E.E. Montgomery's Blog, page 6

Can doing one difficult thing help you achieve another difficult thing?

I don't enjoy exercise. I know it's good for me. I know it's necessary. I always feel great afterwards.

I resent the time it takes out of my day, especially if I have to drive somewhere before I can even begin.

Still, I have to do it.

This afternoon, I decided to go for a walk. Easy. No problem. Except I hate just going for a walk. I never feel like I've accomplished anything. If I walk with someone, I accomplish social contact. By myself...

So I walked to the nearest shopping centre. I went the long way round, but it was still a short walk - about 20 minutes. Then I walked to the other end of the shopping centre and straight into my favourite cafe. It's a book cafe. I've blogged about it before. All the walls are lined with books and bookcases separate the diners. It's cosy and intimate and no one bothers you.

I ordered tea and sat there for two hours. During that time, I edited a chapter of the next story I'm writing, I wrote basic character profiles for the three main characters (Rik, Jon and Steve), and I plotted the story - ten chapters, although that might change if the secondary characters come alive.

Plotting is something I don't usually do until about half way through a story and I never plot the end of the tale. I sort of have to with this one because the part I've already written is actually the last chapter... or maybe the second last. I have to work out what came before it.

Now the challenge is for me to actually write the rest of the story. I have trouble writing a story if I know what's going to happen - hence my reluctance to plot - so this is a totally new path for me. I'll have to push myself to continue.

It's not going to be an easy story to write either. It's about domestic abuse so there's lots of angst and tension and bad-and-sad things going on. Expressing emotion is one of the toughest things for me as a writer (my friends say it's also tough for me as a person - they're right).

I think I'll wed this story to walking. I'll go for another walk tomorrow afternoon and see if I can end up somewhere else for a couple of hours to work on this story. Doing one difficult thing to achieve another difficult thing might make both of them more achievable.

Let's hope I can keep it up for more than a day or two. Rik's story needs to be told.

Listeners, Readers, and The Great Fire of London

Some people are listeners.

You can usually tell them at a glance. They're the ones who look at you while you're talking. They nod and ask leading questions and touch their chins to indicate they're hearing what you're saying. They rarely mispronounce words they've heard.

I'm not a very good listener.

I blame it on having a slight hearing problem when I was a child, although it could just be laziness or preoccupation. I didn't realise sentences spoken were supposed to be as long and as connected as the sentences that were written, or loud enough to hear. I thought there was some trick that speakers were supposed to learn that taught them which words to miss out when they spoke. I could never work it out and felt like an idiot most of the time, at least whenever I noticed someone was speaking. Lip-reading helped because I could work out what the missed words were but, in the end, I just gave up trying to listen. My quiet world was infinitely more interesting that their half-spoken one could ever be.

In my world I had fairies and goblins, and friends who spoke in complete sentences I didn't need to hear because they spoke directly in my head.

It never occurred to me to consider the possibility that the complete sentences I read and wrote should be spoken in their entirety all the time by everyone. I always did it because I'd never worked out which words to skip.

I don't have a hearing problem now, apart from being useless at parties or in bars because I can't hear anything if there's background noise. Mostly now, I'm a lazy listener. I have to focus intently on the person talking to make sense of what they're saying and remember it afterwards. If I have a transcript at any time, I can skim through that and understand immediately what's going on but listening is still a trial. I suppose it's lack of practice when I was young.

Image from:
http://geektyrant.com/news/2011/9/30/
the-film-adaptation-of-isaac-asimovs-foundation-
has-a-writer.html
I'm a reader.

The first book I ever read as a four year old was one of Hammond Innes'. I can't remember the title, but there was lots of ice in it. The second was Isaac Asimov's Foundation (still one of my favourite books). I never read children's books, apart from a few my sisters read to us at night.

I still read, at least a couple of hours every day. I learn better and quicker when I can read and highlight and make notes. My attention wanders when someone else is talking, no matter how interested I am in them or the topic.

As with listeners, it's usually fairly easy to tell if someone is a reader.
Image from:
http://www.london-fire.gov.uk/TheGreatFireOfLondon.aspThey're the ones with lots of seemingly irrelevant trivia ready for any situation, like the fact that flour dust is highly flamable and possibly the cause of the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Their eyes will light up when someone mentions an author's name but glaze over at the name of a movie.

