Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Part two of Ian Irvine

GRIM & GRIMMER
            





                                                                                 






                                                                                                                         

  1. The Headless Highwayman                                    
  2. The Grasping Goblin
  3. The Desperate Dwarf
  4. The Calamitous Queen (coming June 2011)
 


Ike and Mellie are definitely my favorite characters in the series, but I must admit to having a love/hate relationship with Con.  Which came first? The story  or the character Con, who is the desperate dwarf.

The story, definitely. I had most of it planned out in advance, but I struggled with the section in the dwarf city, Delf. My initial ideas about the dwarves didn’t work, so I changed them quite late in the story development, and that’s when the leering, smirking conman and huckster, Con Glomryt, appeared. He’s on the cover of The Desperate Dwarf and the brilliant artist, Martin McKenna, http://www.martinmckenna.net/, has captured Con to perfection.

Have you had a lot of, “Ew gross,” from your young readers who all love to seem to love that type of book?

No, not from young readers. I think they enjoy the gross-out moments, and take pleasure from parents and oldies being shocked, too.

I must admit to falling in love with all of your characters from Pook to Aigo. Have your readers also expressed loving your books so much that they loved all the characters, even the nasty antagonists?

I had a debate about this on my Facebook site a while back. A lot of readers love the nasty antagonists for their sheer, single-minded villainy. And after all, the antagonist is really important, because if he or she (or it) isn’t as strong or stronger than the protagonist, it’s really difficult to create a powerful and compelling story.

Tell us more about the GRIM AND GRIMMER series, Ian. I know there is one more book scheduled called THE CALAMITOUS QUEEN. Has a release date been set?

Awkward Ike, who is useless at everything except drawing, has just been expelled from school. He touches a magnificent pen and hears a girl crying out for help. Ike draws a door on the wall and finds himself in the land of Wychwold.
Within ten minutes he’s accidentally betrayed a princess to the wicked Fey Queen, Emajicka. Then Ike is caught and chained to a guard imp called Nuckl who wants to eat his liver. With the aid of a thief girl, Mellie, Ike escapes and they set out to rescue the princess.
But the Fey Queen is stealing the children of Grimmery for her Collection. She bathes in their nightmares to relieve her own, and there is one nightmare she wants most of all - Ike's. And She’ll spend much of the next three books trying to get it, while Ike is trying to stop her, and save Grimmery.
All is revealed in the final book, The Calamitous Queen, which has just gone to the printer and will be published in June 2011.

Will you write more novels for children after this series is finished?

I definitely will. I’ve loved writing for children over the last five or six years, and now that I’ve written several Grim and Grimmer books and seen how they make people laugh, I’m keen do a lot more.
I don’t have any ideas for a new series yet, because I’m furiously writing my next big epic fantasy series, The Tainted Realm. But towards the end of that, in a year or so, I’ll be thinking hard about my next humorous series for kids. If any readers care to tell me what they’d like to read, I’d love to hear their ideas.

Please tell the blog readers where they can go to check out all of your books, Ian.

I have a gigantic website, http://www.ian-irvine.com/, where readers can see all my book covers, read blurbs, reviews and first chapters, listen to samples of some of my audiobooks, and hear me read excerpts from several of my books.
This page tells readers where to buy my books http://www.ian-irvine.com/buy.html. They’re all available from Australia, and many from Amazon and Amazon UK.  If readers have questions, they can make a comment or ask a question below this blog post. I also have a large Facebook author site where I give away signed sets of my books every week, http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author, and readers can contact me there. And I’m tweeting the beginnings of these books, http://twitter.com/#!/ianirvineauthor.
It’s been lovely talking to you and I look forward to your questions. And Happy Reading!
It has been lovely having you here. And it has been a real pleasure getting to know you these past few weeks.Good luck with the rest of the tour Ian. :)

Here's the full schedule for the blog tour. Some of this has passed, but you can always go back and read what Ian had to say.
January 15, 2011                    
Ripping Ozzie Reads              Book Promotion

