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Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
Yesterday I woke up to the realisation my headcold hadn’t gone away after all. Then the bf cursed me for making him sick, too. And that would’ve been about all that happened that day if the cats hadn’t needed feeding (I hear if you lie still too long, cats will start in on your face & not stop until they lick your toe bones clean. Could be hearsay).
So then we got up & we did what any thinking people do after rinsing cat food from their hands: we sat on the couch, sniffling, coughing, and feeling depressingly mortal – and watched all three Blade movies. That second one is a non-event, eh?
And at some point I opened my email and lo! My secret had been revealed: my ISHTAR novella has been officially nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award! I can’t tell you how thrilled to bits I am. I’m proud of that little story, & REALLY proud to see it in the same category as Elizabeth Hand & Lucius Shepard, Reggie Oliver, Michael Marano and Tim Waggoner. Some amazing talent throughout the categories, with Kelly Link, Ellen Datlow, Jack Dann, Peter Straub, M. Rickert, Genevieve Valentine, Kit Reed, Joyce Carol Oates, both Vandermeers … it really is a blast. I would have blogged this yesterday, but the strength in my upper body did not extend to hauling my computer off the desk, so I was confined to whatever an iPad allowed me. Plus, it was just fun to bask for a while.
Results will be available at Readercon in July. But, y’know? Just awesome to have made it this far. Nothing is ever a solo effort, though, & I want to thank the fantastic team I worked with: Mark Deniz, Amanda Pillar, KV Taylor, Cat Sparks and Kaaron Warren.
One more thing: interesting to see how many in the novella section look like horror stories, eh? A BOOK OF HORRORS; THE PLAGUE YEARS; GHOSTS BY GASLIGHT… It’s a great length for horror, I’m finding, & I’m looking forward to hunting out my fellow novella-writers’ works. Yay for Gilgamesh Press being at the forefront of this awesome format.
And remember, kids, if you’d like to support a Shirley Jackson nominated work, you can buy Gilgamesh Press’ ISHTAR here, here and here. Or enter the Goodreads giveaway! Two free copies to be won. Only 402 entries so far. 
(Those of you I owe copies to: I should have them by Continuum-time, this June!)
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
Aaaaaand, we’re back. Life, eh?
Marvellous entries to the favourite fictional woman giveaway. Here are some of my favourite answers:
Liz Lemon from 30 ROCK. Nerdy and awkward and sometimes selfish, yet also attractive, determined (if sometimes misguided) and ultimately kind-hearted. And frequently laugh-out-loud funny. – Chris Barnes
Jessica Atriedes (DUNE) for her poise, brains and loyalty, Minerva McGonagall (HARRY POTTER) for superior magical awesome as well as teenager-wrangling skills, Princess Leia (STAR WARS) for rescuing her helpless frozen boyfriend who isn’t even a prince, Eowyn (LORD OF THE RINGS) for recovering from romantic rejection in time to kill the witch-king, and Yu Shu Lien (played by Michelle Yeoh in CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON) for her integrity, discipline, and the best female fight scene EVAR – Thoraiya
Diana in “Trouble with Lichen” by John Wyndham: Diana is a biochemist who values brains over frippery, she is brainy, driven and idealistic but not part of the modern cadre of “kickass sex object” fictional women (Buffy, Girl Genius, Echo, River, etc). – exp_err
Polgara, from David Eddings’ BELGARIAD series. She’s strong and powerful in all sorts of ways; she’s also humble, comfortable in her own skin, determined, calm, and able to quell kings with a single glance. I like that combination – and even though there are some problematic aspects to her character, she is still really appealing. – Alexandra
Granny Weatherwax (DISCWORLD). What I love is how real she is. She’s got these seemingly opposite drives – on the one hand she doesn’t really like people and wants to avoid them if possible; on the other hand she’ll continually go and risk her life to save said people. After a while, you realise that they actually come from the same source – Granny knows people. Heart and soul, good and bad. So while she doesn’t have time for them, she sees them as unique and valuable and important and so will do what she can to save them. – Nicole Murphy
Marla from Jennifer Fallon’s HYTHRUN CHRONICLES. I like how she works her way up (using brains!) from miscellaneous princess married off for political gain, to matriarch more or less running the whole country. – Tsana
Nancy Napoleon from SIREN BEAT, because she’s not your ordinary Urban Fantasy heroine, with a halter top and a tribal tat. She’s disfigured, yet powerful and sexy and desirable, oh and an Aussie, oh and written by one of my fave authors. – Sean the Blogonaut
Carrie White (CARRIE). In honour of Stephen King and of the first horror book that inflicted my love for this genre. Also it was a very strong character. Carrie’s traumas, her wishes and dreams and the final breakdown makes her an unforgettable character. – Mihai A.
Corinna Chapman from the EARTHLY DELIGHTS series by Kerry Greenwood. She’s not a traditionally shaped heroine, she loves food, she holds down a full time job, foils criminals, lives in Melbourne, and has a funky bunch of friends and neighbours. – Helen Patrice
Honestly? I couldn’t decide. I thought, ‘oooh, Granny Weatherwax!’ then I thought ‘oh, Liz Lemon! Wait, Carrie! Wait, Diana…’ You see how it went. Really the winner turned out to be ‘awesome fictional women’. And us, because we get to read about them.
So if you spy your name in the above listed answers, then you’ve won a book! That’s right! Your choice of BAD POWER or ISHTAR in hardcopy. (Though I don’t have my ISHTAR copies yet, so it might take me some time to get one to you, just so you know.)
AAAAAAANNNND if your answer didn’t make it into this list but you’d still like a copy of ISHTAR, you have two more chances to win! ISHTAR is now the subject of a Goodreads giveaway, closing beginning of May. Go on, join the 266 people who have entered so far!
Plus, don’t forget, my Aurealis Award nominated novella “And the Dead…” from ISHTAR is still available free! In PDF! Which means I can pretty much email it to you right away (no waiting on hardcopies ). Email me at rous AT deborahbiancotti.net for a PDF.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
One astute reader has pointed out to me that she’d like a free! PDF copy of my ISHTAR novella for purposes of research & review while she weighs up her Ditmar nomination list.
If you, too, are looking for some reading while you ponder your Ditmar list, email me at rous AT deborahbiancotti.net for a PDF of my contemporary-supernatural-Sydney novella. And did I mention, free!? (Actually, I think I did.) Ditmar voting closes 15-April.
And the competition is still open for a chance to win a print copy of either ISHTAR or BAD POWER (your choice!) simply by answering this question in the comments: who’s your favourite fictional woman, & what makes her so awesome?
Both ISHTAR and BAD POWER are eligible for Ditmar nomination, but if you need more recommendations you can always check in on the AA-listed works nominated & published in 2011 over here.
I’ll announce the winner of our ‘fave fictional woman‘ comp & collate all entries next week so we can all have a reading list of awesome fictional femmes.
But if you can’t wait that long, remember you can buy the books & support small press here and here and here.
Read on, fellow readers!
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
Just a reminder that we have not one but TWO giveaways to celebrate the recent Aurealis Award shortlists. Winners of the AAs are announced on 12-May at North Sydney's Independent Theatre (tickets at the Aurealis Awards website).
Give-away #1: If you’re interested in reading my AA-shortlisted novella – set in modern day Sydney, in present tense, as Detective Garner investigates the strange & terrible deaths of male prostitutes in the city, which leads her eventually to confront the very goddess Ishtar herself – email me at rous AT deborahbiancotti.net for a PDF of the novella.
I’m mad keen for people to read my story, ‘cos I’m not sure I’ve ever had so much fun writing anything, ever. Go on, send an email or drop your email address into the comments for a free PDF. Hopefully it will even whet your appetites to buy the whole AA-nominated anthology so you can read the awesome ISHTAR novellas by Kaaron Warren & Cat Sparks.
Give-away #2: If you’d like a chance to win a print copy of either ISHTAR or BAD POWER (your choice!), answer this question in the comments: who’s your favourite fictional woman, & what makes her so awesome? Winners announced at the end of this week, so please vote early & often!
You can also BUY! both books. BAD POWER is available at the Twelfth Planet Press website and ISHTAR at the Gilgamesh website. Both books are also available for the Amazon Kindle: BAD POWER and ISHTAR.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
The Aurealis Award shortlists have been announced, & winners will be made public at a presentation on 12-May at North Sydney’s Independent Theatre. You can still get tickets to the event (catered – and with booze!) at the Aurealis Awards website. It was a record-breaking year for entries in most sections, I hear. It definitely was for the category I was judging: we practically tripled last year’s number of entries.
I’m very proud that BAD POWER from Twelfth Planet Press made the shortlist for Best Collection amidst a strong field of contenders – Paul Haines, Sue Isle, Lisa L. Hannett and Tansy Rayner Roberts – & a big year for collections overall. BAD POWER can be purchased in print or ePub at the Twelfth Planet Press online shop & all good bookshops.
I’m *also* proud to see Gilgamesh Press’s ISHTAR novella anthology in the Best Anthology section. ISHTAR was recently reviewed at the awesome Thirteen O’Clock website: “This collection is a bold and clever book, with three writers taking very old stories and breathing new life into them. The Ishtar mythology on which the stories are based is renewed by the words of these three.”
