Horses for Courses

I've been trying to read a Martha Grimes novel, "The Blue Last". It's not doing it for me. Slow. A thousand seemingly irrelevant sub-plots (no doubt she'll weave them in sooner or later but I skipped a whole chapter to avoid one sub-plot I thought was stupid and pointless). A main character who seems to be the world's most dithering, inactive policeman, and whose idea of investigation is to put his friend, Lord Something-or-other, on the property (undercover) as a forelock-tugging gardener.
I talk to students about credibility in fiction - the gardener thing was the last straw. Back to the library it goes.
And thank heavens for libraries where you can try out authors before you buy!

RSI never went away...

Another day of procrastination on the rewriting. Instead I did my tax. I must be getting desperate.
I have been spending a substantial amount of time and money lately visiting an osteopath. This came about because of neck problems (and shoulder problems, and lower back problems) and I finally decided it was time to take action.
Turns out that one of my significant problems is a knot of fibrous stuff on a muscle that, funnily enough, is the muscle most likely to be used when ... clicking a computer mouse. About 15 years ago, I managed to get RSI when I was working as a typesetter for a small printing company. A lot of rest, exercise, strength building, and care about keyboard use meant that the RSI has subsided to nearly nothing. Except ... now because I use the mouse a lot more for things like clicking on internet sites, email, online courses, discussion boards etc, I have managed to develop another problem.
And I've known for a long time that I tend to get "computer scrunch" which is generally caused by laptop use (bending the head forward over the keyboard while squinting at the screen). That cliche - all the chickens come home to roost - is taking on new meaning.
So now I will go and read my books on back care and Buddhism (because my stress/tension issues are making things worse), and then I will read my book on wombats (because we have one in the bush - poo piles are the evidence - and because I have a picture book about a wombat that I am working on).

Floods of Words

I think I'm having a mental revolt against rewriting. I have at least two things I need to be looking at seriously right now and rewriting, and I can't bear to go near them. Not that the rewrites are necessarily that difficult (especially when you have comments to help you along) but I just feel like I have spent nearly all of this year on rewrites. So I keep launching off into new stuff.
Finished a short story for the 'Age' newspaper short story competition. This is big deal stuff here. Writers who win this competition get asked by publishers for their (unpublished) manuscripts. Entry is free. The 'Age' is getting more and more secretive about advertising the closing date, hence this year they had to extend it because nobody knew about it.
Then a couple of different friends sent me information about a fantasy publisher in the US who is open to submissions of pirate short stories (for adults) for an anthology. I went to check out their website and discovered that they have another anthology/competition open right now, closing 15 October. I happened to have a short story that fitted their category guidelines, only it was barely half-finished. It had been sitting on my laptop for 6 months or more. Aha! I could surely write the other 1500 words and finish it in time?
Certainly could. Except when I started writing, it grew ... and grew ... and finished up at nearly 8000 words. Luckily their word limit was 10,000 - and I made the deadline!
Aren't deadlines wonderful things?
Now someone needs to give me deadlines for those rewrites.
On Saturday I ran another Children's Writers' forum at the uni where I work. We had 28 writers come along to listen to Lorraine Marwood talk about writing children's poetry (and teaching it), Carmel Heron from Harcourt Educational Publishers, and then a Picture Book Slam. That's where writers stand up and have three minutes (not a second more) to read their picture book to an audience who then vote for the winner.
It was a lot of fun, and was also a very interesting session.
The notes from Carmel Heron's talk will be up soon at our website:
www.staff.vu.edu.au/profwriting
Follow the links for the forum - other publisher's notes already up from previous days.
At the moment, for a little bit of research, I'm reading a few different books about Melbourne's underworld crime scene. There's a never-ending series called "Underbelly" by John Silvester and Andrew Rule, as a starting point. They cover other crimes as well as the "Melbourne mafia" stuff. I have to say the books are not nearly as well-written as the feature articles that both writers publish in the Melbourne newspapers. Makes me wonder if they've "dumbed down" the books for some reason.
However, they're perfect for taking into my Short Story 2 class as examples of straight non-fiction writing as compared to "creative non-fiction" and personal essays, especially in terms of style and language.

What is Good/Bad Writing?

