Picking things up, putting 'em down...

It's a well-known technique for writers - putting a work aside, and then coming back to it with fresh eyes, motivation, or ideas.  After a couple of fallow months I got around to picking through the thriller again, and I'm feeling quite good for doing so.  I've been playing around - as I've mentioned in a past post - with a early-teen/young adult story which is, I think (and to continue the agricultural allegory,) in the fullness of time going to be quite a fertile row, or whatever.  But to labour a point, it needs fertilising, and to lay fallow itself.  Annoyingly, I don't seem clever or inspired enough - any of the time - to be able to string together a whole book's worth of good ideas without putting it aside at least once.  So that one's out to pasture, and the thriller's come back into the stable.

Maybe it's the genre, or maybe it's because parts of this story have been kicking around my head for so long, but I haven't had too much trouble getting the words out, and it makes me wonder if the reason I put it aside was a blockage of another sort - perhaps an emotional one on my part: an I'm not good enough kind of blockage, perhaps.  Think of it like a golfer getting the putting yips, perhaps - either way, it seems apparent that I can only write constructively on a project when the drive and inspiration together outweight the self-doubt.

Putting things aside in another way, I haven't been surfing since I got back from the 'naki.  I've had some truly beautiful, cold bike rides up and over Mount Cargill, heading out towards Blueskin Bay with snow-capped mountains on the skyline.  I've been looking for surf, mostly found none but once or twice blown it out because I can't be doing with getting cold on a miserable day.  Maybe I'm just going to have to mentally put my surfing aside until the elements align, and just pick up the bike instead and see what happens.

Not quite a lightning bolt...

It's been an odd, great week.  I flew up to Taranaki with daughter number one, and from the moment we landed it felt very clear to me that I was home.  This is odd for a number of reasons, not least of which is that I've lived in (count 'em) thirteen different places in my life, and I've not yet ever moved away from somewhere and then had any tug to it whatsoever, let alone one as strong as that exerted by Taranaki.  I felt like the blessed child - I got to surf Weld (and got waves there, which for me is seldom a given), the Patch in the sunshine and light offshores with just me and a friend out, and then drove south along the highway, stopping in at a couple of places I've never even seen before, then getting good, if hungover waves south of Opunake. 

Quite apart from the obvious - going for a surf without having to check into the thermal injuries clinic afterward - the trips along the coast really did it for me.  It's easy to take waves round every corner for granted, easy to growl at the rocks that remove fins and lumps of shin, easy to take umbrage at the amount of cow shit coming down Taranaki's watercourses.  It's less easy to explain why it felt so right.

So, after not even six months the estate agent was back in the building last night and the house is - quietly for now - on the market again.  I have a month to try and knock the garden into some kind of shape.  The days are getting longer, there's even almost occasional warmth in the sun.  I'm sure there'll be waves along too, and I'll get to see Otago at it's best.  I'm going to enjoy every moment and try and garner more memories for the rest home, which will hopefully have a view something like this.

 

How much swearing is acceptable in a children’s book?

I've been up against this one for the last couple of days: just how much can a writer swear - and when - in a children's book?

Obviously, I'm not talking about picture books for the under fives here. I'm thinking more specifically of the type of reader that number one daughter is: Twelve years old, reading ahead of her years. A Twilight fan par excellence, (books which I tried to read but gave up – I went through my own teen angst, thank you very much. I don't really feel the need to read four whacking great volumes of someone else's, vampires or no), she's also a fan of the Cherub series by Robert Muchamore (which has a certain level of bad language) and the Bartimaeus trilogy by Jonathan Stroud, which doesn't, instead showcasing the fact that you don't need to be swear to convey rude or insulting language. Alright, the Cherub series has its protagonists drawn from children's homes in working class areas, and there are probably few enough linguistic angels there, so I can understand Robert Muchamore's including a few "naughty" words. But elsewhere in children's literatureliterature: how much is too much?

