Deborah Kalin's Blog, page 10

explore-blog: Two Guardian designers chart Hitchcock’s…

explore-blog:

Two Guardian designers chart Hitchcock’s cinematic obsessions. The aesthetic is as much a homage to the great Saul Bass, who designed many of Hitchcock’s title sequences and the accompanying film posters. 

Pair with this animated recipe for what makes a Hitchcock film.

via deborahkalin.tumblr.com

recommended!

Through a combination of not checking my email for a couple of days and scrolling through twitter at just the right moment, this morning brought me the news that "First They Came…" has snuck itself on to not one but two year's best recommended reading lists — Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2012 Recommended Reading, and an honourable mention by Ellen Datlow in her Best Horror of the Year (Volume 5).

For being the only thing I published in 2012, I'm incredibly grateful to this little quiet/angry story, the way it keeps popping up here and there.

i hate it when she cries

Don't check on her for ten minutes. Listen to her — is she crying up? Or down? Even if she's crying up, leave her for at least five minutes, all babies need five minutes of crying to get themselves to sleep. Except those that don't.

All babies learn to fall asleep by themselves between 3-6 months of age. Except those that don't. Which is most of them.

Subsequent children get ignored, and they're better for it. Leave her. Let her cry. It won't take long. A couple of days of fussing.

Fussing, that's what they call it. Fussing.

And I know she won't die, I know there's nothing terribly or drastically wrong, I know she'll eventually wear herself out and fall asleep and feel better for it.

But she doesn't. And she's crying because she's scared or angry or confused or just too effing tired to figure out what's wrong, and isn't it my job, as a mother, to be there for her? Precisely when she doesn't know what to do, and what's supposed to happen next, and how to get there?

I let her cry today. Because I'm tired, because I have work to do, because my back aches and the painkillers can't touch it, because I'm impatient, I let her cry. I let her down.

I know she won't remember it. But I will.

honesty vs openness

I've been thinking, lately, about honesty and openness, and how that pertains to my blog.

I am always honest; I am not necessarily always entirely open.

That should be no surprise. This blog is a public space, and I aspire to behave professionally in public spaces, so I don't, for example, allow myself to be a prat. I'm also a pathological introvert, who can take the concept of me-time and privacy to a rather extreme degree. So there are things I won't share online, because they don't belong here, or because I don't want to be cavalier about the privacy of others.

But lately I've been thinking that some part of my approach is actually just … bad habit. More and more, it's come to feel as if I'm hiding. I don't talk about what's important to me, I avoid talk of politics or feminism or religion — for fear of alienating people, for fear of speaking clumsily, for fear of claiming space for myself. For fear. Then, when things go wrong, or life happens, I can't post because I can't talk about them, which simply contributes to the stigma keeping me silent in the first place.

I'm not sure what the finer points of my new approach will be. I'm not going to change my personal rules on behaving professionally in public spaces. But I am going to experiment with pushing my boundaries of what is and isn't private.

here we go again

Out with the old, in with the new: after taking about a week "off", it's been back into writing stories, this time the Clockmakers story. And of course I wasn't really taking time off. I was instead taking some time up front to make sure I knew the end of the story, the point toward which it was driving and why, in the hopes this would make writing it rather more streamlined.

Of course, no plan survives first contact. Having written the first 2,500 words of the story, the precise ending I had in mind quickly began to feel nebulous. Not the facts of it, but the reasons for it. Initially I told myself it was just because I hadn't outlined the middle very well; the emotional heart was still the same, it was just how I was getting there that was changing as I wrote.

But last night I received some feedback on Cherry Crow Children, and how it fits together with Briskwater and Wages of Honey, and this morning, after soldiering on for another 500 words, I've had to admit defeat. I think I've misconstrued the foundations of this story. Dammit.

In the end, I know the story will be much better for my having stopped now, ripping everything back up and re-plotting it as I will be (hopefully by the end of today, Squawk willing) — but I must admit to feeling disheartened right this second. Writing is awesome, but not necessarily easy, and writing around a baby is next to impossible.

