Narrelle M. Harris's Blog, page 36

Six lessons I learned from Chef Ramsay

In the last two weeks I’ve seen far too many back-to-back episodes of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. The damned things are addictive.

Who can resist the pull of The Dilemma of the Failing Restaurant, the arrival of The Expert and the inevitable Confrontation as a restauteur discovers just how bad everything is? Not me.

There is the whole dynamic of Bad Gordon/Good Gordon as he at first condemns and then encourages the owners, chefs and staff. There is the journey from Dilemma to Conflict to Epiphany and Redemption.

I love the short, downwardly inflected ‘Wow’ that is Ramsay-speak for ‘I am appalled’ and the heart-cry of ‘Oh My God!’ he expresses at the walk-in, which is Ramsay-speak for ‘How is no-one yet dead of food poisoning? HOW?’

Yes, the show has an easily surmised ‘story arc’, and clearly the episodes are edited for effect: but it’s cracking good television!

For all the high drama, the crafting of footage for narrative and effect and the sheer voyeuristic glee of it all, I’ve come away from Kitchen Nightmares with several important lessons.

1. Pretending there is nothing wrong until the problem goes away has never solved a problem.

2. Stop panicking and step back. When your project isn’t working and you don’t know why, going heads-down, tail-up in a panicked frenzy, doing the same stuff you’ve been doing all along may be a natural instinct, but it’s what got you in this mess in the first place. Make time to stand back and reassess.

3. The phrase “I don’t know how” is not always  a weakness. It’s okay to ask for help from people who have more experience or a different perspective. New viewpoints are valuable, and you may discover something about yourself or what you do. You may in fact learn a new skill!

4. Listen when you ask an expert for advice. There is no point in asking for expert advice and then telling the expert you don’t think they know what they’re talking about, just because you a) don’t like the advice, b) don’t like the expert’s tone and/or c) don’t like the expert.

5. Trust your team. You need to lead and make the final decisions, but you should gather all the facts first. Listen to the expertise you have in your partners and colleagues. You’ll go further rowing in the same direction. (Jean-Luc Picard provides a good example of this as well.)

6. For god’s sake, clean out your fridge on a regular basis before you kill someone.

All this came to a head recently when I realise I needed to find (and please excuse me for the dry business talk) a marketing and engagement strategy for the Kitty and Cadaver multimedia project.

I was getting increasingly anxious about not knowing how best to bring in readers and encourage interaction, but felt so frantically busy with writing the book sufficiently ahead, and getting other parts of the project moving, that I couldn’t stop to find out how. And I didn’t know where to start. And I couldn’t make time to start. And, and, and…

Cue spiking stress levels.

Cue my team, my partner, my colleague, my resident expert, my husband, who had great ideas (and with me hyperventilating in the corner, plenty of incentive to get me to stop and deep breathe long enough to listen to them).

We’ve just returned from a brainstorming weekend in Warburton, and I am now armed with two pages of (excuse me, more office-speak) action items. I have many more pages of detailed notes and a commitment to put aside three hours a week from the writing to work on them.

I have a plan! I feel confident, and supported, and I know there will be a lot of work ahead, but at least I have a roadmap now.

So many thanks to Tim Richards, my wise and helpful guide. And thank you Gordon Ramsay for reminding me to both ask for help and to listen and act on it when it was given.

And for reminding me to clean out the fridge. Because. Wow.

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, iPhone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.

Expendable and Showtime: e-available!

Good morrow, good readers! It’s mid July and things that I write continue to wriggle out into the world at every opportunity.

Kitty and Cadaver: Not the Zombie Apocalypse continues to appear, one part at a time, every Monday. The second part of Chapter Three went up on 15 July. If you haven’t checked it out, you can start at Chapter One here.

In the meantime, the second of my erotic spy stories has been published. The Secret Agents, Secret Lives series began with Double Edged, and the story of Spymaster Philip Marsden and his lover, Agent Martine Dubois, continues in Expendable. As the blurb says:

Secret Agent Martine and her spymaster lover, Philip Marsden, are back in action and on the trail of international bad guy Bartos Rigo. Will they have to compromise their love or their honour to get the job done?

You can get both books in digital format from Clan Destine Press for only $1.80 each. Double Edged is also available on Kobo. 

Expendable will follow its footsteps there soon.

In the meantime, you can also get both stories for Kindle on Amazon.com:

Double Edged (Clan Destine Encounters)
Expendable (Clan Destine Encounters)

Finally, my Twelfth Planet Press contribution to the Twelve Planets series, Showtime, is now available for Kobo along with a stack of other Twelve Planets titles. These include collections by Tansy Rayner Roberts, Margo Lanagan and Kaaron Warren, who has just won the Shirley Jackson novella award for Sky, which appears in her Twelve Planets collection Through Splintered Walls.

If any of you feel so moved, it would be great if you wrote reviews for any of the Twelfth Planet Press or Encounters books on GoodReads, Amazon or Kobo (or all three!)

