One of the opportunities A Book of Endings created was the chance to get my writing in front of a wider audience. To see what the rest of the world might think. The Australian genre scene is so warm & welcoming that I’d grown suspicious of the kind words occasionally attributed to my work in reviews & conversations.

So I pinged a couple of wider-stream review sources to see if, well, if the Emperor really was wearing any clothes.

The Syd Uni Alumni review came out first & said: “These are unnerving and elliptical, in the main, and tread a fine line between the everyday mundaneity that never is and overblown literary style that can be tiresome when too self-conscious. Mostly they stay on the right side of the line and intrigue more than irritate.”

Yes, I spotted it, too. “Mostly”. But that’s cool. Given the book is largely retrospective I could even entertain the idea that maybe the irritating ones were the early ones, and the new ones are better. Hell, I’m occasionally optimistic that way.

The Short Review is a site dedicated to short story writing, & is definitely worth checking out. Of my book, reviewer Mario Guslandi said, “Deborah Biancotti’s debut collection left me both hopeful and frustrated. Here we have a writer with a great potential, able to produce some outstanding stories, who, unfortunately, often wastes her talent writing tasteless pieces with implausible plots and nondescript characters. When inspired, Biancotti is a top notch author. When uninspired, the author of mediocre tales can irritate, in view of what she can do when at the top of her game.”

I know, I know. Now you, like me, want to know which are the tasteless stories!

Well, I guess taste is a matter of … erm, taste. So I can’t fault Guslandi for his passionate chastisement of my choice of writing subjects. Though I am curious about it. Maybe I’ll email him to find out what he means. Since he also reviews for SF Site, infinity plus, Horrorworld and Alien Online, it’s certainly not that he’s NOT a genre reader — which would be the easiest out.

Guslandi then go on to discuss the “five sparkling gems” of the book — and this is the really interesting stuff, I find: I love finding out what stories *worked* for people. There’s no predicting it, and here again I’m surprised to find what he enjoyed the most. If I’d had to choose my 5 best stories, would I have chosen these? … Hmmm. Maybe not.

If you’ve read the book, I’d love to know what stories worked for you — & what you found positively TASTELESS! Comment or email as is your will, noble readers.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

… turns out you can still buy Redsine #7, edited by Trent Jamieson & Garry Nurrish, from about 2002.

I loved Redsine and always wished it had continued for longer. It was a classy zine, and short (a good characteristic for a zine, imho: one-sitting-reading always scores well with me).

And I love it not only because it was the home of my second-ever published (and first-ever completed) story, Silicon Cast — which is, ahem, *also* still available thanks to GoogleBooks. Well, in part.

Not sure how I feel about that. *pauses to reflect* Well, pretty relaxed.

Silicon Cast feels very young to me now, but still has a relatively straight-forward horror narrative that makes me grin. I do love a bit of ‘ew’ in my reading. Terry Dowling, my first teacher, read this over for me when I was struggling and it was certainly in part because of his encouragement that I ever continued with writing. And yes, you can read a hardcopy version in A Book of Endings if you’re so inclined.

Anyhow. If you read the full version, let me know what you think of the story!

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

Honestly? I got into short stories because it seemed like a good way to learn to write. It’s become much more than that, of course, but I’ve not paused very often to think about what place they do have for me, and further what place they have for readers.

I’ve been surprised by the amount of interest in A Book of Endings, for example, and overwhelmed by the response of readers. Enough of my friends not only bought the book but *read* it to make me think people actually are interested in the short form. When challenged, plenty of my friends were adamant that yes, they really did like reading short stories even before my book came along and yes, they weren’t just buying it out of sympathy (though I suspect some of them were!) that I thought I’d overlooked something.

I admit I always thought short stories were rather esoteric, enjoyed more by writers than readers. Short stories are often a harder read than novels, I think. Because you have to pay attention the whole way through. Novels you can drift in and out, doze off on a daybed, miss a few words because the hammock is swinging too hard — all those hiccups that occur in perfect reading fantasies. But overall it’s easier to keep track of a novel because even if you miss bits the narrative spine will hopefully pull you through.

So I was still surprised when I read this in the Syd Uni Alumni magazine review of A Book of Endings: “Biancotti is further proof of why readers enjoy the short story, even though publishers prefer to pretend we don’t.”

And over here at the Guardian, some discussion about why women, in particular, are being recognised in the short story field (are they? well, isn’t that good news).

Short stories, on the other hand, are famously uncommercial; that, coupled with the perceived exactingness of the form and its heavyweight literary lineage, means that short stories by women are taken seriously – and awarded accordingly.

That would be ironic if true: women gain more recognition in short stories because short stories aren’t coveted by publishers either.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

I made it. With the emailing of the full draft of my 21st Century Gothic essay on NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, I’m done. That’s it. I’ve met my deadlines for 2009. Which is remarkable because for a while there I thought I wasn’t going to make it.

(I think I made it by going a little crazy for a while.)

Of course, a lot of those deadlines were for A BOOK OF ENDINGS (six new stories, yours now via Twelfth Planet Press!), but the timetable of 2009 work made it all the way into December. Now I’ve got to start thinking about my timetable for (*gulp*) 2010. Something a little calmer, I hope, though I maybe have just signed up for another Gilgamesh project. And there’s editing for the contemporary Ishtar story soon, most likely.

Anyhoooo, the essay. It’s in & it may or may not coherently argue that the battle of good (Sheriff Bell) and evil (Anton Chigurh) for the soul of one man (Llewellyn Moss), the elements of the supernatural, the voice of despair, the struggle to believe in a God who seems less involved in the world than Satan are all Gothic elements of this modern novel. There’s other stuff, too. I refer to Anne Radcliffe and Terminator in about equal measures, and naturally I mention MELMOTH THE WANDERER more than once.

But here’s the thing: I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about gothic literature. Turns out I’m not that knowledgeable at all. It impresses me how much trust esteemed editor Danel Olson has placed in his extensive contributor list (2 volumes!).

Plus, essays. Wow, I’d forgotten how hard they can be.

For now, though, the next steps are to return to the fun stuff. My stuff. The BROKEN novel. I’d left off with John Eiger about to — well, let’s just say he could be making a big mistake.

Man, I love when characters make big mistakes. I love sitting alongside them thinking, ‘oooooohhh, buddy, you’re in trouble now….’.

But tonight some rest and something new to read that *isn’t* NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. I’m thinking it’s time to return to some Michael Robotham.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

I’ve had some shitty day jobs.

There was the mortgage-processing job, where the boss was at great pains on day 1 to tell me about the culture of ‘no blame, only teamwork’. And two months in when I uncovered an error that had been made with some mortgage cheques, he tried to guilt-trip me about the costly solution he’d have to implement — apparently assuming that because I’d uncovered the error, I’d also made it. (I hadn’t.)

There was the workplace I refer to as the Toxic Avenger, where my last defiant act was to act as a witness in a formal complaint of corporate bullying. I hadn’t really considered the aggressive, ignorant behaviour of my superiors to be bullying until I went to HR for something else & they showed me a copy of the Anti-Bullying Policy. Which was about when I realised that no one had ever described my exec director as accurately as that document. He was also a liar, but the policy didn’t cover that.

