August

In August 2009 this blog was born. I was reading The Ask and the Answer.

On this day in 2010 I was singing along to Darren Hanlon's latest (at the time) album.

Around this time in 2011 I was reading Yellowcake and enjoying some MWF sunshine.

In 2012 I  was being brief (though excited) about books, and keen to hear The Futureheads' acapella album, RANT.

August last year... who knows, really... But I had been to see Joan Baez (has it really been a year?!) and was soon to muse on the cost of books.

Skipping to the present day...

AUGUST 2014

Four months (almost to the day) after being retrenched from my in-house editor job, I am cheerfully living the #rockstarfreelancelifestyle, editing picture books for Little Hare and proofreading whatever comes my way.

I have also returned to my original career as a children's bookseller! I like to think of it as working at the coal face. Excitingly, this includes visiting local primary schools...

And there's time to read.

The protag has already eaten at least one "simple meal".

I loved it. In spite of this cynical review.

Some pop-lit-psych as an entree to understanding literacy.

And the end of August is bringing SPRING to Melbourne. It's (starting to be) T-shirt Weather!

allez viens je t'emmene au vent

Feeling awfully lazy. I blame the blue skies and sunshine.

Went along to the Melbourne Writers Festy today and wandered in and out of a couple of sessions, slightly vaguely. Nick Earls is just great, funny and friendly and everything he says makes such sense and I really felt like writing a novel was achievable for about fifteen minutes there. Maggie Stiefvater was extremely energetic and spoke so fast sometimes I missed what she was saying but then she explained that she just wanted to write books that made people so emotional that they cried - the big snotty sobbing kind of crying - and this amused me. I was really impressed with the questions the audience asked.

I’ve been reading the blog Hyperbole and a Half quite obsessively because Allie is hilarious and self-deprecating and likes grammar and dogs. I like this blog alot.

In reading news, Kate Constable's Crow Country is amazing. I wrote a little thing about it on the Younger Sun blog. You can read Kate's blog here.

Rereading Mahalia and feeling a funny old feeling now that I have heard Jo Horniman pronounce it ma-HAY-lia when i’ve been pronouncing it ma-HAH-lia this whole time. It's a feeling sort of like an existential crisis plus foolishness.

A friend came home from Africa and brought back the DVD of Spud for us to watch. This is v exciting because this is one of the funniest books I have ever read. The funniest three books I've ever read.

And then I looked at some baby elephants thanks to my Marvellous friend's twitter link.

All these things made me feel better about the Chelsea Hotel closing down without me ever getting to stay there and how BHP is going to make ooh a roughly TWENTY BILLION DOLLAR profit this year and how the newspapers hardly ever publish any articles about young adult literature.

But anyway. Here you can watch and listen to Louise Attaque's song Je t'emmene au vent. It is a supremely daggy film clip but a top song.

where's the buzz?

after hardly any bloggery, tweeting buzz (i am very disappointed in everyone. did you not read loving richard feynman??) an advance copy of clara in washington by penny tangey (UQP) arrived at the shop and it is brilliant. very clever, funny and touching as clara (often anxiously) navigates the social and political streets of washington dc, while trying not to think about her year twelve results and wondering what the heck she wants to do when she grows up. and trying not to get mugged or murdered on the subway. and she makes friends with some anarchists.

plus, coffee.

this bit of the book was particularly fun for me. american coffee is really, really bad. this is me drinking it:

clara in washington is released (according to titlepage) on 27 june. that's not far away! i'll review it properly around then.

read about it at penguin books.
go see penny at the melbourne writers festival.