Trent Jamieson's Blog

Threnody

Short stories come and go, they are read and forgotten, and a few, such a tiny few, live on a little through awards, or republication. My...

Frog, Log and Dave Almost Save the Day

Brent Wilson and I have been holding this pretty closely, but our graphic novel Frog, Log, and Dave Almost Save the Day is coming out in two weeks, and we'll be launching it at Where the Wild Things Are on March 8 at 2.30pm.

We're both so excited to give this book a great send off, I can't even begin to express how proud I am of Brent's incredible art and his authorly collaboration. Which is to say I think we've made a glorious thing. And we even have matching FLD t-shirts.

Brent has had a part in every element of this book, it's infused with his wit and DNA, and I've learnt a lot in seeing it come together from us just spitballing ideas, to shaping a story, to creating this fantastic book.

I'm used to mostly just having my name on a book, but it's been a wonderful thing sharing this, and having a book that is so totally me but also so totally Brent, you rarely get a chance to work with a person so in sync with you creatively.

Anyway, come for the air guitar and the teary eyes, then stay for the adventure. I might be biased (HAH) but this book delivers.

Don't Let the Big Idea Get in the Way

Last year I was (am and will be for next year at least) working on a book with the aid of a Creative Australia grant. The idea was a big one, that I have been thinking about for a long while, in fact I have had an opening scene for that book for well over a decade, but finally I thought I was ready to write the book, to hit the ground running. But the book swamped me, the idea overwhelmed me, and I spent the first few months thrashing around, trying to live up to the concept of the book, its themes and so on.

 

It wasn’t until I stepped back and returned to first principles that the book started to take shape, rather than a nervous thrashing around. I’d forgotten that a book starts with the little things for me. An image, a movement, a conversation (a wild smile and a match lit in a vampire’s crypt; a dead girl coming down an escalator; hands and faces flowering from the earth and grabbing a child’s feet and begging for help; a city surrounded by roiling darkness) and I build from there.

 

I can’t write from top down; I need to write from bottom up. I need to know my characters, their peculiarities, and then the story shapes that I tend to, will make something of them. But at the start of 2024 I forgot this. Instead of just sitting down and writing, I spent an awful lot of time panicking and worrying how I was ever going to live up to the amount of money Creative Australia had given me (even factoring the large proportion of tax I had to pay back).

 

Panic as a creative impulse is never a great thing. Drafting with anything deeper than story, movement, character (and the story and the character are in constant feedback) in mind. Drafting with expectations, and the worry that you won’t meet the expectations of others (whatever they actually are) is not a good thing.

 

Maybe for some people the whole canvas is there, and they have the big picture. But I’m the match in the dark sort of writer, working away until the big flash of lightning reveals all (though it’s only a flash, and I might have missed a whole section in all that clarity).

 

Ideas, big ideas, are great. Ambition is great (and I want this to be the best book I have written, my crazy, lumpy, messy Brisbane book about creating things, children, stories, and truth and untruth), but focussing on the little and moving out, working to finish the tale rather than stew in fear that it’s never going to be that big thing is the only way I get things done.

 

Writing is epic, but it starts small. It always starts small. Like the universe, like a child. It starts with the almost not there a particle galumphing out of some quantum space, or two gametes that connect and grow and grow, and you never know what you have until you finish it.

 

I held a finished book of mine for the first time a couple of days ago.  A deeply collaborative project that I am very proud to have been a part of. A dream that became a conversation, that became a failure, that became another book that started not with a big picture, but a few words, some characters, and a lot of sitting down and writing. And now I have a comic in my hands something I’ve wanted to do since I could read.

Anyway, I guess I’m saying let the story become the idea. Let the inclination grow into that grand thing. Nothing’s grand at the beginning. Get the big idea out of the way and write, otherwise you’re never going to finish anything (at least that goes for me). You can’t take risks; you can’t leap the crevasse of doubt if all you focus on is the fall.

 

Trust yourself, that small thing that the ideas get to type, do the work, finish it, and see what happens. You might discover the big idea was not an impassable rock on the road of the story, but it was there all along, holding your hand.

