Gillian Polack's Blog, page 98

gillpolack @ 2013-10-08T10:02:00

One of the good things about review books is that sometimes, just sometimes, I have to confront my limitations to deal with them. I get to grow. My limitation in the case of the one today is that, under the surface, it plays politics and takes Judaism out of the Middle East equation. I have to decide whether to do a confrontational review of an otherwise totally gorgeous book and prejudice people more in a situation that is exceptionally fraught, or find a way of handling it that works fairly for everyone (which I think I might have done), or ignore the elephant in the room.

I am calling on Uncle Yunkel to help me, I think. Him and his orange orchard. I just need to see if that works...

Watch this space.

Update

Yes, I'm on at midday my time. It's here: http://coyotecon.com/chat-rooms/coyote/ And right now I'm hanging out in a chat room and meeting interesting people when I really should be making my coffee and blitzing my work.

gillpolack @ 2013-10-06T09:39:00

Sorry about Paul's post being so late. I got involved in various aspects of the Middle Ages and didn't realise the time until after midnight, by which time I'd forgotten that I'd put the post up but not actually hit the publish button.

Today is more Middle Ages. My aim is to sort a whole section of the Beast for which much is written, but it isn't in order and it needs the same revision I'm giving the rest of it. The current revision is mostly double-checking against my original notes in case things have disappeared that need to not disappear and also starting on the new referencing system*. My aim today is to finish with that whole section, plus make a solid impact on the 2500 words that need (non-negotiably) to be ready for Katrin this week. When this is done, I can draft two (smaller) sections of one of my papers, for today is a day when I shall accomplish...or else.

In between all this (midday my time, I think, though with the sudden-but-expected advent of Daylight Savings I need to hie on over there and check) I have a panel on using the non-US English speaking world in fiction. I would love people to join me, for my greatest expertise is on spotting fake Australian stuff and jokes that go awry because they're just not jokes Commonwealth people would make. Coyote Con did ask people from other Commonwealth countries, but the timing is US and so many writers had deadlines and so it's a small panel. It's very, very cool they're having this topic, however, and I promise to do my best with it.

That's not my whole day, but it's quite enough of it. I'd better check the time in the US right now, and then make me some coffee and the see how much of the Beast I can get through before my panel. The topics, at least, are my home turf: languages, literature, magic, folklore and recreation. Also calendars, oddly.




*another of those things about which one should not ask - every publisher who wants the Beast has different ideas for referencing and it becomes increasingly difficult and I strongly suspect that I will never put footnotes in a novel again. Or maybe just not a lot of footnotes.

Guest post - Paul Collins

THE BECKONING
RRP $5.95 EBOOK
RRP $15.00 PRINT
AMAZON: http://tinyurl.com/ny6urwy
PUBLISHER: DAMNATION BOOKS
RELEASED: SEPT 15 2013


Matt Brannigan is a lawyer living on the edge. His daughter Briony is psychic and trouble shadows his family wherever they go.

Cult guru Brother Desmond knows that the power within Briony is the remaining key he needs to enter the next dimension. Once he controls this, he will have access to all that is presently denied him.

When Briony is indoctrinated into the Zarathustrans, Matt and psychic Clarissa Pike enter the cult’s headquarters under the cover of night to rescue her.

So begins Armageddon . . .

You will often hear that persistence is the key to most success. Luck and word-of-mouth help, too. I wrote The Beckoning thirty plus years ago on various counters of bookshops I owned in St Kilda, Prahran and Brisbane. Luckily for me, despite various rejections from major publishers (it once made the long list at Lothian!), I typed a draft on to a computer. It travelled over the years on various storage devices such as 3.5 discs, floppies, zip drives, USB sticks – five computers.

On whim I searched for it when I saw Damnation Books was open to submissions. I followed their guidelines, submitted three chapters. Within two days they wanted the rest. Within two weeks it was accepted and away we went.

I prefer one-on-one research, so after writing the original first draft, I approached various people I knew to authenticate certain aspects of the book.