In 2002 I went to a summer school at California State Uni at Fresno. It was two weeks devoted to children's writing, with tutors such as Janet Wong, Bruce Coville and Pam Munoz Ryan, among others. A fabulous two weeks, during which I learned much and was inspired to later write my first verse novel for children.
I also wrote 7,500 words of a YA novel while I was there, and workshopped some of it. The greatest surprise to me was when Alexandria LaFaye, the course leader, told me, "You write well but with not enough variety and style - look at the actual words and sentences you are using." So my next question was - how? How can you do that using a method that will then change and enhance your own writing?
As a class, we did some close reading, examining two pieces of writing, word by word. I have since researched this more and developed it into a method I use with my second year classes. But I also worked out a method of how to use it on my own writing, and do this also with classes. Each time, I test a piece of my own writing and am always very interested to see what comes out of it.
I'm reminded of all this by a post on a blog called Lit Agent X, where X lays out the common elements of bad writing, i.e. writing that is not yet publishable.
Go to http://raleva31.livejournal.com/ and have a look at the entry "Not ready for representation...?"
I plan to show this to my students, as it's a really good list of the kinds of stuff we see all the time, yet find it hard to "pin down". Although maybe that's because we see it over and over, and just haven't had the time to compile it as a list. Whereas this agent has offered information that cuts to the core of what is going wrong.
Thanks, Agent X!

Celebrity Picture Books

First Madonna, now Kylie. And this latest from Publishers Weekly (4/10/06):

'Terrell Owens, the troubled wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, is the latest celebrity to stamp his name on a book for children. BenBella Books, the four-year old independent publisher in Dallas, has scored his series, dubbed T.O.’s Time Out, and is crashing the first title, Little T Learns to Share, to reach stores on November 15, the height of football season.
Little T Learns to Share, which is co-authored by the television writer Courtney Parker, depicts the travails of Owens as a boy learning to share his new football with friends. The initial print run will be 10,000 copies, with a $20,000 publicity budget. IPG is distributing the book and handling publicity. "

I'm sorry, but Little T Learns to Share? In Australia, our version would have to be Big Famous AFL Footy Player Learns Not to Assault a Member of the General Public (Especially a Female).
All of you writers who've been told over and over not to write moralistic stories for kids? Obviously if you're famous, you get to tell anyone you like how to be a "good" person.
Hmm, it's Friday. You'd think I'd be in a better mood, wouldn't you?

Spring in the Australian Bush

Australian bush is mostly gum trees (in central Victoria, anyway). These photos are taken at Lancefield, about an hour north of Melbourne. Despite the green stuff, the government has just declared the bush fire season is off to an early start, and yesterday was our first total fire ban day.

The top photo shows you why gum trees suddenly keel over and land on stuff (including people) without warning. Inside the trunk, insects have been solidly at work. I could draw an analogy with writers in garrets, but I won't. Instead I have posted below about Voice.

When Your Voice Changes

Voice in fiction is a strange thing, almost nebulous. You hear editors say, 'I'm looking for a strong voice,' but they can't define exactly what it is. I've tried to define it in an article I wrote - needless to say the article is still in draft form because I'm not happy with what I came up with.
Some would say it's a combination of tone and style. Yep, OK. But it's deeper than that, I think. It brings in elements of the writer's own voice as well. Some writers deliberately change their voice in each work - others don't worry about it because it becomes part of how readers recognise them. And when you are writing in first person, in particular, how do you separate the narrator's voice from the voice of the writing? Can you?
Our obsession with first person these days both muddies the water and adds to the possibilities of what voice can do. What if you can't change your voice through style and tone? Can you change it via a different kind of narrator?
A novel gives you a lot of time and words to experiment with voice, and a lot of space in which to be inconsistent if you haven't nailed your character well enough. In short fiction and poetry, one story or poem can have a very distinctive voice. It's when you put a lot of them together that problems might arise. The following is a comment from a review of Cate Kennedy's new collection of short stories (Kennedy is well known here in Victoria, if nowhere else, for winning nearly every short story competition, including the Age twice, over a period of 2-3 years):

This is the problem with collections. Placed together, stories can rub together to create chemistry and a cumulative sense of ‘life’, but the risk is that their proximity can reveal shared flaws.

This is from a review by Delia Falconer which you can read at http://home.vicnet.net.au/~abr/Sept06/Falconer%20review.htm
You may be very accomplished at writing short fiction, but when a bunch of stories are read together, what can sometimes happen is a 'sameness' of voice emerges. In poetry, it tends to be a sameness of phrasing, chosen words, similar subject matter rehashed.
What originally led me to think about this was reading 'Just In Case' by Meg Rosoff this week. Like many others, I really liked her first novel 'How I Live Now'. In HILN, the point of view is first person and the story is being told by a narrator looking back. The language is often lovely in its descriptions, and emotion is created with a tight rein that makes it more effective. 'In 'Just In Case', however, Rosoff has apparently decided to change horses and gone for omniscient POV, moving between characters' thoughts and emotions yet always keeping the reader at arm's length. This may well have been a sensible choice, as the main character, Justin, dives into madness and first person POV could have been both smothering and unbelievable. But it left me feeling disgruntled with the book, quite distant from the characters and the story and often tempted to put it down and give up. I'll be interested to read reviews of it, especially after the first book was very positively reviewed by all except those who objected to the narrator having an affair with her first cousin!
A writer friend is currently struggling with the new Barry Maitland crime novel, quoting sentences which are truly awful to read, despite the precise punctuation (Question: how many clauses can a writer fit into one sentence and still make sense? A: depends - if you're Annie Proulx, as many as you like). I, on the other hand, found a Maitland I hadn't read in the library book sale for 50 cents, and thoroughly enjoyed it, up until the last thirty pages. Then the author seemed to suddenly decide he was short of a plot twist or two and piled in two more that seemed rather ludicrous, and then a character who proceeded to do the 'now, dear reader, here is the explanation of how it all happened'. Tsk tsk.

