The Leila Soliloquy

So

2011-10-05T11:46:00.000+13:00

As you may or may not have noticed, I haven't been blogging much recently. You can probably guess why. This is The Baby Formerly Known As Sproglet:

Her poppa is holding her in this one.

We call her Squidge. And also Adele, which is her name. It turns out that babies - especially babies who arrive five whole weeks before you expect them to - well, they don't leave much time to write. Or blog. Or shower. And it turns out that you have a choice between writing, blogging and showering on a regular basis, showering wins. (I know! Who'd have thought?)

So this is just to say there's a gap, and I know there's a gap, and I'm working on fixing things. And that's ok.

Here in the world of the internet, us writing folk like to project an image of perpetual productiveness. There are the word counts on twitter, the freshly written teasers (and the not-so-freshly written teasers). We like to make it seem as much as possible like we're Getting Things Done. And you know, some of us are Getting Things Done. And that is excellent. And some of us are Getting A Little Bit Done. This is excellent too. Writing in big chunks and writing in little chunks still adds up to the same thing in the end.

And some of us - well, some of us aren't, at the moment. Life intervenes, and sometimes big things take over for a while. But the stuff that we live out when we're not writing is just as important, if not more important. Because all this other stuff is what fuels our writing in the first place.

So sometimes there are gaps. But the gaps are as valuable, and we are better writers for them. It's just a matter of knowing when it's time to go back to writing again after. And working out how to make writing fit into life when all the foundations have shifted, working out new ways to make writing happen. I'm typing this with one arm and holding a sleeping baby in the other. I know that it's possible.

We can't always live in huge productive bursts. Sometimes we live one sentence, one word, one breath at a time. And this is a very good thing.

Sproglet

2011-04-08T22:21:00.000+12:00

Sproglet keeps wriggling as I write this. Sproglet often wriggles when I write. Actually, Sproglet often wriggles most of the time. Especially after I eat chocolate. Early mornings and late at night are Sproglet's favourite times of day. I lie in bed and inside me my tiny human dances, dances, dances.

I don't know the sex. That was deliberate. I love the mysteriousness. I love looking at my midwife's notes and seeing Estimated Date of Delivery: 14 July. It's like when you're on a long haul flight, and you keep looking back at the screen with the map of the world and the little plane gradually moving across oceans and continents. And you keep reading the estimated time of arrival and even though you're exhausted, the time stamps itself into you, and you can't look at it without feeling a tiny thrill because at that time you'll be landing in another world, and you don't know quite what it will be like.

Only that it will be amazing.

Road Trip Wednesday: Like Mandarin!

2011-03-09T23:02:00.001+13:00

Today's Road Trip Wednesday is extra special! Extra extra special. You can win Kirsten Hubbard's beautiful, newly released debut novel Like Mandarin if you participate over here.

Wow. I don't think I've ever made that many hyperlinks in one sentence before.

More about Like Mandarin, for the curious:

It's hard finding beauty in the badlands of Washokey, Wyoming, but 14-year-old Grace Carpenter knows it's not her mother's pageant obsessions, or the cowboy dances adored by her small-town classmates. True beauty is wild-girl Mandarin Ramey: 17, shameless and utterly carefree. Grace would give anything to be like Mandarin. When they're united for a project, they form an unlikely, explosive friendship, packed with nights spent skinny-dipping in the canal, liberating the town's animal-head trophies, and searching for someplace magic. Grace plays along when Mandarin suggests they run away together. Blame it on the crazy-making wildwinds plaguing their Badlands town. Because all too soon, Grace discovers Mandarin's unique beauty hides a girl who's troubled, broken, and even dangerous. And no matter how hard Grace fights to keep the magic, no friendship can withstand betrayal.

Because Like Mandarin is about yearning to be like somebody else, today we're writing about who we would have given anything to be like growing up.

this girl in my drama class in high school. I'm going to call her Gabriella, although that wasn't her name. But like Gabriella, her name was kind of theatrical.

Gabriella was totally my Mandarin.

Gabriella wasn't one of those skinny stick figure girls. She was round and curvy. She had a kind of beauty that was all her own. She had an epic laugh. And when she stepped onstage, even if it was in a crummy low budget school production and the lights weren't working properly, even if she was surrounded by stage fright stricken school kids saying every line in a monotone, she glowed. If you were in the audience, it was impossible to take your eyes off her. Her comic timing was perfect. No one made an audience laugh like Gabriella. Sometimes it seemed like she could imitate every voice in the world and turn it into her own.

Needless to say, even in close proximity, she completely ignored me. Not that I ever really tried to get her attention in the first place. I never saw myself as worthy. In high school, there are a few talents that will give you status. Gabriella's was one of them. Gabriella never really tried to be 'cool'. She never needed to. She spent her weekends partying hard and had new stories about drunken crazy antics almost every Monday. At lunchtimes she joined an elite crowd who disappeared off to a certain clump of trees and came back reeking of smoke. With anyone else, this would have been gross. With Gabriella, it somehow added to her mystique. Sometimes after a long weekend of drama rehearsals I used to find myself wishing I was a smoker, just so I could have some of that mysteriousness of my own.

I was the complete opposite of Gabriella. I was so shy it hurt. I didn't like cigarette smoke, and I wasn't brave enough for partying, but I would have given anything to have her talent, and even more than that, her confidence. Even just for a day. I would have loved to float through high school on a cloud of charisma, rather than scuttling between classes trying to avoid people's eyes.

Looking back on all this, I want to go find my high school self and give her a hug, and tell her everything will be ok in the end.

Who did you most want to be like?

Road Trip Wednesday (or Thursday): What’s in a name?

2011-02-17T08:26:00.000+13:00

How do you pick the titles of your novels?

I pick the titles of my novels with a great deal of saintly, zen-like calm. And absolute sureness. Because, you know. It’s only this one tiny little phrase that’s meant to make people pick up your book from a crowded shelf in their favourite bookshop and tell them what sort of novel it is, whether it’s a dark one or a funny one or a dreamy one or one that hasn’t brushed its hair this morning, and also hint vaguely but intriguingly about what it might be about. And also maybe sound ever so slightly sexy at the same time. It’s not hard to come up with a couple of words that do all that, is it? Oh no. There’s never any stress about this at all. Never any combing the internet, desperately hoping that no one else has named their darling the same combination of words as yours. Especially if they’re published, and maybe a little bit successful. And there’s never any gnashing of teeth, or pulling out of hair, or filling pages and pages with crossed out scribbleful maybe titles, which could be absolutely perfect if it wasn’t for the fact that they didn’t work at all. There’s never any envy for those painters who get to name their masterpieces ‘Untitled IV’ and then smile enigmatically when you ask them why.

No, no. Never. Why on earth would anyone stress about any of that?

So. My current works in progress:

There’s Beneath, which I’m going to call urban fantasy for now, because it makes life more straightforward if you give things categories. Beneath might be the final title, or it might not. It was meant to be the final title, because it was the title I came up with when I first thought of the story. Sometimes stories just turn up in my head with titles. But you see, there’s another book coming out next year with a similar-ish title, and even a vaguely similar theme. One that I didn’t find out about until I was at least halfway through Beneath.

I did not gnash my teeth at all when I found this out. Honestly.

But for now, anyway, Beneath is still Beneath. I have this long running love affair with one word titles. There’s something strangely poetic about all the space they leave around them. Beneath is a world which exists alongside this one. It’s also sometimes called Hell, or Hades, or Wonderland, or Oz, or Faerie. And many other things too. It’s also the weird unconscious territory you walk in nightmares, where things that aren’t even meant to exist can turn solid and hurt you at any moment. But my main character knows it as Beneath. So, for now, that’s the name of my story. Maybe forever, or maybe just until one of my scribbleful maybe titles turns out to be better.

My other work in progress is a contemporary novel called King Lia*. And god knows why, but it was actually blissfully easy to name. I don’t know what came first – the title, or the idea of the main character and her life having parallels to Shakespeare’s play King Lear. Or maybe both at the same time. It’s not meant to be one of those stories that retells a Shakespeare play in a straightforward way. There are plenty of those out there, and quite a few of them are very and extremely good. Basically with King Lia I let the two stories get tangled, the one I thought up about a girl called Lia living with her famous writer father in a house full of dust and books, and the one Shakespeare copied from somewhere* about a king who loses his kingdom and goes insane. And the title reflects the tangledness. And also the idea that Lia has claimed a fragile kingdom for herself.

I think the best way to come up with titles is to let them happen by accident. And I’m not always very good at letting things happen by accident, but I’m getting better. If you come up with an idea and let it tell you all about itself gradually – I’m coming dangerously close to one of those annoying unfolding flower analogies, but I’m not going there, I promise – if you don’t push it too hard, and just keep following it, sometimes it will tell you its name. These days that seems to happen more often for me. Or maybe my brain has finally picked up on the fact that teeth gnashing and hair pulling aren’t particularly healthy, and is trying to make me do less of that kind of thing by being obliging and giving me titles right from the start. Well. Slightly less.

How do you come up with your titles? Come join in at YA Highway!

*Contemporary fiction. Yes, really. How I ended up writing contemporary fiction is actually a whole other blog post. Most of the time my brain is strictly fantasy.

**Whenever you start worrying about whether your writing is original enough, remember: Shakespeare copied almost all of his plays from various places. If you can tell a story well, it doesn’t have to matter.

Literal Poetry Surprise, featuring Robert Burns!

2011-02-15T22:03:00.000+13:00

Scene: I am sitting in my favourite cafe with a mango smoothie* and my notebook, watching the Ponsonby traffic and raging relentless battle against plot bunnies.

At a table across the other side of the cafe, I see a strange old man with jagged wrinkles and crumpled clothes. He has a notebook too. He glances at me so fast I almost convince myself he didn't. He picks up his notebook and starts shuffling across the cafe. I tell myself he's not coming over to me, but this doesn't work.

Old man: *shoves notebook in my face*

The notebook is full of scrawl worse than mine. I make out the word 'mice'.

Old man: *reads from notebook* Somethingmumblesomethingbestlaidplansofmiceandmenmumblemumblesomething!

A tiny drop of spittle flies out of his mouth and lands on the table in front of me.

Old man: *pauses for my response*

Me: *tries to remember where the mice and men line comes from* *fails*

Me: It's... very nice.

Old man: Robert Burns! It's Robert Burns! *starts shuffling away*

Me: It's a great poem.

Old man: *looks pleased* *sits down at his table and hunches over notebook*

Me: *hunches over own notebook* *plans beginning and ending of plot bunny infested novel*

___

I've just looked up the poem. I didn't realise how very and extremely Scottish it is. Possibly the old man actually read me the original poem, painstakingly scrawled out by hand, only to have me not understand about 95% of it. I still don't understand 95% of it. It makes most sense when you read it out loud. If you'd like some translation, there's some here.

To a Mouse

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim'rous beastie,
O, what panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave 'S a sma' request:
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' wast,
An' weary Winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald.
To thole the Winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

- Robert Burns

I keep wondering what drew the old man to this poem, whether there was some carefully laid plan in his own life that fell apart and led to him spouting other people's poetry at strangers in cafes, or whether he empathised with the foreboding fear of all unknown things to come. Or whether he just liked the sound it made.

*Usually, this would be an enormous latte. But I'm hardly drinking any coffee at the moment. This gets italics because usually - well, usually I am a coffee fiend. But there are reasons.

Poetry Surprise, featuring Sylvia Plath!

2011-02-04T22:28:00.000+13:00

Remember the whole poetry surprise idea? Did you think I'd forgotten? I haven't at all! In fact, I'm going to blast you with awesome poetry right now.

If you guess why I've chosen this poem, then I might just have to give you a cookie. Well. A metaphorical cookie. But metaphorical ones are definitely the best sort.

Metaphors

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

- Sylvia Plath

Road Trip Wednesday: Groundhog Day!

2011-02-02T22:20:00.001+13:00

In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray has to live the same day over and over. What books would you pick to read over and over for the rest of your life?

What’s funny is that I don’t really need it to be Groundhog Day to keep reading the same books. My brain seems to be hardwired to love reading the same thing a few times in a row. And also a few more times. And maybe just a few more. In fact, my sister and I have some books we call ‘chocolate fiction’. This means that they’re full of cosy sweet goodness and must be returned to over and over again for full effect. Because who eats chocolate just once?

To start with, anything by Sarah Dessen. Especially Just Listen and The Truth About Forever.

At my place, Sarah Dessen always inspires this one particular conversation. A groundhog conversation!

Scene: Josh walks in. I am curled up in a ball with a book. There is a cat purring unbelievably loudly somewhere near my feet.

Josh: Haven’t you read that book four thousand and sixty two times now?

Me: No. At least five thousand and twenty three.

Josh: Don’t you have it completely memorised by now?

Me: Yeah. *continues reading*

Josh: *is perplexed*

You know how you have that jumper, the one that joins you on all the most miserable days of winter, the woollen one with the really long sleeves that you can pull down over your hands? I can’t explain why exactly, but Sarah Dessen is that jumper for me. Her books join me on all my worst days.

Australian YA of all kinds. But especially Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta (see previous post), Everything Beautiful by Simmone Howell, and pretty much anything by Jaclyn Moriarty.

It’s all the way across the Tasman, sure, but for me, Australian YA is just that much closer to home. It’s often easily as sophisticated as YA from the US, and something about the voices connects with me like nothing else. I love the quirkiness of Jaclyn Moriarty’s books, the raw but tender love story in Everything Beautiful, and I want Francesca’s friends to be my friends, dammit. There’s a lot of Australian YA out there that I’ll happily read again and again and again. And again.

Beloved fantasticalness

There’s a lot of this, but for now I’m going to narrow it down to Kristin Cashore and Margaret Mahy. Otherwise I’m at risk of writing a novel length post. Last year I discovered Kristin Cashore, and I’ve already lost count of the number of times I’ve reread Graceling and Fire. Interesting magic! Strong, complex female characters! Complicated relationships! Katsa and Po! What more can I say?

And then there’s Margaret Mahy, who I’ve been in love with since I was a kid. I first read The Changeover when I was twelve, and it changed my life. I don’t think there’s any book I’ve reread more. I love Laura and her complicated but loving family, the mysterious witches, the creepy but somehow beautiful love story. I can honestly say that my writing would not be the same without this book.

My favourite Get Off Your Ass and Write Something Dammit book

Anne Lamott is kind and extremely funny, and whenever I’m convinced I can’t write, I go read a few chapters of Bird by Bird, and that usually fixes everything. It has a place in one of my bookcases, but it’s virtually never in it. It’s usually on my bedside table, because even though one of my bookcases is right next to the bed, no bookcase can be close enough given how often I read it.

What books would you read over and over? Come join in at YA Highway!

Road Trip Wednesday: Give a book character a Christmas present!

2010-12-22T23:24:00.000+13:00

Saving Francesca on Goodreads

For this to make sense, you need to know Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta. If you don't know it, then you should go and rectify that at once.

