The Year of Ancient Ghosts

For those who have enjoyed my books in the past, there is a new one in the world. It’s a collection of five novellas called The Year of Ancient Ghosts and all the stories are fantastical or scary or both. I think it is the best stuff I have ever ever written, and you can buy it here in hardcover, paperback, or limited edition hardcover. It also has an introduction by Australian fantasy writer Kate Forsyth, and illustrations by newcomer James Blake.

I launched the book on Thursday night at Avid Reader in West End, and was so humbled that 100 people came along to support me. To all who were there, your ongoing interest in me and my work is so appreciated. I had such a lovely, lovely night. I’ve added some photos below.

Relaxing with a glass of Veuve before the launch.

Doing 5 readings in 5 minutes.

These are my awesome launch boots.

Signing books (with wine)

One of the fabulous illustrations

That which we are, we are.

I grew up in Redcliffe in the 70s and 80s, when it was pretty rough and socially disadvantaged. In fact, I was pretty rough and socially disadvantaged too. We were welfare class. My dad had an accident at work and was on sickness benefits, which he spent almost wholly on beer. My mum worked hard to support us all. I was bullied at school, never really fit in, and went to work in rubbish jobs in fast food. Then I finally got my shit together, went back to high school, then got out of town.

For a long time, during my university studies and with my new inner-city friends, I was faintly (if not entirely sometimes) embarrassed about having been a Redcliffe chick, one who used to hang out with boys in cars or wag school to sit on the jetty and smoke. I didn’t speak of it. I made myself anew; I tried to stop saying “Me and my friends” went somewhere or did something, or “brought” when I meant “bought”. I got a PhD. I published books and spoke elegantly and eloquently in public places.

Then one day I was coming home in a plane from Sydney, and we flew over Moreton Bay, that body of grey-blue water that I grew up looking at. And it struck me how magnificent the bay is, how it gives me the feeling of being home, of being somewhere that everything is all right. I looked down at the islands, and a story idea came to me. The story became Ember Island, the book I worked on over the summer (a Kimberley Freeman book). Imagine my surprise and delight when they sent me the cover and the jetty on the front is actually Redcliffe jetty. “We managed to get an actual picture of Moreton Bay,” the publisher told me excitedly. But she couldn’t know just how familiar that part of Moreton Bay is to me. Redcliffe jetty, on my book cover. Fifteen years ago I would have been appalled. But now, this just fills me with strange pride.

I am a Redcliffe girl. I am rough as guts. I did work at every fast food chain you can think of. And then I did something different; and I am not a better or worse person for growing up bogan. I am so proud of this book and the fact that it is set somewhere unexotic, maybe even parochial. I am what I am, and I am fucking proud to own it.

Writing, Parenting, Careening

Just out of shot: three kids and a harrassed mother.

The title of this post arose from a Facebook discussion I had about balancing writing and parenting. Fellow writer Fiona McMillan said that “balancing” was possibly a bad choice of verb, as it indicated there was some kind of control in place. She’s right. That’s when “careening” came to mind.

The thing about parenting is it’s so unrelenting. Writing is also unrelenting, especially if you have deadlines, which I always do, and especially if your deadlines are very tight, which mine always are. I’ve been single-parenting these school holidays, while trying to write 30 000 words a month. I’ll be frank with you: if I don’t deliver on time, I don’t get paid on time, and so I need to write to feed the children whom I also need to parent.

So I careen, from one task to the other, doing a little here and a little there, arms wheeling wildly, trying to gain purchase with my feet. I am always certain that I am short-changing both tasks. I skim across sentences and dinner-times, I write in bed in the mornings while my children lie on either side of me asking me questions I don’t remember later; I play Lego distractedly while planning out scenes in my imagination. From time to time, when I offer up pre-packaged ravioli, my son (who is very interested in cooking) will say, “You know, we should make our own pasta from scratch”, and I want to laugh hysterically and perhaps even set my own kitchen on fire so that I never ever have to make pasta from scratch. Or ice cream. Or organic wholemeal omega-3 anti-oxidant treats that will make my children into a übermenschen. (Please note: any comment about how “easy” it is to make pasta or ice cream from scratch will be instantly deleted and possibly also set on fire). It got so nuts, that I went on a writing retreat with my kids. That’s right: I took my kids and was writing with one hand and making cheesy toast for morning tea with the other.

