A Bad Night For Rangas

Last night in the car, we were talking about seat-belt laws or something and Evie piped up, 'But there isn't any government now!'

Anarchy! Bring it on!

I'm not sure how I feel this morning.

It's thrilling (and surely significant) that the Greens have earned their biggest ever share of the votes, and stand to have a real voice in deciding policy, no matter which side ends up forming a government.

But it's bitterly disappointing that both the major parties conducted such negative, shallow campaigns when there are so many issues of real substance and urgency facing us (climate change, anyone? Indigenous issues? Didn't hear a peep). No wonder informal votes were at an all-time high: a pox on both your houses, seemed to be the prevailing feeling. "Liberal or Laboral?" to quote Evie again.

And to cap it all off, the Western Bulldogs were hopeless on Saturday night, and Cooney's done his hamstring.

What a great weekend!

* * * STOP PRESS * * *

International Beard Appreciation Day has been cancelled. At least, postponed till next year.

I can hear your groans of disappointment from here. Never mind, we will all get a chance to put on fake beards in 2011.

Starting in the Wrong Place

They say that you ought to start with character. Know your protagonist; know how they eat breakfast, know their hopes and fears; then make bad things happen to them. Make their worst nightmares come true.

Excellent advice. Except that I've realised that I never work like that. I've always found those "get to know your character" exercises artificial and mystifying. I feel as if I'm inventing stuff for the sake of it. Those characters, assembled from desires and needs and physical quirks, feel as if they're put together like robots, and like robots, they never really come alive. (This is just me, I hasten to say, I'm sure this approach does work for lots of writers.)

I've realised that where I start, almost invariably, is with a place.

I wrote pages of notes about Tremaris before I knew anything about Calwyn or Darrow or Samis or Halasaa. Calwyn and Darrow appeared in my head as figures in the scenery. I saw the Art Deco architecture of Eloise's abandoned house in Cicada Summer, long before I knew anything about Eloise's history. And Crow Country grew out of a determination to write a fantasy set in the Australian landscape; I had at least three separate plots and sets of characters before the story settled in its current form.

And now I'm wrestling with the New Guinea book. All I've known for certain about it for the past year or so is where it's set - in the Highlands of PNG, in the last days before Independence, in the weird cocooned expatriate society that existed in the 1970s.

I've had three characters dancing around each other, but I couldn't bring them into focus. Their personalities, their hopes and fears, were all blurry to me, I couldn't quite make them gel in relation to each other, their conversations and interactions didn't quite work. Was my girl protag too angry? Was my older male protag too breezy, my younger one too shy? I swapped their personalities, reinvented them, threw them away, changed their genders and their names (names matter!), resurrected them in altered form.

And now, at last, I think I can see Julie and Simon and Andy clearly. I can hear their voices. I'm digging out scenes I wrote six months ago and thinking, that's not too bad. If I tweak this piece of dialogue... if I change the voice a little... I can still use this stuff.

And who makes these rules, anyway?

Beards For Babies

For those of you who are not aware, Ben Hudson, the magnificent ruckman of the Western Bulldogs, is the official Guardian of The People's Beard, and what a beard it is.

To celebrate beardiness and raise beard awareness, Saturday 28th August has been declared International Ben Hudson's Beard Appreciation Day, aka Beards For Babies.*

That's right, you too can come along to the Western Bulldogs v Essendon game on Saturday night, buy a beard (and wear it!) and raise money to support the sterling work of Tweddle, an early parenting centre located in Footscray, right near the Whitten Oval, who assist parents with young children who need support.

Hoorah for Beards! Hoorah for Bulldogs! Hoorah for babies!

(And hoorah for the very very clever First Dog on the Moon, whose brainchild this event is.)

* Let's hope the Bulldogs are all over the flu by then. Imagine having the flu, then being asked to go out and play four quarters of grinding football, like they did last Sunday. In the pouring rain. In Adelaide. Jeez, those boys are tough! And they won!!