Dear Francesca Spinelli,

Everyone needs at least one book character like you in their life. This is going to make me sound psychotic crazy, but you are far more than a character I love. You're a best friend. I hunt through my bookcase for your story whenever I'm sad and need cheering up, whenever I'm happy and want to be even happier. Your voice makes me grin. And even on the 948746th reading, you still make me laugh.

So. For Christmas I'm giving you:

- A large supply of delicious chocolate from the fair trade shop near my house. Seriously, they do the best chocolate ever. I give chocolate to pretty much everyone. And you've been going through hard times, what with your mum's depression and your new school. Chocolate will make you feel very much better.

This is also fitting because my sister and I like to call Saving Francesca a 'chocolate book'. This means, basically, that it's delicious and comforting and all kinds of wonderful.

- A boxed set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All the seasons. Your nonna was mean not letting you watch it, and you need to have proper ammunition for that crucial Angel/Spike/Riley debate. And hot vampires are also renowned for their cheering up qualities. If the chocolate doesn't work, then this very much will.

- A plane ticket, so you can fly across the world and visit that Star Trek fan boyfriend of yours.

Love, Leila

Come join in and see what your favourite characters are getting for Christmas this year on YA Highway!

More posts coming soon, my poor neglected blog! I promise! I have many many things to post about!

Truckzilla, or why I need to stop behaving like my cat

2010-08-10T00:41:00.000+12:00

Josh is a good driver. But even for him, reversing into the carport for our block of flats is still at least, I don't know, a 28 point turn. I'm not allowed to to reverse into the carport for our block of flats at all, because I'm still kind of rubbish at driving and would probably kill cars and houses and small children if I tried. Or if I tried to reverse generally, for that matter.

I have no idea how on earth Truckzilla manages to fit.

Truckzilla turns up mysteriously on Mondays. Truckzilla is not so much a truck as a small god.

Truckzilla announced itself this morning while I was still in bed by filling the whole flat with a rumbling so ferocious you could virtually see walls shaking. Nothing fell over, but that was probably only because everything that could be knocked over by the force of Truckzilla was knocked over last time Truckzilla visited.

I glanced at the end of the bed. My cat Horatio was curled up sleeping. This was not surprising. Horatio could nap through the apocalypse. I couldn't see Cali at all. Cali is small and calico. She is sometimes slightly neurotic.

The first time Truckzilla visited, I was writing at the table in the living room. Cali flew in through the kitchen window, shot across the living room floor, and threw herself at the door out onto the deck. The door was shut. She landed against the glass with a thump. She threw herself against the windows next to it, which were shut too. All of this happened at the speed of cat, which is slower than the speed of light but faster than the speed of human. I sat with my notebook, gaping at her. And Truckzilla kept roaring outside, probably loud enough to show up on the Richtor scale. Cali didn't hesitate. She dug her claws into a curtain and climbed so fast that by the time I realised what she was doing, she was at the top, looking at me, her eyes the size of planets.

Neither of us had any idea what to do.

I took a step across to get Cali down, but she was faster than that. She flung herself off the curtain and bolted into our bedroom. I followed her. The venetian blind across the bedroom window was down. Cali plunged straight through the middle of it and sat on the windowsill, with that statue stillness that cats only have when they're terrified.

'Cali?' I said.

She gave me a long look of pure misery, and curled herself up behind the blind.

So when I heard Truckzilla this morning and wasn't sure where Cali was, I was worried. I heard a small thump in the next room and dragged myself out of bed and into the lounge.

Cali was on top of the washing rack. From reading that, you probably think it's one of those huge-ultra-strong-stand-up-in-a-tornado type washing racks. It's not. It's one of those small fiddly ones which collapses if you walk into the wrong part of the room and breathe. It's kind of a miracle it hadn't collapsed as soon as Truckzilla turned up. Cali gave me her terrified look again, her claws curled between my bras and Josh's work shirts, the entire rack swaying underneath her, ready to fall at any moment.

I took a step towards her and she pelted into the bedroom. She stared at me through the middle of the venetian blind. I went to grab her, but her eyes were so pitiful I changed my mind. I let her keep the space between the blind and the world. It was the last hiding place she had left.

I have no idea why Cali is so scared of Truckzilla. But I know that she's scared enough that she'll do anything in the world to get away from it. Even strange curtain climbing things that don't make sense.

I stood there, looking at her. And suddenly I was reminded of me. Of how when my writing isn't going as well as I want it to, it turns into Truckzilla. It is rumbling and unavoidable, and I do everything in the world to get away from it. I rearrange small objects; I play inane pirate games on the internet; I turn on the tv and watch music videos for songs I don't even like; I cook complicated meals with lots of spices. If I could climb a curtain to escape, I probably would. I run around inside my head like a scared cat in a small flat, flinging myself against windows, defying gravity.

And what am I so scared of? What is Truckzilla, really? The prospect of a writing day that could go horribly, brain bendingly badly? What's a day like that actually going to do? Run me over?

I don't think it's actually the thing itself. It's what the thing could be. A day of writing could be wondrous, or it could be awful. I've survived both. And they're more ambiguous than you'd think. Sometimes I reread a day of intense euphoric writing and it turns out to be a heap of incoherant descriptions and tangled dialogue; sometimes I reread a day of pure drudgery, one of those days where I would rather climb a washing rack and hang precariously, and the writing turns out fine.

Truckzilla is the prospect that things might be difficult. And that it would be better to avoid the scary difficult stuff and do a thousand other things instead, things that don't achieve anything much. Things I can't fail at. Things less likely to turn out imperfect and agonising.

I stared at the shape of my petrified cat, and thought that really, both of us were kind of ridiculous. A godlike truck was not the end of the world.

I found my notebook and my pen and crawled back into bed, and made myself start brainstorming the novel that's been giving me headaches for months on end. Truckzilla thundered through the walls. I ignored it. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and suddenly the story opened outwards and made sense like it hadn't for a long, long time. It burnt so strong it was weird to think I'd ever been wary of it.

I kept writing, and Monday flew by like a dream.

This is not a blog post. This is just something like a blog post.

2010-08-06T22:59:00.001+12:00

My brain has this weird thing that it does when I write first drafts. Ok. I'm lying. My brain has at least ten weird things that it does when I write first drafts. But one of them is especially weird.

So. Imagine you're watching a romance. And let's face it, we've all watched at least one. Even those of us who proclaim ourselves to be profoundly unromantic. Even those of us who claim to be manly men who don't watch romance. Even you. Yeah, you. I can see you trying to hide that Pride and Prejudice dvd, the BBC one.

And anyway, you're watching your romance, and there's this whole plot where there are two people who are in love, but they don't notice that they're in love. They think that they're in hate. Or they don't even notice that. They are absentminded in their adoration, even when it's written all over them. And it's annoying, but annoying in a good way. Us story loving folks, we actually quite like being annoyed, if the annoyance is gentle, if we know it will be resolved or concluded, if we know it's leading to something good. The annoyance of two people who should be together but aren't quite there yet. You know, it's like the smell of a perfect chocolate cake baking, so good that you just want to eat it right now, cooking be damned, but you don't, because you know you have to wait so that it can be the best thing possible. Romance is exactly the same.

See, my brain does this. But with words. Actually, not words. With a word. One particular word. My brain doesn't notice, but it likes to fall in love with one particular word. Deeply in love. So in love that it wants to use it at least once every paragraph. Sometimes every sentence. Sometimes twice every sentence. The word changes from one thing to another to another over the days and weeks and months that go into writing a first draft for me, but the love remains the same. The unnoticed, unrequited love. Except unlike Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, it's not really a love that can go anywhere.

Oh, my poor brain! Even if it was possible to marry a word, it's not like I'd want to marry the word smile. Or breathe. Or darkness. Or something. Especially something. I'm actually writing this blog post because I'm in the middle of transcribing a scene from my notebook and the scene is full of something. Something has crawled into every paragraph. I'll be typing away, and then another something will come in, where there should be an object or a description. And I'm so flooded by the something virus that I'm procrastinating by writing a blog post about it rather than actually dealing with it. It's that bad.

But, you know, this is a first draft. And that's what first drafts are for. Sometimes the 2836th way my brain chooses to use a word is the perfect way. It sits in its sentence exactly right. I just have to cull the first 2835 times to get to it. And sometimes, if you're doing it consciously, repetition can be glorious. But it can't be an unrequited love that slipped under the radar. It needs thought. A marriage needs to take place. A metaphorical marriage, but a marriage all the same. And you want it to be a happy one.

So yeah. It's probably not a problem for you, but you might want to watch out for it. You know, just in case it creeps up on you. It's something very sneaky.

Something.

Two for Tuesday featuring Poetry Surprise

2010-06-23T00:09:00.000+12:00

The name of this blog post sounds like some random late night music video with two artists collaborating. Two for Tuesday can be the rappers. Poetry Surprise can be the soulful female vocalist.

The idea of Two for Tuesday is to post two things, things of any kind, and then connect them somehow.

So, without further ado, I give you Thing One:

Things With Extremely Optimistic Names.

Ok. Thing One is actually a bunch of things. Technically.

I have a weird affection for things with optimistic names. To start with, Auckland has a suburb called Meadowbank. Meadowbank in name? Happy shiny frolicking in sparkling meadows, like a stray Meyer vampire! Meadowbank in reality? A middle class suburb tucked in tidily next to a very posh one (Remuera), with nondescript but pleasant enough houses, and a nice bakery. Meadowbank in reality is absolutely fine, but oh, Meadowbank in name! The frolicking! The frolicking! There's also a suburb called Beachhaven, which has some beach, if you live on the right side of it. The rest, I guess, is the haven. But it looks like a normal bunch of houses built, I don't know, about thirty years ago. I've been there many times and I haven't noticed the haven. Criminal! And then there's Sunnynook. Can you believe there's a suburb called Sunnynook? Do you know I sometimes want to move there for the name alone, even though all I really know about it is that it has a bus station?

Also, old fashioned recipes often have extremely optimistic names. You know, the sort of thing you read about people eating for dessert in a picture book you used to have when you were a kid. Lucky berry Supreme! Peach Surprise! Don't you love how someone thought that the peach would still be a surprise? Shouldn't it be renamed 'Spongy Thing with Peach in the Middle'? No. It shouldn't. Because of the optimism.

Therefore, I am inventing a new blog feature with an extremely optimistic name. And this new blog feature will also be Thing Two:

Poetry Surprise!

I blogged on Sunday at YA Highway with a whole heap of random writing advice. One thing I advised was reading poetry. Poetry is an excellent thing. I would like this blog to contain more of it. So, whenever I feel like it, I'm going to spring Poetry Surprise on you. Poetry Surprise will occasionally be a poem I've written, but it's much more likely to be a poem that a vastly better poet has written that I want to share with everyone, so we can all bask in its loveliness. My poems are ok, but they don't have all that much loveliness to bask in, because I'm not much of a poet.

The first poem I'm sharing with you is this one:

Sonnet XXII

When our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,
Until the lengthening wings break into fire
At either curvèd point,--what bitter wrong
Can the earth do to us, that we should not long
Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher,
The angels would press on us and aspire
To drop some golden orb of perfect song
Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay
Rather on earth, Belovèd,--where the unfit
Contrarious moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.

- Elizabeth Barret Browning

Road Trip Wednesday: when and why did you start writing?

2010-06-17T00:11:00.000+12:00

AKA the post that somehow turned into Leila's life story.

It started with self publishing when I was about four. I didn’t have a printing press, so each book was a one off limited edition, handmade with scrap paper, felt tip pens, and the stapler*. Most of the stories were about little girls named Celia or Delia, witches named Celia or Delia or dinosaurs named Celia or Delia**. And also about magic. Later, I extended my subject matter to include mermaids named Celia and Delia and princesses named Celia and Delia.

I don’t think anything really beats that discovery you make as a kid, when you realise that if you write a story, it’s there as long as the paper is there and you can read it over and over again. Or someone else can read it and know exactly what you said word for word, even if they weren’t in the room when you came up with it.

Originally I didn’t want to be a writer. I had other plans. First I wanted to be a professional witch. Then I wanted to be a teacher. Then, when I was seven, I wrote an unbelievably long play about two princesses and a dungeon, and also a poem about putting syrup on porridge, how the syrup runs slowly off the spoon and makes little golden corridors through the porridge. And for some reason my teacher was absolutely delighted with them, and then my parents were absolutely delighted with them, even though the play was full of nonsensical rambling dialogue and the syrup poem was, well, syrupy.

That’s when I realised that writing was not only magical. It also impressed grownups. And because of that, it would make me rich and famous. I was a vain kid, and also one of those notoriously weird kids. You knew one of those kids. The sort of kid who cries if her new book falls on the ground, and disappears to the edge of the playground for hours on end to play intensive make believe about orphan girls from large families during Victorian times. I have never ever in my whole entire life been cool. So the prospect of being rich and famous made me happy, if only so that it would make the mean kids regret being mean.

Someone gave me a second hand typewriter. A manual one. I bashed out page after page of description of characters and their whole families and their whole families’ families, including middle names and eye colour. I didn’t include star signs, but I probably would have, if I had known about them.

Then I got sick of the typewriter, and wrote stories and songs and in large spiral bound exercise books which always fell apart before I’d filled them. I’d grown out of dinosaurs and I’d grown out of naming characters Celia and Delia by then***. But I couldn’t stop writing about magic. Magic and transformation and people dealing with dark stuff. Being a twelve year old girl is one of the hardest things in the world. I knew dark stuff.

Then high school. I wrote epic fantasy in maths class when I was meant to be doing algebra. I wrote poetry in my study period when I was meant to be doing homework. I never finished anything unless it was a class assignment. But I made up for that by starting approximately one million novels. I had one particular story that turned up when I was meant to be doing French homework and tangled with me and wouldn’t go away.

My French is still terrible.

In university, I was still writing that story, and it was still tangled. I went to cafes and drank enormous lattes and wrote and wrote and wrote. Over the years I changed almost everything about it except for some of the characters’ names****. Then, in a year of turmoil, I decided the story was a lost cause and abandoned it. Even so, that story still calls to me sometimes. One day I might go back to it, when I'm less bothered about whether it's publishable or not.

Abandoning my novel was one of the ugliest things I've ever done. It took me two and a half agonising years before I could work on anything novel length again. Then Aven and Elias turned up, and I spent most of 2009 working on their story. Then some different people turned up, and I’ve spent 2010 so far working on their story.

I see things through to completion these days, and it’s slow. Slow like a sleeping snail is slow. I want to get everything pretty and polished and perfect, and that takes a long time. In fact, when you’re in the middle of working on things, it feels like the longest time in the world. So I go to my favourite cafe, I buy a large latte and cake, because cake makes everything better, and I pull out my notebook and write for hours on end. And I enjoy every moment of it as much as I can.

