Reading for the love of it

This month Orca attended the Reading for the love of it conference, where Andrea Spalding was a keynote speaker.

Here’s a photo of Andrea at the Orca booth:

Gotcha!

	Here are a couple of cool photos to get you excited for Shelley Hrdlitschka’s new YA novel, Gotcha!.
Creativity must run in the family—these photos were taken by Shelley’s daughter Cara. Read more about the book and the photos at Shelley’s blog.

New: Student Projects

Take a look at the creative things students are doing with Orca books!

This week I posted the new Student Projects page. There are three projects there so far, and it’s already really interesting to see what students have come up with.

…and plus, if you send a project in, we’ll mail you a free book. What’s not to love?

A note from K.V. Johansen

I’ll be a guest at Animaritime 2008 in Moncton, NB, on March 7-9th. I was a guest last year as well, and read from the manuscript of Treason in Eswy, as well as giving a talk on avoiding anachronisms in writing historical fiction and fantasy. This year we’ll be having the book launch for Treason in Eswy, and I think I’m doing a couple of fun writing workshops — the schedules aren’t quite finalized yet!

Last year they ended up having to turn people away, as they exceeded the allowable numbers for their space by a couple of hundred, I believe — it was enormously successful — so this year they have booked a much larger venue. People come from all four Atlantic provinces. I especially liked seeing all the cosplaying. There were some really great costumes, lots of Bleach Shinigami, especially. Because my usual reading formalwear is often a Chinese jacket a friend brought me from Kowloon and black trousers, a few people assumed I was cosplaying someone too — they weren’t quite sure who, but someone cool and dignified, I hope.

Warlocks of Talverdin isn’t anime (yet? I wish!) but there’s a kinship between speculative fiction and manga that means there’s a lot of audience overlap. I had a wonderful time last year, and I’m really looking forward to it again.

But before that happens, I’m off to Salisbury (no, not that Salisbury; Salisbury, N.B., which has an Irving Big Stop but no cathedral), to take part in Salisbury Elementary School’s “Authors’ Day” celebrations on Feb. 25th. I need to propitiate the Lesser Power of the weather (first I need to invent one, I guess), though. So far this year I’ve had one reading postponed four times because of weather before I actually got to it, and another that looks like, because we’ve run out of storm days and now other commitments are causing conflicts, it will have to be cancelled entirely. Note to teachers: October and May are far better times to schedule readings than January and February in the Maritimes!

Cheers,
Krista

Authors at OLA

We took so many pictures at OLA a couple of weeks ago we’re still looking at them. Check out a whole heap of Orca authors:

Frieda Wishinsky (A Frog in My Throat and others), Holly Bennett (The Warrior’s Daughter and the Bonemender series) and Melanie Jackson (the Dinah Galloway series)

Ben Hodson (Jeffrey and Sloth), sisters Andrea and Carolyn Beck (Buttercup’s Lovely Day) and Liam O’Donnell (Wild Ride, author)

Raquel Rivera (Orphan Ahwak)