April 2, 2009

Classic children's fiction

Filed under: recommended reading — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 10:47 am

Another list of recommendations, this one is for authors of classic children’s fiction.

  • Joan Aiken, author of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, its eleven sequels, the thirteen Arabel and Mortimer titles, and other novels
  • Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, its three sequels and other titles
  • Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of A Little Princess, Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Secret Garden
  • Helen Cresswell, author of Ordinary Jack and nine other Bagthorpe saga titles
  • Richmal Crompton, author of Just William and thrity-nine other William titles in addition to numerous unrelated works
  • Lorna Hill, author of A Dream of Sadlers Wells and nineteen other ballet school titles
  • Geraldine McCaughrean, author of A Pack of Lies, A Little Lower Than the Angels, Stop the Train and various other titles
  • L. M. Montgomery, author of Emily of New Moon and two sequels, as well as of Anne of Green Gables and numerous sequels
  • Noel Streatfeild, author of Ballet Shoes and many other titles
  • Mildred D. Taylor, author of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and other titles

March 9, 2009

Books of colour

Filed under: recommended reading — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 7:30 am

Events in the blogosphere have inspired me to post another list of recommendations, this is for fiction by or about people of colour.

Authors of colour

  • Octavia Butler, science-fiction author of Wildseed and the Xenogenesis series
  • Steven Barnes, science-fiction author of The Descent of Anansi, Dream Park, The Legacy of Heorot and other titles
  • Rosa Guy, author of young adult fiction including The Friends, Ruby, Edith Jackson and other titles
  • Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go
  • Mildred E. Taylor, author of the Logan family series for young adults which includes Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Let the Circle Be Unbroken, and The Road to Memphis

Books with characters of colour

  • Across Realtime, science-fiction by Vernor Vinge
  • Come a Stranger, young adult fiction by Cynthia Voigt
  • Lionboy by Zizou Corder (one half of the Zizou Corder partnership is the biracial British author Isabel Adomakoh Young)
  • The Ear, the Eye and the Arm, young adult science-fiction by Nancy Farmer
  • The Other Side of Truth by Beverly Naidoo

This list is shorter than it ought to be so please add your own recommendations. I hope to expand the list myself later this year. If you’re looking for more works by authors of colour try the following links:

March 3, 2009

Post-apocalyptic fiction

Filed under: recommended reading — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 12:00 pm

Seriously, what is it with Monica Hughes? Why can’t anyone remember what books she wrote? If you haven’t read them already go and find Devil On My Back and The Dreamcatcher. Monica Hughes, people! She deserves to be remembered.

And to bulk out this entry a bit here are some more post-apocalyptic fiction recommendations since both Hughes titles are set after a nuclear holocaust event. I’m keeping myself to ten titles or I’ll be here forever. All are young-adult – or can pass as such. All contain some reference to adult themes. I’d advise these for readers aged 13+.

  • Brother in the Land by Robert Swindells (1984)
  • Children of the Dust by Louise Lawrence (1985)
  • Deepwater Black by Ken Catran (1995)
  • Exodus by Julie Bertagna (2002)
  • Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve (2001)
  • Noah’s Castle by John Rowe Townsend (1975)
  • Shade’s Children by Garth Nix (1997)
  • The Chrysalids by John Wyndham (1955)
  • When the Tripods Came by John Christopher (1988)
  • Z for Zachariah by Robert O’Brian (1975)

On LibraryThing (the library cataloguing website) I have some of these and other adult titles saved under the tag post-holocaust.

February 28, 2009

Where do you get your ideas from?

Filed under: Advice for writers,Q&A,Rhiannon's books — Tags: , — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 1:51 pm

The question “where do you get your ideas from?” is one writers dread. It’s a very popular first question at school visits and talks, and probably a natural one but it’s still extremely difficult to answer.

Just googling for where do you get your ideas from? produces pages of authors agonising over this question. Neil Gaiman’s answer is the first hit.

It’s difficult for the people who ask this question to understand why it casts us creative types into such convulsions as we strive to articulate an answer. I think the problem lies in the fact that the instant answer that flashes through my mind is “wheredon’t I get my ideas from?”

In fact it reminds me a little of when I was eleven years old and being asked by classmates “what’s it like to have a mother whose an author?” Again, the answer is: “well, what’s it like not to?” There’s no basis for comparison.

Having ideas for stories is one of the things that makes me a writer. I have them all the time. Sometimes it would be a mercy to have less of them since I have bulging files (actual and theoretical) of ideas I haven’t had the opportunity to do anything with yet. My head is stuffed with fragments of stories and snapshots of scenes, sometimes just names, words, a single sentence of dialogue.

