Vale Kevin

It’s horrible when your publisher decides to put one of your books out of print, especially if it’s one that you like. (I really wasn’t terribly upset when Con’s Bewdiful Australia was put out of print.)

Kevin the Troll is officially out of print, and has been for a year.  There are about two thousand copies in schools and libraries so I hope you are lucky enough to find a copy. It was fun to write about a main character who wasn’t terribly nice, even though he has his reasons for being nasty. I finished writing this book on the day of the second-last Federal election. I always vote. I like to think I can make a difference. And I don’t mind queueing at the St Kilda school to do it. You meet interesting people in queues, especially in StT Kilda queues. But on the day I was finishing off the manuscript for Kevin the Troll, I was so thrilled with how easily the story seemed to come that I completely forgot  about voting and I didn’t care! I happily paid the fine (and writers on the whole are not happy to pay for anything.) I did try to say in my defence that I was writing a very good book at the time and couldn’t be disturbed. (Smarty-pants excuses like this don’t  go down well with the electoral office. Not that I’ve used smart-pants excuses before . I’ve always voted and happily paid two dollars for a charred sausage on Home Pride bread with White Crow tomato sauce.)  The one hundred and sixty page manuscript was delivered to Penguin on the following Monday. I was slightly nervous, because what I wrote on my website is true. Penguin wanted me to write another book like I’m Being Stalked by a Moonshadow, a sort of romcom for boys. Trolls had never been mentioned in the deal. But I got writer’s-blocked, as usual. Although I have now finished the romcom and am editing it with Amy Thomas at Penguin. (New editor! How exciting! Though I think I’ll miss my old editor, Dmetri Kakmi. Kevin the Troll is dedicated to him. One of the trolls is named after him. He hangs around a lot with the troll call Barberastreisand.

 Writing Kevin the Troll was my rest and relaxation from the romcom.  It gave me an excuse to surf the Net for cool sites about Scadinavian mythology. It also gave me the opportunity of doing the talking book version. I’ve not actually listened to it, but I’m told that my Swedish language skills are borderline at best, even though I did get a brief language lesson from the kind people at the Swedish church in Toorak.

Kevin the Troll also gave me the opportunity of writing things that were funny but not particularly relevant to the plot. The book sort of wanders along and takes to very occasional diversion from the plot, which is what Nordic sagas are supposed to do.

But now Kevin is off to Walhalla. Penguin has come up with the absurd excuse that the book isn't making a profit for them. Most unprofessional of them.

There will be something visually amusing here as well, when I've fixed the glitch. Kevin fan Emma Hancox has written Kevin's Epitaph in the form of a poem. Thank you, Emma, I'm sure Kevin would have loved it. It's got that delicate balance of niceness and creepiness, which is difficult to achieve, bt you've puled it off nicely. There are no awkward lines that have been tucked in, just to make a rhyme. Thanks again, Emma, for your good work, and shame on your teacher for not believing you wrote it.

The Ballad Of Kevin The Troll

By Emma Hancox - Aged 9 years

When bones go crunch,

and flesh is ripped, 

Kevin The Troll is near.

When you can feel cool

mist about,

Kevin The Troll is near.

If you can hear groans

and shouts, 

Kevin The Troll is near.

When you can see black

mould and slime,

Kevin The Troll is near.

If you can taste him,

that would not be true,

For Kevin The Troll would

be eating YOU!

This wonderful picture of a troll skulking under a bridge and no doubt contemplating his next meal, was done by Dogstar artist Scott Vanden Bosch. I am using it without his permission, but I think he'll be okay about it because it just shows how highly I rate his work.

Who murdered my brain?

There has been a fair whack of publicity regarding Baz Lhrmann’s ‘reimagining’ of The Great Gatsby. In light of this, I feel I have to clear up a gaffe I made during a speech at last year’s Australian Book Council conference in Adelaide. I was on a panel with Michael Gerard Bauer and some other funny writers, where I espoused my habit of reading all the ‘short classics’. There was a general discussion about books like Heart of Darkness and The Outsider and Northanger Abbey, some of which made it to Twitter. I was pretty happy with an answer to the question about whether my books were preferred by girls or boys. I answered that both sexes seem to dislike them about equally.

Then it fell to pieces.

