The Concrete Midden

She Came, She Saw, SheKilda

2011-10-10T23:15:00.000+11:00

Over the past weekend women crime writers from across Australia, and from Singapore (Shamini Flint), South Africa (Margie Orford) and New Zealand (Vanda Symon), gathered in Melbourne for the 20th Anniversary of the Australian chapter of Sisters in Crime. The event was called SheKilda and from Friday night to Sunday afternoon there were panels on a range of subjects, across a range of crime writing genres involving 70+ writers.

Why a women only crime writing conference, you may ask?

In the week leading up to the conference, this question was one of a number of topics addressed on the SheKilda blog. I was very happy to be given the opportunity to submit an entry for the blog and I chose to look at the history of the Sisters in Crime organisation. I was left exhilarated at the progress within the women's crime writing world but also frustrated that many of the same issues that had led to the formation of Sisters in Crime were still there, and that was before I read Andrew Nette crunching numbers in his blog The State of Play!

So, why a women's crime writing conference?

Well, for one thing, we writers don't get out much you know. For most of us it's a solitary life, often spent in pyjamas (am I right Sulari Gentil?) forgetting about OH&S as we slump, hunch and sweat over keyboards, notebooks, or pages. Whilst twitter, facebook and email provide the cyber equivalent of the tea room, where we can stop, have a chat and procrastinate, it's not the same as a real life, honest to goodness, in the flesh meet up.

As Malla Nunn put it, "There's something about being in the presence of so many smart, bright women." It's inspiring, that's what it is. Listening to so many writers sharing their thoughts, their processes, their take on writing, on crime, on society and politics and work and life - you come away energised, convinced that the stubborn draft you've been wrestling with single-handed isn't going to get the better of you.

Networking is one of those vile, cold, managerial terms, that has (to me) a slightly parasitic flavour to it. I like to think that what took place over the weekend at SheKilda was something less rigid, less vampiric than "networking." I think it was simpatico-ing. A whole lot of solitary souls suddenly recognising one another.

So that was how SheKilda looked from the point of view of an author. I met writers and I met readers. I hope that the readers enjoyed the weekend as much as the writers were.

Saturday night was Davitt Awards night - and over at Fair Dinkum Crime they have already blogged up a good wrap of the winners, who were:

Katherine Howell "Cold Justice" - Best Adult Novel
Penny Matthews "A Girl Like Me" - Best Young Adult Novel
Colleen Egan - "Murderer No More" - Best True Crime

I know that I have special reason to be grateful to the readers - they selected The Old School as The Davitt Readers Choice - for which I am extremely grateful. I even prepared a speech! Which due to a number of factors (2 hours sleep after a nasty bout of gastro overnight, low lighting, forgetting to put my glasses on thinking the font was big enough - it wasn't) I rather mumbled and stumbled my way through before sputtering to an end and slinking away...

No photos as yet, if any come to hand I'll blog them up. Till then keep an eye on some other blogs - Angela Savage has some great pre SheKilda goodness, and was tweeting the #SheKilda news from her iPad. Tara Moss has blogged a summary of the weekend and an excellent comprehensive list of authors' websites.

That's it for now .... I'm off to play with my new best friend.

Thank you Asher Literary Award.

A crime writer and a poet walk into a literary award night ...

2011-09-21T15:20:00.001+10:00

... sounds like the start of a "walk into a bar" joke, does it not? Instead it was the start of a really wonderful night down in Melbourne a few weeks back.

When Clem, the ever optimistic Penguin editorial assistant who shepherds the Penguin stable of books into awards, contacted me to suggest The Old School should be put forward for The Asher Literary Award my reaction was curious, closely followed by dubious.

Curious came first, as I'd not heard about this particular award, but dubious soon followed when I saw that tag "literary" and learnt that I'd need to provide a 500 word "artist's statement."

Just goes to show how you can be totally wrong about just about everything.

I read up about The Asher, and discoveredthe story of Helen Waltraud Rosalie Asher, a German refugee to Australiain the wake of World War Two, who established an award to recognise womenwriting on an anti-war theme or issue.

So, I set about preparing an artist'sstatement and found that instead of the process being a drag, the opportunityto write about themes and ideas and how the story and plot informed thosethemes was actually liberating.

The Old School is a crime novel. It sits firmly within the genre of crime,but when I wrote it I also had many ideas and concerns on my mind beyond justproviding a murder plot.

Creating an artist's statement suddenlygave me a chance to explicitly articulate the political and cultural questionsI had discovered throughout the journey of researching and writing the book.

So, when I was contacted by the chair ofthe judging panel Professor Kate Darian Smith and told that The OldSchool had been declared joint winner withRoberta Lowing's poetry collection Ruin (Interactive Press), well, thrilled, doesn't come close.

And so it came to pass that a crime writerand a poet walked into the Melbourne Writers Festival and walkedout sharing an award for literature by women writing on an anti-war theme or issue.

Thank you Helen Asher for your decision to create such a uniqueaward.

As writing an artist's statement is not something that you are asked to do everyday, I thought it might be interesting for anyfuture entrants to this particular award to see the approach I took: -

The Old School is a crime novel that bears witness to the enduring wounds of war. My vision for this work was to use the accessible genre of crime fiction to interrogate Australia’s contradictory, and politically malleable, myth making about war. In recent years we have adopted as our national foundation narrative an act of war that occurred nearly a century ago on the other side of the world. We celebrate the sacrifice that took place on the beaches of the Turkish peninsula, whilst comforting ourselves that such slaughter has never bloodied our land.

My ambition in the novel was to demonstrate that this national myth is dishonest and destructive. It elevates tales of heroism and mateship in order to sanctify the brutal truth of war while denying the violence of white settlement. It is remembrance without reflection.

The Old School challenges the nature of our chosen foundation myth through story and characters. Central to the novel are women, immigrants and Aboriginal Australians; characters who defy the national identity constructed by a male military narrative based on an imperial war. The Old School is an account of seeking the truth about murder, about the past and about war. It is fitting to approach these subjects through crime fiction. It is a genre that honours those who seek the truth about the most serious crime imaginable – murder. And after all, what is war but state-sanctioned murder perpetrated on an industrial scale?

Unlike the national myth in which the foreign dead are but a rumour, The Old School tracks the tragedy of a Vietnamese family through decades of war. It is told through the eyes of a young Australian-Vietnamese police detective, Nhu “Ned” Kelly, who discovers the truth of her family history; of three sisters who made three choices on how to survive in war. A Buddhist nun who joins the ranks of the martyrs who self-immolated for peace, another who joins the North Vietnamese to fight for independence and resolve the shame of a father who collaborated, and the third, Nhu’s mother, who chooses to leave and start afresh in a new land with an Australian soldier who can longer bear to do his duty.

This modern war is interwoven with an investigation into the discovery of two bodies buried in the footings of a building in Bankstown. It is 1992, the year of the Mabo High Court ruling and Paul Keating’s Redfern park speech. As the excavation at the crime scene burrows deeper into the past, a son discovers his mother, a 1970s Aboriginal Land Rights activist, was murdered over of a piece of land already stained with Aboriginal blood. When Aboriginal bones dating from a white-settlement era massacre are discovered The Prime Minister’s words, “We committed the murders” take physical form.

Society demands each act of murder is investigated, the guilty punished, justice served. The Old School demands the same of Australia’s sentimental attachment to its stories of war.

It's almost summer (well it's almost the end of winter).

2011-08-04T23:48:00.002+10:00

I don't do winter well. It's probably no coincidence that the rather long silence on the blog roughly corresponds to this Sydney winter, which has been extra cold, extra wet and extra miserable.

So it's probably also not a coincidence that having had my first outdoor swim of the new season at North Sydney Olympic Pool today in glorious mid-twenties temperature, I find myself back at the blog and doing a bit of an update.

Much too much to catch up on.

There was a lovely writing residency up at Varuna in the late autumn.

There were log fires, red wine, delicious food, quiet times writing in Eleanor Dark's studio

and long walks, that always seemed to end up somewhere that served good coffee and homemade chocolates.

Then there was the Sydney Writers' Festival where I had a marvellous opportunity to talk about crime with Shamini Flint and Nicole Watson, moderated by Mark Dapin in front of a knowledgable crowd. It was also the opportunity to experience first hand the "Oh my, that other writer's autograph queue is looooong" moment that all writers must face.

In our case, we were up against one of the SWFestival's BIG stars, Michael Cunningham. As our little crime panel wandered in and sat down we saw a long queue, a very long queue. It went out the door and down the stairs of the Sydney Theatre at Walsh Bay. A few hardy souls of the the criminally minded found their way in and we signed, with delight.

Then as we ~~scurried~~ left the room, past that long, long line, we were waylaid by some delightful audience members clutching our books, unknowingly caught at the back of Mr Cunningham's queue (and possibly thinking to themselves, "Wow, these crime writers are coining it!")

Since then, I've been lucky to have shared microphones with Kirsten Tranter, James Bradley, Georgia Blain and Mardi McConnochie, at a series of "When Genres Attack" events with Shearers Bookshop. These events are an ongoing project that will be growing, and spreading, to many indie bookshops. It's a chance for writers to provide some of that extra je ne sais quoi that customers can get at a bricks and mortar bookshop, that the online experience just can't deliver. And that is, a good night out, in good company, taking part in a good conversation about books, writing, reading, and storytelling in all its forms.

There are more events coming - and I'll be updating the events page in the next day or so.

Then of course there is Book 2, which has been preoccupying my mind as I work through the editorial feedback from my thoughtful and insightful editor Jo Rosenberg. I say pre-occupied, as the winter blues have had me riddled with good old fashioned old self doubt.

Amazing what a difference one afternoon sitting in the warmth of the outdoor office, listening to the churn of the pool with the manuscript on the knees, can make.

Pages were struck through boldly, new bits added, structure starting to take a bit of a hopeful shape. Roll on spring and summer.

One of the many distractions to working on novel structure 24/7 has been my new role as Writer-in-Residence at North Sydney Council.

This has given me a space to work in, at the beautiful Don Bank Museum - a mid 1800s wooden house in North Sydney's CBD, surrounded by high-rise.

It has also given me a project - My Place at The Pool. As part of the North Sydney Olympic Pool's 75th Anniversary, I'm working on a way of collecting words and images about it from the people who love it. Drop in at the blog and add yours.

There is more news, a short story in the works, and an online writing course that's got me rather excited and adding to the deadlinitis, some future teaching news, and more.

But I'll save that for the next blog.

At this stage I'll close with some rather lovely news that arrived this week.

The Old School has been shortlisted for a Ned Kelly Award along side two very fine books Line of Sight by David Whish-Wilson, and Prime Cut by Alan Carter (both Western Australian stories and writers!)

Congratulations to both David and Alan, two very fine books. If you haven't read them, go, do it now.

I'm also thrilled that my mate Angela Savage has made it two out of two with her second book, The Half Child, being shortlisted for the main Ned Kelly award. She's side by side with Chris Wormsely's Bereft and Geoffrey McGeachin's The Diggers Rest Hotel. Angela has written a fabulous book, handling issues of culture and society in Thailand, doing what crime fiction does best.

That's it for now, more soon.

Go big or go home .....

2011-04-01T14:08:00.000+11:00

... or you could go to the Sydney Writers' Festival, in May.

I'm looking forward to talking about crime fiction, The New School of crime fiction no less, with Shamini Flint, Nicole Watson and Mark Dapin, on 22 May.

Come along it should be fun.

And continuing the go big or go home theme, well sometimes, go small can be good too.

Coming at the end of May - The Old School in B format.

Same number of words, in a smaller and sexier spine.

Loving the new blue look, the nice words and that gorgeous little Penguin shimmying on the spine.

Guwanyi (to tell) - 3rd National Aboriginal Writers’ Festival at NSW Writers' Centre

2011-03-21T13:20:00.000+11:00

Often it's the headline "names" that lure you in to a writers' festival, but it's the discovery of the "names" you've never heard of that deliver another level of satisfaction in the experience. Cathy Craigie, Festival Curator, delivered on all counts at Guwanyi.

On Saturday 19th March the NSW Writers' Centre was the venue for Guwanyi (to tell) the 3rd National Aboriginal Writers’ Festival there were well-known names in Aboriginal writing, such as Anita Heiss and Kim Scott, along with brand new names, such as Ricky Macourt, and (to this reader) a previously unheard voice such as poet Ali Cobby Eckermann.

