Gillian Polack's Blog, page 38
March 18, 2015
gillpolack @ 2015-03-19T01:33:00
This evening I'm catching up with piles of admin stuff. I've spent the week doing that, and finally my catch-up includes 17th century recipes. Your recipes for this month are:
To boyle a Capon larded with Lemons.
Take a fair Capon and truss him, boyl him by himselfe in faire water with a little small Oat−meal, then take Mutton Broath, and half a pint of White−wine, a bundle of Herbs, whole Mace, season it with Verjuyce, put Marrow, Dates, season it with Sugar, then take preserved Lemons and cut them like Lard, and with a larding pin, lard in it, then put the capon in a deep dish, thicken your broth with Almonds, and poure it on the Capon.
To Bake Red Deere.
Parboyl it, and then sauce it in Vinegar then Lard it very thick, and season it with Pepper, Ginger and Nutmegs, put it into a deep Pye with good store of sweet butter, and let it bake, when it is baked, take a pint of Hippocras, halfe a pound of sweet butter, two or three Nutmeg, little Vinegar, poure it into the Pye in the Oven and let it lye and soake an hour, then take it out, and when it is cold stop the vent hole.
To make fine Pan−cakes fryed without Butter or Lard.
Take a pint of Cream, and six new laid Egs, beat them very well together, put in a quarter of a pound of Sugar, and one Nutmeg or a little beaten Mace (which you please) and so much flower as will thicken almost as much as ordinarily Pan−cake batter; your Pan must be heated reasonably hot & wiped with a clean Cloth, this done put in your Batter as thick or thin as you please.
To make a Steake pye, with a French Pudding in the Pye.
Season your Steaks with Pepper & Nutmegs, and let it stand an hour in a Tray then take a piece of the leanest of a Legg of Mutton and mince it small with Suet and a few sweet herbs, tops of young Time, a branch of Penny−royal, two or three of red Sage, grated bread, yolks of Eggs, sweet Cream, Raisins of the Sun; work altogether like a Pudding, with your hand stiff, and roul them round like Bals, and put them into the Steaks in a deep Coffin, with a piece of sweet Butter; sprinkle a little Verjuyce on it, bake it, then cut it up and roul Sage leaves and fry them, and stick them upright in the wals, and serve your Pye without a Cover, with the juyce of an Orange or Lemon.
To boyle a Capon larded with Lemons.
Take a fair Capon and truss him, boyl him by himselfe in faire water with a little small Oat−meal, then take Mutton Broath, and half a pint of White−wine, a bundle of Herbs, whole Mace, season it with Verjuyce, put Marrow, Dates, season it with Sugar, then take preserved Lemons and cut them like Lard, and with a larding pin, lard in it, then put the capon in a deep dish, thicken your broth with Almonds, and poure it on the Capon.
To Bake Red Deere.
Parboyl it, and then sauce it in Vinegar then Lard it very thick, and season it with Pepper, Ginger and Nutmegs, put it into a deep Pye with good store of sweet butter, and let it bake, when it is baked, take a pint of Hippocras, halfe a pound of sweet butter, two or three Nutmeg, little Vinegar, poure it into the Pye in the Oven and let it lye and soake an hour, then take it out, and when it is cold stop the vent hole.
To make fine Pan−cakes fryed without Butter or Lard.
Take a pint of Cream, and six new laid Egs, beat them very well together, put in a quarter of a pound of Sugar, and one Nutmeg or a little beaten Mace (which you please) and so much flower as will thicken almost as much as ordinarily Pan−cake batter; your Pan must be heated reasonably hot & wiped with a clean Cloth, this done put in your Batter as thick or thin as you please.
To make a Steake pye, with a French Pudding in the Pye.
Season your Steaks with Pepper & Nutmegs, and let it stand an hour in a Tray then take a piece of the leanest of a Legg of Mutton and mince it small with Suet and a few sweet herbs, tops of young Time, a branch of Penny−royal, two or three of red Sage, grated bread, yolks of Eggs, sweet Cream, Raisins of the Sun; work altogether like a Pudding, with your hand stiff, and roul them round like Bals, and put them into the Steaks in a deep Coffin, with a piece of sweet Butter; sprinkle a little Verjuyce on it, bake it, then cut it up and roul Sage leaves and fry them, and stick them upright in the wals, and serve your Pye without a Cover, with the juyce of an Orange or Lemon.
Laura Goodin - Women's History Month
I figured I’d been pretty brave to up stakes and move halfway around the world with my husband and our two-week-old baby, far from everybody I’d ever known and loved. And I had; I’ll cheerfully admit that. It was really hard, and it required a lot of fortitude to fight through the loneliness and exhaustion and culture shock, and the dreadful, dreadful homesickness. To learn about being a mom with nobody to help me. I couldn’t even phone my own mom very often, because 20 years ago international phone calls cost about 15 times more than they do now, and money was very, very tight.
In due course I went back to work (my daughter, then a year-and-a-half-old, was less than impressed). One of my co-workers had a little girl at the same daycare. In unnerving contrast to my alert and healthy daughter, hers was profoundly physically and mentally handicapped. She was a little knotted rag of a thing in a massive padded wheelchair that dwarfed her. As far as I could tell, she could not interact with her surroundings. Even eye contact seemed to be impossible for the amount of muscle control she had. Her mother loved her desperately and cared for her with adamantine devotion.
One day this co-worker asked me about my coming to Australia. I related the details: tiny baby, frantic packing, endless plane trip, parental cluelessness with no resources. I didn’t say much about how miserable I felt most of the time; that would have been appallingly self-centered, I thought (and think). But she was curious about what it had been like, so I told her.
And then this woman, whose child faced the possibility of catastrophic bodily failure and death every day, who required ceaseless care in absolutely every aspect of life, who would never be able to say “I love you” – this woman said to me, with admiration in her voice, “I don’t know how you did it.”
I lost touch with my co-worker over the years. I don’t know what became of her little girl. But that moment of compassion from her – who spent every drop of compassion she had on her daughter, but somehow still found more for me – stretched my own heart several sizes larger. She’s one of my heroes: able, even under staggeringly heavy burdens of heartache, love, and grief – not even to mention the demands on her time, energy, and finances that her child’s challenges mandated – still to open herself to know and understand others’ distress and offer them encouragement and affirmation. I think of her whenever someone asks for just one more bit of understanding from me than I reckon at the time I can spare. She redefined “all I can do”.
In billions of ways every day all over the planet, billions of women are changing the limits: for themselves, for the people around them. They’re doing as much as humanly possible, and then doing more. They’re raising a scornful eyebrow and snorting derisively when people tell them, “Well, that’s enough now, isn’t it?” They’re looking up after a hard day’s work and realizing they’re the only ones left in the office or in the field. They’re surprising even themselves with the miracles they find they have wrought.
I give thanks to and for all the women who have taught me that “all I can do” is a meaningless limit. I thank them for their compassion, courage, charity, imagination, and energy. I hope that I, too, can look at “all I can do” as nothing more than the sign on the doorway into a place of boundless power and compassion.
Bio:
American-born writer Laura E. Goodin has been writing professionally for over 30 years. Her stories have appeared in numerous publications, including Michael Moorcock's New Worlds, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Adbusters, Wet Ink, The Lifted Brow, and Daily Science Fiction, among others, and in several anthologies. (Her story “Jimmy’s Boys” will be appearing in the forthcoming Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild anthology The Never Never Land.) Her plays and libretti have been performed on three continents, and her poetry has been performed internationally, both as spoken word and as texts for new musical compositions. She attended the 2007 Clarion South workshop, and has just completed a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Western Australia. Her web site is http://www.lauraegoodin.com/thework.html.
In due course I went back to work (my daughter, then a year-and-a-half-old, was less than impressed). One of my co-workers had a little girl at the same daycare. In unnerving contrast to my alert and healthy daughter, hers was profoundly physically and mentally handicapped. She was a little knotted rag of a thing in a massive padded wheelchair that dwarfed her. As far as I could tell, she could not interact with her surroundings. Even eye contact seemed to be impossible for the amount of muscle control she had. Her mother loved her desperately and cared for her with adamantine devotion.
One day this co-worker asked me about my coming to Australia. I related the details: tiny baby, frantic packing, endless plane trip, parental cluelessness with no resources. I didn’t say much about how miserable I felt most of the time; that would have been appallingly self-centered, I thought (and think). But she was curious about what it had been like, so I told her.
And then this woman, whose child faced the possibility of catastrophic bodily failure and death every day, who required ceaseless care in absolutely every aspect of life, who would never be able to say “I love you” – this woman said to me, with admiration in her voice, “I don’t know how you did it.”
I lost touch with my co-worker over the years. I don’t know what became of her little girl. But that moment of compassion from her – who spent every drop of compassion she had on her daughter, but somehow still found more for me – stretched my own heart several sizes larger. She’s one of my heroes: able, even under staggeringly heavy burdens of heartache, love, and grief – not even to mention the demands on her time, energy, and finances that her child’s challenges mandated – still to open herself to know and understand others’ distress and offer them encouragement and affirmation. I think of her whenever someone asks for just one more bit of understanding from me than I reckon at the time I can spare. She redefined “all I can do”.
In billions of ways every day all over the planet, billions of women are changing the limits: for themselves, for the people around them. They’re doing as much as humanly possible, and then doing more. They’re raising a scornful eyebrow and snorting derisively when people tell them, “Well, that’s enough now, isn’t it?” They’re looking up after a hard day’s work and realizing they’re the only ones left in the office or in the field. They’re surprising even themselves with the miracles they find they have wrought.
I give thanks to and for all the women who have taught me that “all I can do” is a meaningless limit. I thank them for their compassion, courage, charity, imagination, and energy. I hope that I, too, can look at “all I can do” as nothing more than the sign on the doorway into a place of boundless power and compassion.
Bio:
American-born writer Laura E. Goodin has been writing professionally for over 30 years. Her stories have appeared in numerous publications, including Michael Moorcock's New Worlds, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Adbusters, Wet Ink, The Lifted Brow, and Daily Science Fiction, among others, and in several anthologies. (Her story “Jimmy’s Boys” will be appearing in the forthcoming Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild anthology The Never Never Land.) Her plays and libretti have been performed on three continents, and her poetry has been performed internationally, both as spoken word and as texts for new musical compositions. She attended the 2007 Clarion South workshop, and has just completed a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Western Australia. Her web site is http://www.lauraegoodin.com/thework.html.
Helen Hollick - Women's History Month
Achieving the Dream.
Luck? Good fortune? Whatever - it was most welcome!
It took me a little over sixty years, but I finally made it. I escaped ‘the smoke’ and found myself living in Paradise.