Tick Tock

How is this year drawing to a close? I've been so busy, but the clock is running down. By the end of it I should have a big living breathing mess of a novel draft to work on, and lots of seeds of things for the years ahead. I've written hundreds of thousands of words this year, followed dead ends, found new things, hollowed stories out of the word mines, it's been great for everything but my eyes.

It never feels like enough, but I've been working steadily all year, and hopefully that will bear some fruit, but even if it doesn't, it has (if that makes sense). A year to devote to writing without having to worry about a day job has been an absolute privilege, and has also given me more time with my children, to watch them grow and be there for them. Time passes so swiftly, but this time was a gift.

It's also taught me that if I am given a year to write I suddenly become the least social person on the planet.

Next year is already looking to be much busier. Not least with a new release for kids coming out in March. You can check it out here. It also means that I will actually start catching up with all the people I have neglected this year. Sorry, I didn't mean to forget that world outside my study existed.

I've an interview over at Meridian Australis, which was a lot of fun. Pop over and check it out.

Also, I'll be helping launch Chris McMahon's next novel Tower of the Mountain King: The Wildness at Books at Stones on the 2nd of November. You can book here. It's an absolute cracker of a fantasy novel and I can't wait to discuss it with him. Come along for the chat, some wine and grab yourself a copy.

Far-flung Launched and Stone Road Deal

The Stone Road had a deal in the US and Australia over the last day or so, and it was nice to see a bump in sales. Hopefully the book will connect with some new readers, and since I so rarely see it, here's a picture that is lovely to any author.

I helped launch Sam Maguire's anthology Far-flung on Friday. It was a lot of fun. I've a story in there called "We Crossed the Bright Blue Water" which looks at Death and how we deal with our inability to truly understand our parents. It's also another one of my psychopomp stories, one day I might actually have enough of these for a collection. It's a bittersweet thing, but there's a brightness to it too.

Anyway, here's my introduction to the launch of Far-flung. Despite my story, it's a great anthology, and if you like short spec fic, I reckon it's well worth a read - I enjoyed every story.

I love a good SF anthology. When I was young, I’d gobble down sf short stories and let them blow my mind. It’s where writers come to play, where they grapple with ideas, and experiment in ways that a novel resists. The most innovative work quite often comes from short stories. As a writer, you can smash ideas, and forms together, you can challenge the very shape of narrative. You can have fun.

 

These stories will take you places familiar and strange and more than a little messed up. In its pages you’ll encounter a mother wanting to get home from work in time to say goodbye to her son before he goes off world, A person stuck in a job and a city that is literally smothering them to death, a vampire just wanting a holiday and a bit of a fishing trip. There’s monsters and robot lovers, and the sense that things could be better if capitalism just got out of the way. There are taut morality tales, a quest story that is also an epistolary piece set in a tavern like no other, oh and watch out for the bugs.

 

SF is often justified as the genre that explores what it is to be human, but we kind of know what that is. SF writers are a bit odd, and they bring that light onto the world, and then they add explosions, or clouds of choking smoke.

 

Kafka once wrote: A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. Far Flungis that axe, except it’s not going for the sea, wherever that is. It’s going for the throat.

 

Far-flung will lift you up, and bring you down and make you see the world for the absolutely ridiculously strange, horrible and wonderful thing it is. Grab a copy, devour it, I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

Here's a link if it sounds like your cup of tea.

How is it July Already?

Halfway through the year, and my current WIP is finally starting to talk to its component bibs and bobs. I just wrote a scene that made sense of something that I knew was important, but wasn’t sure why. I’m also rediscovering how messy my first drafts are, particularly if a book is a bit complicated, and this book is the most complicated thing I’ve ever attempted. That said, it’s teaching me a lot of stuff, and it might be complicated but it isn’t dry, and you need to be a bit ambitious from time to time.

 

The book is also finding itself another name, which is odd, after many years of thinking about it as one thing, then coming across something else that completely illuminates what I’m trying to do.

 

I reckon by the end of the year I should have something whole(ish) and a book that has sat in the back of my head for so long will actually have a shape.

A lot of writing going on, which means not much else (parenting/cooking/cleaning etc fills the rest of my time), but that's my happy space. I hope the year has been treating you kindly, we all need a bit of pause I think, there's some bumpy times ahead.

