January 8, 2011 by amanda
Although I’ve well and truly got 2011 away with a great plan of attack and some poetry, I have just found time to take a proper look back on what I achieved (and didn’t achieve) during 2010. I’m not going to make excuses for not spending as much time on fiction writing as I usually would – it’s not every year you have a baby, and no matter how much I want to be a published novelist, being a mother is – at least at this stage of his little life – a whole lot more important. Although I’m planning on combining the two a lot more effectively in 2011.
Just the same, I didn’t do all to badly on my 2010 goals, mainly because I was smart enough to realise it was never going to be the year of huge amounts of writing. I had four goals, the first of which I completely achieved (submitting my Bratislava novel to a contest); the second and third (submitting Kanako’s Foreigner to agents and increasing this blog’s readership) got a little attention though not much progress; the fourth, to plot and complete my third novel didn’t really do so well, but at least I have a solid idea and a reasonable plot outline.
Looking back on reading – all important for a fiction writer! … first of all, there’s my 2010 reading list. Basically, I read a huge number of books pre-baby, and nearly none after, but this averaged out to “not too bad” in the book-reading department. Take a look at the list if you like and see if we’ve shared any reads this past year.
And now to my “Book of the Year” for 2010 – Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. I cannot tell you how many reasons there are to love this book. A bonus is that it’s even by an Australian – you know how I can’t go past Aussie literature! I had planned to make more effort to read outside my preferred modern literary fiction genre during 2010 and I did “okay” – there is some crime/spy stuff on the list, a couple of classics and even a romance and a chick-lit – but I’m still hoping to read a little more widely in the future (I’ve got a gory thriller on the go at the moment so you can see I’m starting 2011 pretty well!).
All in all, 2010 was certainly the year of a new baby and not much of a fiction writing year, but at least I didn’t completely drop the bundle (or the baby!). And I’m on track to get a lot more writing done in 2011. Go me!
PS: Speaking of 2010 reads, I’d love to hear your favourite reads of last year – let me know in the comments.
Tags: 2010 goals, New Year's resolutions, reading list
Permalink | Posted in Australian Fiction, Goals and Motivation, Reading Fiction | 2 Comments »
• • • • •
January 3, 2011 by amanda
I absolutely hate knowing anything about a novel before I read it. For me, there is nothing worse than a blurb that tells me anything more than what I can learn from the first page. I don’t want to know what happens in the second chapter before I get there. And that’s why I was rather pleased by the blurb on the back of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas which I read recently … it goes like this:
The story of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is very difficult to describe. Usually we give you some clues about the book on the cover, but in this case we think that would spoil the reading of the book. We think it is important that you start to read without knowing what it is about.
My sentiments exactly! Funnily enough I didn’t read this until after I’d finished the book, because I really am paranoid about what back covers can give away.
Obviously, this can make choosing a novel somewhat difficult, although publishers are very clever about designing covers in such a way that I can usually tell that a novel is “my thing”, plus I also go for my favourite authors, recommendations from trusted reading friends, and results of writing competitions. I also very often read the first page or two of a novel, which usually gives me a good sense of whether I’ll like it. I very rarely buy novels, usually borrowing them from the library or friends, so I can also afford to take home books that I end up not liking at all – I can just return them, no harm done.
Now, I assume that publishers go to the trouble of making tantalising blurbs for the back covers of books largely because the average book buyer wants to read them. Do you? Don’t you get frustrated by knowing part of the story? Do you have another method for choosing your books? Please let me know in the comments.
Permalink | Posted in Reading Fiction | 6 Comments »
• • • • •
November 13, 2010 by amanda
Warning: very book geeky post ahead. But at the same time, don’t judge me until you’ve tried this yourself.
