L.E. Truscott's Blog, page 40

Book Review: Ninety East Ridge by Stephen Reilly

I first read this book in 2002 when it was originally released. It’s probably every sibling’s worst nightmare to be continually mentioned only in reference to your more famous brother or sister but that’s how I found out about this book. Matthew Reilly had published several immensely successful books, which I had read, and when I heard his brother, Stephen, had published a novel of his own, I was interested to read it.

I have now read it again thirteen years later as part of several I am rereading in order to post reviews on Goodreads for books that I have only rated. It’s much as I remembered, which is a positive.

Ninety East Ridge contains numerous characters but the two who dominate the story are Anna Spires and Matthew Turner. Anna is a talented engineer with a vision – to build a new civilisation. Without money, without fossil fuels, without defence forces. And with direct democracy, with science that isn’t for profit, with equality for all. Matt is a games designer with a lack of direction. When Anna announces to the world’s media that she’s going to build this civilisation in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Matt is enamoured with the idea and enchanted by her. He hitchhikes across Australia and hops a fishing trawler to become the new civilisation’s first refugee.

Oh, and the civilisation in the middle of the ocean is being constructed by building a huge cylindrical sea wall and pumping out all the water to create what is becoming less and less available these days: land. It’s a radical idea and a huge amount of engineering work, which is why the project has been secretly underway for the past five years.

You know from the first page that the project fails so I’m not giving away anything there. It’s the first in a long succession of secrets that are periodically revealed, not for any reason other than it propels the story. Anna’s been secretly married to the project’s financial backer for years. Matt abandoned his fiancée to join the project. Everybody has their secrets, which in one way or another contribute to the downfall.

Because, of course, there’s one thing about the world that can’t be changed: human nature. Even though some of the world’s brightest minds are recruited for the project, they bring with them all their prejudices, all their weaknesses. There are people determined to break up marriages, people determined to keep the ways of the old world, people determined that the new world cannot happen, no matter what.

In the end, it’s a morality tale. Except I’m not sure exactly what the moral is. The project spends $4.4 trillion trying to achieve Anna’s vision even while the populations of African nations starve and the Middle East is at war. Is it more important for rich people to feel like they’re doing something important in a historical context even if it means leaving the most vulnerable behind?

The style is flowery at times. A lot of characters speak and think in bumper sticker slogans. And it takes a long time for not a lot to happen. It’s not the kind of book with fast-paced plotting (so no comparisons with the books of his brother). But it is the kind of book that when you read the last page, you have to sit and think in quiet retrospection for a while.

In the thirteen years since I first read this book, there was one phrase that stuck with me because it was such a unique piece of description, pronouncing random beautiful people attending a party as having “star spangled smiles”. Sometimes it’s just the small moments that make all the difference for individual readers and that small moment did it for me. It was worth reading nearly four hundred pages just for that.

Stephen Reilly hasn’t published any other novels that I’m aware of. I’m left to wonder if he is the kind of writer who only has one novel in him. If that’s the case, Ninety East Ridge is a reasonable effort. But it won’t be for everyone. But I’ve read it twice now. And I’ll probably read it again in another thirteen years to see if my feeling have changed about it. If they haven’t now, they probably won’t. But it’s a book worth rereading.

*First published on Goodreads 16 September 2015

Announcing the release of my new book, Project December

I’m very pleased to announce the release of my new book called Project December: A book about writing.

Project December is all about writing – a guide for writers and wannabes to getting started, developing characters and plot, the writing itself, editing and what to do when the book is finished.

For the next few months, it will be available exclusively as an ebook through Amazon. To find it on Amazon US, click here. To find it on Amazon Australia, click here. And it should be available on all the other local Amazon sites.

Thanks for reading my blog and thanks in advance for reading my book!

Where Have All The Idealists Gone?

In May this year, I interviewed Barry* for an article. We talked about many things, mostly him, but somewhere in the middle of our conversation, we deviated onto the broader topic of workplaces with poor cultures, poor managers or poor management styles.

He’d just been made redundant from a company he’d been with for over a decade and in that time he’d become jaded and demotivated and he was far from being the only one. From processes that made no sense to workers who were treated with contempt, he’d seen enough to welcome the redundancy and the chance to move on and up in his career, hopefully to a company that didn’t engender the same or similar employee disappointment and dissatisfaction.

My response, in the form of a question, was this: “If good employees leave, how will poor cultures and poor managers ever change?”

Barry didn’t answer. He didn’t know the answer. We finished the interview and as I drove home, the question crystallised in my mind. Because it’s not just the workplace where this is relevant, it’s the entire world. If we all just turn our backs or leave when times get tough or when we encounter difficulties, where will the impetus for change for the better come from?

In short, I wondered, where have all the idealists gone?

The Workplace

I was an idealist once. It’s probably more accurate to say I was a perfectionist who wanted to use that specific skill (or obsession, if you prefer) to achieve something approaching an ideal situation. Progress at the very least if not completion.

