So then we got up & we did what any thinking people do after rinsing cat food from their hands: we sat on the couch, sniffling, coughing, and feeling depressingly mortal – and watched all three Blade movies. That second one is a non-event, eh?

And at some point I opened my email and lo! My secret had been revealed: my ISHTAR novella has been officially nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award! I can’t tell you how thrilled to bits I am. I’m proud of that little story, & REALLY proud to see it in the same category as Elizabeth Hand & Lucius Shepard, Reggie Oliver, Michael Marano and Tim Waggoner. Some amazing talent throughout the categories, with Kelly Link, Ellen Datlow, Jack Dann, Peter Straub, M. Rickert, Genevieve Valentine, Kit Reed, Joyce Carol Oates, both Vandermeers … it really is a blast. I would have blogged this yesterday, but the strength in my upper body did not extend to hauling my computer off the desk, so I was confined to whatever an iPad allowed me. Plus, it was just fun to bask for a while.

Results will be available at Readercon in July. But, y’know? Just awesome to have made it this far. Nothing is ever a solo effort, though, & I want to thank the fantastic team I worked with: Mark Deniz, Amanda Pillar, KV Taylor, Cat Sparks and Kaaron Warren. 

One more thing: interesting to see how many in the novella section look like horror stories, eh? A BOOK OF HORRORS; THE PLAGUE YEARS; GHOSTS BY GASLIGHT… It’s a great length for horror, I’m finding, & I’m looking forward to hunting out my fellow novella-writers’ works. Yay for Gilgamesh Press being at the forefront of this awesome format.

And remember, kids, if you’d like to support a Shirley Jackson nominated work, you can buy Gilgamesh Press’ ISHTAR here, here and here. Or enter the Goodreads giveaway! Two free copies to be won. Only 402 entries so far.

(Those of you I owe copies to: I should have them by Continuum-time, this June!)

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Marvellous entries to the favourite fictional woman giveaway. Here are some of my favourite answers:

Liz Lemon from 30 ROCK. Nerdy and awkward and sometimes selfish, yet also attractive, determined (if sometimes misguided) and ultimately kind-hearted. And frequently laugh-out-loud funny. – Chris Barnes

Jessica Atriedes (DUNE) for her poise, brains and loyalty, Minerva McGonagall (HARRY POTTER) for superior magical awesome as well as teenager-wrangling skills, Princess Leia (STAR WARS) for rescuing her helpless frozen boyfriend who isn’t even a prince, Eowyn (LORD OF THE RINGS) for recovering from romantic rejection in time to kill the witch-king, and Yu Shu Lien (played by Michelle Yeoh in CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON) for her integrity, discipline, and the best female fight scene EVAR – Thoraiya

Diana in “Trouble with Lichen” by John Wyndham: Diana is a biochemist who values brains over frippery, she is brainy, driven and idealistic but not part of the modern cadre of “kickass sex object” fictional women (Buffy, Girl Genius, Echo, River, etc). – exp_err

Polgara, from David Eddings’ BELGARIAD series. She’s strong and powerful in all sorts of ways; she’s also humble, comfortable in her own skin, determined, calm, and able to quell kings with a single glance. I like that combination – and even though there are some problematic aspects to her character, she is still really appealing. – Alexandra

Granny Weatherwax (DISCWORLD). What I love is how real she is. She’s got these seemingly opposite drives – on the one hand she doesn’t really like people and wants to avoid them if possible; on the other hand she’ll continually go and risk her life to save said people. After a while, you realise that they actually come from the same source – Granny knows people. Heart and soul, good and bad. So while she doesn’t have time for them, she sees them as unique and valuable and important and so will do what she can to save them. – Nicole Murphy

Marla from Jennifer Fallon’s HYTHRUN CHRONICLES. I like how she works her way up (using brains!) from miscellaneous princess married off for political gain, to matriarch more or less running the whole country. – Tsana

Nancy Napoleon from SIREN BEAT, because she’s not your ordinary Urban Fantasy heroine, with a halter top and a tribal tat. She’s disfigured, yet powerful and sexy and desirable, oh and an Aussie, oh and written by one of my fave authors. – Sean the Blogonaut

Carrie White (CARRIE). In honour of Stephen King and of the first horror book that inflicted my love for this genre. Also it was a very strong character. Carrie’s traumas, her wishes and dreams and the final breakdown makes her an unforgettable character. – Mihai A.

Corinna Chapman from the EARTHLY DELIGHTS series by Kerry Greenwood. She’s not a traditionally shaped heroine, she loves food, she holds down a full time job, foils criminals, lives in Melbourne, and has a funky bunch of friends and neighbours. – Helen Patrice

Honestly? I couldn’t decide. I thought, ‘oooh, Granny Weatherwax!’ then I thought ‘oh, Liz Lemon! Wait, Carrie! Wait, Diana…’ You see how it went. Really the winner turned out to be ‘awesome fictional women’. And us, because we get to read about them.

So if you spy your name in the above listed answers, then you’ve won a book! That’s right! Your choice of BAD POWER or ISHTAR in hardcopy. (Though I don’t have my ISHTAR copies yet, so it might take me some time to get one to you, just so you know.)

AAAAAAANNNND if your answer didn’t make it into this list but you’d still like a copy of ISHTAR, you have two more chances to win! ISHTAR is now the subject of a Goodreads giveaway, closing beginning of May. Go on, join the 266 people who have entered so far!

Plus, don’t forget, my Aurealis Award nominated novella “And the Dead…” from ISHTAR is still available free! In PDF! Which means I can pretty much email it to you right away (no waiting on hardcopies ). Email me at rous AT deborahbiancotti.net for a PDF.

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If you, too, are looking for some reading while you ponder your Ditmar list, email me at rous AT deborahbiancotti.net for a PDF of my contemporary-supernatural-Sydney novella. And did I mention, free!? (Actually, I think I did.) Ditmar voting closes 15-April.

And the competition is still open for a chance to win a print copy of either ISHTAR or BAD POWER (your choice!) simply by answering this question in the comments: who’s your favourite fictional woman, & what makes her so awesome?

