Back From The YABBAs 2013!

Today, I took a day's leave without pay to attend the Young Australian Best Book Awards, held this year at Haileybury College in East Brighton. I would have liked to take some students, but I just couldn't. The most interest would have come from Years 7 and 8 and I would have had to come to school and pick them up and then take them to the event and back to school again and East Brighton was just too far from Sunshine. I did ask the late Graham Davey once if my school could possibly host it. "Sure!" he said. "Can you fit in 300 students?" And of course, without a school hall, I couldn't. My library fits 200 and that's if they're all on the floor(which isn't a problem as they usually are on the floor at the YABBAs) but not much space for 20 writers to sign afterwards. So the event tends to go to Eastern/southeastern private schools, although Graham told me it would have been nice to have the event in the western suburbs for once.

So I went as a writer and at the same time, they had a lovely box of books waiting for my library, though it was too big and heavy for me to lug home by public transport, so Sue Osborne, the TL, kindly arranged for the books to be posted. I would have loved to take them in tomorrow to show my book loving students, but will just have to wait. Even better, she said that in future, she would send me anything she got for the Premier's Reading Challenge for my library!

Here are the winners of this year's awards:

Winner Fiction Years 7-9

Morris Gleitzman After Publisher - Viking (Penguin) 2012

Winner Fiction Younger Readers

Emily Rodda The Golden Door Publisher - Omnibus Books, 2011

Winner Fiction Older Readers

Andy Griffiths & Terry Denton The 26-Storey Treehouse Publisher - Pan Macmillan, 2012

Winner Picture Storybooks

Carol Chataway & Nina Rycroft Pooka Publisher - Working Title Press, 2012

Graham Davey Citation

The Very Grumpy Bear Nick Bland Publisher - Penguin, 2008

Of all the winners, alas, only Andy Griffiths was there to collect his award. Morris Gleitzman andCarol Chataway were sick. Emily Rodda sent a video acceptance speech.

And here's something I'd like to say: Andy Griffiths is a delightful man. I bought a copy of his newest book for Priyanka, my most enthusiastic book clubber, and got him to sign it, then asked for a photo with him for my students to enjoy. I don't think he will mind my showing it here.

And then he gave me some signed copies of his Schooling Around series, which has just been re-released with new covers. We do have the series, but the individual volumes keep going missing. The students will be delighted!

I also had my photo taken with Gabrielle Wang, whose book A Ghost In My Suitcase is being read by some of our students for Literature Circles, and who asked after Sweet, my talented student who did a manga version of a scene from her novel.

I was sitting next to Felice Arena, author of the Specky Magee series, and told him some of our students had studied the first book for Literature Circles. I don't know yet what they have in mind for their creative response, but he agreed that he would do an interview if they wanted one. We'll see how they go. I think they were playing around with a book trailer, but weren't too enthusiastic about it. 

Anyway, I thought they might enjoy seeing a picture of him with me, so here it is!

Also a delightful man and very funny. 

I also had a chance to chat with Oliver Phommavanh, a primary teacher and the author of some hilarious books about life in primary school, especially when you're growing up Thai. We saw him at the State Library a couple of years ago, and he could make a living as a stand-up comic, honestly! I didn't manage to get a picture with him, unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond our control. 

The ceremony included the amusing doodle thingie, where the kids get to do a Mr Squiggle, giving a few lines to authors or illustrators which they have to turn into a picture, which is then signed and put up in the school. This year's illustrators were Bruce Whatley and Felice Arena. I was very impressed at how well someone who isn't officially an illustrator could do the job. It was good fun for all.

There were student performances and then, after morning tea, we all sat down to sign. I was sitting next to my friend George Ivanoff, who has done seventy books in his time and is making a living from his writing. He tells me most education publishers have now gone to flat fee payments, not very good if you're counting on royalties. It was nice to be with him, anyway, and we were both kept busy. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Dymock's had brought some copies of Wolfborn and they actually sold some! I wouldn't have thought they could sell it to primary students, but there you are. The young women came and got me to sign their books and I gave them bookmarks(they were Crime Time bookmarks - if I'd known, I would have brought some Wolfborn ones as well). I even signed a copy of Your Cat Could Be A Spy! It was a library copy, but this means someone knew I would be there and sent a student with the book. How cool is that?

We were fed lunch as well and then George took me to Moorabbin station, from which I was able to catch a train to Glenhuntly and then a tram home. A nice day all round!

Just Finished Reading... Ghost Hawk!

Susan Cooper's Ghost Hawk is sitting on my iBooks shelf, just finished yesterday. I learned about its existence on a blog post by someone who had just been to hear her interviewed(and what an interesting background! She has heard Tolkien lecture!). The blogger described herself as a Susan Cooper fan girl and, I must admit, so am I. I remember going to a library conference in Hobart at which she was the guest of honour, along with Jan Needle.

Jan was a delight, a very funny man, considering he wrote depressing YA novels, but we could all talk to him comfortably because we weren't major fans of his, though I did try to read more of his stuff after meeting him. But Susan Cooper was surrounded by a bunch of female teacher-librarians who could barely think of anything to say to her because they were such fans. I was one of them. And this was despite the fact that I had once written her a letter, back in the days before email and Goodreads, and had a reply. I found an address for her in a reference book on children's writers in the State Library. These days, she has a Goodreads profile, but you can't friend her, only become a fan, so no opportunity to communicate. Perhaps she was getting too much fan mail to answer, or her agent or publisher advised her to set up some social media profiles, but not to make herself available for contact - after all, if you answer fan mail, you aren't writing while you answer, and that means less money for the agent or publisher(which is odd because my first publisher encouraged answering children's fan mail). Still, it's ironic that I could write to her directly in the days before the Internet, but not now.

Ghost Hawk is a typically beautiful Susan Cooper book, a fantasy set in the early days of the settlement of America. Little Hawk, a Native American boy, is the narrator, but I can't say much more about him without spoilers. It's also about John, a white boy who is considered rather too sympathetic to the indigenous people. Reading this, especially the author's afterword, makes you realise just what a poor deal the Native Americans have had over the centuries. I mean, we know about it, but this gives you the gory details. Even Presidents you're supposed to admire, such as Lincoln, did horrible things to the indigenous folk who, by the way, didn't even get the vote till after everyone else, including women and African-Americans!

I also learned, to my delight, that the couple who befriended Ishi, the last member of the Yahi tribe(the whites had wiped out the rest of them) were the parents of the wonderful Ursula K LeGuin!

I am always going to love The Dark Is Rising best, but this one is at least as good as King Of Shadows and The Boggart, two of my other favourite Cooper novels.

Amazonish Goodies: The Final List

In the end, I missed out on the Asimov book and the Crime novel with Agatha Christie in it. The  problem was, Foundation, the ebook version thereof, refused to release price details, after quoting $5.99 the day before. And I don't like uncertainty where price is concerned.

Instead, I bought another Arthur C Clarke book, a rather large selection of short stories, starting with The Star, a favourite of mine, where there is a team arriving at a store of alien treasures on the outer world of a dead system whose star has gone supernova. The narrator, a Jesuit, asks God why it was necessary to wipe out this beautiful civilisation just to have the star of Bethlehem. I wish the anthology also had The Nine Billion Names Of God, but can't have everything.

But this book was rather more expensive than the Asimov had been, so there was not enough for a fifth book, with only $1.20 left. Ah, well.

So my final list includes the two Clarkes, this one and The Songs Of Distant Earth,  the Colin Falconer novel, Isabella: Braveheart Of France and Winter Is Coming.

I've already got stuck into the Falconer novel and started the others. Thank you again, Stephanie Carroll, lovely giveaway host, for your gift!

Sunday Morning And Books

I'm lying in bed on a Sunday morning listening to classical music on ABC FM. I woke at 6.20 am and knew I wouldn't sleep any more. The dishes I didn't wash await me in the sink. A house needs cleaning. They can wait another half hour or so. After my breakfast of fruit, toast and something herbal in the way of tea, I will do them all, but now is mine.