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, iPhone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.

Review: Haze by Paula Weston (AWW Challenge #9)

I read Shadow, the first of Paula Weston’s Rephaim series, last year, and was pleased to find a book about angels that was robust, fast-paced and full of action. The second in the series, Haze, is now out and continues to pack a lot of punch into the few days over which the story takes place.

Gaby, who once thought she was pretty ordinary though mired in grief for the twin brother she’d lost in the car accident that left her scarred and with terrible nightmares. Now she knows, however, that most of her memories are false, that her brother Jude may not be dead after all and that he and she are both Rephaim: wingless human-angel hybrids, descended from fallen angels.

That is of course the least of it, because there are demons and hell-hounds hunting her, and some of her former friends aren’t so friendly. Gaby’s already been tortured by her former allies for information she doesn’t remember. It seems that she and Jude were up to something, and perhaps knew where to find the missing Fallen.

Gaby may also be falling in love with Rafa, another Rephaim, who was Jude’s best friend and is trying to both protect and teach her – when they’re not fighting, at any rate. Gaby and Rafa appear to have a complex past, but she can’t remember what it was. She can’t remember most of her clearly extremely complex past with the other Rephaim either; and she’s not at all sure she wants to remember the person she used to be. That person, Gabe, appears to have made some questionable choices.

The story of Gaby’s past and the conflict between the two camps of Rephaim (those at the Sanctuary and the split away group known as the Outsiders) gets more complicated with the introduction of a group of women in Ohio, who seem to be tracking the Rephaim. Add in the group of roughs in Gaby’s home at Pandanus Beach in Queensland, who think the Demons they’ve encountered are part of some government conspiracy, and you have at least four sources of conflict – and that’s before you count the internal conflicts, suspicions and just plain levels of dislike of each group.

It’s a lot to juggle, and Weston does a pretty good job of keeping the multiple threads of the back story and the warring camps clear and concise. (I still feel a bit of a flow chart or map would help sometimes…) It also gets a little frustrating that Gaby constantly laments how much she doesn’t know, because we don’t know it either. Some chapters my teeth hurt from clenching them with frustration and how little progress there is on that score.

For all that, Haze offers action and sexual tension aplenty, and although plot progress doesn’t always come fast enough for my impatient liking, yet there is progress. Some of it brings more questions, but enough brings answers, and of course not long after one major issue is resolved, another bounds in, teeth bared, swords unsheathed, to take its place.

My impatience will have to curb itself for another long while, I guess, before the third book in the series comes out to let me know what on earth (or in heaven, or hell) comes next!

Get Haze from Text Publishing
Review of Shadows by Paula Weston (first in the Rephaim series)
Get Shadows from Text Publishing

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, iPhone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.

Lost and Found 4: Wanderlust

He assumes it was an accident, rather than deliberate cruelty. He assumes it was drunken forgetfulness, or frustration with a blister, or something to spite the original owner of the shoe.

He tells himself it was not knowingly cruel.

It’s cruel, all the same. Somehow it’s worse that it’s only one shoe. One garish purple boot, made for striding confidently out into the world. A statement of sorts. I wear sturdy footwear, for the road I walk is long and hard; but I wear my footwear purple because fuck you, that’s why.

The shoe rests against his own feet. He sees it with his peripheral vision, stuck as he is with his gaze forever drawn upward, his mouth in that moue of astonishment.

When he first reached this town, with his two equally gormless, equally impressed bronze friends, he was astonished. He was impressed. Now he’s just here. All the time. Every day. Staring at the roofscape and wondering what else he’s missing. The people who pass him talk of other things. A river nearby. A tall gilded tower that can see way out to the ocean (and what is an ocean, he wonders? The closest he can understand is that it’s vast like the sky and wet like the clouds: to him the moon on stormclouds is his understanding of ships and seas).

Other people speak of even stranger places. Sand and forests and cities with great bridges and snowfall. He doesn’t really know what those words mean, but they sound wonderful.

He longs to go. To bend and snap his metal feet from the concrete and take a step. Take two. Three and four and to see a new angle of those rooftops, a new street, who knows, maybe that river (a ribbon of dense cloud on the ground, he wonders, is that what it looks like?).

He longs to move and to discover.

Instead, one purple shoe leans against his own cold feet and reminds him that his wanderlust is futile. All he can do is stand and gawp and wait for the world to come to him, and hope that their exotic words like pyramid and lake and mountain and free will one day make sense.

Review: Gamers’ Rebellion by George Ivanoff

At the beginning of June, I was very honoured and delighted to launch Gamers’ Rebellion for George Ivanoff at Melbourne’s Continuum 9 convention.

Gamers’ Rebellion is the third in George Ivanoff’s Gamers trilogy. It began with Gamers’ Quest (which I reviewed on my previous LiveJournal blog) and continued in Gamers’ Challenge. Here, the story of Tark and Zyra’s quest to escape the game in which they are characters and be in the real world reaches its finale.