Here’s the thing. I love The Book Depository. I first blogged about them a couple of years back when I discovered, much to my disgust, that the only way I could buy a relatively rare Australian novel for a price I could afford was to get it shipped (for free!) from The Book Depository, a UK-based company. Since then, I admit to using them almost exclusively as my source for books – not that I buy many (I’m a library freak and besides, my bookshelves are pretty jam-packed full), but when I do, that website usually gets the gig. Wide range, good service, very reasonable prices, quick delivery. No complaints.
And now while wandering around their website on a Saturday night, I discovered something super-cool. You can watch people all around the world buying books. In real time. On a Saturday night (or any time, really, but Saturday night seems to be a moment when I get a few spare seconds to do something geeky like this). Have a look what I saw:
Honestly, it’s incredibly fun: you watch the map of the world with new pop-up boxes appearing every few seconds showing what book has just been bought by customers in various countries. It’s like standing at the cashier looking over everybody’s shoulder, only heaps geekier, and heaps better. Go to The Book Depository Live to see it for yourself. My only complaint? They pin the pop-up box down in the middle of each country so it looks like all the Aussie customers are from somewhere right in the middle of Oz, pretty much exactly where nobody at all lives.
(Disclosure: Unnecessary. These guys (unfortunately) have not paid me a cent to rave about them, they have just been good to me over the years and, well, I couldn’t resist passing on some book geekiness to my fellow book lovers.)
Tags: buying books online, The Book Depository
Permalink | Posted in Featured, Headline, Reading Fiction | 4 Comments »
• • • • •
October 6, 2010 by amanda
I do love getting books to review, and one of the most appropriate I’ve been offered recently (given my well-documented lack of time these days) was Hint Fiction
by Robert Swartwood. Its subtitle tells it all: “An anthology of stories in 25 words or fewer”.
Now, I must admit that before the review copy arrived, I was skeptical. I’m not a huge fan of the whole flash fiction thing because I find it hard to believe you really can tell a story without using at least a few pages. And 25 words seemed like a ridiculously low number. You may know that famous Hemingway six-word story:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Some say yes, poignant, telling, what a story, and I say, I’ve got at least six pairs of baby shoes I was given for my own baby that he never wanted to wear, and I could sell them too, without having any sad story behind it. So yes, I was very skeptical before Hint Fiction arrived on my doorstep.
However, I’m also man enough (woman enough?) to admit that I’ve changed my tune. For a start, sending a collection like Hint Fiction to a new mother was genius. It was the kind of book I could get through in a day or two (writing the review has taken a little longer though!). Stories that are less than 25 words in length are ideal for those in-between minutes of life. And I was surprised and impressed at just how much story some writers could fit into their 25 words. The idea, Swartwood says, of “hint fiction” is that these couple of sentences suggest “a larger, more complex story” and in many cases they really do that, and send you right off into the realms of “what if” and “what else”.
The collection is divided into three parts – “Life & Death”, “Love & Hate”, and for all the miscellaneously-themed stories, “This & That”. Not every story impressed me – some seemed more like a random sentence out of a bigger story than a true “hint fiction” suggestion of something more – but enough got me thinking that I would highly recommend the book. Especially to mothers of young babies who are struggling to finish a book at the moment!
Permalink | Posted in Featured, Headline, Reading Fiction, Short Stories | 1 Comment »
• • • • •
September 30, 2010 by amanda
I know babies take a lot of time but I did expect I’d be back to doing a bit more of my beloved reading by now. Mothers the world over are shaking their heads at me now, saying, Amanda, of course not, how do you expect to have any energy left to read after spending twelve hours looking after a six-month-old, followed by finishing the housework and cooking dinner, and spending the evening doing the work you get paid for so that you don’t have to put said six-month-old in day care and can therefore spend those twelve hours looking after him … yep, when I get to bed the last thing I feel up for is a book. Which for me is very, very unusual.
