Ten-Minute Blog Break - 26th August

I'd like to start this week's column with a special message for the Space on the Bookshelf team. Stop writing so many interesting posts! It'll be your fault if no-one gets any further than paragraph two on this week's Blog Break.

Space on the Bookshelf, you may remember, have a special series of features running about comics, graphic novels and magazines. Let's start with their top picks for graphic novels for various age ranges, then move on to off-the-shelf and subscription magazines for children and a special spotlight on The Phoenix (as championed extensively by David Fickling the other day). Most recently, the site ran an informative interview with Emily Haworth-Booth, who teaches a course in London on making comics and graphic novels.

One SCBWI blogger who always seems to avoid appearing in the Blog Break is our very own Words & Pictures editor Jan Carr. She generally does this by not blogging very much, but this week I've caught her! Her latest post may be "shameless self-promotion" for her novel You're Magic, Duggie Bones, but it's also a chance to see the very positive kids' feedback that gave her the idea for the Chalkface Challenge.

Moving to illustration, Loretta Schauer contributes a terrific process post to Big Little Tales this week. After admitting her unusual phobia of sketchbooks(!), Loretta talks us through her recent life drawing classes and shares the results at each stage.

What made you the artist you are? Miriam Halahmy and her photographer brother have journeyed back to Hayes in Middlesex, where they grew up. In a reflective post for The Edge Miriam traces how this outwardly uninspiring suburban environment shaped her creative outlook.

Finally, author events can be scary enough for anyone, let alone if you have Asperger's Syndrome. So you have to applaud Julie Day's determination to get out there and meet her audience, as she does in her latest post about a children's workshop at Bexley Community Library.

Nick.

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A SCBWI member since 2009, Nick Cross is a former Undiscovered Voices winner who currently writes children's short fiction for Stew Magazine.

In Nick's most recent blog post, he enters phase 0.5 of his plan for world domination, sharing A Work in Progress.

Ten-Minute Blog Break - 1st July

The Bunker Diary has been very much in the news this week. I knew that my teenage daughter had read the book and disliked it, so I asked her why. I expected a reply that cited the darkness and brutality of the story, but instead she said: "The character arcs were too flat."
I guess this is what comes of having a writer and a librarian as parents!

Nicola Morgan has written an eloquent post that aims to sidestep the Bunker Diary controversy and focus on why we shouldn't fear bleak books for teenagers. Ewa Jozefkowicz also finds inspiration from the book in her blog post considering the nature of happy endings.

Space on the Bookshelf seem to be sneaking into this column rather regularly of late. This time, their appearance is because of another informative award round-up, analysing the non-fiction shortlist for the Booktrust Best Book Awards. Children's non-fiction doesn't always get the coverage it deserves, so it's good to see awards like this celebrating it.

My wife has been pestering me for literally years to visit the Keswick pencil museum - to the extent that I've renamed it "Chessington World of Pencils" and turned it into a family joke. But Layn Marlow has no such prejudices; as a self-proclaimed "pencil nerd", she's blogged about her visit to the museum, and may even have managed to change my mind!

Everywhere I look - either at home or at work - there are stacks and stacks of books. But it hasn't always been that way, and I enjoyed Miriam Halahmy's reminiscences for The Edge, about a childhood where books were in rather short supply, and how she grew to cherish the few that she owned.

Finally, Sam Zuppardi often posts a weekly illustration, but this week he chooses to pair it with a lovely piece of observational storytelling. Read all about The Bubble Man.

Nick.

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A SCBWI member since 2009, Nick Cross is a former Undiscovered Voices winner who currently writes children's short fiction for Stew Magazine.

Nick really should write another blog post, but until then, you can enjoy his recent fairy tale on the "dangers" of fairy tales: The Improbable Prince.

Ten-Minute Blog Break - 11th March

I have emerged, blinking, into the light this week and put fingers to keyboard for my own blog again. It's a good feeling and I'm glad that our SCBWI bloggers have been just as busy, because that means the Blog Break is once again full of tasty treats!

They say that there's many a slip twixt cup and lip, and nowhere does that apply more than publishing. Miriam Halahmy is guest blogging over at Bookwitch's site to talk about a very nasty slip indeed, when her publisher withdrew their fiction list with one book of her trilogy unpublished! Read the inspiring story of how Miriam was able to push through and give new life to her Hayling Island trilogy when all seemed lost.

