The Great Raven

Mythic Resonance anthology - the details

2012-01-28T02:29:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to the Specusphere web site page with the info about the anthology. It has the blurb, information about how you can get it (it will be out on ebook as well as print) and a book trailer which feautres the cover blurb and some very nice music.

Go check it out here!

I'm starting to get excited. But I have to be patient. Patient! :-)

Mythic Resonance - it's coming!

2012-01-26T21:54:00.000-08:00

This is an anthology in which I have a story - coming soon! Honest! Great cover, isn't it? And especially nice because, having a name early in the alphabet, I'm near the top of the list.

Not sure when it will be out, because apparently the printer is giving us trouble, so I will have to be patient a little longer, but I'll let it be known when it's out and I have a copy in my hot little hand.

This anthology, being published by Specusphere, is on the theme of myths and legends. Mine is based on Snow White, seen through the eyes of the dwarfs - or, rather dwarves, who are more like something out of Tolkien than Disney. I wrote it long ago, put it aside after not selling it, then dusted it off and rewrote it for this one. I was keeping my fingers crossed and waiting with bated breath as it got on to the short list, and finally got the good news that it had been selected - yay!

It was edited by the wonderful Satima Flavell, who helped me make it look its best.

I must admit, I'd never realised how many versions of Snow White there were till I did this story. There's a web site called SurLaLune, recommended by Juliet Marillier at the Swancon fairy tale workshop last year, which really opened my eyes as to how many versions there are of all fairy and folk tales. I knew it in theory, but on this web site I got to see them. Terrific site, check it out if you like folklore and if you're into myths and legends and great spec fic writing, keep an eye out for this anthology when it's available.

The Optimism of Dystopian YA Fiction

2012-01-26T21:26:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of dystopian YA out there these days, along with the paranormal romances.This morning there was a jokey discussion on Twitter about the differences between Jules Verne SF (optimistic) and current YA dystopias. It made me think about this.

I've read some YA dystopian, along with the paras, and I can see why it's not necessarily a bad thing to read/write about a horrible society in the future. My only objection is the building of a world that fails to convince me it could exist and most of them fall into that category.

But that's a topic for another post.

In some ways, dystopias are optimistic because in them, the heroine - and it's almost invariably a heroine (yeesh! Isn't anyone writing for boys any more, except the action thrillers?) - defies the establishment. We don't need to look any further than Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games series, which in my opinion is far and away the best of the genre written in recent years (I'm not counting John Wyndham's The Chrysalids, which was written a long time ago and is a classic). Without spoilers for those who haven't read it (and what's taking you so long?), she fights hard against the establishment and won't let herself be used even by those who are supposed to be on her side.

Mostly, the heroine of the dystopian novel wins and settles down with the cute boy who fought at her side, or with the one she met later, after the original cute boy died heroically.

There is, as far as I can see in the ones I've read, not usually a last-page suicide, as there is in mainstream YA fiction. Well, it's kind of hard, given how many of them are written in first-person, but still...

So, I'd argue that dystopian YA fiction is generally quite optimistic. There may well be a YA book out there with a "He loved Big Brother" ending, but I haven't read it yet.

What do you guys think? Come on, lurkers, join in!

Guest Post Up On Mary Victoria's Web Site

2012-01-25T14:38:00.000-08:00

Mary Victoria, author of the Chronicles Of The Tree series, has been celebrating the release of a new anthology in which she has a story by a series of posts on the theme of Place As Character. Most of the guest bloggers have been people with stories in the anthology, but Mary, who has been very supportive of my writing since we met at Aussiecon 4, invited me to add my thoughts though I wasn't in the anthology.

So I've written a post, partly on other people's books - the character of the Citavita in Froi of the Exiles and of Mordor in Lord of The Rings - and partly on the forest as a character in Wolfborn.

Here's the link and while you're on the web site, check out the fabulous trailer for Mary's new book.

Go to Mary Victoria Net, here.

New Upload to Youtube - Me Reading!

2012-01-25T04:37:00.000-08:00

Okay, it's up on Youtube, but hey, you can watch it here if you like. I thought it might be a good bit of promo to read a snippet from Wolfborn, which I will be doing soonish, but on an impulse, I read from the manuscript of my Wolfborn prequel, working title The Sword And The Wolf. I hope I'll come up with something better, but then, Wolfborn wasn't my idea either. :-)

So here I am, making a fool of myself on-line, reading a bit from Chapter 2.

Hope you like it.

Forthcoming Interview - Mark Walden

2012-01-22T20:20:00.000-08:00

I'm preparing some questions for Mark Walden, author of the H.I.V.E. series and am hoping to pop up his replies here, when he's answered. One of the most popular posts on this blog is one of my H.I.V.E reviews and I know he has a big audience out there. It will be a very interesting post when it goes up, so stand by!

I'd also like, at some stage, to interview some young bloggers - teenagers or people who started a blog in their teens and are still going. If that works out, I may follow it up with an interview with people who started a blog later in life, not having been brought up in the Internet era.

For the time being, if you're a youthful blogger who would like either an interview or a guest post here, let me know, either in a comment or by email. I do have a few people in mind whom I might email anyway, as soon as I have done the questions for Mark Walden. I think it's quite wonderful that teenagers are doing something this creative. There are a lot of young book bloggers out there, but at least one I admire, who isn't a book blogger, has a career in journalism ahead of her.

A gem of a post to share with you

2012-01-22T15:44:00.000-08:00

If you liked the post on "You Know You've Been Reading Too Much YA paranormal Romance When..." take a look at this one, which is "what would [insert YA heroine here] do?"

http://ht.ly/8CfuV

It's very funny! I found it posted by Stephanie from readinasinglesitting blog. Thanks, Stephanie!

Catching Up With Slush

2012-01-21T21:04:00.000-08:00

Not sure how it happened, but my slush reading for Andromeda Spaceways has built up. So this morning I printed out a huge pile, because I just can't read long stories on the computer. At least there are no novellas this time around, but there is so much to read all the same.

I'm halfway through a story centred around a classic British novella. I just finished a humorous ghost story and one which had scary critters worked casually into it. There was a short humorous one with gods in it and a medium-length one in which not much happened at all. Oh, yes - I get a lot of those. And pieces of flash fiction which end on a joke you'd probably only understand if you live in the US, the kind where I go, "Huh?" and scratch my head. And the ones which are supposed to be funny "non-fiction" (I can't stand those, so usually ask for them to be re-assigned.)

There have been some quite good stories in the pile I've been reading - so far I've only said no to one of them - but it's been a while since I got a story to which I said, "Wow!" I think the last one may have been the one I've chosen to edit for the anniversary edition of ASIM, #56.

Well, never know, there may be another "Wow!" story in this pile. Back to it.

Review Policy Update

2012-01-21T02:22:00.000-08:00

Hi guys.

I've updated my review policy to make it clearer, since I've had a review request I can't help with. (Check it out) At this stage I'm not planning to review anything I can't either buy in the shops or order and get in my letterbox. Sorry! Don't get me wrong - I absolutely adore my new e-reader facility!

But for a number of reasons, I don't want to use it for reviewing. Firstly, you can't curl up in bed with an e-book. Well, I can't, anyway. For bedtime, when I do much of my reading, I really prefer paper which I can then lay on my bedside table with a bookmark in it.

Secondly, and most important, there's my major reason for reviewing books, apart from knowing what's out there and my own love of reading: I like to donate my review copies to my hard-pressed school library (anyone who has been following this blog for a while will know that last year, my already tiny budget was slashed in half). I can't, alas, catalogue an e-book and put it on the shelves when I've finished reading it. My library software doesn't handle that.

Also, I'm asking anyone who would like me to review their book to please ask first, not send me the book itself.

If any of you bloggers out there would like to read and review a new indie title sent to me in PDF, email me and I'll forward it to you, along with the author's email address.

H.I.V.E Aftershock by Mark Walden. Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2011

2012-01-19T17:41:00.000-08:00

If you’ve been following the H.I.V.E series, you’ll knowthat it’s centred around a school for future super-villains, run by Max Nero, amember of the council of an organization called G.L.O.V.E – Global League OfVillainous Enterprises. At the end of the last volume, Zero Hour, Nerodismissed the entire council and started again, with a council made up ofH.I.V.E graduates on whom he believes he can rely.

As you can imagine, the former members aren’t happy – some even less happy than others. And there’s the organization known as the Disciples,formerly working with the evil super-computer Overlord, which wanted to takeover our hero Otto’s body. Overlord is dead and the Disciples scattered … orare they? Who is the mysterious woman known as Minerva who has offered theex-council an alliance? Will they accept the offer?

Back at the Higher Institute of Villainous Education, OttoMalpense and his friends are about to sit their exams and go on a fieldexercise called the Hunt, where you really had better excel, or else. Laura,the computer hacker, suggests that they steal the exam papers, mainly toembarrass the unpleasant new security chief. Well, they are villains-in-training. What could go wrong, anyway?

Read this and find out. Be warned, it ends on a cliffhanger– and some characters will dounexpected things.

The cover blurb (and isn't it a snazzy new design?) features a comment from Eoin Colfer, authorof the Artemis Fowl series, that his hero would fit right in at H.I.V.E. I can see his point, and not only becauseof the villain thing, but because the Fowl stories, like these, become darkeras they go and because Artemis becomes nice.This is where the series is a little strange. You find yourself cheering foryoung villains, each of whom could be the hero or heroine of their own series.This is because the real baddies are so dreadful. They want to take over theworld or even destroy it, while those behind H.I.V.E. just want to helpthemselves to the money, dress in style and enjoy a challenge.

There’s a lot of running around and blowing things up inthis one, with characters hanging from gunship helicopters, driving tanksthrough an old Soviet base,fighting duels with super-weapons and escaping the forces of evil – er, the other forces of evil, seeing the good guys in this series are the forces of evil.

Despite the darker tone, there is still plenty of humour andexcitement for those who have finished their Alex Rider and Young James Bondbooks. I finished this book in a day and a night and am now waiting anxiouslyfor the next volume.

I’m also waiting to see if there will be a movie, as the first novel was optioned some time ago. A pity it wasn’t made when it was firstoptioned – Tom Felton, who played Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies,would have made a splendid Otto, but is too old now.

A Day At The Movies

2012-01-19T01:00:00.000-08:00

Today I took the older children in my family, my nephew Max and his cousin Dezzy, to see Hugo, the new Martin Scorsese movie. I'm not a huge fan of 3D, because I HATE having to fit the 3D glasses over my own, very uncomfortable, but I could see why this one was done the way it was - and the director made an excellent use of 3D, which is an integral part of the film. Despite the fact that the DVD, when it's out, will be in 2D, though, I will be buying it, probably the first day it's available!

It's a film centred around cinema history, the story of Georges Melies, who did what is arguably the world's first science fiction film,

except it's seen from the viewpoint of Hugo, a young boy who has a mysterious automaton figure which he was fixing with his clockmaker father before his Dad's death. He's now living by himself in the main train station in Paris, in the 1920s, still trying to fix the automaton, but he's missing a heart-shaped key that is needed to wind it up...

Thing is, quite apart from the cinema history here, it is so very steampunk! I watched all that clockwork and the era in which it was going on and that's the first word that came to me. Steampunk!

The cast is great too, with Ben Kingsley as Melies, Christopher Lee as a kindly bookshop owner and Jude Law as the boy's father. The music is composed by Howard Shore, of Lord Of The Rings fame. Sacha Baron Cohen is in it too, but if you haven't seen it I'll let you see what role he plays. He's funny, yes, but with a twist.

The station itself is a character in the film - and wouldn't we all love to be able to go to a station full of toyshops and bookshops and cafes where you can dance to a live band every day?

It's a very special movie and now I'm going to have to dig out the book.

New Goodies For My Enjoyment

2012-01-16T00:34:00.000-08:00

Today I came home from taking the kids out to see the latest Alvin and the Chipmunks movie to find some lovely stuff in my letterbox. There was my ordered DVD of Going Postal, the telemovie of Terry Pratchett's novel. I don't think it quite as good as the Hogfather movie, but I got sucked into a second viewing on TV and thought, what-the-heck and bought it through the ABC Shop. I'm looking forward to my third viewing. As per usual, Terry appears at the end, this time as a postman.

There's also a lovely package from Bloomsbury, in which I found a review copy of Mark Walden's latest H.I.V.E novel, Aftershock. It's been a while since I read the last one and I might have to do a skim-through to refresh my memory, but it's always worth a read. There was also a blurb from the publicity lady at Bloomsbury offering an interview or guest post from the author. That's something I'll think about while I read the book. I do have some questions to ask. If you haven't read the series, the theme is goings-on in the world of super-villains. H.I.V.E is a school for the training of future super-villains, as well as a henchman program aimed at the future sidekicks. The first novel was very funny, and the school a sort of Hogwarts for villains, as if seen from the viewpoint of Draco Malfoy. There is still humour, but the series becomes a lot darker as it goes, and the protagonists are - well, nice!

Finally, among today's arrivals is Joanne Anderton's first novel, Debris, published by Angry Robot Books. I am very much looking forward to reading this. I had never met Joanne till last Swancon, but we'd worked together on the Andromeda Co-Op and I have read several of her stories, including one I was lucky enough to get in slush. We read blind, so all I knew was that I was reading this wonderful story that deserved to be published. I was in the staffroom at work when I read it, as I recall, and said, "Oh, my God, there's a story in which the Royal Flying Doctor Service fly out on dragons!" And the dragons were simply enlarged, winged Australian lizards. The story was duly published and as the art director, I arranged for the cover art with an American artist, Anna Repp, who was a wonderful dragon-painter. Anna looked up the Flying Doctor Service and photos of the Australian desert and did a terrific cover for that issue. I will be reviewing this book as soon as I can, so stand by.

SECOND HAND TREASURES

2012-01-14T00:04:00.000-08:00

In an earlier post, I talked about discount bookshops and the treasures to be found there. Today I'm going to talk about treasures to be found second-hand.

Some of the books that have been closest to my heart weren’tbrand new from the publishers at all, they were second hand, sometimes veryold.

When I was at school, I used to go to school fetes, wherepeople would donate books they wanted to get rid of, a win-win situation. For20 cents, I acquired a proof copy of Mary Renault’s Alexander novel FireFrom Heaven and Leon Uris’s Exodus in hardcover. Diving right into the books on offer,I found a velvet-covered 1900s copy of Romeo and Juliet. I gave that to a friend returning to America andshe, in her turn, gave me a book she’s discovered at the fete: a very old copy of TheVolsunga Saga – you know, the Icelandicversion of the story Wagner used for the Ring operas? Sigurd instead of Siegfried,Brynhild, Gudrun… I was thrilled to bits.

I found Howard Fast’s autobiographical The Naked God at a church fete near my place. It told me a lot more about the background to his books than I could have found elsewhere in thosepre-Internet days.

I have some nineteenth century books – Byron’s poems and an1876 works of Shakespeare turned up at a second-hand bookshop high up onFlinders Lane in Melbourne, as did a 19^th century copy of the Aeneid, which had been given as a school prize. The shop islong gone now and I haven’t seen anything like it since; there are second-handshops, of course, and my favourites belong to David and Penny Syber, who sellsecond-hand SF books in their shops near my home. Well, they sell more thanthat, but it’s what they specialise in. But not only that. Once, a workmatetold me she had lost her copy of the autobiography of Franco Zefirelli, a bookI owned and loved. Would you believe David had a copy parked in his back room?

At another second-hand shop in the Melbourne CBD, I havefound a pile of Celtic-themed books, so helpful when I was researchingbackground to the Faerie stuff in Wolfborn.I still wander in now and then and pounce on the latest title about Scottish orIrish fairy tales. It was in one of the books I found at that shop that I readan Irish version of Bluebeard. Iremembered it when doing Juliet Marillier’s fairy tale workshop at Swancon lastyear, because the ending was so different. In it, the young wife succeeds inscrubbing away the bloodstains before the husband returns, with the help ofsome animals she has befriended. When he returns, he says, basically, “Oh, youobeyed me! Well done!” and they live happily ever after. Or as happy as you canbe with a wife-killer in the house, anyway.

My sister Mary found me some books I really got excitedabout. Once, she gave me a second-hand Charles De Lint chapbook, of the kind hewrites for family Christmas presents, then prints in chapbook form for sale,then mass market, because she knows I’m fond of his work. What she hadn’trealised was that it was signed! (Later, I was lucky enough to be invited to doa panel with him at a Swancon … great guy!)

Another time, she borrowed a second-hand book catalogue froma friend and ordered me a copy of A Yankee At The Court Of King Arthur by Mark Twain (the British title) because she knowsI’m into things Arthurian.

Dear Mary. It turned out to be a first British edition,published in 1889, at the same time as the US one. It wasn’t signed, but I wasNOT complaining!

In recent months I’ve acquired copies of old books by MurrayLeinster, Bob Shaw, Henry Kuttner and other SF writers of the golden age,usually at Penny Syber’s shop in Windsor, which is right next to the tram stop,so I can go there after work if I’m willing to get off the train a couple ofstops early and go on the tram.

My friend Anne is an expert at finding things in op shops.When I complained that I didn’t have any money left to order a copy of Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword At Sunset for my library, she posted me an early hardcovershe’d unearthed somewhere. Ulp! It’s now only in print in the US! I’m keepingthat one; I’m going to order a paperback through Of Science And Swords bookshopin town as soon as my new budget comes through.

John, another friend of unbelievable search skills, sent mea Robin Hood TV series annual from the50s, while my friend Gaye found me another, with a different Robin. Bliss!

New is nice, but for me, there’s nothing quite like thethrill of discovering the old.

Giveaway Winners!

2012-01-13T15:52:00.000-08:00

Okay, roll of drums! The time has come!

Thanks to a fabulous random number generator, I didn't have to cut up all those names and put them into a hat. So please believe me when I say the names were totally randomly chosen - two books and two sets of bookmarks. I'm also giving away a couple more sets of bookmarks on a whim - more of that later.

You've all been wonderful and it's been exciting to have had so many entries from around the world. I hope you'll check out the book anyway and maybe get it as an e-book (I've found it on the iTunes store as well as Amazon).

Now - stop rolling those drums, Etienne! I have to make the announcement!

Two copies of Wolfborn will be winging their way to:

RandomlyKait

and

Brenda Demko

I'm sending signed bookmarks to Christina Fiorelli and DindaSi. You'll get some for my children's non-fiction book Crime Time and some for Wolfborn (I thought I'd run out and found a stash my publishers sent me months ago and I'd forgotten)

Congratulations, ladies!

I'm also sending bookmarks to the following:

Helen, because you actually commented on a post other than the giveaway one; I really appreciated that.

Cayce: because you implied you might have taken a look at either the Wolfborn review or the sample chapter. You didn't have to, but I appreciated it.

I'm going off to have breakfast now and do my grocery shopping, but later on today my time I'll be emailing the winners for their mailing addresses and hopefully I will send off the books or bookmarks on Monday.