ISHTAR is available for Kindle for only a few bucks, & is available in other formats on the Gilgamesh Press shop. The print release should be available soonish, too.
ISHTAR contains my first novella – a form I’m finding myself quickly addicted to, alas (‘cos, where can I send ‘em for publication, they are quite long??), which I kinda tongue-in-cheek called “And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living”, a reference to a particular piece of Ishtar mythology I came across during my research. To my delight, “And the Dead…” is also up for an Aurealis Award in the category of Best Horror Short Story. There I am again, alongside Paul Haines & Lisa L. Hannett, Margo Lanagan & Angela Slatter. Such awesome company.
Give-away #1: If you’re interested in reading my AA-shortlisted novella – set in modern day Sydney, in present tense, as Detective Garner investigates the strange & terrible deaths of male prostitutes on her beat, which leads her eventually to confront the very goddess Ishtar herself – email me at rous AT deborahbiancotti.net for a PDF of the novella.
I’m mad keen for people to read my story, ‘cos I’m not sure I’ve ever had so much fun writing anything, ever. Go on, send an email or drop your email address into the comments for a free PDF. Hopefully it will even whet your appetites to buy the whole AA-nominated anthology so you can read the awesome ISHTAR novellas by Kaaron Warren & Cat Sparks.
Give-away #2: If you’d like a chance to win a print copy of either ISHTAR or BAD POWER (your choice!), answer this question in the comments: who’s your favourite fictional woman, & what makes her so awesome?
And finally, as convenor of the Illustrated Book/Graphic Novels category, I’m very, VERY proud of the shortlist Andy Buchanan, Zoe Wadsworth & myself put together of 5 strong, remarkable works from a field of 23 entries this year. They are all wonderful & you should read them all & support our burgeoning local graphic novel industry:
“Hidden” by Mirranda Burton (author and illustrator ) (Black Pepper)
“Torn” by Andrew Constant (author) and Joh James (illustrator ), additional illustrators Nicola Scott, Emily Smith (Gestalt Publishing)
“Salsa Invertebraxa” by Mozchops (author and illustrator) (Pecksniff Press)
“The Eldritch Kid: Whiskey and Hate” by Christian Read (author) and Michael Maier (illustrator) (Gestalt Publishing)
“The Deep: Here be Dragons” by Tom Taylor (author) and James Brouwer (illustrator) (Gestalt Publishing)
Read the full list of shortlistees in the Press Release.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
(Spoiler alert.)
A movie in the all-too slim category of Best Xmas Films Evah (with Action), THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT stars Geena Davis as an amnesiac undercover assassin – I know, right? what’s not to like! – whose past is coming back to bite her, then spin her around, then bite her again.
The bf and I have argued over which is the greatest character moment in this film. The bf asserts that it’s the point where Davis – still playing Samantha Caine, stay-at-home Mommy – kills the assassin on her kitchen floor. He claims this to be her turning point. From there, her motivation changes from I-wanna-be-a-Mom-and-gf, to I-need-to-know-who-I-am.
“Chefs do that,” she says, ironically, the dead man between her feet. Putting paid to the fantasy that maybe in her pre-amnesia days she was a chef.
But I’m not sure I see that moment of change there. Is she propelled by that moment, or is she propelled by the coincidental fact that downbeat detective, Mitch (Samuel L. Jackson) has just uncovered a suitcase of her stuff from her pre-amnesia days? I’m not sure, I think it could be either, and since it *could* be either, I don’t feel I’m seeing that Great Character Moment (of change and re-motivation) on screen.
For me, the greatest character moment is the more obvious & familiar moment. It’s when bad guy Luke is trying to drown her on some kinda water wheel. Samantha goes from screaming, panicking Mom-and-gf (she thought Luke was her ex-fiance, after all) to avenging freaking angel.
“I let you touch me, cowboy. I think I need a bath,” she tells Luke.
By then even her diction has changed. Her entire face has changed. Her breathing has changed, her voice has changed – now coming in short, sharp grunts. The film spins, the character motivation pivots and –
– she’s plunged into the water, where she reaches a hand into the trousers of the deceased Nathan Waldman (Brian Cox), pulls out a gun, and shoots her torturer in the leg. And oh! How she rises from the waters like a monstrous water demon, a mermaid from hell, a raging, screaming elemental force! For anyone who was sick of those James Bond fetish shots of girls in bikinis in the ocean, this moment was for you (& me). It’s THAT moment, imho, she goes from ‘wanting to find out who I am’ to ‘wanting to kill this freaking cowboy – & anybody else who ticks me off’.
Then she wrenches her hands free, tearing her wrists to shreds in the process. And henceforth, she attempts to be the assassin spy she apparently was before the amnesia. When Luke – shot & confused – cries out, “Samantha, please!” our heroine’s response clinches the deal. She is no longer who she was trying to be.
“Who’s Samantha?” she grunts.
From then on she’s Charly Baltimore. Well, when I say ‘from then on’, you know that the uniting of her disparate personalities, the discovery of a way to live with her daughter and her past are all to come in the final Act, of course.
Also, the dialogue in this film is generally hilarious.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
AND today is the day I rave about Shirley Hazzard on Gillian Polack’s blog for Women’s History Month (cross-posted below, for the curious):
Novelist, memoirist and essayist Shirley Hazzard has won the Miles Franklin Award (2004), National Book Award (2003) and National Book Critics Circle Award (1980). She’s been nominated for the Orange Prize (2004) and was shortlisted for the ‘Lost Man Booker Prize’ of 1970. She’s been described internationally as “unusually old-world” (from Slate) and “one of the few living novelists who seems able to traverse the distance” between heaven and earth (from Salon.com). But locally, our own presses have preferred to focus on her geographical absence rather than her literary presence.
Hazzard was born in my adopted hometown of Sydney in 1931 but left the country when she was fifteen. Fifty years later she won the Miles Franklin Award for The Great Fire; an award which recognises “the novel of the highest literary merit that portrays Australian life in any of its phases” (via Miles Franklin website). In a parallel win for the ‘tall poppy syndrome’, Hazzard – who dared to be an apparently affluent, well-read and successful woman – ignited ire from such respected journalists as Kerry O’Brien and Jana Wendt. Perhaps forced into a defensive position, even Hazzard herself seemed surprised by the win, explaining it like this:
It’s unclear what criticism the judges received.
By then, however, Hazzard wasn’t unfamiliar with contention. Winning the 2003 National Book Award for The Great Fire, she was second on stage after Stephen King. As noted in The Paris Review (The Art of Fiction #185):
She skewers his defence with her sheer understatement, and she doesn’t skip a fight. Even being a traditional King fan, I found myself chuckling out loud.
Hazzard has spent little time in Australia since leaving it, though she seems to talk about it with insight and some affection. More affection than I would have felt if I’d had the opportunity to leave so young. She praises her early education in Australian schools, but rejects the ‘institutionalised dreariness’ of the Australian arts in the fifties. Of her history education in particular, she says,
- Shirley Hazzard, The Art of Fiction #185
Though I admit even during my schooling in the seventies, the Australian history component struck me as dull, full of the deaths of white men in either exploration or war. The only drama I recall was presented by my second-grade teacher who told us the aboriginal kids in our class were smarter than the white kids, in a kind of blanket statement that had something to do with ‘the land’ and our white-kid inability to live off it. Looking back, I recall the aboriginal kids taking the news with grace, and the white kids – children, mostly, of immigrants responsible for clearing the land for “settlement” – being mainly baffled. The land had always struck me as a grim place, even before then, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to live off it. Which I now consider a dreadfully ‘white’ reaction, and just one of several examples of my dreadful whiteness.
In her most famous work, the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel, Transit of Venus, she contrasts Australia to Britain through the eyes of young Caroline Bell:
“Australian summer is a scorching without a leaf to spare. Out there, the force is in the lack, in the scarcity and distance. [snip] For colours like these you need water.” But even with water, in Australia the pigment might not be there. It was doubtful that pinks or blues lay dormant in Australian earth; let alone the full prestige of green.”
- Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus, Part I: The Old World, ch. 3
Words that I think, in my mid-twenties, I would almost have written myself if I’d had Hazzard’s power. That yearning she expresses to be elsewhere has been part of my Australian experience for as long as I can remember, and I don’t just mean for me. In twenty years of travel, I’ve found it impossible to be anywhere that other Australians aren’t, as we strike out from our island as far as feet and plane and ship will take us.
Since Hazzard averages around twenty years between books (though in recent years, that’s sped up – mostly through essay collections), it’s no surprise to see her career stretch from the 1963 short story collection Cliffs of Fall to the 2008 non-fiction of The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples (with her husband, Francis Steegmuller). In between, she has been nominated for the Orange Prize (2004) and the ‘Lost Man Booker Prize’ of 1970 (for The Bay of Noon). She’s also written two non-fiction books that criticise the United Nations where she worked when first arriving in the USA (though the UN sounds, sadly, about as bad as any bureaucracy I’ve ever encountered), and a memoir about her friendship with Graham Greene.
