Tor Roxburgh's Blog, page 2

Thinking of cork trees again…

Now that I’ve almost finished writing my young adult, science fiction, murder mystery novel, I’m almost ready to start volume II of the Promise of Stone series and I’m going to use a new method.

In February this year I had the good fortune to be able to listen to Hugh Howey speak at the Savannah Book Festival. I hadn’t heard of Hugh and hadn’t read his books but went along because the blurb said he was a successful self-published science fiction writer. I’ve now read four of his books: the three novels in the Wood trilogy and another novel called Sand. They were great and had plenty of interesting ideas, which is something I really value in my speculative fiction. Hugh deserves the enormous success that he’s had.

Before hearing Hugh speak, I’d begun thinking about writing the second volume in my Promise of Stone series. I’d decided to try writing the last chapter first and then working my way towards that ending. Maybe writers shouldn’t be thinking about productivity – but I was. I was sick of writing and cutting around 50,000 extra words as I wandered away from, and around, my plot. Hugh Howey suggested the same thing. He also talked about writing novella-sized slabs that you can release as you write. Releasing novella-sized slabs is a really interesting idea but you’d need to be very confident about your process and you’d have to have a great editor to work with.

In the meantime, I have to wrangle the present novel before leaving it to settle for a few months.

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My Language Nightmare

Meet my… bond mate? shadow daughter? love niece? significant other? clone? daughter’s mother’s daughter?

I’ve been thinking about English language kinship terms and their woeful inadequacy when describing contemporary family relationships.

Wife, husband, mother, father, son, daughter, brother, sister, niece… Even if I list them all, including the gradations of cousins and the step and in-law equivalents, I’m still left high and dry when I go to introduce some of my family members. The trouble is the kinship terms I’m reaching for don’t exist.

My closest familial term problem is Will. Will is my…

My what? My him? The one I live with? Not my partner or boyfriend because that underestimates the seriousness and longevity of our relationship (28 years and children). Lover? The notion makes me think of French cinema, which is no bad thing, but it suggests that we spend all of our time in bed and have nothing else in common. And as for the very Australian descriptive: my de facto, the term makes me cringe and giggle at the same time. Cringe, because I’m forced to admit that my mother wasn’t the only snob in the family. Giggle, because, de facto is such a silly, needless term outside the particulars of legislation and the judicial system. If Will is my husband in fact but not in law, then then he’s clearly my husband.

Maybe I should just get on and call Will my husband: keep things simple. And I do, quite frequently, but only because English doesn’t offer me anything else that seems to fit. The problem is we’re not married for a reason. We don’t want to be husband and wife. Ugh! Trivial but ugh.

I have other familial term problems that worry me more.

E is my ex-sister-in-law’s daughter from a relationship subsequent to her mother’s divorce from my brother. Mouthful? Absolutely. Too much detail for a casual conversation? Yes.

I’d really love to be able to speak about E without taking my listener into that sort of guerrilla territory. Generally, I call E my niece. Sometimes, when I want to clarify that descriptor and show a little of the subtlety of our kinship, I reach for something else. I’ve tried my almost niece and my niece-in-law – sort of. Recently, I asked sister-in-law, M (I don’t refer to her as my ex-sister-in-law because the term reminds me of Monty Python’s ex-parrot) what familial term she’d suggest for describing my relationship to E. She said that E could be my love niece.

At first I was really excited about love niece and thought I could apply it universally. But my next conundrum makes it pretty plain that love won’t work as a catchall familial term modifier.

I have an ex-husband, D. We have a son, A. D went on to marry S and they have had four children together. Will and I have had two together. That makes seven children with A as a kind of pivotal link. The first lot of familial terms are easy. S is A’s step-mother. A is a brother to all of his siblings (we don’t use half-brother – too diminishing). Will is A’s step-father (ignoring the fact that Will and I aren’t married). Beyond those few, relatively clear kinship terms, things get horribly nameless and invisible.

What is the relationship of A’s paternal and maternal siblings to each other? There is no blood, step or in-law relationship between my subsequent children and my ex-husband’s subsequent children and yet they all share a sibling. My brother’s brother? My brother’s sister? Sounds odd. And yet it shouldn’t be so difficult to speak about such common and important relationships.

