post-teen trauma

Sometimes

2012-01-29T00:11:00.000-08:00

All the writing happens in your head and the soundtrack is so good you can't breathe ...

More songs that should be novels

2012-01-25T21:56:00.000-08:00

Amelia O'Donohue is SO NOT a Virgin

2012-01-24T16:45:00.000-08:00

I thought I would do the Australian Women Writers Book Challenge because it can't hurt. So my aim is to review 12 books - one for each month of this year.

AMELIA O'DONOHUE IS SO NOT A VIRGIN by Helen Fitzgerald
(Sourcebooks, US 2010)

"I never tell other people's secrets...."

Rachel lives on a ~~floating prison~~ island in Scotland with her emotionally retarded parents. All she wants to do is go to Aberfeldy Halls, the best senior boarding school in the highlands but her parents seem intent on keeping her isolated. Then after a fateful incident at the local dance involving a boy with a sandpaper tongue and some Irn-Bru Rachel is banished to the school of her dreams. '"Oh delicious eclectic new world!" where she immediately becomes the repository of half the school's secrets. This does something to her already fractious mental state and i can't tell much more except to say that if you like books that are funny, fast and have dodgy narrators you will love this book. From the cover I thought it was going to be a kind of Catholic school Heathers (which in itself would be cool) but there's a whole lot of other stuff happening in Rachel's story than the girl-crush/jealousy alluded to in the blurb ... anyway, she had me with the tampon trauma page 10.

Helen Fitzgerald grew up in a crazy-big Catholic family in Kilmore but now lives in Scotland. She mostly writes dark, funny crime fiction and this is her first YA - I've read four of her books now (lucky she writes fast) and find her 'voice' confessional, deluded, scabrous, daft, but always likable. Can't wait to read the next one.

GIVEAWAY!
As one of my other resolutions of 2012 is to increase my book trafficking, I'm giving away my copy So if you'd like to snag it please tell me a secret in the comments. I will draw one out of a hat and send you this fine book!

Signal Creative Journaling Workshop for Teens

2012-01-22T20:32:00.000-08:00

The Secret Life of Me

Journaling is the process of putting what's in your mind onto the page using art, text and mixed media. Writers and artists have long used journals as a testing ground and springboard into other creative forms. Make journals using recycled materials and explore new ways into writing to create a visual and textual time capsule of who you are now.

Facilitators Simmone Howell and Lisa D'Onofrio are experienced wordsmiths, paper-fanciers and art seekers.

Dates and time: Thursdays in March from 5pm - 7pm
Program kicks of March 1

Contct Signal to book your place

2012-01-22T06:10:00.000-08:00

I made a Notes from the Teenage Underground page on facebook. I thought I'd post content relevant to the book, really just another excuse to spend hours on youtube ... see here I also made a page for myself as author person here

modern movies, anyone?

2012-01-10T02:06:00.000-08:00

I had an email from a reader (Hi Susanna) who said do you REALLY think most modern movies are rubbish? I probably should put a qualifier on that, say most Hollywood "blockbuster" movies are rubbish or most rom-coms are rubbish. I didn't love Bridesmaids at all for example, but recently I've seen some rippers. They are:

Submarine
d.Richard Ayoade
Looks great, lovely nerdboy with serious hair, enigmatic smoker girl with mean streak, noah taylor, NOAH TAYLOR! and Paddy Considine playing a new-ager with high pants and a terrible mullet. I laughed out loud more than once and sighed when it was all over. When I think about Notes from the Teenage Underground being a film, this is the sort of feel I dream of...

The Future
d. Miranda July
I loved Me & You and Everyone We Know, so I thought I'd probably like this - and I did. Lots. I was hunched forward not wanting to miss a breath. The story seems to be about nothing, ends up being about the end of intimacy and the human condition, alienation, weirdness, loneliness. All that sweet stuff.

Critic's Choice
d. Don Weis
The most awesome thing about school holidays is all the ace old films they haul out. Yesterday Jeremiah Johnson was on! So, not modern but I thought still timely what with 2012 being the unofficial Year of the Woman Writer. Lucille Ball is married to Bob Hope. He's a theatre critic and she's a housewife ... but then she starts writing a play. He thinks it's crapola and then says he's going to review it and then there's all sorts of pain and suffering ... the subtext is pretty much that Bob Hope wants a shag and Lucille Ball's not available because she's writing. ... Sometimes when I watch these old films I can't believe how the world must have been for women ... I so would have been a beatnik. (They still had to do the dishes though ...)

Anyway. My movie mojo is revitalised. Please send me your recommendations!

Seconds

2012-01-03T04:41:00.001-08:00

Watching: Secondsd. John FrankenheimerFrankenheimer told Gerald Pratley in 1969:Many of my films concern the individual trying to find himself in society and trying to maintain his individuality in a mechanized world. I do feel that society wants everybody to be exactly the same. It's so much easier. I think the theme of the indomitability of the human spirit is very much there, and the fight against regimentation.When we talk about life my philosophy is that you have to live your life the way it is. You can change it but you can't change who you are or what you've done before. And you have to live with that. I think that point was very well brought out in Seconds, that's what the film is all about.Via: http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/62/62seconds.php

melancholy new year

2012-01-03T02:04:00.000-08:00

Barry Gifford on writing longhand

2012-01-02T14:44:00.000-08:00

"When I write a novel, I don’t necessarily plan it out, I don’t know what’s going to happen. But as I go, things occur to me and I note them down, on another piece of paper or in the margins, so that I’m going to get to that part. And that’s as much as I’m willing to do. I’ve never made an outline in my life.

I’ll say this much. I write in longhand. Then I reread it. As I reread it, I make changes. Those are two drafts. Then I move it to the typewriter. I still use a manual typewriter. On the typewriter it undergoes another change. Three drafts. Then I reread that. I make changes, by hand most of the time. Four drafts. Then I make a final copy, on the manual typewriter again. That’s the fifth draft. If you then include changes which might be made in galley proofs—that could be six, even seven drafts.

Now people write on computers, people work in different ways. I never even owned an electric typewriter. I didn’t like the hum; I didn’t like the idea of being plugged into the wall. I didn’t want the insistence of that. I don’t want the computer staring at me. To me it’s very tactile, writing is a physical event, it’s a physical activity. I like to hold the paper and the pencil or the pen. It’s corporeal. It’s a living being, the manuscript. I wouldn’t know what to do without it."

–Excerpted from an interview by Thomas A. McCarthy, included in The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile Room: A Barry Gifford Reader, June 30th–July 2nd, 2002

favourite reads of 2011

2011-12-30T05:19:00.000-08:00

Urk, I have been on and off goodreads that many times. I can't cop to the star ratings so now am back on not giving anyone any stars, which feels a mite churlish, but anyway...

My favourite reads of 2011:

why we broke up by daniel handler& moira kalman
dream school by blake nelson
please ignore vera dietz & everyone sees the ants by A.s King
fall for anything by courtney summers
imaginary girls by nova ren suma
a monster calls by patrick ness
imagination of the heart by barry gifford
the end of everything by megan abbott

I also loved reading the novella of 'brick' by rian johnson (you can download from his website)

yours?

merry all that

2011-12-22T03:41:00.000-08:00

Merry Xmas or Happy Hanukkah or Sweet Nothing day. I hope Santa brings you lots of books not bought at Big W. I am about to have a significant birthday. I have chocolate and Miranda July's movie. And this is just to say thanks for reading, commenting, seeking and supporting. Whether you came for the funzies or my circular updates on never-ending book three, I hope you have a good one.

Progress ...

2011-12-12T16:02:00.000-08:00

Perry Comopetered out and Nancy put on Peggy Lee doing Is that all there is. She sang along and aimed her operaglasses down at the street. After a bit she stopped singing. “She looks sad.Why does she look so sad?“

I didn’t need theglasses to know she was talking about the girl on the wall. The poster hadappeared a few weeks earlier. It was a stencil of a girl’s face, three feethigh, opposite the shop: white face, dark hair and eyes. Her lips were slightlyparted, and three black tears trailed down her cheek.

“I saw anotherposter outside Beany’s.” I said. “Same, but smaller.”

“I’ll bet she’s amodel or a singer. Ray‘ll know. Ray knows everything.“

Raywas Nancy’s landlord. He sold books on a blanket near the St Kilda market. He wasgood for pulps but hard to look at, being morbidly obese with eyes that wenteverywhere except where you’d expect. His mouth was always open, shelling factsand spit and according to Nancy his at-home wardrobe consisted of a shortkimono that left nothing to the imagination.

Reading at Castlemaine Word Mine

2011-12-06T14:44:00.001-08:00

Our next monthly reading is on Wednesday December 14 at 7.30pm for an 8pm start, at the Anglican Church Parish Hall on the corner of Kennedy & Forest Sts (enter via the side street on Forest St – here’s a map)
We’re excited to be featuring readings from poet (and Word Mine board member) Lisa D’Onofrio, and young adult author Simmone Howell.
We’re also featuring our regular open mic section, with a limit of 2 minutes or (1 piece under 2 minutes), as well as a book swap (bring a book you want to pass on and take one home for yourself) and a raffle.
If you’ve got an event coming up in the area that you’d like us to give a plug to on the night, come along and tell us about it, or leave a comment here and we’ll make sure we announce it.
Entry is via gold coin donation and memberships will be available on the night as well. The event is BYO, but we can provide glasses.
So come along. Bring a poem to read, something to drink, a book to swap, a coin to donate, your lucky socks to score you the raffle prize and your best pair of listening ears for the words that will be on offer.
See you there!

All the Weird Girls

2011-12-01T15:35:00.001-08:00

Rookie had a whole month on girl gangs - so I thought I'd add mine to the ether.

I always wanted to be in a girl gang. I think it was becauseof Grease. I had the fotonovel and I thought Marty Maraschino was the bomb. She looked great in pedal pushers,and she didn't have to think. A couple of years later I saw Foxes on late nightTV. It's about four teenage she-heathens running around Hollywood in spandex,scoffing quaaludes and insluting Scott Baio. Again, I wanted to be the mostfoxy of the foxes, Dierdre, purely because she was able to seduce a bagboy witha tub of yoghurt. Girl gangs wereglamorous. All through school I yearned for campadres.I had the two best friends but in the rule ofthirds, somehow I was never the hot point. If you read too many sex'n'shopping novels off the grown-up's shelf you start tothink that there are only four kinds of girl: the good girl, the bad girl, thesexy girl and the funny girl. But then you find the weird girls and the worldopens up. Here are some of my favourites:

Thee Headcoatees
They look cool because they don't give a fug. They'resinging Billy Childish's songs and it's like he created this awesome girlmonster. I can't believe they are sidekicks, wingladies, girls-behind-the-man.When I listen to them I feel like someone took a stopper out somewhere and itthrills me.

The Touchables

Bonkers modpiece written by Donald Cammell (who wrotePerformance and was no stranger to weird). Three swinging chicks kidnap apopstar and keep him in their plastic dome house and have their ways with himand the dialogue's pretty awful and I can't remember how it ends because it'spossible that I wandered off, but you know, cool cars and a waxwork effigy ofMichael Caine and a supremely nice soundtrack does a lot to redress thebalance.

Foxfire
Moody novel by Joyce Carol Oates, a memoir about a girl gangin upstate new york in the 1950s. It's full of hero worship and evil andor/repressed grown ups. It crackles with camaraderie and competition. Take noprisoners! I read this as a teenager and totally wanted to go into recruitment,but like Lou Reed says, Those were different times. This was made into a filmstarring Angelina Jolie but the book is so much better. The book you can feel.

The GTOs
Freaky-deaky girl group 'groomed' by Frank Zappa, mostlyfamous because they included Miss Pamela Des Barres, super-groupie, author,ebay seller, optimist. So maybe there are four kinds of girl and then theGTOs. You can still pick up copiesof their album, Permanent Damage, but the reality doesn't quite match thedream.

The Shaggs

Sisters who formed a band, songs written by their Dad. Sometimes sublime. Apparently there has been a screenplay about their life in development forever - I remember reading a great piece about them by Susan Orlean. Serious bangs.

one of these things is not like the other thing

2011-11-27T18:08:00.001-08:00

1. treehouse. It's awesome. I think I will move in there for the summer.

2. dr feelgood.
Julian Temple's documentary Oil City Confidential is great. Look at those hard men! look at the girls dancing! look- lee brilleaux might explode!

3. How good is Teenage Bedrooms? Each one like a novel.

4. mondays.
I have been having problems with them all year. I shouldn't even be blogging but I am waiting for my spinach to defrost so I can eat something with iron in it and then write popeye-ishly.

Castlemaine Readings and Writing

2011-11-16T19:48:00.001-08:00

This week I attended the first of a series of readings at the Castlemaine Word Mine. The theme was "Out of the Blocks' and the readers were Robyn Annear and Adam Ford. Robyn Annear read from Mrs Bradley's Melbourne, a miscellany (I guess you could call it a miscellany) - offcuts and observations of Melbourne's history. Just great, weird, funny and I learned a new word.

Then Adam Ford read some poetry from his collection, The Third Fruit is a Bird. Adam's work drifts around nerdy romantic waters - always surprising and never ordinary. Then there was a break and then open mic. I had forgotten about open mics - they appeal to the ethnographer in me. This idea that everyone has something in them they're trying to get out ...

The next Castlemaine Word Mine reading is on December 14th and I will be reading something on the theme of Red. Eek. I may have to take beta blockers or at least magnesium. Consider yourself invited.

And this: I have discovered a blog that I recommend for all writers: http://writingalife.wordpress.com/

It's by author Louise De Salvo who wrote Writing as a Way to Healing among other books. She writes about how we have to be nicer to ourselves and how writing a book is a long long process and you can't really expect it to be otherwise if you're trying to attempt anything of depth. But sometimes everything aligns and makes the process quicker. I truly hope my next book will be like that.

In one post De Salvo writers on Sylvia Plath. She spent a long time reading her work and trying to find out why she killed herself (in as much as you can know such a thing) and one of her points is that Plath did everything the hard way (raising bees, canning fruit, living in a cold cold place and having impossible expectations). I'm reading lots of Sylvia Plath and other female writers for a project for next year, so it was fantastic to read De Salvo's insights...

Anyway. Back to it. Hope your week has been a good one. I have had one of those weeks where can't leave Book Depository alone. It think it's that coming-up-to-Christmas-spending-frenzy that I always seem to fall prey to. I am thinking of having a little book stall on this blog - do you think it would work?

less blogging more tumblr-ing

2011-11-13T16:51:00.001-08:00

http://www.girldefective.tumblr.com

november-ish

2011-11-07T05:47:00.000-08:00

1. I'm watching This is England 86. *shivers*

2. Also listening to Bill Callahan and Alasdair Roberts. You would never see a music festival like this in Australia. We need our beers and zinc and stupid.

3. I read Vicki Wakefield's All I Ever Wanted and thought it great. A YA novel set in a world that was like a reverse Ramsey St. Mim has rules to live by but over nine days she starts breaking them for reasons she never could have anticipated. Great characters, grit and heart. Also nice to read something slender. I like a slender book.

4. Other stuff: Writing, yes. A possible second vegie patch. Planning for summer CJ workshop. Thinking about ways to find and then justify $900 to purchase a spiral staircase for the treehouse. Planting trees. Listening to things running around the roof. Wondering how much water can get into the bathroom walls before it becomes a problem. Walking the dog. Taking photos of like, nature.

Happy Halloween

2011-10-31T03:38:00.000-07:00

One from the vault!

needful things

2011-10-25T20:50:00.000-07:00

Daylesford Creative Journaling Workshop

2011-10-20T23:33:00.000-07:00

Sunday, October 30 - Daylesford

A one-day workshop to inspire and invigorate your writing.
Does your writing need a boost? Do you want to learn some new ways into wording your vision? Come join us in bucolic Daylesford for a one-day workshop. Creative Journaling is the act of exploring your thoughts, feelings and responses on the page. Lisa D‘Onofrio (poet and lifecoach) and Simmone Howell (author) will help you draw from your creative well with the tools you have at hand. Suitable for those already on the writer‘s path or those just beginning. For more information feel free to call on the number below.

When:
October 30
Where:
The Reader, Daylesford
Time:
10am- 3.30pm
There will be tea and cake, and a break for lunch (BYO)
Cost:
$120$100 concession
All enquiries:
writeasrain@zoho.com
Phone: 0401097599

Creative Journaling is Lisa D'Onofrio and Simmone Howell, two writer/educators based in regional Victoria. We run hands on, informative, inspiring workshops to reinvigorate your personal and creative writing. Our workshops are designed to give balance to reflection and action. We like mindfulness and autumn leaves, Plath and Dylan, tea and cake and freshly sharpened Derwent pencils.

bower book (inside)

2011-10-18T22:50:00.000-07:00

Night of the Hunter

2011-10-11T17:46:00.000-07:00

I am reading Davis Grubb's The Night of the Hunter. The film has long been a favourite but the book is so solemn and beautiful, like a noir fairytale. I think its a predecessor for Winter's Bone.