There was the Narcissism Is Me workplace, where the MD was prone to sending self-pitying emails to all staff about stuff he’d decided to take personally: staff leaving, staff not filling in their timesheets, staff calling him a moron (oh, wait, no one told him that, right?). He also had a nifty way of firing people or downsizing a role without ever actually having to pay out a redundancy. He wasn’t so much a liar as a man living in a land of complete make-believe, fantasising about his own efficacy in the chaotic organisation he’d fostered. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those at greatest geographical distance from him reported being the most happy in their jobs.

Reading back over this list I can see the truth of the idea that people don’t leave bad workplaces, they leave bad bosses.

And of course, we must note the good jobs. The State Library job was a lot of fun. I loved working in a ‘cultural institution’, loved the events, loved the Library’s mission, loved the history, the building, loved a bunch of the people. The casual jobs I had while at or just after uni were great. I worked on campus in a bunch of roles: stuffing envelopes, staffing the info centre, admin-ing at the careers centre. None of it taxing, all of it cheering. The multimedia job I had (right before the internet ate all the multimedia technologies that weren’t net-specific) was also awesome for the 3 months it took the company to go bust.

But the caveat on each day job is that it must feed the writing. Occasionally this has felt like the inevitable failure to serve two masters. Sometimes — less often — it’s worked.

The multimedia fed the writing because it was both creative AND structured (I was a Macromedia Director author, in case anyone recognises that terminology) – but because I loved it I also worked a bunch of extra hours on it, which limited my writing time. In contrast, the Toxic Avenger allowed me a helluva lot of time (these were the years when I was most active in the blogosphere) but made me feel dead on the inside. It’s hard to write when you’re dead. Not so hard to blog, oddly.

I figure by now I’ve tried just about everything I can think of. I’ve tried the dead-end, dull job, I’ve tried the all-in, exhaustive job, & a bunch of patterns in between. I’ve tried a day-job in writing & several well outside. I’ve tried part-time & full-time work. I’ve learned what -– for want of a better word — works. I’ve tried my darnedest to maximise that stuff & minimise the rest.

And I think Eden Robins’ post over at Ecstatic Days is the picture-perfect day-job description. If you’re a similar kinda writer as me, that is.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

I’ve been checking back in with Angel Zapata’s blog for more news of our plagiarist friend, Richard Ridyard, & by now I’ve learned:

* Richard Ridyard is the name of a deceased journalist, who — if he had any kind of professional integrity — must be rolling in his grave to see his reputation sullied by some petty thief.

* Editor after editor is coming forward to express their horror at being duped by a guy that would steal the words of STEPHEN KING, fer goodness sake (there’s some speculation this one was a cry for help — after all, someone will eventually twig to what you’re doing if you’re stealing from Stephen freaking King, kiddo).

* ‘Ridyard’ also approached Infinite Windows with his “The Tyburg Jig”, with my stolen paragraph in it. Infinite Windows has removed all his work.

* ‘Ridyard’ has also been publishing under the name RM Valentine — & “The Tyburg Jig” has been shopped under that name as well over at StoryWrite (who have now taken all RM’s stories down)

* I didn’t know this, but the Tyburg Jig is the dance of a hanged body. How … apt.

* The Facebook pages for Valentine Publications & co-founder Matthew Shackleton (who professed to knowing his buddy Ridyard ‘for ten years’) have both disappeared, and the website has also disappeared.

* Brimstone Press has a little something to say about ANOTHER theft.

I mention the names of the zines because I think they deserve kudos for reacting so quickly to the discovery of plagiarism. Thanks, guys! Ridyard appears to be disappearing into a vortex of his own making.

What baffles me, though, is how prolific this guy’s been with his stolen stories. Hell, he’s published “The Tyburg Jig” at least 3 times. I only sold that story once!

Clearly I have been slack.

But just think, if he’d poured all that effort into original work, instead of cutting & pasting & emailing that sucker out so many times (and all the other stolen stories, of course), he’d probably *be* Stephen King by now.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

This morning a good morning on The Great Unsaleable. It’s coming together nicely on this draft. By taking a secondary character and making her more primary, I’ve — unexpectedly — added a layer of logic to the events. This is gratifying & confusing in equal measure. (I’m trying not to question it. Go with it, deborahb, goooooo with it.)

This afternoon, doesn’t bear discussion.

This evening, a glass of red to ease out of the afternoon, two episodes of Burn Notice, time spent staring at The Great Unsaleable, moving pieces about like shifting blocks back and forth on the floor. Perhaps not a lot achieved, but something consolidated. Perhaps that’s just in my head? Afraid to work too much on it in case, in my frustrated/red-wined way, I screw it up.

Watching Burn Notice makes me think it’s time for me to do one of my infamous (ie. not-famous-at-all) livejournal polls. Which you’ll find here.

I’ll start you off. I wish I’d written Burn Notice. Damn, it’s fun!

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

Poll #1458282 Whatdoyouwishyoudwritten
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 5

What book, TV series or movie do you wish YOU'D written (that you didn't write, obviously)?

The lurgy is finally lifting, thankfully. For a while there it was impossible to sleep AND breathe simultaneously. Which can add a layer of difficulty to, oh, everything.

From the weekend surfing:

* Rebecca Solnit, “You know, a lot of my work has been based on the field of disaster sociology, which emerged after the World War II, when the US government decided it wanted to know how human beings would behave in the aftermath of an all-out nuclear war. The assumption, as it often is, is that we would become childlike and sheepish and panic and be helpless, or that we’d become sort of venal and savage and barbaric. And the disaster scholars started to look at this and eventually dismantled almost every stereotype we have and found that people are actually, as I’ve been saying, resourceful, altruistic, brave, innovative and often oddly joyful, because a lot of the alienation and isolation of everyday life is removed. [snip] What you also see is that because the authorities think that we’re monsters, they themselves panic and become the monsters in disaster.” Elite panic, it’s called. Solnit’s book, A Paradise Built in Hell, has gone into the shopping cart.

* How to Innovate Like Apple: this includes nurturing talent, flattening hierarchies, and ignoring market research.

* Relatedly, an article on why big business isn’t bothered about helping you find your stolen iPhone.

* Follow the Reader: a blog for readers

* The Short Review: a review site for short story collections (I so wish I’d known about this a year back when I was putting together my own short story collection — think of all the brilliant ideas I could’ve stolen learned from!

* And finally, via catsparx: if architects had to work like web designers (so. very. true.)

And the even better news is that the brain is working well enough again for me to be pushing forward on the writing schedule. Over the past few days I’m managed to get halfway through my Ishtar contemporary novella (currently being brought down from 23K to the requisite 20K) & I am having a blast with this project.

Ah, Ishtar. Putting the FUN! back into love & war.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

Years back, when I was clearly more of an optimist than I am now, I started collecting links on ‘promoting your book’. Just the links, not the articles, because I didn’t want to fill up my computer with useless words. And now that I have a book, of course all those links are out of date. I have text files full of links to broken pages! What, I wonder, did those pages say? And where are today’s pages?