Of course, if you want to email me your addresses without hearing from me first, that's fine too. :-)

Me And My E-Reader

2012-01-12T20:23:00.000-08:00

Okay, I've now had my wonderful new iPad for about a week. I thought it must be two at least because of all the fun I've had with it, but I've checked out the post in which I announced it and it was January 7. It's been great being able to check my email and read the Age newspaper in bed each morning. Once I'm back at work, I won't be able to do that except on the weekend, but I can take it on the train.

What I've been most thrilled with, though, is the e-reader facility. looking at my virtual book shelves, I now have the following:

A Connecticut Yankee At King Arthur's Court, What Katy Did, What Katy Did At School, Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, Keith Laumer's Legions of Space, Andre Norton's The Time Traders, Fritz Leiber's short story "No Great Magic", which I've read and liked before, a 1930 copy of Astounding Stories, The Lost World and a Professor Challenger short story, "The Disintegration Machine, Wells' The Time Machine, both Jungle Books and a volume of Kipling's horror fiction, The Berserker Throne, The Code of Hammurabi (did you know you could be executed for receiving stolen goods in ancient Mesopotamia?), Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, A Princess of Mars, Grimm's Fairytales, Agent of Vega and A Logic Named Joe, a collection of Murray Leinster stories. The title story, published in 1946, predicted the Internet!

I do, of course, have the iPad manual for emergencies. It's several hundred pages long, so I'll use it when I need it.

And, just because I could, I bought a copy of my own novel, Wolfborn, so I could carry it around, maybe show it off a little, use it for reading from in public (when, one of these days, I get invited to speak in public about my writing... :-D). So far, it's the only book for which I was required to pay; the rest were from Project Gutenberg or the Baen free book page.

I don't mind paying, but most of these are classics I either haven't read or haven't read in years. And I can carry them all in my bag and open up whichever of them I want, when I want. I've been like a kid in a lolly shop! When I calm down I will start shopping, and buy some current books.

Today, while I was waiting for my mother to join me at Macca's, I opened my e-reader to Mark Twain's gorgeous time-travel novel, which I've loved since I first read it in primary school. (I have a battered old paperback and a first British edition my sister bought me from a catalogue). There was a table nearby with another mother and daughter and the daughter asked me lots of questions. Her elderly mother's ears pricked up when I said that if your eyesight isn't too good you can enlarge the letters on an e-reader.

Now, if my local library would make e-borrowing possible I'd buy my mother an e-reader so she could read her crime novels in large print...

Once I get a word-processing program I will be able to use it to check my students' homework, read slush and prepare stuff for the library.

Read A Book!

2012-01-12T19:57:00.000-08:00

Found this link on Twitter, which is proving to be very handy, pity it's blocked at school. Go check it out, come back here and comment - go on:

http://yfrog.com/g0vwk3j

I'd add to this picture one of a computer/mobile phone/ games console. Although now I think of it you can read a book on your computer and mobile.

SHAKE A LEG By Boori Monty Pryor and Jan Ormerod. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2011

2012-01-11T17:14:00.000-08:00

It’s a hot night in far North Queensland. Three boys are ona quest for pizza, as you do on a hot summer night. They find a highly unusualpizzeria whose owner not only makes – very unusual!- pizza and speaks Italian but tells indigenous stories, using song and dancein which the listeners are invited to take part. The boys are about to get alot more than something to eat…

I’ve read Boori Monty Pryor’s novels, but this is, as far asI know, his first picture book/graphic novel, created with award-winning artistJan Ormerod.

This book itself won a Prime Minister’s Literary Award in2011 and it’s very clear why. It’s a joyous, stunningly-illustrated journeythrough traditional stories and it tells you that indigenous and non-indigenousAustralians can celebrate their own traditions and each other’s together. Youcan almost hear the music and the storyteller. Perhaps an audio-book read bythe author with accompanying book would be a good way to go?

It’s an interesting combination of graphic novel andpicture-book and the pizza-maker looks just a little like a younger version ofthe author. That’s not surprising; Boori Monty Pryor does tend to write himselfinto his novels, so why shouldn’t the artist draw him in?

Mr Pryor has recently been appointed one of Australia’sfirst two Children’s Laureates, something that has been done in the UK foryears. His job will be to encourage children to love reading and frankly, Ican’t think of anyone better.

HIT LIST By Jack Heath. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2010

2012-01-11T15:55:00.001-08:00

Ash and Benjamin are teenage thieves working for amysterious figure called Hammond Buckland. Actually, Ash is the one who doesmost of the running around; Benjamin is her admiring helper, who does thetechnical stuff.

Ash had started off as a straight thief, trying to get moneyto solve the family financial problems, but has started to feel guilty about itand is now only stealing things that have been stolen by others, to return themto their rightful owners…for a price.

Now, she and Benjamin will travel to the heart of theworld’s top technology facility in response to an SOS from someone calledAlice. Rescuing a kidnapped girl sounds good. The only trouble is, there areothers who have the same goal and are prepared to kill to achieve it – and sendin hit men and hit teams. And who is the Ghost even the hit team are terrifiedof?

It’s a nice, easy-to-read thriller for teenagers and I likethat the author has written it from the girl’s viewpoint, meaning both girlsand boys can enjoy it. I liked that Ash is not confident about her ownattractions and doesn’t have friends apart from Benjamin. I liked that Benjaminwas a nerdy type, not the usual athletic hunk. And wouldn’t we all like toimagine ourselves running around major places in the world, kicking ass?

You can really enjoy it if you’re prepared to suspend somedisbelief. Like - telling your dad that you’re going for a sleepover at afriend’s place and to please pick you up from school next day and thentravelling – without any paperwork whatsoever, it seems! – from Australia tothe US and spending the next however many hours having adventures and beingfollowed overseas by various other characters who are after you, who arrive inplenty of time to threaten you. (Time zones, anyone?) One of whom, by the way,has just been badly injured and really shouldn’t be out of bed?

But this probably says more about me and my attitude tothrillers than it does about the author or his editor. I have read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code which has sold millions of copies and was non-stop adventure and all Icould think of, when I’d finished it, was that no one ever slept, ate or wentto the bathroom in the 24 hours in which the book is set and no one seemed evenremotely tired at the end. Thrillers are like that. Nobody would read them ifthey had people stop for a rest. Get over it, Sue.

So I’m just going to make one nitpick: the author has done alot of research about the big things, but there are some small things thatcould have done with checking. As far as I know, alimony is very rare inAustralia, can be paid to either partner depending on the circumstances, ifthey can’t support themselves, and child support is paid to the parent who hasthe child. Admittedly this is usually the mother, but in this case Ash liveswith her father and at one point they discuss the alimony and child supporthe’s paying to her mother, who had left them and has a well-paid job. He’sclearly being ripped off here! Someone has not told Ash’s father the law, itseems.

Just a nitpick on my part. And of course, Ash’s homelocation is kept vague, but it’s not in the US and the terms used are mostlyAustralian.

This is the second of two novels (there’s also a shortstory), but I haven’t read the first. It pretty much stands alone, though Isuspect it might be better to read the first one before this.

Go on, read it. It’s not too long for even a reluctantreader and it’s fun.

Giveaway Nearly Over

2012-01-11T13:23:00.001-08:00

It's been a fascinating week, seeing all those entries come in from around the world, everyone saying thank you nicely and some showing they might be interested in this particular book. One even hinted she may have checked out the sample chapter! For me, living in Australia, this is the last day, but you guys keep entering till midnight your time. I'll take it into account. I won't be drawing the winner till afternoon Jan.13 my time. Winners, that is. Two books and two lots of bookmarks. I had planned to cut out the names and put them into a hat,but thanks to my friend Lan Chan of The Write Obsession I have learned about a web site that generates random numbers. So you will each be given a number and I'll then go to the web site with a set of numbers between...whatever the final number is and 1. It will generate the required set of numbers and those will be my winners. Good luck!

O joy! New toy!

2012-01-07T03:01:00.001-08:00

I've acquired three new toys over the last couple of weeks. Well, I needed the phone. The old one was playing up on me. I don't care if it does more than make calls, though I admit the camera is nice. And my little mp3 player was a gift from my sister and handy for podcasts, but not an iPod. But my iPad! I'm carrying a mobile computer.And, because I'm a book lover, I've been hankering after an ereader. I found a free app that links with a number of free book sites - not only Project Gutenberg, but the Baen web site. I've already downloaded three books by classicSF writers. My very first ebooks!The iPad is something I have wanted to get, but I finally got it when I knew our Year 7 students were to be issued with them. Won't it be fun learning it before I go back?Excuse me while I go play with my new toys.

YOU KNOW YOU’VE BEEN READING TOO MUCH YA PARANORMAL ROMANCE WHEN…

2012-01-07T00:58:00.000-08:00

You go grocery shopping in a long formal gown.

You’re disappointed when you turn sixteen and all that happens is a party.

You’re being stalked, but it’s okay, because he is so hot!

You check out new boys in your class for evidence of wings.

You’re invited to go flying and assume it’s going to be in his arms, not a plane.

You go to a new town and hope there’s a mysterious bunch of gorgeous guys to fight over you.

Your parents tell you there’s something they need to discuss with you and you hope they’re going to tell you that you’re a long-lost Faerie/vampire/demon princess.

You get frustrated because the school 's head cheerleader is actually NICE and isn't accusing you of stealing her boyfriend.

And you really knowyou’ve read too much of this stuff when you get a copy of Dracula and cheer for the vampire!

I came across a list of five signs of reading too much YAfiction on Book Riot blog and thought it such a good idea I couldn’t resistdoing my own list. Thanks, Book Riot!

SO, WHAT ARE YOU DOING FOR THE NATIONAL YEAR OF READING?

2012-01-07T00:40:00.000-08:00

This is the National Year of Reading in Australia. There arediscussions going on all over the web and ideas thrown around for how to dostuff to encourage reading. I don’t think I can add to these discussions, but Ican talk about what I’m hoping to do andmake suggestions for things that can be done in a school library with a tinybudget and limited staffing.

A library like mine.

I’ve experimented with most of these suggestions and amplanning to have a go at the others. My book club had better watch out, becauseI am going to ask them to give a hand – okay, Dylan and Thando? J(Students following this blog, and Thando has been a guest blogger)

There are the obvious ones, which any school can do if theyhave time and/or money. The Premier’s Reading Challenge, for example. Reader’sCup. MS Readathon. But all those are team efforts. They need to be a schooleffort, not just that of the teacher-librarian. If you can arrange that, fine.

However, I’m going to make a few suggestions that you can dowith limited staff help and funding, though they do rather rely on studentsco-operating. But hey, the students are what it’s about and who it’s for and ifyou can’t get student co-operation you might as well not bother!

These things all need effort. There’s no way you can getaround that. But they work, as long as you’re prepared to be obnoxious and makea fuss till you get some support, however little. Here they are, in no specialorder – if you have some more you’ve tried out, why not add them here?

Offer to do book launches for new writers. In this era of internet contact, it’s not hard to track down a new writer who might be willing and able to have a go. It’s win-win. It gives the author promotion and practice in speaking to young readers and they can bring books to sell. Students get to meet a writer at the start of their career You have to have some copies in the library and promote like mad for days before the visitor arrives for the launch. Call the local press. That’s good for everyone. When my book Starwalkers was being launched in a school library, I persuaded my publisher to give us some goodies and a few dollars towards the lollies and cordial. The TL called the local press and did a space-themed trivia quiz before I arrived and held the final round during the launch. I signed copies of the book for all four students. It was very successful. Since then, I’ve had a number of launches myself.

Start a book or library blog, if you don’t have one already. You can review new books, which can then go to your library, and you can invite students to review books on it. If you’re planning on doing something for IYR, you probably have a blog of one kind or another anyway.

Start a lunchtime book club. Yes, it can be exhausting and you need to work out what it will involve, with your students, but believe me when I say it’s well worth the effort. And these students can become “reading ambassadors” and help with activities you might plan and choose books for the library.

Join YABBA (Young Australians Best Books Award). This is CHEAP! Even I was able to afford it last year. You get posters and stuff and the students can nominate and vote for Australian books they like. It helps to have the support of English staff for this one, but you can also get your reading ambassadors to encourage their fellow students to nominate and vote.

Why not check out Banned Books Week? It’s amazing how many books in your library have been banned at one time or another. Last year I experimented, doing it myself and putting it up on Youtube, but how about encouraging students to do this? Even if it doesn’t go on Youtube, why not film it anyway and have a festival of readings in the library? Have a prize – it doesn’t have to be big and you’ll probably have some review books put aside anyway. There’s also Teachertube, which is less likely to be blocked!

How about a book trailer competition? I haven’t had the opportunity to do it in the library yet, but last year I did it with my English class. I got the idea when Random House, my publishers, ran their annual teenage book trailer comp. Teachertube has a very good book trailer presentation that gives you information about Creative Commons web sites that will let you use the images, music, etc, free. Check it out. My English students were given the chance to prepare a book trailer as a creative response to their Literature Circles books. These were so very good that I put them together on DVD and will be showing them to other staff. I gave all my class members a copy to take away as a souvenir. Teenagers are better at this sort of thing than we are, being familiar with the software. The trailers can be shown in the library during Book Week, perhaps, or Banned Books Week. You do have to model this, though, and I prepared my own trailer for Wolfborn, which I expected them to laugh at, and go do a better job, but they liked it. You can also go on-line and find trailers made by students to show them. I used Teachertube. We had everything from Morris Gleitzman’s Once as a sort of PowerPoint with music to a performance of a scene from Wuthering Heights done as a modern American soap opera!

How about a Book Week lunchtime trivia quiz? Prizes can be small. You can buy bags of fun-sized chocolate bars for $3 to $5 at the supermarket. I’ve done this many times and it always works, though last year I gave up on Book Week altogether when my book club helpers all went off to camp. Oh, well. The beauty of this is that you can create a quiz that can be varied a bit each year, but doesn’t have to be completely new each time. Sometimes, I grab students in the library and invite them to think up a question for the quiz. Only one each. That way they only know the answer to one in advance. ;-) You will need a barrel girl/boy to mark and record the scores of each group on the whiteboard, but there’s bound to be a staff member who is happy to give a hand.

How about an on-line interview with a favourite writer? Check out the ones I’ve published on The Great Raven. All but the interview with Miffy were done by my students. They have been among the most popular posts on the blog. I sat down with them and had a chat about their questions. I gave these questions a light edit before submitting them to the author, but otherwise the questions belong to the students who wrote them. Not all authors will be willing or able to help. Sometimes they’re just too busy writing and we do want them to get on with producing more for us to read. Sometimes they don’t include a contact email on their web sites. Sometimes you get a response from an agent who sees your request, not as an opportunity for promotion, but as a nuisance.

But most of the writers wequeried were simply wonderful. Every one of the interviews we received wasbetter than we could possibly have expected.

Some publishers will actuallyoffer an interview. This is where I got the idea; Juliet Marillier’s publishersaid she was doing interviews that month and as I’d only read one of her booksat the time and I had a student who was a passionate Marillier fan, I asked ifshe could do it. “Sure!” said the publisher. The rest is history.

If you have any ideas of yourown, do respond here. Library folk have to look after each other and whyreinvent the wheel?

SEIZURE By Kathy Reichs. Sydney: Random House 2011

2012-01-05T21:24:00.000-08:00

Tory and her friends live on an island near the city ofCharleston. Their parents work as researchers for the university’s veterinaryfacility. What they haven’t told their families is that they have all beeninfected with a mutated virus that gave them wolf abilities – better sight,hearing, smell, though each is better than the others in one thing. They havebeen testing out their new abilities when disaster strikes: the facility isbeing closed down, the animal reserve will probably be sold to developers andthe friends will be split. What to do? Well…there’s always buried piratetreasure to seek. And the Charleston area is overflowing with pirate history,including that of notorious woman pirate Anne Bonny. And Anne left a treasuremap…

This is the second book in the series, but apart from theappearance, late in the book, of a character from the first novel, it canpretty much stand alone. I haven’t read the first book and I had no troublewith it at all.

Kathy Reichs is best known for her series about forensicanthropologist Tempe Brennan, on which the TV series Bones is loosely based. I’ve read several of them and Ihave to say I never expected the author to have a go at YA fiction. Tory isTempe’s grandniece, which made for an odd feeling when I first picked up thisbook; you don’t expect a straight crime series to have a companion series withfantastical elements. In fact, there were a number of Reichs fans at theSisters In Crime convention I attended last year who were complaining bitterlyabout it.

I have to wonder, now, if they had actually read either thisbook or the first one. Odd as the idea is, the book itself is a hoot. Think TheGoonies with superpowers. The authordefinitely had a nod to that movie in mind, as she has a character mention itat one point. There’s also a scene in which Tory and her Dad watch Bones on TV, without telling us if it’s a documentaryseries, since Tempe Brennan is a real person in this universe.

But it’s huge fun. The characters have superpowers allright, but they can’t be sure when they will “flare” and it takes differentthings to get them flaring. Shelton has to be scared. Ben has to be angry toget it going, which means the others have to upset him. Tory is the only onewho can join them as a “pack” and communicate telepathically.

The kids are desperate to find the treasure, but they aren’tthe only ones after it and spend most of the novel being chased, shot at andotherwise threatened by other treasure-seekers. I found myself grinning,chortling and laughing out loud.

And it’s lucky it was written by this particular author, whois herself a forensic anthropologist, because otherwise I would have wonderedhow well a three-hundred-year-old document would survive being carried aroundin a girl’s backpack while she’s nearly killed in several violent ways. ButKathy Reichs is both a forensic scientist and a former archaeologist and if shesays it’s possible I’ll accept that.

I’m looking forward to trying out this one on the studentswho have been reading Justin Richards, Anthony Horowitz and Charlie Higson’sadventure novels.

This 'n That! :-)

2012-01-05T15:20:00.000-08:00

I've just finished reading Kathy Reichs's YA novel Seizure, which will be reviewed on this site soon. What a hoot! It took me a while to get started, then i read the lot in a day.

The book giveaway hop has started and for the next few days, folks will be wandering through in hopes of getting a copy of Wolfborn. I'll look forward to meeting them, and some will also receive some bookmarks. I've just unearthed a stash of Wolfborn bookmarks to add to the Crime Times.

Yesterday I had the good fortune to meet Lan Chan of The Write Obsession. a blog I read daily. We took a stroll through the State Library, one of my favourite places in Melbourne, and Lan joined. If anyone reading this lives here and isn't a member I do recommend it - there are so many wonderful on-line resources you can use, even if you never step in the door again (and you can join on-line if you can't get in). We did try to join the Victorian Writers' Centre, but it's closed for holidays till next week.

Then we went for lunch and sat down in the Melbourne Central food court to talk writer shop - agents and the difficulty of getting them, markets, problems of focusing on writing, researching... (As a matter of fact, I'm supposed to be doing my copyedit of "Call Him Ringo" for Trust Me Too! and will be doing that as soon as I log off here)

Any Melbourne YA writers who'd like to get together over coffee to critique each other's work? Lan would like to have a face-to-face writing group, so if you're interested, stroll over to The Write Obsession and make contact.

