I watched the pilot and second episode of the new sci-fi offering Terra Nova the other day. For the uninitiated: our world is royally screwed and barely habitable about a hundred (ish) year from now. Technology has surprisingly only-sort-of come to our rescue, in the guise of a "crack in time" that allows us to send people and objects 85 million years into an alternate past (note the key word "alternate" there - it's code for "now we can make up whatever the hell we want, and put Jurassic and Triassic creatures in the Cretaceous period. Woot!". It's a very special form of Handwavium.) So we recruit the best and brightest to send on a one-way trip back to live with dinosaurs in the hope that it''ll inexplicably help those stuck back on Pollutions R Us.

Because that totally makes sense.

 

Over the weekend my partner and I saw the last Harry Potter film. We watched it in 3D (which I hate, because it just gives me a headache with the occasional "hey, that thing is floating" moment, but the 2D screenings were all sold out. Hah.) which I must say is used very subtly in the film (so subtly, in fact, it doesn't add a damn thing to the proceedings and might as well not be there.) You're certainly not missing anything by watching in 2D, but the 3D is at least not used as a gimmick anymore.

I was interested to see my partner's response compared to mine: he hasn't read the books, missed some of the films and his memory isn't geared to remembering the minutae of detail necessary to connect Part 1 and Part 2. After asking for the cliffnotes of what happened in the preceeding three movies, we entered the theatre. And from here there will probably be SPOILERS, because my discussion rather depends on you knowing what I'm talking about. If you have somehow managed to avoid all knowledge of what happens at the end of the series and care about retaining that precious ignorance, by all means go read something else. Here.

 

Still moving. Argh. You know how they tell you not to put too many books in a box, because it makes it too heavy to lift? That you should spread your books out between the boxes and put other things in there? Yeah. That doesn't work when 80% of what you own is, in fact, books. Sigh.

I've stopped boxing my books and started piling them instead. I've emptied two bookshelves (one of which was mostly DVDs - they HAVE been boxed, they fit so neatly in, I couldn't resist!), and I have six thigh-high piles of books. I have another three bookshelves to go, all of which are packed at least two books deep. Then I'm getting those sturdy cloth supermarket bags, and putting them in those. Or I will, when I have bookshelves at the other end to put the books in.

I may have a slight book obsession.

In book-related news, there's a review of Google's new e-reader that I mentioned last week, which addresses one of my concerns at least - it is multiplatform, but doesn't make it easy for you.

And, in the face of all those who say we'll suffocate under an avalanche of Kindle Crap, The Pauper's Book Club is a site that helps you find books within a certain price bracket and a certain category (eg 'High Fantasy'). Presumably they're amazon affiliates. The site's beautifully designed and they claim not to censor for content, but to "censor for crap" - that is, remove the books that should really have been publishing with a shredder. Will keep an eye on them.

Okay, this isn't a writing exercise so much as a thinking one. But it's valuable:

I've been re-reading my favourite book in the world: Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. Partly because I want something I know I can disappear into when I'm on breaks between moving, and partly because it's been years since I last read it, and I haven't ready my copy of The Year Of The Flood yet. As they're sort-of connected, it seemed like a good excuse.

I first read O&C when I was nineteen, with a small collection of other books on loan from a friend. I'm not entirely sure why I fell in love with it so much. On re-reading it, to be frank, it's not really living up to my memory of its incredibleness. But that doesn't diminish its place in my heart.

It was, I think, the first "adult" science fiction (sorry, Margaret) I'd ever read; the first what-if that had real thought and meaning behind it, and was about more than Defeating The Evil Empire. It was the first book I'd read where the future wasn't generic space formula and TechnologyAwesome, where the characters were more than a line-drawing, and the story arc couldn't be plotted with crayons. My first foray into future dystopia, human fallability and hubris, and speculative fiction with subtext.

It was also being read in contrast to some of the dreariest literary fiction I've ever had inflicted on me, thanks to my literature-worshipping creative writing classes at university. That probably had something to do with it. But I when I realised that Atwood was doing what my professors were talking about, and discussing themes and ideas that my professors were pointing to in more traditional literary works, I was floored.

I'd discovered speculative literature.

I suspect that's why this book remains so important to me. Not because the book itself beats out any other book in the universe (though, as Matthew Riley stated on the First Tuesday Book Club last week, Atwood can pretty much write whatever she likes) but because I saw the possibility of doing what I really wanted to do - discuss things that were important to me whilst playing with the what-if and the fantastic. And that's why I love this book.

So the thinking part of this exercise: what's your favourite book? If you can, I suggest re-reading it.  Look at it critically - does it, on its own merit, deserve your adulation? If not, what it is about that book that puts it above all others? Is it really only about the book itself, or is that book a symbol of another time, a meaning, a decision or discovery in your life? What makes it so special to you?

 

I'm currently reading Richard Curtis' How To Be Your Own Literary Agent, partially because I'm curious about how the system really works on the inside, but mostly because I need to figure out exactly how the minutae of contracts, royalties and rights work for the second part of SubTracker.

