The Tooth Fairy

 

So far, I have two complete unpublished manuscripts (I'm open to offers). Here's a tiny excerpt from the work currently under construction:-

Let me tell you about the Tooth Fairy. 

Long ago, in Mediaeval Europe, to be gay was a terrible, terrible thing. It meant certain torture and death. So all the Men's-Men made sure they looked as masculine as possible, they worked out and developed huge muscles which they proudly displayed as evidence of their straightness by wearing that most masculine of clothing: outfits made basically out of straps of leather, that left almost nothing to the imagination.

They also got themselves the most butch jobs they could find: things like the artistic side of masonry (sculpture, often carving statues of naked men), and jobs like ... you guessed it ... blacksmithy.

Now, in Mediaeval Europe, dentistry was terribly primitive. The village herb-wife could give you a poultice of numbing herbs to bite down on, but if your dental issues were at all serious, that just didn't hack it. Often there was nothing for it but to have the tooth pulled. And usually it was the village blacksmith who owned the only pair of pliers in town, plus the only set of muscles big enough to give him the strength to yank a tooth out of a screaming patient's mouth.

 So, when your teeth were bad enough, you went to the gay blacksmith, the local puller-of-teeth, the ... Tooth Fairy.

Endings, Beginnings, Endings, Beginnings ...

 A few days before the end of October, I finally finished the book whose working-title was "Under the Sign of the Raven", which was completely relevant to the book but somehow unsatisfying. I did quite a bit of editing, and tucked it away so that I could scrub my characters out of my mind. After a year constantly in their company, I needed a break.

The first of November came along, and on a whim I decided to work on another idea I had for NaNoWriMo. By the end of November, I had over 70,000 words. From there it was a straight-sprint to the finish-line, and over the last several days I've been editing rather than writing new material. Over a year to write one book, under six weeks to write the next. And I have three more novel-length ideas in my head, jumping up and down and waving their arms and screaming, trying to get my attention. Okay, possibly four, but I'm trying not to listen to that one.

I went back to "Under the Sign", and suddenly it was patently obvious it should be called "The Raven's Nest", which also works well for the structure of the book. I read it over again, glad to have a bit of a distance. It reads really, really well - better than many books I've paid money for. My chosen beta-reader is a young bookseller in Perth, and I've sent it to her. She is both my honorary second daughter and my birthday-sister, and has known me since she was eight. In all that time, she hasn't read a word I've written, which is handy, because she can come at me fresh, like an unknown author.

Having sent that to her, it was time to edit the other manuscript. I discarded its working-title, and now I'm groping about for a new one. I'm also groping about for a literary agent, because the whole idea of hunting publishers seems exhausting to me: someone who covers quite a lot of literary genres, and verse, and memoire/biography, because ... I ... Have ... Plans. I think I've found one. Let's hope she thinks she's found me! 

Storytelling and Storytellers

 

Mankind has a long history of telling stories. Currently we go to YouTube and Netflix to hear the stories of our culture. Just prior to that, we went to the cinema. For many generations before that, we went to bookshops if we had disposable cash and libraries if we didn’t, to read the written word. Arguably, the written word was-and-is better for our brains than visual storytelling: we had to imagine the scenery, give the characters their faces and voices using our own brainpower and visual creativity. Now the director does all of that for us.

Before widespread literacy, though, our storytelling was all oral. To the pre-literate, our young children, it still is: a parent perches on the edge of their bed with a book, and with a greater or lesser degree of expressiveness and relish, reads them a bedtime story.

Since the times of early Christianity, the people gathered in churches weekly, to listen to the literate priest tell them the written-down stories of their people. Since the earliest times of agriculture around the time the earliest alphabets were just being devised, after the harvest and before the next planting when there was less heavy physical labour to do, people would gather when darkness fell, and listen to the stories of their people.  Since the earliest times of pre-human language when every day in every life was dangerous, people would gather around fires at night, and listen to the stories of their people.

And it is those earliest stories, the unrecoverable ones, that fascinate me the most. Early humans and proto-humans were migratory. They followed the cycles of plenty and scarcity in the plants that gave them life, and they followed the migrations of the game-animals that gave them life.

Because of the lack of writing implements and sound-recording devices at the time, there is only very indirect evidence of those earliest stories. Fossil records, middens and ancient art combined, only hint at their stories.

If I were a very early human sitting around a campfire with my kin, what would I tell them? I might tell them that when I was a small child my family-group came from the other side of those hills (pointing), but that the rivers and streams dried up and we had to climb the hills and come to this side to find water to drink, fruit trees that hadn’t died, and animals that had fled the famine before us or with us.

Or I might show you specimens of fungi I had gathered during the day, and tell stories about how this one and that one both tasted delicious, but when my sibling ate one of those other ones, they vomited for days and then died, and make sure everyone in the group could tell which one was poisonous.

I might tell you how I was told by my grandfather that one day when his father was a child the river broke its banks when there had been no rain, and the community was swept away as it slept in its camp in the dried riverbed, and how that flood must have been from the gods as there had been no rain, so the people who drowned as they slept were the bad ones, but we are all the descendants of the ones who lived, so we are the good ones, whom the gods love.

I might tell you a story that my grandfather’s grandmother told him, of when we lived in the hilly country, and a neighbouring band of strangers fought us and killed most of our warrior-hunters and stole some of our younger women, so we picked up our children and fled, and now we live in the coastal marshes on fish and crabs, instead of in the hills eating large four-footed animals.