But the intention was subtly taken from me in most cases and blatantly beaten out of me in others over a succession of workplaces, some better, some worse than others. Bullies prospered and were promoted and people in positions that you would generally consider gave them the power to effect real change did nothing or were prevented from doing something by even higher powers. Employee morale was equivalent to environmental programs in the eyes of the hierarchy – paid plenty of lip service and then forgotten.

Workplaces these days have become adversarial, everyday and ongoing mini competitions, not just between management and employees but also between every individual worker. It’s not about what can be achieved as a team, it’s about what an individual can achieve – or at least claim to have achieved, often by screwing over the rest of the team when the time comes for recognition – and how that achievement can be used to climb the corporate ladder.

Syria

To someone safely ensconced in a comfortable, wealthy and very far away country like Australia, it’s probably easy to look at the Syrian crisis and ask the same question: “Where have all the idealists gone?”

There are so many refugees fleeing the country, over the border into Turkey and further into Europe if they are lucky enough to make it that far, that it’s difficult to believe there’s anyone left. In past conflicts, it seemed like more people stayed to fight. Perhaps it only seemed that way. Maybe what they actually did was stay to die and Syrians aren’t prepared to suffer the same fate.

Which is fair enough. But it doesn’t help in answering my original question. It doesn’t help us to understand how things will ever get better in Syria if everyone who could make a difference, if everyone who has a genuine right to determine the future of the country – Syrians – leaves.

Fiction

So where have all the idealists gone? I’ve had this question written on my ideas board for months now. A few weeks ago I added the following words next to it: “Only in fiction these days.”

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that idealists are disappearing from our fiction, too. The appetite for anti-heroes seems insatiable. Katniss Everdeen. Walter White. Hannibal Lecter. Dexter Morgan. Raymond Reddington. Tom Ripley. Jack Reacher. Captain Jack Sparrow. Emily Thorne (formerly Amanda Clarke). I could go on and on. In fact, there are so many anti-heroes, there’s an entire Wikipedia article devoted to listing them all.

I can understand this appetite. These characters are so much more interesting and complex. And because it’s fiction, they often achieve an ideal anyway. But is it influencing a generation of people who are no longer willing to try to change the world for the better?

Humanitarian Clowns

I was an idealist once. But I now sound like a cynic. I don’t like that. But I think I may have gotten a little bit of my idealism back last night after meeting with representatives of a charity called Humanitarian Clowns.

I previously worked with their Treasurer and agreed to donate my time to help develop proposal material to assist with fundraising, sponsorship and grant applications.

Humanitarian Clowns offers a variety of charitable services but its primary role is compassionate clowning. They visit aged care facilities, rehab facilities, the homeless, seeking people who often slip through the cracks, the forgotten, to provide laughter therapy and what they call Random Acts of Clownness.

I asked for a demonstration so that I could properly understand what it is I’m going to be writing about. The demonstration lasted less than ten seconds but in those brief moments I was enchanted, I was smiling and I was convinced that this kind of engagement was important and could change lives for the better. Maybe not the world, at least not all at once, but definitely lives.

Humanitarian Clowns is a charity very much in its infancy but they already have close to 100 volunteers in Australia and more than 300 in a variety of other countries around the world.

I know there are a lot of charities out there these days, so many different causes, so many worthy intentions. But here is where at least some of the idealists have gone. If you can donate, if you have room in your charitable donation budget, consider Humanitarian Clowns. Go to their website (soon to be overhauled through another generous donation of time from a web and marketing specialist) to learn more about them and how you can help them change the world, one laugh and one smile at a time.

*Named changed for privacy reasons

Book Review: The Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly is one of those writers you can always rely on (with a rare exception or two) to produce a book that you don’t regret picking up.

This is the latest in the Mickey Haller series (keep an eye out for a cameo from Harry Bosch). Mickey takes on a case defending a man accused of killing a prostitute, who herself was a former client of Mickey’s. It’s a pretty straightforward courtroom thriller with a law enforcement conspiracy thrown in for good measure (yawn – when will we see the end of the ‘good guy is actually the bad guy’ endings?).

I enjoyed it and was disappointed when it ended as Connelly is terrific at arranging words on the page to keep you intrigued. But there was no real ‘Wow!’ moment and the book has more than a few spelling and grammatical errors that any editor worth their salt should have picked up on – I certainly did and it was a distraction.

If you’re a fan, you won’t be disappointed. In you’re not, it won’t matter too much if this is the first book in the Mickey Haller series you read. Worth a look.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 24 August 2014

The Stories Around You, Stereotypes And What You Find When You Scratch The Surface

For months now, the top of my ideas board has been occupied by the following yet to be explored (until now) idea for a blog post:

“Taking inspiration from the things you see around you every day (myself as murder victim or suspect – what could the police tell about me from my house?)”

For some reason, I kept focusing on the bits and pieces tacked to my refrigerator including photographs of and drawings by various nieces and nephews. And, of course, what these things say about me is that even though I’m single, I am part of an extended (and still growing) family and I am loved. But recently something happened that made me realise I’m too close to the subject matter. Not able to see the forest for the trees.

