My Students Meet Morris Gleitzman! At the MWF...

On Monday I took nineteen students to the Melbourne Writers' Festival, where they were going to hear Morris Gleitzman speak about his Once series. It would have been twenty, but young Kim, who is a huge fan of the series, suddenly had to go with her family to Vietnam. She had been so looking forward to it. There wasn't time to invite another student to go in her place. I ended up buying her a copy of the newest novel in the series - Maybe - and getting him to sign it for her.

We had been planning this since July. My original plan had been to take them to Reading Matters, but it sold out before we could get the numbers, so we went to the Festival instead.

The kids were wonderful. All of them who were going to be late rang me to let me know. One poor girl ended up having to walk all the way to the station because she didn't have a myki card. I gave her one of my spares, which I'd topped up, because there is always at least one student who either forgets to buy a card or to top up the one they have with money. That time there were three - and I had bought extra cards just in case.

And who should we meet on the train station platform but Natasha, one of my former book clubbers, now studying to be a teacher! Natasha ended up chatting to Taylor, a hugely book-loving student, so I left them to it, after a brief chat with Natasha.

Morris Gleitzman was a very good speaker, talking about his series in general and specifically about the new book, which I hadn't realised was out already. Kim will love this, I thought. one of my students, who hadn't read any of the books, admitted that "it was a bit boring" when I asked him how he had enjoyed the talk. But next day he told me that he had found Once in his literacy class's book box, started reading and was loving it. So in the end, he did get something out of it.

I had intended to text my friend George Ivanoff, who was going to be there, but there wasn't time. I stood near the book-signing queue and took photos for the school magazine. Morris was quite happy to have kids pose with him.

Not all the kids had money for a book and I ended up buying about three books for them, because I couldn't bear for them to miss out.  It was worth it to see those joyful looks as I handed them their copy. And then I thought, what the heck, I'll get a print copy for me, and I was the last to have a book signed that morning.

We went to lunch at the Melbourne Central food court and along the way to the court, I pointed out the Little Library. People donate books to it and you're supposed to take one and either return it or bring one. I will certainly be putting in some books soonish, but I doubt my students will. They pounced on the books with cries of joy - one of them even walked off happily with a Rick Riordan novel, one of the Magnus Chase ones rather than Percy Jackson.

They all returned to our meeting place on time and we returned to our station, where I dismissed them. 

It was a good day!

A Visit From The Local Member

Earlier this year, we had a phone call from the office of the local Member of State Parliament, Marsha Thomson,  asking if we were doing the Premier's Reading Challenge.

As it happens, we were. This is the first time I've ever done it and I must say, I regret not having done it before. It's not like Reader's Cup, which is a lot of work and requires a lot of support from the staff. And it doesn't cost anything, just a bit of the librarian's time to set it up, encourage kids to get into it and make sure to verify completed books. The kids get a certificate from the Education Department afterwards. Not a huge prize, but if they're reading anyway, why not? And if not, well, it might get them started, encourage them to challenge themselves. We don't have that many this year, but enough for now. 

Here's how it works: between two set dates, the kids are required to read a minimum of fifteen books. Of those, at least ten must be from the Reading Challenge list, but that's okay - there are plenty to choose from. In fact, two of my books, Wolfborn and Your Cat Could Be A Spy, are on the list. How good is that, eh? I was hoping that there would be more kids finishing the challenge, so far only two and a couple more are just about there, but haven't marked their books online as finished. If I had it to do again, I would make sure everyone chose their own passwords right at the start, so they didn't have  to have troubles logging in. And I'd urge the staff to get it going as part of our literacy program.

Anyway, on to the local member! 

Apparently she was a great enthusiast of the Challenge and of reading and was planning to visit schools doing the Challenge to get kids interested. Would we like a visit? Well, I thought, a writer would be nicer than a politician, but a writer costs money I don't have and it could do no harm to have someone promote the Challenge. So I discussed it with my Principal, who agreed it would be a good thing, and we said yes. 

The lady came this week, on Tuesday. We panicked a little when the whole school had assembled in the library and nobody had arrived yet. I was just hunting for a Challenge book when she arrived with one of her staff members.

And I must admit, she did very well. She began with talking about reading in general, about her own reading and the book club they have in Parliament House. The kids were intrigued by the idea of having a book club in Parliament and what the politicians do up there. She was impressed to learn that there were boys in my book club, and also asked who was doing the Challenge. I did suggest that perhaps not everybody knew what the Challenge was, so she explained to the kids that it started in Victoria in Premier Steve Bracks' time and told them what it involved.

Question time came and there were quite a few hands up to ask questions. One book she mentioned was To Kill A Mockingbird, which I lent to one of my book clubbers next day. She said she was not a great fan of fantasy and that she was never going to read Harry Potter! She pretty much only reads adult books and likes biographies best.

Since then I have signed up another Reading Challenge student. There were other requests, but nobody turned up at lunchtime to do it, so I can only assume it was a case of "it seemed like a good idea at the time, but lunchtime is when I go out and kick a footy around."

Marsha had another school to visit, so we said farewell to her and she had her photo taken with some of the students. I gave her some of my bookmarks, of Wolfborn and Crime Time, telling her she could give it to the kids at her next school or keep it to distribute at her Parliament book club.

It went for just the right length of time; another few minutes and kids would have been fidgeting, but as it was, they enjoyed it.

Thank you, Marsha!

Latest Brother Cadfael Re-Read: The Pilgrim Of Hate by Ellis Peters

Yet again I'm re-reading some of Ellis Peters' classic whodunnits. This one came off my shelves, but some of them are at Mum's place, including one I recently re-read, An Excellent Mystery. 

They are all set in twelfth century Shrewsbury, a sort of mediaeval Midsomer, where corpses turn up regularly and it's up to herbalist monk Brother Cadfael to use his forensic skills to find out how they died and who killed them. He does this with the help of his friend Hugh Beringar, the Sheriff of Shropshire. Has anyone noticed the trope of the amateur sleuth and his or her buddy the cop? Because really, that's what Hugh is. He may be in charge of the shire, which he holds and defends for King Stephen during the war between Stephen and Empress Maud, but in the end, he is also the local law enforcement officer, a kind of police chief, so it fits, really, doesn't it? Hugh is in this one.

Despite what I said about a mediaeval Midsomer, this author sometimes does something a little different. In one novel, there wasn't actually a murder at all, just a mystery, with a missing character everyone thinks must have been murdered. In The Pilgrim Of Hate, the murder took place offstage, before the story even begins. The victim was a knight of Empress Maud who was killed on the street in Winchester while defending a follower of King Stephen from attackers. Nobody knows who the killer was; he vanished into the dark streets. But Brother Cadfael works it out anyway, or this wouldn't be a mystery. 