I might tell you a story about how we came, just a few of us, from far away over the sea, clinging to fallen trees after a huge storm, licking their leaves and bark and our own skin for water as we floated, until we reached this island we are on now. And how our ancestors learnt to hollow the logs out and make the ends pointy so that it would slide through the water, and learnt to paddle with flattened sticks, and how we explored and settled all the islands hereabouts when our numbers had grown.

Any of these stories, and many others besides, could have been told over and over, by successive generations, each generation and each storyteller within the generation embroidering some details and forgetting others, or else, if the story is crucial for survival (like fungus-identification) making sure to repeat it exactly. Storytelling was to early humans what a complex technical education is to us: the passing-on of skills and knowledge that will enable the younger people to be able to survive and, hopefully, thrive.

Thus, storytelling is profoundly and fundamentally human, going back to our deepest origins and coded in every cell of our bodies. We are, as Bryce Courtenay once said (and I paraphrase) either storytellers, or listeners, and if we neither tell stories nor listen to them, we wither away and die, if not physically, then at least spiritually.

For a few generations now, we have been relying on flickering screens to give us our stories. My parents – or at least my mother – hated the idea of waste and pop-culture, so we didn’t have a television until well after the moon landing (which we watched on a relative’s TV), so I lived the first nine or ten years in a TV-free zone.

At night, after our bedtime, I remember night after night, watching the yellow triangle of light on my bedroom wall from the slightly opened door, and listening to Janacek, Vaughan Williams, Kodaly, Smetana or Sibelius as my parents sat in the well-lit living-room, reading. The music was complex and powerful, and hit you right in the core of your emotions. And sometimes my father would be amused by a sentence or a paragraph, so he’d read it aloud to share the pleasure with my mother – his voice was too quiet to hear from my room at the other end of the hall, but the lesson was loud that reading was a treasure.

Later, when I had learnt to read, the world unfurled for me. I read omnivorously: nursery rhymes, fairy tales, Dr Seuss, A Child’s Treasury of Greek Myths (there was some really dirty sex in that, it would be banned today, but it was absolutely right to read stuff like that as young as possible), Tisi and the Yabby, 365 Things to Know, the Child’s Encyclopaedia of Science.

My parents’ books were on shelves all around the house. Every single room had books, including the shitter. I helped myself, as my reading skills improved. I read Portnoy’s Complaint and Lolita when my age was in single figures, and understood them, too. (I understood Lolita as a child better than most adults do: it is not a book in praise of paedophilia, but one showing you what a dreadful specimen the stepfather was, and how miserable the girl was.)

My own turning-point came when I first read Patrick White, also in single figures (I was nine, a year older than the character Gandalf in my book, who read him at eight). I think my first White book was either A Fringe of Leaves or The Solid Mandala, but whichever it was, I read it, then the other, then all the rest of them on the shelf, in rapid succession. A lot of people I know have a special fondness for Voss. I particularly like The Vivisector, which Gandalf did, too, being a man of taste. From that moment onwards, I was always going to listen to the stories of my ancestors, fossilised forever in paper and ink.

Some time towards the end of the 1990s I started catching Jennifer Byrne hosting Foreign Correspondent. I liked her voice, her intelligence, her eyes. I loved her smile, especially her signing-off smile. I watched every episode for that smile. I was crushed when George Negus took over, but delighted when she founded the First Tuesday Book Club, or as it later became known, just Book Club. Sometimes I bought the books she liked, sometimes I didn’t. I found that more often than not, our likes and dislikes coincided.

I was, then, understandably shocked, when the whole book club core, Jennifer and Jason and Marieke, all turned out to dislike a Patrick White novel and regarded his literary style as dense and hard to read. I had found it easy to read and easy to understand and to like, even when I was a child! I found myself shouting at the screen, as I might shout at a particularly recalcitrant politician during a TV interview.

Patrick White was a quintessentially Australian storyteller. Contrary to popular opinion, and theirs, his male characters were just as unlikeable as his female characters. I suspect he might simply have just spent too much time in the company of – and observing closely – a great many regular human beings, few of whom have very many redeeming characteristics when they are under stress. And let’s face it – it is an author’s job to put their characters under stress, and observe carefully the many different ways that they might crack when that stress keeps building up.

But authors aren’t the only storytellers. As descendants of our earliest storytelling ancestors, any of us who have any kind of life-experience, are storytellers. We have a grasp on language, and we have had experiences which might amuse others, or touch others, or frighten others, or anger others, or delight others, or instruct others. And any experience we may have had, when recast as a story, can teach, directly or indirectly, if only teaching us how to think critically by being an uninteresting story. We should all be sitting around that campfire with our peers, listening to their stories and telling our own.

Even in literature, the philosophy of sitting around telling stories in the evening is common. The fictitious Sheherazade did it in the Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio’s characters did it in the Decameron, and Geoffrey Chaucer did it in the Canterbury Tales. Of those three examples, the first is an example of a single storyteller, telling incomplete story after story every night, to save herself from being executed by her husband.

The frame stories for the other two involve multiple narrators telling stories to amuse each other and to fill in time: from memory I believe the narrators in the Decameron are in isolation in the countryside trying to escape an outbreak of smallpox or the Plague, while Chaucer’s character-narrators are on a pilgrimage together, and tell stories each night along the way as they rest and prepare for their travel the next day.

If a novel is an ornate necklace, then each chapter is a gem. If a collection of short stories is a jewellery box filled with individual gems, a collection of narratives linked by a framing-story such as in those three classic examples, is a fine gold chain with a number of gems strung on it, the better displayed for being strung on the framing gold chain.

