Lili Wilkinson's Blog, page 12

NaNoWriMagain?

Do I do NaNoWriMo again?

Last year it was a pretty tough haul. I was pretty miserable by the end, stressed and exhausted. Particularly since in Australia, November is the month where the sun comes out again and all you want to do is loll around outside with a beer in the sunshine.

On the other hand, I wrote a 50 000 word novel. In 30 days. Which I now have a publishing contract for.

To Wri? or not to Wri? This is the question.

The future of reading

I've heard a lot of talk about The Future of the Book lately, and lots of nonsense about Are Ebooks Going To Kill Reading.

I read paper books and eBooks (on my iPhone, but am hankering for an iPad). Both have advantages. I can read a paper book in the bath without worry. It won't ever run out of battery. I don't have to worry about format or DRM etc. But on an eBook, I can highlight and annotate, and search my annotations. I can tap on a word or phrase or name and look it up in the dictionary ...

Bears

I'm reading about bears for the junior fiction project I'm working on. Apart from my favourite fictional bears (Pooh, Paddington, Teddy Robinson, Iorek Byrnison and the bear from Tender Morsels), I'm also developing a love of some bear subspecies, just because of their names:

Tibetan Blue Bear or Himalayan Snow Bear (very rare, never photographed in the wild)
Cinnamon Bear
Spectacled Bear (especially since the Stephen Fry documentary)
Moon Bear or Crescent Bear
Sun Bear

Don't you just want...

Wanting vs Needing

(this post contains Mockingjay and Harry Potter spoilers)

Some writers create dossiers about their characters – what they look like, what breakfast cereal they like best, what star sign they are. It doesn't really work for me. Instead I ask myself two simple questions:

What does this character want?

and

What does this character need?

For a good story, the answers to those two questions must be different.

Let's go back to our old friend Harry Potter. Luckily for us, there's a chapter in the first...

Phew!

What a busy few weeks that was. It included:

1. Working at a polling booth on Election Day, handing out ballot papers and then counting them at the end. Probably my two most interesting brushes with humanity were when one man informed me: "Lady, this country didn't want my vote for the 15 years I was in prison, and they're not getting it today"; and when another man – a prominent Melbourne literary critic – was grumpy when I told him he wasn't on the electoral roll for that division and...

Appearances

Here's where I'll be over the next week:

Melbourne Writers Festival

Tuesday 31 August, 12:30 pm Growing Pains: Lili Wilkinson & Jaclyn Moriarty
Shifting schools smack bang in the middle of term – in your final year of high school – is a nightmare scenario. It's bad enough fitting in with kids you already know, never mind a bunch of strangers. To make things worse, Ava may or may not be gay, and when Amelia and Riley show up they create havoc for their new fellow students and teachers alike...

Book Week 2010

Definitely my busiest Book Week to date – I did 14 talks in 10 different schools, all crammed in to five days! I was pretty hoarse by Friday afternoon, but it was a great week. It included:

-Food! Morning teas, afternoon teas, writers breakfasts, pizza and books nights – and my very favourite: a teacher and her son at Emerald College hand made me nori rolls for lunch because on  my website it says I like Japanese food. Thanks!

-Watching a fox wander around the grounds of a school, but not...

This is Shyness

(last night I launched Leanne Hall's marvellous This is Shyness. Here are some of the things I said.)

I'll start with a joke… of sorts.

Maureen McCarthy, David Lynch and a WEREWOLF walk into a bar. Not just any bar. It's one of those deeply cool, unmistakably Melbourne bars, with absolutely no signage out front. One of those bars that's down two different alleyways, behind some bins, at the bottom of a dirty flight of stairs. Inside the bar it's all moody and mysterious, with dimly lit alcoves ...

Scatterheart wins Ena Noël Award (plus giveaway!)

Scatterheart seems to be having a bit of a rennaissance this year – new Australian and German covers, and now I'm so very pleased to say that it has won the IBBY Ena Noël Award. The biennial Award is an encouragement award for young writers (under 35), and was last won in 2008 by Markus Zusak for The Book Thief . Other winners whose company I'm delighted to be in include Sonya Hartnett, Anthony Eaton and Catherine Jinks.

Here's what the announcement says:

Each chapter of Hannah's story begins...

US cover for PINK!

PINK will be published in the US early next year by HarperCollins. And here's the cover! It sure is going to stand out from all those black and red vampire books! Hurrah!

(click to make it bigger)