Yesterday I bought another print book while waiting for a tram outside my local bookshop, so will have to donate another few to the library to make space for it. It's Simon Schama's The Story Of The Jews. It's going into my reference collection - you never know what you'll need for writing. I like Simon Schama very much. He hosted the wonderful TV series The History Of Britain and brings the same chatty, laid-back style to his writing. The Jews in this book are ordinary people, not the famous history-makers we usually read about in other history books. A father writes to his soldier-boy son about why his kit hasn't arrived, tells him he hasn't been able to arrange the young man's back pay yet and adds that Mum is worried, something every Jewish boy has heard at one time or another, as Simon Schama adds. Someone in business writes to a less-than-reliable colleague and makes dire threats as to what he'll do if the man doesn't turn up on the docks to collect the goods. A woman divorces her second husband and he sues her for his share of the goods(and loses). This is history, who needs kings and generals? And I didn't know about the Jewish community in Elephantine, Egypt, who had their own Temple, much to the annoyance of the folk running the one in Jerusalem. This book is already proving to be great entertainment.

I'm well over halfway through Rachel Hartman's Seraphina, which I like very much for its worldbuilding, and I hear that her reason for human-shaped dragons started in her original  graphic novel, because she couldn't draw dragons very well! Who would have thought you could take a problem and solve it by making it such an integral part of your universe? I like the charm of the characters, the humour and the fact that she has some knowledge of the Renaissance and uses it as a starting place only.

 But is it really a YA novel, despite the heroine's youth? I don't know. This far into the novel, not a lot has happened, except offstage. There's a buildup, but teens aren't patient with buildups. Heck, a LOT of people are impatient with buildups! There's one Goodreads reviewer who panned my novel Wolfborn because not enough happened in the first eight pages(she stopped reading it)! My main action started in Chapter 2, after a buildup in Chapter 1.  And here's a book in which there's a conspiracy going on and the heroine having visions, but nothing happening onstage hundreds of pages into the book. That isn't going to please young readers, though they might hang around for the romantic interest, a nice young man called Prince Lucian Kiggs, who's Captain of the Guard at the palace,  though he can't be much older than the teenage heroine, a brilliant musician who is already assistant music mistress of the palace musicians. Lucian feels like someone at least in his twenties, who is calm, mature and handling his responsibilities well. But something he says early on suggests he's in his teens. Oh, well, keep going. But as an adult, I am enjoying it very much. It has a lot of charm.

I have chosen for this week's random reading My Life As An Alphabet by Barry Jonsberg. I really have to admire Barry, who manages to write novels regularly despite having a day job in teaching. Teaching is a worthy job that lets you make a difference, but it tends to use up your creativity, leaving little energy for other forms of creativity such as writing. People manage - look at all those art teachers who do exhibitions - but it's not easy. I haven't started reading the book yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

This week's download is Susan Cooper's Ghost Hawk, set in early America instead of Britain, where most of her earlier books are set;  she has, after all, been living in the US since the 1960s. The novel starts with a  Native American boy, Little Hawk, going on his manhood vision quest, during which he must survive in the woods for three months and fast till he finds his Manitou, or totem animal. Susan Cooper is always worth reading and has done some wonderful books since The Dark Is Rising series, though I, personally, think that series is her classic and will continue to be read after the others are long out of print.

Time to get up now. Maybe I can unfreeze my writer's block and do some writing today other than blogging!

Unveiling My Choice of Amazonish Goodies

Okay, I've made my choices! I get five ebooks, adding up to just under $25.00! Ghu, I'm good! ;-)

One of them is Colin Falconer's new novel, Isabella, The Braveheart Of France. He's been talking about it endlessly on various blogs recently, so let's see what it's like. $4.99.

Number 2: Winter Is Coming, another analysis of Game Of Thrones. I already have one called Winning The Game Of Thrones, but for $2.99, why not? Always nice to see someone else's ideas.

The London Blitz Murders is yet another crime novel with a real person as sleuth(this time Agatha Christie). This sort of book is a guilty pleasure of mine. And only $3.99!

  I decided to finish off with a couple of SF classics: Arthur C Clarke's Songs Of Distant Earth and Asimov's Foundation.  I have never read the Arthur C Clarke book at all and I remember curling up with the Asimov when I was babysitting my nephews David and Mark, now grown men with children of their own. Yes, that's how long it's been. These two are, respectively, $6.83 and $5.99. Total: $24.79.

Some time tomorrow, when I have a bit of time to myself, I'm going to sit down with my iPad and my redemption code and follow the instructions.

Five lovely, delicious new books! The only pity is that I can't stroke their shiny new covers or open the crisp fresh pages to other worlds of delight. But there's still plenty of delight to be had in pressing a button and downloading them to read immediately instead of waiting days or weeks for delivery.

I'll live with that.

On Winning Giveaways You Don't Remember Entering!

For the second time in a row, I've won a book giveaway contest I don't remember entering.   The first time, it was an informal one on The History Girls website. That one I definitely didn't enter, because I checked. I simply put a comment on a post which they must later have decided was their September Giveaway. They give the prize to the comment they like best, in this case a historical novel from HarperCollins. In that case, I didn't actually get the book, because the publisher had specified  UK only, another reason I wouldn't have entered if I had known, but  they offered to send a copy to a British friend, so I put them in touch with my friend Jackie Marshall, who lives in Norfolk and loves historical fiction as much as I do.

This time, I won a $25 Amazon gift voucher from a website I don't recall visiting, but must have, because when I followed the website link, there was my name among the winners. I still don't recall the website, but I have a vague memory of entering one of those centralised giveaways which have a long list of sites giving away books. I don't do it, usually, preferring the more informal ones on English Historical Fiction Writers or, now and then, at the History Girls(rarely the latter, who offer only print books and so don't usually send books outside the UK).

But there are so many of these online giveaways and I must have thought, I have done this myself with very little to show for it, what the heck! And added my name to the Rafflecopter list.

So now, how do I choose? I have discovered that the book being promoted by this author is available for $1.99 on iBooks, so I will leave it for now and buy it later with my iTunes account. I prefer iBooks anyway; I don't have a Kindle and rarely use my Kindle app, which is clumsy, IMO, and doesn't make me feel like I'm reading a book, just a professionally laid out manuscript.

But I must be practical in my choice. A print book would waste several dollars of my precious voucher in postage. And this lady had to work to earn it in order to be able to give it to me, so I will buy as many good ebooks as I can find and get the best value out of it.

And thank you very much, Stephanie Carroll, author of Victorian Gothic novel A White Room!

Random Reading

I've been picking up books at random from my library library shelves lately and taking them home to read.

It's nice just picking up a book that I might never normally read - or, in some cases, never getting around to read - and taking it on the train with me.

One was ACID, a YA dystopian by British writer Emma Pass. I'm not hugely into dystopians, with a few exceptions, but this one was quite readable. In this novel, Britain has become literally a police state. ACID is an organisation that started life as the police force and took over after a global financial disaster known as the Crash, instead of the usual nuclear war. Different! In this country. - England only, it seems, not Europe or the rest of the world - you enter an arranged marriage(LifePartnering) at sixteen and go into an arranged job while you wait for permission to have a baby. The  heroine, Jenna Strong, is in an adult all-male prison for killing her parents, ACID agents. When a rebel organisation called FREE springs her from jail, she discovers her memories have been tampered with big-time. I enjoyed going along for the ride, despite some difficult-to-swallow premises and for an oldie like me there were hints of the 1980s British series Blake's Seven. No spaceships, of course.

I put that back and, yesterday, picked up a book by Heather Brewer, the beginning of the Slayer Chronicles. This one was American and featured something called the Slayer Society, built on the premise that vampire-slaying skills are genetic, running in families, and seen from the viewpoint of thirteen-year-old Joss, who has agreed to go into this because his little sister was murdered by a vamp. I couldn't help wondering whether the author gave the boy the same first name as the creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer on purpose. Bet she did!

