And the winner is ...

Tarantara!! The competition has closed and I have selected a winner. Clare Scott will receive a signed copy of My Elephant is Blue. It would be very cool to have the book in Te Reo! You weren't the only one to suggest this but you got in first with this most excellent idea. 

The book is launched, and has bravely gone forth into the world. It's a scary time for an author - I've talked about the book, reviewers have talked about the book (you can see some at Poetry Box here, at My Best Friends Are Books here and at What Book Next here) and now it's over to the readers and the book buyers. While our little book meet the moment and be embraced? 

Soon I'll be talking a bit more about my next book, Batkiwi (Scholastic NZ), illustrated by Izzy Joy Te Aho-White. This book is out July 1st and is a bit of a love letter to our native fauna and flora. I've always wanted to write a kiwi story and I'm thrilled Scholastic are publishing this. The illustrations are lush and beautiful and cute as anything. 

Being a writer is quite the roller coaster ride both in terms of the ups and downs of the faith you have in your own writing and the feast and famine of being published. I've had more than twenty years of this wild ride and I have not yet found any means of flattening the journey out. Right now I am in the unusual position of having three books out this year and it is quite the whirlwind with a touch of overwhelm. When you send things out you never know how it's going to go. One book was delayed from 2020 to this year, and I just wasn't expecting things to be so swift with the other two so here we are. And I'm so proud of all of them. I love writing picture books - there is so much poetry and refining and crafting involved - a balancing act to find the right ratios of word play, meaning and story, knowing all the while that ultimately illustrations will share the job of telling. I feel sad when picture books are dismissed or trivialised - I put so much into them and I know the illustrators do too. It is all too easy to forget that picture books contribute mightily to kick starting the career of a reader. That's where my love of reading began ...

I've had a bunch of questions running round my head recently ... and I am thinking about these as the basis of some future blog discussions. If you want to hear more about any of these let me know.

1) Is it problematic for children's writers to have adult opinions on social media? Is there a line that shouldn't be crossed?  

2) Are twitter book pitching opportunities evolving in to a less functional creature? (sub question - is writer twitter good or bad for us?) 

3) Do we influence boys' reading choices right from the get-go in unconscious ways? (Are we part of the problem?)

And if you have any questions you want me to add to the list please comment below.

 

And my manuscript assessment competition winner is ...

Crikey that was interesting. I am heartened to see all my suggested topics get a request so I'll work my way through them all beginning with the most requested to the least. And no one correctly guessed my favourite Harry Potter movie. The correct answer is Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Dolores Umbridge is a terrific villain and her detention punishment is breathtakingly clever and nasty. I love Luna Lovegood and Dumbledore's Army and how Harry and Dumbledore are finally vindicated. Anyways ... a number of you did pick my second favourite, Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban, so I put all your names in a hat and the winner is ......

....  AB who commented here on the blog. Woohoo! Congratulations! AB, if you contact me at melinda@tale-spin.com, we can make arrangements for the assessment.

And in the next few days I'm going to talk a little on the most requested topic - developing a distinct voice in your picture book writing. So stay tuned!!!

Talk to you soon!

Out in the world...

Tarantara tarantara!!

 WE HAVE A WINNER!!! 

I had a flurry of entries over the last few days, some on the blog and some via email for reasons which I decided were entirely acceptable. Not only did the winner correctly guess my favourite story (Crocodile Dreaming) but they also guessed my second favourite as well (Pirate Eye) and their order of 1st, 2nd and 3rd faves was closest to my own. No one picked my third fave and I am leaving this as a mystery for another possible competition in the future. And the winner (DRUM ROLL please) is: Ezabella Lanuza from St Mark's School in Pakuranga. Ezabella wins a signed copy of Time Machine and Other Stories!! which will be in the post shortly.

Thank you to everyone who entered. You are all terrifically smart people who know books make awesome prizes.

