Joshua Donellan's Blog: JM Donellan's substack, page 10

Quotes

I just found out that someone made one of those ‘quotes as images to share on social media’ things from something I wrote in Zeb and the Great Ruckus. Apparently it’s been used on a dating website as a ‘this is a selection of words that encapsulates who I am and if you are of a similar temperament we should high five with our tongues’ kind of deal. I can’t tell you how much this pleases and amuses me. Maybe I should start using online dating and employ my own quotes as tags to express my personality, sort of like an existential ouroboros of self-expression.

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 Review of Machiavelli's the (Artist Formerly Known as) Prince  Dear vending machine in the emergency ward at the Royal Brisbane hospital: I hate you.  REVIEW OF EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD PART ONE  Fan art  Copyright © JM Donellan [Quotes], All Right Reserved. 2013.

Xmas tree made from dead trees (aka books)

This is our Xmas tree! This xmas, just buy everybody books. If they don’t like them, they can always use them to make trees like this.

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 ART, FICTION, FASHIONISTAS  INAPPROPRIATE SHARE HOUSE BEHAVIOUR  THIS IS THE EIGHTH OR NINTH WORST THING THAT COULD POSSIBLY EVER HAPPEN.  ZEB IS EVERYWHERE!  PROMETHEUS VS PROGENYCopyright © JM Donellan [Xmas tree made from dead trees (aka books)], All Right Reserved. 2013.

100 books a year

For the last three years I’ve set myself a goal of reading 100 books a year. I’m often asked how I ‘manage’ to do this and the answer is simply that people make time for the things they value. Some people lift weights 7-9 hours a week, some people watch entire seasons of a TV show in a weekend, some people like to dress up as furry animals and pleasure each other in seedy hotel rooms for hours at a time. I like to read. This year I reached my reading goal slightly early, and I thought I’d share some of the best (and worst) things I read.

 

Elliott Perlman is an amazing novelist and also a barrister. HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE? IS HE BATMAN AS WELL? I once left a copy of his fantastic book Three Dollars on the bed of a hotel in Cartagena, and three days later I found the exact same copy sitting on the bookshelf in my hostel in Bogota. This story has nothing to do with this excellent collection, but it was pretty weird.

 

This is one of those novels where you feel like the characters are friends that you want to call up and invite out for drinks. The chapter told from the perspective of an autistic child written entirely in flowcharts and graphs was particularly astounding. As someone who works with autistic kids, I was thrilled by how well Egan was able to capture the feelings and frustrations of a child with this condition.

I’ve never been so transformed by the ideas contained within a book whilst also wanting to punch its author in the face. Think! has some revolutionary ideas on the application of thinking as a skill to areas like education, business and art. Unfortunately, approximately 25-35% of the book’s content is just extensive brag lists where De Bono rambles on about places that have used his systems and awards he’s received. Maybe he should Think! about letting the ideas speak for themselves, rather than trying to be some sort of erudite Kanye.

 

Not quite as amazing as Consider the Lobster (which, if you have not read, you need to acquire and insert into your eyeballs IMMEDIATELY)  but there are some incredible observations on language, consumerism, sport and just about every other subject under the sun. Wallace is the very definition of genius.

 

MOBY DICK

Herman Melville

I’m not going to lie, this was something of a struggle. Luckily I was tipped off onto the Moby Dick big read project. Hearing chapters read by Tilda Swinton and Carys Matthews from Catatonia made some of the weightier chapters a little more bearable. “FROM HELL’S HEART I STAB AT THEE!”

 

For his high school science experiment, Kaku made a fucking atom smasher. AN ATOM SMASHER! And yes, that does exactly what you think it does. You think rockstars are cool because they smash the odd hotel TV? Kaku is exponentially cooler (and, unlike most rockstars, he can also rapidly calculate exponential figures). In this book he examines the likelihood of all the inventions we see in science fiction novels and movies becoming reality. This is important if, like me, you constantly argue about the plausibility of teleportation and time travel.

