What a whirlwind the last few weeks have been!

It all began with the launch of 'The Wildkin's Curse' at Berkelouw Bookshop in Balgowlah on April 30th. A massive crowd of family, friends, fellow writers and local children came along to help celebrate with me and my beautiful and talented sister, Belinda, whose book 'The Ruby Talisman' was launched the same day.

How often do you have two sisters launching books on the same day? We had to celebrate! Our brilliant brother Nick launched the books for us, charming the crowd with his wit. The whole place was buzzing!

The next two weeks were spent with Belinda going out to schools all over Sydney, talking to several hundred children a day. Belinda and I put together a Sister Act, sharing the stage and talking about our own books and inspirations in a way that would, hopefully, both engage and entertain our audience and express our different personalities.

It was actually really hard to get our act together! We are both so used to having the stage to ourselves, telling our own stories. For two weeks, Belinda and I worked hard on our speeches, timing each other, and making sure we each did our best stories and performances. We ended up finding it easiest to talk as we walked, and so very day we walked our dogs along the esplanade at Manly, telling tales of bloody murder, treachery, adventure and romance, much to the bemusement of passing tourists.

The Sydney Writers Festival was next. Belinda and I were starring on the School Days program with Brian Falkner, Andy Griffiths and Leigh Hobbs. Every day, we spoke to 1,000 or more children in amazing venues like the Sydney Town Hall, the Sydney Theatre at the Wharf, the Riverside Theatre at Parramatta, and the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre in Penrith.

Some highlights

• Kids bringing great piles of my books to be signed and telling me I'm their favourite writer in the world
• Being mobbed by kids wanting us to sign books in the street outside Sydney Theatre
• Having an 11 year old tell me that it was the best day of her life and showing me how much her hands were shaking
• A boy telling me that he was writing a novel too & wanted to be just like me when he grows up

On Saturday 22nd May, Belinda and I were joined by the fabulous Deb Abela to run creative writing workshops at Admiralty House, on behalf of the Governor-General of Australia.

I have never been to Admiralty House before, but every time I catch a ferry across the harbor I gaze at the gorgeous sandstone house glowing amongst green lawns and gardens, and wish that I could live there. It must be one of the most beautiful houses in Sydney, with a spectacular view of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House.

It was so exciting to have been asked to go there, and meet the Governor General, Her Excellency Ms Quentin Bryce, and to have the opportunity of teaching ninety children from three Sydney schools. Each of the three writers took a class of thirty, who then rotated to the next teacher. We devised a program based on Character & Setting, Planning & Plotting, and then Writing. The children were all bright and talented and enthusiastic, and it was an absolute pleasure to teach them. Her Excellency was charming and spoke beautifully about what a privilege it was for her to be involved in such a wonderful day, sentiments we all shared!

As I write this I am in London, which is almost as cold in early summer as Sydney was in early winter! I fly to Greece tomorrow for a week, running a writers retreat in sunny Skyros. I've never been to Greece so it feels like such a marvellous adventure. I plan to spend my free hours swimming in the Aegean Sea, enjoying a feast of Greek food and wine, walking through olive groves and writing.

Blessed be!

Having been rather busy this past month, I haven't had time to set up an interview with any of my favourite writers. So here is an interview I did with Burn Bright, the YA blog of Marianne de Pierres:

Interview of Kate Forsyth by the Burn Bright blog

1. You've written more than 20 novels. Would you describe writing as more of an unstoppable compulsion or a discipline that requires great focus and energy?
Both, actually. It's true I'm a compulsive writer. As well as writing novels, I do numerous articles every year, I blog a lot, I keep in email contact with writers all around the world, and I write in my diary most days. I've kept a diary since I was twelve – that's twenty-two years of consecutive diary writing and a whole lot of shelves lined with tattered notebooks. I also have boxes full of old manuscripts. I wrote my first novel when I was seven and have never stopped since. It'd be a rare day when I don't spend some time at least writing. And if I'm kept from my writing, I get fidgety and unhappy. Sometimes I feel as if I have a constant undercurrent of words running through my mind and the only way to stop them from damming up is to write them out.

William Gifford once described writing as "the insatiate itch of scribbling."

Enid Bagnold said: "Writing is a condition of grinding anxiety. It is an operation in which the footwork, the balance, the knowledge of sun and shade, the alteration of slush and crust, the selection of surface at high speed is a matter of exquisite finesse. When you are without judgement and hallucinations look like the truth! When experience (which trails behind) and imagination (which trails in front) will only combine by a miracle! When the whole thing is an ambidexterity of memory and creation – of the front and the back of the brain – a lethargy of inward dipping and a tiptoe of poise, while the lasso is whirling up for words! It is a gamble, a toss-up, an unsure benevolence of God!'

(Isn't that marvellous?)
Jean Cocteau simply asks, in despair, "This sickness, to express oneself. What is it?"

So we've had the writing impulse described variously as an itch, a sickness, a condition of grinding anxiety, an unsure benevolence of God … I have felt all of that and more. Yet I still love it and cannot live without it. It's an utterly fascinating conundrum.

Dostoevsky was a compulsive writer too. He had a condition called hypergraphia caused by temporal lobe epilepsy. This is because the temporal lobe is the site of language and sound processing, memory, and emotional drive. People who have hypergraphia get an intense pleasure from the act of writing. They are driven to write regardless of whether or not they earn income from it, and whether or not anyone appreciates what they do (even though we may weep about it!)

