Characters, characters, characters – they’ve dominated my last few weeks. This weekend I judged the Mosman Youth Awards in Literature and was impressed by how well entrants got into the heads of such a diverse range of characters – young and elderly, real and surreal, abstract and concrete, monstrous and angelic, troubled and troubling. One of the reasons I love writing is because it gives me the opportunity to get to know a new character and explore a world through their eyes. And I love diversity. Yes, we all love a standard textbook hero – if we didn’t they wouldn’t be popular! As times progress, that standard changes according to our sensitivities, and always will; but there’s nothing like variety to help readers appreciate the humanity in all of us.
Supanova in Australia is a great chance to hang out with fans who really appreciate that, since you get to meet a full range of characters from humans to creatures to droids. I know I did! Here I am with some characters at Supernova Sydney a few weeks ago.
BB8
Yoda
Stormtrooper
Also a few weeks ago, I was honoured to launch ‘A Noise on an Island’, an anthology of short stories I’ve been busy editing over the last year. My writers’ group and I decided to challenge ourselves by writing a dozen short stories all centred on a singular event. We imagined a small tropical island where an abandoned quarry was making a strange noise. We pretended that, on this particular Tuesday, a group of specialists from the mainland would come to investigate. We could select any character we wanted and write from their perspective. Not one of us picked the same character! They varied from a deaf boy to an immigrant shopkeeper, a sailor to a barmaid, a policewoman to a military specialist. It was fascinating to put all the stories together and see if they commented on the event as a whole as well as individually. They did! Well done, fellow authors! Interested in the read? It’s over here!
Another collaborative project also came to life this weekend, when I launched ‘The Guitar Wizard’, an award-winning co-authored children’s book for 8-14yr olds about the importance of music – with a sci-fi twist! This is another short adventure book I sell with my writers’ group to raise money for The Kids’ Cancer Project. Did you know that kids’ cancers are actually very different to adult cancers? They’re not caused by lifestyle or environmental factors, so can rarely be predicted or prevented. Kids are not little adults, and cancers in their bodies behave differently, so adult treatments often don’t work or are too destructive for their bodies. That’s why kids’ cancers need their own special cures.
Thanks to fundraising activities, like selling books, The Kids’ Cancer Project has to date raised over $36 million to fund cutting-edge scientific research to unlock those cures. We’ve raised about $15,000 of that. Fifty years ago, survival rates were 2%. Today survival is 84%. One day it will hopefully be 100%! If you’re interested in helping out, ‘The Guitar Wizard’ makes for great reading, and you can buy it over here! The blurb is below and, talking of characters, our main character is a lion tamer!
‘Fifteen-year-old Emerald O’Shea and her mother, Catherine, make a living wrangling their lion, Dhoruba, who’s been hired to appear at a rock concert. But when an anti-music group, the Aletheia, send Jack to steal the rock star’s guitar, Emerald’s true calling is discovered. If she doesn’t accept the unwanted gift she’s been given, and leave her comfort zone, music and everything on which it depends will disappear. All life. All people. All existence. The entire universe as we know it…’
And what a character I found at the launch – a dalek in complementary colours to the book cover!
Characters of my solo creation have also been making an impact, with England’s heatwave bringing out readers with good taste (spot the copies of Towards White)!
Last week, I also got a wonderful email from a recent reader, John:
I finished reading ‘Towards White’ and wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed it. It totally transported me to Iceland (my first trip there, but I’d like to go back). You did a great job of concealing the baddie till the end. And I loved the science. How did you come to invent such great names for machines, and places, in such a very foreign language? Maybe you’re channeling Tolkien, who I think might have been a scholar of Icelandic?
Aw, how lovely! Thank you, John!
Next week it’s school-holiday time in Sydney and I’m teaching writing workshops at various libraries across the Northern Beaches. I chuckled at the way they advertised them in their leaflet: me leaning across the three dates I’m teaching, he he!
The council subsidises my workshops too, so they’re only $7 to attend – what a bargain! Of course, given the focus of my last few weeks, it was easy to decide what to include in the lesson plans I was creating yesterday – characters, characters, characters!
