Gillian Polack's Blog, page 27

gillpolack @ 2015-07-07T16:45:00

I've tendered my apologies for the meeting tonight and tried very had to get onto the organiser so that my key items get discussed. I've been trying this for a bit and he never returns my calls, so I suspect that all I can do is all I did ie leave a message saying "I hope this is being discussed." Doing my shopping, earlier, had me breathing the outside air for only about ten minutes and that made me decidedly more off-colour and even somewhat feverish, so the lovely smoke is getting my lungs as well as my eyes and going outdoors is not going to happen again today.

From a writing point of view, this is good, for it gives me about 2 additional hours (maybe more) to battle this chapter into shape. It's getting there, bit by bit. 'm halfway through the chapter (but still have to add a few examples to the earlier bit) and it is beginning to make sense. It made sense in my mind months ago, but months ago I had other deadlines and didn't finish writing this down, which is why this particular chapter is causing me so many headaches. Still, now I have food and no meeting, I should be fine to finish most of a draft today, which means one of my two must-be-finished-by-Thursday chapters will happen. I'm hoping the second one won't be quite so recalcitrant. Mind you, I'm also hoping the air will clear.

gillpolack @ 2015-07-07T12:33:00

I'm embedded in Chapter Three, which is proving recalcitrant. What I thought were highly developed ideas turned out to be vague sketches. It's very frustrating. I have nearly 2000 almost-good words, about 5000 not-so-good words and am slowly getting there. I hope the next chapter behaves better! I also hope I get the time tonight to return to the interviews. For people who were left waiting for questions, I haven't forgotten you!

In news (I have news!) Katrin and I will be interviewed on Friday at 1.25 pm Spanish time. She will be in Germany and I will be in Australia. The interview will, I hope, be in English. No-one has asked me how my Spanish is, so I must assume they want English. I'm going to practise good British English the whole evening leading up to it, in the hope that my accent doesn't befuddle people. Right now I am less Melburnian and less international than usual, for I've spent much time talking to people who originally hail from rural NSW and from Canberra. It's a broader accent than my default one for I am a bit of an unintentional mimic. If any of you can tune into Spanish radio and want to hear my dulcet tones, I will be on Talk Radio Europe, which is based in Malaga on 10 July.

For Sydneysiders (and anyone for whom Sydney is an achievable weekend dream), I'll be in the Circular Quay area on Sunday afternoon. If I'm alone, I might catch ferries or sit in cafes and work. If anyone wants to join me, they should contact me privately and we'll sort something out. I won't be that mobile, so whatever we do will either be in the Circular Quay area or will involve ferries. Watson's Bay tempts me, right now, but I'm not fixing my plans until I know if it's just me, or if I need to find a nice table in a sun=blessed cafe and catch up with friends. I'm at liberty from lunchtime until about 5.30 pm and my only real obligation is a certain set of photographs I promised.

Also for Sydneysiders, my Saturday session at the NSW Writers' Center is definitely happening. There are still spaces, if anyone wants to book.

And now for my return to Chapter Three! I have nearly an hour of straight work before life intervenes. Let me see if I can sort out a few more hundred good words in that time.

gillpolack @ 2015-07-07T12:33:00

I'm embedded in Chapter Three, which is proving recalcitrant. What I thought were highly developed ideas turned out to be vague sketches. It's very frustrating. I have nearly 2000 almost-good words, about 5000 not-so-good words and am slowly getting there. I hope the next chapter behaves better! I also hope I get the time tonight to return to the interviews. For people who were left waiting for questions, I haven't forgotten you!

In news (I have news!) Katrin and I will be interviewed on Friday at 1.25 pm Spanish time. She will be in Germany and I will be in Australia. The interview will, I hope, be in English. No-one has asked me how my Spanish is, so I must assume they want English. I'm going to practise good British English the whole evening leading up to it, in the hope that my accent doesn't befuddle people. Right now I am less Melburnian and less international than usual, for I've spent much time talking to people who originally hail from rural NSW and from Canberra. It's a broader accent than my default one for I am a bit of an unintentional mimic. If any of you can tune into Spanish radio and want to hear my dulcet tones, I will be on Talk Radio Europe, which is based in Malaga on 10 July.

For Sydneysiders (and anyone for whom Sydney is an achievable weekend dream), I'll be in the Circular Quay area on Sunday afternoon. If I'm alone, I might catch ferries or sit in cafes and work. If anyone wants to join me, they should contact me privately and we'll sort something out. I won't be that mobile, so whatever we do will either be in the Circular Quay area or will involve ferries. Watson's Bay tempts me, right now, but I'm not fixing my plans until I know if it's just me, or if I need to find a nice table in a sun=blessed cafe and catch up with friends. I'm at liberty from lunchtime until about 5.30 pm and my only real obligation is a certain set of photographs I promised.

