Blog | Posted by Carole on Tuesday 12 July 2011
If there’s one thing I love it’s a pop-up dragon book. I have a small collection of about four of them. My daughter Lili just bought me another one for my birthday. It’s called Dragons and Monsters and it definitely contains the best pop-up dragons I’ve ever seen. The paper engineering is done by Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart. You might be familiar with some of their other fabulous pop-up books.
People have been experimenting with moving parts in books since the 1300s when astronomical calculators had moving paper discs. The first books that could be truly called pop-ups were made in 1800s, but the term pop-up book wasn’t coined until the 1930s.
There are several online exhibitions showing the history of pop-up books, such as here and here with lots of pictures of how they evolved over time.
Blog | Posted by Carole on Monday 6 June 2011
Last week I received an envelope full of letters from students who had read my book Dragonkeeper. This wasn’t unusual in itself. From time to time, I get letters from kids who have read the book as a class, or whose teacher has read it to them. This collection of letters was different, because it took more than two years to reach me.
The students were from Kinglake West Primary School and the letters were written in November 2008. They were in an envelope all ready to post, but for some reason they were never posted. Then the Black Saturday fires went through Kinglake. The school survived, but the letters were lost and I can’t imagine what the community went through.
The teacher left the school. The letters were later found and the envelope passed on to someone, who passed it on to someone else. Eventually it was handed to my daughter Lili at a conference last week, and I finally got to read the letters and look at the pictures those students drew. I can’t write back and thank the kids for their letters, because they’d all be in high school now. So I thought I’d post some of their artwork here on my blog. And thank them that way. Better late than never.
Click on the thumbnails to see the full images.
Blog | Posted by Carole on Sunday 15 May 2011
I went to the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs Exhibition at the Melbourne Museum last week. I always love to see artifacts up close. Tutankhamun is from the 18th Dynasty of ancient Egypt, the same as Prince Ramose, the main character from my Ramose books. In fact, Ramose was Tutankhamun’s great-great-great-great uncle.
Even though I’ve written five books set in ancient Egypt, I’ve never been to Egypt, so it is only through exhibitions like this that I get to actually see those wonderful things that have survived for around 3,500 years. In the exhibition there is a statue of Ramose’s father Tuthmosis I. My favourite pieces were the lovely jewellery with scarab beetles and the wooden statue of a panther.
I saw the Treasures of Tutankhamun Exhibition in London back in 1972. I think that was the first time Tutankhamun artifacts had travelled overseas, and the gold mask of Tutankhamun was part of the exhibition. The mask is no longer allowed to leave Egypt, so I’m very glad I saw it back then.
I still have the catalogue from that 1972 exhibition, and it was the pictures of the scarabs and the lion-footed chair that inspired parts of the Ramose stories.
Blog | Posted by Carole on Monday 9 May 2011
I have written a guest blog for fellow writer Gabrielle Wang, who has asked a number of writers to write about where they write and how they write. So if you want to see a photo of my very messy desk, go to Gabrielle’s blog.
While you are their you can see how other writers such as Michael Pryor, Sue Lawson, Claire Saxby, Michael Gerard Bauer, Cath Crowley, Lili Wilkinson (my daughter), and Gabrielle herself approach their work. There are more to come I think.
Blog | Posted by Carole on Tuesday 3 May 2011
This is an interview I did recently with author Carole Wilkinson.
Me:
So…you’re writing a new book.
CW:
Yep.
Me:
Going well is it?
CW:
Not especially.
Me:
Another historical novel?
CW:
Yes. Set in ancient China again.
Me:
So, you’ll be seeking out lots of information about the time when the book is set.
CW:
I’m trying to. Unfortunately, it was “a time of great disunity”. China was ruled by marauding nomads.
Me:
But someone must have written something down.
CW:
I don’t think they actually had a written language.
Me:
It will be absolutely historically correct though, won’t it?
CW:
Well…
Me:
You always say you never change history.
CW:
I know but…
Me:
It’s expected.
CW:
Other writers change stuff. I saw a mini-series recently about the Pre-Raphaelite artists, you know, Rossetti, Millais, William Morris. Whoever wrote that wasn’t too worried about the facts and that was less than 200 years ago.
