.......am I still a writer?
I have been travelling around a lot lately visiting schools which is fun and challenging. I love it but it does take a lot of energy, which could otherwise be channelled into writing, Although sometimes I think there are stories out there, happening all the time, and perhaps they are the food a writer's mind needs. Chance encounters, and observations.
Sitting in a very comfortable B & B in the wilds of Aberdeenshire I have a large catherdral style window in front of me and wonderful views acress farmland, which is beautiful, even now as it starts to rain, washing the grass green and lush. There are cattle in the field below the window, three beautiful beasts, two black and one deep rich brown, 'show ' cattle I was informed.
They are playful despite their size, behaving much like little children.
Yesterday the chap who owns them was trying to build a fence. He had just put in the first post when they came up behind him, obviously curious to see what he was doing. They started sniffing at the post and rubbing against it when he had turned to the next one. He heard them and turned around. Immediately all three looked away, as if they had had been caught out, and they looked as if they were trying to pretend they had not been interested in the post at all.
He went back to work, and working incredibly fast put in the tall fence posts in a row and then returned to them one by one to hit them deeper into the ground with a large mallet.
But as he worked from one end to the other in the small field these playfull creatures headed again towards the first of the posts that had not as yet been hammered into the ground. When he was not looking (and you can almost sense that they checked to make sure,) they started to rub their noses against the post, then lean on it until it began to move and eventually was sitting at an angle.
At this point the chap returned, having seen what they are up to and shooed them away. Off they trotted like small errant children and as soon as he started repairing the damage, they began again on one of the posts at the other end of the field.
Eventually he saw what they were up to and came back to shoo them off again and one of them, the deep brown one, began to studiously examine a a bale of wire, as if trying to persuade the chap that it had not
been pushing at the post at all (' It wasn't me! Honest!')
There are truly stories everywhere.
So when I am travelling and not having time or energy left to write, I am looking, imagining and enjoying observing the world away from my desk. So perhaps when I am not writing - I am still writing in my head.
....
www.lindastrachan.comBookwords Blog
Or getting in a plane again. This time to Istanbul, which is a city I’ve never been before. Am I excited? Yes, I am. But it does mean that blogging may not be as every single day as I like it to be. Might be a couple of weeks before normal service resumes. On the other hand, there may be kickarse wireless in the hotel and I’ll blog like a demon. Just to keep you on your toes.
Have fun in my absence—I know it will be hard—and patient with my slow response to emails and questions etc. If you do have any quessies for me the best way to get a response is to go to the FAQs and ask there. I check them regularly. Whereas questions asked on regular posts often go unanswered. Sorry bout that.
I have a question for youse lot though: What do you feel about novels written in collaboration? I’ve heard some readers won’t touch them, which I find really odd. But I’m curious to know if it’s a widespread feeling. You don’t see that many bestselling collaborations, though there are a few. (I’m excluding ghostwritten books.) I’ve always wanted to do one but the opportunity has never arisen.
Thanks for your answers.
Who was it that claimed jetlag is caused by souls not travelling as fast as bodies? I can’t remember. But I think they’re a hundred per cent correct.
So, this is very weird but I’ve had three people write to ask if it’s true that I changed hotels in Perth in order to watch the South Africa v Australia test.
Yes, it’s true. The Duxton did not have Fox 3, the Hyatt did. What else could I have done?
I shall be brief for the internets is expensive and wobbly.
Organisation: superlative. The PWF crew know that authors are a hapless lot and they have kept us on course and on time. Why, I have not gotten lost or been late for a single event. Bless them all!
I have met too many wonderful writers to name them all but I particularly enjoyed meeting Barry Jonsberg and his wife Nita who love the cricket as much as I do. There was much discussion of the South Africa v Australia and West Indies v England tests that are currently unfolding.
