Auntie Fran

 

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Jesus once said 'It is more blessed to give than to receive.' He said quite a lot of things, but that is one of the better ones.

But it's hard to get your head round it when you're a kid. My Mum's best friend was Fran Smith. Mum went to school with Fran at PLC, they were very best mates. And I can remember Fran coming to visit when we were little kids. She was 'Auntie Fran' and to me she was the picture of elegance. She was slim, she had excellent hair and she drove a nice car. She called Mum 'Mazza', in a way that seemed stylish. I've used Fran as the basis for a character in one of my books.

As far as we kids were concerned, Fran had only one fault, and that was that she didn't know how to 'receive' a gift. Mum loved Fran and whenever she came around she would have a little gift ready for her. It was never jewellery or anything expensive like that. It was usually a cake or something interesting that Mum had bought at an auction. Mum was always in the auction houses buying boxes of things called 'sundries'. These were brown cardboard boxes full of things that didn't really deserve to be auctioned on their own. So you might get a box containing a Rupert the Bear book, some dolls, a bicycle pump and a wood carving - all for two dollars. One of the weirdest things we found in a sundry box was a bicycle pump that seemed to work backwards. Rather than blowing air out, it sucked the air back in. You could use it to deflate bicycle tyres, if you ever felt the need. None of us knew what the strange thing was (this is years before the Internet) but Mum - through talking to a scientist - found out one day that it was a 'smoke tester', used in his daily work and could he buy it? Mum sold it for a lot more than she paid, so we were all happy. I kept the book and my sisters kept the dolls. The wood carving was set aside. When Fran came around one night, Mum had the wood carving all wrapped up nicely in pretty paper. . She thought Fran might like it. And she did like it, but there was one thing about Fran that we could could never understand. She would actually abuse Mum for giving her a present. The conversation would go like this:

Mum: Hello Fran.

Fran: Hello, Mazza.

Mum: Would you like a cup of tea?

Fran: Look, I'd love one.

Mum puts the kettle on.

Mum: Oh, by the way, Fran, I was at an auction the other day and I found something nice that you might like.

Mum hands over the carving wrapped in gift paper. Fran frowns.

Fran: Oh Mazza, you shouldn't go buying me gifts.

Mum: It's just a little thing. Open it.

Fran: You're very naughty for buying me a present.

MUm I just thought you might like it.

Fran: Oh Mazza, I hate you for doing this.

Fran unwraps the present and admires the wooden carving.

Fran. Oh, it’s beautiful.

Mum: I'm glad you like it.

Fran: You're terrible to give me things. Oh, It's so pretty, I really hate you.

Mum: It's nothing. I got it in a box of sundries.

Fran: Mazza, I can't possibly accept this. You're awful, giving me things.

Mum: But I like to.

Mum brings in the tea.

Fran: Oh, and you made a cake too. You're very naughty to go to effort.

Mum: I just bought it, I didn't make it.

Fran: Mazza, you're horrible, you little shit, going to all this effort. The wood carving and now the cake.

Mum: Milk?

Fran: Yes, milk please. Well, I feel so spoiled by you that I can hardly bear to look at you, you grotesque harpy. What a bitch you are! Presents and cake …

Mum: I think the cake might actually be a bit stale. You can dunk it in your tea.

Fran: Oh Mazza, this is delicious. You've been too nice to me. I don't deserve it, you horrible cow. Christ you make me sick sometimes with your generosity.

Mum: Oh, I don't mind. You're my friend.

Fran:  Ooh, this tea is nice.

Mum: Would you like a chocolate biscuit?

Fran: Mazza, if you dare to offer me a chocolate biscuit I will burn your stupid ugly house down. Oh yes, just the one, thanks.

Auntie Fran, you see, had great difficulty in receiving. She never thought she was worth it. I've exaggerated the conversation just slightly. Fran would never have called Mum a 'shit', but it's how we kids heard it. What was the matter with Auntie Fran? She was Mum's best friend but she was always abusive when you offered her a present. Of course, when we grew up we learned that this is fairly common behaviour - people pretending to be cross if someone gives them something unexpected. But as a kid, I just couldn't understand it. I vowed I would never be like Auntie Fran and if someone gave me a present I would always be grateful. Actually I overdid it a bit. When Mrs Wittingham nextdoor gave me a bag of lemons from her tree I practically collapsed with delight. 'Thank you so much, Mrs Wittingham, for these very beautiful fragrant lemons. I love them all.' Mrs Wittingham backed away nervously. Grandpa gave me an old dictionary once when I was in primary school.  It did look fine, with its leather binding, but I overdid the gratitude, with 'I don't know what to say for this precious gift.' Dad sighed and told me to say 'Thank you.' But my whole sense of gift-receiving etiquette had been completely bent out of shape by Fran's expressions of hatred to Mum for giving her presents. Sometimes we would ask Mum not to give Fran a present, so that we wouldn't hear Fran's endless litany about how awful Mum was. We didn't like to hear Mum being insulted for being nice.

