Lili Wilkinson's Blog, page 4
March 27, 2012
Pink shortlisted for a Lammy!
I am SO EXCITED to learn that PINK has been shortlisted for a Lammy, or Lambda Literary Award, in the Children's/Young Adult category. The awards, now in their twenty-fourth year, celebrate achievement in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) writing for books published in 2011.
Hurrah for PINK!
Read more about the awards, and the other finalists here.
March 6, 2012
Doctor Who! PINK! Somerset!
I'm currently judging a competition over at Viewing Clutter. Decide what you'd like to give the Doctor for Christmas, and you can win the latest Doctor Who Christmas Special on DVD! Enter Here.
Also, the Epic Reads Facebook page has gone PINK CRAZY! You can download stuff, read an extract from PINK and take a quiz. Hurrah!
Next week I'm heading off to the Somerset Celebration of Literature. I'm super-excited because
a) some of my very favourite author-friends will be there.
b) I love literature festivals
c) it's on the Gold Coast.
Hopefully I'll see some of my readers there!
March 5, 2012
Faber Academy
The Faber Academy started in Paris, at the famed Shakespeare & Co bookshop. It's since spread all over the world – mixing wonderful writers and publishers with people who want to learn how to be wonderful writers and publishers.
Here in Australia, Faber Academy is coordinated by Allen & Unwin, and later this month I'll be speaking at Get Published As A Writer For Children, run by the wonderful Rosalind Price, and also guest-starring Elizabeth Honey and Erica Wagner. It looks like an amazing program – I want to stay for the whole day!
There's also lots of awesome other courses coming up, with literary luminaries like Sophie Cunningham, Shane Maloney, Jenny Darling, Markus Zusak, Margo Lanagan and Carrie Tiffany.
Want to learn more?
Get Published As A Writer For Children
February 16, 2012
Engaged
Michael and I have been together for three years.
Last Sunday, as I walked in the door after driving home from Adelaide, he suggested we go for a walk.
We went down to the Merri Creek, and he asked me to listen to a song he'd been writing, and proffered his iPhone and headphones.
I listened.
It was a beautiful song.
It was also a proposal.
(with a ring!)
I said yes.
We couldn't be happier.
(here is the ring again – it's white gold with sapphire and teeny diamonds in an Art Deco style setting. Needless to say, I adore it.)
February 12, 2012
Marjorie Beatrice Wilkinson
My grandmother died last week. It was definitely time, over the last twelve years she had sunk into the depths of dementia, and for at least five of those years she was barely there at all. We all wanted her to go, and were surprised at how sad we felt when she finally did.
When I was little, Marj used to create elaborate treasure hunts down at Shell Beach, the paradise on the tip of South Australia's York Peninsula, where we went camping every summer. She gave me warm flannel nighties for my birthday. She made me a narrated tape of music to listen to when I went to bed (everything from Swan Lake to Cockeyed Optimist). Our relationship was often complicated - our politics didn't exactly mix (she was a prominent Scientologist), and we clashed quite a bit, particularly when I was a teenager.
Her funeral was last Friday. She wanted it to be outside, and outside it was, even though it rained the whole time. People told funny stories – like the time when she escaped from her nursing home and walked in through some stranger's back door, putting the kettle on for tea. People cried a little bit. Dad reminded us that she voted for the Greens one year, and Pauline Hanson the next (who he described as 'someone to the right of Genghis Khan'), and blamed that particular phase of Marj's life on her Alzheimer's. Of course the next person to stand up and speak was a One Nation member and Scientologist, with a black eye patch that made him look like a Bond villain. My family is a bit weird sometimes.
The best bit of the funeral was when we had a moment to listen to some of her favourite classical music, after all the eulogies. We sat in silence, and then my uncle Howie sprang up with his red and white striped umbrella and danced around the coffin in the rain. Marj was a dancer, before she got married. Howie is a dancer too. He leapt around and twirled and tossed his umbrella aside and let water pour down his face. We were all a bit undone after that. The funeral director (who was a little bit like Murray from Flight of the Conchords) said he'd never seen anything like it. I think we made his day. I was a pallbearer (the only girl). We took her coffin up to the car, and escorted it off the property, as Howie danced before us, flinging petals at the hearse like it was a wedding car.
This last photo is my favourite one of her – when she was a teenager. It's so timeless and dreamy – it could have been taken yesterday.
February 1, 2012
Bookclutch: Beyond Heaving Bosoms
I've talked about my new-found love of the romance genre before, but here I go again. I've been reading a lot, not just of the genre, but about it. I've learnt some awesome things, like how romance far outstrips normal commercial fiction in terms of sales. And always has – a first edition Jane Austen had a print run nearly ten times that of a first edition William Wordsworth. Looking back at history also gives us an idea of why the genre is so maligned – Lady Novelist was one of the first respectable professions for women, which gave some women an income and therefore independence. The stories are inevitably about independent women too (the good ones, anyway), women who make choices based on what they want. In a world where the first rumblings of the suffragette movement were starting to be heard, it's suddenly very clear why some people thought that novels were very dangerous things to be consumed by women.
Did you know that Nora Roberts has had 173 New York Times bestselling novels, but the New York Times has only reviewed her twice? This seems kind of insane.
ANYWAY, none of that is actually from the book I'm clutching today.
Beyond Heaving Bosoms: A Smart Bitches Guide to Romance Novels is the book written by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan, the two writers who head up the Smart Bitches Trashy Books blog. It's about the romance genre – its strengths, its weaknesses, its horrendously ugly covers*. The book is funny and irreverent and excellently filthy. In it, I learnt about the romance hero's Mighty Wang, and the heroine's Magic Hoo Hoo. I learnt that no romance writer seems to know where the hymen is. And I discovered the term "man-titty" (think Fabio bare chested romance covers), and I'll be forever grateful for that.