For the first time in my career I wound up talking to under twelve year olds as opposed to over twelve year olds, which was dead interesting. I was asked many questions that I’ve never been asked before. Also my jokes that knock ‘em dead when they’re a bit older did not always fly with the younger set. Fortunately, they laughed at many jokes that hitherto only I have found funny. It made me really want to write a book that skews even younger than How To Ditch Your Fairy. It will involve quokka.
Thanks to everyone who came out to see me. Thanks for the great questions and comments and stories of your fairies and curses. I especially loved the girl who has a sunshine fairy.
And now (for me) it is over and I wend my way back home. Later!
In the last few years I have spent way more time in hotels of every kind than I ever though I would. This has led me to the realisation that there are four essential items for a hotel to be acceptable:
- Free fast wireless
- Windows that open
- Good food—especially breakfast
- Decent bed and bedding. (I.e. something you can sleep without waking up feeling broken that is also clean.)
You’d be amazed how many hotels can’t manage any of these. It fills my heart with sadness.
What are your bare minimums for a hotel?
Initial disclaimer: I realise that just by announcing that I’m not that fussed I’ll be seen as protesting too much. To which I respond: Whatever.
In the course of reading Diana Peterfreund and Carrie Ryan’s lovely posts about all the ways in which YA is dismissed by people who know nothing about it and have read at most two YA novels, and the New Yorker blog post that set Carrie off, I realised that I, in fact, wasn’t particularly annoyed or outraged by it. There are a few reasons for that:
- The post in question, while declaring that it is the exception that proves that YA is not worth reading, raves about a novel by a truly wonderful writer: Kathe Koja’s Headlong. I’ve not yet read it. (Tragically, it is not set in the 1930s.) But I have heard great things and I’ve read several of Koja’s other novels. She’s a genius. Pure and simple. Anyone spending time praising her work in a public forum is okay by me. Continue!
- I’ve seen that kind of dismissal of the genre many times before—not just YA, but also sf and fantasy. It’s boring and I’m bored by it. Yawn. Been there done that. The more you hear an erroneous set of assumptions, the less they bother you. I’ve also mounted the counterarguments and had them largely fall on deaf ears so I can’t be bothered saying it all again. I’l leave it to those more able and willing. Like Diana and Carrie and Maureen Johnson and John Green and Jennifer Lynn Barnes.
- We’re doing better than they are. I don’t want to skite about my genre, but . . . Oh, who am I kidding. I totally want to skite! I don’t care that there are adults who will never read YA because there are heaps of adults who are reading it. Not to mention the gazillions of teenagers. YA totally outsells adult litfic. Our audience is bigger than theirs. Our books earn out; theirs mostly don’t. Many of the YA writers I know can make a living writing; most of the litfic writers I know can’t. Many YA writers sell in multiple territories. We have books in Korean and Russian and Indonesian and Turkish and Estonian as well as English. We get fan letters from our readers all the time. We’re doing just fine; it’s adult litfic that’s in trouble.
Now that last skiteful point may turn out to be an historical aberration. Horror as a genre was riding very very high in the eighties and look at it now! Exactly. There are very few “horror” sections left in book shops and Stephen King’s pretty much the only one still doing fabulously well. Best to take that point with a grain of salt. I imagine that when the genre dries ups and my books stop selling1 I’ll be annoyed all over again at those mean litfic types peeing on YA. But I hope not. On both counts. But, yes, especially in the US, this has been a very scary year in publishing.
In the meantime, yay for Koja praise. Yawn to ignorant dismissals of any genre. And yay for all us YA writers doing just fine, thank you very much, while the rest of the publishing world collapses. Some of you astute followers of publishing in the US may have noticed that there were way more job losses and other slash-and-burns in the adult publishing world than there were in children’s/YA. Maybe the current spate of litfic sniping at YA is sour grapes?2
Oops, seems that I’m still skiting3 Look away, pretend you saw nothing! And read whatever damn books you want to read: litfic, YA, romance, fantasy, manga, airplane manuals, cricket books. It’s all good.
