Alphareader - Danielle Binks

I am being published!

I sold a book.

I've actually sold two books.

Here's the official write-up from trade magazine, Books+Publishing;

Hachette Australia has acquired ANZ rights to a middle-grade novel, The Year the Maps Changed, and a yet to be titled YA novel by literary agent Danielle Binks. The two-book deal was negotiated by Binks’ employer, Jacinta di Mase Management.

Binks’ debut middle-grade novel, is set in the Victorian coastal town of Sorrento in 1999 during the events of ‘Operation Safe Haven’, when the Australian government welcomed some 6000 Kosovar refugees into ‘safe havens’ around the country, including the Quarantine Station on Point Nepean, on the Mornington Peninsula. The novel takes place over one year in 12-year-old Winifred’s life ‘when everything’s already changing at home, and then the outside world seems to come crashing in’.

Commissioning editor Kate Stevens said, ‘I’m absolutely delighted to be working with Danielle, who is not only a brilliant writer but also has an acute understanding of her audience and a whole lot of love for the #LoveOzYA and #LoveOzMG movements. The Year the Maps Changed is about the bonds of family and the power of compassion … I can’t wait to get it into the hands of readers around the country, I know they’re going to love it like I do.’

The Year the Maps Changed will be published in June 2020 and Binks’ YA novel is tentatively set for 2021.

So yeah - that happened! And one reason updating the blog with the news slipped my mind, was probably because for the last two-weeks I have been in the thick of my first round of structural edits ... which is a thing that is happening now, because I have a book coming out next year!

And also because between structural edits, I've been brainstorming and writing in fits & bursts for this other idea of mine ... the YA novel. Which is also going to be an actual thing you can buy and sit on your bookshelf one day or read on your e-reader or - I dunno! - listen to on audiobook, *maybe*! This all blows my mind. 

Because - here's the thing ... Last week I stumbled across this old interview with me, from 2012 over at The Writer's Burrow. I talk about how coming runner-up in the John Marsden Prize the year before, kinda changed my whole life. I didn't know how true that was, until I connected a few dots. Like how the John Marsden Prize is now called the The John Marsden & Hachette Australia Prize (still with Express Media!) and I have just signed a two-book deal with Hachette Children's. 

Back in 2011 I didn't win a writing-award. But I got runner-up and received praise for one of the first short-stories I ever wrote and shared with the wider world - beyond anonymous FanFiction or a private Word Doc on my computer. I got to tell John Marsden - one of my all-time favourite Australian YA authors - that Checkers changed my life and was my favourite book of his. And he told me that I'd come *so close* to winning, and that he hoped I'd keep writing. 

I did. And now here we are. 

You can buy my book next year, and the next one the year after that!What a world. What a funny, old world. 

Anna Akhmatova poem

You'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behaviour. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them — if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.

'The Catcher in the Rye' by J.D. Salinger

Every time you look up at the stars, it’s like opening a door. You could be anyone, anywhere. You could be yourself at any moment in your life. You open that door and you realize you’re the same person under the same stars. Camping out in the backyard with your best friend, eleven years old. Sixteen, driving alone, stopping at the edge of the city, looking up at the same stars. Walking a wooded path, kissing in the moonlight, look up and you’re eleven again. Chasing cats in a tiny town, you’re eleven again, you’re sixteen again. You’re in a rowboat. You’re staring out the back of a car. Out here where the world begins and ends, it’s like nothing ever stops happening.

‘Lost At Sea’ by Bryan Lee O’Malley

I think it's a response to terrorism. From the time we're little girls, we're taught to fear the bad man who might get us. We're terrified of being raped, abused, even killed by the bad man, but the problem is, you can't tell the good ones from the bad ones, so you have to wary of them all. We're told not to go out by ourselves late at night, not to dress a certain way, not to talk to male strangers, not to lead men on. We take self-defense classes, keep our doors locked, carry pepper spray and rape whistles. The fear of men is ingrained in us from girlhood. Isn't that a form of terrorism?

Dietland by Sarai Walker