Taking a leaf from John Scalzi’s “View from the hotel window” when he’s out of town. This is the view from our motel window in Donald.
We stopped in the township of Donald the other day. Very hot, very dry. I always think the Wimmera/Mallee in summer is another world. And it wasn’t even summer then, only spring.
They had their Christmas decorations up, including paintings on the windows. Every few shops along the way the windows had pictures of Santa on them, and the Santas were shop-appropriate (if that’s a word).
Kudos to the artist, whoever you are.
Sun glare and reflection were real problems, so the photos have a lot of both in them. But you get the gist.
It’s heavy work delivering all those presents. Even Santa gets a meal break.
A local cafe.
While his helper elf made do with a coffee. Like the rest of us, elves love their coffee.
Another cafe.
Even Santa has to pay for dinner. Or maybe he’s buying more presents.
One of the local banks.
And when all the presents are delivered, Santa and his elves get to sit down and do a little celebrating of their own.
No prizes for guessing this one was on the local pub.
And finally, Santa gets his own present (from Mrs Santa) and gets to sit down and read his new book.
Our lovely garden, back when Helen was still weeding it.
Our garden is overgrown with weeds at the moment.
Helen, who used to do our weeding for us, retired some months ago. She was eighty-one years old.
She started weeding because she wanted to earn a little extra money. She was worried her rent would increase. Not only that, she lived in an upstairs flat, so she didn’t have a garden of her own, and she enjoyed working.
She came once a week, sun, hail or shine. She was fantastic.
By the end of the day she was exhausted, and then she had to get home. It got too much for her, so she finally said she couldn’t do it any more.
Sherylyn was talking to her the other day.
A downstairs flat in the block she lives in had become vacant. Her landlord offered it to her for the same rent she has now. Not only that, he said he wouldn’t increase her rent while she lived in the unit. And that’s not all. He’s pulled up some of the concrete for her out the back, so she can have her own garden.
Helen, may your garden be as beautiful as you made ours.
I kid you not, but the white of my eye is currently as red as the girl’s in this picture.
Growing up, Halloween was a weird celebration other countries (US, and maybe Canada) celebrated. We didn’t.
Over the years, Halloween has become a thing, here, with parents buying scary costumes for their children and the kids going around to neighbors’ houses. Or some of them, anyway. It hasn’t really become a thing in our suburb yet—although I can see it will—because until recently this was mostly a renter’s area, full of students who went to the local TAFE. But that’s changing. We’re in a suburb where the families are moving in. Kids are starting to appear.
So much so that this year we actually bought sweets and had them set aside in case someone rang the doorbell. No one did, so I might add that we had lollies left over (which we’re slowly eating), but … I digress.
For a long time I thought trick or treat meant that you either gave the kids lollies or scared them witless by being really scary. I know better now, but my old version of trick or treat would have worked really well in this last week.
You see, I had an injection in my eye last Tuesday and, to quote my eye doctor, “What must have happened is that somewhere along the way they nicked a blood vessel.”
For the last few days I’ve been going around thinking I looked like a vampire. Believe me, it looked bad. The blood pooled around the eye, totally covering the white. I would have taken a photo, but it looked so bad, I didn’t even want to show it.
I tell you, if it had been Halloween, and my definition of ‘trick or treat’ was scaring kids witless, all I would have had to do was answer the door in the dark and shine a torch on my face. They’d have run, screaming, and probably had nightmares for years afterwards.
Fact number one. I wasn’t a vampire.
For the first few days, I swanned (can I call it that?) around thinking I looked like a vampire. But investigating photos for the blog I realised that the pupils in vampires are red, not the whites of their eyes. So, definitely not a vampire.
In fact, the closest I could come was the Aswang of the Phillipines. A shapeshifting witch who eats unborn foetuses. According to Wikipedia, they’re not harmed by sunlight, they can be befriended, and they talk to you like any normal human. In fact, they even protect their friends and neighbours. They have bloodshot eyes, which is the result of staying up all night searching for where wakes are being held, so they can steal the bodies.
Mind you, my eye isn’t bloodshot. It is absolutely, irrevocably, bloody. There is no white whatsoever. It is red.
Blood red.
Fact number two. You can’t see how bad it is.
Seriously, other people recoil, but you can’t see how awful it looks, unless you look in the mirror.
Fact number three. It makes the eye look smaller.
I have to say, when there’s no white around the eye, the eye looks so much smaller. So all those monsters you read about that have red–or black–eyes where the white should be. Either they’ve got tiny little eyes, or otherwise their eyes are so much bigger than humans.
Fact number four. It could be worse.
I was sitting in a shop today, having my nails done, and the nail technician asked about my eye. By now, I had the spiel down pat. “I had an injection in the eye, and they nicked a blood vessel, and …”
“You’re lucky,” said the lady having her nails done next to me. “My sister had both eyes done. She spent a week walking around, looking like her husband had bashed her.”
I am lucky. It is only one eye. But believe me, I’m holding out for the week to be over.
Life has been somewhat hectic lately. We weren’t sure if we’d get up to Brisbane for this weekend, but in the end we decided to come—admittedly, later than we planned—but here we are at GenreCon.
