Karen Comer

Collecting Stories

Ovarian cancer day

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This Sunday, Mother’s Day, is world ovarian cancer day. It’s appropriate timing – one of my closest friends, Leane, mother of three daughters, has just passed her five-year anniversary of being diagnosed with cancer. You can learn more about the wonderful Leane and her story in the video above – Leane has worked tirelessly to raise awareness and funds for an early detection test.

And my lovely Mum was diagnosed with ovarian cancer last year – now healthy after an operation and chemo, but still receiving treatment.

Supporting the Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation with their Witchery white shirt day is very important to me. Witchery donate 100% of their gross proceeds from every white shirt sold to the OCRF. I love this year’s shirt – crisp and classic, perfect for tailored pants and a skirt for work or with jeans for a casual look!

I bought my white shirt for Mum, for Leane, for women already diagnosed with ovarian cancer and for women yet to be diagnosed. Perhaps a Witchery white shirt is the perfect gift for yourself or another special woman…

Immersion into other worlds

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I’m not back into writing yet – I still need to conserve my energy after getting Covid almost six weeks ago. I’m back into my editing work and am edging my way back to writing by immersing myself into research for my third book.

This book for young adults has a fairy-tale theme, and I’ve been reading many scholarly works by Marie-Louise von Franz, Bruno Bettelheim, Joan Gould and Lisa Marchiano on fairy tales.

But as I’ve spent a considerable amount of time lying down over the past few weeks, i’ve been using that time somewhat productively by watching Once upon a time, the Disney series.

I’d watched the first three (of seven!) seasons a few years ago but decided to rewatch them to immerse myself in a visual fairy-tale world.

The premise for the show – the evil queen, Regina, (the stepmother in Snow White’s story) has cursed all inhabitants of the Enchanted Forest, transporting them to a small town in Maine where they have led controlled, dull lives for 28 years, with no knowledge of who they really are until Snow White and Prince Charming’s daughter (sent through a portal before the curse) wakes them up.

The characters play dual roles, each with a contemporary modern existence with flashbacks to their lives in the Enchanted Forest. For example, Jiminy Cricket in the Enchanted Forest is now a psychologist in Storybrook, Maine, the evil queen is the mayor and Rumplestiltskin is Mr Gold, an antiques dealer.

Occasionally, I’ll roll my eyes and wonder how many more portals and strange lands can these characters fall into but most of the time, I love the characters and the way their hidden depths and secrets are revealed. As I’m looking at my book through a Jungian perspective, I’m really interested in the split roles of the characters, how the ‘evil’ characters are often a catalyst for the ‘good’ characters to wake up and how most characters are a fascinating blend of good and evil.

I watch each episode with either my phone or a notebook, so I can pause the show and take notes.

I’m up to season 6! I can strongly recommend films and television series for a visual immersion into another world!

And thank you all so much for your kind comments – I really appreciate your support and interest in my writing.

A publishing contract with Hachette!

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I’m so thrilled to share with you that this week I signed a publishing contract with Hachette for my debut young adult novel, Even the ocean! It’s due to be published in February 2023.

This is a verse novel about two fifteen-year-olds living in Melbourne during 2020, trying to hold on to their creativity despite being restricted by both lockdowns and their families. Crux wants to be a street artist but it’s illegal for kids to carry spray cans in public. Talia wants to become a professional violinist but her family has academic expectations. It’s a book about self-expression and resilience.

Oceans of thanks to Danielle Binks, my agent, and Kate Stevens, Hachette publisher, for their belief in this story from the very beginning. Their enthusiasm came through my screen in Zoom meetings during Melbourne’s lockdowns!

Hachette publish some of my favourite young adult and middle-grade authors – Danielle Binks, Pip Harry, Cath Crowley, Jessica Townsend – I’m in excellent company!

I’m looking forward to sharing more details about my research into street art and my violin lessons. Warning – I do not share my characters’ talents in these fields!

It was so wonderful to receive the contract this week – I’m almost five weeks past getting Covid (hence my silence on the blog) and I’ve been struggling through Covid brain fog and physical exhaustion. The Hachette contract is absolutely a highlight for my year!

You don’t have to finish reading a book

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Permission granted – you don’t have to finish reading a book. Perhaps you’re gasping with horror right now – surely if you start reading a book, you need to finish reading it. Why?