I lost my mind for a few moments and mentioned how perfect are the letters that Fitzgerald exchanged with his editor during the process of writing the great American classic (which, of course, Fitzgerald didn’t realise he was doing). I made the startlingly stupid remark that the reader is never sure of who drove the car that killed Myrtle, one of the principal characters. (Spoiler, but you all know it.) What I said was patently wrong and rates right up there with Sarah Palin telling us all that Africa is a country and not, in fact, a continent. No one corrected me so I shall do so now. Of course we knew who was driving the car. In the letters to his editor, Fitzgerald was never happy with the plot point that forced the departure to New York, thus setting up the Death of Myrtle story. It didn't seem strongly motivated. (Fitzgerald's words.)

Fitzgerald was never satisfied with this part of the book, and this somehow made my stroke-addled brain activate my voice to inform a large, literate audience that Gatsby’s car must have driven itself.

I am profoundly, humbly sorry for saying such an idiotic thing. I think that the only two movies to feature driverless cars are Stephen King’s Christine and Disney’s The Love Bug, neither of which appear in the movie of The Great Gadsby, unless Baz has taken some startling liberties with the story.

It may seem all too convenient to blame the great stroke of 2011 for my gaffe, but that damned thing has changed pretty much every aspect of my life. I find it very difficult to write. And while I bear little in common with WH Auden, unless I age particularly badly, I agree with him when he says that unless he writes something every day, he goes to bed feeling unwell.

WH Auden, presumably at the end of a day where he hasn't written anything.

It’s taken a lot longer to recover from that stroke than I thought it would. I can walk, read, watch movies, yet I’m still disabled on so many levels. The bit of my brain that died is at the base of the Basel ganglia. It’s a part of the brain that we need especially for memory, but also for logic, or ‘cause and effect’, which are rather important for a writer. I nervously accepted a job on Shaun Micallef’s wonderful series, Mr and Mrs Murder. I warned the producers that I’d had a stroke and that I wasn’t at the height of my powers, but they still wanted me for the table meetings, where a group of writers sit and go about the vital task of plotting a series. We were making good progress. I pitched a storyline and started to write it up myself, away from the table. My story was based on a book I’d read about the extraordinary world of professional body-building, which touched on the subject of doping and strongly indicated that the most effective growth hormone there is can be found in the human pituitary gland, just behind the ear. My story would be about some mortuary worker who was extracting the valuable fluid from cadavers. (It's what Hitchcock called The McGuffin, the terribly valuable or powerful thing that people want and that drives a story.) The subject matter didn’t give me a readily apparent and interesting ‘corpse’, so that Charley and Nicola Buchanan had a murder to investigate. I thought of what I considered a brilliant idea of having the corpse provided by a sunbed, from which the occupant was unable to escape, owing to whatever that drug it is that Agatha Christie keeps putting in her books, the one that renders the victim completely immobile, so that they are alive to feel the horrors and agonies of the demise that the perpetrator has arranged for them. I believe it was given to the murder victim in Murder on the Orient Express. Thus the victim remained alive to witness his death by (huge spoiler) absolutely every single suspect.

My body-building story seemed to be going quite well, until the migraines started. What I had once been able to do fairly mechanically (that is, write TV scripts) was now almost impossible. It was actually painful. I hated letting down the side, but I was forced to hand over my scene breakdown and retire hurt to the pavilion. I actually saw the episode based on my scene breakdown that went to air. It was pretty well salvaged, I expect by script producer Kelly Lefevre, but what I’d envisaged as a climactic and terrifying mortuary stalking scene had been cut. And it was cut because my script was far too long. Mr and Mrs Murder is probably the hardest show on Australian television to write for.

I'm guessing that this is a PR exercise and not an actual scene from MrR and Mrs MUrder

Must crucially, it airs on a commercial station, meaning that each episode that is supposedly an hour in length is, in fact, a ‘commercial hour’. In other words, 43 minutes. And in that time we had to have an interesting but not too graphic murder, a crowd of suspects, an unusual location, sufficient red herrings to throw the viewer off the scent, and a fair whack of comedy, a lot of which is fortunately provided by Shaun Micallef, who does a ‘comedy pass’ over every script. I honestly don’t know if I was getting the headaches because of the difficulty of the project itself, or because the base of my basel ganglia was at that time a vacant lot.

It’s good to see the show, even if defiled by commercials. I hope we’ll see many more episodes and that one day I’ll be able to write an AWGIE-award winning contribution to the series.

By the way, I‘ve since found out that my ingenious ‘death by sunbed’ murder has been done by everyone.

Do you want to see something really scary?

In the last post but one I referenced The Twilight Zone, surely one of the best American TV series ever made. 

