Spring reflections

*  I once had a poet friend** who would start a new writing project on the spring equinox, without fail, every year.  Winter was her fallow period; summer was all golden phrases and Fremantle sunsets.  If I were able to write to my natural writerly inner clock, I'd probably be the same.  Now, I take time wherever I get it: insomniac mornings, blustery weekends, in my head while swimming laps or sweating on the cross trainer.  It has occurred to me lately that I've got used to this compression of time.  Which doesn't, as I've said before, make it easier not to have big chunks of days or weeks in which to write: I have a big project I am itching to begin but cannot until I know I have guaranteed space to complete it.  But I'm learning how to cut my suit to fit the cloth.  There is something joyful in this, and I'm enjoying writing more than I have in years.  I'm not doing anything ambitious or groundbreaking (right at this moment) - I'm having fun.  And who knows what the equinox might bring?

* I've tried to comment on the nice comments y'all left after my last post, but Blogger says I'm not authorised to access my account (I know!)  Anyway, what I tried to say was, thank you, and I will let you know if there's a launch.  My daughter was going to do the honours but she's gone all mid-teen self-conscious on me.  Kids these days, pffft.

*  I've been madly harvesting and cooking the last of the winter greens: kale, spinach, silverbeet.  The broad beans are flowering promisingly but holding back the pods (probably it's too early), but the onions and garlic are fattening nicely.  For the first time I've planted flowers that aren't bulbs: I have little pots full of purple pansies. 

* The spring equinox hosts my birthday, and my birthday resolution for this year is to find new and creative ways of being naughty (as opposed to being bad, you understand).  A former friend** once said that the older you get, the harder it is to be naughty.  I'm bound and determined to buck this trend, but in case my imagination fails me, please feel free to let me know any naughtiness I can lawfully indulge in at my advancing age.  Also, am I the only one who has birthday resolutions?

* In the shopping centre yesterday I saw two of the girls I met over the summer while researching my junior novel.  Which I took as the universe's way of saying, get on with it.  So I am.





**Well, she probably is still my friend - I just haven't seen her for an age: such are the perils of day job plus writing plus family plus plus plus ... JTK, if you're out there, hello!

***Who also might still be a friend: see above.

A Tale of Two Covers (and a Poster)

Well, not so much a tale as a - oh, anyway, here they are:



I am so happy with this I could just burst!  Thank you Marina.



The Chinese cover of Famous! 



Yes, that is photoshopped.  But it is the best welcome I've had to a school ever.



Children's Book Week etcetera

1.  I have workshop/presentations in Geraldton and Albany for the Fremantle Children's Literature Centre's Youth Lit days; a day in Ballajura Public Library for City of Swan; and Merriwa Primary School.  I'm speaking to kids from year 1 to year 12, a prospect that is slightly terrifying.  (Still, I guess as long as I don't read the year 1s the opening of Losing It I'm sure I'll be fine).  I am preparing new material: the old stuff works perfectly well, but I want to stretch myself a bit, and the students.  There is also the possibility it will be a complete flop and the kids will go, 'What the - ?'  Once when I was doing comedy we had a fabulous idea involving a potato peeler and a set of knitting needles.  The finer details escape me, but not the memory of the audience's puzzled silence.  Let's hope history doesn't repeat.

2.  The daffodils are preparing themselves for spring: the teardrop bulbs that will release glorious yellow petals are fattening.

3.  I went to Sydney and Melbourne last month, to see my wonderful publisher and editors and for some much needed creative-battery recharge.  Which makes the fact I am on the third rewrite of my ghost story bearable.  While I was there I sat on Nina's seat and wondered why I don't live in Melbourne.  But maybe it's better the city is like an affair: maybe daily familiarity would ruin the mystique and the passion.

4.  I promised in May I'd report back on my effort toward Moderation.  I'm doing quite well, thank you.*  Am I finally growing up?

5.  I ran away from my daughter's subject selection night at her high school to eat chocolate fondue with another recalcitrant mother, dragging our daughters behind us.  So the answer to the question in 4. is clearly: maybe not.

6.  I was having a particularly bad day last week, and my old friend B sent me a message, saying: Today at our school we had a 'surprise visitor' (a teacher dressed in a Clifford the Dog costume).  A bunch of year four girls were disappointed because they hoped that YOU were going to be the guest.  They all so love Chess Nuts. :)
 Ah.

* Maybe not all the time, right?  But mostly.  Mostly is good.

Writing exciting

In an otherwise trying week, I had a burst of writing-related serendipity on Wednesday.  Sometimes, with writing, you feel like you're trying to melt glass with your breath: it just won't yield, and no matter the effort you expend.  Sometimes it's not the writing itself: you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, you've lost your mojo, or you know what you want to say but not how to say it.  All you are doing is howling at the moon.  At other times, things elegantly, magically cohere.  Like last Wednesday: I talked new projects with a fellow writer at lunch, among many other soul-enriching things, then returned to my desk to find:

 a) a pile of Amazon-purchased books (see picture below, which also contains two others from my Dymocks Fremantle foray), and

 b) an email from my editor with the proposed cover of Losing It.  I squealed with delight and surprise.  I can't share it with you just yet, but if you were to design a cover for novel about four smart seventeen-year-old girls making a bet to lose their virginity (yes, you can tell it's fiction coz they're so old, right?!), what would you come up with?

Stay tuned and I'll show you what Penguin's designer came up with.  It's right.

