Time for Something Different

Time for me to do something different. I’ve been writing the next book. The first draft is half complete, or at least that what it feels like.

There’s this funny thing that happens when I start writing. Sometimes the story takes over and leads into areas that I never thought of in the initial planning. That’s OK, but it means that my idea of how long the book will be can sometimes change. And that’s where I am at the moment.

I was writing like mad for the month of November, and found that by the end of the month I had half a first draft instead of the complete thing.

And now I’m a bit brain dead and have decided to take a break from the book for a week or so. Trouble is, here I am writing again.

Pobody’s nerfect.

A Day with the Coppers

I spent today in the local Police Station.

One of my clients rang me this morning. He either had to hand himself in or wait until somebody came to arrest him. He decided to hand himself in. So I picked him up and took him to the station. We spent the rest of the day in the charge room. And in the afternoon as I went to my next client, he went to the court cells to wait for his bail hearing tomorrow.

It’s not everybody’s idea of a day well spent. But being a prison chaplain means I spend my days differently from most. This client has paranoid schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and personality disorder. He’s a difficult person to deal with sometimes, such as when he is not taking his meds, which is most of the time.

His life is like a centre of gravity that draws everything towards it. It draws the heavy things faster, and they do greater damage. This means that while most people live lives that are somehow “normal”, this man lives his life with heavy things coming at him pretty often. Tomorrow he will probably get another lagging. That’s a heavy thing.

My presence in the place made a difference for him and for the officers. I was able to keep him calm, and the officers were able to get their work done calmly. It was not like that the last time. He spent the time shouting at the officers and punching the perspex cell door and raging around the tiny cell in the charge room. Today they didn’t have to lock the cell door, it stayed wide open and we both sat there talking. As long as there is somebody to listen to him he can manage the turbo-charged thoughts in his mind. It’s not a task that I would be able to take on for more than a few hours at a time.

I worked with him through a crisis some months ago. Back then I managed to get him back on his medication and his life started to settle down after a few days. He didn’t end up in the police station that time. This time he hadn’t paid the gravity bill and everything came rushing at him faster than he could manage. I spoke with my assistant about him this afternoon. We recognised that perhaps being in custody is the only way that he will get medication at the moment. That’s a heavy trip in my opinion.

We sometimes like being the centre of attention. But it is a very different story being the centre of gravity.

Samantha Hughes Does Shoes

First up I want to know why ‘does’ does not sound like ’shoes’.

I don’t, really. But there’s this Australian artist named Samantha Hughes who does shoes. And if those two words up there did rhyme it would make the title of this blog a bit special.

OK, that’s the word thing. Now for the art thing.

Go over here. http://samantha-hughes.blogspot.com/ It’s Samantha’s blog, but you can see that already.

Scroll down until you come to her painted shoes. They are worth finding your way to Western Australia for I reckon.

NaNoWriMo – Half way point

It’s Nov 15th, half way through the month, and last night I got to the half way point of my novel writing.

The goal of NaNoWriMo is to get 50,000 words up in thirty days. I’m up to 25,105.

Check me out.

Trouble is, I keep thinking I’ve now got all the easy stuff done and the hard stuff that I have not thought through yet is going to take me longer than the time I have left. I then tell myself that this is about as valid as “The dog ate my homework”.

The Berlin Wall, My Part of it’s Downfall

I have a piece of the Berlin Wall, a piece that is now twenty years old.

Want to see it?

It’s not a big piece, about the same size you see here, a few inches across. It is painted in grey, several layers of varying shades.

It is made from cheap concrete with no aggregate, just sand, cement, and a few tiny stones. Such concrete has no strength of its own. And that was the wall. The only strength it had was in the oppression of the people who lived behind it.

It is quite a strong symbol for me. It says something of the way we lock parts of ourselves away somewhere. And many years later those parts cry so loud to be free that there is no choice but for some weak pretence of protection to crumble within us.

People sometimes ask where I got the piece. Simple answer. My Uncle Barry got it when the wall went down twenty years ago. Uncle Barry was a diplomat and back then he was Australian Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Romania. When the wall came down, my uncle was there.

