Too Young to Publish

Recently I’ve had a number of letters from teenagers wanting advice on how to get their novel published and wondering whether their age will make it harder for them to get it into print. Specifically, would they be discriminated against because they were only thirteen or fourteen or fifteen or sixteen or whatever?

The simple answer is no. When you submit a query letter to a publisher or agent you don’t have to tell them how old you are. You’ll be rejected or accepted on the quality of your submission.

Continue reading Too Young to Publish.

The simple answer is no. When you submit a query letter to a publisher or agent you don’t have to tell them how old you are. You’ll be rejected or accepted on the quality of your submission.

Being young can be an advantage in getting published. I was first published when I was nine. A short poem in The Newcastle Morning Herald (now The Herald). My mother sent it in and it was published with my age listed. While the poem was clearly a work of genius, odds are that if I hadn’t been nine, it wouldn’t have been published. As it happens I was more embarassed by the publication than I was proud. The kids at school teased me to buggery for the rest of the year. Happy days.

Up until I was 15, I had a number of other poems and stories published. Without motherly intervention even. Every one of them with my age beside my name. After that, nothing of mine was published until I was in my thirties.

What happened?

Another simple answer: I started competing with adults. I stopped listing my age and started sending to more grown up venues. My work was not as good as that of the grown ups. I didn’t find my way into print again until I was way past my child prodigy days.

The teenage me was cast into deep, dark despair by this. On my seventeenth birthday I had a midlife crisis. There I was seventeen years old and still no novel published! I was a complete and utter failure! What was wrong with me?

Another easy answer: I wasn’t good enough yet and I wouldn’t be good enough until I’d learned to write and rewrite and rewrite again. Until I got past thinking my first drafts were perfect and that rewriting involves a wee bit of chipping at the surface of a story. It’s much, much harder than that. And, I’m belatedly learning, more fun too.

If you’d have told me back then I wasn’t good enough and had a lot more to learn about writing I would not have believed you. Actually come to think of it, people did tell me back then. But they were polite about it saying that I had a "great deal of promise" and a "bright future ahead". Blah, blah, blahdy blah. I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted to be published immediately! Before I hit twenty-one or, worse, thirty and was too decrepitly old to enjoy it.

Now, of course, I’m incredibly grateful that no one did me the disservice of publishing me back then. I’ve kept a lot of my juvenilia and, well . . . it shows promise.

I have a couple of friends who were not so fortunate. They were first published in adult venues when they were still teenagers. Both of them are horrified that their learning and growing as a writer has been done so publicly and that there’s nothing they can do to make all that evidence of early missteps go away. They both wish they’d spent more time honing their craft and less time desperately trying to get into print.

But how do you hone your craft?

Read a lot. Write a lot. In that order. There are very very few good writers who aren’t also good readers.

Never send off a first draft for publication. Even though the temptation to do so is enormous. I mean you wrote a complete draft! A whole poem/story/novel! It has a beginning, a middle and end! The sense of accomplishment is enormous you can’t wait to show your work of genius to the rest of the world.

Resist that feeling.

Wait a few weeks after writing something, then reread it, rewrite it (and I don’t mean just fixing typoes), then give it to some people you trust for comments. (Not your parents. Most’ll just tell you it’s wonderful no matter what.) If you have friends who read a lot give it to them. Or to a teacher you trust. Give it to as many people as you can think of. Trust me, most of them will not get back to you with comments.

Ask the ones who read it to tell you when they got bored. Ask them to tell you the plot. This is a great way to figure out if your readers are reading what you think you wrote. It’s amazing how often they aren’t.

When they get back to you with all their comments, rewrite it again. Many of the comments will be intensely annoying and boneheaded and will make you want to end the friendship with the idiot who said them. Resist your urge to do so. Resist the urge to tell them how moronic they are. Also resist the urge to cry (I still haven’t quite mastered this one). Instead look for parts of your story/poem/novel that all readers had problems with. Figure out how to fix it. Most likely the solution you find won’t be the one they suggested. (Later on when you’re published you’ll find this also applies to your editors.)

Learning to take criticism is one of the major prerequisites of being a professional writer. Once your work is accepted for publication, your editor will criticise what you have written and ask you to rewrite it. Usually many, many times. And after it’s gone through all those rewrites she will often forget to tell you good it is. There will be few gold koala bear stamps. Your editor’s primary concern is to get rid of that which sucks. It should be yours too.

Just as important: don’t get too caught up in the praise your readers offer you. If your readers only have good things to say about your manuscript, enjoy it, but then be suspicious. Very few pieces of writing are perfect first go. (I rewrote this essay several times and then gave it to Scott to read and it could still stand a bit more rewriting.)

Once you’ve made your manuscript as good as you can possibly make it—if it’s a novel that should take months, maybe even years—then and only then do you send it out for publication.

But how do you get a novel published?

With great difficulty. Getting published is very, very hard no matter how old you are. Most novels never find their way into print. Even really good ones.

Ian Irvine outlines the whole process in his essay, The Truth About Publishing (the link’s in the menu on the left). I strongly advise reading the whole document through to the end. It’s depressing, but it’s also very very useful. I wish I’d read it back when I was fifteen.

Good luck. Do not despair when you are rejected. Welcome to the club. There isn’t a writer in the world who hasn’t been rejected. Many, many times.

New York City, 13 August 2005

The Hebrew translation is here.

For those young writers who are angered by this please read my clarification.

The short answer is that there is no one way to get an agent. Luck and hard work both play their part. But first you have to figure out whether you’re ready for representation. Don’t even think about pursuing agents until you have a finished novel. And make sure that novel is as good as you can possibly make it. Then make it a whole lot better. Rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and then rewrite some more before you send it to anyone. And, yes, this does apply to you. And yes it applies to non-fiction proposals too. Even though you don’t need a completed book you do need the best proposal you can possibly write.

Scott got his first agent by first finding out which were the best agents representing adult science fiction. He did this by looking at the acknowledgments pages of his favourite writers, as well as looking up agents in the various writers’ guides available at the time (you’ve got it much easier these days; you can use Agent Query). He then spent a whole week writing the perfect query letter, before sending it out to every suitable agent (that’s important: do not be sending your YA cheerleader novel to someone who only handles adult non-fiction). He received only one request to see his novel. He sent it and she signed him up. At the time Scott had no connections, knew no one in literary publishing, indeed, he’d never met an agent before. This is the traditional method for finding an agent and it still works. But remember that query letter has to be perfect. Agents get hundreds and hundreds of queries a week.

I got my first agent because I like people. I always have. I frequently wind up in conversations with total strangers in the queue for the loo, at bars, restaurants, parties, wherever. Meeting new people is one of my favourite things in the world.

So my first agent? It was 1999, I had just flown from Sydney to NYC (via LA) to spend six months in NYC researching the New York Futurians for my post-doctoral fellowship. I arrived at JFK knackered out of my mind and found myself in the longest queue for cabs I’ve ever seen. The woman in front of me asked where I was heading. I said Manhattan. We agreed to share a cab. We got talking. Turned out that she was a writer too. A real one with a published book and eveything. Once in the cab we were already fast friends. Then the cab got stuck in traffic and it took almost two hours for us to get into the city. By the time we finally parted ways I felt like I’d made a friend for life. But as usually happens we never saw each other again.

We didn’t forget, though, and almost a year later I received an email out of the blue from a friend of Pang-Mei’s. She was starting up a new literary agency and Pang-Mei had described my Futurian project to her. She was intrigued and wondering if I had representation. She asked to see samples of my work. I sent them to her, she signed me up.

Before she emailed me, I’d already made an effort to get an agent for my first (written) novel (which to this day hasn’t sold, though it’s come close a few times). At the time I had no professional fiction publications (not even a haiku) and precious few of any other kind. My manuscript was rejected by three different agents. One in Australia, two in the USA. At the time I thought the novel was as good as I could make it (maybe it was) but I’ve since rewritten it several times and it’s much much better now. Did I send it out too soon? Probably.

All three of those agents represented friends of mine. They agreed to look at my novel because said friends had recommended it. I did not need to write a formal query letter. (To this day I have never written one and hopefully I never will.) Having that connection meant that my manuscript was read and that I got a prompt response. Two of the agents even took the time to sit down with me to explain in detail what they thought was wrong with the novel (an exquisitely painful experience, let me tell you—at the time I wasn’t used to criticism—years of living with Scott has since hardened me).

But did my connections get me an agent on that occasion? No, they did not. Unless an agent likes what you’ve written and thinks they can sell it, they will not take you on as a client. Not even if you’re best friends with J. K. Rowling. It’s that simple.

The common theme here is being connected. But how do you get connected? I did it by going to science fiction conventions and meeting lots of writers, other aspiring writers, editors, agents, publishers and fans. All of whom were full of gossip about the publishing industry and books and writers and who the best agents and editors are. After going to two or three conventions I was connected in a way I’d never thought possible. I’d had conversations with some of my favourite writers in the whole world. It was dizzying.

Without even intending to I was laying groundwork for my own fiction publishing career. (Remember though the most important groundwork for a writing career is to write and write and write.) But let me put it in perspective. None of this was instantaneous. I attended my first convention in 1993. I finished my first novel in 1999. I got my first agent in 2000. My first (non-fiction) book was published in 2002. My first professional fiction sale came in 2003 (the Magic or Madness trilogy to Penguin/Razorbill). My first novel was published in 2005. Not exactly greased lightning.

The not-intending-to part is important. Over the years I’ve seen ambitious aspiring writers go to conventions and try to make as many connections as possible as quickly as possible. I’ve seen them rock up to parties and just happen to have the manuscript of their novel in their bag, ready to hand over to the first agent or editor they talk to who expresses interest. Not a good look. Desperation and naked ambition make people on the receiving end nervous.

So, am I recommending that you go to conventions to make connections but pretend that you’re not? No. I’m saying that if you’re even vaguely a people person going to a convention or festival or other gathering of writers who write stuff similar to you (horror conventions if you write horror; romance if you write romance; sf for science fiction and fantasy; writers’ festivals for mainstream) you’re going to meet at least one or two like-minded people and become friends. After more than ten years involvement with the sf community, nearly half my friends are part of that community. The most important thing I’ve gotten out of attending conventions is friendship, becoming part of a community that extends over many continents. I have sf friends in Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK, and the United States (and I’m sure I’m forgetting some countries).