 

Let me tell you a secret. The category ‘Young Adult’ is a term used for marketing purposes and it doesn’t mean anything. People who say ‘I don’t read YA fiction’ might as well say ‘I don’t read books where the protagonist has a distant relative who eats jam sandwiches on Tuesdays.’ One of my other favourite books this year, The Midnight Dress, is classified as literary fiction in Australia and YA overseas, (much to the bewilderment of its author). The Ask and the Answer is one of the single greatest examinations of the complexities of war, colonisation and patriarchy I have ever read. Intelligently tackling themes like this whilst maintaining a breakneck pace is an incredible feat. The first of the Chaos Walking movies is currently in development and IT HAD BETTER BE GOOD, HOLLYWOOD.

 

I’m not sure if Ballard typed this or just turned on a dictation program before dropping a tab of acid and languorously masturbating. There are SO MANY references to semen in this book it doesn’t even make sense. It’s a hallucinatory, surrealist work that has one or two good ideas buried amongst 200 pages of slavering, self-indulgent grandiosity.

 

IT CHOOSES YOU and NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU

Miranda July

July’s films, books and music will break your heart then mend it with super glue and lullabies and then put it out on a boat out to the ocean where it gets stranded on a desert island and then rescued via helicopter and shot in a rocket to the moon until it finally comes home in time for tea. Her short stories are just perfect, and her sort of memoir/behind the scenes of making a movie It Chooses You is weird and illuminating.

Recommended to me by a good friend while sharing some very long car rides in Spain, this is a fantastic novel on every level. There’s a reason why this book scored a Pulitzer, they don’t just throw those things around you know. I’ve certainly never gotten one, although I’m hoping one will turn up on ebay sooner or later. 

People who think that comics are just for kids make me sad and angry and confused and slightly itchy. Would you say that chocolate is only for kids? Or going to the beach? Or tequila? No, wait that one’s just for adults. In any case, this graphic novel is a beautiful study of the human condition that peeks into the lives of various New Yorkers. Trivia: The Eisner award was named after Will Eisner and he won it a bunch of times. Imagine if he’d lost every time he got nominated. Can you imagine watching some jerk’s grubby hands clutching an award that literally had your name on it? Irony on steroids.

 

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 Interim parliament vows to keep Australia 'one nation under a groove'  Bright Eyes @ the BNE Hifi reviewed for Rave magazine    Zeb and the Great Ruckus: coming at you like a rampaging bewilderbeast in 2012  Paper girl festival video interviewCopyright © JM Donellan [100 books a year], All Right Reserved. 2013.

Stories + cushions = best friends having amazing literary pillow fights forever

Ladies and gentlememes, if you frequent this little corner of the internet on a regular basis then you may have heard that as part of the Brisbane Writers Festival I had a short story, Lenore Meets a Mack Truck, printed on a few cushions scattered around the festival thanks to the good folks at Tiny Owl Workshop. There were a total of five printed, one of these was sold to a charming gentleman who told me he was going to also buy one of Sam George-Allen‘s and make his children fight with them, which sounds hilarious and delightful.

I’m going to keep two of them myself, but I thought it might be fun to give the remaining two homes in strange and unknown places. As a special preXmas offer, anyone who purchases either Zeb and The Great Ruckus or A Beginner’s Guide to Dying in India direct through this website in the next week goes into the draw. One book = one chance. You buy both books, you double your chances. You buy 50 copies, you’ve pretty much got it in the bag (hint).

    One has a shiny blue backing and the other is chocolate brown with tassels. Because everything is better with chocolate and tassels. 

My only caveat is that, because these cushions are super large, you’re either going to need to pick them up from my house in Paddington (QLD) or, if you live within a half hour drive of the Brisbane CBD I’ll deliver one to your doorstep. Remember, there are only 5 of these IN THE WORLD, or to put it in modern terms, there are only five times as many of these story cushions as there are women in Tony Abbott’s cabinet. HURRY HURRY HURRY CLICK CLICK CLICK! 

Here is a handsome man holding one of the super fun story cushions. Perhaps by winning one of these cushions you will  either become or acquire a handsome man of your own! It certainly wouldn’t be the most ridiculous thing a promotion has ever promised you, I’m sure.

