How Big Is Your Slushpile?

By Maureen Lynas

Are you embarrassed by the size of your slushpile? Do you hide it, ignore it, lie about it? DON'T! Be PROUD of it! SHOUT about it. I'm telling you now - MINE IS HUGE!
Why am I telling you now? Well, after reading Candy's latest blog post on the trauma of completing her second book, and seeing ex-lurker Tamsin's comments about writing for six years and not giving up, I was inspired to come clean and reveal all. This is my writer's journey. From 2000 to 2012.

THE WRITER'S (HERO'S) JOURNEY

THE ORDINARY WORLD (2000)

My world was teaching in a primary school. A story lover, child lover, OFSTED hater. A wanna be writer of children’s fiction.

What I Learned From Writing My Second Novel

Dig the cool cover by David Dean who
also designed the cover of Tall Story

By Candy Gourlay

How do you finish a second novel?

With difficulty.

Especially if the book is has been listed on bloody Amazon for a YEAR and has a cover and your SENSITIVE, HELPFUL friends keep saying, 'Candy, we're going to pre-order your book!'

And life keeps getting in the way, and new ideas for future books keep sneaking into your brain except how are you ever going to write another book this one is taking so LONG, and you've got to market your OTHER book, and you're afraid of saying no to Dylan Calder and to school visits and your other book is published in paperback to a deafening silence in the United States and you know you've got to DO SOMETHING to make the Americans read it but HOW? (for pity's sake, my non-fellow Americans,  buy it on Amazon) And you've got to visit your mother in the Philippines and the children have inadvertently EATEN the fridge (again!) and blah blah blah BLAH.

Climbing Mountains with Patrick Ness, Tim Bowler, Sally Nicholls and Moira Young

by Teri Terry

On Saturday I went to the Oxford Literary festival with most of my crit group and a few others along as well. Friends, books, a gorgeous sunny day in Oxford, and promise of a pub after: bliss. But first and foremost, we were there to hear a stellar panel of award-winning YA authors on this topic:

Life, Death and Other Grown up Subjects.

Patrick Ness: author of the acclaimed Chaos Walking trilogy, the first of which had me glued hour after hour to the pages...then throwing it across the room at the end because book 2 wasn't out yet. He won the 2011 Carnegie medal for book 3, Monsters of Men, and also wrote A Monster Calls, completed from an idea left by the late Siobhan Dowd.