Both ISHTAR and BAD POWER are eligible for Ditmar nomination, but if you need more recommendations you can always check in on the AA-listed works nominated & published in 2011 over here.

I’ll announce the winner of our ‘fave fictional woman‘ comp & collate all entries next week so we can all have a reading list of awesome fictional femmes.

But if you can’t wait that long, remember you can buy the books & support small press here and here and here.

Read on, fellow readers!

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Just a reminder that we have not one but TWO giveaways to celebrate the recent Aurealis Award shortlists. Winners of the AAs are announced on 12-May at North Sydney's Independent Theatre (tickets at the Aurealis Awards website).

Give-away #1: If you’re interested in reading my AA-shortlisted novella – set in modern day Sydney, in present tense, as Detective Garner investigates the strange & terrible deaths of male prostitutes in the city, which leads her eventually to confront the very goddess Ishtar herself – email me at rous AT deborahbiancotti.net for a PDF of the novella.

I’m mad keen for people to read my story, ‘cos I’m not sure I’ve ever had so much fun writing anything, ever. Go on, send an email or drop your email address into the comments for a free PDF. Hopefully it will even whet your appetites to buy the whole AA-nominated anthology so you can read the awesome ISHTAR novellas by Kaaron Warren & Cat Sparks.

Give-away #2: If you’d like a chance to win a print copy of either ISHTAR or BAD POWER (your choice!), answer this question in the comments: who’s your favourite fictional woman, & what makes her so awesome? Winners announced at the end of this week, so please vote early & often!

You can also BUY! both books. BAD POWER is available at the Twelfth Planet Press website and ISHTAR at the Gilgamesh website. Both books are also available for the Amazon Kindle: BAD POWER and ISHTAR.

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I’m very proud that BAD POWER from Twelfth Planet Press made the shortlist for Best Collection amidst a strong field of contenders – Paul Haines, Sue Isle, Lisa L. Hannett and Tansy Rayner Roberts – & a big year for collections overall. BAD POWER can be purchased in print or ePub at the Twelfth Planet Press online shop & all good bookshops.

I’m *also* proud to see Gilgamesh Press’s ISHTAR novella anthology in the Best Anthology section. ISHTAR was recently reviewed at the awesome Thirteen O’Clock website: “This collection is a bold and clever book, with three writers taking very old stories and breathing new life into them. The Ishtar mythology on which the stories are based is renewed by the words of these three.”

ISHTAR is available for Kindle for only a few bucks, & is available in other formats on the Gilgamesh Press shop. The print release should be available soonish, too.

ISHTAR contains my first novella – a form I’m finding myself quickly addicted to, alas (‘cos, where can I send ‘em for publication, they are quite long??), which I kinda tongue-in-cheek called “And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living”, a reference to a particular piece of Ishtar mythology I came across during my research. To my delight, “And the Dead…” is also up for an Aurealis Award in the category of Best Horror Short Story. There I am again, alongside Paul Haines & Lisa L. Hannett, Margo Lanagan & Angela Slatter. Such awesome company.

Give-away #1: If you’re interested in reading my AA-shortlisted novella – set in modern day Sydney, in present tense, as Detective Garner investigates the strange & terrible deaths of male prostitutes on her beat, which leads her eventually to confront the very goddess Ishtar herself – email me at rous AT deborahbiancotti.net for a PDF of the novella.

I’m mad keen for people to read my story, ‘cos I’m not sure I’ve ever had so much fun writing anything, ever. Go on, send an email or drop your email address into the comments for a free PDF. Hopefully it will even whet your appetites to buy the whole AA-nominated anthology so you can read the awesome ISHTAR novellas by Kaaron Warren & Cat Sparks.

Give-away #2: If you’d like a chance to win a print copy of either ISHTAR or BAD POWER (your choice!), answer this question in the comments: who’s your favourite fictional woman, & what makes her so awesome?

And finally, as convenor of the Illustrated Book/Graphic Novels category, I’m very, VERY proud of the shortlist Andy Buchanan, Zoe Wadsworth & myself put together of 5 strong, remarkable works from a field of 23 entries this year. They are all wonderful & you should read them all & support our burgeoning local graphic novel industry:

“Hidden” by Mirranda Burton (author and illustrator ) (Black Pepper)
“Torn” by Andrew Constant (author) and Joh James (illustrator ), additional illustrators Nicola Scott, Emily Smith (Gestalt Publishing)
“Salsa Invertebraxa” by Mozchops (author and illustrator) (Pecksniff Press)
“The Eldritch Kid: Whiskey and Hate” by Christian Read (author) and Michael Maier (illustrator) (Gestalt Publishing)
“The Deep: Here be Dragons” by Tom Taylor (author) and James Brouwer (illustrator) (Gestalt Publishing)

Read the full list of shortlistees in the Press Release.

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A movie in the all-too slim category of Best Xmas Films Evah (with Action), THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT stars Geena Davis as an amnesiac undercover assassin – I know, right? what’s not to like! – whose past is coming back to bite her, then spin her around, then bite her again.

The bf and I have argued over which is the greatest character moment in this film. The bf asserts that it’s the point where Davis – still playing Samantha Caine, stay-at-home Mommy – kills the assassin on her kitchen floor. He claims this to be her turning point. From there, her motivation changes from I-wanna-be-a-Mom-and-gf, to I-need-to-know-who-I-am.

“Chefs do that,” she says, ironically, the dead man between her feet. Putting paid to the fantasy that maybe in her pre-amnesia days she was a chef.

But I’m not sure I see that moment of change there. Is she propelled by that moment, or is she propelled by the coincidental fact that downbeat detective, Mitch (Samuel L. Jackson) has just uncovered a suitcase of her stuff from her pre-amnesia days? I’m not sure, I think it could be either, and since it *could* be either, I don’t feel I’m seeing that Great Character Moment (of change and re-motivation) on screen.

For me, the greatest character moment is the more obvious & familiar moment. It’s when bad guy Luke is trying to drown her on some kinda water wheel. Samantha goes from screaming, panicking Mom-and-gf (she thought Luke was her ex-fiance, after all) to avenging freaking angel.

