And the winner of the game of tag is …

Okay, it’s been a month since I posted that huge tag-fest to see who might search-engine their way here, and this seems as good a time as any to offer an update.

To start with, some of the most popular searches on the internet drew no traffic here at all. I bet millions of people searched for things like ‘United States of America’ or ‘new Pope’ during the past month, but none ended up here. Why? Because thousands of sites were always going to outdo me in the rankings. No one ended up here looking to treat their goldfish either.

Several people came looking for the Duchess of Cambridge, but none for Kate Middleton. My guess is everyone’s searching for Kate and not so many searching for the Duchess. Again it might be a question of rankings.

I can tell you that someone out there is interested in Coldplay naked. I don’t know how far and wide a person needs to search for that, and my apologies for getting that person’s hopes up.

Top among the rankings of searches that found their way here were, as usual, Nick Earls, followed by his ever-present shadow Nick Earles and then the clear winner in this game of Google tag … drum roll please … ‘Mila Kunis naked’. Yes, despite this being a hot search term with serious site competition out there, ‘Mila Kunis naked’ was my #3 search term for the month. I’ve tried the search myself – as part of this experiment, naturally – and haven’t found my way back here, so people must be prepared to wade through dozens of sites (mostly, from the look of it, featuring doctored nude selfies with Mila Kunis’s head photoshopped on top) in order to seek that elusive goal.

But here’s something I hadn’t anticipated: an explosion in the number of ‘unknown search terms’. Most months there’s a handful of those, but this month they came in a clear #1 ahead of ‘Nick Earls’. From what WordPress tells me, ‘unknown search term’ is a result that comes up when someone’s using a search engine or search-engine feature that keeps their search private.

I’m not the only one now thinking that there were a lot more sneaky porn searches finding their way here, am I? No one searches for goldfish constipation advice secretly. In the interests of science, I’m sure we all wish those searchers had been more open about their goals.

I can only speculate about potential biases in the searches run by those slightly more tech-savvy people. Maybe they’re big Mila Kunis fans too. Or maybe not. As a consequence of just one tag, this site now ranks #4 on Google for ‘Kevin Rudd Naked’, but no one (openly) came here looking for it. There were well over 100 who made their way here under the cover of ‘unknown search terms’ though. Hmmm. Perhaps the member for Griffith is more popular than Mila Kunis after all (naked).

Tag, You’re It

I’ve been glancing through my blog stats. Actually not glancing – it’s been more purposeful than that. I thought I’d noticed a pattern in the search terms people were using to get here, and it turns out I was right.

About a year ago, I published a post that looked at the background to my short story, The Haircut of a More Successful Man. Its central character is over-attached to his hairdresser and has an active imagination and fantasy life. Among the tags, mainly as a joke, I included ‘hairdresser porn’. I had no idea that was a thing, or something people would search for. Wrong.

Since then, week after week, ‘hairdresser porn’ has figured prominently among the search terms that have brought people here. I hope not too many are unhappy when they discover all I’ve got to offer is a story, ie, words on a page.

So, now I’ve gone and reviewed the all time stats for searches that have led people here. Despite the hairdresser piece having been around for only half the life of the blog, here are the top search terms, out of seriously hundreds:

1. nick earls

2. nick earls blog

3. hairdresser porn

If you added the searches for ‘shampoo porn’ to #3, it’d move into second spot. Yes, more people get to my blog through searching for niche porn than searching for my blog. ‘Shampoo porn’ ranks #7 and ‘porn hairdresser’ and ‘hair dresser porn’ are in the top 20. Several more variants made the top 50.

Also in the top 10 were ‘nick earles’ and ‘nick earl’, so either people are looking for someone else or my lifelong quest to get people to spell my name correctly is far from over.

So, if this blog was all about traffic, it turns out I’d be getting it badly wrong running with tags like ‘Amazon’ and ‘free ebooks’.

So today’s post is an experiment. It’s all about the tags. I’ve picked a few that Google acknowledges as world favourites and thrown in a few more (including at least one I hope I never see in use). I’m interested to see how much impact tags really have. For anyone else interested, I’ll post some figures when enough have come through.