Enough of that – I’m sure this will change in time. So instead of a book of the month I’ve got a book of the quarter! In the last three months I’ve read a grand total of three books:
- What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
by Haruki Murakami
- Omega Park
by Amy Barker
- The Pact
by Jodi Piccoult
These were certainly all quite different books, and actually I’m tossing up the Piccoult and the Murakami for book of the quarter … and I think I’ll have to go with Haruki Murakami, just because he has such a gentle writing style when he’s writing non-fiction, it’s so pleasurable to read (even when it’s a horrible topic, like his book about the Sarin gas attacks). If you haven’t read some of Murakami’s more bizarre novels, I’d also recommend them, but go in with an open mind. I devoured nearly everything he’d written while I (appropriately) lived in Japan, but you don’t have to be a Japan-ophile to love Murakami’s writing.
I’m hoping that October will provide me with a bit more reading time – well, it’s up to me to provide myself with a bit more reading time, really. Next on my list is The Boy In the Striped Pajamas
. Unfortunately – I know it’s a serious story – seeing this book always makes me giggle as I heard Marieke Hardy tell a story on Triple J radio last year about a video shop which had put up the title with incorrect spelling making it “Stripped Pajamas” – highly inappropriate. Putting that aside, I’ve heard it’s worth reading and am looking forward to getting into it.
What’s on top of your reading pile at the moment? Do let me know in the comments (perhaps I can read vicariously through you?!).
Tags: Book of the Month, Haruki Murakami, Jodi Piccoult, Marieke Hardy
Permalink | Posted in Reading Fiction | 2 Comments »
• • • • •
July 29, 2010 by amanda
I’m an avid follower of The Australian’s A Pair of Ragged Claws blog, a great read put out by Stephen Romei from the Australian Literary Review. It’s not just for lovers of Australian literature: this week the discussion has covered whether or not you could give up books, and exactly what would take priority over books for you. For example ,would you rather live a life without books or without coffee? Without books or without travels? Without books or without TV?
There are two things this post made me think about. One is that I really, truly, undeniably love books. My husband often teases me about how many books I have (it is a lot, I must admit), and no doubt the root of the teasing is that he really cannot understand why anyone would want so many books. Not want – need! I can’t really begin to explain why I need to have so many books around me, apart from the obvious answer that I love to read them, but that’s not enough – then I could just borrow everything from the library (though I do an awful lot of that too). I guess in the world there are just book people and non-book people, and I clearly belong in the book person category. I love to touch them, hold them, turn the pages (you can see my resistance to eBooks there) and it makes me happy to see them sitting on the shelf. Now that I’ve got a little boy to raise, there are new shelves to fill with children’s books and that’s another special joy altogether. (And who says four-week-old babies don’t care for books? I’ve been training mine since birth and now as a four-month-old I’m quite certain he loves our nighttime bedtime book as much as I do. No comments disputing this from child development experts, please!).
The second thing is that I really can’t imagine life without books and, with apologies to many of my friends and acquaintances who manage to go years without turning pages, I have a little trouble understanding people who don’t read regularly. I accept that everyone has different interests and so, in theory, I understand that not everyone I know will love reading. But just think what they’re missing out on! All that excitement, or new knowledge, or drama, or beauty, or whatever else you might get out of a book.
So to conclude: there’s really not much I would give up books for. For my son, yes. But – and this might be hard for some of you to believe – if someone offered me a choice between no chocolate for the rest of my life or no books, I’d wave goodbye to the chocolate. It’d be difficult to do, but I can’t imagine a life without books.
What would you give up to keep books in your life? Let me know in the comments.
Tags: Australian Literary Review, chocolate, giving up books
Permalink | Posted in Reading Fiction | 4 Comments »
• • • • •
July 5, 2010 by amanda
Ha ha. Tricked myself. I’ve been hunting around on this site for my May book of the month post, taking quite some time to realise there wasn’t one because I didn’t finish any books in May. Oh, how depressing. I did, however, finish a book in June. So I’m combining those months, and giving you an update on my writing progress during that time, all in one (probably pretty brief) post.
The good news is that my beautiful time-drainer has just hit three months of age and is sleeping a lot more consistently, to the point where in these first couple of days of July I’ve read half a book already! So things are looking up on the fiction front.
