Brain? What brain?

Sometimes I wonder about people.

Look carefully. See the lines of red stuff in big pile of rock? That’s lava. These guys are standing in front of a lava flow taking photographs!

Oh dear lord, what have I done!

Lee is having a crisis of faith and I caused it.

To explain I need to give you some more history. A lot more, so this will be a long post I’m afraid.

Lee has been writing a book for a while now, let’s just call it B1. It’s the book she was writing when she decided to get serious about this whole writing lark. It’s a gritty type fantasy. Lots of politics and heavy themes like racism. It’s complex and intricate.

She submitted it to the Harper Collins Varuna Awards for Manuscript Development in 2005. It was shortlisted which is a sign that the work has definite potential. Unfortunately, it didn’t win one of the five prize places.

Why? Well obviously the first thought is that it wasn’t good enough. That’s a possibly you must always face. No point in fooling yourself. There is some suggestion that fantasy as a genre struggles in the Varuna competition but there’s little point in assuming that this was the reason. One issue we did have is that the feedback mechanism from Varuna (a phone consultation with the director, Peter Bishop) breaks down if you’re shortlisted but don’t win. Basically you miss out. So Lee was left very unsure of what she had to do to improve the work.

One thing that Lee and I did talk about at this time was that perhaps the mood of the book wasn’t ideal for a first book in this field. So she decided to work on an alternative project. Why don’t we call it B2.

B2 is an Asian themed fantasy. Very much my sort of thing. Martial arts, magic, shapeshifters, exploding monks, everything a childish person like me wants. This was submitted to Varuna in 2006 and sank without a trace. You might think this would be even more depressing but unlike the first time Lee was able to get some real feedback.

Peter Bishop was extremely complimentary of the work. He also mentioned that he remembered reading B1. Lee mentioned that she was thinking about editing B1 as part of a five part editing workshop run by the Queensland Writers Centre. He suggested that he would very much like to see the edited work. So with this in mind Lee returned to her first love and went back to working seriously on B1.

So that’s were we stand today. Lee has finished an extremely useful editing workshop run by one of our favourite Australian authors, Kim Wilkins. Kim was also extremely complimentary of the parts of B1 that she read and has strongly advised Lee to complete the edit and start looking for an agent.

So how did I screw up?

Well I’m Lee’s first reader but she also has two family friends who help critique her work. One of those two recently said that while she was enjoying B1 it was B2 that she was really looking forward to. Foolishly I agreed.

Lee is now very conflicted about which work to continue with. B1 is the more complete of the two but she is now thinking that B2 is more sellable. I’ve tried to reason with her. I mean my opinion shouldn’t carry any more weight any anyone else’s. My liking for B2 is completely low brow. I like shiny things and it’s definitely the shiner of the two books. That doesn’t make it better however. B1 is by miles the more sophisticated of the two.

I like pulp, I can’t help it. How do I convince her I’m an idiot and she should ignore me?

Winning.

It was autumn but in Brisbane the summer seems to hang on forever. By early April you’re just waiting for that first sign of the weather breaking.

Mww and I arrived home after work. Actually now that I’ve been found out I think I’ll call her Lee. It’s not her real name but she writes under the pseudonym Lee Dublin so let’s use that – it’s seems fitting somehow.

So anyway, back to the story. We arrived home from work. If it was a normal day, and I think it was, it was probably sometime around six in the evening. The sun was probably close to the horizon but still very much in evidence.

I say probably to all these things because my memory won’t bring them back clearly. I don’t remember who went to get the mail. It was probably Lee. That’s normal. I unlock the door, she retrieves the mail. But how then did we end up at the back of the car together? I don’t know.

I remember standing at her shoulder as she opened the letter from the Australian Science Fiction Foundation. Lee told me later that night that she read the first word Congratulations and being pissed off that they would start a letter that way. She never in her wildest dreams expected anything from this venture. Me? I read faster than she does and I guess I’m a little more confident in her work. I’d already read the next few words …on winning the Swancon Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Story competition!

I was off away doing my little dance of glee (think Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack). Lee was still confused as to what was going on. I got a lovely clear look at her face as she read the rest of the first paragraph. Your story was quickly chosen by our judges as the best story submitted and your cheque (courtesy of the Australian Science fiction Foundation) and certificate are enclosed.

In my mind that is the moment when this went from a possible future to a definite. I no longer have any doubts about if, only when.

