L.E. Truscott's Blog, page 28

Short Story: Midday in the Bourke Street Mall

She has such a strong sense of this moment but almost no sense of herself in it, except as an observer. Maybe because she doesn’t come to the city much anymore. She isn’t a part of it. She used to work in the city years ago but not since then. But this is where the recruiters are. This is where the jobs are now.

She has already met with one recruiter. She mistook his polite enquiry about what she was doing for lunch as a come on. Or maybe she didn’t mistake it at all. She will meet with another recruiter this afternoon and will listen for over an hour while he outlines everything that is wrong with her. She will sit there and take it.

But for now she sits at midday in the Bourke Street mall. There’s a book in her bag but so much is going on around her that she has no interest in getting it out. The bench below her is hard and cold, metallic beneath the back of her thighs, even through the material of her skirt.

Across the mall, sitting also and leaning against a grimy, tiled wall underneath the front canopy of an expensive department store is a woman not wearing any shoes. The soles of her feet are grimy, too. A beanie with a pompom on top can’t conceal her stringy hair and her mouth can’t conceal her lack of teeth. But she is not ashamed. She holds herself with pride. A casually well-dressed man approaches and stands over her, begins speaking to her, feigns concern for her.

Back on the other side, back on the bench, she watches the two of them speak. She doesn’t know much about the real world but even she can tell he is an undercover police officer. Someone from the department store must have called and asked if they could move on a homeless woman. She’s been sitting on this bench for over an hour and no one has come to move her on. She is ashamed on the woman’s behalf. Not of her status but of her treatment.

He talks to her for a while and then a marked police car slowly winds its way through the pedestrians and parks a short distance away. Two uniformed police get out of the vehicle with clipboards and take over the conversation. They won’t just move her on, it seems. She has to be convinced to go.

A tall, stout man walks past the bench shouting, “Richmond! Richmond!” and it distracts her from the police. He’s wearing a heavy brown blazer, shorts and long socks. He crosses the tram tracks that run down the middle of the mall and keeps shouting. “Richmond! Richmond!” She knows he isn’t asking for directions.

His single word soliloquy catches the attention of the same undercover police officer now freed from responsibility for the homeless woman. He tails him half the length of the mall and the man doubles back. Then he takes off his blazer and throws it onto the roof of a phone booth. She’s less surprised by the gesture than the fact that there is still a phone booth in the mall.

The man walks away, unconcerned by the loss of his blazer, and the undercover police officer follows him. Another undercover officer appears from somewhere. And a third. She wonders if their job is simply to patrol the mall. Why else would there be undercover officers here?

She looks back to where the homeless woman was sitting and the space is empty. She is gone. She has been moved on. But the grimy, tiled wall beside the entrance to the expensive department store doesn’t look any less grimy.

She realises there are things wrong here. A nine-year-old girl walks past in a sheepskin vest and wearing boots with two-inch heels. She’s with her mother who’s dressed the same way. A sparrow hops in front of her and she’s close enough to see the bird is missing all the toes on its left foot. It hops to a crack in the pavement and drinks dirty water pooled in the gap. And there are smokers. So many smokers. Her hair is going to smell bad for her meeting.

A tall, swarthy man walks from the east end of the mall hiding something in his hand but the massive clouds of vapour he leaves behind betray him. He’s smoking an e-cigarette, breathing in, breathing out, and it hangs over him like the Cheshire cat, a tail snaking around his shoulders. Later, he will walk back from the west end doing exactly the same thing.

Down near the phone booth, the undercover police are still talking to the “Richmond” man. They talk to him for a long time. Long enough for an ambulance to arrive. His blazer is forgotten entirely as he agrees to get into the back so they can check him over and the door closes after him before it drives away.

And then the real world is interrupted by an RMIT fashion student wanting to survey her on how she feels about discount and department store brands. “Do you have positive feelings about Kmart?” I have no feelings. I’m numb, she wants to say. I’m changed from sitting at midday in the Bourke Street mall.

Except she isn’t changed. She has such a strong sense of this moment but no sense of how to change any of it, not the recruiters who will hit on her and criticise her, not the police who will move on the homeless and the mental health challenged, not the sparrow without toes, not the smokers, not a fashion student who will end up with a huge student debt and a job in one of those discount and department stores, not even herself. Not because she isn’t a part of it. But because she is.

Short Story: The Ballet

I look good. I like to make an effort when I go to the ballet. Some people turn up in jeans, track suits, even school uniforms. I always wear a dress. At the moment, it’s concealed underneath a knee-length black overcoat. I’m also wearing knee-high black boots in deference to the cold. It’s a nightmare driving to and parking in the city so I usually take the train but it’s winter and the platform is chilly.

I duck into the partially enclosed seating area but it isn’t any warmer. The breeze whistles through unintentionally but perfectly created wind tunnels and ruffles my hair. I hate the wind more than any other kind of weather. For rain, I have an umbrella. For sun, I have hats. For heat, I have loose, barely-there clothing. For cold, I have jackets – like the one I have on now – and scarves and gloves. There is nothing for the wind but staying inside. But I have to go out to get to the ballet. So instead I have a hairbrush in my bag to repair later the damage it is doing now.

He sits down next to me before I even realise he is there. “Hello.”

“Hello,” I say in response before I can stop myself. I am polite to the point of ridiculousness. I once thanked a dentist, through my swollen jaw, for extracting a wisdom tooth.

He rubs his eyes before he speaks again. “I fell asleep on the train.”