Terry Pratchett has written about inspiration particles sleeting through the cosmos. Someone else (and if you know who, please tell me) described writers as dragging around an ideas net and everything that happens to us gets stuffed into the net.

One part of this question that some people focus on is whether writers get our ideas from real life: real people and real events. For me the answer to this is “much less than you might expect”. Real people and real situations can inspire me with ideas or empower the reality of my fiction but I don’t stuff my friends (or enemies) into my books. My characters are also much more me than they are anyone else. Raven was an ego ideal for me when I first wrote her. The three cousins in ‘Waking Dream’ and the five teenagers in ‘Bad Blood’ all have aspects of me in them. And ‘Bad Blood’ of course, has its origins in a real house and the real scenery of the Lake District. But if you’re worried about writers being a sort of vulture, greedying up bits of other people’s lives and using them in our fiction – that’s not the way I work. Perhaps because my literary origins are in fantasy, I hoestly don’t find real life interesting enough to write about – not without considerable embellishment.

For aspiring authors wanting to find ideas, the best advice I can give is that everything has the capacity to inspire. The more I learn and read and think the more ideas I have; too many to ever write them all down.

One vision I have of heaven is a place where every book that has ever been thought of exists and could be read. Not just my ideas, although there are some I’ve had that I’ve love to read the book since I don’t know how to write it… yet. But more importantly the unwritten ideas of the authors I’ve loved. Books they might have written but died before they could, or books they thought of writing but didn’t. I know from talking to my mother, Mary Hoffman, about ideas that she has the same problem of far too many than she can use.

One word of warning though. Once you open yourself to ideas for stories they come so thick and fast that you may end up forgetting some of them. I try to jot the best ones down even if I don’t have time to do more than summarise them. In my ‘ideas file’ I have synopses and first chapters of about twenty books right now and i have even more snippets tucked away in notebooks. One of the reasons writers will tend to carry a pen and paper is to keep track of the ideas. Sudden inspirations, like butterflies, flutter past all the time and need to be caught in the net or pinned to a page. Unlike butterflies, pinnning them down doesn’t hurt ideas and the more you think about them and play with them the more they flourish.

A stock of ideas, carefully saved, is a dragon’s hoard of gold. Some ideas are fairy gold and can vanish if you try to spend them. Others cluster together and can be scooped up in a shining goblet of rainbow gems. Some that seemed glittery turn out to be fool’s gold – or lead. But the shiny metaphor is leading me off into other questions for other days like “how do you use your ideas?” and “how can you tell which ones are the good ones?”

February 27, 2009

What kind of book would you be? and other questions

Filed under: Q&A — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 12:32 pm

I have more questions about the kind of books I like, these ones come from Sarah B. If you have questions of your own please contact me!

If you were a book, what kind of book would you be?

I’d like to be the book that Harry talks about at the end of ‘The Tricksters’ by Margaret Mahy. I’d also happily be most books by Mahy: ‘The Changeover’ would be just fine by me, as would ‘The Haunting’.

I am a book already: ‘Specially Sarah’ by Mary Hoffman.

What was your favorite book when you were little?

I liked ‘Phoebe and the Hot Water Bottles’ by Linda Dawson and Terry Furchgott.

What book(s) can you read over and over?

I have to read all my books over and over because I am a lightning fast reader and I can’t afford enough books to read each one once. That said, there are some books I’m more likely to read when I just want to relax with a friendly book. They include: ‘Archer’s Goon’ by Diana Wynne Jones, ‘A Deepness in the Sky’ by Vernor Vinge, ‘The Diamond Age’ by Neal Stephenson, the ‘Wild Magic’ quartet by Tamora Pierce, the early Draegera books by Steven Brust, and the childrens books of Noel Streatfeild and L. M. Montgomery.

Do you buy/read books if you know nothing about the book or its author beforehand?

Yes, I do. Cover, blurb text and author info page all come with the book so it’s not exactly knowing nothing when the book is right there. I have read some awful tosh this way, of course, but also found some brilliant fiction. Awful tosh includes the books of Gor (not suitable for younger readers) and brilliant finds include Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock.

I am currently a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke award and some of the contenders are by authors I haven’t heard of but plainly should have done judging by the standard of their writing. It’s exciting to discover how many authors there are that I haven’t explored yet.

Have you ever bought/read a book just because you liked the cover art? If yes, do you think this is a good method for buying books?

