books

If you look at the thingy at the top left of this blog, you may have noticed that the ingredients of the magical fusion have been absent of late. Not a lot of books, music, socks or cake going on at the moment.

Remiss.

Luckily Joan is about to release her new book! and here is the spiffy trailer:

Click here to see it on Joan's blog.

doing it by the book, or Sybylla says hi

So I set off from Jasper Jones...

...made a right at Breath...

...and oddly enough, ended up right in My Brilliant Career in time for tea.

it's what you do with time

Here is some Time. It's mine.

I am Biding it.

Things are afoot. There is much to do.

Alongside the biding, though, and the things underway (it's under weigh, isn't it, ship people? I know. I do know. But underway is less weird), I hit the big city lights with my book talk, Steampunk is the New Zombies, this week!

It's all on my own, so I don't even have to defend my (measured, literate, solid-as-a-fictional-steam-powered-juggernaut) theories against anyone. If you wish to challenge me, I will fight you with my ninja handouts. They have fonts. Zombie fonts.

And now, back to the Biding.

*bides*

debut book covers

Because I have plenty of time right now for things that are not work-related, I allowed myself to get completely distracted by this buzzy thing going around - building your own YA book cover.

The Alien Onions pointed at 100 Scope Notes, which has come up with a winning process, involving fake-name generating (to get your author name), random-word generating (to get your title), random-picture-related-to-random-word generating (to get your cover pic), and finally mucking about with the result to patch it all together and see if you can make it look like something you might see on the shelves.

(The process, if you wish to do it yourself - which you DO - is explained at both links above, where they have links to all the randomness sites and also to the rawther brilliant picture-mucking-about-with site, Picnik, where I whiled away several hundred hours a few minutes mucking about with pictures.)

And here are my two efforts:
I had to think hard with 'Air' because I had expected to get some sort of ethereal cloud-type picture, and instead I got a bizarre Miami golf course thing. And thank goodness for picture-weirding effects, because really the image of a cute baby stick insect on someone's fingertip that came up for the word 'afraid' wasn't absolutely the scariest thing I could've imagined.

This was fun. Go do it.

Dear Author

Welcome to our Society! We are thrilled to have you as a member.

The Society for People Who Write Books About Things They Did For a Year is a thriving organisation. Since its inception in 1991, when our esteemed chairman, Peter Mayle, took off to Provence, we have been growing and growing!

You may wish to look through our catalogue. It includes titles such as Eat, Pray, Love (spiritual journey); Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (cookery; and now a major movie!); The Year of Living Biblically (following the Bible’s tenets to the letter), and Just Do It (an inclusion that divided the admissions committee, as the author had sex every day for only 100 days rather than the traditional 365). We will shortly be admitting the previously-rejected Sean Aiken, as his One-Week Job Project (doing 52 different jobs for one week each) is finally due to be transferred from an organic endeavour of youthful idealism into the proper print format recognized by the Society. We also have high hopes for the Around Oz On A Battered Fish bloggers, who drove around the coastline of Australia in an environmentally-friendly car powered by waste vegetable oil (except when they had to use diesel!).

Our selection process is a rigorous one, and we are proud to have rejected My Year Of Just Doing My Job, Raising The Kids, Getting Groceries, And Looking After My Mum Etc.

Forthcoming titles include Underequipped and Ridiculed: A Year Painting Rowboats In A Landlocked Finnish Village; Living Canadian: 365 Days, Eh?; and Twelve Months of Relentlessly Quoting the Goons.

You will be pleased to hear that both of your proposals have been accepted by the Committee! Your initial idea to take a year off to write a book, and then write a book about the year in which you wrote a book, is inspired. And your second, to spend a year reading 365 books people have written about things they did for a year, and then write a book about it, shows admirable commitment to the Society’s cause, alongside a healthy grasp of a very comical metatextual conceit! Dear Author, we are impressed. A position on the Society’s Steering Committee for the Promotion of Doing Things For A Year seems likely to be in your future.

Membership expires on an annual basis.

Sincerely,

The Society for People Who Write Books About Things They Did For A Year

parallel importing

This article, while possibly spending slightly more time on chooks and utes than is strictly proportional in the overall issue, sums up quite well what's going on in the Aussie book industry right now.

