If 2009 were a story arc, it would be one with a happy but tension-filled cliff hanger.
This is the year I
officially moved off the Slushpile into The Beyond. Or have I? Will getting published fulfil my dreams or create new miseries? Will life as I know it change for the better? Or for the worse? Will readers like my book or hate it?
My first post in
January 2009 was filled with hope and happiness, I surveyed what kids in my neighbourhood read in 2008. Here's the video I made:
I celebrated my friend
Sue Eves' new book
The Quiet Woman and the Noisy Dog with
an interview. I hear it's doing very well indeed!
In
February, as the screws of the credit crunch tightened,
I advised authors building an online presence not to go wide but go deep.
Let me quote myself:
If you are a children's author writing about aliens, you don't want someone searching for "book" to find you. You want someone searching for "children's book about aliens". It's the quality of the traffic that counts, not the number. You don't want to be found by just anyone. You want people who are actually likely to reach into their wallets
...If you are trying to use social networking sites to raise your profile ... it's better to have one social network that really works for you than half a dozen that don't. It's the quality of the network, not the quantity (ie. You don't want to friend 3,000 people who will never buy your book) ...
March was the month I read the wonderful
Solace of the Road by Siobhan Dowd, who died in the summer of 2007.
It made me so sad to think there would be no more Siobhan Dowd books to come.
April was busy, busy, busy!
There was the
launch of the second Undiscovered Voices competition - the very same competition that
gave me a leg up, helping persuade my agent to
take me on.
Then I discovered that Kathleen Duey, author of the amazing
Skin Hunger, was
writing a novel on Twitter!
Then I posted a whole bunch of stuff from the London Book Fair including this piece on
what UK editors were looking for. If you're my friend on Facebook, you might have also noticed me updating my status with LBF facts Twitter-fashion (that was fun because each update launched hilarious conversations amongst my FB pals).
Then
I participated in a monsters and zombies Comics Jam (my lovely friend
Sarah "The Mankiest" McIntyre was one of the cartoonists there) at the Crystal Palace Children's Book Festival organized by author illustrator
Alex Milway (of
Mousehunter fame). On the right is my drawing of the kids I took to the festival (as zombies ... they didn't really have leaky brains).
Whew. April. Come she will.
May blew in - it was sunny, remember? I helped my friend
Fiona Dunbar (
Pink Chameleon)
edit her video, found out
what a textonym was (the textonym for book is cool, isn't that cool?), drove cross country from
Sarwat Chadda's magnificent book launch to the SCBWI retreat.
The coolest thing about the launch of
Devil's Kiss, the dark un-putdownable novel by
Sarwat Chadda (pictured with spear), was this:
One of the younger guests at the launch was so engrossed in the book he ignored all the proceedings. What a compliment!
Then I discovered the text to movie website Xtranormal via uber-blogging author Nicola Morgan (
Deathwatch), whose
DIY video had me rolling around under my desk.
For most of
June I was busy with my day job and barely managed to post. Sorry about that.I was still terribly busy designing websites in
July and was
shocked to receive some mail from the Vogon Postal Service ... as well as proofs of my very first little book,
Animal Tricksters for Oxford University (Daughter is pictured holding it at right).
In August, I blogged about
attending Arvon's Writing for Teenagers Course with Malorie Blackman and Melvin Burgess. Melvin kindly sent me off with this message of hope:
My friend Mark Hudson's book
Titian: the Last Days came out and
I helpfully made this video with his daughter - titled 'My Dad Wrote a Book' and scored to the tune of Bing Crosby's version of Yessir That's My Baby, the video was mentioned by the Guardian when
it picked Mark's book as one of the best travel books for 2009:
In
September, I attended a workshop on writing Fantasy led by Working Partners editor Sara O'Connor, who basically told us to
slash and slash again. "KILL those darlings," she cried! "KILL KILL KILL!" Sara is pictured right, kindly advising attendees during the manuscript review session.
There was also a radio programme about how street performers built and kept their audiences and
I was struck by the painful similarities to authors.
September ended happily with
the launch of The Boy Who Fell Down Exit 43 by fellow Undiscovered Voices author
Harriet Goodwin. After the launch, we took pictures of each other posing with random books. That's Sarwat with
Twilight, Margaret with
When Cats Turn Bad, and me with
Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country.With
October, came Blog Action Day - the day bloggers get together and try to effect change.
This year's topic was Climate Change which would have been a perfect time to plug the fact that I had a story in the new climate change anthology
Under the Weather edited by Tony Bradman ...but there were more serious things going on. The terrible issue of Climate Change was horrifically brought home by a deluge of biblical proportions in my native Philippines. Thousands were left homeless and several hundred people died.
And then
November came and with it, life-changing news.
Tall Story, my novel about a boy with gigantism, sold to David Fickling Books, of Random House. It felt like I was moving from one scary fairground ride to another.
From trying to get published:
To trying to succeed as a published author:
With all the possibilities ... good and bad.
The bad news that the Publishing industry endured in
December ...
... gave us all
a lot to think about.
All t
he good reasons why we do what we do as writers. And all the reasons why we should keep going.
For me personally, now that I'm on the cusp of becoming a published author, I've got to change mindsets - I've been blogging for an audience of writers, how do I reach the readers? Suddenly I've got to practice what I've been preaching on this blog! It's exhilirating and scary at the same time.
One can only do one's best.
So farewell, 2009 - what a year that was!
2010.
Here we go.
for a YEAR and has a cover and your SENSITIVE, HELPFUL friends keep saying, 'Candy, we're going to pre-order your book!'