For anyone lured here by the tags and feeling let down that I’m not delivering, peas can help constipation in most aquarium fish but it’s best to get species-specific advice. Sadly I’m no help with any matters related to Mila Kunis. Still unsatisfied? Please click on the ‘Free Stuff’ section and help yourself to some fiction. It’s the least I can do. If you’ve fluked the right day, it might even be the hairdresser story (sadly still without video, but you have imaginations, right?)

Three Times the (Almost) Everything: on Writing a Trilogy

I learned today the precise Australian publication date for the second volume of Word Hunters (The Lost Hunters, to accord book two its subtitle). It’s 27 Feb. No idea why it’s a Wednesday, and I’m not planning to ask. But, as that’s only two weeks from today, I thought I’d share the news.

Book three is written, edited and being illustrated, and the moment I’m waiting for is the one when I can hold all three books in one hand some time in June. Then I can look at them and go: so that’s what those two years of my working life were about.

It wasn’t supposed to be two years. In early 2011, my friend Terry Whidborne and I pitched to some Australian publishers something smaller, far easier and, in retrospect far less ambitious and far less rewarding. Back then it was to be a series of five 6,000 word books for 7-8-year-olds, each one sending its characters on a fun dance through the possible etymology of a word.

But, since we pitched an idea rather than a finished product, our publisher rightly brought some ideas to the table too. Great ideas. Big ideas. And now we’re at a point where I can say that, instead of a 30,000-word series, we’ve written a 155,000-word trilogy. And a lot of the seven and eight-year-olds are probably better off turning nine before they start reading it.

Each book involves three of the things we’ve come to know as ‘word quests’, in which Lexi and Al, our 12-year-old co-leads, plunge into the past, hunting down the evolution of a word (and, it must be said, far more than that …). Each word quest involves 3-6 different time periods, so that meant knowing about wardrobe, architecture, food, etc, in more than 30 different places and times during the past 3000 years. And early on I came up with the idea that Al would take his pet rat, so I had to know what those 30 times and places would smell like too.

Each book became its own novel, and each one required more research and more facts than one of my adult novels, while at the same time needing to be chock-full of battles, danger, adventure, challenges and story.

Like any reader, in book one I got to know Lexi and Al and the intriguing Caractacus – a kind of 5th-century cross between Gandalf, Leonardo do Vinci and a certain early British wizard he’d prefer you didn’t mention. So, Terry and I at least didn’t have to invent them for future books. Or the model for time travel and shape of the word quests. But that was about it. Each book still called for its own vast quota of stumbling around on the internet, and its own big story.

In book one, Lexi and Al become Word Hunters, discover what that means and fight to survive in the past (without Mum, Dad, clean toilets and any mobile coverage at all …). In book two they’re back in the past in pursuit of their grandfather, who might be lost there (somewhere, some time). Also in book two they discover they have an enemy, who will stop at nothing to bring the word hunters down.

Book three will be the reckoning. I can assure you it’s a big finish.

But one thing I hate is a trilogy that sags in the middle and serves only to link books one and three. So, we didn’t even start writing until we knew we wouldn’t be doing that. Word Hunters Two ups the stakes from book one and has its own story. Despite the dangers, Lexi and Al have to keep going back to the past.

Book two takes in Chicago in the 1920s (for which Terry has done an amazing two-page cityscape that will be going on my wall), no fewer than three 19th-century US presidents (two major figures and one rather more obscure, yet crucial to the existence of one of the most commonly used words in the language), a visit to the Globe while Shakespeare and the King’s Men are workshopping Macbeth (a section I had far more fun with than I’d expected), Paris in World War One and a 9th-century Viking siege. And there’s more. Of course there’s more. Everything but the free set of steak knives.

Okay, not everything. While a lot of reviewers of book one totally got what we were on about and went with it, one found it a a bit Anglocentric and the history a bit male-dominated, and wished we’d taken Lexi and Al at least once to a matriarchal warrior society. Trust me, if I’d discovered one English word with a half-interesting story that owed its existence to a matriarchal warrior society, I would have send the kids there faster than any of us can spell Boadicea (or Boudica, or Boudicca or, if you believe wikipedia’s Old Welsh, even Buddug). I need to warn that person now, and any others of a similar bent, that we have still not tracked down that word. Book two does not feature a matriarchal warrior society.

But I can promise you I had to learn about a million new fascinating things to write it. Well, at least several, if I’m claiming that’s a promise. Dozens? Yes, dozens at least. I loved that. I have to admit I loved the research for these books, and couldn’t believe I got to call it work.

