The Tussock

Running out of monsters

2012-01-25T14:35:00.001+10:00

We're running out of monsters - at least as far as literature and entertainment generally are concerned. You might think that seems unlikely: we're overrun, lately, with vampires; werewolves are almost as common; zombies still won't lie down; and there's a supporting cast of predatory aliens, robots, serial killers, you name it, who pop up to make a contribution.*

But these creatures aren't monsters any more. Well, zombies are still largely monstrous, and it should become obvious why, but vampires are about as dangerous as the dudes from Mills & Boon -- misunderstood local bigshots, advertising executives, sharp dressers; a cast of good-looking misogynists, fated to be redeemed by the love of a whatever. Werewolves are misunderstood and cuddly. Cuddly! Ask an old woman from 14th century Latvia about werewolves (assuming you can find one) and I'm pretty sure her answer won't contain any of the medieval Latvian words for 'cuddly'.

Even in the new(ish) tv series with all the blood and violence and boobs, the vampires and werewolves aren't monsters; they're bad boys and girls; powerful but motivated by entirely human desires. The drive of the new monster narratives (from Buffy through, in particular, the Twilight books, and down to True Blood and so on) is not to scare; it's to look in on monsters' lives and explain why they're better than ordinary old us.

Stare long into the abyss and the abyss stares also into you, according to Nietsche. But also, stare long into the abyss and you'll eventually take all the fun out of it. We've been staring into the abyss quite a bit since Buffy first got to know Angel, and what's happened is that all those creatures we used to rely on to scare us have turned into self-absorbed superheroes. In Nietschian fashion, the human characters take on the lost quotient of evil. The narrative that Anne Rice shares with Stephenie Meyer, as much as Rice might want to deny it, is that it's good to have a vampire on your side. (Dangerous, perhaps, but danger only realised in that thrilling way where you suspect yourself to be in deadly peril of letting a vampire into your pants.) Good to have a vampire on your side? I suspect Bram Stoker would rather have shot himself in the face than write Dracula that way, and Nosferatu's Orlock would make a pretty disturbing bedfellow.

Nosferatu: terrifying undead monster or misunderstood potential boyfriend? You decide.

Team Edward,** Lestat, Buffy the Vampire Slayer As Long As The Vampire Isn't One Of Those Other Kind Of Vampires...the quality obviously varies, but the effect is the same: lots more vampires, but no more monsters. Serial killers? Dexter. (Maybe even Hannibal Lecter.) Werewolves? Twilight again, along with lots of less-popular books and properties. Dragons? Almost every dragon post-Tolkein I can think of has been a proud, put-upon, too-big-for-this-puny-human-world beast.*** If we were only enlightened enough to understand them, we'd stop seeing them as monsters.

I guess this isn't an unreasonable motivation for an individual story -- I mean, it was pretty effective when Mary Shelley did it -- but it seems like it's all we're getting. We're running out of monsters.

Something can't be a monster if you understand its motivation, if you explore its limits and possibilities -- get inside its head. This is (he said uneducatedly) basic sociology that we try to apply (much less successfully, it seems) to schoolyard bullying, oppositional politics, sexism and multiculturalism. Understand the 'other' a bit better and you won't fear it so much. The literary version of this -- which has to contain an element of essential conflict to be worth reading -- is 'poor monster, everyone else misunderstands you, but I know better, or at least I will after I've spent the first half of this book wrestling with your superhero monster broodingness. And one day, when the cruel human world is as enlightened as I am, we will live happily together as thing and wife.' And as literature is especially good at showing us the map of the self held by someone else (and thus is a teacher of compassion), it's a terrifically effective way of making molehills out of monsters.

If we are too busy understanding the Creature From the Black Lagoon, we won't be frightened of it. But being frightened is a valid story-telling technique, at risk of serious dilution by all this 'understanding'. And besides, if we're not frightened by monsters, what have we left to be frightened by? Ourselves, I suspect. Oh look, Avatar.

In fact, in a neat piece of mirroring, as monsters become more sanitised, heroes are darkening to the point where you can barely recognise them as the good guys. I mean, sure, the pretty knight is not especially interesting any more, but hasn't the opposite been done to death? Bring back monsters and let us defeat them (at least some of the time) -- and let the way they get my pants off be by scaring, not by charming.

*Mad scientists are out of favour. I deplore this state of affairs, but I think the rest of my thesis explains why it's happened: we (think we) understand science too well.
**Edward is the vampire, right?
***Gaming is beating literature on this one, you'd have to say: witness Dragon Age, Deathwing, Skyrim. Dragons that would still want to eat you even if you hadn't just transgressed some ten-thousand year old dragon society rule far too complex for us short-lived humans to understand.

Stardate: 2012. The Search Continues.

2012-01-17T13:07:00.000+10:00

"The Quest is the Quest",

They traversed galaxies in this kind of two-handed hairdryer thing. No wonder they couldn't find the other Minyans.

according to those crazy, Confucian, trope-embodying Minyans of Minyos. Endless searching certainly seemed to keep them motivated.

Seeking is important. Progress in (but explicitly not completion of) our own quotidian quests (for meaning, for promotion, for learning, for donuts) is one of the keys to happiness, according to positive psychology. So the fact that I'm starting out 2012 by continuing the search for an agent is clearly a good thing that will provide me with joy.*

I had a short but flattering comment about The Queen of Crakesville from the agent who requested the full MS last year, which sweetened the rejection a bit. (Writers! We're so easy!) They made it clear, though, that Australia is no place to try to get a novel with goths and zombies in it published, an opinion other friends have confirmed. (Picture me at this point, steeling myself for the avalanche of evidence to the contrary that you, imaginary reader, are about to heap upon me. No?)

So the search continues -- overseas. Thank goodness for email, says I: I'm not sure if I would (will, if it comes to it) have the strength to navigate international reply postage for queries en masse. One of the agencies I've got on my list mentions that they've only just opened up to email queries, and that their resistance was broken down largely because otherwise they'd go to the bottom of pretty much every foreign author's querying timetable, and therefore be getting the last look at at least some good stuff. It seems that many of the prominent UK agencies are still avoiding email queries too, perhaps as an effort to auto-gatekeep (It is so a word.): by putting a surmountable obstacle in the way, presumably the most casual will be dissuaded.

No doubt some days I could be described as that, and wouldn't be surprised if most writers weren't in the same boat. So thank you, Abhay Bhushan, Ken Pogran, Ray Tomlinson, and Jim White, for documenting the standardised network mail header. I couldn't have done it without you. Now I only have to worry about convincing someone a thousand miles away to love my work, and also that JZ is not too sweary for the US.

I don't mind admitting that it's a bit frustrating to be still searching for an agent, despite the at-least-a-bit-positive signs. To cheer myself up here are a few other people still searching for something important in 2012 despite having some reason to hope they'd have hit upon it in 2011:

Sachin Tendulkar (the search for 100 international-match hundreds not helped by unexpectedly good Australian bowling over the last few weeks)
CERN (the Higgs Boson is almost found, but not quite. In particle physics, 'almost found' is a legitimate state for matter to exist in...yay weirdness!)
Google (still searching. You'd think they'd have given up by now.)
Steve Carell, in the upcoming Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (Read the blurb...it sounds simultaneously stupid and pretty feasible. Descriptive of the strangeness of being human, or just a dumb attempt to squeeze some cynical cash out of the Mayan calendar business? Hard, though, to go completely wrong with Steve Carell.)

*How deflating it must have been for the Minyans when the Doctor solved all their problems and ended their quest. "You competent bastard! Now what's going to give our unnaturally extended lifespans meaning and purpose?!"

Advertising: playful narrative or just weirding us out?

2011-11-16T22:16:00.001+10:00

There's a series of TV ads for an insurance company going around at the moment, in which we are exhorted to believe that taking out private heath cover will cause us to 'meet a healthier version of ourselves', or some such twaddle. The money shots are a lot of teary and/or stoic reunions between two incarnations of the same person: men sharing almost-bawling man-hugs with their dopplegangers; women brought to speechlessness and bouts of meaningful-slash-pitying hand-touching.

I can't tell, in any given pair, which of the two is meant to be healthy. Perhaps it's all the movement, or perhaps it's truth-in-advertising at work: the advertiser implying visually that they can't deliver what their slogan promises. Anyway. There's a set of internet banner ads, of course, that go with it. (Remember seven or eight years ago when everyone was saying internet advertising was going to die out because nobody was bothering to click on it?) In the internet ads you can see much more clearly which is the unhealthy and which the healthy version. To whit, exhibit A:

Hint: the one on the right is the 'after' shot.

The message here seems to be that this health insurance company promises to stop you experimenting with crack (she really doesn't look well). Or alternatively that in order to become healthier, what you really need to do is wear makeup, blow dry your hair, and hang around in flattering light.

NaNo Day Three - The Tricky One

2011-11-03T07:42:00.000+10:00

Day three of NaNo is traditionally the first difficult day for me. I woke up this morning knowing where I wanted to go with the morning's writing, but it still hasn't come easily. I'm bogged down with missing facts; I'm trying to write a wiccan coven scene, but I don't know enough about it. Time, I think, to just make something up, and resolve the problem of facts later in editing.

The best thing about NaNo, though, is that even when I'm struggling, I'm struggling to get beyond 300 words, not struggling to get beyond zero...

A moody little snippet from this morning:

None of the other women shifted. They all met her eyes as she looked at each one in turn, but they didn’t look comfortable, or entirely present. Lash wondered whether they were trying to make themselves believe her, or whether they already agreed and were nervous about it. Incarnating the God! Chaos, even the beloved and important chaos that would result, is not by its nature a comfort.

New beginnings - a hackneyed phrase

2011-11-01T10:29:00.001+10:00

Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month. Auspiciously, is it a Tuesday -- usually a Writing Race day. Though the races are on hiatus (or out of season?) at the moment. My username is Dirtman, if anyone randomly should decide to add me to their NaNo buddy list.

I've started NaNo three times, and succeeded twice. Last year was a washout -- I think I was thinking too much about John Zombie to write a different novel. I certainly didn't feel sufficiently committed to it -- and tried to start other new things at the same time, a rookie NaNo mistake. This year I'm starting the JZ sequel, which I'm calling The God of Crakesville (cue ominous music). The third book will be called The Ghost of Crakesville (cue other ominous music probably involving thunder and/or a theramin). There may or may not be a sort of a theme going there. I'm discovering that the books are about the value of persistence, in a sense: John Zombie is a detective, but definitely not in the mode of forensic psychiatrist or super-spy or military thriller protagonist. His greatest skill is bloodymindedness -- though I'm trying hard not to write him as any kind of everyman. His struggles are those of a normal person faced with enemies more powerful/skilful*/determined than himself. My friend Dawn pointed out that his struggle against iconic figures with special powers (voodoo queens, gods, ghosts) is a handy metaphor for trying to get published, with which I have to agree.

It is past time, I suppose, to let the previous book go a little bit. I will keep sending it out if the latest agent passes on it, but I don't think I can keep submitting it to mentorship and MS development competitions and the like; it has had its day there. And I'm not prepared to do another big editing pass on it without some better (external?) reason beyond the vague possibility that I'll hit randomly on a version of it that better satisfies the next lot of QWC/ASA/Hachette/whoever competition judges.So this NaNo definitely has the spirit of a new beginning, hackneyed as that may be. I'm also enjoying the short stories I've been writing -- and learning that there is some room in that style for me has been a new beginning too. Though given the 50,000 words I'm about to spew out, I think the current story will have to wait a bit to reach its conclusion.