Talking Dialogue

Dialogue is one of those things that gets newer writers in a knot. "I can't write dialogue," they say. I don't get it. If you have ears and you can eavesdrop, you can begin to work on your dialogue. Eavesdropping tells you a few things - how people really speak (repetition, half-sentences, ums and ers, more 'likes' than you can poke a stick at, cliches, rambling) for one. So you learn not to write dialogue like this (no, not even if you have a mentally deranged character - readers will only put up with so much stylistic rubbish like that - get on with the story!) But you can get some great story ideas from those half-heard, half-unspoken conversations. The writer in you just fills in the gaps.
Listening to daytime soaps will also teach you about dialogue - how to be boring and repetitious and explain everything three times. That's the job of dialogue in soaps. It's not what you do on the page, because a reader who fell asleep and missed a bit can just flick back a couple of pages and read them again.
Watching movies with lots of silence in them - that's often very useful. Why? Because usually when there is some dialogue, it's packed with meaning and subtext.
Dialogue has a lot of jobs to do. I think that's why people freak out about it. It has to show character, provide information, move the story along, show emotion (so you don't need all those adverbial tags) and create action/reaction. And more. One way of looking at it is to think, Wow, dialogue is such a great tool. I can use it for all that stuff and I can avoid the dastardly disaster commonly known as [telling].
Why am I thinking about dialogue this week? Because this novel I'm playing with seems to have an awful lot of dialogue in it, and the suspicious, editorly part of me is shaking its head and saying, You need to watch that - remember how you complained about Jonathan Kellerman's last novel (Rage) because it told too much of the story through the characters chatting to each other?
Not to worry. I've run out of things to write for now, so I'm going to let that bit of fun and frivolity sit and contemplate its own toenails for a while. And go back to working on a rhyming picture book, just to make myself feel creative (not).
Finished Kathy Reichs (very enjoyable, apart from a bit at the end where the sheriff did a big explanation/info dump so us readers would know what happened - clunky). Am now reading "Fragrant Harbour" by John Lanchester. I've had it there for ages - lost under a pile of other stuff, like many things in my house - and suddenly found it the other day and thought Hong Kong! I have to read this. Because I am going back to HK in November to do more things with our new training business (writing and editing mainly) and would really like to know more about the history of the place.
How are my Mandarin lessons going? Very good (hen hao) thank you (xiexie). In last week's class I learned how to ask where the ladies' toilet is. And I know how to order two beers. Two vital sentences.
Maybe I should write my picture book in Mandarin. It might improve it.

Problem Child Novels

When do you abandon a novel, or a story, or a poem? A poem is easy to let go - and by let go I mean give up on it and put it away, probably forever. There are many poems that I write just for me. Sometimes they are warm-up poems - I might not have written any for a little while, and I need to write a couple of awful, cliched ones to get back into the language and the rhythms. Then I'll write one that I'm happy with, that I'll keep reworking.
Short stories take more time. Often with a story what I will have is a beginning, and the abandonment happens because I can never come up with the rest of it - the middle and the end - in a way that satisfies me. If you read enough short fiction, you come to see how much has been done before and I find now that unless I can create a story that feels different to me in some way, that is at least new for me, it won't hold my interest long enough to be completed and reworked.
The other problem story is the one that starts well, moves into the middle, then launches off into something that threatens to become a novel and I can't figure out how to rein it in. Or if I want to. That kind of story (I have one that's been sitting on my laptop for about six months now) becomes "I'll tackle that one tomorrow".
But what to do about the problem child novel? If it's not working because you don't care about it enough to wrestle through the problems, it's easy to put away and forget about.
It's when you've written six or eight drafts of it, the story still won't leave you alone, but you believe that you've done everything possible to fix whatever is wrong with it - and somehow it still is not working ... What then?
One solution is to put it away for a couple of years. Then read it and decide if it's worth another draft.
Another solution is to re-vision it - make it into something else entirely so you can see it with new eyes. This might mean changing from first to third person (or vice versa), changing the POV character, changing the genre, taking out the first three chapters and starting in the middle. What is sometimes needed is a huge shift in how the novel is going to work. A huge shift in the writer's own perception of it. Not always possible.
A novel contains a huge number of words, a huge investment of time. You look at the pile of pages and remember all the hundreds of hours you spent on it. How can it not be "right"? It must be, you think. It's just little things that another edit will fix.
But your heart and/or your gut tell you that it's something fundamental, something that maybe is not fixable. The voice is not convincing, the concept is laboured or boring or been done a million times before, the characters never really come to life. These are major problems. The kind that cause abandonment.
Hmmm, that all sounds very heavy and depressing for a Saturday morning.
On a lighter note, a writer friend and I have been discussing, via email, two stories recently published in the New Yorker. One is "Black Ice" by Cate Kennedy (an Australian short fiction writer whose first collection is just out) and the other is "Kansas" by Antonya Nelson. We've had opposite reactions to both stories! Email comments such as competent but not totally engaging, too much telling, characterisation too obvious, have been really interesting - and a good reminder of how everyone engages with stories in different ways. This often happens in class. A story can divide everyone down the middle, sometimes into hate and love!
I've just started the new Kathy Reichs novel, and am very relieved that she's moved away from the current obsession with religious artefacts and "what they really mean". Ergh. Wasn't the Da Vinci Code enough for anyone's lifetime?