That many of these friends are writers, editors and agents is secondary, but, yes knowing them wound up making it easier for me to become a published writer. (But remember, some of them weren’t any of those things when I first met them.) I’ve been invited to contribute stories to an anthology just because I happened to be in the room with the editor who was talking about it. Most themed anthologies aren’t open submission, you have to be invited, and to be invited editors have to know who you are. If you’re unpublished—as I was at the time—it’s damned hard to get the invite. So far I haven’t had a story accepted for one of those anthologies. Like I said, being known gets your foot in the door, but it doesn’t get you published unless the editor loves what you’ve written. Established writers with many published books still get rejections.

The best panel I attended at WisCon this year was Common Questions for Pros. It featured the diametrically opposed Robin McKinley and Scott Westerfeld. In good spirit they disagreed about how to write (Robin: in one big, compulsive, mind-destroying burst; Scott: in the same place, at the same time, every day, with the goal of writing a thousand words), as well as about how to go about getting an agent, or published. Scott spent a lot of time talking about the community in a similar vein to what I’ve written above. Robin McKinley kept making the point that if you prefer the life of a hermit, if you can only handle people in small doses, then the becoming-connected route is not for you. You can, she insisted, get published without knowing a soul in the industry. After all she managed it.

I totally agree (and for the record, so does Scott). I’ve seen people at cons schmoozing because that’s what they think they should be doing and looking utterly miserable in the process. If you don’t like talking to strangers then don’t do it.

Here’s something else Scott and Robin McKinley agreed about: the writing is the thing. No matter how connected you are, if your writing doesn’t cut it then you will not be professionally published. Your writing must always come first. There’s no race to be published. I swore to myself that I would have my first novel published before I was thirty. It didn’t happen and I’m glad (though that’s definitely not how I felt at the time). Right now I’m a much better writer than I was at thirty. I hope that like Ursula K. Le Guin and Carol Emshwiller I’m going to be an even better writer in my seventies and eighties. That’s one of the great things about being a writer: there’s no use-by date.

Good luck.

New York City, 4 July 2005

Acks are crucial. Yesterday, over at Tingle Alley the proprietress posted some interesting thoughts on this micro-genre. Those posts and follow-up comments got me thinking about exactly why I think acks are so important.

My default position is that no one writes alone and acknowledgments are the proof of that, the place where a writer gets to acknowledge their debts. The length of the acknowledgements section is directly proportional to how many people were involved in making the book happen. Thus non-fiction books have much longer acks than fiction ones. My first book, a heavily researched non-fiction tome, has acknowledgments that go for five pages. It had to because that many people helped me research and write the book over the many years between beginning my phd thesis in 1992 and the resulting book being published in 2002. My novel has only one page of acks because it took less than two years from conception to publication—trust me, in this business that’s amazingly quick—and thus required the assistance of many fewer people.

Acknowledgments admit that a book emerges not just from one writer, but from a community. Without these particular editors, copyeditors, librarians, friends, lovers, children, pets, this particular book would be a different book. There are different sets of fingerprints on every page.

Besides, finding your name in the acks is one of life’s great pleasures. Every time it happens to me I’m dead chuffed, why should I withhold that chuffage from the people who’ve helped and supported me?

In the Tingle Alley comments Jenny D talks about her embarrassment at the extreme length of the acknowledgments in her first novel. It took a long time to write and involved the input of many people, some of them very famous (like Joyce Carol Oates & J. M. Coetzee—I confess I haven’t heard of all the writers she mentions, but I’m plenty impressed by Oates & Coetzee) who Jenny D claims to have hounded for their input. She worries that her acks thus look like a horrendous name-dropping fest as well as reminding herself of her callow youth.

I have done exactly the same. I still flush with horror over the earnestness with which I harassed Janette Turner Hospital when I took her one semester undergraduate creative writing course. But here’s the thing: it’s one of the best ways to learn your craft—whatever your craft may be, plumbing, painting, singing, basketball—you go after older, wiser, better, more patient people than yourself and ask them to teach you. And sometimes they do. It’s not something to be embarrassed about, though, of course, both Jenny D. and myself are. But, you know, there’s not a lot the nineteen-year-old me did that I’m not embarrassed by now (not to mention the me’s at a whole raft of other ages, some distressingly close to my current age).

While agreeing that there’s much that is wonderful about acknowledgments, Ms Tingle Alley also enjoys

the pristine simplicity of a ‘To Véra’ and that, say, Lolita contains no references to librarians or pedophiles who were helpful in the writing of the novel. Yet when I ask myself why, I have no idea. Except that it’d be like finishing watching a play and having the costume designer and props guy come trotting out for a bow, like having the backstage come forward.

That it would ruin the magic of a novel you’ve been lost in to have the artifice, the underpinnings, held up for scrutiny?

Sometimes I feel the same, or not quite the same. But there are books that would be better off ack-less. There’s one (which I won’t name) that I love, yet the acknowledgments are so cringe-making I have to rush past them, pretend they’re not there. Trust me, I have thought about ripping the offending pages out, but I suspect that in their absence they would loom even larger. They are truly that embarrassing. One paragraph is devoted—in ornate language, liberally festooned with smatterings of Italian—to detailing how much this particular writer loves their spouse. It is to retch.

I imagine it is just this kind of acknowledgments that is spoofed here (via Tingle Alley) or that Salon spoofs in an essay on the acks of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s books (thanks, Ginger). But I can’t say because I haven’t read her books. Not even the acks. And though these spoofs are clever I could only half enjoy them, because I have written gushing acknowledgments, and can imagine mine being mocked in just that way, and because I believe it’s better to gush (however cringe-makingly) than not to acknowledge at all.

And yet, I know writers—generous, big-hearted, wonderful writers—who do not have acknowledgments in their books. I asked why. "Because," one told me, "I have thanked the people who need thanking, I see no need to do it publicly. They know who they are." Another said it struck them as unnecessary and somehow crass. Another maintains that most acknowledgments pages are show-offy: Look at me! I have a cat, a husband, a wife, friends, children, editors, agents! I exist! They feel that the book should be left to stand on its own. That once published, the writer should step out of its way, not loudly proclaim ownership for several pages.

I kind of agree, but when I look at the acknowledgments page of a book I’ve just read, especially if I’ve really enjoyed it, I’m looking at some hint of where it came from, who helped it into life. I’m looking for its place in a community, in several communities. I’m looking for the connections that mark it as part of the web of humanity. Perhaps, I’m looking in some small way for some other, more tangible way it’s connected to me. Not just because I love it, but because I also have family and friends and editors and agents. Or maybe I’m just vainly hoping my name is in there too and I’ll find it if I just look hard enough.

New York City, 10 June 2005

Scott Westerfeld went to the first two workshops and got to discuss Secret Writers’ Business with some of my favourite writers in the entire world. Afterwards he and many of the others were red eyed and seemed to have this new and amazing bond. I confess I felt a pang of jealousy, but I knew I didn’t belong in that room. At the time of the first workshop I’d published a non-fiction book and had one semi-pro sale of a short story. Now, I’ve sold three novels, one of which has been published and I still don’t belong in that room.

Pat Murphy has now come up with a much better definition of a mid-career writer: someone who’s had at least one book remaindered. Ouch.

This WisCon I was involved in several conversations about the problems of being a mid-career writer usually with a bunch of writers who’d all been in the game much longer than me. In one conversation I started burbling on with first-novelist enthusiasm about the business cards I’d printed up, visiting bookstores, and other bits and bobs I’ve been doing to promote Magic. Their eyes glazed over. "Stuff business cards," their body language said. They started to talk about what to do when you’re remaindered, or when you’re told that you’ll have to change your name if you want to sell books for more money. Oh, I realised once again, I am not a mid-career writer.

Here’s why a closed discussion is necessary. People at my stage of their career just slow the conversation down. First-time novelists just don’t get where the mid-career writer is at. Neither do writers who are unpublished. Every time published writers try to discuss the problems with their publishing career online someone comes along (often way more than one person) and flames them. "You should be grateful to be published at all!" "I know loads of brilliant writers who can’t even get an agent!" Blah, blah, blah. Look at the vitriolic attacks on Jane Austen Doe.

I was in my thirties when I started making professional sales. I started sending my stories and poetry out when I was fifteen. I know just how hard it is to get published. I know several unbelievably talented writers struggling to get their work into print. That’s a problem. It just happens to be a different problem to those that mid-career writers have. It’s also a problem if your advances and sales are going down with each successive book (despite them being the very best books you can write). Writers in that position need to be able to talk to their peers without gormless first novelists burbling on about business cards or frustrated unpublished writers bitching at them.

I have a couple of friends who have been very successful with their careers and are now getting big advances, being pursued by Hollywood, sent on book tours, the works, and guess what? There are problems involved with success. The two most successful writers I know have barely been able to write a word in the last year. The amount of publicity they have to do for their publisher has increased by a factor of ten, as has the amount of mail they get, and books they’re called on to blurb. They’re barely home. They’re exhausted. They’ve forgotten what their families look like. But they can’t complain because the most common response they get is: "I wish I had your problems!" which is the same as saying shut up.

Supporting yourself as a writer is a difficult, fraught business with all sorts of different problems at every stage. If you say as an unpublished writer, "I don’t want to hear about your problems! You’re published! I have nothing!" you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face. If you go on with your career, one day the problems of a mid-career writer will be your problems. The book that you have slaved over that is as good a book as you can make it, will die in the markerplace, will be remaindered. When that happens I doubt that you will consider yourself lucky to have been published at all.

So it’s probably worth listening—without envy—to those whose careers are further along than your own.

New York City, 2 June 2005

I’ve noticed over the last year that shorter pieces that are more blog-like than musing-like have been increasing in frequency, and also that I say very little about the books I read, or the films and TV I watch, or the shows and exhibitions I see. So I’ve decided to start an actual, real, proper blog where I’ll write about some of that, with proper blogging software and comments and everything. You’ll find it here.

