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From 1p.m. till 3p.m. on Sunday July 12th, I'll be appearing at Broadbeach library here on the Gold Coast! Here's what the event is all about:

Take over the library with authors Tristan Bancks, Steph Bowe and Brian Falkner. Share pizza and soft drink and find out why they write, how they write and whether you could write books too.

(OF COURSE YOU COULD WRITE BOOKS TOO, is what I'm going to say. Writing books is the greatest and everyone has awesome story ideas if they have a go at it.)

It's for 12- to 17-year-olds! I am always excited about events for teenage readers (and writers) being held here on the Gold Coast, so this is pretty awesome (I'm looking forward to the pizza!).

SO: if you're a teenage reader on the Gold Coast and wondering what to do on the twelfth of July, you really should come along.

You can register on the library website here.

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This Saturday, September 6, I'll be at Brisbane Square Library as part of their Love YA festival!

At 2pm, I'll be speaking about blogging, becoming an author and other writerly things (and likely referencing The Very Hungry Caterpillar a lot - the greatest book of all time)!

At 3pm, I'll be appearing on a panel with bloggers Nyla Jade (Style Creeper), Kerry Heany (Eat Drink and Be Kerry), Jeann Wong (Happy Indulgence Books) and AJ (Pepper Passport), talking about blogging!

Brisbane Square Library is at 266 George Street Brisbane, and it's free to attend the Love YA festival (just call the library to let them know you're coming! Here's the event listing on the library website) - there are lots of awesome authors who'll be appearing from 12pm until 5pm.

I'd love to see you there, and if you do come along, say hi! I'm sure it'll be a lovely afternoon. If you get the train up from the Gold Coast we will probably run into each other. If you want, yell out 'STEPH BOWE? STEPH BOWE THE NOVELIST?' Only not in the quiet carriage. Just shout-whisper.

For more details about the Love YA festival and the other sessions, check out the Brisbane Writers Festival website. Here's the blurb:
'Love Young Adult Fiction? So do we! We’ve lined up some of the best YA authors for panels, signings and a chance to pitch your YA book to a publisher. A whole afternoon of book love for teens and YA fans! LAINI TAYLOR, Dreams of Gods and Monsters, AMIE KAUFMAN, These Broken Stars, A.J. BETTS, Zac & Mia , SEAN WILLIAMS, Jump , DIANA SWEENEY, The Minnow, KIRILEE BARKER, The Book of Days, ANANDA BRAXTON-SMITH, Secrets of Carrick. Plus book signings, cosplay and more!'

I'M EXCITED. ARE YOU EXCITED? To sum up: All those awesome folks. This Saturday, September 6. Brisbane Square Library. 12-5pm. Free. See me make a lot of silly jokes from 2pm! Free hugs and/or high-fives!

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I am terribly excited about All This Could End making the longlist for the 2014 Gold Inky award, especially alongside such splendid writers (shamefully I've only read 4 out of 10 of these, including the one I wrote. So clearly I have some reading to do). The Inky Awards are for young adult novels, and they're judged by young adults, so obviously I think they're the best thing ever.

If you're 12-20 and in Australia you can apply to be an Inky's judge. I was a judge in 2009 and it was the most exciting thing ever (I got to go to an awards ceremony and everything. I don't know what happened to that pale pink outfit of mine. I probably gave the dress to my sister). This was during my era of 'I have to have my photo taken with everyone and then put it on the internet'.

I've never been on a longlist before. It's all very novel to me. (To be honest I am probably more excited about a longlisting than people get about winning awards. I'm an excitable person. Do you think I've used the word 'excited' enough yet? Exciting, excited, excitable. Maybe I should start using 'thrilled'.)

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1.
I'll be appearing at Brisbane Writers Festival on a panel called the Rise and Rise of YA with Justine Larbalestier (!!!) and Melissa Keil (!!!) which is just awesomely fantastic. It's on Saturday the 7th of September at 10am at the State Library of Queensland. Open to the general public! Tickets at that link! (My other session is an online one so regional schools can listen to me talk about books and such. So I am looking forward to that, also. And to the Write Across Queensland tour I'm involved in with BWF. But I'll talk more about that later.)


2.
I'm now a speaker with Speakers Ink! Which is incredibly exciting and super awesome since they're Queensland-based, and I very much like visiting Queensland schools. I spent four days on the Sunshine Coast last week, talking about books! And enjoying the sunshine! Basically my life is the greatest.

3.
I hate to use the word awesome so much in one post, but this is fairly awesome, too: we are currently in the middle of Cool Australia's Enviroweek, for which I am an ambassador. Lots more info on getting involved, taking positive action and raising awareness on their website!

Cool Australia is an innovative not-for-profit focused on building a generation of eco-solutionaries through inspirational environmental education.

Enviroweek makes Cool Australia’s classroom learning real life and encourages positive, measurable and meaningful change.

Since 2009, Enviroweek has raised more than $160,000 environmental projects and 200,021 kilograms of CO2 savings (10,401,130 kilograms annualised) have been saved.

