“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.” – D.H Lawrence.

I have been honoured to be in the presence of some hot speak during the Perth International Writer’s Festival 2013.

“Being Bold” with  Julia Lawrinsonand Vikki Wakefield, chaired by Bonnie Davies.  What was interesting was that each of us took to the topic as if it were anathema.  Each of us having been labeled “bold” in the past (with varying consequences) we argued that the “bold” tag can almost be a hobble in our market.  Where we write for our audience (or in my case with no audience in mind) we find ourselves nose to nose with the gatekeepers of young adult literature time and time again.  With adults deciding what is appropriate and what is not, what opportunities for authentic, contentious discussion are being lost?  Is this fair?  We didn’t answer that question as well we shouldn’t.  Our job is not to anticipate the response to our writing lest that inhibit the honesty from which we draw our motivation.  To be on a panel with Julia Lawrinson whom I have read and respected for so many years was wonderful, even though now I have a permanent mental picture of her with her legs out the sunroof of a Yaris.  And Vikki Wakefield and I discovered quite early on that we are actually twins separated at birth. ‘Nuff said.  (Check in with Vikki if you need validation of this).

“At The Edge of Darkness” with Caroline Overington and Emma Chapman, chaired by Jane Cornes.  Having read the latest from these extraordinary women (Sisters of Mercy and How To Be A Good Wife, respectively) I was very excited to meet them.  Both of these women have credentials and prizes the listing of which throw me into an alcohol/codeine induced depression.  Just as well I was wearing my “Artist” lanyard, otherwise someone would have shoe-horned me out of my seat on the panel gently explaining “The audience doesn’t sit there, dear.”

What a ride!  With the faultless, and gentle, direction of our chair (Jane Cornes) we covered realism in literature, the process by which our experience with the real morphs into fiction, our favourite characters in our own books, where we draw from to create our worlds, the editorial process, and the future of publishing (p-book, e-book, online). 

It was so good to be given the opportunity to have these public conversations with such extraordinarily talented writers, to interact with other readers, and to sit in the signing chair earlier occupied by Andy Griffiths (I kept it warm for you Andy...).

The "C" Word

“I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone’s teeth get cleaner?” - Frank Zappa

 Before I get into this Blog I must warn all sensitive readers that I am going to use the ‘C’ word...CENSORSHIP.

In August 2012 I was invited to attend and participate in a well known Literary Festival in Western Australia.  It is a Festival I have supported, attended and loved as an audience member for years.  So you can only imagine how delighted and humbled I was by an invitation to be a presenter at said Festival.

Six months after the invitation and my acceptance, just weeks before the Festival, the organizers read Creepy & Maud.  I received an email from the organizer, part of which reads:

"And having read it, I realised with great sadness that I would not be able to get you to present it at the festival because the actual life experiences of many adolescents can be so very distasteful to their parents...and completely at odss with the more wholesome vision of themselves as good parents etc that they generally prefer to have!"

 

I was offered two other roles at the Festival: a writing workshop or a chaired debate, the proviso being Creepy & Maud was not presented. 

What amazes me about this request to pull my head in at their Festival is that they seem to be asking me to do so out of respect for the delusion of the parents.  That is, the parents here like to think of themselves and their children in a certain way and while the Festival supports that fantasy they are concerned that I don’t or won’t. 

Wrong.  I whole-heartedly support the right of any and all individuals to live in whichever fantasy world they choose.  It’s not my business.  What concerns me here is the elevation of one fantasy over all others; the decision of the Festival organizers to only choose content consistent with the vision these parents have of themselves, rather than exploring what this denial of reality may be doing to the children raised in such an environment.  And then there is fear.  I’ve seen fear of controversy clutch at the throat of people too often – people who should be speaking loudly and fearlessly, joyously and with good humour, too often whittled down to a nub of their real selves in the misguided belief that peace is better than sharp thinking and tasty conversation.

Something very exciting could have happened between older adolescents and Creepy & Maud in this forum.  Now, through an extraordinary set of events, it cannot.  I have chosen to withdraw from participating in this event as I believe my attendance (in scold’s bridle) would be condoning their decision to censor.  This year it was me.  Next year it could be someone else.

I am left with an overwhelming sense of sadness.  I don’t care about losing the gig, but is this the thin end of the wedge?  Bruce Coville once said that the real heroes are the librarians and teachers who at no small risk to themselves refuse to lie down and play dead for the censors.  I won’t play dead either.  I will continue to be loud and honest.  I respect your right to feel confronted or offended.  I do not respect your right to choose shutting me up over talking it through.