In short: it's an awesome resource. You can stop reading this right now if you go buy it. Yes, it's a little outdated regarding e-publishing and self-publishing (the last update was 2003, cut him some slack for not being prescient) but the areas where that shows are not areas where he's saying anything important to the core of the book - ie royalties, contracts and rights. Even if you're planning to self-publish, you should read this book to understand how the rest of the industry works.

The more I've read various blogs over the past few years, the more it has amazed me just how many authors get along without actually understanding their contracts. They leave all that to their agents or their publishers. This is their business, their livelihood, and they're just trusting other people won't screw them over, when screwing them over is pretty much in the agents and publishers' best interests.

These people do not work for your benefit, they work for their own. And if that benefit means quietly pocketing your money, or not telling you things you need to know, then they may well do that, even if it ends up tanking your career. If you can't understand your own contract or your own royalty statement, how are you going to protect yourself? This is the real world: you have to look after yourself, no one is going to do it for you.

Understanding contracts is not astrophysics - it's just careful consideration of phrasing and word choice. We're writers, for heaven's sake, this should not be on our forbidden list. Yes, it's legalese and utterly dry and boring, but it can be understood after some practise, just like shakespeare. And you don't lose points for having an IP lawyer (not a regular flavour one - IP is a special area and requires specialist knowledge) help you out with understanding (or negotiating) - if the result is that you understand the piece of paper you're supposed to sign, that's a win.

Ditto on your royalty statements and your rights. They're not hard, they just need some thinking. And Curtis' book makes that thinking a lot easier. Go read or buy, before you start sending stuff out.

    Disclaimer: this post involves colloquial expressions of excrement. Persons adverse to such four letter combinations may be advised to return next week.

Yesterday's post on alpha readers was inspired by a conversation I had with a writer-friend of mine. I had just finished proofing some poetry and prose that she was sending off to a competition, and in the midst of some disappointment, she said: 

"Everything I write, it's brilliant, and then I give it to you and it's a piece of shit."

I can relate to that. I had a scriptwriting teacher in university who would start each workshop session with everyone repeating the mantra "My work is a piece of shit, my work is a piece of shit" in tones reserved for reverential supplication. After that, no one was allowed to mention how bad they felt their work was. We'd all already said it; yours wasn't allowed to be worse than anyone else's. Luckily, that particular class was pretty cluey to the practise of fishing for writerly compliments by protesting the tragic terribleness of the work. That sort of thing didn't fly, though it was fun to see a few hopefuls trying. That wonderful teacher simply looked at them, and asked

"Well, if you think it's so irredeemable, why are we wasting our time on it?"

Nobody else dared fish again in that class. It was refreshingly honest. 

 

This one's a writing exercise that doesn't involve much actual writing, at least from your point of view. But it's an important skill to develop.

Alpha readers are people who read your incomplete, unpolished not-working-yet drafts, and make suggestions. They're a special kind of reader - the kind who can see past the use of cliches and the dodgy bit where you've used the same sentence structure four times in a row and the fact that 'inflammable' doesn't mean what you think it does. They're people who can ignore the fact that what you're trying to do might not be their type of story, and might not be how they would have done it. Not everyone needs them, but they're invaluable to those who do.

You will need: a sense of tact and diplomacy, a friend who has some rough drafts they will permit you to read, said rough drafts, a box to put your ego in for a moment.

First, put your ego in the box, and leave it outside the door. It has no place here: this is not about you. (Other than the fact that you'll be learning how to see past the surface of writing to the bones underneath, and what the writer is trying to do.) Nobody cares how you would have written this, or if you don't like space giraffes. All that goes in the box outside.

Take the piece away from your friend. Having them staring at you while you read it will totally distract you from what you're trying to do. Gently send them on their way for about thrice the time you think it will take to read it.

Next, read the piece. Do not have a pen in your hand. Do not correct typos, spelling mistakes, grammar gaffes, word confusion or undulating sentence structure. That's not your job right now.

Think. Hard. What is the piece about? What are the main conflicts, resolutions, character alterations - what, in short, is going on in this story. If this is a novel, it's going to take you a while. It's probably a good idea to tackle it chapter-by-chapter. Write them down. If you have a particularly ascerbic natural tone or you tend to think in a sarcastic manner, it's probably best to plan time to rewrite this stuff later.

Now think even further - look at what you've just noted down, and your gut feel of the story - what do you think the writer was trying to do? Nevermind if they achieved it, or if you don't like it or don't agree with it, what were they trying to do? What did they want to bring across? This is a tricky step - it's the crucial skill of the alpha reader, one that takes some practice, hard thought, and a complete lack of ego.

Some people here like to talk to the writer, and see if what they think they're trying to do marries with what the writer thinks they're trying to do. Personally, I prefer to only talk at the end. Sometimes the writer might think they're trying to do one thing, when they're really trying to do another, or may not yet know, or may not want to talk about things that way. It's up to you.

