Trent Jamieson's Blog, page 2

Carrying the Rock, and Putting it Down

 

 

There’s always a point where I must force myself to stop with a novel. Where I put the rock down and pass it on to someone else. It’s not a finishing point, but a pause where I can get some distance. Novel’s take up a lot of my brain space, I write slowly (though I can write fast – there was a year where I had five books on the go) and if I don’t create an artificial pause, I’d never let the damn things go so they can come back at me.

 

I put the rock of my novel down yesterday and passed it on to my first reader – in this case my partner. The book’s structure is pretty sound, but I can feel a few wobbles, and I want someone else’s opinion now – there’s scenes in this book I’ve rewritten twenty times. There are bits of clunky dialogue, some odd transitions, and some stuff that doesn’t quite make sense. But it’s closer than I’ve been in years to seeing it finished. I reckon there’s only a few months more work until it’s a submittable book. I’ve even sent off a brief blurb to my agent – that I could manage that is also a good sign that the book has a comprehensible shape and that I can talk about what the book is about (at least from a story point of view).

 

This week I also wrote the blurb for the next bit of the project that Brent and I are working on. The second book is (almost) ready for the editors at Puffin. Writing these has been fun, having Brent as a second brain is fantastic, he’s great at refining first drafts, and resetting the broken bones of stories and we make each other laugh. I’ve learnt a lot about my process working with him, which is cool this late in a writing career.

 

Oh, and the artwork I am seeing for the first book is incredible – we did a deep dive into books we love and the books out now in this genre, and I feel like Brent’s taking it to some exciting places. There’s something classic and fresh about his style and getting new artwork every few days is incredible.

 

Finally, having put down those two bookish rocks, I can finally give much more thought to the new book and its shape. It’s one thing to be ambitious, it’s another to meet those ambitions. All I can do is pick up the rock and see where we take each other.

Fruit

January was a blur, mostly parenting, discovering that new to us gap between daycare and school starting.

But I managed a little writing, and planning. I finished a workable draft of the next book with Penguin, and Brent has passed over it too, adding some great scenes and tightening, we work very well together and a lot of that comes from trust and I'm loving the shared space (universe) that has made (also, I think the book's very funny). I’m also finishing one novel so I have a clean slate for the next, which is my grant book (which currently consists of a few scenes, notes, and a lengthening reading list of everything from fairy tales, parenting books, to stellar astronomy).

 

The novel I am nearly done with (well this stage of the doing done) is Fantasy (with a capital F) and feels like a fusion of everything I have learnt in the writing of the previous books. It’s intimate, but big. The writing is less heightened, but it also contains some of my most heightened passages getting the balance right is the trick.

I am quite in love with it, which is a good sign, but I know that I will head to the sick of it stage soon. I don’t think I have ever read and re-read a book so much, which isn’t to say that it is any better than any of my other books, but it does feel the most considered (hopefully in a good way). It’s also my biggest book by a good forty thousand words (and that’s with a lot of cutting and shaping) and I don’t think I’ll write a bigger book than this*, but it has been fun to let it have its space. It’s also doing that thing that some of my books do at this stage where I am beginning to see the shape of stories flowing out of it, and how they might work – it’s an odd kind of echoing that the cavern of a story makes.

 

The novel that is going to keep me going for the bulk of the year though is the grant book. I’m still grappling with the voice and the incidents of the story and how best they might play out, but as I’ve been thinking about this book for the best part of a decade I think I know the way.

 

So January has been the joy of collaboration (and seeing the wonderful art Brent sends me of our first book which out in 2025 and which I’ll start sharing as soon as I can), the hyperfocus of a book nearly done, and the thrashing broader strokes required to get a new book working.

 

This grant, even with the school holidays eating up most of January is already starting to bear fruit. We’ll just have to wait and see how it tastes.

*Though there's definitely an argument that the Nightbound Land duology** which clocks in at around 180,000 words and the Death Works trilogy which comes in around 240,000 are essentially single novels.