 

News

 

I’ve a new short story out in the Saturday Paper (my second story published there, which thrills me!). You can find it here*. Thanks to Alison Croggon for taking it, and for pushing me to make it better. It’s a tiny offshoot from the WIP, so that gives me a little faith that I’m heading part ways right. Also, very pleased that they chose a Richard Dadd picture to illustrate it.

*And here's the first one if you're interested .

Cracks

To celebrate the paperback release of The Stone Road this month, I'm putting up the short story that was the seed of the book. I think I use about two lines from the story, and a couple of the character names.

I always suspected that this story, and the world of Day Boy were connected. Another story of mine, in fact my first published short story Threnody has also become a part of this world, which weirdly makes this series thirty years old. (How did I get so ancient?) I guess if you're a slow, but kind of (slightly) prolific writer you end up using everything.

Cracks was first published in Shiny Magazine and won the Aurealis Award for best YA short story in 2008

Cracks

The dark is the dark. The song is the song.

     

The shadows were boiling to midday when Lolly Robson found me by the river, my feet dangling over the bank, not touching earth so I could get some peace. He grinned, that crooked stunning smile, and spat a wasteful spit on the ground like it was a challenge, like everything for Lolly was a challenge to be spat out. "Jean. I got need of you."

"Yes I see that," I said in my old voice. The voice that isn't mine, but that's all me, which you'd understand if you had what I had, and maybe you do. "And don't be all spitting and short with me, boy. Just because I was raised peculiar, don't mean you have the right."

Lolly looked almost abashed, but he didn’t say sorry. Robson boys don't. They're haughty. Pretty too. And we were close enough of age that I had no right in calling him boy.

"I like your dress," he said, kind of charming.

I fixed him with a black stare. "Flattery, boy. Too hot for flattery."  Though I liked it. He was a Robson after all. Not that I'd show my pleasure. "What's your need?"

We'd done our dance. Lolly understood, and took the direct path, and snatched back a bit of the old voice's respect.

"Snake's bit my mum." He touched his right biceps, then a point above his wrist, near where he would be cut when he came of age, like all the Robson boys were cut. "Here and here.  She's dying." He choked a little, at that. And the part of me that was me, the small bit, the nailed to the flesh bit, felt sad for him. Like I felt sad for all of them and for myself as well, if I was honest.

"I'm coming, then. Shall we get a move on?" I let him lead me, down the street and by the river. Past the dulling midday traffic.

The dark is the dark. The song is the song. I was all sweat beneath the sun. And the river was all sweat, too. I could feel the dead humming beneath. I could feel  their rumblings in the dry earth; could hear their miserable voices coming up from the cracks in the ground, and through the cracks in the soles of my feet.

I had worn the blue dress that day, and the sun was greedy. I kept to the shadows, but there weren't that many, and the colour was starting to fade. Sun bleaches everything made, beads your skin with sweat. It tasted salty on my lips. That's what the sun tastes like, salt.

The sun crouched on my back; heavy, endless sun. My head burned. I took a deep hot

breath that caught in my lungs, and I felt the dead pause. Felt their seething restless motion still. They waited for something. I waited with them.

And if I'd had any reason to doubt Lolly's claims, the dead snatched them away. They were waiting for her. Mrs Robson. Matriarch and power.

#

I was born mad. Crazy. Born with teeth and snapping. Bit the old doctor's finger, tasted blood before milk, suckled hard, gave a little pain before I let the world have my tears. My mum says that's all the child I was allowed, that moment of insolence. Didn't stop her treating me like one. Didn't stop the thrashings I got.

I was nasty growing up, given to tantrums. But you deal with what I deal with and you've but two choices. Fight and hiss and spit at all those dead voices, or let them wash over you and drown and become their puppet. Some folks reckon that's what the Husk Gods are, but I can tell you they're not. The Husk Gods are too hollow to ever be filled by the likes of the dead.

Comes a time when you make parley with the chatter, but you've a long way to that point, and it ain't till childhood's been mostly burned away by the sun and the noise coming up from those cracks.

"Hurry, boy," I said as regal as I could. "We've not time for your slows."

Lolly regarded me, his eyes brown and deep, and living - vital. "You know I'm not scared of you."

Which was funny, but I didn't laugh.

