L.E. Truscott's Blog, page 9

A Little Too Close to Home: When Fantasy Becomes Reality

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“Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,

The long numbers that rocket the mind.”

From “Advice to a Prophet” by Richard Wilbur

I mostly follow other writers on Twitter, people I’ve never met or generally even heard of but who are the most supportive community you could ever hope to be a part of. There are also a few people I follow that I do actually know.

One of them, a friend and former non-writing colleague who is obsessed with things like renewable energy, electric cars and advances in technology, recently tweeted a link to a Gizmodo article with the headline “China claims to have a real-deal laser gun that inflicts ‘instant carbonisation’ of human skin”. His accompanying comment was, “Sounds too good to be true. The ability to put such an effective laser in such a small form and to be able to fire it, at least multiple times, have to be questioned until we see it.” A picture of the laser assault rifle, which looks a lot like those brick mobile phones from the 1980s except with a scope attached, was also included.

I’d seen a less descriptive headline and the same image on another website and scrolled past it earlier that same week. But the additional information in my friend’s tweet piqued my interest. I responded to him, “This sounds a lot like the storyline of a certain debut novel of mine…” He replied, “Ha ha yes.”

So I opened the article and started reading. “As the US prepares for war in space, China’s bringing the space war home. Its ZKZM-500 laser assault rifle is reportedly capable of hitting a target from a kilometre away, igniting flammable objects, and burning through human skin. And it’s ready for production, the researchers behind the project claim.

“A weapon that fires a destructive laser beam has been a dream of military researchers for decades. The US military has recently had some luck with huge laser-firing cannons that are intended to be mounted on ships or trucks and can take down a drone by burning through its body. But effective laser rifles for use by individual soldiers have been stuck in the land of fantasy.

“The South China Morning Post, however, spoke with researchers as the Xian Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics (at the Chinese Academy of Sciences)…” This was the point at which I had my “Holy fuck!” moment. I actually said, “Holy fuck!” out loud. Then I went into my files, opened the final version of my debut novel, Enemies Closer, and confirmed what I had suspected. The story that I’d started writing in 2004, finished in 2007 and published in 2012 with the outlandish plot that (spoiler alert) a prototype for a laser assault rifle had been developed by none other than the Chinese Academy of Sciences. (You can read the prologue here and see it for yourself – the organisation, at least; the plot reveal obviously comes much later in the book.)

I’m not vain enough to think that anyone at the Chinese Academy of Sciences had actually read my book and been inspired by it. Considering the complex nature of the technology of lasers, the research necessary to get them to this stage of weapons development has no doubt been going on since long before I ever had this idea for the story. Still, it is freaky weird coincidental how many similarities there are between the article and my novel.

But I am vain enough to be proud of how much I got right. I did an awful lot of research into lasers (as much as a lay person could understand, at any rate) so I knew back in 2004 that extremely large lasers designed for mounting on ships were a reality. I knew that China was heavily involved in research and development of technology. Alluding to this fact, at the start of Enemies Closer, I included a quote from George J Tenet, the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, from a publication entitled The Intelligence Community’s Damage Assessment on the Implications of China’s Acquisition of US Nuclear Weapons Information on the Development of Future Chinese Weapons: “China’s technical advances have been made on the basis of classified and unclassified information derived from espionage, contact with US and other countries’ scientists, conferences and publications, unauthorized media disclosures, declassified US weapons information, and Chinese indigenous development. The relative contribution of each cannot be determined.” [Emphasis mine.] And obviously I did enough research to know that it would be the Chinese Academy of Sciences who would be overseeing this development. Yay me!

However, my celebrations were tempered by the fact that the weapon I imagined, the weapon now being described as a reality ready to go into production, is utterly altogether too horrible to envision being unleashed on the world. According to the article, “the technology is expected to be restricted for military and police use only. Even that level of use could face pushback from other countries. As the Morning Post points out, the United Nations’ Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons came into force in 1998 and has been signed by 108 nations around the world.” Hmmm, I’m sure China will take that fact into consideration in making its final decision on what to do (or maybe not).

In my book, the Chinese researcher who successfully develops the laser technology deliberately but covertly blows up three laboratories she works in and then tells the authorities that it’s highly unstable and unable to be harnessed in order to prevent it going into mass production. As she puts it later on when the technology is discovered to be working perfectly, she didn’t want “to be known as a destroyer of worlds”. I suspect no such real life equivalent currently exists.

It’s all just a little too close to home for comfort. One of the reasons we write stories like this (or at least why I did) with heinous villains and terrifying weapons is that it’s a way to control them. They exist only on the pages of the book and when we scare ourselves to the point of overload, we can simply close the cover and return to the real world. But at the moment, the real world and the fictional world I created are dissolving into one and the same thing.

When the Las Vegas shooting occurred, I had a moral crisis about having written a book focused so much on weapons without ever considering whether I was glamorising them. Now I’m having another. In 2012, I was so proud of this book. I published it. I became – and nobody could ever take this away from me – a published author. Now I’m also someone who imagined awful things and lived to see them become reality. It’s taken just a little of the shine off.