(Note: This Blog does not refer to the Perth Writers Festival.  I will be attending the PWF in the company of some of my favourite fellow writers)

"The Next Big Thing"

My lovely editor, friend and favourite West Australian writer, Amanda Curtin, has tagged me to participate in this book meme - “The Next Big Thing”.  It is an embarrassingly inappropriate title in my case.  I prefer to name this blog “The Next Hopefully As Moderately Successful WIP Crawling Toward Deadline”.  To read about a genuine Next Big Thing please refer to Amanda Curtin’s blog here.

1.What is the working title of your current work in progress/next book?

Open Slather

2.Where did the idea come from?

When I was living in the United States there was a trial involving a teen couple who had become pregnant and decided to hide the pregnancy.  They delivered the infant in a motel room and then killed her, disposing of her in a dump bin.  The story has never left me.  I began to think about what circumstances could possibly convince two affluent, well-educated young people that they had no other choice but this.  What are the psychological mechanisms which enable two young people to convince themselves that a human life is just a thing?  How do young people become so isolated from, and fearful of, the intervention of parents?  What are grown-ups doing within their relationships with young adults to sabotage the one connection that should be the safe place to fall?  I approach this with no judgment. 

3.What genre does your book fall into?

Young adult/Cross Over.

4.What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I do write very visually!  (Little movie in my head...)  I can see Abigail Breslin as Rose.  Logan Lerman would be a great Michael.  I would cast Ryan Gosling in there somewhere.  Just for funsies.  Give me an excuse to lick the screen....

5.What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Does doing something monstrous make you a monster?

6.Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Fremantle Press has given me a deadline based on the first 10,000 words they read.  However said read words are no longer the first 10,000.  They may not like it so it may be “The Next Big Rejected Thing”.    Stay toooooned....

7.How long did it take you to write the first draft?

Bit of a premature question as unfinished.  I started making notes in 1997.  I started writing real words late 2011.  In between I had a husband and child to raise.  The husband has since moved on to more bruise-accepting pastures and so I write and write and write...

8.What other books would you compare this to within your genre?

Who knows?  And who the fuck cares?  Comparisons are so self-defeating.  I’ve got one little book out there compared to years and years of dozens and dozens of beautiful, thought provoking YA. 

9.Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Refer question 2.

10.What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

This is a non-judgmental stare at perpetrators of infanticidal manslaughter.  Interested?

Hand on the Stove

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes...” – Neil Gaiman

Done, Neil.  In fact I predict I’ll make at least three new mistakes tomorrow.  I made a big one yesterday which only proves that I’m living my life fully right up to the end of the old year.  Let’s celebrate mistakes for a couple of hundred words, and look at the fallout a bit more closely.

We’re a mistake prone species.  And we don’t like them.  There’s great judgment awaiting anyone who makes mistakes.  We don’t like them in others and we don’t like them in ourselves.  Some mistakes are so glaringly obvious we might as well print up the sandwich board for ourselves and wear it with pride.  If everyone knows about your mistake then no amount of self-effacing humility and best effort to move on as quickly as possible can diminish the consequences: a public mistake can hang in the air like a fart in a lift for years.  Then there’s the private mistake, the one only you know about.  The one that you can distract yourself from for as long as it takes to follow a dress pattern or build a bridge, some activity that engages enough of your analytical brain to muffle recent memory.  But eventually mortification sneaks up and plants a wet nose in your crotch and then it’s only a matter of time before your mistake is barking at you incessantly enough to wake the neighbours.

Of course mistakes come in all shapes and sizes, so defining the mistake on the fallout scale is probably useful.  There’s the mistake that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme (“I really shouldn’t have gotten this hair cut”) verses the mistake that is definable by law (“I really shouldn’t have set fire to the neighbours car”).  I’m talking about something in between, obviously: something really, really bad that can hurt you or others like a bastard, but won’t get you arrested (“I really shouldn’t have voted for Tony Abbott”).  And if we’re on this road of classification then surely the real test of any mistake is how we feel about it afterwards, and how other people make us feel.

