Christine Bongers's Blog, page 15

Writers afloat

It's been all hands on deck for the hard-working crew of the Queensland Writers Centre.

While extreme flooding in Brisbane's Southbank area has closed the office, staff continue to man the writing pumps at home.

Writing Queensland Magazine, QWC's flagship publication and compulsory reading for those interested in the craft of writing, has gone to the printers, according to WQ's newly appointed editor, Jason Nahrung.

The February Craft issue of WQ will feature an article on Shaping the Story Arc, where I interview Bill Condon, winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction, Anthony Eaton and Kate Forsyth.

You can subscribe to WQ here or click on the next link if you'd like to read an article I wrote for WQ last year on Creating your own distinctive writing voice.

I'm thrilled to see Jason at the helm of WQ. Not only is he a talented writer with twenty years journalistic experience behind him, he was also one of the creative inspirations behind Henry Hoey Hobson. (Check out his website Vampires in the Sunburnt Country and see if you can guess which character he inspired.)

What bubbles to the surface after the flood

I don't know if it has rained for forty days and forty nights, but I do know that we could have counted the sunny days of this summer on the fingers of our hands.

Yesterday, the sun shone with an eerie calm, while Brisbane braced itself for the arrival of flood waters from the west.

Today, the skies have darkened again, and our little pocket of Brisbane is trapped in a bubble of unreality.

Our homes are bounded by the fast-flowing caramel of Enoggera and Ithaca Creeks.

Bike paths are cut, playing fields submerged, our yards, saturated and squelching beneath our feet. But our homes are high and dry, while only a couple of kilometres away, the serpentine Brisbane River has invaded more than sixty suburbs, two thousand streets, forty thousand properties.

We have been spared, but we grieve for those who have been lost. The toddler torn from his mother's arms. The parents who pushed their children through a manhole to safety before being swept away. The eight year old boy who begged rescuers to save his little brother, before he too was lost.

We who've been spared, venture to the river's bloated edge, and return, shocked by the carnage, moved by the reverent silence of the onlookers.

We look into the swirling brown waters and see the grief and terror of the dead, the dispossessed, and the homeless. We see, but for the grace of God, ourselves.

We are grateful to have been spared. Click here to donate to the Queensland flood relief appeal if you can.

Video: Floating in the flood.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here's a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 13,000 times in 2010. That's about 31 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 42 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 100 posts. There were 113 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 73mb. That's about 2 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was February 9th with 254 views. The most popular post that day was Bio.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, networkedblogs.com, christinebongers.com, auslit.net, and blackboard.qut.edu.au.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for 10 things i love about you, christine bongers, ten things i love about you, i'll be back, and chris bongers.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Bio May 2009
7 comments

2

Ten Things I Love About You September 2009
16 comments

3

Henry Hoey Hobson March 2009
12 comments

4

Dust December 2008
2 comments

5

Dust reviews August 2009
13 comments

Happy New Year from all of us!

Books for Xmas 2010

Here's some last-minute recommendations from chez Bongers for gifts for the family this festive season.

Hubba Hubby recommends Melina Marchetta's The Piper's Son (also one of my picks for 2010). Despite him being a non-fiction kind of guy, I packed it into his bag when he went surfing in the Maldives and was delighted to get this email from Singapore Airport on his way home:

'Absolutely loved MMs Piper's Son. I never read those sort of books. Reminded me of Somerset Maugham The Razors Edge. I found the book really moving, warm, believable. The characters were wonderful. Best part of my holiday!'

Our eleven-year-old was whisked away by his namesake, Tall Jake, the sinister Master of Ceremonies, into the horrifying comic book world of Malice. After reading the first volume of Chris Wooding's part-novel, part-comic duology, he has put the sequel Havoc  on the top of his Christmas list this year. Recommended for 10-13 year old boys.

Series fiction is always a winner for keeping kids occupied over the long hot summer holidays, but mine have already consumed the mega-hit trilogies for 2010, Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games and Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking series.

We had to go back in time to find something 'new' for Miss Thirteen, who happily discovered Uglies, Scott Westerfield's dystopian series where everyone is compulsorily operated on and made beautiful on their sixteenth birthday and radical politics is opting to keep your own face.  She is hoping to find Pretties in her Xmas stocking, and with two more in the series, Specials and Extras, she'll have beach reading well into the New Year.

For the Nanas, it's hard to go past Kate Morton's latest romantic thriller  The Distant Hours and Malla Nunn's stylish crime thriller set in South Africa, A Beautiful Place to Die.

Our eighteen year old has decided she wants to read Caroline Overington's compulsive page-turner I came to say goodbye.  An engaging read that draws the reader into the other Australia where family triumphs over the adversity of poverty, mental illness, abuse, and abandonment.

For those hard-to-buy-for twenty-something young men in your life, get a copy of Simon Groth and Sean Sennett's Off the Record: 25 years of Music Street Press. This must-have Indie anthology features best-of band interviews over the past quarter century.

That's my Xmas shopping done – so, what books are you ordering from Santa this Christmas?

Here's something I didn't know….

A little surprise in my letterbox today.