I’ll get out of your way now . . .
If you want a signed copy of HTDYF and you live in Toronto you should go to Bakka Phoenix Books, a lovely sf bookshop located at 697 Queen Street West. I believe you’ll also find books signed by John Scalzi and Scott Westerfeld.
My history with Bakka Books (as it used to be known) goes back to the 1990s when I was in Toronto doing research for my Phd at the Judith Merril Collection. I spent many hours at Bakka, gossiping with the staff, and feeding my book habit. So it was quite the thrill to be back there and signing my own books. Who’da thunk it?
I was also reminded me of how much I like Toronto. It’s not the prettiest city in the world but who cares when there’s so much cool inventive stuff going on? It totally reminds me of Melbourne. Queen St and Brunswick street bare a very close resemblance. I stumbled into Magpie Designs1 and may have accidentally wound up with some clothes. Can’t be sure.
It was lovely to be reminded even briefly of another of my favourite cities. I could totally live in Toronto.2
I am noticing an odd phenomenon: Readers of this blog apologising for not reading my books.
Please don’t!
I do not write this blog to get people to read my books.1
I write it cause it’s fun and because I’m shockingly opinionated—seriously there is NOTHING I don’t have an opinion about2—and I like to share. Blog writing is the most relaxing fun writing I do.3
It saddens me if any of you are feeling guilty about not reading my books. Put that guilt away. You are excused from ever reading them. So no more apologies, okay?4
In other news an interview with me can be found here. Thanks for the great quessies, Cynthia.
Brooke Taylor is giving a copy of How to Ditch Your Fairy away for Faery Week of her Monster Month of Giveaways.
Bloomsbury’s HTDYF contest also continues. There are several different prizes but I think this one’s best: $150 gift certificate to Forever 21.
Shortly, I am off to Toronto. If you’re there come see me and Scott Monday:
Monday, 27 October, 7:00PM-8:00PM
Indigo Bookstore
Yorkdale Mall
3401 Dufferin Street
Toronto, Ontario
I’m lying awake with a nasty case of bunker brain. Sleep eludes and weird thoughts intrude. I’m trying to combat them by
a) planning some fun ways to promote How To Ditch Your Fairy—so far the winning plan is to glue copies of the book to the backs of toilet doors—and,
b) trying to figure out how to describe the smell of flying foxes without using the words “musk” or “feral”.
Also I’m wishing I could draw.
How about you?
I just read a book that’s been getting rapturous reviews. It is every bit as beautifully written as advertised. There were whole paragraphs that were very WOW inducing.1 I loved parts of it and not just because they were about cricket.2 But I did not enjoy this book.
I will break my usual procedure and name the book: Netherland by Joseph O’Neill. I’m naming it because it really is gorgeously written. Seriously, it’s stunning. O’Neill deserves the reviews he’s been getting. I think many people will love it. Hell, many people are loving it. I’m writing this to figure out why it didn’t work for me.
The book’s a realist fictional take on the after effects of 9/11 on a marriage, on the narrator, on the city of NYC, centring around the narrator’s experience playing cricket and getting involved with a shady cricket-obsessed entrepreneur. I loved the descriptions of cricket as well as the discussions of the game and why USians don’t get it. I also loved the sequence in which the narrator attempts to get a NY driver’s license. It’s a deliciously funny and accurate description of city bureaucracy.
Yet, other than those glorious parts, Netherland bored me. I found myself skimming, looking for the next mention of cricket.3 I was not engaged by the passive drifting narrator. Worse, I didn’t care about him. I didn’t care about his marriage. I was bored rigid by his reminiscences about his past. He is so distanced from his life, so flat, that he seemed passionless about everything.
But my biggest problem was that there was no discernible plot. Over the course of 250 pages all the dramatic events happen offstage. The more I read the more frustrated I became. Perhaps, though, that’s the same problem: Because I was uninterested—and eventually came to dislike the narrator—I could not look past the lack of plot.
