“Gee, you don’t ask for much!” was my reaction when I was contacted by the Forest of Reading Awards about making a video for their website. I’m delighted that my book DIEPPE: Canada’s Darkest Day of World War II has been nominated for the 2010 Silver Birch Award and am enjoying giving talks in schools that participate in this amazing reading program. But I’m a bit of a techno-peasant and had never made a YouTube video before.  I asked my young nephew about this and he said: “It’s no big deal, you can do it with your MacBook.”  He showed me how to do it and then wrote out instructions for me. I then spent a morning working on it and managed to succesfully upload it to YouTube.

View the video below:

I was thrilled to hear that BREAKOUT DINOSAURS: Canada’s Coolest, Scariest Ancient Creatures –Return! has been nominated for the 2010 Hackmatack Award.  This marks the third of Canada’s ‘tree’ awards for which this book has been nominated.  These hugely successful reading awards programs select a list of Canadian books for young readers and students are encouraged to read as many of them as possible and then vote on their favourites.Breakout Dinosaurs was nominated for the Silver Birch Express Award in Ontario last year, is up for the Red Cedar Award in British Columbia this year and is now nominated for Atlantic Canada’s Hackmatack Award for which the winner will be announced next spring.  While it’s nice to win one of these awards, being nominated makes you a winner already since the schools and libraries purchase copies of your book and you receive fan mail from lots of young readers.