Melissa Garside lives south of Sydney with her family, their hilarious golden retriever and some entertaining free-ranging chooks. When she’s not writing or teaching, she enjoys getting her hands dirty in the garden, immersing herself in nature and using her family as guinea pigs for her recipe-free kitchen experiments. Today we’re chatting to Melissa about her debut junior fiction novel: Lexie Moon and the Word Burgling Bungle, illustrated by Lauren Mullinder.
The publisher provided Alphabet Soup with a reading copy of Lexie Moon and the Word Burgling Bungle.
From the publisher:
Lexie Moon built her latest invention, The Vocabuliser, to help people learn to say tricky words, like spaghetti and Worcestershire. But the device is stolen by infamous gadget thief, Gizmo Lightfinger, who sees other people’s inventions as his ticket to glory. With Grandad’s help, Lexie devises a plan to catch the gadget thief and get her invention back.
Lexie Moon is an enthusiastic inventor – did you try your hand at inventing gadgets when you were growing up?
I didn’t think of myself as an inventor as a child – although I did do a fair bit of inventing in the kitchen, coming up with many recipe-free, experimental dishes, and I’ve always played with different forms of design, including drawing fantastical house and garden plans. Dad was an electronics technician which meant that I was surrounded by a lot of gadgets, components and parts, and spent many hours in places like Sparky’s Electronics. Among my ‘toys’ were empty photographic film canisters and an egg-beater drill. I also used to imagine that the printed circuit boards Dad used were city streets and the various components were skyscrapers and vehicles.
I wanted Lexie Moon to be an inventor partly because I needed a way for the villain to steal people’s words, and also because I really love books that have things that are slightly outrageous or impossible. I think most of Lexie’s inventions are both!
Lexie is a courageous kid who isn’t afraid to race into danger. Are you like this yourself?
No way! I wish I was more like Lexie. To her, it’s more important to do the right thing than worry about being scared, and once she decides what she needs to do, almost nothing can stop her. I’d like to think that I would always do the brave thing, and there have been one or two occasions in which I’ve had to face a snake or spider, but to be honest I’m usually much more of the scream-if-I-see-a-mouse sort of person.
If Lexie’s Vocabuliser could help you pronounce a particular tricky word, which word would you choose?
Well, these days I teach English to migrants from around the world. I must say I probably find the Vietnamese pronunciation the trickiest of all, so I would quite like The Vocabuliser to help me say some tricky Vietnamese words. If we’re talking about English words, I would like some help with words I read in books but don’t know how to say properly. Words like isthmus (a narrow strip of land), interlocutor (someone you talk to) and sphygmomanometer (a blood pressure machine)! That last one really is a tongue-twister!
Lexie Moon and the Word Burgling Bungle has lots of twists as the reader hurtles through the story! Do you have a tip for young writers who would like to add some extra excitement to their storytelling?
The advice that I’ve been given is that to make your story extra exciting, you need to put your character in danger or put them in a very tricky situation. Once you’ve done that, you can make your story even more exciting, by making the danger even more dangerous or making the tricky situation even trickier.
I recommend thinking about the situation that your character is in and brainstorming all the different ways things can go wrong. Choose one or two things from that list and make them happen in your story. Then your character’s job is to find a way out of the tricky situation and get everything back to normal. That part of writing can be a lot of fun!
Can you tell us a bit about your next Work/s-in-Progress?
I’m very excited to be able to tell you that the next book in the Lexie Moon series, Lexie Moon and the Space Day Disaster, is planned for publication in August this year! I really enjoyed writing it and I can’t wait to share it with everyone.
If all goes well, I have a few ideas for other Lexie Moon titles. I’m also currently working on a portal adventure story and have lots of ideas for other books.
Lexie Moon and the Word Burgling Bungle is out now! Ask for it at your favourite bookshop or local library.
AWESOME EXTRAS
Design your own gadget and try Melissa’s Lexie Moon wordsearch
Listen to Melissa read the first chapter of Lexie Moon and the Word Burgling Bungle on the Your Kids Next Read Podcast [it starts at 02:49 on the slider]
Visit Melissa Garside’s website to find out more about her and her books
Visit Lauren Mullinder’s website to find out more about her and her art and design work
alphabetsoup.net.au 