"You are," I said. "Everyone is, even my mum."

And she was. My mum was scared of me more than anyone because I got what she should have, what was hers, and that meant something. She'd been scared of me and vicious since, always on the sauce. Drunk, and bitter.

"Not an easy thing. That thing that you bear," he said all serious. He reached to touch me, then hesitated. I watched the movement die.

I laughed at that. Kept my lips shut. He might mouth the sympathy, but he didn't know. He didn't know shit. The things I'd seen, the things what had whispered up through the soles in my feet. Silly boys, with their playing at knowing. Folks could speak with their dead kin, yes, but I could speak with em all, and they were honest, and they were demanding, and I didn't like it all hated it.

The sun sucked at us. Burnt the earth, burnt my feet - widened the cracks in both. Out here there's flat and heat, and hills that boiled up from the black soil and the red. And there's the dead. In the ground. Where you'll be, and me, soon enough. We ain't granted much. Just a sliver of heartbeats. Grab a big handful of that dark dry soil, let it slide through your fingers and those grains they're as many minutes as you've got – if you're lucky.

All of us rot, and sooner than we'd like, which is why the dead moan, as they fall, down and down into the deep dark and the circling solitude of the Husk Gods, and why they scramble for as long as they can in the earth, clinging on, grumbling and spitting and singing their song at the cruelties of the universe.

 

 

Way to the Robson place was long and slow in the heat, and even I felt it, for all the chill whisperings, that dry fire. Horizon was thick with dust and smoke. The scrub west of town was burning. Lightning did that, and there were folk out there fighting the sky's work. I could feel them, ’cause they were close to death. We're always ready to die, to fight the world, its flood and famines, in the hope that we might earn our living in it. They were out there fighting now, and I knew Lolly wished he were there too, amongst all that danger.

And I was glad he wasn't. A girl likes some prettiness about her. 

It wasn't that way we walked, but down to the floodplain by the river, the soil rich and dark. And another death that was coming.

We passed a Jersey, all shrivelled up and half drowned in mud, dry and tight about its ribs, like a sucking second skin.

"You hear them cows?" Lolly asked me.

I shook my head. "Just the people. Seems animals don't sit and grumble."

Lolly stopped, bent down and picked up a stone. He threw it hard at the dead thing's head.

"Why's that?"

"I think they're content with death," I said. "They don't rail and grumble and snatch at the still living bits. Life's thin and precious. But it ain't everything."

I took another step and he gripped my wrists, and I could feel the desperate fluttering of his heart, through his bones.

"Not just yet," he said, tears bubbling in his eyes and his voice. "Not just yet."

"But her time's running down."

Lolly shook his head. He wiped the snot from his nose with the back of his hand. He straightened, and tried to be the man he just wasn't yet ready to become. I wanted to kiss him. And, in a moment long as anything I've known, he would have let me.

But the earth beneath me hissed. The ground stung my feet, her bile was that strong.

"This ain't for you," my gran whispered. "No Lolly for you. I've plans that I won't let your hungers ruin."

So I didn't press my chance, but I didn't push Lolly none either.

"You know why she wants me?" I said.

Lolly nodded. "She wants her due. She's done all the things, all the obeisances to the husk gods, the whispering listening ones. She's prepared the soil." He clenched his hands to fists.

"Her life's been devoted to making sure her death is long and powerful."

I wanted to shake my head, and tell him that such a death wasn't power, it was hissing, and vile and made up of threats to those that walk. The Husk Gods are cruel. They rule the beneath, and the worlds above when there is enough death to draw them, but there was more to it than that. That the handful of life we're given was something still.  But I couldn't explain it. Life itself's the explanation, so I let it rest, just stood in silence holding his gaze.

We stood a moment. Then another, the air drying our lungs, even if there was a kind of peace in it. Then in the corner of my eye, I saw it drifting towards us. Huskling, servant of the Gods.

"Keep your eyes shut," I whispered to Lolly. "And your ears, plug em up."

The skin fluttered down to us. I walked in front of Lolly. Checked that he was doing what I said.

The skin shivered, and billowed, it filled with air, man sized and shaped, from toes to cock, to crown. It was puffed up on the fire, on all that death building in the west.