Surrounded by good friends and family, the book was launched last night by publisher Mary McCallum from The Cuba Press, and book-loving, book-reviewing, librarian and friend, Crissi Blair, at Time Out Bookstore in Mount Eden.

Just outside the door at Time Out Bookstore :)

Crissi, Me and Mary

(photo by my SO)

Speechifying

The most delicious mini-cakes from The Caker on K Rd.

My little book is now set free to fly to readers and hopefully the stories inside will delight them as much in the reading, as they delighted me in the writing.

And the winner.....

We have a winner  to last post's competition!!! A copy of Fuzzy Doodle will be going to the first commenter, Girl For All Seasons. Congratulations! Email me your details and I will sign it forthwith and pop it in the post :)

And as a cool bonus in addition to the competition announcement ... one of my favourite-of-all-time writers, Maggie Stiefvater (The Scorpio Races, The Raven Cycle and many more...), recently responded to a question on twitter about 'Imposter Syndrome' with a somewhat unexpected but totally genius answer. I've often felt the sting of this syndrome. I've picked myself up from the fraudsters' floor and reminded myself that I have a few clues about how stories work. But I love how Ms Stiefvater embraces the idea as a mechanism of keeping ourselves grounded, and a reminder that many things contribute to any success we might enjoy. You can read it for yourself below and I also recommend you pick up one of her books and give them a go too. She is equally smart (and linguistically lyrical) with fiction.  And as always, writing itself, word by word, is what we need to keep doing.

On Twitter, Connor Allen asked: "do you ever deal with imposter syndrome as a writer? If so, how do you get past it and just make yourself write?"

My answer:

Dear connorallen94,

I think everyone does to some degree or another.

Career success and artistic skill are only poorly correlated. What do I mean by this? I mean that you have to get a certain level of skill in order to get published/ put in a gallery/ get musical gigs, but after you get to a certain level of competency, greater or less skill doesn’t seem to have any relationship to how commercially successful you are. Other factors begin to take over in exposing your work to buyers, and moreover, the more rarified your skill becomes, the fewer the punters are who can appreciate it. You can turn a beautiful turn of the phrase while juggling 47 themes and delicately drawing an allegory for the pain of man’s condition? Great. Most people won’t notice. And while that additional skill will get you noticed among peers who are also writing beautiful novels with 47 themes and delicately drawn allegories, it is a bad predictor for commercial success. If you use that skill to delicately render specific lizards, for instance, you still run the risk of only appealing to lizard people.* But mostly it’s just excess — the average person doesn’t care if Coldplay’s Chris Martin can play Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in D on his guitar. (I don’t know if he can. But I hope so.)

This is because in the commercial art world, most consumers are not also artists. Other factors are nearly always more important to the non-artist consumer: a strong story, a topical subject matter, a celebrity name, a catchy tune, a wicked hook, a pretty cover, the creator’s funniness on Twitter, the creator’s ability to speak in public, the creator’s actual and literal hotness because wow, relatability of the themes, a movie tie-in, an omnipresent advertising campaign, availability of the work in places that rhyme with BallMart.

It’s why you can be an international bestseller without being the best in your field. It’s why you can be an international bestseller without being remotely the best in your field.

Whenever I say this online, people like to shout “what kind of a self-drag!” I suppose because as an international bestseller, I am supposed to think I am 100% fantastic and have definitely earned my title at the top of the heap by some objective measure of wonderfulness. Also because people are weird and possibly don’t understand how self-awareness, confidence, and humility really ought to play well together if you want to be a happy professional artist. It’s crucial to understand just how big of a role you play in your own success. This is so that you can focus on only the things you can control (you can’t make your subject more topical, you can’t suddenly become a famous rock star with a memoir, you can’t guarantee you have a beautiful, eye-catching cover; you can only work on writing faster, writing more accessibly, writing well), so that you don’t take it too hard when all of your career dreams fail to come true overnight. But it’s also to keep you from being a self-aggrandizing asshole about success. You’ve sold millions of books? Great. Remember, Stiefvater, that your skill is only poorly correlated to that number. You wrote a competent-or-better book at a good time for that genre/ subject/ cover/ something, and it took off. Good job, that was nice. Get back to work.