I plan to update it on something like a daily basis. In the same way that musings are added here on somewhat of a weekly basis. And, yes, I plan to keep on musing. Thanks for reading me over the past two years. Hope you enjoy the blog too.

New York City, 25 May 2005

Thanks for the advice and agent suggestions and all the good wishes. Much appreciated. Here’s the answer to the two questions:

1) How’s the search going?

Not too foul. Nice lunches have been consumed, meetings have been held, there has been much talk of the future, of our careers, where we want to be headed and how best to get there. I’m starting to get a little weary of saying the same things over and over (Make me a star! Give me a career like Philip Pullman’s!). But fortunately the agents we’ve been meeting have been less tedious. Each one has been different and not one of them has been even a tiny bit creepy. I don’t know about you, but I’ve long been brainwashed by Hollywood into thinking all agents are unscrupulous and evil. Though, come to think of it, those were mostly Hollywood agents.

None of the seven agents we’ve met have done anything to get themselves crossed off the list: they’re all smart, interesting and fun to hang out with. I’m hoping I get to stay friends with the ones I don’t choose. (I wonder what the etiquette on that is? Christopher?) Every single one of them has met all eight items on my list. They all take the same percentage, offer the same services, go to the same important book fairs around the world. The more agents I meet the harder making a decision becomes. So I’ve decided that I’ll go with the agent who loves my adult novel (an historical set in twelfth century Cambodia) and my young adult books. That should narrow down the field some!

2) What on earth does an agent do to earn that fifteen per cent?

They act as a bulwark between you and your publisher. I negotiated my contract with Penguin/Razorbill myself, which was really awkward because Eloise Flood, Razorbill’s publisher, is a good friend. I don’t ever want to be in the position of bargaining with a friend again. An agent won’t be embarrassed about asking for more money, or to keep control of the movie rights, or the foreign rights, or whatever it is you want.

And your agent should know to ask for stuff you didn’t even realise you wanted. Agents have been negotiating with editors for longer than you. They know what scary clauses in a contract have to be crossed out. They know which publishers will do what for which writers and thus how to get you a better deal. Hell, agents understand contracts which already puts them a long way ahead of me. My eyes glaze over before I’ve hit the end of page one. (In my defence: contract pages are really long.)

A good agent knows which editors are actively hunting for which kind of books. They know who’d be right for you at all the major houses and most of the boutiquey, hip ones too. It’s their job to know all this. It’s a lot harder for a writer to be up on all that stuff, thus unagented books typically don’t get seen by as many editors and don’t get as good a deal.

If your publisher does something you’re unhappy with a good agent can fix it for you, or at least find out what’s going on and smooth things over. Just having someone run interference can be worth the 15% alone. Sometimes your publisher want to change the terms of the contract by, say, cutting one book into two, or publishing a book in paperback when they’d said it was going to be hardcover (neither of which has happened to me). That’s when you need to have someone who’s got your back to talk to, figure out how best to handle it, and then, best of all, go handle it for you.

Not only do agents understand contracts, they also understand royalty statements, which have to be the most incomprehensible things I’ve ever struggled and failed to understand. Trust me, I’ve really really tried, because your royalty statement is the statement that tells you how well your book is doing. They’re important! A good agent can spot when they don’t make sense, figure out what happened, and extract the outstanding money from your publisher. Useful, eh?

They also take you out to lunch at yummy restaurants and gossip with you. Yeah, yeah, I have friends I do that with too, but a) they don’t pay, and b) they’re not your agent so it’s not nearly as cool. "La, la, la, here I am at this fancy pants restaurant with my fancy pants agent. Look at me!"

To sum up: having an agent is all about looking cool.

New York City, 23 May 2005

Gulp. Much much easier said than done.

First of all there’s the researching, asking people in publishing—writers, editors, publishers, publicists etc. etc—about all the agents they know. Who does what? Who’s looking for new clients? Who handles Young Adult? Adult fiction? Both? Genre? Non-fiction? Who has a client list that I’d fit in with? Then there’s approaching them and seeing if they’re interested. Then meeting them. Then deciding who to go with.

Fortunately I’m not doing this alone. Scott is also in the hunt for a new agent. He’s gone agentless for several years and has decided that it’s time to have someone else take care of the parts of being a writer he’s least fond of (negotiating deals, checking contracts etc. etc.) and that it’s worth giving 15% away to have them do it. Even though we mightn’t go with the same agent, we decided to look together so that we could compare gut reactions, and point out cool career achievements the other one forgot to mention. "Scott just won an Aurealis." "Justine just got nominated to the BBYA list." (Always easier to have someone else toot your horn for you.)

While deciding which agents to approach we put together a list of what we wanted from an agent. Here’s mine (Scott’s was a lot less mushy):

Someone who

• I can trust;
• understands and enjoys my writing;
• has long-term plans for my career and can give me advice on what projects to pursue next and how and when;
• is based in New York City and on a first-name basis with most of the editors and publishers here. NYC is, after all, still the centre of publishing in this country. And also so I can see them face-to-face during the northern summer when I’m here. (I also plan to get myself a Sydney agent to handle my Australian career.);
• knows the business inside and outside. Not just the people, but how the strange arcane business of publishing works;
• responds to my calls and emails promptly;
• understands and loves young adult fiction;
• understands and loves genre fiction.

Not that huge a list really, and yet . . . It’s such a strange relationship, that of agent and writer. Some end up being psychologist, social worker, mother, father, editor and banker to their clients as well as everything I listed. I don’t want any of that. I got plenty of people in those roles already! But I do want someone I feel is looking out for me and will fight to protect my 85% as much as their 15%.

So ever since we got back to NYC we’ve been meeting with agents. All of whom have been lovely. Seriously, we haven’t met a one we haven’t liked. Still I’m not sure that liking your agent is the most important aspect of this particular relationship. My previous agent was the first agent to ask me. At the time I was unpublished and had been knocked back by the two agents I’d approached (one in Sydney, one in NYC) and could not believe my luck. It’s much much much harder getting an agent when you’re unpublished. It turned out that I liked her a tonne, but even so that wasn’t enough for our agent/writer relationship to be what we both wanted it to be.

The meetings, mostly lunches, have been very very weird. It’s like a first date except that . . . actually, no except, it’s exactly like a first date, right down to them bringing you a present (not flowers—much better than that—books! which is how I got to read Holly Black’s brilliant and amazing Valiant so early). It’s awkward and tense and exhausting. Just like a first date you’re wondering whether they like you, whether you like them, whether you’ll be good together, whether this has a future. You’re analysing everything they say and don’t say. Why did they pick this particular restaurant? Why this part of town? Why did they dress that way? Should you have dressed this way?

Still, it’s early days, we have the whole summer to decide and already we’ve both met an agent we’d definitely feel more than comfortable with. We both have high hopes it’ll work out okay.

In the meantime, if anyone out there who is an agent, or has an agent, has any thoughts on this peculiar, yet incredibly important relationship in a writer’s life I’d love to hear from you.

Wish us luck in our search!

New York City, 12 May 2005

Of course, when I say we did it all by ourselves I stretch the truth somewhat. Deborah Biancotti answered my Dreamweaver questions every time I got stuck. What a fabulous person she is! And Chris McLaren was my WordPress guru, because Scott now has his very own blog which he’ll be updating on a near daily basis. If he manages it’ll be damned impressive. Remember this is a guy who still has two novels to write and turn in this year.

So for the past few weeks Scott has been writing great swathes of new content. I particularly enjoy his News section which has a potted (and very wry) history of his entire publishing career going back to 1996. Naturally enough it also includes the latest news like the fact that the Uglies trilogy just sold at auction in Japan! Yup, there’s going to be Japanese editions of all three books. There are also pages for his vampire book, Peeps, which will be out in September and, also for the Uglies trilogy.

Meanwhile I’ve been learning way more about Dreamweaver than I knew before and am now busily learning all about Cascading Style Sheets. Gulp. Who knows, some day soon I may even be brave enough to tackle doing some of the stuff Petey’s suggested I do.

Enjoy Scott’s new site and blog.

New York City, 12 May 2005

The Artemis Fowl and Co. ("Co." being me and Scott) event was fab. Its fabulousness was clear from the very beginning when the praise monster (all hail!) manifested itself in the form of Peter Glassman, the owner of Books of Wonder, who greeted me with the most amazingly effusive gush about my book, which he was three-quarters of the way through reading. I caught the words "brilliant" and "writing" in close proximity to each other. Blush.

The event consisted of me and Scott doing a short reading from Magic or Madness and Midnighters 1: The Secret Hour respectively. I read the scene where Reason steps through the door from the summer of Sydney to the winter of New York City and sees snow for the first time; Scott read the scene from the first Midnighters book where Jessica discovers the blue time and rain for the first time. We hadn’t planned to read such similar scenes. Actually until we read them out loud side by side we hadn’t realised they were similar. (For those wondering, that would be me plagiarising Scott.)

Eoin Colfer didn’t read from any of his books, instead he told a very funny story about why you shouldn’t tease six year olds, even if they do have big heads, not all their teeth, and in their swimming goggles resemble Golem from Lord of the Rings. He also explained in detail how "hurling" and "jumper" don’t mean the same thing in Ireland as they do in the US. This gave me an excellent later segue to promote my book as educational because it has a glossary of Australian English at the back.

Next there was Q & A. All the questions but one were asked by the actual demographic of our books. This was very exciting for me because I spend a great deal of time thinking and talking about children’s and young adult literature, but almost always with adults, hardly ever with the people for whom it is written. My first and only question was the first asked: "Is there really no snow in Australia?" To which I answered that yes there is, just not a lot, and mostly in places like the Snowy Mountains and Tasmania. It’s very easy to grow up in Australia without ever seeing it.

Scott’s one question came towards the end, "When is the third Midnighters book coming out?" You’ll find the answer here. All the other questions were for Eoin and they were all asked by kids (mostly boys) who displayed an intimate knowledge of his books and a huge thirst for more: there were many variations on the when-is-the-next-book-coming-out and will-there-be-more-books-in-the-series questions. For a writer those are very sweet indeed.

