The Boogie Books Blog

(Emma Mactaggart, guest speaker as a Finalist in the 2012 Strong Women’s Leadership Awards, at a function hosted by QRRRWN) ..

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Never underestimate the power of the edit. You want to make sure the first time a reader gets their hands on your words, they are not distracted by spelling or punctuation errors (or both!) or lazy hooks, stilting qualifiers, tardy segue ways and repetition.  ..

I have been hibernating... a summer version of hibernating never-the-less, and realised that I had well and truly let the slumber continue for a month too long. It is nearly February! (“What!” I hear you reply. “I still haven’t packed up the Christmas Tree!”) ..

For a long, long, long time, the costs of publishing a full colour children’s picture book has been very expensive – so the cost of the end product for the consumer was high, the investment made by the publisher was high and the risk associated with taking on an ‘unknown’ was too high to contemplate lightly. ..

Debut novelist Anna Funder as had a spectacular year. Not because she cleaned up in both the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize; All That I Am has also won Book of the Year and Literary Fiction Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards, the 2012 Barbara Jefferis Award, the Independent Bookseller’s Award for Best Debut Fiction, and the Indie Book of the Year. It is reasonable to say Funder is now a literary heavyweight!  ..

When you receive the news of a win, your heart races and your pupils dilate.  Your limbs feel as though they are detached and your breathing changes from fluid to chaotic.  It is very difficult to jump out of your seat, find your nearest and dearest loved ones to share the news under these physical circumstances. ..

After our monthly book club meeting last night, where we dissected that speech from Julia Gillard and Slipper’s great slip up, oh, and books 50 Shades of Grey and The Great Gatsby; I did finally give myself a moment to think about the day.  It helped that our internet connection has spectacularly failed, and the cloud I was relying on for data storage seems to have dissipated... See, rather than get distracted, I could only just think!  ..

Hi, it's Ainsley Shepherd introducing myself, and continuing on with Emma's story about 'why' I picked up the phone and called her. ..

Predominately, the first bit of advice you hear when sitting happily, languishing in the sunshine at writers festivals, or in the stupefying heat of an under-resourced workshop, is if you are going to blog, then BLOG. Don’t pick it up sporadically and assume everyone is still following the conversation. After all, who wants to spend time with someone who only interjects annually?  ..