Narrelle M. Harris's Blog, page 47

New competition: Pimp my e-Book!!

The Opposite of Life is now available as an e-book on Amazon.com. At last it is available at a reasonable price to people living outside Australia! At last you can add it to your own digital collection!

To celebrate, and to get the word out there, I am running a Pimp My e-Book competition. All you have to do is get the word out there: add the link to your Facebook wall; tweet about it; blog about it. If you have the urge, go and leave a review on the Amazon.com page for it.

(I must stress that entry in the competition does not rely on you leaving a good review. If you want to leave a review, say what you really think. You'll get an entry whatever you say, though obviously I hope you enjoyed it.)

Then all you have to do is paste your link on my Facebook wall or in a reply to my blog here to be in the running for a prize pool of specially-made prizes (pictured). These include t-shirts, tote bags, pens, a coffee cup and a key ring all featuring the cover of The Opposite of Life or the artwork Audrey Fox did for the sneak preview of the sequel, Walking Shadows.

I'll keep a tally of everyone who has entered. Every week, I'll select a winner, some at random, one or two for any particularly creative or effective promotions on the book's behalf.

Already some people have spread the news on Twitter and Facebook: so the first two entrants in the competition are Julie Salisbury and Tom Cho!

Book Hungry

I recently read The Hunger Games. The whole trilogy. In five days. I'm still feeling the emotional fallout from the books themselves, and I still have residual soreness in my neck and shoulders from the intensity of the reading experience.

Numerous friends of mine had, without saying anything about the plot, sung the series' praises. When I learned a film was being made,  decided I wanted to read the books before it came out.

I started reading The Hunger Games on a Sunday night on my Kindle, and was immediately drawn into the action-and-anxiety-packed world Suzanne Collins had put together. Desperate to find out what happened next, I hardly put it down . I synced the book and read from my phone when that was more convenient. I read after work and at lunchtimes

I finished the first book and almost instantly moved onto the second, Catching Fire. An apt title. The book had certainly set me aflame. The personal story of Katniss and Peeta and the Games was one thing, but the larger story of the brutal rule of the Capitol, the vile concept of the bread-and-circuses games, was a bigger fire. It pressed all my buttons about love, cruelty, justice, sacrifice and the need to stand against tyranny.

Every few chapters I was choked up; sometimes actual crying occurred. Sometimes at work, where I read voraciously during lunchbreaks or while cueing for coffee.

For the first time in a decade, I read while I walked to work, from my phone screen. I stopped reading at interesections, of course: I couldn't afford to get myself run over and killed before I knew how it ended.

And if I thought the first two books had been emotional ordeals, the third left me literally unable to sleep. All my buttons fully engaged, Collins then hammered on my personal horror of the loss of self. I read Mockinjay in 24 hours. I cried a lot, right up to the bittersweet ending which nevertheless gave me a resolution that was both realistic and gave me solace.

I'm still absorbing the books: their themes, the reason for my intense emotional respose to them, and my reaction to the fanfiction that seems so focused on wrting traumatic adventures during previous (and sometimes future) Hunger Games tournaments.

Mostly I remain excited that here are books I have engaged with in an obsessive, consuming, compulsive way that I haven't really had since I was a teenager myself. I love a lot of books I've read and love getting back to them when the necessities of life have made me put them down. But it's been a long time since I couldn't sleep because I was so anxious about the fate of two characters and their world.

The two writers who have come closest are Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series and just about anything Mary Borsellino writes (her prose and ideas both excite me! Go and read The Wolf House series if you haven't already). My husband tends to become a book widow for those two writers, too.

I'm excited that books that swallow me whole still exist. When I've had a chance to recover from this first encounter, I'll be going back to The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay. Perhaps knowing everyone's fates will make the reading of them a slow burn rather than a wildfire.

I don't love books! (I love stories.)

The big question on every literate set of lips lately seems to be "Do you prefer old fashioned paper books or e-books?". I'm not convinced it's a valid question. I read stories, in whatever guise they come in, which means I read both digital and print books, and my preference is for whichever one is on hand at the time.

I certainly understand the affection readers have with the printed word. I have myself thrilled to the view of actual manuscripts, kept tantalisingly under glass, of the great books and diaries of yore. I've seen one of the first editions of Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in a castle in Poland, alongside one of the oldest known atlases in the world. At the British Library, my spine shivered in empathy at the last words in Scott's diary: "For God's sake look after our people."  The written word, on the page, can be spellbinding.

