Top 10 authors I'd put on my auto-buy list:

Just about every week, I intend to take part in The Broke & the Bookish's Top 10 Tuesday feature. And quite as regularly, I spend so much time explaining my choices that I completely explain my way out of ever sharing the finished post. Not so this week. There will be caveats -- it seems like it's not in me to completely give myself over to something without at least a small percentage of reserve -- but I'm determined to post my list all the same.

Perhaps the most obvious disclaimer I'd make about a list of authors on an auto-buy list is that I don't automatically buy anything. For starters, there's the money thing; I work part-time and I'm a student -- I have to think about what I purchase. And while I definitely spend a disproportionate amount of my earnings on books, I still have to think about it. Then there's the matter of only wanting to own books that I'll read several times or loan out to lots of people, and my favourite authors don't always write my favourite books, weird as that may seem. Finally, there's this fear of my books banding together like some sort of sentient paper blob, rising up in the night, and swallowing me whole -- all because of the sheer power of their combined volume. So yes, I don't just buy whatever books I want.

Finally, I stuck to children's and YA fiction because, honestly, one has to draw the line somewhere. Enough minutiae. Here, in alphabetical order, are the authors whose books I leap to investigate as soon as they appear:

Paolo Bacigalupi -- this is a new discovery for me, and how can his books be on my list when I've only read two? Yes, it's positively shameful. But it doesn't matter because I am intrigued by Bacigalupi's wordsmithing, and his excellent ability to build compelling worlds in dystopian and science fiction settings. I want to read more!

Suzanne Collins -- if you've read my blog for a while, you know I loved The Hunger Games trilogy, and while they weren't classics in terms of literary richness, they are absolute classics for me in the realm of character development, as well as a mesmerising story arc I just couldn't look away from. Collins' The Underland Chronicles are, I think, better written than The Hunger Games, but they don't have the exposure the Games has. Based on both these series, I am super keen to see what Suzanne Collins comes up with next. There had better be a next, Ms. Collins!

Sarah Dessen -- I randomly picked up a Sarah Dessen book, What Happened to Goodbye, in a little indie bookstore at my sister's house, when I was flying home after the birth of her second little boy. It was a completely spontaneous purchase, something light and happy for the plane ride. I couldn't believe how delightful it was, and over a few months, I read six of her books in quick succession. It was probably overkill, but I loved her 'voice', especially in the teen lit genre that can so often descend into mere fluff. I would be reticent about wholesale recommending her stories, as some of her characters have less-than-savoury lifestyle choices, but I am still very keen to see what Sarah Dessen writes next (a new book is out soon!).

John Green -- ah, John Green! How can I explain my feelings about this guy's work? Green is an incredibly gifted author whose rare voice will stand out as one of the greats of this generation, I believe. He is also a brilliant, kind, thoughtful, and genuine person who is engaged in really healthy, wise discussions about life, culture, faith, and politics. His characters are intriguing, and he has the power to draw out really vivid responses to his work without devolving into sappiness or tacky pathos. However, some of the actions of his (frequently sexually uninhibited) characters -- as well as their vocabulary -- are not ones I would choose as role models for my teen friends. I recognise this sounds incredibly naive and cloistered, since one of the ways we learn is by watching others live their lives. But this is my hesitation with Green's books, and I would not be honest if I didn't share it.

Rosanne Hawke -- Rosanne Hawke is one whose books I do automatically pick up whenever I see them. I was privileged to study under her during my bachelor degree, and was delighted to get to learn from someone who occupies a respected and unique place in Australian young adult literature. Rosanne's work is one that definitely deserves the title of 'literature' -- rich, high quality writing that totally avoids the abyss of trend-focussed YA cliches. Much of Rosanne's work is issues-focussed and delves into the real challenges of young adult life, but it does so in a healthy, thoughtful, discreet way.

Odo Hirsch -- Odo Hirsch! Odo Hirsch! Lovely, happy, quirky characters! Beautiful word choices! Delightful worlds and adventures!

Patrick Ness -- Patrick Ness gets the award as The Writer Most Likely To Take Out Your Soul, Wring It Dry, Then Try To Stick It Back Into The Cavity Inside You. It's hard to express just how this guy manages to do it, but his voice and language are profoundly unique, and the characterisation impeccable. I can't describe what Patrick Ness's books do to me, so I'll just give up trying.

Veronica Roth -- I want to hate Veronica Roth because she is younger than me and she has already written the first two books of a bestselling trilogy which is being turned into a movie. But I can't hate her. I can only be happy that she has achieved this immense success -- and that she thanks God in the acknowledgements of her books. You go, girl.