Fiona is right. This isn’t balancing anything. This is simply a constant struggle not to fall over. I am two-thirds finished this book. Don’t wish me luck, just wish me the ability to function on fewer hours of sleep.

The Hobbit: You Want Chicks With That?

So I saw The Hobbit. The LOTR movies are my favouritest movies ever, so of course I was so happy to be back in Middle Earth and this isn’t a review of the movie. This is about the chicks.

Or lack thereof.

There were so many ways that Jackson could have worked some more women into the film, and that’s what I’m going to write about. Now, before you say, “but it was an adaptation of Tolkien and he was being faithful as all good adapters should be” let me just offer you a pre-emptive BULLSHIT, MATE. Adaptations do not have to be faithful to be good. They have to be good to be good. Case in point, what Jackson did with the structure of The Two Towers. The book is boring; the movie had pace, plenty of narrative interest, a clever interweaving of multiple threads.

This is what I reckon he could have done:

* Kili and Fili could have been female dwarves. Think about how RAD that would have been. Female dwarves are awesome! They’d not be all slender and holy-looking like Arwen and Galadriel; they’d be dirty and nuggety and rough as a bear’s arse. Massive missed opportunity.

* Radagast could have been a woman. Birdshit hair-product and all. Imagine, a cool old forest witch character, a crone with a cackle and gnarled hands.

* Smaug could have been a female dragon. Like Onyxia in World of Warcraft (who my cat is named after). Female dragons are cool.

* The Goblin King could have been a Goblin Queen. Let’s face it, we were all thinking of David Bowie as the definitive screen goblin king anyway (“you remind me of the babe”); why not get Judi Dench to voice her and have her be a wormy piece of womanly nastiness instead?

Maybe I’m biased because these are my ideas (worked out in conversation with my terribly clever boyfriend), but I think if Jackson had done all of the above, The Hobbit would have kicked arse. It would have been a movie that truly thrilled me, and a great many other fantasy movie fans, on many levels.

 

 

November, also known as CRAZY MONTH

I am winding up one of the busiest, fullest, bizarrest, diversest (I will stop making up words now) months of my fucking life. Where do I even start?

Genrecon: a mad weekend in Sydney with a bunch of awesome Australian genre writers being awesome. Made new friends, had lots of ideas, wrote every day, ate a lot of room service food. Then home for a few days and then off to Sharjah International Book Fair. Sharjah is the next-door emirate to the much better known Dubai. I talked on panels about women’s writing with Arabic women writers and made a guest appearance at a local Australian-curriculum school. Went out to the pool deck every afternoon to listen to the call to prayer from the mosque next door. Magic. They flew me out there and back business class on Emirates; now I am ruined for long haul travel FOR LIFE.

Then home for a few days, still writing and writing and crossing off those numbers on my writing productivity bingo card (see previous post). Sunday the 18th attended the Harvest Festival in Brisbane to see my favourite band ever, Sigur Ros. Sobbed with happiness through the first three songs, then pulled myself together. Touched the face of God. Best concert ever. That it followed one of the most violent and spectacular hailstorms I have ever seen in Brisbane only made the stars coming out all the sweeter.

Then got on another plane to Dublin, where I am writing this from. Kept writing my story, hit 30K 5 days ahead of schedule. Finished a novella. Wrote and delivered a talk about resilient writing to the postgraduate creative writing students at the Oscar Wilde Centre at Trinity College. Felt like a very big girl indeed. Saw the Book of Kells and went to the magnificent Long Room. See the picture below. Old books up to the ceilings and ladders. Dusty smell heaven.

I’ll finish November by meeting my UK publishers for lunch, then heading up to Cambridge to do a punt tour with my friend Lisa. Then back on a plane, back home to warm, sunny Brisbane, to all my beloved mammals, and to my very own bed.

I am exhausted, but this has been one of the most amazing times of my life. Oh, and I bought a super cute dress in Dublin and some awesome knee-high socks. Thanks for listening. I’ll resume normal, sane transmission in December.

