Deborah Kalin's Blog, page 18

it's alive!

You guys, I've done it: I've finished the thorn girls short story.

And by short I mean 9,156 / 10,750 words (depending on whether you count by human rules or printer's rule), so, um, yeah, not exactly short. In fact, it's what I affectionately like to call one of those unsellable lengths between a short story and a novel.

And by finished I mean I have a working first draft that I'm not ashamed to show people, and will doubtless need more work but I'm pretty sure said work, from this point on, will be polishing only, not structural. (Please, please, please let it not need any more structural work. This story has been taken apart and put back into exactly the same shape only different so many times I've lost count. Not to mention numerous brain cells in the process.)

This poor little frankenstein of a story was first started halfway through 2007, which takes a bit of believing even for me. I always forget that writing a short story is no quicker for me than writing a novel — in fact sometimes it's slower. Although in all honesty a great deal of the slowness in this case had to do with the story being constantly temporarily abandoned in favour of higher priorities, such as the editing passes on Shadow Queen and Shadow Bound.

There's something heady about the moment you know you have an actual draft, a "finished" draft. Somewhat akin to the moment you pull your hands back from adding the final card to a house of cards, holding your breath for fear of triggering the collapse and realising no, it's steady.

If I had the means on hand, I would totally be getting celebratorily drunk right now.

what i saw at the zoo, by deb. aged … more than five.

post-coital primate

Too much empathy and not enough scientific detachment, I know, but I can't help but anthropormorphise this chap.

Dear Monkey: if you're disconsolate (or even just bored) afterwards? You're doing it wrong.

your mission for sunday: stare at the screen

Today I am full of yearning.

It's been too long since I travelled; I've forgotten the feel of an open sky. There are plans … not in place, but at least taking shape, for the next trip; but they won't come to fruition for months. MONTHS. All I can do is flick through my pictures of Mongolia and Bhutan and promise/remind myself there will be mountains before the year's end.

(I love Melbourne, but I must admit to missing hills. Australia doesn't really do mountains, not by a world scale, but Melbourne takes that to ridiculous extremes and while that can be great for walking everywhere it's not great for getting my lungs somewhere they can feel swept clean of cobwebs.)

The next trip is going to be Switzerland — or rather, it shall start in Switzerland. That part has been set by a friend's wedding. The rest, though, is yet to be determined. I'm tempted to head east to Vienna, then south to Croatia through Slovenia. What do you recommend, my better-travelled blog people? Have you been over that way? What should I know about, so I don't miss it?

In the meantime, my weekends will consist of the usual staring contest between my and my brain.

thorn girls: a battle of wills, wordcount, and attrition

two months down? already?

I'm behind in my blogging (as usual), and partly that's because I'm this close to wrapping up the thorn girls short story. I am tempted to indulge in the cliche so close I can taste it, but really that would only be attractive if finishing were, say, a peanut butter sandwich. With fresh white bread. Yum.

Last night I got the structure all but nailed down (albeit with an awful lot of white space in the manuscript which is nothing more than the note GET HIM OUTSIDE NOW, or some other such crossing-the-room instruction); tonight I get to trawl through and put in all those room-crossings and transitions.

Normally when I write my first draft, I put the transitions in — but in a tricky first draft, such as this one, which I got half-written and then threw at Tess in desperation, and sulked until she came back with the suggestion to rip it to pieces (which was more helpful than it sounds, given she told me which pieces I needed to keep) and thus required significant structural edits at the same time as trying to write the rest of the story … well. In those cases I tend to skip the transitions. Mostly because I find I'll spend hours agonising over the one sentence that will impel the character across the room, only to find that character now needs to not be in the scene at all. Structural edits never progress linearly, for me. Heck, nothing about my story-writing process is linear. Let's be honest.

So, because listening to me opine about editing is bound to be a little dry, I'll point you instead to Gillian's blog, where there is a piece up by me in honour of Women's History Month, where I talk about my dayjob:

…my favourite subjects were mathematics and chemistry. …I could go on at length about the appeal of science and engineering — the way it takes hard physical evidence and observable, reproducible phenomena, and strings theorems and hypotheses between them to create stories of why the leaves are green and the sky is blue. That, just like writing, it's about past experiences, a shared history, imagination, and daring to dream. The fact that the entire discipline is built on a premise of being collaborative and rigorously open, encouraging invention and innovation, like a global remix project centred around numbers and factoids. I like that language is immaterial, that the stars speak to us through chemicals and fractals and ratios.

In the end, it comes down to the fact that I crave answers, yes, but more than anything, I want space and the chance to both be curious and to indulge that curiosity.

very neat bookwork

Today, since I may or may not be staring down the barrel of moving in the near future1 I was inspired to get around to cleaning out the filing cabinet. Or at least make some significant headway on it. Well, when I say cleaning out I mean to say I stared at it. And sorta dug about in it. A bit. (What? It counts!)

Which is how I stumbled across my school reports. Back to primary school, no less. I didn't know I owned these, let alone kept them.

I can't decide which is my favourite. Could it be Trying hard in the arts? Heh. Trying hard. That's a kind way of telling a parent your kid has all the artistic ability of an elephant with an amputated trunk. On smack.