So, in light of these new beginnings, here is the first-draft beginning of the new book, and just for kicks, the beginning of the short story (which I wanted to call The book-thief, but I think that's a bit close to a certain global shelf-busting colossus of which you may have heard). The first one stars the sociopathic egotist wizard Giordano. The second one stars the rather limp and timid recent retiree, Clive. I don't think they have much in common.

The God of Crakesville: from the Prologue

Giordano rolled away at the completion of the ritual, gasping and sweaty. He buzzed with effort and power, though the heated urgency of the moment and the sense of out-of-self, of transposition into the greater thing, had snapped as soon as the ritual was finished. He tried to hold onto it.

Lash’s white belly skin was cool under his hand. He looked at her and gave her an expensive porcelain-white smile. She smiled back, but looked quickly down at his hand and put her own over it, entwining her fingers in his. This made him smile again, to himself this time. Doubtless she was nervous, still: eager to be near and yet reluctant to give in to his accelerating advances. Desperate to begin their work, too, but frightened of what it required, or what it meant, or both. He had no doubt she was terrified of the consequences of success; he had reservations himself, though his longer years had taught him how little those reservations mattered.

“So: we have begun,” he said.

Inside the locked book

Antique shops are foreign places. For all the prettily run-down furniture that comes in in container-loads and wobbles out the door again at a price that could shock the original owner out of his grave, what really fills antique shops is a lot of stuff hardly anyone recognises. Maybe your grandmother used this or that to prise or shuck or peel; maybe your grandfather’s grandfather knew of a use for that thick, rusted bent thing, but now it’s as foreign as a street sign in Russia in the background of a Cold War spy movie. By which I mean you don’t expect to understand everything you see, nor expect it to have anything important to do with your life. So coming across a tin bucket full of greyish sand on a storeroom shelf was hardly more remarkable to me than stumbling over some cast-iron multi-purpose doorstop, or a set of novelty darning tools. I didn’t remark upon it until I pushed it off the shelf and spilled the sand all over the concrete floor.

At that time the apple of my increasingly watery eye was the owner of the antique shop, Maria. She was a Spanish lady with all that that suggests; a passionate temperament, dramatically waterfalling dark hair, full lips in olive skin. I was five years her senior at 50, and still in good shape then, but she was very much the leader, if there was such a thing, in our short but hopeful friendship. I was trying to impress her by helping out for free in the antique shop she’d recently come into. Early retirement from my own commercial ventures had left me well off, or well enough; and when I’d offered to help her out with her business for free I’d been thinking of chilly evenings spent staring moodily into her mesmerising eyes over profit and loss statements and glasses of wine, and not this dark, infernal, uninsulated back room that seemed to produce dust spontaneously, and all the pushing and carrying and relocating that I had apparently agreed to do inside it.

*'skilful' is one of those words that looks weird if you stare at it too long. Skilful skilful skilful skilful. See?

I suppose we will.

2011-09-14T13:08:00.000+10:00

Recently I finished Marieke Hardy's book 'You'll be sorry when I'm dead'. I dearly wanted to like it, because I think Hardy is fascinating; because I've always liked her written work; because we're not so far apart in age and I remember living in the Melbourne she describes -- so it was a relief, really, that it turned out so well. The writing is at turns restrained and excitable and emotional, and it all seems done deliberately and with skill, bringing out Marieke's feelings, not leaving the reader to judge (in the first instance) how they think they'd react or feel in the same moment. There's quite a bit to judge, so this is important. It seems the point of the book: to deliver Marieke's emotional responses to things in her life, not to explore (at least not directly) the human condition, nor to transport the reader to memories of similar things in their own life, and it seems the point of this book beyond the usual aim of the autobiographer. Marieke seems to want us (increasingly as the book continues) to know something important about her, and it reads (no doubt deliberately) as if it takes her a while to figure out exactly what that is.

There's a stunning movement from light to darkness in this book, which is arranged emotionally rather than chronologically. Hardy claims she will not spare us her own failings, but her despair at the particular failings she presents to us increases dramatically in the second half. Because the events are not listed chronologically, Hardy allows herself room to build emotional depth. The hook for the average reader is, of course, the promise of amusing tales of hedonism, and Marieke doesn't shy away from that,* but the book's depth comes from her fears, which she reveals only later. Her choices here are interesting: she depicts her friend's diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer as a story about bravery and resilience, yet later reveals her own deep-seated fears about mortality in tales about old school friends and step-children -- the stand-out passages in the book, I think.

The anecdotes are brave and open. Bravery is something to which all writing is supposed to aspire -- an unflinching carrying-out of the responsibility to search and then reveal. Autobiographers -- and particularly memoirists of this kind -- have in some senses an easier time of it: it's intellectually a simple task to be brave when your subject matter is your own proclivities; you just tell it like it was. At the same time there are higher stakes in autobiography; real people revealed in necessarily fallible rememberances potentially pay a real cost as a result. Hardy reveals, through an interesting if clunky series of emailed responses from people she writes about, both that there is a cost for those others and that the cost is rarely as high as she fears it might have been. Her father's preface, in which he wishes she might have used fake names for everyone, is amusing but smells of device, serving mainly to call attention to her (nevertheless brave) decision not to go down that path.

In her correspondences with some of the book's subjects, Marieke reveals the thread of fallible memory that tacitly underlines each anecdote. She claims, in the first one, that she herself is likely to appear as the villain if any of the stories were to require one. It's a fascinating and convoluted decision to include that particular correspondence, because it is in the story to which it pertains that she comes across (in light of her ex-partner's response) as being the only time she may not have been generous in her recollection. Again you can't fault her for openness and bravery, but it's hard (given her skill) to imagine that she never considered how being able to make herself look bad could make the book look better. Her description of her fears over her failed (and possibly failing) memory is extraordinary writing, and much more uncomplicatedly honest.

I have wondered about Marieke's very public obsession with Bob Ellis, who usually seems to me little more than a highly talented shit-stirrer whose partisanship exists largely because it gives him a target. That she chose to explain or at least describe this obsession in the darker last parts of the book is interesting; it makes Ellis appear particularly scary, and her obsession with him particularly charged, more dangerous -- through some trick of the positioning and the writing -- than the binge drinking and drug-fuelled promiscuity she describes earlier. She includes his frankly disturbing response near the end of the book, and it is a frightening counterpoint to all that she wrote about herself, perhaps to underline the book's subtext that the truly talented are dangerous people.

I'm eager to see her write a novel -- I want to read what she has to say about all of us, now that I've read this complex set of things she has to say about herself. This is marvellous, warm-hearted work.

UPDATE:
I just found this entry on Readings' site wherein Hardy discusses the writing of the book, worth reading because it further suggests that the titillating hedonism is far from her own motivation for the writing. It's interesting particularly for her short comments on the emails from her story 'participants' -- she notes that these pieces 'took control of the story' from her, which I think is the source of that clunkiness I felt in reading them. She says she's most proud of having included them regardless, and it's hard to fault that.

*Her choices around the break between hedonism and perversion are interesting, though.

Awards and otherwise

2011-09-08T23:21:00.000+10:00

I have in my inbox an email from the Australian Society of Authors which, among other things, details the winners of this year's mentorship program -- congratulations to all those worthies. Of which I am not one, so I am eating of the sour grape and weeping the bitter tears of the majority, as you'd expect. As is traditional for these sorts of contests, one of the selected 15 appears to break the contest's eligibility rules, and another is a winner from last year (an especial tactic of the ASA). This is a reminder, if such a thing should be thought to be useful, that writing for publication seems to be to a distressing degree a game in which the objective is to find the right person to make a subjective decision in your favour.

I found interesting the ASA's presentation of the news to its membership this time around. Usually these things come with a broad statement to the effect that the judges are consistently if generically blown away with how fair-to-middling-or-perhaps-sometimes-even-actually-good the pool of manuscripts have been. The 2011 edition must have been disappointing for the poor slush-sullied souls this time around: they picked 15 winners and five commended entries, while the rest (a proud list of about 300 saps, including me) attracted this feedback which I would characterise as 'challenging', with piquant overtones.

Judges' comments:
Many writers, particularly novelists, submitted manuscripts that were underdeveloped and read more like blueprints for imagined works. The guidelines state that manuscripts must be at first draft stage at least. For the genres of fiction and non-fiction, a first draft can be defined as a manuscript that is complete and structured at roughly the intended final length but that is yet to go through a rewrite.

Judges commented that many writers need to pay more attention to the crafting of sentences and to grammar. Language is the principal tool of the writer, they said, and manuscripts would be more readable and engaging if writers employed more precise and vibrant language.

It's difficult, as one of the unselected dross-producers, not to imagine that this criticism is meant for me, and my manuscript. I'm surprised that they felt the need to be so blunt -- we must have been pretty awful, on average. Normally I allow myself to think, when confronted with rejection, that there's room for my work to be just not quite the right version of 'good', but here I'm finding it hard not to feel that I've just been called an imprecise and unvibrant writer who can't even read contest guidelines properly.

I think I ought to give this particular contest a rest: three rejections over two manuscripts in three years from the one organisation is probably sufficient for now. Perhaps if I notice my writing has changed somehow.

I don't think I've read any of the work of the winners, but something that struck me was how I have been, in various ways, on such a similar journey to some of them. Submitted to the same poetry journals, the same competitions (in both cases obviously with more success on their part), worked through the same kinds of writers' centre courses, struggled to finish and edit and polish a manuscript. I'm left wondering if they just worked harder at it than I did.

Why yes, they are quite large.

2011-08-23T17:20:00.001+10:00

Sometimes I think I am, to my shame, just an unreconstructed teenage boy.

Case in point. In my day job, I get emails from a range of scientific journals detailing the tables of contents for their latest issues. This includes several international ecology journals. The generalist ones usually have a mix of plant and animal ecology papers in them. The animal papers are usually pretty exciting and fabulous, but as they're not in my professional area I usually skip past those links and go to the plant ones. Except when there's a paper featuring some study or other on the European bird species, Parus major, as was the case this morning.

Why am I so interested in (or, to use a more accurate term, diverted by) the European bird species Parus major? Here's a clue; it's hidden in the actual title of the paper from that table of contents which I am going to reproduce, link intact, here.

Mismatched reproduction is energetically costly for chick feeding female great tits

I'm convinced that Parus major is the most-studied animal species in the world -- beyond ourselves of course -- and that the reason for this is not because they are intrinsically interesting or especially convenient to work with, but because it allows researchers to use the words 'great tits' in the title of serious scientific works. In fact eight out of ten short papers on European bird species ecology have great tits as the species of interest, according to this statistic that I just made up.

If you have a look at the reference list for the paper linked above, you'll see that the ornithology world is divided into two parts: those who decry and deny (and indeed defy) teenage-boy-ness and refer to P. major in the singular (such as in the genre-defining 1951 classic Kluijver, H.N. (1951) The population ecology of the great tit Parus m. major L. Ardea, 39, 1–135), and those who give in to their inevitable, infantile inner sniggerer and use the plural (such as the mega-entendrenous Verboven, N. & Visser, M.E. (1998) Seasonal variation in local recruitment of great tits: the importance of being early. Oikos, 81, 511–524). From a brief scan, I don't think this Childish Childy McChild vs Serious Grownup divide runs along gender lines, either.

