Gillian Polack's Blog, page 17
November 11, 2015
gillpolack @ 2015-11-11T20:33:00
Today is all things, so I taught most of them and we wrote about some. We talked about Armistice, but not Uncle Maurice's birthday. We swapped stories about meeting Gough Whitlam, and were introduced to Diwali by someone in the class. She's from the Punjab, so we learned what happens when Diwali is not-so-happy. (I need to think about a dark Diwali - it's a day of much power). We spent an unholy amount of time discussing late medieval papal politics. Then it was tea break and the library was in silence for a minute.
After tea break I introduced them to the wonders of alliteration. What was a bit odd was how many students loved it so much they overused it. I had to rein them in, not push them forward. We also continued to explore what happens when you see the world as a writer. My students have made a leap in their understanding since last week. They're now learning to see, not just to inwardly interpret the possible evidence of their eyes.
After tea break I introduced them to the wonders of alliteration. What was a bit odd was how many students loved it so much they overused it. I had to rein them in, not push them forward. We also continued to explore what happens when you see the world as a writer. My students have made a leap in their understanding since last week. They're now learning to see, not just to inwardly interpret the possible evidence of their eyes.
November 9, 2015
gillpolack @ 2015-11-10T13:02:00
I've just got back from a lovely overnight stay at the South Coast. The Fellowship of Australian Writers there asked if I would give a workshop on worldbuilding. This is the third time that I've used the results of my research to fuel a workshop. Third time, third very different group of writers. Same result.
1) It's a very useful set of concepts for writers.
2) It opens up discussion, rather than closing it off.
The obvious corollary is that research done by working with writers translates far more easily into teaching writers (even though that was not the purpose of the research or even the subject of the research) than research of writing done from the literary end.
More and more I am someone who enjoys working with other writers and helping them find out what they want to say and exploring ways of telling their stories. I especially love it when writers who know what they're doing get an 'aha' moment. Those moments justify all those years of work.
While I envy the togetherness of those who can divide research from teaching, I am not one of them. Teaching is such a fundamental part of the equation. I enjoy it a great deal. This is a good thing, for I have teaching today and teaching tomorrow, it being that time of year. Three entirely different subjects and three entirely different student groups.
Tonight is all about medieval magic. We talked about principles and learned magic last week. Tonight we're going to take the religious element one step further and move on from blessings and curses to diminishing demons, the role of Jews in medieval magic systems and look at some sermon literature.
1) It's a very useful set of concepts for writers.
2) It opens up discussion, rather than closing it off.
The obvious corollary is that research done by working with writers translates far more easily into teaching writers (even though that was not the purpose of the research or even the subject of the research) than research of writing done from the literary end.
More and more I am someone who enjoys working with other writers and helping them find out what they want to say and exploring ways of telling their stories. I especially love it when writers who know what they're doing get an 'aha' moment. Those moments justify all those years of work.
While I envy the togetherness of those who can divide research from teaching, I am not one of them. Teaching is such a fundamental part of the equation. I enjoy it a great deal. This is a good thing, for I have teaching today and teaching tomorrow, it being that time of year. Three entirely different subjects and three entirely different student groups.
Tonight is all about medieval magic. We talked about principles and learned magic last week. Tonight we're going to take the religious element one step further and move on from blessings and curses to diminishing demons, the role of Jews in medieval magic systems and look at some sermon literature.
November 7, 2015
gillpolack @ 2015-11-07T19:22:00
I keep looking at the Attorney-General for Australia and the Attorney-General for Canada and wishing we could swap. I'm sure we have people of that calibre here, somewhere.
I'm feeling a bit political today, due to the weather. And the job prospects of an awful lot of people. And the fact that my landline is fuzzy thanks to the wonderful NBN policy and that I get even fewer TV stations than this time last year (even ABC comes and goes).
However, I have new season cherries from the market and bought some chocolate chai for my brother and I bought two dolls at a church fete today. I have wanted those dolls for fifty years and they cost me the princely sum of $4.
Tonight I have paperwork to do. Much sorting of things, basically. I shall do this in style, by watching the trashiest DVDs I can. DO not ask me their names, for that would mean admitting that I am watching them. By tomorrow the paper will mostly be sorted and I'll have done my teaching prep for Monday (and maybe Tuesday - Wednesday is already done) and I'll maybe be able to admire a flat surface or two.
I'm feeling a bit political today, due to the weather. And the job prospects of an awful lot of people. And the fact that my landline is fuzzy thanks to the wonderful NBN policy and that I get even fewer TV stations than this time last year (even ABC comes and goes).
However, I have new season cherries from the market and bought some chocolate chai for my brother and I bought two dolls at a church fete today. I have wanted those dolls for fifty years and they cost me the princely sum of $4.
Tonight I have paperwork to do. Much sorting of things, basically. I shall do this in style, by watching the trashiest DVDs I can. DO not ask me their names, for that would mean admitting that I am watching them. By tomorrow the paper will mostly be sorted and I'll have done my teaching prep for Monday (and maybe Tuesday - Wednesday is already done) and I'll maybe be able to admire a flat surface or two.
