We interrupt this program

… to bring you a public service announcement. Jacqui Robbins has offered an amusing challenge on her blog: to write the worst possible first sentence for a children’s picture book ever. Is good! Is funny! … is nearly over!

Entries close on the 15th, so I have been slack in not telling you before this. Hop on over and join in the fun. Some of the entries so far require a strong stomach. I’ve had a couple of attempts myself, but I fear I shall never make it as a picture book writer – too wordy. Witness one of my efforts:

"Maybe the smell should have warned him, or the way Tricky Tim sniggered as he held out the bowl, but Greedy Gordon never said no to chocolate ice cream and by the time he realised what he really had in his mouth it was too late."

Jacqui, however, already is a picture book writer, so her sentences are much better, eg:

"Fuzzy the Bunny lived with his Mama Bunny, Papa Bunny, and his sister, Roadkill, in a hutch at the base of a tall oak tree."

Jacqui's new book, Two of a Kind, has just come out, and promises to be full of all sorts of authorial genius. I bet it is even good for you.

And speaking of good for you, I bought a loaf of packaged herb bread to have with dinner tonight. As I prepared to put it in the oven, I noticed the advertising on the pack loudly trumpeted that it was “suitable for vegetarians”.

You know, unlike all those other loaves of bread that are made of meat.

Shameless self-congratulations AKA Writing Progress

Lookee! My little wordcount widget – the numbers, they are going up again! I’ve written about 4,000 words since I set my new goal. Can you tell I’m pleased with myself? The goal itself changed from “write 500 words every school day” to “be happy with whatever amount you manage to get done instead of feeling guilty because it wasn’t more”. Funnily enough, it still came out at an average of 500 words a day – but the process was much less painful.

Plus I got lots of practice at not guilting, which has got to be a good thing, since my “feel guilty about everything” gene is almost as well-developed as my worrywart gene. Witness the following exchange:

Guilt Complex: Oh Noooes! We’ve only written 286 words today. We are a Failure! We will never get this book finished. Never get published. We will be lying on our deathbed one day saying “if only we had tried harder we could have Achieved Something”. And we promised on our blog to write 500 words a day! Public humiliation!! Death and catastrophe!!!

New Improved Me: Begone, evil spawn of Satan! I refuse to listen to you any more. Tra la la! See? That’s me not listening. So what if I only had time for 286 words? At least I wrote something. I’m enjoying this book again! And ideas are starting to come! All is sunshine and roses!!! And tomorrow is another day, tra la la.

It’s true, ideas are starting to flow. I don’t know if they’ve been lurking in my subconscious all this time I’ve been avoiding the book, but they’re popping up all over the place since I poked a cautious toe into the dark waters of The Novel. Some of them are even good.

I had the most gob-smackingly brilliant one (ahem, even if I do say so myself) last night while I was cooking dinner. That pivotal moment in the finale of the book? The one covered in my sad excuse of an outline by the extremely useful sentence “SOME HUGE COMPLICATION NEEDED HERE”?

I thought of it. And it is brilliant. Totally worth waiting for. Sigh.

Gee, I’m just full of smug today, aren’t I? If you feel the need to go away and barf somewhere, go ahead. I’ll wait.

Back so soon? Let me just squee over one more thing, and then I’ll stop. Promise.

I killed someone!! Not a real someone, I hasten to add. That wouldn’t be squee-worthy. A character in my book. Since I am such a scaredy-cat, I couldn’t face leaping off into the unknown of the last quarter of the book. So I went back to a scene I had previously skipped over. It was a necessary scene, but at the time I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for it, so I just wrote “K tries to kill A and fails. She and G are captured” and moved on. Faced with the idea-less void of the rest of the book, however, even that much guidance made writing that part an easier choice to ease my way back into the book.

I was plodding through it, busily getting this secondary character out of the way for the big fight, so he’d be free to come back and rescue my heroine from captivity later, when it occurred to me that it would be much better if the heroine rescued herself and gee, wouldn’t it be fun to actually kill this guy instead. Immediately that scene became much more attractive to write, plus the implications for the rest of the plot started bouncing around, sparking new ideas left, right and centre. I may even become a mass-murderer, I enjoyed it so much.

But you know what the best thing about my new writing goal is? It’s made me remember that writing is fun. Take that, guilt complex!

"Should" is a dirty word

Yesterday was my blog’s first birthday. Way to go, little fella! Can’t believe you made it!

When I told the ducklings it was my blog’s birthday, Baby Duck asked, “What’s a blob’s birthday, Mama?” He couldn’t understand why his sisters cracked up. That child is just made of cute.

I hesitated for a long time before starting this blog. I was afraid that I’d lose interest and it would go the way of so many – initial posts full of enthusiasm, gradually petering out into silence. But I cleverly got around that problem by being a slack poster from the beginning. Such forethought!

I wondered if I could think of enough things to write about. Fortunately I have the ducklings to help there – they provide plenty of inspiration with their funny ways.

I used to be a mad keen scrapbooker. For a few years there our lives were obsessively documented. The ducklings couldn’t sneeze without me shoving a camera in their face to capture the moment forever. These days I’ve gone back to quilting and writing, but at least if scrapbooking gains the ascendancy again I’ll have plenty of readymade journalling from the ducklings’ bloggy exploits.

Not that those exploits have been comprehensively covered by any means. I remember one of my goals at the beginning of the year was to blog twice a week, and that certainly hasn’t happened. No one could accuse me of being a speed demon.

I’d like to blog more. I feel I should blog more, though it’s just something I do for fun. Why do I feel like that? Life seems full of worthwhile things that it should be easy to fit in, like brush your teeth for three minutes, exercise at least 20 minutes every day, wipe down the shower and sink after your morning shower so it’s not such a big job later. Yet if you added up all these “just a few minutes” activities you’d need about 40 hours in every day. And so we all seem to run around, perpetually behind where we think we should be up to, doomed to feeling like slackers forever.

I set some writing goals in January. Assessing my progress so far, I can see it’s a bit of a mixed bag. I haven’t gone back to the revision of Man Bites Dog, and I certainly haven’t completed the first draft of Dragonheart. I have written more short stories and even submitted two. Yes, a whole two. Please try to contain your excitement.

I was also hoping to establish a daily writing routine. It wasn’t going too badly till personal things reared up and threw my concentration into disarray. Still struggling with that one, but hoping for improvement soon.

Note that I cleverly didn’t include “participate in Nano 2009” as a goal. Much as I love Nano, I’m starting to think another Nano this year might be a bad idea. I can see a classic “non-finishing” pattern emerging: Nano 2007, start first draft of Man Bites Dog, but don’t have time to revise and complete before – Nano 2008, start first draft of Dragonheart, but don’t have time to revise and complete before – Nano 2009, start first draft etc, etc. You get the picture.

I blame my three-second attention span. My life is filled to bursting with unfinished projects, and it drives me nuts. Three seconds? Who am I kidding? That’s waaaay too generous.

One of my non-writing goals was to declutter the house, but I think first I need to declutter myself. All this incompleteness is weighing me down. I wish I could get a working attention span. Would anyone care to swap? Mine’s quite cute, so tiny and decorative. I need a big honking industrial-strength model to get through all the stuff I’ve left hanging over the years.

In recent years I’ve even had trouble finishing reading books, let alone writing them. There’s been a pile of half-read books on my coffee table for over a year, often as many as a dozen books high, all with bookmarks shoved into them. One had been there so long that when I removed the bookmark I discovered it had changed colour. The part inside the book was still dark green, but the part sticking out had been bleached by the sun for so long the shade was half its former strength.

For months I’d looked at that stack of books, thought, Nah, don’t feel like reading any of those, and gone and started another one. Sometimes I finished them. Often they just joined the growing pile. When the guilt got too much, or the pile threatened to topple over, I might finish one, but it never made much difference. The pile had almost achieved sentience, it had been there so long.

I knew I didn’t want to read them, but I couldn’t bring myself to give up and put them away. They were unfinished projects, clogging my mental to-do list, depressing me every time I saw them. Just one more thing I knew I should do.