Do you have an obligation to the author? Will the author know you started their book but didn’t enjoy it enough to finish it? Will your grade three teacher scold you? Will the librarians know when you return the book? Does it mean you can’t start reading another book until you’ve finished it?

The answer to all these questions is no! There is the slight caveat that if you know the author, perhaps you might want to finish reading their book!

I used to finish any book I began, ploughing through shaky character motivation, boring descriptions, meandering plots, too many long-winded sentences.

But there are too many wonderful books out there to spend time on one that’s not to your taste. For every book I read, there’s a thousand other books I’m not reading.

I always give a book a fair go – I’ll read a few chapters before deciding that it’s not for me. But just because a book isn’t for me doesn’t mean that it’s not a good book or it’s not a wonderful book for someone else. Some of the best bookclub discussions I’ve had involve half the women championing the book and the other half wanting to throw it across the room!

I have an unfinished book sitting on my window seat, ready to return to the library. I read the first four chapters and skimmed through the rest of the book. It was a non-fiction book, and I thought it would be useful background information for the book I’m writing. It gave me a little bit of insight but I didn’t think it would offer me much more, and I have a pile of non-fiction books on the same topic, waiting to be read. So I’ll return it, unfinished.

Let me know your thoughts on this controversial subject!

The Stella longlist 2022

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Earlier this week, I attended the announcement of the Stella Prize longlist on behalf of Springfield, one of Stella’s sponsors. Wonderful night for the 10th Stella Prize, a prize awarded annually to Australian women and non-binary writers – the descriptions of each of the 12 longlisted books made me want to read them all.

The five judges – Melissa Lucashenko, Cate Kennedy, Sisonke Mismang, Declan Fry and Oliver Reeson – discussed the books, an impressive list which included seven debut authors and five First Nations writers. The longlist consisted of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, short stories and a graphic novel – surely something for everyone!

The 2022 Stella longlist:

  • Coming of age in the war on terror by Randa Abdel-Fattah – non-fiction
  • Take care by Eunice Andrada – poetry
  • Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen – poetry
  • She is haunted by Paige Clark – short stories
  • No document by Anwen Crawford – non-fiction
  • Bodies of light by Jennifer Down – novel
  • Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss – novel
  • Stone fruit by Lee Lai – graphic novel
  • Permafrost by SJ Norman – short fiction
  • Homecoming by Elfie Shiosaki – poetry and prose
  • The open by Lucy Van – poetry
  • Another day in the colony by Chelsea Watego – non-fiction

I hope you find something from this wonderful list to read over the next few months!

Where do ideas come from?

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Thank you so much to all the new blog readers, especially the year seven students who have signed up – I really appreciate your support!

My middle-grade verse novel Y is a crooked letter will be published next year and I’ll start working on the structural edit in a couple of months. I thought I would explain where some of my ideas for this book came from.

It’s a story for 9-12 year-olds, set in Melbourne, about a girl called Freya (aged 12) who is passionate about basketball and fearful about lifts. The book opens with a scene of Freya and her mum moving house, from their home in Eltham to an apartment in Abbotsford. Freya can see the neon sign of the Skipping Girl from the apartment’s balcony.

Basketball – for quite a few years, my three kids played a lot of basketball. This meant that my life involved driving them to training, supervising training sometimes and watching their games. Because the thud thud thud of the basketball became the soundtrack to those years, it naturally wove itself into my story. I’d never played basketball and I never intended to write about basketball but I thought that Freya needed to have a sport so I gave her basketball. Then it turned out that not only did she play basketball but she loved it. It was her favourite thing in the world! So although I intentionally included basketball in my book, I had no idea it would feature so prominently.

Skipping Girl – one of my school friends, Kathryn, had told me years ago that when she was a little girl, she loved driving past the Skipping Girl sign at night a few times a years when her parents would drive home from a city excursion. She loved seeing the Skipping Girl lit up at night – it was something to look out for, something special. Another friend had a small son who would climb on to their wheelie bin, hold on to the fence, crane his neck and just make out the Skipping Girl in the night sky. Again, she was special. When I was thinking about Freya moving house, and how she had left behind a part of her family, all of her friends, her basketball team, I thought she might need something that represented stability and certainty to her. I can’t even remember how the Skipping Girl sign came to me but once I thought of it, I knew she would be important in my book.

