allsorts

Just listened to Go4it, a children’s programme on radio 4 all about…yes! children blogging! It featured a young (now 16-year old) author Rachael Wing, whose recently published book Starcrossed began life as a blog. After gaining over a thousand readers online, someone noticed it and Scholastic have now published it – it’s no longer virtual!

In the radio interview, she was modest about her success, but emphasized the importance to her of peer review and encouragement. She didn’t write it to get it published, and was encouraged to write further chapters because her friends and others read it and demanded more.

In fact when asked if she would write more, she appeared to say that she would not choose the publisher route, but would begin a new blog with a different username, and proceed in the same way as before to see what happened.

It was striking to me that she wanted to write in this way, and was evidently extremely motivated by the direct response of her online readers. I’m sure it would be inspiring to other young writers to hear about her. The programme also briefly touched on some kids who were podcasting at school. They too were enthusiastic, as you might expect.

I was excited to hear all this, but realised that proably most of Rachael’s blogging was done at home. I suppose we’re not alone in the difficulties we’ve had getting our rm managed system at school to even allow us to use the digiblue cameras and other hardware, and to allow some of my book group members to log onto the wikispace I set up. I keep reading about how this or that blogging mechanism is not allowed by school networks. It’s as if the people who have the enthusiasm (and that includes me by the way) are constantly having to battle with the gate-keepers to allow progress to be made. For heavens’ sake, it’s tiring enough doing it without obstacles like filters and network managers.

So it was good to hear about Rachael and her clear enthusiasm for her writing, and good to know that Scholastic have taken it the next step, which will be even more encouraging for other young writers.