The day opened with Anita Heiss and Peter Minter talking about the process of editing the Macquarie Pen Anthology of Aboriginal Literature. They began with Peter Minter reading the first text in the anthology, Bennelong's letter to Governor Phillip, the first recorded written text by an Aboriginal author.

The letter, much like the man who dictated it, prompted discussion and divergent responses. Minter saw the letter as exemplifying the twin themes of the anthology - the way in which Aboriginal people used the language of the colonisers strategically in order to negotiate survival and also as a way of preserving culture.

Minter read the letter as an example of a man attempting to strategically negotiate with authority in a new language, whilst also trying to establish a sense of reciprocity, of exchange, in an attempt to preserve culture. For others the letter prompted tears of sadness, whilst some felt strongly that Bennelong was a collaborator.

The discussion about Bennelong, known to white Australia through school texts and place names, proved that he is still a contested figure. So, it did seem like the universe was stirring the possum when, the following day, the Sunday papers led with headlines that after 198 years the site of Bennelong's grave had been located in the front yard of a house in suburban Putney.

Anita Heiss talked about the editorial process of choosing what went into the anthology, narrowing down from 3,000+ pieces to 81. Their approach was that Aboriginal literature is about self- representation, so they pushed the boundaries of what was regarded as "literature" by including letters, petitions, manifestos, song lyrics, plays, autobiographical and biographical materials as these were where the voices were located.

The second session chaired by Melissa Lucashenko was about how to use genres and included Goie Wymarra, a young woman with a lot of stories and different ways to tell them. Goie Wymarra has used comedy, film, children's books, and is now working on animated films at Batchelor Institute as part of a creative writing degree. Wayne Blair had exciting news about transferring the stage play The Sapphires into a screenplay for the big screen.

Marcus Waters spoke about writing screenplays for mainstream TV and his eventual disillusionment when he was unable to write stories that included Aboriginal faces or experiences. He described getting the courage to walk away and tell his own stories. He now concentrates on writing stories from the community and for the community, for his kids. In a moving reading he shared one of these stories with the audience, "Fade to Black."

The third session discussed the ways to get Aboriginal writers out into the world, and heard from AIATSIS (The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) and their publishing arm the Aboriginal Studies Press. Ricky Macourt spoke about writing his life as a boy from Nambucca Heads who winds up as a boarder at a Sydney private school into Jali Boy, part of the Yarning Strong series by Laguna Bay Publishing. He is now studying law at Bond University, and his ambitions to be Australia's first Aboriginal Prime Minister (or President) do not seem unreasonable.

The third panel member, Ali Cobby Eckermann, spoke about the battle to find her family in her thirties, an event she believes saved her life. Growing up with a family that loved her but denied her their knowledge of her birth family triggered her writing. She talked about her "need to tell" as greif and anger were blocking her ability to live her life. She then read some of her poetry, which contained the heartbreak and the humour of an extraordinary woman and gifted writer.

Lunch was accompanied by some open mike poetry readings on the verandah from the stars of the next festival, then it was time to return for the afternoon sessions.

A session asking Is there a future for Indigenous Literature? - was sure to provoke lively discussion, and it did. Melissa Lucashenko argued that literature should not be narrowly conceived, that is should be an account of "What it is to be alive in this place where so many have lived before." In thinking about what story is for, she believes it is for building a society that works.

Philip Mclaren talked about subject matter determining readership, using the example of Martin Cruz Smith, a Native American writer who sells millions of his straight thriller novels (Arkady Renko) and considerably less of his Indigenous themed work. Same writer, same talent, same skill. Mclaren suggested Indigenous Australian writing should consider writing their own "Gorky Parks" which got the debate off to a flying start.

Bruce Pascoe said he felt confident and hopeful about the future. He pointed out that ten years ago this festival wouldn't have happened, so it was a concrete sign that Aboriginal Literature was strong and getting stronger. He believes that the country, the landscape itself, was changing White Australia.

Cathy Craigie chaired Kim Scott, fresh from his success as the winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the best book in south-east Asia and the Pacific, and Leanne Tobin, whose research into her family history uncovered a wealth of documents charting negotiations over land in "Blacks Town" Western Sydney conducted by a strong Aboriginal woman Maria Locke.

Kim Scott talked about how his novel That Deadman Dance grew out of a decade of reading the historical archives, his project on "cultural maintenance," such as his book with Noongar elder Aunty Hazel Brown. It became clear to him as he read that the protagonists in these archives were not victims, and that, for a short time, the oldest civilisation in the world and the newcomers had conducted relations across a friendly frontier.

He realised this might be a bit of a controversial take, as "the dominant yarn is the story of defeat", but from his point of view, "the story is not over" it's a "long yarn." The resistance warrior stories have appeal but Scott fears that these stories are not perhaps the most nurturing for angry, damaged people to tap into, and are in many ways similar to the Gallipoli stories white Australia tells itself.

The overwhelming sense of confidence that he drew from the archives, stories about strong people, people who were so confident, people of their place, were the source of his approach to the book. The colonisers were outnumbered and scared and, as Scott put it, "When we had power - how classy we were."

Cathy Craigie compared the Noongar encounters with the story that emerges from Cpt. Dawes' diaries and his encounter with Patyegarang. The themes of exchange and reciprocity, adaptability and ambassadorial roles felt like we had returned full circle to the first story of the day in Bennelong's letter.

Kim Scott spoke about creating a new narrative, the Recovery Narrative, and his desire to story it in a way that empowers the whole community.

There was more, a lot more, but perhaps it's best to seek out some of the works mentioned and read them, and check out your local festivals for these, and other names, and listen to them.

Ali Cobby Eckermann signed my copy of her book of poetry, and I'll quote her inscription to finish off:

Palya - travel true.

Why The Wire sets the bar for crime fiction writers

2011-02-28T15:39:00.000+11:00

It started on twitter.

An observation from Jon Page, of Pages and Pages Bookstore, who was re-watching Season 4 of The Wire. He was moved to tweet that it was "the best written piece of drama (novel, TV, movie) ever" - which kick started a conversation conducted in 140 character bursts. The Wire lovers tumbled out of cyber space to wax lyrical about the show and debate Jon's suggestion that a TV drama could go close to having the depth, complexity, and weight of a novel. It later moved on to Facebook, where there was a bit more room to talk about the ideas.

Not being one to waste words, I've taken my contribution to the conversation and tidied it up a little bit for the blog.

I was thinking about what it was about The Wire, that for me, made it perhaps the most powerful piece of dramatic fiction (written or visual) that I'd ever come in contact with. It certainly stands as a powerful piece of crime fiction, and towers over every other crime genre TV drama yet made but I think it was doing more than that.

When looking at it in the terms of a novel, I feel that the sheer scope of The Wire does what few other single novels do. Whilst the old-school of, for example, Dickens and Tolstoy certainly didn't shy away from vast sagas, big casts, long sweeps of time and history, there is a tendency in contemporary fiction to choose to go small, even if the "issue" is big. The focus is usually on an individual or small handful of individuals, even if large sweeps of history are taking place outside. The increasing popularity of the 1st person narrator also tends to preclude a vast narrative sweep in which a range of characters present their stories.

The Wire is structured in five seasons, with each season being similar to a novel, each episode a detailed chapter. As the seasons went on, The Wire just built and built and built. It kept filling out a rich and detailed cast of characters, who were all interrelated, all connected organically by the city of Baltimore.

As the seasons passed characters died, minor players grew into major ones, the focus shifted from the streets, to the schools, to the media, without ever forgetting any of these places on the way, and all the while five years of life in a decaying American city unfolded.

Seriality is not new in crime fiction. It's one of the characteristics of the genre, and that feature is often raised as a reason that it fails the serious literature test. In all honesty, the serial nature of crime fiction and its investigators is not often used as effectively as it could be, becoming a dilution of story rather than a strength.

This is why, for me, The Wire raised the bar on crime fiction writing. After seeing how long form serialised drama was used on The Wire, seriality should no longer be seen only as a lazy shortcut to writing the same book, over and over again. Instead it should be the key to developing complex, nuanced characters and places of rich texture, that grow and change and have decided effects one upon the other.

In trying to think of "crime" that has had such a broad scope, Ian Rankin was one of the first crime writers to actually place his detective in "real" time, have him age and change, and interact with the real world. James Ellroy's LA Quartet set in the post-war Los Angeles had a recurring cast of characters who moved through the world of the novels. I have The Red Riding Trilogy DVD set on my shelf to watch soon, based on David Peace's Red Riding Quartet of novels which cover a decade in time.

I'm hoping that The Wire will have an impact on crime writing, not just on TV drama production. It's no coincidence that crime writers worked on The Wire. Pelecanos, Lehane & Price formed a real synergy with Simon and Burns to produce something that took storytelling to a new place. They managed to marry the pace and narrative of the written form to the visual form and the result was extraordinary.

However, there are somethings The Wire does which a book cannot. Visual storytelling can do things that, when done in a novel, are not as obvious or as effective.

The Wire featured a cast that was predominantly black. Something that is not often seen on American TV, and not seen at all on Australian TV. In a novel this just does not have the same impact. You can describe the characters and name them, the reader can register their ethnicity, their colour, their appearance, and then the reader gets stuck straight back into the story.

But remember watching the first few episodes of The Wire?

They were confusing, hard to follow.

Why?

Well, because for most of us viewers we were not that used to seeing so many African American faces all at once in the one show. Most mainstream movies and TV shows usually feature "the" black character, (the Asian character, the Hispanic character, etc) and perhaps his/her family. Generally there is not an entire community of non-white faces who appear all on the screen at once, all in the same scenes at once.

I'll freely confess that it took me time to figure out who was who. It took me time to be able to tell Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale apart. That was confronting. That told me, the viewer, a few things about myself that I wasn't all that proud to discover.

Not only that, but the language these characters were using was a barrier. That could be solved by (belatedly) turning on the sub-titles, suddenly the "ya feel me" code was cracked, and I could identify the characters by name (Poot? Wee-Bey?) but the makers of this show (as Simon has said in many interviews) deliberately set out to make the viewer work, and to discover something about themselves as they did.

The Wire, in this way, kicks arse, both visually and literally, and does things that a novel can't do. But I know I'm looking to it for inspiration in my writing because it has set the bar, for brave, honest, storytelling, for characterisation and scope, for showing how to turn a political thesis into gripping human drama, in whatever format you are working in.

PS. Draft of Book 2, finally finished. A few little seams to sew up, buttonholes to add and remove. And it's off.

Writers on rafts, upcoming events and a rather lovely surprise

2011-01-27T19:12:00.000+11:00

The floods that have hammered Queensland over the last few weeks have drawn support from Brisbane's Mop Army to sports folk donating amazing packages.

The Queensland Writers Centre have come up with a fund raising project that offers something for everyone. Ever wanted your name in print? Well, how about your name turning up in John Birmingham's latest volume of all-explodey goodness? What about a book package signed and sealed by Emily Maguire? Or a visit from Linda Jaivin? I don't get out much, so I volunteered myself for a few things.

Five bucks will buy you a ticket in Writers on Rafts that's right $5! Prizes will be drawn on February 25. More information here.

I have a few events to update on the events page - until I do that, this is what the year holds so far:

List of upcoming events:

Sunday, 6 February, 3pm,
I'll be having a yak with Partners in Crime at the St Helens Community Centre, 184 Glebe Point Road, Glebe. We're going to have a chat about The Place of Place in Crime Fiction.
Cost is $10/ $5 (members). Contact: meetings@partnersincrimesydney.com

May 6 and 7
I'll be at the Literati Festival, Gold Coast QLD. No website as yet, but I've seen the guest list and it's going to be a great weekend.

Saturday 4 June, 10am - 4pm
I'll be at the NSW Writers Centre, for a 1 day Workshop Perfect Crime

Then in September back up to Queensland

17 and 18th September I'll be doing two workshops with the Queensland Writers Centre

17th September, Cairns
Workshop From Cleanskin to Crimewriter

18th September, Townsville
Workshop From Cleanskin to Crimewriter

#WIP is the twitter hashtag lonely writers wave from their desks to signal their engagement on the work in progress.

As to my, #WIP, it progresses.

The scary bits I've been putting off have started to appear and the first set of eyes have started reading. Doing it like Dickens - I'm sending out instalments. Keeps the pressure up on me not to succumb to the vortex of endless rewriting - so far so good.