November 5, 2015
gillpolack @ 2015-11-06T14:13:00
A quick update:
1. The post I promised is on my other blog, but when i get time I'll do an update (with links) on the blog tours.
2. I've just come back from the check up for the eye. This was the Big Decision Day. And... I'm fine. The eye will be completely functional and quite clear in its own time and they don't want to see me for three months and they don't want to operate and they know what caused it and I'm quite, quite well, thank you. It turned out to just be a rehash of what happened in 2010, only it was so bad (the eye had so much blood) that no-one could see to be certain. It's only a matter of time before I get full vision back and can do normal exercise without blood swishing and causing strange side effects, also.
3. #2 explains why I was able to get so very much work done while being so very tired all the time. It was the eye. My underlying health is much better than it looked! Which I knew the first time I pulled an all-nighter this year, to be honest, but it was bugging me that I had to sleep sitting up and that I was always tired and always hurt. Turns out that one can feel perfectly dreadful while being in reasonable health. Who knew?
4. I was palpably 3/4 blind on the way home today, but people took care of me and I only had to cross one road.
5. There is no #5. I just felt like saying this.
1. The post I promised is on my other blog, but when i get time I'll do an update (with links) on the blog tours.
2. I've just come back from the check up for the eye. This was the Big Decision Day. And... I'm fine. The eye will be completely functional and quite clear in its own time and they don't want to see me for three months and they don't want to operate and they know what caused it and I'm quite, quite well, thank you. It turned out to just be a rehash of what happened in 2010, only it was so bad (the eye had so much blood) that no-one could see to be certain. It's only a matter of time before I get full vision back and can do normal exercise without blood swishing and causing strange side effects, also.
3. #2 explains why I was able to get so very much work done while being so very tired all the time. It was the eye. My underlying health is much better than it looked! Which I knew the first time I pulled an all-nighter this year, to be honest, but it was bugging me that I had to sleep sitting up and that I was always tired and always hurt. Turns out that one can feel perfectly dreadful while being in reasonable health. Who knew?
4. I was palpably 3/4 blind on the way home today, but people took care of me and I only had to cross one road.
5. There is no #5. I just felt like saying this.
November 4, 2015
gillpolack @ 2015-11-04T19:44:00
My busy two days are almost over. To celebrate, I've crunched some numbers. The actual numbers are not useful, but what they show is that my most popular book in Australia is Langue[dot]doc 1305, and my most popular book in the US is The Time of the Ghosts (which totally goes against what I was told about novels concerning elderly women and set in non US or UK locations) and in the UK it's The Middle Ages Unlocked. This means I'm selling France to Australia, and Australia to the US, and England to the UK. The numbers of each have been consistent for several weeks, ie this is not a one-day market blip.
Today is about interesting realisations all round, for my class this morning had a moment of truth. I found out why they weren't seeing the world in a way that enabled them to write as observers and have devised a new technique for them to observe the universe in order to turn it into story. It's going to take the whole term to work through it, but even today, there were advances. The big thing was realising that they weren't actually seeing and putting words to what they saw. This means they didn't automatically have words to use when they wanted to put anything other than themselves into story. It's a slightly different approach to vocabulary-development.
Last night I taught medieval magic and a whole new group of people know about blessings and curses and medicine and reading the scapula of sheep. Also the power of whitewash in forcing miracles.
And I danced yesterday! Not many dances (maybe 7 or 8 all up), and all slow ones, but I danced. Now I have to work on stamina and strength, since I have basic mobility back. I'm very happy with this. I didn't only dance, I taught after dancing and I walked back from the more distant bus stop (about 600 m) after a very full day that included that dancing and much alcohol. And then I taught and walked this morning and afternoon. And I'm sorting out what work has to be done this evening (an article to write and an interview to attempt). I'm very happy with this, too!
Today is about interesting realisations all round, for my class this morning had a moment of truth. I found out why they weren't seeing the world in a way that enabled them to write as observers and have devised a new technique for them to observe the universe in order to turn it into story. It's going to take the whole term to work through it, but even today, there were advances. The big thing was realising that they weren't actually seeing and putting words to what they saw. This means they didn't automatically have words to use when they wanted to put anything other than themselves into story. It's a slightly different approach to vocabulary-development.
Last night I taught medieval magic and a whole new group of people know about blessings and curses and medicine and reading the scapula of sheep. Also the power of whitewash in forcing miracles.
And I danced yesterday! Not many dances (maybe 7 or 8 all up), and all slow ones, but I danced. Now I have to work on stamina and strength, since I have basic mobility back. I'm very happy with this. I didn't only dance, I taught after dancing and I walked back from the more distant bus stop (about 600 m) after a very full day that included that dancing and much alcohol. And then I taught and walked this morning and afternoon. And I'm sorting out what work has to be done this evening (an article to write and an interview to attempt). I'm very happy with this, too!
November 2, 2015
Magna Cartadom
My second post for tonight is a ten point one and the third will have to wait until Wednesday, for life has caught up.
I was at a symposium at Parliament House on Friday and wrote down ten interesting things. I don't actually know if they are really interesting, or whether I wrote them down when one of the speakers turned dull.
Most of the speakers were excellent, so all the coolest things are unuttered on this blog. You can, however, see them live, for they have been streamed online here and here. The best speakers were Stephanie Trigg, Andrew Lynch and Kathleen Neal (since they're the Medievalists and I know them, they have my vote - but actually, they were really and truly excellent) and the pre-recorded speaker from Britain who ably defends the case for the existence of British universities. He had all the best jokes and he made them all with an entirely straight face and managed to be educational to boot.
