It’s late. I shouldn’t be doing this. I can hardly see. Slits for eyes. Been staring at a computer for what seems like years.
The days when I’m working at my day job start at 6.30am (cup of tea delivered to the bedside, thank you very much). Catch the ferry at 8, office by 9, ready for the second cup of coffee by 10 – usually ready for lunch by about 10.15.
Home on the 6.30 ferry. Dark. Wet. Cold. I hate winter.
Tonight: homework. Who ever knew there was so much to consider about picture books? I’ve stared at Max in Where the Wild Things Are for so long I want to slap him and put him to bed early.
I wish I could play on the monkey bars with Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge or go on a bear hunt with Helen Oxenbury. Today I was at the Children’s Bookshop in Ponsonby and someone very small was chanting rather loudly in amongst all the books: “Oh no! We can’t go under it. We can’t go over it…”
There are worse things to have to do, I know. People look at you very strangely on the ferry when they are reading the latest Dan Brown and you are reading the latest Anthony Browne. And laughing.
But now my eyeballs are falling out of my skull so I must stop.
That’s all by way of a long-winded explanation of why I can’t think or blog about anything else this week.
Although I do love this exchange from the John Irving/Stephen King/JK Rowling session in New York, which inevitably focused on poor old Harry and his imminent or otherwise demise:

King recalled that when he had a character kick a dog to death in his novel Dead Zone he received more letters of complaint than ever, to his surprise.
“You want to be nice and say ‘I’m sorry you didn’t like that’, but I’m thinking to myself number one, he was a dog not a person, and number two, the dog wasn’t even real,” he said.
“I made that dog up, it was a fake dog, it was a fictional dog, but people get very, very involved,” King said.
Rowling noted that Irving had killed off many more characters than she had.
“When fans accuse me of sadism, which doesn’t happen that often, I feel I’m toughening them up to go on and read John and Stephen’s books,” she said.
“I think they’ve got to be toughened up somehow. It’s a cruel literary world out there.”

I love to read kids’ reviews of books – my book, or anyone else’s for that matter. It’s fascinating to hear what elements they pick up on, and how they see the world you’ve created.
Here’s a lovely review by Callum from Laingholm Primary School, published on LeafSalon:

This book has more action than a movie and is absolutely brilliant! My favourite character was Lily Swann. I liked her because she was taken as a slave by pirates and managed to take a ship from the pirates without fighting. She then became a queen among the pirates.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so?
The smell of roses, you think? No, mouldering books.
~ Andre Sinyavsky

Dina Rabinovitch takes on the “anti-readers”, with a brief overview of the kidlit scene in the UK, a sprinkling of smart reviews, and a few hints to parents about how to engage kids with books and authors:

It is one of the many mini-miracles of the great flourishing of children’s writing that children’s literature should be so strong in a country where the anti-readers hold sway … The groundswell in children’s literature has been child-led; it’s been playground word-of-mouth success first, with the adult critics running along behind.

The anti-readers, she says, are “the people – many are parents, some are teachers or classroom assistants – who simply do not know what it is to read, to handle books for the pleasure of their feel, to savour words, stories and pictures with no endgame in sight at all.”
I just can’t imagine what that’s like, but it sounds terribly bleak.

The second Swashbuckler book, The Pirate’s Revenge, goes to the printer tomorrow apparently.
I do hope it’s all right.
It’ll be out next month.

Somewhere in the blogosphere, a contentious kidlit enthusiast has been compiling a list of the 200 “coolest girls” in children’s books.
Here’s her (and her readers’) top ten:
1 Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
2 Lyra from the His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman
3 Jo March from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
4 Laura Ingalls from the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder
5 Harriet M. Welch from Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
6 Hermione Granger from Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling
7 Turtle from The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
8 Arrietty from The Borrowers series by Mary Norton
9 Meg from A Wrinkle in Time (and sequels) by Madeleine L’Engle
10 Nancy Blackett from Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

We’ll accept that these poor US-based people have not yet had the pleasure of reading the Swashbuckler trilogy, or, obviously, Lily Swann would have been number one.
But who’d like to explain to me how Anne of those infernally boring green gables is cool?
I’m happy to accept that her lesser-know fictional colleague, Emily of New Moon by Montgomery is pretty cool. But Anne’s a wuss. A dull, wimpy, uninteresting wuss.
Give me, any day, the obnoxious Mary Lennox of The Secret Garden, Katy doing what she did, or indeed the mischievous Jo March.
Lyra? Yes. She’s way cool.
I’m glad Hermione got a run, although Harry and Ron would snort pumpkin juice out their noses at the idea of her being cool. I have high hopes of Hermione.
It’s an hilariously dated list, reflecting the respondents own childhood reading of the Victorian classics, in which, we’d have to admit, cool was normally not an attribute of female protagonists. For God’s sake, that goody-two-shoes Sara Crewe from A Little Princess made number 18. Not a cool bone in her body. And don’t start me on Fancy Nancy Pantsy Drew.
Where’s Kit from Cue for Treason? Eloise, surely the coolest child that ever ordered room service? Olivia?
I vote for the scalliwags and swashbucklers, like Nancy Blackett. The black sheep. The girls who swam against the current of their times. The heroines who made their readers believe that anything was possible – even writing children’s books.