About to clean off the big white board (as the breakdown of final scenes there no longer resembles the breakdown of final scenes in scrivener and in my head) and look at landing the plane in detail. While it's good to forward plan - it's also good to stay flexible. (Usually results in a bit of back-stitching - but it won't be the first, or the last, time things get unpicked, re-arranged and re-stitched.)

In a delightful bit of news this week The Old School has been shortlisted in the Debut Fiction Category of the 2011 Indie Awards alongside some very fine books indeed: Rocks in the Belly by Jon Bauer, Book of Lost Threads by Tess Evans, The Legacy by Kirsten Tranter.

As an unknown novelist you step into a very very very crowded agora with your first book. The difference between debut, and dead in the water, comes down to the enthusiasm of the Indie Booksellers, readers themselves who are prepared to pick you up off the shelf and put you in the hands of other readers. It's every wallflower's dream come true.

Thank you Indies!

B2 D1.5

2011-01-11T23:09:00.000+11:00

Realising that I've been a tad slack about updating the blog - the new year is here and already into double figures!

So Happy New Year to all. May it bring stories to tell for one and all.

Busy being busy here, still working away on B2 D1.5 (that's Book 2 Draft 1.5). The 1.5 is because the majority of it is first draft plus a read through and re-draft whilst a small but significant section is fresh - very fresh - smoking, steaming fresh - some of it, in fact, is still "cookie dough" to borrow an analogy. Which is to say, I'm still at the stomach knotting, knuckle gnawing stage where I wonder if the story I have to tell and the way I want to tell it is going to work. No way to know for sure until it's finished and being read, so press on.

I've started to send out bits to be read by a trusted set of eyes. We're "doing it like Dickens" - starting at the beginning and moving on. It's good because it gives me the sense that the story is in motion, so to speak. But I'm still to get my head around releasing it into the editing/drafting process in a much rawer state than The Old School. That's when I get the stomach churning, knuckle gnawing, yips again.

I did get to take my mind off my own long-dark-tea-time-of-the-soul for the traditional five day pilgrimage to the SCG for the New Years Test. Nothing like seeing a team of cricketers being comprehensively humbled, before a huge crowd to put things in perspective. The fact it was an Ashes Test just made it hurt more.

The Barmy Army were in full voice (have to admit, it is good to see them finally get the team they deserve). Twenty thousand voices singing "The mighty - mighty - English" (and other much ruder things to Mitchell Johnson) was rather traumatising by Day 4. That's how I felt and I was only in the stands - I imagine Mitch Johnson might need therapy.

I confess to returning home and watching the South Africa V India game on the telly at night, to remind myself of what a real contests looked like. Steyn and Tendulkar both at the top of their games. Magic.

And ..... oh yes.

Indulged in a little extra-curricular fun involving a short story and a cylon.

Enjoy.

Has Stendhal's Mirror had its day?

2010-12-09T23:21:00.000+11:00

Over on the marvellous blog of Sci-Fi writer Paul Macauley, Earth and Other Unlikely Worlds a conversation began about whether neo-realistic literature has had its day. Two authors, Peter Handke and Haruki Murakami have written articles suggesting that this indeed is so. I would recommend a visit to Unlikely Worlds to enter into the wider discussion of this issue, whilst here at The Concrete Midden, I'm reposting a slightly longer version of my response, as it is somewhat tangential to the main topic under discussion at Unlikely Worlds.

First up, cards on the table. I'm a realist writer. Dunno if I'm a neo-realist, but I'm a new writer and I write crime fiction which is firmly based in reality and incorporates real events. It involves the creation of a fictional world which contains the realistic political and social atmosphere of the 1990s. I’m also a big admirer of science fiction (as can be seen in my other blog world).

What took me off on a tangent from the discussion of realism/neo-realism versus magic realism at Unlikely Worlds, was the observation, made by Murakami, that realism was no longer relevant because two events, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attack on the twin towers in September 200,1 had " greatly transformed our mentality . . ."

This “the world changed on 9/11” thesis frankly irritates me beyond belief. And when writers start to embrace this thesis and use it as a reason to argue why certain things cannot – or should not - be written, or to suggest the way things should or shouldn't be written, then I start to vent a bit of steam.

In days following 9/11 “the world has changed” was the most common reaction. It was understable. The events were shocking. They were awful in the true sense of that word - they filled one with awe. And they were captured on film, replayed again and again, and we watched, each time hoping somehow for a different outcome.

But that "world changed" response was also dangerous as it permeated our psyche and permeated our politics. Its legacy has included such things as waterboarding and rendition, shock and awe.

It also permeated a lot of the literary responses.

High profile critic James Wood used it as a reason to bury the social novel, writing in the Guardian in October 2001 Wood claimed that the "Stendhalian mirror would explode with reflections were it now being walked around Manhattan. For who would dare to be knowledgeable about politics and society now?"

Martin Amis took to writing essays about terrorism and making up words like horrorism, as if what was available to describe criminal acts of terror were insufficient. Ian McEwan reckoned that,

“… even the best minds, the best or darkest dreamers of disaster on a gigantic scale, from Tolstoy and Wells to Don DeLillo, could not have delivered us into the nightmare available on television news channels yesterday afternoon.”

OK, so I wouldn’t expect McEwan to be familiar with the oeuvre of Tom Clancy and his 1994 novel Debt of Honour, in which a 747 is flown into the US Capitol during the State of Union address, wiping out the President and a fair chunk of Congress (hell, I only know about it because of a ten month stay in a Buddhist monastery in South India where reading material was …. limited) but in both Wood's and McEwan’s reactions I found the retreat from the possibility of creativity and imagination to absorb and reflect what had happened on 9/11 to be overly nihilistic.

Writing in The New Statesman at the end of 2001, literary critic Jason Cowley described the reaction of the literary world to the terrorist attacks as having a:

“catastrophist - eschatological anxiety and an unconvincing sudden seriousness, as if human nature itself changed the day the towers collapsed. Or perhaps it was merely that we in the relatively benign, affluent west had forgotten that the world has always been a spectacular carnival of suffering.”

It was that “spectacular carnival of suffering” that bothered me about the “world has changed” reaction as well. It contained in it a denial of other places and peoples whose “worlds had changed” but because they hadn’t changed in the heart of a western power and were not captured on TV, well, somehow they didn’t count.

My inchoate misgivings were captured by the phrase – the “parochialism of the present" - and by a rather unlikely source, the foreign policy analyst and editor of The National Interest, Owen Harries. He defined it as:

“[A] condition resulting from a combination of ignorance of history and an egotistical insistence on exaggerating the importance of events that more or less directly involve oneself. Horrifying and atrocious as the acts of terror were, it should be remembered that they have happened at a time when people who experienced the Somme and Verdun, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, are still alive.”

Well, yes.

Imagine the stories that would never have been written had Erich Maria Remarque decided that the trenches had shattered his Stendhalian mirror, or Primo Levi been silenced by the horror he witnessed, or Bao Ninh or Kurt Vonnegut had allowed their own war experiences to so overwhelm them that they dared not be knowledgeable about politics or society.

Writing about the world we live in can take many forms, magical realism, realism, crime noir, science fiction - in fact some of the strongest writing to take on the post 9/11 world came, I think, from the world of crime writing. Sara Paretsky's Blacklist conveyed not only the fear of being the victims of terror that every American felt after the attacks but the fear of the state as it reacted to that terror with legislation that threatened the Bill of Rights. Ian Rankin, in The Naming of The Dead brought Rebus, George Bush, the G8 and the London Tube bombings into a book that was as much about the fragility of the rule of law as it was about a murder.

So, in summary, I don't believe that realism, the social novel, the social crime novel, are dead and past their use by date. I do believe in science fiction and the exciting imaginative leaps and bounds of alternate worlds and realities that end up telling me something about my own reality.

And, no the world didn't change on 9/11, anymore than it did on April 6, 1994, or August 9, 1945, or July 1, 1916 or 24 August 79AD, it just added to the layers of pain that make up what it is to be human. And that's what writers, realist, neo-realist, magical, fantastical, speculative, graphic do best, make up stories that help us work out what it means to be human.*

*And sometimes they do it by writing about humans who aren't.

A Cave of One's Own

2010-11-13T18:22:00.000+11:00

Virginia longed for a room.

Some writers can afford something a tad grander ....

... and then there are the rest of us.

But the desire to have some place to go and make stuff up is pretty universal.

Stephen King in On Writing agrees with Virginia that "We do best in a place of our own."

And - he's right.

There are quite a few things that lend themselves to being done with a background hum, that don't really suffer from random interruptions, phones, doors, distractions, twittering. In fact, sometimes it's nice to have human company when the word track blues strike.

And then there's the other stuff.

The getting-it-out stuff. The first draft stuff, in fact the bits and pieces that come before the first draft. That stuff is better done alone. We all know what happened to the creative flow thanks to the visitor from Porlock. To quote Stephen King again, "Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open" - and I'd add, ignore the visitors.

Ignoring family members who drop by, or those who live in, is somewhat easier said than done, and can have certain ramifications. This is one reason why I like to write by hand, in notebooks, out and about, in parks, by the pool, on the train. That's where a lot of the fresh stuff gets its first airing. Away from the screen, from the delete and back buttons. I'm not in a room alone, but I'm still alone. No distractions.

But it's finding a space for the next stage that has been trickier this time round. The Old School made its transition from pen to pixel in a study space provided by my university, UTS, where I was enrolled in a research degree. Hours would fly past. No phone. No doors. Lots of wall space to blu-tack up images. The day would turn into night and I wouldn't even notice.

I'm discovering, with Book 2, what writers always say, that every book is different. This time around I'm working from home. Not an office but a corner of a room. And sometimes I have to share it.

This time around is different. I find I'm wanting wall space to write on. I'm close to the end of the first draft and I have a burning need to have a space to "see" it laid out - plots and people - but even more importantly emotional touchstones.

This book has required me to step a bit out of my comfort zone. To explore, in some detail, psychological spaces I haven't (thankfully) been. I've felt the need to create a space where I can have certain truths about the wounds my characters carry, and the way those wounds effect them, "in my face" as I write and as I edit the first draft.

I need to be able to look up and weigh the truth of what I've written against the truth of what I have discovered. Such things don't really belong on the walls of rooms that non-writers, visitors and family members share.

So, I've found a cave.

All it needed was to have some storage things crammed into other storage places and then I could cram in me.

It's a small rom. With a small window. And lots and lots of wall space.

This was taken a few weeks ago. The walls have more posters blu tacked up now. Notes to self scrawled. The white board has been wiped and new notes added, subtracted, altered.

There's even a bit of a view out the door for when I want to keep it open.

What we talk about when we talk about crime - with the Sisters in Crime

2010-10-21T23:07:00.000+11:00

While it was an eventful journey just getting to the event, once we all landed safely we had a great night with the Sisters down in Melbourne last Friday.

The panel was chaired by Robin Bowles, who'd done her homework on Sulari Gentill and Angela Savage just as effectively as she had on me. For two completely different takes on the same night, check out Sulari's blog and Angela's blog. And just to prove the old adage that three eye-witnesses will provide three entirely different descriptions, I'll now add another.

Place is my "thing". It's what gets me excited about reading crime and it's what excites me about writing crime. With a great deal of help from a marvellous editor, Dr Malcah Effron, I have recently finished a chapter for an upcoming academic monograph on what I've dubbed "The Politics of Place" specifically how place is developed in Ian Rankin's The Naming of the Dead and Sara Paretsky's Blacklist as they chart the disintegration of western legal values and traditions in the wake of 9/11.

In both Sulari and Angela's novels, place is given a high degree of attention but in very different and interesting ways.

Sulari commented that she had had letters from elderly people whose memories of the New Guard in those days of madness in Sydney during the 1930s had been reawakened in the pages of her novel, A Few Right Thinking Men. I feel that this kind of response is a real tribute to the sense of political and cultural place Sulari created and proof, yet again, that a real sense of place involves a whole lot more than just getting the names of the streets and the numbers of the buses right. It involves creating a real sense of the place, of the culture, of the conflicts, of the news and the gossip and the violence and the struggles, just as it was in that time for those people.

Like her first novel, Angela's second, The Half-Child, is set in Thailand. When Angela began talking about writing Thailand, a place she loves and wants to share with her readers, she described her unease when she acknowledged that writing crime set there would mean dredging up all the negative stereotypes people harbour about that country; crime, corruption, drugs, vice, sex, exploitation. For her this meant she had to think carefully about how she handled the material, about making sure her characters and issues were real and complex.