Terry found out plenty too – who could have guessed that the world’s largest airship actually did visit one of the places Lexi and Al do, and at the same time, allowing it to drift quietly into shot in one of his masterful illustrations. And, while we all know what Shakespeare looks like (or have settled on a common idea of it anyway), Terry had to track down things like a particular soap wrapper from 1865 and a particular coin from 1519. I can’t say I made it easy for him. At least he had free rein in creating the look of our villain, and close to it for some long-gone historical figures like the Viking warrior king Ivar the Boneless.

Yes, we got a chance to feature someone called Ivar the Boneless, at the head of the Great Heathen Army, on his way to seek revenge on a Northumbrian king for throwing Ivar’s father Ragnar Lothbrok into a pit of snakes. How could you even think of not including that little gem from the past in your book, once you’d found it? It’s in.

But all the facts we cornered don’t amount to much if the story doesn’t fly, so it needed to get at least as much attention. While these books are triggered by the words, they need to work as if it’s all about the stories.

It’s all come a long, long way from the quick and simple idea we took to publishers. It turned out to be neither. And, now that the writing’s done, I can say I’m glad about that.

We’re about to start previewing it in schools, but on 27 Feb we set it free in the wild. For now, here’s a glimpse on the UQP website and there’s more about it on the
Word Hunters website, with new material to be uploaded there some time soon.

‘Creepy/Surreal’ – a Different Christmas Story

In late 1994, I was making an unhurried transition from practising medicine to writing full-time. (Inside I was hurrying, but outside there were still groceries to buy and a mortgage to pay, so some kind of regular income seemed smart.) I’d found the ideal job to bridge the two – I was the part-time continuing medical education editor for Medical Observer, a national magazine for GPs.

For the 1994 Christmas edition, they asked me for something different. They wanted me to write fiction – something connected to Christmas (however loosely) and to medicine. For no reason I can recall, I settled on a Christmas caught up in a patient’s psychosis. It’s possible I was already developing ideas for a story, and realised I could slip the Christmas reference in in a way no one would expect. There are far too many ways to write a cliched Christmas story, and I really didn’t want to do that.

I thought back to the kinds of stories some psychotic patients had told me at long-term psych facilities when I was a student, along with the persecutory, grandiose or simply bizarre interpretations they gave to mundane events. On rare occasions, the logic of it all was elaborate and internally consistent (though all the rest of us get by through agreeing on a different interpretation of the same events). I wanted to write a story where I built a sort-of logical but impossible world a bit like those I’d been given a glimpse of.

I was trying to find my way in when I drove past – and mis-read – a poster advertising an upcoming show by They Might Be Giants. The poster was torn and I came away thinking something about lions. There must be lions. And I thought: maybe I can use that in my story. Here’s someone who is able to interpret a whole range of things as evidence of the presence of lions. And I’m going to try to get into their head and that logic, and see how it plays itself out. And somehow I’ve got to link Christmas in too. Christmas and lions … Christmas and lions … The solution to that that came along surprised me, but all the better.

Off the story went, and in that incarnation I think it was called There Must Be Lions. It made another couple of appearances in the 90s (including in Headgames, not surprisingly) and then slipped quietly away. But, as 2012 has shown me, these new-fangled e-reading gizmos are a great chance to breathe life back into old stories.

So it’s back. For Christmas. In the Kindle Store and called Christmas Inside.

And, having written it years ago, it’s been around in my life so long I’d forgotten how odd it is. How ‘creepy/surreal’ to quote my publisher. But we need at least one Christmas story that goes there, don’t we? They can’t all end with ‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus’.

And, while I’m at it, we’ve just put out another new/old story as well.

In 1997, when the world was younger and the internet was still a little bit exotic, someone showed me what a chat room looked like. It was called the Palace and you had to avatar up to go there. What a great crazy non-geographic place, I thought. I bet I’ll come back here all the time. And then I didn’t. I had work to attend to, and a life, so I never quite got as hooked on the Palace in the way I thought I might.

But I figured one of my characters could, and I wondered how that might play out. And along came Nights at the Palace. At the time I dared to think there was something edgy about a chat room story. Now that feels as edgy as a story featuring a rotary-dial telephone, or a vehicle with an internal combustion engine. But it’s a story about people, and how they behave, even if the tech world has moved on a little (as has George Clooney’s hair, which rates a mention in the story).