My head is filled with questions!

So now I’m looking for good resources on promotion for writers. I understand there are such things as ‘press releases’ and ‘review venues’ & even ‘bookstores’, & I’m wondering how you write ‘em, contact ‘em, or convince ‘em to carry your book.

I’ve been wondering this for a couple weeks (since the launch, in fact), but today the questions were really brought to the fore when one gentle friend said to me, “I looked for your book in Borders AND Dymocks, and they both didn’t have it!” She even, apparently, convinced the helpful woman in one of these stores to put it on ‘the list’, whatever ‘the list’ is. I hope it’s a good list. I hope I get on it!

If you, gentle reader, have a link (that’s still active) to a place in the interwebby which addresses any or all of these questions, feel free to post that link here.

Conversely, if you are a marketing student looking to work for free for a good cause, well, you probably should be looking into the plight of native fruit bats or something, rather than wasting your time with my queries — but if you do have a term paper lying around that explains all these things, well, your work is welcome here.

Now I might do some recreational reading, for once, because my head is toast.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

A quick update because I have to do some novel writing tonight, but wanted to say hurrah! and thanks! to all the people who came to the very first launch of my very first book, A Book of Endings at Cabinet Bar over the Continuum weekend in Melbourne. I’m not sure if it was the Lady Lara’s (ie. gin & champagne cocktails), the welcoming staff at Cabinet, the cheeriness of the crowd who were able to find their way out of the con hotel, down the road, around the corner, into the alley way (past the garbage bins) to brave the steep staircase into the bar, or whether, indeed, it was Mr Strahan’s compelling & convincing speech & Mz Krasnostein’s convivial catering — or indeed, whether it was ALL of these things — but the launch was a blast!

Thank-you to the peeps who came, the peeps who accosted me the next day in the corridors to say, ‘Sorry I missed your launch!’, & the peeps who couldn’t make it but thought about it, or are thinking of coming to the next one:

Sydney Launch of A Book of Endings
3pm Saturday 10 October
NG Art Gallery
Upstairs at 3 Little Queen St
Chippendale NSW 2008
(about 2 bus stops from Central Station or a 10-minute walk)

Launching by the inimitable Mr Garth Nix.

And if you stick around at the gallery (well, if you stick around until October 27), you can see Nick Stathopoulos’s gallery exhibition, Playtime. I had a preview of some of the new works recently & they’re fabulous.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

Now that A Book of Endings is largely done — for me, at least (until the launches. Stay tuned!) — I can get back to projects I enjoy, have been missing have put off for the interim. My first task was to come up with a timeline to get me through the writing committments until the end of the year (project management fans: yes, I really do mean I made a Gantt chart). Then I prioritised the committments so I know which ones I can give up if I have to. Then I stared at the plan for a while with a kind of ‘holy fuck’ gaze.

Then I closed down the plan and opened up instead my favourite project (of the moment): the Great Unsaleable Novel. Which, I’m pleased to say, on Draft 4 is a lot less unsaleable than it used to be. But as I’m only at the beginning of Draft 4, there is still a shinto-load of work left to be done.

And all this mundane news is delivered in real time to your screens because I am bookending. Not bookmarking, as I read it initially, but bookending: the process of alerting a supportive friend to your plans in order to keep yourself on track, knowing you’ll have to report back later. I followed a link from the Procrastinating Writers to the Relaxed Writer (a journey I’d like to take spiritually myself someday) to find out about bookending & I’m kinda liking the idea.

Apart from the fact that previously whenever I’ve read posts/tweets announcing things like ‘Writing now’, ‘Taking a break from writing now to make dinner’, I’ve always thought, “Who gives a damn?”

But clearly I was in the wrong, & this is EXACTLY the kind of info you should be sharing.

So: I’m writing now.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

At highschool I had a friend who insisted it was important right after an exam to take the rest of the day off and not study. Important to rest the brain and re-establish your energies. Workable idea, provided you didn’t have a second exam that day.

I treat a lot of things like that. Reading (always take a break between books), writing, day-jobbing. A break is replenishing. Gets the mind geared up for the next thing.

Right now, my brain is exhausted, just like I’ve been through an intense exam period, but the schedule I put together earlier this month to plot out all my writing committments for the rest of the year (some of which are committments just to myself) is screaming, ‘No time to rest!’

… Best thing to do is just to shut down the schedule, I figure.

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

The window is replaced, the excitement has died down, I still can’t find anything missing from the house after last week’s uninvited visit. But now we have a motion-sensitive light over our backyard & a locksmith scheduled to make our internal door even more steadfast than it proved to be last week.

(What a great idea that internal door was. I always figured I was just being paranoid.)

Energy levels have finally recovered, too, after last weekend’s 33-hour Robert McKee Story seminar in Sydney. And though the organisers & I will agree to disagree on some aspects, it was a worthwhile weekend. Satisfying? I couldn’t call it that.

Because what McKee reminds me of is how good story can get, & that’s always going to make you remember the gap in your own work between where you are & where you want to be. “Only amateurs love everything they write,” says McKee, further pointing out that, “Ninety per cent of all writing is shit.”

Ninety per cent of your own writing — he assures us — is shit. That’s why you need that ‘passion for perfection’, that willingness to throw stuff away, the desire to edit & re-edit, to plan, to process, to pull out just that ten per cent & to keep doing it.

People will tell you, says McKee, that writing is a highly competitive business, that writers are a dime a dozen. But that’s not true, because for someone who can actually write good story, “There is no competition.”

It’s a seller’s market. If you can do it.

“Write the truth.” That’s what he wrote when he signed my edition of his book. Don’t write the facts (”The facts are what happened. The truth is our human interpretation of what happened.”). Don’t be satisfied with the ninety per cent.

Write the truth.

… Sound easy?

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

Yay! For Will Self:

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn’t enjoy writing novels I wouldn’t do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn’t faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I’d go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don’t write I’m not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.

– Will Self, Guardian UK

Nobody told me writing wasn’t meant to be enjoyable. (Actually, a lot of people did, but they seemed a little glum so I ignored ‘em.)

Though I can certainly understand the bulk of the comments about the day-in/day-out work of a selling writer, it seems to me that if you really want to do something miserable, there are plenty of quite horrific other day jobs out there. I think I’ve had a few of ‘em myself.

… trade yer…!

 

(Thanks to J. for the link!)

Mirrored from my website at deborahbiancotti.net. You can respond here or at the other deborahb blog.

Awesome posts discovered today on persistence -- psychotic persistence, even -- from Jay Lake (here) and Sean Williams (here).

I don't have a persistence story to share. Personally I'm much better at giving up. But you shouldn't follow my example. In art, I've seen tenacity triumph. In work, I've seen application beat what day-job recruiters call 'talent' every time. It's not what you bring to the game, it's your willingness to play that counts. Like one sage person once said to me, "It's the work that creates the opportunity."

But you have to do the work.

This year, though, I'm glad to say I have found (built, written, created) an ending for my first novel. It took almost exactly two years of drafting & doubting. It ain't finished, & I'm not convinced it's ever going to be saleable in any way. But I'll never know unless I keep doing the work. And in the last year I've felt something stirring which I've been calling 'grim determination'. Which I hope will be enough to keep me on this track.