This area of discussion came up towards the end of our allotted time, unfortunately, as it is something that is also of concern to me in my work. How to write about issues such as police corruption with nuance and depth, avoiding the cliches, making it real without making it repellent, keeping it authentic which means, to some degree showing how and why it occurs with subtlety, even empathy.

I related very strongly to Angela's concerns in depicting an Asian setting with both honesty and affection, as I have set the events of Book 2 in Cabramatta in early 1993. A quick glance at the headlines of that time ticks all the boxes of a great crime novel; young, violent gangs fighting and killing over a share of the drug market, home invasions and extortion, gambling and prostitution, drug sellers taking over the streets, crime out of control, police overwhelmed - every headline a story. And every headline fodder for those who did not want to see the development of an Australia where a good percentage of its population would not come from Anglo-Celtic-European backgrounds but from Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos.

No doubt about it, Cabramatta in 1993 was quite a place. A complex, rich and troubled place, where some kids went "out to play", ra choi, and ended up dead, others went to school while their parents tried to learn English, worked two jobs. Some kids went to jail and some kids went to university, carrying all the weight of expectation on their shoulders that they could claw back something of what their parents had given up to come to Australia.

It this nuanced Cabramatta I want the next book to explore. A place where kids dealt drugs and carried knives and lived in groups like little families taking care of each other, while behind closed doors, other families, damaged beyond all repair by war, just tried to hold on.

One of these days Angela and Sulari and I will have to have a good long talk about writing honestly but with nuance about places and people that are all too often seen in black and white*.

*Which is to say we're available for weddings, parties anything ....

Sisters in Crime and a Stitch in Time

2010-10-17T12:55:00.000+11:00

I am a pretty uncoordinated person. Never ask me to dance. In fact, discovering aqua-aerobics was a huge boon. No longer condemned to hide in the back row of the gym, stumbling my way through another series of complicated moves, always a beat or two behind the music. Oh the joy, of thrashing away in the pool where no one can see you moving below the neck.

My uncoordinated approach to movement often sees me shoulder charge into doorways rather than moving gracefully through them, pinball off the edges of tables and somehow be able to trip over a dust mote. So on Friday night, battling the wind, the driving rain and a thick layer of treacherous slippery foliage that had been stripped from the trees by day of vicious weather, I was tiptoeing very cautiously from my hotel to the edge of the road to try to flag down a cab to attend my first Melbourne writing event.

Sisters in Crime, a meal at Bell's Hotel to be followed by a good chat about crime with two wonderful writers Sulari Gentill and Angela Savage, with Robin Bowles on hand to steer the conversation and keep us on our toes.

I was feeling pretty good, the terrible weather at least providing the excuse to give the black winter coat that goes swoosh a final trot before summer, make-up was in place, hair not looking too weird, all I had to do was find a cab. Miraculously one appeared creeping up Fitzroy Street and pulling in as I waved my hand.

Ever so carefully I stepped off the curb, my leather soled cowboy boots, a souvenir from a ski holiday in Steamboat Colorado, have a tendency to feel like they're skating on ice when its wet, but I remained upright and advanced on the cab, steadied myself on it before opening the door, leaning down to speak to the cab driver. Unfortunately, as I performed both actions simultaneously I ended up clobbering my face with the edge of the door.

Reeling back, I kept hold of the door, cabs on a wet Friday night in Melbourne were not to be given up so easily. I bent down to talk to the driver, to tell him where I wanted to go and noticed he was shrinking away from me.

"There is a little blood," he said just a little nervously.

I reached up, touched my forehead, which it was true did now feel a trifle lumpy. My fingers came away bright red and wet.

It was a similar moment, to the way I felt as I sailed through the air two days before the Joss Whedon event at the Sydney Opera House - oh nooooooooooo. But, whereas that fall had seemed to take forever as I flailed and fell through the air prior to crashing in an ungainly pile on the ground, this one seemed to have happened before I'd even realised it.

Reluctantly I released my cab back into the wilds of Friday night and ever so carefully retraced my wet slippery steps back into the Tolarno Hotel, digging a crumpled tissue out of the handbag to press against my forehead. A quick check in the mirror of the ladies room by reception was enough to convince me that a Band-Aid at least was going to be required if I was to speak at my event without blinking through blood.

At the reception desk Amanda had just started her shift, she looked up and sprinted out from the office, insisting politely that I should sit down and she would get something. I retrieved my running list for the night and managed to punch in the number of my soon-to-be-equally-marvellous-under-pressure publicist from Penguin, Dianne Biviano, and leave a message, at which point Amanda returned wearing latex gloves and bearing a fairly large dressing which she pressed against my head and started talking stitches.

At this point my natural instincts to not-feel-very-well-at-the-thought-of-blood-kicked-in and I slumped back in the lounge, feeling just a bit too warm and murmuring things like, "but I have to give a talk". Amanda took over my phone and my now slightly blood spattered running list -

and in short order Amanda had organised Dianne to collect me, had been in contact with Carmel Shute who supplied the location of the closest doctor's clinic, for which Amanda then printed up a Google map, whilst supplying me with water and a lolly.

By the time Dianne arrived to take over and ferry me to the Acland Street St Kilda super clinic, I'd rallied to the point that I ooohed and ahhhed at my first glimpse of The Palais from the Coles Supermarket carpark. The clinic was doing brisk business but thanks to Amanda's preparatory call, we found that walking in with a head wound is a good way of getting a bed and a good lie down. There, the lovely Sara cleaned the wound and provided me with an ice pack which felt so good I didn't want to give it back and the equally wonderful Doctor Bert who, in between treating a bustling waiting room, managed to pop in an injection of anaesthetic along with a few neat stitches, and a classy little dressing to cover it up.

Thank you again, Amanda, Dianne, Carmel, Sarah and Dr. Bert.

And so it came to pass that on a wild and wet and stormy night in Melbourne, I was only a little bit late to my first big adventure and had an excellent night, in fine company, sharing some great conversations about crime.

Of which more later .......

Having a chat and working on my three-legged table

2010-10-14T10:37:00.000+11:00

Four bookclubs in the last few months, two by twitter and two with friends who ~~inflicted~~ suggested The Old School to their clubs. Different experiences but all vastly good fun.

Bookclub by twitter is intense. An hour of frantic reading, typing, keeping it concise, checking to see what's come through on the feed and backtracking to answer ... lucky the cyber drinks & nibbles are, well, imaginary. I was lucky to do one with the NSW Writers' Centre and the second with Avid Reader Bookstore in Brizzy. I'd have loved to have been sitting on the backdeck of Avid with their gang, but twitter was a great way of connecting to a live bookclub when you can't be there in person.

Bookclub with live readers is a far more leisurely event. You have a few hours to talk, about "the book", about other books, about politics, about life, about great TV and movies. Oh, and then of course there are the drinks and nibbles. Yum. Thanks Helen and Kate for lending your bookclubs to me for the night.

Now looking at some more live appearances. Off to Melbourne tomorrow to a Sisters in Crime event, From the Sydney of the Past to the Thailand of Today, with Angela Savage, Sulari Gentill with Robin Bowles interviewing us. Friday night, Bells Hotel, South Melbourne, brothers-in-law welcome.

Sulari's A Few Right Thinking Men and Angela's Behind the Night Bazaar, are crime novels which are as different as they can be from each other and from The Old School. Sulari's involves the New Guard and political intrigue in 1930s Sydney, Angela's, set in mid-1990s Thailand, involves police corruption and child prostitution rackets, and mine, set in Sydney in the early 1990s deals with police corruption, land rights and the Vietnam War. To some extent we are all a little bit stuck in the past!

The range of topics is a good example of why I love crime. It provides a sturdy skeleton but what goes around it, well, that's as unique as the author cares to make it.

And that's why I was thrilled to be asked to be on a panel for the Emerging Writers' Festival Roadshow when it swings into Sydney next month. More about that in an upcoming blog but at this stage put Sunday 7th November in your pocket and come on out to the NSW Writers' Centre in Rozelle. The session I'll be doing is titled Genre is Not a Dirty Word.

If free events are more your speed then come along to Kings Cross Library on Tuesday evening 26 October for a talk in the library about writing crime about Sydney. You may need to book details here.

Now off to work on my 3 legged table ...

... that pile of paper there is my three-legged table. It's Book 2, finally printed out but still missing one major plot line which I now need to weave through it. The subject matter has been intimidating me for a wee while. Then had a mental breakthrough a few days ago. Realised I was approaching it ALL WRONG. Could almost hear all the little levers and gears clicking into place for new approach.

So work printed up (with very wide margins all round - don't panic at the size of the pile yet Jo!) so that I can now start reading through what's there, editing as I go and writing in the fourth leg.

I can share the first line ...........

It was still a wound, not yet a scar.

That was fun - twitter and architecture

2010-09-16T18:06:00.000+10:00

So, can twitter and book club work?

We found out on Wednesday when the NSW Writers' Centre Book Club kicked off on twitter. It was hectic but a lot of fun. I was a bit worried no one would turn up, but we ended up with enough people to have me head down at the keyboard typing responses and trying to keep up.

There were some thoughtful questions and it was challenging to come up with answers that were cogent and short. It really makes you think about the heart and soul of an answer without any of the caveats, waffle or padding.

If you want to have a read then the twitterstream can be found here. You don't have to have a twitter account to look - it opens up just like an ordinary web page. Click on the bottom link to older tweets to get the full discussion.

An interesting morning before the bookclub - I sat in on a session with some very, very, very smart architects presenting papers on their forensic architecture case studies in Beirut as part of an intensive workshop they were doing with Eyal Weizman Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University, London. Weizman was also giving a series of lectures titled Political Plastic at UTS.

Why was an ex-cop, crime writing, part time librarian in that room?

Well, the idea was to listen to the papers and offer feedback from the perspective of a cop, on evidence gathering, compiling a brief, considering material evidence. It was fascinating, however I suspect I got more out of it than the students got out of me. It was one of those situations where I spent the rest of the day (between tweeting) thinking "Oh, I shoulda said that" .....

Quite a week, working with High School English students and MCing a Get Reading event on Monday at GleeBooks, discovering a whole new and exciting area of research and a new way to talk about books on Wednesday.

Meanwhile back at the ranch ...... an academic book chapter to wrestle through its third (and please final edit) then I can get stuck into the final section of Book 2 draft 1.

Tweeting, talking and teaching.

2010-09-14T22:17:00.000+10:00

Spring is finally making an appearance - the pittosporum is popping, starting to scent the days and nights with a lemony sweet promise that summer isn't far away.

Meanwhile - things are hopping.

Tomorrow - Wednesday 15th September - I'm having a go at a Twitter Book Club run by the NSW Writers' Centre. We'll be meeting at the hash tag #NSWWCBookClub and having a tweet about The Old School at 1pm - so you can tweet and eat lunch.

Hoping to "see" some familiar faces in the twitterverse -

Walter Mason, author of Destination Saigon, making an astute book purchase at Dymocks, Liverpool.

A few events are also rapidly approaching -

Friday 15 October is shaping up to be a great night with Sisters in Crime in Melbourne. I'll be chatting with Angela Savage and Sulari Gentill while Robin Bowles wrangles us into order. So if you're in Melbourne come along to Bells Hotel at 8pm and join in as we talk about crime, in Sydney and Thailand, in the past and today.

Hopefully I'll get to put some faces to names during the trip to Melbourne, both in the house of the Penguins and also out and about with some of the hardy handselling indie booksellers I've met in only in twitterland.

Back home, if you're in Sydney, then there's another event in late October. Come along to Kings Cross Library on Tuesday 26 October and we can talk about all things criminal. Booking details will be available in early October from the library.

And if you have a crime short story (or book review) inside you, then now is the time to get it out. I've been asked to judge this year's Queen of Crime competition for Partners in Crime so break out your plot machine and get writing. The closing date is 29 October, 2010 and their are plenty of good prizes to look forward to.

And lastly - best wishes to the Year 12 gals of Extension 1 English at Hornsby Girls High School as the countdown to HSC approaches. We spent one crowded hour mashing some ideas about crime and genre and writing together. Good luck with those exam response questions.

Joss Whedon and writing from “the dark place”

2010-08-29T23:59:00.000+10:00

Joss Whedon at the Sydney Opera House with Wil Anderson (from notes scrawled in the darkness).

When it comes to telling stories, Whedon’s the man. When it comes to combining those stories with characters, emotion, sex, wit, sly humour, and dialogue that rewards use of the rewind button – Whedon’s the man.