Without further ado, the book of the month for May and June is … After the Fall
by Kylie Ladd. Granted, there was no competition, but it was nonetheless a great book. Kylie Ladd is an Australian author (remember, I love Aussie writers) and I “met” her on Twitter somehow recently, which inspired me to get her book out of the library (sorry Kylie, I know I should have bought it, but I have post-birth-of-baby budget issues!).
After the Fall was particularly interesting to me because it uses chapters written from the point of view of different characters, much like my Bratislava novel draft but with even more characters and no systematic rotation of them. I have to admit to being a little confused at first, because I couldn’t get the names of the characters straight in my head, but that’s probably because I only had a chance to read just a short chapter or two at a time. By the end, that was no problem. I enjoyed seeing how different characters interpreted the same situation differently, a technique I’ve tried to use in Bratislava as well.
And to complete the monthly update, yes, I did actually do some writing in June. And a tiny bit in May too. I finished up this round of edits on Bratislava and submitted it to the Allen & Unwin/Vogel award. Yay! I was desperate to enter this year as I’ll sadly be too old next year. Oh and you may note I say “this round of edits” because even during that process I had some new ideas of some more tinkering I could do. I really hope some publisher will take pity on me someday and just publish all my draft novels so I’m not continually tempted to “fix” them, as I’m sure not all the changes are for the better!
Stay tuned for the July update which I hope will be more a productive month. Fingers crossed.
Tags: Bratislava novel, Kylie Ladd, Twitter, Vogel award
Permalink | Posted in Goals and Motivation, Reading Fiction, Writing Fiction | 1 Comment »
• • • • •
May 8, 2010 by amanda
If you happen to have been following my 2010 reading list, you’ll have found it a bit boring recently. After ploughing through a book at least every two days during most of the year, in April my reading came to a bit of a standstill. Which is hardly surprising considering what happened on 2 April. But anyway: my April reading totalled this -
However, I’m still going to announce The World Beneath as my book of the month, because it really was excellent. If it hadn’t been, I would never have found the time to read it this month! I’ve seen Cate Kennedy speak at writers’ festivals and she impresses me so much because she’s absolutely down-to-earth, and makes me feel like I, too, could actually publish a novel too – though probably not as good as hers.
While I’m at it, since April is over (oops – by more than a week!), let me give you an update on my writing for the month. You might be able to guess it was a bit of a slow month. However, one big improvement is that post-pregnancy, my poor carpal tunnel-affected wrists and fingers have improved considerably and I can stay back at the keyboard a lot longer. I did manage a significant piece of writing during April, but it was just for me – a summary, I guess, of the whole process of conceiving and giving birth my son, so that I don’t forget details of the experience. It was really refreshing firstly, to be able to sit at the keyboard and type for that long (interrupted by a crying baby rather than by pain), and it’s also been a long time since I wrote something “beautiful” that was for my eyes only – and it was a lot of fun.
Noticing that we are well into May is a bit scary, though – the Allen & Unwin/Australian/Vogel award closes on 31 May, and this year is the last year I’ll be eligible to submit a novel for the prize. After that I’ll (eek) be too old! This means that I really need to find some time to finalise the edits I want to make to my Bratislava novel. Soon. I’m not quite sure how I’ll do it, but they say the first six weeks with a newborn are the craziest and they’re nearly over, so I’m hoping I’ll find a few spare hours somewhere, somehow. And I’m also hoping that come the end of May, I’ll be able to report back with a bit more reading and writing progress than I had in April.
Tags: Cate Kennedy, Vogel award
Permalink | Posted in Australian Fiction, Awards for Writers, Reading Fiction, Writing Novels | 3 Comments »
• • • • •
April 1, 2010 by amanda
So March is over and it’s time to look back on my reading and writing for the month … as I warned, there hasn’t been much writing. My poor carpal tunnel fingers just won’t take it, and it should be only two or three weeks until they’re back on board so I’m waiting patiently and trying not to stress them too much.