Some quotes*:

"Willa's poor, thin hands were knotted into tight blue fists. The knuckles shone white like the joints of butchered fowl"

"It was not a knowing that he could share with anyone. It was a secret that was a little world of its own. A terrible little world like an island upon whose haunted beach he wandered alone now, like a solitary and stricken Crusoe, while everywhere about him his eyes would find the footprint of the dangling man ..."

"And it was probable that when Miz Cunningham like an ancient barn owl fluttered and flapped to earth at last, they would take her away and pluck her open and find her belly lined with fur and feathers and the tiny mice sculls of myriad dreams ..."

*(but seriously, I want to type out the whole book - and I might yet.)

Anatomy of a Novel: A Brief History of Montmaray

2011-10-09T02:18:00.000-07:00

Anatomy of a Novel: A Brief History of Montmaray
Guest post by Michelle Cooper

Islands

I grew up on an island in Fiji and spent a lot of my holidays climbing over rocks and into caves, collecting driftwood, messing about on boats, and trying not to get killed by sea snakes, falling coconuts and sudden tide changes. However, my main inspiration for the fictional island of Montmaray came from the Isles of Scilly, an archipelago at the southernmost tip of England. The wild weather, shipwrecks, fleeing aristocrats, stone fortifications and puffins of Montmaray were all borrowed from the history of the Isles of Scilly. To make my story plausible, I also needed to know about everyday island life (How do residents get their mail? What do they use for fuel? What happens when someone gets sick?), so I spent a lot of time reading about modern communities in the Pitcairn Islands, the Channel Islands and the Azores.

Castles

Who wouldn’t want to live in a castle? It would be awesome – apart from the icy draughts whistling through the cracks in the walls, the damp stone floors, the tiny windows and the antique plumbing. I’ve never seen a real castle because I’ve never visited Europe, but luckily, there are lots of books about the subject. My favourite is The National Trust Book of British Castles by Paul Johnson, which traces the history of British castles from Iron Age forts to nineteenth century ‘imitation castles’ such as Balmoral. Whether you need to know what an ‘aumbry’ or a ‘quoin’ is, or just want to gaze at hundreds of beautiful photographs and illustrations, this is the book for castle fanciers.

The Holy Grail and Otto Rahn

The story of the Holy Grail has everything – a mythical treasure, knights on a noble quest, modern-day conspiracy theories, even Nazis. Those Indiana Jones films weren’t completely fictional, because Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, really was obsessed with finding the Holy Grail. In the 1930s, the Nazis funded an organisation called the Ahnenerbe, which attempted to prove the superiority of the Germanic race. One of their researchers was a young historian named Otto Rahn. He had such a bizarre career and died so young, in such mysterious circumstances, that I couldn’t resist weaving him into my story.

Portuguese Water Dogs

I first read about these dogs years ago and was fascinated by them. Portuguese Water Dogs have webbed feet, large lungs and strong muscles, making them excellent swimmers and divers, and they were traditionally used by Portuguese fishermen to herd fish into nets, retrieve objects dropped overboard, and carry messages to other boats or to land. The breed is described as clever, loyal and full of energy, so I thought a Portuguese Water Dog would be a perfect companion for the royal children of Montmaray. At the time I was writing the book, the dogs were a fairly rare breed, but just before A Brief History of Montmaray was released in North America, President Obama’s family acquired a Portuguese Water Dog called Bo. The puppy was given to the Obamas by Senator Ted Kennedy, who had several Portuguese Water Dogs of his own. Young Teddy Kennedy met the FitzOsbornes and their dog Carlos in the late 1930s, when he and his family lived at the American Embassy in London – which is when the future senator developed his love of the breed.**This last sentence is not actually true.

The Famous Five

One of the early reviews of A Brief History of Montmaray described it as the Brontës mixed with the Famous Five. After I’d finished feeling insulted (about the Enid Blyton bit, not the Brontës), I realised the reviewer had a point. A group of cousins. A tomboy. A dog. A mad uncle. An island, a cave, secret tunnels, Cornish smugglers, and foreign villains searching for hidden treasure. All those Famous Five books I read as a child clearly had more of an effect on me than I’d realised.

Giant Squid

Most novels can be improved by the addition of a giant squid. For example, The Great Gatsby is a very good novel, but imagine how much better it would be if there was a giant squid living in Gatsby’s swimming pool. I like giant squid because they lurk about mysteriously at the bottom of the ocean and make good metaphors.

http://www.michellecooper-writer.com/

Bower Book Madness!

2011-10-07T23:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I ran the Make a Bower Book session at the Castlemaine Children's Literature Festival. The session was booked out. The workshop called for participants aged 12+ but most of them turned out to be younger - this wasn't a problem, it was in fact a delight, and it makes me wonder about the optimum age-group for this kind of workshop. I think because my books are for older teens, I always envisage these workshops with older teens in mind, but this group being slightly younger felt absolutely right. Everyone went home with a near-finished book and the results were fantastic. The slideshow doesn't really do it justice, but will give you some idea. What I loved is that even though most of the materials used were impersonal to the maker, they became personal through use ... I hereby express my love for fat black bookbinding tape and secret envelope pockets and arnos fasteners!

Castlemaine Charm 5: Castlemaine Library

2011-10-03T17:03:00.000-07:00

Before we moved to Castlemaine there were a few things on the checklist like was there good coffee (yes - there's a whole coffee emporium!) Was there a swimming pool (yes! ... not Olympic but quiet) but, most important, was there a library? YES!

Some things I love about Castlemaine library: the vibe is hallowed yet cosy. It feels like I could have important thoughts here, but also if my son starts jamming buttons on the photocopier no one's going to hurt me. If by some strange accident I was trapped in here for a night I would be fine. I would just read a book about artist's maps or home-made houses and sleep on the cushions in the kids section. The YA section has its own alcove - this is important! The DVD selection is good and free. FOCAL (Friends of the Castlemaine Library) have excellent book sales. Also, the library recently held an exhibition of weird stuff found in books including a piece of bacon and a pair of undies. How cool is that? (The exhibition, not the undies).

I will be there this Saturday morning for a WORD JAM as part of the Castlemaine Children's Literature Festival with Lisa D'Onofrio and DJ Pop Proud, who is another local charm. Bring your kids, make some poems, have a coffee and listen to ace music.

What I did on my holidays ...

2011-09-30T03:23:00.000-07:00

1. Read Virginia Woolf's diaries.

(now underlined and dog-eared to bits. Now re-reading The Hours and listening to the audiobook of Mrs Dalloway, which I never had much luck with but for some reason now get.)

2. Watched Carrington, Parenthood and Kiki's Delivery Service

(A nice thematic link between Kiki & Virginia Woolf when Kiki loses her powers, because she's trying too hard and her artist friend says take a walk and sleep until noon ... On school holidays there is very little writing on the page, but a lot happening in my mind ...)

3. Ate chocolate.

(the renaissance of the Crunchie bar bringing much joy to the house)

4. Took photos.

Whose diaries did you love?

2011-09-21T01:44:00.000-07:00

Friday's talk for ATW festival has me thinking about the diary/books I read in my youth: from Adrian Mole to Go Ask Alice. Later, under my sister's influence I moved on to Joe Orton and later again Sylvia Plath. I'm reading Virginia Woolf's at the moment. She says:

"What sort of diary should I like mine to be? I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through ..."

And for all my Internet wanderings in the name of research I end up with this lovely video of Lou Reed and John Cale, a piece composed for Songs for Drella, Cale reading from Andy Warhol's diaries.

Whose diaries did you love?

A Thousand Words Festival

2011-09-20T19:59:00.000-07:00

I am excited to be taking part in the A Thousand Words Festival, which is dedicated to young adult literature. The program is excellent and varied and full of spark and wit. Tim Peglar is giving the keynote on Saturday! Steph Bowe, Fiona Wood and Cath Crowley will talk about how to turn reluctant readers into not-sos! Leanne Hall and Michael Pryor have to do something interesting on the spot! Also Sally Rippon, Aimee Said, HJ Harper, Megan Burke, Andrew McDonald, Sue DeGennaro and Festival Director Bec Kavanagh. A cavalcade of interesting ozya persons. Click on the link under 'events ' to see the program.

Castlemaine Charm Four - Tracks

2011-09-19T22:42:00.000-07:00

Some days are just: seek coffee, write, walk the hound. In the bush down the road there's a walking track that goes all the way to Daylesford. It has a dozen different trails that I've mapped in my mind and strange stone formations and abandoned mines and waterholes and eucalypts and lilly-pilly and this tree that looks like Grug.

Last nudge ...

2011-09-16T02:19:00.000-07:00

There are two spots left for Sunday's Creative Journaling workshop in sunny Mulgrave. Details here.

Castlemaine Charm Three: Grottos

2011-09-12T23:24:00.000-07:00

The courtyard at Origini has this bit like an ancient grotto, with mystery steps, like you might find Charlton Heston in robes standing at the top of them (the coffee is powerful good). And there is an actual for real grotto at St Mary's ... I love religious statues and rocks and succulents ...

Anatomy of a Novel: India Dark

2011-09-11T00:06:00.000-07:00

Anatomy of a Novel: India Dark*
Guest post by Kirsty Murray

* congrats Kirsty on winning the 2011 NSW Premier's Young People's History Award for India Dark!

1.    Pollards Lilliputian Opera Company

India Dark is a work of fiction about a troupe of child performers - Percival’s Lilliputian Opera Company – that toured India from 1909-1910. Although Poesy, Tilly, Charlie and all the other children in the novel are characters that I invented, the Percival troupe is closely based on Pollards Lilliputian Opera Company. The Pollards were a real troupe of child performers that toured the world from the 1880s onwards. Real life tends to have an impossibly sprawling and messy shape and it was only through fiction that I could tell the story of the last disastrous tour of the Pollards. Peter Downes is a New Zealand historian who has written a history of the NZ branch of the Pollards that was helped me to imagine the life and times of my characters:

2.    Theatres, popular culture and Shirley Temple
Popular culture feels so powerful in your own era but most of it fades quickly from memory and from history. If you look back more than 50 years, you’ll find a lot of the things that were valued and thought really important in terms of film, theatre and mainstream culture is badly documented. If Poesy Swift and Tilly Sweetrick, the teenage girls who tell the story of India Dark, had been real actresses they would be as forgotten as the Pollard kids. Most child performers, no matter how much they are loved in their own era, are abandoned by their fans and by history. There are a few exceptions, most notably Shirley Temple.

I loved Shirley Temple when I was a kid. I still admire her hugely. Her life’s trajectory was incredible. As a child labourer in the film industry she worked like a Trojan. I wrote a brief summary of her life in an early non-fiction book, Tough Stuff (Allen & Unwin, 1999) and focused on the work she did in the Baby Burlesques. These films could never be made today and yet they were made when my own parents were children and I watched them on television when I was a kid. They are disturbing on many levels and make the Lilliputians look very tame in comparison.

Shirley Temple in War Babies
<iframe width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/orq4LqX7WEE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

3.    India and Southeast Asia

I grew up as a total USA/Europhile. With the exception of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Jungle Book’ and ‘Kim’, I read nothing much about India until I stumbled across Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in the 1980s. But it wasn’t until I started thinking about writing India Dark that I started to explore the shared history that Australians have with India.

I could never have written India Dark without spending time in India. If I hadn’t scored an Asialink Literature residency, I probably wouldn’t have been able to wrap my brain around what my characters went through. I wouldn’t have found the vocabulary to describe the heat, the colour, the scents and sights, the turmoil and richness of both India and Southeast Asia.

4.    Annie Besant and Theosophy

Annie Besant appears briefly in India Dark but she loomed large in my imagination as I wrote the novel. In one chapter, Poesy and Charlie row across the Adyar River to the Theosophical Society Headquarters in Madras in the vain hope that Annie Besant might be able to save them. If they had met her, she just might have changed their lives.
Besant was possibly the most influential woman in the world in the early 20th Century. She spent her childhood in her widowed mother’s boarding house in England and ended it in India as President of the Theosophical Society. She abandoned her first marriage to an Anglican minister to become a famous social reformer, women's rights activist, and member of the Fabian party as well as an avowed atheist. She abandoned atheism, the Fabians and Europe to move to India and become a Theosophist. She fought for the rights of Indians, was arrested by the British and was the first woman president of Indian National Congress. There was so much about Annie Besant and her life that connected to Poesy that I simply had to put her in the novel.
Theosophy was the spearhead of what we now might describe as the New Age movement and Australia was a hotbed of Theosophist activity in the early 20th Century. So the links between Australia and India and Annie Besant and Poesy Swift grew more and more complicated as I wove these seemingly disparate threads into India Dark.

5.    Magic

I’ve never written fantasy. My idea of magic is intrinsically linked to this world and its endless, mysterious and convoluted realities. But stage magic was an obsession of Edwardian boys like my character Charlie Byrne and just as Annie Besant connected to Poesy and India, so magic drew Charlie more deeply into India.

While writing and researching India Dark I scored a Creative Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria. One of the collections in the SLV that I had the most fun exploring was the William Alma Magic Collection. With around 2,000 books of magic, it provided me with a huge amount of material to use in the novel.

www.kirstymurray.com

Spring things

2011-09-09T00:42:00.000-07:00

1. We are going to have a treehouse very soon. I went up on the platform for the first time yesterday. It's very high and I completely had the shakes and almost couldn't get down. But I could see the whole town! From the Gaol to the Needle. I predict some excellent sunsets this summer.

2. How good is Rookie? Really good.

3. I am reading A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews. It's taking me ages because it is so smart and funny and also I sense there will be great sadness. Ah. I wish I could write like this:

Being seasick at sea is not the same thing as being homesick at home. I sat in the vacant lot across from Darnell's Bakery writing profound things on the sidewalk with my piece of chalk and watching Bert drive his Red Phantom up and down Main Street. He had a jean jacket with the sleeves cut off and he'd taken a Jiffy Marker and written LED ZEPPEL on the back of it and then under that the remaining two letters. I wished so badly that he'd taken the time to measure the letters out and sketch them on with pencil first. I thought to myself that there were really so many simple ways we could make ourselves look less like idiots ...

Castlemaine Charm Two - Stoneman's Noticeboard

2011-09-06T21:15:00.000-07:00

Is the noticeboard outside Stoneman's Books* a microcosm of this town, and does that make it a microcosm of society in general? I could run some awesome site-specific writing workshops around here. When I was young I used to love to read the notices outside Readings, all the wanting hippie households and strange items for sale. Outside Stoneman's someone is always selling Fowler's Vacola jars, or a double pram. Today's favourite's were lessons in how to be visionary and an ad that says 'typist wanted for manuscript' that almost has me reaching for my phone. Maybe a month ago, I was contemplating the disco unit ($120) and the guy reading next to me pointed out two ads, one was for an artist wanting a nude model, and the other was for a nude model wanting work. I hope they got it together.

In other news the Castlemaine Children's Literature Festival program is up! Check it out here.

*Where you can buy books about orb therapy, prospecting, or vegan treats or Andy Warhol's complete Interview series. And where they are so kind as to keep me in stock even as time elapses.

Anatomy of a Novel: The Truth About Verity Sparks

2011-09-01T04:36:00.000-07:00

Anatomy of a Novel: The Truth about Verity Sparks

Guest Post by Susan Green

(1) Names.

In the cemetery in Angaston in South Australia, there standsa gravestone surrounded by dry grass and rusty wrought iron railings, and thename on the stone slab is:

SADDINGTONPLUSH

What a wonderful name! Almost instantly I could see him;a young man circa 1878 who was unconventional, slightly bohemian, a bit of adandy, with a weakness for checked trousers, false moustaches and fiddlydocumentation, who was braver than he thought he was, with an adorable smile. Ifell in love with Saddington, and tucked him away in my memory for future use.(I found Sideney Dumayne in the Maldon Cemetery, and I plan to use her sometimesoon, too). So when I began dreaming up this book, Saddington Plush was justright for both father and son; Confidential Enquiry Agents, bibliophiles,herpetologists and collectors of long, obscure words.

The character but not the name of my heroine came to meas I was walking past one of East Melbourne’s Victorian Gothic churches. On aboard outside, the service times were displayed. Evensong was at five thirty.And from that I spun a little baby abandoned on the steps of a church, found bya kind old couple who were walkingpast, and named Evensong. Evensong Levine, for they weren’t C of E, they wereJewish old-clothes merchants in Victorian London...