So, when word went around that he was slipping up to Sydney after strutting his stuff in Melbourne for the MWF – I knew I wanted to be in that audience. In fact as I sailed through the air two days ago, airborne as a result of hitting a mossy wet footpath in plastic soled shoes, the thought that went through my brain as I crashed towards concrete was “Noooooooooooo, can’t hurt myself, tickets for Sundaaaaaaaay.’

Thirty-six hours later, ice packs and painkillers had done their job and I limped up the stairs with fellow acolyte Sophie to hear from The Master.

It was a beautiful sunny Sydney sprinter day – winter about to end and spring finally poised. Fair enough then, that Joss Whedon wondered ….. why? Why were we all prepared to surrender such a glorious afternoon to come and sit in a dark place and listen to him?

Well, clearly, it was because we were part of a cult, he told us. That was the term often used to describe people such as the couple of thousand gathered beneath the shells on Sydney Harbour this afternoon, and though Whedon used it self-deprecatingly and the audience laughed, he made the point that the term was often used to denigrate and marginalize. And so he touched on a theme that would become central to the question he then posed himself. Whedon decided that we were the ones who deserved an explanation. An answer to the question - why?

Why he does what he does and why he writes what he does and why it comes from “a dark place.”

And he did.

In a chat – it was too relaxed to be called a speech – he shared with the audience the discoveries he had made in thinking about why he writes what he writes and who he writes about. He recalled a starting point came about during a conversation with Stephen Sondheim about writing and about what their universal themes were. Whedon said that he always ended up writing about adolescent young girls with super powers. Sondheim said that his own writing would always be about yearning.

Whedon decided he needed to think somewhat more deeply about what he wrote – young adolescent girls with superpowers – and work out – why?

This took him back to his childhood which, he has to confess was boringly normal, a father he feared disappointing, elder brothers who teased him, certainly no grist for the horror memoir mill. But nevertheless he was physically a small child, curly haired and often mistaken for a little girl, who felt afraid and helpless.

So perhaps it was no coincidence that the characters he ended up writing were, on the surface, similarly small and helpless. He says he grew up feeling scared and alone, not scared and lonely, but scared and alone. Not all bad, he points out, as writers who wish to write should probably love being alone.

So, he asked, “Why is my avatar a female? Am I a literary transvestite? Why do I identify with these girls?”

The revelation, when it came, surprised him. For the 7 years he wrote Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, he identified with Xander, funny, clueless and never getting laid. Then when he was writing an extended piece of prose about a Buffy-type character, a first person narrative, it struck him that he was bucketing therapy on to the page. Only then did he finally see it – “Buffy was me.”

Writers often talk about creating a loveable character, someone for the reader/audience to relate to. But Whedon describes writing characters that he wants to love him. And in a transmogrification they become him.

His avatar. “She will save my life. I’m tiny, terrified and in need of saving and this girl is going to save my life”

This then was “the dark place” Whedon draws his characters from.

It’s a fascinating and generous admission and one that most writers would respond to, knowing as we do, that stories, characters, ideas, come tumbling out of dark places that not all of us are willing to even look at – let alone share with a vast audience on a sunny afternoon in Sydney. Whedon admits he was always helpless. He describes getting mugged regularly in New York, the first time was when he was going to the comic store. He attempted to defend himself from future attacks by taping coins to the inside of his coat so that they wouldn’t jangle. The adult version of helpless was clueless, he tells the audience.

Returning to talking about character he insists that it’s vital that he respect all his characters. Good guys and bad guys and, when you respect your characters – the greatest act of disrespect is killing one of them. “I want them to overcome danger,” he says.

Every character has to have something to say, and a reason for being there. The villains as well as the heroes because, he asks, if you don’t have respect for them, then how can you write them. “Respect is the essence of why I write”. It can be a problem he says, because by giving the bad guys so much time, by making sure that all their actions have reasons, it can destroy the drama.

He talks about writing character and story as a need. “The need I have for everyone to feel that they are IN this story and respected.” The audience responds because it feels that need. He describes a desperate love of the character. The situation and the character comes first. He loves to create a character no one takes seriously and has knowledge that nobody else has.

In the end, Whedon says, he can’t really understand his own dark place, but he reckons all writers need to find their own dark place. Get stuck in with a trowel if necessary.

“Stories come from darkness and pain.”

“If there’s no why in your story then you’re just spinning a yarn.”

He discussed the episode, The Body, from Season 5 of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer. He wanted to write about the surreal experience of the first few hours of a death. The dull pain of it. The way it goes on with no opening up because there IS no opening up in death, swimming through death.

After his talk about drawing on the dark places – Wil Anderson then joined Whedon onstage and conducted a Q and A followed by some audience questions.

Firefly cancellation - did it hurt? Did you have more stories? “Are you fucking kidding?" Everyday the stories of Firefly, characters, dialogue still haunt him. “I learned about grief from Firefly. You never get over it you adjust.”

How to create a cult? Do it well. Work hard. Pop culture is about reaching out to the audience. Says he is lucky and a hard worker.

Music? He comes from a musical family. Bonding with Dad meant listening to all the Sondheim musicals over beer. House filled with music. Music, like drawing, something he dabbled with. He was a talented 12 year old artist and still draws like a talented 12 year old artist, no follow through on anything except writing.

Fan fic? No greater compliment – the most beautiful part of this thing is the fan fic, the worlds people build.

TV Networks? Monkeys understand his work better than Network executives, but terror of cancellation makes the work better. Knowing the executives are outside the door makes the team inside work harder to make something good into something great.

Writing dialogue? Is a lot like joke writing, points out he was raised by a pack of comedians. He looks for the heightened moment in writing dialogue. Writes to movie scores, mood pieces where you just feel. Thinks about what do the characters actually have to say – the lines feed off each other – every line a leapfrog they’ve taken over the scene. He collects dialogue. Some lines are stolen from movies, but usually it comes in the moment of creation.

Character killer? Whedon jokes that he’s a bit shirty about being accused of killing too many characters, and he asks people to look at the percentage here. Says the common response on his gig directing Glee was - “Oh he’s directing Glee who’s he going to kill?” He defends himself - “I’m not the grim fucking reaper.”

He points out that when people die in his work, he does kill people that people love. He lost his mother suddenly. He understands death. Killing people that people care about is not something that happens too often. But when it does, the audience will feel something.

Broadway or Opera? Love to do both. – a pipe dream, a really good pipe. But difficult to find time, money – would love to see Buffy the Musical or Dr. Horrible.

The long form narrative for TV – initially Angel was going to be “Touched by The Equalizer” and it began as episodic TV then they realized they didn’t really do that – so went for the long form. Dollhouse had an ending then was surprisingly renewed.

Vampires? Whedon’s fault? Won’t take the blame for Vampires. “Ain’t taking the heat – Anne Rice can” he saw Interview with a Vampire as a teenager and it “totally changed some shit.”

Working on Dr. Horrible? Tells a story about arguing over the songs and sums it up with a deadpan “We’re cynical, ugly people, especially Nathan Fillion.”

Firefly – western? Civil war? – He was reading The Killer Angels a book about Gettysburgh and it was the catalyst for Firefly. He read it on his first vacation from Buffy.

The dialogue in Firefly came from old movies, from Elizabethan language. Slang from any age “I love language”. Speaks aloud as he writes. Loves writing the left of centre characters, River, Dru, Illyria.

And then it was over. Time had run out. Some of the questions had been personal statements – how Buffy had got a young woman called “Bella” through school, she’d “saved” her. How “The Body” had helped a young man feel connected and not so scared and alone in the wake of his mother’s sudden death from a brain aneurism.

Proof, if any were needed, of the power of stories and characters to reach into real lives and remind us that we are not alone, that human beings exist to tell and be told stories.

Music of crime

2010-08-24T08:42:00.000+10:00

Music and crime. In much the same way that place has come to be seen as a crucial element of crime fiction, music has also become linked with crime writing.

Think Rebus, alone at night with a bottle of whisky, we'll learn a lot about his state of mind by what his choice of music. If it's The Stones we might suspect he's getting ready to rock and roll on the case but if he summons up Leonard Cohen for company then we can guess that if he's not actually at rock bottom, then he can probably see it. Rebus's record collection became an iconic image of the Ian Rankin's lonely, damaged detective. Whilst the soundtrack to a Rebus novel reflects the author's own taste, it also adds significantly to the reader's sense of Rebus the man.

Peter Temple, in The Broken Shore, uses music, in this case the development of a taste for opera, as a moving and highly effective metaphor for both the healing of Joe Cashin's physical wounds as well as the opening of the man to a new way of experiencing the world.

So, when it came to writing The Old School, I knew that music could play any number of parts in the story. On one level, it could serve the very basic purpose of providing a crime fiction trope that the reader would recognise and expect to see. As the events of the book take place in late 1992, music could also serve as a a useful purpose in placing the book in a specific time. But, as a someone who travelled across the world to Mali on the strength of the hearing Salif Keita's soaring voice one night in a park in Adelaide, I knew that I wanted music to be more than just a device or a time marker, I wanted it to be eloquent.

I had been writing about music, West African music, before I even knew I had a crime novel (or two) inside my head. In retrospect, music was clearly instrumental (!) in unlocking that story.

The choice of songs was made as carefully as if they were a soundtrack, each adding to the atmosphere, and each reflecting something about the character, Ned, as she listens and responds to them. I wanted, originally, to use some lyrics, however, the harsh reality of rights and commerce meant that using the actual words was not an option.

With the wonder of youtube it's now possible to assemble a mini soundtrack to The Old School. For those familiar with the music in the book, I hope you enjoy this reprise. For those of you unfamiliar with some 1970s Joan Armatrading or Malian griot Salif Keita - kick back and enjoy.

Breaking the girl - Red Hot Chili Peppers is a song that, when it first came out, I found particularly disturbing. Having worked in Sexual Assault it was difficult for me to separate the lyrics from their literal meaning. It was easy therefore to imagine this as a song that Ned would find haunting and unsettling, and she does.

He started the car. The tape player came on. Music wound out, sinuous and sinister.

p. 11 The Old School

Down to zero - Joan Armatrading An old album from a wonderful artist. Joan Armatrading was, in fact, the first serious concert I ever attended. I liked the fact that the music "fit" the scene, when Ned was feeling a bit battered by life, as well as being a latent memory of a song she'd heard in her childhood.

The familiar guitar riff slithered out. Ned’s skin tightened. She punched a cassette in, one of her sister Linh’s oldies.

Light reggae and a rich voice replaced the Chili Peppers. ‘Down to Zero’.

p.14 The Old School

Sina - Salif Keita A good example of the high energy drive and excitement of the music of Mali, of which Salif Keita is a fabulous example. Impossible to listen to without moving. Imagine this blasting out of the speakers as TC settles back in the passenger seat.

He rummaged in the glove box, came up with one of Ned’s cassettes and popped it in.

Salif Keita’s wails and beats leapt from the speakers.

‘Jesus, girl. What the hell is this shit?’

‘It’s African.’

‘African bloody bonking music, if you ask me.’

p. 22 The Old School

True tears of joy - Hunters & Collectors Classic Australian sound. Romantic but rough around the edges, passionate but tinged with sadness. A love song that is about lust and desire and wrong choices.

It was a mostly silent trip back over the bridge. Hunters and Collectors on the stereo filled in the gaps.

Ned stared hard out the window, blinking her eyes dry.

p.226 The Old School

Television: The Drug of the Nation- Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy Cops spend a lot of time in cars. Driving to and from work, driving to jobs, aside from sitting a desk, sitting in a car takes up a lot of the job. When you share cars, you have to share music and radio choices. At one point Ned climbs into a car to find the radio set on a shock jock talk back station. She drops in one of her cassettes, and when the Disposable Heroes start up ... she has a bit of fun with the lyrics.

Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy replaced the anger of talkback with some equally angry hip-hop.

Beating her hands against the steering wheel, she sang her own version of the chorus.

p. 294 The Old School

Sanni Kegniba - Salif Keita A sublime piece by Salif Keita that throbs with heat and grief. Sanni the Beautiful is dead, the translated lyrics tell us. The hypnotic music and the keening vocals provide a soundscape to the meeting between Ned and Marcus.

... ‘Sanni Kegniba’ was dissolving in a waterfall of notes from the kora.

p 273 The Old School.

Save Me - Joan Armatrading The discovery song. An album track that, as I discovered when I looked for it on youtube, has been used in the series Oz - to devastating effect. This is the track that Ned is re-discovers as she listens to her Discman in the final pages of the book.

