A Little More on Inertia

Last week I wrote briefly about inertia.

This was largely because I didn't feel like I was having a particularly good week. I got a lot of little stuff done, but somehow the big stuff (like writing, for example, or working on the couple of academic papers that I've been plugging away at for what feels like forever) wasn't getting done, and not for lack of time, but motivation.

In my rather bleak post last week, I put this down to inertia, and suggested that; ...it's irritating when the brain and the willpower don't come into alignment. For a writer, it's dangerous.

But today, I'm going to disagree with that.*

Because after due thought and consideration, I've come to the conclusion that inertia isn't dangerous, or even bad. It's a necessary part of the whole creative process.

At the moment, I've got my next book sitting on my computer, almost finished. It's somewhere in the region of about 35,000 words, and I expect it'll top out at around 50ish. (It's going to be a lot shorter than my last few books, which is not a bad thing, in my opinion.) It's been at that point for roughly two months now, on a sort of jumpy pause, halfway through chapter twenty-three.

But where last week I was letting this really bother me, the weekend gave me a chance to recharge my batteries and get a little perspective. (There's nothing like working in the garden to help clear the mind...)

And the conclusion I've reached is this: The book will finish itself when it's ready to be finished.

Now, I suspect that this isn't the way a lot of writers work, or think. But it's the way I need to work and think, for a few reasons.

One is because this book is going to be an important one for me. It's different to all my other stuff; very different. It's much more commercial than most of my previous works, but that's not a bad thing. Up to date, it still has an awful lot of me in it; I'm enjoying writing it, I'm loving the story, and most importantly I'm having a lot of fun with it, and I want all this to continue right through the draft. This book is going to involve a little bit of re-imagining of myself and my writing, and if I try to force it out onto the page, all I'll end up with is a disingenuous piece of writing, that has nothing of myself in it. So for that reason, I'm loathe to try and force it out.

Another reason is that the reality of my life now is very different from what it was a couple of years ago. Back then - when I was writing 'Into White Silence' for example, I had the luxury of being able to put a couple of months aside and just bury myself in writing. Not so much any more - now I have fatherly duties which take up (and are the best part of) most of my weekends. I have my job at uni, which is work I love doing - both the teaching and researching - but which leaves me mentally wiped at the end of most days. Time has become a commodity, and if there's one thing that good, genuine writing needs, it's time. So I'll just have to accept the fact that I might need to space my writing more widely across the year, and get used to writing in those periods where I have my mojo on.

Finally there's the requirements of the book itself. During these last couple of months of inertia, I realised the other day, I've been mentally tweaking, exploring and shifting a lot of tiny aspects of the story around in my head, and improving it as a result. This makes me wonder if, just perhaps, this story isn't ready to be confined to the page quite yet.

So there you have it. I'm reversing my position on inertia. For the moment, at least. It's not dangerous, it's natural and probably necessary.

Now, I'm going to have a nap...




* I read somewhere that all good blogs engage in public debate. Well, that's just what I'm doing here. Only with myself.

What I Did on My Weekend...

If there are a few typos in this post, then I'll apologise. I've got some minor typing issues at the moment, mainly to do with the fact that my left thumb is currently encased in an enormous bandage.

If you follow me on Twitter, and if you were following along last friday night, then you'll already know the sad saga of my evening. But, for those of you who weren't* here's the abbreviated version:

Friday night, Min and I planned to do a chinese steamboat dinner - yum. We had scallops, pork, beef and chicken all marinading, along with yummy enoki mushrooms, cloud ear fungus*, and a simmering stock of chicken infused with szechuan peppers and soy and tsing zao.

Oh, yeah, and cabbage. That Chinese cabbage called Wombok.

And it was the cabbage that brought me unstuck. I was cutting it up in to managable pieces when I managed to almost slice the top off my left thumb. It was a lovely cut - an almost perfect circle, with just a tiny little hinge holding my fingertip onto the rest of my finger.

