Hair-Trigger Scribes?

Reading Jane Turner's regular column 'Turning Pages' in The Age this morning, I was pointed towards a piece from last year in Ploughshares magazine by novelist Rebecca Makkai.

Titled 14 Ways to Tick Off A Writer, the content is, I think, self-explanatory. If you're in doubt, she opens with: Writers are fun and easy to annoy. Minimum effort, maximum rage. She goes on to provide details about how to poke your favourite scribe with a stick just for the heck of it. Mind you, she's mostly referring to novelists with actual publications under their belt, so much of this was news to me.

Anyway, the one I liked most is: Turn up at a reading. Raise your hand to ask a question. Launch into a ten minute description of your novel-in-progress. But in a whiny voice, with a question mark at the end. That totally makes it a question.

This I can relate to. It gives me flashbacks of the uncomfortable sort. I love attending literary festivals, buying books, bumping into folk and chatting, hearing the wise sages of writing dispense interesting facts and advice, but am far less enamoured with the question times after.

Sure, every now and then, you get a good session, with smart people who raise interesting topics that aren't all about them. However, more times than I can count, I've curled my toes and stared hard at the floor while long-winded people try desperately to impress the writer up on the stage with their own brilliant output by going into great detail about the amazingly different novel, which is sort of like the guest speaker's, they're presently working on. Or worse, they give a not so quick rundown of the three manuscripts at home in their drawer that no publisher will take, the inference being that they'd like the guest speaker to champion their masterpieces. Or they launch into a dissertation about how they, with their particular genius, interpreted the writer's work in a way that no-one else has ever done before and they've made a fifty point list of fascinating observations that they alone have uncovered which they would now like to share...

Cue groans.

I feel sorry for some of them, I do, the ones with their neediness so nakedly on display or those determinedly struggling with awkwardness so as to seize what they believe is their big moment, but at the same time, such behaviour seems rather obviously ill-mannered to me. Festival attendees are supposed to be smart people, yet some simply cannot comprehend that the audience has paid to hear pearls from the proven writer, not listen to the ramblings of floor stealers.

I suppose it's all human nature though, the kind of boorish behaviour that celebrities draw from certain types. You get the wannabes and attention seekers at conventions of all kinds, be the speaker a star of SF, a Wall Street predator imparting advice on how to smilingly rip money from the hands of the gullible masses, or a combination of the two, namely a Kardashian.

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

This week was one of those just-get-through-it times with me trying to pace things so as to not to slide back into the Cold that Came for Christmas, negotiating an ad hoc transport system while they do maintenance on the train lines, and making it to the Arvo Job as much as possible (which turned out to be not very much at all) between a stretch of let's-start-the-year-with-a-round-of- hospital-crap. I made it to the weekend relatively intact, but no writing was done, so I'm catching up on bits and pieces today so as to set myself up for a more organised next week.

I did, however, get to see two writerly movies. After hospital crap late Friday afternoon, rather than head home during peak hour traffic, I treated myself to fried noodles, ice cream, and a movie no-one else I know wanted to see -  Saving Mr Banks - which still has me thinking about many aspects of storytelling. Australian born PL Travers ditched both her nationality (so crass) and her childhood name then reinvented herself as a British writer, used aspects of her own life to propel her Mary Poppins stories, then struggled with the idea of handing over her creation to someone she was convinced would rewrite the character. She knew the Disney populist version would swamp her rather stern and non-coddling nanny and turn Mary Poppins into a singing, twinkling, more sugary individual, and she was entirely correct. These days, when anyone thinks Mary Poppins, they think of Julie Andrews. And for the record, I adored that movie as a kid. But I feel for Travers and her loss of creative control. Unfortunately, Travers was broke. Backed into a corner, and fearful of poverty, she did the deal. Once more, penury forced an artist's hand. Still, she got to keep her house and was set up for life, which isn't to be sniffed at.

Anyway, I liked the idea of a movie about two creative people battling it out for their own version of a character, about popular entertainment versus literature, and all the layers of wondering how much of the real Walt Disney and PL Travers made it into movie and their various biographies, how much their own life stories informed their work, and how much they both used their work to redress the deprivations and wrongs of their childhoods. With the real lives and subsequent industry based on other writers' and filmfolks' interpretations of two such strong-minded individuals, there's much to sort through, and a lot of storytelling of both the truthful, not so truthful, and purely exploitative kinds to negotiate.

