Hazel Edwards: Authorpreneur

Authorpreneur is on my business card. Or author-educator-speaker.

I’m a creator in a small business of big ideas, but in quickly changing formats. I used to call myself an author of children’s books and adult mysteries, but circumstances are changing so much that writers need a portfolio of skills: Digital. Legal. Marketing. Publishing. And to be pro-active in suggesting projects. But also the ability to have fun with material that matters and may improve lives. Stories can have more impact than government stats.

My second grandson Henry introduced me to Oliver Sack’s Uncle Tungsten bio about his childhood and passionate affair with chemistry. I was more interested in the extended but skilled and quirky family’s love of learning and support of Oliver’s experiments, even blowing up things or keeping an octopus in the bathroom. Family support is so vital as emotional but also skilled support to an author. I really appreciate mine. My daughter helps with my website and marketing and my son in law helps with medical facts for mysteries. or if I need to poison a character. My younger grandsons test read stories.

Enid Blyton’s The Land of Far Beyond. It was the first symbolic ‘quest’ story I’d read.

An author.

Surprised that I’d travelled to Antarctica as an expeditioner, trekked in Nepal and visited unusual places so I could write realistically. ‘Participant observation’ is important for a writer. It’s the going and doing so you can write well about it afterwards. But it’s also the reason for doing fun stuff like hot air ballooning, going behind the scenes or interviewing people with unusual jobs like fireworks experts.

A blank notebook to fill with experiences.

I write a personal gift book to each of my four grandsons on their individual birthdays. Each is about something special to them that year. The real gecko in their Darwin letter box became Go! Go! Gecko, which is being translated into Indonesian.

I’m known as ‘The Hippopotamus Lady’ because of the picture book which my then four-year-old son inspired. As an ambassador for various groups, I’m keen to encourage literacy for adults and children. Reading is fun, not a chore. There’s a Hippopotamus on Our Roof Eating Cake is 45 this year. He still gets poignant fan mail like ‘I haven’t got a friend, will you come and sit on my roof?’ And this year, illustrator Deborah Niland has submitted a portrait for The Archibald Prize with hippo in the background.

Albert Camus’ The Plague.

I would read about four books per week, in varied formats. I like biographies. And well-plotted mysteries. Audiobooks are useful for travel and exercise. Since I read in the bath, I use print books there.

I also read factual works for background research for my current books, That’s why I’ve always been attracted to Antarctica.

Animal Farm by George Orwell. It works for young readers at the animal level but is really a political satire for adults. This interested me in ‘layered’ stories with symbolic subtext.

Lexicographer Dr Bernadette Hince’s The Antarctic Dictionary by CSIRO Publications. It sounds weird to recommend a dictionary but this has such quirky words and is really enjoyable. Highly recommended. Digitally available now and also an Arctic version coming.

I’ve been involved for over 10 years with an asylum-seeker family seeking visas and they inspired some of Wasted?.

Wasted? (BookPOD), a YA #Clific novel, took me exactly one year to write and has been the most challenging ever. An atypical, futuristic, political story set beside the Great Garbage Patches mid-Ocean. Faced with challenges, the asylum seekers prove to be innovators, not victims. Drawing on their resources, they repurpose, recycle and re-create a new state, trading bio-fuel via the mid-ocean garbage patches. Teenager caricaturist Kit illustrates how you can draw a new future as activists turn to science. It’s recently been released in dyslexie font and big print with ReadHowYouWant.

In response to requests, Not Just a Piece of Cake: Being an Author is my sort-of autobiography around the questions I’m most asked. It’s available in audio, e- and print formats and is currently being translated into Tamil, which 12-year-old Hazel would never have anticipated.