PS This is super secret, but in addition to being a standalone microfiction piece, this story is also the opening page of a novel entitled Lenore’s Last Funeral. I’ve only just started writing the first few chapters, so it’ll probably be released sometime in the next few years. It will most likely be the weirdest thing I’ve ever written. You can think of these cushions as an ultra-exclusive sneak preview.

Tags:  art, BWF, Lenore's Last Funeral, love, writing




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 Fan art  Bright Eyes @ the BNE Hifi reviewed for Rave magazine  Twitter interview (twitterview? Twinterview?)  Alliance of Best Smelling Authors  "Look ma, I got a book deal!"Copyright © JM Donellan [Stories + cushions = best friends having amazing literary pillow fights forever], All Right Reserved. 2013.

VLAD = Very Lucky Australian Dictator

My dearest Newman

it’s your old pal JD here. As you know, I do my utmost to be a law-abiding citizen, no matter how ineffective, draconian or heavily criticised by experts the laws in question may be. After all, we all know that pesky experts just get in the way of progress, right? What with their opinions formed from actual experience and/or academic qualification, rather than the far more validating source of pure, irrational, gut-feeling. You’re a man who thinks with his gut, Mr Newman,  you don’t have time for consultation or due process, and I think that’s something that we all admire. Sure, the odd West End hippie might get questioned for drawing in chalk and police might start receiving death threats, but we all know that doing the (very far) right thing isn’t always easy. In fact, what’s confusing about doing the right thing is that it so often looks like exactly the wrong thing. On every conceivable level.

Now, as much as I am doing my best to abide by these shiny new VLAD laws, much like Jarrod Bleijie I have only limited experience with the law and I am somewhat confused about the details. I’m hoping you can clarify a few things for me, thanks in advance for your assistance.

1 Next week my book club is meeting to discuss Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance. We often travel on bicycle, sometimes in groups of three or more. Should I call my lawyer and give him a heads up in case we get arrested?

2 Every third Wednesday I get together with my friends at the Sons of Anarchy fan club. We usually wear our official t-shirts but recently police have been questioning fans for showing off their affection for SAMCRO. Is it okay if we continue to wear the merchandise of fictitious American TV shows? Because I’d really hate to give up my official Mad Men smoking jacket just because police thought it was the name of a irate terrorist group with a gender biased recruitment policy.

       

“Damn it Jeremy,  that’s the wrong Scorpion! You do this every time!”

3 I’m going to a costume party this weekend and a couple of us of thought it would be fun to go dressed as popular video game character Scorpion. Unfortunately, this means we would collectively be referred to as The Scorpions. While it’s true that experts say that the Scorpions don’t actually exist in Australia, you have wisely added them to your list of banned organisations and I just want to make sure that I don’t ruffle any legal feathers. I’ve also revoked my membership to other non-existent organisations like SHIELD, Weiland-Yutani, Lexcorp, Cyberdyne and the Australian Quidditch League.

4 I play in a band called the Bandidos, we mostly perform Latin flavoured covers of Miley Cyrus songs (you haven’t heard ‘Wrecking Ball’ until you’ve heard it played on the Charango, believe me!) and we all have matching jackets with our band name on the back. Will we be alright to go ahead with our performance at the West End retirement village next week? I really don’t want to disappoint Mabel. She’s 94 years old and this might be the last concert she see before she dies. I mean, she doesn’t hear so well these days, but damn can the old girl twerk!

It’s true that hundreds of people have flooded your facebook page with angry complaints over the last few days, but they don’t have the same thorough understanding of the legal system as you.  Sadly, there have been some downsides to the new laws, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs right? And sometimes those eggs include mistakenly harassing a funeral cortege on their way to mourn the death of a 70 year old cancer patient. Thanks for reminding us that the separation of powers is ‘more of an American thing,’ just like the right to freedom from persecution is ‘more of a Canadian thing’, the right to a well-financed education system is ‘more of a Scandinavian thing’ and the right to a state ruled by a democratically elected leader who creates laws that actually work is ‘more of a Queensland circa 2011′ kinda deal.

