Coming Soon... Sally Murphy's Blog Tour Stop

Hi, everyone! On March 7th, Spinning Pearls will be meeting Sally Murphy as part of her blog tour for her new picture book, DO NOT FORGET AUSTRALIA.

You can follow the tour at these venues.

1st March 2012	Let's Have Words	http://letshavewords.blogspot.com.au/
2nd March 2012	Kids Book Capers	http://content.boomerangbooks.com.au/kids-book-capers-blog/
3rd March 2012	Running With Pens	http://kerrilane.wordpress.com/
4th march 2012	Read and Write with Dale	http://orangedale.livejournal.com/
5th March 2012	Karen Tyrrell	http://karentyrrell.com/
6th March 2012	Writing for Children	http://writing-for-children.blogspot.com.au/
7th March 2012	Spinning Pearls	http://spinningpearls.blogspot.com.au/
8th March 2012	Katwhiskers	http://katswhiskers.wordpress.com/
12th March 2012	Pass It On	http://www.pass-it-on-blog.blogspot.com.au/
12th March 2012	Kids Book Review	http://www.kids-bookreview.com/
13th March 2012	Under the Apple Tree	http://angelasunde.blogspot.com.au/
14th March 2012	Lorraine Marwood. Words into Writing	http://lorrainemarwoodwordsintowriting.blogspot.com.au/

Sally Murphy's on Tour!

Today I'm delighted to welcome Sally Murphy as guest blogger at Spinning Pearls. Sally's on tour with her brand new verse novel, the cleverly-titled "Pearl Verses the World".

Here's what Sally has to say.

Thanks for having me here, Sally.

Today is a special day for me, because it marks the release of my first verse novel, Pearl Verses the World, a verse novel aimed at primary aged children, about a girl dealing with isolation at school, and with her grandma’s illness at home.

As someone who loves to laugh, I didn’t expect to ever sit down and write a book dealing with loneliness, death and grief. But one night as I was getting into bed a poem came to me, speaking of loneliness and isolation. I wrote it down, and left it alone. Soon afterwards, other poems came to me, and I realised I had a story about a girl who was very sad and very lonely. There was a story which needed to be told and I needed to sit down and be the teller.

Pearl’s story was easy to write in many ways. It was almost as if Pearl was channelling through me – she told me her tale, and whenever I felt that I didn’t know what was going to happen next, I stopped writing and waited for it to come to me. And come to me it did; often when I was in the shower, or lying in bed, or doing something totally removed from writing. I gradually worked out why Pearl was sad, and why she felt lonely. She was watching her beloved grandmother fade away, and her grief had forced her apart from her classmates.

Having said that, Pearl’s story was in other ways terribly hard to write. When I wrote the scenes dealing with Granny’s death I experienced grief. A grief so real that I had to stop writing, curl into a ball and howl. Even long into the editing process I still cried. I also had to consider whether the book was too sad for child readers. Did I want children to cry as I had cried? The eventual answer was yes, I did need to share this story with children. They may cry when they read it – but hopefully they will also smile and even, perhaps, laugh out loud. Above all, I hope they will see that although they may experience loss or grief in their lives, life does go on and there is always hope. I also hope they will know it is okay to grieve, in their own way and in their own time.

I hope that readers – young and old - will smile with Pearl.

Thanks, Sally! I feel it in my bones that Pearl Verses the World is going to storm into the world and take it over... by storm. And I'm sure many writers who read Sally's account of the writing of "Pearl" are nodding with sympathy. Some books are just books, but some books, authors LIVE, even if they have never experienced the situations themselves.

Follow the tour!

May 1st - Here at Spinning Pearls. http://spinningpearls.blogspot.com
May 2nd - BJ Cullen - The Writing Life at http://bjcullen.blogspot.com
May 3rd - Tips 4Young Writers at www.tips4youngwriters.wordpress.com
May 4th - Persnickety Snark at http://persnicketysnark.blogspot.com/
May 5th - Let's Have Words at http://www.letshavewords.blogspot.com
May 6th - to be announced
May 7th - to be announced
May 8th - Write and Read with Dale at http://www.livejournal.com/users/orangedale
May 9th - Tales I Tell at http://belka37.blogspot.com
May 10th - Robyn Opie's Writing Children's Books at http://www.robynopie.blogspot.com

The Big Blowie! Sally Murphy swats my questions

Hello everyone, and welcome to this stop on the inaugural Aussie Blog Tour! Today author Sally Murphy has kindly agreed to answer my inquisitive questions regarding her new book, The Big Blowie.


Q.1. The Big Blowie is a title to send me for the swatter. Please provide one (1) true-life horror story concerning one or more big blowies.