1. I ate a piece of the Magna Carta for morning tea. If you want to know what an edible Magna Carta looks like, Andrew Lynch posted the whole thing on FB. If you want to make jokes about ingesting the law... go for it.
2. I Apparently have a Reputation. No-one will tell me what kind, so it's probably not a Good Reputation. (I always hear the oddest things about myself in Parliament House. This in itself is odd!)
3. My book is finished and edited. This has nothing to do with the Magna Carta and everything to do with why I sat there all day, looking smug.
4. Adaption vs adaptation. Argue. A lawyer used one instead of the other. I want to argue with this lawyer. Instead I encourage debate here. Arguing with lawyers is far too exhausting...
5. Some of Australia's senior legal people yet again demonstrated their unfailing capacity to think of humanity as almost solely male.
6. My favourite overhead said "Seventeenth century mythology. Coke." This was about legal and constitutional stuff, not about the range of possible drugs needed to handle such mythology. My apologies to all seventeenth century historians reading this list and hoping for succor.
7. Boothby in South Australia in 1858 invented a voting machine that would have bankrupted the colony but delivered awesome elections. When he was denied its use (see bit about bankrupting the colony) he invented the modern voting form with its ticky boxes. This means we can blame Australia for a lot more than we currently do.
8. A little history is much more fun if a little more history is added. Clarke put up erroneous views assigned to the Magna Carta. "No man could be hanged twice without his consent" was one of them. It's not a Magna Carta thing, but he didn't say whether or not it was linked to the case of the triple hanging in early Tasmania. The sentence (being hung until dead) was carried out on Yom Kippur. The convict was Jewish. He was let off with "God obviously doesn't want this man to die." One of my forthcoming novels makes vile use of this real historical incident. More novels should make vile use of it.
9. A speaker attributed the first use of the term 'human rights' to 1629. My immediate thought was that animal trials for crime (porcine crime! canine crime!) were much earlier than this and that this says something very important about human evolution.
10. I so want several of the Magna Carta dummies currently sold by the British Library. I have no idea why they thought making Magna Carta dummies was a good idea, but I have uses for them. It's quite possibly just as well they didn't stock them last year, when I was there.
For anyone who has reached the bottom of this long post, I have a free copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of... the Magna Carta. Calligraphied in Sydney because someone could. Issued this year because it is the Right Time for such things.
I was given it on Friday and now I am offering it to one of you. It's tempting to find the scribal errors, but I've a couple of spares and I can do that when I'm bored (for my life is but a wasteland and I have nothing to fill my empty aeons). I'm happy to post this document to anywhere in the world, but you need to give me the best reason for you having it. I will use my excellent judgement and appalling sense of humour and ask the winner for an address. The losers will have to content themselves with the joy that is Australian Medievalists being streamed as part of official Parliamentary proceedings.
I was at a symposium at Parliament House on Friday and wrote down ten interesting things. I don't actually know if they are really interesting, or whether I wrote them down when one of the speakers turned dull.
Most of the speakers were excellent, so all the coolest things are unuttered on this blog. You can, however, see them live, for they have been streamed online here and here. The best speakers were Stephanie Trigg, Andrew Lynch and Kathleen Neal (since they're the Medievalists and I know them, they have my vote - but actually, they were really and truly excellent) and the pre-recorded speaker from Britain who ably defends the case for the existence of British universities. He had all the best jokes and he made them all with an entirely straight face and managed to be educational to boot.
1. I ate a piece of the Magna Carta for morning tea. If you want to know what an edible Magna Carta looks like, Andrew Lynch posted the whole thing on FB. If you want to make jokes about ingesting the law... go for it.
2. I Apparently have a Reputation. No-one will tell me what kind, so it's probably not a Good Reputation. (I always hear the oddest things about myself in Parliament House. This in itself is odd!)
3. My book is finished and edited. This has nothing to do with the Magna Carta and everything to do with why I sat there all day, looking smug.
4. Adaption vs adaptation. Argue. A lawyer used one instead of the other. I want to argue with this lawyer. Instead I encourage debate here. Arguing with lawyers is far too exhausting...
5. Some of Australia's senior legal people yet again demonstrated their unfailing capacity to think of humanity as almost solely male.
6. My favourite overhead said "Seventeenth century mythology. Coke." This was about legal and constitutional stuff, not about the range of possible drugs needed to handle such mythology. My apologies to all seventeenth century historians reading this list and hoping for succor.
7. Boothby in South Australia in 1858 invented a voting machine that would have bankrupted the colony but delivered awesome elections. When he was denied its use (see bit about bankrupting the colony) he invented the modern voting form with its ticky boxes. This means we can blame Australia for a lot more than we currently do.
8. A little history is much more fun if a little more history is added. Clarke put up erroneous views assigned to the Magna Carta. "No man could be hanged twice without his consent" was one of them. It's not a Magna Carta thing, but he didn't say whether or not it was linked to the case of the triple hanging in early Tasmania. The sentence (being hung until dead) was carried out on Yom Kippur. The convict was Jewish. He was let off with "God obviously doesn't want this man to die." One of my forthcoming novels makes vile use of this real historical incident. More novels should make vile use of it.
9. A speaker attributed the first use of the term 'human rights' to 1629. My immediate thought was that animal trials for crime (porcine crime! canine crime!) were much earlier than this and that this says something very important about human evolution.
10. I so want several of the Magna Carta dummies currently sold by the British Library. I have no idea why they thought making Magna Carta dummies was a good idea, but I have uses for them. It's quite possibly just as well they didn't stock them last year, when I was there.