It’s easy to dismiss psychic phenomena as fanciful and in the realm of fantasy. But if you’re going to write about it, you need to suspend disbelief in those who do read your book. Luckily for me I rented rooms out to psychics in my bookshops, so I had a psychic go over my manuscript to tell me exactly where I had gone wrong and how to correct it? Similarly, it’s easy to write about cults – back in the 80s and 90s we all read about Jonestown, WACO and a plethora of other catastrophes involving cults. But I wanted to make my cult to be authentic, so I cast around and finally met a former cult member. She gave me all the rituals, acronyms for recruitment drives, mantras that you’ll read in The Beckoning. I have detectives in the book and as luck would have it a good friend of mine was a Detective Sergeant. Rather than guessing about warrants and the rights police have, or even studying literature and still getting it wrong, I asked my friend to read the relevant aspects of my manuscript and steer my hand in the right direction. I also have prayers, so I asked an Anglican priest, after giving him an outline of the book and the scenes for which I needed prayers, for some original scripture. Last but not least, a lawyer friend went over the entire book to ensure the authorities played out their bits to the letter of the law. All of this material will suspend disbelief simply because it was created by experts. And I think this is the most important part of any work of fiction.

Some material I couldn’t corroborate, such as medieval woodcarvings and how they were created* – this took research and I endeavoured to get it right. I didn’t look at tourist maps to get the lay of the land in Warrnambool, where it’s set. I went there and stayed in a motel for a couple of days, pottering around the place. Yes, two of my characters stay in that same motel.

I have to admit that I don’t usually go to so much trouble with my fiction. But I’m glad I did put in the effort. An unfortunate part of this book’s journey is that cults were extremely topical at the time. Just three weeks ago I saw a documentary basically asking where they have all gone. Still, at the time of writing this blog I see that Amazon ranks The Beckoning at #15 on the psychic thriller page (just 14 behind Stephen King’s latest book!) and #42 on their occult suspense page.

Hopefully my friends and I have put forward a very credible horror tale.

Paul Collins
Melbourne 2013



*Note from Gillian: Paul didn't know me that that time...

Delays and teaching methods

I'm a day late on a lot of things because of the joys of asthma. I managed to do all but three of the things I meant to do yesterday, however. Two of the three things were rather hefty and needed more breath than I had, and the third will happen in a few minutes and will result in a second post for the day. Your second guest post for the week, by Paul Collins, was delayed. For which I am sorry.

I'm almost back to normal today, though still resting a lot and still taking much medication and monitoring things. I shall catch up on one of my big things today, then, and the other sometime during the week. The second, you see, was my testing of my new teaching notion.

The more I think about my concept, the more will serve the dual purpose of opening better world-building up to people from different learning backgrounds and teaching people how to assess the depth of influence their own assumptions have on the worlds they want to write about. This will give them much more control over their work, as well as helping them address basic world-building in a more credible fashion.

If this works, then, it can be adapted to teach diversity in fiction and could work rather nicely with a series of readings to help individual writers understand how they handle the status quo and how they feed the unquestioned into their own reading and writing. It could also be used as a somewhat different approach to literary analysis, I think, because of the way it looks at crucial assumptions the writer makes in world-building: it would be easy enough to turn it on its head and say "If this is what writers do, how does it affect what you do when you read those writings and assess them?" This turn about was brought to you by Sean Wright, whose regular assessment of how many women writers he reads made him aware that he still thinks he reads more than he actually does. I've been watching his progress with great interest. If literature students logged their private reading while they studied, then I have two of the hard-to-achieve aspects for a one year course on diversity and gender in literature.

The question is really how confrontational this is for the students and how far the method goes in actually bringing these understandings to life. So many grand theories dissolve into "That was nice. Now let's return to normal." I handled a lot of this when I was in the Karpin Secretariat and later when I taught leadership and cross-cultural understanding to various government departments (yep, my evil past emerges again today). I learned on the job that it's not enough to have brilliant theory straight from the experts - there has to be stuff for the student to latch onto and own for each major component of the lesson.

This is the nuts and bolts of what I've been doing with my idea. I think I have those bridges into the theory and I think they'll do the trick on all the levels I need to address.

And now you know what I do with my spare time, I'd better get back to work.

On numbers and the hunger of the masses

My past keeps haunting me. Today it's in a good way.

Once-upon-a-time I worked as a policy analyst in an area of government that depended heavily on economics. At that stage, I found it a bit daft when I had to give economics advice to economists, but there was a reason for employing me. I was given basic economics on the job and I had a couple of units of economic history at university, but they weren't the reasons. The reasons were that, as an historian, I could see contexts. I saw outside the numbers, in fact, and the bent of government at that stage was to focus on people more than numbers, so they wanted me. They didn't want to promote me, though, for my degrees weren't in economics, so I moved elsewhere and got back to my own field (or closer to it) but that's another story for another day. What I was, was the person who said "This set of numbers doesn't do what you think it does" and "This argument doesn't fit with the historical framework" and "Look, an error!" I was also the person who knew the people in DFAT who worked on multilateral trade negotiations, for I'd worked with them for three months, and I was the person the wine people came to for French, but those are also other stories. The story today is why I want to rewrite a paragraph in the Beast. For I have remembered the things I said in meetings and on paper* and I need to make it more human.