It didn't take long to finish this book, which is readable by a late primary/early secondary student reading at their right level. Today I finally borrowed Seraphina by Rachel Hartman,  which has had some good reviews and which I bought last year for a dragon-loving girl. It has dragons who can take human shape and a kingdom sort of like Renaissance Europe. The heroine is a part-dragon musician. So far, lovely, but I'm on page 47. It may take longer to read than the others, but never mind, there will be more random reading to come. Stand by for more reports!

Gamers' Rebellion By George Ivanoff. Melbourne: Ford Street Publishung,2013

When the Ford Street anthology Trust Me! was published a few years ago, one of the short stories was "Game Plan" by George Ivanoff. It was based on a simple idea: where do the characters from video games go for their holidays? The real world,  of course! There, teen thieves Tark and Zyra become ordinary teenagers John and Tina, who do homework and go to school. It was an entertaining and amusing idea.

Who would have thought this little story would be expanded into not one but three novels? 

Tark and Zyra, after many adventures, managed to leave the Game, but we discovered that they had gone for their holidays to another game environment called Suburbia, not the real world. 

In this book, they finally arrive in the world outside the Game and it's not remotely like Suburbia. And the lovely Tina and John, on whom their own appearances are based, are respectively Designer Alpha and Beta and both are thoroughly nasty pieces of work who haven't been teenagers doing homework and going to school for years. Tina had managed to get John to spend all his time in the virtual world while she ran things from  the huge complex which houses the Game. Their former partner, Robert, is Designer Prime and works from his quarters, opposing them with the help of his clone assistant, who... 

You know what? It's a complicated story with a lot of running around, some tributes to Dr Who, teen rebels and much more than I can describe. Best just to read it - after the first two novels, Gamers' Quest and Gamers' Challenge. It won't make sense without them.

Reading this is like playing a video game without having the family complain because you won't get off the computer. Do yourself a favour. Do your family a favour. Read this instead of playing on the computer. The kids will thank you, at least until they pinch your copy of the Gamers' trilogy.

Greylands By Isobelle Carmody. Melbourne: Ford Street Publishing, 2012

Jack is dreaming of his mother, who died after a fall from a height in a fun park. She had been suffering from a form of depression, whose cause we learn late in the book - and Jack blames himself, because it happened on his birthday treat. He is close with his young sister and their father, but since his wife's death, the children's father has been unable to smile or show affection. Soon after the dreams, Jack finds himself slipping in and out of the Greylands, which are strangely bare of humans, apart from a few individuals who appear now and then when necessary to the plot, and are colourless. The Greylands are, in fact, the country of depression and grief, where flying represents escape. There, he meets a little girl he calls Alice, who is clutching a bundle which she refuses to put down for even a moment, a caged being known as the laughing beast who laughs at the absurdities of life and so is not popular, and the terrifying creatures known as wolvers, whose howls and growls are heard, though you can only hope not to see them. There is a puzzle to be solved here, and Jack knows it's connected with Alice and her bundle. It needs to be solved, because another tragedy is on its way...

This novel, one of the author's few stand-alones, was first published some years ago by a much bigger publisher than Ford Street. It's strange to think that anything by a wildly popular writer like Isobelle Carmody would ever go out of print, but this one did, and is now back, in a revised edition with a new cover. The introduction speaks of the background to the novel, her feelings after her father's death, when the world was just going its normal way while her family was grieving its loss. I confess I haven't read the original version and would have liked some hint as to the difference between that and this version, but it doesn't matter, really. You take the story as is, and if you have read and loved the original, you will know as you read and can make your judgement on the changes. I get the feeling that this book is very important to the author, whichever version you read.

This is really something of a literary novel rather than a straight fantasy. There's enough adventure that children might find exciting, though it mostly involves escape from wolvers, but really, it's about family and what happens to a family suffering loss, and which family hasn't? There are some nice references to Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen and it's likely that the author has this in mind; Jack sometimes enters the Greylands through a mirror and his sister suggests that perhaps their father has a piece of mirror lodged in his heart, like Kay in the Andersen story.

Greylands is a bit too sad for me to think of rereading any time soon, but is worth recommending to a good reader of about thirteen upwards. It will become a classic.

Thoughts On My Female Characters

Today, a Year 7 girl returning a copy of Wolfborn asked, "Miss, are you a writer?" - making sure I was actually the author of the book she had just read. When I said yes, she smiled and told me how much she had enjoyed the novel, adding, "especially the girl". It was not just a bit of egoboo, but it made me feel good that finally someone had said they liked my heroine, Jeanne. I have had far too many reviews that have said they liked the book, but not Jeanne, or that the romance was "tacked on".

It wasn't. Jeanne, daughter of the werewolf knight, Geraint, was strong, but vulnerable too. She wanted her father to be rescued and returned to his rightful place, but knew that if and when he did, she would lose the freedom of the forest where she had been brought up and be a castle-bound knight's daughter. And Etienne, the boy from whose viewpoint the story is told, made a huge sacrifice for her at the end, after making his love for her clear all through the story. If that's "tacked on", all I can say is, please, reviewers, go find a nice YA vampire romance. This book isn't for you.

One or two reviewers got it, and made me cheer.

This made me think of my female characters in general. When I wrote Wolfborn, I had fun with the wife of the werewolf knight, who had betrayed him. I deliberately gave her the soppiest name I could think of -  Eglantine, with a nod to Chaucer's Prioress. I ended up feeling a little sorry for her. She had a history, having discovered that a boy she had cared about and nearly married was a werewolf. Mind you, when I wrote a short story based on that incident ("Midwinter Night", published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, issue #54, edited by Simon Petrie) I went back to being unsympathetic toward Eglantine, indicating that it served her right to end up married to a werewolf after she had betrayed her previous fiance, though it would be best for her new husband if she never found out. But she was limited in many ways; still, I gave her a chance to make a better life for herself at the end of the novel. I just couldn't make her a total villain.

Geraint's first love, Sylvie, Jeanne's mother and the local wise-woman, was meant to be strong and was in some ways, but had made some mistakes in her life and never quite gotten over them. I have a confession to make: there's a scene between her and Geraint, late in the novel, which was inspired by one in that lovely movie Ladyhawke, which I was watching while working on the edits. She's tougher than Eglantine(who isn't?) but she lost her family at a young age, due to what she was born, and had to grow up fast, alone in the forest. Only near the end of Wolfborn does she find out what happened to her family.

Of course, she wasn't completely alone after a while. She had a teacher, Lysette, who doesn't appear in this book but is the heroine of the one I'm working on - minus a publisher for the moment, but sooner or later I will feel confident to offer it around. She gets a mention, because my editor wanted to make a sequel possible, but that hasn't happened - there was a shakeup in the company and the Woolshed list and I no longer know anyone in editorial at Random House Australia. On my own, I went back to a prequel I'd already been working on.

Alys is Eglantine's waiting-woman and the wife of the castle's steward. She is the real chatelaine of the household, a woman who knows her domestic tasks well and performs them because Eglantine won't; she never had to, as a spoilt child who went straight from home to court to marriage. Alys is a more traditional woman than the others, but she isn't weak or passive. Women who ran such large households couldn't be. In some ways,  they were like hotel managers who also had to look after the whole estate. Etienne mentions that before his birth, his mother once had to defend the household from invaders while his father was away. Alys doesn't do that, but without her, some of the vital things that happen in the book wouldn't have happened.

Lysette is the heroine of my as-yet unfinished novel set in the same universe, at an earlier date. She is the result of my wondering what would happen if you were born a werewolf in the peasant class. Mostly, they'd be likely to be killed, of course, as soon as they were caught raiding the flocks, but Lysette has to escape from a bunch of local louts, having turned into a wolf for the first time in their presence. After that, she meets a Merlin-like wizard she accidentally releases from a tree, and travels the country with him, searching for a long-lost prince who had gone missing when the wizard's previous apprentice had locked him in that tree.