And what about my relationship to A’s paternal siblings: those children D had with S after our divorce? For obvious reasons, I can’t call them my love children, which puts a dent in M’s beautiful new familial term modifier. And if those children are introducing me to someone, how should they explain me? Am I their step-mother-in-reverse? Should I be their mirror mother (as in Through the Looking Glass)? Could I be their shadow mother (the nameless and ambiguous one)? All too difficult. My not-quite-step-children should be able to introduce me as, ‘This is my…’ and have everyone understand our important but attenuated kinship relationship.

There are cultures where Auntie and Uncle and Grandma and Grandpa are used for respected older adults – and that’s all you need to know, unless you need to know more. It’s a nice global solution but unfortunately it doesn’t really satisfy me. Apart from the fact it doesn’t solve my children’s sibling of my sibling dilemma, I like a bit more precision in my conversation. When I want to show more, I like to be able to show more.

Kinship terms in Aboriginal cultures in Australia describe genealogical, moiety, semi-moiety and, frequently, skin relationships. These categorisations are much more complex than English familial terms. They describe the kin and cosmological position of all natural phenomena and some spiritual entities in addition to dealing with genetic relationships. In a real sense they cover a person’s relationship to everything and everyone. The existence of such sophisticated systems gives me hope that English familial terms will evolve. (Some links are given at the end of the post).

So I’m looking for new kinship terms that might nudge English along the evolutionary path. If you have some, please share. You might want to make them up, you might know of some interesting ones from historic or existing cultures, you might have read a novel that had something that would suit.

Here is my latest find: odd sister and even sister from Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold.

The author created the terms for sisters born in a technologically enhanced future. The standard daughter (created from two parents) was the even sister and the daughter who was created from one parent, but and enhanced and modified, was the odd sister. Perhaps the idea could be reworked to suit the existing world. Perhaps my subsequent children and D’s subsequent children could be each other’s odd siblings.

Sources in relation to Aboriginal kinship and Aboriginal Languages

The Northern Land Council

The Central Land Council

Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages

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The Next Big Thing

I’ve been off the blog for far too long (and by the way off the blog isn’t anything like being off the grog) but I’m back on it again because Patrick O’Duffy invited me to contribute to an online writers’ roundabout called the Next Big Thing. Each writer answers ten questions about their current book and then tags five other writers.

Patrick is the author of a terrific ebook called The Obituarist and he is currently writing a novel called Raven’s Blood. Raven’s Blood is a young adult fantasy and I really liked the sound of it so I hope he hurries up and finishes it.

Thanks to Patrick, I’m enjoying envisaging my new book as the Next Big Thing. Imagining success is something all writers have got to be good at. It sustains us over the years it takes to write each book and keeps us busy writing.

1) What is the working title of your next book?

The working title of my new book is The Half-Life Girl. I usually change my working titles and character names several times during the drafting and redrafting process. It helps me to come to terms with the essence of the characters and the book’s overall narrative. This book has already had two working titles. The original working title was Long Sweet Song. I’m about ready to create another as The Half-Life Girl doesn’t really do it for me anymore.

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

I had been thinking about the way professional boundaries drift over time. I’d also been thinking about the diversity – across cultures and times – of the age at which a working life begins: anything from early childhood to post-university or even later. Those thoughts combined into an idea for a young adult novel set eight generations in the future, at a time when there is no school because everyone undertakes on-the-job training within family businesses.

I looked backwards to look forwards and was inspired by those times when disciplines that now seem incompatible, such as astrology and astronomy and barbering and surgery, were compatible. It seems likely to me that those sorts of professional shifts will continue and that the future will contain some odd professions. I knew I wanted to write a police procedural crime novel but imagined different kinds of law enforcement officers: midwife coroners and detecting psychologists.

In The Half-Life Girl, my protagonist is called Fortune Sweet Song. He lives and works in a medical law enforcement family. His mother is a midwife coroner and his father is a detecting psychologist. In the first chapter, sixteen-year-old Fortune begins his apprenticeship in the family business by examining the body of a teenage girl found lying, presumed dead, in Armstrong Street in Ballarat.

Ballarat’s Central Square has also disappeared and has been replaced by a shop called Shimmerama on Sturt. 
This is the location where Fortune finds the body of the teenage girl

3) What genre does your book fall under?

