Digital Camera--my favourite writing tool

For Today's Parent Toronto, I was invited to a photo tutorial at Riverdale and then given the camera to keep! Hurray! These two photos are taken on my year old Sony. I love digitals for taking notes on fiction and non fiction projects. Helps my description immensely. I take photos of food,menus, and decor, for restaurant reviews. It's my visual memory.

I went mostly because I'd never been to Riverdale Farm before. I've written about it which always feels slightly fraudulent. We were encouraged to bring a child-subject so three year old William and I were off on an adventure.

Negin Sairafi gave us tips on the features of our new Kodak plus general hints in exporing our photographic creativity. I enjoyed the tutorial very much.

I loved the animals and the idea that here was this green and organic oasis in the middle of the hustle bustle city. I would post a lot more photos of horses and goat and donkey bottoms (that's how they faced us) except I accidentally deleted ALL instead of PICTURE. Maybe Kodak makes it too easy?

Recouping from the holiday.

The first few days back from Alaska and in between blowing my nose from an airplane cold, I wrote like crazy trying to sort out the sites of Toronto. I checked websites, talked to people, looked over event calendars, asked Today's Parent people for some KidSummer sites, double checked neighborhoods and hours and prices, cut hours and prices because of space issues.

Readers don't realize how much work is behind an article, sadly publishers don't either. You only see the end result, you don't see the mass of info that got sculpted into a slant.

Now I feel better and I'm onto writing a feature on Art Slade. It's how I began my published career, writing about authors. First off I'm rereading as many of his books as I can get my hands on. A joy, really, no problem there. I'm also reading everything written on him. I've already been to one of his presentations with kids at a school in Newmarket, I've also seen him speak at launch and interact with a fan. Friday I will skype with him. I present in Saskatchewan all the time but just not conveniently in time for this piece. I'll meet his new daughter( just arrived from China ) on a computer screen.

Then will come the hard part, sculpting it all into a slant. Watch for it in the Canadian Children's Book Centre Magazine.