Doug MacLeod's Blog, page 3

And now ��� in new, improved GERMAN flavour

I���m not going to bore any of you with a definition of  onomatopoeia, because most of you already know, and if you don���t, it doesn���t especially matter. In my very first verse book that I wrote for Penguin (it was called In the Garden of Badthings and it was a long time ago) one of the verses is nothing but a collection of nonsense words.
My first book of verse with Penguin. It's still in print, if you go for that kind of thing.

 The verse is called A Swamp Romp, and, when read aloud, it���s meant to sound like trudging through a swamp. That���s all there is. There���s no sharp sting in the tail, and nobody dies in a peculiar way. (I was a little surprised when I read my second book of Penguin verse, The Fed Up Family Album. Just about every character ends up dying in a weird way.  My second book of verse with Penguin. A complete bloodbath. The corpse count is higher than Romeo and Juliet, which manages to knock off all the teen characters except one.
People are devoured by shearing machines, or expunged by sculptures made of plumbing. One cousin meets her demise in a knitting machine, and another in a coffin perched on roller skates. It didn���t occur to me at the time that  the book is fixated on death, yet purports to be funny. A critic called David Tickell gave me a really hard time about it, and I now see why. I���m also amazed that I can remember such a dreary name as David Tickell after all these years. We pretend the bad notices don���t bother us, but of course they do. If David Tickell were a character in the Fed up Family Album he���d die a particular nasty and bizarre death, no doubt involving machinery. And yet he���s probably a perfectly nice person. We always pretend to believe that, as well. He���s obviously not a nice person. He���s a troglodyte, a reprobate and that 'c' word that I never use. CRITIC. We seem to have wandered off the point a bit. Here is the original version of A Swamp Romp as it featured in In The Garden of Badthings. (There's an illustration too but you really don't need to worry about that.)

Makes no sense at all. Really doesn���t work unless you���re prepared to read it aloud and indulge a horribly precocious author.
To my knowledge, none of my work has been translated into any wonderfully exotic language, not even French. The Night Before Mother���s Day was translated into American English by the painless rendering of ���Mum��� as ���Mom���. I was surprised when Penguin told me that someone wanted to translate one of my poems into German. I was even more surprised when I learned that the poem they wanted was A Swamp Romp, which really can���t be translated from English, since it���s not actually in English to begin with. I wished them all the best and was startled to find out, eventually,  what a good job somebody had done of translating Anglish nonsense into German nonsense. Here���s the German version. (And German really is the ideal language to use if you���re going to create the impression of trudging through a swamp.) Eins, zwei, drei ���

I'm immensely flattered that someone went to all the trouble of making English onomatopoeia into German onomatopoeia. Here's the German book ���



And here's the monster that apparently makes all those German onomatopoeic noises:




And here is the finished cover art of my next Penguin novel, Tigers on the Beach. It's due out early next year.





Pretty, isn't it? The book will investigate such topics as why there are so many weird deaths in a book that is meant to be funny (The Fed up Family Album, not Tigers on the Beach). Yes, it's a book about comedy.





xxxxx

And now … in new, improved GERMAN flavour

I’m not going to bore any of you with a definition of  onomatopoeia, because most of you already know, and if you don’t, it doesn’t especially matter. In my very first verse book that I wrote for Penguin (it was called In the Garden of Badthings and it was a long time ago) one of the verses is nothing but a collection of nonsense words.
My first book of verse with Penguin. It's still in print, if you go for that kind of thing.

 The verse is called A Swamp Romp, and, when read aloud, it’s meant to sound like trudging through a swamp. That’s all there is. There’s no sharp sting in the tail, and nobody dies in a peculiar way. (I was a little surprised when I read my second book of Penguin verse, The Fed Up Family Album. Just about every character ends up dying in a weird way.  My second book of verse with Penguin. A complete bloodbath. The corpse count is higher than Romeo and Juliet, which manages to knock off all the teen characters except one.
People are devoured by shearing machines, or expunged by sculptures made of plumbing. One cousin meets her demise in a knitting machine, and another in a coffin perched on roller skates. It didn’t occur to me at the time that  the book is fixated on death, yet purports to be funny. A critic called David Tickell gave me a really hard time about it, and I now see why. I’m also amazed that I can remember such a dreary name as David Tickell after all these years. We pretend the bad notices don’t bother us, but of course they do. If David Tickell were a character in the Fed up Family Album he’d die a particular nasty and bizarre death, no doubt involving machinery. And yet he’s probably a perfectly nice person. We always pretend to believe that, as well. He’s obviously not a nice person. He’s a troglodyte, a reprobate and that 'c' word that I never use. CRITIC. We seem to have wandered off the point a bit. Here is the original version of A Swamp Romp as it featured in In The Garden of Badthings. (There's an illustration too but you really don't need to worry about that.)



Makes no sense at all. Really doesn’t work unless you’re prepared to read it aloud and indulge a horribly precocious author.
To my knowledge, none of my work has been translated into any wonderfully exotic language, not even French. The Night Before Mother’s Day was translated into American English by the painless rendering of ‘Mum’ as ‘Mom’. I was surprised when Penguin told me that someone wanted to translate one of my poems into German. I was even more surprised when I learned that the poem they wanted was A Swamp Romp, which really can’t be translated from English, since it’s not actually in English to begin with. I wished them all the best and was startled to find out, eventually,  what a good job somebody had done of translating Anglish nonsense into German nonsense. Here’s the German version. (And German really is the ideal language to use if you’re going to create the impression of trudging through a swamp.) Eins, zwei, drei …



I'm immensely flattered that someone went to all the trouble of making English onomatopoeia into German onomatopoeia. Here's the German book …



And here's the monster that apparently makes all those German onomatopoeic noises:




And here is the finished cover art of my next Penguin novel, Tigers on the Beach. It's due out early next year.





Pretty, isn't it? The book will investigate such topics as why there are so many weird deaths in a book that is meant to be funny (The Fed up Family Album, not Tigers on the Beach). Yes, it's a book about comedy.





xxxxx

The Loneliness of Liz Lemon

I love 30 Rock, the series created by Tina Fey, based on her experience as a script producer on NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Tina Fey’s beautifully nuanced character is called Liz Lemon, and she has a fairly ambivalent view if her job. But she is very sure about one thing. In the show she has a team of writers working for her and they all hate her. Surely this is paranoia? Why would they all hate someone who basically wants to do a good job and behave like a decent human being? The actors try to beguile her with the usual charming tricks that actors use to get what they want. But the writers’ hatred for Liz Lemon is blatant.