We've lost contact with Auntie Fran, but I hope she has learned how to receive a present. The Queen will be a little miffed when she sends a 100th birthday card to Fran. Will Fran send it back, writing, 'You're awful' and 'Christ, I hate you," all over it?

What's in a Title?

Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires

Trimalchio in West Egg

On the Road to West Egg

Under the Red, White, and Blue

Gold-Hatted Gatsby and The High-Bouncing Lover.

Okay, you probably know what these are. They're the various titles that were considered for 'The Great Gatsby' by F Scott Fitzgerald. And if today we knew that magnicient book as 'On the Road to West Egg', we'd probably laugh if we learned that the publisher had once considered calling it 'The Great Gatsby'.

This cover art was complete before Fitzgerald finished writing the novel. He loved the picture, and adapted some of his prose to make the cover more relevant. (He was probably afraid the publisher might reject it.)

Choosing a title is hard. Unless I get a flash of inspiration while writing, I usually leave the selection of a title till the very end of the writing process, which is why my book 'The Shiny Guys' was for many months known as 'Ward 44'. It's even on the contract. Editor Dmetri Kakmi liked the title because Chekhov wrote a peculiar short story called 'Ward Number Six', which he thought had a natty ring. But since most of the literary references in 'The Shiny Guys' are to Kafka and not Chekhov, it didn't really fit. I originally called the book 'Ward 44', because that was the number of the ward where I ended up in 1985 when I had my first serious encounter with clinical depression. The title helped me write the story, because whenever I opened the document on my computer, there were the words 'Ward 44' and I was mentally transported back to that unhappy time. But 'Ward 44' sounds self-important and far too serious. I really didn't want to write that kind of book. As the story developed with the appearance of shiny antennaed creatures in my narrator's peripheral vision, I was determined that these creatures would somehow find their way into the title. But in the book they are referred to as 'Nestorians' or 'giant cockroaches'; another tip of the hat to Kafka and his most famous short story, Metamorphosis, where a typical man called Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find that he has transformed into a cockroach. (Actually, I don't think Kafka ever refers to Samsa as a 'cockroach', but rather a bug that seems very like one.)

'Get your hands off me, you filthy cockroach, if indeed you are a cockroach..'

And 'The Nestorians' seems a lousy title for a book, since it's difficult to remember, though the more rabid of Doctor Who fans seem to have no difficulty recalling the names of all the aliens in the good doctors' adventures. When I last checked in on the Sci Fi channel he was battling a sort of giant Dutch alien chicken called an Ergon.

The terrifying Ergon, that lives in a crypt in Amsterdam. (If I have this wrong I'm quite sure the Whovians will put me in my place.)

Anyway, I think that most readers familiar with Kafka's work take it as read that Samsa has become a cockroach. The important thing is that Samsa has become a repellant creature and he has to deal with people's horrified reactions to him. A lot of teens seem to like this story, and I think I know why. In my teen years I certainly turned into a bit of a 'repellant creature' myself, at least for part of the time. I changed by the day, growing pimples, greasy hair, then ugly soft hair on my face. My body became long and gangly and I lost all coordination. My voice went squeaky. I was grotesque. I might as well have been a giant cockroach.

Me having a bad hair day in Year Nine.

The last line in 'The Shiny Guys 'is a direct reference to 'Metamorphosis', even though I don't mention the book anywhere in the story. It's a bit of foreknowledge that gives the ending an extra kick for the initiated. But you don't have to have read 'Metamorphosis' to gather what is meant by the last line. (There is quite a lot of mention of 'last lines' throughout the story, as Colin, my narrator, is reading a Kafka novel, 'The Castle', which doesn't actually have a last line - only a last half-line.  It seems Kafka lost interest, as he finished mid-sentence.)

 It's a terrible anticlimax, or I found it so after devoting hours to it, even if I was listening to a talking book version as I was travelling around Western Australia. I should probably have been reading Winton or Stow for local colour, but I was reading Kafka's 'The Castle' -  and from now on, I will always associate Western Australia with a bizarre landscape over which i must travel to arrive at a mysterious castle where I will finally learn exactly what is going on.

The coast of Western Australia. Eagle-eyed viewers may see a castle in the distance. Or not.

 As for the title of my last book, I wanted it to be playful and creepy, which kind of sums up the book itself . I thought of 'The Shiny Guys', which could either be malevolent creatures or even decent, handsome ones. (Although 'shiny' characters in novels do tend to be horrible. Just look at Edward Cullen. ) Penguin didn't like the title at first. I rewrote the book so that the term 'Shiny Guys' was used more often, and I justified the title that way. The book had another title that I liked. It was 'Good night, Mental-case,' which is how Colin bids sweet dreams to his best friend and fellow patiuent Mango. But that title was vetoed early on, as we didn't want to offend mental-cases.

Titles can be buggers to think up. The members of the Monty Python troupe recall how frustrating it was to come up with a title for their brilliantly crazy TV show. They went through several alternatives:

Owl Stretching Time

Gwen Dibley's flying Circus

Sex and Violence

Whither Canada?