After the questions were all asked, the astoundingly large audience (given that it was mother’s day) formed a very long queue and we signed lots and lots of books. This was a big surprise because frankly I was expecting to sign at most four or five books (for my friends who came: Hey Liesa! Hey Eloise! Hey Tui! Hey Barry! Hey Will & Alice!), but for over an hour there was a steady trickle of people I didn’t know who wanted me to sign for them. Astounding! Wonderful! Happy making! Most of my signees were girls who looked incredibly young—twelve at the very most. One of them had already started reading my book and was impatient for me to hurry up and sign it so she could get back to reading. Happy sigh.

Next to me all the Midnighters fans had emerged to get Scott to sign their books and ask why they had to wait such a long, long, long, time for the next Midnighters book? And why were there only going to be three books? Scott was able to placate them by pointing to Uglies, and So Yesterday as possible substitutes while they waited.

Eoin (turns out it’s pronounced "Owen" not "Ian" as I had guessed—oops!) Colfer signed and signed and signed and signed. He was charming, entertaining, and wonderful with his fans, spending time chatting to every single one. There were a lot of them and most seemed to have every book he’d ever written, held in teetering stacks supported only by their small, wee, tiny, little hands. In fact, one kid came up to Scott and me after having his mountainous pile of Colfer books signed: he let out a weary sigh, slid our books onto the table, asked that we sign in exhausted tones, and explained that his back hurt from carrying so many books.

Quite a few of the kids who’d come to see Eoin Colfer also wound up buying Scott’s and my books. When the event was over we gave Peter a list of all the other writers we’d be more than happy to do an event with: Diana Wynne-Jones, Ursula Le Guin, Garth Nix, Phillip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Jonathan Stroud etc. etc.

In the pauses between people wanting me to sign, I signed for Books of Wonder. First the lovely staff brought about thirty books, which I duly signed. Then they took those away and brought thirty more, which I also signed, expressing surprise at how many there were. "Oh," Sarah said, "these are the mail-order books. There are plenty more. We haven’t even got up to the store stock yet. I love your book, we’ve been handselling it like you wouldn’t believe." Were ever sweeter words heard from the mouth of a bookseller? A brief pause while yours truly blushed, coughed, and thanked Sarah profusely, then returned to signing. I have never signed so many books in my life. I loved it!

Another huge thrill was meeting Cassandra Claire. She’s just gotten a big, prestigious, three-book deal, agented by Barry Goldblatt, but much more importantly Cassie is the author of The Secret Diary of Aragorn Son Of Arathorn (and other secret diaries) which was circulating all over the internet a few years back and completely cracked me up every time someone sent it to me, which they did a lot. It continues to crack me up every time I think of the phrase "still not king". It was grouse being able to thank her in person and to sign a copy of Magic or Madness for her. Cassie Claire bought my book!

Oh, and Eoin Colfer showed me the worm in his eye ball which is exquisitely gross. I want one too!

It were a good weekend.

New York City, 9 May 2005

For those of who don’t know, Eoin Colfer is one of the best-known, best-selling, and popular writers of children’s books around. His Artemis Fowl books have put him up there with Lemony Snickett, Holly Black & Tony DiTerlizzi, Garth Nix and Jonathan Stroud. Exalted company indeed. It’s quite the honour for a total beginner in the genre like me to be on the same billing. Here’s hoping I’ll be able to impress one or two of Colfer’s legion of fans enough that they’ll want to check out my book. Fingers crossed and gulp.

I can’t tell you exactly what we’ll be doing because I’m not entirely sure. Books of Wonder events are varied and as the name of the shop would suggest—wonderful. I’ve seen writers and artists do short readings, discuss their books, their children, their life, interrogate their readers in the audience, draw the audience, answer questions, juggle and tap dance (okay, I may have made up the last two). I’m hoping this Sunday will be more of a laid-back chatting thing. I have no problems gasbagging about Magic or Madness, but for some reason I get very nervous when I’m asked to read from it. Nope, I don’t understand it either. I’m sure Eoin Colfer has no such problems, and I know Scott doesn’t. And this recent article full of advice on how to read in public has only made me more nervous.

Books of Wonder is my favourite bookshop in New York City. It’s huge, beautiful, full of books I’ve read or want to read, the staff know their stuff and are sweethearts. The shop is owned by Peter Glassman who has an encyclopediac knowledge of children’s literature and does his level best to read everything new that comes out. An impossible task, but if anyone gets close it’s him (or Joe Monti the children’s and YA book buyer for Barnes and Noble).

One of the things I love best about Peter and his wonderful shop, is the way they support writers. Books of Wonder has an event two or three times a week for most of the year. If you live anywhere near NYC, or you’re visiting, and you have even a slight interest in childrens and YA books you have to visit. And if you’re not being showered (or showering your mother) with presents and attention this Sunday why not stop by around 1PM?

See you there!

New York City, 6 May 2005

One of the cool things about writing a trilogy populated by Australian and US characters, and attempting to use both vernaculars, has been coming across differences between Australian and US English. Yesterday, while defining "bitumen" for the glossary of Magic Lessons, I learned that not only do USians not know what "bitumen" is, they don’t call a road made from bitumen a "sealed" road. I don’t know why but it had never occurred to me that a sealed road could be called anything but a sealed road. Apparently they call them paved roads. Huh.

This is weird to an Australian because "paving" is something you do to garden paths, or around swimming pools, not to roads or streets. Unless they’re made of cobble stones and frankly, I’ve not come across many cobblestoned streets in Australia.

Here’s the Macquarie Dictionary (Australia’s premier dictionary—I adore it) definition of "sealed road": a bituminised road. (That’ll explain everything to a bewildered USian.) And of "pavement": 1. a walk or footway, especially a paved one, at the side of a street or road. 2. a surface, ground covering, or floor made by paving.

Naturally enough, Webster’s and the American Heritage Dictionary don’t have a definition of "sealed road". But here’s how the American Heritage defines "pavement": 1.a A hard smooth surface, especially of a public area or thoroughfare, that will bear travel.

Not the same are they? To "pave" something in the US can include laying out asphalt on a road. The Maquarie Dictionary definition of "to pave" is you have to be laying out tiles, stones, bricks, the stuff that we refer to as "paving". It took many minutes of incomprehension between me and Scott before we sorted it.

I also had a US character say, "He wants in to the house". My editor queried it. I didn’t understand what the problem was, so I asked Scott, who changed it to "Looks like he wants to get into the house." To my ears that sounds too formal, but apparently in US English "to want in" can only mean that you want to be included, as in "Jo wants in on that bank robbery". In Aussie English "wanting in" can mean both wanting to be included and wanting to be (literally) inside.

At one point another of my US characters said that they were "made to go" there. Once again my editors cranked out the red pen, and once again I was confused. Turns out that to a USian if you say that you were "made to" do something, it means that you were created for the purpose of doing that thing, not that you were forced to do it. In Australian English we have both meanings, so that "I was made to write the first great Australian, feminist, monkey knife-fighting, cricket & Elvis novel" can mean either that you were created for the purpose of writing such a novel (which I was) or that that you were forced to write it (which I could be if someone would pony up the dosh).

I also learned that US English doesn’t include "a dog’s breakfast", "demountables", or "unco". Which made me sad for US English, until I remembered some of their great words and expressions, such as "write me", "geek out", "sketchy" and my all-time favourite: "discombobulate". Best word ever!

New York City, 2 May 2005

Even without the whole site going off air, you’ll have noticed I haven’t been musing a whole lot of late. And if you’re a mate, you’ll notice I haven’t been so great about email. I’ve been deadline busy, volunteer work busy, and travelling far too much. This month things should calm down and I should be able to catch up on my life.

Now, back to the (possibly) final round of rewrites on Magic Lessons: they’re due tomorrow!

New York City, 1 May 2005

My first novel has now sold in three different markets: USA, Australia, and now Taiwan (including Hong Kong and Macau). Magic or Madness is going to exist in a language completely unlike my own. Ideograms not alphabet! Top to bottom not left to right! I can’t wait to see what it’ll look like.

So I am now finally convinced that the book is real. Surely they wouldn’t have offered for an imaginary book? Besides I’ve been into four bookshops since we arrived in NYC and even through my jetlagged haze I could see that they had my book. They had them in their twos and fours and at Books of Wonder in their fourteens! I love that shop. At the Union Square Barnes and Noble there was a special section, Myths and Heroes (I may have that title arse up, I’m jetlagged, okay?), that featured Magic or Madness along with five other books including Holly Black’s fabulous Tithe.

Booklist gave the book its second starred review:

In this fierce, hypnotic novel, character, story, and the thrumming forces of magic strike a rare, memorable balance . . . Readers looking for layered, understated fantasy will follow the looping paths of Larbalestier’s fine writing, as graceful and logical as the coiled chambers of Reason’s ammonite, with gratitude and awe.—Jennifer Mattson

Sigh. Gratitude and awe . . .

Heh hem, what was I saying? Oh yes, Magic or Madness is real. Okay, just so you don’t think I’m irretrievably lost in the maws of the mighty praise monster (which, actually, I am) I also got my first review from a reader on barnesandnoble.com. He gave me a scant two stars and declared that the book is like a "bad Australian episode of Charmed". Brilliant turn of phrase, eh? I’ve been imagining Charmed a la Neighbours ever since:

Jane: Charlene!

A petite, curly-headed blonde emerges fron beneath a car dressed in overalls, holding a spanner. She wipes her forehead leaving a grease mark.

Jane: Whatcha reckon about that new warlock, Cole? Bit dodgy, eh?

Charlene: Too right. I don’t reckon he’s really you-know-who’s son. And what were you doing snogging my hubbie, anyway?! You witch!

If the movie rights to Magic or Madness ever sell, I do hope they get the Charmed/Neighbours combination right. Could be tricky. I’ll just have to keep my fingers crossed that our Kylie’s available for the role of Reason.

Tomorrow I begin a brand new novel. One that hasn’t even been sold in English yet. Can’t wait.

