Interview With Susan Green

Last year, I was sent a copy of Susan Green's The Truth About Verity Sparks to review for Sisters In Crime. It is not only a mystery, it has touches of fantasy and goes into the Victorian fascination with spiritualism and seances, and it was short listed for a CBCA Award. Also, I found myself on a panel with Susan at SheKilda, where I discovered she had also written books for Dolly Fiction many years ago. Here she is, to tell us more about herself and her writing. Enjoy!


GR: Tell us a bit about yourself - your background, what you enjoy doing when you aren't writing, where you live.

SG My mother was a teacher and later, school principal, and my father was an artist. I have two older brothers. We lived in Chelsea, a Melbourne suburb on the bay, and our back gate opened directly onto the beach. Then when I was 7 we moved for 3 years to Castlemaine in Central Victoria. I spent a lot of time in the bush – actually, in the local cemetery, which was near our house. I loved the Castlemaine area, hated leaving and always wanted to return. Lucky me, I have.
It was an idyllic childhood in many ways, but the teenage years…? All that angst! Books were the great escape. They still are. When I’m not writing, I work part-time in the local bookshop. Apart from that, I’m fairly domestic - I am pretty slapdash at them, but I love cooking, gardening and especially knitting.


GR: when did you realise you were a children's writer?

SG: I was late learning to read (in fact, had to repeat Preps) but as soon as I could – around the age of 7-8 - I was hooked and I wanted to write books too. The Secret Seven series by Enid Blyton were my first great inspiration.

GR: What was your first book? Tell us about it and how you came to sell it.

SG: My first book was a picture storybook called The Possum Charmers, published in 1987. It was a joint effort with the illustrator, Stuart Billington. It was due to sheer luck and short-sightedness that it came to be published. I was trying to find a seat on a crowded train home to Castlemaine but without my glasses, it was a struggle. A man patted the seat beside him and we got chatting. He and his wife were having a picture storybook published by Greenhouse Publications and they’d just been to see their editor. I told them about my story and they gave me an introduction to her.

GR:How did you celebrate your first sale?

SG: To tell you the truth, I don’t remember, but we were both very excited and happy.


GR: You once had a gig as a Dolly Fiction writer - how did this happen? (And which one was it? I bought some of the Dolly Fiction books for my school library and there were some big name writers doing it under pen names!)

SG: I wrote 5 in all. Is He For Real?, So Hard to Leave You, The Worst Best Year, The Summer People and Runaway Girl. My Dolly name was Suzanne Lennox – Lennox is my middle name. My editor for the picture storybooks asked if I’d like to make some money. The answer was yes! For Dolly Fiction titles, authors were paid a flat fee instead of royalties. I think it was around $4000, which seemed like a fortune. I enjoyed writing them; I learned a lot.

GR:Who, if anyone, influences your writing style?

SG: I’m not sure – the true answer is probably every writer I’ve ever read, even the ones I didn’t like much. For example, when I was 12, I started to re-write The Magic Faraway Tree because though I loved the story, I thought it wasn’t very well written!  In my work for children, I try to write prose that makes you want to keep turning those pages…

GR: How did you get the idea for The Truth About Verity Sparks?

SG: I was walking in East Melbourne and looking at the Victorian architecture – you know, the columns and fancy mouldings and ironwork and stone. Those buildings told a story all about power and money and class. I began to think about what the city would have seemed like to a child, especially a working class one. How you’d have to be very strong not to feel overwhelmed and ground down. The character of Verity just insinuated herself in to my mind from that beginning. She almost told her own story. It was definitely one of the easiest books to write.

GR: What kind of research did you have to do for that novel?

