Miriam signing my book before nipping off on a whirlwind tour of radio and tv stations.
This is going to have to be the world’s fastest blog post as I am supposed to be painting the bathroom in the harvest manager’s house before he comes back next week. I sneaked off this morning, to the Hayling Island Bookshop where Miriam Halalmy was signing copies of Hidden. It was a low key event , unlike her fabulous launch in London that I failed to make (frequent readers of this blog will know this is not unusual, me being a hermit and the chain to the farm being about a foot long).
So, all over excited at getting out for an hour, I arrived early.
FATAL MISTAKE.
Me, in a bookshop, with time. Bad. Especially one with such a fantastic teen selection. Luckily I had read an awful lot of the books on display because an awful lot of them were by fellow SCBWI members – including, of course, the book I had gone there to buy: Miriam Halalmy’s HIDDEN. If you haven’t heard of SCBWI and you are a writer or illustrator of children’s fiction you really should check it out – the third, fabulous Undiscovered Voices competition is launched TODAY for unagented , unpublished writers in the UK. It has helped launch the careers of many of my writing buddies:
Candy Gourlay, Jon Mayhew, Sarwat Chadda, Bryony Pearce, Harriet Goodwin, Steve Hartley, Nick Cross, Dave Cousins, Mariam Vossough, Sara Grant and more….
Do it, join to day, submit to the competition – who knows where it could lead!
Oh look at me, sidetracked AGAIN. You see , this is exactly what happened in the book shop and exactly what caused the terrible shopping accident. To make things worse, Beloved came in before I had a chance to hide my stash,
‘Got enough books there Kath?’
‘Urm,’ I had to think quickly, ’It was an accident, they fell in my bag.’
Bookshops are Dangerous Places.
See?
Oops.