What Else I Do

Ah, the holidays. Time to dust off the pile of books waiting to be read, put up my feet and read, read, read.
If only. In fact, I have been writing, but it's a letter to a planning officer about an application, and it's one of those things you have to psyche yourself up to, because it has to be diplomatic, direct yet polite, clear and concise - and all the while I just want to have a screaming hissy fit about it. But I guess that's one of the things that's good about being a writer - I can usually use words as my swords - the death of a thousand paper cuts. That's probably a cliche (two cliches, but who's counting?), but it fits.
I've also been finalising my tax (always a joy), and then having a little splurge at the wine supermarket to celebrate when all the icky, boring, stressful things are finished.
Writing? Yes. An adult novel. Just for a complete change. I have no expectations of it, I just like the main character, I have a good plot idea as a starting point (with a novel it's always just a starting point) and I am seeing where it might go. No pressure, just words when I feel like it. If I get stuck, I leave it alone for a while until a new idea emerges or the next scene develops in my head.
Unlike a certain other middle-grade novel of mine that a very kind, very experienced writer has just read for me and confirmed what I knew in my guts - start again.
But I have been reading - a book I have been meaning to get to for ages, ever since I heard its author, Kate Grenville, read it at last year's Melbourne Writers' Festival. Only took me a year. It is as good as I thought when I heard her read an excerpt - "The Secret River". Of course, it's already won tons of prizes but that's not something that makes me want to read something urgently. It was the words I heard last August. Fabulous language, strong voice, great description. A historical novel that totally captures the time and the people.
I am also still thinking about the Elizabeth George novel I read last week - "What Came Before He Shot Her". It is not an Inspector Lynley novel, so at first I thought, Huh? But once I got into it, it was amazing. Such an eye-opener about life in London in North Kensington - if I ever get to London again, I'll make sure that's one place I avoid. When a book and its characters stay with you for weeks afterward ... what more can I say?

What I Do In My Holidays

Living as a Writer

Don't be alarmed - this is not a post about trying to make a living as a writer. I don't have that many funny jokes in me this week. But my previous post about would-be writers not reading led one reader of this blog to send me a link to a Washington Post article. This was by a uni teacher who was astounded by the number of students who didn't know what relatively simple words meant - words such as affliction, for example. The guy put it down to a lack of reading - if you don't read enough, you simply don't come across these words in context and so you never get to "experience" them.
I've been having similar problems, and the most recent example was having to explain to a class what a canon of literature was. However, although I do see this as a problem for students who want to be writers, it's not a problem for me. I actually enjoy having to pull a definition out of my head (can't always guarantee one will be there, but then that's what dictionaries are for). I think where the issue lies for young writers is that without a good knowledge of the words that are available to them in creating their stories and novels, how are they going to write things that are a pleasure to read? Where do imagery, metaphors, similes, great description, style, tone etc come from, if not from your use of language? You can't argue that genre writers don't have to worry about that stuff, because the really good genre writers are doing exactly that!
In Short Story 2 I have recently inflicted a series of close reading and editing exercises on the students, amidst complaints. The exercises have been about examining language and sentence construction initially, delving into how a writer creates what is on the page by looking at a short excerpt, word by word (if you want to know how to do this, take a look at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~wricntr/documents/CloseReading.html and also at http://www.mantex.co.uk/samples/closeread.htm )
One of the excerpts I used, which they had to examine in minute detail, was from the latest Janet Evanovich. It had plenty of description, a great voice, and interesting, varied sentence constructions. Evanovich might be writing humorous crime but she knows how to write well and dismissing her as a simple genre writer is a mistake.
This week I made them do close editing on their own work, just one page. I probably sound like a pedantic, boring nit-picker, but I am convinced that until you engage with what a writer is doing at the micro-level (and that includes your own writing), you won't be able to improve your use of language, your understanding of how good writing works, and raise your writing to the next level. I did get the feeling that when I told them this, there were still disbelievers around the room, but at least I tried!
The other thing that we discussed briefly was what I call "living as a writer". What you do in order to become a better writer. Under this heading, I listed: reading widely and critically; writing lots and then writing more; being in a good critique group; being aware of the world around you and finding ideas in it; giving up other things in your life in order to have a decent amount of time for writing; informing yourself about the world of publishing, how it works, who does what and why, and then updating your information regularly; researching markets for your work so you don't waste your time and money or the publisher's.
I also know from experience that people don't take in information and knowledge until they are ready for it (usually at the moment when they need it), so I recommend a good library of books about writing. Not to read slavishly, but to delve into when I want someone else's point of view on point of view, or setting or dialogue.
It can take a few years to build up to a point where all these things become a natural part of your writer's life, but it's worth the effort.
P.S. One of my favourite student misuses of language is still the novel where the main character put moose in her hair. After a rewrite, the character then proceeded to put mouse in her hair.