Well maybe not quite Paradise – Devon to be precise, although there is an old saying here in the County:
“When God removed Adam and Eve from Eden
He sent them here to the Heaven that is Devon”
From when I was a little girl living in a busy town did not feel right, I longed for open spaces, for trees, grass – that heady scent of pure air. Instead, I had a North-East London suburb as home. Yes, it was on the very outer edge of London, bordering the several hundred acres of Epping Forest, but we lived in a semi-detached house in a road with other semi-detached very similar houses (forty-eight of them in fact), with Number 1 at the top of the hill, and 48 down the bottom. We were number 5. Third one down on the left.
I clearly remember as a little girl (I think I was about four) standing at the top of the hill crying bitterly in the hot summer sun. Why? I was very short sighted, most of everything was a blur (Mum only discovered that I couldn’t see when I went to school a year later. You would have thought that the fact that I was constantly falling over, or dropping things, or bumping into doors would have alerted her to something wrong. Oh well…) I could see down the hill a large blue area bordered by something whitish-brown. I thought it was the sea and a beach. I had no concept, then, of reservoirs being low because of weeks of drought. To me, it was the sea, and I was heartbroken that we had lived there a long while (to be fair it could have been only a couple of days) and we had not been down to the seaside.
I remember it clearly because I was disappointed to discover that we did not live near the sea after all.
To make up for living in town I enjoyed horse riding in Epping Forest. I started when I was four because I got packed off down to the stables with my sister who was (is!) six years older than me. I must have been a pain in the backside to her.
I guess riding was OK if you couldn’t see. After all, the horse could. I remember falling off for the first time. The horse stopped, down went its head to eat grass and I slid down its neck to land in a heap on the grass.
Holidays were my salvation, especially when I started work as an assistant in a library and became independent of Parents’ Choice Venues. I went to Dorset occasionally, or more often, the Lake District. Real ‘Swallows and Amazons’-type holidays. Complete with boats.
The elation when I got there. The sound of rooks and chaffinches. The intoxicating air. Houses built of stone, none of them the same, most of them old. Cows, sheep. Bliss.
The despair coming home. Coming off the motorway and looking out over the gloomy sprawl of London. Was it any wonder I suffered from bouts of depression? Even as far as the verge of suicide for a short while?
I grew up, got married, had a daughter - who also rode from a very early age and apparently loved the open spaces and countryside as much as I. We had our own horses and ponies, we rode together in the Forest. Life was goodish, despite being so near a town But it could have been better had the dreams come true.
Why didn’t we move? We couldn’t. Our house was rented, my husband had a low-paid job. Some weeks it was a struggle to get by. But we managed it. Ron retired, we moved to a slightly better house because the flat above us caught fire, and their bedroom ended up on my daughter’s bed. (fortunately she was not in it!) Our landlord was obliged to rehome us.
We only went round the corner, but we were opposite a school with trees and a playing field. And we were the last house in a very short road. Number 32. Except there were only 16 houses. All the odd numbers had been destroyed in the war and they built the school there instead of rebuilding the houses.
Not exactly peaceful – we were only a few hundred yards from the A406 London North Circular Road. Above, the stacking area for planes waiting to land at Stanstead Airport. It was a nice house. But it wasn’t the countryside.
And then luck, fortune, karma, whatever, visited. Big Time.
2012. The opening night of the London Olympics. The National Lottery had a special raffle for one-hundred winners. Little did we know that evening as my husband and I watched the opening ceremony on TV (and heard the fireworks from the stadium not far away,) that the next day would change our lives. We were one of the one-hundred £1,000,000 winners.
Winning was surreal. Most of our good friends were delighted for us. A few pretended they were. A couple immediately asked for money. (funnily enough, they are no longer friends!) At one point I wished we hadn’t won the money. Financial advisers, bank managers, legal advisors. They all like pouring cold water over everything and peeing on your parade.
“Live in the country? You’ll soon realise you’ve made a mistake.” – er, why would we make a mistake?
“All that mud? No.no. awful.” From the age of four I’d been used to mud. Horses = fields = mud.
“Stables? You’ll soon find your daughter will become fed up with horses.” She’s had horses for almost thirty years. Why change now?
“Move away from friends?” I haven’t many friends in London.
“Move away from family?” They can always visit.
I got sick of it. All the nonsense advice from people who didn’t want us to spend the money, but to invest it. All I wanted, all I had ever wanted, was to live in an old farmhouse in the country. I wanted to wake up hearing the birds. To look out of my bedroom window at the sky and fields and trees. To wander up a lane with a dog. To have our own stables for our own horses.
We looked at various places in various locations. Nothing suited. Then I said, “What about Devon?”
I applied to a TV show that helped people house-hunt. “Please,” I said, “help us escape from London!”
My daughter and I were whisked away to Devon, courtesy the BBC (husband stayed behind to look after the pets). The first house they showed us was The One. An eighteenth century farm house, with thirteen acres of land. Stables, a stream, a waterfall, some woodland, and on the edge of a quiet, peaceful, village that had no street lighting, and about eighty-odd houses.
We bought the house. Moved in on a mid-January day when it started snowing. Most of the money has gone – we invested a little, but most of it has been spent on the house and happiness, which included building a self-contained extension for my daughter and her new husband. They had known each other a long time but had parted company. Sh*t happened to both of them in-between, they met up again a few weeks before we were due to move. He, however, was not going to lose my daughter again. He followed us to Devon, found a good job, proposed, and they were married almost a year ago today as I write this (February 22nd 2015)
It is pouring with rain outside. Who cares? I hear the owls at night, the mournful cry of the buzzards by day. The horses – including two purebred Exmoor Ponies who were born wild on the moors – live at the end of the garden. We have Baz, a rescue dog from the local dog’s home. Two cats, eight chickens, five ducks and a delinquent goose.
It has taken a little over sixty years to find contentment. It was worth the wait.
Follow Helen’s move from London to Devon in her Devon Diary Blog, Leaning On The Gate:
http://leaningonthegate.blogspot.co.uk/
Website : www.helenhollick.net
Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/HelenHollickAuthor
Twitter: @HelenHollick
Luck? Good fortune? Whatever - it was most welcome!
It took me a little over sixty years, but I finally made it. I escaped ‘the smoke’ and found myself living in Paradise.
Well maybe not quite Paradise – Devon to be precise, although there is an old saying here in the County:
“When God removed Adam and Eve from Eden
He sent them here to the Heaven that is Devon”
From when I was a little girl living in a busy town did not feel right, I longed for open spaces, for trees, grass – that heady scent of pure air. Instead, I had a North-East London suburb as home. Yes, it was on the very outer edge of London, bordering the several hundred acres of Epping Forest, but we lived in a semi-detached house in a road with other semi-detached very similar houses (forty-eight of them in fact), with Number 1 at the top of the hill, and 48 down the bottom. We were number 5. Third one down on the left.
I clearly remember as a little girl (I think I was about four) standing at the top of the hill crying bitterly in the hot summer sun. Why? I was very short sighted, most of everything was a blur (Mum only discovered that I couldn’t see when I went to school a year later. You would have thought that the fact that I was constantly falling over, or dropping things, or bumping into doors would have alerted her to something wrong. Oh well…) I could see down the hill a large blue area bordered by something whitish-brown. I thought it was the sea and a beach. I had no concept, then, of reservoirs being low because of weeks of drought. To me, it was the sea, and I was heartbroken that we had lived there a long while (to be fair it could have been only a couple of days) and we had not been down to the seaside.
I remember it clearly because I was disappointed to discover that we did not live near the sea after all.
To make up for living in town I enjoyed horse riding in Epping Forest. I started when I was four because I got packed off down to the stables with my sister who was (is!) six years older than me. I must have been a pain in the backside to her.
I guess riding was OK if you couldn’t see. After all, the horse could. I remember falling off for the first time. The horse stopped, down went its head to eat grass and I slid down its neck to land in a heap on the grass.
Holidays were my salvation, especially when I started work as an assistant in a library and became independent of Parents’ Choice Venues. I went to Dorset occasionally, or more often, the Lake District. Real ‘Swallows and Amazons’-type holidays. Complete with boats.
The elation when I got there. The sound of rooks and chaffinches. The intoxicating air. Houses built of stone, none of them the same, most of them old. Cows, sheep. Bliss.
The despair coming home. Coming off the motorway and looking out over the gloomy sprawl of London. Was it any wonder I suffered from bouts of depression? Even as far as the verge of suicide for a short while?
I grew up, got married, had a daughter - who also rode from a very early age and apparently loved the open spaces and countryside as much as I. We had our own horses and ponies, we rode together in the Forest. Life was goodish, despite being so near a town But it could have been better had the dreams come true.
Why didn’t we move? We couldn’t. Our house was rented, my husband had a low-paid job. Some weeks it was a struggle to get by. But we managed it. Ron retired, we moved to a slightly better house because the flat above us caught fire, and their bedroom ended up on my daughter’s bed. (fortunately she was not in it!) Our landlord was obliged to rehome us.
We only went round the corner, but we were opposite a school with trees and a playing field. And we were the last house in a very short road. Number 32. Except there were only 16 houses. All the odd numbers had been destroyed in the war and they built the school there instead of rebuilding the houses.
Not exactly peaceful – we were only a few hundred yards from the A406 London North Circular Road. Above, the stacking area for planes waiting to land at Stanstead Airport. It was a nice house. But it wasn’t the countryside.
And then luck, fortune, karma, whatever, visited. Big Time.
2012. The opening night of the London Olympics. The National Lottery had a special raffle for one-hundred winners. Little did we know that evening as my husband and I watched the opening ceremony on TV (and heard the fireworks from the stadium not far away,) that the next day would change our lives. We were one of the one-hundred £1,000,000 winners.
Winning was surreal. Most of our good friends were delighted for us. A few pretended they were. A couple immediately asked for money. (funnily enough, they are no longer friends!) At one point I wished we hadn’t won the money. Financial advisers, bank managers, legal advisors. They all like pouring cold water over everything and peeing on your parade.
“Live in the country? You’ll soon realise you’ve made a mistake.” – er, why would we make a mistake?
“All that mud? No.no. awful.” From the age of four I’d been used to mud. Horses = fields = mud.
“Stables? You’ll soon find your daughter will become fed up with horses.” She’s had horses for almost thirty years. Why change now?
“Move away from friends?” I haven’t many friends in London.
“Move away from family?” They can always visit.
I got sick of it. All the nonsense advice from people who didn’t want us to spend the money, but to invest it. All I wanted, all I had ever wanted, was to live in an old farmhouse in the country. I wanted to wake up hearing the birds. To look out of my bedroom window at the sky and fields and trees. To wander up a lane with a dog. To have our own stables for our own horses.