Hazzard is known for her masterful prose, her detailed attention to even the minutiae of everyday life and ‘ordinary’ relationships. At times, her writing feels like it has that particular qualities of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Locke, where each tiny movement, each hair on the head of each protagonist is meticulously wrought into large, almost overwhelming shapes fraught with consequence.
It’s been said that her prose outweighs her narrative and character to the point where even readers who care deeply about those elements will put them aside to feel the sense of portent and the strength of moment that only Hazzard can bring. This has certainly been my experience, as I’m swept along by her stories about characters I despise in circumstances I find strange and foreign. As Judith Shulevitz describes it in Slate:
There is indeed something about Hazzard’s writing that isn’t exactly timeless, that feels caught in a very particular era where women could be headstrong but not liberated. And yet that very call to history is one of Hazzard’s strengths, along with a wry humour and fierce perceptiveness. She opens us up not only to the world as it is and was, but the worlds inside ourselves, as they’ve been throughout human history. Her writing is bold and wry, her words deceptively gentle, her insight uncompromisingly sharp.
I love Shirley Hazzard because before reading her work, I despised most relationship and romance writing for never quite getting the full picture of even the most ordinary relationship. But Hazzard writes about relationships with a towering maturity that makes you realise just how central our relationships are to our humanity, how they can bring out the best and worst of what we have to offer. And how they will do that – bring out the best and worst – for as long as humanity survives.
Links:
Old World Style: Shirley Hazzard’s long-awaited novel, by Judith Shulevitz:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2
“The Great Fire” by Shirley Hazzard, by Charles Taylor
http://www.salon.com/2003/10/28/hazzard/s
Shirely Hazzard: Miles Franklin Award Winner (reporter Jana Wendt):
http://sgp1.paddington.ninemsn.com.au/su
Shirley Hazzard’s Rich and Varied Career (reporter Kerry O’Brien):
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2005/s
The Miles Franklin Award website:
http://www.milesfranklin.com.au
Shirley Hazzard’s Australia: Belated Reading and Cultural Mobility, by Brigitta Olubus:
http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.p
‘At Home in More Than One Place’: Cosmopolitanism in the work of Shirley Hazzard, by Brigitta Olubus:
http://www.australianbookreview.com.au/f
Shirley Hazzard, The Art of Fiction #185, The Paris Review:
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5
New Yorker Bookclub discusses The Transit of Venus (with spoilers):
http://downloads.newyorker.com/site/book
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
This Tuesday, I’m tooting in Alan Baxter’s Tuesday Toots series, waxing lyrical about my book, BAD POWER, from Twelfth Planet Press.
Last Tuesday, I was at Lisa L. Hannett’s blog doing some Tuesday Therapy.
Tuesdays, eh? Pretty interesting days.
Speaking of therapy, I’ve accidentally come across some brilliant advice lately, in one of those ‘synchronicity’ kinda ways where the universe kinda pokes a hole into your life and fills it up with exactly what you’ve been needing even if you haven’t realised you’ve been needing it. Here’s some:
First, Good and Bad Procrastination
Says Paul Graham in the above article, “Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you’re not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.
There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I’d argue, is good procrastination.”
Next, & linked from above, Richard Hamming on You and Your Research
Hamming says, “In order to get at you individually, I must talk in the first person. I have to get you to drop modesty and say to yourself, “Yes, I would like to do first-class work.” Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You’re not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that’s a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn’t you set out to do something significant. You don’t have to tell other people, but shouldn’t you say to yourself, “Yes, I would like to do something significant.””
And then, Gretchen Rubin from The Happiness Project on Problem with Procrastination? Try This: Do Nothing.
Rubin says, “This rule was inspired by the habits of writer Raymond Chandler. Chandler set aside at least four hours each day for writing; he didn’t force himself to write, but he didn’t let himself do anything else. He wouldn’t let himself read, write letters, write checks—nothing. He summed up: “Two very simple rules, a. you don’t have to write. b. you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.””
Also some reassuring words from successful writer Jeff Vandermeer: Panic Attack: Understanding your Work Cycles.
“So I think I’m only just beginning to see the complete outline of my long-term work cycle, obscured in part by the pattern of publication, not creation, of my prior novels. It may seem odd to not have recognized this, considering I’m 43 and been writing for three decades, but sometimes you need to take a step back to really see everything clearly.”
Finally, a comment from Ira Glass for beginner writers: Ira Glass on Storytelling.
It’s a video, so I can only paraphrase: when you begin, your taste is greater than your ability. As you practice, you close that gap. And I think it’s true, a lot of people must give up in that first bit when your story just isn’t as good as the story you had in your head when you started. I sure struggled with that. Still do, but not in the same way.
‘Nuff advice for the day, eh?!
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
Going back to my 18-December post, I wrote:
That is a very low goal indeed. And I have to say that though I am minimising my expenses, I am STILL, somehow, buying books.
So far this year I’ve reviewed 3 books out of the four I’ve read:
- The Spare Room, Helen Garner
- Cliffs of Fall: And Other Stories, Shirley Hazzard
- Liar, Justine Larbalestier (can’t review friends’ books, sorry!)
- The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard
I have to read 2 more books in order to meet my goal. Which really is a sad goal indeed, I’m kinda embarrassed by it now. And I’ve bought another oh, half dozen books by Australian women writers. So there’ll be plenty more reading & reviewing in 2012!
Onward.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
It’s taken me a long time to write this review, mainly because I became aware of how negative it was becoming.
But THE TRANSIT OF VENUS is a marvellous book, a literary love story which ponders beauty and time, and is written with Hazzard’s trademarked sharp, searing prose. Hazzard offers up deceptively tiny moments which come to define her characters and stories later on, and reward careful reading and re-reading (and I will likely re-read this book, despite having re-read about 3 books in my life). Later in the novel you will often find yourself struck dumb by her foresight, having mistaken her verisimilitude for reality, but a more beautiful and meaningful reality than you yourself had so far had access to. There is something painfully sensitive about Shirley Hazzard’s writing, and I love it.
Take for example, the defining piece of writing about Ted Tice, which occurs on page 16 of a 335-page novel.
““His story has such nobility you can scarcely call it unsuccessful.” Ted Tice was honouring the faith, not the failure.”
You will not understand, when you first read this, that the same can be said about Ted. Not until the final pages. And then you’ll be tempted to call him a failure anyhow, for holding something as old-fashioned as faith. But you won’t be able to. Because over 300 pages ago, Hazzard corrected you. And in the end, briefly, Ted Tice’s faith is indeed honoured. Just a little. Just enough to make you admire him and feel sad for him, and wish he’d let the world corrupt him as the world so often does.
Also (more grimly) enjoyable are Hazzard’s sly asides about Australia, a place whose “history soon terminated in its unsuccess” (page 32), a place perhaps unable to offer up “the full prestige of green” (page 26). A place, you end up thinking, that feels like the past for Hazzard, that lacks the future-promise of America where her protagonist winds up.
As to the bad: as someone forty years younger than Hazzard, I admit some of her ‘olde worldeness’ made me uncomfortable. Her description, for example, of “the men with their assertions great and small, the women all submission or dominion” (age 84, yes I really did bookmark all these precise, efficient pieces of prose). And it’s true that Hazzard’s men are often cold and full of bluster, and her women are such passive little things you want to wring their slender necks. When heroine, Caroline Bell, asserts that her true capability may be ‘to love’ (I didn’t bookmark the page: it annoyed me too much), I wondered what she meant. I would have thought her true capability, from the evidence of her behaviour, was to do pretty close to nothing, and let the world act on her, and then feel sort of melancholic about it.
But then you have these wonderful moments, such as this, when a woman confronts a man. “In a long pause he was made to feel her superior strength, and the fact that she had been withholding it for years out of charity” (page 193). And you find yourself, after you finish the book, missing that marvellous, eye-opening and surprising prose with its intelligent humour, its fierce wit.
Because this is where we get to the real ‘bad’ of Transit of Venus, and I’m afraid it’s Caroline Bell, that milksop of a heroine who takes up far too much of the book even though at the beginning it holds out hope of being some kind of ensemble piece (it’s not; it’s mainly about Caroline Bell). I keep calling her Caroline Bell, of course, but in the book she’s more often called Caro, a discordant abbreviation that left me seething. Was it some kind of mistaken ‘Australianism’, a play on the idea we all shorten our names? Because no one calls a Caroline ‘Caro’ instead of ‘Carol’. Just saying.
But no. My frustration drove me to Googling, and I found that Caro is latin for ‘flesh’. (Or ‘meat’ or ‘meat eater’, both of which suit her better.) By this reasoning, then, Caro is flesh while her far more likeable sister Grace is spirit. By extension, Caro is the sister ‘of the body’, the sensual sister, the woman in the text who signifies flesh and the act of love, and of loving.
Which drives me mad. Because it seems to me that any sensual woman ‘of the flesh’ would not be so numbingly placid as Caro (gah! Caro!) Bell. That any woman capable of love – romantic love – would also, surely, enjoy sex. She might even experience orgasm. And this is where it comes crashing down, for me, because I cannot imagine our wan little Caro Bell, in her bloody blue dresses, orgasming. Even though she has sex throughout the book, I’m sure she is capable only of a sigh and a melancholic turning away, and then some ridiculous assertion that her ‘capability is to love’. Not ‘to come’.
