Marianne's Blog Day 4.

Hi everyone!

It's day four of my placement and I started the day by having a look at several different manuscripts that had been sent to Paul and Stu via email, which included short stories, outlines and chapters of books. This was really interesting as it gave me insight into the kind of topics that people choose to write about and what condition these are in when they are sent to publishers.

After this I spent some time planning the budget for the Johnny Lonely book launch, which is taking place on Thursday the 26th July at Brickworks building. I was also thinking about how to arrange the rooms allocated for the launch to best accomodate all the people that will come.

I also spent time writing the latest addition of the Tonto Press Newsletter which informs everyone about the upcoming book launch and also how you can now pre-order their books that will be published in September, on Amazon. These are 'The Rocketbelt Caper' and 'Jonny Kennedy; The Story of the Boy Whose Skin Fell Off'. In the afternoon I also continued reading through the Jonny Kennedy manuscript.

I have also decided to recommend my favourite book, dvd and cd to you all, so here goes!

One of the best books I have read in a long time was by Arundhati Roy and was called The God of Small Things, it is not religious like the title implies, but is set in an Indian town called Ayemenem and tells a very poignant and tragic story of a pair of twins and how their lives are torn apart through traumatic childhood experiences. This book is beautifully written, perfectly evokes the climate that is described and made me cry several times! This book also won the Booker Prize in 1997 and I always look out to see if the author has written anything else, but as yet she hasn't!

The dvd that I am going to recommend is called Overboard and stars Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. This is a slightly dated film but is absolutely hilarious and is very firmly one of my favourite films. Both Hawn and Russell act their parts brilliantly and it is a typical slushy romantic film, but it's also very funny! It's one of those films that you can actually watch again and again so I would say that it's not only worth watching, but also worth buying, here's a link to Amazon so you can do so now!

At the moment I have Snow Patrol's album Eyes Open in my cd player so I'm going to recommend that cd to you today. I think the lead singer, Gary Lightbody has a fantastic voice, really smooth and easy to listen to. In particular I really like the third song on the album 'Chasing Cars' and also the sixth song, which I can't remember the name of but it's lovely and the start of it sounds like a lullaby. I also like the fact that all the songs don't sound the same, which can happen with a cd from only one artist.

By Marianne Lund.