When the bee stings

Books!
Writing!
Ideas!

These are definitely a few of our favourite things.

And, as we trust you all know, Books! Writing! Ideas! are now handily housed in one place: the Wheeler Centre. And their inaugural event features yet another one of our favourite things: Storytelling! In fact, A Gala Night of Storytelling. Doesn't it just sound divine.

And look at this line-up.* Chloe Hooper! Paul Kelly! Cate Kennedy! Judith Lucy! Shane Maloney! David Malouf! John Marsden! Alex Miller! John Safran! Christos Tsiolkas! Tara June Winch! Alexis Wright!

We trust they will all linger alluringly on the literati red carpet in fine gowns and fabulous suits.

So if you want to take in pearls of wisdom from the fascinating writers who put the scintillating stories in the pages of the books who put the proud glow on the noses on the faces of the peoples of the centrepiece of Melbourne's UNESCO City of Literature...

You're too late!
Because they just passed by - well actually it's sold out (we know that you know we meant that).

But you might be able to take some pictures...

And if you haven't checked out the calendar of coming events at the Wheeler Centre - go forth and do so immediately. Soapboxes! Debuts! In Conversations! Spotlights! Reading the City!

Oh my - now we don't feel so bad.



* We cheer for John Marsden who is flying the kids' book flag. But we also show our range. Don't tell anyone, but sometimes we do read adult books. And we listen to adult music. And laugh at adult humour. Yes, yes it's true.

Time After Time

This year's Newbery Medal winner, When you Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, is doing the rounds of our office. It's one of those books that as soon as you've finished you want to read again from the start so you can see how all the pieces click together. (Kind of like Fight Club, only really really not at all like Fight Club.) It's got us thinking about other time-travel books. Here are a few of our favourites:

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

This is the only book that the wonderfully endearing Miranda, who tells the story of When You Reach Me, ever reads. Truth to tell, I generally read it at least once year myself - so I knew right away that Miranda was going to be a girl after my own heart. (It was clearly completely justified that I buy Wrinkle in Time again in the beautiful new edition - but why did I not know there was a box set?!) In some ways, A Swiftly Tilting Planet is really more about time travel in the sense of going somewhen than Wrinkle is, which is about travelling through time to a somewhere. (And don't even get us started on Many Waters - where the O'Keefe twins find themselves in biblical times when everyone is, you know, sleeping with angels, and having tiny unicorns as pets.) But it all begins with Wrinkle, and what a beginning it is. (She says sternly, glaring at the wall of the adjoining office wherein resides a children's book editor who has NEVER READ MADELEINE L'ENGLE.)


Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce

This book will gently break your heart. Time travel is not just about rollicking adventure, it's about memory and change, being young and growing old, the eternal and the ephemeral, loneliness and friendship. And gardens and clocks and iceskates. Oh, the iceskates.

Cicada Summer by Kate Constable

We love this book. It's a moving, gentle, funny, heart-squeezing timeslip tale. Eloise needs out of her now - but where or when does she stumble into? We suspect this book might be a time-traveller in another way too - it feels enduring, sort of out-of-time... classic.

Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park

Speaking of a classic... If you're interested in children's fiction or you have been a child anytime since 1980 and you have not read this book, then we can only envy you the great pleasure that awaits. Reading Ruth Park's autobiographies, A Fence Around the Cuckoo and Fishing in the Styx, is another wonderful kind of time travel - especially if you are interested in New Zealand and Sydney in the 30s and 40s.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams

Unless, like Marvin the paranoid android, you are Very Very Patient, you can only get to Milliways, the restaurant at the end of the universe, by travelling through time. But once you do arrive, you can sit and eat in comfort while you watch the universe end. Best floorshow ever.

Prince Caspian by CS Lewis

Not a book about time travel as such, but Queen Susan's horn brings the four Pevensie children out of the deep past (Narnia's past, that is - for the children it's only been about a year). And that scene at the beginning where the they wander round the ruins of Cair Paravel gradually working out that hundreds of years have passed since they were last in Narnia is wonderful, and a little bit heartbreaking. For some reason, this paragraph, where Susan finds a chess piece they played with centuries before, stays with us:

'All now saw what it was - a little chess-knight, ordinary in size but extraordinarily heavy because it was made of pure gold; and the eyes in the horses head were two tiny rubies or rather one was for the other had been knocked out.'