I don't do well at explaining this whole thing, which is one reason I haven’t touched it here, but the Guardian nutshells it neatly. The other reason I haven’t written about it is that every time I get into it I lose any articulate expression all that education carefully engendered in me, and start going “No. Just no. Because no. Because. No.”

So instead, you can find many thousands of spectacularly well-chosen words on this issue right here. Start with this (ignore what he says about booksellers. He doesn't mean all of us, and you can find submissions from indies too - for example, and some figures). See this. And then, this, especially because it addresses the allegation of protectionism. This, too, because it also addresses figures, or the lack of them. It’s livelihoods, and industryhoods, and culturehoods.

If nothing else, if you’ve read the US version of Don’t Call Me Ishmael you will know how maddening a North Americanisation of a novel can get. Reading it over here is bad enough. Reading this version in Australia would make me want to weep. And break something.

(This is a different-but-related thing, but I loathe that Americanisation suggests North Americans can’t access a novel unless it’s written for them, with cultural and linguistic references of anywhere else removed or changed. It’s insulting. Canadian friends, if I were you I would be spectacularly pissed off with the implication I couldn't interpret what a ute is from the fact that someone’s driving it. In DCMIshmael, the big debate was over ‘dag’. There isn’t really an equivalent over here. But I'm guessing you could probably have got it from the context.

Finally, and what I think is more worrying, is that a generation of American kids could grow up thinking the world is really like that – a) completely tailored to them and b) all the same. An American kid reading DCMIshmael would have to surmise that Australian high schools have a thriving American football culture. American kids aren’t stupid. But if they’re not given the chance to be informed, well, could you blame them if they were to grow up being bemused every time everyone isn't just like them?)

zombie ap-sock-alypse

This is how you read The Forest of Hands and Teeth when you also have a birthday sock knitting deadline. Because there is no option on not doing the socks, but there is also clearly no option to not read The Forest of Hands and Teeth. As your hands are occupied with sock, The Forest of Hands and Teeth has to be held open with elastic bands.

I do not like zombie movies. I wondered about a zombie book, to be truthful, but I heard it was awesome and must be read!! So I read it.

I had to go to bed one time in between starting this book and finishing it. Going to bed in the middle of this book is not recommended.

It is scarier than zombie movies, but in a much better way.

The characters’ world is post-zombie apocalypse, and people are hemmed in their village(s) by metal fences that keep them safe, but the zombies – (‘the Unconsecrated’) are always there. You can hear them all the time. You get used to seeing them ‘tearing [themselves] against the fences’. They can’t die; they just batter themselves into an ever-weaker state. They are the people you loved, the people you grew up with, and you want them near you even though you don’t, and you have to live knowing the only reason they want near you is hunger.

The change that precipitates the action is a breach of the fences, a village attacked; survivors head out onto unknown narrow enclosed paths through the Forest. The tension is heightened all the time, because the Unconsecrated are there against the fences as the survivors walk. Blunted, torn fingers tangle in hair if they stray too close (scratchy zombie Hands, survivable; bitey zombie Teeth, prognosis not so hot).

So unlike zombie movies when OMGsuddenlyzombiesarehappening!!! Howcanwestopthemandsavethewoooorld?? , you start out in a place where life just includes them and always has. Which is quite the paradigm shift. There are procedures in place for when a living person gets bitten and starts to Turn; Guardians and gates and ropes. The bitten have options, while they’re still with-it enough. People get used to it.

*MILD SPOILER*

I cannot stress enough that the zombies are always there. Did I say that? Always. There. When the survivors make it to a better-prepared village, with treetop refuges, it’s clear people are equipped to just live on while below, scores and scores of the Unconsecrated shamble and crave and moan without cease.

*END OF SPOILER*

To be a bit serious for a sec, most of us will never have to live in a world where any real level of danger becomes just part of our daily lives, and where we have to scoop bits of hope when there’s no evidence there’s any good reason for it. But plenty of people do, and that’s what’s terrifying about this book’s world – that every decision in life has to be crafted around that horrible relentless truth.

Also, rope bridges. I recommend working on them. Preferably before the zombies are actually breaking the doors down.