SG: I read a lot - lots of books and websites about Victorian London. There were so many things to find out about – transport, manners, shops, servants, fashion…as a milliner’s apprentice, Verity is very fashion conscious. I found myself investigating topics like plumbing and hot water services for Verity’s first ever bath. I love research because I’m always getting ideas that move the plot along. For instance, a book called The Ghost Hunters Ghost by Deborah Blum, about the Victorian obsession with life after death, sparked the fictional Society for the Investigation of Psychic Phenomena. I love using visual aids too, and I pinned up illustrations by Gustave Dore showing the 1870s London slums. I also used paintings by James Tissot of wealthy Victorians to help me with the Plush family, and actually ended up making Tissot and his doomed mistress Kathleen characters in the story.


GR: How did you celebrate the novel's CBCA short listing?

SG: We flew over to Adelaide for the awards. I had lunch with my editor, Mary Verney and with Bob Graham, another prize-winning Walker author/illustrator. Then my husband and I had a weekend at a B&B in Angaston in the Barossa. When we ventured outside early on the first morning to admire the mist over the dam, I managed to lock us out of our B&B. We were just wearing our PJ’s and it was very, very cold. We laugh about it now.


GR: I see there's a sequel - can you tell us about it? And when it will be out?

SG: The sequel is called Verity Sparks Lost and Found and it will be released on May 1st. It’s about Verity’s adventures in Australia. She, along with Papa, SP, Mrs Morcom, Judith and Daniel, travel to Australia and settle in Melbourne. As the story starts, Papa still wants her to be a perfect young lady. But that’s not our Verity… Even though she feels she’s lost her gift, she manages to solve a tricky mystery when she’s briefly at a posh boarding school. Then she and her new governess tackle an investigation for the Inquiry Agency in Mount Macedon. I won’t spoil the mystery -  but I will say that I just love an insanely complex plot.

GR: Are you working on anything right now?

SG: No. This is the first time in more than 8 years I haven’t had a book on the go. I’m taking a short holiday in Canada in May. There was a whisper at Walker Books about maybe another Verity, so perhaps when I get back from my trip I’ll start jotting down one of the plots that I’ve got floating around in my head.

Thanks for visiting The Great Raven, Susan!

The Truth About Verity Sparks is available in your favourite book shop now and keep your eye out for the sequel!

Rhiannon and Braydon Interview Justin D'Ath

Dear readers,

Today I would like to introduce you to my guest interviewers Rhiannon Mustapic and Braydon Harvey, who have prepared some questions for well-known Aussie YA writer Justin D’Ath, who has kindly agreed to answer them here on the Great Raven.

Pool, a novel published by Melbourne’s Ford Street Publishing and shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, is set in New Lourdes, a small Victorian town where a miracle once took place at the local swimming pool. In fact, the town was renamed after the miracle happened, to get the tourist trade, which it does. Wolfgang, a boy who has a summer job at the pool, meets and befriends blind and nocturnal Audrey, the object of the miracle, in which she seemed to drown as a toddler, but came back to life. As the summer goes on, strange things begin to happen and butterfly-loving Wolfgang begins to see black butterflies unknown to science…

I reviewed this book when it first came out, so I’ll let you find out more details from that  and let Justin, Rhiannon and Braydon tell you all about it. Welcome to my blog, everyone!

RM What inspired you to write the book Pool?

JD: Believe it not, I wrote Pool because I didn’t want to write another book. Here’s what happened. Fifteen months earlier I applied to the Australia Arts Council for funding to write a YA novel about a rock band called Wolf Gang. Eventually, and much to my surprise, my application was successful and I received a $30,000 grant to write the novel. But by this time I had lost interest in the project so I turned the would-be title into the name of a character and wrote about him instead, and the result was Pool.

RM: What is your favourite line from the book (Ours was when Audrey said “I want to smell the lions”)

JD: Good choice. I think that’s my favourite line, too. In fact, the chapter when Wolfgang takes Audrey to the zoo is my favourite.

RM: Why did you use butterflies as part of the story?

JD: I like butterflies. And when I began the first chapter I had this character called Wolfgang working at the New Lourdes Pool and I needed something to happen to kick off the plot, so I wrote a butterfly into the scene to see how he would react, and it turned out he was interested in butterflies, too (but in a different way than me).

