Ford Street At Bologna

This morning, my lovely publisher, Paul Collins of Ford Street Publishing, got the email below and shared it with his writers:

"Dear Paul,

Here in Munich, the spring is on hold as winter seems to be returning again but, as every year, the White Ravens are ready to "soar into the sky". My colleagues and I are delighted to inform you that we have selected the short story anthology

            Trust Me Too edited by yourself with an introduction by Judith Ridge  

as one of the titles for The White Ravens 2013, our annual selection of outstanding international books for children and young adults, which will be presented at our stand at the Bologna Children's Book Fair. The books for this year's exhibition, 250 titles from more than 40 countries, have been selected from the thousands of books that our library received as review copies from publishers, authors, illustrators, and organisations from all over the world within the last year.

The exhibition is accompanied by a printed catalogue containing bibliographical data and short reviews for each of the selected books. You will receive a copy of the catalogue (which is also available at www.ijb.de) either in Bologna or by mail after the fair.

With best wishes,

Claudia(Soeffner)"

Trust Me Too is the second of two anthologies put out by Ford Street Publishing over the last few years - this one came out only last year. I'm in both. Actually, the first one, Trust Me!, could be said to be the book that started Ford Street Publishing. Paul Collins takes on freelance editing work as well as writing himself. At one point he was commissioned to do an anthology for an education publisher which made things difficult for him. Finally, he returned the fee and decided to publish this himself. It was so very successful that last year he did a follow-up anthology. I have stories in both - historical fiction, both times set in the 1960s.

I'm in the top row, left of Isobelle Carmody

These guys are taking our anthology to Bologna, where, every year around this time, publishers from around the world gather to show off the children's books they have published in the last year, in hopes of selling foreign, or foreign language, rights. Ford Street is really too small a publishing company to be able to do this, but with luck, White Ravens will let other countries know that we have some wonderful writers here in Australia, and who knows? There may be overseas editions of Trust Me Too. Fingers crossed - and congratulations, Paul! You deserve all the good things that might flow from this.

Trust Me! Published by Ford Street Publishing

Okay, I can't review this book, because I have a story in it. Still, I can't resist giving it a plug. It started life as an anthology of historical fiction, commissioned by an education publisher. The publisher and Paul Collins, who was editing, disagreed about enough things that he withdrew and decided to publish it himself, through his new company. Oddly, there are only three pieces left under "historical" - mine being one of them - but the theme of this anthology is "genre". That gives a wide variety of choices and there are stories under romance, crime, horror, fantasy, SF, humour, adventure, etc. It's a big, fat book, with about fifty contributors, mostly big-name Australian writers and artists, and as a teacher-librarian I think it will come in handy in classrooms, because you can choose a genre for whatever work you are doing with the kids. I've been reading the stories and enjoying so far.

Isobelle Carmody wrote the introduction, in which she gave my story a whole paragraph - nice!

My story, Countdown to Apollo 11, was one of the historicals. I had a lot of fun researching it; I went to the State Library and browsed through the newspapers of July 1969, to find out what people were concerned about, what things cost, what was on at the movies and the theatre, even what Star Trek episode was on just before the moon landing, because my hero was a Trek fan. The episode was "The Enterprise Incident", by the way. Most of it had to be left out, because I only had about 2000 words, but the story was better for it, and I know all that information, anyway. 1969 was a different world, wasn't it? No Internet, no mobile phones, no personal computers, in Australia TV was still black and white, not even answering machines on phones. I found an article about an anti-Vietnam rally outside the US consulate on July 4th and used one of the individual stories as the background for this one. One of my friends from work told me he remembered that rally and had been there.

So now I know I can do historical fiction if I want. Good to know for the future.

Anyway, conflict of interest or not, I do think this book is worth getting.