For anyone who has reached the bottom of this long post, I have a free copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of... the Magna Carta. Calligraphied in Sydney because someone could. Issued this year because it is the Right Time for such things.
I was given it on Friday and now I am offering it to one of you. It's tempting to find the scribal errors, but I've a couple of spares and I can do that when I'm bored (for my life is but a wasteland and I have nothing to fill my empty aeons). I'm happy to post this document to anywhere in the world, but you need to give me the best reason for you having it. I will use my excellent judgement and appalling sense of humour and ask the winner for an address. The losers will have to content themselves with the joy that is Australian Medievalists being streamed as part of official Parliamentary proceedings.
November 1, 2015
gillpolack @ 2015-11-02T17:34:00
I have 3 weeks' worth of reading of friends' blogposts and three posts here and about ten emails, and then I'll be caught up on online things. Well, mostly.
The book is at its next stage and I'm free of it for at least a fortnight.
I was gradually coming off an impossibly high level of tension from actually finishing the thing when someone persuaded me to do an online survey to help someone with a research project (there are a lot of them around right now, and I mostly say 'yes'). I did this, and it was so very badly designed that the poor student has a bunch of answers that don't even nearly match my views. I was waiting for the last screen, so that I could explain this, but there was no space for explanations: the interview was done and dusted. And so this student's results are false and there's nothing I can do about it! I got something out of it, because I re-learned the need for an 'other' choice in selecting between one thing and another if one is going for restrictive lists, or for more spots where survey respondents can indicate personal views. I feel very worried for the student, though, for their results are going to be extremely skewed to match the questions. There is absolutely no way of identifying where a respondent made reluctant choices and no box was allowed to go unfilled ie 'no view' or 'different view' was impossible to record. Very bad survey design.
All my books are out for the year and all my blogtours are done and all the books for next year are written and I have an unexpected acceptance of a chapter for an academic volume (and the chapter is already written, but still hasn't been edited) and possibly a nibble of interest in an article for a scholarly journal. I will drink some bubbly tomorrow to celebrate (for tomorrow is Melbourne Cup Day) and then I'll get back to work, for I don't actually get proper time out for good behaviour for at least two weeks. Possibly longer.
I do, however, cease to work round the clock. The impossibilities are almost all under control. My life is possible again. All this and publications: it's magic.
My other two posts for today are from last week. Watch this space!
The book is at its next stage and I'm free of it for at least a fortnight.
I was gradually coming off an impossibly high level of tension from actually finishing the thing when someone persuaded me to do an online survey to help someone with a research project (there are a lot of them around right now, and I mostly say 'yes'). I did this, and it was so very badly designed that the poor student has a bunch of answers that don't even nearly match my views. I was waiting for the last screen, so that I could explain this, but there was no space for explanations: the interview was done and dusted. And so this student's results are false and there's nothing I can do about it! I got something out of it, because I re-learned the need for an 'other' choice in selecting between one thing and another if one is going for restrictive lists, or for more spots where survey respondents can indicate personal views. I feel very worried for the student, though, for their results are going to be extremely skewed to match the questions. There is absolutely no way of identifying where a respondent made reluctant choices and no box was allowed to go unfilled ie 'no view' or 'different view' was impossible to record. Very bad survey design.
All my books are out for the year and all my blogtours are done and all the books for next year are written and I have an unexpected acceptance of a chapter for an academic volume (and the chapter is already written, but still hasn't been edited) and possibly a nibble of interest in an article for a scholarly journal. I will drink some bubbly tomorrow to celebrate (for tomorrow is Melbourne Cup Day) and then I'll get back to work, for I don't actually get proper time out for good behaviour for at least two weeks. Possibly longer.
I do, however, cease to work round the clock. The impossibilities are almost all under control. My life is possible again. All this and publications: it's magic.
My other two posts for today are from last week. Watch this space!
October 21, 2015
gillpolack @ 2015-10-22T14:21:00
I have a special guest post tomorrow. Today, I have some thoughts.
I was finishing the first of what will be a half dozen sessions sorting the bibliography of my work on writers and history and it got me thinking about a few communications from readers. Every time I have a new novel I get these and I've never seen the pattern before and... it's got me thinking. I know I fall between genre categories and I know I get less critical attention than most, but I've never quite understood why I can have all this and readers, too.
I can't give you the text of any of these emails. They're all intensely personal and very special. Every time I read one I have to take a step back and look at what I've done.
There's a lot of talk around the traps about our need for diverse stories. There's a hashtag for it. There are campaigns for it. I've participated in these campaigns, but for other people. I'm so neatly between minority and majority in so many ways that I've never felt as if that platform is for my writing. I don't get invited to write for the anthologies - even my feminist self didn't merit an invitation to write a letter to Tiptree. I'm not evaluating this here, I'm evaluating me. I look mainstream. Even when I'm not. I"m one of the people who help others, not one of the people who write issues into their novels.
Except I always do. I write these things. I don't mind if they're not seen as issues, because what I want is deep narrative changes ie I care more for the story being read getting out there, giving narrative choices, than I do for my ego as a change agent.