You either have to be crazy gifted, crazy lucky, or a crazy hard worker to get anywhere at all, and it helps to be all three.
-- matociquala

Hats off to the persistent ones!

Yesterday I mentioned to my partner that I'd written 'another 2,500 words' of the not-a-novel project in a day. In fact, I think what I said was 'holy CRAP, I've written another 2,500 words of that freaking novel'.

"How did I do that?" I asked.
"I dunno," he said, "there must be something wrong with that word count."

Which is an entirely fair supposition. I'm not a fast writer, nor prolific. Managing a couple thousand words daily on the same project for a couple weeks is really not something I do. Except in the last 2 weeks*. During which time it's been a heady, addictive experience, & not at all like the drudgery of writing something you've grown to hate. I guess I'm fickle that way.

So I exported the document from Scrivener and put it into Word & sure enough, same overall word count. I presented this with a 'tah-DAH!' flourish to my partner & he said, "Wow. I did not see you write that many words today."

No. Because I magicked them while I was pretending to do something else.

S'only explanation.


-----
* An aberration that will surely right itself in the very near future**.
** Plus, no doubt, those words are crap. I refuse to look at them right now. It's all about numbers today baby, NUMBERS. Also words, but the NUMBER of words. The worry about which words will be saved for later.

He could knock off a novel in a week or 10 days of manic typing — he never revised, as the work sometimes shows — and in Paris in the 1920s he is said to have broken off an affair with Josephine Baker, the expatriate American chanteuse and star of La Revue Nègre, because in the year he was with her, he was so distracted by his passion for her that he had managed to write only three or four books.
-- THE ESCAPE ARTIST: JOHN BANVILLE ON GEORGES SIMENON By John Banville


The older I get (& I am gettin' old), the less impressed I am in the concept of 'suffering for your art'. Sure, we can be in awe of Simenon's dedication to his craft, his willingness to give up the good for the work (the other for the self). Or we can say the bleak old buggar sounds like he needed more damn *fun* in his life. Perhaps if he'd sacrificed word counts for love he would have written less, but he would have written -- what?

If he'd engaged more with 'life', would his writing become happy, more fulsome, more engaging? A change from his trademark bleakness. And perhaps that's what he was afraid of. Happiness can do funny things to art. Unpredictable things.

It's a risk.

But everything is.

"Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter," said Alice Walker. "I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for."

And I was all set to make some point about art & how it can be used to open the soul or shut it down, expand compassion or assert self (or both), when I came across an interview with Alice Walker's daughter, Rebecca Walker, & was reminded all over again of the dichotomy of art & life, crusade & domesticity. Self and others. Ironic, really. Is reaching out to an audience really so different to the act of reaching out to family?

And as I chart a path between day-job/writing/family, I wonder again how successfully the path of 'writer' can be taken amidst the incongruous tug & flow of life. But the choice, it becomes clear, is not between taking the risk or ignoring it. The choice is simply between one risk or another.

Trying for balance between all the demands -- well, it's just another risk. But who would we be without risking it?

Last night watched a documentary about a failed attempt to climb the north face of Mount Eiger: The Beckoning Silence.

Now, I have a particular fascination with this thing we call 'the human spirit', & most often I see that .... 'thing', for want of a better word ... elucidated in stories of courage & daring & sheer audacity (some might say 'stupidity'). I personally have no idea why anyone would do something as crazy as spend their recreational time courting death on the sheer sides of mountains -- & climbers I've met are often strange, self-centred individuals with romanticised notions about the world & their place in it (to utterly generalise about an entire group based on just two negative experiences). I'm not interested in the *methodology* of their challenge, I should say. I'm interested in why they'd take on such a challenge in the first place. And how they survive it, mentally, once they're in the middle of it.

So I watched with interest as Joe Simpson narrated the harrowing story of the Eiger. Simpson himself is famous for his Touching the Void experience: he's the guy who spent 4 days dragging himself backwards off the Andes, alone & with a shattered leg. (His leg broke when his friend -- believing Simpson dead -- cut the rope that tethered them together, leaving Simpson to fall into a crevasse 'the depth and scale of the St Paul Cathedral', according to one article.)

( The story Simpson told is under the cut )

But what kept rolling around in my head after The Beckoning Silence was a comment from Joe Simpson. He talked about his own experience in the Andes, & how that led to the book, Touching the Void, and he said this, that 'Writing had opened up a Pandora's box of fear.' Once he began *reflecting* on what he was doing -- on the dangers of climbing, on its many deaths -- he became too aware of frailty. He became afraid.

He could no longer trust the young-man's view he'd had, the view that he was immortal, that he could outwit the mountains through sheer smarts and courage.

He kept climbing for another twenty years, giving it up finally when the injuries he'd sustain throughout his career made it too painful.

And giving it up because of the unholy hell of writing about it.

I don't tend to be a big re-reader of books. So I've fallen into the habit of giving away books shortly after I read them (or rather, putting them in a box by the door & getting rid of boxes at a time; it's a rather unglamourous spot to live out a few months, that spot by the door, but life is harsh).

As I live in a small corridor (ie. a Sydney terrace), I'm quite content with my rapid removal of books. I like the small gap on the shelf made by an abandoned book. Space for something new.

So it's with mixed feelings that I finish a book & realise it has to be kept. An important book, or a book to remind myself, or a book I'll go back to (in part if not in totality).

It turns out Sara Paretsky's book, 'Writing in an Age of Silence' is one of those keepers. Not only does Paretsky write about writing when you're a child, writing when you're a woman (with the keen feminist eye that works like a cold espresso to the brain), but also writing in a time when civil liberties are under threat in the post-911 world.

And though it *may* help to be familiar with Paretsky's fiction work (she often refers to the influences on her PI invention, V.I. Warchowski), it's not necessary. I've read only one Warchowski book & still found enough to be fascinated by. Paretsky's vision of Chicago & history & civil liberties is enough to keep me interested all on its own.

Highly recommended.

From Roger Sutton of The Horn Book, Inc.:

I'm interested in the ethical propriety of returning a book because you didn't like it. Can't imagine doing that myself--the reader is paying for consuming the intellectual content, not just for the physical item. I'm equally interested in the whole question of the difference between readers and fans, if there is one. One distinction the Meyer debates seem to bring to the fore is the way fans personalize the object of their affection--the ones who hate Breaking Dawn feel that Meyer has betrayed them and must suffer; the ones who like the book feel they need to be "loyal" to the author

His interest is sparked by the debate between Stephenie Meyer 'fans' about her new book Breaking Dawn. Something I'd not heard anything about until I stumbled upon Sutton's post this morning (yes, yes, I am Out of Touch). To recap for anyone else Out of Touch, Breaking Dawn is the fourth (and theoretically final) book in the Twilight series featuring teenager Bella and her vampire lover Edward Cullen, & that's right, I got all that from the wikipedia entry.

Remember a few years back when wikipedia didn't exist? I don't.