And there was some bleeding, too.

"Hmm... ouch." I said, very calmly.***

Then, with Toby asleep in bed, we called my brother in Law - the awesome Joe - who drove all the way across Canberra on a friday night, picked me up and took me to the emergency room at Calvary hospital, where I had the following conversation with the Triage nurse.

Me: Hi. I've managed to slice open the tip of my finger.
TN: How.
Me: With a kitchen knife, while making dinner.
TN: What were you cutting up?
Me: Uhm... Cabbage.
TN: (slightly incredulous) Cabbage?
Me: Yeah.
TN: Is your tetanus shot up to date?****
Me: Yes.
TN: Okay. Well, sit down and wait over there. But I should warn you that there are people in the waiting room who've been there since three this afternoon*****, so you're looking at a minimum 5 hour wait. Probably closer to 6 or 7.
Me: You're kidding?
TN: *Shrugs*

So at that point, and resisting the urge to point out that it would have been quicker to drive to Sydney and get it looked at there, I left, choosing home surgery as a more viable alternative. Luckily, while stopping at a late night chemist on the way home to pick up supplies, the nice pharmacist suggest I go to the medical centre down the road and just three minutes from the emergency room of the hospital which is open every night until ten. I went there. I didn't have to wait. I got the top stitched back onto my thumb. I find myself questioning why TN didn't just send me right there in the first place, but I guess she had her reasons.

Then Joe drove me home. It was 10.30. Min had put the steamboat stuff back in the fridge and ordered a pizza.

Saturday morning here was one of those gorgeous spring days, which in Canberra are particularly lovely; cool, damp, sunny. You can taste the season in the air. We'd planned to get to work at taming our feral garden, and weren't about to let the fact that I had a thumb encased in bandages stop us. Saturday morning saw the three of us outside in our wellies, weeding, digging, planting.

One of the first things we did when we bought our Canberra house was to build two big garden beds and fill them up with good soil. And for first couple of years that we lived here, our garden beds were the envy of the suburb: silverbeet, cucumbers, zucchini, spinach, garlic, spring onions, basil, coriander, rosemary, sage and, of course, tomatoes. Lots and lots of heirloom tomatoes. Black Russians, Green Zebras, Golden cherries, Romas, Black Krims, and others I can't quite remember. At one point, we had about seven different species of tomato in our gardens. Right through summer we ate them with everything: a thick sliced Black Russian, on toast, with a liberal sprinkling of salt for breakfast on a summer morning is just delightful. As summer wore on, we got ourselves a preserving kit and started bottling and during the winter months, when all outside was dark, cold and dead, we had the pleasure of opening our own jars - filled with garden tomato, basil leaves and a dash of balsamic vinegar - every time we needed them.

Then, a couple of years ago, things changed. Toby came along and, for some reason, last year's gardening was less than successful.

Now, though, he's old enough to toddle around out there too, and to 'help'. Occasionally he even pulls out weeds, and not plants.

So Saturday morning was great; the three of us out in the sun, under our flowering plum tree, with the dog, getting in seedlings and pulling out all the winter-dead plants and prepping the soil for the upcoming growing season. With the wet winter now behind us, it promises to be a really good season, and we're going to make the most of it. Right now our broad beans are flowering profusely, promising a nice crop before a lot longer (one of the things I love about early summer is the broad bean harvest; such an earthy, springy taste, and they grow through winter. And they're good for the soil, too...) Our third generation parsley plant is going nuts, and our oregano and sage have come back to life. We also have a cos lettuce growing out the side of one of the garden beds, where it self-seeded last year.

The garden has become one of the big pleasures of our lives (Oh god, I've become my parents!) and last weekend it was just fantastic introducing Toby to it, too.

Anyway, I should get on with my day, and stop bothering you all.




