Kirsty Eagar
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7 Aug 2009

news & interviews

Big shout out to…

Everybody who came to Manly Library on Tuesday. Thank you. And thanks also to Louise McMorland who organised it. While we’re on the subject of Manly Library, their book blogs are definitely worth a look:

Novel Ideas and also The Whatever Club

And, feeling so efficient I should be holding a clipboard, I now have info on Penguin’s New and Emerging Writers event on the 3rd of September in Melbourne (otherwise known as the panel where 4 authors use only 2 names or variations thereof…). Behold:

Penguin3sept

6 Aug 2009

surfing & the sea

Today was small, cold, shippy and fun…

Winter fun

5 Aug 2009

news & interviews raw blue

Tried to resist sharing this, but can’t…

Raw Blue is Read of the Week at Woman’s Day… And there was a nice review too, which is going straight to the pool room. I could try for irony, but we both know irony is for wankers. Big joy…:)

31 Jul 2009

on writing raw blue

Book editing – the process…

Book editors help you ‘see’. They understand what you’re trying to do better than you do; find the words that will help you do it; are your ‘go to’ person; and, best of all, are on your team. They bring so much to a book. I don’t know if that’s true of all editors, but it is certainly true of mine. And here she is:

Amy Thomas grew up in Adelaide before moving to Melbourne to study. She has worked in publishing for nearly ten years and has edited children’s books for most of this time (and quite a few books for adults too). She has been lucky enough to work with authors and illustrators such as Shaun Tan, Sofie Laguna, Colin Thiele, Neil Curtis and Isobelle Carmody, to name just a few. She always wanted to have a job that involved books and reading, even from an early age, so being a book editor was perfect for her.

Amy Thomas

Book editing is not proof reading, is it? Can you give a brief overview of what an editor does?

The role of the editor is to take a book from manuscript through to finished book, guiding the author along the way. This sounds pretty straightforward and not too involved, but it can mean a lot of different things depending on the book an editor is working on. It can sometimes mean taking a manuscript through a number of drafts, giving structural/story feedback along the way, and then giving the manuscript a final edit. It’s not just about picking up errors in punctuation and spelling; it’s also about picking up inconsistencies/weaknesses in story and the narrative arc of a book, and often involves making suggestions to strengthen these elements of a book.

With fiction editing, it’s also about asking the right questions.

Sometimes I ask:

  • Would this character really say that?
  • Is that really how their relationship would unfold?
  • Does their voice feel real?
  • Is that repetition deliberate?
  • Do the characters sound like different people or is it easy to confuse who is speaking?

More

19 Jul 2009

book extras raw blue

Synaesthesia stuff…

People who’ve read Raw Blue keep saying they liked Danny. Which is nice. Because I liked him, too. A lot.

Anyhow, then they either: a. say they know someone else with synaesthesia (or synesthesia as it is spelled in other places); or b. want to know more about it. Thing is, Danny just had this thing where he related colours to people from before draft one (when the whole story was brain soup). It was later I read an article on synaesthesia and realised it was along the lines of what I’d been thinking.

That said, people→colour synaesthesia hasn’t really been explored much in the research on synaesthesia*. Danny also got colours from letters and days of the week, which is a more common manifestation of the big S. And it doesn’t have to be just colours, some people get a sense of taste, or hear sounds.

(*If you are uber into this and want to know more, you can check out this as a jump off point. Or, if you want to get all scholarly, you can contact me for a list of references…)

Check out:

 

More

1 Jul 2009

on writing raw blue

Book design – the process…

To me, ‘design’ is the functional, working arm of art. Creativity within constraints, like time and money. As a huge reader, I’m influenced by book design all the time. I’d heard of David Mitchell, knew he was a great writer, but I never would have picked up Cloud Atlas if it wasn’t for the fact I loved the cover.

So how do you decide what goes on the cover? How do you convey a story with one arresting image?

Tony Palmer has worked as a book designer for various publishers since 1986, designing and crafting beautiful books for children and adults. He also worked as a teacher with Victoria University, teaching typography and design. Not only did he design the cover of Raw Blue (which I think is amazing), he also generously agreed to answer a few questions about his working process.

pict1003-r

There’s more to book design than just the cover, isn’t there?

I sometimes look around the Penguin studio and wonder what draws and keeps designers here. I suppose there’s a variety of reasons, but a common motivation is books – those wonderful, three-dimensional, interactive, pieces of sculpture. The designers I know read them, make them, collect them and live them – so creating great book covers are often just the natural expression of a life that already exists.

What’s your general approach to designing a book?

Design is commercial. It’s not fine art. Any book I work on is not my own original and creative force. So, design starts at the beginning – the manuscript. There’s quite a bit of intuitive thought nudging before I even begin to think of any visual ideas: Who wrote it? Why did they write it? Is it any good? Why are we publishing it? What is it really about? Who is going to read it, and who is going to pay for it – two quite distinct questions… More

15 Jun 2009

on writing

FAQ: How did you get published?

A lick of luck and seven years of writing would be the short answer.

The long answer would go something like:

I wrote a thriller which got me a UK agent who put it up for auction but nobody bid which was funny/terrible so I tried again and wrote something else which should have been ‘same, same, but different’ but turned out to be just different and as a result lost the UK agent (understandably) but got some okay feedback from a publisher but still no interest whatsoever which left me wondering if I was going backwards and feeling pretty low for a while before I started work on two new stories which fascinated the hell out of me even if I didn’t know what they were or where they belonged and they got me an Australian agent who turned out to be incredibly generous and organised some excellent feedback on how I could improve those stories so I worked really hard to address that feedback and while I was doing it I suddenly realised I didn’t care about outcomes anymore and that I loved the creative process more than anything else and not long after I realised this – in a sort of epiphany while I was sitting in the audience of a literary festival – I found out those two stories were getting published. Go figure.

2 Jun 2009

surfing & the sea raw blue

Before winter crashes the party…

Let’s take a second to remember the Autumn that was.

Summer’s over, winter’s coming, but right now is the in-between, the change. I’ve always loved this time of year the most, always loved Easter more than Christmas. It’s because of surfing. The swell’s mixed, which means you still get runs of easterly swell, not like winter where it’s usually coming from the south all the time. And there’s not much wind about, or if there is it’s often offshore. The ocean’s still warm but the sand is chilled. The water loses the emerald green of summer and starts to keep secrets, turning a deep, dark sapphire blue.

Most of all I love the light. I love how everything is golden, precious. Some days it makes things so beautiful it hurts.

(From Raw Blue)

blog-photos1

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Instagram post 2174453854207414816_1604921575 The speech-to-text on my phone just gets better and better.
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