**I actually think the Nightbound Land Duology works best as single book, the first half the hesitation before the storm, the second all action. It's a bit unbalanced as two novels, but I really didn't know what I was doing when I wrote those. Some of us learn slower than others.

GIFTS

Another birthday comes around.

Fifty treated me well. I wrote a lot, did some amazing work with Brent Wilson which we’ll start talking about in 2025, published a little, mainly focussed on finishing off what I hope is the next novel (nearly there), won an Aurealis Award for the Stone Road (!) and ended the year with a Creative Australia grant large enough for me to take next year off work and spend the time writing another book.

Fifty was also the year that I learnt that I could decide to do a project with someone and actually see it through. It's just a matter of working with the right person. Since it's taken me three decades to reach this conclusion I guess it's easier said than done, but it's about the most fun I've ever had artistically.

 

Time is the most precious thing. And getting it to work on a book I’ve been putting off for years because it’s a real stretch of my skills is an absolute gift and one I won’t be taking lightly.

 

I’ve made do with moments snatched between childcare and work and weekends and there’s a real power in friction of competing needs, but I am looking forward to days of writing in a row, and being able to give deeper thought to what I am doing. I guess we’ll see how that goes.

I'll also have more time to make sure that I actually promote the work I have coming out. I sometimes let that slide. And I'm going to be giving the old webpage a bit of a polish too. With so many other things going on it often gets neglected.

I'm also working on a series of essays. It's a weird little project that I'm aiming to write 200 essays of 200 words each, all about writing and art as I see it. It's either going to be fun or repetitive. Not sure what I'm going to do with it, but I'll actually have time to think about that too.

Now, a child has just gotten up, so time to get breakfast. But here's a link to a story of mine that came out earlier in the year. Hope you enjoy - if you have time :)

https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/fierce-happening

SATISFYING MYSTERIES

One of the great joys of living with a novel* or some other story project over a long time are the characters. These simulacrums of people and other entities that fill out and become not just longings or arcs of story but satisfying mysteries. When they grow enough that they actually surprise you, but in a way that feels right – which is where fiction differs from reality, I mean I don’t make up my friends (though I guess in a way our brain does, cause I mean, you can never KNOW anyone really).

I manufacture the characters and situations, but there’s still that magical place where connections happen, and all that making gets nicely out of hand and you’re suddenly laughing at something this person who came out of your head has said on the page or done. And the world itself, which is in essence character as well, will shift and assume something unexpected, or throw a place name at you that just works.

This is happening with my current novel. I’m reading through it one more time before I pass it on to beta readers, knowing it’s not perfect, but it’s as far as I can take it on my own, and, even now, my characters are surprising me in the margins.

Half the time I don’t know why I do things, and it’s a fine trick to see your characters do that too, watching them dive into their own self-justifications and delusions.

I tend to write from a very close first-person point of view, and the new* novel is mostly that, and giving secondary characters depth and continuity can be a challenge, but I’ve lived with these creatures long enough that they feel like they’re doing that. A single surprising moment from one of them today had me laughing for a couple of minutes (which is either a good sign or a terrible one).

I love the challenge of writing a big fantasy world from the narrow focus of one character. I feel like the last two books have gotten me ready for it, that I’ve learnt from what I feel are the successes and failures of Day Boy and Stone Road. I guess only time will tell.

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Edits and illustrations are going apace with the Brent and Trent Next Big Book Project.

I’ve seen some amazing art from Brent (it makes my day every time I get a text or an email with some art) and I am always humbled by his generosity in sharing his process. Story telling illustratively is utterly fascinating, and Brent just has a way of making words sing on the page no matter how silly they are. We've made a great world, I think and there's so much more to explore.

I’m so excited for these books, and looking forward to sharing various details and bits and pieces as we get closer to publication.

*If only they would clean up after themselves, though. This house is a mess, and don't get me started on my desk.