Now, armed with your knowledge of the structure and intention of the story (as you see it) read the story again. What is and isn't working for their intention? What's missing? What's undermining it? What is working really well (it's equally important to tell them what they need to keep as it is what they need to lose). Remember, your ego is still in the box - this is not about how you would write it. This is about making a story that does what they want it to do.

Make notes on this. If necessary, rewrite things into a tactful response. You'll need to give them all the notes - the conflicts and arcs (because they may not see them, or may think there are some there that haven't actually come through), your views on the intention, your notes on how to strengthen that intention. Keep a copy of these notes.

Hand them to your friend, and scamper to safety while they read it. Be prepared to have a conversation where they explain with anger and dispair that that wasn't what they intended at all, and you completely read it wrong, and it works fine just the way it is! Don't judge them too harshly - when we ask for feedback, every one of us secretly wants to be told that our baby is absolutely perfect and shouldn't be touched, even if we know that's a load of pants.

You may find at a later date they come back to you with questions, hoping for a discussion to illuminate some finer points. Refer to your copy of the notes to refresh, and have that discussion. You may need to rethink your suggestions if your reading of their intention was actually inaccurate (if it's that out of whack, though, then there are big problems with the story - generally that the author is trying to trick themselves, or put too many things in).

That's the job of the alpha reader - not to judge or rewrite, but try to help the writer achieve what they want to with a story.

 

Inspired by an ex-colleague, I started up a GoodReads challenge not long ago. My goal is 40 books for the year - 30 seemed a paltry number, and 50 too high. It wasn't until later I realised that leaves me little over a week per book, and I have some Ayn Rand's sitting on my To Be Read list, not to mention several door-stop fantasy novels. 40 will definitely be pushing it. At any rate, the latest on the list was something I picked up in a first-book-in-trilogy-super-cheap book sale.

The Eleven Domains were forged in blood a thousand years ago. The blood is about to flow again.

Bramble is as wild as the animals she follows deep into the forest near her village. Her dark eyes betray her heritage - she's a Traveller, one of the despised original people of the Domains. And for as long as she can remember, she has wanted to take to the Road.

In Turvite, where ghosts drift along dark cobbled streets, Ash must leave his parents, and the Road, to begin an apprenticeship with the only person who will accept a Traveller - the scheming Doronit. But the gods who linger in the gloomy square have other plans for him...

From different ends of the Eleven Domains, death casts Bramble and Ash on journeys across valleys and mountains, and into the dark history of their ancestors.

Freeman has a richly imagined world - the book is impregnanted with a deep history and culture that, while romanticised and idealised rather than realistic, lends weight to an otherwise non-existent story. Unfortunately, her timescale errs on the dramatic-and-unrealistic side -  not only has the civilisation not developed at all in a thousand years (no science, no change in religion, politics or social values) they're still hanging on to the prejudice and wrongdoing that was engendered thirty generations ago. A thousand years is a long time for a people to sit stagnant on things like this, but these people act like the wars happened last Winter. It's an odd blend that just doesn't ring true, to me.

Her writing is clean, clear and evocative, and certainly the strongest element in her work. Despite the books other flaws, which would normally have resulted in a dog-eared bookmakr hanging out from one-third-in for the rest of eternity, her writing kept me interested enough to finish it to the end, even when I could clearly see there'd be no significant plot development for the rest of the book.

And there's one of the main problems - this isn't a trilogy, it's a novel in three parts. After the first plot-points, which occur a little later than you'd expect in a novel, nothing much happens but the following of those plot points. At least, nothing that coherently fits together to make an emotional arc or a story. It's interesting - things happen to people, they make decisions, and other things happen, but it doesn't seem to have much of a point. There's no answer to the character's starting states - nothing that shows how they've grown, their development, and the closure at the end seems shoehorned in at best.

There's no resolution at the end of this book. Their quests aren't remotely answered - in the case of some characters, it's not even clear what their journey will be yet. Which makes the book fundamentally unsatisfying, to me. I wanted a story, something that would finish what it began, at least in part. 

And while the characters themselves feel dimensional, they're difficult to tell apart. Bramble was the only character I could keep track of - all the male characters blended into one another in short order. This was not helped by the fact that Freeman would stop the whole story to give us the point of view of another, inconsequential character. For example - one character killed a would-be-pick-pocket in self-defence, and spent a good deal thinking about the consequences of that. We then jump to a three-page POV of the death scene from said pick-pocket's point of view, a tangent which does not serve the story and does not give us any information we needed to know - it doesn't even give us anything unexpected. This happens several times throughout the book, and I'm at a loss as to why these interludes are there. There is no useful information in there. These characters are not important - we can see they're not important, and seeing things from their viewpoint doesn't add anything. They distract, confuse and slow down the book.

To me, those are big flaws, things that run right to the bones of the book and should have been addressed in the first or second draft where they could have been fixed relatively easily. So it is, I think, a testament to the quality of Freeman's writing that I still finished the book with a reasonable sense of enjoyment. While I won't be purchasing the remainder - I've no wish to slog through another lot of not-much-happening before the plot reveals itself - I will have a look at any other series or books she brings out.

