Brendan D Carson's Fiction

World Mental Illness Day

2011-10-10T16:06:00.000-07:00

This week is World Mental Illness Day or Mental Health Day or some such (I think it varies from place to place, like the various state Cancer Foundations, locked in deadly struggle with their mortal enemies, the various state Anti-Cancer Foundations).

Anyway, I have given this World Mental Illness Day thing some thought and I have decided what I want. I am aware that it is not customary to receive gifts on World Mental Illness Day, but I am more than willing to swap this for Christmas. And if we did have gift-giving and parties and so on on these kind of days, it would do a hell of a lot more to increase awareness than many other measures.

Anyhow - my wants. And the following is focussed on BPAD, not only for the obvious reason, but because a lot of the patients I have seen, and a number of those I have lost, have had BPAD.

So.

I want a cure.

And I know there isn't "a" cure because it isn't "a" disease, because everyone's bipolar is different, but even so:

I want a cure.

I want it gone, like smallpox is gone, like the vapours and frigidity and green-sickness is gone.

I want bipolar dead.

What I want is to open the obituary pages and read "today, bipolar affective disorder lost its long battle with so-and-so", or "After a long and debilitating stuggle, bipolar disorder slipped peacefully away." Or violently away, I don't care, I'd settle for a car crash on a rainy night, a fall in the bath, a glassing outside a pub, police being called to a boarded up house.

Hell, I'd even settle for a combination of auto-eroticism and silly string. I am not fussy.

But I want it dead. It kills people, and it wounds those it doesn't kill, and it inconveniences a hell of a lot more, and if it's BPAD or us, - and for too many people I know, it has been - if it's it or us, I'm going with us.

Freedom

2011-10-09T23:51:00.000-07:00

Hail,
First off, have a look at this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jd-samson/i-love-my-job-but-it-made_b_987680.html

It's an interesting article, and the comments are fairly vigorously written as well. Now, the situation in which JD Samson finds herself is not the same as the one in which I, and the majority of my readers find themselves. She is, and I am not, a tattooed lesbian punk musician living in New York.

But the reason you should read this is because the question she raises is important, and it is the question every single writer faces, and how you answer this question, and how you come to terms with your decision, may screw with your head for the rest of your life, if you do it wrong.

The question, depending on who you ask is "Do I dare to live my dream?", or alternatively, "Who's paying for this shit?".

This is a complicated issue, and I know that I am not the most objective about it. I have taken one path, and many people whom I greatly admire have taken another, and I am not foolish enough to think that I never regret choosing the low-risk, low-return strategy of part time writing. There are works within me that will never see the light of day because I am spending hours writing when I could be spending days.

Then again, I suspect many full time writers, if they are ever faced with the inability to buy something or do something expensive - and more acutely if it's for someone who depends upon them than if it's for themselves, some child or spouse or parent - sometimes wonder if they should have taken the day job.

There is no simple, one-size-fits-all answer to this. I know there are always roads not taken. And work is art and art is work, there is drudgery for pay in your art and there is creative expression and wonder in your work, and it all changes from day to day.

My intial response to reading about the whole issue is "you do your homework and you make your choices." I chose one option, to work full time and write part time. That means I don't get to whine about not having time for writing because no-one put a gun to my head and said "work full time or I shoot the kitten". I chose this option. Parallel-universe-full-time-writer-Brendan doesn't get to whine about not having financial security, because he chose the other option.

The thing is, I don't know that that entirely holds. Like the author says, the women's dollar is less than the man's dollar, the gay is less than the straight, and as a straight male Anglophone writer, it is likely that my rewards for choosing work (and quite probably choosing art) are a lot more than hers would have been.

And the whole issue of choice in a lot of this is something with which I feel some disquiet anyway. There are societal, and intrafamiliar, and economic issues. I wonder if "I" could have really chosen differently if I wanted to. Doctors have needs - sometimes the need to be important, often the need to be needed, always the need for coffee - and I wonder if writing would have satisfied all of them. Additionally, there are people for whom the full time work option is just not possible - a number of people with full time mental or physical illnesses, for example.

Lastly, all of this is predicated upon all of us having the unimpeded moral right to make all of our own choices - and I don't know about that. If I am the mother of twin toddlers, and the muse seizes me by the arm as I am standing beside the road with my kids, she can piss off. If people depend on you, you don't have that freedom. And if you choose not to have people depend on you, well, firstly, good luck with that, and second, if you choose to do that but depend on other people, well, I hope that that works out for you.

Anyway. Complicated topic. If anyone has any insights, do tell.

BDC

Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.

2011-10-03T04:48:00.001-07:00

This post has been deleted.

Maybe you should hire the arsehole

2011-09-24T16:54:00.000-07:00

Hail,

The post that started this line of thought is here. It's Giles Coren, English humourist, restaurant critic and author, responding to a sub-editor editing some of his stuff. One word of his stuff, actually. It's from a few years back, but it's still worth a read.

I read this, and I sent this to a few friends, and hijinx ensued. Well, not so much hijinx as a moderate and reasoned exchange of views, but a signficantly larger proportion of people will read on if promised hijinx than if promised reason.

So - writer writes article, editor edits, writer expresses his displeasure, the email goes viral (or "virile", as I saw in another context), and among other things, my writery friends and I talk about whether or not this behaviour is what you would expect from a professional. Would you, if you were an editor of the Times, hire someone like that?

Well, I'm not, but heck yeah, as Coren did not say. I dashed-well would.

Why?

First off - it's an articulate letter. The structure of it, the rising cadence, the surgical scorn, even the way he ends it in such a way that it cannot be taken too seriously - he writes well. He's the guy on Supersizers, by the way.

Second, it was a private email. I don't know the relationship between the correspondents - obviously they are on first name terms, and have known each other for years, but aside from that I don't know - but this is not just the factory floor worker vs supervisor relationship, and it was not intended for publication, and the standards that would apply to him addressing his boss in public do not apply here.

Third, he's right. Scansion is important. Jokes like the ones he was making can be important. Structure and rhythm and content matter.

But most importantly of all, I think the things that make him a good writer and probably a very good employee are evident in this letter because they are the things that made him write this letter. The understanding of his language. The ability to express himself well. The "less vigorous than the rest of us" self-censorship. The need to be noticed more than the fear of causing offence. The care, the passion, the dedication with which he approaches what he does.

He's still quite employed, from what I can see.

Pretty close to all attempting writers like me have read about writing, and if they are able as well as willing, they have gone to seminars or write camps or something like that. They learn vital, crucial, fundamental things. One of the things they learn - if the tutors are any good, and the ones I have had have been very very good - is about the less intoxicating parts of writing. This is not a traditional area of strength for "arty types", the whole obeying instructions and keeping to deadlines and so on, and if you learn one thing from a more successful writer than yourself, learn professionalism.

We were taught it. I remember emerging from Clarion South with an idea that there were sortof three pillars to writing, like three legs to a stool. I am big on acronyms, so I came up with Words (you have to love them), Work (you have to do it) and Why Yes, I'd love to reply to this email/talk to your group/do something for someone beside myself. You have to be a professional, and you have to build connections with others.

(and no, there is no "have to". You can be an indolent prick who rises at eleven and stabs at passers by with a dinner fork. But you will be obscure, and what you say will be forgotten).

And the stuff about professionalism and decency is true, and it's what people need to hear.

But there is something else that is also true. For those of us almost pathologically unwilling to offend, for those for whom timidity is the dominant humour in our body, for those who want everybody to be right, there is something else. I don't know if it's part of each of the three legs, or if it's a hitherto unsuspected fourth leg of the stool, or if there's any way I can get rid of the whole stupid furniture analogy and pretend it never happened.

But both in the art and the profession, there has to be more. In the art there has to be some kick, some light, something you can't put words to. Something that moves you must, at some level, disturb you, and disturb others. You have to push.

And in the profession, sometimes you cannot just acquiesce. Sometimes you have to back yourself. Sometimes the love and the work and the getting on with people means there has to be a "Here I stand" moment.

Anyhow. These are my thoughts. I have published less than other people. I could be wrong. But I could also be wrong about saying I'm wrong about this, so I'll leave it at that.

BDC

PS: There is a (deliberately written for public consumption) letter of reply here.

BDC

Fat.

2011-08-25T00:18:00.000-07:00

Hail,

I am close to being fat. The guidelines vary, but if you look at BMI - calculate your own here, what is wrong with it at the end of the entry - I am just under obese. An obese man my height would weigh 90kg, and a few days ago I stepped on my scales for the ever-popular first weighing of spring*, and I am 88 kilos.

88.1, to be precise, but who's counting?

Almost everyone.

Now, as I explain later, a blunt BMI is not ideal, it does not take into account differences in race and muscle mass and so on, but twenty years ago I weighed seventy five kilos, and I wasn't twenty kilos less muscly or South-East Asian. I was thirteen kilos less fat.

Why has this happened and what do I do?

First off - the why. The two fundamental truths - and they are truths - is that weight is controlled by diet and exercise. Like many fundamentalist ideas, they don't do that well under even the most cursory analysis and reflection - in 1991 I ate appalling amounts of food.

I have vivid memories of my girlfriend's family driving by (her father was the Methodist minister, her mother the school music teacher) half an hour after I had left their house for Sunday lunch, and seeing me with my head inside a chicken. I had been overcome with starvation after their substantial three course meal, and had bought a four dollar roast chicken from Coles, and by the time they drove past I had almost eaten it all, and was trying to force my face into the ribcage to get to the last of the giblets.

And I regularly ate entire party sized pizzas for myself, and I cooked by boiling up three packets of those two minute noodles for lunch and coating them with cream cheese. And -

I don't think I can go on. But the truth is, and it is a truth to which almost everyone can attest, if diet and exercise was the secret to weight loss, how do you explain teenagers?

Well, for a start, there is more to it that that. There are a lot of other factors, some more intuitively obvious than others, that underlie the enfattening of an entire generation over a quarter of the world.

Air conditioning - if it's really hot, you eat less, if it's freezing, you have to burn more calories. If it's neither, maybe you get us.

Psychotropic drugs. God alone knows what proportion of the population is on these. They are life-saving and life-changing for a great many people - although it is interesting to look at, say, suicide rates in the US over the last fifty odd years and see the huge difference these medications have not made. Obviously, there is so much more to this topic that discussion could fill several internets. But if you're on antidepressants, or antipsychotics, or mood stabilisers, they may be making you fat.

Don't look so smug if you're using non-condomoid contraception, either.

Disruption of circadian rhythms. Again, if you're reading this, and the sun is down, you're not helping. Stress causes release of cortisol. Cortisol causes you to eat more, eat worse, and stack on the fat around the abdominal area (all of which is a really good idea if it's the Bronze Age, and you're stressed because you have to trek across the snow or something - it's less of a good idea now). One of the unrecognised causes of what I think of as sub-clinical stress is disruption of circadian rhythms. Shift work, for example makes you fat (as well as very definitely giving you cancer). Sleeping less quite possibly does the same.

And there are other non "diet and exercise" causes, but I am trying to keep to a time limit. Diet and exercise and medications and shift work and increasing maternal age and lots of stuff cause weight gain.

What to do?

Most of the research on weight loss is on diet and exercise, so I can briefly scroll through that. Diet and exercise work when we do them. Exercise alone maybe works, maybe doesn't, diet alone does work, diet and exercise work better than either alone.

There are caveats. The reason exercise alone does not work (although it provides very considerable health benefits, and it is a lot better to be a fit fat person than a skinny unfit one) - is that if you exercise more and get hungrier and eat more you may well weigh the same, or maybe even more. It's good and it's good for you and it's a damn fine thing of itself, but if your sole aim for exercise is to lose weight, and you don't control your diet, you may well fail. High intensity interval training appears to be the best, but basically, more and harder exercise works better - conditions apply.

Dieting works, when we do it. There do seem to be some tricks that make it easier - protein makes most people "fuller" than carbohydrates, it is very hard to get fat on non-starch vegetables, soups and spices and (for some people) dairy seems to play a role - but in the end, diet control is the single most powerful and safe intervention for weight loss we have. The health benefits from a good diet are startling.

And now the bit I actually started writing this for. There was an article in the latest Journal of the American Dietetics Association about why we are fat. It is called "Time to abandon the notion of personal choice in dietary counselling for obesity?" and it brings a lot of the stuff that underpins addiction medicine, that we have been using for years, into obesity studies. It's a big idea paper.

Basically, what the paper argues, and what I have been saying for years, is that the idea of individual free will in this kind of stuff is not that useful. My own opinion is that the idea of free will is neither sustainable or useful in a lot of areas, but that's my opinion, not theirs. The idea of diet and exercise as being just about free will does not explain, for example, why we, presumably no less determined than our forefathers, weigh so freaking much more.

Perhaps - and I am trying to keep an eye on the word count here - there is more going on here. Perhaps there are issues like what could be called the obesogenic environment. Perhaps there is a complex interplay between increased availability of sweet, starchy food, and chronic circadian stress, and individual variation in things like inhibitory control, reward discounting and so on.

Perhaps just saying eat less and do more is not enough. Perhaps rather than saying eat less, exercise more - and as I said, those two things are essential - we should talk about what was going on when those approaches worked for us, and what was going on when they didn't.

Maybe we should talk about our food (and our ergonomic) environment.

Maybe we should talk about modifying the causes of circadian stress.

Maybe we should talk about medication, and reward.

Maybe we should talk about fun. One of the more startling things I read recently about health was a woman (fit, strong, athletic) saying she believed in giving her body what it wanted. The obvious response is "my body wants to lie in bed and drink chocolate and eat croissants", but your body also wants to be strong and attractive and fit, so there is a truth in that.

Maybe - and everyone is different - we should talk about things that aren't about will-power and just doing it and being good, because that whole approach has had a hundred year trial run over a quarter of the globe and has utterly, utterly failed. Sooner or later, we have to drive the stake through that ghastly, depressing, futile cycle of motivation and enthusiasm and frantic inner pep talks, followed a few days or weeks or months later by failure and guilt and self-loathing. And then saying fuck it, chuck on some pasta, because it's quick, and after the day you've had you deserve it, and tomorrow you start your diet, or alternatively, deciding to love your fat, as if love was something you decide.

Anyhow. Complicated topic. If anyone is interested in this, I will be posting links and maybe references and trying (amateurishly) to answer questions.

Thanks for listening,

BDC

* This is almost the only seasonal rite we have left. Our ancestors leapt over fires of thorns, or chased cheeses down English hillsides, we stand, naked, on small squares of steel and shriek in the early morning.

BMI is height in cm squared divided by your weight in kilos. It's used as a measure of fatliness. BMI of 25 to 30 is meant to be overweight, BMI of 30 or over is meant to be obese and so on. There are different cut-offs for South East Asians and older people and bodybuilders and so on, and it doesn't predict who will die when (overweight people live as long as normal weight people, while underweight and obese ones die early). It's not the best measure of fatness, but there isn't "a" best measure, and the big thing the BMI has going for it is ease-of-use.

ASR

2011-08-21T01:20:00.001-07:00

Hail,

I am on Facebook, but... it's complicated. I try to keep FB fairly entertaining, fairly upbeat, fairly interesting. I don't want FB people to log on and have to be confronted by post after post of my pointless whining about my problems.

I'll save all that for here.

Now, for those who don't know, my wife, Katy, had surgery in 2008. She is young, and beautiful, and the light of my life, but like a maiden in a Greek myth, or a woodsman's daughter in a fairy tale, she is so perfect that she arouses the envy of the gods, and to punish her for the good things she has been struck with a Very Bad Thing.

The Very Bad Thing in this case is a combination of a weird-arse immune disease (Common Variable Immune Deficiency, present in about one in two hundred thousand people, as opposed to the Freakishly Rare Immune Deficiency, which is so rare we're still waiting for someone to come up with it), and "an arthritis". When you cobble together the five in a million immune disorder with the fact that there are over two hundred and seventy causes of arthritis (including one you can catch from drinking infected walrus milk - always check the use-by dates), you can understand that things are on occasion difficult for her.

Now, there is a lot here I am unwilling to say, and there is a lot more that it would be unwise to say, so all I will say for this next bit is in 2008 Katy had both hips surgically replaced, using a new, impressive sounding artificial hip things called the ASR hip resurfacing system, and it went less well than she had hoped, and in August 2010 the company recalled the product world-wide, because it seems not to be quite as good as they perhaps originally hoped, and in a few months she goes under the knife again for re-replacement.

These two are actually bigger operations than the first two, and the first two, believe me, were monstrous. They knock you out and cut through your hip to the bone, and dislocate your hips so they can saw the ball part of the ball and socket off one bone, and chisel or whatever the socket out of the other. Then they replace it with metal, and sew you back together, and you're cured.

That is not why I am writing this. I am writing to draw people's attention to the recent article in the British Medical Journal about the whole issue. The BMJ is one of the Big Four Medical Journals (similar to, but different from, the Big Four Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, or the Big Four species responsible for most of the snakebite deaths in India). The BMJ article is available free online, but for those less inclined to read the entire ghastly story, I have listed some highlights below.

1. The ASR joint replacement is a disaster. It "fails" - either fractures, or comes loose in its cup, or wears out, or causes such pain and disability that it has to be replaced - a lot, lot faster than it was meant to. It was meant to last thirty years. One in twenty don't last two years, one in seven don't last five, it may be one in three don't last six. This is vastly more than the devices they were meant to replace.

2. The ASR joint replacement wasn't really tested much at all. New medications and devices have to go through an incredibly long and involved process to get onto the market - stage I to III trials take close on ten years, and involve thousands of people and millions of dollars. Modifications of existing drugs or devices don't go through that, they get fast-tracked. The good part of this is you, the patient, get access to new, improved medications and devices. The bad part is stuff like this.

DePuy (I'm not sure how to pronounce that, if it's De-POY to rhyme with "Shady Marketing PLOY", or Du-PWEE, as in "Unnecessary surgeRY", or even DuPIE, as in "Some of the people who have the repeat surgery will DIE". Someone help me out here...)

3. DePuy seem to have marketed this in a way that would make drug barons in Columbia look askance. They seem to have paid off some surgeons - bribes in Greece, Poland and Romania, kickbacks in Iraq under the UN Oil for Food programme. They appear to have offered to pay people to do nothing, rather than investigate this. There are suggestions that they tried to blamed failure and complication rates on bad surgery, that they produced faked photographs that they used in their advertising campaigns, and that when doctors and patients in one area expressed concerns that the implants were actually poisoning them, that DePuy representatives blamed this on illicit ships covertly dumping heavy metals in the river.

4.... actually, I reckon I'll stop there. Have a look. It's a bloody depressing read. As I said, there is a lot more that I could say, but there are lawyers involved, and I don't understand the inner workings of the law, and so I am going to keep quiet. It is all very complicated.

Repeat surgery is soon. More news as it comes to hand.

Thanks for listening,

BDC

*49% actually, which is very very nearly one in two, but let's not be pessimistic here.

Infidelity

2011-08-19T23:11:00.000-07:00

Hail,

Having been on twenty-four hour call, and gone to a glorious book launch, and seen my patient in hospital, and written all afternoon on ears (upon the subject of ears, that is, not the organs themselves), I am now able to get on with the serious part of the week - writing.

One of my characters is a man who is being unfaithful.

This is a difficult topic to write about. There is an idea - I don't know about "laws", these things are more of what you call "guidelines" than actual "rules" - about writing. One of them (that someone made up) was that if something doesn't make the reader or the writer uncomfortable, it shouldn't be written (and maybe shouldn't be read). I don't know about that, but I do know that you do need a certain courage to write. You need to care, either love or hate or fear, and that caring is at least as important as knowing. You need a certain emotional risk, you do need to look at things that affect you in some disturbing way, and without that effect, without that risk... well, maybe your superlative craftmanship and unerring sense of what matters will get you through, but maybe what doesn't move you won't move your reader, and maybe you'll be boring as batshit.

Anyway - infidelity. If you've ever done it, or it's ever been done to you...

One of my male characters is being unfaithful. I don't know that he's a bad person - I don't think the others around him think of him as particularly bad. He is liked and loved and respected. The way I see things, how someone is seen says less about what that someone is like than about the effect that someone has on others. My suspicion is that people who are well-thought of are at least as likely to be charismatic, or attractive, or articulate, as they are to be moral paragons.

There is a reason why baddies look different to good guys in movies. We are wired to think that evil is as evil looks, and to trust and welcome and follow the gorgeous. That is why being hot is one of the only true superpowers, why it is more important to be beautiful than to be smart or strong, why it is the chic, in the final analysis, who will inherit the earth.

But my character is being unfaithful. He has no real "reason" - his partner is smart, and beautiful, and (what is often as important) she needs him. She has what modern doctors would call multiple health issues. While this all goes on, she is sick.

And yet he does what he does. The secret meetings, the hidden communication. If this was now, it'd be pseudonymous email accounts and having to stay back after work.

She suspects. She knows what he is like. In some ways she does not blame him.

He, if questioned, would blame him. He is a man with a violent past - even for a Viking - and he is generally regarded as a very ethical man. He does not tolerate deceit in others. He would agree that a man is responsible for what he does. He would agree that a man should not betray his partner, and that a man who would do this when his partner is sick is not the kind of man he would like to be. If he saw himself doing this, seeing himself from the outside, he'd stop himself.

But he does not. His friends are wondering whether to speak to him, but none of them have yet. Partly because they are not without vices, and partly because they know absolutely nothing they say will make any difference whatsoever - stones fall to earth, the earth falls around the sun, the unfaithful man is in the grip of forces as strong and singleminded. Love, or inloveness, or lust, or whateverthefuckyouwantocallit, is madness, and it's not the benign, "singing about little goblins" or "dressing as a teapot" kind of fictional madness. It's the psychotic, manic, obsessive-compulsive breed of madness, every few seconds you think of her, can't get her out of your head madness. It is the fixed belief, neurochemically (or humorally, in my character's case) printed on your brain. For the lover/luster/whatever, nothing else exists.

Also, his friends haven't said anything because it's none of their business, and also because he's scary.

My understanding is the transgressor (as opposed to the one transgressed against, or the one transgressed with), like the rest of us, can hold two or more diametrically opposed thoughts in his head at once. Most smokers believe smoking kills people, most smokers believe it won't kill them - that kind of thing. He has what we would call "unmet needs" - although the term "needs" assumes a great deal.

I read, to change the subject slightly, superhero comics. In one such comic, someone had tracked down the Hulk (you know - big, green, not a tree). The Hulk and his alter ego Bruce Banner form what in the old days we would have called a split personality. In the old days it was smart, puny Banner and stupid, strong Hulk. In the more successful modern writings, the split is between the Superego (the skinny, rational, moral Bruce Banner) and the Id (the bestial, arational-if-that's-a-word, carnal, Hulk). In the old Comics Code days the Hulk was the Inner Child. In the modern version, he is the Inner Monster.

A monster, by the way, is not necessarily a bad thing. Monsters dot the edges of the mediaeval maps. They are the inhabitants of the unknown, the mediaeval Id - things we know are there but cannot glimpse. They are disturbing, but that is because they are real, not because they are bad.

Anyhow - the Hulk, who is the Id, the hidden part of all of us, is tracked down in this comic, and after a protracted hunt, we finally get to see him. It is a remarkable image. The monster is sprawled on a throne. There are countless naked women draped over him. He is being worshipped and adored and gratified constantly. It seems he is at peace.

And the image is laughable and childish and it's also true. There's a part of all of us - essentially all men, although I suspect the differences between the sexes are not absolute - that will not be satisfied without that or a variation of that. That's the part that "needs". It's not a "need", but by God, it's a strong pull, and to completely deny its existence is as stupid as to indulge or satisfy it. Because if you can live in a comic, that's all well and good.

But in the real world, you have to come out some time. There are people there who depend on you, who trust you and need you and to whom you have promised your life. They - and there's more than one - they get hurt. No matter how good the sex is - and in my book it's good - the hurt and the guilt and the trying to get back the trust last longer.

Anyhow. Enough Viking stuff. This all may not make the final cut, because I have three or so months to go - I suspect this will all end up in book three. Which won't get finished if I don't get on with this.

Thanks for listening,

BDC

*The book launch of the marvellous Lisa Hannett. Check it out.

Some doctors agree some doctors suck

2011-08-14T10:02:00.001-07:00

Hail,

Sometimes I post about writing, other times I post about... other things. This is one of those other times.

I felt strongly enough about something to write a letter to the editor the other day. I suppose if I sought hard enough I could find a more futile exercise - trying to beat one of those greatest-number-of-eggs-balanced-on-the-forehead records, or voting, but today, I thought I'd write to my profession's newspaper (or one of them). The newspaper in question is the Medical Observer, and the subject of a considerable part of today's letters column is doctors' right to refuse.

(Note to self - remember to use word "right" in front of every behaviour, no matter how childish, toxic or selfish. See how it evokes images of solemn assemblies, ideals of liberty, stirring oratory, fundamental and inalienable stuff. Practice declaiming "the clearest manifestation of the ethical imperatives of Western civilisation is a naked-arsed man holding a shotgun, standing outside a schoolyard dealing crack and waving lizard porn" until you can say it without flinching).

Anyway. The issue in this week's issue is doctors' rights, and it springs from a survey that suggested a fair proportion of British medical students (and by extension, probably Australian doctors) believe they have the right to refuse treatment to patients on religious or ethical grounds.

There are caveats, of course - in Australia, you are required to ensure that the would-be patient is referred to a doctor who can and will carry out the practice, and that practice cannot be geographically or financially inaccessible, and I think there may be more. If that is the case, then you can refuse to treat. I am not a lawyer, but I would imagine that one of those declarations of human rights things that we signed a while back trumps some of this, so that if I were to open a "No fat chicks" practice, someone would shut me down damn fast, but if anyone knows differently, message me.

But anyway. Many doctors believe they have this right. I do not believe they do - I believe no such right exists. I am fairly fundamentalist about this: if I had to sum it up in a line I would say you only get a choice about things that won't make your patient's health better or worse.

That's it. Paint your office any colour you like.

But if it makes your patient better (suggesting aspirin is better than lard after a heart attack), you have to do it.

If it makes them worse (putting an IV in so that they can have a lethal injection) you can't.

That's fundamentally it.

You can't erect even the smallest of barriers to improved health for your patient when you could choose not to, because the public expectation is your job consists of exactly the opposite to that. The public, by the way, are the people who pay you, and give you those special car parks out the front of hospitals, and allow you to stick your finger up their bum.

