Where Have I Been Lately?

Hello all! I have been stupendously remiss about keeping this mini-blog up to date so I thought I’d do a bit of a recap to get up to speed.

Late 2019

As mentioned in my last post for 2019, after the birth of our youngest son Joshua, I had been working on some new projects to send out to publishers and agents for consideration. Sad to day, everything I sent out was promptly rejected.

Bummer.

Far from ready to give up, I used the last bit of money from my advance for Super Nova to hire a mentor, highly-published children’s author Aleesah Darlison from Greenleaf Agency, to help me brush up a junior fiction concept I had been tinkering with for almost a decade. The key piece of feedback I received was that the manuscript was not targeting the right age group – it was more like a short middle grade story, rather than a chapter book. And by ‘manuscript’, I mean pretty much everything – the language, characterisation, themes, sentence structure etc. But the central idea (being mermaids with magical powers) was a winner, so I decided to persevere. I enrolled in a writing course with the Australian Writers’ Centre, Writing Chapter Books for 6-9 year olds, put together by Lesley Gibbes, and learnt a TONNE about the specifics of writing for this age group.

As part of the course, I also bought about a dozen books aimed at the same age group and analysed the heck out of them – word count, sentence length, complexity of language, chapter length, themes, style, voice (yes those last two are different), illustrations, you name it. Some of the titles I analysed included:

• Pearl the Magical Unicorn by Sally Odgers, illustrated by Adele K. Thomas
• The Rainbow Magic series (Scholastic)
• The Princess in Black by Shannon and Dean Hale, illustrated by LeUyen Pham
• Juliet, Nearly a Vet by Rebecca Johnson
• Clementine Rose by Jacqueline Harvey, illustrated by Anne Yi
• EJ10 Super Spy by Susannah McFarlane
• Hey Jack by Sally Rippin, illustrated by Stephanie Spartels
• My Little Pony series
• Mermaid Holidays by Delphine Davis, illustrated by Adele K. Thomas

I re-wrote the manuscript and was extremely relieved when Aleesah informed me it was a lot closer to the mark. We continued to work on some of the weaker areas, mainly clarity of story and making sure the main character, nine-year-old mermaid Pearl, wasn’t too passive and instead made the choices that drove the story forward to its conclusion. After about 3 re-writes, I had used up my mentorship hours and came out with a manuscript I was VERY happy with.

Aside from working on the manuscript itself, Aleesah’s mentorship included putting together a series proposal. What’s a series proposal? It’s a collection of documents outlining a book series, and includes:

• The over-arching concept (elevator pitch)
• Info on the target audience, themes and word count
• A paragraph on the setting
• Paragraphs on the main characters (in this instance, the four mermaids)
• A full one-page synopsis of the first story in the series
• Half-page outlines of other potential books in the series (usually three concepts)

This, together with the full manuscript of Book 1, would be pitched to publishers and agents – as long as it was within their guidelines, of course!

Then came the illustrations.

I never intended to illustrate these books, solely because I didn’t believe my art was good enough. But sometime in 2019 I happened to draw a mermaid using a Wacom graphics tablet, mostly on a whim, and it kind of came out pretty well:

I posted the drawing on social media and the response was amazing. People loved it! I started to think, maybe I could actually be the illustrator for these books. So I drew more mermaids, basing them on my best friends, and added them to the series proposal.

Around the same time I was extremely fortunate to be awarded an Illustration Mentorship Award from the ASA. I chose to work with Marjorie Crosby-Fairall, whose work I just adore:

I’ve always felt my weakest illustration skill is creating compositions, so I asked Marjorie to help with that as a key point of development. Her mentorship was utterly brilliant. I learnt so much, and Marjorie was also kind enough to direct me to further learning. I signed up to SVSLearn for about a year, doing their composition course and a few others as well. Definitely worth it! Under Marjorie’s guidance I put together a few pieces of sample art for my mermaid series, including a character sheet, one piece of colour art and two black and white layouts. This is one of them:

All up, working with both Aleesah and Marjorie, I spent about 6 months really polishing the series proposal and getting everything together. Which brings us to …

Early-Mid 2020

In early 2020 I sent the series proposal for the mermaid series (titled MerTales) to literary agent Justine Barker of Mayfair Literary Agency. My submission was not sent directly (Mayfair’s books were closed at the time), but rather by booking a manuscript assessment at the CYA Conference. Conferences are an EXCELLENT way to get your work in front of publishers and agents, especially those that never (or rarely) accept unsolicited manuscripts. Justine loved the concept, the writing and the artwork, and could see the potential for the series to be transferred to other media. It was probably the most exciting week of my life when she asked to represent MerTales and take me on as a client. It was a great match! (And of course I said yes!)