My own feeling is that in reading matters, we should(with a few caveats) leave it to children to be self-censoring. If my daughter picked up The Wasp Factory I might feel obliged to offer her a few words of warning before she got too far ( and I'd probably express my own forthright opinion on the book at the same time..!), but I wouldn't take it out of her hand. The pace of reading is, I think, sufficiently different to watching a film or a television programme, and the level of involvement required – a book requires reading, in a way that other media don't – makes it much easier for us to put a book we don't like down. And to make a massive generalisation (which pointedly excludes The Wasp Factory, by the way!), gratuitous sex, drugs and violence seem to figure much less prominently on my bookshelf than they do on my TV screen. I'm not saying that they're not there and/or equally/more compelling or graphic, here: if anything, quite the reverse. Just closer to their proper places in life.

But in books specifically for children?  I wouldn't be too happy with my daughter having writing designed for her that included f-bombs, the c-word is definitely out, and bugger - that favourite Australianism - greatly offends at least one of my close friends (who I certainly wouldn't describe as overly prudish) and is not, particularly, a word whose true meaning I'd like to explain to my twelve-year old on a winter's night just before bedtime.  Almost anything else would seem to represent something that most kids will have seen coming out of themselves since birth...

Thoughts and opinions welcome!

Them there school holiday work breaks...

Yes, the dreaded school holidays are with us again, and like thousands of parents the world over, I've been dredging the innermost reaches of my brain trying to figure out new ways to get the kids cold, tired, or otherwise to a state of exhaustion where they might give me five minutes peace.  This is a quest in which I've largely succeeded, but needless to say - by the time I've got them tuckered out, there isn't enough left in the tank to contemplate writing a blog post most days, let alone mount an assault on The Novel.

I have, however, had one minor result that I am - in the spirit of depthless generosity - going to ascribe to this fortnight of toil.  I managed to wake up this morning, after a night of unusually vivid dreams, with almost a fully-formed plot in front of me.  I flicked the kettle on for tea, and while I waited for it to brew sketched out the outline, ready to revisit once I've recovered.  Dreams like this don't come on their own - no.  They require the imbibing of copious quantities of alcohol and blue cheese, and my children - the little darlings - have given me plenty of motivation to seek solace in the arms of either the bottle or indeed, barely controlled fungus cultures over the last ten days.  So this story's going to be all theirs.

Snow and the lack of Surf

Yes, the surfing's been completely proscribed by the aforementioned school holidays.  I did take the family off skiing, up to Mount Dobson, a small field in the Mackenzie Country which is almost all beginner and intermediate terrain and which has terrific views over to Mount Cook and Lake Tekapo.  It also looks like a great place to break myself into going a bit more backcountry - lots of moderate off-trail runs accessible by relatively easy hikes, so I may revisit there on my own account if it looks like there's some really nice fresh snow on the cards.  What struck me about Dobson though - apart from the complete lack of school holiday crowds - was what a terrific place it was to just be, in the most hippy-dippy, quasi-Buddhist horseshit sense of the word.  The facilities are - well, basic is being generous - but somehow that just adds to the experience.

Of course, no school holidays or ski trip would have been worth its salt without the obligatory rising-of-the-swell.  The east coast, it seems, was all time during the time we were away.  But with the cold spell we've been having, and  legs heavy with the after-ski burn, somehow I didn't mind too much.  Yes, the clarion all of the warm north might be growing stronger, but there's days down here that are just pure magic.

Fresh tracks...

There's an old saying, which I'll paraphrase as "the body is the window to the mind", from which comes the oldest writing "do" in the book (so to speak): show, don't tell.

Right now, this window's feeling pretty broken after the first skiing of winter.  I'm certainly not in any state to pick up what I was working on - it's written in a way that demands my full engagement.  So instead, I'm casually jotting down in a notebook exactly how I do feel, for next time I have to show  my reader an utterly exhausted shell of a man who, on this evidence, is just about to have his skiing arse well and truly handed to him by an upstart daughter.  

It's a curious mixture of physical pain, mental exhaustion, definitely a sense of encroaching age, all tinged with parental pride.