Studies suggest a significant proportion of doctors disagree with me about this issue, but I have investigated this, and there is a reason for this. It is because they are wrong and I am right.

Below is a slightly modified version of the letter that may not see print in the MO. Previous letter-writers has said that it was okay to turn people away "in a compassionate and caring way", and had suggested that no other profession asks people to act against their moral beliefs, so why should doctors?, and lastly that patients could not really complain about this - as long as the doctor was not being discriminatory on the basis of sex, race or sexuality.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I must disagree with several of the points raised in last week's discussion of a "right" to refuse treatment on moral or ethical grounds.

There is an expectation, when a patient goes to see a doctor, that he or she will be treated fairly, regardless of race, colour, creed or sex. I suspect most patients would say that this is not some kind of optional extra, I think it is seen as inherent to our profession. If we are willing to accept the still considerable rewards of our profession, we cannot avoid either the constraints or the responsibilities.

Firefighters do not refuse to rescue drunks (or even arsonists), the police aid and arrest people without asking about the workings of their soul. Our calling is at least as important as theirs, we should not hold ourselves to inferior standards.

Rather than asking if other professions ask people to act against their moral beliefs, perhaps we should ask ourselves why we do not need to adhere to the inherent moral requirements of a profession once we have entered it. If we feel ourselves unable to provide an equal standard of health care to all who come to us, perhaps medicine is not for us. However compassionate and caring we feel ourselves to be, choosing who you will help and who you will send away on any basis than patient need and physician ability is erecting barriers in the way of health-care, rather than opening doors.

And denying discriminatory intent does not somehow make us incapable of acting in a discriminatory manner. If I refuse to treat women who come to me seeking advice about terminations, what equivalent steps should I take to inconvenience a similar number of men? Because if I don't, my "non-discriminatory" approach just happens to impact 100% upon women.

I wonder how many of us, waiting in line at a bus stop, would be happy with being glanced at by the bus driver, as those before and after us were ushered on, and being told "I'm sorry, I can't help you, but there's a number 28 down the road that should be just right for someone like you."

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Anyhow - rant over. I can, by the way, think of things I disagree with that it might be my job to do. One colleague suggested female circumcision - would I perform that, if someone brought their child to me, if I thought that the alternative was an unsterile, backyard procedure? Obviously, this is not so much a medical issue as a housing and accommodation issue, and once we had addressed that part of the issue by putting the people who had brought me the child in prison, we could start really addressing things.

Anyhow. Thanks for listening/reading/whatever.

BDC

I'm smart and happy and over thirty and I really loved Twilight.

2011-08-05T17:15:00.000-07:00

Hail,

I am really trying to keep these blog things short, so below are ten points, explaining why if you don't like Twilight the movie, you don't understand what good fiction is.

1. The Pacific Northwest is one of the most beautiful places in the Americas. It should be illegal for movies to be made in the Pacific Northwest without each and every character at least once every scene looking out the window. Seriously, fucking amazing.

2. Edward is some kind of obsessive stalker dick with one thought in his head. This is because he is a teenaged boy. If a teenaged boy has ever been in love with you, this is what he was like. He thought all about and only about you.

3. Sparkly vampires aren't scary. Actually, they are, in several scenes. But, and this may distress some of my fellow writers - vampires are not scary. I don't know when they stopped being scary, - someone who knows more about the history of this kind of thing than I do could say - but they do not scare us, and they may never scare us again.

This is why, by the way, the marriage of horror and the supernatural is such a difficult thing to do well, and is occasionally done perfectly and frequently done craply. What scares us must be real, and everyone who has not made a deliberate and sustained effort to infantilise him- or her-self knows vampires are not real.

What is scary is a car crash on a lonely night, the neighbour's two black pit-bulls, the masked, the man with a gun, disease and loss and loneliness. This is why there won't be a better writer of horror than Lisa Tuttle any time soon.

4. Twilight articulates our need for strength. It is not enough to be, as Bella's mother is, loveable and approachable, albeit the kind of middle-aged child who abandons her daughter to run off with a children's entertainer. Her dad, on the other hand, is strong.

5. When Bella comes down the stairs in her prom gown, and her father and Edward simultaneously rise to their feet - if you don't see the conflict there between the Old King and the New King, the change in allegiances, the uneasy co-existence of two powerful, significant, erotic relationships - you're not looking.

6. And if that "erotic" with her father strikes you as Ewww, then good. Eww is good. For writers and readers (and watchers of movies), eww (and wow, and almost any inarticulate utterance), is life, meh is death.

7. The vampires in Twilight depart from traditional ideas of what vampires "actually" - I have heard this word used, more than once, in this very context - are like. For the best take on this and other traditional ideas of vampirism, check out the following. Plus the reeking stench and the bloating and stuff.

8. The scene where they are dancing, under the lights, and conveniently everyone leaves. That is what happens. When you are dancing with the one you love, everyone else does disappear.

9. The whole constraint/virginity/self-control thing. Some of this enrages some people - some of the ideas, such as the supernatural preciousness of virginity, are repugnant to many people, and it is difficult to engage even with fiction that appears to support those ideas. That's one of the several squillion reasons I haven't read the Gor books.

But besides confusing the depiction of events in fiction with the advocating of those events in life (why we didn't lock up that sick bastard Nabokov, I don't know), what is distasteful isn't untrue. Constraint or restraint of some kind is fundamental to desire. If Elizabeth and Darcy had snuck out to the stables and shagged in chapter two of Pride and Prejudice, it would be a much shorter and less satisfying book.

The tension, the denial, the heightened, unbearable, white-hot heat of wanting and needing and thinking you'll die without and not getting and still not dying - that's what the movie is talking about. That's what it evokes, that's what moves you. That's what works.

Anyhow. Must go off and finish my novel. Possibly by making all the characters sparkly, possibly not.

BDC

Polished cats and decorative knobs

2011-07-15T17:15:00.000-07:00

Hail,

I drove home last night, trying to remember all the words that don't have rhymes (silver, purple, orange and so on). This seemed to me to be a deficiency that required remedy, so I spent the rest of the trip inventing words.

Below I have listed the first three of the ones I came up with. There are more of these than you would think, by the way. Some words you wouldn't think of as having rhymes do:

"Circle" rhymes with "hurkle", a word that means "to retract all one's limbs", like a startled baby octopus, or a man on a winter morning whose blanket has been suddenly whisked away.

"Wasp" rhymes with "knosp", which means "a decorative knob", one of whom worked in the ED with me for almost a year in 2004.

There do not appear to be rhymes for "bulb", or for "wolve", (third-person singular simple present "wolves", present participle "wolving", simple past and past participle "wolved") meaning "to behave like a wolf", or, when used of an organ, "to make a hollow whining sound like that of a wolf".

That's presumably a pipe organ, the musical kind, to which they refer, not something like a spleen. But isn't that a glorious word? Can you not see the fey young men, all long gone a-wolving?

There is also not a rhyme for "be-fezzed", which probably does not come up in conversation that much.

But anyway - I was coming up with words the English language does not have but clearly needs. I limited myself to the ones I made up to rhyme with colours, because I once lost a quiz night about this and twenty years later I am still bitter.

1. Blorange (BLOH-rinj).

Blorange (adj.): Inconceivable in nature, in quality, as opposed to inconceivable in, say, extent or mass or number, which related to quantity - like a true bluey-orange colour. This is a word that does something that I don't know English does. Correct me if I am am dung-ignorant.

By the way, it did strike me that people who use the word "inconceivable" seem to have a fairly mild idea of what people can conceive. Like the medical question where we ask about "the worst pain you can imagine?" or movies that promise "terror beyond your wildest dreams".

2. Dilver (DIL-ver)

Dilver (adj): This one isn't really that convincing. It refers to albedo. Albedo is reflectivity, but from what I understand it refers to both kinds of reflectivity, diffuse and specular. A very black cat and a very white cat have very different albedoes, specifically they have different diffuse reflectivities, a grey cat has an albedo in between.

However, consider highly reflective, mirror-like cats. A dull, unpolished cat and a highly polished cat, one burnished by the careful application of cat polish, also have different albedos, but they differ in their specular reflectivity. In between black and white is grey, in between a polished and an unpolished surface is a... dilver one.

From dull silver. I told you it wasn't that convincing. But there isn't a word that means "sortof polished" at the moment, and it's got an etymology, and it'd help pre-teenaged boys like I was who wanted to write romantic poetry about elf-girls with hair of finest silver.

And lastly,

3. slurple (SLUR-ple).

I know this one is crap. But let me talk you through it.

What flavour is green cordial?

It's not lime - or if it is, it's lime, Jim, but not as we know it. I did a quick survey and most people say it's green flavoured. But green is a colour. We need names for those flavours that resemble nothing that grew on on any tree or sprouted in any forest on Earth.

I propose adding the prefix "sl-" (for Slushy) to these flavours, to distinguish them both from the colours (because they don't taste green) and the flavours (because they don't taste lime). Instead we have "sleen", and "slellow" and, my favourite, "slurple".

While I'm at it, we need coolth: like warmth, but cool.

And I have been waging a futile war for the last four decades to bring back the second person plural - specifically, "yous". You wait here, yous come with me.

Anyhow. I am meant to write and... do stuff today, and the stuff isn't going to do itself.

Thanks for listening,

BDC

The Grate Werk, and Pangolins

2011-07-08T06:10:00.000-07:00

Hail,

And all the pissing and moaning seems to have had some effect. I have today finished the second draft of the (still untitled) Novel.

The Grate Werk is complete.

Three years.

32 chapters.

133 432 words.

How cool is this?

And yes, it needs some work, but it's third-draft work, tinkering around the edges kind of work, the last bit of embroidery, the lace and stitching and the exact style of buttons. Whereas the second draft, to continue the seamstress analogy, was stitching bits of boiled leather with a bone made out of a walrus tusk, and dried bear-guts for thread.

And the first draft was getting the needle, and getting the thread, and the materials are not obtained lightly.

And I know it is not finished, but for now, a great deal has been done, and there is much rejoicing. I am a forty four year old married man, I am not the world's most raucous rejoicer.

This is a pangolin, King of the Wild, thwarting a lion. I suppose it could be a lioness, but I suppose it could be a pangoliness as well, but who can tell?

But I shall drink cheap port, and sleep in a warm bed, and read something fantastic and happy and brainless and bright and full of sensual indulgence.

"The Rainbow Bright Ponies Get Some," springs to mind, or "Conan the Barbarian Goes Adventuring Again,", or "The Thing on the Doorstep that Wanted to Know if You Liked Fresh Watermelon, because We Got Some and We Can't Eat It All".

And when my poor clueless abused muse next puts her head around the corner, we shall start on volume 3. In which true love is thwarted, ingeniators make machines of war, poisoned honey is quaffed, robots fall in love, and the werewolf half-brother of the Emperor of Byzantium emerges from the shadows.

Seriously, how good are these? Pangolin is from the Malay word pengguling which means (according to Wikipedia) "something that rolls up", or (according to me), "pangolin".

And some time after that, I will return to what I have just finished, and revise it once more and send it away.

Far. Far. Away.

Seriously. I don't care if this does not see the light of day. I am still enjoying it. But may pangolins swing from my soft bits if I look at the bloody thing at all in the next three months.

This person is very talented, and I don't know that even the most dedicated pangolinologists have ever seen a sexier pangolin than this.

Thanks for listening,

Brendan

The trouble with down time.

2011-07-08T02:04:00.000-07:00

Hail,

And a few days into the "not writing" bit and I am thinking, perhaps too much, about language. Anyone who can shed some light on this stuff, contact me.

My characters in my novel live (and on occasion, die) in what we now call England, in the last years of the tenth century.

(Hereafter instead of qualifying place names every time I mention them, I am going to use asterisks - *England, *France, etcetera.).

Anyhow, my characters come from *England, and they have various degrees of difficulty communicating with each other.

This would not have happened in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. In AD&D everyone spoke (from memory) around three languages. They all spoke a common tongue, called (from memory) the Common Tongue. They spoke a particular language peculiar to their region and race - High Forest Elvish, or something. And they spoke, from what I recall, a language that was comprehensible by people who shared their ethical viewpoint - chaotic good people spoke chaotic good with other chaotic good people.

That last one doesn't seem that sensible to me, but it's a fascinating idea - you can imagine the "bad seed" of the family, fundamentally unable to communicate with the other siblings - and I am sure I have forgotten something - I think there was a were-rat language, although I don't know whether there was speaking or squeaking involved.

But either way. In tenth century Europe, things were... complicated.

In *England, one language did not quite rule them all. There were dialects. There were pockets where Danish words and phrases were used than in other places. There may have been survivals of bits of the Breton tongue. There was some ghastly story somewhere, of a group of men cast out of their own land who arrived at another, who went into the new land and took wives, and cut their tongues out, so that their children would only learn the language of the land the men had come from.

But overall, my suspicion is that someone who came from London to Wessex on the King's business could with little difficulty understand and make himself understood.

But there were places in *Germany where you could understand more of what was spoken than in places in *Britain. There was a certain comprehensibility between Old Norse and Old High German and Old English, and also between Church Latin and some of the Romance tongues, and it may have been that someone could pidgin-talk their way from Iceland to parts of Russia and as far south as parts of Italy with less difficulty than some of us would face today.

But it's complicated - I can't easily understand the nurse I work with on the night shift. He is two years out of Scotland, it is a real difficulty. I can understand the vast majority of what I read from the US, but some of it (Octomum?) I am sure evokes a different mental image to me than to most Americans, and that is the start of something being in a different language.

I can read early Modern (Shakespeare), I have to work my way through Middle (Chaucer), I can recognise maybe one word in twenty of Old (Beowulf) English.

My grandparents spoke German - I can say about ten words, but I often say "danke" instead of thanks, possibly because that was how we behave when we saw them.

Twenty years ago I went to France and Italy, and I couldn't understand a word anyone said for the first few days (after that you start to pick stuff up), but I could almost read my way around Italy because a lot of Italian is like a lot of Latin and a lot of Latin comes into English.

And I saw an American sailor pick up a Turkish girl, and I don't know that they had a lot of words in common, and my ex-wife's parents wooed without a common tongue, and later that same year I had a conversation with a drunken Asian man in a youth hostel in London. We were both unshaven, and bleary eyed, and he told me a long story that involved the shooting down of aeroplanes in the second world war, and not a word of it was in English, but I think he thought I understood what he said, and I think maybe I did.

And that's without acrolects and basilects, cants and covert creoles, argots and deliberate obfuscations. Comprehension, incomprehension, miscomprehension - the possibilities are endless.

See, I'm not even writing and it is complicated. It's complicated because I tend to substitute research for action when I am nervous, and I am nervous about this book. And it's complicated because what I am trying to do is have these people living in their lives - living in their houses, speaking their languages, having their struggles - and living in the world that they believed in. Where my characters live there are the threats of Norse and Magyar and Saracen, but also of devils and shape-shifters and weeping things that live in the water, and it is true that an owl, nailed to a doorway, protects those within from lightning, and that a snake grows into a dragon if it is unseen by human beings.

Thanks for listening,

BDC

I hate my novel

2011-07-02T00:38:00.000-07:00

I hate my novel.

No, I do. I hate my stupid novel. I hate my bimbo psychopath heroine. I hate my atheist* Christ-child. I hate my overeducated sodomite apprentice monk and my drunken skank of a soldier and I hate my fool. I hate my sexy leper and my misunderstood dog-headed woman and my earnest and good-natured blemmye. I hate every jot and tittle - and by God, there's a lot of jotting, and it's packed full of tittles - I hate every pointless fight scene and every nine hour conversation. I hate how I can't make up my mind about sex, how I don't know if I'm writing Lord of the Rings or Lord of the Rogerings. I hate every mention of sex I have inserted into and withdrawn from, the text.

I don't have character arcs. Instead of arcs I have that shape that balloons make when you blow them up and let them go. That erratic, circuitous, flatulating course, where much ado is made and much labour extended only to end in a flaccid bladder smacking limply into a wall and falling with a flop at your feet - that's pretty much the entire thing. My characters travel from England via the Channel to France and I hate England and and the Channel and France, and they cross the Alps and descend into Rome and I I hate the Alps and I hate Rome and in their voyages they meet a goat called Rutiger and I don't know a goat called Rutiger but I reckon if I did I'd hate him.

It has all become very clear. I have wasted my talent and time and the indulgence of those who support me. I cannot be trusted to write "bum" on a wall, given spray-can and wall and bum. I probably can't even read. Maybe I am a moron in an institution in the Alps where they keep people who think they can read but can't. The Alpine Unninschlossen Treatment Home for Obviously Really Stupids Retreat, or AUTHORS retreat. SEE HOW I CAN'T EVEN WRITE AN ACRONYM WITHOUT MISUSING THE POSSESSIVE APOSTROPHE?

Perhaps I have had a stroke that has destroyed the part of my brain that distinguishes literary shit from sugar.

There is only one decent thing to do.

I shall fold up my laptop, and take it with me to Tibet, and I shall cast this into a volcano. And I shall go from that place to another place, and cast off my raiment and reason, and my hair will grow long as eagle's feathers, and my nails as long as claws, and I shall live as a goat on the mountainside. Neither shall I study words no more, and if I see a stylus or a quill or a pen, I will eat it.

Two more chapters to go.

BDC

*not like you.

Things I learned from my recent monster-flaming torch reenactment.

2011-06-14T05:09:00.000-07:00

Hail,

In my novel, my heroes fight off - or fail to fight off - some remarkable talented wolves. It's night, and someone picks up a flaming torch and drives the blighters away.

"Hold on," I thought. "How hard is that, anyway? If you're standing in the dark, waving a blazing torch in front of your face, are you going to be able to see anything at all? Won't you blind yourself?"

This question needed answering, so I did it. Myself as the mediaeval monk, Katy as the onlooker, psychic wolf and potential pourer of water onto my seared body. Here is what I found out:

Yes, it's a constant flurry of activity out there. Seriously, this kind of stuff actually takes a bit of time, and by this time any self-respecting wolf would be flossing its teeth with my uvula.

1. Flaming bits of wood are actually quite useful as torches. I did not try them out as weapons, but my guess would be that someone stabbed in the face with one of these would be unlikely to say "that all you got?"

2. By lifting the torch you can actually see quite a way away - not colour, of course, but a startling amount of detail and a fair amount of movement. If you were looking in the right direction at the right time, you could probably see more than one monster-spring away from your throat (results may vary with individual monsters).

3. This is assuming you have dry pine-branches lying around. Ones with pine-cones are great. They do burn rather fast - there is no ligneous equivalent of those eco-friendly spiral lightbulbs that burn for a zillion years.

4. Unidentified Melaleuca spp are surprisingly crap, and I would imagine non-Eucalypts (oak and ash and so on) to be worse. You get enough light to both blind and locate yourself, but piss all else. It's the tactical equivalent of covering yourself in Tabasco and putting a sprig of parsley behind one ear.

I have no idea why there is a big girdery thing in the picture above my head, nor why I appear to have sprouted a bicycle rear-vision mirror from my right parietal bone, but never mind.

5. It takes a bit of time to set dry wood on fire enough to fight off monsters. You can't just stick it in the fire and "whoosh".

6. The best thing for all concerned is if the monsters (psychic voice-stealing wolves, in this case) stick to a pre-arranged schedule. If they just rock up unannounced, and you have to grab a branch out of a fire, you're screwed. Try waving a flaming mallee root around.

7. Actually, don't.

He who fights with googly-headed monsters might take care, lest he also become a googly-headed monster.

8. Blackberry canes are light and burn quickly but give bugger all light and are covered in bloody great thorns which break off in your palm. Back in the day (999AD, Anglo-Saxon England), this was probably an invitation to septicaemia, delirium and death.

9. A little known pyrochemical fact - fires are hot. Also, burns hurt.

10. I have the best wife in the world.

Katy's attitude to this kind of thing.

Thanks for listening,

BDC

(some) People who write books, their mind-fucking boringness

2011-05-28T22:48:00.000-07:00

Hail,

This, by the way, is great coffee. Serious. Moconna Forte, or methyl-Nescafe, or Starbucks Black Label or something. Get some.

Now, where was I? Some of my fellow writers: their boringness.

Right.

(inhales)

If you're a writer, and all you ever use FB for is to alert people to amazing reviews of your work, I'm unfeeding you, or unseeing you, or whateverthefucktheterm is. I am doing this because you have become deeply, deeply, almost bathyspherically boring. If I wanted the FB equivalent of the home shopping channel, I'd watch it. But I don't, and I don't want your ads either. So fuck off. No hard feelings, good luck with your latest project, wishing you well in all things, Brendan.

(exhales).

Seriously.

This is a good reaction, or a bad reaction, depending on what you like.

What I am talking about is this: post after post of "I’m so excited! Volume XIII is for sale here! Squee! Look at the gorgeous cover of this, isn't it gorgeous??? Omg, what a great review here..."
The constant diet of self-promotional posts gets insanely boring insanely quickly, like the friend of a friend of a friend of a friend who calls you up and tries to sell you Amway.

Now - I have arguably the most impressive writers out there on my "friends" list. They write gooderer than you think possible. They writed Anno Dracula, and a Spaceship Made of Stone, and Veniss Underground, and stuff like that. Some of them done the words in Aurealis-award winning works this year, and last year, and will next year. We chat, we correspond, we send each other stuff.

They are not on my list because of their achievements.

They are on because I like them.

They are on because they are interesting people, with interesting opinions, and interesting ways of looking at things.

They say things I want to read.

They don't make me feel like this. This is not a good reaction

And yes, they talk about their work - it'd be bizarre if they didn't. And I like hearing when such and such is being published in Europe, and I share in their joys and rage at their bad reviewers and that kind of thing, and I pick up their stuff when I hear it has come out.

But to be honest, if I'd found a really good author, and I'd friended her, and then every week or so I got a reminded that "My Awesome D and D Adventure is now out in paperback..." and then the next week and so on and so on and that was all that there ever was....

Do you reckon I'd keep wanting to hear this? Or do you reckon I'd be pissed off enough to hide her, and then the next time I was online with thirty edollars to spend, maybe I'd choose to give someone else a go?

A good status update (visual representation). Doesn't have to be this good.

Now, I am not saying you have to be interesting all the time (actually, yes I am – if you’re going to post in a public forum, and you want to tell people things, either what you say (and you) are interesting to them or what you say (and you) are boring. It's a continuum, but unless you're on FB solely for the die-hard devotees, and don't want to make new readers, those are your choices).

And in case I haven’t explained that enough, it’s not the glee I object to. I am your friend, I share your delight, the first, maybe even the thirteenth time. But I know people where all they ever post is some variant on the above, and I want to hurl them into a volcano and throw barrels of batter in after them.

And I am not saying every single post has to be deeply intimate. That, too, is boring. It doesn’t have to be your hopes and dreams, it doesn’t even have to be personal, it could be about an interest of yours. (What, you don’t have any other interests at all? Good luck with the writing). It doesn’t have to be the recipe for your literary secret sauce.

It doesn’t have to be anything at all, except if you want to keep readers, it just has to be “not boring”.

Seriously, we are writers in public fora. We can do better. There has to be some programme to go between the ad breaks. This is, after all, a social network.

But it has to be better than this. This is not good.

I think part of what irritates me about this is that underlying it is an element of contempt. If we communicate with someone, if we post something out to someone, we are asking something of them - their time, their energy, space in their head. We have to give them something back. They are not our bondsmen, sworn to follow us, people who exist to buy when we say buy and celebrate when we say celebrate. They have, oddly enough, their own lives. They will stop being entertained - on FB this is silent, you won't even know if your feed has been hidden - and they will stop listening, and they won't be back.

Anyhow, just my thoughts.

Thanks for reading,

BDC

Great Grand Glorious News

2011-05-23T00:31:00.000-07:00

Hail,
Read this article.

It is four pages long, but it is brilliant. It is four great, grand, glorious pages. Read this article and then go for a walk and think about the implications of it.

(As an aside, this blog post could be subtitled "why I am not a rationalist", but that's just me. Want to argue with me about that? Read the article).

And then go write the great novel.

Or climb the north face of Everest.

Or bed ten thousand men/women/insert whatever wherever, or do whatever it is with the months and months of extra time the writer of this article has just given you free, without charge, without asking.

Seriously. Never Get Into An Argument With Stupid People Who Just Can't See Fucking Reason Again Because Now You Understand What A Fucking Waste Of Time It Is And You Don't Have To Do It Any More Ever Again.

Stop arguing and start writing/climbing/shagging.

Go now. You are free.

BDC

Finland

2011-05-13T23:01:00.000-07:00

Hail,

A few years ago, in a faceless block of apartments, at the end of a hot Queensland summer, a muscular, bearded, Floridian changed my life.

I could go on about it, and to those who know me I do, but I met Jeff Vandermeer at Clarion South in 2009 and along with a small number of other people, he was responsible for me coming to believe that I could write, that writing was something that I could do, that writing could and would and should be done by me.

And he has been instrumental in the development of a number of very very good writers, and his wife, a woman of remarkable acumen, has made the best magazine in human history even better.

All of which I am telling you so that when you (the readers) hear that Jeff and Ann Vandermeer have been to Finland, and have unearthed literary treasures there, then you will rise up with one voice and go forth and buy them. Because that's what I think you should do.

Seriously - Jeff and Ann Vandermeer. Weird Tales. Finland. What more do you need?

Thanks for listening,

Brendan Carson

The way forward.

2011-05-09T15:57:00.000-07:00

Hail,

First off, whenever I write normal looking blog entries on this computer, it turns them into abnormal looking blog entries with vast paragraphs between

the

words, as if I am a teenager writing about my unbearable

loneliness of my life but you

wouldn't

under

stand.

Which I'm not, but if it's done this again, I will rewrite once I get home.

I think I have almost finished my novel.

Seriously. I have maybe twenty thousand words to go, and then it will be done. Off to my wise-eyed wife for proof-reading, and on from there. All I have to do is finish the four short stories that the pilgrims tell, maybe tell how the Pope was seduced by the demon in the forest, and a bit of background history on how he got his bonze head.

Essentially, the book has almost finished because my original plan to delay finishing, and thus always be the guy working on a really good book that unfortunately was too brilliant for you to ever read, has failed.

My original plan was to tell this story in three arcs, wherein my pilgrims travel from a small settlement in Anglo-Saxon England to Rome, and then Rome to Jerusalem, and then Jerusalem to the Edge of the Universe. Unfortunately, that would have resulted in an eight hundred and thirty three page volume one, which would not have fitted on the bookshop shelves and would only have been read by fiddler crabs.