The other movie was The Book Thief, which also had many scenes to warm a writerly heart. I was told after the movie that I meaningfully aaaahed in certain places, which I don't usually do (how annoying!), but I'd say it would have been caused by me identifying with a young person who loves books and writing, and uses them as a calm focus to steady herself amidst the chaos and often cruel twists of our mortal existence.

If you're not one of those people who haunted libraries as a kid in search of Answers to Life's Mysteries and who views books as portals to other, often realer than Real Life places, then my behaviour is not something I can explain to you.

Plum Job

So, I'm back after multiple failures. Firstly, I was clobbered by my Christmas cold. It seemed to be getting better at one point, then returned with a vengeance. Alas, not much writing got done during my holidays, but I did prod a couple of dormant stories back into life. I napped a lot, watched movies, ate ice cream, and sat a lot in the backyard on the swing with Gus (the other cats were too busy doing their own thing) just enjoying the weather and wrestling with a few story ideas. This blahness only started to turn a couple of days ago, so I stayed home from the Arvo Job today just to make sure I didn't push myself into a relapse.  Secondly, I had internet problems. No connection for daaaaaays and daaaaaays. It was awful, but I survived :)  Now, thanks to my older little brother's emergency dash across the countryside, things have been fixed and upgraded and I'm speedier than I've even been before.

In the category of country produce news, I beat the birds to the plums in the front yard this year. I made sure to be quick after last year's catastrophic non-jam making happening. This is just half of my so far plucked haul - the rest is on the floor - and there's just as much fruit still on the tree that isn't quite ripe yet. Hopefully I'll manage to nab the rest too, but even with what I've got, there'll be plenty of plum jam for the year. Now I just need to get a truck load of sugar. And clean jars. And cut up the fruit and...

 In even further country produce news, in case you were wondering, the Chook today presented her eleventh egg. One more, and she'll hit a respectable dozen. So there you have it - I'm practically self-sufficient when it comes to plum jam and eggs.

Aliens Favourably Received

Lazily scooting around the blogs before I sit down for my first session of serious 2014 writing, I discovered over at Alex Dally MacFarlane's blog that Aliens: Recent Encounters, the anthology she edited (which includes my short story Nullipara) is on io9's list of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2013.  

io9 writes:

There were a lot of anthologies this year, including several with ambitious themes — but this one blew us away more than any other.

Mostly because of the sheer volume of greatness contained in these 32 stories, ranging from Ken Liu's "Bookmaking Habits of Select Species" to Ursula K. Le Guin's "Seasons of the Ansarac." These are classic stories of alien encounters, from some of the best science fiction writers working today.

 Nice. Very nice. I'm loving 2014 already.

Writers Get Political

Yesterday, which was International Human Rights Day, Writers Against Mass Surveillance set up a petition to launch an appeal in defence of civil liberties against surveillance and information storing by corporations and governments. As someone who has been following the whole sordid and often surreal NSA affair (see this article about the Information Dominance Centre - yep, really, that's what they so benignly called it - with your surveillance-loving types courting funding by using a Captain Picard chair to milk funds from congressmen. It's scary stuff if you like to believe politicians are grown ups), I can only cheer. It's a worthy international cause supported by a very impressive bunch of writers from all over the globe. You can hardly argue with their stance:

The basic pillar of democracy is the inviolable integrity of the individual. Human integrity extends beyond the physical body. In their thoughts and in their personal environments and communications, all humans have the right to remain unobserved and unmolested.

 

This fundamental human right has been rendered null and void through abuse of technological developments by states and corporations for mass surveillance purposes.

A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy.

 

To maintain any validity, our democratic rights must apply in virtual as in real space.

* Surveillance violates the private sphere and compromises freedom of thought and opinion. 

* Mass surveillance treats every citizen as a potential suspect. It overturns one of our historical  triumphs, the presumption of innocence. 

* Surveillance makes the individual transparent, while the state and the corporation operate in secret. As we have seen, this power is being systemically abused.

* Surveillance is theft. This data is not public property: it belongs to us. When it is used to predict our behaviour, we are robbed of something else: the principle of free will crucial to democratic liberty.

 

WE DEMAND THE RIGHT for all people to determine, as democratic citizens, to what extent their personal data may be legally collected, stored and processed, and by whom; to obtain information on where their data is stored and how it is being used; to obtain the deletion of their data if it has been illegally collected and stored.