And also, look; the birthday socks match what Mary is wearing on the cover of this book! I made awesome zombie-fighting birthday socks!! So the birthday recipient will, if nothing else, be dressed for the zombie apocalypse.

Which may be all some of us can hope for.

this book wot I loved

I read about Diamond Dove over at Matilda and wanted to read it from Middlemiss’s post of an interview with Adrian Hyland. And it wasn’t straightforward, because you cannot get Diamond Dove here. It turns out you will be able to get it, soon, but the English Branch had to come through for me on this one. And hooray that they did.

I was put off by the phrase “An Emily Tempest Mystery” on the cover, because 1) I’m not a big fan of The Mystery Genre when it’s purposely identified as a genre, and 2) I just hate that construct on a book cover. You might as well put “A Pigeonholeable Sort Of Mystery”. Y’know? Which it isn’t.

So. I’m not a marker-up of books. Yet here it sits, bristling with yellow stickynotes at the many bits I loved. Almost all of them turns of phrase and dialogue. Hyland rocks at dialogue. You’d want to talk to every single character in the book (or have them talk to you, endlessly. Even the bad guys. Especially the bad guys). Everyone’s a collection of images (miner dad Jack’s a rock-hard torso and piercing blue eyes), fleshed out in how he or she talks.

This is not a quiet novel; it’s big and messy and noisy and seedy. Everyone shouts; everything’s filthy and held together with number eight wire. It’s a great yarn, no doubt. A murder mystery with a good cast of suspects, tangled up in land rights and geology and dreaming and drinking and dangerous dogs.

But I was secondarily interested in the story (partly because I’m so incurious about whodunthings; like I said, not a Mystery fan). I’d have read a year-in-the-life of these people just to be around the characters in the places in which they find themselves.

Ok…not quite true. There’s a bit where it gets mired in relationshippiness and leaves alone the mystery, and although the narrator makes a point of telling us she got distracted, I found it…distracting. I was not so taken with the grown man in a red beanie (that is where the Canadian word for it, toque, should come in, because it sounds like at least a half-grown up item of clothing; o gods, could the beanie be the whole reason I was not on board with the sex in this book? I think it was).

But. That was truly the only point at which my wild enthusiasm for every single thing in this novel dipped even slightly.

I’m sad I won’t run into these characters again. (Apparently there’ll be three books in this series, but Hyland reckons he’s aiming Emily off to far-flung places for the next ones, or something.) I will miss them. I already do miss them, since I finished the book. You can’t go about being spoilery and ruining endings, but I was especially keen on minor heroism from an unexpected quarter at the end. I should like to see more from that quarter. And Emily’s dad had better be around again. When Motor Jack starts “marshalling his narrative forces” there are very few people I’d rather listen to.

today's post is brought to you by the word 'disposed' (and some prefixes)

I read a book. It was an advance copy from a publisher, and it didn’t look like my kinda book. But the pub said it wasn’t her kinda book either, but she read it and was delighted and laughed like a drain. And, you know, sometimes it’s good to read not your kinda books.

Tell you the truth, I didn’t find it the best I’ve ever read. But it wasn’t at all bad. The pub was right; I laughed. The protag is an old guy who is smart and funny, and I am totally pre-disposed to get behind smart, funny old guys. But. Oh, but.

The protag is always talking about how he has a full head of hair.

Wow. Did I ever not like that. First, as we all know, old boys should be bald. There are very few exceptions to this rule. If they are unlucky enough not to be bald, they can slink away until they are grown-up enough to become bald, or maybe even get out the razor. Full-head-of-hair-as-important-characteristic is not likeable. There I was, reading along, laughing, and suddenly, he'd make a point of the hair thing again, and I would feel all cross and ill-disposed. (Also, this is a protag we are supposed to like. He’s no anti-hero. The hair thing isn’t an authorial conceit to show the protag’s, well, conceit. We’re meant to approve of the hair).

Then I checked out the author bio. He has, says his blurb, a multi-million-dollar business. Like that. Multi-million dollar.

I liked the book less.

