A new book. Argh, run screaming!

So. It hath happened. Wildflower Hill has hit the shelves. My bestie took this photo at the airport, so I have evidence. There’s always an awkward feeling of vulnerability when I have a book published (yes, even after 21 occasions). It’s almost impossible to explain but let me try. Imagine you are at the supermarket, and you look down and realise you are wearing only your underwear. People may be appreciative of you in your underwear, but nonetheless you feel exposed. Later, when you go home, you try not to think about it, but your mind returns to it again and again. What have people seen of you? What do they now know or presume about you, from that moment of exposure?

You may remember Wildflower Hill from such tortured posts as this and this and this. But now it is a real book in the world and real people will read it and they will have their opinions. Oh yes they will. Some of them will write and tell me their opinions, which is always nice if they like the book; but is a form of torture if they don’t (not because I can’t handle criticism, but because the accepted wisdom is that one does not write back snarly emails full of swears) (oh, and I lied: I also can’t handle criticism). Also, there is book promotion to do. This involves being interviewed and having my photograph taken. Do you like having your photograph taken? Yes, well, now imagine that the photographs are printed in public places before you even know whether or not they make you look like a half-witted yet slightly lascivious Amish milkmaid.

All of it makes me want to crawl under a rock and hide, but there is still that little part of me that hopes that people will read my book and like it, and like the people in it. Because for a little while, when I was writing it, they meant an awful lot to me.

Wildflower Hill

In 1920s Glasgow, Beattie Blaxland falls pregnant to her married lover Henry just before her nineteenth birthday. Abandoned by her family, Beattie and Henry set sail for a new life in Australia. But life is not about to follow the plan that Beattie had hoped for and fate will play her a cruel hand… In 2009, London, prima ballerina Emma Blaxland-Hunter is also discovering that life can also have its ups and downs. Unable to dance again after a fall, Emma returns home to Australia to recuperate. But on arrival she is presented with some surprising news – her recently deceased and much-loved grandmother Beattie Blaxland has left her Tasmanian property to Emma. Told through the eyes of a young Beattie Blaxland and a contemporary Emma Blaxland-Hunter, this is an emotionally charged, seductive tale of self-discovery, secrets and surprises.

“evocatively written” – Australian Women’s Weekly
“the reader is helpless to do anything but turn the page” – Bookseller & Publisher Magazine

Politicks and Ladies (swear warning)

I’ve hesitated to write this post, because there’s an old-fashioned part of me that warns me never to speak about politics (or money or religion) in polite company. But I figure this isn’t polite company necessarily, and I do so want to say a few things.

I’m an ALP voter. I like their whole social justice, spend-money-on-education ethos, even if sometimes they are a bit dodgy about holding strong on those things. I hate the Coalition, like, with a passion. Rich people moaning, that’s what they are to me. (By the way, I’m not going to publish any comments from Coalition supporters, so don’t bother posting them. It’s my blog and I’ll do as I damn well please).

So then we had this election and WTF? W? T? F?

I know there was a lot of shit going down, but I have a horrible sinking feeling that gender played a big part in the WTF-ness that was Saturday’s election. First, when J-Gill took over, everyone was all like, “oh the union heavies put her in there”. Implication: women are always men’s pawns. Then, the media were all like, “this is what she’ll look like old!”, “this is what she looks like glamorous!”, “she has red hair!” Or, if they weren’t talking about her appearance, they were all like, “she’s going to move her boyfriend into the Lodge!”, “she’s setting a bad example for women on marriage!”, “she’s only got one piece of fruit in her fruit bowl!” I mean, FFS, people. F. F. S.

And then, because she knew she was already pushing shit uphill with a pointed stick cos she is a lady, she took such a conservative line on everything. Boat people? Really, Julia? Those 1500 or so poor, sad bastards that struggle into our country every year because they would rather spend weeks on a leaky stinking boat than stay where they live because shit is THAT BAD for them? And gay marriage? Really, Julia? As a defacto-living aetheist, like you give a shit about marriage-is-an-institution and God and whatever. I reckon she knew these were dumb, conservative things to say. But when you’re trying to get elected while in the possession of a vajayjay, I guess you try to appear as unthreatening as possible.