Book Review: Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

This is one of those books that was always destined to succeed. The publishing company wouldn’t have allowed anything else. Most writers hide themselves, plugging away solitarily, swallowing the loneliness until finally a book is produced. And then a select few people assist in polishing the manuscript before it is finally accepted or rejected. There are over one hundred people listed in the acknowledgements at the end of the book. Ergo, this is one of those books that was always destined to succeed. Whether the readers liked it or not. Thankfully, it does have some merits. But maybe not as many as we would have preferred.

The story is told through a series of transcripts of web chats, interviews, camera footage surveillance reports by uninvolved analysts, official testimony from military officers, diary entries, memorandums, emails and – from about halfway through the book – the thoughts of an artificial intelligence named AIDAN. While I imagine people brought up in the digital age won’t find anything unusual about this, I did struggle with the mostly non-prose format until I got used to it about half way through the book.

Set over 500 years in the future, teenagers Kady and Ezra – who’ve just ended their relationship – live on an illegal mining planet. For reasons that are unclear, a corporation has launched an all-out attack on the colony. The United Terran Authority rescues as many survivors as it can and then three ships – the Alexander, the Hypatia and the Copernicus – try to outrun the Lincoln, the operators of which seem determined to kill them all. The Alexander is a huge military ship but its jump gate generator was damaged in the battle. If they can make it to Jump Station Heimdall, they can all use a wormhole to get to safety.

But the jump gate generator wasn’t the only thing damaged. AIDAN, the Alexander’s artificial intelligence computer, has been shut down after malfunctioning with deadly outcomes. The ship’s command team doesn’t want to turn it back on until they’re sure it won’t malfunction again but they’ve got zero chance of getting away from the Lincoln without it.

In the meantime, they begin conscripting civilians into crucial jobs. Ezra shows an aptitude for flying and becomes a pilot. Kady is an IT expert but refuses to be conscripted, instead spending an inordinate amount of time hacking the ship’s systems and trying to find out what they aren’t being told. There’s a lot they aren’t being told.

This book falls into a lot of genre categories – young adult, sci-fi, romance, action, thriller and even a few more (I saw it described in one place as a space opera). It’s most successful at the young adult and sci-fi elements, less so at the romance, which felt a bit unoriginal to me. There’s a lot of swearing so it’s probably meant for older teenagers but because it’s portrayed as an official report after the events, most of the swearing is blacked out. Literally. There are a lot of black blocks concealing the swear words. Anyone with a bit of imagination will be able to figure out what it says but at least if younger teens want to read the book, they won’t be scandalised.

My favourite character in this book isn’t even a real character; it was AIDAN, the artificial intelligence. When AIDAN is eventually turned back on towards the middle of the book, it begins not just narrating but influencing a significant portion of the story’s events. The poetry of AIDAN’s words and the way it thinks are the best things about this book. I know I was supposed to be invested in Kady and Ezra – they’re on different ships so they spend a lot of time chatting online and rekindling the relationship they ended just before the invasion – but I just wasn’t. There was nothing particularly interesting about them or their interactions until the very last pages of the book and by then it was a little too late.

There are two more books in this series (so far) and I’m not inclined to read them at this stage. I feel this way a lot about book series. Unless the first one blows me away or has characters that I just have to know what happened to them, then the sequels are pretty far down on my To Be Read list (and it’s a pretty enormous list right now so the prospect of me getting to Gemina or Obsidio any time soon is almost zero). But I might get there eventually because AIDAN is just so intriguing.

I will say that for a book written by two people, there was no sense of disjointedness so that’s a plus and the graphics are a treat if you like that sort of thing. Overall, it was enjoyable enough. Good but not great. It’s exactly the kind of book you might imagine when publishers try to guess what is on trend for teens. Somewhere in the vicinity but not quite there.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 1 October 2018

Naming Your Evil Fictional Corporation

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If there’s anything that capitalism has taught us, it’s that all companies are evil. They don’t start out that way, they don’t intend to be evil but somewhere along the corporate path they take, they all seem to end up not very nice. They pollute, they steal (from their workers, from their customers, from their competitors, from taxpayers and many, many others), they manipulate, they plan obsolescence, they cover up management misconduct, they are just generally bad.

Regardless of all that, there comes a time in every writer’s career when one of these evil corporations is exactly what a story needs. You can use the Jennifer Government (brilliant, brilliant book) method in which Max Barry uses actual big name corporations to skewer the path of consumerism that we’re on but his publisher was required to include a long-winded disclaimer that the references to real companies were “used simply to illustrate the increasingly important role played by large corporations in the future and not to denigrate them in any way. However, some people (whom we shall call ‘lawyers’) get very uptight when you describe large corporations masterminding murders. So let’s be clear: this is a work of fiction set in the future.” So maybe the way forward is to come up with a fictional corporation of your own.