This is why I was surprised by the reader communications. I underestimated them until today, for they started as a trickle. We're no longer talking one or two here. Given my moderate sales, that's important. When Life through Cellophane was first published, I received direct communications from nearly half my readers (small press, limited print run - easy to track). None of them are quite the same, but they have a shared theme. The shared theme is "You wrote the novel for me, about me, about my fiend, about my dreams." I'm not going to detail the personal responses here. They're private and some of them are very intimate. Public servants have said "This is our narrative." Middle aged women have said "Finally, a novel for us." Older women have said "Finally, a novel for us." Some people have told me amazing things about their past and said "And this is the novel that gives me my fantasy perfect solution" to problems that they faced in their lives. And this was something they were happy about.
I write the novels I think ought to be written. I write them because I love to write and because these are the kind of novels I write. I'm prickly and difficult until they're written, so they're full of prickly and difficult issues. Politics and history and feminism and all kinds of big picture issues are integrated into my work the way they are in my life. I can't imagine writing about a peasant boy as king-in-waiting, but I can turn a once-homeless girl into a hero, because I have met many once-homeless girls and they have to draw on such amazing inner strength to get through: they're perfect heroines and some of the best people I know. Same with elderly women.
I write what I know. I didn't know that a significant portion of my readers would be quietly passionate about my work and would identify with it so very strongly that they can't speak up in public about it.
To those who have spoken up in public - thank you. To all of you - thank you for making my writing your own. Thank you for seeing what I put in and for understanding that it's yours, the moment it's in print. And thank you for letting me know how much you care and how personal it is.
I'll keep writing strong women of all ages in my writing, and people from normal (complex) backgrounds, for these are the people I know. What I'll change is how I read the public narratives about writers. I need to write, even if there's no glory and not much money. I need to find a way to keep on writing, even if I don't get a job in my field. I need to do this because I've been very, very lucky and achieved the dream: my writing matters.
I'm still astonished about this. It might take me some time to absorb. Each of my novels matters to different people for different reasons, but the more I challenge tropes and stereotypes and what ought to sell, the more emails there are and the more notes through social media, and... my writing matters.
Thank you, everyone who's written to me. It means a lot.
I was finishing the first of what will be a half dozen sessions sorting the bibliography of my work on writers and history and it got me thinking about a few communications from readers. Every time I have a new novel I get these and I've never seen the pattern before and... it's got me thinking. I know I fall between genre categories and I know I get less critical attention than most, but I've never quite understood why I can have all this and readers, too.
I can't give you the text of any of these emails. They're all intensely personal and very special. Every time I read one I have to take a step back and look at what I've done.
There's a lot of talk around the traps about our need for diverse stories. There's a hashtag for it. There are campaigns for it. I've participated in these campaigns, but for other people. I'm so neatly between minority and majority in so many ways that I've never felt as if that platform is for my writing. I don't get invited to write for the anthologies - even my feminist self didn't merit an invitation to write a letter to Tiptree. I'm not evaluating this here, I'm evaluating me. I look mainstream. Even when I'm not. I"m one of the people who help others, not one of the people who write issues into their novels.
Except I always do. I write these things. I don't mind if they're not seen as issues, because what I want is deep narrative changes ie I care more for the story being read getting out there, giving narrative choices, than I do for my ego as a change agent.
This is why I was surprised by the reader communications. I underestimated them until today, for they started as a trickle. We're no longer talking one or two here. Given my moderate sales, that's important. When Life through Cellophane was first published, I received direct communications from nearly half my readers (small press, limited print run - easy to track). None of them are quite the same, but they have a shared theme. The shared theme is "You wrote the novel for me, about me, about my fiend, about my dreams." I'm not going to detail the personal responses here. They're private and some of them are very intimate. Public servants have said "This is our narrative." Middle aged women have said "Finally, a novel for us." Older women have said "Finally, a novel for us." Some people have told me amazing things about their past and said "And this is the novel that gives me my fantasy perfect solution" to problems that they faced in their lives. And this was something they were happy about.
I write the novels I think ought to be written. I write them because I love to write and because these are the kind of novels I write. I'm prickly and difficult until they're written, so they're full of prickly and difficult issues. Politics and history and feminism and all kinds of big picture issues are integrated into my work the way they are in my life. I can't imagine writing about a peasant boy as king-in-waiting, but I can turn a once-homeless girl into a hero, because I have met many once-homeless girls and they have to draw on such amazing inner strength to get through: they're perfect heroines and some of the best people I know. Same with elderly women.
I write what I know. I didn't know that a significant portion of my readers would be quietly passionate about my work and would identify with it so very strongly that they can't speak up in public about it.
To those who have spoken up in public - thank you. To all of you - thank you for making my writing your own. Thank you for seeing what I put in and for understanding that it's yours, the moment it's in print. And thank you for letting me know how much you care and how personal it is.
I'll keep writing strong women of all ages in my writing, and people from normal (complex) backgrounds, for these are the people I know. What I'll change is how I read the public narratives about writers. I need to write, even if there's no glory and not much money. I need to find a way to keep on writing, even if I don't get a job in my field. I need to do this because I've been very, very lucky and achieved the dream: my writing matters.
I'm still astonished about this. It might take me some time to absorb. Each of my novels matters to different people for different reasons, but the more I challenge tropes and stereotypes and what ought to sell, the more emails there are and the more notes through social media, and... my writing matters.
Thank you, everyone who's written to me. It means a lot.
