A better year
Maya Angelou has to be one of my heroes. I was reminded of her when I saw a new, and quite frankly exciting, press: Bindi Books. Their mission is to publish and represent diverse writers and I can’t wait to see what they come up with. For International Women’s Day (tomorrow, 8th March), they posted a picture of Angelou’s poem Still I Rise. A wondrous piece of writing that speaks to me, along with her autobiographies which I focused on for my BA dissertation. Seeing as I’m reaching a big birthday milestone late in 2018, I was drawn to this one:
On Reaching Forty Other acquainted years sidle with modest decorum across the scrim of toughened tears and to a stage planked with laughter boards and waxed with rueful loss. But forty with the authorized brazenness of a uniformed cop stomps no-knocking into the script bumps a funky grind on the shabby curtain of youth and delays the action. Unless you have the inborn wisdom and grace and are clever enough to die at thirty-nine.
I’ll just leave it above here. It’s beautiful.
In previous posts I’ve mentioned the SfEP and Byte the Book, but today I want to write about Bookmachine. It seems that the publishing industry is blessed with so many networking groups and support networks. I joined Bookmachine last year, but didn’t do much with my membership, but that’s going to change as I increase in confidence. I’ve just booked a place for their event, ‘Talking Editorial‘. I think this is going to be a wonderful event, thinking about inclusion and diversity. This is something that is increasingly becoming more prominent and it’s so important. Bookmachine’s website has numerous helpful and insightful pages, and I’ve just found this great article about wanting to be a freelance editor. See it here.
I’m very excited to be attending the London Book Fair in April. Going to this huge book fair will require some planning before the freelancer attends. By this, I mean I am going to go through the directory of exhibitors, picking out the ones that interest me and then possibly contacting them to see if I can have a quick word with them on the day. I’m not sure whether this is the right thing to do, but I can’t just go there without any direction or idea what I’m actually doing. I really want to exploit this opportunity to get my name even further out there, so especially with ELT publishers, I will be coming for you! Got to get those business cards ready!
#MayaAngelou #Bookmachine #LBF #BytetheBook #SfEP #ELT #BindiBooks