Mid-Late 2020

In just a few short weeks, Justine had sold the series to Albert Street Books, an imprint of Allen & Unwin, with the first book to be released mid-2021.

Then came the hard work! Over the next 6 months, we worked on both the manuscript and illustrations for Book 1. I also did the artwork for the front cover, which has to be done early for marketing purposes. The book shaped up really well and was SUCH a brilliant project to work on. I scaled down my hours in my web design business and was so happy to be living the life of my dreams, drawing mermaids and writing dad jokes all day!

2021: Year of the Mermaid

Following directly on from completing Book 1, 2021 was basically ‘The Year of the Mermaid’ for me. I wrote and illustrated Books 2, 3 and most of 4 during this year. It was a challenge, for sure, but the most rewarding one ever. In July 2021, the first MerTales book was released, titled The Best Friend Promise.

Sadly the timing of the release was greatly affected by COVID, with half of Australia – including the two largest cities – in lockdown right over the launch. I said YES to everything I could do to help give the book its best shot, and was really awed by the publicity and marketing team, who did amazing work in launching MerTales.

Unfortunately, the launch of Book 2 (The Daring Reef Rescue) landed right in the middle of more major lockdowns. It was disappointing, but I’m the kind of person who doesn’t stay knocked down for long. By this time I was finishing up the illustrations for Book 3 (The Great Treasure Hunt), which is my favourite book in the series. I felt I had hit my stride illustrating the MerTales characters and after drawing literally HUNDREDS of mermaids, I was feeling very confident about the artwork for this book!

A few months after the release of Book 1, Justine left the industry as a literary agent, and I was stupendously lucky to sign up with Sarah McKenzie. Even though I was elbows deep in MerTales, I was starting to think about what might come next, and started developing some new series concepts.

Meanwhile, in between writing and illustrating, I was developing some fun new skills in game development. Having almost 15 years experience in web dev, I had the bright idea to make a MerTales video game for mobiles. How hard could it be, right? (Famous last words much?) I undertook several online courses and made 3 or 4 different games. It was SO FUN. I honestly just loved it. But then as the deadlines for the remaining books began to creep up, I put the game dev aside and concentrated on the book series. A bird in the hand, as they say!

2022 Already?

In mid-Feb 2022, I finished the final artwork for The Mysterious Rainbow Thief. It was both elating and a bit sad. I was so proud to have written and illustrated four entire books in just over a year, and of course, SO super grateful to have had the opportunity. But I was also a little sad that I was leaving Cockleshell Cove behind. Well, almost …

With some extra time up my sleeve before my next project was to kick off (more on that later), I spent the next 10 weeks finishing up the MerTales game. To say it was intense is a HUGE understatement! I crafted every aspect of the game myself – the backgrounds, character art, animation, maze layouts, coding, all of it. The one thing I didn’t do was create the music. For that, I sourced music via audiojungle.net, purchasing mass reproduction licences for each track and sound effect. I also had to re-learn Premiere Pro after not touching it since uni (after 20 years, it’s basically a different program!), in order to make the marketing materials. Actually publishing the apps via the App Store and Google Play was another mammoth effort. I won’t go into it all too much in this blog, as I’m intending on writing a (very long!) post about the full process in the near future, but holy tamale it was epic.

Which leads us to now!

On May 3rd 2022, MerTales Book 4: The Mysterious Book Thief was released into the world! And later this month, MerTales: Mermaid Rescue will be released on the App Store and Google Play. Watch the super cute trailer below!

You can learn more about MerTales: Mermaid Rescue on the MerTales website.

So what’s next?

A few weeks ago I was thrilled to sign another contract with Albert Street Books for a brand new junior fiction series! The first book will be released in June 2023. In between working on that, I’ll also be continuing on with some other works-in-progress and prepping them for submission, including a middle grade sci-fi novel and a third junior fiction series.

If you’d like to stay up to date with my writing progress and/or watch my super silly Grizzly Giggles videos, jump onto Instagram and find me at @rjtimmis

Thanks for reading!