The best place to start is to remember that nobody, not even in the real world, names their company with the intention of scaring the pants off anybody. Intimidate, maybe, but scare, no. And unless it’s a fake company being run by a conman, the founders don’t intend for their creations to be vessels for evil. So the fear that evil corporations and their names inspire come from what the readers (and viewers in the case of television and movies) see them doing.

When I began writing Enemies Closer, I needed two companies: one that my main character worked for and one that was trying to destroy her. I wanted the company she worked for to be well-known and to resonate with readers familiar with the industry she worked in so I chose the real corporation Heckler & Koch. A German gun manufacturer with facilities in the US, they were perfect (and as far as I know scandal free).

But there was never any question in my mind that I would create a fictional evil corporation to represent the company trying to destroy her. I wasn’t trying to make a statement about capitalism, I was just trying to write an interesting story. And I certainly didn’t want to have to deal with any lawyers. But what to call it? The answer was staring me in the face the entire time.

During the years I was writing Enemies Closer, I worked full-time and at my place of employment, there was an official looking folder that sat on one of the shelves of a desk neighbour from an organisation called IBSA. It’s a decade ago now but I think it stood for Innovation & Business Skills Australia and I think the contents of that folder outlined the requirements of courses to meet the standards for nationally recognised qualifications. IBSA. IBSA. IBSA. And just like that, International Ballistics & Strategic Arms was born, the perfect name for a company in the weapons industry that was being used as part of a plot to bring my main character down.

If you need a little inspiration for your own evil corporation, here are a few beautifully named evil corporations (although it’s hard to say now whether they sounded evil before they became well known or if the sense of their evilness developed over time as we got to know them):

*Weyland-Yutani: In the first movie of the Alien franchise, the company was originally just known as Weyland but since fifty-seven years passed between Alien and its sequel, it’s reasonable to assume there was some kind of merger in the intervening years. Indeed, when the story was rebooted in Prometheus many years before the events of Alien took place, it was back to being just the Weyland Corporation. But I think we can all agree that Weyland-Yutani brings a sense of evilness that the singular name doesn’t. Even though we didn’t realise it at the time, I think the moment we should have known Weyland-Yutani was an evil corporation was when we heard Burke utter their meant-to-be-inspiring-but-slightly-ominous motto, “Building better worlds.” To paraphrase Serenity, you’ll never get to live there.

*Massive Dynamic: I’ve been a Joshua Jackson fan since the Mighty Duck days but I’ve only recently started watching Fringe so I’m not one hundred percent sure if Massive Dynamic is an evil corporation or not. They certainly have all the hallmarks: smug employees, missing billionaire founder, access to technologies that no one should have access to, knowledge of just about every bad thing going on in the Fringe universe, sometimes before it even happens.

*Cyberdyne Systems: They came along at a time when we were still a little bit suspicious of technology and the evil corporation of the Terminator franchise seemed destined to end up that way. After all, technology has no conscience.

*MomCorp: Futurama’s MomCorp sounds homey but, of course, if you’ve watched the show, you’ll know it’s run by a power-hungry woman who dominates her sons and toys with the emotions of Professor Farnsworth. MomCorp produces products such as suicide booths, killbots and has copyrighted “mom” and “love”.

*Wolfram & Hart: Lawyers. Need we say more? How about lawyers for demons? They’re a thorn in the side of Angel for all five seasons of the show.

*Soylent Corporation: Soylent Green is people! It’s people!

*****

In Project June, the upcoming third book in my Project… series, this chapter appears in the “Characters” section. Why? Because a corporation is a character. In the same way that a town can be a character. They must be complex and multi-layered and well thought out, not just a place someone works or a place someone lives. Otherwise they become just another stereotype.

The Things Editors Look for That Writers Have Never Heard of

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I love to edit. I love knowing the parts of speech. Nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, clauses, phrases, conjunctions, prepositions, gerunds, subjunctives, infinitives, participles… Have I lost you yet? I wouldn’t be surprised. You have to be a particular kind of person to appreciate these things.

Editors are these particular kinds of people. While some of them are instinctive editors and know from experience how words should appear sequentially and the order that gives them their intended meaning, others are trained editors who also know the names of all the mistakes. Here are a few things editors look for that most writers will never have heard of before.

Count and Mass Nouns

Count nouns are things that can be counted. Flowers, televisions, cats, people. Mass nouns are things that are difficult to quantify and therefore count. Love, chaos, information, freedom.

During a shortage, you would have fewer cats. But during peacetime, you would have less chaos. During a good harvest, you would have many flowers. But during a massacre, you wouldn’t have much love to go around.

Double Negatives

Okay, most writers will probably know what a double negative is but do you know how to interpret this sentence from George Orwell in Politics and the English Language?

“I am not uncertain whether she will not be unaccompanied by her lawyers.”

It took me a while. But the key is to find two negatives that cancel each other out and remove them.