The Gamers story began, obviously enough, within a computer game. Tark and Zyra quickly grew beyond their avatar confines to become more individual and more real with every chapter. They are dynamic characters, with great strengths as well as weaknesses, who work really well as a team. Their friendship and  love are both sweet and gently persistent reminders that they might be made of data, but they are fully human all the same.

After breaking their programming in Gamers Quest, then breaking free of the game’s rules in Gamers’ Challenge, Tark and Zyra begin Gamers’ Rebellion by breaking into the real world. They are downloaded into clone bodies outside the digital matrix in which their consciousness previously developed independence.

In this story, they learn that reality is just as challenging as their digital life, and they have as many battles to be true to who they have become as the ones they fought within the game. Now they have bodies, and are separated, the struggle to deny the powers that try to make them conform to some other (blander and more easily controlled) ideal is more dangerous than ever.

As with the other two books, Gamers Rebellion is full of adventure and excitement (and the occasional, delightful Dr Who reference) and whips along at a cracking speed. But it also has a lot to say beyond its perfectly enjoyable function as an action adventure yarn.

These books are about a quest to find a place where you can be real, and be yourself. They are about the realisation that every place has its limitations and darkness, and that every place has people and systems that want to curtail your independence and individuality. Gamers Rebellion explores the notion that being a whole human being has less to do with the environment you’re in than with how you choose to behave there. Gamers Rebellion also moves explores the philosophy of the power that exists in the balance between the community and the individual.

So – the Gamers books are fast-paced, character-driven adventures full of humour, excitement and unexpected resolutions to thorny problems. But they are also about breaking out of conformity and becoming yourself: engaging and important concepts for readers of any age, not simply the young readership at whom the books are aimed.

All that, and it’s still a rollicking good adventure!

Buy Gamers’ Rebellion from Boomerang Books

Get the previous books in the series.

Buy Gamers’ Quest for Kindle from Amazon
Buy Gamers’ Quest from Boomerang Books
Buy Gamers’ Challenge for Kindle from Amazon
Buy Gamers’ Challenge from Boomerang Books

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, iPhone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.

Review: King Kong at the Regent Theatre

When I first heard that King Kong was being turned into a stage production, I was intrigued but not hopeful. It seemed much too big a task to fold that story down into the confines of even a large theatre, and I strongly suspected the efforts to reproduce a believable version of Willis O’Brien’s iconic ape would fall short.

I was even more surprised to discover that the production would be a musical.  Surely, I thought, there will be enough trouble translating that superbly weird film, and how, especially to the modern eye, it has such distinctive racist subtext.  (The depiction of the inhabitants of Skull Island in both the 1976 and 2005 remakes never quite escaped that uncomfortable depiction.)

So, I felt that King Kong was started with numerous challenges.

The very good news is that the stage production meets most of these issues head on and succeeds spectacularly well. The stage of the Regent Theatre is brilliantly converted to the streets of New York, the deck of a ship, a menacing jungle and the top of a skyscraper with flair each time. That giant story fits on the stage and doesn’t feel small. You have characters climbing vines, falling from towers, battling giant apes and generally filling the stage to bursting with dynamism.

The sound and lighting effects are excellent, especially where we first meet Kong. There are glimpses of eyes and massive teeth in the darkness, the rumbling roar of the creature, the deep, echoing crash of his mighty fists in the forest. Anne Darrow, suspended in vines, can only scream and twist as the beast arrives, examines her, takes her in his massive paw and disappears into the dense foliage. It’s a superb and genuinely spooky scene.

The entire show was always going to rise or fall on the depiction of the central character, and it has to be said that the puppetry is first class. Kong has a huge number of puppeteers and, as War Horse has already demonstrated, they do not have to be hidden in order to make us believe in the existence of the creature they animate. Kong’s face is enormously expressive, as are his physical movements. The occasional action (usually when he is leaping up buildings) isn’t very convincing, but for the most part, you absolutely believe in King Kong, from his first creepy appearance behind the trapped Ann Darrow, to the very effective scene of him running through the jungle at night and his forlorn figure when trapped in chains in the New York theatre.

The costume design is likewise excellent. Many of the costumes are done in varieties of grey-to-black, echoing the black and white film origins of the story, with occasional bursts of primary colour (red, green, blue and occasionally a shocking pink) to spice up the stage. The set design is also fascinating, and there’s no doubting the technical expertise of individual sets and scenes. But these two areas, as technically excellent as they are, are where King Kong begins to fall down.

The sets vary wildly to the point where many of them don’t seem to belong in the same play. The lighting is often effective, but it also has a weirdly Tron-like feeling, or at least some 1980s pop video, at odds with the period costume elsewhere.

