A Very Writerly Update

August and Sep­tem­ber are always busy months in the writerly world of Mel­bourne. There are writ­ers fes­ti­vals, Book Week cel­e­bra­tions and much schmooz­ing to attend to. As well as occa­sional bouts of (shock, hor­ror, etc) writing.

To recap, here’s exactly what’s been going on in my writerly world lately:

I reviewed two of the nov­els short­listed in this year’s Young Adult cat­e­gory of the Vic­to­rian Premier’s Lit­er­ary Awards - The Shiny Guys by Doug MacLeod and The Shadow Girl by John Larkin (win­ners announced on Octo­ber 16).

I cham­pi­oned Gillian Rubenstein’s clas­sic novel Space Demons as part of Kill Your Dar­lings’s YA Chal­lenge (in the end Tomor­row, When The War Began won — reg­is­ter your com­plaints here).

Dur­ing Book Week in late August I did a few school vis­its, author talks and blog­ging work­shops (here are a cou­ple of snaps from such a work­shop with the grades threes and fours of Fitzroy North Pri­mary School).

I also chaired a hand­ful of school ses­sions at the Mel­bourne Writ­ers Fes­ti­val and was lucky enough to meet and chat to John Boyne (about his glo­be­trot­ting, adven­ture novel The Ter­ri­ble Thing That Hap­pened To Barn­aby Brocket), John Larkin and Heath McKen­zie (about their new — and very funny — series Nerdy Nin­jas) and Scot Gard­ner who had just won the CBCA older read­ers prize for his stel­lar YA novel The Dead I Know (which you must read if you haven’t already).

All this on top of recently fin­ish­ing another draft of what I hope will become Book Num­ber Two. I will, how­ever, save all ‘huz­zahs’ and ‘w00ts’ for when that final draft is done.

Thus endeth this writerly update.

And since I have returned to one of my favourite blog­ging themes with the mock goat blog above, here is a video of a baby goat jump­ing around like a maniac. Enjoy!

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