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Studying Anatomy or How One Thing Leads to Another

2012-01-30T21:22:00.006+08:00

One thing all writers have in common is the fact that they’re into words, bigtime. A gift for languages is not uncommon: most writers I know have at least a smattering of knowledge about languages other than their own. And words can even be the key to getting us to learn other subjects. I love it when I have to write a scene that demands research such as a sword fight or a walk in a northern hemisphere forest in spring. I not only garner facts, but new words to add to the collection. These ventures have some practical spin-offs: most writers are useful to have on your team at a quiz night and can be relied on to play a decent hand at Scrabble. And they can bandy about words that are not usually found outside specialist dictionaries.

Anatomy, for example, is longstanding fascination of mine. The parts that make up a physical being, be it a flower, a mouse, a raven or an elephant, form such wonderfully cohesive wholes that one wonders how the heck it all happened.

Physiologists, geneticists and experts on evolution can give us some answers, but they are hard put to explain their findings in terms ordinary mortals can understand. Me, I just look at the petals and stamens and wonder at the beauty of the flower and stand amazed at the cleverness of the evolution that brought it about. Any deeper interest I have in anatomy has to do with its wonderful vocabulary.

As a uni dropout back in the early sixties, when I had no money and less sense, I did whatever I could to earn a crust. This involved doing a great many things that my parents wouldn’t have approved of, some of which required me to get naked. One such money-spinner was posing nude for artists and photographers.

A regular gig was posing for the art students at East Sydney Tech, now the National Art School. The school was (and still is) housed in the old Darlinghurst Gaol, an ancient edifice with thick stone walls that kept the sun out and the cold in – nice in summer, but it made for little joy in nude modelling in winter-time! The door would be open to let in light, and they would put a two-bar electric radiator close to me. This meant that one half of my anatomy was freezing and one half burning. I remember one time when the lecturer completely forgot to give me the obligatory stretch break after 20 minutes. When she finally remembered, I had trouble standing up. The cold half had gone completely to sleep while my buttocks must have been ruddier than the cherry, although it would have taken more than a Handel aria, or even a Puccini one, to warm my tiny hands, to say nothing of my entire front and most of my left leg.

I didn’t only model for straightforward sketching classes. One nice gig – I got to keep my clothes on! – was posing for the portrait class. It was mind-blowing to look at the students’ work as it took shape, week by week. Of course, the lighting was subtly different for each one, depending on what part of the room they were in. Some added glamour to my appearance, some painted me half in shadow, but the most surprising one was of me as a boy! The features were there, but the clothes had somehow become masculine and my trade-mark pony-tail had metamorphosed into a short back and sides! OK, so maybe my girl-friends calling me The Titless Wonder was not entirely unwarranted…

But the most interesting term was the one in which I was the female model for the anatomy class. It meant taking my clothes off again, but the weather was better by then so I didn’t mind as much. I hadn’t done Biology in high school, so the entire subject matter of the course was a revelation. As a dancer, I knew how to pose, of course, and I also knew what poses would make which muscles stand out. What I hadn’t known was the names of the muscles. We spent several classes on the visible musculature of the leg, and I think I can still, even today, recite the names from hip to toe, for the lecturer was determined that his students should not just able to sketch the muscles, but know their names and functions as well: gluteus maximus. fascia lata, sartorius, plantaris, tibialis, gastrocnemius, extensor digitorum longus and a dozen more. I can’t remember exactly where they are or what they do anymore, but the names still roll trippingly off my tongue, and what lovely words they are! Latin, like its grandchild Italian, has a poetic, sonorous, musical feel to it. I could listen to either language for hours.

I got to know some very interesting people through modelling, including Thea Proctor (1879-1966), the well-known artist. She was nearing the end of her life when I modelled for her and her friends, but she was sprightly and intelligent, her mind still as sharp as her lino-cutting tools. I still have a sketch she did of me, which funnily enough did not look remotely like the ‘me’ of the time (I was dancing then, and weighed less than 50 kilos) but it looks very like the mature me with curves more voluminous than voluptuous!

Naturally, the snippets of anatomy I learnt from modelling stood me in good stead when I later became a dance teacher and later still, when I decided to update my expertise by studying at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. There, our anatomy lecturer would take contorted poses that looked like something from one of those statuary groups that depict an attack on some helpless tribe by another that wasn’t so helpless, sometimes twisting one arm behind her back or overhead in a dramatic manner that made me think she should have been an actor instead of a physiologist. She was a hard taskmaster, making us name the agonist and the antagonist and other such technicalities that I never did quite figure out. But I learnt a lot more lovely words: pectoralis major, brachialis, latissimus dorsi, supraspinatus...

Isn’t it funny how one thing leads to another in life? In the last decade or two, I’ve done quite a lot of academic editing, and I am quite fearless in tackling theses and papers in the medical arena. I’ve had a crack at most of the health sciences, predominantly physiotherapy. After meeting extensor digitorum longus and his mates, fascinating facts concerning COPD or female incontinence hold no terrors. And it’s unlikely that I will be intimidated by any jargon, ever again!

Pictures courtesy Wikimedia Commons:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A2009-08-31-akt-muehla-041.jpg
by Ralf Roletschek [GFDL 1.2 (www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html)], via Wikimedia Commons (Even though that pic is from Germany, it looks a lot like the environs of the old gaol where I worked!)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/Muscle_posterior_labeled.png
by Mikael Häggström (w:Gray's muscle pictures) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Real self-publishing

2012-01-19T16:11:00.003+08:00

Graham Clements, a colleague on the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre's spec-fic mailing list, recently complained on his blog that he'd just read a book from a well-known publisher and found rather a lot of typos.

I am not surprised by the news. In the current economic climate, I suspect that a lot of shortcuts and cutbacks are being made by publishers. But on the brighter side, I'm pleased to report that more and more self-publishers are engaging freelance editors before uploading their work.

I like to distinguish between self-publishing and what used to be called 'vanity publishing'. A better name for it might be 'desperation publishing' because it seems to pull in people who haven't a clue how to get their work out there and in desperation they pay some dodgy outfit to publish their books.

Bad idea.

Much better to do it yourself.

True self-publishing means that you engage your own editor, designer, layout person and printing firm and buy your own ISBN, which makes you a publisher in your own right and therefore a true 'self-publisher'. Paying some firm, even a relatively reliable one, to do all those tasks for a few hundred dollars — well, you get the book you deserve! Three rounds of editing, which used to be the standard at publishing houses, don't come cheap, and nor do all the other services needed to get a book up to scratch.

With vanity publishing, editing is the first thing to go. If you're lucky you'll get a light copy-edit, and some firms don't even do that much, even though they say they do! If you absolutely must publish through a vanity press, at least get your work edited first by a reliable freelance. Like me. (Ok, a bit of self-promotion there, but I'd be the first to admit that I'm not the only one! Check out the listings on the Society of Editors website for your state.)

But I can’t afford it! I hear you cry.

If you do the sums, it is indeed frightening. Three rounds of editing will take at least 40 hours. Most editors charge at least $40 per hour, and many charge more, so it’s safest to allow a minimum of $2000 for editing. Allow another thousand for your ISBN, art and layout. So an e-book is going to set you back about $3,000, and a print book a good deal more. For a firm to advertise that it can do it for a tenth of that price, you’re just not going to get as good a job, are you? As with all things, you get what you pay for.

But here’s the escape clause. You can cheat a bit by doing away with one round of editing. To do that, you need to have a very high standard of self-editing, friends in your critique group who are already advanced and proficient writers, and half a dozen beta-readers-cum-proofreaders with eagle eyes to pick up typos.

Here’s the sequence:
1.    Thoroughly learn your craft in regard to spelling, grammar, syntax and punctuation.
2.    Join a crit group that contains writers more advanced than you are, people who, perhaps, have already had a few short stories or even novels published by traditional publishing houses. If you can’t find such a group, go to workshops. Lots of workshops. Or enrol in a writing class, online or face to face. Many people do all the above.
3.    Read as widely as you can on the craft of your own genre. (And it goes without saying that you will read other things as well, both fiction and non-fiction!)
4.    Be prepared to write, rewrite and rewrite again. Two full drafts are a minimum and you might find you need to do four or five!
5.    Only when you and your critters feel your book is as good as it can be, engage an editor. Most editors are honest souls who genuinely want to help writers, so ask the one you choose to give you a considered opinion of the story and the way you’ve written it. Editors vary in their procedures, but I like to do what I call a mini-assessment first, based on the first twenty or so pages and a synopsis – and I often find I have to teach the writer how to create a synopsis! So if this is one of your bugbears, read my article on The Specusphere about synopsis-writing.
6.    When you’ve finished working with your editor, find half a dozen new people willing to read your manuscript, making sure at least some of them have really good English skills and can pick up spelling and typographical errors (‘typos’).

This procedure will speed up the editing process enormously, saving you at least half the cost you’d have to pay if you sent your raw first draft to an editor.

Remember that anyone who wants money from you to publish your book is a vanity publisher, even if they claim not to be. Writers are much better advised to set up their own outfits, be their own bosses and have complete control over every stage of the work.

Let's face it, you aren't likely to make a fortune from any self-published book, although with e-publishing there are notable exceptions and anyone prepared to do a bit of marketing and promotion can at least hope to break even eventually. So why be a cheapskate? If you're doing it for love, surely it's better to spend more and be proud of what you've done? As my mother was fond of telling me, if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. And a well-written, well-edited and well-presented self-published book can hold its head up in any company!

2011 - my personal retrospective

2012-01-02T09:42:00.003+08:00

I’m pleased to report that 2011, while not the Perfect Year I’ve been looking for since 1943, was somewhat better for me than its seven or eight predecessors! I hope all my friends and family have enjoyed the year and can look forward even better things to come in 2012, Mayan calendar and end-of-the-world doomsayers notwithstanding.

I found late in 2010 that I had a pretty full calendar of house-sitting engagements for this year, so I decided to use the opportunity to move back to Perth. After due consideration, I gave up my flat in Mount Gambier, South Australia, and sold or gave away all my furniture and most of my personal effects. I even cut my wardrobe by half and my bookstock by two thirds! So all I have in the world now will fit into a few suitcases and 40-odd cardboard boxes of the kind you buy at the post office for $2.20-ish. Much of my stuff is stashed in the garage at the home of my sister Anne and her husband Brian in Mount Gambier and the rest requires a couple of camels or the motorised equivalent thereof to shift me from house to house! However, for the second half of the year I’ve been in one place. Since mid-June, I’ve been house-sitting for my friends Tom and Wendy, who are away on a protracted and very exciting world tour. A wonderful experience for them, and for me, it's nice to feel settled, if only temporarily!

In mid-January I move on again, this time out to York, which lies about 100 km inland from the city of Perth. I’m going to stay with my friend Pam, who has an enormous garden and is keen to have help with the hand watering, as she spends about half her time in Perth on business. Every summer she loses a few little plants and every winter she replaces them and adds more, a kind of three steps forward and one back sort of arrangement. So hopefully this year the losses will be minimal, since I will be there to keep the water up to them over the stinking hot York summer. It’s a tiny town of only about 2,000 people. You can find out about it in the helpful Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/York,_Western_Australia. Those of you who live in gentler climes will wince at the climate details – in summer it seldom drops much under 30 degrees Celsius in the daytime and in winter the nights can sometimes be freezing. It’s also in a bush-fire prone area! All being well, I shall stay in York until Easter, and I’m hoping that after that I’ll rise to the top of the waiting list at the retirement village where I’ve had my name down for nearly a year. If not, I shall have to look for more house-sitting.

Having a rent-free year means I’ve been able to save enough to replace my furniture when I do find somewhere to live. Of course, despite my good intentions, I’ve already replaced with new titles a fair number of the books I sold or gave away before leaving Mount Gambier. However, my recreational reading time has been sadly reduced due to other commitments. With my Specusphere colleagues, Stephen and Amanda, I’ve been involved in the production of an anthology of short stories. (See my blog post Mythic Resonance to learn more on that one.) It’s our first venture into hard copy and my first time at helping to edit an anthology, and while it’s been very time consuming it’s also been very worthwhile from a personal and professional development standpoint. Mythic Resonance will be available sometime in the next few weeks, all being well. Watch this blog for details!

Another commitment has been membership of a judging panel for a national speculative fiction award. As it’s still in process, I won’t comment further at present, but it is also proving a most interesting and valuable, if time consuming, experience.

Due to all this busy-ness, my writing has been virtually moribund and even my blogging has suffered – I’ve barely kept this blog alive and haven’t posted on the Egoboo one since May! Fortunately, my colleagues there – Carol Ryles, Helen Venn, Joanna Fay, Keira McKenzie, Laura E. Goodin and Sarah Parker – carry the blog along. Sarah, especially, always seems to come up with something timely, even it’s just a link to another blog. Many hands make light work.

Being a glutton for punishment, though, I’ve started a third blog, this one for the Perth Shakespeare Club, at http://perthshakespeareclub.blogspot.com/ but there I can rely on other members to do at least some of the posting and if nothing comes through I can just report on the latest meeting!

I’ve also started a Facebook Page for the Shakespeare Club and have kept up my personal presence there, too. It’s by far my favourite of all the social media sites. However, through another site, Friends Reunited, I have been in touch with Gudrun, an old school friend from Tamworth, NSW, where I lived for about four years in late childhood. Gudrun has recently visited Perth and, and we met on Boxing Day – our first meeting in almost five and half decades!

I’ve also caught up with an old WAAPA friend, Angela, and through her I’ve joined a Dhamma group. It’s a private one, held at the home of some kind friends of Angela’s. They have set up a big screen TV with Skype so that talks by Buddhist teachers can be brought to us live from the UK. It’s great to be with like-minded friends to hear the dhamma and to meditate. We had a lovely end of year celebration with a ‘Buddhist Christmas tree’! That’s got to be multi-culturalism at its best!

Angela has been my transport mainstay for nights at the theatre, too, now that I’m writing theatre reviews once more. It’s been wonderful to go to shows again, since being on the pension means most of them are out of range financially. Here’s a list of the shows I’ve reviewed so far. It’s more for archival purposes than to bore you witless, so don’t feel obliged to read any or all of them! But most of the shows were very, very good, demonstrating that Western Australia can come up with top-flight entertainment, both home-grown and imported.

The Enchanters (Prickly Pear Ensemble)
Helix (solo dancer Daryl Brandwood)
The Complete Works of Shakespeare (abridged) (The HOO-HA)
Julius Caesar (Bell Shakespeare)
Neon Lights (West Australian Ballet Company)
When Dad Married Fury (Janus Entertainment)
We Unfold (Sydney Dance Company)
The Taming of the Shrew (West Australian Ballet Company)
Chamber Jam – September (North St Music/Ellington Jazz Club)
Chamber Jam – October (North St Music/Ellington Jazz Club)
The Magic Pudding (Janus Entertainment)
When the rain stops falling (Black Swan State Theatre Company)
Symphony by the bay (Perth Symphony Orchestra)
Blood Brothers (IAJ International)

Family history-wise, the big find of 2011 was the will of my 3x great-grandfather, Samuel Flavell, who died in Sedgley, Staffordshire in 1864. The will, which was made in 1856, came to my attention through a link on the Sedgley mailing list (hosted by Rootsweb.com) and I acquired a copy via the Staffordshire Record Office. If this is your bloodline, too, and you’d like to purchase a copy, these are the details you’ll need to order it from the archives:
• Harwood and Evers, Solicitors, Stourbridge - Deposited by Messrs. Harward and Evers, solicitors, of 1 Worcester Street, Stourbridge, Worcs.
• [no title] D695/1/13/1/2 1856-1892
• Contents: Draft will and probate of wills of clients of Gould & Elcock including J. Greenway, J. Wakefield, R. Venables, E. Harvey, B. Jevon, J. Webb, J. Harland, S. Flavell.

The last one is our Sam and a copy of his will only costs six pounds. It tells us that he left a widow, Dianna, and three adult children – Edward, Samuel and Rosehannah – and he was wealthy enough to leave each child a couple of houses. What happened? Recent generations have been lucky to own one! I wonder if Sam fell on hard times in the last few years of his life and had to sell his properties. Such is life.

In October, I had a very pleasant break in Mandurah (see the Wikipedia article on this lovely town at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandurah) with my sister Anne, her husband Brian and their daughter Frances, together with canine friend Lulu, who is quite a dancer! She can stay on her back legs longer than any other untrained dog I've met. We had beautiful weather and enjoyed some lovely times at the shops by the jetty or just gazing at the yachts on the bay from the front veranda of our borrowed holiday cottage!

Health wise, things haven’t been too good for me this year, and it’s my own fault! Once I was settled in the longest house-sit ever, I decided to use my improved financial state and proximity to the city to participate in a number of keep-fit activities. I can walk into the city from my house-sit, and did so several times a week. However, I found I was getting out of breath every time. I’d already been doing belly dancing for several years and attending yoga classes on-and-off, too, but I decided I needed to engage in more aerobic activities. This turned out to be a bad idea, because my heart wasn’t up to it and after three weeks of classes I had to give up. More visits to the health-care professionals, more medication, more expense … So now I’m on a weight-loss kick, eating very little (for me!) and exercising only for short periods a couple of times a day. I do hope I can lose a lot – I should really be aiming to lose 30 kg, but being realistic I know that probably won’t happen. Nevertheless, if I can lose enough to get back to the fitness classes under medical supervision I’ll be happy.

Financially, things are looking up, though. I have had more editing work this year than in the previous two years together. This is largely due to the rise in self-publishing, and I’m pleased to see that many authors are having their work professionally edited before taking the plunge into print. I still do some academic work, but doing ‘mini-assessments’ for aspiring authors has accounted for much of my work this year. That’s got to be a good thing, because the standard of self-publishing, historically, has been abominably low. If I can do my bit to raise the standard a little I’ll be very happy.

And to finish with, here’s a list of the books I’ve read and reviewed for The Specusphere this year. It’s a pathetic effort compared to previous years. I really have taken on too much in 2011!

The Thief Taker’s Apprentice by Stephen Deas
The Folly Series by Ben Aaronovitch (first two books: Rivers of London and Moon over Soho)
Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis
Horses for King Arthur by LS Lawrence

I have read a lot of other books, including nearly half the oeuvre of Bernard Cornwell and Ken Follet's medieval duology. Along with fantasy, my favourites are historical novels. Good, well-written ones that don't take too many liberties with the facts!

So off we go into 2012! A new year and hopefully lots of new adventures of the enjoyable kind! Best of luck to all of you for the coming twelve months. May we all be well, happy, peaceful and at ease with the conditions of our lives.

Mythic Resonance

2011-12-11T09:28:00.004+08:00

It's been a busy year: one in which I've bitten off more than I can comfortably chew. A bad habit of mine, but I can't seem to help myself - I get all fired up with enthusiasm whenever someone suggests a new project, and I wade in, boots and all, without testing the waters for depth.

So at the end of last year, when Stephen Thompson, our Editor-in-Chief at The Specusphere, decided to publish an anthology, I cheerfully volunteered my services. 'Wow, that'll be fun!' I told myself.

Well, yes. A qualified yes, because producing an anthology is not easy. Slush reading, negotiating with authors, editing, proofreading - it's taken a year to get there, but our destination, that magical place where we shall be rewarded with a Real Live book full of stories, is just around the next curve of what's been a long and winding bit of wayfaring.

When we first called for submissions, they were slow in coming and we started to panic a bit - what if we couldn't make up the quota? But gradually they started to trickle in, and the trickle eventually became a deluge! Some of the submissions were not within the guidelines - some not even close - and those were rejected at once. But the slow business of reading the fifty-odd that remained was angst-making.

It wasn't easy to pick the right content. There were seven of us reading, and most of us read all the submissions. We wanted stories based, however loosely, on traditional material: stories about the archetypal characters that we all know - the valiant hero, the boy on a quest, the trapped princess, the femme fatale, the monster from the deep ... the fabled beings we'd known and loved since childhood.

There were no truly awful stories, so it was a matter of choosing those that best fitted the guidelines and collectively provided a good sampling of the myths and legends of the world, presented with a twist that gave us something new and fresh rather than just a rewrite. And above all, of course, most of us had to at least like, and preferably love, the selected stories.

Reading the different reactions of the slush readers to the same stories was an eye-opener! We didn't quite come to blows, although I think we might have come close, once or twice, had we not been separated by a lot of kilometres. But being spread across the country from Brisbane to Perth, we were able to negotiate until we had a shortlist of about twenty stories.

At that point, Stephen had us list our ten favourites, and promised us that each of the list-toppers would be included. (Except for Stephen, we read 'blind', so none of us knew who'd written what until the final list was in place.) We breathed a sigh of relief to find that our lists were not as different from each other as we'd feared, and I was delighted that one reader put my story, 'La Belle Dame', at the top of her list!

'La Belle Dame' has a long history. I first wrote it back in about 2005 for submission to an anthology that never went ahead. That's not an uncommon occurrence, so I just sighed and put my handiwork away. Every now and then, I would take it out, edit it again and send if off to a possible market, but while it always got shortlisted, it never made the final cut.

Then last year, I decided to enter it for the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre SF award. This is a well-respected competition, many of whose winners have gone on to become successful in the profession. I um-ed and ah-ed a bit, because I'd always felt there was something not quite right about 'La Belle Dame', but couldn't put my finger on what it was.

Finally, I showed it to a well-published friend, and she made a suggestion for the ending that I thought was a good idea but felt I wasn't skilled enough to do. 'Give it a try,' my friend advised, and to my surprise it wasn't as hard as I'd thought. I was delighted when 'La Belle Dame' was selected from a field of about 120 stories for the award's shortlist of eight. But again, no banana.

So I only offered it for the Specusphere's anthology somewhat diffidently, during that early phase when entries were slow and I thought maybe we'd have trouble making up the numbers. You can imagine how delighted I was when one of the readers actually preferred it to all the others! So at last 'La Belle Dame' (a take on the Keats poem, of course) has found a home. And a very nice home it is, nestled under a truly lovely cover designed by the Specusphere's graphic designer, Amanda Greenslade, and in the company of other lovely mythic tales, many of them by well-known and well-published authors.

So now it's getting exciting! Mythic Resonance goes to press early in the new year. (Watch this space!) And yes, we are already talking about doing it again next year. A new anthology, with a different theme! I can already feel that enthusiasm coming on again...

The value of "how-to" lists for writers

2011-11-28T12:34:00.000+08:00

A friend on one of my mailing lists sent a message yesterday about a great blog post by author Ian Irvine, on creating suspense. Ian Irvine is the author of 27 novels. His next epic fantasy novel is Vengeance, Book 1 of The Tainted Realm, to be published by Orbit Books in Australia in November 2011, and in the US and UK in April 2012.

You can read the post at http://ripping-ozzie-reads.com/2011/11/26/ian-irvine-reveals-41-ways-to-keep-readers-turning-the-page/.

A second friend replied, questioning the value of such lists. He pointed out Ian Irvine's suggestion that puzzles and mysteries create suspense through curiosity, and said ‘I agree with this but it only tells you to have puzzles. It gives some examples, but doesn't really tell you how to have a puzzle.’

An interesting discussion ensued on the list, batting the pros and cons of such lists back and forth. There was plenty of food for thought. My take on it is this: the underlying problem is that in fact no one can actually teach us to write.

Lists such as Ian Irvine's are useful because they can help us to identify where our work might be lacking. The lists are written by people who analyse writing after it's been written, by themselves or others. Naturally gifted writers don't need lists - they just do the right things without thinking about it. The process they follow is largely unconscious, and therefore can't be readily taught to others.

Anaïs Nin is on record as having said that one of the essential characteristics of a good fiction writer is being able to access the unconscious at will. I don't think gifted writers always realise they are doing that, but there's no doubt that some people have a gift for knowing intuitively how to plot. When you analyse what they done, it nearly always falls into the three-act structure - inciting incident, three disasters and a denouement. Many of these very talented people also have the knack of knowing how to keep up the tension without any analytical process at all, and might also have a gift for getting characters down on the page in a manner that makes them come across as real live people.

As my second friend pointed out, Ian Irvine doesn't tell us "how to have a puzzle". He just points out that puzzles might be Good Things to Include, and when you think about it, that's the kind of thing that makes up any set of writing instructions. I don't think Mr Irvine or anyone else can actually teach me a formula that would enable me to create puzzles (or other tension--inducing factors) in my stories. By analysis, I can see what really gifted writers do, but all the lists in the world will not make me able to do it myself.

Many of us, myself included, just have to struggle along with the trial and error method. Lists such as Ian Irvine's help us along a bit, that's all. But they form an essential part of a would-be writer's reading, so thank heaven they are available, or some of us would never learn to write at all!

An editor's role

2011-10-03T12:13:00.000+08:00

Recently, a friend sent me a link toan article in The Guardian by restaurant reviewer Giles Coren. My friend said that was exactly how he feltabout his writing.

As fiction writers, we do feel veryprotective of our work. Our stories are like babies we have birthed andparented. We like to think they are perfect, and that not one word should be changed.

A few weeks in a good critiquing group, however,is usually enough to show writers that their work is not perfect and can beimproved, but even so, there is always that flash of resentment when someonewants to alter one of their darlings. It can take a long time to wean thatbaby, and the process is painful for the parent!

But we're talking here not about fiction but about writing for journals, and in that light I think Coren’s tirade issheer wankery. As an editor, I feel I should put the other side of the storyforward.

For a start, Coren is not writing the Great British Novel. He is writing ephemera. Writing that goes into a newspaper, journal or online zine is always edited without consultation – it's just the way it's done, because of tight deadlines. And for any writer to be so precious as to be highly offended at the removal of an indefinite article is just laughable.

Nobodylikes having their work altered, and I agree that sometimes sub-editing is doneless than skilfully, simply because there is a deadline to meet. The worstinstance of this in my experience happened when I faxed off a review to theAustralian and the next morning received the phone-message equivalent of apoison-pen letter from the artist concerned, complaining bitterly about the"mean-spirited review". I found out why when I opened the paper – myreview had been cut in half, and only the negative criticisms made it intoprint. (I only got paid for the part that was published, too, but that’s theway the system works.)

Thisepisode was largely my fault. The golden rule of criticism is "put thegood stuff first", and for some reason, on this occasion, I did not. Allthe good stuff was at the bottom of the article – the part that got sliced “onthe stone” as they used to say in those pre-electronic days, probably to makeroom for a last minute ad or "stop press" paragraph. Mea culpa, meaculpa – but it taught me never to break that rule again.

AsI understand it, when a sub removes a small word, it's usually because leavingit in would result in a "widow" on the next line. Apart from wastingvaluable space in a print journal, orphans and widows are anathema to layoutpeople. One sorry little word sitting on its own, looking lost, can spoil thewhole look of a page. Because, you see, a layout person is, in his or her ownway, also an artist, one with different sensibilities. The rhythm of reading thework out loud means little to the layout person, I fear. And in any case, whoreads the bloody newspaper out loud, for heaven's sake?

(A “widow”BTW, is a word or phrase that hangs out on its own at the top of a page or column,while an “orphan” is a word or phrase – usually a heading of some kind – that isleft alone on the bottom of a page of column. It does depend, though on whosedefinition you read!)

Butall that I've just said only applies to writing for ephemera. Fiction writing, of course, is adifferent matter. There, ongoing consultation is the norm, to-ing and fro-inguntil the work is satisfactory to both writer and editor – within a givendeadline, of course. And in fiction, the writer has the last say – but theeditor has right of veto, if not on that work, then the next. A writer whostets every tiny word and every comma will pretty soon find herself withoutanyone to publish her work. Word of such things gets around.

Oneonly has to look at the morass of badly-written, unedited, self-published workson the market to see that the editor, whether of journals or books, performs anessential task in bringing the reader a product that delivers value for money.And that, friends, is the bottom line in any industry, even an arts-based one.Perhaps especially in an arts-based one, because all performers, all visualartists, all writers, are competing for that same tiny slice of people'spurses, and if we produce a sub-standard product it will not sell. The factthat we editors hurt people's feelings now and then must be balanced againstthe fact that we help many, many others to create a better product. For, makeno mistake, a writer's work is a product. It may also be a work of art, butonly history can judge that.

