young adult – Page 16

Miscellaneous Memoranda

'Drei neugierige Katzen' by Arthur Heyer (1931) — Fluffy indicates the time of the crime, while his assistants, Muffin and Smokey, examine the evidence carefully for further clues

– I think I’m writing the wrong sort of books. Apparently, cat mysteries, a “subgenre of detective novels in which crimes are solved either by cats or through feline assistance” are selling “millions upon millions of copies”. I tend to agree with the author of the article, who suggests cats are “more likely to commit crimes than to detect them”. (To appease any cat fanciers who may be reading this, here’s a cat comic.)

– Those who regularly use Wikipedia may be interested in this article, which points out that only nine percent of Wikipedia editors are women and that male editors frequently try to delete articles seen as not culturally “significant” enough (that is, too “girly”). This leads, for example, to an article on Kate Middleton’s wedding dress being flagged for deletion for being a “trivial” topic – although somehow, Wikipedia manages to find the space to include more than a hundred articles on Linux.

– I love What Was That Book?, a community on LiveJournal in which readers write in to ask for help finding books they’ve read so long ago that they’ve forgotten the titles and authors. I’m constantly amazed at how quickly the community is able to identify a book, based on very vague clues. For example:

“The last radish in the world (galaxy? universe?) goes up for auction. The person who wins the radish is underwhelmed by the experience of eating the legendary vegetable. It might be a science fiction short story or a scene in a novel.”

And, within twenty-four hours, a reader had let us know that the book was Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper.

– Kill Your Darlings is hosting a YA Championship, in which their “ten favourite YA fanatics – authors, buyers, publishers, readers, writers – [will] champion their favourite Australian YA book from the last 30 years”. The public will then vote on the selected shortlist, although there’s also a People’s Choice category allowing the public to nominate their own favourite books, with book packs as prizes.

– And my own Vintage Classics book giveaway is still on, with entries closing on Wednesday.

Miscellaneous Memoranda

– The National Year of Reading Read This! prize winners have been announced, after attracting lots of fabulously creative entries from young readers. I think my favourite entry was the knitted Wizard of Oz characters by twelve-year-old Lexi, although the papier-mâché model of James and the Giant Peach by Michelle, also twelve years old, was wonderful, too. (Also, I just discovered that ‘papier mâché’ is French for ‘chewed paper’. Thanks so much for telling me that, Oxford Dictionary.)

– Entries in the 2012 John Marsden Prize for Young Australian Writers are now open, with “young writers under the age of 25 [. . .] urged to enter the competition to share in $5,500 in prize money and have the opportunity to be published online and in the December issue of Voiceworks, Express Media’s literary quarterly.” You have until September to enter your short story or poem, with more information here.

– Speaking of young readers and writers, there’s a great new(ish) online magazine for teenage girls called Rookie. I wish magazines like that had existed when I was a teenager. (Sadly, the internet hadn’t even been invented when I was a teenager.)

– There’s an interesting article here by Anthony Horowitz about how book covers end up plastered with glowing endorsements from other writers. I’m currently reading a YA novel by an established US author, and the Cassandra Clare endorsement (“A gorgeously written, chilling atmospheric thriller.” CASSANDRA CLARE, bestselling author of THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS SERIES) takes up more space on the front cover than the name of the book’s author. But do book buyers actually pay any attention to these quotes? As the first commenter on the article says, “Probably the only people who would truly benefit from an author’s endorsement are new or little-read authors – exactly the kind of people who (for completely understandable and rational reasons) are least likely to get them.”

– I recently read two fascinating articles about successful novelists who decided to stop writing (and, presumably, to stop endorsing other authors’ books). “There’s just too much stress on authors,” said Steph Swainston, author of the Castle series. She was unhappy with the pressure from fans and publishers to produce a book a year, and disliked the modern need for authors to be ‘celebrities’ and engage with social media (“The internet is poison to authors”). The other author, Elizabeth Harrower, was less forthcoming about why she stopped writing in 1966:

“It’s not as though she ran out of things to say – ‘there were probably too many things to say’. It’s not as though her work was poorly received – her second novel, The Long Prospect, was described as ranking ‘second only to Voss as a postwar work of Australian literature’. It’s not as though she was busy raising children – she never married and is childless.”