New York City, 17 April 2005

Of course, I should be entirely focussed on Magic or Madness. It’s the one in the shops, being reviewed, and (I hope) being read right now. I should be doing what I can to promote and support my first born and stop thinking about the next baby (Magic Lessons) and the baby after that (Magic! Magic! Magic! Oi! Oi! Oi!—no, I will never tire of that joke). But I haven’t forgotten Magic or Madness, honest. On the 8th of May I’ll be doing an event at Books of Wonder in New York City: me plus Scott plus EOIN COLFER (!!).

In that vein, yesterday I went into Galaxy Books in Sydney because I’d heard a rumour they had a couple of copies Magic or Madness. Said rumour was true. There were three faced out on the recent titles shelves and one shelved alphabetically (disappointingly, not next to Tanith Lee as I had fondly imagined). I signed all four—my first novel-signing in a real-live bookshop. I saw an actual customer who didn’t even know me, pick up the book and giggle as he read through the glossary. I ran into a dear friend who’d come to Galaxy specifically to buy my book (and Scott’s latest) and watched her do just that (bless her). And, yes, that was thrilling too. And I was asked, yet again, when the sequel would be out and why it takes so long in between books.

Here’s the answer as I understand it:

Typically publishers reckon that only libraries, obsessive fans (such as me—I won’t bore you with the list of writers I must have in hardcover) and rich people buy hardcovers. Most people wait for the paperback. Some say the main job of the hardcover is to be an advertisement for the paperback (though if none sold at all there wouldn’t be any paperback).

I’ve been watching this process with Scott’s first Midnighters book, The Secret Hour. The hardcover came out a year ago, now the paperback is out and selling even faster than the hardcover (which did just fine). At the same time he has a paperback original, Uglies, out. Together the two paperbacks are generating a lot more Scott Westerfeld attention, a steady flow of fan mail, and are driving sales of the newly-released hardcover Midnighters 2: Touching Darkness. Most excellent.

Ideally a publisher wants an author to write a book a year, so that once a year the author has a new (hardcover) book out at the same time as their previous book appears in paperback. That way the sales of paperbacks and hardcovers feed on one another in an endless cycle and the author is never forgotten. That’s the theory anyway.

Scott has gone even further: he’ll have four new books out this year: Midnighters 2: Touching Darkness and his vampire novel, Peeps (I reckon its his best YA so far), in hardcover, and Uglies and its sequel Pretties in paperback. On top of that there’s the paperbacks of last year’s Midnighters 1 and So Yesterday. Next year he’ll have three new books: Midnighters 3 Blue Noon (hardcover), Specials, the final book in the Uglies trilogy (paperback) and an as yet unnamed (and unwritten) hardcover followup to So Yesterday and Peeps. Then of course there’ll be the Midnighters 2 and Peeps paperbacks. Too much Scott Westerfeld is barely enough.

By which time Scott will have suffered a nervous collapse. Frankly, I don’t recommend writing at the pace he’s been maintaining for the last few years.* But it sure makes for some excellent cross promotion. You liked the Midnighters books? Why not try Peeps? You liked Uglies why not try So Yesterday? And so on . . .

Some publishers actually fear Scott-Westerfeld-style prolificness. They worry that if hardcover and paperback books by the same writer come out too close together it will cut into the sales of the hardcover books. They imagine readers staring at the shelves thinking, "I can only have one Westerfeld book. One costs US$6.99 and the other US$15.99. Hmmm, which will I buy?" In amongst the many Westerfeld books you’ll notice that there’s a year gap between the hardcover and paperback of the same title.

However, publishers are much more against too big a gap then they are against too small. They fear that if you wait 18 months or more everyone will have forgotten about the book and it’s author. But many (I’d say most) writers aren’t like Scott and just can’t write that fast, particularly if they’ve got a day job, and/or children, or value their health.

No matter what pace you’re being published at, it really helps to have some kind of track record. Scott’s sales are increasing as he has more books out and more people have heard of him, he’s being more widely reviewed, shortlisted for awards (not to mention winning the Aurealis) and finding his way onto best-of-the-year lists. One of the problems first-time novelists like myself face is that you’re brand new, haven’t won any awards, and you don’t have any obsessive fans yet. The only place an impulse buy is likely to happen is at a real world bookshop. Especially if you have the luck to be shelved face out as Magic or Madness is right now at Galaxy (Sydney), Pulp Fiction (Brisbane), Books of Wonder (New York City) and some Barnes and Nobles in the US. I’ve had a few emails from folks saying they bought Magic or Madness because they were struck by the cover and the title.

But the face-out shelving won’t be in all stores and won’t last long. There are too many newer books waiting for their moment on the new teen shelves. Sales after my books moves into the land of spine-out-only are generated by promoting your arse off (see the Eoin Colfer event mentioned above, all the cons I’ll attend this year, and all the many bookshops I plan to visit and say "Hi, I’m Justine with the unpronouncable surname. You might possibly, if I’m reallly lucky, know me from such . . . "), good reviews, being shortlisted for—or even better winning—awards, making best-of-the-year lists, and, of course, the ever-mysterious word of mouth. If I knew how that worked I’d be a very wealthy girl indeed (though I suspect Scalzi knows the answer).

To sum up: Having Magic Lessons come out a year later (accompanied by the paperback of Magic or Madness) is not a nefarious plan on the part of my cruel publishers to torture those who are dying to know what happens next. Rather it’s all part of a cunning plan to make the trilogy sell over a longer period of time, and for me to have a more-than-ten-minute-long writing career. Fingers crossed.

For those who really must know, email me, and I’ll send you a five-word summary of the next two books. Or not. Depends on my mood. Oh, what the hell: he dies on the bus.

Just kidding.

Sydney, 11 April 2005

*Though our mate Sean Williams seems to have managed an even more insane pace for a decade now.

I’m having a lovely morning, not just because of wall to wall cricket (I’m also checking scores around the world on my laptop), but because I don’t have to feel guilty about it. The last few months have been work, work, work. But now I’ve met all my deadlines. I turned in the anthology last week and the latest rewrites on Magic Lessons (sequel to Magic or Madness) last night. For the next few days, before my pesky editors get back to me, I can do whatever I damn well please and I choose cricket.

Especially as it’s just this second gone live: the fourth day of play has begun. And even more especially because in just over a week I’ll be stuck in that cricket-free zone: the US of A with little hope of getting to England to watch Australia destoy them in the Ashes. So here’s to inswingers, yorkers, googlies, cover drives, front-foot play, back-foot play, silly mid-on, short square leg and french cuts. And to W. G. Grace, Ranjitsinhji, Learie Constantine, Peggy Antonio, Sid Barnes, Weekes, Worrell and Walcott, Keith Miller, Garfield Sobers, Dennis Lillee, Viv Richards, Micheal Holding, Bruce Reid, Zoe Goss, Makhaya Ntini, Adam Gilchrist, Steve Bucknor and Belinda Clarke. How I shall miss you all!

Sydney, 7 April 2005

Not bad placement, eh? I’m very happy about the eccentric alphabetisation which has me next to one of the hugely-selling Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants books and Boy 2 Girl which is all the buzz right now. (Me being suseptible to such buzz I can’t wait to read it.) And what book should be on the shelf below? It’s Scott’s second Midnighters book, Touching Darkness, which he wrote while I was writing Magic or Madness on our fantabulous San Miguel de Allende writing holiday.

Just looking at our two books together makes me teary remembering the wonderful time we had, the excellent tequila, the hibiscus quesadillas, the sopa azteca and Silvia and Luz and Alejandra. Sigh. I wish we could write all our books there.

Stephanie also snapped the rest of new teen fiction, revealing many copies of not just Touching Darkness, but also of Scott’s other new book, Uglies.

How about that? Larbalestier and Westerfeld conquer the universe! Or at least the new teen fiction section of Barnes & Noble at College Station in Texas. It’s a start.

Sydney, 24 March 2005

And here’s hoping (double plus a billion) that her entire backlist of adult historicals are brought back into print. Although she’s best known for her children’s and YA (young adult) books, which are indeed all splendid, it’s her adult historical novels, The Maypole, Fire’s Astonishment, Vainglory, Lovesong and The Ideal Wife that blow me away. If I could write a book even a tenth as good I would be a very very happy vegemite. And if she would write some more, lots more, I’d be even happier. I’m sick to death of mentioning her adult books to people who are fanatic readers of historical fiction and them never having heard of her. It must end.

Here’s to a bloody brilliant writer getting the kudos and dosh she deserves.

Sydney, 19 March 2005

And you know what? Good on him. Go, Scalzi! When your very first novel is finally, finally (!) available in real shops and libraries for actual people who don’t even know you to purchase, borrow and maybe even read (!) then damned if you aren’t compelled to shout it from the rooftops. It’s a very big deal.

My first novel, Magic or Madness will be officially released into the wild in the USA on the 17th of March (the Australia edition comes out in September). That’s 13 days away (well, okay, fourteen on account of the whole time-difference thing). Less than two weeks! So soon!

My novel is going to be real. Not just an electronic file, or a pile of papers, or an ARC, but an actual finished book with a dust jacket and that fresh paper, fresh glue smell, and it’s going to find its way into the hands of folks who don’t know me! How about that?

I’m excited. I’m nervous. I’m happy. My stomach’s in knots. I keep giggling at inappropriate moments. Like while watching this TV show about parasites, Body Snatchers (best show ever), this man was lying on the grass beside the more than 2 metre long tapeworm that had been living in his bowels and I thought, eww!, and then I remembered that my novel was coming out and clapped my hands and laughed. Yay tapeworm! Yay Magic or Madness!

The only sad thing is that I’ll be here in Sydney not there in the US when vast quantities of my novel are unloaded from huge crates and arrayed on shelves (or, you know, the lone copy is slotted in between Madeleine L’Engle and Ursula Le Guin, either way). So I won’t be able to go to bookshops and gaze at MY novel for sale. This is where Scalzi’s genius idea comes in: if anyone out there happens to be in a real live bookshop that happens to stock my novel, and happen to have their camera with them, and just happens to take a photo of Magic or Madness in said bookshop, well, I’d just adore it if you sent it to me.

