Melbourne Writers Festival Volunteers

Melbourne, the City of Literature is alive and bustling with writers at the moment, because at Federation Square, The Wheeler's Centre, Town Hall and other venues, the Melbourne Writers Festival is in full swing!

To me, volunteering at the festival is the best way to attend it, and I think even when I have books out I'll still try and volunteer. Wonder what the protocol is there? Anyway, not only do you get to attend as many sessions as you can, for free (if there's room for you) but you get to meet all sorts of book lovers and book makers. I had a fabulous day working on the "Whole Shebang" workshop (I'd say it was more like a day at a conference) and met many of the speakers - editors, agents and writers alike, not to mention the other volunteers and fantastic participants who are so passionate about books, writing and the industry. Like me!

And that night I worked at the Town Hall and nearly collided with Joss Whedon (think the creator of Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Doctor Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog and the upcoming Avengers movie) as he came inside for his sound check.

Being a volunteer at an event is such a different experience to attending, and I have a great time doing it.

Being a young adult fiction writer, I am attending some sessions this week during the schools program which feature young adult authors. This year is the first year I discovered that NON school people could attend these sessions too. Think of all the amazing speakers I've missed out on! But no longer.

In the next couple of posts I'll share what I learnt when Melina Marchetta (Looking for Alibrandi, On the Jellicoe Road, Finnikin on the Rock) discussed 'How I Write', and Chris Morphew (Zac Power, Phoenix Files) and Gabriel Lord (Conspiracy 365) talked about 'Action!'

I still have more sessions to attend, so stay tuned for those!

Sairz

What I've been doing and stuff.

Hello Blogosphere, it is I. Sarah. I just realised today how very long it has been between posts, because in class we’re working on blogs and I had a quick squiz at mine and *cough*…so here I am.

Interesting stuff, actually. We're looking at digital publishing and as well as setting up blogs for the class, we had to rewrite a short story we had already written, but as 5 text messages, and look at how the different technology changes the way the story is told. And it did change the story. You should try it. Except YOU should use a good phone that doesn't make you swear because it keeps turning off mid-text message and moving the cursor so you're typing in the wrong place. You should use a different phone. Learn from me.

Anyway, that was just today. The whole rest of the time I was on mid-semester break for what felt like forever (not a complaint) and my exam went awesome (thanks for asking) and it’s not like I was just lounging around in my pyjamas all winter holidays (yes you American and British types! It’s winter and cold and rainy and very hard to get out of bed because I don't have central heating and the air outside of my doona is c-c-cold!) and technically that wasn’t much of a lie about spending most of my days in my pyjamas because, well, I was in my tracky daks (track suit) for a lot of it. But I wasn’t bludging. I was WRITING. I finished my first draft of an MG called What’s so cool about Carrie (Working Title) within the first four days (sing hallelujah! Sing it…haaaaaallelujah) and while giving myself some space away from that so I can crack the whip and slash pages, characters and kill all my darlings with no remorse when I’m not so attached to it, I got to work on the second draft of a YA book I wrote two years ago, which is now called The Kiss Off.

Two years was enough time for me to get out my butchers knife and hack the bejesus outta that book and feel good about it. The only problem with hacking the bejesus out of your first draft is you may end up with only about 30 pages that you’re going to keep and a whole bunch of awesome characters who need a brand-spanking-new story.

Which is what I did. Actually, what I’m still doing, I’m in the middle of the big ‘oh no she didn’t’ climax but don’t have the time or energy to finish it just now cos I’m back at Uni and working (hard for the money…so haaaaard for it honey) and this whole not finishing my book thing is frustrating. You know? Cos as soon as I finish The Kiss Off, I can get back to What’s so cool about Carrie? and get something off to my agent. I’m looking forward to finished drafts. Oh yes I am.

In other news, I just recently discovered Australia has an Ice Hockey league so I have found my sport of choice. I am not a sport fan, but I am an ice hockey fan, oh yes. Go Melbourne Ice! Can you imagine what the mascot looks like? I haven’t seen it yet. Do you reckon it’s just like, a snowball? Or a block of ice from the freezer tray?