I just hope citizens in general haven't been too trained in handing over all their personal information to be outraged at what has been happening all over the world, and too accepting of what they perceive to be a fair trade-off for the technological goodies they so thoroughly enjoy to see that such passivity leaves us vulnerable to the vagaries of politics. It's all good if your government has no busybody, fascist tendencies, adopts zen-deep calm in the face of calamities, is rational when faced with irrational suspicions, is transparent, kind to old people, children and animals, and has sterling anti-corruption policies in place. However, Orwellian powers are less fun in the hands of ruling bodies who decide they need to know and control everything because their own citizens are actually the real enemy, who are in government purely to accumulate wealth and power for themselves and their cronies and family, or who are a collection of sociopaths who simply like to keep people in a permanent state of fear and paranoia for the fun of it.

Personally, I prefer to err on the side of caution. Checks and balances, please, really big ones, because people mostly have a very hard time not abusing power. 
 

Naughty Writer

Writers like to think of themselves as the poor, suffering, misunderstood underdogs of the publishing industry (and we are! We really, really are!) but over the last couple of weeks I've come across a few examples of editor and publisher misery caused by... hmmm, my fellow writers.

There was an email from a publisher exhorting writers not to review their own work on Amazon, the reason being that Amazon's review policies prohibit writers from reviewing their own work and if said writer is reported, Amazon comes down on the publisher, which makes the publisher look bad. Apparently, this is an ongoing problem, but I'm at a loss as to why anyone would do such a thing. Review your own work? It's embarrassing to even think about someone being so unprofessional. What would you even write about your own piece? Something along the lines of This is a fabulous story of great depth and intelligence and humour and complexity and subtlety and anything else you want it to be obviously written by a genius, who just happens to be me...? :)

Speaking of reviews, there's always the perennial problem of the occasional unseemly Internet ruckus caused by oversensitive writers wildly responding to reviews they don't like (not having written them themselves, obviously). The best advice I've seen in ages on how to deal with this situation is over at Alan Baxter's blog:

http://www.alanbaxteronline.com/authors-responding-reviews/

Don't worry, it's succinct.

In the meantime, Lakeside Circus, which is just starting up and is dealing with a influx of material and wrangling many writerly egos, felt it necessary to post a piece about reading guidelines, because many writers are such creative giants  that they seem to feel they can skip such mundane constraints (in this case, among other things, sending non-spec fic stories to a magazine that deals in speculative fiction), and another about experimenting with personal rejections. The latter included a warning :

Here’s the problem, though: for every author who takes the notes in stride, we have another who feels the need to reply to the rejection. Saying, “Thanks, I hadn’t thought of that!” is okay–it’s not necessary, but we don’t mind hearing from you. What we do mind is the authors who reply to argue with the rejection, who insult our staff, or misread the suggestions in order to complain that the fault lies in our reading instead of in their writing.

Too many of those, and we’ll go back to form rejections.

It's sad that they felt the need to add that last warning. Personally, I cannot fathom why anyone would think that being aggressive is appropriate behaviour in this, or any other business. If you're a writer who can't deal with rejection letters, then you really need to find another creative outlet - they're part and parcel of the landscape, for most of us, at least. This post also helps me understand why so many publications do default to form letters. Of course, that just makes the personal ones all that more exciting and special.

Finally, there's the poor, beleaguered literary agent, and if you don't already occasionally pop over to Slushpile Hell, billed as One grumpy literary agent, a sea of query fails, and other publishing nonsense, do so now. You'll do a lot of groaning, but also laugh. And it's a wonderful example of what others in the industry deal with on a daily basis, and a lesson in how NOT to behave if you wish to establish a reputation for professionalism. Mind you, most of the examples used seem to be from the extreme end of wannabe writerly egos running amok and demonstrate a pathological lack of perspective. At least I very much hope they do.

So be good, writers. Do your homework, abide by the rules, be professionally polite, and save your rantings about the unfair treatment of writers for your Facebook pages or blogs :)

And if you truly don't like the way things are, there's always self-publishing...

One Day, In A Faraway Land, When I've Got Plenty Of Time...

I was doing a quick, Sunday morning whizz around my usual sites and came across Charles Bukowski's poem air and light and time and space, which I'd pretty much forgotten about. It was great to reread this piece and once more be inspired to continue the daily grind of finding an hour here and there to develop ideas, of getting the words down one at a time, of accumulating pages and finishing stories and polishing prose and submitting work and once-overing rejected stuff and sending it out again. Because that's what writing all boils down to really, over and over again.
 
Basically, Bukowski's poem is a response to the perennial if-only-I-had-more-time-I'd write-a-novel-or-if-I-had-a-beautiful-Tuscan-studio-I'd-paint-a-picture lament which most artists regularly run into, the insinuation from these tormented creative types often being that they themselves lead lives that are far too busy or cluttered or devoid of necessities for them to fit in the luxury of creative pursuits, so any artist who does manage to write a novel or paint a picture must either live a Nirvana of no responsibilities, be wonderfully rich, or be a mad recluse with no social life whatsoever.

