Nick Earls

Joel and Cat the Story Straight is two weeks in the life of Joel Hedges and Cat Davis.

Joel would prefer to get through his final year of high school without Cat Davis or his mother's faux Spanish boyfriend and just hang-out with his best-friend Luke. Cat Davis has an annoying best-friend, and even more annoying little brother, and a deep abiding hatred of Joel Hedges.

Due to an unfortunate incident involving a leaking pen and suspected outbreak of Bird Flu, Joel and Cat are forced to sit next to each other in Extension English. To make matters worse, and to their mutal horror, they are paired together for a tandem story writing assignment.

What ensues reveals alot about how smug teenage boys are, what teenage girls really think. No, wait - it's about a sane female and an insane male. It's about revenge and mistaken identity. And while it may be a little Jane Austen and a lot Matthew Reilly, it is not about the First Eleven cricket team.

Nick Earls is the author of tweleve books, including a number if bestsellers: 48 Shades of Brown, After January, Making Laws for Clouds and Monica Bloom. Nick was once interviewed by Rebecca Sparrow who spent several hours telling him about how she came to be living at home with her parents while she had a secret husband in America. Nick told her to write it down, and she did, the result being The Girl Most Likely. Her second novel, The Year Nick McGowan Came to Stay has been performed as a stage play.

Last year Rebecca hatched a plan to co-write a book with Nick, and thanks to some genius spam email from Nick's mum, the hilarious result is Joel & Cat Set the Story Straight.

Envisage yourself as an animal, which one would it be and why?
Today, a raccoon. I've just done 50 laps of a swimming pool, and I'd like to say dolphin but my goggles leave me raccoon-eyed, and I probably swim more like a raccoon than a dolphin if I'm to be honest (assuming that they're
pretty average swimmers, but don't actually drown).

Describe your writing style in one sentence
I think it's best left to others to describe, since I only notice in passing when it's on its way out of my head and I don't ever get to read it in the way I read anything else.

Without the rude bits, describe your typical writing day
It's all rude bits, baby. But if it wasn't, it might go like this ... Actually, it's pretty tame, very tame. I think the job breaks down into the public side (tours, festivals and other events), the admin days when you try to get your head above the rising tide of emails and unfinished business, and the days when you've cleared the decks and you're actually writing.

The writing days have tragically limited scope for rudeness and I seem to follow more routines than an elderly house pet. Get to work before eight, write. Fruit smoothie at lunchtime. Write. Start fantasising about next
meal. Write. Succumb to fantasy and buy ingredients. Write. Run (or recently swim) late afternoon. Make dinner for long-suffering partner (a gift given in lieu of conversation, since the writing has by that stage of the day/week/month turned my brain and/or personality to putty). Then maybe write, maybe slothfully slide into harmless coma in front of the TV. Transfer to bed. Wake, begin again until manuscript complete. Attempt social rehab, remake (or if necessary make) friendships, etc. That's me on a first draft. At other times I can manage some degree of
social functionality around the writing.

Rump steak, greasy chips or crisp vegetables?
Oh, crisp veges for me now. Body = Temple. Surely you would have guessed that?

What did you do to get published in the first place?
Survived 14 years of not being published with some shred of resilience intact. Wrote several things that went nowhere, or made a brief trip to a publisher or two before being snuffed out. Wondered how to get publishers to
notice someone toiling away in a suburb of Brisbane. It was the 80s then, and a rather different world. Brisbane was about to change from the city David Malouf left by boat for England in 1954 to pursue a writing career,
but it wasn't there yet. All of which doesn't mean I think it's easy now, but some of the old challenges don't apply in the way they did.

I felt like I was a long way form the publishing industry, and I now know I was also a long way from having a clue about how it all worked. UQP looked like the only game in town, so I took the first chance I got to impress
Laurie Muller, then the head of UQP, and I gave it everything I had. That led to my first collection of short stories ('Passion') being published three years later, in 1992.

Since then, Brisbane has evolved, Australian publishers seem to have become more willing to look anywhere for new writers, and email etc makes it feasible to live where you want and do business everywhere. It now means we
all compete on slightly more level terms, though any emerging author always faces the challenge of standing out from the pack of manuscripts written by thousands of other people just as desperate to be published.

