Network News: Welcome to the new South East Scotland Network

Edinburgh
A new Local Network Group is being formed by M. Louise Kelly and Sheila Averbuch - SCBWI BI South East Scotland. The group is meeting in Edinburgh and is (currently!) the most northerly local network group in SCBWI BI.

SCBWI members from nearby are encouraged to get in touch. 




"

We're planning quarterly scrawl crawls where SCBWI members and non-members are invited to come along to write, share and find out more about SCBWI..."

Members’ work in progress currently includes 9-12 and teen fiction. The group's crit session meets on the third Thursday of the month and has most of its meetings in the Skylark Cafe, Portobello.

"We're planning quarterly scrawl crawls where SCBWI members and non-members are invited to come along to write, share and find out more about SCBWI," said M. Louise Kelly, the group's co-founder. "As we're one of the newest networks, we’re open to ideas for Professional Series type events for both published and pre-published writers and illustrators."



Elizabeth Wein writes about the opportunities for Scottish Authors:

" Little did I know that because I’d been living in Scotland for over ten years, I now qualified as a Scottish author.  It’s opened up a whole new world to me in terms of interaction with young readers and with other authors.

Of course I’d known of the existence of the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Scottish Book Trust.  But apart from taking my kids to an awesome Horrid Henry event where they got to meet Francesca Simon, until I had my own book to promote I hadn’t been aware of how much support and interest is available for young readers in Scotland.


I knew that the Scottish Book Trust (like the Book Trust) provides educational support with their “Live Literature Funding” programme, which helps pay for authors to come and speak in schools and at festivals.  What I didn’t know was that they also sponsor the Scottish Children’s Book Awards, with over 23,000 children from a quarter of all Scottish schools participating in the voting last year.  I didn’t know about Scottish Book Week, with fantastic events scheduled throughout Scotland, or about their Bookbug programme, which provides courses for professionals, events for children, and gives books by Scottish authors to every primary 1 child in Scotland.  The Scottish Book Trust’s newly upgraded website at www.scottishbooktrust.com is stylish and attractive, including podcasts, author videos and booklists.

Teen Titles, a book review journal sponsored by the City of Edinburgh Council is well worth checking out. It's put together entirely by teens, including not just reviews but also feature articles and author interviews with a mandate “committed to improving reading within Edinburgh and beyond”—“and beyond” includes a subscription circulation throughout the UK but you can browse some back issues for free. I was lucky enough to be interviewed by students from the Portobello School for an article in the 54th Teen Titles issue, and to meet many other talented contributors (and keen readers!) at the Teen Titles annual reception in Edinburgh in August 2012." 

For more information on SCBWI BI South East Scotland contact Louise and Sheila via southeastscotland@britishscbwi.org



@spacekidsbooks
Sheila Averbuch lives in East Lothian in Scotland and is working on Space Kids and the Spy from Planet 12, a sci-fi adventure for 9-11's. She holds an MA in journalism from Stanford University and a BA from Harvard University in American History & Literature. Sheila is managing director of the content services agency ENNclick. She contributes social media how-to videos to Words and Pictures.

@mllouisekelly

M Louise Kelly lives in Edinburgh and is working on Rules of Sail By, a YA comic coming of age novel set in Valparaiso, Chile, the Antarctic and Scotland. She's also written for 9-12s. Louise gave up a permanent position lecturing in Psychology and Linguistics to follow a portfolio (patchwork) career: writing fiction; working as publicist for Nicola Morgan; teaching Neuropsychology for the Open University; being a University Dyslexia Adviser and tutoring students for their Scottish Higher exams! Some of these pay money.

4 comments:

  1. there is an error in the email contact address; I think it should be:

    southeastscotland@britishscbwi.org

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Elizabeth - fixed.
      That was probably me - I have such a problem with i's and s's which makes the scbwi emails particularly challenging!

      Delete
  2. We tend to disguise the email address by putting the punctuation in words so that spammers can't get at them. I note one of the editors has corrected this, so I'll leave it for now. But your call.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi everybody,
    Thanks for spotting and fixing errors and Gill, I never knew why people did that with email addresses!

    And thanks, Elizabeth for that fabulous summary of some of the perks of being a writer in Scotland.

    If you're reading this, and are anywhere in Scotland, do get in touch. We're primarily South East Scotland, but are keen to encourage Scbwi throughout Scotland.

    ReplyDelete

We love comments and really appreciate the time it takes to leave one.
Interesting and pithy reactions to a post are brilliant but we also LOVE it when people just say they've read and enjoyed.
We've made it easy to comment by losing the 'are you human?' test, which means we get a lot of spam. Fortunately, Blogger recognises these, so most, if not all, anonymous comments are deleted without reading.

Words & Pictures is the Online Magazine of SCBWI British Isles. Powered by Blogger.