What is the Point of Poetry?

I'm talking about How To Write Young Adult Fiction on a panel at the Penzance Literary Festival today as Victoria Lamb. My fellow panellists are Ian Thomas and Helen Douglas.

That event is at 3pm in the Open Shed, Champion's Yard, Penzance TR18 2TA.

At 6.15pm today, I will donning a different hat and asking 'What is the Point in Poetry?' at a discussion with Angela France and other poets and readers. That event is at the same venue as the YA panel.

You can book tickets for these and other Penzance Festival events here. Or follow the individual links above.

Fascinating stuff, though I can ill afford the break from writing today. My summer is packed with book deadlines, promotion and festival events. And I have still not decided what the point of poetry is.

Perhaps it will come to me on the long drive to Penzance ...

London Book Fair

Had an amazing day yesterday at the London Book Fair, sited at Earl's Court. Sorry this photo of the exterior is a bit thin. Taken on my iPhone.

Apologies to all those friends and acquaintances who were also there yesterday but I didn't manage to catch up with. I know many Twitter and Facebook friends were about, and I did spot some and wave or have a quick chat - such as Danuta Kean, Carol McGrath, Kate Allan, and Lyn Vernham among others - but I missed a whole bunch of that crowd by failing to make the London Book Fair Tweetup.

Not my fault, I hadn't realised events would be on so late and booked my train for 8pm, then found that to change my Advance ticket would cost over thirty quid. Which seemed a bit steep, even for the undoubted pleasure of a LBF Tweetup. So I trundled home instead, and my sore feet thanked me for it.

Had a productive day, meeting people in independent publishing and discussing Embrace Books, and my role there as editor. I took along Rachel Lyndhurst's Storm's Heart beautiful glossy print edition as a sample, and allowed people to fondle it jealously.

And as an author myself, I met up with both my editors at Transworld, and also with my lovely and fantastically talented agent, Luigi Bonomi - who is very excited about the Young Adult novel I'm currently writing.

I received back some line edits on my forthcoming novel - in paper form, no less, egad! roughly 550 pages to carry home - and met some new faces in publishing as my alter-ego, a historical novelist.

It was a brilliant day and I thoroughly enjoyed it. A massively busy place though - must have walked about ten miles just going round and round the hundreds of stalls!