Liz Lemon is right about all her writers hating her.And I know that, because I used to have her job. Okay, the show was Full Frontal and not Saturday Night Live. But my job on Full Frontal was to say ‘No.’
And that’s a terrible job. People will often do anything but say that word, because they know what it leads to. I was the script producer on Full Frontal for a couple of years, where my task was to prepare for air one hour of sketch comedy per week. And it had to be ‘heartland’ sketch comedy. That is to say, the jokes had to appeal to people who live outside the inner city. These outlers actually had to like it. Programmers arrogantly tell you, ‘We make shows for the people we fly over.’ This creates all sorts of problems. First of all, if you’re working in comedy in Melbourne, none of your close friends lives outside the inner city, unless they have farms or islands. So, it’s 1996 and every week I’m getting nagged by my many, many friend about why the show is so lame. I sort of shrug and give a goofy smile that I think is endearing but probably is as annoying as an Andy Mcdowell simper. And I remind myself that I’m being quite well paid by people who want me to deliver them a rating of around 18 per week on a regular basis. And that’s what Full Frontal used to get. So, stuff the inner city, there were obviously a lot of people in the suburbs who were watching Full Frontal week after week, and why the hell would they do that if they didn’t think it was funny?


 One year we employed the excellent New Zealand-born comedian Alan Brough as a core writer for the show. I fell in love with Alan, just like everyone does. He’s ridiculously charismatic. And yes, he’s very funny. You can also talk with him about literature if you want, because he actually reads, though my main aim was to extract from him two minutes of broadcast-quality comedy script material per week. At first I was sure it wouldn’t be hard. He was sweet, clever and funny. He also didn’t seem like other sketch writers. He bathed, he cared about how he dressed, he flossed, and he was polite.  I was staggered by the air of politeness the gentle giant brought to the scuzzy writers’ room in Dorcas Street. When Alan picked up a ringing phone, he didn’t give the usual Dave O’Neil ‘Yeah?’ He actually told the ringer which extension they had reached and asked to whom would they like to speak. At first I thought it was some sort of wind-up, but I’m now convinced it was all quite genuine. I think Alan was just born nice, like a lot of New Zealanders. I was reasonably sure I’d have no trouble talking him through a script, maybe suggesting a rewrite, or getting him to liaise with the performers, since his script would have a better chance of being filmed if a performer was particularly keen on doing it.
I’m not affable. I thought I was, but I’m not. And I discovered that Alan Brough isn’t affable either – at least not when you say ‘No’. I was so dumb, I didn’t get it at first. I asked the other writers what had happened to Alan? Why had he stopped being nice? Things not going well at home? Some relative fall into a mud spring? Pesky outbreak of ebola virus? The writers thought I was being disingenuous, or probably an easier word that means deceitful. Surely I knew why Alan Brough had started hating me. ‘Hate’ is probably too strong a … no, we’ll stick with that. Finally Anthony Watt, who is one of those sketch writers with a pretty impressive education behind him and who ended up producing ABC’s The Spicks and The Specks, explained to me that I had rejected a script from Alan. Alan hated me for the same reason that all the writers hated me. I had said no. Actually, knowing how keen I was to foster better producer/writer relations, I had probably given Alan a whole page of notes as well, maybe even grand final tickets. (We were working at Seven, after all, and there were usually good tickets to the tennis, the footy and even the Olympics – though not, oddly, The Logies, even in a year that we were nominated (it hurts, and it’s on my website, in the ‘Commercial break’ section, if you’re interested. I didn’t think so). I know I would have been polite to Alan, even though I had not used his work. Because, dammit, I wanted lovely big funny Alan to likeme. I had heard reports of other script producers who had been so despised by their employees that they had been forced into a graceless retirement up north somewhere, maybe teaching the odd class in Advanced Irony at a TAFE college.  But I was determined that wasn’t going to happen to me. I’d be the ‘nice’ script producer. But unfortunately, as I was soon to learn, you’re only nice if you say ‘yes’ and if that means we spend a lot of money shooting a sketch that stiffs and that I’ve greenlighted, then everybody, not just the writers, will stop liking me.
What amazed me was the speed of Alan’s transformation. I’d only rejected a script for god's sake, I hadn’t told him that his mother had a face like a bashed crab.
I didn’t truly realise the depth of this writerly resentment until I attended Anthony Watt’s wedding and found myself listening to four speeches, all of which were delivered by members of Full Frontal’s writing staff and all of which included a cheap swipe at me about what a bastard I was.



Shaun Micallef was such a rare and wonderful find that I not only wanted him to like me, I wanted him to write an awful lot of sketch material every week. He and Gary McCaffrie were easily the best writers we had. I had been known to schedule Shaun Micallef sketches without them even existing, confident in the knowledge that Shaun would come up with something.  And Shaun was, indeed, the picture of what Alan Brough had originally been. He was courteous. He never stuck a phone receiver down the back of his shorts to scratch his arse. (Neither did Dave O’Neil, but I swear I once saw one of my writers do that.) Of course, it helped that Shaun was a strong performer and he would be the one delivering the material, so he had a vested interest in making the thing go as well as possible. Shaun Micallef will do absolutely anything for comedy. He has been shaved completely bald on a ‘live night’ for a gag, the nub of which  escapes me. He has walked through the South Melbourne Shopping Precinct stark, bollock naked except for a police cap and boots. The sketch wasn’t the best we’ve done, but you have to admire courage like that that. He has also done some of the most dangerous slapstick I have ever seen in front of a studio audience. I had to make discreet enquiries about whether Channel Seven would be liable to compensate Shaun (a lawyer, don’t forget) in the event of his damaging himself. I was more concerned about losing the show’s main engine. Without Shaun we really wouldn’t have a show. He was always nice, even when I had to drop sketches that hadn’t quite worked though they were ‘conceptually funny’. Shaun never used that expression. He’s not as pretentious as I am. No one is.
A brief detour. Producer Alan Hardy has had a brilliant career. I believe he ‘discovered’ Kylie Minogue. She was under a chair somewhere.  Though Alan was always doing great work, he was forever known as ‘the son of Frank Hardy’. It’s one of the bugbears of having a famous parent. And now that Frank is no longer the behemoth he once was, Alan is now faced with another bugbear. He is now known as the father of Marique Hardy, yet another behemoth who happens to be his daughter. I sat with Alan recently, though it can’t have been that recently because we drank a fair bit and I haven’t done that for a while. We were chatting like a couple of old luvvies about Shaun Micallef, when Alan mentioned an anecdote that Shaun had told at some conference somewhere. Someone complimented him, quite rightly, on the quality of his first ABC sketch series. Had it been hard to do? Shaun replied that it wasn’t that hard to do, since it had already been written. He had simply used all his sketches that had been rejected from Full Frontal. Alan seemed to think this was incredibly funny. (So, I gather, did the audience at the conference.)  I did not think it was incredibly funny because it was untrue and wrong, wrong, wrong. (Wow. Sorry about the font change but this hurts.) I won’t be accused of being the man who turned down plasticine ‘Myron’, a mini masterpiece that certainly would have been absorbed and, inevitably overwhelmed by Full Frontal.
That first ABC Micallef series really was a belter and I hated the notion that I had rejected that much good stuff. I’ve never told Shaun I'm upset about what he apparently said at the conference. It would be awkward, so I had to pretend that I could take it on the chin, just as all the comedy workers have to do. The loneliness of Liz Lemon. How well I understand it.