I'm thinking that there's some kind of semi-secret ornithologists' annual award for 'most double-ententred use of the term 'great tits' in an international peer-reviewed journal'. It's probably called the Perrins award, after that author's frankly brilliant (in a postmodern, ironic, subversive kind of way) and, I promise you, entirely serious and not at all pornographic 1979 book.* I'm going to provide you with a screen shot from the bibliography to prove I'm not making this up. Here it is.

Not at all rude.

A great tit. Ironically quite attractive. You can bet when I googled for this image I searched under the scientific name. Image attribution: Luc Viatour, see below.

I know this is all extremely immature. But some days you just have to laugh, right?

I hope it's not just me and the ornithologists.

Somewhat on-topic for this blog, the title of this latest paper is also a good example of why grammar matters. "...chick feeding female great tits" is spam about boobs.** "...chick-feeding female great tits", on the other hand, is an entirely sober expression about the undoubtedly difficult job of being a small female bird with offspring to feed before winter comes and you all freeze to death.***

*This book is so not what it appears to be that I'm betting it doesn't even HAVE a page 3.

**Or an ecology journal wanting to pretend for some reason that it's boob spam. Scientific papers pretending to be spam in order to get more hits...have we come that far already?

***Ontologically this problem is even more complex for male Parus major. Imagine you're a male Parus major and you're on your way to whatever birds think of as the pub**** with one or more of your best mates. Along comes some smart-arse ornithologist; s/he points at you and announces: "Hey, great tits!" Totally emasculating.

****This would probably have looked better if I'd written 'on your way to forage devotedly for food for your hungry avian children' instead of inventing bird pubs.

Image attribution: bird picture is courtesy Luc Viatour, used without express permission under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. It must be amusing being able to tell your friends you have a data card full of tit pictures on your camera, then giving them a slide show of small yellowish birds. Or, once again, maybe it is just me.

The Last Good Book In Borders

2011-07-12T10:52:00.000+10:00

I wandered past the Borders at Robina (QLD) on the weekend. It was their last day of trading, or so they said, and the upstairs was all but empty. There were half a dozen tables and a wall shelf with the remaining stock, which they'd started the day selling for $2 each. By the time we got there in the afternoon it was down to a dollar a book. I was strangely resistant to wandering further than the tables to look at the empty, suddenly and symbolically pointless bookshelves -- all of which were to be likewise sold.

There appeared to be about four staff members left, one of whom was acting as crier, repeating the one-dollar-a-book mantra, which seemed to me both increasingly plaintive and increasingly pointless. It must have seemed doubly so to her. At one point, she broke the impressive shell of dignity that all the Borders staff appear to have lived within since the collapse: she shouted something like "Come and buy a book...I need a job!" It sounded sad and desperate and brave - but I kept thinking how the unavoidable context of the moment was that the two things were definitively no longer linked.

The remaining stock consisted of about a dozen copies of a guide to the Australian summer cricket season for 2009-2010*, a few well-thumbed mass-market paperbacks, and this:

District and Circle, by Seamus Heaney (Faber and Faber, 2006)

It felt rude to buy it, in a way -- a bit like an unscrupulous and unloved relative picking over the posessions of a recently-dead aunt -- but better than seeing it thrown away, and worth having on its own merits of course. More than that, though, it was a symbol of how Borders started and what it became. In the first Borders I visited, which I think would have been at Chadstone in Victoria, I was enchanted by its multi-level grandness and the ecumenical filling of the shelves. A bit like Tony Martin's experience recounted here only not as well expressed, and a bit less pompous. I remember in particular buying my dad a beautiful imported Americana art calendar with humorously but attractively exaggerated cows. It should have been a hint, I suppose, that they never stocked it again after that first gloriously diverse year. (Though to be fair, the book I bought was only published in 2006, so you have to give Borders credit for stocking things out of the mainstream at least somewhat recently.)

According to the plaintive crier, Robina was the last branch to close. So this slim Heaney was, I like to think, the last good book in Borders. Outside of the inner cities, Borders was almost the only place you could ever have bought something by Heaney, and yet he's among the best and most significant poets in English from the last hundred years. If I had an irresistible craving for another Heaney tomorrow, what would I do? Fly to Melbourne and take a taxi to Readings? I'm not going to find a physical copy in Toowoomba, or Robina, or Wacol, or anywhere anything like them.

Or I could, you know, download the bastard**. Vale Borders, and viva la revolucion.

*Had all the ones that were only a year out of date actually been bought? How bizarre.
** Possibly not this actual specific bastard; I haven't checked. But you get the point.

Six years

2011-06-10T10:33:00.001+10:00

A few days ago I turned 40. I was unhappy about it, and wrote a self-indulgent few paragraphs about which I retained just enough judgement not to put up here. Today, however, is the sixth anniversary of my brother Brian's death, and I am reminded that living long enough to reach 40 is something that not all are priveleged enough to do. I'm reminded too in a tangential way that the unspoken assumption that we'd had, that we would all live out basically the entirety of our lives on parallel lines, is historically and globally unusual -- or at least its reasonableness is.

Which is to say that we were lucky, in the context of the world and its history, to have what we had for as long as we did, even while the losing of it through his death remains evidence of the fundamental uncaringness of the universe.

www.beyondblue.org.au

We Need More Words, or; The Day A.S. Byatt Stole My Face

2011-06-06T13:01:00.000+10:00

I had an especially writery (as opposed to 'writerly') experience last night. I'm reading A.S. Byatt's 'The Children's Book' (which I found a substantial challenge to get started with, but which has become much more compelling and directed in the middle section) and came across the description of a character with 'a face like a knife'. Which I think is fantastic writing*, at least partly because I vividly remember coming up with exactly the same description for a character in one of my own stories.

It's just a nuisance, when you find that someone else (of infinitely greater stature and ability) has already published some little bit of something you wrote that you think will stick in the reader's mind. It's only a few words, and really, pretty discardable ones at that. Punchy, cute writing, but hardly indispensable as character description. So the impulse is to drop them, I suppose. Coincidentally I find (on searching for the offending words) I'd already changed the description anyway, so disaster averted there. It makes me wonder, though, how often this sort of thing happens, whether it will keep happening to me in particular, and how powerless I am to stop it. Clearly the zillion words already in English, and the other words we're always willing to borrow from somewhere else, are not enough...

*If you search on "a face like a knife" you will find, as I just did, that it's already been used plenty of times by such disparate luminaries as Honoré de Balzac, Jean Genet, and Jeff VanDerMeer, though presumably in translation in some cases. See? It's going on all the time and somebody needs to do something.

Dr Strangebyrne, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the E-reader

2011-05-19T12:19:00.002+10:00

I managed to catch Kate Eltham (CEO of Queensland Writers Centre) on the ABC's Jennifer Byrne* Presents series (i.e. not quite the First Tuesday Book Club, but not not the First Tuesday Book Club -- how confusing!), discussing the future of the book. (It will be on the ABC's iview for a few more days; check it out if you didn't see it.) It looked like quite an intimidating panel, especially with Kate being so obviously the lone voice of enthusiasm about the future of writing and reading. In fact, I thought it was particularly telling that Kate looked like she felt she needed to be a bit apologetic about not following the group's line on that point. Up until pretty recently, I have been somewhat in the 'we'll all be rooned' category, I have to admit, but calm, enthusiastic discussions like Kate's have helped me discover a lot more of my own enthusiasm for where the novel will sit in the future.

The panel all agreed that electronic mediation of writing offered us new forms -- they talked particularly about 'multi-writer' texts, and texts altered after initial writing by interaction with others' responses. However nobody drew what I thought was the blatantly obvious conclusion that the arrival of new forms has little or nothing to do with whether old forms continue to be desirable. Surely if enough people like reading novels with a linear narrative written by a single writer, there's no quintessential threat to them continuing to be made. So many writers now are solitary creatures dreaming out their feelings about the world into book form; why would those people (whose output is what we currently understand to be 'the novel') suddenly disappear? Richard Flanagan (who, given the amount of screen time afforded him, seemed to be the reason the show was put together in the first place - though you can't blame the ABC for that) expressed legitimate concerns that people who can currently write won't be able to afford to -- but hasn't that been a substantial problem with publishing for years, dating from well before the first e-reader was even built?

Screens=stupid?
The panel talked about whether reading on a screen makes us all scatterbrained, and the idea that paper somehow has a more emotive, connective quality. I mean, it's paper, people; you're not reading something printed on a baby!** Surely any emotional connection you have when reading paper is to your own previous experiences of reading, not to some intrinsic quality of pressed wood fibres. When reading something absorbing, I think the device disappears, regardless of what that device is, and I've heard the same in a number of discussions. There was some comment to the effect that reading on a screen has been found to cause people to skim more, something about reading in an 'H' or 'E' pattern, which reminded me precisely of how I read a newspaper. In fact I usually find myself reading sections of the newspaper back to front. I don't think it's the delivery mechanism that makes people read in a scattered pattern, I think it's the content, and all of that discussion about whether a particular medium is more intrinsically able to connect with the human consciousness is really just an attempt to justify (perfectly natural) conservatism, and a reflection of one's own personal history. You may prefer paper because that's what you're used to, but that doesn't give paper any magical powers over anyone else.

We may indeed read internet pages in a disjointed way, and incompletely. And we may indeed have our lives filled, nowadays, with screen-equipped things that distract us. But I think that's because we want to be distracted, not because the existence of screens that show text has engendered some kind of irrevocable mental shift. Mobile phones are increasingly distracting -- they have pretty colours, they beep when you get an SMS, and push email is now mainstream. But did you ever find yourself truly distracted by your phone when you didn't want to be? When you're talking to someone you find attractive or interesting, or reading a great scene in a novel, do you really stop to check what the beep was all about? If you're finding a novel hard going and you keep sneaking a look at your Twitter feed, is that Twitter's, fault, or does it just mean that you're just not that into the novel?

Distrac- oh shiny!
I'd argue that we become distracted by the beeps and screens and messages only when we're not really engaged with what we're doing or reading. The fault is in the lack of engagement, not the device, and people who find reading intrinsically interesting (i.e. what I argue should be publishing's real market) aren't at substantial danger of finding their attention fragmented -- at least not in the middle of enjoying a book. Why worry about whether people who don't really like books will be able to sustain their concentration on one? There's a legitimate and important argument that teaching language and literature will be more difficult under conditions of greater fragmentation of students' attention, but the way I remember it, 'those' kids never actually read the books anyway, even in the days when a phone had a springy wire attaching it to the wall. I'm certain there are many 14-year-olds who can and do read highly literary novels, but I don't think they're representative, and I'm not sure that adult literary novels are (or should be) written for a primary audience that explicitly includes 14-year-olds in the first place.