I know a mother’s work is never done. Jobs waiting to be done everywhere you look is pretty normal in most people’s lives, I guess. But how silly is it to let your leisure activities become a burden of guilt, to see the books you read, supposedly for enjoyment, as a chore hanging over your head?

So I finally took my attention span aside and gave it a good talking to, woman to woman.

“Admit it,” I said, “you are never going to finish reading those books.”

“I might,” it whined, giving me those big puppy-dog eyes. “At one stage I really wanted to read them, and you never know when that feeling might come back. Could be any millenium now.”

“Don’t give me that crap. Look at this one – the bookmark has changed colour, it’s been there so long! And what about this one? You can’t even remember what the book is about any more. You’d have to go back and start at the beginning anyway!”

“But I really enjoyed the first one in that trilogy. I’m sure I’ll get into again if I just … Hey, look over there!”

“What? Over where?”

“There! Look – new! Shiny!”

And that was about it for my attention span. But I refused to admit defeat. Time to bite the bullet, turn over a new leaf, take the first step on the long road to Organised Me. Or at least Slightly Less Maddening Me. Time to wean myself away from should.

So I did it. I took all the bookmarks out of those books. Oh, the pain! Then I lumped those suckers downstairs and banished them to the bookshelves, never to be guilted over again. And it was ridiculous, what a feeling of release such a tiny act gave me.

So, we’re trying, me and the teeny tiny attention span. Trying to let go of so many shoulds, to make more time for the ones that really matter. Trying to make easier goals. My new writing goal is to write only 500 words a day on school days, instead of 1,000. Yeah, I should be able to write 1,000 words in a day, but so often I don’t and then I feel all hopeless and disappointed with myself. So time to be kinder and more understanding of the teeny tiny attention span.

I doubt we will ever metamorphose into a frequent blogger, the attention span and I, but then, I’ve decided that “should” is a dirty word. And I never thought I’d be wishing you happy birthday, dear blog, so you never know.

Many happy returns.

When too much choice is Not a Good Thing

In the beginning, there was Breakfast. And it was good and wholesome, and the children thrived. And the mother smiled, and there was peace in the household.

And then one day, alas! TV, the Great Tempter, whispered unto the children, “The mother seeks to keep you in ignorance, that you may not know the joys of multicoloured breakfast cereals. For behold, they come in many flavours, all of them sugar-laden, and yea, though they may be bereft of all nutrition, yet are they pleasing to the palate.”

And the children looked, and saw that all that the TV spake was true, even unto the chocolate-flavoured cereals, and there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

So the mother, moved by the piteous cries of her children, relented and said that they might have the cereals of many colours on weekends only. But still the children wailed, so the mother allowed the cereals of tooth decay and damnation for the whole school holildays as well, yet still the children were not comforted.

So the mother went in search of the Holy Grail – the cereal that would delight her children with its taste while still pleasing in its nutritional value. Alas! though the mother trod the grocery aisles till her feet bled, the Holy Grail eluded her, and though she offered many a compromise to her children, still nothing pleased them as the Cereals of Decay and Damnation had.

And so it came to pass that the pantry filled up with half-eaten boxes of cereal, even unto the width of the top shelf, and also with many tins of different types of spaghetti and beans. And the freezer did groan under the weight of different styles of bread, to tempt the children’s appetites.

And Breakfast, once so wholesome and pleasing, became a time of great trial for the mother and the father. Though the breakfast offerings were as numerous as the stars or the grains of sand on the shore, still the children looked on them and were displeased.

And they took a damn long time making up their minds, too.

Scene: Demon Duck’s bedroom. Demon Duck is sloooowly dressing for school.

Normal Sane Mother: What would you like for breakfast?
Demon Duck: Mutter mutter.
Normal Sane Mother: Pardon?
Demon Duck (sullen): Peanut butter on microwaved bread.
Normal Sane Mother: What’s that face for?
Demon Duck (emoting): Cause I’ve had it every day for a week!

[Evidence is mounting that the wrong child is nicknamed Drama Duck.]

Normal Sane Mother: Then have something else. Have spaghetti, or weetbix.
Demon Duck (tragic): All right. I’ll have mutter mutter.

[In the blink of an eye, Normal Sane Mother transforms into Screaming Banshee Woman. The look of surprise on Demon Duck’s face would be funny if Screaming Banshee Woman wasn’t too busy bursting blood vessels to appreciate humour.]

Screaming Banshee Woman (at top of lungs): Just … [last remnants of sanity engage in desperate scramble to prevent Bad Words coming out] TELL ME what you want for breakfast so I can HEAR YOU without all this MUMBLING!!!!

[Screaming Banshee Woman exits, in direction of kitchen, though not before fighting down a powerful urge to punch the wall.]

Enter Baby Duck.

Seething Mother: What would you like for breakfast?
Baby Duck: Toast with peanut butter.
Seething Mother (speaking from bitter experience): Do you mean toast or microwaved bread?
Baby Duck (for at least the 183rd time): Confused expression
Seething Mother: It’s not that difficult. Microwaved bread is soft. We do it in the microwave and it’s bread. Toast goes in the toaster and it’s hard and brown and it’s TOAST. WHICH ONE do you want?

Then the mother saw the light, and in a mighty voice spoke unto the children: “From this day forth, let all partake of the Weetbix for breakfast, that all may know its nutritional blessing, and that peace may once again descend on our household.”

And there was much weeping and lamenting for the lost pleasures of Spending Hours Each Morning Choosing What to Have for Breakfast. But the mother looked on the children’s sorrow and was unmoved.

See? Lots of choice isn’t always a good thing.

Tomorrow breakfast will be nutritious and calm. Calm as in everyone will be too busy directing burning looks of bitter resentment at their Loathsome Mother to speak. She will have to wear her special Anti-Venomous-Looks Armour.

And yes, I am feeling a little stressed lately. Why do you ask?

The Adventures of Sparklebum

I realise it’s childish of me, but just typing that title makes me smile. Imagine how much fun I’m going to have writing the story!

Drama Duck was wearing a pair of glittery jeans the other day and I started calling her Sparklebum. This led to a very silly conversation where we decided that Sparklebum would make a great name for a fairy. Poor Sparklebum! The other fairies twinkled all over, but alas! her twinkles were confined to just one spot …

We agreed that we’d both write a story featuring the adventures of Sparklebum. There’s nothing like a hint of competition to get the creative juices flowing! Baby Duck was keen to help too, though his contributions were mainly along the lines of “and then Sparklebum did a really big sparkly smell and saved all the other fairies”. Small boys and toilet humour = a match made in heaven.

I was thinking of having Sparklebum being the only fairy able to save fairyland because of her peculiarities. Your typical “and then all the other fairies learned to accept Sparklebum just as she was” thing. But then I thought … naaah. Forget parental propaganda. Let’s have some fun. Let’s make her really naughty.

So I don’t know where Sparklebum is going to end up. I had the first line of The Hobbit running through my head yesterday, so this is where she starts at the moment:

“In a hole in a tree there lived a fairy. It was a very large hole for such a small creature; it could easily have fit a whole family of owls or possums, but Sparklebum lived there alone. The fairy council had thrown her out of Daffodillia when she was only little, which seems cruel, but it was either that or nobody in the fairy city would ever have got a wink of sleep again, due to
Sparklebum’s rather unfortunate affliction.”

Okay, Drama Duck, over to you.

For fear that my ten-year-old may outdo me, more helpful suggestions for Sparklebum’s adventures than Baby Duck’s will be warmly welcomed in the comments …

Methuselah, eat your heart out

I remember when I was a kid, how old everyone over the age of, say, 14, was. Twenty-year-olds were indistinguishable from 60-year-olds. They all just belonged to the category “ancient”. I’d be reading the newspaper and find some story about a 25-year-old killed in a car crash and think, “Oh well, at least it wasn’t anybody young. At least she’d lived.”

Baby Duck made a birthday card for his beloved teacher last term. She can’t be any more than late twenties, if that. He drew a careful picture of her blowing out her candles on the front of the card. The candles were those ones you get in the shape of numbers.

“How old do you think Mrs F is?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, “so I just picked a really big number.”

The numbers said “81”.