I don’t generally mind this push-pull, actually. Imposter syndrome whispers that I might be a fraud, a just-okay writer wrapped in accolades I don’t deserve. But mostly I think that’s all right: let the voices whisper. The opposite of the imposter syndrome would be letting myself believe that I am entirely to credit for my success, and that’s just as false. The truth is a middle ground, and this truth is also why imposter syndrome doesn’t get in the way of my work.

Because the truth is this: I’m a writer who works hard, puts down a quarter million words of fiction each year, shows up for work even when life throws health or family or world crises at me, and doesn’t make excuses. Those things aren’t subjective. Those things I can control.

So get to work.

urs,

Stiefvater

*http://maggie-stiefvater.tumblr.com/post/163714808581/x

and the book give away winner is.......

It is time to announce the winner of my book give-away.

Frogmella, the envelope please......

table top drumroll.............

...All the entries were fabtabulous. I love the heady magic of a good opening line and you all reminded me of some wonderful beginnings, but there can only be one... Maureen I could not help but agree about the game-changing nature of the Harry Potter canon, and that opening line of the first book does indeed draw us in before we are even aware we have been hooked. What deliciousness followed. You are my give away winner. A copy of Fuzzy Doodle will be on its way to you shortly.

A winner haz been picked...

Tis time to announce the winner of my competition to win a copy of my new book The Song of Kauri. I have had a range of terrific entries on facebook and here on the blog. And the winner of the English version, with her name picked out of a hat by my eldest, is Sue Copsey, who picked her favourite name, the hattifatteners (from the Moomintroll books) for it's sublime mixture of silliness and pathos. Your book will be making its way to you soon. As it was unclear whether any of you would like to win the Maori version, if any one would be interested in this copy, I will give it to the first person who puts their hand up. Thanks to all for entering my competition.

I will be officially launching the book in Dunedin on August 1st. Exciting times!!

And in the ongoing debate about YA literature and what teens should and shouldn't be reading, here is a terrific post to remind adults everywhere that the kids, and their books, are alright.

On display...

Oi competition judging is haaarrrrdddddddddddd. There was nothing to pick between the entries. Like really. Everyone was inspired and moved by the books they chose. Yay!! But there can be only one. The entry that seemed to most suggest some kind of personal transformation was Dawn Grant talking about 'I Am David' by Anne Holm which gave her the sense that she too could write stories like this. Dawn, you are my winner. I will be in touch to discuss your prize.

In other news, my book While You Are Sleeping features in my exhibit as part of the What Lies Beneath Exhibition at the National Library in Parnell, Auckland. My display will be there from now until February 20th with an accompanying teacher resource (available on this blog - see below the blog title). My exhibit looks like this:

Sweet, huh?

There are four other exhibits along with mine, covering picture books, non-fiction, junior fiction and YA (mine is for poetry). You can go and see them at the National Library (8 Stanley Street, Parnell) or have a sneak peek here at the What Lies Beneath Exhibition blog. You can also download all available teaching resources there as well. There will be five new exhibits every month till April 20th. You should check them out.

There was cake...

Drum roll please......with just a few entries for my book give-away, I can report the randomiser had a hard time picking a winner.  Noizy - you are the winner. I have emailed you for your address and a signed copy will be in the post to you shortly.

Had the book launch for A Winter's Day in 1939 yesterday. Thank you to everyone who came. And to all those buying the book!! I will post some photos up shortly. It is great to have the book officially launched, and its head wetted.