The Half-Life Girl is a cross genre, murder mystery, science-fiction novel for young adults.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

The Sweet Songs have Chinese, Indian and Anglo-Saxon heritage. I’m not really sure which actor should play Fortune, but he’d have to have an ethnically mixed background. The supporting character Cara Wungalu is an Indigenous Australia. I can imagine her being played by Miranda Tapsell. I’ve been watching in Redfern Now on the ABC and I really enjoyed Miranda’s work in the episode called Joy Ride.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A boy who is planning to amputate his gifted hands ends up investigating a death, solving a murder, finding a profession, making a friend and accepting his genetic inheritance.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’m not sure that I can answer that question at this stage. I’ve had fifteen books published in my writing career. All bar my latest book, an epic fantasy novel called The Light Heart of Stone, have been published traditionally. I’ve really enjoyed self-publishing but it takes lots of work and time: time that could otherwise be spent writing.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?I’m still writing the first draft. I began writing in January and have written about 60,000 words. I’ve thrown out about 40,000 of those words so I’m still some way from completing the draft. I expect I’ll have the first draft finished by March 2013, which is when I plan to begin writing volume II in my new epic fantasy series.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Ender’s Game without the military theme (is that even possible?). Harry Potter without the magic (well, that’s probably not possible). The common element is that The Half-Life Girl is a story about a boy who is shouldering an adult responsibility, much as Ender and Harry had to do in their stories.

Looking back on my answer, I feel I need to say a word about my protagonist being male. I wanted Fortune to be male because I wanted him to experience the emergence of his upgraded, gifted hands as something akin to menstruation. Fortune’s hands give him certain powers, but they weep, bleed, ache and have to be managed. Sound familiar?

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I attended a fiction master class with Steve Carroll at Writers Victoria in January this year. It was really inspiring and got me started on The Half-Life Girl.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

Readers will probably enjoy reading about the technological differences in this future Australia, which is familiar but different. I hope they will also enjoy reading about the challenges faced by the characters.

What particularly interests me about technology and change – and I hope the readers will agree – is that new technologies often present real difficulties for people entrenched in old technology (think about publishing in the digital age). While that abstract thought might not grab young adult readers, the story of Fortune’s family’s business – the Long Sweet Song Gifted Hand Clinic – probably will. The Clinic has relied on the physical upgrades possessed by family members to make a living. A new forensic technology has emerged and the Sweet Songs look as though they’ll be out on the street, facing a hostile world, in the not-too-distant future.

For the next, Next Big Thing (posting Wednesday 12 December) please visit:

Amra Pajalic

Julie Mac

Pete Aldin

Sue Isle

Gillian Polack

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Help! My plot has come unstuck

 It’s 200 years into the future. Fortune SweetSong looks out at this view and… 

And I stopped writing because I realised my plot was in trouble.

I commenced this writing year really well by starting a new science-fiction novel in Steven Carroll’s master class at Writers Victoria. I wrote every day for the first four months. It was great. But here I am, six months after that wonderful beginning, and my plot seems to have come unstuck.

The story that I thought I’d plotted out – so carefully, so confidently – doesn’t seemed to be as well conceived as I’d imagined. The ending doesn’t fit the cast of characters. Specifically, the ending would be very satisfying if you cared about one particular character. The problem is, that character is dead and even before he died he wasn’t very interesting.

I could, should and will replot. The problem isn’t insurmountable but it has stopped me in my tracks and I have begun to wonder about my plotting method. Having written 12 teen romances that were driven by a combination of plot and an assumed adolescent voice, I felt I knew how to devise a novel plan.

The method I’ve always used involves an arc that relates to the genre, a story arc for the main character or characters and a chapter-by-chapter plan in which something interesting happens. In terms of writing teen romance a plan could look something like this:

1 Genre arc: The female protagonist ditches her existing boyfriend for someone more interesting.

2 Story arc for the main character: The female protagonist intends to become a jockey but ends up becoming a horse trainer.

3 Chapter action:

Chapter 1: Our hero goes to the sale yards to try and meet a famous trainer but ends up buying a horse to save it from the slaughter yards. She has a fight with her boyfriend.