I wrote my first full-length novel at 62 - I was the queen of the short story for the decades leading up to that. A week after I finished the draft, I put it aside, and started another. I decided to follow the glowing examples of Sheherazade, Chaucer and Boccaccio. It is cheating to cannibalise your back-catalogue for little gems of stand-alone short stories, to thread onto the gold chain of a framing story? 

And I like my framing-story. Set in the Nullarbor, which I know, in a time of devastating climate change, which is topical, without electricity or WiFi, modern-day humans who are used to being spoon-fed their stories on demand, start to starve. That, or they start telling stories amongst themselves, just as our ancestors did.

I’m not sure if I have gems to offer in the new work I'm assembling, or just pretty coloured glass. I’m also not sure if the chain joining them is pure gold or just cheap rolled gold. But why not take your chances, once I get it published? Open the casket. Reach in. Read.

Thunderstorms, Gods and the Big Bang Theory of the Universe

There are some gods one has to love. A particular favourite of mine is Thor. Thunder-gods exist in all cultures and mythologies from every time and place, but Thor has to be my favourite. I am interested by the combination of his incredible gentleness with his goats, as opposed to his harshness with a starving boy, who unwittingly hurt one of the goats. I am more than interested by - I positively like, his tendency to roll his goat-cart over my head!

An hour ago the sky was blue with occasional puffs of grey. Half an hour ago I noticed, peering through my window, that it was that deep midnight purple of heavy storm-clouds, underlit by afternoon sunlight streaming in from a largely clear westerly sky. That underlighting always reminds me of Jeffrey Smart paintings - I would dearly love to hang some of his work in my hovel. With the underlighting and the deep, rich clouds, the electrical wires stopped being black and started being a glowing, numinous, shining white.

Of course, it didn't last - the western sky clouded over and electrical cables dimmed. Then the thunder and lightning started: Thor's goat-cart rattling on the clouds and striking sparks as he passed over. I went outside to greet him. After that, the rain started falling: much less welcome than the thunder, in this sodden landscape, with the river already up. I liked the dry electrical storm much better.

There are all kinds of interesting sciency-bits that go into creating a thunderstorm, but while all of that does the physical work, absolutely none of it stops Thor from existing, and travelling overhead. Richard Dawkins, whose books I like and have, tells us that God is not necessary (the cheek of him, assuming masculinity and singularity of the Divine!), and this is strictly true. 

But nobody, not Dawkins, not anybody else, has ever been able to show that gods do not exist. I am reminded of a creation-myth I was told by someone in the Georgian Trad once: In the beginning was nothing. Science says that in the beginning was nothing. The myth says that then, the Goddess in her aspect as a chicken laid an egg. Science says that in the void, a Singularity developed. The myth says that after a period of incubation, the egg hatched. Science says that after a period of rapid expansion, the Singularity exploded. The myth says that out of the egg came the entire universe and all life within it. Science says that out of the exploding Singularity, all matter and all energy in the universe came, and transmuted itself and evolved into what we have now, which is still transmuting and evolving. Orthodox science looks awfully mythological and god-friendly to me!

Gods don't walk the streets like mortals - at least, not often. It is my contention that I am, in fact, a Goddess, and I'm just doing a few lifetimes in human bodies just to see what it feels like to be human. And let me tell you, it doesn't feel good! That thing they keep complaining about, that thing they call pain? Not nice. I've had some of it myself - I know. But in general, gods are not running around loose in the world. And if we/they're not, it becomes hard to prove (and equally hard to disprove!) their existence. 

Decades ago I was once told by a teaching-figure that the universe is a kind of very large doughnut, and deity is the hole at the centre of the doughnut. The hole has no independent existence of its own, but without the hole, a doughnut is just a kind of rather unpleasant, heavy fried cake. With the hole, it develops a loveliness in its identity, and becomes a great thing to eat. In the same way, a universe without deity will function mechanically, but it becomes a glorious universe to live in when it has the "hole at the centre", that touch of the divine.

When I was, I think, a teenager, I wrote a short story which expanded outwards. Looked at from a larger and larger perspective, the solar system got smaller and smaller, until the sun was the nucleus of a single atom, and the planets were the electrons in their shells. All humans were subatomic particles on the surface of one of those electrons. One of the gods made a pretty, sparkling paperweight for the coffee table in their living room. That paperweight was our entire universe, each galaxy a single point of sparkle. Of course gods don't interfere personally in every detail of your life! You are too small for them to know you're there. That doesn't mean they are any more unreal than we are, to a nanoparticle. Such was my story.

Fleas live only a few weeks, and that feels like a lifetime to them. We live several decades, and that feels like a lifetime to us. It follows that the bigger you get, the more time it takes to feel like a lifetime. In a scaled-up world where earth is only an electron, then the whole of the Age of Mammals would probably pass in a few minutes. 

Scientists are confronted by a dilemma: in a universe many billions of light-years across and at least fourteen billion human-years old, would that really be terribly old? I could set off an explosion of some kind. In the instant of ignition, the potential energy in the fuel heats up terrifically, and expands. As it expands, there is a moment where the velocity of that expansion is increasing - it is accelerating. Once all the chemical energy has been released, the explosion starts to cool and slow, but until that point, at the very beginning of the explosion, it accelerates.

In universal terms, fourteen billion years doesn't seem like a long time. It might be the equivalent of a human-sized nanosecond, scaled up. Are scientists really making the best use of their brains theorising about the Dark Energy that is making the expansion of the universe speed up instead of slowing down? After all, if we are right at the beginning of an explosion where our whole galaxy is just one of the sparks thrown out, then it stands to reason that without any other energy-source, the universe is still expanding. When the explosion has been happening for what the universe considers to be a second or two, then perhaps its expansion sill start slowing down. It is only then that it will need Dark Energy to accelerate its expansion.

