet that's fairly comfortable to live on, if not excessive.

New authors must feel a little bit like this. Some are prolific and can turn out enough books to keep their heads above water, but for most, the creative process is time (and resource) consuming and can't just be churned through - and for most, if they can manage a book a year, they feel they're doing OK - and I doubt there are many emerging authors in kidlit who could earn an advance that's good enough to live on for a year when they're starting out.

Virtually every single piece of guidance I see for new and prospective authors and illustrators in kidlit start with the stark point one of "Never do it for the money, there is no money" and that remains true. Which, in a roundabout way, brings me back to my original point of thinking that we should be clapping creatives on the back when they make enough to afford something nice for themselves, not shouting them down for it.