People have taken pieces of that wall to the ends of the earth. One of them ended up with me.

On Being Mindless

Not me, somebody else.

Every now and then we come across something completely stupid and without thought. It’s my turn.

I have just spent the weekend with my son. It was his birthday and so my wife and I headed west to his place for some catchup time. We took the kids to a playground to mess around a bit late on Saturday afternoon. It was a pleasant family thing. Four adults, four kids, nobody misses out.

Sunday afternoon and our son suggested that we drive back to the playground as one of the boys had lost his jacket and thinks he took it off there. We got to the playground and got out, one on each side of the car. So far, pretty normal. I scanned around from my side and saw what looked like it might be the jacket. My son scanned his side and saw what looked like the jacket. We each set off in different directions, and we each arrived about the same time at our target. We were both right.

Each of us had found one half of the boy’s jacket. It had been ripped in half down the back from the neck to the waist. The two pieces were lying about fifty metres apart.

Small boys forget things. That is normal. But this was a big boy bit of petty vandalism. So a small boy has lost his pride and joy leather-look jacket, and a big boy with a small mind has lost something else. I haven’t figured out exactly what he’s lost. Perhaps one day I will.

Oh yeah, NaNoWriMo. It was a slow weekend for writing, considering the birthday and all. But there’s a modest increase and a few ideas got written down in my notebook in some waking moments through the night. So far, so good.

 

Day Five

Time for a NaNoWriMo check-in. It’s day five and I have 12,651 words so far. That’s 25% of the goal.

The story is going well. I’ve got a one page timeline sitting above my desk. And I have found using Simon Haynes’ yWriter to be perfect for this project. I’ve got all sorts of story parts floating in my mind and with yWriter I can write any bit I like and just plug it in where it fits the timeline.

You can keep track of my progress here
http://www.nanowrimo.org///eng/user/552019

End of Day One

Word count is now 3566 for day one.

I can tell you right off, I’m not going to post the tally on here every day.

Or maybe I will.

Depends on if I fade out or if I keep up the pace. So far, so good.

Off And Racing

That NaNoWriMo thing is off and racing. Or is it up and running? Whatever it is, here in Australia we get November 1st a few hours earlier than most of the world’s population. I guess that means we start writing earlier.

It’s about 5pm and I’ve been writing for part of the afternoon. yWriter tells me I’ve got 1482 words down.

yWriter is author software by Simon Haynes. Simon Haynes is the author of the Hal Spacejock books. I blogged about him a day or two ago. The good thing about yWriter is that it keeps track of chapters and scenes, so I can write any section as it comes into my head, then just chuck it into the appropriate place in yWriter. If I want to move a scene I just pick it up and move it, no cut and paste for me.

It also keeps tally of each scene or chapter word count so I can see how busy I’ve been any time I need to. And that 1482?  It’s less than the minimum of 1,666 I have to keep up every day for November if I’m to reach the 50,000 words.

Better get back to it.

How To Slow Down

I blogged a while ago about moving out of my Nissan 200SX turbo coupe (which my wife now drives) and into a Subaru Outback station wagon. I needed the space for people and stuff for work. Considering that the Nissan has been my work car for six or seven years I’ve held out pretty well.

The Subaru is nice enough to drive, but let’s face it – it’s not the Nissan. Consequently the changeover has slowed me down a fair bit.

Today I came across this. It’s a Subaru. 1958 model, the mother of them all.

If anybody wanted to slow down I reckon this would be the way to do it.

Oh yeah, and if you are wondering about the real reason behind posting this. It’s because tomorrow I start out on the NaNoWriMo thing, so today I’ve been getting notes and chapter planning in order so I’ve got a bit of a framework for the next month. Trouble is, it’s a pretty boring thing to be doing. So I mowed the lawn, did some planning, and chased up pics of old Subarus. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Remedy For Straining My Brain

I think it was Ulysses that did it. Strained my brain, I mean.