(Some of these titles became individual episode titles in the first series.)

In the end the show became much bigger than the title and it's hard to think of it being called anything else but 'Monty Python's Flying Circus'. I feel sorry for people who found out about Monty Python via their movies, which are pretty patchy, to be honest. The team's best work was undoubtedly the first three series they did of their TV show. The second series especially had the best sketches and  animations by Terry Gilliam, which tied the whole show together. But I'll blog about Monty Python another time. This is supposed to be a blog about titles. And it's quite relevant to me at the moment because I've written a musical tribute to the life of Australian cookery celebrity, Margaret Fulton. It's going to be staged later this year so it needs a title. But no one can agree on what to call it. Margaret disliked my first idea, which was 'Margaret Fulton: Communist'. Margaret was indeed a communist and quite committed, but then communism under Stalin rather rapidly lost its gloss and people were disinclined to identify themselves as 'red'. I love the fact that Margaret Fulton, who is to many an image of conservative suburban cosiness, was also attending communist meetings and reading about Marxism. 'Margaret Fulton: Communist' is a surprising title that grabs the attention, which is what I was trying to do. It was also accurate, but Margaret preferred a title a little less inflammatory. And so, we devised a list. It has been sent to Margaret (who does not use email) in the hope that one of them grabs her attention. The first dozen or so are all her suggestions. I'll keep you posted on this. My preferred title for the moment is 'Margaret Fulton: Warrior Princess'. We'll see how we go with that one. But here are the present contenders:

Margaret Fulton Through a Looking Glass

Margaret Fulton, Don't Sing at the Table

MF - An artichoke is only a thistle

MF - Not to be dismissed

MF - Out of the Kitchen

MF - With a light touch

MF- With warmth and humour

MF - Not Really Intimidating

MF - The Secret Ingredient

MF - Revolutionary

MF - Capable of Cooking a good Dish

MF - Commands Respect

MF - Self Respect Works Miracles

MF - Shares Her Life

MF - Commands Respect

MF - Revolutionary

 MF - Braveheart

MF - Warrior Princess

Make Your own MF,

MF - Two inches larger than life.(The cardboard cutouts)

Margaret Fulton Knocked Me Over

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner - The Margaret Fulton Musical

Margaret Fulton in the Red Corner

Margaret Fulton not being a communist.

Thus we come to the end of another post. There is no book puffery that I can append, as is the wont of most Facebook authors, so I'll close by mentioning that transcendentally talented Craig Smith has completed the design and illustration of my new book, Heather Fell In the Water, a cautionary tale about the need for kids to take swimming lessons. It’s the easiest title I've ever dreamt up, as the story features my little sister, Heather, who had this extraordinary habit of falling in water, no matter where we went. Even in places where there wasn't very much water at all she would somehow find some and fall in it. Hence, the family car was always equipped with a change of clothing for Heather. Craig's work is typically beautiful but I really can't show you any of it just yet. I can show you the new cover of the recent Sister Madge hardback reissue. If anything, the 'Heather' pictures are even better.

And if you'd like to hear Tracy Harvey give a performance of my book , The Night Before Mother's Day, accompanied by Judy Horacek illustrations,  go here.

Honour

 

About ten years ago I started work on a musical based on the life of Margaret Fulton. There had already been quite a few pastiche biographical musicals - one particularly famous one about former PM Paul Keating.

 A very cool ex- Prime Minister

But I don't want this musical to be a pastiche, because when I met Margaret while researching another TV project, I found her to be delightful and full of surprises.  Margaret Fulton deserves a proper musical. I was nervous when I visited Margaret's home in Balmain and I made some lame comment about our shared Caledonian history and how it was strange that a cook like Margaret descended from a race whose cookery is often held to be just a little higher up the culinary ladder than cannibalism. Those weren't my exact words, but I certainly made some uncomplimentary remarks about Scottish cookery. (I suspect that Margaret had previously heard remarks about her Caledonian heritage and how one does not immediately associate Scotland with fine food, but rather, the Scots are known for eating some parts of an animal that are generally - if not correctly - considered revolting.) Margaret was a good deal less than impressed with my attempt to break the ice. She didn't lose her temper but she became quite wary of me, and rightly so.

An even cooler Scotsman.

It was stupid of me to make the comment, for I have eaten and enjoyed haggis and other Caledonian delights, especially when my father was President of the Clan MacLeod in Victoria. I remembered a New Year's Eve ceilidh in a hall in the Melbourne suburbs, where there was a lot of highland dancing and good cheer going on. I enjoyed the fact that one of the kilted Highland dancers was very definitely Chinese, though he proudly associated himself with the Clan MacLeod, and was duly embraced by the clan, as his name was most cetainly MacLeod. (Would that other groups were so elastic in their entry requirements, except, say for the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons.)

Behold Ye haggis.

As the night wore on, we kids were falling asleep, though Mum and Dad kept inviting us to take part in the dancing. We might have been wearing kilts, but we knew very little about the correct dance steps, though we did happily roar during the chorus of a fine song, The Black Bear, in which participants are expected to roar like a bear during the nifty bagpipe skirl at the end of each verse.