But Bukowski's poem knocks the pretension out of artistic wannabes (some of his poems about fellow writers are also brutal) who spend their lives saying that one day, most definitely, when everything is lined up ever so perfectly, they plan to get around to comfortably creating those fabulous masterpieces they know they have buried deep inside them and which are just bursting to get out. When they do finally sit down, said masterpieces are expected to manifest themselves easily and seamlessly. It's a wonderful dream, and an admirable goal, and if it helps people get through their lives, then it's not all bad. I can't say I haven't fantasized about full-time writing a few thousand times myself, just as I've fantasized about stories effortlessly appearing from the ether, presenting themselves perfectly on a page, and being snapped up immediately by ecstatic editors.

Unfortunately, for most people, the day job is a necessity, life never lets up, art is hard, and oases of peace and quiet with no distractions rarely present themselves just before a deadline.

So just shut up, sit down, and do the work, Bukowski bluntly says, and do it now:

no baby, if you’re going to create

you’re going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or

you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children

while you’re on

welfare,

you’re going to create with part of your mind and your body blown

away,

you’re going to create blind

crippled

demented,

you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your

back while

the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment,

flood and fire.

If you have the urge, creating is not a luxury, but a necessary part of life. You have to negotiate, you have to prioritise. You can't do everything, so you have to choose. The act of choosing is what makes something important to you. If you choose not to, that's fine, but then don't pretend creating is as vital to you as the very air you breathe. Do it as a hobby. Nothing wrong with that at all. Enjoy the process. But either do it or don't. The rest is waffling.

Over at Zen Pencils they've actually illustrated the whole poem. The pictures are as amusing as the poem itself.

Hmm, I feel a Bukowski episode coming on. I think I'll be dropping the word baby into conversations for the next few weeks.

Some Good PR for SF

Stay your alarm, reads the review by Helen Elliot that I read this morning in the Age, 'The Humans' is not speculative. It has more in common with the most memorable fairy tales than anything else because it has a simple moral instruction at its centre; kindness as opposed to selfishness, warmth in the place of chill.

Because, like, you know, speculative fiction can't be about moral instruction, kindness and warmth... And fairy tales aren't speculative fiction, oh no they aren't, so get your nasty specfic cooties off our most beloved stories! Also, the novel is witty, droll, tender, romantic, and sad, so yeah, with all those praiseworthy qualities, it definitely can't be speculative fiction.

The book in question is The Humans by Matt Haigh. This post is not about his book - I'm sure it's a  great read - but about the usual haphazard labelling of genres, and the predictable implied hierarchy of merit. So, according to the review, The Humans is about an alien - a Vonnodorian - from a galaxy where mathematical genius is the norm. The Vonnodorian dispatches a mathematics professor and assumes his human identity. Much observation of the human race ensues and the ever so logical Vonnodorian, much to his surprise, develops fond feelings for our erratic species.

Nope, not speculative fiction at all.

In the usual litfic tendency to cherrypick who gets to pass through the hallowed gates of literary respectability, and despite the main character being from another galaxy and engaging in what I imagine are debates about humans that have already appeared in hundreds of brilliantly written and thoughtful SF short stories and novels, this book gets the mainstream seal of approval. Kudos to Matt Haigh. I wish him all the best. However, I can only surmise he escapes what the reviewer obviously regards as the dreaded speculative fiction label (possibly to do the book a favour because she views The Age readers as being biased against it) because the alien in the novel cunningly morphs into a middle-aged, Cambridge mathematics professor with marital problems, one of the customary mainstays of mainstream fiction (though a professor of English is even more acceptable). Mind you, I've read plenty of SF with that exact same hero, and pretty much the same scenario and well-written to boot, so, hmm, back to square one.

As I've wondered time and time again, who gets to choose what is "respectable" fiction, and what is sniffingly rejected as genre dross? What criteria do they use? How widely read are they? What are the limits of their imagination? Oops, I might be getting a bit snippy there myself...

On a brighter note, over at The Atlantic, science fiction gets the thumbs up in an article about a couple of M.I.T. Media Lab researchers who are teaching a course called Science Fiction to Science Fabrication aka Pulp to Prototype, in which they use texts (not the movies) like Frankenstein and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to encourage students to anticipate the consequences of their inventions and designs:

Reading science fiction is like an ethics class for inventors, and engineers and designers should be trying to think like science fiction authors when they approach their own work.