October 19, 2015
gillpolack @ 2015-10-20T12:24:00
It's a busy week and it's a difficult week and I'm very easily flustered. I'm making progress with the book (will finish Ch 7 in the current draft in about 2 hours) and have a new course to teach tonight (all the teaching notes are done and the student handout - I just have to get my teaching bag together and sort tonight's class - so about one hour's work). I'm planning to attend a seminar on Friday week and the bods-going-to-dinner are going to dinner with me (which is nice) but 2 buses from my place (which means taxi home before I get paid for any of this term's teaching and before I pay off that electricity bill). Such is the writing life.
Tomorrow I teach writing, of course, and the afternoon will be spent editing (all going well) and rearranging medical appointments (for the seminar could not have been worse timed in terms of my medical appointments and I only realised this very recently).
Thursday is the book launch and... more editing. Someone has already tried to buy the book from the publisher directly and the first printrun is all gone. You may need to buy it from somewhere else that has stock! Anyhow, I'm hoping this means good sales all round rather than a run on my publisher's direct stock. He ran out of Langue[dot]doc 1305 just before Conflux (I know this because a would-be purchaser was disconsolate and told me so), so I am hopeful of a few sales.
Friday is my eye appointment and all the messages I couldn't do during the week. It's going to be interesting to do all the messages with eye drops (they open my pupils wider than most, because my eyes respond to them that way) , but my yesterday's plan to do messages without walking fell through, and my walking will be pushed to the limit with all these various other things, so I will be catching a bus (hopefully without crossing too many roads, but that depends on the state of the roadworks on the hospital grounds and whether I can get one of the hospital buses), then shopping, then walking a half mile (crossing several major roads). I can walk the half mile now, if I push, but I have to go exceptionally slowly and crossing roads is still my bug bear. And I'll be carrying things. And the bus that goes to my place from Woden is just one an hour and so precious little use. I'll catch one if I can, but with perishables in the shopping, I can't wait for it. Friday, then, is going to be a bit of a nightmare day. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to do the second half of it, to be honest, but I will. But I shall buy some extra pain relievers on my way to teaching tomorrow, for I anticipate bruising and headaches. (Glare and not being able to see where to walk - Canberra has lots of lovely blue sky and white buildings.)
The big thing right now is finishing Ch 7. Only Ch 8 and then I get to return to all my critical apparatus and the unwritten closing. The format of the bibliography isn't the format I used and I have to make the changes manually because of the way I set it up. There were reasons for setting it up that way, but right now I'm paying for them.
There is good news. I just got an email saying that I don't have to walk to get my student handouts for tonight - the staff at the CCE are putting them in my classroom for me. They are wonderful!
Just in case you're worried, my levels of pain are overall much diminished. I can work long days with no side effects. It's just taking a while to get full mobility back. And the cause was nothing new and nothing worrying. Just a bunch of chronic illnesses arguing with each other inside my body.
Tomorrow I teach writing, of course, and the afternoon will be spent editing (all going well) and rearranging medical appointments (for the seminar could not have been worse timed in terms of my medical appointments and I only realised this very recently).
Thursday is the book launch and... more editing. Someone has already tried to buy the book from the publisher directly and the first printrun is all gone. You may need to buy it from somewhere else that has stock! Anyhow, I'm hoping this means good sales all round rather than a run on my publisher's direct stock. He ran out of Langue[dot]doc 1305 just before Conflux (I know this because a would-be purchaser was disconsolate and told me so), so I am hopeful of a few sales.
Friday is my eye appointment and all the messages I couldn't do during the week. It's going to be interesting to do all the messages with eye drops (they open my pupils wider than most, because my eyes respond to them that way) , but my yesterday's plan to do messages without walking fell through, and my walking will be pushed to the limit with all these various other things, so I will be catching a bus (hopefully without crossing too many roads, but that depends on the state of the roadworks on the hospital grounds and whether I can get one of the hospital buses), then shopping, then walking a half mile (crossing several major roads). I can walk the half mile now, if I push, but I have to go exceptionally slowly and crossing roads is still my bug bear. And I'll be carrying things. And the bus that goes to my place from Woden is just one an hour and so precious little use. I'll catch one if I can, but with perishables in the shopping, I can't wait for it. Friday, then, is going to be a bit of a nightmare day. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to do the second half of it, to be honest, but I will. But I shall buy some extra pain relievers on my way to teaching tomorrow, for I anticipate bruising and headaches. (Glare and not being able to see where to walk - Canberra has lots of lovely blue sky and white buildings.)
The big thing right now is finishing Ch 7. Only Ch 8 and then I get to return to all my critical apparatus and the unwritten closing. The format of the bibliography isn't the format I used and I have to make the changes manually because of the way I set it up. There were reasons for setting it up that way, but right now I'm paying for them.
There is good news. I just got an email saying that I don't have to walk to get my student handouts for tonight - the staff at the CCE are putting them in my classroom for me. They are wonderful!
Just in case you're worried, my levels of pain are overall much diminished. I can work long days with no side effects. It's just taking a while to get full mobility back. And the cause was nothing new and nothing worrying. Just a bunch of chronic illnesses arguing with each other inside my body.
October 18, 2015
THE FOURTH WALL AND HOW TO BREAK IT – special guest post by Ian Sales
You can blame it on Michael Haneke and Laurent Binet.