The other day he was eating a bowl of grapes and I took one. Very magnanimously, he offered to share the bowl. Mindful of all that positive parenting advice that says you should praise behaviour you would like to encourage, I told him how kind he was to share.

“I want to be really nice to you while I still can,” he confided.

“Do you mean before you grow up and move out?” I asked.

“Mmm. And before you die.”

Guess I’d better book my spot in the retirement village soon. Fortunately for my battered ego, Demon Duck was given an email account at school last week. She spent the weekend emailing sweet messages to everyone she could think of.

One of the ones I received said:

“i love you mummy. it's like you are a star and i am a twinkle. when we get together we shimmer and shine. that's why i love you so much.”

Much better to be a star than hovering on the brink of death! I feel better already.

Drama Duck and the $327 hair-washing hose

You’ve seen them before. You may even have one in your home – those short rubber hoses with a thing like a shower head on one end and something on the other end to attach to your tap’s spout. You use them for washing kids’ (or pets’) hair in the tub.

I bet yours didn’t cost $327, though.

I saw one in the supermarket recently and thought how handy it would be for washing the kids’ hair in the bath. Better than the little red toy bucket we normally use to scoop already-soapy water over their soapy heads for rinsing. This could provide non-soapy, temperature-controlled water. A luxury experience!

Admittedly, I did hesitate for a moment. Not at the price – it was only about $7. But my friend who cuts our hair has one, and when she comes to our house to do hair, the only tap hers fits is the one in the laundry sink. But the packaging on this one said “fits most taps!” in big, confident letters, so I trustingly put it in my trolley.

“Look what I’ve got!” Full of enthusiasm, I display new fit-most-taps hose to ducklings.

“Cool!” says Drama Duck. “Can I see if it fits?”

“Sure,” I say. What could go wrong?

Drama Duck disappears to bathroom, where she attempts to ram the very small fit-most-taps fitting on to the very large distinctly-not-fitting tap. Undeterred, she twists evil, lying fitting back and forth, trying to somehow screw it on to persistently oversized spout of bath tap.

Moments later Drama Duck reappears with that “uh-oh” look on her face that every parent knows.

“I’m really sorry, Mummy,” she says, holding out the spout, which has sheared off the wall in a distressingly non-fixable way.

She’s clearly expecting to be roused on, but I’m so impressed at this bizarre feat of strength all I can do is laugh.

Of course, the plumber’s bill to instal a new tap was less funny. We are now the proud owners of the most expensive metre of rubber tubing in history.

How do I know what I know?

Pandababy reviewed The Stars Blue Yonder by Sandra McDonald recently. It’s a fantasy set in Australia. I’ve read a few fantasies set in Australia, and this one sounds good, but normally I avoid them. To me, Australia is too ordinary to be interesting. Pandababy, on the other hand, is fascinated by Australia and Australians. What is ordinary to me is exotic to her and vice versa.

This led me to think some more about the old “write what you know” maxim. I’m a “virtual” traveller. I love to read stories that immerse me in some foreign culture or historic time. Bring on the geishas, the slave plantations of the deep South, bring on the Mongol hordes or the denizens of Edinburgh, or Toronto, or New Delhi – anywhere, really, except here. When I read I want to be transported to another place, to experience another way of life. I guess that’s why I like fantasy so much. It doesn’t get much further from reality than dragons and magic and impossible quests.

I can see, of course, that to someone who doesn’t live here, Australia is just as exotic and enchanting as these other places are to me. I can see that if I wrote “Australian” stories they could be fascinating to someone else, though they might seem “ordinary” to me. The problem would be determining what exactly gave them that Australian flavour.

Assume that I’m not talking about a story full of kangaroos and Uluru and the Sydney Opera House, the very obviously “Australian” things. I just mean a regular kind of story, with an Australian feel that makes it different to an American/Canadian/Indian-feeling story. If I write what I know, how do I know what’s “Australian” and what’s something everybody knows? To me, what I know is just “life”. Not having lived anywhere else, I don’t know which parts of that life are particularly Australian, and which are universal.

Confused yet? Let me give you an example. I’ve just discovered Joshilyn Jackson’s hugely entertaining blog, Faster than Kudzu. I’ve been visiting her blog every day for the last few weeks, laughing myself silly at her sense of humour, but every day I stared at that blog title and went “what the??” .

Kudzu. Maybe some kind of martial art? Or some fiendishly difficult mental game like sudoku? Finally it got too much for me and I googled it. Apparently it’s some kind of super-plant that infests all the southern states of America. In peak growing season it can grow a foot a day. My eyes were nearly falling out of my head reading about it. You’re kidding! People have to shut their windows at night to keep this stuff out? And it’s called “mile-a-minute” plant??? Wow! That’s so amazing!

So here I am, oohing and aahing over a noxious weed that probably every five-year-old in America knows about. The “faster than kudzu” reference now becomes clear – a reference that to Jackson needed no explanation, because it’s part of her “ordinary” landscape, but to me was impossibly foreign.

Once the Carnivore and I were taking some visiting Americans around town. He suggested they might enjoy a wander through the Botanical Gardens and a stickybeak at the harbour.

One of them looked alarmed at this. “Er … my wife doesn’t drink.”

He thought “stickybeak” meant something like “to wet your beak” and the Carnivore was suggesting we go for a drink. To "have a stickybeak at" means to look at something. Till that moment I hadn’t realised it wasn’t a universal expression.

So when I’m writing, how do I write what’s uniquely Australian? How do I know what my kudzu is?

Not that I’m getting my knickers in a twist over it (is that an Australian expression or not?). It’s just something I’ve been thinking about. To write what I know, first I have to know what I know that’s different from what everyone else knows. It sounds like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan. “A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox …”

Confessions of a worrywart

My mother has a black belt in worrying. Nothing is too large or too small for her to fret over, and if she has nothing to worry about, well, she just dreams something up.

It’s possible I may have inherited a tiny little smidge of this worry gene. I’m nowhere near her level of expertise, and I do try to keep it under control, but it’s not easy. “Hello, my name is Marina and I’m a worrywart.”

It also seems to be infectious. The Carnivore will occasionally give me an accusing glance and say, “I never used to worry about things like [insert trivial thing here] before I met you.”

It’s certainly been worse since I had children. I worry about every little facet of their lives. I worry that they’ll turn out like me. I worry that they won’t.

It seems as if the girls may be turning into sportswomen. Nothing could be more astonishing to me. If they grew wings or sprouted an extra head I wouldn’t be more surprised. There are rocks that are more interested in sports than me. And yet here they are, both keen and competent netballers. And today they had their first tennis lessons and loved it.

I would think that there must have been some mix-up at the hospital and I accidentally brought the wrong babies home, except …

Yeah, I worried about that too. And let me tell you, there is no greater worrier than a crazy, hormone-filled pregnant worrier.

When Drama Duck’s due date was approaching, I sprang a special surprise on my obstetrician.

“When the baby is born, I want to write on it.”

My obstetrician was a lovely man. He didn’t laugh or offer to prescribe drugs for the crazy pregnant lady.

“I seeee. Would you mind telling me why?”

“I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to create this baby, and I don’t want to accidentally bring the wrong one home from hospital.”

“You are aware that they put ID tags on the baby’s wrists and ankles in the hospital?”

“Yes, but I’ve heard they can slip off and I want to be sure that I get my baby.”

“You know that every time the nurse brings your baby to you, she will check the ID tags and ask you to check them too? They’re very careful about it.”

Don’t care don’t care don’t care I want my baby. I had nightmare visions of getting the wrong one and then five or ten years later being told I had to give back the child I had raised and loved as my own.

When he saw that I was set on it he asked what I was going to write with. I hadn’t expected that question.

“Um – a texta?”

“I’ll give you a surgical marker. It won’t wash off for days.”

See? I told you he was a nice man. And he did, too. I have the photo to prove it.

Then the only question was what we should write. The Carnivore and I discussed options such as “Ours” or “Property of …”. In the end we decided on the nickname we had given her through the pregnancy, when we didn’t know who she was. Actually mainly he had given her.

Thus my flawlessly beautiful baby daughter came to have the word “SLUG” printed on her back in her daddy’s messy handwriting.

