A Not-So-Tiny Thing

Over on the Ten Tiny Things blog, we've taken a break from our (ir)regularly scheduled tinies to bring you some news of the not-so-tiny kind ...

Ten Tiny Things has just been announced as the winner of the Australia/New Zealand division of the SCBWI 2013 Crystal Kite Award!

The Crystal Kite Award is peer-voted by members of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, a global organisation to which I have belonged for many years.

Here is an excerpt from the notification illustrator Kyle Hughes-Odgers and I received yesterday:

As you know, members voted for the book they felt represented excellence in children’s literature, and you came out on top.  We here at SCBWI headquarters are thrilled for you, as are all your friends and associates in the SCBWI.

In the media release which followed shortly after, I noted that SCBWI is an organisation that has meant a lot to me over the years, both personally and professionally. It’s so lovely to have my work awarded by this wonderful community.

Kyle observed that illustrating a children’s book has been a dream since he was a child, so to be recognised by people in the industry on his first attempt is very humbling.

We are both thrilled that Ten Tiny Things has found such a receptive audience. Although you can't consciously write for the zeitgeist, we really believe it's a book whose time is now, and it's wonderful to know that readers and colleagues feel the same.

To read the official media release from Fremantle Press, click here.

To see the complete list of winners and learn more about the Crystal Kite Awards, click here.

To view lots of really cool tiny things from all over the world, go and explore this blog.

To find lots of really cool tiny things in your own neighbourhood, step outside and look around you ... (No link is available; you will have to find this for yourself!)

More Postal Goodness

So in my last post I was gleeful over reader letters that had arrived in the mail. Today, there is more postal goodness, though of a different kind.

This morning, the white van roared up my driveway (FedEx - it always feels American somehow when it's FedEx, doesn't it?) to disgorge this:

Audio books! I have audio books! Unabridged. 4 Compact Disks. Approx. 4 Hours, 10 Minutes. The school run will never be the same.

This version is released by Candlewick on BrillianceAudio, and is performed by Tara Sands. And if you are interested, you can listen to an excerpt here. It's such an odd experience hearing my story, my characters, with an American accent. When I get a spare 4 hours and 10 minutes I'm going to listen to the whole thing. I can't wait to hear how Tara does good old Finkle.

Then, just as I was getting over that excitement, another white van roared up my driveway. This time, there was a box. I do love a box. I like the way you can open the flaps and stare down at the contents and say ahh. 

Hardbacks! I have hardbacks! There is something about the heft of them that pleases the soul.

Eventually, of course, I took one out of the box, and then I discovered something unexpected. My ripple has texture! I've always loved the way the designer has the 'O' of the title rippling out into the surrounding water but I didn't realise the ripples were going to actually ripple under the fingers. I may have spent some time stroking the cover. I think that is perhaps allowed at this point.

And last of all, was not a van but a motorbike. It was my everyday trusty postie (will US blog-readers understand that, do you think?). I have come to know this man well. We often stand and chat in the driveway. He says things like, "How's the writing going?" and we both try and pretend I'm not standing there in my socks with my hair unbrushed at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, even though that is in fact the answer to his question.

But I digress. The point is - my trusty postie brought me this, about which I am extremely pleased.

It's a letter, and a certificate and what seems to be a small tie-pin, all of it from the Junior Library Guild. They have written to tell me that 'in keeping with [their] goal of providing extraordinary reading experiences for children and young adults' they have awarded Below the designation of "A Junior Library Guild selection" for Spring 2013.

They tell me that this designation is 'often viewed as a bellwether of future success', and I am extremely pleased all over again, not only because I am in favour of future success, but because I am delighted to see the word 'bellwether' slipped so easily into a sentence.

Thank you, Junior Library Guild. And Candlewick and Brilliance and Tara Sands and all the many delivery folk who make the trek up my driveway to deliver me such lovely stuff. I swear that one day soon I will afford you the respect you deserve. Shoes, a hairbrush. I promise.

In the Post ...

I've been thrilled to have Candlewick Press pick up some of my work for US publication over the last year. There are all sorts of reasons why this is a good thing for me professionally, and those probably go without saying.

Lately, though, I've been on the receiving end of some more unexpected benefits. Letters! Actual letters coming to me from kids in the US. I get a bit of mail from kids here in Australia, but contact often tends to come via email. I'm not sure why that might be; perhaps there's something exciting about the idea of picking up an actual pen (or texta) and sending a letter across the world. I know I've been having lots of fun writing back.

This photo is of a couple of my recent favourites - one is a DVD that came from a family in North Carolina. They wrote that they had enjoyed No Bears so much they decided to act it out for their annual Christmas video, which is sent to family and friends, and also, this year, me! Their interpretation of the story, complete with costuming, sets, and blooper reel at the end, had me in stitches. I had never imagined a 2-year-old boy in the role of monster, but somehow he was absolutely perfect. And to have the story narrated by a real-life Ella was simply the icing on the cake.

