Category: Uncategorized

In 2006 I wrote the first draft of a book that became Guardian of the Dead. In 2008 I sold the publishing rights to Little, Brown and Allen and Unwin. On April 1st, 2010, the book was published.

The novel features a side character named Kevin Waldgrave, a 17-year-old Maori boy who loves acting and science, who is fiercely protective of his friends, who is gunning for an important scholarship at his impressive boarding school.

He is asexual. He says he is asexual, on the page.

In 2010, he was one of very few explicitly asexual characters in any fictional media. In 2010, he was one of the first, maybe the first, explicitly asexual characters in young adult literature.

It’s 2017.

Every now and then, Guardian of the Dead appears on asexual representation recommendation lists. Over the last seven years, those lists have changed a lot. They used to look like “Sherlock, kind of!” “The Big Bang Theory, according to some people!” “In Guardian of the Dead, Kevin actually says he’s asexual!” Now they look like: “This explicitly asexual main character is great, and so is this one, and also this one, and then there’s Kevin from Guardian of the Dead, sidenote, not a main character.”

I think Guardian of the Dead is now on these lists because of a brief moment of historical significance, and I think it’s time to take it off.

I know Kevin has been really important to a lot of people. I’ve had email and conversations with people for whom he was the first representation of an important part of their identity. If Kevin, or the fact of his existence, is or was valuable to you, I’m so glad.

But in 2017, I don’t think he’s a good example of asexual representation. He’s not a main character – it’s Ellie’s story. Kevin’s coming out is too much like a confession, my terminology inaccurate and out of date, my explication of his sexuality too glib and misleading. He disappears from the narrative at the halfway point, which works fine for the plot, but is terrible for representation purposes.

And Kevin’s writer isn’t ace. I did the research and I talked to people, but this is not own voices work – this was me, an allosexual writer, awkwardly doing the best she could with the resources she had in 2006, revising in 2008, for a book published in 2010. In 2010, a lot of people were happy with this. (A lot weren’t, and I’m sorry.) I really hoped that this would help people. I didn’t want Kevin to be the only one; I wanted there to be more, and better.

That’s happening now. Many other writers have created other works with asexual and aromantic and demi-sexual characters. They are main characters, the focus of their own stories. More, many of these writers identify as ace or demi and/or aromantic, and create characters not at a distance, from research, but from experience, from within a community I was never part of. (I don’t want to create my own recs list here, because I’m not an ace-spectrum reader either, but I am especially fond of the excellent and demisexual Seanan McGuire’s post-portal fantasy, Every Heart A Doorway, which stars asexual magical mystery solver Nancy.)

I can’t stop you from doing anything, and I have no right to instruct you. You are absolutely free to recommend Guardian of the Dead to anyone, for any reason.

But, insofar as the author is alive in 2017, she thinks it would be a good idea to omit Guardian of the Dead from future asexual representation lists.

I am a very pale person, and I live in Australia.

Granted, I don’t live in one of the places in Australia where people actually live underground because the surface is so ridiculously hot, but in summer I layer sunscreen over my moisturiser-with-sunscreen-in-it, and try to avoid going outside between 11 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon. Because if I don’t, I very swiftly look like crispy bacon.

Crispy bacon skin hurts, y’all. Also, I have plans for my life that melanoma might delay or halt.

The other day, my delightful friend Mary had a delightful birthday party picnic, and I attended, suitably sunscreened up. But we were outside for some time, and sunscreen sweats off, and despite my best efforts, my arms still got crispy fried.

This picture represents my last, desperate move, which was to steal Mary’s parasol and twirl it becomingly.

[Image transcript below]

The friend who took the picture sent it to me, and then, operating on the principle that if I were in pain, others should suffer also, I may or may not have emailed it to some North American friends currently trudging through Snowmageddon 2011.

BFF ROBYN: You’re such a nice girl.
ME: I know, right?

I am fondly reminded of the time I sent another friend an email that contained only the chorus of Willow Smith’s greatest hit. That time was ten seconds ago.

GOOD MORNING, miggy!

[Image transcript: A white girl with freckles (your humble author) wearing a black top, black and white skirt and white sunglasses sits barefoot and cross legged on a picnic rug, the world’s most adorable red parasol with ruffles poised on her shoulder, under a blue, cloud-spotted sky.]

Internets, this afternoon I went to the gym and pushed too hard – damned endorphins – and am currently suffering a NAP ATTACK. I am going to have to fall on my face for an hour, or I will never get anything done tonight.

But! In the interests of your delight, and my crossing something off my To-Do list, would you like to see the Australian/New Zealand The Shattering cover?

You know, I thought you might.

[Image transcript at bottom of post.]

Lovely Editor S. emailed the draft to me from the House of Onion a couple of weeks ago and I stared at it in frozen awe for a second. Then I picked up the phone.

Normally I email my editors, but I have Editor S’s cellphone number, in case of emergency, such as thinking it would be a great idea for us to have a cocktail.

Editor S: *wary concern* Helloooo?
Me: I. LOVE. IT.

Oh, I love it so much. I love the fonts. I love the way the setting evokes both the brightness and menace of the book in the dying grass, and that sun, whose rays are breaking up the pictures solidity – and after all, is it setting or rising? I love the fantastic illusion of the sky, which is actually the ocean. Things are not what they seem!