RM: Does the black butterfly represent Audrey’s soul?

JD: It wasn’t my intention. On the other hand, when you trust a novel to your readers it’s their interpretation that matters, and I quite like the idea.

RM: Why did you choose for there to be a love interest between Audrey and Wolfgang?

JD: I wanted their lives to come together. Also it presented Wolfgang with some interesting dilemmas.

RM: Have you ever known or experienced any of the events that occurred in the book in real life?

JD: No. It’s entirely fictional. I come from a strong Catholic background, so drew on that where it touched the plot and found it interesting to juxtapose Wolfgang’s beliefs with the extraordinary spiritual contradictions suggested by the sloping pool and by Audrey.

RM: Why did you choose for Wolfgang to finally see Audrey’s “special place” near the end of the story?

JD: I think Wolfgang needed to understand Audrey as fully as possible, if only to offer the readers entry into where she came from, or went.

BH: Why did you make Audrey blind?

JD: Again, this was purely happenstance. When I write I simply explore ideas, and it seemed interesting, since I had a butterfly in the story, to see how a blind person, who couldn’t see one or feel one, might react to it.

BH: What inspired you to write your first book? (And what is it?)

JD: My first book was a novel for adults called ‘The Initiate’. I wrote it after spending 10 months on an Aborigine mission in Central Australia. Living there was like being in a novel, so I decided to write one.

BH: What books have most influenced your life?

Every book that I have read from beginning to end has influenced me both as a writer and a person. If they don’t influence me, I don’t finish them. But there are too many to name.

BH: Why is Audrey nocturnal?

JD: I wanted to give this blind girl a reason to be at the pool every day, and since she was asleep most of the time I wondered why.

BH: Why did you choose for Wolfgang to have an interest in butterflies?

JD: See my answer to Rhiannon’s question. Also I wanted to make Wolfgang an interesting and slightly unusual young man – a misfit, if you like, which gave him a connection with Audrey.

Thanks for the great interview! One more thing before I go: last year, some of my students who had read Pool stumbled across some information on the Internet, about an American girl called Audrey Santos, who had had the same experience as the girl in the book. I asked Justin if that was where he’d got his inspiration for his own Audrey and he said he’d not heard the story. Weird!

Portrait of a Book Illustrator: Duncan Long

 As a writer I have all too often groaned when I saw the cover designs for books I've written - and only once in a while have I been lucky enough to get a proper cover artist instead of the usual stock photos taken from photo libraries. 

But as art director for Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine I've also worked with artists and editors and have perhaps a better understanding than most writers of how it works and an appreciation of what goes into it, the miracles that artists come up with despite a tight deadline.

I invited book illustrator Duncan Long - who, you'll find below, started life as a successful writer! - to give us an insight into his work. This is a set of questions I asked him; tomorrow there will be a guest post.

Duncan didn't put in a link to his blog for this interview, but I think you should start checking it out right away, so here it is for you to enjoy till his guest post appears tomorrow:

 http://duncanlong.com/blog/ 

Here you’ll find all sorts of fascinating stuff about the process of illustrating books, what can go wrong and what works well. You might also like to check out his portfolio if you’re considering hiring him.

SB: You’ve had a fascinating career as a cover artist. How did you decide that this is what you wanted to do with your art, rather than, say, gallery art?

DL: Well, I have always loved books. In fact, my mom sewed together some small blank page books when I was a first grader, and I can remember spending hours and hours writing and illustrating them to fill the pages.

I loved reading and often wrote and drew pictures all though school. Sadly I lost about two decades after a “detour” during college to become a musician (the electric guitar and synthesizer having stronger siren calls than the paintbrush, I guess), but eventually I got into the publishing business as a writer/illustrator, landing jobs where I could create illustrations for the articles I wrote.

From there I wrote a few novels (13 all together with HarperCollins and Avon) and eventually put some 70 non-fiction books into print as well. I love writing fiction but discovered that I had some skill at creating book cover illustrations and thus have gradually migrated to mostly doing that and only occasionally ghost writing a book (about one a year).