I belong to a Facebook group called ‘Actually, I do judge books by their covers’. I don’t think I’d buy a book on cover art *alone* without even attempting to look inside but I do have a strong response to covers.

I get turned off by derivative covers that are plainly trying to say that one book is like another. So Josh Kirby style covers for books that are a bit like Terry Pratchett novels annoy me – and probably annoy Kirby even more! I am drawn to covers that look like antiquated books such as the relatively recent Piratica series by Tanith Lee. I don’t like books where the cover artist has clearly not read the book and the character looks nothing like my vision of them. My Emily of New Moon books are a series with photo realistic covers of a girl who looks nothing like the Emily in the books.

I think I bought ‘Callaghan’s Crazy Crosstime Bar’ because of its cover – and was not disappointed.

What book(s) do you find yourself always recommending to people?

‘A Deepness in the Sky’ and ‘The Diamond Age’ (both mentioned above). I am always shocked when any fantasy/magic fan hasn’t read ‘The Changeover’ by Margaret Mahy. Joan D. Vinge’s ‘The Snow Queen’ I’ve recced a fair few times. I have some good recs from the Clarke award reading but I’m not allowed to say what they are yet!

The authors no one remembers

Filed under: recommended reading — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 12:15 pm

When I was small my mother used to get cross with me for forgetting the authors of the books I liked. (A stance not entirely unrelated to the fact she is a professional author herself). Now I am older and have achieved memory skills better than than the average goldfish I do remember authors and titles , which is why I share these enviable skills on what’s that book

But I do pity Monica Hughes who seems to be the most forgotten of all authors. Today yet another of her books was listed by someone who’d forgotten author and title. It is, of course, Keeper of the Isis Light. Monica Hughes died in 2003 and her wikipedia page lists 37 published titles from the 1970s to the turn of the century. I have read five of those: Keeper of the Isis Light, The Guardian of Isis, Devil on My Back, The Dream Catcher and Sandwriter. I’ve read each of those several times and still have copies of the last two. But there are 32 more books of hers to read and I am determined to acquire more of them – if only to prove that someone remembers her and rates her work high enough to recall.

Eva Ibbotson is another who seems to linger in obscurity although she is very much alive and published two new titles last year. Margaret Mahy doesn’t get remembered well either and at the height of the Harry Potter craze many of my friends bewailed the fact that Diana Wynne Jones wasn’t getting more notice.

What are other people’s candidates for forgotten authors who deserve better of their readers? And which are the books I should immediately order?

February 16, 2009

Advice for writers

Filed under: Advice for writers,Q&A — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 11:00 pm

Because I am a professionally published author and also run creative writing workshops, I’ve been asked various questions about the art and craft and business of writing. I’m planning to start a new section on my blog for answering these questions, linking them under a new “advice for writers” category. I’m also going to reference and link other sites that provide answers, help and support in greater depth than I can offer.

The answers I give will be my answers. They are not intended to be authorative but I hope you will find them useful. I’m hoping that readers will enter the discussion and perhaps other professional writers will be willing to offer their points of view. Much of my understanding of how to approach writing professionally has been gleaned from other authors and I’ll aim to cite specific points where relevant (eg the idea that ‘people who are in pain have the most impulse to change things’ comes from Orson Scott Card’s book How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (1990)). If I miss a credit, please let me know.

My answers to specific questions occasionally change over time, as I gain a better understanding of how I work. When this occurs I’ll try to flag it up for further discussion.

Questions that have either been asked by students or suggested by friends as good topics so far are listed below. Please feel free to add your own suggested questions.

How do I get published?
How much money do writers make?
How often do you get paid, how do royalties and advances work?
Do I need to have another job?
How do you juggle writing and another job?
Who does the artwork?
Should I arrange my own illustrator?
How does editing work? What do editors do?
Do I need to have everything spelt and grammatically correct?
What does the marketing department do?
Who makes up the titles?
How do I get an agent? How much should I pay them?
When should I get an agent?
Is it worth “vanity publishing” or “self-publishing” my work?
What is the market like for [x] type of book?
How can I tell if my writing is good enough to be publishable?
How do I write a best seller?
What should I write about?
Should I “write what I know”?
Can I write about people I know?
Can I publish my fanfiction?
How long does a novel have to be?
Do books have to have a moral?
Should fiction be educational?
Have all the good ideas been taken?
What makes a book junior, teenage or adult fiction?
How does age-ranging work?
How do I get decent critiques of my work?
How can I get a professional to read my work? Do I have to pay them?
How should I start a story?
How should I end a story?
What about the middle bits?
How do you approach an empty page?
How do you make sure that Fear doesn’t get in the way?
How do you deal with self-doubt or “writers’ blocks?
Where do you get your ideas from?
If I dream about a story does that mean I should write about it?
How much should I write, how often should I write?