I love Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. It has no plot. It’s about a poor writer stumbling around a city starving. That’s the entire book. What could be more boring? I love that book. There’s way less plot in Hunger than Netherland.
Come to think of it, the likability of the narrator is not that big a deal. The narrator of Hunger isn’t likable. I can think of lots of protags I don’t like, but who are immensely engaging. My problem with Hans is not that I didn’t like him, it’s that I found him and his life boring. Almost every other character in the book is more interesting than Hans and yet it’s his head we’re stuck in.
I tried very hard to like Netherland. I can’t remember the last time I disliked a book that was as good as this one. I suspect quite a few of you will like it. Do ignore me and give it a go!
Have any of you experienced this? Read a book that you didn’t like despite being able to see that it’s really really good?
Note: I have now left the bunker but bits of the bunker are still lodged in my brain. It may be a while yet before I catch up on the crazy email backlog. Or my life. Or anything really.
By:
Aline Pereira,
on 8/21/2008
Blog:
PaperTigers
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JacketFlap tags:
Friends restaurant Phnom Penh,
Gap Year,
Helen Coughlan,
Hill Tribe Children's Village,
Janet Lawrence,
Rotary Polio Plus,
Save the Children,
The Brighter Side of the Road,
War Child Australia,
Young Adult Books,
travelling,
Add a tag
The Brighter Side of the Road: Upbeat and Offbeat Yarn from Home and Abroad, edited by Helen Coughlan and Janet Lawrence (Boolarong Press, 2005) is a “Compendium of stories … a gathering of recollections and reflections of Australians who have ventured out to make a difference – both at home and abroad.” As more and more young people are setting their sights on taking a gap year when they leave school, they (and their parents!) may be looking for reading material to help them make their choices.
There is something here for everyone. A fair share of travel disasters and both uplifting and amusing anecdotes of experiencing different cultures: food in China, for example, or attending a ploughing ceremony in Cambodia. Two sections really stand out – “Making a Difference – Helping Hands”, which contains some inspirational experiences of people working for humanitarian organisations; and “Young Trailbalzers”, experiences of Young people who have stepped outside their normal lives to experience a different culture, whether on their own or as part of an organised group, including Round Square. What comes across very clearly is how all their lives – and the lives of many others - have been changed by their experiences.
As well as being good reading for anyone setting off on their travels, some of these “Upbeat and offbeat yarns” would make great school assembly material… And another good reason for getting hold of the book is that all Profits are shared between War Child Australia, Rotary Polio Plus programme, Save the Children Fund, the Hill Tribe Children’s Village at Mai Suai in Thailand, and “Friends” restaurant in Phnom Penh, which trains street children for hospitality work. Read here for how to order the book…
One young contributor, Justin, who introduces himself as a 17-year-old “indigenous Australian… of the Kamilaroi nation” describes how and why he helped to set up the Croc Festival in Moree, New South Wales for 8-18 year olds. His Trailblazer article ends with these words:
“I challenge you as the reader of this book, regardless of your age, race or gender to get out there, find something you would like to see changed and DO IT!”
Well, I got lots of things but a couple of them are embargoed. [[Kicks embargos]] And most of them are all about the book I am currently writing (more than 70 thou words now) which is deadly dull to anyone other than the person what’s writing the book, which would be me.
Ordinarily I would demand that you lot entertain me, but seeing as at the moment I only emerge from the bunker to have a brief squiz at the internets for a few minutes of every day . . . So how about you entertain yourselves?
Or something.
I returns to bunker. Is happy there. Warm. Filled with writing vitamins. Mmmm . . . bunker.
NB: The Alchemy of Stone is not a YA book.
I have just read a splendid book, Ekaterina Sedia’s The Alchemy of Stone, and now I must blurb it. I am realising once again that blurbing a book is really hard. As you may have noticed from this blog, I am not naturally succinct. I fail at all forms of writing that are on the short side: blurbs, pitches, haikus, summaries. They are all nightmarish to me.