I don't blame her. I know a lot of groups these days are on-line and that's fine, but it's just not the same as meeting in person, having a good group bitch about publishers and sharing the excitement of a sale when it happens. I was in one of those groups, years before the Internet, and it was exhausting but exhilarating. Some of us did end up selling and going professional. Besides, it was one of those group members, Carole Green, who let me know I was a children's writer. If I'd been in on-line groups I'm quite sure I would never have discovered this. Carole passed away long ago, but I owe her one for that.

So if anybody reading this is always at their computer and all their writing friends are on-line, do consider getting out from the house and meeting others like you at a cafe somewhere in Melbourne.

The Hobbit Movie Goes On Location

2012-01-05T06:14:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to the latest movie-blog for The Hobbit movie. Go check it out. They've been doing months in the studio and now have gone on the road, because they know what brought so many people to New Zealand after the LOTR movies ;-) . (I was one of them and what a wonderful trip it was!)

They've actually built a Hobbiton which is going to stay up for the benefit of future tourists, as a gift to the people of New Zealand.

Follow this link and open the full screen.

http://the-hobbit-movie.com/2011/12/24/the-hobbit-production-video-5/

Fantasy and Fairies Book Giveaway

2012-01-05T04:00:00.000-08:00

Just a reminder to anyone who intends to enter that the Giveaway starts midnight tonight, Australian time. Tomorrow morning I will start checking out the page labelled Giveaway for comments, which should be your name and, if you wouldn't mind, your country. You should also be following this blog. Why not join, then put in your entry? :-)

The pretty logo with a fairy on it will lead you to the I'm A Reader Not A Writer web site, where you'll find all the other participating blogs if you want to get more books.

There are two copies of Wolfborn for the lucky winners and I will throw in some Crime Time bookmarks for early birds - not YA fantasy, but I'm running low on Wolfborn bookmarks (my publishers have none left at all!) and the Crime Time ones are VERY nice!

If I get more than two entries I'll pull names out of a hat. If you win, I'll announce it on this blog and invite the winners to email me with their mailing addresses.

Good luck!

Hal Junior: The Secret Signal By Simon Haynes. Bowman, 2011

2012-01-05T03:50:00.000-08:00

Cover Blurb:

Hal Junior lives aboard a futuristic space station. His mum is chief scientist, his dad cleans air filters and his best mate is Stephen 'Stinky' Binn. As for Hal ... he's a bit of a trouble magnet. He means well, but his wild schemes and crazy plans never turn out as expected!

Hal Junior: The Secret Signal features mayhem and laughs, daring and intrigue ... plus a home-made space cannon!

I've read the adult Hal Spacejock series, which were published by Fremantle Press. They're basically Bill, The Galactic Hero meets Red Dwarf. Hal Spacejock, the hero, is a klutzy interplanetary truck driver with a robot sidekick, and the adventures have this unlucky pair caught up in much bigger events than they are prepared for.

This children's book takes us back to a time when Hal was still living at home on the space station with his parents. The book began like a typical Hal Spacejock adventure, with Hal involved in a couple of near-catastrophes, one of them to do with reversing gravity to get back a paper plane that was part of his homework. But the events at the beginning turned out to have significance later in the novel, when Hal is called on to save the day.

Between chapters are silly drawings and comments reminiscent of some of the Terry Denton illustrations in Andy Griffiths books. There's even a page of Morse code dots and dashes that children should have fun with.

If you've read the adult books, it's almost poignant thinking that this little boy who manages to use his wits and save the day will become an adult klutz, stumbling from one misadventure to another. But if you're a child just discovering this universe, it's a great giggle. I read the book from cover to cover on the beach one hot afternoon and thoroughly enjoyed it. We can only hope that there will be an entire series.

The Hunger Games movie is coming!

2012-01-03T12:26:00.000-08:00

If, like me, you've read and loved the Hunger Games trilogy, wander over to the Book Hounds web site, where Mary has put up the trailer for the new movie, which is coming out in March (oh, please, let it be here at the same time!). The trailer looks quite faithful to the book.

It was this time last year when I first read the books - I got through the whole trilogy in as many days. I think this is one of those YA series that will become a classic. Think Tomorrow When The War Began meets The Running Man (book, not film!).

The books haven't been borrowed from my library for a while, after a lot of borrowing some time ago, but with the movie coming I might just be able to persuade the students to give it a try.

FROI OF THE EXILES By Melina Marchetta. Melbourne: Penguin, 2011

2012-01-02T00:46:00.000-08:00

In Finnikin Of The Rock,we met the exiles of the kingdom of Lumatere, locked out of their homes – literally!– by a curse, while a usurper king ruled with the help of invaders from Charyn, another kingdom.The book was more about the refugee experience than about typical fantasyissues. The story was seen from the viewpoint of Finnikin, a young exile whohad lost nearly everything. When he found the lost heir to the throne, Isaboe,they returned to the kingdom to rebuild after the tragedy of the invasion.

In this book, three years later, we see things from theviewpoint of the enemy, who have had tragedies of their own and some of whomare now refugees themselves. We meet ordinary Charynites who lost sons draftedinto that invading army.

Finnikin hasmarried Isaboe and they have their first child. The kingdom is graduallyreturning to health and prosperity under their competent rule.

But bad things are happening in Charyn. To stop them, an assassin will have togo to Charyn to kill the king whose soldiers invaded Lumatere in the previousstory. That assassin is Froi, a former street kid who, despite what he hadattempted to do to Isaboe, has been brought back to Lumatere, where he haslearned pride in himself and has come to worship Isaboe.

Froi has found a home in Lumatere, but something is missing.Will he find it in Charyn? What else will he find in Charyn?

This book took me a long time to read. Apart from beingthick-as-a-brick, it’s not easy reading – you have to work at it. I had to stopand read something, anything else, everyso often, to give myself a break.

Was it worth the effort? Yes. The beauty of the writing andthe way you can feel for the characters made it well worth persisting. Thetragedy of Charyn unfolded gradually, layer by layer. You didn’t feel the same about any of the characters at theend as you had at the start, once you found out the truth of what had happenedover the last eighteen years. The descriptions of the landscapes of Charyn were breathtaking. The author says in an afterword that it was inspired by Matera in Italy

Matera

, Cappadocia in Turkey

Cappadocia

and the castle of Conwy in Wales.

If you don't have good head for heights, all that description of Froi jumping across scary heights and climbing up to the next storey with the gravina (ravine) below will make you dizzy! Looking at the pictures I've inserted above should give you some idea of the scariness of the scenes.

The chapters about Froi in Charyn are alternated with whatis happening back home, on the border of Lumatere, where some Charyniterefugees have taken up residence, waiting and hoping to be allowed in. Looseends from Finnikin Of The Rock are tied.

Finnikin was aperfectly good standalone book, despite the few loose ends; this one ends on acliffhanger, so be warned.

I will bevery surprised if it doesn’t go on this year’s CBCA short list, but it's not for the kind of teenager who likes the average YA fantasy.

I will be recommending it to those of our students who readand enjoyed Finnikin of The Rock. Therewere quite a few of those and they’re all very good readers, so we’ll see whatthey have to say – stand by for student comments!

YA Book Judging: An Interview with Miffy Farquharson

2012-01-01T21:05:00.000-08:00

Since I became a teacher-librarian and a writer for young people, I have always taken a keen interest in writing competitions. Judging, as you will see in the interview below, is not easy. It's a huge task and not everyone will agree with your choices. I thought it about time that a CBCA judge had a chance to explain the process to those of us who only see it from the other side ;-)

.Some of it is up on the CBCA web site, but there's nothing like asking someone who has been at the coalface. I asked Miffy Farquharson because she is a veteran not only of the CBCA Awards but of a number of others - and still, somehow, manages to keep her library running like clockwork. AND she blogged about it! Thank you, Miffy, for answering these questions! I hope my readers enjoy reading your answers as much as I did.

Miffy

SB: You’ve been a judge in the Aurealis, the CBCA and the WAPremier’s Literary Awards. How did you come to be involved in each of these?

MF: a. The firstaward that I was involved in was the CBCA awards as the Victorian Branchrepresentative. I was chosen to be the judge after answering a request for‘Expressions of Interest’ that was published in the branch newsletter. I wasinvited to an interview and had to present to the Vic committee as to why Iwould be a good choice to be the next judge. And I got the gig. So that was twoyears (2007 and 2008 for the 2008 and 2009 awards) that I lived, ate andbreathed CBCA awards. You can only be the CBCA judge for two years (which is agood thing, as there are so many books to read across the three age-relatedcategories) and cannot apply for another four years after your last year.

b. After thereading finished for my second year, I was still doing talks for CBCA in 2009and was still in contact with the judges from ACT and NSW. The NSW judge sentme an email that had the contact details to apply to be an Aurealis judge. Wewere all going to apply, but in the end I was the only one who got the gig. Iwas a panellist for Young Adult in my first year, and then convenor of YA in mysecond year. I am now the convenor of the Children’s Panel. You can keepworking for Aurealis indefinitely, but you can only do two years in any onecategory. So I did two years in YA, and have done one year (so far) inChildren’s.

c. And finally.As a result of being involved in the Aurealis Awards I met Tehani Wessely, whocontacted me early in 2011 to see if I wanted to be involved in the WA Litawards on the Children’s panel, as they hadn’t had enough people apply for thepanels. WAPBA is a three-year gig.

(SB: TehaniWessely is a super-teacher-librarian who also publishes through her press,Fablecroft, was a major member of the Andromeda Spaceways Co-operative, reviewsbooks for various SF and education publications, blogs, judges various book competitions,~~walks on water...)~~

SB: How are judges usually chosen for these awards? I notice thereseem to be more women than men. :-)

MF: See above. Something I forgot to say is that thepanel changes every single year, as four judges retire and four new ones starttheir two year stint. So WA, Vic, NSW and ACT are one 'bloc' and SA, NT, Tasand QLD are the other 'bloc'. In my first year, the SA, NT, etc. judges were intheir second year, and in my second year, SA NT, etc. were the newbies. This ispart of the reason why the lists can change from year to year, as the range ofjudges can be so disparate. And you are right, the majority of judges arewomen. The ACT judge during my time, Michael Janssen-Gibson, was a lone male onthe panel, and I don't think that there has been a bloke on the panel sincethen. Very sad.

SB: How many entries did you have to read for each set of awards –and how did you manage to do this and still have a life outside of reading?

MF: 400 plus for the CBCA per year.

Less than 150 for each of the Aurealis and WABLA.

You need to have very understanding family/ husband/employer. My husband is also a teacher-librarian, so that really helps. My kidslove me getting the books – they get to read them too! And both places I’veworked while judging (both independent schools) have been very supportive of metaking time off to do talks and attend judging panels and awards ceremonies.

And the key to reading for awards is to read forexcellence – as a t-lib I read lots of books that aren’t great, but I read themso that I know what’s out there so that I can recommend them to my students. Asa judge, excellence is what you are looking for.

SB: As achildren’s writer and a teacher-librarian, my particular interest is in theCBCA Awards, so here are some questions about this award in particular:

What is the process you and your fellow judges go through in thejudging? For example, do you each prepare a short list you discuss with theothers?

MF: Each of the judges receives boxes of books fromthe co-ordinators – about 25 titles per box, and across the age-relatedcategories. You have about 3 weeks to read the titles, and each judge writes aconfidential report on each of the books which indicates its potential as anotable or shortlist book. The reports are sent back to the coordinators, whocompile the reports for each box and return them to the judges so that all thejudges can see each other’s opinions.

Once all the books are read, each of the judgescompiles a ‘long list’ of their favourite titles – which is in no way set inconcrete!

The eight judges all meet in the coordinating state(SA at the moment – it cycles) to decide the shortlists and the winner andhonour books in each category. A category is decided each day, with the PictureBook category decided on the last day. Each and every book is put up forinclusion for discussion as a shortlisted book, and these books form the basisof the notable list, the shortlist and the winners and honour books. The actualnumber of votes needed for either notable or shortlist is on the CBCA website(I can’t remember the numbers right now).

SB: Doyou meet at any stage or is it all done by email/chatroom?

A bit of both. Most discussion is through the reportsand the judge’s conference, but some discussions are held outside that viaemail and teleconference.

SB: What are some of the criteria you have to address when judging theentries?

MF: All the criteria are on the CBCA website, but in short, they are: isthe title age-appropriate (for the EC, YR and OR categories), and is thewriting excellent? For PB category, do the text and illustrations complementand extend each other?

SB: Doyou, as is done in other awards, concentrate on one area, say older readers?

CBCA is ALL submitted titles

SB: Asyou’re a teacher-librarian, do you invite any of your students to read someof the books andgive their opinions?

This year we will be doing that across the school. Tocombat the secondary school ‘reading is uncool so I’m not going to put my handup’, we are nominating Reading Ambassadors and they will be reading the titlesthis year.

SB: If it’s not too personal a question – what did you DO with allthose books you read? :-)

MF: I kept all the shortlisted books, the notable booksthat I loved, and anything else that I really enjoyed but which didn’t make thecut. The rest of the CBCA books went to church charities in Bendigo. We took upabout 12 green bags full of books. The minister almost died!
:-)

Since we’ve moved to Melbourne I donate all the booksI don’t want to keep to a disadvantaged school that is supported by my sister’spartner. They are very grateful, and I wish that I had time to donate to themto get their library up to scratch. Maybe if I win Tatts!

SB: Would you do it again?

MF: In a flash! It is a HUGE task, but so enjoyable. Imade some lifelong friends in the other judges over the two years, and had aninsight into the process behind Australia’s most prestigious award forbooks for young people.

SB: Thanks again for your fascinating insight into this process!

Coming Soon - Interview With A Book Judge!

2012-01-01T15:19:00.000-08:00

Keep an eye out for a new post in which I interview Miffy Farquharson, teacher-librarian and judge of several book competitions including the Children's Book Council of Australia, the Aurealis and the WA Premier's Literary Awards. Miffy takes us behind the scenes of the judging process.

I'm just going to make it look pretty for the web site and find an image or two and you'll get to read it.

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T23:06:00.000-08:00

First post for 2012 - I hope you enjoyed last year's posts! Have a happy new year, all my friends and followers, and here are some resolutions:

1. Write as much as I can, short fiction and long.
2. Finish the Wolfborn-universe novel and have a go at selling it.
3. Read and review as many books as I can, YA and speculative fiction.
4. Get my oven fixed so I can bake again, something I find very soothing and creative. Now I've discovered that wonderful YA writer Sophie Masson has a recipe blog and seem, for some reason, to be picking up followers on Twitter who have their own recipe blogs, it's time I got stuck into it. You CAN write books and cook.
5. Get my library doing lots of good stuff, as I did last year.
6. Score some speaking invitations..? Well, I can only try.

Giveaway deal up

2011-12-29T22:23:00.000-08:00

I've put in a page for the January 6 to 12 YA fantasy novel giveaway. It's on the side as "Wolfborn Giveaway". Go check it out. You do have to be following me, here, on Twitter or Goodreads, to be eligible. If you're not following me yet, go ahead and join - it just takes one click of your mouse! For Blogger, you'll need to be following publicly, because I have no way of knowing who's following me privately.

Good luck!

Crime Time Sample

2011-12-28T17:37:00.000-08:00

If you take a look to your right on this page, you'll find I've now slipped in a sample chapter from my children's crime book Crime Time: Australians behaving badly. I had a lot of fun writing this book, which is definitely not aimed at helping kids with their homework, though there are a few chapters about bushrangers. For this sample I've chosen one of the sillier stories, that of the April Fool's Day robbery attempt.

I remember going into Borders and browsing through the children's section. I asked a staff member where I could find books on crime. I knew they had it, but not where. And it's always hard to find non-fiction in the children's section, anyway.

"A crime book? In the children's section?" he asked, startled.

It was in the adult true crime.

This is what you get for writing something unusual.

Anyway, take a look at my sample chapter and if you like what you read, go to your local bookshop and ask for a copy. If you live outside Australia, you may have to look it up in ABEbooks, but don't stress over the horrendous prices - those are for shipment to Australia from the UK or US. Just check with the bookshop if it's in your country.

The Glasshouse by Paul Collins. Illustrated by Jo Thompson. Melbourne: Ford Street, 2010

2011-12-28T17:18:00.000-08:00

Cover blurb:

Clara lives in her balanced world where everything isperfect.

Her glasshouse is free of bugs, her prized pumpkins freeblemishes. But then one day a boy walks into her life and slowly Clara realisesthat her world is not perfect at all. paranoia spreads and she loses all hercustomers. Finally, she must face up to the realisation that her world is notperfect, and she must make allowances and compromise she is to survive.

I have to admire anyone who can tell their story inpicture book format. You have to make your point in only a few words and makeit in such a way that children will understand and enjoy, without talking down to them. And this one is a good startfor classroom discussion – or parent discussion – of themes like perfectionismand about living in a world of your own, without being willing to communicate with others.

I may just use it as a start to Literature Circles thisyear, because there are only a few words, but you can use it for a good discussion.

It’s not for three-year-olds, although you can probably talkto younger ones about the silly girl who’s so crazy about her perfect pumpkinswhen there’s a lot of other people out there she could be talking to.

The art is gorgeous – and it’s a nice touch to have the lastthree pages absolutely without text but making the point.

Nice!

My YA Crush

2011-12-28T12:35:00.000-08:00

I have received a request from Strange Chemistry, the YA branch of Angry Robot Books, for a YA crush, i.e. which character from a YA novel is your crush? Well, I thought I'd blog about it here rather than on their blog, although they may reproduce it if they like.

And my YA crush is Aubrey Fitzwilliam from Michael Pryor's fabulous YA steampunk series The Laws of Magic. Maybe he's a crush for a mature woman rather than a teenager. When you're in your teens you want a prince to sweep you away on a white horse (or to a dark vault or into the realms of Faerie or whatever).

But I like Aubrey. And I did even before his image started to appear on the covers of the new edition of this series. Okay, he does dumb things now and then. That only proves he's human. But Aubrey is not only a strong character in his own right - clever, funny, great at improvising in a nasty situation, a genius with magic - but he likes his women strong. Well, his woman. And this is the hitch. I'd never be able to pry him away from his beloved Caroline. :-( And you do have to be careful, now I think of it. Caroline could warn any potential Aubrey girlfriends of the sneaky thing he did to get her on-side in Heart of Gold, the second book in the series, when he needed her help. Lady Rose, his mother, was not at all impressed with him in that case! At least you'd have her on-side if he stuffed you around. Aubrey does have strong women in his life from childhood on - his mother, a scientist in the parallel Edwardian era, his grandmother... Aubrey reminds me a bit of my other main crush in fiction, Miles Vorkosigan.

