Events gone by and to come

Last week I went to Melbourne and:

• gave a talk to Kevin Brophy's Creative Writing students at the University of Melbourne (and met someone who really did steal my YA novel The Best Thing from her school library)
• did the Sleepers Salon on young adult literature
• went down the Yarra to Williamstown on the ferry (hi Mum; hi Dad, hi Eti!)
• spent two days at Reading Matters 2007, being fascinated by my fellow writers - oh, and being fascinating myself, of course, as far as I was able.

The book haul:

• Just in Case, Meg Rosoff
• Notes from the Teenage Underground, Simone Howell
• My Big Birkett, Lisa Shanahan
• The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, John Boyne
• Little Wing, Joanne Horniman
• Abyssinia, Ursula Dubosarsky
• Could You? Would You? Trudy White
• Rose by Any Other Name, Maureen McCarthy
• Jacky Daydream, Jacqueline Wilson

Mm, that was a good week.

Today I spoke to a huge, friendly multi-school group of secondary students at the Riverside Theatre at Parramatta as part of the Sydney Writers' Festival. I was on the program with Markus Zusak, John Boyne, Shaun Tan and Philip Ardagh, a very tall and manly man with a beard but otherwise, he assured us, no body hair at all.

Tomorrow the Festival presents the same array of authors/illustrators in the city, and then on Thursday at 3pm, Sean Williams, Matthew Reilly and I will be talking with Kirsten Fishburn about Crossing Over, between YA and adult writing, between mainstream and genre writing, and all things interstitial and alternative space-y.

This all officially counts as having Too Much Fun, so after that, it's technical writing for two weeks solid to bring me back down to earth. But after that it's all novel, novel, novel until the end of July - wheeee!