Lots of people have talked about separating author from work – can you like the book if you know the author is a raging homophobe, that kind of thing (I made a typo there initially, and wrote ‘homophone’. Man, how eye hate their two bee homophones. Ewe?) But those are often things you learn about authors by really looking, not things they put in their bio on the back cover. But here is an author a) whose protag goes on about what a tremendously fetching and important thing his hair is, and b) who wants it noted in his bio that he has a multi-million dollar business.

So, the truth. I would’ve liked this book better if its author had not been someone who wanted me to know about his multi-million dollar business. It’s not the fact of having the multi-millions, but the wanting it to be part of the selected information people know about you, that turns me off it.

And the other truth. I would have been better-disposed to like it if I knew it had been written by, say, Carl Nixon. Nick Earls. Tim Winton. And maybe that’s the thing of it. I don’t know if Carl Nixon and Nick Earls and Tim Winton have multi-million-dollar businesses. Why? Because they don’t go on about it in their bios.


I don’t mean I would have done an about-face on a book I wasn’t all that keen on if the author had been a granola-munching pinko whale-saving do-gooder in Birkenstocks. It still wouldn’t be my kinda book. I would emphatically not have suddenly seen the light and realized it was in fact the greatest novel ever written, and the hair thing would still have got right on my wick. It doesn’t even mean I automatically like anything and everything Carl Nixon or Nick Earls or Tim Winton comes out with.

But I am pre-disposed to like it - yes, mostly because a)I know I have liked their other novels, but also because b)I am not put off by what they want readers to know about them.

I feel smaller and more confused as I go along. Help me out. Has reading what the author wanted you to know about him/her ever put you off reading the book? Are you brave enough to admit when you don’t like your favourite author’s latest? And, most importantly, what is up with these men and their hair? It’s that important? Really?

booklust

So there’s been a lot of Work lately. In the bits where there wasn’t Work, there was Knitting, and getting Things knitted In Time for Things. It all conspired to create a certain leanness in the Reading area, such that one or two Advance Reading Copies may not, strictly speaking, be Advance any more. But Santa was generous to the lucky, lucky booky chick, and brought a definitive end to the drought. He started with this:







The Knife that Killed Me, Anthony McGowan

…and I grabbed it with wanton abandon and read it in an afternoon, so I could share it among my booky mates. I love how Santa in an international entity, because this can’t be got in North America, and yet! I still get to have a copy, and more importantly be the bringer of it to others.

The desperate edge taken off my appetite, I started on this:








Stargirl, Jerry Spinelli

Which, I realise, everyone whose job is YA books should’ve read actually years ago, and wish I had, but at least I got to it now.

But then, this – another one you can’t get here, or not in this format – took up a siren call from the bookshelf:







Diamond Dove, Adrian Hyland


(Be interesting to see what the North American ed. has done to this actually. Different cover, different title (Moonlight Downs). Anyone know what's been done to the words on the inside?)

Anyway I’ve slipped, and I started cheating on Spinelli with Hyland, who is quite magnetic, but you know what? I can totally juggle two, and neither needs to know about the other; it’s not fair to ask me to choose between them right now, because I kind of need them both for different reasons, and nobody’s getting hurt and I can handle it, so if you can’t be supportive and accept my choices then just get off my freaking back, okay?

But Hyland and Spinelli are paperbacks, and sometimes I need a sturdy hardcover that will lie flat on my knees while my hands are occupied knitting all the many new request items, and I promise you it was just once, and just casual, but I dipped into this:







The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness



I’m pretty sure I’m still in control, so long as Ness remains with the knitting pile and Spinelli and Hyland stay on the bedside table and don’t see.

Trouble is, I know Santa also dropped in on New Zealand, and I have it on good authority that these good-looking Kiwi specimens will shortly be knocking on the door and asking me out for a flat white, nothing implied, no strings, just to acquaint ourselves:

New Zealand Book of the Beach 2 and Best New Zealand Fiction 5

…and I don’t think I can say no.

48 shades of love

So over at Pants at Large we’ve been talking about Nick Earls’s smashing book 48 Shades of Brown. Pants and I are in disagreement over the character Naomi. Naomi’s the girl that both main characters in the book are in love with. Pants maintains she is unconvinced by Naomi being the curly-headed blonde who is kooky and spacey and adorable in every way but doesn’t know that everyone’s in love with her kooky spacey loveableness because, as Pants says, those girls always know. And cultivate the kookiness etc on purpose because they just like to make boys lose it.