Happy Star Wars Day!

May the 4th be with you.

I have no reason for posting today other than a wish to make you all groan at the terrible lameness of that pun. I promise a real post soon, but how could I resist? It’s a once-a-year opportunity.

Tomorrow serious I will be, my young jedis.

Curse you, Dav Pilkey!

The ducklings have discovered Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants books. Demon Duck and Baby Duck are particularly smitten. Not only do we have Captain Underpants stories at bedtime every night, but they have both written Captain Underpants stories themselves, which they read to each other. Demon Duck also does comics. Nor can we enter a bookshop without purchasing another volume in the saga. We also have Captain Underpants songs, computer games and much discussion of wedgies.

In short, our house has been taken over. Not even Drama Duck is immune. I have a whiteboard in the kitchen where I write the weekly menu. The other day I discovered my menu had been vandalised. Drama Duck explained that this was something they did in the Captain Underpants books – the boy heroes change the letters around on the school noticeboard to make the notices say something funny.

So last Tuesday, instead of beef skewers for dinner, we had bee sewers. Captain Underpants would be proud.

Alien invasion

I’ve just come back from a week in sunny Queensland, enjoying the theme parks on the Gold Coast. The ducklings had a marvellous time. Demon Duck is now known as Daredevil Duck, from her complete lack of fear on rides that scared even her daddy. I, on the other hand, am now known as the family chicken.

Surfers Paradise is a funny place. I’ve never seen so many hotels and holiday apartments in one place. And yes, I’ve been to Waikiki. Every single local resident must work in the tourism industry. I can’t imagine how they all make a living in winter.

And what is it with Irish pubs? They’re on every street corner, often cheek by jowl with a tattoo parlour. I tell you, Surfers is the tattoo capital of the world. Every second person you pass on the street has a tattoo. And every other person is a Japanese tourist -- although many of them have tattoos too.

I saw everything from full-back tattoos to barcodes on the neck; from delicate swirls on girls’ shoulder blades to hideous things protruding from low-slung jeans that looked like the top of a particularly ugly grey lacy g-string (or thong, for the Americans out there). There were full sleeves, the classic barbed-wire thingy around the upper arm, coloured flowers, writing – even one guy with a girl’s name tattooed over his heart. I hope it was the name of the girl he was with.

Tattoos were particularly noticeable at Wet ‘n’ Wild, a theme park full of waterslides, since everyone was wandering around in their swimmers. It led me to realise that they weren’t really tattoos at all, but some kind of aquatic aliens. Lurking in the dark tunnels of the waterslides, they waited for their next host to swoosh by, allowing them to spread through the park and, ultimately, the world.

I figure they must have made planetfall somewhere near Japan, hence the large numbers of Japanese tourists already infected with the alien parasites. It makes sense that they’d pick an island nation like Japan, so they were never far from water. And Japanese tourists are everywhere – what easier way to spread than to hitch a ride with such seemingly innocent characters?

I haven’t figured out their motive yet, though. World dominion is so old hat. And why start in a place like Queensland, if that’s your goal? Queenslanders all seem to drive about 10 km under the speed limit, a habit which the Carnivore found very annoying. I suggested to him that the aliens may have come to teach the Queenslanders to drive faster, but he didn’t seem convinced.

At least the ducklings enjoyed helping me with the alien spotting. I’m glad to report that we all made it back unscathed, though there was one touch-and-go moment as I passed a tattoo parlour when the alien mindwaves almost lured me in.

Be on guard, earthlings. You never know where they’ll strike next.

Where writers really get their ideas

Writers get asked a lot “where do you get your ideas from?” Most answer with some variation on “ideas are everywhere – it’s not getting them that’s hard, it’s the execution that’s the tough bit”. Unless, like me, you blame everything on evil brain sloths.

But now I can reveal to you, in a world first, that there really is a place writers go to get ideas. They don’t want you to know, in case you stumble on the next best-selling premise before they do, but it’s there, a treasure trove just waiting to be tapped. Or dug up, or whatever you do with treasure troves. And isn’t “trove” a funny word? You never hear it on its own. It’s always part of a treasure trove. Why is that?

But I digress. Back to the world first. Drum roll, please.

Ideas are free for the taking right here on the Glorious Internet. There are sites like Seventh Sanctum that do nothing but generate ideas for stories, themes, characters – whatever your writerly heart may desire. In mere moments there I had the seed of several breathtaking new novels. Check these out:

The story of Dracula as an occult rags-to-riches story. Everyone’s looking for a new take on vampires. Stephanie Meyer, eat your heart out. Not just any old angsty emo teen vampires, but The vampire, re-imagined as an angsty emo teen, just trying to make his way in a cruel world. Suffering the slings and arrows and stakes of outrageous fortune as he claws his way up from humble beginnings to the top of the Transylvanian heap.

A fusion of the story of Noah and the story of Hansel and Gretel. I’ll be on to this one just as soon as I can figure out a way to get around the likely effect of 40 days and 40 nights of rain on that trail of breadcrumbs.

A fusion of the story of Cain and Abel and the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. Kind of a Day of the Triffids thing happening here, where the Beanstalk tries to kill Jack because he’s always been the favourite.

A fusion of the legend of Samson and the tale of Lady Godiva. Great potential for conflict in this one. “What do you mean, cut off my hair? How am I going to stop those peeping Toms from seeing all my jiggly bits with no hair??”

The tale of Lady Godiva being about a group of dolphins. Okay, so Seventh Sanctum’s got a thing for Lady Godiva. But see, this one proves it’s all true. Clearly, David Brin gets his ideas here. Only instead of Lady Godiva his said something like “Star Trek with dolphins instead of people”.¹

So there you have it. No, don’t thank me. I’m happy to provide a public service to all struggling writers. Besides, it wasn’t my idea – I snitched it from Jaye Patrick.

Just goes to show that there really are no new ideas in the world.

1. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you need to get hold of a copy of his Startide Rising. Great novel!

Books for ducklings

If you look to the right, you’ll see a few books for younger readers on my list of books read this year. There are two reasons for this:

1) As an involved parent, I like to keep up with what my kids are reading.

2) I find books that other people are reading insanely attractive. I’ve read a whole bunch of thrillers and sf space operas over the years that I would never have picked up except the Carnivore was reading them, and I couldn’t resist a little peek. It drives him nuts, which is an added bonus.

I’ve got Demon Duck started on Terry Pratchett, which she’s enjoying. She’s only eight, but she has quite an adult sense of humour. Either that or mine is pretty juvenile, because we laugh at the same things.

Drama Duck is more of a problem. She’s ten and reads as well as someone 14 or 15 – but she doesn’t like to read the kind of thing that’s aimed at 14 and 15-year-olds. She doesn’t like dark or scary or sad, which pretty much rules out most of YA, as far as I can tell.

She loves Emily Rodda’s Deltora Quest books, though she’s bright enough to pick holes in the plots. But she enjoys the adventure and puzzle-solving in them. She also loved The Hobbit. I gave her the first Harry Potter, which she liked, but the movie of it frightened her and she’s shown no desire to read any more of them.

I’d like to introduce her to some good writing, rather than the pulpy girls/babysitting/boyfriends type stuff she often reads, but I don’t know what. At her age I was reading The Lord of the Rings and other adult fantasies. I don’t remember much that came before that except Enid Blyton (which she also enjoys). And though I still read the occasional YA, I don’t read “middle grade” books, so I don’t know what to recommend. I bought her a Garth Nix on the weekend, which looks promising – and there’s certainly a good backlist there if she likes it!

Does anyone have any suggestions of something to suit a fluent but sensitive young reader who enjoys adventure?

Don't judge a book by its ... author's surname

I did something very brave the other day. Even foolhardy, you might say. I wanted to google an author’s name. I’d just read a book of hers and wanted to see what else she’d written.

The problem was her name. Nina Bangs.

Exactly. Now that you have finished laughing, you can see why I felt some trepidation.

“Self, this is going to end badly,” I thought. “Your pure white computer will be sullied by the suggestive, nay – blatant – filth that will appear. Hot and torrid things will rear their ugly heads on screen and you will end up being spammed by a million people offering you enlargements for organs you do not possess.”