Or perhaps it's the Not an enthusiastic sports participant. Yeah, I hated sports as a kid. Actually, that's not entirely true: what I hated (and still hate) is to be forced to participate. Mandatory team-building? Can bite me.

In the end, though, I think I have to award the winner's badge to the comment under Personal Development: Doesn't smile a lot.

Aww. So sad.2

Oh hi, rent hike. No, you haven't landed yet, but yes, I sense your presence.Don't worry, Mr Kearney. I smile more now.

i for one applaud your effort, sir

There is, near my work, an odd little lane affording free parking (and therefore choked with cars by about 7.30 a.m.) and access to the foot-and-rail bridge which is the quickest way across the river from work.

It runs at the foot of the embankment holding up the rail lines, so along with cars it's also choked with weeds, graffiti, and discarded televisions. (This last bemuses me, and I'm at a loss to explain precisely why, but there really is an inordinate amount of abandoned televisions in this lane.)

And I'm guessing it's a relic of Valentine's Day, but yesterday when I wandered up this odd little lane I found notes tacked to the walls. Probably above where she parks.

Clearly he's a man who has his priorities in order.

dear grandchildren: your grandmother has the wrong number

There is in Melbourne a little old Eastern European1 lady, who has the wrong number. Namely, my direct line at the dayjob.

She doesn't call often, all told. Somehow, she knows exactly when I'm not at my desk, be it through illness or holiday or simply the fact that it's 9 p.m. on a Sunday night. That's when she calls. And listens to my voicemail announcement stating my name and place of employment. And finally leaves me a long and rambling voice message in her mother tongue. She's not disgruntled, and though to my ear her language sounds a little growly I suspect she's just chatting. Leaving a message for a family member.

Does she not wonder why her family member's home phone number has such a strange, business-centric answering machine? Is her only contact with this family member through my phone — does she never meet her in person, even once a year, and in the inevitable confusion discover that her messages were never received? One message, which I discovered on my return from Mongolia, was at least five minutes long, full of lilting incomprehensibilities.

I wonder what she's telling me in those messages. That I never return her calls? Not to eat the boiled sheep's head? To get back to work already, lazy sod?

I'm guessing

i asked him for a title and all he said was: i see…

What to say about today?

Mostly I worked on the thorn girls story (which is now 2 pages longer, bringing the tally up to 46 pages — I live in a dreamworld in that I still hope, despite all evidence and rationality to the contrary, that it will shrink to a manageable length some time very soon). Today's efforts involved killing a character with sudden violence, a little bit of blood, and a lot of ennui. This, I think, is a worthy enough effort for now. It's an effort that cost me some seven cups of tea, at a conservative estimate. However much Earl Grey a human body can stand before the brain begins to pickle in the tannins, I think I've had one sip less than that.

I also attempted to minimise the STUFF I own. It just accumulates despite my best efforts. I've hatched a daring new tactic: if I sell its breeding grounds, the drawers and empty surfaces and nooks and crannies otherwise known as my desk and filing cabinet, then I might be able to wipe out this infestation right proper. Or at least cut it back to non-plague levels. (Anyone want a desk? Or filing cabinet? C'mon. Save me from ebay.) So far I've managed to throw out a lot of ink-less pens I apparently thought would be worth hoarding in case of apocalypse. (What? They'd make excellent dart-blowers. I could sit on my balcony poison-darting all those zombies jostling three floors below. It would be sport and entertainment at the same time!)

I also realised, for the zillionth time this past four weeks, that despite knowing there are hot cross buns available for delicious purchase right now, I have (STILL) yet to buy any.

This has got to change. And HOW.

by definition: a crush must hurt

The mighty Tessa pointed out this snippet of street art to me not long after I moved down here, and I've loved it ever since. I particularly love the gleeful face it's paired with. Cos those crushes, my friend: they're going to hurt you every which way 'til Sunday, but you'll still welcome it. At least in part.

chasing zen. again.

It's not often that I suffer from writer's block.

For me, it strikes when I have too much to say, and not enough time to say it. My head fills up with fragments of sentences and splinters of stories, none of it tied to any other piece or theme, just a great swirling structure-less tangle. All that mulch in my head is so busy growing such a multitude of different ideas that none of them can get a clear shot at the sunlight.

Blog posts and stories get tangled together, pairing off wrongly and spawning little mutant baby ideas, until my focus disintegrates and I find myself thinking re-tagging my mp3 library is a worthwhile use of my time right now.

I've never been at a loss for something to say, particularly, not when writing. I simply get choked by how much I want to say, or by how best to say it. (That last is easier to attack at least: write something appalling, and edit it mercilessly into something cogent, and call it done. (For some reason that tactic works much better on writing fiction than it does on writing a blog post, though.)) I want to write about silence, and breaking it; about conversations and confrontations; about the mechanics of a story, its structure and its heart; about innovation as opposed to invention; about people who can't give up and people who can. I want to finish that troublesome thorn girls story, and crank out some mileage on the faerie novel. I need to get that international report done for the dayjob, and prune back that tangle of further correspondence breeding in my in-tray faster than I can sterilise them.

Instead, so far, my mp3 library has sprouted a more comprehensive collection of cover art.