Creative Leaps

http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/reviews/index.php/Special:Search?search=Island+Fiction&fulltext=Search

http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20090525/ent/ent3.html

 http://legacy.guardian.co.tt/archives/2008-12-16/features1.html

http://guardian.co.tt/features/life/2009/01/31/folklore-book-targets-tweens

http://guardian.co.tt/features/life/2008/12/17/making-papa-bois

How to read aloud for and give advice to kids old enough to grow beards and bear children themselves? MY TOP THREE TIPS: 1. BE REAL OR GO HOME: The teen mission is to sus out when the adult world is duping them out of their natural "innersense" of Justice and Truth. If you are unwilling to reveal yourself first, to risk rejection it's unlikely you'll get more from a teen audience than patience and tolerance at best. 2. TAKE RISKS: Speak about what you know yes, and show them how confident you are in your field yes, BUT show them an area in which you took a flying leap and fell flat. Share what you learned through personal death and resurrection! Adolescents spend more time feeling the uncertainty of life than not. Show them this is not a unique or shameful condition and that there is life, and in fact a better life is possible, even after failure. 3. SHOW YOUR CREDENTIALS FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF LIFE : Give ample evidence that you have lived what you know; offer va

At St. Francois Girls School in Belmont, Island Fiction seres editor, Joanne Johnson and Trinidadian authors Lisa Allen Agostini (The Chalice Project), and Francis Escayg (Escpae from Silk Cotton Forest) took the Reading Revolution to the tweens - and they loved it! Courtesy the school and with the support of principal and visionary Mrs. Pat Mc Intosh, each student received her own Island Fiction tween novella. All six titles were made available and each girl from the three Forms 3, one hundred and thirty-five in all, took one home, with a few remainders going to he school library, which now carries the entire Island Fiction series. The girls were encouraged to swap with friends so they could read the series, not just one book and to meet their favorite authors online via the Island Fiction community. Some expressed an interest in purchasing all the books in the series and were directed to RIK stores throughout Trinidad or to Amazon online. Having the author himself, Francis Escayg

Island Fiction author, Michael Holgate plays the dread locked warrior Kundo from his first book Night of the Indigo in the book trailer now on You Tube: Gerald Hausman, Island Fiction author of Time Swimmer and published author of over seventy books says this about Indigo: Night of the Indigo is an excellent book for learning about self-realization -- that it's entirely possible to gain power while giving up willpower. In the novel, the 15 year-old Jamaican boy Marassa becomes a mystic warrior and carrier of the light. As an allegory -- a story upon which another story rests -- this poetical novel shows us how a boy turns into a man. But it also shows how Marassa vanquishes fear of self to become a selfless practitioner of inner vision. Perilous forces are present in the story but I found myself swept away by the passages on healing with heart and inner light. These moments are very real indeed. Anyone who wants to know more about overcoming personal obstacles will love Michael Hol

Book Trailers on YOU TUBE, Face Book community, author web sites and blogs, SKYPE school visits, media interviews local and international tours - IF! authors are putting themselves out there to meet their readers! VIEW, RATE, SHARE, LINK!

Michael and Helen asked me to send some words for their first launch event in Jamaica for their Island Fiction titles: Night of the Indigo and Delroy and the Marog Kingdom ( respectively). Here is the speech I sent which was read by proxy: (With Trek-like reverence), Greetings from Trinidad, fellow fiction lovers. I hope you do not feel short changed on hearing the suggestion, but one could reasonably have expected a series editor of speculative fiction in 2009 to at least beam herself over via SKYPE video conferencing! Truly, what IF I could project a hologram from my living room just after I've left the callaloo soup dinner to simmer? What IF I could be there with you all having hit the road over the past few days across bridges and chunnels, leisurely island hoppng my way from Trinidad to Jamaica in my solar powered amphibious vehicle? What IF instead, I am now using astral projection and my gorgeous, intelligent forty-something Trini-mix of a woman self inhabi

Time Swimmer author Gerald Haussman takes questions from fans at schools in North America via SKYPE which is fittingly hip for the Island Fiction "Tweens". But the heart to heart, face to face technology of meeting in person will never grow old. "I presented the book at a school and the kids ran at the book table and bought all the copies we'd brought with us. A fifth grade girl came up to me five minutes after she'd bought the book and said, "I've read ten pages already, and I love it!" The cover catches them, the words do the rest." Meanwhile on YOU TUBE hosts another Island Fiction author - Michael Holgate. His book trailer for Night of the Indigo, really illustrates the cinematic quality of the stories in this series. So log on, rate and share the trailer - then go buy the books! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-AbxwkE2TQ

"Last night I was dead center with the grandfather of Time Swimmer saying, 'Where are you going?' a great line for a child and fantastical yarn, and all this book literally swims by story and the language and even the type on the pages: a sort of oceanic syntax." American poet Bob Arnold, author of some 50 books, about Time Swimmer:

HIGH TIDE for Time Swimmer! Waves of praise come in for Gerald's "Time Swimmer" from David Greenberg, US author of the crazy, now classic, picture book Slugs, which has been a bestseller since the 1980s. According to Gerald, David's a really tough critic. "I'm quite surprised he likes Time Swimmer this much. Was a wee bit afraid he might not go for it." I've just started your book, and I love it. Just love it! Boy, can you sling words. I adore the way you start with the almost-suicide, and I adore the way you mix the mundane (failing the test) with the fantastic (the sea turtle) with the men who want to chop its head off with the voyage out to sea and the fact that it can talk. Extraordinary word craftsmanship from the very start..... DAVID GREENBERG, picture book author, SLUGS