Hey, we did it right, RORettes!

Says Meghan McCarron:

Every writing retreat should involve someone making you breakfast (thanks Karen!), cooking dinner for others, outdoor porches, and hot tubs. There is nothing better.

And that should be '(thanks, Launz!)' for both breakfast and dinner.

Ah, for the spa and the waft of horse poo from the paddocks...and a glass of wine, and thou(se). Oops, must send those photos around.

And in Noo Yoik...

...you can find Black Juice on the New York Public Library's Books for the Teen Age list as 'Stories: strange, dark, beautiful, deadly'. Mwa-ha.

More White Time glory

It's on the Cooperative Children's Book Center Choices list for 2007. The Center is a library of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It's

A vital gathering place for books, ideas and expertise...committed to identifying excellent literature for children and adolescents and bringing this literature to the attention of those adults who have an academic, professional or career interest in connecting young readers with books.

And now White Time has been brought. Noice.

Zoe's got a blog!

Or at least, an online portfolio. Zoe Sadokierski designed Red Spikes and created the covers for the reprinted Black Juice and White Time, and of course, now that I see it, I realise that only she could have designed Ursula Dubosarsky's Red Shoe as well. Go and have a look.

She's also designing the ROR series The Lost Shimmaron, so you'll be seeing a lot of her work on this blog as the series unfolds...

We came, we RORed, we conked out

Seeing as everyone else is doing it, I'd better mention the ROR weekend in Tasmania, which was long, luxurious and head-bursting in all the good ways, including shining a number of lights along possible paths forward in The Novel. (I'm already racing along a few of these, picking up interesting-looking objects along the way.)

We had the twin pleasures of Dirk Flinthart's cooking and Tansy's two-year-old daughter Raeli's conversation, as well as warm sunshine, cool breezes, a big old house, a spa, peacocks and horses to admire, a sky very full of stars at night, and a crit room full of light and comfy chairs, where you could look out over Bass Strait while you marvelled at how different, and how detailed!, your fellow workshoppers' comments were on the story at hand.

Trent Jamieson should have been there, of course, but he knows that now and he won't miss out again, if he knows what's good for him. Apart from that, it was a top weekend.

Work in Progress meme

Turn to page 123 in your work-in-progress. (If you haven't gotten to page 123 yet, then turn to page 23. If you haven't gotten there yet, then get busy and write page 23.) Count down four sentences and then instead of just the fifth sentence, give us the whole paragraph.

Well, it depends whether I count the first sentence as the fragment that breaks across pp. 122-3, in which case you get:

Maybe Urdda had had the same thought. She was an orange-outlined shadow springing as if dancing, herself, along the shore. She was orange sprays and convulsions in the water, mingling with the dwarf’s mess there, her cries as sharp as his.

or as the first complete sentence, in which case you get this:

The pond water gulped the dead hand down. The line was gone. A frazzle of light had whipped out across the surface and was now gone in bubbles—that had been a tuft of beard, Branza realised, cut off by Urdda. ‘Oh, dear,’ she murmured.

I prefer the second.

The New York Public Library...

...Office of Young Adult Services has announced its list of 'Books for the Teen Age' for 2007, and—dags and bleeding dildos!—White Time is on it!

(Thanks, Dina and Ruth!)

Me/dia darling

Over here, at the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy you will find not only a glowing review of White Time ("Remarkable, shocking, and hauntingly beautiful, these stories stay with the reader long after the final page is turned.") but a perspicacious interview with the author, by librarian extraordinaire and future resident of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, Amy Fiske. Thanks, Amy!