And then there’s Tony Abbott with his misogynist bullshit about virginity being a “gift” for the right guy. When do the ladies get their gift in the bedroom, Tones? Oh, by the way, I don’t want my gift from you. Unsexiest man EVER. (And yes, I can say that cos it’s MY FRICKIN BLOG).

And amongst it all “working families” “working families” “working families”. I work. I have a family. Is that me? Cos I don’t recognise myself in your anti-boat, anti-gay, let’s-just-wait-and-see-on-climate-change bumwank.

So now we’ve got what they deserved, a hung parliament. I kinda think WE deserved better. We deserved a viable alternative to the Tweedledee/Tweedledum BS that is the two-party lockdown. If God had meant for us to vote, he would’ve given us candidates.

Weird, huh?

The Anglo-Saxons had this awesome concept called “wyrd”. So say it like “weird” (cos that’s where the word comes from: Shakespeare adopted it for his witches in Macbeth) but flatten the “e” sound and harden your “r” a little. Wyrd is a heathen concept, and is often translated simply as “fate” but it’s more complicated than that. It comes from the verb “weorthan”, which means both “to become” and “to happen”. And somewhere between those two words (which hint at both personal agency and random-shit-you-can’t-control) lies the meaning. Wyrd refers both to universal destiny: the uncontrollable factors around us that we are caught up in and can’t ever really escape; and personal destiny: the actions we take in every moment to become what we are going to be next. So wyrd is both woven for us and by us.

The best analogy I can think of is this: you’re out at sea on a sailing boat. You have no control over the weather, and there’s no point pleading with the sky not to storm because the sky won’t listen and wouldn’t care anyway. But what you can do is set your sails the best way possible to get through the storm: those actions you take shape what will become of you. Wyrd is the same idea, but applied to Life.

I like this idea so much I had it tattooed on the inside of my left fore-arm yesterday. The lettering is an early medieval scribal form used for Old English manuscripts like Beowulf and The Exeter Book (the “w” looks a bit like a “v” with a tail). It’s my first, and will probably be my only tattoo. I still feel quite giddy that I did it. Fear me!

So, that’s quite a complicated and long-winded explanation and I’m not going to repeat it. If people ask me what it says, I’ll direct them here. Or maybe I’ll just tell them it says “pwnd”.

Thanks to Scott at Wild at Heart for being so kind to this cleanskin n00b. Here are pictures:

Before

During

After

The Infernal: thirteen years later

1997: more hair, more lace

In July 1997, I launched my first novel, The Infernal, at the University of Queensland bookshop on campus at St Lucia. The launcher was Frances Bonner, who was one of my teachers (she’s now an Associate Professor and she supervised my PhD); my bestie Kate Morton did a short reading for me (she’s now a super-famous internationally bestselling author and still my bestie); and my MC was Norman Doyle (he’s now a well-respected and busy actor). I was a third-year undergrad, and utterly clueless as to how publishing worked. But, yeah, I was pretty excited.

And I’m pretty excited all over again because, 13 years later, Ticonderoga Press has launched a limited edition signed & numbered hardcover of The Infernal. I received my copies today, and they are beautiful. To commemorate the occasion, I’ve included below the text of the foreword to the new edition. Every word is true and heartfelt.

It has been thirteen years since this, my first novel, was published. I look back on the story now with a mixture of fondness and embarrassment (all that sex and swearing!), but can’t deny that its publication was an event that changed my life. Up until The Infernal was published, I was a working class girl with dreams too big to come true. Afterwards, nothing seemed impossible anymore. The Infernal opened many doors for me, but the most important door was the one into the Australian speculative fiction community. I was received, and continue to be received, with such warmth and enthusiasm; I found “my people” and that is worth more than any financial success or critical acclaim. In the first edition of the book, I thanked many individuals, some of whom I’m still thanking twenty books later. But for this special edition I would like to simply thank the writers, readers, publishers, and thinkers that make up the Australian SF community, people who I am privileged to call my friends.

