Melbourne

I've had a wonderful start to the week. Since it's book week I got invited to a couple of schools. I did some talking about my books and writing and read a couple of chapters to kids from grades 3/4 and 5/6. I asked the kids if they liked scary stories, and then what scary stories they like and one kid said 'Revenge of the Flightless' which had me all teary-eyed.

Also scored a box of chocolates.

Yesterday I was a 'celebrity' reader for another school so I read a couple of chapters to about 40 kids who mostly seemed enthralled (though I am sure I heard one kid whispering 'this is boring' lol). And after that I did a writing workshop. I thought I'd get like 5 kids interested, but had 30. It was like my own classroom and we started thinking about stories and how we write them and I got them to talk about scary experiences in their lives and how we can use them as ideas for stories, creating characters and all that. It was really fun.

I got the 92 on my assignment.

I was also told that the librarian at my daughters school (who recently bought my books for their library) is reading them and really likes them.

This morning I got a message from the parent of one of the kids in the workshop thanking me for doing it and how her son came home talking about it, and being confident in sharing his work (I mentioned at the end to not be afraid of sharing their work with friends and family and how it took me 35 years to have that courage).

And finally, I volunteered to read in my daughters class this morning (not my books) and I got to see a glimpse of how classrooms look and work before I got to read. It went well which was good and my daughters face was priceless (despite her asking me to do it).

So all in all a damn good week so far.