Okay, if I couldn't have Aubrey, his best friend George is also pretty good. He's handy at just about anything, considerate, also likes his women strong (woman - Sophie the journalist and potential magician - drat! Taken, again) and best of all, he can cook, and looking after people, feeding them, is the dream that comes up in one of the books when they're in a fantasy world where you get what you really, really want. He's also got common sense and is able to hold Aubrey back when he gets an idea that's just too insane.

If you haven't read the series, go get it! Both boys and girls are borrowing it from my library and loving it. I'm going to see if young Shane (see the interview with gabrielle Wang - that Shane) is interested in it this year, when she finishes with Terry Pratchett's Discworld books...

Look What I Found - My Heraldic Device!

2011-12-28T02:45:00.000-08:00

While I was writing a guest post on Wolfborn for Chelsey Carter at Starry Sky Books blog, I unearthed my old SCA device. I joined the Society for Creative Anachronism to get some idea of how to write fight scenes; at the time, I was writing a lot of swords and sorcery and having great fun doing it, but Sean McMullen, who was already a big noise in the SCA, said, "If you're going to write this stuff, you'd better know how it works."

In the end, I was in the group for a couple of years. It was fun and one of the things we did was put in a request to the College of Heralds in the US for a name and a personal device. We did this with the help of our own herald, Steve, whose Society name was Thorfinn.

I'm no artist, so I asked Robert Jan, who has now been doing his own radio show on 3RRR for many years, to do it for me, and a fabulous job he did, too!

The device has been up on the web site of Lochac, the Australian kingdom, for some time, and I've used it to show Year 8 art students an example of what they could do. My friend and colleague, Jasna the art teacher, used to get them to do a shield of their own. She pointed out to the students that in some ways we're still doing it, with logos that we recognise immediately, and that, really, was what the devices were for - you'd know immediately who was on that prancing horse in front of you - or who that man-at-arms was working for.

Here it is, with the heraldic terms:

Vert, two unicorn'sheads coupedrespectant, horns crossed in saltire,in basea crescent, a chiefargent.

My Society name was Gwenddydd Rhosyn O Gymru Newydd.

At the time, Robert and I were writing stories set in a place called New Wales, so I asked for that. You weren't supposed to be from somewhere fictional,but no one queried it and I created my persona to go with it. The two unicorns and the crescent moon were to symbolise my status as a female warrior, though it didn't take me long to realise I was never going to be that. Not with my lack of fighting skill!

When my guest post goes up on Starry Sky Books, I'll put in a link here.

Ships In The Field By Susanne Gervay. Illustrated by Anna Pignataro. Melbourne, Ford Street Publishing, 2011

2011-12-27T16:25:00.000-08:00

A girl lives with her refugee parents in Australia. Sheshares everything with her soft toy dog, Brownie. The new life is good, withweekend trips to the country, where they can enjoy the forest and the river andthe fields, in which are “ships” (sheep). But not everything can be forgotten.The old life, before the world changed, is still there, along with theexperience of flight from nightmare.

What do you get when you put together two creative peoplewith refugee experiences of their own? Probably something like Ships In TheField. Susanne Gervay’s background isHungarian, Anna Pignataro’s Italian, but both are daughters of families whoseold lives were destroyed before they came to Australia.

I can relate to that! A country like Australia has manystories like this one, including my own family’s.

The story in the book is more or less autobiographical,Susanne Gervay’s memories. It is gentle, a gentleness reflected in thebeautiful, soft water colour art. It doesn’t hit you over the head with themessage, either, for which it is to be commended. The message is there, buttold gently and sorrowfully, yet with hope.

A good one to read with your small children. The recommendedage is from seven up, but if you read it with them, you can give it to slightlyyounger children.

Remembering Dad

2011-12-27T13:11:00.000-08:00

My dad, Baruch Bursztynski
15/1/28-28/12/09

Today is the second anniversary of my father’s passing. Itis too painful to think about that day, so let me tell you about Dad as he was.

Dad was my biggest fan. He thought Shakespeare wasover-rated – why read his stuff when you could be reading Monsters andCreatures of The Night by Sue Bursztynski?And when Potions To Pulsars, mywomen scientists book came out, he had a go at the local bookshop owner forputting books about Hitler in the window when he could have been putting inthis wonderful book with all this useful information in it.

Which didn’t stop him from making sure the shop got sales.He hung out with a group he called “the geriatrics” all of whom hadgrandchildren. Nothing would do but that every one of them must buy a copy fortheir grandchildren. When anyone protested that his grandchild was only a yearold, Dad would say, “So? Is it going to go off?” He would argue that all theinformation crammed into this little book was the equivalent of a library ofbooks about women in science. And then he’d send them off to buy it at theshop. What the shopkeepers made of this parade of elderly men asking for mybook, I don’t know, but I would have liked to be a fly on the wall… J

Dad read all of my books, except the last one, which cameout after he was gone. If you have a copy of Wolfborn, you’ll find a dedication to him in it. (Andif you don’t have it, what are you waiting for? Go get it! Dad would have said)

He came to two launches with me. One of them was the launchof Ford Street’s Trust Me! in which Ihad a story. It was at the State Library and what a day it was! Food, booze andfifty writers and artists signing! Dad had a fabulous time; he drank champagneand ate the foods on offer and took photos. And he said hi to Mitch Vane, thewonderful artist who had illoed my spies book, Your Cat Could Be ASpy. They’d met before, you see; he was atthe local photocopy shop, doing a copy of the cover of Cat. He asked the nice lady next to him in the queue forhelp and she said, “Oh, I illustrated this!” It was Mitch.

The other launch was the one I arranged with Sisters InCrime, for my Ford Street book Crime Time: Australians behaving badly. While we sat at dinner, Dad told me he’d been tothe Cuckoo restaurant, robbed a couple of years before, and they’d told himthat they were now keeping a bag of rolls at the counter in case any moreidiots did a repeat of the April Fools’ Day robbery attempt. It made a greatstory to tell when I got up to launch my book. Dad had a great time there too,and had a long chat with Kerry Greenwood.

Dad was a fan of all his children and grandchildren’screative efforts – there’s a framed article about my nephew Mark, a musician, above the computer Dad learned to use very quickly when, in his seventies andeighties, he became a “silver surfer”. (And believe me, he very quickly pickedup the art of Googling, looking for any references to me!) Even when he wasdying in hospital, he lent a copy of Mark’s CD to a doctor. He went to everyone of my nephew Max’s school concerts to hear him play.

Here’s a toast to you, Dad, which I will drink later today, perhaps with my family. I may never have had an agent,except very briefly, but you were my fan club, my promoter, the terror ofbookshop owners everywhere. I will never forget you.

Ford Street Creative Net

2011-12-25T12:37:00.000-08:00

The last few days I've tried to get through to "add a gadget" on Blogger layout and failed. Not sure if it's my computer or Blogger dropping out on that page, but for the time being, before I add the permanent link, I'll just give Creative Net a well-deserved plug here. If you're a teacher-librarian or a teacher trying to get guest speakers, you should definitely consider Ford Street's speaker agency, Creative Net. I'm on there, although I really need to re-write my bio. I put too much emphasis on the fact that I'm a teacher-librarian good at speaking to kids (well, I am, but that's not the point)and not enough on the fact that I'm a writer with a couple of Notables under my belt and that kids love my books.

However. This isn't a Sue plug, it's a Creative Net plug. Paul Collins knows EVERYONE in children's and YA writing in Australia, having been around for decades, and publishes a lot of great writers from his home in Ford Street. And he has an impressive list of speakers there, not all of them published by Ford Street, but all of them well-known.

So, why this particular agency? If, like me, you've booked guest speakers, you know that whatever the fee, you have to add the booking fee for the agency.

Creative Net doesn't do that, because it charges us for getting us work. So whatever you're quoted for booking one of us, that's what you pay.

And no, Paul hasn't paid me to say this. He has been really supportive of my writing over the years and supportive of the writing of a whole lot of others and any way I can help him I will, but I wouldn't plug this unless it was worth doing.

Have A Cool Yule!

2011-12-24T17:05:00.000-08:00

Have a cool Yule, a sparkling solstice (a few days ago), a happy Hannukah! Whether you're with family around the tree, having a Christmas picnic with friends or grating potatoes for tonight's latkes, have a great time.

I'm just finishing off Michael Pryor's new steampunk novel which will be reviewed here soon, and will take that and something I haven't read to the beach with me as soon as I finish rustling up my picnic lunch. And don't forget to give a goat, a mosquito net, a set of school supplies, a kitchen garden to someone somewhere else in the world. I have, and would love to do more. That link was for Oxfam. There's also TEAR Australia and many others to choose from and you don't have to wait till December to do it. Go on - do it after Christmas lunch. Why not have everyone chip in for something big, like a cow, a donkey, a year's education?

One nice thing about having joined Twitter is that I'm now following Father Bob Maguire. The man is amazing! His tweet this morning said he was going over, after Mass, to help Les Twentyman serve brunch. Coz it isn't only the developing countries where people get a raw deal.

GAMERS’ CHALLENGE By George Ivanoff. Melbourne: Ford Street Publishing, 2011

2011-12-24T00:33:00.000-08:00

In Gamers’ Quest, Tark and Zyra, two teenage thieves in the world of computer games, decided, finally, not to play any more, and looked for the way to Designers’ Paradise. Now, they’re back. As they’re no longer part of the game, nobody can see or hear them and they can’t ever go back to their old lives.

Then they discover that they’re not the only game characters who are refusing to play, and so begins the next part of their lives - if they can survive long enough, that is, and avoid being absorbed by the balls of static known as VIs, which are pursuing them and the other non-gamers.

But who is the Ultimate Gamer - and can he help them finally to escape the game? And that man Tee, who can see them and is so helpful - why does he look so familiar?

The only way to find out is to read the book and I’m not telling you more, for fear of spoilers.

I believe this one is even better than the first, unlike to many sequels; there’s plenty of adventure, as well as humour, but the humour is less of the slapstick variety that characterised Gamers’ Quest, and there is more character development, which may be appropriate for computer sprites who aren’t having to act according to the plans of the Designers any more.

Just adding that before this author got to write for a living, he designed computer web sites, so he knows all about computers,designing and, no doubt, games as well. believe him! Enjoy his tongue-in-cheek presentation of such cliches as chanting monks and absent-minded professors.

Read it if you liked Gillian Rubinstein’s Space Demons and films such as Tron. Or, what-the-heck, just read it! But make sure you read Gamers’ Quest first. If you haven’t read it yet, check out my review of that book here.

New Links

2011-12-22T22:15:00.000-08:00

The other day, when I wrote my post about the wonderful Howard Fast, I was thrilled to get a comment from Mimi, his widow. Mimi suggested I check out a video on Open Road Media, which I did, and it was fascinating - only a couple of minutes, but well worth a look. In it, you see the bit where he was up in front of the McCarthy witch-hunters (House UnAmerican Activities Committee) and interviews with his son, Jonathan (SF writer), daughter-in-law, Erica Jong - a VERY famous novelist in her own right - and Mimi herself. I have put in a link to this at the side, so if you're interested, not only in Howard Fast but in this period of American history, do yourselves a favour and go take a look. I first researched this when I was teaching The Crucible in my first year as a teacher. Amazing how many big name writers and actors and other artists were black-banned at this time. Quite a few appeared in Woody Allen's The Front. And did you know that the British children's TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood was written by Americans fleeing McCarthy?

Another link is to my sample chapter of Wolfborn, so if you missed out when I was offering to email it, now is your chance. It isn't going anywhere now and hopefully there will be another sample up when I can arrange it., for one of my other books.

New Give-away

2011-12-21T03:18:00.001-08:00

Give-aways seem to be a big thing on YA book blogs, so I'm joining the YA Fantasy Book Giveaway on I Am A Reader Not A Writer and have added the Great Raven to the list. I will add the information to the permanent Pages on the side of this web site in the next day or two, but basically, it works like this: I have two copies of Wolfborn to give to two lucky readers who make contact in the period January 6th to 12th. If I can, I'll put up one of those Linky forms, otherwise it will just be a matter of asking and if I get a few I'll draw names out of a hat. You have to follow me, either on this web site, on Twitter or on Goodreads, to enter, so if you aren't already following, why not do yourself a favour and start? :-) Keep an eye on this page. Oh, and check out the sample chapter. It's there permanently now.

Welcome Amie Kaufman!

2011-12-20T03:09:00.000-08:00

Not long ago, I was on my way home from work, wearing my Aussiecon 4 t-shirt, the one designed by Shaun Tan. A lady stopped me as we got off, saying she liked the t-shirt and had been at Aussiecon herself - had, in fact, attended a panel I had done, when I was coughing so badly one of my co-panellists had to hand me a bottle of water. We started chatting and she told me she'd sold her first trilogy, overseas yet. The lady was Amie Kaufman, who has joined us on this site. so welcome, Amie! I'll look forward to reading the first of her books when it's out.

At some stage Iwill add her web site to my links, but meanwhile, why not look her up?

Chanukah and Howard Fast

2011-12-20T02:59:00.000-08:00

Tonight is the first night of Chanukah - here I am, lighting the first candle! This evening, on the way home, I bought some potatoes to make latkes, potato pancakes. This is the time of year when we're encouraged to eat fried things; for the next eight days., we eat things cooked in oil, to remember the miracle of the lights meant to last only one day, which lasted eight. In Israel, people have doughnuts, but I'm more than happy to cook savoury latkes for dinner.

Another tradition - my own - is to re-read Howard Fast's novel My Glorious Brothers, his left-wing re-telling of the story of the Maccabees, who led a rebellion against the might of the Syrian/Greek empire - and won. In case you haven't heard of Howard Fast, he also wrote Spartacus, on which the movie was based.

Howard Fast was a member of the Communist Party, which he eventually left, for reasons he explained in his autobiographical book The Naked God. He began writing Spartacus in prison, where he'd been put for refusing to give names during the McCarthy witch hunts. Unfortunately, he had to self-publish it - and then the Communists hated the book as much as the witch-hunters!

Back to My Glorious Brothers. I remember when I first saw it, on a rack of paperbacks in the local milk bar. I was there to buy a few groceries and homed in on it. It cost me about 40c, a small thin paperback - not the cover above, one I couldn't find in Google Images. It has almost fallen apart from all the times I've re-read it.

The story is told from the viewpoint of Simon, last of the five brothers, now an old man, looking back over his life. As an adult, sadly, I know how it all ended, with the Romans conquering the country (they had actually helped the rebellion succeed) and the descendants of the heroes fighting among themselves in a style worthy of Hollywood soap opera.

But I was about twelve then. The story won my heart, leading me to read a whole heap of his historical novels, such as Spartacus, Agrippa's Daughter (the story of Queen Berenice). April Morning, Freedom Road, Moses, Prince Of Egypt... That one was set in the time of Rameses II, and ended when Moses left Egypt and walked into the desert with his servant and friend, Nun. The premise was that Moses's adoptive mother and some priests were dreaming of returning the worship of the Aten. Like his other novels of the time, it was a left-wing interpretation. There was meant to be a trilogy, but it never happened, though there was a sort-of-sequel, a novella set on the last day of Moses's life and seen from the viewpoint of Joshua. There were just hints that it was connected with the previous book.

And he wrote science fiction as well. The first story he ever sold, when he was in his teens, was SF, and he wrote a number of SF short stories and novellas, published in such collections as The Edge Of Tomorrow and The General Zapped An Angel. The title story of the latter has, in recent years, been updated and adapted for theTV series Masters Of Science Fiction.

Fast's SF is thoughtful stuff; you won't find light space opera or straight adventure here. Notice the cover of the first one? The story is called "The Large Ant". A man on holiday wakes up to see a giant ant standing by his bed. He kills it and takes the body to a scientist friend. Turns out it's not an ant - it's an alien, and the question is - was it actually a threat or did the man just assume it would be because we're scared of big insects? In another story, a company finds a way to drill very deep for oil and what comes up is not oil but blood. If that had been written today, reviewers would have complained about bloody greenies and cliches.

Why do I love his work so much, even today? I love his characters. They are a bit black-and-white, but he cares about them, deeply, so you do too. His language is beautiful. He cares about the story he's telling and can send a message without hitting you over the head with it.

Most of his historicals are about America, and that's fine. He loves his country, but isn't a flag-waver.

Most of all, I have been moved enough by his work that it has had an influence on my own style.

I've become the kind of writer I am because of my love for Howard Fast's writing. Whether that's a good thing or not, you will have to decide when you read my books, but for me, it works.

Writing cards instead of stories

2011-12-18T03:15:00.000-08:00

Ah, what a time of year! It's a time for writing cards instead of fiction (or non-fiction as the case may be - I do both). I'm partway through a story submission for an anthology on the theme of beginnings and won't get much further till Christmas is over. I have a lot to write still, and I'm way overdue for overseas friends, who will now receive theirs after the festive season, along with, in some cases, something very special that I have prepared for them.

I've picked up a couple of Bob Shaw books in the second-hand bookshop (later! later!) and I'm looking longingly at something about which I will write more very soon. Kevin Lee, who is a regular friend from the Centre for Youth Literature and was lucky enough to be chosen as an Inkys judge this year, has done something remarkable. He has translated a book from German into English, using the translators on the Internet to help him! He was kind enough to give me a copy which he has bound nicely at his work.

More of this later!

Some of the cards I wrote tonight were to the folk from the Centre for Youth Literature. I don't imagine I'm by any means the only person to receive a card from them, but the thing is, it was personalised. Those of the staff who actually know me have put in comments I know are just for me when they could just have written their names or, at best, "Merry Christmas". or "best wishes". But they did better. Christine, whom I have known since she was working for the Little Bookroom, said how nice it was to see me again, finally. Liz thanked me for my "words of wisdom" on the Insideadog web site - lovely to know someone was reading and enjoying! I mean, know it for sure. And while Heath's comment was brief, I haven't forgotten the lovely review he gave Wolfborn when it came out. So, of course, I had to send them each a card, just so they know I appreciate it, even the ones whose wishes were short. With all the work they have to do, it's nice to know they took that trouble.

Now, what I would really, really like if I had just one wish for a gift, is to be invited to speak at the Centre for Youth Literature next year, to be recognised as a writer, not just a librarian who turns up at Booktalkers. Sigh!

Now Tweeting

2011-12-17T16:12:00.000-08:00

Okay, after holding off for a long time, I'm now on Twitter. It seems to be the simplest way to get information out to the most people. If you'd like to follow me on Twitter, my name there is SueBursztynski. I'm still trying to work it out.

***Currently listening to ABC radio. They're discussing bande dessinee (graphic novels). Great! Mike Shuttleworth talked about it at a Nova Mob meeting. He went to Belgium on a Churchill Fellowship to attend the festival.

