New Month, New Challenges

So Summer is now over, according to the calendar, and it is now Autumn, in the Southern Hemisphere. In South Australia, particularly in Adelaide and further north, Summer is very much still here, with an awful day out there today – forty degrees and humid with it. Hot and sticky is never great, in terms of weather.

But it’s a new month, I’m inside, and the air conditioner is on in our lounge room, so it’s much cooler than it is outside. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here or not, but another of my writing related tasks is to be the Editor of the Mallala Crossroad Chronicle. This is a newsletter that is distributed around the town of Mallala, and a couple of other towns nearby (Two Wells to the Library, and Gawler to the P/A Hotel).

The copies delivered are printed in black and white (by the lovely people at Senator Alex Gallagher’s office), but the copy is available to be viewed in colour at the Facebook page Mallala Crossroad Chronicle. Click on the link, and you can download this most recent one, and many of the earlier issues. Things almost always look better in colour, don’t they?

So, being the Editor of this newsletter isn’t my New Challenge, but it’s sort of relevant. A couple of my friends, who are also members of Adelaide Plains Poets (a group of which I am President), these lovely people help me with the Chronicle, by giving me articles to publish in the Chronicle, and I absolutely love the idea that I am helping them to get their words ‘out there’, while they are helping me, by adding interesting things that are quite different to the usual community group things. I love these kinds of win/win situations!

And further sharing the love to my writing group, and relating to my new challenge, I brought several copies of the text of a picture book I have written, with a view to getting feedback about it. My work was praised, and one of those present gave me some excellent feedback, which I have utilised, and made adjustments to the words, accordingly. So thank you Michelle K, when I get this book published, you are definitely getting a free copy!

Putting together a community newsletter is a slightly messy, sometimes fraught, but always satisfying thing, but if you know what you are doing (which I do), then you can get it done, month after month after month. Getting a picture book published, that is a very different thing indeed.

I have tried to do this a few times, with a couple of different stories, and received only rejections, lots of them. So do I really want to put myself through that again? Well of course I do, rejection slip/letters  – they’re par for the course, if you want to get a book of any kind published …

My little picture book is set in Australia, and it has a theme of the importance of friends. I can almost see the book in my mind, and I love it! I hope I can find a picture book publisher now, one who will love my little book too! Michelle thinks my book is suitable for the 0-3 range of ‘readers’. I’d put it at 2-4, I think. Anyway, I’ll start sending it out, and see how things go.