Me:
No need to get defensive.
CW:
I think it’s called ‘dramatic licence’.
Me:
I’m not sure I approve.
CW:
I liked it. It was funny.
Me:
Readers will get confused.
CW:
They can look up the facts on Wikipedia.
Blog | Posted by Carole on Tuesday 12 April 2011
I’m grumpy. Most of the time I like being a writer, but sometimes it isn’t much fun. I’m having one of the “not fun” times at the moment. I’ve been stuck in my writing for weeks. Just can’t seem to get it right. It makes me very cranky, ask my husband, ask some of my readers who have emailed or posted wanting information about me for their homework. Just lately they’ve been getting short shrift.
I took the dog for a walk this afternoon to look at the flooded creek. That didn’t help. I went and had a cup of tea with Lili. She wasn’t very sympathetic, says she’s heard me make the same complaints with every book. So I’m giving up for today.
I’ll try again tomorrow.
Awards,News | Posted by Carole on Tuesday 5 April 2011
I have discovered that my YA novel Sugar Sugar has been selected for this year’s White Ravens Catalogue. What is the White Ravens Catalogue?, I hear you ask. Well, there is an institution called the International Youth Library (IYL), a collection of books housed in the Blutenburg Castle in Munich, Germany. Each hear the IYL selects a list of “newly published books from around the world that they consider to be especially noteworthy”. That’s the White Ravens Catalogue, which is announced at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair held in Italy every year. You can see all the titles chosen from 1996–2011 at the International Children’s Digital Library.
This year Sugar Sugar is alongside some great Australasian titles, and I am thrilled that my book is among this international list of books that are considered worthy of “worldwide attention because of their universal themes and/or their exceptional and often innovative artistic and literary style and design”.
Dragonkeeper was a White Raven in 2004.
Blog | Posted by Carole on Thursday 24 March 2011
Guest blogging seems to be all the rage at the moment. I haven’t had time to do anything on my own blog, but I did do a guest spot on Gillian Polack’s Blog for Women’s History Month. It’s about how Sharon Penman inspired me to become a historical novelist. I sent it off to Gillian and it turns out she is practically best friends with Sharon Penman!
Blog,New Books,News | Posted by Carole on Thursday 17 March 2011
So I’ve started writing a new novel. It’s a Dragonkeeper novel. But it doesn’t follow on from Dragon Moon. It’s set about 400 years later.
This is my fifth Dragonkeeper book. I suppose I thought it might be a bit easier, fifth time round. It isn’t. I spent about two months last year working out the characters and the plot. I wrote a six or seven page synopsis, so I thought I had it all worked out. I didn’t. The story I am writing is changing as I write it. In the synopsis I’ve got “A meets B and together they do C.” But when I come to write it, I find that A and B can’t possibly meet because they are in different places, and, what’s more, D hasn’t happened yet, so they couldn’t do C anyway.
I have to reorganise events, rethink the characters’ motivation, and think of another way for them to do what I want them to do. Today I did a big plot diagram on my whiteboard and I think I made some progress. I’ll see tomorrow when I reread my ideas from today if I still think they work.
If not, it’ll be back to the whiteboard.
Blog | Posted by Carole on Tuesday 15 February 2011
I have received my copies of the book I have written about the World War I Battle of Fromelles. It is part of the black dog books non-fiction series called The Drum and the book is titled Fromelles: Australia’s Bloodiest Day at War.
It is about the first battle that Australians took part in on the Western Front in World War I almost 95 years ago. It was a complete disaster. There were more Australian casualties in this one battle which lasted only about 19 hours, than in the Boer, Korean and Vietnam wars combined. It’s a shocking statistic.
In my book I tell the story of this battle with all its chaos and confusion. As with my other Drum books, each chapter begins with a piece of fiction that, I hope, helps readers imagine what it would have been like to be part of history and actually experience the events.
The story continues into present time with the discovery, in 2009, of the bodies of soldiers who fought in the battle and their subsequent reburial in a specially built war cemetery last year.
It is a grim story, and one that history tried to forget. It involved ordinary people, who were thrust into the horrors of war, who dealt with it each in their own way, and earned their place in the pages of history.
It will be in bookshops on 1 March.
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