Guest Blogger Maureen Lynas: Happy New Competence!

Previously on Incompetence- The Series:

Episode One: Our very excited Lesser-spotted Red-faced Authors have hatched from their egg of unconscious incompetence and discovered a world in which they don't know what they don't know. Please Note : If you've just read the first episode and found no reference to the Lesser-spotted Red-faced Author blame my incompetence and lack of imagination at the time.

Episode Two: The fledgling authors discover just how enormous their incompetence is and they now know what it is that they don't know.

Library Visits…. from 'The Other Side'

By Teri Terry

I’m not referring to holding a séance, here. Though, if it could work and you could get Roald Dahl or C.S. Lewis or the like in for an afternoon, that would be interesting. But that isn’t today’s topic. Instead, I’m putting my other hat on for a moment, and looking at author visits from the library’s point of view.

Disclaimer: These are purely the views of the blog author (meaning me) and are not meant to represent anyone who may or may not be alarmed at the expression of any pro-literacy or pro-library sentiment which I may or may not hold.

Am I good to go on?

NYC 2011: Sara Zarr gives the speech that she wanted to hear

By Candy Gourlay

Reports from the 2011 Winter Conference of the Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators

I didn't manage to get a good shot of
Sara so here's a nice portrait I found
on several blogs

Note: This post has been abridged extensively since it was first posted. I'm afraid my detailed notes threw up some copyright issues and I have had to scale back my piece. Apologies to all.

The best books I've read are the ones that make me go, "OMG that was me. That book is totally who I am."

That's what I felt about YA author Sara Zarr's keynote speech on the last day of the SCBWI conference.

Sara attended her first New York conference in 2001, after five years of being serious about writing. She was frustrated - even angry.

"I wanted something to happen ... seriously, how much longer did I have to wait? I had an agent, I had finished my book ... I came in part to figure out the system and work out an angle; network the hell out of it ..." She was straining to hear that "magic piece of information" that would finally open the door.