If You Wee Yourself Just Bust a Move and Break into “Singin’ in the Rain”...

Book Launch preparations for the uninitiated:  Is there a handbook? 

1.       What if people aren’t interested?

We’ve all been to them: the particularly dull public event that initially arouses a toddler style boredom whereby your focus just continually drifts towards all the shiny things in the room.  This then morphs into an unabashed crowd surveillance (“Wonder where she got that dress?”; “Is he actually picking his nose?”)  Then slowly a sort of hobbled animal anxiety begins to build (“There’s no air in here!”; “Where’s the fucking bar?!”).  Followed by the upright, alcohol-induced semi-comatose state which at least offers you the subterfuge of attention and interest and a reason to spend half the event in the loo.  I am aware of all of these stages of public event disinterest (ever been to a construction industry sundowner?) which makes planning my own public event particularly distressing.

2.       The Guest Speakers.

Even more stressful is the knowledge that I’ve managed to rope in people far more interesting and respected than me to speak before me.  WHAT was I thinking?  If I wanted to ensure I wasn’t going to be looking out on faces clearly resenting the fact that they were missing an episode of Home and Away I should have booked, as speakers, my mother off her blood pressure medication and my brother-in-law after a few beers.  But no – I have Cate Sutherland and Norman Jorgensen speaking.   (On the run sheet I’m considering asking them to be ridiculously brief and not use their best material).  How to recover successfully from this? – I have considered busting out my balloon animals or performing my rhythm and blues version of “Rhinestone Cowboy”.  Opinions welcome.    On the 1 to 10 Fret Scale I think I’ve hit a 73 thinking ‘What the hell am I going to say and how do I say it without wetting my pants?’

3.       What if Something Goes Wrong?

At my sister’s wedding I walked from the toilets back to my table, through a myriad of guests, beautifully coiffed and made up, with my dress artfully tucked into the back of my pantyhose.  Didn’t notice until I sat down and the chair felt cold.  I shared my anxiety recently with someone inimitably familiar with public events and she told me about a similar event where someone had fainted and projectile vomited.     I am in preparation already.  I will cease all fluids from September 27^th.  And curry.  I believe curry is unnecessary at this point.  If the lighting or sound fails the event will be tailor made for my parents who probably won’t wear their hearing aids and could possibly suffer a stroke with any light stimulation.  So there’s an upside.

4.       What if no one turns up?

Bring board games for the family.

5.       No one talks about this.

No one talks about the bladder control issues associated with book launch anxiety.  They just don’t.  There’s plenty of highfaluting stuff out there about “successful public image” but no one talks about how to hide your Depends under a little black dress.  So I’m going to.  As a writer you imagine your life to be comfortably confined to the darkened room where you do your thing (I recently had a Vitamin D blood test that read close to Rickets.  I’m taking supplements...).  When you just don’t want to disappoint anyone, you’re at your most vulnerable.  So how do you be truly and honestly you, sans persona, when the anxiety brought on by performance is both your best intellectual stimulant and your best chance of sphincter failure? 

If only Creepy and Maud could run this thing. 

And if you’re going down the Depends route, a loose slack is probably a better wardrobe option.

James Earl Jones and Water in My Head

“These teens are useless.  They come to us with a reading age of five.  Their only hope is to improve themselves just enough to marry into the middle class.”

Someone said this to me recently and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.  I hate it when something gets stuck in my head (water’s the worst...).  And when things replay in my head it’s like a frigging James Earl Jones voice over, saturating the replay with all the significance of God clearing his throat.  In an effort to exorcize God’s phlegm I’m going to briefly bore anyone foolish enough to venture onto this blog with my views on this statement.

Firstly, we all know these sorts of teens (or think we do by appearance).  You know the ones – bad haircuts, bad language, bad dress sense, mooching about in shopping centre car parks wearing T-shirts with slogans so offensive that I wonder how their mothers actually let them out of their cages that day.  I’ve been as enraged as the next person when some 15 year old with the Rock of Gibraltar on his shoulder loosens a grolly at my feet as I’m passing.  (If you spit on my shoes I will vomit on yours).  So what is it about?