I've found myself getting Lysette to make a decision, late in the novel, that will not make me popular with girls, hence the fact that I'm still working on it. The problem with prequels is that there are some things you can't change. And one of them is the fact that the romantic interest of the book is a long-lost king and they don't usually marry peasant-girls, let alone werewolf peasant girls. And we know what happened to her later, anyway. Help!

I'm starting to understand why there are so many YA novels where the girl has to choose between two or more boys!

If you don't know what I'm talking about, but are intrigued, I have read from both Wolfborn and the manuscript, The Sword And The Wolf, on Youtube, there's a Wolfborn sample chapter on this web site and you can always order a copy from your local bookshop or library.

Marketing 101: How NOT To Do It

So, I got yet another request for a book promo. I could have had a copy of the book, but the blurb told me it was not my kind of book, though YA. Because the PR firm handling the marketing had addressed me by name instead of making it sound like a mass mail-out, I replied. I wasn't really interested in reviewing the book, but that didn't mean it wouldn't interest my readers. I was prepared to offer the author a guest post. I've done this many times before and it has worked nicely.

They didn't get it. Either that or they hoped if they bustled about enough, I might just go along with what they had planned, which was a blog tour with a press release, a character profile from a book nobody has read yet and one of those fancy Rafflecopter giveaways. Giveaways have never had much success on this web site anyway, except once, when it was being hosted by another site that specialises in giveaways. I think the best result I ever had was about six entries and that included my Goodreads invitation. Honestly, you guys, anyone would think you don't want a free book! Maybe you just love reading my fabulous posts. ;-)

No, I said. I had offered a guest post and ONLY a guest post. I was, however, happy to include a less formal giveaway with the post. And I sent a link to a guest post on my site to give an example of what I had in mind. They admitted that the giveaway was US only. I don't live in the US and neither do half of my readers. I asked them to give my email address to their client so I could explain what was required.

This morning, they sent me their press release again, asking if this was okay for my post today! Today?

I said no, it's a press release. I don't publish them. I explained why the author should write it, and suggested that as I was clearly holding up their blog tour, perhaps we'd better forget about it for now and get the author to contact me later to do the guest post outside the blog tour. I would even CC them.

So that's that. Can you see what these PR folk have done wrong? The only right things they did were to choose a YA site and address me by name. After that, it was a waste of my time and theirs.

And it's a pity. I have, out of curiosity, visited the author's web site and was quite impressed. Yes, it's a self-published book, but this person didn't just rustle up something on CreateSpace or whatever and start emailing blogs to please, please review my book. It's bigger than Ben-Hur! A boutique publishing company with admittedly only one book, printers, distributors, editors, quotes from friends in the business and a crowd funding campaign. And getting copies into bricks and mortar stores. You have to take your hat off to that sort of enterprising nature. I was almost tempted to make direct contact, but thought no, that's what the PR firm is being paid to do. Up to them. They wouldn't like it.

I hope still to do that post, because I think this person deserves promo, so I'm not naming author, book or PR firm.

So, what do you think? I know I did the right thing for my blog, but what would you have done if you had offered one thing and they had tried to push something else on to you? I know it's a PR firm's job to be pushy, but I don't like pushiness. Sorry!

SF To Science Fact: Michael Crichton's Mosquito

Anyone out there read the novel Jurassic Park? I did, a while before the movie came out. Remember the mosquito trapped in amber with a bellyful of blood and they used the DNA to create a dinosaur? Well, they've found a fossil prehistoric mosquito with a bellyful of blood, though they won't be creating dinosaurs any time soon. For one thing, it was about twenty million years after the last dinosaurs  died out. For another, the DNA wouldn't have lasted.

Still, it's exciting. And it was lurking in someone's basement in Montana, US., for about twenty years.  I love it when science fiction becomes science fact, which it has been doing for a very long time now. For example, those mobile phones with the flip tops. The inventor admits he got the idea from the original Star Trek communicators. We'd never have had them if Captain Kirk and his crew had tapped their shoulder gadgets to contact each other, as they did in the later series. And floppy disks, which we admittedly don't use any more, first appeared in Star Trek. And then there was Murray Leinster's A Logic Named Joe, which predicted the Internet, back in the 1940s.

Is it any wonder I love science and science fction?

Parke Godwin, 1929-2013

Having read a post this morning that reminded me that in the northern hemisphere it was still October 14, anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which brought Norman rule to England, I thought it might be fun to discuss Parke Godwin's Sherwood, which sets the story of Robin Hood in William's England - it makes as much sense as Richard the Lionheart, which was basically Walter Scott's idea. I went searching for a suitable picture of the book's cover when I discovered, to my dismay, that the author had died in June this year!

So let me be a little broader. Parke Godwin could  and did write fantasy, award-winning fantasy, but he was also, in my opinion, America's answer to Mary Stewart in writing historical fiction with just a touch of fantasy, and, at that, an American who wrote some of the best fiction about British legendary heroes I have ever read. He comes close behind Rosemary Sutcliff and Mary Stewart in my favourites list.

Let's start with his two Robin Hood books, Sherwood and Robin And The King. Robin is actually Edward, a minor English country gentleman when the Normans arrive. Robin is his mother's pet name for him - "Puck Robin". For various reasons not his fault he is outlawed and his property given to Ralph, the new Sheriff of Nottingham. But Ralph is actually a decent man who treats Robin's peasants well and when the loony Earl of Huntingdon tries to start a rebellion that Robin knows will lead to civil war, he finds he can't support it. As he and Ralph are locked up in the Earl's dungeon together, they must co-operate to get out. What happens then, I will let you find out.

It was a delightful book, though the sequel was much darker. There are also implications about what Robin wrote, once he learned how, and became interested in law, which I won't go into due to spoilers. Just read them, but keep a few hankies for the second book. It's sad!

The Arthurian duo is Firelord and Beloved Exile. They're set in fifth century Britain. Arthur is a stiff -as-a-poker Roman officer. One day, he is kidnapped by the faerie, who are neither Tinkerbell nor Galadriel's relatives, but the indigenous folk of Britain, scorned and mistreated by everyone, the poorest of the poor. And they're his mother's people - Ygerna was left by a faerie midwife with a Roman matron who hadn't been able to give birth to a live child and was persuaded the little girl was her own. Arthur becomes third husband to Morgana, the polyandrous tribe's leader, who loves him but says she can't just dump her other husbands for him. He must leave her to solve an emergency among his own people and never returns, leading to tragedy much later. But he becomes a king who has empathy for the poorest of his people.

The second book, Beloved Exile, is seen from the viewpoint of Guinevere, after Arthur's death. This Guinevere is tough, intelligent and arrogant. She also has a way of staying friends with men she has let down, such as Ancellius(Lancelot), whom she used when depressed and dumped to return to her husband. Now she has been kidnapped and sold into slavery among the Angles. Over several years, she comes to have a respect for the people who were her enemies, and see things their way, impressed by their democratic system.

Both books drew me in and swept me away. The characters were ones I cared about, but not perfect. They had major flaws and so were human and believable. And one of my favourite bits in Firelord is where Arthur tells a Christian knight, "Oh, go and look for your silly cup!" ( The Holy Grail). 

Americans, be proud you produced a writer who could do such a wonderful job with other people's stories! 

I'm going to miss him.

Image taken from Creative Commons.

Launching Murder And Mendelssohn

This morning I left my mother's place early, to go across town to the Sun Bookshop in Yarraville, which is in the nicer part of the western suburbs(the nicest is Williamstown, which is by the sea). The occasion was the annual launch of Kerry Greenwood's latest piece of crime fiction. Usually, she alternates between the Phryne Fisher mysteries, set in the 1920s, and the present day stories centred around Corinna Chapman, baker extraordinaire who lives in a wonderful block of flats in Melbourne's CBD.