He has an accent but not an undecipherable one. He’s dressed in dark pants and a dark shirt that match his dark skin but he isn’t wearing anything that will keep out the deep cold. I wonder if he’s homeless. If I were homeless, I’d ride the public transport system to keep warm.

“Don’t you have anywhere to go? To sleep safely?” I ask. He laughs quietly.

“Yes. But I missed my stop because I was asleep.” He names the stop and it’s in a respectable suburb.

“Oh!” I laugh at my mistake but I’m relieved at the same time. I understand that there are all sorts of homeless people but I don’t think I have anything in common with any of them. I am strong. I am independent. I don’t allow myself to get into situations that would result in my own homelessness. And if worst came to worst, I have a large extended family, any member of which would offer me a bed for however many nights I needed it.

“I’m Harry.” He offers me his hand and I shake it after looking at it for the briefest of moments.

I offer my own name in return.

“You look nice,” Harry says.

“Thanks,” I respond but there’s something about the way he says it that makes me wary. “I’m going to the ballet with my cousin.” He nods his head but I can tell he’s not interested in ballet.

The train arrives and we both stand. When it comes to a complete stop, I press the button to open the door and it slides apart electronically. I step into the carriage and it’s virtually empty. At the other end, a tradie gets on. He must have been standing on the platform as well but I didn’t notice him.

There’s safety in numbers, I think, and sit across the aisle from the tradie. He has curly orange hair and he’s wearing khaki shorts and heavy work boots. I sit next to the window so I can look out of it and ignore what goes on in the carriage. Harry sits down opposite and adjacent to me, his legs splaying and stretching so that I can’t get past without asking him to move. I look over at the tradie but he’s looking away from us.

“I’m from Pubjab,” Harry says to me. “Do you know where that is?”

“India?” I guess.

“Pakistan. I’ve been here for two months. I’m studying accounting.”

I nod my head to acknowledge the information but I don’t want to encourage him to share anything else. He’s too interested, especially given my reticence. It must not be obvious. I need to be more obviously reticent. But it conflicts with my natural instinct to be polite. I stare out the window instead.

“Would you like to go somewhere for coffee?” he asks, drawing my gaze back to him.

“I can’t. I’m going to the ballet,” I remind him.

“What about later?” He’s clearly not going to let this go.

“How old are you?” I ask.

“Twenty-two.”

“I’m thirty-seven. Don’t you think you should… have coffee with girls your own age?”

“You’re so beautiful,” he says but it’s not a counter to my argument, it’s merely evidence he is choosing not to listen to what I am saying.

I pull out my mobile and text a quick message to my cousin: Guy on the train won’t leave me alone.

She texts back: Tell him to piss off.

But she knows I won’t. She knows I’m too well-mannered.

I text again: It’s okay. There’s another guy here in case. See you soon. I don’t elaborate on what “in case” means.

As soon as I put the phone away, Harry asks, “Can I have your number?”

I’m not very good at this but my friend Samantha coached me once after a religious fanatic masquerading as a Red Cross volunteer where I was donating blood asked me to attend his church and made me write down my number for him.

“I don’t think my boyfriend would be too happy if I gave you my number.” I don’t have a boyfriend.

“What’s his name?”

“Alex.” I don’t know anyone named Alex.

“How long have you been together?”

“Nine years.” I’ve never had a relationship last longer than it takes to make cheese.

“Are you going to get married?”

“No.” It’s hard to marry your fictional boyfriend.

“Why not?”

“I have no interest in getting married.” Finally, the truth. It rolls off my tongue so much easier than the lies but I hope Harry can’t tell the difference.

He shuffles in his seat and adjusts his clothing as though he’s trying to get comfortable and I look out the window again. It’s completely dark outside and very well lit in the carriage so I can barely see anything. I’m not good at staring unseeingly. I’m an observer. I observe things. When there’s nothing to observe, I can’t just pretend. I’m bad at pretending.

Harry’s hands are moving in his lap and with nothing outside or even inside the carriage to keep me looking away, my eyes flick to the movement. He’s not adjusting his clothing, he’s adjusting himself. He’s not even trying to be discreet about it. His penis is semi-erect and he is moving it around underneath the fabric of his dark pants. Not enough so that he comes. Just enough so that he is enjoying this as much as I am hating it. I look away again.

“You’re so beautiful,” he says again, leaning over towards me. “Your lips are so pink.”

I want to shout at him but I don’t seem to be able to control my reactions. Instead, I laugh in disbelief and cover my face with both hands, cover my pink lips, cover the sticky lip gloss that I applied so carefully in the bathroom at home an hour before without ever thinking that this would be the result. But it’s no more than a few seconds before I know what I want to say and am able to say it.

“You are making me very uncomfortable.”

He just looks at me. His erection is still evident. He is still touching himself.

“Piss off, mate. She’s not interested.” Harry and I both look over and the tradie I deliberately sat near for precisely this reason and this moment – not really thinking it would be necessary, hoping it wouldn’t be necessary – is looking back at us but mostly at Harry. The tradie is closer to my age and looks like the kind of man who would drink beer, drive a truck and pick fights, although there aren’t any tattoos. I sort of wish there were.

But his intervention is enough. The tradie doesn’t look away, doesn’t move, doesn’t do anything but stare until Harry jumps up, backs away and heads for the nearest exit, alighting one station earlier than the one he told me he was heading for.

I’m not relieved, I’m ashamed. I don’t want to be saved. I don’t want to have to be saved. I don’t want to be in situations like this in the first place.

“Thank you.” I say it anyway because the tradie deserves it. In a line up to choose the bad guy, between Harry and the tradie, I would have chosen the tradie. I’m so bad at judgements based on first impressions.