Aneditor is to a writer what a choreographer is to a dancer, or a conductor is toan orchestra. If you're a fiction writer, try to be grateful to your editor forhelping you to produce something that really shines, something more people willwant to read!

Andif you're a reviewer or a feature writer, for God’s sake just smile and takethe money.

Walking with Harry and Pip

2011-09-11T17:17:00.003+08:00

I am looking after a couple of my furry friends while their “mum” is away at the Geraldton Writers Festival. Pip is a miniature pinscher and Harry … well, I’m not too sure about Harry. He is long bodied and short legged, like a dachshund, but he has the head of a terrier and the woolly coat of a poodle or a bichon frisé. Let’s say his mother married below her station, and leave it at that. (The pic, courtesy of Wikipedia, is of a Real bichon frisé.)

We all know that the highlight of a dog’s life is walkies. Just mention the word, no matter how sotto voce, and Harry and Pip will appear within seconds, bouncing like rubber duckies in a turbulent bath. Little as they are (neither one stands more than 20 cm at the shoulder) they need a lot of exercise, and they keep reminding me of the fact. There is much excitement and chasing of tails – one’s own and others – as we make ready for our outing. Mini-pins have tiny necks and can often slip their collars, so Pip must wear a harness. No matter how often I apply a harness to her tiny personage, I almost always have to sort the complicated structure of straps, rings and buckles several times before we are ready to go. The picture (courtesy of Wikipedia) shows what minipins look like. Pip is just like the tan one on the left!

This harness business seems to have an effect on Harry’s libido. As a neutered male, he should be uninterested in sex – but I suspect he harbours a kinky bent because the sight of the harness on Pip’s back seems to make him randy. Pip tries to tell him that she is a decent, well-brought-up young lady who will have no part in such shenanigans, but Harry is undeterred. He always tries his luck at least once.

Finally, we are kitted up with leads, harnesses, poo-bags, mobile phone, door keys and the essential doggie treats. Sometime I almost think the treats are main reason my little friends are so keen on walkies! But perhaps not. There are some lovely walks nearby. My favourite is a stroll down to the old oval in the early morning. Nestled in a wide triangle formed by the junction of two waterways and surrounded by native trees, the oval is a slice of nature within the sprawl of suburbia. A short walk down a gentle slope and we are in the bush. The oval is seldom used now, but one can imagine that in the olden days locals would have gathered here on Sundays for a picnic and a genteel game of cricket. There is something very English about this area – it was settled by free immigrants, not convicts, and it shows in the gracious architecture and the numerous parks and reserves. The photo, of course (where would we be without Wikipedia) is of a Real Dachshund, which Harry resembles not all all except in length.

This photo (Wikipedia again!) is, of course, of a Real terrier! Apart from his woolly white coat, Harry actually does resemble this one about the head, golden eyes and all.

Although the main road is only a few hundred metres away, it might as well be on the other side of the country. There is no sound of traffic, and apart from a few early morning fishermen and the odd rowing crew out for a training session, there’s rarely a soul in sight when we reach the bottom of the hill. Even so, it’s a rare morning when we don’t meet other canines and their humans. This would be fine but for the fact that Harry and Pip between them have the biggest Napoleon complex this side of St Helena. It’s most noticeable when they are on the lead, but even off the lead they can’t be trusted not to chase any pooch, big or small, that comes within fifty metres. Yesterday they chased off what looked like a Husky, and they definitely have it in for a rather large Dalmatian that we often run into. One day they will pick the wrong mark and get eaten, but they don’t seem to have considered this possibility. On the streets I’ve learnt to cross the road at the first sight of a canine silhouette on the horizon, but when we go to the oval there is often no escape. Sightlines are good and there’s plenty of open ground to give chase. And give chase they do, loudly.

Tiny as Pip and Harry are, there is no way I can keep up with either of them once they get some speed up. And I get no warning. From a standing start to full speed ahead takes them about .05 of a second. I waddle along after them, calling their names and cursing the wombs that bore them, with no effect whatsoever. The rapid take off seems to demand that they sacrifice hearing for speed, and they are deaf to my calls. By the time I catch up with them their quarry has usually fled, tail between legs, with the two canine Hell’s Angels hard behind. Panting, I arrive to find the victim quivering at its owner's side and gazing down in horrified disbelief at the miniature terrorists. I offer humble apologies while trying to get leads on the two struggling dogs, then flee in disgrace. But do Pip and Harry care? Silly question.

Harry is addicted to chest scratches, and is much given to lying around on his back in case a willing scratcher should pass by. In fact, he sometimes falls asleep waiting! He is going to obedience classes but I don’t think he’s realised that the classes are supposed to be preparation for Real Life. Still, I cling to the expectation that one day he and Pip will both come when called, no matter what the circumstances. I must admit, though, that this probably is a forlorn hope. The terrible two are having too much fun saving the area from all other furry four-legged creatures. This week, the oval; next week, the entire state of WA!

Cousin Pheobe and the Fire of London

2011-08-21T16:40:00.001+08:00

A couple of weeks from now falls the 345th anniversary of the Great Fire of London, the great conflagration that swept through the city from Sunday, 2 September to Wednesday, 5 September 1666. It consumed over 13,000 houses, and many churches and other public buildings, including the old St Paul’s Cathedral. The number of lives lost is unknown, but the death toll, said to be in single figures, was not as bad as it could have been. However, given the destructive nature of the fire, it is likely that many bodies were incinerated. It is likely, too, that many more died of disease in the makeshift refugee camps that sprang up in public parks and on the outskirts of town. (Thanks to Wikipedia for the wonderful image of Ludgate in flames, with St. Paul's Cathedral in the distance. Oil painting by anonymous artist, ca. 1670.)

None of my direct ancestors, as far as I know, was affected by the fire, but some distant cousins quickly got in touch with family in Yorkshire. A letter written by Phoebe LISTER (née HEMINGWAY) of Halifax to her son Samuel of Upper Brea, Yorkshire, passed on the news that her cousins were safe. Phoebe (1608-1695) was my third cousin – eleven times removed!

Her letter, which is in the archives at Wakefield, is transcribed below:

Samuel,

I need not acquaint you with the lamentable accident that hath befallen London. I know you have heard of it and indeed it is a most heavy judgement not only upon them but upon the whole land. John received a letter this day from my cousin Thomas*. He saith that the Lord hath dealt most grievously with them. Though their house be burnt yet much of their best goods is safe. Thomas Dickenson hath writ to Mr Palin that he is now reduced to the same condition he was at first. Whereas he was able to relieve others he fears that he shall now need relief. I suppose you have a great loss with the rest at Blackwell Hall but we must be content to submit to the wise providence of God and as we have had a hand in the sin that hath brought this judgement so let us be content to submit to the punishment. I would not have you discouraged but trust in the Lord. He hath bidden us cast our cares upon him and he will certainly provide for his in the worst of times. He knows how to bring good out of these sad providences. I have not yet heard anything of Jeremy**; whether he be alive or no. Remember my love to Mary and to all our friends at Shibden Hall and Lower Brea.

Your loving mother
Phebe Lister

Write whether my bridle came home with the horse or no.

*Possibly her cousin Thomas LISTER, who was also her brother-in-law. They liked to keep things in the family in those days!
**Possibly another cousin, Jeremy HEMINGWAY.

PS - I do wish I knew the story of that horse and bridle!

Yoda lives - in English

2011-07-17T17:46:00.002+08:00

This post is really about substantive verbs, sometimes called "linking verbs". The verb “to be” is sometimes called The Substantive Verb, and some people just call it a substantive, not a verb at all. Be is not the only verb in this category, though. There are several others, notably become, feel, go, remain, stay, stand.

A substantive verb does not have an object. You can turn the sentence back-to-front, Yoda-like, and it will still have the same meaning, although it will probably read like something from a nineteenth century poem or novel if you do.

Look at these examples:
The air sits heavy in monsoon season: if we invert it we get “Heavy sits the air in monsoon season”

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown: inverted: The head that wears a crown lies uneasy.

John became a doctor - A doctor John became

The grass remains dry - Dry remains the grass

She felt unhappy - Unhappy she felt

The woman went crazy - Crazy went the woman

The athlete will become a coach – A coach the athlete will become.

He remained a lawyer – A lawyer he remained

Mary stays at home – At home stays Mary

Bill stood still – Still stood Bill

These sound rather poetic, don’t they – or maybe rather like Yoda on a bad day – but we do sometimes use this form of expression, even in speech: for instance “He always wanted to be a farmer, and a farmer he became”.

Yeomen of Yorkshire

2011-07-03T18:36:00.002+08:00

Because a lot of my friends are more interested in family history (and history generally) than in writing, editing and reviewing, I thought I might start to add the odd snippet of family history to this blog. I’ve been very lucky – I’ve been able to discover my ancestors on several lines for many generations back.

My maternal grandmother, Frances HINCHCLIFFE, was born in Liversedge, in Yorkshire’s Calder Valley, where her ancestors had lived for hundreds of years. Frances’s maternal grandmother was called Edna HEMINGWAY. There have been Hemingways around Halifax for at least 600 years, ever since the time surnames as such were coming into common use. The name originated near Halifax: one possible derivation is that it means “Heming’s Way” and was, perhaps, a place name in Viking times – Heming was the name of several Viking heroes, including a king of the ancient kingdom of East Anglia.

We can identify a Henry HEMINGWAY, born about 1410, probably the father of a Richard and a Robert: it seems likely that we are descended from Henry through Robert. The family quickly proliferated in the area, many members becoming prominent landowners. Two of the Hemingway properties were called Shibden Mill and the Walterclough.

Hemingways intermarried with other notable yeoman families including the Sutherlands, Crowthers, Drakes, Reyners and Listers – all still common names in the area.. Through such marriages, the Hemingways improved their status and wealth, and were instrumental in the founding of local charities.

Although it is not possible to be absolutely certain of the relationships amongst the various Hemingway lineages in those early days, I can positively identify one Thomas HEMINGWAY, my 11xgreat-grandfather, who died at the Walterclough on the 23 October 1579. His son John, my 10xgreat-grandfather, left a will, which, unusually for the time, directed that all the children were to have a share in his property. John describes himself as a “yoeman”, and gives directions for the payment of his debts and funeral expenses. “I will and devise” (he continues) “to the said John Hemingway” (his eldest son) “Arthure, Michael, Abraham, Richard, Marie and Anne, my children, all that messuage and tenement, houses, lands etc in Southowram which I, the said testor, occupied in the lifetime of Thomas Hemingway, my late father, deceased, and also one close of land and pasture called Jony Ridinge in Southowram - - - for the term of 21 years at the yearly rent of 8s”. He decreed that his wife (the former Agnes Mawde, whom he had married on 26 October 1557) and all the children except Grace, his oldest daughter, who was already married, should be joint executors of the will. To Grace he left 6s.8d., provided her husband, John Wilkinson, release to the executors “all manner of demands to my goods”. John must have been on his deathbed when the will was made, as it is dated 1 October 1587, and John was buried on the 5th. The will was proved on 15 December in the same year.

I am descended from Richard, John’s youngest child, who was only ten years old at the death of his father. He grew up to marry Frances ARCHER in 1604, having moved to Dewsbury along with an eponymous younger cousin once removed. It is possible that, together with quite a few other citizens of Halifax, the two Richards moved to Dewsbury to escape the plague, which was apparently rampant in the Halifax area during the closing years of the sixteenth century.

But after the cousins left, the Hemingway name continued to flourish around Halifax. Some of their doings make interesting reading! For example, Richard’s cousin Edward, who owned the Shibden Mill property at that time, shows up in the Wakefield Manor Court Rolls as follows:

Wakefield-- At the great Court held there 29th April 1614: We payne Edwarde Hemyngwaye, of Sibden Milne, that he shall att or before the feast of St. Michaell next, take awaye, pull, and caste downe one greate dame of water, newlie erected in August last, demmed over all the whole broke and hyeway att Damhead, to the great daunger of drowninge both men abd cattell, and to the annoyance of all passengers, and especially of the Inhabitants of Northowran, in payne, xxxxix.s.xd.

A funny corollary to this tale: when my second husband and I were farming in Tantanoola, South Australia, one of the local farmers did exactly the same thing as Edward – he dammed a roadside ditch, which flooded the nearby road. His neighbours were up in arms, of course, and he was fined heavily, just as Edward was all those centuries ago!

Another distant cousin, Mathew Hemingway, is found in the West Riding Session Rolls (1602 to 1611) in this wise:

fforsomuch as ther hath bene divers orders made in the Court for the educating of a base Child begotten by Mathew Hemyngwey on the body of Dionis Savile, all which orders are now determined & for that Henry Savile father of the said Dionise, in respecte of his povertie craveth further allowance until the next Sessions for the relief therof: Yt is therefore ordered that the Towneshipp of Southowram wher the said Child was borne shall pay iiijd. & Richard hemyngwey ffather of the said Mathew ijd. weekely until the next Sessions towards the education of the said Child, And that in the meane tyme the said Dionise shalbe whipped for her offence.

Poor old Denise! It would be nice to think that Richard gave Mathew a thrashing as well, but I don't suppose he did! The sixpence a week, however, (four pence from the township and tuppence from Richard, father of young Mathew) would have at least given Denise and her “base child” a decent living in those days.

Meantime, the two Richards had settled down in Dewsbury and founded lineages which contributed much to the development of that town over the ensuing centuries. Another time, I’ll tell you what became of them, and give you some insights into the lifestyle of our “yoeman” ancestors.

I am indebted to many other researchers for much of the above material. They are too numerous to mention, but all of us owe a debt to researchers of earlier generations, notably Henry Hemingway, surgeon and antiquarian of Dewsbury (1790-1875) and John Leonard Noades Hemingway of Southport, Lancashire (1884-1955).

Back on the reviewing trail

2011-06-14T20:50:00.004+08:00

Regular readers will know that for the last few years I have been Reviews Editor for The Specusphere, a webzine for the SF community. Friends of long standing will also remember that at one time I garnered a fair proportion of my livelihood by writing reviews and feature articles for arts-oriented journals such as Music Maker (which later became ArtsWest), Dance Australia, and others and also for newpapers incuding The Australian and The West Australian. Not only did I get paid, but I got free tickets to many fabulous shows.

Since I've been on the pension there has been no money for such frivolities as theatre tickets, so when a friend recently pointed me in the direction of ArtsHub the lure of free tickets led me to investigate.

Artshub is a kind of clearing house for all matters pertaining to the arts. It is a very comprehensive site, and well patronised. Their articles and reviews are of a high standard. So I thought, "Why not", and asked to be added to their list of reviewers. Now, for the first time in years I am going to the theatre again!

I've reviewed three shows so far, two of them marginally related to matters Shakespearean, and the third a wonderful dance performance by Daryl Brandwood, a fellow WAAPA graduate. I hadn't seen Daryl dance for about fifteen years, so it was a joy to watch the show, Helix.

And the two Shakespearean ones were very, very funny. You can read my reviews of all three shows if you're interested:

The Enchanters

Helix

The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged)

While it's fun to be reviewing again, I feel a bit uncomfortable about the fact that I am doing it gratis - apart from the free tickets, that is! When I was writing for print journals, I would be paid anything up to about $350 for an article. But web sites simply can't afford to pay people. The Specusphere, for example, is run completely by volunteers, and, in fact, our editor-in-chief has to cough up the necessary to have the site on line at all. We tried taking advertising, but it brought in little or nothing. What's more we had no control over the content, and some of it was dodgy, to say the least. (Be published today! It will only cost you an arm and leg and last year's income...)

I suspect this is another sign of the amateurisation of so many things that seems to be a result of the internet. Maybe it is not such a bad thing - it means everyone's voice can be raised.

But in the cacophony, who is listening?

Common misuses - confusing words

2011-06-05T18:37:00.001+08:00

Some words have two negative forms, which can be confusing. Two such words are "satisfied" and "interested". Both have two negative forms: one starting with dis- and one starting with un-. These negatives, in both cases, have very different meanings.

Dissatisfied/unsatisfied

If a person is dissatisfied, he or she is feeling upset or disappointed in some way. For instance “Cheryl was really dissatisfied with the service at her hotel.”

But someone who is unsatisfied hasn’t had enough of something: “I was still unsatisfied after the meal.” (You might say this after going to a posh restaurant where they served you miniscule piece of salmon and an artistic trail of sauce, garnished with some unidentifiable herb.)

Disinterested/uninterested

These examples show the difference:
“We need a disinterested party to adjudicate the competition” (i.e. someone who has no vested interest in the outcome. A parent of one of the competitors would not be disinterested!)

He or she might, however, be uninterested. E.g. “Our daughter likes to compete in gymnastics competitions but her father is totally uninterested.” (In the vernacular, he couldn’t give a stuff about gymnastic competitions even if his daughter is competing!

In neither case are the two negative forms interchangeable, because each has its own clearly defined meaning.

Amazing Amazonian friends

2011-05-29T18:22:00.005+08:00

No, I don't mean the kind that lop off one boob and go around shooting arrows off at all and sundry. I mean the kind who are brave enough to put their books up on the web for people to buy.

Lots of authors, including some pretty high profile ones, are e-publishing these days. Given the volatile nature of the print publishing industry and the ever-growing interest in e-books among the reading public, publishing online is beoming a viable option. Some new authors - notably Amanda Hocking - have done extraordinarily well via this route, and several authors already established in print, including Jo Konrath and Scott Sigler, are also doing very nicely, thank you.

What's more, e-publishing as an independent author already carries less of a stigma than it did even a year ago. The standard of e-books - until recently notorious for poor presentation and lack of editing - is rising all the time. The reading public is, by and large, reasonably selective. If your work really stinks people are not going to buy it, in e-copy or in print.

Three former critiquing partners of mine, Fiona Leonard, Patti Jansen, and Phillip Berrie have recently become "indie authors". I dips me lid to these enterprising people, nervously wondering whether and when I should follow in their footsteps. I know their work is good, because I've read it. (In fact, I had the privilege of editing Fiona's novel The Chicken Thief, a political thriller set in an African country that has become a dictatorship. Sound familiar?) Check it out. It's one of the best reads I've had this year.

If you don't believe my fulsome praise, hie thee over to Amazonian territory and seek out Fiona's and Patty's books. (Patty's work is scifi, and she has a good handful of stories waiting for you, the latest of which is His Name in Lights.)

And over at the magic land of Smashwords you will find Phill's book The Changeling Detective, an entertaining SF/crime crossover. If you like Jim Butcher you'll really dig Phill's work, too.

One of the great things about e-books is their affordability. You can buy a short story, novella or novel for prices ranging from 99 cents to 3.99. And you can get free samples, so there's nothing to lose. Compared to print books, there is no contest, is there?

Common misuses: pronouns – subject and object

2011-05-22T20:49:00.006+08:00

Pronouns. Little words. But they can give writers – or, more likely, editors! – nasty headaches.

Look at "I" and "me". They fill me with despair. I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve shuddered at things like “The boss gave Damien and I a rise last week” or “Chantal invited Jenny and I to her birthday bash”. This has become increasingly common in both England and Australia and no doubt in other English-speaking countries as well, and I suspect that within a few years even the Oxford Dictionary will give in and list it as normal usage.

You would never say “The boss gave I a rise” or “Chantal invited I”, would you? When in doubt, try taking out the first name. If it still sounds OK (as in Queen Elizabeth’s classic “My husband and I are very happy to be here", then you can safely say “Damien and I”.

That’s because “I” is the nominative case. It is used when the speaker is the one performing the action, such as the Queen (as above) being pleased. So “I invited Damien and Chantal to the barbeque” is correct. But if I’m one of the people being invited, “me” is the correct pronoun – Damien invited Chantal and me to the barbeque”.

Another misused family of pronouns includes who/whom and whoever/whomever. Here again, the first-named is the nominative case, as in “Who stole my pen?” The second of each pair is the objective case, and the problem is that usage is in the process of changing. For example, If I said “Did you know Jack’s been charged with assault?”, you might reply, “Who did he assault?” and no one would blink an eye. In fact, if you were to use the correct form “Whom did he assault?” you might even sound a bit old-fashioned and pedantic.

But there are times when many of us still use “whom”. For instance “Did you know Jared was assaulted last night?” might well draw the reply, “Assaulted by whom?” We’re tending, more and more, to use “whom” when it’s preceded by a preposition, but “who” when it’s not, and many people don’t use “whom” at all, preposition or no preposition. Or they use it in the wrong places, thinking it makes them sound more refined. In other words, many people haven’t got a clue about who and whom, and I suspect that within a few decades, “whom” will disappear altogether.

Whoever and whomever are of the same ilk. Basically, "whoever" is nominative; and "whomever" is objective.

But in practice it gets complicated.

The reason is that these words often turn up as subjects of subordinate clauses, so they have to be in the nominative case even if the clause itself is the object of the sentence. The rule is that agreement is always within the subordinate clause itself, even when that clause appears as the object of the main clause.

For example “Give the prize to whoever/whomever arrives first”. Now, on first glance, it’s tempting to use “whomever” because it appears to be the indirect object of the first clause.

BUT it is also the subject of its very own clause “whoever arrives first”. So “whoever” is the correct form here.

I cheerfully pinched some examples from http://www.englishforums.com/English/WhoeverVsWhomever/cxcp/post.htm which is part of a worthwhile site for all matters pertaining to English grammar.
Give it to whoever pays the highest price.
Give it to whomever you like best.
Introduce whoever you think is the tallest to whoever you think is the shortest.
Introduce whomever you invited first to whomever you invited last.
Introduce whoever arrived first to whoever arrived last.

While we’re examining who and whom and their kin, what about “whomsoever”? It’s rather a quaint, old-fashioned sort of word, dating right back to Chaucer’s day and possibly earlier, but it refuses to die altogether. It is pretty much interchangeable with who and whom in expressions such as “To whom/whomever/whomsoever it may concern”. The nominative form “whosoever” is very rare. More often, we use “whoever” in the nominative.

So, another part of our language that is changing – but it’s still advisable to use who/whoever and whom/whomever correctly in writing, even in places where you might not do so in speech – unless, of course, you’re writing colloquial dialogue!

Common misuses: common expressions

2011-04-10T15:45:00.004+08:00

When editing or critiquing, and even in everyday conversation, I am often jolted by the misuse of common expressions, so I thought I might don my pedant’s hat today and talk about some of them in this post.

As Such
One of these misused expressions is “as such”. This phrase is seldom used correctly these days, and its incorrect use often renders the sentence laughable. Some people misuse the phrase completely because they have mistaken its meaning, thinking it means “therefore”, which is just plain silly.

In order to make sense, “as such”, a pronominal phrase, must refer back to a noun in the previous sentence or clause. It cannot be used to refer to a verb.

Consider this: “I’ve worked in the hospitality industry for some years now. As such, I’ve learnt a lot about cleaning equipment.” The speaker obviously intends “as such” to refer to “worked” which is the verb in the previous sentence, but grammatically, “as such” can only refer to a noun. You could say, however, “I’ve been a hotel room attendant for some years now. As such...etc”.

Partake of/partake in/take part
Another word whose misuse is becoming widespread is “partake”. It really means “to take a share” and has traditionally been used to refer to the sharing of food, as in “We partook of a delicious seafood banquet last night”. However, it has long been used in a figurative sense, as in “partaking in each other’s joys”, which carries the implication of sharing. The difference between the two usages lies in the accompanying pronoun, in or of. If we partake of, we each take a share of something – I eat my share of the food, you eat yours. If we partake in, we share mutually – your joys are also mine, my joys are also yours. Can you see the subtle difference between the two?

But the main problem is that some people are now using “partake” where they should use “take part”, as in “We partook in a football match yesterday”, which to my mind ruins a nice, rather subtle little expression. However, language is constantly changing and I don’t think I can do anything to stop this particular change!

Two more misuses can only be seen in writing, as both ways of using them sound the same in speech. I’m talking about “all together” vs “altogether” and “on to” vs “onto”. Let’s look at the second phrase first.

Onto/on to
The word “onto” is quite new. It used to be considered altogether incorrect when I was a child. However, it is now considered quite OK to say “I put the plate onto the shelf”, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Where the word gets misused is in sentences such as “He went onto say how pleased he was with the new house” or even “The plane flew onto London”! In cases such as these, where something is definitely not being superimposed on something else, we should leave the two words separate.

Altogether/all together
I hope I haven’t got you altogether confused because I’ll now go on to “all together”. When we do something as a group we do it all together, as in “We left the party all together”.

The word “altogether” is another matter altogether.

If you were to write the sample sentence as “We left the party altogether” it would mean that you left the party absolutely, utterly and completely, never to return. You might apply that to a political party, but not the social gathering sort of party, which you might have left early because you were tired, not because you were in high dudgeon over something, although I suppose that’s also possible!

I plan to do a few more of these posts, so if you have any words or phrases that you're not sure how to use, let me know and I'll try to incorporate them.

On being bewilderingly busy

2011-02-18T08:56:00.006+08:00

This fun, zany pic is Circus Amok Jugglers by David Shankbone, New York City. This is how I've been feeling lately. I am really four people, each one juggling several objects...

I don't know what has happened to my life over the last three months. Actually, I do know, in a piecemeal kind of way - I've moved back to Perth from Mount Gambier, where I've officially been living for the last four years, even though I've actually managed to spend a good deal of my time back in Perth, house-sitting. I'm still doing that, and because I had an almost full year of engagements--if you count the Swancon SF convention and a meditation retreat!--I am assured of accommodation. Thanks to a kind friend, I have a place to stay between engagements, so I decided to take the plunge by giving up my flat in Mount Gambier and taking myself back to Perth on the strength of little more than a wing and a prayer. I am now busily applying for various kinds of accommodation for next year, since public housing and retirement village rentals both have long waiting lists. Wish me luck!

Anyhow, moving house tends to take at least three weeks out of my life. I know this because I've done it so often - my current address is about my fortieth! There was, of course, the usual Christmas kerfuffle (I become a stauncher supporter of the Bah Humbug brigade every year) and also I was desperately trying to get the magnum opus revised in time to send it to an agent who was kind enough to express interest in it last year. This agency only opens its books a couple of times a year and I was most disgruntled at having to pass up that window of opportunity. But with everything else that has been going on, the magnum opus has had to sit on the backburner much of the time, and I've been feeling very depressed as a result. A writer who has no time to write is a sorry creature indeed.

Yet as soon as I got back to Perth, the editing diary suddenly started to fill, which gives me confidence that I have done the right thing. Isn't it funny how when a thing is "right", we know it, because things start to flow along freely.

Another bit of busy-ness is, of course, The Specusphere. This year we are reverting to a rolling system of publication. Instead of putting an issue to bed on the first Sunday of each even-numbered month, we are going to put up reviews and articles as they come in. You can see the last formally dated edition here - just click on the cover for a list of contents. There are ten new reviews, thanks to our doughty team of reviewers, and we shall add more over the coming months as they come to hand. Here are the newly harvested ones:

Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, reviewed by Bobbi Sinha-Morey
Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis, reviewed by Satima Flavell
Chains of Ice by Christina Dodd, reviewed by Bobbi Sinha-Morey
Taken By Midnight by Lara Adrian, reviewed by Bobbi Sinha-Moery
The Alchemist in the Shadows by Pierre Pevel, reviewed by Astrid Cooper
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi, reviewed by Ian Banks
The Vespertine by Saundra Mitchell, reviewed by Katherine Petersen
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, reviewed by Ian Banks
Tymon’s Flight by Mary Victoria, reviewed by Carol Ryles
Wolfborn by Sue Burstynski, reviewed by Katherine Petersen

And if you're a writer who loves myths and legends, be sure to click through to our submission guidelines, too. We are planning an anthology of speculative fiction stories and poems based on old tales. We have a few very good submissions so far but we're also receiving a lot of material that isn't suitable, one way or the other. Rather than change the ethos of the anthology, we're going to hold off publication until we get our ten or fifteen really great stories that owe their inspiration directly to a myth, a legend or a folktale. Please write one for us!

