Shadowmancer, Bums, and Boegey's

The great bum and bogey war continues over in the UK, with G P Taylor asking in the Guardian whether "bum" is a bad word, and recounts getting tossed out of school for the first time since he was a teenager.


The kids were excited when I arrived at the school. The talk I had planned is one I have given to hundreds of children, many younger than these. It aims to fire their imaginations and get them to think the impossible. I tell them you can make a story out of anything - anything! - you can even write a story about a bogey. They all laughed and I said, all right, what happens to the bogey? They said, "Oh, it gets arms and teeth and it chases you down the street." I didn't realise at that stage that "bogey" was considered an offensive word.


The hoopla over the "harry potter is gay" story from Reuters has died down, though a few news outlets are still running it--they apparently didn't get the retraction from Reuters. And the whole episode has apparently been good for Taylor's reputation.


How many vicars get expelled from a school? At a talk I gave this morning, I said to the teacher, "Do you have any objection to me using the words bum and fart?" And he said, "Is that all? Crumbs, I wish that was all they said in the classroom."

At the end of the talk on Tuesday, one of the kids came up to me at the end when I was being thrown out. She said: "GP, that was real." The word real means cool. I took it as a great compliment.



BTW, I know that I am biased, as I am writing a book about Taylor, but his new novel, Tersias is very good. My wife even liked it, and she doesn't care much for fantasy novels of the Harry Potter variety. It's only out in the UK now, but you can get it from Amazon.co.uk.

If you are interested, The Scotsman recently ran an interesting feature on Taylor.