I'm sure that I'll get something else out of looking back at being in that environment on such a wonderful couple of days, too, but in the meantime I'm off to finish my notes, do some yoga, and just maybe - just maybe - get enough fitness to delay the arse-kicking for another trip at least.

Second drafts and letting go

I'm really enjoying revisiting this novel-in-waiting after the thriller stalled.  Partly, that's because it's such a completely different type of book:  thrillers are all about plot and tight, sparse language.  If your prose interferes with the page flipping, inhibits the pure story-telling, then that's bad.   The story I'm working on at the moment is much more about the carnival of language, as my Creative Writing lecturer at Massey puts it. 

An exercise I've always enjoyed is trying to write like  foreign languages translate into English. Translated Spanish and Italian novels , for example, have this wonderful quality to them - I can't really describe it as anything other than a lilting music.  Books written in or by Indians - whether in another language first or in Indian - have their own music too, a curious mixture of sub-continental flare and a tight, correct use of words.  (I wonder what a linguist would say about that: if British Colonialism is the common ancestor of modern Indian English and English English (for want of a better word), why is it that the Indian version seems to be so much more correct?  Has the presence of other languages in the country slowed the evolution of the language, or do they contribute in some other way to keeping it more correct?  I digress, wildly.) 

This story's set in Italy, rooted in a time at the end of the first world war.  So it's an interesting exercise trying to find the right voice - there's not only geographical considerations, but historical ones too, and it contributes to me using language in a way that I, at least, am loving, which in and of itself drives the story in ways I hadn't planned or foreseen.

Which does present its own set of problems.  Because I'm so proud, really, of some of the writing I've done, it makes the whole business of re-envisaging areas in the story rather bereaving.  This side of editing is one I suspect many novelist struggle with:  after all, carrying out a complete revision of a short story is one thing, but investing the time and energy to completely chuck out a whole novel?  The thought of it would make a strong man weep.

Maybe I'll get to the end with a better understanding of what's going on with this, look back and decide to chuck it all out and start again. What's fun though, is letting the language alone be the driver.

Oddly enough, I'm finding that working on this is also rekindling my confidence to go back and tackle the thriller again when it's time. I can't help but feel that maybe at the end of the day, they're all parts of the same puzzle.

The drought breaks!

Finally, I got in.  It's been a beautiful morning, the kind that makes you want to take a camera with you everywhere you go, right from the first pink rays of dawn scraping the tops of the hills around the harbour.  I drove up and over them to go check the surf.  Fantastic views on a golden morning.

The small swell has shifted direction slightly from yesterday, and had too much south in it to wrap into murderers.  I had a tantalising glimpse of lines hitting the outside bar, but it was asking too much for them to bend all the way around and into the bay.

So off I went to Aramoana, where I had it all to myself.  This wasn't entirely surprising - it's not like it was all-time, or even average.  It was crumbly chest-high beach break on a tide that was rising when it needed to be dropping, with the first breaths of a cross-shore beginning to blow.  But it was very user-friendly, in the world of recuperating, recently freaked-out surfers getting used to the cold again.  I left the gloves in the car, preferring cold hands and feelin' it to warm alienation.  I was too slow to my feet the first few, getting caught behind the section.  Then I locked (or lucked) into a punchy left that I could race nearly all the way in, where a little end ramp begged to be hit.  Like a punch-drunk old heavyweight with a speed ball, I kind of remembered what to do.  It doesn't matter that it was probably one of the ugliest turns I've done in years:  I landed it, and the morning was complete.  I got out.  I would have been rude to ask for more.

Dangerously close...