Swarm Regards,

JM Donellan

PS

Tags:  correspondences, politics




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 HOUSEMATE WANTED (OR: would you live here?)    THIS IS THE EIGHTH OR NINTH WORST THING THAT COULD POSSIBLY EVER HAPPEN.  Interview with Jo Nesbo  BLACKLIGHT featuring Pigeon / Lunch Tapes / The Medics reviewed for rave magazineCopyright © JM Donellan [VLAD = Very Lucky Australian Dictator], All Right Reserved. 2013.

Twitter interview (twitterview? Twinterview?)

 

I’m going to be doing a twitter interview thing from 9am AEST today. Hit me up with questions about writing, poetry, art, quantum physics, home decorating tips, that weird rash on your elbow etc. https://twitter.com/jmdonellan

Tags:  Killing Adonis, poetry, twitter, writing




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 The Next Big Thing  ZEB IS EVERYWHERE!  Dying's 1st birthday  A human writes about human rights.  Soon soon soon...Copyright © JM Donellan [Twitter interview (twitterview? Twinterview?)], All Right Reserved. 2013.

Blog Tour

Hello there humans and approximate facsimiles, I am excited to tell you that this week I am in the middle of a blog tour. A blog tour is basically like a hedonistic punk rock tour except without all the hotel room trashing. Or chain smoking. Or public performance. Or actual touring. But what it does mean is that I get to talk to people all over the world via the comfort of my couch and pyjamas. The tour includes a couple of interviews with different blogs and a few different pieces I’ve written on different aspects of writing, plus a tiny confession about when I pretended to be a woman. I’ll be cataloguing them all here, feel free to respond either in comments below or on the various websites hosting the tour.

Interview with Ravina

Becoming Your Character guest post at Bunny’s Review

Your Setting As A Character guest post at High Class Books

I’ll update this post as more tour things happen. I hope your day is filled with guitar solos and high fives.

Tags:  a beginner's guide to dying in india, Blogging, Brisbane, India, Killing Adonis, writing, Zeb and the great ruckus




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 350 PROJECT    Alliance of Best Smelling Authors  Love letters to corporations episode #6  STUPID WEIGHTS MACHINE FOR JERKSCopyright © JM Donellan [Blog Tour], All Right Reserved. 2013.

Library

I originally wrote this poem when I was invited to do a speech to honour the opening of the Ann Christopherson library at Ipswich East primary school, and it’s been one of my favourites to perform ever since. Also, unlike most of my poetry, it’s very ‘clean,’ so it’s safe to perform for younger audiences (although we all know how much kids love dropping F-bombs, I think schools would stop booking me if I tried to get away with it…)

I haven’t done much of the youtube poetry thing and it seems like all the cool kids are doing it, so I might as well jump on the bandwagon. Let me know what you think. And of course, super nerdy and awesome discussions about your favourite books/libraries and how they changed your life are always welcome!

You can also download the full text here: LIBRARY

 

 

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 A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO DYING IN INDIA BY JM DONELLAN, REVIEWED BY JM DONELLAN  Ain't no party like a launch party    A human writes about human rights.  State of Origin: yet another thing that I don't care about but apparently shouldCopyright © JM Donellan [Library], All Right Reserved. 2013.

Look ma! I’ve gone viral!

Remember when Australia had a Minister for Science? Ah, good times, good times. Well, back in those dizzy halcyon days in the distant past (about a month ago) I wrote an angry little letter to Teresa Gambaro. It was just before the election and I was feeling angry and confused about the state of politics in general, but particularly in regards to Gambaro, owing to the fact that she was my local member, an unabashed racist and a chronic snail mail spammer. I emailed it, tweeted it and posted it right here on my little corner of the interwebs. And then this happened:

Over the next few days my little rant was shared, retweeted and ‘liked’ more than 10 000 times. I’d had a few posts get shared around before, like this complaint letter I wrote to QANTAS and this dating profile,  but never on this scale. Most amusingly, hundreds of people (including one of my literary heroes and chronic heartbreaker Marieke Hardy) retweeted my post directly at Gambaro. I had friends tell me they heard colleagues discussing it at work, overheard people talking about it in bars and, hilariously, it was printed and read out at the start of a local ALP volunteers meeting. The comments section quickly exploded into a rather chaotic clusterfuck of compliments and death threats, which I responded to here (scroll down to the bottom).