Also for Sydneysiders, my Saturday session at the NSW Writers' Center is definitely happening. There are still spaces, if anyone wants to book.

And now for my return to Chapter Three! I have nearly an hour of straight work before life intervenes. Let me see if I can sort out a few more hundred good words in that time.

gillpolack @ 2015-07-06T14:50:00

Between the cold and the never-ending virus and all sorts of interesting things happening to my close friends, I'm a bit fragile today. Last night was so full of crises that I only read 3 books and didn't quite finish any of the articles that are all due today. I've now got reasonable first drafts of most of them. All going well, three will be done by this evening.

The other thing for today, of course was 10,000 words of outstanding scholarly prose. Some of it was already written. All of it was a mess. And I actually had to reach the 10k of good words this time last week.

I'm making slow progress on this. I've worked out where I was going wrong, for instance, and how it's all going to hang together. I'm not going to magically catch up on all that lost time, but I hope to have something rough done by the time I sleep tonight. Last night I'd intended to stay up however long it took, too, but last night was fraught and nothing I intended to do actually happened. Tonight I'm in a place where, if I don't get this chapter done, then I'm in real trouble.

I allow heaps of fudge time to prevent real trouble, but I hadn't anticipated a 5 week lurgy *and* all kinds of friends having all kinds of crises that require me to rearrange things. Also, this is another week of meetings. Unavoidable. Essential. Time-consuming.

By Thursday night, I need 20,000 good words for the book. And this is the chapter where things are sticking and which could have flow-on effects. And today I am fragile. It's probably just a weather change incoming. And the fact that the virus announced over the weekend that it was going then changed its mind this morning.

I shall have a hot bath, a big cup of coffee, some chocolate and I shall persevere.

gillpolack @ 2015-07-05T11:49:00

It's nearly midday and it's 2 degrees outside. Add windchill and it's in the negatives. It's a wet cold that gets into everything. I have a snow headache, which means that not much higher than I am, there is snow. Where I am, it's just cold.

The noisy neighbours have moved to Perth, but someone else decided that a conversation and revving a car engine outside my bedroom window were the perfect activities at 7.30 am on the only Sunday I'm able to sleep in this month (Last month was lacking in sleep-ins on Sundays, too). I actually opened my window and apologised and explained that I was trying to sleep and that talking was OK, but would they please do it a bit quieter. I didn't have my glasses on (for I actually sat up in bed to do this) so I don't know which neighbour it was. I rather suspect that because of the behaviour of the previous neighbours, they didn't realise that my bedroom was just there. I lay in bed, shivering, for an hour after that, because it was -5 outside at that point and opening a big window next to my bed was not a wise thing to do.

Now you know why I am cold and tired from the inside out.

My plans for the day are to write 2000 words (for this round of blogs) and edit 1500 words (ditto) and finish with ten more of the electronic facsimiles for the 17th century novel and to diminish my in-box so it isn't scary. This is all quiet and gentle work, and it will clear the decks for the writing assault that will dominate my Monday to Thursday and for the rapid learning that is developing case studies (which are for a later chapter).

As you can tell by this, although I am still viral and physically just not happy in my body (or in winter), my mind is operating again and I'm clawing back lost time. I finished with eight books last night, and have a lot more understanding about what I need to do. I'll be much less worried about things when I catch up with myself! Some of my deadlines this year are terrifyingly non-negotiable.

gillpolack @ 2015-07-04T23:51:00

When i read the long s, I mostly just read. My eye is attuned to it and it's not a problem. Except, obviously, late on a Saturday night when I'm up to my last book for the day. When there are choices on meaning When I don't quite feel on top of things. When it's cold outside. In other words, now.

The sentence that tripped me up (using an f for a long s, for my keyboard doesn't run to such things) is perfectly decent. It's not the best of its kind, but it's what flung me back into the twenty-first century just now. It goes:

The fweet that the Pope Fucked hence a long time so easily fave occafion to their fucceffors to fuck England almoft dry with extorting from the Clergy, and impofing fuch burdens upon then, that Adam de Murymuth called Englifhmen "The Popes Affes, willing to bear all burdens whatfoever."

I will go to bed in 420 pages time, and if more sentences shake me from my serious composure, I will keep them to myself. I promise, I will only use the long s in my novel if I really, really must.

gillpolack @ 2015-07-04T22:06:00

I'm almost over the virus, I think.