Writing is like many things in that after a while, it becomes part of living. You don’t know your own breath without it. Stories wait in dark corners, and under beds, and inside the linen cupboard, and sometimes the cats bring them in and leave them on the rug. And every time the stories leap out at you and insist on being written. They bring out their most intriguing people, and their most beautiful events. And you know that they’re absolutely right. They absolutely must be told. And if you don’t write them, there is no one else who will.

Honestly? I write because I no longer know how not to write.

You want to hear about how my fellow highwayers started writing as well, don't you? Head this way straight away!

*This was before I entered the bookselling world and realised that stapling is probably not the greatest form of binding in the world.

**I also named my guinea pigs Celia and Delia. I was obsessed.

***Mostly. I think a few Celias and Delias still snuck in occasionally.

****Incidentally, none of them were called Celia or Delia.

Road Trip Wednesday: How do you know when a project is going to work and when it's not?

2010-06-09T23:25:00.000+12:00

I know when things glow. Some stories have this buzzing electric current, which runs all the way through them, this bright sharp line joining up the characters. It’s the thing that makes me know that out of all my hundred thousand random floating ideas, this one is worth writing. This one has people who are fascinating, who are going to collide and leave a trail of sparks from their collision. It’s often a romance, because I have this whole endless obsession with love stories, but it doesn’t have to be.

Anyway. If I find something that glows, I know that I could have a story of pure wondrousness on my hands, if I could just write it well enough. Or sometimes I have a whole bunch of beautiful lines all through my head, and I keep coming across them at inappropriate times and having to sneak into the back room at work to write them down. And then I know it could be great, if I could just get the story behind them to make sense.

But that’s not whether a project will work. That’s whether a project can work. Most people have projects that can work floating around, whether or not they choose to do anything with them.

But in the end, whether it will work actually comes down to me. And that’s scary. It comes down to whether I manage to dislodge enough time for the damn thing from all the stuff time usually gets itself stuck in*, whether I revise and edit well enough and follow people’s advice on things that need fixing. And whether I keep going when everything about the project is making me outraged, or bored, or paranoid, or headachy, or all at once. And also, whether I do the idea justice. A good idea is all very well, but I could unwittingly write it so badly that you can almost hear the trees which fell for my notebooks groaning**, write it so badly that it turns into a Humpty Dumpty sort of thing where not even all the best beta readers in the world can put it back together again. Not to mention whether my judgement was right in the first place, whether my idea genuinely does work, or whether it was a waste of time. What glows for me might not glow for you. Or for an agent. Or for anyone. Except my mother. It will probably glow for my mother. But she likes everything I write, so that doesn’t count***.

So, in one respect, I know the answer before I ever start anything. I only start novels that I am absolutely certain could work. In another, it’s murky. Because whether something does work beyond the inside of my head is another matter.

I write. I revise. I hope.

That’s all.

How do you know when a project will work? And how about other writers? You should go see what my fellow highwayers have to say. And while you’re heading in that direction, you might also want to check out my Sunday post on being a New Zealand writer.

*Work, loved ones, cooking, insect warfare, Grey’s Anatomy.

**I’m actually quite sure they do this. But I try not to listen.

***The 987234th thing that I should maybe leave out of query letters: “My mother rather liked this novel.”

If you think about it, keeping a blog is actually quite a lot like having a pet monster

2010-05-19T00:04:00.000+12:00

Scene: Leila sits down at her desk. It is late at night, and she is weary. She has that nasty eerie feeling like something is watching her. She turns around. It is watching her with black, beady eyes.

Blog: Hello.

Blog reaches out with long fingers and starts stroking Leila's neck.

Leila shivers.

Leila: Go away.

Blog: It has been a while, hasn't it, Leila?

Leila: A while. A short while.

Blog leans closer.

Blog: It's been a month, Leila. You haven't fed me any posts for a month. I'm hungry.

Leila: It's 11pm, and I'm tired. I've spent an evening fighting off a potential world invasion.

Blog: World invasion?

Leila: Of ants.

Blog: Ants?

Leila: Ants. In the kitchen.

Blog: You're saying that ants are more important than me.

Leila: I never said that. It's just that you have to get rid of ants straightaway, or -

Blog: Where's my post, Leila? I have waited weeks, and weeks.

Blog whispers in Leila's ear.

Blog: I can't even begin to describe how hungry I am, Leila.

Leila: I'll give you a post. I'll give you a post tomorrow. Ok?

Blog: I think I am too hungry to wait until tomorrow.

Leila: You don't understand. I have to sleep.

Leila sighs.

Leila: I explained about sleep, remember? How I actually really do have to sleep?

Blog puts a hand under Leila's chin and turns her head so that she has no choice but to look into Blog's eyes.

Blog: I am so hungry that if you don't give me a post right now, I will just have to eat you instead. Ok?

Blog opens its mouth. Its breath smells like cigarettes and old peppermints.

Leila: Fine! I'll write you a post! Just stop doing that!

Blog's eyes widen.

Blog: You will?

Leila: I will. Right now.

Leila thinks for a moment.

Leila: You know, Blog, I'm still very tired. If I write you a post right now, it won't be a very good post. Wouldn't you rather wait until tomorrow, when I can cook you up something much better and -

Blog: HUNGRY!

Blog opens its mouth again.

Leila: Ok! Ok! I'll give you a post right now!

Leila starts to type.

Blog smiles.

Blog: I could always eat you anyway.

Leila runs.

Road Trip Wednesday: What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

2010-04-15T00:14:00.001+12:00

Ok. So a lot of people tell aspiring writers to read, which is excellent advice. A lot of people tell aspiring writers to get English degrees, which is good advice, or to not get English degrees because you should do a degree that actually leads to a job, which is sensible advice*. A lot of people tell aspiring writers to be friendly and professional to all publishing people, to blog and be internet friendly, to have hobbies which are not writing, to write the stories that you love to read, to learn grammar rules so you can be all the better at breaking them, to only write plans if you like writing plans, to follow your instincts, to write wholeheartedly and give each story everything you have. Great advice, all of it.

But the best advice I ever received came from the author John Marsden.

About five years ago he did a talk at my old high school. My sister and I went up to talk with him after. He was friendly and polite, my sister was a quiet mouse, and I was a babbling crazy fangirl. I somehow ended up telling him that I wanted to be a writer. Or my sister did. Later, as we were walking away, he called out, "You’re the one that wants to be an author?"

I nodded.

The advice he called out after me was one word long.

“Persevere.”

That word has stayed with me ever since. Because no matter how good your intentions are, none of the rest of the advice means anything if you don’t persevere. A lot of the time I write with all this other stuff talking away inside my head, telling me that I’m not a very good writer, that the story is never going to be as good as I want it to be, and also that there are very extremely important things I should be doing right now at this exact minute, like practising my singing and wandering round the house and feeding the dishwasher. You know, important things.

On the days when I get stuck and confused, on the days when I would rather be doing anything except writing, I tell myself to persevere. And when I persevere, more often than not, things sort themselves out.

And that’s how novels get finished.

*I’m not sensible. I did an English degree. I’m still trying to work out what the hell to do with it.

Hello again internet! It's been a while, don't you think?

2010-04-07T23:51:00.000+12:00

There is a big epic long post coming soon. It will be full of deep and meaningful things. Unfortunately it's 11.42pm and I still haven't finished it, because it's that epic. So it's going to have to wait until tomorrow.

In the meantime, this is my cat. His name is Horatio. He has very good taste in shoes.

Blog series! Where stories come from: from the time you get the idea for a novel to the day you first put your fingers to the keyboard, how does the story come to you?

2010-03-26T01:15:00.000+13:00

Right! Let’s look at what Anne Lamott has to say on novel writing prep and where stories come from. This post is going to be kind of low on advice on how to plan stuff. You know, with a nice tidy plot that does what you tell it to, performing all these perfect, synchronised dances down to the last millimetre. That’s because Bird by Bird isn’t that sort of book. Some of the best preparation we can do, is, in fact, not to prepare too much. We might know where we’re going, we might not. Either way, everything will be ok.

You remember those Polaroid cameras that everyone used to have? How they’d take a picture and spit it out, and it would start off as a blank blur, but then the image would slowly appear? With a Polaroid, you can never start off knowing exactly what the picture would be; instead, it’s something that drifts into view gradually.

And finally, as the portrait comes into focus, you begin to notice all the props surrounding these people, and you begin to understand how props define us and comfort us, and show us what we value and what we need, and who we think we are.

You couldn’t have had any way of knowing what this piece of work would look like when you first started. You just knew that there was something about these people that compelled you, and you stayed with that something long enough for it to show you what it was about. (p.40)

It’s useful to bear in mind that we can work on stories even when we’re not sitting down writing them. Not in an 'Obsessing Endlessly and Agonising and Trying to Force Things to Turn Up' kind of way, more through keeping things open. Lamott carries index cards around, so she can jot down ideas. At the moment I carry a small, fat spiral notebook, which is starting to fall apart from being shoved into small handbags and scribbled in so many times. I keep eye an out for new stories, and compelling images, and solutions to problems with existing stories, and strange conversations, and random words that sound nice together. And other things too. This is a great way to prepare:

And then, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives. Some will float into your head like goldfish, lovely, bright orange, and weightless, and you follow them like a child looking at an aquarium that was thought to be without fish. Others will step out of the shadows like Boo Radley and make you catch your breath or take a step backward. They’re often so rich, these unbidden thoughts, and so clear that they feel indelible. But I say write them all down anyway. (p.136)

In a way, we are our own best subject matter. Our stories come from ourselves, from what it is to be who we are:

The greatest writers keep writing about the cold dark place within, the water under a frozen lake or the secluded, camouflaged hole. The light they shine on this hole, this pit, helps us cut away or step around the brush and brambles; then we can dance around the rim of the abyss, holler into it, measure it, throw rocks in it, and still not fall in. It can no longer swallow us up. And we can get on with things. (pp.197-198)

A great way to come up with stories is to remember. My memories are something I often completely take for granted, but rereading Bird by Bird always reminds me how sacred they are. The good ones, the brilliant ones, the ugly ones, the awkward ones. All of them. Why? Our memories define us: they draw a map of who we are and who we’ve been. And they’re also an excellent source for material. Lamott recommends mining all of them. Not all of them meaning all of them except, you know, that dark ugly stuff we don’t like thinking about much. All of them especially that dark ugly stuff we don’t like thinking about much. When stuck for material, Lamott urges us to delve into our childhoods, into the school lunches we used to eat, our families and how they compared with other people’s families, into our memories of holidays long past.

Writing is a way to make our past as alive for others as it was for us when we lived it, and it’s also a way of defeating all our old monsters, all of the stuff we try to forget. Our memories can be shaped and transformed and sung out to the world.

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won’t really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. (p.231)

We could let our anxieties and jealousy and despair stop us from writing, or, like our memories, we could use them as fuel for ideas too:

You can be defeated and disoriented by all these feelings, I tell them, or you can see the paranoia, for instance, as wonderful material. You can use it as the raw clay that you pull out of the river: surely one of your characters is riddled with it, and so in giving that person this particular quality, you get to use it, shape it into something true or funny or frightening. (p.11)

Lamott also recommends having a clear and strong picture of the worlds our characters live in. When we don’t have memory to guide us, use research to build up the details of a character’s world. Lamott writes about calling people and asking them to give her details that she would not otherwise have access to about gardens her characters have planted and houses her characters have lived in. When we sit down to write, it’s good to know what our characters are surrounded by every day, and what this is like for them:

Just as everyone is a walking advertisement for who he or she is, so every room is a little showcase of its occupants’ values and personalities. Every room is about memory. Every room gives us layers of information about our past and present and who we are, our shrines and quirks and hopes and sorrows, our attempts to prove that we exist and are more or less Okay. You can see, in our rooms, how much light we need – how many light bulbs, candles, sky lights we have – and in how we keep things lit you can see how we try to comfort ourselves. The mix in our rooms is so touching: the clutter and the cracks in the wall belie a bleakness or brokenness in our lives, while photos and a few rare objects show our pride, our rare shining moments. (pp.74-75)

So. There’s no amazing and straightforward plan we can draw up before we start that takes us through everything with speed and ease. For Lamott and for me, writing isn’t driving on the motorway; it’s taking the weird side streets and the gravel roads. It’s about discovering what happens as it happens, about seeing where we end up. We remember old things that happened to us ages ago, we learn new things that happened to other people, we watch the world, we take notes. And sometimes this magic happens, and things shine out, then find their way onto the page. And the best way to be prepared is to be patient, and keep a pen close at hand, because the glowing stuff can turn up at any moment.

This is my last post for the writing process blog series. It’s been fun, and writing about Bird by Bird has been all kinds of awesome, and reading other people’s thoughts on other books on writing has been all kinds on awesome too.

In the meantime, it’s late at night, and Josh is already fast asleep. Just now, my cat leapt on top of my chest of drawers, then looked down and gave me a concerned look. What you should do is go check out the other posts, and maybe win a prize. And if you do win a book on writing, I strongly recommend you try blogging about it.

However, right now, I’m afraid I’m going to have to go to sleep. It’s after 1am, and I don’t want the cat to worry.

Road Trip Wednesday: Which author's career would you most love to emulate?

2010-03-24T22:21:00.002+13:00

When I first looked at the question, my brain immediately gave me all these wildly successful people. Like, wildly wildly successful people. J.K. Rowling! Stephanie Meyer! And then it went into all the various things I would do, if I had their money. I would buy a beautiful villa in Ponsonby! I’d pay for a cleaner to come every week and do all my housework for me! I’d have enough leftover money that I could buy Greenpeace a whole new ship! And also I could set up some kind of literacy program for disadvantaged kids! Yes! However, I would not be one of those obnoxious rich people who goes on and on to the sales assistant with the faded top and the scuffed shoes about how much money I have, how I’m taking my children on holiday to both Athens and Venice and then skiing, because yeah. I know what it is to be that sales assistant.

And then, once I was over that whole train of thought, with all the money and the lack of financial worries and did I mention the money, once I was over that, I thought to myself, do I really want to be Stephanie Meyer or J. K. Rowling? And the answer was a resounding HELL NO.

Why?

Because I don’t want to be surrounded in hype. I like having time to myself, and doing normal daydreamy Leila things, like walking down the road and admiring the trees. If you put me on a red carpet, I would have no idea what to do. I’m not particularly photogenic. You’d end up with lots of photos of me smiling awkwardly, like a newly hatched alien with strange teeth.

But more than anything, I don’t want to be Rowling or Meyer because I don’t want to write just one astronomically successful book or series, a Harry Potter or a Twilight or a Da Vinci Code to weigh me down for the rest of my career. I love the Harry Potter books dearly, but I can’t even begin to imagine the pressure a writer like J. K. Rowling is under. How on earth do you follow up the success of something like Harry Potter? I don’t want to write this one thing that takes off so hugely that it shadows all the rest of my writing forever. I don’t want wild success. I want stable success. I want something constant and lifelong. So if I could have anyone’s career, whose would I go for?

