Trees, Terror and Tumble Drives

The Bones of Trees

A fuzz of green leaves is pretty enough
But the bones of trees, the stripped skeletal
Most honest form of the thing,
All the flesh stripped right back,
Is the most basic honesty of the tree.

Each Spring is a single systolic thump
In the life of a tree, a single
Gasp of air, a single pounding thought.

Human flesh is so ephemeral.
Its systolic thumping so rapid
That a human hardly starts thinking
Before it dies. But the tree
Watches centuries pass, castles rise and fall,

And still stands, a silent sentinel
Stretched out over a silent earth.
And stripped bare, showing every small bone,
The tree has a lasting grace
That outlasts the comings and goings
Of the years, and of the leaves.

I haven't been blogging, because I have been writing. And I haven't been writing as much as I could, because I have been gaming. Gaming is meant to be a gentle introduction to the screen for me, easing me into sitting still so that I can write without twitching. Don't worry, I'm judging myself.

At the next meeting of the local writers' group I was thinking of workshopping this poem, even though it is older work and I'm happy with it. The theme for the meeting is nature/supernatural, and this was my take on nature one special day long ago and far away, when I went outside and looked at a freezing but clear blue sky through the stripped skeleton of a golden Robinia, all its gold dropped into autumn mulch to keep its roots warm, as deciduous plants try to do. And by spring and the annual surge of growth, that mulch will have turned into nutritious compost. Really, I grieve every time I see people raking fallen leaves.

From memory, I went back inside and pulled a few Tarot cards, and they all featured trees in one form or another. At that moment, writing the poem became inevitable.

There is something inevitable about writing, generally. I started trying to write at eight, and I was certainly reading adult literature plundered from my parents' library before I was ten. There were none of these YA books back then, and a good thing, too. The authors I read as a tween and a teenager respected my intelligence. Reading omnivorously sets you up nicely for a life of writing, and I had a life of writing, with one six year break in the middle of it. An upheaval meant that I lost everything I wrote before my late forties, but that is not such a problem. The past is past.

I wrote for my own amusement. I wrote for my own pleasure. I occasionally gave copies of things to other people, for their amusement and pleasure. It was only when I firstly came here to Dubbo, secondly joined the writers' group, and thirdly decided that at last I was formally retired, that I finally gave myself permission to "write properly."

A little under two years ago at the group meeting I workshopped the first chapter I'd written that week, of a bizarre psychological drama, that people around me are currently calling "crime" for no better reason than crimes happen in the book. I don't think it fits the crime genre at all, but what would I know.

When I presented that chapter, I had a shadowy idea of the general arc of the book, and very great clarity on the final paragraph, but no real intention to write it. The group received it so well, though, that I kept on writing, at the pace of a chapter every so often. I was enthralled by the odd relationship between my two living characters, and another relationship between one of them and a dead character.

Because I wasn't working with any speed or discipline, it took me over a year. In October 2022 it became obvious that I'd have it finished before the end of the month. November is NaNoWriMo - (inter)National Novel Writing Month - when a diverse spread of people the world over all sit down to write 50,000 words of a novel, and for the last few months a diverse bunch of characters had been rattling around in my head screaming "Write our story! Write our story!"

I knew if I did, Raven would be badly neglected, so I kept saying no to them, and when I finished the manuscript a week before the month's end I put it away so that I could come back to it with fresh eyes, and resolved to spend NaNoWriMo writing that other book that so desperately wanted to be written.

Barranarra is completely different in tone. There is a much broader cast of characters from differing backgrounds, who are thrown together in close proximity against their will, and have to deal with privation in that psychologically uncomfortable situation. 

Writing 50,000 words in a month requires daily writing, at a rate of around 1,700 words a day. It was my hope that taking part in NaNoWriMo and being forced to write every day would help me develop a work ethic. And it did - in that sense at least, it was wildly successful. I had significantly over 50,000 words at the end of the month, and was more than three-quarters the way through. I kept up the daily writing - three more weeks finished the book, whereupon I went back to the manuscript of Raven and did some serious revising. That gave me a break from Barranarra, and I was able to go back to that one with fresh eyes, too. 

But guess what. Even during the first half of Barra, I had two other books screaming at me. One, a memoire of five years of my life when a lot of bizarre things happened, and an SF book, slightly dystopian in parts, utilising an interstellar transport method that I wrote about it in the lost literature of my twenties, and which I don't believe the physicists have started thinking about yet. 

I'm currently working on the memoire. And true to form, the characters in the book I haven't started yet are all screaming at me, wanting me to write their story. Last month I relented slightly, and wrote an opening chapter for one of the major sections of the book - I don't believe it will be the first section, though it might be. I took it in to the group and workshopped it with them, and some of them liked it. They kept quizzing me about aspects of the society, and the history behind the routine surgery that the pilot had elected not to have, which I would have preferred to have been revealed organically through the text - which it will be, for all others.

