Ten-Minute Blog Break - 17th June

Does Tuesday really come around incredibly quickly, or is it just me? Mind you, after a frenzied weekend it's rather nice for me to sit down and go through the SCBWI blogs, then share the best of them with you.


I spent Father's Day pulling up old carpets, visiting the dump, then putting a nail through a water pipe and almost flooding the house! Luckily, other fathers seemed to be having a more sedate time, and it was a perfect opportunity for John Shelley to showcase his own dad's paintings. In an affecting post, John talks about inheriting his artistic talents from his dad, and how lucky he was to be born into a generation where going to art school was a viable career option.

The YA and fairy tale debates I highlighted last week have rumbled on, and Katie Dale had the neat idea of combining both in a single blog post. Is there (she asks) anything better than reading for pleasure, or anything worse than being told what to read? Sally Poyton also combined two topics into one post, the need to celebrate fairy tales and (somewhat more randomly) hell hounds!

There is a lot of sniffiness (from writers especially) about celebrity authors barging into the world of children's books. I therefore enjoyed Ewa Jozefkowicz's balanced post about this phenomenon, and her thoughts on which celebrity writers do and don't make the grade.

Loretta Shauer is interviewed on her publisher's site this week, talking about her latest picture book work. Loretta's journey from amateur artist to full-time illustrator is one that I'm sure many of us aspire to, and wonderful to read about!

Nick.

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A SCBWI member since 2009, Nick Cross is a former Undiscovered Voices winner who currently writes children's short fiction for Stew Magazine.

Nick jumped fearlessly into the media furore this week, writing a fairy tale on the "dangers" of fairy tales: The Improbable Prince.