**new as in roughly five years old. I am SO SLOW!

Writing Where Does it Happen?

There’s nothing mystical about writing it’s the most prosaic activity at its heart. You put one word after another, and you hope to God that you get the punctuation right. You put another word after that, and so on, until you have a story or a fragment. It’s just using words. But it’s also the most mystical of processes.

Those words come out of the soup that is the mind. And if your mind is like mine, it’s a very messy place. Often I just chase the words and rely on my innate sense of structure to guide me. There is intent, but even when I try to drive that to the surface it will often dive straight back down again. My writing is driven by the deeper currents of my brain. That generative soup of stories read, experienced, dreamed.

I look at my notes and my ideas and my sketches, the kind of things that act as a rudder or are meant to act as a rudder, and they are rarely actually used except as diving off points. Which makes sense because the sea we’re crossing is changeable and the shore we’re heading for is vague and probably isn’t even the one we thought we were. Maps are but part-way useful.

Which, to me, really drives home the importance of reading, and reading, and reading. You learn the shape of stories by experiencing stories. You bury that in your skull and, over time as more stories are laid down, the seeds of new stories are planted,

The writing process when you break it down to the particulate matter is just like consciousness, or matter itself, go deep enough and there’s kind of nothing there. Write a scene one day and it will be different to how you might have written it another, because the eddies of thought that bring our words to us change endlessly.

Editing of course brings things together, draws in those notes where stories begin but don’t, but even then, it’s a fraught process, tidal, uncertain. What seems a great sentence on one editorial pass can seem utterly rubbish the next.

It’s just putting words one after another, but what it makes through that odd, mechanical process can thrill, delight and confound. Art is magic. Process is just the scaffolding built after the edifice, the story that we tell ourselves and others, so that we have more to say then well, I just sat down and wrote it.

Currently in my happy place knitting my edits together for what I’m hoping will be my next novel, and drafting what should be book two in the series that I am working on with Brent Wilson. I’ve seen some of the art that Brent is producing for the book and it’s absolutely outstanding. Brent is at the beginning of a new stage in his career and getting a glimpse of what he is doing is an absolute honour.

Words and art, you can’t get better than that.

RELEASED AND AN ANNOUNCEMENT

Today is Day Boy’s US trade paperback publication day. That book has done far better than I ever expected. The Text Australian edition was shortlisted and longlisted for more awards than any of my novels, and it won two Aurealis Awards for Best Fantasy and Best Horror novel.

I’ve lived in that world for a very long time, elements of it are as old as my writing career, and it has been interesting to see how it has changed as I have changed. The world of Day Boy and The Stone Road is one of harsh and sudden transformations over which a thin curtain of scrub-dry pastoral fantasy has been stretched.

It is the fantasy of Australia and the fantasy of a rural life that never really was, and an ideal that was neither inclusive nor particularly true.

At least that’s how I see them, of course you can never trust a writer to see their work clearly, we’re too down in the muck of it where any reading is also buried in the way we produced the work: a word at a time.

Regardless, I am proud of Day Boy and the journey it has made from paperback to hardcover to paperback. It’s as close to a cult novel I’ve ever written (as in it’s known and loved by a very few ). Some of the sentences sing and startle me with that lovely jolt that has me wondering how I ever wrote them.

And the book’s lived a life longer than any of my other works, and that’s more than I ever expected. People still find it and love it or hate it, and I am extremely grateful. And now, more people will encounter it. Thanks to Erewhon Books.

The Audio Book is out and about too. It's read by the talented Adam Fitzgerald. May it find even more readers.

I don’t normally ask this, but if you’ve loved the book and haven’t reviewed it on any of the usual sites I’d be delighted if you did.

And I’m also delighted to announce that Brent Wilson and I have signed a two-book deal with Penguin Random House, Australia. Brent and I have been working on these books all year and we have created an amazing world that I can’t wait to share with you.