The real give-away, though, is the mispronunciation of words. A reader sees the words and interprets it based on spelling and context. I was an adult before I realised Siobhan was pronounced "Sh'Vawn".

Sometimes you have to do something about the neighbours

I don't like curtains. The only place in my house that has curtains, rather than blinds or bare windows is the master bedroom. I don't have any window covering in the kitchen. I like to look out and watch the birds. We have miners, minahs, butcher birds and kookaburras so it gets pretty interesting out there.

My neighbour goes out to his backyard to smoke. I can smell the smoke and occasionally see the red glow of the cigarette at night if he's right up the back on the high part of his land.

Image from:
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/star-jasmine-vine.html
accessed 14/2/13A while ago, the old six foot brick fence between our properties fell down in a storm so we replaced it. That meant all the creepers growing on the fence had to be cleared away. It took a while to replace the fence as well. It was during this time that I noticed the neighbour watching me through my kitchen window as he smoked. Sometimes he'd call out and start a conversation, but most often he just watched. Even at night (remember the red glow).

I don't know about other people, but when I'm inside my house, I like to feel I only have to talk to whoever is inside the house with me. I don't want people I don't know well calling out to me through the window, especially when the window overlooks my fully fenced back yard. Surely the six foot high fence is an indication I want privacy.

Gradually, the creepers grew back, up the fence and along the top. I trimmed them to encourage them to grow taller, but the neighbour could still see over the top. One evening, just before sunset, as I was cooking dinner, I saw him come out and step up onto a block (or something) he had on the other side of the fence. It was tall enough to allow him to see over the creepers and straight in my kitchen window again.
I trimmed the creepers some more and fertilised them as well. I haven't seen more than the top of my neighbour's head in a while so it must have worked.

Writing and music

I don't often listen to music. It distracts me from what's going on inside my head. When I'm at home, it's quiet unless I'm cooking. Then, depending on what I'm cooking, I put on anything from jazz to heavy rock. I usually have the radio on when I'm driving short distances. Longer distances, I listen to books.

My radio station gets changed when I get bored or annoyed with the noise. I often drive to classical music because it doesn't require my concentration to understand it. I can just let the emotion of it wash over me and stay focused on my driving. Every now and then, though, something comes on the radio I don't want to listen to so I change the station. I have several stations tuned so I can pick the one I feel like listening to with one button. I need the one-push button change for the really annoying ads I refuse to listen to.

A few weeks ago I was driving and a song came on the radio. I'd heard it before, fairly often, but this particular afternoon it stuck with me. When I arrived at my destination, I stayed in the car and listened to the whole song, then I went onto iTunes and bought it. Over the next four days I played the song probably four or five hours a day, over and over. Most of the time I used headphones but sometimes, I played it on speakers because it has a different impact when the sound bounces off walls.

I didn't listen to anything else the whole time I was listening to that song. No television, no other music. Just that one song. Over and over.

By the fourth day, I was grinning. On the fifth day, I sat down at my computer and began writing. Days six and seven, I played the song again. Over and over. By the end of day eight I'd written a 7000 word short story and was bouncing around the house because I thought the story was one of the best ones I've written. The whole thing seemed to come so easily, primarily because of the music and the way it inspired me.

Over the next few days, I edited the story and then I submitted.

Today I received an email letting me know it's been accepted by a publisher for publication. *happy dancing*

I want to repeat that process but it isn't easy. I don't listen to music as a matter of course. I don't like noise around me all the time. Any music I hear is accidental. Trying to search for something that inspires me is incredibly time consuming and usually fruitless.

Here's the song: http://youtu.be/Ahha3Cqe_fk
Katy Perry's The One That Got Away.

My story is nothing like the video clip. I didn't watch the clip until today so I couldn't take anything from it. I managed to get a happy ending from it. Could you?

Tragedies

I don't often make comments about tragic things that happen around the world. This is mostly because I feel totally overwhelmed by the hatred that seems to spark the action and the fear and hatred that is always the response.

I can't understand how people can hate anyone they've never met, who has never done anything to harm them. I can't understand why anyone would want to hurt or put in danger complete strangers, innocent people, children. See what I mean - overwhelmed.