Following yonder star

2010-12-31T07:12:00.006+08:00

Happy New Year, everyone!

On my old Worldpress blog, I had a post about Astrology for Writers, with a link from this blog. I noticed from my stats that someone recently came to this site looking for it. The link I had up was incorrect, which meant the person may not have been able to find the post. I decided to put the material on this blog so I don't "put people crook" as the old Aussie vernacular has it. Then, of course, I found one of the links within the post itself didn't work, either, so this post actually differs considerably from the original!

Why is nothing ever simple?

I guess at least some of you, dear followers, must be interested in astrology, and I know most of you are interested in writing. So let's knock off two asteroids with one comet and have a look at how astrology can help writers.

Authors have often used astrology in their stories; it’s an important component, for instance, of Kim Falconer’s Quantum Enchantment science fantasy series. Kim, an astrologer herself, has devised an astrological system for her characters to use, and it certainly adds an interesting twist to both plot and characterisation. On her website, she even offers horoscopes according to the system she created for the books!

If you’re going to use astrology in your stories, you need to have more than a superficial knowledge of it. I was amused to read in one of my favourite historical novels set in medieval times that one of the characters had Venus and Neptune conjunct in her horoscope. Now this may well be true, but the character and her astrologer would not have been aware of the fact. Neptune was not discovered until 1846!

If you’re a writer, your own chart will undoubtedly show a bent towards verbal expression and some kind of artistic talent. Those among you who have horoscopes will know this already, and those of you who have not might enjoy a new voyage of self-discovery if you take the time to learn more about the subject. It might also show you the appropriate times to submit manuscripts to give yourself the best chance of success! Perhaps I'll write a whole post on these topics sometime, but for today, let's have a look at how astrology can help you develop and understand your characters.

I know some of you are cynics about astrology, and so you should be – there’s a lot of crap flying around out there on the subject. But even cynics can use this tool with useful results. There are lots of websites to help you and rather than reinvent the wheel I’ll provide links to a couple of good ones.

The Metaphysical Zone investigates various psychological and metaphysical tools for character development, including astrology, the Enneagram and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. In regard to astrology, it suggests going into considerable depth by ascertaining your character's date, place and time of birth and setting up a complete horoscope. This is certainly the most thorough and legitimate way to use astrology - it's what I do, and every time, I am amazed to find that by reading the chart in depth I can learn more about that character's deep fears and desires, which add dimensions I was not aware of and explain why the character sometimes goes off on tangents that seem contrary to the way I want the story to go!

‘But,’ I hear you ask, ‘how do I find out my character’s place, date and time of birth?’

There are two ways. Both require that you first decide the year of birth, which should be easy because you probably already know how old your character is. You probably also know the place.

Having got at least the year of birth, do one of the following:

*Ask the character! Just sit quietly and imagine the character has come to join you, and simply ask him or her for the data you need. It will probably pop into your head immediately, but if it doesn’t, thank the character anyway and accept that the information will come to you later, perhaps in a dream. It nearly always does. Then you can go to any one of the numerous sites that offers free astrology charts and download the character's horoscope. You can get a perfectly good free chart and a simple reading from Astrolabe.

*The second method, which is the one I use, demands more in-depth knowledge of astrology. I look at what I know about the character already and hazard a guess as to possible dominant signs. (Sometimes something else leaps out at me, too, such as a possible aspect between two planets.) I follow my intuition as to which is the Sun sign. That gives me the Zodiacal month. Then I pick what I think should be the Moon sign – that will narrow it down to about three days. Then I look up those days and again just following my nose, I pick one of them to be the birthdate. Then I pick the possible rising sign to get the time to within a couple of hours. A bit of fine tuning and I can sit down and learn my character’s innermost secrets at my leisure!

But of course, it doesn’t matter how well I think I know my characters – if I can’t write them well the knowledge does me no good. Blending characters and plot is the essence of fiction writing and in that regard, I still have along way to go, despite my Air (intellectual ability, verbal reasoning) grand trine (a generally fortunate combination) of Mercury (verbal skill) Neptune (creativity, imagination) and Saturn conjunct Uranus (hard work + sudden breakthroughs and changes).

Ah well, plod on! And that’s Saturn talking. :-)

My Facebook Year

2010-12-19T18:06:00.012+08:00

Facebook is full of wonderful time-wasting activities! Two recent ones have enabled me to look back over the past year to see just how I'd been wasting my time.

First, a selection of my status posts for the year. These do, in fact, give a pretty good run-down of my year's high points.

Then there's the one that looks at which words I've used the most in my status posts. These suggest that I've been a bit of a Pollyanna in 2010, although it's apparent I've had a few friends with cancer. Nevertheless, they do give an indication of my priorities, I think.

Top words from my Facebook status messages:
1: Great - used 9 times
2: Friends - used 7 times
3: Birthday - used 7 times
4: Cancer - used 6 times
5: Know - used 6 times
6: Carol - used 6 times
7: Family - used 5 times
8: Lovely - used 5 times
9: Stuff - used 5 times
10: Yay - used 4 times

And finally, just because it's cute and it's Christmas:

I wish you all a very happy holiday season and all the things you love the best for the coming year.

In transit, with books

2010-11-21T09:51:00.005+08:00

I'm currently in Adelaide en route to Mount Gambier, where I'll be for the next ten weeks. I like summer in the The Mount - daytime temperatures tend to hover around 30 degrees Celsius, with only an occasional day hitting the old century and rarely going higher. What's more, it's a clear, dry heat that I revel in. Water in the air, cold or hot, makes me very uncomfortable, and of recent years, Perth's summers have become more humid.

Even so, I'd like to move back to the West, and have almost decided to give up my flat in Mount Gambier, sell my worldly goods and move to a boarding house in or near Perth, if I can find somewhere suitable. After all, I've been commuting between Perth and Mount Gambier for the last four years, and have actually spent more time in Perth than in The Mount. I have, from time to time, missed a particular book or item of clothing, but by and large, I've managed fine on what I can lug around (with a bit of help from my friends!) in two suitcases and a motley assortment of supermarket bags. Many people on this planet live with far fewer personal effects.

So why does the thought of shedding books terrify me?

My name is Satima and I am a bookaholic...

I have bookshelves in every room except the wet areas, and more books in boxes and cupboards. Yet there is no information in them that I cannot get from a library or on line. Why do I find it so hard to think of parting with them?

I'm working on overcoming this attachment but it's painful. Books have been the one continuing theme in my life. There's never been a time when I did not own at least a shelf full. I've lugged them about from country to country and state to state for over fifty years, and the thought of getting rid of them hurts. Besides, on the rare occasions when I've cut down by giving a few dozen to charity or parted with them for a pittance to a dealer, I've regretted it the next week, because the very book I needed to consult was one of those I'd off-loaded. I might have owned the book for several years and never needed to look at it after the initial reading, but if I part with it, some extension to Murphy's Law comes into play and it will be the only book in the world that contains the information or the quote that I need, dammit.

But I cannot live in a boarding house with several hundred books, or even several dozen. If I am to move back to Perth, the books will have to go. I'll let you know how I get on with my fight against the book demons!

Fifteen Novellists

2010-10-30T17:57:00.004+08:00

Another meme! Instructions: take no more than 15 minutes to compile your list of fifteen authors who’ve influenced you. I’ve put mine in chronological order on the timeline of my life before the age of 40. Other authors have influenced me since, of course, but the works of the names below are woven into my psyche and no doubt always will be.

You don’t have to list your authors chronologically, of course – you can organise your collection however you choose!

I had to leave one author off because he would have been one too many, but let me acknowledge the debt I owe to A.A.Milne, whose Winnie-the-Pooh books formed the basis of my library between the ages of two and six!:-)

1. Enid Blyton: Part of the fabric of my childhood! Between the ages of 6 and 13, I read and re read the Famous Five and the Adventure Series until the covers were falling off!

2. Rudyard Kipling: Likewise, The Jungle Book and Just So Stories were favourites that I read again and again.

3. J.R.R. Tolkien: In grade two our teacher read The Hobbit aloud. It terrified me! I first read LOTR in my teens and have owned several copies since. Don’t tell anyone, but I liked the films better!

4. Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series was much loved, too, although I don’t think I ever owned all of them.

5. Rosemary Sutcliff: I first read The Eagle of the Ninth when I was eleven and have re-read it many times since, along with Sutcliff’s other lovely historicals. I’ve never succeeded in collecting the complete set, however.

6. Elizabeth Goudge: An historical writer with an eye for the mythical and mystical who was my favourite author when I was a teenager. I would like to read her books again. (On the to-do list!)

7. Daphne du Maurier: I read her avidly in my teens, too, but have never re-read her work. I should, because she must have had an influence on my own writing!

8. Anya Seton: Another historical author whose work I relished as a teenager, especially, of course, her famous Katherine.

9. P.G. Wodehouse: another author I should re-read. I spent many happy hours in my teens rolling with laughter over his stories.

10. L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt: As with Wodehouse, it was their humour, typified by The Incomplete Enchanter and The Castle of Iron, that hooked me. Later, I came to prefer Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, but de Camp and Pratt showed me that humour in speculative fiction is not only possible, but great fun.

11. A. Bertram Chandler: The first Australian SF author I read. My favourite was False Fatherland, which won Chandler one of his several Ditmars.

12. Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke: I’m cheating by lumping the “Big Three” together. As for many fans of my generation, these guys were the saints of SF and their work was Holy Writ.

13. Mary Stewart: The first historical fantasy author I read. I re-read The Crystal Cave every few years and still love it.

14. Anne McCaffrey and Roger Zelazny: Another cheat, because I discovered these authors about the same time, and different though they are from each other, they have both influenced my own writing. The first two books about the Pern Dragon riders and the first five books of the Amber series are still among my favourite re-reads.

15. Ursula K. Leguin: The Left Hand of Darkness is one of my favourite books of all time in any genre.

So, take the meme and run with it, if you like. Let me know when your list is up because I’d love to read it!

Versatile Bloggers

2010-10-17T14:05:00.012+08:00

A couple of weeks back, the very wonderful Kim Falconer passed on a meme/award. Now, I’m a sucker for memes, and as for awards – well, who doesn’t appreciate a bit of kudos now and then?

Here’s the meme part: Award Recipients list seven things about themselves that their readers might not know. Here are my seven – the first one is identical to Kim’s!

1. I love dark chocolate
2. Dogs are my favourite animals, followed by cats, sheep and pigs
3. I love language and communication in all forms
4. History is possibly the one thing I love even more than language, and only just behind language follow ballet (and dance generally) Yoga and meditation
5. My musical tastes run to Folk/Ethnic, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic
6. Jobs I’ve worked at include Astrologer/Palmist, Ballet Teacher, Dancer (of the tits’n’feathers persuasion), Database Manager, Editor, English Coach, Housekeeper, Family History Researcher Freelance Journalist and Pig Farmer
7. I have lived in five countries, at a total of over 30 addresses. And that’s not counting house-sits and other temporary places of abode!

And speaking of house-sits, here is my Playmate of the Month, Jayjay. She is a lovely placid puddytat, whose only foible is a spot of tail lashing when dinner is not what she wanted. But she always manages to swallow her pride and eat it anyway! She's my Playmate of the Month because I am house-sitting for her family for the whole of October. This is the longest house-sit I've had this year and comes as a blessed isle of calm after so many moves in such a short few months!

The Versatile Blogger Award is hard to pass on, because most bloggers don’t set out to be versatile. They blog, often very eruditely, on one topic and one topic only. There are heaps of wonderful blogs devoted to exclusively to writing, reading, language, history, music, dance and all the other things I love – and things I hate, too, come to that! But here are some blogs that don’t limit themselves to one topic and so often come up with the odd surprise to keep the reader interested.

First, my friend Jo Wake, who blogs on travel, cooking, reading, current affairs and life's vicissitudes generally.

Then there’s Laura Goodin who can turn her pen to movies, books, fencing (the foils and sabres kind, not the 12-gauge wire kind) as well as fiction writing and topics related thereto.

And my friend and crit buddy Fiona Leonard, who blogs on anything and everything, especially travel and current affairs. Fiona has travelled widely and currently lives in Ghana, so her posts often deal with matters that seem exotic to those of us left behind in Oz! Her posts are often graced by photos taken by her clever partner, Nyani Quarmyne.

Lisa Gold calls herself the Research Maven, and she researches for writers on any and every possible topic. She passes on the gems she mines via the blog.

Author extraordinaire Karen Miller is a woman of many parts, and it shows in her very versatile blog. Karen writes on writing (of course) and also theatre, current affairs, biography, music and more.

Sue Isle is a versatile author as well as a versatile blogger, as she writes both YA and adult stories. And her hobby is keeping rats! If you want to learn about these fascinating and much-maligned animals, Sue’s your woman.

Gillian Polack is another author whose interests are legion. She loves both history and cooking, so the history of all things culinary features largely in her blog posts. But that’s only the beginning. Her blog provides unique entertainment and is often a barrel of laughs, sometimes through tears.

Lastly, a pat on the back for my Egoboo friends, Carol Ryles, Helen Venn, Joanna Fay and Sarah Parker. The five of us together pretty much cover the spectrum of interests and lifestyles, and I like to think this infinite variety is reflected in our posts!

New Furry Friends

2010-09-19T16:43:00.010+08:00

I am currently house-sitting for a friend who lives in the tiny historic township of York, which lies 97km inland from Perth, Western Australia. It is the oldest inland township in the state, having been founded in 1831, only two years after Perth itself was settled in 1829. For the first few years it was merely a collection of scattered farms, but in 1836 an army barracks and store were built, and soon a thriving little community took shape. York is still the centre of a farming district today, and is a popular "tree change" village for people moving here from Perth. Many of these are artists or hobbyists, and the place is replete with things like an automotive museum, art galleries, and arty gift shops jostling with farm supplies and real estate agents.

It's very cold here in winter by Australian standards, and winter has lingered this year. Only in the last few days have we been frost-free in the early mornings. Yet there has been little rain, and my friend's fledgling garden requires constant watering. We are promised maxima in the mid-twenties Celsius later this week, which will be nice for me but not for the water-starved plants.

My family of four-legged fosterlings comprises a little shaggy dog named Gizmo and three cats - a haughty Burmese named Foxy and two young tabbies, Dasher (she was dumped on a vet's doorstep at Christmas time along with her litter mates, and they were promptly named after Santa's reindeer!) and Kitteny. The two look very alike, but Kitteny is slightly darker than Dasher. Name notwithstanding, she is the elder of the two, but she still enjoys a kitteny game with Dasher now and then. Gizmo quite enjoys a game of tug-of-war, too, but Foxy is far too dignified for such goings on. Foxy has habit of not quite closing her mouth, so her incisors show, making her look like a vampire, but try as I might, I couldn't catch her doing this on camera.

I'll be here for another few days and then I go back to Perth to stay with some other friends of the winged persuasion! House-sitting is nothing if not varied:-).

(The pets are shown here in order of age - Gizmo, Foxy, Kitteny and Dasher, who is taking time to smell the flowers.)

A worldcon is a wond'rous thing, God wot!

2010-09-06T20:16:00.010+08:00

Aussiecon4, the 68th World Science Fiction Convention, has just ended. An amazing and sometimes overwhelming experience, it has been a once-in-a-lifetime event for me, since the “Worldcon” is only held in Australia about once in a decade. The four held here so far have all been in Melbourne

The event was both exhilarating and frustrating: exhilarating because of the combination of guests from all over the world, a huge array of panel topics and panellists and activities that included kaffeeklatsches with, and readings by, dozens of writers; the opportunity to buy books and other fan-pleasing merchandise from a veritable army of dealers, and the possibility of falling over a favourite author in the bar or in an elevator.

And the frustration? It just wasn't possible to take advantage of even a tenth of the offerings. Several times I found myself sitting in the foyer, poring over the program, unable to make up my mind which panel or kaffeeklatsch to go to and ending up so paralysed that I did none of them, opting instead for the comfort of a hot coffee or a turn about the dealers' room! Nevertheless, I did attend about a dozen panels, four or five kaffeeklatsches and about the same number of readings. Some of my favourite authors, including Glenda Larke, Juliet Marillier and Karen Miller, sat on panels,and I even took part in one myself. It was about YA paranormal romance, which I list among my least favourite sub-genres, while I was overlooked for all the reviewing panels. Obviously the mode of allocating panellists to panels is beyond my comprehension. However, my fellow-panellists – Crisetta McLeod, Amanda Pillar and Tehani Wessely (who is an awesome moderator) - covered up for any deficiencies I might have!

There were glittering social events, too, and. I was lucky enough to be invited to two of them. The first was a fifteenth birthday celebration for HarperCollins's spec-fic imprint, Voyager. No less a personage than George R R Martin himself cut the cake, to the accompaniment of a blaze of exploding torches outside the windows framing the dais in the Crown Entertainment Complex. Mr Martin joked about authors who do not submit their books on time, to the amusement of those of us who have been awaiting the appearance of his long-delayed opus, A Dance with Dragons. (Perhaps next year, in Reno, brethren...) The second event was a pre-Hugo awards party, kindly put on by the Orion imprint of Hachette Livre. This was another stupendous event, in which artist Nick Stathopoulos proudly showed the shining throng his beautifully crafted award statuette. It incorporated elements of Art Nouveau and Aboriginal creation stories, a mix that shouldn't have worked but did, and that right wonderfully.

Later in the evening, the Hugos were presented. There was one Aussie among the winners – artist Sean Tan, a Perthite now living in Melbourne. Tan is highly regarded, not only for his art but also for his writing and his personal popularity as a humble and generous all-round Nice Guy. Aussie editor Jonathan Strahan just missed out on an award, but I hasten to add that to be shortlisted for the Hugos is as prestigious in the SF world as is being shortlisted for the Oscars in the realm of cinema, so we in Aussie fandom are very proud of both these talented men.

I had hoped to catch up with many of the friends I've made online, and indeed I did manage to kaffeeklatsch with some of my fellow webzine workers, not only those on The Specusphere but others including Nyssa Pascoe, Phill Berrie, Crisetta McLeod, Chuck McKenzie, Simon Petrie, Helen Stubbs, Damien Smith, Brendan Carson and Catherine Gunson. I also managed quick schmoozes with many others including Sally Beasley, Sue Bursztynski, Michele Cashmore, Shane Jiraiya Cummings, Edwina Harvey, Judi Hodgkin (a lovely surprise, that, for I hadn't seen ex-WAAPA buddy Judi since 1990!), Heidi Kneale, Dean Laslett, Dave Luckett, Ian McHugh, Nicole Murphy, Ian Nichols, Gillian Polack and Monissa Whiteley. Plus, of course, my dear friends from the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre: Sarah Parker, Andrew Partington, Carol Ryles, Helen Venn and Jessica Vivien. There were, in fact, well over a hundred Perthites among the membership, perhaps more per head of population than any other city in the world!

What's more, I made many new friends and acquaintances, not least my room-mate at the Melbourne Central YHA hostel, Ruth Anne from San Francisco. I also had the opportunity to consult with the London literary agent who had been kind enough to read the opening pages of my trilogy. He was very encouraging and offered me the opportunity to submit again when I've made some improvements.

There is so much to say about Aussiecon4 that I feel I should stop waxing lyrical about it lest I bore you, since only being present at such an event can give a true idea of its wonder and complexity. There will be plenty written about it elsewhere, and I will probably write more myself for The Specusphere. But let me register here my profound thanks to Sue Ann Barber and the rest of the hard-working team who put the con together. It was an amazing achievement!

I return to Perth tomorrow for another round of housesitting, so I should have pictures of some new furry friends to share with you next time!

Ups instead of downs

2010-08-22T09:04:00.007+08:00

The one thing we can be sure of in life is that things will change. People come and go, workplaces alter, and the weather is a constant reminder of the basic unreliability of life. A lot of changes bring sadness, and even fortunate changes are stressful. All the same, isn't it nice when things look up a bit for a change?

I'm going through a period when positive things seem to be happening. First, there's the keen anticipation of the Worldcon - the World Science Fiction Convention - which will enliven the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre from 2-6 September. I was among the first to put my money down, courtesy of a kind and generous friend, so I've been looking forward to this event for months.

There will be loads and heaps and tons of panels to attend, all featuring writers, publishers, artists, agents, editors and fans of note: names like Ellen Datlow, Cory Doctorow, Glenda Larke, Juliet Marillier, George R.R. Martin, China Mieville, Karen Miller, Charles Stross, Catherynne M. Valente, Sean Williams, and scores of others including the fabulous Guests of Honour: Kim Stanley Robinson, Shaun Tan and Robin Johnson. And I am even on a panel myself, with fellow Aussies Amanda Pillar, Crisetta McLeod and Tehani Wesley. Wow. Me. On a panel. At a Worldcon. Wow.

The problem is one of being spoilt for choice, as there are times when I shall want to attend two or three panels or events in the same time-slot. Not having mastered bi-location yet, I just won't be able to go to everything, but I'm darned well going to try!

You can find out all about "Aussiecon4" at http://www.aussiecon4.org.au/.

You will have gathered that I'm feeling pretty happy at present, and all the more so because I've had a couple of exciting things happen in the last few weeks. First, a well-known and widely respected literary agent from London opened his books to down-under writers who planned to attend Aussiecon4. I queried him by email and he was kind enough to not only look at my package, but to say a few complimentary things about my writing and to give me some very useful feedback. He even said nice things about my blog! And while he wasn't willing to represent my book "in its present form", his generous interest in my work was very encouraging.

Then, a couple of weeks later, I learnt that I'd been shortlisted for the Katharine Susannah Prichard Speculative Fiction Award. I only wound up with a commended certificate and a whole ten dollars in prize money, but to be in the top 10% of a large field in a respected competition feels like a validation of my work. My friend Carol Ryles won third prize. She's a better writer than I am, and more experienced, and having read her story, I know the competition was pretty fierce. I'd love to read the stories submitted by the first and second placegetters, Victorian writers Denis Bastion and Janeen Samuel. Fellow Egobooer Joanna Fay read the winning entry out loud, but sadly I was in South Australia so I didn't hear it.

So, in an optimistic frame of mind, I'm eagerly waiting to head off to Melbourne in ten days' time to see and maybe even meet some of the greats in my chosen genre; to catch up with old friends and meet new ones, and to put faces to the names of some of the many lovely people I've previously only "met" online. Be assured that I'll be back with a blow-by-blow commentary in a couple of weeks!

BTW, those of you who are interested in such trivia might like to check out a post I wrote for the Egoboo blog last week about the different kinds of adjectives, the proper order for them, and when to use and not to use commas while doing so. Fascinating stuff, I assure you!:-)

Specusphere, August-September 2010

2010-08-01T10:46:00.003+08:00

The new Specusphere is live. Just look at the great table of contents!

Editorial

Voting, FIFA and the Moon by Stephen Thompson

Features

Do I really like speculative fiction? by Stephen Thompson
Medical Bag: Briar Rose by Brendan Carson
Fantasy genre paradigm shift by Amanda Greenslade

Writing and Publishing

Tips for the older writer by Satima Flavell
Challenges and Denizens of the Road of Trials by Stephen Turner
Patience by Anne Hamilton

Book Reviews

* Ancient Whispers by Marie-Claude Bourque, reviewed by Bobbi Sinha-Morey
* Angel’s Blood and Archangel’s Kiss by Nalini Singh, reviewed by Damien Smith
* Burning Lamp by Amanda Quick, reviewed by Bobbi Sinha-Morey
* The Crows of Bedu by Nye Joell Hardy, reviewed by Katherine Petersen
* Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris, reviewed by Felicity Dowker
* Dragon Haven by Robin Hobb reviewed by Satima Flavell
* Instructions by Neil Gaiman, reviewed by Felicity Dowker
* Legends by Jack Dann & Jonathan Strachan (eds) reviewed by Satima Flavell
* Naamah’s Kiss by Jacqueline Carey, reviewed by Satima Flavell
* New Model Army by Adam Roberts, reviewed by Ross Murray
* Shadow Bound by Erin Kellison, reviewed by Bobbi Sinha-Morey
* The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner by Stephenie Meyer, reviewed by Felicity Dowker
* The Song of the Silvercades and The Cry of the Marwing by KS Nikakis, reviewed by Donna Hanson
* Soulless & Changeless by Gail Carriger, reviewed by Damien Smith
* Tome of the Undergates by Sam Sykes, reviewed by Damien Smith
* White Cat by Holly Black, reviewed by Ian Banks

Game Reviews

Machinarium by Amanita Design, reviewed by Marisa Wikramanayake

Fiction

Serial 8: Toyol by Yusuf Martin

So hop over to http://www.specusphere.com/ and have yourself a nice big read!

What is Success?

2010-07-29T20:02:00.005+08:00

Another post copied over from my old WordPress blog.

Over at her Year in America blog, my friend Fiona Leonard posed the question, “If you knew you could not fail, what would you do?”

I thought for quite a while about this before posting a comment, trying to identify how I define success and what anchors me in my undertakings. I came to the conclusion that it’s not the lure of success that motivates me, but my passion for the thing I’m doing.

I’ve had many interests over the course of my life: in fact, in a post about a year ago I described myself as being “artistically promiscuous” as a girl, since I loved so many things. I studied piano, singing, speech and drama and several forms of dance as well as a full trencher of school subjects and all the peripherals that go with being a music student – theory, harmony, aural training, history and form of music…my days were full from wake-up time at 6.00am until I collapsed into bed at about 9.30pm. I loved all those activities (or at least most of them, most of the time!) and did not want to give any of them up.

Until, of course, they became too difficult. This happened first with piano. I was a student at Sydney Conservatorium, and I was well aware that although I had above average ability in music, I was never going to be much better at it than I was then. It had become a hard grind. I pushed myself through the required two hours of practice each day, but each session was a struggle. My teacher, Raymond Fischer, told me I was at least three years away from being ready to sit even the simplest diploma exam, and I realised I just didn’t have the enthusiasm to last the distance. Possibly, with a lot of effort, I could have done what my parents hoped and expected I would do – go on to Teachers’ College and become a specialist music teacher in a high school. But the prospect of having to face four or five classes a day for the rest of my life, trying to interest a mob of teenagers in a subject that had already lost its juice for me, was utterly unthinkable.

After a year of Arts at Sydney University, I took a year off study to work in the public service and make a rather unfortunate early marriage. It didn’t take long for me to realise that working in an office environment was not my thing, either, and in 1962 I entered the National Institute of Dramatic Art to try my hand at acting. However, during that year I had my first baby and in those days there were no creches at universities, and as I couldn’t find suitable child care, I had to give up my scholarship and quit the course. I was sad, but not devastated, because at heart I’d already realised that this was not my path, either. I loved Shakespeare, but opportunities for specialist Shakesperean actors in Australia were virtually nil at that time, and the thought of spending my time preparing for auditions for TV commercials didn’t exactly fill me with enthusiasm. Several of my fellow students did indeed become professional actors — two of them, John Bell and Anna Volska, even became specialist Shakespereans! — but many more became bartenders, teachers and insurance agents.

I continued to be involved in amateur theatre and to teach dance for another twenty years, while rearing my five children. Along the way I furthered an interest in astrology that had started in my teens, and tried my hand at farming, even gaining a Certificate in Rural Studies to give myself a theoretical base for milking cows, drenching sheep and mucking out pig pens. Actually this was one of the happiest times of my life in many ways, and not the least happy-making part was watching my children growing up close to nature, seeing first-hand the cycles of life that as urban dwellers we see only dimly, as when someone has a baby or an elderly relative dies. In farm animals these cycles play themselves out far more quickly.