Beautiful, isn't he? I don't know why the Scots sing about

a black bear when there aren't any bears in Scotland, to my knowledge. This one is from Canada.

But come midnight, the novelty of roaring and wearing bright yellow kilts had worn off. We were asleep. Fortunately, a lone piper woke us up; for we had come to the highlight of the evening: the piping of the haggis. After the piper played a flourish, a Scotswoman with a loud and proud voice came out and recited a poem by Robbie Burns, Scotland's greatest poet (who is, for some reason, extraordinarily popular in Russia. This is true, I learned it from a Russian. It's not just some dodgy piece of ephemera I picked up from watching QI.) The poem ended. It was called Address to a Haggis. It starts like this (in the anglicised version, since you'd never understand the Scots version):

Fair is your honest happy face
Great chieftain of the pudding race
Above them all you take your place
Stomach, tripe or guts
Well are you worthy of a grace
As long as my arm

The groaning platter there you fill
Your buttocks like a distant hill
Your skewer would help to repair a mill
In time of need
While through your pores the juices emerge
Like amber beads

His knife having seen hard labour wipes
And cuts you up with great skill
Digging into your gushing insides bright
Like any ditch
And then oh what a glorious sight
Warm steaming, rich 

 

But why all this fuss and bother over a pudding? The idea  was to compliment the food we were about to eat, to honour it. After such a huge introduction, we kids couldn't wait to eat the bum-shaped haggis - but there was one more ritual to be completed. (I cannot say for sure if this is a traditional ritual, or one that is only performed in Preston West, because I think that's where we were.) The piper walked out of the hall, playing some marvellous Scottish tune, and everyone followed him round the block. I'm sure that some people would have called the police to complain about the noise, but our nip around the block was over in seconds. We were back in the hall, with the magnificent haggis whose qualities we had just praised.  The loud, proud Scottish woman took out two knives that looked like they belonged on the wall of a Scottish castle, and started to hack the haggis into pieces. We kids couldn't wait to try the stuff. There was enough for everyone at the ceilidh; the haggis being a sort of Albert the Magic Pudding. There was a slice for everyone. And it was delicious. I don't know if it was all the preceding ritual that made it so, but I remember my first slice of haggis tasting absolutely brilliant. (That's right, the haggis you make out of lungs and liver and lights of a sheep, oatmeal flavoured with whiskey and onions, then stuffed back into the sheep's stomach and boiled for an awfully long time.)

Another Scotsman, not quite as cool as Sean Connery, though he certainly looks as though he's prepared to eat the whole animal, if he hasn't already.

And when I think of that, I realise why Margaret Fulton was so brittle  with me for 'joking' about how the Scots are not terribly picky about which parts of the animal they eat. You've seen Margaret. She has a beautiful round face that seems ever-smiling. But I made her frown. Margaret pointed out to me with great patience, for this was important, that the reason the Scots ate so many parts of the animal is out of respect for the animal, just as we had paid respect to the haggis by piping it in and reciting a poem to it.

The superstar herself. 

It's all about respect. And I write this now because it looks as though the Margaret Fulton musical will go ahead, at Theatreworks in Acland Street, St Kilda. Director is Bryce Ives of Call Girl fame.  Here are the dates (STC):

 

And thanks to Guy LeCouteur for this timely update on black bears and Scotland (click on the image below, and I don't mean Taylor Lautner. Scotland did have them, apparently, and I think I should have known that because I do remember seeing the drummers Highland bands wearing the fur off the poor bear's back. Of course, it might have been imported black bear fur, but I somehow doubt it. They were Scottish bands, after all.

BOOK NEWS:

Now, because I've stopped using Facebook to do my skiting, I'd better update you on my glamorous literary life so as to make other writers grass-green with envy. I've just had the new hardback version of Sister Madge translated into seventeen languages, including semaphore, and teen hearththrob Taylor Lautner has agreed to play the major role of Mango in the movie version of my book, The Shiny Guys.

Okay, this is a complete lie. There is no film planned for The Shiny Guys, I was just trying to make writer Michael Gerard Bauer as jealous as he makes me. And even if a film does  happen, I doubt that Taylor Lautner will do it, especially as the character Mango spends a whole pivotal scene completely naked in front of a mirror. Ooh, hang on ... we may have another google-wacker here: Taylor Lautner naked.

I'm shortly going to be travelling with the CYL  to Geelong, where I will beguile people with marvellous stories of my literary life, both in hospital and out. So far the reviews of my latest Penguin book 'The Shiny Guys' have been positive, but I'm not going to link to them because that would be just too pathetic. America took ten thousand copies of the book I did with Judy Horacek, The Night Before Mother's Day, I have made fifteen flourless orange cakes, and consumed many excellent sandwiches that I made myself, oh and I'll be at The Melbourne Writers Festival This Year for the first time ever!  (Praise be to Mike Shuttleworth.)