The Importance Of Being Earnest

2011-12-17T04:12:00.000-08:00

This evening I was lucky enough to see the MTC production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance Of Being Earnest. It's a play that means something to me; I played Lady Bracknell in my last school play, back when I was in Year 12, and I seem to still remember all the lines, which I found myself muttering during the performance (luckily my sister didn't mind!). I had a terrific time doing this. None of us in the production at school ever went on to do anything professional (although two of our drama club members did go on to professional acting, they weren't in this play), but I think, even after all these years, that as school plays go, it was rather good, so there! ;-)

This is the same production the MTC did some years ago, when Ruth Cracknell was still alive to play Bracknell and Frank Thring, as I vaguely recall, played the two butlers. The set was the same design - it's a giant pop-up book with a handbag on the front cover - the handbag in which Jack Worthing was found. The butlers turn the pages with each page being a set.

This time, the fabulous Bob Hornery played the dual butler role and he played them very different from each other - Lane the standard butler who manages to keep a straight face through all Algernon's nonsense talk, and Merriman as an elderly, doddering retainer who is going deaf.

Geoffrey Rush played Lady Bracknell and really, after a few minutes, you forgot he was a man or Geoffrey Rush and just went along with the delicious silliness of the play and the character.

There was one member of the original MTC cast - Jane Menelaus, who played Gwendolen way back when, came back as Miss Prism and the character was played as a nod to Margaret Rutherford, who performed the role in the original movie.

At the very end, during the curtain calls, Geoffrey Rush did a small tribute to the more recent movie, in which Judi Dench played Lady Bracknell.

I had such a good time, I just had to share it here, even though my usual reviews are of books.

DIVERGENT By Veronica Roth. Sydney: HarperCollins, 2011

2011-12-14T23:57:00.000-08:00

This is one of the books I got in my goody bag at the last Booktalkers for the year. It is, of course, the Australian edition.

In a future, dystopian world, your friends, job, lifestyle,all depend on a choice you make when you turn sixteen. That’s when you’retested for the “faction” which suits you – Dauntless, Amity, Candor, Erudite orAbnegation. You’re advised on the basis of this test, but make your own choice,after which you go to live with your faction, possibly leaving your familybehind. And even that is uncertain; if you fail training in your new faction,you become “factionless” and get all the dirty jobs no one else wants and livein the shabbiest part of town. The government of the time is made up ofAbnegation members, because it was decided some time ago that the job should goto people who don’t want it. This leads to major problems later in the book.

Tris’s family are members of the Abnegation faction, livingan unselfish lifestyle dedicated to helping people. Tris’s test results areinconclusive. She learns that she is Divergent – one of the few who don’t quitefit in with any faction. She decides to join the Dauntless, who jump on and offmoving trains, get piercings and tattoos and believe in courage. Sounds good,right? And Tris finds she’s very good at what she’s required to do to become aDauntless member.

But something nasty is going on at the top levels ofDauntless – and Tris has been warned not to reveal her Divergent status if shewants to stay alive…

Things that worked for me: Tris is a strong character, andone who captures the reader’s sympathy. She doesn’t whine and she does show theunselfishness she feared she didn’t have, at the beginning of the novel. Theromantic interest, Four, is a decent young man who respects Tris’s strength andhas his own problems, so isn't there to lead her, except as her teacher in the initiate training. It’s a good, exciting adventure story, and it is not implied that there’s anything perfect about any of the factions, with the possibleexception of Amity, whose members are cheerful and kind and play folk-music inbetween tasks… And this is only because no major characters in the book seem tobe Amity, so we never really find out. Possibly they will play a larger role inthe next volume.

Things that didn’t work quite so well for me: the wholenotion that a working society could be created based on such simple qualities. And - Jeanine? What kind of name is that for a villain? I was also uneasy with howcomfortable Tris was with a gun, once she learned to use it, and even moreuneasy with the suggestion that the faction dedicated to learning and readingwas so generally nasty, as if we should be suspicious of anyone who lives bytheir intellect. Maybe we'll find out in the next book that the Erudite don't generally approve of what happens in this volume, but meanwhile, the message seems to be: "If you're smart enough to be in Erudite, you're a slimy, sneaking baddie."

There have been comparisons with The Hunger Games and I cansee how this idea came about, but I much prefer The Hunger Games.

Still, there’s enough here to interest both girls and boys,and not many YA books can say that.

And I believe that Tris and Katniss would get on well!

Angry Robot Books Opens A YA List

2011-12-14T23:45:00.000-08:00

Here's a press release I got yesterday, at the same time as the other one I've posted. Angry Robot is a press of which I've heard; Joanne Anderton, a wonderful Aussie writer, sold them a novel which has been published recently, and this one doesn't seem to restrict itself to US writers, so if you want to go take a look at their web site, give it a go. You may sell them something! :-)

Angry Robot announces new YA imprint, Strange Chemistry

Angry Robot, the award-winning publisher of SF, F and WTF are pleased to announce their newest venture – a sister imprint, Strange Chemistry, which will publish Young Adult genre fiction.

The imprint will launch in September 2012, with five titles appearing before the end of that year, before settling down to one book each month. Strange Chemistry will follow AR’s strategy of co-publishing its books simultaneously in the US and UK, in both eBook and paperback formats. Subject matter will include fantasy, science fiction, supernatural and horror, and as with Angry Robot the lines between those genres are likely to be very blurry at times.

Running the imprint will be Amanda Rutter, until recently best known as the tireless blogger behind genre review site, Floor-to-Ceiling Books. She takes up her position in Angry Robot’s headquarters in Nottingham on December 12th.

Angry Robot’s managing director Marc Gascoigne said: “The key to any truly successful genre imprint is the personality of its editors. In Amanda we’ve found the perfect mix of editing skills and wild, wild enthusiasm for the subject. Her first signings are already making us jump up and down in excitement. We’re beyond delighted to welcome her to the team.”

Amanda Rutter commented, “Angry Robot have quickly become one of the most exciting and challenging genre publishers around, and I have so much admiration for the types of novels that the guys are bringing to the world of speculative fiction. I’m absolutely thrilled that I have the opportunity to join the team, and create a list full of Young Adult novels that share the same sharpness and passion as those in the AR list.”

:::

More information can be found at Strange Chemistry and Angry Robot Books. You can meet Amanda at http://floor-to-ceiling- books.blogspot.com.

Angry Robot is a new genre publisher, bringing readers the best in new SF, F and WTF?! All titles are released as paperbacks and in all major eBook formats. Distribution

is through Random House (North America) and GBS (UK). Angry Robot is part of the Osprey Group.

For more information, review copies, interview and feature requests contact our Marketing Manager, Darren Turpin at darren.turpin@angryrobotbooks.com or +44 (0)773 – 410 4792

Books for Darfur! And A Competition for new (American) YA writers

2011-12-14T02:06:00.000-08:00

Today, I got this request. It seems like a very good deal and support for a good cause. The bad news is that you have to live in the US to enter, but with luck there are some US folk reading this, so I thought I'd put it up on my blog anyway. I work with a lot of African students, including plenty of Sudanese, and knowing what they've been through, I'd like to cheer this cause. Even if you don't win the competition, the anthology seems well worth buying. Just follow the link and decide for yourself.

Dear The Great Raven,

Can you share this new Essay Contest for Aspiring Writers of YA/middle grade fiction with the readers of your blog? Thanks if you can. Please contact us if you have any questions. Lorraine Kleinwaks, Book Wish Foundation, 571-281-3117.
______________________________

Win a literary agent or acclaimed author's feedback on your unpublished manuscript for young adult or middle grade readers. This rare opportunity is being offered to the six winners of an essay contest recently announced by the literacy charity Book Wish Foundation. See http://bookwish.org/contest for full details.

You could win a manuscript critique from:

Laura Langlie, literary agent for Meg Cabot

Nancy Gallt, literary agent for Jeanne DuPrau

Brenda Bowen, literary agent and editor of Karen Hesse's Newbery Medal winner Out of the Dust

Ann M. Martin, winner of the Newbery Honor for A Corner of the Universe

Francisco X. Stork, winner of the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award for The Last Summer of the Death Warriors

Cynthia Voigt, winner of the Newbery Medal for Dicey's Song and the Newbery Honor for A Solitary Blue

All that separates you from this prize is a 500-word essay about a short story in Book Wish Foundation's new anthology,What You Wish For. Essays are due Feb. 1, 2012 and winners will be announced around Mar. 1, 2012. If you win, you will have six months to submit the first 50 pages of your manuscript for critique (which means you can enter the contest even if you haven't finished, or started, your manuscript). You can even enter multiple times, with essays about more than one of the contest stories, for a chance to win up to six critiques.

If you dream of being a published author, this is an opportunity you should not miss. To enter, follow the instructions athttp://bookwish.org/contest.

Good luck and best wishes,

Logan Kleinwaks
President, Book Wish Foundation

What You Wish For (ISBN 9780399254543, Putnam Juvenile, Sep. 15, 2011) is a collection of short stories and poems about wishes from 18 all-star writers: Meg Cabot, Jeanne DuPrau, Cornelia Funke, Nikki Giovanni, John Green, Karen Hesse, Ann M. Martin, Alexander McCall Smith, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Joyce Carol Oates, Nate Powell, Sofia Quintero, Gary Soto, R.L. Stine, Francisco X. Stork, Cynthia Voigt, Jane Yolen. With a Foreword by Mia Farrow. Book Wish Foundation is donating 100% of its proceeds from the book to the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, to fund the development of libraries in Darfuri refugee camps in eastern Chad.

THE KING’S BASTARD: Book 1 of The Chronicles Of King Rolen’s Kin, By Rowena Cory Daniells. Oxford: Solaris, 2010

2011-12-12T01:29:00.000-08:00

Byren Rolen Kingson, a prince of the kingdom of Rolencia, isonly seven minutes younger than his twin, Lence, making Lence the heir to thethrone. That is fine with Byren, who has no interest in ruling Rolencia, butstrange things are happening. Suddenly, the brother with whom he has been closeall their lives, is not happy with him, and the terrifying forecast made by theold seer at the start of the book seems all too possible.

And Byren has other troubles. His cousin and best friend,Orrade, is declaring his love for Byren, the girl Byren loves thinks he prefersher brother, warlords out in the mountains may be on the rampage and Byren’sfather is sending him into the middle of it.

At some time in the past, during King Rolen’s teens, therewas a rebellion by the Servants of Palos, an organization with gay links andrenegade Power Workers supported them, killing Rolen’s father and brother. As aresult, gay men are definitely not welcome in Rolencia and anyone born withsomething called Affinity is banished, executed or sent to an abbey where he orshe will be trained to use their power for the benefit of the kingdom. Theyoungest son of the royal family, Fyn, is there already – and there may beanother family member with the unwanted gift…

The world-building in this book is fascinating and, to behonest, my favourite part of it. What is Affinity? While you can be born with it, there are things calledseeps that bring it up from under the earth, so is it a genetic thing or is itto do with the planet? Perhaps this will be revealed in a future volume.

The society is more or less mediaeval Europe, but withadditions. Instead of a Church, there is a god and goddess, although they areserved by monks and nuns with Affinity. The entire novel takes place in winter,when the lakes, rivers and canals are frozen hard, making skating a viable formof travel, sometimes faster than going by horse, where there is a short cut.Everyone skates. Such heraldic animals as manticores and phoenixes (or, in thisworld, foenixes) are real and have a normal life cycle like any other animal,although they are known as Affinity beasts. There are unistags, rather thanunicorns and leogryfs rather than hippogriffs (although the hippogriff is, Ihave read, a joke animal created long after heraldry came into being), but whenyou carry a unistag on your shield, you know there are real ones out there.

I quite like all the politics, which is reflected in a gamecalled Duelling Kingdoms, not unlike the game of Thud in Terry Pratchett’snovel of the same name.

I did wonder whether King Rolen had thought out his strategyof putting all those people with powers into abbeys, where anyone with ambitionor resentment has access to followers with a variety of powers. If it was me,I’d be putting my son there to make sure he became abbot and supported me, notto get rid of the runt of the litter.

But then, King Rolen isn’t the smartest character in thebook and has issues that blind him.

And there are two more volumes to come, tying up all theends. Hopefully, they will answer all the questions this book raises.

Picking Names For Fiction

2011-12-10T01:18:00.001-08:00

Recently on Goodreads, I came across a post by an author who is working on a novel. One of her minor characters had a name the publishers didn't like, so she was inviting her fans to suggest names. It made me think about how I choose names for my characters. I'm not -

Interruption! We have our first Children's Laureates, just heard it on the news! About time. They've had them in England for YEARS. Did you know, at one point, there was serious danger of there being no money to run the Children's Book Council of Australia awards? That hasn't happened, fortunately, but it goes with the attitude of folk who ask me when I'm going to write an adult, i.e. a "real" book. (My response is always, "Never!") The first two Aussie Laureates (for two years) are Boori Monty Pryor and Alison Lester. They will have the job of getting kids to read. I will be following this with great interest, and mention it on this blog whenever I hear about it. I am thrilled to bits! Here's a link to a news article on-line, though there must be more; today's Sydney Morning Herald.

Now, back to the topic of this post - names, as I do them. In a previous post I discussed names in Harry Potter (and recently I wandered back to Insideadog and found, to my delight, that a young reader had commented on that post after all and liked it. Which reminds me, I owe Cara some bookmarks, must email the CYL and ask for them to pass them on, as I don't have the young lady's address.). I noted that the names in JKR's novels generally have meanings that are appropriate for the characters concerned. I think it's wonderful the way she has worked them out, but me - I mostly pick names because I like them.

This was mostly the case for Wolfborn, though I did have some characters with names that meant a little more than that. The wise-woman was called Sylvie because she lived in the forest. The werewolf knight's fief was originally called Lupin ... until I read the third Harry Potter novel and realised that it was no longer an in-joke - someone else had got to it before me. I called him Geraint, even though it didn't fit in with all the French names, because I liked it and because it was a name associated with mediaeval romance.

Eglantine, another of my characters, was named for Chaucer's Prioress for reasons I can't reveal without spoilers, but also because I thought it a good, soppy name for a soppy character, and from what I've read, it may be that Chaucer also thought it a nicely soppy name. ;-)

The Faerie characters were originally named after the ones in Shakespeare. "Come on, Sue, you KNOW Oberon and Titania didn't appear till much later than this story!" said my editor (it was my own universe, but yes, it was meant to be a sort of twelfth century Europe) so, grumbling to myself, I found them other names - the names of a couple of Celtic gods who were appropriate for these two characters - a horned god and a goddess of the grove with whom he was associated. But personality-wise they remained Oberon and Titania.

My short story called "Brothers", which is being published in the Specusphere anthology Mythic Resonance, early next year, was based on Snow White. I called the princess Blanche (White) and because I'd decided that my seven dwarfs were going to be seven Dwarves a la Tolkien, I gave them Norse names.

You do have to be careful with name choices. Justin D'Ath wrote his novel Pool with a heroine called Audrey who had nearly drowned in a pool as a child and had miracles associated with her. All he had in mind, he tells me, was Audrey Hepburn, but some of my students, researching for their creative responses to the book for English, stumbled across information about an American girl called Audrey whose story was uncannily like the one in the book! Now, it may be he read about it in the news some years ago and forgot, but as far as he knows he had never heard of the real-life Audrey.

At least he got to choose his names. Try writing for the education publishing industry and thinking carefully about your names!

Publishers there will change your names at the drop of a hat, without consulting you; the first you know of it, often enough, is when you get your contributor's copy!

I wrote two chapter books for the education industry, The Sea's Secret and Grey Goo. The former was about a hunt for a painting donated to the school before the artist arrives for a visit. Nobody knows what happened to it, since it was twenty years ago, and there are rumours about the Principal of the time having kept it. I had three siblings, Ariel, Hanna and Nehama.

Ariel became Adam, Hanna became Hannah. Oddly enough, even though these and other names in the book were Anglo-ised, the youngest sister, Nehama, remained Nehama. In the American edition, the Principal's name and gender were changed. I wouldn't have minded so much if they hadn't been changed halfway through the book! I remember reading my contributor's copy of the US edition and saying, "Hang on, who's ... ? Oh. The Principal? " The thing is, somewhere in the US, someone is reading my book - a teacher, a librarian, a parent - and thinking, "What sort of an idiot can't remember the names and genders of her own characters?" Sigh!

Grey Goo had a heroine called Amelia, named for my little niece. In the original manuscript and right up to the page proofs, her brother was called Max, the name of the real-life Amelia's brother. Proudly, I showed the kids the page proofs, promising them a copy of the book when it came out.

Problem: when I got the book, the heroine was still Amelia, but she now had a brother called Mark. When I inquired, I was told that there was a character called Max in another of their books, so they had decided to change this one. I still can't see any reason for it, but there you are. They weren't the ones who had to break the news to Max that he had been bumped from my book. I let him keep the page proofs.

Whenever I need a teacher, I call him Mr Pearl after my brother-in-law, who is the best primary teacher I know, but as it happens, he will appear in my short story "Call Him Ringo" in Trust Me Too, being put out next year by Ford Street Publishing, for a different reason. It's about the Beatles' visit to Melbourne in 1964, and my brother-in-law, long before he met my sister, was at the Southern Cross on the day the fans gathered outside the hotel because their heroes were staying there. How could I not give him a walk-on?

There are plenty of on-line name generators which are no doubt fun, but even choosing a name just because you like it is no reason to choose one at random, without caring about the character, however minor. I am never going to do that.

After Midnight, Still Going

2011-12-08T05:13:00.001-08:00

I've spent the evening at the opera (and couldn't believe that parents would bring children to see an opera about a dying courtesan in 19th century Paris, but serve them right if they have to explain it). Now, I'm sitting here on-line, after midnight, loading my students' book trailers on to iMovie, adding them to the Literature Circles movie, so I can burn more discs. Today I showed my class the last of A Midsummer Night's Dream (they loved it! I hadn't intended to show them the lot, but they wanted me to, so...) and then, with a few minutes left, I showed them the book trailers done by some of them. They were interested and when I asked them who wanted a copy of these and the Literature Circles movie (they've seen bits of that before I edited it on iMovie) nearly every hand went up. So, because next Friday will be our last class together (sob!) I thought I'd present each student with a DVD.

And there were some nice trailers there, though everyone chose music which cut out before the trailer finished (but the music was appropriate in all cases). Andy and Amadeu did theirs on Dragonkeeper, using almost the same images and the same music, but they were different. Andy asked me if he could fix his up because he spotted some errors. He can, of course, though if he doesn't get it to me by tomorrow, I won't have time to add the corrected version to the student DVD - I want to do some on the weekend. Andy is our computer genius, but it was Amadeu who knew how to convert raw Moviemaker files to WMV(and then I converted them again, using Handbrake!). Michael's trailer for Once was beautiful. Minh had done his on the novel his group read, Cirque Du Freak (Darren Shan). I watched him research it, looking for pictures of freaks from freak shows. They aren't exactly the ones in the novel, but impressive all the same, with a good musical soundtrack. Taylor kept looking through Google Images for just the right pictures to use to represent Wolfgang and Audrey and families for her trailer of Justin D'Ath's Pool (and I will be sending Justin a copy at some stage, as promised). Emily did a very good trailer of Marianne De Pierres' Burn Bright, with music changing abruptly when she got to the bit about Ixion, the isle of Evernight, to a loud rock beat, appropriate for a place where teenagers party all night. "Hey, I did one on Burn Bright!" called Brittany and I suggested she gets it to me so I can add it to the DVD. It was supposed to be a part of the assessment. She was actually studying Pool, but loves Burn Bright. Elizabeth and Rana did A Ghost In My Suitcase, but it was too late to add music. I'm putting on the silent trailer anyway.