Reading for What?

I've been on a literary fiction reading jag for about two months now, initially reading "The Dogs of Babel" and then moving on to other recommended books, including a list from Miss Snark's blog. Latest Snark book was "Winter's Bone" by Daniel Woodrell. Not what I expected at all. It's set in the Ozarks and is a stark novel about a girl trapped by her family and the environment - the family includes a crazy mother and two younger brothers, a father who has disappeared so that they are about to lose their house, and an extended family and community of hillbillies (sorry, can't think of another word to describe them but think Ozarks, isolation, closely-linked families), most of whom are high on crank. Reading this straight after "Diamond Dove", which was a similarly stark novel set in Aboriginal communities and an outback town, I needed a break. Both of these novels, by the way, were terrific in their own way, not what I thought they'd be, and strong reminders of what a writer can create when they really know the places and people they are writing about.
So I've launched into "Twelve Sharp", the new Janet Evanovich. The writing is clean, tight, funny (no, doesn't have great amounts of imagery but she does a great job of making me feel I'm right in that doughnut shop) and a welcome break for my brain.
It never fails to amaze me when someone who wants to be a writer says they don't read. I shouldn't be amazed because it happens regularly. Sometimes in classes I feel like I want to chain the students to a shelf of books and not let them go until they've read every one. Instead I set assignments where they have to read at least 3-4 books before they can write reviews or analyses or whatever, but hey - 3-4 books is so minimal as to be laughable. There are so many things that I gain, as a writer, from reading that I just don't understand those who refuse to take it on board. And the complaint (also heard a few times) that they don't want to be influenced accidentally is also wasted on me - the more widely you read, the less likely you are to accidentally "copy" someone. It's actually quite beneficial to deliberately try to copy someone's style as a writing "lesson". Hey, I had a Sylvia Plath period just like a lot of other poets I know!
What do I gain? Insights about style, about how writers use words differently, how sentences can be put together, how description can be threaded into a story without bogging it down, how dialogue can show character, how pacing works, how cliffhangers work, how much to put into a chapter, how to use different narrative devices and structures, how characters can be shown effectively, how to foreshadow, how to subplot ... need I go on?
The trick is to read like a writer. No, it doesn't destroy your reading enjoyment. Well, OK, it might for a while, but then you just get used to reading differently, and suddenly you are seeing all these other things behind the story - you're seeing the bones the writer used to hold up the flesh of "what happens". For me, it increases what I get from the book tenfold.
And when Miss Snark runs her Crapometer, it helps me see what is not working with those submissions, and why, and how I might fix that kind of problem if it comes up in my own writing.
As for the dreaded query letter, if nothing else, the current 100 victims of Miss Snark prove that less is definitely more. Now, if only my submission had been one of the 100...