Merryll of the Stones by Brian Caswell

I felt sure we'd talked about this one before on Alien Onion - but if we did I couldn't find it. This has absolutely everything you could want in a timeslip adventure: welsh dragons; handsome, black-haired Welsh boys; magicians; usurpers; rebels and a modern girl who might be an ancient queen. In the interests of full disclosure, the very beginning takes a bit of getting through, but after that it's hands-down fabulous.

The Boy, the Bear, the Baron, the Bard & The Hero of Little Street by Gregory Rogers.

In one adventure The Boy slips into Shakespeare's London via the magic of theatre - the detail in this book is amazing, right down to heads on sticks. In the other adventure it's through the magic of painting that The Boy slips into seventeenth century Holland - more stunning streetscape detail, perhaps best to avoid the butcher scenes if you tend to the squeamish.

Honorary film mention:
Back to the Future

The time machine is a DeLorean that requires 1.21 gigawatts (pronounced jigawatts, by Doc Brown) of power. We don't feel any further explanation is required.

But for good measure we'll throw in: Michael J Fox, a flux capacitor, skateboarding, rock 'n' roll and a main character literally fading out of existence.

Dishonorable mention:
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

I understand that this book has a place in some people's hearts.* But not mine. Not when I had to read it for school. Not now. Not ever.

Which time-travel books are your favourites?

*Actually I don't understand this at all. It is inconceivable.

Books Ahoy!

As we have said before, we're for books and, of course, we're for reading, and we're for literacy and numeracy.

And we're for beaches.

And we're especially for beaches with bookshelves that are for literacy and numeracy. So we're definitely for this...



Brought to us (very appropriately) by the letters ABC and their news service.

Friday stuff and items

1. The year got off to a ripper of a start when the short list for the 2010 Territory Read NT Book of the Year was announced and it featured Barry Jonsberg's Cassie and Leonie Norrington's The Devil You Know. Hooray, Barry! Hooray, Leonie! Hooray!

2: And it continued to be awesome with Nathan Jurevicius winning the Aurealis Award for Best Illustrated Book/Graphic Novel for the wonderful, the delightful, the strange and quirky (the pink!) Scarygirl. Hooray, Nathan! Hooray, Scarygirl! Hooray!

3. In a few short days, Lord Sunday, the very last book in Garth Nix's The Keys to the Kingdom series will be out in the world, and the Will of the Architect will finally be made whole. (And ZOMG the ending puts The Max in climax*.) But you don't even have to wait the few days to get started. You can listen to Garth reading the first two chapters RIGHT NOW. Download the podcast from iTunes or listen online - both links are here.

4. 'Don't ever tell anybody anything.' Vale J. D. Salinger.

5. So, the Mothership threw down the gauntlet with this amazing display - and on Wednesday we kind of accidentally picked it up. A happy confluence of events saw us inundated with more cake than we knew what to do with.** There were birthdays, and a sort-of going away that we are refusing to accept so are mostly pretending it isn't happening, and there was this array:

ISOLATE. ENHANCE

This is made of ice-cream, people! ICE-CREAM! It was a good day.

* I can't believe I just wrote that - but it's totally true.

** Ok, this is a lie, we knew exactly what to do with it, it just took us a couple of days rather than the usual 15 minutes.

What Do Editors Do All Day, Part Two - Structural Editing

Herewith, the second in our occasional series What Do Editors Do All Day. You can find the first in the series, our essay on copyediting, here. Today we want to talk about Structural Editing.

If we were structural editing this occasional series, we might ask, 'Why didn't you begin this series with Structural Editing - given that it precedes copyediting in the linear process of producing a book?' To which we might reply to ourselves, 'You make a valid point, but it just works better this way. Can we keep it as is, please?' To which we would then say, 'Right you are. Carry on. But can I just draw your attention to something else over here...' Etc, etc, you get the idea.

Part Two: Structural Editing



*

Again, thanks to all the original, unknown-to-us authors of these lolcats (and lolbears and lolruses lolephant seals**).

