I am very excited to be included in a new anthology put together by Ford Street editor, Paul Collins. Trust Me Too hits bookshops next month. It’s jam packed with great Aussie authors and illustrators. I have departed from adventure for this one and have contributed a high school romance, The Bridge. Find out all about it here.
Happy reading!
Everyone has heard how tricky the adolescent years can be. When your little angel moves to planet teenager, you need to be prepared for mood swings, arguments and absurdly risky behavior. Add alcohol, sex, peer pressure, then throw in a dash of menopause, unhealthy work commitments and the occasional family drama and you’ve got a pretty volatile cocktail.
I’m brand new to all this. My son has just hit the teenage years, so I’m desperate to find out all about it – researching stories and advice on the net and asking all my friends how they handle things.
There is such a wealth of information out there – it’s just a matter of harnessing it and making use out of it. So, that’s what I’ve decided to do. With some like-minded friends we’re creating a hub for parents of teenagers – with ideas and suggestions that we hope will help readers emerge from this challenging period with a sense of optimism and accomplishment.
Whatever! is also a venue for sharing experiences. It’s a virtual café, if you like – a place to meet up with other parents of teenagers without the temptation of thousand-calorie-a-mouthful chocolate treats. We can’t promise a silver bullet, but we hope readers will find information that’s useful and fun.
Check it out here. I hope you enjoy it.
Julie
It’s a year since the first stories in the Hazard River adventure series hit bookshops. Phew, I have learned a thing or two in that time …
Securing a publishing contract for your first book is a little like giving birth to your first child – you spend so much time preparing for the actual event, you’re scarcely ready for what’s ahead. Well, that’s how it was for me anyway. I spent my whole career writing – as a television news reporter, features writer and writing marketing material, yet before I began the Hazard River children’s adventure series I had no experience whatsoever of the publishing industry. And so when I secured my first contract with Ford Street Publishing, for a four-book deal, I naïvely believed the hard work was over.
My manuscripts had been accepted. Hooray! Now, I just had to open the champagne, stand back and wait for the royalties to start pouring in. Right? Alas, that’s not quite how it works.
If there is one thing I have learned in the year since the first stories in the Hazard River series came out, it’s just how hard authors have to work after their books are released, to make sure they are successful. If I may use yet another analogy, being a new author is the same as being a new business owner – you have an exciting new product that you and your publisher have to get out to the world and that is all about marketing. And while publishers will do all they can to market new books, authors need to work at it as well.
Since launching the Hazard River series, I have set up a website (possible even for a techie novice), produced several book trailers (thank goodness for my new Mac) and started a blog for young writers WRITE NOW. I’ve also done countless interviews and written many stories for children’s book sites. I’m not complaining. Luckily for me I’ve had plenty of experience in marketing and I enjoy it. In fact, I loved filming and editing the book trailer and so did my two sons, who starred in it.
The other element of writing children’s fiction that surprised me is the public speaking part. Children’s authors spend a lot of time talking to the people they write for – school kids. Visiting schools, libraries and children’s festivals are all an integral part of being a writer. I started out by giving talks about the Hazard River series at my younger son’s school. My son had been promoting my books for two years in the lead up to them being published – reading my manuscript during free reading time and quoting from it for his book reviews. So when I finally turned up with the published books, the whole school was behind me!
Since then, I’ve had a lot of fun talking about the inspiration behind the Hazard River series and running workshops for young writers. There are some amazingly talented kids out there. I am also thankful that my series is aimed at eight to twelve year olds – they’re a great audience and always have so many questions (which always include: how much do you earn?).
I was also lucky enough to be invited to speak at the wonderful CYA Conference in Brisbane last month. I went along a few years ago as a (slightly clueless) aspiring author, and it was exciting to return as a fully-fledged published author, to share my journey and a few ideas on writing adventure stories. It was a novelty to be addressing adults on the subject of writing, but it was a great event and I was glad to be involved. Apart from lining up some very experienced authors, the Conference provides writers with the chance to meet industry professionals. Nothing beats face-to-face contact when you’re chasing that illusive publishing contract. Authors – Tina Marie Clark and Ally Howard do an amazing job pulling the event together. This is what this year’s line up looked like: Marc McBride, Brian Falkner, Sarah Davis, Tristan Bancks, Mark Wilson, Aleesah Darlison, Jess ‘Jaybird’ Briscoe, Julie Fison, Sue Whiting, Jack Heath, Karen Robertson, Michael Bauer, Clare McFadden, Anne Spudvilas and Amanda Ashby.