Meanwhile, in Shrewsbury, the monks are preparing for a huge festival, the annual celebration of the arrival of the Welsh Saint Winifred, whose coffin was brought there four years ago from Wales during A Morbid Taste For Bones(but not her body, because Brother Cadfaeł did a switch to keep her in her home soil with the villagers who loved her). Pilgrims are flocking there for the party, some in hopes of miracles. Among them are a widow, her crippled nephew Rhun and his sister Melangell, and two young men who are on their way on foot to Wales. There is a mystery here(of course!) about the two men. As usual there is a sweet young couple whose love might not prosper. And Brother Cadfael's son, Olivier De Bretagne, whom we first met in The Virgin In The Ice turns up on a mission. And there's a miracle - actually, two, as far as Cadfael is concerned, the second being his chance to see his son again. 

I love this series! I love its gentleness and its worldbuilding. It brings mediaeval England to life, not to mention a small-town community. The Shrewsbury of the novels is real - I once found I could follow the old streets just by having read the author's descriptions. 

But in the end, people are people and learn from their mistakes - or don't...

If you haven't yet read any of these wonderful books, you've been missing out - go read! 

Just Finished Reading... The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Attwood

For some reason I thought I had read this before. Well, some of it was familiar, but I suspect I never finished it then. This time I did. Mainly, I decided to read it now because I have been unable to watch the TV series at this stage, even though it's available online at the SBS station web site. I think my OS and browser are out of date and I can't update either till I delete a lot more stuff on my computer. I will wait for the DVD.

My copy is an ebook, a new edition with an intro by the author. The intro alone is a fascinating read. For example, she says she made the decision that her story would have nothing in it that hasn't happened at one time or another in our world. She has simply put it all together in one dystopia. It was written back in the 1980s, before the Internet was more than a bit of an experiment, and even then it was possible to simply switch off credit cards. Imagine how easy it would be today. Even in Australia we are being asked to give up freedoms, give authorities extended rights, all in the name of security. The novel is scary exactly because it is so easy to believe!

The novel starts when the nameless heroine(we only ever know her as "Offred", i.e "Of Fred", her master's name) is already living as a walking womb in the Republic of Gilead. The author tells us in her introduction that it's Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the place where bodies are hung like the heads on London Bridge is the wall of Harvard University. As the novel goes on, we gradually learn in flashback about her earlier life with her husband and child and how one day she is a working woman with an income and the next day her credit/debit card is cancelled and her boss has to sack all his female employees.

Interestingly, the Wife whose baby she is supposed to bear is a woman who used to be a member of a choir on a TV televangelist program when "Offred" was a child. The woman was one of those who declared in public that women should be staying home, in the kitchen, and no doubt regrets it now.

The "history conference " documents at the end were interesting, throwing hints of what might have happened. You needed that, because there was a very abrupt ending to the main story.

I thought there was rather too much flashback and my goodness, didn't those characters smoke! 

Still, an interesting story, one which is unfortunately all too believable, and hopefully I will be able to get hold of the DVD at some stage, and see how much difference there is.

Of Doctors And Regeneration - Some Silly Thoughts!

So, we have a female Doctor, after months of speculation. Well, we have had a female version of the Master, everyone says, so why not a female Doctor? I think if they had given us a male Doctor after all that, there would have been howls of outrage from the fans. Especially after that scene where the Doctor tells Bill that Timelords don't worry about all that gender stuff. If that wasn't a powerful hint, then we needed a big marching band, preferably all female, to announce it. 

Me, I will wait for the stories before judging. All I can say is, if XX or XY Chromosomes don't count among Timelords, then that race is very, very different from ours, and it's a lot more than the two hearts, so it's highly unlikely that the Doctor is half human as suggested in the Paul McGann film. And I say this as a great Spock fan. 

Are all Gallifreyans Timelords? Do you get peasant Timelords like the peasant elves we meet in The Hobbit? There must be someone to grow the food and wash the dishes and so on. And as I recall, there was a barn in one episode. The Day Of The Doctor, I think. So yes, there probably are people on Gallifrey who don't go having adventures in time and space or playing politics on the Council of Timelords. Didn't Leela marry one? It's been a long time since I saw that episode, so don't complain if I got it wrong, just inform me. 

If there are ordinary people on that planet who don't regenerate, are they more like us, apart from the two hearts? With XX and XY chromosomes that don't allow them to change gender except by medical means? When you think about it, regeneration with the option of a new cycle of twelve for everyone could stuff up inheritance and you'd really have to keep the population down. 

Or it might just be those who graduate from the Academy who get that privilege... As I recall, the Master was offered a new round of regenerations in return for helping the Doctor in The Five Doctors, and it has since then been confirmed, so ability to regenerate can't be merely a genetic thing. And if it's not genetic, perhaps they can get around this whole chromosome issue. Problem solved! 

 Do the Timelords perhaps bring in children who have shown certain  abilities for training and give them the ability as part of the deal? 

Certainly, the Master has some amazing abilities. Think of the number of times he has come back from the dead, even in the Paul McGann movie, when the previous Doctor was bringing back his ashes, for heaven's sake! Maybe he/she will come back yet. In fact, I predict they will. Let's face it, we saw the last Dalek in New Who series 1 and we STILL have them! 

We know that there are children on Gallifrey - remember that episode where the Doctor is talking about how they are taken to stare into this abyss(he sensibly ran away)and we see a flashback in which a young boy who will become the Master is taken there and, it's implied, goes crazy as a result? (Talk about child abuse!) And yet, the first Doctor we saw was an old man with a granddaughter - seeing he was the first incarnation, not the first regeneration, surely he grew up and aged this first time. Hell, he must have been a child at some stage! 

There was an article in a fanzine I read years ago, speculating on what a Timelord family picnic might look like - the elderly man might be the youngest family member while the young girl is an aged Timelord on her final regeneration...that would be bizarre! 

One thing that I have always found mildly amusing is the matter of Susan. As far as we know, she is his granddaughter. That implies some sort of family life, or maybe a companion who managed to get into his pants. But as I recall, there was an early novel which told us that Susan was not actually related, she just called him "grandfather". See, someone worked out that having a granddaughter implied that at least once the Doctor must have fooled around - can't have that on a children's show! 

And with that particular silliness I will leave you. Feel free to comment, although if you have seen every last episode and remember the lot, I should explain that this is not the case with me and I would appreciate not being abused for having forgotten something. Let's keep this fun! 

An Interview With Vikki Wakefield

My guest today is Vikki Wakefield, award-winning Aussie YA novelist whose recent novel Ballad For A Mad Girl I discovered in my goody bag at Reading Matters and reviewed here. I first met Vikki when she visited my school along with authors Adrian Stirling and Tim Pegler, courtesy of the Centre For Youth Literature and Adele Walshe, the head honcho. She had only one novel under her belt at the time, All I Ever Wanted, but she impressed our students no end with her talk and computer images of the drawings she does while thinking about her stories. Every copy of All I Ever Wanted was checked out immediately after the talk! She tells me she hasn't done sketches for this one, but sent me a photo of her "mood board" , which I have posted below. It's nice to know that Vikki is a fellow "pantser" in her writing(a plotter is someone who plans out their story meticulously ahead of time, eg J.K Rowling and my friend Alison Goodman, a pantser does it "by the seat of the pants", eg Vikki and me!)

Ballad For A Mad Girl is a lovely piece of Gothic fiction which I have passed on to my Gothic fiction-loving niece Dezzy, and is Vikki's first speculative fiction. I hope her publishers will submit it for next year's Aurealis Award for speculative fiction, where it is likely to make the shortlist. 