I almost didn’t do it. But in the end I took my courage in both hands, and was vastly relieved to find that the whole first screen of results were all about the author. Nothing turgid, throbbing or otherwise discombobulating in sight. (But I wasn’t game enough to look beyond the first page of results. There is a limit to my bravery.)

Turns out that Ms Bangs has quite a backlist. The book was called Eternal Pleasure, and the Carnivore bought it as a joke, simply because of her outrageous name. And then it turned out the joke was on us, because he read it and said “this is great, you’ve got to read it!”. So I did.

My first paranormal romance. It felt more like a guilty pleasure than an eternal one, as if I shouldn’t be reading such a book. As if there are book police who disapprove of books by authors with suggestive names. But I did enjoy it, despite yelling “you have GOT to be kidding!” when I first realised the nature of the hook. It was a real page turner, and certainly different to anything I’ve read before.

We bought another of hers today. What’s in a name, indeed? That one certainly did its job. I just have to make sure not to read the book in public places. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was in the market for an … ahem … organ enlargement.

Sometimes the hardest part is keeping a straight face

Baby Duck is enjoying school very much, thank goodness. He adores his teacher, has made some nice little friends and loves learning to read, since he’s a book lover from way back. Most days when I ask him how school was he says “lovely”.

But a couple of weeks ago I picked him up after a rainy, miserable day and asked him how his day was.

A look of disgust came over his face. “I had to go to the canteen at lunch time to pick up the lunch basket.”

I was a bit surprised that this wasn’t a high point of his day. Usually the kids love doing little jobs like that. It makes them feel important.

“Is that your job this week?” I asked.

He nodded. “Me and my friend went, and it was raining. We got wet.”

“Oh well,” I said, “it wasn’t raining that hard at lunch time.”

“But that’s not the worst part! We had to go all the way to the canteen in the rain” – he threw his arms wide, an outraged expression on his little face – “and there was only one bloody lunch!”

It’s very difficult to chastise a small person for inappropriate vocabulary when you’re trying hard not to crack up. But he’s never used that word before and it caught me by surprise. He sounded so absurdly world-weary, and the look on his face was priceless. I suspect my protests were unconvincing.

Note to self: Must try harder at this parenting thing.

Blade needs sharpening

You know what bugs me? When writers set up the “rules” of their world and then proceed to break them without consequence. Even if it’s only a teeny bending rather than a break, it spoils the story for me. It makes me stop suspending disbelief and start actively hunting for plot flaws.

I found one such instance in my own Dragonheart, when I was rereading it last month to remind myself of the story so far. After carefully setting up that human blood mages like my heroine would only use their magic against the fey, never other humans, I proceeded to write a scene in which she slaughtered no less than five people with magic because they were ambushing her. That one’s definitely going to need a rewrite!

Can’t believe I did it – but still, I picked it up before the first draft is even finished. How do such things get into finished, supposedly polished, pieces?

Take Blade, for instance, an action/horror movie. Tortured vigilante hero hunts down vampires. Not my usual choice in a movie, but it was entertaining enough for mindless Friday night viewing. Until, that is, they started breaking their own rules.

Why bother saying sunlight kills vampires if you’re going to have your vampire characters walking around in broad daylight? You can’t have one vampire dissolved by sunlight and another walking and talking in the daytime because he’s wearing sunblock.

Sunblock. I kid you not. The Carnivore and I were howling with laughter. What would that have to be? SPF 30,000? And the vampire put it on his eyes, right? And the inside of his mouth?

Oh, and for most of the movie vampires are so hard to kill our hero has to go to amazing lengths, yet near the end our plucky heroine sprays one with garlic juice and its head explodes. Uh huh.

Nor is it just fantasy that’s guilty. I watched a BBC production called Lost in Austen recently, about a modern girl who magically changes places with Elizabeth Bennet and ends up in the events of Pride and Prejudice. Well, I guess that’s fantasy too, but my objections had to do with the societal rules that got twisted to suit the plot, not the fantasy element. As if a gentleman like Mr Bingley, having asked Jane Bennet to dance, would then refuse to stand up with her because Darcy warned him she was after his money. To do so would have been unpardonably rude. He might have danced with her and behaved rather frostily, but I can’t believe he would have snubbed her outright. The rules of polite behaviour just wouldn’t allow it.

Not to mention the many things the modern heroine did and said that should have had her cast out of polite society. Or the fact that everyone accepted her sudden appearance and Lizzy’s disappearance. It’s a society where women are closely guarded, yet no one blinks an eye when Lizzy disappears without trace or warning.

Not that I didn’t enjoy it. I did, it was a lot of fun, and not to be taken seriously, I guess. But still, why not follow the “rules” of the society? Just because it makes a more dramatic scene for Bingley to refuse to dance with Jane? But if the viewers are going to sit there and say “but hang on a minute, that doesn’t make sense” is it worth going for drama over logic?

Maybe I’m just getting too picky in my old age. I hardly ever watch TV, but lately it seems that I’m picking holes in everything I watch. Does it really matter if entertainment isn’t internally consistent? Maybe not. But I can’t help feeling that if the writers made the extra effort to obey their own rules, they might come up with ideas that were even better.

Or at least that didn’t leave their audience in stitches when they weren’t intending to be funny.

What Marina needs

I found an idea on Jacqui Robbins’ blog that appeals to my sense of the ridiculous: Type your first name and the word “needs” into Google and see what Google thinks you need.

Marina needs:

1. a better slipway
-- sounds vaguely obscene …
2. a facelift
-- it’s not that bad … at the right angle … in a dim light
3. an iDockUSA
-- this is what comes of having a name that means “boat parking lot”. Thanks, Mum.
4. a home of her own
-- or at least a “space” of her own not invaded by kids
5. her rest
-- AMEN!!
6. to replace fuel system
-- that would be eating more chocolate, I assume
7. a clean-up
-- I don’t know; I think I scrub up all right
8. gas
-- the less said about this the better
9. a drink
-- a cup of tea would be nice, thanks
10. a large hole excavated
-- another suggestive one!

I’m jealous; Jacqui needed “werewolf points” so she could become a “Fire Werewolf”. I didn’t get anything that exotic.

What Marina really needs, of course, is to stop stuffing around on the internet and do some writing. But hey, it was fun.

So what do you need?

Fashion for the elderly

You know, it’s possible there are worse things for your ego than the well-meant comments of your offspring, but I have yet to discover them.

“You look good, Mum,” the ducklings said when I appeared in a new outfit the other day.

“Almost like a teenager,” says Demon Duck, who is a generous, if misguided, soul.

“Except for your hair,” says Drama Duck, surveying me with the critical eye of a ten-year-old fashion guru.

“Why? Can you see the grey?”

“No, it’s just a bit short. Teenagers have long hair, and you don’t, so you look old.”

My expression must have clued Demon Duck in to the fact that her sister isn’t exactly winning any prizes for flattery here.

“But the dress is beautiful,” she says, clearly eager to make up for her sister’s shortcomings. “It’s not fair, you know. I wish they made dresses like that for kids, but they don’t. They’re only for elderly people.”

The little engine that could

You may notice I’ve put the “cover” of Dragonheart and an up-to-date wordcount widget in the sidebar. Not because I think anyone will be interested in how many words I’ve written, but I because I find the “public accountability” aspect a useful weapon in the war against procrastination. And the cover? Hey, I made it for Nanowrimo and I just like looking at it! Makes me feel all “authorly”.

Having spent the last two weeks celebrating my new freedom to do anything I like by in fact doing very little, I decided that the time had come for butt-in-chair. So on the weekend I read through the manuscript so far of Dragonheart, which I haven’t looked at since November, to get myself back up to speed. I have such a bad memory I’d forgotten where I was up to. Fortunately I still liked it. It was almost like reading a real book. I got engrossed in the story and was quite disappointed when it ended. “But what happens next?”

I wish I knew! I have the next little bit mapped out, but the rest of the book is distressingly vague. My notes to myself are full of “But why?”s and “such-and-such needs to happen – HOW?”. And in the big finale: “some huge complication needed”.