The series was/is popular enough to warrant a movie version, where four different directors tried their hands at remaking four of the iconic episodes. It was a disappointment, with some good bits, most notably a new prologue where a hitchhiker is picked up by a driver who tries to scare him by driving recklessly and turning out the headlights from time to time. The hitchhiker begs the driver to be more careful, he is getting scared. Talk turns to the original Twilight Zone TV series. Both driver and hitchhiker try to scare each other with memories of the spookier episodes. At the end of the trip the hitchhiker takes  one parting shot. He asks the driver if he wants to see something really scary. The driver naturally says yes, and in an instant the hitchhiker turns into a hideous blue monster that lunges at the driver. I’m not sure if we saw blood or not. But I remember the reaction in the cinema at the time.

Something really scary

There was a momentary gasp then a delighted roar of laughter. Frankly, the movie doesn’t have much going for it, although the fourth story, directed by George Miller is a beauty. It’s based on an episode Nightmare at 20,000 feet where a nervous passenger on an international  flight can see a sort of imp creature, tearing up the aluminum wings and feeding them into one of the engines. The passenger (played by William Shatner) tries to alert the cabin crew, who of course see nothing when they look at the ‘imp’ sabotaging the plane. I think the story worked so well because a lot of people on flights have wondered what it would be like if they saw something appear on the wing. (You can see a still from it at the top of this post)  It’s truly a nightmare scenario, though it’s played for laughs. In the original Twilight Zone episode, the imp looks like a cross between a gorilla and one of the Zygons  from Doctor Who. 

One of the aforementioned Zygons, and my apologies if this constitutes a spoiler

It’s a  risible imp and somewhat detracts from any element of horror. In the film remake, the imp is a beauty. He’s spindly and blue., complete with a leering face and clawed hands. The nervous passenger (played in the movie by John Lithgow) is thoroughly believable. Here again, when the imp appeared, there were  gasps then laughter from the audience. My good friend Kimpton knew I had seen the movie. She wanted to know if it was too scary for her daughter Tiffany (14) and friend (same age). I had no hesitation in recommending it, not thinking for a moment that the monsters might give nightmares to a young teen. And Kimpton took ages to forgive me. The girls had nightmares for weeks. I really didn’t think there was anything in the movie to give nightmares. After all, hadn’t we all laughed?

Anyway, Kimpton never asks me for movie recommendations these days. Which is a shame because it means she will never see Iron Sky. And I’m genuinely sorry the girls were as upset as they turned out to be. I honestly thought the movie was funny, even if the dull stories (especially Kick the Can) seemed to go on forever.

We all find different things funny. And if the scares are ingenious and completely over the top, I tend to laugh. I’m not a ghoul and absolutely hate the current crop of torture porn movies. I would no more recommend one of them to a teen than I would recommend a movie about a deranged scientist who sews human bodies together in such a way that they resemble an underendowed centipede (and I thank my editor, Dmetri Kakmi, for drawing my attention to this movie).

But I’ll be more careful when I recommend movies to kids in future. Because some of them don’t see movies in the way I do. And I should keep reminding myself that these things used to terrify me.

So, we meet again, Mr MacLeod

The gun-wielding Penguin is back with the extraordinary news that my book, The Shiny Guys has been shortlisted in the older readers category of the CBCA awards.
Here's the shortlist for the older readers category:

And here is the complete shortlist.
The armed Penguin congratulates you all.

No Foreknowledge Necessary

In order to overcome what I hope is only a temporary case of writer’s block, I went to the St Kilda library to get out some kick-ass Young Adult fiction, that might present me with the inspiration I so obviously need. The first book I chose was Billy Mack’s War.

I selected it because I’ve met James Roy and enjoyed speaking with him. I’ve also heard him talk to teens and he seems to have a good idea of what goes on inside the head of a teenage male. I would have borrowed anything by Scot Gardner too, for similar reasons, but there was nothing there. I didn’t consult the catalogue. I’m sure that the St Kilda Library has no shortage of Scot Gardner titles but that I arrived on a bad day. I probably wouldn’t have borrowed a Nick Earls, because I’ve read 48 Shades of Brown. In the back of the book there is a quote from Cleo magazine that if you read a Nick Earls book you will ‘never be unhappy again’. Perhaps they should stop using that quote, surely penned by a well-meaning friend of Nick’s? It’s certainly enticing but incredibly hard to live up to, and didn’t apply to me, though I certainly would never recommend crucifying a book then setting it aflame, which some angry YouTuber did, complete with visual directions. I wish they’d remove it. I see books burning and I hear jackboots.

I had limited time at the St Kilda Library. The next two books I grabbed were Quintana of Charyn by Merlina Marchetta, because everyone keeps telling me how wonderful she is, and The Sending by Isobelle Carmody, for the same reason. 