I have finally given up my fight against the fundamental laws of mathematics, and succumbed to reason, and I will now tell the same story in more books.

This actually illustrates what I am doing in terms of story arcs.

So now, the way ahead looks like this.

Volume One: Wexgate (said small settlement), to Dovere. Will end up probably 150 000 words, only about 30 000 to go of the rewrite. Looking for beta readers soon.

Volume Two: Calais to Rome. Rough copy done. Rewrite yet to commence. Won't take as long.

Volume Three: Rome to Byzantium, which is at war with the Bulgars. The Khan of the Bulgars is an able administrator and a fierce genereal. His brother is a werewolf.

Volume Four: the Journey to Jerusalem, the centre of the world, and the Battle at the End of Time.

Volume Five: Eden, which is in the East. And there to settle an ancient quarrel.

Volume Six: By medieaval starship to stand on the Edge of the Universe, and to feel the face of God beneath your feet. And then home again.

(Because I think this is a life's work thing. I love this story. Sometimes I look around and see the world, with the screen on which I type, and the noise of traffic outside, and it is unfamiliar. I immerse myself in saint's tales and medieaval sex and medicine).

Anyhow. I must download an article on lycanthropy in Byzantium, and write the swan sex scene. And maybe see some patients in between my exulting.

Anyhow, thanks for listening. Speak soon,

BDC

MIce and Nerddes

2011-04-30T15:31:00.000-07:00

Well,

The sparkling essay I wrote a few days ago, touching upon mouse plagues, "rules for writing" and some weird-arse dream I had about a wizard, has been eaten by the ether. It enrages me when that happens. All I have left is this picture of Bishop Hatto:

As you may remember (if you either read about it, or are a near-eternal thousand year old monstrum who was alive in the tenth century when he was), he taxed the peasants unfairly and a swarm of mice came and devoured him alive. I also have a number of other mildly amusing mouse pictures which I will cram into some unrelated post later on something completely different.

The mouse plague, by the way, continues here unabated. We have more cats than I am allowed to disclose, but still, this morning I came out and one of the cats was peering at a mouse in the waterbowl, and another was re-enacting (with snarls and rolling about) what must have been her titanic struggle with a small and slightly undernourished looking mouselet.

But anyhow - yesterday was the Mediaeval Fair.

Here is me

Yes, I've got mail.

Apparently, I do not hold the spear like a true Byzantine infantryman. I hold it like a man who has watched too many Jackie Chan movies.

There is a mediaeval re-eneactment group down the road - I am not the kind of person who can join these groups and stay with them, but some time in the next three months I shall drop in on them and be informed.

I also bought books. For mediaeval nerds like myself (nyrdes? nerddes?), these things are like the EOFY sales, and I hied myself hence and got the following:

A book on limekilns and limeburning

A book on Byzantine soldiers

Sabine Baring-Gould on werewolves

The Curley translation of the Physiologus, worth it for the illustrations alone

and a ring-bound herbalry by a woman who lives less than a hundred km from here, who seems to know pretty much everything about herbs that I want to know and is maybe the last piece in the research jigsaw puzzle I have been grappling with the last two years.

And I know you don't grapple with a jigsaw puzzle, but hear me out here.

Aside from that I am trying to get the idea of heroic rebels straight in my head. I suspect most people reading this - myself included - thrill to the idea of a rebellious hero, whereas to my characters, who lived in a different world, the idea meant something else entirely. Aelfewn, Wulfric, Cenwulf and Emma live on the edge of anarchy, most of them have seen violent death and anarchy before the book started (and the one that hadn't sees it by chapter eight), and to them, the rebel would have been maybe a less enticing idea.

It may be that rebels are wonderful, glorious, intoxicating creatures, as long as they live a decent distance away, or are rebelling against someone comfortably separate from us. If Black Agnes spits in the eye of authority, drinks gin straight from the bottle, swaggers and cries "Every cur for themselves, and the devil take the hindmost!", she may make a fascinating hero in a story, but you don't want her picking up the kids after school. Rebels are good when they oppose evil Baron Malamorde, bad when they play NIN at three AM outside your house.

I had to put this in, it's some woman wearing a head-dress made of mice.

Maybe it's a form of psychic pontillism - the further we are from rebels, the more attractive they become. But I think it's about constraint - a lot of the boundary crossers I knew when I worked in the public methadone clinic were deeply conservative in their social and political views, a few tens of kilometres away I have friends who talk a lot about their tattoos and listen to Marilyn Manson and live in gated communities.

Myself, I find the idea that I am not a rebel deeply un-nerving. I write scary stuff, I say, inside my head is spooky, my rebellion is internal. And a few months ago I called a friend to help me break out of a car-park, and there was that one time where if the cops had turned up, we would have been seriously screwed, hey.

Uh huh.

Anyhow - I will leave this until later, before I say something I don't mean to say.

Thanks for listening,

BDC

Madness

2011-04-23T16:17:00.000-07:00

Hail,

This would actually be an easy post to write if it wasn't so hard.

What I mean by that is, a post about writing and mental illness should be easy.

Yadda yadda mental illness, writing, yadda yadda methodologically dubious relationship.

Cut and paste romantic historical pseudofactoid about tragically misunderstood genius writer of choice.

Add random, insightful-sounding homily about mental illness medicated by drugs/alcohol/sex - good for an image search, anyway.

Close with sententious "Prozac or Proust" paragraph - How many Great Works would have been lost if tragically misunderstood genius writer had been medicated.

Easily done. The work of half an hour, three quarters if I checked Facebook.

Why can't I write that?

This is not the forum to go into great detail, but the relationship between writing and mental illness is one that's important to me. The relationship is complicated - it's easier to make facile generalisations. But symptoms of mental illness do seem to be relatively commonly detected amongst those who write.

I am not saying writing causes teh crazy, or craziness causes teh writing. There are multiple, multiple factors involved, and there are arguments that the perceived relationship is illusory - that articulate people who explore their own feelings of distress and fear are going to be diagnosed at a higher rate than your archetypal strong silent type.

But I have met strong silent writer types, and the other day we had a guy around to fix the roof who explored his own feelings of distress, anger and fear from about eight to twelve without a break, so I remain at least suspicious that there is a relationship.

Plus, a significant number of my writery friends have been affected by mental illness. Obviously, the only possible thing they all have in common is writing....

Anyhow - if there is a relationship, why?

I think part of the reason is there is an element of self-selection with writing and anxiety, or depression, or paranoia. If things are going poorly in that Outside World we writers have all been told about, if there are significant difficulties in, say, social intercourse, or adhering to a regular schedule, or dealing with routine, then writing may look more appealing than it otherwise would. Those symptoms may make you more likely to choose a career as a writer.

You don't have to be crazy to work here, like they say, but it helps.

That does not mean that everyone who finds, say, dealing with other people difficult, or who finds mindless drudgery of a nine to five job to be... mindless drudgery is suffering from a mental illness - I do not believe that at all.

But it may be that, if you are finding unprotected social intercourse significantly difficult, or if it is becoming increasingly difficult, or your capacity to deal with frustration and focus attention is poor, or deteriorating, or if your thoughts are intrusive enough and odd enough to stop you doing other things than writing - then there may be something wrong.

And maybe you should get that checked out.

Whether or not you do, of course, is up to you. What you do about it, again, that's overwhelmingly up to you. Whether you take the medications, whether you go to the counselling - unless things are significantly bad what you do or don't do about what are, after all, your symptoms in your head where you live, remains solely your concern. The exceptions to that, the times when other people are able to obtain some kind of legal control over that, are very very few, and in order for these powers to be evoked, you have to be very ill indeed. Lives, specifically, must be in danger.

The reason I say this is because a lot of people are afraid of seeking treatment. Their fears are multiple, and I don't think all of them can be assuaged or dismissed or "explained away", but two of the big ones are loss of freedom and loss of creativity.

Loss of freedom - that's pretty much as I wrote above. It is very, very difficult to do this as a doctor. I am made acutely aware every day of how much the government and private enterprise don't want to spend on mental health. As I said before, you have more to fear in this country from under-treatment than over-treatment.

Loss of creativity - actually, also see above. You choose. No-one "puts you on" medications any more than anyone "puts you on" an all-pastry diet. If you agree to start something, I'd give it a good go, I'd at least give any medications you choose to start (which, by the way, are the sole indicated treatment for relatively few conditions, they are part of the answer for some of the people some of the time) a few months trial, side effects permitting, but - in the end, you choose. If you are happier and more creative with the treatment, I'd keep at it. if you're happier and more creative without, I'd tell my doctor, and negotiate the safest way to stop. If it's happy on one side vs creative on the other - weigh things up. People are different.

But treating mental illness does not cause the muse to flee. I say this almost at the hundred thousand word mark of my novel. When I was sick, very very sick, I could not even read. That remains one of the more frightening things about mental illness, and it's why I am determined to hold those symptoms at bay by any means fucking possible.

And I know many, many writers, people who have been treated, and now write, several professionally, one or two very successfully, people who would not ever go back.

And lastly, I see the other side. I see people brought in when it's all gone wrong. Jonathon Frantzen can and does writes beautifully about surviving depression, David Foster Wallace cannot. What we do is craft as much as art, and madness, true, malignant madness, will take away your craft, and then your art, and then you.

And we want to read your books. So if it's you, or someone you love, go get that checked out.

Thanks for listening,

BDC

Pangur Ban

2011-04-22T21:04:00.000-07:00

Hail,

And I am still working on the "madness" post, in between cleaning out the library, so that will not be today.

How cool is this? That's a rhetorical question - it's damn cool. It's an illustration for a mediaeval cat tarot card pack.

I also must pass (and not in the kidney-stone sense), one hundred thousand words of the Grate Werk by Wednesday morning, or I must frottage the national leader of the conservative party - Tony Abbott. Believe me, no Elysian Fields entice me half as much as avoiding that.

In the meantime, here is the Robin Flowers translation of Pangur Ban", a ninth century Irish monk's poem about his white cat.

I and Pangur Bán, my cat

'Tis a like task we are at;

Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
'Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.

'Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur's way:
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

'Gainst the wall he sets his eye

This is what our cats do all day. I think those big white oval things are eggs, laid by a hen or whatever and I think there is no hen or whatever in the picture, because the cats have eaten it.

Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
'Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night

Turning darkness into light.

More once I have finished these next two chapters.

Also, very cool.

Thanks for listening,

Brendan

Scrivener's back - and he's not happy...

2011-04-18T12:38:00.001-07:00

Hail,

This is the first in a series of my not-specifically-related-to-you, I-haven't-examined-you-and-don't-know-what's-wrong-with-you, if-you're-sick-maybe-you-should-you-know-see-a-doctor vague and disorganised thoughts about medical stuff that may stop or impair your writing.

First off - scrivener's back. Scrivener's back, known to the entire rest of the world as musculoskeletal thoracic back pain, is that unpleasant, often quite severe pain, deep and cramping, between the shoulder-blades, that gets worse when you take a deep breath.

(That does not mean, of course, that your severe back pain is musculoskeletal thoracic back pain. Your severe back pain is probably caused by an alien baby gnawing on your thoracic vertebrae like a teething ring. Go get it checked out).

There are many causes of back pain.

Basically, this is caused by and exacerbated by long periods sitting, particularly in a round-shouldered head-forward, "I have to finish this fucking thing or I will die" position.

What causes this - besides alien babies - is chronic strain of the ligaments between the vertebra and occasionally problems with the joints where the ribs join the spine. Either or both of these problems involve inflammation, which involves pain.

What can you do? Good posture - seriously. It may sound like an eighteenth century idea, but it may well be that hunching over the keyboard like a mountebank sunk in brutish coxcombry, head protruding and eyes blinking in the manner of an addle-pated catch-fart is neither stimulating to the soul or enticing to the muse.

Portrait of the writer at his physical peak, age 31. The trilogy was never finished.

Kyphosis (a hunched back), rounder shoulders and a neck sticking forward rather than up seems to be associated with this kind of pain. Obviously, it's hard to tell which came first, the posture or the pain (you can't really compel people to slump around for a couple of months) but people who hunch have pain, so if you try not hunching, maybe you won't have pain. Consciously adjusting posture, having a decent chair and strengthening those muscles all seem to be associated and in some cases cause relief of those symptoms.

The chair is important, by the way. I write on an old church pew. I thought it would in some way evoke the lives of the mediaeval monks whose stories were so important to my novel. It did. It also gave me a pretzeloid posture with the strong sensation of a stone gargoyle perched between my scapulae. Learn from my fail.

What else? Exercise. You don't have to oil yourself up down the gym and try to deadlift a Volkswagen, but the horrible truth is a decent programme of anaerobic and aerobic exercise will keep you productive longer.

Don't do anything! I've fucked my back!

Here is a link to some gentle and effective exercises you can do. They are easier to do if you do them before you get the thoracic musculoskeletal back pain, rather than afterwards, because if you do it before, you don't have to carry the weight of the bitterness that the reason that you aren't writing is because you didn't do anything to protect it.

There are, by the way, two kinds of people in the world - those who will be able to look at the illustrations for exercise five without comment and those who will not.

The lucky hunchback. I don't know what those sticks are.

So, that's preventing musculoskeletal thoracic back pain. As I said, Yadda yadda, me not you, you could be have an alien inside you, call an ambulance. Another reason this is not specific medical advice, because for all anyone knows, the real Brendan is tied up in the corner and I, Frenzy Straitjacket-McLoon, have coated myself in Nutella and am now feverishly hammering away at the keyboard, telling people exactly what the weasels have in store for us all if we do not placate them. If you have symptoms enough to cause you to wonder "what's the worst this pain in my back could be?"* see a doctor.

A comfortable mattress is also important.

Next time is either writer's cramp, your fetching pallor which maybe is a sign of approaching cripplitude or the whole mad thing.

Thanks for listening,

BDC

*Cancer. Specifically pancreatic cancer. Or a thoracic aortic aneurysm, depending on whether a slow painful death is worse than a single, catastrophic loss of a couple of fistfuls of neurons that it turned out, were rather important.

Help

2011-04-17T15:10:00.000-07:00

Hail,

Help me out here.

First off, I have started writing this and walked away about ten times so far. A smarter man would say that was some kind of warning sign, a bold, lack and yellow indicator of fuckedness ahead. But if there was some kind of warning sign, you will have to imagine I was texting at the time and didn't see it.

I told a friend of mine about TGN (either The Great, or the Grim, or the Ghastly God-awful God-forsaken Novel, depending upon my mood at the time). He's a doctor, not a writer. I tend to get fairly blithery when describing The Novel, and one thing I said was how it had four, like, main characters, but not so much heroes, well, yeah, they probably were, but like two of them were women, sortof, early teens, but of course socially the same categories of childhood could not be said to yadda yadda, and two of them were men.

"Two women?" He said. "Swords, armour, adventuring, that kind of thing?"

I nodded.

"Doomed" he said. "As serious literature, anyway."

Aethelfraeda, conquerer of England (artist's impression).

I stared.

"All this warrior women, nipple breastplate stuff is historically ludicrous," he said (I am not making this up). "It's coming out of white male guilt, because you're wearing t-shirts sewn by little brown women in sweatshops. That or it's a vestigial remnant of when you were trying to jump someone in uni by showing her how touchy-feely you are."

Yes, it's a hoot, my new job. This guy is one of the four co-owners and thus the supervisors of the practice.

"Everything you have said is correct except the words," I said, after a few seconds. "For a start, Aethelfredea of West Sussex - ,"

"Tish," he said. "Female. Heroes. Can't. Work."

And then he outlined his argument, which I have reproduced below.

1. In reproductive terms, men are a high risk, high return "strategy". They quite possibly won't reproduce at all, but they may be hugely successful. Woman are blue chip, low risk, low return.

2. If this is true, you can expect each sex's behaviours to be hardwired to reflect this. You'd expect to see more men engaging in risky behaviour (exploring, warfare, crime), gaining the benefits of that success (leadership in practically every field) and suffering the penalties of failure (higher rates of imprisonment, deaths on the battlefield, etc.)

3. Stories are an expensive good to produce. You all have to take time off from mammoth-wrangling. You have to feed the storyteller. Someone has to shag him (and why him? see above). The fact that storytelling survives shows it must be valuable, that we must have evolved not only to tell stories but to love hearing them.

4. Who benefits from stories about men who adventure? Everyone - because when they hear about Thragnar Thewstrong and his struggles, we learn about the pluses and minuses of boundary-riding behaviour for people who do the boundary riding behaviour, and their mates and children. We learn of trust and treachery, war and peace, theft and vengeance.

5. Who benefits from Thragnarina's stories? Vastly fewer people. There are fewer women doing that kind of stuff. Those that do are seen as aberrant - and often not in a good way. They serve no evolutionary useful purpose.

6. Thus we don't like stories about them as much.

Now, I have multiple, multiple difficulties with this argument.

I don't believe in hard-wiring, and neither does modern mol biol.

I think that if you call heroism exposing oneself to great risk, doing or enduring something (this will sound wanky) for others who depend on you, then most day-to-day heroes are women. I can see he's using the word hero in a different fashion, but still, I think that's important.

A story that doesn't work for you. If you're dead.

I think, in terms of dramatic efficacy, no-one in LOTR was half as heroic as Eowyn (Sam second).

I think we have to distinguish here between things to which are "natural" (huge issues there) and ethical, in that it's presumably "natural" for me to piss in the street, and cheat, and steal, and I try to try not to do those things. Thus, we don't have to retell Thragnar's tale, just because it was primetime listening back in the day.

There are others who can put this into better English than I can, but writing something that replicates the same shit we've been telling our girls and boys for millennia, in an age where axe-play occupies less of the curriculum is wrong, and conservative, and boring. Part of being a writer is knowing we can do better.

What I find frustrating here is that I am grossly undereducated. There are people whom I know who could rip this argument to shreds, but stuff like even Feminism for Dummies was apparently not considered important in medical school. Instead we got lectures on insulinomas. In my daily practice over the last ten years I have dealt with huge numbers of women whose pathologies have been defined by, and often derive from the kyriarchy, (which would have included, and still does include, me). I have never seen an insulinoma.

Wouldn't you like to get hot and sweaty on the mat with her, boys? No, because I've had this done to me, and it fucking hurts.

But I know he is right about men - specifically boys - and risk, and damage. I know that despite what I learned in the eighties, there is no blank slate, that there are inherent tendencies, that the distribution of behaviours and thus cognitions must be in some way non-random. I tend to give anyone who questions the loftiness of my motives a bit of stage-time, because they are usually right. And Emma, my spear-wielding commander of men, is my favourite character ever, and she has struggles that none of the male characters will ever have, but I wonder sometimes if I have not over-done her martial prowess, her blood-thirstiness, her efficacy, as a consequence of my own inner doubts about this.

And I've had this done, only I didn't get my hands up as fast as the woman in the blue trunks, and that was all she wrote.

I don't know. I used to work in the juvenile prisons (or, as they call them, "training centres", because they're where they train kids for the adult prisons. Boys and girls (and I know there's a lot more going on), but there was and there always had been a lot more boys.

And there's a cave somewhere in Europe. I can't remember exactly where it is (and I am aware that that does rob the anecdote of much of its power), but it's a cave that during the late Auelian was inhabited by generations of human beings. We know, because there's bones and stuff. The front of the cave, obviously, opens out to the light.

But the back stretches back into the darkness, tens and tens and (I believe) tens of metres, and then the floor disappears into a chasm (this is pre-EMT times, by the way - the drop would have been effectively unsurvivable). You can imagine the tribe sitting around in the cave, sometimes glancing over their shoulders, maybe averting their eyes, knowing that at their back was the dark space from which no-one had ever returned.

We don't know no-one ever returned, of course, but we know something about those who didn't. At the base of the cliff there are tens of skeletons, the remains of those who had gone a little further into the dark than was known.

They are all the bodies of young males, between ten and twenty years of age.

I know, by the way, there are multiple interpretations that can be put on that evidence, this is not my field or expertise. But most of them don't end too well for the boys.

Back to reality. This pretty much says everything I want to say. We succeed as a society when these stories can be told.

Seriously, I think I am right, and Doc Neverwroteafreakingbook-Butsomehowknowsallaboutit is wrong. But I would appreciate anyone's thoughts.

Thanks for listening, and I would appreciate any ideas.

BDC

PS: This is apparently true, but I haven't looked it up: What proportion of all your ancestors were female?

About two thirds. The further you go back, the higher the chance of someone turning up on both sides of your family tree - of being , say, great-great-grandparent Sam on your mother's and your father's side. Apparently (see above caveat) the chances are much greater that that person will be male - the same guy could be your great-uncle and your great-grand-dad, or something similar. Correspondingly there are far fewer individual men in your family tree).

WFC 2013.

2011-04-13T12:33:00.000-07:00

Readers,

What earthly Paradise is this?

Can such beauty be?

For here, five miles of festive ground

with domes and palaces are found,

And there are towers carved, and fluted spires,

Which do evoke the ancient orient...

Speak I of fabled Samarkand? The incense-gardens of Trebizond? Whispered Taprobane?

No, it's Brighton. Brighton, East Sussex, dialing code 01273. In the times about which I am writing, by the way, Brighton (or Bristelmistune, as the locals called it), paid its rent in herring. Four thousand herring a year.

Anyway, it's Brighton, and it's the site of the World Fantasy Convention 2013, and it's where Katy and me and my book are going to be.

See you there.

If you like this, you'll certainly like reading my blog. And my book. Opening line is "It was a dark and stormy night in 999 AD. Thunder crackled and lightning boomed over gloomy, mysterious, accursed Saint Hudgen's nunastery. Inside, sexy sister Vanessa unzipped her chemise..."

Want to read more? Buy my book. Or get therapy.

By the way, spoke to Angela Slatter, who Knows, about how to blog more effectively, and she suggested some things that I should try. She did not suggest the following:

Sexy Vanessa Hudgens to star in nude leaked World Cup Golf movie with Charlie Sheen, Kim Kardashian, Yuri Gagarin?

That was all my idea. The reason I wrote was that's a fair few of the most popular search terms over the last few days, so if I tag this (I only found out about the existence of these things a few days ago), people will read. Gagarin would presumably be surprised to see the company he keeps nowadays.

Anyhow, Angela Slatter suggested wise things, and I am going to be doing them. This, she assures me (along with good writing, and reading, and a lot of other stuff she mentioned) should bring the metaphorical boys to the figurative yard....

I actually find this picture rather moving.

Thanks for listening,

BDC

Binge. Purge. Snack.

2011-04-09T17:35:00.000-07:00

Hail,

And this will be a brief post, because this is Sunday, my sole actual day off, and I have much to do.

First off, I went to a workshop last week as part of GP training. It was a two day workshop about Self-care for Doctors - about the importance of having other things in your life, being creative, doing regular physical activity, obtaining and maintaining strong relationships to other people. Unfortunately, it was over a hundred miles from home, so I didn't get to see Katy that night, or write, or go to the gym, and I slept on a mattress on someone's floor.

This has nothing to do with anything I am writing about, but how cool are these? If I am ever at a book-signing, I want to wear these and see if anyone says anything. They may say something, of course, about my long eyelashes and my eye-makeup, but that's not the point.

But it was good.

One thing they talked about was snack writing, as opposed to binge writing. Anyone who reads this probably already knows how to write, but people who write in a disciplined, daily fashion, (as opposed to those who await the arrival of the muse), get a lot more done. Specifically, for people who write academic papers, they get about two academic papers more a year. I don't know what that translates to creatively, but the central distinction remains.

Sean Williams, our tutor for the first two weeks of Clarion South 2009, arriving at the workshop. Writers groups are an effective way to hone your craft.

This may seem excessively Apollonian rather than Dionysian - Apollo was the God of order and light and mathematics, Dionysius was chaos, frenzy, passion - but the thing about Dionysius, the god who unties, the giver of unmixed wine, the outsider - is he does not arise out of chaos. There were regular Dionysian festivals. Dionysius was not worshipped via some people happening to bump into each other and being seized with the need to run masked and naked through the streets tearing at the flesh of others - although that'd be an interesting religion, too. If His symbol is the vine, twisted and writhing and forever unfurling, nourishing and beautiful and intoxicating, then vine grow out of not only the black earth, but also regular sunlight, and careful watering.

Anyway - look at this. It is the best thing I have seen on the internet recently:

1066

The video, by the way, contains footage of far and away the sexiest embroiderer I have ever seen. I understand the group of "sexy embroiderers I have ever seen" is not particularly large, but be this as it may, this woman is the sexiest.

Not as sexy as Katy, of course (pictures to follow).

I wrote to the people behind this and said it was brilliant because it treated these stories as what they were - important, exciting and sexy. The people said that was the magic triad. Someone else suggested that the woman here was dressed as Matilda of Flanders - and what teenage boy did not lie awake at night, dreaming erotically of Matilda of Flanders?

Criticism at a writers group may be harsh, but must always be fair.

But the weird thing is I got a bit teary watching it, which is, as I said, really weird. And this may be because I am a dangerous hysteric. Alternatively it may be because I saw someone responding to the same things I love, treating them with - and this sounds weird even now - respect. Thinking that this stuff was important enough to want to know about.

Being a writer necessitates treating as important stuff that other people at best find interesting in a quirky, anecdotal kind of way, but that they find essentially pretty trivial. To writers, these facts are of fundamental importance - to me, the fact that lepers were able to watch the elevation of the Host in church only through a hagioscope, literally "holy-scope", is so fascinating, says so much, that I am impelled to put it into words. For other people, it's not the same.

Light refreshments may be served.

And being a writer of stuff that deals with mediaeval religion in a sympathetic way, I suspect, interposes another membrane, another layer between me and anyone else I talk to about this.

Anyhow. Those videos rock, as you young folk say. Now, off to read about the mediaeval underground, and to write.

Thanks for listening,

BDC

Medicine

2011-04-04T12:52:00.000-07:00

Hail,

Alexander of Tralles (6th century), said "The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command."

I don't have a motto in my job, but if I did, that'd be it. Patients tend to flinch when I wheel the mangonel into the waiting room, but what the heck.

Now, I was going to do a post about Thudicum III of Vulsellum and his physical chastisement of his son after the disastrous Battle of Tenaculum (imaginatively entitled "I whip my heir back and forth"*), but instead, here is something really brief on mediaeval medicine.

Because today I have to sit with my supervisor for an hour and discuss paediatric respiratory diseases, and if I squint, I can just see her in a mediaeval abbess' head-dress, ordering me to be dragged off to some kind of stocks or something. Peine et fort duer won't be in it.