The other letter here is from a young reader in Illinois, who was very keen to know how the bear managed to get into Ella's book without her noticing. This is a question I have asked myself many times, of course, and I hope I was able to answer in a satisfactory way.

My middle-grade novel Below is due out in the US in mid-May, but I am a bit less optimistic that its readership will be sending things like this through the post. However, if anyone wants to act it out for their Christmas video, I would be very intrigued to see the results!

Below: The Cover

Two years ago, I wrote about how much I loved the cover for my forthcoming novel Surface Tension. In fact, I loved it so much that it helped me re-write the book. I loved the dreamy quality of the image, the muted colours, the hazy lack of clarity, the stylised but somehow childlike way the drowned town was represented.

When I was told that Candlewick wanted to re-jacket the book for its US release, I wondered what they could possibly come up with that could match it. To be honest, I was a little skeptical, a little apprehensive.

While they were designing, we talked about titles. They didn't feel that Surface Tension was the best title for the book, given its middle-grade audience. And there was also another book on their Spring 13 list with a similar title. Given those two factors, they asked whether I was open to changing it. I was, but I really struggled to come up with alternatives. 

There was much riffing along the lines of:

Atlantis/drowned town/sunken world/mermaid
secrets/mysteries/lies
beneath/below
diving/swimming/drowning/floating/holding breath
bubbles/rising/ripples
still waters/underwater/waterproof

We mulled it over for months. Eventually, I sent an email to my editor that read:

I'm leaning towards something like:

Secrets from the/a Drowned Town

Our Town, Drowned

The Town that Drowned (but oddly, I've just googled and discovered that a book came out in Canada last year with this exact title - about a town flooded to make way for a reservoir. You can't beat the zeitgeist, can you?).

I think I like the 'drowned town' phrasing because it's evocative and likely to make a potential reader curious. I don't think we can use Atlantis without a qualifier, or we run the risk of misleading readers into thinking it's an actual Atlantis story. I was thinking of something like "Secrets from a Sometime Atlantis", but that feels a bit like it's reaching too hard to me.

And after all this back and forth, the title we agreed on was ...

Below

Huh. You guys, I was a bit worried at first. I thought it was kind of flat, that it lacked energy, at least compared to the sorts of things I had been considering. But when I saw the title on the new jacket, I was immediately sold.

I think the title and the cover work really well together. I love the way the 'O' is rippling as Cassie swims through it, the way some of the other letters are slightly off centre, as if they're floating. I love the deeper colours. I love the birds' eye view of the lake. At the risk of loving far too many things, I really love the way that at first the town beneath isn't obvious - it just looks like patches of shape, shades of colour. But the closer you look, the more is revealed, the more the shapes resolve themselves into something - something regular, planned, built.

This is perfect for the story, which is in essence a mystery, slowly revealed and explored. But it also fits really well with the way the very first seeds for the story were laid - when I was standing on the edge of the lake all those years ago, thinking I was standing on rocks, just like Cassie does in the book, then gradually realising they're oddly flat, and orderly. And ah ... a road? Going down into a lake?

So yes, I love it, for many reasons.

The other element to this cover that I really like is that both Cassie and Liam are there. Their friendship is so central to the story that it almost seems odd to me now that we only had one character (which one? ah, ambiguity!) on the cover of Surface Tension. 

So there it is - my brand new cover, for my old new book. I felt that the Surface Tension cover was so right for the story that I couldn't imagine the book with a different jacket. But somehow, as different as the Candlewick cover is, I find myself equally taken by it.

I can only hope it strikes a chord with US readers. Candlewick will release Below over there on 14 May.

World Read Aloud Day (Night?)

So yesterday was World Read Aloud Day. What a great idea! I love reading aloud. When I write, I often test a sentence I'm not sure about by reading it back to myself over and over, listening for the way the rhythm falls. It's something poets do all the time but it really helps for prose as well.

But I also just love reading aloud. Now that my daughter is older, I don't really get to read to her, though I am prone to sudden attacks of poetry. Someone will say something that reminds me of a poem and the next thing my unsuspecting family knows I'm standing in the kitchen with a book in my hand, holding forth. They love it! (I swear)

In celebration of World Read Aloud Day, I got to do something really fun. I signed up on a register over at Kate Messner's blog and volunteered to Skype visit with some schools. Even though it was *World* Read Aloud Day, most of my requests came from the US. With the time difference I could only fit a small handful in because while they were waking up to their school day, I was getting ready to head for pyjamas. For me, it was World Read Aloud Night, because I started Skyping at 10.30pm and finished after midnight.

I ended up talking to elementary schools in Wisconsin and Illinois - some 2nd graders and some Grade 5 students. I read to them from Duck for a Day and Surface Tension and we talked a bit about some of the 'Australianisms' in the books, and the changes that were made for US publication. In the case of Surface Tension that included the title and the jacket, but I'm going to talk a bit more about that in another post.