Optimism is not a dirty word
So what do we make of the literary establishment's (if you assume the panel is representative of that) attitude to the ebook revolution? I thought it was telling that in the final analysis everyone (except perhaps JB herself) seemed optimistic. Grudgingly, perhaps, except in Kate's case, but owning up to the belief that writing, reading, and novels are good enough and desirable enough to survive changes in the way we buy and consume our books. It's clear, as Flanagan stated, that Amazon, Google and Apple have no interest in Australian literature or of its place in the culture, but I'm not sure that's entirely a bad thing. I think there aren't enough players in the market -- power is way too centralised. However, provided Amazon etc stay away from gatekeeping*** and just act as a place to buy and sell, Australians should be able to write and sell and buy and read as culturally broad a range of material as ever -- maybe even more so. If we want more titles to mean more voices, a culturally hands-off approach on the part of the retailers (or facilitators, I suppose is a better term) is a real opportunity to get that. It will be interesting, as this change progresses, to find out exactly who's in favour of that idea, and who's not.

Addendum: You can find a fairly diametrically opposite reading of the panel discussion on Crikey's Culture Mulcher blog here: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/culture-mulcher/2011/05/19/nobody-wants-to-read-but-everybody-wants-to-write/

*I love Jennifer Byrne. Possibly in a creepy inappropriate way. I don't think I've disagreed with anything she's said on television, at least not since 60 Minutes. But as arguably the nation's most prominent book lover I would have thought she could have got the name of IF:Book right the first time. Or the second time.
**If you are, stop it right now.
***On which point, I think Amazon's announcement of its own imprint/s is a bad idea -- I preferred it when they had no reason to be particularly interested in the content of the books they sell. Let writers and readers worry about that; just give them access.

Some writing advice

2011-05-11T16:20:00.000+10:00

So because this is a writing (or at least writer's) blog, I feel I'm beholden to offer writing advice. It seems to be the thing you do. And yet, I haven't got the slightest bit of proof that I'm qualified to offer any. Is this some sort of impediment? I think so. And yet, the imperative, the expectation. So here I am.

1. Don't start paragraphs with 'So'. It doesn't make you sound as if you and your reader are in the middle of a conversation already; it sounds as if you're in a conversation with your imaginary friend and I just happened along in the middle of it. Or does it? Not really, no. Honestly, I just think it's obvious and annoying, and I wish I hadn't done it.

2. Don't look for advice while you're not actually writing.*

What do I mean by this? Well. Before I sat down and actually wrote my fairly terrible first novel (that which dares not speak its name, by which I don't mean lesbianism), I spent an inordinate amount of time reading blogs and how-to-write books and even doing an online course. I was writing a bit at the time, but not much, and certainly not novels. I wanted to feel like a writer, though, so I immersed myself in writerly things and the online community -- but mostly I procrastinated, by reading up on writing advice. There's a lot of it about.

I knew, really, that it didn't make me a writer, but it made me feel like I was connected to writing and the community of writers, somehow -- which is a lot easier than actually writing, if not productive. As with all procrastination, I was fooling myself. I can't remember any of the advice en blog that I read, and very little of the writing book advice either. It slipped out of my head like a tablespoon of warm axle grease.** It's all terribly obvious now, of course. It's nothing to do with the accuracy of the advice or the quality of its presentation. You just can't expect unused advice to stay in your head -- it recognises that it has nothing to connect to, and runs off to help someone else avoid taking action. Advice is pointless unless you're in the throes of the thing, wrestling with it and having problems that you can use advice to help you solve.

So if you like spending time reading writing advice, my advice is this: make sure you're writing (preferably not very well) while you're reading it, or admit to yourself that you're just wasting time.***

* This is the real advice, guys. The other bit was just for laughs. Although accurate.
** Warm axle grease is very slippery. However, it slips out of your head with such alacrity mostly because it tastes bad.
*** Not literally while reading it. Unless you have some kind of special double brain thing going.

With vulcanising upon us, all is lost

2011-05-05T15:48:00.000+10:00

I've never had any trouble ignoring spam emails before. Black market pills that may or may not be genuine Viagra. Spurious penis lengthening. And -- well, actually I can't think of any other examples. Are these the only things that spammers think worth spamming people about? Anyway. I see the email in my inbox, and my brain just ignores it automatically. Never the slightest hint of a suggestion of wanting to open one before.

And then I get this.

"Order vulcanizing equipment for the one u love."

Absurdist comedy in spam subject lines? I am so screwed. I can't resist; I'll be opening every single one that comes my way, collecting viruses like the new kid in a day care centre. Pity me.

And have a look at this:

Google n-gram: 'Vulcan' vs two spellings of 'vulcanising'

This suggests to me two interesting things. One, Americans are historically much more likely to have been interested in rubber-hardening treatments than British-spelling people. And two, the Roman god Vulcan was three times as popular in 1818 as Star Trek was in 1968. Talk about star power.

Finding the Origin

2011-05-04T14:47:00.003+10:00

I have been stewing on a blog post for a couple of weeks now, on and off, about digital publishing and serialisation and penny dreadfuls. Unfortunately, it's not very good, and in most of it I don't really know what I'm talking about. Mostly I'm worried about the devaluation of writing, but excited about the possibilities of higher royalty percentages. Worried about loss of quality, but excited about possibilities for more reader choice around genre fictions. Worried about loss of legitimacy, worried more that I would worry about the loss of the particular kind of legitimacy that I'm worried about losing.

Instead, here's a ridiculous short story I wrote about alien abductions.

Nud was a scientific officer in a two-person, one-computer crew. He wasn't the right man for the job, except on the day it turned out that he was, briefly.

He exuded a fresh pair of psuedopods into the hermetic chamber where the candidate lay. With one of the greasy tentacles he opened the candidate's mouth, while with the other he picked up a small specimen device, and used it to collect intra-orifice cells. He flipped the candidate over with a squishy bump, and performed a scratch test for cross-matching. The candidate and the pseudopods were bathed in blinking status lights of orange and green. The candidate moved a little, squirming against the wall of the containment chamber. Nud made a chittering sound and adjusted some settings; soon, the squirming stopped, and the subject went back to slow, gurgly breathing.

One of the pseudopods fed the cell samples into a slot, and Nud waited, watching. Some feedback text occurred across the wall, and his grey head fell forward for a moment. The operations manager read the text too, and turned to Nud for confirmation before bringing their silvery craft down to a level where the ground was visible. A patch on the ground below them turned bright white, and was suddenly filled with the shuddering figure of the candidate, transferred from the hermetic chamber to a soft patch of undergrowth with only picoseconds of transference time.

Nud turned and removed his helmet. His breath steamed slightly in the cold air of the cabin. He scratched his face; his beard sweated and chafed inside the grey safety helmets that contact with the candidates required. Its bulging, angled view-ports gleamed blackly up at him as he looked at it. Without the readouts they provided, he had to rely on what the wall screen told him about the latest sample, but he already knew they hadn't found the one they were looking for.

"How much longer are we going to keep looking, Deeve?" he said to the operations manager. Deeve twisted in her seat and bent her mouth sardonically.

"You know we have all the time in the world, man," she replied. "Or, all the time in all time, as the saying goes."

"Yes, but is it going to bloody take that long?" Nud said. "There are only four teams looking, and forty years to go through, and I don't know how many damned candidates born in that time."

"Yes you do. Assuming the curve the statisticians nailed down is accurate, there are seven million, four hundred and eight candidates."

"Well, alright, yes. I know that. It's just taking a long time. They could have nailed it down a bit more precisely."

"We could get lucky," said Deeve. "You never know."

"Right. How many candidates have been checked so far?" said Nud.

"One hundred and seventy three. Plus whatever's been done by the other teams since the last update."

Nud sighed. "Oh good; we're nearly there then."

"Sarcasm looks very ugly on you, Nud," said Deeve disapprovingly.

They swooped high over the curve of the planet; one that was unfamiliarly blue and green and poorly lit. Nud didn't say anything for some time. He brooded. Deeve flew on, ignoring him.

After several minutes had passed, and the craft in its orbit was reaching the leading edge of the target area again, Nud snapped out of it.

"Let's pick up another candidate," he said.

"You know we can't," said Deeve. "Can't do two within twenty-four hours. Against the protocol."

"Please, Deeve," said Nud. "I've, uh, I've got a Feeling."

Deeve peered at Nud and tilted her head.
"A Feeling?" There was a pause. "We can't go down again yet, Nud."

"Yes; a Feeling," said Nud, his voice rising with agitation. "I've never had one before, and now, now when I get one, you want to ignore it? Come on, Deeve. Just one more."

"Nud-"

"Feelings don't come along every day, Deeve," said Nud.

There was a pause, broken by various soft beepings and slurpings. Then there was a muted roar as Deeve put on the brakes. Nud beamed.

"Alright," said Deeve."One more candidate. Just this one time. Because you have a Feeling. Don't bloody tell anyone."

"Thanks, Deeve," said Nud. He put his helmet on again, pumped the seal, and started up the scrubbers. They made a subtle, scritchy, whirring sound as they filtered the air in both directions. Deeve set her helmet on her head too, and started their descent. The ship trembled momentarily as they broke the atmosphere, and then the brakes went on again, and they coasted silently, several hundred metres above the surface. Their anti-detection equipment fed fake 'I'm-not-here' signals back to radar antennae and satellites above and below them. Having historical records of exactly what technology was deployed, when, and where, made their disappearing act a piece of cake -- at least with the lights off.

Nud was quiet. He put his thick-fingered glove to his helmet.

Deeve waited for the word from Nud, and coasted. She punched up a circling pattern.

"Better be quick," she said. "We can't circle forever; something will be along up here eventually."

Of course they both knew that the computer would tell them exactly when 'something' would be due to come along, up there -- excepting undocumented craft, which was unlikely at their altitude. Arrivals, departures, airspace violations; it was all in the database. The records were good for Late Industrial in the target zone. Nevertheless, Deeve was a worrier. She believed in Feelings, but she knew they weren't that hard to fake, either. Nud wasn't at all sure how long or how far Deeve would trust him.

Nud stroked his helmet, as if rubbing his forehead. He knew he was behaving irrationally. Perhaps that was what a Feeling was actually like. Could he really have actually had one? He struggled to listen to the inside of his head, to see if it might tell him where to go, and not just NOT to go. It would have been more useful, but it wasn't to be. His head was empty.

He turned to Deeve, ready to say that the Feeling had gone and they should just ship out like Deeve had wanted, but he saw that constant number on his helmet readout -- over seven million candidates to go. Every cell in his body would have become etherised by the time they'd worn that number all the way down, at this rate. Something had to change. He knew they had forever -- sort of -- but it just didn't feel that way. He pointed at random.

"Down there, head down there," he said.

"Are you sure?" Deeve managed to look sceptical even with the helmet on.

Nud wasn't at all, but he said he was anyway. They headed downwards. Within a minute they were hovering about a hundred metres over a gravel road between two flat areas filled with tall green plants. Cornfields, Nud reminded himself. They'd seen enough of them by now.

Two lights in the distance indicated that a vehicle was headed their way. The ultraviolet revealed a cloud of dust behind it; it was moving fairly fast. Not the safest capture, but Nud was in too deep to back out now. He nodded and pointed.

"That one, in that vehicle." He hoped there was only a single occupant.

Nud was lucky. Their ship plucked the vehicle off the road and killed its engine. They set it down and extracted the driver, reassembling him in the hermetic chamber. He wasn't a pleasant sight, worse than most of the candidates so far, though not the very worst. He was blind drunk and had been smoking heavily, which made anaesthetising him properly post-transfer a delicate balancing act. He was unshaven, tall, vastly overweight. His vision, hearing, heart function and peripheral circulation were all poor. Unexpectedly, his teeth were quite good.