In the end, she simply says, “[I] realised I just can’t be bothered any more.”

– To end on a more positive note, this year The Famous Five celebrate the seventieth anniversary of their first adventure, Five on a Treasure Island. Naturally, the celebratory feast will feature ham sandwiches on crusty bread, hard-boiled eggs, currant buns and lashings of ginger beer.

Inside a Dog Index

I’ve just finished a month of blog posts at Inside a Dog, the website of the Centre for Youth Literature, so I thought I’d post the links to each post here, for my own reference and for the benefit of anyone else who might be interested.

Introduction

How To Write a Historical Novel in Seven Easy Steps

1. Think up a good idea for a story
2. Do lots of research
3. Get organised
4. Write lots of words
5. Edit, edit, edit
6. Gaze upon the efforts of the designer and typesetter
7. Admire your finished book

More About Writing a Historical Novel

Planning vs Not Planning
Real People in Historical Fiction
Same Book, But Different (editing for an international readership)

Life in Wartime

Keep Calm and Carry On
Looking Good in Wartime, Part One
Looking Good in Wartime, Part Two
Eating Well in Wartime
Blackout
Animals at War

An End and a Beginning

I promise my next blog post will not mention the FitzOsbornes. Or the Second World War.

Attention Aspiring Authors

If you’re an aspiring author of children’s or YA books and you live in New South Wales, you might like to check out the Children’s Book Council’s Frustrated Writers’ Mentoring Program, which awards mentorships with a professional editor or published author. There are separate categories for writers who are Juniors (under 15 years), Young Adults (15-20 years old) and Seniors (anyone over 20 years), with entries closing on the 1st of June. Some of the successful Australian authors who’ve entered the program include J.C. Burke, Jacqueline Harvey, Kirsty Eagar, Oliver Phommavanh, Aleesah Darlison, Nathan Luff, Jenny Blackman and er, me. I won a CBCA mentorship in 2003 with Alyssa Brugman, and not only did Alyssa give me a lot of useful advice for improving my manuscript, she also helped me find a publisher and an agent for my first novel. So I think this program is pretty good.

The CBCA and the State Library of NSW are also getting together this year to offer four days of creative writing workshops for teenage writers, led by Anthony Eaton, Michael Pryor, Ursula Dubosarsky, Tony Thompson and the Bell Shakespeare Company. The first Master Class is on the 29th of March and you can find all the details here.

Same Book, But Different

There’s an interesting post at The Readventurer about the significant differences between the North American and Australian editions of Cath Crowley’s YA novel, Graffiti Moon*. The reviewer, who has read both editions, concludes that the American version “felt a bit…sanitized, which I didn’t like.”

Interesting. Especially as there didn’t seem to be anything particularly edgy or controversial in the Australian edition of Graffiti Moon, as I recall.

American publishers do tend to change spelling and punctuation when they publish Australian YA books, and they also change any vocabulary that might prove confusing to American teenage readers. I remember reading the American editions of some YA novels by Barry Jonsberg and Melina Marchetta, in which the settings were clearly Darwin or the inner western suburbs of Sydney – yet the characters talked about ‘dimes’ and ‘sidewalks’. Even J.K. Rowling’s first book was subjected to Americanisation, with her American publishers making more than eighty changes to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, including the title. (And some of the changes seem pretty silly to me – surely American readers could work out that ‘multi-storey car park’ means the same as ‘multilevel parking garage’.)

For the record, the North American edition of A Brief History of Montmaray is very different to the Australian edition. Apart from a much-needed structural edit (for example, I completely re-wrote the final chapter), I spent a lot of time wrangling with my American copy-editor over words such as ‘biscuit’ and ‘jersey’. This was complicated by the fact that my narrator spoke a posh 1930s British version of English. But The FitzOsbornes in Exile and The FitzOsbornes at War are pretty much the same (apart from the spelling), wherever you buy a copy in the world. Maybe my American editors figured that readers who’d made it through the first book in the series would be able to cope with the characters eating ‘biscuits’ rather than ‘cookies’, and using ‘torches’ rather than ‘flashlights’, and so on. Or maybe my editors just got tired of arguing with me.

*Thanks to Bookshelves of Doom for the link to the Graffiti Moon discussion.