Deborah Kalin's Blog, page 17

an overstretched tendon; a muscle built around scar tissue

The last knuckle on the little finger of my right hand is inexplicably fragile.

There's nothing visibly wrong, but then I can only see the surface of it, and the problem lies deeper, as it always does, as it always must. I can feel its weakness when I grip, especially in the cold: there's a sensation of bending in the joint, of negative flexion.

I amuse myself with explanations. There's a cavity in the joint, perhaps, a nest threaded into the ligaments between the intermediate and distal phalanges. It was carved out by some kind of blood-swimmer, a creature with bulbous black eyes that can see through the haemoglobin spectrum and bristling with cilia allowing it to taste, touch, and move, weaving its way past the corpuscles. They take their sustenance from the blood, the salts or the albumin, and excrete lassitude. And they find a pocket, when their time comes, some void in muscle tissue or hollow fold of bone, and there they lay their young and so crumple into death, their cilia drooping, their black eyes fading.

I wonder how many micro-hollows I sport, this nibbled-through body that is their universe.

I wonder how long until that day when I grip too hard and the distal phalanx snaps backwards. And I shall have to learn to touch-type all over again.

a city of derelicts, human and architectural

As I may have mentioned, I've recently moved, and am currently rocking new digs in a new neighbourhood.

Mostly this is awesome, for so many reasons, not least of which is that the new neighbourhood is much funkier and edgier1 and is also — this bit is very exciting, in case you didn't realise it — a fifteen minute walk from work. Goodbye terrible dragging commute on Yarra Trams; no, I shan't miss you! I NEVER LOVED YOU. OR YOUR MOTHER.

It's a suburb of derelicts, my new neighbourhood, both human and architectural; a suburb of the monied living cheek by jowl with the not-monied; a suburb of laneways and factories crammed in and around once-stately now-subdivided homes. It's a liminal space, its shadows filled with graffiti and discarded dreams, and I can't wait to discover more of it. I'm planning lots of rambling impulse-driven walks in my (ha!) free time.

Now, I'm told the fact that I live near an (allegedly) famous cafe type place is also exciting, but I am a philistine and to me food is food is an interruption in my day to refuel that I don't dislike but do resent the inordinate quantities of time it consumes in turn, so that's not my favourite thing about the new digs. My favourite thing about the new digs is that it's such a cosy little place, with a heater (that works). And that the building has a cat! Yay building cat!

Her name is Abigail, and she loves (to run away from) me. So that's working out just fabulously. Uh huh.

Although, to be fair, of the two neighbourhoods … it was the old "less edgy" neighbourhood which delivered the over-excitable naked man. So, yanno, judge for yourself.

mission: climb a mountain is GO. well, born.

This is a snap I took on Saturday, of the Australian landscape somewhere between Melbourne and Sydney rolling beneath the plane's wings, but it's a suitable enough backdrop to say it's official: I paid for my flights today.

Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and Croatia, I am on my way.

(For those who've been already: what's unmissable? So far I have Plitvice National Park, Split, Dubrovnik and Hvar in Crotia; Ljubljana, Lake Bled and the caves in Slovenia.)

This of course leaves me with a myriad more tasks, such as figuring out my itinerary and double-checking visa requirements, not to mention finding a dress to wear to the wedding, but I shall at the very least attempt not to bore the entire internet with all my talk of travel arrangements in the months leading up to my escape.

Instead I shall tell you that the weekend brought me the rather exciting news that Shadow Queen and Shadow Bound have been featuring on the Highly Recommended shelves at local Borders stores. Sadly, I have no photographic evidence, because my eyewitnesses did not realise just how upside-down this industry can get, and logically and rationally assumed an author would know things about her own books. (Kids these days.)

I also learnt, completely unrelatedly, that the Shona people of Zimbabwe name their children for a purpose. So apparently there's a whole slew of ex-army types who go by names such as Bloodthirsty and Bloodlust. (Sounds like a happening party, right there.) And there's a security guard called Nomore — he was the last of six children.

I kind of like this practice. I think, if ever I have children, I shall name them for the purpose they shall serve in (my) later life. Plentiful Retirement Fund and Tireless Chef are sounding pretty good for starters.

the exotic made familiar

These little guys were everywhere in Mongolia. Mostly they came out at dawn and dusk and fled at sight of people, in a strange bounding, dashing gait. I remember being woken one morning by a stream of angry chittering: we'd staked our tent so that the stay-rope interfered with his favourite exit.

We nicknamed them the mighty marmots, but only because we didn't see any real marmots. In reality he's a gerbil.

Why this spate in travel photos? Because tomorrow I'm booking plane fares for my next trip. Which will not be as exotic as Mongolia — Switzerland is far more … trodden — but it will not be here and it will involve MOUNTAINS. Huzzah mountains!

tarbosaurus forgives all

Today I am feeling somewhat whimsical, and somewhat nostalgic, so I think that means it's time for more Mongolia pictures.

To perfectly encapsulate my mood, perhaps it's best I give you pictures taken inside the Natural History Museum.

I visited this museum because I wanted to see a Tarbosaurus Bataar skeleton, and say what you will about this museum, no one quibbles with the Paleontological display, which is small but includes a complete Tarbosaurus and the hands of Deinocheirus, whose name means Terrible Hands. (We're not sure about how terrible or not the rest of him was, because to the best of our current knowledge we've only ever found his hands; but one can extrapolate.)

