On chickens
please don't mention my looming deadline
Chickens make the best pets.
Okay, dogs make the best pets. And cats are wonderful if you’re not allergic to them. But chickens are great too. They eat all your food scraps. They lay eggs (a valuable commodity these days!). They eat all the earwigs in your backyard. And they are very funny.
Twelve weeks ago, I picked up four new chicks that had hatched that very morning. Four little balls of fluff to join our one remaining adult chicken. We have a pretty small suburban backyard, so four chickens is pretty much our limit, and I was betting on at least one being a boy (gender is a construct, but our local council has some strong feelings about roosters). Following our tradition of naming all our chickens after fictional witches, we called them Nanny Ogg, Serafina Pekkala, Elphaba and Agatha.
Our dog, Mags, was obsessed with the baby chicks. Like, vibrating with tension whenever she was around them. It looked like a real internal struggle - she clearly felt maternal towards them. But also she wanted to play with them. And maybe eat them just a little bit. But she knew she couldn’t eat them because she is a very good dog. Now they are much bigger and she is less intense, but she does enjoy following them around the garden, trying to gently push her nose under their wings.
Agatha, who Mags has renamed Rich (full name: Eat the Rich), will be leaving us soon because he is definitely a rooster. I thought that Elphaba might be a roo as well (Mags pre-emptively renamed her Cake—Let Them Eat Cake), but seems to be a pullet. She is very aptly named, as she is all black with the most beautiful beetle-green shimmer.
I don’t think they’ll lay until Spring, but I am pretty sure Serafina Pekkala is going to give us blue eggs, which I am tremendously excited about. It goes without saying that I have made a character in my WIP low-key into chickens.
Unhallowed Halls, four months in
I’m so thrilled at the response to UNHALLOWED HALLS. Thank you to everyone who has read it, bought it, borrowed it and reviewed it! I especially loved this review from Jodie Sloan, who wrote
Lili Wilkinson’s Unhallowed Halls is a simply delicious piece of YA dark academia, infused with fantasy, magical realism and horror, both otherworldly and all too bloody. It’s tightly plotted, and wildly atmospheric; a home run from the Aussie author.
Perfect.
If you haven’t read Unhallowed Halls yet, allow me to suggest that it makes an excellent Pride Month read, and will suit the gloomy winter weather for Aussie readers.
Upcoming events
I’ll be appearing at the Q-Lit Festival Opening Gala on Friday 20 June. Explore the whole program here.
I’ll be chatting with Demet Divaroren about romantasy at Willy Litfest on Sunday 22 June. Book here.
Come see me on a panel with Will Kostakis and Lucy Christopher at the AATE/ALEA Conference in Hobart on Saturday 5 July (I’m also leading a workshop on how to teach creative writing). More info here.
And I’ll be talking about fantasy with Lisa Fuller at the Riverina Readers Festival in Wagga on Saturday 12 July. Bookings here.
Read
I’ve been lucky enough to read two books recently that a) were excellent, b) I devoured in a single day and c) were written by my clever friends. Please go and get yourself a copy of Lady’s Knight by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner (think A Knight’s Tale but sapphic), and An Academic Affair by Jodi McAllister (romance set in the nerdy and cutthroat world of academia).
Watch
Loving Murderbot. And the second season of Poker Face is absolutely ridiculous and I could not be more here for it.
Play
I’m sad to say I have bailed on Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. I had such high hopes for it! It looks stunning, but I found the story rather boring. There are waaaay too many cutscenes that can’t be sped through, and the gameplay feels bland (remember when Assassin’s Creed had puzzles?). And most importantly (for me), it doesn’t have that layer of mythology that made Odyssey and Valhalla so great. Maybe they’re saving it for the DLC, but it seems like such a missed opportunity in a Japanese setting.
Lili Wilkinson is the award-winning author of twenty books for young people, including A Hunger of Thorns, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and was a CBCA Honour Book. Lili has a PhD from the University of Melbourne, and is a passionate advocate for YA and the young people who read it. Her latest books are Unhallowed Halls and the Bravepaw series.