Thursday 25 March: An Evening with Andrea Levy
I will be hosting this event, featuring Andrea Levy, the Orange and Whitbread prizewinning author of Small Island (Headline)--and tickets are selling fast! Andrea is in NZ to promote her new novel, The Long Song, and I will also be interviewing her for Women on Air (Plains 96.9FM). Contact Ruth on (03) 3844721 to book.
You Can Check Me Out Here! Cool, huh?
On Saturday 17 October I ran a workshop at the Christchurch Central Library on the essential elements of 'fantastic world building' in SciFi-Fantasy. This sold-out workshop focused on structure and keeping writing 'real'. A NZ Bookmonth event.
I appeared as a panelist at the above event, discussing "the fine art of selling your work" with fellow panelists John McIntyre (The Children's Bookshop), Noel Murphy, (NZ Book Council) and Frances Plumpton (Richards Literary Agency). As with the rest of the conference, there were both common themes between the panelists (e.g. be professional; love what you write and write what you love; respect those you work with) as well as unique perspectives based on the sector each speaker came. And as with the publishers' panel the previous day, there was general agreement that you can't tie down the x-factor that makes a "Harry Potter" or a "Twilight" mega bestseller.
The overall "Spinning Gold" programme was excellent, with many fascinating speakers — from Martin Baynton who has bought back the film rights of all his books and is busy making tv series such as Jane and the Dragon, Brian Falkner on promoting your book, and this year's NZ Post Children's Book Award author, Kate de Goldi, whose focus was on the importance of "just writing". Whose lead to follow? In the end, I think we can do worse than listen to William Shakespeare:
"...to thine own self be true; and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any ...[other] ..." Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3
Tim Jones and I were delighted to draw a standing room only audience for this evening event at Toi Poneke, the Wellington Arts Centre. Ably chaired by Lynn Freeman of Radio New Zealand's "Arts on Sunday" programme, Tim and I read from Transported and Thornspell respectively, discussed our writing, why we love writing speculative fiction, how we've gone about getting published, both in NZ and internationally, as well as that perennial favourite, future directions! The discussion was lively, with Lynn and the audience both keeping the questions coming. Unity Books supported the event with a book table and both Tim and I were pleased to sign books and chat with audience members afterwards — with the stalwarts going on to Wellington's Fidels café for coffee.
You can read more about the evening on Tim's blog, with related blogs here: Anna Caro, Jenni Talula and Sally McLennan
Note: There's also a podcast on Anna's blog.
Our thanks to Lynn Freeman, Unity Books, the Wellington Arts Centre and Random House New Zealand for their support for the event.
I appeared on a panel discussing SciFi-Fantasy writing with my fellow Sir Julius Vogel Award winner, Russell Kirkpatrick (Best Book, Adult for Dark Heart, HarperCollins), Tim Jones (Transported, Random House), and publisher Lorain Day (HarperCollins). The discussion is on podcast.
Hagley Writer's School was founded in Christchurch in 2008; Morrin Rout is the director and the founding tutors were Bernadette Hall and Fiona Farrell. Morrin asked me to speak with the 2009 students about my own journey to becoming a published writer — which I did, "warts and all"—but the students seemed to enjoy the narrative and had plenty of questions along the way. Like many in the NZ writing community I think it is a great step to have a South Island writing school and look forward to what emerging writers of such talent will being to NZ writing in future.
Marshland Primary School has a group of students who are already writing and I was invited along to talk to them about my own experience of being a writer and to answer their questions about Thornspell, which they had been looking at with their teacher. And because their teacher told me that the group had been working on "conflict" in writing, we also worked through some ways in which conflict could be revealed through the storytelling process. Afterwards the Marshland students, like the Strathallan pupils in Auckland, had a lot of relevant and thoughtful questions, so our hour and a half together passed really fast.
Recently I attended ConScription, the 2009 national Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention in Auckland, where I ran a session on "Kid's/YA Lit's Hot: What Makes It Rock" and participated in three panels: Building Fantastic Worlds with Julie Czerneda, Future Directions in SciFi-Fantasy: Beyond Harry Potter with Julie Czerneda and Barbara Clendon, and Being A Writer with Julie, Nalini Singh, Russell Kirkpatrick and Tee Morris.
All the events were a lot of fun and there were also some great displays that I got to attend as part of the convention. My favourite was the exhibition of (largely) medieval weapons and their use by the Dawn Reavers. I was very impressed by both the array of authentic weapons and the knowledge and skill of the Reavers.
You can see some photos here and read my friend Joff's excellent review on the entire convention here
On Friday 29 May, while in Auckland for ConScription 2009, I visited Strathallan College at Karaka school and spoke with Year 6 and 7 pupils, as well as meeting with a group of older pupils interested in writing. I talked with this latter group about the process of writing, getting started, and getting published, and to the Year 6 and 7 students about writing Thornspell — which they had been working on in class — and how exciting it is to see my book "out there" in the world. All the students asked lots of smart of questions, which was great, and the feedback from Head of School Carolyn Shapcott was that the kids had a really good time. I'm glad because I know I did!
On Saturday 23 May, I visited Frankie MacMillan's CPIT class in creative writing as a guest, speaking to the students about developing character within the context of writing Thornspell. Everyone in the class was either already writing or wanted to write so the discussion was very focused.