Deborah Kalin's Blog, page 12

ASIM 55

ASIM 55, which features my short story "First They Came…", is apparently now in the wild, in a variety of formats.

Talk about squeaking in a 2012 publication date, eh?

It's a (not quite so) little story which turned out to be both longer and angrier than I anticipated, featuring Melbourne (specifically some of my old Richmond haunts), boundaries, and lost things.

The print copy is currently only $12.95 plus shipping, and the e-formats are even cheaper.

mystery solved

You guys, all those missing bees? They're just fine. Apparently they've moved in with my mum.

the bees' front door

Despite that modest crowd at their front door, there's apparently about 70,000 of the buzzy little freeloaders that have moved into her living-room wall. This isn't surprising: my mother's always had a knack of acquiring strays. My childhood was filled with cats, dogs, birds, horses, rabbits, a tortoise, and a steady string of other people's children, all of them professing that they liked it best here and deciding to stay. She's a sucker for soulful eyes, basically.

Reactions to the rats have been mixed

After being the only parents at the childbirth education class to have absolutely nothing prepared for the oncoming baggage (everyone else had, I quote, everything prepared), I've spent the past two weeks buying shit. Mostly because I have now reached the point where, on meeting me, strangers involuntarily cry out in shock, or alternatively eye my stomach thoughtfully and pronounce me "ready". (Pretty much all conversations now are held with my belly. It's mesmerising, I guess.)

People have also started asking if I've packed my hospital bag (er, must get on that…) and what my birth plan is.

Are you kidding me? The plan is to have the child. That's it. What more do they think I have any modicum of control over?

So, yes. Money flying out the door, even though I'm doing a lot of second-hand purchasing. And all of it on stuff that is really, genuinely, not in the least exciting.

Well, except the stuffed rats I bought for the cot.

I really, really love the stuffed rats.

I call them The Alonsi. I imagine they are already whispering among themselves of which particular pieces of rattish wisdom to impart first.

We are not allowed pets in the new flat. Since I am very deep in pet-deprivation yearning, when we spotted a very plump rat scampering through the front garden, I promptly named it Alonso. You make do with what you have.

the price of creativity?

Fast.Co have a fascinating article up about the link between creativity and mental illness, I mean health:

Overall, creative professionals were about 8% more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder than the general population. The study found this to be true for artists (practitioners of everything from photography to choreography) and scientists (professors and researchers). The most startling results, however, related to authors. Writers were a whopping 121% more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder than the general population. Moreover, Simon Kyaga, the study’s lead researcher, says that authors had a “statistically significant increase” in anxiety disorders–38% to be exact. Rates of alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide also increased among writers.

Now, I've long known of this prevalence towards mental illness among creative types, being friends with quite a lot of writers, but I'd always assumed it was actually correlated to all creative types. That writers stand out as being particularly afflicted is fascinating.

The article briefly posits some interesting theories as to why this might be the case, but what I liked most about the article was the conclusion it drew in regards to possible treatment methods, and the emphasis that any treatment method which gets in the way of the creativity is unlikely to stick, as it were.

Ross Kalin: 21 August 1925 – 27 October 2012

He was the best flirt I've ever known, and my grandfather. From him I inherited a boundless and unnatural love of sugar, a habit of saying cheeky things just this side of offensive, and learnt that when someone adores you, in the end you can do no real lasting wrong.

And his pout. I definitely inherited his pout.

Rest in peace, you old brat. I wouldn't be me without you, and I'll never be the same now I've lost you.

and i shall call it … this land

It turns out that one of the (many, many, many (oh so many)) things no one ever told me about pregnancy is that as the third trimester approaches, the leg cramps set in. The only weight I've gained so far can be accounted for by the baggage and the placenta, so it's not like I'm talking about a sudden increase of 20kg or anything here, but that extra weight is in a STUPID POSITION,1 all jutting out in front and pulling me over like it is, so my legs have started to feel a touch overworked with carrying it all around. Oh, and add to that the absolute joy of being allowed to sleep only on your left hand side, which crooks your legs and points your toes and therefore works your calf muscles just that smidge, and the end result is midnight cramps agonising enough to catapult you out of bed before you've actually opened your eyes.

Apparently the best way to minimise or avoid said cramps is to make sure you rest your legs a lot during the day.

Instead, I've been … packing to move house. Good one, Deb. Let's just say there's been a lot of stompy pacing around the pitch-blackened reaches of my box-crammed flat of late.

my current vista

On the upside, moving house! Okay, the moving itself I'm not loving in the least, but the new place has more than one room. It actually has three of them! Three! It's entirely giddy-making. PEOPLE, I AM GOING TO GET A SANCTUARY-STUDY OF MY VERY OWN. I honestly can't tell the number of knots in my neck and shoulders that released and how much easier breathing got when I realised that in the very near future I would be able to shut a door and be truly, honestly alone for a bit in a nest of my own making. I am going to fill it with all the things that remind me who I am, artworks and music and movies and books that ground me and protect me from the world.

