Deborah Kalin's Blog, page 14

creativity is an addiction

A golden outfit made from spider silk has gone on display at London's Victoria and Albert Museum:

The four-metre-long hand-woven textile, a natural vivid gold colour, was made from the silk of more than one million female golden orb spiders collected in the highlands of Madagascar by 80 people over five years.

I remember hearing about endeavours by scientists to mass-produce spider silk. The approach, if I remember correctly, was to modify the DNA of goats so that spider silk proteins were produced in the goats' milk. I even wrote a (terrible) story around that premise during my stint at Clarion South. But I haven't heard any more on that front for years — I wonder what happened?

I never knew that anybody had collected enough spider silk by hand to weave fabric from it, which is apparently an until-now forgotten art.

The effort involved in such an endeavour — catching the spiders every morning, harnessing them into contraptions designed to extract their silk, making thread out of the silk and textile out of the fabric — the patience and time and labour that has been poured into it is … humbling.

It made me think about all the energy that I pour into my writing. Sometimes, when I'm tired, when I'm frustrated with my chronic time-poverty, it's easy to feel dispirited. About a lack of progress, or the latest mental block, or the sheer enormity of the task still to go. And I can't whinge, like I want to, because I chose this, and I keep choosing this. Every day I choose writing. (Even if it feels like a Clayton's Choice, but that's a topic for a whole different post.)

It helps me to stumble across stories like this. Tales of fascination, and the endeavours born out of and carried onwards by that fascination. Perhaps making a coat out of spider silk does nothing for us on a practical level: but I, for one, smiled when I heard of it. And felt inspired.

And now I have a new trick to add to my toolbox for when I get the grumps with the process: I shall simply consider my words to be little golden orb spiders. All I need to do is catch a few dozen a day, and coax them gently into a pleasing order.

And hope the wily bastards stay put.

in which the linkable kindle list is born

The laundry sink is backed up, so there's been no washing for over a week now, which has forced a little ingenuity and/or creativity into this week's wardrobe choices. If I were rich, I could afford to live somewhere that had, oh, I don't know, working taps. It's the little things, eh?

Anyway! I have not been idle!

After much trawling for solutions that would allow me to add links (simply and with a minimum of headache) to the list of australian women writers on Kindle, I believe I have at last hit upon a solution. I have therefore set up a page: Australian Women Writers on Kindle.

It's currently not optimised, display-wise, and the list only has those whose names I've managed to collect links for, but it will grow, link by link and name by name, as I add to it in dribs and drabs over the coming evenings.

The names are sorted into sub-lists of genres (contemporary, historical, romance, speculative fiction, non fiction, memoir) and format (novels and anthologies) — which is broad, but I figured part of the fun of a reading challenge is finding something outside your comfort zone.

And now, it's totally time for a pizza dinner.

if your name, or the name of the author you think is missing, is not on this page but is on the blog post of the initial response, then I'm working on adding it

aus/nz women writers on kindle

Yesterday I foolishly put a call out for Aus/NZ female writers who have work available on the Kindle, as part of the Australian Women Writers 2012 challenge.

It is fair to say I have not been able to keep up with the response.

Originally I'd intended to go through and present the names in a lovely collated list complete with links to authors' websites and their kindle-edition books. But so far I haven't even had a chance to do more than the most cursory of vetting of names — and, too, I figure it's better to get the list out sooner rather than never.

So, while with time I still plan to go through and sort by genre, and add links and book info (maybe a goodreads shelf?), for now: a very bare-bones list of Aus/NZ women writers, for your reading/researching pleasure.