Ursula Le Guin’s.

She’s prolific; she’s written a wide, wide range of stuff; her writing is consistently wonderful with everything she does. And she’s been going at it far longer than I’ve been alive. She’s highly regarded by writers and critics from all ends of the spectrum. She has written a few books which are particular standouts, but they don’t overwhelm everything else. You don’t go buy an Ursula Le Guin book saying, dammit, this had better be like Earthsea or else. At least, I don’t. I buy an Ursula Le Guin book saying, I know with sureness that this will be a highly crafted work of great beauty. And that’s what sells her books. She’s a successful writer, but it’s a quiet, constant sort of success. It’s not a world consuming explosion; it’s something slow burning but unfailing. It’s not one particular book, one particular series. It’s her writing itself. And that is exactly the sort of writer I would like to be one day, if I could choose.

So, how about you? For more answers, check out YA highway!

Blog series! Deepening your characters: what is at the heart of a complex character?

2010-03-18T22:59:00.001+13:00

This week as part of our blog series about the writing process, we’re looking at characters, and the many things that can make them real and complicated and interesting and messy and spectacular. (More information and prizes and interesting stuff over here!) I’m looking at Anne Lamott’s advice on character in Bird by Bird. And, as always, I kind of just want to quote the whole book, because it’s that sort of book.

Just don’t pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don’t. Stay open to them. It’s teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It’s that simple. (Bird by Bird, p.53)

Characters come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. They reflect us, and the people we know, and the people we want to know, and the people we don’t want to know but know anyway, and the people we’ve watched walking down the street and eavesdropped on while catching the bus. Character building is more complicated than self-consciously grabbing a bunch of things that you’ve found and quickly finding some kind of glue to stick them together, and then attaching strings so you can put on a puppet show.

Character building is more about character uncovering, because characters are mysterious. They leap up from some murky subconscious place. As you write them, you gradually find out new things about them, and they wander off and do things that you didn’t expect them to do, and say things you didn’t expect them to say. Getting to know them is also getting to know ourselves. You probably won’t know them until you’ve spent a lot of time writing their stories.

Lamott tells us not to worry if we don’t know everything straight away. We can test out the details, we can set situations up and see what our characters do. It’s best to let them make mistakes, to find their flaws, to make sure that there are important things at stake. Sometimes a character turns out not to be the person we first assumed they were, but someone far more interesting. And yeah. You can’t flick a switch and have everything light up. Like everything, it’s all about patience:

We start out with stock characters, and our unconscious provides us with real, flesh-and-blood, believable people. My friend Carpenter talks about the unconscious as the cellar where the little boy sits who creates the characters, and he hands them up to you through the cellar door. He might as well be cutting out paper dolls. He’s peaceful; he’s just playing.

You can’t will yourself into being receptive to what the little boy has to offer, and you can’t buy a key that will let you into the cellar. You have to relax, and wool-gather, and get rid of the critics, and sit there in some sort of self-hypnosis, and then you have to practice. I mean, you can’t just sit there at your desk drooling. You have to move your hand across the paper or the keyboard. You may do it badly for a while, but you keep on doing it. Try to remember that to some extent, you’re just the typist. A good typist listens. (pp. 71-72)

And what’s the best way to find out more about our characters? Dialogue. There is no better way to reveal characters, for both our readers and ourselves:

You need to trust yourself to hear what they are saying over what you are saying. At least give each of them a shot at expression: sometimes what they are saying and how they are saying it will finally show you who they are and what is really happening. Whoa – they’re not going to get married after all! She’s gay! And you had no idea! (p.66)

I can’t even begin to describe how much I relate to this passage. My characters always have a habit of mentioning things in passing that are actually Huge Important Things That Change The Whole Damn Story. I think they sometimes forget that I don’t already know.

Dialogue is the way to nail character, so you have to work on getting the voice right. You don’t want to sit there, though, trying to put the right words in their mouths. I don’t think the right words exist already in your head, any more than the characters do. They exist somewhere else. What we have in our heads are fragments and thoughts and things we’ve heard and memorised, and we take our little ragbag and reach into it and throw some stuff down and then our unconscious kicks in. (pp.67-68)

Lamott also talks about characters being engaging and likable and reliable, people who make for compelling company, who aren’t trying to lie or manipulate us. Sure, this might be fiction, but when it comes to characters, it’s all about truth:

A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It’s a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly. You make up your characters, partly from experience, partly out of the thin air of the subconscious, and you need to feel committed to telling the exact truth about them, even though you are making them up. (pp.52-53)

I did a couple of writing papers at university, and seriously, I think if you presented this idea to one of my writing classes, they would probably have argued it down and then beaten it with sticks and then argued it down some more. There’s the whole movement of writing where fiction is all conscious about itself being fiction, and there’s lots of messing around with truth and what truth means, if anything. And this absolutely endless obsession with unreliable narrators. Nothing in the world is shifty and postmodern like an unreliable narrator. And there’s definitely lots of fascinating territory to explore in that sort of thinking*.

But that stuff has never been my territory. I like my characters honest even when they’re trying to hide; I like closeness and intimacy. I’ll never forget the summer when Amber and I became best friends, or the weeks after I first fell in love with Josh. When you find someone who is a true kindred spirit, in the full Anne of Green Gables sense of the phrase, there are always so many things to tell each other, so many confessions to make. You learn the other person piece by piece. And the more you learn, the more you realise there is to learn. That’s how I like things to be with characters. I love the gradual unfolding, and my god, I love falling in love with them.

And that’s why I’ve reread Anne Lamott’s writing on characters so many times. For me, it describes the frustration and joy of getting to know my characters perfectly.

*Janet Frame did it wonderfully, for one. Go read Living in the Maniototo!

Blog series! Getting Into the Zone: What goes into the creative process of writing a novel?

2010-03-11T23:20:00.002+13:00

This is my second post in our writing process series. For more information and prizes and, best of all, many, many interesting things to read, I shall point you in this direction.

Ok! Here's Anne Lamott's take on the creative process of novel writing in Bird by Bird. Or, more accurately, my version of Anne Lamott's take on the creative process of novel writing, which is not quite as elegant as hers. Except, you know, when I quote hers.

There’s this daydream. It involves a bunch of things at once: being published; never having to deal with any job other than writing; having famous writers you have loved forever say nice things about you, including how they want to come to your birthday party; having a large, well lit study with a desk and ten bookcases and a couch and an espresso machine and a stereo system and a grand piano. And part of that is this idea that, eventually, writing will always be blissful. We will sit down, and then we will unleash magic rockets straight into the page. It will explode with excitement and literary goodness, like a muesli bar ad but tastier. In fact, we want that magic now, right now. And as we wander through days of self doubt and headaches and writing things that sound forced and crossing them out and then writing things that sound even worse, we start wondering if we’re doing something drastically wrong. And we long for the day when we’ll know the code off by heart and own all the secrets, and writing gets to be this wonderful and effortless explosion of stuff, all the time. You know?

It’s just a dream, folks.

People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed sentences as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. (Bird by Bird, pp.21-22)

There is no amazing secret to creating a ‘zone’ to write in. There are things that are definitely useful. You create a habit as best you can, sitting for a long time, day after day. And it might be an uphill battle, but persevere long enough and eventually something will happen from this. You keep at it, and you do your best to hear the voice in your head that is the story amongst all the other stuff going on.

You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your subconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind – a scene, a locale, a character, whatever – and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind. The other voices are banshees and drunken monkeys. They are the voices of anxiety, judgement, doom, guilt.
...

Yet somehow in the face of all this, you clear a space for the writing voice, hacking away at the others with machetes, and you begin to compose sentences. You begin to string words together like beads to tell a story. You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started. (pp. 6-7)

But how do we get started?

Lamott suggests breaking things down into small pieces, which she describes as ‘short assignments’. Things are easier to conquer when they’re bite-sized and easily doable, rather than when they’re big and vague and unwieldy. You could sit down and go, ok, time to begin my epically epic novel about epically huge stuff, about what happens when humanity are enslaved by ravenous geese and there’s a slave girl and she falls in love with a fallen angel vampiric werewolf wizard*. Or you could sit down and go, I’m just going to write this one scene, the one where the main character buys a new hat from a moose at the side of the road, and he warns her that the geese have been acting a bit strange recently.

These chunks fit together to make up a ‘shitty first draft.’ I love that she calls them that. Because god, yes. When you are in the middle of fighting with everything, and you’re sure you are that what you’re writing is complete rubbish and unworthy of ever being read by anyone in the whole entire world ever ever ever, it is great to be able to say, yes. This is a shitty first draft. It is full of diabolical sentences and plot holes and Things That Need to be Fixed**. But it is also necessary. Sometimes you have to write bad stuff – sometimes a great deal of bad stuff – in order to work out what the good stuff is. And you have to be free enough to let the bad stuff come tumbling out onto the page, wasting trees or making Microsoft Word blink at you grumpily or whatever, because more often than not, there are the seeds to awesomeness buried in all that compost. But in order to get to the awesomeness, you have to produce the compost too.

Rereading can be handy. It’s a good way to put things into context, and to gain some sense of direction when starting anew for the day. Also, having a good long think can be a good thing too. Lamott emphasises moments of hesitation as useful, the moments where we sit caught between the story and the blank page. That doesn’t have to mean being stuck. We reread, we think, and we find a pathway in:

This is how it works for me: I sit down in the morning and reread the work I did the day before. Then I wool-gather, staring at the blank page or off into space. I imagine my characters, and let myself daydream about them. A movie begins to play in my head, with emotion pulsing underneath it, and I stare at it in a trancelike state, until words bounce around together and form a sentence. Then I do the menial work of getting it down on paper, because I’m the designated typist, and I’m also the person whose job it is to hold the lantern while the kid does the digging. What is the kid digging for? The stuff. Details and clues and images, invention, fresh ideas, an intuitive understanding of people. I tell you, the holder of the lantern doesn’t even know what the kid is digging for half the time – but she knows gold when she sees it. (Bird by Bird, p.56)

What’s funny is that since I’ve started working on following Lamott’s advice, in accepting that the ‘zone’ is always going to be unstable territory, I’ve found it a lot easier to find my way into it. The fight will be hard some times and glorious other times, and god knows, there’s so much bad stuff I have to write in order to get to the good stuff. But in writing with that awareness, in giving myself permission to write badly, I’ve found it a lot easier to write well. There are good stories there, always. Sometimes it’s just a matter of getting out of the way.

*Yeah. I am totally writing that novel, in case you’re wondering.

**I always start lists of these things that I have to go back and fix up, then forget what I did with them, then start new lists of new stuff. I sometimes come up with as many sentences that need fixing as there are sentences, but anyway.

Desk with self cleaning cat ornament

2010-03-08T22:14:00.002+13:00

This is where I spent Monday afternoon:

The first in a blog series where I get to write about writing about writing

2010-03-04T22:51:00.002+13:00

So, people! I signed up for a blog series, started by the wonderful Cory Jackson. We’re blogging every week about books on the strange, agonising and miraculous process we call writing, and we’re each focussing on a different book on the writing process. I chose Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott, because there is no book on writing in the entire universe I love more, and because I’m constantly quoting it on the internet anyway. So now I can, like, quote it some more. Each week we’ll be looking at a different topic and how the books approach it. Also, if you do some blogging of your own about your take on things and leave a link in Cory’s comments, you could win a book on writing.

Now, on to this week’s topic! We're looking at writers as artists: how do you define yourself as a writer? Are genre writers artists?

Let's begin with lots of quotes, because quotes make the world go round.

Writing taught my father to pay attention; my father in turn taught other people to pay attention and then to write down their thoughts and observations. His students were the prisoners at San Quentin who took part in the creative-writing program. But he taught me, too, mostly by example. He taught the prisoners and me to put a little bit down on paper every day, to read all the great books and plays we could get our hands on. He taught us to read poetry. He taught us to be bold and original and to let ourselves make mistakes, and that Thurber was right when he said, “You might as well fall flat on your face as lean too far backwards.” But while he helped the prisoners and me to discover that we had a lot of feelings and observations and memories and dreams and (God knows) opinions we wanted to share, we all ended up just the tiniest bit resentful when we found the one fly in the ointment: that at some point we had to actually sit down and write. (Bird by Bird, pp.xii-xiii)

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. (Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades, 1947)

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott never once writes about writers as a closed, exclusive society that only a select few can join. Anyone can be a writer. You just have to watch the world carefully and keep collecting details that might be useful, to enjoy good writing whether it is yours or someone else’s, and also you just have to write even when you would rather die a slow and painful death. Lamott writes about the neuroses of writers with unflinching and hilarious honesty: about the panic that sometimes sets in when you’re staring a long project in the face and realising just how difficult it’s going to be; about being paralysed by perfectionism; about sending your work out into the world and the crushing fear of rejection that comes with doing so.

Being a writer, or an artist, is nothing glamorous. In fact, it’s the opposite. Art isn’t about some fancy definition. Art is in facing the perils and joys of creating, both on the days when things fall into place easily and on the days when there are a thousand voices in your head telling you why every single word you put on the page is wrong, when the sea is full of waves and you’re starting to wonder whether you’ll ever get anywhere at all before you capsize.

Lamott doesn’t discuss genre, but I write genre and I’ve been rereading this book for years. As far as I’m concerned, it’s no different. It can easily be as much agony writing about magic as it can be writing realism*. Also, my best friend Amber, who got me onto this book, is a visual artist, and the other day she was talking about getting it for her boyfriend, who is a musician. What I’m trying to say is, it covers all sorts. Regardless of what you’re making, art is perseverance. Art is hanging on on the days when you’re not sure quite what you’re doing, let alone why you’re doing it. It doesn’t matter whether you’re creating an installation piece with three dimensional images and small plastic dinosaurs**, or whether you’re writing a novel about a girl trying to deal with having the most dangerous magic in the world***.

But if writing and creating is so hard, why do we bother at all? Well, it's also about having stuff that we have to say, stories we have to tell, things that will sit around and nag at us if we don't find a way to let them out, much like my cats when I accidentally leave a door closed.

And then there are also the dogs: let’s not forget the dogs, the dogs in their pen who will surely hurtle and snarl their way out if you ever stop writing, because writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeps those ravenous dogs contained. (Bird by Bird, p.26)

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. (George Orwell, Why I Write, 1947)

Yeah. My cats can be very forceful.

Like Lamott, I write because it’s what I’m driven to do, because it’s what keeps me glued together. It can’t save the world, but it can render it luminous. The thing that makes a writer is the drive to write. Sometimes the drive to write is a glorious thing, a thing that makes us move and write at a million miles an hour and happy about the whole world, and sometimes it's a burden that life would be so much more straightforward without. You know, if we could go home after work when we're all tired and weary and just, you know, watch some bad TV for a bit, and not have words to put together and characters to argue with and plot logic to make sense of.