Dance was the one thing that never lost its appeal for me, despite my short legs and hockey-player’s build that rendered me unsuited to classical ballet. In my forties I returned to study at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, where I completed an Associate Diploma in Performing Arts (Dance) with the intention of “updating my expertise” so that I could catch up with the latest doings in the dance world, especially in teaching. My forty-odd-year-old body complained terribly and it took three years for me to complete the two year course, but complete it I did, and I was quite proud when I walked across the platform to receive my scroll. Concurrently, I’d started a BA in Religious Studies, which I loved. I complemented it by converting my Associate Diploma to a Dance minor, and also started another BA in Languages. This was in those heady days of the 1980s when all tertiary education was free, so I was merrily undertaking units in French, Italian, English Literature, Linguistics, Psychology and Journalism. However, when I was part-way through this second BA, my second marrriage broke down and fees for university courses came back, so I could not afford to finish it, much less go on to do the masters in Religious Studies that I’d hoped to do. Of course, none of those transcripts actually qualified me to do anything, and I was getting older and becoming less and less employable in a country that has always valued youth above almost everything else. So I turned to my other interests to put bread on the table, and these are the things I still do today – writing, editing, astrology and meditation. And I still love all of them.

Writing fiction, however, is just as heartbreaking as music, dance and acting. The chances of any individual “succeeding” at it are very low indeed. For every thousand manuscripts that are started by hopeful would-be authors, only one or two, at best, will eventually be published by one of the major commercial publishing houses. I frequently become discouraged, and talking to my fellow writers, I realise most of them do, too.

Nevertheless, I will keep up the battle until writing loses its juice for me. And when might that be? If my past experience is any guide, it will be when I know that I’ve reached the limits of my ability, which to me isn’t failure; it’s just a fact of life. I have the good fortune to have better-than-average talents in a lot of directions, but I have never proved to be outstanding at any of them.

But is this a bad thing?

I think not. If it were, I wouldn’t have had the chance to do so many wonderful things because I would have spent my life focussing on the prospect of success in just one of the things I love. I worship all the muses, and while, perhaps, none of them loves me quite as much as she loves her dedicated votaries who have just one talent in abundance, I can nonetheless bathe in all their sacred pools and come away refreshed. And that may be the best gift of all.

Once I thought I'd like to be an editor

2010-07-28T10:23:00.006+08:00

Here's another post recycled from my old WordPress blog.

As I wrote the title to this post, I thought it sounded vaguely familiar. Then I remembered a silly little song my father taught me when I was five years old, which began, “Once I thought I’d like to be a cricketer”. I can still remember the words, so just for fun I put them up here.

But this post is not about cricketers, but editors. How does one become an editor?

I suppose it’s not unlike the way one becomes a cricketer or anything else: you watch other people doing it, then maybe you get someone to teach you a few things, and from then on its practice, practice, practice. That’s certainly the way I learnt, but that was twenty years ago. Things are a bit different now, in that there are tertiary courses devoted to editing and publishing and the Institute of Professional Editors has set up a qualifying examination. But a lot of people, even today, just fall into it, as I did.

I was at Edith Cowan University and had just started to write for Music Maker Magazine, in which I had my own column. Fellow students, therefore, thought I might be some kind of expert and they would often ask me to check their work for spelling and grammatical errors before they passed it in. I soon realised I was, in fact, not bad at copyediting. After all, I come from a generation that had the Rules drummed into them from an early age. It horrified me a bit to realise that in my French classes there were young people fresh out of school who literally did not know a noun from a verb. The lecturer was in despair. ‘How can I teach them French grammar,’ she asked, ‘when they don’t even know the rules in English?’ I sympathised completely, and I felt sorry for the students, who had never had chance to learn the beautiful intricacies of our language.

If our own young people cannot understand English grammar, what hope does a foreigner have? So when a few years later a student from Nepal asked me to help him learn to speak and write better English, I was happy to help. Jaganath (who has since become a friend) somehow persuaded his university that they should pay for his English lessons. The university responded by sending me more students, and it didn’t take me long to realise that they didn’t want conversation practice nearly as much as they wanted help with their assignments.

In some countries, styles of writing differ considerably from the linear point-to-point-to-conclusion logic that we are used to in English. Rather, scholars there prefer a rather more circuitous approach. This difference puzzles a lot of students for whom English is not their mother tongue.

What’s more, academic English, especially in the sciences, still prefers a formal style with a preponderance of Latinate words rather than plain Saxon-based ones. Formal written English is almost a different language. Naturally, lot of students, not all of them foreign, find this really confusing. Formal English uses Latinate words for historical reasons – after the Norman invasion of 1066, the ruling classes, who made and enforced the laws, for several centuries did not speak the same language as the predominately Anglo-Celtic people they had conquered. When I explain this to students it’s a joy to see comprehension dawn in their eyes, and some of them get the hang of the different “feel” of the two forms of English very quickly.

And so it was that I fell into editing quite by chance. As more and more students were awarded their degrees, so my confidence grew. By this time I had become interested in writing fiction, and other writers would ask me to critique their work. At first, I would only copyedit their offerings, but here, too, I gradually became bolder and more confident and as my expertise grew I took on more and more complex editing jobs and felt I could charge a reasonable fee for my work.

If you feel drawn to editing and would like to learn more, find your state’s society of editors (There’s a list on the Society of Editors WA website.) If you live outside Australia, try an internet search for society+editors+Antarctica, or whatever other country you live in. The internet is full of wonders and you’re sure to turn up something!

Of course, if you’re young enough to want to make this your career, you can enrol in a formal course either in journalism or editing and publishing. But a lot of freelance editors are older people like me, who learnt formal English in school and who may have some journalistic or teaching experience; who have read widely and taken appropriate workshops when they’ve had the opportunity, and who are willing to go on learning.

There’s room for all kinds of editors. Few freelancers make a full living from their editing activities, but that’s not a bad thing. Many people today depend on a portfolio of skills for their livelihood . If you love language and enjoy helping people, why not make editing one of yours?

Genealogy in a multicultural world

2010-07-26T22:00:00.006+08:00

This is another post that I've copied over from my old WordPress blog.

When I was a child, ethnicity was a relatively simple matter. England was full of English people, Chinese people lived in China and in the south sea islands there were people who wore grass skirts and possibly ate missionaries. Of course, it wasn't really quite as simple as that, but that was how it appeared to me at three or four years of age.

I remember Mother calling me to the window one day, saying, "Look, there's a Chinaman!" I leaned over the windowsill and gazed down at the street below, but all I could see was the back of the man's head as he hurried along like everyone else in the bustling crowd, heading for a bus stop, his workplace or the shops. (I should explain that we were between houses and at this stage were living in a flat over a butcher's shop. It was at 26 King St, Stretford, Manchester, if you'd care to consult Google Earth!)

My illusions were shattered! The man wasn't even wearing a long robe like the mandarins in my picture book.

The world was already changing. The end of World War II left millions of people displaced, and they often ended up somewhere far from their place of birth. Other emigrations involved young women from Japan and Germany who had married soldiers from the UK, America, Australia and other countries. My own eldest sister married a refugee from Serbia and our house was often filled with his friends, many of whom spoke little or no English. And when we emigrated to Australia in 1952, we already found the beginnings of a multicultural society.

It was largely European multiculturalism, of course, for at that time the White Australia policy was in force. It suited the authorities to forget the Aboriginal people their ancestors had displaced, the Chinese adventurers who had settled here during the Gold Rush of the mid-C19, the Kanakas from the south seas islands who had been kidnapped and brought to Queensland as slave labour, the Afghan camel-drivers of Australia's Red Heart and the Japanese divers who worked in Broome's pearling industry. No, Australia was White, and White it was going to stay.

But Australia was flourishing and people all over the world were on the move. Laws had to change to bring in much-needed labour. Young people of the developed nations discovered the joys of travel, and many of them brought home foreign partners or settled in other countries. Students began to attend universities in lands other than their own, and by the 1960s countries that had been reasonably homogeneous, population-wise, found themselves turning into melting pots. Multiculturalism had arrived.

Now we have second and third generations of children whose parents or grandparents came from other lands. In some families, the immigration took place long ago, as in the the case of the Chinese gold-diggers' descendants. Some time ago, I met a girl from Broome whose four grandparents were Japanese, Aboriginal, Afghan and Irish. She was, I might add, extraordinarily attractive!

Two of my children descend from a part-African slave trader from Jamaica, who brought his family to Australia in the mid C19 when that terrible trade failed. Two more of my children are part-German. I have nieces and nephews of two generations who are part-Serbian, part-Greek or part-Polish, and step-grandchildren who are part-Italian.

All this has made for some interesting research in my family tree! I have not attempted to follow the Italian, Serbian, Greek and Polish laterals, leaving those for closer relatives to investigate, but I have found out a great deal about the ex-pat Jamaican line and that of my German children. Family historians are incredibly generous in sharing their research, and in fact my German cousin-by-marriage, Elfriede, came to visit me with her husband, who is Indian, a few years ago and I was fortunate enough to visit their lovely home in the Rhine Valley in 2006.

The ever-increasing mixture of nationalities must surely strengthen the gene pool, although it might create problems for genetically-based medicine in the future. Already we occasionally hear of someone who cannot find a tissue match because of their unusual bloodlines. But as genealogists, we face our own challenges. We are very lucky today in having access to so much information from all over the world. Not all of it is readily accessible, but even so, many of us can trace our ancestry back for at least a couple of centuries if we are determined enough. But who knows how long this happy state of affairs will continue? Borders alter, governments fall, mass migrations of people can happen almost overnight, especially in the event of war or natural disaster. All these things can mean gaps in the records. Anyone with any sense of history, anyone with any feeling of family pride, anyone with any sense of curiousity and wonder, wants to know about their ancestry. It is of vital importance, therefore, that this lucky generation of family historians should collect and preserve all the records they can for their multicultural, multi-coloured descendants! Write down everything you can remember of the stories your parents and grandparents told you about life in the old country, and their difficulties in learning to live in a new culture. Don't throw out those old photos, documents and letters Opa Jan, Aunt Mary, Uncle Ngobo or Cousin Takeko left in the garage. Rather, preserve them in archival quality folders and albums. Your great-grandchildren may well thank you for it.

Authorial voice, passive writing and the passive voice

2010-07-25T11:49:00.003+08:00

How do you like my new-look blog? Kudos to my clever son Scott over at ManeyActs.

I've decided to import some old posts from the WordPress blog that I no longer use, and as Blogger won't let me import the lot in date order, I shall copy and paste them one by one. Here's one I posted in March of this year:

On sites that offer writing advice one sometimes reads instruction that confuses “passive writing” with “passive voice”. We see this among critiquers in writing groups as well, and it’s a source not just of confusion but also of misinformation.

I think there are two sources for this confusion. We often read that a writer needs to develop his or her own “Voice”. (I’ll capitalise this hereafter, to distinguish it from the other meaning of the word, which I’ll deal with farther down.)

“Voice” in this context really refers to those distinctive elements of a writer’s style that remind us of who is writing. If we look at authors of bygone days, Voice is not hard to see. Charles Dickens, for instance, had a distinctive Voice. So did Rudyard Kipling and DH Lawrence. In fact, pick up a work by any well-known author active before about 1980 and if you’ve read a few of that author’s books you will probably recognise the Voice straight away, because it did not vary much from book to book within that author’s oeuvre.

Few authors today have that kind of truly distinctive Voice. This is, I think, because of the popularity of the so-called “deep third” (AKA tight third or close third) Point-of-View (POV). It is currently fashionable for authors to hide behind their characters, giving the reader a seamless experience in which the author almost “channels” the POV character. In speculative fiction, two authors who demonstrate remarkable mastery of the deep third are Joe Abercrombie and Margo Lanagan. It is easy to lose oneself in their characters; to feel the character’s sensations and emotions and even to feel as if one is thinking that character’s thoughts. The author’s Voice and the voice of the POV character become one.

Some other authors use the close third only for moments of high tension and drama, retaining their own voice for narrative passages. Guy Gavriel Kay’s work is largely written in this style.

That more obvious, capital-V voice found in authors of past decades is easily confused with another sense of voice – passive writing. If a writer employs a lot of unnecessary auxiliary verbs (forms of “to be” and “to have” as part of an action, such as “He was running”) and constantly uses weak verbs such as walk and go (or went) people say the writing is passive. It’s only a short step from here to thinking that the writer has a “passive” Voice, and here’s where the trouble really starts, because the expression “passive voice” has a clearly defined grammatical meaning.

The “passive voice” as opposed to the “active voice” means using a verb without close reference to the doer of the action, as in, for example, “The ball was thrown by John” instead of “John threw the ball”. The giveaway is that little word “by”. A verb in the passive voice is followed by a preposition, most commonly “by” or “to” (as in “The award was given to Jenny”).

Let's look at examples of the three matters under discussion here – authorial voice, passive writing and the passive voice:

1. An author’s voice (I'll stop capitalising it now you 've got the picture!)
Here is Dickens’s famous opening of A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

The opening gives us an excellent feel for Dickens’s very distinctive (authorial) voice.

2. Passive writing
Here’s a passage I’ve just made up:

I was walking along the road, having just been to the dentist, when I was hit from behind by a cricket ball that had been thrown by a schoolboy. I had been intending to go to visit my mother, but the blow to my head gave me such a migraine that I found myself thinking that perhaps I should be going straight home to lie down.

That is passive writing. We don’t get any feel for the action or for the character’s feelings and sensations because we are separated from them by wases and –ing words – and one example of the passive voice! Can you see where it is?

3. The passive voice
Yup, that’s right: “I was hit from behind by a cricket ball” is in the passive voice, grammatically speaking. The passive voice is best avoided in fiction writing because it is frequently found as an element of passive writing.

But don’t get the terms mixed up. Passive writing is not always in the passive voice. Passive writing, as I’ve said above, is characterised by too many auxiliary verbs, weak verbs and probably weak nouns as well. It may or may not include use of the passive voice.

And not all writing that uses auxiliary verbs is passive, either. For instance “The pretty girl was dancing when I first saw her” uses the auxiliary “was” to indicate the past continuous tense. Some critiquers might try to persuade you to replace it with the simple past – “The pretty girl danced when I first saw her”. They would be wrong, because the simple past tense in that case would be incorrect and somewhat ambiguous. It might suggest, for example, that the pretty girl started to dance because I saw her!

What I’m trying to get across here is don't confuse authorial voice with the passive voice and especially don't confuse passive writing with the passive voice. “The pretty girl was dancing when I first saw her”, and, for instance, “The pretty girl will be dancing next time I see her” are certainly not in the passive voice, and, used correctly, are not necessarily examples of passive writing, either. They are perfectly legitimate uses of continuous forms of the verb “to dance”.

We are fortunate in having so many ways to express things in English, and the continuous tenses have their place. The skill lies in knowing when you can get away without using them, rather than making blanket statements about "passive writing" or worse, confusing them with the passive voice.

A winter's tale

2010-06-27T21:47:00.006+08:00

This is the fourth winter running that I've been able to spend in Perth, rather than in the colder climate of Mount Gambier, where I've offically lived since late 2006. Not that Perth is actually tropical, especially in winter, but it's five or ten degrees warmer than Mount Gambier much of the time.

I manage to spend so much time here by house-sitting for friends and friends of friends. In previous years, I have enjoyed at least one long house-sitting engagement of two months or more, but this year all the gigs have been relatively short, some as short as a week or even less. Now, while variety may be the spice of life, moving house several times a month is disconcerting and confusing. I sometimes find myself waking up in the morning quite unable to remember where I am!

I've just moved into a three-week sit, my longest for this winter, in South Fremantle, only a stone's throw from the beach. This is a lovely house with lots of livestock - laying hens, a worm farm, a veritable lake (far too grand to be called a pond) full of lovely big fish - and the star of the show, a furry four-footed friend called Nila.

Nila is a most interesting kind of bitza. Her mum was a Labrador-Blue Heeler cross and her dad was a Mastiff. She's a just a bit bigger than a Lab or a Heeler, but her head and feet are as big as those of a Mastiff so look as if she's never quite grown into them. She loves to play ball and she likes to herd the chooks, which characteristic no doubt comes from her Blue Heeler grandparent.

For the next three weeks, Nila is my New Best Friend. As with most of my canine fosterlings, she will no doubt claim a special place in my heart and I shall miss her when I move on. But meantime we will have fun!

Swancon 2010

2010-04-06T15:11:00.009+08:00

I came back to Perth especially to attend Swancon, and a friend has very kindly put me up for the nonce, since my first housesit doesn’t start until Thursday. I have house-sitting or other accommodation lined up for the next three months, so I shall avoid at least half of Mount Gambier’s beastly rotten horrible cold wet winter.

Are you wondering what “Swancon” is? It’s Perth’s annual Speculative Fiction convention. Easter every year is special for Perth fans. We descend on a hotel — for the last few years it’s been the All Seasons in Northbridge — to play RPGs, to listen to speakers, to socialize and to dress up for the masquerade that’s held on the Saturday night. There is always a Guest of Honour from overseas (this year it was American Scott Sigler) and an Aussie Guest of Honour (Ian Irvine from NSW filled that role for 2010). They are both interesting speakers who are keen to advise and assist less experienced writers. Scott Sigler had us all enthused about the benefits of self-publishing (he’s one of the rare birds who gained contracts with publishing houses via that route and has now become a bestselling author) while Ian Irvine offered useful tips on writing and publishing, as did other authors including Narrelle Harris, Richard Harland, Dave Luckett and Stephen Dedman. These are the panels I love best and I find it a great privilege to sit at the feet of writers who have made it to the revered status of professionally published author!

As last year, I was on a Romance panel, again with Juliet Marillier, one of my favourite authors, who won the Tin Duck, a prize awarded by popular vote to the WA author who has had material published in the last year. Juliet won the trophy for her novel “Heart’s Blood”. Three other friends — Laney Cairo, fellow Egobooer Sarah Parker and fan Samara Morgan — were on the panel with Juliet and me, and despite a certain amount of sometimes overwhelmingly enthusiastic participation from the audience I think we gave a pretty good account of ourselves:-)

There were book launches, too, notably Belong, an anthology about finding and acknowledging one’s true home, and Scary Kisses, a good fun blend of vampires and other shape-shifters with suspense, horror and humour. Both are published by Ticonderoga. Several friends and colleagues, including Annette Backshall, Astrid Cooper, Carol Ryles, Donna Maree Hanson, Felicity Dowker, Nicole Murphy, Patty Jansen, Simon Petrie and Sonia Helbig have works in one or other of these anthologies. Scary Kisses will be reviewed in the April issue of The Specusphere, which goes live this Sunday. We hope to have a review of Belong ready for the June issue.

Swancon’s all over until next Easter, but meantime I’m eagerly looking forward to the Katharine Susannah Prichard SF group’s mini-con on 2 May and the much-anticipated Worldcon in Melbourne in September.

Trials of Old Age

2010-02-27T08:36:00.007+08:00

Things are still pretty chaotic in my neck of the woods. No sooner had I finished rejoicing at the end of limited downloads and successful publication of the latest Specusphere than my eldest sister, who is nearly 85, had a "funny turn" - her third - and wound up in hospital. She is home now, but sadly, she is not only becoming physically feeble, but mentally so as well. She needs constant attention, so I'm now busier than ever.

I'm one of four sisters, and three of us live here in Mount Gambier. Although we're spread out in age, we are all getting old and we constantly laugh at our forgetfulness, our aches and pains and our poor eyesight and hearing. You have to laugh or you'd spend all your time moping.

The poor hearing alone gives us a lot of giggles. Last week I went with a book club run by my other sister, the one closest to me in age, to the new Mount Gambier library. It's stunning, BTW, and has been hailed by one overseas expert as "the best small library in the world". The picture at left is of the children's corner - a magical place full of caves and tunnels and frogs - even the automatic check-out is shaped ike a giant frog. The link above will take you to a page from which you can hop to the library's site and also to the town's tourist site to see pics of this unique and attractive little city.

The librarian who showed us around noted various areas of interest - the Les Hill local and family history room; the coffee shop, the magazine collection..."And here," she said with a wave at a trio of screens, "is where we keep the Weed."

"Good gracious me," thought I. "They are really determined to get the youth of the town interested in books if they are growing dope in the library". Common sense prevailed. "Pardon?"

"The Wii. You know, games and such."

Ah, yes, well. Ah hem...

Then at dinner, my sister read out a letter from a mutual friend. Said friend was talking about their home and its surrounds. "And Josh still likes to walk across the park in his undies to get to church", the missive concluded.

Again the mind boggled. The vision of an elderly man strolling across the park in his boxer shorts - or maybe long johns - and entering the church, thanking the sidesman for the prayer book and parish paper, making his way to his customary pew...

I was starting to get ideas for a story. Why was Josh half naked? Was this a particularly eccentric brand of Christianity, one with which, for all my degree was in Religious Studies, I remained entirely unacquainted? Or was Josh making some kind of protest, making a statement about the need for non-judgemental acceptance of each other's idiosyncracies? Alas, common sense again reared its head and I realised the phrase "in his undies" must really have been written as "on Sundays". Pity.

One of the funniest misunderstandings due to deafness actually involved my father, who was very deaf from quite early in his adult life. It was an occupational deafness - as a power station engineer, he spent a lot of time in noisy environments, and away from them he was as deaf as a post. For some reason, he took me to work with him one day when I was about four years old - I think Mother must've been in hospital or otherwise indisposed - and I was amazed to find that alongside a boiler his hearing was perfect. It actually frightened me a bit. This couldn't really be my father. My father was deaf, and was always asking me to speak up. Yet now I was the one who couldn't hear him until he bent down close to my face. "No need to shout, lass," he said. "I can hear you."

But back to the story - one morning my father was getting ready for work when a neighbour came to the door. "Fred's dead," she announced sadly.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," said Dad. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Fred's dead!" repeated the woman, louder this time.

"Yes, I'm sorry to hear it. Can I do anything to help?"

This time, the neighbour shouted. "For heaven's sake, lend me a loaf!"

She had been telling Dad she was "out of bread".

Chaos reigns

2010-02-18T09:09:00.003+08:00

Apologies for my long silence, friends! So far, 2010 has been all Go-Go-Go. I bought a new computer and loading it ate up all my download allowance. It would have to happen at Specusphere time with its attendant panic, wouldn't it? Then one of my sisters was hospitalised, which further complicated my life.

Things are settling down now - I'm back on line with a whole 2GB to play with, the February Specupshere is up, Erica is safely home and there's a nice mini-interview with me on A Writer Goes on a Journey.

More posts soon, all being well:-)

A Day at the Zoo - with Pandas!

2010-01-17T12:14:00.013+08:00

I've had a lovely time this past week, because I caught up with friends and family and enjoyed the hospitality of my good friends Denise and David in Adelaide.

Last Sunday I went with my Perth family to Kings Park for a picnic, something we haven't done in years. My granddaughter Cassie is starting high school this year! Then on Monday I had coffee with my friend Harriet, and on Tuesday my friend Jay, whose dogs I'd been minding, took me to the Perth airport. We thought my bags were heavy and I was dreading putting them on the scales, but the bigger one only weighed 16 kilos - a record for me as I usually have more than I'm supposed to be allowed. I guess any bag over 10kg feels darned heavy to an overweight, unfit type like me.

What a flight to Adelaide - lots of turbulence and a head wind that slowed us considerably. But the next few days made up for that. Denise and I had coffee with Robert N. Stephenson, who kindly gave me a review copy of his newly released book, Uttuku. You could file it under vampire books, but it's based on an even older legend - that of the uttuku of ancient Assyria. However, it's a modern book, set in Adelaide, and I'm enjoying it, even though I Do Not Like Vampire Books!

On Friday Denise and I visited Funi and Wang Wang. What? You don't know them? Allow me to introduce you - here they are, in their new bamboo forest home. Funi (left) is still a bit nonplussed by the change of scene, perhaps because her new keepers don't speak Chinese, but more likely because people will keep taking pictures of her with nasty flashes. So flash photography has been banned in the panda enclosure. Even so, I still got some nice pics, although they had to be taken through the glass.

Wang Wang, however, seems quite at ease. Here he is lying on his back, munching bamboo and apparently thinking "Yeah, right, more visitors. Whatever."

The keepers, of course, are delighted with their new charges and are hoping the pair will breed in a year or two, when Funi is old enough.

It was a hot day and we were exhausted by the time we trudged back to the car. I was OK - straight into an air-conditioned bus for the six-hour ride to Mount Gambier, but poor Denise had to drive herself home.

So here I am, back in "the Mount" complete with a nice new little netbook which I'm still setting up. The mobile wireless keeps dropping out so downloading software is proving tedious. I guess I'd better get back to it!

And more rejoicing!

2010-01-12T10:13:00.002+08:00

Even more of my friends will be showcased in Worlds Next Door, 12th Planet Press's planned anthology for children. Congratulations to: Bren MacDibble, Dave Luckett, Dirk Flinthart, Edwina Harvey (again!) Felicity Dowker, Jenny Blackford, Martin Livings, Rowena Cory Daniells, Tansy Rayner Roberts and Sue Bursztynski.

Rejoicing at my friends' success!

2010-01-11T21:34:00.006+08:00

Six of my friends - Donna Marie Hanson, Edwina Harvey, Sonia Helbig, Patty Jansen, Simon Petrie and Carol Ryles - have had stories accepted for Ticonderoga Press's forthcoming anthology Belong. Yippee!

Update 12 Jan - If you've clicked the above link without finding Ticonderoga Press, don't worry. Ticonderoga is having website problems and is seeking a new server. I'll post the new address when it's up and running.

Reading, 2009

2010-01-03T17:05:00.007+08:00

These are the Fantasy and Historical novels I read in 2009. I read a couple of things that don't fall into these two genres, and odd bits of non-fiction as well, but the names of these escape me. I guess that shows where my interests lie! Some of these were read in order to review them, some were recommended by friends and the others are re-reads of old favourites.

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait by K.A. Bedford
The Priestess and the Slave by Jenny Blackford
In Ashes Lie by Marie Brennan
The Magician's Apprentice by Trudi Canavan
Kushiel's Scion by Jacqueline Carey
Graceling by Kristin Cashore
The Champion by Elizabeth Chadwick
The Running Vixen by Elizabeth Chadwick
Sword Song by Bernard Cornwell
The Spell of Rosette by Kim Falconer
Arrows of Time by Kim Falconer
Hand of Isis by Jo Graham
The Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobb
Shadow Queen by Deborah Kalin
Riversend by Sylvia Kelso
How to Ditch your Fairy by Justine Larbalestier
The Last Stormlord by Glenda Larke
Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin
Subversive Activity by Dave Luckett
Wind Follower by Carole McDonnell
Heart's Blood by Juliet Marillier
The Road to Camelot (Sophie Masson, ed)
The Reluctant Mage by Karen Miller
Hammer of God by Karen Miller
Witches Incorporated (Rogue Agent 2) by K.E. Mills
Sasha by Joel Shepherd
Petrodor by Joel Shepherd
Tracato by Joel Shepherd
Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliffe
Red Gloves by Beth Vaughan
White Star by Beth Vaughan
Rosa and the Veil of Gold by Kim Wilkins

I haven't included books I couldn't finish - there were half a dozen of those. I get sent a lot of material to review that simply isn't to my taste, and since I review books for the love of it I'd rather not read things I don't enjoy or can't find at least a few things about them to commend! But if you're looking for a good read, stick a pin into the above list. I'm sure you'll find something to enjoy in all of them, although having said that, I'll cover my tracks by admitting that reading matter is very much a matter of taste!

I also beta-read, critiqued or edited half a dozen novels or non-fiction works and a considerable number of short stories. My own writing, however, languishes. Again.

And for 2010? I'm looking forward to more from Simon Haynes (of Hal Spacejock fame) Glenda Larke (second book in the Rainlords Trilogy) Juliet Marillier (another "Sevenwaters" book) and Karen Miller (K.A. Mills) who has at least a couple of new works in the pipeline. All these authors are Aussie born or resident and in my top faves list:-)

Writers need editors!

2009-12-27T05:55:00.003+08:00

I have just added a post to the Egoboo blog on the topic of why a writer should engage an editor. Click your way across – and while you’re there, read some of the other recent excellent posts too, including Sarah Parker’s contribution on how to use Wordle to identify overused words in your writing.

