Hi everyone
Firstly, let me wish you all a belated very Happy New Year. I hope 2010 will be good to you.
Well I’m finally getting around to updating my website. My apologies for making you wait so long – I can only blame that on pressure of work and hope you haven’t become too bored waiting for updates.
I’m going to make sure I give you my news or views more regularly from now on. Yes, I know I’ve said that before but this time I’ve made it a New Year’s resolution and I’ll stick to it (honest – fingers crossed). The intention is to give you an update in the first week of each month. I’ll do my best.
OK so what’s been happening over the last half year or so?
News
In 2008, I suggested to the members of New Writers UK that perhaps we could consider running a creative writing competition for children but it didn’t actually take off until March last year. That month I attended a meeting with Nottinghamshire Library Services, together with Nottinghamshire County Councillor, John Allin, to see if they would partner us in the running of this competition and was delighted when they readily agreed. We launched the competition in June at Rufford Abbey Country Park, Nottinghamshire. After the closing date in July, we shortlisted the finalists and, at our Book Fayre and Festival in September, 19 finalists, from School Years 5 to 8 were presented with certificates, shields, medals and gift tokens by highly acclaimed author and very great friend, Helen Hollick and BBC presenter, Des Coleman who spent a great deal of time talking with the finalists and having photographs taken with them. Des is as nice a person off screen as he is on and it was a real privilege to have him spend so much time with us.
The final part of their prize, a book of their entries is to be presented to each of the finalists this month.
The competition and the festival both took up a huge amount of time to organise but are such great fun that I wouldn’t miss getting involved for the world. However, in addition to both these events, I was also one of 15 members of New Writers UK who participated in writing an entry for our first collection of short stories ‘New Writers Telling Tales’. You can see a picture of the cover and details on my Gallery page.
Brit Writers Awards
One thing I’m absolutely thrilled about is to have been invited to participate in the judging for the Brit Writers Awards. Although there is a category for published authors, these awards are primarily for people who have never been published or are independently published and the categories include poems, songs, short stories and full novels for children and adults. This is a very exciting initiative that will help to promote and encourage new writers from all fields. The closing date for entries is 26 th February and the Award presentation evening, which is likely to be in London, is on 26 th June. I can’t wait.
But Brit Writers are doing a lot more than organising awards; they also provide resources such as author’s visits to schools and encourage children’s writing in all forms. Take a look at their website www.britwriters.co.uk to see if your school would like to get involved. If you can’t see me amongst the judges, look for Julie Malone – Karen Wright is my pen name.
Book update
Currently, when time allows, I am working on a biographical novel and, as promised, the fourth ‘Winterne’ book, ‘Avaroc’s Return’ will be easily read by anyone who doesn’t already know my first three books. It is a tale of greed and strife within the elven world and introduces a few new characters – both human and elf. I am well underway with this and really looking forward to seeing where it takes me.
The other book I’m working on, currently under the working title of ‘Deadly Nightshade’ will take some time to write as I will be concentrating primarily on ‘Avaroc’s Return’ and, of course, the next four months will be busy with the Brit Writers Awards.
I still plan to write the prequels to the Winterne Series and, in addition, have complete different story bubbling around in my head. I have already written this in short story format but it needs to be expanded into a much longer story to do it justice. I’ll tell you more about that in time.
Don’t forget, you can always contact me through this website if you want to know more about what I’m doing or have any questions you’d like to ask.
I think that’s it for now but will be back with the next update in March.
Happy Reading.