Because being an aunt is not my defining characteristic and upon entering my house in the event of my unnatural death or to arrest me for someone else’s, the fridge is not the first thing the police would notice.

No, the first thing they would notice is the nine cats.

Now please let me assure you that I don’t normally have nine cats. I normally have three. I recently saw someone on television telling the viewing audience that having any more than one cat makes you a crazy cat lady, so I can’t avoid the tag anyway (although I prefer cat woman). And it’s understandable.

But calling me a crazy cat lady and just leaving it at that ignores the multiple events over a rather long period during which I became known in this way.

At the end of this story, I’ll still be a crazy cat lady. But you’ll be able to see why. You’ll be able to see my character development, if you like. And hopefully when you do look at the people around you and think about using them for inspiration in your writing, you won’t just make them stereotypes; you’ll give them depth, multiple dimensions and a back story worthy of you as a writer.

My Name Is Louise and I Am a Crazy Cat Lady

Until I got my first cat, I always thought of myself as a dog person. My parents bought me a Pomeranian cross when I was six months old and his name was Boffy. He was with me through my parents’ divorce, multiple house moves, finishing primary school and heading into the scary world of high school. The Easter before I turned fourteen, I was staying with my dad when my mum called to tell me that Boffy had died. I was devastated and I had no desire to replace him.

I was twenty-eight when I bought my first house. When one of the other residents was moving out, a note appeared in all the mailboxes asking if someone would take her cat, a tortoiseshell named Torti. Because I didn’t consider myself a cat person, I didn’t even really think about it. Until about four days after my neighbour had moved out and I found Torti living in my garden under a cover I used to protect my bike from the elements. My neighbour had gone and simply left Torti behind.

And that’s how I got my first cat. I didn’t understand how anyone could just abandon a pet, an elderly pet at that. I certainly wasn’t going to be that kind of person.

My house was a unit in a suburb that had something of a stray cat problem – not hard to understand why given my former neighbour’s actions. I had volunteered to become the property manager of the twelve unit complex to save the owners, including myself, some money. And one of the most common complaints was in relation to the stray cats.

The local council offered a free service. Humane cat traps could be borrowed and when a cat was trapped, you simply called the council. They would come to collect it and take the cat away. I’m not naïve. I know that in all likelihood the cat would be determined to be without an owner. I also know that over 50,000 cats are put down in Australia every year.

It only took a day or two and we trapped a thin black cat. The council came and took it away.

A couple of days later, the tenants of one of the units complained about a noise coming from underneath their floorboards and asked me to investigate. And when I crawled under the house, I found four black kittens no more than a week or two old crying for their mother. The mother I had taken away.

I took the kittens to the vet to see what could be done for them but I was told they were too young to survive without their mother unless I was prepared to become their full-time carer. And that meant full time. Newborn kittens need to be fed every one to two hours. But I worked full time. And Torti did not react well for the hour or so the kittens were in my house before I took them to the vet.

The vet said the kittens would have to be put down. He took them away, out of sight to the back of the surgery and that was the last time I saw them. I cried all that night and I am crying now as I write this because that was the moment that I failed. That was the moment that I was asked to step up and didn’t.

I refused to trap any more cats after that. Instead of trapping them, I started befriending the stray cats that would turn up and another neighbour did the same. That’s how Kiwi came to live with me. He was a big all-black male and he had clearly been somebody’s cat because he was tame and desexed but he never left our property.

Torti died after three years with me, most likely because she was old, after a short illness. Her lungs kept filling with fluid and she couldn’t breathe properly anymore. She died in my arms the night before my sister’s twenty-first birthday party. I was inconsolable for months and determined that it would just be me and Kiwi from then on.

But one morning six months later, as I was putting Kiwi out before heading off to work, I noticed a tabby and white cat in my garden emerging from the kennel that was supposed to be for Kiwi during inclement weather. And when I went down to have a look in it, there were two black and white kittens in there, staring back at me.

They were older kittens, old enough that they were no longer feeding from their mother. I managed to grab one but the other escaped. Kiwi and the kitten bonded immediately. I don’t know why because Kiwi is normally a jealous brute but he loved that little boy. I christened him Jock because he was so active.

The other kitten continued living in my garden but it was wary, knowing I had snatched Jock away. It took another two months to catch Jock’s sister, who my youngest sister adopted and named Lexi. I assumed the mother was owned by somebody in the area because she was so tame and so friendly that she approached me from day one and seemed comfortable around humans.

It was only a couple of weeks later when I looked at the tabby and white cat, which was continuing to come by my house every day, and I realised she was fattening – pregnant again. Clearly, even if she was owned, it was by someone not familiar with how to be a responsible pet owner. I let her into my house and she never left. That was five years ago.

Mama Mia gave birth to five kittens and I found homes for them all but she stayed with me. Three cats. Kiwi, Jock and his mother, Mia. And I was, and still am, very determined that I can’t have any more cats. I might be a softie but I’m not a lunatic.