I am so crappy at pitching my own books that Scott uses my feeble attempt to pitch Magic or Madness to a Sydney bookseller as his standard example of how not to pitch. (After hearing me out the bookseller put on a forced smiled and said, “Hmm, that sounds really complicated.”)
I wish I could just say:
Ekaterina Sedia’s The Alchemy of Stone is rooly good. Read it!
—Justine Larbalestier, Magic or Madness
Or do as Quentin Crisp used to, which was to respond to blurb requests with the following:
You may attribute to me whatever words you think will assist in the marketing of this fine work.
On this occasion my problem is that The Alchemy of Stone is a really complicated book and I love it but I don’t know how to describe it and thinking about it is hurting my head.
Maybe that should be my blurb? Hmmm.
The Alchemy of Stone is a really complicated book and I love it but I don’t know how to describe it and thinking about it is hurting my head. Buy it! Read it!
—Justine Larbalestier, Magic or Madness
Blurbing a dense, original and smart book like Sedia’s is especially hard. There are so many things to say about it. I love the alienness of the protagonist, Mattie, who is an intelligent automaton in a world in which automatons are dumb: they can neither talk nor think and are used as servants. How she grapples with being the only one of her kind and with actually knowing and talking to her creator is the heart of the book. She never once reads like a human being and yet she is a compelling character. I like her. I want her to succeed.
I love, too, the stone gargoyles who watch over the city, the power struggles between Mechanics, Alchemists, and the hideously oppressed miners and farmers, the subtle yet brilliant worldbuilding, the quasi-myth like though also fairy tale-ish feel to the language. Oh, yes, the language! Sedia’s a gorgeous maker of sentences. Not in an obvious show-y off-y way. Many of her sentences are sparse and unadorned. Yet several times I had to back up and re-read in order to savour and relish the implications of a particular word or phrase.
You see my problem? And I haven’t even really begun to describe why I enjoyed the book so much. Or mentioned the Soul-Smoker or explained why I don’t think it’s steampunk, which leads me into a long rant on why I don’t find “steampunk” is very useful term for describing books.
Stupid blurbs. I kick them.
How about:
Ekaterina Sedia’s The Alchemy of Stone burst with inventiveness from its robot heroine to the Soul-Smoker and stone gargoyles that watch over the city. The book is full of explosions both literal and metaphorical as well as being a gorgeous meditation on what it means to not be human. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this beautiful book.
—Justine Larbalestier, Magic or Madness
Or something. Did I mention that I hate writing blurbs?
Alchemy of Stones is rooly good. Read it!
Update: Here’s what the publisher decided to go with:
“A gorgeous meditation on what it means to not be human. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this beautiful book, from its robot heroine to the Soul-Smoker and stone gargoyles that watch over the city.” —Justine Larbalestier, author of Magic or Madness
As usual I’m not going to mention the books that I didn’t like because I don’t want the authors to hunt me down and kill me.1 Writers are scary people.
I’m still on a bit of a crime binge. And have been reading a scary amount of adult books. Who’d've thunk there was some good books over on those shelves? Colour me, shocked.
So here are the novels:
- The final book in Denise Mina’s Garrnethill trilogy, Resolution, was every bit as good as the other two. I have a major writing crush on Mina. She’s amazing. I love the way she writes. I love it so much, in fact, that I typed out an entire chapter of Exile so I could figure out how she did the very cool thing that she did in that particular chapter. I’ve yet to read a book of hers that wasn’t pure genius. I also like the warmth with which she portrays her characters. Even the total shitheads. Set in a very bleak dark Glasgow. Left me feeling hopeful despite the subject matter. (Adult, crime.)