Lemony Snicket -- Lemony Snicket, aka Daniel Handler, is a man who is obviously in love with words. He's probably best known for his Series of Unfortunate Events books, but his dry, dark sarcasm, his slightly morbid humour, and his delirious and unashamed love of the English language come through in all his stories. It's good stuff.
 
Jerry Spinelli -- I love Jerry Spinelli's characters because they are rare and beautiful. Spinelli celebrates words and he celebrates special people, and he does both extremely well (the Newbery society or association or whoever they are agrees with me). My favourite thing about Spinelli is his ability to bring the beauty of the outsider into the light. His books are just beautiful.

Bonus round! Top 10 authors who'd be on my auto-buy list if they were still alive and therefore still producing new work:

Louisa May Alcott
Amy Carmichael
Mary Grant Bruce
Charles Dickens
CS Lewis
LM Montgomery
Ellis Peters
Rosemary Sutcliff
Elizabeth George Speare
Ethel Turner

Who's on your list?

Oh, Queensland.

There are rock pools. In my yard.

7/100 (dear someday)

Dear future me*,

I don’t always like to think of you. I mean, I have enough trouble with present me. There’s so much I want to do and still haven’t done. There’s so much I wish for. There are so many ways I could be a better version of myself. And of course there are the grey hairs I keep finding lately (I am too YOUNG for that, I tell you). What I’m probably actually saying — what I’m realising even as I type this, future me — is that I have high hopes for you but I realise not all of them will be fulfilled.

When I was younger, I had a perfect picture of who you’d be, future me. You were going to have long straight locks (of a rich chestnut brown). You would be suave, confident, a sophisticated city-dwelling executive. Also you would wear a canary-yellow power suit with matching heels. Obviously you were gonna be one classy lady.

When I got a bit older, the picture of future me shifted a little. Future me was going to be a hippie type who wore ravelling sweaters in unflattering shades of green and did her hair in two plaits, who never wore makeup, and whose favourite shoes were gumboots. She would paint and draw and write things, and she’d chase hens around the chicken coop.

Present me is less sure of what future me will be, but funnily enough, present me sits fairly smack dab in the middle of my two earlier projections. If this says anything at all (and more likely it says nothing), it suggests that future me will be less about personality and individual style, and more about the series of choices I make between now and then.

So dear future me, I don’t care whether you wear canary yellow heels or gumboots, whether you have a favourite hairdresser or you’re a wash-and-wear kind of woman. I acknowledge that the grey hairs will probably increase rather than decrease (at least in reality, if not appearance; there ARE such things as hair dyes. Please don’t be disgusted, hippie seventeen-year-old self).

I want you to assure me, future self, that there will be a good man to love and children to love on, but I know you can’t make those kinds of promises and so I won’t hold you to them. Instead, future self, I’d just ask that you learn from what’s going on now, so you can be more of a person because of what happens to you. Be braver than current me. Be kinder than current me. And please, always be faithful. Cling to the rock. I’ll keep my end of the bargain.

Love,
your fanciful younger self.

*this post was entirely the result of a meme prompt left for me at tumblr by Hayley.

Group-smoosh:

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day.

I don't know. That simple sentence is frought with such an intensity of feeling. There are people in love who know that tomorrow will be merely an overflow of the togetherness they already possess. There are guys freaking out because they have no idea what they're meant to do to make it special. There are people complaining about commercialism and greed and "just another excuse to try and sell greeting cards and chocolates". Then there are the waiting few, the scattered band of soloists who -- whether they regard Valentine's Day as a ridiculous first-world rort to make people spend money, or as a rich celebration of romance -- scuff their toes in the dust and wish for their duet to start.

To these few, these treasured superheroes of going it alone, I want to say something magical and wonderful and perfect. Only there isn't one thing that's magical and wonderful and perfect to be said, because to say it -- to try to say it -- would be to diminish how hard it can be sometimes to eke out life singly in a world that's made for pairs. There are many excellent things about travelling solo, and I hope that you experience all the best of them. But if the balance for you is weighing more heavily to the side of heartbreak than hallelujah, I want to smush you into a big group hug and let you know that you're not alone in being alone. And you're not ignored, either.

So, I wrote a thing. And it's messy and raw because love and lovelessness are messy and raw. But it's for people like you and me who might be waiting for something but don't ever have to wait for grace. SMOOSH.

daybook xiv:

It's been a while since I did one of these things.

