What I did on my weekend…

Credit Where Credit’s Due

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On Friday night, after a panel at the QWC’s One Book, Many Brisbanes program, I got the opportunity to go hang out with Cat Sparks, Trent Jamieson, and the elusive Ben Payne. There was beer and chatter and hot chips with tomato sauce. The true value of this experience probably doesn’t sink in unless you know Cat and Trent and Ben, but fortunately for me I do, so I got to be there (although, given I had to drive home, I elected to drink coke. This seems to keep happening when I find myself in pubs; somehow I seem to have lost the ability to get my drink on).

Should you not know Cat and Trent, the short version goes something like this: one is the author of Death Most Definite and Managing Death and more quality short stories than you can poke a stick at, while the other possesses a resume similarly stacked with quality short stories and recently took up the position of fiction editor for Cosmos magazine. Should you come across them in bar, they may look remarkably like these two:

Trent Jamieson & Cat Sparks, Brisbane, Feb 2011. Documenting the fact that Cat drinks a glass of water.

Should you not know Ben, you will just have to imagine him, for he’s not among the photographs on my phone (such are the perils of being an elusive gentlemen). I can point out that he edits a zine with one of the quirkiest titles in Australia and he’s known for his damn fine taste in writers.

– ahem –

Er, sorry, the spokesbear gets snarky when I sneak that sort of thing into blog posts. He also points out that I should publicly thank Cat for coming up with the title Horn back in 2007, back when TPP and I were stumped in terms of possible titles that would work for the weird little noir novel about unicorns. My original title, and many of the replacement titles that followed, were awful and far less pointed than Cat’s suggestion.

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A friend of mine from uni pointed out that the Motel I was talking about in yesterday’s post is still in existence, although there’s no real reports on whether it’s still got its alien-abduction motif going or there’s a motley crew of long-term residents in addition to the visitors using it as an actual motel. The website does feature the graphics from the gloriously kitsch signs they used though. I lived in the one featured on the left-hand side of the header.

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I recently bought Amanda Palmer’s new album, and one of the surprises on the album was a duet she did with a member of the Jane Austen Argument on the song Bad Wine and Lemon Cake. After three or four days of listening to that song, over and over, in the car I finally broke down and went searching for the band’s website.

Turns out they have an EP out.

Ordinarily this wouldn’t be much of a story – roughly once a month I’ll find myself going to a band website and checking out their list of albums and such. I tend to listen to a lot of music, after all, and it’s really only the limitations of my budget and the rapid closure of CDs stores in all my favourite shopping centres that keeps me from spending as much money on music as I do books.

Despite these limitations, I’ve been highly resistant to buying music in electronic formats. I like the tactile pleasure of having something physical to play, and I like album art and liner notes, and I generally just like CDs and cassettes and LPs before them. Plus I have the kind of luck with computers that says backing up daily isn’t actually one of those things you ought to do; it’s a necessity that keeps me from wailing and gnashing my teeth. As a general rule, I don’t buy MP3s.

It would appear I can’t make that claim anymore. And, well, I’m not entirely sure how it happened, only that it did. It’s one of the things that always leaves me envious about music – it’s much better at beguiling us than fiction is, if only because it takes far less effort on the part of the audience on the receiving end.

I still miss the album art though. And the liner notes.

Sunday Morning

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Picture by Sally Ball 2011
Picture Courtesy of Sally Ball, 2011

When I was about twenty I lived in a motel, and it was the weirdest place I’ve ever rented in my life.

If you’ve read Bleed, you’re already kinda familiar with it, ’cause it served as the basis for Palm Tree Row and abandoned motel where Aster finds the corpse. If you read the second installment of Flotsam when it comes out, the motel pops up again, albeit in a more inhabited form.  It’s one of those touchstone places in terms of my fiction, a secret I’m still trying to unravel.

The motel had these green fluorescent lights running along the first floor patios that turned on automatically at sunset and stayed on until midnight, which meant my second floor bedroom was lit up with an alien-abduction glow that was accompanied by the unearthly buzz that close comes from close proximity to bad lighting. One of my neighbours was a six-four American hip-hop fan with tourette’s who used to come home at weird hours, frequently bombed out of his mind. Another was an short, gnome-like older woman in a leather cap who friends used to spot as a patron at the local strip clubs. Someone living in the neighbouring unit block used to keep a black cat that was easily the size of a small Alsatian, which would freak people out when they first saw it and couldn’t quite work out what it was.