But when I got into the story, Evensongwas wrong. Too drifty and romantic for this story (but tucked away for futureuse, too). My foundling had to be active, plucky, straightforward and very honest. Verity, which meanstruthfulness, sounds just right. The dear old Jewish couple had to be shelvedalso, for I needed Verity to be orphaned in order to have adventures, and Ijust didn’t want to kill dear Mr and Mrs Levine. I wanted an ordinary surname,and what could be more ordinary than Jones? A Mr and Mrs Jones, I decided,could be disposed of. So, Saddington Plush, Senior and Junior, and VerityJones. I was all set.

(2) Title

At first, I had From the Casebooks of Saddington Plush above thetitle, and I started the book with a letter from him, saying that he’d takendown the story verbatim from the inimitable Miss Verity Jones.

The book’s title all the way until thefinal draft was Verity Jones and the Sign of the Seventh. I wasrevising it at Varuna when I realised that it was a rotten title. Too much likeHarry Potter and the..(take your pick). Not to mention IndianaJones and the Temple of Doom and even BridgetJones Diary.

Each bedroom at Varuna contains part ofEleanor Dark’s book collection; my room had the British books. While I wasrevising (and pondering my dud title) I started reading Memento Mori (a great andvery weird novel) by Muriel Spark. Suddenly I had my name. Spark. A name thatwas sparky and sparkling; that made you think of sparklers and bright sparks,and even, as the Bible says, that man is born to trouble as sparks flyupwards... I decided on more than just one spark for my girl. She was VeritySparks.

Verity spends most of the novel tryingto find the truth about herself. Who are her parents? Why did they leave her?Why did her adoptive mother leave her a ring and a medallion? Why is someonestalking her? I don’t think I am very good at titles, but when this one came tome, I knew it was just right. The Truth About Verity Sparks.

(3) An Idea

The Truth About Verity Sparks is ahistorical-detective-murder mystery-melodrama romp. It’s for younger youngadults, and is completely without any teen angst, sexual yearnings orfumblings, or vampires. But it has a supernatural element. Ghost Hunters:The Victorians and the Hunt for Proof of Life After Death by DeborahBlum was the book that located Verity’s adventures amongst the late Victoriancraze for spiritualism. I made Verity a rather reluctant psychic. She can findlost objects, and her fingers itch when she’s getting close. And that led toanother absolute neccesity for me – a first line. It’s the hook to hangeverything else on.

(4) First Line.

My name is Verity Sparks, and I’ve got itchy fingers.

(5) Things to Look At

Finally, I find it really helps to have things to lookat.

I used Gustave Dores engravings of London low-life andJames Tissot’s paintings of fashionable high life to help me describe placesand people. I haven’t used the spirit photographs yet, but they’re somehowgoing to be part of Verity’s next adventure.

Castlemaine Charm One: Happy Valley Trail

2011-08-29T02:55:00.000-07:00

In the weeks leading up to the inaugural Castlemaine Children's Literature Festival* I thought I'd post on some of charms of my hometown. Castlemaine is an old mining town about an hour and a half out of Melbourne. We have a library and a prison, an art gallery and a bacon factory, six churches, four pubs and one writers centre. It's a mixed crowd. In 2006, Wikipedia called the population at 6797 - I'd say it's quite a bit more now. (Castlemaine is an arty town and a broody town.) One of my favorite things to do here is to go a'rambling. The countryside is ravaged in places, but if you look at something hard enough it can become beautiful. The Happy Valley Trail was damaged in last year's floods. Sometimes when I walk it I imagine I am exploring some post-apocalyptic landscape. Or I just watch the swallows and feel a great happy weight in my chest.

* The program is about to be released and it looks great. There will be poetry rambles, craft workshops and a story-making tour of Buda Historic Home. For older kids, script-writing with Fiona Wood, Graphic Novel with Alice Steel, song writing with Dan Warner and I'll be doing bower book workshop (your bower book being the place you put all your shiny, precious ideas and things). Isome links: http://childrensliteraturefestival.tumblr.com http://www.castlemaineindependent.org/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlemaine,_Victoria

totally happy-making

2011-08-19T06:15:00.000-07:00

Workshop plug for journal-y types

2011-08-17T20:57:00.000-07:00

CREATIVE JOURNALING – SPRING WORKSHOP

A one-day workshop to inspire and invigorate your writing.
A light exists in Spring … You‘ve made it through the winter and now it‘s time to clean house and open all the doors and windows.
Creative Journaling is the act of exploring your thoughts, feelings and responses on the page. Lisa D‘Onofrio (poet and lifecoach) and Simmone Howell (author) have devised a series of exercises to help you draw out your creativity and find clarity.
Suitable for those already on the writer‘s path or those just beginning.

When:
September 18
Where:
Body Shop HQ, Corner of Wellington & Jacksons Road, Mulgrave
Time:
10am- 4pm
There will be tea and cake, and a break for lunch (BYO)
Cost:
$120
All enquiries:
writeasrain@zoho.com
Phone: 0401097599

What people said about our winter workshop:
“thought-provoking and enjoyable.I can recommend it wholeheartedly to anybody interested in writing.”
“inspiring”
Thanks to our Melbourne connection Justine Telfer.

Anatomy of a Novel: This is Shyness

2011-08-16T03:30:00.000-07:00

Anatomy of a Novel: This is Shyness

Guest post by Leanne Hall

Here are just a few random ingredients that went into the This Is Shyness cake:

Carl Linnaeus

The first teeny-tiny twitches of the idea that become my novel, came from some short story research I did into the 18th century Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus. At one point in his career Linnaeus wrote a book called Systema Naturae, which was concerned with categorising living things, including humans. Linnaeus ranked the human races in a blithely racist fashion (whities up the top!), and also included a bottom-rung category called `Monstrosus.’ Monstrosus included creatures such as giants, troglodytes, satyrs, phoenixes, and the two creatures that became the names of my protagonists, wolf-boys and wild-girls.

Melbourne

The suburb of Shyness is Melbourne with the lights turned out. It didn’t start that way, but I gradually found that it was easier for me to draw on real places when creating my fictional suburb. Shyness is a higgledy-piggledy collage of places that I frequent, only twisted and moved about and made strange. Some of the real life locations that I used were: Smith Street, Merri Creek, Edinburgh Gardens, and the Carlton Housing Commission flats.

The Warriors

The Warriors is a bit of a cult movie from 1979. When a friend heard about the gangs of Kidds in my book, he told me I had to watch this film, and I was not sorry when I did so! The Warriors is about a New York run over with gangs that have names like the Warriors, the Rogues, the Orphans, the Riffs, and the Lizzies.

The distinctive ways that the different units of Kidds dress in This Is Shyness is based on this film. One of the weirdest things (and trust me, there are plenty of weird things about this film, including the acting) about The Warriors is the way each gang has a uniform: clowns, baseball players, roller-skates, natty waistcoats...

Bat For Lashes

I hope I don’t spoil the picture that readers have in their heads of Wildgirl, but for me, the way she looks has always been based on English singer Natasha Khan.

Natasha is English-Pakistani, a veritable music genius, and makes albums as Bat For Lashes.

The video for her song “What’s A Girl To Do” is suitably kooky and Shyness-esque, with animal-headed cyclists riding BMX’s down a country road at night.

Gothic Dark Glamour

This is a fabulous book by Valerie Steele and Jennifer Park that I used for all manner of inspiration when writing This Is Shyness. There are two great essays on all things gothic, including music, fashion, art, historical figures, architecture and books. And pages and pages of truly breathtaking photographs of gothic imagery and clothes. My favourite image is the one used on the cover. Whenever I needed a little visual inspiration to create eternal night, I flicked through this book.

Get more Leanne Hall at http://thelongblinks.com/

A Few Good Things

2011-08-14T00:40:00.000-07:00

1. My friend telling me about Ernest Hemingway rewriting the last page of A Farewell to Arms 39 times. I am so there.

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?Hemingway: Getting the words right.
(Ernest Hemingway, "The Art of Fiction," The Paris Review Interview, 1956)

2. Watching the swallows along the Happy Valley Trail. And the dog doing divebombs. And everything looking so green. Also blossoms.

3. Mucking around on the Ipad: in particular the Wreck This Journal App with my son - leading to much hilarity but not much genius

4. Up.
I really enjoyed it. I was so delighted to meet Ellie, a wonky-looking, socially suspect, adventure-loving girl, but *spoiler* then she dies (she's still there, ya know, symbolically). Little girls need more tearabout non-girly role models... Up had lots of stuff about Stuff, objects, talismans, nostalgia. I thought it was unusual to have that in a kids film but it worked beautifully. W (5) loved it.

4. Just the things some people do. Like: This mobile book library for homeless people. Read about it here.

5. Tim Riggins &amp; his ever -present brewski.

writer geekery

2011-08-08T03:10:00.000-07:00

Love this! My aim is somewhere between the mouth and the heart...

source: http://flavorwire.com/199878/awesome-infographic-venn-diagram-of-author-sensibility

three book launches for lovers and liggers

2011-08-07T03:56:00.000-07:00

One of the nicest things about being a writer is having writer-friends. Writer-friends are friends like no other for they understand the pain, they share the cake and congrats or comizzes, they say 'go, go, go' when you're staring down your deadline and they write books that make you remember why it's good to be alive. There are three launches this week I wish to draw to your attention.

1. Thursday August 11, 2011 at 6.30pm, Readings Carlton

Tim Richards's short story collection Thought Crimes (Scribe).

In Thought Crimes, Tim Richards peeks behind the everyday appearance of things to explore unspoken fears and desires. The world Tim Richards describes is almost ordinary – but dark quirks lurk beneath the surface.

Tim has been a friend and mentor and skewerer of the suburban dream for a long time and I have been waaaaaiting for this. It will be great.

2. Sunday August 14, at 2pm, Readings Carlton

Penni Russon's launch for Only Ever Always (Allen &Unwin), her highly-anticpated, totally dreamy-sounding YA novel.

Claire lives in an ordinary world where everything is whole. But inside Claire is broken. The silvery notes of her music box allow her an escape from her grief into a dream-world, into Clara's world.

Penni is superwoman. We were on the road last year and I wanted to steal all her ideas. It's true.

3. Sunday August 14, at 2pm, Ray Bradfield Room, Castlemaine

Susan Green's launch for The Truth About Verity Sparks (Walker)

The Truth About Verity Sparks is a historical-detective-murder mystery-melodrama romp. It’s for younger young adults, and is completely without any teen angst, sexual yearnings or fumblings, or vampires. But it has a supernatural element.

Susan was one of the first writers I met when I moved to the 'Maine. I love her writing and I can't wait to read Verity, which has Victoriana-spooky up the antebellum.

Anatomy of a Novel: Only Ever Always

2011-08-04T03:58:00.000-07:00

Guest post by Penni Russon

1.Papercut animation

I always have a visual image, playing a novel like a moviereel in my head. In this case, it wasn’t live action though, I distinctly sawthis novel as papercut animation. To me Clara’s world is made of paper andpencil and brown ink, smudgy and torn. Claire’s world is paper too (one is notrealer than the other), but the paper of her world is elegant and patterned andtextured, colourful though still a little muted, a little blurred at thecorners, like aging Victorian wallpaper.

2. TheDouble Life of Veronique

I went to see this movie when I was twenty with my flatmateand good friend Andrew. We came out stunned into silence and didn’t want totalk for a long time afterwards. A residual echo has stayed with me throughoutmy adult life. Irene Jacob is Weronika in Poland and Veronique in Paris. Theyare not related but connected in some deep, philosophical sense. This fantasyelement is never explained, which is why the movie is so haunting. I havealways been fascinated with the idea of doubles and alternate realities, by therelationship between self and other when we confront ourselves in the mirror,at the horror we feel hearing our own voices played back on tape.

3. Alicein Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

I am enchanted by novels for children that work on aphilosophical level, that deal in tropes and archetypes, images and metaphors,allegories and double meanings and wordplays. I was a fan of Alice inWonderland growing up, and my favourite scenes were the ones where somethingdeeply profound seemed to be going on, as in the scene where Alice and the faunwalk side by side, Alice’s arms around the baby animal’s neck. The faun isunafraid of Alice because they have both forgotten their names. But when theyreach the edge of the wood and remember their names, the faun also remembers tobe frightened of the human and bounds away, and Alice grieves. I love the lastlines of the Looking Glass poem: “Still she haunts me phantomwise/Alice movingunder skies/Never seen by waking eyes.” This image of Alice as a giant dream“everchild” is arresting… and sad. By the time he penned those lines the realAlice Liddell, for whose amusement Carroll invented the original tale, wouldhave grown up.

At the centre of the Wonderland stories is Alice’s journeyand her interactions with a cast of unusual characters. I tried to capture someof that feeling in Only Ever Always, though Clara has a very specific quest. Iam not sure Alice could ever be written now – a modern editor and audiencewould be asking: “But what’s at stake for Alice? What does Alice want? Whatdoes Alice need?” She is very much a product of her time – a questioninginvestigation into selfhood always bordering on a collapse intomeaninglessness, in a truly circular narrative where arguably nothingsignificant has altered or shifted for Alice by the end.

4. TheStrongman (and carnivalesque)

When I was a child I wanted to be a clown – but a sad one, aPierrot. I have always been intrigued by the melancholy of the carnivalesque –circuses are shabby and strange manifestations. When you go to a modern circusat first you see the shabbiness, the old dusty tent, the dodginess of thecarnies, the cheap toys and overpriced popcorn. Then you are dazzled by theshowmanship and the colours take on a different hue. And then I think you lookdeeper in again and start to see the mechanisms behind the showmanship, thewires holding the girl up, the sleight of hand. So you are constantlyconfronted with the layers of reality and pretence and are constantly having torevise or reignite your experience of belief and credulity. This seam of thecarnivalesque is strong in Only Ever Always. There’s one character Salvador whomakes a brief appearance who I purposefully modelled on the old-fashionedstrong man, with bald head and waxed moustache. He is big and strong but inother ways ineffectual and timid. So I was deliberately playing with this ideaof reality and pretence.

5. TheForm Guide

Clara’s world is made of debris, and so the language of herworld is also broken. Characters speak in broken sentences or drop consonants,they have idiosyncratic grammatical constructions, and language is made up of“found objects” – so sometimes old fashioned words or turns of phrase appear,or new words or phrases are coined. My favourite example of this is a characterwho exists in both worlds, Old Mrs Jarvis, who is presentient and speaksentirely in “Form Guide” speak (from the horseracing section of the newspaper).This came about after a workshop I attended run by Carrie Tiffany, where shegot us to do a piece of creative writing using the form guide as inspiration(her rationale being that it has its own distinctive language, but a languagenot created by writerly types, so it reminds us to try different phrasing andbreak out of writerly clichés.) I ended up sorting phrases I found into a sortof character arc.

Teatime tattle. Looks genuine improver. Hidden strings.Chance in harder event. Must come into contention. Will appreciate rise indistance. Shouldn’t take long to keep current. Go well. Keep safe.

In the shadows. Needs more ground. Always well back. Gottahave heart. Not a strong first-up record. Prefer to see.

Hard to knock winning form. In strong stable. Commandsrespect. In the money last three outings. Expect bold showing.

Hard to enthuse on recent efforts. Bled during race. Lookingto others. Passing. Wait until she shows more. Mixing form and proving hard tofollow.

Scratched. Scratched. Scratched.

Chance with suitable conditions. Needs more ground. Goclose. Go well. Salute the storm. Eternal’s choice. Will make the most from oneof the inside’s barriers. Keep safe. Go well. Keep safe.

Many of these phrases are now in the novel.

6. Snow globes and music boxes

The instrument of magic in Only Ever Always is a music box –an object of “uncertain value”, worth what the beholder thinks it is worth. Iam interested in collections and in particular oddments, the sorts of things westockpile, objects that we define ourselves through although they say nothingin particular about us. Claire’s music box is an invention: a glass globe thatcontains the queer marriage of a mouse groom and a Thumbelina type bride. Butsomewhere in the back of my mind I did have a snow globe that encased a bigeyed rabbit who would be showered with flowers. It was an object I owned in mychildhood that is adrift somewhere on the tide of things I have lost or thrownaway but never forgotten. As I was writing Only Ever Always, Martin found me amusic box mechanism in an op shop and it sat by my desk, I often studied itsworkings. It too has now been lost, carried off perhaps by one of the children,and is similarly adrift.

http://www.pennirusson.com/

Workin'

2011-08-01T02:03:00.000-07:00

I went to Gippsland Grammar last week to be their artist-in-residence and it was such a great experience. Sale was beautiful. There had been floods the week before and there was still half-submerged trees and surreal puddles along the highway. Also clouds that looked like long-necked, thinking birds. It's been a while since I did a solo road trip. On the way up I listened to the Beach Boys, Devendra Banhart and this song which puts a lump in my throat the size of Alaska.