"Huskling," I said. "What's your business here?"

Its voice was a hot wind, a searing gust. "You're slow. Too slow. Time's running out for the mother."

"She made her deals with you. Not me."

The Huskling nodded, bobbing in the air. "Perhaps I should eat the child." It grinned with its flap-of-skin mouth, more than wide enough to eat Lolly.

"You eat the boy. Then I walk slower."  I sat down. "Maybe I'll stop here a while.

The Huskling hissed its frustration, and then popped like a balloon. Bits of skin dropped, leaving a ring of dry rinds.

I shook Lolly and he opened his eyes, and gasped for breath. "I said, your eyes and ears. Nothin' about your mouth and nose."

"What did the Huskling want?"

"To hurry us," I said. "Now run."

Lolly did, with me on his heels, careful though to avoid the skin ring of the Huskling.  I yelled at him all the way, told him to speed it up, and tried my best not to look at that pretty face, all grim with the hurrying to his mother's last breaths.

 

 

 

They were waiting out the front of the house. Not that they could meet my gaze. Robson boys, the young ones. Lolly's older brothers were out fighting the fire. Still, the ones left had managed to build a coffin. And it was done right. I could feel the dead regarding it with approval, Nan seething, because it was too good. Made with fear and love. Oh, them Robson boys loved and feared their mum.

"Run your nails over it, lass. Anti-clockwise." Nan hissed through my feet, her dead bones communing with my living ones. "Dull it a little."

I did, but they were on to me quick, and counter marking, and all the while nice, because they needed me, and they were just boys, and almost as afraid of me as their mum. They guided me, swift and surely from the coffin.

"Ah," Nan spat. "You give her what she wants, but not too much, hear?"

Not too much.

There wasn't too much you could give the dead, and they knew it, even the powerful, which was why they grumbled so.

 

 

Nailed to the veranda was the dead snake, a parody of power now. A brown snake. She didn't have much time left. The Huskling was right. I went inside, and could feel the death impending.

His mother got her eyes in me: still living sight that could burrow deeper than any dead regard. Her breath came shallow and swift like one of them fabled carriages of the gods, pulling her to death, as it puffed its smoke and crashed its engines.

"You ask her where I am to be put?"

I knew what she was talking about. Could feel her. The numbing presence nearby. The stark jealous intensity. People reckon the dead's all rage and vengeful and there is that, in the powerful ones at least, the ceaseless grumbling and grasping. But mostly death is stillness. Mostly death is drifting. Unless you're buried right. Then you've a chance at influence, at matriarchal power. And you can watch over your young'uns, and direct them, subtle but definite. And sometimes not subtle at all.

"You tell her," my gran said, with that sudden weird loyalty that the dead have for the dead. “You tell her, neath the eucalypt. The tall one, back of the house. She'll have what she wants there. She's lived the life.”

I told her, and her boys, then she turned her gaze to them all, and they trooped out of the room. And then she started crying.

"To live the life you've lived isn't easy," I said. "Never easy."

"No," Mother Robson said. "But I've had my kids. I've them to keep on with my life, and they may find pleasure in it yet."

Not likely, I thought, thinking of the lash of a dead matriarch's tongue. She'd be demanding this, demanding that.

I told her that, told her to settle her rage and her misery at death or none of her kin would find pleasure. She laughed at that, and for the first time I saw the fear in her eyes, behind the determination, behind the acceptance. "I ain't your gran," she said.

"Dead's all alike," I said. "All grumbling."

She laughed at that again, and then she stilled.

"Peculiar," she said, and that was the last thing she said.

I shut her eyes, then marched the Robson boys through to see her, to kiss her head, as kin must, then out the back to start their digging. Keep them busy in their grief. Let them cry later when the work was done, when their brothers came home.

Once they left the room, I sat and stared at her, in this moment of stillness, these first moments she had had since birth. Soon they would pass and she would be in the ground and chattering. Her skin was already finding the blue pallor of death. A fly settled on her nose, then lifted and landed on the corner of her lip. I brushed it away, and admired her momentary peace.

She'd be all talk soon, relishing her power, then realizing its diminishment, feeling her body decay, feeling the slow march of rot, in and out. Things would start eating her, the worm and beetle. And, from her position of power, she would be one of the loudest. I wasn't looking forward to that.

