Edsel Grizzler Book Gig

Great news! As part of this year's Brisbane Writers Festival WordPlay schools program, students from the Queensland University of Technology, under the direction of Carolyn Heim, will be doing two Book Gig performances of Edsel Grizzler. The dates for the performances are Wednesday 7 September (12.30pm), and Friday 9 September (12.30pm). I'll be there to answer questions and enjoy the show, so get along if you can! I'm also doing a whole bunch of other sessions with the festival. It's always a great program up there: all your details can be found here.

NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2011

The venue was the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House. The date was the 16th May, 2011. And the event was the announcement of the NSW Premier's Literary Awards.

This was the first year that the winners haven't known prior, making it more like the Oscars, except that the presenter read something about the winner in each category before reading the name, thereby giving a ten second heads-up to anyone paying attention.

It's good to see this morning that the mainstream media has broken with tradition and published the names of the winners in all categories, rather than just the 'big' ones. And those big ones were Alex Miller for Lovesong, and Malcolm Fraser and Margaret Simons for Fraser's biography. But of most interest to many of us were the winners of the Ethel Turner and Patricia Wrightson prizes, won by Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon) and Sophie Masson (The Hunt for Ned Kelly) respectively. Both shortlists were stacked with potential winners, but unfortunately there could only be one in each list. I have to say that those who missed out took it in very good grace. I admire their nerve - I don't know if I could have been quite so calm during the tense wait.

But the biggest cheer (and a standing ovation) was for Libby Gleeson who, in a huge surprise to her, won the $20,000 Special Award for her past and ongoing contribution not only to young people's literature, but the literary community at large, especially her efforts in establishing the Lending Rights scheme that we all look forward to each year.

It was also a great night for the Western Sydney Young People's Literature Project, soon to be renamed Westwords. This project, overseen by Judith Ridge, kept getting mentions all night, including from Libby in her acceptance speech. From memory, Libby (who chairs the project's board) said something like, 'Watch out for us - we're going to be big.'

Deutscher Jugendliterapreis...

...which means, German Youth Literature Prize. And I'm on it! With the help of the wonderful Stefanie Schaeffler in bending my words into their German equivalent, Town: Irgendwo in Australien, (Gerstenberg Verlag) has attracted the attention of the selection jury! Let happy dancing abound!

So, having calmed down, let's examine what this news means.

I'm so glad you asked. First, the book may win some prize money, so there's that. Second, the prize has its own stall at the Bologna Book fair, which is the premier children's/YA event in the world for publishers looking to buy/sell their products internationally. So that's pretty good, too. Third, this will hopefully boost sales in what is a pretty major kidlit/YA market. And fourth, it may well help to crack open the door to the European International Schools. I've already worked in such schools in Singapore, Japan and China, but to use such a high profile shortlisting to do some work in Europe would be amazing. Could a publicity/schools trip to Frankfurt in October be on the cards? Watch this space...

Top 10 girls

CMIS Fiction Focus recently compiled a list of the top ten female protagonists in recent Australian YA fiction. And guess what? Anonymity from Anonymity Jones is there! You go, girl!

At risk of stumbling blind into a debate for which I am completely unprepared, is it telling that only two of the ten in the initial list are written by blokes? And for the record, I'm not making a statement either way, I'm just pointing it out...(For Facebook Notes readers: this post is redirected from my 'head vs desk' blog at headvsdesk.blogspot.com)

The first chapter of Anonymity Jones

This is the first chapter of my new book, Anonymity Jones, available from Monday 1st March (Woolshed Press). If you like it, please go and buy the whole thing. Even if you don't like it, one of your close friends or relatives might. And failing that, buy a copy for you Welsh cousin whom you never, ever see, but still buy birthday presents for.

ONCE, IN A STREET not very far from yours, there lived a girl called Anonymity Jones. She lived with her mother – who had over the years changed her name from Corinne Randall to Corinne Jones, then back to Corinne Randall – and with a man called John, who behaved as if he was Anonymity’s stepfather but wasn’t in fact her stepfather at all, since he wasn’t really married to her mother.