“No problem.”

“He just wouldn’t leave me alone.” I feel like I have to explain myself.

“I noticed.”

“I don’t know how not to be nice to strangers, even those who don’t end up deserving it. I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

“Probably not,” he agrees. He seems to be a man of few words. He gets up a few stops later and asks before he heads off, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yes.” I nod my head. “Thank you again.”

I get to the city and meet my cousin, telling her what has happened. I sit through a ballet that I don’t remember afterwards. My cousin, who drives everywhere, drives me home, refusing to let me take the train and I let her refuse to let me.

Days later, I tell my mother what happened and she buys me an engagement ring, a big one with a knuckleduster fake diamond, to help sell the lie of the fake boyfriend. I guess he’s now my fake fiancé. The trains aren’t the same. The ballet isn’t the same. I am not the same anymore.

Book Review: The Man Who Forgot His Wife by John O’Farrell

It took me until I was nearly finished reading this book to realise which category of novel it fell into and that is “romance for men” – dick lit instead of chick lit, if you will. The story is a romance between Vaughan and Maddy but instead of the high emotions and drama that appear in romance for women, this book has comedy, farcical confusion and a sidekick/wingman/best friend/loud mouth. I expect it would still be read mostly by women but almost certainly it would also have more male readers than a romance written for women (which generally have none).

Vaughan is on a train when he is “reborn” – it’s nothing to do with religion, it’s just that he can’t remember anything. Not a single thing about himself, who he is, where he’s going or where he’s been so he feels like a fully grown baby. He finds a hospital and spends a week wearing a wristband listing him as “Unknown White Male” until his best friend, Gary, figures out where he is and comes to take him home.

Except home isn’t where home used to be. Vaughan is in the middle of a messy divorce from Maddy, his wife of fifteen years. He’s homeless as a result and has been couch surfing at Gary’s. Which is why Maddy didn’t miss him, didn’t even realise he’d been struck down with a medical condition, wouldn’t have cared had she known. But from the moment Vaughan sees Maddy from a distance, he knows he loves her despite being unable to remember her. And he wants to win her back.

Except… how do I put this politely? Vaughan, pre-memory wipe, was an A-class a-hole. He smoked incessantly, drank like a fish, wore a bedraggled beard, dressed badly, stayed out late frequently, didn’t lift a finger to help around the house and upset the children with his incessant arguing with his wife over the most trivial things.

Luckily, the memory wipe has turned him into an entirely different person. He no longer smokes or drinks, he shaves, he buys new suits, he makes an effort with his kids and he’s considerate of his wife. But, of course, she can’t forget as easily as he has all the things that led to their acrimonious relationship breakdown.

I can draw parallels between The Man Who Forgot His Wife and The Rosie Project. Both feature men suffering social awkwardness (for different reasons). Both feature men trying to figure out who they are meant to be spending the rest of their lives with and then pursuing that goal. Both feature amusing and embarrassing moments for the main characters as they navigate the limitations of their neurological conditions.

The problem with the premise of the book is that it seems to suggest that all a man has to do in order to save his marriage is completely change his personality. New and improved Vaughan is everything that old Vaughan never was. In fact, it’s hard to believe that they are both the same person because they are exact opposites. He’s woken up from his old life with a completely different approach for no apparent reason, like those people who wake up from head injuries with the ability to speak a foreign language or with an accent they never had before. But can you imagine the uproar if John O’Farrell had written a book in which a woman wins back her husband by changing everything about herself?

Vaughan gradually recovers enough of his memories to be able to see his relationship with his wife from her perspective but he never once acknowledges that he was a great big tool. He just expects her to forgive him because he’s a different person now.

There are a couple of big twists at the end of the book in the grand tradition of every romance ever written and I’m sure you can guess how it ends given the genre.

The book is written well and it does have its moments, such as when Vaughan has to give the eulogy at his father’s funeral for a man he doesn’t know anymore, when Gary constructs a Wikipedia page for friends and family to reconstruct Vaughan’s life and it is hilariously hijacked by Vaughan’s students (he’s a history teacher) and when he has to take the stand in his divorce proceedings and answers every question with the words, “I can’t remember.”

But it isn’t anything more than a collection of moments following a very familiar formula. There are plenty of worse books out there but there are also plenty of better books. And one dick lit book every few years is probably enough for me.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 13 May 2016

The Fictional Diary: Another Way to Structure Your Novel

I wrote recently about some of the basic choices writers must make when they first begin to write their novel – tense, point of view and perspective – and another of those basic choices is the format of the book. One of the great options is writing your novel as a diary.

Diaries are great for readers because as well as telling a story, they also give a voyeuristic view into the worlds and lives of the people writing them. Diaries are great for writers because they allow for a type of novel that is more focused on the voice of the character rather than how beautiful the words of the author are (even though they are essentially the same thing).

For anyone struggling to get into writing a novel in a more straightforward narrative, a great way to exercise the writing muscles is to forget about writing the novel and to write a diary from the perspective of the main character or characters.

There are some truly terrific and memorable novels that were written as diaries:

*Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding

*The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend

*Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney

*The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot

Perhaps the most notable thing about all of the above books is that they were the start of the books’ series of diaries, which have all been very successful (all made into films or television shows).