I’d spent the previous few months researching the Apollo astronauts and their wives and women writing science fiction. I had the plot of the final book of the Apollo Quartet, All That Outer Space Allows, clear in my mind, and had even started writing it. It had been my original intention to juxtapose my protagonist’s science fiction dreams against the science reality of her Apollo astronaut husband. But my increasing dissatisfaction at the continuing levels of ignorance about women sf writers of the twentieth century suggested a slight tweak I could make to my story. And so “invisibility” became the theme of All That Outer space Allows, the invisibility of women, the invisibility of things associated with women… which in turn gave me an idea for the sf story, written by my protagonist, which I was going to use as the novel’s “hinge”.
So there I was, writing about Ginny Eckhardt, Air Force test pilot wife and science fiction author, setting the scene, which was Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert in 1965…
Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games is about a pair of young men who foist their attentions on an affluent middle-class couple holidaying at their lakeside house. At first, the pair are just annoying and rude. But they soon turn creepily malevolent and violent. There is a moment in the film when Paul, the leader of the two, turns to the camera and winks. It’s a shocking moment in a film which grows increasingly, well, shocking. The film’s title refers not just to the psychopathic antics of the two home invaders but also to Haneke’s approach to cinema narrative.
Laurent Binet’s novel HHhH (the title stands for Himmler’s Hirn heißt Heydrich, Himmler’s Brain is named Heydrich) was originally intended to be a non-fictional work on Operation Anthropoid, the attempted assassination of Reinhard Heydrich during World War Two by a pair of British-trained agents. But Binet also discusses the process of researching and writing about Heydrich and his death, and how his own life has affected, and was affected by, his writing.
If Haneke inspired in me the desire to “break the”fourth wall” in my novel, Binet gave me an idea of how to do it. But I didn’t want to make it as large a part of my narrative as Binet had. All That Outer Space Allows was, after all, Ginny’s story. I didn’t want to make an issue of the amount of research I had undertaken - I’d hoped it was obvious in the narrative, since I was writing about a person of a gender and nationality not my own during a period before I was born (although our lives do overlap by some six years). But breaking the fourth wall would allow me to discuss some of the artistic choices I’d made and my reason for making them. I could also do something with my research by comparing the life of my protagonist’s husband with that of real-life Apollo astronauts, using actual quotes from their autobiographies.
When it came to the writing, the first break sort of naturally slipped into the narrative:
… And she thinks, so strange that his parents should name him after a book subtitled “Life in the Woods”…
They didn’t, of course; I did, I named him Walden for Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 polemic. There is a scene in Douglas Sirk’s 1955 movie All That Heaven Allows - the title of this novel is not a coincidence; the movie is a favourite, and, in broad stroke, both All That Heaven Allows and All That Outer Space Allows tell similar stories: an unconventional woman who attempts to break free of conventional life… There is a scene in the movie in which Ron has invited Cary back to his place for a party. While he and his best friend, Mick, fetch wine from the cellar, Cary is at a loose end and idly picks up a copy of Thoreau’s Walden lying on a nearby table. She opens the book at random and reads out a line: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Not only is Walden Ron’s favourite book, she is told, but he also lives it -
That gave me the pattern for all the subsequent breaks in the fourth wall. This was stuff I wanted to talk about, but it wasn’t explicatory, it wasn’t additional material within the invented elements of the novel story, it wasn’t really suitable for footnotes. And I knew about footnotes...
Back in early 2013, I’d submitted a story to a railway-themed genre anthology to be published by Eibonvale Press. But rather than write a story about trains, I’d written about rocket sleds. Well, they ran on rails, so I thought maybe the editor would let me get away with it. He didn’t. He liked the story a lot but felt the link to the theme was too tenuous. The story, which rejoiced in the title ‘’The Incurable Irony of the Man Who Rode the Rocket Sleds’, was published in The Orphan in September 2013. It was about an unnamed USAF tech sergeant who volunteers to work for Major John Paul Stapp’s rocket sled programme at Muroc AFB (later renamed Edwards AFB) in the 1950s. But what I did was drop the theme of the story into a series of footnotes. So while the main narrative describes three trips on the rocket sled by the sergeant, the point of those trips is explained in factual detail in long footnotes.
I liked the story, I still like the story. Its mix of real history and fictional narrative is the sort of fiction I enjoy writing. It’s about shining a light on selected technological and engineering achievements, it’s about showing the human side of those achievements and then pushing the envelope in considering what it all means.
‘The Incurable Irony of the Man Who Rode the Rocket Sled’ had shown me one way to make use of footnotes in fiction, and I knew it wasn’t appropriate for All That Outer Space Allows. Because they weren’t shocking enough. There was no way I could make Ginny wink at the reader - not overtly, anyway - but Ian Sales the author could do it.
And, standing behind me, and winking over my shoulder, would be all the real astronauts of the Apollo programme and all the women science fiction writers of the twentieth century.
Ian Sales grew up in the Middle East but now works in Yorkshire for an ISP. The first book of his Apollo Quartet, Adrift on the Sea of Rains, appeared in 2012 and won the BSFA Award and was a finalist for the Sidewise Award. Books two and three, The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself and Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above, were published in 2013. All That Outer Space Allows was published in April 2015. He also has two books for a space opera trilogy, A Prospect of War and A Conflict Of Orders, both currently out from Tickety Boo Press.
All That Outer Space Allows is available in hardback from Whippleshield Books and in paperback from both Whippleshield Books and Amazon. The ebook edition is available from Amazon.
