Tripping

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
~ E. L. Doctorow

Lately I've been...

Reading

• The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, having screwed up my courage in the face of its not being The Poisonwood Bible. But it's pretty wonderful in its very own way so far.
• Phryne Fisher books by Kerry Greenwood (under strict instructions from my aunt, who was right - I did like them). Very happy to read the ABC is making a series: will be great stylish TV if they get the casting right.
• Travel guides to Paris and Provence.
• Prisoners of War by Patsy Adam-Smith - dipping in an out - it's too horrific to read right through.
• Seventeenth Century France Through the Eyes of Travellers. Fascinating and often hilarious.
• Also re-read Pride and Prejudice on my iPod to see how it was on the tiny screen - far too much page  turning for my liking, but fine if you're stuck - astonished, after so many reads, to find things in the book I'd overlooked or forgotten.

Admiring

• New Guinea art and artefacts at the Museum of South Australia. Two afternoons in a row. Too exciting. Identified a few of my arrows.
• Carrick Hill house and gardens in Adelaide, with a perfect little collection of old English oak pieces and jewel-like paintings by the likes of Nolan, Dobell, Fox, Nora Heysen, Gaugin, fake-Gaugin, and Fantin-Latour. Lalique glass. Gorgeous Streeton of Venice. Arts & Crafts garden including a children's book trail with a hobbit house and a Secret Garden (although it was far too hot to explore it thoroughly).

Not admiring

• The new Saturday Age layout, clearly designed without any usability advice.
• The weather.

Worrying

• About poor Mission Beach, where I would happily spend every winter forever. Of all places for a cyclone to cross the coast.

Scribbling

• Research for Tragédie only, not drafting at present. Have to do the immersion thing - period food, clothes, buildings, streets - before I go much further. Met with the lovely Michael Shirrefs who is full of tips on how to do research in French archives.
• Ideas for something set in Marvellous Melbourne - maybe a sensation novel - maybe a detective novel - probably both - too early to tell.

Listening

• To Tancrede, a baroque opera in which La Maupin performed
• Brand New Heavies - just rediscovered a couple of old CDs and forgot how much I loved them

Writers' houses

Latest favourite website: Writers' houses. Mostly US so far, of course, and a hell of a background coming through slowly and affecting usability.
But fun, especially this post from  on Willa Cather and Red Cloud.

This is where I live.

Inky cuffs

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them.  The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.  

~ Joan Baez

Challenges

Happy to see Swashbuckler books on the lists for the Premier's Reading Challenges in NSW and South Australia this year, and never fail to be amazed at what a wonderful idea the PRC is.

In news of other challenges, summer is the time for people to make resolutions and sign up for everything from gyms to book clubs, and book bloggers are no exception.

One of my favourites, to which I challenge you all, is the Australian YA fiction challenge, kicked off by Irresistible reads and Inkcrush. The idea is that you simply read 12 local YA books this calendar year, and post reviews: you sign up so everyone else can read your reviews (and vice versa) even if they're on Good Reads or the like, rather than a blog.

And you get to wear the badge of pride:

I haven't decided on my books yet, but titles by both Simmone Howell and Margot Lanagan are in the pile already. And I need a copy of Stephen Herrick's latest.

I doubt very much that any vampire/angel/unicorn books will be on my list. Mind you, I'm not averse to a decent fantasy novel, especially if there's lots of sword-fighting (unless it involves several chapters of crossing plains and mountains on horseback and eating herb-laden stew - which, by the way, fantasy writers, is a stupid thing to cook on the road unless you have a pressure cooker - or Esky).

In fact, I'm not normally averse to a decent vampire/demon novel either but I am so sick of standing in the YA section of a bookshop staring at nothing but black and red covers, and now just want it to be over.

Dragons? Any time.
Your good old-fashioned vampire-killer? Sure.
Smart, strong, sexy vampires? Depends.
Magic? You bet.
Evil trickster demons (so long as they aren't too scary)? All good.

Total vampire epidemic? Done. Next?

Mapping La Maupin

Thinking about travelling around France in La Maupin's footsteps in September, and needed to get it clear in my head.
So I made a map: it includes the main sites, some of which, like Avignon, still contain the buildings she lived in or performed in  - or tried to burn down, like this one:



Tried to trace her route while on the run from the police, but drawing in Google Maps drove me so crazy I gave up.

Nothing on but air

Dance, Lalla, with nothing on
but air. Sing, Lalla,
wearing the sky.
Look at this glowing day! What clothes
could be so beautiful, or
more sacred? 


~ Lalla, or Lalleshvari
A Kashmiri poet, circa 1350


Here's another:


I didn't trust it for a moment,
but I drank it anyway,
the wine of my own poetry.
It gave me the daring to take hold
of the darkness and tear it down
and cut it into little pieces.