I don’t see why I’m not in Africa. I ought to be in Africa. I planned to be in Africa. I really meant to be in Africa.
But I’m not.
Not this year.
The story is too dull to tell, but the point is that I really haven’t been anywhere far far away for months and everyone in this house is getting itchy feet.
Morocco was supposed to be next on the list, after we’d been to southern Africa. We’ve bought lots of books about it, but not the tickets.
I keep meaning to get to Uzbekistan too. I have wanted to stand in the Registan like Robert Byron for as long as I can remember. The turquoise tiles. The dry hills. The textiles and mud walls and mutton stew.
I have to go to London at some point this year for research purposes. It’s a very good idea, I’ve found, to set one’s books in distant places, because then you have to go do the research in person. And really, while you’re in London, you may as well travel around and look at some gardens and boats and castles and swords. Maybe buy a book or two. That kind of thing.
And then again, there’s not much point going all that way and not going to Ireland as well. Or Wales. Or both.
The next book is, very cleverly I think, set in Amsterdam, Venice and Seville.
But then again I still haven’t been to Russia. Or Portugal.
Or Broome.
Or …

Well, I’m home. Or not, as the case may be. Anyone who says “home is where the heart is” hasn’t ever left it, clearly. The heart can be in more than one place at a time.
Flew out of Melbourne (which is home, where you get woken by kookaburras, and the ghost gums lurk in the fog) to Auckland (which is also home – where I live, with my partner, in what has recently been dubbed a little gingerbread house, on an island).
In between I suffered my usual airport confusion, not knowing where I was going or leaving. Looked for the Bar Coluzzi cafe which is actually at Sydney airport. At least I didn’t go searching for Charlie’s, which is in Dubai.
But, finally, here I am. We’re not rushing into anything today. Late breakfast. Now it’s 4pm and I just dragged myself out of my pyjamas. Spent the afternoon so far with face under a mudpack while tearing recipes out of old food magazines.
I’m recovering from a week of frantic school readings on top of the usual family events (four basketball games, many meals, school drop-offs and pick ups, birthday celebrations for a ten-year-old, maybe the odd antique shop, and one or two cups of coffee). Saw Pirates of the Caribbean, Ice Age 2, most of the old BBC version of Pride and Prejudice on DVD, and an awful lot of NBA 2006 on Playstation over my nephew’s shoulder. And study and work and … now I need a holiday.
On the plane on the way over I re-read Edith Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers, which I hadn’t read since I was ten or so.

I have often thought, writes her young narrator Oswald, that if the people who write books for children knew a little more it would be better. I shall not tell you anything about us except what I should like to know about if I was reading the story and you were writing it. Albert’s uncle says I ought to have put this in the preface, but I never read prefaces, and it is not much good writing things just for people to skip. I wonder other authors have never thought of this.

Ha!

Almost at the end of my Melbourne stint, and I’ve lost count of the number of school groups I’ve met.
I’ve been reading a bit, talking about pirates a lot. We’re all pirate mad at present. In every school there seem to be several pirate experts who can hotly debate the exact shape of a scimitar or the symbols on Blackbeard’s flag. We are past the age of the dinosaur experts who scoff if you don’t know your diplosaurus from your T Rex.
I have even met the great-great-great-many-greats-nephew of Calico Jack Rackham.
I usually say “people tell me that girls couldn’t be pirates” and then go on to explain that there were really women pirates. I love it when a whole class roars back: “Girls can so!”
I love looking up and seeing fifty spellbound faces, wide eyes, and intense concentration. I love the gruesome questions about various pirate methods of destruction (I’m not sure if the teachers like that so much). I love it when the kids laugh at my jokes. I love it when they make me laugh.
Tomorrow morning I’m going to read at my old school. The biggest thing I remember happening when I was there was the moon landing. The whole school sat out on the cold lino in the corridor, staring at one old black-and-white telly. There were regular bushfires. And snakes lurking beyond the oval. We didn’t even have a library then – we had a cupboard off the hallway. I wonder if it’s changed?
I never knew it would all be this much fun. First, I just get to write stuff. Then, somebody actually publishes it. And then I get to read and talk to kids about stuff they find fascinating.
How cool is that?

I’m going home this afternoon. Melbourne. Soul of the South.
Will try to blog from there.
I’m reading at several schools, including my old school, and on 23 July, I’ll be at the Chatterbooks Adventure Afternoon. Christine Harris, author of the Spy Girl series, and David Harris, author of the Cliffhangers books, will be there too, for an afternoon of “swashbuckling, espionage and thrill seeking”.
Chatterbooks is run by the Eltham Bookshop, and offers “a chance to talk about your favourite books and authors, and let us introduce you to the most exciting and readable books. Don’t forget that we also run writing and storytelling workshops and close encounters with acclaimed authors. Especially for 8-13 year olds and their families.”
It’s from 2 to 3.30pm at Eltham Library, Panther Place, Eltham.
For more information or to book in, phone 03 9439 8700 or email elthambookshop@bigpond.com.