Mistakes are certainly motivating and sometimes the best response to them is to own them.  (I caused this, I set this up, and it’s going to hurt me, and you.  Now buggar off and enjoy the show).  And we should be hurt by our mistakes, shouldn’t we?  People run around all-consumed with a self-preservation inspired avoidance of any sort of pain when pain is the great teacher, isn’t it?  Bollocks.  When we put our hand on the stove and learn never to do so again through the pain caused, we don’t then put our hand on the stove again the following week just to make sure.  But some mistakes we make over and over and oftentimes because of our irrational belief in our right to be happy (is that a right?) and our desire to be understood and validated.

Are we, therefore, actually defined by our mistakes?  And would that be so bad?  Here’s to another twelve months of fucking things up.  Happy New Year.

Why is everyone so sensitive about the Right Wing?

“To admit you want to have a comeback means you have to admit you weren’t what you were supposed to be.  You dropped below your own standard.” – Marilyn Manson

I found myself in a situation recently where the conversation got really good.  You know those situations when everyone at the table is suddenly engaged, even when the topics scud about with merciless speed and then out of the blue there’ll be two, maybe three, different topics floating about at once and everyone is following everything?  The sort of conversation where people can disagree but still value each other and people talk over the top of one another but with enthusiasm for the discourse rather than recourse to bullying?  Good conversation that reminds an anti-social divorcee that people are great fun? 

Well, that didn’t last long.

One of the guests made a statement.  That’s ok.  It was racist, xenophobic bullshit but I am not one to judge (stop laughing...).  Keeping with the wonderful spirit of the occasion I countered with an alternative view and expected the tête-à-tête to continue with aforementioned enjoyment.  But something strange happened.  Everyone went quiet.  It wasn’t what I said or how I said it.  As far as I can deduce, it was the simple fact that I had disagreed with this one particular person.  The person next to me actually “shooshed” me.  Being a guest, as was this gentleman, I complied.  I shooshed.  For a time.

You see, they then gave him the floor.  I knew there were people present as uncomfortable with what he was saying as I was, but still the floor was his.  He was offensive, belligerent, and spoke with the sort of authority that only comes from a frightened person reverting to the kill-switch for fear: anger.  And somehow his fear was creating an even greater fear in everyone else.

Everyone just sat there.  I engaged with this man a couple of times and found that the angst of the table was directed at me!  So I shut the fuck up.  All of my comebacks are still festering in me.  Later I was told that this man was very sensitive and had strong views.  I was asked (told) not to respond.  Just let it go, for everyone’s sake!  It doesn’t matter!  He’s old fashioned!  Let it go!  Right...ok.  And more right.  And some more.  So much right I walked in fucking circles for a week.

I myself am sensitive.  It helps to be when you are creating people to inhabit a made up world you want your readers to believe in for just a little while.  Of course Creepy also came up in the tirade.  He could understand why I was so “bleeding-heart liberal” (liberal in the American sense) – that was made very clear in the “shit I was peddling”.   No response.  We don’t want to upset the sensitive Right Wing nor those who are sensitive about it.  And bringing up the Bible on top of everything else – well! Screw rational, evidentiary thought!  Screw conversation – let’s just move onto the chicken wings...(“How are they coming along, darling?...)

Here’s what I’ve noticed:  the Right Wing seems very sensitive to me.  And even those who are not Right Wing are terribly sensitive about that sensitivity.  My son said to me: “The only argument the right wing seems to have is that you can’t argue with them.” 

So much for discourse. 

Writing the Sex Scene

“…like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her” – Rowan Somerville – The Shape of Her (Literary Reviews “Bad Sex Award” 2010)

I’m reminded of a scene in a highly underestimated movie, “She-Devil”, and the delightfully appalling ruminations of romance writer Mary Fisher (played by Meryl Streep) as she struggles to find new descriptions for the oldest past-time in the world.  She does use the term “love button”, but we are left mercifully unaware of what part of a woman’s anatomy she is referring to.  I read a few of the under-the-counter Mills & Boon when I was a virginal adolescent and found it all very exciting.  However since then I have mostly been left cringing at sex scenes in literature.  And there are a lot of badly written sex scenes out there.

The problem with badly written sex scenes is that they become the focus of the entire book.  I remember having a conversation with a publisher (not mine) about a newly released teen novel in which she described the sex scene as “powerful and confronting”.  I smiled and nodded but was left wondering if we had read the same book.  I found that same sex scene shocking.  (And those of you who know me or read my stuff know full well I am not easily shocked).  I also found this particular sex scene unnecessary.  I kept imagining how this young girl’s first time might have been alluded to in a far more powerful way; a way that respected her more and acknowledged the necessary awkward humour of such an event (or am I just channeling my first time here?). 