“I let you touch me, cowboy. I think I need a bath,” she tells Luke.

By then even her diction has changed. Her entire face has changed. Her breathing has changed, her voice has changed – now coming in short, sharp grunts. The film spins, the character motivation pivots and –

– she’s plunged into the water, where she reaches a hand into the trousers of the deceased Nathan Waldman (Brian Cox), pulls out a gun, and shoots her torturer in the leg. And oh! How she rises from the waters like a monstrous water demon, a mermaid from hell, a raging, screaming elemental force! For anyone who was sick of those James Bond fetish shots of girls in bikinis in the ocean, this moment was for you (& me). It’s THAT moment, imho, she goes from ‘wanting to find out who I am’ to ‘wanting to kill this freaking cowboy – & anybody else who ticks me off’.

Then she wrenches her hands free, tearing her wrists to shreds in the process. And henceforth, she attempts to be the assassin spy she apparently was before the amnesia. When Luke – shot & confused – cries out, “Samantha, please!” our heroine’s response clinches the deal. She is no longer who she was trying to be.

“Who’s Samantha?” she grunts.

From then on she’s Charly Baltimore. Well, when I say ‘from then on’, you know that the uniting of her disparate personalities, the discovery of a way to live with her daughter and her past are all to come in the final Act, of course.

Also, the dialogue in this film is generally hilarious.

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Novelist, memoirist and essayist Shirley Hazzard has won the Miles Franklin Award (2004), National Book Award (2003) and National Book Critics Circle Award (1980). She’s been nominated for the Orange Prize (2004) and was shortlisted for the ‘Lost Man Booker Prize’ of 1970. She’s been described internationally as “unusually old-world” (from Slate) and “one of the few living novelists who seems able to traverse the distance” between heaven and earth (from Salon.com). But locally, our own presses have preferred to focus on her geographical absence rather than her literary presence.

Hazzard was born in my adopted hometown of Sydney in 1931 but left the country when she was fifteen. Fifty years later she won the Miles Franklin Award for The Great Fire; an award which recognises “the novel of the highest literary merit that portrays Australian life in any of its phases” (via Miles Franklin website). In a parallel win for the ‘tall poppy syndrome’, Hazzard – who dared to be an apparently affluent, well-read and successful woman – ignited ire from such respected journalists as Kerry O’Brien and Jana Wendt. Perhaps forced into a defensive position, even Hazzard herself seemed surprised by the win, explaining it like this:

I thought this was also very generous to include me in that way but, of course, Australia was the first fifteen years of my life and you are already Australian for life by doing that.

It’s unclear what criticism the judges received.

By then, however, Hazzard wasn’t unfamiliar with contention. Winning the 2003 National Book Award for The Great Fire, she was second on stage after Stephen King. As noted in The Paris Review (The Art of Fiction #185):

[King] delivered an extended, pointed, even aggressive, defense of “popular” writers that seemed to condescend to mere “literary” writers. When Hazzard got to the microphone, she hit back–with brief, polite but firm eloquence–at King’s claims, and noted that his having offered a reading list of best-selling authors wasn’t “much of a satisfaction.”

She skewers his defence with her sheer understatement, and she doesn’t skip a fight. Even being a traditional King fan, I found myself chuckling out loud.

Hazzard has spent little time in Australia since leaving it, though she seems to talk about it with insight and some affection. More affection than I would have felt if I’d had the opportunity to leave so young. She praises her early education in Australian schools, but rejects the ‘institutionalised dreariness’ of the Australian arts in the fifties. Of her history education in particular, she says,

The only history that was boring was that of our own country–a sad little brown book of failed explorations, intrepid deaths of those who tried to map the dead interior of the Australian continent. This was so shamefacedly presented, with the terrible chronicle of the convict settlement that was the founding of the nation, that it wasn’t until the publication of Patrick White’s masterpiece (as I think of it) Voss that most Australians began to consider the drama of it all.

- Shirley Hazzard, The Art of Fiction #185

Though I admit even during my schooling in the seventies, the Australian history component struck me as dull, full of the deaths of white men in either exploration or war. The only drama I recall was presented by my second-grade teacher who told us the aboriginal kids in our class were smarter than the white kids, in a kind of blanket statement that had something to do with ‘the land’ and our white-kid inability to live off it. Looking back, I recall the aboriginal kids taking the news with grace, and the white kids – children, mostly, of immigrants responsible for clearing the land for “settlement” – being mainly baffled. The land had always struck me as a grim place, even before then, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to live off it. Which I now consider a dreadfully ‘white’ reaction, and just one of several examples of my dreadful whiteness.

In her most famous work, the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel, Transit of Venus, she contrasts Australia to Britain through the eyes of young Caroline Bell:

“Australian summer is a scorching without a leaf to spare. Out there, the force is in the lack, in the scarcity and distance. [snip] For colours like these you need water.” But even with water, in Australia the pigment might not be there. It was doubtful that pinks or blues lay dormant in Australian earth; let alone the full prestige of green.”

- Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus, Part I: The Old World, ch. 3

Words that I think, in my mid-twenties, I would almost have written myself if I’d had Hazzard’s power. That yearning she expresses to be elsewhere has been part of my Australian experience for as long as I can remember, and I don’t just mean for me. In twenty years of travel, I’ve found it impossible to be anywhere that other Australians aren’t, as we strike out from our island as far as feet and plane and ship will take us.

Since Hazzard averages around twenty years between books (though in recent years, that’s sped up – mostly through essay collections), it’s no surprise to see her career stretch from the 1963 short story collection Cliffs of Fall to the 2008 non-fiction of The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples (with her husband, Francis Steegmuller). In between, she has been nominated for the Orange Prize (2004) and the ‘Lost Man Booker Prize’ of 1970 (for The Bay of Noon). She’s also written two non-fiction books that criticise the United Nations where she worked when first arriving in the USA (though the UN sounds, sadly, about as bad as any bureaucracy I’ve ever encountered), and a memoir about her friendship with Graham Greene.

