Rants and Research

The holidays are fast disappearing and my To Do list stays the same. This week has had some highs tho.

My family managed to all go to the movies together. It may not sound like a big deal to you but it is to me. With so many things pulling at each one of us, we can only usually manage to eat together once a week. Family events of more than the fifteen minutes to eat dinner take major planning.  We saw The Sorcerer’s Apprentice...and we all enjoyed it for various reasons...How they managed to cleverly mix physics and magic, the mop scene from the old Disney version, Nicolas Cage, and the Harry Potter trailer....

Straight after the movie I raced into The Children’s Bookshop for Diana Menefy’s little soiree to celebrate her book, The Shadow of the Boyd. This ripping yarn’s journey to publication has been long in the making. Diana has been researching this piece of tragic New Zealand History for about a decade. She has cleverly woven in many facts about shipboard life in the early 1800’s but not at the expense of a great story of tragedy and survival against the odds. When I got home after dinner out with some great writers...I started the book and kept going...finishing it in one bite. Shadow of the Boyd is the last book picked up by a publisher from the pitch session at Spinning Gold to be published and I was delighted to be able to celebrate this with Diana and some of the Spinning Gold team.

I haven’t been doing much researching on the net this week so this morning I took a look at what has caught peoples attention that might be of interest to you.

Lynn Price, Editorial Director Of Behler Publications has ripped into Christopher Pike for not only NOT researching properly but for then trying to defend the resulting mess. She does not spare the editors of his publishing house either who did such a sloppy job that they didn’t catch obvious errors which ruin the whole foundation of the story....You may think she is a bit harsh...but I don’t. Diana Menefy spent ten years getting the history right, the life and times, the names of the characters and the language right for Shadow of The Boyd. It is children’s novel but it has been meticulously done. I know how much time I spend researching...writer friends have called me on it...(stop and just write the damn book...) We have a duty to our readers after all to write a good story. Our readers are not dumb and treating them as such shows an amazing arrogance which will fast lose you credibility and readers.

While I am ranting (but not half as well as Lynn Price) Suzannah of Write It Sideways has a minor rant on her blog about being plagiarized. Suzannah has discovered that whole articles have been copied and pasted, cut up and attributed to other bloggers. She is trying to get a perspective on it that doesn’t involve wasted energy...and negative thoughts. Suzannah has posted a short list of rules for new bloggers to understand about linking to others work, and commenter’s have linked to some great sites for copyright protection.

Off on a different tack Victoria Moxon has another very fine article on How To Make Your Novel Hopelessly Addictive and Nicola Morgan has one on Dialogue Techniques. Both of these bloggers are a valuable resource if you are looking for writing help.

Chip MacGregor has posted an exhaustive list of things a good agent needs to know. As Chip is the owner of a successful literary agency he is well qualified to speak. As always I urge you read the comments of the articles I link to because they often have some great extras to add to the discussion.

Over on Craicerplus my Amplify page I have links to articles on

7 Factors For Success In Finding An Agent

Earth Like Planet Can Sustain Life (geeking no apologies)

9 Ways To Prepare For NaNoWriMo

A Writers Guide To A Successful Interview (how to use an interview to get your message across)

Writing Series-Thoughts and Resources (this is great if you find your story going on longer than one book)

Kindle Self Publishing (writers can now self publish on Kindles....)

On a slightly different facet of the writing life...Alexis Grant has a good article on Writer’s Colonies. These are amazing residential places that writers can go and just write. Someone else takes care of all the other details...food, laundry etc etc. Some colonies will pay you to go there...It is to dream...

Guy Le Charles Gonzales has been doing a bit of that lately and has re mixed his ideas on 21st Century Publishing. Traditional print plus fan sites plus book cafe sites plus on demand printing equals a very interesting publishing model for writers.

For those of you interested in the 1000 fans idea, my friend Justin sent me a link to a photographer who is experimenting with the concept and has chronicled his two year journey...(yes he is making money...and he doesn’t have 1000 fans...)

enjoy,
maureen


Pic is the cover of The Shadow of The Boyd and below a little clip (you can find anything on YouTube)

Number 100

It’s that time of the year again when the great and the good gather together to witness the awarding of the ultimate prizes in Children’s Literature in New Zealand. Last night they gathered in Auckland for the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards 2010.

The annoying thing about the awards is that they can’t give great cash prizes to all the finalists...because they were all so good.

Every year Children’s Choice seems to up its profile and that is as it should be because we write for the children.

This year the Children’s Choice overall  winner was Wonky Donkey  By Craig Smith Illustrated by Katz Cowley

The winner of Children’s Choice Young Adult was Brainjack By Brian Falkner

The winner of Children’s Choice Junior Fiction was Friends By Joy Cowley Illustrated by Gavin Bishop

The winner of Children’s Choice Non Fiction  was Dear Alison edited by Simon Pollard.

As an interesting side note none of these books took out the top prize in their respective category.

Melinda has a great run down of the winners so you can jump over to her blog to satisfy your curiosity.

Thanks to the power of text and friends I was kept up to date as the awards were announced in Auckland and due to the power of email and friends the results were soon posted up on The Wellington Children’s Book Association website...almost in real time!!!

