Monthly Archives: April 2011

the sleepover

In a book I read recently, a middle-aged novelist who’d let herself go a bit was nervous and excited about a potential friendship. She commented that new friends made her feel as excited these days as new boyfriends used to.

It made me chuckle (I’m allowed, it’s just fictional people who aren’t) and think, How true!

During school, friendships are a fact of life; five days of your week are spent relentlessly in the company of your peers. Once you grow up a bit, as I discovered to my horror when I returned to Melbourne in 2009, you become much more insular. You form smaller family units, you depend on fewer people, your work and aspirations now take more head-space than your latest emotional drama.

Mostly, this makes sense. But I miss the sleepover. Spending a minimum of 24 hours living in the same space as your mates. It’s just not an activity that fits easily into grown-up life – but it’s worth fighting for.

Tomorrow I’m flying to Sydney to spend the weekend with two of my oldest friends. I cannot wait.

wedding vows in action

We wrote our own wedding vows. Contrary to what you might expect, mine were full of well-considered guidelines of behaviour for our future, and special k vowed to love me beneath a mountain, by a forest, under a moon.

One of my vows was this:

I will not mistake success or failure in our lives for the success or failure of our marriage.

Today I went for an interview at the Big Issue for a part-time editorial position. I didn’t get the job.

When special k came home, he cuddled me for a while. He told me that it isn’t nice to have someone say, “No. Not you.” Then we cooked dinner together. We carefully planned how we would stuff the zucchini flowers with mozzarella then dip them in beer batter and deep fry them. I watched with admiration as he added the pasta to mushrooms and tomato cooked in shallots and garlic, and he cheered me on as I fried the prawns.

We were closed in the kitchen in the kind of warm camaraderie that autumn brings. I tentatively allowed myself to think, “At least I still have this,” which was when I remembered my wedding vow.

It’s an odd feeling, an odd equation that the human heart makes. I did not succeed today, it says. Therefore I do not deserve the unreserved comfort and enjoyment of home.

I knew, when I wrote that vow, that it would be a hard one to live by. But today I did, and I feel triumphant.

numbers in fiction

I don’t know if I’ll ever be one of those people who lies about their age. A friend of mine recently told me that when she was backpacking in Europe at 18, she told everyone she was 19 because it sounded less green. It worked wonderfully until an American girl saw her passport in passing and called her on the lie. My friend had to cut all ties with the American for fear she would out her to everyone else.

Numbers in and of themselves are a fiction we tell ourselves to make sense of things that would otherwise go unnamed like the passing of time, and how much a can of baked beans is worth.

What I’ve recently been struggling with, is how age means a different thing in fiction. When you don’t have a person in front of you, whose lined skin and calloused hands and thinning hair tell their own story of experience, it’s much harder to say what a number means.

I realised the other day that I’d mistaken the romantic interest in my young adult WIP. My protagonist is 13, and as the story stands the real love interest is about 28.

Considering they won’t actually be romantically involved for a good few years, this doesn’t actually bother me too much. But if I imagine special k, who is also 28, being in love with a 13 year old, it bothers me a lot (aside from the fact that he’s my husband and shouldn’t be in love with anyone but me).

So I have, grudgingly, started to shift the numbers around. Having to make him younger brings some new, interesting elements into the story and I think it’s going to work. I’m still finding it hard to let go of the character as I originally wrote him, though.

There are genres and settings where the age difference would work. If he was a vampire (werewolf/demon/angel/fairy), for example, he could be 2,080 and it would make no difference. If the setting were pure fantasy, rather than a science fiction universe populated solely by humans, it could work. If the story was going to be an epic that spanned a good decade or two, also possible.

The series I’ve been thinking of quite a lot is Tamora Pierce’s Immortals quartet. The romance that spans four books does very much what I want to do: a young girl starts to build her powers under the mentorship of an older mage. They fall in love almost imperceptibly as she grows up.

Do you read fictional relationships according to what is acceptable in real life? And what would push the boundaries too far beyond your comfort?

never, never, never, never give up

I misquote Churchill, because “never give up” galvanises me more right now than “never give in”. Though maybe the latter is more constructive. Maybe this is war.

After a couple of weeks of productive writing (which coincided, without coincidence, with me doing all my dishes every single night) I have hit a general, across the board wall. No surprises, then, that the wall applies equally to my blog, and that I found a large-ish cockroach in my kitchen the other day.

I have noticed a feeling of quiet confidence in me. Actually, quiet is the wrong adjective, because it’s more stubborn and immutable than quiet. It’s not trumpeting from the rooftops or anything (who used to trumpet from the rooftops, anyway?), it just is.

The confidence says: If you keep writing, keep progressing, keep learning and breaking it down and polishing it up, you will be published.

We’re always being told this. The main reason people don’t get published is that they give up. It seems like a pretty straight-forward equation: just keep writing. So it’s amazing to me how even with this sense that I’m on my way towards what I want, it quite frequently feels impossible.

