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.

What You Can Do With A Schooliform

In one of the Charlie and Lola books, Lola announces that she doesn't want to go to school because she doesn't want to wear a "schooliform." (Luckily as it turns out, her school doesn't have a schooliform and she can go dressed as an alligator if she wants to.)

Our school does have a schooliform, though a fairly flexible one. There is an official jacket, official windcheater and hat, and the uniform shop sells checked frocks, tops and trackie pants. But in reality, as long as it's navy or white, pretty much anything goes. Thus Evie went to school the other day in a dark blue Seed skirt with a nifty buckle belt (thanks, Sandra!), a white skivvy and stripy tights and got away with it.

Among the older girls,the current fashion is for white leggings (preferably lace-trimmed)* and netball skirts. Nothing else will do. Some girls also wear skinny pants under their dresses. Others wear a very smart tunic (not part of the uniform, but in prep Alice wanted one because her cousin had one, and she actually started a trend. Now she won't be seen dead in it.)

Back in my day, we rolled our socks down as low as they would go, and we all buttoned our shirts under our chins and turned up our collars (it was the 80s). We did our best to contrive drop-waists in our dresses, knotting our belts or even our school ties at hip-height (until we were reprimanded).

It's astonishing how much flexibility schoolgirls can wring out of the same basic ingredients. I was shocked a few years later to realise that the kids on the tram were wearing their socks LONG and their shirts unbuttoned and their skirts hitched UP. Quelle horreur!

So what did you do with your schooliform?

* if there is a less practical garment for schoolyard play, I'd like to know what it is. We are on our sixth pair already this year.

The Library-Fighters

I have clear memories of all the libraries in my life -- from the soaring glass walls of the Ela Beach library in Port Moresby, to the cupboard sized room (perhaps it actually was a storeroom?) at Tarangau Primary in Mt Hagen, where the headmistress growled at me for borrowing books that were "too old" for me, to the blissful hours I spent on library duty, stamping and sorting, in the cavernous library at my secondary school. There has never been a time of my life when I didn't belong to at least one library. Even when I spent six months in Scotland, I made a beeline for the Stockbridge Library in Edinburgh, curled up in the democratic warmth, and wrote a suite of short stories.

Our school's library has been a little bit neglected lately (note: the picture above is not our library. It is a random library I lifted off Google.) Our library used to live in a gorgeous purpose-built space with a mezzanine, but the year Alice started, that space was turned into the Prep Unit and the library was shunted upstairs into a disused classroom.

Staff shortages (and other priorities) meant that over the last few years we've had a part-time librarian at best, or at worst, only parent volunteers and classroom teachers to keep the library going. At least ours is still open. One nearby school has closed its library altogether; at another, the children can access the library only once a fortnight (attendance optional), and only if a parent is available to process the borrowing.

We're lucky. We're getting one of those snazzy new economic-stimulus buildings, four classrooms with a space in the middle which is designated a "library." Woo-hoo! A group of book-loving parents are starting to organise ourselves to make sure this opportunity to revitalise our precious library doesn't slip away.

Our first job is to do a stocktake. I fear it might not take long. A lot of books have been culled in the last few years, sold off at fetes and fundraisers. The problem is that everyone has their own idea about what makes a book cull-worthy.

Mum #1: Oh, those revolting old books. So tatty!

Mum/Booklover: Oh those wonderful classics -- they're old but they can be re-covered. They might even be valuable!

Teacher #1: (rolls eyes) Please, get rid of all those terrible old-fashioned books full of mums bringing slippers to dad and cooking his dinner! So un-PC!

Mum #2: Some of those books have guns in them, we'd better throw those out.

Dad #1: All those out-of-date non-fiction books must go. Look at this "computer" book, it's a disgrace!

Dad #2: We need books that relate to the curriculum. If it's not relevant, it can go.

At this rate, we'll have no books left! And that wouldn't really matter, if we had a bottomless pot of money with which to buy gorgeous new shiny books to fill the shelves, but of course we don't. And even a nice fat wad of cash doesn't buy you very many books, sadly. Not to mention comfy chairs or beanbags, or a new computer cataloguing system, or nice new shelves on castors, or some audio-books, or DVDs, or (wildest dreams) a full-time teacher-librarian, or any of the other things we'd like.

But because we all love books, we all remember the libraries of our own childhoods, and we all believe that the library is too important to neglect any longer, WE WILL FIND A WAY!!

We will find a way.

The Name-Go-Round

I am slightly obsessed with names, particularly fashions in names, what's hot, what's not. This stems partly from having to choose baby names myself and also with choosing suitable names for characters. Nothing is more jarring to me than reading a contemporary book where the characters all have names that were highly fashionable in the 70s or 80s but have since fallen from favour (like Caroline and Jennifer). My current WIP, set in 1974, features Julie and Nadine, daughters of Barbara and Allan. I obsessively check the birth notices every week to see what's in and out.