It feels like the designers of both sets and costumes wanted to pay homage to pulp film of the first half of the 20th century, so we have 1930s style suits and dresses, but also a startling appearance of 1950s style space suits; there is a batty woman in tattered Victorian garb (looking a bit like a vintage Cyndi Lauper in Kabuki make-up) prophesying doom, and the natives of Skull Island in their silver lame body suits (which at least dispenses with the more racist ways these people are often portrayed) looking to me like an interpretive dance act from the International Festival ended up at the wrong theatre. There are little fur leotards, fascist uniforms, harem outfits and burlesque-style black vinyl corsets.

None of this would matter, if it felt cohesive. Baz Luhrman, for example, has a knack of taking disparate elements and somehow ‘painting them Baz’ so there’s a sense of continuity, that everything belongs. In this production I just felt a bit pulled to and fro, going from disconnect to disconnect, and it’s such a shame, because artistry has gone into what we see onstage. It’s just that the individual parts all feel like they belong  to completely different shows.

In particular, I found myself terribly confused by the presence of the police dressed as fascists, and what that meant in relation to the main villain being a very camp Jewish filmmaker. It’s entirely likely that there was not meant to be a link, but those costumes and character choices have social and historical implications, not simply neat design effects, and it jarred.

Costume and set design aside, then, the cast do a great job – but again, with certain challenges diminishing the whole. Everyone on that stage is a terrific singer, from Queenie Van Der Zandt as Cassandra (the Kabuki-Lauper) to Esther Hannaford as Ann Darrow.

It’s important here to note that while people refer to King Kong as a musical, its own posters refer to it as a ‘music theatre event’. That may seem to be mincing with words, but I think it does better describe how the music is used on stage. It’s not a musical in the traditional manner. Actually, like the trouble with the set and costume design, the music is something of a mish-mash. There are ballads, and the sweet lullaby that Ann sings to Kong; songs that sound pure 1980s, but versions of songs from the 1930s. Then there’s the appearance of the sort of 90s hip-hop piece, and the stompy, angry version of  ‘Come On, Get Happy’ as Kong is wreaking havoc on New York. I really liked that one as a song, as it happens, but once more, the styles jarred.

The final problem for me is really the script itself. It has dealt with some problematic issues of the original story by making the whole story breathtakingly sexist. Certain elements are emphasised – the fact that when Ann first appears she is set upon and nearly molested by a bunch of thugs; that when the film producer, Carl Denham (Adam Lyon) ‘rescues’ her he spends a bit of time sniffing her. This concept of the animalistic man is highlighted when first a pet monkey also sniffs at her, for quite some time (and apparently focusing on her crotch) until finally King Kong himself takes a good long whiff.

Ann twice shows some fabulous gumption – once when she roars back at Kong, and a second time when she stands up to her love interest for a moment, but essentially the character remains at the whim of the men who assault/abuse/use/command her. It says something that Kong is the one to show her the most respect. The whole thing didn’t have to be quite so cringingly about a woman who has no say in her own life, except that so many elements of that are emphasised, with the sniffing, with the literally being dragged around by men and apes, with her love song to the creature himself. Frankly, Ann Darrow is set up as a woman doomed to end up in abusive relationships.

So. It’s a difficult thing, this show. It is certainly full of spectacle and brilliantly executed design, but sadly it lacks a cohesive feel and the storyline fails to adapt to a modern audience by having a heroine who can seize control over her own fate. I found myself thinking of that line of Samuel Johnson’s about the Giant’s Causeway, that it is ‘worth seeing, yes, but not worth going to see’. King Kong is sadly less than the sum of its parts.

Nevertheless, if you do get an opportunity to see it, it’s definitely worth it for the ape.

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, smartphone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.

Introducing: Kitty and Cadaver – saving the world with rock ‘n’ roll!

Anyone who has spoken to me lately has seen me, bright-eyed and over-excited, going on (and on and on and on) about my multimedia online story project. And I really am VERY ALLCAPS EXCITED about it. The project is called Kitty and Cadaver, and this post is so I can squee all about it to the world – and then invite you to join me!

Kitty and Cadaver outline

Kitty and Cadaver is a book about a rock band that uses music as magic to save the world from monsters. As the story opens, the three surviving members of the band (who played as Rome Burning until the very recent and violent death of their lead singer) and their roadie have come to Melbourne, Australia, to lick their wounds and try to regroup, as it were.

Enter Kitty Carrasco, a 21 year old with a strange past, who works as a beautician in a mortuary. Brought up by her grandparents, Kitty doesn’t know what happened to her parents, and she doesn’t know why her grandparents forbade music in their household.

Of course, things start going pear-shaped pretty quickly, and the dead start getting restless. Some of them start to literally sit up and take notice. It’s as well Kitty has a cool head on her shoulders and, despite her grandparents’ best attempts, knows how to sing to the dead anyway.

Soon Kitty meets up with Steve (Texan, bass player), Salvadore (guitarist from Goa, India), Yuka (Japanese, drummer) and Laszlo (the Hungarian roadie who knows a lot more about the violin than he’s letting on). With them is another guitarist, Stephen, whom Steve is trying to recruit as his replacement. (Steve would rather like to be one of the few band members to retire rather than being killed on the job.)