So - a cut and paste from an article on early mediaeval medicine:

A mangonel. A therapeutic mangonel.

How to tell if a sick person will die? One way was copied somewhere in France around the year 800. ‘Take the tick of a black dog in the left hand and go into the sick room, and if, when the sick man sees you, he turns himself towards you, non euadit [he’s “a goner”]’. Alternative techniques immediately follow. One of them requires wiping the sick person with a lump of lard and throwing it to a dog in an unfamiliar neighbourhood (or an unfa-miliar dog: the Latin is ambiguous). If the dog eats the lard, the patient will live.

Now, what to think of this? I guess - and like I said, I am an absolute amateur - there are a number of alternatives.

1. Mediaeval people were stupid.

Go back to the beginning, start again. Or don't, and we'll go on without you.

2. None of these ideas make sense.

True, but irrelevant. It doesn't make a lot of sense to allow a gang of unknown masked men to poison you and cut you open, but I've assisted at gall bladder surgery. Radiotherapy, immunisations, giving people with faltering hearts tablets of stuff because we noticed it killed cows... the list is terrifying. And when I turn on the electric blanket at night, I sleep on live wires.

Therapeutic trebuchets. Several of them, suggesting some sort of mediaeval public health programme or something.

3. This stuff is crap. They must have died at vast rates.

Actually, while they had significant problems that we in the First World didn't, and while some death rates were vastly in excess of ours (deaths in infancy and childbirth, infectious diseases), they were on average fairly tall, and they survived a hell of a lot, and some of them seemed to die quite old.

4. Mediaeval people had knowledge of herbal and other remedies that was surprisingly sophisticated and advanced, and in many ways the equal of our own.

This will make me unpopular, but I do not believe this in any but the weakest sense. My strong suspicion is that, had we been born in the late 960s, both my wife and myself would have died in infancy. My mother had what sounds like perinatal sepsis, and nearly died in Perth in the late sixties. Had my wife managed to survive her mother's labour, she would have been almost blind by now (she has had laser eye surgery), and crippled, and would have been carried off by one of the several plagues that swept the land like tsunami.

Christ knows what's going on here, but I think it's Archimedes, whose pen was actually mightier than a shipload of swords. "Give me a lever and a place on which to stand, and I will really freak those bastards out".

I don't want to labour these points, but they are unavoidable. I don't believe most remedies worked. I believe some did, and I believe a lot of people who were treated by doctors got better, because a lot do anyway, and I believe that in certain cases, therapies worked. Pilgrimages removed you from the source of your dietary deficiency, alterations in diet may have done the same, from memory some baths contained lithium, which treats bipolar disorder.

And makes you vomit if you get the tablets wet, but that's another matter.

But I don't know that the dog-eating-lard test would have worked. I can meander towards the idea that a dog would not eat lard reeking of sickness, and maybe that was behind it, but I see what our dogs eat, and I am unconvinced mediaeval dogs would be any more fastidious. I think people did stuff, because it seemed to make sense and seemed to work, and other people wrote it down, and things accreted, and went on, and there was good and bad, and help and harm, all interwoven in some vast snarl of thought and deed.

This is a dalek carved out of a pumpkin.

In the Anglo-Saxon era, if you were struck on the head, and your head was dented in, and you lost consciousness, it may be that the doctor who came by would cut a hole in your skull, lift up a flap to relieve the pressure, and you would heal. There are skulls that show people survived multiple surgeries like this.

But a few feet way from your unconscious body another doctor is working his way through the fallen. When he sees someone unconscious, with a dent in the head, he lays a plant of wood beneath the feet and beats on it with a hammer - to cure them. Which would in no way help, and could only shorten what little time the fallen had left. You'd be better off with the priest.

Anyhow. This means room to manoeuvre in my story, back to which I should get.

Will write again soon, thanks for listening.

BDC

*That was a joke. There's a pop song of a very similar name. And all those names are surgical instruments.

Twenty two.

2011-04-02T18:01:00.001-07:00

Hail,

Here is a partial list of what I have done to chapter 22 over the last two years. The corresponding list - the things that chapter 22 has done to me - would be a shorter and considerably darker read.

Okay. Wrote original, probably three thousand word chapter. Added nun. Added nuns. Removed nuns. Added backstory. Shifted ending back. Added Pallid Northern Stranger Dude.

Replaced nuns. Removed horses that everybody had inexplicably obtained, having been walking the last thirty thousand words or so and now rode casually, expertly and without comment.

Added vague reminiscing by then POV character (Blonde Peasant Hottie). Modified same to co-incide with, as opposed to flatly contradict, events of preceding chapter. Added, for reasons that seemed to make sense at the time, strange, high-pitched Squeal of Doom. Squeal of Doom was one that only POV characters could hear, and caused them to make cryptic but irritatingly vague Cassandran prophecies of something bad maybe happenening to someone sometime soon.

Changed POV character, re-wrote from POV of Sexy Crippled Princess Babe. Cut 2500 words from now 7000 word chapter.

Turned nuns into mutant demon nun things. Eyes on fingers, tongues and teeth inside ears, etcetera. Went out, stared at chickens, dug in garden. Removed mutant nun demon creatures, anything else that evoked (to my mind) Mr Potato Head.

Considered writing chapter in first instead of third person. Weighed up again relative merits of same. Reconsidered and actually sketched out plan for rewriting entire book (200 000 words, three years) in first person, four different first people, one insane, one speaking old Danish, another polysyllabic polyglot. Pallid northern dude would speak proto-Germanic, hottie and babe a variant of Anglish, other POV character (Hypersexual Monastic Dude, currently being rescued from death by a chicken) to use Latinate terms, language akin to mediaeval French.

How I wanted to cut words from my manuscript

Reflected on many advantages of this style of storytelling - authenticity, unreliable narrator, me being like Italo Calvino, but shorter and working in Elizabeth. Came to accept that disadvantages of new plan - rewriting entire novel, self (and to a lesser extent reader) having to learn two extinct and one made up language - seemed to outweigh advantages.

Reintroduced demon nun.

Rebooted entire desecration of altar scene. Revised desecration, went for more minimalist look. Cut little dolls that walk about by themselves, like Smurfs but sinister. Really sinister.

This was actually my favourite comics character for a long time. In a deeply, deeply transmogrified form, she probably underlies my two female characters. But without breast armour.

Grappled dramatic need for candle-light in this scene, also logistic need for it to occur in daylight. Moved altar from indoors to outdoors.

Moved start of chapter forward and end of chapter back - bad writing not being made less bad by being spread over more words.

Drove along country roads at night, turning things over in head. Reflected on words of Michael Chabon. "Writers choose". Maybe should choose other job.

Moved scene again from cave (inexplicably situated in middle of clearing) to cave (situated sortof in some rocks). Changed, I am not making this up, POV character a third time to Pallid Northern Dude.

Introduced air taut with erotic tension, squealing, toothless red-headed monk.

Cast demon nun into Hell, never ever ever to return.

Thought deeply. Left chapter for months.

Hold on - did he say "put more fire into my writing" or...

Came back. Rewrote. Let arc form. Placed fear, erotic tension, faithlessness as backbone of chapter. Began to feel what characters would do.

Clarified erotic tension. There is no desire without fear. Rewrote. When you desire, you watch, you gaze, you stare.

Reintroduced stripped down theological speculation - gave me goosebumps, seemed to work.

Hammered dialogue. Allowed Sexy Crippled Princess Babe to speak as if commander of hardened veterans, which she is, not mediaeval surfer babe (baebe?), which she is not.

Made erotic tension tenser and... eroticker. Had mediaeval surfer babe play with idea of killing pallid northern stranger, but stop because somewhere - and this was the first time I felt this - somewhere she plans to get him into bed.

Connect this with events of prologue, foreshadow events of end of second book. Say something now that will mean nothing now, mean everything later on. Cut, cut, cut.

Went back to the start. Cut, cut.

Finished. Today. At last.

I attended Clarion South 2009 Writing Camp - Friday nights we'd go down the pub. This is an actual photo of how we looked.

I think this chapter can work. I think it cam bear the weight of what is required of it. We have less spectacle, more loss. Less bloodshed, deeper wounds. Less explained, more felt, less clarity, more fear and guilt and glamour.

This had been the hardest chapter from the very beginning, and it is done.

Anyway.

Next post - I am trying for one of these posts a week - I will do something - either video or text - on medieval medicine.

Thanks for listening,

Brendan

Scry hard

2011-03-31T14:07:00.000-07:00

Hail,

And here, for my countless ~~hundreds~~ ~~dozens~~ couples of readers, is a video. I did it for a website called Medievalists.net (they did ask), and I do mention the book at the end.

They wanted their readers to discuss what the Middle Ages meant to them and how they "got into them".

Click on my link, ye discerning, and despair.

Here are some pictures, sortof of the kind of thing the video contains:

Me and my mighty sword.

Me and three of my friends dressed as Invisible Men.

It also contains chickens.

As I maybe said, I am looking at doing two to three posts on this a week - I also do two or three a week on my deeply secret pseudonymous medical blog, which I can't link to here. If anyone wants anything on this blog - posts on particular topics, questions about something, videos - do feel free to ask. I am thinking about doing something on mediaeval medicine later, if anyone's interested.

My muse, when Katy's not here.

Thanks for listening,

BDC

Patty Jansen turns my head around (pictures to follow)

2011-03-28T14:45:00.000-07:00

Well,

I just read something remarkable.

It's here, by a woman called Patty Jansen. I saw the article and I thought "who is Patty Jansen?" and then I saw you could click on a button labeled "who is Patty Jansen?" and I found out. It's that kind of blog.

Anyway, Patty Jansen writes fiction, and gets it published, and she has a blog. The entry in question is about writing and getting published, and having a blog. I can't prove that she knows what she's talking about, but she does write fiction, and get published, and yadda yadda.

And what she wrote has given me new ideas about blogging.

Not these kind of new ideas. These new ideas are bad.

See, what she says is if you're writing a book, and you want people to read it, you have to start three years ago. You have to let people know that it's coming, you have to make people want it. You must lure, ensorcel, dance erotically in a revealing costume while drunken men, their faces in shadow, holler and wave fistfuls of money at you.

Actually, she didn't say that last bit, that was me. I don't know where that came from at all. It wasn't her.

Anyway, she says you have to do this. Not "have to" have to, of course. You are perfectly free to hunch in a cave in the dark, hissing and throwing handfuls of poo at anyone who disturbs you in your lair, but you may not sell a lot of books like that. So after some consideration, I have decided to roster the hissing and poo-throwing to alternate weekends, and to resurrect my blog which you are reading, and which I am writing about my writing.

Don't, says Patty Jansen. It will be boring.

Not this kind of boring. This kind of boring is good.

See, I think she has nailed what has stopped me blogging about my writing for... months. Reading about writing is - often - blood-coagulatingly boring, and writing about writing for me is worse. I think I will die if I have to read one more example of "I did how many thousand words this week, but to be honest, I'm not sure about Januvia's motivation in this bit, and if her feelings for Qlara are reciprocated, and whether the narrative structure can sustain ohJesusChristLordtakemenow".

And it can be, to be frank, obsessively self-referential and insular, and you end up doing what I'm doing now, writing about writing about writing in a literary version of a Klein bottle, and soon you are averting your own eyes from the horror. And how's anyone meant to read what you cannot?

The solution, Patty Jansen says, is to make it interesting (I know - crazy talk, isn't it?).

Write interestingly about your writing.

Write about yourself.

If you have something else in your life - a job, a garden, people you love - write about it.

If your book touches on something - Anglo-Saxon history, gender fluidity, Mars - write about that.

If there is more to you than how many thousand words this month, write that - not only, but also.

And then, if you write interestingly enough, it will happen.

So.

Klein (pronoiunced Kline) wine bottle. When you pein for some fein klein wein when you dein.

The book. Seventy nine thousand words into the rewrite. It is the first blood- and sex- and guilt-soaked pilgrimage scene (there's another later). One of my characters is on his knees before a second, the sword - and more on that later - at his throat. She is staring at him and wondering if she should let her cousin kill him, or if she should take him to bed.

(Not all of these questions will be answered in this chapter).

The job. I just saw a man who a month ago had his first heart attack. A tingling in the arm, a vague not-rightness, a feeling like he wanted to take a deep breath. They lay him on a table and they put wires on his chest and the thin, wavering lines showed that part of his heart had died.

He seems to have been doing better without it. Now he eats low fat food, walks everywhere, avoids side-stream smoke.

The self - the least comfortable part. I have ducks at home, and twenty years of mucking about in various martial arts, and bipolar disorder. All of these have helped my writing, none of these interfere with my work. Trivia wise, I am slightly stocky and unwieldy looking, and I have a video of myself which I will try to link to next post, and I eat sour green apples to the point of delirium if nobody stops me. I have deep and odd religious convictions that aren't what you think and about which I am keen not to talk.

And things that touch upon the book. In the area that is now Bulgaria, and was at the time of my near-finished novel the Empire of the Bulgars, Peter the son of Simeon the Great was Emperor, eighth in line from the great Krum, who drank wine from a skull. His descendant was not his equal. He was, according to the foremost historical authorities of the time, an able general, a monk and later a saint, and his brother was a werewolf.

The brother, I think, turns up in book two, some time before the end of the world.

Krum, drinking from the skull of the Byzantine Emperor Nikephoros (lit. "Bringer of Victory").

So, that's my writing, and me, and the other things in my life, and stuff about which my writing... is. It's a start after months of neglect. The next bit is to write regularly (twice a week) and interestingly (no promises, but will try) about all this.

One third of the way through the rewrite, whole book finished by Christmas, coming out soon after that.

Thanks for listening,

BDC

Swive talking.

2011-03-04T16:19:00.000-08:00

Hail,
Seventy three thousand words into the rewrite of story. Probably about a third of the way through. I am going through the story filing off un-necessary characters, cutting out foreshadowings of events I subsequently decided not to include, and writing the sex scenes.

Sex is... well, it's actually going quite well.

I think there was an issue earlier on with the ages. None of my characters are over the age of consent, and I know that that shouldn't cause me any problems, but I did worry about it. I don't now. I worried about explicit versus allusive - I don't worry about that now.

And then there were the mechanical worries - if someone has sex, there is the not-insignificant chance that they will become, say, pregnant. There are the ways of dealing with that. There are the various consequences.

And the thing is, my characters do not, for example, have luteal and follicular phases of the menstrual cycle in response to spikes and troughs in the secretion of follicle stimulating hormone and luteinising hormone. If Emma, my favourite character, becomes pregnant, it will be because semen and menstrual fluid have mixed in the womb. Her child, if born in the seventh month, may live, but in the eighth will die. If she were to have twins, and to lie with two men in one night, one may resemble one lover, the other the other. Should she have sex after the eighth month, the child may be born with a belly full of the food that Emma has eaten. Either way, because she is lame, having fallen from a horse as a child, her child will be born lame.

These are ideas that are important to me, that are intoxicating, even, but they are hard to get my head around.

But if this book is to be worth writing or reading, they are worth it.

Anyhow. For a group of teenagers outside of "adult" supervision, they don't get as much sex as, say, the cast of "Medieval Babes Gone Wild XVII". For a start, they are adults. Second, while loving the one you're with does have its advantages, they have a number of other issues. Chastity and the terror of pregnancy, bare-bones survival, a lack of privacy, the influence of the Church, sickness, starvation and appearances of mouthless men all slow things down a bit.

You can't really see, but that couple in the north tower are really going for it.

And I am writing about it.

Anyhow - thanks for listening,

BDC

A time to look things up, a time to make things up

2011-03-02T19:31:00.000-08:00

Wikipedia has it that the longest gestation period of any animal is that of the Frilled Shark (Chlamydoselachus anguineus), which is pregnant for three and a half years.

Frilled shark.

Now, I am not an elasmobranchologist, but that strikes me as surprising - I don't know how this data could be collected, because it's a seldomly encountered deep sea animal, and I don't imagine anyone following one around for three years to see if it has started knitting little shark booties and so on.

But either way, my novel makes a frilled shark look like a Virginian opossum on cocaine*.

Non-intoxicated opossum.

I have been writing this fucking thing for literally ages. The first image my wife has of me in front of the computer is in sepia, (in the one before my face is all blurry because I moved it while the bitumen was being washed off the heliograph). I did the plot outline on a keyboard that has "S" for "f", half my character's names had ligatures in them, and the other day I found a first draft I had written in runic.

None of that is true. But good God, this is taking years.

I can wheel out the usual excuses. I work. My wife is unwell. I have started a new job and I have to revise a hell of a lot - a hell of a lot - of stuff. It's an hour and a half each way to work. This may me some sort of high-water mark in middle class whining, but our cleaner quit, and until I can get the broom to magickally do all the sweeping for me (and nothing could go wrong with that), that takes up some of my time.

But a lot of that is bullshit. In the end, I choose to do all these things, and if I choose them, and then I bitch about the consequences of my choices, well, more fool anyone who listens. This is a long term plan, and in two years I will be working closer to home, revising a lot less, and able to write more.

This illustration is not actually that far from the truth - add laptop, subtract hair.

And things are not that bad. I get up fiveish and write for an hour, I am about 70 000 words into the rewrite, and that means it's about a third of the way there. And I enjoy rewriting, and I enjoy research, and I am finding the whole thing rather satisfying.

See - there's the problem. I am finding the rewriting enjoying, and unsurprisingly it is taking me a long time. I suspect - no, I know - that I am doing this very, very inefficiently.

One thing that lures me away is fact-checking. This is a weakness. An hour does not go by without me checking the accuracy of something. What was the price of a goose in midsummer in Sussex before Lammas Day of a wet year? Where was Robert the Pious in the winter of 998? How did the roles of aristocratic women in Anglo-Saxon England compare to that in Normandy?

And all the while one of my characters is a dog-headed woman and another sweats blood and sees visions.

Fiction, Brendan. From the Latin for "Make shit up".

So. By sheer coincidence, Lent is approaching (as always, if you want to leave comments about my religious beliefs, simple press control-alt-delete a few times to bring up the dialogue box). Lent, the ideas of scarcity and lack, a commonality with those who have to do without, the experience that differs from the otherwise ubiquitous "everything I want any time I want it" is something to which I have committed myself.

Now, Lent is meant to be about self-denial - it's not Lent if I give up Star Trek, for example, because I hate that shit. And I suspect that giving up carbs so I can get abs like "the Situation" is similarly unLentish.

Seriously, always have, always will.

(Apparently, there is a guy on a tv show who calls his abdominal muscles, and by extension, himself, "The Situation". As in "You ladies must be thinking about the situation." If reality and parody were in a wrestling match, things would not be looking good for reality right about now).

So giving up research, so I can FINALLY FINISH THE FREAKING BOOK, doesn't "count". But I could do it anyway. I could use the start and finish of Lent as convenient time limits, and I could do it along with giving up what I'm actually giving up.

So- Lent starts in six days. I could prepare - descend into an orgy of fact-checking, glut myself on Carolingian chronicles and the pollen records of first millennium Britain (I actually have a book on this).

Or I could not. I could start today. I could write during my writing time. I could write. I've heard that that's what writers do.

Will let you know how it turns out.

Thanks for listening,
Brendan

* 12 - 13 days without cocaine.

Uncanny, unfunny, unsexy.

2010-11-13T20:43:00.000-08:00

Hail,

This has nothing to do with writing. And if I could work out how to put graphs in this thing, this would be a much easier post to read. And the following post contains discussion of sex. You have been warned.

Okay: You've all heard of the uncanny valley.

I don't know how they get the numbers on these axes. "Hmmm- that stuffed dinosaur is probably a 62%..."

That's it there - I don't know if I am meant to cite wikipedia or anything, because I don't think there are any wikipolice, or wikiprisons, but that's where I got it from.

What the graph "means" is that as something gets more and more humanoid (progresses along the horizontal axis from left to right) it becomes more and more attractive or loveable or familiar ... until it suddenly becomes too lifelike, and thus deeply creepy. The precise location (and presumably depth) of the valley varies from person to person - I find zombies mildly amusing, but to be frank, muppets creep me out. Your mileage may vary - and probably should.

The horror, the ghastly, googly eyed horror.

Anyhow - what I thought today is that there may be a number of valleys. The same topography may hold for a number of different qualities. There may be uncanny valleys, there may be others. There may, specifically, be an unfunny valley.

The way that works would be like this.

The horizontal axis is discomfort. As you go from left to right, you get more uncomfortable. The vertical axis, instead of showing loveableness or something, shows... funlitude, or whatever. You move from left to right, getting more and more uncomfortable, funnier and funnier, until.. bang. Unfunny Valley.

To me, the high point of the curve, the most funny of the discomfort funny (and discomfort funny isn't all of funny, it's just the aspect of funnynesss I am thinking bout at the moment), is stuff like the Office (UK), the camping scene in Bruno, that kind of thing. Fawlety Towers when I was a kid. I have a friend who can't watch Fawlty Towers, another who can't watch the Office. To them, it's in the unfunny valley.

The reason I brought this up was a picture I saw. A friend posted it. A lot of his stuff works for me - that whole "I cannot look, but I cannot tear my eyes away" kind of stuff. This one, for the first time, didn't (having said that, I don't know if he thought it was funny, or interesting, or whatever, and that's not really the point). It made me feel acutely uncomfortable. That was the first time I looked at something and winced, and thought "why don't I find this funny?"

Anyway - the unfunny valley. I think there may be other valleys. There is definitely an unsexy valley - I pretty much spent all of high-school in it, gazing helplessly out at my peers. But seriously, it's the same kind of general pattern: increasing progression in a particular direction (from a man who is a professional firefighter wearing what he would actually wear to fight a fire, for example, to a man wearing what he wears on one of those hall of Flame calendars), creating an increasing effect until quite suddenly it's too much and bang - revulsion. For me (and I am sure everyone is keen to hear this), mouths are gorgeous. Slightly parted lips, more gorgeous. Endoscopy footage - less so. Please tell me you know what I am talking about, because it's difficult to write explicitly about sex and what you find sexy to an unknown number of your facebook friends. .

And the topology of these valleys changes over time, according to what you become accustomed to. And some people don't have very deep valleys, or high mountains, or whatever - I can see there may only be so far that I can push this idea. But I think that with discomfort in a certain kind of humour, with humanoidness in attraction, and with, say, nakedness in sexual attraction, more is not always better.

(I have been unable to illustrate this with regard to what is sexually attractive without feeling bad. So I have been forced to rely upon audience participation.

Imagine a picture of "more" here:

And here imagine a picture of "better":

See the difference?)

Anyhow - this is just an idea, and I may be completely wrong, and if I look at this again tomorrow, I may think "what was I on?". It has successfully delayed the revision of chapter fourteen, to which I will now return. But in the meantime, thanks for listening.

BDC

I am probably deeply wrong about all this.

2010-10-22T17:33:00.000-07:00

Hail,

You know when you have an idea that’s so disturbing that you don’t know whether it’s true or not? This is mine. I would appreciate anything anyone can add in the way of explanation or refutation.

And a warning before you read on - I actually don't know what I'm talking about here. I really have sod all idea about technology, about copyright law, about anything but the most basic economic ideas. And I really think it's possible I could be wrong about any and all of this. if so, please tell me.

Anyway I think is this. If you're trying to make a living as a spec fic writer, stop now. Don't dream, it's over. It's not going to happen. Some time in the last few years, in a process that started less than five years ago but is accelerating very, very fast, making a decent living as a spec fic writer has started to shift from being "hard" to being "effectively impossible".

Why do I say this?

When I was a child, I wanted to write. I wanted to write short stories. I wanted to be a professional spec fic writer, which to me meant someone who earned enough money from his/her writing of short stories and novels and poetry to live on it. I wanted to be Robert E Howard and Robert A Heinlein and most of all I wanted to be Harlan G Ellison (G for God) and write stories like The Discarded and I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. The idea, the image

of that freedom to do the most wonderful thing in the world all day every day - that was like a drug to me.

So I wrote. I wrote all the time about everything, and I wrote because I loved it, I loved it like I have loved shamefully few others things, and in the last ten years, for what is somewhere between a thousand and ten thousand hours of writing, I have earned about a thousand dollars. I’m actually happy with that, whether or not writing is worth it or should be done is not what this is about.

But anyway, the preceding paragraph is a pretty common story. What many people say – I suspect I may have said it myself – is you have to keep trying. It will get better. You can become a professional spec fic writer. Many fail, but those who work mind-meltingly hard and have the talent and the luck and the connections and the professionalism will succeed. Or

more realistically, may succeed. But can succeed.

I don't think that's true anymore. I hold these truths to be, if not self-evident, pretty damn difficult to deny.

1. To make a living, you have to provide a desirable good or service cheaper than others who provide the same desirable good or service.

2. I can get the complete works of Terry Pratchett bundled into a format that will work on an e-reader that is cheap and light, that can hold ten thousand books, that cost me under a hundred dollars.

3. I think this means that soon, if not now - and I believe it's now - it will be possible to spend a one-off-fee of under a hundred dollars and never pay another author another cent. I think that a short time after it becomes possible, it becomes cheap and easy and undetectable and widespread and eventually almost universal.

4. As it was for movies, and as it was for music, it is now and will ever be for books. But easier.

To me, and I am talking about professional writers of spec fic short stories and novels, points one to four means game over.

There are a number of counter-arguments that can be made, but to me only one or two hold water.

It can be argued that some people will continue to pay for stuff that they can get free, like some people still pay for DVDs of movies. True, but the number is plummeting. It may eventually stabilise, but I suspect it will stabilise at a very low level. I don't know how many people pay full price at those roadside stalls where they offer bags or fruit for a few dollars. I don't know that it can be a lot of people - someone should ask an owner of said stall. I would imagine that kind of low-level theft is quite common, otherwise otherwise places like Woolworths wouldn't have to employ, you know, security staff and checkout operators. And that's theft of concrete, “real” objects from “real” people who are presumably close by and are poor and do real work. It's not as easy as taking from Stephanie Meyer, who has squillions of dollars and lives millions of miles away and how hard is it anyway to sit on your arse and make stuff up and it's not like she can catch you and anyway, everyone else does it?

It can be argued that restrictions can be put on either the books or on all possible e-readers themselves to make this kind of copying and sharing impossible. I can't imagine this working at all. I could be wrong, please tell me.

It could be argued that movie stars and pop singers still make money. They most certainly do (although I suspect some peak has passed). But the Beatles released I think twelve albums in eight years because they made money doing it. U2 have released twelve in thirty years, and two in the last eight. Some of it's creative fatigue, but some of it's the fact that you can't download actually being at a concert, so people pay for it. Parallels can be drawn.