I, on the other hand, am a bit in love with Naomi. She is, after all, blonde and spacey and kooky and oblivious, and that is very adorable. (Pants does not like that girl). Nick Earls has created a very intelligent main character who is quite wordy and clever with language, but when it comes to Naomi, he’s somehow a little simpler with language, as if he can’t quite articulate what it is about her. It is a disarmingly straightforward way to talk. He loves “the ways she finds of understanding things, the things she finds to like.”

So. So. My point. Is. I think I am mostly in love with Naomi because of how the narrator talks about her.

And then, the song I was going on about the other day, Richard Thompson’s Beeswing (as sung only by Roy Bailey. Remember?) Here’s another wild and wilful lass, with whom the narrator (singer, I guess) is utterly smitten, a factory girl who belongs free on the moors and by the sea. She was a lost child, she was running wild, she said, ‘as long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay, and you wouldn’t want me any other way.’ Well, so the poor lad gets a bit keen to tie her down, and off she runs, and he hears of her every now and again, getting worn down and worse for wear as the price of refusing his ‘chains’, until finally he just wishes he could have any of her at all; better whatever little she can give than nothing.

Now, in this case, here’s a story that tells you more about the one singing it than the lass to whom he sings. You know? I’m not loving the girl he’s talking about, but falling in love with him for the way he’s talking about her.

The narrator that makes you fall in love with the object of his love, or the narrator you fall in love with because what he says about her reveals more about him? Which do you like best?

in which Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld hold a sock

Me: Let’s go to Toronto to hear some Authors!
Librarian Friends Ess and Dee: That’s awfully far, and we'll be up way past our usual bedtime.
Me: It is Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld.
Ess and Dee: Road trip!

In Toronto. We advance menacingly three-abreast on the Authors.

Me: *Hear myself say* I loved this awesome monkey knife fighting fairy mangosteen book you wrote. My favourite bit was the bobsled accident. It was tremendously funny and clever. I think you should also write one about the main characterʼs little sister. She was great.
Me: *apparently actually say* We brought you biscuits. They are the Australian Arnott’s biscuits I get from our local British/NZ/ Oz shop when I am homesick. However, it seems to me there are very few Australians/ Kiwis here because the Australian/ Kiwi stuff is all really old. I suspect these of being at the very least stale and possibly poisonous.
Justine Larbalestier: Um, thanks.
Dee: *gets out enormous pile of Scott Westerfeld’s books for him to sign. Cackles*. I’ve got forty three thousand books, and she brought biscuits. All we need is for Ess to ask you to pull her finger.
Ess: *faints with mortification at her two compatriots* I am a very shy person. Please don’t think I am anything like these two yahoos.
Scott Westerfeld: *sees that there are Advance Reading Copies in Dee’s enormous pile of books she has brought for him to sign* Hey, where did you get these?
We chorus: We’re librarians. We choose books for libraries. We bought your books for many libraries.
Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld: We generally like librarians.
Scott Westerfeld *to Ess, who also has ARCs*: Who should I sign these to (or 'to whom should I sign these'; I don’t want to put grammatically incorrect words in his mouth)?
Ess: *fainting in shyness* Ohhh…no…it’s ok – I am too shy to tell you my name. You could just sign them. No name.
Scott Westerfeld: *gives Ess the stink-eye* I strongly suspect you of going off to sell these on eBay.
Ess: *drops dead*

There was also a bit with a sock, which I won’t go into, because thanks to my camera battery going dead, there’s no evidence. But you can tell a lot about someone if they are willing to hold your sock-in-progress for a photo. It is an indication of their soundness, some would say, that they are willing to engage with you on a sock-holding level, especially if they already suspect you of going off to make gobs of cash from their signed ARCs.

A, Ess and Dee *being shepherded out by security*: Result. Now, when does Jaclyn Moriarty next come to Canada? I bet we can totally freak her the frack out.

most dinosaur fun

I'm trawling through the new publishers' catalogues once more.