Of course, it’s easy with all of the marketing and speaking engagements to lose sight of the fact that writing is still the chore business of the writer. The skill is saving some energy and space in your life to work on the next story. When I write, I have to immerse myself completely; I can’t just dip in and out. And when I do, I remember why I started in the first place. Because, although I like marketing, making video promos and speaking to school kids and adults about writing, it’s hard to beat creating a fictitious world, filling it with characters, throwing a problem at them and seeing how they get out of the mess that you’ve made for them.
If you would like me to visit your school or festival, contact Speakers’ Ink. www.speakers-ink.com.au
For more information on the CYA Conference visit www.cyaconference.com
There’s something very special about packing up the car, turning your back on the beach and heading west. And without wanting to go all Bob Katter on you, it doesn’t get much more rewarding than a trip into outback Queensland to the towering sandstone cliffs of Carnarvon Gorge. The Gorge boasts remnant rainforest, Aboriginal rock art, crystal clear streams and a whole lot of wildlife – an oasis in the midst of semi-arid pastrol land, 720 km northwest of Brisbane. We broke the journey in Roma and came home via 1770. It was such a great adventure – I think I’ll have to write about it!
Aboriginal rock art at the Art Gallery, Carnarvon Gorge
Stepping stones on Carnarvon Creek
Queen's Arms, Roma - opposite a great bakery - Bakearoma
Safari-style tent at Takarakka Bush Resort
Two new stories in my Hazard River series are now available. Toads’ Revenge and Blood Money are great reading for kids aged 8+ who love a holiday adventure and have enough action and laughs to keep even reluctant readers turning the pages. The books are published by Ford Street Publishing and the covers are done by the very talented Marc McBride.
Jack Wilde, his brother Ben, and his friends Mimi and Lachlan find themselves in a freaky other world in Toads’ Revenge, when they accidently shoot themselves into the future. The kids face their most gruesome adversaries yet – giant mutant cane toads. How will they overcome them and more importantly, how will they get home again?
Here’s a taste of the action:
‘Eenie, meenie, minie, mo . . .’ Ben says, pointing at the buttons as he chants the rhyme.
‘This one looks good,’ he says. He makes a random selection and pulls down a lever for good measure.
The lights in the cinema go down and a nice woman, like a flight attendant, comes on the screen. She starts rattling off some safety instructions. It’s the usual stuff about seatbelts and emergencies. Just why you’d need that stuff to watch a movie is anyone’s guess.
I completely ignore the seatbelt warning. I’m hardly listening at all, until the screen goes black. I wait for the movie to start, wondering what will come up.
That’s when a countdown begins.
‘Ten…nine…eight…’ a serious voice says.
‘We have to get out!’ Mimi shouts, jumping out of her chair. She runs for the exit, banging at the control panel. The door doesn’t budge. The countdown continues.
‘Relax,’ Lachlan says.
But I’m not relaxed. I’m getting nervous. I wish I hadn’t followed the Master of Disaster on another dumb mission.
I jump out of my chair and help Mimi, mindlessly pushing buttons.
The countdown goes on. ‘ Three . . . two . . . one.’
The room starts spinning. Slowly at first, then faster. So fast that I’m hurled against a bare metal wall. Mimi is flung against the door beside me. Lachlan is ripped from his chair. I look around and find Ben. He’s spread-eagled against the television screen. His face is frozen in terror.
We’re all trapped like flies on a piece of honey toast.
‘Enjoy your flight,’ the countdown voice says.
The room is spinning so fast that I can’t
see a thing. It’s all a blur. There’s a flash of white light, a nasty pain between my eyes, then my mind goes blank. (Chapter 1 Toads’ Revenge)
In Blood Money, Jack Wilde thinks he’s made the big time when Ben discovers a bag full of money. Jack and Lachlan want to spend it, but Ben thinks it’s cursed and Mimi wants to take it to the police. The gang decides on some detective work to find out where the money has come from. But that’s when they really get into trouble!
Here’s the point where things start to wrong in Blood Money:
‘ Think, Ben,’ I say. ‘ What were you doing when you first saw the bag?’
Ben scratches his head. He doesn’t say anything. I hope that is because he’s thinking. But he might just be deciding if green thongs are better than red ones. Who knows?
‘I was hanging from the rope swing,’ he says. ‘That’s when I saw the bag.’
