Book Week 2010
Definitely my busiest Book Week to date – I did 14 talks in 10 different schools, all crammed in to five days! I was pretty hoarse by Friday afternoon, but it was a great week. It included:
-Food! Morning teas, afternoon teas, writers breakfasts, pizza and books nights – and my very favourite: a teacher and her son at Emerald College hand made me nori rolls for lunch because on my website it says I like Japanese food. Thanks!
-Watching a fox wander around the grounds of a school, but not pointing it out to the students for fear of distracting them.
-All my teen fangirls! (and one fanboy) It’s so absolutely wonderful when you guys come up and tell me how much you like my books. You make me feel like a rockstar.
-A spontaneous “three cheers for Ms Wilkinson” at Preston Girls (thanks! but you can call me Lili).
-About 300km of driving all over Melbourne.
-Getting asked how old I am, how much money I make and what my Year 12 score was, about a million times.
-Lots of lovely flowers and biscuits and chocolates and wine. Thank you to all the fabulous teachers and librarians who invited me and made me feel so very welcome, and to all the students for their wonderful questions and comments.
Wow, that’s brilliant. I watched you in the panel with Jaclyn Moriarty and both of you were so great, and I can see why you’re so popular at school visits. You read your extract and you made it come alive in a way I that I was completely in awe of. And I also love the comments you were making about young people. Having the opportunity to run some workshops and be able to interact with young people it’s so frustrating to sometimes hear the negative comments and stereotypes that abound. Also when you were talking about this generation being the first who write constantly-text messaging and IM’ing was a revelation. Sometimes we spend so much time de-crying the loss of traditional language skills because of the way words are adapted for technology rather than celebrating this and the possibilities it can create.