This is why I do Author School Visits

Many weeks are been busy with school visits, editing bits and family events. There’s often little time for capturing new ideas. One school visit was to a school in Traralgon, Victoria. I was up before the sun and drove out of Melbourne as the sun rose. It was early, but a lovely time to be heading out of town. I did three sessions with preps, Yr 1’s and Yr 2’s. The sessions all went well and the new ideas flowed.

Capturing New Ideas

This is always a scary thing, because trapped almost-ideas become like bees buzzing inside my head. I don’t want to forget that wonderful thought I had, so I repeat it over and over in my head, against a time I can write it down and test it. Add a few more thoughts and the humming becomes almost audible.

Last week, when I travelled to the country to visit some young students. I was on the road before sunrise, driving through the waking city and beyond. The trip up was consumed with ordering my thoughts for presentations and doing vocal warmups. A child in a session asked if I’d considered a sequel to one of my picture books. No, I said. I hadn’t. But I will now. Then it was morning recess and a conversation over a cup of tea with one of the teachers set the bees a-buzzing.

A Special Reward

The children were great and the sessions went well. Reward enough. But at the end of the third session, the prep teacher brought a sheaf of papers. The preps had gone straight from my session back to their classroom and written me letters.

Here are three of them:

Made me smile all the way home.

New Ideas Begin to Flow

The 2 hour journey home gave me thinking time. I stopped at a cafe for lunch and wrote down the bones. By the time I reached home, I’d loosely plotted two new stories.

Time will tell if the stories will work. But it was just magic letting the stories out.