Ten-Minute Blog Break - 14th January

It's been quite a challenge just getting to work this last week, but thankfully the floods around Oxford are now receding. I'm very happy to greet a flood of great SCBWI blog posts instead!



The Summer Reading Challenge is a terrific yearly event that aims to get kids into libraries, then incentivise them to read books. So it's great to find out that our very own Sarah McIntyre is the illustrator for this year's challenge. In an extra-special blog post, Sarah shows us the poster and reward stickers she's designed, and gives us a peek at the process she used to create the monsters that populate the Mythical Maze!

Jan stole my thunder a little by linking to KM Lockwood(AKA Philippa Francis)'s blog in her editorial the other day! But it's such a good post that it bears mentioning a second time. The Unwanted Guest is an incisive parable, full of sneering looks, judgmental voices and dubious personal hygiene.

Just before Christmas, I highlighted Jane Heinrich's idea of telling three stories with one picture. That seemed to strike a chord with quite a few people, and Jane has now launched a monthly blog challenge for others to do the same thing.

Another follow-up blog can be found over at Space on the Bookshelf. Blog Break readers with long memories will remember the article about story sacks featured last September. The book chosen for the sack was The Little White Owl by Tracey Corderoy, who coincidentally turns out to be a story sack devotee herself! This week, Sally Poyton catches up with Tracey and asks her all about it.

I appealed a few weeks ago for Candy Gourlay to stop writing great blog posts, but it seems that my pleas have fallen on deaf ears. And maybe that's the whole point, as Candy discusses why you should never let other people tell you why you shouldn't write.

Finally, I'm not sure I should post a link to Nicky Schmidt's blog, because she's written 14,700 words on her novel in a few days and it could make everyone really jealous. On the other hand, Nicky had a terrible 2013 (which seemed to be a bit of a theme last week, too) and like Kathy Evans, her writing binge has happened when she least expected it. As Nicky puts it, Mission Control, we have a manuscript!

Nick.


Nick Cross is a children's writer, blogger and all-round techno-ninja. In 2010 he was a winner of Undiscovered Voices with his zombie comedy Back from the Dead and currently writes short fiction for Stew Magazine.

This week on his blog, Nick wonders what will happen now his short story has escaped Into the Wild.

1 comment:

  1. Sorry Nick for stealing but you still have plenty left!

    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.