As a relative newcomer to the genre, the book was delightfully funny and informative. I learnt about the rapeyness of Old School Romance, and how the genre changed in the 70s along with, well, just about everything else for women. Much like the Smart Bitches themselves, the romance genre is now savvy, sassy and empowering.
If you want to learn about the genre in a light, fun but still solidly awesome way, as well as get a whole bunch of romance book recommendations and participate in a Choose Your Own Romance Adventure story that may or may not end up with tentacle sex, then I highly recommend Beyond Heaving Bosoms.
*Oh, and as I have learnt – those covers bear absolutely no resemblance to the plot, story or characters. None at all. They're usually not even from the same historical period.
January 29, 2012
Bookclutch: The Fault in our Stars
I've been thinking a bit about the difference between a "problem novel" and a really good book. Someone once asked me if I was planning on writing any more "problem novels like Pink", which rather astonished me, because I was under the impression that Pink was a funny, nerdy chicklitish sort of book, not a problem novel at all. But some people have classified it as that, because it is about sexuality (amongst other things).
You could say that John Green's The Fault in Our Stars is about a girl with cancer. This immediately makes it sound like a problem novel, to go on the shelf next to the one about the girl with the eating disorder, the boy who gets cyber-bullied*, and the girl who has an abortion.
But that isn't where this book belongs, and I think I've finally figured out why.
There is a girl with cancer in TFIOS. But the book is so much more than that. It's about all sorts of other things, things you would expect in a John Green book. It's about love, and introspection, and video-games, and death, and the meaning of life (or at least humanity's search for a meaning of life). It's funny and irreverent. It's about literature and the power of made-up stories, and the inevitably fallibility of the people who make them up. It's beautiful and sad and I couldn't put it down.
I think what makes a problem novel a problem novel is that it's only about that one problem. The book lives and breathes its issue, and its characters are just vehicles for exploring that issue. Some of these books are produced from a genuine desire to help teenage readers, others are preying on the adolescent desire to be shocked. There is a place for both kinds of books, and I don't want to suggest there isn't. I loved the problem novel as a teen, devoured it alongside my old friends the Doorstopper Fantasy Tome and The Babysitter's Club.
And I also hate the distinction between books that are just generally entertaining, and Proper Quality Highbrow Literature. But for today I'd like to distinguish between Books That Are Just Fun To Read and Books That Make You Think About Lots Of Things.
I like both. I'm certainly enjoying devouring lots of regency romances at the moment, and they don't usually make me Think About Lots of Things (there are always exceptions)
. That's one of the reasons why I like them – it's a great way to wind down when I've been spending all day with my head in my PhD.
But occasionally you will read a book that does Make You Think About Lots Of Things, and it isn't necessarily a Great Classic. It might be funny. It might be romantic. It might have a pink, sparkly cover. It might be a picture book. Or A Doorstopper Fantasy Tome*. Or it might be John Green's The Fault in Our Stars.
And you will read the book. You may laugh (I did). You may cry (I did). You will live in someone else's life for a little while, look at the world through someone else's eyes.
And you will be changed. You will put the book down (with only a slightly guilty look at the pile of things you should have spent the day doing), and you will Think About Lots Of Things.
This, to me, is the very best kind of book.
*don't get me started.
**it is unlikely to be a Babysitters Club book, but you never know.
January 27, 2012
Introducing… Love-shy
This is my new book. It'll be out in a couple of months.
Remember how that one time I finished NaNoWriMo? In, like, 2009? Well this is the resulting novel, after some heroic editing on behalf of the Onions, and my wonderful friend @snazdoll.
January 26, 2012
A great week for PINK
PINK is having a truly awesome week at the American Library Association in the US!
It's been declared
A Stonewall Honor Book
This is an ALA Award for books of "exceptional merit relating to the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender experience".
as well as being on the
Amelia Bloomer List
Another ALA honour, this time for "the best books with significant feminist content that will appeal to young readers from birth to 18 years old".
and the
2012 Rainbow Room List
This one is from the a joint task force of the Social Responsibilities Round Table and the Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Queer Round Table of the American Library Association.
and finally the
Reluctant Young Adult Readers List
Hurrah!
I'm so pleased – not just because it's my book, but pleased that funny, pink books that are light but not insubstantial and still have Stuff To Say are getting recognised. I'm actually about to sit down and write a chapter for my PhD about the subversively political nature of chick lit, so this couldn't have come at a better time!
December 14, 2011
Recent writings
Kids today are not the same as when we were young. They are a generation of true writers and readers, and they're using books to save the world.
That's from this article what I wrote for Meanjin. It's pretty closely linked to the work I'm doing for my PhD.
Oh, and a month or so ago I had my First Ever Academic Journal Article published in Write4Children, edited by the wonderful Anthony Eaton. My article is what's called a "practice-led paper" which means I talk about the Important Philosophical Theory behind my novel Pink. It's in Volume 3, Issue 1, and can be found here.
AND, I have a chapter in a new book called Read to Succeed: strategies to engage children and young people in reading for pleasure.
Speaking of writing, I'm sure you're all be pleased to know that I finished my personal NaNoWriMo target of 20,000 words. Hurrah!
Now I'm getting my Christmas on (I know, shocking, right?) – yesterday I made candied peel, ginger-and-orange cordial and ginger-and-honey infused whiskey before heading over to Mum's and making six dozen mince pies and a Christmas cake. Then I was all domestic goddessed out, so Mj and I ordered pizza for dinner.