*ie: anyone who thinks that life deserves more than 140 characters
** Black. Looks like a cloud crossed with an ear. Texture a bit like seaweed. Min loves it
*** Or words to that effect.
**** I didn't know you could get tetanus from cabbage, either.
***** At that point, it was 8.30

Bathrooms. Books. Workshops. Inertia.

Let's start with inertia, shall we?

Perhaps its because the ongoing saga of our bathroom renovations has thrown the last three weeks of our lives into utter disarray, or perhaps it's because I've got the middle-of-semester blues, or perhaps I'm just having a flat spell, but the last couple of weeks I've been finding it increasingly difficult to fight the overwhelming urge to do nothing. It's a little like everything has ground to a halt, and I just can't find it in me to get going again.

Which is utter crap, of course, I've got about a million and one things to do, most of them distressingly soon. Blog posts, for example. But still it's irritating when the brain and the willpower don't come into alignment. For a writer, it's dangerous.

Okay. Enough with the whinging. Now on to workshops...

Last friday I spent the day up in Sydney working with a group of fantastic young writers, and also fellow scribblers Jacqueline Moriarty and Suzanne Gervay run by the New South Wales CBC and held at the Australian Maritime Museum which, in addition to being a fantastic venue, is also the home of the Endeavour Replica, which I helped to build, rig and sail in Fremantle back in the early 1990's. Part of the day was a tour of the ship, which I haven't set foot aboard since it left Fremantle, and it was lovely to be back aboard her.

The rest of the day was fantastic - one of the best parts of this job is meeting and working with young writers, and a number of the guys and girls at the workshop have already done some incredible writing.

Tomorrow, I'm working at UC with students from Gold Creek High School, as part of our 'Uni Student for a Day' program, and that also promises to be fun.

Books:

I recently finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy (another of those big holes in my reading which I've been intending to fill for ages). It had quite an impact on me. I may have raved about it slightly at Goodreads. As I mentioned in my review, I think that one of the main reasons this book resonated so strongly with me was because of the portrayal of fatherhood within it. It captures all the utter powerlessness and desperation that comes with being a parent, and particularly a father (IMHO). It's a thoroughly beautiful, if completely gut-wrenching book.

Finally, Bathrooms:

In theory, our bathroom should be more-or-less finished tomorrow, except that while I've been typing up this post, our bathroom guy just called to let me know that there's been a problem with a benchtop, and we'll have to wait until thursday. This isn't overly surprising. Lately, I've been feeling a little bit like I'm on Grand Designs. I keep expecting to turn around to find Kevin McLeod in our hallway, looking terribly earnest and just slightly smug and saying something like "Tony and Imogen are convinced that they're going to come in on time and on budget*, but I'm at all convinced that they'll be able to achieve such an ambitious schedule on a project like this..."

Still, I can't complain. As of last night, at least we have a functioning shower again for the first time in three weeks.** This, if nothing else, has had a dramatic impact upon our quality of life. I'll stick some pics up here when it's all done***

Anyway, that's the brief summary of life at the moment. With a bit of luck tomorrow will see me in a more cheerful mood.

*We haven't. On either count.
** I smell a lot better, now.
*** Next year, on current projections.

Those Pesky Kids...

Here's something one of my students found glued into the endpaper of one of the books from our library, circa about 1982:



Says it all, really...

Into the Depths of Chaos

I've been resisting the urge for the last week to post yet another little lefty rant here, and to propose that at the moment - with both the major political parties effectively on good behaviour bonds and desperately trying to look stable and responsible, while the public service run the country - we're getting the best political governance we've had for a decade and-we-should-consider-just-leaving-things-this-way.

I'm not going to do that, however. Because, let's face it. There's no point.

So, instead, I'm going to talk about bathrooms.

Specifically, our bathroom. Or what remains of it.

It's amazing the way that the loss of one little room can throw an entire family into complete chaos. Until a week or so ago, I wouldn't have believed it possible, but - trust me on this - it's absolutely the case. Even a bathroom which is, let's face it, pretty much a single purpose room.