Sadly, current museum policy is no pictures of Tarbosaurus, so I can only tell you that walking through the doors in lighting that can best be described as Soviet-era-on-a-fading-budget to find yourself standing beneath his gaping jaws was AWESOME, and well worth the cost of entry.

But the museum also has other … delights.

this was the closest i got to a dino photo. yes, that is an inflatable dinosaur mounted in a picture frame. DO YOU BEGIN TO SEE HOW BOGGLING THIS MUSEUM IS?

The Lonely Planet guide says: The general impression, however, is that you've stumbled into the warehouse of a long-deceased taxidermist, rather than into a serious scientific exhibition. Some of the animals have been fixed with puzzling expressions, as if they remain perplexed as to how they ended up in such an unfortunate state.

And I have to say I agree.

from the bear being reunited with his favouritest tree ever...

...to the rodent chased up an inverted autumnal branch by a - is that a zombie squirrel?

...to the beaver apparently determined to commit inanimate suicide...

…the place is, well, quite a lot of fun, actually, in its way.

learning to read, by deb. aged … more than five.

This year, the powers of Easter and Anzac Day have combined to hand me a five-day long weekend. Five days!

I'm using this bounty to visit family, and one of the things I've learnt, in this visit, is braille. And when I say learnt, I don't mean to say I've mastered even the smallest skerrick of it. I mean to say I've witnessed someone typing my name on a braille typewriter.

That, there, reads Deb.

Afterwards I closed my eyes and practiced running my finger over the braille … and I couldn't even tell where one letter ended and the next started.

the stuff you own ends up owning you

Whoa.

If ever you are offered the opportunity to pack up all your belongings in the span of two evenings, haul them across town in an afternoon, and unpack them all into a space approximately one quarter the size of the space they previously occupied, word to the wise: don't. Or, if you do find the offer irresistible, consider packing industrial quantities of valium into your bloodstream.

I have just last night managed to crawl out from under all the boxes.

Today's task was supposed to be to organise the desk area — it and the linen closet are the last remaining areas to be sorted and organised and made bearable. Instead I chose to run a power cord around the bedroom, so that I may have light at night. Luxury!

Normal blogging to resume soon. Ish.

hungry sunday musing

Today I'm working on the faerie novel. Poor oft-abandoned faerie novel, always put aside when the world wants my attention on outstanding promises. It's going well enough, if slowly. But then, writing always goes slowly, these days.

Partly it's because I commit that cardinal "sin" of editing as I go. Which is really only a sin, at least for me, if I'm writing my first novel (so, scratch that as an excuse) or if I'm so stalled on the current novel that it simply won't move ahead. But I've learned that all I need to do, when my brain gets stuck in a negative editing loop, is to open a new blank document (a consequence-free-zone, if you will) and dump whatever's troubling me in there, without worrying about making it pretty or workable. Normally it ends up being an instruction to myself — don't forget she's on heroin; eyes? speech? reaction time? was one of this morning's notations. Once it's down, I can edit it with a little more objectivity and focus, which is of course the reason beginning writers are often urged to write first, edit later. I heeded that advice, myself, for my first couple of novels. Now that I'm confident I know how to finish a novel, I find I prefer to edit as I go whenever possible. Because in the end there's only one inviolable rule of writing: WHATEVER WORKS (FOR THIS NOVEL). It's finding whatever works that's the trick.

Because the faerie novel just presented me with a fight scene I'm not entirely sure how to tackle, and I'm still trying to decide whether we find the (fourth) dead body now, or later, I thought I'd take a break and give you all another bird picture, this time of Bernice the Black-Breasted Buzzard.

When on the ground she likes to run and she does it … well, kind of like a fanged chicken, actually.

she's got herself some standards

Yesterday I met Nova.

Nova is a lyrebird, named for their lyre-shaped tail feathers but, in an astounding display of synchronicity (that works only in English), better known for being liars. Go figure.

When I say I met him, I mean I watched him attempting to woo his lady lyrebird. I've never seen a lyrebird in the flesh before, so I was ready to be impressed simply by his presence and his pretty, pretty tail. But his courtship ritual displayed that this brown bird is, at least in personality, adorably and laughably vibrant.

It's early in the breeding season, so his lady lyrebird was blithely, determinedly oblivious to him, forcing him to ever grander and more desperate measures to attract her attention. It started with him scratching up some lovely nesting material for her, since that's what she was concentrating on — but she simply ignored or accepted said material as the whim took her, and went on with her own foraging.

Throughout it all he tried every single noise in his repertoire — including kookaburras laughing (always three at once), the call of a whipbird and a bellbird, something that sounded remarkably akin to a young child crying "Wow!", and a noise I can only describe as the sound effects of Space Invaders.1

But lady lyrebird was less impressed by his vocal abilities than the small crowd of humans, so in the end he resorted to fanning out his tail, jumping on top of tree stump (still no reaction) and finally, tail still fanned out and an astonishing array of space invaders noises coming from his throat, literally dashing in dizzying laps around her.

The photo above is of him running, around and around and around, calling Look at me! Look at me! in every way he knew how.

Poor Nova. She didn't even glance up once. Boy's got to do more than sing for his supper, apparently.

The keeper said this noise was, as far as they could work out — it's hard to be sure with a bird known for its mimicry — not mimicry at all but possibly his natural call.

er, would you believe … narrative genius?

It's not her handwriting, but this is the story Spawn dictated over the weekend.

She then promptly refused to show the story to Nanna, because it would make said Nanna too sad, being reminded that Spawn lived so very far away.

I think I need to teach her about non sequiturs, and guns on the mantel.