No one gets murdered in the Chapman mysteries. Teens go missing. Shonky televangelists do their thing to make money. The local chocolate shop's products are sabotaged, mysterious drugs are causing unintended deaths, but not murders. That sort of stuff. I love them and was looking forward to the next one for this year, but instead, there was a new Phryne Fisher adventure with not one, but two murders! Both victims are choir conductors of the same amateur choir about to perform Mendelssohn's oratorio Elijah. And we discover that Phryne has choral experience(what has this chick not done?). The author has fun with Sherlock Holmes, creating a character who is like Holmes in personality, suggesting that a real-life Holmes, as opposed to Dr Bell, his inspiration, would be impossible to live with for most of us. The venue is Scots Church on Collins St, which is still there, and I think one of the characters lives on the site where the Education Department was located when I started teaching, a tower building considerably bigger than the digs of the choir's accompanist. This is one of the things I love about the series - Melbourne is familiar, and not.

I arrived at Yarraville in plenty of time and as I approached the bookshop, a voice called to me from behind: it was Kerry herself. We sat on a bench for a chat before going on to to the launch. She was wearing a robe which had hand painted titles of all her books on it.  I think she may have done  that herself. She is multi-talented.

As usual, there were plenty of people, though I only saw one familiar face apart from Kerry and her partner  David - a gentleman called Steve, whom I have known since my days in the SCA and now see at the Nova Mob science fiction club meetings. He knows Kerry and  David through the SCA. However, it was a nice event as always. David, who sings, runs the launch and organises the choir
which sings every time.

The bookshop is next to the Sun Theatre and the launch spills over into the cinema foyer. I bought my book - I had already bought the ebook, but I share these books with my family - and wandered into the foyer.

They always have munchies, soft drink and celebratory champagne and catering people hired to serve them. I enjoyed some sushi, cupcakes and toast with cheese.

It was impossible to get a decent photo with my poor little phone; every time I tried, someone woud wander past or bob up in the crowd to put their heads in front of me. And when I did get in a shot, there was strong light coming from outside, removing David's head! Ah, well...

Afterwards, I lined up to have my book signed - ony one this year, alas, since my poor friend Jan Finder the Wombat passed away.

I asked Kerry's Mum to be in a pic with me for my mother, whom I couldn't persuade to come along, though she loves Kerry's books, because she doesn't like travelling all that way from home; Jean Greenwood is five years older than Mum and more fragile. She kindly agreed and one of her other daughters took the photo. I came out blurry, alas, but never mind.

I believe that this afternoon there's to be a singalong of Elijah, but I am home, writing this and about to watch this week's Miss Fisher's Murder Mystery which is the Jock McHale's Hat story with a murder added to it. 

The Chopper Is Gone

Chopper Read is dead. The professional criminal is gone. Why mention this on a book blog?

A few years ago, I wrote Crime Time: Australians behaving badly, a children's book about crime in this wide brown land. And Mark Brandon Read, the Chopper, was in it. He had recently been diagnosed with cancer and he was being overwhelmed with offers of organ donations.  He said that  no, he wouldn't accept; sick children deserved it more.

The man was a criminal, no doubt about it. Of course, he only picked on fellow crooks, not out of any nobility, but because, after all, as he said himself, they weren't going to call the cops, were they?

But there has to be something about a criminal who could become such a celebrity that people were offering him organs! Something charming? Charismatic? I don't know. I just researched and wrote about him, along with the serial killers and the stupid thieves and the gangsters.

I wrote that book on commission and as usual, I learned a lot about the subject I was researching, but unlike other times I couldn't write about people my young readers could admire. At best, I was playing with them in a whimsical way, showing them as the idiots they were. At worst, they were scary, as one student said recently when another student was borrowing my book from the library. And then there was Chopper, who wasn't an idiot as such, but wasn't a serial killer either. It was hard to know what to make of him. In the end, I just showed him as another crook who, somehow, became a celebrity.

I will be grabbing a few quiet moments to read my chapter about him on to a video for YouTube. I'll add the link here when it's done.

Image taken from Wikimedia Commons

Monster School. City of Monsters Book 1. By D.C. Green. Melbourne :Ford Street Publishng, 2013

Thomas is the Prince of Monstro City, heir to the throne since his father and brother were carried off by vampires. His mother has been lying comatose in hospital. And Thomas is virtually imprisoned with an ogre bodyguard called Erica, as, ruler of a dying species - humans - he is in constant danger of being assassinated by anything from Bloody Mary, who reaches out from the bathroom mirror to vampire mosquitoes.  

But there is something fishy in the state of Monstro City and it isn't necessarily the swamp monsters. Thomas goes undercover - literally - at the local monster high school to find out. There, he meets sweet mummy girl Scarab, a wisecracking giant spider called Bruce, maggot-riddled zombie Zorg, cynical goblin girl Greta and Stoker, a mohawked vampire who looks oddly familiar.

I should add that, despite the title, the novel takes off from here. The school is only there early in the book, to introduce the characters and give some background to the universe. And the author does find ways to explain the world he has created, partly through the teachers and partly through a volume called The Monster Guide by one DC Greengoblin. Interestingly, the monster characters aren't merely cutesy fantasy critters. The mummy is a genuine mummy, woken from death only four years ago. The zombie was once a human boy, as was the vampire. We learn that the monsters of various kinds always existed, they simply had to go underground during the human era. After a major flood, they returned.

When Thomas and his new friends find out what has really been going on and why the palace is broke, they go on a quest to save the kingdom. Starting with collecting back taxes from a dragon...

There is plenty of action, adventure and humour, with excellent cartoon illustrations and cover by Danny Willis, who has done the art for some of Paul Collins' books. There is also an oddly serious flavour to the later parts of the book and be warned, it ends on a cliffhanger, with a few pages of the second volume. 

An entertaining book for good readers in late primary and early secondary school.

Donating To The Library - When You KNOW You Won't Read It Again

As a teacher-librarian, I get a lot of would-be donations, but rarely something the kids will actually want to read or use. Like the old textbooks the faculty is cleaning out because they're no longer using  them, but for some reason think we're going to be able to use it. And the Jackie Collins epics. And a class set of someone's self-published semi-autobiographical novel, handed to the principal who, looking sheepish, hands them to me, arguing,"She's a former student!"

Once in a while, there's some good stuff - once, I scored twenty-five Aurealis Award YA entries. And of course, my friend Stephanie Campisi gave me a pile of her wonderful YA review copies. I have been donating my own review copies, though recently, I have only been receiving books from Ford Street and Bloomsbury; not sure what's happened to the others, but at least one of the other publishers which had been sending me review books has gone cheap and now offers only Netgalley ARCs for review. I might accept their excuse of,"It's about being environmentally friendly" if they'd stopped printing hard copy books, but they haven't. So I explained, twice at least, that I only review print books, because I can't put ebooks on my library shelves.

Now, I've gone to my own shelves for books that are perfectly good, but which I know in my heart I will never get around to reading again. It will help make space on my home shelves and hopefully the kids will enjoy books that I loved when I read them. A couple of them are personally autographed to me, which makes me feel bad, but what the heck! I bought them, they weren't gifts, and better for them to be read again by the age group for which they were  intended than sit around gathering dust on my overflowing book cases. They 're in excellent condition - I never give away stuff that isn't.

But I feel a little sad. There's a Richard Harland book there, a Scott Westerfeld one(one of our students has recently asked for one of his other books), a wonderful novel by Archie Fusillo... And of course, a couple of recent titles I got for reviewing and have reviewed recently on this site. I am less attached to those ones, because I always intended to donate those. The others were books I bought for me.

So I will have something new to show the students this week.

Meanwhile, I do have some Ford Street titles to finish and review before they land on my library shelves. I am reading DC Green's Monster School, before getting back to review George Ivanoff's final Gamer's novel  and two by Paul Collins which I haven't finished reading and a Tanya McCartney picture book, which I need to unearth from my pile of books and papers.

Better get on to it!

Books I Just Couldn't Resist

I've just put together all my spendings for tax - tomorrow I see my tax agent - and have realised that in this financial year, I've bought far more ebooks than print. I claim all my books, because of my dual role of writer and teacher librarian. Non fiction is used in my research and fiction both for my market research and doing my job as a schoolmarm properly.