Without further ado, here is Vikki! 

Let's start with an obvious question: where did the idea for Ballad For A Mad Girl come from?

It was a very different book in the beginning and it only started to come together when I found several boxes of old research papers. Many years ago I used to save stories based on urban legendsーI would try to trace more modern incarnations back to their origins to see how stories (passed through generations) had changed. I read through the entire box and got lost in them. That was when I first knew I wanted to include supernatural/horror elements and the story began to evolve from straight contemporary into something else.

Each of your books is different. For example, this one is Australian Gothic, the last one was about some characters who fix up an old drive-in cinema, your first one was humorous ... Will you be trying something different each time, or would you like to do a bit more of the same?

Someone once said most writers tell the same story, over and over, and to some extent I think that's trueーmy books are all similar in tone and underlying themes. On the other hand, they're quite separate from each other, too (in plot, character, language and structure). So, while I do attempt to write a unique book each time, when I'm rewriting there's a centrifugal force that pulls my stories in a similar direction regardless of my intentions. (It's probably a combination of instinct and fascination that makes this happen.) I can only promise I'll write many more YA books, but I never know what they are until they're finishedーthankfully, the YA readership is pretty open to writers who work this way.

You have mentioned in our chats on Twitter that the pipe in this novel was based on a real one not far from where you live - and that you had played on it as a child. Were there ever any "pipe challenges" or was that strictly fiction?

Yes, the pipe is real. There were no pipe challenges (as in time trials) but crossing the stormwater pipe was a rite of passage and it did sort the 'brave' from the 'scaredy cats'. I moved away from the suburb I grew up in but I've since moved backーnow I live very close to the old quarry where I used to play as a kid. When the area was developed the landscape changed dramatically and I assumed the pipe was no longer there. I only re-discovered it recently while I was walking my dog, and it reminded me of the foolish things I did to impress my friends (and enemies). I ended up rewriting the first chapter of Ballad for a Mad Girl to include the pipe crossingーit seemed like the perfect scene to begin a story about overcoming fear.

How much, if any, of this novel is inspired by where you grew up?

I grew up in the outer northern suburbs of Adelaide (the setting of All I Ever Wanted). Swanston and Möbius (from Inbetween Days) are inspired by the country towns I've lived in (places where everyone knows everybody's business and old feuds are generational), and my characters are loosely based on people I knew growing up. I have my setting in mind long before I understand my characters well enough to write about them and, because I write about teens on the verge of adulthood, I find my own teen experiences are the greatest source of inspiration.

Small town life is very different from city life. Do you think any of your characters would ever live somewhere else? (At one point, your heroine, Grace, says that her friend Kenzie is likely to succeed outside)

Kenzie is the most determined to succeed, but Grace is the restless oneーshe's more likely to move on than any of her friends. I think she would chase the original dream. I see her leaving Swanston while the others stay. 

This is a murder mystery as much as a supernatural story - did it take a lot of plotting before you got started?

Not so much before I got started (I tend to plan fairly loosely, leaving plenty of room for discovery), but once the first draft was complete it took a while to plug the plot holes I'd created. It meant cutting a few sub-plots and tightening the structure until the threads came together. As someone who doesn't rely heavily on plot, I found it challenging to allow plot to reveal character rather than the other way around. I was also aware there were two distinct reader perspectives in this storyーthat of the believer, and the non-believerーand I wanted to make sure both were validated. It was tough to find that balance; it taught me how to step away from the story and let go of my own convictions.

Actually, what is your writing process - plotter or pantser? Details, please!

I plot in my head (and that can take up to a year of doodling and daydreaming) but once I start writing I make it up as I go. Nothing ever goes to plan. I don't find the essence of a story until I'm well into my second or third draft (I edit as I write, so a draft takes forever), but I've learned to be patient. It comes when it comes. And by essence, I mean the premiseーI think the premise is for the writer, not the reader, because it's the underlying belief that holds the tension in a story. 

Grace has some very loyal friends, even though she scares them for a while. Who, if any, is your favourite? (I have to say, I'd like friends like Kenzie and Gummer!)

Gummer is lovely, and he's based on a real person, so he was easy (well, not easy, but true) to write. Kenzie is the friend who does the best she can, but when she falls in love she can't help but give a piece of herself to someone else. Grace doesn't handle that well (and she knows), but she tries to make up for it. She's a difficult friend to haveーGummer and Kenzie are the antidote, but they're both so grounded they were never potential main characters. They wouldn't have such a compelling story to tell. 

Is there an Australian book you've read recently that you have wished you had written? (Or just admired)

There are so many I admire! The most recent Australian YA book I wish I'd written is The Stars at Oktober Bend by Glenda Millard. I love all her work, but Alice's voice is particularly enchanting and Glenda's commitment to it is masterful. I also loved The Eye of the Sheep by Sofie Lagunaーanother voice I found utterly compelling from start to finish.

Finally, are you working on anything right now?

I always have two or three projects on the go, whether they're in the daydreaming stages or slowly taking shape on the page. I tend to concentrate on whichever story calls loudestーI'm working solidly on a YA novel from the perspective of a sixteen-year-old boy right now, but I have a middle grade novel in the works too. Aside from writing novels, I recently spent a month working with illustrator Dan McGuiness and a group of SA primary school students on a progressive book. It's called 'The Carisbrooke Creek War' (theme: gender equality) and it'll be published in The Advertiser newspaper during  the last week of July.

Vikki's mood board

And here's where you can buy it on line! It is also available from Amazon.

Thanks for dropping in on The Great Raven, Vikki! 

The Laws Of Magic - Steampunk Rules!

The Laws Of Magic is a series of six steampunk novels by Aussie YA novelist Michael Pryor. Michael Pryor is a wonderful writer anyway, but I think these six books are his masterpiece. They are witty and exciting, with barely a stop for breath. And the worldbuilding is amazing. I discovered them several years ago, when the first novel, A Blaze Of Glory, first came out.

How can you not love a book that begins with the sentence,"Aubrey Fitzwilliam hated being dead"? Tell me that doesn't draw the reader right in!

The series is set in an alternative universe Edwardian England, except it's called Albion and the royal family is not the one we know. Magic is a part of everyday life. Even the technology is based on it. In one scene the hero, Aubrey, sneers at going out to see a sleight-of-hand artist on stage, because it's probably just ordinary magic, not sleight-of-hand at all. 

And someone is planning huge-scale death magic for his own benefit, and the best way to get that going is by starting what, in our universe, is known as World War I.

Fortunately the world has Aubrey Fitzwilliam, his friend George and Caroline, the girl Aubrey adores. 

But Aubrey is starting from behind. He's a magical genius, but stuffed up an experiment in death magic he was trying before the novel began and consequently is - well, technically dead. He is having a hard time keeping his soul from leaving his body. 

However, Aubrey, Caroline and George have plenty on their plates while Aubrey is trying to find a way - literally! -  to keep body and soul together. As the series goes on, the Great War begins and they need to focus on stopping the villain. 

