There are so many exciting things are happening this week in my little world! From Tuesday through Sunday I am booked out for six days straight of exciting bookish events!
On Tuesday I am heading to Sydney for the inaugural National Book Bloggers Forum hosted by Random House. I am really looking forward to this as it should be very interesting.
Wednesday night, I am going to an advance screening of The Fault in Our Stars movie thanks to Penguin Australia which should be amazing by all accounts. This is the movie adaptation of the book of the same name by John Green.
Then at the crack of dawn the next morning I am on a train off to the first day of my Sydney Writers’ Festival adventures. This year I have four exciting days of the SWF with so many wonderful sessions to attend. From Thursday through Sunday I am attending ten sessions and hopefully getting a few of my books signed. I love going to the SWF, I’ve only been going these past few years but it’s always a joy.
The sessions I am particularly eager to go to are The Wolf in Winter session with John Connolly, Mind the Body with John Connolly, and Violence, Lust, Revenge and a Touch of Poetry…also with John Connolly. There may be a slight John Connolly reason for my attendance this year but it is going to be awesome. I have been trying to practice my best ‘staying calm on the outside whilst freaking out on the inside’ but as my recent Ryan O’Neill experience at the Newcastle Writers Festival showed me, I have not perfected this yet. Hopefully if I get to meet John Connolly I will be calm enough to get some books signed and not sound too weird.
But I’m not just going for John Connolly let’s be clear! The wonderful Adrian McKinty who I fell in love with the at the NWF will be in some of Connolly’s sessions, and I am attending sessions with the delightful Kate Forsyth, Kathryn Heyman, plus many authors who I have yet had the pleasure of knowing about but who are in sessions that are filled with excellent topics of discussion including short stories, women writers, and book collecting and libraries.
Across these SWF days I am also going to be the master of multi-tasking because due to pressure and looming assignment due dates I am taking things for my uni assignments with me for those moments in between sessions and I’m not doing anything else. So if you come to the festival and see someone sitting on the wharf or at a table with piles of papers in front of her and she’s looking stressed, you’ll know why. The joys of having a writer’s festival in the final two weeks of uni when everything wants to be due.
As much as I am looking forward to this week there are going to be A LOT of early morning trains trips and a lot of late night returns. On top of my already sleep deprived state hopefully we can stay alert enough to get some wonderful notes from the Festival to come and report back to you all. Though if we’re honest it may be sometime in early June because with six days away from the computer my assignments are going to be getting some serious all nighters as a result. But we can’t miss out on a Sydney Writers’ Festival because some silly Masters degree wants to be completed! I may sneak a post or two about the other two events if I get enough work done beforehand. Who needs sleep when there are exciting things like this happening!
So those are my upcoming plans, nothing to it, won’t be any hassle at all *laughs to self unconvincingly*. I don’t know what’s going to happen come May 31st when I can slow down, but until then we power through it! I hope you are all going to have a great week, it may be not as packed as mine, but if it is I hope it is enjoyable. If you are looking to attend the Sydney Writers’ Festival all the information is on their website about attending authors, venues, programs, and much more. Be sure to check the details because there are free sessions and paid sessions, and some sessions are booked out.
Jule Welsh can sing. She enthralls people with her bel canto voice. But it takes more than practice to reach her level of exquisite song; it takes siren’s blood running through her veins. Jule is starting her senior year at Cougar Creek High when her relatively normal world begins to resemble a roller coaster flying through a carnival scare house. Her mother is diagnosed as insane and committed, a psycho-stalker is snapping pictures of her to put into his homemade Jule-shrine, her voice is suddenly putting people into comatose trances, oh and the gorgeous new guy in town, Luke Whitmore, is interested in her . . . but also wants to kill her.
I had been looking forward to this night for awhile and I was eager to get a copy of Francesca’s book. Overall it was a very fun evening to attend, and there were quite a few people there who had all come to help celebrate Francesca’s book. Before the event had even “officially” started Francesca was already talking with people and signing books for them that they had purchased, and as a bonus people also got gorgeous bookmarks as well.
In addition, a competition was being run alongside the launch with the winner receiving a hamper. The question to answer was along the lines of “What would you say to your sixteen year old self?” The answers were then places on the tree with the winner being chosen later in the evening. When I first read it I thought it was a rather dangerous question, it could go anywhere, but as the evening went on and you read what people had written down they were rather poetic. Even if you had no idea who had written what, somehow without knowing the face or the name or the history of the person who had written the message, you were given a brief insight into their life and who they were or who they had become. It was also a great chance for reflection; I know I had to think for about five minutes before I had something to write down. And while I initially thought it was a dangerous question, in that simple question you actually have to reflect and face either who you were when you were 16, or who you are presently. It’s quite profound really.
Today is once again International Star Wars Day. Last year I made a wonderful 