Sometimes I have downloaded a book the kids are reading - last year we ran out of copies of Gabrielle Wang's A Ghost In My Suitcase, for example, and I was sitting with that group reading it aloud, as one of the students was a dyslexic. It seemed simplest to download and read immediately. This year I bought ebooks of some of the CBCA shortlisted books as soon as the list was announced.

And sometimes, I just read about a new book or an old favourite and yield to the temptation to download. I seem to have done that a lot this year. It's so easy just to open iBooks and start downloading. Which is what I did during the Reading Matters conference, often while the authors were speaking. So when autograph time began, I had nothing for them to sign.

I have downloaded Harry Harrison's The Technicolor Time Machine. That's an old favourite of which I never tire. And my print copy is falling apart. I got a Howard Myers book from the Baen free web site - never read any of his work before. A good time to try it. I bought Kerry Greenwood's new Phryne Fisher novel, Murder And Mendelssohn, though I will also have to buy the print copy because I share these with my mother and sister, but I just couldn't wait. I have to say that for the first time I figured out the murderer before the end and thought,"Oh, no, I will HATE it if the killer turns out to be..." and suspected that it would. And it was. But the book was fun and as so often, Kerry has written about a subject she knows - in this case, choirs. There was also Trust Me, the anthology in which I have a story, because I can't recall where my print copy is and before the holidays, a student asked me if I had anything similar to the title story of the anthology, and, to my shame, I couldn't remember the story. So I will make sure I read the lot.

The thing is, it 's just so very EASY to do this. You don't have to go to the bookshop or the library and when you finish one book, there's plenty more on your little computer to read. A very good thing for soone like me who can't do the deferred gratification thing, eh?

On Editing My Science Fiction Magazine - Latest Thoughts

I have been browsing through my stories for ASIM 60, having sent off my editorial yesterday. There are still some book reviews to slot in,but that has to wait until Simon Petrie, our wizard of everything, has finished the layout and can tell me how many words we have left. There also has to be space for the advertisements that help keep us going.   I am still awaiting the art - the cover artist, Eleanor Clarke, emailed the other day to say she had done some initial sketches she would send on as soon as she got access to a scanner. Eleanor is a wonderful artist - I feel very old, because I remember when she was born.  Now she is the young mother of two bright little boys, and doing very well with her art.

Reading through my editorial, I have suddenly realised that almost half of the contents are space-themed. Oh, dear. I hope we don't get any rude letters about it. I remember when someone who loves horror fiction made an entire horror-themed issue and lost us some subscribers.

But there's fantasy. There's humour and serious. There's a little bit of horror, because we need it to balance an issue, though I confess to knowing very little about horror fiction. As I have said, I'm not a fan. I chose stuff that worked well for me, but wasn't too horrific.

 So it balanced, sort of. I could only work with the stories available to me, and I would receive a wonderful story, cry out,"YESSS!!!" and suddenly there's a full table of contents and about seven of them are about "strange new worlds" . Whoops! And yet, they're mostly about what people do on those worlds. Because when we're out there, we will still be human, with human faults and dreams.

 I have a confession to make:  my love of speculative fiction is based on something called "sensawunda", ie "sense of wonder", and for me, that means, "Space, the final frontier!"

But I think it's going to be a great issue and I am really chuffed at how many first and second sales I have among the veterans. When the cover is ready I will show it off here to my readers. Stand by.

Richard III is 561 today!

It's October 2nd in this part of the world, though northern hemisphere folk won't be able to celebrate till tomorrow. Last year, I posted a Richard III birthday celebration. Here's the link:

http://suebursztynski.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/happy-birthday-richard-iii.html

Since then I have reread Daughter Of Time, The Sunne In Splendour,  and the two Rosemary Hawley Jarman books, We Speak No Treason and The King's Grey Mare. I think the last-mentioned is not as good as Jarman's first book. It could have been a good historical romance except that the heroine stops being the heroine early in the book. She gets Edward as a husband using witchcraft and is horrible to people we care about. It was just too hard to write a novel from her and the Lancastrian viewpoint when cheering for the other side. We Speak No Treason was wonderful except that I kept muttering, "Richard, you idiot! Stop forgiving everyone! Lock up Stanley, execute Morton, do it NOW!" And her saintly Richard III really was an idiot. I think The Sunne In Splendour was more believable in this respect. But still a beautiful book.

I wish I could find my copy of the children's book, A Sprig Of Broom, part of the Mantlemass series. There are a lot of books out there if you can find them, which give Richard fictional descendants. And there's Margaret Campbell Barnes' The King's Bed, which features Dickon, a bastard son of Richard who may have lived a long life as a stonemason. Well, you never know.

Banned Books Week Readout: Northern Lights

So, here it is! As usual, my lips don't synch. I think YouTube doesn't much like .mov format. I do have it in Quicktime but it's hundreds of megabytes and I don't know how it will work out anyway, so maybe later.

Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AReFKTQf78Q&feature=youtu.be

Alas, I couldn't get much interest in this year's Banned Books Week from the kids. Little Priyanka expressed interest, and I may be able to get Minh to have a go,  possibly a couple of others,but generally, things have gone downhill since my original Book Clubbers went off to Senior campus. It's just not the same any more. I may have to wait and see who turns up next year.

Still - let's see how it goes when I show this to them. And later, I may just read from Lord Of The Rings, even if the week is over. That's another favourite that seems to end up on the Banned Books list. Would you believe that there are objections to the religion? I mean, that it's against religion? We're talking J.R.R Tolkien here, a devout Catholic who wound his faith into his novel. I can understand them saying that about Phillip Pullman's books (though there's a rather interesting online discussion between him and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who likes the series), but Tolkien? The poor man would be shocked! Oh, and there are objections to the fact that young readers are exposed to characters smoking. Well, yes, but really, I can't see kids getting stuck into pipe smoking just because Bilbo does it! And there's a scene where the supremely sexy Legolas tells the rest of the Fellowship that he really doesn't get this smoking thing and how they could possibly waste their time on it.

What I love about it is the fact that in Tolkien, ordinary people can be heroes and save the world. And interestingly, Father Bob Maguire said the same thing on Twitter the other day. Nice to know that I'm not the only one who thinks that.

Do check out my reading, try to ignore the dubbing glitch and see what you think. Let me know!

And just so you know, I will not be publishing any rude comments by people who are against Banned Books Week, like that man last year. Some people seriously need to get a life.

What I'm reading For Banned Books Week

I read recently that this was at one stage the second on the top ten banned and challenged books. Who can resist? I am a bit late this year, but what the heck? My video will stay up. And the students will see it. I often wonder why they keep Googling me, but am kind of flattered when a student finds me reading aloud on YouTube and calls,"Miss! Hey, Miss!". They found me interesting enough to look up. 

I read the entire series a few years ago and loved the beauty of the imagery and realised that, like the Narnia books, it had more than kids would notice while reading it. I borrowed it from the library on Friday for a reread and am having trouble deciding which passage to read. I think it may be the scene where, having gone through her long, dangerous and exhausting quest, Lyra turns up on Lord Asriel's doorstep only to find herself unwelcome and bursts into an angry speech.

A great and powerful trilogy, though, like China Mieville, the author seems to think he's better than Tolkien. No way, mate! It's good stuff, but not that good!

Some time today, perhaps after lunch, I will sit down at my laptop and record, then have fun and games trying to remember how to convert it to a format usable on YouTube. Otherwise, you get a thing that looks like an attempt to dub a foreign film, with lips moving faster or slower than the sound. And no matter what I do, I get a mirror image of the book cover.

Still, it's the reading that matters. I will post a link when done.

Two Trickster Tales From Russia, Retold By Sophie Masson , Art by David Allan. Christmas Press, 2013

Some time ago, as I mentioned on this blog, I was invited to join a crowd funding venture. Sophie Masson, author of some gorgeous YA novels based on folk tales, had started a new venture with her friends, Christmas Press, which would publish traditional folk tales, starting with two from Russia. Would we donate towards this and for a set amount of money, we would receive a "perk" - in my case, a signed copy of the book.