- Clockers by Richard Price. This is a brilliant book. Astonishingly so. Richard Price can write. Some of his sentences made me cry they were so perfect. And yet . . . And yet I did not love it as much as I wanted to. There are two protags and I did not like either of them. Though Strike is definitely less repellent than Rocco. Though that wasn’t it either. Because there are lots of books I love that have wholly repellent protags. Hmmm. I’ll prolly have to read it again to figure out what my problem is. It’s my problem though not the book’s. Clockers truly is amazing. (Adult, crime.)
- We need to talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver. Speaking of books with repellent protags—the narrator of this book is completely unlikable. She’s self-obsessed, self-serving, unreliable, a racist, an elitist. I would go so far as to say that I hated her. And yet I loved this book. It did not leave me cold the way Clockers did. Along with The Man in the Basement by Walter Mosley this is the best meditation on evil that I have read in a long long time. Plus it’s a bad seed novel. And I adore bad seed novels. Shriver totally deserves all the accolades and prizes this book as won. Do not read this book if you’re thinking about having kids. It will put you right off. (Adult, crime—though I believe it gets classified as Literature, but it is a pure crime novel.)
- Double Fault by Lionel Shriver. See? Immediately after finishing Kevin I had to read more Shriver. I didn’t like anyone in this book either. And yet, once again, I loved it. Shriver totally reminds me of Patricia Highsmith. They have the same bleak, unblinking gimlet eye. As they write it we all have something to hide, we are all complicit and selfish and incapable of happiness. This book is the anatomy of a marriage between two tennis players. Reportedly she based it on her own relationship to another writer. Wow. That must have been the most fun couple ever. Like Highsmith I highly recommend that you don’t read too many of her books in a row. Otherwise you’ll start thinking poorly of everyone. (Adult, not crime although it sure felt like it.)
- No Place Safe by Kim Reid. A memoir about the Atlanata child murders from the point of view of a young girl who lives smack dab in the middle of where the children are disappearing and being murdered whose mother is one of the investigating officers. It took me awhile to warm to this one because I kept comparing to Tayari Jones’s astonishing novel about the same events, Leaving Atlanta. It’s not a fair comparison. Tayari Jones is one of the best novelists in the US and Leaving Atlanta is stunning. But it’s also a novel and while No Place Safe uses some novelistic techniques it’s not—it’s shape is constrained by the real events in retells. Those events are chilling. If that many white children were being killed no way would it have taken so long to start a proper investigation. The crimes remain unsolved. (Adult, memoir.)
Manhwa and manga read on the Queen Mary 2:
- Bride of the Water God Vol. 2 by Mi-Kyung Yun. You know, I’m not entirely clear on what’s going on in this one but it’s so gorgeous I don’t care. There are gods. There is a human sacrifice who isn’t killed and lots of really gorgeous art. (Mythological Korea.)
- Line by Yua Kotegawa. Didn’t like this one as much as her four volume Anne Freaks. It wasn’t as dark or disturbing, but still worth checking out. Well, not if you don’t want to read about about mass youth suicides. (Contemporary Japan.)
- Emma Vol 7 by Kaoru Mori. I would have read this A LOT slower if I’d realised it was the last volume. Only seven volumes!? Mori hates me, doesn’t she? How can I go through life not knowing more about Emma’s life? How? Highly, highly recommended. This is so romantic. It’s reminds me very strongly of Brief Encounter but without the incredibly annoying—I was going to say ending, but the middle and beginning drive me crazy too. It’s also gorgeously drawn. One of the many things I love about this series is how light on text it is. Some of the most moving sequences happen with no words at all. I can’t wait to sit down and read all seven volumes back to back. (Victorian England.)
- Monster Vols. 12-14 by Naoki Urasawa. Speaking of bad seed narratives—Monster is a beaut. I especially love how rarely you see the Monster and yet he spurs almost everything that takes place. Tense, unputdownable, and every volume introduces some new strand or character or complication. Yes, the female characters are a bit same-ish. Don’t care. Love it. (Contemporary(ish) Europe.)
The more manga, manhwa and graphic novels I read the more I want to write some of my own.