I'm blogging this thought for writers. Not my life-history explanation, that's because I like giving contexts. But writers who build worlds (even contemporary worlds for contemporary stories) need to know this stuff just as much as economists.

Largely agricultural non-literate or semi-literate societies are usually assumed to have subsistence economies. My (obviously perfect) example of this is much of Europe in the Middle Ages.

This is probable. Not demonstrably true, just probable. If a society also doesn't record many of their transactions in writing and we can't access that writing, then our only way of knowing if this is true and if those subsistence economies are leading to mass starvation is from other evidence. Why I love archaeologists - their evidence and our evidence combine to give us people of the past. But it's still not the whole picture.

We cannot assume that societies are on the brink of failure if they then get through hard times with aplomb or even with a narrow escape. England ought to have been collapsed and destitute from the Anarchy, and some areas of it were. The country was buildable-up, however, and was prosperous shortly thereafter and weathered many famines. Most of the books I read assume this is the wonder of Henry II's systems (for he was a good ruler and developed solid systems, some of which are still in use) but the reality is that we don't know what the reality is for most people. We know about Henry because (systematic man that he was) he kept records. We don't know about the farmers who got burnt out by the feuding lords/kings/idiots. We know that there were some big disasters (deserted villages, for instance).

What else do we know? We know that there was no international aid bringing seed for crops and new livestock. We know that the Christian charity system wasn't actually a fully-developed system at that point. This indicates that subsistence farming in the Middle Ages wasn't always actually subsistence farming. There were mechanisms to get through hard times. Wild harvesting is a very probable one, as is mutual support (we have some evidence for both of these). There was also political action, but that's been known for a long time. Non-literate doesn't mean stupid or unaware or inactive**. Monty Python was closer than David Eddings in their depictions of peasants.

Historians are looking into this, but they're calling it (at least the ones I've read are calling it) 'poverty' and it doesn't seem to have changed the popular understanding of rural life yet. They're finding some rather interesting mechanisms of local help and mutual support. Their discoveries suggest that we need to be careful what we call a subsistence economy and we need to be very careful about assuming that non-modern equals non-viable at difficult times.

Basically, human beings are complex. If you want to simplify them, then do it knowingly. Also, expect me to argue that simplification with you, for with simplification often go prejudices.

And now I think that there's a paper in the difference between Monty Python's peasants and David Edding's peasants and what they say about our society. I don't know if I want to write it, though.




*in fact, I read a book review that reminded me
**come to think of it, 'literate' can totally mean stupid, unaware and inactive, if you apply it to the right group of people

Ann Leckie and her new book

When I write, I like to have a...a mythological underpinning. I don't mean that I base any of my stories on myths, because honestly I don't. Not in any meaningful way. But I like to have a sort of...poetic logic maybe? I don't base anything on whatever I've chosen (or more accurately, whatever myth or group of myths I've found that feels like it would be appropriate). No, instead I use the myth for things like setting details--sometimes something as foolish as what color a character's dress is, or what food they're eating, can hang me up. Sometimes I come to moments in a story where I could get to the ending I'm planning by a couple of different paths. In all of those cases, I can fall back on my guide-myth and see if there's anything there for me to use. I don't use the guide to construct the whole thing. Mostly I just...keep it in the back of my mind. I'm a big believer in keeping things in the back of my mind while I work. I nearly always find, when I go back and look, that they've moved up front into the text in a helpful (if not always obvious) way.

When I was working on Ancillary Justice I found myself looking for something I could use to guide me, even though I had mostly mapped out the plot already. For preference, it would have to be something elaborate and complex, not just a simple folktale. And, having decided that, I wasn't long in realizing that the most obvious one to choose, for a narrator who had thousands of bodies, who was, for much of the novel, physically separated from her self, would be Isis and Osiris. Osiris torn to pieces by Set, his body parts strewn up and down the Two Lands, Isis mourning him, looking for pieces. Conceiving Horus who...Horus has some identity issues, doesn't he, who is Horus anyway? Is that two gods smashed into one (the Egyptians liked doing that)? For various reasons I'd already intended to set up a story where characters and motifs could be split and/or doubled, and look, nearly everyone in the Osiris myth has a double! Isis and Nepthys, Osiris and Set--Horus and Set! Horus and Osiris! Hell, even the Two Lands of Egypt!*

I was going to have to do some reading. Although I had a more or less basic grasp on Egyptian mythology, and of course went through a minor Egyptian Phase (in middle school, right after my Greek Phase and before my Aztec Phase) I had never been particularly interested in Osiris.