Removal of first double negative: “I am certain she will not be unaccompanied by her lawyers.”

Removal of second double negative: “I am certain she will be accompanied by her lawyers.”

There is always a place for negative constructions but there are few justifiable uses of double negatives.

Sentence Fragments

Most people probably know about sentence fragments these days thanks to them being Microsoft Word’s favourite error. You will also know that sentence fragments aren’t always wrong. They’re great for emphasis.

Example: They are reminders of the things she has lost. (Full sentence) But not painful reminders. (Sentence fragment)

These two sentences are evoking two different sentiments so separating them gives each sentiment a chance to be experienced properly. However, there are some sentence fragments that just don’t make any sense.

Example: Authorities being unable to prevent these cultural changes.

I came up with this example and I’m not even sure what I was trying to say but the correct version of any sentence fragment will have a finite verb or a main clause.

Example: Authorities were unable to prevent these cultural changes.

Modifiers

Strong nouns and verbs are always recommended but sometimes we choose to use more basic words and strengthen them with adjectives and adverbs. These kinds of modifying elements in a sentence should be placed next to the word or words they are modifying (or as close as possible at any rate). This is important because one modifier has the potential to modify many, if not all, of the words in one line of text. Consider the following five identical sentences apart from the placement of the modifier:

*Just I saw her at the park yesterday. (I was the only one who saw her.)

*I just saw her at the park yesterday. (But I didn’t speak to her.)

*I saw just her at the park yesterday. (But I didn’t see anyone else.)

*I saw her just at the park yesterday. (But I didn’t see her anywhere else.)

*I saw her at the park just yesterday. (I saw her recently.)

While they are nearly identical, the simple act of moving the modifier into different positions changes the meaning on each occasion.

Misplaced Modifiers

A misplaced modifier is an adjective, adverb or adjectival/adverbial phrase or clause in the wrong place in a sentence, causing ambiguity or creating unintended meanings.

Example: There is an app on the phone that is never used.

Is it the app that is never used? Or is it the phone that is never used?

Example: Sarah, a former personal trainer and police officer, gave me directions to the train station.

Is Sarah a former personal trainer and a former police officer? Or is Sarah a former personal trainer and current police officer?

Reorder the modifiers or add additional information for clarity.

Example: There is an app that is never used on the phone OR The phone that is never used has an app on it.

Example: Sarah, a police officer and former personal trainer, gave me directions to the train station OR Sarah, a former personal trainer and current police officer, gave me directions to the train station.

Squinting Modifiers

Squinting modifiers appear in the middle of a sentence and could potentially modify the information before it or after it.

Example: She promised in September not to smoke.

Was the promise made in September? Or was the promise not to do it in September?

Move the modifier so that it’s clear which part of the sentence is being modified.

Example: In September, she promised not to smoke OR She promised not to smoke in September.

Dangling Modifiers

A dangling modifier exists in a sentence where the thing that is being modified is in the wrong place or implied but missing altogether.

Example: Summoning the taxi, the car arrived in less than ten minutes.

Clearly, the taxi must be summoned by a person but there’s no person referenced in that sentence. It needs to be rewritten to include the person.

Example: Summoning the taxi, we were relieved when the car arrived in less than ten minutes.

In the following example, the person is referenced but not in the right place.

Example: Annoyed by Amy’s crying, it was easier for Phillip to just leave the room.

“It” is not annoyed by Amy’s crying, Phillip is. So the sentence should be rewritten to move “Phillip” closer to the modifier.

Example: Annoyed by Amy’s crying, Phillip found it easier to just leave the room.

Split Construction

A split construction is where an auxiliary verb is awkwardly separated from the main verb.

Example: Some people will if provoked by threats retaliate against aggressors.

“Will” is the auxiliary verb and “retaliate” is the main verb and separating them results in a sentence that is more difficult to read. It’s better if they stay together.

Example: Some people will retaliate against aggressors if provoked by threats.

However, not all split constructions are awkward. In some cases, the split constructions are easier to read.

Example: Abigail got on the bus to excitedly show her friends her new dress.

If the word “excitedly” is moved before or after the infinitive, the construction becomes awkward (Abigail got on the bus to show excitedly her friends her new dress) or changes the meaning entirely (Abigail got on the bus excitedly to show her friends her new dress).

Elliptical Construction

An elliptical construction is a sentence where a word or words (usually verbs) are omitted because to include them is repetitious and leaving them out doesn’t alter our understanding of what is being said.

Example: The cat was miaowing and the dog barking.

The missing word is “was” between “dog” and “barking” but the sentence still makes sense because the omitted word is the same as a word already in the mix. Problems occur when the word omitted in an attempted elliptical construction is not the same as the word that remains. Those problems become obvious when you try to reinsert the omitted word.

Example: The day was long and the clouds grey.

Example with omitted word reinserted: The day was long and the clouds was grey.

Correct example: The day was long and the clouds were grey OR The days were long and the clouds grey.