A while back, we decided to have our bathroom done up. We made this decision for two reasons:

1. Our house was designed and built (along with every other house in our neighbourhood) in the 1970's as a 'Guvvy'; that is, to be used as 'government housing' for either government workers who had to move to Canberra, or for low income housing. This means that the house was built to a plan, a budget, and a certain standard*. When we purchased it, a lot of the house had already been renovated, but not the bathroom. We inherited the original, 1970's bathroom, complete with narrow, shallow, enamel-less bath, peeling water damaged paint, mouldy roof, uneven water-catching floor and permanently dirt-ingrained grouting.

2. The whole room, like pretty much anything built in Canberra in the 1970's, was lined with asbestos.**

So a few weeks ago we bit the bullet, organised some quotes, and chose a nice bloke to do up the bathroom. We picked out new taps, showerhead, tiles... all the usual stuff. We try not to think too much about the dollars involved.

Of course, the downside was that we'd have no bathroom for a couple of weeks, but we consoled ourselves with the fact that we'd booked the renovation in for spring, when it'd be getting warmer, and our respective workloads would be a little under control.

"We'll manage." Min and I told each other. "How difficult can it be?"

Well, quite difficult, as it turns out.

Partly because our bathroom man had a cancellation, and bumped our job forward a month-and-a-half, which put it into the busiest part of the uni semester for me, and the trailing-but-still-bloody-cold final weeks of the Canberra winter. Still, at least we'll have our lovely new bathroom sooner.

In the meantime, though, we're facing down the challenges of a house where all the bathroom stuff (and it's incredible just how much stuff can come out of such a small room - Toby's bath toys alone filled a green bag, which is now sitting outside on the back porch) is crammed into whichever cupboard or horizontal surface will hold it. Then there's the challenge of keeping a toddler out of a room which currently:

• Has no door and
• Has drying concrete on the floor, drying waterproofer on the walls, a gaping hole where the shower drain used to be, power sockets hanging out of the walls and a sharp steel strip along the floor where the new shower base will sit. In other words, it's the most interesting room in the house at the moment.

Then finally there's the fact that, well, we don't have a shower. I'll be honest here; I like my showers. Especially in the mornings. It's safe to say that after coffee, a shower is perhaps the most important part of my daily routine. I'm one of those people who doesn't actually feel conscious until I've had my morning shower. At the moment, I'm showering in the bathroom down the hall from my office at work, by which point I've usually been up for hours, and feel like a sort of grotty zombie, and the feeling never really goes away.

It's not all bad, though. For one thing, our new bathroom, when it's done, will be lovely. It'll be the first time that both of us have owned and lived in a house with a really *nice* bathroom. It'll help us pretend we're on holidays in a hotel.

Also, from a personal perspective, I love watching professional tradespeople at work. I'm someone who likes building things and working with my hands, and have had various degrees of success with various projects. Min and I (with help from family) did most of the renovation work on our old house in Perth ourselves, and it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. It also gave me an appreciation for the skill involved in creating and constructing so many of the things we take for granted. Like bathrooms, for example. There's a lot of pleasure to be had from watching people who really know what they're doing, and at the moment, I can't wait to get home in the evenings and see what the guys have done during the day - and because the job started with a complete strip out of the whole room, I get to watch it on a step-by-step basis, which is teaching me a lot, too.

So it's not all bad. Sure, the house is in disarray and we can't park our cars in the garage at the moment (mainly because it's full of tiles and wall paneling), but there are a lot of pluses, too.

And, of course, in a couple of weeks, we'll have the largest shower in Canberra.

Now that's worth waiting for.

*low
** Actually, turns out that this also applies to the toilet and laundry, neither of which are covered in the existing reno, and the latter of which I did up myself last year. Oops.

Who I Voted For...

Today, for the first time in my voting life, I didn't cast my vote for the Australian Labor Party in either the house of reps, or the Senate.