We looked at various places in various locations. Nothing suited. Then I said, “What about Devon?”
I applied to a TV show that helped people house-hunt. “Please,” I said, “help us escape from London!”
My daughter and I were whisked away to Devon, courtesy the BBC (husband stayed behind to look after the pets). The first house they showed us was The One. An eighteenth century farm house, with thirteen acres of land. Stables, a stream, a waterfall, some woodland, and on the edge of a quiet, peaceful, village that had no street lighting, and about eighty-odd houses.
We bought the house. Moved in on a mid-January day when it started snowing. Most of the money has gone – we invested a little, but most of it has been spent on the house and happiness, which included building a self-contained extension for my daughter and her new husband. They had known each other a long time but had parted company. Sh*t happened to both of them in-between, they met up again a few weeks before we were due to move. He, however, was not going to lose my daughter again. He followed us to Devon, found a good job, proposed, and they were married almost a year ago today as I write this (February 22nd 2015)
It is pouring with rain outside. Who cares? I hear the owls at night, the mournful cry of the buzzards by day. The horses – including two purebred Exmoor Ponies who were born wild on the moors – live at the end of the garden. We have Baz, a rescue dog from the local dog’s home. Two cats, eight chickens, five ducks and a delinquent goose.
It has taken a little over sixty years to find contentment. It was worth the wait.
Follow Helen’s move from London to Devon in her Devon Diary Blog, Leaning On The Gate:
http://leaningonthegate.blogspot.co.uk/
Website : www.helenhollick.net
Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/HelenHollickAuthor
Twitter: @HelenHollick
gillpolack @ 2015-03-18T23:25:00
LJ was down yesterday for the whole time I put aside to do WHM stuff! Today I've been giving a library talk (lovely people, great questions - and the library had to get more chairs!) and teaching and running messages. Tomorrow is more messages and more teaching and doing the last of my prep for the HNSA conference. All this means that I'll give you 2 WHM posts tonight (for yesterday and today) and 3 tomorrow (to get you through til Saturday).
From next week, life will calm down.
And on other news, for Canberra people, Harry Hartog is stocking my fiction. They ran out of Illuminations within a few minutes of obtaining 3 copies and they won't be getting more (for it's hard with small press from the US, but there are now 3 very happy readers who got those copies) but they have loads of Langue[dot]doc 1305 and will have the same of The Art of Effective Dreaming quite soon.
No other news. Or probably there is, but we had a thunderstorm from about 6 am today and that on top of everything else (and the return of smoke before I left the library) means that I can't think of it. I just wanted to reassure you that it wasn't me, yesterday, it was LJ!
From next week, life will calm down.
And on other news, for Canberra people, Harry Hartog is stocking my fiction. They ran out of Illuminations within a few minutes of obtaining 3 copies and they won't be getting more (for it's hard with small press from the US, but there are now 3 very happy readers who got those copies) but they have loads of Langue[dot]doc 1305 and will have the same of The Art of Effective Dreaming quite soon.
No other news. Or probably there is, but we had a thunderstorm from about 6 am today and that on top of everything else (and the return of smoke before I left the library) means that I can't think of it. I just wanted to reassure you that it wasn't me, yesterday, it was LJ!
March 15, 2015
gillpolack @ 2015-03-16T13:43:00
I'm full of statistics today, mostly not useful ones. Of interest maybe is that people who buy one of my books on a major webshop are likely to buy either another one alongside, or a novel by Terry Pratchett. And that's it. Every other statistic basically convinces me that people do runs on a given writer and work through their works. This I suspected already.
In the mail today I received advance purchase forms for the Beast, for Australians (not cheap copies, but postage paid). If anyone wants them, let me know or hunt me out, or something. I'm giving a talk on Wednesday and will have copies there. I will also have copies at Continuum and at the HNSA conference. For non-Australians, you may have to do your advance orders through whichever bookshops permit.
And the cursed novel's curse is dying slower than we'd like. It's not quite out yet. It's very much a watch this space, though, for it will be out soon. Very soon. And it will be officially launched at Harry Hartog's on 1 April at 6.30 pm.
There will be a WHM post later, and apart from that, my day is all rather important paperwork and reading. I'm in countdown mode for the consultations over the weekend and and working through all the things I need to do and all the things I need to know. It's 50 pages for each writer, and it's my own theory (which was on hold for a few months while I worked on the Beast and fiction) and it's working out a bunch of things about how each writer works and thinks. It's home turf for me and a lot of fun, but it takes a lot of concentration, so I've been trying to clear the decks a bit. I might report on either it or the HNSA here or at the History Girls after the conference. If you have a preference, you might want to let me know.
And this was the dull and dutiful post of the day. I was dull and you are dutiful and we're all up to date (well, sort of). My reward for dullness is kale chips. I bought kale at the market and a bunch goes impossibly far. I've made salad for the whole week and for some of next week and there was still 3/4 of a bunch left. Chips. Or crisps. Green and crunchy and slightly peppery. Also, surprisingly filling.
In the mail today I received advance purchase forms for the Beast, for Australians (not cheap copies, but postage paid). If anyone wants them, let me know or hunt me out, or something. I'm giving a talk on Wednesday and will have copies there. I will also have copies at Continuum and at the HNSA conference. For non-Australians, you may have to do your advance orders through whichever bookshops permit.
And the cursed novel's curse is dying slower than we'd like. It's not quite out yet. It's very much a watch this space, though, for it will be out soon. Very soon. And it will be officially launched at Harry Hartog's on 1 April at 6.30 pm.
There will be a WHM post later, and apart from that, my day is all rather important paperwork and reading. I'm in countdown mode for the consultations over the weekend and and working through all the things I need to do and all the things I need to know. It's 50 pages for each writer, and it's my own theory (which was on hold for a few months while I worked on the Beast and fiction) and it's working out a bunch of things about how each writer works and thinks. It's home turf for me and a lot of fun, but it takes a lot of concentration, so I've been trying to clear the decks a bit. I might report on either it or the HNSA here or at the History Girls after the conference. If you have a preference, you might want to let me know.
And this was the dull and dutiful post of the day. I was dull and you are dutiful and we're all up to date (well, sort of). My reward for dullness is kale chips. I bought kale at the market and a bunch goes impossibly far. I've made salad for the whole week and for some of next week and there was still 3/4 of a bunch left. Chips. Or crisps. Green and crunchy and slightly peppery. Also, surprisingly filling.
Milena Benini - Women's History Month
The (not so little) Space Opera that Killed
Space operas have been known to contain dangerous bug-eyed monsters, but none were as deadly as this novel!
I've been writing since I was twelve, publishing since I was fourteen, and that's a very long time. And in all those years of publishing, no other piece of work went through more adventures than one novel.
It was the first—and so far, only—full-length space opera that I wrote, and I was quite pleased with it when I first finished it. It contained lizard-like aliens, a sprawling Terran Union, parallel universes and uncomprehensible extraterrestrial technology, and dealt with issues such as colonialism, identity, and ecology. I know the whole thing sounds pretty much run-of-the-mill nowadays, but things like that haven't been done at the time.
So, I started looking for a publisher who would be willing to take the novel. To be honest, I didn't expect it to find a home: for one thing, it was rather long, and long books are always a tougher sell. For another, Croatia has a strange contradiction in its relationships towards SF: while we have five conventions (for a country with 4.5 million people, that's a lot!) and an extremely active fandom, it seems to be a truth universally acknowledged in the fandom that local authors can never be as good as imported ones.
Be that as it may, I took my novel and started looking for a publisher. To my immense surprise, I found one almost immediately. It was a small house, and had no previous experience with publishing local authors, but they did have a solid track-record in publishing translated genre novels. The owner read my novel, and liked it so much he immediately agreed to publish it.
I couldn't believe my luck! Not only did I have a publisher, I had an enthusiastic publisher, who wanted to put my novel with great marketing support and expected it to be successful. Paperwork was done, the edits were done, and the rest was supposed to be plain sailing. I was so happy, I walked on clouds for the rest of that week.
But, of course, things did not go as expected. That Saturday—and yes, I still remember it was a Saturday, all these years later—I got a message from my publisher, with somewhat disturbing news: there was a little problem with the cash-flow. My payment may be a month or two late. That didn't really upset me too much. What was important was that my novel would get published. Whether I got paid promptly or with a few months' delay really didn't seem all that important.
Except that the little problem with the cash-flow turned out to be a full-blown bankruptcy by the end of next week. There would be no novel with a pretty cover, no marketing support, and no payment at all. The publisher did manage to give me my rights back, but that was the only thing he could do.
So, I took my novel, and went in search of another publisher. Time passed, and other publishers passed on the novel, as well, without even reading it: it was long, it was speculative fiction, and it was by a local author. Nobody could sell that, they told me—all stuff I'd known from the beginning. In the end, I went to work on other things and the novel just sat in my drawer, collecting dust.
Then, a few years later, a friend of mine started a publishing house. He wanted to do local authors, and he wanted to do speculative fiction. I told him about my unfortunate space opera, and he asked to see it. About a month later, I heard back: he liked it, his editor liked it, and they were going to buy it. They already had all the books they could do for the first year, but the year after, my novel would come out.
Now, this wasn't as sweet a deal as the first one: their books weren't the slick hardcovers that the first publisher had done, but rather small, cheap paperbacks. That didn't bother me: there was something cosmically right, in fact. It was a space opera, after all. It belonged in a paperback, and the lower price might even make the book an easier sale.
I waited patiently as the first year books came out. There were supposed to be six titles in all and, by the time the fifth title was out, the editor would be ready to take my manuscript and work on it, so as to make it the first book in their second year. Except... only four titles ever did come out. By the time the fifth came round, the money ran out, and no new funds were coming in, with the sales practically non-existent. The fifth book did appear the following year, but after that, the house folded and went out of business. My space opera and I were on our own again.
This time, I shelved it (no more drawer-room) immediately, and decided I wouldn't even bother with it any more. I was getting into theory, and fantasy, and all kinds of other stuff, and could let off any occasional science-fictional steam by writing short stories, which were a much easier sell.
Only, a few more years later, another friend of mine asked to see it. He also liked it, and was just in the process of starting his own publishing house. Would I like to be his first title? Of course I would. I did warn him that two other publishers had gone under before they could publish it, but he was not a superstitious man. Or, should I say, had not been one. After his entire venture collapsed before ever getting off the ground, he may have changed his opinion.