But not all printed words are world changing. Not all books are lovely to hold and look at. Sometimes, no matter how thick the paper or lavish the cover, the story within those pages is bland, or vile, or simply not my cup of tea. The argument that a story is only worth reading if it's in a book just doesn't hold for me. As a writer, I find it vaguely offensive that it's the format, not the story held inside it, that counts.

Perhaps my view comes from the fact that I'm a traveller too. I've been reading e-books, on and off, for ten or more years. My husband and I like to travel light (partly because he's a travel writer and we're often moving every few days and heavy suitcases get in the way). With only a small backpack into which to fit our temporary lives, we were early adopters of Palm Pilots and would load travel guides and classic literature onto the devices before the trip. (I still miss the neat auto-scrolling capacity my Palm had, so I could eat a meal and read without having even to flick the page with a finger!)

The format was a necessity for the way we travel, but the convenience was marvellous. I didn't have to worry about favourite books getting damaged as they collided with everything else in my handbag.  If my train was delayed, or I had to spend an irritating amount of time in a waiting room, I always had several books on hand. As screens have developed, it's become easier and easier to read from them. I used my smartphone to hold my books for ages, and now my Kindle has a delightful matte screen and I can change the font size for those tired-eye days.

Have I found having an e-reader is changing my reading habits? Yes. I'm reading a lot more: at lunchtimes at work; on the tram; waiting for the tram; at home; at cafes. I am reading several books at once, which I can choose from depending on my mood, because I have all of them with me at once. I'm more likely to spontaneously buy a book on  reading the review or getting a recommendation, rather than trying to remember the title next time I'm near a bookshop that's open. Having a digital to-read pile is less intimidating than my still rather large paper book stash, and easier to add to. (This great news for publishers who benefit from my impulse buying; less so for my bank balance.)

Of course there are going to be less pleasant consquences of the e-book revolution. Bookselling giants like Borders and Angus and Robertson are already disappearing. Will the independent and boutique bookshops follow? I'm not convinced they all will, but I don't know what the future holds or how readers will adapt to the new market. I'm concerned that access to books may be restricted to people on lower incomes because e-devices may not be affordable and the cheap books, championed by the likes of Penguin, may not longer be available.

It may be some years before the dust settles on the e-versus-tree upheaval and we see how it all pans out. Like all such upheavals, some changes will be for the better, some for the worse. I suspect that books on paper will never leave us, and that when readers discover an digital book that hits them in the heart, they'll go an buy a lovely paper edition to display on the shelf, to hold and re-read and adore. And people who find a beautiful print book may then buy a digital edition to preserve that book in all its shiny glory while reading the e-book to digital death. Some people will continue to love and seek out dog-eared copies of pre-adored stories with notes in the margins, in the manner of Helen Hanff, while others will treat bound editions like precious art, not to be damaged in any way.

But people will keep on reading. They will keep finding the stories that tell them about themselves, or teach them what it's like to be someone else, however they are told. We're human: telling and seeking out stories is one of the nobler things we do.

For myself, I read stories in all kinds of formats. I read paper books and e-books. I read comics. I read texts on my computer and on printed-out sheafs of A4 paper. Whatever the format they come in, I read stories and it is the words, not the medium, that transport me.

*Note: The Opposite of Life is not yet available as an e-book, but it's coming soon!

Everyone has a first time

If you haven't yet tried e-books, perhaps July 2011 can be your first time! Smashwords is having a sale, and you can get a whole heap of e-books at discounted prices, including my four e-books!

With 50% off the price, Fly By Night and Sacrifice are both $1.50 and Witch Honour and Witch Faith are only $3.50. You can download the books in any one of ten formats. Some formats are compatile with e-readers like Kindle and Kobo, or on the various e-reader programs that work on smartphones or regular computers, as well as PDF, RTF, plain docs and even HTML.

So go on, give it a whirl!

And if you've already read one or more of the stories, feel free to leave a review on the site. This writer sure would appreciate it.

Review: Kill Your Darlings, Issue #5

Melbourne's latest literary publication, Kill Your Darlings, was first published in 2010. Issue 5 came out in April 2011 and the team are getting ready with Issue 6 as we speak.