 Not long ago, Shaun did a magazine interview about how dispiriting it was to join Full Frontal, especially as he had submitted thirty scripts on his first go, and they had all been rejected – the reader inferred, quite summarily. He’s right, I did reject them, but I didn’t actually throw them into a fire while brandishing a crucifix, I rejected them courteously. I don’t know if it really was thirty scripts, though it wouldn’t surprise me, as Shaun’s annual scriptfall is huge. There were certainly a lot of scripts in his first submission. But I do remember sitting with Shaun in his first week and telling him that I thought the material he had submitted was very funny (undoubtedly most of it was) but that I was concerned it might not appeal to our show’s target audience, who might not be as familiar with the movie Greystoke  as Shaun evidently was. One of Full Frontal’s trademarks was a weekly - usually dire - TV or movie parody. If we did a movie parody it had to be something like Star Wars; any movie that was ludicrously well known, or ‘our audience wouldn’t understand.’ (I had that direct from the Seven boardroom boys. Channel Seven viewers apparently did not go to movies, perhaps in fear that they might accidentally end up seeing an Australian one.) Now, Shaun had chosen to write a parody of a movie that was not only ‘arthouse’ but that had also been made in 1984, twelve years before our meeting. There were jokes that not even the most ardent of  Christopher Lambert fans – and there must be dozens - wouldn’t have got. Most of our viewers would have been around four in 1984 and probably thrilling more to the wit and wisdom of Owly School than an elegant retelling of the Edgar Rice Burroughs tale of the mysteriously cross-eyed boy who was raised by apes and eventually brought into society. Anyway, Shaun seemed affable enough about my gentle rejection, and, thank god, he kept writing for me. Though he pointedly resisted writing show or movie parodies since he rather detested them. There was an incident … I remember casting Shaun in a live night presentation of a parody based on the Fran Drescher series, The Nanny. It turned out that cast member Kitty Flanagan could do a pretty good impersonation of Nanny Fran Fein’s laugh. Anyway, a script was produced by four of Full Frontal’s regular writers.  I tried to make it as painless as possible for Shaun by adding a few good jokes for him – though I recall it wasn’t a solid-gold script and was probably just a limp parody highlighting Australia’s ineffably stupid government. We used that same formula for nearly every parody. I wonder if anyone noticed? I thought that, in a way, casting Shaun was an act of flattery. After all, we needed a handsome performer to play the debonair Mr Sheffield, and while cast member Eric Bana was certainly handsome, he just didn’t have the ‘class’ that Shaun had. And John Walker was so small he could only play ants. Anyway, the sketch was never aired, or indeed completed. Shaun found it impossible to deliver a single line correctly and seemed to have suddenly developed Alzheimer’s. I think it was Shaun’s secret  message to me that he would be writing his own material from then on. Actually, it would have been better if he’d actually told me this to my face, since we had already spent a motzer on a set that passably resembled the set in the original  TV show, wardrobe had sourced some suitably outrageous stuff for the Fran Fein (Kitty) to wear, and make-up had spent hours trying to get our regular cast to look like the cast of the famous American sitcom highlighting the talents of Fran Drescher. Musician Yuri Worontschak had already written a soundalike of the show’s theme song. I really, really wish Shaun had said ‘No.’ But maybe he didn’t want me to get offended.



Years later, in an awkward turning of tables, Shaun asked me to submit material for his new SBS sketch program, Newstopia.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIfH0vY2ANA  I knew that it was probably a mistake, but I did agree to submit some stuff and my name even appears on the IMDB writing credits of the show, even though nothing of mine went to air. There’s a good reason for this. I felt embarrassed about submitting to Shaun, as by now I was quite in awe of him. I did send him one sketch that examined the trope, oft favoured by reporters, that if a butterfly beats its wings in Brazil, there ends up being an earthquake in Australia, or somewhere on the other side of the world. I think it’s to do with chaos theory, because everything is. One night I saw a journalist trying to use the expression, but he became geographically confused. His butterfly was located in Paraguay and his earthquake ended up being in Bolivia. That doesn’t quite work, because Paraguay and Bolivia are too close together, they share a border, so the whole sentiment of the expression is lost. It’s almost as if there really are butterflies in Paraguay that are capable of causing earthquakes in neigbouring countries by beating their wings. So I wrote a sketch that had Shaun arguing the point with an interviewee, moving off the subject and wondering whether there should be some eradication program for these South ameican killer butterflies. Even as I type this, I blush with embarrassment. It wasn’t a good idea, I shouldn’t have turned it into a sketch and sent it to Shaun. It wasn’t used and neither of us has ever mentioned it. Shaun didn’t want to say no. He let me do it for myself.
 The loneliness of Liz Lemon.

From Bad to Verse

I'm sorry, but this post is another of my old verses. I couldn't find any appropriate pictures to go with it.
It's one of a pair that you can find in this book:

I'll post he seond ne, next time i miss my blog deadlinne
The Yay Boo Spell
A solemn child, I never smiled.My face was long and scowling.The kids would cry when I walked byAnd dogs would all start howling.
My dad was bleak, ‘Our son’s a freak.There’s nothing we can do.We’ll simply have to sell himTo a circus or a zoo.’
‘We cannot sell our baby boy!’My mother told him flat.‘You'd have to be an idiotTo buy a kid like that.’
They took me to a hypnotist,(They found her on the 'net)She made a first impressionThat I never will forget.
It didn't make me confident,The costume that she wore -A dozen coloured tableclothsThat almost reached the floor
But naturally, I couldn't smileAlthough she looked absurdI simply sat there frowningAnd I didn't say a word.

The hypnotist regarded me,A pouting, scowling kid. 'His face could stop a clock,’ she said. My father said, ‘It did.
'We'll pay you anything,' he said. 'To fix his wretched state.' The hypnotist said, 'Fifty bucks?'And Dad said, 'Forty-eight.'
She waved her hands before my eyes,‘You’re feeling very sleepy.’I sat perplexed, and what came nextWas curious and creepy.
'Yay boo!' she cried, as if possessed'Yay boo a thousand times!'(I think it was a magic spellThat came from foreign climes.)
And as she spoke repeatedlyOf yaying and of booing,I scarcely could believe the thingsMy face had started doing.
A blink, a twitch, a facial itch,A jerk, a smirk, a sneer.At last I wore a giant grinThat stretched from ear to ear.