Nud sighed. He'd have to come clean about his Feeling. This clearly wasn't the origin; it was just another candidate. He extruded pseudopods and went through the motions, trying to figure out how to explain his moment of madness to Deeve. Swab...sample...analysis. He decided that he hated his job.

"Deeve, you know," he began. "Can't the future look after itself?"

"What?" said Deeve.

"The future -- the present. You know what I mean; our time. Can't it look after itself? It's not perfect. I know that. It's pretty shitty I suppose. OK. But the alternative reality; I mean, I've read the papers, I've seen the physics. We all have." Ned paused. He didn't know what to say next. Just that everything seemed a waste of time and energy. Even saving the species from itself.

"Nud-" said Deeve.

"Hear me out. Look, the bubble theory I understand; the existence of multiple invisible universes, OK, I get that, and it explains a lot of stuff. I've read how they found other realities and I've seen the statistics that predict it all comes from here and now. Or doesn't come from here, depending on what happens. What happens to the origin. It's too confusing to be real. Isn't it?"

"Nud-"

There was little room to pace, but Nud managed a few steps.

"You know how it works," said Deeve. "Everyone in the other universe descends from this guy. Or not this guy, the actual guy. The Origin. Or -- their version of the Origin. We don't descend from this guy, in our universe. We've sent our universe down the toilet, so what else can we do?"

"We don't descend from this guy that we're looking for-" mused Nud.

"No, and we have to make it so that we do. You know all this, Nud," said Deeve.

"But, so...wait. If we aren't descended from the Origin, and we make it so the Origin does in fact do whatever it is that he is supposed to do, or doesn't do what it is that we're trying to prevent him from doing, whenever the statisticians manage to figure that out, what happens to us?"

"Hm?" said Deeve.

"What happens to all of us, who aren't descended from the Origin?"

Silence fell, like a tumbling rock emptying a shallow pond. The only sounds were the subtle beeping of the instruments, and the tiny noise of brows knitting.

Deeve looked at Nud. Nud looked back, then realised that Deeve was in fact looking past him. It was hard to tell what anyone was looking at, he thought, from the inside of one of these helmets. He turned around, and there was a sort of horrified hiccup; the combination of a belch and a gasp at once. There was a large and excited message on his in-helmet readout and the same on the wallscreen status, confirming complete matches between the candidate samples and the target data. Origin Located.

The candidate -- the Origin -- was on his knees, staring straight at them. He was a strange yellowy green colour -- even with the blinking lights, he didn't look right. Nud wondered if he was going to throw up, and if he did, whether they could transmat the results and the smell somewhere more convenient. Then he wondered what the devil they were going to do; candidates were not supposed to wake up. Invisibility was meant to be the most important part of the whole operation. The statisticians had been very insistent.
The candidate said something Nud couldn't understand. Activating his suit relays, Nud extended a fast pseudopod, whipping it out over the candidate's face, covering his eyes. He was too big to move out of the way, and too groggy to protest, though it was hard to say how long that would last.

Deeve and Nud panicked in unison. "Hit it, hit it!" called Nud. Deeve squeaked, and hit 'it' -- the transfer control. There was a whooping rush of vacant space filling up with air, and the candidate, the Origin, was gone.

Oh dear...oh shit, thought Nud.

"Where did he go?" shouted Deeve.

"I don't know! You hit the control," said Nud.

"Uh, OK, look, OK, look," said Deeve. "Calm down, calm down, OK; we need to be calm."

"You don't sound very calm, Deeve," said Nud. "What do we do? We found the Origin, and now he's seen us and we've sent him somewhere that -- somewhere -- we don't know where it is! All of that is bad; bad, Deeve, bad."

"Well, not all of it; we did find the Origin."

"Yes but where is he NOW, Deeve?"

"Ah, well, where are we?"

"You tell me, Deeve. You're in charge of the steering wheel," said Nud. He flailed his arm around in the direction of the guidance controls.

Deeve spun around and checked.
"Alabama. Just about the middle of it," he said.

"So did we send him straight down, or what?" said Nud.

"I don't know, Nud. I just hit the switch; I don't know."

"They're going to throw us into space, Deeve," said Nud.

Deeve sighed, and covered the eye-holes in his helmet with one big grey glove. "Nice work, Nud."

"This is what we get for mucking about with bloody time travel."

Ten thousand and seven metres below them, a large man with sallow skin, even teeth, and a thickish stream of vomit running down his jeans and into his boots fell through his own front door.

"Stacey Lee! Stacey Lee! Oh my God, Stacey Lee, you are not going to believe what just happened."
Stacey Lee didn't.

"Little green men! Space aliens! Bug eyes! Oh Jesus, has my butt been probed? You gotta check it for me, Stacey Lee!"

The Origin turned around, but Stacey Lee declined.

History tells us that fortunately for them, Nud and Deeve never saw the Origin again. In this universe, anyway.

Contests and development programs

2011-04-19T12:20:00.003+10:00

The QWC announced this week that applications are open for the development program they run in conjunction with Hachette Australia. The program is a bit in the news at the moment, with former participant Favel Parrett's book coming out (you can read Dawn Barker's interview with Favel here). The program gets good reviews from participants, and appears to open doors* at least for some. At worst, participants may get an opportunity to hear first hand that their book is going to be hard to market (and therefore not likely to be taken on by various publishers). The entry competition for the Hachette program is a particularly interesting one, in that it goes beyond nominal questions of writing quality. It seems like it's a good analogue for selection processes in commercial publishing, because positioning in the market appears to play overtly some meaningful part in deciding who's in and who's out.

I was longlisted for the program last year, and was disappointed not to go further. It seems like it can't have been a whole year since I slaved away trying to get ready to submit, but I guess it must have been. I certainly remember going to bed about 5am on the morning the longlist submissions (the full MS) were due, exhausted, scared and elated.

Elation notwithstanding, I didn't make the cut, and I have a habit of holding irrational grudges. I was angry not to make it all the way in the competition last time (with myself and with QWC and Hachette -- I did say it was irrational), and felt rejected, and am reluctant to invite upon myself those feelings again -- at least specifically in the context of an organisation that's already rejected me once before. But it's a test of skin thickness - all of this business is. And so I feel driven to submit something again, if for no other reason than to show myself that I'm not so weak, nor so much a slave to the anger and disappointment of rejection.

However. I haven't got a new MS to submit. JZ1 (The Queen of Crakesville) is not definitively finished until the final (putative) galleys, of course, so it's not like I think it's illogical to subject the current version to a new round of revision. And there have been revisions since I last submitted for the competition. But I'm nervous about something beyond the normal fear of rejection. Perhaps I'm worried I'll appear to be unable to take a hint -- suggesting that the judges 'got it wrong' last year, and wasting my $50 on some kind of pointless grandstanding about the flawed nature of selection processes in publishing or QWC/Hachette's in particular. Or perhaps I'm reluctant to call the work truly unfinished (as opposed to just needing an editor) again. I have submitted it to agents -- if I then say that I think it's a good fit for this development program, am I also saying that I believe I submitted prematurely?

I do know someone who got into the program on the second try, so that's encouraging. And the opportunity to talk properly about my work with a captive professional audience is too useful to pass up. Despite the angst-inducing, hopelessly subjective judging process, the contribution that these professionals make to the writing lives of the winners is something that just isn't handed out every day. So I guess I'll revise some more, resubmit, and try to ignore my doubts.

UPDATE: I received an agent's rejection email a couple of hours after posting this. Reduces one's confidence that it's worth applying again. Skin thickness test?

*The doors may be to publication or just to having more useful publishing people aware of your work. I don't mean to speculate on whether any publications arising from the program would or would not have been published anyway.

On zeitgeisty

2011-04-14T21:04:00.000+10:00

Zeitgeisty (a): having the character of being part of the zeitgeist. Being trendy in the eyes of the kind of people who believe themselves to be above being susceptible to trendiness. Something achieving the approval of those likely to understand the meaning of the word 'zeitgeist'.

Is your novel zeitgeisty?* I think it's worth considering. It will help you to be hip, with it, on the cusp, without being so avant garde that the garde are still standing back looking at you like you've suggested that growing an extra head would be a valuable career move.

Mmm. Zeitgeisty.

Below: evidence that even though you think you've invented a marvellously stupid useful word, someone has inevitably been equally stupid before you. (Unless, apparently, you did it in 1968.)

Google n-gram: Zeitgeisty

*For me? Zombies: not so zeitgeisty any more.** Goths: potentially avant-zeitgeisty. I worry that I'm on both sides of the zeitgeist. It doesn't feel very comfortable.

** i.e. screwed by all those people who thought that stealing someone else's story and putting something zeitgeisty in it constitutes 'writing'.

It's free stuff whateverday! (Emily in the forest)

2011-04-08T10:26:00.001+10:00

Here's something I wrote during Year of the Novel, featuring Emily, who's a character that has an important part in The Queen of Crakesville without actually appearing in the book...

While Emily got ready for her penultimate trip through her enchanted forest, she figured it must have been the fifteenth time she’d taken that particular walk in that particular way. Oh, she had wandered the paths of the little wood at the back of her parents’ house hundreds of times, but there was only one opportunity each year to see it in the way she knew it would be today: frigid and leafless, devoid of signs of any living thing. It rarely snowed around Crakesville, but because the cold air poured like invisible syrup down the sides of the big hills to the west, there was in each winter a morning on which the frost laid itself down so thickly that the entire forest seemed a great monument made of a delicate lace of crystals and icicles. It became a completely different place, frozen for her sole enjoyment for one morning a year. She had formed a habit as a girl of entering the crystallised forest looking for an elusive part of herself. On this, her second-last trip, she was hoping to find something different.

She pushed her hat down tighter, pushing a fringe of bright blue hair out to frame her small, smooth white face. She paused at the fence and looked in, thinking that beyond her misty breath there was nothing living – not a single sign of any creature. The white sky of low clouds closed in. The old wire fence sagged; it was pointless. There was nothing to keep in the forest, and nobody to keep out, except herself. Nothing moved, and she watched the stillness and felt herself emptying.

Emily pushed the wires down with her gloved hand and stepped over, feeling the snap of frozen undergrowth. She pushed through knee-high crystal sculptures and made for the path. Ice clung to her pants and jacket; despite her layers of clothing, the cold seeped in. The air itself was frozen into stillness; only her own steps proved the existence of anything but ice.

Alone, she walked deeper into the little wood along the path. Two parts of herself fought for her attention; one part fixed on the once-a-year marvel, the other nagging with pointless fear that someone, something, was sure to arrive to spoil the magic at any minute. Magical moments have never been anything but cut short. She searched.

It took some time – an hour, perhaps three – but finally she found it – him – in a clearing not far from the centre of the forest. He was bigger than the trees surrounding him, but not so big he frightened her. She looked up into his high, broad arms, and wondered how she could have failed to see him this way all these years, to have missed the fact that he was obviously the one. She considered what it would be like to be cradled there. Her eyes made plans.

She took off one glove, and held her hand against his frozen trunk until the numbness hurt. Her palm left a print in his frosty coat, and she gave it as a sign that she would be back.

On being out of touch

2011-04-06T14:42:00.000+10:00

I've been on holiday. It was good. As with all the best holidays, it ended with an infection, though as is typical for me these days the infection is a chest one belonging to a seven-year-old and was probably contracted during the three hundred hours she spent in the lagoon.*

The other lingering problem is that I've lost touch with my story. I battle against this constantly, but when I've been away and unwilling** to find time to write is when it's at its most debilitating.