I love all the characters in this series. George is the calm and competent one who keeps Aubrey from going overboard. He likes cooking; in one of the novels, when the characters find themselves in a place where they can live their fantasies, George's fantasy is to be cooking for lots of people. Caroline is the kick-ass young woman who manages to fight anything from a villainous human to a dinosaur in her elegant costume. (And yes, there are dinosaurs in the second novel, Heart Of Gold, which is set in Lutetia, this world's version of Paris).

That's another thing. In this Edwardian era, women may not yet have the vote, but they can be scientists or famous artists or explorers or whatever, and nobody thinks it's odd. The women in Aubrey's family are all strong, including his grandmother. No wonder he likes his women - or woman - strong and intelligent. But George too finds a strong, intelligent girlfriend, Sophie, a trainee journalist. 

And the books are funny, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. I lent a copy of Blaze Of Glory to one of our students, who told me her mother had come running to find out what was going on when she was reading it; it was just the girl laughing out loud. 

One other thing: Aubrey is oddly like Miles Vorkosigan in personality, if you can imagine Miles as tall and more or less healthy(if you don't count the fact that he's technically dead) and living on one planet instead of travelling through space. In fact, I asked the author and he did agree that he is a fan of the Vorkosigan saga. 

So, if you like Miles Vorkosigan and can imagine him in Edwardian England instead of out in space, this series may just be for you! Even if you don't, read these anyway - they will keep you chuckling through the dullest day! 

And here is where you can buy them!

Matters Arising From The Identification Of The Body by Simon Petrie.Sydney: Peggy Bright, 2017

I bought this from the author as he was staffing the Peggy Bright Books table at this year's Continuum convention. Peggy Bright Books is one of Australia's many small presses that specialise in speculative fiction. Because the big presses in this country are mostly sticking to Fat Fantasy Trilogies, it's up to small press to publish science fiction.

I like hard SF and I like crime fiction. Simon Petrie, a physicist, knows his science and is an enthusiastic reader and writer of crime fiction - in his case, SF crime fiction. Usually it's humorous, but this one is utterly serious. 

Guerline Scarfe is a forensic psychologist living on Titan, where there is a colony. Her latest case: a girl who has gone out into Titan's freezing, lethal atmosphere and pulled off the helmet of her spacesuit. Why would a well-balanced girl with no particular reason for committing suicide do so? And why in that particular manner? As Guerline says, it's a nasty way to die. 

Guerline Scarfe is determined to find out, no matter how many people are trying to stop her, some in lethal ways. That, of course, is a standard trope in crime fiction, but no less enjoyable for it. And it is a very good piece of writing and I will be reading the next one if I get the chance. 

My only two gripes with this are as follows: firstly, the title. I have a copy and kept forgetting it. Something shorter and simpler next time! Please! Secondly, there were some scenes which told us about the heroine's background, but didn't really move the story forward. However, I'm going to assume that these will play a more important role in the next book.

Still, a well-written piece of crime fiction in a believable world. I finished it in about two sittings and I only took that long because I had other commitments. 

Buy it at Amazon, here,  or from the Peggy Bright web site here.  The publisher web site also offers the ebook edition. 

Just Finished Reading... Ballad For A Mad Girl by Vikki Wakefield. Melbourne: Text, 2017

I received this book courtesy of Text Publishing, in my Reading Matters conference goody bag. I was a bit surprised, because it was a very new book, just published this year. I think Text has been doing a huge promo for this book; I saw a number of reviews on Goodreads whose authors mentioned they had received it in a giveaway. Of course, those might have been eARCs, or even just ebooks, but this is a print copy and there were several hundred attendees at the conference. That's a lot to give away, and not even proof copies! 

So I thought it deserves a review of sorts, even a chatty, informal one like this - and I hope to do a more formal version for January Magazine, which really prefers to review books published recently, so I can't review CBCA shortlisted books for them. It will probably  end up on next year's CBCA shortlist anyway, and I'm betting it will be on the Aurealis shortlist too, if not the Ditmars. 

So, what is it about? In a small town called Swanston(I'm guessing in South Australia, where the author lives)is a girl called Grace Foley. Her mother was knocked over and killed by a car a couple of years ago, and the family - Grace, her Dad and her brother Cody - moved from their farm into town, where they are still grieving.

Grace does pranks for her friends. Currently, she is grounded for one of them, but being grounded doesn't stop her from responding to a text message persuading her to do something called a "pipe challenge." 

Swanston - or Swamptown, as the kids call it - has a gorge nearby, crossed by a pipe. Teenagers have been going there forever and students from the state secondary school are competing with those from the private school next door, Sacred Heart. The challenge involves getting safely across the pipe in record time. Grace holds the current record. 

But this time, something strange happens on her way back. She doesn't remember what it was, but for a short time she has been seeing something different from her friends - something very different. 

Soon, Grace realises that she has become possessed. She finds herself bruised for no obvious reason, the gentle, placid dog is snarling at her and she is drawing pictures in art class of a girl who disappeared twenty years ago. She was believed to have been murdered by a boy who apparently stalked her and looked in through her bedroom window, but there was not enough evidence to convict him. However, he had jumped into the gorge a year later and died. There is a ghost who is possessing Grace, one who won't go away until she has found out what happened and the ghost has had justice. 

But it isn't just a ghost story. It's about Grace and her friends, and how she learns to move on, and acknowledge she hasn't treated them well in recent months. It's about her family and coming to terms with what happened to their mother. They feel responsible because they didn't worry when she was late coming home. 

Oh, and there is a twist near the end, so please don't do the DNF thing. Read and finish! Even if you are annoyed with Grace! She is annoying, but there are reasons - and she admits that she has been doing the wrong thing by her friends. (Which is no excuse for what one of her friendship group does to her)

It is interestingly like CBCA shortlisted novel Yellow in some ways. Both books are set in a small town, where everyone knows everyone else and anything you say is likely to be all over town in a short time. Both have a ghost in them and both have something dreadful that happened over twenty years ago, and a heroine who is investigating it. But this one is scarier and the heroine is under much more pressure to solve it, because the ghost won't go away till she does, whereas in Yellow, she just has to keep away from the phone booth from which she hears the ghost boy's voice, and she does for a while. And unlike Yellow, which was set in the 1990s, this one is set well and truly in the present day, where kids all have their own phones instead of relying on adults, where anything that happens is all over Facebook and you can be hurt when you're unfriended on Facebook by a lifelong friend. Grace only has to google information about what happened during that tragedy twenty years ago, instead of having to read old newspapers. 

And both have a twist at the end.

But to be honest, I prefer this one to Yellow, though that one was good. If you've read these two books, what do you think? 

CBCA Shortlist #5 and #6: Captain Jimmy Cook Discovers Third Grade And Dragonfly Song

So, as I have read these two nominees a long time ago, and reviewed Captain Jimmy Cook and interviewed the author of Dragonfly Song, I thought it might be best to simply give you the links. Of course, I wasn't thinking of them as shortlisted books at the time! 

So, what did I think? Captain Jimmy Cook was great fun. There has since then been a sequel, Captain Jimmy Cook Discovers: X Marks The Spot. I have given them both to a book loving younger family member, Eden. Eden is in Year 2, but reading at a much higher level. However, the story themes do appeal to even a good reader who is about Jimmy Cook's age.

