I went to my next session after lunch in Marquee 3. It’s always an experience in the marquee’s on the oval as it’s either sweltering hot and desperately uncomfortable or wet, muddy and sweltering hot. So having been a Somerset veteran I knew what to expect. As for the presenters, I wonder what they think. I’d met Cath before and was early enough to re-introduce myself and enthuse over finally buying ‘Graffiti Moon’, which I promptly asked her to sign. I’ve already done an interview with Cath that you’ll find on the ‘Interviews Gals’ tab. As you can tell I’m a bit fan of this creative talented lady.
Summary of my day at Somerset 15th March 2018 – Part Four By Jill Smith©June 2018
12.45 to 1.30 Cath Crowley
Cath Crowley is a young adult author published in Australia and internationally. She is the author of The Gracie Faltrain trilogy, Chasing Charlie Duskin, and Graffiti Moon. In 2011, Graffiti Moon won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Young Adult fiction, the Ethel Turner Award for Young People’s Literature, and was named an Honour Book in the Children’s Book Council, Book of the Year. Cath lives in Ballarat, Victoria. Title List includes; Take Three Girls, Words in Deep Blue, Graffiti Moon.
Cath introduced herself as an author for usually fourteen-year old’s plus. Explaining her books ‘Words in Deep Blue’ and ‘Grafitti Moon’ are for this age bracket. She also admitted that she is nervous public speaking.
Graffiti Moon is about a girl in love with Shadow who she’s never met. Ed is Shadow. It’s the last night of year 12 and the group of teenagers are planning to celebrate, and maybe deal in a nocturnal activity they don’t usually do. What Show does is art. The story is about the importance of art.
In Melbourne you are allowed to be a street artist, taggers just tag their names. Cover designs can change, the yellow can is the first. The other cover is more about the art.
In school, Ed was not very good at English. He could hardly read and relied on his friend to do the words to go with his graffiti, so Poet was his night roaming cohort.
Cath needed strategies for the book, to figure out how to plot and plan how these boys would go out at night.
Falling in love can be dangerous. Art can change peoples lives. So she started with the characters.
To get a feel for her characters she drove around at night to a park near home. She got a bit lost and ended up meeting four guys who came out of nowhere, they were covered in tatts who wanted her to sign a form saying she was their mum so they could skip school.
The idea of a nighttime poet spraying poems became the voice of a character which the catalyst for the book.
She had a phone call from a graffiti artist and questions came to mind. What would it feel like to be an artist? He hadn’t told his mum about and he had an alarm but slept through it and was busted. Blue – the colour of hope was on his hands.
The graffiti artists she met would tell her their ideas for stories and she would write them down. They thought the stories were dumb, but they weren’t.
Lucy – vibrant colours – glass blowing shapes. The idea for her interest in glass blowing came from Prince Ruben Drop, you can look it up on YouTube – always forms a teardrop in ice water, top of teardrop won’t break but the tail falls apart.
Ed is tough, but pick on his reading and he gets upset.
Jazz appeared in the book when she was writing it.
When you get a red pen marking had enough respect to go through and correct. That’s the first edit. She got stuck on a girl in the basement. She deleted it then rewrote it. She deleted the whole book and rewrote it.
Cath said Phillip Pullman and J. K. Rowling inspire her. Then invited questions from the audience.
Q. What made you decide to write?
A. She was always telling stories and wrote letters to her brother.
Q. Why did you call the book Graffiti Moon?
A. While teaching I started an editing course. She was interested when her friends started talking about their characters like they were real.c
Cath finished up by saying she won’t write anything she doesn’t want out there.
Feeling – dreaming all the time. She moved to the country and found writing late. Now she dreams of writing.
Megan Daley is passionate about children’s literature and sharing it with young and old alike. She firmly believes that YA literature is far better than adult literature and that picture books are works of art which should adorn the walls of art galleries and libraries. Megan is a Teacher Librarian and was recently awarded the Qld Teacher Librarian of the Year by The School Library Association of Queensland.
Nikki Parkinson is a former journalist-turned blogger and author. She blogs at award-winning fashion, beauty and lifestyle blog, Styling You. Her first book, Unlock Your Style, was published in 2014 by Hachette Australia. Styling You won the 2015 Queensland micro business Telstra Business Award.
Steph Bowe was born in Melbourne in 1994 and now lives in Queensland with her family. She is the author of Young Adult novels Night Swimming, Girl Saves Boy and All This Could End. She is a Stella Prize Schools Ambassador for Queensland and a 2016 May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust Fellow.
MC – Asks the audience – How many read a blog every day? How many use a blog as a base? (after an impressive show of hands to both questions) Asks the panel -The money side of things – What is the background of the commercial side of blogging?
On the 2nd May, Marion and Jill went to Burleigh Heads Primary School and were delighted to be able to share our experience of being part of a group writing for children with such inquisitive minds. They asked great questions and were happy to see Plinko sitting in the corner of the room on the day.
We offered the students the opportunity to win a copy of our latest anthology through a colouring competition.
two-year term as Laureate.
She began by asking the students who thought books were boring. Then she made a bet with everyone in the audience that every child there who thought this will want to read when they are engaged. She said that publishers spend a lot of money on the covers to get the attention of young readers. Then she suggested that if you want a magic potion, to make you better at school, (up to 15 IQ points better), you can by reading. That readers younger than 24 with every book they read, can increase their IQ and therefore makes you more intelligent.
There are different kinds of wars. She experienced a battle facing bushfires. Where she along with a few friends, only five people, battled a blaze for two days and two nights, till they put it out. She met a blind girl who helped because she could feel the air on her skin, she was able to save the horses, although the sighted people couldn’t see through the black ash in the air, the blind girl could tell the direction the fire was coming from. She wrote a book from experience fighting fires, based on real things. When people are facing their hardest struggles, people do wonderful things.
lonely lady but was never recognised, as WWI ambulance and hospitals were manned by women who never were acknowledged by the war. This woman was a cross between James Bond and Downtown Abbey.
9.15 to 10 Jaclyn Moriarty
I loved how she explained a little about her life but had the kids wondering how she learned to stand up to a bully, and how she learned to swear. This story had the students in the palm of her hand.
prove them wrong and become a writer. She studied law and waited till she became a Lawyer, then she would write a book. She decided she wanted to be a writer in England, she moved to Australia. She was a Lawyer in Sydney when the 2000 Olympics were on. The Olympic Torch relay went past her building. She didn’t want to wait anymore, that was when she decided to try again.
My notes became a bit disjointed at this point as I became as engrossed as Jaclyn’s audience.
Plinko has been preened and fixed up to look her beautiful best for The Ten Penners visit to Burleigh Heads Primary school tomorrow.
the story better. That’s a win even though I won’t complete it! I’ve already let my writing mentor Robyn Burrows know that I’ll be drawing on her expertise again for the final edit of this book. Meantime I’ll finish my first edit using all her valuable tips and hopefully, it will be much easier to 
polish.
As a member of The Ten Penners adults writing for children subgroup of Gold Coast Writers, I’ve been planning more school visits. We launched our children’s anthology called Mystery, Mayhem & Magic last year. Our next visit is next Wednesday to Burleigh Heads Primary School.
jillsmith