I’ve since sold my first house and bought another in a different suburb that doesn’t have a recognised stray cat problem. I’ve been here for over four years and barely seen another cat. Until six weeks ago.

I don’t know how she found me. But Sunday morning six weeks ago, I was woken early by a young tabby vocalising at my front door. For those who don’t know cats, vocalising is a lot like a child crying. It’s hard to ignore. I went downstairs to investigate and my three cats were all sitting at the window by the front door looking out and the tabby was sitting on the other side looking in and making an awful racket.

I opened the door and she ran. Not tame, then. But she came back the next day. And the next. And the next. I gave her a little food. She started coming back morning and night. This routine established itself for two weeks and over that period I noticed that her stomach was getting rounder and rounder on the sides.

I don’t know how but I knew she was pregnant. So I steeled myself and made the decision. I grabbed her by the scruff of the neck on a Monday morning. She wasn’t happy about it. I put her in my garage, made a nest out of old bedding, and gave her food, water and a litter tray. The next day I took her to the vet to check for a microchip. Not surprisingly, she didn’t have one. But she was healthy, he told me. I asked if she was pregnant. He couldn’t tell – if she was it was too early for him to be able to confirm it.

But I knew. And three nights ago, Tabitha – as I have named her – gave birth to five kittens in my study. So now it’s me and nine cats; Kiwi, Jock, Mia, Tabitha, three tabby kittens and two black ones.

Friends and family who I’ve told about this look at me in a way most people don’t want to be looked at. Nobody seems to understand that had I shooed Tabitha away and washed my hands of the situation, there would now be six stray cats roaming my neighbourhood instead of just one. And six quickly becomes more than you can count on two hands because cats apparently have no problem mating with their brothers and sisters as soon as they reach sexual maturity.

Neither Tabitha nor the kittens will remain living with me any longer than I can manage. Kittens can leave their mother at twelve weeks and I’m already telling everybody I know and having them tell everybody they know that there are kittens needing good homes. If I can’t find homes for all six of them, I know of a cat shelter that has a “no kill” policy, taking as long as it takes to find homes for cats. My neighbour’s mother told me she follows them on Facebook and one featured cat spent over forty weeks at that shelter.

So, short version, I’m a crazy cat lady. And I’m going to be a little bit crazier than normal for the next three months. But it all makes sense if you know the long version. And maybe I’m a little bit less of a stereotype than the label suggests. I certainly hope so.

From One Crazy Cat Lady to Another

Of course, there’s a crazy cat lady just a little more famous than me. I refer, of course, to the original, the inimitable, the one and only Dr Eleanor Abernathy MD JD. Who? Well, she’s much better known as Crazy Cat Lady from The Simpsons.

The creative honchos responsible for this long running cartoon have admitted that she was meant to be a one-off character. But they liked her so much that they began to give her a back story. It turns out that she was a bit of a smart child. By the age of 16, she was studying to be a lawyer at Yale and by the time she was 24, she had also earned an MD from Harvard. But by 32, she was burned out and had turned to alcohol.

As a result, Eleanor now suffers from alcoholism and mental illness and is constantly surrounded by her many feline friends. And the fact that we know all this about her makes her so much more interesting than just being Crazy Cat Lady. Instead of simply laughing at her and judging her, we love and understand her.

As writers, this should be our goal for all characters in our writing, from the supporting cast to the main players. I apologise for using my own long-winded crazy cat lady story to demonstrate it but really, would you have done any different if you were me? Would your characters have done any different if they were me? And if they would have done something different, is there something in their back story that logically explains why? I hope so. And your readers will, too.

The Benefits Of An Ideas Board

I’ve written before about my ideas board. I’ve had it since July when I went out with the specific purpose of purchasing an actual whiteboard to replace the scraps of paper I was writing my ideas on and struggling to keep track of. It now has pride of place in my bedroom (where I do most of my writing); in fact, it’s sitting on a bedside table that is no longer at my bedside but between two windows across the room so I have a good view of it at all times. (There’s a lamp abandoned forlornly on the floor.)

As writers, we can sometimes lose sight of the little things that help make writing easier. My big picture was to write a lot of blog posts. But the small step of buying and implementing the ideas board is what has helped me to do it. Here’s why.

Organisation

The older I get, the harder it is to keep ideas just in my head. I used to be good at it. Now when I have a great idea and don’t write it down, I am usually able to remember that I had a great idea, just not what the idea was.

I suspect it’s a result not only of age but also the number of different pieces of writing I am constantly trying to juggle these days. Multiple novels in multiple series, multiple blog posts, multiple articles, the occasional poem. It’s all just too much.

But having it all written there on the ideas board helps me to keep track of everything. Sometimes it’s not a coherent idea, just a thought I might have had or an idea for a title with no idea of what the actual piece is going to be about. Current examples of this include:

*Things we don’t talk about

*Love should not be an obligation or an expectation – love always wins

*Where have all the idealists gone?

The one about idealists has been floating around in my head since May and has been on the board since the first day I bought it in July. I think I finally know what the idea is and how to execute it because I’ve been confronted with it so often that I’ve been thinking about it on and off for months. But without the ideas board it probably would have been nothing more than a fleeting thought.