I think that when we write a long work (eg a novel but not restricted to those), we are to some greater or lesser degree telling ourselves the story as we go. Even for writers who plot and plan pretty tightly before they start, I'd argue they still enjoy finding the story unfolding before them as they write. It's a different kind of story-unfolding from what happens for readers, I think, but not completely divorced from it. For me, therefore, this unfolding of the story, my reading-while-writing experience, provides a lot of the emotional satisfaction of writing and, importantly, is an ingredient in the bottom glue that gets me to sit down day after day and keep writing. It helped me get through two NaNoWriMos successfully. I mean, it's not just discipline that keeps me at it -- though that is of course critical -- it's the desire to experience what happens next in the story. That 'experience' could be replaced by 'find out', for writers who don't plot or plan, or it could be more along the lines of seeing the plan successfully come out as dialogue, description and
action, for writers who always know what's going to happen next. But either way (or more realistically, wherever you happen to be on a continuumn between them on any given day) it's still experiencing the thing as it comes into being. If I didn't have a desire for that while writing a novel, I don't think it would get very far. Indeed, on writing this I wonder if it helps explain all those attempts I made over many years before I finally figured out how to get from start to finish. Did I just not want enough to know (or see) what happened next?

I guess the advice that you need to keep in touch with your story is far from new. I'm sure it's in just about every book or course on novel-writing. Still, it is sound advice. I try to go no more than two days without writing something when I'm in the middle of a manuscript, though of course I often fail in that. If you look at it statistically, I'm sure that my chances of writing something today correlate more strongly with whether I wrote something yesterday than with just about any other factor. So, because I'm pretty keen to write something tomorrow, I'm going to boost my chances by sitting down to write something today.

*Reality check: I was never cool enough to contract one of 'those' infections on holiday.
**I had written 'unable' here, but I'm pretty keen on aspiring writers*** not fooling themselves, me included. How often do you smooth your ego by saying 'unable' when you know you really mean 'unwilling'?
*** Well, people really.

High Art

2011-03-25T14:23:00.001+10:00

I'm often concerned that what I write isn't Art, though perhaps less often, and less concerned, as I get older. I'm enjoying what I write and how I write it, and life's too short to worry about where your material fits on some rubbery, subjective continuum from 'art' to 'doggerel'. Isn't it?

I remember reading years ago, in the Age newspaper I think, a satirical article on Les Murray, with the hook (obviously, in this context) being confusion/conflation between L.M. the poet and L.M. the sports commentator (not-very-famously immortalised in the TISM song 'What Nationality Is Les Murray?'). There was a piece of poetry fictitiously (I assume) attributed to L.M. the sports commentator who, in order to make the joke make sense, was I think assumed to also be L.M. the poet. The piece went simply: 'I like the World Cup/It cheers me up' -- which lines were (satirically, remember) attacked as doggerel.

Well. High art? Doggerel? To what degree does it depend on context? And how much does the context depend on the degree to which it matters? Those lines have a sardonic quality to them that I quite like. If you're into absurdism it's quite appealing. If it's deliberately naive, then it's art, see? It's only if it's sincere that it's doggerel, which I think is something that shouldn't be true, but is. And that's pretty interesting in itself.

As poetry it raises interesting questions, coming (fictitiously or otherwise) from L.M. the sports guy. In particular, why does he need cheering up? He's got a pretty interesting job and, on the face of it, a nice lifestyle. And he smiles a lot. Is all that smiling, and his apparent deep involvement in his work, just a front? If it is, why is he letting it slip now? Doesn't it change something important about his relationship with us, which in the end is what his whole 'product' really is? What's changing for him? What's it like living with that lie, and knowing that the only way out of it is a fleeting delight in a bloated, self-important sporting event that only happens for a few weeks every four years, and then is gone? Who, in fact IS this guy, who we thought we knew so well? And in the end, how and why do we keep fooling ourselves that we really know the people we watch on TV?

Isn't that what Art does? Provoke questions that lead to a greater question about something to do with the human condition? I guess I'd find it hard to argue that there's as much of this in genre fiction about detectives and zombies as there is in literary fiction, but at the same time I think it's deliberately shortsighted to claim that genre fiction can't and doesn't suggest honest and difficult things about the human condition, from time to time. So I'm left with pleasing myself in what I write and hoping that it makes a difference to someone, somehow, in spite of that.

I like to remember Douglas Adams's contribution to this debate: "You can't go skiing on High Art."

I think that's true on several levels.

N-gram: Postmodernism

2011-03-23T11:04:00.000+10:00

Postmodernism is not dead:

Google n-gram: postmodern and similar terms

But it's coughing up blood.

Also what happened in 1895? A typo? Or was it a time-travelling humanities postgrad? Hm.

What do ants do with their dead?

2011-03-22T12:27:00.001+10:00

In my day-job office, the ceiling is perforated. Presumably there's some reason for that, but I don't know what it could be. Lately, my desk has been covered, each morning, with a sprinkling of dead ants; maybe a hundred or so a day. I think they're falling out of the ceiling, as there is no evidence anywhere of ants moving across the desk alive in such numbers. I guess there's either a nest or a bait right above my computer.

Myrmecian performance art: the first three bars of the Pink Panther theme song.

This morning, some time after I'd swept away most of the ant corpses, I noticed a lone ant (of the same species as far as I can tell) carrying one of the corpses I'd presumably missed. She walked over to the far edge of the desk, near the wall, and dumped the dead body over the side. Why would she do this? What do ants usually do with the dead bodies of their colony-mates? She resumed meandering, antishly, around an empty spot on my desk.

I found three more dead ant bodies, and put them down in the general area where this ant was wandering. It took a while (ants must not be able to see very far) but eventually she found one of the bodies. She picked it straight up and took it in a meandering but not completely indirect route to the same edge of the desk and...
dropped it over the side. She did it again with the second body, after a short wander to check out a particularly interesting square centimetre of laminex. It took her a long time to find the third one, but once she had it, she took it straight to the dropping-off point, and away it went.

I like to think it was the anty equivalent of a burial at sea. "UNTO the almighty but quite small Ant-God we commend the soul of Ant1654961464, and we commit her body to...whatever it is that's all the way down there."

These ants are freaking me out.

Writing Races

2011-03-22T12:00:00.001+10:00

AWMOnline's Writing Races have started up for another year. There's one on tonight, as on each Tuesday. 8-9pm Brisbane time (GMT+10, no daylight savings, if it helps). They're held in a web forum -- you just sign in, say hi, fawn a bit over whatever famous author/s are there, and give the other Racers some indication of what you're going to be working on for the hour, and how many words you want to write, or how much editing you want to get done, or whatever. Then at 8pm you carefully minimise your browser window, and try to ignore it for the next 60 minutes while you write in your own document. You may peek at the browser window around 8:30, in case someone has posted helpful and/or inspiring quotes, or similar.

Write access to the forums is usually restricted to AWMOnline subscribers, but the first ones for this year have been open to all. Maybe (with luck?) they'll stay that way. Meg Vann organises them (lately with the help of AWM interns), and she often ropes in a special guest author. Those nights are often quite busy.

There's a great sense of a writing community, especially on the days when a decent crowd shows up. Even on the days when it's a bit quiet, though, I find it provides great accountability. If I say I'll be writing, I'd better have something to show for it at the end. Often at the end of the hour some of us will show a couple of paragraphs of what we've written, so I get some sense of what the regulars are writing, and get some ego-boosting feedback too. Win-win.

Some weeks this is all the writing I can make myself do -- but it's better than none.

It's Free Sample Monday

2011-03-21T14:52:00.001+10:00

Here's something I wrote a couple of years ago for a BBC radio satirical news program open-entry contest. I completely misread the guidelines so it's no wonder it wasn't used, but I still think its good for a wry, indulgent shake of the head and perhaps a tutting sound, sotto voce.

SKETCH: RAIN OF ZOMBIES

BY DAVID THORNBY

CHARACTERS:

STUDIO ANCHOR (KEN)

REPORTER (ANNIE)

MAN 1

MAN 2

WOMAN 1

WOMAN 2

METEOROLOGIST (DICK)

SCENE : ON LOCATION IN BARNSLEY, YORKSHIRE

ANCHOR (V.O.): We cross now to Annie Cropley, reporting live from Yorkshire, where the local residents are apparently experiencing some unusual weather. Annie?

F.X.: SOUND OF STORM RAINS FAINTLY THROUGHOUT, INTERSPERSED WITH OCCASIONAL MOANS

REPORTER: Yes, thanks Ken, I’m here in Barnsley, where I’m in the middle of what can only be described as a rain of the living dead.

MAN 1: Aye, it were just a light drizzle this mornin’, the odd one comin’ down in the front yard every few minutes. Some of ‘em couldn’t walk, o’ course, on account o’ droppin’ out o’ sky, but them as could just sort o’ wandered around the place, sightseein’ like. Weren’t no trouble, as long as you stayed indoors wi’ shotgun. Then around tea-time it started gettin’ heavier, ‘til it were comin’ down cats an’ dogs. And zombies. Hell of a racket they made, on roof.

REPORTER: The first zombies were reported around ten o’clock this morning, and it’s been raining for about six hours now. At first it seems the residents of Barnsley tried to go on about their usual day, but the rising tide of living dead seems to have made things more difficult as the day’s gone on.

WOMAN 1: My poor old pussy can’t take much more of these zombies, I can tell 'ee.

F.X.: A CAT HISSES LOUDLY

WOMAN 2: Aye, they’s all over the place; dreadful mess they make. Tangled up in washing line, bangin’ on door of pub afore openin’, splittin’ open the heads of passers-by and scoopin’ out the brains. Dreadful mess.

REPORTER: I asked meteorologist Dick Wobble: just how did this rain of zombies come about?

METEOROLOGIST: Well Annie, we can’t say for sure, but it’s likely that a large group, or posse if you like, of the undead has encountered a strong updraft, perhaps during some kind of migration, most likely during a cyclone or tornado. And a particular set of climatic conditions has led this group—

REPORTER: Or posse?

METEOROLOGIST: Or posse, yes, of undead, to stay up, probably in the troposphere, circling the globe until they met an area of low pressure coming across northern England.

REPORTER: But where would they have come from?

METEOROLOGIST: Well, it’s hard to say of course, but it would have to be an area with both strong tropical weather systems, and a high concentration of individuals willing and able to circumvent the natural cycle of life and death, through voodoo or some other means. I think perhaps these zombies have been up there since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

REPORTER: For the moment, emergency services are doing their best to stem the tide of the unholy, but for the most part are expecting to have to wait out the storm until the full extent of the damage can be assessed.

MAN 2: It’d been comin’ down for about an hour, just started gettin’ heavier, and up pops that Geri Halliwell, right there in the street, and she’s singin’ away about how it’s rainin’ men. Ruddy cheek. ‘Course she didn’t last long; one o’ them zombies come up and cut ‘er in half, started suckin’ the marrow out o’ her thighbone. Serves ‘er right, daft cow.

REPORTER: For now, Ken, it’s back to you in the studio.

END

Appealing beyond the borders

2011-03-17T12:32:00.002+10:00

On the perils of growing the market.