One of the many things I love about Bird by Bird is that it celebrates both parts of being a writer, or a person who creates, the part where it's easy, and the part where it seems almost impossible but we still try anyway, even when the writing is bad, even when we can only handle one small step at a time. Because we know that while writing may be a struggle sometimes, but it’s also the thing that makes all the struggling worthwhile.

*Actually, as far as I’m concerned, fantasy is realism. Just a different sort. Which is stuff that requires a post all of its own, because otherwise I will go on and on and derail this one. Remind me to write it at some point, ok?

**True story, actually. When I was flatting with Amber in Sandringham, we had a lot of plastic dinosaurs around for a few months while she worked on her final art school project. And the end result was spooky and quirky and wonderful.

*** My thing that I spent, like, almost all of last year doing.

Road Trip Wednesday: How I Procrastinate

2010-03-03T23:34:00.004+13:00

Although the better question is how don't I procrastinate?

So. Here are some of the ways I put off writing.

I Will Just Quickly:

It goes something like this.

I will just quickly cook a complicated curry with lots of ingrediants. Then I will write. I will just quickly clean up the aftermath of cooking complicated curry with lots of ingrediants. Then I will write. Actually, I'll just quickly feed the cats, because they're meowing loudly, and I will just water the plants, because they would be meowing loudly if they knew how to meow. Then I will write. Wait. I will just quickly look for a note that I wrote down earlier about the dream I had last night, because there was something in it that might be relevant. Then I will write. Honestly. But the night news is on. I have no idea why I'm suddenly so interested in the night news. I will just quickly watch, like, five minutes of the night news. Then I will write. I will just quickly make myself a hot drink. Then I have to do writing. I should just quickly check the internet though, in case anything has happened on the internet really suddenly that I should know about. I will just quickly brush my teeth, and then I will just quickly go to bed. Then I will write while I'm asleep.

There's an immense sense of urgency and productiveness, without any actual productiveness at all. You're always on the thing before writing. Hell, it's just one step away. Once you have finished the thing that you are doing. Then you will sit down, and you will write, and it will be easy peasy. It's like perpetually wandering over to a door without ever actually walking through it.

Making Mocha in a Massive Mug by Mixing Hot Chocolate Powder With Decaf, Then Sitting on the Couch And Watching Medical Dramas:

I actually have no idea why I do this. I don't even like the sight of blood.

The Infinite Internet:

I have a lot of beloved people who I am only in contact with via the internet. And that means google groups and facebook and forums and twitter and reading blogs and emailing*. To a certain extent, that's actually justified. If the internet is your only way to hang out with someone, and they happen to be awesome, then you have to hang out on the internet in order to hang out with them. You know? So I think as procrastination excuses go, it's fairly legit. The problem is how you look at the clock after a while, and start wondering if it's wrong, because it says that five hours have somehow passed, and you were just sitting down to check up on things for five minutes. And now it's time to go to bed.

Also, there's househunting on Trade Me Property. I am a chronic househunter. I hunt for houses even when I have no reason whatsoever to move house at all. I hunt for houses I will live in when I one day have money, like actual money like other grown up people seem to have, houses I might live in next time I move, and houses that my friends could live in, and houses that my characters could live in. I hunt for houses I would live in if I was abandoned and penniless, and houses I would live in if I was swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck.

I love houses. Looking at people's homes is sometimes the closest you can get to looking inside their heads. Some people get to know their characters by filling out questionnaires about their favourite colour and all that stuff. I get to know mine by imagining where they live. So househunting is a somewhat justified form of procrastination, sometimes. Or it would be, if I spent less hours househunting on the internet and more hours actually writing.

And there's Wikipedia. Oh, Wiki. I could totally date Wiki, if I wasn't engaged. You know, you're about to start writing, then you quickly decide that you want to just look up this one article on Wiki. Or maybe two. Just quickly, just to make double extra sure you're being accurate and all your characters are being mentally ill in exactly the right way and the tropical cyclone doesn't have unrealistic details that a weather geek might call you on one day. And then all the articles have links, and the links are interesting. So you go from reading stuff that's closely related to writing to stuff that's vaguely related. Then you notice links in the vaguely related articles, and they all look very interesting too. And then many hours and many links later you realise that you've somehow gone from cyclones to the Norwegian royal family, and you're not quite sure what happened, except that it definitely wasn't writing.

Finally, I can't talk about the internet without talking about YouTube. Because YouTube has so many opportunities for an eager procrastinator, and seriously, it can eat up hours effortlessly. I love investigating beautiful music, and watching tv shows that I can't track down DVDs for right at this moment, and watching stand up comedians being wittier than I am, and watching vlogbrothers.

Maybe one day I will be efficient with time. Actually, I'll be efficient with time right now. Immediately. That is, once I've reread a few chapters of a book I've already read six times, and played some spider solitaire, and researched my future wedding dress. Ok? Immediately.

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow. (Mark Twain)

Also, you should go find out about how my fellow highwayers procrastinate. You know, if you get around to it.

*I'm abysmal at emailing, actually, and procrastinate far writing an email far worse than I ever procrastinate working on a story. You know, in case you're wondering why you sent me that email way back in the day and never heard anything. Never fear! It's not because of you. It's because I'm an idiot with an irrational email aversion!

In which I am a bit of a fangirl

2010-03-02T21:08:00.000+13:00

There are a few defining moments in a writer's life. The 'I've Finished A Novel' moment, the 'An Agent Actually Likes Me' moment, the 'My Novel is Going to Be Published for Shizz!' moment. And one of the best of them is being able to share the official cover of your debut novel for the first time.

So I am delighted to share the cover of my friend Kirsten Hubbard's novel, Like Mandarin. Isn't it pretty? I love the intensity of the girl's gaze, and the sunset colour scheme. Also, I have a real thing for covers that use white space well. See how simple and striking it is? You need to commit this cover to memory and look out for it in 2011. And then when you see it in a bookshop you need to buy a copy for every one of your friends, because Kirsten's writing is beautiful.

Like Mandarin on Goodreads.

Road Trip Wednesday: if you could be any character in a book, who would you be?

2010-02-24T23:36:00.000+13:00

I've been trying to come up with ideas for this post all day, and it's basically been an epic fail. I've had lots of conversations with myself that have gone like this:

Ok! Let's be Clare, from The Time Traveller's Wife! She is a hardworking artist who creates amazing sculptures, and her husband is a hot librarian time traveller! Yes!

Actually, being married to a time traveller is agonising and troublesome, which is kind of the point of the book. Not so fun.

Fine, fine. I'll be Kristin Cashore's Fire. She is the most beautiful woman in the world, and she has amazing psychic powers.

But her powers mean that no one trusts her, and she is so beautiful that monsters want to kill her and men want to capture her. In fact, stuff keeps trying to kill her throughout the whole damn book. Let me think about that one again. No.

I know! I'll be Elizabeth Bennett! I mean, who doesn't want to be Elizabeth Bennett? She is smart and witty and she ends up with Mr Darcy. And Regency women wore such beautiful dresses. Case closed. Right?

Um. Leila. Regency women = marriage fodder. Basically. You're there to be matched up and become a housewife. YAY. Not to mention, Elizabeth Bennett's family are actually kind of a royal pain in the ass. Mr Darcy's family too.

Francesca from Saving Francesca! She is both sensitive and sarcastic, and her friends are hilarious and wonderful. And Will Trombol. Oh, Will.

And Francesca's mother suffers from chronic depression. Her whole family goes through hell.

Hermione Granger! She has magic, and she's extremely smart! She kicks ass!

And she ends up married to Ron Weasley. I apologise to all the Ron fans, but for some reason I'm just not that wild about Ron. I mean, he's a nice guy, and he would make a great friend, but I kind of feel that Hermione really should have gone for someone who was more her intellectual equal. You know?

Laura Chant, from The Changeover! She's smart, stubborn and falls in love with a strange and fascinating boy. And she will do anything it takes to save her younger brother's life.

Aaaand her parents are messily divorced. Also, Laura has to deal with Carmody Braque, one of the most repulsive villains I've ever come across. And while Laura's love interest is fascinating, he's also kind of creepy. Oddly enough, that kind of adds to his charm, but still.

Wynter from the Moorehawke trilogy by Celine Kiernan. (If you like fantasy, you have to go read her books right now. Ok?) Wynter is only fifteen years old, yet she's already earning her way in a male profession and adept at dealing with the perils of life in the royal court. Her father is kind hearted and wonderful, and her love interest is gorgeous and charismatic and complicated.

Wynter might have a wonderful father, but he's dying. And a courtier has very little privacy, so Wynter has to spend all her time treading exceptionally carefully to avoid trouble. I don't think I'd enjoy that so much.

So, yeah. That's what's been going on inside my head today. Not particularly conclusive.

Basically, I'd love to be any of these characters, as long as you promise me I get to go back to being my boring old self after a while. I think this says a lot about the way I read. I don't read as wish fulfillment. If I pick up a book and the main character seems too perfect or their life too easy, I don't connect with them and I put the book down. All of the characters I love most in the world are characters who struggle. I read so I can be them for a little while, and live out their battles and be carried away on the tides of their lives. Then the make believe ends and I finish the book dazed. And by that point it's usually time to go cook dinner and deal with the real world again.

I think a good character is like a good friend. They let you in on their secrets, their hard times and their good times. And they're constantly telling you interesting things, whether or not they even mean to. And in their own way, they help you appreciate why your own life is a worthy one.

And now you should go find out who my fellow highwayers would like to be!

Valentine's Day

2010-02-15T22:37:00.001+13:00

A Few Days Before

Scene: Early in the morning. Josh and I are lying in bed and we are both half awake.

Me: You won't believe what I dreamt about!

Josh: Mmph?

Me: We got married!

Josh: *groans*

Me: And hardly anyone was there! And the whole thing was weirdly unstressful and matter of fact and normal. Except that we were married. I kept having to remind myself that we were married, because it somehow just seemed like part of the stuff we do everyday already. It was actually really nice.

We drift back off to sleep.

Valentine's Day

Scene: North Head, some time in the afternoon. Josh and I are sitting on a bench looking down at the harbour and the islands and the boats flitting past. He's reading Transport for Suburbia, I'm reading The Crowded Shadows.

Josh: Do you want your Valentine's Day present now?

Me: Sure!

Josh pulls out a small box and hands it to me. Even before I open it I'm lightheaded, shaking.

Inside there's a small, perfect ring with a stone the same colour as the sea.

Me: PRETTY!

Josh: It's an engagement ring.

Me: I know.

*puts ring onto ring finger*

*snuggles Josh*

*says soppy stuff that I'm not repeating on a public blog*

*feels even more lightheaded*

Josh: I take it that's a yes then?

Me: Yup.

Josh: Are you sure that's the finger it's meant to go on?

____________________________

So, dear internet, I am engaged. Engaged. It's weird, because in one sense I've been engaged to Josh forever, but just as an Inside My Head Which Is Often Quite a Crazy Place Anyway Thing. The whole thing being, like, an Actual Thing That I Actually Tell People About is really quite weird. Yesterday it all seemed very unreal. Today it seemed very real indeed and I looked at wedding stuff on the internet when I should have been writing, even though the wedding is at least two years away and I really shouldn't be drooling over wedding stuff yet anyway.

My friends and I sometimes talk about chocolate fish. You know how in the movies, or wherever, a girl has a nasty breakup and her friends all go, 'Never mind. There are plenty of fish in the sea'? Well, we think that while there are plenty of fish, there are very few chocolate fish. Very few indeed.

I have found me my chocolate fish.

Road Trip Wednesday: The Next Big Trends In YA

2010-02-04T00:20:00.000+13:00

It is 11.08pm, and I've been procrastinating. Did I ever mention how I should be, like, an Olympic level professional procrastinator? Seriously. I make it so easy. Just now, I was looking in google streetview at random streets at the complete other end of New Zealand. I still don't know exactly why. Lesser procrastinators should aspire to the level of grace and doggedness in my procrastinating.

So. Predictions for the next big thing in YA. Predictions. It's probably worth bearing in mind that I am bad enough at predicting what the next day of the week will be sometimes. I would be an appallingly bad fortune teller.

I predict that fantasy/paranormal fiction is going to stay big. We are the Harry Potter generation, my friends. We like our magic especially magical. I think angels and witches are on the rise. But in the long run, I predict that fantasy will not be so much about publishers trying to pick the next "in" creature. Instead fantasy will be darker, weirder, and more diverse. (Is there possibly a bias showing here? Of course not. Whatever would make you think that?) There will still be vampires, but plenty of other things too, from plenty of new interesting angles. And I predict more demons and dystopias and people with magical powers, and more unusual settings. (No. Shut up. There is no bias towards the stuff that I write. I told you already. At least, not a deliberate one. Honestly. )

And given how huge Avatar has been, I think it's about time science fiction had a comeback in YA. There's lots of potential there. I don't write sf, so there's no bias this time. Just logic. Among other things, it'd be a great way to grab some of those reluctant boy readers.

Also I predict even more beautiful contemporary fiction. And that it will hopefully get more time in the spotlight. I predict LGBT characters becoming more widespread in mainstream YA. I also predict that the edgy factor in contemporary fiction (and fantasy too) is going to grow even more, that writers will take even more risks. There will be more outraged parents, more attempts at book banning, but also many more important, honest and gut-wrenching stories that show us the world in all its grittiness and all its beauty. There are going to be many, many more arguments about censorship and influence and corruption and all the stuff that people come out with when stories are so true that they're threatening. But in the end, the books are going to win, because the books always win. And the books are going to be wonderful.

And yeah. I'm kind of thinking this possibly isn't so much about predictions as it is about hope, but hope is good. Hope can change everything.

I've also been wondering whether YA won't change so much as mainstream literature will change to become more like YA. With electronic readers, and the increasingly fast pace of, you know, seemingly everything in the world, I think that there is an increasing call for immediacy in fiction. And as far as I'm concerned, YA is one of the most immediate genres there is. I think that's one of the reasons why it has stayed afloat so well, why people read it and love it who are long past being young adults themselves, why it is a genre on the rise. We want our books to be here and now and everywhere, to make a direct connection with who we are, to ask questions, and maybe even to give us hope. I think that New Adult (under that name or a different one) could possibly happen and happen brilliantly. And as a result, there might be more grey area where YA and mainstream merge. I'm not sure how I feel about this yet.

But yeah. Who really knows what the future will be? Not me. But I'm looking forward to finding out.

To find out what my fellow highwayers have predicted, visit YA Highway.

Road Trip Wednesday: Our Favourite Book Covers

2010-01-28T08:23:00.003+13:00

New Zealand is kind of an unusual place for book covers. Ours come from three different markets: Australia, the UK, and the US. Or four, if you include covers designed locally for NZ books. With an internationally published book, we usually get whatever Australia goes with. If there's a cover especially for Australia, we almost always end up with that. If there isn't, it almost seems to be a fifty-fifty thing, whether we get the US one or the UK one. Probably vaguely swinging towards the UK. Our Harry Potters have the English covers, rather than the US ones. However, Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld is out here with the US cover.