And right on cue, Thor has gone away and the rain is easing off.

Re-Learning the Basics

We have been trained to be screen-dependant. How many of us have memorised our friends’-and-family’s phone numbers, now that we don’t need to because our phones remember them? How many of us remember how to use a street directory to work out a route to an unfamiliar address or town, now that we have GPS units doing our thinking for us? How many of us really remember how to do research from source documents (and how to access those documents) now that we have a search engine at our fingertips? And with that search engine, we seem to have lost the twin powers of discernment and discrimination, as utterly fallacious material is presented with the same authority as real information.

If the GPS satellites fell out of the sky, many of us would be lost, and no longer have the skills to become un-lost. If the internet failed or was hijacked, how many of us would know how to access real life-saving information, or organise into rescue parties if there were a natural disaster (or even know about that natural disaster if we weren’t in the same area)? Gradually, bit by bit, we are being trained to become helpless in the name of enhanced quality of life. I estimate we are about a third the way towards utter helplessness, and not only are we not fighting against it, we are eagerly rushing towards it with open arms! And who benefits from a helpless population? A corrupt government, who does not bear scrutiny and does not want to be overthrown.

Learn how to read maps - and collect a lot of them. Learn how to tell direction without a compass, and time of day without a phone or clock. Learn how to make fire from scratch, and to find potable water in your environment. Learn what native plants, imported plants and weeds in your area are edible and medicinal. One day you will need this knowledge, and as a screen-dependent person without a screen, how will you get it?

Your new skills are intrinsically valuable. But that doesn't mean the skills of the past have lost their value. If anything, in these days of programmed helplessness, they are more valuable than ever.

Halloween, NaNoWriMo and Samhain

 Today would be the 31st October, I'm thinking. For some, that's Halloween. For others, that's Hallowed Eve, or All Souls' Day, or Samhain, or the day before All Saints' Day.

But for me, being an earth-centred witch, it's Beltaine (Beltane, if you prefer). Right now, we are at the point of the swing of the seasons, where Spring passes the climate into the hands of Summer. Birds have mated and are raising their young, plants have flowered (and still are flowering), and their scattered seeds are germinating and growing. It is a time of youth, and the rising of blood or sap, and life.

Samhain/Halloween is later in the cycle. It is the point where the harvest has been gathered in (hence the symbolism of grain and pumpkins (storable supplies of food to get communities through the barren winter). It is a time when the ailing and elderly are starting to be more likely to die as the increasing cold weakens them. It's a time when the spirits of our ancestors are more likely to be around, as once the harvest is over there's less physical work to do, and it's possible to sit back and think. It's also a time of sitting around the family hearth, and listening to the old folks (alive and dead) telling stories, passing on family knowledge, oral history, and just plain horror-stories.

Yep, the Autumn/Winter transition doesn't happen now, here, but around April/May, when we are actually entering into the colder months and the shorter, darker days.  And In this time when I can't keep up with all the weeds enjoying the energy of Beltaine and springing up in my vegetable patches, and with the commercial centres reminding me of Sanhain by decorating with plastic pumpkins and plastic skeletons, I'm finding that I'm missing that darker energy.

I'm of a mind to talk to my dead friends all year round, and many of them answer, or even initiate the conversations. But to have a few days put aside to do only this, is quite special. When I stop writing this, I will stuff a few baggies with sugar - treats. And a few tricks, in the form of plastic cockroaches and blowflies. This, just in case kids come begging. Who knows, they might - I have a skeleton sitting out the front of my house all year round. The postie and the neighbours are quite used to it - nobody turns a hair. I have a few real animal bones scattered around the interior of my house, as well as a few stereotypical Crone-like witches - I might give them a night outside, as well. 

I really should get around to introducing myself to the local primary schools, and offering to do a talk on Halloween and witches once a year in mid/late October. 

All Souls' Day is followed by All Saints' Day, the first of November. Get a Catholic to tell you about that one. For me, this has significance in that it is the first day of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, a misnomer as it's actually international). For over a decade I've been watching my friends participate, but I always identified as a writer of shorter articles and short stories, rather than a novelist.

Less than a week ago, I wrapped up a novel. In the later stages of writing, two more longform ideas occurred to me, ideas that cannot possibly be written in short forms. Plus, of course, the memoire that various people have been egging me on to write, about my time as a night manager in a coastal hotel.

The memoire can wait. It is still too recent, and I still feel a bit scarred by it. I'll see how I feel in another decade. So that left me to choose something to write for NaNoWriMo, out of Idea A, and Idea B. Idea B was a framing story, set solidly in the present and in the outback, in a society with a huge dependence on WiFi for basic functionality. How a diverse group of people break down in the absence of both urban infrastructure and WiFi interests me. That is the framing story: the inner narrative will be a series of monologues that each of these stranded people tell each other for entertainment during two long nights where they don't even have electricity.

That was Idea B. Somewhere in my subconscious I chose it over Idea A in the last day or two, and I'm getting ready to write, starting tomorrow, on the first. It tickles me to think that at a time of year when the other half of the world is celebrating Samhain, a time of sitting around and telling stories and passing on wisdom and spooky tales, I will be writing a book about a group of most reluctant storytellers, sitting around telling stories because they have absolutely nothing else to do.

And now, I should go and fill a few lollybags. With more than lollies. Muahahaha!

Bite that, Fyodor!

 

It is Farmers' Market Saturday today. The farmers' market happens on the first and third Saturday of the month. I like farmers' markets, even though my backyard has been throwing me a lot of vegetables recently. There are other interesting things that my garden doesn't give me: local honey, salamis, baked goods, and other odds and ends. 