 

 

I read and adored Friedman's Coldfire trilogy a few years ago - a blend of science and fantasy, with brilliant worldbuilding, vivid, rich and fascinating characters, and brilliant writing and description. A while ago, I picked up her second trilogy, starting with A Feast of Souls, and was, frankly, disappointed. Her main character was irritating, unlikable and not in the least bith sympathetic, and while I was curious enough about the ending to finish the book, I certainly wasn't on the lookout for its siblings. However, the second book arrived as a gift, so here goes:

In a world where the price of magic is life itself, a group of seemingly immortal sorcerers appears to have cheated the system. But only one man knows the true origin of their power, or understands the true cost.

Now Kamala - born to poverty and abuse, the first woman to claim a Magister's power - will seek her rightful place among these mages, and lay siege to their secrets. The monk Salvator will claim his father's throne, and test his faith against a legendary darkness. The beautiful Siderea Aminestas, consort to Magisters, will be offered the thing she desires most - at the cost of her human soul. And an ancient Evil thought long-destroyed begins to stir anew, corrupting kings, shattering alliances and ultimately threatening to unweave the very fabric of human civilisation.

A mystical bloodline was cultivated to withstand this darkness, and its power must be wakened. But this will demand sacrifice of its warriors - and corruption is rife.

 It's an improvement on the first book of the series, but falls well short of her first trilogy.

Our main protagonist, Kamala, starts to develop some humanity, but is still far too out of touch with her own feelings or the feelings of others to be believable. She struggles with anyone expressing gratitude towards her, or respecting her, and yet that's exaclty what she envies when she meets women who are treated as equals by men. She spends an entire book wondering at her own attraction to a man, after running through more or less that exact process in the first book.

In short, she's patchy and inconsistent, but admittedly less irritating and inhuman this time around. Other characters are most consistent, but not particularly more interesting. There are a few mysteries set up and some posed questions, but I was honstly struggling to care.

There are some really great ideas in here, particularly the 'true cost' of their defence, and indeed the whole set-up, but it's swamped out by scenes that are just frankly dull (I found myself skimming), characters who have little input and should have been amalgamated, and the occasional truly cringworthy description - it shattered like rotton silk. Rotten silk can shatter? News to me. I think that might be her word of the year - almost every time she used it (which was quite often) it was in conjuction with something that just wouldn't shatter. Ah well.

As before, I was still curious enough to finish the book, but I wouldn't be looking for the third one. When she brings out her next trilogy, I'll take a gander - there's still enough good faith from her Coldfire series that I'll forgive her one that's a little rough around the edges. But I'd steer clear of this lot, for now.

 

I have finally gotten back to my giant pile of Books To Be Read (which has now toppled over into two piles, because some friends have recently come to the epiphany that I both like books, and have an amazon wishlist). Not a book that was on my wishlist, but has definitely been on my 'have a look at that' list. In my head. Anyway:

Alren lives with his parents on their small farmstead, half a day's ride from the isolated hamlet of Tibbet's Brook. As dusk falls each evening, a mist rises from the ground promising death to any foolish enough to brave the coming darkness. For hungry demons materialise from the vapours to feed, and as the shadows lengthen, humanity is forced to take shelter behind magical wards and pray that their protection holds until the dawn. 

But when Arlen's world is shattered by the demon plague, he realises that it is fear, rather than the monsters, which truly cripples humanity. Only by conquering their own terror can they ever hope to defeat the demons. Now Arlen must risk leaving the safety of his wards to discover a different path and offer humanity a last, fleeting chance of survival.

The Painted Man is Brett's debut, but reads far more like it comes from a seasoned author. The characters and world are engaging and vivid, the story and pacing spot-on for both a discrete novel, and the first book in a trilogy. Brett avoids constructing a three-volume-novel, and instead gives us a satisfying read that piques out interest for the later books.

The qualms I have about the book are few, though some are a little troubling. One of the societies Brett created had a clear caste system and complete male dominance over women. They were a violent, proud people with a number of faults, and clearly not displayed in an altogether positive light. So far, not a problem - the issue comes, for me, when he introduces burkhas into the equation (though he doesn't say the word, it's bloody obvious what he means - black cloth that covers women completely from head to toe, and while they may wear beautiful silks and jewellery underneath, only their husbands will ever see that.). 

I take issue with this because the burkha is such a strong image of Islam that introducing it to this society does not help enrich its culture, but instead invites the reader to assume that Brett is really writing about his understanding of Islamic culture - and it is not a flattering portrayal that he gives us. Instead of allowing the impression of these people to form from Brett's words, we're inundated by our own ideas of what Islamic cultures are. In the current cultural climate, slapping this Islamic brand on an invented woman-subjegating, violent, proud and easily offended people seems sensationalist, manipulative, and frankly racist. Not only unnecessary, but detrimental to the book.