New blog up and running!

2009-12-06T13:54:00.008+08:00

I've just been away on another writers retreat, this time with four friends from the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre. The Trilogy and I had a good time, even if The Trilogy was being badly behaved and wouldn't go where I wanted it to:-)

Now I must needs prepare to return to South Australia on Thursday next, where The Trilogy and I will continue our ongoing struggle. The Trilogy, you see, does not want to be forced into three books. It would much rather be four books, or even five, and it's not allowed to be more than three. The struggle continues.

But on another front, I'm really excited! With four writerly friends - Carol Ryles, Helen Venn, Joanna Fay and Sarah Parker - I have started still another blog! It's called Egoboo and I've just put up my first post, about how I got started in writing. Check it out at
http://egoboo-wa.blogspot.com/2009/12/words-words-glorious-words.html

A different kind of retreat

2009-11-29T22:50:00.003+08:00

I belong to several writers groups, one of which is called Egoboo. There are five members and we've all been working on novels. I keep thinking mine is finished but it never is. Every time I think I've "finished" I show it to one of my groups and they always find more things that aren't working. It's a swings and roundabouts sort of thing. Or maybe Jason and the Dragon's Teeth would be a better metaphor. I just get one problem straightened out and six more leap in.

A few months back, one of the Egobooers was offered the use of a lovely house at Eagle Bay, a holiday town in the south of Western Australia, so for a remarkably low cost per head we spent three nights there last week while we did our critiquing. A month or so beforehand, we'd exchanged manuscripts: I sent the latest draft of the WIP to my Egoboo buddies and they sent me theirs, which meant we each had four novels to read within four weeks. A pretty big ask and I didn't find it at all easy. I don't read nearly as quickly as once did. Once upon a time I could easily read 500ww per minute, but alas, no longer. I doubt if I read at half that rate these days.

Not that it was a chore. There were four great stories in my pile. But when you're reading to critique you have to keep your wits about you. You can't let yourself get lost in the story, no matter how much you enjoy it. You always have to have one eye on the pace, plotting, character development, point-of-view, vocabulary, grammar, syntax, spelling and probably a dozen other things. You just can't allow yourself the luxury of sitting back and reading for fun. Then, of course, you have to make margin notes and write up a few pages of general comments on the above items and anything else that takes your eye.

Each writer had a three-hour session in the stocks...well, it wasn't quite that bad because we are not unkind critters, but harrowing enough, all the same. No one likes to see their work pulled apart and its insides put under the microscope. It was, however, a very worthwhile exercise. Not only did we examine our works in depth and brainstorm methods of improving them, we also studied plotting by watching movies and drinking wine. After a hard day's critiquing, I can think of no better way to study plotting.

It was so successful that we hope to do it again sometime next year. I hope we can go to Eagle Bay again. You can see from the above picture how lovely it is. If you look closely you can see where the sea meets the sky, but before you get to the sea there is a beautiful long beach of soft white sand.

Perhaps by the time we go again I really will have ironed out all the problems with my book. Well, I can hope, can't I?

Egoboo is in the throes of putting up a group blog. Another blog? Yes, it seems to be bloggy breeding season. I'll let you know when the Egoboo one is up and running. It should be pretty good because the five of us have amongst us an amazing breadth of knowledge and experience to share. More on that next week!

Crit buddies

2009-11-22T21:44:00.003+08:00

This week I am going to spend time with several good writerly friends. We are going to eat, talk, critique each other's novels, talk, drink, admire the scenery, eat, drink, talk some more...

I expect to learn a lot, not just from the critiques my friends will give my work but from listening to them critiquing other works. It's one of the best ways to grow as a writer, I believe: listen to what people have to say about their own work, my work, and the work of other writers. And, of course, to talk, eat and drink in good company.

Writers are special to each other. It is so good to be in the company of friends who talk, eat and sleep writing. It is so good to start a quote and have a friend finish it. It is so good to share ideas, to talk about books, to commiserate over rejections. To share life experiences and reminiscences.

I love my writerly friends:-)

Multiculturalism and genealogy

2009-11-15T22:22:00.007+08:00

Yesterday, on my way by public transport to an editing workshop, I had three experiences within fifteen minutes that showed me how much Australia has changed since I arrived here in 1952 at the age of eight. In those days, you could buy two kinds of cheese in Australia: mild and tasty. Well, three, if you counted the processed stuff that came prepackaged and tasted like greasy cardboard. Not that I've eaten greasy cardboard, mind you, but I'd imagine the taste and the nutritional value would not have been much different. These days, we can buy delicacies from all over the world, in many different varieties, and I thank heaven for that because I absolutely adore cheese, and being a vegetarian, I eat a lot of it.

It was a two hour journey each way to attend a three-hour workshop. It's a good thing it was such a good workshop, or I would have been a bit grumpy by the time I got home, but in fact it was excellent, thanks to Amanda Curtin, the leader. She made me think hard about some of the techniques I'd been using and how to improve their worth in my work. But there was added value to the outing. In fact, the interesting experiences started before I'd even boarded the first bus.

As I waited for the bus to arrive, a young man crossed the road and began to read the timetable on display at the stop. He looked a bit bemused, so I asked where he was going. He told me, I gave him directions, and we got on talking. It turned out he was from Africa, had grown up in the UK, and had spent some time in Canada before coming to Australia. He had already found a job and was hoping to buy a car this week.

His accent was fascinating. It sounded North American. Sort of. Sort of English, too. I wondered if he still spoke his own African language but as it was almost time for the bus to arrive there was no chance to ask. I wished him luck in his car quest and took the bus to the railway station.

The station is close to a school that has a specialist dance stream, and waiting for the train were two young people. They looked slightly Asian, the boy more so than the girl. I would have guessed him to be Chinese. The pair must have been to a dance rehearsal, for the boy was practising steps he'd just learnt. I heard him tell the girl that he did not want to forget them. Over and over again he did the same sequence. I didn't like to stare, but from the corner of my eye I guessed he'd been learning a folk dance of some kind, quite possibly a Morris dance. The sight of a Chinese boy practising English Morris dancing on the platform of an Australian railway station was incongruous to the point of being surreal. It would have been impossible only a few years ago. When I was that age, few boys danced at all, there were hardly any Chinese people in Australia, and to my knowledge, absolutely no Morris dancing.

When the train arrived, we got in separate carriages. I wondered if he kept on practising during the train ride!

At the next station, two young women got on. They appeared to be Indian. One had the dark hair and eyes typical of the sub-continent, but the other, athough her features resembled those of her companion, had eyes of a lovely shade of dove grey. She had a dear little toddler in a stroller. His skin was considerably lighter than hers, but he had the same deep brown eyes and dark curls as the other woman. At a guess, I'd say maybe his father was southern European, or perhaps half Indian.

This is not only Australia today: it is the world today. These three brief encounters led me to consider the problems inherent in researching the family trees of the children of this multi-cultural generation. I have blogged my thoughts over on my website blog. If you're interested in family history, please do check it out.

Once I thought...

2009-11-08T21:08:00.007+08:00

Over on my writing and editing blog, I’ve just put up a post about how one becomes an editor. I called it “Once I thought I’d like to be an editor”. This sounded vaguely familiar and I soon realised why. When I was a little girl of five years old or so, my father taught me a silly little song that went like this:

Once I thought I'd like to be a cricketer
So down to the park I took a little stroll
To see a cricket match, the first one in my natch
To see how I could bowl.
One young man, he knew the way to bat a bit
He sent the ball so wonderfully high
Right up in the air, you could see it there
It looked just like a stick into the sky!
I stood and watched it, right above my head
‘Come away from under it,’ everybody said
But I knew how to catch a ball, about it I had read
In a little penny book I’d bought.
My eyes were shut and my mouth was open wide
I felt a sort of earthquake; I thought I should have died!
They never got the ball back from out of my inside…
Well caught! Howzat!

Like the old Yorkshire song On Ilkley Moor b'at’at, which I can also still sing right through, this song was part of my childhood. Neither song is much heard today, and more’s the pity, because they are good fun and easy to sing. What favourite old songs can you remember from your early years?

Specusphere Time Again!

2009-11-01T16:21:00.003+08:00

Funny how a couple of months can fly by so quickly, but there's a new Specusphere up, with 19 reviews, several articles and a brace of stories. Check it out if you can.

Meantime, the new website is swelling every day! I've added an article about how I came to write fiction and another about why I love genealogy. Please have a look and give my stats counter something to do!

Meantime, I'm staying in my friend Pam's "spare" flat, which means I have no animals to mind, which meansI won't be doing much walking. Not good. Maybe I could practise a bit of belly dancing each day instead!

New web site

2009-10-24T22:05:00.005+08:00

First of all, here is the promised pic of my new canine friend, Morgan (as in le Fay!)

With my son Scott's help, I've just launched my new web site. It's still a bit of a Work in Progress, but it has at least the beginnings of all the things I want to include. My very first blog over there follows on from the one I did here in August called The Promiscuous Artist. I was inspired by a post on my friend Fiona Leonard's Year in America blog, in which she poses the question "If you knew you could not fail, what would you do?" Please do check it out!

However, I've decided to leave my main blog here,at least for the time being, because I cannot get WordPress to do some of the things I've got used to doing on Blogger, such as putting pictures in the side column. WordPress, however, has the advantage of giving me extra pages so that I can run a "proper" web site in conjunction with the blog. As with most things in life, some kind of compromise had to be found, so I'll keep on blogging here but will put at least one post a month on the other one. It will always be writing-related, while this blog will continue to carry my meanderings on a variety of topics. I'll always give you a link when I update the new blog: here's the one for the new post. I've carried all my other writing-related posts over there, too.

Next week, new Specusphere. Nose down, tail up until then!

Glitches and hitches

2009-10-18T23:19:00.002+08:00

Isn't life full of them? No progress on the web site because poor Scott had a computer catch fire, with predictable results - lost files, lost time, lost money. And I had planned to post a pic of my new doggie friend, Morgan - but the battery went flat on the camera just as I was trying to take a pic.

However, I had a lovely afternoon with friends today at a fundraiser for next year's Swancon, Perth's annual SF convention. Our team won loads of prizes both individually and as a group. I scored a bottle of Baileys and some chocolate, among other things - a nice little stroke of luck, for a change.:-)Not that I did much to earn them - I just happened to be with the smartest team. Their collective knowledge, especially on comics, movies and themes from TV shows had me floored. Most of the few answers I contributed were wrong. I guess I was born too early for most of the questions!

Back next week with Morgan and maybe more on the new website!

New look blog Mk II

2009-10-11T21:23:00.002+08:00

So here is the brand-spanking new two column version. I was interested to see that Laura couldn't see columns at all in her browser - is anyone else having that problem?

Do tell me what you think: what you like and what doesn't work for you. And of course if you're reading this on Facebook, please check out my Blogger page at http://satimaflavell.blogspot.com

New ideas

2009-10-04T20:41:00.004+08:00

Do you like the new look of this blog? It's an experiment - part of a scheme to combine my blog and two websites in one location. I would love to get feedback from you on these factors:

Whether you like the new look of the blog or not. Tell me what you like and what you don't like!
Would you read the blog if it was incorporated into a private website rather than being hosted on Blogger?
Do you think it's a good idea to combine all my interests, both paid and unpaid, in one place? I've blogged about most of my favourite things: reading, writing, editing, music, dance, astrology, yoga, family history, history generally...so it wouldn't make a big difference to content. I might be a bit more organised about it, thats all!

In other words, what do you think makes a good blog? Do tell - I'm open to new ideas!

BTW, if you're reading this on Facebook, please take a minute to visit the original site - http://satimaflavell.blogspot.com/ - and give me your opinion!

Family stories

2009-09-27T21:31:00.014+08:00

I suppose all families have their little stories that get handed down from one generation to the next, often growing in the telling - or sometimes shrinking by the convenient omission of embarrassing bits, like the one told by a man who said his great-great-grandfather was sent to Australia as a convict because he stole a length of rope. When a family member researched the family history she found that the said great-great-grandfather had conveniently forgotten to tell his descendants about the thoroughbred horse that was tied to the other end!

My family doesn't seem to have any stories that were handed down from many generations back, but we do have oft-repeated tales from the last two or three, and I've often thought that these should be written down for the entertainment of my own descendants. What's more, some of them might trigger ideas for stories, if not for me, for my friends and relations. Since many of my readers are also writers, I guess this blog is a good place to start recounting.

One story, which I think could be the basis for a super adventure-romance with more than a dash of comedy, concerns a guy named Alf Hyde, a cousin many-times-removed of my father. Alf married a local girl but he was a restless soul and after a few years he began to talk about emigrating to America. His wife, however, refused to leave her family and friends and eventually Alf went without her.

Years passed, and the wife became quite a local identity, even having a place on the local council - very unusual for the early C20. She ran a little corner shop and did very well for herself.

Meantime, Alf, in America, married again. No divorce from his first wife, mind you - Alf was apparently not one for formalities. He and his new wife had three children, or so the story goes, but after twenty years or so his wife died and Alf had a hankering to return to England. So back he came, and was pleasantly surprised to see his old wife was doing so well. He persuaded her to take him back and he lived the rest of his life helping to run the shop, taking occasional trips to the States to visit the children whenever he became restless. Of course, Alf's descendants may have a different version of the tale, and if any of them read this I hope they will share their version with me.

Family tales often involve bigamous marriages. Another distant rellie, or so I've heard, married a girl who turned out to be a kleptomaniac, addicted to shoplifting. This man, too, left his wife and went to America. He never returned, but rumour had it that he'd married again - also bigamously.

Another marriage tale of ours does not involve bigamy, but what would in those days have been considered an incestuous marriage - and still would in many parts of the world, although no longer here in Australia. My great-grandfather James Gaunt married a girl named Jane Suffill (1840-1874) who died at the age of only 34 from tuberculosis, (that's Jane in the photo, probably taken not long before she died) leaving him with three young children, one of whom was to become my grandfather. Within three months James had married again - to his sister's daughter! Her name was Eliza Partington and she bore James six more children. My mother remembered her - James died before my mother was born, but Eliza, who was much younger, lived to a ripe old age. Mother said that she followed the old Victorian custom of wearing an apron in the mornings to do the housework and taking it off at lunchtime, when she would add a little frill of lace to her hair to show that she was now available for socialising, which of course was generally tea and sandwiches with the neighbours. Sadly, no photos of Eliza have been passed down to us.

One really funny thing about this tale is that Mother had the facts right but the second wife's name wrong. She told me it was Hannah Woodstock. I spent years looking for this woman, and it was only when I thought to look up the 1881 census for her children's names that I discovered her real identity, for she and two of the children were staying with her family of origin on census night. How mother converted Eliza Partington into Hannah Woodstock I can't imagine, but it's a lesson in not taking family stories too seriously until you've researched the facts for yourself!

Do you have any strange or amusing stories from your family archives? I'd love to hear them if so!

Back with my doggie friends

2009-09-20T22:12:00.003+08:00

After a lovely quiet week in my friend Pam's "spare" flat I've moved back to the home of Timmy and Lucy, a pair of crazy little canine friends - you might remember this post where I uploaded a photo of the terrible two. I will try to get a better shot of them this time around but as they are seldom together and still for long enough to get a picture the only time I might get one would be if I were to sneak up them as they slept!* The house-sit is for two weeks while their "mum" is over in Adelaide, spending the school holidays with her granddaughter. Then I move on to another canine house-mate that I haven't met yet. Watch this space:-)

I haven't been doing much writing lately, and I'm missing it. I've become used to the rather strange cycle I go through, which goes something like this:
1. Get inspired and write anything up to ten hours a day for a few months
2. Run out of ideas and play with the piece for a while
3. Give it up as a bad job and don't touch it for a few weeks or months
4. Start to feel really cranky and distressed because I'm not writing
5. Get inspired again

Often what stops me writing is the realisation that I'm not doing nearly as well as I thought I was. This last time I got so fed up with not getting anywhere that I decided to start sending the book out in any case. After all, I've been struggling with the darned thing for three years - my reasoning was "If it's no good yet then it never will be," which is really not a good enough reason to inflict the work on agents and publishers. A couple of friends have read the opus recently and said I'm being premature in sending it out in so raw a state. Now I actually didn't think it was all that raw, but apparently it's raw, or at least somewhat undercooked, due to my usual problem - not enough setting.

It's not only setting. Good writers have a knack of including setting and characterisation very subtly but as one of my critters puts it, I tend to segment things - first THIS emotion, then THAT piece of information, then THIS conversation, then THAT battle, then THIS little bit of description... "Layer things" says my friend. "Multi-layer. Interweave"

It's that multi-layering and interweaving so that nothing is left out but everything serves the whole - which, if the thing works, will be greater than the sum of its parts - that I really don't have the hang of. It must take ages to learn, unless you're absolutely brilliant, for the writers I know - both published and unpublished - who have the knack of it, have all been writing for quite a while. Mind you, I've been trying to write fiction for fourteen years, so surely I should be getting the hang of it by now!

OK, I won't send the book out again until I've had another go at multi-layering. But I'm feeling too down in the dumps about my own apparent thick-headedness to do it at the moment so I'm at the cranky stage. I don't like the cranky stage, but I've started to realise there's nothing I can do about it. It's a natural cycle, like the seasons, and I can no more make the succession change of my own volition than force winter to give way to spring. What a good thing I have doggie playmates in the meantime.

*Update - I couldn't get around the front without disturbing them but on the third go I compromised and photographed the terrier terrors from behind. Butter would not melt, eh? (HA!)

A wobbly landing

2009-09-14T09:01:00.003+08:00

Hurrah - I'm back in Perth! After a pleasant few days in Adelaide, catching up with friends and rellies, I flew into Perth on Thursday night - in the middle of the most godawful storm the city's seen in quite a while. We had head winds all the way across the Nullarbor, so we were already late when we began our descent.

Head winds aside, the weather at 30,000-odd feet was delightful, with clear sunny skies all the way. But the descent was something else. The cabin crew made a point of checking the emergency exits were clear and that we had all read the emergency instruction cards. They made a joke of it, but their faces were grim. We soon found out why - the poor plane shuddered and juddered and rocked and bounced its way down through layer after layer of cloud into drenching rain, and more than rain. Those witches from The Scottish Play had a hand in that storm, I reckon. I've flown into Perth many times but never before has a descent been so protracted - or so uncomfortable. When we finally hit terra firma (gently, I should add there!) the cabin attendants led us in a round of applause for the flight crew. The relief on all their faces was plain to see as we exited the plane.

Because I've been on the road this week and haven't quite settled down in Perth yet, I thought I'd post links to some of my favourite history blogs. Yes, cheating, I know, but I promise a "proper" post next time:-) And if you have any interest in history you'll love these.

At http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/ Geoff Chaucer hath penned a few words on the economique downturne and the use of Twittre for broadcastinge the lawes of Engelond. And at http://lostfort.blogspot.com/ you will always find a selection of wonderful photos by blogger, writer and history buff Gabriele Campbell

Climate change? Nothing new, apparently. Check out this post on Alianore's blog to learn about the weather in the early C14. And while you're there, be sure to read this screamingly funny one in which every badly-done-by queen in history tells her tale of woe to her support group. The comments are well worth reading, too!

See you next week, or maybe on Facebook in between. Be well and happy meantime.

It's That Time again!

2009-09-06T16:54:00.008+08:00

Yes, another issue of The Specusphere has gone live, thanks, as always, to the expertise of our webmistress, Amanda Greenslade.

As usual, there's lots to crow about. First the excellent Editorial on the current Hot Topic - Parallel Importation - by Astrid Cooper. Under Features there's a super piece on Zombies by our worthy Editor-in-Chief, Stephen Thompson, and a most scholarly article in our Medical Bag series by Brendan Carson. Stephen Turner continues his series on aspects of the genre with Mentors and the Hero's Journey, while Benjamin Solah contributes a report on the Melbourne Writers Festival. About People there's a tryptich of articles by Up-and-Coming editor Astrid Cooper, featuring interviews with K.J. Taylor and Stephen M. Irwin and a piece on Astrid's own work as a writer of spec-fic erotica.

Under Writing and Publishing we have contributions on writing a novel by Damien Kane, writing a novella by Benjamin Solah and a further argument against Parallel Importation by Paul Collins of Ford St Publishing.

And then there are all those lovely Book Reviews. Twenty-five of them! And we have a world exclusive - we're sure we are the only webzine to feature a review of an Iain Banks book - by Ian Banks! Here's the run-down:
Arrows of Time by Kim Falconer, reviewed by Satima Flavell
Book of Secrets by Chris Roberson, reviewed by Ian Banks
Deadly Desire by Keri Arthur, reviewed by Bobbi Sinha-Morey
Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days by Alistair Reynolds, reviewed by Simon Petrie
Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg, reviewed by Maurie Breust
Every Last Drop by Charlie Huston, reviewed by Maurie Breust
Hand of Isis by Jo Graham, reviewed by Satima Flavell
Horn by Peter M Ball, reviewed by Felicity Dowker
Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin, reviewed by Satima Flavell
Nekropolis by Tim Waggoner, reviewed by Ross Murray
New Ceres Nights edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Tehani Wessely, reviewed by Simon Petrie
Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod, reviewed by Maurie Breust
Orphan's Triumph by Robert Buettner, reviewed by Maurie Breust
Outlaw by Angus Donald, reviewed by Joan Malpass and "Hypatia"
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, reviewed by Jennifer Kremmer
Shiny No. 5, edited by Alisa Krasnostein, Ben Payne and Tehani Wessely, reviewed by Ian Banks
Silver Dolphins Series Books 1 & 2 by Summer Waters, reviewed by Ian Banks
The Destroyer of Worlds by Mark Chadbourn, reviewed by John Paul Fitch
The Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobb, reviewed by Satima Flavell
The Fire King by Marjorie Liu, reviewed by Bobbi Sinha-Morey
The Last Stormlord by Glenda Larke, reviewed by Carol Neist
The Spy Who Haunted Me by Simon Green, reviewed by Simon Petrie
Transition by Iain Banks, reviewed by Ian Banks
White Star by Beth Vaughan, reviewed by Satima Flavell

Up and Coming features new books from Ford Street Publishers, Hachette Australia and Harper Collins, while under the Fiction banner we have stories from Martin Rusis and Greg Bishop.

Go on, get yourself over to The Specusphere and have yourself a darned good read!

The promiscuous artist

2009-08-30T16:09:00.009+08:00

Over at the Mad Genius Club, Rowena Cory Daniels recently posted a piece called You know you’re a writer when… It’s a fun post, but one that pulls you up and makes you realise, Yeah, me too…

I’ve loved stories ever since I began to understand English, and as English is my mother tongue that was a while ago! I was lucky in that being the youngest of four sisters, I had lots of stories read to me, and by the time I was three I could read my favourites to myself, largely because I knew them by heart. Gradually the squiggles on the page started to make sense. What liberation, to find that I no longer need rely on my elders to read to me!

When I was four, I bullied my family into taking part in a dramatisation of Oliver Twist's meeting with Fagin. My older sisters had just seen the film and on hearing about it I immediately wanted to be Oliver, and the only way I could be Oliver was by collecting a company and rewriting the script. My father had to be Fagin, of course, and my sisters the other urchins. My mother was an audience of one. (I was lucky. Being the youngest by a lot of years meant I got indulged a fair bit.)

For a long time I wasn't sure whether I was an actor or a writer. I continued to be interested in stage and film, but at the same time, I lived a double life, in which I was not me, but a girl named Jill who had more adventures than anyone else in the world. The yarns I spun in my daydreams came out in pictures that I drew, because I was too young to write. I got right into Jill’s character and started to think of her/me in the third person, which is a worry. I wonder if this tendency to dissociate is common among writers?

My pictures often involved dramatisations of stories I heard, translated to the stage. A year or two later, when I could sort-of-nearly-almost-write (apart from a dyslexic misunderstanding of the difference between d and b) I discovered Enid Blyton. I immediately wanted to be the author of stories like those, and told everyone I wanted to be a Children's Authoress.

But then one day I went with my sister Anne to visit her friend Maureen. Now Maureen had a younger sister, Jacqueline, who was learning ballet and tap dancing. World War II had just ended and clothing was still rationed, but Maureen’s mother had cut down one of her old evening gowns to make a costume for Jacqueline. To my satin-deprived eyes it looked fit for a princess in one of my stories, and I was immediately hooked. I wanted to be a dancer, too.

Unfortunately, my family was not theatrically inclined, so I was not allowed to take lessons like Jacqueline. Even so, the Sadlers Wells (later the Royal Ballet) company was a shining light of beauty and glamour in the shabbiness of a war-torn country, and my sisters had several books about ballet. They and their friends would argue among themselves about who was the most beautiful, Margot Fonteyn or Moira Shearer. I spent hours poring over those books and eagerly thumbing through magazines for pictures of my idols. But it was only when I was eleven that I finally went to classes, which I paid for myself out of my pocket money, forgoing the weekly matinee at the cinema to do so. Mother was willing to pay for me to learn piano, but not dancing.

When I was fourteen I struck a deal with Mother. She paid for me to have four dance classes a week on condition that I also studied Speech and Drama. (She was a Yorkshire woman but I had been born in Manchester. We were by this time living in Australia, and my polyglot accent grated on Mother’s ears.) I was a pupil at the Conservatorium High School in Sydney. Fellow students included future internationally known artists such as Roger Woodward and Charmian Gadd, who threw all their energies into their musical education. Not me. Then, as now, I loved too many things. I was artistically promiscuous. So my days were very full indeed – Piano, Singing, Speech and Drama, Ballet, Character Dancing, Modern Dance – as well as normal school lessons. Oh, did I mention Theory, Harmony, Aural Training, History and Form of Music…Ye gods, these days it exhausts me to think about the schedule. Some nights I would get home at about 9.00pm and go almost immediately to bed, only to get up at 6.00am to catch a train at 7.05. During the hour long journey to the city from Liverpool, then an outer suburb of Sydney, I did my homework.

I started to help with children’s ballet classes at a local dancing school, and later I taught on my own account. My story telling now went into choreography rather than pictures. I still read voraciously, but I did not write fiction. Although I used to win prizes for poetry and prose, my prose was all descriptive. The stories I dreamed up were simple things that translated better into dance than the written word. There's more than one way to spin a yarn.

I only went back to writing fiction when I was in my fifties, after I'd given up dancing and acting. But that’s a tale for another post.

Schlepping towards publication

2009-08-24T15:15:00.002+08:00

As most of you know, for the last four years I have been writing a fantasy novel. This is my third – the first one took me seven years to write and it was pretty terrible, although I still love it and read it for fun sometimes! One day I might serialise it and put it up on the blog for you all to laugh at.

The second book was better: I started in it 2003 and at the end of 2005 I sent my “package” (synopsis and three chapters) to four literary agents. None of them was interested and after putting the manuscript away for three months I realised why – it had far too many characters and a confusing two-strand plot. George RR Martin might have got away with it: I certainly couldn’t. Funny how I couldn’t see that when I was writing it, but after a break from it the shortcomings were painfully obvious.

Well, the time has now come for the latest opus to start “doing the rounds”. The procedure has changed a little since I last looked for an agent or publisher. I am amazed at how many agents have shut up shop and how many more have closed their books in the last four years, so there are not as many places to try for representation. Also, fewer publishers are taking un-agented submissions and more want a professional assessment if you aren't agented. Heck, even some agents want a professional assessment before they will look at your work. Hard times breed hard policies, I guess, but it means the chances of getting published are lessening with every passing year. Bring in Parallel Importation (see last post) and we newbies will have no chance at all.

What’s more, reading the publishers’ guidelines, I can see that epic fantasy, which is what I write, is not wanted at present by many publishing houses. The American publisher Juno, for instance, used to publish a lot of it, but now they only want urban or near-future fantasy. Vampires still rule, and look like doing so for a while yet. I don’t do vampires, sorry. But even if I did, and wrote the world’s best vampire novel within six months, by the time I’d found a publisher the craze would certainly have passed, and there’s no predicting what the next Big Thing will be.