Technology Tussles

It seems there is always something new to learn when dealing with computers. First I was introduced to Photostory which is a Microsoft thingy that is the next step up from Powerpoint. In fact, you could use it for a PP presentation and never have to say a word because it allows you to record a voice-over. Next will be a course on how to facilitate (jargon word - don't you love them?) online learning. In other words, how to create courses that people can study via the internet that won't bore them to tears and will give them what they want.
In the meantime, I'm about to film another interview for my Writing for Children subject, this one with a publisher. I already have a writer, an illustrator, an editor and an agent. If I could just master the video editing program, Premier Pro, I'd already have those videos finished and ready to show my class.
Yesterday, we bought an MP3 recorder in order to record the guest speakers we have for our industry class. I have it at home - my job is to figure out how to use it and download the files, and then I have to show everyone else and write instructions. If I do work out all the 'ins and outs', I may end up with a podcast of poems to put on my other site www.poetry4kids.net. We'll see how I go.
What am I reading? 'Diamond Dove' by Adrian Hyland. It's an Australian novel, set in the Northern Territory. The main character is a half-Aboriginal woman called Emily Tempest (yes, this is a white male writing this book). I think it is a terrific book - the descriptions of life in NT for Aboriginals are stark and vivid. The writer apparently lived up there in outback communities for years and it shows in the details. Emily is a great narrator, full of life and humour, and I'd give this one five stars (never thought I'd say that for an Australian novel!).
I have the new Janet Evanovich sitting there, and also the new Anne Tyler. The library sent me a note to say a copy of 'Winter's Bone' (Daniel Woodrell) is waiting for me. Where did all my reading time go? The trouble is, I'm used to spending at least an hour reading in bed every night. At the moment, I'm so tired I'm lucky if I manage 15 minutes. I need to get off the computer earlier, and have some time out for reading.

Launches

Five launches in seven days. Must be some kind of record (outside of conferences and book fairs, of course, where they happen every half hour). It's a record for me anyway. A combination of Children's Book Week and the Melbourne Writers' Festival. Launch 1 last Sunday was "Ebi's Boat" by Claire Saxby (ex-student of mine) and illustrated with beautiful water colours by Anne Spudvilas. A quiet, wistful story with plenty of room to enjoy the pictures and add your own thoughts.
Launch 2 - the online journal Divan which is created by Box Hill TAFE students and teachers and IT people. The site is not quite up yet, but we saw it on the screen. I have a poem in the new issue and read three poems at the launch, which was part of the Box Hill TAFE's writing festival at the Victoria Hotel. The Vic seems to be the favourite spot for writing things at the moment - the SciFi/Fantasy convention a couple of weeks ago was held there.
Launch 3 - the Society of Women Writers' anthology, launched by me. A lot of familiar names and faces and a lovely collection of poems and stories.
Launch 4 - Saturday afternoon - "India Vik" a collection of short stories by Liz Gallois (another ex-student - by ex- I mean they've finished studying the Diploma I teach in -wonderful to see they have gone on to be published). "India Vik" contains stories set in India, and is published by Transit Lounge, a new small publisher filling a niche in the market very effectively. Liz's stories are evocative and thought-provoking - and not too obscure and clever - a pleasure to read.
Launch 5 - a little later that day - "The Music Tree", a picture book by Catriona Hoy, illustrated by Adele Jaunn. Catriona organised a great launch at a primary school, and some of the kids played music to go with the story. Sorry to say that publisher Hachette (who bought out Lothian, the book's publisher) made a point of saying they did not support book launches. Is that corporate-speak for "we don't give a stuff about our authors"? We had a wonderful time all the same, and the book is lovely.
Today I went off to my master class with Kate Thompson (who assured us she is not the Kate Thompson who writes chick-lit). Many in the class were beginners but were brave and read out their work. It was a very interesting experience for me. I'm used to workshopping student writing where the first thing I do (because I can't help myself and because so many still are pretty hopeless at punctuation and grammar) is grab the pen and start correcting stuff. Today all I could do was listen. No pages in front of me. And it was so much easier to focus on the story, the action, the characters and what was or wasn't happening. True - we couldn't offer in-depth critiquing, but for most people that wasn't what they needed. They needed to know what was and wasn't working in the story itself. It gave me much food for thought.
I read most of the first chapter of a novel I have been struggling with. Struggling in terms of getting it to say what I wanted, and also to work out what I was really saying. I've had other comments that have indicated the whole thing is confused and has too much in it. I just got to the point where I no longer knew if was any good, if it was worth rewriting yet again. Now I think it is. Some of the comments showed me what I already knew but hadn't got to grips with.
I've been reading a blog or two recently that have said things like "If you think editors or publishers might be reading your blog, that last thing you should be doing on it is saying how badly you are writing, or what problems you are having". So here I am, breaking the rules. I'm not writing this for publishers. I doubt any publishers would take the time to read this. I'm writing this for other writers who grapple with the stuff I grapple with - that we all grapple with. (All that grappling conjures up awful images!)
And I write it for myself. Like a sounding board. I hear what I say, and I move onward and upward.