I've spoken to other mums, who all tell me they used to spend their unable-to-write time furiously thinking and re-thinking and plotting and pondering, so that in the precious few moments they did get a keyboard or a piece of paper, the words just poured out. I really need to master that.

In the meantime, it's back to clocks, shame, and dandelions for me and this story (and teething rattles for Squawk).

bad mother, no biscuit

So here's something obvious if only I'd stopped to think about it: an overnight trip with a 4 month old is a bit brutal.

This weekend, Squawk, the pterosaur and I tripped up to Sydney for the Aurealis Awards. We went partly because "First They Came…" was shortlisted, and mostly because I wanted to be part of the scene. To prove to myself that having a child hadn't fundamentally changed my commitment to my writing (even if it has shifted around my writing process, available time, sleep levels, patience, general location, living arrangements, diet, tea addiction, slavish devotion to twitter and all things internet related, ability to think, and just, you know, everything).

I still can't decide whether going was a mistake.

I had a truly fabulous time, and got to catch up with friends I haven't seen in years, and even to meet new friends and to connect in person with people I've only known via the internet before now. After the isolation of the first months of motherhood, being able to frock up and play with the grown-ups was reinvigorating.

But at the same time, the whole experience has left me riddled with guilt. First for disrupting poor Squawk, whose four month old brain hasn't yet learnt the soothing patterns of predictability. For her, nothing is familiar, and sleep is hard to come by because her brain is constantly being bombarded. I mean, a plastic giraffe that squeaks when you happen to push its stomach the right way is brain-bending to a baby. You should see what cellophane does to her ability to control her limbs. The other night I showed her that you could take two cups and tap them together to make a noise, and that revelation was so alarming and world-enlarging that she damn near thrashed herself right out of the bath.

My brain knows how to filter out information it doesn't need, such as the way light bounces off lino, or background babble. Being in an unfamiliar room is no problem, because I know how I got there and how long I'm staying and that I can leave when it all gets too much. I know what's roughly going to happen each day — but Squawk's "days" are usually only 2 or so hours long and they're all pretty varied. Sometimes it's light when she wakes up, sometimes it's not. Sometimes she feeds straight away, sometimes she feeds just before sleep, and sometimes she doesn't feed at all.

She's so little that she's quite simply lost in the detail of this world and its adult-sized patterns.

And this weekend I took her out of her comforting home, threw away all her familiar routines, and dumped her in the middle of a raucous party. One that was four days long, by her reckoning of days, and came straight after a trip that was also four of her days long.

I spent most of the awards ceremony itself mentally kicking myself for what I'd done to her.

To give credit where it's due, Squawk behaved with admirable aplomb. She never once got stroppy with her sleep deprivation, didn't panic at strangers plucking her out of my arms, and she sat through the ceremony without real protest. She did maintain a fairly constant low-grade eerie moaning mutter that had those nearby turning to check whether they were about to die — which promptly had me feeling anxious about spoiling everyone else's ceremony experience into the bargain.

So after the ceremony I left her tucked up in a hotel room with her Nanna, safely away from all the noise. And promptly felt guilty for abandoning her. There she was, needing to tell me what the day had done to her synapses and wanting only something as simple as a cuddle from me or the pterosaur to help her get to sleep, and she had neither. I was downstairs, so worried about her, and so tired myself, that I barely managed a coherent sentence, stuffed up pretty much every conversation I attempted, and didn't manage to find the courage to talk to even half as many people as I'd have liked.

I comforted myself with the thought that I'd be able to catch up with everyone I'd missed at breakfast. But I spent pretty much all of the night comforting poor Squawk, who was so wired that she spent every second of her sleep moaning. Breakfast therefore found me so tired (and hungry — in looking after Squawk I forgot to eat any dinner myself) that I forgot to say hello to people, forgot to say goodbye, I even forgot how to manage my utensils.

I took her because I wanted to be normal, and present.1 To be both a writer and a mother. And mostly, I feel I achieved only an effed-up version of each of them. So busy being a mother I couldn't interact with the writers on a normal level, and so busy being a writer I couldn't be a proper mother.

To everyone who took the time to chat with me, and to put up with my laggy responses as if they were normal, my sincere thanks. To everyone I missed, my apologies. (Or should that be the other way around?) I can see I'm going to have to work on this balance thing.

