Post-con depression is best cured by attending – or indeed organizing – another event. Shamrokon taught me that! (Liburnicon taught me that maybe three con weekends in a row might not be the brigthest idea in the world even if the third on is at the beautiful Croatian seaside).
So that’s exactly what I did. I took part in the organizing of the first ever Zagreb Book Festival, starting today. On the organization end of things, I am handling the kids’ workshops happening daily until Sunday that range from Museum treasure hunts – today is International Museum Day and ZBF’s venue is the beautiful Museum of Arts and Crafts – to early reading, internet security and literary detective workshops.
I am doing these at the ZBF, but on behalf of RODA, Croatia’s most famous and most successful parenting NGO that has changed and improved the lives of many parents in the country. Alas, its very successful promotion of breastfeeding has led it to be associated with aggressive promotion of this very important but small part of parenthood in the eye of the public.
This is why it makes me so happy that taking part in ZBF has given RODA a lovely chance to show that it does not feel that parenthood begins and ends with breastfeeding alone. There are many facets of parenthood RODA is actively working on and ZBF is an awesome opportunity to showcase some of them.
On the attending another event end of things, I will be going to a number of adult programming of the festival that is this year dedicated to crime fiction and Sweden. There are some new Croatian books – Balkan noir and Zagreb noir – in the crime genre and there are very interesting foreign guests.
One of them is – to circle back to kids again – the Swedish children’s author and illustrator Sven Nordqvist whose Pettson and Findus picture books my son is literally crazy about.
Ulf Stark has been recently translated and is also one of the guests, as well as Jens Lapidus, Kristina Ohlsson, Anders Roslund i Stefan Thunberg, Sven Nordqvist, and Ece Temelkuran. And a huge number of Croatian authors, among whom is Darko Macan, Croatia’s foremost writer and editor of SF.
So, post con depression? No time for that – there are festivals to run. And attend.
I know this if off topic but I’m looking into starting my own weblog and was curious what all is required to get
setup? I’m assuming having a blog like yours would cost a pretty penny?
I’m not very internet savvy so I’m not 100% certain. Any
tips or advice would be greatly appreciated. Appreciate it