I did, however, hear the bad news that my novel didn’t make it through to the next round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest. Boo-hoo! Just this morning I got a copy of the reviewers’ feedback (there were two of them, who read just the first chapter) – the good-ish bits include stuff like this:
technically superior writing … this novel has potential … I like the characters as presented … This author can write and do okay dialogue, but the strongest aspect of this excerpt is, oddly enough, also its weakest. The writer can pile up detail after detail, like layers of icing on a cake. Only a further reading of this book could determine whether the cake is sweet enough …this writer has considerable skill
The problems, according to these reviewers, is that it’s not exciting enough and they’re not sure why they’d keep reading. There’s definitely something to that, although I have had great feedback on this first chapter from other sources and I think that part of the problem in the Amazon contest lies in competing against genre fiction – there are a lot of thrillers and science fiction and mystery novels that the reviewers are also reading, so my “subtle, oblique” (their words) lit fic might not be their cup of tea. In any case, I’ve already started revisions and the next version will be even better!
On to my reading update for March, and here’s a list of the books I finished this month (full info with my opinions on each book at my 2010 reading list):
- The Imperfectionists
by Tom Rachman
- 10 Short Stories You Must Read This Year
by various Australian authors
- Hunting and Gathering
by Anna Gavalda
- The Book of Rapture
by Nikki Gemmell
- The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
- Juliet, Naked
by Nick Hornby
- Conditions of Faith
by Alex Miller
- The Death of Bunny Munro
by Nick Cave
- The Paperbark Shoe by Goldie Goldbloom
- My Life on A Plate
by India Knight
- Washington Square
by Henry James
Picking the best is not so obvious for me this month: The Book of Rapture was beautifully written, but in retrospect didn’t quite reach my (admittedly high) expectations; Juliet, Naked was an excellent read, but still not my star pick. I guess I have to go with Conditions of Faith, both for great writing and an interesting storyline. Stick around for the April list though – I’ve got a truly impressive pile of new novels to read and I’m really excited about finding some gems in there that I’ll be recommending highly.
Permalink | Posted in Fiction Comps, Reading Fiction | 1 Comment »
• • • • •
March 5, 2010 by amanda
I was definitely a voracious reader as a kid, my parents would vouch for that. (And my husband would confirm that it’s no different today). When I was a child, I remember reading at night in bed before I went to sleep, and I even had a notebook where I’d write down words I didn’t know, and my parents would explain the definitions to me when they came to turn out the light.
Thanks to the influence (and book collection) of my mother, I was a mad keen fan of Enid Blyton books – and I know she gets some bad press these days, but I’ve still got a shelf full of both my own Enid Blyton books and those I inherited from my mother, and I’ll be reading them to my children. Her Secret Seven and Famous Five series were high on my favourites list and I remember adoring The Magic Faraway Tree
in particular. (I hope you’ll confess in the comments if you also read a tonne of Enid Blyton books as a child …)
As I got a little older, so Australia also got a little less British, and the influence of American authors like Judy Blume seemed to grow. By far my favourite and most often re-read Judy Blume book was Tiger Eyes
. I swooned, and felt so grown up when I read it. It’s still on my shelf too and I should re-read it now, I think, as I’m wondering what it’ll seem like to a real grown-up!
Finally, I have a really strong memory of a book I used to borrow from the local library over and over again. It was a novel by Mabel Esther Allan called The Night Wind
(I’d forgotten, but thanks to Google I know again) with a main character named Tafline. I really have no idea at all what drew me to this story, but I read it many times and I can even picture exactly where it could be found on the library shelf.
Over to you: what were your childhood favourites? Do you think you’d still like them today, or want your children to read them?
Tags: childhood favourites, Enid Blyton, Judy Blume, Mabel Esther Allan
Permalink | Posted in Reading Fiction | 2 Comments »
• • • • •
by Cate Kennedy