Hazzard is known for her masterful prose, her detailed attention to even the minutiae of everyday life and ‘ordinary’ relationships. At times, her writing feels like it has that particular qualities of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Locke, where each tiny movement, each hair on the head of each protagonist is meticulously wrought into large, almost overwhelming shapes fraught with consequence.

It’s been said that her prose outweighs her narrative and character to the point where even readers who care deeply about those elements will put them aside to feel the sense of portent and the strength of moment that only Hazzard can bring. This has certainly been my experience, as I’m swept along by her stories about characters I despise in circumstances I find strange and foreign. As Judith Shulevitz describes it in Slate:

[This is] a standard Hazzard trick, in which an abstraction is rendered concrete and given its own agency and power. At another point Hazzard describes the action of a man swabbing down a sickroom from which a patient has been removed as “creating vacancy.” This is a novel about and in protest of the abstractions that work upon us—war, history, bureaucracy—and Hazzard has found a language evocative enough both to make us feel them and to worry about them.

There is indeed something about Hazzard’s writing that isn’t exactly timeless, that feels caught in a very particular era where women could be headstrong but not liberated. And yet that very call to history is one of Hazzard’s strengths, along with a wry humour and fierce perceptiveness. She opens us up not only to the world as it is and was, but the worlds inside ourselves, as they’ve been throughout human history. Her writing is bold and wry, her words deceptively gentle, her insight uncompromisingly sharp.

I love Shirley Hazzard because before reading her work, I despised most relationship and romance writing for never quite getting the full picture of even the most ordinary relationship. But Hazzard writes about relationships with a towering maturity that makes you realise just how central our relationships are to our humanity, how they can bring out the best and worst of what we have to offer. And how they will do that – bring out the best and worst – for as long as humanity survives.

Links:

Old World Style: Shirley Hazzard’s long-awaited novel, by Judith Shulevitz:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2003/10/oldworld_style.html

“The Great Fire” by Shirley Hazzard, by Charles Taylor

http://www.salon.com/2003/10/28/hazzard/singleton/

Shirely Hazzard: Miles Franklin Award Winner (reporter Jana Wendt):

http://sgp1.paddington.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/art_profiles/article_1584.asp?s=1

Shirley Hazzard’s Rich and Varied Career (reporter Kerry O’Brien):

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2005/s1399427.htm

The Miles Franklin Award website:

http://www.milesfranklin.com.au

Shirley Hazzard’s Australia: Belated Reading and Cultural Mobility, by Brigitta Olubus:

http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1509/2080

‘At Home in More Than One Place’: Cosmopolitanism in the work of Shirley Hazzard, by Brigitta Olubus:

http://www.australianbookreview.com.au/files/Features/April_2010/ABR_April_10_Olubas_commentary.pdf

Shirley Hazzard, The Art of Fiction #185, The Paris Review:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5505/the-art-of-fiction-no-185-shirley-hazzard

New Yorker Bookclub discusses The Transit of Venus (with spoilers):

http://downloads.newyorker.com/site/bookclub/bookclub_june2010.mp3?_kip_ipx=658205317-1328851271

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Last Tuesday, I was at Lisa L. Hannett’s blog doing some Tuesday Therapy.

Tuesdays, eh? Pretty interesting days.

Speaking of therapy, I’ve accidentally come across some brilliant advice lately, in one of those ‘synchronicity’ kinda ways where the universe kinda pokes a hole into your life and fills it up with exactly what you’ve been needing even if you haven’t realised you’ve been needing it. Here’s some:

First, Good and Bad Procrastination

Says Paul Graham in the above article, “Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you’re not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.

There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I’d argue, is good procrastination.”

Next, & linked from above, Richard Hamming on You and Your Research

Hamming says, “In order to get at you individually, I must talk in the first person. I have to get you to drop modesty and say to yourself, “Yes, I would like to do first-class work.” Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You’re not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that’s a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn’t you set out to do something significant. You don’t have to tell other people, but shouldn’t you say to yourself, “Yes, I would like to do something significant.””

And then, Gretchen Rubin from The Happiness Project on Problem with Procrastination? Try This: Do Nothing.

Rubin says, “This rule was inspired by the habits of writer Raymond Chandler. Chandler set aside at least four hours each day for writing; he didn’t force himself to write, but he didn’t let himself do anything else. He wouldn’t let himself read, write letters, write checks—nothing. He summed up: “Two very simple rules, a. you don’t have to write. b. you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of itself.””

Also some reassuring words from successful writer Jeff Vandermeer: Panic Attack: Understanding your Work Cycles.

“So I think I’m only just beginning to see the complete outline of my long-term work cycle, obscured in part by the pattern of publication, not creation, of my prior novels. It may seem odd to not have recognized this, considering I’m 43 and been writing for three decades, but sometimes you need to take a step back to really see everything clearly.”

Finally, a comment from Ira Glass for beginner writers: Ira Glass on Storytelling.

It’s a video, so I can only paraphrase: when you begin, your taste is greater than your ability. As you practice, you close that gap. And I think it’s true, a lot of people must give up in that first bit when your story just isn’t as good as the story you had in your head when you started. I sure struggled with that. Still do, but not in the same way.

‘Nuff advice for the day, eh?!

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I’m a Dabbler (according to the rules: more than one genre), & I’m aiming at the Miles challenge level (read 6 & review 3 books by Australian women). It’s a kinda modest number, but the challenge contradicts an earlier rule I’d laid down to minimise expenses next year. And – weird, I know – that includes minimising book buying!

That is a very low goal indeed. And I have to say that though I am minimising my expenses, I am STILL, somehow, buying books.

So far this year I’ve reviewed 3 books out of the four I’ve read:

• The Spare Room, Helen Garner
• Cliffs of Fall: And Other Stories, Shirley Hazzard
• Liar, Justine Larbalestier (can’t review friends’ books, sorry!)
• The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard

I have to read 2 more books in order to meet my goal. Which really is a sad goal indeed, I’m kinda embarrassed by it now. And I’ve bought another oh, half dozen books by Australian women writers. So there’ll be plenty more reading & reviewing in 2012!

Onward.

