Last week teaching the Young Writers Boot Camp at the Queensland Writers Centre was absolutely awesome: I talked about developing character, sourcing ideas, constructing plots and settings and structuring stories, editing and publishing, but then I also went off on a lot of random tangents about alternate universes and zombie cyborgs and fan fiction and lots of other silly things. Generally was a bit loud in the State Library, because I'm a rebel, yeah (only not at all).
The week was made awesome by the amazingly talented and very funny kids who came along (and by 'kids' I mean 'intimidatingly grown-up-looking teenagers'). So many amazingly brilliant ideas from terrific novelists in the making (spending half their school holidays learning about novel-writing! Gosh). This whole being-an-author business is pretty marvellous.
Really lovely at the end of the week to receive some nice thank you notes and little gifts, including this super adorable gnome from Grace (she promised me no theft was involved in the acquisition of said gnome), as yet unnamed:
Big thanks to all the lovely folk at Queensland Writers Centre, and big apologies to whoever was trying to study on Level Two (the talking floor) of the State Library of Queensland last week - there was a lot of laughing, I admit.