The trouble is, each and every one of those people has a secret. Some of them don’t even know they’re keeping one.

So all they have to do is try not to get eaten, sing the dead back to sleep, find out who’s raising them and save the world. Again. As soon as they can stop fighting among themselves, in traditional rock band fashion.

Not just a book – a whole song and dance! And also a comic book.

The whole thing about writing a story about a band that defeats monsters with music was that, clearly, I had to write music as part of the story. Well, it’s been 30 years since I learned the piano, although I’ve dabbled in songwriting on and off in the intervening decades. Oh, but look – I have an awesomely talented niece, Jess Harris, a guitarist and songwriter! I’m more excited than I can tell you that I’m now co-writing songs with Jess (and Jess is contributing some of her own songs) for this book about a band.

So now my book, which I wanted to post in chapters and parts in a blog, had songs to go with it.

The next thing I realised was that, if I wanted to post this onto a blog, I’d need banner art. I approached Nath Holden, the drummer from Jess’s old band, Vermillion, who is also a pretty cool artist. He came right on board to create the banner you see above. At the same time he said, ‘That’s a neat idea. Have you thought about making it into a comic?’

I’m sure you can guess what happened next.

Nath and I are in the process of creating an 18 page comic, telling the ‘secret origin’ of Yuka – the drummer whose heavy metal band accidentally summoned a demon, and Yuka was the only survivor of the encounter. We hope to bring you the first pages of Demon of the Earth in a few months.

Not to mention the craft project

My brain is having some kind of creative supernova at this point, because my next thought was ‘Yuka wears bracelets and a necklace made out of the smashed up musical instruments of her dead bandmates as memento mori. It would be so cool to have something like that’.

My researches showed that only a very few craftspeople/jewellers made wearable art from recycled instruments, and I couldn’t find any in Australia. So I thought the obvious next step would be to collect suitable materials and then have a workshop. Yay!

I’m in the process of getting donations of bits of instruments that might otherwise be thrown away, and my friend Ali Alexander, a jewellery maker, is going to work with me to determine how best to use such materials and then get the workshop together in a few months’ time. Stay tuned for details!

The Axe Principle

One of the key ideas behind the world of Kitty and Cadaver is that the band has a 700 year history, playing under different names, depending on the make-up of the troupe at the time.

The piper and drummer who began in all in the 13th century died long ago, but the mantle has been handed on and on through the centuries. Like an axe that has had its handle replaced, then the head, then the handle, then the head – hundreds of years later, it may be considered the same axe with an historic persistence-of-vision, although the component parts are no longer the original.

This means that although Kitty and the band she’s meeting now are the latest incarnation, I have a hugely long history of music magic I can play with in this universe. I can write short stories or comics set anywhere in that time period, with whatever the band looked like then. I can write songs that are from the band’s repertoire and then invite musicians to work out how they sounded in the 16th century, or the sixties; as madrigals or pirate metal!

An invitation to play

But wait, there’s more!

Another key idea behind the Kitty and Cadaver universe is that this is a huge world, with room to play in all kinds of time periods and musical styles and even characters. The music and art already coming out of this idea could lead to so much more. Add to this my background as a writer of fanfiction – thirty-odd years ago, it’s where I learned so much about writing, and where I’ve seen many writers and artists make a start before going on to professional work.

The result is that I’ll be posting Kitty and Cadaver under a creative commons licence, and inviting people to come and play in my sandpit. The licence I’m using essentially means that I’ll be thrilled if you have some creative response to the work as long as you credit the source and don’t use it for commercial purposes.

That’s getting a bit ahead of myself, I know. Still, everyone I’ve spoken to about the world of Kitty has been enthused about the creative possibilities, and I’d love for the project to grow!

Blogging at Kitty and Cadaver

I aim to post a new part each Monday, but I’ll also be blogging about related material: song lyrics and soundfiles; other books with music and monsters; music-themed art and craft; music-related folklore; the occasional video or link about the macabre (I have a video up already about being a make-up artist in a mortuary); discussions of music, instruments and music history; and pretty much anything that seems relevant and interesting.

Join us at Kitty and Cadaver

The Kitty and Cadaver project has its main site, www.kittyandcadaver.com – please visit that for the blog posts and the weekly story update.

You can also follow the Kitty and Cadaver project on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. (Some songs are already posted on Facebook and Tumblr, as well as Jess’s Soundcloud site.) When we’ve had the opportunity to develop some more art for a clip, you’ll also find songs and related videos being posted in the Kitty YouTube channel.

If you’re new here, start at Kitty and Cadaver: Not the Zombie Apocalypse, Chapter One, Part One.

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, smartphone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.

The commercialisation of fan fiction

The lead character from my new project, Kitty and Cadaver. How does the concept of a creative commons licence interact with the new Amazon Kindle Worlds concept?

