Mayhem Happiness

So Meerkat has hit the shops! Its sales, after only three weeks, are amazing. Thrilling doesn’t get near describing this wonderful reception to the book. Long may it reign!

But also, more Green Sheep excitement… On Dec 2nd 2024 a series of real stamps is being released, with a different piece of art from Green Sheep on each one. It’s may be irritating for you to read about it as it will probably have sold out by December 3rd, but anyway, it’s good news that I wanted to share, to round off this amazing 20th anniversary year.

End of year busy-ness, and all that, mitigates against any further news at the moment. But it’s enough, I hope, to show I’m still alive and kicking and looking forward to 2025.

Happy everything!

Love

Mem xxx

2024 Facelift!

Well, hello!

Much though I need it, I haven’t had a facelift myself. It’s the website. Refreshing it is a work in progress so there may be some hiccups. I hope you love what we’ve done already.

I’ve worked particularly hard on the Advice to Writers. People who want to write picture books should read it to prevent themselves from making the many silly mistakes and foolish assumptions that I made when I sent off the first (rejected) draft of Possum Magic in 1978.

Anyway, the thrilling news I couldn’t tell in you in my last blog was that the Australian Mint was about to launch a coin featuring the Green Sheep, no less! And then it was pointless writing about it as it sold out within two hours of its release. Incredible. And there were also editions of Where is the Green Sheep? with one of the coins inserted in the covers but they were gone within days too, so why mention it? Except to say all of it was hugely complimentary and put the book on an even higher publishing pedestal.

Two more pieces of happy news: the Margaret Hendry school in Canberra has named its library the Mem Fox Library, so I’m making a literal flying visit to the school next week. I’m in awe that any school would do this in my lifetime. Divine of them. Photos will be here when I get home (and when I remember to update my website…). And here they are! I’m with the librarian Bridgette Manley.

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Yesterday and today I’ve signed 200 copies of Meerkat Mayhem at the request of Readings Bookshops in Melbourne. Readings, for those of you who don’t live in Melbourne, is one of the best bookshops in Australia, so the fact they wanted 200 signed copies ready for the publication date on November 5th was (and is) a massive vote of confidence in the book. It made my heart race a little when the request came in. If Readings wanted so many copies, I reasoned, others would too. Thank God! The weeks before publication are nail-biting.  Here’s the latest advertisement:

Wish me luck!

Love

Mem Fox xxx

A Quick Word

Greetings!

Sadly, the delicious 40th anniversary of Possum Magic is now over. But this year, 2024, as if the good news can’t tumble into the world quickly enough, I’ll have the happiness of the 20th anniversary of Where is the Green Sheep? (Shared with Judy Horacek, of course.) Both last year and this year there were, and will be special anniversary editions of both books. Lovely. Nice, at my age…

The biggest 40th celebratory event last year was Possum Magic The Ballet, performed by a cast of the final year students at the Australian Ballet School in Melbourne. No expense or effort was spared to create this exquisite show. It was both delicate and dynamic, and gorgeously uplifting. And hysterically funny in parts as well, when the male dancers were boxing kangaroos and lifesavers. Julie Vivas, the illustrator, and I were over the moon and hugely grateful, and awed, and almost shy. It was a glittering affair.

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Here we are, the two ancient creatives, still smiling through on December 8th 2023.

The program and the performance were simply gorgeous:

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I’m sorry not to have any fresh news about books at the moment. You may be asking yourself, with reason, why I even bother with an intermittent blog. Fair call, frankly. It’s to indicate I’m alive. Anyway, on the bright side, one of my books is still being illustrated, another is waiting for the illustrator to start, and right now I’m writing yet another, about which I’m currently obsessed. I’m aiming, by hook or by crook, to have something published in the year I turn 80. Wow! Fun times! It may come as a necessary shock to the world to discover that brains can still work doggedly inside old heads. If I’m no longer here in two years’ time, or my mind is wandering, or in the end there’s no new book out in 2026, feel free to laugh at my expense.

Here in Adelaide, South Australia, it’s the height of summer, but honestly, no matter where you live in the world, the weather been weird. Different. Unusual. Unpredictable. Too much of one thing and not enough of another. Too hot. Too cold. Too wet. too dry. A few years ago, one of our Prime Ministers, for whom I had scant regard, declared verbatim: ‘Climate change is crap’. What a deluded fool! Poor man. The legacy that we the Old are leaving to the Young is a disgrace. I am mortally sorry.

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About the changing climate: it rarely rains in our summer. The lawns die, the gardens wilt, the streets are hot-hot under bare feet, and the beach is crowded. Imagine then, the shock of this storm over ‘our’ beach before Christmas. What??? No! Not possible. But yes. Fabulous.

In spite of the peculiarity of the weather, summer provides lots of breaks for coffee and friends and walks and reading and gardening and perhaps a touch of travel, and cooking-and-family, the latter of which, in my case, comes together every evening. I’m still exercising and weight-lifting, although my asthmatic lungs increasingly let me down. I’m often red-faced within twenty minutes of an hour’s fast fitness class and looking at my watch far too often. I never leave a class early, but I do sometimes sit out for a moment to catch my breath. I’ve survived Covid once, pretty well, but wear a mask in crowded situations. Why get Covid twice, I ask myself, with all the risks it presents to weaklings like me? Er, that’s not right. I lift 6kgs above my head every morning, 20 times in each arm. No weakling can do that. I must focus on the positives.

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Let’s all focus on the positives in 2024. A smile never goes amiss.

All the best!