We chose a different hotel this time, as we didn’t plan on doing anything except go to the conference. This one is as close as we can get to State Library of Queensland without camping out at the library itself.
It’s an older hotel, a cheaper one, and it has this vibe that makes it feel like a motel in a country town. Part of that is because the road (bridge, actually) outside is so busy. Part of it is the old High Surf motel sign across the way. It isn’t actually a motel, it’s a sculpture for Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), but it took a while to work that out.
Nevertheless, all combined, it feels like one of those old towns, back before the freeways bypassed them, where there was a motel on either side of the highway.
With the continual traffic, it feels like one too.
GenreCon highlights, day one?
Claire Coleman, in the plenary session, “The Art and Business of Genre”, talking about editing.
“No one ever finishes editing, they just take it off you.”
Nalini Singh, same session, talking about squirrels as a way to stay engaged and enjoying writing, even when you’re writing to a deadline.
“Give yourself time after your writing day to write the squirrels. Don’t focus only on what you have to do … you have to keep them secret.”
At Conflux a few weeks back, at the ‘Starting Writing Later in Life’ panel, an older member of the audience asked something along the lines of, “You talk about how long it takes to write a book. What’s the point in someone my age starting now? I’ve likely only got one good book in me before I run out of time.”
I’ve thought about that question a lot, since. I can’t remember what was said at the time, but here’s what I think.
Don’t put off your dream because you think you’re too old.
While you may find some dreams harder to do as you get older, if you have the determination, you can do almost anything. Sure, it becomes more difficult. Yuichiro Miura was 80 years old when he climbed Mt Everest, and he probably did it harder than someone half, or even a quarter of his age, but he still did it.
True, too, most people wouldn’t bother.
But we’re not talking hard, physical exercise here, we’re talking writing a novel, which older people can do as well as younger people.
“Sure,” you may say. “But we’re not talking about writing a single novel. We know we can do that. We’re talking about making a writing career out of it.”
And it’s true, some of us might die or become incapacitated before we got any further than the first book. But we don’t have to get old to do that.
Would I go through the hassle of writing a book and having it published if I knew I was only going to have time to publish one book?
Most definitely.
There’s something magical about having that first book published. It’s an experience worth having.
Sure, we’d all like to have it again and again, but don’t stop just because you think there might be only time to do it once.
Believe me, it’s worth it, even just for that once.
No, this is not Sherylyn’s picture. This an image from clip art, that I tried (unsuccessfully I think) to Photoshop using the oil paint filter.
Sandwiches
We came up to Wangaratta this weekend to see our mother. It’s 270 kilometres, so we stop half-way for coffee and something light to eat.
By light, we mean something that’s not going to make us want to fall asleep in the car half an hour later. What do we normally eat? Tomato and onion sandwiches. Made with fresh bread, not toasted.
Now adding onion to a road trip may seem a weird thing to do, but it’s the perfect meal. Fresh, light, and not too much. The café we usually stop at isn’t grand to look at, but they have deliciously fresh bread, which is super important. And the tomato’s been allowed to ripen, so it’s tasty, and doesn’t freeze your teeth.
We must be the only people who ever ask for this type of sandwich, however. The owner doesn’t recognise us—until we order the sandwiches. Then she starts saying things like, “I haven’t seen you in a while.”
Of course, when we get back in the car, we need some gum to clean our teeth, otherwise we taste onion all the way to Mum’s place.
Tomatoes and onion as art
Sherylyn enjoys painting. She did a “Drawing on the right side of the brain” class a few years back. Once they’d finished that, the class voted to move on to painting. After a term everyone started doing their own projects, with the art teacher providing assistance as required.
Sherylyn’s concentrating on painting techniques.
One of these was a colorization (note my use of US spelling here, for no reason other than that I can) technique done using a palette knife.
The art teacher wanted her to do still life. (Art teacher loves people to draw fruit and veg.) Onions. So she could demonstrate the technique.
“Onions,” I said. “What do you want to paint onions for? What are you going to do with a picture of onions?”
Those onions stayed around for a whole painting term. And because she was learning the technique, she couldn’t finish it in her own time. That meant she had to keep the picture wet (it was that type of technique) and the paint on her palette from drying out.
The picture took up a whole shelf in the fridge. The paints a shelf in the freezer. In a two-person house there’s no need for a massive refrigerator. That was half the freezer, and a quarter of the fridge.
“Karen wants to know when she’s getting the fridge back,” she told the art teacher one week.
“Oh, but she’ll love it when the picture is finished and you hang it on your wall.”
“I don’t think she’s going to let hang an onion on the wall.”
The poor art teacher doesn’t know when Sherylyn’s being flippant, but it’s true. Neither of us wanted the picture on the wall, no matter how good it was. While we both like to eat onions, we’re not going out of our way to hang pictures of them.
Next term, the art teacher wanted Sherylyn to continue the technique.
“Sure,” said Sherylyn, who’d enjoyed painting the last picture.
“I think you should do some tomatoes,” the art teacher said.