And it could have so easily been averted. Did the women's wrappings have to be black? What if they were coloured to identify their marital status, or their husband's caste status? Just that slight change to move it away from the Islamic stereotype.

Other than that, it's a strong book. The characters are a little less dimensional than I'd like - but packing three complete and (for the most part) separate character arcs into 540 pages means something has to go. The female characters are the weakest - Leesha seems largely to be a one-note song, while Arlen and Rojer have much more depth. I would also have liked to see more of Arlen's transition - he exits stage left as one character, and essentially re-emerges later as a completely different one. Which is a valid technique, but when he's ostensibly the main character whose every nuance we've been following for the past three hundred pages, I feel a little cheated.

But, that aside, it's a book that I'd highly recommend, if you haven't picked it up already. The other two in the series have already made it onto my wishlist, and I'm looking forward to the other book of his (not from this series) that's sitting (unfortuntely quite a way down) on my Books To Be Read pile.

 

As I'm overseas, my blogging time is limited. This is an essay I wrote several years ago in response to Nancy Mairs'  thoughts in her memoir 'Remembering The Bone House': that we cannot “relive the past exactly.” You may “live it as often as you like,” she says, but only as your present self. 

On memory and memoir

Memory is a tricky beast. Our entire sense of self is dependant on it: the experiences that shape our prejudices and reactions, our values and our affections are housed solely in our recollection of them. In ourselves, we are secure in the ‘truth’ of these recollections, certain of our feeling that they occurred exactly as we feel them, for when we retrieve a memory, we don’t scroll through lists of dates and names and words, but relive it, as Mairs suggests – the present self returns to the past and re-experiences the event. It is difficult to believe such a powerful tool, that fills us with such assurance of its accuracy, could be subverted, or even downright arbitrary. What colour top was your best friend really wearing that day at the beach? Did your mother actually say that, or was it just something you were expecting her to say? 

Our memories are nowhere near as trustworthy as we think – or as we rely on them to be. Countless psychiatrists, hypnotherapists, investigators and scientists will testify to the power of suggestion, or other techniques that can fool our little record-keeper, yet we still instinctively depend on the information stored there as absolute reality. The traditional ‘autobiography’, as written by someone that a certain percentage of the population thought (or remembered as being) important, delivers details of early childhood and adulthood that are decades – often half a century – after the event, expecting the accuracy of a video playback. Robert Hillman gives us accounts of his childhood in The Boy In The Green Suit, starting with the words “It happened like this…” and tangles the canny, knowing voice of the adult with the perspective of the child as he takes us through his past.

Hillman gives us an understanding of the reasons and hidden meanings of events that, as a child, he could not have had. At some points, during snippets of the past written in present tense from a clearly childlike viewpoint (but still with sentence structure and grammar too perfect to even approximate a child’s voice), he adds the afterthoughts of what he has realised on reflection much later, such as his father’s aborted attempt to have him adopted by a childless couple. At other points, we’re given information that a child would not have noticed – or perhaps, have noticed but not realised the significance of enough to formulate the ideas that Hillman writes. At the same time, Hillman acknowledges his child-self’s limits of knowledge in other areas; “the community slid into the drabness of the past. Or perhaps it was all to do with contrast. After all, I didn’t know the past all that well.” There’s no continuity to which sections have been unconsciously ‘adult-erated’ and which Hillman recognises as being too knowing. 

Hillman writes what he, as an adult, remembers of his childhood, including the revelations and realisations that have occurred to him about various instances in the meantime. He doesn’t separate out the naivety of the child; what knowledge he has at the time of writing is what he writes – it is clear that his emotional experiences as a child retained a much stronger image than his speculations about socio-economics, or politics. Scenes such as the moments of his mother leaving or his father requesting that he call his stepmother ‘Mum’ have the intensity of the child’s experience, are far less laden with an adult’s re-evaluation. The inconsistency draws attention to the childhood episodes, certainly, but also calls into question the timeframe of the surrounding realisations. How much of what we are reading can be trusted as the “real” memoir – what the child-Hillman thought and felt? No more than in any other memoir, excluding (perhaps) a diarists’. But Hillman refuses to address this question at any length – not even the admittance that this might not be ‘historically’ accurate, or any difficulties he faced recalling these memories. Rather, he sticks to what he gives us at the start: this is what happened.

In comparison, Louise De Savlo’s Vertigo grabs past and present in tiny pieces, dealing more coherently with theme and mental journey than any form of chronology. She states bluntly that this ‘may not be an accurate account of how she grew from a working class child to a Virginia Woolf scholar, as memory cannot be entirely trusted’. Her writing implies, however, that her reports of the past are taken from diary entries that she was keeping at the time – whether or not she’s including actual snippets of the entries isn’t strictly determinable, though she does describe the diary entries as different to the memoir we are reading – “My diary entries are filled with prosaic happenings…” She writes in present tense, different to Hillman’s past accounts; instead of a concrete story of her past, we’re given the impression that while she is exploring past events, she is in fact re-experiencing them and relating her experience of the re-living, not the original. Perhaps this is because, at the time of the events, it is difficult for her to accept her sister’s suicide and the surrounding crises. She verges on being simply unable to compute what has happened; information and emotion are squirreled off the to side and barricaded away. De Salvo conveys both the not-dealing and attempting-to-deal simultaneously, twining past-and-earlier-present together in one section.