I’ll keep you posted. If I remember.

Pretty much that’s been my last month. Writing, working and some ice hockey.

Thought I might share a teeny tiny snippet of what I’ve been working on since I’ve been working pretty hard. This is from the YA novel: The Kiss Off.

My protagonist, Poppy and her friend Vanya are helping their other friend Mads get ready for a date.

So we were in Mads’s room, Van and I scrutinizing every top she owned and Mads was kind of pacing, forehead furrowed as she glared at herself in the mirror.

‘I’m hideous.’ She said, throwing her hands in the air in defeat. ‘Why am I doing this to him?’

‘What are you talking about? Doing what?’ I asked.

‘This. Tonight, why am I subjecting Dev to the hideousness that is me.’

‘Oh shut up Mads,’ Vanya said. Mads crossed her arms and huffed.

‘I’m with her.’ I nodded at Van as she tossed another top into the “hell no” pile in the corner.

‘You’re pretty and nice and sweet and he likes you. You don’t have anything to worry about.’

‘And you can hardly notice the pimples anymore,’ Vanya said helpfully. Mads gasped and slapped her hand to her chin. I pulled it away and clasped both her hands in mine, squeezing them reassuringly.

‘And you’ve got us there to help you.’

For a moment she seemed to be settling down, but then she pulled her hands away, strode to the other side of the room and declared: ‘I’m not pretty, I’m horrible, I’m hideous, I’m disfigured!’

‘What are you talking about?’

And that was when she whipped her top off. Just like that. She pointed to her boobs. Her naked boobs. This was new.

‘Um, Mads,’ I started.

‘I like this one!’ Vanya threw whatever top she was holding at the time at Mads’s chest. It happened to be her gym uniform. Mads threw it to the “hell no” pile.

‘Look at them,’ she said. ‘Look at the left one, it’s growing as big as a porn star’s but then look at the right. It looks like my dad’s boobs!’ I didn’t exactly want to, but since she was being so demanding about it, I checked out her boobs. I looked from the left to the right and back again.

‘They look fine to me.’

‘They’re not fine!’

‘What do you think, Van?’

Vanya huffed, shook her head, bent at the waist and squinted at Mads’s boobs.

‘You say the left one’s bigger?’ She asked.

‘It is!’

‘I don’t think you have to worry. The other one’ll catch up.’ Van stood up and crossed her arms with a nod.

‘And besides, Mrs. McCleary said it’s perfectly normal to have one boob bigger than the other.’ I reassured her.

‘You see it too, then?’ Mads looked panic stricken. ‘That the left is bigger?’

‘No!’ Vanya and I both shouted.

‘You don’t?’

‘Your boobs are fine, Mads.’ I told her, picking up a baby pink singlet from the “maybe” pile. I handed it to her slowly. Thankfully, she clutched it to her chest.

Vanya held up Mads’s vintage electric blue MotoCross jacket, and we had a winner.

‘I think that’d look good with some long necklaces, don’t you?’

See you erm…sometime before the end of the year?

Sairz

Characters always LOOKING at each other

It was serendipitous timing, when Nathan Bransford posted his latest blog about writing tics, because that's something I've been thinking about a bit while working on a book revision.

Though this is a big revision, so it's more "writing book from scratch" for the most part and I'm not actively looking for my writing tics, but it made me think about what they are. And as all writers do, I have a few.

Mine are different to what I thought they were going to be though. How do I know for SURE which words are showing up in my manuscript more than others?

I created a word cloud with Wordle. Mine has a lot of LOOKED, LIKE, AROUND and BACKs in it. Yeah, okay, my characters look at each other, look at the floor, the wall, into the distance, I understand why there's a lot of LOOKing. Much of this is probably unnecessary and I'll be hacking away at it in my next pass. AROUND probably follows many of the LOOKs, but LIKE? And BACK? It'll be interesting to see what sort of context all of those BACKs and LIKEs are in.