 

Keeping going is sometimes super hard

Yesterday, I started my new Kimberley Freeman novel “Ember Island”. I have 30 000 words a month to write for the next four months, and in my planning for how I’m going to accomplish this, I had to assess my weaknesses and the threats to my writing time (Hello, Interwebz). The big threat to this project is that I am travelling a lot through November, including two long-haul trips; there’s Christmas in December; and school holidays with my kids home for 4 weeks in Janaury. It would be all too easy to throw my hands in the air and say “I don’t have time to write!”

So I need strategies, and over the summer, for the benefit of all mankind (at least those who write), I’m going to be trying out a range of strategies to make “keep going” a reality. See, for example, the photo of my notebook here (excuse my knees and toes in the shot; it is customary for me to work in bed or on the couch). There are twenty-five numbers in the table, and combined they add up to 30 000 (my goal for November). On 25 of the 30 days of November, I have to pick a number and write that much. There are small amounts, for days when I am tightly scheduled, and big amounts for when I have the luxury of time.

Watch this space for more helpful tips.

No, no… don’t get up.

Shit just got real around here, with me needing to start a new Kimberley Freeman, finish my novella collection, and write an academic paper. It’s a big scary bottleneck of WRITE SOMETHING, BITCH so I’ve had to have a long hard look at my writing habits, which have been a bit slippery of late.

We all understand that to write we have to sit at our keyboards (for example, I’m sitting at mine right now, in bed with the electric blanket on… this is my favourite way to work). But I don’t think sitting at the keyboard is specific enough advice anymore. Do you know why? Because of the siren call of the FUCKING internet, which clearly doesn’t want me to get my work done.

Because in every writing project—creative or otherwise—there comes a moment where you hit a slow spot and you’re not quite sure what to write next. Now at this stage, many of us will pop open an internet browser. Guess what, you just walked away from the work. You just got up and walked away. Worse: you just put your writing out of your head too. At least if you take a little walk around your garden, you can still be mulling it over. Let me make this really clear to you:
• When you google a bit of research, you have walked away from your work and are now in a library. That’s kind of okay, but it’s a library where there are a lot of celebrity gossip mags lying around that have enticing headlines.
• When you open Facebook, you have walked away from your work and are now in a room full of your friends and they are all bored and talking derp and exchanging hilarious animal pictures.
• When you start instant messaging on Skype or Google Talk or whatever, you have walked away from your work to chat with a friend.
• When you slide over to your favourite blogs, you have walked away from work and are reading a magazine instead.
• When you check your email, you have walked away from your work and up to your letterbox, collected your mail and opened it and started composing responses.

You wouldn’t do this in any other job and expect to get things completed. In all these examples, not only have you stopped writing, but you’ve stopped thinking about your writing. You’ve killed your flow. ERMERGERD!

Simply reframing your internet procrastination as wandering away from your work can really help. When your mouse is hovering over that Firefox logo, you must say to yourself sharply, “Don’t get up. Don’t walk away. Be here in the story.” The internet will wait for you. And the animals are never that funny anyway. Except that sneezing baby panda. He’s awesome.

Multi-millionaire

Many books, many editions, all by me!

On August 31, I will launch my 22nd book, Lighthouse Bay, under the name Kimberley Freeman. I have done the maths, and calculated that the release of this book will see me pass two million words of fiction in print. From the age of 4 (if not before), I knew I wanted to be a writer, though I never imagined I’d have two million words in print one day, especially as I’m not yet (I hope) halfway through life. That means there’s every chance that I might make it to five million before I pop my clogs.

Still. Something about the passing of this milestone has given me a new feeling of knowing everything. Okay, technically I can’t know everything. But I feel like I do anyway. Like, if you asked me any question at all about writing fiction, I would answer you immediately, thoroughly, informatively, and be 100% confident I was right. After all, I am the two-million-word girl.

So here is my best advice for fiction writing distilled. (There are swears. I grew up swearing a lot in the outer suburbs and I used to be embarrassed about that, but now I’m rocking my outer-suburbs upbringing because I’m a fucking expert now and nobody can say welfare class girls can’t do it.)