She also flicks back and forth in time without warning, bringing a flash or two of realisation or understanding back into the context in which it belongs, such as her mother’s hospitalisation:  “We find out, from my father, something we have never known: my mother has been hospitalised for depressed before, as a young girl”. De Salvo makes no mention of when this information was given, but from the context we can deduce that it wasn’t at the moment of hospitalisation. This technique operates more explicitly when she writes of telling her friends about her sister’s suicide, and unconsciously accepting fault for her sister’s decision: 

“When I tell my friends about my sister’s death, I tell them that the belt she used to strangle herself had been a gift from me. I don’t know if this is true. I had given Jill a belt – but I am compelled to say it, and at the time, I don’t know why. Now though, it seems to have been my way of taking responsibility for what happened to her, though I have never admitted it to myself that I have felt guilty about her death.”

In this way, she acknowledges implicitly that her memory of the past has been irrevocably altered by her present self, but that she must deal with the memories as they currently are. This method of examining memories not as an indelible film, but a fluid medium of expression of self leads to a very different feel of memoir – we feel far more exposed to and entrenched in De Salvo’s experience than Hillman’s – perhaps the constant shifting of chronology around the experiences grants an immediacy – everything is focused on the current thought, rather than sailing smoothly through the linear transitions. 

Nancy Mairs’ Remembering The Bone House performs a similar trick with time, though nowhere near as pronounced. Instead, Mairs tends to deal in sections, glancing back and forth with a brief adult recognition or realisation, a reflection or thought, a snippet of an earlier or later time that relates to the event at hand. She constantly deals with the unreliability of memory in her writing, stating at several points during the memoir that she has no way of knowing if what she writes is ‘historically’ accurate, but also that this inaccuracy is not something that disturbs her:

At forty-five, I no longer know which of the details I can retrieve from my past are memories, and which are daydreams, and to be honest, I no longer care. I have lost any reverence I may have once had for the “facts”. Not long ago, my mother told me a version of an incident from our past which was simply wrong, though at earlier times she’d told it accurately enough. For some reason, she’d suddenly revised the take, “dreamed” it differently. I started to correct her… Then I shrugged. If I’d told her my version, she wouldn’t have believed it. She’d have thought I’d forgotten what “really” happened. But what “really” happened, I understood suddenly, is always irredeemable. 

With this in mind, Mairs freely acknowledges parts of her history that she doesn’t understand, apparently in response to her editor’s probing about the why and wherefore and meaning of certain events – Mairs always replies with a variation of “If I understood these things, I would tell you. I have told you what I know.” What she does know and understand includes an intriguing separation of self – there is an internal Nancy entirely different to the Nancy that the world views, and different again to the amalgamated self of her-and-her-sister (and earlier ‘selfhood’) and again to what she seems to have nominated as the ‘watcher’ – the writer inside her, the observer. All of these Nancies are referred to in third person (one wonders who it is that writes the book, apparently unnamed, unless it’s all of them at different times).

Just as she refers to different selves, Mairs flicks between different memory-states; past, present or future tense all exist within the same voice. A child’s voice, complete with misunderstandings and vocabulary, is embedded quite naturally in Mairs’ recollections – instead of exploring the memory from an adult viewpoint as Hillman did, Mairs conveys the “real” (or as close as she can get) thoughts of her child-self, such as her confusion over her mother’s anger at her indiscretion of personal information with strangers: 

On the way up the street, Mother scolds me for telling a perfect stranger the private details of our lives. I scuff my feet. I don’t see what she’s mad about. I didn’t tell any lies, except for the one about her age but that wasn’t my fault. How could I know she was joking? She didn’t laugh.

In the same voice, Mairs refers to her current self, and speculates about her future self:

Grandma’s breakfast is always the same: a biscuit of shredded wheat softened with a splash of water form the boiling tea kettle. I hate shredded wheat… When I’m grown up, it will turn out, I’ll have a glass of juice and a bowl of cereal every morning, often shredded wheat; I may even come to the boiling water part eventually.

Instead of attempting to divide the childhood from the adult, past from present, as Hillman does, and pretend that such memories are static, fixed in progress, Mairs allows for the fluidity of her memory in her writing – her memoir is framed within the expectation that not all of what she says will be agreed with by others, and she constantly refers to the jumble of the remembered and imagined; things she expected other people to already know, things they believed happened – Mairs’ memoir is written through the idea that all forms of memory are fleeting and progressive, altered by the experiences that come after them, and her acceptance in writing this gives a greater sense of ‘truth’ or reality than a memoir written as undeniable fact. We’re lead gently into what Mairs feels has happened, with no expectation that this is what actually occurred from an outsider’s perspective. It’s Mairs’ internal reality, honest with its foibles, that we’re reading. This modern style of memoir, such as De Salvo’s and Mairs’, questioning truth and reality and exposing flaws in memory, prompts a question as to the nature of this self-exploration: If memory is altered, and we can’t access the original, does it matter what that original was, or that we no longer possess it? Was there even an original to begin with? 