Dragonfly Song is set in the ancient Minoan civilisation and follows the adventures of a heroine who is suffering elective mutism, as she becomes a bull dancer. Unlike in Mary Renault's The King Must Die, in which the youngest member of Theseus's team is fourteen, these bull dancers are twelve or thirteen - and they actively compete for the honour, while those in The King Must Die are tributes who believe they are going to be thrown to a monster. Those in Dragonfly Song train and exercise and the best are chosen to go to Crete for the bull dance. 

The youth of the dancers in Dragonfly Song makes good sense. Children are far more flexible than adults; just check out those "women's" gymnast teams at the Olympics, made up of kids who can't be much beyond primary school, some still in primary school. If you live in Australia, you've probably heard of the Flying Fruitfly Circus, a team of child acrobats who do the most amazing feats. In fact, my school used to have a Circus program for our EAL students, many of whom were asylum seekers with dreadful memories who needed a chance to play. After only a few weeks, they performed for their schoolmates and they were wonderful. So, yes, children being bull dancers works for me.

Likewise, the behaviour of the bulls. Wendy Orr knows about these animals, having spent twenty years on a dairy farm with her husband. She says that sometimes the "tame" bulls are more dangerous than wild ones, because they know what to expect and can't be as easily fooled.

But look, why not just go and read both posts? I think these are both strong books. One of our students who read Dragonfly Song said she loved it. That has to count for something! 

CBCA Shortlist #4: Mrs Whitlam by Bruce Pascoe. Magabala Books, 2016

This is in the Younger Readers category of this year's shortlist. Younger Readers books vary from picture storybooks to books that most people would consider YA, but this short book is only eighty pages long and definitely falls in the middle grade category, though the heroine is in her teens.

Marnie is a horsy girl, incidentally Koori(the author is Koori and the imprint exists to publish indigenous work). On the very first page, the grief-stricken mother of a schoolmate who has died offers her the girl's horse, Mrs Margaret Whitlam, aka Maggie, a part-Clydesdale, begging her to take the animal off her hands, because it's just too much to look at her and remember. Oddly, it isn't because the late Vicki died in a riding accident, but I guess if you had to look after, feed and exercise a huge part-Clydesdale every day, you couldn't help remembering. 

Marnie is thrilled to be the owner of such a gorgeous horse - and I have to say, Maggie is the sort of horse I would have loved to have had as a horsy child, reading pony novels by the Pullein-Thompson sisters, if I hadn't been living in a flat, a long way from pastures and stables... She is huge and cuddly and loving. And before the novel is over, she has also been heroic. What's not to love? 

Luckily for Marnie, she is able to keep Maggie at the local riding school, where she hangs around and helps out, a good thing, as horses are expensive!  (That, of course, was something I never considered as I put away my pocket money for a horse...). The riding school owner is a wise older man who knows everyone in the district, including the apparently snobby girl who makes Marnie unwelcome at the pony club, but who has her own troubles. 

The reader is introduced to Marnie's large, cheerful family, and I feel sure that in a book for older readers it would be interesting to read about them, but they come and go and suddenly the book is over, with Marnie potentially an item with the school hunk, a surfer and a terribly nice, kind boy, who helps her out in a rescue. 

Really, not a lot happens or has time to happen, but I imagine horse-loving girls in the later years of primary school will drool over Maggie the horse. I know this middle-aged teacher-librarian did. 

Will it get far in the CBCAs? Hard to tell. I have only read two of the other contenders. One is the wonderful Dragonfly Song by Wendy Orr, and that is a book I think really belongs in the Older Readers category, not sure why it's with the Younger Readers. The other is Captain Jimmy Cook Discovers Third Grade. That one is good fun, in a Diary Of A Wimpy Kid style, but not really, in my opinion, awards material. However, I'm not one of the judges. Possibly the YABBA Awards, which are voted on by children, yes, but the CBCA Awards are judged by adults.

If there was a Morris Gleitzman Once novel on the list this year, it would be very likely to win, but the next book in the series, Maybe, is still cooking... There is a Holocaust novel by Robyn Bavati which I really should get, as our students love their Holocaust fiction and there's no new Morris Gleitzman book yet. Mind you, Gleitzman's hero, Felix, has survived the war and now has other troubles in post-war Poland. 

Still, let's see how this horse story goes over!

CBCA Shortlist #2: Yellow by Megan Jacobson. Melbourne: Penguin, 2016

"Yellow" is the nickname of Kirra Barley, given to her because of her unusual eye colour, by her father, whose nickname is Lark, because in his teens he used to lark around a lot, nothing to do with the bird. Actually, there are a number of characters with nicknames in this book and Lark is the only one whose real name we are never told.

But Kirra's surfer father, a genuine dole bludger, has run off with the Avon lady, or at least, the door to door cosmetics seller, only a couple of months ago, and set up a home only three blocks away, which is not good in such a small town, where everybody knows and gossips about everybody.  Kirra's mother, Judy, has been living at the bottom of her gin bottle ever since, though it turns out later that it isn't only Lark's betrayal that has caused it. To tell you more would be spoilers.

Kirra's home troubles are bad enough, but she also has bullying troubles at school, with girls who are supposed to be her friends, but are the local Mean Girls. She finds herself being befriended by the school Bad Girl, Willow, who doesn't care what anyone thinks of her and gives the thumb to whatever or whoever she doesn't like. She teaches Kirra a lot and helps her confidence.

Then, one day, she answers a ringing in a telephone box that was supposed to have been removed years ago, and finds herself talking to the ghost of a teenage boy who died twenty years ago and claims to have been murdered. In return for her help in bringing his killer to justice, he will help her overcome some of her problems, though only with advice, of course, since how much physical help can a ghost give from the afterlife? The boy, who calls himself Boogie, has been unable to move on and is going crazy from loneliness.  

Really, it's a story about life in a small town on the coast, where everyone has been living for  the last couple of generations, never moving out, which gives it a faint flavour of Back To The Future. It's the story of a girl who learns to overcome the bullies and make real friends and help her mother. The fantastical elements are a bonus, but not, repeat not, a tacked-on element. They belong. 

I began to suspect who Boogie was when Kirra was talking to the town librarian, a nice old lady who remembered everyone from her parents' generation. I was a little disappointed that Kirra's research in the old newspapers was interrupted abruptly and never resumed. But there was a reason for it. 

And it was made clear that things - and people - aren't always what they seem. 

Interesting that it was set in the 1990s. A number of "contemporary" books have been set in the 1980s and 90s recently. I suppose it does help if the characters can't go on line to do research or make an urgent phone call with their own mobiles; in one scene, Kirra is wondering if the whole Boogie thing was set up by the bullies using their parents' mobile phones, because this is before teens had their own. And, as in Back To The Future, the parents had to have been there in a certain era.

Did I like it? Yes. I finished it more or less in one sitting. It's easy, comfortable reading. Do I think kids would like it? Perhaps. I think they might prefer Frankie. This one is a bit preachier than Frankie: "Be yourself! Don't believe people are what they look like!" And so on. 

