It has definitely been a very busy couple of months and especially hurling towards Christmas! with so much happening since my last post.

Just yesterday, I was able to double-team with my eldest at a Career's Expo at a local school of around 800 students called Papatoetoe Intermediate school. 

I was invited as an Author and Publisher and I was able to share some tips, considerations, ideas and answer questions from the students as well.

My eldest was able to give her perspective as an avid reader, and law student on how enjoying reading and writing had helped her to get into law school with other tips about publishing on Whattpad and AO3 (Archive on your own).

There, we exhibited with 9 other career "experts" that included a lawyer, entrepenuer, a CEO, police, virologist, environmental scientist, general manager of a hotel and an artitect.

It was a really interesting experience as we got to have 8 groups of students over a period of 4 hours. The neat thing about my eldest was that they got to introduce themselves and we played a game with them of making up their own story with each student contributing three words each. It was hilarious at times.

I was able to thank Vilimi, the careers coordinator, for inviting us there as they served us with a lovely lunch and even gave us a box of biscuits as a Christmas gift. I was also able to respond in kind by leaving two of my books for the school and will keep in contact too.

One of the highlights of my day, apart from having my eldest accompany me, was that there were some students who recognized my books from the earlier schools they'd attended. One in particular remembered some of the books that she had seen at her earlier school library and at an ECE Early Childhood Education and that family members had bought some. I in turn had to give her one that she didn't already have in her collection and that was a real blessing. 

It was also interesting that she explained that "Sina and the Tuna", my first book that I published in 2015 almost 10 years ago (next year) was her favourite of them all. The neat thing was that I had already considered to re-publish books in a different format so looking to re-launching the books with a different look but still retaining the same text. Roll on 2025...