There is a woman there who keeps goats, and uses their milk to make lotions, soaps, shower gel and the like. Once, months ago, I bought her handwash (identical to her shower gel) on a trial basis, and immediately fell in love. The problem was, I had just restocked everything with supermarket brands. It took me a fair while to use them - I wasn't about to waste them. Then I went back with an empty two-litre bottle, and asked her to work me out a bulk price and fill it for me, which she did. Now, I refill my conventional supermarket containers with her handmade product. 

The problem with Farmers' Market Saturdays - and any Saturday - is that they follow Friday nights, when I am likely to be out singing. As, in fact, I was last night, and I was having an off night. I didn't cover myself with glory. Still, I didn't have the decency, either, to shut up and go home early, so this morning I woke up muzzy with exhaustion. As, in fact, happens on many a Saturday.

I looked at the alarm and thought: "I'm not going to go to the market," turned it off, and slept for another hour. Then I finally got up, rehydrated, and staggered off to the shower to use my lovely locally-made shower gel. Dressed. Went outside for a bit. Came back in. Sat down at the computer for a bit.

Then my phone made a noise of the "pay me attention" variety, so I had a look. Oh yes, that's right, soon I would have to be down at the library, where the flooded river was no longer licking the bottom course of bricks, for a book release. I didn't remember the details and I hadn't recorded anything, but I assumed it must have been at least slightly interesting because otherwise I wouldn't have booked myself in. So I turned up in good time.

The  book was An Uncommon Hangman, by Rachel Franks. Its subtitle was just beautiful: "The Life and Deaths of ..." I liked that. I liked it a lot. A small group of other people who also somehow survived Friday night came along. Rachel stood up, and did her talk. I decided I liked it a bit more. It piqued me that while I was writing fictitious crime, she had written factual punishment. There was a nice circularity about my being there - I simply had to buy the book, now, and add to my pile of stuff-to-be-read. Bite that, Fyodor Dostoyevski! 

Turns out that even though he was based in Sydney, he was regularly exported to regional areas to do their dirty work for them, and Dubbo had the largest number of his regional clients, so it was fitting she was presenting to us. He must have been a terrifying sight for them: not only was his the last face they would ever see which would make even an unremarkable face scary, but he wore no mask and had no nose!

He seems to have done all the work he possibly could, saved his money, invested in property, and left all of his numerous children comfortably off when he died. It does seem as though he was a devoted family man. You don't need to have good looks or even a nose, to have a heart. Gogol knew that!

After the talk I took my new acquisition away, and despite the fact that I really have no time for reading right now, and I'm halfway through reading something else anyway, I knocked over a couple of chapters to whet my appetite and make me want to come back to it when I do have time and I've finished what I'm already reading.

Rachel Franks' style is clear, conversational and appealing. Even in the text itself, she's candid about the conflicts and contradictions that came up during her research. So far, when that has happened, she's offered both stories, and made a value-judgement about which is more likely.

This is not a review. I've only taken the first bite out of what looks and smells like a mouth-watering meal. I'm keen to eat the rest of it at a more opportune moment.

I don't do fandom or hero-worship ...

 Not quite as old as Steve Kilbey, I am, nevertheless, old. When I was in my twenties I did a lot of long-distance driving, with the radio, cassette or later CD on full blast as I hewed my way through spacetime. I soaked up Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton, Joan Armatrading, Ross Wilson, Leonard Cohen, and, yes, Steve Kilbey. I wasn't much of a gig-goer back then: in that era, I only made the effort to see Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello (There is only one king, and his name is Elvis. Elvis Costello) and a few long-defunct local bands: people like Unit 17 and the Gibbering Monkeys. My introduction to then-new music was mostly through the radio.

In my dotage I'm behaving more the way I should have back then, and I'm going to gigs more. Of course, Covid put the brakes on that. I'm also involved with the local writers' group, the Outback Writers' Centre., who have regular meetings in a nearby cultural centre.

I was on my way to one of those meetings last weekend, when a notice on the notice-board that I usually walk past at speed caught my eye. Steve Kilbey plays all The Church Singles in a night of music and conversation. I backed up, read it carefully, photographed it, then went to my meeting. Later, I got myself a ticket.

I've watched a few interviews over the years. Now, I know that when I've had enough of working (dreadful work or pet projects), I will do what most people do: I will turn on the TV and slump in my favourite chair. What do you think a creative musician like Steve does when he stops working? Slumps in a chair in front of a flickering screen? That's right, he gets out the brushes and does paintings. More work, more creativity.

I've been very active in the international Tarot community over a great many years, and in a treasure-trove of a forum that used to exist I heard that Steve Kilbey had put together a Tarot deck, out of reproductions of many of his artworks. I was never not going to get that, so I emailed the person in charge of marketing, and asked how I would go about buying a deck.

The story was this, back then. Currently the decks had been printed, but they were boxed up. The band were in Australia, getting ready for a tour of America, and the decks would only be sold through the merch table at their gigs. I said I'd be more than happy to pay for it to be mailed to me before they left. Nope. They'd mail me one, but only after the tour had started, and Americans had had first crack at buying it! Imagine that: an Australian deck-creator, still in Australia, with his decks still in Australia also, and his henchman refuses to make an early sale to another Australian, only a few hundred kilometres down the road! 

To say I was bemused would be ... tactful. Still, I was given no other option.

I waited months. The tour finally happened. I eventually made a payment. An Australian deck was mailed to me ... from America.

And I loved it.

