Ten-Minute Blog Break - 27th October

Logo by Melany Pietersen

The life of a writer is not all fun and frolics - I have been staring at my manuscript literally all weekend and fear that I may have lost the ability to string together a coherent sentence. So please excuse me if I start typing
jabber
jiber
gybbar
gibberish.

Halloween is almost here, so why not celebrate with Catherine Friess's delightful list of witch-themed children's books? Spooky stuff.

Forget ghosts or ghouls though, because what scares me is the thought of the crazy fancy dress that some people are going to wear to the SCBWI conference party! So thanks go to Olivia Levez for pre-empting the discussion with a blog post about some of the looks you probably don't want to be sporting in November...

You might think you control a character while they're still in your word processor/art package, but once published they have a tendency to escape! Chitra Soundar blogs about her picture book character Farmer Falgu, who started in India but now finds himself (through the wonder of foreign rights deals) touring all over the world.

Sarah Broadley is trying to work out the age bracket where her latest children's novel sits most comfortably (a problem I can certainly relate to). Luckily, she attended a recent YA event with writer Keith Gray, which gave Sarah the chance to work through her problems, while simultaneously also reporting back loads of useful detail from the workshop for us.

K.M. Lockwood is feeling aspirational, but not for fast cars, diamond jewellery or a celebrity lifestyle. K.M.'s aspiration is to be a writer, which seems a paradoxical statement given that she already is one! But as she explains in her blog post, writing and identifying oneself as a "writer" can be very different things.

Finally, someone who has definitely moved out of the "aspiring writer" bracket is Kathy Evans, who was in seventh heaven this week as the cover of her debut novel was revealed to the world. So what was the experience like? Let Kathy tell you all about it.

Nick.

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Nick Cross is an Undiscovered Voices winner and has recently received the SCBWI Magazine Merit Award, for his short story The Last Typewriter.

Click here to read Nick's latest blog post for Notes from the Slushpile.