Another great use of diaries is as a way of exploring real historical people. There have been books written as the diaries of Anne Boleyn, Adolf Hitler and Jack the Ripper to name a few. Some have clearly been fiction, others were presented as real diaries and later declared hoaxes, others still have people debating their veracity. The Diary of Jack the Ripper: The Discovery, the Investigation and the Debate by Shirley Harrison is a great read, regardless of which side of the fence you fall on. In fact, I included it in my top ten books, writing:

“Who doesn’t love a good hoax diary? That’s to say, if it is a hoax. Paper and ink analysis experts say it’s conclusively a hoax and it probably is but that doesn’t make this book any less of a ripper (pun intended) yarn… Creativity comes in many forms and sometimes that creativity is a little bit sneaky, a little bit underhanded, a little bit malevolent. The story of the Maybrick family was already a fantastic one – patriarch James, a cotton merchant and arsenic addict, his wife Florence, an American (which in those days in England was enough said), his brother Michael, who never liked Florence, Florence’s lover Alfred, a house full of servants and two children who were ultimately left orphans. I don’t think I’m spoiling the surprise if I tell you James died from an arsenic overdose and Florence was convicted of his murder and hanged. And simply by combining the story of the Maybricks with the story of Jack the Ripper, you get this book, which is a terrific way to spend a week, particularly if you’re a Jack the Ripper conspiracy theory enthusiast (which I am).”

In the next novel I am planning to write, the book will open with a diary entry (although it won’t continue in that way) in order to give a voice to a character who will after that day spend twenty years in a coma while the world changes around her. You don’t have to write a whole novel in diary form. You can intersperse a more traditional narrative around entries or you can do as I’m planning to do and use them sparingly.

Writing a diary of your own life can also be a great way to practise. I’ve written previously about writing journals but I’m talking about something entirely more personal. Thoughts, feelings, day-to-day activities that comprise your entire life. Historians love diaries because they are primary sources, firsthand accounts of great moments in history and, even better, of how those great moments in history impacted ordinary people as well as the more normal events that make up the majority of their lives.

There are also plenty of real diaries to read in order to get a sense of how people write their own lives when they think no one is ever going to read it, although many diarists clearly intend for their diaries to be published eventually. Some of the greats include Virginia Woolf, Samuel Pepys and James Boswell. And Anne Frank is probably the most well-known diarist, although I doubt she ever realised her words would be published, let alone so cherished.

In any event, if you’re looking for a way to spice up your own writing journey, the diary – whether fictional or not – is another way to challenge yourself and mix it up.

Deciding Who or What Makes a Writer: Is It a Worthwhile Use of Our Writing Time?

Recently in a writing forum, a poster asked the question, “Can saying ‘I’m a writer’ make you a writer? If so, is this a positive or negative trend in the context of preserving the art and craft of writing?” One witty response was, “Can saying ‘I’m a doctor’ make you a doctor?”

Of course, the answer is no. Just asserting the truth of something doesn’t make it true. In almost everything in life, it is our actions that prove who and what we are. Writers write, doctors study for a long time and then use that knowledge to help people get better. Even love, which is difficult to prove in the abstract, is almost always demonstrated in the small, everyday, practical tasks people in love undertake for each other.

So what are the small, everyday, practical tasks writers undertake that make them writers?

Writing (But Never Showing Anybody)

Simply writing, I think, is a pretty good step – in fact, the most important step – towards being a writer. I’ve come close to addressing this issue before in my blog post entitled, “There’s No Such Thing as an Aspiring Writer”, where I wrote, “If you write, you’re a writer. And if you don’t, then you’re not… The great thing about writing is that you don’t require anyone else’s permission to do it. It doesn’t require study or training, although that helps sometimes. You don’t have to be a member of any group or if you write something you aren’t happy with, you don’t have to show it to anyone. You can write a little here and a little there in between working your real job, paying off your mortgage and raising your family. And anyone with a basic knowledge of the language they want to write in can do it.”

I spent a long time simply writing and not showing anyone the results of what I was doing. Looking back on it now, I think of it as training, practising, getting better. After all, don’t all skills (both those with professional intent and amateur enjoyment) require an investment of time as a means of improvement? And don’t we all like to show off the successes we’re proud of and hide the failures we’re embarrassed by?

With writing, there are likely to be early efforts that we’d rather nobody saw. I know I certainly have plenty of pieces of writing that fall into that category. But does the fact that we hide our less impressive work make us any less of a writer? I don’t think so.

If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one around to hear it, does it still make a sound? Who knows? If someone writes but never shows anyone, are they still a writer? Nothing writes itself. It always requires a writer.

Studying and Gaining Qualifications

I have two writing qualifications and while they have been important to my development as a writer and certainly helpful in gaining employment in the corporate writing field, in terms of the writing I want to do – my novels, my non-fiction books – they are almost shoulder shruggers.

What’s a shoulder shrugger, you ask? It’s the lack of enthusiasm displayed by people who are completely unimpressed by educational studies. You know the type. They ask things like, “Why would you bother with university when the School of Hard Knocks is out there willing to teach you everything you need to know without it costing you a cent?”

Whenever I need to write a short biography for myself, I usually include the fact that I have those two writing qualifications. But now that I’ve published two books, that seems to be the more relevant information.

I also have a university degree in history but I’m certainly not a historian. So I think qualifications, while they may be useful in helping us to become whatever it is we want to become (writer, doctor, historian), are only a stepping stone. Having a writing qualification doesn’t make you a writer.

Putting your Writing Out There (Self-Publishing, Blogging, Writing Groups, Etc)

Much like having a qualification, I don’t think putting your writing out there makes you a writer. But I think it helps in convincing others that you are a writer.

When I started blogging, that was certainly my motivation. I’d done a lot of corporate sales writing that had to remain confidential so when I was asked to provide writing samples, there wasn’t a lot I could do. I started creating and posting pieces on topics that I wanted to write about, which generally were writing, editing and employment as well as all my creative work, and my blog became my writing portfolio.