Bad Blood in Japanese translation

Filed under: Bad Blood,news,Q&A,Rhiannon's books — Tags: , , — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 10:54 pm

Bad Blood is currently being translated into Japanese for publication by Shogakukan and I’ve been corresponding with my Japanese translator Ms Yumiko Inui about the text.

I’ve worked with a number of translators and it’s always been interesting to see what points are raised. One translator (Swedish, I think) spotted that the chapter titles of the Hex books were quotations and contacted me asking to check what works they referenced. She’d spotted the Duchess of Malfi quotations but hadn’t placed the ones from the Book of Revelation.

Ms Inui’s questions were particularly interesting because they focused on some very colloquial turns of phrase I had chosen. One question was about a reference to pantomime – or rather the English countryside Christmas pantomime. Reflecting on why I’d chosen that precise term made be realise how much of the book involves specific cultural references. Bad Blood is set in the Lake District and is shrouded with the very specific scenery of a particular season, a particular landscape and a particular mood. The landscape is also liberally strewn with literary allusions, slang terms and in-jokes used between characters and what increasingly appears to be a vast panoply of very specific language: Kat has read A Little Princess, Cat watches MTV, Roland plays D&D, Fox talks about fox-hunting, Mirror and Glass first appear as mimes.

I have permission from Ms Inui to quote a specific question she asked me and my answer here.

Yumiko asked: ;”…. . We can even do the high school makeover scene thing if you want to but would you please unleash your inner geek or whatever it is ……”
What are “the high school makeover scene” and “your inner geek” ?

My answer was:

This one is tricky. The “high school makeover scene” is a reference to films about teenagers set in the United States. In a lot of these films set in American high schools (which are schools for children aged 13 to 18 ) involve an unpopular girl thought to be unattractive by her classmates. At some point in the film the girl is given a “makeover” which is a new look created by the popular attractive girls who put makeup on the girl, lend her fashionable clothes, persuade her to exchange eye-glasses for contact lenses and generally make her more attractive. Then the unpopular girl is transformed and everyone is impressed by her new image.

“Geek” is a word that can be used negatively or positively. It means something like a “swot” or “nerd”, someone who either very academically focused and/or obsessed with a certain subject like computers, science fiction books or TV shows. Someone who was obsessed with Star Trek and attended Trek conventions and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the TV series might be called a Star Trek geek.

Katherine is a “geek” to Catriona because she is shy and obsessed with reading. By “unleash your inner geek” she means “use your academic knowledge and skills”.

To summarise. In this scene, Catriona is asking for a truce between “popular girl” (herself) and “shy studious girl” (Katherine). She offers to re-enact this classic film scene that signifies a truce between the popular and the shy girls – to show that she wants a truce. She then asks Katherine to help, using Katherine’s own academic skills.

What do you think, readers? Is there anything I should have added to that? Do you think the concept will translate?

And how do you feel about colloquial dialogue? I have been working towards making my characters express themselves in ways that I find believable for that character, which often means that sentences are not fully formed, particular styles of speech and expression, tone conveyed through word choice and as little exposition as I can manage. This is because I think that speech often is sloppy – especially as people attempt to convey new and exciting concepts, hurry to find answers and race towards conclusions in fictional texts.

I know very few people who speak in proper sentences all the time. That said, two of them are my parents – who may turn up at any time to rebuke me for my own sloppiness in blog writing.

December 11, 2008

Q&A: 18 new questions on Facebook fan page

Filed under: Q&A — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 10:00 pm

I’ve been asked some new questions for the Facebook fan page.

Facebook members go here to see the questions, you may need to log into Facebook or join the group.

August 12, 2008

10 SF titles

Filed under: recommended reading — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 12:30 pm

Sara W asked me to recommend some science-fiction titles to her. An insto-list of good SF follows. I’m limiting myself to ten titles or I’ll be here all day.

  • A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge
  • Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
  • Drinking Sapphire Wine, Tanith Lee
  • Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (short stories), James Tiptree Jr
  • Palace, Katherine Kerr and Mark Kreighbaum
  • Permutation City, Greg Egan
  • Snow Queen, Joan D. Vinge
  • Steel Beach, John Varley
  • The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin
  • Xenogenesis trilogy, Octavia Butler
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