She pressed play, and the music began, precise and CD-clean. The simple strummed guitar,

then piano, then that unique voice, full and round and splendid.

p.362 The Old School

Now well into Book 2, I'm already "hearing" the soundtrack to many of the scenes ..........

Talking about The Old School - Writers Radio & gleebooks

2010-08-08T19:25:00.000+10:00

During the past few weeks I have had the chance to talk about The Old School on radio with a range of people across the country. It was a great experience and wonderful opportunity.

One of those conversations was with Cath Kenneally for Writers Radio in Adelaide. It was a luxury to have the time to get into a good long discussion about the book, about writing about places and times that are real ... I really enjoyed it. So, as the podcast is now up I thought I'd let you know that if you'd like to have a listen - you can.

If you liked the sound of that, and you'd like to hear more, then come along to gleebooks in Glebe this Friday night, 13th of August.

Camilla Nelson, author of Crooked, and I will be having a conversation about crime, about the fascination with crime that we see in books - true crime and fiction - and the recent popularity of TV series such as Underbelly and The Wire. It should be a great night. Contact gleebooks for tickets.

Writing retreat, "moving forward" and in the wild

2010-08-06T16:57:00.000+10:00

Wrapping up a two week break of house (and cat) sitting in the rural loveliness of Perthville and putting in some concentrated hours on the elusive Book 2. Set my self a target of 30,000 words and, surprising myself, I've achieved it. I think a big factor was forgetting to pack my portable hard drive which had Time Machine on it, which forced me to go forth and write on with no looking back.

It wasn't that straight forward of course.

After discovering I'd forgotten it, I fretted and had my security blanket hard drive posted up from Sydney, only to find that as I had not formatted and exported my copy of the novel from Scrivener, I couldn't open the file on a new computer! So I was there, on the road to novel, without the comforting distraction of "Oh, I'll just go through what I've already done and edit it a bit" to provide the appearance of activity without making any actual forward progress.

So I have been writing off the map, so to speak. Resisting the temptation to tinker, just creating the next piece of the jigsaw, and the next, oh and a bit over there, and something that might go down there, and this might work later on in the piece after that ... scenes and sketches that will need to be fleshed out, slotted into place, re-worked, in some cases possibly scrapped but .... they are now in existence. And that's a happy thing to be.

So thank you to the beautiful - though bloody cold - Central West for providing excellent walking, thinking and dictating landscapes:

Thanks to those I met along the road:

and cheers to the welcome glimpse of sprinter:

Meanwhile back at the ranch!

Thanks Maggie for two sightings of The Old School in the wilds of Paddington!

Maggie at Berkeluow's at Paddington

The Old School - face out at Ariel Paddington!

So, back to Sydney tomorrow, to warmer weather (I hope) and tickets to see Neil Gaiman read "The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains" at the Sydney Opera House thanks to Galaxy Bookshop's competition.

Writer's retreat, software, hardware and spotting The Old School in the wild

2010-07-26T00:37:00.002+10:00

How to make the best use of three plus hours in the car en route to a couple of weeks writing retreat? That was the question I considered as I was preparing to head out of town.

I’m prepared to experiment with different approaches to writing. Although, as I’ve said before, I’m pretty old school, I like my pen and notebook and the freedom it gives me to get out of the house, away from the tyranny of the screen, and most importantly away from the backspace and delete keys. It’s so much easier to turn off that internal editor when you write by longhand. Having now seen a text through to publication, I realise there are going to be plenty of opportunities for editing down the track.

For me, creating straight on to the screen provides too many temptations to second guess and edit as I go. I’m way more productive (and creative) if I just write and save the first edit for when I’m transferring the work from notebook to the computer.

Despite my love of pen and paper I’m no Luddite. In fact I’m a big fan of new technology – an unabashed if not always entirely successful geek. So when I picked up a reference to a software program called Scrivener from John Birmingham’s blog, I decided to give it a whirl and downloaded the trial version. They are smart folks those Scrivener folks. They let you have a good long trial period – one that works on how often you open the program rather than by dates. It took me about three weeks to get the hang of it, to see the potential of it and to realise that I wanted it in my life (in fact I've become embarrassingly fannish about it - first the conversion to Mac, now proselytising for software - the shame, the shame). However, the best news is that it is such an inexpensive program (under fifty bucks!) that you really don’t have to think twice about it when it comes to affordability.

So, what does it do? Well for a start it doesn’t hang and crash like my word program does. But better than that is that it somehow manages to turn all those tactile creative processes I like to use, such as making notes about plot, about characters, pinning things up on a board, shuffling the order of chapters, of scenes within chapters, of having a great big pile of research that I sometimes want to have open at the same time that I’m working on the manuscript – well, Scrivener makes all of that possible.

I’ve also invested in MacSpeech Dictate in order to rest a chronically sore shoulder I’ve developed from over use of the dreaded mouse. Unlike Scrivener, this is a software package that is going to take me a little longer to master. At this stage I’ve pretty much limited it to a dictation tool. I can read from my handwritten notebooks to get that precious first rough-as-guts draft into the computer. It’s taken a bit of time (and the necessity of privacy) to get used to saying my writing out loud but .... what it did do was plant the seed of an idea, which brings me back to making use of that driving time.

As I had the car to myself for the drive up I decided to try the dictation thing in the raw, so to speak. I bought a pretty basic inexpensive digital voice recorder and set off. I admit to feeling pretty self-conscious, not to say foolish, when I pulled it out and began to “write” but I found that as I went along I started to forget myself and I got stuck into the story. Although it’s certainly not “writing” I was surprised to find that it did begin to feel like I was “creating” and "talking" the dialogue was a something of a revelation. Like writing in notebooks, dictating lent itself to “finding” the way (stumbling) into a scene, via false starts, digressions, intuitive leaps, realisations that something would need to happen before or after this particular scene. The time and the kilometres flashed past and I arrived at my destination with that sense of satisfaction that only a good writing session can deliver.

So now I’ve settled in, transcribed the first couple of files from yesterday's travel recording and discovered that I’ve had a 3,000 word day. It's rough, there's still much to tidy up – but I’m resisting the temptation to fiddle too much at this stage. I have a couple of weeks to really get stuck into building the scaffolding of this novel; the polishing, the refining, the embroidering and yes, the inevitable stripping out, will come through once the structure is there.

I have a sensational work environment -

– my view from the computer desk is pure Australia Felix.

And I have a companion who keeps watch over the word count.

Meanwhile, The Old School is still out and about, lurking in bookstores, sharing shelf space with some pretty fancy company as can be seen here.

Thanks to Sophie who spotted this at Tullarmarine...

... and thanks Barbara for a shot at Berkelouw's in Newtown.

Both up front and cover out!

So, tomorrow - another session transcribing from files made during the car journey. Then, I might take a walk, voice recorder in hand and try out a few scenes on the locals. There's a delightfully absurd bunch of alpacas living up the road who look like they might enjoy a spot of crime fiction.

The Old School in airports, in the wild and in performance.

2010-07-21T23:02:00.001+10:00

Thanks to the roving reporters out there - some more shots of The Old School snapped in the wild.

Snapped at Sydney Airport.

Thanks for snapping this Mark and Alison for sending it in. Though I'm still jealous that you were en route to Port Douglas at the time! Brrrrrrrrrrr, I'd swap Sydney for some warmth just at the minute.

Spotted in Shearers at Leichhardt.

Thanks Neerav! Though you may have caused consternation and head scratching by those what keep the shelves in order. :)

Looking good enough to eat at Melbourne Airport.

Thanks to JoAnne for snapping this despite no doubt shivering like an extra on the set of Dr Zhivago as she and Bronwyn took their Darwin acclimatized bodies south to Melbourne in mid-winter. Big Brrrrrrrrrr.

Spotted at The Constant Reader in Crows Nest.

My "local" - and spotted skulking very UC style between the shelves was Ethel, aided and abetted by David. Cover out too! Wooo Hooo! Thanks to you both for your mission. And to Ethel for making sure the libraries of the Sutherland Shire will have access to The Old School.

Had a grand old time over the weekend going to the official opening Mini Writers Fest at the new Dulwich Hill branch of Gleebooks. On Saturday heard Georgia Blain read from her new work Darkwater - a young adult novel set in the early 70s and (in the slice we heard) reeking of those long hot summers of childhood, which were not always glorious but on occasion filled with the painful business of bad decisions. Charlotte Wood then gave us a sneak peek of a work in progress and had the room nodding and barracking for her character's attempts to silence the dreaded leaf blower.

On Sunday I joined a packed house to listen to David Marr and Annabel Crabb discuss what happened to Kevin. Then to Airlie Lawson give a peek inside the business of the book business via her novel Don't Tell Eve and Robyn Catchlove paint a picture of life up the top end before I took my spot in the window, and talked a little about what "place" in crime novels is all about and then read a little from The Old School about a place a little further up the road. Then I was relieved by Anne Summers and was able to dash outside and catch up with the Wake-Paljor family and promise to do bookclub with Kate's inner west bookclub gang. They meet in cafes - hopefully licensed ones.

For a good review of the weekend check out LizaBelle's blog.

And I'll be doing another event with Gleebooks on Friday the 13th August back at the Glebe mothership - so come along and we can chat about crime. Check out the Gleebooks website for information and bookings.

THE OLD SCHOOL launched in old school style

2010-07-16T12:27:00.000+10:00

The plan was for a very small, informal, family and friends style book launch.

But when you come from a large family the numbers pretty soon blow out, the room is full and 2/3rds of the people in it are blood relations. It's part-reunion, part-launch, part good old style get together, with the added advantage of it not being a funeral.

So that's pretty much what it was at the Warringah Bowlo on Wednesday night.

After a last minute stress out when the small domestic sized oven refused to light, and the large intimidating industrial sized gas range had us all quaking in our boots, until we were rescued by a lady bowler, who was the only one in town who knew how to coax the big fella into action. The oven alight, 100 quiches, some spanakopita and samosas stowed away, room set up (thanks Camilla) and then it was drinking, eating, talking, launching and book signing.

Thanks to Sophie for being a great agent and and masterful MC, and to Jo Rosenberg my editor from Penguin who came up for the night, and to Jon Page, from Pages and Pages for doing the official launch business.

Jon Page Launching THE OLD SCHOOL, while Sophie, myself and Jo watch.

An old-school launch at an old-school bowlo beneath an old-school honour board listing the past presidents of the club.

Signing.

Thank you to all who came a shared the night. I felt like I spoke to everyone and no one, as the faces kept flashing past. I wish you all an entertaining ride back to the early 90s in THE OLD SCHOOL.

More OLD SCHOOL snapped in the wild PLUS talking in the TARDIS

2010-07-13T20:12:00.000+10:00

Nearly two weeks since P Day and it's been a lot of fun so far.

There have been some more sightings of THE OLD SCHOOL ...

Dechen, (displaying her clear potential for a big future as a weather wench) found (and pointed out) some copies at Shearers on Norton Street, Leichhardt. Thanks Kate Wake for sharing.

Meanwhile over in Chatswood, Juliette was restrained by David from removing THE OLD SCHOOL from the shelf and placing it in the Number 1 spot out near the front door. Juliette might have found herself in a spot of bother from Border(s) Security if she tried!

Me, I'm just happy to see it cover out ... wooo hooo!

Then last night, a sighting in Dymocks from my old university mate Nigel Bartlett (remember that name - a great crime novel is being brewed in that head as we speak).

I have also had the chance to talk to some great people across New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia over the past couple of weeks. Some for print interviews, some pre-recorded interviews and some LIVE. If any turn up as podcasts I'll link them up.

It's been interesting to respond to the range of questions - some focus on the past life in The Job, some on teasing out what we can of the book without blowing the twists and turns, some have been fascinated by the time in India, others by the time in Africa and the music. Just goes to show, live long enough, make enough career U-Turns and you too will have a rich tapestry to draw on.

Then on Monday my inner geek got a real thrill.

I did four interviews for various ABC Regional radio programs from the ABC TARDIS at Ultimo. Yes, that's what they have named their live radio booths, where you slide in and talk to the regions and the sound quality comes out as pure as if you were sitting in the same room.

And they call it the TARDIS.

This is why we love Aunty.

Any fly buys with that? THE OLD SCHOOL coming to an airport near you

2010-07-05T13:41:00.000+10:00

Thanks to Y.A. Erskine for this very cool shot of THE OLD SCHOOL up in lights at Canberra airport.

