Excuse me while I do the limbo...

This year is a year without a book. I have a small project which will be out in print next month and I have been writing, mostly on the novel which I began while at the Pah Homestead, but this has been a fallow year. Sitting on the sideline watching the book world move forward without me. Excuse me while I do the limbo.

After the hurly burly of the last few years this feels strange. But I am no stranger to strange. Much of the first half of the year was spent at the Pah Homestead. Several months ago my focus was on preparation for our big overseas trip and then we embarked on the trip itself, which was awesome and monumental, both literally and figuratively. And then we returned and the remainder of the year fell into a kind of limbo with few fixed dates. The most excellent NZ Book Week (in the last week of October) and the wonderful and full of warm fuzzies NZ Bookshop day (on Halloween!!) was a most welcome departure from this. Huge thanks to the NZSA for rescuing this incredibly important event, and to the two bookshops (Time Out Bookstore in Mt Eden and the Dorothy Butler Children's Bookshop in Ponsonby) who invited me along on the 31st to share in their celebrations. It was a day of mutual love and respect between booksellers, writers and illustrators, and readers, and every one felt very wanted by the end of the day. I have everything crossed and knotted that this becomes an annual arrangement.

But the rest of the time... well ... I'm mostly still in limbo. It feels like being in one of those flotation chambers where you have no choice but to be introspective. I've been navel gazing and reading posts and articles on the social media platforms I'm signed up to which can be a very dangerous occupation. And trying to fathom twitter which is a deep well of weirdness. Whether Essena O'Neill's reasons for quitting social media were honest or not she's right about sites like facebook, twitter and tumblr being a heavily filtered version of reality. Even if photos and comments are raw and genuine, folk still curate their images and words carefully to show the side of themselves they are willing to reveal. And people have agendas. Twitter, while it still feels like learning a foreign language, is a perfect example of an agenda driven medium. All sorts of strangers have started following me and I know it's not because of my phenomenal wit and stunning beauty (ahem - cough) as clearly neither of these are on display on the platform (cough, cough). For some, it's because they hope to sell me something at some point, whether it's their services or their books. I am allergic to direct selling, preferring to find my books by way of good writing and discovering an author is really cool and has interesting things to say, which seems to be a novel way of doing things these days. And I always (where possible) try and buy my required services locally. And yet twitter  is so interesting. Social media has multiple means of luring you in and turning you into an internet zombie ... anyways, as always, I have digressed.  

So, while I wander the labyrinth of social media like a modern day  Ulysses without a ball of string wondering whether I mind being lost or not, 2016 looms... looking mostly like a blank canvas. The thought of a new year is always a mixture of dread and giddy anticipation. So many possibilities, so much free time.

I do have a picture book scheduled for release next June. Yay!! Fuzzy Doodle. Illustrated by the marvelous Donovan Bixley and published by Scholastic. I don't have any pics to share yet and I am feeling a little coy about revealing any part of the story. Soz. But soon folks ... soon you can have a wee peek...

So, one key event for 2016, and the rest has still been feeling like a yawning chasm of nothing. An emptiness...

I booked a few things to give myself the illusion of busy and/ or important. Tickets for my SO and I to see The Tempest at the Pop Up Globe Theatre in March. And a follow up specialist's appointment in October. Woohoo! But after the schedules of the last few years things were still looking a leedle bit barren. Don't worry, my SO said, things will crop up. That's pretty much always been my philosophy too. Stay connected and involved. Keep writing - cos that's what I like to do. And have faith that things will arrive to pepper the calendar with busy and/or important. And fun!

And you know what? It's already started happening...

What lay beneath...

It's New Zealand Book Month people. I hope you have plans to read a book by a New Zealand author during the month of March. I read them all the time (not because I am one but because we write such good books) so I'm feeling like I'm a little ahead of the pack on this one.

My book A Winter's Day in 1939 is now available in bookshops (whoop, whoop!!) and on Monday evening I got to talk a little about the book and the highs and lows of writing it at the Gala Opening of the What Lies Beneath Exhibition, now on at the National and Takapuna Libraries. I appreciate that I am probably biased about the event as I was one of the eight speakers (including Kyle Mewburn, Donovan Bixley, Maria Gill, Heather Arnold, David Elliot, Lindy Fisher and Fifi Colston) but I found it really interesting and had a great time.We were each invited by author and illustrator wrangler, Rosemary Tisdall, to share something positive, something negative and something interesting about the creation of our books. It was fascinating to me to hear some of the similarities in our experiences. All of us had put our hearts and souls into our work and it was clear that 'What Lies Beneath' was a true title for the exhibition as we talked about the passion we felt for our subjects, and the lengths we had gone to to give our books the depth, the layers and the meanings that are there for readers to tap into when they pick up our books.

For those of you who wanted to be there, but weren't able to make it, this is what I said.

Something positive - I was given the chance by the publishers Scholastic, to share my father's story with a wider audience. And the chance to share a lesser known part of World War 2, the experience of so many Polish people, with a wider audience.

Something negative - transforming a true experience into fiction, into a story that would be accessible to younger readers (the book is for those 9 or 10 and up) was challenging, especially a story that is so significant and personal for me. After completing the first draft, I rewrote the entire story twice to try and get it right. It wasn't easy. And it just occurred to me when I was preparing for this event, that the fact I wrote this story is a bit of a give-away about whether my father survived or not :)

Something interesting - I learned a lot of interesting and amazing things as I worked my way through the story - history, geography and much more but to me one of the most interesting was how people coped in the harshest of situations. I read this from my book:

When the screeching of braking wheels announced the train had finally stopped, there was no mistaking it. Along the length of the siding were nothing but closed-in cattle wagons.

Soldiers undid the bolted doors and slid them open to reveal cold, dark interiors. Looking through the open doorway of one wagon, I saw a black pot-belly stove in the centre.

“What’s that?” I pointed at a pipe sticking up through the floor to the left of the stove. Everyone stared. A small boy beside me crouched down and peered beneath the train.

“The pipe sticks out the bottom too,” he said.

“Maybe it’s for rubbish,” Zofia suggested. That sounded reasonable, I thought, but Father frowned and Mama pursed her lips. Whatever they were thinking, they kept it to themselves. When we boarded the wagon a few minutes later with two other families, the soldiers explained what the pipe was for and I understood their reactions. That pipe was our toilet; just a hole in the floor. It looked disgusting.

“I’m not using that,” one of the mothers said. I silently agreed. I could hold on for a long time if I had to. Maybe even a whole day. There was no way I was going to the toilet in front of everyone else. 

They weren't on the train for a whole day - they're journey took eleven days. And they had many other journeys on trains just like it throughout the time they spent in the USSR. My father's experience was much much more than interesting. And I am very proud I got the chance to turn his story into a novel.