My parents hugged the hypnotist,'A miracle!' they cried.'However can we pay you back?''With money,' she replied.
They paid the bill, then with a thrillMy parents hit the mall.They jumped for joy, ‘Our darling boyIs human after all!
'His rosy cheeks look lovelyAnd his teeth are pearly white.Did anybody ever seeA more enchanting sight?
'We thought we would abandon him,Or send him far awayBut now he's started smilingWe're prepared to let him stay.'
But then a solemn funeral passed,The coffin piled with roses,I couldn’t stop my smilingAs the mourners blew their noses.
'You'd better stop your smiling, son.'That's quite enough for now.'You should look sad,' my father said,And I responded, 'How?'

'You mean, that grin is permanent?'My mother was appalled.(I blushed at all the naughty thingsThe hypnotist was called.)
The people saw my grinning face,They bellowed, ‘How unkind!’Then threw their soggy hankiesAnd whatever they could find.
The crowd went wild, ‘You gruesome child!For leering at the dead!’A lady picked her crutches upAnd crunched me round the head.
We passed the local hospitalWith patients on their trolleys I beamed at all the invalids,They pelted me with lollies.
A nearby busker played guitarAnd sang a bluesy songAbout the tragic life he'd ledWhere everything went wrong.
His mother never wanted himHis father called him namesHis sister played with matchesSo their house went up in flames.

And every single line he sangWas sadder than the last The people gave him moneyAs, respectfully, they passed.
Alas, my grin got bigger stillDespite his tragic rhymesAnd when the busker swore at meIt echoed several times.
The busker didn't care for it,He lifted his guitarAnd showed me how convenientFor whacking things they are.
Police pulled up and collared me,The cause of all the fuss'Does someone own this grinning child?'My parents said, 'Not us.'
'You're lying!' the police declared,'It's absolutely clear.You'd better make him wear a bagAnd get him out of here.'
We couldn’t find the hypnotistWho’d started all the strife.‘He can't go out like this,’ said Dad.‘We’re stuck with him for life.’

As usual, my dad was wrong.I'm very pleased to sayI broke the dreaded Yay Boo spell By shouting out 'Boo Yay!'
And now my face is beautiful,I promise that it's trueAnd if you don't believe meThen to you I say, 'Yay Boo!'

Bloody Stupid

I learned with sadness that Terry Pratchett is suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s. I think I have a taste of what that is like. This morning I managed to screw up two perfectly simple tasks. The first was to confirm that the Foxtel repair person was coming today to fix my clapped out Foxtel, as originally arranged. I rely upon Foxtel quite a bit at the moment, as the days drag by and I’m still finding it impossible to write and hard to read anything deeper than a Stephen King. Foxtel’s computer negotiated me through various departments and eventually I got to the customer service people. Why is customer service always the last option? And why do they always tell you at the start of the recorded computer stuff that ‘options have been recently changed, so please pay attention’? Surely the options can’t change that often? Anyway, I waited and eventually spoke to a lovely man called Darryl in India (I suspect ‘Darryl’ might have been an alias.) Anyway, there was a breakdown in communication (my fault). Rather than confirm the appointment, I managed to cancel it altogether. So I rang back, sat with the computer for ten minutes, then desperately tried to reach Darryl and tell him I had made a huge mistake. I wanted to reverse the decision that had been made by accident. No way was that happeningt. I had to make a new appointment and the Foxtel man will now be coming on Sunday morning. So, it’s just two days more without Foxtel. No big deal but how the hell did I manage to cock things up like that? I also renewed my membership with The Australian Society of Authors but gave them a credit card number that was quite wrong. They rang me back about that not half a hour ago. How did I manage to get three of the digits wrong? I had the card right in front of me.
These seem like tiny things to you, and indeed they are, but I make stupid mistakes like this every day. I’ve obviously reached a part of my stroke ‘recovery’ (they assure me I’m getting better) where I am useless at positively everything. No wonder they won’t let me drive. I’m really not bothered that my short-listed book, The Shiny Guys didn’t win the big award. I forgot when it was all supposed to happen and I didn’t know the books with which I was competing. But cancelling the Foxtel man when I already had a perfectly good appointment does bother me, because it seems the sort of thing a mentally impaired person would do. Suddenly I’m living in Mother and Son and I’m Ruth Cracknell. How long will it be before I put something appropriate in the fridge, to gales of laughter from the polite and surprisingly indulgent ABC studio audience? I never liked the show and now I like it a whole lot less. This weekend, will I forget the rule about Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses and invite them in? Will I walk down to Fitzroy Street and give away my money to everyone who asks for it? (A lot do. Though it’s dropped off lately since I started walking and talking like – well, a stroke victim. I guess even the junkies must realise that someone who looks like an extra from The Living Dead is probably unlikely to have anything on him that’s worth taking.)
But, aside from a rather rapid descent into dementia, things have been okay recently. I did my Book Week talks (no more than two in a day, because that’s all I can manage before I close down). The schools were all delightful hosts. I even got a present from St Kilda’s very own Christian Brothers College. I nearly teared up. That’s something else I’ve been doing lately; crying when I shouldn’t. I guess all the drugs I’m taking make me a bit hyper-emotional. I cry at Sherlock Holmes stories. Toilet paper ads. Funeral insurance ads where they tell me that my funeral could cost as much as $20,000 and they imply that if I don’t pay a weekly premium to them, then I would be leaving my penniless children to a life of prostitution and drug-taking.  (Okay, they didn’t actually say that, and I don’t have children, but I still found it sad enough to weep.) It drives me crazy that Penguin wants to call my next book The Opposite of Funny. And it really shouldn’t drive me crazy, because I realise there is no way a publisher would make itself look so utterly stupid by putting out a book with a title like that. Why not just call it Don’t Buy This Book? The first title was Tigers on the Beach, which is why Karen Trump did this amazing cover art:


I know the book isn’t as good as the Body-snatcherbook or even The Shiny Guys, but I don’t have the brainpower to make it better. My brain isn’t sharp enough for me to be an author at present, which is why I’m relying so heavily on my editor, Amy Thomas. She’s good, but I think I need to be taken to task more often. I miss my old editor Dmetri Kakmi because he was quite hard and often I had to justify and fight for the choices I’d made. Here is a typical example of Dmetri editing a page from one of my YA novels. As you can see, he’s fairly ruthless.






But I kept my cool with Dmetri, we found some good solutions and we both of us did the final draft together. I don’t think I’d be able to keep my cool at the moment if I was in a cover/title meeting at Penguin. I’d probably cry. God, it’s all so embrrassing.
Anyway, this afteroon I get to see my neurologist, Dr Palit, to talk about all the terrible crap that has been happening and how we might go about fixing it. Maybe I really do have early onset Alzheimer’s? 
Speaking of funny, or the lack thereof, I went to give blood this week. It sounds benevolent but it’s because I have too much iron, and it needs to be taken out from time to time, or apparently I'll get liver cancer. But for some reason, the nurses always find it very hard to find my veins, which is why my arm has trackmarks. (Probably another reason that Fitzroy street people no longer ask me for money. They’ve all got arms like mine. I’m a brother!) Behold my arm. You can just see the grey mess of trackmarks.

