Another wildly wonderful day...

The morning began with a keynote presentation by Shaun Tan, which included images from his upcoming Tales from Outer Suburbia.

Now, call me a softy, but I can NOT look at Shaun Tan's without getting emotionally involved - even after I've read his books dozens of time. All I need to do is cast my eyes on his images, and I melt into a bubbly mess of infatuation with his work.

After the launch of the amusingly alliterative picture book, The Pumpkin-eater of Pondicherry, it was time for more picture book magic with Jan Ormerod, who interwove the pictures and stories of her books with the various stories of her personal life, the highlight being the touching story of her upcoming book "Molly and her Dad". Again, call me a softy, but I definitely got slightly teary-eyed at its bittersweetness.

And after many cups of much-needed tea to appease my emotional exhaustion, we returned to encounter the enchanting combination of Liz Honey's words and Sue Johnson's music, with the launch of I'm Still Awake Still. I'm still tossing up whether to buy it - the CD also features Liz Frencham on double bass, and it's just magical.

There was a forum on the future of picture books, which unfortunately degenerated into slight bitchiness about the CBCA shortlist and the ever-emerging comment that we need more teacher-librarians - a sentiment that I totally agree with, but we need to do more than just fight for teacher librarians. We need to *produce* teacher librarians to actually put into schools. I often thought about upgrading my qualification to teacher librarianship, but there just isn't any incentive around to convince me that it's worth going back to uni for.

The afternoon featured a session on Graphic Novels, with Neil Gaiman giving us a basic rundown on the emergence of "Graphic Novels" over the past couple of decades. I found it interesting that he considered the main difference between "Graphic Novels" and "Comics" to be related to people's attitudes and prejudices to the medium, rather than the content, and that in referring to his work on The Sandman, he described himself as a comic writer, and being told that he didn't write comics, he wrote graphic novels, was "like calling a hooker a lady of the night" (it's late and I'm paraphrasing). Queenie Chan gave us a Manga 101 lesson, which was informative, but possibly unnecessary. Then Nicki Greenberg guided us through her 6-year labour of love - her awesome adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Now, I have to confess that I hated Gatsby in high school - all the characters really irritated me, and I had difficulty relating to any of them (as that is how I read books in those days). However, I encountered this book last week, and I'm once again in love. *sigh*

This evening, I was determined to play the socialite, and despite ruining a shirt in an unfortunate incident involving an iron, I made my appearance at the Melbourne Museum, and got through a glass of wine and my salmon entree, before racing down to the Butterfly Club for yet another sold-out show.

It was possibly the most awesome performance of that show so far - which is good, because it's the second-last performance. The audience was amazingly receptive, and I'm still buzzing from pleasure of performing for such a awesomely fun crowd. Tomorrow night is already sold out, too, which I'm a little sad about because I know quite a few people who haven't booked tickets and will therefore miss out. However, it's a great feeling to have three sell-out shows in a row! :)

Now it's time for sleepy bo-bos...