I will be adding Paige's lovely, if short, trailer for Fallen, because the rest of the class admire it.

Gotta go to bed, guys! I still have to be up at six, but Amadeu's trailer is taking ages to load.

Pepa and Shane Interview Gabrielle Wang

2011-12-06T01:46:00.001-08:00

One of the nicest things about being involved in children's and YA writing is the people you meet. Gabrielle Wang, the author of several lovely, gentle fantastical books for young readers, is a Melbourne writer, so we've met at a number of events at the Centre for Youth Literature and other places. Two of my students, Pepa and Shane, absolutely loved her novel A Ghost In My Suitcase, which they read for English, as a part of Literature Circles - so much that they hunted up her other books to read. Pepa is currently enjoying Little Paradise. It seemed a logical follow-up to ask her some questions - and Gabrielle very kindly agreed to answer them - not only that, but to publish the interview on her own web site. But for now, you've read it here first! Take it away, girls!

P/S: Did youwrite this book to help children face their fears against ghosts they areafraid to find?

G. I wrote AGhost in My Suitcaseto explore ghosts and ghost hunters and the Chinese idea of death. Hopefullyalong the way, children will also be able to overcome their fears. The ideacame from the character Por Por in The Pearl of Tiger Bay. She was so strong she needed anovel written all about her.

P/S: Have youseen ghosts?

G: I haven’tseen a ghost but I have heard them calling my name. I’ve also had strange,ghostly things happen like doors opening and even words that suddenly appearthe next time I open the word document on my laptop.

P/S: Accordingto your site, you have used ghost-hunting equipment. What equipment have you used?

G: Did I saythat? I’ve never actually used any ghost hunting equipment but I do have somecoin swords and mirrors.

P/S: Why wasthe sequel, ThePearl of Tiger Bay, publishedbefore this one?

G: I have already answered this in Question One. When I wrote ThePearl of Tiger BayI had no idea I was going to write a prequel.

P/S: Okay,I’m going to ask about the characters now, the places and the culture.

Aboutthe Characters –

How comeCeleste is the only one who has the ability to fight ghosts with her voice? Isshe the chosen one? Because according to Por Por, she never found informationabout this ghost ability she has.

G: Yes, Celeste is the chosen one. It came naturally to her.That’s why she was destined to be a ghost hunter. She was the first ghosthunter to use her voice as a weapon.

P/S: What caused Celeste’s mother to die?

G: She died of cancer. Even though this is not written in thenovel, a writer has to know her characters’ complete background.

P/S: AboutTing Ting, how did you develop her character?

G: When I first began writing A Ghost in My Suitcase, Ting Ting was Celeste’s Shanghaicousin, a university student called Ky. He was also a boy. But I grew boredwith Ky and I thought that if I’m bored with him so will my readers be. As soonas I changed Ky into a moody girl, the story suddenly took off.

Aboutthe places –

DoesIsle of Clouds exist? It seems so real! I want to visit it!

G:The Isle ofClouds is based on an ancient water town near Shanghai called Wuzhen.

P/S: Does BaoMansion exist?

G: Bao mansionis based on an old house in the hills overlooking West Lake in Hangzhou, China.When I was writing the scenes with Bao mansion, I pictured the old house in mymind.

P/S: s thestory based on true events?

G: Everythingin the novel is made up except for the historical parts about China and theinternational settlements.

P/S: If youcaught a weak ghost, can you actually turn them into goldfish?

G: I made thatup too. I thought it would be fun and far less violent than destroying the poorghosts. Only Shen Da Pai needed to be destroyed because he was Celeste’s enemy,and an enemy of her family for generations.

P/S: If youwere trapped in a mingshen mirror, could you really get out with the help ofpure or holy water or tears?

G: I am toldyou can trap a ghost in a mingshen mirror but the part about using tears I madeup.

What doyou think it would be like to be trapped in a mingshen mirror if it waspossible?

It would belike being trapped in a goldfish bowl. You would be able to see the worldoutside but not be able to escape. It would be like torture.

P/S: Celeste’smom made a short appearance in the book. During that short appearance, she wasplanting tomorrows. What are tomorrows? I tried surfing the net about it and Iended up with ‘How to plant tomatoes’.....-_-.

G: I made up‘tomorrows’ to symbolise the future. Celeste’s mum was planting them becauseshe knew she didn’t have many ‘tomorrows’ left. She died young.

P/S: Aboutthe types of ghosts: were those types of ghosts (such as fat belly etc.) realin Chinese culture? Are there more types of ghosts?

G: All the differentghosts came out of my imagination. It’s so much fun writing novels!

P/S: Arethere different techniques to catch or fight ghosts?

G: Some of thetechniques I researched are real, like trapping ghosts in mirrors andcontrolling them with coin swords.

P/S: With allthe ghost and supernatural books you have been writing, do you actually believein supernatural things such as spirits and an afterlife?

G: I dobelieve in an afterlife. I am not Buddhist but I lean towards that belief –that we are reincarnated.

P/S: Do youcelebrate any of the things the Chinese culture celebrates, such as hungryghosts, mingshen mirrors and others?

G: Wecelebrate Chinese New Year with a big family dinner, the Autumn Moon festivalwith moon cakes and grave sweeping day where we clean the grave of my father.

P/S: Do anyof your books describe yourself or any of your own memories?

G: Much ofwhat I write is from personal experience. For example the scene in A Ghostin My Suitcasewhere Celeste is in the bus on her way to the Isle of Clouds is from a realexperience. While I was studying painting in China we went to sketch in themountains. To get there we rode for hours in a rusty old bus. That chapter isexactly how I experienced it including frogs jumping around our feet and thebig hole in the roof. I really did have to put up my umbrella. My YA novel LittleParadise was basedon my mother’s story. And my first novel, The Garden of Empress Cassia is based on how I felt when I was achild.

P/S: In themiddle of your writing, do you feel that you are the characters or the maincharacter?

G: I amdefinitely all the characters - even the bad ones. They are parts of myself.

Post To Come - Interview With Gabrielle Wang!

2011-12-06T00:29:00.001-08:00

Two of my students, Shane and Talapepa, have interviewed Gabrielle Wang, author of some fabulous books, as their creative response to their Literature Circles book, A Ghost In My Suitcase. Gabrielle's answers have just arrived in my cyber-letterbox and when I have been able to get it into a readable order, I will be sharing it with you. Gabrielle was impressed with the girls' questions and I must say, I've learned quite a lot from her answers that I didn't know before! :-)

So stand by. If you're not yet a Gabrielle Wang fan, what are you waiting for? Go check out some of her books right now!

Riffling through my bookmarks

2011-12-05T00:44:00.001-08:00

Over the years I've been on-line, I've collected an awful lot of bookmarks on my Safari browser. The thing about web sites is that you can never tell whether they will still be there when you come back, but they form a history of my on-line research. There are a large number of crime-based web sites from when I was looking up stuff for Crime Time: Australians behaving badly. There are some on spy-related themes from when I was writing Your Cat Could Be A Spy. The CIA web site was especially terrific for that, with all sorts of stuff about spy gadgets, which they have in a museum - much more entertaining than the Australian version, which was just a dull public service thing back then. There are the teaching-based ones which I looked up whenever I was desperate because they'd just given me a class in an area in which I had very little experience, or none.

And then there are my favourites, the ones that helped me research my fantasy fiction. Monstrous is an encyclopaedia of monsters and such creatures of the night as fairies (or even Faeries!) and where they came from. Gosh, I wish I'd had this one when I was researching my first book, Monsters And Creatures Of The Night! I did go on-line for that - once a week, for an hour, at an Internet cafe on Glenferrie Road, Malvern,back in the early days of Internet cafes, when you could actually buy food there. But mostly, I was researching in the State Library of Victoria, using books. Twice a week.

Omniglot is an encyclopaedia of languages, where I went to look up Breton, in case I needed some words. And speaking of languages, there is the one I have only discovered recently, the translator in Dictionary which lets you translate from one language into another. For example, "On Saturday I'm going to the football" translates into Irish as Ar an Satharn, tá mé ag dul go dtí an peile. The only disadvantage is that if the language doesn't have Roman letters, you'd better know how to read Arabic or Hebrew or whatever! But it comes in handy if you need a character to say something - briefly! - in another language. It's a great web site anyway, with a pile of other sections. There's the Reference section, which has stuff like the word of the day (frondescence is today's, meaning "leafage/foliage" - what a cool word!) and a hot word (did you know in Old English the word "gift" referred to a dowry?) or you can look up something as you would in an encyclopaedia.

I stumbled on to Mysterious Britain and Ireland when I was trying to remember where I'd come across the story told by Armand, the hero's friend, in Chapter 3 of Wolfborn. For some reason I'd vaguely recalled it being French, but it was Irish and, in fact, comes from the Travels of Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis), who lived in the time of King John. The web site has a link to another one which tells the story. The stories on this web site are short, but useful, and range from water horses to werewolves.

An amazing web site I heard about from Juliet Marillier at her Swancon workshop on fairy tales is "Sur La Lune fairy tales" which gives a huge variety of fairy tales from all over the world,including variations on the same story from different countries. It has its ownblog, which, right now, has a video of “The Lady of Shalott in art” withLoreena McKennitt’s song. It has a lot of annotated fairy tales, which have comments on the different themes in the story. I really love the variations. You think "Snow White" is just a Brothers Grimm story? There are versions from Italy, Turkey, Romania, even West Africa! I checked this out when I was doing my story "Brothers" for the Specusphere anthology on myths and legends. Mine, in the end, was fairly straight European, but if you want to try something that starts somewhere else, this is a fabulous web site.

If you're planning to write a Celtic fantasy or just want to have a browse among all the things available, why not check out these web sites?

Personally, I just love the browse. You know how it is? You're looking for something and there's a link to something else, which is so fascinating you have to read it and that has yet another link and before you know it, you've gone a long way from where you started and you've learned a lot more than you expected.

Ah, I love the Internet!

Book Launch: Michael Pryor's New Book

2011-12-03T17:05:00.001-08:00

If you live in Melbourne and can get to the Northcote public library at four p.m. this Wednesday December 7th, Michael Pryor's new book, Extinction Gambit, Volume 1 of a series called The Extraordinaires, is being launched.

I won't be there, alas! I work in Sunshine and can't get away much before 3.30 p.m. I did buy a copy at the last CYL Booktalkers for the month and get the author to sign it for me, but there's nothing like a good book launch!

It's a pity it was timed this way; if they'd done it a bit later, plenty of people could have made it - and on another day, the Nova Mob SF group which meets there every month, could have come as a group. As it happens, that's been planned as the annual end-of-year dinner, somewhere else. But a later time on that day and some of us, at least, could have scrambled into each other's cars and gone to the launch first.

Ah, well. Go if you can, though - it will be well worth the effort!

Hour Of Need: The Laws of Magic #6 By Michael Pryor

2011-12-03T16:59:00.001-08:00

Sob! The Laws of Magic series is over. No more will we readof the adventures of Aubrey Fitzwilliam and his friends George, Caroline andSophie. The only thing that comforts me is that the author has begun a newseries, The Extraordinaires, which I’ve just started reading. It has taken me awhile to finish this one because I was trying to relish it, but finally, aftermy month’s stint on Insideadog, I am working my way through all those review copiesthat have been languishing in the pile by my bed. And I do have a new MichaelPryor book to read, after all… ;-) By the way, Michael is doing this month's stint on the Dog - go have a look.

The war is in full rage and is looking quite a lot like ourWorld War I. Aubrey and his friends, a special unit, are right on the battlefields.And it looks like Dr Mordecai Tremaine, who is supporting Holmland (Germany)may just get his shot at immortality. How do the friends stop him frommurdering half of Europe to get his way?

I can’t tell too many more details, because of spoilers, butthis one is non-stop action, following on directly from Moment Of Truth, the fifth volume in the series. It builds to atremendous climax in which Aubrey is going to need all his magical abilities tocope, and even those won’t necessarily work out as he needs them to.

Like all the other novels in this wonderful series, Hourof Need has plenty of humour – and at theend, while I can’t reveal it, I thought, “Oh! How clever! This is whereAubrey’s universe will split from ours and go down another path.” Actually, Iwould have liked to know how the world got this way in the first place; perhapsMr Pryor will return to this universe one day to write about it, even if it’sonly as a novella – perhaps for another volume of Ford Street’s TrustMe! short fiction?

The women in this universe are strong, intelligent andass-kicking – but not unbelievably ass-kicking. Aubrey, son of a strong woman,a scientist, and a strong grandmother, has been brought up to respect strengthin women and find it attractive, so Caroline is a believable partner for him.

You really can’t read this without having read the others,but that’s no problem. Just read them if you haven’t.

The series is doing well in my school library and there’s astudent currently waiting for this last volume, so I’ll have to buy anothercopy, next year if necessary; he isn’t getting mine.

A Different Kind Of Book - Cookbooks!

2011-12-02T12:56:00.001-08:00

I have a confession to make: I'm addicted to cookbooks.

"Who isn't?" you may ask. They're so colouiful and mouthwatering to look at. But you're never going to make all those recipes, unless you're that lady who cooked her way through Julia Child's book and blogged about it...

Well, yes, all that's true. My sister has gotten rid of all her cookbooks and now finds any recipes she wants on-line. Actually, she admits to an addiction to recipe blogs.

I see her point. It saves space in the cupboard and it's true you're never going to cook all those things. I mean - red braised duck with plums? Quail stuffed with this or that? (I won't even EAT quail - a schoolfriend of mine used to keep them as pets).

But when I find a recipe I like, I make it and type it up on my computer, so I have them all in one file and can look up favourites without having to hunt it up.

And meanwhile, while going on-line is fine for a specific recipe you want, how you you get ideas from it?

Right now, I'm drooling over a Women's Weekly Christmas cookbook and a Good Taste magazine with Christmas recipes in it. Christmas isn't actually my holiday, but there is plenty in there you can use any time.

Last year I made chocolates for gifts, using moulds I bought in a convenient el cheapo homewares shop. I experimented and didn't use either cookbooks or on-line help. This time, I'm playing with truffles. I admit I got some recipes for those on-line - good heavens, just type "chocolate truffle recipe" into Google and you get 1,350,000 hits and it's everything from the elegant ganache-based ones you have after your dinner party to the condensed milk ones suitable for kids to make (and very nice indeed - just so you know, my students made and sold enough truffles to make $65 in profit as their donation to Greenpeace).

But can you really wade your way through that many recipes?

It took a hard-copy book to suggest something that hadn't occurred to me: why not make a chocolate coating for your truffles? I'm going to try that this weekend. It warned not to make the coating too hot or risk melting the truffles. I'll let you know how it works out.

The home economics teacher at my first school swore by the Women's Weekly cookbooks. They have recipes even kids can make, under supervision, among the adult ones. They're well laid out. They have a good glossary at the back, explaining some of the more unusual ingredients.

This one that I'm drooling over (I really must try some of the ice cream recipes) actually tells you not to worry if you don't have the exact amount of, say, cream - one carton this size will do - saving you buying two cartons and wondering what to do with the rest, a real problem for me; I still have a packet of cardamom I bought a while back for one recipe with "two teaspoons of cardamom". I don't have an ice cream maker, so it was nice to find a cookbook that says, "If you don't have an ice cream maker, here's what to do instead."

And then there are the more exotic cookbooks. Some years ago, I bought the Death By Chocolate cookbook, which has in it a recipe for chocolate peanut choc chip cookies, utterly decadent, easy to make and not as expensive as you might think, given how many biscuits you get out of it.

That said, I also collect recipes from the sides of packets - my nicest banana cake recipe came from a packet of house brand flour.

Yet there are even cookbooks based on recipes from the sides of food packets!

In the library I found a cookbook with recipes from the ancient world. I have since tried out some of them. One of them, involving a kind of pancake from ancient Greece, my Greek library technician told me was still made. She herself makes it. Wow!

Another one a Queensland friend sent me was about mediaeval holidays and festivals, which, apart from the fun of cooking mediaeval (my friend and I agreed that perhaps it was a bit much, nowadays, to waste a bunch of roses on rose petal bread), is useful for me as a writer, as reference material. I could possibly have found some of this on-line, but not curled up and absorbed it, knowing the person who wrote the book is an expert in this area.

The Ritz Guides (discovered in one of those discount book shops I mentioned on the Dog) are fun and I have made some wonderful family holiday breakfasts using the Ritz guide to breakfast, able to assure everyone that this is how they make Irish soda bread and decadent hot chocolate at the London Ritz.

Mmm, I'm going off to have a special breakfast right now...

On Writing And Finishing Things

2011-12-01T01:31:00.001-08:00

This is a large chunk of my very last post on the Dog, with a bit extra. It's aimed at younger writers because it was written for a youth web site, but no reason why it can't pretty much apply to anyone interested.

I have had an email from a young writer who asked me how togo about being a writer, because, even though she is already running what I think is awonderful blog on things that matter in this world, what she really wants is to do a novel. She does write fiction, including somepretty good poetry, if the samples she sent me were any example, but says shecan’t seem to finish anything. She hoped I might have some tips. I hope she will forgive me for putting it all up here instead of answering personally, because it just seems like something that can apply in general.

Perhaps I’m the last person who should be offering tips onfinishing stuff. I have two unfinished novels sitting on my computer. One ofthem, only a few chapters long, is a mainstream YA novel. The other is acompanion volume to Wolfborn and isalready longer than the finished book! I’ve put them both away for a while,till I can get a fresh look at them and meanwhile, I’m writing short fiction. I've sold three stories that will be out over the next few months and am working on another one right now. It's not like doing a book, but it makes me feel good not to be doing nothing writing-wise.

In the end, the only way to be a writer is to write. I nevergo anywhere without a notebook and pen. (People don’t ask me if I have a pen,they say, “Sue, can I borrow your pen?”). Just write. I once read a book onwriting that advised you to overcome writer’s block by starting with, “Iremember…” It makes sense – you can’t get writer’s block about your own life,can you? And it worked for me; I once wrote fifteen pages after a severe caseof writer’s block, using that exercise. One of these days I will use what I wrote that time to do a historical novel.

Why not try short fiction while that unfinished novel iswaiting for you to get back to it? Perhaps write a story set in the universe ofthe novel? This, in its turn, might help you to get a new perspective on thebook-length project. And you've got all those handy characters and settings lying around already and if you can sell it, that will raise interest in the novel when it comes out.