I started on Quintana of Charyn. Somehow, when I gazed at the cover, I had missed the subtitle: Book Three of the Lumatere Chronicles. However it became very clear on closer inspection that I was reading a portion of a much larger work, and was ill-equipped to do so. The volume is over five hundred pages long. Presumably this means I have to read around one thousand words to finish the first two volumes and get a decent idea of what is going on. I figured that rather than read ten thousand words so I could pick up the thread, that time that would perhaps be better spent on learning to use my Dragon voice recognition software, so that I can speak my books as I compose them, and not have to rely upon my stroke-addled fingers. The idea of writing a novel by way of voice recognition software seems cumbersome, though I understand that Rod Serling wrote most of his Twilight Zone episodes that way (although his Dragon was a stenographer) and there were some really wonderful Twilight Zone tales. An Easter treat was watching DVD’s of the old fifties shows, and marvelling at how well they still hold up. Does anyone know of novelists who dictate their novels? Is that how Dan Brown did it? Anyway, I put down Book Three of the Lumatere Chronicles and picked up The Sending. Reader, I had made the same mistake. While it doesn’t leap off the cover, there is a line of copy alerting us to the fact that this is Book Six in The Obernewtyn Chronicles. So, once again I had a little reading to do before I was ready for this book. Now, Book Three is overwhelming enough – but Book Six! The Sending is 750 pages long. Why do these fantasy writers feel the need to go for such massive Russian literature-style word counts? Assuming that the first five volumes of this Obernewtyn Chronicle are of similar length, I would be committing myself to reading a total of 3750 words before I could fully appreciate The Sending, knowing of all the elegant twists and turns the narrative had taken before Dragon, a creature of quite astonishing beauty, appears on a broken stone column on the night of a full moon (my precis of the first paragraph of The Sending). I put it aside.

Picking up James Roy’s novel was a more promising exercise. Unlike the two, no doubt splendid fantasy novels that I had put aside, this book didn’t have shadowy goth girls on the cover. It had a title that included no invented place names. And it certainly wasn’t Book Three of the Billy Mack Chronicles. It was a stand-alone. A decent looking book without a bloody map before the story starts.  I could read this one secure in the knowledge that I already knew everything there was to know about Billy Mack (that is, nothing) before entering the world of young adult fiction. It read well, but I had this niggling feeling that I wasn’t getting the full picture. The writer seemed to presume some amount of foreknowledge on my part. But this wasn’t a whacking great doorstep of a novel, involving dragons on stone columns on moonlit nights. It was a down-to-earth slice-of-life fiction, like Jasper Jones, which I had read recently and enjoyed.

This is when fate played a particularly cruel trick. I learned from examining the back cover blurb that what I was reading was a prequel to a well-regarded book called Captain Mack. I’m sure Captain Mack is a fine work, and that most people have heard of it. But I hadn’t. Perhaps more importantly, I hadn’t read it. And yet I felt I really had to for Billy Mack’s War to be fully enjoyed. So, the books I had borrowed to coax me to invent new stories for teens were a Part Three, a Part Six and a Prequel. And we authors point accusing fingers at Hollywood when they dare to bring out a sequel to Shrek. (‘Typical of Hollywood to exploit a successful movie.’ ‘They’ll be doing a sequel to Blade Runner next.’)

Please understand that this is not a blog post that drips poison. It is more despair than poison, though perhaps I was a bit poisonous to Nick Earls (who’s actually good) to mention that horrible YouTube movie about his book 48 Shades of Brown though I certainly don’t advocate that books should be crucified and burned - despite what I might have recently muttered about Stephanie Meyer when I was on a panel at The Wheeler Centre, and it was filmed.

I’m the fool. First of all, I knew I was being filmed. And secondly, anyone who doesn’t take the time to read book covers carefully or realise that paperback cinderblocks about fictional places with names like Lumatere or Obernewtyn are unlikely to appeal deserves what he gets. It’s just, I was hoping to get some reading done today. In the end I blogged. Even last night’s Doctor Who: ‘The Rings of Akaten’ (silly place names again) was boring and forgot to tell a decent story, just because all the aliens looked so cool. What a rotten long weekend.

And this is not just a selfish whine because I couldn’t think of a sequel to my only book to cause any kind of modest commotion, The Life of a Teenage Body-snatcher. At least, I couldn’t write one. 

Oh, no. But one day I might speak one.

And for those who might still be interested, plenitude is, of course, alive. John's father is John Lamb, the real character from history, and Thomas's resurrectionist name is (perhaps ironically) Modesty.