So when I got myself a ticket to last night's gig, I was always going to take the deck and see if he would sign it for me. Also, I was going to scan the merch table and see if they still had the deck in production - if so, I had evil schemes to buy as many decks as my little arms could carry, then later sell or trade most of them off in the hard-core Tarot community.

Because it is SUCH a potent deck. And with a limited print-run, it's automatically sought-after.

It took me a day to locate my copy, because it was lurking in the back of my collection, trying to be invisible. And it nearly got away with it, too! The box is a deep cobalt-blue, the backs also - no visible surface to sign, there. And I'd long rid myself of the title card, if there ever was one in the first place, so nothing to sign there. I'd have to get him to sign the face of a card.

So I sat down with the deck, thumbing though the well-known and well-loved images, deciding which one I could sacrifice to his signature. Muxing? Lost? I decided on Truce. It's a fairly odd watercolour: fence, windows, heterochromatic eyes. The Sun was another choice and perhaps would have been a better background colour for black felt pen, but he would have had to sign over one of his better self-portraits: a distrustful expression on a slightly older face than many of 'em. I wasn't about to let that happen.

I had the deck with me when I turned up and showed my ticket, then straight to the merch table, where a lovely, friendly young woman chatted to me for quite a while. I was disappointed that there were not decks for sale - I bought a book instead, "Something Quite Peculiar". I have a pile of to-be-read books waiting for me, and I'm looking forward to all of them, but I'm looking forward to this one, too.

We talked about the Tarot deck, too, which apparently is out of print, and I said I wanted it signed. At the end of a very enjoyable night the same girl strongly suggested that I should just force myself backstage and crash his unwinding-time. Others had done it, he wouldn't mind. I very much doubted that, but I did it anyway.

He looked at the box: Tarot of the Time Being, a gorgeous play on words that I have always loved. He said it didn't exist any more. I said here it was, blatantly existing right in front of his eyes. And not just existing, but loved. We talked a bit, he signed the card for me, I told him what my favourite Church song was (not a single, so not on the programme), and he was pleased - nobody mentions that one, and he seemed proud of the writing and ideas in the song. It exists on YouTube: look up The Day They Turned Off the Great Machine, from the album the Hologram of Baal. It's worth a very serious listen.

Before I left, he offered to pull a card for me. He pulled the Ace of Spirits. He thought it was predictive, and it was about what a wonderful day I'd have today. I thought it was expressive, and was about what a wonderful night I had last night. At the bottom of this post you can see it plus the card he signed. Below them are the three cards I pulled about his reaction to our contact. "Lover and "Imitation" seem to me to say that he saw me as an adoring fan. The Sun, with that strong expression leavened with a slightly ironic smile, implies that he didn't hate the contact between us.

The night had had a very early start, so we were done and dusted by ten. Friday is Karaoke Night, which ends at midnight. So I raced off down there, and sang "Unguarded Moment" entirely differently to the way he sings it, as a tribute.

But before I left the gig ... during the performance he had borrowed a capo from the venue as he'd left his own somewhere. They lent him one. I saw it being returned at the end of the night, so I sidled up to the staff, and offered to buy it. I am now the proud owner of a capo that has only ever been used by Steve Kilbey not on his famous bass but on a twelve-string. Used during a gig on the 7th October, 2022 in Dubbo. Such is its provenance.

I fell into bed at the end of the night, a very happy old woman.

On Crime Writing

 I'm still not entirely sure about this business of longform writing. For someone who's been writing since at least the 1970s, I'm remarkably tentative about it. 

I have a back-catalogue of non-fiction articles, short stories, and some verse, most of it dating from after the Great Purge of the mid 1990s. Prose at around 2,000-6,000 words? Sure! Verse? Sure! But longform writing? -er- ...

And here I am, writing a crime novel. Crime? Really, Nisaba? After all the genres you are interested in? Of all the genres you could have picked for your belated first novel, crime? And here's the thing - it was never meant to be a crime novel. It was meant to be psychodrama. Black humour at times, perhaps. An existential and metaphysical romp through the mind of the protagonist. 

I thought a lovely lens through which to look at the minds of my characters, might be the lens of crime and punishment. That creates unique stresses which are going to expose any cracks, and it's the cracks that make people interesting.

From the very first paragraph it was evident that crime was involved. It was also clear that it was not a whodunnit: who dunn it is known at the outset. So, not a thriller, but a novel with crime as the book's windmill. 

The original plan was to have two major characters bouncing off each other. At the beginning of the book one of them is free and apparently stable, the other is serving a custodial sentence and apparently dangerous. As the book went on, the one on the outside would go through a gradual process of personal disintegration, while the one inside develops into a structured and upright personality.

I liked the idea of two different personalities, one on a downward trajectory and the other on an upward trajectory. And that is still the larger plan, although now that I've spent some months with my characters and have got to know both of them quite well, there are interesting little fiddly bits in the book that don't take away from the basic planned structure, but add some interest and decoration.

If you are looking for a fast-paced adventure, this is not it. If you are looking to solve the mystery and work out who the murderer is, this is also not for you. But if you enjoy looking at the lives and minds of bizarre and damaged human beings in an environment that is drenched in blood (blood that is always shed offstage), then perhaps you will like it.

The more I write, the less I like my characters. But the more I write, the more interested I am by my characters. There is a dark fascination that makes me think about them all the time. I wake up thinking about them. I go to sleep thinking about them. And in this process, the next chapter gestates in me, until when I next sit at the keyboard, it flows out of me as fast as I can type.

I've been talking about it. A publisher I spoke to, compared it with a particular NZ crime writer, which was both deeply complimentary and also a bit odd, as I don't feel like a crime writer. This same person mentioned as a possible genre, rural-noir.