*Actually, none of us can ever remember suggesting a prologue - it mostly seems to work in the reverse. But the point stands.
** (UPDATE) Thanks for the heads-up, Anonymous commenter! This brings up a lesson that is all too easy to learn the hard way: if you lose an author's trust by making silly mistakes, like mixing up your flippered marine mammals, it's very hard to convince them you know what you are talking about on the big stuff. Perhaps our structural note should have read: 'Dear author, it is not clear how your protag shape-shifts from walrus to elephant seal and back again - seemingly at the drop of a bukkit.' For further reading on this subject, I recommend www.walrusbucketsaga.com

Stationery 3 - The Revenge

So, we have had the Top FIVE (six) FOR THE WIN stationery items and the Top THREE (four) FAIL stationery items.

What's next? As Jed Bartlet would say. And in the spirit of Let Bartlet Be Bartlet, we say: Let Stationery Be Better.

And with that we give you the Onion list of:

Oh-I-Wish-It-Existed stationery items:

• Self-organising notepad that records all those helpful tips jotted down and never to be found again.
• An auto-complete proof-checker and print-order generator (once-activated it checks all corrections efficiently, identifies any unseen errors and corrects them, and packages up the final PERFECT proofs - with trim marks - in a bundle with a letter to the printer and a completed print order).
• Right-sized, right-strength rubber bands.
• A filing robot that takes any document or photocopy and puts it neatly away in an easy-to-find file.
• A device that automatically sorts and tidies shelves, boxes, files, my brain...
• A mini desk-sized guillotine (with Buffy on it, and it's scratch 'n' sniff and smells like purple lollies, and beeps at 2.30 every afternoon like an editorial alarm. And also gives me unsolicited compliments.)
• The absolutely perfect never-fail pocket-sized pencil sharpener.
• Household sponges with labels, eg floor sponge, toilet sponge, sink sponge.*
• A nice green plant.*

Meanwhile, in the Mothership they are letting Bakers be Bakers. Behold this range of items that once-activated did not remain stationary** for very long. A beloved member of staff was leaving, and it seems the Mothership expressed their feelings through cake. Lots and lots of lots of cake. Jealous.





* No, we don't know how these items qualify as stationery either. As we have said throughout this stationery-fest, disobedient Onions. Nor can we fathom how one Onion has failed to realise that a nice green plant is not a pipe dream - nice green plants do actually exist in the world and could be easily, you know, acquired.

** By-the-by, if you have trouble telling your stationery from your stationary, here are a few mnemonics you might find useful . (1) The friendly person who sells you pens and post-its is a 'stationer', clearly not a 'stationar'. Problem solved. Or (2) remember that the 'e' in stationery is for 'envelope'. Problem solved. Or (3) paper ends in 'er', so does stationery. Problem solved. Onions - we are here to help.

Highly Relevant to Our Interests

Not sure if you've noticed - we're pretty subtle about it - but we Onions like to read. A lot. And we like to eat cake. A lot.

So you can imagine (and we have, in many idle daydreams) that if there were a book group that also baked cakes, we would be IN FAVOUR of it.

Well, let me unfold a tale of joy into your shell-like ear...

A couple of days ago we received an email from Karen Healey, author of Guardian of the Dead, that contained The Best Fan Letter Ever from a girl in the USA who had read an advance copy of Guardian. It is the Best Letter Ever not only because the reader was clearly smart and articulate and funny and had really liked the book - but because she and her friends had BAKED A GUARDIAN OF THE DEAD CAKE.

Because... I almost can't type for the awesome ... they belong to a book group called LET THEM EAT CAKE, where they bake cakes inspired by the books they read.

Head over to Karen's blog, wherein she is dead chuffed and does some BAKING OF HER OWN.

And for more pics and more amazing creations check out Let Them Eat Cake's own blog.

Here is our awesome Bruno-designed cover of Guardian of the Dead.

And here is the also-very-cool US cover, which helps puts the cake in context.

Stationery 2 – When good pens go bad

On Monday we revealed the Onions’ Top five FOR THE WIN stationery items. So much love, so little time.

But it seems that when passions ride high, disappointments gallop alongside. When asked to list the top THREE items of stationery that frustrate or would never darken their desk, the vitriol flowed.

The ire was not focussed on items with a core-functionality for which people had no use (although there was a marked lack of love for the mouse mat), but rather on items that failed to adequately perform their core-functionality.