Also, since when is a vampire called Edward Cullen? Doesn't sound Transylvanian to me. What? Right, right, Out of Touch.

So, as Roger points out, fans are split. Hate the book, hate the author; or hate the book, love the author. Some of 'em must have liked the book, of course. Though nobody seems to have heard from them.

It does indeed raise the question of what a fan is. Readers read, right? Fans, to my mind, are *passionate* readers. They read, they enjoy, but also something else. They are invested in what they're reading. And perhaps that is where an almost proprietary interest comes in. They are invested. They own.

But do they own the product, or the producer? And either way, as Sutton points out, if they've consumed the book, then how can they expect a refund? The contract entered into by the purchase does not come with an 'or your money back' clause. A reader, or even a fan, cannot control what is produced. They can only control what they consume.

Comments on the Amazon page for Breaking Dawn do seem to imply a level of ownership of the book's *producer* -- "I can't understand what Meyer was thinking," say some fans. The writer that the fans thought they related to so well has 'betrayed' them by doing something unexpected, unwanted. What was she thinking? Perhaps she was thinking the fans didn't own the processes inside her head. Perhaps the particular group of fans complaining would disagree with that.

Which raises another question: is the writer most responsible to the fan, or to the story?

No surprise to anyone in NSW: art funding is near impossible to attain.

"I've been advised a number of times by people on staff at Arts NSW not to bother applying because there just isn't the funding," [independent director and performer, Nikki Heywood, said]. "Money is so thin on the ground that we're like hungry seagulls. We scurry for crumbs and we can't celebrate other people's success."

Yes. Biggest population. Potentially biggest number of artists, biggest audiences (I said potentially -- heck, I'm not doing an audit). And no money.

Gah.

Today I'm loving the smarts of Mr David B. Coe (davidbcoe), as he lets us in on a few secrets in the repertoire of the repeat-novelist.

Also loving Friday's Forgotten Books over at pattinase (now with lj feed: pattinase_rss).

This week, Alistair MacLean & Iain Banks -- both unexpected authorial entries. But it's all about the forgotten books, not the forgotten book-writers. Having just commenced MacLean's Ice Station Zebra two days back & instantly fallen back in love with his style, I'm now hanging to find a copy of HMS Ulysses, MacLean's first novel (circa 1955).

But when do the rejections outweigh my belief in this book? When do I accept that even though I love it and remain certain that it’s my best work ever, no one else sees it the same way? I’m not ready to give up on this novel yet. I still believe it will sell, and I also believe that when it finally hits the shelves it will do well. But my faith, in this book in particular and in my self-judgment in general, has been shaken by the experience. And I fear that sometime soon, I’m going to have to let go of this dream.

So, I guess I’m asking: When does that time come? When do I give up and accept that those editors who have rejected it know better than I what’s good and what’s not? Have any of you faced similar issues in your own work? Is it possible to love a book too much? Could it be that in making the book so special to me, I’ve made it less attractive to others? I’d be grateful for feedback.

David B. Coe -- a man so funny he could be an Australian -- is asking the eternal writing questions. And I really, really want to know the answers.

So hop on over to sfnovelists.com & give him what for. I mean, provide him with some erudite insights, if you will.

[Hanif] Kureishi also said that when he goes to his desk each morning to begin writing, he thinks to himself: "Why am I doing this? Shall I commit suicide?"

Y'know ... there are other things to do with your time .... if, y'know ... you're this unhappy ... maybe, macrame instead?

I have taken the role of the dog in the ongoing war with the sandwich. Which is to say, benpayne has allowed my story triad Conversations to be aired at Dog Vs. Sandwich.

... Er, I don't really have much I can say about this story. Except I think I was in a pretty bad mood when I first came up with it.

Although I have had jobs that have been extremely demanding, both in terms of time and intellect, writing is the hardest thing I've ever done. Every morning when I sit at the keyboard I descend into the depths of self-loathing. I fear I will never arrive at a satisfactory sentence, paragraph, chapter, whatever. I know for some people writing is easy, but I've never met one in real life. I just thought I'd tell you that. And don't expect your non-writing friends to understand you any more. You can talk to them about other stuff.
-- Leda Schubert

"The best and darkest Australian short stories of 2006 in one book!
Each of these tales explore the darkness of the human condition.
Ghosts, monsters, alien gods, sadists, the forsaken, and the deranged all lie within.
Australia’s best dark fiction writers will scare the hell out of you."

AUSTRALIAN DARK FANTASY & HORROR 2007 edition available from early January for a limited time from Brimstone Press.

Cooooooool.

Brown, Burrage, Caselberg, Cavanagh, Cummings, Dedman, Dowling, Flinthart, Haines, Hood, Lanagan, Lawson, McDermott, Nahrung, Ward, Wardle, Witteveen, and me. Not too shabby, eh?

Today I bought a staircase.

A staircase, yes, not a suitcase. Not something you buy every day (because it's bloody expensive), & in fact the spending of that much money all at once is still making me queasy. But I'd fallen down my old, sagging staircase one too many times & either it had to go or I did.

Which brings me to the issue of money (having it is good) &, indirectly, the issue of career & eventually, the issue of writing.

By my reckoning I've had about 4 career changes since leaving university in 1992. Four in 15 years implies an average of just less than 4 years in each career -- though this is misleading. Some have been much shorter & some I probably shouldn't be counting as careers at all ('a series of similar but dull jobs', might be better). Also, I'm just talking about day jobs, not writing. Writing is something I've not even called a 'career' until as recently as, oh, the last year or so.

The problem with my newest day-job career is that I like it. I feel kinda proud to be doing it. It's the first time I haven't hated the 'so, what do you do?' question at parties. I'm a project manager, I say, & this is the kinda project I'm working on & so on & so on. Heck, I even joined that professional body with the trivial pursuit evenings (I hope there aren't any more of those).

I know, I know, it's weird & unfashionable to like your day job, but alas, I always have been somewhere on or over the edge of fashion.

The last time I had a job I liked this much, they sacked me. Well, they actually closed down the entire company & sacked *all* of us, & I'd only been there 4 months anyhow, but still I took the entire thing personally. It does tend to leave a person with a lot of superstitious dread when that happens.

Still, here I am, enjoying another day job, all the while trying to have a writing career. And more than ever, 2007 has left me with the sense that I'm serving two masters. I fear that I'm not at my most effective in my day job if I'm up late the night before writing about evil clowns, say. I'm not sure I can effectively write most nights when I'm mentally exhausted from a day of talking & thinking & talking & occasionally turning out a paper about something. And also there's the eye strain.

Not that I'm complaining. There's solutions to be had, of course, & I'm simply in the process of ( choosing my own )

The Aurealis Awards nomination list is up. My story, A Scar for Leida, makes the shortlist in the YA section -- along with several other Fantastic Wonder Stories anthology entries!

Woo hoo Ticonderoga! And to all the other nominees, of course.

Results (if those results aren't enough!) announced Jan 26.

In other news, walking home this evening (having artfully waited for the latest tropical storm to pass), I saw a girl in a shirt that read 'i want to be a novel and a strong woman'.