Or more than briefly interested in Egyptian myth in general, really. It seemed fragmented and incoherent to me, little more than a list of gods and functions. "Ra was the god of the sun. Bast was a cat-goddess. Isis was a goddess of love. Osiris was the god of death. The Egyptians were obsessed with death. Look, here's a mummy!" There wasn't anything there for me to really get my teeth into.

The thing is, Egyptian sources on religion and myth are often fragmentary and contradictory. And that can be disorienting when you've grown up assuming that religious stories or scriptures are authoritative and unchangeable. And my teachers presented Greek mythology in just that way--as though the stories in that book of Greek myths I'd been assigned to read were the stories. Greek myth has been tidied up over the years, so that it can be presented to schoolchildren in just this coherent, unambiguous form, with a nice, tidy overarching narrative.(I didn't realize at the time how inaccurate and deceptive this view is. Also, to save us all time, please pretend I included here a rant about the way ancient religions--or heck, even some living ones--are presented to schoolkids as compilations of charming stories and/or superstitions, and not as religious beliefs and practices that were profound and important to their adherents.) But it was difficult for me to look too closely at ancient Egypt without getting a bit confused--who's the sun god, now? Re? Horus? Osiris? Amon? Atum? Khepri? And what was this about the Aten, now? It seemed like any major god would, at some point, be referred to as "the Egyptian god of the sun." And what was Isis goddess of, exactly? How was she any different from Hathor, then?

The thing that's not clear when they give you the Middle School Version of ancient Egypt is, when we say "Ancient Egypt" we're talking about a stretch of three thousand years. To imagine that there's one simple summary of "Egyptian Mythology" that will have remained unchanging over that period of time is...well. It's not terribly realistic. And religion and mythology are always going to be more complicated than a boiled-down and cleaned-up summary that's going to fit in a history unit. In hindsight, it's kind of obvious that three thousand years of Egyptian religion is going to seem muddled and incomprehensible when you try to jam it into that small of a box.

But I'm going astray. Given the physically separable and sometimes literally dispersed nature of some of my characters, and the motif of a (sort of) return from the dead (and, once I began looking closely enough, the very distinct undercurrent to all the Osiris and Set/Horus and Set stories of the question of legitimate succession and authority), given all that, I clearly needed to get better acquainted with Isis and Osiris.

Which brings me around to The Book of Going Forth by Day. Or, as it's more popularly known, The Book of the Dead.

The Book of the Dead is very closely connected to the worship of Osiris, and it's basically a compilation of funerary literature--some prayers that were probably said at various points during embalming and burial, some dialogues and scenes that maybe were read aloud or acted out, some instructions to the deceased on how to handle the perilous journey from life to the afterlife. That's how the book is often described--as an instruction manual for the deceased. I'm not an expert, I'm only a hobbyist, so I can't claim any kind of authority, but it strikes me as likely that, in the end, it's not so much an instruction book one is meant to read after death, or a collection of spells, as it is a way to make all those prayers and successful trials permanent, so that it isn't just a one-time thing, but it's always happening, the prayers for your safety and immortality, the images of you safely passing the tests, are always there, working for you.**

Probably the most famous bit of the Book of the Dead has to do with the weighing of the heart. Your heart was that part of you that was you. Ancient Egyptians divided a person up into a varying number of component parts--your ba and your ka and whatnot--but the part of you that was your personal identity, your mind and your feelings and your will, that was in your heart. So it's your whole self on that scale, weighed against the feather of Ma'at--justice and rightness and order personified. You stand there before the judges, and recite a list of bad deeds, asserting you have never done these things. Every lie weighs your heart down just a bit, and if it becomes too heavy, if the side of the scale sinks too low, your heart is eaten by a monster and you never exist again.

And it's here that I ran across a tiny little moment of poignant in the Book of the Dead.

O my heart which I had from my mother! O my heart which I had from my mother! O my heart of my different ages! Do not stand up as a witness against me, do not be opposed to me in the tribunal, do not be hostile to me in the presence of the Keeper of the Balance, for you are my Ka which was in my body, the protector who made my members hale. Go forth to the happy place whereto we speed; do not make my name stink to Entourage who make men. Do not tell lies about me in the presence of the god; it is indeed well that you should hear!