I'm fascinated by the cycles that names seem to churn through. At the moment we are living through a revival of the kinds of names that were last hot at the turn of last century. One of my friends pointed out a few years ago, "Our daughters are all named after Edwardian housemaids!" -- Alice, Thea, Lucy, Evie, and Nelly (since then Freya has arrived to break the trend). All the little girls at school are called May and Amelia and Esther and Grace and Sophie. The little boys could be a roll call of WWI soldiers -- Jacks and Wills and Harrys and Stans and Henrys and Alberts.

Of course this matter becomes especially pertinent when there is a BABY on the way (not in our family, but one of our dearests!) and the name debate becomes positively fevered. We named both our girls in utero (perhaps rashly) but it wasn't until I attached a name to my unborn child that I could regard her as a real person. Before Evie was born, we often spoke of her by name to Alice -- when Evie comes, we'll do this or that -- which I think helped Alice accept her arrival quite happily; she was a proper member of the family long before she popped out.

But I digress. Penni and I were talking names this weekend and remarking on the fact that names from our grandparents' generation are back in style. Which leads me to ask: what were your grandparents' names? Are there any neglected gems lurking out there?

(For the record, mine were Matthew Irving and Doris Alice on one side, and Frederick Charles and Pamela on the other. If we'd had a boy, he would have been Charlie.)

Humpty Dumpty Eats Bananas

This is what my girl and her friend made at school!

What Makes You Cry?

A wonderful post over at the Guardian book blog about children's books that "still make you cry." Personally I don't think I've cried at a book that wasn't a children's book for a long time. Also, I cry more now that I ever used to when I was an actual child.

The one that is guaranteed to set me off is the last scene in The Railway Children (cited by many Guardian readers) where Bobby sees her father, returned at last, on the train platform, and cries out, 'Daddy! My Daddy!' (Oh, God, I'm crying just typing this...) The film version makes me weep just as hard, if not harder.

I was also surprised, a few years ago, to find myself sobbing at the death of Matthew in Anne of Green Gables, a scene which I'm sure I read quite dry-eyed, dozens of times, as a yoof.

I must admit that the deaths of animals, which moved many Guardian readers, have never really troubled me, but then I am not really an animal person. Though I was amazed when Ginger died in Black Beauty. I think that was the first death I'd encountered in literature, and I couldn't quite believe it could really be true.

Most recently I found myself tearing up at David Almond's perfect Skellig. Though maybe they were partly tears of sorrow that I myself will never write anything so wonderful.

The Book Files

I have a little black book beside my bed.

It is a diary (an X Files diary actually -- ahem!), but there's no salacious reading in there. It's a record of every book I've read since 1996.

I've always had a habit of jotting down the titles of books I've finished. I used to keep a list at the back of my real diary, the one filled with angsty moanings about the unfairness of life, but I let that journal dry up years ago. Instead I have my X Files list.

Here's a random day's worth and what it tells me:

3rd May
Time In History: GJ Whitrow (98) Picked this up from the Readings bargain table. Not as interesting as it looked. This was obviously pre-children when I had more patience for dull books.
The Red Queen: Matt Ridley (99) A science book, something about sex and evolution? I used to read a lot of pop science, before my brains got scrambled by child-rearing. Don't know if I could struggle through this now.
The Veiled One: Ruth Rendell (01) When I was pregnant with Alice I read nothing but murder mysteries. Hm, that could explain a lot about Alice actually...!
Venus In Copper: Lindsay Davis (02) Another murder mystery, but set in ancient Rome. Alice was a baby. These were light but diverting reads.
Elsewhere: Gabrielle Zevin (07) Rosalind Price from Allen & Unwin lent me this when I was struggling with Cicada Summer. It didn't really help much but it was... interesting.

So in a way, my book diary does function like a real diary. I can remember what was happening in my life, where I was when I read a particular book, and why I picked it up. I go through phases -- mysteries, favourites from my childhood (in one difficult month I re-read all of Arthur Ransome), research for books I want to write (most recently, lots of books about New Guinea), books about the supernatural. There are books I read for my old book group, and books I've read for the new one.

There are weird pieces of synchronicity. I finished Kate Grenville's Searching For The Secret River three years (less one day!) after The Secret River itself. I seem to read more children's books in winter. I read less in September. There are days overflowing with books, and days that are completely empty, year after year.

But alas, the X Files are almost full. Too many days are crammed. So much in my life has changed since the day I bought it at the newsagents in Clifton Hill. In 1996, I was living in a Collingwood share-house, young and single, optimistically sending off short stories to Meanjin and Island. In 2010, four houses later, I'm in Preston, middle-aged and married, with two school-aged children and eight books to my name. I need a new little black book, for all the reading experiences the next fifteen years will bring.

Does anyone else keep a list of their books? Or is it just the Virgo in me?

