•October 13, 2011 •
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Up until recently I have done most of my writing at the dining room table. I think this is because I always have to trick myself into settling down to do some work and this fooling myself process seems to work better if I am in the dining room. Dining rooms are nice. There’s a big table and lots of chairs to choose from. And there’s always the chance that someone may suddenly walk in and serve dinner.
But just recently I have been feeling the absence of a place to call my own. No office. No den. No loft. Nothing. And the trouble with working at the dining room table is that inevitably, just when you’re on a bit of a writing roll someone comes in and tells you shove out of the way so that the table can be used for its intended purpose. Dining.
So a couple of weeks ago my upstairs neighbour and I ventured off to a certain well-known producer of Swedish furniture and I got myself a desk. Well actually, it’s not really a desk. It’s more like a small kitchen table. Because a real desk would be too… desky. And I’d never do any work at it. But a kitchen table feels like a good way to wean myself off the dining room table.
And then the ‘M’s helped me set it up in the funny little sticky-out window thing we have in our loungeroom which, the upstairs neighbours, tells me is called an ‘Erker’ in Deutsch.
Here it is:
Nothing grand, clearly, but this is why I love it. It’s not scarily office-like and I don’t feel shut off but I also don’t have to clear everything away each time a meal approaches. As an added bonus it offers fantastic spying opportunities on the people passing through the platz opposite. Although this may change once the leaves of the tree outside my windows fall. I may end up eyeballing the residents on the other side of the street. Hopefully they won’t turn out to like ‘nuding up’ as one of our neighbours in another building does.
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•August 31, 2011 •
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Tomorrow Shift is officially released in Australia. It feels weird to be so far away from Oz as this happens – but luckily I have a few friend-spies who are under instruction to send me shots of the book in situ so that I can try and make myself believe that it’s actually happened. Most conveniently one of these friend-spies also happens to be a book rep and she has been busy going around telling the book shops that they should stock Shift. Book reps are great. Especially Mandy, who took this photo of the first sighting of Shift in a bookshop. It’s a little blurry, but first sightings should be, I think.
And now that it’s out there I have the nervous wait to see how people respond. Will they buy it and like it? Will they buy it and hate it? Will they buy it at all? It’s had some really nice reviews online, including this one on Words on Paper and this one on In The Good Books. Both of these book sites are amazing by the way. I can’t imagine having the wherewithall to maintain a review site at age 16 / 17. It’s strange – but also great – to be reviewed in such detail by the exact people your book is aimed at. And it’s extremely heartening, of course, that they seemed to like it. I guess I’ll just have to keep my fingers crossed that other reviewers feel the same way.
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•August 18, 2011 •
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Last week was a big week, Shift-wise. Firstly, my own two copies finally arrived from Australia, after two weeks of obsessional letterbox checking by me. Mum and dad’s copies had arrived and I’d made them show them to me on skype – in detail. ‘First the front cover. Now the back. OK – the spine. Now the inside cover. It’s red, I can see that, but what sort of red?’ It was a little weird I’ll admit. It was much better to see the real thing, and fondle it, admire the glossy cover and the nice paper stock. Since they arrived I’ve been leaving them around the flat in various places so I can just stumble across them. Sometimes literally.
Then there were the online interviews – one with the wonderful Booktopia and another with a great book blog Alpha Reader whose author had already had my undying love after the great review she gave Shift a couple of weeks ago. The thing that really thrilled me about Danielle’s review was that she’d clearly understood exactly what the book was all about. When I showed it to my editor she basically said ‘cripes. I couldn’t have written that any better myself.’ Neither could I.
So. Now it’s exactly two weeks until Shift is officially launched. I feel a little sad that I won’t be in the country to see it set sail but I have instructed various friends and family members to take photos of it if they spot it in the shops.
Although I hear there aren’t many bookshops left in Australia these days.
