Congratulations to Tansy Rayner Roberts/Kaia Landelius (“Nine Times”)and Aidan Doyle (“Inksucker”), whose Worlds Next Door stories have been shortlisted for the Young Adult category of the Aurealis Awards! There are many other wonderful books and stories on the shortlists, but I’m particularly chuffed about these ones 🙂
The full list is here, and well done to everyone on it!
The Collaborative Arts, by Tansy & Kaia
Tansy: Collaboration most definitely used to be a dirty word for me.  I am – or was – a complete control freak when it came to my writing.  Taking on critiques and editing was one thing, but sharing ownership of my work?  That’s just weird.
Kaia: I find it hilarious that you have ever been a control freak in ANYTHING. I mean, you write until you fall over, pretty much. And then you get up and keep writing for God knows how long, and somehow it ends up working out anyway. Just the thought of doing it that way makes me twitch.
Tansy: I have grown as a person.  I used to take a whole year to write each draft of a book! Also I used to have spare time.  And an attention span.  Where was I?  Writing with you is AWESOME because you make the spreadsheets and timelines and keeps notes.  It’s like having someone tidy up all your clothes while you are sleeping.
Kaia: Ha, yes, there is that. I guess it’s no surprise that I am *still* a control freak about my writing. But I think I need all these meta docs and meticulous little things because I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. Which is why I absolutely love having somebody bringing not only the crazy (and the Tansybrain is kind of nuts, in the best of ways), but also a bit of make-write-good to the project. Because if I pick up your metaphorical clothes of the floor, you totally throw them into the closet and close the door really quickly, making the room (and the story!) all presentable to other people.
Tansy: Ha, how do you know my methods for cleaning house?  While we have been on-and-off collaborating on a lovely soccer and blueberries novel for some time now, the story we wrote together for Worlds Next Door was something of a departure for us – for a start, it’s set in Sweden rather than Australia!
Kaia: Oh, yes, that was a first. In fact, I automatically gave them all mostly English-sounding names that we later had to go in and replace. And I absolutely love that my cousin, not knowing about this story, went along and named her baby Emil. Possibly I should tell her that her adorable six month old baby isn’t going to end up like that. (I hope.)  I did love writing this story, because it’s so far away from what we both normally write! It was my first attempt to write something for younger kids and actually the first short story I managed to write since I was about… twelve. It’s fun, and I was absolutely delighted by the review that sorted it (along with a few others) under the heading “creepy”. Mission accomplished and all that.
Tansy: Yes, I’ve written (a bit) for the 9-12 age group and I’ve written a teeny bit of horror type stuff, but I’ve never put the two together before, and there are so many elements in the story which are outside my usual bag of tricks.  Ultimately that’s the best thing about collaborating – you get to play with someone else’s toys, steal things from their List of Awesome and produce a story that you never would have written on your own.
Kaia: I do love your list of awesome.
Tansy: And of course you end up “borrowing” bits of pieces from each other which you take back to your own writing.  And the danger of collaboration is that your writing voices completely merge and you end up sounding like each other even when not collaborating!  But there’s one thing in the story which is completely representative of your writing and mine equally: the characters are CONSTANTLY drinking cups of tea!
Kaia: A proper Swede would drink seven cups of coffee a day instead. Then again, I’ve never claimed to be a proper anything…
Tansy: You must be a writer then.
Worlds Next Door teaching materials 