Dr Mel - Comics

Dr Mel Comics

Dr Mel - Comics

November is NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly. (taken from http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/whatisnano)

This writing project is a good way of encouraging young writers to attempt to write a novel.

Find out more here: http://www.nanowrimo.org/

Hallowe'en Idea

This evening at my Library I ran my Hallowe'en Teen BOO!k Group. So as not to offend the religious sensibilities of the parents of the attendees the book discussion was fairly generic focusing on scary books they have read or are reading. I also provided some Halloween sweets in the shape of body parts (candy teeth and gums were the most popular) and sherbert in a skull.

At the September TARGET (TeenAge Reading Group EdmonTon) meeting a couple of the group members asked me to make them a Librarian mask each, so instead of making them individual masks I photographed my face,

and made a mask template and photocopied it for all the attendees.

This event was one of the most popular book sessions I have run this year and it really creeped out some of the library staff when they saw several mini-mes running around the Library.

New author website

Rachel Wright author of You've got Blackmail and Get your Paws Off has joined the ranks of the online brigade. Visit her website here: www.rachelwright.me

Mary Hoffman

On wednesday 23rd July I was one of a fortunate group of Librarians to be invited to the offices of Bloomsbury Publishers to meet Mary Hoffman (the author of the fantastic Stravaganza series as well as The Falconer's Knot and many other fabulous books).

We all sat round a table and discussed the Stravaganza series with Mary - how the inspiration for the stories struck, her love for all things Italian and heard her read an extract from the latest book Stravaganza - City of Secrets. We were also fortuante to hear er read the prologue from her latest (as yet unpublished) book set during the time of the Albigensian Crusade - the title escapes me at present but I will add it as soon as I recall it. We were also shown the talismans from each book that she acquired during the writing and used as foci to keep her mind in the project. Mary was also barraged with questions about her books, plans for future titles in the series and Italy. I was interested to discover that her family was close to one of my favourite authors when I was growing up the late Douglas Hill author of Blade of the Poisoner - the first fantasy novel I can recall reading and the Galactic Warlord series starring the last Legionnaire Keill Randor.