It's a terrific little magazine, filled with essays, reviews, fiction, opinion pieces, art and articles – and issue 5 is a ripper! I can't really pull out highlights because it's all so fabulous! Things I really liked, though, which make me want to follow up on the writers, poets and books concerned are:

The interview with Geoff Dyer, who has an interesting take on both fiction and non-fiction. The interview questions were intelligent and interesting and prompted some great observations and ideas.
S.A. Jones's essay on Ted Hughes and Sylvia Path called A Peanut Cruncher's Defence makes me want to finally getting around to reading both Plath and Hughes. The writer's insights on who possesses the narratives of a person's life, especially after they've passed is intruiging,
Cristy Clark gave me a few things to think about with Being Ecotarian: The Complexity of Food and while I'm not a gamer, Daniel Golding's defence of videogames in terms of both art and culture in Not Art, You Say? resonates because I do read comics and I've heard all of it before there as well.
Fiona Scott-Norman's retrospective of The Professionals had me howling with laughter, mostly because I absolutely recognise all the stages she's gone through with  the boys!  This review is partnered with an equally funny take on Twilight, by Margot Cullen called All that Glitters: Decoding the Edward Cullen Effect — which begins with Margot making her boyfriend stand in the backyard during winter in his underwear before making him come inside to ONLY CUDDLE.

Added to this is fiction by Patrick Cullen, Sonja Dechian and Eva Lomski, articles on the future of Australian bookshops, the resurgence of cassette tapes, alcholism, blogging reality television and a heap more.

Kill Your Darlings is a terrific magazine, meaty and engaging, challenging and hilarious. With luck, it will continue to have the occasional vampire!

Visit Kill Your Darlings to subscribe or find out where to buy individual issues. The Kill Your Darlings team also have a blog and a podcast.

Review: A Golem Story by Lally Katz, at the Malthouse Theatre

A GOLEM STORY photo by Garth Oriander

I saw my first Lally Katz play in early 2000 at the La Mama theatre. It didn't quite work for me at the time, but the ideas and execution were intriguing. Over the next few years, while Tim and I reviewed for our website, Stage Left, I kept seeing shows by Katz: Pirate Eyes, Dead Girls are Fantastic, Henrietta's Last Safari.

I interviewed Katz  in 2001 and we talked briefly about what her shows might look like if a theatre with budget, experience and a uniformly talented cast took on the job.

Now, at last, with A Golem Story, I know the answer. Her show looks amazing. In the last decade, Katz has honed and matured her skills without losing that surreal, dreamlike quality she always wrote so well. The story is replete with both high drama and humour, and has a tone that is simultaneously childlike and profound. In the hands of director Michael Kantor, a fabulous cast, imaginative set design and gorgeous soundscapes, the result is really something magnificent.

A Golem Story is set in 16th century Prague when, as legend has it, the Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel created a golem to defend the Jewish population from violence after they were accused of murdering Christian children for strange rituals.

At the heart of A Golem Story is one of Katz's 'lost girls', who feature so significantly throughout her work. Aheva (Yael Stone) has been exorcised of the possessing spirit of her fiance, who committed suicide, but she is now without memory and, she thinks, without God. She is meant to work in the synagogue as a maid, but her world is confusing and full of mysteries. Things are being kept from her and no-one will tell her why her fiance killed himself or what she may have done to trigger it. Her role in assisting the Rabbi to bring the golem to life is pivotal to learning the answers to those questions.

Brian Lipson as the Rabbi is riveting, his stage presence an excellent balance for Yael Stone's intense portrayal of the girl who yearns to know who she is and where she belongs. Greg Stone brings a rakish air to his Guard Captain while Mark Jones's Emperor is a witty delight. The rest of the cast, which includes the wonderful Dan Spielman, also provide fine performances.

Jones also served as musical director for the production, and he has achieved something special. The Yiddish songs performed throughout by the cast provide an astonishing soundscape and add texture to the drama (and sometimes melodrama) of the production as a whole.

The wooden set, lit in part by candles and the shimmering spotlight that represents the golem, is a combination of clean lines and earthiness. Those contrasts capture the contrasts of the script and the characters. As always with a Lally Katz play, I am not entirely sure what to think of it as a whole yet. There are certainly comments in there about the monsters we create and then lose control of, and what those monsters may choose for themselves. These ideas can relate readily to the consequences we are already experiencing of modern technology, social media and biological engineering.

I have other thoughts, about women, knowledge, love and power, about victims seizing control of their own lives, about what happens when Frankenstein's monster becomes self-aware, all percolating in my head. It'll probably be a few days before they coalesce into something sharper, but that's what I've always loved about the best theatre. You catch yourself thinking about it for days afterwards, sometimes much, much longer. This play is strange and beautiful and I'll be thinking about it for a while yet.