March 9, 2011                         http://angusandrobertsonedwardstown.blogspot.com/
A&R Edwardstown                On Writing Children’s Fiction

March 21, 2011                       http://content.boomerangbooks.com.au/kids-book-capers-blog/
Kid’s Book Capers                 Review and giveaway

March 22, 2011                       http://deescribewriting.wordpress.com
Dee Scribe                               Writing Ike’s Character

March 23, 2011                       http://bloggingwithianirvine.blogspot.com/
Our Lady Of Lourdes School General Writing

March 23, 2011                       http://tristanbancksflow.blogspot.com/
Tristan Banck’s Blog              Creative Process/Workspace

March 24                                 http://www.kids-bookreview.com/
Kid’s Book reviews                Top 10 Writing Tips

March 28, 2011                       http://www.robyn-campbell.blogspot.com/ 
Robyn Campbell                     About the writing life and this book

March 28, 2011                       http://content.boomerangbooks.com.au/literary-clutter-blog/
George Ivanoff                       10 things I enjoyed most about writing this book

March 31, 2011                       http://content.boomerangbooks.com.au/literary-clutter-blog/
George Ivanoff                       10 things I found hardest about writing this book

April 6, 2011                           http://dcgreenyarns.blogspot.com/
DC Green                                Where the character and story ideas came from

April 11, 2011                         www.buginabook.com
Bug in a Book

Monday, March 28, 2011

Please welcome Australian author Ian Irvine to Putting Pen To Paper. Don't forget there is a chance to win the first three books in the GRIM AND GRIMMER series. You have to be a follower and comment. Chit chat with Ian. :) I'll use random.org after part two of Ian's interview tomorrow. Good luck. He sent me the books to read and autographed them for me. These are not the books I'll be giving away. I bought some for the giveaway. They had me giggling all the way through. You gotta have these books!












Ian Irvine, a marine scientist who has developed some of Australia's national guidelines for the protection of the oceanic environment, has written 27 novels. 
These include the internationally bestselling Three Worlds fantasy sequence (The View from the Mirror, The Well of Echoes and Song of the Tears), an eco-thriller trilogy and 12 books 
for children. His latest book is Grim and Grimmer 3: The Desperate Dwarf.

Ian’s website is www.ian-irvine.com
His author site on Facebook is http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author

I just want to say it has been  pleasure getting to know Ian over these past few 
weeks. On with the interview. (^_^)

Ian, when did you write your first book?
1987. I’d been thinking about writing for years, and writing epic fantasy because it was the genre
I most enjoyed reading. I had done reams of planning and world-building, and drawn maps of my 
fantasy world the size of doors, but struggled to get any story down on paper. Then, finally, in 
September
of that year my frustrated creative urge burst forth and I told myself – “It’s mid-September, 
I’m starting now, and if I write three pages a day, by Christmas I’ll have the first draft of a novel done.”
Easier said than done. The moment I started writing A Shadow on the Glass I realised that 
I didn’t knowhow to tell a good story. I’d never tried it before. I soon realised that planning was useless, 
so I simply began with the heroine, Karan, in a bad situation and tried to write her out of it. I never 
knew what was going to happen next, but I quickly discovered that every chapter ended with her,\
and her impractical friend Llian, in ever more desperate trouble.
Writing was agony – I felt sure that I was writing rubbish. I often wanted to take the manuscript, the 
computer and floppy discs, out into the middle of the lawn and set fire to them, just to escape. Then, 
suddenly, a third of the way though the book, something clicked and I got into the story, and at that
moment I knew that writing was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
And I did finish the first draft, three days before Christmas.
Unfortunately, Karan’s and Llian’s story didn’t finish there; within weeks I had sketched out three 
morebooks of the quartet called The View from the Mirror, though it took years to draft it all, 
and many years after that before it was finally published, in 1998 and 1999. But since then it has
been published in a dozen countries and has sold a million copies, so the agonising wait was worth it.
It taught me howto write.