There are, by the way, plenty of youth markets out there.Why not try Voiceworks, a Melbourne magazine produced and written by peopleunder 25? It takes poetry as well as fiction and it pays! For more, you can Google. I just looked under“Young writer markets Australia” and a whole pile of web sites popped up. Thisone – 40of the Best Websites for Young Writers - seems pretty good. It featureslinks to a lot of other web sites, including Inkpop, the one which my studentsswear by, an on-line writing community which is run by HarperCollins and whereyour work may be seen by a real publisher. Writing can be a lonely job, buton-line you can share with people who have the same interests as you do and thesame problems.

So – write. And read. You love reading, right? Why elsewould you be writing? :-) Check your markets by reading, to see whatpublishers are buying. Join a book-based web site like Goodreads and “friend” as many people asyou can. See what they’re reading and share.

If you write, you may never sell anything, but if you don’twrite, if you spend your life boring your friends with that “great idea for abook” you mean to write one of these days, you definitely won’t.

The Night After Leaving The Doghouse

2011-11-30T01:25:00.001-08:00

So, what do you do when your writing commitment is over?

I'm going to read and read and read tonight. I've just started a new iMovie project, putting together my students' book trailers. I really can't put them all up, even if I had their permission, because there is too much need to check out how much material is copyright, although it was all credited. Too much hassle! But I will be burning it all on to DVD for the staff's professional interest, so they can see what Year 8 English students can do when they try, and catalogue it for my library, and I will be showing it to my class before we all go off for holidays.

If any of the authors want to see what 8B has done, I'll be happy to pop a copy in the mail for them. They're not perfect, but they did what I needed - showed they understood the book and that they had got something out of it. Also, they hopefully persuaded the viewer it might be a good book to read.

Here are the books: Pool, by Justin D'Ath, Dragonkeeper by Carole Wilkinson, Burn Bright by Marianne De Pierres and Once by Morris Gleitzman. A Ghost In My Suitcase was saved as a plain Powerpoint because I couldn't open the original file (pity - they could have changed it to .wmv - if only I'd known! )However, two other students prepared interview questions for Gabrielle Wang, who has kindly agreed to answer them and offered to publish it on her own web site as well as this one. Anyway, if any of you guys who wrote these books are reading and are interested in a copy, let me know.

I'm also about to prepare some interview questions for Miffy Farquarson, who has agreed to answer questions about being a CBCA judge.

So, while I won't be blogging every day now, I will be keeping busy.

Today I got such a nice email from Bill Condon, who had been a WIR on Insideadog too, and said how much he had enjoyed my posts. It does feel a little lonely when you blog away and nobody - or, in my case, almost nobody - commented. But it's nice to know.

Late dinner time - I'm off to eat and read.

Insideadog - The Last Post!

2011-11-29T04:18:00.001-08:00

Well, my month's gig on the Dog is over. I am very, very tired. I spent lunchtime today supervising students who were selling frog-in-the-pond for their Pathways community assignment. I think i may have given myself ten minutes to eat an unsatisfactory sandwich and a little fruit after lunch was over. After work I went to the year's last Booktalkers at the State Library. We got goody bags! With books in them! Michael Pryor was there to talk about his new book, and Paul Collins had finally been invited to talk about the new Ford Street publications, including the new anthology with my story in it ... and an Obernewtyn prequel by Isobelle Carmody, which you'll have to buy the anthology to read.

Tomorrow, more supervising of Pathways projects and no lunch break at all, and another long day.

But I was determined, tonight, to get that last post done, so go over and hopefully enjoy. Good night!

On Being a Library Teacher - second-last post for the Dog

2011-11-28T03:16:00.001-08:00

I suddenly realised that I'd left out my post on YA book blogs, so I popped that up this evening. Then I put in tomorrow's post, which will be about my other hat, that of library teacher, and some of the things we've had happening in the library in the last year or so.

I am very tired, alas, and hot and ready to go take a shower and fall into bed. Tomorrow night I will be at the State Library for the last Booktalkers for 2011.

It would have been nice to be invited to speak at Booktalkers myself, some time, but being on Insideadog for the last month, and meeting the challenge of a post a day has been good.

I'm already throwing myself into review books so that I'll have those to blog about in a few days. And I suppose I'll need to go back into slushing for ASIM.

Meanwhile, thanks to those of you who have been following. You might be interested to know that in the last month or so, my hit rate seems to have tripled!

Keep visiting! :-)

What's On TV Right Now - Pride And Prejudice

2011-11-27T03:48:00.001-08:00

I've just finished my post for the Dog, on YA book blogs. After sitting through one book-based TV show, Brideshead Revisited (Revisited - it's a remake) while working on my post, I'm having trouble tearing myself away from that wonderful version of Pride And Prejudice with Jennifer Ehle and the gorgeous Colin Firth, even though I have my own copy of the DVD, autographed by Andrew Davies, the scriptwriter. I remember when it was first on and all the female teachers at my school gathered every Monday morning to drool over Colin Firth. And the producers knew what effect he'd have. That wet shirt scene and the one where he's in the bath were never in the novel... :-)

This episode is the one where Elizabeth and Darcy are finally realising that they just might be right for each other (just before she gets the bad news about Lydia and has to go home).

The series was clearly made by people who loved the book. There's the beauty of the countryside, the costumes and the music. The actors are just right for the roles. And if you know about it, there's the delicious fact that Anna Chancellor, who plays the role of the snooty and jealous Miss Bingley, is actually related to Jane Austen.

It's my favourite of Jane Austen's books and this one does it full justice, in my opinion.

Has anyone seen Lost In Austen? Loved it! Especially that scene where the heroine, who has somehow swapped places with Elizabeth Bennet, asks Darcy to please walk into the water so she can see him in a wet shirt. (wide grin)

Welcome, Emma! A new link

2011-11-26T16:36:00.001-08:00

Welcome to the new member of this site, Emma McGregor, who was kind enough to attend my writing workshop at the Bendigo Catholic College Lit Fest (see my post about this visit on the Dog).

Emma has her own blogs, one of which I've added to the links on the right hand side of the page. I really need to work out how to make it a proper blog roll. That wasn't an option when I started this site, but I'll get there.

Emma's site, Be The Change, has lots of terrific social justice and environmental stuff on it and useful links to things like Fair Trade sites - no more having to go Googling it all (which I have been doing) just check out on Emma's site. Emma is also a writer and I hope she sells lots of books, a lot earlier than I did. Meanwhile, why not do yourselves a favour, guys, and join Be The Change?

Procrastination - a post from early in the month

2011-11-25T22:32:00.001-08:00

Putting

off

The

Joys

This was up on Insideadog earlier this month. I put in a link and so many people have checked out the one on this site which just said, "This is my new post" and put a link to it that I thought maybe I should put up the actual post here in case anyone else wants to read it. It's the only one for which I got any comments at all, AFAIK, both from Goodreads friends. The comments thingie on IAD is confusing. To add a comment or even to see if there ARE any comments, you have to click the heading. And I don't think there are instructions, or anyway, not where I can see them.

Procrastina

Which is a lot of waffle, but for those of you who didn't follow the link or who have just discovered this blog - enjoy!

When thinking about this post, I went on-line to look up the word “procrastination”, which means, “putting it off”.

Here’s what I found on Dictionary.com:

procrastination

1540s, from L. procrastinationem "a putting off," noun of action from procrastinare "put off till tomorrow," from pro- "forward" + crastinus "belonging to tomorrow," from cras "tomorrow," of unknown origin.

Notice the date? 1540s? So even back then, it seems, people were putting off doing things. I’m sure they were doing it before, but in the 1540s, someone must have said, “I’ll just go watch the execution of the King’s wife before I finish making dinner, cleaning the house, writing my poem… hey, there should be a word to describe that.”

This is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), the idea being that you write 50,000 words in a month and if you break it up nicely you can get it done, even if you have a day job. I believe people have met the challenge and some have actually sold their writing month books.

I don’t think I could do it, but I can totally relate to the idea that if you have a deadline you’ll somehow meet it. That’s one reason why I love writing non-fiction. It’s commissioned, you have a deadline and you can break up the work. If you can’t actually write something just now, you can do some research.

Right now, I’m putting off washing last night’s dishes (I made chocolate truffles for my students and the sink is a mess) because, knowing how I do put off things, I’ve set myself the challenge of writing a post for Insideadog every day this month.

Having a deadline helps. Even if you only get a draft done, you have the pleasure of seeing the whole thing in front of you. Who cares if it’s a mess? You can fix it later.

There are other ways. I have to take public transport to work each day. I take along a notepad and scribble away. While I had time off work to write Crime Time, I took my laptop to the local café, where I could have another pot of tea without having to get up. That way I had no excuse for not writing.

Mind you, I was putting off cleaning the house and doing the wash…

E-readers and me - from The Doghouse

2011-11-25T13:17:00.001-08:00

This was yesterday's post. I have suddenly realised that putting "Residence" into the link meant you had to be logged in to find the page that way. And of course, you can't log in unless you're a member. But you can just go to Insideadog and find the page. However, to save hassles for everyone, here it is. I'm working on this morning's post, whoch is about my visit to Bendigo Catholic College.

I don’t have an e-reader yet. When I was growing up, you never saw one outside of science fiction. You’d read novels set hundreds or thousands of years in the future and everybody in them would have shelves of book spools or tablets. Come to think of it, in the TV series of Hitch-hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, made in the 1980s, the alien Ford Prefect handed earthling Arthur Dent what looked like something we’d recognise now as an e-reader.

Now that they’re all over the place, not that far into the twenty-first century, what are they going to do in three or four hundred years? Have a chip installed in their heads, perhaps, to deliver books directly to your brain? Urk!

There’s something magical about choosing a book on-line and downloading it straight to your e-reader or even your phone. A friend who had bought his Kindle at the supermarket demonstrated by buying my novel Wolfborn from Amazon and downloading it straight to his e-reader. “Ooh!’ I breathed in wonder.
Another nice thing about it is the lightness instead of carrying a load of books with you, you can carry a whole lot on your little reader that goes in your bag or pocket. You can change the font size– terrific for people with poor eyesight.
The fact that a lot of these readers have pre-loaded books means that you might read something you wouldn’t choose in a bookshop of a library; one of my students is reading Frankenstein because it came free with the reader. That has to be a good thing.
And yet – for me, there’s nothing like the feel and smell of paper, the curling up in bed with your book, the overcrowded book cases in my study. You could put an entire encyclopaedia on e-reader, I suppose, but why not just go on-line where it would be up to date?
Because I don’t read non-fiction just for research, I like to browse the bookshops and libraries for books I might enjoy; you’d have to have some idea of what you want to get it from a web site. It’s just not the same as discovering that book about astronomy of the Middle Ages or the Faeries of Brittany.
Tell me you can do that on-line, ordering from a catalogue!

Guys, this post is shorter than most I’ve done so far because it’s getting late and tomorrow I’m heading up to Bendigo with a bunch of other writers from Ford Street Publishing to do some workshops at a school there. Wish me luck and if you’re going to be there, do come up and say hi!

Paragraph

For the Dog: On E-readers

2011-11-24T04:50:00.001-08:00

I don't have one. I say so. Go take a look on the Dog and I hope you enjoy. Me, I'm going to bed - I have a long trip to Bendigo to do my first writer visit and I really, really hope it works out. I'll be one of about sixteen guests and we all have to do workshops with students who have paid to be there.

Fingers crossed for me!

Books and Covers

2011-11-23T06:37:00.001-08:00

Today's Dog post is about the importance of book covers. Go check it out. Sorry i can't be witty right now, but I've returned from the Year 12 Formal, I'm still sitting here in my fancy clothes and longing for a shower and bed. I have a very short time to sleep. But I'm determined to get a post a day on to Insideadog till the end of the month - it's my very own NaNoWriMo.

Today's Insideadog post - Books and Travel

2011-11-21T20:43:00.001-08:00

Once every few years I travel overseas. When I do, I’ll try to go somewhere connected with a book or a writer. It’s just a nice thing to do, to know that where you are is where a writer lived or a favourite story happened in the book world.

I’ve been to England twice. While I was there, I visited some places connected with writers I loved. A friend took me to Stratford-on-Avon, where I visited Anne Hathaway’s cottage. Anne was the wife William Shakespeare left behind when he went off to London to be an actor. The house was where she lived with her parents and Will would have visited her there before they got married.

Passing the Stratford Tourist Information Office, I spotted a small plaque on it that told you how old the place was; Shakespeare’s daughter Judith lived there with her husband.

I also visited the mediaeval town Shrewsbury, which is on the border of Wales. It’s a very beautiful place. At the time I was reading Brother Cadfael, a series of mediaeval crime novels by Ellis Peters. Ellis Peters was actually Edith Pargeter, a woman who wrote both historical fiction and crime fiction. She put them together to create Brother Cadfael, a mediaeval monk and amateur detective, living at the abbey in Shrewsbury during the mid-twelfth century, when there were two people fighting over the British throne.

In Shrewsbury, there were Brother Cadfael walks, Brother Cadfael souvenirs, bookshop windows with Brother Cadfael displays. The church which was a part of the abbey mentioned in the books was still there. I snapped photos outside it. A gentleman walking past called, “Dare I ask if you’re a Brother Cadfael fan?”

I smiled: “Need you ask?”

After that, he told my mother and me about the church and pointed out some places mentioned in the novels. What was really wonderful was that you could walk along the streets and recognise the layout from the novels.
In Oxford, a friend took me to the Eagle and Child, a pub where J.R.R. Tolkien and his friends used to go regularly for a drink. It was known locally as the “Bird and Baby”.

And speaking of Tolkien, I couldn’t go to Hobbiton or Gondor, but, after the release of the Lord of the Rings movies, I could go to New Zealand, where the movie was filmed. New Zealand is a gorgeous country, whatever your reason for going.

In 2003, I booked a tour on something called Magic Bus, travelling New Zealand and went.

One place I visited was Queenstown, in the south. Queenstown is a place well-known for its sports facilities. You can do everything from skiing to bungee-jumping. Only one member of the tour group wanted to bungee-jump, though, and while we all cheered her on, we stood on the bridge across the river and gazed at the water that had played the role of the River Anduin in Fellowship of The Ring. Of course, they’d had to remove the traffic from the background and add in giant statues of Aragorn’s ancestors, but it was pretty impressive anyway.

During the three days we were there, my mother and I went on a half-day Lord Of The Rings tour. The tour guide was a pleasant American-Kiwi gentleman who had been cast as an Uruk-Hai orc. He took us to the Remarkables, where the Misty Mountains scenes were filmed.

We also got to see a bit of stream where the Nazghul had turned up to threaten Frodo.

Once we’d seen all these places, it was easier to notice them next time we saw the films.

Book – and movie – travel is a special thing to do.

Tomorrow's Dog post: My own world-building (and chocolate)

2011-11-20T04:30:00.001-08:00

It's Sunday night and I need desperately to get to bed, so I'll just urge you all to go along to Insideadog and check out my post for Monday. I give a lot of detail about what I did in my world-building for Wolfborn and add a recipe for chocolate truffles, just because I can.

Good night!

The Eagle movie

2011-11-19T12:53:00.001-08:00

A part of the Ninth Legion went to Scotland and never came back. Some years later, Marcus Flavius Aquila, the son of the cohort commander, comes to Britain and, when he's invalided out of the army, goes north to find out what happened and retrieve the legion's lost Eagle, without which the legion is shamed and can't re-form. He finds out, perhaps a lot more than he wanted to, but comes to accept what he can't change and get on with his life...

I finally got the chance to see the movie of The Eagle of the Ninth (called The Eagle as a movie), on DVD. While watching it I wrote my post for Insideadog and it was about Rosemary Sutcliff, not the movie. Watching it made me think again of her books.

I'm glad I saw it on DVD, because I got to see the alternative ending, which I think better than the one they used, if not like the novel either. I also got to see two deleted scenes which showed bits that were in the book - the one where Marcus is trying out a chariot and horses belonging to a local and the one where Esca goes into detail about his family's death. Those were right out of Rosemary Sutcliff - why did they scrap them? I have some ideas about that and about why the ending was changed, but won't go into them here. I also watched the doco, in which the director says he read and loved the book as a child ... so why did he do things to it?

If you haven't read the book, you may not know the point was that the legion had become corrupt before they ever went north to Scotland and, while the hero's father was not a part of that corruption, the legion really is better off not re-formed. This point was missed in the movie, even in the alternative ending. A LOT of the original points were missed, in the producers' eagerness to shout, "Look! American imperialism! Aren't we clever?"

Whatever your politics - and I'm not going into mine here - why shove it into a story where it wasn't written or intended? The book was written in 1954 and it was about Marcus and his coming to terms with his life - and the adventures he has while it's happening. In the end, he stays in Britain and marries Cottia, a British girl who was left out of the movie, probably because it would have been less of a buddy movie if she'd been there.

Here are some of my thoughts about the film: It was better than I expected, though I have a number of issues with it.

Unlike a lot of people who complain about Tatum Channing as Marcus, I don't mind him. He looks like a Marcus to me, if a little older than the original; he had to deal with the script he got and he did it well, in my opinion. And let's face it, Anthony Higgins, who played the role for the BBC, is WAY too old to do it now! :-)

I did prefer Jamie Bell's Esca, the British slave who goes with him. What I didn't like was that in the movie he's still a slave when they go north, because the producers are planning to change the storyline and if he's not a slave at the time they can't make you wonder what he's up to. In the novel, Marcus frees him before they leave on their journey because he can't ask a slave to go into danger with him. And he does ask, not demand.

In the book, Marcus goes as an eye-doctor, as they're welcome everywhere, and actually does some healing - not in the film. Would he be dumb enough to take no thought for what might happen if the two of them just turn up in Scotland and are caught? It seems so.

The scenery is amazing. The second part of the movie was actually filmed in Scotland and who's to say that the blue-painted Seal People with the mohawk hairdos, or their historical equivalents, weren't ancestors of the extras who charged across the landscape? I liked that they took the trouble to have the Seal People speak in Gaelic, because we don't know what the Picts spoke. I believe that they searched for a Gaelic-speaking boy for the Seal child.

The costumes are believable and look lived-in. The music is beautiful, lots of Celtic-sounding pipe skirls in it, and I will get the soundtrack when I can.

Marcus's uncle lives in Calleva, which was a Roman town - so why is his house surrounded by acres of open land? I wouldn't mind so much, but he actually says that this is Calleva.

In the novel and the film, Marcus meets Guern the hunter, actually a Roman, one of his father's legionaries, who tells him what happened, but in the novel he isn't interested in coming back. He's settled into this life, has a wife, family and friends. In the film they seem to decide, after all this talk about imperialism, to let a bunch of elderly ex-legionaries redeem themselves. And, just to make sure it's okay for them to fight the pursuing British victims of imperialism, the Seal Prince does something very nasty in front of them.