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•July 4, 2011 •
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I was so excited the first time I saw the (still in progress at the time) cover for Shift. I’m not really sure what I thought it should be like but when I saw the design that Astred Hicks of Design Cherry had come up with I knew that she had got it exactly right. Creepy. Pretty. Unsettling. Perfect. Astred talks about the process of turning a publisher’s brief into a finished cover in this post. I was hoping that Shift would lead to a flood of work for her but it sounds like she’s currently got more than enough anyway…
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•June 27, 2011 •
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I have tried to resist stalking Shift online as I know from experience this tend to lead to pain and anxiety but I couldn’t resist taking a peak on Goodreads the other day, just to see if anyone was interested in it and found a link to this review by Alex of Alex Eats Books. My first blog review. And my first blog follower! Thanks Alex.
The review came at the perfect time. Marisa emailed me recently to let me know that Shift is off to the printers and since then found myself feeling rather edgy in that ‘there’s nothing more I can do now, it’s all out of my hands’ kind of way. So it was a huge relief to read that Alex enjoyed my book. After two years of working on it I’ve kind of lost perspective. I mean, my mum liked it, but just quietly, she’s not the most objective critic.
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•June 9, 2011 •
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I am still trying to work out what I think about this article, published in the Wall Street Journal on June 4. At first I reacted how a lot of other people have reacted – with exasperation and irritation. Surely, I thought, the author had missed the point of teen fiction – that by raising dark issues it gives readers a chance to work through their own feelings about a given topic. Perhaps I reacted a little defensively too, having just completed the sort of teen novel that I suspect the journalist – Meghan Cox Gurdon – would not approve of.
But now I’m not so sure that my initial reactions were entirely fair. There’s no doubting that Gurdon’s opinions seem conservative and a little old-fashioned and there are things in this article that I simply don’t agree with. Surely very, very few people set out to make something ‘depraved’ and ‘brutal’ just for the sake of depravity and brutality. Especially not in published teen fiction. I just don’t accept it.
But the more I thought about the article the more I thought ‘well, what she’s ultimately calling for (more or less…) is an evening up of the choices available for teens.’ She’s pointing out that there are readers to whom the current crop of very dark books simply don’t appeal. It’s useful to be reminded of that. And I’m also glad she’s raised the issue because it’s useful to be made to reflect on what you do and why you do it.
For me, and again I’m sure this is true of many YA authors, Shift came as a direct result of constantly reading about teenagers for whom the world seemed so bleak that they felt their only option was to give up. That there was no hope. No chance of things getting better. When I read news stories like that I always wish that someone had told that teenager that this simply wasn’t true. And the desire to convey that message was always in my mind as I wrote. I haven’t read all of the books the journalistcites in the article and there’s no denying that they sound pretty freaking bleak the way she describes them, but I suspect that the majority of YA authors have a similar motivation to what I had – or at least that they hope to raise the kind of issues that teenagers think about / are concerned about. And surely that can only be a good thing?
I do think, however, Gurdon raises an interesting point about there being a growing ‘trend’ towards darkness in YA. Perhaps there’s room for some balancing up. It’ll probably happen anyway once the market becomes tired of the darker books. After all, as Gurdon points out, it’s ultimately about choice. You buy what appeals to you or what you think will appeal to your teenager – and what you think they can handle / gain something from. I doubt that there are many teens buying YA novels for themselves so most of these books have to get past the ‘gatekeepers’ anyway. I suspect that the larger issue is not what the teens are reading, but if they are reading at all.
Like I said, I’m still mulling this over. I’ve ordered some of the books Gurdon recommends in the article, as well as some of the ones she strongly doesn’t, and will go away and ponder the topic some more.
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•June 6, 2011 •
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Last weekend I finished proof-reading the final Shift manuscript. Now it’s been sent to another proof-reader – a real one this time rather than just me wondering whether there were accidental double-spaces between words. I must admit I was dreading reading through it all again but once I got stuck into the job I actually really enjoyed it – perhaps because this time I was just looking for errors rather than dealing with structural issues. It was almost relaxing. It’s the kind of work where you are congratulated for being anal-retentive and nit-picky. I mentioned my enjoyment to my editor Marisa and she said that she likes proof-reading too and that it’s her ‘happy place’. Perhaps, she suggested, I should consider editing as a side career? I know she was kidding, but it’s really not the worst idea in the world. But perhaps I’ll wait to see what the real proof-reader picks up that I missed before I make any decisions. Anyway, the best bit is that now it’s probably now only two months until I get a hold of the actual, final, printed book. Hooray! German customs allowing, of course.
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