It's followed by Thoth announcing, "His deeds are righteous in the great balance and no sin has been found in him." I've frequently run across assertions that this is a spell designed to magically force one's heart to give a good report. But it doesn't feel like that to me. It feels like a verbal image of what that moment must be like. If you believe that your ultimate eternal fate rests in that moment, in the report of your heart to the gods--that's frightening. And how many of us, called in to talk to the boss or the principal at school, immediately think "What did I do? Am I in trouble?" even when we know we've done nothing wrong? What if you've been ignorant or deceiving yourself all this time? And honestly, who of us has done nothing wrong all their lives? If you fail this test, it will be no one's fault but your own. That cry of "O my heart which I had from my mother!" has a sincere feel to me. "You're supposed to protect me! Oh, please don't betray me!" Even ritualized, formulaic, I feel like there's a real poignancy there.

I love moments like that, when for just an instant an ancient text rings with...reality. It's like, I've suddenly heard the voice of this person who's long gone speaking in my ear. Or sometimes it's just a detail that reminds me of something I've experienced in my own life, and this other person experienced it, too, thousands of years ago. It's hard to describe, that sudden moment of...real detail.

Well. I'm not quite expressing what I mean, and maybe this is all apropos of nothing. In the end, there are probably no traces of Isis and Osiris in Ancillary Justice, not to speak of. The story isn't based on the myth. The Radch, the interstellar empire that the main character serves, is not based on Egypt. The main character--and narrator--is a ship, the AI of a huge troop carrier. And also a unit of twenty human bodies slaved to that ship's AI. And also one, single segment of that twenty-body unit, the only remnant of the ship after it's destroyed. She needs to bring a direly important message to the ruler of the Radch--and she wants revenge on the person who destroyed her. There's a bit of resonance with the dismemberment, there, but not so much that I could say the novel is based on that.

So why take two thousand words to natter about Ancient Egypt? Well, mostly because it's interesting to me--particularly the ways that real people, people's lives, stand all around these things, invisible until you look for them. From one angle The Book of the Dead is a curiosity, an indicator of Ancient Egypt's strange fixation on death, dry superstition--but I can't help thinking of families burying mothers or fathers or children and feeling, deeply (the way you feel at a time like that) that it's right, that its necessary and important to put that papyrus in the coffin with them. That's not dry, not a curiosity, it's something we most of us will feel, some time. Ani, whose copy of the Book of Going Forth by Day is in the British Museum, has been dead some three thousand years. He is, to us, an abstraction. That papyrus is more or less all that's left of his life. But he was a real, individual human being, and his family grieved when he died, and we know what that feels like because we've felt it ourselves.

gillpolack @ 2013-10-02T09:47:00

It's been too long since I had a guest post, so this week I might give you two, since two colleagues have books out that might be of interest. Watch this space.

gillpolack @ 2013-10-01T23:02:00

I forgot to post yesterday because I attended a birthday party and fought with my printer (I lost and the printer needs to get to the dealer to be sorted) and otherwise filled my time exceptionally well. I'm caught up on most things, I think. I've got an hour of various things to do and an hour and a half to do them in, which is exceptionally odd. It means that, for the second time in two days and the third time in two weeks, I'm taking time out. The time out is diminishing, though. It was two days and then it was an evening and I do not want to consider what that means for the rest of October.

My surprise of the day was to discover that I've had flu. I worked the way through it and complained the way through it and thought it was me not dealing with life. Then I found out that several people in my vicinity had all the same symptoms and took time out. So I'm going to spend my half hour in bed, then pat myself on the back for taking such very fine care of my health.

I got royalties today, by the way. I like royalties. I never expect them and am always happy when they tuck themselves neatly into my bank account. I'm especially happy because this lot was all for Ms Cellophane and it was more than last time, which means more people have read it. I hope they enjoyed it.

Creative seasonal cheer

I've taken some soundings. The weather here in east coast Australia has left a lot of people bleak. The incoming seasonal gloom is about to hit the northern hemisphere, heralded by Christmas decorations (I never understand why Christmas decorations appear before Halloween, in a society that celebrates both). To top it off, Australia is about to get a rise in postage.

I have six envelopes. Each envelope has two of my favourite photos (for personal use only, please, not for scanning and interwebbing, either). I'm happy to send them anywhere in the world, just as long as I have an address by my Tuesday night. I will be going to the post office on Wednesday, you see. PM or email me your address and specify you want pictures and the first six in get the pictures. I'll explain them on request, since I've discovered that some prefer the mysterious.

Also the first six unlucky souls with poor taste in literature to send me their email addresses (clarification - with the specification that they want this. I do not want to subject unsuspecting photolovers to my fiction.) will receive the first three chapters of an unpublished novel by me.

You don't have to know me to ask for either! (Update - since I'm doing updates - but you can ask for both and see what happens)