Anonymity’s older sister went by the name Raven even though she’d been called Megan when she was first born, and some of the way into high school. Raven loved dark, brooding, frightening things, and didn’t live with her family any more. She’d finished school and was hoping to become a writer but hadn’t yet worked out what she was going to write about. So instead she’d gone travelling to see the world, even though Europe is only a small part of the world, and she was seeing only small parts of Europe.

Anonymity’s father, Richard, had once been very much in love with Corinne. They’d met at the accounting firm where she was a receptionist and he was her boss.

At that time he’d had a wife, Virginia, with whom he was no longer in love. Virginia knew about the receptionist from Richard’s work, and would pretend not to notice when, in conversations about things that happened at the office, he would mention Corinne’s name, before hesitating.

Virginia had also pretended to be surprised when she learnt by accident that the five-day conference Richard and Corinne had flown to lasted only two days and that the rest of the time they weren’t listening to long presentations about tax law, and how to run a private accounting firm, but were in fact ordering meals up to their eighteenth-storey hotel room, which had a balcony overlooking other hotels built beside a beach.

Anonymity didn’t know that this was how her parents had met until Corinne used it against her father. This wasn’t because her mother was an especially unkind person, but because she was doing what cats do when they are cornered, which is to spit and hiss and scratch until whatever has cornered them either runs away or has been stripped to ribbons. And since Corinne was a Leo, this might have made sense to anyone who believes in such things.

Anonymity heard Corinne use this information against her father when he accidentally let slip that the conference in Hong Kong wasn’t in fact a conference at all but a two-week holiday with a sales rep who had visited him in his office and left behind several notepads, two pens, a lava-lamp paperweight with the name of a software company on it, and a piece of her underwear.

It was this very lava-lamp paperweight which Corinne Randall, who was still Corinne Jones at the time, had thrown at Anonymity’s father. The sound of the paperweight crashing into something on the other side of her bedroom wall had made Anonymity jump in her bed. She’d been almost asleep, but after the terrible thump and the sound of raised voices in the next room she grew concerned. Her parents had been known to fight from time to time, just as all parents do. But, until now, nothing had been thrown, ever.

‘You must really think I’m some kind of bloody idiot,’ shouted Corinne, who very rarely swore. ‘And maybe I am. Maybe I should have seen this coming.’

‘Why would you say such a thing?’ Richard shouted back.

‘Because you cheated on your first wife, with me! Do you remember?’

‘Look, Corinne ––’

‘Why would you do this to me? Are you trying to punish me for something?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Are you looking for a way out? Because if it’s too hard, with what we’ve got to deal with around here, I’d understand. I would. But can’t we talk about that without introducing a third party? Christ! Again, Richard?’

The argument didn’t last very much longer. For a while, all Anonymity could hear from her room was the sound of their voices, but indistinctly. Then, just when she was beginning to think that perhaps the argument had been nothing more than a rehearsal for another, larger argument to be staged at some point in the future, she heard her mother screaming, downstairs.

‘Get out! Get out! Get out!’ Over and over she screamed it. ‘Get out! Get out! Get! Out!’

By the time Anonymity had come downstairs, her father had gone. Surprisingly, he hadn’t slammed the front door, and Anonymity stood at the bottom of the stairs and frowned at the back of the door.

Corinne was in the kitchen, leaning against the bench with her head pressed against the overhead crockery cupboard.

‘Mum?’ Anonymity said.

Then she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Raven, who was still living there at that time because she was two weeks from sitting her final school exams.

‘Hey, sis, leave it and come back up to bed,’ Raven said. ‘Just leave it.’

‘But Dad’s gone,’ Anonymity replied, and as she said it she heard the sound of his car roaring away.

‘I know. But there’s nothing you can do now. Come back to bed. Where’s Sam? Has he headed for the hills?’

‘Yeah, he ran out the back, I think. He couldn’t stand the shouting.’

‘Poor thing. He probably won’t come back in for ages now. I’ll go and get him in a minute. But go back up to bed, sis. There’s nothing we can do about Dad right now.’