... which got me thinking along another line. Just why are there so many dark novels set in the bush?  I've lived in big cities. I've lived in tiny country towns. Currently I'm living between the two, in a regional centre that is small enough to feel rural and large enough to provide everything I need. And let me tell you: I feel a hell of a lot safer here or in tiny bush towns or even camping by the side of the open road, than I ever do in cities.

In large cities, you have a much larger population around you, so you are more likely to have criminally freaky people in your sphere. In smaller communities, if they don't all know you, they know people you know, and are much more likely to have a kind of tribal acceptance of people living in the region. Goodwill is rife in the bush. And a larger percentage of people seem to be educated and have a bit of creativity about them somewhere.

You're safer in the bush. You can walk around at night. You can't do that in a large city. I just worry that, by setting a bizarre novel about bizarre people in the bush, I am perpetuating the irrational urban fear of darkness, of unlit streets and low populations. But I can't rewrite this book to place it in an urban setting - it just wouldn't work. At least, I'm not skilful enough, personally, to make it work as an urban book. 

I just can't imagine either of my two main characters in Adelaide, or Sydney, or Melbourne: not in the inner suburbs, not in the suburban sprawl. Yet both of them have pasts before the start of the book where they lived in urban environments. The  destruction of their lives may have happened in rural Australia, but it could well have started in the soulless cities. 

I'm absolutely not writing that in. You have to allow the reader to do at least some of the work. I'm not spoon-feeding anybody - do your own thinking.

Granny and Me

 I picked up my first deck of Tarot cards in the 1970s as a teenager, and have been reading professionally, on and off, since 1981. I started off fairly conventionally, with a Rider-Waite and a Marseille deck. I gradually added a few others to them over the years.

In 1993, as a new-ish mother, I had little time to myself. One day my then-partner stepped up, and acted like an actual parent, giving me a day off. Such a precious thing, a day off! The down-side was that I was taking the two-hour commute to Sydney to have a job interview, as we were both getting sick of poverty but my partner showed no inclination to work, so it wasn't a real, proper day off. 

Being left alone with the baby for a whole day was a kind of test: would I be able to work full-time again, and trust my pit-crew to do the job, day after day? Let's just see how they coped with a full day, I thought cynically. So I put on my Responsible Adult Clothes, and left the house.

Job interviews are job interviews: I always laugh, and always seem as if I can do the job. I wasn't worried. When that was over, my time was my own. I made a beeline down the other end of the city, to the Theosophical Bookshop, at that stage been managed by Laurie Harris, whom I fondly remembered from when he was running his own bookshop, Mr Books, in Martin Place during the eighties. Mr Books catered to the commuters with crime and romance, but had a very decent mystical and philosophical section down the back, always a magnificent thing in a bookshop.

I browsed. I probably bumped into Laurie, or other people I knew. I moved to their divinatory section, and a title sprang out at me. The Granny Jones Australian Tarot. Well, why wouldn't it stand out? I read Tarot, I was a fervent Australian, and even in my early thirties I had more than a whiff of the Crone about me. I was always going to buy it. 

There were six copies of the boxed set on the shelf. I bought one, I found myself a cafe, ordered a late lunch, opened the boxed set and flicked through the book. It didn't look impressive. Then I cracked open the cards.

They did look impressive.

Very impressive.

They were illustrated in a naive style, a style reminiscent of children's drawings in coloured pencil or crayon, but packed with depth, glowing with numinous meaning. I left the cafe, and found my way onto the right train. All the way back to the Gosford station, I was going through them with a greater and greater thrill.

I got off the train a little after dark, and walked home, this great treasure in my bag. I wanted nothing more than to sit down and play with it. Instead, I was greeted by a sticky baby with a loaded nappy, and a partner complaining how hard their day had been. 

I am by nature a collector and now I have around three hundred decks - I had about ten when it bought it - and I love most of them, adore a score of them. But Granny is different. She stands out against the rest of the pack. She lives permanently in my handbag, so that if anything happens to my house while I am out, she will be safe. 

I don't use her when I am teaching Tarot classes: the Rider Waite gives you a solid base that you can translate to most decks and most people know the images even if they don't know the name. I don't use her when I am reading for strangers. She's special. She's mine. Friends see her, but she is mine.

Recently, in the weeks leading up to the Dubbo Writers' Festival, I taught one of the pop-up classes, called "Tarot for Writers", where I taught people to use Tarot decks not for doing readings, but for developing plot-lines, developing (or understanding) their characters' personalities, and for breaking writer's block. It was well-received, but not too many people turned up because the pop-up workshops didn't get as much publicity as the festival itself. I'm really hoping that next year the committee will invite me to hold that workshop again as a part of the main festival.

I've been working on my book - with the working-title of "Under the Sign of the Raven", for months. It's coming along nicely, and I haven't had to pull out a Tarot deck once. This morning, just before I woke up, I dreamt the last chapter. Now, I've known for a long time what will happen in the last chapter. But last night I dreamt how I would actually write it. And what stays with me now, is the final two word sentence.

After that, I desperately needed a cup of tea, and a warm, wise, older woman to give me a cuddle. So, of course, I went to Granny Jones.

Writing with She-Oaks

 

This is the view from my library window. To my left, the wall is covered by well-filled bookshelves. To my right, ditto. Behind me is a cabinet, some statuary and ... well ... junk, frankly. Below that window is my desk, covered in books, packets of seed, stationery items, and usually my other pair of glasses and a drink, not to mention the all-important laptop in the middle of it all. And just above the laptop, this view.