Y.A. Erskine, Yvette, is another ex-cop who will be appearing in print next year. Random House will be publishing her first novel, THE BROTHERHOOD. File that name away for future reference.

And, if you are travelling this month then keep your eyes peeled - Penguin tell me that there are 11 of these lightboxes at airports around the country. See it, snap it and send it in!

THE OLD SCHOOL spied in the wild @ North Sydney

2010-07-03T19:29:00.000+10:00

Thanks to David and Juliette for forwarding their photos of THE OLD SCHOOL. Captured in the wild at Dymocks North Sydney.

More to follow as they come to hand.

Talking about THE OLD SCHOOL

2010-07-02T15:13:00.000+10:00

Radio 2CC have put up a link to my interview on Drive with Mike Welsh - so if you didn't happen to be driving through Canberra yesterday afternoon, you can listen to the podcast here.

A video review from Pages and Pages Booksellers

2010-06-29T09:32:00.000+10:00

A video review of THE OLD SCHOOL from Jon at Pages and Pages Booksellers Mosman.

If the reviews that follow are half as enthusiastic then I will be a very happy camper indeed.

First sighting of THE OLD SCHOOL in the wild

2010-06-28T17:04:00.000+10:00

Thanks to Jon @ Pages and Pages Booksellers for the first pictures of THE OLD SCHOOL in a real bookshop.

What a great looking display. I'm sure I'm not biased in saying that.

If Pages and Pages is too far away for you to pop in and pick up a copy, then check out your closest local indie bookseller.

I'm hoping to pop in and visit Pages and Pages this week. Phone interviews and Book 2's demands notwithstanding.

The night before P day

2010-06-27T22:48:00.000+10:00

Twas the night before P Day and all through the house ....... a bottle of red was consumed with a sticky date pudding chaser.

Yes, as of tomorrow THE OLD SCHOOL will be out and about on book shelves around the country. Lurking about like an unaccompanied minor, shuffling for space with all the other hopefuls out there, working hard to catch the eye of the browser, luring them into picking it up, reading the blurbs, scanning the back of book hook, perhaps reading the opening pars .... maybe deciding that yes, this one's worth laying down the cost of a couple of movie tickets for, this one looks like it'll be worth spending a few hours with over winter.

My job this week.

Stay at the task at hand - writing book 2. Putting one word after the other until I have a first draft that has a beginning a middle and an end - then rolling up the sleeves and really getting to work on it. Mental deadlines are to have a first draft ready for spring. This would be a full first draft for me - no one else is going to get a peek at it until we've been on many miles of walks and thinks and edits together, in the parks, by the harbourside and the pools around here. Pen and paper. Old school edits. Then hours spent at the screenface deciphering the pen marks, the lines and arrows and additions and subtractions of the edit.

So that's task one - task two is making sure I'm beside the phone at the appointed times to take the phone calls. Over the next few weeks I'm privileged to have the opportunity to talk to people in Western Australia, South East Queensland, Northern New South Wales, South Australia .... I get to come through the radio waves into people's cars as they wait in traffic, scoot home from doing the shopping or search for that car space. I have a few precious minutes to persuade them to stay a moment longer in their car, door open, one leg out, hands on the keys about to kill the ignition, listening right to the end because they suddenly need to know the name of the book. They've been convinced that this book is going to be a worth a read.

I'm getting the chance to come into their offices, their workshops, their homes. To sit with them in waiting rooms at the dentist, the doctor, the physio. I've got a chance to distract them from the everyday world, to promise them the chance to shapeshift, to time travel, to make a journey in another's skin.

I'm about to go to work in a way I never imagined.

Writing and speaking: is it like walking and chewing gum?

2010-06-19T16:10:00.001+10:00

As publication day draws nearer my google calendar is starting to gather a few appointments.

Interviews.

It's a decidedly odd experience, (as a new writer about to be ~~foisted~~ launched onto an unsuspecting world) anticipating spruiking yourself and your book for a few precious minutes to an unseen audience. You need to seduce them. Excite them just as much as you were excited about writing the book. Convince them to part with what may be the equivalent of a couple of hours pay to buy it. Promise them that the hours of their lives they'll spending reading it will be worth it.

You find yourself listening carefully to podcasts of people you know, or authors whose books you admire as they strut their stuff on The Book Show. You wonder if you can maybe pick up a few tips. Then Malla Nunn, hypnotises you with the story she tells and the way she tells it. What a gorgeous voice - she could DO radio not just appear on it occasionally. And then you hear Lenny Bartulin managing to be funny, self-deprecating, spin a good yarn and promote his book in a seamless flow of intelligent wit and charm and think "Hang on, how did he just do that?"

You listen to the big guns, the imports who rock up for the writers festivals: Lionel Shriver being alternately withering and razor sharp, you hear Richard Glover confess to being intimidated by her. Then you hear Christopher Hitchens, who even when he's contradicting his past positions, still manages to sound as if he has never seriously doubted anything he's ever said, thought or written.

How do they get that kind of confidence? Maybe listening to them wasn't such a great plan after all, as by now, you've sort of curled up under the desk and decided you may never actually want to come out again. You're feeling the pressure to be "interesting" really starting to build up.

There's a reason writers write, you see. They have some facility with words. But becoming the interview subject? That means talking to an audience off the cuff, on the fly and that's like putting your first draft out there with no editing, no polishing - no delete button. And as most writers will tell you, no one but them usually ever gets to see the first draft!

A lot of the interviews that have been lined up are for radio, by phone. Takes me back, along time ago (pre Sydney Olympics). I was a newly-returned-to-Australia-ex-cop in need of a job and I applied for a position with ASIO. They were recruiting analysts. I didn't know if I could be an analyst, but it sounded interesting and it was based in Sydney, working on Pre-Olympic stuff. I sent off my application to Canberra and scored an interview, by panel, over the phone.

It was bizarre, Sitting on the lounge at home, hearing different voices asking the pool questions. From the echoing timbre I guessed they were sitting around a table, leaning in towards a speaker phone. I felt totally off balance, being unable to see anyone, or imagine the room, or pick up on the body language. Those anti-nervousness strategies - like imagining the interview panel naked - don't work so well when you can't see them.

I must've done OK because they sent up some paperwork for the next step. It was a pre-screening security document and to say it left no stone unturned would be an understatement. By the time I got to page twenty-something and it needed the names and addresses of all the friends and acquaintances I had met overseas, I'd decided that I was just not that into ASIO. The thought of friends, who'd extended kindness to a traveller in Africa, ending up being subject to some kind of security screening, in order that I could land a job seemed just bit too much to ask.

So, while I'm not expecting any ASIO style interrogations, it did get me thinking. Maybe book promotion interviews do have a fair bit in common with job interviews. I guess you'll know if you got the job when, one day, you see someone sitting opposite you in the train, or beside the pool, and they are totally engrossed in your book.

I reckon I'll call that job satisfaction.

Tools of the Trade - pen, paper and places to write in

2010-06-03T10:26:00.000+10:00

It's easy to get obsessed with the right tools for the job, a new computer, a new laptop, a new bit of software and as you can see from my book trailer - I'm easily distracted by new software, the shiny baubles of the computer bound. Of course, all those toys provide wonderful reasons excuses to procrastinate.

In all honesty though, the most important tool for my trade is a notebook - a paper one - and a pen.

I don't go in for the expensive, fancy notebooks. They intimidate me, they're a bit too nice. I keep thinking that at this price, I better make every word count. That's not how I write. And that's why I go for supermarket cheap and fat, so that I can write a lot. I can write my way into a character, or into a scene. I can write stuff that sometimes won't survive beyond the notebook but had to be written because I had to know it, even if the reader maybe doesn't.

Now, I know I'm going to fill up quite a few of these little devils before I'm through and I don't want to be worrying about the expense. So they have to be fat enough that I can write freely, even if a fair bit of what goes in there never makes it into the final draft. And if really random stuff pops up, I turn them upside down and start writing notes and ideas at the other end.

My notebooks go everywhere with me, so they get beaten up and battered about. A notebook has to be small. It has to be tough and tiny enough to be able to travel with me, knocking about in the bottom of the bag, a pen tucked into the spiral binding, close at hand in case a line of dialogue appears that I realise is the way into a scene, or a plot twist or complication should suddenly clunk into place.

Cheap and cheerful for notebooks and the same goes with pens. I like the glidey ones that can race across the paper. When I can move the pen fast I feel like I have a better chance of keeping up with the writing going on inside the head. (Though I do often spend many frowning moments later trying to decipher my scrawl). I buy pens in bulk when the supermarket has them on special, no loyalty to any one brand, and then I try to make sure that I have them rattling around in all of the various bags I might leave the house with. I lose them regularly, so again, no fancy expensive pen for me.

I bought a half a dozen hard-backed notebooks a few years back but soon discovered that they're too heavy for carting about day to day. They have become the designated notebook that I use to record characters breakdowns and plot points for the novel; notes on events of the time period I'm working with; or bits of research I've done - all tabbed into different sections, with enough pages left either side to grow and add to them. I transfer these reference type bits and pieces that have occurred to me when I'm out and about from the travelling notebooks into this bible.

Once I've got a fair bit in the notebooks, I'll sit down and start to write on the computer. There's something very satisfying about dipping into these handwritten notes and then watching them grow, change and take on another life as they are transcribed into the binary world. It becomes a second draft right there and then.

I've noticed that when I write directly onto the "screen" I'm much slower. I stop and tinker en route, fussing over word choice, fussing over sentence structure, all important of course but they do tend to stymie the flow. When I write on paper the story dominates, not the editing, the characters talk and think and feel and I tend to get out of their way.

Then, sitting at the computer, notebook propped up on the messy desk, it is here, at the transcription stage, that the editor comes out and fiddles with the work, the first of a long series of sweeps over the material, brushing, polishing, snipping and embroidering.

But, you want to know the very best thing about writing in a notebook with a pen?

Well, your office can be here:

North Sydney Olympic Pool

A pen and your notebook and you can swim laps, plot and plan, then take up a position in the shade and watch the harbour go by in between filling up the pages.

Or you can remind yourself how good the Bún bò Huế at Dong Ba is, spattering your notebook with spots of red broth as you soak up atmosphere along with the noodles.

And of course you can always just go and walk, sit quietly,

..... no phones, no email, no distractions of the household

... and lose yourself in story.

The Old School - The Book Trailer

2010-05-28T13:18:00.000+10:00

Inside every author is there a film director trying to get out?

I don't know, but I have noticed that a lot of books these days come out with short movie trailers.

Now, as I have a slightly geeky side, a penchant for taking photos and access to a brother who knows his way around Final Cut Express I thought to myself, hey - how hard could it be?

As it turns out, quite tricky. It meant mastering the basics of what is a very, very, very cool and complex bit of software.

Now, as I'm working on the follow up to The Old School at the moment, I couldn't afford to spend too long on this. So, over the last few days I've rationed myself to a few hours of playing after putting in some solid word time.

But my goodness, it's fun! And, I can only imagine, much quicker once you actually know what you are doing.

Anyway, after a couple of hours of repairing mistakes and polishing it all up last night (the polishing and repairing done by big brother Robert - thank you) - we had a "thing" - a book trailer.

And here it is ... housed at youtube at the moment.

Enjoy.

The Old School - The Book Trailer

Highlights of the 2010 Sydney Writers Festival

2010-05-24T09:23:00.000+10:00

As Sydney Writers Festival recedes into the rear vision mirror, here's my highlights of #swf2010.

Lenny Bartulin and Neil Cross gave exceedingly good crime panel and were teamed up a few times over the days. They seemed to develop some good chemistry, making each other laugh as well as the audience. When it comes to giving a thumbnail sketch of the lads it's tempting to see them as source material for a potential crime-writer-buddies-sit-com; a recovering poet and an escapee from Booker Prize nomination, out do each other in finding the remotest places on earth in which to live (Tasmania and NZ) and write crime. And all this before Neil Cross even lifted the veil on Spooks.

"If something is too big to fail, it is, by definition TOO BIG".

So said Bill McKibben, who then went on to give the speculative fiction idea that's been knocking about the back of my mind some truly frightening substance. His latest book EAARTH ought to be shoved into the hand of every politician on this poor old planet. I'd really like to see Banksy get creative with the number 350 as well; www.350.org explains why that's the number that needs to be emblazoned on our minds, in our hearts and tattooed into the consciousness of every politician in town.