So, two slices of the 90s, for anyone who’s game. We’re making them available on Amazon worldwide for prices in region of 99c each.

And while I’m talking Amazon, a big thanks to everyone who’s bought Perfect Skin there over the past couple of days. A rush of sales on Friday pushed it into the #100 spot in the Kindle Store. Okay, so it only held the spot for an hour, but there are 1,771,394 other books in the store. A big moment for me and for Exciting Press.

Ho Ho Ho – ’tis the season to give things away

Around 1700 years ago, Nikolaos, Bishop of Myra, got into the habit of secretly slipping coins into the shoes of people who chose to leave them out in case rumours of his nocturnal good deeds were true.

Fast forward a while and we have ourselves an annual orgy of gift-giving in his name, and – if wikipedia’s to be believed – he’s the patron saint of Aberdeen, Amsterdam, Barranquilla, Bari, Burgas, Beit Jala, Fribourg, Huguenots, Kozani, Liverpool, Paternopoli, Sassari, Siggiewi, Lorraine, sailors, merchants, archers, thieves, children, pawnbrokers, students and the people who once guarded half his bones. How all that came about I hardly dare speculate. I know there were miracles involved, but show me the Venn diagram that makes sense of that list.

Anyway, as his namesake, I figure it’s up to me to carry on the tradition, albeit in a somewhat updated way (so don’t go leaving your shoes out hoping for coin).

Seasonal purchasing is well underway, and I know that tablets and ereaders will be ending up under more than a few trees. No, I’m not about to offer to come over and poke either of those free into your shoe, but how about some content? How about, instead of just giving the reading device this Christmas, you give it preloaded with some fiction?

I’ve talked to the team at Exciting Press, and they’re happy to get in on the spirit of the season. We’re ramping up free giveaways at the Kindle Store dramatically, so that people can pick up some ebooks to preload onto gift devices (and, sure, pick some up for yourself while you’re at it).

Something of mine will be free here in the Kindle Store every day for the next month, with each book free for 2-3 days at a time. Some of these won’t be worldwide but, for the next week, the three stories featured will all be free worldwide.

On top of that, Exciting Press is temporarily reducing the price of all their books of mine in the US Kindle Store to 99c each (short stories, novellas and novels). My apologies to people not in the US …

I’m not expecting that, 1700 years from now, this’ll see me as patron saint of Slough, Novosibirsk, Caloundra, homeschoolers and LOL cats, but who knows? In the meantime, some free fiction couldn’t hurt.

New Adult – A Genuine Genre or a Too-thin Slice of a Shrinking Pie?

I can’t say who invented the notion of New Adult as a book genre, or what their intentions were. It’s easy to guess that their intentions might have been centred around something like, um, selling books, but perhaps they saw a body of work emerging that they felt didn’t quite fit the Young Adult or Adult boxes and fell somewhere between.

Is it a real distinction and is it a useful one? I’d be interested to hear what you think. Would or does New Adult as a label have any impact on the books you buy, for yourself or any New Adults in your life? Are booksellers you know using the term? Or does it need to be the title of a movie starring someone like Charlize Theron before it really finds its feet?

I see on dearauthor.com that St Martin’s Press (a former US publisher of mine, and original publisher there of perhaps my most NA novel, World of Chickens) held a submission contest in 2009 for NA titles but, by 2011, they hadn’t published anything as a result of it and one of the contest organisers was quoted as saying: ‘New Adult is a fabulous idea in theory, and authors seem to be excited about it. But in a world where bookstores shelf by category, to them, it is either Adult or Young Adult.’

My publishers, I have to admit, haven’t ever mentioned New Adult to me. I’ve written five novels with teenage central characters – one of whom has just finished school and another of whom was 18 and had left school a while before – and they’ve all been marketed as YA. My books with post-teen characters start with 21-year-old Philby in World of Chickens and 24-year-old Jon in Bachelor Kisses and get older from there, and have all been marketed as Adult.

There’s a system for YA, developed by the book industry and educators, and publishers know how to work it. It’s about schools and teacher librarians, and it produces a wider/longer sales curve. Retail has the look of a secondary market.