The sex scene can so easily turn into teeny-porn.  That’s great if you want to be controversial and have the most thumbed library copies in the state.  The only pages of “Flowers in the Attic” I ever read were the couple in which the brother and sister get it on, and that’s because someone slipped it to me in science class whilst I was in real danger of burning it down with my Bunsen burner.  And believe me, the book fucking fell open at the pages in question.  Here’s the rub: how to write the sex scene that doesn’t become the focus but becomes a part of the tapestry.  Or are we just not culturally ready for sex scenes to sit comfortably and noncontentiously beside the rest of a narrative in YA literature?

I am also aware that there is an enormous amount of criticism awaiting anyone who approaches that bridge.  “Bridgekeeper: What...is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?”  There are a number of correct answers to the question.  So many approaches.  And it is very rare for the critic to be the one catapulted into space.  

So.  The sex scene.  Clothes on or clothes off?  Both first time or one experienced?  Planned or unplanned?  Mutual or rough persuasion?  Orgasm? – who the fuck am I kidding (hard enough to locate one now! – no offence fellas).  The problem is that no matter what choices a writer makes in her head, there is the unenviable task of translating that onto the page in a way that respects the characters and the readers.  One must blur the line, like a smudge of charcoal, between the leading up to, the event itself, and the immediate aftermath.  If a sex scene stands out like sore fucking thumb (no pun intended) it’s just not working for me.

So far, none of my sex scenes are working for me.

Then The Boys Light Up...

“The best way to get kids to read a book is to say: 'This book is not appropriate for your age, and it has all sorts of horrible things in it like sex and death and some really big and complicated ideas, and you’re better off not touching it until you’re all grown up. I’m going to put it on this shelf and leave the room for a while. Don’t open it.’ “

- Philip Pullman

Last week I had my first public speaking engagement as a published writer.  I had the enormous privilege of speaking to a Year 9 Creative Writing class at Christ Church Grammar School in Claremont, Western Australia.  I almost made myself sick with anxiety in the preparation for it.  I almost made myself sick with anxiety on the morning of the class.  Here’s something people won’t say out loud: “I feel like a fraud and don’t think I’m good enough.”  Being appallingly honest and abysmally unfamiliar with Writer’s Blog etiquette, I will say it out loud though: “I feel like a fraud and don’t think I’m good enough”.  Turns out being fraught works in a girl’s favour!

Quaking, sweat in my ears, glass of water white-knuckled, trying to conjure my happy place, I stepped up after my introduction and began.  And it fell into place.  How?- well, I prepared as if I were stepping up to argue for my own stay of execution; but it was the young men in the class who turned my fraught into fascination into delight.  They were genuinely interested, in that subdued, polite way young men are with a guest speaker.  I spoke about my own journey as a writer and the importance to me of character over plot.  I read aloud from Creepy & Maud to illustrate the two distinct character voices (nothing grabs an audience’s attention like alcohol, pubic hair grooming and the odd “fuck”).  But it was the activity I had them do which really kick started things.  I don’t know exactly what their teacher (Mr. Tom Spurling) does on a regular basis in that class, but these boys can write!

Based on the observational drollness of Creepy I asked these young men to write a description of someone – someone in the room, or someone from memory.  I then asked for volunteers to read what they had written aloud.  The silence at this point was terrifying.  The class teacher, Mr Tom Spurling, came to my rescue and jollied someone up to go first.  After that the hands went up and boys wanted to read.  I was staggered by the result.

Every single boy who read aloud had something quirky, honest and entertaining to say.  Many of them described others in the room which made for some moments of piss-myself comedy.  “He thought he had a six pack, but then he’d always had double vision” will stay with me forever.  Likewise, one young man chose a more serious topic and wrote about asking a girl out and being rejected.  His description of the girl, himself, and the heart breaking understatement of the pain involved, led to applause from me, and the class.  There were descriptions of fictional characters and descriptions of people well known.  The language used, the pithiness, the effort, were absolutely delightful to me.  I actually lost myself in my audience.

So thank you, Christ Church Grammar School Year 9 Creative Writing class.  Thank you Ms Teresa Scott and Mr Tom Spurling, for inviting me to enjoy a moment with some very talented young men who, even though they may not realize it, have extraordinary skills with language. 

How lovely.