If I am created by my memories, then I must change as they do. Logically, once a memory has changed, I would have no recourse to even know that it has, or sense the difference, let alone retrieve the ‘original’. Therefore, what difference does it make to me as an individual that my memory is, from an outsider’s perspective, ‘wrong’? This different memory is only an external influence – another’s version of what happened, no more reliable than mine. Theirs is creating the person they are, and while we both feel our memories should agree, agreement isn’t necessary to the survival of our inner self. Memory is personal. Even though I know my memory is auto-modifying, I have to consciously fight to accept a version different to the event that I remember, and rightly so – that memory did not create me-as-I-am-now; it has no part of me. It’s an ingredient to another person, part of their self. Indeed, for the most part, our disagreeing memories remain a personal thing, quietly recreating us as we live our lives. It’s only when the different memories are brought to light– through memoir, or something close to it – that others will even know to disagree, but disagreeing with another’s memory is rather missing the point of the memoir. It’s not about historical accuracy. The exploration of memory is not to present facts, or we’d all read historical data entries. The point of the memoir is as a collection of the self, as it has been created – through unreliable, undependable memory.

Consulted Works:

Louise De Salvo Vertigo Dutton Books (Penguin Group) 1996 New York

Nancy Mairs Remembering The Bone House Beacon Press 1989 Boston

Richard Hillman The Boy In The Green Suit Scribe Publications 2003 Melbourne

 

 

Last week I was sent a link to something interesting - Scrivner, writing software package that I've long been interested in (and just as long been miffed that they were mac-only) was holding an open windows beta*. It is, unfortunately, not a beta of their Scrivner 2.0 version, but an earlier version (I say unfortunately, because some of the stuff in Scrivner2.0 for mac looks very problem-solvy for the few shortcomings I've found) but I downloaded it, dutifully went through their introduction video and tutorials and had a play.

I should mention, before I get into this, that Scrivner's having a promotion at the moment - anyone who enters and wins Nano gets Scrivner for windows half-price.

Like yWriter, Scrivner is writer's software that knows its place - which is to get the hell out of the way of the writer and let them write. There are no questions, character profiles, location profiles, goal mapping, etc (though you can certainly - and easily - set those up as a template if you want them), no pre-structured outline or expectation that you're going to write a certain way. It's designed to be broader than yWriter - for people writing research papers, screenplays, articles, anything - so Scrivner avoids anything that would centre the software as "software for novelists". This may be a turnoff for you, if you want something that feels like "Novel Writing Software(tm)", but I find it refreshing. It means the software can't have preconceptions about how I'm going to work.

About two weeks ago, the aussie dollar was near-parity with the US, which in my book is a cue for online shopping splurges. Mostly Amazon - even with shipping and the dollar at 80 cents, amazon is still often a fair whack cheaper than buying locally, but with such a strong dollar, the books are a comparative bargain.

I also picked myself up a new Kindle, for a few reasons: with all the developments in self-e-publishing lately, I've been meaning to try out a dedicated e-book reader; with all the reading I'm (supposed to be) doing for general writer-research, keeping up with the market and so forth, using an e-reader should be easier on both my wallet and my shoulder-bag;  also, I'm planning a long trip soon, and taking a few hundred books in the space of a chapbook sounds ideal.

So I ordered a 3G new Kindle, which arrived last week.

 

A while ago I wrote a review of yWriter, the little software package I use (mostly) to write novels. I praised the fact that while it had an impressive array of useful features, almost all of them could be completely ignored without much detriment to your work process - this is a good thing. It means you're not spending hours farting about with something that feels like writing but actually isn't. That's far too seductive a game to play.

Liquid Story Binder is a beautiful software package that does exactly the opposite. You can have plot trees, character dossiers, galleries, timelines, mindmpas, outlines, journals, project goals, colour schemes for your work area, a music playlist, multimedia organiser, storyboarding, scene 'building', and a host of other things, most of which sound like things I've already listed but are apparently something completely different. It sounds wonderful - so many things you can do with your writing!

Oh - it also has a word processor. Yeah. The thing you actually use to write.

I'm a techy-kind of person. I love programs that promise to organise my ideas, or give me fifty new ways to arrange and look at the same collection of concepts. I've tried most of the writing software out there, played with it gleefully for about half an hour until I inevitably realise that while I love all the crazy wacky things it does, that's just not how I work.

yWriter is one of the very few programs I've found I can actually work with - and not only can, I prefer to. Compared to yWriter, word documents are giant marshes of forgotten plot points, misplaced notes and vanishing character arcs. yWriter keeps my stories organised without me having to actually spend time on the organising part.