Bookseller+Publisher posted what looks like a media release from the administrators of REDgroup recently, giving the sad details of which company-owned Borders and Angus&Robertson stores would close (franchise stores, it is noted, are not in administration). One Borders, 37 A&R. REDgroup's recent collapse has acted as a sort of milestone (in the old sense) in the book retailing shakeup -- touted by some as evidence that physical book retailing is dying as a result of its inability to compete with online retailing of physical and digital books. Others have suggested that it is in the business side that the problems really lay. I'm not going to pretend that I know in any sort of detail what the accounting looked like, but it seems reasonable to think that both of these things are likely to have contributed. I'm going to explore a different issue here with the ever-reliable but unnecessary and irritatingly long-winded help of a comparison with cricket.

The mass-market book industry and the cricket industry have both been pushing, in relatively recent years, to increase the size of their markets. Both have been trying to get more people interested in buying the things that those industries sell, rather than (or as well as) trying to get established customers to buy more themselves. These attempts to grow the audience aren't about changing the split of market share (although both industries operate in more widely-definable markets like sports and narrative entertainment. Even more broadly 'entertainment' if you like.). It's about pie size.

The International Cricket Council and some (or maybe all) of its member boards -- particularly India's BCCI, England's ECB and Australia's CA -- have been trying to get people to watch more Twenty20 cricket, and in Australia at least, to get more people to come to the grounds to watch live. They're trying, nominally at least, to get more people to like cricket, so that the whole pie of people willing to pay money for cricket-related stuff (from bats to apps and everything in between) is made bigger. Noble enough. But how are they trying to get people who aren't interested in cricket to start watching it? Not, it seems to me, by promoting the cricketiness of cricket, but by trying to make it less crickety, so that the new audience won't be offended by cricket characteristics that, you would have to assume, have been keeping them away from being fans up until now. Twenty20 cricket has a bare minimum of traditional cricket 'stuff'. It's like they're worried that the 'new audience' might be offended by the game if there were too much cricket in it. There's a logic in that, but the proponents of Twenty20 within the ICC and member boards would have to be assuming some or all of the following: 1. People who didn't like cricket before, but like Twenty20 now, will come to like (and be willing to pay for) other forms of cricket. 2. People who didn't like cricket before, but like Twenty20 now, can be relied upon to pay enough so that Twenty20 cricket can (and should) prop up the other forms of the game in perpetuity. 3. People who already like cricket will still stay part of the audience if Twenty20 becomes the main, and even only, form of peak competitive cricket.

Some of these things may not be entirely true all of the time.

The focus on getting people who don't really like cricket through the gates of cricket grounds carries a risk of cannibalising the forms of the game supported by actual cricket fans. The IPL and the Champions' League have so much money they're already eating away at international test cricket in the form of carved-out playing windows and players that are either too rich to bother with playing in the more taxing forms of the game, or too injured to make it through five days at a time. It seems to me that there must be a fallacy there around the idea that the size of the pie can be grown by adding new products without risk to the existing products or the existing pie. What will happen to test, one-day, and Twenty20 cricket in the next decade is still unclear, but CA is following the IPL's lead and trying to introduce franchise-based competitions, and this seems likely to lead to more players choosing (naturally) to specialise in the most lucrative form. At the moment the ICC and its member boards seem at least publically interested in using the money from Twenty20 to maintain the other forms, but as the cost and income inequities become greater, it will make more economic sense to focus increasingly on the cash cow, to the detriment of higher quality test and one-day matches.

Similarly, book shops (and publishers) are interested in getting more people into the habit of buying products from them. As above: hard to see much wrong with the general idea, and as an author I'd be particularly crazy to think that someone wanting to increase book sales and generate more readers is in general a bad idea. It's the kind of products the high-turnover players are doing it with that are the problem. They're not pushing fiction or well-crafted non-fiction to the not-particularly-frequent-reader market; they're pushing gift books with black and white pictures of animals and gushy, banal sentiment on alternating pages. They're pushing books - autobiographies, picture books - 'by' people famous for things not related to writing, to consumers who buy based on the recognisable name because they either don't know or don't like books very much. They're pushing empty tins painted to look a bit like Penguin Classics. Are these things 'gateway drugs' to get people hooked on reading? Or are they high-margin lines that the retailers particularly but to some extent the publishers are using to generate an increasingly core part of their income? I rather think the latter. And if this turns out to be true, is it cannibalising the creation and success of 'real' books, and 'real' authors? Visible retail space (even on the internet) is far from infinite, and publishers' ability to seek out, retain, and edit books with substantial content is similarly limited. So it seems likely that books like 'Dad, You Share Characteristics With The Following Animals: A Study In Monochrome' or Justin Beiber's second autobiography before he turns twenty, could be squeezing midlist authors out of the publishing space, despite the fact that they are obviously catering to different kinds of reader. The industry wants to cater to beaver/Bieber-reading people (see what I did there?) not because they are a better market for books than the lovers of fiction, but because there are more of them. I expect they'd have a reasonable argument that the fiction-lover market has not provided very high returns in the past, in their defence.

It's hard to argue with the theory that retailers are just selling what people want to buy, but I do think that the industry, and especially big, non-specialist retailers like REDgroup, are trying to cater for people who buy a book or two every year at the expense of the people who buy a book or two every month. Some of that gap is, perhaps, filled by the brave new market egalitarianism of Amazon, but Amazon are the original widget-pushers; they're not dedicated book lovers or ideologically-motivated protectors of the literary arts. Their product diversity is a current feature of their popularity and the maturity of the digital market, I think, not a feature designed to provide a platform for the endangered midlist and their readers. So it's dangerous to rely on that model continuing to provide the current benefit.

The recent collapse of REDgroup might have something to do with the fact that A&R and (particularly) Borders stopped being places for book lovers to go, and started trying to be places where people who don't really like books very much could find something book-like for their aunt or grandfather or partner, without having to try very hard or think very much. I think that a world without big bookshops that take hours to browse through and filled with interesting books is a sadder world - but I couldn't say that Borders/A&R in Australia circa 2010-11 are really like that anymore. And so I wonder what the book-buying public has lost.* The blockbusters and gift books that Borders have switched to pushing are still on sale at Kmart and Big W. What have authors lost? Equally little -- REDgroup's failure (if it turns out to be that, in the long run) is really only the disappearance of a retailer that had just about stopped selling the midlist anyway, and the most popular authors are still available everywhere. It'll be harder to buy a tin painted to look like a book, but really, who gives a shit about that? Clearly not enough people to keep REDgroup in business.
At the other end of the scale, various pundits have noted the opportunities here for small, hand-selling, specialised sellers of books (and cricket!) to get back some of their lost share of the dedicated-book-lover market, which they never tried to step out of. Their success could hardly be a bad thing.

*A number of people have lost their jobs, and their loss is certainly worth noting and lamenting.

N-gram: zombie vs voodoo

2011-03-15T10:00:00.002+10:00

My new favourite thing is Google's ngrams. An n-gram analysis describes the number of times a particular substring (in this context, a word) appears in the whole string of similar items (i.e. all the words in Google's database of literature). So Google's n-gram viewer allows you to graph how often particular words appear in particular corpuses. Highly worth playing with. I have already wasted several happy hours therein, discovering interesting, pointless things. I think it's fascinating how the popularity of words and topics changes over time, and I'm pretty keen to inflict that fascination upon you.

Google n-gram: zombie vs voodoo, 1800-2008

Here's an n-gram analysis comparing the frequencies of 'zombie' and 'voodoo' in all English language texts in Google's database between 1800 and 2008 (I suggest you click to see the image full-size). From the first, voodoo had been the topic of choice, on the metaphorical lips of commenters as much as 0.000005% of the time in 1900. And that's not even counting other spellings. Zombies were not a topic of polite (or even impolite) writing until the 1940s. Both topics gathered steam and since the 1960s have become ever-more-rapidly popular at roughly the same rate. But there's more.

Google n-gram: zombie vs voodoo vs crinoline, 1800-2008

Clearly, people who once talked about crinolines have, in our very lifetimes, switched to talking primarily about zombies and/or voodoo*. Interestingly, voodoo has over that time been a more popular topic of conversation than zombies, with similar rate of increase in frequency. That is, until approximately 2003, when interest in voodoo basically started to fall off a cliff while zombie mentions continued unabated. I blame the New Wave of virus-mediated-zombie tales, and Milla Jovovich.

I urge you, prospective (or indeed metaphorical) John Zombie fans, to get out there and provide support in what is obviously hard times for voodoo. Shrink a head. Throw some bones. Divine something using entrails. Or publish a book in which the word 'voodoo' is used several times. I know where you can get one.

*Interesting also are the concurrent upward blips in the late 1930s for 'crinoline' and 'voodoo'. I like to think this represents a ripple of popular texts on voodoo crinolines. Probably Nazi voodoo crinolines.

On ethics and the inadequacy of uninformed commentary in times of disaster

2011-03-14T13:36:00.000+10:00

I wrote down some thoughts recently on ethics and the internet as on show around the issue of natural disasters, but it seemed a bit pointless, so I didn't put it here on the blog. Then today as the completely horrifying disaster continued to unfold in Japan, I wondered first what I ought to say about it, and then second what the implications of saying/not saying anything about it are. I mean, I don't know anything particularly about earthquakes, tsunamis, disaster recovery, or nuclear power safety. If I wrote anything about it at all, it would just be pointless opining, wouldn't it? And it would be wrong to drag people here to read some baseless opinion about something so important, when they could be spending the time instead reading properly informed commentary of whatever sort.

Then again. The enormity of the disasters that the world seems to be going through at the moment -- earthquakes, floods, violent oppression -- demands acknowledgement. Not acknowledging them at all feels a little like ignoring them, and the thousands of lives that have been so instantly, horrifically, inexorably broken. So I acknowledge the tears and terror of so many around the world at the moment, and acknowledge as well my inability to understand what it must be like to be living through any of these things. And I offer some thoughts about the ways that we who are little affected have sometimes responded.

I noticed recently a comment on a youtube video that I happened to check out because an old school friend was in it. (I'd link it here if I could find it again...) It's about a competition associated with the Sydney Film Festival. I think it had only garnered three comments or something like that at the time, two of which were pretty inconsequential. The third one was a brief tirade about the relative value of the arts. Paraphrased: "Why bother showing this crap? Put up lots of videos of TC Yasi instead. Why is my youtube 'recommended' page showing something about the arts instead of being filled with low quality mobile phone videos of natural disasters?" How odd, that 'people' seem to think that youtube ought to operate like a news organisation. How not-odd, that 'people' seem to think that their ideas ought to be everyone's ideas.

I guess it's not new to see people decrying spending (especially public) on things they personally don't value, but since the earth recently turned weird there seems to be more of it going around. Part of it is about the (lack of) value of doing anything except covering disasters and responding to them, couched pretty directly in terms of it being unethical to pay attention to anything not disaster-related. These comments are typically made in spaces that are about culture, or politics in a theoretical or intellectual sense. Sport items tend to stay
much more on topic, for some reason...