Cars pass along that road, every so often. The timber fence separating what I laughingly refer to as my front lawn from public space is lovely: dark, heavy, reminiscent of horse fencing. When I arrived here less than two years ago I put in those timber venetian blinds and planted those she-oaks, and I have been sitting here ever since, writing and watching them grow.

I love she-oaks. They are such graceful trees. The sound of the wind through their needles reminds me of distant singing - it is quite different to the sound of wind through pine needles. Still saplings, they have more than doubled in height, and some of them are over three metres tall now. 

I live for the day they are mature trees, Grand Old Ladies. Having spent a lifetime wanting my own grove of she-oaks, I have made it happen. I can't wait for them to stop being young and start being majestic - but there is the rest of my life. We will get there together.

Eating with Ambulances

 I had freshly washed clothes hanging on  my rack drying in my living-space, and dishes waiting to be washed on the bench in my kitchen this morning, so it was a perfect time to go out for a sit-down cup of coffee.  My addiction to coffee is manageable in the long-term if I don't keep any at home, and have it only as my going-out treat. So out I went. 

Well ... it had to be more fun than washing dishes!

I chose a quiet cafe in the depths of suburbia surrounded by quaint old houses not unlike the one I live in. I pulled up, parking the Rolling Box between two ambulances. Hmmm, I thought, but the ambulances were just sitting there silently. And there were four paramedics sitting around an outside table, having an early lunch. What a great place to come, I thought to myself. If I'm going to have an accident or some kind of medical incident, now's the perfect time!

Instead, I had coffee. I love sitting in cafes by myself. It's not social, although I have been known to enjoy the company of a companion in the past. I sit alone with my coffee, watching, listening, sipping and smiling. Or I sit there with my phone, playing silly little games. Or I sit there with my laptop, writing. Today there wasn't a lot of charge on my phone, and the laptop was at home, waiting for me to return. I also didn't feel much like pulling out a Tarot deck. So I sat and people-watched, one of my pleasures.

Sometimes people-watching is gold. You'll hear just a single line clearly out of a whole conversation, and it will inspire a poem or a short story. Or you'll listen to two people chatting and the chat will be friendly and unremarkable, but both of them will be terribly tense and hypervigilant. That, too, will be story-worthy.

But not today. Today, it was all about the oddity of parking my van between two larger vans equipped with sirens, and four paramedics being much more relaxed than you'd ever see them on the job. And no, I didn't have a stroke or a heart attack while I was surrounded by trained and capable people. Not quite sure whether I dodged a bullet, or whether the Fates are saving it up for a much more inconvenient time.

And this, folks, is why I live in the moment, and enjoy every day as it comes.

Vomit

 The universe was kind enough, this year, to throw a local literary festival on the weekend surrounding my birthday, for my own personal pleasure. Here is an enjoyable piece of flash-fiction produced during one of the workshops, that didn't make the cut.  This piece, in an expanded form, will make it into one of the planned but unwritten chapters of the book I'm working on. I like to call this little snippet ...

VOMIT

After falling off the fire station roof, he woke up in an isolation room in a hospital.

"John!"

"Marcia!"

"How are you feeling?"

He winced. "How do you think?"

"Tell me another story," said Marcia, aware of narrative as pain-relief. She settled back to listen.

"When I was in the boys' home, we turned over a bottle shop and stole brandy. I got so drunk that I couldn't run away when a cop car arrived. I couldn't even walk, so he dragged me into the car, then into a cell. I puked everywhere."

John sat up in bed and made realistic vomiting sounds.

"Then the cop came along and dragged me into an interview room. I said I was going to puke but he didn't believe me, so I leaned forward and puked on his uniform."

John made more vomiting sounds, really relishing the memory.

There was a commotion in the hallway, as two nurses frantically scrambled into their isolation-gear. In a moment, as plastic-wrapped as Marcia was, they burst into the room.

"He's only telling stories!" and "I'm only telling a story!" they said simultaneously.

"That's fine," said one of the nurses, "but next time you tell a story in a hospital bed, please try not to talk about vomit."

Daniel Quixote Burns

To Blog or not to Blog

To blog or not to blog, that is, indeed, the question. I can think of lots of reasons to blog, chief among them raising my profile so that when my bizarre and hideous book is published there will be a ready-made audience of desperate people, just gagging to read it.

I can also think of lots of reasons not to blog. I have a bizarre and hideous book that needs completing, and blogging will just take yet more time out of my day, making it harder to sit down and write. 

I have no idea at all how I ever managed to hold down a full-time job, but I did, and sustained what could be described as a career for some time. At that time I was also raising children (and, occasionally, bread), who are time-hungry little beings. Yet I still managed to write short stories, poems and articles for my own personal amusement.

And here I am today. I stand before you (or, at least, before this glowing screen), proudly salary-free. Also, proudly child-free: kids in Queensland can't possibly count. It is, in fact, a truth universally acknowledged that I must have plenty of time available to me at this stage of my life for writing, yes? 

No. Not a chance.

All the interests I have now, I had when I was raising children, and running around earning money. But now, with no career or family to slide the other stuff around, I get up in the morning and every hour of my day is accounted for until I go back to bed. I often don't find time to work on my book, in a given day. So how can I possibly find time to blog?

This is the same conversation I have with my doctor. She wants me to find time to exercise: others want me to find time to blog. It's about time I acted on my long-term goal to become Dictator of the World. Then, as dictator, I will be able to decree a fifty-six hour day, and the speed of the earth's rotation will have no choice but to comply. Perhaps under those conditions, I will have time for everything.

(Self-referential photograph inserted for my own amusement)