I can’t paint.

But Trevor Pye can.

He illustrated my brand new book, The Importance Of Green and he’s done a fabulous job. I’m downright furious.  Who cares about my writing when they’re dazzled with such visual mastery? How dare he outshine me with his artistic brilliance and fabulous flair for detail? (Sigh.)

Look. I’ll include a double page spread from my book, just to show you. See? The nerve of the man.

ImportanceOfGreen_pages

Yes, I’m literally green with envy.

Oh, what’s the book about? So glad you asked. It’s about a boy who paints with green until one day, he runs out of his favourite colour. Painting becomes a disaster, like his line of cars that turns into a traffic jam, because there’s no green for the lights.

Disaster looms and he needs to find a solution. I can’t give it away … but he finds an interesting solution to a colourful problem.

Right, that’s it from me. I’m off to buy a maths compass. It’s the only way I’ll ever draw a perfect circle … maybe I can ask Trevor for tips.

If he’s still speaking to me, of course.

Best

Leonie Agnew

Yep, I’m Leonie Agnew, the next Star Author for June and I’ve nothing to say. I’m not giving you a single writing tip. Not one. Why?

Because you might learn something useful.

I can’t have that. You might write your own book. And when you’re sunning yourself by the pool outside your billion dollar mansion, sipping drinks from diamond studded goblets and snap chatting with J K Rowling … guess what you’ll be? MY COMPETITION!

I will be extra grumpy because I drink out of plastic cups, don’t own a tent, let alone a mansion and well, J K keeps ignoring my tweets. Can’t imagine why.

Anyway, the point is, my lips are sealed. I won’t tell you about the children’s writer’s conference in Christchurch. I certainly won’t mention the workshop on editing with Joanna Orwin. Instead, I will take her tips to my grave, written in microfiche and encased in glass, worn around my wrist and disguised as a friendship bead. Why should I tell anyone about the importance of editing and taking out adverbs, even if it does avoid unnecessary description and make your writing sharp?

She also told me something so top-secret, I’m thinking of writing it down with heat sensitive ink. That way, when historians dig up my body and find the bead (and they will, mark my words), the warmth from their breath will make the words evaporate. Clever, right?

No one will ever know Joanna said take words out and add words in – necessary if you haven’t milked the crucial moments in your chapter. That’s like, after the big moment in each chapter, you need to show the main character’s emotional reaction, not just the physical. So if your character wants to run away, it pays to make them think about it first. Understanding character motivation helps the reader to care and keeps them turning pages.

Yep, wild horses couldn’t drag that information from me. Oh … darn.

Right.

Well … give J K Rowling my best, okay? I will come to all your book launches and eat the free food. Mostly because I’ll be unemployed and starving.

Bye for now,

Leonie Agnew

P.S. I think I was supposed to tell you stuff about me. I’m the author of Super Finn and The Importance of Green. That’s a start. Stay tuned and I’ll tell you facts about my life that may or may not be true.

Usually I tell the truth, until I get bored. But it’s not telling lies. When you write lies down it’s called writing fiction, and that’s completely okay.  Just ask your librarian.

Thanks for joining us Leonie!  We’re looking forward to hearing all about your books and your writing.

Well it’s Wednesday and I’ve already had a busy writing week. On Sunday, I went to a writer’s meeting, expecting to hear a talk by a local bookseller, and was delighted to find he had been replaced: not because I didn’t want hear him, but because the new guest speaker was children’s author Janice Marriott.

Janice is one of those clever writers who writes everything. Novels, school readers, non-fiction, plays, and TV and radio scripts (she was one of the writers for the award-winning TV programme ‘The WotWots’, produced by Weta Workshops).

It was very inspiring to hear her talk, especially about her belief that writing is something that happens on top of life, and how important it is for writers to have another life, other than writing. This cheered me up, as fitting the time to write into the rest of my life is something I struggle with constantly (as I know do lots of other writers).