On the way back I listened to the Ruth Rendall audiobook I bought at the opshop (excellent opshopping BTW. Purchases include Woody Herman's Men from Mars original Verve lp and a fold-up sun-hat.)

At GG the students were awesome, lovely, inspiring, funny and full of stories. We did black-out poetry, per-zines, list poems. I rambled on about myself for the Year Nines, and did a practice PechaKucha (but forgot to tell them that's what I was doing) based on Ben Okri's Secret Trail of Books ... sort of a Simmone Howell's Pop Trail. The ICU staff were all lovely and supportive and there was cake and the kinds of conversation you can only have with people who love books. I try not to leave the family fold too much. I think I want to be like Paul McCartney who never had a night away from Linda and the gels, back in the day. But I have to say that time alone is like a tonic. My head cleared in a way that it hasn't since ... probably parenthood. And I even got some writing in!

I am a Camera #15

2011-07-21T22:09:00.000-07:00

I will tell you that we visited this small city at the bottom of the south island to look for traces of a long ago music scene, and inside that, some kind of resonance with the part of me that loves a particular type of pop song …

Vanessa Berry I adore ye! Proving always that the best writing is well well out of the mainstream. I read I Am a Camera #15 (in Dunedin) on the way back from the city when it was so grey out the window that there was nothing NOTHING to look at and for that half-hour I was transported and it was beautiful.
This, I decided, was my idea of heaven, a paradise where one forever goes exploring with the person they have a crush on, through the streets of the suburbs and empty houses, in the cold weather. I could easily insert myself into the world of the songs and become a character in them.” …
Dreamy, evocative, poppy like the songs she cites. So glad I read this and not New Weekly.

Upcoming: Castlemaine Children's Literature Festival

2011-07-19T01:32:00.000-07:00

Website http://childrensliteraturefestival.tumblr.com/

another irritating article about YA fiction

2011-07-18T17:09:00.000-07:00

Gag me. I don't even care if they're right.

Katie, having come out of an M.F.A. background where the rule was that good writing requires rumination, pain, and the slow loss of your best years, fought the craziness at first. But readers in Y.A. don't care about rumination. They don't want you to pore over your sentences trying to find the perfect turn of phrase that evokes the exact color of the shag carpeting in your living room when your dad walked out on your mom one autumn afternoon in 1973. They want you to tell a story. In Y.A. you write two or three drafts of a chapter, not eight. When kids like one book, they want the next one. Now. You need to deliver.

from Slate

watching ...

2011-07-06T18:48:00.000-07:00

Anatomy of a Novel: Galactic Adventures: First Kids in Space

2011-07-03T21:40:00.000-07:00

Anatomy of a Novel: Galactic Adventures: First Kids in Space
Guest post by Tristan Bancks

My new book Galactic Adventures: First Kids in Space required tons of research. I’m glad that I didn’t realise this before I set forth into the dark. Here, I share some of the influences on the writing.

Virgin Galactic Animation

This was the video that first inspired me to ask the question, ‘What will it be like for the first children in space? And how long will it be until they go?’

Real-Life Civilian Space Travellers

Regular people, non-astronauts, are going into space and spending ten days on the international space station (NB: regular people with $20-35 million).

I voraciously consumed the blogs, videos and images of real-life civilian space travelers like Dennis Tito, Richard Garriott and Cirque Du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte who hosted a circus live from the International Space Station.

Wired.com Articles and Videos on Civilian Space Travel

There is a fantastic article on Wired.com about the challenges faced by millionaire space travelers when they train at Star City in Russia. They stay in cramped conditions, eating dodgy food and are subjected to grueling physicals and medicals for around eight months. This video from Wired.com also gives a good sense of the extreme challenges of civilian space travel:

The French Fighter Pilot

I met Alexis, a French fighter pilot, while writing this book and he provided lots of insight into what it’s like being a young boy with serious dreams of flying aircraft. He gave me insight into what first sparked his interest, right through to the punishing selection and training process and the dangers of flight. Many of his insights have made their way into the book.

The Googleplex, Skywalker Ranch and Pixar HQ

I took lots of photos in airports to build the world of my spaceport in the book. It had to be fun and amazing but realistic and believable. I researched cool HeadQuarters’ like the Googleplex where they get around on scooters and Pixar HQ where each office is uniquely designed and Red Bull HQ in London where they have a giant slide in the middle of the office.

Kennedy Space Centre

Words and images from my visit to Kennedy Space Centre in Florida were useful to me. I declared in a travel journal ten years ago that it was the most inspiring day of my life to that point. A big call but I have always been fascinated by space travel.

Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster

On the morning of my first day of year six my family gathered around the TV to watch the space shuttle Challenger launch. Less than two minutes into the journey the shuttle exploded. I was eleven years-old and the experience has always stayed with me. That moment definitely informed the writing of this book. Here is a 2-minute clip of the launch. I still find it moving.

Music

I listened to music by Scottish band We Were Promised Jetpacks, French band Phoenix and UK band Keane as I wrote. The energy of their music dictated the high-energy pace of the story. I also listened to Tibetan chants, which seemed to tap the mythical aspects of the story.

The Right Stuff

This film, based on the book by Tom Wolfe, taught me so much about the bravery of the very first astronauts and the kinds of characters who are drawn to a pursuit where it is highly likely that they will not come out alive. The desire to do something never achieved before, to bust through fear, is what fuels Dash Campbell in Galactic Adventures: First Kids in Space.

More on the book and process at www.tristanbancks.com

Thanks Simmone!

On being submerged

2011-06-28T00:50:00.000-07:00

cross-posted at ibrary.com.au

Swim. Run. Walk. Especially when the words stall. If I’m having plot problems or I’ve hit a wall somewhere with my ms, the answers will come to me when I’m moving forward. Woody Allen said relationships are like sharks, they have to move forward or they die. Same with stories. When I swim I think about all kinds of things, but mostly I think about this weird/great film I saw a few years back called The Swimmer, about a man who decides he’s going to swim his way home via other people’s backyard swimming pools.

The film is based on a John Cheever short story – you can read it here. It’s so unsettling and delicious. It makes me think of how weird the suburbs are, how complex human beings are. Imagine a man in swimming trunks running down the street faster than his past can unravel behind him.
A friend from my writing group spoke recently about a Jungian thing about the dangers that can occur when your conscious and your unconscious are too out of whack … what would happen if they were to meet and didn’t recognise each other? Or worse - if they didn’t get along. Something like The Swimmer, I think. Meanwhile, here is a list poem masquerading as a concrete poem about all the swimming pools I have known. (With thanks to Nadia for the photoshoppery!)

Right at the Heart of You

2011-06-20T23:48:00.000-07:00

Crossposted at ibrary.com.au

I read David Almond’s My Name is Mina in one sitting and I loved it. It’s sorta surreal and unpredictable and beautiful. I loved the relationship between Mina and her mother. Mina's mother is home-schooling her – but they know this is a temporary, and so special, arrangement. Here’s one of my favourite bits, Mina and her mother:

“When you grow up,” I said, “Do you ever stop feeling little and weak?”
“No,” she says. “There’s always a little frail and tiny thing inside, no matter how grown up you are.”
“Like a baby?” I say.
“Yes. Or like a tiny bird, right at the heart of you,” she says. “It’s not really weak at all. If we forget it’s there, we’re in deep trouble.”

This reminded me of the great Charles Bukowski poem – Bluebird. I love to think that someone even as crusty as the Buke could have some little flutterings inside.
Here is the poem, with photographs:

And here is an animation which I also love:

Bluebirds to you!

things that might help

2011-06-12T06:52:00.000-07:00

1. A wonderful tune

2. That $1 Yma Sumac Album from Bentleigh market

3. MUBI - strange, eloquent, cult, classic films you can watch for not much money. Look - they have Lion's Love and other Varda

4. SWIMMY
(via Toys and Techniques)

5. Ogling Sandpiper lobby cards on Ebay:

6. Sleep.

June - she'll change her tune

2011-06-06T03:10:00.000-07:00

1. I will be blogging at Brisbane's ibrary for the month of June. Brisbane libraries are forward-thinking as far as catering to their teen/yoof clientele. I noticed they have a Books-to-Movie film club at Sunnybank Hills Library. I wish there had been something like that around when I was a teen instead of me just sitting there watching movies on my ownsome.

2. Lisa D'Onofrio and my creative journaling workshop in Daylesford was a success!Am so glad that something we dreamed up over cups of tea actually happened, and happened well. Topped off with a long walk around the lake in the late afternoon winter sun. We're planning another workshop in Spring. If you'd like to register you're interest you can do so here or at writeasrain@zoho.com. In the meantime we'll be posting on matters pertaining to journals and writing and all the wheres around it at http://www.creativejournaling.tumblr.com

3. Last night I watched the mother of all three girls films: They Were Sisters - "an epic tale of three sisters, their loves and their lives". This movie has the longest time-jump. One minute they're getting married and then whoosh! seventeen years has passed and James Mason is being a total arse - although this was foreshadowed with his rowdy bachelor-boy behaviour. ... Here's a link to the book at Persephone Books (which is all class).

Looking for something to do this weekend?

2011-05-31T17:50:00.000-07:00

A Different Voice: Emerging Writers Festival

2011-05-22T04:51:00.000-07:00

Tis a bookish week with Reading Matters Conference AND the Emerging Writers Festival happening.
My EWF panel is on Sunday May 29th at 12.30 pm in the Yarra Room at the Melbourne Town Hall:

A Different Voice:You’re a 50 year old woman, your character is a 12 year old boy… How to handle voice? Character? Is it research or does it come naturally? Do people assume you are your characters? How to get realistic dialogue? With Alan Bissett, Maxine Clarke, Simmone Howell and Tony Moore. Hosted by Ruby J Murray

Daylesford Winter Journalling Workshop

2011-05-18T00:51:00.000-07:00

There are still places available if you want to book in for the Winter Creative Journalling Workshop I'm running with Lisa D'Onofrio. This is a bit of a sidestep/offshoot from the zines projects I've done - more portable and personal. It's a one-day workshop from 10-4pm on Saturday June 4th. We will be looking at ways INto writing: mining memory and emotional terrain; we'll be making maps of heart and home; also wordscaping*, dream restoration and magical thinking. All you need to bring is a pen and an open mind. Age is also open, and there will be cake. See sidebar for more information.

NB: On the same weekend it's the Daylesford Weekend of Craft as evidenced by this lovely Lark post. So clearly it's a perfect time to book a cabin and get away from it all and into something different.

*I might have made this word up.

Anatomy of a Novel: Noah's Law

2011-05-16T03:58:00.000-07:00

Guest post by Randa Abdel-Fattah

noahs law by simmoneh on Polyvore.com

The Seeds for Noah’s Law: Being a Big Mouth

When I was in primary school, most of my weekends were spent hanging out with our close family friends. They had a daughter, Lora, who for many years I believed was my blood relative given how close our families were. Whenever my sister and I wanted to spend the night at Lora’s house (or have her spend the night at ours), our parents used to insist we stand up in front of the living room and deliver ‘a speech’, mounting an argument to convince them to grant us permission for a slumber party. In hindsight, this was a monumentally foolish thing for our parents to do. By training us to argue, they were setting themselves up for intellectually based challenges from then on (although we also reverted to a good old-fashioned whinge and tantrum attack when it suited us too).

Suffice to say, I learnt from a young age that there was a certain thrill in the art of persuasion. Being an avid debater in the Debaters’ Association of Victoria during high-school was another taste of standing up before an audience and trying to win them over through the power of a good argument (and when you’re wearing a hijab and showing up to debate at schools where, very often, the students assumed you couldn’t speak English, let alone deliver a devastating argument, the thrill was amplified ten-fold!)

Given I’ve always had a big mouth, and embraced just about every cause and movement on offer throughout high school, I knew very early on that I wouldn’t rest until I’d achieved two ambitions: becoming a lawyer and writer. When you combine a strong sense of justice (I remember questioning the universal use of the male pronoun to my teacher in grade six!) with family TV nights watching Perry Mason and Columbo re-runs (my parents’ favourites), it’s kind of hard to avoid an attraction to a career in the law.

Inspiration

Juggling being a writer and being a lawyer has had its challenges. Like how to pretend to be taking notes in court about the case being heard when you’re really writing your novel.

Major parts of my first book, Does My Head Look Big In This?, were written while I was instructing barristers in NSW regional courts- in my defence, I was only filling in for the actual solicitor with control of the files and only had to maintain a watching brief of the case. Rather than fall asleep, like some of the other solicitors did, I wrote a book. So there.

But the real challenge is how to curb the flow of ideas when you’re actually supposed to be concentrating. The idea for Noah’s Law came to me when I was in a meeting with some senior partners of the firm I was working at. As they went on and on about some inane topic, the beginnings of a plot started to form in my head. So what should have been some very detailed meeting minutes in fact became a plot outline for a legal thriller.

Interacting with barristers, clients, solicitors, court staff and judges means you cross paths with a very interesting, diverse group of people. You know the stereotypes about pompous barristers in their wigs and dishevelled robes, making submissions to the court in droll, authoritative voices oozing self-assurance and ego? Well, the stereotypes are true! Not all the time, of course. But I’ve been exposed to my fair share of pompous barristers. They’re often redeemed by the fact that they have intellects the size of planets and minds so quick that you’re left dizzy listening to them. Many such barristers and solicitors (egos to share around there too) filtered into some of my characters in Noah’s Law, from Noah’s dad (although I love him dearly) to the barrister, Valopolous, (my revenge on some of the barristers I’ve had to listen to in court) to Casey, the wicked witch of the firm. What I love about characterisation is how much of it is subconscious. It was not until I’d gone back to read Noah’s Law that I identified actual people I’d worked with or met over the years. While I hadn’t consciously thought about them when developing my characters or scenes, a ‘bird’s eye view’ of my completed novel allowed me to see a subconscious process that saw me drawing on the people in my life.

Law and Order

Huge fan. Obsessed. Positively crazy about Law and Order. Especially SVU (ahh, Elliott!) I know the credits by heart. I love the music. I love the story-lines. Even the wackiest, most obscenely implausible ones. It should be no surprise that I get a little bit wild when, as usual, Olivia and Elliott basically catch somebody standing over the body of a victim holding a bloodied knife implanted in the victim’s body and the evidence is eventually inadmissible because of a legal technicality. I’m a lawyer. Technicalities are my specialty. But COME ON! HE DID IT!

Okay, so there’s the basic tension between knowing the truth and proving it. And that tension is held together because of our legal system’s fundamental principle of the rule of law. Which is why Noah is struggling really hard with the case he’s stumbled across. And that’s my ode to Law and Order.

My trouble-maker friends in high school

Tymur, Ahmed, Salih and Hasan.

There are pranks. And there are PRANKS.

Attending an independent Islamic school gives you even more ways to push the limits and send teachers stark raving mad with your antics. From ordering ham and pineapple pizza and having it delivered to the local Imam’s house, to driving teachers to resign through sheer frustration (evil, huh?), to dabbling in hypnotism in the art room as a ‘lunch time’ past-time, to writing a poem on war with a word-for-word copy of the lyrics to a Guns ‘n’ Roses song and getting such high praise from the teacher that it was read aloud in assembly, to other stuff that would probably require a rating by the Classification Board of Australia, these guys knew the meaning of rebellion. And so it comes as no surprise to me to realise how much these guys, my friends at school, subconsciously influenced my creation of Noah’s character.

My husband, Ibrahim, was a school prefect but got up to more pranks with a badge on than without. One of his pranks (changing the marks on assignments) inspired the opening scene in the book. The nerd in me still can't understand how he and his other friends (all of them clearly corrupted by the Power of the Badge) had the gall to do such a thing. But it seemed exactly like the sort of thing Noah would do so it went into the book!

http://www.randaabdelfattah.com

Mayyyyyyyyyyyyyy

2011-05-06T04:26:00.000-07:00

They were selling proteas outside my coffee shop today for $1. What a flower! How can such a thing exist? I bought two, went home, drank the java and wrote many words.

Our Mother's House : the kids are not alright

2011-04-29T07:19:00.000-07:00

I saw Never Let Me Go recently and found it disquieting - it felt like it was telling me to accept all hells-on-earth - and I thought of it when I watched Our Mother's House - a similar fatalistic thing running through it. You just know it can't end well. It starts of like a fairytale: there are seven young children and their mother dies so they bury her in the garden and keep in touch by holding "Mother time" (seances) in the "tabernacle" (garden shed)... and then the wayward father returns. There is beautiful Dirk Bogarde and scary Yootha Joyce and sweet Mark Lester - all of the children are fantastic, subtle, sad. It's a creepy film, there are a lot of 'wrong' moments, gorgeous camera-angles, screenplay co-written by Haya Harareet who was director Jack Clayton's missus. I do love these children-without-adults movies and think the best children's fiction has adults off-stage. I was never sure if I was supposed to like Dirk Bogarde or not (until the end when it becomes obvious). Here is my favourite scene. Crystal Palace (ahh!) and that music that haunts me... strange and sad as one of the Youtube commenters says.