Because this market has traditionally worked so well and its gate-keepers work with it so willingly, it’s tempting for any novel with a teenage central character to be shunted down the YA track, even if it’s not its natural home. That might have been the case with my novel Monica Bloom, which has a central character in his last year of school and is set in 1980. It’s past tense and there’s a feeling – or I think there is – of an adult narrator years later, looking back and recalling his story. I always thought it might be an adult novel about a teenager – the way Richard Ford’s Wildlife and Canada both are – and most of the readers who responded positively and strongly to it have been over 40.

You’ll notice I’m not saying that, instead of YA, it’s New Adult.

A recent article in the Guardian proposed the idea that New Adult might be for 14-35-year-olds, to which my first thought was, exactly what does the 14-year-old have in common with the 35-year-old? To me, 14 feels squarely in the middle of YA and 35 seems simply Adult. That’s not to say a 14-year-old can’t read Salman Rushdie and a 35-year-old can’t read Harry Potter, but my point is that I don’t see them hanging out in the same demographic (or, frankly, in many places).

But is there a group aged, say, 18-25 with particular interests who form a demographic and a potential discrete market? Are those the NAs? And, if they are, let me taint this with commercialism and say, are enough of them buying books (and those kinds of books in particular) to make this work?

Is NA as simple as the post-school story being sold to the post-school crowd? And, whether it is or it isn’t, how’s it working?

I thought I’d ask someone who’s looked at this a lot more closely than I have.

Cally Jackson has recently published The Big Smoke, she’s calling it NA and that’s something she’s put some thought into. I’m currently halfway through reading it, as a Somewhat Older Adult, and I can see what she means about where it fits. Its characters are immediately post-school and their concerns are post-school, but I get it as a piece of fiction and I’m not a New Adult (though I was one once).

Setting the pigeonholing aside for a moment, there’s a lot that impresses me about The Big Smoke. It’s narrated in alternating chapters by two very different characters and their voices are distinct, consistent and authentic. It’s a great strength of the book and, in the wrong hands, it could easily have been its downfall. I’m also convinced by the story. It’s complex, and it deals with issues without being dominated by them. Like all good writing, I suspect a lot of hard work has gone on behind the scenes, but it’s never evident in the reading. While I might be questioning New Adult as a category, perhaps the best argument for it might be a book like this – this book will mean a lot to some people close to the age of its characters, who are facing similar issues. Sometimes a book is the first thing to tell you you aren’t alone, and for some people this will be that book.

But let’s hear from Cally. I thought I’d ask her a few questions.

NE: First, you’ve seen the Guardian’s stab at it above. What’s your definition of NA, in terms of age range and anything else you think is relevant?

CJ: Rather than give you my own definition, I’ll give you the best definition I’ve come across. It’s by Kristan Hoffman, who was one of the winners of the St Martin’s Press competition you mentioned earlier. Kristan says, “The transition from teen to adult doesn’t happen overnight… There’s a period of time where adulthood feels like a new pair of shoes. The expectations of independence and self-sufficiency are still new, still being broken in. New Adults are the people who have just begun to walk in those shoes; New Adult fiction is about their blisters and aches.”

In terms of age range, 14-35 seems a little broad to me! From what I’ve seen and read, most NA protagonists are aged 18 to 26, and most NA readers are 16 to 26, but the genre appeals to anyone interested in reading about that transformational period of life where we’re officially ‘adults’ but don’t quite know what that means for us yet.

NE: Did you write The Big Smoke as an NA novel, or did you discover NA when you were already writing it?

CJ: When I started writing The Big Smoke, I was simply writing a book that I would like to read, featuring characters my age. That was 11 years ago – The Big Smoke has had a very long gestation!

It was only when I began to consider querying agents and publishers that I discovered the NA genre. Honestly, traditional publishers of paper books don’t appear to be very interested in NA, mainly because of the reasons you cited earlier – publishers know how to market adult books and YA books, but NA is largely untried and therefore too risky.

Online, though, it’s a different story. More and more authors and publishers are categorising books as NA, and readers are taking notice. You only have to look at Goodreads (the Facebook for book lovers) to see that many readers are starting to create their own virtual bookshelves of NA fiction. Here are just a few examples: Jaime Ark’s NA bookshelf, Andrea Thompson’s NA bookshelf, Alexis’s NA bookshelf. None of these people are authors trying to plug their own fiction; they’re all readers who have chosen to categorise books in this way.

When I discovered this emerging genre online, I was ecstatic – finally I’d found a home for The Big Smoke!