It was also very exciting to hear that she thinks her best book is Thor’s Tale (which won the junior fiction category of the New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults in 2007), and then to go home and find it on my eldest son’s bookshelf. The story is about an 11-year old boy, Thor, who works on a sub-Antarctic whaling station where he encounters Shackleton and his fellow explorers as they set out to explore Antarctic. I am looking forward to starting it tonight.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of talking (on Skype) to a wonderful group of kids from Dyer Street School in Lower Hutt. They are all part a book club of keen readers that meets once a week to discuss and research books and writers. And they found out about me on the Christchurch Kids Blog!

We had a lovely chat (even though there was an enormous thunder storm going on in the background here) and they asked some great questions, such as: Why do I like poo so much? (oh no!); Who is my favourite author? (a tough one, but in the end I said Margaret Mahy and Kyle Mewburn); and Why hadn’t I written more books? (which made me think I need to get on with it).

Tomorrow, I am off to Golden Yarns, the biennial children’s writers’ and illustrators’ hui in Christchurch. I will be attending workshops with some of New Zealand’s top children’s writers and listening to publishers and booksellers talk about what’s hot and new in New Zealand book publishing.

I’m really looking forward to it, although it means this will be my last post as Star Author. So I wanted to say, thank you very much for having me. I’ve really enjoyed the blog, especially because, as with all writing, it has opened up new paths and ideas for me to ponder and explore.

Happy reading and goodbye for now from Whaingaroa Raglan (in the picture).

Sarah

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Between Raglan (where I live) and Hamilton (which is the nearest city), there is a range of large hills. To get from Raglan to Hamilton (or the other way) you have to go up and over a pass in these hills. People in Raglan call this “going over the divvy”. (Divvy by the way, is short for deviation. I assume the Raglan deviation is called that because there used to be another, older road, and when they built the new one it followed a different path, so it was a deviation.)

Anyway, our car, which was rather old and very decrepit, made it all the way up to the tip top of the deviation, then died.

This was OK. Raglan is a small and very friendly place and lots of lovely people stopped to help. Our car was towed away to the scrap yard and we got a new one. The new car is just the same as our old one, except that it is even older, but rather less decrepit. This makes things a touch confusing, as it means our new car is actually our old new car, or our new old car, and our old car was our new old car, or our old new car. It’s a good thing it’s been scrapped!

But the best thing about our new old, old new car is that it has a CD player. So now when we’re making the long drive over the divvy and back, we can listen to stories, and this week we’ve been listening to Roald Dahl.

Now I love Roald Dahl’s stories, and the reason I love them is that they are so BIG. Everything about them is big. They have fabulous fantastical plots, tons of action, wacky language, amazing ideas and larger than life characters. It is as if he has taken a normal story (beginning, middle and end) and crammed as much as he can in. Then a bit more. And then an incy-wincy bit more. Then he’s sprinkled on a handful of fun and craziness, just to be sure, and he’s slammed the story shut.

So far, we’ve had The Witches, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Enormous Crocodile (with his cunning plans and clever tricks), Esio Trot, Danny the Champion of the World, and The BFG.

I have especially enjoyed The BFG, because somehow I have managed to get all this way through my life without ever having read or heard it. (If you haven’t read it yet either, BFG is short for Big Friendly Giant.) Also because it is very funny and full of huge (literally) characters. Not only is there the 24-foot high BFG, who catches and bottles dreams, then blows them into the bedrooms of children who need them, but there are nine other revolting people-eating giants (Fleshlumpeater; Bonecruncher; Manhugger; Childchewer; Meatdripper; Gizzardgulper; Maidmasher; Bloodbottler; Butcherboy). There is also Sophie, a little girl in her nightie who helps the BFG stop the people-eating giants, and the Queen of England.

Fantastic! My kids have been so inspired by the stories they have drawn some great pictures. Here’s a selection; perhaps you’ll add one of your own?

The reluctant assassin is Riley, a Victorian boy who is suddenly plucked from his own time and whisked into the twenty-first century, accused of murder and on the run. Riley has been pulled into the FBI’s covert W.A.R.P. operation (Witness Anonymous Relocation Program). He and young FBI Agent Chevie Savano are forced to flee terrifying assassin-for-hire Albert Garrick, who pursues Riley through time and will not stop until he has hunted him down. Barely staying one step ahead, Riley and Chevie must stay alive and stop Garrick returning to his own time with knowledge and power that could change the world forever.

