What dawn looked like for me last Sunday!
Last Saturday night, I couldn’t sleep – I was too excited about what was going to happen the next day… taking the Write-a-Book-in-a-Day challenge!
Last year, my team (of ten Northern Beaches Writers’ Group members) took the ‘WABIAD’ challenge to raise money for The Kids Cancer Project at Westmead Children’s Hospital, and we did rather well. We won Best Book, Best Illustrations and Most Sponsorship Raised nationally. So the pressure was on!
My laptop & fluffy writing socks ready at 8am!
My alarm clock finally went off at dawn and it was time to get up. At 8am later that morning, we would be given our writing parameters and I wanted us all to be set-up with computers and brainstorming butchers’ paper ready to go as soon as those instructions arrived. Last year we had to write about a dinosaur in a pub with a sculptor and a cleaner going ‘over the rainbow’ (see Scribbles in the Dark). Surely nothing could be as difficult as that!
Well, this year our challenge came in a different form: to write a book for 11-14yr olds incorporating the following parameters:
Primary character #1: an entertainer
Primary character #2: a waiter
Non-human character: a dolphin
Setting: parliament
Issue: ‘crossing the country’
Five random words: Hectic, Fascinating, Cantankerous, Furry, Curious
A dolphin character for 11-14yr olds?! How were we going to make a dolphin cool enough for that age group?!
Luckily, my team was a highly imaginative one – Zoya Nojin, Kristin Prescott, Leah Boonthanom, Chris Lake, Madi Duncan, Kylie Pfeiffer, Susan Steggall, Mijmark and myself soon had the idea of making this dolphin a robotic one, and the rest of the plot came from that. No mammals for us!
Me and our completed WABIAD book!
We then wrote over 12,000 words, illustrated, painted, printed and bound our book ready to go into the post exactly 12 hours later. Our book is called A Dolphin for Naia and it’s about a 13yr old boy and his kickass ex-carnie grandmother, it’s got car chases, fights, emergency extractions, an online activist group and… a high-tech surveillance robotic dolphin! Read more about our book here.
The KSP Write-a-Book-in-a-Day challenge, or #WABIAD, is a nationwide challenge designed to raise money for the children’s hospitals in each state. If you would like to donate some money to this worthwhile cause (you get a tax receipt!) – don’t delay! You have until the end of August to sponsor A Dolphin for Naia – just click on the Northern Beaches Writers’ Group here.
A Dolphin for Naia
Thank you to everyone who’s sponsored us so far, especially Australian Doctors International, who allowed us to use their office space on Sunday. Your support has been invaluable! Thank you also to the dolphin – having you among our writing parameters really kept us focussed on our end-readers and we hope the children at Westmead love reading A Dolphin for Naia:
When thirteen-year-old Mason’s parents sent him to live on the other side of the country, he swore he would never forgive them, or the invention that kept them so busy…
Now they’ve called him back, promising they can be a family again. But when Mase and his grandmother arrive, the caravan in the shadow of the giant dam is silent and his parents are gone. All that is left is a cryptic message begging him to bring their strange dolphin-like creation to the coast. Mase suddenly finds himself caught in a race where the price of failure is higher than he could ever have imagined. Will he ever see his parents again?
Pingback: So, We Wrote a Book About a Robot Dolphin… - The Good. The Bad. The Asinine.