I got a bit too close, that’s all. Too close to the rarified atmosphere or wherever it is that Ulysses lives.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have written yesterday’s blog. Well, not all at once, anyway.

It’s left me a bit vague and drifty. Not a bad feeling, but certainly not conducive to full functioning.

I’m sure it will pass, this light-headedness. But I’ll be more careful when approaching the dizzy heights of literary genius next time.

However, I have a remedy. Hal Spacejock.

Yep, that’s the way to get back to normal. I hope you’ve heard of Hal. Not the, ‘I’m sorry I can’t do that, Dave,’ HAL of Stanley Kubrick.

Hey, hold on there. Stanley Kubrick is getting up into rarified air again.

Let’s get down to earth again. Stick with Hal Spacejock.

Hal is the brainchild of Simon Haynes. Simon is an author from Perth, WA. And Hal Spacejock is the worst space pilot in the galaxy. The books are funny, filled with gung-ho adventure and mishap, have beautiful women, crazy plots, and a save-the-day robot named Clunk.

Simon has written four Spacejock books, and if you like Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett or Red Dwarf, or that guy Ford with two ff’s, then perhaps Hal Spacejock should be on your reading shelf.

You can get the first book free. Yep. Free, with one f.

Head on over here http://www.spacejock.com.au/ and you will see the link for a free download of his first novel in the series.

Ulysses for the Patience Impaired

I’ve never read James Joyce’s Ulysses.

I’ve never even started to read it.

I believe that some people pretend to have read it, for example at a posh literary dinner, but that’s not me.

I have however, read some of the Wikipedia entry. I don’t think that counts for much in the world of literature, but it lets me say profound things at literary dinners like how Ulysses contains the longest single sentence in the English language.

At something over 4,000 words it’s really a short story without a meal stop. If you want a bit more accuracy on the word count, go chase up Wikipedia. Or perhaps you can read the book until you come across a sentence that has been going on for over three thousand words and perhaps you’d better go back and start counting them to see if this is the one.

And now …..

And now there is another thing you can do. You can read the comic version.

Seriously.

It’s not completed yet. In fact they’ve only got into the first of its eighteen episodes. But they are adding to it each week, which is what, after all,  Joyce did with the original. (I got that last bit from Wikipedia. Don’t hold that against me.)

Here is the link http://ulyssesseen.com/

Confession Time

OK, I’ve done it. After years of resisting, of holding off, of directing my attention elsewhere, of what the psychologists called ’sublimating’, I’ve done it.

Today I signed up to NaNoWriMo.

Don’t know that that is? Check it out here http://www.nanowrimo.org/

NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. In November each year a bunch of people sign up to encourage themselves and others to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month.

I’m looking at getting serious with the next book, so I signed up.

OK, I feel better now that I’ve got that off my chest.

That PIR Thing Again – A New Twist

We once had an Irish Setter. We had three of these wonderful dogs over many years and I suppose I could tell the following story about any of them, but I will choose one. Flash was the most recent. He was energetic, enthusiastic, enlivening, every else that starts with E.

Flash loved to wrestle. My son or I would get down on the floor and growl and he would get into position, hind-quarters up and forelegs and chin on the floor, eyes alive. We would make our move and grab him around the middle and he would try to lick us into submission, wriggling and twisting all the time to get free.

It was impossible to hold him for long as wriggling and twisting was his best thing. As soon as he was free he would get back into position for the next round. We tired out before he did.

There’s an irony in wanting to get into the wrestle, only to wriggle free. Can I leave the metaphor with you?

Don Grover is CEO of Dymocks Booksellers. John Forsyth is the Chairman of the family company that owns Dymocks. Dymocks is one of the members of a retail coalition that wants to get rid of territorial copyright on Australian books. The other members of the coalition are Coles and Woolworths. These other two are supermarket giants who between them own 80% of Australian grocery business. This is the highest concentration of grocery ownership in the world. They want to sell cheap books and they want to get rid of territorial copyright, saying this will make books cheaper.