It could be argued that there are many professional spec fic authors – I know, I’ve met them. If I apply the definition exactly – someone who makes his money wholly and solely through writing short stories and novels, I don’t know that there are that many. Of the tutors we had at Clarion, the ones who had probably made the most money in the last triennium

a) didn’t turn up in mink coats festooned with bling despite being amongst the world’s best

b) worked in other media. Games, a short film, music.

In any case, I am talking about what will happen – I think the coming decade is going to be the same as the last. I suspect that both of those authors will lose money through copyright infringements in the next few years. Both of them seem to have positioned themselves very well to ride out what is coming, and both will probably do well.

It could be argued that some people will always prefer real, physical books. I don’t know that there will be enough of these people for you to make a living.

I don't know that e-readers will always look the way they do. But who knows?

(Having said that, a few years ago, I went to Thailand. I bought one of the Lonely Planet books from I think a second hand bookshop: sizeable, solid, full colour cover with fold out maps, the lot. Later, in the back of a truck, the bitumen blurring under my feet, I took the book out and examined it. It was a fake. Photocopied (in colour), stitched together, made by hand. I still have it. It remains for me personally one of the more disturbing artifacts I have held in my hand).

It could be argued that spec fic writing is valuable, and we should get paid for it. Definitely, there will doubtless continue to be arts grants and that kind of stuff.

What I am saying is that in the next few years the situation will change irrevocably. The floor will fall out of the market. Writer's incomes from writing words that go into stories will collapse. I know a lot of this is not new at all, but I don't know that it's widely appreciated. I know a lot of people who want to be professional writers. If this is true, what happens to them?

What this means to me is not "Oh God, let's stop writing." I will write until I die. I will keep on telling stories, like I will keep on reading them. That is what I am.

But what it does mean is that the model that I think a number of people use, the idea of the many who strive but the few who succeed, may have to be changed. It may be that where we had an industry, we will have niches, where we had professionals, we will have wealthy amateurs, where we had warehouses, we will have boutiques.

My own suspicion, by the way, is that this will not be a bad thing. I don't know there's any direct correlation between writing for commercial success and writing stuff I want to read. Philip K Dick wrote for money, he wrote glorious, wondrous stuff, but Borges had a

day job. So did Dick, from memory. It may be that we are all free now - free to write what we want, write the stories that we can be proud of, write what we don't want die without having written, to write as if contracts and profits and sales and all that didn't matter

at all.

Because it may be that they don't.

This could be good - I suspect somewhere in my heart that some of the people who are writing yet another DURP (dark urban romance of the paranormal) because of the success of Twilight might actually write better if they wrote what they wanted to write. (Note – if you’re writing a DURP to make money because of the success of Twilight, this means you. If not, it doesn’t mean you.

I should stress that a lot of what I have written above does not apply to, say, video-game writers, or script writers. I know piss all about that. For all I know, they will be tomorrow’s railway barons.

It also doesn't apply to people who want to make a small, or occasional income.

And most of all, I’m not suggesting anyone should stop writing. I am not. Write on.

Anyway - this has probably alienated everyone I know. I am not an economist. I am technostupid. There may be - and I don't doubt it - some fundamental thing that I have missed. I would be delighted to be told.

But at the moment, it seems to me that the wolf is not at the door, the wolf is here.

BDC

Killing people is wrong....

2010-10-01T10:28:00.001-07:00

Hail,

And herein a serious post.

It's three AM. I've been up since two. One of my friends is up, and one of the writers whose recent accomplishments I most admire, and so, I believe, is that guy who wrote that book I really loved back in the eighties, but two of them are in Queensland and one is probably intoxicated, so to all intents and purposes I am alone.

The clock ticks. The cats purr. The cold air of the outside world comes in. The real world.

Today we went to see the orthopod. When I went through, orthopaedic surgeons were reputed to be particularly difficult people to deal with. I doubt that was ever true, every time we have seen one they have listened courteously and compassionately and answered every question that we've had. Today, he ran an hour and something late, for reasons I will now explain.

Two years ago, my wife became a cyborg. She has an aggressive and inadequately explained form of arthritis, along with an actual one in a million auto-immune disease. Because of this, she required surgery on both hips, to resurface the head of the femur (the thigh bone) so it moved freely and smoothly in the socket (the hip bone).

This was huge surgery. Even thinking about what went on at that time it is frightening, so I am putting it off. But it required vast amounts of blood, and pain, and courage on her part.

A few months ago I was reading in the New York Times and I read that the prosthesis (sometimes it's called the "implant") has been recalled by the manufacturer because of an unacceptably high failure rate.

I rang up. The hospital had not read the NYT but they did have an email. We got the first available appointment, which was a month away.

In the mean time we read more. We were originally told that the implant could last decades without any trouble at all. The web was full of stories of people who had had this major orthopaedic surgery and gone on to full, astonishingly active lives - people who ran in marathons, climbed mountains, the like. I understand there was a fifth dan Shotokan in there.

It turned out that by "decades" they meant for many people, a very few years, and by "without any trouble at all", they meant something entirely different again. My wife has increasing pain and decreasing mobility. She has pain at rest which she did not have six months ago. The pain, the sleeplessness, the inability to do the things she loves, is seeping through everything. Things are as bad now as they were a year before the surgery.

That may not be all. The steel which covers her femoral head and her acetabulum is high in chromium and cobalt. In a number of cases, the metal ions are released into the surrounding tissue, into muscle, bone and fat. They cause pain and inflammation, in extreme cases they cause symptoms of themselves, they may cause difficulties with further surgery.

As an aside, I have always thought that if I was ever angry enough to want to kill someone, I should tell someone about it. That way, even if the "killing people is wrong" part of my brain didn't kick in, the "you'll get caught because you already confessed and explained exactly what you wanted to do and how you would do it" part would. Be informed, therefore, that if this goes much wronger, if, for example, something were to go wrong with the subsequent surgery, or it were to have been made impossible because of ion deposition from the current prosthetic, or if my wife were to die under the anaesthetic, I would feel like going to America, looking up the names of the people responsible for deciding to keep this on the market after the facts became apparent, and removing them from this earth.

Without descending into hubris, I reckon I could get a couple before I went. I am smart and rich and could probably get back into shape enough to drag most people's bodies. And there would be none of this "left for dead but managed to crawl to a nearby farm" bullshit. I have called time of death enough times to know what is required.

Obviously, that's the anger talking. And I write fiction. And killing people is wrong. And the fact I have said this in public means I can't do it. And anyway, America is many thousands of miles away, much to far for me to drive my tiny little car. However would I get there? It's just impossible.

This anger is a difficult thing to articulate.

Anyhow. We wait on bloods, and on the ultrasound, and we go back. We see what can be done. It may be something else is going wrong. The orthopod said he could not imagine what it could be, but maybe he was having an unimaginative day. It may heal, somehow.

It may not.

Anyhow, it's nearly four. I must retire. Tomorrow I clean the chook cage, and spread compost on the fruit trees, and we set up another quail house. I will hit and gouge the punching bag, and maybe break my resolution and finish a book. Read Paul Theroux, it's the thing to do, when you're in a stew, or feeling blue.

And I write again soon.

Thanks for listening,

BDC

Brand New Plan

2010-09-26T04:23:00.000-07:00

Hail,

Two weeks. I have not been at work for two solid weeks.

Surely any normal, decent, self-respecting writer would have done a whole lot of writing in that two weeks.

Well, when I meet one of those mythical creatures, I'll ask him/her. Me, I've done a little.

Why is this so? Well, not to get into the kind of online emotional enuresis I am very keen to avoid, I had two weeks off work because I was very probably burnt out, and when you are burnt out you have to plan to do nothing for a while, because otherwise you go beyond burnt to... charred out? Fricasee'd out? I don't know.

Anyway, you can't get everything done you planned to do. And forget that shit you see on tv about "just relaxing," too. Relaxing is hard. Relaxing - not working, not worrying about work, not thinking of the things you should be doing, ticking off or not ticking off the items on the list that you have somehow even without pen and paper written for yourself to do today, seeing the list hovering translucent in front of you, the empty squares at the end of each line mocking you... that stuff is hard. Relaxing is hard.

But anyhow, whether I am rested or not, tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow is, specifically, the first day back at work. Distressingly, it is a long shift - nine to nine - and I might be thinking again about how much of a good idea those shifts are. I also have to start putting in place some of the changes I have worked out we need at my workplace to stop this kind of stuff happening.

(This all may seem incredibly self-important. But they advertised for someone to do a job very similar to mine in a more desirable area three years ago, and no-one applied. This means if I don't do this job, no-one else will, and my patients will be without a long-term doctor. I cannot afford to be unable to work again).

So if I haven't written a lot (I have written quite a bit, and I have thought a lot about ye accursed chapter four, and I have written a lot of stuff that I deleted, so it has not all been vegatating), what have I done? Writer-wise?

Well, Victor, I've been thinking*.

I think I've got the whole physical side of things worked out. This will be anathema to some, but you write with your brain, and your brain is part of your body, and if your body is not healthy, you don't write well. This means cardio daily, gym alternate day, that kind of stuff. Kickboxing or some kind of gentle kind of martial arts at least twice, hopefully three times a week. Kickboxing is not normally seen as a gentle martial art, but I'm not very good at it - I call what I do "kung faux".

It also means - horror of horrors - vegetables and suchlike.

I am going back to the writing schedule tomorrow. That does mean up at five, and a number of nights a week I will be writing. I am bringing in a comfortable chair so Katy can lounge and read, and some nights of the week we will watch movies together.

It also means from tomorrow a degree of unplugging. The irony of writing this on one computer and doubtless reading it later on another is not lost upon me. But in the last fortnight I have had definite proof that I write better if I unplug. I wrote more hours, I concentrate better, I think more deeply.

There are certain elements within what I write, within what anyone writes, that only swim to the surface in the dark, after some period of silence. That is not compatible with Fishville.

So that means FB once a day from home, probably in the evenings, (or if I am at work and patients don't turn up. I used to use that time to read scientific journals, do random audits of my notes, looking for mistakes, or work on power-point presentations I would give to, say, the medical students whom I had requested so that I could prepare power-point presentations for them. That was before the diagnosis of burnout). It means I may have to wean myself from other internet things.

Lastly, it means fun. I am not naturally a fun-haver. I am doing something about that.

Anyway - that is the plan, the goal, the schedule. Part of the plan is to have no plan, all very Zen. I will log on, log off and write.

BDC

*authentic Fantastic Four quote. Mr Fantastic to Doctor Doom, in Grant Morisson's "4". See, fun and educational, too.

I also think that a lot of reasons people stay online, have a vigorous online presence, may not be that valuable to me. I think the writers I admire do this. I don't know - they don't answer my emails.

Fight. Club.

2010-09-12T14:48:00.000-07:00

Amongst the several excellent things I went to at worldcon was a presentation on writing fight scenes. I had been worrying about the sex and violence in my book, and so when there was a talk on writing fight scenes by a big guy who'd fought constantly (and competitively) for the last twenty years, with hundreds if not thousands of people, I leapt at the chance.

(There was, unfortunately, no corresponding talk on sex scenes from a big guy who'd shagged constantly and competitively for the last twenty years, with hundreds if not thousands of people, but presumably that would have been well attended, too. I would have gone, but would have been perhaps more reluctant to be a volunteer from the audience).

The talk was given by a guy called Alan Baxter - I don't know him, I will try to post some kind of link. He knows his stuff. He spoke at length about how fighters fight, how they think, how they feel, and then there was a public demonstration of arse-kicking (in which I was the volunteer coccyx). He did some technique like "Warrior Monk Strikes at the Heart" and I countered with "Confused Fat Man Gets Smacked In Head".

The problem is, of course, discussing violence in almost any public forum is difficult. A lot of men and a number of women get some weird form of testosterone poisoning. You can't listen for more than a minute without some guy hobbling out of his chair to wheeze about how he beat up these five young punks the other day. The way the audience was at some stages, you cold close your eyes and imagine it was tryout day for the Justice League.

Anyhow, I enjoyed the talk a great deal, but as the man said, fight scenes are a vast, vast topic, and he could do little more than sketch the outlines. It did get me thinking about fight scenes.

The remainder of this is rather serious.

I have sat in my office and been afraid of my patients. Once or twice it's been that quick, oddly soft feeling in my chest, an immediate fear of the here and now - large men have leapt from their chair, very angry at me, and stood until I could get them to sit down. My patients include a number of people who have killed people, several who have done very bad things.

Other times it has been a colder, somatically more difficult to identify, a feeling on the surface of my skin, when people have told me off-hand of things they have done. A patient of mine mentioned in passing trying to burning down a caravan with someone inside it, another (admittedly, under the effects of something a lot like adrenaline) gestured irritably about how time consuming it had been one time out in the Queensland rainforest, waiting for some guy to finish digging his own grave. That's a different feeling.

When I write about violence, that's the kind of stuff I think I will write.

There are other things I remember. When someone hits you in the face, their fist, if you glimpse it, is for an instant very big and blurry. If you are not someone who has fought, or sparred, or whatever, you don't see the punch coming at you. You might see a blur.

A lot depends on what you are trying to do - trying to hurt someone is different to trying to stop someone hurting you. Being hit can actually disable you - if you get kicked in the ribs, say, it is not "difficult" to breathe. "Difficult" implies that some sort of extra effort will achieve a result. My limited experience has been that for a time, it will not, and breathing will be impossible.

What else? I boxed with some guy for about three months. He'd had about twelve ring fights for a few months. What I remember is people who are very good at fighting are almost baffling to fight. You hit and they are not there, or they don't get hurt, or you try to punch and there is somehow nothing in it.

Hitting people hurts a lot - your fists and your shins and so on can really hurt for days. Joints twisted the wrong way are agonising. Broken bones in the hand take, like all bones, sixish weeks to come good.

Being thrown on the ground, particularly if you have never been thrown, is utterly disorientating. It's like falling, but not falling where you stumble and at least have a chance to put your hands out, it's that horribly swift falling like on ice-skates, or where your legs are actually swept out from under you and the earth strikes you. If anyone reading this has a partner who used to do wrestling, rig up a bloody big mattress behind yourself and ask them to do a single or double leg takedown. In judo, it's morote gari. Imagine then, the same thing on concrete or cobble-stones. Even half-speed, if you are not a fighter or monstrously strong and aggressive, it's game over.

When you get hit really hard, or strangled, and you can't breathe, there is after a while a fringeing of black spots, almost like dancing insects, that merges into a dull brown-black at the edge of your vision. As you continue to not be able to breathe, to try and suck air in, the darkness coalesces and grows inward. It is my belief, and I do not know where this arose from or if it is true at all, has always been that if the fringe of darkness grows so much it blots out your vision, you will lose consciousness. Later on, if the strangly person does not stop or is not stopped I presume that you may die.

Winning a fight - and I have not had a lot of fights - for me, was difficult. Afterwards, you feel bad. Unless you have an unusual way of looking at things, you pass the person later on and you feel bad.

Once you iron out the statistical noise, someone who kicks well will be beaten by someone who boxes well who will be beaten by someone who wrestles well, but obviously, for a single event and with dramatic licence, you can write it pretty much any way you like.

Anyhow. Enough of all this. I have to go off and make my character not fight with someone, which is almost as difficult.

Thanks for listening,

BDC

In which I meet a Wise Woman

2010-09-06T18:19:00.000-07:00

Hail,

I met with the Wise Woman the other day.

First off- an explanation.

Part of going to Worldcon is pimping, pitching and schmoozing. "Pimping" is telling people how damn fine you or your stuff is. I am incapable of doing this, but my wife has been pimping me ceaselessly. "Pitching" does not refer to throwing oneself bodily at an unsuspecting publisher, it is telling a publisher about your novel so s/he goes home afire with the desire to read your stuff. It is a difficult task, basically a cross between street theatre and a voce viva exam, and if it goes wrong, it's verbal water-boarding. But I met a senior publisher and I pitched, and it went quite well.

Anyhow, buoyed by this success I went in search of the Wise Woman, and to schmooze.

The Wise Woman (not her real name) writes a blog that I read. She writes about writing. We have mutual friends, and she says smart things, and we have chatted a few times over email. I thought it'd be good to chat, to sort of explore a few more of the things she'd said, maybe get a bit of advice - and she seemed like the kind of person I could talk to. I knew she would be at the World SF convention, so I went looking for her.

(Note: SF fans seem almost cripplingly bad at identifying describing other people:

Me: Hail, I'm looking for Andrew Nothisrealname.

Andrew's co-worker: He's up there (points to crowd of over a thousand people). He's wearing sort-of trousers and a shirt kind of thing. He's got - you know, hair.)

Anyhow, straight after The Pitch I went looking for TWW. I walked into the talk given by people who had written a lot and I saw her. She looked just like she did on facebook and the net. I listened attentively, and afterwards, still glowing with hubris, subtly throat-jabbed and eye-gouged my way to the front of the crowd. The crowd surrounding her was large.

"You rock," I said, trampling a small child. "We're friends on facebook, and we both know Insert Name Here. Could I have five minutes of your time? I will pay coffee."

She seemed a bit taken aback, but agreed. We went off and spoke.

Brilliant stuff. Five minutes turned into forty five minutes of how to handle sex and violence, who to live as a writer without going mad or getting a divorce, what people want from a book and what they want not to get. Her opinions were a little different from what I suspected, a little more traditional perhaps, a little more about romance than what I was expecting, but still - very good stuff. We spoke about what she had written about how to show character, the role of fear and loneliness in motivation, why we want kings and castles. I took copious mental notes. She truly was a Wise Woman.

"Thanks so much for this," I said. "I was wondering - a friend of mine asked. What's the best jumping on point for reading your stuff. Where should someone start?"

She smiled and slid over one of those promotional bookmark things. It had details of her latest trilogy on it. I feasted my eyes. The first title was familiar, but not what I was expecting.

"I didn't know you wrote this," I said.

She nodded. I glanced subtly down a her name-tag. Part of it was obscured, but enough for me to read it. It did not say, and here I paraphrase, "The Wise Woman". It said, and here I paraphrase again, "Someone Quite Famous Who Doesn't Know You At All."

I smiled and nodded. Shortly afterwards, we were joined by Other Famous Woman Who Writes A Lot. The two luminaries chatted. I excused myself and rushed off to the bookstall. I and grabbed two paperbacks, one by Wise Woman and the other by Quite Famous Woman Who Yadda Yadda Yadda.

"These two women," I shrieked to the man behind the counter. "They aren't the same person?"

"No," he said.

"Why not?"

He stared at me. "I'm not the go-to person here."

I stared at the photos. They were both women. They each wore a shirt kind of thing. They both had, you know, hair. To me they looked exactly the same.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes," said the man. "That's why their names are different. And they live in different cities. And - "

"Crap," I said, and thrust money at him. I bought two volumes of Quite Famous Woman's stuff, for forty six dollars, and went off to get it signed.

I have it here in front of me. "To Brendan," it says. "A true fan."

Mmmm.

Wouldn't life be much simpler if we all had those coloured bars that floated above our heads that listed useful information?

Anyhow, off to write. Thanks for listening,

BDC

Abnormal transmission resumes

2010-08-22T12:18:00.000-07:00

Hail,

Sorry about the previous. Back to the writing.

In other, non-drunken, less hysterical news, I have finished the first draft. Well, I started at the start and today - about twelve hours ago, in fact, I reached the end.

The final scene is writ. The last words are spoken. 207 000 words.

What does this mean? It means the phase starts. The story drifted as it was being written, I have to make sure that the ending derives naturally from the beginning. There are initially crucial characters who appear and then vanish without a trace, there are people whose stories do not make any sense. There is much to do.

But there is a whole lot that has been done. 200 000 words. I have told a story.

I feel pretty damn good about this now.

BDC

Why does my heart feel so mad?

2010-08-21T14:41:00.000-07:00

Dear ALP,

This is where you went wrong.

First off, an introduction. I am "rusted on". I have voted ALP every election of my adult life. Twenty years ago, I marched and was arrested, last election I was a member. This election I voted, but the thing is, if it wasn't compulsory, and the booth wasn't just down the road, I might well not have done. I voted for you, but for the first time in my life I looked down at the list of alternatives, and wondered.

Why did this happen to me and a game-changingly large number of people this year? Why did you lose - final counting isn't in, but I cannot see how this can be called anything other than a defeat - an election in the context of a very strong economy, against a candidate his own party considered unelectable six months ago?

I don't know, but I'll tell you why you lost people like me.

If I had to say the biggest differentiating factor between your policies and the policies of the other lot this year it would be broadband.

That's it.

Broadband.

Jesus Fucking Christ. It has come to this.

The world scientific consensus is that anthropogenic climate change is occurring as we speak. You were elected by people who wanted you to do something about this. You have done precisely nothing. You have let yourself be scared by Andrew Bolt and a few half-witted fringe figures so that when someone regurgitating press statements from Esso calls him- or herself a "sceptic", and suggests that some powerful hippy cabal is pulling the strings of this debate - the tofu lobby? the labcoat mafia? - you sit on your hands and do nothing.

Refugees. Same thing. You were elected on the backs of widespread public concern about Howard's inhumane policies. Children locked up for years, people fleeing the threat of death towards the certainty of imprisonment. You have in that time done nothing. If someone wants a party to drive the nig-nogs into the sea, there's Abbott. If they want someone to be humane, there's the Greens. If they want someone to festinate about and witter and try to have a bet each way and achieve precisely zero... that'd be us.

Gay marriage - same thing. Basic human rights, something crying out for leadership, an intellectual battle we could have had against bigotry and wowserism, a "bringing in" of the disenfranchised - remember those ideas? - and you have done fuck all.

I don't know how much more strongly I can put this. On each of these three areas - and there are more - you have failed to engage, failed to offer anything consistent, failed to differentiate yourself at all from your predecessor and from those who will doubtless, in a few weeks, come after you.

That is why votes bled to the Greens.

That is why people returned to the Conservatives.

On each of these these issues, Abbott believes we should do something. Usually, he has believed we should do nothing, that being the essence of conservatism, but at least he is clear and consistent in his bigotry. The Greens - pants-on-head crazy as they are - believe we should do something. The public perception is that your plan is to do pretty much what everybody wants.

You can't do what everybody wants.

You have to do what you believe in, and to do that first you have to believe in something.

Anyhow. I will send this off in the sure and certain belief that I will receive a "thank you for your views" letter from one of the rapidly diminishing MPs we still have. Don't send it. I don't want letter saying thank you. I want you to do what you said you'd do when I voted for you.

Yours,

Brendan Carson

Closer....

2010-08-05T00:52:00.000-07:00

Hail,
First off - I have pixel envy. Go you and have a look at Lisa Hannet's blog:

How good is that? I feel the need to go through with whatever the electronic equivalent is of a paint-roller and make my blog look all nice. Have a look at the list of accomplishments to the side of hers, too. Impressive.

But this being the blogosphere, enough about other people, let me talk about me. How go things with you, I ask myself. Specifically, how goes the Great Work?

The Great Work goes great. I have written 0ne hundred and ninety odd words. I am enjoying it a great deal. I am less than fifteen, and maybe as few as ten thousand words from the end. I have five chapters to go, I know roughly what has to happen in them, and I know pretty much who will live and who will die and how.

This is a bit alarming. I have never written anything close to this big before. It is a first novel, and there is a lot that needs fixing - the crucial character whom I introduced in the first chapter who subsequently vanished forever in chapter four, the remarkable skill that one of my heroines displays in the climactic scene that she inexplicably fails to utilise back when it would have been really useful - that kind of thing. Plus, at least one character gets killed and eaten and then turns up nonchalantly three thousand words later (admittedly, she's a donkey, but even so) and I would rather I fix this than damage the heads of my reviewers when they smack their heads upon the keyboard.
Anyhow - I am enjoying it. One of the central tenets of this kind of writing is to take the character where s/he does not want to go. That I feel has been done - as we speak, one of my heroines is sealed in a crypt, the other is watching my mediaeval torturer preparing the cauldron in which she will presumably be boiled alive. One hero is imprisoned with not one but two lunatics, and has just found out he has abandoned the love of his life to terrible danger. The other is on a long-ship with a Nubian blemmye...

A blemmye. Note the absence of a head. Actually, I probzably don't have to remind most people to note that.

...and a wolf-pelt has just winked at him, and the man he is talking now he last saw lying in the dust with a spear through what he had previously considered a vital organ.

None of them right now is where he or she wants to be.

One thing I do worry with this is fecundity. There is a lot of this novel. It's a lot of fecund words, and it's taking a fecund long time. A while ago this would have paralysed me - I thought that what I wanted was to write well, and I thought that writing well meant bare, sparse, minimalist prose. Less, in good writing, was more.
I don't believe that now. Look at Jeff Vandermeer, look at Gaiman, look at the whole Weird. It is permissible for language to be gorgeous, for things to be ornate and complex and wonderful.

(If "less is more", of course, if sparseness is abundance of quality, then it would seem to me that "less less" - a dearth of sparseness - would be even "more more", or a super-abundance of goodness. I have virtually no "less" in my book, stuff just crowds onto the page. This must mean it's really, really good - right?)

At last count, by the way, I have splurged over two hundred thousand words on this. This is a small amount by some means of reckoning - I calculate it only amounts to zero point one six six zeptomole words, (I may be wrong, but I am not making that unit of measurement up) - but by me it's a hell of a lot).

A zeptomole - billions of times smaller than a normal mole - magnified several times.

Anyhow - what now?
Finish the last few chapters.
Get Emma out of the crypt.
Conclude the Anti-Christ chat-up scene.
Move on to where Wulfric brains a poppet with a crucifix, set the ground for the earthquake, the demon face that appears in the mirror, the lifting up of my peasant girl to the outer realms of the primum mobile.
The primum mobile. More features than the iCosmos.

Finish it by the start of next month, when I am in Melbourne at the world-con.

And then begin again.

Thanks for listening,
BDC

Not so much Blogger King as Blogger ceorl.

2010-07-16T18:08:00.000-07:00

Hail,

A number of things.

FIrst off - I have come up with Aninerak's Law:

Every bad fantasy novels is bad in the same way. Every great fantasy novel is great in its own way. It's sort of the opposite of Karenina's Law. Those familiar with nineteenth century Russian literature will recognise that Anna Aninerak was one of the great works of Yostlot.

Second - I'm trying to come up with how this novel and me as a writer are going to work. Jeff Vandermeer's book got me thinking about this - how do you survive, how do you be a writer in the world that most of us live in.