A crisp, cream-coloured envelope from the Office of the Hon. Simon Crean MP.

I vaguely register the bit about him being Minister for Regional Australia as I rip it open.

Inside, the letterhead thoughtfully centres the words Minister for the Arts under his other accomplishments.

Aaah, the penny plinks. I know what this is  - my publisher entered Dust into the Prime Minister's Literary Awards – it's an acknowledgement letting me know that my book didn't win (which of course, I already knew).

That honour went to fellow Woolshed author Bill Condon in the YA category for his fine novel CONFESSIONS OF A LIAR, THIEF AND FAILED SEX GOD, and to Lorraine Marwood's Star Jumps in the children's section.

Then my eyes lock onto the following paragraph:

'Although only nine works were selected for the children's fiction short-list, the judging panel felt it appropriate to recommend your book to the Prime Minister and me as a highly commended work. You should be very proud of this recognition for Dust.'

Wow. I am. Really. 

I had no idea that Dust had made a long list and been Highly Commended  in the Prime Minister's Literary Awards. Thanks for letting me know, Mr Crean, that is awesome news. 

Mind you, I also had no idea that it had been entered in the Children's category, which requires the work to be suitable for children aged 0 to 12 years.

Most of the schools that I know are studying Dust have set it for Years 8 and 9 and older. The CBCA listed it as Notable Book for Older Readers (ie 12 years and over). The NSW Premier's Reading Challenge 2011 lists it for Years 7-9, but adds the rider "Contains adult themes. Usually read by students in Years 9, 10 and above.'

So, not sure how it scraped into the 0-12 years category, but will take any kudos, any way they come.

Thank you, Mr Crean, I really do appreciate you letting me know.

Large as life characters

OK, this has never happened to me before, so I just have to share it.

When I rocked up to Brisbane's Somerville House this week to talk to 250 Year Seven and Eight students, the last thing I expected was to be greeted by two of the characters out of my latest novel, Henry Hoey Hobson.

Somerville's inspirational and enthusiastic librarians, Lucia and Jannine, not only transformed themselves into Caleb and Vee, HHH's mysterious coffin-owning neighbours, they also recreated the chili fizz cocktail served to Henry by the broken and scarred Manny.

Thank the high heavens, as Vee would say, for librarians everywhere.  And a special thank you to Lucia and Jannine, for bringing my characters to life and making my visit to Somerville so memorable. :)

Spoiler Alert!

I'm dying here, people.

Half of me wants to let the cat out of the bag, the other half wants to warn off anyone who hasn't yet read Henry Hoey Hobson.

Teachers Notes for HHH are now available. They're awesome, but be warned, they do contain, ahem, spoilers (like a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of plot and character, and pages of ready-to-use classroom activities for over-worked teachers of Grades 6-8).

Click here if you are a teacher, know a teacher, or want to make a teacher's life just that little bit easier.

The rest of you, click here for a taste that won't spoil your appetite for more.

It's a juggle out there

Writing books is like having children. You go into it in ignorance, make a lot of mistakes, and marvel when each turns out so beautiful in its own way.

But oh my giddy aunt, they are so so different, sometimes it's hard to believe that they all share the same blood.

My first-born, Dust, was all sweat and tears. Delivered after an excruciating elephantine labour dogged by every conceivable complication.

When I finally held it in my hands I marveled that such a small package could have caused such anguish and such joy.

Twelve months later, I welcomed Henry Hoey Hobson into the world. The unplanned second-born. My little surprise.

Perhaps because he arrived unannounced to an uncertain reception, he was different from the word go. His story came out with so little prompting, it was as though he had been here before, an old soul who had come into the world fully formed.

He slipped out so naturally, so sweet and so true, that I wondered if he would forever spoil me for the next…

I hope not, because I'm currently tussling with my third in three years.

This time round, I've found it harder to juggle three balls at once. There's always one ball in the air, and of late it seems to have been Intruder, the work-in-progress.

Dust has made it into high schools, and Henry Hoey Hobson into middle school, so there's been a flurry of activity on the schools and promotion front.

But now that I've finished my last public appearance for the year, I have finally been able to put those two balls to the side.

I'm back in the dacks of track, centring myself at the keyboard.

Picking up that third ball and running with it. A thousand words a day until it's done.

What writers do

 

Dali at the age of six when he thought he was a girl lifting the skin of the water to see the dog sleeping in the shade of the sea

For me, this extravagantly titled 1950 painting by surrealist Salvador Dali captures the absurdity, the innocence and the complexity of what writers do.

Writers look at the world with fresh eyes, with all the curiosity and wonder of a child.

We peel back the skin, peer beneath the surface, to discover the unexpected delights and beating heart of a subterranean world that those who coast lightly on the surface may never know.

We walk naked, exposing ourselves alongside our discoveries as we share them with the world.

We do this knowing that not everyone will like, or even understand, what we do.

As Kate Grenville writes in the excellent Griffith REVIEW:

'Each of us brings our own experiences, memories and prejudices to a work of art and looks at it through that unique lens. We all read the same words…but we all see different things.'

I look at Dali's painting and I see myself, a writer, doing what writers do.

What do you see?