And now, since this has been a long story already, to jump to the hopefully happy ending: the space opera in question currently has a publisher, and an editor, and is slated to come out this year. No, it's not out yet, but the publisher is alive and kicking. Whether the situation will change before my little bug-eyed, publisher-killing monster sees the light of day, I do not know. I'm keeping my fingers crossed: this time, there's funding from the Ministry of Culture (yeah, we're that kind of a country: SF publishers can get government funding because no genre sells well enough if it's by a local author). This novel has destroyed three publishers, but I'm hoping it can't really destroy a whole country!
Milena Benini started writing when she was twelve, and hasn't stopped since. In the meantime, she published a large amount of short stories, some of which can be found in English, here and here . She also won a few local awards, and published three novels in Croatian (not counting the one she talks about in this post). One of her novels, Priestess of the Moon, is also available in English from MuseItUp Publishing.
In the interest of breaking curses (and letting us see just how unwarranted they can be) Milena has given us an excerpt from her novel.
Lahù caught my hands and started speaking so quietly I had to struggle to hear her through the chatter of children riding next to us.
"You're a dreamseller, Bobbie. You dream professionally, for money."
I tried to say something, confused, but the soft touch of her hands stopped my questions before I could form them.
"Dreams are... immensely powerful. Everything we have on Zaría, we have because of dreams. I've heard that other planets simply don't work that way, but I don't know anything about them... and it doesn't matter, anyway. We turn dreams into energy. Like this streetcar. What do you think, how does it move?"
When I shrugged, she indicated the ceiling with her head. "Up there, there are people dreaming. People like you. Professional dreamers, whose dreams are strong enough to make the streetcar's machinery move. That's the simplest use of dreams. And that's what you were doing this morning at Beggam's: filling the batteries for his store. Gods, with what you've pulled, they'll have enough power for several months!"
She shook her head a little, watching me with a strange kind of admiration. "You're one of the best, Bobbie. Certainly the best I've ever met. But you're also more than that. You're a real dreamseller, the kind that was first to appear, or at least so the legends say. People come to you, and you make them feel what they want, see places they want to see, do things they'd like to do in real life, but they don't dare, or aren't able to, or just can't afford to." A glint of pleasure appeared in her smile. "Not that many can afford us, lately."
"Us?"
That was the only word that actually meant something to me: us. Lahù laughed and touched my cheek with her lips.
"I'm your guide, Bobbie. Do you know what that is? No, not even that. Well, I... I guide your dreams for you. Like this morning, remember? Even the best dreamsellers can't always keep their dreams in control. So, when you dreamsell, it's a lot safer to have a guide as conduit between you and the customer. If nothing else, to protect you from passing nightmares. And, of course, to protect you from dreamer fatigue."
A smile escaped me before I could stop it, but when Lahù tried to turn her head away, I caught her chin and made her look at me.
"It's not your fault, Lahù," I said, as gently as I could. And I really believed it. The way in which she'd shielded me when I panicked—and I was certain it wasn't just the feeble protection of her tiny body—had filled me with profound confidence in her talent for... whatever it was that guides did.
Lahù returned my look with a lot less conviction. For a moment, I felt that I might—should—hold her, just to show her how much I trusted her. But I didn't. I was almost embarrassed. Feeling trust, even closeness, that was fine. But not in that way; not now, when I was something I didn't recognize, a brainless monster replacing someone that Lahù obviously cared about. Slowly, I lowered my hand back into my lap, and Lahù straightened, creating a distance between us.
I felt sudden cold at the place where her knee had been touching my thigh, and shivered. Lahù must have sensed it, for she immediately leaned closer again. My conscience resented such childish, needy behavior on my part.
"You don't have to that, you know," I said, almost angry. "You don't owe me anything."
She looked away, with a sad half-smile in the corners of her lips.
"But I do, Bobbie."
Unreasonably angry at her guilt, I said, "Not that I remember!"
I had wanted the words to be a blow, even though I regretted them the moment they passed my lips.
Lahù didn't flinch; she just shook a little, like a street dog shaking mud off its back. And then, before I could say anything else, she got up, pushing her way through the children surrounding our bench.
"We''re getting off at the next one."
I followed her uncertainly, my jaw clenched to control the mindless fear that swallowed me the moment her comforting warmth had moved away. One of the children slumped onto the now empty bench and yelled after me, "Lazy Southerner!"
The child's father muttered a quick apology, but he needn't have bothered on my account. Lahù's tiny figure was already at the door; I hurried towards her through the throng almost blindly, pushed simultaneously by the desire to soften her anxiety and my own painful need to feel her closeness again. I caught her shoulders and bent to her, whispering to her ear, "Forgive me, Lahù. You know I didn't mean it that way."
Without turning, she shook her head. "It's my fault."
I was ready to deny that, but the streetcar stopped. For a moment, I was busy just grabbing blindly and trying to keep us both on our feet. And then we were out on the street again and, despite my longer legs, I had to fight to keep up with Lahù's quick, nervous steps. At last, I felt stupid running after her like a puppy, and caught her wrist.
"Lahù!"
She turned and said, her voice thick with suppressed tears, "I—I'm sorry—I shouldn't leave you alone like that. It's just..."
I wouldn't let her finish the sentence. Whatever chances there were for getting out of this, they all lay in her hands. And suddenly, I knew, still in that emotionless, shallow way, but I knew that it was the point of the relationship between a dreamseller and a guide: to pull one another from holes, whenever the effort become too much for just one person. I wet my lips, searching for words that would tell her that I knew. I couldn't find them. So, instead, I took her arm and kept walking, asking the first stupid question that came to mind.
"That kid in the streetcar... why did he call me a Southerner?"
She shrugged, waving a hand to indicate people on the street. "Try to figure it out for yourself."
I looked around, and immediately understood. Most of them were smaller than me. And they were mostly dark-skinned. Gray locks were the closest to light hair I could see. I frowned, uncertain of my memory, and pulled a tuft of my own hair over my forehead, trying to see its color. Lahù laughed and nodded.
"You're very blond, Bobbie, yes. If your ears were pierced, I'd consider you Sayya Fiaytan, too. Or just Sayyan, actually. You were the one who told me they were two different peoples, and that only Sayyan pierce their ears, but they're much stronger and more numerous than the Fiaytans, so other nations tend to lump them together. But then—" suddenly, she stopped and frowned at me—"you might be a Fiaytan, right?"
I spread my hands, strangely frightened by the question. "You mean to say you don't know where I'm from? I'm not... not from Bana? Not from here?"
"Considering your looks, that's hardly possible. But no, I don't really know at all. You never told me. I simply assumed you'd come from Sayya Fiayta, because you knew so much."
"About what?"
"Sayya Fiayta, of course! You'd tell tales of their mountains, their cold mists, their snow... you even used to laugh at our local winters, calling them 'pure spring' when compared to real Fiaytan snows, far south. I just presumed you must have come from there. I thought maybe you were a runaway or something, and didn't want to discuss your past." She lowered her eyes and added, barely voicing the words, "We said something about that."
"What?"
She sighed. "Here and now... you really don't remember? Here and now and getting back north."
"Here and now and getting back north," I repeated experimentally. "No, it doesn't ring any bells."
Shrugging, Lahù started walking again.
She led me through several narrow passages and winding alleys that led us to a square. It was small and didn't seem like one of the tourist attractions of Bana.
Lahù crossed it calmly and waved to the streetcar standing on the other side of the square. I followed her with a renewed feeling of urgency. If I never remembered... I didn't really want to consider that possibility, but I had thought that it wouldn't be so bad, convinced Lahù could fill me in on everything I needed to know. Now, I realized what a huge part of my past could be lost forever if I didn't recover. A thin voice in the depths of my skull was whispering it might not be a bad thing at all, but I shook it off.
Space operas have been known to contain dangerous bug-eyed monsters, but none were as deadly as this novel!
I've been writing since I was twelve, publishing since I was fourteen, and that's a very long time. And in all those years of publishing, no other piece of work went through more adventures than one novel.
It was the first—and so far, only—full-length space opera that I wrote, and I was quite pleased with it when I first finished it. It contained lizard-like aliens, a sprawling Terran Union, parallel universes and uncomprehensible extraterrestrial technology, and dealt with issues such as colonialism, identity, and ecology. I know the whole thing sounds pretty much run-of-the-mill nowadays, but things like that haven't been done at the time.
So, I started looking for a publisher who would be willing to take the novel. To be honest, I didn't expect it to find a home: for one thing, it was rather long, and long books are always a tougher sell. For another, Croatia has a strange contradiction in its relationships towards SF: while we have five conventions (for a country with 4.5 million people, that's a lot!) and an extremely active fandom, it seems to be a truth universally acknowledged in the fandom that local authors can never be as good as imported ones.
Be that as it may, I took my novel and started looking for a publisher. To my immense surprise, I found one almost immediately. It was a small house, and had no previous experience with publishing local authors, but they did have a solid track-record in publishing translated genre novels. The owner read my novel, and liked it so much he immediately agreed to publish it.
I couldn't believe my luck! Not only did I have a publisher, I had an enthusiastic publisher, who wanted to put my novel with great marketing support and expected it to be successful. Paperwork was done, the edits were done, and the rest was supposed to be plain sailing. I was so happy, I walked on clouds for the rest of that week.
But, of course, things did not go as expected. That Saturday—and yes, I still remember it was a Saturday, all these years later—I got a message from my publisher, with somewhat disturbing news: there was a little problem with the cash-flow. My payment may be a month or two late. That didn't really upset me too much. What was important was that my novel would get published. Whether I got paid promptly or with a few months' delay really didn't seem all that important.
Except that the little problem with the cash-flow turned out to be a full-blown bankruptcy by the end of next week. There would be no novel with a pretty cover, no marketing support, and no payment at all. The publisher did manage to give me my rights back, but that was the only thing he could do.
So, I took my novel, and went in search of another publisher. Time passed, and other publishers passed on the novel, as well, without even reading it: it was long, it was speculative fiction, and it was by a local author. Nobody could sell that, they told me—all stuff I'd known from the beginning. In the end, I went to work on other things and the novel just sat in my drawer, collecting dust.
Then, a few years later, a friend of mine started a publishing house. He wanted to do local authors, and he wanted to do speculative fiction. I told him about my unfortunate space opera, and he asked to see it. About a month later, I heard back: he liked it, his editor liked it, and they were going to buy it. They already had all the books they could do for the first year, but the year after, my novel would come out.
Now, this wasn't as sweet a deal as the first one: their books weren't the slick hardcovers that the first publisher had done, but rather small, cheap paperbacks. That didn't bother me: there was something cosmically right, in fact. It was a space opera, after all. It belonged in a paperback, and the lower price might even make the book an easier sale.