But perhaps Hazzard didn’t mean ‘flesh’. Caro can also mean ‘dear’ or ‘darling’, which might make better sense, since Caro is obviously dear to Shirley Hazzard (not so much to me, though). And when Caro is dropped into the world’s most miserable relationship with one of the world’s most miserable men, you can’t help but feel Hazzard’s sympathy for her dear Carol. Sorry, Caro. You can’t help feeling it, and marvelling at Hazzard’s authorial cruelty to have put Caro there in the first place. And when poor, old Caro is surprised by her lover on an evening walk, and reacts with something like fear, and Hazzard steps in to curse the fates that pulled these two, agonised lovers together yet again – when that happened I, of course, more astutely cursed Shirley Hazzard.
But I still bought three more of her books. Because I know a Maestro when I read one.
This review is part of the AWWC2012 challenge & is cross posted on Goodreads.com.
NANOWRIMO always sounded like such a fun idea, but I'm always too busy (& usually travelling) in November to take part. So for the last several years, January haws been my personal NANOWRIMO for one.
My previous record was around 36,000 words in a month (NANOWRIMO aims for 50,000 words), so, I can't claim to be a seasoned practitioner of the 'many words, one month' school. But this January, having thrown off the shackles of the day job in a way that suggests a certain delicious finality, I wrote 80,000 words. Or, more specifically 79,951 words. In 31 days.
Here's how:
1. Quit your job.
What?
Oh, ok, disclaimer: I never said the process was going to be a financially responsible or sensible one.
(Note: writers should never quit their jobs. No one makes money from writing anymore. In fact, you should probably stop reading this post now & step awaaaaay from the crazy lady's blog.)
2. Put off as many other commitments as you can.
Buy some TV dinners. Put your phone in a drawer. Set up an iTunes playlist &/or make sure to have a whole bunch of familiar TV on hand for background noise. It's a good time to start watching CRIMINAL MINDS again from the beginning if you like that sort of thing, or something else you're largely pretty familiar with. Don't answer the door. Postpone your socialising for 4 weeks. Tell everyone this is 'novel writing month' & you can't respond to their emails until February.
Do whatever else it takes to open up as many hours as possible in your life. Except, don't quit on sleep. You'll need it.
3. Memorise this TEDx video featuring Elizabeth Gilbert discussing creativity.
And then, every day follow her advice to just damn well show up. Gilbert has changed my entire approach to writing, & maybe she'll work for you, too. Go on, watch it again.
4. Work on a story that's been nagging at you for years, but that you haven't had the time & energy - or courage - to address.
You've been telling yourself this story for years, you may have even mentioned it to a couple of friends. All the while, your subconscious has been clamping down, squeezing the story, transforming it from a grain of sand to a hard, perfect pearl which you will now spit out onto the screen or page.
This is another of those very personal steps that I 'got lucky' with this January, but any nagging, important story will probably feel the same. Don't think you have to wait years before you begin to tell it!
5. Don't set out to write 80,000 words.
Just tell yourself, sincerely, that you're here to beat your previous January best. Aim for something more like 40,000 words, say, or 10,000. Whatever is a challenge for you - but a challenge you at least have a chance of achieving. Be delighted when it becomes obvious you'll be hitting your goal about 2 weeks into your writing month.
Make a new goal, but don't forget to celebrate hitting that first one.
6. Set a low daily word count goal.
I aimed for 879 words a day, since I based this exercise on previous experience & thought an 80,000 word draft would take me something more like 3 months (80,000 divided by 3 months is 879 words, about).
I failed to meet this word count exactly four times in the month. Some of those days were spent thinking & plotting instead, which still contributed to the story. Some days were just difficult. But each day I set out to meet that goal afresh.
Having a low word count meant it almost always felt achievable.
But even when it proved to be unachievable, I didn't waste time beating myself up about it. I needed my energy for writing!
Remember, also, that January was about generating words. It wasn't about editing or perfecting. It was about telling the story.
7. Record your progress.
I kept a spreadsheet where I recorded my cumulative & daily totals & compared it to my daily word goal. I can now look back & notice that my biggest word-generating day was Friday 6-January, when I wrote 4,749 words. But on Tuesday 17-January I wrote only 297 words (I even made a daily word count graph). My average was 2,579 words daily.
The word count logbook makes me feel proud every damn time I look at it.
8. Work to an outline.
OK, this contradicts the 'No Plot? No Problem' ethos of NANOWRIMO, but I've discovered without an outline I can fall into cliche and worse, writerly boredom. I need something to aim at and something to keep myself on course.
I had an outline which I started work on during my first week. That means my first few writing days were just free-form, trying to work out the character & direction. After that, I started outlining. I kept that outline open on the desk beside me as I worked, ticking off the scenes as I progressed. (It became another great way to record my progress, & to check that my 80,000 word goal was realistic. When I hit my middle scene at almost exactly 40,000 words, I figured my planning & progress were on track.)
The next step will appear to contradict this advice, btw.
9. Don't force yourself to work to the outline.
Yes, that's right.
Are you okay? Do you need to lie down?
What I mean by steps 8 & 9 is this: have an outline, but don't feel feel obliged to write only that, or exactly that. Where the outline came in handy was on the days where I sat down, blank-minded, & tried to work out what the hell to do next. I could check the outline, cross out scenes that were no longer relevant, recognise the scenes I'd added in new - and, most importantly, I could identify events from the outline that the novel needed in order to meet its ending. Sometimes, I added those scenes in next. Sometimes I wrote them even though I hadn't yet worked out how to get from where I was to where that scene occurred. Then I could go back & add in the bridging scenes over the next day or days.
Mostly, though, I wrote the novel in order. I've no idea if this helped or not, but it made sure I didn't try to skip any scenes (if you're trying to avoid scenes, your readers will probably want to avoid them, too).
And, finally:
10. Be kind to yourself.
Don't expect your best performance every day (remember what Elizabeth Gilbert says!). Some days you'll be tired even though you've eliminated the day job or cut out all other commitments. Some days you'll be disappointed with yourself. Sometimes you really will have to take time out for your physical and mental well-being and just have a damn good lie-down. Sometimes you'll feel depressed about how you've sabotaged your finances. Some days you'll find yourself napping even though you were perfectly wide awake a minute ago.
And some days you won't be able to face the page until late in the day or evening, and you'll wonder what happened to the rest of the day. All of that is OK. Don't beat yourself up about it. Just take the time out that you need, safe in the knowledge that though you're resting, your subconscious isn't. And then show up again the next day, aiming to hit your daily word count goal.
Also be prepared for the fact your NEXT month of writing will probably not be as prolific. :)
Because, of course, some days will be everything you hoped they'd be: absolutely wonderful and brilliant and liberating. And you'll be glad you took the plunge.
"Leap and the net will appear."
- Zen saying
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
If only I could write every day. I look back to the far-off time when I did so, mostly early morning and then late in the day. I do write in my head every day–I’m tempted to say all the time. One does instinctively reserve a part of oneself as the writing self, visiting it secretly while doing and saying all the daily things. I envy writers who feel compelled to write–John Updike, for instance–who are overflowing into reviews and articles and lectures. I have rarely felt that way–only when I was first writing, one short story after another, even though I had my bureaucratic job then, still full-time. Mostly I have to goad myself to it. And these days I’m beset by so many interruptions and by a sense of obligation. And there are the precious pleasures. It is hard to do. Yet one is never happy unless one is doing it.
- Shirley Hazzard, The Art of Fiction #185, The Paris Review.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
(Spoiler alert.)
IN THE LAND OF WOMEN is a great film with a title bad enough to be a novel title. Yeah, I’ve said it.
Actually & tangentially, I once started putting together a list of ‘best movies with the worst titles, in history’ but it turned out to be mostly movies based on novels, & so I had to retire the list out of fellow-feeling for my writer colleagues. But if I still had that list, IN THE LAND OF WOMEN would be at the top of it.
The movie starts with a rather writerly, unrealistic introduction where our protagonist is cries silently while his girlfriend breaks up with him. If you can stand the Juno-esque cutesyness of that, the rest of the movie is lovely & smart & bittersweet – the latter being my favourite style of movie or book.
As another aside, I’ve been trying to come up with a word that means ‘so cute it’s kinda grotesque, but not in any kind of satisfying way like Mark Ryden or the recent Cute & Creepy exhibition at Florida’s Museum of Fine Arts’. Cutesque just doesn’t seem to cut it, because it still implies there’s something kinda cool about the cuteness. Or, you know, I could probably just stick to ‘schmaltzy’.
ANYHOW, I’m circling around this, because it’s hard to pinpoint just one moment given the smoothness of the film, the way the moments are drawn out, often revealing both humour and sadness (like when protagonist Carter tells his mother that his girlfriend has left him & she responds with a tearful, “She’s so beautiful, she’s so funny and great!” before remembering to add, “Oh, Carter, how are you doing?”). And it’s hard to pinpoint one moment because, frankly, there are so many. This is a character-driven film. Almost EVERYONE in the film gets a great moment.