Motivation

I look at my ideas board up to fifty times a day. In the morning when I wake up, when I get dressed, during commercials when I’m watching television, every time I leave the room, every time I come back into it, and before I turn the light off to go to sleep at night.

The presence of the board has become so motivating that I am now having to force myself not to write. I entered a writing competition yesterday – one that I’ve known about for three months and have been telling myself I have to submit to for the same length of time – but only after I looked at my ideas board eagerly, then said it myself, “No, Louise, you have other plans for today.” I entered the competition, then wrote a blog post as well.

Actually, this has been one of the most productive blog writing periods of my life. Eight in five days this week alone. Because I keep looking at my ideas board and being inspired. It’s a visual and unavoidable reminder that there is always something more, something else, something next to write about.

Satisfaction

There are plenty of things I find satisfying but in recent times there is little I find more satisfying than picking up the eraser and removing an idea from the whiteboard after I’ve finished writing about it. In fact, the idea for this post about the ideas board came to me as I was doing just that. I was crouching down to erase an idea at the bottom of the board and I realised I was smiling stupidly. And then I realised why.

I used to get the same satisfaction from drawing lines through items on a paper-based to do list but I’d be left with a messy page full of crossed out text that would have to be thrown out (recycled) eventually, usually before I’d finished everything on the list because I couldn’t stand the chaos on the page.

The whiteboard never has lines through text and while my handwriting might not be straight or might be a bit untidy because I haven’t been able to lean on the writing beneath it when I’m filling a previously used gap, it is a source of more satisfaction than I ever thought it would be.

Post-It Postscript

I’ve previously been a proponent of the post-it method but it has a significant drawback in that you have to be quite close to be able to read them. The whiteboard has allowed me to use large handwriting and position it across the room. I can then lie on my bed and contemplate it in comfort for hours. I’ve quoted Truman Capote before on this topic, who said, “I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down.” If only he’d had an ideas board.

Book Review: Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

A friend of mine recommended this book to me last year with the comment that it “reiterated my choice to not have kids. I think you might like this book, but don’t hate me if you don’t.” She has a history of recommending books that are long, sweeping, epic sagas and take long journeys through the lives of multiple characters in such detail that it is painful and mind-numbing to me. (Each to their own, right?)

And when I told my (married) sister (with three children) I was reading this book, she looked at me strangely and said, “I didn’t think it was your kind of novel.” She wasn’t wrong. Without knowing anything more about it than the information revealed in the extremely small blurb, I didn’t think it was my kind of novel either. Parents, children, school participation, gossip, feuds and a murder, a slightly atypical suburban nightmare but still a nightmare nonetheless. As someone who has chosen not to take the traditional wife, husband, 2.4 kids path, I suspected I was going to be not just disappointed with this book but bored stiff.

Savour this moment because you won’t hear me say this (or see me write this) very often. I was wrong. So very wrong. Gleefully, gloriously wrong.

Big Little Lies is the story of Madeleine, Celeste and Jane, three parents who have children starting kindergarten. Madeline is a mother of three, abandoned by her first husband when their daughter was a newborn and now happily remarried. Celeste is a mother of two (twin boys), married, rich, beautiful, smart and adored by everyone in town who thinks she has a perfect life. Jane is the newly-arrived mother of one, a single parent in a town that doesn’t have too many single parents and with a son named Ziggy in a town that doesn’t have too many parents who would name their child Ziggy.

But, of course, as the title suggests, not everything in the lives of these women or any of the other characters who populate the fictional town of Pirriwee is as it seems. Before the reader has even settled in with a cup of tea and a cookie, five-year-old Ziggy has been accused of bullying behaviour against another classmate at kindergarten orientation and a divide appears between the parents with Madeleine, Celeste and Jane on one side and most parents on the other.

The story reveals almost immediately that someone has died at the local school’s trivia night to raise funds for “smart boards” (whatever they are), then rewinds more than six months to show the events leading up to it and each chapter is supplemented with commentary from other mothers and fathers as they are interviewed by a reporter after the event. It’s a triumph of structure as well as execution as the facts and memories and different viewpoints of each participant and witness slowly dribble out and begin to form a complete narrative.

Liane Moriarty has created a large cast of complex and interesting main and supporting characters, none of whom are copies of each other, just as in real life, despite their commonalities. And she has weaved them into a story that on the face of it should be banal, the kind of suburban drama that goes on every day in every town in every country around the world. But she does it with such superb command of the English language and understanding of the beauty to be found in unremarkable, ordinary, routine daily interactions.

I particularly liked the supporting character of Samantha, who is one of those parents interviewed by the reporter, but who isn’t actually seen in the story until the trivia night. Her observations are peppered with humour and the common sense that is severely lacking in a lot of the other characters as what should have been a minor incident between five-year-olds is whipped up into fever pitch.