Goldie Alexander

Belinda Alexandra

Jo Anderton

Philippa Ballantine

Deborah Biancotti

Laura Bloom

Honey Brown

Alyssa Brugman

Frances Burke

Trudi Canavan

Leslie Cannold

Isobelle Carmody

Lisa Clifford

Claire Corbett

Denise Covey

Rowena Cory Daniells

Cecilia Dart-Thornton

Marianne de Pierres

Joy Dettman

Sara Douglass

Felicity Dowker

Hazel Edwards

Jennifer Fallon

Phillipa Fioretti

Elaine Forrestal

Kate Forsyth

Andrea Goldsmith

Alison Goodman

Janet Gover

Posie Graeme-Evans

Kerry Greenwood

Kate Grenville

Lisa Hannett

Donna Hanson

Narelle Harris

Rhiannon Hart

Karen Healey

Lian Hearn

Lisa Heidke

Talie Helene

Nette Hilton

Anna Jacobs

Linda Jaivin

Patty Jansen

Myfanwy Jones

Toni Jordan

Deborah Kalin

Leah Kaminsky

Margo Lanagan

Glenda Larke

Stephanie Laurens

Julia Leigh

Gabrielle Lord

Helen Lowe

Bren MacDibble

Melina Marchetta

Juliet Marillier

Sophie Masson

Colleen McCullough

Kirstyn McDermott

Fiona McGregor

Monica McInerny

Fiona McIntosh

Maggie McKellar

Juliet McKenna

Foz Meadows

Gillian Mears

Hazel Menehira

Liane Moriarty

Kate Morton

Nicole Murphy

Malla Nunn

Kate Orman

Amanda Pillar

Gillian Pollack

Tansy Rayner Roberts

Sally Rippin

Jane Routley

Penni Russon

Angela Savage

Mandy Sayer

Katherine Scholes

Jessica Shirvington

Angela Slatter

Cat Sparks

Lucy Sussex

Anna Tambour

Rachael Treasure

Mary Victoria

Kaaron Warren

Kim Westwood

Felicity White

Anne Whitfield

Kim Wilkins

Lili Wilkinson

Janet Woods

NOTE: The names listed have, in most cases, been volunteered on behalf of the author. If you spot something incorrect — or think someone is missing from this page (as there undoubtedly is!) — please email me with the correct information, including any appropriate links. Thanks!

Call Out: Australian Women Writers on Kindle

It has been suggested by minds cleverer than mine, namely Tansy, that a list of SF & Fantasy (or any genre really) books by female authors available on the Kindle in the Aus/NZ region would be a useful thing.

And since I haven't actually managed to start the challenge for myself yet, and since I'd been toying with the idea of starting a twitter list of aussie women authors only to find I didn't need to because Elizabeth has one started, I thought this might be something I could do to help.

So!

If you are — or know of — an Australian female author with books available on the Kindle in the Aus/NZ region, let me know.

Leave me a comment here, or send me a twitter reply/dm (my username over there is debkalin), or email me and I'll set up a post or page with the collated information. Links to author's websites (and/or straight to the Kindle store) would of course be appreciated, but for those who forget to/can't provide one, I'll do my best to hunt out what I can on that front. Genre information for the author and/or book might not go astray either, for the benefit of those seeking books to review.

today's alpha draft addiction is the em-dash

The playlist for the kelpie story is full of drowning songs. Sinking songs. Listening to it is like having all the air siphoned slowly out of my lungs while weariness expands like a squeaking black balloon in my head.

I suspect I need to write this story very, very quickly — or else very, very slowly.

Probably I will do neither of these things.

sometimes, daily means when you can

I started this year with an admittedly-ambitious daily target: 1,200 a day on the faerie novel and 700 a day on a short story (which will probably end up not entirely that short). I could have aimed for a lower target, but that would have meant working on Saturdays and Sundays and one thing I learnt last year is that time off — and flexibility — are things I can't skimp on.

So naturally this week threw me two non-writing day curveballs in the form of a 3-hour round trip to get the hail damage on the car assessed on Thursday, and a dizzy spell on Friday. So today has been all about catching up (on the faerie novel, at least). Sometimes, writing every day does not mean writing daily.

Eh. Whatever works, right?

I "met" this fellow at the Tiergarten Schönbrunn: he's a Marabou, a species of bird of which I had never heard before that day. He's part of the stork family, and he's from Africa.

And he has a magnificent get-off-my-damn-lawn! dance the like of which I have never seen before. Wings akimbo, he would cover the length of each wall of his enclosure in a sliding-hopping-gliding motion in heartbeats.

Do storks dance in courtship, or is it only the crane family who do that?

I wonder if the poor, magnificent fellow was simply bored, and passing the time?