Anatomy of a Novel: Thyla

2011-04-24T19:51:00.000-07:00

Anatomy of a Novel: Thyla

Guest post by Kate Gordon

1. The Cascade Female Factory

I've only actually been inside the Cascade Female Factory once. And only for about five minutes. When Leigh and I first moved to Hobart, we did all the “tourist” things like going up the mountain, and climbing the shot tower. And we went to the Female Factory. The Female Factory was created to house the growing number of female convicts being sent to Australia. It also had other incarnations as a lunatic asylum and a hospital for sufferers of contagious disease! I have always been really interested in convict and colonial history so I was the one who suggested we go and check it out. It is, without exception, the saddest, most ghost-infested place I have ever been inside. I walked through the entrance and was immediately overcome by despair. And the feeling that the women who were imprisoned there never really left. I made my excuses to Leigh (who, as always, rolled his eyes at my wussyness and my belief in “ridiculous” supernatural things), and went and sat in the car. I was shaking and on the verge of tears. I also resolved I would, one day, write about the Factory. Since I'm not a historian, and have no desire to write a purely historical novel, it took until I had the idea for Thyla for me to make good on that resolve. I drove past the factory a couple of times while researching. But I never went back in.

2. The thylacine

I've always been fascinated by thylacines, ever since my dad wrote me a story when I was little, about a baby thylacine called Tessa (I shamelessly pilfered the name for the main character in Thyla). I love the idea of creatures that are thought to be extinct but are, secretly, hiding in shadowy forests. People spend their lives looking for these creatures – I suppose to them they represent meaning, in the same way gods or religion represent meaning to other people. They represent hope. If a supposedly extinct creature really does exist, that means the world is so much more full of possibility. And magic.

3. Countess Bathory

Again, I have always been intrigued by the idea of Countess Bathory – the 16^th century Hungarian murderess who bathed in the blood of virgins in the quest to achieve eternal youth. When I created the baddies in Thyla – the Diemens – I consciously wanted to avoid existing monster “tropes”. I didn't want them to be vampiric creatures. Instead, I looked to Countess Bathory. The Diemens achieve what she didn't – they maintain their immortal state by bathing in virgin blood. As long as they have access to virgin blood, they never die. I did add an extra facet to the evil of the Diemens, though, by making them eat the hearts of the virgins as well as bathing in their blood – well, if you're going to make a race of evil creatures, you might as well go the whole hog!

4. Sonata Arctica and Kamelot

When I'm writing, I like to listen to music that has the right feel for the work I'm producing. My husband thinks I have a bit of an attention deficit taste in music. One month I'll be obsessed with pop music like The Spice Girls and Pink; the next I will only listen to – Opeth or Pain of Salvation. At the moment, I'm listening to a lot of Xavier Rudd, Paul Kelly, Archie Roach and Dan Sultan. The reason for that is I am writing a story where the protagonist is indigenous and from the country, so that music inspires me. When I was writing Daisy Blue, it was all about the bubblegum pop when I was writing Daisy's diary entries, and classical music when I was writing Paulina's. When I was writing Thyla, I listened to Sonata Arctica and Kamelot. They are what's known as “power” metal bands. I'm not great with metal genres but the way I can tell a power metal band is they have a driving drum beat that sounds a bit like horses galloping. The music is atmospheric and, well, powerful. I loved these bands already but I really connected with them writing Thyla, partly because of the epic nature of the music, and partly because of the subject matter. Kamelot wrote a suite of songs about Countess Bathory, and Sonata Arctica has several songs about werewolves! Enough said!

5. Romeo and Juliet

Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet came out when I was about fifteen years old – the exact right demographic to be completely entranced by this story of forbidden love. Of course, we'd studied the play in school but, like so many things you study at school, whether it's good or not it seems boring and stuffy. The movie brought it to life. Of course, it didn't hurt that it had the gorgeous Leonardo Di Caprio as the lead player (although I was more taken at the time with Harold Perrineau's darkly manic Mercutio). Ever since then, I have really wanted to write a story of forbidden love, but it seemed to trite and “done” to do it in a “straight” story. When I started work on Thyla, I thought this might be the perfect chance to write a story where two characters who couldn't be more different fall in love, despite the mores of their respective societies. I won't say more than that as the two characters who fall in love in Thyla aren't revealed until the end (but it's pretty clear early on who they might be), so you'll have to read to find out more!

6. Mount Wellington and The Butterfly Man

The Butterfly Man – by Tasmanian author Heather Rose – was the beginning of my preoccupation with Mount Wellington. I read it long before I moved to Hobart and, when I did, I found myself spending great swathes of time staring up at the mountain. The proposition presented by Heather Rose is that the murderous Lord Lucan – who was never apprehended after he "offed" one of his household servants – escaped to Tasmania and took up residence up Mount Wellington. It sounds a bit ridiculous, but Heather Rose makes it completely believable. Ever since I read her book I couldn't look at the mountain without thinking what might be hiding up there! Of course, since I love paranormal fiction, it couldn't just be some guy hiding up there; it had to be a shapeshifter!

7. Metal (of the non-musical variety)

I liked the idea of the contrast between the wildness and bestial nature of the shapeshifters contrasting with the rigid, cold, clinical nature of the Diemens. I got obsessed with the idea of the Diemens being metallic. They are like machines. Their teeth are metal fangs; their skin has a metallic sheen; their hair is streaked with silver. When they are hunting, the victim – or the shapeshifter patrolling – sees a flash of silver. When I was writing this, anything silvery or metal caught my eye and obsessed me!

http://www.kategordon.com.au/

opheliary

2011-04-20T18:33:00.000-07:00

Photo Source

Paperback Love: The Member of the Wedding

2011-04-18T23:56:00.000-07:00

"Frankie, you got the sharpest set of human bones I ever felt."

So I re-read Carson McCuller's The Member of the Wedding last week and found myself marking it up with multicoloured fine-liners as every page had something that sighed and hummed and stirred. It's one of those sweet ache books. Frankie, 12, rejected by the neighborhood girls, spends her afternoons in the kitchen with Berenice and John Henry talking herself into being and then not knowing what to do when she gets there. Frankie (aka F. Jasmine) is in love with her brother's forthcoming wedding. She has a private dream that her brother and his bride will take her away. Frankie's feeling of being caged is palpable. The text is hypnotic, it's like the words are tying you up as you read. It's slip-knot fiction that makes your throat and heart constrict as it gets closer and closer to The Event that is the wedding. And then - we don't see the wedding, we only read about it and not until page 168 (of 189). "The wedding was like a dream outside her power..." It is nothing like Frankie imagined. "her cheap heart hurt. It was a framed game. The cards were stacked ..."

This is a strange and beautiful novel - I kept waiting for an epiphany or some huge evidence of change, but there is none of that. There is just the accruing sadness, loneliness. The novel ends hopefully (beautiful last line!) but I don't know that Frankie's grown. I read this in my early twenties, but it didn't have such an impact on me then, other than I loved its poetry. I wonder if it's one of those books that resonates only after you've racked up some big sads. It also reminded me of the short film Crackerbag (Glendyn Ivin) and the idea of the first big disappointment... that is surely our entry into adulthood.

"It was the hour when the shapes in the kitchen darkened and voices bloomed. They spoke softly and their voices bloomed like flowers - if sounds can be like flowers and voices bloom. F. jasmine stood with her hands clasped behind her head, facing the darkening room. She had the feeling that unknown words were in her throat, and she was ready to speak them. Strange words were flowering in her throat and now was the time for her to name them."

Crumbs...

2011-04-12T06:50:00.000-07:00

1. The CBCA list is like kryptonite! I am very excited to see four of my favourite books on there (and as usual surprised at what's NOT). Of course I found out about it all on Twitter. Two (three?) years ago I was on holiday trying NOT to think about whether EB would make the cut and I had to PAY MONEY at a crowded Internet cafe with a bodgy keyboard for the not so chuffy news. Times are changing.

2. Today, in my quest to find out what writers really wear, I invited writers to send in a photograph and/or at least admit to cardigan love. Thank you to Rebecca James, Vanessa Berry and Gabrielle Wang for playing. Here we are: http://twitpic.com/4jufy9
http://twitpic.com/4jujm5
http://twitpic.com/4ju28e

3. I am thick in revisions and some surprising things are happening. Today was a great novel-kicking day (I kicked it with my fake crocs and smiled while I was doing it). I'm about to nick off for a week and only taking pen and paper and a Stephen King book (Apt Pupil) - so we'll see what comes of that.

Anatomy of a Novel: The Unidentified

2011-04-11T01:36:00.000-07:00

Anatomy of a Novel: The Unidentified
Guest post by Rae Mariz

rae mariz by simmoneh on Polyvore.com

FEED by MT Anderson

Feed was sort of my intro to YA and what YA could do. I loved what this book was doing with language and how it exaggerated the effects of consumer culture. Super inspiring. I definitely played off of some of the themes in that book, but I wanted to try and explore what the Feed characters never did... and what I think is central in adolescence... that sense of skepticism and rebellion against the effed up adult world. So the Unidentified characters deal with the same media bombardment, but respond to it in individual ways. I still don’t know what is scarier: total teen apathy like in Feed, or a sense of rebellion that gets absorbed into the machinery like in the Unidentified.

Adbusters

I was a big fan of Adbusters (http://www.adbusters.org) growing up. I’d been known to print up stickers and deface advertisements in my time. But at some point, I got disillusioned by what that kind of activism could accomplish. Attacking images sort of gave the superficial more power? And by the time they started selling a shoe with their not-a-logo logo, it felt like a game that couldn't be won. But I’m still fascinated by the blurry line between counter-culture and mainstream and how sometimes you have to squint to see it. If it’s even there anymore.

Micachu and pop music

I thought of modeling the “sponsorship” aspect of the Game on the music industry kind of early on. Sort of playing with all the cultural stories about dreaming of the record deal but how signing the record contract didn’t make the dream of “making it” come true. How it caused more problems/screwed over artists/etc. The insult of “selling out”—and how selling out is a dead concept. Nobody accuses anyone of selling out anymore. There isn’t really any negative connotations to being commercial nowadays. And I thought that was interesting.

I'd described Kid, Mikey and Ari’s approach to music in the story and then I heard Micachu. Or actually I saw this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GscoX1ABZDQ) and thought OMG YES THIS IS IT. (WARNING: this is not particularly easy listening, but there is an infectious quality if you give it a chance... or just listen to Floor at 8.22). Micachu's odd instruments but undeniable pop sensibility sounded exactly as I thought the characters’ music would sound. And when I started searching out everything the band had ever done like a sixteen-year-old fangirl, the kindred sense was confirmed by watching the three-person band give awkward interviews and stuff when they were “discovered” by the world media. I genuinely am just a fan of what I heard. Especially the Filthy Friends mixtape that was available from their MySpace page (but sounds more like what Kid collaborating with Tycho would sound like, tbh). Such. A. Fan.

And this isn’t Micachu, but it’s one of the Unidentified’s theme songs/musical influences:

“I am a weapon of massive consumption/It’s not my fault it’s how I’m programmed to function...”

Lily Allen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD-c6cx98ls

danah boyd and Facebook

danah boyd is a Social Media Researcher and wrote a dissertation (http://www.danah.org/papers/TakenOutOfContext.pdf) after interviewing many many teens from various economic backgrounds about their social media practices. It’s probably the only dissertation I’ve ever read from page one to last. I was on the final revision of the story when I found out about her work, but it felt like she scientifically confirmed some of the things I was proposing in the story. Especially about adult fear and restriction of kids’ movements in the larger world. Fascinating work, and cool lady.

MAKEmagazine and etsy

I’m into all manner of DIY, so that’s why so much of it is featured in the Game and its workshops. I knit and sew and refashion sh*t myself, but the Craftsters in the story represent a trend that makes me uncomfortable in crafting circles. The make-it-to-sell-it-on-etsy mentality. I guess I think it makes people mass produce handmade things? And stuff starts to look alike and kind of defeats the purpose. Anyway, that’s how the Craftster clique came about. Another one of those blurry lines I like.

http://raemariz.com/

Anatomy of a Novel: Friendship on Fire

2011-04-04T01:35:00.000-07:00

Anatomy of a Novel
Guest post by Danielle Weiler

1. Friendship on Fire – Daisy, the main character, is the perpetual ‘nice girl’. She’s the girl everyone knows, and people either love her because they relate to her or hate her because they’re threatened by her. She made herself known to me one cold Sunday morning in Melbourne in 2009 with a vision of a normally honey/blonde girl who’d had a dye accident and now had flaming red hair coming out from under her school hat. And the one line that she wouldn’t shut up about was, ‘It wasn’t my fault’. So then I had to explain why it wasn’t her fault.

2. School – Daisy’s school St Dominics College is fictional but the concept of having a rival Grammar/fancy school across the road came from my own high school years. Except we were the state school and the Catholic school across the road (our graduating class DID put jelly crystals in their swimming pool on muck-up day) was full of the rich kids. But we had a bigger common room. The school bitch, Skye, was created from an alter ego that would never be real – ‘Now what would I say to the nice girl if I was a bitch…?’ type of thing. Daisy’s English teacher was the funniest teacher I’ve ever had. We would be reading through Macbeth and during Lady Macbeth’s dialogues he would scream, “She’s a cow! A filthy cow!”. The maths teacher was taken from a teacher who really did tell my class that we’d all fail using an analogy about playing football. Maybe I should have stopped doodling with the ruler.

3. Soccer – I’ve watched my 5 older brothers play soccer since I was born. Every Sunday we’d traipse from oval to oval and watch them win or lose. People often said to us that we’d make a convenient 7-a-side team. The culture of afternoon practices, the noisy clubhouse and the team’s token ‘alpha’ male in my story came from countless weekends observing such boys – and laughing at them.

4. Work/Play – The bakery in FoF was taken from a little bakery I love but don’t get to go to often. Twin Rocks is the fictional name for Daisy’s town as I didn’t want to lock her in to just one Aussie city. Beaches, parks, schools, cafes, shops, bakeries are all based on my favourite places in WA, Melbourne, South Australia and Sydney. Daisy works at McDonalds not just because I did when I was her age, but so many teenagers run these fast food places and they have to learn to juggle work and school commitments. They also plot boys’ downfall while folding evil cup trays in drive-thru that make your fingers bleed.

5. Driving lessons – Ahh yes, the embarrassment of stalling the instructor’s car while trying to pull out of the school grounds. It’s hard to forget.

Flustered, I burnt a little rubber as I finally took off into the intersection. A Commodore with too many teenagers in it to be legal was trying to drag me while I concentrated on the road. They were cheering at my take off and making horse and jockey movements in their car.

There was an instructor who was called ‘The Terminator’ and he was notorious for failing tests first time on principle. I have, however, never driven a BMW M3. Daisy is one lucky girl.

6. Beach/parties – Daisy resonates with the beach. She takes her diary there and observes people. She even does an embarrassing sketch of boy and girl stick figures (guilty as charged). I have fond memories of any kind of beach party that happened during my teenage years, especially ones with a big bonfire in the middle of the sand dunes. The scene with Roman and Daisy during the party is taken from a particular beach in the town we lived in that was used for a grad party one year, whose sunsets were unbeatable.

7. Nate – The bad boy in my novel, who is also very well cultured and spoken (and GORGEOUS, even if I do say so myself), is a mixture of every boy I’ve ever dated (and probably any girl has ever dated). He is the guy you can’t say no to, the one who makes you weak at the knees, courts you, surprises you, keeps you guessing, says all the right things to your friends and family, the one you test and he passes with flying colours… until he surprises you... That’s all I’ll say.

My hand burnt where he left the scrunched up piece of paper, heart nearly leaping out of my chest. I still didn’t know his name. I looked down. ‘Nate.’ Was that a model’s name? A king’s name? An actor’s name? It was the sexiest name I’d ever heard, that’s for sure. And a date? I couldn’t tell the girls. How could I not?

I don’t have a specific image of Nate in my mind. However, for the sake of eye candy and Daisy thinking his name could be a model or an actor’s name, he might just be a mixture between Josh Peck and David Boreanaz – younger versions, of course.

http://www.danielleweileronline.com/

Help, please!

2011-03-31T05:00:00.000-07:00

If you are into reading side-bars and break-out boxes you may know that I'm doing writing workshops this Tuesday in Sunbury for the Youth Mental Health Forum.
Here's some blurbage:

Style your mind is a youth mental health forum that aims to raise awareness of depression and anxiety in young people. Our activities will be based on the Youthbeyondblue message of Look, Listen, Talk and Seek.