Creating and maintaining my blog has also helped me become a more prolific writer because I made a decision that I wanted to post frequently. I didn’t want to bother with it if I wasn’t going to fully commit.

So I’m putting a cross through this criterion as well. Putting your writing out there doesn’t make you a writer. But it sure is a great way to prove to others that you are.

Publishing (AKA Getting Others to Put Your Writing Out There)

I will admit that publishing is a great way to convince yourself you are a writer. It wasn’t until my first book was published that I started thinking of myself as one. And getting someone else to publish your book means they thought it was good enough to take a risk on. But there are plenty of unsuccessful books out there. I listened to a publisher recently trying to give away 300 condoms that were sitting in her office, the result of a marketing campaign for a book that failed to gain any traction.

But the fact that it was published doesn’t advance the cause of being considered a writer and the fact that it failed to sell doesn’t in any way diminish the achievement of having written it. I’m putting a line through this one as well.

Earning Money

Ah, the dream of all writers, to be able to quit their day jobs because they’re earning enough money from publishing their writing. It’s not always a practical dream though. There are plenty of well-known authors who have to supplement their incomes by teaching and lecturing and doing a variety of other things they’d really rather not be doing. My last royalty payment was for $1.94 so I’m back to working as a corporate writer, mostly for financial reasons.

There are also plenty of people out there who have never written a thing in their lives such as actors and footballers but who earn considerable amounts of money from books about them and ostensibly by them, although they were almost certainly written by ghostwriters.

Nope, I don’t think this is a good enough qualifier either.

My Verdict

I keep coming back to the first description: simply writing. As far as I’m concerned, a writer is someone who writes, regardless of whether they have also studied it, published it or been paid for it. Nobody can give a writer that title and no one can take it away from them. After all, if we only included people who earn a living from writing, there would be very few writers in this world. Remember, some people write for the love of it.

I suspect this is a question that most writers don’t think about in the context of themselves. I write, therefore I am… a writer. For most of us, it’s as simple as that. It’s when writers start to worry about other writers polluting the writing gene pool that this question gets asked and debated. And to be honest, it seems like an enormous waste of time, worrying about what someone else is or isn’t doing or perhaps isn’t doing well enough.

Certainly the second part of the original poster’s question makes me think that. “If so, is this a positive or negative trend in the context of preserving the art and craft of writing?” Preserving the art and craft of writing? Writing isn’t a closed shop. It’s a “the more, the merrier” sort of prospect. Even at the Olympics, there is room for dozens and dozens of people who all want to do the same thing. Surely writing can accommodate as many people as there are who want to give it a go?

In an age when we are losing young people from the craft of reading, I think anything we can do to encourage them to return should be embraced. The more people who are writing, the more types of writing that exist, the more writing as a whole will appeal to the broad mass of people.

And if when someone asks you what you do and your first inclination is to tell them that you are a writer, then go ahead and do it. Ultimately, the only person who can decide whether you are a writer is you.

 

Book Review: I Came to Say Goodbye by Caroline Overington

This doesn’t happen to me often but there is a moment in this book when my jaw dropped open, like a scene from a cheesy, poorly-acted TV movie, and stayed open and I couldn’t close it. I had to cover my mouth with my hand until the ability to move my face returned to within my control. There aren’t too many books I can say that about. There aren’t too many things in life in general I can say that about.

I Came to Say Goodbye is the second Caroline Overington book I’ve read. I was extremely impressed with the first one, Sisters of Mercy, and you can read my review of that book, too. I keep doing this thing lately, which is being in the middle of a long and difficult book and thinking I’ll just read something else for some light relief and then choosing, unknowingly, to read a book that might be less dense but offers no relief at all.

This is the story of the Atley family. Med, short for Meredith – it’s a boy’s name, too, he insistently tells the reader – is the main narrator. He lives in the country town where he was brought up and gets his brother’s girlfriend, Pat, pregnant while his brother is away fighting in Vietnam and exploring the Vietnamese girls (“They’re all the same,” he writes in a card he sends back to his family). So Med and Pat get married. Kat is born, then Paul.

But Pat isn’t the motherly type and sends Med off to get a vasectomy to make sure there aren’t any more. They don’t wait the required six weeks before having sex and Pat falls pregnant again. Another daughter, Donna-Faye, is born. Med unthinkingly calls her Fat because it rhymes with Pat and Kat. When Fat is two, Pat literally says, “To hell with this,” and walks out on her family. They never see her again.

Kat, the smart child and a teenager by now, is sent off to boarding school in Sydney. Paul drops out of school and heads off to seek his fortune mining for opals at Lightning Ridge. And Med is left to raise a little girl by himself. When she’s fifteen, Fat takes up with a twenty-five year old, a clear loser but what can Med say about it without alienating her completely? He tries to help out, he tries to make the best of it. And when Fat has a baby, all he can think is, “I’m a grandfather!”

But when the baby, Seth, is taken to hospital at fourteen weeks of age, vomiting and lifeless, and then removed from Fat and her partner’s care while the Department of Community Services waits for him to die, everything spirals into a neverending path of courts and caseworkers and mental health services and streams of people trying to do with right thing even though the result is always the same, always the wrong result.

Caroline Overington writes at the start of the book that she has worked for seven years as a journalist and for “better or worse, my round has been child neglect and child murder” and that she wrote this book to honour the people who work so hard and sometimes so fruitlessly to stop it from happening. I don’t know how she could have done it for seven years. After seven days, possibly after seven hours, I would have curled up in a ball and refused to go back to that job ever again.