To further heighten my already fever-pitch excitement and make it impossible to think about anything other than Magic or Madness, reviews have started to appear. A friend of mine, an established novelist, who’s published many books and received many reviews, told me I should pay no attention to reviews. Good or bad, she says it’s unwise to let them affect how you feel about yourself or your work. This is especially true of good reviews. You must not let praise go to your head. I’m sure she’s very wise. Sadly I have not a skerrick of wisdom and I’m revelling in the good reviews, learning them off by heart. I just got a starred one (which even tops getting a gold koala bear stamp from your kindergarten teacher) in School Library Journal:

Australian author Larbalestier has wrought beautiful and fearsome magic in this novel, the first in a proposed trilogy. Reason Cansino has spent her life with her unusual mother in the bush, moving frequently, keeping to herself, and learning how to guard against her bizarre grandmother, Esmeralda. When her mother goes insane and 15-year-old Reason is sent to live with Esmeralda, she starts to question all the stories her mother has told her. Is Mere practicing magic, which Reason’s mother insisted was not real? Why have nearly all her ancestors died young? When Reason digs up a dead cat in the cellar and finds the key to a locked (magic) door, she escapes her increasingly frightening grandmother only to find herself halfway around the world in New York City, weak, in danger, and befriended by the mysterious Jay-Tee. Authentic teen voices from two continents reveal the fast-paced events and the conflicts faced by youth when powerful (and predatory) adults seek to take advantage of their ignorance. Readers will especially identify with Reason as she struggles to accept her identity and establish autonomy. Larbalestier’s sense of place and refreshing exploration of magic as a force for both good and evil make this novel unusual. By turns a fantasy adventure and a thoughtful examination of relationships, this radiant gem stands alone, but expect readers to be impatient for the rest of the trilogy.-Melissa Moore, Union University Library, Jackson, TN.

I plan to have a T-shirt made that says "radiant gem". Sigh. This review will sustain me through every bad one. Hell, I’ll be remembering this review when I’ve got one foot in the grave, my books are long forgotten, and I’m living on charity. "I was a radiant gem!" I’ll tell them. "A radiant gem!" I love School Library Journal. I love Melissa Moore. I love her library and the whole city of Jackson, Tennessee.

I don’t want you to think I’m naïve though. Well, okay, I can be naïve (when I watch Entourage I’m forever asking Scott if men really talk that way about women) but I’m not naïve about publishing in the USA. Having your first novel published does not guarantee anything very much. Having a sheaf of wonderful starred reviews doesn’t either. Many highly lauded novels have sunk without a trace. Many first novels sell poorly, rarely earning out their advance, and boy do I know just how small those unearned-out advances usually are. Though a recent survey by Tobias Buckell (who’s also soon to have his first novel published) did point to higher advances as your career continues. That is, if you’re career continues . . .

Many first novelists never sell a second novel. This is where I’m a teeny bit ahead of the game: I sold a trilogy. Whatever happens, I’ll have had three novels published. Cunning, eh? That is, if the first one doesn’t tank and the next two don’t wind up cancelled. But, I’m not worried, honest. My editors like the sequel and, hey, it already has a beautiful cover design! It’s got a scheduled publication date!

Besides, I’m a radiant gem. School Library Journal said so.

Sydney, 4 March 2005

"Sweetheart" is not a word that normally passes my lips. To me Scott is Scott not darling, sweetie, sugar, possum, love or anything else. Clearly, this playing wife thing is destroying my brain. I’ll start wearing gingham and aprons and long for a house with a white picket fence. I’ve been making him lunch and dinner as well as breakfast and doing all the washing up, cleaning, tidying and laundry. It’s just exhausting.

Or it would be if I was a bit more conshie about the whole thing. Fortunately I’m not. I let the dishes sit. And my version of tidying is more of a gather and dump process. I haven’t gone near the mop or vacuum cleaner or dusted or anything that requires true exertion. I’m a pretty crap wife, really.

One night instead of rushing back to cook dinner for knackered husband I sit around and drink beer with the students, gossiping and swatting blood-bloated mozzies, before belatedly dashing back to the flat and taking over the dinner-making proceedings from the exhausted and ravenously hungry husband. "Is that beer on your breath?" he asks, suspiciously. "I was near people who were drinking beer," I answer honestly. Scott is turning into a husband.

Neither of us quite realised how much work a Clarion workshop involves. Scott presides over the crit room from 9AM to 1PM where he and the 17 students dissect the day’s stories and he dispenses pearlers about writing that involve the following phrases: "first shoe", "Brechtian law of dialogue", "information assymetery", and "sweating commas". The students diligently write down everything he says. I worry this will go to his head.

Sometime between 1:10 and 1:30PM he comes home for lunch. We eat, briefly converse, then in the few minutes left before he begins the one-on-one sessions with students that will occupy the rest of the day (usually three or four one-hour session), he plunges into reading and re-reading more of their stories.

He returns for dinner. We eat and exchange possibly as many as fifty words, before he starts reading the next day’s stories: all 20,000 words of them. Long before he’s finished I go to bed, read, pass out.

While he’s away critiquing and being wise, I’ve been rewriting the Magic or Madness sequel, working on the Daughters of Earth anthology or slacking off. Slacking off is best. I had a lovely lunch with Kim Wilkins where we talked writing, babies, academia and frocks and I managed to douse myself with a glass of champagne, which the kind restaurant replaced without charge. I’d had only one sip before it filled my lap.

Mostly I went into the city to visit my mate, Ron Serdiuk, at his wonderful sf, fantasy and crime bookshop, Pulp Fiction. We gossiped and I watched him sell four, five, six or more books to customers who come in just looking for the one. Ron’s passionate and knowledgeable about those genres and it shows. He pays attention to what his customers do and don’t like and recommends accordingly. Very dangerous indeed. Yes, I bought books too. Louise Welsh’s latest (Ron got me hooked by loaning me The Cutting Room) and Devil in the White City.

I also helped out the young man from Mallorca with very little English who came in looking for Spanish-language books. I’m pretty sure I translated Ron’s directions to a shop that sells such books reasonably accurately. Though I do tend to get left and right mixed up. Still, we gave him a map, and I got to talk Spanish. By the time I got home I was exhausted. I took one look at Scott and revised my assessment of my fatigue to mildly peaked.

Yesterday I helped out Grace Dugan, Clarion South’s co-founder, with printing out the stories for the following day. There were four of them ranging in length from nine pages to thirty-seven. Just under 20,000 words. The author of the shortest manuscript neglected to add page numbers so I numbered the 153 pages by hand. The printer freaked out several times and started printing a line of garbage at the top of otherwise blank pages and would not stop until we’d done everything we could think of to fix it several times. At which point the stapler started buggerising around with us. Two hours later we had 72 copies of the stories to distribute to students and tutor. It gave me a tiny glimpse of the hard work that makes this workshop run. The conveners: Robert Dobson, Kate Eltham (the other co-founder), Heather Gent and Robert Hoge look every bit as tired as the students.

To recover from the printing ordeal I went swimming with Grace and Lily Chrywenstrom (one of this year’s students). It was rather gorgeous, despite the crushing disappointment of a short-course pool. I expect such mingy pools in the USA, but in Australia! The horror. The day was balmy and humid and lovely, the water warm strewn with leaves from the surrounding gum trees. We swam, laughed, floated, sank and gossiped, while I tested my new boardies, rashie and fins, and swam fast as Thorpie (or almost). We agreed that swimming is good, so is writing, and that hard work is best avoided. The last one may just have been me.

Grace led us to the path through the bush that connects the two Griffith Uni campuses, Nathan (where the workshop is held) and Mount Gravatt (where the swimming pool is), and we walked back past gums and paperbarks and grass trees and other plants that Grace knew the names for but I’ve now forgotten. We saw butterflies, bush turkeys, heard many different birds calling to one another, but saw only crows which we dubbed singed rainbow lorikeets (you had to be there). The walk was even lovelier than the swim.

Earlier in the week I spent forty minutes stalking a goanna, just shy of two metres long from head to tip of tail. It took a while to find just the right stalking distance; every time I got too close it froze, clearly hoping I would stop seeing it and go away. Only at ten metres did it believe I was gone. I watched the goanna being divebombed by birds when it ventured too close to their nests, and at last reaching its goal: a garbage bin. It climbed in and out of the bin always having some part of its body peeking out, tail, hind legs, or head, snout and eyes. A strange clicking hissing sound came from inside as if the goanna were torturing a cicada.

The goanna waddled rather than walked, its stocky limbs moving in a circular motion that made it resemble one of Tolkien’s grumpy dwarves. When it was startled by a group of US exchange students it ran half way up a tree, where it froze in its you-can’t-see-me pose. The Americans were transfixed, unable to believe the size of it. I told them it was still a baby and would grow much much bigger. Who knows? It may even be true.

When Ellen Klages, another—despite her many acclaimed stories, recent first novel sale (to Sharyn November at Penguin USA) and growing reputation—Clarion student, stumbled across a goanna, it reared up on its hind legs and hissed at her. Surely it can’t have been the same one. It was strange seeing Ellen here in Australia. I’ve known her for years, but only in North America, and only at conventions. This is the first time we’ve hung out together when her accent has been the odd one out. It’s most peculiar. She’s as exhausted and worn out as all the other students, who’ve not only been reading and critting the 20 thousand words of stories every day for the last six weeks, but have been writing a sizeable number of them too. I’ve never seen her happier.

It’s just after midnight, the beginning of Friday, the last day of Clarion South 2005. Scott’s reading the last and longest story for tomorrow. He’s not a fast reader. It’ll be at least an hour before he crawls into bed. The bags under his eyes are meeting up with the stubble on his cheeks. It’s not a good look.