A nice golden glow was provided by Mandy Hager, her book ‘The Crossing’ was launched at Spinning Gold last Year and who won the Young Adult category.

As I have said before we must celebrate the brilliance, not only of the winners, but of the finalists because it was a truly hard task to separate them out.

I have been thinking lately that it is about time New Zealand woke up to the fact that we have world class GENRE writers  in this country  who quietly get on and do the business and never get acknowledged by the literati or CNZ....This would be a great profile push for New Zealand Book Month. 

Who are our unsung heroes in GENRE FICTION in this country? 

A good pointer to the answer can be found in the nominations for The Julius Vogel Awards for New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Nalini Singh has two novels and a novella entered...She is a New York Times Bestselling Author and Yes she is one of our top Romance authors. If you look down the Julius Vogel list you will see familiar names from the New Zealand Post Children’s Book finalists this year.

OK rant over (...well muted)

In other news... recently Booktalks was launched. This lovely initiative was sparked and germinated at the Spinning Gold Conference last year. The website, where Schools, Authors and Illustrators can hookup through Skype is up and running. New Zealand yet again is among the leaders in using this technology. This week I came across a great little blog Picturebook Junkies (five PB authors) extolling the virtues of Authors skyping into schools in the US and thought yep we’re doing it... only we are more organised.

Nathan Bransford has a great little poll on his blog at the moment - Which fictional land would you like to live in? No prizes for guessing  the most popular...although quite a few authors were extolling the virtues of their own created fictional worlds...heeheehee....

On Craicerplus (my Amplify page) I have links to articles on

Defending Teen Fiction

The Big Digital Issues in 2011

Humanoid Robot in Space...Go R2 (a nod to my geek side)

The Children’s Lit Conference programme...ax murderers, sexism, Pulman and fairytale fallout (this one has generated a few comments on Facebook)

The pic is The New Zealand Post Children’s Book of The Year 2010 Old Hu Hu. Congratulations Kyle Mewburn and Rachel Driscoll.

I can't think of a better pic to celebrate my 100th Blog Post.

maureen


So which fictional land would you like to live in? If you said Middle Earth we'll make room for you in Central Otago where Kyle lives....

Using Twitter

Today is Twitter Thursday. Yes this blog post has Twitter as the main theme. 

I was sceptical about Twitter but I am beginning to change my mind. If you regard Twitter as a tool and use it as such then it can be a very useful tool in the marketing tool box.

I use Twitter to find information to share with you...tricky huh. I follow leaders in the fields that I am interested in. They tweet their blog post titles and if I see anything of interest I go and have a look.

My own blog posts get posted to Twitter for my followers. Anything that goes up on my Amplify page also gets posted to Twitter.

I don’t use Twitter to talk about myself or what I’m doing...I find Twitter streams on professional sites can be full of silly minutiae of some people’s lives and that detracts from the professional image that these sites want to portray. If you have a personal blog then it is appropriate to put a twitter stream in there.

So from the Twitter feed today....

Tony Eldridge of Blogmarketing tips for authors has an interview with Melissa Giovagnoli where she shares 3 internet marketing tips. and it is no surprise that Melissa mentions Twitter and what you can do with it.

 Now Tony is the Twitter King and he has previously posted a great article from Penny Sansevieri which had a huge list of twitter tips for author marketing.

Margaret Atwood is a fan of Twitter and she recently wrote a very funny article for the Guardian newspaper about how she came to be involved...of course there are a few digs at her publishers on why she chose to do her own website. Margaret is all about communication.

So what's it all about, this Twitter? Is it signalling, like telegraphs? Is it Zen poetry? Is it jokes scribbled on the washroom wall? Is it John Hearts Mary carved on a tree? Let's just say it's communication, and communication is something human beings like to do.

Gail Carson Levine author of numerous best selling children’s books has a great  blog which I pop in to from time to time...this week she is looking at ideas and where they come from if you are stuck.

I found this a great read and very pertinent to me as I am writing a chapter for a fun project that several writers are involved with...It is just early stages but the possibilities of sending characters on a wild goose chase and also authors as they have to follow on in their own chapters is irresistible and Gail’s blog post fits right into this spirit.

People have built on stories forever. Shakespeare did it. The playwright George Bernard Shaw did it. I do it (to put myself in exalted company) when I adapt fairy tales for my own use.

Over on my Amplify page there is a link to an article about using book trailers to grab agents attention.

A link to a report on a Publishers Weekly panel where they looked at what teens are reading now...fat vampires?

And a link to a comprehensive article on the recent Bologna book fair - what publishers want and what is selling.

Spinning Gold News...Adele Broadbent is launching her book (which was picked up at the Spinning Gold conference) next month.

Tonight Mandy Hager, who launched her first book in her trilogy, The Crossing, at Spinning Gold, launches the second book at The Children’s Book Shop Kilbirnie Wellington.

And in pure gossip Spinning Gold number 2 may be held in Auckland...

Just finally Justine Larbalesteir is having a moment about why reviewers are saying a book obviously set in NZ is Australian and rightly so...the comments are interesting and thought provoking...my favourite was the comment that had one poor US citizen confused -isn’t New Zealand Middle Earth ?

maureen
pic is alien twitter bird...yes i know geek strikes again