I’m no social anthropologist - I’m not even a teacher - so I am ridiculously unqualified to offer an opinion as definitive as that given to me during a discussion about connecting with teenagers.  And I know that I am probably in the minority in having an opinion about these sorts of teens which does not involve them either ending up in prison or marrying “up”.  But the truth is someone failed these kids multiple times.  As soon as invalidation meets adolescent hormones, we’re in trouble.  And I do mean “we”.  It’s not just that these are the people who will be running the aged care facilities we’re all in someday so let’s not piss them off anymore – it’s that somewhere around their young adulthood, when we’re bleating at these teens about taking personal responsibility, we conveniently forget that we were accountable for them up until yesterday so if their reading age is five, we bloody failed!

And are we abandoning the marginalized too quickly?  If the adults in their lives have decided there’s no point, why should the objects of this apathy decide any differently?  And let’s look seriously at the option of marrying “up”, if that’s their “only hope”.  What does that mean?  We stop concentrating on engaging with kids who are failing our expectations and simply concentrate on teaching them not to wipe their mouths on the tablecloth or fart in church?  Strike me purple.  I can hear James Earl again...

I think teenagers from lower socio-economic areas are in danger of being ghetto-ed by the very people entrusted to inspire them.  I understand being jaded – however the longer I’ve been in this world I’ve found that the demographic who has most inspired my cynicism has been grown-ups.   

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly know how far one can go.” - T.S. Eliot

How far is too far?

I ask myself this question after being questioned myself, about the subject matter I choose to explore Creepy & Maud.  After being questioned by someone I thought would simply celebrate the fact that I was being published.  After being questioned by someone who shrunk into themselves even further when I mentioned what I was working on now.

So, how far is too far in the YA genre?  I’m not talking about the superficial stuff such as: how often can I use the word “fuck”?; can my characters do a line of cocaine?; can my characters have sex?; can my characters be raped?; can my characters hold up a bottle shop, collide with another car during the get-away, kill an innocent in the other vehicle, blah blah blah?... Ironically all of this seems kosher.   Pick an issue, get the moral in, and make sure the didactic conclusion satisfies the expectations of every adult who reads it. 

But what if you write without the filter of “will-the-adult-audience-be-comfortable-with-this?”  What if you lost that filter somewhere in your own young adulthood...in a gay nightclub...on a school night...in a borrowed bra...getting drunk when your mum thinks you’re at a study sleepover with responsible adults supervising?  (I’m just saying, you know, that that could happen...)  And what if you never re-claimed that filter?

I’m not talking about shock for shock’s sake.  Plenty of things that have been labeled “confronting and authentic” have left me going “Ewwwww”.  Nor am I advocating personal irresponsibility.  However when ‘responsible’ becomes cipher for bowdlerization, I get a bit itchy.  We underestimate our young adults.  I’m guilty of it myself.  I had the most ungenerous thoughts about the gang of obnoxious criminals-in-waiting harassing elderly shoppers at my local recently.  But what if those young men had been cut off at the pass with books which asked, with genuine interest: “What is your secret life?”  We can go there in picture books for Christ’s sake; what’s the big deal when we’re using words with more than two syllables?   Could uncensored, won’t-make-grown-ups-comfortable literature have made a difference?  (Of course it’s too late for those little illiterate wankers...)

I once heard Noni Hazlehurst in interview about her time on Play School.  She said it was one of the hardest gigs she ever did because kids have the greatest bullshit detectors on the planet.  If they suspect you are patronizing them, they immediately tune out.  We lose out bullshit detectors as adults – our bullshit detectors are lost within the stupor of political correctness, civility, doubt in ourselves, hesitation to offend, and desperation to please. 

I love the YA genre because the audience isn’t cooked yet.  They think they are, but they’re not.  There is so much fervor, faith, ire and conviction in our young adults, and I want to grab them there, where they are.  I don’t want to teach them anything.  I want to hold a mirror up.  There are so many exquisite YA writers doing this: Scott Gardner, Melina Marchetta, Julia Lawrinson, Nick Earls, Sonya Hartnett, and of course Margo Lanagan - where and when do people get the time and audacity to be offended by anything written with heed and poise when there are things like Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey out there...

I want young adults to know that everyone feels like they’re not good enough; that everyone makes colossal mistakes; that everyone regrets something ; that doing something monstrous doesn’t make you a monster; and that fully-cooked adult human beings often behave in really fucked up ways too.  So I take all of that uncooked stuff still in me and find that even in its tempered form it is still offensive to some people?  Reality is often the most offensive thing, isn’t it?