Every agent you submit to takes several weeks to respond. Every publisher takes several months. And “simultaneous subs” — sending your package to several agents or publishers at one time — is becoming increasing frowned upon. Furthermore, I have two or three friends who took several years to find agents, and those agents have still not sold their novels. What a slow process it is! Hey, I am 66 already. I could die before I get published!

I can see why people get sick of it and decide to self-publish, like my friend Fiona Leonard with her lovely Dancing with Zebras, which I blogged a few weeks back. But self-publishing and e-publishing have their own problems – no distribution network, no editorial help, fear of plagiarism or outright theft if you put the book on line…

I'll give it a year of trying the conventional agents and publishers before considering other channels but I’ll be honest. I am not hopeful. But nevertheless, I will be getting on with book two of the trilogy!

Blog Carnival!

2009-08-15T11:38:00.013+08:00

Nyssa Pascoe, editor of A Writer Goes on a Journey, gave me the opportunity to host this month's Blog Carnival. The host's job is to note blogs of interest from the last four weeks. Obviously, posts will be selected that reflect the host's interests of the moment, so I focus mainly on writing and on the Big Issue facing the industry at present: Parallel Importation.

Most publishers, writers and booksellers are opposed to Parallel Importation, which would see all import restrictions on books lifted. It could have dire ramifications for all branches of the industry, resulting in job losses and fewer books with Australian content on the shelves of the shops that survive. Instead, we could find ourselves restricted to American books, with American spelling and idioms. The only businesses that stand to benefit are the big chains such as Coles, K-Mart and Target. They already discount their books to prices that the "real" bookshops cannot hope to match, and if they are allowed to import more mass-produced and remaindered books Aussie authors will be hard pressed to earn a living. As it is, the average Australian author pays little or no tax, because the average Australian author does not earn enough. If a book sells at its Recommended Retail Price (RRP) the author might get 10% of that, at best. If the book is sold for less, the author will get proportionately less. There are, friends, too many $1.50s in a week's wages.

Almost all other countries protect their authors and publishers and have no intention of changing. New Zealand is one that no longer does, and apparently book prices have not come down there by more than a few cents, if at all. Our British and American colleagues think we are mad for even considering it - but they will profit if we do, for it will then be worth their while to print huge numbers of books and sell them cheaply to the Aussie market.

Anyway, don't just listen to me. Check out some of these websites for better explanations -

First, there is Richard Flanagan's excellent piece in the SMH, to which many other commentators refer: http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/books/losing-our-voice/2009/05/29/1243456730637.html
Clear and helpful commentary can be found at:
http://savingaussiebooks.wordpress.com/
http://girliejones.livejournal.com/1415806.html
http://simongroth.com/2009/07/30/parallel-export/
http://stephen-dedman.livejournal.com/224986.html gives a slightly different slant to the argument.

So, having done my bit for the Down with Parallel Importation campaign, I turn to my own involvement in the industry; learning the craft of writing -

We've all been to a class or a workshop in which the leader gave us first line for a story and asked us to continue, haven't we? Well, Heidi Kneale came up with a novel way of kick starting a story: last lines! She got some beauties, too, by asking for suggestions! http://hkneale.livejournal.com/168081.html
Patty Jansen blogged on the value of social networking to an author:
http://pattyjansen.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/its-only-useless-banter/
and then on how annoying unfamiliar references can be:
http://pattyjansen.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/do-you-want-your-reader-to-feel-like-this/
which was coincidentally followed up with this post on brand names from Rowena Cory Daniells: http://madgeniusclub.blogspot.com/2009/08/brand-names-and-world-building.html.

BookEnds, LLC - A Literary Agency blog gives tips on the submission process:
http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/2009/07/submissions-101.html

Lee Harris of Angry Robot (the newest imprint of Harper Collins) tells the serendipitous tale of how Aliette de Bodard got her big break!
http://angryrobotbooks.com/2009/08/angry-robot-signs-aliette-de-bodard-lavie-tidhar/

Over at Ripping Ozzie Reads, Rowena Cory Daniells has written about Point-of-View, with particular reference to "deep third". (It is also called "tight 3rd" and "close 3rd".) "Deep third" is closely related to the technique known in literary circles as "Free Indirect Discourse" (FID). Check out Rowena's post here.
And quite co-incidentally, Edittorrent (Alicia Rasley) has written a guest blog on when not to use "deep" POV at
http://jordanmccollum.com/2009/08/not-use-deep-pov/

Also at ROR, Rowena has posted on how to structure your work.

Juliet Marillier writes on inspiration through pictures, music, poetry and more here.

On the Borders Blog, Karen Miller discusses a number of topics as guest blogger. She kicked off with this one in which she cogitates on the sanity - or otherwise - of writers in general.

On research:
Gillian Polack's Food History Blog is always good value and she has recently had some fascinating input from guest bloggers, Simon Brown, Mary Fortune and Lucy Sussex, Laura Goodin, and Alma Alexander.

Lisa Gold, Research Maven, gives tips on attaining accuracy in your work.

On Cabbages and Kings:
Patty Jansen took part in a forum with the PM on climate change. She blogs it here.

And Glenda Larke has the last word - on the trials and tribulations of travel!

Dancing with Zebras

2009-08-09T17:37:00.006+08:00

Now there's an intriguing title for you! It's the name of a new e-book by my writing buddy Fiona Leonard. Fiona is a former Australian diplomat who spent three years living in Zimbabwe and travelling in southern Africa. Dancing with Zebras is an exciting tale about an adopted young woman’s relationship with her birth mother – but the story behind her adoption is strange and complex, filled with mystery and intrigue.

This is Fiona’s first novel and there are three good reasons why you should buy it:
1. It’s a bloody good read
2. You choose the price you want to pay - as much or as little as you like.
3. My name turns up (in good company) in the dedication

And, of course, if we don’t all buy the book Fiona and her family may have to swim back to Oz from America.

You can find Dancing with Zebras over at Smashwords. Check out Fiona's Smashwords profile and read more about Dancing with Zebras.

And to find out what Fiona, her husband, daughter and dog are doing in America, check out their blog at http://www.yearinamerica.net

Next week I hope to have a really special blog post and if I am to meet the deadline it will go up a day early. So come back on Saturday for a Carnival!!

Just checking in

2009-08-02T11:49:00.003+08:00

I'm on the road at present, staying for a few days in Adelaide en route from Perth to Mount Gambier. I've spent worthwhile time with friends Annalou and David and caught up wth mutual friends from Annalou's writing groups as well as Facebook friend Lee Masterson. I also had a pleasant get-together with fellow Specusphere writers Astrid Cooper and Maurie Breust. Helen Blake, whose book Boy Phoenix I had the privilege of editing, also stopped by for a drink. The book is lovely, with lot of photos. Since Astrid had a copy of her new book, Starlight to show us as well, there was much back-slapping all round.

I'm just about to catch the bus to Mount Gambier, a trip of six hours. Crazy, isn't it - less than three hours to travel the 1,800km from Perth to Adelaide and six hours to get from Adelaide to Mount Gambier, a trip of only 600km. But as the plane costs well over $100 and as a pensioner I can do the bus trip for less than $40, there's no contest.

I'll be back with a "proper" post next week, by which time I should be thoroughly settled back into my apartment in "the Mount".

Shingles

2009-07-26T21:02:00.003+08:00

I’ve taken a bit of downtime these last few weeks, in the wake of the tragic death of my grandson. The stress triggered a particularly nasty attack of shingles – it was so painful I thought I was having a heart attack! That’s what they thought at the hospital, too, as my heartbeat had turned a little strange since my last run-in with the cardio dept. It was doing something called “left bundling” which sounds scary but they assured me lots of hearts do it.

The pain and the left bundling were enough to make them want to do an angiogram. Now, you may or may not have had one of those, and in case you haven’t, I’ll tell you all about it. They open an artery, insert a stent, thread a wire through it and guide it all the way up to your heart while watching the process on screen. The sensate ability of medical people never ceases to amaze me.

As he removed the wire, the cardiologist assured me there was nothing wrong with my arteries. Just then, he glanced at my chest. “Um,” he said. “I think this is shingles.” And sure enough, by the time I got back to the ward, little blisters were merrily popping up all over the left side of my upper torso. One interesting spin-off from this was that the interns all wanted to see Real Live Shingles and so for the first time in maybe forty years I had a number of young guys lining up to look at my boobs. Gotta be something good come out of a shingles attack, I guess, but would have gladly forgone the attention to be rid of the pain.

And make no mistake, my friends, shingles is painful. Big time painful. I have given birth three times and I’ve had migraine attacks since I was nine, but I’ve never experienced pain as bad as shingles. Before the rash came out, the inside of my chest felt as if it were being attacked by sharp cutting weapons. The pain lessened slightly after the rash came out, but the painful itching of the skin compensated for that small relief. The movement of clothing against my skin alone was enough to make me whimper, woos that I am!

This was actually my second bout with the beast, and it has lasted six weeks. The first bout, four years ago, was not as bad as this and it only lasted three weeks. Yet they say that if you’re unlucky enough to get it more than once, it's usually less severe on the second round. And it’s very rare, they say, for anyone to have more than three attacks. Three? Two are more than enough, thank you.

I have high hopes that the last of the painful rash will fade away this week. I’m off to South Australia for six weeks, as I’ve run out of house-sitting gigs in Perth and besides, I want to spend time with family and friends in Adelaide and Mount Gambier. I’ll be back in Perth in September, and my first assignment will be with Timmy and Lucy, whom I lived with over the recent school holidays. They are a crazy pair, but loveable withal. And ever so cute:-)

By-the-by

2009-06-15T17:10:00.003+08:00

This is an interim post while I finish getting myself together. I hope to be back blogging next weekend, but for now I'm still feeling a tad fragile after the tragic death of a family member.

Stateside literary agent Nathan Bransford has put together a FAQ-style compendium of all the writing advice on his blog. It includes such topics as How to format your manuscript; Why you shouldn't follow trends; Do you have a plot? (I loved this one!) and Does your novel have enough conflict? There's a total of some forty-odd posts covering almost everything you could possibly ask about the writing process and how to get your work published.

And while I'm at it, don't forget Richard Harland's Writing Tips - 145 Pages of sound information and advice from one of Australia's best-equipped and qualified authors. And watch out for Richard's new book, World Shaker, just released by Allen and Unwin and already snapped up for international release!

Back soon...

2009-06-01T13:39:00.003+08:00

Bear with me friends, while I take a break. While the brain scan was clear, I have continued to feel unwell, and now there has been a tragic death in my family. Come back in a couple of weeks, and please send me and my family good vibes meantime.

Wrong in the head

2009-05-17T17:48:00.003+08:00

Well, friends, tomorrow I go to have my head read.

Actually, it's to have a CT scan of my poor brain, which according to certain of my friends, has probably always had something wrong with it. My mother always assured me I was not right in the head, so maybe this goes back a lo-oong way. However it only caught up with me properly a few weeks ago, when I realised that I could not remember what I'd done five minutes earlier, kept losing words (which is most unusual for me: if there's one thing I'm never at a loss for it's words) and kept making silly mistakes in daily tasks. In short, I have become quite muddle-headed.

This would happen just when I'm deperately busy (see my penultimate post) and trying to do extra stuff including facilitating a reading of The Merchant of Venice for fellow members of the Perth Shakespeare Club. The whole thing skirted disaster. The day before the reading someone noticed I had not cast a couple of parts. How can one not cast a couple of parts, given a list of dramatis personae and a list of willing readers? I could, and did. Fortunately I was able to cast them both at very short notice, as well as two parts that the readers had to reneg on due to illness. The reading of acts one and two went really well, after all, so I'am grateful for small mercies. We'll tackle acts three, four and five at the June meeting, and maybe I'll have my head back together by then.

At first, the doc thought it was thyroid trouble causing the brain fog. I did indeed have a dearth of Thyroid Stimulating Hormone, but I think it must have been a lack of iodine because a few good feeds of fish pulled the levels back to normal. The foggy-headedness, however, has persisted. So tomorrow I have to take two buses and a short walk to a place where they will take nice coloured piccies of the old grey matter to see if anything else is wrong. The doctor assures me that it's not Alzheimer's, and I agree. I fully expect to get some kind of dementia, but not yet. Most of my family succumbs to dementia in their late seventies, but I should have ten more years of normal brain function before it's my turn.

I have a gut feeling that it's actually caused by a medication I've been taking for some time for a hiatus hernia. The literature tells me that it can cause confusion, depression, anxiety, memory loss and many other complaints, and I suppose I've been lucky not to have had these side effects before. I've been on the stuff for three years, and I'm one of those people who falls asleep for twelve hours after taking a pill for travel sickness. If a med can cause strange side effects, it will cause them in me.

But even if we're erring on the side of caution, the doc and I both think brain pix will be a nice thing to have. Maybe I could have them made into a collage with the pretty ones they took of my heart three years ago.

Old age? I'd just as soon give it a miss, were the alternative not so very final:-)

A new best friend

2009-05-10T11:20:00.002+08:00

This is Benny, my latest little charge. He is a proper raggamuffin of a dog and although he is black (with some silver stripes, earned through long service) he reminds me more than anything else of Ginger Meggs, a popular comic strip character in Oz when I was a child. (Ginger Meggs was of the same ilk as Huck Finn or Sweet William, for those of you who are of the American or British breeds.) In short, despite being a well bred miniature poodle, Benny is a bundle of mischief, always covered in grass seeds or something more unsavoury, sloppy in his personal habits but with a heart of gold and of the sweetest temperament you could wish for in a canine buddy. I'm enjoying his company immensely!

Busy, busy, busier yet

2009-05-03T09:43:00.004+08:00

My blogging has become, to say the least, spasmodic lately. That's because my life has become somewhat chaotic since I arrived back in Perth in early March, having gone from pleasantly industrious to red alert.

The pleasantly industrious part lasted a few weeks while I was house-sitting at the home of furry friends Gretel, Sara and Sonia. The first two ladies are of the canine variety, and both are of an age at which they need to watch their health, so there was a good deal of medication to be dealt with as well as the usual walks, bathing and grooming. Sonia the cat is as dignified and self-sufficient as ever. She's no longer young, but still enjoys excellent health apart from the odd fur ball, the bane of all long-haired cats everywhere.

It was a worrying fortnight, as I'd come back to Perth to find that two of my friends had breast cancer. However, they both had surgery and their prognoses look excellent, although one is in for a long round of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Not much fun, I shouldn't think, but far better than the alternative. I lost two friends to breast cancer within a few months of each other back in 1995, so I am always relieved when I hear of someone who has taken early, appropriate action. Go have that mammogram, friend. It could save your life.

Of course, at sixty-six years of age I'm in the same boat as my furry friends: the body is packing up and so are those of my contemporaries. My personal current grizzle has to do with an underactive thyroid. It lowers my energy, sometimes to a level that's hardly worth measuring; makes me excessively, constantly tired; raises the heartrate and the anxiety levels, makes me feel cold even on a hot day and makes my skin so dry I could use #3 sandpaper to exfoliate. I am eating extra fish in the hope of giving the poor thyroid some reserves of iodine, but although that's helped a bit it looks as if something stronger might be needed. So perhaps soon there will be still another medication joining the hoard - or maybe that should be horde, for I have enough meds on that bench to make an army of pills and potions.

The current state of panic, I believe, is April's fault. April brought me not only the usual stress of getting the new Specusphere reviews ready to roll, but also an editing job that I really, really, wanted to do, quite apart from the financial angle. It's a biography of Jimmy Melrose, a young Australian aviator back in the 1930s who was something of a national hero. His death at the age of only 22 created a national outpouring of grief. Yet today we seldom hear his name, and the author of the biography is keen to redress that. She has written an excellent manuscript that's a pleasure to work on, but as so often happens, I received it so close to the projected publication date that it has tipped me into a state of chaos. Even so, I thought I was almost on top of things until I received a record number of reviews to edit and upload for The Specusphere. Twenty-eight of them! It's great that I have a fine team of reviewers and the trust of a dozen or more publishing houses, but to go with those things I really need two more sets of hands and eyes. It's been truly stressful this last ten days and it didn't help that for reasons beyond my ken the webzine went live on Friday instead of Sunday - sans most of the reviews. Last night was a late one, seeing me up until midnight to get them online, and meantime, authors and fans were desperately hitting the titles in the Table of Contents, only to find no substance behind the facade. As the hits mounted, so my desperation grew and I felt little but out-and-out exhaustion when I finally put the last review to bed.

But now, as usual, I am thrilled to see my babies online and already getting lots of hits. Go and see The Specusphere's nice new front page, and dip into the reviews while you're there!

So now I've only got a couple of days to do the last pass of the Melrose book (wish me, and the poor long-suffering author, luck!) and then I move on to a new housesit. The one I'm in now is lovely - in fact, I'm not a house-sitter, really, but an honoured guest in a flat owned by my friend Pam - but I haven't had time to explore this delightful area (Woodlands, in Perth, if you'd like to check Google Earth) because of the crazy workload. I'm hoping that as from this Wednesday, when I move to Shenton Park for two months, my life will slow from a gallop to a nice easy trot.

Year in America

2009-04-22T09:16:00.006+08:00

My friends Fiona and Nayani and their daughter Teya are spending a year in America. They were so excited about the election of Barach Obama to the presidency that they wanted to witness happenings in the USA at first hand, so almost on the spur of the moment they sold up, packed up and left. You can follow their blog here.

Now they have set up a competition called “Go Ahead, Blog My Town!” They would like you to tell them in 400 words or less about your town. It can be an overview of what makes your town great, or it can focus on a particular element – an event, motorcycle ride, scenic attraction, cafe or restaurant. And it doesn’t have to be an American town, they’ll accept entries from anywhere in the world. The three best entries will feature as Guest Blogs on their site.

And not only will your contribution be up there in the blogosphere for all to see, but you will also win one of Year in America's limited edition baseball caps, modelled so beautifully in the gorgeous photo on the site!

And while you're there, check out more of Nayani's lovely photos. To see them is great; to buy them is even better:-)

The competition closes April 30. Please send your entries to contact@yearinamerica.net.

It's not only a neat competition but an opportunity to show off your town to the blogosphere. Go on, have go!

Climb an occasional mountain

2009-04-05T21:51:00.006+08:00

I am sixty-six years old and I can count on one hand the number of mountains I have climbed. By international standards, not one of them is seriously worthy of the epithet, but then, this is me we're talking about. I don't even walk unless I have to, much less roam about on hilly protuberances. However, I have scrambled to the top of Auckland's Mount Eden (196m) as well as other baby mountains in this part of the world, including Mount Schank in South Australia (which boasts about the same height, or lack thereof, as Mount Eden) and, when I was much, much younger, I once climbed Australia's highest mountain, Mount Kosciuszko. It's a positive giant for this country at 2228 metres, or 7310 feet.

None of these can match the mountaineering adventures of my friend Carol Ryles who tackles mountains as readily as she does underwater caves (shudder) or treks in wilderness of all kinds. But when I boasted to Carol that I have climbed a real Himalayan mountain she told me I ought to blog it. So here is the story of my adventure on Phulchowki.

I spent three weeks in Nepal in February, 1995. Someday perhaps I'll blog other aspects of the trip, during which I explored Kathmandhu, met lots of wonderful people, managed to catch Giardia and survived a nasty bout of food poisoning, but climbing Phulchowki was definitely one of the highlights.

One reason for visiting Nepal was my lifelong love of rhododendrons, which grow in profusion on the hills around Kathmandhu. (Locals do not think them worthy of being called mountains, even though Phulchowki, the tallest of them, is, at 2760m, taller than Mount Kosciuszko.) My Lonely Planet guide assured me that Phulchowki was quite the best place in the Kathmandhu Valley to see rhododendrons, so I asked around the hotel, seeking information on how to get there. I'd made friends with a few other tourists by then, and one of them was a Pakistani named Kumar. He spelt it Karma, which seemed a bit eccentric until he explained that his mother had really wanted a girl and had thus lumbered him with having to spell his name aloud to every clerical officer he encountered. He assured me that he was an experienced climber and offered to take me to Phulchowki the next day. Climbing, he said, was his spiritual practice. I was intrigued.

So we got up bright and early and made our way to Patan, where we caught a bus to the village of Godawari, nestling on the lower slopes of the hills. After a cup of steaming hot black tea from a roadside stall, we hiked the short distance to the foot of Phulchowki, which rose above us into the clouds. Phulchowki is home to one of the last surviving "cloud forests" in Central Nepal. This means that the vegetation acquires much of its moisture directly from the clouds rather than from precipitation. That's not to say that it never rains or snows on Phulchowki. In fact, it can sometimes snow even in February. But it wasn't snowing that day, and the clouds were clearing as we ascended the gently sloping path up the hillside.

It remained gently sloping for about 20 minutes, then suddenly, sheer cliffs rose above us. They were not very high, but I had no idea how I was going to climb them. Not to worry: Karma found a sturdy stick about two metres long. 'Watch where I put my hands and feet,' he said, and then, clutching the stick in one hand, he hauled himself up the first little cliff. Lying on his belly, he leaned over the edge, holding the stick by one end. 'Hold onto the stick with your right hand,' he instructed, 'and put your left hand and your feet in the same places as I did.'

What had seemed like a good idea back at the hotel no longer seemed nearly so enticing, but I could hardly say so after Karma's kindness in offering to act as my guide. So, swallowing hard and definitely not looking down, I followed his instructions. With a bit of coaxing and careful instructions as to the whereabouts of the handholds and footholds, I was soon beside him on a ledge, and facing another steep clifflet.

We repeated the exercise again and again. I soon realised why mountaineering was Karma's spiritual practice. There was room in my mind and body only for the next handhold; the next foothold. I became as focussed as I had ever been in my meditation practice and more focussed than I'd ever been in any other kind of lesson. After all, one slip and I could break a leg. Or worse. It's amazing what such thoughts can do for your concentration.

After an hour or two I pleaded that I needed to rest, and after just one more (and one more, and one more...) small ascent Karma and I sat down to enjoy the view over the valley. Little villages dotted the landscape below, and around us the first few rhododendrons were just coming into bloom. I had brought sandwiches which Karma did not want to share. In fact, I didn't see him eat all day.

He told me we needed to push on if we were to make the summit and return to the world below by nightfall, so off we set again. More steep cliffs, more hauling on the long-suffering stick. I was seriously tiring by that time. After all, mountains were not part of my normal exercise routine.

Just as I was wondering how I could possibly reach the top, let alone come back down again, we suddenly arrived at a road. Its dark surface gleaming in the sunlight, it embraced the mountain like a spiral bracelet. On the other side of the road, the vegetation changed abruptly from shrubs to trees. Rhododendrons were still in evidence, but towering over them were magnificent oaks. And the ascent looked pretty steep.

I was starting to feel a bit cranky. If I'd known there was a decent road up the mountain I would have simply hired a taxi to bring me up. What was I thinking of, wasting over half a day hauling myself up a hill? It was nearing the early dusk of late winter, and I told Karma that I would follow the road and return to the village below. He, however, wanted to press on to the summit. We had come over two thirds of the way, which was enough for me. After all, I'd seen the rhododendrons and the cloud forest, and had more than enough of mountain climbing, thank you. Karma didn't have any water and he wouldn't take mine, which worried me a little, but really, I just wanted to get back to civilisation. So with a final wave to my guide as he entered the oak forest, I turned to follow the road downhill.

I had gone only a few yards when there was the sound of a car behind me. I moved over to let it pass. Unlike most cars in Nepal, it was a late model, shiny-black limousine, and it pulled up alongside me. A Japanese woman wound down the passenger side window. "Can we give you a lift?" she offered in perfect English.

Could they what! Thankfully, I crawled into the back seat of the car. My saviours were a diplomat and his wife who had not only spent a tour of duty in Canberra, but had a daughter who was born there. We had a pleasant chat about life in Australia, and then they asked if I'd mind if we stopped off at the orchid nursery in Godawari, home of the Royal Botanic Gardens. Mind? What a silly question! So I not only saw the rhododendrons and the cloud forest, but a wonderful display of native Nepalese orchids as well. I went to bed that night tired and happy, all angst having faded away on the car ride back to the Star Hotel.

As for Karma, he turned up in time for breakfast after spending the night in an army hut on the summit of Phulchowki. He and the diplomatic couple were just two of the many lovely people I met in Nepal, and that outing was just one of the many wonderful experiences I had there.

Because I'm in Perth I don't have access to my own pictures of that outing, so here is one I pinched from the Samrat Treks website. Next time I'm in Mount Gambier I'll try to remember to post some of my own and I hope the proprietors of Samrat Treks will forgive my plagiarism in the meantime!

Readers' pet hates

2009-03-22T17:10:00.010+09:00

I know, long time no blog - but I've had internet and computer problems as well as being busy catching up with friends now I'm back in Perth for a few months! Today I'll post about something I've had an ongoing interest in for some years: things that turn readers off a book.

I've actually researched this, both on the internet (by reading forums, mailing lists etc) and by questioning friends who are readers rather than writers. Writers tend to read rather differently from others because it's almost impossible to turn off the editorial voice that says things like "Hmph - badly researched" and "How stupid to drag up that old trope" and "Oh no, not another vampire story..."

A reader who does not write, however, generally wants two things: an enthralling story and at least one character to identify with. Of course, ideas of what constitute an enthralling story and a likeable character are as varied as readers, which is why one reader's soul food is another's Bali belly material. It also means that the most unlikely book can attract at least some readers.

When we look at what turns readers off, however, there are several things that a wide range of readers will dislike. One is a waffly or confusing story. There are various factors that can contribute to this. The main one is lack of action. Many readers, and especially genre readers, want to see action on page one and want to see the action kept up throughout the book. Gone are the days when writers could spend a chapter or more setting the scene and introducing the characters. Modern readers want to become involved in an adventure of some kind right away. They also want plenty of sensory detail: first-hand experience of the sights, sounds, smells, textures and even tastes that the characters encounter. So boring writing that goes nowhere slowly or engages in lengthy description without a definite point of view doesn't cut it. Too many point-of-view characters - some readers will not tolerate more than three or four - can also confuse and annoy readers.

In fact, point of view is probably the next thing on which most readers have a firm opinion. Unless the story is a real stand-out, most readers dislike the old-fashioned head-hopping or fly-on-the-wall omniscient styles. Most people relate well to the "close third", which puts the reader right inside the character's head, experiencing the character's thoughts and physical sensations as closely as possible. Yet some of these same readers dislike the first person point of view, and I've been given two reasons for this. One is that although most readers love close third and its immediacy, some find first person, which is even closer and more immediate, somewhat threatening, as if they were being made to think another person's thoughts and must lose their own. Another reason given for disliking the first person POV is that it's obvious the character survives the trials and tribulations of the plot, since s/he couldn't be recounting the story otherwise. Seeing as the main character almost always does survive, no matter what the point-of-view, I can't really fathom this objection, but it has been given to me more than once as a reason for disliking first person narratives.

Which brings me to another widely held pet hate: the killing off of a favourite character. I've even heard readers say they will not read a particular author any more. "She killed off the man I really liked; the one I hoped the heroine would end up with," one of my informants said of a well-known fantasy author. Readers can be very unforgiving sometimes!

Most readers dislike long, unpronounceable names. Names with lots of x's, k's, y's, z's and funny symbols supposed to represent sounds not found in English generally annoy readers. Solid text - long paragraphs that take up more than a quarter of a page - are another pet hate, as are long internal monologues and long stretches without dialogue. Excessive use of italics is unpopular, although readers' tolerance for this varies widely: speculative fiction readers will put up with it if it represents telepathic communication, for example.

The final hate is of mucking about with time - flashbacks, flashforwards and big time jumps upset a lot of readers. Persons of a more literary bent tend to accept these more readily than genre readers, however.

What is your pet hate? What turns you off a book? I'd love to hear about it, especially if it's something I haven't covered above. So do leave a comment and let me know!

Specusphere rocks!