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But THE TRANSIT OF VENUS is a marvellous book, a literary love story which ponders beauty and time, and is written with Hazzard’s trademarked sharp, searing prose. Hazzard offers up deceptively tiny moments which come to define her characters and stories later on, and reward careful reading and re-reading (and I will likely re-read this book, despite having re-read about 3 books in my life). Later in the novel you will often find yourself struck dumb by her foresight, having mistaken her verisimilitude for reality, but a more beautiful and meaningful reality than you yourself had so far had access to. There is something painfully sensitive about Shirley Hazzard’s writing, and I love it.

Take for example, the defining piece of writing about Ted Tice, which occurs on page 16 of a 335-page novel.

““His story has such nobility you can scarcely call it unsuccessful.” Ted Tice was honouring the faith, not the failure.”

You will not understand, when you first read this, that the same can be said about Ted. Not until the final pages. And then you’ll be tempted to call him a failure anyhow, for holding something as old-fashioned as faith. But you won’t be able to. Because over 300 pages ago, Hazzard corrected you. And in the end, briefly, Ted Tice’s faith is indeed honoured. Just a little. Just enough to make you admire him and feel sad for him, and wish he’d let the world corrupt him as the world so often does.

Also (more grimly) enjoyable are Hazzard’s sly asides about Australia, a place whose “history soon terminated in its unsuccess” (page 32), a place perhaps unable to offer up “the full prestige of green” (page 26). A place, you end up thinking, that feels like the past for Hazzard, that lacks the future-promise of America where her protagonist winds up.

As to the bad: as someone forty years younger than Hazzard, I admit some of her ‘olde worldeness’ made me uncomfortable. Her description, for example, of “the men with their assertions great and small, the women all submission or dominion” (age 84, yes I really did bookmark all these precise, efficient pieces of prose). And it’s true that Hazzard’s men are often cold and full of bluster, and her women are such passive little things you want to wring their slender necks. When heroine, Caroline Bell, asserts that her true capability may be ‘to love’ (I didn’t bookmark the page: it annoyed me too much), I wondered what she meant. I would have thought her true capability, from the evidence of her behaviour, was to do pretty close to nothing, and let the world act on her, and then feel sort of melancholic about it.

But then you have these wonderful moments, such as this, when a woman confronts a man. “In a long pause he was made to feel her superior strength, and the fact that she had been withholding it for years out of charity” (page 193). And you find yourself, after you finish the book, missing that marvellous, eye-opening and surprising prose with its intelligent humour, its fierce wit.

Because this is where we get to the real ‘bad’ of Transit of Venus, and I’m afraid it’s Caroline Bell, that milksop of a heroine who takes up far too much of the book even though at the beginning it holds out hope of being some kind of ensemble piece (it’s not; it’s mainly about Caroline Bell). I keep calling her Caroline Bell, of course, but in the book she’s more often called Caro, a discordant abbreviation that left me seething. Was it some kind of mistaken ‘Australianism’, a play on the idea we all shorten our names? Because no one calls a Caroline ‘Caro’ instead of ‘Carol’. Just saying.

But no. My frustration drove me to Googling, and I found that Caro is latin for ‘flesh’. (Or ‘meat’ or ‘meat eater’, both of which suit her better.) By this reasoning, then, Caro is flesh while her far more likeable sister Grace is spirit. By extension, Caro is the sister ‘of the body’, the sensual sister, the woman in the text who signifies flesh and the act of love, and of loving.

Which drives me mad. Because it seems to me that any sensual woman ‘of the flesh’ would not be so numbingly placid as Caro (gah! Caro!) Bell. That any woman capable of love – romantic love – would also, surely, enjoy sex. She might even experience orgasm. And this is where it comes crashing down, for me, because I cannot imagine our wan little Caro Bell, in her bloody blue dresses, orgasming. Even though she has sex throughout the book, I’m sure she is capable only of a sigh and a melancholic turning away, and then some ridiculous assertion that her ‘capability is to love’. Not ‘to come’.

But perhaps Hazzard didn’t mean ‘flesh’. Caro can also mean ‘dear’ or ‘darling’, which might make better sense, since Caro is obviously dear to Shirley Hazzard (not so much to me, though). And when Caro is dropped into the world’s most miserable relationship with one of the world’s most miserable men, you can’t help but feel Hazzard’s sympathy for her dear Carol. Sorry, Caro. You can’t help feeling it, and marvelling at Hazzard’s authorial cruelty to have put Caro there in the first place. And when poor, old Caro is surprised by her lover on an evening walk, and reacts with something like fear, and Hazzard steps in to curse the fates that pulled these two, agonised lovers together yet again – when that happened I, of course, more astutely cursed Shirley Hazzard.

But I still bought three more of her books. Because I know a Maestro when I read one.

This review is part of the AWWC2012 challenge & is cross posted on Goodreads.com.

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My previous record was around 36,000 words in a month (NANOWRIMO aims for 50,000 words), so, I can’t claim to be a seasoned practitioner of the ‘many words, one month’ school. But this January, having thrown off the shackles of the day job in a way that suggests a certain delicious finality, I wrote 80,000 words. Or, more specifically 79,951 words. In 31 days.

Here’s how:

1. Quit your job.

What?

Oh, ok, disclaimer: I never said the process was going to be a financially responsible or sensible one.

(Note: writers should never quit their jobs. No one makes money from writing anymore. In fact, you should probably stop reading this post now & step awaaaaay from the crazy lady’s blog.)

2. Put off as many other commitments as you can.

Buy some TV dinners. Put your phone in a drawer. Set up an iTunes playlist &/or make sure to have a whole bunch of familiar TV on hand for background noise. It’s a good time to start watching CRIMINAL MINDS again from the beginning if you like that sort of thing, or something else you’re largely pretty familiar with. Don’t answer the door. Postpone your socialising for 4 weeks. Tell everyone this is ‘novel writing month’ & you can’t respond to their emails until February.

Do whatever else it takes to open up as many hours as possible in your life. Except, don’t quit on sleep. You’ll need it.