Brent is an incredible talent, and it has been a delight working with him. I think we’ve both pushed ourselves in new directions that also celebrate the things we love.

I know I’m being vague, but as details are released, I’ll share more on the webpage. Needless to say, this is a dream project with a wonderful collaborator. There's a teensy tease above drawn by Brent, of course.

Stone Road News & Sticking At It

The Stone Road is on the Ditmar preliminary ballot, which is very exciting.

I've never won a Ditmar, but this is my fourth time on the ballot, and I'm always thrilled when it happens. Thank you to those who nominated me! If anyone is interested and exploring their Ditmar voting options let me know and I may be able to send you an ARC of the book - I've still got a few lying around.

Also, the audio book of Stone Road is now available. It is read by Katherine Littrell and they have done an amazing job bringing the story to life.

It's been an exciting few weeks here, after a very busy start to the year, and hopefully I'll have something new that I am absolutely over the moon about to announce soon

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Finally, I've been thinking about my career lately. I've been working at writing for publication for over thirty years now, slowly building up publishing credits, watching my career leap ahead, and then lag, and it's never been clearer to me than now (particularly with little kids) that the mo

st important element to any writing career beyond even a facility with words is regular writing.

Sitting down and writing regularly, getting the words down, consistently. It almost doesn't matter how many words that you write, but that you just keep doing it. Targets etc don't really matter. Just getting down the words, being gentle with yourself, and open to where those words take you.

I've had periods where I have had loads of time (and they're great) but I've also had periods where I have had less than a few hours a week, and the output (as long as I am consistently writing) is about the same.

You write, you read, you try and get better. They're the only things you have ultimate control over. Every other writing strategy is really just built on that. It's the hardest thing I do, I'm never satisfied with what comes out, but it can also be damn fun.

I love this writing business, and it has taken me places I never would have expected, far beyond my dreams scratching out Dr Who stories in Primary School (honestly, that pretty much happened from the first professional story I had published).

It's heartening to

think that every story started with me just sitting down, looking at a blank page, and seeing where the words took me.

I sometimes feel like the least professional writer in the world, but there's magic and joy in this craft, and any success I've had has just come from sitting down, filling the pages, bit by bit, and dreaming for the stars.

Events and an Award's Arrival

There's been so much fun with Mr Impoppable lately, some podcast chats, a workshop I taught on the weekend, and even a story that I forgot to mention here. Fierce Happening was a long time coming, I have the first words in a notebook somewhere from around twenty years ago (even for me that is a loooong gestation). But please do check it out.

Kathleen Jennings that most astute of readers had this to say about it on her wonderful and much more furnished blog than this one.

Fierce Happening” — Trent Jamieson (The Sunday Morning Transport, 2023 — a girl must defend her community’s ambulatory houses from attack) 3,009 anxiety — determination — certainty ominous — storm — clearing towards — in — emerging realise — hope — stripped back listen — stand — travel all that’s carried — disencumber — travel lighter the weight of responsibility — the act of responsibility — growing into it

(The viscera of the living houses!)

This shape — moving from obligation into experience, the determined carrying-out of an obligation conferred too young — means a story can rattle along at a fast pace without feeling like its plot has been laboriously constructed.

I was surprised how short it was when I glanced back over it. A definite sense of “no time to explain, get in the car/house”.

In terms of that pacing — incident packed into a relatively short wordcount in a way that makes it seem longer, not squashed — it reminded me of Tina S Zhu’s considerably shorter “Recipe” (here in the September 2022 notes).

“Fierce Happening” is longer, and doesn’t compress and build from a traditional structure in the same way as “Recipe”. But it does compress its worldbuilding — in this case, not by relying on an already-known story-shape to fill it in, but by simply NOT filling it in, and letting the reader keep up as best they can.

There’s something there, too, about the way a brief but continuous roll-out of telling details can make a world seem more complete and a story larger and faster.

