Jane Rawson's Blog, page 6

The writer as performing artist

Image by David Henley

It’s been a hectic year for me so far. I’ve organised and run a readathon, appeared at five writers festivals (Emerging Writers Festival, Willy Lit Fest, Bendigo Writers Festival, Melbourne Writers Festival and Write around the Murray), launched two books, read at a fundraiser for Visible Ink and done a bunch of interviews. It’s all good stuff – getting out there, talking about books and ideas, meeting cool people, learning how to mingle and be spontaneous and talk confidently. Even selling a book or two. All of that matters. But when I look at what I’ve written this year, there’s not a great deal going on.

I wrote an article about why commemoration of Anzac Day gets my goat for Overland. I wrote a brief essay/rant, ‘A letter to the west‘, for my performance at Emerging Writers Festival. And I wrote a piece I’m very proud of – the speech Bob Brown will give on the last day of human civilisation – for a Patrick Allington/Seizure Online project called Rhetoric. I’ve also written one short story which I’m still trying to make utterly perfect.

Novel writing? No. None.

Until yesterday, that is. Yesterday I started again. This morning, before breakfast, I did a little bit more. And I reckon I felt cheerier on that train ride into work today than I’ve felt in months. Five hundred quick words of writing is, for me, so much more satisfying than a book launch. Which is ridiculous.

How about you, fellow writers? Would you rather write, or talk about the things you’ve already written? Edit, or spout some ideas on stage? And is there a way to get the perfect mix?

[Postscript – I just realised I’m not quite done: I’ll be on Writers Bloc bookclub with Geoff Orton next week talking about Formaldehyde, but there’s a good chance I’ll do it from the couch in my pyjamas.]

Some Formaldehyde bits and pieces

Formaldehyde is popping its little preserved head up all over the place. Like where? Like here:

On WritersBloc: Dear WritersBloc have chosen me for this month’s book club, which means you can read an excerpt from the book and join me and Geoff Orton online when we talk about it on September 29.
On Seizure: another, different excerpt (you should read this one first because it’s the first chapter…) and a lovely piece from Marisa Wikramanayake about editing Formaldehyde.
At Write Around the Murray: Marlee Jane Ward, who wrote the arse-kicking  Welcome to Orphancorp , Seizure publisher David Henley and I will be talking novellas and reading some bits and pieces in Albury on the evening of Friday 11 September.
On Goodreads: get a copy for free (if you win, but not if you don’t).
In Collingwood, for Visible Ink: Visible Ink magazine wants to pay its writers, so they’re running a fundraiser to get the cash together. I’ll be doing a reading.
On YouTube. Formaldehyde was the first proper thing I wrote and I was terrified I’d run out of ideas so, instead of coming up with a plot like a normal person, I made a mix tape (yes, on cassette) and set myself the task of writing one chapter per song. Something from the song had to appear in the chapter. Not all the references have survived til the final version, and not all the songs can be found on YouTube but still, if you think you’d have fun listening to the kind of terrible music a homesick Australian in San Francisco might cue up, go for it!

Something I never imagined I’d see…

Melburnians, Canberrans, Sydneysiders: wouldn’t you love a weekend away?

Write Around the Murray – Albury’s literary festival – kicks off on September 9. It seems like the perfect excuse for a weekend in regional Australia. This year they’re encouraging visitors to ‘take a journey to alternate worlds’, and featuring sessions on fantasy, sci-fi, climate change, astrophotography and illustration.

I’m taking part in three events:

Viva la Novella launch (Friday afternoon): if you couldn’t make it to the announcement of the Viva la Novella winners last Friday, you’ve got a second chance – David Henley, Marlee Jane Ward and I will be talking about novellas and reading a bit of stuff. As a bonus, Howard Jones will be there too (maybe not that Howard Jones).
When sci-fi becomes cli-fi (Saturday afternoon): Cat Sparks really knows her stuff on this topic, and she’ll be grilling me, James Bradley and Tim Flannery about hope, fear, humor, hubris, science, fiction and the future.
Alternative publishing platforms (Sunday afternoon): David Henley, Danielle Binks and I will talk about all the different ways you might get your words out there so people can read them with their eyes.

