Only 4 weeks to go until 50 Ways to Die in Space is officially released!
Writing 50 Ways to Die in Space was a very different process for me, as the book wasn’t my idea at all! I was at a party at my publisher’s house when she asked me what I’d done earlier that day. I had been at my day job, and as Halloween was approaching, we did a Halloween spooky special planetarium show. Lots of kids dressed up for it and it was lots of fun. Then my husband said; “What you should have done was all the ways you can die in space.” My publisher whipped her head around to me so quickly she must have given herself whiplash and said; “Can you write that book?”
I didn’t take their suggestion too seriously at the time, but over the next week or two the idea really grew on me. I could write that book. So easily. I knew all the science behind it*. As the idea had started from a conversation, I pictured the book being a conversation between two nameless characters, one enthralled by the beauty of space, one warning of its dangers. I wrote the dialogue and really liked the flow of it. There was no he said/she said, it was just the characters talking. I thought it really worked. So I put it in the proverbial bottom drawer to let my mind forget about it and look at it with fresh eyes in a few weeks’ time.
Once I’d dusted the manuscript of and re-read it, I still really liked it and was excited to send it to my publisher. But there was only one problem: the only way to present a conversation without quotation marks and he saids/she saids was as a graphic novel. And graphic novels are expensive. There were over 400 pictures to draw, and the printing process uses a lot of ink.
Anyhoo, I sent the manuscript in, reminding the publisher about the conversation we’d had, and waited. Not for long! 12 days later I received a yes. This is ridiculously fast in publishing time frames.
So writing the book was fast, receiving the contract was fast, but from that point it took over two years to bring us to today when the book is available for pre-order. The long bit was the illustrating. First of all we had to find an illustrator. That took almost 6 months, and we were very happy when Nico O’Sullivan agreed to bring the story to life. As I said, there are over 400 frames in the book (some of them double page spreads), which is more than a frame a day for a whole year with no days off (not even Christmas!). To top that off, Nico was doing Year 12, which is quite a high study load. He turned in an outstanding job. After that there’s the whole … actually I don’t really know what comes next, I just do the words, but there was some massaging needed to get the book up to the print stage, and then printed and shipped.
There are lots of launches and library visits lined up in April:
April 8 Noosaville and Kin Kin library workshops
April 12 Quick Brown Fox Bookshop launch 2:30pm
April 13 Avid Reader/Where the Wild Things Are launch 3pm
April 16 Russell Island and Capalaba Library workshops
April 26 Harry Hartog launch
*To be honest, I did have to do a smidge of research, especially on physiology