Are your characters based on yourself or anyone else you know?
I never base characters on people I know. Partly because that can cause trouble, but mostly because I
write about larger-than-life, often wildly eccentric characters and I don’t know people who are that 
unusual. And because it’s much more fun to create characters from scratch than it is to copy them
from life.
Besides, what writer really understands the innermost workings of another person’s soul. We may
think we understand our spouses, children and dearest friends, but do we really?
Ultimately, the only person I can really understand is myself, so in a way every character is
based on aspects of myself – perhaps turned upside-down or inside-out, but still more me
than anyone I know.
Which is rather worrying, considering the terrible things that happen in my books.

Which is your own favorite book or character?
At the moment it’s The Calamitous Queen, the fourth and last book of Grim and Grimmer
because I’ve just finished correcting the proofs and on the read-through I really enjoyed it. 
I usually like best thelast book I’ve done, because I try hard to learn something new with 
each new book and make it better than the ones that have gone before.
But my sentimental favourite will always be my first book, A Shadow on the Glass
Over ten years Idid 22 hard drafts, and I lived every mile of Karan and Llian’s adventures.
I miss them.

 Do you work from home or elsewhere?
I work from home. I’m a marine scientist by profession, an expert in the management of 
polluted sediments.
I set up my own little consulting company the year before I started writing and I’ve been 
working from my home office ever since. My office has a literary side and a scientific side,
and this is where I’ve done most of my writing for the past twenty years.
But I used to travel a lot for work, and I’ve also written in a mining camp on a
small island in Torres Strait,on a mountaintop in Papua-New Guinea, and on assignments in 
Mauritius, Bali, Fiji, the Philippines, Indonesia, South Korea and Western Samoa, among 
other places. When you have a burning desire to write, and little free 
time, you have to write everywhere.

Is it easier writing for children?
Yes and no. My epic fantasy cycle, THE THREE WORLDS, comprises 11 books so far, written over
nearly 20 years, and runs to 2.3 million words. I loved doing it, but writing all those big books
in such a long sequence was mentally and creatively exhausting. At the end of each series
I have to get away to somethingdifferent, and lately I’ve done this by writing much smaller books for
children (I’ve written 12 so far).
In one sense it’s easier writing for children. Children’s books are much smaller than epic fantasy novels,
and simpler – more often than not there’s but one viewpoint character, rather than many, and the plot is
simpler and tends to be more linear.

Are there any drawbacks?              
On the other hand, huge fantasy novels offer more freedom, because readers are more tolerant
of diversionsand many readers love huge, complex plots. Children, however, won’t put up
with a meandering story orpoorly drawn characters; the writing has to be tight and focused.
A few years ago I wrote a quartet called The Sorcerer’s Tower for mid-primary readers.
Each bookwas just 10,000 words and I found it difficult to adapt my writing style to such
small books – to developinteresting characters and tell an involving adventure story in so few words.
But I learned a tremendous amount about writing economically. It’s changed the way
I’ve written since.

What is the very best thing about writing for children?
Being able to let go and indulge the wild and wacky side that I’ve probably suppressed
in writing my moreserious epic fantasies, and my thrillers about catastrophic climate change.

How did you come up with your enchanting character Ike?
I’ve written about a lot of extraordinary characters, but I wanted to begin Grim and Grimmer
with a very ordinary hero, a boy called Useless Ike who is always in trouble because he can’t
do anything right, and isexpelled from school in the first chapter.
But no one wants to read about a totally useless character. In the crisis of the first chapter,
Ike can’t bear being Useless Ike any more, and decides that he has to make something of his life.
Ike is good heartedand brave, but also impulsive, thoughtless and reckless, and he often gets
himself and his friends into worsetrouble. But he never gives up. Ike keeps trying and by the
end of the story, though sheer, admirabledetermination, he not only transforms himself
but is the hero who has saved Grimmery.

