Latest Posts by alphareader - Page 3

Entirely possible we’ve all been in iso too long - but to celebrate BSC on Netflix and a resurgence in the books, my local indie bookstore (Readings) turned me into a spin-off! 😍

‘The Year the Maps Changed’

Not all heroes wear capes ✌️

Book launch in the time of COVID! Wasn’t exactly what I’d planned, but it was still joyous and exciting!

Hard times ahead - but books community is exactly that, and we help each other ❤️

From the Channel 4 ‘complaints’ video

Amy & Hope are the new (and better) Claire & Bender

‘The Year the Maps Changed’ by me, Danielle Binks! Coming out in 2020 with Lothian Children’s Books! https://www.hachette.com.au/danielle-binks/the-year-the-maps-changed

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. 

Life was a too-tall stack of books that had started to lean to one side, and each new day was another book on top.

‘Goodbye Stranger’ by Rebecca Stead

Taking something to pieces doesn’t spoil the whole when you put it back together. You can still love the effortlessness, even when you’ve noticed the effort.

‘How Not to be a Boy’ by Robert Webb

Books are family. Books are community.

Begin, End, Begin: A #LoveOzYA Anthology

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

It is rarely the book you came to seek, but the book next to that book, which changes your mind and heart.

‘When A Bookstore Closes, An Argument Ends’ by Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker (June 12, 2015) 

‘Perfect Strom’ by T. Hanuka for The New Yorker, Feb 2014 

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

This One Summer written by Mariko Tamaki illustrated by Jillian Tamaki

I heard nothing more of the Texas officer, LaBoeuf. If he is yet alive and should happen to read these pages, I will be pleased to hear from him. I judge he is in his seventies now, and nearer eighty than seventy. I expect some of the starch has gone out of that “cowlick.” Time just gets away from us. This ends my true account of how I avenged Frank Ross’s blood over in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the ground.

True Grit by Charles Portis

People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.

True Grit by Charles Portis

What, drawn, and talk of peace? I hate the word, As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee.

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare 

I am in blood Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

Macbeth by William Shakespeare