I'll be conducting the writing workshops - falling under the Seek component*.
The question that keeps turning in my mind is, How can writing help? As a person who often sinks and flails and requires caffienation, and when asked how I am, can not ever say Great or even Good, but always, just Okay, this question is interesting to me. If you put it down on paper will it really come true? Does writing the darkness rid you of it? Or does it make you obsessive and gloomy? Discuss.

Where I need your help is I'm putting together a list of YA/children's books that deal with depression - obliquely or directly, main character or MC's parental squonk. Suggestions would be great.

*And I was interested to read Damon Young's little piece about the human urge to seek all over the Internet.

sad girls and wilful girls and lost girls

2011-03-25T19:43:00.000-07:00

So I seem to be reading in a circular sort of manner. Maybe this always happens. I've been reading Blake Nelson's Dream School serialised on Figment and then yesterday I read Allison Burnett's undiscovered gyrl. And ah ... I feel kind of immobilised or annihilated or ... I don't know... sad. It reminded me of Blake Nelson's Girl - that voice that's one minute all feverish teenage importance and the next heartbreakingly honest - and it also reminded me of Catcher in the Rye - just the purity of voice. I wish I had read it when I was sixteen. It's a book for sad girls and wilful girls and lost girls.

In other news: I feel the blog has gone a bit Anatomies-crazy. I hope you don't mind. This is because I'm writing a lot and it would be very boring to blog about my daily ruin. But in case you're interested, it goes like this:
wake up late, foggy and full of recriminations
pack lunch for young genius child, attempt to get bundle him into the car and to school by 8.55.
Go and buy take-away coffee.
Come back to quiet kamikaze house
drink coffee, faff around on Internet, feel unproductive, do dishes, sometimes the washing, finally write, and write, and write until pick-up.

After that I usually still want to write, but I can't, so I do lots of dreaming, and sometimes despairing. There was a line in Undiscovered Gyrl about months going by like days ... and so it goes with me.

In other news: I am very sad about Elizabeth Taylor.

Anatomy of a Novel: The Laws of Magic

2011-03-23T20:38:00.000-07:00

Anatomy of a Novel: The Laws of Magic

Guest post by Michael Pryor

The Laws of Magic by AubreyF on Polyvore.com

1. Covers.

Even if we don’t admit it, we all judge books by their covers. As an author, the whole issue of covers is fraught, nervous making stuff. What’s the book going to look like on the shelf? Once the book is picked up, the writing can do its work, but if the cover is off-putting, have I wasted all my efforts?

Fortunately, Random House have some superbly talented people. When I saw the black and gold first draft of Blaze of Glory, I was excited. The deliberately old-fashioned, distressed look was perfect. The subsequent covers maintained this look and feel and added to the early twentieth century atmosphere of the books.

Then Zoe Walton, my editor at Random, had the brainwave to repackage the series, giving them new covers. I was torn, as I loved the cool and mysterious black covers, but when the roughs for the high impact, new, colourful covers came my way, I was knocked out.

2. Edwardiana

Because this series is set in a world very much like ours in 1910, I’ve had to do a great deal of research to get details right. Big details like political movements and international diplomacy became jumping off points for my imagination, as I could tweak and rearrange things to make my plot work. Small details like the way people lived became vital in creating the overall mood of the books. I had to research clothes, food, modes of transport, forms of address, furniture, architecture and more. It became fascinating, and I’ve bookmarked a treasury of websites as well as devoting a special part of my bookshelf. I’ve been helped by the fact that this Edwardian era was a boom time for photography. I don’t lack for photo references, and some of them provide fascinating details of faces, clothes and attitudes.

3. Sherlock Holmes

Preparing for writing Blaze of Glory, I sat down and read the entire corpus of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. I made notes, primarily about turns of speech and small domestic details, but mostly I soaked in the rhythm of the prose, the shape of the sentences. Later, I enjoyed the whole Jeremy Brett depiction of Holmes. Even though I love the classic Basil Rathbone version, and I am enjoying the Robert Downey and Benedict Cumerbatch takes on the great detective, I think Jeremy Brett was the definitive screen Holmes.

4. H.G. Wells

Wells is one of the great influences for anyone writing speculative fiction. Doubly so for me, in that he was living at the time my books are set. His life, too, is fascinating, and an example of what a rich and surprising time it was.

5. C.B. Fry

The Edwardian superman. He played cricket and soccer for England, held a number of world records in athletics, was a first class classical scholar, a fine writer, a dazzling conversationalist and an extraordinary human being. He was so renowned that at one time he was offered the vacant kingship of Albania, which he declined. When I hear people tut-tut at how some characters in some books are too good to be true, I think of C.B Fry.

6. Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Strictly, IKB is a Victorian figure, not an Edwardian one, but in many sense he is the patron of Steampunk. His audacious engineering feats, his outrageous undertakings, exemplify the sense of derring-do, of pushing past horizons, of forthright modernity, that typify Steampunk. And, possibly, he has the coolest name of all time.

7. Airships

If IKB is the most potent human symbol of Steampunk, then the airship is its most powerful visual signifier. Steampunk loves airships and their stately, impossible grandeur. Remarkable, remarkable creations.

http://www.michaelpryor.com.au/

Anatomy of a Novel: Little Paradise

2011-03-17T15:41:00.000-07:00

Anatomy of a Novel - Little Paradise
Guest post by Gabrielle Wang

What do I know?

My novels are usually a combination of my experiences and my imaginings - a series of what ifs and therefores. But with Little Paradise the story had already been lived, told to me by my mother since I was small.

I knew very little about World War Two. What was Melbourne like in the 1940’s? What was China like? What did the clothes, hairstyles, schools, shops and so on look like? What were people’s attitudes, feelings, common knowledge?

I realised I didn’t know very much at all.

The Process

My first step was to interview my mother. I recorded her over the next few months and ended up with 5 hours worth of tapes. She has a fantastic memory for detail so it was easy and fascinating. But what she didn’t tell me was how she felt. She just got on with life, she said, without suffering over it. Perhaps that’s what it was like back then. Everyone experienced hardship. They had lived through the depression and many people lost loved ones. On the home front there was rationing of food and clothing and the threat of being bombed. Life was difficult.

There has been a lot written about World War One but not so much in Australia about World War Two. I’m not sure why. It was an important time for us. It was the first time Australian women joined the work force, the first time we encountered American culture, the first time we knew we were a part of Asia and not the British empire. And it was the first time war in the shape of real bombs rained down upon Australian cities.

The difficulties of melding fact and fiction

Three major challenges.

1. I had never written a YA novel before

2. or an historical one

3. And it was a romance based on my parents!

What to leave out is one of the major problems when writing historical fiction. During my research I was told me so many fascinating anecdotes but they didn’t move the story forward. For example, while interviewing my mother’s best friend in her Adelaide home, she told me she was psychic and that she warned my grandfather when he was visiting not to catch the plane back to Melbourne as something was going to happen to it. My grandfather was not a superstitious man but for some reason he listened to her. The plane, the Kyeema, crashed into Mount Dandenong in 1938 killing everyone on board. This accident sparked off major reform of Australia’s air navigation system, with benefits to air travellers to the present day.

Who does the story belong to?

This was a major stumbling block for me until I realised that it was my story, not my mother’s (sorry Mum). I was writing fiction not a biography. From that moment on I gave myself the freedom to make stuff up and what a liberating feeling that was.

The Drawings

Many of my novels are about the power of art to transform. In Little Paradise, Mirabel, the heroine, is a wonderful fashion designer as in real life my mother was. In the 1940’s, teenagers had no choice. They had to wear either women’s clothes or children’s clothes. My mother used to design all her own clothes and was amazingly stylish. The fashion illustrations on the inside front and back covers of the novel are drawn by her when she was 14 years old.

As Time Goes By

As Time Goes By from the movie Casablanca was the song that played through my mind as I wrote Little Paradise. It is one of the greatest movies ever made and was showing in Australia during the war.

I was unable to embed the video due to copyright, but I have provided the link here. It is such a beautiful scene. A must see. Enjoy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vThuwa5RZU&feature=related

http://www.gabriellewang.com/

Gem shall be smitten with Andy Warhol ...

2011-03-14T23:38:00.000-07:00

I have a German review!
I love how a Google translation can pinpoint the exact thingness of a novel:

After a painful process knows Gem, "that art is all that is shitty compensate it."

Marchness

2011-03-10T15:46:00.000-08:00

Gawd. The March of March. In case you are wondering why I am being so quiet, I will tell you. I am rewriting Girl Defective. I just need t o get the last bit. I need to stop 'polishing the corpse'. I will not be vanquished! The last few weeks I have been so head down that I've hardly been able to come up to read. I did manage to read Goldengrove by Francine Prose, which is not YA, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to teen readers. It's a novel about grief and coming of age and a child's recognition of the failures of adults. It has one of the most beautiful last lines I've ever read. And it rolls out gently. I had that strange thing where I started off reading thinking meh and was completely absorbed by the end.

ps- life with the family dog is jumpy and hilarious and blurry ...

Anatomy of a Novel: Raven's Mountain

2011-03-05T21:10:00.000-08:00

Anatomy of a Novel: Raven's Mountain
Guest post by Wendy Orr

Raven's Mountain by Raven's Mountain on Polyvore.com

1). The Fox and the Child: I saw this film when I was on about the sixth draft of Raven's Mountain, and the little girl reminded me very much of Raven, although she's prettier and a bit younger. She was red-haired, and though she's wandering alone in the mountains by choice, unlike Raven, she still faces the challenges of being out in the wilderness and interacting with nature. The first influence on Raven being a redhead is probably Anne of Green Gables, but the film represents my visual idea of Raven.

2) The Bear: Growing up in Canada means that bears are a background to any mountain hiking or camping, deeply embedded into the subconscious in a combination of fear and fascination. Our family mythology contained a few stories of close encounters with bears, including a home movie of baby me on a picnic rug... cut short as my father spotted the approaching bear and raced me to the car. Later, as a teenager, I was chilled to hear that a grizzly had taken someone from a tent not far from where my cousin and I had camped out in just sleeping bags. And yet I love to see them - at a safe distance, or in a film or documentary.

3) Snow White and Rose Red: Unlike most fairy tales, this one doesn't have a good and bad sister: they're simply very different: Snow White is blond and gentle; Rose Red is dark and lively. Raven sees her older sister Lily as a golden girl, and herself as the opposite. The fairy tale girls' mother is a widow, and once again, there's a bear... but it was the difference between the sisters that I was drawing on as the girls grew in my mind.

4)Pikes Peak Country: Climbing Pikes Peak with our dad, when we were ten and twelve, was highly significant to both my younger sister and me; there was obviously a tremendous sense of achievement, but it was so outside normal life that there was also a kind of 'otherworld' appeal. I'm not surprised it finally made its way into a story.

5) Mean Girls: I loved this movie; I felt it really captured a lot of those adolescent feelings that Raven is confused by as she sees her sister Lily changing from a caring big sister into a 'mean girl.' It also touches on the dislocation that Raven feels as she moves across the country into a totally different environment.

6) The Algonquin Legends of New England: I chose this because I couldn't get a cover image of Glooskap's Country, the collection of Algonquin legends I grew up with, which started me on my passion for First Nation stories. Later I became fascinated with Raven, the trickster god, who seems an appropriate one for writers.

7) Make your own Inuksuk: About six years ago my sister and I were walking on the beach in Vancouver and spotted all sorts of Inuksuks that people had been building. (You've got to remember that 'beach' on Canada's west coast often means rocks.) Something about them wormed its way into my subconscious.

8) Glasses: When I was putting myself into Raven's skin, it struck me that the first thing that would have happened to me if I'd fallen off a cliff is that I would have lost my glasses and been unable to see. I was always breaking glasses when I was a kid, especially skiing, or just playing in the snow, and then I'd have to make my way home without them, which was quite a challenge. But glasses are also a symbol of different ways of seeing: on the trip up to the campsite, when Raven is threatened by the mountains she takes off her glasses to soften the view.

http://wendyorrjournal.blogspot.com/

RIP Suze Rotolo

2011-02-28T15:49:00.000-08:00

Sad to hear about the passing of Susan (Suze) Rotolo, artist and writer. I loved her memoir about growing up female, artistic, radical, beat and about her early relationship with Bob Dylan. I always loved the cover of Freewheeling - as a teenager it totally thrilled me. Obit here. Suze (The cough song) here

the beat, the beat!

2011-02-28T15:34:00.000-08:00

Billie: I wish I were a boy
Dad: Well so do I but you're not
Billie: Daddy, do you love me?
Dad: Of course I love you
Billie: I'm glad. because you're really going to have to

I remembered this film last night. It had slipped my mind for so many years but when I watched this video I was right back in Ringwood sometime in the early 1980's probably on a beanbag, eating. I don't know why I loved it, probably because I was sporty and had short hair. But I used to try and put a beat in my head so I could run faster. I don't remember dancing like this though:

Anatomy of a Novel: Angel Creek

2011-02-23T02:34:00.000-08:00

Anatomy of a Novel: Angel Creek

Guest Post by Sally Rippin

1) The Merri Creek
This is the obvious one. The Merri Creek runs beside the oval not far from our house and it is the place I go to hang out with my kids. I find it constantly inspiring: this rambling piece of wilderness cutting right through our clogged-up inner-city suburbs. I had been struggling with different versions of my novel for years, it had begun as an angsty YA novel; a mash-up of angels and rebellious youth, but I kept hitting walls and was close to despair. A walk along the creek with my seven year old inspired me to start again with a younger fresher story, a story of magic and possibility and wildlife and daydreaming – everything the Merri Creek represents for me.

2) My 1970s childhood
As a child I spent four years in Perth, from grade two to grade five. I remember these years as endless summers, going shoeless for months on end until the soles of your feet became hard like plastic, hanging out at the park on the end of the street where all the neighbourhood kids would climb the big tree and the girls would flash their flat chests at the boys. There was no sunscreen or bike helmets, no hovering parents and loose curfews. As long as you didn’t go further than the park you were only expected to return at mealtimes and bath-times, if that. It was the days when a 20-cent bag of mixed lollies got you a long way. Even though childhoods are quite different today, in Angel Creek I try to recreate that feeling of lawlessness in a contemporary setting, where kids rule the streets.
(The photo is out the back of our house celebrating someone’s birthday party, I imagine, which is why we’re all dressed up. I’m on the right, my two best friends in front. Don’t know who the sullen blonde is in the back. Someone’s poor big sister, perhaps?)

3) Books
I’ve chosen three that have had the greatest influence on this novel:
‘I’m Not Scared’ by Niccolo Ammaniti
This book blew me away when I read it a few years ago. Ammaniti’s 1970s childhood contains even more anarchy than mine. In the remote Italian countryside, a gang of kids mooch around the village streets and the surrounding wheatfields while their parents bicker or snooze in the midday heat. They find something terrible in the ruins of an old farmhouse and this leads them to an even more horrifying discovery about their very own families.

The ‘Black Juice’ short story collection by Margo Lanagan
When you choose to write about angels, or any other mythological creature for that matter, you are already encumbered with a whole lot of previous assumptions about what an angel looks like. William Blake and Jeanne d’Arc claimed to have seen angels in blinding visions, through science has now attributed this to visual migraines. So, assuming that no one other than perhaps the Virgin Mary has really seen an angel (and even her accounts are a little dubious), how has it become a given that angels have long flowing hair and long white dresses and play harps? In true Margo Lanagan style, the description of the angels in her short story ‘Earthly Uses’, is unlike anything I have ever read and gave me the confidence to create an angel-like creature free from all existing stereotypes.

‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ by Harper Lee
I first studied this book at school and remember being deeply moved by the characters and the terrible injustices that take place. Reading it again only recently I recognised how much this book has influenced me as a writer. I realise I am particularly drawn to stories of bad things that happen, witnessed through the eyes of a child and skewed by their mostly innocent perception of the world. Nothing as bad as what happens in Scout’s world happens in Angel Creek, I am, after all, writing for a younger audience than Lee, but once again that sense of the rules set in place by a childhood hierarchy is definitely present in my story.

http://www.sallyrippin.com

Anatomy of a Novel: Girls Meets Cake

2011-02-17T03:09:00.000-08:00

Anatomy of a Novel: Girls Meets Cake (aka My Invisible Boyfriend – USA title)
Guest post by: Susie Day

1: 80s roller disco Shakespeare on lightbikes

When I was a teenager, going to Burger King was an event (I remember the opening of Wales’ very first one: we were underwhelmed by the lack of cutlery), so any 80s American movie where quippy teens with cars and phones ate Twinkies seemed to take place in an intoxicating parallel world of grown-up cool. I wanted to capture that urgent need to catch up, that conviction that there is something truly glorious, exotic, adult going on just outside your field of vision - and though there are far better 80s teen films, the trashy party in Teen Wolf nails that.