My sister went to collect it for me from the post office. As soon as I had opened the parcel and begun to drool, she asked me if she could have it for Eden, my nephew Mark's older boy. I had waited for this and looked forward to it and it was every bit as gorgeous as I had expected.

But I thought of my crowded shelves and remembered that it was, after all, a children's book and Eden was about the right age to be discovering folk tales. I sighed, read it and handed it over. Really, there are too many adults collecting picture books as works of art instead of reading them with the children in their lives. And the publishers know about this and make sure there are plenty of artistic picture books aimed more at adults than children.

This isn't one of them, though it is a work of art. The style of the pictures is inspired by old Russian children's books and I can see this, but it also reminds me of English fairy tale artist Walter Crane, whose work illustrated such familiar tales as "Red Riding Hood"(see above). Gorgeous!

The two stories are "Masha And The Bear" and "The Rooster With The Golden Crest". The first reminds me of the folk tale where the girl marries the Devil and tricks him into taking her home in a sack. The second, about a truly stupid chook, is also familiar. Both have the repitition kids love, and should be fun to read with the little ones.

Read, enjoy, but make sure the child in your life does too.

The good news is that four year-old Eden has declared his passion for tales of brave knights, princesses and dragons.  Ah, little boy, come to Auntie Sue! 

The Walter Crane picture is taken from Creative Commons.

More On My iBooks Shelf

I finished rereading Star Prince Charlie yesterday, just as delightful as the first time. It's all too easy to have fond memories of a book and then find out it's not as good as you thought.

When Ann Crispin died the other day I downloaded her YA novel Starbridge, the first of a series. It has the flavour of an Andre Norton, well, sort of. I liked it very much, anyway, a story of First Contact, where the little ship is chugging home to Earth, minding its own business and suddenly -  aliens! Who turn out to be looking for their own First Contact for their own reasons... And the baby-blanket-shaped sentient fungus who farts oxygen...:)

I downloaded Percy's Reliques, but couldn't read much of it, so I went back to Gutenberg and found a volume of selected Percy ballads edited by Andrew Lang, bless him! Much easier to follow and missing the waffle.

Today I bought John Safran's new book, Murder In Mississippi, which was about what happened when he went to the US, firstly to record an episode of Race Relations which was never aired because the white supremacist who was the subject of it was a lawyer who had sued an entire county, among other things, and could easily do the same to the ABC. A year later the horrible man was murdered by a black man and certain questions about him led John Safran to go back to the US to write a book about it all. I'm a couple of hundred pages in already and finding it very readable, like a detective story in its own right. If he's going to be a true crime writer, he's made a good start.

Now, I'm putting this on the charger till bedtime and asking my ebooks to bed with me.

Of Another City's Writers' Festival

I'm finishing breakfast and listening to Books And Arts Daily on Radio National. Some of the interviews have been with participants in this year's Berlin Reads program, connected with the International Literature Festival. Check out this link, go on. In case you don't, there's a page about an event known as Berlin Reads in which anyone and everyone's invited to apply to read aloud from a favourite book in a favourite spot. One woman read from Henry Fielding. Another reader, a librarian at Humboldt University, chose to read poems by one of the Humboldt brothers near a statue of the pair, in Bookburning Square, where the Nazis burned books in the 1930s. How wonderful! ( The choice of spot, not the bookburning!)

And what a fabulous idea! Everyone can take part in the Writers' Festival and share their love of books. You do have to apply, so the organisers know what's happening, can clear it with the council and presumably make sure it doesn't get nasty. But it works. It worked so well last year in Berlin that they're doing it again.

So, what do you think, oh, my readers? Wouldn't it be a terrific thing to do in our hometowns at the next writers' festival? Melbourne Writers' Festival, I invite you to consider it. A Fed Square/State Library event or people could negotiate other venues if they thought anyone would stop to listen.

Opinions?

Paul Collins And His New Book

Last night, I received the following email from my lovely publisher Paul Collins, who has also been writing for many years and supporting Australian speculative fiction since Year Dot:

"Hi Sue

I've just had a horror novel published by Damnation Books in the US --Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/ny6urwy.

It's now time to try and get some reviews/promo happening, but I'm long out of the adult fiction scene. I don't suppose you have any ideas -- horror magazine editor contacts, etc?

I've attached a copy in case you'd like to blog about it or review it for your site."

I am not a horror fan and I don't read much adult fiction, but if Paul Collins wrote it, it will be worth reading and from the acknowledgements page I see that he has done his research on certain aspects of the story - cults, police, things spiritual and other such stuff, asking people who knew more about it than he did.

I have asked some bloggers who have wider tastes than I do, but thought it might be good to let my readers know about it.

Fortunately, The Milk... By Neil Gaiman, illustrated Chris Riddell,Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013

"This is quite possibly the most exciting adventure ever to be written about milk since Tolstoy's epic novel War and Milk. Also it has aliens, pirates, dinosaurs and wumpires in it (but not the handsome, misunderstood kind), also a never-adequately-explained-bowl-of-piranhas, not to mention a Volcano God." - Neil Gaiman's web site

What else can I say? Mum goes to work. Dad has to go out for a carton of milk because otherwise there will be none to put in his tea or on the children's breakfast cereal. He comes back quite some time later, clutching the carton of milk and with a bizarre story to explain his long absence - being abducted by aliens who want to conquer - and redecorate - the planet, rescued by a time travelling dinosaur professor and going on a scary adventure involving all of the above and somehow retaining the milk. Is he telling the truth or, as the children suspect, is it a load of rubbish? Decide for yourself.

It's a funny, cheeky, over-the-top story for younger readers and, I suspect, for the adults who are reading it with them. Indeed, if you're familiar with Neil Gaiman and what he looks like, you may notice that the Dad in Chris Riddell's delightful cartoons looks a lot like the author. 

I received this review copy on a day when I was home in bed with a nasty cold, feeling miserable, and it cheered me right up. Thank you, Neil and Chris!

Slushing For ASIM

• For the few of you who have no idea what ASIM is, or think it's short for Asimov, it's Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, which I have mentioned in previous posts. I'm a second-wave member of the ASIM team - not the original bunch, but one of the next lot to join. People have come and gone over the years, but we still have quite a few who have been with the team since nearly the beginning and a few who have been there since the start. And somehow, we've kept it going and it's now up to issue 58. Mine, issue 60, will be out early next year and I'm proud to say that I have five first sales, including one poet and one story writer who had previously self published(well, most poetry has to be self published these days, so it was lovely for the author to finally be paid!)
  
  All but one of my stories I found in slush - and that one I asked to look at because I was short of submissions in that genre, and it turned out to be only a second sale. The author is herself a slush reader, though for a different publication. And here's where I am going to get to my point: we're a popular market. There are some Hugo and Nebula nominees out there who sold us their first stories. We're so popular that our slush wrangler, Lucy Zinkiewicz, is currently short of slush readers. I have agreed to take on more stories per week, but that really isn't enough.
  
  This is a volunteer thing. There's no money in it. But if you're a writer who wants to see the slushpile from the other side or an editor who currently has no work and wants to keep their hand in or just a reader who would like to read new stories, this is a good place to come. It's fun. My sister does one story a week, because she has done the Holmesglen writing and editing course and wants to keep her hand in.
  
  You don't have to be a professional. You don't have to live in Australia, everything is done by email. You just need to love speculative fiction. You can volunteer for as little as one story a week or as many as suit you. It's a real eye opener and if you are a writer yourself, you will have a better idea of what happens on the other side of the slushpile and maybe grumble a bit less when your masterpiece comes back. Or maybe, after having seen some of the submissions we get, you will appreciate why a story might be rejected, apart from the readers being philistines. ;-) In fact, we have a wide variety of readers, from the ASIM members, who are all writers themselves, to those who are just keen readers and think what they would and wouldn't be willing to pay for in a magazine.
  
