On Monday, I did my first session at Melbourne Writers Festival, about my book (and myself... which it's also a bit weird for me to talk about myself, because I haven't been alive particularly long or done anything wild or exciting, but people seemed interested, so that's good). The chair was Cordelia Rice, who was infinitely nice and a very good interviewer, and I felt supremely nervous beforehand, but it was a nice conversation-type thing, and the audience was very lovely. Kate from Bean There Read That came to that session (and she did a cool little Paint artwork on her blog about it), and I got to meet her too and she is very lovely.
Shirley Marr (author of Fury) also came to that session, and was my adopted sister for the morning. It was great to finally meet her, and she was just as fabulous and funny as I expected. And she had awesome shoes!
Then I went to sign books. Next to Andy Griffiths. Andy Griffiths has his own bus. Andy Griffiths is like a rockstar.
Melina Marchetta was also signing near me, so I got a photo with her (she is lovely, too):
On Wednesday, I had a second panel at MWF - Colonising the Internet, with Shirley Marr! James West (who was also really nice! And the author of Beijing Blur, which is a very good non-fic/memoir type book about his time in China). It was a really fun panel (James was a great chair, Shirley is fantastic, and the audience had great questions). My Girl Friday (who I met! she has really lovely hair and she's nice, too!) did a recap of what we talked about here.
And then (I know, I'm really bad at telling stories, sorry) I went to sign books with Shirley. She signed 'don't steal garden gnomes' on bookmarks, which is my line! Read her recap of MWF here, it's very good.
From there, we (my awesome mum, my lovely publicist Steph from Text, and I) went straight to Melbourne airport to fly to Brisbane. On the plane, I was given snacks (a little cake, and tea). I was quite pleased by this. I think I might have been to Brisbane at some point in the past (I go to the Gold Coast quite often), but I can't remember. It was really lovely though - the weather was great, and the city is very pretty (it has a nice vibe). The hotel where we stayed had a pool a couple of storeys up, and a glass wall where you could see the street, but I didn't get to swim, sadly.
I'll do a part two soon, about Brisbane Writers Festival, and Sydney, rather than giving you an information overload all at once!