Why not get out of town and have a look?

A happy ending to a long story of rejection

Here’s me reading my book seconds after it began existing (thanks to Marisa Wikramanayake for the pic).

It’s not that long ago I was feeling glum about ever getting another book published. Look at me, here, in the past, all glum. Now I have two books coming out at the same time. It’s pretty hard to feel glum about that (though knowing me I might try). There’s The Handbook, out in a couple of weeks. And now my manuscript has won Seizure’s Viva la Novella prize and turned into an actual book called Formaldehyde (which, coincidentally, is a book about hands: a hand book, if you like).

First, thank you so much to Seizure (particularly publisher David Henley) and to editor Marisa Wikramanayake for choosing my manuscript and for putting in so much effort to make it the gorgeous little thing it is today (seriously, it’s worth getting a copy of Formaldehyde or one of the other winners – The end of seeing by Christy Collins and Welcome to Orphancorp by Marlee Jane Ward – just so you can touch the delicious, waxy covers Seizure came up with).

If you wanted to do a case study of the long, hard road a manuscript can take, Formaldehyde might not be a bad choice. I wrote the first draft in November 2000, my first attempt at Nanowrimo (then in its second year). On November 30 it was 50,000 words long and I thought it was bloody brilliant, so I sent it to an agent. It wasn’t, so they rejected it. I rewrote it a bit and sent it to a few more agents. They rejected it. I turned it into a 70,000-word novel. Several more agents and publishers rejected it. I rewrote it and sent it out some more so it could get rejected. By 2014 it had accrued 15 rejections.

Last year Rose Michael, who is a fine person, a great editor and the author of mysterious puzzle-novel The asking game, helped me rewrite it again, this time as a novella. Her excellent suggestions really sharpened the story. But I was also surprised how much, in the intervening 15 years, my view of the characters and what they would do had changed. Giant chunks of the plot needed to be totally rewritten, mainly because I am now a far less romantic person than I was at the turn of the century.

Anyway, the point is that I am so, so delighted it is finally a thing people can read, and a thing I am proud to have them read. Sometimes it’s worth the wait.

(If you’d like to hear Marisa and I burble on about writing, editing and a bunch of other stuff, here’s a podcast from Australian Women Writers.)

Want a free Handbook?

For the next week we’re giving away copies of The Handbook: surviving and living with climate change on Goodreads. If you’re in Australia, pop over here and fill in your details and you could win.

Melbourne Writers Festival & an impersonation of Bob Brown

Illustration by Luke Marcatili

Want to see me on a stage at Melbourne Writers Festival? I’ll be posing as an author at two Melbourne Writers Festival events, a ‘Silver Screen Science’ session featuring the movie Outbreak, and a session with two of my favourite-ever co-panellists, Michael Green and James Bradley, talking about whether climate change is the new apocalypse (fun!).

If you’d rather see me at floor-level with a fortifying drink in my hand, come to the announcement of this year’s Viva la Novella winners – my novella Formaldehyde is shortlisted and if it wins it’ll be available on the night.

If you’d prefer to see me in an audience, I reckon I’ll be going to most of Patrick Allington’s sessions, Mireille Juchau and James Bradley on novel ideas, Eleanor Catton on reading, Kelly Link on the new gothic, and Naomi Klein firing me up for a revolution (I’m ready).

Meanwhile, over at Seizure I’ve been impersonating Bob Brown as part of Patrick Allington’s super series Rhetoric. As Patrick says:

Julia Baird has written that, ‘Political speech-making in Australia today is almost completely lacking in thunderbolts. Political oratory is a lost art, and we are all poorer for it . . .We are all craving inspiration, and leadership, but are deeply bored.’ I agree, which is one reason that I have asked several Australian writers to write a speech on behalf of a politician of their choice. Australia is full of savvy and subtle wordsmiths, and I’d also argue that it is full of political figures and other citizens who do actually give a shit. And yet our national conversation has become straitjacketed, tenaciously earnest, resistant to shades of grey, and – most especially – bogged down in rancour for rancour’s sake. Rhetoric is a response – a fun response, I hope – to these concerns.