A.1. Blowies (or blowflies if you are not Australian) are truly insidious creatures. They are worse than ‘normal’ flies, in their ability to just stick around, being big and buzzy and gross. Living in hot, dry parts of Australia, I’ve spent many hours trying to get rid of persistent blowies. The worst is when they start buzzing in your bedroom in the middle of the night. If you turn on the light to spray or sat them, they go quiet and you can’t find them.
But a story? Hmm – let me think. Perhaps this one: yesterday morning I took a bag of kitchen rubbish to the green wheelie bin outside. When I opened the lid, it was wriggling with big juicy blowfly maggots. One of my darling children had taken some rubbish out for me the day before and not pushed it in far enough. As a result he lid was ajar, and a blowfly, attracted by the delicious aroma of week old rubbish had decided to make my bin her nursery. Eeeeewww. Fortunately for me, yesterday was bin day and the whole stinking mess has now made its way, to the local tip.2.

Q.2. The best way to make a big blowie into an ex-blowie is via a folded newspaper. Discuss.

A.2. Oh definitely. And it works for other pests, too. After my recent holiday, I bought in the morning paper, which had been buried deep in a bush in my front garden. When I started to unroll it, a family of big cockroaches came scurrying out. The newspaper was hastily employed to say goodbye to the cockroaches. It turned out it was not that day’s paper at all, but one which had been lost in the bush for some time, long enough to become a little cockroach heaven.

Q.3. That’s a very feral-looking child on the cover. Is he based on one of yours? (You may take the fifth on this if necessary.)

A.3. Lol – MY children wouldn’t dare look feral. Okay, well maybe occasionally. Very occasionally. Is there such a thing as frequently occasionally or occasionally frequently?
But no, Syd doesn’t look like any of my children, though I do have sons about his age, and three of my kids do have blue eyes. But none of them have yellow hair. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen a kid with yellow hair.

Q.4. Oh, the story. Yes. Did the Aussie Aussie Aussie theme set you thinking about Things Aussie, such as thongs, chops, and blowies? Or was it the sight of a Big Prawn, Big Pineapple or the daddy of them all, the Big Spud that set you off?

A.4. Yes, the story was definitely prompted by the series theme, although I’ve always been strangely fascinated by Big Things, and on my recent trip across Australia insisted on not just viewing as many as possible, but also photographing them.
The Big Blowie, came about because the publisher was looking for very Australian stories for the series. I wanted to have a good chance of being accepted, so I tried to think of things were very Australian – I came up with the Outback, blowflies, and Big Things . The guidelines also mentioned that it wanted books to deal with issues, so I decided to include a drought in my book because drought is a huge problem here in Australia. From this list of ideas, I came up with a plot where the drought is affecting a family’s livelihood, so the child comes up with the idea of building a big blowfly (blowie) to draw tourists in.

Q.5. How do you individualise the voice of a young protagonist? One pervasive problem in books at this level is that the protagonists CAN begin to sound generic… boy, smart, eight-to-eleven, scrape-prone, or girl, smart, feisty, tomboy or proto-feminist, eight-to-eleven, scrape prone.

A.5. You are so right. In these shorter length books you have less room to develop the protagonist’s character, and there is a risk of them all sounding the same. I sued first person narrative for this book (I tend to use it a lot, actually), and there is always a risk in first person that the character sounds just like you, the author. For Syd, I tried to have him focus on the things a kid would focus on, rather than having him have an adult take on the world. For example, Syd’s in a rural area in a drought. For an adult, there would be worries about stock and crop prices, concerns about water for the house and property, financial concerns. These issues are not what’s at the top of Syd’s list of concerns. He likes Dougie and the tourists coming to visit – he’s a social kind of kind – so his concern is with the tourists drying up when the water does. Kids are, by nature, egocentric, so he’s concerned about the things that affect him. But he’s also proactive. He can’t fix the drought, but he can come up with a way to get the tourists to come back, and that’s exactly what he does.

Q.6. Is this book a move to rehabilitate the humble blowie?

A.6. No, I think they’re beyond redemption, quite frankly. But it is a move to make the most out of the things that we can’t change. Before Syd comes up with his big idea, he and his mum are being bothered by blowies. That’s the source of his inspiration. The blowies don’t go away, and although they don’t appear much again in the text after Syd gets his idea, the illustrator (Craig Longmuir) has them there in the illustrations right till the last page.
I’ve noticed a bizarre tendency for me to right about things that gross me out. Obviously blowies, but previously Giant Cockroaches (blehhhhh) and, more recently an incident with a huge spider is fodder for a new story I’m planning. Snakes and bitey insects such as scorpions also feature prominently in two nonfiction titles I’ve written, and flies, snakes and snails are in my poems. Will I rehabilitate them? No. But sometimes when I write about them I do learn things that make me feel more kindly about them. Sometimes

Thanks, Sally, for visiting Spinning Pearls. And readers, why not follow the tour? Sally Murphy has been to..

February 8 - Dee Scribe - http://deescribewriting.wordpress.com
February 9 - Let’s Have Words - http://letshavewords.blogspot…com/
February 10 - Robyn Opie’s Writing Children’s Books - www.robynopie.blogspot.com
February 11 - Spinning Pearls - http://spinningpearls.blogspot.com

Tomorrow she will visit -
February 12 - The Book Chook - www.thebookchook.blogspot.com

The Big Blowie is part of the Aussie Aussie Aussie series published by Aussie School Books and distributed by Blake. http://www.blake.com.au/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=9781921255366&Show=TechSpecs