Chapter 2: Our hero finds a farmer willing to agist her new horse and in return agrees to help with some fencing. There is a farm accident and our hero has to go to the neighbour for help. She meets the neighbour’s son…

SPOILER ALERT: this next example includes some plot outcomes from The Light Heart of Stone. You can skip to the following paragraph if you’ve yet to read the novel.

In terms of The Light Heart of Stone, my recent epic fantasy novel, the plan looked something like this:

1 Genre arc: The agricultural system in an alternate world is failing and the world needs to be saved.

2 Story arc for main character #1: A young girl named Fox loses her home and family and ends up dismantling the system that caused her that loss.

3 Story arc for main character #2: An old woman named Oria is given a second chance at life but finds that she must become a different person if she is to survive.

4 Chapters:

Chapter 1: Oria finds a perfectly preserved body in a coffin, touches it and loses consciousness.

Chapter 2: Fox is tested for talent and taken from her family…

SPOILER ALERT ENDS. You can continue reading safely.

When I realised the proposed ending for my new science-fiction novel no longer seemed to fit the story, I thought I could solve the problem by reading the book as though I was the reader rather than the writer. I thought I’d know what the ending should be by the time I reached the end of the 48,000 words I’d already written.

I read chapter 1 and everything felt dandy. Chapter 2 had some good material but soon I was in despair because my pages weren’t sticky. Stephen Wright talks about his eyes sliding over a page ‘without getting any adhesion’ and calls those bits of weak writing ‘white-outs’. All I could see in my manuscript were white-outs.

As my despair deepened I began to have second thoughts about key events in the story – never mind the ending!

I’ve had a few public speaking engagements over the last 10 days so I haven’t been able to write. I did a radio interview at Inner FM with Marie Ryan. I did an author talk at Collins Booksellers in Bacchus Marsh. I sat on a panel about creating fictional worlds at the Bayside Literary Festival and I sat on a panel about public art for the City of Darebin’s DIY Arts Seminar Series.

In a way I’m glad that I couldn’t get to my writing. I think I would have sunk deeper into despair if I’d had time to write. During the break I had these thoughts:

Well, white-outs are always going to be present in first drafts, particularly when your plot is unresolved and you haven’t finished drawing your characters – and both of those are true in my case.

A plot crisis? Big deal. It just means I need to rethink and re-plan.

How fortuitous that Pete Aldin told me about that new writing software. I can download the free trial, transfer my existing plot and text and – in the process – work out what’s wrong and how to fix it.

I’ll let you know about the writing software if it ends up being useful.

Review News

I can’t let this post go past without mentioning that The Light Heart of Stone has just received its first review. Sean Wright, who writes reviews, news and views on speculative fiction at Adventures of a Bookonaut, has said some very exciting things about the book.

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Creating Worlds – part 2

I’m consumed with thoughts about world-building because I’m preparing for this Sunday’s panel discussion at the Bayside Literary Festival with Alison Goodman, Jesse Blackadder, Narrelle M Harris and Lindy Cameron.

I’ve been reflecting on my own writing process in relation to creating speculative fiction worlds. In my last blog entry I had a look at the factors that I need to have in place in order to make my speculative worlds go around. This post looks at the elements that are involved in creating believable worlds.

Attention to detail and accuracy… Festival director, Jessie Doring, associated both of these factors with the task of world creation in historical fiction. Instinctively, I want to them for speculative fiction too. Attention to detail is fairly easy to argue because we like the big and the small picture when we’re reading stories set in new worlds. The gritty stuff of sound and smell is important but so is the political system.

I recently read When We Have Wings by Claire Corbett. Her future world of fliers and non-fliers gives the reader both sorts of detail. Corbett gives you the ‘sharp forest scent’ on the wings of a flier and also provides a bigger picture that involves a complex and disturbing nexus between extremely realistically drawn political, socio-economic and religious forces.

Which is a nice segue into the subject of accuracy. Accuracy in a made up world? Really? Well, accuracy is called for – and I don’t just mean putting hard science into science-fiction. I think there are other areas where accuracy matters: internal coherence, non-speculative elements in imagined worlds and an attitude of truth-telling in your writing craft.

The world you create can’t be fuzzy or inconsistent and real world elements must be correctly rendered. Even the invented parts of your speculative world have to be correctly imagined, make sense, be precision-made and accurate. And – in craft terms – when you write about your new world, it should be so well envisioned that you are engaged in virtual truth-telling. Your world should be so real your writing should border on non-fiction.