Hooray! He thinks!
‘The rope swing!’ I shout, hugging my brother. ‘That’s near here.’
I run through the mangroves until we reach a clearing. A big gum tree stands in the middle. A rope dangles from one of the branches. Dad tied it up there at the start of the holidays. I haven’t used it much, but Ben often comes here. It’s some kind of kangaroo graveyard. Ben likes to look for kangaroo bones. What can I say? It’s just something Stink Collectors do.
I run to the swing and grab hold. I wrap my legs around the rope and swing towards the mangroves. I see something big and black.
‘There!’ I shout. ‘The bag! It’s right behind you, Ben.’
A sports bag is hanging by one handle. It’s on a low branch of a mangrove tree. The bag is bulging. It must be packed with money. I let go of the rope and fly through the air towards the mangroves.
‘Weee!’ I shout. ‘Money does grow on trees!’ (Chapter 2 Blood Money)
Blood Money is fiction, but it was inspired by a true story – a few years ago two brothers were fishing in a quiet creek in NSW and they found a plastic bag full of money – $100,000 in cash! The boys thought long and hard about what to do with it, but eventually handed it in to the police.
Check out my website for more details or to buy a copy of the new books here.
Visit Speakers Ink if you would like me to visit your school or festival. Also visit my blog for young writers WRITE NOW.
Happy reading!
Julie
As every aspiring author knows, writing a good story is about inhabiting the minds of the story’s characters and translating their motivations and actions into convincing and entertaining prose. And so, it was without hesitation, that I invaded the mind of a ten-year-old boy for my first foray into the world of fiction writing, the Hazard River series.
The idea of writing an adventure series for tweens crept up on me during a family holiday to the Noosa River. My two sons teamed up with friends and spent the summer on a Boys Own Adventure – exploring sand banks, biking through the bush, dodging snakes and avoiding stingrays. I was inspired.
While the kids had adventures I started to write about them. It seemed only natural that I would choose a boy to narrate the story. I called him Jack Wilde. I saw things through his eyes, I talked like him and I behaved like him (only in print, of course). You don’t need a psychologist to tell you that thinking like a ten-year-old boy is a dubious life choice, but I found the experience quite enlightening.
I have now written six books in the Hazard River series – four are in bookshops, another two, are due out next month. The whole process has been frustrating at times, but overall it has been hugely rewarding. I think it has also made me a better parent.
It goes without saying that working from home makes the school run, homework and sporting commitments much easier to manage. But I was working from home before I started writing fiction – as a freelance features and marketing writer. The improvement in my parenting skills came from other things.
Firstly, I thoroughly enjoy writing and a happy mother is a good one. I also get incredibly absorbed in my work, so a lot of small indiscretions in the household slip under the radar – another good thing. My sons have became very involved in the whole writing process, coming up with ideas for stories, editing my manuscripts and helping with the marketing, by showing off my stories to classmates. And whenever my children see me at the computer they assume I’m working on a new story. The boys groan when my husband is in front of the computer. He’s not doing anything useful as far as they are concerned – he’s just shirking his cricketing/rugby/tennis responsibilities. When they see me working, they believe there’s something very tangible in it for them.
Finally, inhabiting the mind of a ten-year-old and writing the Hazard River series has given me a little more insight into my own boys. It has also reawakened my sense of humour. As a mother, it’s easy to fall into the role of head of the fun police, a joy sucker on every occasion. Now I’m on the lookout for funny things to weave into my stories. And I’m finding them – everywhere. I’m glad I’m not trying to raise a family on my royalties, but the personal rewards from writing are tremendous.
Just don’t ask me about the size of the washing pile or what’s lurking under the sofa. My propensity for housekeeping is inversely proportional to my interest in writing. The good news is that no one (as far as I know) has ever been arrested for sending their sons to school in a creased shirt and few people are celebrated for their housekeeping prowess.
It’s always enriching for a writer to hear the experiences of a best-selling author. Just listening to their stories, the inspiration for their books, the routines they follow, provide clues to how to succeed as an author. And when that author is Pulitzer Prize winning author Geraldine Brooks, I have to admit, I’m hanging on every word.
This week I listened as the author of March, Year of Wonders and my favourite, People of the Book, shared snippets of her journey from her time as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East to her latest book Caleb’s Crossing.