But given my previous, almost random criteria that a great character moment should also change the character’s motivation, should propel the character into a new direction (& a new Act), I figure the best character moment here must be the moment Carter decides to leave LA with its busted romance & it’s shitty day job (I’d mention what that day job is here, but I get enough spam as it is) & head to Detroit (okay, he writes soft-core p0rn) to look after his crazy Grandmother whose latest paranoid claim is that she’s dying.
In this filmic moment, then, Carter’s mother is still attempting the belated comfort, reassuring Carter that he’ll meet a really great girl one day. And Carter says, ”I don’t want to meet a really great girl. I don’t want to meet anyone, I just want to be alone with my Gramma. And her cat.”
Which launches the next Act of the film and underlines the main theme: the impossibility of being alone.
Of course, his first discovery on reaching Detroit is that the cat is already dead. Welcome to the rest of your stay in Detroit, Carter Webb.
IN THE LAND OF WOMEN, starring
- Adam Brody (warmly likeable; from The OC, apparently)
- Meg Ryan (in an emotional role somewhat compromised by a little too much botox pre-filming, which is a crying shame – a crying, crying shame!)
- Olympia Dukakis (absolutely hilarious! I bet this was the best fun she’s ever had acting & with most of her clothes on) and
- Kristen Stewart (in her pre-Twilight days when she was just a super-talented young actor)
Oh, just watch it!
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
Matthew Powell, for his answer to the question, “If you had a superpower, what would it be?”:
I would like the power to write competition-winning entries just by blinking, because {blink}.
Damn.
What? It’s funny! Also ironic, because he did win. See?
Email me your address, Matthew, for a signed copy of BAD POWER.
And, thanks, everyone for playing!
“One of us is in prison.”
“Both of us, as it happens.”
“Yeah? What’d you do, Sheriff, land you in here with me?”
“I was the fool put on this badge.”
“They lock you up for that? This place has a temper.”
“You only just now working that out?”
- Titular story from BAD POWER
She calls herself ‘Bad’, hides out as a man and a regular human being, but she has the power to control people. If she could control more than one person at a time, she wouldn’t be in this mess. But when she’s kidnapped by bandits and forced to do their bidding, she withers around her pregnant belly, relying for her escape on a promise she extracted from a Sheriff in a town whose name she doesn’t recall. If her son’s ever born, she’ll call him Maxillius and tell him this story. But it’s fifty-fifty either one of them will live.
(P.S. If you’d still like a copy of BAD POWER, it’s available via Twelfth Planet Press & several good bookstores.)
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
Last reminder! Win a copy of BAD POWER today by answering the question:
“If you had a superpower, what would it be – and why?”
Answers in the comments or via email deborahb AT livejournal DOT com. Competition closes in about 24 hours!
But if you prefer to buy your copies, BAD POWER is available via Twelfth Planet Press & several good bookstores.
“Don’t let your father ruin you.”
“Mum? Wow. He’s dead, for chrissake.”
“My point, exactly. How about you go sleep it off, Matthew. Seeing you like this, people will talk.”
“That’s the problem. That’s the problem, they talk. They never stop talking.”
- Web of Lies, BAD POWER
Matthew Webb has been hearing things for years, ever since the disappearance of that homeless woman who’d stalked him. His father has kept him comfortably numbed against the voices in his head with a prescriptive chemical padding. But when his father dies, his mother takes over and she’s got plans for him.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
A reminder that you, too, can win a copy of BAD POWER by answering the question:
“If you had a superpower, what would it be – and why?”
Answers in the comments or via email deborahb AT livejournal DOT com. Competition open until the end of the week!
And if you prefer to buy your copies, BAD POWER is available via Twelfth Planet Press & several good bookstores.
“She told me my future.”
“What was it?”
“In the words of Dorothy Parker-”
“I know. No one gets a happy ending.”
“You want to hear something really creepy, you should ask her what she sees in her own future.”
- “Palming the Lady”, BAD POWER
Detective Palmer is called to the home of Matthew Webb, an anxious young medical student who claims he’s being stalked by a homeless woman. When Palmer takes the nameless woman in, she finds she has an uncanny ability to tell the future. By the time Palmer unravels the truth about so-called ‘Mad Mary’, Palmer herself must confront the devastating future that Mary has left her – a future where the only forgiveness available to her will be her own.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
I woke up to a Twitterverse full of book industry talk.
a) “All sorts of middle-class folks agree with the billionaire owners of sports teams that the millionaire players make too much money.” Good point, Sherman Alexie. Some interesting questions raised here about the effect of the current eReader gold rush on culture, especially for poor kids, in: Sherman Alexie Clarifies “Elitist” Charges
b) Avid book readers (more than 10 books/year) make up 30% of the US population, or 70 million people, with the biggest proportion of those readers being 45-55 year old women. This presentation from the Digital Book World Conference on 25-January goes on to discuss book buying behaviour & why a ‘diversified retail ecosystem’ is important (because buyers want it). Plus, the influence of eReaders & customer preferences on eReader and eBook price points. And did you know that eBook purchases, in order of most % purchased, fall into these categories:
- General Fiction
- Mystery
- History
- Fantasy/SF
Eh? I always thought F/SF was first on the list, not fourth. But nope, general fiction reads outrank all other types. More in the Verso Digital 2011 Survey of Book-Buying Behaviour. Very interesting reading.
c) The Guardian annoyed me yesterday with an article on ‘lady writers’ and their new taste for horror (the dears), but today I find Ewan Morrison discussing The Self-ePublishing Bubble as a temporary phenomenon akin to the dot com bubble that caught a lot of people out (remember that? A handful of people got rich, a much bigger group of people went broke, & the world kept turning). Says Morrison, “I, for one, could never have guessed that writing about the end of books would generate more income for me than actually publishing the damn things.”
And here’s an interesting comment from Morrison, “Take for example digital guru, free culture activist (former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) and author Cory Doctorow - an SF celebrity and aggressive exponent of self-epublishing who gives his books away for free under a creative commons license (with optional payment). It turns out that Doctorow isn’t just any old novelist: the subjects he and his characters talk about are file sharing, the digital revolution, digital rights management and the oppressive old gatekeepers of the mainstream. His kudos comes from the fact that we are in a transitional period in which “free digital culture” is still an issue. Ironically, if and when self-epublishing becomes the norm, his subject matter will no longer seem so radical and no doubt his reader base will diminish.”
Ouch. Better invest in some diversified shares, Cory.
d) But if you get into the bubble quickly enough, maybe you, too, can do what Amanda Hocking did in this self-explanatory entitled (Guardian) article: Amanda Hocking, the Writer Who Made Millions by Self-Publishing Online.
e) Jonathan Franzen won my vote in one of his articles when he argued for ‘the protection of public spaces’ from the intrusion of those banal conversations that happen whenever someone answers a mobil/cell phone on the bus & begins with ‘I’m on the bus’. Here he argues that serious readers will always prefer paper books to eBooks, in Jonathan Franzen warns eBooks are Corroding Values from our friends at, yes, the Guardian. Hmm, I’m not convinced. Most paper books don’t come with a Search option (or Index), for starters…
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
A bunch of BAD POWER review copies arrived today & in celebration I’m giving away a copy to the best answer to the question:
“If you had a superpower, what would it be – and why?”
Answers in the comments or via email deborahb AT livejournal DOT com. Competition open until the end of the week!
And if you prefer to buy your copies, BAD POWER is available via Twelfth Planet Press & several good bookstores.
“There are two kinds of people with lawyers on tap, Mr Grey. The powerful and the corrupt.”
“Thank you.”
“For implying you’re powerful?”
“For imagining those are two different groups.”
- “Shades of Grey”, BAD POWER
Esser Grey is a rich and powerful man who has discovered, despite the world’s attempts to soften its edges for him, that one power eludes him: he cannot die. He sets out to divert the unwanted miracle through suicide and, when that doesn’t work, through murder. Along the way he meets Detective Palmer, the first person not only to acknowledge his miracle, but also his humanity.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
Here’s a quick round-up of some of the articles I’ve been reading on the whole ‘book industry’ future panic that’s going on. Mostly as a result of Amazon’s move into publishing. Which is the kind of smart capitalist move that makes a worldwide centralised marketplace so worrying. What’s Amazon worth, again – about USD$88 billion, isn’t it?
Sounds like another ‘accidental empires’ in the making. Can’t wait to read the book (she said, wryly).
The Bookstore’s Last Stand: Barnes & Nobel taking on Amazon in the fight of is life.
Amazon’s Hit Man: Larry Kirshbaum was the ultimate book industry insider – until Amazon called.
Confessions of a Publisher: “We’re in Amazon’s sights and They’re Going to Kill Us”
Ok, this next one is about television, but I still find it interesting in terms of organised fandom:
Farewell to an Unlikely Hero: Why ‘Chuck’ Packed Such a Potent Punch
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
“Elizabeth got used to the sound of her own laughter, which she had at first found faintly improper.”
(From “Cliffs of Fall”.)