So my favourite covers have always come from all over the place. For me, the best covers are the ones that drop a few mysterious and wonderful hints, rather than the ones that are trying to tell as much about the book as possible. Actually, I believe in 'show, don't tell' with book covers a bit more than I do with writing. (There's a whole other post in that, actually. Which I'm not going to write now. Remind me sometime, ok?)

Part of the reason I own most of Sarah Dessen's books is because for me they're the reading equivalent of high quality chocolate. When I'm depressed and need cheering up, when I'm unwell, when I'm longing for something familiar, I go back to her books over and over. They make me happy. But the other reason why I own them is because I love the UK covers so much. Deeply, deeply love them. I love the overall look, how they're a bit sixties in the best way possible, I love their colour scheme, I love how the artist has taken little details from in the books and incorporated them. Love love love. It's impossible not to buy books when their covers are this beautiful.

I also love covers when they're moody and dramatic. You know, like a thunderstorm in the middle of winter.

And also, whimsical covers are awesomeness. I really need to read this one, actually.

Find out about more beautiful covers at YA highway!

ETA: I forgot to mention my favourite NZ cover! It's a wonderful book too.

Blogging About Blogging About Blogging

2010-01-25T22:09:00.002+13:00

Scene: Me and Josh are sitting at the dining room table on respective laptops. Josh is Typing Important Transport Related Things. I am Staring At The Screen As Though It Is About To Explode.

Me: Josh! If you were me, what would you write a blog post about? If you were writing a blog post, like, right now.

Josh: I dunno. What are you trying to write a blog post about?

Me: I dunno. I keep starting blog posts and they all sound like crap.

Josh: What were you trying to blog about?

Me: I tried writing about the cats and it got all boring. I tried writing about how hard it is to write a blog post and it got even more boring. And I've already written about forty boring blog posts about how hard it is to write a blog post. So now I am staring at the blank box on the screen feeling empty. Empty, like the box.

I Lean In Closer To My Unsuspecting Computer and Eyeball The Empty White Blogger Screen Thingy Intently. Eventually, Some Nonsense Arrives In My Head and I Type Out The Nonsense.

Road Trip Wednesday: The Best Books No One's Ever Heard Of

2010-01-21T08:42:00.000+13:00

This Wednesday, we’re blogging about obscure books that we love. So, this post is about some books that I rave about to people only to get a blank but polite expression in response most of the time. That’s my definition of obscure, and it’s a fairly loose one. Also, I’m half awake. So this post will be all rambly and half awake Leila-like and I’ll probably find some way of nonsensically repeating myself halfway through. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte.

Yeah. I meant it when I said it was a loose definition. But, let’s face it, if you bring up the Brontes, everyone who doesn’t think of Wuthering Heights thinks of Jane Eyre, and everyone who doesn’t think of Jane Eyre thinks of Wuthering Heights. And Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are all well and good but The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is possibly one of the bravest books of its time, and because of that I’ve always had a soft spot for it. Also I once read it when I was really, really ill, and it was a good distraction. I can't normally read when I'm sick, especially dense Victorian prose, but I somehow managed to read and love this.

Think Victorian times, when female writers were still frowned upon simply for being female writers. Think of the ideal of the saintly housewife, keeping house so beautifully that not even one single speck of dust is out of order, always abiding by her husband’s wishes, accepting her lower position without any fight, because, naturally, her husband knows best. Think of marriage as even more binding than it is today, something you rarely get out of except by death, something you are honour bound to continue with even if it kills you. And if it's killing you, then you don't admit it. Ever.

And then you get Anne Bronte, who goes and writes a book about a woman who takes her son and walks out on her drunken, domineering husband, sets up in a house in a new town, arising the suspicion of most of the locals, and earns her own living as an artist. There’s a lot more to it than that, but seriously, if you can handle Victorian prose and you want to read something compelling and difficult and at times brutal, give Tenant a try.

The World to Come, by Dara Horn.

This is possibly only going down as obscure because I don’t really hang in literary fiction circles much these days. But anyway. My sister and I are both in love with this painter called Chagall, who painted dreamlike surrealist scenes, full of flowers and flying lovers and animals with guitars and cloudy blue night sky. Looking at them is like watching a slow and beautiful dance where things might not make sense at first, but drift perfectly into place all the same. And that’s what this book is like. It starts with a guy stealing a Chagall painting from an event at a museum in New York, and it goes in all sorts of directions from there.

A Fistful of Sky, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

I can’t really do this book justice in a description, but basically, in Gypsum’s family, all the children go through transition during adolescence and become mages, like their mother. When Gypsum reaches twenty and her transition still hasn’t happened, and she’s pretty much accepted that her life is going to be a non-magical one. Until she discovers that what she thought was the flu was a transition of her own. But unlike her siblings, her power is dark.

I seriously have no idea why more people haven’t heard of Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Her way of writing fantasy is whimsical, psychological and wonderfully bizarre.

Everything Beautiful, by Simmone Howell.

Again, this is cheating, because while a lot of people in Australia, NZ and the States don't know this one yet, this book is totally going to be huge once the YA community catches on. And I seriously want to know what it is about Australia that makes them produce so much excellent YA, because this is no exception. For me, Everything Beautiful was the equivalent of a big block of chocolate. I carried it around in my bag for a while and snacked on it whenever I needed cheering up. Unlike chocolate, it didn’t melt or go stale. Always a plus.

Riley is outspoken and atheist, and when her stepmother organises for her to be sent to a Christian summer camp, Riley is sure there will be no conversion story happening here. In fact, she’s pretty much convinced it will be hell on earth. And she’s certainly not wrong. But being stuck at Spirit Ranch Holiday Camp also means that she meets the mysterious, wheelchair-bound Dylan. I love how this novel is at turns funny and serious, I love how it somehow manages to be both realistic and larger than life at the same time, and I love Dylan and Riley and their banter.

To read about more brilliant novels that you should read, visit YA Highway!

A few odd things

2010-01-18T10:33:00.002+13:00

- Yesterday we went to see Avatar in 3d. I've never seen anything feature length in 3d before. Today when I blink I keep seeing those blue creatures. It's a bit distracting.

- Last night we were watching a documentary, one of those documentaries which make you feel like a grown-up. It was about economic growth and its effect on cities and countries, and how it can happen unevenly and leave people poor if they come from the wrong place. Basically. Somewhere quite near the end, my cat Cali leapt on top of the tv and sat there, staring at us. Then she started licking her leg. She was extremely matter of fact about the whole thing. Like, yeah, I'm on top of a tv. What's your problem? As she leapt down her paw hit the volume, and suddenly we were hearing about economic growth very loudly.

- In the early hours of the morning, I had a dream about being in England with my family, and staying in the same house as one of the members of the Sex Pistols. He was very nice. We all chatted a bit, and then my siblings and I went out to Cafe Cezanne because we figured that he was a rock star and he wouldn't really want to hang with us. (Cafe Cezanne was somehow in England, but it all seemed very logical at the time.) But next thing, we were sitting in the cafe and we saw him walking past, then he saw us, smiled, and wandered over to sit down with us. And I realised, hey, we're friends with a rockstar. I have to text Amber and tell her. They were reuniting with a new lead singer, and they had a new album coming out, and later on he gave us a preview of some of the tracks. They were indie and melodious and full of unusual instruments. None of it sounded anything like the Sex Pistols, but I didn't say anything, because I was being polite.

- I wrote a blog post about my work at the bookshop for YA Highway, my first highway post for the year. There are going to be many more. I've filled up a whole incredibly crammed notebook page with ideas for posts. There are so many that some of them are at the side, in little tiny letters, which is kind of a note-taking quirk that I have. I probably should have gone on to a new page, but there is something about little tiny half-readable notes and my brain that I can't even begin to understand. Anyway, what I actually meant to say was, I will be blogging more, and about interesting things. Or things that seemed interesting when they were in little tiny notes. So yeah. Keep an eye out.

Road Trip Wednesday: Things People Say

2010-01-13T21:56:00.004+13:00

This week we're blogging about the things people say when they find out you write young adult novels. So yeah, I rant about writing novels all over the internet (internet, how do you like being ranted all over?), but in person I am generally pretty cagey about talking about the whole writing thing, especially the whole writing novels thing, and even more especially the whole writing YA novels thing. Because then most of my conversations turn into this sort of thing.

The 'Leila is deluded but I have to be very polite about it' conversation:

This is the one where they think to themselves, look at her. It is not particularly likely that she could ever earn any money from writing, really, and she already looks like she doesn't eat enough. She needs to not give up her day job, because she needs to put food on the table, and she needs to be able to afford a table so she has somewhere to put her food, and she needs to be able to afford a roof over her head so she has somewhere to put her table. I will feel guilty forever if I don't drop a hint.

To be honest, these days I'm very pre-emptive. Almost as soon as I tell people I want to be a writer, as my job job, like the thing that I spend all day every day doing, I tell them about how I'm after a career in publishing, which is true as well. Even though getting into publishing is not a hugely lucrative or easy career to get into either, I love books. Finding manuscripts with potential and helping them become polished and wondrous is something that I would adore. Also I like the idea of being a librarian, or the idea of venturing further into bookselling. I tell people all this stuff in a huge awkward gush, because if I don't, they either straight out say that I shouldn't quit my day job, hahaha, writing is hard, you know (you reckon?), or they politely ask what my real career plans are, or they ask me whether I'm going to go into teaching. Always teaching.

I think there's this assumption out there that there's nothing you can really do with an English degree except being a high school English teacher, which to begin with is a completely wrong assumption. And also I think that to be a teacher, you have to really really want to be a teacher. I would like being a tutor or a university lecturer, especially in creative writing, but I would have to be published and highly regarded before I could have any hope of going there. And high school English? Nooooo way. I loved my high school English teachers. They were brave, hardy souls and I have the utmost admiration for them. But at the moment, I'm just not courageous enough for that sort of thing.

The 'OMG fame and fortune' conversation:

This is the one where they either seriously or somewhat sarcastically name an Author Who is Seriously Famous. You know, DanBrownJKRowlingStephanieMeyerStephenKingShakespeare. That author. And start talking about how I'll be ever so rich and famous too.

All I can say is, 'That would be nice.' Because yeah, it would be. It is also extremely rare. I sometimes point that out too.

The 'OMG I have this idea!' conversation:

Often follows on from the 'OMG fame and fortune conversation'. This is the one where they have this amazingly amazing idea for a book, which they could share with you so that you can write it, and then you can share all the fame and fortune, and then you can both live happily ever after.

Fact: the idea is the easy part. I get ideas for novels all the time. I wake up in the morning with fresh new shiny ideas in my head that I already don't have time to write for at least, you know, ten years, what with all the other ideas I have. The writing part is the hard part. I'm always telling people that they should go write their amazingly amazing idea themselves, because I have plenty of my own and I wouldn't do it justice anyway. And then they have all these excuses, all this oh no, I don't have time, I don't know how.

No one in the world knows exactly how to write novels. That is because there is no right way. And no one has more than 24 hours in their day. But I want to lie on my deathbed and be able to say, I wrote novels dammit, not I had this amazing idea once and I never did anything with it because I didn't know how and I was a bit busy.

I don't usually say this to people.

The 'give me juicy details' conversation:

Some people would like to know everything. You know, the publication date, what the cover will look like, whether I've included a villain based on them*, what it's about.

Which usually has to turn into me saying, I don't have an agent yet. Publication takes a long time and I don't know when it will happen. And I don't base my characters on real people that I know, because that's not how things work for me.

However, I really, really need to work on the 'what's it about?' response. Because it is something that people are going to ask me for the rest of my life, and I need to have everything contained in a nice catchy sounding line so I can give them my line and leave it at that. Also I need to not be so embarrassed. It's quite hard telling people I write YA, the fantasy sort of YA, the magic and supernatural beings sort of YA, because people either get all awkward about it or start talking about Stephanie Meyer. Or both.

Sometimes I think life would be a lot easier if I did write the sort of books that people with English degrees are expected to write, with lots of characters you don't feel particularly sorry for who are all committing adultery with each other and remembering their childhoods in a very literary way, the sort of books that are generally only read by other people with English degrees.

The 'I'm writing something myself' conversation:

Seriously, this depends entirely on who I'm talking to.

I used to be very wary of this conversation. In the wrong company it can have kind of a patronising vibe to it. As in, you're writing YA fantasy eh? Well, I'm writing a screenplay/postmodern amorphousness/a novel about people remembering their childhoods while committing adultery. And then we end up sort of smiling at each other awkwardly for a bit. And then one of us has to excuse themselves.

But in recent times I've discovered in the right company it can be completely and utterly awesome. I can't emphasise how wonderful it is to find other writers who understand, who go through similar struggles themselves, who share the same dreams. And yeah. They're also so freaking talented that it's actually kind of scary.

Sometimes talking about writing can be a very good conversation indeed.

You should go to the highway right now and read about what people say to my fellow highwayers when they find out they're talking to a writer.

*No, seriously. I've actually been asked that more than once. I'm not sure whether it's people mistakenly thinking that I have some kind of grudge against them, or wanting to be all badass and tell people at parties that a writer based a villain on them so that they can get laid. Or both.

North

2010-01-08T17:45:00.017+13:00

The view from the beach house at Mangawhai Heads

Between Mangawhai Heads and Te Arai Point

Trying to skim stones at Helena Bay

Mangonui

Taupo Bay

Matai Bay

Josh at Karikari Beach

Boatshed Cafe, Rawene

Opononi

Rush hour in Northland

Road Trip Wednesday: Questionnaire

2009-12-09T23:41:00.003+13:00

1. What are the three best books you've read this year?

Oh god, I have read so many books this year. This is tough. If I have to just pick three, my top three are:

1. Teach Me, by R. A. Nelson: a girl falls in love with her English teacher, only to have him break her heart. In a word, this book is stunning. Simply stunning. The prose is tight and beautiful and every page is full of tension. I felt every moment of Nine's heartbreak and fury.

2. Wintergirls, by Laurie Halse Anderson: this is about a girl's battle with anorexia, and another one for the intense and searingly beautiful category. Anderson's character building is remarkable: Lia is not simply a Tragic Anorexia Victim, but a person in her own right, a girl who loves reading fantasy fiction and is fiercely protective of her younger sister. I loved the way Anderson plays with the text, like sections with cross outs which show even more the battleground inside Lia's head, as she even tries to edit her own thoughts.

3. Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow: I'm not usually a thriller person, and I'm definitely not usually a technology person, but I loved this. Seventeen year old Marcus uses technology to fight against the Department of Homeland Security when their methods of providing security become increasingly extreme. This book raises some fascinating questions about civil rights, but also it moves breathtakingly fast. And the computer stuff is just, well, cool.