I waited patiently as the first year books came out. There were supposed to be six titles in all and, by the time the fifth title was out, the editor would be ready to take my manuscript and work on it, so as to make it the first book in their second year. Except... only four titles ever did come out. By the time the fifth came round, the money ran out, and no new funds were coming in, with the sales practically non-existent. The fifth book did appear the following year, but after that, the house folded and went out of business. My space opera and I were on our own again.
This time, I shelved it (no more drawer-room) immediately, and decided I wouldn't even bother with it any more. I was getting into theory, and fantasy, and all kinds of other stuff, and could let off any occasional science-fictional steam by writing short stories, which were a much easier sell.
Only, a few more years later, another friend of mine asked to see it. He also liked it, and was just in the process of starting his own publishing house. Would I like to be his first title? Of course I would. I did warn him that two other publishers had gone under before they could publish it, but he was not a superstitious man. Or, should I say, had not been one. After his entire venture collapsed before ever getting off the ground, he may have changed his opinion.
And now, since this has been a long story already, to jump to the hopefully happy ending: the space opera in question currently has a publisher, and an editor, and is slated to come out this year. No, it's not out yet, but the publisher is alive and kicking. Whether the situation will change before my little bug-eyed, publisher-killing monster sees the light of day, I do not know. I'm keeping my fingers crossed: this time, there's funding from the Ministry of Culture (yeah, we're that kind of a country: SF publishers can get government funding because no genre sells well enough if it's by a local author). This novel has destroyed three publishers, but I'm hoping it can't really destroy a whole country!
Milena Benini started writing when she was twelve, and hasn't stopped since. In the meantime, she published a large amount of short stories, some of which can be found in English, here and here . She also won a few local awards, and published three novels in Croatian (not counting the one she talks about in this post). One of her novels, Priestess of the Moon, is also available in English from MuseItUp Publishing.
In the interest of breaking curses (and letting us see just how unwarranted they can be) Milena has given us an excerpt from her novel.
Lahù caught my hands and started speaking so quietly I had to struggle to hear her through the chatter of children riding next to us.
"You're a dreamseller, Bobbie. You dream professionally, for money."
I tried to say something, confused, but the soft touch of her hands stopped my questions before I could form them.
"Dreams are... immensely powerful. Everything we have on Zaría, we have because of dreams. I've heard that other planets simply don't work that way, but I don't know anything about them... and it doesn't matter, anyway. We turn dreams into energy. Like this streetcar. What do you think, how does it move?"
When I shrugged, she indicated the ceiling with her head. "Up there, there are people dreaming. People like you. Professional dreamers, whose dreams are strong enough to make the streetcar's machinery move. That's the simplest use of dreams. And that's what you were doing this morning at Beggam's: filling the batteries for his store. Gods, with what you've pulled, they'll have enough power for several months!"
She shook her head a little, watching me with a strange kind of admiration. "You're one of the best, Bobbie. Certainly the best I've ever met. But you're also more than that. You're a real dreamseller, the kind that was first to appear, or at least so the legends say. People come to you, and you make them feel what they want, see places they want to see, do things they'd like to do in real life, but they don't dare, or aren't able to, or just can't afford to." A glint of pleasure appeared in her smile. "Not that many can afford us, lately."
"Us?"
That was the only word that actually meant something to me: us. Lahù laughed and touched my cheek with her lips.
"I'm your guide, Bobbie. Do you know what that is? No, not even that. Well, I... I guide your dreams for you. Like this morning, remember? Even the best dreamsellers can't always keep their dreams in control. So, when you dreamsell, it's a lot safer to have a guide as conduit between you and the customer. If nothing else, to protect you from passing nightmares. And, of course, to protect you from dreamer fatigue."
A smile escaped me before I could stop it, but when Lahù tried to turn her head away, I caught her chin and made her look at me.
"It's not your fault, Lahù," I said, as gently as I could. And I really believed it. The way in which she'd shielded me when I panicked—and I was certain it wasn't just the feeble protection of her tiny body—had filled me with profound confidence in her talent for... whatever it was that guides did.
Lahù returned my look with a lot less conviction. For a moment, I felt that I might—should—hold her, just to show her how much I trusted her. But I didn't. I was almost embarrassed. Feeling trust, even closeness, that was fine. But not in that way; not now, when I was something I didn't recognize, a brainless monster replacing someone that Lahù obviously cared about. Slowly, I lowered my hand back into my lap, and Lahù straightened, creating a distance between us.
I felt sudden cold at the place where her knee had been touching my thigh, and shivered. Lahù must have sensed it, for she immediately leaned closer again. My conscience resented such childish, needy behavior on my part.
"You don't have to that, you know," I said, almost angry. "You don't owe me anything."
She looked away, with a sad half-smile in the corners of her lips.
"But I do, Bobbie."
Unreasonably angry at her guilt, I said, "Not that I remember!"
I had wanted the words to be a blow, even though I regretted them the moment they passed my lips.
Lahù didn't flinch; she just shook a little, like a street dog shaking mud off its back. And then, before I could say anything else, she got up, pushing her way through the children surrounding our bench.
"We''re getting off at the next one."
I followed her uncertainly, my jaw clenched to control the mindless fear that swallowed me the moment her comforting warmth had moved away. One of the children slumped onto the now empty bench and yelled after me, "Lazy Southerner!"
The child's father muttered a quick apology, but he needn't have bothered on my account. Lahù's tiny figure was already at the door; I hurried towards her through the throng almost blindly, pushed simultaneously by the desire to soften her anxiety and my own painful need to feel her closeness again. I caught her shoulders and bent to her, whispering to her ear, "Forgive me, Lahù. You know I didn't mean it that way."
Without turning, she shook her head. "It's my fault."
I was ready to deny that, but the streetcar stopped. For a moment, I was busy just grabbing blindly and trying to keep us both on our feet. And then we were out on the street again and, despite my longer legs, I had to fight to keep up with Lahù's quick, nervous steps. At last, I felt stupid running after her like a puppy, and caught her wrist.
"Lahù!"
She turned and said, her voice thick with suppressed tears, "I—I'm sorry—I shouldn't leave you alone like that. It's just..."
I wouldn't let her finish the sentence. Whatever chances there were for getting out of this, they all lay in her hands. And suddenly, I knew, still in that emotionless, shallow way, but I knew that it was the point of the relationship between a dreamseller and a guide: to pull one another from holes, whenever the effort become too much for just one person. I wet my lips, searching for words that would tell her that I knew. I couldn't find them. So, instead, I took her arm and kept walking, asking the first stupid question that came to mind.
"That kid in the streetcar... why did he call me a Southerner?"
She shrugged, waving a hand to indicate people on the street. "Try to figure it out for yourself."
I looked around, and immediately understood. Most of them were smaller than me. And they were mostly dark-skinned. Gray locks were the closest to light hair I could see. I frowned, uncertain of my memory, and pulled a tuft of my own hair over my forehead, trying to see its color. Lahù laughed and nodded.
"You're very blond, Bobbie, yes. If your ears were pierced, I'd consider you Sayya Fiaytan, too. Or just Sayyan, actually. You were the one who told me they were two different peoples, and that only Sayyan pierce their ears, but they're much stronger and more numerous than the Fiaytans, so other nations tend to lump them together. But then—" suddenly, she stopped and frowned at me—"you might be a Fiaytan, right?"
I spread my hands, strangely frightened by the question. "You mean to say you don't know where I'm from? I'm not... not from Bana? Not from here?"
"Considering your looks, that's hardly possible. But no, I don't really know at all. You never told me. I simply assumed you'd come from Sayya Fiayta, because you knew so much."
"About what?"
"Sayya Fiayta, of course! You'd tell tales of their mountains, their cold mists, their snow... you even used to laugh at our local winters, calling them 'pure spring' when compared to real Fiaytan snows, far south. I just presumed you must have come from there. I thought maybe you were a runaway or something, and didn't want to discuss your past." She lowered her eyes and added, barely voicing the words, "We said something about that."
"What?"
She sighed. "Here and now... you really don't remember? Here and now and getting back north."
"Here and now and getting back north," I repeated experimentally. "No, it doesn't ring any bells."
Shrugging, Lahù started walking again.
She led me through several narrow passages and winding alleys that led us to a square. It was small and didn't seem like one of the tourist attractions of Bana.
Lahù crossed it calmly and waved to the streetcar standing on the other side of the square. I followed her with a renewed feeling of urgency. If I never remembered... I didn't really want to consider that possibility, but I had thought that it wouldn't be so bad, convinced Lahù could fill me in on everything I needed to know. Now, I realized what a huge part of my past could be lost forever if I didn't recover. A thin voice in the depths of my skull was whispering it might not be a bad thing at all, but I shook it off.
March 14, 2015
On Bats in Flats
I have a delightful WHM post for you today, all about curses, but it has to wait.
I have a bat problem. There is a bat in my flat. I didn't know it was a bat for 24 hours - I thought it was a moth. Then a few hours later I thought "A giant moth*" because of its flying patterns and weight in the air (there are some advantages to being a delicate daisy - I can tell size from sound and feel, although this time I was wrong because the heft of a bat is quite different to birds and moths). Then there was nothing all day yesterday and I forgot it. Last night it flew round again and I listened to the wing beat again and thought "That's very big for a moth" and I investigated, for if it was a bird (even if it sounded and felt wrong), it needed to go outside sooner rather than later. I was very surprised to find a big black bat.
By 6. 30 this morning, the bat had found its way safely to my kitchen and it's currently asleep on my ceiling. I'm staying by my computer, for in the lounge room I'm less of a disturbance. I'm finding it hard to concentrate, is the problem, for there is a big black bat clinging somewhat precariously to my kitchen ceiling and it's visible out of the corner of my right eye as I type. Every few minutes I turn and hope it's sleeping peacefully.
The wildlife people were very pleased with me for having a not-ill bat and for managing to confine it to one room. The universe is rewarding my goodness (for not killing the poor thing by mistake) and there is less bushfire smoke. This is just as well, because I have to leave my sliding door open until the bat has gone. Two experts say to leave it open, one says to keep it closed. Two are bewildered by a bat in a flat, one says "It was drawn to the big lights by the feast of moths and then probably confused by the bushfire smoke." We think it was let into the apartment block by the neighbours who believe in leaving doors open whenever possible, and got stuck in the stairwell then crept under my door in a bid for freedom. Big lights are dangerous...
The reason I can't just shoo it out is twofold. First, it's daylight, and that would be cruel. Second, bats in the ACT are liable to infection by a virus which is transmissible to humans. I've been reassured that I'm perfectly safe with it hanging round, but to avoid close contact.