An hour, then another passed, just me and her. Then the boys came in. Carrying the coffin. Lolly at the back. They lay it on the bed beside her, then looked at me, all anxious, some of them sniffling. Not Lolly. I could see he was done with his tears. His back was straight, his eyes dark.

"You've got to lay her in the coffin," I prompted. "Gentle now."

They did. And then they hammered the lid on, with old black nails, round which she had wrapped her hair, and dipped in blood. When the last nail was in I led them boys, all carrying their mum, out the backyard to the grave they had dug.

It was getting dark, there was only a lighter darkness in the west now, like a cave's dream of sun. The ground was chattery, roaring with the dead. Old voices, distant for the most part, now rose up.

"There. There. There." The ground was chattery, yes, and bubbling. I caught glimpses of fingers, of dark flesh, curled and chewed on flesh, and bone, eyes sunken and black. Death darkens everything with its tar touch.

 They were too excited, and me too intent on getting it done. I tripped at the edge of the grave and fell in that hole, all Alice, and tumbling, chasing important dates or fish or whatever nonsense. The fall knocked the wind out of me and the dead rushed round me.

My gran's face pushed through the dirt. Her lips pressed against mine. Most times I feel them; this time they felt me.

And I wanted to scream, but I wasn't bought up to give utterance to my fear.

"Back," I spat. "Back, your time is done."

"So is hers," my gran whispered. "Done. Done. Down here with us now. Do you want me to eat you, girl?"

I laughed at that. All that threat, and how she didn't understand. She'd already eaten me. I pushed her face away with my palm, felt the spongy flesh give. I laughed.

"Why not? This is a powerful place to die, and for me to do it willingly, I could have a nice time of lording it over you all."

I closed my eyes and lay down on the dirt.

And I was suddenly bigger than my flesh. I was the sky and the vast dark beyond, and the raging boiling stars. I was everything, with a scrap of me attached, a tiny flake that seemed so insignificant. I knew in that moment that I could scrape it away. I could scrape everything away, and just be that big everything.

The Husk Gods shuttled around me. The Husk Gods whispered such promises in my ear. “Ruin it. Ruin it.”

Their tongues lashed my back like whips.

But I thought of Lolly and his wanting face. And I stilled my power, pushed it away, cut it out of my flesh. My gran was screaming, and cackling, and cursing my name. “You’ll rule us all.”

But I did not want to rule such an emptiness. I did not want that great dark to be mine. I just wanted this brief happiness.

“What you doing, girl?”

I pulled myself from the dark earth, I pushed away their reaching fingers. They snatched and tried to hold me, but I knew that I was stronger, that my will was iron, and for the first time in a long time, maybe ever, I did not listen.

#

I got up, and out of the grave. I smiled at Lolly, and he smiled at me; uncertain, but a smile all the same.

I nodded to the coffin and the ropes they'd placed under it.

"Lower it now," I said.

And they did.

"You can look down now. Your mother's in the grave. Your mother's to her power." I held his hand. "You can look down, and listen. But you don't have to."

I thought of him. Me and Lolly, leaving this place. And I'd like to think he considered it too. Maybe, for a second, because he didn't pull away, not as swift as he could have. He squeezed a little then he let go and walked down to the grave's edge

Lolly looked down. He looked down for a long time, and when he turned around, he wasn't the same Lolly any more. He was older, smaller, his back bent with a weight that hadn't been there before, even in his grief. And I knew I'd lost him.

"Thank you," he said. And he said it all formal, all polite.

"Nothin'" I said.

"Thank you, all the same,"

I already had my back to him, already started the walk into town. And he was digging, throwing spade after spade of that black earth into the hole he had dug. His other brothers helping, his family closing round him, closing me out. Listening for the mother. I could hear her, so loud, and spiteful.

"Not a proper choice, boy," Dead Mrs Robson said. "You need yourself a sane one, a real one. Don't curse our line with that. Surely you understand."

He must have because he didn't come running. Oh, the weight the dead have, and their judgments. The other dead whispered, whispered, whispered, through the cracks in my feet; almost all the family allowed me.