(from Naked Song Lalla, translations by Coleman Barks, Maypop, Athens, GA, 1992)

List of lists

The time for best book lists is here.
Here are just a few:
Publishers' Weekly (US) includes Patti Smith (which I still can't find anywhere) and [sigh] Freedom. This is the test for each list - does it include Freedom?

Anis Shivani at the Huffington Post calls it one of the year's several notably "ponderous, bloated, eminently editable books". He prefers Orhan Pamuk.

Closer to home, the Fairfax papers asked a whole lot of clever people what they liked. Christos has discovered Margaret Yourcenar. Colm Toibin loved David Malouf's Ransom. And Geraldine Brooks adored- surprise, surprise - Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.

The Guardian did the same thing, with rather more mixed results: Philip Hensher loved Freedom. Can  that be right?

Finally, The Daily Beast added up the votes and came up with a list of lists - with Room at the very top, which is splendid. This list saves you having to read all the others. Nice.

Mine?
Wolf Hall. No contest.

Democracy in action

Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.

~ E L Doctorow

Lately I've been...

Reading

• Swordspoint and The Privilege of the Sword, by Ellen Kushner. Mannerpunk novels with lots of swordfights. Swordspoint, in particular, is delicious. And I get to claim I'm reading them for research, too.
• Opera, or The Undoing of Women, by Catherine Clément - gorgeous critical writing.
• The Slap. Finally. And I don't know why it's so compelling either, but it just is.
• Occasional Writings, by Margaret Atwood. I meant to save it for my holiday but couldn't.

So instead I'm taking to the beach:

• Timepieces - Drusilla Modjeska on writing
• The Lacuna - Barbara Kingsolver, about which I've heard mixed reports, but I know it isn't The Poisonwood Bible, so I'm prepared for anything
• The Red Shoe - Ursula Dubosarsky
• Notes from the Teenage Underground - Simmone Howell 
• And Bleak House. Just because.

Watching

• Teddy Tahu Rhodes in The Marriage of Figaro
• Firefly on DVD
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1) about which I feel better as the distance between us grows. 

The sixth HP film was always going to be slightly problematic, since it is largely about the trio and their quest/conflicts, without the usual ensemble, and all the big battles will be in the final instalment. But it really does work, not least because the three main actors are now so much better than they were when they were younger.
I've heard numerous stories of small children sobbing in the cinema. It's not a little kids' film by any stretch of the imagination - please, if your kid is not old enough to read the book without help, don't take them to the movie.


Writing
Of course I'm writing my PhD novel. But also making scribbles for a sort of fantasy something.
And doing last minute proofing things to Act of Faith, which is now coming out in July.

Great things: at stake right now

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honour, duty, mercy, hope.

~ Winston Churchill

Toast

Made a rough timeline of La Maupin's life - on timetoast - these are just a few dates of performances etc where I know the specific date:

Hearing voices

Here's a (short) paper on writing La Maupin, presented today, including a couple of brief extracts from the draft - it's here on my website.

Proof of life

Proofreading's all done on Act of Faith.

Those sharp eyes at HarperCollins spotted a few howlers, thank God. That's what happens when you chop and change, which you inevitably do. You lose track of whether you are just before dawn or just after dawn and make your characters do a bit of time travel - not a good thing when it's not science fiction or fantasy. Or you move a sentence and then find it swinging in the breeze, alone and without meaning. Anyway, I hope we caught them all.

That's what editing's for.

I love being edited. As someone who is also in the business of publishing other people's content (albeit online), and often trains people to write for the web, I'm always astonished when people say "Don't change a word". Meaning, "I don't want my pearl-like prose to be touched by some talentless hack". Don't you mess with my text. You'll ruin it.

Madness.

This book has been well edited and I'm very pleased with both the process and the result. Other people see things you simply cannot see - you stop seeing - especially words or phrases you use too often. Other people ask sensible questions like "Did you mean for that to happen?". It all goes to make the reading experience as smooth as possible. Don't you hate it when you're caught up in an adventure or an argument and your mind trips over a typo or a logical gap?

Of course, we all make mistakes and sometimes editors do too. Have you ever seen those websites where people dissect in minute detail any bloopers in the Harry Potter books? Well, life's too short to spend time documenting them, but they are all good fun - just the other day I was reading Deathly Hallows and was stopped yet again by the fact that Dean has no father on one page and parents a few chapters later. It's easy enough to do, especially with that many characters and details.No doubt there will be something, even with all this wonderful editing, in Act of Faith. I will find it the day after it comes back from the printers.

But never you mind. Which is one of those phrases I used far too often in it.

Skippy

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.  

~Elmore Leonard