It's a joy to see one of Katz's plays finally get the director, cast and crew who know how to get the very best out of it. A Golem Story is visually and aurally lush, engaging on its surface level and intriguing in its other layers. If you like stories about monsters and people, and especially about how they are sometimes the same thing, you should see it.

A Golem Story by Lally Katz is playing at the Merlyn Theatre at The Malthouse on Sturt Street until 2 July 2011.

Visit The Malthouse to find out more and to book tickets.

Review: Little People by Jane Sullivan

Jane Sullivan draws on the true-life events of 1870, when a troupe of little people toured Australia. General Tom Thumb really did fall into the Yarra River and was rescued, and from this starting point, Sullivan creates a fictionalised account of their adventures.

Strange beliefs, secrets and mystery surround Mary Ann's unborn baby. Who should she trust, and what will the truth mean for her, the child and the theatre folk on whom she now depends? Chapters from the point of view of the web-fingered governess, Mary Ann, who saved the General instead of drowning herself as planned, are interspersed with chapters narrated by the other players in the story. The General's rival, George Nutt and Nutt's brother Rodia; the General's tiny wife, Lavinia and her sister Minnie.

Sullivan draws her cast with just the right touch of the outre and the humane. Her exploration of the little people reflects the time in which they lived and were treated as curiosities, celebrated but not always considered quite 'real'. Web-fingered Mary Ann, a pregnant woman without a husband, is equally suspended between two views. Her determination not to be 'tractable' leads her to both trouble and to find her courage.

Little People draws on the arcane and bizarre, the same fodder for curiosities that fuelled sideshows, PT Barnums' wonders and the science/fantast hybrid fiction of Jules Verne, HG Wells, Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stephensen. The book is also full of humanity and warmth, so that when all the arcane beliefs are taken away, the reader is left with a story of love and courage.

Buy Little People by Jane Sullivan.

Buy the e-book of LIttle People.

GaryView: Beauty and the Beast Pilot Episode

Gary: That wasn't very plausible.

Lissa: A cat-faced man forming a strange and intense friendship with a plucky gal with a regular job?

Gary: For a start.

Lissa: Says the vampire who is friends with a librarian.

Gary: … I suppose when you put it like that…

Lissa: (laughs) Only you never read me poetry.

Gary: No. Not likely to either. My high school English teacher made me promise to never read aloud again.

Lissa: Oh, that's mean.

Gary: Yeah. But. You know. Warranted. Not everybody has a voice like a cat-faced man from New York.

Lissa: (a little wistfully) He does have a very nice voice.

Gary: Are you telling me you liked all that schmaltz?

Lissa: … It's not that schmaltzy.

Gary:  Say that again without sounding defensive.

Lissa: Okay, so it's a bit schmaltzy. And also a bit creepy, having a secret boyfriend who beats people up.

Gary: Oh, I hadn't thought of that bit. That is creepy.

Lissa: But I love this show anyway. I watched it when I was a little girl. I used to dress our cat in a little teatowel cape and made him listen to classical music with me. I made my sister Belinda find all the poems and read them to me and Kate at bedtime. We didn't know what half of it meant, but we loved the way the words sounded. A few years after Belinda died I found the series on videotape and watched it all again. I went and found all the poems and music from it. It reminded me so much of her…

Gary: (a little panicky)  I'm sorry. Don't cry. I'm sorry I said it was schmaltzy.

Lissa: (taking big breaths) Sorry. Sorry. I didn't mean to get all… sometimes it gets me like this. I'm okay. I just… I miss her so much, sometimes. I miss the things we did together, even the fights we had. Belinda should have been a great writer, and instead she… she… (gulps down a breath) I even miss talking about her. We stopped doing that at home. It made the sadness unbearable.

Gary: I'm sorry you're sad.

Lissa: Me too. So this show, and the poetry in it, it's like, it's something Belinda gave me.

Gary: Um. The poetry is… very pretty. And the music's nice.

Lissa: (sniffing) Yes, they are. This show is one of the reasons I became a librarian, in the end. I spent so much time in libraries finding all the texts, I liked being in there much more than I liked being at home. I always felt safe in libraries. And close to Belinda.

Gary: Libraries are great. I usually hang around the non-fiction section myself, or look for the SF.

Lissa: (calmer) You should try some of the great poets one day.

Gary: Maybe. I've certainly got the time to read them nowadays.

Lissa: So. Right. Seeing as it's schmaltzy and a little creepy, I take it you're not keen on watching any more.