I can understand the fear that come afterwards. I can understand the need to hunker down and protect self and family and community. What I can't understand in that is the hatred that seems to flows from that. Anger is a natural part of grief and of fear, but surely that doesn't have to morph into hatred.

It doesn't have to become us judging everyone who looks like, sounds like, was born near, those who committed the crime. We can be better than that and only punish those who committed the crime.

I feel for the victims and their families. I cry for them. This loss and fear is something they will have to live with forever and it's wrong. They shouldn't have to suffer like that.

I also feel for the loved ones of the people who did it. Someone must love them, and someone must feel the pain at their loss and the bewilderment that they could have such disregard for life.

Of course not all tragedies are deliberate. Some are natural occurrences, some are accidental. They're no less devastating to the victims, their families and loved ones. With these though, it's more difficult for us to find a focus for our anger or our sense of betrayal, and the hatred that seems to grow from those things. We find other ways to channel it and often those ways become constructive. We form committees to look at storage of certain substances, we look at workplace health and safety regulations, we monitor alcohol consumption in drivers.

In short, we find positive and constructive ways to minimise the problems.

When it's deliberate though, our reactions seem to be little better than the perpetrators. Our goals seem to merge into one thought: hatred. And that hatred, if there's no constructive outlet, seems to manifest itself into the need to isolate our beliefs further and to condemn anyone outside those. It's a natural reaction but I don't believe it's the best one, particularly with our world so open and available to everyone. It worked in pre-history but we're long past that stage of community.

Through all these ramblings, I have one more thought. I really hope they get the right people, the ones who actually caused the harm, and not someone it just might have been and who was acting in fear.

There are good neighbours too

There's a Great Dane across the street. I've watched him grow from a puppy that tripped over his too-long legs every second step to a self-assured master of his domain. He's gorgeous and has a deep throaty bark that resonates behind my ribs. If I'm out in my front yard when he's coming home from his walk, he comes over to say hello, all legs and toothy smile and curiosity.

I don't have actual photos of him because I never have my camera with me when I see him, but he looks like this one, only with floppy ears.

[image error] Image from: http://www.desktopcave.com/great-dane-desktop-wallpaper/, accessed 14/2/13
His owners are a slim, short couple, barely taller than he is. It's obvious they adore him. I hear them playing sometimes and they take him for a walk every afternoon. He's well-trained and obedient.

One afternoon, they were coming down the street on their way home from their walk, when the fluffy terrier that belongs to the Neighbours From Hell rushed out onto the road and attacked the dane, who had been walking calmly on his lead, beside his owner. The little dog was in the unfenced front yard with the children (no adult). The dane, of course, defended himself, and picked the little terrier up and shook it before the dane's owner rescued the little dog.

The kids began screaming, then the mother came downstairs and started screaming abuse and threatening to have the dane put down. The poor dane and his owner didn't know what to do, except flee.

I told the nice dane-owner if he needed a character reference for his dog, I'd be happy to supply one.

The neighbourhood has been a thrill-a-minute since the Neighbours From Hell moved in.

I'm looking at toasters

Some parts of this post will shock people who know me. I usually hate shopping. I will make lists and research all my options and make the decision on exactly what to buy before I leave the house. Then I go to the shop, straight to what I want, check the return policy, pay for it and leave. It rarely takes me more than twenty minutes to buy anything and if it takes longer, it's because the salesperson wouldn't shut up.

This morning I went shopping in one of those massive home appliance centres. I'd decided what I needed, had done my research online so I knew which brand and model I wanted and how much I was willing to pay, so armed with a sheaf of papers, I entered the store.

The dishwashers were the first things I came across. That was handy because I was looking for a dishwasher - not for me unfortunately, but for another house I have. I wandered along the line, checking the brands and models and prices, then went back to the beginning again. I had time to browse the stoves as well and found a couple I'd like to take home with me - in another life - before a sales assistant finally came up and asked what I wanted.

"I'm looking at dishwashers," I said and smiled as he looked at the gas stove in front of me in confusion. I returned to the dishwashers, him trailing along behind me. "There's the Bosch I was considering but I wanted to see the Fisher & Paykel as well and you don't seem to have it."