Why I Love Getting Emails From People Who Have Read My Books

This one came last week:

Dear Kate,
I was wondering if you would talk to Mattel and ask them to make barbie dolls from The Chanters of Tremaris Trilogy like: Calwyn, Darrow, Tonno, Xanni, Samis, Mica, Trout, Marna, Tamen, Ursca, Halassa, Heben and the twins, Keela, Gilly, and the other children from the palace of cobwebs. If you do and they agree than could you have them make different versions of the dolls from the different books. And could you also have them make different outfits for them when they changed their outfits within the book. And one more thing you should help design the dolls so they don't mess up. I'm sorry if I sound bossy. Thank you.

Bless. Seriously, how much fun would that be??

A (Slightly) Free Range Birthday
Alice decided that this year her birthday was to be a Day in the Forest. So we borrowed a big car and took a handful of friends to the Ferntree Gully National Park.

First we had a scavenger hunt and some exploring...


... and then a picnic...


... followed by cake and pinata at Alice's grandparents' house (conveniently located just up the hill).


Afterwards, we had intended to visit William Ricketts' Sanctuary, but it began to rain, so we took them for milkshakes in the village instead, and then gave them 50 cents each to spend on a knickknack stall at the weekend market...


... then we drove five slightly damp but very happy little people home again.

And the next day, we got Rex!Best. Birthday. Ever.

Goodbye Betty

Betty Collins was one of the loveliest women I have ever known. Unfailingly kind, generous and positive, she was the kind of person who made you feel better just by walking into the room. She trained and worked as a pharmacist in an era where such a career was extremely unusual for a woman. She faced many hardships, including the sudden death of one husband and the slow decline of another, with faith, cheerfulness and courage. She was a dearly loved mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, and a loving and thoughtful friend to many. She died last week on her 81st birthday.

She was the mother of my friend David, and Michael's friend Marg. If not for Betty, Michael and I would never have met, so I have particular reason to be grateful to her. But I'm also grateful just for having known her. Thank you, Betty.

Weekend in Boort

Mikey checking out the old railway station.

The top of my head, with the main street as backdrop.

The all important war memorial. This one, unusually, lists only those soldiers killed in conflict, not all those who served. Those names are listed beneath a mural on the wall of the RSL building down the hill.

Cracked mud under a bridge over the creek. This shot turned out a lot more arty than I'd intended!
Trees near Little Boort Lake. We walked all the way around it. Twice. There's not a lot to do in Boort on a Saturday afternoon when there's no footy on...

View of the lake from the window of our B&B. It was so peaceful, we could hear frogs croaking all night. And there were birds everywhere - swans and ducks and galahs and cockatoos and wrens - there were lots of others but I didn't know their names. And of course there were crows...


One of the many scarred trees by the lake. Boort was once an Aboriginal meeting place, and the people would remove long scoops of bark from the trees to make canoes, shields, containers and baby-carriers. Boort means 'smoke on the hill' - a signal for meeting, perhaps.


We made a visit to the cemetery, too. Mikey searched for fallen diggers, and found a few. Lucky we didn't bring the girls, I don't think they find old country cemeteries as fascinating as we do.


We also investigated a 'dry' lake that wasn't as dry as it was supposed to be. We spent the next three hours scraping mud off our shoes.

So why did we drive for three and a half hours to spend a night in beautiful, historic, isolated Boort? You'll have to wait and see...

Happy

Cicada Summer has been shortlisted for the 2010 Prime Minister's Literary Awards, the first time children's and young adult fiction has been included. You can find the full lists here.

The shortlists were announced yesterday at Readings bookshop in Carlton, by the (extremely tall) Minister for the Arts (and lots of other things) Peter Garrett. That's me in the front, fitting snugly under the Minister's armpit.

It's such a tremendous honour to be included in lists featuring such kid- and YA-lit luminaries, but most of all I am pleased for Cicada Summer itself, if that makes sense. Though it touches on big themes (grief and loss, family and friendship, growth and change and trust), Cicada Summer is in some ways such a small shy book that I was always a little worried it might be overshadowed by flashier, noisier stories. It's like seeing your quiet, introverted child being led out onto the dance floor to glow, just for a moment, in the spotlight.

I Dig Time Lords, Too...

When I came across Chicks Dig Time Lords (via Lizbee's blog -- see, good things do come from googling oneself...) I knew I had to have it. This is a book about me, I thought. And lo, I sent away for it, and it hath arriveth, and I hath eagerly read it.