Faulty Parallelism

Parallelism is almost like a list. Each of the components should be formed in the same way and when they aren’t, the flow of the sentence is disrupted.

Example: My sister is smart, thin and a woman of great beauty.

It gets a bit wordy on the end, right. Condense it down into one word just like the other descriptors.

Example: My sister is smart, thin and beautiful.

The key is to match nouns with nouns, adjectives with adjectives, infinitives with infinitives and clauses with clauses.

*****

If it’s all just a little too confusing, that’s what editors are for. But I guarantee that knowing what to look for will make finding them a whole lot easier.

The Completely Different Viewpoints of Men and Women on Domestic Violence

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At the end of October 2018, I went to the monthly meeting of my local branch of the political party I’m a member of. I’m not hugely political, mostly because talking about politics is a good way to lose all your friends when you realise they think in a fundamentally different way to you. If you think joining a political party and making friends with the other members resolves this problem, then you’re wrong. I’ve yet to meet a single person who thinks exactly the way I do.

There was nothing particularly special about this meeting. There was some discussion about how the two branches that meet together wouldn’t be meeting together for much longer because the federal boundaries had been changed and they were no longer in the same seat. We briefly discussed the upcoming state election and I asked them to look into whether my 92-year-old grandfather would automatically receive a postal vote or whether he needed to apply for one. We talked about federal politics and how the ALP had been sitting back quietly doing pretty much nothing while the Liberal-National Party coalition was tearing itself apart over personality politics. We talked about solar panels, the 25% of people who didn’t vote in a recent by-election even though voting in Australia in compulsory, the local member who had unselfishly nominated for the unwinnable fourth position on the Upper House ticket and a dinner being held by the local Muslim community for Remembrance Day. None of these topics got anyone particularly riled up.

And then the subject of domestic violence was raised. One of the more active members of the branch passed around a flyer inviting people to a walk against family violence. I noted that it started just before lunch on a mid-week day, that I would be at work and therefore unable to attend. I also noted that the statistics were out of date. One woman murdered every week, it said. But those statistics were out of date.

In October 2018, women in Australia were being murdered in family violence circumstances at a rate of three every week. A 200% increase. Which I pointed out.

“It’s all about education,” someone said.

“We’ve already reached peak awareness,” I reminded them.

“And it’s never been worse,” said the person chairing the meeting, an older gentleman who I could have forgiven if he had tried to downplay it given the several generations separating us, our experiences and our viewpoints.

“Perhaps it’s time we shifted the focus to enforcement,” I suggested. “Punishment,” I added in case my meaning wasn’t clear. And that was when several men closer to my generation piped up.

“We should focus on resources.” It was a valid point. There isn’t enough money being dedicated to family violence. “There’s nowhere for men to go when they need to get away.”

For a moment, I was confused. “For victims or perpetrators?” After all, men do make up about 5% of the victims of family violence. But they didn’t like the word “perpetrators” and my question was ignored.

“Sometimes men just need somewhere to go to cool down. Maybe for a night or two.”

So it wasn’t that they thought resources needed to be directed to education or enforcement or safe houses for victims. They thought we should spend money setting up retreats for men who need to get away from their families in order to prevent them from killing their wives and children.

I was stunned into silence. It wasn’t that men needed to be better at controlling their tempers, it was that they had nowhere else to go to get their anger out and so inevitably ended up taking it out on their supposedly nearest and dearest. It wasn’t the fact that they got irrationally angry in the first place, it was that they didn’t have a socially acceptable place to expel or manner of expelling that anger.

There were twice as many men at that meeting than there were women. One of them was the wife of one of the men making these comments. Another was an electorate officer for the local member. I looked at them both, a silent plea for back up, but they didn’t say anything. I hoped it was because they were as stunned into silence as I was.

Since I didn’t know what else to say, I said, “I think this is something that men and women see from completely different viewpoints.” I was reminded of the Margaret Atwood quote: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”

“It would be good to have an expert speaker on this subject,” I said as a way of winding it up. The unspoken portion of my message was, “Someone who can refute the absolutely ridiculous notion that the reason women are being killed is because men don’t have the opportunity to get away from their families for a little respite.”

And that was it. The meeting was closed and I drove home, still stunned. I am still stunned as I sit here and write this five days later. But perhaps I’m a little closer to the reasons why domestic violence continues to get worse, not better, despite concerted efforts. It’s because some men – certainly not all but definitely some – think a man getting uncontrollably angry is perfectly natural. It’s because some men think self-control isn’t possible and it’s unreasonable for anyone to ask for it. It’s because some men think the women in the lives of domestic violence perpetrators are merely bystanders getting in the way of their rage rather than the unfair focus of it.

I think – and I may be wrong, I frequently am, about many things – that until we treat all domestic violence perpetrators as criminals (in the same way we do people who rob convenience stores or traffic drugs or make child pornography) instead of victims of their circumstances (whatever those circumstances happen to be), nothing is going to change. Or worse, the situation will continue to decline and even more women will die.

