NZ Book Week & NZ Bookshop Day

Category: Book sellers, Spark

Oh boy I’ve been so slack updating my news page lately, mostly because I am in the thick of rewriting Shield, book 3 of the Spark trilogy. But I’m here now and it’s been a busy time with a Teen Book Club visit, NZ Book Week AND NZ Bookshop Day shenanigans! All three of these events involved my favourite local indie bookstore Page & Blackmore.

So, at the end of the November I met with the Page & Blackmore Teen Book Club at Café Affair to talk about Spark and Stray and the writing process. What a completely delightful group of young women. Lots of great questions and laughter.

In October I began stocking up on new Junior and YA NZ Fiction to read, read, read in preparation for NZ Book Week! Look at these gorgeous covers. You can read 4 of my review here: of Sue Copsey’s The Ghosts of Tarawera, Phillip W Simpson’s Minotaur, Ella West’s Night Vision and Mandy Hager’s Singing Home the Whale. It was wonderful to dedicate this reading time to NZ novels and each of these books

The grand finale of NZ Book Week was NZ Bookshop Day on October 31st! I spent the afternoon at Page and Blackmore, serving cake and tea for the Great Man Booker Debate/Wrestle. P&B ran special events all day and even went out on the street giving away free books! We graffiti-ed the shop windows with the names and titles of our favourite authors and books. There was a lot of book chat and laughter. I loved it.

Here I am subverting the genre in the Continuous Short Story!

I took the Short Story to a dark place 😉

The book people wrestle! Civilised wrestling … okay, debating over cake and tea.

Book nerd graffiti!

I swear, I didn’t write my own name! That was Stella! 😉

And look at this lovely memento, my very own #NZBookshopDay bag!