I started by wondering why I sucked so much at email, blogging, schmoozing, all of that stuff, and I thought about something that someone had said once, that in the middle ages, I'd be straight to the monastery. There was a place for me, she said, in the Middle Ages.

Note, by the way, how weirdly familiar those few hundred years have become. Elizabeth I and Henry VIII are more well known to us than anyone from between 1700 and 1900. We know Robin Hood's supporting cast better than we know Dick Turpin's or even Ned Kelly's. I don't remember the last time I saw Gilgamesh advertising roofing insulation, or Cromwell hawking pizza, but there's a Donut King, a Tyre King and a Gutter Knight in the local phone book.

I think she's right in one sense. Not that I am a mediaeval person. I did read of someone saying he was probably about five hundred and fifty years old. He felt he had been born in about 1430, lived all his childhood there and the early part of his teens, and then entered some kind of suspended animation (he went to great lengths to say he did not blame the faerie) and then had somehow ended up in a suburban high school amongst things he did not fundamentally understand. So he was, in some sense, over five hundred years old. And like all of the elderly, an refugee and an exile from a place to which he could never return.

I don't know about that. "The" middle ages is not "the" middle ages. When we see or speak or write of them, we see "our" middle ages, a middle ages we have made for our purposes. For one of my friends, it's a backward priest-ridden hellhole of flat earthers and torturers. For another, you couldn't walk a furlong without tripping over something magickal and fey.

I don't know why this is. My suspicion is that it's a modern idea - I don't know that the middle ages occupied the same place in our imaginations before, say, Ivanhoe, or LOTR. The earliest actual Gothic novels* I can remember are from about that time.

If "our" middle ages are a modern idea (and I am not a historian, I could be completely wrong) then their form has something to do with fulfilling modern needs. Form follows function, and they have a function to us.

I don't know what that is, I don't know where I would find out. This is not what they taught me in uni. But I wonder if the emphasis on the grotesque, on nature, on questing, on the unthinkable-ness of certain kinds of behaviour, have something to do with the absence of those things from our lives.

I don't have a quest. I can do pretty much what I want. I haven't been rained on unless I wanted to be for over a year. I can and do in my daily life surround myself with the comfortable, the beautiful, the tamed.

What is the opposite of that? What is the incarnation of all those things I lack? What is the shadow to that sun?

Our middle ages.

Maybe it makes sense to look at people who write this stuff and people who read it not as refugees from the middle ages, but as refugees from ours. Exiles from that place.

Anyhow. Enough of this, I have chooks to feed. And a chapter to be done this week.

I am on Facebook more often than I am here, by the way. I've managed that.

Thanks for reading,

BDC

Punctuation for writers.

2010-04-19T17:07:00.000-07:00

Hail,
As an internationally successful writer I am often asked to donate a small part of my valuable time and vast expertise to help others. I am always happy to do so for the appropriate hourly fee and subject to the relevant legal and copyright restrictions.

One of the most common questions I am asked about is about the proper use of punctuation. Correct use of punctuation is vital for a writer - it ranks alongside TEXT SIZE and meticulous use of adverbial dialogue tags ("he said slyly, she replied fulsomely, it nodded crunchily") as one of the primary means by which writers tell readers what to feel at various points throughout the story arc.

Correct punctuation is to a writer what a threatening moustache is to a Grand Vizier. It is a crucial tool.

The following is a brief guide to the three most commonly misused punctuation marks.

A scene of myself and a student from my recent writing workshop. I pride myself on my approachableness, and my egalitarian tolerance of inferiors.

The apostrophe.
The word apostrophe (from the Greek "apo" - meaning "to, near or approaching", and "strophe", the Doric name for the letter sigma, or "s") is used to indicate that a letter "s" either will occur soon in the text or has recently occurred. Montaigne's famous advice on its use,("Sacre merde, est ici un s") is best translated today as "Holy crap, here comes an "s"".

Grammatically correct examples of the use of the apostrophe include the possessive tense -"I ate Jim's food", the plural, "I drank Jim's bottle's of fine wine"and the present tense "Jim run's gibbering after me". This simple rule may be confusing to some, but when in doubt, throw apostrophes about.

Exclamation marks.
These are of comparatively late development. When speech was first recorded, stenographers needed to be able to transcribe qualities such as vocal intensity, emotional emphasis and changes in intonation. Prior to the invention of emoticons, exclamation marks were used for most of these tasks.

In modern writing, it is probably best to think of exclamation marks as marks on a dial of amazing - the greater the emotional impact or intrinsic importance of what is being said, or the louder the speaker's imaginary voice, the more exclamation marks should be used. Three or four in a row is probably the minimum, suitable for daily conversation - ("I thought it might rain today!!!!! But it didn't!!!!!! Perhaps it may rain TOMORROW!?!?!?!?!?!?!?), and to reflect true awesomeness of text, they go up to eleven.

Without his heart a writer is nothing.

Quotation marks.
These are used to add emphasis to words. Originally, quotation marks in mediaeval manuscripts were decorative banners - intricately detailed, often worked with gold and illustrated with heraldic beasts and scenes from the psalms. They were used to support and emphasise points of great theological or dramatic importance, almost forcing the eye to linger upon the emphasised word. They serve a similar function today.

"Try our"fresh" pies, with real "meat"" indicates a culinary delight of remarkable quality. A large man grabbing you by the lapels and shouting "I'll "fix" your face in a minute, mate" is obviously a very enthusiastic maxillofacial surgeon.

I hope this post has removed any lingering doubt from your mind. Try not to think of these as rigid guidelines, but more as divine commandments.

Only by slavishly imitating writers of great individuality in every aspect can we hope to reproduce what made their work so important.

Punctuations, like grammar, am important. Whether or not you adhere to guidelines in this post may end up being the difference between a lucrative publishing contract with a powerhouse like Lulu.com or financial ruin.

Thanking you,
Brendan Carson

What I done did

2010-03-27T17:46:00.001-07:00

View of me in my house - actual engraving.
Hail,

And a very brief post today - I have a one-day weekend, and if I don't write 1000 words today I will have to put myself in the stocks.

And that's hard. You can never get the little latch done up after you've put your head and hands in.

Anyway - raining outside, glorious coffee and glorious wife inside, and I am sitting next to a pile of books I bought yesterday at a library book-sale. I have tied up my inner censor, so I am just going to write freely about what I have bought.

Here is the list:

"Cleopatra" - Lucy Hughes-Hallett. Never read anything by her, but she comes highly recommended by Marina Warner, who writes beautifully.

"The Essential Erasmus" - probably the most literate man of his age. It contains not only the Handbook, Folly and Peace but also something I hadn't seen before - a fifty six page document "Concerning the Eating of Fish".

"The Magic Apple Tree: A country year" - Susan Hill. Images of traditional English farming and countryside.

Look at the redness of the apples. I wish I had the vocabulary to describe this stuff. You can almost feel these in your hand.

"Christi-Anarchy" by Dave Andrews. Don't email me about this trying to logically prove the non-existence of something or quoting Monty Python. This is part of something I have been looking into - it's a movement that sometimes calls itself New Monasticism, Bonhoeffer alluded to it in one of his letters - that takes the whole no-violence/new criticism/compassion/social justice side of things seriously.

"Godless Morality" - Richard Holloway. He's a bishop, it's about the need to keep religion out of ethics.

"They called me the Wildman" - Richard Hollingsworth. Fictional prison diary of a Swedish man who lived among the Aborigines in the 1870s.

"The Pilgrim's Progress", John Bunyan. I have this on etext, and this reads like an inferior translation, and I do't get much out of the book at all, but it was fifty cents.

"Jerusalem" - Time Life books. Lots of photos. In book two my characters get to Jerusalem.

"Falls the Shadow" - Sharon Penman. Title taken from the second greatest English poem of the century, plus also set "only" two hundred years after my book.

"Parable of the Blind" by Gert Hofmann. Never heard of, never seen, opened it up and it looks interesting. Plus the cover looks good, detail of a painting by Brueghel. I think that there are only a few times and places you can feel you know in some visceral way from the visual art, and sixteenth century Holland is one of them.

"Giving up the ghost" - Hilary Mantel. Looked at it because of the author's name. Could be good.

Not an actual ghost. Does not appear in Mantel book.

"The Lair of the White Worm" - Bram Stoker. Radio National were doing a reading of Dracula recently and it was actually disturbing - for a few seconds you could get under the skin of the story, see what it had been before Blackula and Abbott and Costello and Twilight and so on. The Penguin Classics version of Dracula has Stoker's mother's letter to someone detailing her reminiscences of the cholera epidemic that swept Ireland in her generation. It will appear in some form in book two.

"The Cistercian World - Monastic Writings of the Twelfth Century". This is another Penguin Classics, it's got pretty much all the primary texts. Same thing - once you get under the skin, try to see the men (not women...) sitting in their cells, the brambles and the briars outside, the world descending into darkness and the devils in the miry air outside - it's incredible. What twelfth century monks and twelfth century laymen thought of twelfth century monks and monks in general was not the same as what we think when we think twelfth century monks and monks in general.

A Cistercian Monk

"The Bachelor's Dinner - Good food for single people" - David Jones. A cookbook with a picture of a fox on the front, drinking a glass of undoubtedly fine wine. I opened it up and it had a quote from the Decameron about the country called Bengodi where there was a mountain of grated Parmesan cheese, and people lived on macaroni and ravioli. What is not to love?

"A Middle East Mosaic - Fragments of Life, Letters and History", ed Bernard Lewis. Again, I read a few pages and found a glorious bit of invective about "the Saracens... whom we never found desirable as friends or as enemies". It's views from and of the Middle East over the last two thousand years.

A non-Cistercian Monk. Note the subtle variation in tonsure styles.

But Brendan, I ask rhetorically, how can you have afforded all of these books? What with a *crippled wife and numerous cats and fowl depending on me for their sustenance? How could you have spent so much money on mere books?

Twenty dollars. Twenty dollars for all of them. Twenty freaking dollars.

And in a month or so, my Amazon (predominantly second hand) books arrive - even though I feel bad about ordering from them. MR James' Apocrypha, CS Lewis' Discarded Image and something on Viking Combat Techniques - presumably more than "no, boy, you're raping when you should be pillaging..."

Anyway. While I am writing uncensoredly about this I am neither reading the books nor writing my own, so on with it.

Thanks for listening,

BDC

*her word, not mine.

Tragedy porn and the Anglo-Saxon worldview.

2010-03-11T12:20:00.000-08:00

Hail,

Okay, here's the situation.

I'm writing. I'm currently writing the first draft. The first draft is meant to be "closed door", it's meant to be inchoate, it's meant to be blurted out over the screen in a great long gloop of words. The second, third, whateverth draft are meant to shape things. Once I have first draft finished, I know where I am going.

And the first draft is driving me mad.

The thing is, it's harder than it sounds. If it was just glooping and blurting, it'd be easy, is somewhat disturbing for someone who suddenly opened the door. But the inner censor keeps sneaking in the back door.

See - the first thing is the novel has to make sense. "Where I get to" has to arise in a believable way out of "Where I began" and "where I went to next". Action has to arise from consequence, both internal and external. It has to be reasonable - if the climactic scene on the battlements of Jerusalem pivots on Aelfwen not liking mutton, I can't have her chomping down on her pet sheep* on page three.

Equally important, as well as reasonable, it has to be affecting. My previous work has had too little action, a lot of people staring into the distance while they drone on about accidie. This one may be slipping into tragedy porn.

What, I imagine I hear you ask, is tragedy porn? Tragedy porn occupies a similar space to violence porn, food porn, and a few other pornres. in this sense, porn writing consists of a nominal character/s to whom the writer makes stuff happen just for the visceral reaction evoked by those events themselves - not for any other purpose, or as elements of a larger story.

If this happens three times to your heroine, it may be tragedy porn.

If the half-naked woman runs from the burning building into the deserted warehouse but the killer is in the deserted warehouse and there's a snake and meanwhile he's torturing her sister and the rats are eating the babysitter and some guy's in the back door sharpening up the egg-whisk, then you can be pretty sure it's violence porn.

Tragedy porn is like that, but it's an endless series of tragic events. Think normal pornography - there's a term - but instead of the babysitter and the pizza boy, it's someone falling through the ice and the countess being sold into slavery - and no-one and nothing changes. I am not saying sex in writing is bad, or that violence in writing is bad, or that bad things shouldn't happen to good characters, but I am saying they are not enough. Tragic events, like violence, like sex, should, by all rights, be incredibly arousing, but in bad writing they instead are ultimately unsatisfying.

We shall see. Hopefully when I get this revised I can make sure it's not tragedy or any other kind of porn.

Hay fever - an everyday tragedy.

At the moment I am trying to work out Aelfwen. She's one of my main characters. The contradiction within her comes from a number of places - her parents are violent, they are emotionally unstable, they live on the edge of criminality. I did read that everyone you see has lost something and wants something - I think that's true, but I think those things often change and are often not what we say or even think they are. I want to be thin, but I eat too much - there is more going on than would seem.

Anyway - Aelfwen. She's someone who'd like to see herself as wilder than she is.

What's happened to her? She's been betrayed by her family, they've gone and left her with something unbearable. She's been attacked and only survived by the intervention of an authority figure whom she has been taught to despise and fear. She has always feared the outlaw, the oath-breaker, and by now (160 000 words) she's starting to get the horrible feeling that she and all the people she depends upon are outlaws, that they're dangerous, and they will end up broken at the cross-roads.

What else? She's been sick unto death. She's had a crush on someone. He said he was married, and that he couldn't be with her, then she's became sick, sick unto death, and when she woke-up he was with someone else. She does't have a home and she doesn't have any way to make one, and if she stands still for too long there's going to be more blood.

And there's already been a lot of blood.

Deeply moving death scene number thirty three.

Anyway, we shall see. Onward.

Thanks for listening.

BDC

*Woolfric

The loneliness of the long-distance writer

2010-03-07T19:49:00.000-08:00

Hail,
There is rain outside, so hard sometimes it's like the house is breathing. I am in here with wife and cats and ginger beer, and pots underneath the drops in the kitchen.

And one hundred and fifty something thousand words of what might not end up being a novel.

This, I should assure you, is not a cry for reassurance. Like a lot of other feelings, it's a transient thing. I may not have learned a lot about writing, but one thing I have learned about myself in the last year or so is I can do "it", I can sit down and write and sooner or later the story comes out of what I write. It's probably dangerous to attempt to quantify something with so many unknowns, but I am probably three quarter way though the first draft, and given that that has to be finished by February next year, things are going well.

(By the way - the spellchecker on this thing just attempted to replace "tha", (an unfinished "that") with "thad". Lowercase, uncapitalised "thad". I don't even know if "thad" is a word.

I've just checked - apparently it isn't. It's a name (capitalised), and it's an acronym (Transient Hepatic Attenuation Differences), for things seen on scans that may or may not be cancer, but it does not appear to be a word.

"Thob", however, is a word. It means "to explain one's beliefs and opinions". Henceforth, what I am doing is going to be called "thobbing". Much less silly sounding than the vaguely gastro-intestinal-sounding "blog".

Perhaps not - "I'm just off for a quick thob" sounds odd.)

Anyway - "what may or may not end up being a novel". It's an alarming feeling. I wonder if I am like one of those mediaeval bird-men who has built a contraption of spars of wood and goose-feathers, and tomorrow aims to climb to the top of the tower with them strapped to his back and leap off, but tonight is sitting staring at them thinking "I dunno..."

A bird-man of the type I am thinking about

So - one hundred and fifty thousand words. And part of the unease, pathetically, is it is one hundred and fifty thousand words with no positive feedback at all. That is due to a number of reasons - the first draft is closed door, the first thing is get the story done, all that kind of thing - but it's alarming. It may well be that I have spent thousands of hours, and neglected my wife and my family and the rest of my life, all for nothing. It may be that this isn't going to fly.

This is, I reckon, the peculiar loneliness of the long-distance writer. Short story writers get feedback each time they get either an acceptance or a rejection. I deliberately knocked the short stories on the head on New Year's Day, and it's certainly helped the novel, but it does make you feel a bit cut off. There are radars "off which I have disappeared."

This kind of bird-man, not so much. But do click on it, it's an affecting picture.
And then, if the novel does get published, so what? I don't keep in contact much with my fellow writers (there are certain exceptions), and I don't often visit their face-book pages or their blogs (or thobs). I am not entirely sure about this but I suspect there may be an element of fear in it. Specifically, I see other writers who have written, and published, and then - what?

What happens next? If you do this for fame and fortune, it's not going to happen. If you're after the hot dudes/babes, ditto. If you're doing this for the winner's podium, the chance to shake that great bottle of champagne and spray it everywhere, the partially clad models undulating around advertising your wares, then that's the Clipsal, not the Booker Prize. If you're doing this so that one day someone, somewhere, in a lift or a hotel lobby is going to say "Hey, aren't you the hot dude/babe who wrote Insert Title Here? That changed my life!" - then that's a lot of hours for very little reward. Give it up, join the CFS or be a surf life-saver instead.

Even less the kind of bird-person I am talking about.
Me, I don't know.

I have to write this.

I have to know if I can do it.

I want to find out how it ends. I want Aelfwen and Emma and Wulfric and Cenwulf to be okay. The pilgrims are starving in a ditch outside Lucca, they have no horse, no opium, no hope. The land seethes around them. In the north, the wild men roam. In the east, in the Land of Darkness, the Iron Gates have been opened so that Gog and Magog are let out, cannibals and eaters of blood. To the south, the Anti-Christ. There are plagues and wonders, and our heroes have their weapons and their wits. I want the world to be saved.

Now I just have to do it.

Thanks for reading,
BDC

Season of mists and mellow fruitcakedness

2010-02-21T14:24:00.000-08:00

Hail,
And now the novel writing season is almost upon us.

I should explain.

As you know, novel writing is a seasonal endeavour. In the southern hemisphere, paper crops ripen in summer, traditionally between the end of the Brisbane Writer's Festival and the intake for the Clarion Writer's Workshop. By Christmas the soft cream-coloured buds have ripened into flowers of A4, foolscap and butchers. Hordes of itinerant essayists and poets are employed, picking paper at rates as low as five cents a ream. From there, the paper is dried and sent to the punctuation market, where it is processed. Both "pre-punctuated" and "eecummings" varieties are -

Hold on, that's not it.

What actually happens is summer I spend time with my glorious wife. Plus I box, I muck about amongst the grapevines, I stare at the geese. Basically, I am not one of those people who believe that it's all about the writing. In the end, time with my wife and boxing and staring at the geese give me something that writing isn't going to: I am not a subscriber to the "pallor, paunch, personality disorder and pimple-picking" school of writing fiction. Summer I don't often get more than an hour a day done - the silent hour from five to six AM.

Some of my alpha reviewers

Plus the thinking about slavery and slingshots and mediaeval sexuality, but that's back-of-my-head stuff, the under-the-surface stuff I do while the front of my head is dealing with patients and paying bills.

But winter - winter is different. Winter is short days, and darkness. Winter my wife is away a lot - she exhibits cats, and rises before dawn to stuff sleek-bodied animals into crates and drive with them tens of kilometres so they can be admired by other people. Winter, particularly Sundays, there is only me and the geese.

And the internet, but that's defeatable. And I don't have Civilisation II any more.

Anyhow - that means if things stay good - and there's a lot that can go wrong - then I will have finished the rough draft some time before All Saint's Day. Then the rewrite. Then the sending off to beta group reviewers. Then the serious revision.

Then of course, the failure, the ignominy, the divorce, tarring and feathering and the being forced to sit astride an ass, facing rearward, in fool's motley, while being whipped with a string of onions, but that's all in the future. I will try to capture it for youtube.

Me, reading my reviews

Thanks for listening,
BDC

I have a scream

2010-02-11T10:07:00.000-08:00

Hail,
Tell you what's driving me mad (besides dealing with my nemeses, or as they are more commonly known, my fellow medical practitioners).
It's that there they internet.
Let me explain. I am writing a novel. I don't know all there is to know about the stuff that goes in the novel. Luckily I sit before the most powerful research tool ever invented - you can keep your Mars colonies, we've got broadband. I can research. I can type in the term "Anglo-Saxon", and find myself in a position that Solomon would have envied. I can become a receptacle for all the wisdom of the ages.
And, it turns out, a fair amount of the stupid of the ages.

Example the first: the Anglo Saxons. The term "Anglo-Saxon" means different things to different people, apparently. To me it's the hegemonic* culture of southern Britain from about AD 450 to AD 1066 - or this:

To some people, on the other hand, they seem to mean this:

See the difference? See how embarrassed I'd be if, instead of Echtheow Long-hand, my novel was suddenly populated by deluded throwbacks like Hans Fossilpenis and Adolf Neverwasser? My ex-girlfriend's father was in the Australian Nationalist Front, which was neither Australian, nationalist nor a front, and I know because I have seen - these people are dickwhacks. When I want to see pictures of them, I'll type "white person -winner" as Boolean terms.

And slavery. My characters encounter slavery - it was an integral part of any society my characters encountered. When I type in "slavery", I am looking for something like this:

Possibly less of this:

(you have to click on the picture)

and surprisingly little of this:

(Again, click to see the full splendour of this). And, yes, they are all Princess Leias, or Princesses Leiae, or whatever the plural would be.
And that's just the mild stuff. Some of this stuff is less concerned with Echtheow Long-hand than with... some other guy.

Anyway - why am I bothering to find this stuff out? Why not, as they say, make it up? I have thought about this and I think the main thing is I find this interesting. I find this world interesting, I find what we say about it fascinating, I find their world as they lived it and as they imagined it fascinating. Hopefully I can write it in a way that makes it interesting for other people, too.

Thanks for listening,
BDC
*this is a really useful word, and you almost never get to use it, which is a pity. Try it now. Hegemony. Hegemoney. What hegehogs spend. And while we're talking about hedgehogs - why can't they just share the hedge?

Normal Transmission will not be resumed for some time.

2010-02-06T21:59:00.000-08:00

Hail,
Now, no update for days and days, maybe weeks. Why is this?
Because of real life. And I don't mean the kind of bitching I am wont to do about how I would really love to write but so many other things keep getting in the way.
Wank. Other things get in the way when I put them in the way. No-one forces me to go to work, or clean the house, or hit the punching bag, plant eucalypyts, or anything. There is no gun to my head, and if I choose to stare at failblog ("So sad: JD Salinger has died." "That's terrible. I loved him in Scrubs") rather than write my next chapter, I can take it up with myself.
But real life it is. Specifically, someone I love having chemotherapy. It is palliative chemotherapy, it has made him very sick, and soon he will die.
Now, what to do about this? One thing I have learnt is that there are people who have the answer to this. I think of them as the salesman school. Every single thing that happens to you can be solved by writing more, or revising more, or submitting more short stories. Like all "it's so simple I can't believe it" answers, it's so simple that I can't believe it. Good luck to those who can, but my mileage varies.
For what it's worth, there is a body of evidence supporting my point of view. The will is neither the strongest nor the most attractive aspect of a human being. There is more going on in you than what you decide, and if there wasn't, you'd be too boring to listen to. There are loves and fears and memories and half-imagined recollections, and things you can't put words to. I believe, although i cannot prove, that most of what we are is inchoate. I have spoken to people who had nothing else in their head but willpower, and they are batshit boring. But I digress.
So, what do I do? I do my job, and I go into the hospital every day, and on the way in I still go to the gym - I've seen myself when I don't exercise, the mood drops like a stone - but I have not written much. I am still doing the get up at five thing, but there was close on a month there where nothing came out, and even now I couldn't write a short story if you put a gun to my head. I write scenes, I read and make notes, I imagine. I have three out of my four characters in places from which I fear they cannot emerge. In my spare time I research early medieval slavery, and try not to read about lung cancer.
But I do write. And this is getting written all the time, it is writing itself while I sleep, plots are flowing together while I drive the car or kick the punching bag. Characters peer out from between the branches, their faces hanging like masks. I do not know what will happen to my novel when I finish it, I don't know if I will ever submit it anywhere, and I know when I get to the end I have to rewrite it from the first word up, pull up every stone, dig up every foundation. But I know I can keep writing, and I know while I can, I will.
While I was at Clarion, one of the authors there was someone I admired very much. To prevent embarrassing her, I will call her conceal her name - call her Schmacey. Schmacey wrote - and will continue to write - amazing things. She wrote things that distressed and disturbed and frustrated and on occasion awed us. I remember pounding on her door and gibbering at her that she was writing with fissile materials. She wrote important stuff.
Anyway. What Schmacey had, and what I have tended to do without most of my life, was courage. I have not had to be courageous because things have always been relatively easy for me. I am not starving, no-one had bombed my village, I have not had to do things I don't really want to do. I have not faced many things truly unpleasant.
But that is all coming. My father's blood count drops. The medication that is killing the tumour is killing him. Things can be altered, and to an extent forestalled, if not reversed, but in the mean-time, the mathematics is ineluctable. I am used to, as a writer, to speak in metaphors, but for him, darkness is coming. No orcs or shrouded litch-kings, nothing like that.
And we will be left behind.
I think the best I can hope for now is to face it with that kind of courage.
Thanks for listening,
Brendan

Help wanted - butchering and eating a horse

2010-01-24T14:20:00.000-08:00

Hail,
Pretty much what it says. I am writing a novel, and I have run into trouble.

Here's the story so far. Two of my protagonists, fresh from protagging, are travelling on horseback to Arras, in 1000 AD France (or Frankland, or whatever I end up calling it). They are a monk and a soldier.

This is not "My Incredibly Awesome D&D Adventure".

The monk and the soldier are travelling to meet up with the other members of the party - an earl's daughter, a peasant girl, last seen in a coma, and a mad monk. The non-mad monk loves the earl's daughter, there is all sorts of emotional upheaval and also the anti-Christ.

But anyway, Wulfric (less-mad monk) and Cenwulf (soldier) arrive, and find Emma (earl's daughter) sitting by the fire. Aelfwen (the peasant girl) is still in a fever. Frethi (the mad monk) is still mad. When they left her, she had a donkey and a cart, which she was using to transport Aelfwen to a monastery to be healed. The cart is shattered, the donkey slaughtered. It's nightfall when they meet, they can't do anything then, so they sit down around a campfire and eat.

Aelfwen's mount, the gentle Fricasee

Now - the donkey's lying there. It was killed yesterday. They're starving. They aren't anywhere where they could salt or smoke it, even if they wanted to. The smart thing to do would be to stuff yourself, take what you can and get out of there.