I’ve seen commercials saying that in order to change viewpoints on this subject, we need to focus on children, the way we bring up both boys and girls, so that the boys don’t think this is acceptable behaviour or something they’re entitled to do and the girls don’t think this is an inevitability or something they will need to expect. “It’s too late for us,” I had joked to the group of mostly middle-aged people in that branch meeting before the discussion got serious. Maybe it is. But I sure hope not.

Book Review: The Last Anniversary by Liane Moriarty

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I finished reading this book over two months ago. Normally I rush to the computer to write my review, eager to capture the way I was feeling as I closed the back cover. Not this time. Possibly because the way I felt at the time was exactly the way I feel now: meh.

Sophie Honeywell is desperate for love. Three years ago, she broke Thomas’s heart by breaking up with him just as he was about to fly her to Fiji and propose. Ever since, her love life has been a bit of a wasteland. And she’s surprised when he calls her out of the blue and says they need to talk. Not because he might want to get back together, as the deliberately misleading blurb suggests, but because his Aunt Connie had died and left Sophie her house in the will.

No, it isn’t an old will that Aunt Connie forgot to update, it’s an intentional decision made after Thomas was dumped and based on the only time Sophie was ever in Aunt Connie’s house and expressed her delight at the beauty of the cottage. She wanted someone joyful living in it and Sophie fits the bill.

Aunt Connie gets that much right. Sophie isn’t one for whinging about how life hasn’t gone quite the way she would have liked. After all, she’s nearly 40, unmarried and childless and all she really wants is to find the one and start pushing out babies. And the PS on the letter Aunt Connie writes explaining why she left Sophie her house is intriguing. She’s sure she knows the perfect man for Sophie and even though Connie doesn’t reveal who it is, Sophie’s desperate enough to want to find out.

So she moves in. And immediately falls in love with a man who’s already married to someone else. But surely he couldn’t be the man Aunt Connie intended for her? From there on, it’s what I think is supposed to be a hilarious escapade amongst Aunt Connie’s extended family and the intrigue of the seventy-year-old Munro Baby Mystery.

Except I didn’t find it hilarious. For me, it was trying very hard, too hard and not accomplishing it. Sophie’s problem – being single – just didn’t seem like enough of a problem to sustain a whole book. And the two characters with real issues – Rose, Aunt Connie’s sister, and Grace, Aunt Connie’s great niece – were buried under the rest of their self-absorbed family.

Unlike in her other books I’ve read, Moriarty also dropped an awful lot of brand names and pop culture references including Mr Sheen (polishing product), David Jones (upmarket department store), Survivor (tv show), Milo (milk drink), Iced Vo Vo (biscuit), National IQ Test (a one-off television show), Pulp Fiction (movie), Pearl Jam (nineties band), Shania Twain (modern country singer), Australian Women’s Weekly (magazine) and Weight Watchers (diet program). Some of these will only be known to Australians, others are better known around the world, but all date the book to a particular period in history when it could have otherwise been a more timeless story.

Instead, it’s a throwaway novel, the kind you read once and never think to read again or need to. Certainly, it’s the least impressive of all Moriarty’s books I’ve read. Still, she’s a skilled writer. So even though the story and its plot wasn’t up to the standard of Big Little Lies and The Husband’s Secret, it’s readable enough.

Maybe it’s because I read Big Little Lies, then The Husband’s Secret, then Truly Madly Guilty and now The Last Anniversary, but it feels like I started with her best and am gradually working my way down to her worst. I have two more of her books to read, What Alice Forgot and The Hypnotist’s Love Story. I hope they prove me wrong.

2.5 stars

*First published on Goodreads 9 June 2018

Project October 2018: Week Four

Day 22: 2,174

Day 23: 0

Day 24: 0

Day 25: 0

Day 26: 0

Day 27: 0

Day 28: 0

Day 29: 0

Day 30: 254

Day 31: 0

Total: 17,021

Day 22, another Sunday, another of those one day of the week days that I have to myself. It took a little while to get into the writing. I started one blog post but it hadn’t had enough time rolling around in my brain. I wrote two other blog posts instead. I went online, added and scheduled all the blog posts I’d been writing onto my blog and then wiped clean my whiteboard, which was full of all the blog posts that would be appearing in the second half of 2018, the things I’ve been writing during this Project October. I find it very motivating to have a whiteboard full of dates showing when blog posts still need to be written for. So now it shows the first half of 2019 just waiting to be scheduled. I didn’t write as much as I would have liked to but sometimes you just can’t avoid having to do other stuff.

Day 23, worked all day, then more freelance work came in and the day was gone without any time to write.

On days 24, 25 and 26, I tried to write but it just wasn’t happening. I think I know why. When I do Project October and choose to work on a novel, it’s just one thing but I have a vague idea of all the little things that go into making the big thing. Because I chose to do a bunch of different things, a lot of blog posts, I just ran out of ideas that were ready to be written. The ideas I do have aren’t ready to become finished blog posts yet.