I have fretted over the content of this book more than any other. As much as it is my father's story I have fictionalised it to draw the reader in and give a clearer arc for characters and plot. The real Polish refugees had endless days of hunger, suffering, pain and waiting. Their existence was the stuff of immense sadness and horror and I have worked the material into a form which I hope gives a sense of how tragic the circumstances were without giving future readers nightmares. My hope is that new generations of children are introduced to a little known side of World War 2 through my book. I hope the blend of fact and fiction gives them sufficient information to pique their interest and keeps them reading to the end.



I made this cake for the launch, basing the decoration on the Polish Flag - it was a very big cake and chocolatey on the inside.

Books are not milk...

Yay - congratulations to Clare Scott who has won a signed copy of The Half Life of Ryan Davis. As soon as I can wrangle the book into an envelope it will be on its way to you, Clare.

I am not afraid to say I am keen to see my work published. And I understand that other authors are keen for this too. There may be nothing wrong with our stories. In fact there may be plenty right with them. The question we ask as writers is "would readers enjoy this story?" This isn't the question publishers and agents are asking. They're asking "can we make money from this"? And this is where authors and publishers struggle to meet in the middle. If lots of people buy a book it does not necessarily make it a good book from a writer's perspective (or a reader's). And conversely a lack of buyers may not mean a book is bad. But this often is the yardstick that is used in the final analysis. This explains why Pippa Middleton can be paid a significant advance for a book on party planning. Because as we know, no one really knew how to plan a party until Pippa's sister married a Prince. A business is not wrong to want to profit from the sale of its products. There is nothing wrong with publishers and agents asking if they can make money from the product they are considering acquiring, printing and onselling. That is how business works. Authors do not want charity. They too want to benefit from the business model. They want to be paid for their product. However books are not a simple product that everyone needs or wants. One book is not the same as another. Books are not milk. The equation that solves for y if books are x often contains a lot of other unknown values. A lot of publishing decisions are based on educated guesses for those unknown values. We often look to educated guesses that were got wrong (JK Rowling anyone) as examples of how the system is broken but many times the publishers get it right too. What worries me most is where business thinking drives what the reader wants. More money can be made (imagine the profits for The Hunger Games: the books, the movie, the merchandising and tie ins) than ever before and this has a huge influence on how those educated guesses are made. Who can blame them for wanting to generate this kind of income? There are huge rewards to be had if you make the right picks. We never know what happens to the picks that might have been right but were not made. A reader cannot choose something that never makes it into print. The book world is transforming before our eyes. More than ever we are part of a global economy.Technology and social media are carving a new highway through society and culture.  Despite being the author and a creator of product, change is a whirlwind happening around me. Who knows what the landscape will look like when the dust settles. But in the meantime I will keep making product and keep reaching out to readers, because the only question I can ask is "would readers enjoy this story?"

And (drum roll please) the winner is ...

I very much like Nicola Morgan's analogy about how the reading experience for children is like strawberries or spinach. Go check it out here. Its exciting to find children are reading and loving the experience. Its cool to think they are relishing the experience and getting so much out of it - both strawberry and spinach. Whatever form they get their books in, stories are still important to them.


Today I feel lucky to be doing what I dreamed of. I always wanted to be a writer of stories for children of all ages. Not only am I writing stories but they are ending up as books with my name on the cover. I read the words and wonder "How did I do that?" I guess I put a lot of good words in my brain over the years. Some of those words were in breathtaking combinations (strawberry and spinach) and that helped me form some of my own good sentences. Sometimes I wish things ran a little smoother and the path was a little more straight forward. But I'm still getting to do my dream job. Every day.


I would like to announce the winner in my 500th blog post competition. It was tough to pick, but my SO and I agreed Ms MANIC was the best. Old Kitty if you would like to pick two from the following titles - picture books The Were-Nana, The House That Went to Sea, or Made with Love, and novels Jack the Viking and The Half Life of Ryan Davis - and send a postal address to me here I will post those out to you. I will be running more competitions in future - both here and on facebook for those of you who missed out this time.