Like my Shaun Tan prints, and that dragon statue I bought when I was 15, and all those paper-pinned worlds others have written for me to dive into. And blankets. Somewhere in that room there shall be blankets for burying myself beneath. It shall be my querencia.

(The new place also has a typical 1970's dearth of power points. One per room? Are you kidding me? Dear landlords: hire an electrician, get them to put in at least 4 sockets per room, and trust me, no matter how "quirky" the rest of the place is, you won't want for tenants. One day I am going to live somewhere that is literally buzzing with all the available sockets hungry to power my various gadgets, and it's going to be awesome. In the meantime, ILU powerboard manufacturers. Never leave me.)

Show me someone who believes in Intelligent Design, and I will show you someone who has never experienced pregnancy. And, for that matter, someone who has never looked at the human male's ball sac with any serious pause for reflection.

wait, who let september happen?

Yesterday, I kited myself off to the suburbs for a photography outing. The set-up was simple: a friend needed guinea pigs for his portraiture assignment, and a whole slew of dirt-poor and socially terrified authors could do with having an up to date publicity mugshot if the offer was on the table.

As I was getting ready, the pterosaur decided to try and prepare me for the process by pulling out his own camera and bombarding me with photos, paparazzi-style. Mostly, I pulled faces at him, talked all through his efforts (which always results in photos of me wearing the most bizarre expressions), and generally acted like a muppet.

Here, for example, I am channelling my inner marabou. I don't think I'm particularly successful because I've seen a marabou exactly once, and at no point did said marabou look in any way bemused.

Unfortunately for all concerned, this panic-induced mania did not change when I actually reached the proper shoot, I must say. Which I suppose will have given the poor photographer excellent training in dealing with difficult subjects, but at the same time, there's now a very real chance there will be photos of me looking like some sort of science exhibit (Sept 2012: Crazy Lady, Looking Terrified) going into someone's portraiture assignment. I've decided to consider this a win for diversity.

And hey, after all that malarking about, I was fed a hearteningly strong cup of tea and the most delicious twitter cookies.

some days losing is winning

This weekend just past I threw what little clothes that still fit me into a suitcase, remembered my ugg boots, and skedaddled off to Lake Mulwala for a writing retreat. In a move that will haunt me for the rest of my living memory, I forgot my camera. Luckily, others didn't.

The lake is actually a dammed-up river, complete with a vista of drowned trees lifting their death-spindled limbs above the water. It's home to a healthy fish population: I never saw any, but late at night when the water was still I heard them, quick and thick and heavy through the air and straight back into the water. It's also home to quite an array of bird life, including pelicans, ducks, cormorants, seagulls, sulphur-crested cockatoos, the tiniest of chittering, swooping swallows,1 and a lone black swan who knew that humans bore bread.

In between contemplating that view (and eating, and chatting, and napping), I worked on the cherry crow children story, and I managed to wring sufficient words out of my brain to call the weekend successful in terms of progress … but I've now also spent all of yesterday and today mulling over where the story's going and what I learnt about Haverny Wood through writing those words, and I think it's time to ditch them all and start a new draft. Truly, counting words is one of the worst, or at least most meaningless, ways of measuring progress on a story. It's just that, often, it's all there is.

It's been far too long since I've indulged in a writers' retreat. Writing can be such an isolating and time-hungry activity — so much so that of late I've taken to spending my Saturdays in a local cafe with some writing friends, in an attempt to combine socialising with productivity. A retreat gives me not only time and space away from the pressures of the dayjob world, new and interesting scenery2 to jog the braincells but also, most important of all, a chance to hang out with people who know what it's like to pound away at the craft of writing simply for the sake of it.

That sort of understanding and camaraderie is priceless and refreshing. Especially since the first person I spoke to on returning home to Melbourne3 summarily dismissed my writing as a hobby in which I indulged "sporadically" in order to "get some alone time". I think I will never cease to be amazed at how much people like jumping to simple, single-reason explanations that let them label and judge others.

I've never seen swallows before — I didn't realise how very tiny they were!In this case the scenery was superbly awesome with a twist of melancholy/eerieNot the pterosaur, for those quick-jumping minds!

Let me 'splain — No. There is too much. Let me sum up.

Back in June, I guest-posted over at David McDonald's blog, on the topic of silence:

It’s something I’ve heard at almost every point of wanting and trying to build a writing career: you have to be active on the internet.

…But it comes at a cost. There’s the inevitable time pressure, yes, but then there’s also the noise.

At that time, I was trying very hard to balance my internet time. Not to restrict it, as such, but to make sure I was getting a good signal to noise ratio and — more importantly, for me — make sure I didn't feel guilty for not paying attention when I needed the time apart.