Top three FAIL stationery items:

1: DEFECTIVE ADHESIVES

• Sticky tape that isn't magic tape - seriously why does it exist?
• Sticky notes (they should stick for years not minutes).
• Sticky tape of the: 'I thought I was buying sticky tape but instead I've ended up with some flimsy bit of cellophane with a sad excuse for adhesive on the back’ school of sticky tape.
• Post-it notes that fall off.
• Gluestick.
• Clag & spray adhesive - the former doesn't secure much at all, and the latter sticks you to everything!

2. DEFECTIVE PENS–PENCILS

• Pencils with leads broken all the way through (how does that happen?).
• Thick or leaky biros, especially the leaky ones that pick up dust blobs or hairs on the point.
• Pencils with constantly snapping leads (especially those 'mechanical' ones).
• Leaky pens.
• 2B pencils that are not 2B.
• Ink, uncontained (i.e. smudged on my face, leaked in my pocket, in a puddle on my desk).

3: DEFECTIVE RUBBER BANDS

• Wrong-sized rubber bands.
• Rubber bands without enough give.
• Rubber bands with too much give.
• Rubber bands that are the wrong size or break as soon as you stretch them.
• Too-big rubber bands that you have to fit around the ms vertically.

4. DEFECTIVE PAPER CLIPS*

• Twisted paper clips (especially the ones with old sticky blu tac attached to them).
• Little paper clips, (especially the terrible plastic covered ones).
• When the giant paper clips are all tangled up with the small paper clips.
• Mating paper clips.

Dishonourable mentions:
Plastic sleeves, textured pads attached to keyboard & mouse on which you're meant to rest your hands (*shudders*), wall calendars with no room to write on, mouse mats, unlabelled manila folders, useless mini-staplers, useless non-sharpening plastic pencil sharpeners, mouse mats, staplers that constantly jam, mouse mats, year planners (I much prefer a Buddhist approach of my diary - one day at a time).



* Yes. This is Item FOUR in our FAIL stationery top THREE. This disobedience is getting out of hand.

Three Million Cheers*

We want to say a

big

fat

humongous

CONGRATULATIONS
to Libba Bray
because...

Going Bovine has won the
Michael L Printz award.

Very well done, Libba - and very well deserved!

We are thrilled and delighted to be publishing Going Bovine
in Australia in February.
That's only a week and a bit away, people.

*As much as we love stationery, we're cheering for something MUCH more exciting than paper clips.

Stationery – in which we pander to fetishists

In our experience, stationery is something of a fetishised item.

Some people have been known to walk the aisles of Officeworks as a kind of meditation. Others will only copyedit with a Uniball Fine Deluxe (0.7mm dia.tungsten carbide ball - naturally). And most remember fondly the back-to-school treat of all new stationery ALL AT ONCE.

So in the service of science and in the spirit of nurturing this fetishism we polled the Onions for their Top FIVE stationery items, the Top THREE stationery items that incite them to fury, and their Top ONE Oh-I-Wish-It-Existed stationery item.

While we did unearth some interesting stationery trends (there’s a PhD in here somewhere) we were also alarmed to discover that for a bright bunch of Onions whose comprehension and numeracy skills are well-developed and exercised daily, most of them can neither count nor follow instructions.

It seems that, given a numbered list to complete, our fellow Onions believe it is perfectly acceptable to note more than one item of stationery (eg: sticky notes, sharpeners, rubbers; scissors, stapler, ruler) at one LIST item. One Onion also noted:

'I honestly can't think of any [items of stationery that frustrate me or would never darken my desk]. My heart warms towards all stationery.'

And then went on to list FIVE items of displeasure. This is what fetishism promotes, people – over-zealousness, contradiction and a marked lack of obedience.

We will be sharing our results over the next few days. So consider this a warning: if you don’t know your HB from your 2B, your fineliner from your art tip, your post-its from your page markers, maybe you should check back later in the week, when the fetishists have left the building.


Top five FOR THE WIN stationery items:

1: PENS*

• A slender blue ball-point with a bright consistent ink & a black fine-liner with a smooth flow (and no scratching on the paper).
• Pens - oh I love a particular kind of smooth flowing, fine but not too fine tip.
• Nice pens that write nicely.
• Free-flowing medium point biro (for firm handwriting).
• Papermate Kilometrico blue pen.
• Luscious fat, yet sleek, weighty but elegant, cool, black lacquered, chisel-nibbed fountain pen (and peacock-coloured bottle of fountain-pen ink).