I recently read a science fiction novel that opened with a scene in a public sculptor’s yard. The main character, a sculptor/architect, undertook a complex and dangerous bit of work during a surprise visit from the client who commissioned the artwork. I guess I’m the worst reader for this particular scene because Velislav Georgiev and I have been running a public sculpture business for a number of years and we’ve had clients drop into the studio. The scene didn’t feel accurate because clients get to see simple show-and-tell work and I wasn’t convinced that in the author’s imagined world this sort of truth had changed.

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Creating Worlds – part 1

I am busy preparing for a panel discussion at the Bayside Literary Festival. This year’s festival is The Art of Words and – being a speculative fiction writer – I’m involved in a panel about speculation and invention:

Creating Worlds: Real and imagined
Scotland 1561; Melbourne 2012; an almost-Chinese mediaeval kingdom; an alternate, undated universe. World-building is an integral part of historical and fantasy fiction. Attention to detail and accuracy are vital in the former; imagination and originality are the building blocks of the latter. Author and publisher Lindy Cameron interrogates historical novelist Jesse Blackadder, and fantasy and speculative fiction authors Alison Goodman, Narrelle M Harris and Tor Roxburgh to find out what makes their fictional worlds go round, what brings them to life, what makes them believable, and just how much reality goes into making something up.
2pm to 4pm
True South Brewery, $10
Food and drinks available for purchase

As part of my preparation, I’ve been revisiting the process I used to create the world in my new epic fantasy novel The Light Heart of Stone. For me, world building starts with people. I remember a panel I attended a few years ago at Conflux, Canberra’s science fiction and fantasy convention. Two writers, both men, were discussing the process of world building. One insisted that the only way to create a plausible world was to begin with the cosmological situation. It was that situation that would determine the length of the word’s day and the nature of the world’s atmosphere, which he saw as the starting points for world building. The other writer spoke about beginning worlds topographically and cartographically. I was impressed and intimidated in equal measure.

Systematic work like that always impresses, intimidates and revolts me. It appeals to that part of me that would like to analyse, categorise and order everything that exists and GET IT RIGHT: the part of me that can still imagine spending twenty years researching a single narrow subject for the pure joy of it. It repels me because I know I would never complete another book or anything else in life. It revolts me because it is so tight and prescriptive.

My world building is based on the idea that all worlds, including our own, are imagined worlds. That is, words are primarily mental: they are created by minds and exist in minds. I don’t dispute the existence of a physical world but I believe we construct more of that physical world than we realise.

So I build worlds with imagined peoples who relate to, perceive and sculpt the landscapes in which they live. I imagine a world by getting to know its people: who they are, what they believe, what they disbelieve, what sort of stories they tell, what’s tolerable for them and what they can’t cope with.

In the case of The Light Heart of Stone, I knew I wanted to write about a post-colonial, continental world and I decided to create two culturally distinct peoples. I set my story 1,000 years after colonisation because I was interested in the idea of post-colonial worlds as enduringly fragile societies.

I wanted to write about semi-nomadic indigenous people who have a custodial relationship to land. I invented a people and called them the Indidjinies because I liked the slippage from the word ‘indigenous’. I wanted to write about immigrant people with a proprietorial attitude towards talents, about people who see talents as exploitable resources. I gave these people a talent for companioning plants and animals and called them the Companionaris. Having given my immigrant people an effective monopoly, I wanted the indigenous people to have a balancing monopoly so I gave the Indidjinies title to the entire continent.

So, at the outset of my world building, I had two contrasting beliefs (custodial and proprietorial) and I had two powerful monopolies (in one case, ownership of land; in the other, control over the growth of plants and animals).

I asked myself: what happened in the beginning when the Companionaris arrived? What happened a few hundred years later? What happens when the novel opens 1,000 years post-colonisation? The answer became the novel.

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Continuum – Melbourne’s Science Fiction Convention

I was lucky enough to be able to participate in Continuum 8 – Melbourne’s science fiction convention. I was at Continuum as a panellist, a reader, a fan and a learner.

Learning

I loved being in the audience for ‘The Crafty Middle Ages’. I got to listen to Canberra-based writer and academic Gillian Polack talking about day-to-day and special occasion crafts in France and England. I especially loved her show and tell items. My favourite was the pilgrimage badge (a kind of souvenir for pilgrims) that depicted a vulva riding a horse – yes, I did write the world ‘vulva’ and it was silver and it was riding a horse.