The cold water awaits.  My injury is now at the point where I can contemplate getting back in there - in fact, I've tried once.  I paddled out down the coast, thinking here was a nice, if a little junky, two foot day to ease myself into it, when in fact it was probably pushing five and with a strong side-shore sweep. I haven't worn hood and gloves for years, and I don't mind admitting I got totally freaked: way heavier that I was expecting, the eerie silence of a neoprene enclosed head and, in my gloves, feeling too far removed from what was going on around me, and ever conscious of my back.  I lasted about ten minutes, and never caught a wave.  But after a month out you expect the first few to be crap, so I wasn't too fussed.  On the upside, I was pretty snuggly warm in my polypro hoodie - if I pick and choose my days through winter, I should manage to keep the motivation up.  The Osteo has got me doing core exercises for all I'm worth, so hopefully some of the benefits of that carry over into my surfing, if I remember what that is and how to do it.

The bus is almost back together, but I'm none the wiser at the moment as to what exactly is causing that CV noise, because it isn't the CV's.  I took them apart, inspected them minutely, and there's no real discernible wear at all - not bad for joints made in August '72, as these are stamped.  Ah, the days before built-in obsolescence, when they used real metal and real rubber, and built things to last.  I'd be interested to figure out exactly what the bus's carbon footprint will have been over its lifetime - cradle to grave - build costs and recycling costs chucked in.  Even though the fuel economy isn't exactly fabulous, I bet the figure's still better than if I behaved as the auto industry would have me and recycled my car every five years.

The writing is progressing in fits and starts. I can see no finished story at the moment, rather I seem to be putting together discrete, loosely-related sets of chapters that will, eventually, find a common tie - something to bind the whole together in one recognisable story.  It's another way to work amongst this infinite variety of stories.

Something to share...

I should really get this blog back towards my writing and away from my back.  And if I could translate "life" for "blog" too, that would be good.  I thought about heading out for a wave today, but it's just - ooh, 5% away from being there.  Maybe tomorrow - this last bit of waiting seems to be the worst of the lot.

Anyway, enough.  I thought I'd share some writing today,  and actually prove I'm doing some.  Here's a revision of a short story I've been working on off and on for a while - please feel free to download - you can go to Scribd by clicking on the embedded page and take it from there.

Dog and Wife

Slowing down and waiting

I seem to be waiting a lot this week:  waiting for my back to get better, waiting for bus parts to arrive, and waiting for clearer decks all round so I can get on with some writing, and on a more positive note, waiting for the NZ ski season to really get underway.

My back is improving slowly, although I'm still unsure as to whether the last episode marked a permanent shift in the severity of the spondy - it certainly seems to be more prominent at the moment, but that could also be because the spine's still being pulled out of alignment by muscles in low-grade spasm protecting the injury.  I'm still keeping up the cycling and yoga, though - bizarrely - as I get fitter, the cycling seems to be more a hindrance than a help.  My current theory is that as I get fitter I tend to spin the pedals faster, so using my hamstrings more, which then shorten and place tension on my spine.  Maybe tomorrow I'll just go for a steep uphill grind and see where that gets me.    I still feel a way away from surfing, although I seem to have arrived at a certain level of sanguinity (?) about the whole thing now, as I'm managing to stay fit (ish) in other ways. 

The bus has decided that 107,000 miles is as far as at least one and possibly two of the original CV joints are going to go.  Driving under load the clanking resembles nothing so much as a knight in armour out for a morning jog.  So I've got that particular delight awaiting for me, just as soon as the parts get here.  Doubtless I'll find something else to do while I'm under there too, although I'm shocked that, just for once at WOF time, I don't have a sidelight bulb out. 

I'm still enjoying working my way through this previous half-finished novel I talked about last time.  It's a nice retreat after the thriller, not least because it doesn't have the same restrictions on prose that the thriller genre does - I can walk round the whole carnival of language and take it all in if I want.  It's fun, challenging, and going well. 

And last, Coronet Peak opened this weekend.  I'm wearing my ski boots of an evening to bed them in, gazing longingly at my K2's in the corner.  The kids are nearly fully equipped - when will they stop growing? - more snow is forecast for this week, and I reckon the back will stand up well to a couple of days skiing as long as I don't push it too hard, and the chances of getting the opportunity to do that with an 8 year old in tow are slim.  Bring it on!