I think that about covers it. Craig Smith has completed the illustrations for my kids' picture book, 'Heather Fell in the Water' which is coming out from Allen and Unwin just before Summer later this year. The pictures are, of course, quite beautiful.

And if you're in the mood, why don’t you come along to the launch of 'The Night Before Mother's Day' at Carlton Readings on 26April, starting at 6.30. The multi-talented Tracy Harvey will be doing the launch. Judy and I will both be there, signing autographs. It's my first professional public outing since the stroke. Come one, come all! See if I can make it through the night without falling over.

Farewell Facebook and Losing the Plot

I bid farewell to Facebook this week. I notice other friends (hi, Jane Covernton) have done the same. I don't know if people responded to my departure, because of course once you've gone, you can't go back. Well, not immediately.

The problem was, I kept losing my temper with authors who posted minute details of their every waking moment. I started griping at Michael Gerard Bauer, who actually is a good guy, though I guess he must doubt it if he feels the need to post so many details about his apparently perfect literary life. Desist! We approve of you, Michael! You're good! And I was probably a little antsy that The Life of a Teenage Body-snatcher appeared on just about every shortlist going last year, but didn't receive a single win. Even Sonya Hartnett (yes, Sonya of Astrid Lindgren medal fame) confesses that this still depresses her when it happens to her. So, it's probably a bad idea to go on Facebook if you're feeling antsy, unless you have the savoir faire to keep your big yap closed, which clearly I lack. I'll return to Facebook one day, because I enjoyed reading the articles that some Facebookers posted, provided they weren't just 'rave reviews' from Goodreads or bloggers. I'll keep blogging about my books here, because I figure you might be interested, since you've made an effort to find this blog, unless you google-whacked me by accident or you were looking for nude ladies, of which there are six extremely tasteful examples on this blog.

 Make that seven.

Something happened this week when I reread my sequel to The Life of a Teenage Body-snatcher. I really didn't like it and found myself getting bored by the time I reached the middle, which would mean that the average reader by this stage would have thrown the book down the insinkerator. The problem is, I think, you can't artificially lengthen a story. As I mentioned last post, I had plotted a perfectly good - but short - story involving my heroes and their battles against a terrible cult called The Herophilists - people who believe in dissecting live humans, as was the occasional practice in ancient Greece. Spoiler: I borrowed from Sherlock Holmes in the book's final sequence, when Thomas finds himself on the dissectionist's slab; quite alive and about to be dissected. He even sees the scalpel go into his chest. The Sherlock Holmes 'steal' was a chemical that causes people to hallucinate. The body-snatching group sets up their new base in a millinary warehouse, where the air is redolent with mercurial sulphate: a felt preservative known to cause hallucinations, and one of the reasons that hat-makers gained the reputation for going mad.

But the story came to little more than 30,000 words. Then I tried to interweave another story to 'pad it out', but I don't think you can do that. Unless your A story and your B story address each other, what you end up with is a patchwork mess. In other words, you really do need to plot at the beginning. So, I've decided to cut all the stuff that I set in The Azores. It was pretty, but it wandered too far from the main plot. To quote Sonya Hartnett again, writing isn't just putting one word after another. And yet, this is what it felt like, which is hardly surprising when you obsess about daily word counts, as I do. Then there is the whole business of writing a novel while recovering  from a stroke. If I were a bricklayer I would know when I'm ready to return to work; presumably when I'm able to lay bricks again.

Just in case you needed to be reminded of what a bricklayer looks like. Sorry I couldn't find you a nude one.

But my brain is all I use when I'm writing and I don't know if it's in good shape or not. The fact that I get so upset by self-congratulatory posts on Facebook would indicate, I think, that it isn't. After all, it never bothered me before. Of course writers are egocentric. It's the way we're made. Some of us just pretend not to be and resist the urge to post every bit of cover art or flattering festival photo that we can. I'm also finding it difficult to read 'demanding' books. My sister recommended The Moonstone, which she assured me I would enjoy, but I found myself reading the same paragraph over and over. I love reading. Before the stroke it was one of my greatest pleasures. But now, there are some books that I find very heavy going. Richard Gill (who runs The Victorian Opera) told me that every year he rereads Proust's gigantic masterpiece, Remembering the Past. Last month I started on Swann's Way, the first of the series, but I didn't get much beyond the famous opening sequence with the Madeline cake. The fact that Richard can read this stuff so easily, then go out at night to conduct an orchestra or even appear on The Spicks and The Specks, leaves me breathless.

 Richard Gill - friend and renaissance man

I've been re-reading books that I liked before the stroke, and am pleased to find that I still like them. And I've been writing the odd article and blog post, but does this mean I'm match-fit? I mentioned in my last post that I had a TV gig and wasn't sure if I was up to it. I'm still not sure that I am. The time I spent at the writers' table last week at Fremantle Media in Richmond  was so exhausting that I would have to leave at three in the afternoon so I could sleep and recover. (Mind you, I've produced sketch shows before where most of the writers do that.)