As she went past her parents’ room, Anonymity looked in there and saw the lava-lamp paperweight lying on the floor at the foot of the bed. It wasn’t broken, because the paperweights that sales reps leave in offices are not usually made of glass, but of a heavy, unbreakable plastic that can easily smash a hole in the door of a walk-in wardrobe.

(c) James Roy, 2010

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The Inkys

So the Inkys are over for another year, after setting a new record for the most votes. And after a very close race, the Golden Inky was awarded to Where the Streets Had a Name, by Randa Abdel-Fattah, while the Silver Inky went to The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, which beat out some stiff competition, not least of all Exposure by Mal Peet, Paper Towns by John Green, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie.

My book Town won the Golden Inky last year, and the most gratifying thing about winning this prize was that it is voted for by teenage readers. And while good reviews are great, being affirmed by the audience for which one writes is even better. At risk of sounding corny, it's what makes us keep doing it.

It's also wonderful to see an organisation like the Centre for Youth Literature generating such interest amongst teen readers. I remember fondly one of my fellow judges, Steph Bowe (who was fifteen at the time) taking issue with someone in the audience at the NSW Writers Centre Writing for Children Conference, when this person attested that 'young people aren't reading anymore'. Steph turned around and publicly put her straight. And the ongoing success of the Inkys supports the view that young people are reading, and doing so in a discerning way.

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The first Anonymity Jones review

By Denise Muir, Head of English Domain, Upper Yarra Secondary College.

Anonymity’s life is unravelling, like the seam of “...the cricket ball she once found under the azalea bush...and she’d found the end, picked at it, and began to unwind it.”

Her life seems to be going nowhere, her home life, her friends and the relationship she once valued with her art teacher. Her life seems to be in a continuous loop, but unlike the neighbour’s dog her yelps and wails are ignored. The novel explores her strength in dealing with the hardships in her life. It explores her insight into what is right and wrong and the courage to make her own mark in life. Anonymity stays true to herself and takes control rather than becoming an anonymous bystander as her name suggests. Beautifully written with a mix of wit and humour it is honest and gritty, whilst at the same time sensitive and insightful. It is refreshing to read a book with such a strong female protagonist and that deals with confronting issues openly and realistically. This is definitely a book that older teenagers will relate to and will want to read in one sitting, as I did. I would recommend this novel for mature teenage readers (Year 10) as it requires a maturity to understand the complexities of the issues being explored and their consequences.

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Anonymity Jones bound proof

It's been a while coming, but here it is – the uncorrected bound proof of Anonymity Jones, from Woolshed Press (Feb 2010). Woo!ˆ–
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My new baby...

...which I'm yet to pick up.

That's my dad, making me a guitar. Sitka spruce top, myrtle back and sides, mahogany neck. It's all strung up and ready to play, but I haven't got it yet. Soon, very soon...

If you're reading this via Facebook Notes: this post is redirected from my 'head vs desk' blog.)

Nursing Registration

In exactly six weeks, my registration with the Nurses and Midwives Board of NSW expires. It's been almost a year since I did my last shift, and I am no longer in the employ of any of the fine health-provision facilities whose halls I once strode. I've handed in my ID tags, my sensible shoes and all the pairs of surgical scissors I borrowed from the treatment room over the years. I've forgotten how to read an ECG, I couldn't cannulate a garden hose with a power drill, and I giggle when I hear someone use the word "infarct". So I'm not a registered nurse any more. Except that I am. While ever I am still RN11***09, I can hypothetically bail this writing caper and seek re-employment in the children's ward or emergency department of my choice.

My wife has made it very clear that even if I did need to seek other employment, she would fight tooth and nail to prevent me going back to the life of an under-paid, over-worked, under-valued shift-working registered nurse. Because it made me a far less pleasant person to be married, she tells me. To which I nod, and say, "Never mind being married to it – living it was bad enough."