Here’s a quick run through on what that means. English speaking countries have territorial right to publish and distribute books in their own place. UK, US, Canada, Australia. They respect the right of local publishers to distribute books on their patch without interference. Because each territory has differences in culture and language, books for each territory are edited to suit the differences, and those editions only sold in the appropriate territory. New Zealand gave up their PIRs some years ago and have paid the price for it since.

This is how it plays out in practice. An Australian author writes a book. It is taken up by a US publisher. The US publisher wants the Australian idiom changed to US norms. Elements of the story have to change. Cricket is changed to baseball, wombat is changed to opossum, Mum is changed to Mom, Dubbo is changed to Dallas, the main character no longer has freckles but has to have long golden hair to reflect the US desire that everything be beautiful. In other words, what was an Australian book has to be edited to reflect the US publisher’s marketing guidelines.

OK, those changes are made and the US edition goes on sale in the US. But the Australian version has territorial rights for sale in Australia, so the Australian reader gets the original. The US reader gets the Barbie and Ken version but not the Australian version. That is the idea behind Parallel Import Restrictions. Each country guards the right to publish for their own culture.

The proposal to lift PIRs in Australia would mean that the US version can be shipped into Australia and sold in competition with the local version. And with publishing costs cheaper in the US because of matters of scale and lower quality of paper and binding etc, the local version would not appear on the shelves. So the local publisher who has put the original and costly work into getting the book up and running can’t sell locally produced copies in the Australian market. And they can’t sell into the US or UK either, because those markets are closed to Australian sellers by the US and UK  PIR legislation.  Australian publishing business drops.

Dymocks, who want to see an end to PIR so they can sell cheaper US imports, recognise this. They recognise that those US versions will lessen the ability of Australian publishers to stay in business. They recognise that Australian authors will therefore find it more difficult to get published. After all, what US publisher is going to spend money on Australian authors, especially in developing new talent?

So Dymocks has a suggestion. They suggest that Australian publishers have a 1% levy applied to them by the Government. And that levy be used for ‘Australian writing grants’.

How about that? Dymocks, the retailer, recognises that removal of PIRs will hurt Australian writing and publishing. So to help prop it up they suggest a new tax on the ailing publishers. And out of that tax we give grants to Australian authors to write what they call ”culturally worthwhile books”.

Is it just me or can somebody else see a bit of wriggling and twisting happening here?

Are you up for a list of questions?

• What does “culturally worthwhile books” mean?
• Who decides what it means?
• Who decides what authors get a grant?
• Who decides how much that grant will be?
• Once the author has written a “culturally worthwhile book” who publishes it?
• Where does it get published?
• If it is published in the US does it have to be edited into a US “culturally worthwhile book” so it’s marketable there?
• If such a book was to be published by a US publisher and imported to Australia does that US publisher have to pay 1% of everything they publish into this grant fund?
• How much of this grant levy goes into administration, and by what govt. department?
• What if somebody was to suggest that 1% be levied on retailers and not publishers?
• Would Dymocks support that?

I tell you, it was a lot more fun wrestling with Flash than trying to sort out the wriggling and twisting of this suggestion.

You can chase up a news report on the Dymocks suggestion here.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/dymocks-says-levy-could-fund-writers-20091026-hgr4.html

Author Interview with Kim Miller

Some time ago I was invited by a local community radio station to come in and talk about my work. Being a prison chaplain sounds a bit exotic and so people like to ask questions about the people I work with. The radio guy suggested I might like to put some questions down that would guide him. I did better. I wrote a whole interview, his questions and my answers. Then I turned up at the radio station and we got on with it. It worked for him, and it worked for me.

This time somebody else is interviewing me. I’m an author. I write fiction. That means I get to tell lies and people pay me money for it. It’s not a good beginning for an interview is it? So this time somebody else is going to make up the questions. Actually, they did it already.

If you head over to the WeLoveYA blog, one of Australia’s young adult fiction appreciation zones, you will find the interview. I didn’t make up the questions. And I managed to tell the truth in the answers.

http://weloveya.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/author-interview-kim-miller/