All shall love me and despair!!!!!!!!!

When it’s all working, writing a book is the Best. Fun. Ever.

You know that feeling when you’re in the middle of reading a really good book, and you’re thinking you’re going to diiiiiiiiiiie when it finishes but at the same time you can’t stop flipping the pages? It’s that times a gazillion.

You know that feeling when you’re at a dinner party or some such and you’re cracking one-liners and dropping intelligent witticisms like fucking Oscar Wilde but with better hair? It’s that to the power of infinity.

You know that feeling when you’re thinking about somebody you know who is teh awesome and you’re half in love with and then you realise that person is a fictional character and the lines just got a little blurred? It’s that turned up to eleven.

You remember that feeling when you were a kid? All of it? It’s that, but without the bad stuff where they called you Bucky Beaver and said Rick Springfield would never lerve you.

It’s sunshine on rain. I fucking love it.

My book is killing me

It continues to surprise me how much I can suck at this job after all these years. I’m blogging because this morning’s writing session was so frickin demoralising. Roughly speaking, everything I write of late goes like this:

Here is a setting. Look at this detail. There are people here. They say things to each other. Everybody thinks for a while. The sun sets.

Two Ducks. Swimming.

I am dyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyying. Shouldn’t this be easy by now? I’ve written 21 books. I don’t often let myself think about that fact. TWENTY-ONE of the suckers. Sure, some of them were short, but some were really long. Those 21 books represent just over 1.9 million words, all in the right order. So don’t be saying to me, “What would you tell your students in this situation?” because my students are usually working on their first or second books. Not their twenty-second. I have no advice for somebody writing their twenty-second book, except maybe, “Dude, if it’s not working by now, perhaps you should take up topiary.”

This book is too important to me. It’s not just that 22 is kind of a favourite number. My birthday is 22/12, my husband’s is 22/10 (and if you add the 12 and the 10 together, you get another 22). And the bingo call for 22 is two ducks swimming, and I really like ducks. And also, it’s just such a pretty, buttercup yellow number. But ducks and buttercups aside, this book is just special because it is and because I’ve fallen in love with the setting and the characters and now I’m in charge of them, I can do nothing with them except make them have tedious bouts of longing then occasionally shout at each other. I feel like a bad mother who realises she should relinquish her child to somebody more responsible. Somebody else come write this book for me! Robin Hobb could do a good job of it, or Guy Gavriel Kay, or Kate Elliott. Meanwhile, I’d best dig out my hedging shears and look for a hedge to turn into a giant panda.

The Darnedest Things

I have nothing of interest to offer you from my own thoughts, but my kids have been saying pretty funny stuff lately so, even though it’s lazy and possibly lame, I’m plagiarising it wholesale.

¤

Luka (7): Astrid won’t kiss me!
Astrid (3): Your kisses are too wet!
Luka: I will kiss you dry as a wilted leaf!

¤

Small obnoxious girl: I’m Emmelina Ballerina
Astrid: I’m Astrid the Viking

¤

Astrid (after playing with a dead moth for 3 hours): Mummeeee! I brokeded my moth!

¤

Luka (to the spider in the web above our car): I’m watching you, with your black coat and your eight legs and your many many eyes.

¤

And my favourite:

Luka (bursting into the bathroom while I’m in the shower): Excuse me, but it’s an emergency. My new invention needs much more toilet paper.

¤

Go on, share yours.

The future of… well, everything…

So, I completely rooted my back.* I would like to be able to say that I did it in a glamorous extreme-sport way: perhaps heli-skiing or white-water rafting. But, no, I did it through hours upon hours of doing what I’m doing right now: sitting at a computer writing. Okay, so I’m a writer, both here and at the uni. But I don’t think it was writing novels and research papers that did this to me. I think what did this to me was the expectation that I must keep up with all this newfangled technology.