He arrived knackered, worn done by a long hard year of writing way too many books, all of them written to his ridiculously high standards. I’m still not sure how he managed it. The Clarion South experience hasn’t exactly been a rest cure, yet he’s loving it here. He uses the word "rejuvenated" frequently, even though he’s so tired he stumbles over that many syllables. He’s full of praise for the smarts, sharpness, energy, creativity, and dedication of his students: Mark Barnes, Nike Bourke, Nathan Burrage, Alison Chan, Lily Chrywenstrom, Suzanne Church, Shane Jiraiya Cummings, Rjurik Davidson, Evan Dean, Ellen Klages, Tessa Kum, Deborah McDonnell, Anne Mok, Emma Munro, Trevor Stafford, Susan Wardle, and Kenrick Yoshida. He says he’s learned as much about writing as they have, has been forced to put into words ideas about the craft that had floated about in his backbrain but never surfaced before. He’s sad it’s almost over.

On Monday we go to Heron Island with Ron and Sarah. Six days without computers: no writing, no internet, no critiquing, just tennis, snorkelling and mango daiquiris. I’ll stop playing wife and we’ll be back to being Scott and Justine again. We can’t wait, but neither one of us would have missed this week for the world.

I crawl into bed now. Scott keeps scribbling in red.

Written Brisbane, 11 February 2005; posted Sydney, 21 February 2005

(As with the first musing all dollar amounts are US unless otherwise specified.)

I’ve gotten a lot of mail on the subject, some from others like me who’ve just sold their first novel and were grateful for the perspective. They all expressed great relief to hear their advance was not nearly as bad as they’d thought. I had the same reaction myself!

Most of the mail came from unpublished writers, wanting to know more about what happens after the whole signing of contract, advance thing. I was tempted to write an essay in response, but then Kim Wilkins told me about Ian Irvine’s essay, "The Truth About Publishing" (you’ll find the link in the menu on the left, eleven down). Ian’s been in this game much longer than I have, and knows, way way more about publishing. Read it! Even if you’ve been published. Read it now. Read it all the way through to the end. Trust me, you’ll be wiser for it. I wish I’d read it before I sold my first novel.

One of my correspondents asked about the merits of self-publishing and vanity presses. I advised them to go check out Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Making Light and the various articles there about some of the many pitfalls of vanity presses who pretend not to be vanity presses. There are good reasons for going to a vanity press. Self-publishing is perfect for small projects like publishing your family history to give to family members, or a book on how to turn toe-nail clippings into jewellery. You know you’ll be able to sell enough copies at all the toe-nail clipping fetishist fairs to make your money back, but you may have difficulty persuading any publisher of same.

Self-publishing is rarely the best route to get your novel into the hands of the reading public. Yes, some writers have had a lot of success self-publishing, Kelly Link is one. But she knew a tonne about the industry, and she and her husband started their own publishing company. They’d be the first to tell you they’re not exactly rolling in money as a result. Critical acclaim and good feeling, yes; dosh, not so much. Theirs is a totally different enterprise from some of those that Teresa Nielsen Hayden discusses. Be very very careful. As in any industry there are less-than-honest people out there.

A number of people objected to my survey, calling it unscientific and meaningless. On the first charge, yes, absolutely, totally unscientific, the sample size was micropscopic. Tobias is going to do it right. But I doubt that the results are going to be wildly different. No matter what actual number he ends up with, the average first novel advance in any genre is not enough money to live off.

There were also a couple of objections to my claim that the average advance for a non-fiction book is $30,000. First, I did say big NY publishing houses. Second, mea culpa, I didn’t specify what kind of non-fiction. I was referring to narrrative non-fiction (books like Longitude and Salt) and biography. The kinds of non-fiction that are closest to novels. And thirdly, $30,000 was a hand-waving figure. But I’ve since heard from more agents and a number of non-fiction writers who all say, yes, the average for those kind of non-fiction books is considerably higher than it is for fiction. If you’re writing computer manuals you’re unlikely to get within coo-ee of thirty thou. Or even worse, if you’re writing learned tomes for university presses, you’ll be lucky to get any advance at all.

Two people got back to me with great detail about how advances are worked out, author, Garth Nix, who was once an agent, and an editor who wishes to remain annonymous. I was fascinated because I’d thought advances were determined by how much your editor liked you. Apparently not. The amount I don’t know about publishing would fill all the world’s oceans. Which is another reason why you should follow all the links I’m providing to folks like Ian Irvine and Teresa Nielsen Hayden who do know what they’re talking about.

Here’s what Garth had to say (he’s talking Australian dollars):

Many publishers actually work out first novel advances using a rule of thumb that the advance offered is 50% of the royalty earnings expected from the first print run. The first print run of a novel for which the publisher has ordinary expectations is usually about 4-5,000 copies (surprisingly this is much the same in the UK and US as well as Australia, though the format will probably be different). Say it’s 5,000 copies of a $18.95 paperback with a 10% royalty, then the royalty earnings if the whole run sells would be $1.89 x 5,000 or $9,450, 50% of that is $4,725, in that case the publisher might round it up to a $5000 advance.

If the publisher is very confident or very keen to get the book (or the author, looking ahead), then both the estimated first printing, the format and possibly the proportion of the royalties calculation will result in a larger offer. For example, the publisher might decide the book can support a C-format paperback (or in the US or UK a hardcover) with a rrp of $39.95 and a first print of 25,000, and to get it they will offer an advance equal to 100% of the first printing. So in this case the advance would be $3.99 x 25,000 or $99,750 which would certainly be rounded up to $100,000 so it can be spouted as a ’six figure advance’.

The editor goes into more detail:

I’d say that most first novel advances tend to be between $5,000 and $10,000. Some people use a more instinctive approach to determining advances, but I base it entirely on how many copies I think I’m realistically likely to net —there’s actually an easy equation for working out the advance based on cover price, royalty, and (presumed) copies sold. A really really simple version is that for a mass-market paperback, to earn out you basically need to net about twice as many copies as dollars paid for the advance, and for trade paperback, you need to net about as many copies as dollars paid for the advance.

If more authors knew the math that goes into it and the number of copies that adult genre authors actually sell, I think advances would make more sense. I’m definitely not out to screw anyone, but I am out to make sure my company doesn’t actually lose money. If it makes first time novelists feel better, I don’t pay established novelists more just because they’re established—I have to have a sense I can sell the right number of copies. If I think it will be a 20,000 copy mass-market seller, I’ll pay accordingly. In all cases, a driven agent can usually push me a little higher, but not further than I’m comfortable. I find good agents are straightforward with editors, and have the long term interests of their clients in mind. They ask for more $$ than I’d ideally pay, but have a good sense of when there’s no more wiggle room or when they’re setting their client up as a losing investment (unreasonable advance that won’t earn out, and a publisher unlikely to invest again), and they fight for the things they know a) a publisher will give up if pressed and b) will actually benefit the author to hold on to.

Lately I’ve been frustrated by the apparently widely accepted "rule" that a lower advance means your publisher isn’t going to do anything for the book. It does frequently work one way (if they spend a lot, they’ll do a lot), but that doesn’t logically mean the inverse is automatically true (if they spend little, they’ll do little). While it’s certain that a publisher will push an expensive book very hard because they have to make back the advance, I often pay less for a book with the idea in the back of my head that I’ll be able to spend more $$ on the packaging & promotion for a book that might not otherwise receive it. All of the money comes from the same place, so if I haven’t "used up" a lot of money on an unrealistic advance, we can find the money for a pricier package or some additional promotion. Often when I ask for something from my publisher, they first ask me how much I paid for the book—when that number isn’t too high, I almost always get approval for the "extras" I want. In my mind, if I spend more $$ on packaging/promoting rather than up front, the book is likely to sell more, and the author is more likely to earn out and receive royalties—so we both win.

Of course, for all my Pollyanna-ing, I’m sure it doesn’t always work like that in some places, or even [at my publishing house] all of the time. I definitely try to use a less-expensive advance as a springboard to other things, but yes, you can get a low or midlist offer and have your book thrown out into the market without much backing. In that case, I’d say the author should do whatever they can to make the book a success via personal promotional effort, forcing friends to buy it, whatever—if the book succeeds, the publisher will notice the previously invisible lowlist book & put more into the next one, or if the author hasn’t signed a multi-book contract, they can walk and go to a new publisher with a successful book that beat the odds under their belt.

For more gossip and information about the business of publishing go to the blog of "Max Perkins", Bookangst 101. The site is devoted to the many pitfalls and joys of publishing. Don’t forget to read the comments, where there are many fascinating (though sometimes uncomfortably bitter) stoushes. Enjoy.

Several people wrote to ask me, why, if the pay’s so bad am I trying to make a living as a writer? Good question. Because I’m insane? Because I prefer to live in a state of permanent stress about money? Actually spazzm (love that name) nailed the answer to that commenting in the metafilter discussion by editing the final sentence of my original essay thus:

"The life of a novelist is, financially speaking, a mug’s game. Enter at your own peril."

Exactly.

Sydney, 5 February 2005

Like Deb, I love wine. I love them, red, white, sticky sweet and dry as bone. I don’t care about the grape variety: pinot gris, malbec, cab sav, merlot (yes, merlot, I have no idea what that guy’s problem is), sav blanc, semillon, riesling, chardonnay, shiraz and so on. And I especially love wine with bubbles. Not just champagne, I’m also in love with heaps of Australian, New Zealand and Italian bubblies. What can I say? They tickle my nose and float across my tongue. What I care about is quality. Every grape variety can produce crap wine and they can all produce absolute glories.

I love the performance around tasting wine: checking out the wine’s colour in the glass, smelling it and trying to figure out what those smells are, what they remind you of, and then best of all, tasting it. Does the taste match the smell? Does it taste the same at the beginning as at the end of a sip, of a glass, of a bottle? (A bottle shared with others, obviously. Drink only in moderation.)

I totally agree with Deb: "It’s earthy and real. I think it’s a way to focus inwards on your body’s sensations and to feed those sensations through your brain and turn them into words. It’s sensual. Kinda—dare I say— sexy."

When we were in Buenos Aires recently we drank a lot of malbec, a red grape variety I’d never drunk before and this weird thing kept happening: the waiter would pour the taste, I’d sip, my mouth would pucker, and the first word that wanted to escape my mouth would be, "b’dna’gah!" or maybe "ack!" The waiter would smile and say, "Too much tannin?"

