No pressure...

Without putting too much pressure on myself, I'm going to try to blog a bit more often. I've found it difficult juggling parenthood (Cassy is almost two), part-time work at Roehampton University, and freelance work. What with my husband also starting his own business during this same period, time is at an absolute premium.

One of the reasons I now feel somewhat bad about blogging is that I'm not able to keep up with other people's blogs. I started to when I first started this, but that was before I had a baby. There are a just a few I view at present.

There's Fledgling by Zetta Elliott. I met Zetta when I was working at Lee & Low. She sent several stories that were promising and I loved her writing voice. So we met for lunch, and while I didn't manage to edit a project with her while I was there, since then she's gotten her picture book, Bird, published after it won their New Voices Award. Zetta is an honest and clear-speaking person, which doesn't always fit comfortably into a publishing world that can often shy away from openly facing issues - especially when it comes to diversity and publishing. Her blog is thoughtful, open, and always worth a read.

The other blog I catch when I can is children's books for grown-ups by Natasha Worswick. Natasha and I did the MA in children's literature at Roehampton University at the same time (if you are interested, it was a fantastic programme and I'd recommend it to anyone). She also has a young child, so I'm always interested to see how she's juggling her interest in children's literature (as someone who worked in publishing and at Bookstart) and parenthood.

Oh, and one more. I'm going to interview author Patrick Ness on May 10th as part of the Brighton Festival. This made me read his first two books, The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer, both published by Walker Books. And I absolutely loved them. They were original, gripping, daring, dark, complex, and I couldn't put them down. In fact, I'm going to have to restrain my enthusiasm during the interview so I don't sound like a complete dork. And as a result, I've started to follow Patrick blog at his website. He's also the first Writer in Residence at Booktrust, and he's blogging there as well. He's also posting writing tips which I think are quite useful and shed more light on his writing process.

But that's about it. Otherwise I'm pretty much out of the blog loop. But hoping to find a bit more time to keep up, and just figured out that Facebook has a kind of blogroll thing that I'm hoping will help.

So that's it - hopefully the first of more frequent posts to come. Now back to maybe doing some of my own writing. We'll see...