It was amazing to be connecting with kids on the other side of the world. So funny to be sitting here at the end of a hot beach-y day in Fremantle, talking to kids who have just returned to school after a 'snow day'. As I said to the 5th graders, somehow a snow day feels to me like something magical and slightly unreal, the sort of thing you read about in books but which can't actually happen in real life. For these kids, though, it is very real. In fact, we did have some technical difficulties at points during the call and I heard later that a big snowstorm had recently blown through some of the local areas, so perhaps that was a factor.

Here's a photo of my giant head suspended on a screen in a Wisconsin library (Hmm ... I think I'm going to file that one under "Sentences I never thought I'd write"). It was great to receive this photo and get a sense of how the kids experienced the 'visit'. It's also nice to see the kids a little more clearly; because of the connection, there were times when they were just blurry smudges, which made question time quite amusing: The girl in pink? No, you're purple now. Wait, you've gone all wobbly. YOU'RE SHAPE SHIFTING. YOU'RE MELTING! YOU MUST BE AN ALIEN! LOOK OUT EVERYONE!

It is entirely possible that last part only happened inside my head. But as I said to some of the kids, this is part of what writers do: we take a little bit of the world around us and then we just go crazy with it. That's how we turn our teachers into solar-charged superheroes. Be honest with me, Grade 5s - you'll never look at him in quite the same way again, will you?

Thanks, Wisconsin and Illinois! I had lots of fun.

And now I might go have a nap.

Meeting Mr Curly

Yes, I know he isn't exactly Mr Curly. That would be like saying I'm Ruby, or Cassie, or possibly even Max.

But last weekend at the Perth Writers Festival, I met the maker of Mr Curly and of many things duckish and otherly delightful - Michael Leunig. I've made no secret of the fact that the original inspiration for Duck for a Day came from an interview Leunig did with Andrew Denton, but beyond that, I've been a long-time fan of Leunig's work, which my father shared with me from a very early age. The corkboard above this very desk is dotted with tattered Leunig cartoons, snipped from newspapers here and there over the years.

In fact, I invoked one of them when I was talking to him outside the Green Room, noting the irony in my meeting him at such a bustling event when, like him, I generally prefer

 ... the Festival of Clouds

 - the festival that doesn't pull the crowds

I like a festival that doesn't pull;

But rather, makes me think of cotton wool.

Kyle, trying to remember how many sides a triangle has.

Still, I was very glad to be at Perth Writers Festival, and not only because I got to meet Michael Leunig. I also got to introduce my shiny new book, Definitely No Ducks, to a lovely group of kids on Schools' Day, and lead a poetry workshop on Family Day. Lastly, Kyle Hughes-Odgers and I pulled a double-act for a Ten Tiny Things-based session which was a (hopefully) delightful schmozzle in which we met some fantastic kids and exposed Kyle's obsessive love of triangles (and curious conviction that cats in fact look like dogs). I also accidentally came up with the possible title for a new book, perhaps another sequel to Duck for a Day: "Kyle for a While". It has a nice ring to it, don't you think? I'm just wondering what Kyle's demands would be if you were to take him home as a class pet...?

This was the first official outing for Definitely No Ducks, which was released into the world on March 1, and whose stacks appeared to dwindle rather satisfyingly in the bookshop. [Webbed] fingers crossed for happy readers!

Ten Tiny Things @ TravelSmart

Last year I was lucky enough to do some work with TravelSmart, who used my picture book Ten Tiny Things as part of their TravelSmart to School program.

At the end of the year, schools who have been involved in the program send student representatives along to an awards day where everyone shares the ways in which they've put the TravelSmart message into practice in their school community. I was invited to attend this event and deliver a workshop for the kids which teachers and other accompanying adults could then take back into schools and adapt/extend for a larger group.

During the morning, the kids did a few preliminary activities using images from the Ten Tiny Things blog. They were asked to write a caption or a description of what they saw happening in the pictures. Check out some of the things they came up with below:

 

Then they were asked to make notes of the sorts of things they saw and heard and felt and even smelled on their journey to school. They jotted ideas down, like this:

Little did they know we were warming them up for the main activity, a process I've come to call "creative mapping". Over a series of steps, we got students to map their trip to school on butcher paper, adding in the things that were important to them. Where conventional maps include things like churches, public toilets, and libraries, we're not so sure those things matter to a kid on their way to school. We were more interested in things like:

* swooping magpies

* the house that always has its sprinklers on late. Naughty, but refreshing!

* the weird old tree that looks like a spooky face

* the hill that doesn't seem steep when you're driving but totally is

* the house where the curtains always seem to move as you go past

* the dog that sticks its nose through the fence to be patted

We also wanted students to draw in a way that represented their own individual journey. So something that stands out to you might be drawn extra large, while that boring block you just whizz past might disappear entirely. It's your map so you can do whatever you like.

And once you get to the end of all this, your map might end up looking something like this:

... which if you ask me is just a little bit more interesting than this:

It was lots of fun to do, and the maps the kids came up were with fantastic. I'm hoping that some of the teachers do get the chance to work the extension activities into this year's TravelSmart to School program. It's so satisfying to me to think of my book being used for all sorts of wild and crazy things out there in the world.