But I'm not writing that book now! Not yet. I have the period of my life between early 2016 and the end of 2020 to get through, first. Those characters can just take a backseat in my brain and bicker amongst themselves until I am ready for them. I'm ageing badly - some unkind souls might say I'm not entirely well. It is my job, now, to try and keep myself alive long enough to write these two projects. Then if another starts demanding to be written, to write that as well.

Until then I shall stand like a winter tree, stripped bare of the fresh, green leaves of my Spring years, branches stretched over these unwritten books, hammering my poor keyboard into submission. 

ICU Fragment

 Here is a tiny extract from towards the end of the memoire that Esther was writing during the course of my book "The Raven's Nest." For context: she talks to ghosts, particularly Tim, who died a decade before the book opened. Aisling is an ICU nurse.

. I still couldn’t think of anything more to say to Tim, so I started singing, the songs he sang most often around the house.

Oh lorrrd, won’t you buy me a merrrrrcedes benz? My friends all drive porscheees, I must make amends. Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends, so lord, won’t you buy me a mercedes benz?” The “night on the town” stanza had me in tears, especially the “prove that you love me and buy the next round” line, but I swallowed it down.

Then Joy to the World. Tim had his own lyrics: “Jeremiah was a bullfrog, and a mighty good frog was he, he called for his pipe and he called for his bowl and he called for his fishermen three.” I sang the Tim version, of course. I was singing quietly, but Aisling was listening with relish. 

While I was singing about bullfrogs, she came and flicked open the curtains, and a flood of gorgeous, clear early-morning-light fell into the room and all over Tim. He was lit up like an intubated saint, painted by one of the Renaissance greats in luminous, glowing oils.

Something tonight reminded me of this, specifically: "... she came and flicked open the curtains, and a flood of gorgeous, clear early-morning-light fell into the room and all over Tim. He was lit up like an intubated saint, painted by one of the Renaissance greats in luminous, glowing oils."

I do, in fact, remember someone else, not Tim, who really did look like an intubated saint painted in luminous, glowing oils in the morning sun as he lay still, a machine breathing for him, capable only of communicating by hand-squeezes. Travel well, my friend. 

Writing About Writing

 I am just back from a delightful writing-session in one of my two favourite away writing venues. One of them is the Macquarie Library, where the local writers' group I belong to has a monthly write-in: a chance to write in company, and be surrounded by people doing the same thing (which helps, somehow) and not be surrounded by the distractions that writing at home offers.

The second is a new cafe that opened late last year: Dripp, where the coffee is good and the writing-environment is better. No people with whom to write in company, but no distractions, either. And good drugs. Dripp is where I spent a few hours this morning. Since they only use disposable cups I always take my own: an insulated cup designed to fit into a car cup-holder, which holds about as much as a regular NSW-sized "large" (yes, different states have different conventions). They know me: I don't even have to ask for soy milk any more, and when I'm ready for the second cup they know to make it weak: just hot, coffee-flavoured soymilk, really.

I haven't written there since late last year: they had funny hours around the end of December, and I had an interstate wedding to go to in early January. I would have made yesterday my first day back there, but yesterday I had a tradesman coming to do some work on what I am pleased to call The Witch's Hovel, and immediately after that, a more formal, paperwork-oriented appointment. Oh, how I hate paperwork! So today it was.

Backtracking: for several years, I'd had a first paragraph in mind. I never did anything with it, because it came with the shadow of the fuller story, and I knew it was novel-length. I'd spent half a century not thinking of myself as a novelist, but as the Queen of the Short Story, so this first couple of sentences was daunting, but I knew that once they were written I would have to continue. And I would have to write a novel. Me, not a novelist. Me, the Queen of the Short Story. No.

Then along came Covid. I already had the plan to retire to Dubbo, but that was going to happen in late 2022. Covid changed a lot of things, and I found myself packing boxes in 2020, and moving right after New Year's Day in 2021, more than a year and a half before I was ready. One of the two first things I did to immerse myself in this new community was to track down the local writing group, the Outback Writers' Centre. I started going to the monthly hub meetings and the monthly library write-ins, so I had fortnightly contact with people who shared one of my enthusiasms.

For the Hub meetings, I quickly fell into the pattern of bringing along a poem for the short section and a short story for the longer section. One day, I found myself writing that opening that I had thought about for so long - and the rest of chapter one fell out of my laptop in record time. I hadn't consciously considered it, but it had been fermenting away unconsciously for a very long time and was more than ready to face the world.

I took it along to the next Hub meeting, and it went down rather well. This encouraged me to write other chapters from time to time, and soon the realisation dawned on me that even the overall structure of the book was already sorted out by my subconscious, and I had to do much less work on actual plotting than I'd expected, because it was all already there, tucked neatly into a corner of my mind. 