Colourful comic strip or 6000 page literary classic?
Unless cast away on a desert island, I think the comic strip would be likely to catch my eye. If I could book in a month of nothing, I might give the classic a go. Maybe I should give it a couple of pages now and see if it
stacks up, see if it's worth a month of my life, then book some desert island time if it's shaping up well.

How long did it take to get a publishing deal after you bagged an agent?
'Passion' first floated as an idea: 1989
'Passion' deal: 1991
'Passion' published: 1992
Next manuscript rejected: 1993
Manuscript after that rejected: early 1994
Bagged an agent: mid 1994
'After January' signed up: six months later

The agenting kicked in in the mid-90s in a number of ways. Through 'Passion' and my agent, I got to be part of the anthology boom that was on at the time. Also, while Zigzag Street was sinking without trace in the Vogel, my
agent told me about a publisher who would be in my audience at a Brisbane Writers Festival event and who was looking for new writers. I did my damnedest to get her attention, she read the manuscript and signed it up. It
came out in Australia in 1996. Then, through my Sydney agent, it was taken on by an agent in London, who signed it up there, and it came out and won an award in the UK in 1998.

I know agents are finding it hard to sell first-time fiction at the moment, but some still gets taken up. And most things are cyclical - fiction will be back and they'll be on the prowl for new talent.

Kylie or Danni?
Kylie, for her staying power and capacity to reinvent herself (though Dannii's definitely had her compelling moments - and it is a double 'i' isn't it, or was that a passing thing?). (No, you right - bad Lola!)

Can you remember anything remotely embarrassing about your very first book signing?
It wasn't my first, but how's this? The world's least successful in-store book signing occurred in Toowoomba some years ago. The first hint of where we might be headed came when the Penguin rep and I arrived. Most of the
shops in the centre were empty, and it turned out that just about every business had relocated to a new centre up the road that was still in the throes of its grand opening. Every business, but for a Crazy Clarks and this
one tenacious bookstore.

I duly sat down at my card table and gazed into the empty distance. Eventually, a few people could be seen at the far end of the arcade, coming and going in their uggies and flanno shirts. None came close to me. The
proprietor set up a 1950s PA system, pulled my media release out of his pocket and started to read it verbatiam. Lines that had seemed brilliant when my publicist and I had written them sounded like far less as they
crackled down the empty corridors and their echoes stumbled back our way.

After five minutes of this with no result (how could it be otherwise - there were no people there to hear it) the proprietor gave up and went back into the store. He came out a few minutes later, tossed me a name tag and said,
'I think this'll fix it'. One the front it had my name and the word 'author' in spidery blue Nikko, on the back it had his name and beneath it 'Woodworking, Beaudesert'.

It didn't fix it (and not because I didn't wear it). The Penguin rep stood at the corner of the table saying 'Im soooo sorry' over and over. At about the 30-minute mark a girl ran up to my table. Suddenly, there was optimism
on the faces of the Penguin rep and the semicircle of bookstore staff - we were going to turn this around.
'Can I borrow your pen?' the girl said. 'I really need to write down a phone number.'
I said she could have it, and we left.

One piece of advice for any struggling writers…
The struggle is normal, and it makes any success seem sweeter. If it's what you really want to do, keep doing it. If it's not, it's okay to stop. Work on your craft, and work out the industry.

And the best thing about being a published writer is…? (Feel free to be totally fickle and materialistic here)
In the simplest of terms: I make up stories, and it's a job. Beat that. There's a lot that's good when it gets to that stage - when it actually becomes a job. You get to tour with a publicist instead of a brain (they really do take on all responsibility other than the interviews themselves, and many of them do it very well), you get to talk about yourself a lot, other people buy you meals. You spend much of your life in the clothes you picked up by the side of the bed in the morning. You don't have office politics to deal with. You don't commute. You have items of intellectual
property that you can sell and resell in more ways than you knew back when this job was just a dream. Sometimes, someone tells you they love what you do.

I'm still doing it, though, because the best bit comes when you step away from all that, shut the door, sit at the keyboard, gaze at the screen and retreat into your next new idea. The best part of it is the part that got me
started in the first place, back when I didn't know what I was doing or who to call.

Visit Nick's website!!

© Lola Jaye