Given my own absence from blogging, It's a good thing that Mark Jones blogs so often. In fact, the latest installment of his Amazing Writing Advice series is all about How to Write a Blog Regularly. The funny thing is, I've looked back at his blog archive and I'm not entirely sure he's telling the truth...

Teri Terry has just been on what sounds like an exhausting tour of the UK - ten schools in five days. But Teri has recovered enough to write a tour report on how she did and also to distill her experience into a very useful list of Ten Tips for Book Publicity Tours.

While I've been wondering on my blog about how to find the heart of my story, Sue Hyams has been attacking the same problem in a different way, musing on how her stories start. Sue doesn't begin with a "what if?" concept, but instead finds inspiration in a sense of place.

Finally, here's a short but thought-provoking piece by Heather Kilgour at Big Little Tales about accidentally defining your characters' behaviour by their gender. The Joanne Harris gender test that Heather links to is priceless, and you might also enjoy Heather's earlier post on the subject of assigning gender to animal characters in picture books.

Nick.

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Nick Cross is a children's writer, blogger and all-round techno-ninja. In 2010 he was a winner of Undiscovered Voices with his zombie comedy Back from the Dead and currently writes short fiction for Stew Magazine.

This week, Nick is searching for "the heart of the story" on his blog and wondering what happens if he can't find it!

Ten-Minute Blog Break - 24th September

It's been a bumper week for new blogs - whether you're published or unpublished, relaxed or overworked, I hope you'll take ten minutes out with our fantastic SCBWI bloggers.




Lorraine Gregory has found some quite unusual reasons to be cheerful this week. Lorraine doesn't have an agent or a book deal and yet she couldn't be happier!

Those writers who do have a book deal will find Nicola Morgan's post on the cost of author events immensely useful. The question of how much authors should charge is always a contentious one, so Nicola lays out her scale of charges in exacting detail, showing exactly how she arrives at the figures and why she thinks they're fair.

Miriam Halahmy has some useful advice on writing the perfect one line pitch. With the SCBWI Agents' Party just a week away, there's never been a better time to boil your manuscript down to a single sentence. I was thinking of having a T-shirt made up with my one line pitch, but I decided that was probably just a bit too creepy...

T-shirt slogans aside, I'm also trying to meet an impossible deadline to revise my manuscript ahead of the Agents' Party, and Jane Heinrichs' latest post resonated strongly with me. Instead of admonishing ourselves for every tiny creative misstep, she'd like us to be gentle with ourselves.

Finally, dogged detective Rebecca Colby is blogging over at the funeverse, investigating that most terrible of transgressions, the Rhyme Crime! Are your rhymes guilty of being wilty? Find out from Rebecca how to give them sizzle before they fizzle.

Oh sorry, I have to go. I think the poetry police are breaking down my front door.

Nick.

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Nick Cross is a children's writer, blogger and all-round techno-ninja. In 2010 he was a winner of Undiscovered Voices with his zombie comedy Back from the Dead.

This week on his blog, Nick's taking a look at story franchises and wondering why No-one Ever Really Dies.

Ten-Minute Blog Break - 20th August

The Blog Break meets Breaking Bad this week, as crazed drug dealers, prize geraniums, summer stodge and parental challenges meet in another eclectic SCBWI selection!



Nicky Schmidt delivers one of those blogs that had me pumping my fist and saying "That is so going in the Blog Break!" Although, as it involves putting herself in a certain amount of danger, I wouldn't recommend she does it too often. Join Nicky as her writerly research into the seamy side of South Africa takes an alarming turn...

Jane Heinrichs is having a somewhat calmer time, spending the summer at her family home in Canada. Her post is a beautiful meditation on what home and family mean to us, and how the seeds sown by an earlier generation can bear fruit in our own.

Over at An Awfully Big Blog Adventure, SCBWI author Miriam Halahmy has some tips for that summer slump. If you're feeling stodgy and unable to get much done creatively this month (a problem I've certainly been having), then check out her post. If that isn't enough incentive, bear in mind that the blog also contains pictures of chocolate (although too much of that can cause stodginess as well).

Finally, I spotted a interesting article by Hari Kunzru in the weekend newspaper. Hari started out, like many of us, with the intention of putting his writing first, but then life caught up with him. Does having a family inspire or impede a writer's art? Personally, I would say both!

Nick.

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Nick Cross is a children's writer, blogger and all-round techno-ninja. In 2010 he was a winner of Undiscovered Voices with his zombie comedy Back from the Dead.
For his latest blog post, Nick has Submissianxiety, a nasty nervous condition caused by having a manuscript on submission.