How to Train Your Patience ...

2020 seemed rather unformed when it started back on January 1st, but I am happy to say things are beginning to take shape and give some structure to my year.

One of my picture books, Sharing with Wolf, (with the lovely and talented Nikki Slade Robinson and published by Scholastic) is off to the printers and oh-my-giddy-aunt, it has endpapers!! You know what that means!! :-) This book is set to take off on June 1st and tells the story of a lamb keen to rent a room at Wolf's place. It is very gratifying when you have tried to write something funny and you hear people laugh out loud as they read it. And there is humour and much more in the illustrations besides.

Look how delicious it is!! I can't wait to show it to you.

Illustrations are also coming along for Moon and Sun (illustrated by the amazing Malene Laugesen and to be published by Upstart Press). I have had a sneak peek and they are dreamy and divine and just right for a story of sibling rivalry and sisterly relations. This book could not be more different to Sharing with Wolf. Was it written by a different part of me? Maybe. You will need to judge for yourselves. I hope to give you a glimpse of this soon. It is all very exciting.

In other news, I was approached by an Auckland Council Community Group to run some creative writing workshops for intermediate and high school aged students and this is now all on at Te Oro: Music and Arts Centre for Young People in Glen Innes. There will be five 90 minute workshops covering different aspects of writing, run weekly on Mondays at 5pm, starting March 2nd. I'll be running the course again in May as well. You can check out details here

And I am now the New Zealand Soc. of Authors representative on the Book Awards Trust. I'm also working on a new junior fiction project which is a very different form to anything I've written before. Please hold caller, while my old brain works out these new tricks. Crikey, folks, it's all go in the muppet labs.

I still have manuscripts out with some publishers both here and overseas and as always I remain hopeful of a good outcome from someone. I mean, why submit if you don't have hope, eh? The challenge, as always, is to keep the career alive. You might point out that I had a book out last year and I am about to have two books out this year, but I would then remind you that publishers are working two years ahead and whatever is accepted now is unlikely to be out until 2022 (or maybe even later). And an acceptance, if it happens, may still be months away or perhaps even years. Or it just might not happen and whatever I am working on now needs to be finished and polished before it too can begin to try its luck out there, rinse and repeat. Training your patience is one of the best things you can do for yourself as an author. So, how do you train your patience?

1) Your patience will function better if it has deadlines to work to. Always ask when a response/result can be expected and keep your patience informed. Although once deadlines have come and gone I have nothing for you and all bets are off 

2) Your patience can sometimes be talked down with a mantra of rational reasons for delays, silences and deadline blowouts. Memorise this mantra

3) Distraction is a useful tool that will help your patience remain up to the task. I find frequently shouting 'over there' and pointing into the distance can keep your patience disoriented enough to perform twice as well as it thinks it can

4) Reward your patience regularly. Your patience will work harder for you if it feels loved and respected. 

5) That ugly relation impatience is always lurking, trying to muscle in on the action. Be vigilant. A good treatment for impatience is to give it something else to do - for example, when will my basil seeds sprout?

Turning in ever decreasing circles

It was a surprise and a bit of a blow to see the recent announcement from the Book Awards Trust regarding changes to the NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults (you can check it out here). There are some positive developments in there - with increasing promotion of finalist titles through several initiatives and a revamped schedule of events that will see authors and illustrators hopefully reaching more of their young readers in what looks like a much more celebratory style - Good!

But my heart broke a little to see that these new intiatives come at the expense of the Children's Choice Awards. For a number of years children were able to vote for their favourite book from amongst the finalist titles. This was a limited approach with a format that tended to favour picture books but it encouraged engagement with all categories of New Zealand children's literature and was an important means of giving voice to our target audience. The prize was much coveted by authors and illustrators, a ringing endorsement from the people we write for. It was a huge thrill when The Were-Nana, my picure book with Sarah Anderson, won the Children's Choice Award in 2009. I love that book and I'm quietly chuffed that the children did too. It gave me the confidence to keep writing for children.

We rejoiced when Children's Choice expanded to acknowledge the book with the most votes in each book award category. And we were jubilant when  over the last few years children could vote for any book submitted for the book awards instead of just the finalists, and Children's Choice then drew up its own list of finalists and each category winner was feted individually. What a tremendous level of engagement for children around New Zealand. This expansion took some of the sting out of the cutting of the LIANZA awards. In a small country with a small population and little media exposure for local children's literature, the loss of these awards has been a real blow to the children's book community. The broadening of Children's Choice was seen as the ideal positive step forward, helping our local writers and illustrators achieve a greater connection with their audience, and giving that audience a chance to speak directly back to us through their choices. A real win:win.

And now it's gone completely.

I appreciate that giving potential voters access to all the eligible children's and young adults titles in a limited time frame, encouraging them to vote and collating the responses must be a significant and costly task. I understand that the organisation of a whole additional tier of finalists and winners adds a degree of complexity for the awards team. Maybe the administration of the Children's Choice Awards is ideally shared with another organisation, or could be reconstructed into a more manageable format that still allows children to have their say. How cool would it be if a dedicated sponsor came forward to fund Children's Choice. Our readers and their opinions are incredibly important to us and the future of children's literature in this country. Other countries with robust Children's Book Awards programmes have Children's Choice Awards. With tightening publishing lists and these cuts to children's book awards we are turning in ever decreasing circles.