In my ‘Writing’ folder there is a ‘Junior Fiction’ folder. In my ‘Junior Fiction’ folder there is a ‘Duck for a Day’ folder.
This is all well and good. This is the sign of an organised mind, an organised computer, a manageable filing system.
But what is inside the ‘Duck for a Day’ folder?
So I’m writing these duck books. Because I love ducks. But it seems that with duck-love comes responsibility. It seems that if you love a duck, you must not feed it Belgian chocolates. My eagle-eyed editor reads my manuscript and informs me that chocolates are not good for ducks and can actually be fatal. This is not good for my story-duck, Max, who is very fond of them. And whose fondness for said chocolates is very important to the story.
When my editor tells me of this unfortunate fact, I take a moment to pause. I say “Damn you, facts! Why must you always get in the way of a good story?”
I found out this morning that Annabel, Again has been shortlisted for the ‘children’s books’ category of the WA Premiers Book Awards.
Which is excellent news, of course, but has nothing to do with the title of this post. ‘The Way Opens’ is the title of a poetry book I had as a child, one of my earliest introductions to rhythm and cadence and image and all the things that make language sing. The phrase has stayed with me, in much the same way particular lines of poetry tend to. When I’ve been struggling with something and finally feel myself emerge into clear water, this is the line I hear. And this morning, it happened on the novel I’m writing. All of a sudden I can see the way forward, maybe not right to the end, not yet, but far enough ahead that I can keep the wind in my sails for a bit longer, hopefully long enough to get to the next point of departure.
A while back, my editor called to tell me that “Annabel got a gumnut!”. My brain cast around for possibilities – was this perhaps the premise for a new, Enid Blyton-style story? Had Annabel, Again sold into a country with an anti-pistachio bias and had to undergo some editorial changes (which I would happily accept! Call me, anti-pistachio nations!)? Then she explained that no, it had simply been reviewed in the Children’s Book Council journal Reading Time, in which gumnuts are awarded to recommended books.
I haven’t seen the review, though I’m happy to have it, of course, but more than that, I guess I just wanted to say that it is a peculiarly lovely thing to work in an industry where praise is awarded on a sliding scale of gumnuts.
I spent some time in Victoria recently, dog- and house-sitting for my brother in a lovely little town called Kerang. While I was over there, I stopped by some schools, which was great fun. And I also popped over to my hometown, Bendigo, to catch up with friends and family. One day, I had lunch with an old friend and then we strolled down to Dymocks so she could buy my book for her niece. Sadly, they were sold out (sold out!) which made me rather happy. So she ordered a copy and we strolled some more and we ended up, as bookish people do, at a secondhand bookshop. And I ended up, as children’s writers do, in the children’s section. And then I saw this:
Annabel, secondhand! I’m choosing to believe that someone loved her so much they just had to share her with the world (it’s my delusion and I’m sticking to it!).
I’ve finished the first draft of my work-in-progress (too early to call it a novel at this stage). It needs a fair bit of re-shaping and editing, but it’s taking on novel-like qualities, which is pleasing.
In the first-draft stage, I’ve been trying a new approach. Rather than getting bogged down trying to find the right words at each point, I’m letting myself construct a scaffolding, sketching out just the bare bones at points, and then keep going. So there are points in the manuscript where I’ve written things like ‘S says why doesn’t B just get over it etc’ or ‘Stuff here about L, maybe go back to rock part?’ and then moved on.
A few people have been asking about my launch – why I did it, how it went, would I recommend it to other first-time authors, and so on. So I thought I’d post here a little post-mortem I wrote for the digital newsletter Pass It On. I loved my launch! We could certainly have been better organised, but there are some things you only learn by doing, and that’s part of the fun.
“Launching Yourself (or, what I learned at my DIY launch so you don’t have to)”
1. Advance Planning
Have a range of possible dates and look into any other events that might be on around the same time. If there’s a festival or similar event, you may be able to piggyback your launch on this, sharing costs and publicity. On the other side of the coin, you might end up clashing with another launch or important book-related event that will affect turnout to yours.
Work out what you want from your launch. There’s symbolic value, a kind of punctuation, in a first-novel launch, drawing a line of sorts between your pre-published life and your sparkling new career (heckling to a minimum, please!), but it can also serve a number of important functions. I wasn’t able to make any decisions with regard to who/what/when/where/how until I’d worked out what those were for me. In my case, the goals were:
Celebrate the book! Mark the occasion with friends, family and colleagues. Kick back and grin. Say ‘huzzah’.
Went to the launch of The World According to Warren at Westbooks last night and what should I see when I walk through the door but a whole stack of Annabel, Again, with a shelf-talker declaring it Book of the Month and nominating me as ‘the Australian Meg Cabot‘.
This is both lovely and alarming, considering how quickly the other Meg writes (can we call her ‘the other Meg’? Can I be the Meg to whom all other Megs will now be referential? What will Meg Rosoff have to say about this? Most likely she will be too busy counting her awards to notice me). The point being that if I’m going to be any kind of Meg Cabot at all, I must put poetry and other worldly distractions aside and knuckle back down to Izzie, which is going perfectly well now, thank you very much (repeat, look convinced).
Made a simple structural change to Izzie which has put things back on track quite nicely. I’m still aiming to have the first draft completed by the end of September, as per my original plan for the ArtsWA Grant period. This will require some speedy writing over the next few weeks, but I can probably make it if I stay focused.
Meanwhile, Annabel has been turning up in some interesting places. She has been added to the booklist for the Victorian Premiers Reading Challenge and is featured in the latest Scholastic Bookclub catalogue. Scholastic tells us that Annabel is for ‘confident’ readers. I’d like to think she is also for thoughtful, quirky and all-round cool readers, but maybe that’s just me projecting.
Izzie continues to resist me. She wants to go this way, then that, then back the other way. Remember those old Choose Your Own Adventure Books (if you open the door, turn to page 18; if you turn around and go back to the hotel, turn to page 27, and so on). I was always very reluctant to commit to what might be unwise decisions, and would keep a finger in every page, so I could go back to key points and undo the choices that had led to my untimely death (I also used to make massive charts of which paths led where and all the complex ways in which they intersected, but that’s another book-geek story altogether).
Meg McKinlay 