Find out why the octopus is our only hope, as I channel Bob Brown speaking to the last remnants of humanity as they’re about to be overwhelmed by a firestorm…

The end of Just Read – a fundraising success

A quick thanks and a really great result.

Can’t get enough of preparing for climate change?

Co-author James Whitmore and I have been blogging away about this and that over on the website for our new book, The Handbook: surviving and living with climate change. He’s been talking about how even laughable heatwaves –  like the one England recently went through – are dangerous under the right circumstances. And I’ve been taking a look at how a chronic over-preparer like me deals with the level of uncertainty and risk that comes with a dodgy climate.

If you want to be kept up to date with events (like the launch) for the book, and find out when we’ve got new blog content (which will include responses to some questions people have emailed us), sign up for the newsletter (down the bottom here).

Just Read readathon wrap up: what I read

Me in later life (image by Steve Bailey/Flickr).

It’s not the end of July, but I’m calling a halt to my sponsored reading and taking a look at what I’ve learned.

You may already know that a few months ago I set up a readathon – JustRead – to raise money for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. Reading and sponsoring happens during June and July, and as of today the 30 brave readers have raised $4811.44. Let’s hope we make it $5000 by the end of July (if you’d like to help make that happen, why not sponsor a reader?)

To lure in sponsors, I offered to read any book on earth, provided the sponsor gave $30 or more. Consequently, since June 1 I’ve read:

Sunset song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (sponsored by Ryan O’Neill)
The wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis (sponsored by Wendy Smith)
Fat, forty and fired by Nigel Marsh (sponsored by Sinead Quinn-Biskup)
A death in the family by Karl Ove Knausgaard (sponsored by Misha Ketchell)
The argonauts by Maggie Nelson (sponsored by James Tierney)
The blazing world by Siri Hustvedt (sponsored by Megan Clement)
Ash Road by Ivan Southall (sponsored by Dani Valent)
Speedboat by Renata Adler (sponsored by Gillian Terzis)
Novel on yellow paper by Stevie Smith (sponsored by Reema Rattan)
The Petrov poems by Lesley Lebkowicz (sponsored by Sue aka Whispering Gums)

(My ‘reviews’ of each are here.)

The weirdest combination was reading Fat, forty and fired followed by A death in the family: two blokes in their 40s in the midst of a mid-life crisis, struggling with being fathers and with the competing pull of art versus making money, each sit down to write a book. The results could not be more different (predictably, I’m going to have to say Karl Ove did a better job. I hadn’t expected to like the Knausgaard, but I was bewitched).

Another major theme was ‘being a woman in a world run by men’, which came out strongly in Sunset song, The wife of Martin Guerre, and The argonauts, hugely in The blazing world and partially in Speedboat, Novel on yellow paper and The Petrov poems.

But the thing I was most struck by was how many of these books were kind-of-a-novel-kind-of-a-memoir constructed out of a series of vignettes: A death in the family, The argonauts, Speedboat and Novel on yellow paper, which seems like an awful lot of books from such a little genre. (While I was doing Just Read I also snuck in a read of Luke Carman’s An elegant young man, which turned out to be another ‘maybe it’s a novel maybe it’s a memoir here’s a bunch of vignettes’ book.) Maybe everyone’s reading books like this right now, or maybe my friends just think I should be.

So should I always get other people to choose my reading? I reckon no. I mostly liked most of the books, but I seem to pick more books I really like when left to my own devices. On the other hand, I probably wouldn’t have read Knausgaard without Just Read and I’m glad I did. But even more so I might never have heard of Maggie Nelson if James Tierney hadn’t chosen The argonauts, and that would have been terrible: no book has blown my mind like that one for a very long time.

Thank you so much to everyone who sponsored me, and to everyone who signed up to read. Push on, you’re nearly there!