Today is a quiet recovery day, with much TV, much reading of 17th century texts (and some 18th and 19th century ones which help me understand their contexts), and just a bit of work. Tomorrow will be more of them same, plus clearing the decks for Monday. Monday to Thursday will be focussed on the book I haven't been able to work on much because of the virus. I will finish my interviews for the extra case studies and I will do my very best to complete two more chapters. If I can do all this, then I'll be a week behind by Thursday night, when I have a meeting and have to prep for the Sydney workshop.

I am slowly adding the material to my webpage that I need to. Today I put up a partial bibliography of the works I consulted for Langue[dot]doc 1305, for there have been quiet expressions of interest. I don't have time to do a full bibliography, alas. It's here: http://www.gillianpolack.com/my-books/languedotdoc-1305/research-for-the-novel-languedotdoc-1305/ The links drilling down from the main pages are not quite there yet, for I need to rethink that a bit. When I've rethought (and when I have more time) expect more interesting stuff about my books to appear, including those FAQs. Tyler worked on a couple of pages, and those will go up when I find them (I thin they've been trapped by spam!) and I have other thoughts. Just not much time!

Interview with Jason Franks - Tyler Foley

Hi there,

My name is Tyler Foley. I am not Gillian Polack. And no, I have not hacked her blog, I have her permission to be here. I swear.

I'm currently a Year 12 student studying at Lake Tuggeranong College and have been Gillian's work experience student for the past week. I've been sticking close to her at all times and seeing how the life of an author works, or doesn't work, on a day-to-day basis. At school I'm studying both a double major in Literature and a double major in Arts; I'm a rather indecisive person.

In sifting through Gillian's personal trove of books and works, a privilege I was given on my first day in her home, I came across something that grabbed me in a way all of the other works failed to. It was graphic novel. A little thinner than her assortment of hard and paperbacks and just a little bit taller too. What it succeeded in doing that the others hadn't was that it reached out and grabbed hold of both of my primary interests: My growing appreciation of words and sentences and full-stops and things, and my love for art and design. The graphic novel is titled 'Ungenred' and it's a random collection of comics written by Jason Franks and drawn by a variety of different illustrators, all armed with their own unique styles. Gillian gave the me the extreme pleasure of contacting Jason Franks and asking him several questions about his creative process and Ungenred itself.



1. Ungenred demonstrates your interesting ability to leap to and fro between drastically different genres. Do you actively try to tailor your writing to varying audiences or is expanding beyond a single genre something you've always done?

I don't really think about genre before I start writing a new piece. Unless an editor has asked me for a particular set of parameters the story comes first. If anything I think of myself as a horror writer, and you can probably see that in most of my pieces, regardless of which genres they present.

2. What kind of differences are there between writing a novel and writing a comic? Does the writing process change?

Absolutely. A novel, in some regards, is easier: you can just sit down and write it. The size is the biggest challenge. I don't plan my prose very rigorously--that rigour comes in the editing and polishing--but comics require a lot more architecture up front. You are constrained by the page-count, the page dimensions and perhaps by the art style. Visual storytelling is an entirely different discipline that you need to master on top of the basics of plot, character, dialogue, and structure. You need to think about how to tell the story with a series of static images, arranged as single pages and spreads. You need to understand how to control pacing using these tools. You need to understand how and when to employ all the tools available to you: words, pictures, dialogue, narration, point of view, sound effects, special effects, shot framing, colour, symbolism, negative space, page turns, panel borders... The artist will help you negotiate some of these aspects, but there's a cost to that as well. You need to learn how to collaborate on top of everything else.

When you write a novel, every word you write will appear on the page, just as you wrote it, so there is a lot more polishing required. When you write comics you are writing a blueprint and only a small amount of your work will be presented unfiltered to the reader. It's a very different experience.

3. Your first story, and easily the most impactful for me, in Ungenred is called One More Bullet. The artwork for this is superb and builds on the tone of the narrative. Do you write with a narrow focus on the story you're telling, or do you consider its visual presentation as well?

One More Bullet was my first comic script, and my first collaboration. It was originally a prose story. I decided to rewrite as a comic so I could submit it to a competition that was being run by Dark Horse Comics. We never did submit the story but it was definitely the point at which I became serious about making comics.

Because I already had the story, that allowed me to focus on the mechanics of the script, which was a huge learning curve. I decided the story needed to be formally structured in a Watchmen-style nine panel grid, which most artists would balk at these days. Most writers, too. It was a difficult way to go about things, but it's a difficult story and I think it needed that discipline in order to make it work.

So yes, I did consider the visual presentation separately from the story, but that's not often the case anymore. Partly this was because I didn't know who the artist would be when I wrote it.