The big plus of the illustration work is that it can generally be wrapped up in a week or two, where writing a novel is a long drawn out process that I find I just don’t seem to have the patience for any more.

I guess my success in the publishing industry pretty much did away with any perceived need to create paintings and display them in galleries. I do have one publishing hounding me to create some limited edition prints for sell through galleries, so eventually I may go that route. But right now, any gallery work is on the far back, back burner.

SB:You have told me that you mostly do your art for self-published authors now. Has there been a lot of change in the market since the growth of “indie” publishing?

DL: Yes, it is like the publishing industry has turned itself upside down over the last few years. There’s always been a big self-publishing segment in the US throughout its history. But this segment of publishing is really growing, with Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and others giving self publishers access to distribution system that’s enable marketing to buyers without having to use direct marketing or display ads in magazines as was the case with self-publishing in the past.

Some self-publishing authors are selling many more books than they ever would have with large presses (in which a mid-list book is sold for a few months, then vanishes off the shelves). Self-publishers can keep their books “in print” forever; since some titles only start to catch on after being available for months or even years, self-publishers can gradually sell many more books over the long haul than they might with a big press printing their book.

For example, in the recent past a large publisher might print 6,000 to 10,000 copies of mid-list a genre novel. Of those perhaps 40-60 percent would sell (at best). Thus, a mid-list author might see only a few thousand copies of his book actually sold – less than what the writer’s advance on the book might be.

With today’s self-publishers, that number of sales is often reached in a few years’ time. AND the author keeps a much bigger percentage of the sales. Where they might have earned 12-15 percent of selling price of the book (with a large number of those discounted to retailers) through a large press, by self-publishing they can earn a dollar or two for every dime they’d have earned from a large press.

So today self-publishing has a lot to offer an author who’s willing to go to a little extra work and expense up front to get a book edited and laid out, and to have a cover designed for it.

Which of course is where I enter into the picture (ha).

Oddly enough, the playing field has leveled when it comes to buying covers as well. The large presses don’t pay huge sums to book cover illustrators; $1,000 - $2,000 for a cover by a talented artist is pretty much the standard.

Since many self-publishing authors can afford that amount for their own book covers, we’re now seeing many self-published books with covers that rival or even better those of the big presses. This also really levels the playing field because many buyers really do pick up and buy a book simply because it has a quality cover.

With all these factors in play, it’s not surprising that self-publishing is exploding – and that the majority of my customers are self-publishers these days. 

SB:How different is it working for the author directly from working for a publishing company?

DL: With the large publishers, the artist generally works with an art director who understands what does and does not work on a book cover.

While many authors have a good feel for what is needed on a cover and pretty much give their cover illustrator a free hand to produce a quality cover, a few authors micromanage the project into the ground, and that is always both a frustrating as well as a disappointing process.

Don’t get me wrong. Authors should have a say in what’s on their cover and should be able to ask for changes and so forth. But a self-publisher should realize that the cover must be very attractive and reflect the genre of the book. If it fails in either, the cover is going to be detrimental to book sales no matter how much money you spend in creating the artwork and layout.

I guess the best advice for an indie author is to study the covers of the best sellers in the genre their book is in, find an illustrator / layout person capable of matching that style, and then explain what the book is about and stand back to let the cover artist do their thing.

In the real world it isn’t quite that simple, but ideally, almost.

SB You have probably had some strange experiences over the years with what is asked of you. Is there one you can share with us without revealing names?

DL: Actually, after a while there are patterns of behavior from clients that seem to be consistent. I’ve got to the place where imaginary warning bells sound when I hear certain phrases coming from a customer’s lips (ha).

Perhaps the most troubling are clients with no clear vision of what they want – but who also decide to micromanage the project. They’ll start out well with something like, “Well, I’m not sure what I need for the cover so I’ll just let you be creative and do what you think is best.”