He leaned over my paper to check the model number and then pointed to the dishwasher right next to the Bosch. "Do you mean this one?"

I carefully checked the model number and picture against the dishwasher in front of me. "Well, how about that." I looked at them both. "This one's prettier. I'll take it." It actually scored better on the energy and water consumption ratings, and was cheaper too, but I didn't need to share that knowledge. You might have guessed by now I don't like the whole browsing and shopping thing much.

I think it was his quickest sale ever. He recovered quickly, though, and took my details. Before he could close the sale, I said I just wanted to look around because I might want a few other things.

I needed a new toaster, but I knew I would also be needing a new washing machine sometime in the future (as well as the stove) and it's always handy to check out what small appliances are available. I wandered away, thinking I could do a bit of on-the-floor research on my way over to the toasters, which were on the other side of the store.

I was carefully reading the specs of a front-loading washer-dryer when another sales person approached me. I thanked him. "I'm just looking at toasters," I said, smiling.

He looked at the washing machine and then back at me, and I could see clearly on his face exactly what he thought of my toaster-that-was-a-washing-machine. I took the opportunity to ask a few questions about the washing machine. I'd just read it but I like to check to see if sales people know their stock - call it a quirk. After a couple of minutes, I thanked him and moved on.

My next stop was at the sandwich makers. I have a flat one but I no longer have one that cuts while it toasts and I always loved the crunchy edges. I lifted lots of lids and checked prices, not really interested in them but enjoying the sound of the lids closing. (I don't get out much.)

Then I came across a pie maker and a little light bulb went on in my head. I rushed back to the second sales person.


Image from:
http://www.binglee.com.au/
sunbeam-ta6220-toastum-2?
gclid=CK2IkIzQs7YCFcVZpQodHHgAJA"I'm looking for the cutters that come with pie makers. I lost mine. Do you stock them?" An egg ring is almost the right size and I'd been using that, but it's not quite right. Unfortunately, if you want pie cutters, you have to buy another pie maker. I didn't.

Next stop was the kettles. I love looking at kettles. There are so many lovely shapes and colours around at the moment. I sighed over one that I could set the temperature on for specific types of tea, and another one that was clear glass and looked very easy to clean. I didn't need a new kettle, though. I paid $7.00 for one when I was renovating a house, and, when my old one broke I brought it out. It hasn't broken yet, and I won't buy a new one until it does.


I finally made it to the toasters. The toaster was for my house so I expected to spend more than $10 on it. The cheapest was $12 but when I lifted it up I thought it would probably melt the first time it was used. Then I saw the orange one. I like orange. This one had all the controls on one end and the cleaning tray right there as well. It would be very convenient. And did I mention orange?

But I only have toast once a month or less. Could I justify spending well over $100 on something that would see so little use? It seems not. In the end I bought one that looks like a 1950s caravan. It has the same streamlined shape.

I wonder how fast it would go towed on the open road.
 Image from:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ruby-victoria-letterpress/5257264782/

In Macarthur's seat

I sat in Macarthur's chair this week.

When he was in Brisbane during WWII, his office was on the eighth floor of the Macarthur Building in the city. Only that floor was saved from being renovated out of history eleven years ago. It's where the Macarthur museum is now.
 General Douglas Macarthur's office
At the Macarthur Museum, Brisbane, Aus.
Macarthur's office is exactly the same as it was the day he left in 1944. The fellow who gave the tour met Macarthur twice, about twenty years apart, and Macarthur remembered him because of a gesture the tour guide did as a child. The tour was particularly interesting because he had a personal connection to Macarthur.

The aunt of one of the ladies in the group was one of the Australian army women who worked on the codes in that office. Apparently she never spoke about her job - ever. The tour guide mentioned another woman who, at 84, when asked about her work, replied, "Oh, I can't talk about that". Sixty years later, and she still wouldn't mention anything about it.

Macarthur's chair.As often happens with things like this, another link was found when I mentioned the museum to a colleague. Apparently her mother was one of the twenty Australian women who worked there, too. My colleague would never have known that but for an aunt who mentioned it just before she died. My colleague's mother took even that much information to the grave with her.