NE: What made you pick this time in your characters’ lives to write about?

CJ: I chose this time in my characters’ lives because I was the same age (18) when I first began writing it – I’d just moved away from my parents (and the country town I’d grown up in) to go to uni in Brisbane, and I was trying to find my feet as a new adult.

The inspiration for The Big Smoke was a lesson I was trying to teach myself. For some reason, I decided the best way to teach myself that lesson was to write a book about characters having to learn the same lesson (makes perfect sense, right?).

What was the lesson? That your happiness and life journey are your own responsibility, nobody else’s. I think it’s a great lesson for anyone, but particularly new adults.

NE: How does the NA market work to connect books with buyers, and are you concerned about missing a schools market?

CJ: When I was an older teen/early 20-something, I would have loved it if there were a separate shelf in bookshops dedicated to new adult fiction. I’d still love it now, because (selfish author reasons aside) it would make it a lot easier to find presents for that age group and I quite enjoy fiction about that time of life myself. Unfortunately, bookshelf space in bricks and mortar stores is limited, and I don’t see booksellers allocating a separate shelf for the NA genre anytime soon. Hopefully, some might consider segmenting the YA shelf into YA and NA, but that’s the best we can hope for in the near future, I believe.

Online, though, the shelf space is unlimited, and as we’ve already seen, many readers are using the NA classification online to help them and other readers set these books apart from the rest. Goodreads itself actually has a page devoted to the NA genre, recognising readers’ desire for this classification.

Away from the internet, the NA market is still in its infancy in terms of connecting books with buyers (in my opinion, at least). There’s a strong opportunity to establish a relationship between NA authors and universities/colleges because so many students in higher education are part of the NA target market, but I don’t believe this has been explored much at all yet. Off the top of my head, potential opportunities could include stalls of new adult fiction at university markets, talks from NA authors for literature students, and advertising in student guild/union publications. All of these options are on my list to explore for marketing The Big Smoke.

To answer the second part of your question completely honestly: yes, I am concerned about missing the schools market. I’ve had conversations with a number of high school English teachers who have all said that while they love The Big Smoke and believe their students would too, the more ‘adult’ content (specifically, sexual and drug themes) restricts it from being included as part of the curriculum. I realised this was a possibility when I was writing the novel, but I wanted to portray that first-semester-of-uni experience honestly and didn’t think I could do that by ignoring these topics.

Thankfully, I don’t believe the schools market is a 100% no-go zone for The Big Smoke. Although it won’t be included as part of the curriculum, teachers have indicated there’s absolutely no reason it couldn’t be marketed to student libraries. So that’s on my list too!

NE: That’s a good point. The high schools I visit usually have my Adult novels in their libraries, even if most of them use only my YA novels in the classroom. Are there any books that readers might know well that you’d see as NA (even if they predated the classification or people’s awareness of it)?

CJ: Some of my favourite books as an older teen were NA, but they pre-dated the classification (or at least my awareness of it). These include Queen Kat, Carmel and St Jude Get a Life by Maureen McCarthy and World of Chickens and Bachelor Kisses by… um, you. I would also classify McCarthy’s more recent novel, Somebody’s Crying, as NA, along with Marcus Zusak’s I am the Messenger.

Outside of Australia, some popular NA novels right now are Easy by Tamara Webber and Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire (which have received 26,536 ratings and 55,085 ratings on Goodreads respectively, so there’s definitely a market for them!). Looking at historical fiction, some people have argued that Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier could be classified NA, considering it deals with a young woman in her first job away from home, dealing with adult situations for the first time.

NE: What’s next for you? Are we going to be seeing more of you in this genre?

CJ: Considering I’m 31 weeks pregnant, what’s immediately next for me is becoming a mum. The dream is that The Big Smoke will become so unbelievably popular, I’ll be able to resign from my day job and be a stay-at-home mum and author.

In the slim chance that doesn’t happen, I’ll still write fiction in my spare time – writing’s in my blood. The idea I’ve currently fallen in love with is more YA than NA, but I imagine I will write more NA in the future – it’s such an interesting time of life. Perhaps I’ll even write a sequel to The Big Smoke. Time will tell…

* * *

Cally Jackson blogs here.

The Big Smoke is available as an ebook and in paperback, with details here.