And discovered, no, it isn't about me after all. This is overwhelmingly a book about Fans of Doctor Who. And I've realised that I am a mere fan, not a fangirl. Squees and shipping and zines and cons and New Adventures have never been part of my experience of adoring Doctor Who; my long and loving relationship with the show has lived behind closed doors, inside my mind, and for the most part, secretly. I never felt that need to share my devotion -- only once, at high school, with one other friend, did I reveal the true extent of my secret life (hello FE, if you're out there).

Because my love has been solitary rather than communal, is it any less real? The mythology of the Doctor has been part of my identity since I was thirteen. I know I'm not the only person who's imagined their own version of the Doctor's story. I never identified with the Doctor myself, or with any particular companion, but invented my own companion and constructed an elaborate story arc around her.*

My high school friend and I referred to our secret life as "etcetera." Etcetera was extra, a parallel existence. The closest I came to fanfic was writing about Calwyn and Darrow's relationship in the Tremaris books. Yes, there was a little pinch of the Doctor in Darrow, and a little smidge of "her" in Calwyn, though they soon developed their own independent lives.

So I guess I'm not a true fan, even though the world of the Doctor is such a part of my own history; I must be something else, something less, something merely partial. A borrower, a visitor in another's world. I've knitted my own scarf out of the Doctor's wool; but it still keeps me warm.

And hey, the TARDIS is a big place. There's plenty of room for all of us.


*Yes, her -- not me, not exactly. She was a princess, for a start, and from another planet. She didn't have my name. And she'd mastered temporal mechanics and developed her own means of time/space transport. In fact the more I think about it the more I realise she was modelled on Romana -- an equal, not a hanger-on, not a damsel in distress. And her adventures weren't restricted to travelling with the Doctor (though he was certainly a handy way of accessing other worlds).

On the Irresistibility of Sand and Water

So we went to the beach.

We were invited for a couple of days to a friend's family beach house at Jan Juc, and I forgot to bring a camera. But we went to the same beach at the same time last year, and once again the three girls were drawn to the magic combination of running water, wet sand, stones and sticks.


Just imagine everyone slightly bigger, and with longer hair, and the banks of the stream not quite so steep, and Alice with a different hat, and you'll have a pretty accurate picture of how they spent every morning.

Liz wondered if the urge to alter the course of running water is hard-wired, or if it's culturally determined -- are there any societies in the world where children don't feel compelled to build a dam or dig a deeper channel? I suspect it's a primal instinct. No matter how cold or wet their feet became, how raw their hands from digging and scraping, they couldn't keep away.

Why Rewriting Takes So Long

It's a funny old job, being a writer.

Sometimes it's like flying; sometimes like pulling teeth. Sometimes it's like playing an endless game of "let's pretend". And sometimes it's like trying to put together a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle -- disturb one piece and the whole edifice comes crashing down.

Little do editors and other commentators realise the havoc they can wreak with their helpful suggestions. Recently one reader of my WIP suggested setting the action in a real small town in central Victoria which spookily matches the description of the fictional village in the manuscript. Great idea, embedding the story firmly in a real landscape (which is an important element of the book).

But -- if they live in X, why doesn't my protagonist go to the real high school there? Why doesn't her mother work at the real hospital in town, instead of miles away? The nearest regional centre is now an hour and a half away, rather than the conveniently fuzzy "about an hour" of the (fictional) big town in the original version. There's a real footy club, with its own colours and rivalries, different from the ones I invented. Where is the war memorial in this town? Where is the football ground? Every time my protagonist goes for a walk, I have to adjust my mental geography.

It's a fine line between adhering to reality and letting the edges blur, and everyone draws that line in a different place. I have no problem creating a fictional family to be the stalwarts of the footy club or the major landowners of the district, nor with shifting trees and even lakes around to suit my story, but it nags at me that Sadie's bus ride to school is now way too long. I think I might send her to the local school after all. But then I need to invent a plausible reason for her to meet her mum in the big town... And that conversation in chapter 7 doesn't make sense any more... But if I change that, I have to change that scene in the restaurant...

And the dominoes topple, one by one. You just have to have faith that when you've patiently picked them all up and fitted them back together, it makes something better than what you started with.