Having thousands of people tell you that you are witty and insightful over the course of a couple of days does very strange things to the ego. Imagine if one day 2 000 strangers came up to you in the street and said “Can I just tell you that you are really attractive?” It would be flattering to the point of being unnerving.

Vitriolic insults, unsurprisingly, have a profoundly converse affect. Imagine that in addition to those 2 000 compliments per day, you had around a dozen people approach you in the street, spit in your face and snarl “You make me sick and I hope you get hit by a bus and then the bus backs up over you just to be sure and then everyone on the bus gets out and shits all over your ugly, stupid carcass and then after you’re dead someone names a profoundly awful flesh eating disease after you and the disease in question immediately causes everyone you’ve ever loved to vomit blood until they die and they are all buried in a shallow grave that rabid dogs will gather round to ritually piss on!” Sure, you’ve just heard 2 000 compliments and you’re pretty buzzed about that, but damn, those dozen strangers REALLY HATE YOU.

“Uh-oh, looks like someone’s got a case of the Donellans!”

It was something of an emotional rollercoaster, to say the very least. And while it was a rush to have something I’d made become so popular, I certainly don’t think that popularity alone is inherent proof of value or quality. Some of my favourite writers and poets have never cracked the best-seller list, meanwhile Billy Ray Cyrus sold millions of copies of Achy-Breaky Heart (and don’t even get me started on his daughter).

The strangest thing about the whole experience of living the Gen Y dream of going viral was reflecting on the fact that a 400 word rant that took me half an hour to write, edit and post has now been read by far more people than either of my novels. Those two books collectively represent five years of sweat, sleeplessness, agonising over commas and cuts, grinding my teeth over characters and subplots, stressing over cover designs and marketing approaches, dozens of meetings with publishers and editors and one vaguely related trip to the hospital.

I’ve been working on my latest book, Killing Adonis, for 4 goddamn years now. That’s longer than I’ve ever kept a job or stayed in a relationship and longer than it took me to took get either of my degrees. I’ve written parts of it in Brisbane and Lisbon and Pnom Penh and Bogotá and Buenos Aires and New York. I’ve rewritten the ending five times. I’ve changed the title. I’ve added and removed characters and subplots. And at the end of all that, I have a roughly 85 000 word novel that will probably be read by about half as many people as my cantankerous little letter. Of course, the difference is that viral posts tend to buzz around the web like digital bees on blue meth for a couple of days and then die out, whereas books are absorbed more slowly, and are cherished and shared over a protracted period of time. So now I just have to hope and pray at least a few thousand people enjoy this collection of words that I have poured my heart, soul, brain, liver and appendix into, or at least hate it for all the right reasons.

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Comments:  4 comments on this itemYou might be interested in this:  
 Alliance of Best Smelling Authors  VAMPIRES, ROCKSTARS, TWITTER AND MY BOOK (WHICH MENTIONS NONE OF THESE).  REVIEW OF MY JOB INTERVIEW  The String Bridge is a thing that you should acquire post-haste.  Eighty-Nine teaser trailerCopyright © JM Donellan [Look ma! I've gone viral!], All Right Reserved. 2013.

#BWF13

Thanks to TIny Owl workshop for organising lots of great stories to be printed on cushions at the Brisbane Writers Festival. Here’s a couple of cuties modelling my story Lenore Meets a Mack Truck. Thank you to everyone who purchased one via donations to the Indigenous Literacy Fund.

      

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 Dearest Academy Floral OR STFU Valentine's day  TOUR DIARY: KING OF THE PENGUINS & HANGING OUT AT THE ASYLUM  Illustrator acquired!    Love Letter to Lisbon (OR Art in the Time of Recession).Copyright © JM Donellan [#BWF13], All Right Reserved. 2013.