I was wary about 80s referencing, because readers are canny and they know when you’re trying to sell Tron, mixtapes and Pacman as hipster retro when it’s just ‘stuff I happen to have lived through’ – but once I’d settled on Twelfth Night: The Musical! as the school show (for the nifty misindentification), I remembered seeing a production with this artsy Morriseyesque Bowie-clown Feste when I was about 16, and it was like the 80s was pursuing me. The saddo drama teacher who can’t quite accept he’s not ‘one of the kidz’ any more is my attempt to acknowledge/handwave the icky.

2: Fangirling

There are TV shows I observe, and others I watch. I reckoned a girl who invents an imaginary boyfriend ought to have that fangirl gene. When my UK editor suggested I include Heidi’s conversations with Mycroft Christie, her favourite time-travelling TV detective, I did the happy writer dance. Mycroft is part-Wimsey, part-Sam Tyler, part-Time Lord, and if he existed I would own the boxset, so getting to write him into the story was a bizarre thrill.

3: Buffy’s Scooby Gang

And on that theme... a while back I got deep into noodly introspective email with Luisa Plaja (genius purveyor of funny/clever/girly Brit YA) about why we both wrestle with expanding sub-plots and incidental characters we can’t bear to cut, and it’s simple: we both love Buffy. We want our sidekicks to have interior lives too. We want the potential for 22 episodes worth of hyenas, bunnyphobia, and Miss Kitty Fantasticos, even if we’re writing self-contained single titles. I suspect that ultimately this isn’t down to Slayers, so much as the shy retiring novelist’s conviction that heroes (even Frog Girls like Heidi) are presumptuous attention-hoggers, and really it’s the human scenery you should care about.

4: Not Malory Towers

I work as a warden – like a house parent, for 15 teenage boys – in a boarding school, and am intimately aware of how very not like Enid Blyton it is. Once you uproot the lacrosse sticks ‘n’ tuckboxes stereotype, you’ve got an environment where lots of very different teenagers are living in close quarters, away from their parents, maybe not always for the nicest reasons, and that’s ultimately more involving than whether Darrell will win her tennis match. (Though probably not more than the ‘will Wilhelmina-aka-Bill’s horse die of colic?’ plotline, which remains the best thing ever.)

5: Ludo, from the film Labyrinth

I always wanted to name a character after the big orange fluffmonster. He has absolutely no relevance to the flirty dippy Italian girl in the book, but being a writer is mostly like work, and only very occasionally like being Queen Of Everything, so you have to grab your chances.

6: That L Word

Sometimes you don’t realise what a book is telling you until it’s written. Heidi’s hunt for A Real Boy is really about self-acceptance and self-definition, not romance, and I was fumbling with exactly the same while I wrote it (though without the handy excuse of being 15). I’d been single for eons and, like Heidi, I just really really wanted to fall in love, the way everyone around me seemed to be doing without any anxiety at all: not only to have a lovely snoggable person of my own, but to feel typical, sane, on the playing field like all the rest. And then, suddenly, somehow, all those times my friends and family had fondly said ‘But are you sure you aren’t gay?’ had the real answer, the one I’d been ducking for forever, and actually it wasn’t new or unexpected at all: it had been there all along, and was just waiting for me to be ready to see it. Holy classic romance plotline, Batman! Heidi’s isn’t a coming-out story, it’s a romcom with a pretty trad outcome - but the real happy ending comes from her sense of security in her friendships, and above all in herself. And I think I needed to write that for someone else before I could let me have it too.

http://www.susieday.com/

Anatomy of a Novel is an occasional series where authors dissect their own work all for your delight.

February You are Short but Fat

2011-02-13T04:22:00.000-08:00

Stuff keeps happening! My deadline looms!

1. Our new puppy is a book muncher. He bit the braille out of my signed copy of How a Moth becomes a Boat by Josephine Rowe and the back blurb off Redeeming Features by Nicholas Haslam. He also knocked my copy of Screwball in the bath*.

2. Last night I watched a documentary by Tamra Davis**. It was called The Radiant Child and it was about Jean-Michel Basquiat. I highly recommend it! But it made me sad. He was unique and maybe definitely a genius. Are there still artists like him? I don't know. He died at 27 and left behind thousands of paintings. I love how his art has layers and references and cross-outs. Faces with grids for teeth and barbed wire halos. He paintings are like crazy mind-maps. The film has excellent footage of late 70s/early 80s Manhattan (shades of Smithereens.) It reminded me of Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids - artists who are artists because they cannot be anything else.
Basquiat's retooling of references gets called "bebop" in the film. Also: "someone's idea going through my new mind" - I kind of think all children are natural artists and all artists have direct access to their child.

3. I love Bored to Death. It makes me want to move to Brooklyn and have psychotherapy.

* Which turned out to be not such a bad place for it.
**I loved her movie Guncrazy starring James Le Gros and Drew Barrymore back in the feedback heavy days of flannel.

Anatomy of a Novel: Loving Richard Feynman

2011-02-08T21:28:00.000-08:00

Anatomy of a Novel: Loving Richard Feynman
Guest post by Penny Tangey

Washington DC
I wrote Loving Richard Feynman while I was unemployed in Washington DC for nine months. I spent my days visiting every tourist attraction in DC (I love revolutionary musketry) and writing. If I hadn’t been so lonely there, I never would have written this book.

Footballer’s Wives
I lie of course. I didn’t spend all my time writing and visiting cultural attractions. I also watched a hell of a lot of television. Including Footballers’ Wives almost every afternoon. I like to think this gave me balance.

Maths Camp
I did a Melbourne Comedy Festival show called Kathy Smith Goes to Maths Camp. I played a very over-excited nerdy character wigging off her nut at Maths camp and saying things like “If I can’t get in the top 1% of the Westpac Maths competition, how am I ever going to kiss a boy?” I originally based Loving Richard Feynman on the show but in the end the book turned into something completely different because it was hard to maintain that kind of enthusiasm for every day school life.

Books about Richard Feynman
Because I had so much time on my hands in DC, I read a lot about Richard Feynman and drew ideas for the plot from Feynman’s life. For example, the letter format came out of reading the very personal letter Feynman wrote to his dead wife, which is published in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track.

Maths
The main character in Loving Richard Feynman, Catherine, is initially somewhat unlikeable because she looks down on people who aren’t as smart as her. Then she meets Felix who is as good, or better, at Maths and Catherine has to adjust her attitude. I did a lot of Maths at school and university. I loved maths but at uni I was insecure about it because I found it really hard. I thought people who were confident of their maths abilities were snobs. Now I realise that it was my insecurity that was the problem. At some point, almost everyone realises that they aren’t the best and I’m very interested in how people react to that.

http://www.pennytangey.com.au/

Anatomy of a Novel is an occasional series where authors dissect their books for your delight. Enjoy!

Anatomy of a Novel: Girl, Aloud

2011-02-02T19:59:00.000-08:00

Anatomy of a Novel: Girl, Aloud
Guest post by Emily Gale

Anatomy of Girl Aloud by EmilyGale on Polyvore.com

The Kitchen Table
“...the round table is protected by a vinyl tablecloth with a red apple pattern. The apples are all identical, and shiny, and the kind of vivid red that is probably supposed to make you feel like skipping through an orchard.”

The kitchen table of my youth was the site of so much of the frustration and joy (in order of frequency) that my family shared. We’d come together - often reluctantly in the case of those of us who were teenagers - for meals that my mum desperately wanted to be happy times (I feel that so keenly now that I have my own family to feed). Or I’d sit on it to watch my mum cook, or we’d play board games (that often ended in tears), or do our homework. The kitchen was where it all went on. Same for Kass, the main character of Girl, Aloud, only she has to sit down to much bigger problems than I ever experienced. The vinyl tablecloth is a symbol of glossing over domestic dramas - wiping them clean and starting again, pretending there isn’t something more sinister underneath. Kass’s mum tries to Cillit Bang their troubles away, but for Kass those shiny red apples are mocking and poisonous because they represent her family’s unwillingness to look their troubles in the face.

The Dinner Guests
“...the game show host takes a seat next to me - grinning and fidgeting, oblivious to the bright orange pepperoni juice smeared across his cheek...”

A variety of celebrities and fictional charcters could be said to sit round that table. In the early drafts of Girl, Aloud (when it was called Push or The Light That Shines On Me or The Girl You Think I Am), the Dad character was never quite obvious enough - as a writer I was skirting around the issue of his mental health as much as my fictional family were doing. But somewhere around draft three I let myself go - I thought of those brilliant mockumentaries like The Office and Summer Heights High where the characters seem so over-the-top at first but somehow you buy into them to such an extent that along with the laughs you experience real sadness when things go wrong - even when, as in the case of the wonderful Chris Lilley, one man is playing all the main characters.
Kass’s dad, Paul Kennedy, reminds me of David Brent: he’s a cringe-making tragedy of a man, but every so often you can see why Kass loves him. The mum, Grace, always made me think of Jane Horrocks playing Little Voice. Her tiny frame and rabbit-in-the-headlights look but the powerful voice inside so desperate to be heard. You want to shake her, but at the same time you fear breaking her...she turns out to be tougher (and more flawed) than anyone imagined.

I loved the film Mommie Dearest as a young teen. That jaw-dropping scene where Joan Crawford discovers a wire hanger in her daughter’s wardrobe and - caked in face pack - begins a terrifying rant. Kass’s dad isn’t violent or mean to Kass but what I was interested in exploring is a child’s devotion to a parent who reliably stuffs up. It is thought that Joan Crawford may have suffered a form of Bipolar Disorder - her story and others like it (my own grandmother was diagnosed with a personality disorder in her eighties - they said she’d probably suffered with it her whole life) always make me wonder how different their lives might have been were there not still this stigma attached to mental illness.
When I was writing Girl, Aloud, there was a fair bit of publicity about celebs like Kerry Katona being Bipolar but this information, lightly dotted in the pages of celeb magazines, seemed to confuse the issue even more - as if Bipolar was the new celeb accessory. Stephen Fry made an honest documentary about his own experiences (Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive) that shed some useful light on the illness, and I wanted to write about an ordinary family going through it. It had been a passing comment in my family (“your great-grandfather had it...” thrown in over a Sunday roast before moving onto the next topic), but it was never really ‘out there’.

I listened to KT Tunstall’s album “Eye To The Telescope” whenever I wrote Girl, Aloud, and her song ‘Other Side of the World’ fit so well because it’s about having a long-distance relationship, which is what I felt this whole family were experiencing even seated round the same kitchen table.
Finally, Simon Cowell came into the mix because he’s got bad cameo written all over him. He’s the perfect symbol of all that is mean and rotten about shows like X-Factor. Ricky Gervais playing Andy in ‘Extras’ puts it well: “The Victorian freak show never went away, now it’s called Big Brother or X Factor where, in the preliminary rounds, we wheel out the bewildered to be sniggered at by multi-millionaires. And fuck you for watching this at home. Shame on you. And shame on me.”

The Refuge
“It’s at times like this that I remember why I chose the room at the top of the house. Most people focus on the bad points: There is almost no floor space...I’ve had to develop a semi-permanent stoop...there is almost no light...there is even less air...it is almost certainly a fire risk...[but] Up here, I can almost forget about down there.”

I’ve always loved attic bedrooms. In my second year of uni I had one - that’s the room I was picturing when I was writing Girl, Aloud (the image here is a lot more Homes and Gardens...).
I remember feeling so trapped as a teenager. I wanted to escape and had nowhere to go. But more than that - I didn’t have the courage to be anywhere else but home. Now I think it’s funny the way we send little children to their room when they’re naughty, but a few years down the line we’re begging them to come out and they don’t want a bar of us.
I was very lucky because home was a safe place, but still I treasured my top-floor bedroom. I would stare out of my window for hours and hours, wondering when life was going to get started. Kass is less cautious - she’s already spent a lot of her life putting out the fires her dad starts - but up in her attic she can lay her thoughts out on the unmade bed and try to make sense of them.

http://emilygale.co.uk/

Anatomy of a novel is an occasional series where authors dissect their books for your delight. Pass it on!

Anatomy of a Novel: The Greatest Blogger in the World

2011-01-26T03:17:00.000-08:00

Anatomy of a Novel: The Greatest Blogger in the World
Guest post by Andrew McDonald

greatest blogger in the world by simmoneh on Polyvore.com

1. Chris Ware’s big bold designs

There is something incredibly grandiose about all of Ware’s work, including his graphic novel masterpiece Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth, which is admittedly similarly titled to The Greatest Blogger in the World. But the influence Ware’s work had on my novel goes far beyond that. When one is writing about a character pretentious enough to think they could possibly be the best blogger on the globe, Ware’s designs are especially relevant.

Artworks like the one above (done for The Escapist – a comic series spin-off from Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) seem to say ‘I’m the greatest and most important font and text design in the world so look at me now!’ Ware’s designs and illustrations seemed to go hand-in-hand with the kind of book and character I was trying to write. I studied them for the research and for the blissy feelings my eyes felt upon seeing them.

2. 30 Rock, Season 2

During its second season 30 Rock walked that old tightrope of hilarity and believable storylines. The show has since lost its balance and has trouble creating engaging story arcs, but back in the second (and first) season I was totally invested in the characters and the universe of 30 Rock. I marvelled at the way satire, slapstick and character development was being weaved together. It was a perfect example of how to do ‘ridiculous humour’ that wasn’t so ridiculous because it was offset by a totally believable world. The show still does punchlines like nothing else, but its plots have become far too silly. Season 2 taught me that ridiculous jokes can and should be made. The seasons beyond that have taught me that ridiculous jokes can be made but must presented in a disciplined story context. On both counts, thanks 30 Rock.

3. Ursula Dubosarsky

Pretty much everything this woman does is pure gold. From her pictures books like The Terrible Plop to her thriller/YA novels like Abyssinia. She is truly one of the great Australian writers for children of all ages. Some of her best work can be found in her books My Father is Not a Comedian! and its sequel How to be a Great Detective. They’re both chapter books for younger readers and they feature the enigmatic and straight-talking protagonist Claudia.

Line for line these books are hilarious. Not the kind of hilarious that warrants a laugh track but more the kind that is delivered completely deadpan – without a murmur from any fake audience – making it all the more hilarious. For me she’s a true role model and if she wrote menus for pizza restaurants I’d probably be writing ‘Anatomy of a Pizza Menu’ right now.

4. Reading about the internet

There are, quite simply, not enough books for children out there that feature characters using the internet. We (and by ‘we’ I mean adults and children) live a good deal of life online these days. The internet is not a medium for playing music – it won’t be outdated in five years time. It’s going to be around for a long time.

We should be talking about blogs and Facebook and Wikipedia and Google with kids whether they’re family or students or from somewhere else entirely. So writing a book about a kid who is a blogger was a no brainer for me. Lots of kids’ and teenagers’ lives revolve around the web. It makes sense to me to have books that do too.

5. Lil Wayne

It’s probably not the anatomy of a kids’ novel to be expected, but I was listening to US rapper Lil Wayne’s album Tha Carter III a lot during the writing of Greatest Blogger. The content of the album’s lyrics are definitely not kid-friendly but as a result of listening to it a lot whilst writing, the rhyme ‘I’m ill, not sick’ from the song A Milli inspired the name of a character in the book – a blogger whose online name is ill_not_sick.

So whilst Lil Wayne didn’t have a big impact on the book I wrote, he did have a trivial impact. And sometimes the trivial tidbits can be illuminating in ways proper bits cannot. For example, you know now I’m a sucker for mainstream American hip-hop. (PS. Anyone heard the new Kanye album? Pretty good, huh!)

Anatomy of a novel is an occasional series where authors dissect their books for your delight. Pass it on!

http://www.andrewmcdonald.net.au/books/

The View from Last Week

2011-01-24T15:23:00.000-08:00

Anatomy of a Novel: Bye, Beautiful

2011-01-19T02:53:00.000-08:00

Anatomy of a Novel: Bye, Beautiful
Guest Post by Julia Lawrinson

Bye Beautiful by julialawrinson on Polyvore.com

Bye, Beautiful was born out of various betweens:

Between the raucous optimism of the Easybeats and the stillness of small country towns, where secrets are hidden in plain view.

Between the formality of what was expected – in appearance and otherwise – of young Australian women, and their secret hopes.

Between the way Aboriginal people were alternately scorned and ignored by white people.

Between the power promised by new cars, and the restlessness of kids who had nowhere to go.