One of the big buzzes in publishing this week was Amazon.com’s announcement that it was bringing Kindle Worlds to the masses. If you missed it, Kindle Worlds is Amazon’s new initiative to ‘enable any writer to create fan fiction based on a range of original stories and characters and earn royalties for doing so’.

The initial set of works open to commercial exploitation of fanfiction are the Gossip Girl series, by Cecily von Ziegesar; Pretty Little Liars, by Sara Shepard; and Vampire Diaries, by L.J. Smith, all of which are held by Alloy Entertainment, a division of Warner Bros. Television Group. More licenses for existing works are expected to be announced soon.

Writers of fan fiction under Alloy’s licenced worlds, provided certain criteria are met, would earn royalties on the sale of the Kindle Worlds fan fiction, as would, obviously, the original author/licence holder, with Amazon naturally getting its cut.

On the face of it, the scheme doesn’t seem a bad idea. It allows a kind of Shared World arena, and the holders of the original licence (which may be an author, or may be a publishing house that owns the copyright) get paid for the use of their intellectual property (IP) while new writers also get paid for their creative efforts.

In some ways, although they are referring to it as fan fiction, it doesn’t feel dissimilar to people who write novelisations or books in the Star Wars, Star Trek or Doctor Who franchises (for example).

Why then did I have such mixed feelings about the announcement? Especially as I have a background in writing fan fiction myself – 30-odd years ago, writing Blake’s 7 and Star Trek fiction is where I learned a lot of the basics of character, plot, dialogue, and sentence and story structure, in a supportive environment where I got constructive feedback.

Part of the unease I felt is answered right there.

Obviously not all fan fiction is good (actually, not all professionally published fiction is good either) – but it’s a labour of love, part of the community of love and appreciation that fans share about their favourite shows. As academics like Henry Jenkins points out, the copyright of broadcast texts may belong to particular individuals or companies, but those who love those texts feel like they own them too, in a way. Not commercially, clearly, but there is commitment, passion and engagement with those texts, and fan fiction, fan art, filking, craft and so on are, I feel, legitimate expressions of creative response to texts people find personally or culturally meaningful.

So, does everything we do for love – to participate in a community of like-minded aficionados – does it all really have to be turned into a money making venture for it to be legitimised? Isn’t it legitimate enough as a creative expression of engagement with both culture and community? And isn’t it slightly discomfiting that a big corporation saw an arena out of which it could be making money and promptly jumped in to plant a flag and claim dominion?

But I was uneasy for other reasons too, coming from the other end of that creative spectrum. As a writer of original fiction these days, I also began to wonder how such an agreement would interact with the original creator’s rights. Would these new stories be expected to be accepted as canon? Fan fiction has no such standing now, but with contracts, royalties and money changing hands, will owners of IP be able maintain creative control? Should they? Who will monitor the quality of forays into worlds they may have spent years building? Can a fan written work render significant changes to backstory or future story? To what effect?

The latter is a particularly interesting question to me, with my new Kitty and Cadaver online multimedia project. As part of the project, I’ve included a creative commons licence to encourage creative response to the material: a licence that essentially says ‘you can come and play in the sandpit, as long as you’re not trying to make money out of it’. (The aim is that I’ll keep an eye out for potential partnerships where both the original licence holder – me – and the new artist will come to mutually fair commercial arrangements.)

So far, so speculative. The idea has some merit, and there are points that might be considered uncomfortable but will certainly be for individual IP holders and budding writers to assess.

Some more worrying detail came to hand, however, via John Birmingham’s post on Attendly, citing concerns about quality control. Now, I know there are some terrific fan fiction writers out there – and some of them will learn their craft, get restless with writing in other people’s worlds and start creating their own. Some people are less skilled but will enjoy noodling around their favourite universes through fan fiction and art, and that’s cool too. But this question feeds into my concerns about not only quality but how these works affect canon – the original creator’s original conception of the world they’ve created.

Birmingham’s blog, Cheeseburger Gothic, has a more recent post now too, talking about the rights set-ups for those potential fan writers. A major concern there is that the Amazon contract for these works include a clause which also gives Amazon rights to any original characters or ideas that appear in the authorised fan stories. Effectively, if you create a neat new character or situation and it turns out to be a huge hit with the reading public (or even if it doesn’t), the contract gives Amazon the right to exploit that idea without the original creator getting any further payment.

Given that many fan writers actually develop original characters or scenarios which they may later peel off into brand new, original fictions (and thereby launching their careers in the non-fannish arena), this is a clause that writers will have to think very seriously about. Birmingham quotes John Scalzi saying the approach is like providing a free ideas mine to the key licence holders (in this case, primarily Alloy Entertainment).

It’s not necessarily a deal breaker, but it’s one of those times where writers are reminded that they really need to look closely at contracts, wherever they come from, to be sure that they are getting the best deal. Being paid for playing in someone else’s sandpit is a grand idea, but it’s worth making sure that the sandpit owners don’t end up with the right to take away your bucket, spade, sunglasses and Factor 15 sunblock while you’re at it.