Ugh, I hate reviewing Shirley Hazzard’s CLIFFS OF FALL. What words can be used to describe such beautiful, lyrical, bittersweet, intelligent writing? Better, surely, to just read the words themselves. And I think you should, you should really read CLIFFS OF FALL because it is sad and beautiful and bittersweet, and Shirley Hazzard *should be more read*. She even made me want to use phrases like ‘our Shirley Hazzard’ or ‘one of Australia’s best exports’, taking refuge in cliche to hide from the dazzling brilliance of her writing. I’m so glad she’s written this book, this collection of, well, not even short stories, but of *moments*, sparkling moments chipped from a colossal diamond that Hazzard probably keeps in her apartment. (I’m not sure which apartment, either the one in New York or the one in Capri. A citizen of the world, she was born in Australia.)
There are themes uniting Hazzard’s works: yearning and sadness, maturity, society, femininity, duty. Relationships. What is said and what it means. What is not said.
None of which would have attracted me to the collection, I admit, unless someone I respected had told me, “Shirley Hazzard is one of the best short story writers working today.” So I will just say to you: Shirley Hazzard is one of the best short story writers working today. But, again, be aware she’s not dealing in narrative. She’s dealing in moment. In emotion, finely expressed and exquisitely, attentively observed.
Some motifs return, such as the aloof male partner, the “meekly attentive” female partner (description quoted from “In One’s Own House”), the social expectations surrounding them from his mother to the people they were at the party with. And there is so much careful detail, almost casually presented, that you have the sense you are there, I mean, really *there* in the 1950s/60s, in an elegant house wearing elegant clothes and swapping witticisms with dreadfully refined men and women at an exquisite ‘do’, while Hazzard’s characters give controlled smiles to everyone they meet (while secretly harbouring complex emotions and reactions which would have them turfed from said party if they dared speak them out loud).
I thought at first Hazzard’s greatest power was the remarkable balance and efficiency of her prose, the moments of sly wit. Lines like this:
“He linked across the lock a small gilt chain in which May had complete confidence.”
(From “A Place in the Country”.)
Doesn’t that just say it all? A security chain on the back of the door, a slight measure in which most of us have ‘complete confidence’. Except it doesn’t. It doesn’t say it all. Because then I realised that the real power of this sentence on its own isn’t felt, that the true impact is not from the innate wryness of tone but relies on it’s equally balanced and efficient context. Because the ‘he’ in that sentence is May’s husband. And the reason May’s confidence is so very ironic is because the true danger in the story doesn’t come from without. It’s already inside, as May’s husband locks the door against social judgement and resumes the affair he’s been having with May’s young cousin.
*Now* read that sentence, & see how much power and meaning Hazzard has packed into it:
“He linked across the lock a small gilt chain in which May had complete confidence.”
Are you thinking ‘poor May’? Let me assure you, that’s because you haven’t met her. Or maybe it’s because you read all the way to the end, because by then Hazzard has given you enough insight into every character that you will find yourself warming to the cold, methodical May in ways you hadn’t anticipated. And she’ll do that, again, in a sentence.
I admit that Hazzard’s characters have a sameness of affect (or even effect), so much so it’s occasionally hard to tell one long-suffering woman from another, or one intelligent-but-emotionall-distant man from another. But the pace of the pitch-perfect prose is enough to keep you reading, and the fact, again, that the stories are *moments* means in the end they feel as if they might even add up to one story, one set of circumstances for one set of characters – an observation that is only obvious when the stories are collected together in this one, slim volume.
Which I strongly urge you to read.
“For the fact was that they were not really suited to one another, which he would have discovered if he had ever tried to understand her properly.”
(From “The Picnic”.)
- Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief‘
This review is part of the AWWC2012 challenge & is cross posted on Goodreads.com.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
(With SPOILERS)
BOURNE IDENTITY has so much to recommend it: it’s an action movie, an amnesia story (gosh, but I love amnesia stories) set in some of the more stunning parts of Europe, & it’s the movie where Matt Damon discovered he could be an action hero. Or, as Bourne has often been described, ‘the thinking woman’s action hero’. On top of this, it has the much under utilised Franka Potente, who is simply stunning on film, a mix of vulnerability and fortitude.
The moment I love most in BOURNE, though, is after Damon’s character – still nameless – is trying to sleep on a park bench and is disturbed by police asking for his papers. Sleepily, he starts to tell them he doesn’t have papers. Then he tells them in German and there’s a spark, a beginning of a recognition that ‘heck, I’m speaking German, wtf?’.
But it’s the next moment that the film turns, that we go from Act 1 hurtling into Act 2. Because one of the police goes to prod Damon’s character with a nightstick, and Damon grabs it. Right then you can see it in his eyes: realisation. Of what, he’s not sure. But he’s just shifted from a kind of bumbling, confused amnesiac with no sense of purpose, to having a strong purpose: to find out who in heck he is. THAT is the moment, the turn, the new Act, when the character’s motivation changes*. THAT is the making of a good Act, with each successive Act turning on the point when a character’s motivation is changed.
As I mentally meander through these great character moments on film, it occurs to me that film is great at establishing that second act via what McKee would name the ‘call to action’. But a third or fourth act is harder to spot. Perhaps once launched on a path, a character doesn’t alter their motivation as much as fine-tune it. Perhaps the third act is not motivated as often by a realisation as by something else. Perhaps a failure to succeed, or a well-earned discovery. (Anyone have any ideas on this one?)
I have a screenplay-writing friend who often asserts that movies today lack a third act. I’m beginning to think that’s because of the lack of any change in direction of character motivation.
- The second in a random series of Great Character Moments in Film. You’re welcome to nominate your own in the comments!
—-
* The idea that a new act is launched by a change in protagonist motivation is – you won’t be surprised to discover – an idea from Robert McKee’s teachings that I’m exploring.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
(With SPOILERS)
I just love the turn in SIXTEEN BLOCKS, the moment Bruce Willis goes from drunk deadbeat cop to hero. The entire movie spins on that point and even the camera spins, giving us Willis’s grim, slack face and his suddenly sharp & sober eyes. And he looks around, at the new world he’s just created. And he *runs*.
And of course, as the movie progresses you realise the Willis character, who everyone figured for a fck-up, was *chosen* for his job for that very reason. Because he was a fck-up, and nobody expected him to succeed. So they gave him the job they didn’t want him to succeed on. And he’s cannon fodder, kiddo, he’s completely expendable. And we learn that as Willis realises it, too. And then he’s given that option: ‘keep fucking up and live, or choose something else – and risk dying’.
We know it’s Bruce Willis, so we know what he’s likely to choose. But the case is put so compellingly that even we, the audience, has to think, ‘hmm, maybe take the low road on this one, Bruce’. Even we momentarily forget that the life Willis has been living so far doesn’t look like much a life, doesn’t look like it’s worth saving. “Life’s too long,” Willis says a few minutes before the first turn – the first ‘call to action’, as McKee would call it. Life’s too long. And eventually, Willis obviously realises, ‘THIS life is too long, THIS life is worth risking’.
The only thing I’d change about that decision moment is I’d make the Mos Def character – the character needing to make it the sixteen blocks to the court house – I’d make him less likeable initially. So we wouldn’t be thinking, ‘aw, Bruce, don’t give up on Mos Def, he’s adorable’. I’d make Mos Def truly irritating, so even the expendable Willis character would think, ‘THAT’S the guy that’s expendable’.
- The first in a random series of Great Character Moments in Film. You’re welcome to nominate your own in the comments!
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
Brilliant! Via Matt Cheney’s post at The Mumpsimus, which links to Lilli Loofbourow’s post at The Hairpin on the book ARE WOMEN PEOPLE? by Alice Duer Miller comes, eventually, this poem:
Women (With rather insincere apologies to Mr. Rudyard Kipling.)
I went to ask my government
if they would set me free,
They gave a pardoned crook a vote,
but hadn’t one for me;
The men about me laughed and frowned
and said: “Go home, because
We really can’t be bothered
when we’re busy making laws.”
Oh, it’s women this, and women that and women have no sense,
But it’s pay your taxes promptly when it comes to the expense,
It comes to the expense, my dears, it comes to the expense,
It’s pay your taxes promptly when it comes to the expense.
I went into a factory
to earn my daily bread:
Men said: “The home is woman’s sphere.”
“I have no home,” I said.
But when the men all marched to war,
they cried to wife and maid,
“Oh, never mind about the home,
but save the export trade.”
For it’s women this and women that, and home’s the place for you,
But it’s patriotic angels when there’s outside work to do,
There’s outside work to do, my dears, there’s outside work to do,
It’s patriotic angels when there’s outside work to do.
We are not really senseless,
and we are not angels, too,
But very human beings,
human just as much as you.
It’s hard upon occasions
to be forceful and sublime
When you’re treated as incompetents
three-quarters of the time.
But it’s women this and women that, and woman’s like a hen,
But it’s do the country’s work alone, when war takes off the men,
And it’s women this and women that and everything you please,
But woman is observant, and be sure that woman sees.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
… closes today! There are 688 entrants, but only two winners.
Will YOU be one of those winners?