We'll see how it goes over when I return it to the library. 

CBCA Shortlist #3: The Bone Sparrow by Zana Fraillon. Hachette, 2016

Subhi is a refugee. Born in an Australian permanent detention centre after his mother fled the violence of a distant homeland, life behind the fences is all he has ever known. But as he grows, his imagination gets bigger too, until it is bursting at the limits of his world. The night sea brings him gifts, the faraway whales sing to him, and the birds tell their stories.

The most vivid story of all, however, is the one that arrives one night in the form of Jimmie, a scruffy, impatient girl who appears from the other side of the wires, and brings a notebook written by the mother she lost. Unable to read it, she relies on Subhi to unravel her own family's love songs and tragedies.

Subhi and Jimmie might both find a way to freedom, as their tales unfold. But not until each of them has been braver than ever before.

Oh, dear, what to say? It is so very sad! The author says in the afterword that she wishes this book didn't have to be written, that the story and characters are fictional, but the issues aren't. It's true, too. We read about it every day in the papers, whatever we can still get, since the government has threatened prosecution to anyone who has worked in these places and spoken out about them. You know - "fake news"? All I can say is, I didn't vote for them!

And the thought of a child actually born in one of these places is truly awful.

But for Subhi, it's all he knows. He makes the best of his situation. When the human rights advocates come to inspect the camp from time to time, the inmates know they will get a decent meal or two, and Subhi pretends it's for his birthday. His imagination frees him and one day a girl from Outside, whose mother has died and father is grieving with her, smuggles the Outside into the camp, along with hot chocolate and a book written by hand by her beloved mother, with the fantastical story of the bone sparrow she wears around her neck, given to her by her mother just before she died. Because of all the moving around she has done, Jimmie hasn't had time to learn to read, so she asks Subhi, whose English is fine(born there, remember?) and who can read, to read it to her. The story he reads is a part of the narrative, a sub-narrative about Jimmie's ancestors.

The characters are drawn with care and love. There is even one decent camp guard, Harvey, who looks after Subhi when he needs it and fills a rubber pool for the children in the hottest weather. When it's time for Subhi to have his say about a tragedy that had occurred, he knows he will have to involve Harvey, who witnessed it, but Harvey lets him know it's the right thing to do.

And there's a rubber ducky, the Shakespeare duck, which makes snarky comments from Subhi's pocket, in his imagination. This brings a little much-needed humour to an otherwise terribly sad story.

It rather reminds me of Morris Gleitzman in style, sort of Boy Overboard and Girl Underground meets Once. If you liked those books, you will find much to like in this one. I believe the kids will like it too. I'll be recommending it.

Meanwhile, I can only hope that this year's CBCA shortlist has at least two books with some real humour in them(I know there's one, Words In Deep Blue); for this one, stock up on the boxes of tissues!
 

CBCA Shortlist #1: Frankie by Shivaun Plozza.

Once again I'm making my way through the shortlist, at least the Older Readers. I've just finished this one and borrowed Yellow by Megan Jacobson. Of course, I read Dragonfly Song ages ago, when I got it for reviewing - check out my interview with the author here! Waer by Meg Caddy is currently out, but no rush. I have The Bone Sparrow and Words In Deep Blue, by the wonderful Cath Crowley, on my iPad - I'm keeping the latter for dessert, though I've started it. I suspect I'm going to need it after some depressing stuff. I could be wrong. I hope I am. But every year the CBCA choose at least two or three depressing titles for their shortlist. That said, kids often like depressing books. I've even been asked for them!

What to say about Frankie, a debut novel that has already scored its author a place on the shortlist and an invitation to be a GoH at the Reading Matters conference this year?

It's set on the grubbier side of Collingwood, a formerly working class suburb of Melbourne which, AFAIK, is becoming more gentrified than the novel suggests. But then, I don't live there, and I did once live in St Kilda, which has large numbers of people living in poverty, yet has house prices that reflect its location next to the sea. Go figure. Collingwood is near prettier parts of the city, not far from the river and has the Collingwood Children's Farm, which features in the novel as the place where the heroine was abandoned by her drug-taking, irresponsible mother, at the age of four, to run off with her current boyfriend.

So. Frankie is Francesca Vega, daughter of the irresponsible Juliet Vega, in Year 12 at the local secondary school, but on an indefinite suspension because she broke the nose of a nasty boy with a hardback Works Of Shakespeare. She won't tell anyone what he said to earn the assault, not even her best friend, Cara, or her loving aunt Vinnie, who has brought her up since that abandonment - and whom she has disappointed time after time.

And one day, a fourteen year old boy called Xavier arrives in her life and tells her he is her kid brother, well, half brother. And suddenly Frankie's life in her aunt's Kebab Emporium has changed for good. Xavier is someone she can care about, a gifted artist who wants to make her happy. He's also in big trouble. Huge trouble! He owes money to people who are likely to take it out of his hide. He is a thief. But he is her kid brother and when he disappears she has to go looking for him, with the help of Nate, a boy who looks like Shia LaBeouf and to whom Xavier owes money. Fortunately for her, he's a burglar...

It's good, no question about it. The grubbiness of the area is well described, though I should reassure any readers from outside of Melbourne that a visit to Smith St will give them plenty of restaurants and other such treats, not land them in the middle of drug deals the minute they get off the tram,  and that it's not far from very pretty places by the river, such as the above mentioned children's farm. But it makes you feel the dirt and despair of the heroine's living space - in fact, her own home is about the only one in the book that isn't filthy and broken down and even that is a sort of shabby place above the shop.

Frankie's family, such as it is, seems to be unlucky from the start. Apart from her mother, her uncle is deservedly in jail and even her decent aunt has had bad luck with the men in her life. But Vinnie wants better for her niece and is frustrated that Frankie apparently won't help herself get out of the kebab shop into university.  

The characters are well drawn. Frankie has the right kind of snarkiness to make the reader like her, and she cares, really cares, about a younger brother she has met only three times, not under the best of circumstances, to make her risk her own future to find him. 

Her friend Cara is just the sort of person we all want for a best friend, who,is always in her corner, and when they hang out, sometimes doing unwise things such as drinking Vinnie's vodka, you still get the feeling of two very intelligent young women. 

Nate, the young burglar, is maybe a little too good to be true, and when the obvious attraction blossoms, you do have to wonder what kind of a future there could be for them, given his lifestyle and where he is living(a squat)and the fact that he hasn't really any other options at this stage. 

So, did I like it? Absolutely! I think the girls will like it too - in fact, the Year 8 girl who borrowed it first enjoyed it very much. I got through it quickly and easily. There's plenty of meat for class discussion if, like my school, you're looking for a new class text, for, as it might be, Year 10. 

Would I read it again? Possibly not. A matter of personal taste and it doesn't, for me, have the sweetness of Will Kostakis or Cath Crowley's books. But again - personal taste. And I suspect that anyone who can score a shortlist and a festival appearance on a first novel has a strong career ahead! 

What I Was Doing At 4.20 am this morning... A radio interview!