And, is my brain well enough to critique what I've written? My first reaction is to cast aside the body-snatcher sequel and start all over again from the beginning. It's a horrible thought, but it will certainly be a better use of my time than haranguing the needy Facebookers.

Stay tuned. I'll let you know how I go. And sorry, Michael.

HOW many words a day?

 

20,000 words in two days. 

It's a figure that's stuck with me, ever since I read in an interview with John Marsden that he wrote the final 20,000 words of Tomorrow When the War Began in two days. Anthony Trollope also claimed he could churn out 10,000 words on a good writing day, and it wasn't unusual to have several such productive days in a row. Jane Godwin, who has a full-time job at Penguin as well as her own writing commitments, aims for five hundred a day, but confesses she is finding it difficult. Sofie Laguna, while in New York, wrote the excellent Bird and Sugar Boy at the steady rate of about a thousand words a day. You can see I'm obsessed with the word count/time quotient, and it's a question people often ask. How long does it take? When I started writing this blog I was feeling pretty full of myself because I had just finished writing The Life of a Teenage Body-snatcher, which seemed to happen very quickly once I had the original idea about how some resurrectionists might in fact have been 'gentlemen' acting for the public good, and not people like Burke and Hare who had the indecency  to be murderers and also Scottish. I think there were a couple of days where I managed about eight thousand words, when I was writing the back story of Plenitude, though it is the big whack of back story toward the end of the novel that some people complain slows down the book, even though it ties all the ends together. Anyway, the book made me laugh, and it made my editor Dmetri Kakmi laugh too, but he suggested there was a little too much of a good thing, and so he started pruning away. The first draft of 70,000 words dropped to 65,000 after Dmetri took out the shears, and I didn't miss any of them, so he was obviously doing a pretty good job. He's left Penguin now (so, it seems, has everyone) and I miss him enormously. 

The very shy and self-effacing Dmetri Gaga

 
And of course I also felt rather good about having written sixteen thousand words in two days, since that almost put me up there with Marsden and Trollope, very strange bedfellows. But after completing the Body-snatcher book, I really wasn't managing many words at all per day. I had writer's block. I felt stupid and useless and wrote a self-indulgent post called Farewell to Bob, which you will find elsewhere on this blog  if you're even remotely interested and even if you aren't. It's still there.The Internet is like that. Creepy, isn't it?  Then I had the stroke in September and for five whole months I couldn't write anything at all.

 Aerial view of my head with the top chopped off.

In a strokebound state you do spend a lot of time meditating and being generally introspective. It's interesting that a Welsh rugby player recently had a stroke which, he claims, turned him gay. He immediately left his fiancée, stopped playing rugby, found a boyfriend and trained to be a hairdresser. I have a theory about this, as I'm sure you do. Sorry, but the sports-hating hairdresser is such a gay cliché. It's the sort of thing dreamt up by that  people who don't get out much, or get their information from old sketch comedy shows. I think that our rugby player, while being introspective after having his stroke, realised that his life was finite, so he might as well be honest with himself and go about enjoying it. Doesn't it seem more likely that he was born gay (as I believe people are, rather than 'turned gay' by people like Margaret Court), but the domestic and school environment in which he grew up simply didn't tolerate the gay kids, so he decided to be as not-gay as possible. A professional rugby player is almost a 'straight cliché'. Was his stroke a tap on the shoulder? Did the whole 'stroke made me gay' story provide a convenient excuse for suddenly adopting a more alternative lifestyle? Come on, it's just as logical as Margaret Court's well publicised and damaging 'theory' that homosexuals are often the victims of child sexual abuse, which has, ipso facto, made them gay. In my meditative, introspective state I didn't have any blinding flashes of self-knowledge like that. I was moderately happy with who I was, and I knew that I definitely wanted to keep writing books for a living. I couldn't work because I couldn't use my hands, so I just lay there thinking about a sequel to The Life of a Teenage Body-snatcher since, much to everyone's surprise and even, I would suggest, distaste, the book started appearing on shortlists all over the place. A sequel seemed like a good idea. I had the new story worked out in my head. I would invent a secret cult of people who believed in conducting live dissections (as Herophilus, the ancient Greek father of surgery apparently did) and, of course, my hero would end up on the dissection table in front of three tiers of Herophilists, until his companions PLenitude and Victoria manage to rescue him in the nick of time. Fortunate, that. There might even be a sequel to the sequel.

 This isn't Herophilus it's Plato, who apparently looked very much like him.

But I didn't start writing this sequel till last week, when I found that I could sort of type with one finger, provided I read each page back as soon as I'd finished it and corrected all the bizarre mistakes I'd made. Oddly enough, I wrote words as they sounded, not as I knew they were spelt. I was like a faulty piece of voice recognition software doing a bad job of turning my speech into words. If I hadn't edited each page as soon as it had been written, it would have been well nigh impossible to comprehend later. But the editing didn't slow me down, and it was quite necessary, even though most writers say you shouldn't edit yourself as you go along, which I would agree with, but what I was doing was literal editing, which isn't the hard stuff - structural editing.