For the last 9 days, I haven’t been on the computer except once a day to check for important emails. And I’ve got to say, it’s been bliss. The endless stream of Facebook notifications dried up. I simply ignored the vast amounts of email that come through the various email lists and RSS feeds I am on. I picked up the phone and spoke to my bestie rather than Skyping her (she’s well, thanks for asking). If I wanted a cup of tea, I went downstairs and made it myself rather than instant messaging my husband (okay, that’s a lie; I just shouted for him to make me tea: it was classy). Oh me, oh my, it was bliss! There have been days in the past where I’ve been sitting at my desk at uni, trying to write a paper, and all I can hear is a symphony of beeps and buzzes as everything notifies me it’s arriving: Thunderbird, Skype, Google Talk, texts or emails on my Blackberry. Insanity. My attention is so divided. I start a thought and don’t finish it. So this week has been quiet, and I’ve felt a strange calm creep over me. If I see an email on a list come through, I don’t feel the urge immediately to wade in and offer my opinion on everything.

I recognise the irony of saying all this on a blog, and this is the strange impasse I have reached. There is so much that is good about the way that we connect with each other now. I love that I have found old friends on Facebook. From a purely practical perspective, the interwebz allows me to promote myself and build a market as a writer. I love doing writers’ races and being in constant dialogue with my writing friends: my bestie, my manuscript group, my stablemates at the literary agency, and so on: writers can feel isolated at times. But writing used to be different for me. It was quieter. It was early in the morning, with nobody around and a hot cup of tea. It was a special place I went alone. And then I just handed it over to my agent and got on with the next one. I am going to say, definitively, that the day my writing computer got hooked up to the interwebz, was the day my productivity dropped. I write in a distracted way now. I can’t seem to focus anymore. I’m too busy being a writer to write properly.

The wonderful thing about any kind of illness or injury is that it gives you an opportunity to take stock, and I realise that I really have to think about how I write. I don’t have a great deal of willpower (though I stopped biting my nails this year for the first time in my life–yayz!); so saying I will try to use Web 2.0 technology “moderately” may not work for me. Also, I don’t want to be one of those writers who only blogs or appears on Facebook when I have something to sell my “friends”. But at the same time, I’ve always found it borderline uncomfortable posting my opinions in public as though I think they’re all that. Besides, I should be using that energy on my novel, which, it must be said, is getting written very slowly. My agent told me recently that she’s seen a noticeable drop in the quality of manuscripts submitted to her since the advent and mass uptake of Web 2.0 technology. I can imagine why: our writing is spread too thin, just as we are.

Over the coming weeks, in the limited bursts I can actually sit at the computer, I’m going to try and find that still pool that I used to write in. I miss it. I’m not ignoring you, I’m just going to stop ignoring me.

—-

*Note: please don’t send me suggestions of ways to fix my back. I’m seeing a great health professional and I’m very happy with the progress.

On watching movies

I’ve seen a bunch of movies in the last week or so, and thought I’d blog about the experience. These aren’t reviews as such: a couple of the movies have been out for a very long time. These are just reflections on a medium of storytelling that I feel has incredible potential rarely realised.

The first was the CGI Beowulf (dir. Robert Zemeckis), which I have resisted watching until now. Why resist? Well, the poem has a really special place in my heart and I don’t want to see it sullied. Also, about the time Zemeckis’s version came out, I watched on DVD the little-known Icelandic version Beowulf and Grendel (dir. Sturla Gunnarson) with Gerard Butler as Beowulf and it was really good: sure they dicked with the plot, but it looked stunning. But I slowly came round to the idea of Zemeckis’s adaptation. Neil Gaiman was involved in the screenplay. Anthony Hopkins and a few other good actors were in it. Surely it couldn’t be that bad.