Please join us tomorrow for part two of my interview with Ian.

Ian's blog tour schedule:

January 15, 2011                    
Ripping Ozzie Reads              Book Promotion

March 9, 2011                         http://angusandrobertsonedwardstown.blogspot.com/
A&R Edwardstown                On Writing Children’s Fiction

March 21, 2011                       http://content.boomerangbooks.com.au/kids-book-capers-blog/
Kid’s Book Capers                 Review and giveaway

March 22, 2011                       http://deescribewriting.wordpress.com
Dee Scribe                               Writing Ike’s Character

March 23, 2011                       http://bloggingwithianirvine.blogspot.com/
Our Lady Of Lourdes School General Writing

March 23, 2011                       http://tristanbancksflow.blogspot.com/
Tristan Banck’s Blog              Creative Process/Workspace

March 24                                 http://www.kids-bookreview.com/
Kid’s Book reviews                Top 10 Writing Tips

March 28, 2011                       http://www.robyn-campbell.blogspot.com/ 
Robyn Campbell                     About the writing life and this book

March 28, 2011                       http://content.boomerangbooks.com.au/literary-clutter-blog/
George Ivanoff                       10 things I enjoyed most about writing this book

March 31, 2011                       http://content.boomerangbooks.com.au/literary-clutter-blog/
George Ivanoff                       10 things I found hardest about writing this book

April 6, 2011                           http://dcgreenyarns.blogspot.com/
DC Green                                Where the character and story ideas came from

April 11, 2011                         www.buginabook.com
Bug in a Book

Friday, March 25, 2011

Grim and Grimmer 3 The Desperate Dwarf

It's up to Ike to save Grimmery now. This book is so funny, so well told, it makes a writer wish he had written it. When Ian Irvine sent me the first three books in his GRIM AND GRIMMER series I had NO idea of what to expect. As I read each book I fell in love with the characters and realized the gift that Ian has for storytelling. (He even autographed them for me,) These are NOT the books I will be giving away. (I ordered some for that.) How could I part with the books he sent me? 


I have to admit to a serious amount of giggling as I read the GRIM AND GRIMMER series. Lovable characters, just the right amount of the gross out factor for boys, action packed, and girls should love it too. Did I mention the gross out factor? 


Ike and Mellie blend nicely, even though at first, I wondered how these two could ever work together. They can and they do. Ike has confidence problems to say the least. Mellie does not. 'Nuff said?

Ian should write a book on characterization. At least one can study the books he's written to find out how he pulls it all together.


Con Glomryt is the definition of scoundrel. A super fun antagonist. I loved him. 


This is from the blurb on the back of the book: 

It's not easy to be a hero when your bum is the size of an airship and you're bobbing around the ceiling, mocked by a host of angry dwarves. 


Mellie has stolen the unluckiest charm in Wychwold and can't get rid of it. Pook has an insane plan to rescue the Collected children. The demons Nuckl, Spleen and Tonsil are after Ike's innards. And the Fey Queen, Emajicka, is coming to tear out his worst nightmare.
Only Ike can save Grimmery. But first he has to win a contest with a lying, cheating scoundrel - the desperate dwarf, Con Glomryt.

All young readers from 10 to 93 will love reading about Ike's adventures. There is one more book in the series due out June 2011. Grim and Grimmer 4 The Calamitous Queen. I can't wait! 

Be here Monday, March 28th to meet Ian Irvine. You'll be glad you did. There will be a chance to win the first three books in the series.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Be Here March, 28th. Visit with Ian Irvine, author of the GRIM AND GRIMMER Series

If you haven't heard of him, you have now. If you haven't read his excellent books, you will now. March 28th meet author Ian Irvine. There will be a chance to win the first three books in the GRIM AND GRIMMER series. Ian is a fantastic author who writes for adults and young readers too. I can't wait for you to meet him. :) On Friday, I will do a review of the third book in the series THE DESPERATE DWARF. So come on out and meet this awesome writer. I'z gonna show you more books you'll just have to have in your TBR pile. You can thank me later. *wink*

Thursday, March 17, 2011

200 FOLLOWERS CONTEST

Head over to Tony Benson's Fireside Park for a cool shot at winning The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson. As soon as he hits 200 (and he's not too far away) he could very well draw your name, but hopefully he'll draw mine. ;) I mean,  come on, I needs to win a contest, people. *wink* Here's your link: Fireside Park

Happy Saint Paddy's Day



 My gift to you,
The Irish Blessing:

May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,             
The rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of his hand.

