News | Posted by Carole on Wednesday 25 February 2009
I’m just about to leave for Perth where I will be speaking at the Perth Writers Festival. There are heaps of other authors there, so check out the link.
This will be my first public event this year. I hope I won’t lose my voice!
The venue is the University of WA.
I will be at a school event tomorrow and then….
“Worlds Apart?” with Leigh Hobbs Sat 28 Feb, 9.30 am at the Fox Theatre
Family Day on Sunday 1 March, 9.30 am in the Kids’ Tent
“Digging Through Libraries” with Bridget Curran on Sunday 1 March, 12.30 (not sure where that will be)
Hope to see some of you there.
Writing | Posted by Carole on Friday 20 February 2009
I’m writing a book at the moment, and it’s going to take me about a year. I don’t like talking about my books as I’m writing them. It’s a superstitious thing. So I thought that I might do a series of blogs about my writing process. How it works for me.
I usually start with a very vague idea, eg “I’m going to write a book set in ancient Egypt”. So the first thing I have to do is think of a story. If it’s a historical book, I like to get some ideas from history. So I read some history books.
At first, I thought the ancient Egyptian book was going to be about cat mummies, so I read all about cat mummies and cat worship, but I couldn’t work out a good story. (It wasn’t all a waste of time, I used some of the cat information in the second book, Ramose and the Tombrobbers, which has a cat mummy, or half of one at least, on the cover. I also wrote a short story about cat mummies which ended up in the anthology called short.)
The story of Ramose that I did end up writing was inspired by a couple of things that actually happened—a Prince who disappeared, palace murder plots. That gave me the idea for the premise. That’s the starting point of the story, the set of circumstances that cause the story to begin.
Some early notes while I was thinking about Ramose.
In Dragonkeeper, the premise was “this is a version of ancient China where dragons exist. A bad dragonkeeper doesn’t do his job properly and a dragon dies. He has to get rid of the evidence.” I didn’t have the whole story, that was yet to come. I just had the beginning.
Some people are surprised that I didn’t make up the way that the bad dragonkeeper got rid of the dead dragon. If you want to know where I got that idea from you can find out here.
This is an important stage of the writing process, even though at this stage I’m just thinking. It needs to be leisurely, unrushed, no deadlines. I usually do this while I’m writing another book. Not while I’m actually typing at the keyboard, but in my spare moments or when I get sick of writing (about lunchtime). I might jot down some notes, that’s about it. It will be months, occasionally years, before I begin writing the new book. The ideas come and go. Some hang around. They’re the ones that end up in the book.
It’s been such a long time since I’ve done a post, I’ve just about forgotten how to do it.
I’ve got a couple of ideas for ongoing posts but first up I wanted to show everyone the lovely cover for the Japanese edition of Garden of the Purple Dragon. It is so sweet. Look for bluish Hua. (There’s a bit more but the opened out cover wouldn’t all fit on my scanner.)
Japanese cover for Garden of the Purple Dragon
In other overseas news, there is a new UK release of the Ramose series. It is now two volumes with the first two books in one volume called Ascent to the Sun, and the second two in the other volume called Fury of the Gods. You can see the covers here.