Outside my window, it's dark right now. But Queensland has been at her furious best over the past few days, making sure that Brisbane has once again had a memorable January. Over the Australia Day weekend, the sky let loose with a barrage of wind and rain, overflowing riverways and sending tides into a wind-whipped frenzy. The storm left behind bits of peoples' broken lives in its wake but for some reason, our house seems to be in a little storm-safe pocket. Our fence blew over in one spot, and a tree fell on one side of the housie, but the only true casualty was the tree. People lost their lives, though, and that's just hard to comprehend.

I have been listening to lots and lots of different stuff, a bunch of things at friends' recommendations, and some old favourites. Josh Garrels continues to be so brilliant and so lovely and every song is like this haunting, lyrical painting in notes. Then there's the Les Miserables soundtrack because, well, because. The Classic Crime is a new favourite after the continued selling by a dedicated friend (she was right; I love them). Mumford & Sons is just right. And haunting the music stands at the library has yielded The Rubens, The Dandy Warhols, and The Smiths. And then there's podcasts... But maybe I'll save those for another time.

I have been wearing I don't know... clothes. I'm a bit uninspired lately. My wardrobe needs a revamp. I have nice tops without the right skirt to wear with them, or a great dress, but no slip that goes with it right. You know how it gets sometimes. And today's muggy Summer Air Sauna Of Doom does not help anything.

I am thankful for amazing words that make my own world crisper, clearer, and more whole.

I am pondering... guh. Too many things and not enough.

I am reading -- well, I'm actually re-reading a lot of things at the moment. I'm not really sure why the re-read quest, as for the last few years I've been on a greedy mission read a bunch of new stuff, but lately I think I am craving the rich familiarity of books that are old friends. What's been good about this has been realising that the books I once loved are still so, so love-worthy. In my current-rereading pile: The Ask & the Answer by Patrick Ness (my emotions! ugh, his characters repeatedly punch me in the guts), The Green Branch by Edith Pargeter (Welsh history has never been so wringing, nor so resoundingly human), and Keep A Quiet Heart by Elisabeth Elliot (I think of her as a mentor I've never actually met).

I am creating lesson plans and copious piles of rainy day activities to do with students.

A picture-thought I'm sharing is from this weekend and all the crazy. Right after I took that shot, a wave came up over the shore siding and swished through the open window of the car. Adventures!

Beautiful decay:

My friend Caitlin came for five days this past week, and on our last afternoon, the four of us (Caitlin, my mum, my brother, and I) went for a little ramble by the bay. We made an unscheduled stop at this amazing piece of deconstruction. The lines and shadows of this old building seem to tell a thousand stories.

Best of 2012: app-happy

Back when it was still 2012, I thought how cool it would be to indulge in a little reflection on all my favourite "stuff" of the year. I talk a lot here about little life moments, about books, and about creativity, but I don't often chat about the gadgets and tools and media that make life smoother -- or even just more fun. Of course, it's now 2013, and 2012 is already an old story. Nevertheless, I'm still gonna go for it. And to kick off the stuff-of-the-year, my favourite mobile apps (Apple-centric, because I don't have an Android devices, sorry) of 2012:

Afterglow, a photo-editing app, has become my go-to for editing shots before uploading them to Instagram. Afterglow is a clean, easy-to-use interface that provides a ton of editing options. There's the basic filter selection, which overlays your shot with a pre-designed light/colour/contrast filter, creating a bunch of cool looks. However, there are also stacks of cropping and rotation tools as well as tweaks for brightness, contrast, sharpening, softening, saturation, exposure, temperature, and graininess. You can add borders or crop the shot to a shape. My favourite feature, though, is the light leaks option, with more than twenty light leaks to overlay onto your picture. Every edit comes with a gradient scale, too, so you can bump up the edit or just impose a subtle change to the photo. Once the photo is edited to your liking, you can save to your camera roll, email, post straight to Instagram, etc in one (or all) of three different sizings. The photos in this post (which I took at my friend Kat's house Adorable Home of Adorableness) were edited on my phone in Afterglow. I'm a fan.

Price: currently $0.99 through the Australian iTunes store.

Solar: There are a million weather apps out there (that might not even be hyperbole; I have no idea) and most of them can be trusted to deliver the information that you need. Can any of them deliver that information as beautifully as Solar, though? I sincerely doubt it. Be sure to click over to the link to see some screenshots of the app in action. It's a lovely piece of minimalist design that's easy to use but also conveys a sense of the weather, with the colour gradient shifting depending on the time of day and the temperature. It delights me every time I check the forecast.

Price: currently $1.99 through the Australian iTunes store.