Meantimes, the books included:

A Pattern Language, principally by Christorpher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein (if you want to understand why most urban planning doesn't work well, check this out)
A Wrinkle in Time (I remember now that I wouldn't pick it up as a kid because I couldn't work out how to pronounce Madeleine L'Engle's name - go figure.  Reading it now because of Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me, which is the best junior novel I've ever read)
Bog Child, Siobhan Dowd
Noah's Law, Randa Abdel-Fattah
M.T. Anderson's Feed and Louis Sachar's Holes
Gathering Blue, Lois Lowry
Laurie Halse Anderson's Fever 1793 and Speak (not pictured, because it's in my suitcase)
Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia (I am ashamed to say I once marked a bunch of student essays about this novel without having read it myself.  Anyone else ever done that?)
and Lois Lowry's The Giver

I will be making a dent in this pile soon, as I head off to read, write and talk to my publishers.  *breathes out*

Bits and pieces

1.  Back in the early 90s, when I first got into the writing scene in Perth, there was an incredible bubbling of energy, ideas and poetry collections from writers like Morgan Yasbincek, Tracy Ryan, Barbara Temperton, Marcella Polain, and Sarah French, to name but a few.  There were readings, arguments and frisson, friendships and collaborations, striving and success.  Even if, like me, you weren't a poet, wouldn't have known a cinquain if it jumped out at you in a dark alley and thought a pastoral was where cows graze, you were nevertheless swept up and along by the sheer creative whoosh of it. 

A similar thing is happening in the kids' lit scene here in Perth at present, I noticed as I sailed westwards to Rottnest for the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators third annual retreat, which I attended with folk like Norman Jorgensen and James Foley, whose Last Viking book launch I attended on Friday night, Briony Stewart, whose next book Kumiko and the Shadow Catchers is about to be launched, and Meg McKinlay, whose book No Bears was launched at Rottnest by the talent-fostering Sarah Foster from Walker Books - to name but a few.  I spent most of the time cycling around the very windy island, ruminating, and having long discussions about writing, the universe and everything with my fellow housies Meg, Patricia McMahon (into whose lap in the dark a quokka leapt) and the indefatigable Dianne Wolfer, but I did notice that same indefinable energy and enthusiasm that I remembered from way back when.  I also believe there was karaoke.

The lap-leaping quokka

AJ Betts getting funky

AJ Betts and Meg McKinlay vik-ing it up

Do you think I could add these to my parliamentary outfit?

2.  Steph Bowe was talking on her blog about the pros and cons of homeschooling, which got me thinking (I know, who knew?!)  The best school year of my life was spent doing what was then called distance education for year 11, and I was only allowed to do it because of a series of factors (like getting booted out of face-time school) went in my favour.  And I loved it: I loved being able to set my own timetable, work at my own pace, and be treated like an adult by my (invisible) teachers.  It did set me apart from my peers a bit, but given most of the peers I had at my high school, that was no bad thing.  It is a great way of studying, especially for the introverts among us.  Why should you be forced to be social if you don't want to, just to learn?

3.  Here is my latest book haul (thanks, Lending Rights!)

They are: Jenny Downham's You Against Me; Antonio Buti's Brothers:Justice, Corruption and the Mickelbergs; Henry Hoey Hobson by Christine Bongers; The Paperbark Shoe by Goldie Goldbloom, which people have been recommending for years; my own copy of Boy on a Wire by sock-man Jon Doust; Michael Gerard Bauer's Just a Dog, which made me weep; Melvin Burgess' Junk; Happy As Larry by Scot Gardner; The Golden Day by Ursula Dubosarsky (about whom I agree with Lili Wilkinson); Margo Lanagan's Yellowcake (ditto); Six Impossible Things by Fiona Wood; Isobelle Carmody's The Red Wind; Libba Bray's Beauty Queens; and the books I mentioned earlier, No Bears by Meg McKinlay and The Last Viking by Norman Jorgensen and James Foley.

Back soon

Just a quick note to you, my one reader, to apologise for the sporadic nature of this blog.  I have been doing other things, like writing (who knew?!) and running amok at Rottnest Island with other naughty writers and illustrators.  But I'll report in soon, with tales of quokkas that leap into people's laps and writers singing karaoke.  Or something. 

Boy bits

When I asked my Facebook buddies about modern terminology for boy bits - for the purposes of the latest version of Losing It (yes, really!) - it caused much household mirth, as middle-aged and otherwise respectable parents called out to their offspring, 'Hey!  What do you young folk call penises these days?' The 56 comments the request amassed included:

dick (de rigeur, apparently)
willy
doodle (archaic, apparently, tho my sentimental favourite)
tallywhacker
dooley
dingle dangle (I'm not making this up)
peenee
donger (not the thing you sleep in on mine sites)
luscious love muscle
woggie
hairy dangler
junk
doohickey (my favourite)
bobbler
wing wang (my equal favourite)
vertical dangler
and
transcendental signifier (For all of you who suffered Literary Theory at university.  The friend who contributed this, one of the brainiest people on the planet, tried to train her young sons in irony at an early age.  But even child geniuses prefer dick, it seems.)

The prize for the most creative response, however, must go to Norman Jorgensen:

A Fine Mess 002. Woody could hardly get his breath. ‘You have to come quick. There’s this guy. He’s been electrocuted. With a cattle prod. In the cattle shed. There’s smoke comi...ng from his …um.’



‘What?’ asked Terry Templar, in disbelief, ‘his bum?’


‘Ah no, his um… his …err…’ Woody pointed to his crotch. ‘His dick.’


‘His penis? What? Smoke? From his penis?’


‘No bull. In the cattle shed.’


Terry and Harry looked at each other in amazement. They had to see this. In all their years in the Ambulance Service they had never, ever, heard of anything this amazing.


Word spread round the showgrounds quicker than a loudspeaker announcement. A man with a smoking penis? Was it a new fairground attraction?


‘Whath’s a penith?’ asked Scarlet Bott. Mrs Bott clamped her hands over Scarlet’s ears.