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Picked this up a while ago as an Australian fantasy debut:

Can healing defeat the sword? In seasons long past, twin gold-eyed princes sundered a kingdom. Rejecting his twin brother's warrior ways, Kasheron established a community deep in the southern forests. Forgotten by the outside world and protected by the trackless trees of Allogrenia, Kasheron's Tremen community has flourished, with his legacy of peace and healing upheld generations on. But now the forest has been breached by hostile intruders ... Fighting and bloodshed follow, testing even the skills of Kira, the greatest of all Tremen Healers. As well as sharing Kasheron's gift for healing, Kira has inherited his golden eyes and inspirational qualities - she, too, is seen as a leader amongst her people. As the attacks upon the Tremen become more violent, Kira is faced with a terrible dilemma. Should she stay and risk the annihilation of her community, or set out on a perilous journey north to seek aid from their long-lost warrior kin?

 

 

So we've talked about finding a writer group that's right for you. But when you've found one, how do you make sure you're right for them? The last thing you want is to find the perfect group and then either ruin the dynamic or be asked to leave. We all know "that guy" in the group - the loudmouth, the bore, the delusional wanna-be who thinks everyone should worship their writing like gospel. And frankly, it's pretty obvious how not to be 'that guy' - just step outside your own head and consider other people for a moment. But there are specific, less obvious 'that guy's for writer groups, and they can make things just as difficult - sometimes more so, because it's not necessarily obvious that they're detrimental to the group. I've been both of them in my day, often at the same time: I'm talking about the Egoist and the Opinionator.

 

Picked this up while on a small spree a few months ago, largely to see what all the fuss was about. Crime isn't my usual genre, but Larsson's books seem far more 'general fiction that happens to be about crime' than crime novels in themselves, which is perhaps some of the basis for their broad appeal.

The back copy makes the book sound positively pedestrian, sprinkling adjectives like candy around the character descriptions of CEO, journalist and security specialist.  Lisbeth Salander - our girl with the dragon tattoo - is an extremely socially awkward but highly intelligent hacker and investigator assisting Mikael Blomkvist, super-moral but convicted-of-libel financial journalist, in investigating a supposed murder for Henrik Vanger - friendly but manipulative head of a giant (and failing) corporation. There's a fair whack about business and secret accounts in the Cayman Islands, more family members that you can possibly keep track of, and the odd gruesomely violent scene.

 With a book this popular, I feel I have to either love it or hate it. But I'm rather ambivalent. It's not a bad book - Larsson certainly puts enough twists in the story that the reveal of The Big Bad People is a surprise, and the plot itself is fairly strong. But it suffers from the translation - the voice of the novel is clunky and uneven, and the pace is far too slow.

 

 I picked up Sawyer's Wake as part of an "I have a book shop gift card!" spree, from a bookshop that doesn't bother to separate young adult from adult in its (considerably large) science fiction section.

I'm not usually a young-adult-fiction reader - perhaps my own such melodramatic trials are too recent in memory for me to feel anything but tedium for the pangs of first love, schoolyard taunts and peer pressure. And, given the bookshop's all-in-one attitude, I've only got my own judgement as to whether this was aimed at young-adult.

It's certainly got the language for it. Our protagonist, nearly-sixteen, mathematical genius (pause to look up her name again on the Amazon page... not a good sign, folks) Caitlin, talks in teenage-speak, especially on her blog, which comprises a significant part of the book. The story focuses on her regaining her sense of sight (the descriptions of which are done remarkably well) and another, rather more important subplot that I can't delve into for spoilers, sperad amidst the usual teenage boy trouble.

However, Sawyer goes to pains to explain Google, instant messaging, email, binary, Google's page ranking system (and alternatives) and other very pedestrian elements of the internet. Or, rather, Caitlin explains it to us (or has it explained to her). Which is utterly redundant, not to mention boring, for today's young-adult reader, who grew up with the internet surrounding them. It's like explaining the desert to an Aboriginie.

 

So I'm rather left wondering who Sawyer was aiming at. Adults are unlikely to be attracted to the gushy teenage voice, and Sawyer's over-explanation of the obvious is likely to grate on a younger reader's nerves. That's not all, either.

 

I nabbed this with glee from the bookshop some time ago, and it gradually filtered up through my giant To Read interdimensional-bookshelf-portal. I knew of (though have not yet located and read) Black Juice, her most famous work of short stories (though I didn't know she's actually produced a fair number of books, most of which are largely unheard of by even the literati, it seems) but she's held a special place in my author-repository ever since a judge somewhere compared my writing encouragingly with hers nearly a decade ago. Ego is a powerful thing.

She became something of an unknown-role-model (interestingly, she also resorts to technical writing 'when the money runs low'), without my ever taking the time to go and research or, you know, actually read her work. 

 

 But - Tender Morsels, her much acclaimed novel released mid-to-late last year, did not disappoint. Except for the parts where it did, but the rest of it was so strong that I didn't mind - ney, I even expected and was happy to receive - disappointment.