And I love, love, LOVE the body language of the three protagonists. It’s wonderful. There’s Sione, cautious and loyal, following the girls and ready to support them. There’s Janna, floating in long, lovely strides, taking up all the space in the world, demanding that you look at her. And there’s Keri, racing out in front to meet the danger, athletic and determined and fast.

Oh, Designer B. You are a scholar and a gentleman and an artiste of stunning delight.

I wish to also convey my thanks to the Australia Council for the Arts, who awarded Allen and Unwin a grant for the purposes of developing and promoting me as a mid-career writer (hurrah!) which I am told is going to include some sort of fancy detailing for the cover (double hurrah!). Embossing, perhaps! I do adore a good emboss.

[Image transcript: Three teenagers, a boy with black hair and medium-brown skin, a girl with blonde hair and pale skin, and a girl with light-brown skin and dark-brown hair, all dressed in jeans and casual tops, are running over a field of dying grass, their faces turned slightly away from the camera. They are partially silhouetted against the sun on the horizon, either rising or setting. What looks at first glance like a dark blue sky with clouds in the top third of the composition is actually an ocean with white wave patterns.]

This is a wee cookie from my next book, The Shattering, introducing one of the three narrators, Sione Felise.

Spoilers, of course, apply.

Continue reading The Shattering Cookie: Meet Sione

Look, Internets, I won a pretty!

This is my William C. Morris Award finalist plaque for Guardian of the Dead!

You see it below in the hands of my American editor, the supersmart Alvina Ling (who is rocking that bob!) and my fabulous editor Barry Goldblatt.

Big congratulations to the other finalists, Barbara Stuber, Lish McBride and Eishes Chayil, and HUGE congratulations to Blythe Woolston, whose book The Freak Observer is the 2011 William C. Morris award winner!

I am currently writing something about which I shall tell you NOTHING as yet. But it has been brought home to me that people might want snippets of my next book, The Shattering. Teasers, as they say! Or in the book world, cookies.

Internets, would you like some cookies?

MERRY HAPPY, EVERYONE (who celebrates it)!

Here is a celebratory screenshot of my main character and her new companion from the very masculine game, World of Warcraft:

.
.
.

I’m wishing you all joy.

Hey there, internets, I have divined that you like talking about food. This is awesome, because so do I!

I plan to make the terrifying Schadenfreude Pie for Christmas dinner – if there were ever a better time for a pie composed entirely of sugar and fat, I don’t know it – and of course ran into manifold difficulties acquiring the ingredients.

Graham crackers? Dark brown sugar? Dark corn syrup? Molasses? Not in evidence, and possibly unholy.

These things are probably all available somewhere in Melbourne, but they were not in my local supermarket, and I had privately resolved that, given the other stresses of preparing Christmas dinner (for the first time by myself, go me!) I would not make myself frantic trying to find arcane American ingredients, and would instead acquire reasonable substitutes.

I did manage to get my hands on clear corn syrup, which I walked past four times, on account of the label read GLUCOSE SYRUP and added underneath ~Derived from corn~.

Afterwards, discussing my difficulties with friends, I noted that at least my chocolate was likely to be better than that in the original pie, since they appear to be standard semi-sweet chunks, and I am super hardcore about my cooking chocolates.

BFF Robyn: I am not surprised.
ME: Hey, some people have a wine palate. And some people can recognise chocolate with fewer than 40% cocoa solids at twenty paces.
MIGGY (who is from Idaho): I have a potato palate. Sadly I am not kidding. Living the stereotype~
ME: Interesting! Come to think, I have friends with really high rice standards.
MIGGY: I mentioned this to [Another Friend] and his thing is milk.

Do you have a thing like this, internets? Are you an insufferable snob about potatoes, or milk, or mayonnaise, or tomato sauce (if you will, ketchup), or cheese?

I mean, I am kind of a snob about cheese in that I insist it should come from a cow and not be orange, but I can’t really tell the difference between a superb cheddar and a mere rather nice one. But my chocolate taste is well-developed. I will happily chow down on a Snickers, but the difference between that and Green and Black’s Dark is remarkable to my tongue.

BFF Robyn’s superpower – well, in addition to being able to break bricks with her hands – is that she is a supertaster.

This is one of those mutant powers that embarrass the X-Men. It’s all very well to have laser eyes or telekinesis, but some mutants have the power to heat their hands to something that approaches a bar heater! Or the power to grow scales!

Supertasting is one of those powers, in that BFF Robyn cannot eat a lot of things that taste just fine to me because to her they are horrendously bitter or taste of soap. It’s hard to be a mutant in a world that hates and fears you!

ME: What was the thing at the restaurant? I remember you were super grossed out.
BFF Robyn: It was some kind of like goat cheese something? I can’t recall, except that it was with a spoon and I put it in my mouth and almost spit it across the table.
ME: EXCELLENT CONTROL.
BFF Robyn: For real, man. Usually I have some kind of spidey-sense or something, I think because of odour.
BFF Robyn: But this one I was all, ooh, that looks good OH GOD BETRAYED.