Perhaps Liane Moriarty’s greatest achievement is that by the end of the book, not one of the characters seems right or wrong or good or bad. Everyone is simply human and the novel is a study of the grey middle in which most people live their lives between the extremes of black and white.

I ummed and ahhed over whether to give this book 5 stars and I was genuinely torn because it was so good. In the end, I withheld the last star because when you find out who has died, it’s the person who deserved it, which meant it was a little too neatly wrapped up, a little too much of a “happy” ending in a book that spent so much time showing that life and its ongoing endings are rarely neatly wrapped up or happy.

However, this was Liane Moriarty’s sixth book and it has convinced me I also need to read her first five and any future releases. In my mind, there is no better endorsement I can give than saying Big Little Lies is a book that leaves me wanting to read the author’s entire back catalogue.

*First published on Goodreads 16 August 2015

Three Books Women In Their Thirties Should Read About Misinformation, Motivation and Motherhood

(Note: When I first published this article on LinkedIn, it was read by approximately 9,000 people and liked over 650 times and one of the authors of the books I recommend contacted me to thank me for her inclusion on the list. It is my most read piece of writing ever. I can’t tell you why. But it was fun while it was happening.)

I’m not generally someone who recommends self-help books. In fact, in the past I have been guilty of pouring scorn on many of them, perhaps because the ones I’ve picked up and started reading have been particularly vague (what exactly is self-actualisation?) and therefore particularly unhelpful to someone like me who prefers the literal to the lateral.

Finding a self-help book that is actually going to help you is a deeply personal thing. You have to be at a particular point in your life to benefit from specific self-help books. And you have to be going through a similar crisis to the one being described by the author. And you have to be able to put into practice what they are telling you to do. They’re long odds.

But as I was sitting in my study recently, the three books I am about to recommend kept jumping out at me despite being on three different shelves on three different bookcases. I’ve read, and in some cases reread, all three of these books in the past five years and the longer I looked at them in conjunction, the clearer it became. These three books had important things to say to women of a certain age.

Only two of them actually qualify as self-help books. The other is a beautifully written and yet deeply disturbing work of fiction. And in recommending them, I am not suggesting they will solve anything. What they will do, I hope, is begin a journey towards realisation for women in their thirties about what it is they really want and how things might have to change in order to accomplish them.

They fall into three categories – I’ve christened them misinformation, motivation and motherhood.

Misinformation

This will probably sound familiar to a lot of women in their thirties and older. (If you’re a woman in your twenties, you might recognise it or you might have to wait until you’re in your thirties to recognise that it is happening to you right now.) But I spent most of my twenties and a lot of my early thirties doing everything that was expected of me (both personally and professionally), doing it well, doing it politely and nevertheless being treated poorly by people in charge. And when I say in charge, I mean people who had power over me because of professional or personal positions or because I simply allowed them to have power over me.

Because I was, and mostly still am, a nice girl.

According to Lois P Frankel PhD and Carol M Frohlinger JD, “If you often feel invisible, taken advantage of, treated less than respectfully, or at a loss for how to get the things you most want in life – join the club. The nice girls club, that is.”

In their book Nice Girls Just Don’t Get It, which is one of a few in the Nice Girls… series (others include Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office and Nice Girls Don’t Get Rich), they assert, “As women, we’re bombarded throughout our lives with messages that try to convince us that being ‘nice’ is more important than getting the things we want. Even if no one has ever said this to you explicitly, we’re guessing you’ve most likely absorbed the message that putting your needs first will land you on the ‘bitch list’.”

Nobody wants to be thought of as a bitch. But the disappointing truth is that being a nice girl is something that many, many other people will abuse. Which kind of leaves us between a rock and hard place.

What nice girls need – all women, in fact – is a little bit of power. Not power that is given but power that is taken. And the willingness to exercise that power more than just every once in a while. This doesn’t mean switching a nice girl persona for one that abuses other nice people. It’s about recognising that you can be a nice person and stand up for yourself at the same time.

Sometimes it’s about learning to say yes. Sometimes it’s about learning to say no. And sometimes it’s about learning to prioritise yourself above others – because certainly no one else is going to. It’s all about how you say yes, how you say no and how you prioritise yourself.

It’s hard. There are 99 tactics outlined in Nice Girls Just Don’t Get It and I haven’t even come close to implementing them all. I probably haven’t even tackled ten per cent. After all, change is a long process. But a few that I’ve found useful have included “Avoid perfectionism”, “You can rock with boat without capsizing it” and “Walk away when it’s time”.

I’m not where I want to be yet. But I’m no longer working in a career that I never wanted to have in the first place. When I’m asked for my professional input, I charge an appropriate fee for it. And when I assert my authority in my specialist fields (writing and editing), I no longer feel like a child wearing my parent’s shoes.

I highly recommend this book, even to those who don’t think they are in the nice girls club. I guarantee most women who read it will come away from it wondering what they might have done differently if they had not been subjected to this misinformation campaign, had they known these things ten years ago, and how things can change for the better now that they do.