The other part of this debate, to the extent that it is one, is about charity beginning at home. Pleasant enough old saw -- but the internet and its army of commenters-on-newspaper-websites seem to be making it into a kind of political warcry by repetition. The idea seems to be that it's wrong to provide assistance to anything not related to whatever the country's current media-darling disaster is. I've seen this most recently, and most vociferously, around the 'what do we cut so that we can pay for flood and cyclone recovery?' issue. What it really seems to be is a way of window-dressing one's real belief, which is that charity doesn't begin at home, it ends there. There has always been this xenophobic appeal to the idea that you're betraying those who are 'like you' (Australians, Queenslanders, citizens of the west, etc) if you suggest being charitable to 'others', exclusively or not, and whether for humanitarian reasons or out of sophisticated self-interest, as in the case of the recent schools-in-Indonesia brouhaha. The whole thing is predicated on the implicit idea that we can only be charitable either to noble Australian disaster victims OR those foreign handout junkies with funny-coloured skin.

What's interesting in the space that houses both of these things is this idea: that not just our money but our attention spans ought to be devoted completely to one person (or group, or party)'s idea of what's important. And if your priorities are wider and/or more complex than what the internet commenters serve up, regardless of how explicitly you demonstrate that you value the same thing that they do (just not exclusively), they'll believe they can attack you on ethical grounds. I know ethics are complicated, but WTF?

Melissa in Salerno - a post-epilogue

2011-03-11T09:56:00.000+10:00

This is a character piece I wrote on Melissa, John Zombie's part-time assistant and conscience. It occurs months after the conclusion of the book, though, and the events aren't related to the story.

I am surprised to find that my legs are turning brown. They are suddenly a pretty golden colour, and although they are not quite the shape that I would like them to be, I'm pleased with their new Mediterranean colouring, and the way they stand out against the floral-and-white of the skirt I bought in Rome, which reminds me so much of Audrey Hepburn and through her, of the imagining of my mother thirty years ago. Since arriving in Salerno I have been pretending that this upstairs room is the same one in which my parents shared the beginning of their love affair together. When I made my plans to come here, I grilled my mother until she described this place, and the room, and the narrow single bed with the white sheets. Although I am alone in the bed, I am comforted by the presence of the ghosts of my parents' younger selves, even though technically speaking my parents themselves are not yet dead. This room has the same white sheets, and the high window through which I can see, as she says they did, down over the Lungomare trieste, and across the water. I kid myself it is the same room; of course the chances are small.

This young woman with the brown legs and the rented room on the curve of the shallow blue bay in Salerno isn't me. I am Melissa Finlark; just a pedestrian girl who lives in Crakesville and keeps herself out of trouble. I don't think she is my mother, either; I think she is the girl who lives between us. I wonder if she is the girl I was supposed to turn out to be, but then I think that is a little unfair. My parents couldn't have stayed here. They were foreigners in the middle of their peoples' great migrations. They had to settle -- somewhere with prospects -- and this was only a stop on the way there.

I arrange myself along the bed, looking up at the motes hang-gliding in the sunlight streaming through the window, and imagine the room filled with them -- with my father's voice reciting his poems, his accent musical and strong; my mother's laughter. I hold my imaginary memory to me for a long time. Eventually, inevitably, the ghosts dissolve, and as the afternoon subsides into a sweet Italian summer evening, I go out walking, to look for them.

I realise, a mile along the Lungomare, that I am in love with this place. I am not sure if it is because it is where these memories live, or because of the place, or even if it is not me that is in love, but this other girl, with the broad black sunglasses, who lives between my mother and me. I am kissed by the afternoon sun, and I feel its welcome and the promise of a pleasant night -- me, for whom the summer sun at home is like a storm of firebirds. The people here -- lean, leering young men with carved brown faces, slim women in skirts and sunglasses just like mine, knots of wrinkled happy grandparents sitting in headscarves and grey stubble and braces -- the people are not friendly, exactly, but they demonstrate every day that they are content that I am here by fitting me in, and going on around me.

There is a distance between me and my parents' adventure, but it pales in comparison to the ages that have come and gone in Salerno's old town. The post-Fascist rebuilders must have been very careful where they stepped in the footprints of the Romans and the Ostrogoths and the Lombards, and all the rest. I walk from the Duomo up to where the cobbles speak of the ancientness of the city, rounded over in a tiny mountain range that's just a little difficult to walk on. Whoever this new girl is, her small elegance is thankfully unruffled by the tricky terrain. A party of adventurous tourists in giant backpacks passes by on the footpath, weaving politely around me, spilling into the roadway. They are consulting their maps, and speak efficiently to each other in what I think is German. I think that they are looking for their next destination, instead of looking around themselves at the stones of deep history. I feel pleased with myself, that I am looking instead inwards and backwards, to see where I have come from.

They stop. One of them addresses me in accented Italian, but I only understand a word or two. I tell him, haltingly, that my Italian is bad; does he speak English? He does; and I wonder at his blond intrepidness. My mother is Greek, but I have only learned a little of it from her. I am jealous of this man's middle-class European exposure to the rest of the world's languages, and feel my retreat into English tars me with British exclusiveness and insularity. I feel my newly tanned face assuming a familiar, and despised, cherry red.

"Do you know where is the Duomo?" he asks. He is in luck, or I am: I know where that is. I point him down the street; they'd have reached it in a few minutes without my help.
"I thought you must be Italian," he says. His friends hang back slightly -- they believe that he is chatting me up. "You look like you belong here," and for a moment he is my favourite person in the world. I tell him that I am here hunting for my history, and think briefly about describing to him my parents' love story. Recounting the passions they indulged in somewhere here -- everywhere here -- in their youth. Flirting with him in this way seems only fitting; but then I worry that I'd be doing it only to mirror my mother's former life, and the feeling goes out of it. I wish him a good evening, and in his masculine striding down the cobbled street towards the Duomo, he looks to me as if he intends to conquer the street with every step. He is unconscionably close to perfect. It must be the girl with the brown legs and the bouncy, wrapped-up hair that he liked, for he wouldn't have looked twice at Melissa Finlark. And I think neither would she have dared to look at him.

"Wait," I call. I hope it is only caution that I am giving up on.

Writing you may come across

2011-03-11T09:40:00.000+10:00

It would be silly to pretend I'm not trying to attract your attention for nefarious purposes. To whit, assembling a modest pre-publication audience for the novel I'm currently trying to find an agent for. I mean yes, obviously I'm desperate to entertain you, but still, the nefarious purpose. So I'm going to put up from time to time bits and pieces of non-novel text that I've written mostly as character exercises. (Note: most of these written originally for exercises in Kim Wilkins' very useful Year of the Novel course.)

The novel itself is a paranormal detective story about a goth private investigator who calls himself John Zombie, in which there are (risibly, trust me) also some actual zombies. Some parts of it are quite funny, and some are a bit gory. So I guess I'm going for the 'people who laugh in the face of other people's danger' market. Fortunately, it's a big market...

I hope this stuff doesn't seem redundant. I'm not expecting to blow your enormous and finely-honed mind with this stuff; I just sort of like the writing I did here and hoped to whet your appetite for the real story with it.

Mind you, though, there aren't any zombies in these bits. Just so you know.

Other writing I'd like to inflict upon you here: a whole lot of absurdist stuff I think is funny but which you might legitimately criticise as being 'a bit stupid'. I expect you'll be able to tell which is which, but just in case I'll learn how to use these tag things, and that might help.

The Tussock

2011-03-09T20:07:00.001+10:00

There's nothing new under the sun - but it turns out there are entertaining ways of covering old ground, fortunately for the fiction industry. And so it is with blogging. This is another writer's blog, by another writer.

Anyway. There are lots of writers' blogs, blogs about writing, blogs about publishing and representation and criticism. It might be because writers like blogs. It might also be because writers like writing. It's probably got something to do with the hope that some people other than writers read blogs, and so any individual writer's blog might, in some parallel dimension in which blogs are important, create some sort of public presence as if by magic. Happily, even though there are lots of places like this one on the web, there's at least the potential for all of them to say something different, or at least to say the same thing in ways that are different enough to be entertaining. Which is, as we noted at the beginning, the basis of the contemporary fiction industry. Ironic, really, when you consider the other meaning of 'novel'. One of my old teachers made a comment on her blog once about 'traversing the universal and charting the unique', which I think wraps up the value of hearing multiple voices speak about what is at one level essentially the same experience. Hence, this blog about (among other things) writing and the journey from manuscript-toting delusional to Proper Author.

Why 'The Tussock'? I was going to call this blog 'An Inexpensive Source of Cheese', partly because it's true, and partly because it's from what I think is one of the best lines ever written for television. Unky Herb gives some sage advice (if you'll pardon the pun) to Bart when asked what an aspiring bum should keep in mind: "Discarded pizza boxes are an inexpensive source of cheese". There's so much tangled up and encoded in this line, so much that I like about writing and literature as art and cultural signpost. Why should there be advice at all about how to be homeless in an affluent society? Isn't just entering into the discussion missing the point about homelessness in some way? And yet, advice about food sources is on the face of it useful. And then again, why is cheese that has melted and then reconstituted and then been thrown away as rubbish the food source that Unky Herb chooses to identify as important? Cheese isn't really a staple. Wouldn't advice about where to find meat that hasn't gone off be of more use? Then there's the twisted meaning of 'inexpensive'. It's not just inexpensive, it's free. Why not just say it's free? And yet, that's part of the meaning of inexpensive -- and it's important for the joke, and the character of the show and of Unky Herb, that it's not the full meaning of the word; it's entirely pertinent that they used a word with more complicated meaning than the sentence really needed. And above all that, the sentence itself sounds marvellous; it has a complex flowing quality with lots of different sounds in all the right places. The repeated x sounds pull the sentence along and it ends with a nice big major chord sort of sound with 'cheese'. It's very musical really, and the sounds fit (deliberately?) Danny de Vito's standard-American-with-a-twist accent marvellously. All this demonstrates, I think, both a powerful awareness of language and character, and the way you can, as a writer, arrive partly by luck at a sentence that really hits a spot.

I cleave to the denseness of meaning and the nuance and the way that it urges me to unpack it every time I hear it. I especially love that it comes in a piece of comedy writing, and not just that, TV comedy writing, and not just that, animated TV comedy writing, which is the last place that most people look for writing that matters.

But it's not my writing. It seems like it would be a bit stupid to label my writer's blog with someone else's writing.

So it's 'The Tussock' partly because it's not 'An Inexpensive Source of Cheese'. The rest of the explanation is tied up with where I came from and where I've been. There's a particular kind of tussock that grows as a weed of pastures in the place I grew up. Many years after I'd left home to seek my fortune as God knows what, I came across a group of fairly recently plonked-down shops in Davis, in central northern California. I was surprised to see that particular species of tussock planted as an ornamental at the corners of the buildings. I've held on to the pictures that I took then, and the feelings that came up too. Those tussocks are packed with meaning for me in much the same way as Unky Herb's pizza box advice: they mean something from different pasts, different homes and versions of me, different adventures that happened without me realising they were adventures at all. At the time, they showed me how far from home I was, and yet how small the world can be. They are (for me) weeds, and now, years later, I'm working in weed ecology. They're an intersection of different meanings and feelings, representative of the connectivity of personal events that is the kind of thing that I think writing is best, of all the arts, at getting at. These are connections that are simultaneously about difference and similarity, which is part of writing and particularly part of humour. And ultimately they represent, in a pointless and small way, the past that is deepest and most meaningful for me personally. Plus, the word 'tussock' sounds like it ought to be an insult used by people in northern England, or a word for some part of one or another kind of genitalia. Or both. And who knows; maybe somewhere it is.