I also learned a great deal from ‘Book Blogs & Reviewing’, which featured Sue Bursztynski, George Ivanoff, Alexandra Pierce, Gillian Polack and Sean Wright.

My Inner Fan

I love space opera so I dropped in to listen to ‘The Forgotten Frontier?’ where m1k3y, Jonathan Strahan and Alexander Pierce talked about that genre. I came away with a reading list that now includes ‘The Mote in God’s Eye’ by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle and ‘Leviathan Wakes’ by James Corey.

I also sat in the audience for ‘Relative Dimensions: The Limits of Doctor Who’. Who knew that anyone could know so much about the good Doctor? Amazing.

Good Reading

My two favourite authors Margo Lanagan and Kelly Link were at Continuum this year and I really enjoyed seeing the people behind the stories and (in Margo’s case) the person behind the novels. I also enjoyed listening to Alison Goodman being interviewed by Jason Nahrung. I didn’t make it to many of the readings, but I did get to hear the beginning of Jack Dann’s latest story (and it was great) and also got to listen to a snapshot from Gillian Polack’s time travel novel (which I can’t wait to read – if only I could remember the title).

Being a Panellist

Continuum 8 was my first gig as a panellist. I was nervous and overawed by my fellow and sister panellists’ depth and breadth of knowledge.

I felt I was on familiar ground with the panel on independent publishing and on the panel on crossing literary genres. Both situations are current for me as I’ve crossed from writing teen romance to writing speculative fiction and I’ve self-published a fantasy novel this year.

I really enjoyed being a panellist on ‘Backyard Speculation’ but realised there is a lot of Australian speculative fiction reading that I need to catch up on.

Being on the ‘Everyone Loves a Good Murder’ panel was a humbling and rewarding experience. I realised that being a murder mystery reader and writing novels with murders and mysteries is not the same thing as knowing the genre through and through.

I came away from the panel with new thoughts about the novel that I am currently writing, which is a young adult, science fiction murder mystery set in Ballarat. Is my murder compelling and tangible? Does my mystery reward the clever reader? Is my resolution going to be just or unjust, tragic or warm?

And then…

I’m reuniting with a couple of Continuum 8 panellists and meeting up with a few new writers at ‘The Art of Words’, the 2012 Bayside Literary Festival. I’m on the Creating Worlds: Real and Imagined panel – and looking forward to it.

The Art of Words needed a new profile photo – a new unfinished painting in the background

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Page Parlour & The Light Heart of Stone’s Melbourne Launch

Page Parlour

The Emerging Writers’ Festival hosts an event called Page Parlour, which is a market place for small independent press and self-publishers. I wandered through Page Parlour in 2011 and this year I had a stall. It was a really fascinating experience and I went home with a hot-off-the-press comic by Matt Nicholls and Lee Taylor, a book of poems by Claire Jansen who has established the Tasmanian publishing house Fire Door Press, some quirky zines, a mook (which is a cross between a book and a magazine) and some other small, non-mainstream publications.

Last night I sat in bed and read a zine – a letter from someone called Luke about his experience of drawing a female model in a life drawing class. The letter was addressed to me as ‘Dear You’. It was quite intimate and I felt oddly connected to Luke even though I’d never met him and had instead found his letter inside a stapled paper bag labelled ‘You’, which was being given away by Sticky Institute, a Melbourne zine shop.

As for me, I sold quite a few books and had some great conversations with readers. Mostly we talked about libraries. I was encouraging those who seemed genuinely interested in reading The Light Heart of Stone, but weren’t able to buy it on the day, to ask their library to buy it for them. What could be better, really? Readers reading for free; me getting paid and benefitting annually from Australia’s public lending right scheme.

Launch Night

The Melbourne launch of The Light Heart of Stone is on tomorrow at The Wilde at 153 Gertrude Street in Fitzroy. Come along at 6:30 if you’re in the area. It’s free, we’re exhibiting some great art, poets Josh Buckle and Tory Wardlaw are performing and The Bon Scotts are playing live. Better still, you can sit down for a meal afterwards as The Wilde serves some great food.

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