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I haven't written anything on this here blog for a couple of weeks now, mainly because I have been writing lots of non-internet stuff. Like novels! Which is great! You want to read my novels, right? I have to write them first. Imagine my mad, machine-gun typing here.

There's book reviews and writerly ramblings in the works, but in the meantime, here's some stuff I've written elsewhere:

Bold. Brave. Smart. Fun. Refreshingly honest. News and opinion for young women.

1. I'm writing for this rather awesome Australian website for young women called Birdee, and so are a whole lot of other awesome young women, so you should check it out. I write articles with controversial titles like THE WORST GENERATION EVER. I just wrote a piece on how the writing of young people is criticised based on the author's age, rather than the work's merits, so you should read that and let me know what you think.

Young Vagabond is a magazine for young women, offering an alternative to other print publications, which often have an unhealthy focus on image and sexuality.

2. I've written some book reviews for the second edition of Young Vagabond magazine, a rather lovely new Australian magazine. You can buy it from their website.

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1. Guess who's going to be at Brisbane Writers Festival this year? Me! I am very excited. I have a session for grades 8-10 on Thursday September 5 at 11am. (I am sure you can sneak in if you are older or younger than that, though. It's free. You can book here.) (Yes it is still three months off the kids' program has been announced now so I couldn't not tell you.)

2. The State Library of Queensland is spectacularly excellent. For instance, on Saturday afternoon, I went there for a reading event run by the Queensland Writers Centre and had a rather lovely time and drank rather a lot of tea. (It was a special 'young writers' event, which is always wonderful.)

Also, the SLQ's Young Writers Award is currently open for entries! So if you're a Queenslander, writer and aged between eighteen and twenty-five, you should have a look at this (Submit a short story of 2,500 words or less! $2000 first prize!).

3. I really like this state. I think people underestimate Queensland. There are lots of wonderful arts initiatives and festivals and things for youth, at least in this corner. I find it is a nice place to be a YA writer. There is less noise and less of a scene to get caught up in, but still enough going on and enough of a writing community about that you don't feel cut off from everything. I am going to go write a proper blog post now. (And I should probably work on that novel. Damn you, internet. So very distracting.)

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1. I'll be at the State Library of Queensland in the Library Cafe this Saturday (the 8th), for the Queensland Writers Centre's Whispers reading salon event. It's from three until five in the afternoon and there will be readings from me and four other emerging writers. More details here. If you are in Brisbane it would be wonderful if you came along. (I am a bit nervous about it.)

2. I have just returned from Voices on the Coast Youth Literature Festival on the Sunshine Coast. This was my second time at the festival (I was there in 2011, also). It is always nice to be invited back. It is a really fun festival. I took my camera but I got so caught up having a wonderful time and speaking to all the delightful kids that I only took three photos and they were all of the view from the balcony of where I was staying, which probably isn't very interesting to you (plus I also took near-identical photos two years ago. It's a nice view, up at Alexandra Headland). I didn't think I would ever enjoy speaking and being at festivals but I think my comfort zone may be expanding. It is fairly brilliant to get to speak to roomfuls of kids (lots of whom are keen readers) about books and writing, and meet lots of authors and illustrators. Plus the food was really good.

3. Here is my talk from TEDx St Hilda's School back at the start of May (it is rather hilarious watching myself speak. I am also getting to the point now where the sound of my own voice doesn't make me recoil in horror, which is a good thing). It's about the way teenagers are portrayed in the media vs. how great teenagers actually are (the audience was about 95% teenage girls):


4. Here is an interview that the very lovely kids at Voiceworks magazine did with me while I was in Melbourne (I say they are kids when really they are 20-somethings and older than me, but it's a youth literary magazine so I think I can get away with it) (The last question is my favourite one):

Voix interview: Steph Bowe from Voiceworks Magazine on Vimeo.

5. It is difficult to write about what you've been up to on the internet without it coming across as bragging, and it is sort of un-Australian (I have no idea where to put the capital in that word, or if there even should be one) to talk about yourself too much. I tend to be very self-deprecating generally, so the business of self-promotion is a very odd one to me. My next post isn't all about me, I promise.

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Here is a recording of my interview on ABC Coast FM!

Plus a podcast and transcript of an interview with the Sydney Writers Centre (which you can also download from iTunes).

There was also an article in the Gold Coast Bulletin you can read online here. (You might have also seen me in the Courier Mail on publication day. I was on page 13. I hope that's lucky.)

Some reviews of All This Could End from Deborah Abela (!!! whose Max Remy series I loved as a kid), Books+Publishing, Vegan YA Nerds (complete with adorable picture of cat posing with my novel!), Alpha Reader, Maree's Musings and inkcrush.

I'll be posting updates on appearances and interviews and the like more frequently to my Facebook page, and adding print snippets and reviews to the All This Could End page on this blog (once I manage to wrangle the scanner and convert PDFs to jpegs) so you can have a look at both of those places if you're interested.

P.S. Thank you to everyone for all of their support and lovely words about the new novel so far! You are wonderful. Releasing a second novel is actually no less terrifying than releasing a first novel. I'm working on a blog post about that.

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