Anyway, the nurses were making it hurt more and more and I was starting to tremble. (It really is a bloody huge needle they use – 4mm, about the diameter of a roofing nail.) One nurse fancied himself as a psychologist and asked me if my trembling was the result of immense pain or the anticipation of immense pain. I confess I was at a loss to answer. Finally, after about a dozen attempts to find the veins in my arm, they decided it would be a good idea to give me a local anaesthetic, which is only a small needle that doesn’t hurt, thus numbing the area before they started plunging in that 4mm roof nail. The doctor who was performing the venesection was a charming Indian man with an expert bedside manner. He kept moving my arm gently and making me hold it out. I had my eyes closed, but rapidly opened them when the back of my hand brushed the groin of his trousers. I felt uncomfortable, but the  Indian guy didn’t seem to mind. I asked him if it was okay to have my hand where it had ended up. He shrugged. It was fine, so long as got the blood out of my body. Then I pointed out - half jokingly - that when I give blood I usually have to squeeze on something like a small rubber ball to assist the flow of blood. The doctor laughed and I swear he said, ‘It’s big and leathery’. He really did say that. Sadly he was the only witness. And given my stunning ability to cancel Foxtel appointments accidentally, or read something that is right in front of my nose, I don’t make a particularly reliable witness myself. 

On Suspension

As soon as the doctors diagnosed me as a stroke victim, my driving licence was taken away. I think this a perfectly sane and correct reaction. I’d hate the idea that there were strokies out there driving SUV’s.
I had a driving test last week in a dual-control car. My teacher David was very good. He specialises in helping to get stroke survivors back on the road. As soon as I sat in the driving seat I felt a huge sense of relief and confidence. Of course I’d be able to drive a car again, I got my original licence without too much trouble and I’d been driving for years. David asked me to drive out onto the beach road that links St Kilda to Port Melbourne. It’s a beautiful road with the sea on one side. I used to drive it every morning when I was working in Nott Street, Port Melbourne, which I did for many years, putting together weekly sketch comedy shows and other productions. It could be an exasperating job, and that drive to work, with the sea on my left, lifted my spirits before I spent the day making decisions about how we could make our productions as effectively and cheaply as possible.
Now my instructor had asked me to rive that route again, and I felt secretly delighted. This was my beautiful commute road. I was fairly confident I’d be able to negotiate such a simple drive. We started well by avoiding the usual crazies on Fitzroy Street who really do seem to want you to run them over. Always drive along Fitzroy Street carefully and slowly, especially outside the Gatwick, and I’m not going to pass judgment, so please people, don’t send me that blood awful poem Blame the Gatwick, which is trotted out whenever something unsavoury like a murder happens there, and fellow St Kilda citizens would prefer it hadn’t and express their alarm or concern.
Back to the driving test. The beach road was perfect, with no crazies wanting you to end their lives and put them out of their suffering. I drove in the right lane for a bit and was surpised to find myself running over the cat’s eyes that divide the right lane from the left. I swear I was driving as carefully as I could, but I kept hitting those cat’s eyes. David took the wheel to direct me back to the centre of the lane. I freaked out. It seemed to me we were about to drive up onto the plantation strip that divides the northbound road from the southbound. I was convinced we would mount the curb and maybe crash into the odd tree, but David told me gently that he was actually redirecting me to the centre of the lane, where the road laws dictated I should be. I remained freaked out. When David let me have the wheel again, I determinedly drove the car back to where I thought we should be, which was far too close to the left lane. Since I was so determined to enter the left lane, David advised me to do so, after it was established that there were no cyclists or cars in that lane. I felt relieved. We were no longer in danger of mounting the right kerb, not that we ever had been. But I kept veering across onto the bike path. After a bit of extra driving, navigation and parking around Port Melbourne, where I saw that the Nott Street Address where I used to work had been changed into a big white thing  (I wasn’t hallucinating, David saw it too) David told me to drive back home.
The whole experience was unsettling because it made me realise that I was suffering left side neglect and this was definitely a result of the stroke.  People think I’m bunking off when I tell them I can’t do much because I’m still stroke-effected. They think I’m lazy. But the damage to my basel ganglia is  very real and I’m not the man I was. I asked David when we would have another test, expecting this might become a weekly thing, the way it used to be. He suggested that three months would be a healthy interval. (Three months! I can remember having my licence taken away for three months when I was in my twenties and a lollypop man reported me to the police because I had crossed over a school crossing while there was still somebody on it. That sounds homicidal, but school crossings are a little different from zebra crossings. In the case of zebra crossings, you may drive over them carefully, provided the pedestrians have already crossed and are well out of your way. But with a school crossing, you are in the wrong if you drive over it even if somebody still has the heel of their foot on the crossing as they are stepping off to the pavement. A three month suspension had seemed an eternity then, and I was kindly ferried around by my girlfriend Carolyn, whose understanding of road law was just a little less than mine. I had been a passenger when she tried to overtake a tram on the right. Carolyn accused me of being a bad passenger because I kept saying inflammatory things like ‘Stop!’ or ‘Please stop!’ or ‘Please don’t knock off the old lady with the shopping trolley.’I deserved the suspension back then, I was the first to admit it. Now, I’ve just been given another suspension while we try to work out my left field perception problem. I deserve this new suspension too. I positively, absolutely don’t want to cause a car accident, because I’ve been in one and they’re nasty. It was in a Sydney cab, so I plead mitigating circumstances m’lud.
Three months does seem an inordinately long time between driving lessons, and who knows if I’ll be any better next time? I don’t know what exercises I should be doing to improve my left side cognition, because my neurologist is on holiday.
My car is an unimpressiveVW Golf and I’ve had it for ten years. Like al the VW Golfs in St Kilda it is silver. I mainly use it to drive to schools on the outer edge of suburbia; schools that have been kind enough to pay me to speak with kids who are ‘studying’ my books, poor sods. A few schools study my book Tumble Turn, which I give away with this site, and will continue to do until Penguin reprints. Since the stroke, I can remember aspects of writing that book much more clearly than ever, so I’m happy to talk about it. I find it much harder to recall recent, trifling things, such as what day it is. The recent break-in and theft of my computer means that I had to come up with a whole series of new passwords, very few of which I am able to remember. No wonder I’m nervous about getting involved with Internet banking.
The stroke happened eighteen months ago. Forgive me if I keep banging on about it, but it’s changed my whole bloody life and not for the better. Someone made an extraordinary statement the other day. They  knew someone who was about my age and who had also suffered stroke. This person apparently said that the stroke was the best thing that could have happened to him., I wanted to know in which alternative universe this person lived, because I can think of absolutely nothing that is good about a stroke. But apparently this person’s life improved because he realized his lifespan was limited, not infinite, and if he wasn’t happy with his lot, he had better  change a few things about his work and lifestyle. The trouble is, I rather liked being an author, even though I sometimes grumbled about it. I would very much like to be an author again, but I know for a fact that I can’t quite do it at the moment. The most frustrating thing for me is I left my nice TV job to write novels, that were profoundly ignored by the people who are not supposed to ignore this sort of thing. I’ll admit, with apologies to my good friend Graeme Base, that I was actually offended when his book Truck Dogs, made the CBCA shortlist one year and Tumble Turn didn’t, and Truck Dogs actually won! But just before the stroke, all that was starting to change. My Penguin titles The Life a Teenage Body-snatcher and The Shiny Guys were starting to appear on shortlists. I was finally invited to speak at The Melbourne Writers Festival, and I was getting more speaking engagements generally, though I think that was probably because I was also script-editing a show, Kath and Kim, which had suddenly became very popular, and teachers found it somewhat easier to get kids to watch an episode of the series rather than look at one of my books before I came to speak. At a writers festival in Kunanurra, pictures of Kath and Kim were pasted up everywhere, inviting the public to see the show’s ‘creator’ speak about the experience of being terribly funny and popular. You’d swear the lovely ladies from Fountain Lakes themselves were coming to the Pilbara. I didn’t like being a spokesperson for their show, though I’m proud to be a part of it. It is spectactularly unfair for Jane Turner and Gina Riley who were the sole creators and writers of the series. I have never seen two people work harder, and my contributions were relatively minor, but you can read about that on my website. Somehow though, I was starting to get noticed as a writer of books. The stroke rather rapidly put an end to that.
I’ll let you know how I get on with my left side neglect.  It’s probably more interesting than writing about how bloody wonderful I am and the trials of being a writer for young Adults. (There really aren’t that many trials. I quite liked my old life.)