Highly honourable Mentions:

Shiver, by Maggie Stiefvater.
Ink Exchange, by Melissa Marr.
The Mortal Instruments series, by Cassandra Clare.
Dreaming of Amelia, by Jaclyn Moriarty. (For my American friends: the US edition of this will be called The Ghosts of Ashbury High, and it's coming out next June, so keep an eye out for it.)

2. If you could meet one author living or dead, who would it be?

To be honest, I've met a few of my favourite authors at events and book signings, and the whole thing isn't nearly as good as it's cracked up to be. Not because they weren't nice (they were all lovely actually), but because I tend to babble hopelessly whenever I meet authors I am in love with, and they probably go away remembering me as The Fan With The Long Hair Who Was A Bit Weird In The Head. If they remember me at all.

So. If I could meet any living author, I'd love to meet Ursula Le Guin, Philip Pullman, or John Green. And if I can meet any dead authors, I'd like to meet Jane Austen or Oscar Wilde. I can't pick one of those people, I seriously can't. You pick one for me. Or better yet, let me hold some kind of dinner party where I get to invite them all. If you let me get away with the dinner party option, you can come too. Then we can all drink wine and talk late into the night about fascinating things.

3. What book are you most looking forward to in 2010?

That's easy. The Piper's Son, by Melina Marchetta. No idea when it's coming out in the US (sorry!), but it's coming out in Australasia in March. All the characters in Saving Francesca feel like friends of mine, I've read it that many times. I'm really looking forward to hanging out with them all again.

Teaser Tuesday/Wednesday

2009-12-08T23:32:00.004+13:00

I really wanted to do another teaser, but my recent rewrites on my novel are kind of behaving like clingy children, you know. I think they've got a lot going for them, but I'm not ready to put them out in the big wide world yet. It might make them cry.

So! You get old stuff. Old can be good, like fine wine, or it can be bad, like leftovers from another century that you just found in the back of the fridge. When I was ranting about names, I mentioned a short story with a main character called Pandora. Actually, the whole story is called Pandora. I first wrote it a couple of years ago and then rewrote last year. It's set in my city, Auckland. The full story is partially set in the Auckland central business district, a part of town I know almost off by heart (which is where this fragment takes place), and also in a magical, hidden part of Auckland called Othernorth, which I made up.

I saw the bus for the first time when I was eight years old and my mother was not misplaced yet. We were going to see a movie in a theatre that looked like a palace, with turrets inside it and painted gold and marble, with stars and clouds buried inside its ceiling, and panthers with eyes that glowed.

She didn’t go out much, and I was worried that it would scare her. ‘The panthers aren’t real, honestly,’ I explained. ‘You’ll be okay.’

The crowd was not too thick, but her eyes went through as if she was trying to check each face for something. She flinched as buses went past, and held my hand tighter and tighter. Her grip was cold and piercing. She wrenched us to the side, towards a shop entrance. Inside, I could see lines of shining chip packets waiting patiently.

‘Mum,’ I said, getting out my best manners, ‘can I please have some salt and vinegar chips, please?’

‘No,’ she said, flinging us into the shop. ‘We don’t want anything.’

I followed her gaze. The bus pulled itself away from the stop, a pale blue-silver bus. The world was coated in heavy afternoon sunlight, but the bus was inside a thin white mist, one that looked like misty morning breath. Silver sparks came off its wheels and dissolved as they hit the road. While you looked out the window and held your ticket tight in your hand, this bus would take you into another world. I wanted to see who was on it.

I detached myself from my mother. ‘Pandora!’ she said.

As I ran, her hands hovered at my back, a step behind grabbing me and putting me back inside the sensible world among the chip packets. I ran onto the pavement and three ordinary buses appeared and blocked my view. My mother wrenched us both back inside the shop. I landed against the blue ready salted row.

‘Are you okay?’ said the shop assistant. Being asked this is a common occurrence in my family.

‘Can I have some chips please?’ I said, looking up at Mum.

I didn’t know what her expression meant. Her eyes went thin, then closed, then opened widely. ‘Well, Pandora,’ Mum said. She put her hand in her pocket and discovered a two-dollar coin. She gave it a surprised look and handed it over.

I had chips and I’d seen a magic bus, and the movie hadn’t even started yet. I was pleased with this.

Mum never mentioned it again, not even last year on the day I saw her step onto it. She didn’t have a chance to mention it to me after that. I thought at the time that maybe she would leave something that explained everything: a magic ring; a locked diary; a tragic letter. Dad and I inherited her bed, her clothes, her jewellery, her things. They were all silent. I inherited her confusion. It didn’t tell me anything either, not really.

If anyone's curious, the theatre mentioned in the first paragraph is this one.

Festive? I'll give you festive.

2009-12-06T23:32:00.007+13:00

We spent a lot of time today fighting with a christmas tree, then fighting with christmas lights, then fighting with the christmas tree some more. It looks very pretty now though. My cat Horatio came in when I was partway through decorating it. He started by playing it cool and pretending that he hadn't noticed it, then he wandered over purring like I had brought him his own personal pine needle shredding manna from the gods. He wandered underneath it and disappeared completely for a few minutes, then wandered back out looking matter of fact, and purred some more. Then he put his head inside the bag of decorations.

But this is all much, much better than our first christmas with the cats two years ago. No matter what we put in the way, this kept happening.

And other news! There's a competition for our followers at the highway where you can win free books. So you should go become a follower, if you haven't already.

Road Trip Wednesday: My Literary Crushes

2009-12-02T23:09:00.003+13:00

My post on literary crushes comes in two parts! Hooray! (And yeah. Clearly I'm not giving up exclamation marks any time soon. Long reign over-excited punctuation.)

The first section is where it gets incredibly obvious how much time I spend obsessing over sentences.

Writers I would like to be

Margaret Mahy Margaret Mahy Margaret Mahy did I mention Margaret Mahy? Her sentences are stunning, full of unexpectedness and humour at every turn, and no writer on earth can wield a similie like she can. She takes the supernatural, family relationships, love, identity, philosophy, the narratives we construct about ourselves, and she tangles all these things together beautifully and makes books which read both fantastical and true at the same time. I don't think I would be a writer at all if it weren't for growing up with her books. Especially The Changeover.

She's quite different to Margaret Mahy, but I'd also seriously love to be Ursula Le Guin for a day, just to write like she writes. Even when you're reading the FAQs on her site and she's explaining why she doesn't like people sending her big parcels in the post, her sentences are precise and polished, like tiny gems.

Also I love Elizabeth Knox and Francesca Lia Block and Audrey Niffenegger. I'd happily be any of them too.

And the second section is where it gets incredibly obvious how much I like my male characters Witty and Beautiful and with Dark Mysterious Pasts. Never underestimate the power of a good Dark Mysterious Past in making me want to immediately leap on a character and -

ANYway.

Characters I would like to do

Ok. Because there is a fair chance that my boyfriend will end up reading this, I'm emphasising the fact that this is all hypothetical fictional stuff.

I loved Jace in The Mortal Instruments series. I mean, you know. Super tough demon fighter who also has awesome one liners. I also really liked Niall in Melissa Marr's books (particularly Ink Exchange) what with the Dark Mysterious Past and the faeryness. And Dylan in Simone Howell's Everything Beautiful blew me away too. I want to say that he's the hottest paraplegic character I've ever come across in YA, but he's actually one of the only paraplegic characters I've ever come across in YA. He's rebellious and sarcastic and deeply troubled.

And in non-YA, I adored the angel Xas in The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox. Don't see the movie, or even the trailer, because they got him all wrong. (Then again, you know you have a good literary crush when you get grumpy at the movie version for getting the character Horribly Utterly Wrong and nowhere near your glorious vision.) But yeah. If you don't mind literary things and you're up for a love triangle in 19th century France involving an angel in a gay relationship, go read The Vintner's Luck immediately.

My ultimate literary crush, however, is Henry in The Time Traveller's Wife. Hot librarian who is extremely well read and also has great music taste and says many witty and gorgeous things and has to deal with trauma from the past, present, and future. I mean being me I was sold on hot librarian alone, but yeah. It doesn't get better than Henry. He's a wonderfully written character, one of those characters who you spend time reading about then put the book down and go back to real life feeling slightly lost, like the character is slightly more real than the world.

So. Those are my crushes. Admitting them is kind of giving me weird flashbacks to being on school camp when I was twelve and telling all the other girls in my cabin the name of the boy I had a crush on.

Want to read more about literary crushes? Go visit YA highway post-haste.

Road Trip Wednesday: what do I do when I'm not writing?

2009-11-25T23:14:00.004+13:00

Um.

If I'm not writing, I'm probably curled up on the couch with a book and at least one cat. Or I am curled up on the couch with my laptop, engaging in my Epic Struggle To Keep Up With The Internet. There are so many people I love, so many well written things, so many laughs to be had. And I'm never quite on top of it all, no matter how hard I try. It is a lifelong saga. And as I am following the internet and marvelling at internet things, both my cats usually arrive and walk all over my legs and meow at me because I didn't feed them enough the first time this evening and they want to be fed again.

And, dammit, this is all making me sound very boring. I kind of have a sinking suspicion that my main interesting thing is the writing thing.

So yeah. I like cooking. I am very much the No Recipe Let's Just Wing it With Random Things From the Pantry school of cooking. Also, when no one else is in the room, I love singing. I love singing so much that I eventually want to get lessons, if I can track down a teacher. I like wandering around taking photos, especially of random suburbia, and I'll happily do that almost anywhere if the light is good enough. The whole thing is very amateurish though. If I manage to take a good photo, it is probably luck and then photoshop.

Um um um.

Oh! I sometimes go to political things. This evening I listened to a talk from Phil Goff, leader of the NZ Labour Party. And I sometimes join in with Josh's transport campaigning, because Auckland needs transport that does not involve people driving everywhere all the time.

You know that advice people give writers? Where they tell them to live wild and interesting lives and do lots of exciting things so they can be good writers with lots to write about? I'm kind of hoping that advice is wrong. Writing is my exciting thing. And the rest of my life is mostly just me procrastinating writing.

One day, I will work out how to surgically attach more hours to the day. Then I will have proper hobbies.

First Teaser Tuesday ever ever ever

2009-11-25T00:21:00.002+13:00

This is by popular demand.

I always wanted to say something was by popular demand. Anyway.

This is from my prologue. (I am one of those uncool writers who has prologues.) My main character has snuck into the cellar in the middle of the night because knows that her father has a prisoner there. And yeah. I've cleaned it up somewhat but it is still very much a work in progress, as always.

Update: I've taken the teaser down now.

Thanks for all your lovely comments. More teasers to come!

What I read (excluding YA)

2009-11-11T23:04:00.002+13:00

This week's topic for Roadtrip Wednesday at YA highway (or Roadtrip Thursday, if you're on NZ time) is what we read outside of YA fiction. The real question: what don't I read?

To be honest I've even been known to find the phonebook interesting. No kidding. I like names.

When I have the energy I read literary fiction. At the moment I'm reading The River Wife by Heather Rose and Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger (she also wrote The Time Traveller's Wife, which is one of my favouritest books in the whole entire world ever ever ever). Also I have The Road by Cormac McCarthy sitting around waiting, and Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame, and quite a few others. When I have even more energy, I read classics. I read masses of them while I was at university but since I finished my degree I haven't had as much time, and I need to rectify that. I loved Jane Eyre and Great Expectations and Persuasion and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and at some point I need to get around to reading my lovely secondhand copy of Bleak House. And to get even older, I have Ovid's Metamorphoses somewhere, I think, but I haven't seen it since several houses ago. Possibly it has itself metamorphosed into something mysterious but I'm hoping it will metamorphose back so I can find it and read it. I love stories about transformation.

And poetry. I love lots of poetry, but I love it especially when it's by Pablo Neruda. And especially when he was going through his depressed surrealist phase and writing about nightmares and sad guitars and ghosts and despair. Good poetry it makes me feel like I'm flying. It's language at its most pure and undiluted and lovely; I think that all writers should read poetry regardless of what they write.

I read a decent number of children's books, picture books and middle grade especially. I have a good excuse in that I sell them, so I have to know them. But also because there are so many out there which are stunning.

I adore grown up fantasy but I'm horribly fussy about it. It's like I have an overly acute sense of smell when it comes to fantasy and too much of it smells like adverbs and horses. But when it smells like magic and rings true, it is very possibly the best thing ever.

And, um, other stuff. I love reading blogs. I subscribe to the NZ Listener, so I often read that, and the odd newspaper. I especially like book reviews. I will even read book reviews of books that I haven't read and am never likely to read in my life, just because I like book reviews so much.

Other than how-to-write books, I don't read as much non-fiction as I think I should. When I do I like memoirs of people's messed up childhoods, and psychology. Especially abnormal psychology, and especially multiple personality disorder. No idea why on that one. And Josh has been on at me to read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything for ages, and I keep not getting round to it, but I will eventually. Every now and then I'll attempt one of Josh's planning related books, because I swear no one hears more about dream versions of Auckland's future railway system than me, or about planning cities around public transport and pedestrians versus planning cities around cars. To live with Josh is to learn about these things, so I might as well read about them.

Also. This is a nerdy confession, but one day when I am very rich, I'm going to buy myself a big fat Oxford dictionary. Not a normal sized one, but one of the monstrous ones that look like spell books. Preferably the monstrous ones that look like spell books that come in multiple volumes. And then I am going to sit around for ages reading it and marvelling at all the words and definitions and all the examples of sentences where a writer has used a word particularly well. And, seriously, to my demented brain it will be blissful. I sometimes used to hang out in the library at my high school so I could do exactly this. (Um, yeah. I was not one of the cool people at school, not by any stretch. I was a nerdy library person who didn't go outside enough.)

The truth is, like a lot of writers, I live off books. Without them my brain ends up starving hungry and I get depressed. When I'm sad, I shove a couple of books that I love into my bag so they keep me company throughout the day and cheer me up. Beloved books are like portable friends.

And yeah. I seriously hate to think how long this post would have been if I'd been writing about YA too.

Grandad Barclay

2009-11-10T22:53:00.003+13:00

I found out about a week ago that my grandfather died.

My parents moved from England to New Zealand before I was born, and I've only ever seen my grandparents once every few years, if that. Basically, whenever one end of the family felt brave enough to spend a heap of money and take on a 24 hour flight, which is hard if you're elderly, and also hard if you're trailing three kids. So he's not a relative I ever knew very well.

What I remember about Grandad Barclay is that his first name was John and his middle name was Barclay, but he was always so much a Barclay that I don't know whether many people ever called him by his first name. He was a creature of habit. He had a schedule of things that he did in a week, like adding to his enormous firewood pile and going into town to have tea at a particular tearoom on Tuesdays. (I think it was Tuesdays.) He would comment if you made yourself tea in the mornings, because there was always a particular amount of tea in the teapot, and if you poured an unexpected cup of tea it changed things and rendered the teapot unpredictable. Also, before I stayed with my grandparents, the concept of breakfast having a set time was completely foreign to me. Grandad always noticed if you stumbled in sleepy and late. Mind you, he was also notorious for getting caught up in what he was doing and being late for meals himself.