I became a full-time writer quite some time ago. That is to say, I stopped being a registered nurse who liked to write, and who had a couple of published books to his name, and became a writer who occasionally worked a casual shift in an emergency department. Something changed in the way I approached my writing. I guess the short version is, I became more professional about it. It felt good.

So now I sit here, with my Renewal of Registration form on my desk before me, and I'm not going to renew it. I'm not. And it's not just the $95. In fact, that's not it at all. This is a symbolic thing. Once I drop that form into the recycling, I'm on my own. I'm a writer, and only a writer. And it feels great.

Bookweek in Griffith

Some statistics on the terrific week I just had in Griffith/Leeton/Colleambally:

• Number of schools visited: 10
• Workshop sessions: 7
• Author talks: 8
• Total students (approx): 1000
• Bottles of wine received as gifts: 4
• Fantastic meals consumed: 10
• Number of those fantastic meals that were consumed at the iconic La Scala restaurant: 1
  
• Total weight gain (approx): 2kg
  

In my experience, it's really unusual to do a full week of touring without having at least one session that leaves you feeling a bit disillusioned. But this really was a hugely fun and rewarding week, with every session full of keen, motivated and responsive kids. So thank you to all the organisers for their kindness, encouragement and hospitality, and to the students of the Riverina for being such a fun bunch of young readers and writers. See you again soon, I hope!

One more sleep...

...until I go home. I love being a writer, and a part of that is speaking in schools. And a part of speaking in schools is traveling. And when that travel is to Melbourne, my favourite Australian city, that softens the blow.

Except this time it's been almost two weeks. Last week I was at several schools in and around Melbourne, and I stayed with my friends Paul Collins and Meredith Costain, in their attic. And on Saturday night they had a bit of a gathering of Melbourne friends, complete with a chocolate birthday cake to celebrate my 41st. They're very kind, and I'm extremely grateful for their hospitality, and to all and sundry who came along.

I spent the weekend catching up with friends, and attending a couple of AFL games at the mighty 'G. And this week it's been the Literature Festival at Scotch College. I love festivals because you get to meet new people and catch up with old friends, such as Tristan Bancks, James Knight, Fiona McIntosh, and many more beside. The highlight? The mushroom and truffle oil risotto at The European on Spring Street. I love my risotto, and this, I must confess, was The. Best. Risotto. Ever. Hands down. No contest.

But risotto, friends, footy and chocolate cake aside, I am most cheered by the knowledge that I am here for one more night, then I'm heading home. Yep, one more sleep...

Edsel Grizzler launch

If you're free on the afternoon of Tuesday the 18th August, and you're in any kind of proximity to Beecroft, in Sydney's north-west, you should definitely consider dropping in at the Children's Bookshop, where the wonderful Deborah Abela will be launching my new book, Edsel Grizzler - Voyage to Verdada. I'm told that there'll be pizza!

We'll also be celebrating the launch of the all new, shiny, VIP Book Club, a book club for kids. So that's two reasons for celebration, plus the pizza!

Here's the proper, official invitation. If you do want to come, please RSVP, and we really hope to see you there.

'Gimlet Eye' review

From Sue Bursztynski's The Great Raven book review blog, this:

In this third instalment of the spin-off of the popular Quentaris shared-world series, a character from the original series is actually killed off, something that doesn’t usually happen in shared universes. As it happens in the prologue, it’s no secret...

(sundry stuff about what happens etc in here: JR)

In my opinion, this one is the best so far in the new series. We learn more about the characters and their feelings. The adventure is fast, but straightforward enough for the young readers for whom this is an introduction to fantasy. At the same time, there’s a murder in the first chapter; there’s no tiptoeing around the issue. What happens to the adult magicians is also scary.

But there’s still plenty of humour, maybe more than there's been since the end of the original series – and in the end, Fontagu is shown in a more positive light than before.

The only thing is, while you can probably get something out of this book without having read the others, you really do need to have read them to understand properly what’s going on. The series is no longer a lot of related but individual titles. There is still, however, a policy of using some of Australia’s top children’s writers to keep the quality up.

Recommended for children from mid-primary to early secondary school.

Yay! Thanks, Great Raven!