For right now, then, writing is an endurance sport.

the perfect mum vs the mum you love

I’ve been tackling an interesting aspect of character recently.

The mother of my protagonist (Abigail) is in a coma throughout the whole of my YA novel. I’ve been conscious of needing to create their relationship pre-coma, so that the reader cares about her waking up.

The street kid who stows away on board Abigail’s spaceship had a bad relationship with his neglectful adoptive mother. When he hints at this to Abigail, I have her remembering a moment with her own mother that shows how much she was loved and cared for, and then looking at him and saying, “I’m sorry.”

I went down the most obvious “my mother loves me” route: A 6-year-old Abigail can’t sleep one night and comes down to the room where her mum and step-dad are playing Scrabble. The light is soft, and her mother comes immediately to her with concerned eyes, and says, “What’s wrong, darling?” Abigail goes and sits on her lap and listens to them cheat each other at Scrabble until she falls asleep.

The funny thing about this passage is that for me, it didn’t actually evoke what I wanted it to, at all. I don’t think relationship is a direct equation between love/overt displays of love.

My instinct here is that Abigail needs to remember a time when her mother told her off, or teased her, or was exasperated with her. I need to show them actually in relationship with each other, and what that allows between them.

These oddities of fiction don’t really fit into any set of rules, but I guess my first try didn’t work in the same way that “I’m hot, you’re hot” does not a romance make.

One of my most distinct memories of my mum, with a sense of love and care attached to it, is the time she and I were doing the dishes together and she drew the entire female reproductive system on the steamed-up window above the sink. Not the first thing it would occur to you to write…

What’s a memory that sticks out for you about a parent or guardian, that shows love and care?

the writing/juggling act

Here’s a quick post on my method for writing two novels at once. (And maybe tomorrow I’ll introduce my second project!)

I allocate days to each novel (Fridays and Sundays for romance; Tuesday mornings, Wednesdays, Thursday afternoons and Saturdays for YA). On any given day I work strictly and exclusively on whatever that day’s project is – I don’t allow myself to even look at, or write notes for, the other project.

That may sound a little excessive, but if I bend that rule at all, what starts happening is that I dither between the two. If my mind starts wandering from one, or I hit a wall, I will switch projects, telling myself that I’m still being productive. And there goes a whole day.

Being strict also means that I can focus entirely on what I’m writing that day, without feeling any guilt about the other project.

Everyone works in their own way, but I’ve found this really works for me, so I thought I’d share it in case it works at least as a starting point for any other writers out there whose ideas are overflowing.

the advent of self-publishing; the dread

Connie Brockway is an established romance writer. She has been on bestseller lists (though I have the impression she’s not one of the authors who consistently stays there) and she has won the RITA twice, which is the romance equivalent of an Oscar. She has just announced that she is going to self-publish her next few novels as e-books.

I realise that now isn’t actually the advent of self-publishing. Many brave people have gone before, a few of them have made it really big, many of them haven’t. The thing about now is that self-publishing has become such a viable option that big-name writers are considering it. Jenny Crusie mentioned an interest in it recently as well.

It makes sense. Writers already do anywhere between 60 and 95 percent of their own marketing through social networks, blogs, websites etc. (This is particularly true of genre writers, I think, and genre fiction has embraced e-publishing with an enthusiasm yet to be matched by literary fiction.) Writing also has very low start-up costs – aside, of course, from the hours and hours you’re not paying yourself to write. Design programs are accessible and relatively easy to use.

One of Brockway’s most compelling reasons for her decision was that it will allow her to write the books she wants to write, the stories she’s passionate about, not just the stories her publisher feels will do well in the current market.

I think it’s a really exciting time for writers, and the possibility of earning 100% of the profit from your work, rather than 6-15% (ish, I did just pull those numbers out of the air, but they’re about right) is exciting.

So why did Brockway’s announcement fill me with a kind of dread?

The first, easiest explanation is this: I have wanted to be a writer since I was very little. That has always meant a book with my name on it and my words in it. Except now that I’ve grown up enough to be a writer, the book world is progressing beyond me into something else, so that the most viable or even likely option might be e-books.

The next is all there in my vague statement that “many brave people have gone before”; I don’t actually know the names of those people. It’s also in my educated guesstimates of statistics I should know. I have never wanted to go into business for myself. It doesn’t appeal to me. I follow aspects of the publishing market that interest me, I regularly read a couple of industry blogs, but I have no drive to educate myself to the extent I would need to be educated, or to network to the extent I would need to network.

I want to be the writer, and let someone else take care of the rest. Even if it means they make as much from my work as I do. I suspect this is a heels-in reaction to change, and that my thought will revolutionise. It’s that kind of “I know I’ll love the water once I’m in, but the anticipation of the icy shock is killing me right now” fear.