If you haven’t read Caleb’s Crossing, the book is about the first Native American to graduate from Harvard. Yet, the story is told by a young Puritan girl who befriends him. So, why did Brooks choose Bethia Mayfield as the narrator? Apparently, that’s the voice she heard when she was researching her story. As Geraldine Brooks puts it: she wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to try to write a first person account in Caleb’s voice. But she was able to write a convincing story in Bethia’s voice from the shreds of evidence that remain of colonial life in North America in the 17th century.
How wonderful to have a voice emerge from the archives, but as Brooks admits – if she can’t hear a voice, she doesn’t have a story. And that’s an important point. The voice is a crucial element of storytelling – a fresh, credible voice can make a novel, a clichéd, contrived one can break it.
When I wrote the Hazard River adventure series, I used the voice of a ten-year-old boy. It wasn’t hard to hear the voice – he was yapping away in the background. My own sons inspired the characters in the series as well as the adventures. I faithfully followed the advice: write what you know.
I shared the inspiration for the Hazard River series at a festival for young writers and readers earlier in the week. The aptly named Voices on the Coast is a celebration of storytelling on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. I was there to help inspire the next generation of writers, but the process works both ways. It’s hard not to be energized by students who are so enthusiastic and talented – bubbling with imagination and ambition. I am inspired to get back to a half finished story on my computer, follow the voices and find out how it ends.
I better get on with it or the voices I’ll be hearing will be those asking for help with Maths homework and questioning what’s for dinner.
What a great story on the ABC this week. My Crazy Gap Year followed a couple and their two young boys as they set sail from England in a catamaran to find paradise in the Pacific.
Their adventure got off to a very shaky start, with the two and four year old boys behaving like typical pre-schoolers (not ideal on a yacht), the Bay of Biscay throwing up a storm and everyone generally getting on each others’ nerves. But by the end of the year they had made it to Sydney and looked like classic laid-back grottie yachties – all smiles and no intention of rejoining the real world any time soon. Despite the challenges they faced they didn’t regret a moment of their gap year.
Enough to inspire a mini boom in ocean-going yachts, you’d think – who wouldn’t want to give up the day job and set sail for the Pacific.
A Queensland sailing adventure (1977)
My parents did something similar when they were in their mid forties. They spent five years circumnavigating the world in a 40 ft yacht – pottering around Asia, drifting through the Mediterranean, travelling the French canals and island-hopping across the Pacific.
I was already working by the time they left Brisbane, but I spent holidays with them – sailing the English Channel to France, exploring Turkey, sightseeing in Tunisia and cruising the islands of Fiji. It sounds idyllic and mostly it was. But sailing can be hard work and things go wrong.
Things get broken – including masts, stuff falls overboard – a lot. Even people fall overboard – more than you’d think. Then there are pirates, storms, unfriendly locals, overfriendly locals and injuries to worry about. (It doesn’t matter how long you live on a boat, you’re still going to bang your head and trip over cleats every single day.) The idea of facing all of those challenges and dealing with pre-schoolers is quite an unpleasant prospect.
But when is the right time for a life-changing adventure? Before the kids go to school, they’re too young to benefit from travel. Once they get to high school they just want to be with their friends. Wait until they finish school and leave them behind? It’s an attractive option, but what if your health fails before the kids leave the nest?
There’s probably never a perfect time for a life-changing adventure, but I guess the challenge is an integral part of it. Wait too long and you might miss the opportunity completely.
You know you’re a fully fledged Mother of Boys when you find yourself alone at home on a Friday night – your kids are in bed, your husband’s out – you ignore the mind-improving book on the arm of the chair, you flick on the TV, scroll past the worthy documentaries, the hospital dramas and reality soaps, then completely voluntarily choose to watch the rugby … the whole game, including the captains’ interviews. The following day you’re able to offer a useful commentary on the match along with predictions for your team’s overall chances for the season, as well as an informed opinion on who’s on fire and who has to go.
It happens – a lot more than you’d think. And it’s happened to me.
Like most mothers of boys I started with very little idea of what was ahead. I was just a mother of two beautiful children, determined to help my sons achieve their potential with as few trips to Accident and Emergency as possible and preferably without stockpiling an arsenal of plastic weapons. But somewhere along the way things changed. Not them. Me.
