Aki in Melbourne!

I am very excited to let you know that the fabulous Aki Fukuoka, illustrator of the Billie B Brown series, will be in Melbourne for one very busy week in August. She will be joining me at the Melbourne Writers Festival to help launch Spooky House the first of the Billie B Mysteries. If you haven't had the chance to see Aki draw live - you are in for a treat! From rabbits in top hats to dinosaurs in trousers, I have yet to find something she can't draw.

As well as the writers festival, Aki and I will have three bookstore events over the week where you can come and see her draw and be among the first to hear me read from Spooky House. We will also have lots of prizes and fun things to give away. Hope you can come! 

Here is a list of our public events:

- Saturday 24th August: 

The Reading Hour, The Edge Federation Square, 4pm

- Sunday 25th August:

Drop in and Draw, Artplay, 2.30pm.

- Monday 26th August:

The World of Billie and Jack, ACMI Cinema 1, 11.15am.

- Tuesday 27th August

Creating Characters, Artplay, 10am (this one is just with Aki).

Reading's Hawthorn, 4.30pm.

- Wednesday 28th August

The Younger Sun bookstore, Yarraville, 4.30pm

- Thursday 29th August

The Little Bookroom, Carlton, 4.30pm

A Little Varuna Magic

Well, it's been a long time since I've picked up a pencil to draw - years in fact, as I have been so very busy tapping away on my computer for the last three or four years. I have had a beautiful manuscript in my bottom drawer for a long time, written by my dear friend Whitney Stewart, regularly postponed by me or our publisher, until finally I knew it could be postponed no more. So, feeling apprehensive about not having illustrated for so long, I booked myself a week at Varuna, The Writers' House, to see if in the stillness of the Blue Mountains I could find that quiet drawing mind again.

There is nowhere else I know of where I can be so focussed and productive as at Varuna, sharing the house with four other writers tapping away quietly in their rooms, coming down for a meal by the fire in the evenings, thoughts turned inward from being so completely lost in their work all day. As the director says, the gift of Varuna is not just that it takes away all interruptions to your work, but that it takes away the fear of interruption.

As this is a picture book on meditation for children, I decided that each morning I would pick a meditation exercise to try out before I sat down to work. I struggle to find a still mind, like most of us do I imagine, and easily fall into the trap of wanting to fill empty space with words, spoken or written, any moment I am not busy. So, the combination of meditating in the morning and then illustrating all day in this quiet yellow house was like a balm to my restless, scratchy mind.

I began by working in pencil to find the mood of the illustration, then when I was happy with my sketch I would place it on a lightbox under a sheet of watercolour paper to trace it in ink. To my delight, the characters revealed themselves easily: an elephant to represent our heavy bumbling mind, and a monkey to represent our mind at its most skittish. I chose a limited palette to colour them with because I will add the backgrounds later with the designer once we have worked out how the words will fit across the page.

This is just a sneak peek of some of my favourite drawings. Later, after I have been working with the designer, I will post some full-colour pages-in-progress. Until then, 'Om' to you for your day.

Billie B Brown Treasury!

Here is a little treat for any Billie B Brown fans, which will arrive just in time for Christmas. A hardback full colour collection of ten Billie stories! I have only seen the cover so far, and a sneak peek of a few of Aki's illustrations in colour - but what I have seen so far looks gorgeous!

Winter days and meditation with elephants

As the weather grows colder I am bunkering down with my laptop, busy with work. Over the long weekend I finally finished the first draft of Book Four of my contribution to the Our Australian Girl series. I have loved writing Lina and feel slightly wistful about winding up my time with her, though it's been great to start hearing from my young readers.

I sometimes forget, because I am still so involved in writing the series, that my first two books are already out there, and only this week I visited a school where a group of girls came up to say how much they love Lina, which was a delightfully unexpected thrill. I feel very lucky to be writing for this series because there are already so many great authors on board and the books are already so well-loved by children and adults alike.

My third book in this series, Lina at the Games, comes out next month, and I think it might just be my favourite. Lina meets a boy on a bus who, with a single letter, changes the whole future of the Olympics. If you are interested in coming along to hear more about Lina and the Our Australian Girl series, I will speaking at the Northcote Library at 4pm on Thursday, June 20th.

Other exciting news, which I will post in more detail later, is that the fabulous Aki Fukuoka, illustrator of the Billie B Brown series, is coming to Melbourne for the Writers Festival. We will be appearing together at MWF on the 24th, 25th and 26th of August, then doing some bookstore events later that week. I will keep you posted - so watch this space if you'd like to see Aki in action! Hopefully there might even be a few previews of our new Billie Mysteries.

Lastly, I have finally begun sketching out ideas for a picture book I am illustrating for New Orleans author, Whitney Stewart, with whom I worked on Becoming Buddha: the Life of Siddhartha. Whitney has written a beautiful text on meditation for children which I can't wait to begin. It is warm and child-friendly but also has some wonderful ideas for meditation exercises that I'm keen to try myself. Other than the odd dabble at the end of a yoga class, I have never had much luck developing an on-going meditation practice, even though I know it's EXACTLY what I need, but these exercises make me think that even an easily-distracted, restless, over-thinker like myself could possibly manage them at home.