But she has done a brilliant job at providing amazing insight into situations that everyday people must find themselves in and that the rest of us hope like hell we will never be in. Simply because of taking up with the wrong man, thinking that having a baby might make everything better, having that child taken away, fighting in the courts to get your own child back, the heartbreak of losing, the ways in the which the authorities “help” or try to. This book is full of the people we see in the street, a little shabby, a little uneducated, people we judge and avoid and think, “I’m nothing like them at all.” And she has made them real people, not just caricatures, not just people holding hands up to shield their faces as news cameras chase them down the street after they leave the courts.

At the start, when Med starts writing a letter to a judge and he goes right back to the beginning to when he was born basically, I thought, “Oh, God, what a silly premise. Why couldn’t she have just written a novel?” But I quickly got over it because it is so well written, the story so perfectly revealed, dropping bombshell after bombshell after bombshell.

As I read and came across plenty of spelling and grammatical errors, I was taking points off in my head but I can’t give this book anything other than five stars. Because the story is perfect. The characters are perfect. The writing is perfect. The editor was responsible for everything else and I can’t blame the writer. I don’t want to punish her or this book because of those errors, which can be easily fixed. I can’t say the same about a book where the story, the characters and the writing are just okay but it’s all done with perfect spelling and grammar.

But be warned that this book will knock you for six. You will want to hate and blame and rage against somebody for what happens but in the end there really isn’t anyone left to direct those feelings at. Just a family, like everyone else’s, trying to make the best of their lives.

It will stay with you long after. It will make you want to hug your kids harder. And it will make you want to read more Caroline Overington books once you’ve caught your breath again.

5 stars

*First published on Goodreads 8 May 2016

How to Write a Book Without Even Trying

This might sound a little ridiculous – writing a book without even trying – but since I’ve done it myself (that’s how I wrote Project December: A Book about Writing), it’s not as impossible as it might seem. The key for me was not realising that all the little things I was writing were adding up to a whole book (I thought I was simply writing blog posts). That might be harder for you since if you’re reading this post, then you’re probably already thinking about writing a book. But the further you can push the idea of the book out of your mind, the easier the process will be.

Stay Away from Fiction

I’ve thought about it a lot and I just don’t see any way anyone could write a novel without trying. So step one in this process is to rule out trying to write fiction. If you want to write fiction, then that’s great. Buy a copy of my book, Project December, read it and then get to work. But when you want to write a book without even trying, the two types that will work best are autobiography and non-fiction.

Pick a Subject You Already Know Well

If you pick a subject for your book that you already know really well, you basically eliminate having to do any significant research. Most people know themselves pretty well so that’s one option.

The other option is to choose the subject you are already an expert on. For me, that was writing. For you, it might be model trains. Maybe it’s dog breeding. Or decoupage (I’m not really sure what that is but I know it’s a thing).

This is how most autobiographies and non-fiction books are written – their authors are simply experts on the topic already so it’s not a huge stretch to put it down on paper.

Think about it like this: if there’s one subject that you bore everybody stupid with at family gatherings, football matches, dinner parties and after work drinks, that you never get tired of talking about, that you have endless information and opinions on, then that’s the subject you should choose for your book.

Don’t Set a Deadline

Setting a deadline is simply setting an arbitrary date that you will watch go by and then feel bad because you didn’t finish the process by then. Deadlines are important for publishers because they plan their whole publishing schedule in advance. Publishing is a long way off for people writing books without even trying.

What you should do instead is set goals. Yes, that’s goals; not one big goal but lots of little ones. My little goal was to write one piece of writing every Wednesday and Friday. Sounds pretty easy, right? It was. In fact, it was so easy that on some days I would write two or three pieces of writing and at the end of each week, instead of having just two completed pieces of writing, I would have six.

Setting goals that are simple to achieve means you will achieve them and also means you are likely to achieve a lot more and feel good about yourself while you’re doing it.

Create a List of Mini Topics

My list of mini topics is also known as my ideas board. Whenever I have an idea about something I want to write about, it goes straight onto the ideas board. It might sit there for a few hours, a few days or a few months. It all depends on the cogitation process going on in my head, which decides for me which topic I will be writing about at any given moment.

It’s a good idea to have your list of mini topics on prominent display where your eyes will frequently be drawn to it, even when you’re not writing. Thinking about the mini topics for long enough will eventually get you to a point where you know exactly what you want to say about it and you can’t keep it inside your head any longer.

Take a Mini Topic and Write

Once you’re at the stage where you can’t keep it inside your head any longer, this is probably the point at which you would lecture friends and strangers at the pub, over dinner, in the supermarket queue. You must resist this temptation. Instead, take all the things you are thinking about saying to them and write it down. As well as having the first part of your book down on paper, you’ll probably have the added advantage of finding that your friends like you a little more, strangers avoid you a little less and the rolling of eyes when you talk is almost completely eliminated.

Don’t Look at the Big Picture

Once you’ve written about your first mini topic, then you have your first chapter. Yay! But don’t cheer too hard, because it probably isn’t your first chapter. It’s more likely to be a chapter somewhere in the middle of your book. The piece of writing that ended up being the first chapter of Project December was the fifty-eighth piece that I wrote of all that chapters that ended up in there.

And there were actually plenty of things that I wrote that never made it into the book because when I realised I had written more than enough to fill a book and was figuring out where each chapter belonged, some of them just didn’t fit into the structure I ultimately decided on (which was “Getting Started”, “Characters”, “Writing”, “Editing”, “What Happens Next?” and “Reading”).