Have any of you read any of these? What did you think?
Tomorrow I will be on a boat. Is big boat.
Which I can report is wonderful though cold. Great food, great gorgeousness, great people. Thank you, Luis and Maude, for showing us such a great time!
Several people have written to ask what on Earth we are doing galivanting about Europe. I could have sworn that I mentioned why at some point. But here it is again for those what missed it:
We are here to do research for Scott’s next book part of which is set in the European alps. As it involves air ships we went for a ride on a Zeppelin. We also came to attend the Children’s Book Fair in Bologna, to launch Extras in the UK, to get some writing done, to catch up with some of our European-based friends such as Coe Booth, David Moles and Ben Rosenbaum who are all in Basel at the moment, and to eat lots of wondrous food (see poll to your right).
Things learned on the trip so far:
- Dutch publishers hate fantasy, but they love Maureen Johnson.
- Germans ones love fantasy.
- Stephenie Meyer is a Scott Westerfeld fan and has been going out of her way to tell her foreign publishers how much she loves his books. Thank you, Stephenie Meyer!
- Switzerland is INSANELY expensive for tourists. Every menu I looked at I thought there had been a series of bizarre numerical typoes. Surely the soup couldn’t be twenty dollars in an ordinary cafe?
- Ben Rosenbaum’s kids are fabulous.
- You can get great vegetarian food that isn’t cheese and noodles anywhere in Europe that isn’t German speaking.1
- Zeppelins are quiet and smooth and the best form of transport other than a bicycle or shank’s pony. You would not believe the views.
- Free wifi is the best thing in the universe. Why are posh hotels so allergic to it?
- Paris remains the most beautiful city I have ever seen.2 Though Bolzano’s pretty gorgeous too. As is Rome and Bologna. And Buenos Airies. And, um, oh nevermind.
And now I must return to having fun in Paris. As you were!
Look what I saw in an actual bookshop, RavensBuch in Friedrichshafen! Isn’t it gorgeous?:
Yup, it’s the German version of Magic or Madness. It’s even more beautiful in real life. Sigh. The book next to mine (the yellow one) is by John Marsden. Two Aussies together in Germany. I’ve been stunned by how many Aussie books I’ve been seeing in translation on our travels. Oodles of them by the likes of Trudi Canavan, Sara Douglass, Sonya Hartnett, John Marsden, Garth Nix, Marcus Zusak etc., etc. World domination!
Speaking of Germany. Random House Deutschland has just made an offer for How to Ditch Your Fairy. A very enthusiastic offer and they’ll be publishing it in hardcover. I am very happy. I met my German publishers in Bologna and they’re all lovely. Possibly because they’re all named Susanne.
This is the first time one of my books has sold to another market before publication. Very exciting. HTDYF will be out in the US in early September. And I may be sharing the cover with you some time soon . . .
We are in Bologna at the Children’s Book Fair. There are five of us in a tower flat. Me, Scott, Holly, Cassie and Maureen. We are the Tower Gang.
So far we have eaten really good food, gossiped and walked under many porticoes. Tomorrow the fair starts and we meet our non-English language publishers. And we eat more good food.
My life is so very hard.
Update: Fine. Here have some photos. Courtesy of Maureen, which is why she is not in them. I will remedy that later.
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thin my own continent, and making forays into a couple of others. I've travelled into a new decade too. Psst! Don't tell anyone but I'm now in my sixth.
)
You should have done book events here >.>
Yes to the Smart Pen!
I'd also add rugs/blankets to keep your writer warm when they feel bad having the central heating on if they're the only person at home...brrrr.
Yeowch! Def rugs and blankets and maybe some chocolate sounds needed, Have just come back from walking the dogs by the icy river and am appreciating our tiny terraced house that is all toasty all year round (not quite so good in the summer!) x
The Smart Pen sounds very incteresting idea. Was dimly aware of such technology but had never thought of it as - possibly - a thing that a writer would use. Until now.