Muse, if you’re paying attention – a little more detail would be helpful. Appreciated, even. My control-freak self hates the not-knowing. Control freak self lies in bed at night going “but why? Why does that character do that?” and getting really frustrated when the answer doesn’t immediately appear. It’s that big gap between being a reader and being a writer. When you read, the story unfolds with such a smooth inevitability you can’t help but imagine it must have fallen fully formed into the writer’s head. If the writer’s done their job, it seems there’s no other way the story could have played out, so once the writer thought of the very first sentence, all the rest of it must have just flowed naturally from there. It's so easy! Anyone could do it.

If only! I try to console myself by looking back through my notebook and realising how much was unclear when I started, which has since fallen into place. Surely the rest of it will too – eventually. But I’m an instant gratification girl and waiting is just hard.

I know if I keep trudging on it will come. So my little wordcount widget sits there like the beacon on top of that terrible hill that leads to THE END, urging me on.

I think I can. I think I can.

Beware crispation and distance creepage

I love the instruction manual for my laminator. I read it every time I use the laminator, because the expressions in it always make me smile. “In order to avoid crispation, please don’t insert the open side of the pouch into the laminator first”. “Crispation” is such an evocative word, it should be a real one. “Please re-laminate if the lamination is not very well for the first time”. After “accomplishment of lamination”, “book, file or other heavy things can make it more flat and good-looking”.

“As to the smutch on the covers of machine, please wipe them off by wet cloth.” “To avoid the danger of distance creepage, please don’t place the machine in wet conditions”. That last one’s got me. I wonder what they mean by “distance creepage”? I picture some poor guy sitting there with his Chinese-English dictionary scratching his head as he searches for the right word.

I take my hat off to him. His English is a hell of a lot better than my Chinese. I still find it amusing, though.

Picking the right word is often difficult, even in your native language. Roget would have been out of a job otherwise. I bet I’d be a rich woman if I had a dollar for every time a writer agonised over a word choice. Creep or sneak? Blue or azure?

So many words mean almost the same thing – but not quite. If you call a talkative character garrulous you project a very different image than if you say they’re chatty. And is she a female or a girl, broad, sheila, gal, lady, chick or woman?

The nuances of word choice are a great tool for a writer. I’m still learning to adapt my word choices to my point of view character. Clearly a Harvard professor has a different vocabulary to a five-year-old, or an old lady or a migrant fruit-picker. In direct speech I’ve always tried to show such differences. But until a year ago or so my brain hadn’t quite cottoned on to the fact that the rest of the narration should also show these differences if I was really deeply in the character’s point of view. My general narration tended to sound like me.

You’d think with all the books I’ve read that this would have been a no-brainer, but no. Finally someone hit me with the clue stick, and it’s improved my writing, though it’s still something I have to work at. Particularly when the differences between characters are not so obvious as Harvard professor versus five-year-old. It’s a bit harder to show the differences between three career women of similar age, say, or a group of kids who go to the same school. Or, in my case, a group of blood mages. I keep trying, though, because those books where all the characters sound exactly the same annoy me, and I don’t want to write one myself!

Of course it’s easier if one or more characters has a distinctive way of speaking. Maybe I need a character who sounds like my laminator manual.

“Caution, when dragon is in nearness – avoid crispation!”

Settings: the devil is in the details

So, you’re writing a novel or a script or whatever and you’d like to set your story somewhere exotic. Trouble is, you don’t know about anything beyond your own home town. What do you do?

1) You could try research. Libraries, internet, even TV documentaries or travel guides. Or you could talk to someone who’s been there, check out a few of their holiday snaps maybe.

2) You could write fantasy. You can make up whatever you like and nobody can tell you you’ve got it wrong (one of many reasons I like writing fantasy!)

3) You could be like the people responsible for the travesty of a movie the Carnivore watched on Friday night, and say your story’s set somewhere else but actually make it identical to your own home town.

It was called Supernova and was supposedly set in Sydney. I watched it for a while but couldn’t take it for long. I could put up with everyone speaking in American accents, but there was so much else that was so badly wrong it left me completely confused. I kept thinking the story must have switched to America and I’d somehow missed the part where the whole cast got on the plane.

It opened with a guy at a desert observatory. After a couple of minutes he got in his car, observed by two agents who had the place staked out, and drove to Sydney airport. One of the agents was an African American, which was out of place enough that it started alarm bells ringing. We have a multicultural society, with people from all over the place: lots and lots of Asians, Europeans of every kind, plenty of Middle Eastern people, quite a few Indians, Pacific Islanders, our own Aboriginals – but virtually no Africans. If you saw one on the street you’d look twice. But they popped up everywhere in this movie. At least half the extras were African Americans.

So the guy drives from the desert to the airport in an hour or so, when in fact it would take at least a day. Hell, some days you can’t even drive from the CBD to the airport in that time. His car is a left-hand drive and has Californian numberplates. In Australia we drive on the other side of the road and, strangely enough, our cars are registered in Australian states, not American ones.

It was all very confusing. A few minutes later another character was exploring an abandoned house at night. She was spooked by an animal in the house. A porcupine. Last time I looked we didn’t have any of those in Australia. Echidnas, yes. Porcupines, no.

I kept thinking I’d missed something at the airport scene. Surely we were now supposed to be in America? But no, people kept insisting it was Sydney. So why were they worrying about running out of “gas” when we call it “petrol”? Why did the children go to school on yellow school buses when children here catch regular commuter buses to school, which come in any colour the bus company chooses? Why were nervous housewives running around waving handguns when the house alarm went off when our gun control laws are so strict nobody but criminals and cops or gun enthusiasts have guns, which, if they’re legal, must be kept locked in a purpose-built cupboard at all times?

I gave up in disgust after about half an hour, but it left me perplexed. If you want to make a movie in America, go right ahead. But why pretend it’s set in Sydney? None of the reasons I could think of put the filmmakers in a good light.

1) They are so ignorant they have no idea that the rest of the world isn’t exactly like America.

I find this one hard to believe. Some parts of it must have been filmed in Sydney. There were shots of iconic Sydney landmarks being destroyed in the finale. So at least some of the people involved with the movie must have been here, in which case they must know at least some of the basic things they got wrong, like cars driving on the wrong side of the road, or Californian numberplates not being exactly that common outside America.

2) They believe their American viewers are so ignorant they have no idea the rest of the world isn’t exactly like America, so see no need to change anything.

This is pretty insulting to the American viewing public.

3) They believe their American viewers won’t notice all the mistakes, so there’s no point going to the expense of getting it right.

Possible, perhaps – except that it costs nothing to say “petrol” instead of “gas”, or to substitute a cricket bat or kitchen knife for a gun. But they couldn’t even be bothered doing that. Or do they think the American audience wouldn’t understand what was meant if characters said “petrol”? Again, pretty insulting to their viewers’ intelligence.

Which brings me back to the question: why bother insisting it’s Sydney if it’s demonstrably America in everything but name? Setting is made up of a myriad of details, probably the least important of which is the name. If I say my novel’s set in Paris, then there can’t just be the Eiffel Tower in the background. There’d better be people walking dogs everywhere, and the smell of fresh, crusty bread, cars parked haphazardly all over the footpath, a biting April wind and the sound of church bells. Otherwise no one who’s been there is going to believe me. Or worse, if everyone works from 9 to 5, just like they do in Sydney, with no mention of the looooong break in the middle of the day, people will ridicule me. That’s not how things work in Paris, so if I want people in my story to work 9 to 5 with a half-hour lunch break, I should set the damn story in Sydney. Or else get a clue and do my homework on Paris. It’s one place where the classic maxim “write what you know” has some merit. And if you don’t know, you’d better find out.

This is where writing fantasy is so much easier. Your world, your rules. As long as things are internally consistent, virtually anything goes. It’s like playing God. On the other hand, the fact that you can’t take anything for granted means more work. Every part of your society and world has to be considered. Characters can’t just hop on a train or drink a cup of coffee. You have to consider the level of technology and civilisation. How do people get around? What foods and beverages are available?

And do they have porcupines?

Flap flap flap

Anybody else hear that flapping noise? Look, up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a guy wearing his underpants on the outside? No, it’s just Baby Duck leaving the nest.