PS If you're interested, there is a thoughtful discussion of Winter of Grace here. Thank you, Lizbee.

Pieces of Nana

Today might have been my grandmother's 105th birthday (there was some confusion about whether her birthdate was actually the 16th or 17th June).

Doris Alice McCulloch was tiny, tough and stubborn. Having survived the Depression, she abhored waste; she kept a basket of half-dead batteries near her radio and rotated them, eking out the last spark of life in each rather than throw it away. She re-used teabags. Before her marriage, in the 1920s, she worked in the rag trade in Flinders Lane, and sometimes used to model the clothes for clients. (Maybe she modelled some of Phryne Fisher's fabulous outfits?) She was a keen amateur actor; she won elocution prizes, performed radio plays and toured country towns with a drama troupe.

At 80, Nana moved into a granny flat attached to my parents' house just as I was moving out. I picked up her armchairs, some saucepans, an antique stove-top coffee-maker (later broken by a careless housemate who didn't even have the decency to confess his crime).

I still have some relics of Nana: her sewing basket, complete with wooden darning mushroom; a china jug; an elocution medal; a book of household remedies called "Consult Me For Everything You Want To Know." But this week, I broke the knob off the lid of Nana's old saucepan that I've been using for the past 25 years, and I felt sad -- one of the last links to my grandmother is about to disappear from my daily life.

But then Alice came down from the attic brandishing a fur hat. "Can I wear this?" The same question I asked Nana when I rescued it from the top of her wardrobe as an 18 year old.

From hand to hand, down the generations, things pass on. Not the things you expect, not jewels or furniture or works of art -- what survives is a funny old hat, a vanity case, a darning mushroom. And I wonder what objects of mine my own grandchildren might end up with?

Happy birthday, Nana. Alice looks great in your hat.

... And Counting

It's almost Evie's birthday, which means it's also almost the anniversary of us moving into this house. We moved in a few days before Evie was born (two weeks early, impatient as always to wriggle into the middle of things).

That was nearly six years ago. By the end of this year, barring catastrophes, I will have lived in this house longer than anywhere else in my entire life.

The previous record is held by my parents' home in Upper Ferntree Gully, where I lived from the middle of Grade 6 till the end of high school; six and a half years. After I started uni, I never lived there again, though it was always my safety net (and emergency storage facility -- sorry Mum and Dad!)

Third place goes to the little dark house in Budd St, Collingwood, which I shared very happily and harmoniously with Robert and the cat (happily, that is, until the very end when it all turned rather messy -- sorry, Robert.) I find it hard to believe now that I lived quite contentedly for six years in a house with almost no external light source, but there you go, it's true.

Six plus six plus six is eighteen, which leaves 25 years of shiftless gypsy roaming. I have a suspicion my restless days are over; this one feels like a keeper.

Phew!

Just as I was racking my brains for a blog post, Simmone put this up at insideadog. Thanks, Simmone!

THE PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE

What is your most marked characteristic?
Tranquility

What is the quality you most like in a man?
To play a straight bat

What is the quality you most like in a woman?
When they confide in me

What do you most value in your friends?
Being there

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Timidity

What is your favorite occupation?
Dreaming

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Second hand books and lots of em

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
As a parent, you are only as happy as your most unhappy child

In which country would you like to live?
Australia, but with holidays in Scotland, Italy & France and places I haven't been yet

Who are your favorite writers?
All my friends of course, and today: Nancy Mitford, Helen Garner, and Patricia Wrightson

Who are your favorite poets?
I don't do poetry

Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Tristan Farnon OH DEAR

Who is your favorite heroine of fiction?
Rosamund Stacey, The Millstone

Who are your favorite composers?
Christine McCombe, Jane Siberry

Who are your favorite painters?
Sandra Eterovic, First Dog on the Moon

What are your favorite names?
Der, Alice and Evie of course.

What is it that you most dislike?
Arrogance

Which talent would you most like to have?
To be able to sing and draw, preferably at the same time

How would you like to die?
In my sleep, knowing the world is safe and my family are all happy, and many many years from now

What is your current state of mind?
Astonished by the number of breweries in Australia (don't ask); very excited to have found a book of Joan Aiken's short stories today (All But A Few)

What is your motto?
Nil desperandum

Okay, your turn.