I was broke and sleeping on a mattress on the floor and drinking far to much cask wine. It was my first real stint of unemployment, and I wrote poetry and theatre scripts with a kind of haphazard energy that comes from convincing yourself both are viable career paths despite their dwindling audience. I failed to understand the basics of cooking and ate toasted cheese sandwiches instead. I developed futile crushes and pined, rather pathetically. I played the same four chords on a battered acoustic guitar. At least once, while I was elsewhere, the police laid siege to the place in order to corner an prison escapee, although my flatmate managed to sleep through the entire thing.

At some point I started disliking my flatmate intensely, which is probably what led to me moving out after our six month lease was up.

And it’s my favourite place of all the places I’ve ever lived.

I like to think my affection for the place isn’t just the nostalgia for your twenties that comes of being a month shy of thirty-four, ‘specially since I’m well aware of the multitude of things I absolutely hated about that period of my life. Rather, I love the place because it’s where I figured out who I wanted to be, even if I’ve spent whole years since then trying to convince myself that I was wrong. Without that motel I doubt I’d ever have developed the love of noir, or spent years reading poetry and trying to understand the rhythm of language, or developed my love of a particular kind of horror that embraces the sensuality of the other rather than abjuring it. I would never have learned to recognise my privilege, even if my initial response at the time was to deny it, as if embracing the experience of living in the motel could somehow scrub the fact that I was a white male kid with working, middle-class parents and a university education up my sleeve.

It was a horrible place to live, devoid of any real redeeming features. It was also kinda magical.

And I’ve been writing stories trying to capture that dichotomy ever since.

Saturday Morning

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Desk View: Coffee, Printer, Keyboard, and Mithrangorfaniel

It’s Saturday morning and I’m drinking instant coffee. Maccona Classic Dark Roast with milk and one sugar, for those who might be interested, although I have no earthly idea why you would be. In an hour or so I’m going to ignore the rest of the internet and start talking to the scattered members of my online crit group, who conveniently double as a group of good and articulate friends, so there’s still good reason to skype on the dates when we’re meant to be critting and no-one actually submitted things.

This, I suspect, is as close to being one of the hidden secrets of writing as I can think of – find people you enjoy talking too who happen to be writers, then talk to them as often as you can. Ideas will form, ambitions will solidify, and the day-to-day despair of being underpaid and frustrated by the blank page will gradually fall by the wayside. I remember this far less often than I should.

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The Friday issue of Daily Science Fiction containing my story appeared in my inbox overnight, delayed until Saturday morning by the magic of time zones. The online version isn’t up yet, but I’ll post a link when it is (I think the delay is about a week, but I subscribed to get the stories via email, so I’m not entirely sure).

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I’ve been up since five AM for reasons unfathomable to me, and spent most of that time re-reading parts of books I adore, because five AM on a Saturday is a good time to re-read and adore things all over again. The world wants you to sleep in on weekends, so the five AM start is like stealing time that doesn’t belong to you, and re-reading parts of books is the kind of sacrilegious activity that divorces language from the context of narrative and gives you the opportunity to appreciate things anew. Language as an art gallery, where you’re encouraged to examine the individual pieces of the whole.

It reminds you of things that have dropped from view.

I’d forgotten, for example, much of the raw power in Fitzgerald’s introduction of Tom Buchanan. I remember the tag-line – the final image of the body capable of great leverage – because it’s one of the great character descriptions that appear in modern literature. It’s the thing that sticks in my memory because that’s what it’s meant to do, but the set-up that makes that one line it’s impact? Forgotten. Lost. Until I sit down and re-read, and am reminded of how carefully that line is built up.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and give him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body – he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see the great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage – a cruel body. (The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Too many people hate the Great Gatsby because it’s one of the books they were forced to read at school, because they were told to ask more of their fiction. I don’t begrudge them that, asking more of your fiction is a choice every reader should make on their own and there’s nothing wrong with saying ‘entertain me’ if it’s that’s the choice they’re making.

But Fitzgerald’s book deserves so much better. It deserves to be read by people who will love it.

Preferably in parts, on Saturday mornings, long after they’ve read the whole