The Kindle Worlds idea has merit, but there are serious issues for both IP holders and fan writers to consider, in terms of how it may impact their intellectual property in the long term. For all my concerns as a creator of IP, my inclination, having come from a fan fiction start, is to be concerned for the rights of fan writers who come up with original ideas and may lose the right to use them under this contract.

It could be that the traditional fan fiction path – starting with fan fiction, developing your craft and then moving naturally into creating your own original worlds – will still be the best choice for writers taking this route.

Further reading

Amazon’s press release on Kindle Worlds
The Kindle Worlds page


John Birmingham’s posts:


Attendly: Kindle Worlds and the Problem of Quality Control
Cheeseburger Gothic: Kindle Worlds update


John Scalzi: Amazon’s Kindle Worlds Instant Thoughts
Wired Magazine: ‘Kindle Worlds’ Lets Authors Publish Fan Fiction — At Dubious Cost

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, smartphone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.

Review: Ruby Coral Carnelian by Mary Borsellino (AWW Challenge #8)

You may have read on this blog before how very much I love the work of Mary Borsellino. Well, here’s some more of that love heading your way.

Borsellino’s latest is a shortish YA fantasy called Ruby Coral Carnelian. The title is a reference to this world’s wizards, the kind of magic they use and their willingness (and success) in using blood magic.

The story sees Del, assistant to the Ruby Warlock, discovering the wizard intends to sell him on to another wizard and realizing that this isn’t going to end well. As Del plans to run, he discovers that one of the Ruby Warlock’s twin step-children, away at boarding school, is in trouble and that the other plans to rescue him. Del ends up helping, and he, Nicholas and Kelsie end up on the run, escaping from powerful people who mean them harm.

So far, so straightforward, and it gets difficult to provide details without also providing spoilers. As always with Borsellino’s work, there is more going on than a simple plot explanation can reveal. The characters are flawed yet sympathetic, the story taking some unexpected turns as they learn about themselves and each other.

Ruby Coral Carnelian initially reminded me of my old favourite Diana Wynne Jones. Like many of Jones’s books, here’s a tale that partly explores what happens when kids learn that the adults in their life aren’t necessarily dependable, and are possibly even dangerous, and must fend for themselves and grow up at the same time.

Adding texture to this are themes relating to gender identity, concepts of privilege, the assumptions we make, and even notions of disability and wholeness.

In trying to capture the flavour of this book, I told a friend ‘imagine Diana Wynne Jones pencilled the art, but then it was inked by a Vertigo artist’.

So that’s sort of it. The core of a story that feels as traditional and as sound as a book by the late great Jones, but with its own freshness (and darkness) that explores new territory and reaches different conclusions.

There are many reasons why I think Mary Borsellino is one of the great underappreciated genre writers this country has to offer. The way she combines horror and compassion. Her capacity to create detailed, believable worlds full of cruelty and beauty. Her splendid characterisation. Her queer sensibilities and sure sense of creating people with real flaws and imperfections that are somehow both very real and simply perfect.

Frankly, I know the hyperbole is a lot for a writer to live up to, but also frankly, I have never yet been disappointed by one of her books. I struggle more to tame my praise than to find enough adjectives to add.

If you’re not sure you want to tackle Borsellino’s longer works like The Wolf House or The Devil’s Mixtape, give Ruby Coral Carnelian a try to see if what makes me pretty much get a literary boner speaks to you too.

Get Ruby Coral Carnelian for your Kindle
Get Ruby Coral Carnelian in paperback

Read my reviews of The Wolf House and the Devil’s Mixtape

Buy Origins and Overtures (The Wolf House) (Volume 1 of The Wolf House) for Kindle or Origins and Overtures (Volume 1) in paperback.
Buy The Devil’s Mixtape for Kindle

Read my review of Mary Borsellino’s latest erotica story, A Brighter Spark.

Buy A Brighter Spark (Xcite Romance) for Kindle

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, smartphone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.

Getting in touch with your inner knight

I’ve never been to Ballarat’s Kryal Castle before, though I’d heard of it. People confessed to having visited in their childhood, often with subtext of ‘I can’t believe that cheesy old place is still operating!’ In fact, the whole medieval-castle-in-rural-Victoria theme park has been closed for a while. It’s been refurbished with lavish attention, and on 2 March 2013, it flung open its drawbridge once more.

It’s a funny thing about theme parks. They can work really well, or they can fall really flat. I half expected this to be one of those latter occasions, but I hadn’t really counted on an essential part of the redevelopment of Kryal Castle.

It was built by storytellers.

There are lots of archetypes in fantasy fiction, especially those in faux-medieval settings. There are knights and ladies, kings and princesses, dragons and dragon slayers, wizards and witches. There are taverns and the quaffing of ale, tournaments where favours are won, and dungeons where dark deeds are committed.