But the main image I had when I was writing was of Marianne dancing in her bedroom to Friday on my Mind, imagining all the things she might do and become. And who wouldn’t want to dance to this?

http://www.julialawrinson.com.au/

Anatomy of a novel is an occasional series where authors dissect their books for your delight. Pass it on!

january rain

2011-01-15T04:38:00.000-08:00

Years and years and years ago I did work experience at Mushroom Records under the formidable Amanda Pelman and she scared the crap out of me. For five days I trooped from Ringwood to Albert Park and then I picked up sandwiches (hold the beetroot!) or stuck labels on Mel & Kim sample cassingles or raided the filing cabinet for promo photos, gifts for my suburban bandmoll friends. Paul Kelly came in and he looked scary. Kylie had just released The Locomotion and I honestly did not think it worked. The secretary was nice. She wore a fuzzy blue cardigan and I'm pretty sure she felt sorry for me. I never did get my $5 per day but Miz Pelman gave me some records, once of which was January Rain by Hunters and Collectors. And I've been thinking of it, because we've been getting it. I feel badly for the people watching bits of their life go floating by. I hope the sun stays out for a while and the army does a good job sorting the silt. NZ author Kate Gordon (Three Things about Daisy Blue) is getting together an auction for flood victims you can check out here.

Anyways. I'm off to sit in a shack for a while. Here's some nice writerly links to tide you over.

1. My Girl Friday made a polyvore for Gem Gordon from Notes from the Teenage Underground. Aw!
2. Urban Fantasy author Kris Reisz has a series called Cabinet of Curiosities. Bring the weird!
3. A.S King, author of Prinz Honor Book Please Ignore Vera Dietz talks book-writing and poultry-breeding. Yay for blue orpingtons!

Anatomy of a Novel: The Piper's Son

2011-01-11T05:38:00.000-08:00

Anatomy of a Novel: The Piper's Son
Guest post by Melina Marchetta

the piper's son by simmoneh on Polyvore.com

1. Tom’s Worldly Possessions.
Tom only has three lots of possessions in the first chapter when his flatmates chuck him out - his Norton Anthology of poetry, his guitar, and a couple of photographs.

The Norton
I love all three of my Norton Anthologies. I had to buy the English Literature editions for university and years later a friend bought me the poetry anthology. A Norton has incredibly thin paper because it’s over 2000 pages long. It’s very delicate inside so you have to be careful turning the pages and this is coming from the queen of the dog-eared books. I remember during a lecture in my first year of uni, watching a girl mark the pages with a thick yellow highlighter. I tapped her on the shoulder and told her I didn’t think she should be doing that and she subsequently kept away from me for the duration of our degree. The Norton includes some of my favourite poems and in a way, they’re poems that I live by. I used Lake Isle of Innisfree in Jellicoe because I think it describes the most perfect place in the world for solace and I’m convinced that if I go there I’ll be able to write a masterpiece. In Tom’s book I used Prufrock because I never want to be a Prufrock. There’s also my favourite poem, Japan, by the former US poet laureate, Billy Collins. I think the sexiest line of all times is in that poem.

The Guitar
I have this strong desire to be a guitarist and the closest I ever get is a few calluses on my fingers just before I give up. I know that if I took up the guitar for real I would never write again so I’m going to stick to what I’m good at. The best thing about being a writer is that you can give your characters all the talents you want to possess so naturally Tom is a guitarist and Frankie Spinelli learns to play as well.

Solsbury Hill (photograph in the novel)

I’m not a big Peter Gabriel fan, but strangely I’ve used two of his songs in the writing of two novels. Firstly in Finnikin I would listen to Don’t Give Up over and over again to get into the psyche of Finnikin’s father, Trevanion. In this proud land we grew up strong/We were wanted all along/I was taught to fight, taught to win/I never thought I could fail. (I’ve just remembered that I also mentioned the song on the first page of Francesca). Then in the Tom novel I used Solsbury Hill. It wasn’t until the end of the final edit that I realised I had mentioned photographs in chapter one and never referred to them again. Tom doesn’t hold anything close to his heart in the beginning so I knew I couldn’t mention the photos without telling the reader what they were. So I decided that one of the photographs would be of his Uncle Joe having his photograph taken on Solsbury Hill because Joe knew it was Tom’s father’s favourite song (Tom’s father and Joe are brothers). Sometimes I use an image or gesture or piece of dialogue between secondary characters to define their place in the story I want to tell.

2. The London Tube
The Piper’s Son isn’t about war and terrorism, but it is about the impact it has on a family years later so I needed to get the emotions right. The thing with research is this - you have to do so much of it but it’s the writer’s job to make sure the reader doesn’t see the research. It has to come out naturally in dialogue or the narrative voice or in a single image. I don’t think I totally got that balance right but I tried hard to. The easiest research was studying the Tube map and working out where Joe Mackee got on and off the train every day and how many minutes it would have taken him to get to work. The hardest part was reading the timeline of what happened in London in July 2005 and the obituaries for those who died in the bombing.

3.The Dixie Chicks
In my 2003 novel, Saving Francesca, the girls were given Spice Girls nicknames by the guys as a stir. Tom’s book is set in 2007 so I thought the girls would be more like the Dixie Chicks. One of my favourite documentaries is Shut up and Sing which is about freedom of speech. But it’s also about friendship, creativity and process and it’s about people at a transitional stage in their life whether they want to be there or not and Piper’s Son was certainly a novel about people at a transitional stage. I was listening to the music a lot that year, trying to imagine what song best summed up the girls and their relationships. Tara Finke’s song to Tom would definitely have been I’m not Ready to Make Nice and when I thought of Francesca’s feelings for Will I’d listen to Easy Silence. I couldn’t use any of the lyrics because the band had shut down communication on their website due to death threats they had received after one of them expressed shame that George Bush was from the same state of Texas as they were.

http://www.melinamarchetta.com.au/

Anatomy of a novel is an occasional series where authors dissect their books for your delight. Pass it on!

Anatomy of a Novel: Pink

2011-01-04T15:59:00.000-08:00

Anatomy of a Novel - Pink
Guest post by Lili Wilkinson

1. Stage crew

I was in my high school stage crew, and it was pretty much exactly the way it is in Pink - except in real life there was more swearing. I loved learning all the names of the lights and learning how to use the sound board - it was like a secret world that only we knew about, hidden from the actors and the audience.

2. Theatre

In the first draft, the musical was Anything Goes, but it was too much of a copyright minefield to use any lyrics, so I invented a whole new musical - Bang! Bang!, about singing and dancing New York gangsters. That was a fun piece of procrastination. High school theatre is such an awesome place for a story - being at school at night is always so exciting, and getting all dressed up in costumes and makeup is kind of like being another person. Everything's kind of sparkling and exciting - and the potential for things to go wrong is very high. Perfect conditions for drama!

3. David Levithan

David is an amazing YA author and publisher. At the Reading Matters conference in 2006, he made this incredible speech about how all teenagers have to see themselves reflected on the shelves of libraries and bookshops - especially gay kids. And I started thinking - what about the kids who aren't sure? I wanted to write a book that said it was okay to not be quite sure who you were - nobody has to fit into a box.

4. Melbourne High School

I went to MacRob, which is Melbourne High's sister school. Both schools are selective entry, and Billy Hughes is kind of based on a combination of both of them. We did all our musicals at Melbourne High, so I spent a lot of time there.

5. Pink!

Did you know that pink originally used to be for boys and blue used to be for girls? There are some fancy writers out there who think that "pink books" are somehow anti-feminist, or shallow, or somehow demeaning to girls. I think that's ridiculous, and I don't think a book has to be obtuse and wordy in order to say important things. I really wanted to write a pink book about smart, funny, flawed, interesting girls, that was fun to read but still had plenty of substance.

6. Dennis

We did have a stage crew teacher called Dennis. And I live quite close to Dennis station. The scene in Pink about Dennis is my favourite part.

http://liliwilkinson.com.au/

Anatomy of a novel is an occasional series where authors dissect their books for your delight. Pass it on!

Shiny Shiny 2011

2011-01-01T17:43:00.000-08:00

Hello 2011 - you are so shiny and impressionable. What marks will we make on each other I wonder?
Last year I was all words and worries. There was England and there was very little sleep. There was Bert Jansch making everything sound like the first slant of sunshine. I always felt like I was running out of time. This year my goal is to slow down. Pay the mortgage. Stop wanting distractions like an Ipad and polished floorboards and just generally let the leaves fall. Willeford will be going to school (!) so there will be days and continuum and books.

The writing goals are as follows:
1. Finish Girl Defective! (Nearly there! At two in the morning I am always there!)
2. Draft Primitive - my country kidnap YA
3. Finish one of my two half-finished full-of-possibility novels

I'll be going quiet for the rest of the summer - apart from the Anatomy of a Novel series which has gone from being 'occasional' to weekly. Lots of rippers coming up including Andrew McDonald, Melina Marchetta, Lili Wilkinson and Emily Gale.

In other news: Chasing Ray's What a Girl Wants #16 is up - about alternatives to the mainstream ideal of beautiful girls ie: twig-thin lollipop head plastic fantastic etc yawn. I've put in my two cents about Addie Pray and Harriet the Spy. You can read it here

And I'll add three girls who have been lingering in my consciousness of late.

1. Ree Dolly from Daniel Woodrell's amazing and haunting Winter's Bone. I loved the movie but the book nearly killed me. Such writing! And Ree is a heroine like no other. Snot-blocking, flawed, persistent, protective, powerful.

2. Katie aka 'Kid' from Rae Mariz's great debut YA The Unidentified. It's about a future 'game' world where most teenagers aspire to get 'branded' by a major company. Kid sees through it. Yay for conscientious objectors!

3. Vera in A.S King's excellent Please Ignore Vera Dietz.Vera is a smart, tough, loner who has to plough through her hurt in order to clear the name of Charlie Kahn, the boy she loved and hated who is now haunting her.

Anatomy of a novel: Five Parts Dead

2010-12-28T18:35:00.000-08:00

Anatomy of a Novel: Five Parts Dead

Guest post by Tim Pegler

Five Parts Dead by timpegler on Polyvore.com

1. Lighthouses

Lighthouses have always drawn me in like a dizzy insect. One of my final jobs as a newspaper journo was to interview the last lighthouse keeper in Bass Strait - an adventure in itself that informed 5PD's plane crash scene. Later, I took my family to stay at a remote lighthouse keeper's cottage on Kangaroo Island. It was here that the story really started to take shape. The isolation of the lighthouse seemed the right location to explore the darker themes I already had in mind.

2. Car accidents/smash repairs

Before I made the lighthouse connection I knew I wanted to explore questions to do with teen risk-taking, survival and fate. I destroyed 2.5 cars in my first year of driving and escaped with barely a scratch; I reckon I've used up seven of my nine lives so far. I'm acutely aware that others aren't so lucky.

3. Beer stubby

The first scene I wrote for 5PD was the party where things turn ugly for the narrator, Dan. I didn't drink as a teenager so I tended to be the sober observer on the fringe of such gatherings. As a journo, I've heard numerous examples of how parties can trigger tragedy and I wanted to give a sense of this, along with the social forces at play. The stubby also represents a conversation I had with an ambulance officer - once heard, never forgotten.

4. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code

There must be an unwritten rule that every Australian beach house has two copies of this book. I read it (like everyone else, apparently,) and it made me wonder whether I could include cryptic puzzles in a YA novel. This led to the nautical flags, Tarot scene and other mystical elements, many of which were cut or played down during editing. I also read Victorian ghost stories and books on death and grief, such as Lia Hills' The Beginner's Guide to Living.

5. Ghosts

I wasn't really a believer in ghosts until I started hearing first-hand stories that I couldn't explain any other way. Two of the spookier scenes in 5PD are based on the experiences of close friends/family members. Others are adapted from true stories at Kangaroo Island.

6. Japan

I've long been interested in Japan and wrote the party scene mentioned above, on a flight to Tokyo. Hiroshi is named after one of the people I met in the Japanese capital and inspired by intrepid tourists I've seen in central Australia and elsewhere.

7. Coldplay/Bon Iver

Coldplay's Viva La Vida begins in a London cemetery and ends with Death and All His Friends. There's also a track called Lovers in Japan so it felt like the right soundtrack when I was trying different elements for 5PD. Bon Iver's debut album, For Emma, Forever Ago, was apparently written and recorded in a log cabin in the Wisconsin wilderness when the artist needed time out for healing. The album is raw and lonely and fits with Dan's character. (And I'm attracted to the idea of going solo in the bush to see what stories emerge.)

I'm a bit of a bower bird so these are just some of the shiny things that went into Five Parts Dead.

http://www.timpegler.com.au/blog/

Anatomy of a novel is an occasional series where authors dissect their books for your delight. Pass it on!

Anatomy of a Novel: Six Impossible Things

2010-12-21T14:09:00.000-08:00

Anatomy of a Novel - Six Impossible Things

Guest post by Fiona Wood

six impossible things by fiona.w featuring fleur jewelry

signals/music

Sometimes art skips the usual routes, reaches into your ribcage and grabs your heart. For me this happens with Fra Angelico’s frescoes, Radiohead’s music, films like Wonderland (the Michael Winterbottom one) and The Thin Red Line, and Cy Twombly’s paintings… So when I looked for a concrete signal for Dan’s mother Julie’s state of being fragmented and sad, I wanted to give her something visceral, engaging and comforting: only Thom Yorke would do. This is a song she would have listened to over and over when Rob first told her he was gay. A bit of denial, a bit of self-pity. There are so many details about your characters that will never make it onto the page, but they lie under the surface, providing ballast (you hope). I love this clip – it’s vintage Radiohead, way back when Thom Yorke has his rockstar blond hair, for which he later bagged himself. But it does make him look like a Fra Angelico angel.

signals/poetry

Teenage years are when frustration and yearning and hope and self-doubt and arrogance all bang up against the walls of family life and school. It’s a fantastic time to read romantic poets like Keats and Byron whose writing is so beautiful and so full of big ideas about love and life and death. I remember reading for the first time lines like ‘Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance’ (Keats, When I have fears) and just longing to escape from the land of plaits and peanut butter sandwiches and compulsory sport and start My Real Life. So, there’s a little bit of Byron in the prologue, and the word ‘yearn’. Dan is a character full of longing and capable of tenderness, as lots of boys are, but there’s still plenty of social pressure not to advertise that side of your nature.

characters from way back

Giving Dan a moral conundrum is no doubt influenced at least in part by some very early reading - Edith Nesbit’s books. Her characters are so fallible and sweet with an appealingly flawed nobility; they mess up but always try to do the ‘right’ thing.

interiors

When our family house was being built we lived with my grandparents in their cosy womb of a house. We moved into the land of modern architecture and ‘upstairs’ when I was three, and I hated it. I missed the old environment’s hug. The memory of that feeling becomes Estelle’s attic. She has built herself a little nest up above the stark interiors of her parents’ life. She has her treasures and her art and her secrets there. And it’s where Dan finds out who the real Estelle is – when he reads her diaries. My other grandparents had piles of ancient luggage and steamer trunks filled with stuff like old pleated dress shirts, embroidered silk shawls and forgotten linen. It felt spidery and forbidden. That leaks into Dan’s side of the attic space.

dogs

Dogs are wonderful people. I’ve spent a lot of my working life in the last ten years talking to my dog. I gave Howard (the elderly poodle) to Dan so he would have someone to care for - a great antidote to feeling miserable, and so he’d have someone to talk to, because he’s alone a lot. Because Howard is always with Dan, he is a witness to the choices Dan makes, and a good sounding-board.

coffee

The place Dan works is called Phrenology, owned by Ali. So this is an example of how details from everyday life can feed the work. The provider of very nice coffee at 80 Spaces in Prahran has a shaved head, and that was the first fragment of the character Ali; it also prompted the café’s name. 80 Spaces has a very hip modern interior, but I wanted Phrenology to be warmer and more colourful, so I used the interior of Sugardough in East Brunswick as a starting point for that.

http://fionawood.com/

Anatomy of a novel is an occasional series studying what goes into some very awesome YA books ... thanks for reading! Let me know what you think ...

links and vales

2010-12-18T05:14:00.000-08:00

Barry Gifford short story Sailor and Lula on Andy Warhol
It's like picking up with an old friend - no time has passed.

Keri Smith's Artist's Survival Kit
Get one for your depressed writer friend for Christmas

Blake Nelson's sequel to Girl - Dream School serialized on Figment
Girl is one of my all time favourite books. It ends with heroine Andrea Marr packing away her 'alternative' clothes and heading for college. Dream School picks up where Nelson left off. I've subscribed to Figment but haven't done anything there yet. You?

RIP Captain Beefheart and Blake Edwards

reading: Same Difference by Siobhan Vivian, The Nancy Drew Files
listening to: The Feelies
watching: Gilmore Girls Season 3, The Runaways, Heathers