Ten-Minute Blog Break - 30th September

Is it really the 230th September already? Oh wait, that's a typo (goes back and edits title). I was sure September hadn't been that long! In fact, it seems to have flown by - helped, no doubt, by lots of quality blogs to read.

There's an interactive component to Katie Dale's latest blog post for The Edge. Katie takes on the subject of censorship to highlight Banned Books Week and sets a tricky quiz. I scored 6 out of 10 - can you do better?

It's great to find a blog with a very different perspective, such as Catherine Friess's Story Snug. Catherine's focus is on book recommendations for non-native English speakers, and her post to celebrate European Day of Languages is a very good place to start. I'd never considered the issues around sharing picture books with a group of children who have varied English abilities, but now I feel like an expert!

Having watched from afar the problems that friends had when negotiating cover designs with their publishers, I assumed that self-publishing would make this process easier. Not so, it turns out, as Larissa Villar Hauser discovers.

It sometimes feels like writers are awash in rules - always do this, never do that. But what would the world of writing tuition have been like two hundred years ago? Marie Basting has a lot of fun setting out her rules for how to write like a 19th century children’s novelist.

Finally, there's nothing I like better than getting a sneaky peek at a work in progress, so I loved seeing the sample designs for Loretta Schauer's new graphic novel. It's a story with a definite Good Dog, Bad Dog feel (by no means a bad thing), as The Three Bears Detective Agency put the squeeze on a certain Incy Wincy Spider.

Nick.

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A SCBWI member since 2009, Nick Cross is an Undiscovered Voices winner who currently writes children's short fiction for Stew Magazine (September issue out now).

Nick's most recent blog post is inspired by a graphic novel whose subtitle is: "Mania, Depression, Michelangelo & Me." You Don't Have to be Mad to Work Here....