At this stage of the process, you shouldn’t have any idea of the big picture, what structure your book will take. Because if you are trying to write towards that big picture, trying to fill that structure, then you are trying. And remember, the whole point of this is to write a book without even trying.

When You Think You’ve Written Enough, Keep Writing

Even when you think you’ve written enough to fill an entire book, keep writing. Because you won’t have enough. There ended up being sixty-four chapters in Project December but there were thirty-two other pieces of writing I did that didn’t make the cut for various reasons. That’s a third of everything I wrote during that period. That’s a lot of writing.

So using that basic equation, even if you have fifty pieces of writing, about fifteen of them won’t be quite right for what your book ends up being, leaving you with only thirty-five chapters and what is starting to seem like a rather short book.

It’s always better to have too much to choose from than not enough. And if you do end up with more writing than you can include in one book, great! That’s the start of your second book. And all of sudden, you’ve started writing your second book without even trying.

*****

There are no guarantees with this method. And it’s undoubtedly a slower process of writing a book than other methods might produce. But those methods can be stressful. This is virtually stress free. Of all the books I’ve written, it was the book I wrote without even trying that was the most fun, the most simple and the best experience for me.

The Beauty of the Midnight Blog Post

I was speaking with another writer at an evening function recently about the structure of our writing days and told him, “I do most of my writing between eight and two.” “Me, too,” he said and he seemed to like the idea that we had similar routines but I knew immediately that it wasn’t the same eight and two I was talking about. “At night,” I clarified. “Oh,” he said as the vast difference in our approach was realised.

I could tell just by looking at him that he was a morning writer. The fact that it was mid-evening and he was blearily drinking his beer and rubbing his eyes made it obvious he was getting ready to go home to sleep. Meanwhile, I was as bright eyed as I normally am at that hour and preparing to go home to write for a few hours.

I know it isn’t always practical for everyone but I have always been a night writer. In previous years, that was just a necessity because I worked a full-time job during the day and I have never been a morning person. Certainly, it would not have been productive for me to get up early to write. I don’t start thinking clearly until about two hours after I get up so I figure I might as well spend that extra time sleeping and schedule my writing for when I am well and truly awake.

Others might be forced to write at night because it’s the only time they get to themselves. But I choose it. To me, there is beauty in the midnight blog post (or whatever other piece of writing I happen to be working on).

I don’t have any children but if I did, they’d be asleep. By that hour, my cats are usually snuggled up beside me or sitting on my stretched out legs (the closest they can get to my lap since the laptop is already on it).

It’s too late for telemarketers and extended family so the phone doesn’t ring. The occasional text might pop up but it’s easily dealt with in seconds rather than minutes. And emails continue to arrive in my inbox but I make sure I’m signed out so I can ignore them until tomorrow.

By that time, the traffic noise has died down to a barely noticeable hum even though I live sandwiched between a freeway, two main roads and the flight path from Tasmania. And as the hour approaches midnight, there’s nothing good on TV to distract me. In fact, after midnight the ads for the phone sex lines start playing and the television starts to be mildly disturbing rather than pleasantly distracting.

So it makes complete sense that this is the time I should write.

I also schedule my blog posts so that they are posted at midnight every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. At least, it’s midnight somewhere in the world (somewhere in the US where WordPress is headquartered, I think). Here in Australia the posts appear at 11.00 am (10.00 am during Daylight Savings Time). But that’s usually the time I’m conscious and able to think clearly in the morning so there’s a nice correlation.

I’m sure there is beauty in the morning blog post, beauty in the lunchtime blog post, beauty in the afternoon blog post and beauty in the evening blog post. But it’s all in the eye of the beholder, right? So until circumstances force me to be in bed early, I’m going to sit up late and write.

As that other writer would say, as he frequently used to say before we both became full-time writers but would spend hours imagining it, “I’m living the dream.”

Book Review: allmenarebastards.com by Allison Rushby

There are some books that are destined not to be remembered and allmenarebastards.com falls into that category. Not because it’s bad. It’s okay. But because it isn’t timeless. It’s about a very specific period in time. It’s a little like the Sue Grafton books with Kinsey Milhone dropping off reels of film for photographs to be developed. It was published in 2000 and its foray into the online world is dated now – the sounds of the dial up modem, having to disconnect from the internet to make a phone call, people having “homepages”. The world has come a long way since then.

Gemma, our main character, and Sarah are typical late twenty-somethings, unlucky in love, drowning their sorrows in Friday night margaritas and keeping a list of every bastard who has ever done them wrong. It’s twenty pages long, stained and falling apart, so to ensure its continued existence, Gemma decides to put it on her homepage. Overnight, it becomes an internet sensation. Before long, it’s a website of its own (with the same name as the book) and Gemma gives up her freelance graphic design job to become its full-time administrator as the advertising revenue begins rolling in.

In fact, Gemma is doing so well and the website is so successful that she takes on a PA, a man named Chris who is so efficient that she now has plenty of time to become even more convinced that all men are bastards as she reads through the submissions from women around the world. From the discourteous to the downright criminal, it seems like every woman has a story to tell. And when Brett, Gemma’s ex-fiancé, calls to tell her he’s getting married to somebody else and to ask her to take down his entry from the website, it’s the last straw.

But, of course, not all men are bastards and some women are bastards and we take a convoluted course for Gemma to come to that realisation through her slowly developing feelings for Chris. But they’re almost too slow to develop. In fact, if it wasn’t for an online chat with an anonymous contributor to the website, she probably wouldn’t have even thought about Chris like that. Because he’s aloof and infuriating and refuses to tell her anything about himself. Even after having read the book, I’m still not sure I feel like I know anything about him or why she would fall for him.