2: PENCILS

• Pencils, pencils, pencils (good sharp pencils).
• A box of 64 Derwent pencils (still in original box with all pencils present, which my little sister was NEVER EVER allowed to touch on pain of death).**
• An army of coloured pencils (they flash me back to my first treasured Derwent set, all standing in perfect order of colour shade, in their tin). **
• Australian-made Staedtler HB pencil (sharp).
• Pencil (for scribbling all over authors' manuscripts).

3: PENCIL SHARPENERS***

• Pencil sharpener, pencil sharpener, pencil sharpener (for good sharp pencils).
• A pencil sharpener with a good action.
• Metal pencil sharpener that doesn't snap leads.
• Pencil sharpener, a good one - that also works on eyeliner.
• Pencil sharpener (to use while I think what to scribble on authors’ manuscripts next).

4: ADHESIVES

• Double-sided sticky tape.
• Magic tape.
• Scotch invisible tape - nothing else cuts it.
• Permanent spray glue.
• Clag (that distinctive smell recalls my first creative projects at kinder).

5: NOTEPADS

• Spiral bound notebooks.
• Notebooks - for all those lists.
• An extra fat, 320-page, dog-eared exercise book (the one I use for 'to do' lists, notes from meetings, discussion points with authors, new procedures to remember - absolutely everything all in one place).
• Brand-spanking new notepad (optimistic).

6: ERASERS****

• A good clean rubber (for rubbing out the markings of the good sharp pencils)
• Completely clean, unused, virginal rubbers (erm ... erasers).
• Rubber/eraser (for when I change my mind).

Honourable mentions:
Clever but expensive rubber bands which go four ways so they can grip a manuscript on all sides, post-it notes, brown paper, wire stands that hold folders at an angle, Manila folders, coffee machine, post-it notes, plastic clear-view sleeves, Sharpies, comfy chair, highlighters (plentiful in quantity and colour-range), smiley-face squeeze ball, post-it notes, scissors, stapler, ruler, paper, cardboard calendar tent, post-it notes, tiny bulldog clips, zip-up diary (so all the pesky loose items are safely secured), removable labels, gorgeous creamy, textured, deckle-edged, silk-to-the-touch writing paper and envelopes, post-it notes.





* Not a hint of fetishism here. No. None at all. Nope.
** SNAP! No, not the pencils. We’re not going to breathe on those Derwents, much less even consider snapping them. We are a little scared by these Derwent fetishists.
*** Who would have thunk it? Pencil fetishists like [GOOD] pencil sharpeners. Imagine.
**** Okay, we know this is List Item SIX in our stationery Top FIVE. It seems we can’t count or follow instructions either. (Birds of a flock, and all that.)

Technology - How Do I Love Thee?

Let me count the ways.

Even though there's PLENTY to read around here, sometimes we Onions go into something approximating a TIZZ when our email or (worse still) our whole computer system fails.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

What to do?
Who to turn to?
We flap about.

And then the seconds minutes hours tick by, and we realise we are now halfway through a manuscript that has been on our desk - trying to lure our attention away from the computer - for weeks days.

I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need,

Quiet reading time. It’s the business. But sometimes it's so hard to find. Especially when there's an avalanche of unread email to attend to, or editorial reports to write, or draft covers to consider, or book websites to check, or blogs to read - or, you know, the world to stay in touch with.

I love thee with a passion put to use

Yes. Enforced quiet reading time. It should be a bonus. Something to celebrate. But when it is prescribed by technology failure, it is underpinned by a sense of unease. (What am I missing? Who needs my attention? How can I possibly meet that deadline now?)

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

And this feeling is compounded when the almost-completed, due-today, in-progress copy-edited manuscript is locked into a computer system to which there is no access. (*tears hair* *takes deep breath* * has faith* *goes back to reading hard copy of new manuscript*)

And then the computer blinks back on...

Smiles, tears of all my life!

Hot Town, Summer in the City

We got this...* What you got?

Via the ever-helpful weather-watchers at the School of Earth Sciences.

*Definitely not our favourite kind of melting moments.