3. Memorise this TEDx video featuring Elizabeth Gilbert discussing creativity.

And then, every day follow her advice to just damn well show up. Gilbert has changed my entire approach to writing, & maybe she’ll work for you, too. Go on, watch it again.

4. Work on a story that’s been nagging at you for years, but that you haven’t had the time & energy – or courage – to address.

You’ve been telling yourself this story for years, you may have even mentioned it to a couple of friends. All the while, your subconscious has been clamping down, squeezing the story, transforming it from a grain of sand to a hard, perfect pearl which you will now spit out onto the screen or page.

This is another of those very personal steps that I ‘got lucky’ with this January, but any nagging, important story will probably feel the same. Don’t think you have to wait years before you begin to tell it!

5. Don’t set out to write 80,000 words.

Just tell yourself, sincerely, that you’re here to beat your previous January best. Aim for something more like 40,000 words, say, or 10,000. Whatever is a challenge for you – but a challenge you at least have a chance of achieving. Be delighted when it becomes obvious you’ll be hitting your goal about 2 weeks into your writing month.

Make a new goal, but don’t forget to celebrate hitting that first one.

6. Set a low daily word count goal.

I aimed for 879 words a day, since I based this exercise on previous experience & thought an 80,000 word draft would take me something more like 3 months (80,000 divided by 3 months is 879 words, about).

I failed to meet this word count exactly four times in the month. Some of those days were spent thinking & plotting instead, which still contributed to the story. Some days were just difficult. But each day I set out to meet that goal afresh.

Having a low word count meant it almost always felt achievable.

But even when it proved to be unachievable, I didn’t waste time beating myself up about it. I needed my energy for writing!

Remember, also, that January was about generating words. It wasn’t about editing or perfecting. It was about telling the story.

7. Record your progress.

I kept a spreadsheet where I recorded my cumulative & daily totals & compared it to my daily word goal. I can now look back & notice that my biggest word-generating day was Friday 6-January, when I wrote 4,749 words. But on Tuesday 17-January I wrote only 297 words (I even made a daily word count graph). My average was 2,579 words daily.

The word count logbook makes me feel proud every damn time I look at it. 

8. Work to an outline.

OK, this contradicts the ‘No Plot? No Problem’ ethos of NANOWRIMO, but I’ve discovered without an outline I can fall into cliche and worse, writerly boredom. I need something to aim at and something to keep myself on course.

I had an outline which I started work on during my first week. That means my first few writing days were just free-form, trying to work out the character & direction. After that, I started outlining. I kept that outline open on the desk beside me as I worked, ticking off the scenes as I progressed. (It became another great way to record my progress, & to check that my 80,000 word goal was realistic. When I hit my middle scene at almost exactly 40,000 words, I figured my planning & progress were on track.)

The next step will appear to contradict this advice, btw.

9. Don’t force yourself to work to the outline.

Yes, that’s right.

Are you okay? Do you need to lie down?

What I mean by steps 8 & 9 is this: have an outline, but don’t feel feel obliged to write only that, or exactly that. Where the outline came in handy was on the days where I sat down, blank-minded, & tried to work out what the hell to do next. I could check the outline, cross out scenes that were no longer relevant, recognise the scenes I’d added in new – and, most importantly, I could identify events from the outline that the novel needed in order to meet its ending. Sometimes, I added those scenes in next. Sometimes I wrote them even though I hadn’t yet worked out how to get from where I was to where that scene occurred. Then I could go back & add in the bridging scenes over the next day or days.

Mostly, though, I wrote the novel in order. I’ve no idea if this helped or not, but it made sure I didn’t try to skip any scenes (if you’re trying to avoid scenes, your readers will probably want to avoid them, too).

And, finally:

10. Be kind to yourself.

Don’t expect your best performance every day (remember what Elizabeth Gilbert says!). Some days you’ll be tired even though you’ve eliminated the day job or cut out all other commitments. Some days you’ll be disappointed with yourself. Sometimes you really will have to take time out for your physical and mental well-being and just have a damn good lie-down. Sometimes you’ll feel depressed about how you’ve sabotaged your finances. Some days you’ll find yourself napping even though you were perfectly wide awake a minute ago.

And some days you won’t be able to face the page until late in the day or evening, and you’ll wonder what happened to the rest of the day. All of that is OK. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Just take the time out that you need, safe in the knowledge that though you’re resting, your subconscious isn’t. And then show up again the next day, aiming to hit your daily word count goal.

Also be prepared for the fact your NEXT month of writing will probably not be as prolific.

Because, of course, some days will be everything you hoped they’d be: absolutely wonderful and brilliant and liberating. And you’ll be glad you took the plunge.

“Leap and the net will appear.”

- Zen saying

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- Shirley Hazzard, The Art of Fiction #185, The Paris Review.

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IN THE LAND OF WOMEN is a great film with a title bad enough to be a novel title. Yeah, I’ve said it.

Actually & tangentially, I once started putting together a list of ‘best movies with the worst titles, in history’ but it turned out to be mostly movies based on novels, & so I had to retire the list out of fellow-feeling for my writer colleagues. But if I still had that list, IN THE LAND OF WOMEN would be at the top of it.

The movie starts with a rather writerly, unrealistic introduction where our protagonist is cries silently while his girlfriend breaks up with him. If you can stand the Juno-esque cutesyness of that, the rest of the movie is lovely & smart & bittersweet – the latter being my favourite style of movie or book.

As another aside, I’ve been trying to come up with a word that means ‘so cute it’s kinda grotesque, but not in any kind of satisfying way like Mark Ryden or the recent Cute & Creepy exhibition at Florida’s Museum of Fine Arts’. Cutesque just doesn’t seem to cut it, because it still implies there’s something kinda cool about the cuteness. Or, you know, I could probably just stick to ‘schmaltzy’.

ANYHOW, I’m circling around this, because it’s hard to pinpoint just one moment given the smoothness of the film, the way the moments are drawn out, often revealing both humour and sadness (like when protagonist Carter tells his mother that his girlfriend has left him & she responds with a tearful, “She’s so beautiful, she’s so funny and great!” before remembering to add, “Oh, Carter, how are you doing?”). And it’s hard to pinpoint one moment because, frankly, there are so many. This is a character-driven film. Almost EVERYONE in the film gets a great moment.