I'd give this film a B rather than an A, if I was scoring it, perhaps 3 1/2 stars. It has a lot going for it and at least the makers loved what they were doing. It just doesn't respect the spirit of the novel as much I would like.

Finally Found A Copy!

2011-11-18T15:46:00.001-08:00

My previous post, written for IAD, talked about the joys of stuff you find in discount and second-hand bookshops. Well, I've unearthed Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber collection - finally! I thought it was out of print, or, at least, you'd need to order it on-line, but there it was at the Bookgrocer in town, and I got it for $10 in the spring sale.

I'm halfway through already and I can see why it's a classic. More on this when I've finished. I also have a Ranger's Apprentice volume to finish and some review books. I don't often put up "reading" on Goodreads because the computer message comes and nags you if you haven't updated it for a while. So this will go up when I've finished it.

Latest on the Dog - bookshops!

2011-11-18T12:03:00.001-08:00

Posted on Insideadog this morning - enjoy!

I woke up this morning listening to the rain on the roof, one of my favourite sounds. That’s the time when I make up stories in my head for later. Right now, I’m trying to think up a story for a science fiction and fantasy anthology about how things started. I don’t know much about it yet except it’s going to be something about the Trojan War and begin with, “It started with that stupid wedding invitation. The one I didn’t get…” and be seen from the viewpoint of Eris, goddess of trouble.

At some point I’m going to hit the discount and second hand bookshops to see what I can find to help. I already have plenty, but you never know and any excuse will do. I just love the kind of shop where you can find books on everything from chocolate to gladiators and what they ate in London in Shakespeare’s time, along with recipes. I found most of my folklore collection in a second-hand bookshop in the middle of Melbourne. It came in handy for my research for Wolfborn and I was interested to find out that Melissa Marr, author of the Wicked Lovely series, found her fairy information in a lot of the same books I used.

(Not my shelves - I'm not at home to take the pic. But these shelves also belong to a writer...)

Between book commissions, I just like to read non-fiction, any non-fiction that looks good. You never know when information will come in handy. Like that history of the Roman games I found in a discount bookshop last summer. Did you know that executions happened at lunchtime, between the real entertainments? While Christians faced the lions, in the stands above people were digging in their picnic baskets for the last of the olives, wondering if they should go to the lavatory or the hot food stands and risk losing their seats. And if you think fast food began with Macca’s and the Colonel, forget it! Most Romans lived in flats. The cooking facilities were pretty much non-existent and dangerous anyway, because the buildings were wooden, so they’d go to their favourite cook shop and buy dinner there.

Will I be writing a book set in ancient Rome? Who knows? Who cares?

I’ve just found a biography of Nicholas Culpeper, a seventeenth century guy who wrote a book about herbs (I have it somewhere on my crowded shelves). Herbs are important to someone like me, writing mediaeval fantasy. So I keep it on my shelves for when I need to know the properties of a particular herb or what they might have used to treat a wound before modern medicine. Meanwhile, it’s nice to know about the author.
There’s lots of great stuff out there, but buying it on-line or ordering it for your e-reader means you have to have some idea what you want. Bookshops mean you can browse and discount and second-hand bookshops have a wider variety than regular ones.

Libraries are great too. I found some wonderful craft books in my school library that no one had read in years and got to take them home. I now have a book or two on weaving, something I may need to know one day.
Now excuse me, I’m going back to bed to read about food in Shakespeare’s London.

Insideadog - on book blogs

2011-11-17T02:25:00.001-08:00

Well, this is a book blog and a lot of teenagers do write them, including some of my on-line friends, so why not post about it? This will be up on the Dog tomorrow morning at 7.00 a.m. Why not check it out?

I'm over the hump now, past the halfway mark on my Residency. It's been a challenge, so far, coming up with a different topic every day, but worth it.

And, interestingly, it seems to be raising the hit rate on this blog! I do hope you'll all continue to read this one after November.

Insideadog - Doing Research The Hard Way

2011-11-16T01:21:00.001-08:00

This is an adapted version of a post I wrote originally for the Random House blog back in February, soon after my novel was published. It will be up on the Dog on November 17.

In it, I talk about being hit on the head over and over at the Society for Creative Anachronism, in the interests of research. My favourite fight arranger is Terry Walsh, who used to do it for Robin of Sherwood. Nasir, the Saracen warrior, seemed to have only a couple of moves, but on the whole, I could believe the fights in that show. I did gape over the scene in one episode where two Saracens are fighting in Sherwood using Japanese katanas...

Anyway, the IAD post is just about me and the SCA and how I used it in my fantasy writing. And my friend Robert, who was bashing a light pole for sword practice, when a watching policeman asked, "Is it dead yet?"

Names In Harry Potter

2011-11-16T01:17:00.001-08:00

First posted on Insideadog November 16 2011

Have you ever wondered what writers have in mind when they name their characters?

I’m going to take a look at some names in the Harry Potter books because there are so many that are appropriate for the characters.

Let’s start with the staff at Hogwarts.

Albus Dumbledore means “White Bumblebee”.

Professor McGonagall’s first name is Minerva – the Roman goddess of wisdom, which certainly seems to suit this wise lady.

The school nurse is Poppy Pomfrey – poppy, in the old days, was used as a painkiller.

The Herbology teacher is Pomona Sprout. Apart from the obvious “sprout”, Pomona was the Roman goddess of orchards and fruit. How appropriate is that?

Professor Remus Lupin is a werewolf. Remus was the name of one of the twin founders of Rome, who were raised by a she-wolf and “Lupin” is connected with “lupine”, wolflike.

The school caretaker, Argus Filch, has a name taken from Greek mythology; Argus was a guardian of the goddess Hera’s herds. He had a hundred eyes. What better name to call a character who is always spying on the students? To filch something is to steal it.

All the members of Sirius Black’s family have starry names, but his is so appropriate. Sirius is the Dog Star and combined with Black, it’s “Black Dog” which is his Animagus shape.

Bad boy Draco Malfoy has a name that means “Dragon Bad Faith” – nice!

The Minister of Magic is Cornelius Fudge. To fudge something is to cheat on it in a sneaky way. Another meaning is “to fail to perform as expected” or “to avoid commitment”. All of them work for me as a description of Cornelius Fudge.

Voldemort means “ flight from death” or “steal from death” which makes sense for a man who wants so badly to avoid dying.

There are stacks more over-the-top names with meaning in the books and all I can say is, J.K.Rowling must have had great fun choosing them!

Speaking of choosing, how about another cast member for the Ranger's Apprentice movie? For the role of Gilan, that yummy former apprentice of Halt's, I think I'll have Orlando Bloom. :-)

Insideadog - Names in Harry Potter

2011-11-15T01:49:00.001-08:00

Tomorrow's post will be on the subject of names in the Harry Potter books. There are so many appropriate ones. The author has a good classical education and uses it. Really, this post is just a list of names (nowhere near all of them) and what they mean or where they come from and how they work in the context.

Go check it out?

I'm halfway through my residency. I hope the lurkers out there are enjoying it!

Competition judging as discussed on the Dog

2011-11-13T23:48:00.001-08:00

Here's my full post on judging the Mary Grant Bruce Award from Insideadog ... just in case you didn't check it out...

So - why would anyone volunteer to judge a writing competition? Especially one where you don't at least get a bunch of free books out of it? Is it the power? Mwa ha ha! All those trembling writers who have entrusted you with their magnificent stories and you alone have the choice of which one wins? (Clap of thunder! Again - mwa ha ha!)

Or - maybe you're just terribly flattered to be asked?

Years ago, I won a writing competition called the Mary Grant Bruce Award for Children’s Literature – twice (see my post on writing groups). The first time, I shared the prize with Robin Klein, whose novel Hating Alison Ashley was made into a film, at my school (I was an extra, but you won’t see me, as they cut my scenes). It told me I was a children’s writer – and I never looked back.

One day I got a phone call from Adrian Penniston-Bird, who ran the Victorian Fellowship of Australian Writers. Adrian said that I’d won twice, so would I judge it this year?

I agreed and the FAW sent me seventy-five stories. On request, the stories had been submitted without names except on a cover sheet. Well, mostly; I got one story which not only had the author’s name on it, but the fond mother’s information that the author was only twelve. (Remember what I said about Alexandra Adornetto’s submission to HarperCollins? She didn’t need that sort of back-up to sell her book.)

After I’d weeded out the stories clearly not for children and those with awful grammar, I read the rest thoroughly.

On a side note, I had a friend who had entered the competition before. I told her that if she’d entered this year I didn’t want to know about it! I read a story that I strongly suspected was by her, because I knew her style. Still, I didn’t know; it was a good story, so it made the short list of seven.

I handed the short list to two children to read, as I’d been asked. Once they had made their choice, I decided that I’d at least give an honourable mention to a couple of stories I had liked. One of them was the story I suspected was by my friend.

When I rang Adrian to announce the winner and honourable mentions, he confirmed that one honourable mention was, as I’d thought, by my friend Edwina Harvey! She had won that fair and square, so she received a certificate and came to Melbourne to collect it at the prize-giving dinner.

The winning story was published later, though I can’t remember the title or the publisher, it has been so long, but Edwina worked her story into a novel, which was published in 2009 as The Whale’s Tale.

I haven’t judged any competitions recently; it’s hard work, and I only had to read short fiction. Imagine what it’s like to read hundreds of novels for a major competition like the Children’s book Council Awards, never mind a few dozen short stories as I did! It was an interesting experience and I’m glad I did it.

Still, I’d much rather be writing.

Latest cast member of The Ranger’s Apprentice movie (which seems to have John Rhys-Davies playing two roles, so I guess I must have been tired) is Sean Bean for the role of King Duncan.

My First SCBWI Meeting

2011-11-12T22:58:00.001-08:00

I don't get to these, usually. Somehow, they always seem to clash with theatre or opera or some other thing I have to attend. But yesterday, I managed to get to my first meeting of the Melbourne chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, being held in a restaurant in Carlton, Lygon St.

Children's writers tend to hang out together or at least meet at conferences. It gets embarrassing when someone calls you by name and you can't remember who they are.

Luckily, we all had name tags, but I found there were a few people I knew - Errol Broome, an older writer who says she's had enough of writing for now, Goldie Alexander, with whom I did a panel at the crime conference, my friend George Ivanoff, whom I have known since before either of us sold anything or even realised we were children's writers and Gabrielle Wang, that wonderful writer of gentle fantasy tales for children and a gentle YA fantasy, Little Paradise. I was a bit embarrassed to meet her because my students had prepared an interview for her and the file got lost!

I explained and, while I plan to have it on this blog, she says she will have it on her own as well, if I can get them to find that file!

Meanwhile, I bought copies of her book, A Ghost In My Suitcase, to be signed for them, and one copy of Little Paradise, which I think will be enjoyed by the one who has read the others.

There were two guest speakers - Alison Reynolds, who wrote a series of choose-your-own adventure books with an environmental theme with Ranger Sean Willmore, and a lady who teaches editing and talked about common grammar errors, giving us examples taken from real books, starting with Thomas The Tank Engine. Both were fascinating. I always wondered how you'd do a CYOA-type book - it must be very difficult.

My grammar is pretty good already, but I did agree that any story that doesn't get its grammar right is far less likely to be picked up than one which does.

There will only be two meetings in Melbourne next year, the others will be outside, but there was a tantalising hint about another Sydney conference - must check it out!

Tomorrow's Dog Post: Judging The Mary Grant Bruce Award

2011-11-12T04:08:00.001-08:00

Yes, I judged it once - many years ago. Because it was a short story competition, I didn't even have free books to show for it, and there was no anthology of MGB fiction to give me, but you get so flattered when people think you're worthy to judge others' writing. I did get a free dinner at the awards ceremony.

Would I do it again? Maybe not; I've been slushing for ASIM for so long, it would feel like a case of "been there, done that!"

I'm not sorry I did it then, though. It was a good experience and I'm sure I learned plenty from it.

Anyway, if you want to read about it, trot along to the Doghouse from 7.00 a.m. November 13.

Insideadog post - Remembrance Day Stuff

2011-11-11T02:46:00.001-08:00

Here's what will appear on my Insideadog blog tomorrow morning.

As I write this, it’s still Remembrance Day. I thought I’dput in a short post on the subject. November 11^th 1918 was theofficial end of World War I, or the Great War as it was known then. Therehadn’t been any previous world wars. So if you ever read a novel set at thattime and find a character referring to World War I (and I have come across it)you can feel free to laugh.

It really was a great – in the sense of huge – war. Millionsdied during it, on truly horrible battlefields from France to Gallipoli.

And it led to some amazing writing. Just go look up WilfredOwen and Siegfriend Sassoon, the two most famous war poets of that time.Sassoon lived to a ripe old age, but Wilfred Owen died in the war. The reallysad thing was that he was killed in battle in France only a few days before thewar ended. Go check out his poem, Dulce Et Decorum Est, whichgives you a real feel for the horrors of that war, with its trenches and gasattacks.

Another writer who was involved in that war was J.R.R.Tolkien, author of The Lord Of The Rings andThe Hobbit. Tolkien served in France, on the Somme.It’s said that when he thought of hobbits and their personalities, he wasthinking of the ordinary English soldiers (he was an officer). When you readabout Frodo and Sam trudging through the Dead Marshes you’ll have some idea of what it was like inthe French battlefields; that’s what he imagined when he was writing thosescenes.

Strange to think some of the most powerful writing evercreated came out of such tragedy!

Writing in Groups

2011-11-10T14:26:00.001-08:00

This is now up on Insideadog. I mean to do an extra post today, dedicated to Remembrance Day. After all, Tolkien was in the Great War and.. stand by.

Let’s face it, writing is lonely. No matter what you do or who you hang out with, in the end, it’s you and the computer. Nobody can write it for you. Well, yes, they can write it with you if you’re doing a collaborated piece of work, but I find the quickest way to lose friends is to write a book with them.

You can have “beta” readers for feedback, though, and this is one reason why people join writers’ groups. On-line you’ll find communities, forums, discussion groups. Some of my Year 9 students have joined a web site called Inkpop, an on-line community where you can choose a cover for your book and have other members read and comment. Anyone can join.

Some on-line groups are for experienced writers, including those who can commit to a story a week, which other members can then critique.

The advantage is that it makes you feel less lonely and you can have access to far more people than when I started writing. Do you sell more stories this way? Sometimes.

I was part of a science fiction and fantasy writers’ group back in the days before email. We wrote a story a month, but actually had to finish the story before the month was over, photocopy it and send it to the other group members by snail mail. A lot harder than now, eh?

Some of us became professionals – not all. I’m one of those who made it, another was Sean McMullen, who has written a lot of books for adults, but, more recently, a Quentaris book and two novels for the YA publisher Ford Street. George Ivanoff, later author of Gamers’ Quest, came to some meetings too.

Did I sell some of the stories I wrote then? Yes. Two won the Mary Grant Bruce Award for children’s literature. One of those, a ghost story set in a library, was published in a library themed anthology. Another, a funny story inspired by a Grimm fairy tale, sold to Family Circle (my first sale). People in my group could be very rude in their comments; the thing was not to take it personally. I must have learned something for my stories to sell.

Bear in mind that if you do join a writers’ group you will have to have a thick skin; at least when I was in a group, I knew the other writers and could make rude gestures back at them if they annoyed me, and have a laugh afterwards. One time I wrote a member into a story as a ghost. On-line, nobody knows you personally or cares if you’re upset or insulted and if you get into an argument about it you learn nothing.

Up to you if you want to have a go. There are plenty of teens doing it; I just spotted an interview with one on Inkpop. So good luck and good writing!

Still casting the Rangers’ Apprentice movie. My choice for Oberjarl Erak is … drum roll! – John Rhys-Davies!

A Clayton's NaNoWriMo

2011-11-09T03:34:00.000-08:00

Thinking about it, while I haven't signed up for NaNoWriMo, that month where you have to write 50,000 words, I do seem to be committing myself to writing a post a day this month. I will, of course, never be able to sell my blog posts and the wordage is nowhere near 50,000 words, but I figure a regular piece of writing fits the bill for committing yourself. I only have to do three posts a week for IAD, but have decided to do one every day, and have done one on something different each time, so yay me! :-)

Latest post on The Dog: fan fiction!

2011-11-09T03:25:00.000-08:00

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This post is appearing on Insideadog on November 10. I love fan fiction. I think I wrote 150 fan stories before I ran out of ideas and, anyway, people started paying me to write. But reading it is still a guilty pleasure for me, So, but many of whom I thought I'd share it with the readers of IAD, some of whom will actually be writing their own and will be familiar with Fanfiction Net, but others may never have heard of fanfic.

Hope you all like it too!

So, what happens when you’ve finished a book or a series of books and there will be no more? Well…you could always write your own. And sometimes the series isn’t finished, but there are holes you just have to plug, or stories you just have to tell about a minor character from the book. That’s where fan fiction comes in.

I have heard that fan fiction as we think of it began when the original series of Star Trek was cancelled after only three seasons and Captain Kirk, Mr Spock and other members of the Enterprise crew had swooshed off into space for the last time. Fans couldn’t bear not to have any more stories, so they wrote their own. They typed them up and shared them. Then they began to produce fanzines, collections of these stories.

Now, with the Internet, we can go to Fanfiction Net and take our pick of fan fiction based on our favourite stories. I’m looking at the web site now – OMG! Books, movies, TV shows, manga/anime, comics, musicals, even games, all turned into stories! There are books I’ve never even heard of on the books list. And others I can’t believe. People have written their own stories about Jane Eyre! I think the site has at least 100 Ranger’s Apprentice stories.

I read fan fiction, though it’s been years since I’ve written it. Some of it is truly awful, some is very good indeed, written by authors who have gone on to be published professionally. I know of one popular young adult novelist who used to write Harry Potter fan fiction which you’ll probably still find up on Fanfiction Net.

The Harry Potter fan stories range from romances between characters you’d never imagine together but someone has, to adventures, to humour, to epics. Bad boy Draco Malfoy is the hero of quite a few. Snape, that teacher you pray you will never find in your classroom, even if you cried for him at the end of the series, got the girl many times in fan fiction before we found out why he would never settle down with anyone. Girls from our world got to marry Legolas the Elf from Lord of the Rings or save Boromir’s life.

You can’t sell this fiction – that’s breaking copyright – but people don’t write it for the money. They write it for love of the books. It’s not always good, but it’s always written with passion.

And then again, there are some professional writers out there who still write fan fiction for fun. What greater tribute could fanfic have?

The pictures at the top of this post show two of my fanzine collection. The cover art of Beyond Antares was done by Marianne Plumridge, who has become a professional artist. The other fanzine contains several stories by Melbourne writer George Ivanoff, now living from his writing and the author of two novels.

Other stuff: I’d like to thank the two commenters who appeared in the post on Putting It off. They have won the first two sets of Crime Time bookmarks.

Here’s another cast member for my proposed Ranger’s Apprentice movie. For the role of Horace, how about … Lincoln Lewis?