Still here ...

I am still head down, rear in the air, working on a few things, so sadly I am neglecting you all horribly. I feel bad. It has turned August and August is full of busyness as well so I am going to be even more distracted. The Storylines Festival is coming up and I am in Christchurch for the family day on the 19th and will be giving a workshop on 'Plotting' in Auckland on the 25th and will be at the Auckland Family Day on the 26th.  Come and say hello as that is the funnest part of the Family Day's. We really do have the most wonderful Children's Book Community and there is nothing quite like celebrating it. It will be a little strange without Margaret Mahy this year but the children's book community in New Zealand has been colluding and we are having a nationwide read of Margaret's work in libraries all round the country on the morning of August 11th. Check out if your local library is involved. Take a look at the link above if you want to take part. It is lovely to read tributes to Margaret such as these from the writing community around the world. Did we ever really truly know how lucky we were to have her?

In the meantime I am still trying to keep an eye on the book world and monitor changes and developments to pass these on to you. Things aren't changing so much as they are being chewed, digested and reformed. These two posts caught my eye. The first (thank you to Graham Beattie for the link), an article by Ewan Morrison in The Guardian, dishes on why social media doesn't extend your reach as far as you think it does when you are promoting yourself. The cynical bottom line is that all these social media tools have a bottom line and it invariably isn't about the users or the consumers, it is about the business owners. More on this topic soon I hope. The other post is from the notable Mr Nathan Bransford on how the sands are shifting under our feet.

Now I am going to hop into bed with my trusty laptop and knock off some more pages :) Oh and take a look at this - one of my books is an app

and this, a new book just out by my fabulous author friend Tania Hutley. It is VERY good!