I'd never even met the artist, J. Marc Schmidt, before I wrote the story. He was someone I had encountered on an internet forum who was looking for a script to draw, when I was looking for an artist. I didn't actually think he would draw the script, so I was a bit shocked when they arrived in the post! The package had his real name on it, because it had to pass through customs, so I didn't know who it was from. It's pretty incredible to see a script come to life for the first time and I remember looking at the pages and wondering how on earth we'd managed to pull it off.
Over the next seven years, culminating in the Sixsmiths graphic novel, Marc would be my most frequent collaborator and to this day he has drawn more of my work than any other artist. I have not worked with anybody yet who is a better visual storyteller. He really excels at conveying body language and I learned a lot about the characters from seeing the way that Marc drew them.

4. What enticed you to write the comic about Rodney the Artificial Intelligence? I love how your comics explore interesting views on religion and sentience. Why do you use punchlines to undermine the seriousness of the issues you're talking about?

My undergraduate degree is in Cognitive Science, so I have always been very interested in consciousness, mind and and artificial intelligence. I came up with Rodney when Greg Vondruska asked me to contribute some stories to an anthology of stories called Robots Are People, Too! Rodney is always trying to figure out what it is to be human--not realizing that the act of introspection itself is what makes us (and him) human. The punchlines aren't meant to undercut the issues, but to underline them. These are hard questions and the best answers that I have are sad or ironic or sometimes just petty.

5. How close is the Jason Franks in the comics to the Jason Franks who writes the comics?

The Franks in my autobiographical stories is me, although sometimes the artists are a bit kind in the way they represent me. (I write the scripts in third person.) If the stories are even partially fabricated I will make the main character somebody else (eg in Bedding Down), so--if I give him my name, it's a true story and that's me.

The first autobio piece in the book, "How to be Cool," (illustrated by 9mm Ed Siemienkowicz) uses the traditional form for autobio comics: emphasis on first person narration, not on dialogue. The story originally had a self-deprecating ending, but luckily Ed persuaded me to change it.

The next autobio story I wrote was "At Own Risk" for Bruce Mutard, who needs no introduction. For Bruce I wanted to write something that was formally challenging, so we have an autobio piece in which I've tried to push my own presence into the background as much as possible. You don't see my face til the very last page. I wanted this story to be about South Africa, so you don't get to see my overwhelmed reaction to everything until the very end.

I wrote NYE: 2001 for Joe Pimienta, who's a genius for presenting quiet, everyday horror. I tried to avoid telling you what I was thinking as the situation unfolded , because I don't know what I was thinking. I was terrified.

The Swede is a story about how others see me, physically and ethnically, so of course it's the only autobio piece that I drew myself. Chris McQuinlan's inks make everybody look a bit more glamorous than they did in my pencil art.

The final story, "Robots of Andromeda", is me pushing autobiography into science fiction and metafiction. I wrote that for Ed again specifically as an endpiece for Ungenred.

Alright, you got me. I don't really have an army of killer robots.

6. What advice would you give to someone who knows that they want to dive into literature but doesn't necessarily know what they want to pursue?

Read widely and without prejudice. You don't have to like or dislike a book because everybody else tells you that you should. Look for stories that sound interesting to you in their own right, don't just look for familiar tropes and trappings. ("I like stories about space ships," or "I like stories about plucky single mothers.")  Don't be a snob. Do be discerning: you should feel free to critically assess everything you read. There's gold in even the least reputable of genres, and there's garbage in even the most lauded of classics. Some kinds of stories are privileged: we call them 'literature' and claim they do not belong to any genre, but this is nonsense. The boundaries of genre and literature, highbrow and lowbrow, shift all the time. Don't let marketing categories limit your tastes.Hope that is helpful.

Cheers for asking!

gillpolack @ 2015-07-01T21:25:00

Still viral, but I did a bunch of things today, including teach. My brain is wandering somewhere odd tonight, for I did so much admin today and I walked home from teaching. I did. Despite dizziness. It was a choice between waiting nearly an hour for a bus, or walking and getting 20 minutes rest. I took the 20 minutes rest, which got me through til 4 pm, when my body announced to me that it could deal with no more. I've been sitting quietly since then and am about to have an abnormally early night. I think what my body is saying it needs sleep, so sleep is what I shall give it.

Also, I've eaten one and a half bread rolls today... with jam. If I'm fine with that then tomorrow night I shall permit myself minestrone.

The insult to injury is that I have no weight loss to show for everything. So not fair.

gillpolack @ 2015-06-29T22:59:00

Apparently there is a stage four to the virus. Stage four is really rather food fixated ie the virus is fixated on getting rid of food from one's body. I've been out of commission since 5.30 pm and am about to go back to bed. Tomorrow I'll try water-only and sort it out.

This post is brought to you by overweening pride and having reached an end of virus. I will recover... just not quite tonight.