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)