 

Here are the obligatory nude ladies, so my post gets more hits. Sandra and Jean are both volunteers for the Children's Book Council of Australia Here they are tallying votes, and being surprised that the Life of a Teenage Body-snatcher did okay.

 

Because I had the story worked out in my head, I managed to churn out 30,000 words last week. That's around 6,000 words a day, which is not too shabby. Trouble is, I didn't have any more story after that. I established the menace of the herophilists, then had my central characters become involved with them and ultimately have their lives threatened by them. The original body-snatcher book was just over sixty thousand words, and I felt I needed somehow to add another 30,000 words to what I had written, so I dreamed up another story for one of my characters, some of which would take place at sea. I haven't been in a sailing ship before, only much smaller sailing vessels, so I downloaded Kidnapped from Project Gutenberg. It had just what I needed, including some really wonderful shipboard scene-setting. 

 Try writing this.

 
In fact it was so good that I even stole a tiny part of it, which I will have to rewrite when I do the next draft, or at least acknowledge that some of the prose is nicked from RLS. And didn't Wikipedia get a hammering! Do you know anything about an island called Corvo which is in the Azores? Well, I didn't but it seemed such an ideal place, near enough to England where the main story was set, so I found out all I could, and combined it with my own memories of tropical island paradises I had visited, like Vanuatu and Noumea and Balnarring, so I had some lovely background scenery for my extra story.

Corvo, in the Azores, looking very much like Efate in Vanuatu, but possibly not Balnarring. 

I added all that extra stuff on the weekend and I now have close to 60,000 words, written very quickly, for that's what you're meant to do, then edit later, very slowly. But I'm not sure they're all great words (except for the ones that RLS wrote). This second story I added took the book into the realms of fantasy, whereas everything that happened in the first body-snatcher book might conceivably have occurred in 1828 and paid at least partial attention to the history of the day. I had people wearing the right clothes, visiting the right attractions or suffering the appropriate privations and indignities of the period. There's no way an historian would give it the seal of approval. For a start, one of the words in the title is an anachronism. We didn't have teenagers in the early nineteenth century. (Though another book with almost the same title has since appeared in America.) But I liked the fact that I had used what was there in 1828 to build a story.

The sequel is different. The 'second story' to bring the novel up to length involves voodoo and therefore, in my view at least, definitely falls into the fantasy genre. (Though The Life of a Teenage Body-snatcher, did get shortlisted for an Aurealis award, and these are given only for works of fantasy. I've since met one of the judge and she told me that the inclusion of the Body-snatcher book was a bit line-ball, given it was supposed to be historical fiction.)

At least I didn't visit Wikipedia every two minutes seeking material about voodoo. I'd remembered a a short story by comedian Alexei Sayle where he wrote about two thinly disguised English TV comics (actually Bob Mortimer and Vic Reeves) who tried using voodoo to boost their ratings and, even more heinously, to rig a football match result. There were whole paragraphs of information about early voodoo, or 'voodon' which Sayle described as something other than ordinary voodoo. I tracked down the Sayles book, and I took copious notes and wove them into my 'novel'. It then occurred to me that Sayles' job is to make up stuff. This also happens to be my job. But what if Alexei Sayle actually invented this whole alternative version of voodoo, and all the stuff I had painstakingly noted down is actually, to quote the brilliant fat bastard himself, 'bollocks'?

I am creating this post as a kind of closure. (There! I've finally used the word that I said I never would.) I now have sixty thousand words and I think they might make sense. I'm just not sure if I have a proper novel yet, or a long short story with another long short story threaded through it. And of course, voodoo is Haitian, which immediately buggers things up for me, because that's on the wrong side of the world to be of any use. But every morning for over a week now, I've risen at 5.00am to bang away at the book, since I need to write because it helps my self-esteem (pathetic, I know. But isn't that why everyone does it?) I’m not about to go putting pictures of my book covers on Facebook because my self-esteem isn't quite that low, and I know I've just offended an awful lot of people - but come on, guys, it’s okay if it's your first book. But you guys all have backlists. Post pictures of your cat being stupid, or the clouds doing weird shit over Westernport Bay, or that video of Rudd being all sweary. I won't be getting up tomorrow morning at 5.00am to continue the mad splurge of novel-wruting. I will rise like a normal person.Ha

And thanks, Shaun, for lending me the Alexei Sayle books. They are a revelation. Sayle does seem to be the genuine article. He's not just a celebrity who's tried his hand at bookwriting, he's a real craftsman, and I feel I have actually met a lot of the people in his stories - but then, I guess we both work in the same industry, only he does stuff for the BBC and I do it for, ooh, wait, I've got the card here somewhere.