Mem xxx

July 19th, 2024 Silence Broken!

Tan-tan-tara! She lives!

Sorry to have been so silent forso long. Mortifying. It’s the longest time between posts I’ve ever been guilty of. I’m knuckling down to the task right now in the unlikely event that you’ve been wondering if I were ill or dead. (I mean, who reads websites these days? But just in case…) Anyway, I’m neither ill nor dead, just slacker than usual about my website, and busy with real life and other important happenings.

The best news for me—and Judy Horacek, and it’s literally hot on the press as I type, is that our new book, Meerkat Mayhem, which has taken many years to evolve, is now done. It’s at the printers at last. The pictures are wildly funny. Only Judy could have pulled them off. I hope my words match her artistic hysteria. Publication in November. So long to wait. I’m counting the sleeps.

Back to the present. 2024 happens to be anniversary heaven. The noisiest of those anniversaries so far this year, and it’s on-going, has been the celebration of the 20th anniversary of Where is the Green Sheep? Exciting times, considering last year was the thrilling 40th anniversary of Possum Magic, illustrated by Julie Vivas.

Judy Horacek, the sensational illustrator (of Green Sheep, in this case) and I have been busy with media appearances, alerting the world to the longevity of this very simple book. It’s been given a gold cover for this auspicious year:

Much to the delight of my own grown up family, for heaven’s sake, a sticker book of Green Sheep has been added to the celebrations:

And soon a crinkly cloth book of Green Sheep is being released for babies and toddlers. Hurrah!

Earlier, when I mentioned that Green Sheep was a simple book, I wrote ‘simple’ with my tongue in my cheek. People who know nothing about writing a book might look at Green Sheep and think: ‘I could do that.’ My reply is: ‘Give it a go!’ And then understand why it took two intelligent women working together for eleven months to create a ‘simple’ book of 190 words, 188 of which were —and are —only one syllable: ‘quietly’ has three syllables and ‘asleep’ has two. The rest have one. The rhyme scheme is ABCB, which means the second and fourth lines have to rhyme. But the first two lines: AB, are pairs of like things, and the second two two lines are another, different pair of like things. Here’s an example of that tight set-up to show how the connections work and where the rhymes have to be:

Here is the sun sheep.

And here is the rain sheep.

Here is the car sheep

and here is the train sheep.

So! Three cheers for the children’s authors and illustrators you adore.  ‘Simple’ is never that simple. We work hard to keep children happy.

It’s also the 40th anniversary of Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge (note Wilfrid, not Wilfred), illustrated by Julie Vivas, with a special celebratory edition coming out in September. Have I ever written a better book? Not sure. The hairs on my arms stood up when I’d finished it. Even now, I have a catch in my throat when I read the last page aloud. The title, in case you didn’t know already, was my dad’s full name. He had re-trained as a librarian at the age of 66 so he loved, loved, loved it: he had his very own ISBN number! But many years later, by heart-breaking chance, he died of Alzheimer’s, which is the theme of the story of Wilfrid.

Yet another book, Sleepy Bears, illustrated by Kerry Argent, will have its own celebratory edition later this year: 35 years. So affirming. I used to whisper the last verse by heart in the dark to my grandson when I was putting him to bed. It calmed both of us:

Sleep my sweetheart, sleep my bear,

Your cradle swings in the evening air.

Moonbeams touch your precious face

And stars float by with gentle grace.

Sleep my sweetheart, have no fear:

Sleep my darling, I am here.

I’m very grateful for these anniversaries given that the lifespan of most books for children is a couple of years.

At this point, it looks as if 2025 will be pretty boring in comparison to 2024, unless something spectacular and unexpected happens. However, 2026 should be better as it will be the 80th anniversary of Mem Fox, so to speak.

At the moment I’m working on three books at once. I’ve never done that before. (One is already contracted.) It’s both relaxing and confusing. When I get stuck with one, I move to another, and then go back and check on the first and probably cut most of it, and then I go to the third book and play with that for a few days until it gets too hard, and then I move back to the first one, and so on. Sheer madness, really. I notice I’ve used the lovely word ‘hubbub’ in two of the three books, so one of them will have to go. But which word will I choose instead?  ‘Noise’ has only one syllable, and ‘commotion’ has three, whereas I need a two-syllable word, so it’s back to Roget’s Thesaurus yet again. You understand, do you not?— that writing a picture book is never plain sailing. It’s a nightmare. Word-and-syllable choice is everything. The plot is minor, and often there’s no real ‘plot’ anyway.

Other lovely things have happened since I last wrote, some of which I’m sure I’ve forgotten, forgive me, because I’ve been so recalcitrant about keeping to up to date. I have a busy family life going on in the background, which never stops. Any excuse…

I won’t forget the thrilling two days I had with the South Australian Premier’s Reading Challenge in four schools in two cities to the north of South Australia: Whyalla and Port Augusta. In each case the entire school came to my presentation, which was different each time, according to the vibe. All my old teaching skills had to be re-born, fast, faced as I was with over 300 children on each occasion, aged between 5 and 12. Keeping the age groups with me, all quiet and agog, was quite something. I found it daunting, I have to confess, but it was so good for me to be challenged like that, and I hope as rewarding as possible for the children, all of whom were delightful and respectful. I loved it. I slept particularly well each night— I mean, I died! I’m not 38 any more.

Below, pictures from the schools I visited: magic children in magic hats, divine teachers in wonderful T-shirts, and cute kids in front of an amazing ‘Welcome Mem Fox’ wall, which isn’t very clear but was spectacular on the day. Thank you to everyone!