They even quote the late, great Frederik Pohl:

Frederik Pohl once said that it wasn’t the job of science fiction authors to create the automobile but to describe the traffic jam.

It follows that it is our job as technologists not to avoid creating the automobile, but to look at the traffic jam and design so that doesn’t happen. Thinking about these things at the beginning and iteratively throughout the process allows us to create better technology. Just as storytelling gives you more lives to live, speculative design or science fiction prototyping gives you more iterations to consider before your creation goes out into the wild and becomes hard to control. Once a genie is out of the bottle, it isn't inclined to allow itself to be stuffed back in. Once an abusable technology is in the hands of a fascist government or rogue nation-state, its leaders aren’t likely to return that technology for an upgrade that removes the features they’re using to spy or express their political agenda. Designing the genie so he can’t be used that way, before he gets out of the bottle, is the safest choice.

It's a good read, positive about science fiction and the vast philosophical playground the genre typically covers. As per usual, I'm just left wondering why well-written stories about far reaching subjects that span time and space should be deemed less valuable a contribution to literature than, say, the shenanigans of shallow, inner-city narcissists. I read all kinds of books, as do all the speculative fiction writers I know, and there's good and bad stuff in every genre. Unless one has done an in-depth study of the works available, one really should refrain from making snide remarks about something one knows nothing about. Besides, using a certain genre as a broadly accepted insult is just plain rude. It happens. We know it does. I saw it in a movie just the other day. I could see the joke coming a mile away - 'I write science fiction', said the nerdy character. Cue the laughs.

*sigh*

I know this is a lost cause, but can't we writing folk and readers all just learn to get on with each other and practice the common courtesy of mutual respect for the hard work of our fellow scribes? Read or don't read books according to your interests, that's each individual's prerogative, but let's ditch the pettiness and toss overboard the judgmental pretensions that can sour the experience.
   

Vale, Frederik Pohl

We hoped he'd go on forever, but Frederik Pohl has just passed away at the age of 93.

As someone who regularly popped across to read his posts at The Way the Future Blogs and marvel at the way he was still participating in political issues and not holding back on what he thought, I'll miss his insights, and great example. Aging, he showed us, does not necessarily mean a diminishing of one's passion for social justice or a brain that slows down (he was onto the fracking debate recently, and was definitely not in favour of it). Whenever one of the acknowledged SF Greats died, his was the blog to head for because he would tell immensely entertaining tales about that person from the good old days. Who will now do the same for him? I'll miss his posts. 



With his seminal books, which include The Space Merchants, Man Plus, Jem, Gateway and the other Heechee novels, and all his many, many short stories, the legacy he leaves spans the universe. Thank you, Fred.

Frederik George Pohl, Jr

November 26. 1919 - September 2, 2013

I'll Have The Quote She's Having

I must, I must (sorry) pass on certain incredibly wise words from Lauren Beukes that I read in the paper this morning, just as I must, I must haul The Shining Girls from my TBR stack ASAP and read it, because the quote not only mentions three of my top twenty most favourite topics, namely writing, keyboards and cats, but it's the essence of all those secret-to-becoming-both-a-blockbuster-writer-and-a-respected-literary-darling theses on offer everywhere (for quite reasonable prices) reduced to a single tweet:

"Formula for a successful writer: 90 per cent avoiding the internet, 1 per cent writing, 9 per cent persuading the cat to sit somewhere other than ON your keyboard."

:)

This sterling career advice hits close to home. At the moment, Jenny, my usual keyboard cat, and Gus, the cat who would be the new keyboard cat, are tussling for lap supremacy. I'd rather Jenny wins this particular battle. She's smaller, stays still and mostly snoozes while I work - good company without any bother. Augusta is a stocky girl who squirms a lot and wants pats all the time. Jenny knowingly walks around the keyboard while Gus stomps on it. Time will tell how this titanic, feline struggle turns out. I know better than to try and tip the outcome in my favour. Never ever get involved in cat sleeping place politics.

Also, I'm trying to reduce my internet time and convert it to writing time, especially on Wednesdays, when I'm prone to giving in to my sooky  'I'm not well, and this is my R&R day, so it's okay to "rest" in front of the computer and recreationally read all this interesting stuff because, hey, maybe I can turn it into a story, besides which, I'm looking for new writing markets too' excuse. No more. Today I wrote for over 5 hours (alas, my cyborg story is not advancing, but I finished my expanded story that might already have a home - it just needs a polish now), resubbed two rejected stories, read, and reluctantly took care of some official boring stuff of the type that makes the world go round. And, of course, napped.