Day 27, worked, then spent all evening buying six birthday presents because there’s a combined family birthday party for six family members next week. Seriously. All that New Year’s sex. Can’t they just watch the fireworks and pass out drunk like the rest of us?

Day 28, football day. I cherish every day I get to spend with my ninety-two-year-old grandfather but football days really eat into my writing time. It’s why Project October started in the first place. It’s the first month after the end of the football season.

Day 29, I chose not to write today. I alternated between binge watching Fringe and doing housework. Cripes, after four weeks, the house really needed it.

Day 30, more freelance work. I wrote most of this Week 4 Project October post but nothing else. Better than nothing, I guess.

Day 31, it’s been more than two-and-a-half months since Day 31 but I know I didn’t write anything. I couldn’t even be bothered to finish this blog post. But consider this: I added 17,000 words to Project June, the third book in my Project… series all about writing, editing, publishing and marketing a book (after Project December and Project January), because they are essentially collections of my blog posts. Project June is now at 60,000 words. Another 20,000 words and it will be finished. It means as of this point, I have three books that are closer to being finished than not being finished. Always look on the bright side, right?

Project October 2018: Week Three

Day 15: 0

Day 16: 1,412

Day 17: 0

Day 18: 0

Day 19: 184

Day 20: 0

Day 21: 0

Total: 14,593

Day 15 was a Sunday, traditionally a good writing day, except it was also football day, so I headed to my grandfather’s and watched the game with him. I had good intentions of coming home early and writing into the night but it just didn’t happen. I’ve never done a Project October of blog posts before and I usually have longer to come up with ideas and let them roll around in my mind. Because I’ve written thirteen pieces, I’ve steamrollered through the ideas I’ve had and I feel like I’m down to the dregs. I need some more ideas.

On day 16, I wrote a piece about the things editors look for that writers have never heard of. It took four hours because it wasn’t just me rattling off a bunch of thoughts I’d had but required research and real consideration. Took me way back. I even used the resources I was given during the first year I studied editing because it’s not stuff I can remember off the top of my head, it’s stuff I really needed to bone up on.

On days 17, 18 and 19, three freelance proofreading pieces rolled in and I didn’t have any choice (if I want to keep my clients) but to put aside the writing and focus on the editing. I managed to get down a few words for the week three Project October blog post but that’s it. I’m about 4,500 words behind target and I doubt at this point that I will be able to catch up. Life. It constantly gets in the way of writing.

Day 20 was a Friday. I worked, then I went grocery shopping, then I fell asleep in a chocolate donut-induced food coma. No writing.

And Day 21 was a football day again so I spent it with my grandfather. Two football days in one Project October week really puts a dent in the ability to get any good writing done. Still, almost 15,000 words in three weeks is nothing to be sneezed at. It’s always better to consider the positives than wallow in the negatives. Glass half full or half empty? I’m just glad there’s something in the glass at all.

Project October 2018: Week Two

Day 8: 0

Day 9: 0

Day 10: 0

Day 11: 1,198

Day 12: 0

Day 13: 0

Day 14: 3,860

Total: 12,997

Finding the time and the motivation to write this week seemed harder than last week, although in retrospect it shouldn’t have been. I’m brimming with ideas, more than I can turn into blog posts without coming up with new ideas. The writing just didn’t flow like it did in week one.

On day 8, I knew I wouldn’t get anything done. It was football day so I headed to my grandfather’s place, stopping at my dad’s house on the way to pick up the mail because he’s away as I write this. I was going to just leave the mail on the kitchen bench but as I went in, I saw a fridge magnet and thought to myself, “What a small world!” Even though we live about twenty minutes from each other, on his fridge was a magnet with emergency home contact details – electricians, plumbers, etc – and a picture of the local real estate agent it was advertising, who just happened to be my neighbour’s son. I just had to call my dad and tell him and we had a bit of a chat. And then there was football and time spent with my grandfather for the rest of the afternoon and evening.

Day 9 is lost in the fog of non-writing. I worked but I can’t remember anything else. I certainly can’t remember why I didn’t write.

I tried to write on day 10 but it just didn’t happen. After work, I sat with my computer open, I had a few ideas about what I wanted to write but they just weren’t ready, I guess, to emerge in fully formed thoughts. Still, I made notes for three blog posts that would hopefully help to make the writing easier in the coming few days.

On day 11, I took a sick day. Perfect for writing, right? Well, first I had to go to the city for blood tests and an MRI to help diagnose my arthritis symptoms officially. I’d never had an MRI before. If I didn’t have claustrophobia before, I definitely do now. Maybe it would have been okay if I’d been lying on my back but I had to lay face down in order to keep my hand flat, but I can’t do that for very long without starting to feel like I’m suffocating. Even though it took nearly half an hour in the MRI machine, I managed not to press the alarm that was pressed into my hand just as everybody else left the room but I did cry just a little in the changeroom afterwards as I was putting my clothes back on. Still, I managed to come home, settle down and hit the daily target.