I'd love to see him in the wild.

oh for aircon

One of the things I'd like to do more of in 2012 is blog, or at least blog more routinely. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that this website needs a serious overhaul to enable me to easily dash off quick or brief posts, lately all my posts have been long or in-depth or emotionally weighty affairs. That starts to drag after a while.

Forty minutes later and one of the major culprits standing between me and a quick post, namely a default featured image, is … well, not fixed to my liking, but there's a band-aid in place. That will do for the short-term. It will have to. Given my tendency to manufacture projects on which I can spend weeks procrastinating, I'm rather proud of myself for going for the band-aid solution. And for waiting until I'd gotten today's wordcount before attempting it. (Well, I got wordcount on one of my two projects, at least.)

Now, I'm off to get wordcount on the other project. And to kvetch about the weather. Which looks like this:

hours and words (eventually) make a manuscript

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and as is periodically inevitable, lately I've been struggling with morale. C'est la vie.

I've hit that spot in writing a novel where the whole thing feels trivial and trifling. Although if I'm honest, it's a feeling that's been plaguing me since I can't remember when; and because I have a nasty habit of high expectations, and wanting everything I attempt to be (at least subjectively) worthwhile, the pressure for this novel to be spectacular is beginning to effect my ability to actually write the damn thing.

This novel has been difficult from the get-go, and I've come up with a hundred reasons why, and ways to fix it, but somehow none of them seem quite to explain everything. When I was writing Shadow Queen, I had a certainty that there was something about that book that would work, not just for me but for other people. Which turned into a bit of a superstition because it went on to sell, and sit on actual bookstore shelves for other people to read. So it's been bugging me that, for a long time, I haven't had a similar certainty about the faerie novel.

But superstition is not going to stop me from finishing it, for the closure if for nothing else. Perhaps that certainty will become apparent during the rewrites — it isn't wise for a writer to trust her own mindset or judgement when she's a long way into the hard slog of a novel, after all, and it's still a story I'm enjoying, which means it's still a story I believe in. (Although I have given myself permission to skip such pesky things as transitions and leave them for the next draft.)

As if to reward me for such self-enlightenment, the internet has since been sending me little reminders. One was a conversation about the power of the square bracket (hello transition which reads simply: [they go here]!), and the other was a post by John Barnes on the effort of quality:

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing poorly at first.

I've seen this advice before, of course, more often in other guises. Give yourself permission to write a shoddy first draft. Write first, edit later. You can edit shit, but you can't edit a blank page.

The post has other gems as well — I particularly liked the remark that fiction doesn't depict nearly enough failure. As an engineer and a writer, I know what it's like to smack my head against a variety of brick walls and seemingly end up nowhere, so that trying apparently-fruitless approaches seems viable and failures teach you more about your task than achievements ever could.

The last reminder (so far) has been a startling realisation, just yesterday, of what's wrong with the faeries: I don't want them to be faeries. Somewhere in this draft I'd gotten too caught up in everybody else's mythologies, and they lost their vibrancy for me. So fixing that will change everything. Again. (I've lost count of how many fundamental everything-changing realisations I've had to slog through 100,000 words for in this book.) (This time, I shall be very good and NOT go back to the start again; I shall simply make a note in the margin for the next draft and, pretending it's fixed already, and forge ahead.)

Out of curiosity, the other day I had occasion to count all the hours and words I've spent on the faerie novel to date.

The answer? 483 hours, spread over a stint of days that add up to about 3 and a quarter years. (The first word was written in 2007.) In total, I've written 168,000 words of manuscript draft, 141,000 of them from scratch. (At one point I reached 95,000 words before scrapping all of them because of a startling realisation that made them redundant. That hurt. So far it looks like I've managed to salvage about 20,000 of those 95,000, but it was in such an altered form it may as well have been from scratch as well.)

Having said that, by the time I was done with Shadow Queen (including all publication-level edits etc), I'd spent 1,143 hours, and Shadow Bound cost me 871 hours.

So looks like I'm still only halfway at best on this sucker. Onward and upward.

truly, slovenia had a plethora of (teeny) spiders

While we were in Slovenia, we stayed in Škofja Loka. The place sported more cafes than I could count — but they only served coffee and cake, or ice cream, occasionally both. For food, we had to visit the exactly one restaurant in town, which served pizza or pasta.