The ‘no guns’ policy lasted a couple of years – until I realized that the boys were improvising with sharp sticks and feeding their addiction at other people’s houses. I gave in to the inevitable and added a couple of water pistols to the toy box. And before you accuse me of being too quick to relinquish the moral high ground – a note of caution: A friend of mine held out longer on the ‘no guns’ rule. But one day, son number four came into the kitchen asking for a glass of water for his older brother. She went to investigate what was making the boys so thirsty and found them making weapons with scrap wood and a bench saw. Two things come out this. Bench saws should be kept well away from children and most boys really, really like guns. As a mother of boys that’s something you have to manage.
Mothers of boys have a whole host of things to endure that mothers of girls might avoid completely – the constant noise, endless fighting, comedy flatulence and an aversion to basic hygiene. The difference between girls and boys is a well-worn topic. But what does this mean for mothers?
Once a year mothers of boys gather in Brisbane for a lunch to celebrate their ‘special’ status. It’s a fund raiser and an awareness raiser. Over the years, speakers have highlighted some of the key issues that young men face – bullying and road accidents are a couple that come to mind. But if you do a pink wash, you’re not welcome. This is just a gathering of mothers of boys. A founding member was famously booted off the committee when (after three sons) she had a girl. At first I thought this rather excessive. But the older my sons get, the more I realise how different it is – just having sons. No one in my house is ever going to need a dress for the school formal, heels and some bling to match. No one is going to share the curse of PMT or moan about boyfriends. And I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing, but it makes things different. It also means that to avoid feeling like a stranger in my own home, I’ve had to embrace some of my boys’ interests.
Apart from an unnatural interest in rugby, I have developed an inappropriate sense of humour. I laugh at Fat Mamma jokes. I laugh at toilet humour. I even made up my own orifice-related jokes for my tween adventure series, Hazard River – www.hazardriver.com . It was hard not to. I inhabited the mind of a ten-year-old boy to write the series – a few vomit and bottom anecdotes were inevitable. I’ve considered following this up with a series for older boys, but the idea of invading the mind of a teenage boy has me worried. It’s dark, scary and mysterious in there.
I’ve just opened Steve Biddulph’s book Manhood for some direction on what lies ahead. Now I’m really scared. While we’ve been busy empowering girls, young men have been drifting along in an underfathered parallel state – getting drunk, getting violent, getting arrested and taking their own lives at an alarming rate – because they don’t know how to be good men.
Gulp.
Sadly, the one thing mothers can’t do, according to Biddulph, is teach boys how to be men. We can nurture them, support them, remind them to take a shower, and laugh at their silly jokes. What we also have to do is make sure we’ve got a good man around to help teach our boys the right way to live.
There’s a theory that book sales are proportional to the number of teeth on the front cover. With this theory in mind my publisher, Paul Collins, of Ford Street Publishing, enlisted the talented Marc McBride to do the artwork for the Hazard River series. Marc, who is famous for the Deltora Quest illustrations, is not known for his subtly. Rather, he’s notorious for adding the fear factor to everything he touches. The result for the Hazard River series is a collection of eye-catching front covers that ought to send my sales figures into space if the theory is correct.
The front cover of Shark Frenzy alone should set new records, with the gaping jaws of a monster shark poised ready to snap up a boat full of children. Then there’s the sinister snake on the cover of Snake Surprise, a tiger on the front of Tiger Terror and the gruesome gob of a bat on Bat Attack. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with for the next books in the series Blood Money and Toads’ Revenge.
Kids love all of the Hazard River front covers, but they really go for the toothy ones. A random sampling of my son’s Year 4 class found the Bat Attack front cover scored particularly well on the ‘awesome’ scale, which tends to support the theory.
But what do parents think? One friend can’t even look at the front cover of Snake Surprise because she’s so scared of snakes. Another is terrorized by the Bat Attack cover and I have to admit that even I am frightened by the front cover of Shark Frenzy and I know what happens. (No children actually got eaten in the writing of that book.) The truth is – the books are all action-packed fun with an environmental twist. The scary animals are all good guys in these books. The baddies are smugglers, dodgy developers, and unscrupulous fishermen. Shark Frenzy starts with a dead shark washed up on the bank of Hazard River. It has no fins. When Jack Wilde and his friends decide to investigate, they find fishermen are killing sharks for their fins.
Shark finning makes for an interesting theme, but a dead, finless shark doesn’t make a great front cover. A monster shark with its mouth open does. Sorry to any squeamish parents, the kids’ votes win on this one. Please avert your eyes the next time your son or daughter picks up a Hazard River book. Or maybe just grin and bear it, if you’ll pardon the pun.
