Festival Time!

Next week I'm off to the Melbourne Writer's Festival. This looks like it's going to be a fantastic week, and if you're in Melbourne, please come and see me. It'll be my first time away from Toby and Min in eight and a half months, so I'm bound to be lonely and in need of friends :)

On the bright side, though, I'm involved in some great sessions, with some *awesome* people:

This Sunday, the 23rd, I'm part of a Professional Development Masterclass on the ins and outs of writing Young Adult Fiction alongside the fantastic Margo Lanagan I'm really, really looking forward to this one, as I haven't seen Margo for years (Actually, Margo was one of the first writers I ever interviewed, on stage at the 2000 CBCA conference in Perth). Since then, she's produced some of the most challenging and beautiful writing to come out of this country, including several brilliant anthologies of short stories, and most recently the stunning Tender Morsels, which I'm reading at the moment.

Then, on Monday 24th, I'll be talking about Into White Silence. This should be a pretty enjoyable session; I'm taking a lot of my photos from my trip to Antarctica, as well as all my research materials, and will be talking about the entire writing process, and how it's changed the way I view narrative. I'll be keeping it fairly open and informal, with lots of opportunities for questions.

Tuesday morning, I'm really looking forward to meeting Scott Westerfield for the first time. I'm a big fan of his work, especially Peeps, (which is how a vampire novel should be written. No sparkly vegetarians here...) and his Uglies series, so actually meeting and being involved in a panel session with him will be fantastic. We're going to be discussing Place, in Space and looking at the role and importance of setting, especially in regard to speculative writing.

On Tuesday afternoon I'm talking about The Imaginative Landscape alongside fellow author Tony Birch, whose novel Shadowboxing I currently have parked on my desk, waiting for me to finish Tender Morsels, so that I can get on to it.

Finally, I'll be doing an in-conversation on Wednesday afternoon - sort of a general meet the author type thingy, which will involve a lot of discussion on just about every topic under the sun.

All in all, it promises to be a really interesting few days, so please do come along if you can. It'd be great to meet some new people. (Or old people, for that matter...)