I don’t know about you, but when I read that a novel ‘plumbs the depths of human depravity’, it just makes me feel a bit like laying my head down on a cool surface and going ‘o, please, not again’.

Are people really approaching booksellers going “The one you recommended last week was pretty depraved, but have you got anything, you know, depraved-er? I just wish there was something out there that really plumbed the depths, you know?”

And at the other end of the spectrum, comes “The Most Dinosaur Fun…Ever!!”

There’s clearly a scale in effect here. How much dinosaur fun is the most dinosaur fun?

It's got to be quite a considerable amount of fun. But it’s a qualified ‘most’ – that is, it might be the most dinosaur fun, but what if amphibian fun, or invertebrate fun, is funner than dinosaur fun? Maybe, once you've experienced invertebrate fun, there's just no going back to dinosaur fun. By limiting yourself to dinosaur fun, you might be missing out.

how are 'you'?

Yesterday, I was one of those lonely people. Now you’re lying next to me, making love to me.

Well, clearly you’re not. Not the last time I checked, anyway.

But: if you doubt what’s in my heart, you can break it open – but be careful when you do, ‘cause inside there’s a girl who looks like you. Or: You are my sweetest downfall. I loved you first. Or even: Today, I thought I saw you standing on the corner. I was just about to call your name.

My thoroughly scientific methodology of flipping through some records shows at least a 2/3 to 1/3 mix of ‘songs that are addressed to you’ compared with songs that aren’t. And this includes quite a lot of folk songs, which, given their generally higher content related to ploughing, highwaymen, and hats trimmed with green willow, you would expect to skew the results against the ‘you’ bracket considerably. (Incidentally, I feel bound to pass on to you that my research reveals all Hawksley Workman needs is you and the candles, which is nice; that Paul Kelly will be your lover now, a concept worth investigating at least; and that Hem know you’ll bury someone for them, which is nothing if not disturbing).

I digress.

Common in songwriting, and we all accept it.

So. Why not books? I’m counting on the fingers of, well, two fingers, how many books I can think of that do the same.

We could discount that subset of songs addressed to a named person, while still using ‘you’ to address them; I guess we quite easily buy into ‘overhearing’ someone addressing someone else as ‘you’ while not thinking it’s ‘us’. The ‘you’ who is Regina Spektor’s sweetest downfall is Samson. The ‘you’ to whom the Muttonbirds reckon they’re not lying is Ngaire; the ‘you’ they said they’d take dancing is Jackie; the ‘you’ with whom they used to be the best of friends is Esther. (Busy blokes).

So let's call books in which two characters write letters to each other the same sort of thing as songs-addressed-to-a-named-‘you’: again, we know the ‘you’ isn’t ‘us’. (This also means, thankfully, that we can discount Clarissa, the fifteen zillion pages of which I finally left behind at the last emigration, conceding that still being approximately one-ninth into it after almost eleven freaking years is an indication that there isn’t enough time in all the world to get through the whole thing).

If on a winter’s night a traveler is one book that really throws the kitchen sink at it, and it’s a whole kitchen sink of weird, actually telling you want you’re doing and narrating your movements to you, without your permission. The only other I can think of is After Summer (or After January, depending on your hemisphere), which has as I recall two passages addressed to ‘you’. And it’s sort of the same as a love song, the main character addressing another character in the story and trying to put into words why he liiiikes her. The first time it happens in the narrative I always find it jarring for about a sentence, and then just go along with it.

Could you read a book done that way, the whole way through, d’you reckon? A whole novel addressed by one character to another, using ‘you’? Or can all that sort of thing just come to nothing good in the end?

pain/paean

For I am Publishers Weekly, and lo, I am bored:

'...a pleasant, if shallow interlude'. '...too much of which isn't especially insightful or funny.' 'Clearly, subtlety is not the order of the day. Sadly, neither is quality storytelling.' 'The narrative is preachy and bland.'

How. Could. You. Stand. It??? How could you stand to write a book and worrit and hope and pray and fearfully open up the hallowed PW pages, or not open them but have someone else open them for you, only to find your blood, sweat and tears boiled down to being 'not enough to buoy a routine plot'?