My Word Cloud looks pretty kick ass, I just don't know how to save it to show you. Any clues?

In the meantime, back to my revisions! I'm on mid-semester break at the moment and spending it being as productive as I can. Spending most of my holiday in my writing cave keeps me out of the FREEZING cold weather outside, so I think I've made the right choice. :)

Ciao for now,

Sairz

Who's in what class with who and when now? OR The benefits of a book bible

I am editing a book right now.

I wrote it 2 years ago and it has potential, but needs a lot of work. Two whole plots are changing, so today I finished reading it, hacking and slashing at pages and it turns out I deleted 76 out of 202 pages. And that's just the FULL pages that I took out, not including the multitude of half pages that have big red slashes through them. Oh God...

So um, it's definitely going to be different from the first draft.

I have always been a bit of a panster, when writing. Just winging it, letting it flow, seeing where it takes me.

But with my revision, I am learning, teaching myself to be much more methodical. And I think that is what is helping to keep my head from exploding.

I never kept a Book Bible or anything like that, sure, I wrote down a list of characters and a couple of facts about them, but now, I really think I need more preparation than that.

I came across this scene, a pretty small scene, but it contained a LOT of information I was going to need further on in the book.

Basically, the scene looks like this.

Mads called her best friends MJ (Main Character) and Vanya and had something super important to tell them, and they all had to meet at the tram stop before school.

So MJ and Vanya were there, but Mads never showed.

So this is the scene that got me thinking:

I scanned the faces for Mads as the first period bell rang and everyone got up and pushed and shoved each other out of the room but she wasn’t there. And I didn’t have class with her next either so I had to be all patient and wait until recess to hear the big news.

In English I was totally checking out Dev though. Did he look extra happy about something? Not really, he was squinting at the white board and chewing the end of his pen. Did he look distracted or whatever? Well yeah – but only because he was sitting next to Lachie and they kept talking and snickering about something. I didn’t like it.

What was I saying? Oh yeah. At recess I was standing by Mads’s locker waiting for her, in the process of flattening myself against the lockers as a hoard of year seven’s bounded past, bumping into people and making passing teachers yell at them to stop bloody running and then the teachers would scurry off to the staff room hoping no one had noticed they’d just sworn at some students.

I caught my muesli bar and was contemplating eating it as Van rounded the corner.

“So?” I asked.

“She wasn’t in Math.” She said. Huh.

And then she wasn’t in Geography or Science either or at lunch which was completely frustrating.

So. judging by this scene, MJ does not have class with Mads first period. She has English second period with Mads and two other boys, Dev and Lachie. But Vanya does not have English with them. She has something else second period.

Vanya tells MJ that Mads wasn't in maths, which means that MJ does not have maths with Vanya or Mads. Similarly, MJ muses that Mads wasn't in Geography or Science either (no mention of whether Vanya was, so I can go either way on that one) which means that MJ and Mads have these classes together.

And all of these lessons took place before lunch.

In order to keep track of all this, and what classes my characters should be on their way to at different times of day, if they can walk into class together or have to split up because they each have something different on at that time, I need a Bible.

My brain just can't keep track of it all by itself. So that's what I'm working on right now. My bible. And doing a chapter summary, before I let myself get to writing the new scenes, which I'm itching to do. It's all in the desire to keep my sanity.

Did that makes sense or has my brain actually exploded and I haven't realised it yet?

Sairz

When you finally write "The End"

I finished classes for the semester on Thursday. I have a whole seven weeks to finish writing my Work In Progress. I figured I wasn't that far off the end so I would have it done by this Sunday.

Um, I gotta tell ya, when I have whole days free with nothing else planned? I am PRODUCTIVE.

I had it done LAST Sunday. The one that is 3 days after finishing classes on Thursday - that Sunday.

I walked around all afternoon like this

I live with my older sister now, and she's sick at the moment, and I kept going into her room where she was lying on her deathbed and I just smiled at her and walked out again.