But given my previous, almost random criteria that a great character moment should also change the character’s motivation, should propel the character into a new direction (& a new Act), I figure the best character moment here must be the moment Carter decides to leave LA with its busted romance & it’s shitty day job (I’d mention what that day job is here, but I get enough spam as it is) & head to Detroit (okay, he writes soft-core p0rn) to look after his crazy Grandmother whose latest paranoid claim is that she’s dying.

In this filmic moment, then, Carter’s mother is still attempting the belated comfort, reassuring Carter that he’ll meet a really great girl one day. And Carter says, ”I don’t want to meet a really great girl. I don’t want to meet anyone, I just want to be alone with my Gramma. And her cat.”

Which launches the next Act of the film and underlines the main theme: the impossibility of being alone.

Of course, his first discovery on reaching Detroit is that the cat is already dead. Welcome to the rest of your stay in Detroit, Carter Webb.

IN THE LAND OF WOMEN, starring

• Adam Brody (warmly likeable; from The OC, apparently)
• Meg Ryan (in an emotional role somewhat compromised by a little too much botox pre-filming, which is a crying shame – a crying, crying shame!)
• Olympia Dukakis (absolutely hilarious! I bet this was the best fun she’s ever had acting & with most of her clothes on) and
• Kristen Stewart (in her pre-Twilight days when she was just a super-talented young actor)

Oh, just watch it!

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I would like the power to write competition-winning entries just by blinking, because {blink}.

Damn.

What? It’s funny! Also ironic, because he did win. See?

Email me your address, Matthew, for a signed copy of BAD POWER.

And, thanks, everyone for playing!

“One of us is in prison.”

“Both of us, as it happens.”

“Yeah? What’d you do, Sheriff, land you in here with me?”

“I was the fool put on this badge.”

“They lock you up for that? This place has a temper.”

“You only just now working that out?”

- Titular story from BAD POWER

She calls herself ‘Bad’, hides out as a man and a regular human being, but she has the power to control people. If she could control more than one person at a time, she wouldn’t be in this mess. But when she’s kidnapped by bandits and forced to do their bidding, she withers around her pregnant belly, relying for her escape on a promise she extracted from a Sheriff in a town whose name she doesn’t recall. If her son’s ever born, she’ll call him Maxillius and tell him this story. But it’s fifty-fifty either one of them will live.

(P.S. If you’d still like a copy of BAD POWER, it’s available via Twelfth Planet Press & several good bookstores.)

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“If you had a superpower, what would it be – and why?”

Answers in the comments or via email deborahb AT livejournal DOT com. Competition closes in about 24 hours!

But if you prefer to buy your copies, BAD POWER is available via Twelfth Planet Press & several good bookstores.

“Don’t let your father ruin you.”

“Mum? Wow. He’s dead, for chrissake.”

“My point, exactly. How about you go sleep it off, Matthew. Seeing you like this, people will talk.”

“That’s the problem. That’s the problem, they talk. They never stop talking.”

- Web of Lies, BAD POWER

Matthew Webb has been hearing things for years, ever since the disappearance of that homeless woman who’d stalked him. His father has kept him comfortably numbed against the voices in his head with a prescriptive chemical padding. But when his father dies, his mother takes over and she’s got plans for him.

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“If you had a superpower, what would it be – and why?”

Answers in the comments or via email deborahb AT livejournal DOT com. Competition open until the end of the week!

And if you prefer to buy your copies, BAD POWER is available via Twelfth Planet Press & several good bookstores.

“She told me my future.”

“What was it?”

“In the words of Dorothy Parker-”

“I know. No one gets a happy ending.”

“You want to hear something really creepy, you should ask her what she sees in her own future.”

- “Palming the Lady”, BAD POWER

Detective Palmer is called to the home of Matthew Webb, an anxious young medical student who claims he’s being stalked by a homeless woman. When Palmer takes the nameless woman in, she finds she has an uncanny ability to tell the future. By the time Palmer unravels the truth about so-called ‘Mad Mary’, Palmer herself must confront the devastating future that Mary has left her – a future where the only forgiveness available to her will be her own.

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a) “All sorts of middle-class folks agree with the billionaire owners of sports teams that the millionaire players make too much money.” Good point, Sherman Alexie. Some interesting questions raised here about the effect of the current eReader gold rush on culture, especially for poor kids, in: Sherman Alexie Clarifies “Elitist” Charges

b) Avid book readers (more than 10 books/year) make up 30% of the US population, or 70 million people, with the biggest proportion of those readers being 45-55 year old women. This presentation from the Digital Book World Conference on 25-January goes on to discuss book buying behaviour & why a ‘diversified retail ecosystem’ is important (because buyers want it). Plus, the influence of eReaders & customer preferences on eReader and eBook price points. And did you know that eBook purchases, in order of most % purchased, fall into these categories:

1. General Fiction
2. Mystery
3. History
4. Fantasy/SF

Eh? I always thought F/SF was first on the list, not fourth. But nope, general fiction reads outrank all other types. More in the Verso Digital 2011 Survey of Book-Buying Behaviour. Very interesting reading.

c) The Guardian annoyed me yesterday with an article on ‘lady writers’ and their new taste for horror (the dears), but today I find Ewan Morrison discussing The Self-ePublishing Bubble as a temporary phenomenon akin to the dot com bubble that caught a lot of people out (remember that? A handful of people got rich, a much bigger group of people went broke, & the world kept turning). Says Morrison, “I, for one, could never have guessed that writing about the end of books would generate more income for me than actually publishing the damn things.”

And here’s an interesting comment from Morrison, “Take for example digital guru, free culture activist (former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) and author Cory Doctorow - an SF celebrity and aggressive exponent of self-epublishing who gives his books away for free under a creative commons license (with optional payment). It turns out that Doctorow isn’t just any old novelist: the subjects he and his characters talk about are file sharing, the digital revolution, digital rights management and the oppressive old gatekeepers of the mainstream. His kudos comes from the fact that we are in a transitional period in which “free digital culture” is still an issue. Ironically, if and when self-epublishing becomes the norm, his subject matter will no longer seem so radical and no doubt his reader base will diminish.”