Oh BTW, we’ve been sprung. One of the wife’s photos that I posted below has left a trail of breadcrumbs she followed to my door. Good thing is that now I can give you her blog address and you can all go piss off and read something written by someone who actually knows what she’s doing.

 So here you go.

http://leedublin.wordpress.com/

Bias.

I’m not a big fan of those ‘idol’ type talent quests. But I must admit the first few shows are always at least interesting. Not interesting in a good way. More like blood sport. No, what interests me is how someone who sounds like a cat being strangled can stand up on national television and try to sing.

Didn’t anybody ever tell them they’re shit at this? Why not? I mean presumably there are people that profess to love them. Parents, siblings, partners. Why didn’t any of them just take the person aside and tell them quietly that this isn’t going to be their thing? Were they too embarrassed? Couldn’t stand to disappoint their loved one?

But the alternative is they get hammered on national television. That’s an acceptable option?

Or maybe, just maybe, when you love someone his or her flaws don’t seem so bad. And that was what worried me the first time I read my wife’s writing.

I always knew she wrote. Privately. In her own time. She would go through phases when she would disappear for hours at a time. She never offered to show me and I tried not to pry. Part of a successful marriage, in my humble opinion, is to let your partner deal with life in whatever way they feel is necessary. Be supportive when you’re needed but mind your own business when you’re not. I quietly informed her that I wouldn’t mind reading some of her stuff and left it at that. So it stood there. A small part of her private life. Not part of mine at all. Except for one small thing. It became increasingly clear to me that she was happier when she was writing. She was calmer. More at peace if you like. I wanted her to write more but I didn’t push. Her life, her decision. I let her be.

Until the day it all changed. It was in a football club of all places. One of mww’s other interests was music. When we met she was playing classical french horn but later swapped to jazz trumpet. This has all fallen by the wayside to a great extent but at the time she was enjoying herself. So I went along to the gigs. Rent-a-crowd.

This particular gig consisted of several sets separated by fairly long breaks. So I took a book. A fantasy book. Mww and I were sitting together when we were joined by one of her friends from the band, let’s call her ‘the instigator’.

The instigator saw the book I was reading and just as an aside mentioned that her mother was a fantasy writer. A long conversation ensued. The instigator’s mother is indeed a fantasy author. One of the more successful Australians working in this field. I believe she’s currently working on her 11^th or 12^th novel. One thing led to another and before we knew it said author was invited over for lunch next time she was in town. Lunch extended out into dinner and a late night. In the end one thing became very clear to mww that night. Authors weren’t these weird creatures living strange lives in strange places. They were people just like you and me.

Most importantly, people just like her.

And so, sometime shortly after that, I read my first piece of her writing. And it was good. And I immediately thought of those poor misguided souls, singing their tuneless hearts out for our nasty amusement.

Was I just biased to the point of not being able to critique her work usefully. I wondered? She wondered. The world wondered.

She went to a masterclass with Zoran Živković. She wrote a short story in an hour. People didn’t boo and hiss. She began to think she might be able to do this. She was advised to enter some short story competitions. She became inspired.

So she came home and wrote two short stories. With the exception of the one she’d written that day at the seminar they were her first short stories since school. A length of time too embarrassing to reveal (I can tease her about this, she’s older than me, by about 20 days).

Anyway back to those stories. The first was just OK. Not awful by any means but not fabulous either. The second was better – tighter, quirkier. She was obviously relearning a craft long forgotten.

Still riding the wave of optimism created by the masterclass she posted them both off to the Western Australia Science Fiction Convention (Swancon) Short Story Competition. And then it was over. There was distant talk of an anthology of the stories written during the seminar (this eventually became ‘The Devil in Brisbane’) but that was not a done deal by any means. All there was left was to wait.

To be continued…..

Focus change.

First new post in a long time. I must admit for a while I was considering abandoning the idea all together. You see my intention in starting this blog received a little kick in the teeth.

I have now decided to continue for a while and see how it works out but the focus must change.

To explain, I must tell you about my wonderful wife who I will simply call mww to save time.

We met at university. We both have science degrees. I stopped at the basic BSc level, she continued on to do honours and a PhD. That pretty much sums up our relationship. I think she’s only a little smarter than I am, but she has a kind of dedication that I can only dream about. When she sets her mind to something she works at it a manner I can only describe as almost fanatical.

