Plans for 2010 are coming together well. Here at SiWC Central, we are SO excited about all that's going on. Keep your eyes on this space, because there's big news coming soon... Very Big News.

Did I say that loudly enough? Perhaps I should put it in bold. Very Big News. Coming soon! I wish I could tell you now, but I will. Soon. I promise.

To tide you over until then, here's a bit of news I'm tremendously excited about, a brand new presenter. Meet Ivan Coyote.

Ivan Coyote was born and raised in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. An award-winning author of five collections of short stories, one novel, two CD’s, four short films and a renowned performer, Ivan’s first love is live storytelling, and over the last fifteen years she has become an audience favourite at music, poetry, spoken word and writer's festivals from Anchorage to Amsterdam. The Globe and Mail called Ivan "a natural-born storyteller" and Ottawa X Press said "Coyote is to CanLit what k.d. lang is to country music: a beautifully odd fixture."

Welcome, Ivan!

Well.

Here we are. Mid-April already!

I certainly have lots to report -- where to begin, where to begin...?

We have almost got our presenter roster in place for 2009. A few tweaks, a twiddle here and there, and it will be ready. This may seem early, but actually I am much later getting to this than I have in the past...mostly because I am also juggling the arrival of my new book. (If you haven't checked it out, you can read about it HERE.)

But all is not only well, but ahead of schedule, in some ways. For the first time, we are going to open registration early this year. As soon as I have a firm date, I'll post it here. 

Why are we doing this, you ask?

Well, mostly because we can. Last year we tried out a prototype registration gateway, and to our delight -- it worked very well. So we have our registration infrastructure in place much earlier than we did last year, and we'd like to take advantage.

We also have to acknowledge that with the state of the economy, we want to give our attendees a chance to save money by booking their registration early to take advantage of our early-bird discount.

Right now I am working on the 2009 schedule, and when this is in place and we have the final okay from all our presenters, it will be full speed ahead.   Make sure you are on our mailing list, get this blog onto your RSS feeder, and you'll have all the info as soon as it is available!

~kc

also blogging as leftwriter

Webwizard Dale has come up with yet another interesting twist on our new website -- it's called 'SiWC In the Media' and you can find it under the yellow News & Media banner on the content menu of the home page, or by clicking here.

This new page will essentially list links to stories that appear about SiWC in traditional and new media -- in newspapers, blogs, podcasts -- if we can link to it, you'll find it there. We are not planning to add an RSS feed to 'In the Media', but will add a little note in the 'What's New' section (which does have its own feed) when anything new is added.

Right now you'll find two or three stories that have seeped into my ken over the past couple of months. Anytime we get a report of anything new -- we'll add it. So if you have a media sighting of anything SiWC-related, make sure you drop me a line at kcdyer@siwc.ca and I'll pass it on to His Wizardliness to make sure it gets posted.

 ~kc

blogging as leftwriter