2009-03-01T18:34:00.002+09:00

These past few days have been chaotic. We finally have a new issue of The Specusphere up and running and at the same time I've been trying to get ready to return to Perth, Western Australia. I have a series of house-sits lined up so I should be there until mid-year at least, which suits me fine because not only will I be able to meet up with writerly friends (I belong to two writers groups in Perth) but I'll also be able go to meetings of the Shakespeare Club and The Society of Editors WA. I just missed the AGM of the latter (good timing, that - I have a dread of AGMs as it's all too easy to get a job) but I'll be there for the Shakespeare Club's AGM. I always risk going to that one, despite my terror of raising a hand at the wrong moment and finding myself on a committee, because it's nice to be there when they choose the plays to be read during the coming months. My faves are the middle period comedies and I hope we'll do at least one of those.

But do check out The Specusphere, and most especially Astrid Cooper's wonderful editorial in which she talks about the animal victims of the bushfires. She's arranged a raffle to raise funds for the welfare organisations treating injured wildlife and looking after lost and sick pets. If you haven't time to see The Specusphere right now, at least check out Astrid's web site where she has a page about the raffle. Please send up a prayer for southern Australia. More bushfire weather is on the way, with conditions predicted to be as bad as the "Black Saturday" of three weeks ago when so many people died and many more lost everything they owned.

Back to the packing! I leave in less than twelve hours and I'll need to sleep for at least a few of those! Talk to you again soon - from Perth!

Excuses, excuses

2009-02-20T10:08:00.005+09:00

Another one of those posts in which I apologise for not posting! I had forgotten that it's almost time for a new issue of The Specusphere - my, how two months can fly by when you're having fun!

Not that there's been a lot of fun in this part of the world. Like everyone else, we in the Land of Oz are suffering a financial crisis - and worse, we are plagued by Fire and Flood. It takes only Famine to rear its ugly head I shall be listening for four sets of horsebeats, drumming ever closer.

But, heaven be thanked, my neck of the woods has been spared this time. Fire is an ever-present threat in this country, and I still remember with dread the terrible fires of Ash Wednesday 1983. At that time, my family lived in on a smallholding close to the township of Glencoe, not far from Mount Gambier, where I now live. Heat wave conditions had prevailed for days on end, and as so often happens, fires came to southern Australia. Over a million acres burnt out that season.

We knew fires were in the area on 16 February, when fierce winds drove heat and smoke to blanket the Glencoe area, and I, worried about my young orchard and beehives, was out in the garden hosing everything in sight when my husband came out to tell me that there had been a call on the radio for us to evacuate to the Glencoe Football Club's playing field, or "oval" as it is called here in Australia.

We debated on whether or not we would obey the call or take our chances at fighting the fire, should it come. I had a gut feeling that it would not, but decided to go inside and start packing the car, just in case. After all, the fire was still five miles away. Surely there was no rush? But as we headed back to the house, the wind eased somewhat. There was still a pall of smoke and a blanket of heat, but the noise of a fire wind, even at five miles distance, has to be heard to be believed, and it no longer assaulted our ears.

The slight easement was only temporary. The wind was simply changing direction. Within minutes, it was as savage as ever, having changed from northerly to south-easterly. The air cleared considerably, and we knew we were safe. But the change came so rapidly that there was no time to evacuate townships in the new path of the blaze. The tiny timbermill hamlets of Kalangadoo, Tarpeena and Nangwarry were almost completely obliterated, and fourteen people in the area lost their lives that day. All we lost were - yes, our infant orchard and the bees, killed by wind and radiant heat at five miles distance, despite my hosing.

This year's fires have been worse. Far, far worse. Ash Wednesday 1983 killed less than a hundred people altogether: this year we've lost over two hundred. And the fire season isn't over yet.

The reason fires are so bad here is that southern Oz gets virtually no rain in summer so everythng is tinder-dry and in addition, our native trees are full of oil, such as the eucalyptus and tea tree oils that you can buy for the relief of colds and other complaints.

Nature knows what she is doing. Seeds of native trees need fire in order to germinate, and fires caused by lightning are part of the process. We are the ones who are in the wrong place!

Back to work on The Specusphere now. I have lots of reviews to edit and couple still to write, and then there's the uploading, which is usually a sit-up-late-at-night job. The new issue goes live on 1 March, but I hope to be back before then, with something more cheerful to talk about than bushfires.

Lady of contrasts: an interview with Carol Ryles

2009-02-09T11:27:00.007+09:00

Another interview today: this time with Carol Ryles; writer, nurse, mother, scholar, trekker, crit buddy extraordinaire and one of the most modest people I know. Carol, like my last guest, Sarah Parker, is a member of the Katharine Susannah Prichard Speculative Fiction Group. She is studying for a PhD in creative writing at the University of Western Australia, and we can expect to see a novel or three at the end of all her hard work. Meantime, you will find her short stories in a variety of publications both in Oz and elsewhere.

Q1. Carol, you're a person who has successfully undertaken many different projects, both personally and professionally, during your adult life. You have been writing for some ten or fifteen years now. At what point did you decide to start taking your writing seriously rather than regarding it as "just a hobby"?

A1. I began to take writing seriously when I decided to switch from journal writing to fiction writing in 1997. However, back then, my children were aged three, five and eight, I'd just moved from Brisbane to Perth, and my writing time was very limited. Then in 2000, when my youngest started school, I decided I wanted to study, so the next 8 years were spent studying part time for an English BA with honours. At the time, it was frustrating because at most I could only manage to finish four stories a year even though I messed around writing a lot more. But now I've finished my BA, I can say it was all worth it. I think much more deeply about what I'm writing these days and, now I have a scholarship to keep me going through my PhD in creative writing, I have no excuse not to devote a full five days a week to writing.

Q2. You're obviously an adventurous person, being keen on sports such as cave diving and trekking. Do you find this kind of edgy contact with nature inspires or informs your writing in any way?

A2. During my recent trip on the Routeburn Track in NZ, I took a writing journal with me. In the end, I wrote very little, because all I wanted to do was walk, enjoy and gaze (or perhaps meditate) for hours at the scenery. I'd love to set a story in wilderness like I saw on the Routeburn. Even though Peter Jackson has already done that, I did manage to see at least one place that didn't remind me of LOTR :) When I look back on my scuba diving journals (1980s), I find lots of descriptions of what I saw, but what really makes me relive it all are the pages and pages dedicated to the times I found myself in potential trouble, such as being surrounded by reef sharks, or nearly running out of air on the seabed in a strong current, or nearly getting dynamited in the South China Sea. It's then that I'm reminded how it feels to be running on adrenaline when only moments before I'd been at peace with the world, and how, in wild places, there's a very fine line separating safety from danger. That boundary is a place I've been exploring a lot in my fiction of late. So I guess, it's not so much the places themselves that have inspired the stuff I'm writing now, but the ways in which those places made me feel.

Q3. It's possible to track your writing career since 1998, when you were highly commended in the first Katharine Susannah Prichard Speculative Fiction competition. Since then, you've gone from strength to strength, more shortlistings and highly commendeds and then winning the KSP competition in 2004. You were given an honourable mention in the Aurealis Award and shortlisted for the Australian Shadow Awards in 2006, and in 2007 you completed an honours degree in English. Then in 2008 you not only started working towards a PhD but you were also accepted for the Clarion West "bootcamp" in Seattle, USA. Of all these endeavours, which has held the most meaning and sense of achievement for you?

A3. All of them surprised the hell out of me, especially the KSP award in 1998 because that was my first serious attempt at writing SF. I can't say which endeavour has held the most meaning, because they all mean different things. But right now Clarion West holds a special place because it was something I'd wanted to do since I first heard about it 10 years ago. It was also the first time I'd left my family to fend for themselves, though they're mostly grown up now, but it was great to see they coped. Also, I was terrified I wouldn't be able to deliver a story every week only to have each one pulled to pieces. In the end I amazed myself by doing just that. The one thing I loved about writing under Clarion conditions is that, not only do your writing strengths shine, but so do your weaknesses. As a result, you spend an entire six weeks figuring out the hows, whys and wherefores. Now I'm home again, I look back on the whole experience as a huge privilege that taught me more than I could have ever learned tapping away at a keyboard on my own. It gave me confidence to keep going and try new things. Plus Seattle is a lovely city, with a generous and vibrant SF community. I came home full of new ideas, new ambitions, my batteries recharged and ready to start my PhD.

Q4. You've had many short stories published both here and overseas. Are you particularly proud of, or do you feel especially attached to, any one of them?

A4. For the amount of time that's elapsed since I started writing fiction, I haven't really published a huge number of stories: a couple in Eidolon, a couple with CSFG, one with Ticonderoga Online, another with Fables & Reflections and three or four in ezines such as AntiSF. I've written a whole stack more, but I haven't bothered sending them out anywhere because I don't like them enough for that. That's probably a defeatist attitude, but I could always see my early stories were flawed and couldn't figure out how to fix them. Again, Clarion has done a lot to help me in that area. Of all my stories, I think my favourite is "The Bridal Bier" (Eidolon 1 Anthology), which I wrote during a uni study break when I hadn't written any fiction for months and it felt wonderful letting the muse take over. It was actually a fictional rewriting of an essay I was working on and I loved the way my unconscious self reinterpreted what my conscious self was trying to make sense of. I'm also proud of my Clarion stories, which I plan to bring up to scratch before sending out this year. I wrote them during the equivalent of a major panic and, though they've yet to prove themselves, they've taught me a lot about myself as well as about my writing.

Q5. What are your goals for the next decade, and what most motivates you to achieve them?

A5. My writing goals for the next decade are to write every day, finish my novel, turn it into a trilogy, keep writing and submitting short stories and not give up. My trekking goals include a lot of kilometres in wild places with mountains, forests, mud and rain. And definitely no sharks.

No sharks, and no dynamite either, Carol. We want to read that trilogy:-)

You can find a link To Carol's LJ in my blogroll.

Ignore this one

2009-02-09T10:16:00.000+09:00

I'm just testing my RSS feed to Facebook:-)

Free e-book from Finlay

2009-02-07T10:26:00.004+09:00

Charles who-no-longer-uses-his-middle-name Finlay and is now known as ccfinlay, has a new fantasy series coming out this year. In association with his publisher, Del Rey, he is offering the first book free! I've downloaded it and the first two chapters are great: so great that I will buy the book, The Patriot Witch, in hard copy if I can find it (Del Rey books are not all that easy to find here in Oz). But you don't have to buy the book – you can read the whole thing on screen. Follow the link above to learn more about CC Finlay and get your own .pdf copy.

"Charlie", BTW, is an indefatigable rock and mainstay of the Online Writers Workshop, where I've served a couple of tours of duty and learnt a great deal from peer reviews. OWW has been a proving ground for some fantastic writers, including our own Karen Miller, and is well worth checking out if you aspire to write speculative fiction.

It's always lovely to read about writers who actually make it into print. But today the magnificent Glenda Larke gives a reality check in the form of statistics from Locus magazine. Four hundred and thirty-six fantasy novels were published in 2008. When you look at sites such as OWW (link above) or Authonomy, which have thousands of members, all of whom aspire to be published, you realise that you must either write for the love of it or not at all.

Universal Woman

2009-02-04T21:55:00.005+09:00

Many women today are Superwomen. They do so many things I become giddy just watching them and have to go and lie down in case it's catching. One such is Sarah Parker: writer, fan, mother and feminist (among other things) active on the Perth Speculative Fiction scene. She and her husband John organise the annual October convention and Sarah joins with a crew of likeminded women to present Femcon each winter. In fact, wherever there's a SpecFic event in Perth, you're likely to find Sarah busy behind the scenes somewhere!

Sarah has recently admitted to a secret predeliction for writing, and a jolly fine writer she's turned out to be, too. So my first question was: Sarah, you've been involved in fandom for a long time now, and only recently did you come out of the closet as a writer. Which came first and how long have you been a writer/a fan?

A1. I used to write novels in high school. My first novel was a collaborative effort with a friend. She supplied the idea/plot, and I wrote it. I've still got it in a cupboard. I used to write a lot before that too, since I had a typewriter before we decided to write the book. It was an SF book, and was all about when the nukes fell and we all lived in domes. Well, the first book was about getting into the domes and having them built first... :-) I stopped writing creatively during uni. (And finding some of my old essays and stuff, I am not at all surprised that I stopped.)

I became a fan around about a year or two after my writing stopped. The two didn't seem linked to me, but now that I'm paying attention to my writing and putting in some work, I realise that fandom has been a tremendous resource for me, with access to wonderfully supportive, creative people. I think I stopped writing for about twelve years, maybe fourteen all up.

Q2. Which do you best like to read and/or write - Hard SF, Fantasy or Horror?

A2. I like fantasy and some science fiction. I think the dividing line for me is space opera vs SF. I find that SF is very concept driven; a lot of the stories are "hey, look at this awesome idea!" whereas I prefer space opera and fantasy like the works of Lois McMaster Bujold, which are character driven. I have written six novels at this point, of which five are fantasy with hints of SF and one is paranormal erotica. I think I am exploring the way women are handled within the standard fantasy tropes. We get to be whores or virgins, cardboard cut outs and prizes, and I think each fantasy novel I write explores that a little bit further.

Q3. Can you name a writer or two you'd like to emulate in some way, and tell us why?

Q4. Lois McMaster Bujold. Terry Pratchett. Neil Gaiman. Gaiman and Pratchett are master story tellers. Pratchett can make me cry for a hunk of rock; and Gaiman writes stories which sing to the soul. McMaster writes characters and mixes between the two; her Paladin of Souls is an awesome awesome book which I think explores themes of power, responsibility, and femininity. I loved a lot of her Vor series, and most of the Curse of Chalion series too. Every book Pratchett writes is a monument to his ability to play with words and themes. I love the Tiffiny Aching series (once again about femininity, power, and responsibility) and his character development is pretty awesome too. I am considering, once the Last Short Story Project is over (ie, next year) immersing myself only in McMaster Bujold, Gaiman and Pratchett books for a whole year and see what I learn out of that.

Q4. You're a person of many talents and many interests: as well as being a fan, a writer and a mum you're also a feminist, a prolific blogger and a fantastic cook. How do you balance all those interests and commitments?

A4. I type really fast, LOL. No no, I don't watch TV at all. I spend far too much time reading blogs (and now short stories.) Being a feminist is like breathing; I don't get how people can not want to understand how the pieces of our society fit together with a view to fixing the broken bits. I love blogging, and have recently updated my userinfo with most of my blogs. I use blogs like journals, notes, ideas, scraps, and also to show parts of myself. You're all an audience, my dears! I have only recently started to admit to my real name on my LJ blog, largely because part of my plan to become a writer means I need to be accountable for what I say, and to make use of the clicks I already get. (Also, you don't have to read my books, just buy them for me, OK??) I've found that people want to know stuff: we've lost a lot of skills in the past few generations and the more details we can give for people, the more people are willing to venture out of their comfort zones. I love doing stuff. I love showing other people how to do stuff. A lot of this stuff has been on the back burner while the kids are small, but I am starting to come out a bit more. This is an exciting time for me! :-)

Q5. Have you got a favourite recipe to share with us?

A5. Hmmm... actually, my favourite recipe is online...It's called Turkish Style Kebabs, otherwise known as Yoghurtlu Kofte kebabi

Sarah Parker, AKA Callisto Shampoo, blogs regularly over at Live Journal.

Fresh Fields, Reading and Recipes

2009-02-03T16:05:00.006+09:00

Jo Wake, whose blog you will find here, is a keen reader, garden enthusiast, bowls player and cook. Jo and I met on a mailing list for readers and writers founded by our mutual friend Annalou. Jo lives in Canada, Annalou and I in Australia. We've never met, but in the blogosphere that really doesn't matter: we meet as old friends on Facebook and the various blogs we haunt! Jo and I share in interest in speculative fiction and we often recommend books to each other.

I could have asked Jo ten questions instead of five, but five's the deal so I stuck to that. You can find an extended version of this interview on Jo's blog, complete with pics of the finished recipes.

Q1. What made you and Matt decide to move from the UK to Canada? Was it a good move for you?

A1. We found that the UK was getting somewhat stifling. There was no room to stretch out one's arms and for people like us, not a lot of room for advancement. It was a bigger wrench for Matt because he has two children. My parents were living in the Meditarranean region by then anyway and I have no siblings. In fact my father died shortly before we emigrated, having said previously that he thought it the best move we could make.

Yes, it was a great move. We have lived in North America, mainly Canada, since 1975 and have, we think, had a much better life than had we stayed in the UK. We had two homes, one in Canada and one in North Carolina and have enjoyed our time in both places. Our Canadian home had a pool in the back yard, I don't think that would have been possible, or, come to that, particularly enjoyable, in England - the weather isn't really good enough. We certainly spent a lot of time in our pool; we lived outside all summer and had all kinds of pool parties. We also had a travel trailer/caravan which we trailed around Ontario and the States and had a wonderful time visiting both people and places.

Q2. What other countries have you visited or lived in? Are there any more that you really long to see?

A2. As I have just mentioned, we lived in North Carolina in the States for about 12 years. We loved it there: the weather was excellent, apart from the odd hurricane, and the living was easy. We had a delightful property of about 1/2 an acre with a double wide mobile home which was a great place to live. We were 15 minutes from the sea shore and could easily feast on shrimp in particular and lots of other seafood fresh out of the water. Whilst in NC we went on a Caribbean cruise with some friends and spent a lot of time travelling in the States. Other than that, before we moved here, I had visited Norway, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia (as it was then) Malta and Spain - I particularly loved Greece, France and Spain. I speak pretty good French, moderate Spanish and a smattering of Greek which helped. Maybe I should say 'spoke', I'm pretty rusty in those languages nowadays although there was some opportunity to use French when I was working here in Canada. My parents lived in Malta once they retired so we joined them there for vacations, although I had already spent two weeks there before they retired. My parents, and therefore I, lived on a boat from shortly after the Second World War, which accounted for my visits to so many countries. When my father retired, he sailed his current home to Malta. Later, things got politically uncomfortable for the Brits in Malta so he moved to Spain, calling in at Southern France on the way where we also joined them. Later they bought a house in Spain and sold the boat. I have also visited the Bahamas for a few days and spent two weeks in The Dominican Republic and another two weeks in Southern Portugal which we loved. In fact I have thoroughly enjoyed most of the countries I have visited.

I would love to visit Asia. Ever since I read Shogun by James Clavell, I have wanted to visit Japan. I would also like to go to Hong Kong, plus see some of the interior of China, which looks so beautiful. I would also love to visit Oz, as much to see some of my cyber friends as to see the country. In fact I once had an ambition to visit one town in every country of the world. It will not, unhappily, come to fruition, but if I could, I would still love to travel a lot more.

Q3. Jo, I know you're an avid reader. Can you pick two contrasting books that you've enjoyed recently and tell us a bit about them and why you liked them?

A3. It's not that long since I read Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, which was a fascinating book and quite outside my normal choice. These days I tend to stick to what you, Satima, call Speculative Fiction which I gather includes both hard sci fi and fantasy. Water for Elephants was a very poignant story about an old man living in a nursing home and reliving memories of his time living and working in a circus and his delight and friendship with the circus's only elephant. The elephant was somewhat mistreated by the official 'handler' who eventually gets his comeuppance. The reminiscences are interrupted occasionally by returns to the nursing home in the current day, with the old man worrying about whether he will get to see a visiting circus.He ends up stealing away from the home to visit the circus all on his own as his family forget about him. Because he does so, his life changes.

One of the biggest contrasts was The Empress (of Mijak) by Karen Miller. The protagonist was/is an absolute horror. From the beginning of her story one has a little sympathy for her: life was extremely hard, but she comes to believe that her God has chosen her and any atrocity she commits in the name of this God is OK and is on behalf of her country of Mijak. By the end of the book she has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands. There is no assimilation of conquered peoples - they are either killed or enslaved: mostly killed. An excellent book despite the horror of the woman. Book two is better and I await Book three with eagerness.

Q4. Bowling is another of your hobbies, isn't it? What made you take it up? Have you been doing it for very long? If not, did you play another sport, and if so what was it?

A4. We took up 5-pin bowling shortly after we emigrated (1975). We were introduced to it by friends who bowled and once we started we joined two leagues and bowled regularly for the winter seasons until we moved down to the Carolinas. There it is 10-pin bowling, and it wasn't really our thing, apart from which we couldn't get into a league; the nearest alley was 20 miles away and we would have had to join the bowling association whether we had managed to get a game or not. When we came back to Canada, we immediately re-joined the bowling alley we had been members of before, even though we now live in a different town. Unfortunately they have since closed down, although I read an article which said 5-pin bowling is alive and well. It is only played in Canada and was invented by a Canadian exactly 100 years ago this year (celebrations are in order) as a more difficult sport than 10-pin. We both thoroughly enjoy it and now bowl in a local alley.

Other than that I used to be a pretty keen golfer, Matt still is, but then I kind of lost my game and finding myself in tears of frustration on the course, decided this was no longer a sport and quit. A great pity in a way as I was laid off work for a whole summer one year and was out on the golf course at 7 a.m. every day. In England I avoided sports altogether for most of my life. Then, because I had almost drowned a couple of times, I took up scuba diving, which is where I met Matt. (We were both married at the time, but that's another story.) Funnily enough, neither of us has scuba dived since we came to Canada although Matt did lots of snorkelling in the Caribbean. (I did a little)

I have just remembered Cross Country Skiing! We took that up shortly after we moved to Canada as well. We loved it and found that there was never enough snow and the winter was never long enough. Matt, in particular, working shifts for a few years, used to come home after a night shift and immediately head out skiing which enabled him to see all kinds of wildlife just about to start their day, or their night, depending on the critter. Not something we can still enjoy unfortunately as Matt has had two hip and one knee replacement and I have had one hip done.

Q5. It's apparent that you love food and are an amazing cook. Have you a favourite recipe to share with us?

A5. My favourite recipes vary from year to year, I guess. One of my latest faves is Bobotie and Yellow Rice, which I recently posted in my blog. My father was always interested in food. When he married my mother she literally couldn't boil an egg; she used to say later that it is, in fact, a difficult thing to do. There was a story about how he picked her up from work one evening and they were going on somewhere else so he took her back to his flat/apartment whilst he changed. He was feeling peckish so asked her to make a bacon sandwich while he changed. He came back to find her in floods of tears because she had no idea how to make one. To me, later in life, knowing my mother for the great cook she was, this was a hilarious story. She could, and did, cook anything. She could out-gourmet most restaurants and knew the French names of everything even if her pronounciation left something to be desired. She was a much better cook than I will ever be. Her main recipe source originally was Mrs. Beeton who is a classic British cookbook author from way back. My mother's copy, which I now have, was dated 1935.

One of my favourite recipes from years back, one I have posted on my blog quite some time ago, is for what I call Tomato Toasts.

Tomato Toast

Toast as many slices of bread as you want.
Rub each slice with a clove of garlic while it is still warm
Spread the toast with a little olive oil, about 1 tsp.
Cover the toast with well seasoned slices of ripe tomato.

Eat and enjoy.

Variation: Sometimes we add Havarti Cheese over the tomatoes and broil/grill until melting.

I just remembered it's Groundhog Day today. I would think there is every possibility of all the groundhogs seeing their shadows - there is certainly a lot of very reflective snow about. If they don't see their shadows it means winter will soon end; otherwise they will retreat to their burrows for another 6 weeks. Our local one is called Wiarton Willie and I know most Canadians will hope and pray he doesn't see his shadow when he pokes his head out of his hole. Everyone has had enough of shovelling snow. This last week we have had piles of the stuff; not seen so much in years. What a pity we don't ski any more!

Thanks, Jo, for sharing the tomato toast recipe as well as snippets about your life. (Jo always has super recipes and foodie pictures on her blog - at least one every day, and some of them look so delicious I wish I was interested in cooking!)

Marvel Man

2009-02-02T15:02:00.004+09:00

This interviewing on blogs thing is getting to me! I could go on interviewing my friends, both the face-to-face variety and the electronic kind, every day of the week, because they are such an interesting bunch of people.

Writer on comics and blogger extrordinaire Danny Best has kindly volunteered to be today's ~~victim~~ interviewee.

Q1. You're an Adelaide boy born and bred. Have you ever lived elsewhere?

A1. Definitely. Lived in Melbourne for a while, and have travelled around the country extensively. So much so in fact that my second home is on the Sunshine Coast and the third home is Melbourne. I love travel, this country has almost too much to offer a person, but each time I see those lights from the hills I know I'm home. A great place, is Adelaide.

Q2. Being allergic to bee stings, have you had any narrow escapes?

A2. Narrow? I guess if you call physically dying a narrow escape then sure. When I was 14 I was stung by a bee resulting in a mad dash to the hospital. Unfortunately for me my ma took me to the Lyell McEwan on a Saturday night! While she was arguing with the admission nurses I quietly slid off my chair unable to breath anymore. By the time they finally got me into the emergency rooms my heart had stopped and I was, for all intents and purposes, dead. Loads of adrenalin and other drugs later the prognosis was worse - I got better.

Q3. It's obvious that you're a fan of the comicbook. Who are your favourite characters, writers and artists?

A3. Too many to mention. No real favourite character, although I do have a soft spot for the Phantom and, naturally (being a boy), I do like the iconic figures of Captain America and the like. Personally you could eliminate shit like Wolverine and I'd be happy - very few people have actually written that character right.

Writers? Alan Moore and Alan Grant spring to mind, obviously. With the later stuff, ie: stuff out now, none of them interest me at all. Too many 'events'.

Artists - Norm Breyfogle, Alan Weiss, Armando Gil, Dave Simons - those guys all move me, along with a hundred others.

Q4. Do you enjoy reading other forms of fiction, too?

A4. Here's my confession - I'm not a huge fan of fiction. Never have been. I love non-fiction. History. Bio. Events. I watch TV and scream at it when I see errors.

I have read a lot of fiction but after a while I realised that what I was reading just wasn't as interesting to me as the stories behind the stories. I love 1984, for example, but I wanted to know what was going on behind the scenes, what prompted Orwell to write it. It's why I write not about comic books, but what goes into them. Who wants to read what I, or anyone else for that matter, thinks of a topic? But if I can give you the backstory to a series or an event, then I'm sure that's more entertaining than the event or story itself. I thirst for knowledge and my flaw is that I think everyone else does. As I've found out in recent times, some people prefer to remain ignorant.

Q5. Tell us one of your personal or professional ambitions for the next decade.

A5. To be alive. I'm just happy to keep working behind the scenes and allowing others to get all the credit. If more of my stuff makes it out there, either with my by-line or with someone else's, then that'll be fine for me.

Many thanks, Danny, for sharing a taste of your special interest with us. May your house be forever filled with groaning bookshelves and coffee tables overflowing with comics!!

Interview meme: my turn to bowl

2009-01-31T17:40:00.005+09:00

Friends, I'd like you to meet Lee Battersby, one of Australia's most highly regarded writers of short stories in the field of speculative fiction. But there's much more to Lee than that. Read on to find out for yourselves.

Q1. Lee, When I first met you, back in about 2002, you had just received recognition in the Writers of the Future contest. Since then, you've had many more short stories published, including your collection "Through Soft Air"; you've been a tutor at Clarion South and you've written one or two novels as well. Of all your achievements since WOTF, which one stands out for you?

A1. Probably being invited to tutor at Clarion South. Most of the things I've done as a writer have been at the small press level, but Clarion was the first (and to date, only) time I was really ranked amongst the big boys by someone, which I think was a massive show of faith by the organisers. I'd like to think I didn't let them down, but, to me, if you look at the names of tutors over the years I do stand out like a sore thumb as the "Who?" guy amongst them. My entire career seems to have been a case of stepping above my station on one occasion and then working my arse off not to have that step be a one-off. To date, that Clarion appearance is my biggest step, and my biggest one-off.

Q2. Which of your own stories do you love the best?

A2. I don't have a favourite. Once the stories are written and published, they're yesterday's news. I don't have a huge amount of reprints because I rarely look backwards. It's more important to be working on the next thing, the new project, than to think about what I've already done. (As Michael Keaton said about playing Batman: I don't want to find myself at a car show in twenty years, still in the suit, with a kid on my knee, saying "Is that your Mom? Tell her to meet me after the show.")

