Hello Fellow Children’s Writers and Friends,

I know I owe you at least one of these posts and I thank those of you who’ve been checking in regularly on my Journeygirl Facebook page, for both your support and your patience. Despite the radio silence, I have actually done a lot and I suggest you take this one with a cup of your favourite hot beverage and a biscuit or two. A mild but chronic illness, plus work has meant doing ‘all the things’ or writing about them. Not that I’ve done ‘all’ the things, that’s impossible, as much as I wish it weren’t.

Since the last blog, I attended a self-run retreat with a couple of friends where I wrote and severely edited a brand new Picture Book ms thanks to my retreat buddies critique of it. I also a attended a CYA Bootcamp at the end of an enjoyable and restful week away with Daryl. Not a bad way to do it.

Crystal Corocher who ran the Bootcamp had a novel idea for the manuscript I submitted, no pun intended. I worked on it a fair bit after that, but decided to submit a couple of Picture Books to her to review post-Bootcamp instead. She absoutely loved one of them: the one from the retreat, which my Western Sydney (WSKL) critique group helped me polish (close) to perfection. Thanks team, you’re the best! I even had a personal win reading it at the monthly WestWords Live in September and taking home the prize, an Anthology called The Power of Football (which I hope is a bit like Ted Lasso 😄 We’ll see.) The PB’s now out on submission, fingers crossed. 🤞🏽

Speaking of the wonderful WSKL that is where much of my free time (Is there such a thing?) has gone and we are all working hard to grow it, our stories and most importantly our unique Western Sydney voice and love of literature. There is still a lot of work to do, but we have made some very important contacts and are excited about what the future might bring for us and the home we love.

These seeds we are planting and hope to see bloom in future generationas include doing a Book Week at a local preschool, where the children enjoyed hearing our books, asking us questions, playing with our activities and more than once climbing up to sit near one of us to be close to the book. Such a joy to experience. Jess the director of Nido is also keen for us to talk to the parents of those getting ready to start ‘big school’ on the importance of reading with, and to their kids before and well after starting school. I look forward to sharing the many benefits of developing a love of literature in their children.

Another seed planted and a major passion project has been bringing my tutoring children and my WSKL friends together for Love Your Bookshop Day in the October school holidays. Much thanks goes to Jane Furniss and her amazingly dedicated team at Five Senses Education. This was indeed a major logistic, promotional and editing undertaking, as it included the launch of the children’s own book Come Venture with Me, readings by them and we professional authors, a Q&A about our books, our top ten writing tips, and many a late night/early morning session pulling it all together. It was worth every minute to see the pride and joy on both the children and their parent’s faces as they children read from their very own copy of the book. Additionally providing the opportunity for them to see real authors who live (and like Dannielle Viera and I) grew up locally as well. Thus, encouraging those who are passionate about writing to see it as a possibility for their own future careers/ side careers and building up our Western Sydney voice and stories.

I also attended the SCBWI Critique-and-Create-a-Palooza event at the state library and cheered with excitement as a fellow WSKL member won the approval of an attending editor for her YA manuscript. I won’t go into detail for fear of jinxing what is looking like a promising outcome of the event, other than to say it was clear to all of us that said editor was clearly smitten by the story. Yay! Fingers crossed again.

Finally, yesterday three of our WSKL members met Margaret Redrup-May, Outreach Coordinator at Blacktown’s Max Webber Library to discuss how we could support each other in our joint efforts to see KidLit grow in our extremely diverse multicultural home on Dharug country.

It’s been quite a few months and I am very proud of all my students, WSKL and I have achieved.

Well, that’s it for me, so until the next time,

Savour the quest,

Journeygirl