Month: August 2011
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Festival of Stories
August 27, 2011This week has been Children’s Book Week, for those of you who work in the book world. And I have to say I had lots of fun hanging out with kids in grade 5,6 and years 7 and 8. And I’m very happy to see these kids really into books and writing, as well as illustration.
Earlier in the year, I proposed a Festival of Stories to CAL Funding Agency to hold a series of writing and illustration workshops at the Yarra Plenty Regional Library with these kids. It has been a great week and has been a win-win for the library, the schools as well as the facilitators who I was able to get to run the workshops.
Our own Kev Howlett, Simon Swingler, Paul Collins and Hazel Edwards all ran workshops to kids who were thoroughly engaged for each two hour workshop. And don’t these kids show us how to be creative!
I look forward to gathering all their work and putting it into an anthology that we’ll launch in November.
Busy Busy
August 18, 2011I had planned to write here more often but i’ve been busy going to writing festivals and dealing with sick computers. They sound like writerly occupations, don’t they?
The Byron Bay Writers’ Festival was fantastic. Exactly the right medicine to get the creative juices flowing and to think about what it means to me when people are panicking about the so-called death of the book. Personally, I don’t think that the book will die. It will sit nicely alongside ebooks and everyone will get along. I was very impressed with a panel of women from Smashwords. They are taking the future into their own hands and embracing both traditional publishing and epublishing. And they aren’t young chicks who have grown up with computers. They’ve just realised that epublishing is part of the future.
There were some at the festival who seem to think that the way things were are better and that those of us who think we can write don’t count! I won’t name any names, it doesn’t really matter. These people will just have to get with the times.
So, my brain has really been ticking and as much as I am in love with the real book, I can see the benefits of an ebook and I will embrace it.