And, I'll be honest, it hurt. It wasn't an easy decision.

I'm also sitting here now, at 10.40 on election night, looking down the barrel of a Liberal minority government, with Tony bloody Abbot as Prime Minister, and wondering what the hell happened to common sense in this country.

But, and I want to be totally clear on this, I don't regret my voting decision - not for a moment.

When I stood there in that polling booth this morning, Imogen was in the booth next door, and Toby was standing between us, holding our hands. And when I looked at those ballot papers, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't vote for a party which backflipped on the CPRS, which stopped processing of refugees for political gain, which is committed to coal power at the expense of funding alternative energy sources and which has, during the last couple of months, proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is more concerned with winning government - at whatever cost - than it is with governing. But mostly I couldn't vote for a party which is so utterly ruthless in regard to environmental policy that it didn't have the moral fortitude or political courage to set an ambitious, or difficult emissions reduction target for this country.

And, of course, the only alternative was the Liberals. Might as well vote for Kerry Packer.

So, for the record, I voted for the Greens in both houses, and preferenced Labor. Neither of my first preference candidates managed to get up, but that doesn't really matter, because that's not who I was really voting for.

This morning in the polling booth, I looked down at my son standing there, and I voted for my grandkids.

And, from the looks of the voting figures, most notably the first preference figures for the Greens, I wasn't the only one.

As we sit here on the verge of three years of complete parliamentary shitfight, I just hope to God the major parties get the message that I, and a lot of other Australians, sent them today, in no uncertain terms.

Get it India!

I'll start by apologising for the bad pun in the title. Ever since I became a father, I just can't seem to get away from the bad 'dad' jokes.

Anyway...

A few years ago now, back at the turn of the century, Imogen and I attended a W.A. Premier's Literary Award dinner at the State Library of Western Australia. At the dinner, I sat next to one of the other shortlisted authors; this blonde woman from Melbourne named Kirsty Murray, whose book Zarconi's Magic Flying Fish got up that evening to win the prize for best children's book.

We had a great night, all of us, and Kirsty and I kept in touch as the decade progressed.

Kirsty writes (among other things) historical fiction - it's one of her real passions. I've heard her talk about it on a couple of occasions (actually, I've got vague recollections of the two of us doing a panel on the subject at some-writer's-festival-or-other, but I can't recall any specifics, so it's quite possible that my brain is just making it up.)

In any case, the point is that not only does she write historical fiction, but she writes it beautifully. Reading her books is reading the work of a true craftsperson - her dedication to her art is evident in every carefully chosen word, and every perfectly constructed sentence. For me, the difficult part about historical fiction isn't so much finding material to write about - the past is just loaded with tiny and intriguing little cul-de-sac's of narrative just begging to be explored - but making the past come to life; getting all the tiny details and elements correct, but also writing in such a way as to capture the sensory aspects of a time and place which I can have no direct experience of.

Kirsty is an absolute master of this, however, and a few weeks ago she asked me if I'd launch her latest novel India Dark here in Canberra, and - as I mentioned at the time - I was thrilled to be able to agree.

Even more thrilled to get the book in the mail a couple of weeks ago.

On Monday afternoon, I took a break from my reading for the ACT Book of the Year Award* and picked up Kirsty's book.

At midnight on monday, I finished it.

And, I have to say, I'm so thrilled to be launching it. It's beautiful. The writing and storytelling is sublime, but most impressive (for me, at least) is the way that Kirsty has taken a fascinating chapter of Australian history, and breathed life into it; utterly convincing, utterly believable, and utterly engaging life.

I'm not going to go into the specifics of the plot and so on here - I'll save that for my launch speech on friday evening. Suffice to say that it's a fantastic achievement, and everyone should read it.

Congratulations, Kirsty.


*In case you're wondering, as of this morning my reading status there is: 6 books to go, 6 days to the judge's meeting. It's probably going to be closer than the election. More interesting, too.