Songwriting

My poetry students were keen to learn songwriting. Around 15 years ago I wrote about eight songs for a rock musical - I wrote the lyrics, a composer wrote the music. Neither of us had done it before. He wrote a lot of music for instruments only, especially keyboards and pianos. We muddled along, created some awful songs and then gradually got the hang of it. By the last song, I was pretty happy with the result.
How on earth do you teach that muddling process to students? So I took myself off to a songwriting workshop that happened to pop up just when I needed it. It confirmed what I originally did all those years ago - it's about playing around, experimenting, trying things out until you find what works for you.
Great. And how do I teach that? Especially after finding out that only two people in the whole class could read music, none can write it in any form. So I spent ages choosing examples of classics for them to listen to, in order to look at how the songs are constructed, how the music figures in, what is a riff, what is a bridge, etc.
Well, either they're getting better at faking "blank and bored" or very little I said connected.
I am left wondering whether they thought I was going to give them a magic formula of some kind. After 8 months of poetry with me ... some chance.
Next week they have to bring in a song they like, with lyrics printed out, so we can discuss the writing process further. Then they're going to have to put their money where their mouths are (yes, we did talk about cliches too) and write something.

Procrastination

I can use anything as a procrastination tool, but not usually blogging. However, I am still tearing my hair out over that short chapter book and instead of working on it this morning, I'm blogging. Sigh...
One problem with it is the word length - I need to get it down to around 1800-1900 words, and no matter what I do, the darned thing insists on sticking at 2200. There is one early scene I could delete, but it's a scene that at this point sets up a central tension builder. If I take it out, I'm not sure how else to create tension. An early comment from an editor was that the story was a bit "flat". So now I'm in crisis about how to create more excitement and build it up more.
Usually I'd go back to the main character and create more internal conflict and lead in from there. With 1900 words hanging over my head like a sword, I'm feeling stuck. So here I am, blogging instead (and having a long, whiney noise echoing inside my head - oh, that's not me - that's the guy cutting and fitting the skirting boards with his power saw).
In class at the moment, students are doing what we call "oral presentations". No, they're not sticking out their tongues and saying "Ah". They're giving a prepared talk to the class on a topic. Students hate them, but in this world where the author is expected to be a publicity machine, or at the very least be able to do press and radio interviews without sounding like an imbecile, it's a torture they'll thank us for later. I think. It's also a great way of sharing information. One class is giving talks on children's authors, another on poets. We get to hear about a lot of authors and poets that we otherwise wouldn't (especially when a student chooses someone whose books they love and everyone else has never heard of them).
Today the poetry students will be tackling the sestina. They've done really well so far - villanelles, pantoums, sonnets, prose poems. And after the sestina, the haibun.
I have inflicted close reading on my Short Story 2 class - I say inflicted because many of them have been quite resistant to the pleasures and excitement of actually being able to see how a writer creates voice, style and tone on a page. OK, so I don't get out much, but I think it's wonderful, and every time I do it with a class, I learn more myself. Last year's class loved doing it too. This year ... let's just say I'm not sure I have convinced them of the benefits. Yet. Maybe I'll ask them tonight what they think. They do tend to be honest.
All right, enough of this. Back to the chapter book.

I'm Practicing Titles

Let's do the link first so if I lose the post, it's only a few words.
Poetry4kids - my new website is finally up and running. There are still some items missing (because I haven't written them yet or compiled the information from my files, but I'm really glad I finally completed it. I had asked a student in the course next door (IT) if she would like to create the site for her class assignment. She did a good job, but in the end I decided to change the main page and make it tighter and cleaner. I did use her banners and links though, and taught myself hotspots and a few other things. Even wrestled with Fireworks a little (a fight I usually lose).
The site is designed primarily to encourage teachers to use poetry more in the classroom, especially in getting kids to have fun with it and write more, but also to promote children's poets as great visiting writers. Poets are usually good performers and have lots of writing experience with poems. So check out the site, if you like. There are also some poems there from my new verse novel "Sixth Grade Style Queen (Not!)" which is being published in May 2007 by Penguin.
On the reading front, I've just finished "The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri and loved it. This is one of the titles I got off Miss Snark's blog as a good read. I've also still got "The Kite Runner" there and will try it again.
One of my students (now ex- as she has finished the course) has her first novel coming out next week, launched at the Writers' Festival. It's "India Vik" by Liz Gallois. The publisher is Transit Lounge, and I discovered last year that TL is owned by an old community writing/librarian friend of mine, Barry Scott. He is specialising in travel books, either fiction or non-fiction. His first title out last year was the book on Mexico by Cate Kennedy. This kind of niche publishing is excellent, and makes good sense in a book market cluttered with ten thousand versions of the Da Vinci Code.
As for teaching, well, the honeymoon is over and the first lot of assignments are in, ready for marking. Guess what I'll be doing this weekend. I'll also be painting skirting boards (don't know what these are called in other countries but they're the boards that go around the bottoms of your walls that cover up all the gaps!), and hopefully will be reading Draft 8 of my pirate novel. A cut and polish read. Before sending it out. It has had enough time to settle, and now I can hopefully look at it with fresher eyes. This book has been through so many major changes, but it still feels a little too familiar. I hope I can be critical enough.
And the short chapter book was workshopped by my group this week and needs another rewrite. Of course.