Although I did inadvertently catch a glimpse of the Miley Cyrus scandal...

The Simplest of Simplest Truths

Squirm all you like - there's just no getting around it, I'm afraid.

Over at SFWA, Mercedes M. Yardley writes:

There’s a difference between being a writer and wanting to be a writer.  There are plenty of conversations about it, about whether payment, time spent, or day jobs land you on either one side or the other. But the consensus seems to be one major thing:  writer’s write. Wannabe writer’s want to write, but they can’t seem to find the time/interest/inspiration.

Words on page. That’s the difference.

You can read the rest here.

It's sad but true, busy, busy folk  - you have to make time for words and ideas. You have to make room in your life for them. And you have to get them down on a page. And then you have to work them over and submit them and...

But mostly, you have to write. And then write some more.

Now, please excuse me, I'm off to work on a WIP on the train.

Talking About Fight Club

What I call rah-rah rejections (in the nicest and most appreciative way), Elizabeth Bear calls rave rejections, and she has posted some advice here on how to move from these almost-there stories onto the next stage in one's writing career.

She evocatively equates apprentice writers with garage-band guitarists that all sound alike or like rip-offs of more experienced musicians - anyone who has ever been "lucky" enough to live next door to a budding rock star and his/her hard practicing pals immediately knows what she means -  and she counsels writing, writing, writing and then some more writing, as well as working on each story's voice and narrative. Solid stuff.

For me, the greatest pleasure, in a deliciously naughty he-he-he way, came from reading a line that a lowly scribe such as myself cannot risk writing without it sounding like sour grapes or an unprofessional tantrum, but which an established writer with major credentials can blithely put out there:

(Plenty of salable stories aren't actually really good--but without the push of an established name, a new writer's will probably have to be. Sorry about that, in the immortal words of Rowlf the Dog.)

 

We all know this to be true. We all know that when starting out as a newbie in most spheres of life, you have to be just that little bit better than the old guard to break through the established hierarchy, or to jump up and down energetically in often undignified ways whilst bragging about your amazingness to be noticed, or to have the support of someone powerful to move up the ladder. Then you have to back up that lucky break with hard work and talent, of course (unless those network connections are really powerful), and keep that hard work coming and that talent sharp lest the next newbie to come alone bumps you from your spot.

It would be unrealistic to maintain that the Writing World exists within a hermetically sealed dome populated by unprejudiced and unfailingly fair-minded folk who remain unswayed by friendships, sticking with what and who they already know and feel comfortable with, personal tastes and sales figures, but we mostly don't like to admit it. We want to think the Writing World functions as a meritocracy of the purest sort, but I doubt any human organisation can attain that level of idealism or professionalism. People are people. As soon as you have more than one person in a room, politics of some sort always comes into play. And some play the game better than others. That's just life. Every day, in both the Real World and the Writing World, we suck it up, and we deal with this often frustrating truth as graciously as possible. Those who can't handle it risk becoming bitter and twisted souls.

Anyway, what I take from this post, apart from a good giggle, is not a swollen sense of injustice, but the lesson that we low-level writers just have to be like the characters that Elizabeth exhorts us to write about - the ones who love something, who hold fast to a dream, and who fight for what they care about no matter how hopeless the odds seem.

And yes, I just received one of those rave rejections. The pro sale that might have been and almost was now won't be.

I've already sent that story somewhere else.

Fight on.

Legend of the Luminous Last Lines

There was a book sale in town today. I almost bought The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson but opted for a couple of more modern tomes instead. Coming home tonight and finding out that the great man himself  had just passed away, I wished I had bought it.

Silly me. Tomorrow I'll go back and remedy my mistake. In the shop, leafing through it, I read again that almost last, tragic but full of wonderment, bittersweet-with-a-touch-of-hope line, which always gets me:

"If nature existed on endless levels, so also might intelligence."

Then there's the kicker of a very last line, but I won't spoil it for those who haven't yet dipped into this classic yet.  

He did last lines well. I cannot even begin to guess how many times I read I Am Legend. I loved the entire book (let's politely ignore the movies for now), but I mostly reread it just to relive over and over the full impact of that final prison scene and the very last, now very famous words which, when I first read them as a teenager, completely blew me away:

 ...a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.

 Some writers fudge endings. Not Richard Matheson. Just as you (if you hadn't read his work before) with the last page turned, might have been winding down, he slammed an image or an idea or a possibility right into your brain, and there it stayed put, sending your thoughts skittering off into multiple, deep, dark, moving and twisty philosophical places. All that, and frightening and touching and entertaining too! I loved his books. I loved his Twilight Zone episodes. And who wasn't scared out of their wits by every passing truck for at least a month after watching the movie Duel?