Tiger, Tiger

After expressing profound doubts in my previous post about the quality of my  current novel, The Silence of Tigers, to be published by Penguin early next year, I have now decided I like it again. I’m doing a ‘pass’ over the first draft, just to make sure the characters’ names are spelled the same way throughout, and  I haven’t committed any howlers involving bad grammar, bad choice of words and just general badness.
The reason I disliked the novel was that I really hadn’t visited it again since my stroke, and was more or less under the impression that everything I’ve been writing lately must be terrible. The book has a plot that’s embasrrassingly simple and old fashioned – boy-gets-girl, boy-loses girl, boy gets back girl by showing extraordinary strength, kindness or just plain decency. There are my trademark explosions. The book will annoy some people, I think, because it examines the theme of comedy and how we are both united and divided by it.  This means I have had to include examples of jokes in their many forms. What I find funny, you may not, and yet you will insist that you have a sense of humour, in the same way that I defend mine. I did mention in my last post that the title ‘The Silence of Tigers’ is far too poetic and would be changed. For the time being the book will be known as The Best Joke in the World, which shows hubris on my part, as I know that critics just love to attack comedies. (Particularly if you're promising something pretty funny, such as 'the best joke in the world'. There was a famous TV critic, tragically no longer with us, who would just itch to savage any new comedy that came to Australia’s TV screens. His name was Ross Warrneke, and his vitriol became so inevitable, that I stopped sending him preview copies of new shows I had made. This naturally made him angry and he went out of his way to  watch the show as it went to air. He then did what many critics do when savaging a comedy. He quoted jokes entirely out of context and challenged the reader to find them funny.  The best jokes in the world can be made to appear lame, if you don’t quote them correctly, or you quote the setup but not the tag, or vice versa.  One of Warrneke’s more surreal pronouncements involved the early Kath and Kimshows, which were gaining quite a following. He refused to retract his critique that the show was awful, and that’s fair enough. The man’s entitled to an opinion, after all, and is Indeed paid for it. But the most bizarre thing he wrote was a piece where he blamed newspapers for elevating the show’s status by overpraising, such as trumpeting that two and a half million Australians had watched one of the episodes, which was apparently some kind of record, but Mr Warrneke was obtuse enough to remind readers that this meant  17,500,000 Australians hadn’t watched the episode. Mr Warrneke is missed by many, and there was a good turn-out for his funeral. About 250 Australians attended, quite an impressive number. Mind you, this means that 19,999,750 Australians didn’t attend. It’s all a matter of perspective, you see. Amazingly, episodes of the some of those comedies I produced at the end of the eighties are appearing on YouTube. It looks a bit jaded after all these years, but I still find Kim Gyngell's performance terrifically funny. We made the show for next to nothing. Unfortunately, it shows. I don't know how you managed to get these, Stig, but well done. Anyone who has the staying power to last till the end of the episode will see the first use of CGI ever in an Australian sitcom. 
But enough about TV. Going back to the original title of the book, The Silence of Tigers, it is actually relevant to an incident in the book, but I had to tweak that incident just enough to make the title work. And the title was born when I gave a talk about comedy books at The Wheeler Centre. I mentioned the Vonnegut classic, The Sirens of Titan, thought by many, myself included, to be a comedy science fiction classic. Certainly, Douglas Adams was a fan and he seemed to have a pretty good grasp of what was funny. After my speech, a lady came up to me and asked me if she’d written down the title correctly, because it seemed a bit odd. What she had written was The Silence of Tigers, which is apparently what it sounded like when I said The Sirens of Titan, with my temporary speech impediment.. It struck me that this was a very beautiful title, and I was surprised to find that it fitted my current manuscript quite well. There are actually two tigers in it, but the don’t feature centre stage like Richard Parker in The Life of Pi.