Back to Casualty

Last week, the symptoms returned. The tingling fingertips, the numb lips: these were two of the symptoms that heralded my stroke back in September. I definitely, positively didn't want to return to The Alfred again, so I ignored the symptoms and figured that I should just go to bed, and they would pass. I rang nurse-on-line and was told to get straight to a hospital and, above all, not to fall asleep. Dreading the possibility that I might be about to go through another few months of hospitalisation and rehab, I gathered up my overnight bag, some spare clothes, then went to the emergency room at The Alfred. It was Friday night and stinking hot, the sort of night where you anticipate there might be a fair bit of alcohol-fuelled violence and that emergency rooms would be clogged with people with knives sticking out of their heads. But the emergency room at The Alfred looked remarkably unoccupied. There were two little old ladies and neither had knives sticking out of their heads. They sat, patiently watching the Australian Open on the TV.
I went to triage - where they had all my particulars on file after the last hospitalisation. The triage nurse did a quick run-through of the tests that indicate whether or not a person might be having an ischemic episode, then I became aware of some noise behind me. The triage nurse, who had a broad Scottish burr, which can sound very authoritative and excellent for crowd control, announced to whoever was behind me that she would deal with only one patient at a time - and that currently I was that patient. The noise continued. I turned around quickly but looked at the floor. I didn't want to make eye contact with any patients who had just been told that I had priority. There was quite a lot of blood on the floor, which made it pretty much impossible for me not to have a look at whichever patient was the source of so much blood. There was an Indian teenager, being held up by two friends. Blood poured from his stomach, Apparently he had just been stabbed. He didn’t look dangerous at all, just surprised and fearful. (Which is how I guess I would look if I had blood gushing from a knife wound in my belly.) I told the triage nurse (in her defence, she hasn't seen the blood) that I was happy to let the Indian boy go ahead of me, and she agreed that this was probably a good idea. In no time at all, he was whisked away to an operating theatre so that someone could stitch him together again. I really hope the stabbing wasn't an act of racially motivated violence. I've read enough articles on The Times Of India website, warning young Indian students that such violent racist attacks are common, and that one (in Spotswood) had ended in a death. (Fortunately there are also op ed pieces by jorrnalists with a better world view, advising readers that the stabbers are a particularly small minority, and that most Australians welcome the Indian students with open arms - but these types of articles do not sell nespapers and are rarely given prominence.)
While I stood aside for the young Indian kid to receive emergency treatment, I realised that the tingling fingertips and numb lips I had been experiencing seemed to have cleared up. They still gave me a CT scan, and they made me wait until I was given the all-clear by the doctor . The ischemic episode had passed. The small clot of blood that had blocked a vessel in my brain had apparently cleared itself. This often happens, but if you're an ex-stroke-patient, it's best to get yourself to casualty as soon as you experience any of those symptoms. I asked one of the nurses if they treated many stabbings at The Alfred, and her comment was that there were about fou per month. This surprised me. I thought the figure would be higher. The nurse said, 'That's high enough for us.' Quite.

On the corner of Chapel Street and Balaclava Roads in Balaclava, there's a gift shop that seems to specialise in items of Russian manufacture. So there are plenty of wooden dolls and toy bears in the window. There is also a whole shelf of knives - all spectacularly lethal-looking and pretty in their own way. And across the road is The St Kilda Police Station. Last year, there was a community service poster campaign in St Kilda, featuring the photoshopped image of a boy with his face stitched up. Beneath was a caption that more or less said, 'Don't stab people. You might get in trouble.'  (A quick bit of research reveals that the caption was actually KNIVES SCAR LIVES .. though it still worries me that people need to be reminded of this.) So, we've become so lacking in empathy that we need to be told that knives are dangerous. And, as an added incentive for people with knives not to stab people, there is the indication that the stabber him/herself might suffer, never mind the kid with a knife in him. 

And the shop in Balaclava, I'm sure, continues to do a roaring trade. The wooden dolls seem to be slow movers, but the variety, beauty and heft of the knives seems ever changing.

  

Missing: One right frontal lobe.

 

Last Friday I got my progress report for my stroke recovery. I've been lucky. That cubic centimetre of brain that was damaged is currently being bypassed by my clever neurons, finding other ways to make my body work properly.

My brave Uncle Ron had a stroke last year and it robbed him of his tastebuds, among other things. I seem to have retained most of mine. Food still tastes like food. Mind you, I still find it tricky to balance on an inflated rubber discus. However, this is something I rarely have cause to do. I have just found out something rather alarming about myself. This has nothing to do with my stroke. My neuerologist looked at my CT scan and announced to me that there was good news and bad news. The good news is that there is no damage to the left frontal lobe of my brain - the part that acts as a self-censor. It stops us from doing or saying dangerously stupid things. It is, in effect, a moral compass. Apparently Sarah Palin was born without one. The right frontal lobe is the more sensible one - the one we use when doing mathematics, solving problems. The bad news is, according to my scan (see below) I apparently don't have a right frontal lobe.

See the big white space on the top right corner of my brain? That's where my right frontal lobe should be. It's just a big puddle of water. We're not sure how I managed to misplace an entire frontal lobe, but apparently the left one is the really important one and it's in great shape.

Good heavens. I've just re-read my blog and notice that the last entry was a long poem about Queen Elizabeth getting stoned. I can't imagine what I was thinking. Maybe the right frontal lobe is the one that tells you not to post poems about our head of state on drugs.