The difference between Dostoevsky and most hypergraphics, though, is the quality of the writing. Most hypergraphics simply write long streams of meaningless gibberish that can be quite painful to read. Dostoevsky, however, brings the craftsman's skill to the task of writing. He has discipline and design and virtuosity.

So even though I suspect my own compulsion to write borders on hypergraphia (even perhaps graphamania!), I try and bring to my writing the discipline I need to make the book the very best that I can make it. I work hard at my craft, always striving to be a better writer. I try and combine my natural flair and facility with words with technical brilliance (and fall short, as we always must).

2. You've played a diverse number of roles, Kate: academic, journalist, author, poet, creative writing teacher…Your schedule is mind-boggling! What's a day in the life of the busy Kate Forsyth like?
It is busy! However, the pattern of my days depends on what stage of the book I am in. The early stages are much easier – I read a lot, daydream a lot, I have time to go to the movies, see a play or go to the ballet, and I cook delicious feasts for my family. As the action in my novels rises in pace and intensity towards the crisis, so does my life. I think about the book all the time. I dream about it at night. Often I cannot sleep because of the fever my brain is in and so I get up and work for hours in the dark and lonely quiet of the night. I begin to burn dinner. Or I cook the quickest, easiest meals I can think of so I can have more time at my computer. I began to be absent-minded. Sometimes the world of my imagination is so much more vivid than the real world that I have trouble wrenching my mind back to everyday things like making sure my poor children have clean undies. By the time I'm in the final stages of the book, I am working at it twelve hours or more a day, at white-hot intensity.

Then I finish it! I am filled with amazement at what I have wrought. I bask in the afterglow a few weeks, catching up on all the things I've ignored – the piles of washing and unpaid bills, my neglected husband. Then comes the editing and rewriting. I always work at fever-pitch at this stage too, wanting to stay as connected to the story as I can. Then it is delivered and goes off to the publisher, and I have to prepare to emerge, blinking at the brightness, into the glare of the publicity process. This is when I teach a lot – I turn down most teaching engagements when I'm writing – and this is when I write a lot of shorter pieces, like articles, reviews, blogs and speeches. This is actually the hardest part of the whole process because I'll have to be out the door at 7am, facing a day of delivering 2-3 book talks a day, doing photo shoots and media interviews (I've done about 10 just in the past week!).

I also travel a lot while promoting, which is hard on my little family. Just in the next few months I am doing the Sydney Writers Festival, then two weeks in the UK and Greece (running a writer's retreat); then I'm writer-in-residence at a Sydney school; then I'm appearing at the CYA Literary Festival at the NSW Writers Centre, running a workshop at the Romance Writers of Australia Conference, appearing at the Abbotsleigh Literary Festival, then I have Book Week (which is more like a month!), then the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Brisbane Writers Festival, the CYA Later, Alligator conference in Brisbane and straight back to Melbourne for WorldCon. Phew!

I'll be looking forward to getting back to my dim and peaceful study after all of that (and my family will be looking forward to the delicious feasts!)

3. Your latest book, The Wildkin's Curse, follows 2002′s The Starthorn Tree in the Chronicles of Estelliana. What was it like to dive back into that world after having been away so long?
I was afraid at first that the idea for the book would be stone-cold ashes and that no matter how hard I blew on them, no flicker of fire would remain. But, much to my relief and joy, I found a handful of hot coals still glowing deep in the ashes and some concentrated effort soon had the flame of inspiration leaping high again. After that, it was a joy! It was liberating to be writing fantasy again and have no shackles on my imagination, and the characters quickened for me very quickly which means the writing process was able to gallop along. I loved it!

4. Which of your many characters Burns Brightest in your mind and why?
Such a difficult question! You have to be intrigued by your characters – if not utterly enthralled – if you are to spend a year writing them to life and then another year talking about them!

My very first heroine Isabeau occupies a special place in my heart – I first dreamt about her when I was sixteen and the Witches of Eileanan series changed my life, catapulting me from desperate longing and poverty into being an internationally bestselling author living the life I had always dreamed of. And she still earns me nice fat royalty cheques thirteen years later! Also, I wrote six books about her which took six years of my life. And with her red hair and laughing spirit and her blazing magical powers she certainly does burn bright!

But then what of Sara of Full Fathom Five? I spent so much of my young adulthood trying to do her story justice. And of course I love Rhiannon, the wild girl that no man can ever tame. And my four heroes in the Starthorn Tree! And Luka and Emilia in The Gypsy Crown! They came laughing and dancing and fighting into my imagination and gave me no peace till I wrote their story. Those six books in the Chain of Charms series just seemed to leap off the tips of my fingers and write themselves. And I have a very tender spot for Hannah and Donovan from 'The Puzzle Ring' – I love a feisty heroine and a dark and brooding hero. While my heroes from The Wildkin's Curse' – brave and clever Merry and Liliana, tall and strong, determined not to show her vulnerability, well, they're just darlings.

I love all these characters and loved writing their stories. However, I have to admit the ones that burn brightest in your own mind are the ones who are jostling at your elbow while you write, talking and arguing and telling jokes you can't help laughing at … and of course those are the characters you are writing into life right now! I'm near the end of my next book, called 'The Starkin Crown'. It's the sequel to 'The Wildkin's Curse and my hero is a teenage boy called Peregrine. Whenever I think of him I imagine a peregrine falcon soaring high in the air. He's bright and brave and quick and generous-hearted, and if I was fifteen years old and living in the world of the book, I'd be falling in love with him, just like plain, shy, practical Molly.

You can read more about Kate here.

Check out the trailer to Kate's latest book, The Wildkin's Curse.

~ by mdepierres on May 14, 2010.

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