So that’s how two of my ideas for Y is a crooked letter came about! I’m writing my third book now, and it still feels the same, like I’m a magnet attracted to everything I need for my book, even if I don’t know exactly what I need.

We need a lot of dreaming time to allow ideas to rise up to the surface. If we’re constantly on screens, constantly being passively entertained by screens, constantly filling our heads with other people’s words and ideas, then there’s no room for our own ideas to fill our heads. I try to be as mindful as I can – I walk every day and I make sure I only spend half my walk listening to a podcast so the other half is for dreaming. Sometimes I drive in silence when I’m alone in the car, no music, no radio, no podcasts, no calling a friend. Ideas come in the gaps of our days – when we’re in the shower, walking, washing dishes, on the tram.

I hope you are filled with ideas in your week ahead!

Hello, February!

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January is such a lovely time for dreaming and planning the year ahead but February (even halfway through!) is much better for putting in action all that dreaming.

Here’s all my dreaming/planning for 2022:

  • teaching Stewardship – a customised ten-month program for writers, offering support, mentorship and writing craft. We had our first online meeting this week, and I am so excited to be working with these talented writers on their books.
  • editing my middle-grade book to be published by Allen & Unwin in June 2023. I’m expecting the structural edit in a couple of months, and then the copy-edit a little later. I don’t know what I don’t know – so to have an editor work with me to improve my book after working on it by myself is such a blessing!
  • tutoring a couple of Yr 11 and Yr 12 students in English. I’m always impressed by how insightful older teens are about the texts they’re studying.
  • continuing with my freelance editing projects, always a wonderful mix of books. So far this year, I’ve worked on an adult novel and a non-fiction business book – both such interesting projects.
  • writing my third book, another young adult book – I’m hoping to write a decent chunk of this in the next month, and do a little research around the edges, before all the other ‘things’ start to intensify.

Isn’t that a wonderful creative bookish year ahead?

Merry Christmas!

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Merry Christmas, dear blog readers!

Thank you all so much for the lovely congratulations messages last post. I’m looking forward to sharing more about the process of publication as I experience it for the first time.

I’m taking a break from blogging for a few weeks, and will be back towards the middle of January.

I wish you all a wonderful Christmas with your loved ones!

A publishing contract!

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Dear blog readers, I have some news! I’m thrilled to share with you that I’ve been offered a publishing contract with Allen & Unwin for my middle-grade verse novel, Y is a crooked letter!

This book began life 11 years ago as a picture book, then turned into a middle-grade novel, then metamorphosed into a verse novel.

That’s 11 years of words – cutting, rewriting, adding, deleting, rearranging, polishing, choosing, discarding, speaking, scribbling – until I finally had something that sung.

I’m so excited to be working with Allen & Unwin! I have attended a few of their courses through the Faber and Faber Institute, met their wonderfully talented editors and read so many, so many of their beautiful books. It is an honour to be connected with Allen and Unwin, and I’m looking forward to a creative collaboration with their lovely publisher, Anna McFarlane. Dream come true!

So grateful to my agent, Danielle Binks, for signing me, giving me such wise counsel in her writerly feedback and in navigating me through the process of pitching to publishers and negotiating deals. She is a gem!

Y is a crooked letter will be published in June 2023, and I look forward to sharing more of the publishing and writing process with you next year.

And stay tuned – I may have more exciting news early next year!

Art journals for writing

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There are art journals – and there are art journals. My art journal – well, it’s more of a collection of notes, scribbles and diagrams than a beautiful object to be placed behind museum glass one day.

I created my art journal to collect all my ramblings about my young adult verse novel, Even the ocean. I have three sections – one for general notes, and one each for my two protagonists.

My art journal is a great place to be messy – something which is absolutely essential to the creative process but not always appreciated by my editorial brain. So my art journal gives me permission to doodle, record scraps of ideas, work through plot problems, add images, tuck secret notes inside envelopes, research – all non-linear, imaginative, daydreamy ways to follow my story.

This art journal concept has worked so well for me that I am now in the process of making another two journals – one for a new middle-grade idea and one for a new young adult book. I think I’ve found my process!