I have several stories that stand out, because of awards, or because they're good to use at readings so I use them more than once, but there's no real star of the litter. I'd much rather hear that a reader has a particular favourite than have one myself.

Q3. Your wife Lyn is also a writer of no mean repute. Which one of Lyn's stories do you love the best?

A3. Ah, see, now this is easier :) Lyn's best story is called 'A Whisper In The House of Angels'- to date, it's unpublished, because it's a very hard sell: it's subtle, disturbing, and gives the reader very little in the way of sure footing. It just needs the right editor, and when it finds publication, it's going to win everything. Of her published stuff, I have a real soft spot for 'Of Woman Born', in Daikaju II. It's very short, only 600 words or so, but it's everything Lyn is capable of: feminine, mature, imaginative, unique, all the elements that make up a Lyn Battersby story, plus it manages to be more than a little twisted and giggle-inducingly funny into the bargain. I think it's been sadly ignored, and vastly underrated.

Q4. You've made it clear on many occasions that traditional fantasy is not your favourite genre. What do you think of some of the current crop of writers, such as Margo Lanagan, who are putting new, darker spins on some of the old tropes?

A4 Actually, I'm not a fan of Lanagan's writing. I find it contrived and soulless. I'm also aware that I'm in a tiny minority on this issue. I am going to raise issue with your statement, though: the thing is, I am a fan of traditional fantasy. What drives me to such public distraction is the sheer amount of bad trad-fantasy we see served up to us. It's precisely because I love the good stuff that I rail against the Eddings' and Brooks' of the genre. Despite all his flaws, Tolkein's work was incredible, as was Dunsany's, and Stephen Donaldson's original Thomas Covenant trilogy was amazing. It's just that trad-fantasy seems to be the logical extension of Sturgeon's Law, and nobody seems to say "Stop! The good stuff is over here!"

I also don't see the usurpation of standard fantasy tropes as a new thing, although I'm a fan of writers such as Mieville and KJ Bishop who are spinning it out in new directions. You don't have to go too far back to see Tim Powers doing wonderful things within 'standard' settings (witness 'Anubis Gate' and 'Drawing Of The Dark') and you can go back even further to writers like Wolfe, Vance, Moorcock, Le Guin and Poul Anderson to see some astonishingly wonderful 'non-traditional' fantasy stories.

It's writers like these who point out how well you can do epic fantasy (Trad-fantasy, high fantasy, call it what you like), which makes it all the more annoying to me to see readers settling for the latest instalment in whichever pale 'Witches Guild of the Wheel of Shannara' Tolkein-shadow you care to name.

Q5. And finally, what are your ambitions for the next five years, both personally and writing-wise?

A5. I'm 38 years old. I want to be supporting my family through my writing by the time I turn 45. I want to make a concerted effort to move away from the short story/small press/horror story niche I seem to have been tarred with, and move into a wider publishing base-- novels, more in the line of guys like Chuck Palahniuk and Jonathon Lethem, who are writing genre, to all intents and purposes, but who seem to have avoided being hemmed in by the label. If I get a chance to write another screenplay, or work outside my current boundaries, I'll be eager to do so. I didn't start out wanting to be an SF writer: I wanted to be a writer, non-specific, one thereof. I've become distracted, rather, since I started selling-- small press SF is a bit of a honey trap, psychologically. I really want to go back to my original, pure desire-- to write, and publish, whatever I choose, without thought of genre, or form, or purpose. I love writing poetry, and comedy sketches, and plays, and screenplays, and short stories, and cartoons. And I've published all of them over the years. That's what I want.

Of course, what I'd like to do is really push towards achieving a significant artistic and commercial impact over an extended period of time. People like Spike Milligan, David Bowie, Stephen Fry, Alice Cooper, and David Hockney are my template: multi- form artists who can move from medium to medium as the need arises. It's a very British way of thinking, to me- defining the artist by themself, rather than what they produce. Nobody over there tells Stephen Fry he can't write a novel because he's an actor, but over here we tend to look down on people who try to cross boundaries, as if they should be glad to work in one form. I'd like to break past that.

Either that, or I'd like to dress up as a bat and fight criminals. I'm still undecided.

Thanks to Lee Battersby for that thoughtful interview.

Interview meme

2009-01-26T14:15:00.008+09:00

Friends, you will be wondering what has gone wrong with me, posting every day for four days running! Anyhow, this one is here because I took the bait over at Jason Fischer's blog, and now I'm doing the interview meme.

In the interests of fair play, here are the rules. If you want to be interviewed by moi, please leave a comment below and I'll interview you as gently as any sucking dove.

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me!"
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will post the answers to the questions (and the questions themselves) on your blog or journal.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions. And thus the endless cycle of the meme goes on and on and on and on...

I am not the must succinct person to interview, and these are great questions that Jason dreamed up, worthy of close attention. So this is quite a long post, I'm afraid. However, without further ado:

Jason Fischer interviews Satima Flavell

Q1) You are a sub-editor for the Specusphere. How did you initially get involved with this brilliant resource, and what is your role?

A1) From 1987-1995 I wrote on the arts, primarily dance, starting off with reviews for Music Maker (which later morphed into ArtsWest) and pretty quickly I was given my own column. I've must've done OK because I soon got head hunted by Dance Australia and The Australian as a dance reviewer. That was great - I got free tickets to see fantastic shows, I got to meet some fine artists, and had opportunities to interview interesting people who loved what they were doing. And I got paid for it! There was the odd nice party, too:-) However, In 1995 I went overseas and was away for over three years. I came back to find ArtsWest defunct - at least in part, or so the editor assured me, because they couldn't replace me! However, the other publications had certainly replaced me, so I would have had to start over, looking for new markets. While I was away, I'd started writing Fantasy. Because I wanted to focus on that, I couldn't be bothered starting again in my old field. But I missed writing non-fiction, and so that I could get to know other writers and fans I wrote occasional articles for the old Visions zine. That morphed into The Specusphere in 2005 and the Editor-in-Chief, Stephen Thompson, needed a Reviews Editor. I stuck my hand up, and I'm still here!

Q2) How do you see the future of reviewing novel-length fiction in Australia? What are the principle difficulties in attracting and retaining quality reviewers?

A2) My first thought here was "Hang on Jason, that's two questions!" But in fact the first segues nicely into the second.

Few print publications are publishing reviews at all and those that do, publish very few. A new genre author has little chance of getting a review in, forex, The Australian, or even the state newspapers these days. Publishers are relying more and more on the webzines for publicity, and that includes reviews. It's easy to see that the whole industry will be largely electronic within ten years or so, and even big publishers - Tor and Harper Collins, forex - are playing with e-publication. Now, the big drawback, as I see it, is that there is not yet a good, inexpensive reader on the market, so reviewers, who are, after all, writing FTL, are obliged to read ARCs on their computer screens.

This brings me to the second part. Few people read on-screen from choice. Most readers - and that includes reviewers - much prefer hard copy. So one difficulty in attracting and keeping reviewers in future is going to be the lack of a good, cheap, hand-held reader. I'm getting murmurings about it already when I ask for volunteers to review e-ARCs. They don't mind doing anthologies, because they can share the workload by doing one or two stories each, but they baulk, and I don't blame them, at Fat Fantasies. Or, indeed, anything over about 30,000ww.

However, that's not yet the main reason it's hard to attract and keep reviewers. The main one is time - people start out willingly enough, but a good review takes time to write, and that after spending anything up to 20 hours reading the book. People who have livings to earn and who also want to write their own works often find reviewing more onerous than they'd expected, and give it away after a few months. However, we've built up a good team at The Specusphere over the last year or so. The reviewers are all keen readers and some of them have had or are having academic training - in fact, some supervisors suggest their candidates write reviews in order to hone their critical faculties - and all of our reviewers absolutely love speculative fiction.

Q3) Who are the most exciting writers you've recently read?

A3) I don't know who to talk about first, Jason! You only have to look at the recent Jack Dann-edited antho Dreaming Down Under, in which you had an excellent story, to see that even in just the short story area there are some fantastically talented and inventive people. Lee Battersby, to name just one, goes from strength to strength and guys like you and Felicity Dowker are hard on his heels. The short story is in no danger of becoming moribund in this country!

Novel-wise, I am particularly taken by the recent crop of writing in the "tight third" point-of-view. People like Jo Abercrombie, Margo Lanagan and K.E. Mills have lifted this style to new heights by making dialogue and narrative seamless, so the reader is deeply immersed in the writer's world. Writers are realising, I think, that reading has to compete with visual forms of entertainment, and reading's big advantage is that it can take the reader into someone else's body and mind, experiencing the characters' thoughts, emotions and physical sensations in a way that is simply not possible in film or TV.

Q4) How do you weigh in on the authors right-of-reply for interviews they disagree with? Have you had any experiences of angry authors attacking reviews done by Specusphere (you don't have to name names of course)

A4) I've never had anyone complain about an interview because I always run my work past the interviewee before upload. It's all too easy to misunderstand something when interviewing and I want to be sure I have got my facts straight and am presenting the inteviewee's thoughts and ideas correctly.

Reviews are a different matter. It would be highly unethical to show an author a review before publication. I'm reviewing the book, not the author. It is also highly amateurish for an author to try to enter into dialogue with a reviewer by complaining. I do hear from authors, of course, but it's usually to ask for clarification of a point of criticism, such as "Can you expand on your comment that my main character fails to convince the reader of his sincerity?" - and the writer is asking because s/he genuinely wants to know why I thought they failed on that particular point, taking it on board if they feel it will help them improve their work.

The only times I've had authors complain about reviews were when I was silly enough to accept a few very amateurish e-published books for review and they got the reviews they deserved. This is another reason why we don't like reviewing e-books!

Q5) Finally, what approach would you recommend for people who'd like to get into reviewing? What makes a good review?

A5) Good reviewers are well-educated and well-read. They have to be able to recognise, forex, classical references or references to other art forms and disciplines such as philosophy and psychology. A reviewer of hard SF benefits from a sound technological base (several of our hard SF reviewers come from a scientific back ground) and Fantasy reviewers (and writers too, but don't get me started on that!) really need, I believe, good general knowledge of history, mythology, religion and linguistics. And of course good grammar, spelling and syntax are important because I don't want to have to rewrite the bloody things.

But the big plus lies in the reviewer's empathy. A good review serves several purposes. One is to help the publisher to publicise the work, and this must be done as sympathetically as possible, even if the reviewer doesn't like that particular book very much. Emphasising the positives, mentioning them up front, and softening the negatives make for good reviewing. Never forget that it's only your opinion - granted, a well-informed and considered opinion, but in the end it's still just an opinion; no more, no less.

The next thing that makes a good review is that it will help the writer to see the work through someone else's eyes and perhaps learn from that. And the last thing is that a good review helps readers to decide whether or not this might be a book worth looking at, in light of their own tastes and preferences. So the reviewer's job, really, is to give service to the publisher, the author and the reader.

Thanks, Jason Fischer, for giving me a soap box.

Yet another reading list revisited

2009-01-25T09:00:00.005+09:00

The book list from the Guardian has, of course, been turned into a meme:-) I will not plague you with it, but if you do want to copy it, go to Stephen Dedman's LJ and snaffle it from there. It's much easier to read (although less interesting and educational!) as a straight list than as a catalogue of synopses and I found a few favourites that I'd thought were missing. So I stand corrected in regard to my reply to Juliet's comment: Ursula K. Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness and Octavia Butler's Kindred are, in fact, on the list. My faith in the Guardian is restored!

Last night was, of course, the annual presentation of the Aurealis Awards. There were some surprises, but I'd especially like to congratulate Adrian Bedford for his win in the Science Fiction section with his novel Time Machines Repaired by Request. Adrian's books aren't nearly as popular as they should be because he is published in Canada, which means his books can only be found here in his homeland in small, specialist stores. But if you like hard SF you will want to hunt them down.

If you'd like to read the full list of winners, go to The Specusphere. You'll find it under "News" in the top right hand corner. Thanks to Lee Battersby for getting the list up before anyone else so that I could pinch it!

A lesson with laughs for the would-be writer

2009-01-24T13:16:00.007+09:00

Another one from Bibliobibuli.

You don't normally see any ads on my blog, right? So what's this?
It's a screamer of a book, complete with examples, that teaches you how to write a really, really, bad novel. You might also enjoy the website the authors have set up - be sure to watch the bookfomercial, do the quiz to see how much you would benefit from reading the book and check out the apocrypha.
If you're like me, you'll have a good laugh.

Yet another reading list

2009-01-23T17:32:00.006+09:00

It must be the season for book lists. I smurched another one, this time from Lisa Gold, Research Maven

Over at the Guardian newspaper there is a list of 1000 novels some people at the Guardian think we should all read. The interesting part is that the list is subdivided in genres: (science fiction & fantasy, state of the nation, family & self, comedy, crime, love, war & travel). Skimming through the first 800-odd titles and synopses (the last section, war and travel, should be up by the time you read this) is an education in itself. I'd read at least a handful of books from each genre, yet in the section on speculative fiction, in which I fancy myself to be quite well-read, I found I'd only consumed about a quarter of the list. That's possibly because it contains a preponderance of hard SF, and while I'd certainly read all the classics such as Asimov's Foundation series, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and so on, there are books there that I've never heard of! And I'm disappointed that so little fantasy is included. I'll be interested to read what other specfic buffs think of the list. Whatever list contains your favourites, you will probably find, like me, that you've read a smattering of all the other sections as well. But as with the list from earlier in the week, you will almost certainly find yourself asking "Who says we should read these particular books, and why? Why not others?"

Nevertheless, if you're into lists of reading material this might be a good one to check out. If you do, please come back and tell me what you thought of it!

Never pass up a good test!

2009-01-20T17:24:00.006+09:00

Smurched from:
mikandra

Advanced Global Personality Test Results

Extraversion	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	54%
Stability	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	42%
Orderliness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	54%
Accommodation	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	42%
Interdependence	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	50%
Intellectual	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	70%
Mystical	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	50%
Artistic	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	76%
Religious	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	43%
Hedonism	\|\|	10%
Materialism	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	56%
Narcissism	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	50%
Adventurousness	\|\|	10%
Work ethic	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	70%
Humanitarian	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	63%
Conflict seeking	\|\|\|\|	16%
Need to dominate	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	36%

Romantic	\|\|\|\|	16%
Avoidant	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	63%
Anti-authority	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	56%
Wealth	\|\|\|\|\|\|	30%
Dependency	\|\|\|\|\|\|	30%
Change averse	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	43%
Cautiousness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	70%
Individuality	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	56%
Sexuality	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	56%
Peter pan complex	\|\|\|\|\|\|	23%
Family drive	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	70%
Physical Fitness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	%
Histrionic	\|\|\|\|\|\|	23%
Paranoia	\|\|\|\|\|\|	23%
Vanity	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	43%
Honor	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	56%
Thriftiness	\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|\|	50%

Take Free Advanced Global Personality Test
personality test by similarminds.com

Oh, dear, it looks as if I'm either very well balanced (although somewhat neurotic!) or I'm so middle of the road as to be wishy-washy and dead boring!

Unfortunately the scores in the r.h. column don't seem to be displaying properly. There's enough showing, however, for you to see that they are all pretty middling:-)

100 Books everyone should read

2009-01-16T18:31:00.005+09:00

Smurched from Bibliobibuli

100 Novels Everyone Should Read ... But Sez Who??

The Telegraph has a list of 100 novels 'everyone should read'. It seems to be in reversed order of importance - but according to whose opinion, I wonder?

But anyway, when we see a list of books we have to play the game, right? The ones I've read are bolded.

100 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein

99 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

98 The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore

97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

96 One Thousand and One Nights Anon

95 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

94 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

93 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré

92 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (Saw the movie - does that count?)

91 The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki

90 Under the Net by Iris Murdoch

89 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

88 Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

87 On the Road by Jack Kerouac

86 Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

85 The Red and the Black by Stendhal

84 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

83 Germinal by Emile Zola

82 The Stranger by Albert Camus (Well, I read excerpts in French...)

81The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

80 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

79 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

78 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

77 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

76 The Trial by Franz Kafka

75 Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee

74 Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan

73 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque

72 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

71 The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin

70 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

69 If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

68 Crash by JG Ballard

67 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul

66 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

65 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

64 The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

63 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

62 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

61 My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk

60 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

59 London Fields by Martin Amis

58 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

57 The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse

56 The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

55 Austerlitz by WG Sebald

54 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

53 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

52 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

51 Underworld by Don DeLillo

50 Beloved by Toni Morrison

49 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

48 Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin

47 The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

46 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

45 The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet

44 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

43 The Rabbit books by John Updike

42 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

41 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

40 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

39 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

38 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

37 The Warden by Anthony Trollope

36 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

35 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

34 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

33 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson

32 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell

31 Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky

30 Atonement by Ian McEwan (Saw the film!)

29 Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec

28 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

27 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

26 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

25 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

24 Ulysses by James Joyce

23 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

22 A Passage to India by EM Forster

21 1984 by George Orwell (Saw the film...)

20 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

19 The War of the Worlds by HG Wells

18 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

17 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

16 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

15 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse

14 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

13 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

12 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

11 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

10 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

9 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

8 Disgrace by JM Coetzee

7 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

6 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

5 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

4 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

3 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

1 Middlemarch by George Eliot

Hmm - barely 30% - and to be honest I only read most of those because they were set texts for something-or-another! There are several others there that I tried to read and couldn't get farther than halfway, at best. And I have no desire to re-read any of the ones I finished, except maybe Pride and Prejudice and Bertie Wooster. And, of course, Hitchhiker's Guide!

I fear my taste in books is as plebeian as my taste in music:-)

Favoured Music

2009-01-12T20:14:00.006+09:00

I'm late posting again because although I've known for a week what I intended the post to be about, I found when I sat down to write that I couldn't organise my material.

This "material" was a list of favourite pieces of music ranging from pops to classics. I started writing down all my best loved titles, but when I got to over thirty I realised I had an unmanageable mess. How could I classify a list that contains such diverse items as El Condor Pasa, Atom Heart Mother, Brahms's Violin Concerto in D and Fields of Gold? I stayed up until 2.00am on Monday morning, listening to extracts from my favourites in various arrangements, trying to sort them out into a top ten or even a top twenty and couldn't. In the end I gave up went to bed, disgruntled.

But the project has haunted my mind ever since, and although I'm no closer to sorting out that messy catalogue of musical favourites, I do know that my four top faves never change. The rest of the never-ending list varies according to my mood, but the top four remain the top four and have for years. Decades, even.

And what are these four super-faves? Why, they are Pachelbel's Canon in D; The Grand Pas de Deux from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, the British folksong Greensleeves (in just about any version) and - wait for it - Unchained Melody.

I've always wondered why this song bore such a strange name, and the very comprehensive Wikipedia article cleared up the mystery. "Unchained" was the name of the film in which the melody first appeared in 1955. The music was by Alex North and the lyrics by Hy Zaret. It's been recorded hundreds of times, but never better, I think, than the original version by baritone Todd Duncan, which I fell in love with when I was twelve years old - because it's a damned good tune.

Tunes, dear friends, are what grab me. I love a good vocal melody that you can hum, whistle, extemporise on and generally muck about with and still have a perfectly good tune when you've finished. Short of being tone deaf and gravel-throated, you can't spoil a good tune. (Well, some jazz musos can, but they generally don't play music for the tune; in fact, some of them just can't wait to get rid of it.)

A good tune is a simple thing, made more beautiful, for sure, by harmony, rhythm or words - but it doesn't rely on these things to carry it along. Music that relies on anything but a good melody as its mainstay either bores or irritates me. Gimme the tune, man, just gimme the tune.

So you will not be surprised when I tell you that the Long List contains a lot of folk music, or pieces based on folk music such as Ralph Vaughan-Williams's Fantasia on Greensleeves and Variations on Dives and Lazarus. Medieval and early Baroque loom large, too: little gems such as Manfredina, which dates from the C14, or snatches of plainsong such as the evocative Hodie that Benjamin Britten grabbed for his Ceremony of Carols have truly lovely melodies, for all their simplicity. Religious music that grew out of this early tradition, such as the magnificent masses of Palestrina, are well up the list, too. Popular music that draws on the folk tradition fits in well here: things like Sting's fabulous Fields of Gold. (Sting plays a mean lute as well, as his recent album of John Dowland pieces demonstrates. Again, simple, sing-able tunes.)

Another place to look for good tunes is the theatre. Opera and ballet abound in them: so do musicals. When we think of Cats, do we think of the costumes and lighting and the acrobatics of the performers - or do we remember the grungy little grey cat standing in the lamplight singing "Memory"? "One Fine Day" pretty much sums up Madam Butterfly and "In the Depths of the Temple" does the same for The Pearl Fishers. Bizet, Verdi, Puccini - fine tunesmiths, all of them, as were the best ballet composers including Tchaikovsky himself, the melody king.

A lot of this music is, of course, hackneyed. It has been transposed, transcribed and transfigured until musical purists shudder to hear it - but Manfredina played on a mouth organ or mixed by midi still remains Manfredina. You just can't keep a good tune down.

Reading Quiz

2009-01-09T20:32:00.003+09:00

Ok, here we go again! I found this on Gillian Polock's LJ and of course I had to try it! (Gillian, being a Gentleperson and a Scholar, came out as an Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm!)

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Literate Good Citizen You read to inform or entertain yourself, but you're not nerdy about it. You've read most major classics (in school) and you have a favorite genre or two.
Dedicated Reader
Book Snob
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Specusphere time again!

2009-01-04T18:09:00.006+09:00

The new Specusphere is up and running, thanks to our doughty webmistress Amanda Greenslade. You'll find lots of interesting articles and a record number of reviews! I'm so proud of my reviewers that I've put up a piece that introduces them to readers - and their collective CVs are certainly impressive. Four of them contributed to the"Best Books of 2008", coming up with a Top Twelve that you may or may not agree with. Check it out and see!

Here's the Table of Contents:
Editorial
Four editorials in one, by Astrid Cooper, Satima Flavell, Amanda Greenslade and Stephen Thompson

Features
Medical Bag: Best of 2008 by Brendan David Carson
Spirits and Shamen at Woodford by Stephen Thompson
Essential Email Inbox Instructions by Amanda Greenslade
Terra Incognita Speculative Fiction Podcast

Writing and Publishing
Wordwatch by Helen Bowers

Up and Coming
Daring to be Different — an interview with Kim Falconer and a preview of The Spell of Rosette by Astrid Cooper
HarperCollins Publishers Releases for January–February, 2009
Gollancz Releases for January–February, 2009

People
Meet the Reviewers for The Specusphere

Book Reviews
Best of the Books, 2008 by The Specusphere reviewers
Best of the Superheroes, 2008 by Brendan Carson

Graceling by Kristin Cashmore reviewed by Satima Flavell
Hammer of God by Karen Miller reviewed by Carol Neist
H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq reviewed by Ross Murray
Water Witch by Deborah LeBlanc reviewed by Bobbi Sinha-Morey
Victory of Eagles by Naomi Novik reviewed by Hypatia
The Third Circle by Amanda Quick reviewed by Bobbi Sinha-Morey
The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan reviewed by Maurie Breust
The Angel Maker by Stefan Brijs reviewed by Felicity Dowker
Hunter’s Prayer by Lilith Saintcrow reviewed by Ross Murray
Ripple Creek Werewolf Couplet by Keri Arthur reviewed by Ross Murray
Fourtold by Michael Stone reviewed by Ross Murray and Simon Petrie
Star Wars: Force Unleashed by Sean Williams reviewed by Simon Petrie
Fish Out of Water by Mary Janice Davidson reviewed by Ross Murray
Dark Curse by Christine Feehan reviewed by Hypatia
Catopolis, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Janet Deaver-Pack reviewed by Hypatia
Angel Rising by Dirk Flinthart reviewed by Felicity Dowker
Bound by Light by Anna Windsor reviewed by Bobbi Sinha-Morey

Fiction
Temple of the Sun by Ashley Hibbert
Wreck, Slash, Burn by Kristine Ong Muslim
Identity Crisis by Gillian Lloyd
Gaitrel the Black by David Schembri

No excuses now - off you go to The Specusphere and get your bi-monthly fix!

Favourite Reads of 2008

2008-12-30T20:36:00.008+09:00

Several of my blogging buddies are listing their favourite books for this year, and that always seems an appropriate thing to do at the end of December. So, in the order in which I read them, here are the books I loved best in 2008...

The Accidental Sorcerer by K.E. Mills. This is by Karen Miller's not-so-altered alter-ego, so you don't need to be told how good it is! Funny, frightening and fantastic, this one got K.E. Mills's Rogue Agent series off to a flying start.

The Last Realm: Dragonscarpe by Pat McNamara, Michal Dutkiewicz and Gary Turner. An utterly lovely fantasy coffee-table book, richly illustrated and decorated.

Escape by Sea by LS Lawrence. Another excellent YA historical adventure from this author, who under another hat is a fine SF writer.

Hal Spacejock: No Free Lunch by Simon Haynes. Just as funny as its predecessors and showing more character development. Another winner from Haynes.

The Two Pearls of Wisdom by Alison Goodman. A beautfully conceived and written tale set in an alternative-world far eastern country. We can hope for great things from this new author.

Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny. A new edition of the first five books in Zelazny's signature series. I needed no encouragement to read them again - for about the sixth time!

The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. Comprising The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged and The Last Argument of Kings, this has to be one of the best first trilogies to come out in years. Dark, bitter, cynical and incredibly entertaining, this set is on my keeper shelf for sure.

Midnight Never Come by Marie Brennan. A quirky, different kind of fantasy set in Elizabethan London, well-researched and well worth reading.

The Siege of Arrandin by Marcus Herniman. This is the first of a trilogy and I'm still trying to track the others down. The world building in this book is amazing - lovingly detailed descriptions of sumptuous clothes and settings almost overpower the reader with their immediacy.

Time Machines Repaired While you Wait by K.A. Bedford. A new twist on an old trope: a murder mystery set in two times. This one has the distinction of being set in Perth, Western Australia - my favourite city:-)

Heir to Sevenwaters by Juliet Marillier. At last - another Sevenwaters book! Just what so many Marillier fans have been waiting for! That is not to decry this fine author's other works - but there is something magical about the Sevenwaters world of medieval Ireland, and the books are a great introduction to Marillier's oeuvre.

Sword Song by Bernard Cornwell. A richly realised medieval setting from the creator of the Sharp series. Cornwell writes and researches impeccably, so his novels are always convincing.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. A mid-life story of a woman who did just as I did - packed her bags in middle age and went a-roaming in search of Life, The Universe and Everything. Any other dharma bums out there? You should read this. And if you've never gone dharma-bumming you should read it anyway, to see what you missed.

Graceling by Kristin Cashore. A truly original fantasy that includes favourite stock characters, thus giving the reader the comfort of familiarity while opening new doors. One of the best coming-of-age novels I've read in quite a while.

Hammer of God by Karen Miller. The third book in the Godspeaker trilogy, and perhaps the best. A very strong trilogy, this one. The first book, Empress of Mijak, shook many readers to the core - some were so horrified they did not want to read the others! - but when we read the other two, we can see why book one had to be so unremittingly dark. Be assured that if you got through the first book, the others will seem easy:-)

That's about half the books I've read this year, so I've been lucky. Not that the others were awful, but these are the ones that grabbed me and have stayed with me. Let's hope 2009 will bring even more excellent reading our way!

And to close, here's a progress report on Fenris the Furred, as Ru christened my son Kurt's new "baby". He's grown - and keeps on growing! (Fenris, BTW, is the name not only of the guard dog to the underworld in Norse mythology, but of the scariest fighter in print, found in The First Law trilogy - Fenris the Feared.) Here is the less scary version with my dinlaw Erinn.

I hope you all have a great New Year's Eve and a super year to follow. Roll on 2009!