Not if you haven’t entered, you won’t. C’mon, be part of history, win a book!
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
So I took a few months off to do some writing. I’ve done this before, but I don’t think I’ve ever *needed* to do this as much as I needed to do it right now, this year. I’d spent a lot of time in recent years feeling inauthentic, shall we say. It’s good for my mortgage, but it drove me a little crazy. I do distinctly remember two thoughts hitting me last year:
1) the next idiot who says something really stupid to me will get a slap upside the head, I don’t care WHO it is; and
2) oh, gee, an ad for a sandwich hand. Sandwich hand. Hmmm. That sounds really interesting.
These are not good thoughts to have.
But taking time off to write a novel WAS a good thought, & I’m powering through the first draft of a novel that’s been haunting me for a couple years, which was inspired by a billboard ad about 15 years ago. I can’t, even now, explain what the relationship was between that billboard ad (which I think was for a hardware store) and the idea that leapt into my head as I sat in a slow-moving bus on a nastily bright day. I just remember thinking, ‘hey, wouldn’t it be cool if …’ And so on.
It does mean I’ve put aside my other novel for a time that I’ve been working on for over four years, on account of being bored to death with it. I may or may not bring that one out of retirement and have at it with metaphorical scissors. Or, real scissors, since it sits in a real, physical pile on a shelf just above and to the right of my head. (I moved it to the right because I was certain it was looking to fall on me. It is a spiteful thing.)
But for now, having a new novel is like having a new romance: you’re enraptured but cautious, addicted but convinced of impending hurt. I have 50% of the words I planned for this novel already (well, 57%, but you need a bit of fat so you can feel the satisfaction of trimming it later) & I started this caper exactly 17 days ago.
Amusingly, since writing the novel is taking up all the time I would have spent in a full-time job, I’m STILL not getting onto all those other projects I thought I would be able to wrap up during my time off. Like, my taxes.
I should really get onto that.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
I’m cross-posting my first goodreads review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012. I read Helen Garner’s THE SPARE ROOM in a couple of days, having left it on my ‘to read’ list for far too long. And, look, I admit up-front that I admired it more than I liked it:
“A brutal, honest look at a friendship pushed to the limits by one woman’s failure to accept her terminal illness or the effects of that illness on her family & friends. It’s also the study of a narcissist, Nicola, equal parts selfish & fascinating, as observed by her angry friend, Helen.
Garner’s prose is hard-edged, occasionally stark, & sometimes oddly melodramatic. She doesn’t just sit in a chair, she ‘dives’ for a chair, she doesn’t hand over a bottle of juice, she ‘thrusts’ it into her friend’s hand. So many strange verb choices that symbolise, I think, the energetic rage of the central character.
Garner’s strength is to keep us reading even when we can’t find a single likeable character in the book. She is a keen observer of the domestic horror of an ordinary life during extraordinary events, & her character are almost all more or less monsters in an untamed landscape. During moments of potential pathos, Garner’s characters have an unusual tendency to suddenly admire a red vase on a windowsill, or ‘dive’ for a pair of shears in order to trim a friend’s rosebush.
Ultimately, my conclusion was that this is an admirable book, & left me with a feeling akin to what the ‘Helen’ of the narrative felt for her friend Nicola: compulsion, repulsion, tenderness, and a pressing need to rush through to the ending.
(Note: This is my first entry in the Australian Women Writers Challenge for 2012.)”
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
Yesterday was Day One of the Australian Women Writers Challenge for 2012 – & the day I commenced with Helen Garner’s THE SPARE ROOM.
I’ve been meaning to read this for a long while: I loved THE CHILDREN’S BACK in the eighties as a gritty & honest look at motherhood & relationships, but then I lost faith in Garner over the whole THE FIRST STONE incident, where she criticised women students for accusations of sexual misconduct directed at a university lecturer. As a recent graduate at the time, well aware of some departmental reputations that had been ‘questionable’, I put Garner on the ‘enemy’ pile.
Last year a friend talked me into trying THE SPARE ROOM, so after a 20-year hiatus, I’m opening my mind up to Garner’s torturous realism yet again. Let’s see how I go, eh?
I’m taking the Australian Women Writers Challenge in 2012.
I’m a Dabbler (according to the rules: more than one genre), & I’m aiming at the Miles challenge level (read 6 & review 3 books by Australian women). It’s a kinda modest number, but the challenge contradicts an earlier rule I’d laid down to minimise expenses next year. And – weird, I know – that includes minimising book buying!
So I’ll be starting by scouring the mountains of To Be Read books I own. Already without moving, I can see Adrienne Ferriera‘s WATERCOLOURS and Caroline Overington‘s GHOST CHILD waiting to be read. I’m pretty sure I have a copy of Joan Lindsay‘s PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (minus the controversial ‘final chapter’) someplace. And of course that’s not counting all the shiny TWELVE PLANETS coming out. I’m also going to use the excuse to read some more Australian women crime writers (the Sisters in Crime site will hopefully help me out). And I *might* just use some of my frugal funding to find out if there’s any Dorothy Porter I haven’t yet read.
So that should cover genre, mainstream, poetry, and crime. Hmmm, what have I missed?
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
Man, I love giveaways – especially giveaways from Goodreads. My book, BAD POWER (which is now, apparently, a Real Book) is now available as a giveaway. Enter to win.
And if you don’t win, you can still buy it direct from the publisher at Twelfth Planet Press.
In other news, the non-Amazon version of CLOCKWORK PHOENIX #1 is available from Weightless Books. $USD3.99. Worth it for the Cat Valente story alone.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
I’m back!
WFC was great, Peter Beagle was absolutely charming, & the Mexican food was exceptional – especially at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, where I was lucky enough to spend an evening with editor Danel Olson & some of the writers from TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY GOTHIC.
AND bunch of stuff happened back home in my absence. F’instance:
- BAD POWER is available for order. BAD POWER is my second short story collection, & I’m really proud of it. It’s also the first collection from World Fantasy Award-winning Ms Alisa Krasnostein of Twelve Planets Press since winning her first World Fantasy Award (well, I think it’s the first collection since October – I didn’t really check that), it also features an awesome cover by Amanda Rainey & an intro by the inimitable Ann Vandermeer.
- Excerpts from BAD POWER have found their way onto the Twelfth Planet Blog recently. I’ll re-post ‘em here in the lead-up to Xmas.
- Gilgamesh Press has released ISHTAR: a 3-novella anthology with stories by Kaaron Warren, Cat Sparks and myself. ISHTAR features a kick-arse heroine in a kick-arse city (my home town) as she chases down a terrifying, ancient deity.
- At Apex Magazine, Tansy Rayner Roberts has published an article on THE AUSTRALIAN DARK WEIRD featuring some of my favourite cohorts & me as we pontificate on how all this sun & surf has given rise to so much literary horror.
- CLOCKWORK PHOENIX: TALES OF BEAUTY AND STRANGENESS is now available for Kindle. My story, The Tailor of Time, is in volume one & scored a lovely mention in a recent Dark Cargo review of the new electronic edition. The Tailor of Time is still available as a free read in two parts at the Steampunk Workshop if you’d like a taste test.
Marvellous way to wrap up the year – thanks, teamsters. 
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
Thanks for paying attention during the Burnout series. I enjoyed that so much I’m already devising questions for another Blog Briefs tour. That ‘one paragraph’ mandate made for some great reading – & inspired writing. Don’t yer love when a constraint becomes a creative coup?
Tomorrow I travel back in time to the other side of the world – San Diego! Just in time for the World Fantasy Convention.
Here’s my schedule:
Pacific 1: The Successful Misfit as a Theme in Fantasy
Is Schmendrick the Magician endearing because he’s a lovable loser, or is there something else going on? Nerds, geeks, and absent-minded professors abound in the pages of genre literature. What is it about the social misfit that attracts readers and makes them empathize with the protagonist? Are authors and readers self-identifying?
Peter S. Beagle, Deborah Biancotti, Erin Hoffman, R. L. LaFevers, Mark L. Van Name (M)
I LOVE this topic!
Apart from that, I’ll be in the bar. The bf is coming along for this one, so he’ll also be in the bar. Or, playing golf. After too few days in San Diego (& probably missing out on Tijuana, on account of timing – omg, I can’t believe we won’t be there for Day of the Dead!!), we’ll be off to NYC for the Halloween parade, & about a week later to San Francisco, including side trips to Vegas & the Napa, depending how we’re feeling.
This trip has been a long time coming, gentle readers, on account of it being a long, long year. But I’ve an inkling this will be exactly what my burnout has been craving.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
Burnout happens when people who have previously been highly committed to a job lose all interest and motivation. [snip] It mainly strikes highly-committed, passionate, hard working and successful people – and it therefore holds a special fear for those who care passionately about their careers and about the work they do.