To get myself into the right frame of mind, I have booked myself a week at Varuna, the Writers' Retreat in July, where, in the foggy quietness of the Blue Mountains, I hope to meditate my way back into illustrating again - having not illustrated anything in over two years! I have also enlisted the help of designer extraordinaire, Regine Abos, who I worked with on Gabrielle Wang's The Race For The Chinese Zodiac. We have already met once to discuss how to combine my old-fashioned hand-drawn/painted artwork with her groovy design skills, in the way we did with the Zodiac book, even though we are planning on a very different look to accompany Whitney's text. Think Saul Bass meets Bruno Munari and a little bit of Eric Carle thrown in. With elephants! (Because who doesn't love elephants?) Will post pics-in-progress when I can. Wish me luck! I hope winter is treating you well and you are somewhere warm doing something you love.

* This is an early sketch from Mannie and the Long Brave Day, by Martine Murray

Mysteries!

I've been holding off sharing this exciting news for as long as possible but have finally received the go-ahead to spill the beans. So here it is! A brand new Billie B Brown series - for older readers!

Over the last couple of years, I have been noticing older girls in book signing queues, who tell me while they know the Billie and Jack books have become too easy for them to read, they're not quite ready to let them go. I have also come across young girls who are such great readers that they read a whole Billie book while waiting in line! So, if you know a little girl or boy like this - this series is for you!

There will only be six books in this series, and they follow Billie B Brown and her friends; Jack, Mika and Alex, all of them now a few years older. They decide to start up a Secret Mystery Club and scour the neighbourhood looking for mysteries to uncover, beginning with the haunted house at the end of their street. The books will be triple the length of the existing Billie books with a much more complex writing style and story structure for older readers, but still maintain the accessibility and child-friendliness of the original series. The wonderful Aki Fukuoka will be illustrating them again and this is a sample cover. What do you think?

I have just finished writing the first book, which will come out in September, the second not far behind in November. Each story will link up with the others though they can be read in any order. I am really excited about this series, I hope you will love them, too!

*NB: originally this book was going to be titled Haunted House - but we changed it to Spooky House at the last minute, so if you see books online advertised as Haunted House, you'll know it's the same book, they have just used the old cover image *

Sydney bound

Next week I will be at the Sydney Writers Festival as a part of the Schools Program and then running a workshop on Writing For Children on the 25th. At the festival I will be mainly talking to upper primary children, but for any Billie B Brown and Hey Jack! fans, I will be touring schools and bookstores the following week.

Here is a list of public events if you want to come and say hi or have your book signed:

Monday 27th May:
The Children's Bookshop
6 Hannah Street
Beecroft.
4.30 - 5.30pm

Tuesday 28th May:
Shearers Bookstore
Shop F6, Market Place
122-138 Flood Street
Leichhardt.
4pm - 5pm

Wednesday 29th May:
Better Read Than Dead
265 King Street
Newtown.
4.30 - 5.30pm

Saturday 1st June:
Kinokuniya Books (Costume Party!)
The Galleries, Level 2
500 George Street.
12.30 - 1.30pm

Bloomin Books
1/153 Denman Avenue,
Caringbah.
2.30 - 3.30pm.

Okay I am excited enough about going to Sydney for two weeks but guess what? Molly Ringwald is a guest of the SWF! I will have to hope I don't run into her in the lift or I may just faint. The Breakfast Club is still one of my all-time favourite teen flicks.

               

Autumn travels

I have just recently returned from two weeks of school visits in Singapore and Malaysia where I was thrilled to discover that the Billie and Jack books have already found themselves a little following over there! This was partly due to the brilliant preparation put in by the librarians who booked me to visit their schools, but also because, luckily for me, the books were already available to buy in both these places. Often international schools have to order my books in from overseas so this was a lovely and unexpected surprise. One delightful children's bookstore in Singapore had even put them in her shop window! Of course I HAD to take a photo.

I love visiting South-East Asia, not only because I spent a big part of my childhood there, but also because my mother now lives in Kuala Lumpur, so my week in schools there was a great chance to get to spend some time with her, too. I love the hot humid weather, the food, the people, and I love speaking in international schools where the kids come from so many different backgrounds and have already lived such fascinating lives at such a young age. My last three days in Kuala Lumpur were in a really lovely smaller international school, where there were turtles in the gardens and the girls wore quite possibly the most adorable school uniform I have ever seen.

The students were wonderful, so engaged and switched on and SO enthusiastic about my visit. Every lunch time I was visited by dozens of students in the library who wanted to chat with me or have me sign autographs. I had been instructed by the librarian, as I often am in schools, not to sign scraps of paper, only autograph books, so one little girl who was determined not to miss out on my signature, dashed off and came back in a few minutes with this.

I thought she deserved extra points for her creative genius and told her so.

Now I am back home and back at work. My latest Hey Jack! has arrived in the mail and I'm about to start the next draft of book four of my Our Australian Girl series, before I have to head off to Sydney in a few weeks for the writers festival and another book tour. I am also working on something very new and exciting for any Billie B Brown fans, but I can't say yet as it is all still Top Secret! Hopefully I will be able to give you some clues in my next blog post.

Until then, I will dream of spicy Indian-Malay breakfasts while I eat my very boring muesli back in Autumnal Melbourne, where the leaves of my young mulberry tree are just starting to fall and I am happy to be home.