There are official bat carers in the ACT and one has just rung me (the third of my experts, the one who says "I'm really a reptile person".) She's been vaccinated and she was very excited by my description. She thinks it's a particularly large insect-eating bat, and I don't remember the type. She'll tell me for certain (ish, for she's a reptile expert) when she gets here. She wants to net my bat-in-a-flat and rehydrate it and then let it go at dusk. We worked out that since my place tends to insects (for the same reason it now has a bat) my bat-in-a-flat's probably not hungry. In fact, it's currently sleeping nicely, but I'll be pleased to say goodbye. A good houseguest shouldn't stay above two days. Also, it's surprisingly freaky to have a big bat asleep on one's kitchen ceiling.
ETA: The bat carer has been and gone. It took a few minutes longer than necessary because we had a lot to catch up on, since the nice woman over the phone turned out to be a friend of mine! The bat is young, female and in surprisingly good condition. She's either a Gould's wattled bat or a chocolate wattled bat. (I've not seen either before!) My friend rehydrated her immediately and checked to see just how starving she was and if anything was broken. The batling is in good condition and may even have eaten a spider and other tasty snacks from around my flat. Apparently she's in the best condition of any rescued bat my friend has seen, and was a really easy rescue to boot. I've been lucky, my little bat has been lucky - and I get coffee with a friend, to boot!!
*When I was a child, we had moths in our front yard that reached 8 inches across, so this isn't nearly as stupid a mistake as it sounds
I have a bat problem. There is a bat in my flat. I didn't know it was a bat for 24 hours - I thought it was a moth. Then a few hours later I thought "A giant moth*" because of its flying patterns and weight in the air (there are some advantages to being a delicate daisy - I can tell size from sound and feel, although this time I was wrong because the heft of a bat is quite different to birds and moths). Then there was nothing all day yesterday and I forgot it. Last night it flew round again and I listened to the wing beat again and thought "That's very big for a moth" and I investigated, for if it was a bird (even if it sounded and felt wrong), it needed to go outside sooner rather than later. I was very surprised to find a big black bat.
By 6. 30 this morning, the bat had found its way safely to my kitchen and it's currently asleep on my ceiling. I'm staying by my computer, for in the lounge room I'm less of a disturbance. I'm finding it hard to concentrate, is the problem, for there is a big black bat clinging somewhat precariously to my kitchen ceiling and it's visible out of the corner of my right eye as I type. Every few minutes I turn and hope it's sleeping peacefully.
The wildlife people were very pleased with me for having a not-ill bat and for managing to confine it to one room. The universe is rewarding my goodness (for not killing the poor thing by mistake) and there is less bushfire smoke. This is just as well, because I have to leave my sliding door open until the bat has gone. Two experts say to leave it open, one says to keep it closed. Two are bewildered by a bat in a flat, one says "It was drawn to the big lights by the feast of moths and then probably confused by the bushfire smoke." We think it was let into the apartment block by the neighbours who believe in leaving doors open whenever possible, and got stuck in the stairwell then crept under my door in a bid for freedom. Big lights are dangerous...
The reason I can't just shoo it out is twofold. First, it's daylight, and that would be cruel. Second, bats in the ACT are liable to infection by a virus which is transmissible to humans. I've been reassured that I'm perfectly safe with it hanging round, but to avoid close contact.
There are official bat carers in the ACT and one has just rung me (the third of my experts, the one who says "I'm really a reptile person".) She's been vaccinated and she was very excited by my description. She thinks it's a particularly large insect-eating bat, and I don't remember the type. She'll tell me for certain (ish, for she's a reptile expert) when she gets here. She wants to net my bat-in-a-flat and rehydrate it and then let it go at dusk. We worked out that since my place tends to insects (for the same reason it now has a bat) my bat-in-a-flat's probably not hungry. In fact, it's currently sleeping nicely, but I'll be pleased to say goodbye. A good houseguest shouldn't stay above two days. Also, it's surprisingly freaky to have a big bat asleep on one's kitchen ceiling.
ETA: The bat carer has been and gone. It took a few minutes longer than necessary because we had a lot to catch up on, since the nice woman over the phone turned out to be a friend of mine! The bat is young, female and in surprisingly good condition. She's either a Gould's wattled bat or a chocolate wattled bat. (I've not seen either before!) My friend rehydrated her immediately and checked to see just how starving she was and if anything was broken. The batling is in good condition and may even have eaten a spider and other tasty snacks from around my flat. Apparently she's in the best condition of any rescued bat my friend has seen, and was a really easy rescue to boot. I've been lucky, my little bat has been lucky - and I get coffee with a friend, to boot!!
*When I was a child, we had moths in our front yard that reached 8 inches across, so this isn't nearly as stupid a mistake as it sounds
March 13, 2015
Women's History Month, a bit of background
In 2005 someone asked me to write a piece about Women's History Month. I just found it in my folder of "Have no idea what happened to this" articles, so I'm sharing it with you today. Some of you may remember that I recently (in historical terms) checked with the surviving members of the first committee and that coffee was indeed the first any of us knew of WHM apart from Helen. Marilyn Lake confirmed that she was a committee member in name only, to give us gravitas (although she did a bit more than that, and was part of our programme online). I've also checked who was on that formal first committee: I talked about this last year.Trivium Publishing gave us a place on the web after that first year (that first year we hosted the whole online event using Blackboard, which had very particular challenges) and gave us a purpose-designed site (Tamara Mazzei rocks!). I also realised that my memories are unreliable: I conflated two different years in my recollection. This means there's a lot more history than in this set of small recollections from 2005. Still, I thought you'd like to see it and to understand why I host a blog event every year, especially those of you who are encountering this for the first time.
3/10/2005
I have been asked to write an article about women’s history.
I don’t want to write this article. I don’t want yet another piece of writing on the web by an historian, telling non-historians how to think. I was involved in Women’s History Month from the day it started in Australia until 2004, and I am sick of basic instruction. I want to hear stories; I want to tell stories.
I don’t have a whole story to tell, though. I have been thinking about women’s history and realised that my mind has fragmented my experiences. What I have is a series of half-memories. I am an historian who feels history fading and a writer who can’t tell a tale. It is about time I recorded some of my morsels before they are forgotten and someone invents a glorious past.
The official record states that Women’s History Month was first celebrated in Australia in 2000.
Helen Leonard had planned a launch to end all launches. She had talked the Speaker of the Senate, Margaret Reid, into allowing her and her committee to launch the event in Margaret’s private garden in Parliament House. Very official. Very impressive. The list of acceptances was official and impressive too – Australia must have a real Women’s History Month if it is to be launched in the private garden of the Speaker. The dignitaries were daunting.
I didn’t know about this. All I knew was that I was planning an online educational project on women’s history. To be honest, I didn’t even know about Women’s History Month. I was having a whale of a time obsessing about online teaching techniques and I just wanted to set up a test group to teach some women’s history and some Medieval history using those techniques.
When I obsess about something, I tell everyone, so Helen suffered a dose of bubbling enthusiasm about the possibilities of online teaching Medieval Studies and women’s history for people with no history background. My logic in allowing my enthusiasm to bubble was that it made a change from CEDAW and women’s peak networks. Until then I had kept my historian self fairly clear of my committee self.
The next thing I knew, I was meeting Helen for coffee at Gus’s, a café in central Canberra.
The first Women’s History Month committee meeting in Australia was that coffee. I don’t know if the others knew before they arrived – one day I must ask them. I certainly didn’t know. There is a formal list of the initial committee on Australia’s Women’s History Month somewhere, I believe, but I really don’t know if it actually represents all the people Helen had in mind or had worked with.
The historian in me wants to present you with a clear narrative, telling you every important aspect and giving you crystal interpretations. The writer in me wants to present you with an elegantly articulated truth. And the committee person in me says, “I wish life were that simple.”
I can remember the coffee, every mouthful. We sat outside at a little table that was diminished further by Helen’s overflowing ashtray. I had a cappuccino and took so long to drink it that the last mouthfuls were icy. Lulu Respall-Turner walked out of a radio station where she was interviewing me, late last year and we looked at that table from across the road and asked each other why it was so far in our pasts. Five years is not a long time, but the underlying fabric of life changed when Helen died: that first meeting was aeons ago.
Like that coffee, my images are frozen. I remember thinking, “In the US they had an Act of Congress to create Women’s History Month; in Australia we have a declaration by Helen.”
Of course there was far more to Women’s History Month than a personal declaration and a cup of coffee.
For one thing, there was Margaret Reid and her garden. Now she bears the title Honourable and is retired: her garden has bowed out, even though she hasn’t.
I met her garden before I met her, so it has a very real personality for me. My mind flirted with the greenery as I helped setting up for the launch, and then I became acquainted with her kitchen as I washed the glasses after that launch. These tasks protected me from the dignitaries: I was too shy to tell anyone I was an historian, so I pretended to be the kitchen volunteer.
Until Women’s History Month was launched in that garden and for the full time we celebrated it, all I saw was my computer, and more of my computer. No, that is not true, one afternoon I saw Helen’s computer. It took long hours from all of us to bring that first Women’s History Month in Australia to life.
That afternoon with Helen’s computer is my next image frozen in time, in fact. It must have been a couple of weeks before the launch. I had set up online discussion boards and chat rooms and everyone agreed we would get key women in to discuss their experiences and that we would record what they said and we could archive this for researchers to use. It would be fun. We were totally determined that it would be fun.
Anne Summers and Marilyn Lake were on the committee and did their bit on the program as well, but weren’t a program in and of themselves. I was happy to train people, but we needed More Big Names to grab the general public and in general, we were lacking in people to train. I had emailed Helen and she had emailed me, and we had talked round the committee and explored some possibilities, but we had nothing like a full program.
By this stage it was becoming apparent that the launch was our flagship and that the online program would be the part of women’s history month that would meet all the rest of our goals. The launch would make people aware of women’s history; the online stuff would get women involved, remembering and owning their pasts. Without much ado, my temporary classroom became our main program focus.
That afternoon with Helen's computer gave us the bulk of our program.
When Helen had said, “Come to my office and we will fix it today” she had been totally serious: I went to Helen’s office. Erica Lewis was there, I think, and helped until meetings overtook her. Wreathed in smoke, drowning in instant coffee, we worked our way through Helen’s black address book.
Soon we had it down to an erratic system. Helen would give me a few names and we would toss about a possible topic, then she would ring or email that short list of friends. Since they were all Great Names, this usually meant her leaving messages. Sometimes she was put straight through and I would hear half-conversations about children and mutual friends and political action before Helen introduced the reason for the call. I was in the background the whole time, which, now I think of it, sums up a lot of my experience over the last five years: Women’s History Month has involved a lot of hidden work.