The Library Book Sale Haul

New Guinea, James L. Anderson & Donald Hogg
A big glossy photo book from 1969, which is exactly the right era to help me with my PNG WIP.

Frontier, Henry Reynolds
One of the first so-called "black armband" (ie truthful) accounts of white violence in Australian history.

The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
Never read it. Haven't seen the film either. I suspect I might find it a bit, well, stupid. But it's a very pretty edition.

The Binna Binna Man, Meme McDonald & Boori Monty Pryor
I just finished Njuljul The Sun; this is the second book in the series about the same indigenous boy.

White Time, Margo Lanagan
My introduction to the extraordinary world of Margo Lanagan, and the first book anyone at Allen & Unwin ever lent me. Coming from the record industry, where visitors routinely helped themselves to armfuls of CDs, I was somewhat dismayed that it was only a loan. But I get to keep this copy.

Keeper, Mal Peet
After this Onion's recommendation, I couldn't walk past this one.

Bachelor Kisses, Nick Earl
Never read this either. Think it looks sweet and funny. Also I love The Go-Betweens.

The House That Was Eureka, Nadia Wheatley
Man, this is one fat book. But it's Oz history. And this is the updated version. And it features a girl called Evie.

Leviathan, John Birmingham
Did someone say FAT? This is a door-stopper, John Birmingham's history of Sydney, which I've been searching the shelves for ages just to borrow. So when I saw it on the sale table I shrieked aloud (much to the distress of the nice elderly gentleman examining poetry books to my left).

I think we can see that my Australian history re-education phase is far from over. In fact I realise now that, unusually, almost all these books are Australian.

Alice came with me this time and picked up her own haul. A Famous Five book, the third volume of the Wind on Fire trilogy by William Nicholson, a very handsome red-and-gold Reader's Digest volume which she chose for its aesthetic appeal (I persuaded her to put back the two Danielle Steeles she picked up for similar reasons), book about creatures of the night (owls, not vampires), and a rather dubious looking graphic novel which appears to include a disturbing number of near-naked ladies (or perhaps it's the same near-naked lady, it's hard to say.)

On the way back to the car, the moor hens from Edwardes Park Lake moved toward us with sinister intent. Alice scared them away by barking like a dog. We thought they wanted to peck our feet, but perhaps they were just after our books.

Calling To The Void (and an echo returns)

Writing can be a lonely job. You work at your book, fretting and fiddling, and you launch it out into the world, and it flies away.

Silence.

Is anybody reading it? What do they think? Is anybody out there? Hello?

I know I'm not the only author who googles her own name for some faint hint that someone, somewhere out there in the wild, has reached up and caught my book in their hand.

The very nicest part of being an author is when a reader takes the time and trouble to actually write and tell you that they've enjoyed your books. ("loved," "adored," "LOVED IT!!!!" "my favourite book EVER!!!" is, naturally, even better.) But then you also stumble across weird little acts of appreciation like this...

...which led me to a lovely You Tube book review of the Chanters of Tremaris trilogy, by Kate (no relation). I smiled wryly when she says that no-one she knows has ever read these books. She speculates that they may be really huge in Australia (sigh!).

But the best part was when she says that she liked the hero, Darrow, because he "acts like a MAN." No one has ever said that before. Kate likes it that Darrow doesn't sparkle. He's not sensitive. He can be difficult, and moody, and uncommunicative, even though he clearly cares. Because, let's face it, men can be hard work sometimes.

But they're worth it.

Changing Spaces

We're building (or rather, paying other people to build for us) a big new living/dining room at the back of our Californian bungalow. As extensions go, it could hardly be simpler - it's just an box of an addition, no demolition, no plumbing. So for the last few weeks, we've enjoyed a succession of new spaces.

At first it was a dance floor outside our back door, a stage, a platform for performances.

Then, when the frame went up, it became a patio, open to the sky, where we could sit in the sun and read and drink beer, paint pictures and set damp towels out to dry in the fresh air.

As the walls closed it in and the roof was laid, it became a magical cave, where we could peer out at the garden through the gaps where the windows would be.

And today, as the last of the big windows was manoeuvred into its frame, it's become almost a real room. We can see where the TV will hang, where the couch will go. We can stand in the nook where the window seat will be and gaze out at the riot of bouganvillea just beyond the glass, and imagine the days when we can curl up with cushions and a book. We realise that there will space for a sideboard along that wall after all.

Living with the new space as it grows every day, we're getting to know it gradually, learning how the light falls, discovering new views. It's only one room, but it will change the way we use the rest of the house, too. The present cramped living-room will become a quiet, darkened study and library, a room for adults to retreat to and children to hide away. The kitchen will open out. We'll have room to build railways and cubbies, a long bench for jigsaws and model castles, storage for games and blankets, and a table where we can eat and be warm and see the TV all at once (yeah, okay, we're bogans, get over it).

It's not a new house. It's better than that.