Puzzling over this duality of desire, thinking it something that *sounded* more intelligent than it probably was, I realised it must've said 'i want to be a novel and strong women'. Novel, meaning unique or original.

Still, the idea of being a novel, and being a strong woman, have stuck with me.

Back when Pulp Fiction was released, I was part of a small band of self-proclaimed Splinters who hated it. Hated the pretentious posturing, hated the heavy-handed humour, hated (oh god! hated) the hyper-mundane, absurdist dialogue (so mundane it becomes like the superpower of mundanity).

One of my friends had photocopied a newspaper review that suggested 'Tarantino is the only director to have ever plagiarised himself' -- citing that one good shot in Pulp Fiction which was exactly the same shot as one in Reservoir Dogs (it's the view-from-the-car-boot shot, you probably know it if you've seen the films). I asked if I could borrow the photocopy to make my own, & my friend was reluctant to let it out of his sight.

Eventually he did, & I still have my copy someplace even now.

Then Tarantino went on to make ... oh, I don't really know ... and recently released the Kill Bill films (about one film too long) and then there was that weird experiment thing with Rodriguez which didn't even make the cinema in Australia, iirc.

And now there's ... something new. Maybe.

But can the director sustain his own career by nostalgia alone? He is obviously annoyed by the idea that his films are often perceived to be a medley of homages. Yet in Death Proof it is almost impossible to miss the conveyor belt of nods to movies such as Vanishing Point, Duel, or David Cronenberg’s Crash. [snip] He is, by his own admission, “quite precious” about this gift that apparently comes very easily to him. That said, there is some doubt about just how easy these blank pages are to fill. Tarantino is still talking about making a spaghetti western-style cowboy film, and a Second World War film, Inglorious Bastards, four years after he announced that these might be his next movies. “Just because I want to do something like that, until I have a [good] story, I’m not,” says Tarantino, which seems fair enough if you’re Tarantino, and slightly alarming if you’re his agent.
--James Christopher, 'Is Quentin Tarantino losing the plots?', The Times, Sept.13 2007

Interestingly, though, the above article points out that Tarantino has spent more time over the past few years writing than directing. What intrigued me about this was that if we assume Tarantino is as arrogant as the journalist suggests, why is he choosing writing over directing? I mean, I know writers are an arrogant bunch, sure, -- but are they as arrogant as directors?

Really?

Don't writers end up doing their work alone, while directors flounce about *directing* people & generally being bossy? Or have I over-simplified?

If anything, my respect for Tarantino crept up a fraction by the end of the article (from the subfloor spot where it previously abided between muddy foundations and an odd assortment of multi-legged creatures) when I heard that, somehow, he has found the -- what? -- the drive, the discipline, the solitariness to write. Naturally I could be completely wrong, & Tarantino in fact 'writes' by sitting in a room full of beautiful admirers, dictating his words to a gallery of a thousand self-aware monkies while staring into a mirror. And yet. He has become a little more interesting to me since I discovered that.

Still don't intend to watch his films, though.

Recently stephen_dedman posted a link to an article on rejection. I composed my own post on rejection, my computer crashed, and silence ensued.

Anyhow, here's a re-constructed version:

Knopf wasn’t alone. “The Diary of a Young Girl,” by Anne Frank, would be rejected by 15 others before Doubleday published it in 1952. More than 30 million copies are currently in print, making it one of the best-selling books in history.

I'm going to skip right over the fact that I think Anne Frank's diary is, indeed, ordinary. Because I think that is its greatest strength: its ordinariness. Anne Frank was an ordinary, teenage girl who wanted an ordinary, adult life and what makes her story remarkable is how all of that -- all that small hope and ordinary ambition -- was savaged. In a way, Anne Frank's book is a book that inescapably needs its context in order to make sense of it, if any sense at all can be made.

Right, I was going to skip over that.

Anyhow, I hold to the thesis that rejection is a victory, because the only option to writing and being rejected is not to write at all. Or to write and be accepted all the time, which only genius-writers do (and they don't exist).

Or to write and never submit your stories for reading. Which is perfectly fine. I have no problem with that, I think more people should do it. And for the price of a beer, I'd probably even tell you who I think those people are.

OR you could write and self-publish. But people who do that are often ridiculed and called things like 'vainglorious' and 'narcissistic'. Of course, you could also call them 'determined' and 'committed', and you may well turn out to be right. Matthew Reilly self-published his first book, but after that he went on to various lucrative contracts with edited publishing houses (or so I've assumed for the purposes of this post), and AT THAT POINT, you may look back and admire his determination and committment. But before hindsight kicked in, I bet there were people calling him vainglorious & narcissistic.

OR you've been contracted to write the story by someone who won't ever reject you. You can't trust those people, btw. They will sully your good name by letting whatever dross you give them out into the world. Meanwhile, without the structure and discipline of good editing, your work will fall rapidly into indulgence and people will begin to say, 'I like your old stuff better than your new stuff, Janet'. Which is particularly hurtful when your name isn't Janet. Naturally.

OK, so let's *pretend* the only option to writing and being rejected is not writing at all.

In that case, congratulations, you are earning your stripes via your capacity to accept rejection, and you are learning something, perhaps garnering some insights into your writing or into the tastes of the people who run the magazines you like. I myself use the rejection to gauge the professionalism of a magazine. If they are polite and even insightful, I'll try subbing to that market again, taking out a subscription, that sort of thing. If they are offhand or belittling, they can bite me. Obviously I won't be writing for or reading their zine again. There are plenty of other ways to get a fiction-fix.

So rejection is part of the game, the give & take, ebb & flow, thrust and parry. It is part of the engagement with writing that selling (or not selling) writers can expect.

It is also really, REALLY beginning to tick me off.

Just as people never tell new parents their babies are ugly (even if they are), you shouldn't ever tell someone who just read you a poem that you'd rather not have heard it, and can you have that portion of your life back, please?

Many years ago, while learning to be an adult ed trainer (yes, settle back kiddies, it's an old-person story), I came across the 'sandwich' approach to criticism. This is a means to framing whatever negative or 'constructive' feedback you have between two pieces of positive feedback.

Positve, negative, positive.

'I like the imagery,' you say, 'although the lead character didn't strike me as sympathetic. Cool name, though!'

I've continued to stick with this method of critique EVEN WHEN the slices of bread I've had to work with have been very thin indeed.

And I have never, ever admitted to a parent that their baby is ugly. I have, however, commented sarcastically that 'gee, it's amazing how very different and not-at-all-the-same babies are, eh? It's human, right*?'

------
* I haven't really ever done that. Parents are fierce when roused and, like bad poets, should be approached only with great caution.

Recently -- like, 2 days ago? I have no concept of time -- a friend of mine said he felt he lacked the introspection required to be a successful blogger. I told him I could relate to that. Lately I haven't had much introspection myself. Too busy. Too freaking tired. Too much going on in my reality-based life. And frankly I considered that state pretty terminal until I had 2 weeks off on medical leave and found that, though it was largely impossible for me to get out of a chair without assistance for several days, my brain still, in fact, worked at the rate it was used to working when engaged in the day job -- and it was looking for stuff to do.