And that’s fine and often the process (the trouble comes later). So I’ll ask them questions about the book, then work on some concepts and submit the artwork to the client. At that point things can go smoothly and the writer picks a concept, suggest changes, and I progress on to a rough painting of the cover to resubmit and after that the finished cover illustration.

But once in a while the author can take the project on a tragic turn by rejecting all the concept ideas we had discussed previously, and heading off in another tangent. Even then, things can work out if the next round of concept art has something that works.

But once in a while a client gets into a “what if” endless loop where I find myself putting in new figures, changing night to day, transforming stances, clothing, hair, lighting, and/or color, and so forth. On and on it goes with the author never knowing exactly what they want. Such projects often end poorly after lots of hair pulling on both sides.

The moral to this story is it’s hard to know whether you’ve reached your destination if you don’t know where you want to be. For writers wanting to hire someone to create a book cover for them, it’s wise to enter the project with a good concept of what is needed for a good cover for their book.

Another problem occurs when an author wants to tell the entire story of the book on the cover. A cover with everything but the kitchen sink on it won’t sell books.

With a book cover, less is more.

All the cover needs to do is entice the reader to pick up the book, not tell him the whole story.

The third pitfall I occasionally see is when an author becomes unsure of their own judgment about the cover. Now if they turn to someone with a good eye who firmly has in hand what a quality cover is, then well and good. But if the author starts asking friends, family, fellow workers, or employees what they think of a cover, then I can be pretty sure we’re going into a downward spiral to the lowest common denominator.

It’s as if Lawrence of Arabia is being transformed into some version of the latest sit-com. Soon all sorts of detrimental changes are being made and little by little what was a good cover becomes a disaster. (I have come to refer to this as “death by committee.)

(I always find this process odd as I’m sure these writers don’t go around asking their friends, children, and co-workers to make suggestions about changing the author’s manuscript, plot, characters, and so forth. Yet for some reason they think these same people will offer expert advice on their book cover design.)

Fortunately these happenstances are not the norm. But it’s always heartbreaking and frustrating for all involved to see an author pay good money for a cover and then run the project into the ground.

For the most part, creating the book cover illustration and cover layout goes smoothly and everyone is very pleased with the results. Which is why I love my work as a book illustrator. 

YA Book Judging: An Interview with Miffy Farquharson

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 WA Premier’s Literary Awards. How did you come to be involved in each of these?

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

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

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

(SB: Tehani Wessely is a super-teacher-librarian who also publishes through her press, Fablecroft, was a major member of the Andromeda Spaceways Co-operative, reviews books 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 there seem to be more women than men. :-)

MF: See above. Something I forgot to say is that the panel changes every single year, as four judges retire and four new ones start their two year stint. So WA, Vic, NSW and ACT are one 'bloc' and SA, NT, Tas and QLD are the other 'bloc'. In my first year, the SA, NT, etc. judges were in their second year, and in my second year, SA NT, etc. were the newbies. This is part of the reason why the lists can change from year to year, as the range of judges can be so disparate. And you are right, the majority of judges are women. The ACT judge during my time, Michael Janssen-Gibson, was a lone male on the panel, and I don't think that there has been a bloke on the panel since then. 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 kids love me getting the books – they get to read them too! And both places I’ve worked while judging (both independent schools) have been very supportive of me taking time off to do talks and attend judging panels and awards ceremonies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CBCA is ALL submitted titles

SB:    As you’re a teacher-librarian, do you invite any of your students to read some of     the books and give their opinions?

This year we will be doing that across the school. To combat the secondary school ‘reading is uncool so I’m not going to put my hand up’, we are nominating Reading Ambassadors and they will be reading the titles this year.

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

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

Since we’ve moved to Melbourne I donate all the books I don’t want to keep to a disadvantaged school that is supported by my sister’s partner. They are very grateful, and I wish that I had time to donate to them to 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. I made some lifelong friends in the other judges over the two years, and had an insight into the process behind Australia’s most prestigious award for books for young people.

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