The whole book is written like the author is having a conversation with the reader, very informal, very relaxed, very self-deprecating. But it’s a conversation with a late twenty-something who still hasn’t quite figured out hygiene or how much alcohol she can drink or that she doesn’t know everything or the fact that she doesn’t actually need a man to make her life complete.

allmenarebastards.com falls into the chick lit category and then falls even further into the chick lit lite category. Fans of Alexandra Potter will probably recognise the formula and they might even enjoy it. I think Alexandra Potter is better though.

There are moments in the book when you will agree that all men are bastards such as when Courtney sends her submission to the website about being gang-raped by three men, one of whom was her uncle, or when Gemma is reading an article about an Italian judge ruling that a woman wearing jeans can’t be raped because she’d have to have helped to remove the tight denim pants. It almost feels like Allison Rushby collected a whole bunch of real world examples and used them to express her frustration with the way a lot of men act with this fake story. Almost as though her indignation got in the way of making it a better book.

But, women, if you’re looking for an easy read after a horrific break-up, this will go down a treat. And, men, I’d stay away entirely unless you’re masochistic. Then again, it’s a great what-not-to-do manual for dating. But it’s not going to change the world at large or the world of literature.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 5 May 2016

Endorsement Quotes on Book Covers: Who the Hell is SJ Watson?

I bought two books recently that had something in common, which was that they both had quotes of endorsement on their covers from SJ Watson. It made me wonder two things. One, is there any value in them, something that makes readers gravitate towards books with them and choose them over books without them? And two, who the hell is SJ Watson?

Okay, so I know now that SJ Watson is the author of Before I Go to Sleep, which was made into a movie starring Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth. I haven’t read the book or seen the film (and didn’t know who he was) so clearly when I was choosing those two books, the presence of his endorsement was not a consideration for me. But then again, I read so many books that maybe I don’t need to whittle them down to a chosen few. For those who have less time to devote to reading than I do, perhaps those testimonials really are useful.

The two books with the SJ Watson endorsements were The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer and The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, both of which I gave three star ratings. Now I’m wondering if I should read Before I Go to Sleep just to see if it’s a three star kind of book, too.

So, clearly, the association might also work against the author giving them. I once read a book that I didn’t end up liking all that much and on the front cover was an endorsement from Garry Disher. Much like SJ Watson, I’d never heard of Garry Disher at the time. Now I know he’s a writer. I’ve seen his books in the book store. But because he endorsed a book that I thought wasn’t very good, I doubt I will ever read them.

It’s not just quotes that are used as endorsements. There are also logos for winning or making the shortlist of prestigious awards, the “Author of Previous Bestseller” listings and the “New York Times Bestseller” tag that made me wonder how hard it is to make that list if so many people are making it. All books seem to have some sort of added extra to make the reader think about buying them. On the cover of my book Project December: A Book about Writing, I included the words “from the author of Enemies Closer and the blog Single White Female Writer” even though the numbers of people who have read my debut novel and my blog really didn’t justify it.

For me, endorsements tend to mean something after I’ve read a book, not before, and several of my book reviews reinforce this where I’ve mentioned the cover quotes:

“There are five quotes on the cover of this book, all by men. I suspect if the publisher had sought any from women, they would not have thought as highly of it as the men did. I don’t feel like this is a story or a character that women would, should or could appreciate.”

From my 2 star book review of All That Is by James Salter

“The quotes on the front and back cover and on the first page are a who’s who of other authors lining up to recommend it: Michael Connelly, Minette Walters, Harlan Coben, Val McDermid, Tess Gerritsen, Colin Dexter and Karin Slaughter. I was already reading Mo Hayder when this book was published so the recommendations didn’t factor into my purchasing decision, but they powerfully reinforced what I came to feel about the book.”

From my 5 star book review of Tokyo (AKA The Devil of Nanking) by Mo Hayder

“The cover of the version I read was drenched in recommendations from other authors and the publisher had even included an extra page of recommendations, a glossy page that seemed like an afterthought after the book had been printed. Usually, when a book is so highly recommended, I am sceptical. But every one of them calling this book ‘perfect’ and ‘elegiac’ and ‘remarkable’ and ‘touching’ and ‘heartbreaking’ and ‘poignant’ and ‘important’ and ‘a tour de force’ is justified.”

From my 5 star book review of The Fault in our Stars by John Green

I’ve never been asked to endorse a book (I suspect I need to be more famous than I am now – which since I’m not famous at all would have to be a whole lot more). It would have to be a 4 or 5 star rated book for me to want to do that. But I’ve written a lot of book reviews and because I like to point out positives as well as negatives where I can, it’s possible that my endorsement could end up on the cover of a book I didn’t give 4 or 5 stars. In my 2.5 star rated review of Gaslight Carnival, I wrote, “Fans of Samantha Shannon could easily be fans of Tracy Cembor.” It would sound great on a cover endorsement. Except I’m not really a fan of Samantha Shannon. In fact, I’m more a fan of Tracey Cembor than I am Samantha Shannon. So how much meaning does the quote end up having?

I guess like everything when it comes to marketing, we have to take book cover endorsement quotes with a grain of salt. Of course, the quotes are going to say good things. They wouldn’t be on the cover if they didn’t. So I don’t put much stock in them. It’s the same reason that I don’t read book reviews before I read a book. I want to have my own experience of reading it, not somebody else’s. I don’t want to be unfairly influenced either way. I rely on the blurb to draw me in or not. Everything else is up to the book itself. As it should be.