The interview was on the ABC radio program Overnights, about my book Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly. I have to take my hat off to those folk who do this nearly every night and act as if it's the middle of the day! They're amazing.  That's both the presenter, Trevor Chappell(no, not the cricketer!) and the producers.

Was it worth getting up in the small hours on a weekday? You bet! And I had already told my daily organiser at school that I was going to go back to bed and sleep in. She was fine with that - I have plenty of leave and I don't have classes on Monday anyhow. She even wondered why I was coming in at all, but I have things that need to be done. which can't be done at home.

So, what was it all about? My lovely publisher Paul Collins arranged it. He did an interview about something else a couple of weeks ago(his own version of Henry Lawson's dog-themed stories). They asked him if he could recommend someone else and he recommended me. Which goes to show how right I am to believe you will always get more support from small press than large.

He sent them a copy of my book(which I think they will be giving away to a listener who rang to ask how to get a copy for their children) and I really believe it was read, or at least skimmed.

Then I heard from a producer who said they were interested in doing the interview this morning. She suggested I focus on the Batavia story and the nineteenth century stories, which I did, and made voluminous notes, just in case. You never know, and it has been a while since I wrote this.

So, I got up at 3.30 a.m to make sure I was awake enough to be able to answer questions. I put on the kettle for honey and lemon - I've been sick recently and still have a hacking cough, which I hoped a hot honey and lemon drink might soothe, at least during the interview.

I kept a copy of the book beside me just in case... and sure enough, some questions were about later chapters, but no big deal.

There were questions about the stories themselves and about how you go about choosing stories for a children's book on this subject and how much you have to leave out - and I had no problem with those. Mr Chappell seemed to get it that this is storytelling as much as fiction, and we discussed that too.

To my delight, one of the talkback listeners referred to a story about "an elderly woman, I don't remember her name, who poisoned her family..." which gave me the excuse to talk about Caroline Grills and how I'd once met a member of the prison staff of the time, who called her "such a sweet woman!" despite knowing exactly what she had done. And about how I had once told a bunch of kids too young for the book about "the very naughty nana... I bet your nana wouldn't do that!"

Really, this was such a good promotion, and the presenter was pleasant and relaxed and chuckled a lot at the colourful characters in my book.

I am very happy to have done it. If you're interested in hearing it, here is the link:

http://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/overnights/crime-time-australian-true-crime-for-kids/8629676 I don't know if it will work outside Australia, but give it a go. I'm going to download it from iTunes and save it to my computer. Just heard from a friend in the UK - you can open it overseas! Listen and let me know what you think! Here's a sample chapter! And here's the Ford Street website! Have a great day, readers!

The Wizardry Of Jewish Women - The New Edition!

And here's the new cover! Nice, isn't it?

A while ago, some of my friends who had books with small press Satalyte Publishing had the shock of finding their beautiful books suddenly out of print when the publisher closed down. One of them was Gillian Polack, author of the above book and other Satalyte titles. 

The good news was, they had their rights back and they have been making the best of things, finding other publishers. Gillian's is Bookview Cafe, a writer's co-op which has some founding members with huge names! (This book was typeset by no less than Vonda McIntyre!). Not everyone can join. You have to have skills the co-op can use - Gillian has several - and you must be someone they can get along with, because you will be helping out with the publishing. 

So the book is now available again, in ebook, and hopefully the others will follow soon. I bought a copy on the web site yesterday, and it was very simple. It's done via PayPal and they send you a receipt which has a link to the download. It's available in both ePub and mobi. When I didn't receive my email, for some reason, I made contact and would you believe I got a reply about ten minutes later, from a gentleman who said he'd sent me another email and, in case that didn't work, here was a link to the checkout page, which I had lost. And that did have my download. So now it's safe on my iPad and I believe they're fine with you downloading it to another device. Well, iBooks lets you do that; my phone is connected to my iPad. And I do read on my phone sometimes. 

So, if you missed out on the Satalyte edition, which was launched only last September, here's another chance! It's well worth a read.

I'm currently reading Gillian's earlier novel, The Time Of The Ghosts, and enjoying it very much. It's set in Gillian's home town of Canberra and features a young woman and her three "grandmothers", in the best fairytale style, one of whom may not be what she seems... And ghosts and odd creatures from Europe(our ghostbusting grandmothers leave the local spirits alone) and saving the world - well, Canberra anyway - one coffee and one dinner party at a time. I'm really liking the flirtatious ghost of a bushranger who died in the 1840s, who rather fancies one of the older ladies. 

I bought one of the last copies direct from the author on the weekend, but if you wander over to Bookview Cafe, it should be available in ebook there eventually.

Back From Another Con With More Books - Day 2!

Today's con was only going till 2.00 pm plus closing ceremony, so I wanted to get to as many sessions as possible. There was no lunch real, only a snack break, when I went to the hotel cafe and had a pot of tea and a Florentine and chatted with a group of folk, some of whom I knew, others I didn't. One of them, a gentleman, was check g through his database of films and books and it seems that he has about four times as many DVDs as I do, though we had about the same number of books, and he had catlogued them all on this database. 

I wanted to arrive on time for the first session, at 9.30 a.m, but I was a bit late anyway, and missed the beginning of "Forgotten Mothers Of SF." Well, the women mentioned weren't so forgotten, as I'd heard of pretty much all of them and read most, but then, I'm old enough to have read them in the 1980s. Maybe most are now out of print? I don't think so, but you never know. I think that there has been rather too much self pity in the panels I have heard at this convention - "Poor us, we've been unfairly treated! Whine, whinge, unfair, mutter, mutter!" And very few stops for questions or comments from the audience in any of them.

Still, it was an interesting panel and I did enjoy the discussion of what the name of the new YA Hugo should be. It was pointed out that most YA spec fic was written by women, so it should be named after a woman. Everyone on the panel had her own favourite. One suggested it should be named for Diana Wynne Jones, not a bad idea, though it was decided in the end that "The Jones" just didn't sound too exciting. Well, pardon her for having a common name! Someone else liked the Nesbit, after E.Nesbit. The discussion will be held at the Worldcon business meeting in Helsinki this year, so anyone at the con who wants to make a suggestion can go. I won't be there, alas! I agree it should be named for a woman, preferably the author of classic fiction, such as E.Nesbit or Dianna Wynne Jones or Andre Norton, whose writing pulled a lot of kids into SF. 

I would have liked to have an invitation to the audience to make suggestions. 

My bet is that it will be named for an American, whether male or female. 

I went to the food in fantasy panel, which included my friend Gillian Polack, and enjoyed that, I even sampled someone's kangaroo jerky, though I don't usually eat unkosher meat, because he has created his own universe with kangaroos in it, as "hoppers", and has devised his own recipes. Sorry, but it tasted to me like beef. Now I know. Maybe it was his marinade. 

 Gillian offered to analyse any writer's attitude to food, and did mine. She was quite right to say that food in my fiction was there only to support the plot. She intended it to be critical, but it was true, and I wasn't offended. There is very little food in my mediaeval fiction, because it's mostly not needed and because my knowledge is not good enough to support it, so I prefer to be vague. Unlike Gillian the food historian, who is willing and able to experiment with cooking the food, I just can't. What I should do next time is email her for advice. She was very helpful in that story I submitted (unsuccessfully, mutter, grumble!) to Cranky Ladies Of History. I hadn't realised, for example, that you had to take your own food on a voyage in the 19th century. Gillian told me that. 