All the mental energy used up in the day job (which I don't tend to blog about -- too many other people involved) or the renovations (too boring) or the social commitments (too personal) -- was liberated for two weeks, and suddenly I could re-engage with whatever thoughts were in my head. Thoughts that, when busy, are left to their own devices, to survive or fade, but rarely to expand to a point that invites thorough introspection.

Back at work, and of course the blogging frequency has fallen apart again. What time I do have to be 'introspective' is spent on fiction writing. And this year, somehow, I've written more fiction than ever before. Well, I think I have. I don't really count that stuff. The marvellous benefit of having very little time to write is that I've developed something which amounts to a kind of 'discipline'. I'm leery of taking the quote marks off that -- 'discipline' -- because historically I have never been a disciplined writer and surely it would go against character to magically become one now. Hell, if my life were a novel, people would be saying, 'your character is inconsistent'.

I was about to launch into my personal theory of 'the psychology of the inconsistency of personality', but I don't have time.

Anyhow, discipline. It's been an interesting adventure. And while I will NEVER back down from my assertion that you don't have to write every day to be a writer, I have found some small benefit in an almost daily momentum. But that's probably for another post.

What I *am* saying is... I forget. No, what I *am* saying is that I miss the time when I could blog more. Blogging taught me a lot about writing -- how to loosen up, how to play (with idea, structure, tone). Blogging also gave me a writing release when the fiction writing wasn't working (nowdays, when the fiction writing isn't working, I keep writing fiction because I don't have time to stop; consequently I both love and hate fiction writing more). Blogging also allowed me to connect with the great 'out there', other people who were also blogging. I miss a lot of that stuff.

I'm not quitting, btw. Sounded like I was for a minute there.

The upshot is: I would not trade my present life for the life I had a year and a half ago, when I was bored witless at work for several hours each day, and working in a place that was toxic with fear and bullying. EVEN THOUGH it allowed me more time to surf the net and reflect at length on whatever random ideas I had. Though I do miss one or two of the advantages of a more ordinary life, I am more thoroughly engaged with what I'm doing & where I am than I've ever been.

I'm sorry about the blogging thing -- which is both an apology for anyone who needs one, & a statement of fact. I'm trying to think of a solution, but currently the only thing I can think is that I need more time. Somehow I need more time, WITHOUT taking time away from the day job or the social commitments or the fiction writing or the renovations (because these are all cool things, too).

Darnedest thing. There's probably some other conclusion I could make from that but... I got something I need to do.

On the rack at the ASiF forums this week: Garth Nix. Author of the SABRIEL and KEYS OF THE KINGDOM books, also a former (reformed?) "literary agent, marketing consultant, book editor, book publicist, book sales representative, bookseller and as a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve" -- and one of the world's true gentlemen. I think you should ask him some questions.

At truepenny's place, Due South gets a *.realism workout: The thing that fascinates me about Due South is the way it shifts between realism, surrealism, contrarealism, and a constantly undercut and destabilized pararealism. Naturally.

And nalohopkinson makes some erudite notes on technique. Particularly, I love what she says about knowing something body-deep. Psychologists would make some point now about amateur and expert understanding.

If, for example, you're a guitarist, practice will force knowledge from your head to your fingers. Practice breeds habit; habit lives in the body. Ask an expert guitarist *how* to execute a particular technique & they will have to pick up their guitars & watch their own fingers in order to answer. That's expert knowledge.

I'm not sure what body part writers most use (cheeky!), but I still like the idea of bone-knowledge, body-deep knowledge. I like that our learning & desires can overwhelm our physiologies. I like the freedom or the power of that idea.

Anyhow, let's let Nalo tell it:

A few years ago, I perceived that my stories felt stronger and more satisfying to me when most of the key elements showed up twice. I mean something more complex than that, but I sense it as shape and motion, and I haven't yet hit upon a way to adequately describe it. Lessee: the two (or more) occurrences of the same element need to be separated by verbiage, i.e. the first shows up roughly near the beginning of the novel, and the second roughly near the end. It's good if the second occurrence makes the reader suddenly flash back to the first occurrence, see it and other aspects of the novel in a new light, and have an 'aha!' moment about something key to the novel. I try to make it so that the reader can connect the dots and the picture takes clearer shape with each connection they're able to make. I guess I'm saying that the first occurrence sets the thread of an element into the weave of the story, and the final one ties it in. Or ties it off, or something. But when I was beginning to write fiction, although I got the information "tie off most of your plot threads" over and over, and although it made sense on a conceptual level, it was a cold knowledge. It finally het up and got exciting for me when I could sense it kinetically, body-deep. At first it was mostly haphazard. At some point I'd remember an attention-getting element that I had put into the story near its beginning, and if I hadn't done something with it before the story ended, I'd find something for it to do. No use creating something tasty, only to have it use up its work day by sitting in the lunch room, bored out of its skull, twiddling its thumbs. Usually it's pretty easy to find something for that plot element to do; something neat to resolve a troublesome aspect of the story that I'd been trying to bury under the rug and hope no-one would notice. Because (it eventually occurred to me), if it didn't have some good work to contribute to the project of bringing the story home, then why was it there? God, I'm starting to sound like lines from a Yoda monologue when I talk about this. Feel the Force, Luke. In other words, start recognizing that the moment when I lift my light saber and swing it at your butt is probably going to have a result at the other end of the swing if you don't take steps to intervene.

In any case, I can now do a lot of the connecting the thigh bone to the knee bone actively instead of by accident. I don't tie off every plot thread; leaving some unfinished business gives the feeling that the characters go on living their lives and working their shit out after you close the book. It helps the story feel "real." I just worked that out this moment, seconds before I wrote it down.

I've decided that writing is not like healing a wound or scratching an itch or transcribing a divine voice.

Writing, I think, is like having a sore tooth. You can't help pushing on it. And the weird shots of pain you get are oddly satisfying. You feel better for having done it. You feel better for the ache because the worst thing is to feel nothing.

'Ouch, mmm, not bad, ouch...'

Here's something I picked up in a brilliant bookstore in San Francisco last time I was there. City Lights Books, I think. I'd forgotten the name, but I looked it up & this sure looks right, the map looks right, too. Such wonderful, esoteric stuff designed to tempt even the most jaded book shopper.

The book took me a year and a half to pick up, and an hour to read.

"When I teach -- and I've taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for a couple of years, at City College, Harvard -- I'm not looking for people who want to be writers. I'm looking for people who are passionate, who care terribly about something. There are people with a hell of a lot on their minds, Lee being a case in point, and if you have a hell of a lot on your mind, the language will arrive, the right words will arrive, the paragraphing will be right."
-- Kurt Vonnegut

(Why did it take so long? I put it on the wrong shelf. I put it on the shelf in my room, where I expected to see it first. I was spending a lot of time in my room that year. But I came home and found out my housemate was moving out, life changed, and I expanded. Now the books in the 'to read' pile sit on the shelf opposite the lounge, in the largest room of the house.)