Now, the poor onions had lasted a whole eight-week term. The tomatoes didn’t last that long. Especially since this time she had to cut one in half, and paint the centre of the tomato as well. Imagine, if you can, what a moving target it is when you have to buy new tomatoes every third week. Especially when the tomatoes start off orange but get redder each the week as they ripen.
We got some nice tomato sandwiches in weeks three, six and eight, however. (The full ones, not the halved ones.)
I have to say, both pictures looked good, and the colouring in them was lovely. (Even if that first week, the guy locking the building after the class had finished said to Sherylyn as she carried her picture out to the car, “I can’t tell what half these people are painting. At least I can see that yours are oranges.”)
Not long after that, the combined classes put on an art show. Every student was asked to provide artwork. Sherylyn put her tomatoes and onions in.
She dragged me along to the opening night.
I finally met the art teacher. “Sherylyn is so good,” she said. “Those pictures are amazing.”
“They’re okay,” I said. And I meant it.
We write novels together. We are honest with each other. Okay means, yes, they are okay. Amazing means wow, wow, wow! This is the best.
Later in the evening I met up with the art teacher again.
“Sherylyn is my best student,” she said.
“That’s nice,” I said. “She’s enjoying the class. That’s the most important thing.” I confess I’m not the world’s greatest conversationalist.
The new term started last week. The art teacher told Sherylyn, “I don’t think your sister is very supportive of your art.”
By the way, the tomato and the onion sold at the art show. We don’t have pictures of them, because Sherylyn forgot to take them before the show.
Is it just me, or are Young Adult (YA) books going the way of their older sibling, the New Adult (NA)?
First, let me define what I mean by YA and NA.
Young adult fiction is fiction where the protagonist is a teenager. Usually mid-late teens rather than early teens. It is often a coming of age story. While the intended audience is teenagers themselves, these books are often also read by adults.
New adult fiction was intended to be stories about people just into adulthood. Late teens or early twenty-somethings. About what happens to teenagers after they finish secondary school and start on the next period of their life. University/College, or work.
Or, as Cora Carmack succinctly wrote on her blog a few years back:
Young Adult books are about surviving adolescence and coming of age. New Adult is about how to live your life after that. New Adult is the “I’m officially an adult, now what?” phase. Just like growing up, that life stage is different for everyone, but I do think there are some things that are constant.
Except new adult very quickly turned into a specific type of book. Post-young adults and sex. In fact, it has a reputation as ‘sexed-up* young adult’ stories.
And you expect this, for yes, people that age are likely to have sex. Most of them, anyway. Many teens have sex as well, and one expects that to be reflected in young adult books too, although often not as explicitly.
I would also add, primary audience for new adult books appears to be female.
Young adult and new adult are marketing groupings, a way of putting books together in a bookstore so that the desired audience (people of around the same age or a little younger than the protagonists) can easily identify the books they want to read, books about people like them.
But it’s not just readers the age of the protagonists who read these books. Adults do too, and voracious, mature younger readers as well.
I read a lot of young adult books. Fairly obviously, I enjoy them. But lately they’re all starting to sound the same. So much so that the last three I picked up, I put down without reading past chapter two. In every one of the three books the heroine was an angsty 16-17 year-old. She hates, or is angry with, a handsome, superior boy a year or two older than herself. The only difference in all three books was the best friend. One was a girl, and I wasn’t sure if she’d stick by the girl to the bitter end or betray her, another was the quiet, ever helpful guy as best friend who you knew would turn out to be secretly in love with the protagonist. The third book didn’t have a best friend.
Sigh.
I need to read more widely.
* There’s a list on Goodreads, New Adult that’s not about sex. It looks to have interesting books, with authors like Rainbow Rowell. I think I might go and re-read Carry On.
The copy edits for Stars Uncharted came back on Thursday.
By this time in the writing process Sherylyn has taken over all the editing on the book, so while she carefully works through each edit, I continue working on an early draft of the next book.
So far, she’s seeing lots of comma changes, a few missed/added words, and some questions about the timeline.
So, not too bad, so far. We’ll see if it stays as clean as we get into it.
That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of red markup, because there is, but they’re small things, like the commas, or slight grammar issues.
We have to get the copyedits back by the end of this month, and our author portal tells us the book will be out in August next year. It’s a long way away, but it’s also coming fast.
Passionate writing
Some of the best passionate writing comes out of things you feel strongly about. Given today’s political climate, it’s not surprising that a lot of people feel strongly about politics and prejudices. I’d like to point to Chuck Wendig’s The Game Is Riggedas an example of some strong, powerful writing.
Some things you take for granted
Hmm. There are some things you take for granted. I would never have expected anyone to consider Leckie’s use of pronouns anything but deliberate, but I suppose, if you hadn’t read her first books, maybe you would think they were typos.
I enjoyed Provenance, by the way, and I’m so envious of the way Leckie managed to make Ingray such a different person to Breq. The weird thing is, even though the story is nothing like—and I mean absolutely nothing like—Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor, this is the book it reminded me of. I still can’t pick why. Maybe it’s the hopeful tone.