Weird, reviews of stuff. Regular folks just don't have to deal with such things. Why, I almost never read of myself in the library journal, "her dialogue with publishers is predictable and weak,' or 'while her copy-editing is incisive, the actual figures are very routine, which detracts from the pace', or even, "her selection of YA books for our collection is interesting and creative, but she has failed again to avoid the heavy-handed Kiwi-isms that tend to lace her decisions.'

Creative people. How are you not always sobbing into your tea and bourbon? Because everyone is never going to like your book. I mean, PW does like some books, as well as being so fearfully bored with others. But does one reviewer's 'skilful, nuanced mosaic' cancel out another's 'disorganised plot and one-dimensional characters'?

O God. A 'routine plot'. The cold sweats and the vapours.

what is it then?

I wore my New Zealand Book Month shirt to work on Friday. Because even when you're not in New Zealand, well, it's still New Zealand Book Month, so you have to show willing, and display your logo with adopted-kiwi pride.

Here is every single conversation I had on Friday:

COLLEAGUE: *looks suspicious at the sort of allegiance I am electing to display in a work environment*

ME: It's not weed.

COLLEAGUE: What is it then?

ME: It's a book.

COLLEAGUE:...

ME: It's a book.

COLLEAGUE: Is it a book about weed?

ME: *facepalm*

lunch with the literati

The Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, held in British Columbia last week, has a quite brilliant comedy twist (I mean, other than calling itself the Sunshine Coast Festival when it’s in B.C. Good one). On the last night of the festival, the authors and other bigwigs gather aprons, teatowels and implements of destruction and serve up a salmon barbecue to attendees. There are photos as proof, and everyone looks remarkably jolly, given they’re being reminded of effectively what they might well be doing as a job if the whole writing thing hadn’t worked out. Is this a scheme to take writerly egos down a peg, d’you think?

Either way, this scene must forthwith be replicated at literary festivals and conferences and awards shindigs the world over. Could the Booker nominees be persuaded to come up with a casserole for the judges? What about the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Potluck? The Montana Awards Strawberry Tea Social? Pasta Night at the Sydney Writers’ Festival!

The culinary expectations would focus the authors’ minds far more than the usual acceptance speeches, Q & As and panel discussions. Going home after a successful keynote address knowing they’ve got to knock up a batch of raisin buns for tomorrow’s coffee morning, and that someone can be relied upon to comment “I don’t care if she did win the Governor-General’s Award, her pastry’s like lead,” would radically up the performance anxiety.

Husband-and-wife team Yann Martel and Alice Kuipers could co-ordinate the teacups. Stephenie Meyer, who got such a rough deal recently from teenagers the world over for not writing the book they expected, might be happy spearing cheese and pineapple cubes on cocktail sticks. I hear Nick Earls does a good line in pesto. And the sandwich production line could have Lloyd Jones digging into the economy-sized pail of mayonnaise and Salman Rushdie cutting off crusts.

Who’d you have in your literary lunch lineup?

it's a big storm. Or, a storm that is big

Here's an inter-island ferry attempting to get itself out of Wellington harbour. This sort of thing is exactly why I’ve spent a Very Long Time sitting in Rotorua airport, comatose and cracked out on Gravol, waiting for Wellington airport to open long enough for the actual landing of one or two planes. Welly is a weather blackspot, and to have any sort of transportation therein or thereout, besides walking, is a ridiculous proposal. The ferry and the planes are cancelled more than they run. The attitude of the pilot towards our flight there, in the end, was more or less ‘let’s give it a whirl and see what happens, and if we end up in Palmerston North, well, them’s the breaks. Hold tight!’

I just finished reading a book, and I think I was disappointed by the editing. There was one place with pointless repetition that didn’t appear intentional, didn’t help, and just felt sloppy and annoying and as if it should’ve been caught by someone before it got to print. A childhood ‘rite of initiation’ is described. It becomes an ‘unwritten rule’ in a game. Then, the rite of initiation is described. It’s mentioned that it became, so to speak, an unwritten rule. And then we’re told that it was a rite of initiation.