Thank you, Richard, for all those great stories.

Richard Matheson

1926-2013

R.I.P.

Vale, Iain Banks

We knew it was coming, but we, I, thought, well, as we always do in such cases, for sure he'll be around for a few more months... He was such a force... Over at Banksophilia, where you can read the overwhelming love and respect that so many people felt for him and his work, he seemed perky enough... I meant to leave a comment myself, to tell him how much I loved his books, but I didn't... I was still composing it in my head, trying to make it special... Now I wish I had just written a simple 'thank you'. Why do we always wait too long?

I'm floundering in ellipses because it's impossible to absorb that he's really gone, and so soon.

Iain Banks
 

16 February 1954 - 9 June 2013

R.I.P.

 

*** Neil Gaiman shares a few wonderful memories of Iain over at his blog in a piece titled 'Iain. With or without the M.'

 

Note To Self: Must Read This

Let me just make one thing clear before I continue - The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is MY special book. I found it, all by myself, without reviews or recommendations, in a school library during one of my lunchtime wanders there when I was about ten years old, years after the book was first published. In fact, the book itself might have mysteriously drawn me to its shelf and compelled me to pick it up and take it home. I know the word 'Brisingamen' certainly attracted me, for being something of a junior mythology buff, I recognised the name of the goddess Freya's necklace and was intrigued. And who can resist a word like 'weirdstone'?

Anyway, just so you know that no matter what kind of a connection you might think you have formed with the book, your "relationship" with TWOB is but a trifling, superficial thing compared with MY deep and meaningful bond with it. So there , now you know. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is MY special book. Ditto with The Moon of Gomrath.

The reason I've brought this up is because thanks to a review over at  Book View Café, I was reminded this morning that I need to read Boneland by Alan Garner to see how it all ends for Colin and Susan. When Boneland first came out, I decided to reread TWOB and TMOG and then clear a bit of dedicated reading time for what I was told would be a difficult  but worthwhile job. Alas, stuff happened, I got sidetracked, blah, blah, etc. But now, thanks to BVC, I'm on it again.

I mean, with a review like this from Ursula LeGuin, how can I not? The circle must be completed. The puzzle must be at least attempted. And how lucky are we that the author has seen fit to bring closure to the saga?

I just hope I understand it. :)

Because I Love A Good Writing Quote or Two (And Haven't Got Much Time For Blogging)

Here, over at SFWA, Larry Hodges has provided a bonanza of 50 quotes. Hastily skimming it, I especially like the obviousness of 13 & 35, and the Jasper Fffordeaness of 17:

13. "Writers never quit and quitters never write."

17. "Choose your words carefully because somewhere in there is a character who has to live with what you choose."

35. "If you write regularly, soon you'll have a lot written. If you don't, you won't."

Now I have to head off to the city for medical crap even though it's my designated don't-take-the-train-to-the-Arvo-Job-but-stay-at-home-and-do-stuff-like-reading-and-writing day. Toodles.

Wow, She Did It Again!

I forgot it was the weekend of the Aurealis Awards! Luckily, there are plenty of bloggers to remind me of that fact.

The winners are all listed here. Congratulations to them one and all.

Perusing the list, I saw a familiar name - that mysterious writer Thoraiya Dyer I posted about here back in December 2012 when The Wisdom of Ants was published in Clarkesworld. It's a great read, and well, as you can see from the list, she's gone and won the Aurealis for the Best Young Adult Short Story for that exact story. And not long ago, she won a Ditmar for it too. Let's not even talk about all her previous Aurealis wins. The woman obviously knows how weave a tale, so a great big congratulations to her on her multiple wins.

However, I thought it was time that I really buckled down and found out more about this Thoraiya Dyer person, but alas, for all my wonderful Googling skills, all I could find was this photo from Conflux 9 over at Donna Maree Hanson's blog. Apparently, behind all those nibblies, the elusive Ms Dyer is lurking within that impressive steampunk samurai outfit .

It's a wonderful photo - nice composition, lush greenery as background, classy dessert stand, delicious cakes, polished armour - but it really doesn't help me any with my enquiries.

So, my investigation continues.

Laughing at Locales and Lola

There wasn't a single movie on at the local theatre that interested me this weekend, so we headed up the highway for a nostalgic visit to ye olde Sovereign Hill. The last time I was there, I was about eight or nine years old, and I suffered a great great disappointment that has haunted me ever since. It was time to seal and heal that old childhood wound. We're talking bucket list stuff. More about my trauma later.