Well, I guess I’ll never know precisely how bad or good it is because I couldn’t watch it for more than 10 minutes. It is officially the movie I have given up on quickest in my life. The CGI was awful, just awful. It looked like a cut scene from a PC game. I will never know if Neil Gaiman’s quirky brilliance saved it, or if Anthony Hopkins made a wonderful Hrothgar because I couldn’t look at it. FFS, if I’d wanted to watch Polar Express I would have rented it.

My second adventure was District 9, which a lot of my friends and family said was Teh Awesome. I’d really been looking forward to this one, but perhaps my head wasn’t in the right place to enjoy it more than “meh”. For one thing, I couldn’t stomach the violence but that says more about me than it says about the movie. I don’t actually mind violence. I like it in books, I love it in computer games. But for some reason movie violence irritates me. I always feel as though I’m being manipulated; it always seems a film-maker’s shortcut to a visceral reaction. Or something. I really don’t know. In any case, I recognise that this movie was a wonderfully original concept, and the aliens looked superb, and the sight of that big ship just sitting up there above Johannesburg was brilliant. But what killed it for me was the lack of a likable character in the first hour. I hated the protagonist (and I’ve forgotten his name, which says something). I didn’t care if he died. I certainly didn’t care if his adequately pretty wife was sad (she looked like she had an illustrious career ahead of her modelling knitware in Kmart catalogues) (seriously, just give the nerdy-looking man a nerdy-looking wife). I got more interested in the alien with the little son and genuinely cared about them, but it was a long time coming. And by then, my disbelief had returned from suspension and I saw ALL the plot holes. And they were huuuuuuuuuuuge. Fatal, even. So my verdict is: great concept, uneven execution.

And then, almost by accident, I watched Ponyo (dir. Hayao Miyazaki). A friend had loaned me a bagful of Miyazaki films to show my kids, and I thought my little girl might be taken by the cute, chubby-faced fish. I expected to do housework while she watched, but from the opening frames I was utterly captivated. So I sat on the couch and watched it all, breathless. It is a work of art. Utterly sublime. Some of the scenes will stay with me forever, especially those that captured to perfection the might and beauty and mystery of the sea.

My final adventure was in an actual movie theatre (gasp!) with 3D glasses on my nose and a squirming three-year-old in and out of my lap. We took the kids to see How to Train your Dragon. I have an interest in medievalism, and particularly in Vikings in popular imagination so I was really looking forward to this one (even though it’s Dreamworks who usually suck and not Pixar who usually rock). Oh my God. It was so amazing. It was beyond brilliant. The story was tight, tight, tight. The characterisation was superb. The CGI was flawless. The settings were incredible. The flying scenes in 3D made the pit of my stomach drop. And the big final scene had me in actual tears (but, okay, I cry easily). A perfect blend of controlled storytelling and real emotional depth. This is the stuff that I always want to see at the movies. Big story, big heart, beautiful to watch. I’d give this one 11 out of 10, and it’s going on the list of my Favourite Movies Evah.

Well, that’s it. Now I’ll go back to watching podcasts of Good Game and re-runs of Friends, and hanging out for The Hobbit. Meanwhile, check out my cat Onyxia: doesn’t she look a lot like Toothless?

I won't bite...

... honest!

Outside my window

I’ve been up early writing this morning. I promised myself I’d write just 300 words then go back to bed if I was tired, but I stayed and finished the scene and I’m quite pleased with myself. I turned off my internet connection so I wouldn’t be distracted, but found myself distracted instead by the view outside my window. All green and cool and white sunlight and Mt Coot-tha in the distance.

But it’s not just the gorgeous setting outside my window that attracts my attention. There’s a big wasp nest on top of my window (don’t worry, I have screens) and I’m fascinated by them. At five a.m., they’re all asleep. I come in here and open my window and the bumping makes them all stir but they just snuggle back down again. But now they are flying about doing wasp-y things. They are so industrious, they are an inspiration.

Much more fun than the interwebz.