It’s also the first selection for NA Alley’s New Adult Online Book Club and anyone interested can chat about it there on 19 Dec.

Philby and Frank and the Marathon that Never Was

There are always risks writing stories set in the here and now and, as I’ve learned these past couple of days, even greater risks in placing a safe-looking bet on the near future.

Most of the time when I’ve tried to anticipate events it’s got me nowhere and, really, fiction needs to be bolder than that. Excessive caution doesn’t make for a great novel. When I was writing The True Story of Butterfish in 2007, aiming it for publication in 2009 and sending one of the characters partying with Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion, I was aware that Hef was past 80 and my inner actuary told me there was at least some risk associated with slipping him into a novel that needed to be current in 2009 and preferably for a few more years. Happily for Hef and those close to him, that concern came to nothing. Since I wrote the novel, he’s dated twins, got divorced, got engaged, almost got married, saved the Hollywood sign and had a species of marsh rabbit named after him – party on.

But world events don’t always play along with the fiction that’s written to fit them.

As some people know, I’ve started releasing some of my older works as ebooks, through Exciting Press in the US and through Allen & Unwin’s House of Books in Australia. In some cases, I’ve used this not merely as an opportunity to put books back into print, but to do something different. A lot of my short stories are now stand-alone ebooks, but I’ve also been working on something bigger.

In 1995, I wrote a story called Green, about a newbie med student at Qld Uni in 1981 who, at a socially critical time in a pub, chokes and makes a seriously embarrassing drink choice. Phil and his disinhibited buddy Frank stuck around and appeared in a few more stories in Headgames in 1999. With World of Chickens (aka Two To Go), they got themselves a novel in 2001.

For quite a few years, I’d wanted to bring all the Phil and Frank stories together – a novel and five short stories covering 1981-1999 in one fat book. I’d call it Green, after the opening story.

More recently, I’ve joined the team adapting World of Chickens into a film – we hope to go into production next year – so I’ve been working with Phil and Frank again, and loving it. And that made me realise I wanted something extra for Green. A new story. A 2012 story. Phil and Frank facing down 50, each in his own way.

I figured Frank would be prone to a big mid-life gesture and, in May this year, I decided it would be, of all things, the 2012 New York Marathon. Okay, so it was slightly in the future but, in its more than 40 years, nothing had cancelled the New York Marathon, right?

So I got online and read all about it – the sign-up, the start, the route, the comfort stops. I booked Jackson Browne for the entertainment at the final bend, figuring readers would allow me a little latitude if someone else showed up in real life. I came up with Otter, Frank’s hirsute personal trainer with an unlikely suite of pre-race prep techniques. And I wrote my story set six months in the future and prepared for an October US/UK release of Green – The Ultimate Author’s Edition, followed by an Australian release soon after*.

Then along came Hurricane Sandy, causing damage and loss of life in the Caribbean and eastern US. The New York marathon, which around now should be a litter of Gatorade cups on New York streets, was cancelled.

So I’ve got myself a brand new 7500-word Frank and Phil story that can only exist in a parallel universe, where the weather was November average and the only chaos affected my two characters (chaos affecting their marathon at least was inevitable).

Meanwhile there’s a lot of damage still to be dealt with in New York and elsewhere and the New York marathon people have created the Race to Recover Fund to support a number of charities involved in relief efforts, including the Mayor’s Fund. So I’m going to donate my New York marathon that never was. And so’s my publisher, Exciting Press. For the rest of November, we’re giving every cent that comes in from sales of Green to the Mayor’s Fund. That applies to all purchases of the Exciting Press edition of Green, which is the version available everywhere but Australia and New Zealand. Each copy sold should raise close to $3.50 to support relief work.

So, if you know anyone in the world beyond ANZ who might be keen on a blockbuster Phil & Frank book featuring a novel and six stories (one brand new) and would like to be part of a different way of raising funds for people affected by Sandy, please spread the word. I’d like to raise as much money as possible, so I’d welcome any tweeting, FBing, blogging, etc, that you’re prepared to give this.

Here’s the link to Green on Amazon.

Thank you.

* Why the delay for ANZ? It’s allowed us to do paper (print on demand) as well as ebooks, and makes the ebook available through all local channels, as well as Amazon. I know some people love paper, and like supporting their local retailers, so I wanted those options to be available. Here it is, on Allen & Unwin’s House of Books site, with links to numerous retailers.