Yes, my baby started school on Monday. I didn’t even get a goodbye kiss. He kept asking if it was time for him to line up yet. Once the bell went he was off like a shot, barely remembering to wave as he disappeared into his classroom.

So far so good. He seems quite happy to keep going back, which is the main thing. The house is very quiet without him, although the Carnivore makes enough noise for three people, so I’m not exactly lonely.

I have spent my new-found writing time revising a short story I wrote before Nano last year. Today I finished scribbling all my corrections on the hard copy and typed them in to the computer. There was a lot of red pen, with many crossings-out and new bits inserted.

As I worked through the pages I noticed something interesting – though some parts were buried in a storm of red pen, most of the dialogue was untouched. I’ve always felt that dialogue was one of my strengths as a writer, but it was interesting to see it demonstrated in such a concrete way.

Or maybe I just suck at revising. It’s entirely possible I’m just rearranging the deckchairs as the ship goes down. I do find it difficult to take a long enough view, even after leaving a story for months. I worry that I’m only fiddling at the sentence level when I should be looking at the much bigger picture: do I need this scene/character? Have I come up with the best possible answers for the story questions? For that matter, have I even asked the right questions?

Eek. So many things to consider. So many balls to keep in the air at once. Did I mention I suck at juggling too?

What’s your favourite part of writing? What are you best at? Or worst at?

Five things I learned on holidays

1) Holiday houses never have enough teaspoons.

2) Fishing is no fun if all you’re doing is baiting hooks and casting lines for children.

3) Children only enjoy fishing if they catch a fish in the first 30 seconds. Makes you wonder why you bothered baiting all those #@$?!*! hooks.

4) Going for a brisk walk along the beach every morning will only do pleasing things for your hip measurement if you don’t also spend the rest of the day lazing around eating cheese and biscuits and drinking wine.

5) Actually fishing is no fun full stop. I only know how annoying it is to take children fishing because the Carnivore told me. I was lazing on the lounge eating the cheese and biscuits while he was out suffering. Look, it was tough, but someone had to do it.

I should probably add a sixth point: I discovered I’m even lazier than I'd realised, hence there were no blog posts while I was away. I did a few pages in my art journal, but failed to finish any of the sewing projects I took, or read any of the books. I was a complete vegetable, though I did manage to drag myself off the lounge long enough to thrash the whole family at putt-putt golf. A most satisfying holiday!

So I’m back, all refreshed and ready to dive into the challenges of the new year. Baby Duck starts school on Monday, so once I get over the tearful goodbyes (mine, not his) it will be full steam ahead on Dragonheart, my fantasy novel which has been languishing since Nano ended.

And yes, I’m aware there was a fairly awful movie around a few years ago of that name. The best thing about it was that the dragon had a Scottish accent, since it was voiced by Sean Connery, who never bothers to alter his accent even to play a Russian sub commander. It’s only a working title. No doubt something stupendous and far more suitable will occur to me in the fullness of time. In the meantime I’d appreciate it if you kept the sniggering to a minimum, okay?

I see dragons, he sees ... bacon?

Remember Mark Antony’s beautiful speech from Antony and Cleopatra that begins “sometimes we see a cloud that's baconish”?

No?

Okay, how about this. What do you see in this picture?

A rhino perhaps? A dragon even?

We visited Jenolan Caves in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney recently. The ducklings and I had fun spotting all sorts of strange creatures in the caves, like this “dragon”. There were stalacmites at odd angles that looked just like unicorn horns, lots of monsters and a couple of dragons.

What was my beloved’s contribution to this game of make believe?


“Hey, that one looks like bacon.” [He's talking about the pinkish shawls hanging from the ceiling.]

My meat-obsessed carnivore doesn’t have a poetic bone in his body. Drama Duck and I looked at each other, that special look that says “we really love him but he’s not quite like the rest of us, is he?”

“Maybe the dragon eats the bacon,” she said.

It was an … interesting day. We changed our minds several times about whether or not to go that day due to doubtful weather and general laziness (at least on my part). So we didn’t end up leaving till eleven, and by the time we got there it was 3 o’clock in the afternoon.

The last 10 kms or so of the trip winds round and round the mountainsides on a road that feels about two foot wide, with a terrifying drop off the edge. I was practically hyperventilating and vowing never to return before we’d even arrived. Thank goodness we didn’t meet one of the many tourist buses coming the other way.

There’s nothing much there above ground, just a hotel and ticket office. We crawled past a million tourists to the carpark, which was full. A sign directed us up a steep road to carpark 2.

Which was also full. So we climbed more mountain roads, around more scary twisty bends to carpark 3.

Which was also full. By this time we are a long way from where we need to be and I’m starting to wonder if we’re going to have to park somewhere in central Australia. The road is now a dirt track with a most terrifying incline. But at last we find a place to dump the car, though we almost lose traction and fall back down the mountainside trying to get there. A helpful man directs us to a walking track to take us back down to the ticket office, which he says will take about 20 minutes “or I could call the bus up here for you”.

“No, no,” says the Carnivore gaily, “we’re happy to walk.”

I think 20 minutes might take more like 40 with Baby Duck in tow, but I can’t face the idea of a bus ride back down that dreadful road either, so we walk.

Did I ever mention that I hate walking downhill? I know I’m not the fittest person, but by the time we got to the bottom my quads felt like jelly – and we hadn’t even started yet.

The first guided tour that wasn’t sold out was at 4:30, so we spent the time in between doing the self-guided tour of the Nettle cave, which is largely above ground. Demon Duck kept having conniptions about how high up we were, but everyone else enjoyed it (though there were a lot of stairs).

Then we took a guided tour of the Lucas Cave. Our guide announced that there were 910 steps to climb “but don’t worry, they’re nearly all at the beginning – after that it’s okay”. So we and 164 million of our new best friends trooped off up the stairs of torment to view the delights of the Lucas Cave.

Which took so long, with 164 million people in the group, that there was no time to see any more caves after that, for which I was profoundly grateful, though Baby Duck was disappointed. He wanted to go back the next weekend.

Fortunately we didn’t have to climb back up the mountain to our car. There was a minibus to take drivers back to the various carparks, otherwise I’d probably still be there, crawling upwards on my hands and knees.

One more not-a-New-Year’s-resolution: Must. Get. Fit.

[And one more time without the bacon:

Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish;
A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,
A tower’d citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon’t, that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air]

Lucky!

Whew! Lucky I didn’t make any New Year’s resolutions. Those babies would have been smashed already. Have I been exercising? Eating less rubbish? Writing every day? Updating my blog twice a week? Only if today is Opposites Day.

Not that I’ve been completely unproductive. I’ve sewn a few bags lately, including a tote bag for Demon Duck’s teacher that we both liked so much we were sad to part with it.


I also finished a more sedate handbag for myself. I’m wearing a lot of blues and browns lately so it goes nicely.


I’ve got stuck into the decluttering and have already thrown out a stack of scrapbooking magazines about four foot high. I’m still working my way through another stack almost as big. This job is part of the reclamation of the rumpus room as a usable space and not just a junk storage area, which has been hanging over my head for ages. It feels great to see the floor reappearing from under the piles!

A curious side effect of the sorting process is that is makes me want to scrap again – or at least mess around with paints and patterned paper, which I haven’t done in nearly two years. I dug out my old art journal and did a couple of pages, which was a lot of fun. This is one of them.


So no New Year’s resolutions, because I know I’ll break them. But goals – I can do that. Generally I aim too high and miss, but at least I get further than I would otherwise. Last year I wanted to finish two first drafts, Man Bites Dog and Starfire. I only managed Man Bites Dog, but I wouldn’t have done even that without something to aim for. I also wrote 50,000 words on a new novel, Dragonheart, plus started revisions on Man Bites Dog.

Another goal was to start submitting short stories for publication. I only submitted two, which wasn’t as many as I’d planned, but one got a very encouraging rejection and the other got published, so that went pretty well too.

Writing goals for this year are:

* finish revising Man Bites Dog
* complete first draft of Dragonheart
* write and submit more short stories
* establish a routine of writing daily (at least on school days!).