There is nothing more infuriating than creating a post and then losing it, which is what happened yesterday. All because I decided to italicise a word. Lo and behold, the whole post disappeared and would not come back. At least on your computer you have a chance at retrieval sometimes. So now I have to work on the memory cells and try to retrieve at least some of yesterday's post from my brain. Hmmm.
The topic initially was a short chapter book I am trying to rewrite, specifically because I sent it off in haste to a publisher, without giving it time to sit and time for me to get my critical faculties in order. The manuscript came winging back (as they do) and I realised that yet again, the urge to get it out there had taken over my common sense.
It's a common problem, I think. We get caught up in the rush of having not only written something but finished it. And we are so pleased and excited and are so sure it's wonderful, just the way we envisioned it ... so we pop it in the envelope (or attach it to the email) and away it goes.
And there it is, zinging right back again. With comments such as "the story felt a bit flat" and "the characters weren't different and developed enough". Luckily I have a good writer friend who had a look at it and made some helpful suggestions. The next step was to sit down and tackle it. That's when the little voice starts - "maybe the story isn't any good anyway" and "maybe your writing skill isn't going to be up to fixing it". I had just read an article about the golfer, Brett Ogilvie, and he talked about those voices on the golf course, and how you have to replace them with positive voices. Ignoring the negatives doesn't work well enough. So I put a positive voice in place - "just look at the story, work out some ideas on how to improve it, and leave the writing part for now - use some thinking power!"
Yes, I did just that. The rewriting lies ahead, but at least I know where to start. One step at a time.
I finished "The New Policeman" and decided I liked it. I didn't really "get" the music bits but then I'm not a musician and can't read the music so it was wasted on me! I have got one of the Switchers books from the library and am about to read it with great interest. As I'm doing the masterclass in 3 weeks with Kate Thompson, I had better read some of her other books.

I seem to be stuck on reworking short things at the moment, while the two novels I want to revise hover somewhere just out of reach, and the new novel I want to attempt Chapter Two of seems to be over the mountain and far away.
House renovations are nearly finished, which means painting is nearly finished. I am down to window frames, doorways and fixing up the little bits where I missed patches or did crooked lines. Or accidentally splattered a bit of paint where it wasn't supposed to go. Soon the fridge will go back in the kitchen where it belongs and I will stop wandering into the lounge room to get margarine, milk, wine etc out of the darn thing and then forgetting what I went for. It's not Alzheimers, it's renovation brain vague-out.
The Melbourne Writers' Festival is coming up in 3 weeks. A new director this year and lo and behold, the first thing she does is take the bookshop out of the main building to free up cafe room and standing/chatting room (and that takes those totally ridiculous book-signing queues out too), put the bookshop outside in a marquee, and put another cafe space in another marquee. Yahoo! This is after about 5 years of people complaining endlessly to the ex-director who seemed totally deaf to everyone's screams of frustration at the sardine-tin-like venue.
Another change - good gracious, there are several sessions on poetry instead of just one. And the session times are staggered so everyone is not coming in and out at the same time (creating an even bigger sardine can).
Not so sure about the guests this year though. Are they worth paying for? (Adelaide's Writers' Festival is still free). But there are master classes on offer - a first - and I have signed up for the session with Kate Thompson, whose children's novel "The New Policeman" won two big awards in the UK last year.
I'm reading it at the moment and am not exactly bowled over by it, but it's getting better as I go along. I'll have to find some of her other books to read as well.
I'm also doing a short workshop this week on songwriting. Not because I want to write songs, but because my poetry class all want to, and I don't know enough about it to tell them anything useful, even though I did write a number of songs for a rock musical about 15 years ago. Writing a few lyrics doesn't necessarily mean you can tell other people how to do it. Especially if, like me, you don't play a musical intrument of any kind, or read music. I was lucky enough to work with a great composer who helped me a lot. So off I go to learn some new stuff, I hope.
Finished the Nicole Krauss novel "The History of Love" and decided I did like it, despite the confusion she created over the time-jumps. There are mostly two viewpoint characters, Leopold who is the old man and Alma the young girl. A lot of the story is about their unrealised connection and how they eventually get to meet, but I thought that running the novel on two different timelines got too confusing. Alma's sections are dated, leading me to believe that Leopold's sections ran in the same time zone, but in fact most of the time I think he is ahead of her. But I'm not 100% sure about that! So when Leopold's son dies, it happens for L and A at different times.
It's a novel that needs a bit of concentration, and a fair amount of puzzling out who is who and what is going on. But overall I liked it, and thought it was worth the struggle. I especially liked Leopold and his ventures into life modelling!
I am trying to read "The Kite Runner" but am probably not giving it a fair go. For something different I'm reading a book called "The Human Face" which is about how our faces develop and why they are different, what we see in faces, how we interpret facial gestures. Great photos, and it is inspiring a series of poems.