Motivation

My favourite career self-help book is Thirty-Something & Over It by Kasey Edwards. The title resonated with me when I saw it on my lunch break because it was exactly how I was feeling at the time. I had a job but it didn’t fulfil me; in fact, a lot of the time it frustrated me to tears. I was constantly asking myself, “Is this all there is?”

In her book, Kasey asserts that in order to be satisfied with your work, whatever your work is, you need to find your metaphorical baby. For some that might be an actual baby, but for the rest of us it’s the thing that gives meaning to our working lives. For Kasey, and obviously for me, that thing is writing. After rising to the top of her field as a management consultant, Kasey is now the author of several books and a frequent contributor to the Daily Life website. You can check out her blog here.

When I finished the book the first time I read it, I did have a moment of, “How convenient for Kasey that the cure to her problem was to write a book.” There are a lot of people who have written books and wish it could be their solution to the question of, “What can I do for the rest of my life that will make me happy?”

But upon second and third and fourth readings, Kasey reveals so much more. She is intelligent. She is witty. She can write (so many people who want to write forget this is a required skill for a writing career). She has a large network of people she can call on for information, favours, guidance and moral support. And she has courage.

Why is all this important? Because there isn’t just one answer to questions of workplace self-help. Altering your career path (and therefore your life) requires a multifaceted approach. You can’t just decide what you want the end result to be. You have to discover the steps you need to take in order to get there and figure out if you can take them and then figure out how. And often that’s a lot harder than realising what your metaphorical baby is.

A job you don’t care about can be a soul destroyer. When you’re in your twenties and early thirties, you often take on roles that instead of being steps to where you want to go are actually steps away from it. But at the time you think it’s all good experience and eventually it will lead somewhere you want to go. Unless you’re a very lucky person, where it eventually leads is to a lack of motivation, of even wanting to get up in the mornings at all.

If you’re at this stage in your career, having this realisation is the first step to getting your motivation back.

Motherhood

So with a little bit of power and upon discovering (or rediscovering) your motivation, we come to the question that confronts many women in their thirties: motherhood.

By the time we hit our thirties, many women have already had children. For those who haven’t, the longer we leave it, the more it seems to become a question rather than a certainty. Regardless of whether we are mothers yet or not, often our thirties are the time when we begin thinking about if it’s what we really want or what we thought it would be.

Which is why the third book on this list is not a self-help book but Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin.

If you haven’t heard about it or read it or if you’ve only seen the movie, you might think it’s just the latest in a long line of books and movies and the all too frequent real-life reports in relation to students who shoot up schools. Which in one sense it is. But more importantly, it’s an exploration of motherhood.

Because although when we idealise the experience when we think about having children, the ideal is often not the way it turns out. Now obviously Eva’s experience in We Need to Talk About Kevin is at one very extreme end of the motherhood spectrum. But we don’t need to go anywhere near that far to contemplate if motherhood is really what we want.

What is your child has a disability and will require parental care for the rest of their life? What if your child becomes a drug addict? What if your children prevent you from realising your career goals? What if your children prevent you from realising your life goals, whatever they might be? What if you end up resenting them?

Alternatively, what if not having children ends up being the one regret in your life? What if you end up resenting your career? Or worse, what if you end up resenting your partner or yourself?

It’s almost astonishing how little thought most women give to motherhood beyond simply wanting or not wanting children. Reading We Need to Talk About Kevin really prompted me to think about motherhood and my personal choice in much greater detail than I ever had before.

Obviously, I’m making assumptions about women in their thirties and the places they have reached in their family and career aspirations. Maybe you’re a woman in your thirties and nothing in this article has resonated with you. If that’s true, congratulations. You’re no doubt a lot smarter, a lot stronger and a lot more self-aware than me.

Or perhaps you know exactly what I’m talking about but you’ve read three entirely different books to help you get to this point. I’d love to know what they are to see if they can help me and anyone reading this article any further on this journey.

*First published on LinkedIn 14 September 2015

Don’t I Know You From Somewhere?

In some – but not all – books, a disclaimer appears in the first few pages proclaiming:

“All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.”

But what if it isn’t true?

It’s understandable that for legal purposes a publisher might require something similar to the above to appear in a book they are publishing. However, most writers will admit to using real people and events as inspiration for their writing. I’m fully prepared to do so right here and right now.

When I use this kind of inspiration, the majority of the time it is to christen characters. I use the names of people I know, not always both names, sometimes just one, sometimes mixed with the first or last name of someone else.

It wasn’t always that way. I have four baby name books and I used to leaf through them for hours coming up with just the right names for the people in my writing, both main, supporting and never-seen characters.

I’m not sure when exactly it happened but I got to a point where I felt like I was naming so many characters that I no longer had the time to be so thorough with it. I didn’t care anymore what the meanings of the names were and whether they were appropriate. If someone appeared for five minutes, then they weren’t worth the investment of time. So I simply started appropriating the names of people in my life at the time.

However, with one exception, I’ve never specifically written a person I know into my fiction. I can’t remember why I chose to do it (it was over ten years ago now) but it was a minor character and I needed that minor character to deliver a piece of information to two of the main characters in order to progress the story. These three characters all work in the same office and the person I wrote into the story is someone I used to work in an office with. Maybe it was as simple as that.