"Rather a lot, yes," I’d say, squeezing the words out of my shocked lips. The waiter would then assure me that it would taste fine in a few minutes. We just had to wait. So we did. Without fail the next sip would be smooth, almost creamy, yet still a big red, still with some astringency. I’ve never drunk wines before that changed so dramatically so quickly. Very very fabulous.

For my birthday last year, Scott gave me the most excellent present ever (except for all the other really great ones, like the watch I’m wearing, my silver wedding skirt, that tropical fruit basket, everything my sister and parents have given me ever, and all the stuff I’ve forgotten cause my memory is crap): Le Nez du Vin (yeah, yeah, it’s French and all about wine, colour it very prententious indeed, and no, he didn’t pay full retail price. Jeeze what do you think we are?). It’s a set of 54 wee bottles of the key essences found in wine: cinnamon, vanilla, pepper, cut hay, lychee, butter, mushroom and 43 other ones. Each essence is matched with a beautifully written and illustrated card that tells you its chemical components, history, and what wines it’s found in. And each essence smells exactly like what it says it smells like. The green pepper smells like green pepper (well, okay, it smells like green capsicum). Fresh, crisp and faintly like grass. The honey like a light, straw-coloured honey. Come on, you know the kind.

We’ve spent hours and hours learning to identify them all. (For extra kink value we’ve even done it blindfolded. Cor!) All our friends have been into it too (blindfolded and everything! Double cor!). It’s a tonne of fun and much much much harder than you imagine. Most people’s sense of smell doesn’t get the same kind of work out that sight and hearing do. None of the folk who’ve played with our kit has gotten even fifty per cent right first go. I kept finding myself holding the teeny bottle under my nose, going, "I know this! I know this! Tip of the tongue! It’s . . . it’s . . . Oh, oh, oh. Bugger. What is it?"

"That would be lemon."

"Aaargh! I knew that."

We’ve played with it so much we know the 54 smells off by heart. We’ve learned that after about the ninth one your nose packs it in and everything smells like cloves. The smell starts coating your mouth. You taste it. I started flashing back to my time in Jakarta and all those clove cigarettes (bloody kretek). Turns out Proust was on the money: memory and smell are intertwined. So many of the guesses began, "Oh, oh, oh! It smells like that summer at my aunt’s place and the ice cream factory down the streeet and the—vanilla. It’s vanilla!"

Both Scott and me have gotten a lot better at isolating different smells in wine, but not just in wine, in foods, in garbage (hmm, I believe that was once a stew flavoured with thyme), in pretty much everything. And our writing has changed—it’s a lot more pongy that it used to be. Used to be I’d go for pages and pages without hitting any odours. My characters would see, and see, and see, and also hear, touch, and taste, but rarely would they smell so much as their dog’s farts, and when they did they’d smell in familiar, unarresting ways. In similies, like clean hair, rosemary, vomit, whatever. I’d rarely take the smell apart, really describe it. There’s a reason for that. It’s really hard and using the chemical components rarely makes for evocative writing. Most people don’t know many beyond H2O and it doesn’t have much of a smell.

I’m still not very good at it, but the kit, and drinking and appreciating wine, has at least gotten me thinking about how to write smells better. Some day soon it should translate into words on the page.

Sydney, 28 January 2005

Magic or Madness 2 (working title: Magic, Madness & Minties) was a much harder book to write than Magic or Madness. It took forever to get started, though my cunning plan of using "once upon a time" as the kickstarter ended up working. Here’s the first sentence:

Once, when I was really little, we passed a road sign peppered with bullet holes.

(Once is just shorthand for "once upon a time".)

Turns out that making the second book in a trilogy stand alone is not easy. There’s a whole book’s worth of backstory that you have to artfully drop into a sentence or two. I can see why some writers don’t bother. I wondered why I was bothering. It’s not like I’ve ever picked up the second book of a trilogy and read it first. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to start at the beginning (according to Julie Andrews it’s a very good place to start). Does anyone read trilogies out of order? (Write me if you have. Be nice to know all my efforts weren’t for nowt!)

I did my best, and Scott, and my first readers, Gwenda Bond, Pamela Freeman, Carrie Frye, Jan Larbalestier, Karen Meisner, Sally O’Brien, Ron Serdiuk, and Lili Wilkinson, let me know exactly where my best wasn’t good enough. Thank you! Now I just have to sit tight (or, er, get back to work on Daughters of Earth) and wait for my editors’ comments.

Meanwhile, the day Magic or Madness is published (17 March) approaches. Reviews are starting to appear. Kirkus just called it "A cleverly creepy fantasy with likable, complex characters and a sinister conclusion". Not too foul, eh? And I’ve heard rumours that it’s also getting a good review in the School Library Journal. People who aren’t my publishers or friends are reading it! Gulp, but also yay! It’s about time. I wrote it, like, a million years ago.

I have now written four novels, sold three (one, Magic or Madness 3, is not written yet, so, yes, there are two unsold ones), and planned about a thousand others. What to write after this trilogy? I’m thinking the world is finally ready for my great Australian, feminist, monkey knife-fighting, cricket & Elvis novel. Whatcha reckon?

Sydney, 26 January 2005

*I’d thought editing would be a complete doddle. Me with my feet up on the desk, while other people killed themselves writing. Not the case: editing that anthology has been much, much harder work than any novel I’ve written. Not editing again, me. I’m not cut out for hard work.

The only awards ceremonies I’ve attended have been at science fiction conventions, most of which (but not the joyous Tiptree Award) have rivalled the Oscars for brain-numbing length. They remind me of school assembly. In fact, I suspect this is why I loathe them so. Remember school assemblies? Row upon row of listless, cranky students sitting on uncomfortable, prone-to-collapsing, fold-up chairs/hot bitumen/the floor while the teachers and head master on stage took it in turn to drone on about school spirit (or as often our lack thereof), how much money the cake stall raised, our glorious sporting achievements, and how the area behind the demountables was not created for students to illicitly smoke/pash/plot revolution and anyone caught there would get detention until the end of time even if they were back there writing the great Australian novel. Each assembly would end (or was it start? Thankfully it’s lost in the fogs of time) with a droning, spiritless rendition of the school anthem set to the music of "Gaudeamus Igitur" or "Rule Britannia" or "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean" or "Pop Goes the Weasel".

I went to a lot of different schools, and experienced many different assemblies, but they were all the same: utter utter torture. Same exhortations and lamentations and threats, same lame school anthems (and the school mottoes were even worse. My favourite: Manners Maketh the Man. That’s practically commie. Be polite? Way to inspire the kiddies to go out and make their dreams come true. And what’s with the "maketh"? Lisping is somehow polite?).

There’s only one school assembly that I remember distinctly. A boy two rows in front of me started making strange noises. Loud strange noises. Like a baby dinosaur being strangled. Turns out the noises came from his very unhappy tum-tum. Seconds later he let loose with the most amazing projectile vomit I’ve ever seen (sorry, Ron, but sometimes these stories are necessary). A long arc of it, which managed to cover at least ten rows in front of him. Fortunately, the incident happened on PE day and all those, um, effected, by it had their PE uniforms to change into (and weren’t they overjoyed about that). Even better, it happened at the beginning of assembly. In the enusing chaos, not only did we miss out on assembly, but most of the class immediately afterwards. Most excellent. That boy became a hero.

So every time I go to an awards ceremony and find a seat amongst the row after row of listless, cranky science fiction people, the full horror of school assembly comes rushing back. I am possessed of a need to pass notes, make smartarse comments, and skip out as early as possible without the teachers noticing. Even when friends or myself are up for an award, on those occasions it just adds a little anxiety into the mix. Boredom plus nervousness, not a great combination. Perhaps that projectile-vomiting boy had been up for the post of monitor or something? (Not that such a post exists outside of Enid Blyton novels.)

Saturday’s Aurealis Awards in Brisbane run by Fantastic Queensland (an organisation which fully lives up to its name) was nothing like that. No boredom, no projectile vomiting. Just a very fetching animated alien called Bruce and well-edited, well-conceived short videos introducing each award. They made everyone giggle. The speeches from presenters and winners were short, and either funny or touching, or both. And Scott Westerfeld won, as did Cat Sparks and Sean Williams and Margo Lanagan (whose short story collection, Black Juice, is the best collection I’ve read in ages), which made it even more fabbie.

Aurealis Awards are pretty.

The theme of the night was community. Or as Jeff Fenech once put it: "I love youse all". Winners didn’t just thank individual people who’d helped them, but the whole community. Scott thanked the Australian sf community for welcoming him so warmly, and said that winning for the first book he wrote in Australia, Midnighters: The Secret Hour, was the icing on the cake of that splendid welcome. Sean Williams talked about community too, thanked all the various groups he’s part of, and warmly welcomed the Clarion South students to the fold. Cat did too, and neatly managed to guilt us all into buying copies of every anthology she publishes from now until eternity. I will, I promise. Their graciousness made everyone feel warm and welcome and, well, part of the Oz sf community.

Then we all went to the cocktail party and drank and ate and gossiped with old friends and made new ones (those frisky Clarion kids), and generally carried on like communities do, and it was more than tolerable.

I didn’t think of school assembly, not even once.

Sydney, 24 January 2005

I’m particularly happy to make these old letters to sf magazines available outside of my book. Isaac Asimov debates the role of women in science fiction in the pages of Astounding. It’s wonderful stuff.

For those interested in the publishing industry, this is an account of the making of my soon-to-be-available YA novel, Magic or Madness, from sale to writing through production. The Magic or Madness section also includes a glossary of the Australian English that appears in the book, as well as the first two chapters, and some answers to cool questions I’ve been asked about the book and about writing generally. If you have any questions or comments feel free to send them my way.

Enjoy!

Deb has been very very busy on my behalf. Thank you, Deb. You should all check out her new blog. Not only is she a fab web designer, but she’s witty, sharp and funny. Often all at the same time!

Thanks also to all my regular readers for your support. I love that there are people in Israel, Spain, the Netherlands, Iraq and Mexico who read me regularly! Not to mention Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the USA. You’re all goddesses.

Sydney, 18 January 2005