More from Max

This is the Max Quigley product review currently doing the rounds on some of the online bookstores. I'm not sure who wrote it - probably someone from Houghton Mifflin - but I like, especially the first line...

For readers just past Captain Underpants, for those who relish the sort of humor of Louis Sachar and Jack Gantos, here is a hilarious novel by an author who truly gets boys. His main character Max Quigley is no angel; in fact one might call him a bully. But even as he taunts "wimpy Nerdstrom," he also begins to understand him. A most unlikely friendship grows. In the end, Max wins readers over, keeps them laughing, shows he is capable of change, and ultimately, brings us to a better understanding of boy dynamics.

NSW Premier's Awards

The shortlist for the NSW Premiers Awards was announced today. Of course, the first place I went was to the Patricia Wrightson (children's) category and the Ethel Turner (YA) category. I had harboured some secret hope that Hunting Elephants might have popped up on one of those lists, but no cigar. Never mind - I had my turn last year, and with all the drama of the stolen laptop, the recovery of same and the subsequent death threats, I can probably do without the drama.

Of some consolation to not being on the list was seeing that a number of my good friends were, not least of all Tohby Riddle, with one book all of his own in the Wrightson category, and one that he illustrated for Ursula Dubosarsky on the same list. So yay for Tohby, and for Ursula. Shaun Tan makes an expected appearance for his wonderful Tales from Outer Suburbia, Sonya Hartnett is on the list with Ann James, as is Bob Graham, and Glenda Millard, with Stephen Michael King doing the illos for her book. My tip? My heart says Tohby, because he's a good mate (not to mention fellow cricket tragic) but the betting man would have piles of money on Shaun Tan.

The Ethel Turner is an interesting one this year. Di Bates is on there, with a book that will add to the newcomer Ford Street's impressive grab-bag of gong short-listings out of a fairly small number of titles. Congrats too to Joanne Horniman, Nette Hilton and Alison Goodman. DM Cornish has kicked a lot of goals with his Monster Blood Tattoo boks, of which this is the second, but I think my money is with Michelle Cooper for A Brief History of Montmoray, which was shortlisted for the Gold Inkys last year, and is by any measure quite, quite special.

As for the rest of the lists, there are too many books to list, but I think the bookies are about to close betting on Tim Winton picking up both the Christina Stead and the overall Book of the Year with Breath. Having said that, it's a powerhouse list, and you shouldn't rule out the Grenville/Garner quinella.

And it would be really great to see a book from a category other than the Adult Fiction list win the overall gong. Shaun Tan did it with The Arrival, and so did Samuel Wagan Watson with Smoke Encrypted Whispers. Can it happen again? Let's hope.

All of the shortlists can be seen here.

Max Quigley, Technically Not a Bully

Huzzah! My first US book has just been released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It's more or less a rejacket and slight reworking of my 2007 UQP book Problem Child.

To me, the most exciting thing about all this, quite apart from the 20,000 hardback copies HMH is printing, is that I got to keep most of the Australian-ness of the original: I didn't have to change 'Mum' to 'Mom'; after a brief discussion Triffin Nordstrom was allowed to keep living in 'the bush' rather than 'the woods'; I dropped a couple of unnecessary details like Vegemite and cricket; and Nerdstrom now enjoys playing with 'Legos', rather than 'Lego'. And they study 'math' rather than 'maths'.

I also had to lessen the number of times I used 'a bit'. As in, 'When I ran over her foot in the car, Mum was a bit cross.' It's an Australian trick of understatement that the US publishers didn't feel would work very well for their market. And since I do use that mini-phrase quite often, I had to trim its use back a bit (!).

I find the differences between the way we look at publishing here and the US quite interesting. I was chatting with an American man on the flight back from NZ, and I told him how excited I was to finally have a book in hardcover. His response: 'Well, I hope it sells so well that it's soon in paperback.'

Good call.