But what might be a tad predictable or shallow in a complex novel of medieval fantasy is just the ticket for creating a framework for a theme park. Easily recognisable archetypes instantly allow the visitor, of any age or preferred genre, to know where they are and how to respond.

The visitor enters Kryal Castle by walking past an animatronic dragon, Red Ruff, who responds to proximity. Then you walk through a series of tunnels, while carvings, chained dragons and Galadriel-esque holographic princesses tell the sad story of the fall of Kryal Castle. About the stolen dragon eggs, and the children who were stolen in return, and how the kingdom suffered as a result.

By the time you emerge into the centre of the castle, you’re set: immersed in the building of this fantasy world. You don’t have to follow the story, but elements of it are scattered all around as you explore.

The origin story is retold a few times a day in the Jester’s Theatre, where the performers and puppets interact with young audience members to discover the moral of the tale. You can visit the dragon egg garden, or see swords and dragon eggs in the Knight’s Tower. There’s a lot to look at.

Kryal isn’t all about staring at exhibits, though – far from it. It’s storytelling, but it’s street theatre too, so there are plenty of opportunities to be interactive with the story, including a maze, a playground, facepainting, and other activities timed throughout the day.  Watching three little girls all trying to pull a sword from a stone was pretty damned adorable. Watching the teenagers tie their friends to the rack or the shutting them in the stocks was fairly gratifying as well.

In the afternoon, I saw knights on the tourney field teaching archery to little kids, and I sincerely hope that at least one them grows up to be either Hawkeye of the Avengers or Merida from Brave. The playing field also regularly has knights showing off their swordsmanship, and horsemanship too, with jousting knights.

There was a real A Knight’s Tale atmosphere about the knights on the field, with the usual town crier (honestly, it’s his regular job, I asked) doing the film’s role of Chaucer while contemporary-sounding, medieval-inspired choral music filled the stands. The audience learned to shout HUZZAH! with enthusiasm while riders attempted to capture rings and hit targets with sword and lance, and later rode at each other with lances that shattered on impact with armour. The setting might have been a story, but the skills were real, which made it enormously satisfying to watch.

I had a long talk with one of the knights, Riggsy (above, in the yellow), about what it took to train a horse to jousting (first, take one fairly unflappable horse; next, train it to do things that don’t come naturally to a horse, like running straight at another horse; thirdly, work out how to ride without having much dexterity in your battle-armoured hands and body; fourthly, try not to fall off, because that bloody hurts).

Riggsy’s passion for his horse, his obvious abilities with weapons and animal, and the fun he clearly has on the field (along with the demonstration of very real skill by both knights) lent the whole thing the frisson of authenticity that makes Kryal work so well. The people working here seem to be having a damned good time, and are happily participating in the theatrical storytelling of the basic concept of this fantasy castle.

That’s the key to Kryal Castle – it’s not trying to be a theme park about medieval history. It’s a theme park about fantasy and storytelling. Your inner six year old and outer proper grown up can both respond to an atmosphere that echoes stories like A Knight’s Tale, the Narnia books, Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, not to mention every medieval-esque fantasy you’ve ever read. It speaks to the imagination, pitching the balance of the fictional and the authentic just right.

Speaking of having a frisson of authenticity, nobody wants their torture chamber exhibit to be too authentic, but you don’t want a bunch of department store fashion dummies with chipped paint to be propped up with their bland, buy-this-nice-suit faces on either. Kryal Castle has managed to walk that line between the theatrical and the authentic with a really very creepy two-part dungeon.

On the ground floor, a series of static displays of various torture devices leaves it up to the explanatory text combined with some instruments and the occasional gruesome dummy to build a mental image of how horrible punishment could be. However, a tight spiral staircase (headed by a warning that it’s not for the under 12s) leads down to twisting corridors filled with light, shadow and sound. Proximity technology allows the lighting and soundscapes to be timed for the best effect, and I found (to my embarrassment) that not all the shrieks came from the recordings…

Some kids went through it with ghoulish enthusiasm. I enjoyed it immensely too, but I found the sounds of ravens interrupted while pecking at the dead and the meaty thunk of a beheading profoundly unsettling as well.  So I went in, expecting cheesy and ridiculous faux-menacing tableaux, and emerged feeling rather grateful for the sunshine.

And my husband, who openly laughed at me being a scaredy cat, especially considering I write horror?

When he went through on his own, it gave him the collywobbles as well.

Well played, Kryal Castle, well played.

Disclosure: Narrelle travelled to Ballarat dined out magnificently at Jackson’s and Co, Kryal Castle and The Forge courtesy of Ballarat Regional Tourism.

Kryal Castle is open from 10.00am until 5.00pm every day of the year (except Christmas Day), including public holidays.

Visit the Kryal Castle website
Ticket info

Narrelle M Harris is a Melbourne-based writer. Find out more about her books, smartphone apps, public speaking and other activities at www.narrellemharris.com.