Yeah Calgary Young Authors' Festival

Calgary Young Authors' Festival is coming up this weekend. I love going to this festival. It's a district-wide one day program for kids from grades 4-10 who love writing or illustrating. The teachers are fantastic, and so are the 1200 or so kids who attend every year. While I'll only see about 50 in two separate workshops, they'll pack the high school gym for the keynote speech. This year my workshop, Rock Your Writing, is going to be on editing. Sound boring?...No way! Editing is the heart and soul of any creative profession. I've asked kids to bring in a first page and will take them through a couple of different ways to edit. We'll be ditching the passive voice, blasting boring verbs out of existence, and trolling for the perfect hook to reel in readers. We'll be cutting and pasting and building characters that jump off the page. I'm so excited.

I'm just hoping that any and all snow storms hold off until after I've come and gone. Now that I think about it, a chinook wouldn't hurt either!

In the meantime though, the rest of the week is work work work on the new novel.