  If interested, contact Lucy at asimsubmissions@gmail.com.
  
  

New Books And Rereads On My Shelves And IPad

Well, I finished the delightful new Neil Gaiman book, which will get its review very soon, and by the way, the father who has all those adventures going out for a carton of milk is definitely drawn as the author! More anon.

My birthday brought me one book from my nephew David. It's a biography of Steve Jobs, written on request by the subject, while he was already dying. He didn't require to be shown the manuscript before publication or to have control over it. He just wanted it written.

I admit it wasn't a book I would have bought for myself, although I quite like biographies, depending on the subject - usually a historical bio of someone dead for a few hundred years, though I have read quite a few of Tolkien and C.S Lewis. But I began reading it yesterday and got through 100 pages. It's a fascinating story. Did you know he was born the same year as Bill Gates? Well, I didn't, and it's a way to be able to compare. I hadn't realised he was adopted either, or that he refused ever to meet his biological father, considering his adoptive parents as his real and only ones. Which is good to know, because he gave them a lot of troubles in his childhood and teens. He wasn't a nice man, but a nice man couldn't have achieved what he did. The nice man he worked with wouldn't have gotten those wonderful computers past the hobbyists. I have left it at my mother's place,to be read in bed while I'm there, as it's a thick, heavy hardcover I can't carry in the train.

And early yesterday morning, when I couldn't sleep, I discovered, to my delight, that Poul Anderson and Gordy Dickson's Hoka stories were available on ebook. If you haven't read them, go get them NOW! The Hokas are a loveable race of ursinoids(think giant teddy bears). They simply adore Earth history and literature and enjoy playing with them. In fact, they live them. A Hoka delegation on Earth are charmed by Don Giovanni and take on all the roles, nearly causing disaster. Another bunch of Hokas become the Space Patrol of a popular children's series. On the planet itself, there are Hoka versions of everything from the French Foreign Legion to Victorian England, including a Hoka Sherlock Holmes. It's all seen from the viewpoint of Alex Jones, a young man given the job of Plenipotentiary, who keeps getting caught up in various Hoka adventures. The one I downloaded first was Earthman's Burden, but I mean to buy the others, Star Prince Charlie and Hoka! 

Star Prince Charlie has a Hoka in it, but isn't set on the Hoka homeworld. A young man, Charlie, and his Hoka tutor, who is playing the role of an Oxford don,  visit a world with a situation similar to Scotland in the time of Bonnie Prince Charlie and this inspires the Hoka to become a Scottish clansman, with his charge as Bonnie Prince Charlie. Delightful!

Time to arise, eat, clean and prepare classes. Sigh!

Er - Comfort Reading?

And while I was going on about being unable to read anything new while sick, look what was waiting for me when I got home! The lovely Sonia Palmisano, publicity guru at Bloomsbury, seems to get it right, time after time, with my review copies.

Pity that one of the other publishers with which I have had a good relationship - no names! - has started offering Netgalley ARCs only, instead of books you can handle and stroke and then put on the library shelves for the kids to enjoy. I have made it clear in the past that I don't review ebooks. I have my reasons, mainly that I do this to supplement my pitiful library budget - and it seems to me that publishers who want you to publicise their product owe you at least a physical option. I know a lot of reviewers don't mind, but they should at least ask, "Will you take it as ebook or would you prefer print?" and keep a few print copies for stubborn folk like me.

Ah, well, at least when I'm recovered, I can enjoy my lovely Neil Gaiman book for younger readers, review it and then offer it to our students. :-)

Of Comfort Reading And Illness

As I write this I'm on the way home. See, I was idiotic enough to drag myself in to work this morning, before I was ready. But I had emailed someone on the weekend to say I probably wouldn't be in and they had already covered me, so I handed over today's work for the class and my friend the welfare teacher took me to the station. And when I get home, I will be warming up the living room and maybe putting on the radio, though more likely a CD if this morning's talk is about the disaster that happened in Australia on the weekend(I will allow myself to be in denial for a little longer) and I will curl up on the sofa under a blanket with some comfort reading.

My comfort reading varies. Sometimes it's Kerry Greenwood's mysteries which I almost know by heart by now. Sometimes it's Tolkien, because his "beautiful writing" really is beautiful, with its emphasis on characters you care about and journeys that matter and sometimes just the plain joy of a good meal and a pint at the pub or a luxurious bath after a long and dangerous trek.

Right now, it's Terry Pratchett, physical book chosen at random - Carpe Jugulum, the vampire sendup that was having a go at the Ann Rice style of vampire, but which ought to be compulsory reading for anyone who thinks Edward Cullen is a hunk.

Also, I have all four Tiffany Aching books on my iPad and I have just started to reread them from the beginning, with Wee Free Men. There's something wonderful about following Tiffany from the nine year old girl who loves words like susurrus to the young woman who has found her place as witch of the chalk country and, incidentally, got an intelligent boyfriend by the end of the final book.

And having read Nicola Upson's crime novel with Josephine Tey as heroine, I'm back, rereading Daughter Of Time for the umpteenth time.

You can't read new stuff when you're sick and get the best out of it. Well, I can't.

So, off to bed and on with the comfort reading.

Anyone out there got their own favourites in comfort reading?

About Ann Crispin

If, like me, you used to read media-themed fiction(books as opposed to fan fiction) you may be familiar with the name of Ann Crispin, who has written some fine books in the Star Trek and Star Wars universes.

Over the last few years, she has done writers' workshops and more and, with some friends, has set up a wonderful blog called Writer Beware, in which they have exposed some shonky publishers and publishing deals and goodness knows, with so many books being self-published these days, there is a need for this sort of information, though it's not only the self-pub companies or even the small presses that rip off writers. I have been following it out of general interest.

Now, Ann has written this post to announce that her life is coming to an end, with no certainty of how much longer she has. If you have read her work or even have an interest in this subject matter, do wander over and take a look. I've left a comment and so can you, if you like.

We're losing too many wonderful creative people. Fred Pohl, a writer from the Golden Age of spec fic, has just passed away. Mind you, he lived to be 94 and was getting Hugo nominations for his fan writing in recent years! So he was at least using his time well, even if it was just fan writing.

See you beyond the stars, Fred!

September 4th

September 4 is almost certainly my real birthday, as I discovered some years ago when researching for a book at the State Library newspaper archives.  I thought it might be fun to get a front page of a newspaper for my day of birth and looked up September 3. Which was a Thursday the year I was born. I was born on Friday. 

Really, if you want to do a birthday meme, this is the wrong time of year. Battles, killings, all sorts of dreadful stuff and boring people who share a birthday with you. September 3, my official birthday, has it all.

But for September 4 I did manage to find two favourite writers - Mary Renault and Joan Aiken. I was delighted.

Mary Renault was the Rosemary Sutcliff of Ancient Greece. She made it feel real, as if you were there, and that included her novels about mythological characters such as Theseus. Evangeline Walton wrote a Theseus novel at around the same time, but it wasn't as good - she was best at Welsh myth. I cried over The King Must Die(which I first read when I was eleven) and The Bull From The Sea. She convinced me that Theseus might have been a real person, and the fantastical elements were limited to his ability to know when an earthquake was about to happen. Even his visit to the underworld was explained as a stroke, after which he can't move properly any more.

Joan Aiken was the kind of writer I have always had a hankering to be - witty, quirky, creating a universe in which of course there are unicorns and the kindergarten class is taught by a fairy and in fact, there are fundraisings for the local retired fairy home. And then there's the Dido Twite series, set in an alternative universe in which the Stuarts still rule England in the nineteenth century and the Hanoverians are always plotting to get in. I have read The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase and The Stolen Lake. In the latter, someone steals the lake into which King Arthur threw Excalibur... No, you have to read it, I won't go into detail. But it's the sort of quirky silliness you'd expect from this author. 

So if my birthday is indeed September 4, I am sharing it with at least two wonderful writers.