Other goals include:

* keep up with the monthly art journal challenges at Blue Bazaar
* declutter and get organised
* have more fun!
* and I’m not even going to mention the whole exercise-and-diet thing.

The “have more fun” goal started well. On New Year’s Day we had afternoon tea with the neighbours that turned into dinner and a movie as well. Less successful (from my point of view at least) was an excursion to Jenolan Caves a few days later. But I’ll tell you about that next time I post on my new bi-weekly*-but-it’s-not-a-New-Year’s-Resolution schedule.

Happy New Year to all!

*I just looked up “biweekly” in the dictionary because I was having a vague moment about whether it means “twice a week” or “once every two weeks”. According to my dictionary it means both. Both?? They’re two completely different things! It’s an outrage!! What kind of sloppy good-for-nothing word is that?

Writing routines

I haven’t done a post about writing in a while.

Don’t get excited. This isn’t going to be one either. More of a thinking-about-getting-ready-for-writing one. And if you think that sounds like procrastination, it’s juuuust possible you’re on to something there. Nevertheless …

With Baby Duck starting school in a month, I’ve been contemplating the vast amounts of time that are about to open up for me. Well, maybe not that vast, but life will certainly be different. It will be strange and wonderful to have several hours to myself every day. Just thinking about it makes me excited, like Christmas all over again – only without all the shopping. Much better.

I want to establish a routine of writing every day. There’ve been some interesting posts on routines and organisation lately, such as Jeff Abott’s series on the organised writer, starting with this one: The Creative Habit and the Organized Writer. Over at Murderati JT Ellison has written three posts on The Writer’s Life, starting with this one. Both of them enthuse over the Getting Things Done system created by time management guru David Allen, so I bought his book (and a couple of others on time management and decluttering, which for me go hand in hand).

Yes, I'm conscious of the irony in adding to the clutter of my house with more books on decluttering. Still, I figure there are worse things to spend your money on, and they make me keen to get started. Not that getting started on new projects is usually a problem for me. It’s more the finishing I find tricky.

The idea I like best from it all so far is to have one central place to keep all your mental notes to yourself, all the flotsam of daily life – be it work, social, school or writing-related. Getting it all out of your head gets rid of the nagging worry that you’ll forget to send the money to school on the right day, or pay the Visa bill or buy flowers for Great Aunt Desdemona or whatever. And if it’s all written in the same place, whether it’s electronic or paper, you know you’re on top of it all and you can free your mind from the stress of trying to remember all these bits and pieces, and focus on whatever your real tasks are.

I’ve certainly missed my share of deadlines, only to discover the relevant piece of paper at the bottom of a pile on the kitchen bench a week later, so I’m familiar with this vague feeling of unease that I’ve forgotten something. Some things I write on the calendar, but not all, so starting tomorrow my new diary will be getting a workout. Onward and upward and all that. I’ll let you know how it goes.

If anyone else has some good organisational tips, particularly writing-related ones, I’d love to hear them.

I lost three kilos today

Otherwise known as having a haircut. My head, which used to look like a beachball, is now only the size of a tennis ball by comparison. You could have stuffed a serious cushion with the hair that was left behind on the hairdresser’s floor. My hair is ultra short again and I feel so much lighter.

Drama Duck says I look just like her father now. Scary thought. They say that married couples start to resemble each other after a while. (Or is it that people start to look like their dogs? I can never remember.)

Worse still, it’s not just a physical resemblance. I’m even starting to think like him. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I walked past his car in the carpark on the way to the hairdresser’s. I was seized with the urge to move it – just by a couple of spots. He might not even notice, or he might come back to the car and go “what the??”. I don’t usually think like that, but it’s the kind of thing that occurs to him all the time. I was strong, however, and squashed the evil impulse.

Ten minutes later I’m sitting in the hairdresser’s and he wanders in with a silly grin on his face.

“I thought I’d better tell you in case you panicked,” he says. “I moved your car.”

I tell you, it's a match made in heaven.

The Painted Man

I mentioned in a recent post that I’d stolen time away from my Nano novel to read The Painted Man by Peter V Brett. If you like fantasy you have to read this. Especially if, like me, you’re sick to death of the run-of-the-mill garden-variety fantasy. As in: farm boy discovers he’s actually the lost heir to the throne/the world’s most powerful magician/saviour of the universe/(d) all of the above, goes on a quest and jaunts around the countryside meeting elves and dwarves, often with a mismatched crew of companions, till the book has been dragged out to sufficiently humungous length. May or may not involve dragons. Or – God forbid! – prophecies.

Or else it’s all kings and princes and constant battles. Sieges galore, political machinations, rise and fall of empires, yada yada yada.

Well, I’ve read a million of ’em, so I’m always desperately searching for something different. I might have missed this one, because a cursory glance had me thinking it was horror and not my cup of tea. I kept seeing the blurb on the Voyager site that begins: “Mankind has ceded the night to the corelings: demons that rise up out of the ground each day at dusk, killing and destroying at will until dawn, when the sun banishes them back to the Core. As darkness falls, the world's few surviving humans hide behind magical wards, praying that the magic will see them through another night.”

But then I stumbled on Brett’s blog, and found he was a debut author. Reading back through his entries I followed his journey to publication, the bidding wars and overseas sales, and became intrigued. If everyone who read the manuscript wanted to publish it, it must be something special, right? (And besides, he seems like such a nice, regular guy and his baby’s really cute.)

So I read it, and okay, there was a farmboy. But he too, was such a regular guy -- so real -- that I became engrossed in his story and didn’t even consider till I’d finished the book that it had started with the dreaded farmboy motif. Because this one didn’t have any magnificent lost heritage or amazing hidden powers to make him “special”. He was an ordinary person doing the best he could to face and overcome his fears and by doing so became a true hero. He earned it, instead of having it handed to him on a plate (no “we know you thought you were a lowly scullery lad/farm boy/whatever, but actually you’re the long-lost king’s son – here, have a sword and the hand of the princess”).

The book spends a lot of time developing its main characters, so you feel you really know them. They’re real, not just fantasy stereotypes. They have real problems, involving complex relationships, which build and snowball into bigger problems till they achieve “saving the world” size.

And then there’s the demons. Loved the demons! The whole worldbuilding, with scattered remnants of civilisation, the nightly assaults of the corelings and the wards that hold them at bay, was brilliant. So fresh and original. Not a dragon, elf or dwarf in sight. No magic swords, magicians, embittered mercenaries or royalty, deposed or otherwise. Just the grinding menace night after night, ordinary lives lived in constant fear and the effect that has on individuals and society as a whole.

Great storytelling. It’s one of those books you want to stay up all night to finish because you can’t bear to put it down. Probably not the best choice of reading material when you’re in the middle of Nano. Comparing my ugly first draft to this made me feel even more inadequate than usual. But I can’t wait to see where he takes the story. There were some intriguing developments towards the end that have me hanging out for the next instalment, The Desert Spear. I really hope it lives up to the promise of the first volume. It’s so good to see someone breaking new ground in fantasy.

Now I’ve just got to figure out a way to do it myself!

Life unplugged

I’ve been enjoying time away from the computer since Nano ended. Done a little sewing, some reading, nowhere near enough Christmas shopping – but mainly spent time just hanging with the family. Depending on how desperate the Christmas shopping situation becomes I may go back to my Nano novel tomorrow. Or … I may be completely slack and leave it till January. (Anyone who knows my capacity for slackness will now be putting their money on the January option.) I still have at least another 50,000 words, probably more, to write before the first draft is finished.

I made it to 50,000 words on Friday the 28th and promptly collapsed in a heap. Heroic notions of continuing on till the stroke of midnight on the 30th to see how many words I could get done were left by the wayside. It just felt so good to stop! And it’s so much more fun to gorge on other people’s finished beautiful stories than wrestle with your own ugly uncooperative creation.

So I’ve been vegetating. And speaking of vegetation, this is what I see every week as I sit waiting while Baby Duck has his swimming lesson. It was even prettier a few weeks ago when the jacaranda was in full bloom, but I didn’t have the camera with me.


It feels like summer when the flame trees flower.