Write, you muthafucka! Write the fucking fiction! Don’t write blogs and marketing plans and twitter yourself in front of everyone in hopes of building a platform. Write the fucking fiction FIRST. The rest is just white noise until you have a good finished product. And it must be good. We live in an instant gratification society. You can post some nonsense while sitting on the toilet on Facebook and seventeen people can “like” it before you’ve wiped your arse. That’s not going to cut it in the world of writing fiction. You need to shape, craft, edit, prune, elaborate, make the writing BEAUTIFUL. Then, and only then, can you hold your head high in a public forum and say, “I am a writer. I write beautifully. You will know my name.”

Extreme love or go home. Don’t write to impress your father/your teacher/the literati/the fickle marketplace. Write something that comes from deep, deep down. Haul it wriggling its slimy tentacles into the light, and pin it on the page with passion and precision and care and EXTREME LOVE. It’s really hard to write a book. Why the fuck would you write one you didn’t love EXTREMELY? It’d be more fun to pull your own eyeballs out on corn skewers. And you know what the world doesn’t need more of: careless art tossed off cynically. Don’t you know that it’s a fool who plays it cool, by making the world a little colder? Or so the Beatles said.

Never compare yourself to other people. Never. It is futile, exhausting, and poisons you to the point where you don’t know what you extreme-love anymore. So somebody in your writers’ group got published ahead of you? SO FUCKING WHAT? Are you dead? Then quit complaining. If you think that somebody else’s success makes you small, then you are telling yourself your stories don’t matter. They do. Write your stories, from your heart; and if you have followed steps one and two, they will be precious and meaningful and belong in the world, even if the only audience they ever meet is a small one.

And all this is true, I know, because I am a fucking expert and I am always right.

June is for writing

My sabbatical is almost over and I’m back at work at the uni in one month. Today, I got all my academic work in order, made notes about how and when to finish it, and filed it. Because June is for writing. For writing fiction, that is; and specifically cool, magical, medieval, paganish fiction set in places with old trees and mossy stones. I am about to start work on the last novella for my collection The Year of Ancient Ghosts (see cover art below). The novella is called “The Lark and the River” and is set around the end of the 11th century when a new church is built on an ancient pagan site and then the shit goes down. The other stories in the collection are:
* “The Year of Ancient Ghosts” about a woman who brings her daughter to Orkney to investigate her husband’s secret past and then the ghostly shit goes down.

* “The Death of Pamela” in which a couple of Arthur’s knights leave their sister at a spooky castle and then the bathing-in-virgin-blood shit goes down.
* “Wild Dreams of Blood” about a woman who finds out on the eve of her wedding that she is Odin’s daughter and then the frost giant cage-fighting shit goes down.
* “Crown of Rowan”, a prequel to my historical fantasy novel The Garden of the Mad King, in which shit just goes down pretty continually.

I’m super excited!

At journey’s end

This time tomorrow, I will be on a plane somewhere between London and Singapore, on my way home to my babies (whom I’ve started to dream about in vivid detail every night) and my house, car, and cats. My usual response to impending travel, especially long-haul, is to curl in a foetal ball all day and worry about everything that can go wrong. But today is the first fine day in a while, so I said to myself: imagine that you have been given one day here in the Cotswolds in spring; you wouldn’t spend it in bed watching television.

So I went walking up the road and through the mud to Stow-on-the-wold (nearest village: Anglo-Saxon for “place on the wood”), and then I sat in the garden with a cup of tea and gazed out over the rapeseed flowers shining brilliantly yellow in the sun, and tonight I intend to head up to The Fox for a pint of Marston’s Pedigree and a pub meal and YES I will eat the sticky toffee pudding because it’s my last day in England.

But the best part of the day was returning to the churchyard and sitting under that centuries-old yew tree, and listening for voices. Travelling Companion snapped this picture of me, authentically working. The story is called “The Lark and the River” and it’s all about an old yew tree and the building of a new church in a pagan place in the Anglo-Norman period. I don’t know what I was waiting to hear, but I closed my eyes and listened hard. I heard the wind in the trees, birdsong, traffic far away. The wind was cold and I came out in goosebumps. And I heard it: the first line of the story, and with it came a whole avalanche of other ideas. I scribbled them all down.

And for all that I bang on about hard work and craft and sticking at it, sometimes writing really IS magic like that. When that kind of magic happens, I think I’m the luckiest woman alive.

I’ll be home within 48 hours. Get the place tidy for me, will you?