If you’re a copy of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series you need to grab a copy of The Reluctant Assassin, the first book in Eoin’s new W.A.R.P. series.  Reserve your copy at the library now.

My Dear Mother,

Well, I’ve gone and done it. I’ve joined the Army!

Don’t be angry at me, Mother dear. I know you were glad when I wasn’t chosen in the ballot. But some of my friends were, and since they will be fighting for King and Country, I want to do the same.

It’s New Zealand, 1914, and the biggest war the world has known has just broken out in Europe.

William eagerly enlists for the army but his younger brother, Edmund, is a conscientious objector and refuses to fight. While William trains to be a soldier, Edmund is arrested.

Both brothers will end up on the bloody battlefields of France, but their journeys there are very different. And what they experience at the front line will challenge the beliefs that led them there.

My Brother’s War is a compelling story about two brothers who have very different opinions and experiences of the First World War.  William feels very strongly that he needs to play his part in the war and so he enlists in the army.  The people in his town commend him for being brave and doing his part.  He believes he is doing what is right to protect his country and the people he loves.  He can’t understand his brother and thinks that his refusal to enlist is ‘wrong and stupid.’  His brother, Edmund, is a conscientious objector who believes it is wrong to go to war and kill other people.  The story switches between their two points-of-view so you see the huge differences in their experience of war.  The story is mainly told in the third person, but each of the characters write letters to their mother which gives more of an insight into their thoughts and feelings.

You experience the build up to the fighting and the horrible conditions of the battlefield through William’s story, but it was Edmund’s story that shocked me.  I knew a little about conscientious objectors before reading this book but Edmund’s story really opened my eyes to how horribly they were treated.  Conscientious objectors like Edmund were labeled cowards and treated like second-class citizens.  Edmund constantly refuses to obey army orders, but in the end really has no choice.  He’s put on a boat and taken to France where he is forced on to the battlefields.  In the training camps he is locked away with little food and water, and he also faces excruciating punishment for not following orders.  Edmund is incredibly strong-willed though and stands by his principles.

A quote from Edmund towards the end of the book sums up war perfectly , ‘I never knew some men could do such dreadful things to one another, and I never knew some men could be so kind and brave.’

A secret history… A mysterious family legacy… Dark magic of untold power… And three kids who will risk everything to bring a family back together. The Pagett kids had it all: loving parents, a big house in San Francisco, all the latest video games … But everything changed when their father lost his job as a result of an inexplicable transgression. Now the family is moving into Kristoff House, a mysterious place built nearly a century earlier by a troubled fantasy writer with a penchant for the occult. Suddenly the siblings find themselves launched on an epic journey into a mash-up world born of Kristoff’s dangerous imagination, to retrieve a dark book of untold power, uncover the Pagett family’s secret history and save their parents … and maybe even the world.

House of Secrets is an action-packed blockbuster of a book about three children who are transported into the world of fiction.  There’s something in this story to appeal to all kids – adventure, mystery, magic, witches, giants, warriors, pirates, and fictional characters coming to life. Most readers have wanted to actually be in the world of a story at some stage, and this is exactly what happens to Cordelia, Brendan and Eleanor (even if it was the last thing they wanted).

Chris and Ned have said that the story was originally going to be a screenplay for a movie, but they thought it would be too expensive to make so they adapted it into a book.  I thought this came through quite clearly as the story really reads like it should be a movie.  It’s quite fast-paced and there is lots of action so it will definitely keep kids’ attention.  I can see why it would have cost so much to make this story into a movie, because it’s quite epic and there would be huge special effects involved.  The house that the children find themselves transported in is much like the Tardis (‘it’s bigger on the inside’), with lots of hidden passageways, and it gets battered about by witches, giants and pirates.  There are many different fictional worlds, filled with different creatures and characters.

The plot races along right to the end and leaves the story hanging for the next book in the series.  I’ll be looking forward to discovering what comes next for the Walker children.