I’d spent the previous few months researching the Apollo astronauts and their wives and women writing science fiction. I had the plot of the final book of the Apollo Quartet, All That Outer Space Allows, clear in my mind, and had even started writing it. It had been my original intention to juxtapose my protagonist’s science fiction dreams against the science reality of her Apollo astronaut husband. But my increasing dissatisfaction at the continuing levels of ignorance about women sf writers of the twentieth century suggested a slight tweak I could make to my story. And so “invisibility” became the theme of All That Outer space Allows, the invisibility of women, the invisibility of things associated with women… which in turn gave me an idea for the sf story, written by my protagonist, which I was going to use as the novel’s “hinge”.
So there I was, writing about Ginny Eckhardt, Air Force test pilot wife and science fiction author, setting the scene, which was Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert in 1965…
Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games is about a pair of young men who foist their attentions on an affluent middle-class couple holidaying at their lakeside house. At first, the pair are just annoying and rude. But they soon turn creepily malevolent and violent. There is a moment in the film when Paul, the leader of the two, turns to the camera and winks. It’s a shocking moment in a film which grows increasingly, well, shocking. The film’s title refers not just to the psychopathic antics of the two home invaders but also to Haneke’s approach to cinema narrative.
Laurent Binet’s novel HHhH (the title stands for Himmler’s Hirn heißt Heydrich, Himmler’s Brain is named Heydrich) was originally intended to be a non-fictional work on Operation Anthropoid, the attempted assassination of Reinhard Heydrich during World War Two by a pair of British-trained agents. But Binet also discusses the process of researching and writing about Heydrich and his death, and how his own life has affected, and was affected by, his writing.
If Haneke inspired in me the desire to “break the”fourth wall” in my novel, Binet gave me an idea of how to do it. But I didn’t want to make it as large a part of my narrative as Binet had. All That Outer Space Allows was, after all, Ginny’s story. I didn’t want to make an issue of the amount of research I had undertaken - I’d hoped it was obvious in the narrative, since I was writing about a person of a gender and nationality not my own during a period before I was born (although our lives do overlap by some six years). But breaking the fourth wall would allow me to discuss some of the artistic choices I’d made and my reason for making them. I could also do something with my research by comparing the life of my protagonist’s husband with that of real-life Apollo astronauts, using actual quotes from their autobiographies.
When it came to the writing, the first break sort of naturally slipped into the narrative:
… And she thinks, so strange that his parents should name him after a book subtitled “Life in the Woods”…
They didn’t, of course; I did, I named him Walden for Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 polemic. There is a scene in Douglas Sirk’s 1955 movie All That Heaven Allows - the title of this novel is not a coincidence; the movie is a favourite, and, in broad stroke, both All That Heaven Allows and All That Outer Space Allows tell similar stories: an unconventional woman who attempts to break free of conventional life… There is a scene in the movie in which Ron has invited Cary back to his place for a party. While he and his best friend, Mick, fetch wine from the cellar, Cary is at a loose end and idly picks up a copy of Thoreau’s Walden lying on a nearby table. She opens the book at random and reads out a line: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Not only is Walden Ron’s favourite book, she is told, but he also lives it -
That gave me the pattern for all the subsequent breaks in the fourth wall. This was stuff I wanted to talk about, but it wasn’t explicatory, it wasn’t additional material within the invented elements of the novel story, it wasn’t really suitable for footnotes. And I knew about footnotes...
Back in early 2013, I’d submitted a story to a railway-themed genre anthology to be published by Eibonvale Press. But rather than write a story about trains, I’d written about rocket sleds. Well, they ran on rails, so I thought maybe the editor would let me get away with it. He didn’t. He liked the story a lot but felt the link to the theme was too tenuous. The story, which rejoiced in the title ‘’The Incurable Irony of the Man Who Rode the Rocket Sleds’, was published in The Orphan in September 2013. It was about an unnamed USAF tech sergeant who volunteers to work for Major John Paul Stapp’s rocket sled programme at Muroc AFB (later renamed Edwards AFB) in the 1950s. But what I did was drop the theme of the story into a series of footnotes. So while the main narrative describes three trips on the rocket sled by the sergeant, the point of those trips is explained in factual detail in long footnotes.
I liked the story, I still like the story. Its mix of real history and fictional narrative is the sort of fiction I enjoy writing. It’s about shining a light on selected technological and engineering achievements, it’s about showing the human side of those achievements and then pushing the envelope in considering what it all means.
‘The Incurable Irony of the Man Who Rode the Rocket Sled’ had shown me one way to make use of footnotes in fiction, and I knew it wasn’t appropriate for All That Outer Space Allows. Because they weren’t shocking enough. There was no way I could make Ginny wink at the reader - not overtly, anyway - but Ian Sales the author could do it.
And, standing behind me, and winking over my shoulder, would be all the real astronauts of the Apollo programme and all the women science fiction writers of the twentieth century.
Ian Sales grew up in the Middle East but now works in Yorkshire for an ISP. The first book of his Apollo Quartet, Adrift on the Sea of Rains, appeared in 2012 and won the BSFA Award and was a finalist for the Sidewise Award. Books two and three, The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself and Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above, were published in 2013. All That Outer Space Allows was published in April 2015. He also has two books for a space opera trilogy, A Prospect of War and A Conflict Of Orders, both currently out from Tickety Boo Press.
All That Outer Space Allows is available in hardback from Whippleshield Books and in paperback from both Whippleshield Books and Amazon. The ebook edition is available from Amazon.