Also, if you’ve read Trent Jamieson’s novels Day Boy and/or The Stone Road (do!), this is revisits a concern of that storyworld: responsibilities necessarily taken on young, and a character growing into/through them.

There's something about walking houses that has fascinated me for just about forever, and I really had to consider their guts - you don't get that sort of locomotion without a serious digestive system.

Here's a little something, completely unconnected that I wrote a few years back (it did not take me multiple decades.

Property Values

The House came over the hill, knuckle-kneed and crackling. Step, step, down the steep slope, and the lady cackled and drove her lads ahead with a stick and a rattle made of stolen teeth. “Hurry, boys. Hurry, or I’ll swallow you up.” I’d never seen such horror on little boy’s faces, nor such consternation on the neighbours’. Property values plummeted with every step. But what are homes for if not to keep out witches, and to let them in? “Stories for a meal,” she said, knocking on my door, after her house had settled in the vacant lot at number eighteen. I flung the door wide, and she ate my noisy children, gulp, gulp, but the stories were worth it, and my house works much better now with legs.

Here's Brent and I at Quick Brown Fox Bookshop, just before an extremely fun event.

We're off to Mad Hatters Bookshop next.

Oh, and here's my shiny new Aurealis Award, sitting next to its siblings. One of which is for Cracks the short story that was the basis of The Stone Road, who'd have thought!

Oh, and the Audio Book of The Stone Road, read by the incredible Katherine Littrell is due for release on the 11th of July. Get your ears ready!

Launched!

Last weekend Brent Wilson and I launched Mr Impoppable into the world.

It was a lot of fun. Thanks to everyone that made it along, and to Avid Reader/Where the Wild Things Are for hosting the event. It never feels like a book is out until it has been launched there.

Also, how cool are these chocolates that Alex Adsett (super agent) made?

And there were the traditional mini-cupcakes with the cover on them! The fact that all of these were eaten before I could get to them shows just how successful the event was.

It was delight getting to read the book in front of an audience, and I may have dressed up as a pirate at one stage.

And swung a sword.

Anyway, if you missed it, we'll be doing another event at Quick Brown Fox Bookshop, the week after next. You can book here.

Photo Credits - Jenny Stubbs, Alex Adsett, Kris Kneen (THANK YOU!)

Stone Road Wins Aurealis Award

I won an Aurealis Award on the weekend (as you do), wrote a wholly inadequate acceptance speech (I didn't expect to win) and leapt about a lot at home - I wasn't able to make the ceremony in Canberra.

Thanks so much for the CSFG for streaming the whole thing, and Tehani for reading said inadequate acceptance speech. It was nice to get back into the headspace of that novel for a bit, because I'll be doing a few Stone Road related things over the next few months.

The Audio Book should be available in July, and the paperback US edition (which is my preferred edition - it's a perfect combination of the Brio edit and the Liz Gorinsky edit) should be out, I'm guessing in the new year.

Meanwhile, my latest picture book "Mr Impoppable" is out in the world. It's such a fun book, with a lot of heart, and my usual weirdness. Brent Wilson's illustrations are incredible, and I feel so lucky to have had him work on the book.

If you're interested check it out. I know it's in a lot of Australian libraries, and any independent (or otherwise) bookstore worth their salt should be able to order it in for you.

And, if you're Brisbane, I'm doing the first of a few events at my bookish home Avidreader. You can book here.

Finally, here's my acceptance speech.

Thank you to the judges and the whole crew at the Aurealis Awards, every time I am shortlisted my heart skips a beat. No book is written alone. I’d like to thank my editors Mandy Brett, David Henley, and Liz Gorinsky, who were there for different parts of the journey. Also, the team at Erewhon Books who are absolutely delightful. I’d also like to thank Fiona MacDonald without whom writing would be a thousand times harder. Finally, any win is for Alex Adsett, my dear friend and agent, who believed in this book and me above and beyond… and beyond. Thank you.