On day 12, I worked, then went to see my phone provider because my contract had ended and I signed up for a plan with more data, even though it cost less. Bonus! I spent the money I’ll be saving over the next year on seasons two to five of Fringe (having just finished binge watching the first season). Then, because I had so much data to use and didn’t have to limit myself like I’ve spent the previous two years doing, I spent the rest of the evening online. This new plan might have been a mistake.

Friday evening grocery shopping on day 13 was supposed to be followed by writing. I had the best of intentions. But during a pre-writing Twitter check, I came across an author who was apologising for a rant, wanted to know what she had been ranting about so went to her Twitter page where I ended up coming across a book selling goal she had set for herself and a couple of mentions about her financial difficulties. I clicked the link through to her books and found she had four- and five-star ratings only and the Kobo version was just over five dollars, so I bought a copy and then started reading it. And kept reading. Sometimes being a good writer means being a good reader.

And to the end of another Project October week. Day 14 was a Saturday and it’s also the one day of the week I have to myself, so I spent it writing. I hit 3,860 words and while it’s good in the context of the daily target, I have fallen behind in my overall goal. So what? Every word is a blessing at the moment. I’m going to just keep writing, just keep writing, just keep writing and see how it goes…

Project October 2018: Week One

Day 1: 2,723

Day 2: 0

Day 3: 0

Day 4: 1,151

Day 5: 0

Day 6: 0

Day 7: 4,065

Total: 7,939

Last year, I set out to do a Project October intensive writing month (31,000 words in 31 days) and ended up writing a grand total of zero words (you can read all about it here, here, here and here) due to a variety of circumstances. Almost immediately after that, I went back to a full-time, non-writing job that has ever since taken up an awful lot of my time, more than I ever planned for it to. And even though I’ve written a little bit here and a little bit there, compared to the three years I spent writing full-time, I feel like I’ve written virtually nothing.

As I approached the half way mark of2018, I decided it was time for another Project October. I made the decision that I wasn’t going to work on any of my fiction. I was still trying to finalise and publish my latest novel, Black Spot, and while I wanted to be writing, I didn’t want my focus pulled away from getting that book out there. Plus, I was running out of blog posts rapidly. So I decided to aim for 31 blog posts in 31 days. Not only would that fill out my blog post schedule for the next seven months, it would be a significant contribution towards finishing Project June, the third book in my series of non-fiction about the writing, editing, publishing and marketing process (since Project December, Project January and Project June are all collections of my blog posts).

Clearly, though, it wasn’t going to be a normal Project October in which I aim for 1,000 words each day. I knew that because there are days when I wake up, go to my non-writing job, come home, eat, continue with non-writing freelance work and then go to sleep without ever having an opportunity to write. If I’m lucky, I may have jotted down an idea or two but it’s nothing that contributes to any type of word count. So this Project October would be a month of binge writing: writing as much as possible on the days I could, knowing that there would be days when I wouldn’t be able to write at all.

The first week has proven my decision prophetic. Day 1 was a Sunday and I wanted to get off to a good start. I wrote three blog posts. Day 2 was a Monday and after a long day at work, I came home and fell asleep before I could even contemplate cracking open my laptop. On Day 3, two pieces of freelance work came in by email while I was at work and I spent that evening doing it. Still, I’d written so much on Day 1, I was only fractionally behind on my intended word count.

By Day 4, though, I knew that wasn’t the case anymore. I came home from work, managed to stay awake and didn’t have any freelance work that needed to be done. I was determined to make the most of it. I wrote 1,151 words, bringing the total to 3,874. Not exactly on target but even within those four days, I’d written more than in the previous four months.

On Day 5, I went to work, came home, prepared and ate dinner, and then took my traditional Thursday after-work phone call from my grandfather. We spoke for an hour and a half, mostly about football, which after my grandmother is the love of his life. No chance for writing unless I sacrificed sleep and trust me, nobody wants to be around me the next day when I’ve sacrificed sleep the night before.

On Day 6, I went to work, went to the supermarket to do my weekly shop after work, came home, decided I’d earned an alcoholic drink, drank it, then promptly fell asleep before I’d even had any dinner.

Which brings me to Day 7, a Saturday. I’ve had another writing binge and the daily total sits at 4,060, so I’m not just on target at this stage of my intensive writing month, I’m smashing it. I’m pleased because if this Project October hadn’t gone well, I would have been thoroughly disheartened. As much as I would like to, there isn’t any prospect of me quitting my non-writing job at the moment (even though I don’t like how much of my time it takes up, I’m addicted to the financial security). So I have to figure out how to work (and do freelance work) and write at the same time. I haven’t been very successful at it in the recent past, although I used to be. Hopefully, I’m on my way to figuring it out again.