When it came time to publish, though, I had second and third and even fourth thoughts about the character. I hadn’t really tried to disguise him at all. He even had his real name. But my portrayal wasn’t especially flattering. It wasn’t especially unflattering either. It was just an accurate reflection of him and some of his characteristics. But I was worried he would read it, recognise himself and be hurt or upset, despite that being far from my intention.

In the end, I left the character unchanged but gave him an entirely different name. I don’t know if he has read the book but mutual friends have and none of them have ever mentioned the similarities to me, which makes me think I did enough.

But isn’t it strange that even now I remember how much I struggled with the decision over a character who appears on less than two pages of my debut novel and who I never plan to have appear again. Additionally, I haven’t seen the inspiration for the character for more than eight years.

It’s a joke I tell at social events that people should be careful around me lest they end up as characters in my novels. They have a good laugh and continue to enjoy themselves but some people I can see thinking about it. “What would I look like as a character in her books? Would I be the hero? The villain? An insignificant nobody?”

Just last night at a dinner party, in fact, I pointed out to a male guest that another male guest had very dainty, feminine hands. “Why would you even notice something like that?” he asked.

“I’m an observer. That’s what I do. And it all eventually ends up in my books. Show me your hands,” I ordered and when he did, I continued, “Man hands. You’re fine.”

He laughed and the conversation changed direction. Nobody I know has anything to worry about because I don’t use my writing as a form of attack or revenge. But then I also remember Helen Garner, I think it was, saying she had described a character in her book as having big pores and a friend took exception, thinking Helen was using her writing to have a go at her. I can’t recall if she clarified whether she was or wasn’t.

It’s a reminder of the awesome power of the written word and the responsibility we have as writers to exercise it with caution. It’s also a reminder that when using real people and events as inspiration for fiction, we should make sure the disguises are firmly in place. Writing is a selfish enough enterprise. And lonely. We can’t afford to lose friends and alienate people. Not when they’re such good inspiration.

Book Review: Chasing the Ace by Nicholas J Johnson

There’s an old adage about under-promising and over-delivering and it applies to many things including books. The back cover blurb calls Chasing the Ace “a fast and funny novel with an ending you won’t see coming”. The front cover endorsement from a semi-famous Australian comedian says, “It will fool you, and you will love it.” I’m sure you can anticipate the problem I’m about to outline and that is that the marketing makes promises that the novel doesn’t keep.

The two main characters are Richard Mordecai and Joel Fitch. Richard, in his seventies, is a con artist from way back and Joel, fresh out of high school, is determined to become one. They meet when Joel attempts to scam Richard and Richard turns the tables on him. Realising later what has happened, Joel tracks down the old man and begs him to teach him the tricks of the trade.

The book takes a long time to set up the premise – so not a fast novel after all (broken promise #1) – and while this may not be a problem in another story, neither of the characters are men you would choose to spend extended periods of time with. In fact, I can’t think of a single character in the book I would want to spend time with.

Joel is a self-confessed breast man who comes undone at the sight of an impressive rack (his words, not mine), which I would have thought a major impediment to anyone trying to run confidence scams. He has watched every con artist movie ever made and thinks he knows it all. Richard is just about ready to retire after a lifetime of ripping off basically everyone he meets but he has one last big scam on the horizon. He agrees to take Joel under his wing.

Together they scam casino patrons and people selling second-hand items on an ebay-like website before cleaning out their paypal-like accounts. But then they scam a man who turns out to be a corrupt police officer. He tracks them down and demands twice what they took, then four times, and reinforces the seriousness of his demands with threats and violence. Sound funny to you yet? No, me neither (broken promise #2).

They try to scam their way out of it and fail and fail and fail again. And the ending that we won’t see coming that will fool us and that we will love turns out to be this: the twist is that there is no twist (broken promise #3).

The author is himself a renowned expert on the perpetration of frauds with a side interesting in writing and has spent significant periods educating the public on how to avoid becoming a victim but I think I would have preferred if he were an expert in writing with a side interest in frauds. The book is layered with confusion which the writer has mistaken for complexity. It also suffers from poor copyediting that has failed to pick up a number of missing words and incorrect punctuation (something that always proves annoyingly distracting for me).

Perhaps most disappointingly, the setting for the story is Melbourne in Australia (where I live) and in the author’s hands, it has become boring and banal, certainly not the Melbourne I know.

This book is about 50% of the way towards where it could have been a terrific book. But the author was so determined not to write a traditional con artist’s story that he took out all the stereotypical elements that readers enjoy so much. There’s nothing wrong with attempting to turn a genre on its head but the resulting story still has to be good.

Despite the problems with the plot and characters, the writing itself is easy to read, uncomplicated and flows well. I’d be interested to read another of Nicholas J Johnson’s books to see if he can improve on his debut but that other book won’t be at the top of my to read list for quite some time.

2 stars

*First published on Goodreads 12 August 2015