I suppose, in 90,000 words or so, we’d all have a tendency to repeat ourselves. Or, to put it another way, in writing a book of approximately 90,000 words, we might tend towards repetition. But isn’t that a crackerjack good reason for having an editor? Isn’t it her job to don the ruthless cardigan of clarity and mention that you appear to have left in your final draft the two different versions of the same bit, of which you were intending to delete one and forgot? I’d go so far as to call that something of an unwritten rule.

It’s not a big deal. But if I were the author, I’d be annoyed with myself and my editor for not picking it up, and for me as a reader, it stood out enough from the rest of the otherwise jolly good story that it broke up the flow of reading and made me feel sort of cross and impatient.

How about you? Ever read a book you thought would’ve benefitted from the editor not working on it at the end of a long week while sitting in front of The Rich List?

not barking but wistful

You find me today wistfully wondering if, just sometimes, it wouldn’t be nice if certain fictions could be the truth and certain truths entirely fiction. O, I know, but that way barking madness lies. And if there’s anything I am not, it’s barking mad. Obviously.

That aside, I am currently absorbed in book blurbs, gathering up ones that publishers have sent me to show off to library people who are choosing what brand spanking new books they’ll be getting in come September. I have no argument with most of the blurbs that publishing people come up with. They are fearsomely hard to write; in the cleverest hands they are an art. It’s not a review; you have to summarise everything about the book and indicate why one cannot afford to miss reading it, in about a sentence. And the sentence can’t be “God, I mean, like, buy this book!!”

Anyway, when you are talking about the type of books that are generally bestsellers, which is what I’m concentrating on at the moment, there are only so many ways you can describe the newest, latest, shiniest crime thriller. So I am forgiving of a certain amount of repetition of ‘unforgettable ‘,‘fast-paced’, ‘gritty prose’, that is ‘intricately-plotted’ and finds a character ‘at the crossroads of x and y (passion and betrayal/ cooking and gardening/ um, barking and mad). And frankly, if anyone were to say any of those things about anything I’d written, it would totally shiver my timbers for many, many months. (Except, possibly, ‘gritty prose’, because that surely just gets right up your swimsuit).

I feel a certain redundancy in sending forth these particular blurbs, though, because really, what library in the world is not going to buy the new John Grisham, James Patterson or Patricia Cornwell? Can there be a single library out there that sees a new John Grisham is on the way and feels an overwhelming need to read the blurb before deciding to buy it? No, there cannot. They are going to say, “Look, it’s the new John Grisham, I will need the usual 20 copies”. Not "But what is it about?? Is it fast-paced and gritty, or fast-paced and unforgettable? Tell me, oh guru of the blurbs!”

CLOTHED IN WISTFULNESS is the intricately-paced, fast-plotted story of a woman who finds herself at the crossroads of fiction and truth. Hers is an unforgettable and, um, intricately…er, I mean, gritty, no! gripping, gripping, um, like, story. Oh, wait, I said story already. God, I mean, like, buy this book!

fingers, signings, and pretty pretty hair

How fitting that on the evening I returned from the publishing orgy known as Book Expo Canada, I found my parcel finally made it to Sydney and a special booklady on the other side of the globe is properly attired for winter with woolly knuckle tattoos that read "book diva". Bless her for thinking it read “book avid” – I guess it does when you’re wearing them and reading upside-down. And are a little hard of thinking.

I did pretty well at Book Expo with only picking up freebies I absolutely was desperate to read. I even put down and left behind books whose covers seduced me when I discovered they were just not my kind of thing. And there were some almighty seductive covers. Not even always the books. I work for a place that gets hundreds of copies of every publisher’s catalogue every week, and I still picked one up just because the cover is so freakin’ beautiful it makes me want to weep.

I almost never get books signed. I don’t get the point. The authors already wrote the books for us, with 60 to 100,000 real meaningful and carefully-crafted words in them, and that's the important bit. I’m not sure what it adds to have them write their names at the front. If I really admire an author, I’d rather just tell ‘em why. What do you have of them, when they have written their names for you? Do you own a bit of their soul? It’s a really weird construct, for my money, the signing of things.

And then, the Yarn Harlot was right there at BEC. So naturally I stood in line and asked her to sign a book for me. I did kind of get to tell ‘er why I admire her, though I was just able to stop short of gushing over how pretty her hair is. But when you have a name that long, signing it over and over must absolutely kill you.