I could have been disciplined about it. I could have worked on it every day - as a Lady of Leisure these days, I certainly had the time. I didn't. By the time the 2022 Dubbo Writers' Festival happened, therefore, it wasn't a complete manuscript. It was almost complete - I knew exactly what needed to happen between the two main characters and the invisible friend of one of them to get to the last sentence, and I knew exactly what that last sentence would be. 

It was just a matter of filling in the intervening words: around 20,000 of them or so. I knew I could write 2,000 words of useable material in a day easily, so that was only ten days' work. But  like one of my protagonists I have a number of Otherworldly beings in my life, and one of those is the Procrastination Fairy. She gets in the way of almost anything worthwhile, and scatters her magical fairydust everywhere. So I went to the Dubbo Writers' Festival with an incomplete manuscript.

I'd booked a slot in the Surviving Submissions Spur event, where we had the first chapter read aloud to a panel of publishers who would then discuss what it was about those first chapters that might cause them to take on the book or reject the book. I also had it booked in for a one-on-one discussion with a publisher, where they see it in written form plus a complete outline of the whole book.

My one-on-one happened first, and she was terribly encouraging, to the point of giving me specific publishers who would be interested, and smiling a lot. She was just as lovely in the public Surviving Submissions event. I was encouraged. I was more than encouraged - I was spurred on. But my relationship with the Procrastination Fairy has been long, faithful and monogamous - at least on my side - stretching for at least forty-five years. There comes a time when you're not in love any more, but you simply can't imagine life without them. The Procrastination Fairy and I have that kind of relationship.

Months before the Writers' Festival happened, there was another novel nudging at the back of my mind, asking to be written, completely different in tone and structure. I kept ignoring it. "You can wait," I kept telling it. "Your turn will come." November is NaNoWriMo: the month when aspiring novelists sit down to write 1,700 words a day every day, to complete 50,000 words of a new novel. I hadn't taken part in previous years, but I always like the idea of it, and I had friends who had done it. 

In mid-October I had only two or three chapters to go before it was finished. I made a pact with myself to do the NaNoWriMo thing with the second idea, but I wasn't going to allow myself to start something new until I had finished the work in progress, at least to the editing stage. Accordingly, I kicked the Procrastination Fairy in the teeth and worked daily, completing it with a week to spare, in the hope that I might actually develop a proper work-ethic over the coming month. I put it aside, to edit in December. I gave myself a whole week away from the keyboard, which was truly remarkable. 

And come November, I started Barranarra, a story of twenty-three characters stranded by a climate-change event in a small town on the Nullarbor Plain (the town very loosely based on Caiguna), and how they coped with it without killing each other. By the end of NaNoWriMo I had over 70,000 words, and a fortnight later topped out at a shade under 90,000. Then I gave myself a rest. Bye bye work ethic, hello Procrastination Fairy.

It occurred to me that on moving to Dubbo I should be retired. Wasn't retirement about taking it easy? I should be drinking good red wine, and watching daytime TV, like any other person with too much time on their hands. And here I was with the Raven's Nest and Barranarra completed-save-for-final-editing, and a memoire of a most unusual five years clamouring for attention, plus a science fiction novel-in-many-parts clamouring for attention, plus an occult-based book clamouring for attention. What the hell? Am I ever going to retire? Or will my foetid, rotting corpse be found one day, slumped over a still-glowing laptop?

I edited Raven. I read about a third of Barra, and decided it was good enough. I contacted three beta-readers: my daughter's best friend who has grown into a delightful bookseller despite the dire predictions of some of her teachers who told me she would end up a career-criminal, a long-term Queensland friend of mine, and a delightful Kiwi friend/academic/Interesting-Woman. I emailed manuscripts in all directions. Then I sat down and read Barra properly, and decided there was work to do. Did the work. (Dammit, I should have read it to the end before sending it out!)

And now I'm working on the memoire, while the science fiction is jumping up and down, waving its hands and calling out to me. Yes, yes. I know you're there. I'll get to you eventually. The Procrastination Fairy is still trying to flirt with me, and she's hard to resist: ocean-blue eyes to drown in, and soil-brown eyes to keep you rooted to the spot, by turns. She's a superlative flirt, and I'm all about the flirting. The Discipline Fairy is a much harder, pragmatic woman, and she doesn't flirt. But I'm trying. I'm trying to fall out of love with one and in love with the other.

It's time. There are books to write. And stand-alone stories. And not too many years left. Why, oh why did I listen to my parents, and get "safe" jobs, just because they paid the bills? I should have followed Peter Carey and Patricia Grace and Kate Grenville, and got people to pay me for having fun. Because I didn't make that choice, I have a lot of catching up to do in my retirement.

(Photo shows the Witch's Hovel. The window screen-right is my library and writing-room. This is the eastern face of the house: my multitude of solar panels are on the invisible bits of roof.)