She, like me, sort of fell into science. Her real loves weren’t considered acceptable by her father so she had to decide on an alternative he could live with. I guess that’s what parents are for. So we both have jobs that lurk at the peripherals of science. They pay us well for our knowledge and we both hate what we do.

Exactly what I am going to do about it hangs in the balance but mww knows exactly what she is going to do. She is going to write. Books, that is. Fantasy books to be exact. For the longest time I tried to convince her to blog about her journey but she figured that if she was writing a blog post she was wasting good writing time and I couldn’t argue with that.

So I decided to do the next best thing. I would follow her journey as well as I could and one day I might tell her about this blog. One day after she has made it. And I’m certain she will. I’ll explain why later.

But.

For a reason I’m not sure of, mww has now decided to blog. On this very site no less. I’m not going to give you the address, not yet. I’ll give it a while to see how it pans out. But anyway the original intent of this blog, to chronicle her rise to glory is now in her oh so more capable hands. All I’m left with is a slightly different perspective. Maybe it will be interesting. Maybe it won’t I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Book 7

Now I should say right now before we go any further that if you’re not a fantasy reader then you might as well wander off somewhere else. In the end I hope that this blog will be quite heavily biased toward the fantasy writing area.

Furthermore, If you’re the type who makes a annoying dismissive noise when people talk about Harry Potter then you should bugger off as well because this is going to annoy the shit out of you.

So that said….

As should be obvious from the title of this blog I’m a bit of a Harry Potter fan. As all fans (and anybody that’s even vaguely paying attention) will know, today was book 7 day.(And don’t worry, I’m not going to spoil the plot for you so you’re safe to keep reading if you desire.)

I had the book in my hands by 9.15 this morning but it took me until ten to get to the point where I could crack it open. My wonderful wife found other things to do and I ploughed through it by about 4.30 this afternoon. So I’m done. I’ve read what is most likely to be every word that Ms Rowling will ever write on Harry Potter. As I sit in front of my computer, it’s 11.00pm and my wife seems to be well into the second half of the book now. We’ll have a chance to discuss it tomorrow and that might help a bit but right now I’m miserable as all hell.

I often feel a twinge of sadness when I read the last words of a book. Sometimes the twinge is a little bigger than other times. But this is different. The only other time I’ve felt like this was when I read ‘The Lord of the Rings’ for the first time in the ninth grade. I was a lot younger and more susceptible then. So why am I sitting here feeling so damn blue?

No I’m not sad about the plot of the book. I’m sad that it’s all over. Oh, I know that every few years I’ll be able to pick them up again and for a wonderful few weeks immerse myself again in the delightful spell of Ms Rowling’s words. But it will be different next time and all the times to come. Next time I’ll know the ending, next time it will all be laid out for me. Never again will I wonder if Harry will live or die. Never again will I agonize over Ron’s inept wooing of Hermione. Never again will I wonder who the hell ‘RAB’ is. Never again will I feel the burning need to know that made me read a 600 page book in six hours.

It comes down to this. Jo Rowling has made me care about these characters and they are now fixed, immutable. They will never grow a day older and they can never again surprise me. Their secrets are laid bare and they will never captivate me in quite the same way. So I’m sad. Sad in a good way. I don’t regret starting the books, not one little bit. In fact in a way it’s quite pleasing that after all these cynical years something as simple and touching as these books can still affect me in this way. Thank you Jo. I know you’ll never read these words but I’ll write them anyway. Thank you for sharing Harry with us all.

Incidentally

There is a slim (anorexic) possibilty that you have seen an identical blog with an identical first post on Blogger. Don’t worry, that was me too. I hated the interface so much that I didn’t go back. I’ve asked them to kill the blog but it may well be still there.

Beginnings

I should warn you, before you go any further, I doubt this will be one of those blogs that is updated every day. My life just isn’t that interesting. I will however wander past every now and again and deposit a mess of my musing for what it’s worth, ie nothing.

So first a little about me. Not too much, just a taster. I’m a second generation Australian. I’m male or at least I was last time I checked. I’m married, that’s definitely true. You don’t forget something like that. I’m not yet middle aged but it’s sneaking up on me.

I am, and I’m certain of this, quite dull. So why blog at all I hear you ask. Well, I do have a motive and it will become clear over time what that motive is, but right now I’ll keep it to myself. Perhaps that will create an air of suspense.

Can you feel it?

Nah, me neither.