Another great cover idea, though, sadly, no longer  relevant to the book.
Amy Thomas,  my new editor, probably anticipated some puzzled rumblings from Penguin’s marketing division, and politely gave me a suggestion list of alternative titles. They were good, and some of them even retained the reference to tigers, but none really grabbed me. So, for the moment we’re calling the book The Best Joke in the World, and keeping our fingers crossed that Mr Warrneke doesn’t rise from the grave. Anyway, I quite like the book now. It won’t make any shortlists, because it isn’t that sort of book.  It sets out to amuse, which is hardly a very lofty ideal and pretty much guarantees being passed over by the gatekeepers, but we don’t write to be featured on shortlists, although of course it’s lovely when it happens. Having written and published about a novel a year since I left full-time TV work in 2002, and having never featured on a shortlist of any kind, it was my firm pronouncement when I handed Penguin the manuscript of The Life of a Teenage Body-snatcher that I had made a book that was quite incapable of being included on any prize lists at all. I was utterly gobsmacked when it appeared on two shortlists, and even got an ‘Honour’ in The Australian Children’s Book Council awards. Suddenly the universe had changed. The Shiny Guys, my last book, also managed a decent showing in the shortlist stakes; it’s a weird book, certainly not classic ‘shortlist’ material, but I think it was considered ‘worthy’; by some people, because it was funny, but about clinical depression. (At least I knew my subject quite well.) It seemed the best way to make the shortlists was not to try to write something that you might consider to be suitable shortlist fodder. So, who knows? Maybe a book called The Best Joke in the World might end up on someoine’s shoretlist, even if it’s just Books I wish I could unread to give me the time to read something that’s actually good.
While we can pronounce shortlists as ‘unimportant’ that is, of course, hooey.  We writers rely on this sort of attention for sales. A nod from the ACBC immediately guarantees a reprint as every school library in Australia does its darndest to obtain a copy. A shortlisting doesn’t just bump up royalties, it means that PLR/ELR, the annual grant that all Australian writers receive as compensation for books unsold owing to library purchases, goes up. This is an immensely important stipend, and without it many authors would find life much tougher. We also get money from the copyright agency, as reimbursement for our works that are photocopied. Gradually, provided you can remain in print, it becomes possible to make a living as an author. It’s not a terribly glamorous living, but it’s not as if I am performing a vital function in writing books about tigers and jokes. Although I must say I’m glad that when I was a kid I could read Australian novels by Mavis Thorpe Clark or Ivan Southall or Patricia Wrightson.  Mavis Thorpe Clark even wrote a book about where I grew up in Gippsland in Blue Above the Trees. It was wonderful to be able to read about a landscape I knew, and I’ll never forget the bit about the burning, where our principal characters stand at the outskirts of a forest fire and are suddenly crawling with waves of huntsman spiders, desperately escaping the inferno.Images like that don’t die easily. I hope we can say the same for the Aussie book industry.
 

Lunch with my editor and other tragedies.

On this very cold and wet Melbourne day I trammed into town to meet with my new editor, the lovely Amy Thomas. We had a new book to discuss, one that I wrote ages ago.  (I confess I have reservations but will do my darnedest to make the book better).
On the way to Penguin headquarters near Southern Cross station, I passed some men who were cleaning some seriously disgusting graffiti from a wall. The rain started pelting down and a toxic slurry produced by their efforts ran over the footpath and into the gutter.  Only a fool would be stupid enough to tread in this slurry, and I avoided it . What I didn’t know was that I had merely avoided walking in the painty part, but there was apparently a corrosive acidy part, invisible to the naked eye. And my eyes were particularly naked today.
As I sat in the classy Penguin foyer I looked down and realized there was a row of footprints on the floor, leading directly to where I was sitting. What the hell was on my shoes? Stupidly, I thought I would avoid detection by moving to a different seat. All that happened was I made more footprints. Even a child of three would be able to follow the path and link the footprints to me. I was the person who had destroyed the trendy penguin foyer with my painty shoes. But this wasn’t paint. A cursory examination of my shoe heel confirmed there were no paint splotches, but that my rubber soles were in fact dissolving.
Amy Thomas arrived, pretended not to notice the vandalism I had committed on the foyer, and suggested lunch in the café at The Age building, which seemed a good idea, except for the problem with my shoes. I was hoping we might eat in. We both walked across the bridge to The Age building. The wind was bitter. The rain fell in sheets. And my shoes chose this moment to disintegrate completely. I had to explain to Amy why I was making faces like a man with his feet in ice water. The reason was abundantly clear. I lifted one of my shoes, but didn’t want it to look like I was checking for dogshit so I tried a more casual approach, ruined by the fact that the last bit of the heel on my left shoe fell off in a lump and revealed my dark blue explorer socks. I had been doubtful about my choice of sock. Blue with black? But the blue explorer socks had the very real enticement that they were clkean and dry. I also figured we wouldn’t be dining Japanese, so the chances of my editor seeing this blue/black fashion atrocity would be fairly slim. But Amy saw more of my blue socks than I would wish on anyone. It then occurred to me that anything strong enough to eat through rubber might also eat through sock and skin as well, so I found it difficult to pay close attention at our lunch. Amy must have heard about my attention deficit disorder because she had notes carefully typed out and there were even some pictures. All through the focaccias I was scared that my feet might be about to dissolve in industrial solvent. So I had to cut lunch short. Rather than have Amy believe that I am the worst dining companion ever in the history of midday prandial discourse,  I thought I should come clean about the shoes, She thought it was funny, which was a great error of judgment on her part. Not only were my toes suffering hypothermia but there was the very real possibility that my feet were about to go Dali on me.
I thought it best to take a cab home, even though the route 96 is just the best tramline in the world that practically takes me to my door.  But a tram had just left and the helpful electronic sign advised me that there wouldn’t be another for fifteen minutes. Could I wait that long? The acid might have reached my knees by then. So I decided to hang the expense and climb into a taxi. The driver thought I was being overly polite when I removed my shoes and he told me I only had to do that when I was entering a مسجد. I tried to explain about the lunch incident, and I’m pleased to say he didn’t laugh at all. Why should he? It isn’t funny. I think that he may have had limited language skills. Every time I mentioned a pub – that’s how we navigate in St Kilda – he seemed to think I was talking about a person. Who is The Prince of Wales? He does not sound like a productive man if he is always standing on the corner of Fitzroy Street and Acland Street.
I have just given my feet the Karen Silkwood shower. All toes intact, I’m pleased to report.The book we were supposed discussing at lunch is a romcom for teens where comedy is examined in detail. It can both destroy relarionships and build them. It also invites the reader to note that some things that may later seem comic were tragic at the time. For the moment, the book is called The Silence of Tigers, which is far too beautiful a title and will undoubtedly be changed.

Vale Kevin

It’s horrible when your publisher decides to put one of your books out of print, especially if it’s one that you like. (I really wasn’t terribly upset when Con’s Bewdiful Australia was put out of print.)




I'll whack some pictures up here just as soon as I figure out why I can't at the moment.