Eventually Helen had rung everyone and moved onto other things and I had a draft schedule nutted out based heavily on who might ring back and what they were likely to say. Then the phones started ringing. I filed the blanks in on my program sheet: we had our Big Names.
Our first program consisted of a totally terrific array of women. They had all made a huge leap of faith: very few of them had been in a web discussion or chat before, and although we were supported by the Women’s Electoral Lobby (and then by the National Foundation of Australian Women) we were not a formally constituted body with funding and written objectives. We were a group of friends, brought together by Helen, all of whom cared passionately about women and about history.
Now Women’s History Month doesn’t meet at Gus’s. It has a permanent, purpose-designed website. It is supported by the National Library and the National Museum and a host of other institutions. It has a budget. It even has sub-committees. Other women than me do the IT training and support and hidden work. I can go back to being a Medievalist and writer. And I can reminisce pleasantly about that coffee with Helen and where it led.
3/10/2005
I have been asked to write an article about women’s history.
I don’t want to write this article. I don’t want yet another piece of writing on the web by an historian, telling non-historians how to think. I was involved in Women’s History Month from the day it started in Australia until 2004, and I am sick of basic instruction. I want to hear stories; I want to tell stories.
I don’t have a whole story to tell, though. I have been thinking about women’s history and realised that my mind has fragmented my experiences. What I have is a series of half-memories. I am an historian who feels history fading and a writer who can’t tell a tale. It is about time I recorded some of my morsels before they are forgotten and someone invents a glorious past.
The official record states that Women’s History Month was first celebrated in Australia in 2000.
Helen Leonard had planned a launch to end all launches. She had talked the Speaker of the Senate, Margaret Reid, into allowing her and her committee to launch the event in Margaret’s private garden in Parliament House. Very official. Very impressive. The list of acceptances was official and impressive too – Australia must have a real Women’s History Month if it is to be launched in the private garden of the Speaker. The dignitaries were daunting.
I didn’t know about this. All I knew was that I was planning an online educational project on women’s history. To be honest, I didn’t even know about Women’s History Month. I was having a whale of a time obsessing about online teaching techniques and I just wanted to set up a test group to teach some women’s history and some Medieval history using those techniques.
When I obsess about something, I tell everyone, so Helen suffered a dose of bubbling enthusiasm about the possibilities of online teaching Medieval Studies and women’s history for people with no history background. My logic in allowing my enthusiasm to bubble was that it made a change from CEDAW and women’s peak networks. Until then I had kept my historian self fairly clear of my committee self.
The next thing I knew, I was meeting Helen for coffee at Gus’s, a café in central Canberra.
The first Women’s History Month committee meeting in Australia was that coffee. I don’t know if the others knew before they arrived – one day I must ask them. I certainly didn’t know. There is a formal list of the initial committee on Australia’s Women’s History Month somewhere, I believe, but I really don’t know if it actually represents all the people Helen had in mind or had worked with.
The historian in me wants to present you with a clear narrative, telling you every important aspect and giving you crystal interpretations. The writer in me wants to present you with an elegantly articulated truth. And the committee person in me says, “I wish life were that simple.”
I can remember the coffee, every mouthful. We sat outside at a little table that was diminished further by Helen’s overflowing ashtray. I had a cappuccino and took so long to drink it that the last mouthfuls were icy. Lulu Respall-Turner walked out of a radio station where she was interviewing me, late last year and we looked at that table from across the road and asked each other why it was so far in our pasts. Five years is not a long time, but the underlying fabric of life changed when Helen died: that first meeting was aeons ago.
Like that coffee, my images are frozen. I remember thinking, “In the US they had an Act of Congress to create Women’s History Month; in Australia we have a declaration by Helen.”
Of course there was far more to Women’s History Month than a personal declaration and a cup of coffee.
For one thing, there was Margaret Reid and her garden. Now she bears the title Honourable and is retired: her garden has bowed out, even though she hasn’t.
I met her garden before I met her, so it has a very real personality for me. My mind flirted with the greenery as I helped setting up for the launch, and then I became acquainted with her kitchen as I washed the glasses after that launch. These tasks protected me from the dignitaries: I was too shy to tell anyone I was an historian, so I pretended to be the kitchen volunteer.
Until Women’s History Month was launched in that garden and for the full time we celebrated it, all I saw was my computer, and more of my computer. No, that is not true, one afternoon I saw Helen’s computer. It took long hours from all of us to bring that first Women’s History Month in Australia to life.
That afternoon with Helen’s computer is my next image frozen in time, in fact. It must have been a couple of weeks before the launch. I had set up online discussion boards and chat rooms and everyone agreed we would get key women in to discuss their experiences and that we would record what they said and we could archive this for researchers to use. It would be fun. We were totally determined that it would be fun.
Anne Summers and Marilyn Lake were on the committee and did their bit on the program as well, but weren’t a program in and of themselves. I was happy to train people, but we needed More Big Names to grab the general public and in general, we were lacking in people to train. I had emailed Helen and she had emailed me, and we had talked round the committee and explored some possibilities, but we had nothing like a full program.
By this stage it was becoming apparent that the launch was our flagship and that the online program would be the part of women’s history month that would meet all the rest of our goals. The launch would make people aware of women’s history; the online stuff would get women involved, remembering and owning their pasts. Without much ado, my temporary classroom became our main program focus.
That afternoon with Helen's computer gave us the bulk of our program.
When Helen had said, “Come to my office and we will fix it today” she had been totally serious: I went to Helen’s office. Erica Lewis was there, I think, and helped until meetings overtook her. Wreathed in smoke, drowning in instant coffee, we worked our way through Helen’s black address book.
Soon we had it down to an erratic system. Helen would give me a few names and we would toss about a possible topic, then she would ring or email that short list of friends. Since they were all Great Names, this usually meant her leaving messages. Sometimes she was put straight through and I would hear half-conversations about children and mutual friends and political action before Helen introduced the reason for the call. I was in the background the whole time, which, now I think of it, sums up a lot of my experience over the last five years: Women’s History Month has involved a lot of hidden work.
Eventually Helen had rung everyone and moved onto other things and I had a draft schedule nutted out based heavily on who might ring back and what they were likely to say. Then the phones started ringing. I filed the blanks in on my program sheet: we had our Big Names.
Our first program consisted of a totally terrific array of women. They had all made a huge leap of faith: very few of them had been in a web discussion or chat before, and although we were supported by the Women’s Electoral Lobby (and then by the National Foundation of Australian Women) we were not a formally constituted body with funding and written objectives. We were a group of friends, brought together by Helen, all of whom cared passionately about women and about history.
Now Women’s History Month doesn’t meet at Gus’s. It has a permanent, purpose-designed website. It is supported by the National Library and the National Museum and a host of other institutions. It has a budget. It even has sub-committees. Other women than me do the IT training and support and hidden work. I can go back to being a Medievalist and writer. And I can reminisce pleasantly about that coffee with Helen and where it led.
Dawn Meredith - Women's History Month
Crazy Hummingbird
www.dawnmeredithauthor.blogspot.com
Last year I was like a hummingbird, frantically flapping about, struggling to fit in everything I had to do and fighting resentment of my life, my husband, my child. When I stopped sleeping I had to ask myself, was it all worth it? Maybe it was time to hang up the clogs and stop dancing.
I’ve been a published author for fifteen years. I’ve written non-fiction, fiction, short story, poems and stories for kids. Many of my fiction stories have a fantasy element, because I am a great believer in the mystery and wonder. I want my stories to make you think, the characters itch at you. Like the boy who decided he could do without two years’ worth of hugs because they’re embarrassing. So he signs a contract. But when things start to go wrong, he realises who much he misses those hugs and that he has to get them back!
People often comment at ‘how wonderful it must be to be a writer! I’d love to do that.’ And gaze at me with admiration and envy on their shiny, earnest faces. Raising an eyebrow imperiously, I usually respond with something like, ‘Do you think you’d enjoy digging your brain out through your ear with a fork?’ That’s what it’s like in those dark, trapped times. Nevertheless, I am always pushing myself up to the next level. I love running writing workshops in schools and at conventions. Some say I’m blessed to be able to do that. I guess they’re right. All I see is the next goal. What I wanted, more than anything, was to have a spec fic novel published. Having completed four of them, I was hoping my ‘apprenticeship’ would finally yield success. I could taste the peppery excitement of it on my tongue. I could feel the warmth of that blanket of recognition and achievement around my shoulders. I wanted it badly.
So, I drove myself half mad and tried to do it all. Shouldn’t a woman have something of her own? Shouldn’t a creative woman feed her soul? Did being a mum mean sacrificing everything? For years I criticised other women for ‘selfishly doing their own thing’ instead of focussing on their kids. Why have them in the first place, I’d say, if you’re not going to devote yourself to the task properly? But here is a truth I have discovered about myself – having a child is a responsibility so pressing, so taxing, that you cannot survive it without something of your own to cling to. Sure, there are moments of blissful love and joy. Sure, there are times when I relish the challenge of motherhood. Of course I love seeing that look of understanding that flashes over my child’s face when she makes a discovery. But many is the day where I feel completely empty. And then I feel resentful. And then I feel guilty. And then I get the cranks.
I put it to my female friends: Do you ever feel this way? How do you manage it all? Should I just give up on writing? Am I being selfish? It seemed too hard. But as I lay in bed, looking at those tiny white lights in the sky, I reminded myself of something else I had learned – only the persistent win. So I divided my week, my days, my hours into blocks of time. I wrote at 2am, I wrote at 9am and 10pm. I wrote in the half hour before I went to work, after cleaning the house and doing four loads of washing. I wrote while waiting at the doctor’s, I wrote while watching TV with hubby, I wrote while eating breakfast. I wrote about a girl who goes through a huge change in identity, from Queen Bee to outcast. Her whole life has been a lie. She’s dealing with a new reality, a new image and the certainty of a young death, especially if she persists in using her powers. The other manuscript was finished – a race of people with dragon DNA, sort of Tolkien’s elves/Avatar/Ironman. The flying hero has his wings mutilated. His love interest is a tortured Goth Girl. I had been writing it for four years. I knew it was ready. Both stories are about characters enduring physical pain and pressing on. It’s a way of making my own pain give me something positive back. But who wants to read about people who struggle with chronic pain/illness? A disabled hero? It’s just not ‘edgy’ enough. It’s whingey. Boring. But, I told myself, people love a fighter, an underdog. I had to believe in my work, believe in the personal connection it could make. Believe in my own message, my ‘voice’.