When I started this series, I gave the Burnout blog posts 2 weeks to run. I approached a couple of writing lists I’m on, then did the rest of the invitations by hand, first plumbing my address book and then resorting to that faithful, timeless tool: Google. I found myself on the electronic trails of many writers I admire, from Alain de Botton to Annie Proulx to Mary Doria Russell, Lee Child, Simon Pegg, Tanith Lee, Delia Sherman, Michael Robotham, Tara Moss, Mary Gentle, Patricia Anthony, Peter Watts, Cory Doctorow, Nicola Griffith – some of whom proved elusive on my cursory electronic search. May of whom were findable, but only *carefully* findable – their websites were available, for example, but not their contact details. I imagine this is the price that’s paid for ‘big fame’, but it did make me admire those that still offered up an email address or contact form. I can’t imagine what offers they receive, apart from my own odd little one.
Some of those that *were* contactable had auto-responders on their email addresses, advising that their existing workloads or deadlines didn’t allow them to read &/or respond. It was rather thoughtful of them, I felt, & in-&-of-itself, it spoke volumes about the dangers of burnout in the schedules these successful writers were keeping. Some others took the time to email in person to explain why they couldn’t respond. Occasionally I had the sense that if some of them slowed down enough to even consider how they address their creative workloads, they’d burn out on the spot. More than one hinted at that very fact.
The reasons people couldn’t respond varied from sad, personal reasons to wonderful, deadline-type, exhilarating reasons, offering up a dialogue based on nothing but their goodwill and my random invitation. I admit, I was kinda touched. And it reminded me of the wonder of words – not just the kind of inspiring words Elizabeth Gilbert can put together in an 18-minute TEDx talk, but the wonder of simple words, ‘thanks for asking’ type words or ‘Australia, eh?’ words. It reminded me, simply, of words.
And I was even more impressed – you can imagine – by those that responded in the positive. Pullitzer-prize nominated author Mary Doria Russell wrote a response despite being on the road. Delia Sherman made a glorious & much re-tweeted contribution. After Ellen Kushner pointed out a wonderful blog post by Terri Windling on Autumn Cleaning, we caught Terri’s eye & she named some of her own favourite posts from the series. I remembered that Terri had, in fact, planted the seeds of my journey in 2005 when, at my first World Fantasy Convention, I saw Terri talk about the value of ‘fallow times’. A lesson it may have taken me this long to execute (though at least I knew enough to remember her words).
One of my favourite authors, Jim Lewis, bucked the trend towards optimism (you see why he’s a favourite, eh?). Ben Payne vacillated in style (or did he?), Alan Baxter taught us something valuable about martial arts, Kaaron Warren gave us a new reason to have children, Matthew Cheney charmed us with the value of ‘crazy’ (perhaps inadvertently). And there are so many very wonderful posts from so many generous people who honoured the mandate to answer ONE question in ONE paragraph with a ONE-line bio – with not a dud post in the bunch. All of them were thoughtful, smart posts that taught me something. I mean, ALL of them. And I wanted to link to them all, except I remembered I could just link to the burnout tag on LJ & trust the readers to find the people and posts they needed.
I’m proud to know you guys.
Thank-you.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
In which a bunch of authors & editors are invited to answer the question: How do you deal with creative exhaustion?
You have to let your fantasy world grow with you. You cannot keep it preserved the way it was when it was first published, because it’s trapped on paper and can’t change, but you will change. The real world foists new experiences on you and you will age. Your opinions and your character will evolve. Looking over your own work, you’ll think it a bit odd, maybe old-fashioned or childish. You have to reinvent your writing to suit who you are now. Do not try to fossilise yourself at the age of your first success. This is fantasy and should be the most lively form of literature; if you want aeroplanes and oligarchs instead of swords and kings, or peace instead of war, of course you can have them. Throw out the old and reinvent to keep up with your new taste.
This reinvention isn’t an immense chore. It is the same creative flow that caused you to write the fantasy world in the first place.
So to any writer who has creative exhaustion I’d say: Maybe you’re stuck in a rut because you’re trying to write in a style that no longer suits you. You know this deep down, but you fear to change because your first books have been so successful. The publishers and fans seem to want more of the same, but you’re sick of it. For heaven’s sake stop thinking you should duplicate it: You’re different now. If you have the strength to lead them in something new, they’ll know it’s good. They’ll be excited and they’ll follow.
Put all your old notebooks in a crate and shove it in the attic. Forget publishers and awards. Don’t open any of your novels trying to create consistency where none should exist. This is fiction and we celebrate its lability. Nothing you have previously written is important, only the bits in your memory. Pick up a few scraps of paper, because a shiny new notebook is offputting. And write a scene for yourself.
Then another.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
In which a bunch of authors & editors are invited to answer the question: How do you deal with creative exhaustion?
If you’ve got a deadline and you’re stuck in the middle of the story, try taking Raymond Chandler’s advice: have someone kick in the door and burst into the room, guns blazing (metaphorically, of course). Injecting something left-field into the stalled plot-line often gets the brain — and the story — working again, even if it changes its direction.
- Robert Hood has written many short stories and a few novels.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
In which a bunch of authors & editors are invited to answer the question: How do you deal with creative exhaustion?
Creative exhaustion is my default mode. In recent years the only reliable way I have broken through is to have an externally-dictated deadline for collections I desperately want to be published in, and with a story waiting to be written that I felt passionate about.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
In which a bunch of authors & editors are invited to answer the question: How do you deal with creative exhaustion?
When I have tapped out the reservoir that is my creative mind, I refill it by experiencing other people’s creations: stories, music, performances, art, history and philosophy. I also “refill” by taking in the natural world, spending time without people or their works, looking at the sea, or a tree, or a bunch of parrots happily bickering in a palm tree. All of this adds up, but it may take time to build the reservoir back up to a point where you can draw on it again, to create new work.
- Garth Nix is the author of quite a few books and stories and has quite often been creatively exhausted, and recovered.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
In which a bunch of authors & editors are invited to answer the question: How do you deal with creative exhaustion?
I rarely suffer from creative burnout, and I think the reason is because, with a couple of kids, writing time is still precious. We just had the school holidays and I could not claw more than a few minutes a day at the keyboard, which means that first thing Monday morning, I fake a tear as the kids go to school and am raring to go. So, yeah. Have kids. Avoid creative burnout.
- Kaaron Warren’s short story collections are The Grinding House and Dead Sea Fruit. Her novels are Slights, Walking the Tree and Mistification. Her website is kaaronwarren.wordpress.com and she’s on twitter @kaaronwarren
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
In which a bunch of authors & editors are invited to answer the question: How do you deal with creative exhaustion?
My first World Fantasy Convention, Hal Duncan stood out as vivacious, charming & well, crazed. Thank god he hasn’t changed.
A lot of the time the burnout I get is project-specific, so I’ll just jump to another project — which might well be something I burned out on a few weeks back or even months ago. If it’s fiction wide, I might jump to poetry. If it’s with all creative writing, I might, say, arse around with Garageband, Paintbrush and iMovie, constructing a 20 minute stickman slideshow animation for a sea shanty about Matelotage and Mutiny, the gay pirate gods of love and death. (Seriously, it’s on Youtube.) Or I’ll try and get a column written, or find some email that requires a meaty response, or there might be an MS sitting waiting for paid critique. Basically, I’m really fucking fickle, so my first impulse is really to preempt full system-wide burnout by latching onto whatever passing fancy grabs my eye, and as often as not because I’m approaching it as an escape from whatever has become The Evil That Is WORK, I find myself getting completely stoked again. But if I just can’t get my head in the game with anything, I’m also lazy as fuck, so I’ll happily just faff with the interwebs, grazing on Twitter or Wikipedia, (or Tumblr, with its surfeit of pretty young men,) or watch the entirety of The Wire… or read a book, of course. Cause, as they say, it’s all research.
- As homophobic hatemail once dubbed him, “THE…. Sodomite Hal Duncan!!” (superfluous punctuation included) is a part-time poet and columnist, full-time writer of SF, fantasy and fiction that’s just plain strange.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
In which a bunch of authors & editors are invited to answer the question: How do you deal with creative exhaustion?
When I run writers’ workshops, I ask everyone to write a list of their reasons for writing, or for wanting to be a writer (not exactly the same thing). Possibilities include fun, money, the challenge, to entertain their children, to prove someone wrong, to impress someone (a la the cavalier poets), etc. I stress that the list is for their benefit, not mine, and they’re not obliged to show it to anyone if they think their motives are disreputable (a la the cavalier poets), but they should keep a copy. Then, if they become stuck or exhausted, they can consult the list and see whether whatever they’re writing at the time matches any of those reasons. Is it fun? Will it make money? Is it challenging them? Does the plot require too much sex or violence for their intended readership? If it doesn’t tick any of the boxes, then they should either think of new reasons or (as Martin Livings has suggested) quit. There are other ways to have fun, other ways to make money, other challenges, other ways to entertain children or impress adults. Come back to writing when there’s something you really want or need to write.
- Stephen Dedman is the author of four novels and more than 120 short stories.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
In which a bunch of authors & editors are invited to answer the question: How do you deal with creative exhaustion?
Author Cat Sparks demonstrates how to access those pieces of yourself that aren’t burned out – because they’re still glowing.
- Cat Sparks is fiction editor of Cosmos magazine. Her story ‘All the Love in the World’ appears in Hartwell & Kramer’s Year’s Best SF 16.
Mirrored from 'other blog' deborahb.