May God be with you and bless you:
May you see your children's children.
May you be poor in misfortune,
Rich in blessings.
May you know nothing but happiness
From this day forward.

May the road rise up to meet you
May the wind be always at your back
May the warm rays of sun fall upon your home
And may the hand of a friend always be near.

May green be the grass you walk on,
May blue be the skies above you,
May pure be the joys that surround you,
May true be the hearts that love you.





Monday, March 7, 2011

Characterization

The definition of characterization from my old pal Webster: the way in which the writer portrays the characters in a book, play, or movie.

Writers know there is a lot more to it. There's indirect characterization:
The wind was so strong that Robyn's highlighted blond hair whipped around  hindering her vision. The sentence is not about the highlighted hair color of Robyn :) but you still learn that her hair is highlighted. And blond. :) (showing)

Direct characterization: Robyn was patient throughout the windstorm. I told what the character is like.  (telling)

Now I know these two sentences are terrible. (Robyn has  co-op today and her brain isn't working, either.)


Showing is so much better. Just compare the two sentences. But. Direct characterization is definitely needed in our novels. The indirect sentences are longer and more interesting to read, engaging us far more that direct. The direct  leaves less imagination to you the reader while still giving you the same information.


It is up to us to decide when to use direct characterization. Using direct characterization lowers our word count and moves the story forward. We may need to use it when we want to reveal something about a character without taking away from the action of a scene.


Anything on characterization I have left out? Tell it to me. I wanna know. <3

Friday, March 4, 2011







I've been gone, but not too far away. I'll be back and it couldn't be soon enough. Crusaders! I'm still crusading, just slower right now.I promise to get around to each and every blog. My recovery isn't going as smoothly as I'd hoped. I had spine fusion surgery. That's a big OUCH! I had the same look on my face as the doctor was explaining what he was going to be doing in the operating room as my friend above does while he or she? is pondering the whole eggs and chocolate thing.

So I come clean in hopes you guys will understand. I can't wait to get outta this bed and visit all my new friends and old buddies. Oops, I've been awake for ten minutes. *she taps her watch* That's the longest stretch of me being up and about since I had the operation Feb. 24th. xxxxxooooo

Great Book Tranlates to: You Gotta read it if You Write For Children

In CREATING CHARACTERS KIDS WILL LOVE, Elaine Marie Alphin gives us fantastic advice which can be applied to any writer.

We learn things from giving our characters the stories they need, a story in search of a cast, and even bringing nonfiction to life.

Ms. Alphin offers a section at the end of every chapter that deals with read the pros. Scattered inside  the chapters are little writing exercises called, Try it Yourself. Here is one that I loved from the chapter called, Keeping Grown-ups in their place: Write a conversation between a youngster and an adult he or she sees everyday, such as the bus driver or cashier at your local McDonald's. (Though my kids have always been home-schooled and didn't do either of those.) So I did mine with the elderly neighbor down the road from our farm. Think of something they have in common that would get them to talking. They both might be shy. How do they overcome that to talk to each other?

Another one: In chapter 4 there is an excellent character interview questionnaire. 56 questions to be exact.

She talks about the letters she receives from kids about why they love her books. The  number one reason? Her characters are just like they are. They identify with them. They compare themselves to the characters we create. But that's true for anyone. So buy the book and grab your highlighter.

I recommend this book to all writers. At least check it out from your local library.