I find it difficult to comprehend living a life that you can't share with anyone. No one at all. Even the people who work with you, who share many of the same secrets, only ever learn part of what you know. You can't even be totally honest with them.


I've never lived in a time or place where that level of secrecy is necessary. I hope I never have to.

What I'm reading

I've decided my reading has become extremely narrow in recent years. I like reading M/M romance, mystery and literature. I like reading the occasional auto/biography. That's what I've been reading. I'm a librarian so I really can't allow that narrowness of awareness remain that way so I've been finding other ways to read.

There are a whole heap of classics I've never finished. I've read all of Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They're my favourite classic writers and I never tire of them. It's the same with authors such as Victor Kelleher, Isaac Asimov, George Orwell. The rest? I can't get past the first few pages. The writing bores me. Or the topic does. Or the pace is so slow I fall asleep.

I've become so used to fast-moving stories, I simply can't tolerate ones that aren't, regardless of how well they've been written or how good the story is by the end.

I've come up with a solution: audiobooks. I've downloaded Overdrive, dusted off my library card and I've started listening to books as I drive. I work really close to home (five minutes drive) so there's no point in listening to or from work, but I go out on weekends so I listen then.

In the last couple of weeks I've managed to finish a couple of classics I've never been able to finish before: Wuthering Heights and Lady Chatterley's Lover, and I'm now listening to A Tale of Two Cities. I first read this book when I was ten and, while I thought I'd forgotten everything about it, it's feeling like an old friend I haven't seen in a long time.

This isn't the first time I've turned to audiobooks to listen to stories I wouldn't read in paper or on my ereader. I stopped because it annoyed me having to change the cassette tape and then the disk, at the lights, or pull over to the side of the road to do it.

I always listen when I'm driving because I don't have to use earphones and I usually drive by myself so I don't have to have a conversation with anyone else. I don't like using earphones because they remove me from the world around me and I don't like the sense of living in a bubble with no awareness of what's happening outside that. That's particularly the case when I'm at home alone or out walking in the evening. Without the earphones, I can still hear if something happens around me - eg a siren coming down the street.

I've made a list of authors I want to read/re-read. They aren't all classics.

John Steinbeck
Neville Shute
Louisa May Alcott
Charles Dickens
Xavier Herbert
Amy Tan
Cassandra Clare
Matthew Reilly
Scott Westerfield
PD James

That's just the first page of my notes on my phone. The list goes on in no particular order. Every time I think of another book I either haven't read but always wanted to or haven't read in a long time, I write it down. I'll be listening to books for years.

The things you see when you're driving

I was driving in traffic last night, waiting to turn right at the lights. Every time we stopped and waited some more, a mandarin flew out the window of the car in front of me, to land in the gutter. I looked back and the entire turn right lane had mandarins in the gutter, at regular intervals.

It was the first time I noticed just how long it was taking to get through the lights (I was listening to an audiobook so wasn't noticing the passage of time). The mandarins were proof that we were moving, about two metres with every change of lights, but they were also proof that we weren't moving much. Usually, four or five cars can go through on those lights but, with the mandarins so close, that obviously wasn't happening last night. It was an amazing illustration of movement and stasis.

They're doing road works there so the area is full of different textures and all shades of grey. The bright mandarins looked fantastic against those colours in the dusk. It made me smile - the bright globes of orange shining in the damp light (we've had a lot of rain), surrounded by ashphalt, charcoal-coloured gravel and pale grey canvas-looking stuff put down to help water flow away. The contrasts and textures kept me interested the whole time I waited to reach the lights and go around the corner. No boredom there.

I wish I'd got a photo, but I'd have had to leave the car to get the right angle. Flying mandarins was enough distraction to have on a main road, without some crazy motorist abandoning their car to squat in the gutter with a camera.

Another part of my brain followed a more practical track. I worried about the birds and animals that would come overnight to test the mandarins, to see if they were food to eat. The mandarins were right at the edge of a busy road, and the risk of injury to animals is high. I'm driving through there again this morning. I hope there are no little carcasses. There's no way for me to clear the area safely either. It's right in the middle of a very busy intersection and I'd end up darting between moving cars. Not a clever idea.

And, finally, my brain ticks over into writer mode, and I begin to think of where I can use the image or the action in a story. I'll think about that.