Conference and Book Signing

Back to visit old friends! Thursday and Friday the 18th and 19th I will be a guest presenter at the IDEAS conference in Kingston. (See the E.O.S.D.N. website) I will be sharing with teachers about how to bribe, trick, cajole, spoof and fool their students into reading and writing. I really like this conference, and it's not just because you stay at the Ambassador Hotel with the pool and water slide... It is where I first learned about Fletchville; the math program that eventually became the title for "Leaving Fletchville". As a teacher I liked it because instead of 'experts' the presentations were all done by classroom teachers (or retired teachers like me). The end result is that the ideas were practical and useful instead of theoretical and hard to put into practice. In Toronto.... on Friday the 26th I will be at a book-signing at the Ontario Librarian's Association Superconference in Toronto. I'll be at the Orca booth at 11:00 AM. They give away free books to all teacher/librarians there. Last year I scored about 20 free books for our school library at Stockdale P.S., all genres, and signed by the authors. I got to meet all of them and that was great. One of them I had met before. Monique Polak is a teacher and author from Montreal and actually I had met her when I was seventeen and she was about ten. She locked me in a closet (true story). Above is a picture of Monique and me. Her book, "What World is Left" is excellent if you want to read a great WW-II history about a young girl sent to a concentration camp. Think of "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" with a somewhat happier ending.

My second novel since retirement is now almost complete. It is the one about the boy and his girlfriend who sneak into a mine to find out why his father disappeared. I am sending a letter plus a sample chapter to various publishers.

I'm nervous.

You never know if people will want it or if it will get rejected. (It really isn't that much easier for authors to get new work accepted. Maybe our inquiry letter is taken more seriously, but publishers still look at the merit of the ideas and plot and the quality of your sample chapter. We still get lots of rejections!)

Adrian goes to Australia. My son Adrian, for whom the character in the new novel is named, has just flown to Perth, Australia to work for a while. My other son Daniel, who is at U. of Ottawa, is home for reading week. It was so nice to have them both home together for a few days.