“Mum and Dad started fighting around the time Dad trimmed his pubes.  I wasn’t supposed to know that but I heard it all.  It seems Dad had never been much into the whole grooming thing down there throughout the marriage, so Mum found his sudden desire to mow the lawn, so to speak, somewhat suspicious.  Rightly so, I reckon.  Dad made out Mum was paranoid and said he didn’t chuck a wobbly when Mum shaved her pits, so what’s the problem?  Mum reminded Dad about the time Dave down the street wanted to borrow Dad’s chainsaw and how Dad had spent two hours cleaning and oiling it for him first.  Dad had never been much into his chainsaw until he found someone else wanted to use it.”

- Creepy & Maud ( Fremantle Press, 2012)

Offended?  I hope so.

Nose Picking and Book Selling

Just like the men who sit in their cars at traffic lights picking their noses believing they cannot be seen, I venture into the world of blogging under the spurious hope that no one will read this whilst bound to become egregiously offended if that actually turns out to be true.

With fingers well away from my olfactory orifices I ask “Can I be seen?” And the answer is now a tentative yes, as I approach the release of my first novel – Creepy & Maud – published by Fremantle Press (October 2012).  The process has been a tonne of fun.  Cate Sutherland (“This book is very loud – can people shout less please?”), Amanda Curtin (“I don’t think anyone uses fly-paper anymore”) and Tracey Gibbs (who hasn’t said anything to me...yet – she just kept sending glorious cover graphics to satisfy every fetish I had) have all helped me birth this thing.  And now Claire Miller (“Don’t blog unless you have something to say...”) is helping me slap it on the arse and send it out there.  Just like any other birth it has involved some gentle reassurance, some enthusiastic coaching and some seriously late nights.  I now look at the finished product and feel much the same as I did after giving birth to my son and sending him forth into the world: “Please don’t shame your mother, and don’t pick your nose at traffic lights.”

Having been a bookseller for so many years it is somewhat confronting (and exciting) to be on the other side of the table, so to speak.  No amount of self-promotion can equal the power a bookseller has to either run with your baby or Tontine it.  I can still remember the excitement of First-Of-The-Month when those trucks backed up and pumped the warehouse full of toxic fumes, the New Release excitement sending a shudder of hushed anticipation through the building on a miasma of exhaust.  There’s nothing like it.  The hovering about “goods-in”, waiting to get your hands on the-one-you’ve-been-waiting-for, getting yelled at for poking about boxes you’re not supposed to be opening, marvelling at frontispieces and getting light headed just from the smell of that delicious polished paper.  It’s like Church. 

And, like Church, booksellers can be swift to point out the shortcomings of their flock.  The opinion as to what has legs and what doesn’t can see some titles scuttled within mere minutes of being pulled from the safety of their Styrofoam noodles. All of a sudden someone’s baby can be shunted to the boondocks of a gondola, spine-out, somewhere between volume 17 of the latest teeny-porn vampire-werewolf saga and the autobiography of a teenage pop star with the maturity of a zygote.  Now I want to go back and rescue those legless, embarrassing little tomes and at least give them one day of face-out-eye-level out of respect for the time it took some poor bastard to write the thing!

It’s an interesting and necessary collaboration, that of bookseller and writer.  There are so many dedicated, intuitive booksellers out there.  They read, they are passionate about getting kids and young adults to read, and they hang about at the delivery dock once a month as if it were a wedding.  (And then of course there’s Big W.  Let’s just admit here and now that we’d all like to be big enough one day to qualify as a loss-leader). 

Symbiotically connected here for the children’s/young adult’s writers is, of course, the teacher and the librarian. They too rely on the bookseller, for advice and guidance and reviews and enthusiasm.  I’m so accustomed to being in that driver’s seat that sitting back and trusting my baby to others is...a very good lesson in self-control.  Because therein lies the rub, doesn’t it? All anxiety is about a self-perceived loss of control.  Which brings me back to Creepy & Maud.

Creepy & Maud is about acceptance of loss of control.  Perhaps I should take a lesson.  But that is not our instinct as adults.  Is it?