 But first we had to get through Daylesford, cutting straight through the middle, which meant I yet again had to giggle when we went down the main drag (my sister and I go around when we head for horse riding). I'm sorry, but it's almost a programmed reaction ever since I read this 2009 article by David Sedaris in The New Yorker in which he threw this evocative paragraph at his readers:

Our destination that afternoon was a place called Daylesford, which looked, when we arrived, more like a movie set than like an actual working town. The buildings on the main street were two stories tall, and made of wood, like buildings in the Old West, but brightly painted. Here was the shop selling handmade soaps shaped like petit fours. Here was the fudgery, the jammery, your source for moisturizer. If Dodge City had been founded and maintained by homosexuals, this is what it might have looked like.

Then it was on to Ballarat and a highly entertaining and interactive afternoon of watching blacksmiths, coach builders, candle makers, tinsmiths, bakers etc strutting their stuff the old fashioned way, redcoats marching, caped policemen keeping law and order, people panning for gold (we swished a few pans of grit, but no fortunes were made, so my castle with a moat and a writing turret located on a isolated hill must wait a while longer), and of course saw lots of mining machinery. We also went down a couple of mines to get a vague sense of the hard conditions the miners endured, and hearing a whistling tune from one of the side drives while our guide exhorted us to stay together and not wander off of course triggered a story about someone (a kid, I suspect, a good kid) who does wander off, following the ghostly tune of a dead miner...  See, writers are always on the job. When above ground, we constantly jumped out of the way of horse-drawn carriages.

I especially enjoyed the re-enactment of Lola Montez whipping Henry Seekamp, the editor of The Ballarat Times, in the main street after he'd published a bad review of her infamous act and condemned the salacious Spider Dance that had miners throwing gold nuggets up onto the stage while she performed.

I've always loved reading about Lola's exploits. Now there was a woman who lived life to the full and didn't give a fig about what folk thought of her. If time travel ever eventuates, I'd sign up just to go back and catch her Spider Dance at our local theatre (she stopped off here and collected a small fortune before continuing on to Ballarat). It'd be fun to see what the fuss was all about. Probably not much by today's standards.

Then it was time to close the circle on my unresolved childhood issue. You see, way back when I was a kiddie and the whole family went to Sovereign Hill, I wanted with all of my youthful heart one of the horseshoes you can get at the blacksmith's with your name stamped into the metal. I was denied this prize (my dad pitched some completely unreasonable argument about if I got one, my siblings would also have to have one each, and the cost would add up to too much for, it was implied, such useless rubbish) and never quite recovered, especially when a few friends turned up at primary school proudly showing off, well, you guessed it, horseshoes from Sovereign Hill with their names on them. How I coveted those metal crescents. My envy was only surpassed by my great sorrow at not having one. 

But today, for the princely sum of $8.00, I finally put an end to my longing and got my horseshoe. It's over my writing desk now, proof that it's never too late for wishes to come true, and that sometimes dreams are surprisingly cheap to achieve. 

No, No, No, No, No! Say It Isn't So!

There will only be one more Iain Banks book ever:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/03/iain-banks-cancer-statement-full

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/03/iain-banks-gall-bladder-cancer

 

I love my Iain M. Banks books, I do. And now there'll be no more Culture novels? Ever. This will take time to absorb.

 

And to lose the amazing man himself so soon, way too soon, is beyond sad.
 

Stella! Stellaaaaaa!

I'm a bit behind, I think, but I read in the Age today that 12 books have been longlisted for the inaugural Stella Prize, and one of them - how exciting! - is our very own Margo Lanagan's Sea Hearts, which I must read ASAP. She is one of my favourite authors, someone (along with a few other brilliant spec fic writers who aren't Margaret Atwood***) I'm always pushing I-don't-like-genre-fiction-I-only-do-litfic people to read. I've read and loved her short story collections and adored Tender Morsels - I still have no clue what all the kerfuffle was about. In fact I was well into the book before I realised I'd already scooted through the witchy-dwarfy sex scene that had raised a few hackles. Where was my outrage? I'm convinced certain people were reading a different version of the book from another, far more sordid dimension. That's the only way I can account for their perception of it being so vastly and wildly and so emotively different from mine.

But anyway, back to Sea Hearts. Must read it. I'm sure it's brilliant. How can it not be?

And go, Margo!

***whom I also love, but so do the I-don't-like-genre-fiction-I-only-do-litfic people to the extent that they don't count her as spec fic. Literary cherry picking.