Bible: Again, there's a whole slew of Bible apps available, but I love this one because it provides a whole multitude of translations to choose from, and is pretty easy to navigate throughout. My two favourite features of this app, though, are the stacks of Bible-reading plans which you can select from (providing you with daily and specific readings directly from your app) and the read-aloud option for the majority of Bible versions. That was especially cool; I found myself listening to the Bible while I was brushing my teeth, applying makeup, or falling asleep at night. Nifty nifty.

Price: This one's a free app, too, so -- bonus!

Marvel comics (for iPad): Yes. I am apparently ten years old, and a boy. But one sick day when I was curled in on myself on the couch, sprawled beneath a cloud of self pity, I just started scrabbling round in the app store, I guess, and came across the Marvel app. It is really just a pretty interface designed to make it even easier for you to fork over dollars for comics, which you can purchase and read from within the app, using your iTunes login. So well done, Marvel. I fell for your wiles and your beautiful high-definition digital comics. However, there are a bunch of free downloadable comics, too -- a gateway, I suppose, to the paid stuff. Enter at your own risk.

Price: the app is free, the comics are not.

Paper (for iPad) is a pretty pretty app that also provides a little bit for free and then lures you into realms of creativity where you must, simply must, fork over seven dollars fifty or so in order to have access to the full palette of sketching and colouring tools. I know; who spends $7.50 on an app? Me, it would seem. And more than once (see below). But when it's worth it, it's worth it. Paper provides a bunch of digital sketchbooks and notebooks, which you can customise by decorating the covers and adding and removing pages. The number of journals you can set up is (I believe) unlimited. The basic app comes with a colour palette of about seven colours, and one drawing nib. With the extra money, there are colours galore and five drawing tools: calligraphy nib, pencil, marker, fine line pen, and brush (which makes for beautiful watercolour effects). Plus there's an eraser. Your drawings, sketches, and notes are completely saveable and shareable. I look forward to doing more with this app because the possibilities are huuuuge.

Price: free... at first.

ABC iView: God bless the ABC, I say! Non-commercial television is lovely enough, but then to offer it all online for viewing at a more convenient time -- yippee! I rarely get to watch a show I'm interested in when it's actually on tv, but the iView app turns my iPad into a little anytime tv. You can add shows to your watch list and be alerted when new episodes appear. Plus, stop watching something halfway through and it will be waiting for you right where you paused it next time you go to watch. I'm sure anybody who is interested is already well aware of this app, but it rates a mention because I really appreciated it this year past.

Price: free, free, free.

Zombies, Run! and Zombies Run 5k training: I actually deliberated for a while about sharing this app with you all. There's no doubt it's my favourite app of 2012 (and I only got into it August, when Laura bought me an iTunes card for my birthday, with the rule that I could spend the change however I wanted but first I MUST buy Zombies, Run!) but sometimes I fear I am loving it too much. It's an exercise app; it shouldn't be this important, right? Oh, but it is!

Basically, Zombies, Run! is an immersive running game that drops you right into the middle of an isolated township of survivors working to get through the zombie apocalypse. You set up a workout playlist, get the app going on your phone or iPod, and then you run your way through all sorts of adventures, getting to know amazing, beautiful, heartbreaking characters as you complete mission after mission and try to help Abel Township stay afloat at the end of the world.

To say that I have fallen in love with the characters is an understatement. These guys are very endearing, with a good mix of drama and humour in their stories. And they are great companions to get me jogging (which I'm super bad at), bike riding, or working out. I've never had such a great inducement to exercise, and the ZR app has taken me through hours and hours of sweating. The app includes more than 30 original workouts, but all of them can be re-run as often as you want. As you run, you collect supplies to help build the fledgling township. And for added incentive, you can turn on zombie chases, and the fear of the undead coming up behind you and moaning in your ear will have you really picking up the pace. It does have its scary moments, as well as other PG elements, so it won't be for everyone (I can't convince my sister to try it) but I have never been more delighted by an app. I am busting for season 2 of the series to come out so I can get over the terrible cliffhanger at the end of the first season of missions!

PS. There's a 5K training app for those new to running, and it is just as wonderful.

Price: this is, to many, an expensive app. At the regular price of $8.99 for ZR and $3.99 for the 5k version, it seems hefty compared to all the free or 99c apps out there. But I'm not kidding when I say I'd buy this app at three times the price. It's really worth it. Plus, for a short time only, the apps are half price to really encourage you in your new year's resolution to move more (don't tell me you didn't promise you'd do it). Half price, guys! Seriously!

So: I've told you my favourite apps of 2012. What are yours?