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.)

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.