Gary: I don't mind creepy. But is this whole series a split between poetry and violence?

Lissa: … You know, I rather think it is. Though there is some great world-building later on, about the society that lives in the tunnels below New York. You might enjoy watching some of the things they do to jury-rig technology.

Gary: Oh, that would be interesting.

Lissa: It's funny how Vincent lives below the city, but he likes to climb up the buildings to look at it from above to.

Gary: If I was forced to live in a cave, I'd probably like to go roofless for a bit too.

Lissa: I guess so. Hey, do you ever climb onto rooftops to look at the city at night?

Gary: Not really. Though I did climb to the roof of Council House Two a few times to look at the yellow turbines up there, and how the shutters work. You know the place, with all that climate friendly engineering?

Lissa: (laughs) That's your kind of poetry, huh?

Gary: I guess so. I made some sketches and tried to do some reading on the engineering principles, but I had trouble with some of it. (shrugs off the limits of his undead brain)

Lissa: Have you ever thought of going up to just… look at the view?

Gary: No. Is it a nice view?

Lissa: Probably. It looks pretty from my apartment block in South Melbourne. The night sky and the city lights are very forgiving to the Yarra River. I bet it would be even nicer from higher up.

Gary: Would you like to see it? I can take you up if you want.

Lissa: I'd like that.

Gary: I'll… even let you read me some of that poetry you like, if you want.

Lissa: Are you sure?

Gary: I like your voice. That would be okay. You can explain all the things I don't understand, too.

Lissa: I'd be delighted to, Gary.

Gary: Good. Maybe… if you miss talking about Belinda. You could tell me about her too. If you want.

(Lissa stares at Gary a moment, then lunges at him, hugging him fiercely. Gary, not sure what he's done right this time, pats her on the back.)

*For newcomers, the GaryView is a review of books/films/TV/entertainment carried out as a conversation between Lissa Wilson (librarian) and Gary Hooper (vampire) , characters from my book 'The Opposite of Life'. Visit my website for more information.

A smashing good time

After a certain amount of trial and error, my four e-books are now available on Smashwords as well as Amazon.com.

Witch Honour, Witch Faith, Fly by Night and Sacrifice are now all available on Smashwords in ten different formats. So if you don't use Kindle, you can now get those books in whatever format suits you best!

While on the subject of e-books, would anyone be interested if I collected the best GaryViews as an e=book? What other stuff would you like to see in there? I can't promise I can deliver it, but if it's possible, I'll try.

Review: Black Glass by Meg Mundell

Meg Mundell's debut novel, Black Glass, is set in a dystopian near-future Melbourne. A friend recently asked me why so many books set in the future were dystopian. Thinking about it, I think that very few books (historical, present or future) are ever set in a Utopia. If everything is happy and perfect, there isn't a lot of dramatic potential. A spanner has to be thrown in the works to get a story going.

Black Glass has multiple spanners and multiple works, but the two key ones are the lives of Tally and Grace, sisters who are separated at the beginning of the book by a violent explosion. As the book flashes towards an ending that is also violently explosive, it's anybody's guess whether the sisters will find each other again.

The story is told in fragments, echoing numerous images of shattered glass, from the sisters' world suddenly blown apart to the abandoned glass factory that Tally later makes her home. Some fragments follow Tally's story, others follow Grace, while yet others follow journalist Damon, the artist Milk or others who will eventually converge in the final pages.

The technique has a very cinematic quality, and sometimes has a very strobe-like sense of disorientation. It suits the world that Melbourne has become very well—a disjointed patchwork of zones inhabited by strict policing, manipulative power brokers, the correctly documented and the 'undocs', the definite 'have nots'. And although it's not an immediately recognisable Melbourne, I did enjoy the passing references to places I knew and places I could imagine.

Tally and Grace, and most of the people they meet, are undocs, scraping a living on the streets and avoiding both police round-ups and the nastier elements in their precarious world. Each sister falls in with a different circle of folks living on the edge, which gives Mundell ample room to explore issues of identity and control. Everyone we meet, whether undoc or legit, has competing interests, potential dangers and a need to hide part or all of themselves in order to survive.

Mundell's style flows easily. The deceptively simple approach seems to gloss many things over, except that enough clues have been given that we know what is really going on without things having to be spelled out. These story shards seem slight at times, but they are sharp.

Dark but never hopeless, Black Glass is a fast-paced, intriguing piece of speculative fiction.

Buy Black Glass from Readings as a paperback or as an e-book from Booki.sh.