Getting to the restaurant, which was in the old town, meant crossing the bridge of the Sainted Spiders.

We tried to count how many spiders lived in the Saint's shadow, but there were simply too many.

Now, I come from Australia. More, I grew up in Sydney Funnel Web territory. I once found a scorpion on my bed. By which I mean, I'm not in general alarmed or made squeamish by the presence of creepy crawlies, so long as they maintain a respectful distance.1

But one thing Slovenia taught me is that there is something deeply and innately shudder-inducing about spiders tolerating each other's presence.

The distance required to qualify as respectful is related to legs. Six is the "sweet spot"; the greater the deviation from that number, the further away they have to be.

first stop: (not dying in) switzerland

Switzerland was my friend's destination of choice to elope, and in a fit of travel lust I not-so-jokingly threatened to come with her, as did members of both her and his families, and that's how their elopement turned into a (modern) fairytale wedding and my trip to Europe was born.

I expected to enjoy the place because, well, if you haven't seen a photograph of at least one of its corners and felt your brain spasm with WANT! then you probably won't understand any reasoning I could put into words on that front. But for all that, it would be — I thought — a bit over-developed, possibly twee in places, and tourist-thronged beyond my personal taste.

So my falling in obsessive love with the country came as a bit of a surprise.

Yes, there are lots of tourists — but the infrastructure and local services of this place are so thoughtfully and thoroughly developed that I barely noticed them. Really. And the Swiss are so unassumingly friendly, welcoming, helpful and humour-filled that I want to adopt them all. Not to mention their rail network, which reaches everywhere and features trains which leave on time to the second. (Are you listening, Metro Trains?)

The rumours, it turns out, are entirely true. The Swiss totally have their shit together.

The one thing they could improve on, however, is sign-posting their treks.

The start of the Aletsch glacier, viewed from Jungfraujoch

I had one request when it came to visiting Switzerland, and that was to hike alongside the Aletsch glacier. Because glacier! The pterosaur's mother, when she found out, begged us to "at least take a satellite phone!" but we weren't worried. This was Switzerland, not Mongolia — we probably wouldn't be able to see the no-doubt-tame hiking path for the swarm of tourists already on it, &c.

We bought a cable-car ticket up to Eggishorn, but back down from Fiescheralp, planning to walk from Eggishorn to Fiescheralp. This isn't unusual, and the hostel owner had assured us it was about a two-hour walk, and if we wanted to detour by these lovely lakes and get up-close to the glacier and walk along it a ways, then it would extend the walk out to about 4 hours. So off we went, in giddy spirits because the cable-car ride took us through clouds thick enough to shroud everything outside the windows, which rather kindly drew away to haunt another mountain and reward us with a view of the entirety of Switzerland when we actually got to Eggishorn proper.

The summit of Eggishorn. Allegedly 15 minutes walk.

See those not-quite-rocks shapes at the summit? Those are people. This shot was taken without the zoom, and in retrospect it looks quite bleedingly obvious that the scramble up all those rocks would take more than the 15 minutes the sign promised. But we were young, and fearless, and hadn't figured out not to trust Swiss hiking signs, so off we trotted.

45 minutes later, we reached the top. In our defence, we'd dawdled a little, so still, not worried.

Rookie mistake.

Our (German) timetable told us the last cable-car down from Fiescheralp was at 6pm, although there seemed to be some caveat for Fridays and Saturdays in the summer months. Our German wasn't up to figuring out said caveat beyond that it had something to do with 10pm. The cars ran until 10pm instead of 6pm? There was a lone car at 10pm? The village came out and laughed at people expecting cable-car service at 10pm? Whatever, it didn't matter, we had 5 hours up our sleeves and we just wouldn't dawdle. Yeah, right.

The signpost for the lakes pointed us down the back side of Eggishorn, in a direction no one else was headed. Clue the first. The 'path' was nothing more than a very faded red-and-white flag painted on a random rock every kilometre or whenever you needed to turn, veer, be guided over a tenuous bit, keep an eye out, or just be bamboozled. We scrambled merrily along, laughing about how wonderful it was to have lucked into such a quiet, unpeopled day. Clue the second.