Now - how do you butcher a horse? This is not my field of expertise. I have seen my dad butcher sheep, pigs and kangaroos, I would not have been ten years old at the time. In any case, this isn't butchering in that sense, it's take what you can carry and get the hell out of Frankland. In case I hadn't mentioned, they are outlaws in Frankland, and they don't want to be hanging around the road for any longer than necessary.

Now - who here has eaten horse? What does it taste like? What bits would you eat first if you had the sensitivities of someone from 1000 AD (I suspect it would be the pluck)? How would an eorl's daughter eat around a campfire with her soldier/s? What about "manners" - if everyone farted and belched all the time, how beneficial is it to the audience to be reminded of this?

And horse - to eat horseflesh was abnormal. The Pope had spoken against it, it was a crime and a sin. The flesh was unclean. in times of famine, people ate horseflesh, they fell upon and devoured each other. How does it feel to eat unclean meat? how does it feel when to eat unclean meat when you are starving? How does it feel to eat unclean meat when you are starving and believe literally in the real and imminent presence of Hell, of a God who watches, of sins that are accounted against you?

How you may feel

How do you feel when you sit across from the one you love, when you are sworn not to look upon a woman with lust in your heart, to see her eating unclean meat, and the grease from it shining on her lips?

And sauce? What about some kind of sauce? Of course you'd eat horse with sauce. You couldn't be forced to eat horse without sauce. That'd be coarse.

As you can see, my brain has cracked under the strain, and strands of childhood Dr Seuss stories are worming their way to the top. This can't go on. I have a novel to finish, for God's sake.

So - advice would be appreciated. If you've eaten horse, if you've eaten taboo food, if you've sat around a campfire with forbidden lust sprouting inside you like a black-leaved plant, email me. Tell me what it's like.

Thanks for listening,
BDC
About 140K down, less than fifty to go.

The Virgin Blue Saga

2010-01-18T18:38:00.000-08:00

Hail,
Just back from alienating people on their blogs - I tell you, this internet stuff is harder than it seems - and I thought I'd share some spite.

Yesterday, while driving to work, I was reciting my "thank you everyone" speech for when my novel is published and I garner the acclaim of tens of readers, and I thought of someone who was very important to me. The woman who, in a way, made my book possible.

And I'm not talking about my beauteous wife, Katy, who is almost literally my muse. I clean house for her and she causes ideas to sprout in my brain. Talking to her solves my problems. If it wasn't for her, I'd be not only crazy and dead but also with crippling writer's block.

And I'm not talking about the many talented people how have given me advice and encouragement when they'd probably rather have been living their own lives. Or the women behind Clarion South - thanks again.

I am talking about the writer of The Virgin Blue Saga.

The book is not called the Virgin Blue Saga, I am calling it the Virgin Blue Saga because I first saw it while standing in an airport waiting for a Virgin Blue flight. It could equally have been called Book One of the Qantas Cycle, or the Aeroflot Chronicles, or, on a normal workday, the Honda Jazz Trilogy.
Anyway, it was about three years ago, I was on the way to Indonesia, and I was standing in the airport thinking, as I do, "how many of these books can I justify buying?" And I browsed through everywhere and I ended up at the fantasy section, and I picked up volume one of said Virgin Blue Saga.

It was fat, and gold-coloured, and it had a woman on the front with a book, which is good, and on the back it said (and I paraphrase) a breathtaking somethingorother of sexual tension, exotic intrigue and hand-to-hand combat. And stuff. And maybe something about it being superbly detailed, and a world in which one could lose oneself, or something.

(Not this book)
This, I said to Katy, is what I want people to say about my book. If I write a book.
Buy it, said Katy, so I did. And over the next three days I read it.
It was utter, unutterable shite. I read it first in perplexity, then in increasing dismay, and then in full blown rage. It was almost inexpressibly bad.

I can't explain further. Nothing happened. There's battles and stuff, I think, but nothing actually happens. The man character, for whom we are meant to feel some kind of affinity, exists to be rescued and speaks like she's had a head injury. The big plot point, which was either to be revealed at the end of the book or at the end of the trilogy (yes, the trilogy) was printed on page one hundred and ten in letters of fire. Reading it was like eating very cheap slice polony slice by interminable slice - you open the book at any page and it's exactly the same as any other page.

(Also not this book)

It was bad.

It remains bad.

It ever will be bad.

And it sold. The first trilogy is out now, the second has just been released.
All this woman had, that any of fifty other writers I can mention do not, is time and perseverance.

And maybe a particularly uncluttered mental landscape, I don't know.

Anyway, I bought the book. I keep it on my bookcase, with the other source materials. Occasionally, I take it down and gaze in stupefaction at the back cover.

(Christ, I even wish it had been this book)
If you are reading this, you can do better. You can write better. You can get published. You can make the world a less worserer place.
Time and perseverance.
Anyway, onward and upward.
Thanks for listening,
BDC

Let's talk about swiving

2010-01-11T01:04:00.000-08:00

Hail,

Okay - the problem with sex.

I am writing a novel, and if it gets finished (fifty or sixty thousand words to go, dear God, then rewrite the first third of two storylines so it makes some sort of sense, and add in the fifth storyline, and then you have to rewrite it the first time so you can get it into some kind of shape for the beta group to look at, and I haven't even worked out exactly who they will be, and God, how can I say "oh, yeah, if you're not doing anything over the next year or so how about having a quick read of one hundred and eighty thousand words and tell me what you reckon," and then reading the critiques, sweet Lord, I'd rather spoon my own eye out with a miner's shovel...)...

If it gets finished, I say, one of the problems I will have to solve along the way is the sex problem.

What problem? So far I have between three and nine characters who are largely between ten and twenty. They spend three or four months together, free from parent or from parish priest. They hope. They despair. They fear, and are fearless, they doubt and they have faith. They eat and sleep and bathe together, they spend summer nights, they fight and feed and flee...

(as sexually explicit as these illustrations are going to get)

Why, then, have I not written them even thinking about fornicating? And I am not talking about wild nine-somes in swimming pools of whatever-the-middle-ages-used-for-jelly*, I am talking four POV characters who have so far had not an urge, not a twinge, not a shadow of an experience of anything that would make a schoolmarm plush.

Because that's what we've got. One hundred and forty thousand words, a bit of low-grade flirting, an unconsummated yearning, and that's about it.

I can think of a couple of excuses, or, as I prefer to call them, reasons.

One problem is the age of my characters. Aelfwen, one of the heroines, is twelve or thirteen. Emma, someone whose beauty has been remarked upon by several other characters, and who has clearly influenced their actions, is fifteen. It may be in this that I am unable to step out of the mindset of the twenty first century and into the mind of the tenth. I have a problem with when it comes to ages of consent.

This particular excuse is obviously crap - if I can't look out through tenth century eyes at sex, what makes me think I can look at the sky, or a stranger, or a spear? If I can't do this, I can't do anything.

Another possible reason is publishability. Somewhere in my head is the idea of a host of thin-lipped, self-appointed guardians of public morals, decrying and... doing whatever it is that they do, and thus rendering my book unpublishable. I mentioned this to my wife and she said "You're saying that if you put sex in your book, it won't sell?" Put like that, the argument neatly defeats itself.

(there is nothing going on here other than what is depicted)

A third thing is about control. Love - and there is no way of saying this any more without sounding stupid - love transforms what it touches. When you are in love, you don't just feel different, you see different, you think and remember and imagine different. That may make it harder to write about love than to write about Dark Ages theology, or spear-battles.

But all of those reasons come down to a lack of confidence. And confidence comes from competence, from doing things well, and doing things well comes from doing them at all. Badly, possibly wincingly badly initially, but then better.

So, sit down in darkened room. Open document. Insert sex scene here.

Thanks for listening,
BDC
*Jelly, apparently

The Father Thing

2010-01-07T13:37:00.000-08:00

Hail,
Occasionally, particularly when the patient list ahead of me looks particularly dire, I try to articulate things I know I can't articulate.

Here is the latest version - my spec fic and my faith. If I was going to give this a title, it would be the Blessed and the Bright. If this kinds of stuff gives you hives on your amygdala, look away now.

I have this blog which you are reading. I also have a facebook page, and occasionally, because I am trying to have intercourse with the wider spec fic community, I check up people whose work or accomplishments interest me. I go to blogs or homepages, I friend* people. I went to someone's page the other day and the little tag thing at the top said "Religion is the most dangerous of the mind viruses: Arthur C Clarke."

(How this made me feel)

Now - I am not going to preach about anything. I am not going to argue with anyone about what anyone reckons is on Mount Ararat or some piece of toast with a face on it. I am not going to defend things that are not only indefensible, but that should and must be attacked, and attacked until they are dead - the long tradition of gynophobia, the hatred of sex, the censorship, the deep, unthinking plutocratic conservatism. In my case there is a deep, almost visceral revulsion at some of this, and I can understand for many people this seeps into the whole of faith, or religion, or Christianity. I do not support these things, and although I do not do enough to oppose them, I try to try to want to do more.

If anyone wants to talk to me about this, don't. My experience has been and my belief is that such dialogue is sterile, but there's a shop in Rundle mall where they sell those sandwich boards and textas.

But what I am going to do is bang on about my feelings for a bit.

I don't know that there is a "meant to be" for speculative fiction. There is not some template or some set of criteria up to which we must measure. But when I think of spec fic somewhere in my head is the idea of freedom - somewhere where we can say what cannot be said elsewhere, where we can explore things that maybe don't get explored in other fields. Somewhere in my head is "The Sands of Mars", where we discovered we were not alone, "Crown of Infinity", with the uncountable and barely comprehensible extraterrestrial species, Molly Millions walking free through Chiba City.

The thing that I love (and always have loved) about spec fic was the revelling in difference. When we were sitting in school being told we must be tolerant of Aboriginals, inside my head I was imagining the Pschaidurusja Conglomerate encountering the Chikkissikkippillin, or honey-dweller traders perplexed by Duende tree marriages**. That is what I love now. I am a xenophiliac, I have alienomania, I am an unrepentant wonder junkie.

And to me, what Arthur C Clarke "said" (if it was him, it may well have been) runs counter to that.

It's not the only thing. I have been on forums where the stated assumption is we are all "brights". I've been at places where the division between Christians and evolutionists, Christians and scientists, Christians and thinkers has been unblinkingly accepted by people who then sit and quibble about the precise nature of supergravity. I've read stuff where I can guess the time between a character with religious belief appearing and them being exposed as a vicious hypocrite down to the tens of pages.

And I'm not saying "poor bugger me" - I'm actually doing quite well. I'm not saying I want "equal time", or Creationist explanations stuck in the back of copies of Cosmos. I'm not saying anyone is failing to reach any particular criteria if, when they find out that I have a faith, they then decide that I have a dangerous mind virus. I'm not trying to convert anyone.

But twenty five years ago I stood in the sea at night, down at Mandurah, and I was baptised, and I came out speaking in tongues. With all due respect, Arthur C Clarke (and the woman who quoted him) wasn't there. I have had a fire in me that burned and did not consume, I have seen Christ on Rundle Mall and I have tasted honey in the rock.

(I am, for those concerned about the welfare of my patients and any children in my care, not speaking literally. I am speaking truthfully. And Juliet was not the sun, and yet she was).

What I am saying is that there is more going on than you think, and on occasion, all of us can do better than we currently do.
Without wishing to evoke imagery that may offend, I am saying that that beam in your own eye stuff may not just apply to other people.
I am saying there are aspects of human experience which, if we wave them away, dismiss them as some sort of icky stupid person virus, we will not see, and we will be the poorer for it.
I am saying if you have a simple explanation or theory about religion, then maybe, like everyone else, you should "consider the effect of your preconceptions on your perceptions", as a patient said to me yesterday.

It may be that we, people of Faith, are more complicated than you think. In fact, I'm pretty sure we are.

Anyway. Blogs are meant to garner readers, I don't know how compatible this post is with that. It may do the reverse. But anyway, thanks for listening,

BDC

* I just had an idea of an alternative Australian internet, where people mate people.

** All this is sadly true. I imagined and had considerable date for thirty extraterrestrial races and and entire history of the galaxy. In other news, I also had no friends.

Don't read this post, read this book instead.

2010-01-05T22:48:00.000-08:00

Hail,
You are what you eat, for certain rather restrictive interpretations of "you" and "are" and "what" and "eat". Specifically, I am not some Arcimboldo-like Golem of green apples, sea-food, interesting sausages and yoghurt, with chillies for fingers.

I am, however, at least in part what I read.

And while I am waiting for fame and fortune to bring people to my blog, and my other writing, I thought I'd briefly mention what a book I bought this week.

The book is Booklife, by Jeff Vandermeer.

It actually arrived a few weeks ago, but it arrived in the midst of a rather unsettling time, and I only opened it a few days ago. I have read it since.

I don't know what the essential books for writers were before this - to be honest, I have never found most of them to be that much use, although I did like and do recommend Robert Stephenson's "Writing Soldier" - but the list now starts with "Booklife." Booklife is not so much a "how to write" book, but a "how to be a writer" book - how to survive and maybe even thrive while you are writing. It includes chapters on dealing with envy, ways of using the internet, professional ethics and so on. It enables you to get from where you are to where you may well want to be while avoiding divorce, or florid mental illness, or bankruptcy, or tarring and feathering, or blood clots to the brain.

No guarantees, of course, but being that being a writer means most of us will run a risk of one or all of those, this book seems a remarkably cheap form of insurance.

If you have succeeded as a writer, I suspect it may be because you know most of this - you don't know all of it, so buy the book.
If you have been trying to succeed as a writer, and so far you have not succeeded, it may well be because you have not read and applied the principles outlined in this book. This book may be the difference.

Seriously, it may be that important. You wouldn't try and get yourself from here to Sydney using only guts and gumption and your vast and glittering talent, you'd maybe give it a bit of thought, read a bit and learn what works. Same thing for writing, and this is what you need to read.

Buy it at Amazon, or come around here and pry it from my cold, chitinous claws.

Thanks for listening,
BDC

Apparently....

2010-01-02T08:00:00.000-08:00

you can add pictures to this sort of thing.

For example: here is a picture of a Panotii, which will appear in my novel, probably book III.

Going east from there is a place where people are born who are in size fifteen feet tall and ten broad. They have large heads and ears like fans. They spread one ear beneath them at night, and they wrap themselves with the other. Their ears are very light and their bodies are as white as milk. And if they see or perceive anyone in those lands, they take their ears in their hands and go far and flee, so swiftly one might think they flew.

Score

2010-01-01T17:33:00.000-08:00

Hail,
And just for completeness:
In 2009, which like all years, has been the best of years and the worst of them, I submitted twelve short stories. Four have been published, two are still out there, six have been rejected. If someone put a gun to my head I could send out probably fourteen stories tomorrow, but none of them are good enough (they include the six that had brief outings into the market this year) to be sent out yet.

That was during a year that did have Clarion, and my wife recovering from major orthopaedic surgery, and those close to me being arrested, or diagnosed, or stuff. And one patient death, which is never good, and does knock you around a bit.

Anyway - luckily none of this affected my fluency in making excuses for myself. Either way, 2009 is gone, and shall not rise again.

So - today I started the third arc of my book. I have yet to wrap up the second arc, and the first arc needs a couple of chapters rewritten so that the rest of the story makes sense, but at the moment we're up in the Alps, and our trusty native guides want to kill us and feed us to wolves.

And I have the plan for my Mohines story. I wrote this at Clarion, and it sucked, but I have rewritten it using a technique I call Co-Authoring with an Imaginary Friend.

The Imaginary Friend is not imaginary in this case, he is real, but he is in Queensland or somewhere, so it's almost the same thing.

Imaginary Friend (let's call him Schmeve) was at Clarion with me, and what I noticed about his writing is he had what I lacked. My characters dithered, his decided. My plots meandered, his plunged headlong. My characters, faced with men with guns, would pose affectedly and reminisce about something penetrating the vicar had said about string theory. His characters shot people.

Schmeve's stories went places. They were exciting. People were gripped.

So what I do when I write is try to keep somewhere in my head the idea of what Schmeve's writing would bring to this story. Could this scene do with a little less conversation, a little less action - would that be satisfactioning? Could my protagonist actually protag? Should they be decisive, rather than indecisive? Ert, rather than inert? Could this story benefit from settings or characters or ideas that were actually intrinsically exciting?

I don't know who thought of this idea - if it's crap, it may be me. But I have a dim memory of someone at Clarion saying you should think about working with someone who is in some ways your opposite. It might have been Jack Dann, or Sean Williams, or Jeff Vandermeer. Or it might have been a fevre dream, some waking hallucination that plagued me while I tossed under gossamer sheets in the tropical heat, big bats blundering against the window. Who knows?

Either way, if I do get this finished and published, part of the credit (and all of the royalties) goes to Schmeve (as soon as he can sign a non-imaginary contract). If it doesn't sell, of course, he's to blame.

Thankis for listening,
BDC

All is quiet...

2009-12-31T16:21:00.000-08:00

This morning I told my wife I had made my new year's resolutions. She smiled at me over her croissant. She is a pulchritudinous sybarite and I am a puritan.
"I'm sure you have," she said. "Why don't you put them on a spreadsheet?"

Obviously I couldn't do that, but only because I already had. Here is a brief breakdown of what I wrote:

2009 - about four stories published, a great swathe of the novel written, a number of new stories written.

2010 - keep writing the novel. Hopefully first the first draft by winter 2010, then finish the first rewrite by New Years Eve 2010.
That's three, four hundred words a day.

Also maybe finish my novella and send it off to Twelfth Planet, and send off maybe three to six short stories.

I'm not sure what to do with the complete 350 K blog that I was going to turn into a novel but that still upsets me when I read it. Probably no rush there.

Publication-wise, all I want for NYE 2010 is to be published in Weird Tales.

Anyway, these are deliberately vague and relatively modest. Part of the reason for this may be what I have been thinking and have been unable to articulate, part of it may have been something I read recently that resonated with me.

It was in a magazine called Wet Ink, issue 14. It's an interview with Matthew Condon, who wrote "the trout opera". Rather than bang on and possibly infringe copyright, here is the salient piece - prior to this he was describing a crisis of faith, one in which he questioned the entire why and what for of his writing.
"At the end of all this angst.... I made a deliberate decision to return to the manuscript and simply write the book for myself. If it extended for 10 000 pages and took me a further twenty or thirty years, so be it. I'd write it for myself. Make it a life project without prospect of publication. Who cares? What did that matter? And as these things happen, the moment I made that decision the book started coming together... something broke inside of me, all those accumulated pressures and fears and doubts, and I came out of it with a clearer view of things."

I did read once that man is the only animal that draws a line in the sand and then trips over it. I am trying not to do that. If writing is a holy chore, then it is dangerous to concentrate only on the "chore" side of things.

We shall see. Happy New Year.

Thanks for listening,
BDC

Following your dream, but not the one with all the chickens

2009-12-30T18:30:00.000-08:00

Hail,
Is there a phrase more capable of causing lips to curl, gazes to be averted and eyebrows to be fleetingly raised than following your dream? I don't know that there is. "Following your dream" ranks up there with "keeping it real" and "being true to yourself" - phrases that were once sudden and startling and new and now are porridge and bubble-gum in the wheels of thought, verbal control rods in the nuclear furnace that our brains are meant to be.

But they meant something once, and occasionally, if you catch a glimpse of them from the right angle, they can mean something again. Which is good, because sometimes, they describe exactly what is going on.

As I type, one of my better friends is on the east coast. He may be in a town called Toowombo. Or maybe Samarkand, or Brisbae, it's hard to keep up. He and his lovely wife drove there.

Yes, drove. Forty one degrees today, probably hotter in Queenslad. I looked it up on the map and it is actually seventeen light-years from here to Queensland. It's a long freaking way.

Why is Daniel doing this? Is he on the run from the law? Is he crazy? Is he posesssed by an alien intelligence, perhaps Abin Sur from the Golden Age Green Lantern comics? While all of those merit some examination, the main reason Daniel is risking a pulmonary embolus in pre-nineteen fifties Australia is he wants to.

He buys and sells and collects comics and books. He believes there are interesting comics and books to buy or sell or collect in Queensland. He has gone there to get them.

This impresses me.

I have another friend - I won't mention her by name, because I have mentioned her recently and more than two posts in succession is cyberstalking. She has a dream of being a professional writer. She has sacrificed money and security of income to fulfill this dream. Currently it looks like it is going well, this was not always the case.

My wife, whom I love truly, madly and deeply, dreams cat dreams. She wants to breed a particular kind of cat - she has described it to me before, I get the image of a feline phoenix, a kind of flaming sword in the shape of an oriental cat. We have build the appropriate containment structures, she has worked out the genetics even unto the seventh generation, and some time this year or the next we await the coming of One Long Propesied.

Why am I baning on about this? The thing is, this is doable. Daniel and X and Katy are doing it. Dreams can actually be followed.

This is good news, particularly for a natural born puritan like myself. I am given to delayed gratification in cases like this. There is an element of what, if I am charitable, I could call excessive caution in my makeup. If I am being less charitable, I could call it cowardice.

But it can, and is, being done. And if it can be done, then the only one who decides whether or not it gets done in my life is me.

So - a few days ago I worked out how to rewrite my two person love triangle story. It now has a hero you want to succeed and a fair amount of derring-do. I worked out how to get my characters across the Alps.

And tonight I revise my erotic floating head story. While the young folk are out there fireworking and revelling, I will be inside, with the faint blue light of the monitor relecting in my eyes.

Believing in myself. Keeping it real. Following my dream.

Thanks for listening,
BDC

The New Deal

2009-12-27T00:44:00.000-08:00

Hail,
So that was Christmas. What happens now?

I start again. The last two months I have essentially taken off. The whole process didn't stop, but I drew a big line through November and December on my "writery things to do" chart, and tried to forget about it. The stories I had out there continued on their way, a few rejections, fewer acceptances, and that was that. A few days ago I read something, today I sat down in front of the computer and looked.

Now what? Now I work out what to do. I have still to get something published in Weird Tales. I want to send something out to Aurealis, because they published something of mine recently. There are a couple of other magazines I want to write something for.

The Great Novel - I am stuck outside mediaeval Rheims with a naked leper, and I have been for a while now, so I might just jump ahead four or so chapters. When next we meet Aelfwen, Wulfric, Emma and Cenwulf, they are scaling the Alps.

Oddly, that was one of the seeds of the book. I read a description of a 1000ADish crossing of the Alps, and I thought "I want a story with that in". 140K later, here we are.

I have started cut-and-pasting my medical novel from my blog to my laptop. That's the 350 000 words of rough copy that I want to at some stage turn into something a little like "Kitchen Confidential", a little like "Speak, Memory", a little like none of the above. Sex, death, mental illness and caffeinism.

And the short stories. I have to open the document and look at what is where, and what is not. I have to revise - my particular loathing. I have to accept that maybe the story that has been rejected four times needs something fundamental done to it, and I have to do that.

And I have to have recommence intercourse with my writing and reading community. Read my blog. Facebook me. Buy stuff with me in it.

So be it. Speak soon. Thanks for listening,
BDC

Keeping it irreal

2009-12-21T09:57:00.000-08:00

Hail,
Four AM in the morning, as the song used to say, and here there is me, and the glow of the screen, and the occasional drawl of a cat. Sunrise is an hour away. My Glorious Writing Future seems farther than that. This time last year I was about to head off to Clarion South. What, in the interim, has happened?

You could argue I have faltered. I went through Clarion with sixteen others - several of them are Doing Quite Well now. Lisa, Aiden, Angie... Angela Slatter continues to do very well indeed. From the previous Clarion class, Peter M Ball and Jason Fischer's names crop up quite regularly. All of these successes are good news, and well deserved, and they are built upon the back of at times unnervingly excellent work. You look at a few of them and you see Stars in the Ascendant.

What about me? When I left Clarion the plan (drunkenly and publicly proclaimed) was to write short stories. Specifically, to write short stories at a particular rate (I settled on one a month), send them off, get them published and watch my reputation flower. Meantime I would work on my Great Novel.
I would finish TGN and send it off. Publishers would beat a path to my door (I sometimes imagined this as a literal thing, pith-hatted people from Penguin hacking through undergrowth with machetes) and TGN would be not so much published but released like a tiger from a cage. Accolades, wealth and fanfolk would naturally follow.

That's a bit of an exaggeration, but there's enough truth in it to make me wince.

So - what has happened? Close on none of the above.

No, that's not true. I have written and sent off. I have had three or four short stories published. As far as I can tell, the editors have bought my good stories and rejected the ones which, in retrospect, weren't actually that good at all. I have received encouraging (and some discouraging) rejections. I have received feedback.

I have continued the novel. There are problems, the main characters need rebooting, the romantic narrative is fundamentally flawed, the plot is grotesquely complex and the whole thing is alarmingly large, but I have about 140 000 words.

I have written a few short stories. Noe of them, to be honest, have done well at all.

And that's it. Overall, more a semi-inflated weather balloon than a star.

Part of this can be explained away. I write only an hour a day most days. That is not long. I try to get a decent day in on the weekend, but until I can drop my hours, that's about it. Of those five to ten hours a week, the novel dominates most of that time - short story writing is very much second priority. This is a matter of simple mathematics - I am going to progress more slowly than if I wrote full-time.

It is also true that life - often seen as the bane of writers - has cut into this. I don't wish to go into details here, but I am needed elsewhere. Other things have cut into my hours and my "emotional energy" - writing is selfish, and sometimes you can't be that selfish.

And there are doubtless any number of other rationalisations "up with which I can come", but this morning (about three thirty) I came up with An Explanation.

It may be that I am failing because I am not very good yet.

It may even be that I will never be very good.

It may be, I thought, that the Hannetts and the Balls and the Slatters possess virtues I do not. They may get there before me, I may not get there at all. I don't believe in an It, but if I did, maybe I don't have It.

This is alarming stuff to hear, particularly in the small hours of the morning. And this is not a cry for reassurance, because none can be given. No-one else knows any better than I do whether I am any good at all.

Having said that, nor do I. The thing is, this - the halting progress, the brusque rejections, the sense of others outstripping me - this is how things would look if I were borderline talentless, but it is also how things would look if things were not entirely hopeless.
This is how things would look if I had some ability but needed practice, if I was not far off cracking one of the big markets, if I was a finished novel and a lot of work and a bit of luck away from publication.
It may even be that this is how things would look if I was actually good, a potential Star in the Ascendant, but one that rises later in the season.