I decided I would attend a pitching session and, (because I am completely insane and compelled to torture myself), that I would pitch both novels (one finished, one half done) to a publisher in five minutes. 30 seconds to say hi etc, two minutes to pitch each novel. I asked writer friends for tips on how they boil down their novel to a summary, then a synopsis, then a pitch page, then a blurb then to a one sentence elevator pitch. It took a full week to do just one novel. I was ready. I pitched to four publishers on the day. They were all fantastic, but I felt a bit sorry for them, having to deal with us nervous nellies with our huge, wide eyes, stammering voices and deafening hope. That was in October. I then tried to forget I had done any such thing and get on with my life. Huh. Yep. So easy.
We had visitors staying, a busy Christmas and New Year and in the first week of January I decided to focus on what I wanted to achieve in 2015, because worrying about what a publisher thought of my work has never helped me write. A huge part of writing now is promoting yourself. I am a keen learner, but I do struggle with this. It is not remotely cave-related, and that’s where I want to be, most of the time. One of my mottos is: If you don’t ask, you don’t get. So I regularly ask for advice. I had three weeks to get my act together before school went back. In my work as a Special Ed Teacher I deal with parents directly, every lesson and students 1:1. I have to devote a lot of mental energy to keeping the balls in the air for each of my ten students, to remember their struggles, their needs, their personality quirks and the program I have planned for them. As a Children’s Counsellor I hear a lot of pain and confusion. While listening I need to engage empathetically and at the same time keep a healthy distance. These demands can be taxing sometimes but they are also hugely inspiring.
I had five projects I was working on – one a biography about a WWII veteran that has taken four years so far, three adventure chapter books and the spec fic novel about the dying super girl. I desperately wanted to finish the novel, in which all four publishers had indicated interest. But I had been stuck at the three quarters finished stage for eight months. The worst writer’s block ever. I just couldn’t see past it. I lay awake every night trying to figure it out. I tried not thinking about it. I asked every test reader, every writer friend, my family, my students. Nope. Stuck. A new novel started creeping in and tempting me to write it. Argh! Go away! And so I struggled with all my other projects too. The year had barely started and I was a dead loss already. The humming bird plummeted to Earth with a poof!
And then I received the email. ‘We have reviewed your submission and we really enjoyed it. If it is still available we would like to offer you a contract to publish with us.’ I cannot express the relief and (tentative) joy! Within two days I had finished my urban fantasy story.
This year I have decided being a hummingbird is too exhausting. I think a moderately brisk woodpecker might be better. Or perhaps a rather determined blackbird?
www.dawnmeredithauthor.blogspot.com
Last year I was like a hummingbird, frantically flapping about, struggling to fit in everything I had to do and fighting resentment of my life, my husband, my child. When I stopped sleeping I had to ask myself, was it all worth it? Maybe it was time to hang up the clogs and stop dancing.
I’ve been a published author for fifteen years. I’ve written non-fiction, fiction, short story, poems and stories for kids. Many of my fiction stories have a fantasy element, because I am a great believer in the mystery and wonder. I want my stories to make you think, the characters itch at you. Like the boy who decided he could do without two years’ worth of hugs because they’re embarrassing. So he signs a contract. But when things start to go wrong, he realises who much he misses those hugs and that he has to get them back!
People often comment at ‘how wonderful it must be to be a writer! I’d love to do that.’ And gaze at me with admiration and envy on their shiny, earnest faces. Raising an eyebrow imperiously, I usually respond with something like, ‘Do you think you’d enjoy digging your brain out through your ear with a fork?’ That’s what it’s like in those dark, trapped times. Nevertheless, I am always pushing myself up to the next level. I love running writing workshops in schools and at conventions. Some say I’m blessed to be able to do that. I guess they’re right. All I see is the next goal. What I wanted, more than anything, was to have a spec fic novel published. Having completed four of them, I was hoping my ‘apprenticeship’ would finally yield success. I could taste the peppery excitement of it on my tongue. I could feel the warmth of that blanket of recognition and achievement around my shoulders. I wanted it badly.
So, I drove myself half mad and tried to do it all. Shouldn’t a woman have something of her own? Shouldn’t a creative woman feed her soul? Did being a mum mean sacrificing everything? For years I criticised other women for ‘selfishly doing their own thing’ instead of focussing on their kids. Why have them in the first place, I’d say, if you’re not going to devote yourself to the task properly? But here is a truth I have discovered about myself – having a child is a responsibility so pressing, so taxing, that you cannot survive it without something of your own to cling to. Sure, there are moments of blissful love and joy. Sure, there are times when I relish the challenge of motherhood. Of course I love seeing that look of understanding that flashes over my child’s face when she makes a discovery. But many is the day where I feel completely empty. And then I feel resentful. And then I feel guilty. And then I get the cranks.
I put it to my female friends: Do you ever feel this way? How do you manage it all? Should I just give up on writing? Am I being selfish? It seemed too hard. But as I lay in bed, looking at those tiny white lights in the sky, I reminded myself of something else I had learned – only the persistent win. So I divided my week, my days, my hours into blocks of time. I wrote at 2am, I wrote at 9am and 10pm. I wrote in the half hour before I went to work, after cleaning the house and doing four loads of washing. I wrote while waiting at the doctor’s, I wrote while watching TV with hubby, I wrote while eating breakfast. I wrote about a girl who goes through a huge change in identity, from Queen Bee to outcast. Her whole life has been a lie. She’s dealing with a new reality, a new image and the certainty of a young death, especially if she persists in using her powers. The other manuscript was finished – a race of people with dragon DNA, sort of Tolkien’s elves/Avatar/Ironman. The flying hero has his wings mutilated. His love interest is a tortured Goth Girl. I had been writing it for four years. I knew it was ready. Both stories are about characters enduring physical pain and pressing on. It’s a way of making my own pain give me something positive back. But who wants to read about people who struggle with chronic pain/illness? A disabled hero? It’s just not ‘edgy’ enough. It’s whingey. Boring. But, I told myself, people love a fighter, an underdog. I had to believe in my work, believe in the personal connection it could make. Believe in my own message, my ‘voice’.
I decided I would attend a pitching session and, (because I am completely insane and compelled to torture myself), that I would pitch both novels (one finished, one half done) to a publisher in five minutes. 30 seconds to say hi etc, two minutes to pitch each novel. I asked writer friends for tips on how they boil down their novel to a summary, then a synopsis, then a pitch page, then a blurb then to a one sentence elevator pitch. It took a full week to do just one novel. I was ready. I pitched to four publishers on the day. They were all fantastic, but I felt a bit sorry for them, having to deal with us nervous nellies with our huge, wide eyes, stammering voices and deafening hope. That was in October. I then tried to forget I had done any such thing and get on with my life. Huh. Yep. So easy.
We had visitors staying, a busy Christmas and New Year and in the first week of January I decided to focus on what I wanted to achieve in 2015, because worrying about what a publisher thought of my work has never helped me write. A huge part of writing now is promoting yourself. I am a keen learner, but I do struggle with this. It is not remotely cave-related, and that’s where I want to be, most of the time. One of my mottos is: If you don’t ask, you don’t get. So I regularly ask for advice. I had three weeks to get my act together before school went back. In my work as a Special Ed Teacher I deal with parents directly, every lesson and students 1:1. I have to devote a lot of mental energy to keeping the balls in the air for each of my ten students, to remember their struggles, their needs, their personality quirks and the program I have planned for them. As a Children’s Counsellor I hear a lot of pain and confusion. While listening I need to engage empathetically and at the same time keep a healthy distance. These demands can be taxing sometimes but they are also hugely inspiring.
I had five projects I was working on – one a biography about a WWII veteran that has taken four years so far, three adventure chapter books and the spec fic novel about the dying super girl. I desperately wanted to finish the novel, in which all four publishers had indicated interest. But I had been stuck at the three quarters finished stage for eight months. The worst writer’s block ever. I just couldn’t see past it. I lay awake every night trying to figure it out. I tried not thinking about it. I asked every test reader, every writer friend, my family, my students. Nope. Stuck. A new novel started creeping in and tempting me to write it. Argh! Go away! And so I struggled with all my other projects too. The year had barely started and I was a dead loss already. The humming bird plummeted to Earth with a poof!
And then I received the email. ‘We have reviewed your submission and we really enjoyed it. If it is still available we would like to offer you a contract to publish with us.’ I cannot express the relief and (tentative) joy! Within two days I had finished my urban fantasy story.
This year I have decided being a hummingbird is too exhausting. I think a moderately brisk woodpecker might be better. Or perhaps a rather determined blackbird?
The state of the novel
The curse is not a happy curse. In fact, it's a bit petulant right now. Rather than drowning cities or forcing an editor to require emergency surgery, it sent the whole of Satalyte into a rather nasty illness. Of course this happened the night before release and of course it's why there was radio silence. Satalyte is emerging and things are getting back to normal and they're doing a massive catch-up. With luck this means the book will go live on their website tonight (although none of us is trusting to luck in the case of The Art of Effective Dreaming - our dreaming is patently less effective than it needs to be) and I'll tell you about it if so. Soon after this, there will be actual physical copies and orders will be filled and so forth. How soon this is depends on what happens at the printer, for obviously places in queues have been lost due to everything going awry.
The cover is funky. It reflects the book and is entirely unexpected, both at once.
And the first event the book was supposed to appear at is tomorrow, and I'm going to it armed with generous discount vouchers, thanks to the kindness of Satalyte.
And tomorrow or Sunday, my special celebratory guest for Women's History Month will tell you about her own cursed novel, because it's the right story to share.
If anyone has a curse to banish bushfire smoke, please wield it in my direction. We now have fires from all directions, two of which are from within the ACT and the authorities tell us there will be more shortly. It's for our common good, they say. They're saving suburbs from future fires next summer, by burning before the autumn and spring growth periods. I'm happy for them. I'm not happy for me. It's now like having bronchitis and a mild flu, both at once. Reason I need the job of my dreams #34.
Work beckons right now, but when I get to a natural pause in proceedings, I'll put up the next WHM post. Watch this space.
The cover is funky. It reflects the book and is entirely unexpected, both at once.
And the first event the book was supposed to appear at is tomorrow, and I'm going to it armed with generous discount vouchers, thanks to the kindness of Satalyte.
And tomorrow or Sunday, my special celebratory guest for Women's History Month will tell you about her own cursed novel, because it's the right story to share.
If anyone has a curse to banish bushfire smoke, please wield it in my direction. We now have fires from all directions, two of which are from within the ACT and the authorities tell us there will be more shortly. It's for our common good, they say. They're saving suburbs from future fires next summer, by burning before the autumn and spring growth periods. I'm happy for them. I'm not happy for me. It's now like having bronchitis and a mild flu, both at once. Reason I need the job of my dreams #34.
Work beckons right now, but when I get to a natural pause in proceedings, I'll put up the next WHM post. Watch this space.