And because we're both using my breasts. Where I go, she goes.

cherry crow children, the playlist

Having finished the cherry crow children story (for certain values of finished), I find myself unable to concentrate particularly well. Coherency is not my strong point right now. It's taken me the last three days to pack, in fits and starts and indecisions, for our overnight stay in Sydney this weekend.

So in lieu of intelligent content, I shall share with you the playlist to which I wrote the cherry crow children.

The official list is over at my last.fm profile.

Unofficially, the playlist was pretty much always drowned out by Squawk. Sometime during the last month she discovered the pram pig, which plays a new song every time you tug on its feet:

Download: PramPigTunes.mp3

I'd take the damn thing off her, but she giggles and grins at it so much I don't have the heart.

why is there no fire? why aren't there the makings of one?

On Saturday I decided I had No More Time. So while the pterosaur did his diligent best to look after Squawk and ensure she didn't try to feed tooooo often, I sat myself down in front of the laptop and deathmarched the cherry crow children story.

I sat down at 10am. There were breaks (Squawk did require feeding, after all, and bathing and putting to bed, and a couple of times my brain required ten minutes to whinge/vent/whine/tantrum/daze out), but by and large it was me and the desk/couch and the laptop and my ipod and the sheer force of my will.

YOU GUYS, I FINISHED THE ‘FIRST’ DRAFT OF THE EFFING STORY #omfg #killme #itneedssomuchmorework #cherrycrow

— Deborah Kalin (@debkalin) May 11, 2013

I wrote the ending at 1am. It hurt. I have no actual idea, even today, what is on the page. I can't bear to look. I simply emailed my publisher the attachment accompanied by the sentence: "I have literally not checked the Scrivener export to make sure it's not gibberish."

Because professional is how I roll. Clearly.1

Yesterday and today, I've been, in the words of Gorey, conscious, but very little more.

Turns out, part of the problem I was having with this story was that I was trying to cram what turned out to be 21,000 words of story into only 12,000 words. (The fact that what I considered to be the inciting incident kept happening at the 7,000 mark should perhaps have been my first clue. When I couldn't collapse that 7,000 down into anything leaner than 2,000? Another clue.)

The other part of the problem, of course, was trying to write around a baby. Who just happened to roll her 3-month and 4-month growth spurts in together, with a head-cold2 in the middle of it all for shits and giggles. Did you know the 4 month growth spurt is renowned for making parents want to walk in front of oncoming traffic? Neither did I. I swear it's like the faeries passed by one night and swapped the baby for a changeling. The effing happiest changeling in the world, who only wants to gaze adoringly at people and make them laugh, but SHE WILL NOT SLEEP. EVER. AGAIN.

If you'll excuse me, I'm afraid I need to collapse now. And then start work on the next story.

In my defense, I would ordinarily hide from the manuscript for at least a week, before doing a final edit, and then maybe even hiding it for another week before handing it in. However, I'm on a tight deadline, and I have my publisher's permission to misbehave just this once.A head cold may not sound like much of a problem. But in the shit I never knew department, turns out babies are obligate nose breathers. And if their little nose is too congested to breathe through, not only can they not breathe, they can't feed. Or sleep. They can, however, cry.

ideas breed on ideas

GUYS, (I THINK) I KNOW HOW TO GET TO THE END OF THIS STORY.

I am so relieved. I was beginning to wonder if I didn't have a workable idea at all. Turns out it was simply a case of exhaustion and time poverty. Getting a break on that front has given me the valuable thinking time I needed to get some ideas breeding.1

Now I just need to actually churn the words out (and therein discover precisely how much I still don't know), and hope the story passes muster.

Which is not to say Squawk is sleeping any better. She's not. It's just that during the days she's currently being babysat by her Nanna so I can focus on wordcraft.

only how many months late?

GUYS, I KNOW THE END OF THIS STORY.

(This story being the cherry crow children).1

Now I just have to get there. I don't actually know that bit. Yet.

I'm scared to stop and count how many words I've written, thrown out, dragged back in, rewritten, edited, revised, and just generally stared at. Least efficient process ever.