This is, I suspect, how it may have looked to the Gaimans and the Vandermeers, the Slatters and the Balls, how it probably looked for a lot of people.

And I do have a job, I have a marriage, I won't starve or die alone. I do have 140K of a novel where more than half the work is done on the first draft. I do have a few acceptances, I have had a number of rejections which I can frame as what med school called "VLEs" or valuable learning experiences. Luckily, this kind of VLE does not involve CPR, as some of the others did. I realised the other day that I have two other unfinished novels and a blog that I wrote a while back - the blog is actually raw material for one of those Kitchen Confidential kind of books, it is 350 000 words of rough draft. Unfortunately, I will have to take out the unbelievable bits if I write it, which means it may be less true.

But it is raw material, and it's part of the ten thousand hours, the million words.

I picked up a book by Charles De Lint the other day. It was from before he got famous. He is a genius, he writes phenomenally well, this book was not very good at all. I read something by Neil Gaiman about how his unshakeable conviction that he was rubbish, that everything he had written was a fluke and that he was, and ever would be, a failure. He was once as I am now.

Anyway - I have written stuff for three decades now, I am unlikely to let a little thing like the prospect of a lifetime of obscurity and penury stop me now. I will arise and go now, not so much to Innisfree but to the dining room table where my laptop is. You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days. Find the next word, write it down. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Thanks for listening,
BDC

Envy

2009-12-15T18:33:00.000-08:00

Well howdy,
Much has been going on - too much to write about it all. So - a brief sortof-haiku for each relevant issue:

Novel is growing
Characters suffer constant
page-turny troubles

I have sold stories
Well, not exactly sold them
Contracts must be signed

Blogging has faltered
I'm too easily distracted
Frog jumps in water

That pretty much sums it up.

The Novel is 130 000 words. It is plodding along, it is almost glacially slow. I am about two thirds of the way through the first draft, this time last year I was about forty thousand words in. That means if I keep on like this it will take me (deep breath) three years to write a first draft.

Three years. First draft. Maybe another three after that to get it finished, doing those seven billion rewrites that all true writers do. It's the first in a trilogy. Each of those will require rewrites.

In the far future, the sun will swell to one million times its current size and envelope the earth. The seas will boil, the land will scab and scar under an ultraviolet sky. The most complex organisms on the planet's face will be tiny, chitinous, rustling things that emerge only during the night to forage and scavenge and then rush off to bookshops to buy my recently released novel.

Sigh. But it's coming along. I think about it all the time.

Here, by the by, is something I read about maps that evokes the England of 1000 AD, the setting of my book:
It's from an essay called "The Coming Anarchy", by Robert Kaplan,published in 1994.

"... It is not only African shantytowns that don't appear on urban maps. Many shantytowns in Turkey and elsewhere are also missing—as are the considerable territories controlled by guerrilla armies and urban mafias. Traveling with Eritrean guerrillas in what, according to the map, was northern Ethiopia, traveling in "northern Iraq" with Kurdish guerrillas, and staying in a hotel in the Caucasus controlled by a local mafia—to say nothing of my experiences in West Africa—led me to develop a healthy skepticism toward maps, which, I began to realize, create a conceptual barrier that prevents us from comprehending the political crack-up just beginning to occur worldwide.
Consider the map of the world, with its 190 or so countries, each signified by a bold and uniform color: this map, with which all of us have grown up, is generally an invention of modernism, specifically of European colonialism. Modernism, in the sense of which I speak, began with the rise of nation-states in Europe and was confirmed by the death of feudalism at the end of the Thirty Years' War—an event that was interposed between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which together gave birth to modern science. People were suddenly flush with an enthusiasm to categorize, to define. The map, based on scientific techniques of measurement, offered a way to classify new national organisms, making a jigsaw puzzle of neat pieces without transition zones between them. Frontier is itself a modern concept that didn't exist in the feudal mind. And as European nations carved out far-flung domains at the same time that print technology was making the reproduction of maps cheaper, cartography came into its own as a way of creating facts by ordering the way we look at the world.

In his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson, of Cornell University, demonstrates that the map enabled colonialists to think about their holdings in terms of a "totalizing classificatory grid. . . . It was bounded,determinate, and therefore—in principle—countable." To the colonialist, country maps were the equivalent of an accountant's ledger books. Maps, Anderson explains, "shaped the grammar" that would make possible such questionable concepts as Iraq, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. The state, recall, is a purely Western notion, one that until the twentieth century applied to countries covering only three percent of the earth's land area. Nor is the evidence compelling that the state, as a governing ideal, can be successfully transported to areas outside the industrialized world. Even the United States of America, in the words of one of our best living poets, Gary Snyder, consists of "arbitrary and inaccurate impositions on what is really here."

That is what the world is like. As a side issue, it's why any atheist "crusade" is doomed from day one. And it's how Anglo-Saxon England, and the world, was.

Anyhow. Next post may be about envy, or about real jobs.

BDC

Glory Days

2009-09-07T08:49:00.000-07:00

Hail,
I am constantly surprised by the kindness* of strangers in the writing community. And at one in the morning today I worked out why.

First off - the kindness. I write something, I ask other people for their comments, I get them. And not just "Umm yeh lol" or "yur teh gay", but useful, well thought out, considered comments. I ask someone for technical advice ("My character is a lesbian beekeeper on Mars - anyone with any first hand experience in this area?") and I get back useful information. I facebook Famous People, and they book my face right back at me.

Deeply good people. Why is this so?

Part of this could be the communion. We have pretty much all been there, and most of us are still there. Uberauthors still get rejected, people with thousands of fans all across the world still realise late at night that their character who stripped naked to swim to the ship in chapter five then stuffed his pockets with biscuits in chapter six**, all of us know that writing SF isn't really beer and barbecue talk for a lot of people. We do unto others how we would like it done unto us.

Part of it could be we do try a bit harder. It's a lonely life, and we know it.

Part of it could be gratitude. There are people in America, in England, all across the world, who made me very happy, who've put together a few lines of text on a page thirty years ago, and those lines mean something to me today. If zombie Philip K Dick ever turns up in Adelaide needing brains, I'll see what I can come up with. I owe the guy.

Closer to Adelaide, and definitely on this side of the undead horizon, the people I know from the Queenland Writers Centre have been superlative, Angela Slatter specifically. My (and previous) Clarion South people have been wonderful. The staff at Specusphere - thanks a lot.

But I also reckon - and this was the one AM thought - that part of the reason I am surprised by the kindness of established authors is I still believe, somewhere in my mind, that spec fic writers live the kind of life that they deserve. I am at some level bewildered that, for example, Sean Williams takes the time to chat to aspiring (and occasionally perspiring, he writes Star Wars books, for God's sake) authors for no money at all. I am startled when Jeff or Ann Vandermeer respond to Facebook things.

And this is because of the life I imagine they lead.

Here is what I imagine. Your average successful spec fic author - someone who'se got three or more novels out there - wakes from his scented sleep at whatever hour he should choose. Milky skinned nymphs massage him with unguents. Fastidious chefs serve the repasts over which they have slaved throughout the night - oysters as big as inflatable chairs, choicest slivers of meats from specially imported imaginary creatures, rare fruits and exotic spices. String quartets, discretely concealed behind damask curtains, accompany their every move with music. At the slightest sign of inspiration, palest vellum is laid before them, soft as a nereid's skin, and quills with built in spellcheck and formatting functions are placed in their trembling hand.

After they scratch out a quick couplet, they retire for the day, to snorkle in the Himalayas or lounge on the beaches of the Congo, or possibly wandering out to the balcony to wave at the adoring crowds.

That is, at some level, what I imagine [insert successful writer]'s life to be like. Sacks full of fan mail, the adulation of their peers, lesser beings stepping aside as they walk down the street.

Ridiculous, I know. Nobody's going to reward writing like that. You have to be able to kick a football to get that kind of life.

Anyway, two AM. I must arise in a few hours - I hit 100 000 words the other day, and what momentum I have must be preserved.

Thanks for listening,
BDC

*And sometimes by the strangeness of strangers, but that's another post.

**Robinson Crusoe. Dead set.

A tuber amongst trinkets

2009-08-25T14:10:00.000-07:00

Hail,
There is, you will have realised, a lot of writing about writing. Writers write about writing a lot more than electricians write about being electrical. Specifically, writers write about HOW to write. But not me, no. I'm going to be different.

I'm going to talk about how to write.

Yes, September 27th, between 930 and 4:30, I will be standing amongst a host of luminaries like a Pink Eye potato in a jewellery box and we will be talking about How To Make Your Writing More Good. Or Gooderer, I haven't quite decided on a title for my bit yet.

Feel free to attend. Well, not free, because you have to pay. We give the money to the library.

In other news, I have a fan. It's quite surprising - it's one of the nurses at work. He and I have worked if not together but fairly close to each other and on occasion sit around and swap stories of working in community psychiatry, specifically on PERT, the psychiatric emergency response team. If someone was mentally unwell but we were too stingy to put them in hospital they were looked after by the PERT team. Most of the time the PERT team were sent out by the government to check on people who had formed the belief that the government was sending out people to check on them. It's not the kind of job I am able to talk about a lot.

But I could talk to Bernie about it, and the other day when I came out to the lunchroom to ask aobut Mr Nails (fifty eight, deeply religious, drinks a bottle of spirits a day and has invented a radical new car engine which runs on air and can power rocketships), he told me he liked my story.

"I read it in Aurealis" he said. I stared wide-eyed, as if this were deeply aberrant behaviour. "I get it every month," he said. "I was reading it and I thought "hey, I really like this, really weird idea,", and I read the author's name and it sounded familiar. And I thought 'is that one of the psych patients?" and then I remembered no, it was you!"

Anyway. This is a damn fine feeling.

Enough gloating. The next day I got a rejection from another magazine, and I have a grand total of two short stories out there. By tomorrow I will have four, and hopefully by this weekend five. The magic number is ten, then it's back to the novel again.

See you all soon,
BDC

Ka-ching. Ka-ching. Ka-ching.

2009-08-15T18:38:00.000-07:00

Hail,
And while it may be difficult to get blood out of a stone, it's not a great deal easier getting updates out of me this week.

Why is this so? I imagine I hear you ask.

First off, I have something viral. When I started medicine I noticed a lot of people would say "It's just a virus", that was presumably before we worked out that AIDS and Ebola and the Spanish Flu were just viruses/virii. Generally, viruses kick eukaryote butt. I see sick people all day, and so do my wife and niece, and although we all get the immunisations, we still get sick. It's a wonder this place isn't a cauldron of creepy crawlies.

Anyway, more importantly than my ringing of death's doorbell...

I HAVE A STORY PUBLISHED IN A SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE.

AND NOT JUST ANY SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, PROBABLY AUSTRALIA'S BIGGEST SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE.

MY STORY IS IN IT. "YELLOW MARY'S LAMP". MY STORY. BY ME. I DID THE WRITING. THE WRITERY STUFF IN IT WAS DONE BY ME.

YES I AM SHOUTING.

Seriously, it's issue 42, page 69. I picked it up from the letterbox the other day. I will try to "post" a "link", as you techorati say:

Maybe this will work.

I am pretty damn happy, as the actress, who was very happy, said to the bishop, who asked her how damn happy she was.

What this means for me is more galvanisation. I have finished the next story, and am not beginning anything else until I have revised some of the Clarion stuff and sent it off. I hate, I loathe, I detest revising - it's somewhere between microwaving leftovers and putting makeup on a corpse. Once the story is finished I get all - I was going to say somehing else, but I'll say post-ictal. I have no enthusiasm for the story, I practically can't stand looking at the thing.

But if I learnt one thing at Clarion, it's that that is wank. It's a ridiculous affectation, and an expensive one. Revising and sending out are two of Heinlein's Laws, and he seemed to know what he was talking about.

So - revising.
I have a choice of easy thirty finished and not submitted stories.
I have at least ten "saleable or can be made saleable" ones.
I have one - that's one - story out in the marketplace.

If I want to die as a coulda-shoulda-woulda writer I am going the right way about it.

But I won't. Because this month I send at least one, maybe two stories out there. That may not sound like much, but it may increase my possible sales by three hundred percent.

So - I've finished the drugs, sex and Moroccan taxi drivers one, and I'll send that off to the critters. Then I am going to revise, and resubmit, either my time travelling nazi one or my trainee priest meets aliens in French Indochina one.

Meanwhile I am thinking about Anne Boleyn meeting an adolescent werewolf on the coast of Calais. It's early summer, 1536, and each of them is going to be surprised.

See you all soon. Thanks for listening.
BDC

I don't feel like dancin'...

2009-08-09T16:02:00.000-07:00

Well, actually, I do.
The gears meshed last weekend, the engine was engaged. The sail cracked in the wind, the motor was hummed. The overused mechanical analogy did what it was meant to, and I wrote.

A good couple of thousand words. Probably close on five.

What does this mean for you, for me, for my liver*?

Well, not a lot for you. I think blogging's like that. Sorry.

But for me, it means the following.
First, I am close on a hundred thousand words all up in the novel, sixty thousand ordered words in part one, twentyish in part two, various scenes and sundries scattered around the place.

I have written ninety seven thousand, two hundred words of one story. I have never done anything like this before.

And last weekend's few thousand were not only words, they were words that penetrated into the knot, the one crucial scene that has been present in my mind since the whole novel started, the scene that has failed every time I've gone to it, the scene that has been been written so far from three different POVs, with added and subtracted blood and sex and tears, the scene that is now filed on my hard drive as "Forest - version eight."

It also means another scene on the "how the hell did this happen" novelette that seems to be flowing from my fingers every time I sit down to write, and it means another scene in the Marrakech story...

It means things are good.

I don't know. Years ago, I learnt how to take blood, peripheral venous cannulation. It is arguably the most basic procedure a medical student has to be able to perform. When I first did it it was a big thing. Colelct the various little doohickeys: swabs, cotton, jelco, bung, tourniquet and gloves. Put the tourniquet on. Search for a vein. Find the vein, swab it. Start looking for the jelco. Find the vein has disappeared. Release the tourniquet, start again. Find the vein again. Swab. Unsheath the needle. Hold it there, unaccountably waiting for things to somehow get better. Slide the vein in. Miss. Swear. Sweat. Apologise.

Five years later, I was doing it while I asked about the football, while I thought about other things, while I gave the impression of grave, hushed concentration and thought about superheroes.

Practice lays down neural pathways. Like bullock tracks, the way the cart has rolled ten thousand times is probably the way it's going to roll again. Practicing the right way makes you better, bad practice makes things worse, perfect practice makes things perfect.

Anyway - the point of all this is sitting down to write gets easier the more you sit down to write. Structuring a scene, seeing what's ahead, weaving in a plot twist here, a strand of sympathy of tension there. That stuff gets easier. You turn on the tap and the water comes out.

Anyhow - work to do. I am seventeen patients away from the end of the day, twelve hours away from finishing up, two thousand two hundred words away from a hundred thousand.

Post soon. Thanks for listening,

BDC

* I have promised myself merlot. I remain a cheap drunk in every sense of the word, so it's not going to be a lot. But I will savour every grape.

Vampires - the anticlowns. Or something.

2009-08-05T17:50:00.000-07:00

Hail,
I have been having an interesting discussion with one of my best friends about the whole toothless* vampires thing.

We all know that vampires - well, I was going to say suck, but that'd be wrong. Vampires do not suck. They do not suck any more. They do not feast, or terrify, or evoke pretty much anything except peripubescent teengirl lust and whatever the word is for that deep, soul yearning after someone else's consumer products - ipod envy, or something.

They are no longer what we fear, either in ourselves or others, other genders, other races, other people - now they are what we envy. Ridiculously rich, impossibly beautiful, adored without needing to work, able to behave like bad children but be treated like good adults (killing animals and sneaking into people's rooms at night?) - vampires are what our inner child wants to be.

Not the same innner child who likes Rainbow Brite, but a little older. That'd put vampires somewhere between, say, Rainbow Brite and the Pussycat Dolls.

Anyhow - that's what's happened to vampires. Clowns, on the other hand, they've gone the other way. Clowns once - and this is almost hard to believe now - clowns used to not be scary. Clowns used to be happy, cheery, innocent kind fo things, the things that advertised cocoa and entertained giggling children, rather an endless stream of child-molesters with chainsaws that they have become.

Clowns have become edgy at about the rate vampires have become loveable. One has be dehabilitated as the other has become rehabilitated.

Clowns and vampires, my friend and I have decided, may well be participants in some vast unreality tv show - sortof like "Swap my Wife" or whatever, but with more ectoplasm. One hundred years ago, the default setting was vampires:scary, clowns:happy. Now the images that come to mind, the ideas that get talked about - they're the other way around.

The thing is, as my friend pointed out, we have fewer imaginary monsters overall. They are an endangered - if not species, then something. Like the Lesser Spotted Furry Thing, or like Przewalski's Horse, vampires and other members of the gothic genera have failed to cope with a rapidly changing environment. While they have thrived in domestication, the wild form is essentially extinct.

Meanwhile, the clowns have broken free and taken over much of the wild. They are the fictional equivalent of feral camels, roaming the outback of the imagination, glimpsed in the distance or at dust, things best not approached.

Not that camels come out at dusk, but it'd be good if they did.

So - what next? Is this cross-migration going to continue? As a fictional species becomes less terrifying, does a previously unscary one become more so? is there a balance of trade that has to be maintained?

If so, then what? Werewolves - the idea doesn't really have bite anymore. They've come over to "our side", the non-scary side - what profession goes over to theirs? Pastry-chefs? Hedge fund managers? Diesel engine mechanics, radiographers, party planners?

Writers of the next wave of weird fiction, start your engines.

BDC

* See "Vampires, edentulisation of" in the index.

The clown - beyond good and evil

2009-08-03T17:31:00.000-07:00

Hail,
What is it about clowns?

Well, maybe not that much. That’s the problem.

Let me explain. The novel plods, the short stories, on the other hand, prance about, and one of the short stories, inspired by (and possibly despite) something Jeff Vandermeer wrote, is about a clown.

The Great Writerly Strategy – six months ago in drunken collusion with people who know a lot more than I do about this kind of thing, is fairly simple. It’s all about the three Ws of writing.

There’s the work ethic bit: Get up at five, write every day, start, finish, revise, submit, keep submitting and start the next one. You’ve got to have the work ethic.

There’s the words: find the best writers you can and read them, write what disturbs you, find that fissure, that vein that goes deep into the soul of you and work at it, open it up. And write for fun, too, write the kind of stuff you’d love to read. If you don’t have the words, the love of words, then there’s no hope for you in writing.

And thirdly there’s the “Why yes, I’d love to sit and chat/stand and drink/lie around and read with you.” Schmoozing, keeping a social and professional profile, that kind of thing.

This is the part that gets me. I am by nature almost unnaturally shy. I don’t go out. I have a few friends who I see less than I should, because my natural tendency is to believe that people hide under the table when I come to visit, resile from any kind of intercourse with me, and that after I have left they cast pitying glances at each other.

What this means is when I am at home, if the phone rings, I don’t answer. When people come to the door, I feign illness, injury or death. When it comes to meeting up with my fellow writers (and oddly enough, this applies more to the second and subsequent meetings than the first, the ones after my limited supply of anecdotes has run dry), it’s a nightmare.

Which brings me to the clowns. Part of the whole “keeping your name out there” thing is “keeping your short stories out there, and that’s why I am grappling, metaphorically, with my clown.

It's not going well.

Why not? I don't exactly know, but I am starting to suspect it's because I don’t know what can be said that’s new and interesting about clowns.

See, the original clown, the children's entertainer, the fun-loving guy – I don’t know the last time I heard about that. I don't know who uses that idea. I don't know if it can be done. I still have to read the Heinrich Boll book.

But the problem is the anticlown, the sinister clown, the clown with the needlesharp teeth, the clown with the cleaver – in fantasy, that clown has displaced the original clown to such an extent that it is now almost the default clown setting. Mention clowns and the image uppermost in most people’s minds is the horror clown. I don’t know when it was the edge, but it’s not the edge any more.

That does not mean the evil clown cannot work – it is a powerful idea, a tremendously powerful idea. The masked man amongst the children, the one impervious to the rules that bound the rest of us – it’s an eternal idea.

And the idea that the mask does not hide as much as it should, the knowledge somewhere in the back of our heads that the man or woman who does this is not like us, does not fit in, is closer to his harried, pale-faced, stumbling public persona than is commonly recognised. Beneath the greasepaint is stubble and pockmarks, the eyes with the soaring brows are bloodshot and rheumed, and there is a reason that men like this consort with freaks, why they arrive at night, depart in the morning, one show only, before anyone gets too close.

But if a certain kind of fantasy (and I am talking about one kind of story here), if a certain kind of fantasy is taking what is there and turning it sideways, then what do you do when the idea that you are seeking to invert is already inverted? What do you invert when the default setting, the resting state is grotesquery? When everyone finds clowns creepy, where’s the edge?

It means you have to better than that.

A lot of this doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’m not saying creepy clown stories can’t or shouldn’t or haven’t been done. The admirable Angela Slatter referred me to one recently that was distressingly well done. And I’m not saying that all fantasy consists of making the familiar unfamiliar and vice versa.

But something has been troubling me about this story, my clown story, and now that I’ve written this I might be a little closer to articulating what it is.

Now on with it. When last we left our hero, he was being sexually assaulted by a Pierott dressed as a hotel maid. Note, by the way, the superficial similarity between Pierott, a figure who belongs with Harlequin and Columbine and the vanni, and Poirot, a figure who belongs with Miss Marple and that woman from Murder She Wrote. People who want to read about someone being sexually assualted by a Poirot dressed as a Columbine – well, that’s a whole ‘nother demographic.

Anyhow – thanks for listening,
BDC

I am a dynamo, with less of the copper wiring and the magnet and stuff.

2009-07-25T15:22:00.000-07:00

Hail,
It's good to have a plan. Today is going to be a writing orgy*. Makes the writing life sound sexy and sensual and daring, doesn't it? Unfortunately, I'm the only one here , so today is a writing orgy featuring a solitary, irritable, shaven headed man in tracksuit pants drinking weapons grade black coffee and occasionally - andthis is important - wondering outside to check on the chooks.

At the moment I am writing The Novel. Currently I am about half way through the rough copy. I am actually writing (deep breath) the last part of the seventh chapter of the second arc of what I plan to be a trilogy. Today I also submit one short story, commence revision on another, start writing a third and look towards finishing a fourth.

The story I am submitting is called Eve. I don't know that I like it anymore. I don't know that it will get published. It was written to a purpose and we shall see.
The story I am revising is one of the Clarion South ones, probably the weakest one. It has parallel universes and someone who may or may not be an adulterer.
The one I am finishing - I don'tknow. I have options. It may be the Charles Darwin one, it may be another.
The one I am starting has clowns, and I suspect there is a very thin window of non-crapness through which this story can pass - but I love the idea so much I can't let go.

Two things are immediately apparent from this list. First off, there is a lot more of the wild flights of fantasy in my writing plan than there is in my writing.
Second, I have worked out that if my muse does not visit me, or even drop me an email, there is still stuff I can do.
Third, there's only so far a plan can take you.

See, there's a tension in this, a Dionysian/Appolonian thing. Writing is sensual, it's something that comes out of the dark, it is chthonic. The wild muse, red in tooth and claw. Getting published is work ethic, efficiency, insider knowledge, the muse wearing overalls or doing a correspondence course.

It's a lot easier to talk about the second aspect of writing than about the first. It's a lot easier to critique your own performance in the second aspect, a lot easier to set up goals, focus your will, burn everything up in your path. Self discipline - it looks and sounds alluringly simple.

But I don't think that that's all we need. We need the voice out of the dark. We need the thoughts that make no sense. We need the yin, the dao, the sophia. We need to go outside and stare at chickens.

Hence, because I can easily become the kind of person who plans for sponteneity and allocate a precisely demarcated place for passion, I am planning down-time. I am scheduling daydreaming. I am setting aside an hour or so to go out the back and stare at the overgrown railway track, or look where I planted the chillies.

Sometimes the truth depends on these things.

Anyhow - will write again soon.

Thanks for listening,
BDC

Why are we here?

2009-07-23T00:41:00.000-07:00

Hail,
This is probably not the smartest idea I've had.
See - I have a problem with blogs - several problems. Things that make me more than a little uneasy. Let me explain.

I kept a blog for about two or three years. It's not linked to this one for reasons that will become obvious. It was during my previous life, when I worked in a small Emergency Department in the north of the town where I live. It ran to about three hundred thousand words.

The ideas behind the blog were pretty simple - it'd give me practice writing, it'd hopefully be intrinsically interesting, it'd be a record if I ever wanted to write one of those big simple fat books you pick up in the airport. And it was a release of pressure thing, the literary equivalent of a punching bag, something to get the rage and the terror and the God this is tediousness out.

But I don't know that it worked out that way. Blogs tend to be all about the blogger, and that can be good and valuable, but it can also be a less good thing. You write them to hone your writing skills, but instead you end up writing stuff that can't be written anywhere else - a great, earnest, indigestible blob of "me", like a half-sucked lolly stuck on the screeen, half an hour a day of my feelings, my hopes, my inadequately described lusts and fears and anxieties. As I'm writing this part of me is counting up the first person pronouns with a mounting sense of contempt.

And that kind of thing is good up to a point, but after a while, no matter who you are, the whole confessorial element tends to wear a bit thin. It gets draining. And it gets boring. And there's always the fear of it getting whiney, of the hetero, male, English speaking doctor sobbing into the aether about how he never asked to be born and how no-one can understand how hard things are for him.

So - that was the end of that. This blog, on the other hand is going to be different. It's about my writing - what I want to do, what I can't do, how I am trying to learn. It's about stuff I've read that I admire, people I think highly of. It's about the novel (currently ninety thousand words, coiled and lurking on the laptop in the dining room), the short stories, the sciency columns I write on occasion. It's about something I am not particularly good at, but something I love, that I'll keep doing no matter what, something I've done since I was larval.

The novel is set in something like 990 AD, in somewhere like England. The "something like" will be clarified later on.
The short stories - I'm sending one off this weekend, for an anthology, I'm working on three or four with vary degrees of industry, I am revising another.
The columns - I'm writing about testosterone.

I'll post links to the things as they go up. And now that I've got the basic bare-bones description out the way, the subsequent posts are going to be more interesting.

Anyway - we'll see if this works.

Thanks for listening,
BDC

It is, actually, all aboout me

2009-07-20T23:37:00.000-07:00

Hail,
I'm testing this thing. If you can't read this, tell me.
BDC