Arriving at Swanwick -Day One

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After leaving home at an ungodly hour this morning we made good time up the M1 and arrived bright eyed and bushey tailed (kind of) at The Hayes just before 12….where we were given our badges *snigger*

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Yep, I’ll be acting as a Steward all week, helping the newbies 🙂 So far today I’ve had to sort out 2 people being locked out of their rooms and find a lady a TV….no mean feet I might add in a conference centre where there doesn’t appear to be any TV’s lol

Jayne and I were in charge of allocating rooms to people staying in the main house. It was good fun, but hard work as neither of us had ever stayed in that part of the centre!

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Jayne being very efficient 🙂

Lunch was good, as was dinner, so I’d already had 2 desserts by the end of the day *gulp* 😉

After the Chairmans Welcome and dinner, it was on to the main speaker. Children’s author Steve Hartley who me and Jayne had already met when he arrived just after lunch. We couldn’t find his room number so at one stage we thought he would have to sleep in his car 😉 Nooooo, it wouldn’t have come to that 😉

His talk, entitled “Things I know now that I wish I knew then” was all about how it took him 15 years to get published. He gave us a list of rules:

1. Be professional
2. Polish your MS until it shines so much you need sunglasses to read it
3. Find your voice
4. Get lucky…do everything you can to increase your chances

An interesting exercise he suggested was to try to sum up your “voice” in a sentence. WOAH! I don’t even know where to start with that one, but I will try 🙂

His talk finished with fitting 11 of our audience into a huge pair of knickers….don’t ask! 😉

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After that we found ourselves in the bar with Peter Jones and Della Galton discussing diets lol. Very appropriate after the food we’d put away today 😉

So then, it was room, fluffy slippers and a cup of tea 🙂 Which is exactly how I shall be starting this day 🙂

Could you describe your “voice” in a sentence?

19 thoughts on “Arriving at Swanwick -Day One”

  3. Haha 🙂 The last picture is really… quite something 🙂
    Describing one’s voice ! I am sure a lot of us would find that difficult 😦
    Would be fun if you could post some video of such conferences- I mean I have never been to such meets but am curious as to how things go…. 🙂

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    • Ha ha ha, he visits a lot of schools and always takes the pants.something to do with Danny Baker (his character) and the record breaking. The most people he’s ever got in the knickers is 10, so he wanted to go for 11 last night lol

      Xx

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