Ouch. Better invest in some diversified shares, Cory.

d) But if you get into the bubble quickly enough, maybe you, too, can do what Amanda Hocking did in this self-explanatory entitled (Guardian) article: Amanda Hocking, the Writer Who Made Millions by Self-Publishing Online.

e) Jonathan Franzen won my vote in one of his articles when he argued for ‘the protection of public spaces’ from the intrusion of those banal conversations that happen whenever someone answers a mobil/cell phone on the bus & begins with ‘I’m on the bus’. Here he argues that serious readers will always prefer paper books to eBooks, in Jonathan Franzen warns eBooks are Corroding Values from our friends at, yes, the Guardian. Hmm, I’m not convinced. Most paper books don’t come with a Search option (or Index), for starters…

Follow @deborah_b

“If you had a superpower, what would it be – and why?”

Answers in the comments or via email deborahb AT livejournal DOT com. Competition open until the end of the week!

And if you prefer to buy your copies, BAD POWER is available via Twelfth Planet Press & several good bookstores.

“There are two kinds of people with lawyers on tap, Mr Grey. The powerful and the corrupt.”

“Thank you.”

“For implying you’re powerful?”

“For imagining those are two different groups.”

- “Shades of Grey”, BAD POWER

Esser Grey is a rich and powerful man who has discovered, despite the world’s attempts to soften its edges for him, that one power eludes him: he cannot die. He sets out to divert the unwanted miracle through suicide and, when that doesn’t work, through murder. Along the way he meets Detective Palmer, the first person not only to acknowledge his miracle, but also his humanity.

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Sounds like another ‘accidental empires’ in the making. Can’t wait to read the book (she said, wryly).

The Bookstore’s Last Stand: Barnes & Nobel taking on Amazon in the fight of is life.

Amazon’s Hit Man: Larry Kirshbaum was the ultimate book industry insider – until Amazon called.

Confessions of a Publisher: “We’re in Amazon’s sights and They’re Going to Kill Us”

Ok, this next one is about television, but I still find it interesting in terms of organised fandom:

Farewell to an Unlikely Hero: Why ‘Chuck’ Packed Such a Potent Punch

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(From “Cliffs of Fall”.)

Ugh, I hate reviewing Shirley Hazzard’s CLIFFS OF FALL. What words can be used to describe such beautiful, lyrical, bittersweet, intelligent writing? Better, surely, to just read the words themselves. And I think you should, you should really read CLIFFS OF FALL because it is sad and beautiful and bittersweet, and Shirley Hazzard *should be more read*. She even made me want to use phrases like ‘our Shirley Hazzard’ or ‘one of Australia’s best exports’, taking refuge in cliche to hide from the dazzling brilliance of her writing. I’m so glad she’s written this book, this collection of, well, not even short stories, but of *moments*, sparkling moments chipped from a colossal diamond that Hazzard probably keeps in her apartment. (I’m not sure which apartment, either the one in New York or the one in Capri. A citizen of the world, she was born in Australia.)

There are themes uniting Hazzard’s works: yearning and sadness, maturity, society, femininity, duty. Relationships. What is said and what it means. What is not said.

None of which would have attracted me to the collection, I admit, unless someone I respected had told me, “Shirley Hazzard is one of the best short story writers working today.” So I will just say to you: Shirley Hazzard is one of the best short story writers working today. But, again, be aware she’s not dealing in narrative. She’s dealing in moment. In emotion, finely expressed and exquisitely, attentively observed.

Some motifs return, such as the aloof male partner, the “meekly attentive” female partner (description quoted from “In One’s Own House”), the social expectations surrounding them from his mother to the people they were at the party with. And there is so much careful detail, almost casually presented, that you have the sense you are there, I mean, really *there* in the 1950s/60s, in an elegant house wearing elegant clothes and swapping witticisms with dreadfully refined men and women at an exquisite ‘do’, while Hazzard’s characters give controlled smiles to everyone they meet (while secretly harbouring complex emotions and reactions which would have them turfed from said party if they dared speak them out loud).

I thought at first Hazzard’s greatest power was the remarkable balance and efficiency of her prose, the moments of sly wit. Lines like this:

“He linked across the lock a small gilt chain in which May had complete confidence.”

(From “A Place in the Country”.)

Doesn’t that just say it all? A security chain on the back of the door, a slight measure in which most of us have ‘complete confidence’. Except it doesn’t. It doesn’t say it all. Because then I realised that the real power of this sentence on its own isn’t felt, that the true impact is not from the innate wryness of tone but relies on it’s equally balanced and efficient context. Because the ‘he’ in that sentence is May’s husband. And the reason May’s confidence is so very ironic is because the true danger in the story doesn’t come from without. It’s already inside, as May’s husband locks the door against social judgement and resumes the affair he’s been having with May’s young cousin.

*Now* read that sentence, & see how much power and meaning Hazzard has packed into it:

“He linked across the lock a small gilt chain in which May had complete confidence.”

Are you thinking ‘poor May’? Let me assure you, that’s because you haven’t met her. Or maybe it’s because you read all the way to the end, because by then Hazzard has given you enough insight into every character that you will find yourself warming to the cold, methodical May in ways you hadn’t anticipated. And she’ll do that, again, in a sentence.

I admit that Hazzard’s characters have a sameness of affect (or even effect), so much so it’s occasionally hard to tell one long-suffering woman from another, or one intelligent-but-emotionall-distant man from another. But the pace of the pitch-perfect prose is enough to keep you reading, and the fact, again, that the stories are *moments* means in the end they feel as if they might even add up to one story, one set of circumstances for one set of characters – an observation that is only obvious when the stories are collected together in this one, slim volume.

Which I strongly urge you to read.

“For the fact was that they were not really suited to one another, which he would have discovered if he had ever tried to understand her properly.”

(From “The Picnic”.)

- Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief‘

This review is part of the AWWC2012 challenge & is cross posted on Goodreads.com.

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