Kevin the Troll is now officially out of print, and has been for a year.  There are about two thousand copies in schools and libraries so I hope you are lucky enough to find a copy. It was fun to write about a main character who wasn’t terribly nice, even though he has his reasons for being nasty. I finished writing this book on the day of the second-last Federal election. I always vote. I like to think I can make a difference. And I don’t mind queueing at the St Kilda school to do it. You meet interesting people in queues, especially in StT Kilda queues. But on the day I was finishing off the manuscript for Kevin the Troll, I was so thrilled with how easily the story seemed to come that I completely forgot  about voting and I didn’t care! I happily paid the fine (and writers on the whole are not happy to pay for anything.) I did try to say in my defence that I was writing a very good book at the time and couldn’t be disturbed. (Smarty-pants excuses like this don’t  go down well with the electoral office. Not that I’ve used smart-pants excuses before . I’ve always voted and happily paid two dollars for a charred sausage on Home Pride bread with White Crow tomato sauce.)  The sixty page manuscript was delivered to Penguin on the following Monday. I was slightly nervous, because what I wrote on my website is true. Penguin wanted me to write another book like I’m Being Stalked by a Moonshadow,a sort of romcom for boys. Trolls had never been mentioned in the deal. But I got writer’s-blocked, as usual. Although I have now finished the romcom and am editing it with Amy Thomas at Penguin. (New editor! How exciting! Though I think I’ll miss my old editor, Dmetri Kakmi. Kevin the Troll is dedicated to him. One of the trolls is named after him. He hangs around a lot with the troll call Barberastreisand.
 Writing Kevin the Troll was my rest and relaxation from the romcom.  It gave me an excuse to surf the Net for cool sites about Scadinavian mythology. It also gave me the opportunity of doing the talking book version. I’ve not actually listened to it, but I’m told that my Swedish language skills are borderline at best, even though I did get a brief language lesson from the kind people at the Swedish church in Toorak.
Kevin the Troll also gave me the opportunity of writing things that were funny but not particularly relevant to the plot. The book sort of wanders along and takes to very occasional diversion from the plot, which is what Nordic sagas are supposed to do.

But now Kevin is off to Walhalla. Penguin has come up with the absurd excuse that the book isn't making a profit for them. Most unprofessional of them.

There will be something visually amusing here as well, when I've fixed the glitch. Kevin fan Emma HAncox has written KEvin's Epitaph. Thank you, Emma, I'm sure KEvin would have loved it.


The Ballad Of Kevin The TrollBy Emma Hancox - Aged 9 years
When bones go crunch,and flesh is ripped, Kevin The Troll is near.
When you can feel coolmist about,Kevin The Troll is near.
If you can hear groansand shouts, Kevin The Troll is near.
When you can see blackmould and slime,Kevin The Troll is near.
If you can taste him,that would not be true,For Kevin The Troll wouldbe eating YOU!

Who murdered my brain?

There has been a fair whack of publicity regarding Baz Lhrmann’s ‘reimagining’ of The Great Gatsby. In light of this, I feel I have to clear up a gaffe I made during a speech at last year’s Australian Book Council conference in Adelaide. I was on a panel with Michael Gerard Bauer and some other funny writers, where I espoused my habit of reading all the ‘short classics’. There was a general discussion about books like Heart of Darkness and The Outsider and Northanger Abbey, some of which made it to Twitter. I was pretty happy with an answer to the question about whether my books were preferred by girls or boys. I answered that both sexes seem to dislike them about equally.
Then it fell to pieces.
I lost my mind for a few moments and mentioned how perfect are the letters that Fitzgerald exchanged with his editor during the process of writing the great American classic (which, of course, Fitzgerald didn’t realise he was doing). I made the startlingly stupid remark that the reader is never sure of who drove the car that killed Myrtle, one of the principal characters. (Spoiler, but you all know it.) What I said was patently wrong and rates right up there with Sarah Palin telling us all that Africa is a country and not, in fact, a continent. No one corrected me so I shall do so now. Of course we knew who was driving the car. In the letters to his editor, Fitzgerald was never happy with the plot point that forced the departure to New York, thus setting up the Death of Myrtle story. It didn't seem strongly motivated. (Fitzgerald's words.)




Fitzgerald was never satisfied with this part of the book, and this somehow made my stroke-addled brain activate my voice to inform a large, literate audience that Gadsby’s car must have driven itself.
I am profoundly, humbly sorry for saying such an idiotic thing. I think that the only two movies to feature driverless cars are Stephen King’s Christine and Disney’s The Love Bug, neither of which appear in the movie of The Great Gadsby, unless Baz has taken some startling liberties with the story.
It may seem all too convenient to blame the great stroke of 2011 for my gaffe, but that damned thing has changed pretty much every aspect of my life. I find it very difficult to write. And while I bear little in common with WH Auden, unless I age particularly badly, I agree with him when says that unless he writes something every day, he goes to bed feeling unwell.
WH Auden, presumably at the end of a day where he hasn't written anything.
It’s taken a lot longer to recover from that stroke than I thought it would. I can walk, read, watch movies, yet I’m still disabled on so many levels. The bit of my brain that died is at the base of the Basel ganglia. It’s a part of the brain that we need especially for memory, but also for logic, or ‘cause and effect’, which are rather important for a writer. I nervously accepted a job on Shaun Micallef’s wonderful series, Mr and Mrs Murder. I warned the producers that I’d had a stroke and that I was’t at the height of my powers, but they still wanted me for the table meetings, where a group of writers sit and go about the vital task of plotting a series. We were making good progress. I pitched a storyline and started to write it up. myself, away from the table. My story was based on a book I’d read about the extraordinary world of professional body-building, which touched on the subject of doping and strongly indicated that the most effective growth hormone there is can be found in the human pituitary gland, just behind the ear. My story would be about some mortuary worker who were extracting the valuable fluid from cadavers. (It's what Hitchcock called The McGuffin, the terribly valuable or powerful thing that people want.) The subject matter didn’t give me a readily apparent and interesting ‘corpse’, so that Charley and Nicola Buchanan had a murder to investigate. I thought of what I considered a brilliant idea of having the corpse provided by a sunbed, from which the occupant was unable to escape, owing to whatever that drug is that Agatha Christie keeps putting in her books, the one that renders the victim completely immobile, so that they are alive to feel the horrors and agonies of the demise that the perpetrator has arranged for them. I believe it was given to the murder victim in Murder on the Orient Express. Thus the victim remained alive to witness his death by (huge spoiler) absolutely every single suspect.


My body-building story seemed to be going quite well, until the migraines started. What I had once been able to do fairly mechanically (that is, write TV scripts) was now almost impossible. It was actually painful. I hated letting down the side, but I was forced to hand over my scene breakdown and retire hurt to the pavilion. I actually saw the episode based on my scene breakdown that went to air. It was pretty well salvaged, I expect by script producer Kelly Lefevre, but what I’d envisaged as a climactic and terrifying mortuary stalking scene had been cut. And it was cut because my script was far too long. Mr and Mrs Murder is probably the hardest show on Australian television to write for.


Must crucially, it airs on a commercial station, meaning that each episode that is supposedly an hour in length is, in fact, a ‘commercial hour’. In other words, 43 minutes. And in that time we had to have an interesting but not too graphic murder, a crowd of suspects, an unusual location, sufficient red herrings to throw the viewer off the scent, and a fair whack of comedy, fortunately provided by Shaun Micallef, who does a ‘comedy pass’ over every script. I honestly don’t know if I was getting the headaches because of the difficulty of the project itself, or because the base of my basel ganglia was at that time a vacant lot.It’s good to see the show, even if defiled by commercials. I hope we’ll see many more episodes and that one day I’ll be able to write amn AWGIE-award winning contribution to the series.
By the way, I‘ve since found out that my ingenious ‘death by sunbed’ murder has been done by everyone.