On a panel entitled "Too late to save?" but which everyone agreed should have been called - "We're screwed", Raj Patel was prepared to name names and apportion blame. When a guy who's worked for the World Bank and the IMF is prepared to name and shame and use the "C" word - Capitalism - when asked for the reasons behind poverty and hunger, then it's time to sit up and listen. He was insistent, and it's a point worth repeating, that he is not advocating a returning to mud huts or de-inventing the wheel. Rather, he is arguing for a fundamental shift in thinking about they way we humans have chosen to organise ourselves and in doing so he points out the hairy spotty bottoms of the Economic Masters of the Universe who have spent far too long prancing about encouraging us all to admire their fine and fancy pants.

On a personal note I finally got to meet and have a drink with my long-distance, long-suffering editor Jo Rosenberg, from Penguin. Released from her desk to wander blinking about in the daylight, we managed to catch up, talk a lot and get in a couple of glasses of wine before dashing off in different directions to different events. Such is the fun of the festival.

Final event for me was a visit to the SH Ervin Gallery for more wine and cheese and a peek at the Salon des Refusés before a talk by Grace Karskens and Ian Hoskins on Sydney Colony and Sydney Harbour. Then a trip to the Sydney Observatory to gaze at the Moon and Mars and Saturn.

Not even a rainy Sydney could ruin it. The crime sessions were full, the environment sessions were full, the wharves were buzzing - lots of people still like to read it seems.

The Final Cover has landed ...

2010-04-10T01:34:00.000+10:00

..... and, just quietly, I reckon it looks pretty fine.

What's even finer is discovering what a generous mob of writers are out there.

When you consider that reading a book is not something that you can just knock off in a bit of spare time between lunch and arvo tea, you realise what a big ask it is to have someone agree to read the work of an unknown writer. When the people you are asking to donate a big chunk of their time to do this are people who have their own books to write, stories break, and deadlines to meet, then you can only say with sincere gratitude - thank you.

I have been lucky enough to have garnered three "you can quote me"s for The Old School, from Graeme Blundell, Matthew Reilly and Andrew Rule.

To three very good blokes indeed, let me say - thank you. I hope to be able to buy each of you a rather large (insert drink of choice here) one day very soon.

George Pelecanos got it right when he said ...

2010-03-18T01:09:00.001+11:00

There is no solving murders, you know. Not unless the dead are going to rise up out of the earth. Once somebody is killed, it's forever for their loved ones and their family and the community.

George Pelecanos http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum100.html

That quote, from an interview with George Pelecanos, forms the epigraph to The Old School. Though it may seem redundant to talk about grief in a crime novel, it is surprising that in fiction that deals almost exclusively with sudden and violent death, grief is an emotion that is often conspicuously lacking. Psychologists and health carers use terms such as “complicated grief” and “spoiled memory syndrome” to describe the complexity and severity of the impact of murder on the friends and families of victims.

Yet within crime fiction all too often the focus is primarily on the processes and procedures, the puzzle aspect, of an investigation into the violent termination of human life. We rarely see the consequences of violent death on those most affected by it: the family and friends of the victim.

These characters are sometimes sighted in brief sad scenes when they are informed of the murder. These are often just set pieces to allow the detective to display their compassion and empathy or conversely to stress how damaged and hardened they have become due to the horror of their job. Any real sense of the family’s grief and the on-going impact of violent death tend to be relegated off-stage. The grieving relative sometimes reappears at the successful conclusion of an investigation, in order to show their gratitude to the protagonist for providing them with justice, revenge or ‘closure’ and provide a poignant moment of closure. However, if family and friends of the deceased appear as suspects then any grief they display is harshly interrogated as a falsity.

But the grief that follows a ‘real-life’ murder is intense and real death ruptures the lives of those left behind. There are some writers who explore this dark territory. It is a constant theme in the novels of George Pelecanos, and one which he brought to the acclaimed TV series, The Wire.

Dennis Lehane’s, Mystic River is an elegiac meditation on the grief and destruction wrought on families and communities by two crimes decades apart.

Emotionally wounded and grieving characters abound in Ian Rankin’s, The Naming of the Dead; a daughter grieves for her murdered mother, a family for a raped daughter, a sister for a battered sister and a mass gathering of people who witness the shattering of their optimism as the G8 protests are swamped by a terrorist bombing.

In The Broken Shore Peter Temple’s protagonist, Joe Cashin, is also a grieving and guilt ridden character, carrying the responsibility for the death of a young colleague and family guilt relating to his Aboriginal cousins.

Each character in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost is in a state of grief, for the loss of love and the loss of lovers. In Sri Lanka Ondaatje suggests that love is being murdered by war. Ananda has taken refuge in alcohol to blot out the pain of his “disappeared” wife, while the brothers Sarath and Gamini are estranged from each other, immersed in work and wrestling with the grief and guilt about their love for the same woman, now dead by suicide.

To each one of these books, George Pelecanos’ words could apply.

A sense of Place

2010-03-05T13:07:00.000+11:00

Great sense of place ........ that's become an expected element of crime fiction. Rebus is Edinburgh, VI Warsahwski is Chicago, George Pelecanos dissects Washington.

In The Old School, I was equally determined that Sydney would be more than just a backdrop to a story. I wanted it to be central, an important character, an old, old player, ever present, holding the secrets and the clues. Here's a glimpse of just a few of the places that inspired some of the events.

I stumbled across this wall carving in the cafe on the country platforms at Central only a couple of years ago. It has been there at lot longer than that, but on the few occasions I'd been in there I'd never raised my eyes to the walls behind me. It encapsulates so much about Sydney's past, and about the way we have told that past to ourselves.

Central Railway Station cafe, Sydney

The scene on the left is dated 1787, and the "noble savage" iconography is pretty clear; a simple happy life, but tough, the bare essentials, even just the struggle to make fire occupies two men. The next scene is dated a year later. 1788, and there is no trace of those original inhabitants. They simply disappear, swept away by the progress of the next scene. Interestingly there is no sign that these industrious, hearty and healthy looking men, bringing ashore barrels (of rum?) from the ship riding at anchor in the harbour behind them, are actually convicts, transported for life. No sign of a chain, or a lash, or scurvy, or despair at being transported to the modern day equivalent of the moon.

There are still a few places around Sydney Harbour that allow us to glimpse how Sydney once appeared. These are the places Ned Kelly goes running, passing the middens and rock carvings of the first inhabitants of this beautiful place.

Sand and stone on Berry Island, Sydney

A view of Berry Island from Greenwich

Beach on Berry Island, Sydney

What working in a public library taught me

2010-02-12T23:00:00.000+11:00

Spend a year working the loans desk in a public library and you will learn a lot about what people like to read.

You see who gets checked out over and over again, whose backlists get chased up by readers who, having discovered a great storyteller, then want to read everything they've ever written.

You notice whose backlists, though they may have departed the scene in the pressure-cooker world of the book shop, have settled into a long loan life on the library shelves.

You notice the titles and authors that you constantly seem to be re-shelving, only to be checking them out again a few hours later.

Working the loans desk of a public library taught me that people like to be told stories. Maybe it's in our DNA. Maybe it goes all the way back to caves and fires and who spun the best yarn about that day's hunt.

The punters in the library taught me a few things. They'll read badly written books that tell good stories, but they get really excited over well-written books that tell good stories. If you think that they can't tell the difference between those two kinds of books - you'd be wrong.

"Beautifully written" books, but ones that bring no plot to the party, or contain unbelievable characters, or where the writers seem to be more interested in being difficult, or clever, or showing off for a small coterie of critics, well, they arrive with a buzz and sometimes a hold list, then get returned with a sigh, their spines barely wrinkled. They sit on the shelves, pristine, to await the dreaded weeder. If they're lucky, there's always the chance a book club will set them as homework.

And all this is a long way of recommending a couple of interesting reads on this very subject.

For another salvo in the ever popular argument about whether "good" books = "difficult" books. Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard according to Lev Grossman in the Wall Street Journal, discovers - again - that people love plot.

and

James Patterson was one of those writers I'd curse as I tried to shove in yet another copy onto a shelf chock-a-block with his healthy backlist, only to find the shelf emptied out a few hours later. So if you want to know how that happened James Patterson Inc. tells the story of a man now too busy to even write his own books, he has "people" to do that! That's what I call writing to a formula.

Thanks to Lenny Bartulin for the Grossman link and to thanks to Call My Agent for the Patterson link.

There are other things I learnt working in a public library - and once I've finished therapy I might tell you about them.

Now - back to copy edit ................ I'm just going outside; I may be away some time

The blue blue sea - or the wonderful world of Word Track.

2010-01-22T00:44:00.000+11:00

Started this one about a week ago in the flush of - yee haa - after hitting send on my structural edit. Then got sidetracked.

But, the edit was done and dusted. After weeks of being married to my laptop, even taking it out to the Sydney Test so I could spend the hours between securing a good seat on the bottom deck of the Old Stand and the start of play, tapping away in a corner of the stand, it was finally all finished.

Of course, since hitting send, through the hot humid sleepless Sydney nights that have followed, all sorts of second thoughts and second guesses have emerged.

Was such-and-such a term actually in common use in 1992 I fret, scurrying back to the net for confirmation - knowing in the back of my mind that I've fact-checked this time and time again.

Would that scene work better in a different location, I wonder.

Just how many typos have slipped through, camouflaged by the red font and red underlining of new content in Word-Track.

And now ........ a whole new colour scheme awaits. The wide blue sea of the Word Track line edit.

My poor poor editor is currently grappling with my profligate and inconsistent use of things like the "..." and the ";" not to mention the ":" and the "-". She assures me she loves rolling up her sleeves and getting stuck right into the language at a line edit level. As she's a fellow cricket tragic, I just hope the dulcet tones of "The Uncles" provide her with a soothing backdrop for the task.

I think the first slab of it will arrive next week. From the sneak preview it looks as if me and the laptop will soon be joined at the hip once again. And despite the encouragement and assurances that what you've submitted isn't setting new lows in abuse of language, it's easy to start to think you're an ignorant unlettered fool as you go through these processes! Talk about learning curves.

Spending the window between the blue sea arriving, poking the next book into life. Starting to get lost in the research, (will I never learn?) But it's hard to resist when it translates into a fascinating morning talking to Clive Small about background for the setting of Ned's next case. His book, "Smack Express" triggered lots of ideas when I read it, and the follow up "Blood Money" is due out on February 1.

Always a comfort to meet and talk to authors who have survived editing and come out the other side!

Note to self: Start a Blog

2009-12-27T16:33:00.002+11:00

Start a blog.

That was Sophie's advice. Sophie is my agent and unlike me, Sophie knows a lot about the publishing world. So when Sophie said, start a blog, stake out some cyber-real estate, learn how to twitter, I had to take her seriously.

The only problem was - I hadn't really read too many blogs, I didn't own any cyber-real estate and I had no idea what twitter was, except it had something to do with mobile phones, and I didn't have one of them either.

It's taken a few months to "start a blog". All sorts of issues arose - such as what to call it - what to put into it - when to find the time to do it. I procrastinated by "researching" other peoples' blogs. I eventually stumbled into the web spaces occupied by writers whose work I admired and had a look at what they were up to.

Sara Paretsky presents a webface that reflects the passions and concerns of her VI Warsawhski novels. There are updates on progress of her new novel, sample chapters, and an engaged feisty blogger.
Ian Rankin's web space is chock a block full of treats and Rebus extras. He doesn't blog but his tweets are a delightful mix of music gigs, trips to the pub, TV and chocolate on the sofa.

So, now thoroughly intimidated and impressed by Rankin and Paretsky (where do these guys find time to write and do all this web-presence stuff?) I've finally set up the blog, opened the twitter account and learnt what predictive text does on the mobile.

All I need to do now is, finish the edit on the novel for a January deadline with Penguin, continue plotting and peopling book 2, whilst remaining alert and attentive for the next stage of development on the SBS crime series project based on Phillip Gwynne's socks-knocking-off Top End crime drama The Build Up ...... oh, and blog a bit!

All in all, 2009, has been a bloody big learning curve for an ex-cop, ex-EFL teacher, ex-research librarian. This time last year I had just delivered my MA in Writing Thesis for examination, I now have a contract with Penguin to publish the first of two crime novels featuring Detective Nhu Ned Kelly and I'm involved in developing a new TV crimes series for SBS.

It all sounds very A + B = C when written like that. Of course it never is, but more of that later .....