Finally, here is the YouTube trailer I made for the book. Please distribute and share freely:

Somerset

Big fun on the Gold Coast, at the always excellent Somerset College Celebration of Literature, a.k.a. the Somerset Festival, or to most people in my particular line of work, simply 'Somerset'. This was the sixteenth year of the festival, which is the one by which all others in Australia are judged. In fact, many of the others have been modeled closely on Somerset.

Highlights included, but were not limited to:

• Great sessions with kids from over 70 schools from as far away as North Brisbane and the Northern Rivers district of NSW;
• Hanging out with lots of other authors and illustrators (peer time is one of the great benefits of festivals);
• The white chocolate and raspberry muffins;
• Alice Pung's very entertaining and moving address at last night's Festival Dinner;
• Playing tennis with former pro-tennis player and now author Pat Flynn. Yes, I lost. But yes, I did manage to get one or two serves back. I was proud of that;
• Yet-to-be finalised invitations to several exciting festivals and events after a number of program directors caught my sessions.
  

Lowlights were very few:

• The ambient temperature and humidity in the marquees on the oval. I swear I saw an anaconda disappear under the stage at one point. Plus there was that macaw up in the rigging. Some private schools are known for hot-housing their students, but this was just silliness.
• I think that's it.

There you go. Not much to complain about, then.

Delicious discoveries.

Yesterday morning, cursed by an insomnia that is no longer funny or acceptable, I got up at 5.30am to go for a run. I figured it was early, the streets would be empty, I'd get to see the sun come up, and when I'm already up, the awakening world is a kind of groovy place to watch.

But I got more than I bargained for, because at about 6.20, just as I was nearing home, I came across a large thicket of blackberries. Now, in the Blue Mountains, blackberries are considered a weed, and as such Council sprays them. When they know they're there. These ones they clearly don't know about, because there are literally hundreds of berries that are ripe and plump and juicy and jet-black, and maybe three times as many as that red and ripening.

I have my reasons for loving wild blackberries, in addition to their obvious tasty merits. One is that they are so much tastier than those farmed hothouse hybrids which cost $5 a punnet. Second, they cost about $5 a punnet less than those farmed hothouse hybrids. Third, they remind me of my late grandfather, who used to come around to our place at Wyee Point, and disappear into the thickets that choked a number of the nearby vacant blocks. He'd emerge with scratches all over his arms, purple-black stains on his shirt and lips, and several ice-cream buckets full of these juicy little numbers.

But best of all, I love wild blackberries because eating wild fruit straight off the bush makes me feel all foragy. I feel like a resourceful nomad. I feel like Adam in the Garden of Eden, but with less nudity. And hopefully less snakes.

I'm going to head up there tomorrow with an ice cream container of my own, and I'm going to forage me several kilos of those bad boys, and I'm going to do it every two or three days until summer ends, or I get sick of blackberries, or Council realises they've missed a patch, whichever comes first.

Dokic Dokic Dokic, oi oi oi.

Not much of a tennis fan, me. I like to play the occasional game, and I don't mind watching a 5 set classic between, say, the Fed and Raffa. But I have to admit that Jelena Dokic's next game is in my diary.

There's not much I can say here that hasn't been said by people who are more astute students of the game than I. But speaking personally, I didn't much like the girl the first time around. I wouldn't have booed her on Centre Court, but there was something about her that made me queasy. Her father, mostly, who is, by any estimation, a first class, bona fide, dyed in the wool dill-whacker. She hit 3,000 balls a day on the practice courts for him. She made unpopular comments in press conferences for him. Then she left Australia and changed her national allegiance for him. And now he wants to come back and play happy families. Someone tell the the customs guys - he should be stopped at the border to preserve the collective Australian IQ.

But all of that personal crap forms the backdrop to what is an astonishing and well-documented story. Getting to the quarter-finals of a Grand Slam after several years out of competitive tennis is amazing enough. But to do it in front of a crowd that booed you the last time you played in front of them, and to turn them around until they cheer for you, and then to use that support to go so far is gob-smacking. I truly hope she can keep going, and if Damir does turn up at her hotel room, I hope the Brothers smack him in the chops and tell him that Jelena doesn't live here any more.