I walked home, to my mum, and her bottle-dreams, and gran whispering up to do this, pick that, help this one and hinder that. Only I didn't.

"What you doing, girl? What you doing?"

I ignored her, and bought some food, and a lot of water.

"You can't. The power, the song."

I walked out of town, into the cooling dark.

"You can't."

I didn't walk far that night, just far enough. But I would. There was days of it ahead, and no guarantee of anything but sore feet, and heat.

"You can't."

I found a place to rest, by the river, where the roos were mobbing. They didn't mind me none. I lifted my feet. It was quiet. So blessed quiet.

The dark is the dark. The song is the song.

But not my song.

Not anymore.

Indexation

I’d forgotten how good index cards are at untangling stories. I’ve got a fair chunk of a new novel written – around 15,000 words – and it’s still feeling formless. Often, I don’t feel like I’m making any progress on a story unless I’m actually typing away, and that serves me pretty well when I’m writing something particularly plotty. I kind of work it out as I go, putting down key scenes and so on.

 

But this new book, as opposed to the one I’ve just finished, is a little looser. There are key elements and themes, but I’m still working out how they connect.

 

Index cards are a useful way of looking at a book (at least the book as I currently intend/hope it to be) as whole and asking questions about it without tripping up on the sentences. Basically, not so much locking in a structure, but looking at structural possibilities.

 

Without going into detail, I always knew this was going to be a difficult book to write, but I don’t want it to be a dreadfully difficult book to read.

 

I think I’m slowly finding my way.

 

#

 

On a lighter note.

 

Brent Wilson and I will be at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival talking about how we made Mr Impoppable. It's going to be a lot of fun.

 

You can book here.

Less Clunk

The final iteration of the Stone Road is coming out late April with US paperback edition. I am so delighted that it has managed an Australian paperback, a US hardcover, audio, and now the US paperback like its sibling Day Boy.

 

The book is slowly sliding into the rearview, and I’m getting deeper into a new work, my grant book which is about as ambitious and vulnerable as I have ever been in fiction.

New books are perilous endeavours because they kind of feel like nothing at the beginning, and then you start throwing words at them and more words and more words and they seem like they will never be more than a mess. But Stone Road felt like that too, and Day Boy, and every other novel I have published. It’s a little reassuring.

 

Also reassuring is the work I’m doing editing another novel project. It’s all holding together and while there’s still plenty of clunk, there’s less clunk than when I’ve started, and a bit of poetry, I think.

 

Finally, the pages keep coming on the project Brent and I are working on. What a joy it is to see a story grow into pieces of art. This book is going to be really special – not least because it’s a dream made real. And once again it all started as words on a page about which there was never any certainty that they would make sense (I just got to share that doubt with someone else from the first draft on).

Things I'm reading:

I recently finished Robert Jackson Bennett's excellent The Tainted Cup. A fantastic big picture (but also sort of intimate drawing room) crime fantasy novel that I'm still thinking about*. There are giant monsters, an Empire struggling with corruption, and a great crime-solving duo that get compared to Sherlock Holmes and Watson, but Robert is doing his own thing. Can't wait for the next one.

*Mostly how did he get that to work, because it does, brilliantly.

NOTES TO ONESELF

I’m going through my notebooks, around thirty years’ worth of them, finding the ideas that flared and the ones that didn’t. It’s amazing how many memories they evoke. Scratched down notes, some crossed out, made on commutes, or in lunch breaks.

 

I’m a patchy notetaker, I tend to take my stuff to the computer as soon as I can. But there are still hundreds of notebooks. And while it might be a bit disheartening to see all those undeveloped ideas, it’s also reassuring. Without them I have still made books and written stories, and so many in one way or another have been folded into other things.

 

A writing life, lived amongst all the other bits of life, is full of flashes of inspiration, but there is only so much time and only so many things you can do. It’s good to be reminded that everything starts out just as a few lines, a scrawl on paper or a tapping on the screen.

 

When this work doesn’t feel quite real – and it sort of isn’t at the beginning – you need to remember that writing is knitting story from nothing (the nothing that is everything – thoughts, dreams, books and stories, and the incessant terrible glorious pressure of the world).

 

Character, world building, structure, the beat of words to drive a story on, all of it comes from there. Something made out of scribbles.