WHAT (SOUTH AFRICAN) PUBLISHERS WANT FROM WRITERS AND ILLUSTRATORS OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS

WHAT PUBLISHERS WANT, WRITING NEWS, A STORY IDEA AND SOME ACTIVISM

The Gauteng chapter of Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators is holding a meeting on the 8 May at the Sandton Library in Johannesburg, where a number of local editors will introduce themselves and explain how their submission procedure works.

The editors will also explain what they are looking for, common mistakes made by illustrators and writers submitting their work and briefly describe the type of books they publish.

Email: bookings at scbwi dotza dotorg by 30 April at the latest (Written out to avoid email address harvestors). Non-members pay R80 while members pay R40 (includes tea and lunch). The event will be from 10h00 – 14h30.

WRITING NEWS

The deal with Writers Weekly has been finalized. Now I wait for payment and publication. The owner/publisher, Angela Hoy, makes the process easy, doesn’t she?

I submitted “Thandi o tshuba moriri wa gagwe” to the Stories Across Africa initiative. It’s my second submission to theinitiative.

I’m still well ahead of the end of July deadline, but I need to get moving on other stories to meet some comeptition deadlines.

I also rewrote “I am not a baby!” The story reads better, but unfortunately the winter coat, which had a touching theme, has lost its central position in the story. But I have an idea of how to fix the problem, so I’ll do another major rewrite and it will be done, ready to be sent out. I might submit the story to Macmillan’s Write For Africa Competition

SINDI SAVES THE SNAKE PROPHET

I’ve decided on the theme for my children’s story based on the snake prophet saga. To read more about the story idea, click here.

To read the real news report, read an article by the The Mail and Guardian.

1100 TEDDY BEARS TO PROSTEST AGAINST CHILD MURDERS

Trade Union Solidarity's Helping Hand Fund today displayed 1 100 toy bears at the Regional Court in Pretoria to symbolise the 1 100 children who are murdered in South Africa every year. The trial of Sheldean Human’s alleged killer was resumed in the court today.

According to Dirk Hermann, deputy general secretary of Solidarity and chief executive of the Helping Hand Fund, it is tragic to think that our country sees 1 1 00 Sheldean cases every year.

“It is awful to look at the large pile of bears and to think that every one of them symbolises a murdered child.”

Hermann said that the decision to collect the bears was prompted by the fact that a teddy bear is all that remains after the death of a child “We plan to hand out the bears to children who had been the victims of crime,” he says.

If you'd like to support children's charities, go through Sangonet's PRODDER database (www.prodder.org.za) to find one that meets your criteria.

Charities Aid Foundation Southern Africa (www.cafsouthernafrica.org) is also available to help identify and validate organisations you can support.