Halfway down, our way was blocked by a tripod-legged excavator, the driver of which frantically waved his arms at us. His meaning, however, was less clear. Stop? Come forward? Did you bring lunch, I wanted the tuna sandwich?

Then there was an almighty BANG! and we realised they were blasting and CLUE THE THIRD.

But with that the driver has decided all is fine, and he's definitely waving us forward now. Only to get past him — because his mountain-crawling excavator is far wider than the goat track he's obscuring — we have to cling with our fingertips to the rubber treads of his wheels and perch on our toes on the bottom curve of the wheel base, and inch our way past those wheels which are hanging over a rocky drop. I won't lie: we'd started to figure out the clues by now.

At this point, we were starting (very quietly) to get worried

But there was still glacier to see! And the time when we finally reached the lake, at around, oh, half-past three, meant we'd miss that 6pm cable-car even if we did retrace our tracks. So may as well press on, right? Because maybe the bit we'd just done was the hard part, and it would get easier and swifter from here on out. There was a signpost telling us the next signpost was 30 minutes walk, and a little stoop-backed grandmother heading our way. Promising!

Let me tell you, I don't know where that grandmother lived or grew up, or what she ate for breakfast, but the answer to these questions would be nowhere and nothing normal.

The glacier up close. (We did not get quite this close; the shot is partially care of zoom

This was the good section of the path. Namely, there was actually a path.

We walked. For hours. And by walked, I mean we hauled arse, no dawdling, no pausing, just head-down into the blasting afternoon sun, squinting to keep an eye out for the flags marking our way, scrambling over and between rocks and along a path so narrow our left feet were perpetually an inch higher in altitude than our right. There was no water left in our drink bottles by this stage, and hadn't been for some time, and when we came across the beginnings of a creek, we stared at that narrow, swift spill of water and decided WHAT THE HECK. (We chose well, actually. Best-tasting water of the entire trip, bar none.) After 45 minutes, we found the 30-minute-distant signpost … which told us the signpost we'd just left was 20 minutes in our wake.

This was when we realised the signposts were not only not trustworthy, they were positively malicious, downright evil, and out to get us. Oh, and we'd be sleeping up here tonight.

We did have a stunning view to keep us company, though

MARMOT!

Time gets blurry around about here, but after two or three more signposts directing us around the curve of the mountain, and about MY ENTIRE LIFE of climbing, climbing, climbing up, we made it to the ridgeline. We were officially, at least in altitude, back where we started. All we had to do now was head down to Fiescheralp. Easy.

Oh, and it was 18:20.

By this point we're just happy that we're not dead. And we've started to hope that state will continue beyond the night.

This is when we discovered a flaw of the flag system: multiple paths, criss-crossing, but each using the same flag. Good one, Switzerland.

Er, which direction?

Do you notice, in that sign, that Fiescheralp is a mere 2.5 hours walk? That's pointing back the way we came. It took us over 5 hours to do a portion of that supposedly 2.5 hour walk.

By the time we did reach Fiescheralp (at 19:45), after two signs, each 45 minutes walk from the other and each promising our destination was 45 minutes walk away (er, what?), we were footsore and staring with horror at the prospect no cable-car and so having to walk from Fiescheralp back down to our hostel in Fiesch proper. Adding to the sense of impossible eerie, the little hamlet was deserted, and I mean utterly: it was composed entirely of hotels which catered to the winter crowd, and they were as closed as a movie set after hours.

We found the cable-car depot, which promised a car at 8:00 and oh, how we cheered! A 15 minute wait and then home and hot showers!

Then we found the exactly one resident of the place, who cheerfully informed us we could choose between a two-hour wait or a two-hour walk (in the dark, with no road or path and no lights) — because the bad news is that 8 o'clock car is tomorrow, not tonight. We were so openly demented with disappointment that he shepherded us into his restaurant and fed us bread and cheese and shots of some hot lemon and cream liqueur cocktail for free.

Then we sat and listened to Michael Jackson and various other hits of the 80's as the sun set and our muscles seized into cramped balls of pain.

Watching the moon rise after not dying? Worth it.