Next, I went to the Dr Who panel. It was a fun discussion of New Who. We all agreed we loved the current series, and this one was open to audience interaction. My friend George Ivanoff was on it, which doesn't surprise me in the least. George is a passionate media fan, and that includes bizarre shows thAt gave long been forgotten by everyone else - so nice to hear him discuss something we had all heard of. This was my favourite panel of the day. 

I should have attended the "Humans Are Special" panel as my last for the day, but made the mistake of going to the one on fan fiction. I love fan fiction, I used to write it, many years ago, so it sounded like it would be fun. It wasn't. The panel consisted of four young things who probably think fan fiction was invented on the Internet, and who wrote the sort of stuff that used to come in plain brown wrappers when I was buying fanzines. One admitted cheerfully to being a sadist in the technical sense and told us that she writes sadist porn. Now, that is not my cup of tea, but if it's in your own universe, well, that is between you and your readers. Using it to write in someone else's universe is another matter. She made me just a bit angry. So did the others, but especially her. 

That's on top of feeing old. These days, fan fiction is HUGE, and it's because it's all on line. You can't filter it through an editor and if you're a copyright owner you can't really stop it. I suppose sooner or later Paramount will try to close down the delightful 1001 Trek Tales web site, but the thing is, they could only do it in Australia, during the print era, because we don't have the same loophole as other countries, so other countries kept publishing it quite legally. Now they would have their work cut out to close down, say, Fanfiction Net, which has hundreds of universes, including those of games, and there are definitely R rated stories which require a statement that you're over 18. My students all know about this site and some write their own fan fiction, though never in universes familiar to me. 

I miss the times when I bought a fanzine at a con and curled up in bed with it. They did say, at this panel, that people shouldn't be charging for their fan fiction, which of course, they shouldn't, but when I was writing and publishing, the editor did have to charge at least for print and postage. The contributors would get a free copy, and that was all. I recall a club in Queensland that had a policy of never handing out contributor copies, which asked me if they could reprint one of my longer stories. I said sure, as long as I got a free copy. They whined that they couldn't afford it(though they intended to sell it)and I told them that I wasn't a charity, though if they had been fundraising for charity, that would have been another matter. It was never reprinted. So be it. 

I loved my print zines, not only because I could curl up in bed with them, but because they were filtered by editors. I grant you that some fanzines were pretty dreadful, but you soon worked out which ones they were, and in general you knew they would be okay. You can't know now. 

Anyway, that was the final panel and was followed by the closing ceremony. I went home in the tram with Gillian, who has family in my part of Melbourne, and a friend of hers who also lives here. 

My plan was to get home about 3.30 tops and do a load of wash, but no such luck. Gillian is popular, and spent at least 20 minutes on her farewells! Oh, well. It will just have to wait.

So, anyone got a suggestion for a name for the YA Hugo? 

Back From Another Con... With More Books! Day 1

And here they are! I did download one book, Feed, by Mira Grant, the pen name of Seanan McGuire, the GoH of this year's Continuum - Number 13, how time flies! I've been to every single one since the start. 

Seanan McGuire, who writes urban fantasy under her own name, explained during her GoH speech that she had to take a pen name for a more literary type of speculative fiction because a lot of people just don't buy anything by an urban fantasy writer, even if it isn't urban fantasy. She said many people who had read and loved her Newsflesh series said they would never have picked them up if they had known who the author was, because urban fantasy is, oddly, considered inferior. So she writes those as Mira Grant. 

She mentioned, interestingly, that she can't afford health care because the costs are over $1100 a month and she lives entirely on her writing. Some years are good, some aren't. 

Due to family commitments I couldn't get there till yesterday, but there were some good panels and I was lucky enough to be able to hear the GoH speech, which is normally on the Saturday. 

As it was, I arrived in the middle of a book launch. It was a children's book published by Allen and Unwin, so I listened, but wasn't interested. Even the bits read by the author were explaining the universe rather than things happening. I left as soon as we were invited to have a nibble and buy a book. 

So I went to the panel on fairy tales, on which Seanan McGuire was appearing. It was a lot of fun and there were comments on such things as siblings in fairy tales. There wasn't much I didn't know, but it's always enjoyable to hear other people's thoughts. Nobody, for some reason, commented on the fact that, actually, there are groups of three - the older two ignore the magical helpers and fail, the youngest shares his/her lunch and succeeds. But nobody mentioned this.

Then there was Kid Stuff, a panel on which a group of writers, led by Michael Pryor, talked about their inspiration from their childhoods. 

At noon, we all attended the GoH speech and I ended up going to lunch by myself, as everyone I know disappeared, including George Ivanoff, who had to go and find some Panadols; his cold is at an earlier stage than mine, poor man! It gave me an excuse to read for lunch, over a freshly made borek and hot lentil soup.

I did intend to go to the talk about the history of Aussie fandom, but as I entered, I was harassed by someone I won't name. I stayed about five minutes, then went out to the dealer's room, where I bought the three books you see above, having a chat with two friends, Narrelle Harris and Simon Petrie. Both of them had new books out, so I bought them, plus Gillian Polack's The Time Of The Ghosts, which I've started reading. Fascinating, by the way - in it, the French fay Melusine is Jewish! And alive and well and living in modern Canberra. It's one of the books which suddenly went out of print when her publisher closed, but Simon told me that she has a new publisher, so great! I managed to chat for five minutes with Gillian as I was leaving and it was even better than Simon had told me. I need to catch up and get details. 

I went to a label on "Queering SF" because a friend of mine, Geoff Allshorn, was on it. The argument was that "there have always been queers in space opera." They then went on to complain about lack of representation. Weird! And one of them complained about that scene in A Civil Campaign in which Ivan, Miles's ultra-hetero cousin, arrives at the spaceport to greet Lady Donna, his sexual mentor, who has come back as Lord Dono, a hulking man with a beard. The complaint? Ivan hadn't wanted to continue the relationship. Well, no... Ivan is a heterosexual. And it wasn't that kind of relationship anyway. It was strictly sexual. At best, it would be "we're friends, but strictly Platonic now."  And Ivan ended up helping Lord Dono to get his inheritance and by the way, Dono ends up engaged to a young woman, one of the beautiful intelligent Koudelka sisters. Donna had been fed up with being a woman and fed up with men. 

Geoff later told me that the panel hadn't quite worked out as he had expected(he was moderating). 

My final panel for the day was on filking. It, too, was a lot of fun. We don't have much of a filk community here, though we used to. A pity. Anne Poore, a wonderful harpist, said that Dave Luckett, our major filker, doesn't perform his sings any more, so she does. Seanan McGuire , who has done quite a lot of it herself and produced her own albums, said there is a major filk con in Columbus, Ohio, every year, because it's right in the middle of the U.S. Bible Belt and the arrival of all those weirdos is a shock to the locals! This is on purpose. 

I had to leave early, to get some food and go to my mother's place, but on the dhole it was a good day.