"In a way .. it's a struggle to be human. I mean, if you really look at it, we wake up every morning to an alien environment. Certainly not the environment man was created in. It's a busy, throbbing, hustling, buzzing, spinning, crazy, alien environment. And the struggle for me, within that, is to try and be human, to try and do human things, to try and remember what we were born with. So to me it is very much a struggle just to be human, not so much a human struggle to do something else, but a struggle just to feel ... human."
-- Lee Stringer

I am, I confess, an idealist (we make the best kinds of cynics). I'd like to pretend good writers are good people and bad writers, well, they'll get theirs, eh? Yeah, right. Now and then it's gratifying to hear someone else -- unapologetically -- espouse the same thing.

"And I have said about the practice of the arts that practicing any art -- be it painting, music, dance, literature, or whatever -- is not a way to make money or become famous. It's a way to make your soul grow. So you should do it anyway."
-- Kurt Vonnegut

Also, I love that this *is* a book, that this book exists, that someone thought to record that conversation between Vonnegut and Stringer and then turn it into a book. Not streaming media, not lost-and-forgotten. A genuine, gods own book.

Vonnegut's tired but intense idealism sparks expansive riffing from Stringer, a new writer still amazed by the art's potential, and the rapport between the two is as engaging as the topics they ramble through, expound upon and pick apart.

A caffeine jolt for the soul. Don't you wish you could've had Vonnegut on speed-dial when he was alive? Don't you wish you could have that right now?

Vonnegut & Stringer quotes are from LIKE SHAKING HANDS WITH GOD: A Conversation About Writing.

Vonnegut always fills me with the desire -- in his fiction, in his talk -- to say goddamn, goddamn, goddamn. Over and over. I love that about him.

This year I'm thinking a lot about structure & the novel.

I'm unconvinced that the novel is doing anything as teleological as 'evolving', & if I think too long about it, I become disillusioned that there's any such thing as The Novel. Given that (as previously asserted), post-modern novel writing is at least as old as the novel itself, we'd have to conclude that the shape, the structure, the rules of the novel have never properly been set.

So, I wondered, just what *is* a novel?

I was wondering that when I happened to pick up David Mitchell's GHOSTWRITTEN: a beautiful book of interwoven short stories, told in prose that is elegant & charming without being self-conscious. A writers' writer, but also an accessible writer.

I developed a deep admiration for him.

David Mitchell served notice that he would be remaking the traditional novel when his first book, Ghostwritten, published in 1999 just after he turned 30, ingeniously braided together nine stories in eight countries and suggested that the same unchanging spirit ran through its central characters, whether in Hong Kong, St. Petersburg or a New York City radio station. Forget multiculturalism: this was novel globalism and an inquiry into what the boundary-dissolving author called transmigration.
-- Time Magazine 100 Most Influential People, 2007

Novel globalism? Is it, though? I mean: is it a novel? Certainly the stories connected such that re-appearances and references to previous characters or events echoed through to the last page. But is that *enough*? Does the sum of the parts add up to anything identifiable as a novel narrative?

*Is* a novel required to be something bigger than its pieces?

And of course, the answer you're going to get from this blog is, as usual: does it matter?

David Mitchell has been feted by critics for his dazzling take on non-linear, metaphysical fiction.

But it does matter. It matters if you need a vocab to refer to your achievements. It matters if you want to sell your 'novel', or win acclaim. Or awards.

Because a few years back, I seem to recall another powerful series of interlinked stories failing to find a home in a popular local awards scheme. 'These are short stories,' it was argued. 'Some of these have been sold separately. This does not add up to a novel.'

Ironically, it was implied that the stories -- chapters -- were too good to be part of something bigger, something other than themselves or greater than themselves. They'd been published, maybe they themselves had won awards. They couldn't be tamed, forced to do duty as part of a team, part of a 'novel'.

The book was Blackwater Days, by Terry Dowling.

I myself found *enough* coherence & interlinking in Dowling's book to warrant a claim to Novel status, if it mattered. And -- to continue the comparison -- David Mitchell has also been known to sell his independent chapters as stand-alone stories. Until his agent told him it might impact sales of the resultant book.

That's a-whole-nother post, I'm sure (I would argue that it would impact sales *positively*, since you've already engineered an audience following for that story, & who's NOT going to want to pick up a book to see if that story, those characters, make re-appearances elsewhere?).

If there is a criticism to be made about Mitchell's work it is that it is overambitious, that his books are too noisy, their multilayered narratives no more than formal tricks which compete ferociously for space in the reader's imagination.

But what if the idea of interlinked stories *isn't* a trick, formal or otherwise?

What if it's just a damn good way to write a book?

My personal experience of people I have helped, say with writer's block, is that it didn't matter how I did it. It still feels great when your thoughts takeoff — you feel like you have divine energy, and it doesn't matter if it came from getting up early or exercise or using a light box or taking a pill or having some big helmet on your head with magnets in it. It still feels divine.
-- Alice Flaherty

Turns out I have writer's block.

I didn't *think* I had writer's block. In fact, everything seemed great. I was writing regularly, I was having all these new ideas, I was *enjoying* what I was doing. It was like finding your stride, y'know? I was calm, I was capable, I was working, I was *producing*. The only problem I had was settling onto one thing at a time when I wanted to do everything at once.

Finding myself in a good place, I blithely picked up a book that's been on my shelf for a while. The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain, by neurologist Alice W. Flaherty.

And that's when I realised: I've got writer's block.

Her prose is, for the most part, sharp and lucid, but the fusion of science and the humanities does cause strange patterns to form in the reader's mind.

Writer's block, in Flaherty's book, is a) writing less than you would like, or b) writing less well than you would like. By that definition, almost any writer worth their salt has it. ;) It's a label for a mental state where the main symptom is this: writer's block is associated with distress. Writers who are blocked want to be cured.

The book isn't only about writer's block, of course. As the title suggests, it's also about the drive to write. One of Flaherty's areas of interest is hypergraphia: a manic urge to write that results in piles of unreadable rubbish (to paraphrase). Though in simplistic terms hypergraphia could be described as the *opposite* of writer's block, in fact it may well be just another expression of the same urges -- anxiety, depression, frustrated needs to communicate.

The main difference, however, is that people with hypergraphia don't want to be cured. Which could be an explanation for plenty of existing trilogies, when you think about it.

The good news is that, in the future, there's a good chance writer's block (which seems to reside in the frontal & temporal lobes) may be cured through the medical application of magnetism. That is, the waving of a magic -- sorry, magnetic -- wand over the temporal lobes.

I did not make that up.

The Midnight Disease is an eloquent dissertation on the neuropsychology of creativity. It's a feast of idea & science that will wake the latent psychology student in anyone. Anyone with an in-road into the scientist-speak, that is -- but I'm a sucker for it. I'm half-way through the grand story of this book (if we're allowed to use that word for medicine, & I think we should be!).

Oh, and I don't have writer's block. Neither do I want to make light of it. I've had my share of droughts & desperate swings. My flippancy comes from delight at finding the explanations & methodical hope in Flaherty's books. I've long been a fan of the brain -- that bizarre organ with the consistency of toothpaste & the raw, romanticised survival instinct of a brute, that pushes out & processes all we know about everything.

No, I don't have writer's block... But I am maybe sounding a little manic...