And then I promptly fell off the internet altogether.

I've been reading all my usual streams, and very occasionally tweeting when the mood took me, but mostly I haven't been blogging because, well, Life.

The biggest but simplest attention-occupier has been, of course, my TPP collection deadline. I swore to myself when I was writing Shadow Bound that never again would I sell something I hadn't already written. Now, even at the time, I knew this for an empty promise, but still. The very first thing I did was sell a four-story collection having only written one of them. Er, yeah. The first story of the three I owed, "The Briskwater Mare", came with great difficulty. Much, much difficulty. I wrote 40,000 words of false start before I finally found the story (which ended up being 11,000 words long), and it took me a good two months more than I'd budgeted (and I'd budgeted a lot of slack and generous leeway, because I know my process). Oops.

Luckily, it has, even in draft form, received the stamp of approval for going in to the collection, so now I only owe two more stories. I'm currently working on "The Cherry Crow Children of Haverny Wood" and, er, guess what? Yeah, it's coming with difficulty. So much for hoping the rest of the stories would just pour on out of me, eh? Oh well. I shall valiantly take comfort in the idea that stories which come with great difficulty are because I'm opening a vein or otherwise pushing at the boundaries of my comfort zone. Or something.

I've also, at the editor's request, written a story for an upcoming issue of ASIM. It was perhaps foolish of me to say yes, given I was already stressing over my TPP deadlines, but, well, see above re empty promises and you can extrapolate that to "I'll sell anything I can, and we all know it, right?" Unlike "The Briskwater Mare", this story came without too much trouble, although worryingly it was a rather angry story, instead of the light or humorous or even just sardonic story I was thinking I'd write. Luckily for me, the editor loved it anyway, and all that remained was to edit it (an easy enough task) and come up with a title (a task so fiendish and horrid it had no less than four people staring blankly at walls and blinking at each other, at a complete loss, for months on end). We threw so many suggestions back and forth at each other, all of them plausible and all of them workable but none of them perfect, that I was genuinely beginning to wonder whether I could send a story to print as "Untitled", or some other such meta commentary. But in the end, through gratuitous/desperate wiki'ing of large-scale abstract concepts, a title was found, and it was perfect.

The story shall be called "First They Came…", and it's going to appear in ASIM issue #55, which is due out … well, now-ish, I think.

That's most of the writing/publication news out of the way. There were also other reasons for my silence, most recently due to the Melbourne International Film Festival, during which I decided to see ten films despite a) my deadlines b) my insufficient energy levels and c) Melbourne raining on me every time I left the house.

One I can most heartily recommend is Ernest & Celestine, a charming little story about a mouse who doesn't want to be a dentist and a bear who wants to be a musician. It's just the perfect amount of whimsy and heart-warming, and don't be fooled by the narrative simplicity: there's a very rich world thought out in this one, and although it's never over-explained or harped upon, there's social commentary on the topic of prejudice, ignorance, bigotry and the value we place on various professions.

And speaking of kids, my other, biggest news (which I've oh-so-cleverly buried at the bottom of a very long post where no one will see it) is that I'm going to have one of my own.

It's due around New Years, we decided not to find out the gender until it learnt of the concept of daylight, and the grandmothers-to-be are both beyond excited and into downright agitation.

Continuum 8, the podcast, and me

Continuum 8: was awesome. My personal experience of it involved good intentions of arriving on time; a complete inability to actually carry out those good intentions; boggling at popularity of the TPP Hour; drinks at the bar; dissolving into a panicky mess on learning that the Embiggen podcast would involve me actually having to speak, interview-style; turning up to said podcast anyway; managing to speak at least without stammering; simultaneously terrifying Alisa into believing that I'm paralysed by performance anxiety; remembering/rediscovering what a friendly con means; more drinks at the bar; lunches and dinners with people who speak my kind of shit; and yet more drinks at the bar.

For those of you interested in listening to the Twelfth Planet podcast at Embiggen Books, it's now live at The Writer and the Critic.1

Join host Ian Mond as he interviews Twelve Planet authors Deborah Biancotti, Narrelle M. Harris, Deborah Kalin, Margo Lanagan, Rosaleen Love, Kirstyn McDermott, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Lucy Sussex and Kaaron Warren, along with publisher Alisa Krasnostein. It's a fun, informal conversation which — and this is how you know it's not an official Writer and Critic episode — goes for less than 50 minutes! You're welcome.

It was great fun to record, and absolutely fascinating to get an insight into everyone else's collections, actual or still planned, so it's well worth the listen. My own collection is still very much nebulous, so there's no much to glean about the stories I'll produce, but you do get an insight into how I work: namely, panicked.

A live recording of The Writer & The Critic featuring Alison Goodman and Kelly Link was one of the few panels I actually managed to attend during the con, and it was a highly entertaining experience. Highly recommended!