Do any of you other writers get all giddy when you finish a book? It's so exciting, I actually did it! What a feat. It took me four months from coming up with the plot and having a couple of characters, to actually FINISHING it.

Writing a whole novel is a huge undertaking, fellow writers. I hope you realise this each time you churn out another one. You don't merely spend a couple of hours a day on the physical writing, but you spend the WHOLE FOUR MONTHS thinking about your book, your characters. You know? LIVING your story.

Writing for Middle Grade and Young Adult readers, my books are a bit shorter than adult novels, so I definitely hope you adult fiction writers out there get just what a big deal it is, what you accomplish. If you're a writer, whoever you are, reading this. If you're not a writer reading this, well, um... Writing is hard work and I guess I'm informing you of that.

Mind you, this is the first draft. I already know of a couple of scenes that I need to add in, and my awesomely wonderful beta readers are going to tell me if there are any big scenes that need to be slashed and cut out.

In the mean time, I have another book to edit! I'm having lots of fun dreaming up the NEW plot bits to replace the plot I'm choosing to delete. So I'll be deleting many chapters and characters, but inserting heaps of better ones!

So hopefully within the next couple of months I will have not only one but two brand new, polished books to send off to my agent. Hells yeah.

That's all I have for now. Woot for finishing my novel, yeah!

Learning from Crap Books

I’m reading a book at the moment (I’m sure this surprises you).

I was at first attracted to it, enjoying it, because of the voice. Now, voice is something I find extremely important when reading a book, and it’s something I pride myself on. I feel I have a strong teen writing voice. I think I do them well and I think that is what will set me apart from the rest.

I have read interesting books that have a great plot, but the voice is a bit generic, similarly, I have read books with a great voice but the plot is a bit so-so.

That’s what is happening with this book I am reading, but unfortunately, the fantastic voice hasn’t even lasted. It is just a so-so plot. Because of this, I’m not going to tell you what it’s called, or who it’s by or what it’s about. Because I don’t want to bash someone else’s writing, someone else’s blood, sweat and tears. Because writing takes all of that. Well, not necessarily blood (unless you get really bad anxiety and bite your fingernails too effectively) but sweat and tears for sure.

So, this book. Okay, I could stop reading it, but I’m having such a strong reaction to it that I’m going to continue it because I want to learn from it, learn what not to do.

I as a reader am just not invested in the story and the characters welfare because the plot just seems too implausible. And the MC’s reactions to events are just…no one would react like that.

There are some pretty dire situations going on here, lives are in danger, but the reader is directed to not care about that, we’re supposed to only care about what the main character wants, the boy she wants, the social status she wants.

Personally – I care about the lives in danger. But maybe that’s just me.

As much as you can learn from a well-executed book, as a writer you can learn from a poorly executed one as well. What are those gut feelings you are getting, what is it that is pulling you out of the narrative to sneer at the book in disdain?

You don’t want readers doing that to your book, so work out what it is about books that you don’t like, that makes you dislike them. Learn from the best, sure, but take the time to learn from the worst, too.

Pretty Little Liars: Awesome Publicity and marketing

G'day everyone,

I know it's been awhile since I actually wrote anything properly here that wasn't a link to someone else's awesome post, and I will write a proper post all of my very own here sometime soon, but erm, well today's not that day.

I wanted to send you all the The Story Siren's post about the promotional game she is involved in, for the new TV show Pretty Little Liars (based on best selling books as many of you know, I'm sure) . Check it out here, at the Story Siren.

How cool is that? I want to play! Just the IDEA of the game has gotten me excited about the TV show, and that's the whole point of creating the game, right?

Really creative marketing and publicity, in my opinion. I approve.

That's all for now. Lots going on, it's the last day of semester today, and I'm knackered. But that means that I have 7 whole weeks of focusing on writing and editing books ahead of me. This is my productive time, and I'm looking forward to it. Maybe after a nap. Or maybe now. I'm not sure.

Ciao for now,

Sairz