It’s officially the Longest Day today. Which means you can moan about the fact it feels like it with justification, if you’re so inclined. Midsummer’s Day, or the Summer Solstice.
Curated by book squirrels
There didn’t seem to be anything dodgy about going along to a hotel room for a Valleys Bloggers meet up when I first signed up for yesterday’s event in Pontypridd. I’d already been to a similar event at Pica Pica in Cardiff
The Nut Press is at the Guardian Hay Festival this weekend and, hopefully, it will look pretty much like it does in the picture while I’m there.
Today’s guest is the very lovely Keris Stainton whose debut YA novel Della Says: OMG! was published earlier this month. You can read my review here. Keris is currently on a Blog Tour to raise awareness of Della Says: OMG! and she was kind enough to answer my questions about the book and writing, including NaNoWriMo.
Do you ever find yourself drawn to something – a person or an object or an event – like, oh I don’t know, say, a bee to honey? It happens to me a lot. After having recently read Wasted by Nicola Morgan, I no longer know if this is my own gut instinct or some other higher power moving me around the chess board of life, but I’m happy for it to continue – irrespective of what’s driving it. It usually works out well.
If the title of this post seems a bit strange to you, I think it perfectly encapsulates the type of weekend I’ve just had and, if you persevere and read on, all will become clear-er. I was in London again, thanks to my trusty steed, megabus.com. And it was a scorchingly hot and beautifully sunny couple of days but very much a weekend of two halves.
Wasted is the latest YA novel by author Nicola Morgan, who has around 90 books published. Nicola is on a a Blog Tour during May to promote Wasted and today she’s here at The Nut Press and was generous enough to answer some questions about the book and her writing process.
Chance. Luck. Fate. Destiny. Choices. Reactions. Timing. Much like Jack’s coin, my head is still spinning days after reading Nicola Morgan’s excellent Wasted. But this is a good thing. The book throws up a lot of questions and ideas and it’s made me look at some of these with fresh perspective.
I always thought one of the benefits of becoming proficient in a foreign language would be that I’d be able to read another country’s literature in the original language, rather than in translation. (In fact, if I chose the language wisely, I’d be able to read that of more than one country.) I never thought for a moment that it would enable me to read a novel set in England, originally written in English by an English author but which has, so far, only been published in translation.
She walks. She talks. She writes. She dances. Meet the Jane Austen Action Figure!