Also, my Grandad Barclay loved ships. 'Love' is actually too weak a word for how my grandfather felt about ships. He spent hours in his study with hundreds of books about ships to keep him company. When he was staying with us in Auckland, he caught many ferries to Devonport so that he could sit looking out at the harbour, watching each ship go past. And he sketched ships in tiny exact detail everywhere - on scraps of paper, on napkins, on the old whiteboard that my parents used to write reminders on when we were little. When my sister got out her felt pens and drew a bold, schoolkid version of the Titanic in bright colours, Grandad gave it a careful look, then added several funnels to improve the picture's accuracy.

The last time I went to England with my family, we left my grandparents' house early in the morning to fly home. Grandad stepped out to see us off. He wore a dressing gown and his captain's hat, and he gave us a sharp salute and a wry smile before we drove away.

That was the last time I ever saw him.

Because they've always been far away, I'm not as thrown as most people are by losing a grandparent. They're people I'm deeply fond of but not people I'm close to. I keep going with my everyday things and someone who breathed on the other side of the world no longer breathes. Nonetheless, he was wonderful, and he deserves remembering.

I'm notoriously indecisive about religion and I don't know what to make of the idea of an afterlife. To me it's the sort of thing you can't ever know with any sureness either way.

Still, wherever you are Grandad, I hope the seas are good.

On choosing a genre

2009-11-04T23:39:00.004+13:00

This weeks question at the highway is about how we choose the genre of our novels. Or, as Michelle put it, how our genre chooses us. I like putting it like this. With genre, I've never really chosen. Also for me, the question of how a genre chooses me links really closely with the question of why it chooses me. So you're going to have to read about both at once, because I can't separate them out. Lucky you.

I have a lot of ideas for stories. To say a lot is quite a nice way of putting it. My head is like one of those explosive houses, you know, the ones with people who build up a hoard of everything in case of an apocalypse, those people who never throw anything away. I have a few strong ideas, which take up lots of space, and countless vague floating butterfly ideas, which take up less. But collectively, it's still masses. I can never seem to dump novel ideas, even when they go wrong. I just bury them until they come back strong and shiny and sure of themselves again.

But yeah. Out of all that, I have two novel ideas at the moment which are straight contemporary, and stubborn about it. They're flukes, both of them. Every other story idea in my head is fantasy or speculative, including my current WIP. I started writing stories as a kid, and they came out fantastical, with magic springing out all over the place in one way or another. And it hasn't really changed since then. I write what calls to me, what makes sense to me, what carries me through the endless but wonderful toil that is novel writing. If it didn't resonate, I'd never get to the end of it.

I love reading contemporary as much as I love reading fantasy, but the stuff that I love writing the most is the stuff where magic exists, where the world is mysterious and inexplicable and beautiful. That can be true in contemporary as well, and that's probably why I have my two ideas which go against the trend and refuse any supernatural elements I try to add. (Which shows all the more how I can never choose genre, even when I try.) But mostly I write magic best. I'd be lying if I said that's because magic is what I know. More because it's what I don't know, what I want to know, what I dream about. When I was about six years old, I wanted to be a professional witch when I grew up, and deal with magic all the time. Writing is the closest I can get to that.

My ideas often start as jumbled up things, conversations between people who turn out to be characters, images, and tangled stuff that I dream about first thing in the morning, the lucid dreams that you have when morning light wakes you up and then you drift back to sleep again. Sometimes it all comes together gradually, like a bunch of threads weaving themselves into fabric, appearing then dissolving into a whole. Other times stuff slams together in my head and leaves me stunned and buzzing, like I've somehow stumbled inside a power socket. (I don't really buy the whole muse idea, but if I had one, he/she would totally be into electrocution.)

And in all of that, genre is the last thing I think of, because usually it's obvious. In all the dizzy note taking and thinking of exciting events and seeing exactly where the key relationships are, something in my head goes, oh yeah. That's fantasy again. Surprise surprise. Or it goes, god. You've come up with an idea that doesn't have magic in it. Will it work?

Basically, for me, the best way to choose a genre is to let the story choose it. Stories know what they're made of, but I generally don't until they tell me. I'm just the person who sits around fussing with words and drinking too much coffee, and trying to work out what she forgot to put on the shopping list because her head was too full of make believe things.

How I name my peeps: a post in which I am both synaesthetic and schizophrenic

2009-10-28T21:53:00.005+13:00

Time for moose blogging! Yay!

This week's topic is about how we name our characters. So, how do I name my characters? The answer basically falls into one of two categories.

The Nice Category:

They arrive in my head with a name.

You have no idea how much I love characters who do this. I love all my characters, but I love the ones who tell me their names when I first meet them very and extremely muchly. Some characters just know what they're called, and dammit, they don't want to leave me guessing and coming up with stupid wrong names.

This method can go horribly wrong. I have a character in a future novel who is adamant that she is called Pandora. There are various problems with this, one being that it sounds like some kind of brand name, maybe for fancy loaves of bread. The second is that I already have a character called Pandora in a different story, and it is a headache to have two similar characters with the same name, let alone two characters with the same crazy fancy bread name.

Generally, though, I love it when my peeps tell me their names. It makes life quite a lot more straightforward. However, everyone who knows me knows that 'Leila' and 'straightforward' are not two words that go together.

And that is probably why about ninety percent of my characters fall into the other category.

The Other Category:

I get a horrible headache.

Fact: I can't just name my characters anything. They usually have specific names that belong to them, and to name them the wrong thing would be the writing equivalent of finding myself a blackboard and running all of my fingernails and toenails down it at the same time. Some characters have more than one name that fits them perfectly, and a few that are a close fit, but for most, it's just the one. There are a lot of potential names in the universe. Finding The One can be hard. (Much like finding true love, if you are into that sort of thing.)

I usually know vaguely what sort of names they have. When I say that, I mean that I know what the first letter is, sometimes. Or that it could be one of three possible first letters. And that can be because I have some idea of what colours it could be.

Yes, I did just say that. And no, I'm not on anything. My brain has some odd wiring.

But anyway, colours tie into letters. If I know I'm looking for a dark green name, then it most likely begins with m or n. If I get a pale aqua colour, then it's probably e. If it's white, then it's probably i or l. And if I get a few different contradictory colours, then that gives me a bunch of letters to try. And sometimes I'll know whether it's a light name or a dark name, which can help too.

The problem is that it's hard to know any of this for sure unless I've found The Name. Because it can also be something nowhere near my original prediction.

I have a book of 1000 baby names, which I inherited from a family friend when she moved away. The cover has the same eerie picture of a staring pudgy cheeked baby repeated over and over in rows, like someone accidentally clicked 'tile' in formatting and decided to leave it that way. It has all the normal names, but also a lot of utterly bizarre ones. (Adolpha, anyone?) I think the friend I inherited it off ended up naming her son Frank, which is not particularly bizarre, so I'm not sure whether she really used the book all that much in her decision making. However, I use it all the time.

It gives roots and definitions, and it lists when names have variant spellings. (I love variant spellings. I don't pay a huge amount of attention to definitions, although I love it when they fit. I'm more interested in the colour and the sound.) When I go name hunting I sit down with my baby name book and a blank page of notebook, and write down as many possible suspects as I can find. I play with spelling and see if a name fits better with a th instead of an f, or change the ending, or try a different first letter. And sometimes, in all that hunting and messing with letters, I'll manage to find something that works.

Although more often I'll get a headache and have to walk away and try again tomorrow, or hope that the character gives up and just tells me what his/her name is. Sometimes I can get it by imagining scenes taking place, and hearing my peeps talk to each other, because sometimes one will accidentally let the name slip. They only do it if I'm not trying too hard to force it out of them, because this is sneaky subconscious stuff. Dealing with sneaky subconscious stuff is like meeting a cat for the first time. You have to approach slowly and put your hand out and convince yourself that you're not even that interested really, and if it feels like it, it might greet you back.

So yeah. I used to think it was impossible, but I managed to find true love. (Right now he's pointing out that it is getting late and I should maybe be sleeping instead of blogging, but anyway.) And likewise, I almost always think it's impossible, but I always manage to find my characters' names. Because in the end, they always want me to write about them. In one way or another, they have to tell me.

One last thing: I wrote at least half of the first draft of my novel without knowing the name of a crucial character. I'm not even exaggerating. He really, really did not want to give it up. I spent ages writing scenes with a little box like this [ ] where his name would eventually be. And this isn't a random character I'm talking about who you don't have to worry as much about precision with, this is a main character, a main character I adore. I felt like a huge idiot for knowing him incredibly well but not knowing his goddamn name, which you'd think would be obvious seeing as I knew so much else. But he happens to be a character who has spent his life hiding, a character whose name is forever linked to a disaster. Understandably, he didn't want to give it away lightly.

After a long, long while, when I had pretty much given up entirely, he let me know that his first name is Elias. He still hasn't told me his last name. I'm hoping he will soon.

Difficult patterns across the moon

2009-10-22T21:25:00.006+13:00

I would just like to mention that I am not well. So if I have been incoherant anywhere on the internet today, or out in the real world, that's why. 'Not well' meaning I have one of those colds where you feel like the whole world is slowly imploding inside your head. And my lovely recurring goose cough is back and making people turn their heads in the street once more. And I'm not even going to start on the whole snot factory thing. It's all very yuckitty yuck yuck.

You might think I am sick all the time, from this blog, and that is actually not true. Actually. I just have a tendancy to blog when I'm sick, because my computer never shows any sign of getting tired of listening to me. I could invent a new category of blogging. Moaning About Minor Ailments Blogging. (To be known as MAMAB.) Do you think this could take off?

The last few weeks have been really damn hard, for various reasons. Most of them temporary though. Still, I'm basically fighting a den of seething stress snakes, and everytime I nail one, a new one arises with its little tongue flicking. It sometimes reaches a point where I want to give up on being a grown up. But I think things are getting better now. Today was nice. One of the things I love about working in Ponsonby is how every now and then someone wanders into the shop selling something wonderful. Today a guy turned up with huge punnets of new season strawberries and I bought one immediately; they were oddly shaped but delicious.

Right now I'm in the stretch of evening between dinner and sleep. The tv is on and a panel are talking theories about conspiracy theories. I am now trying to think of theories about theories about conspiracy theories. And theories about theories about theories about conspiracy theories. It all feels a bit like what happens when you're a kid and you find a small mirror, then take it over to another mirror and face the two mirrors off into each other.

And somewhere during the last paragraph my dear cat Cali noticed that I am still on the couch under a blanket, and curled up next to me to keep an eye on things. But now she seems to be napping on the job. Both cats gave me a skeptical look when I moved the blanket from the bedroom to the lounge. They never understand when I move things around. Also my cats often feel this need to keep an eye on me, I've noticed, but in doing so they usually become so bored that they go to sleep. Apparently I'm not a particularly entertaining person to watch.

Now! I need to type up the rest of my novel and then I need to edit edit edit it sideways up down left right centre until it gleams and hopefully doesn't put any humans or cats to sleep.

My novel in haiku form

2009-10-21T23:41:00.005+13:00

This is for Roadtrip Wednesday at the highway.

worst storms are my own
magic strikes inside me and
there is no shelter

It took a long time and turned out a bit cryptic. But I guess that's how most haiku behave. I'm a bit sleepy and keep typing 'haiky' instead of haiku. Not sure what a haiky would be. Sounds a bit like a sneeze.

Crazy sauce tastes like it's crazy

2009-10-19T14:37:00.004+13:00

Josh is away overnight again and I miss him like hell. And yeah, I'm aware that I would make an absolutely useless army wife. And that's before I even start on pacifism. Good thing I'm in love with a planner/public transport advocate instead, don't you think?

My charming cat has already brought me two half dead lizards and the day is generally feeling rather long, so I'm cheering myself up by blogging about sentences and horses.

Rough drafts

2009-10-15T08:20:00.003+13:00

How rough are my rough drafts?

Think harsh sandpaper rough. Not the stuff you use for polishing and prettiness, but the stuff you use for taking the surface off things.

When I write first drafts, my sole aim is to take the surface off everything - my glorious but vaguer than vague daydreams about how the story might work, and all the odd layers of resistance that sit around in my head. I write furiously and rub all of that away, and I see if there's a story underneath.

I don't aim at anything even vaguely approximating perfection. I just aim at creating a big bunch of words that tell a story, even if they're a scruffy bunch of words that need transcribing and spell check and all sorts of prodding and pulling apart and therapy before I let anyone near them. It's far better to have a deeply flawed first draft than not to have one. Judy Blume once talked about being not a writer, but a rewriter, and that's very much me as well. All I'm doing in writing a first draft is creating clay, clay that I can sculpt and play with to my heart's content until a story that sings and makes sense and has every word in the right place finally emerges a long time later. Hopefully.

If you're like me, and you have to write an embarrassingly bad first draft in order to have one at all, the book to read for reassurance and incredibly sage advice is Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott. It's a book I go back to over and over again. As Lamott says:

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts...

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something - anything - down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft - you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft - you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed or even, God help us, healthy.

(Bird by Bird, Anchor Books 1995, pp. 22, 25-26)

For those attempting first drafts right now, I wish you luck and give you lots of chocolate chip cookies to eat along the way (the big fat kind, chewy in the middle, and with extra big chocolate chips).

And you know those first draft things? I just finished one. They do end. Sometimes you just have to take a messy path to get there.

25 things to know about Leila (from a tagging on facebook)

2009-02-10T23:14:00.002+13:00

1. I like it when everyday things turn dreamlike. I love the way the light looks on Queen St late on a sunny afternoon, when it's deep gold and makes everyone crossing the road glow at the edges.

2. I refuse to eat banana under almost all circumstances. The only exception I make is for my flatmate's banana cake.

3. When I was about five years old, my ideal career choice for when I grew up was to be a professional witch.

4. When I was a few years older, I told other kids at school that I believed in fairies. Not because I ACTUALLY believed in fairies. More because I really deeply wished they were real, and I wanted to will them into reality.

5. This didn't make me particularly popular in primary school.

6. Actually, I was NEVER very popular at school.

7. A major contributing factor here is the fact that I am not really capable of being 'cool'. I would not recognise 'cool' if we met in the street. 'Cool' and Leila would do that whole stupid dance, you know, the thing where you are walking in opposite directions and you almost collide but don't, and you both go to the left at the same time, then you both go to the right at the same time, and then you smile awkwardly and one of you bolts sideways so that the wretched experience ends and you never have to see each other again.

8. My favourite board game is Cluedo.

9. At the moment I'm reading a book called 'Broken Soup', by Jenny Valentine. It's very good.

10. I am addicted to scarves. Unless it's the middle of summer, I feel weird without a scarf.

11. I don't like heights very much but I somehow managed to go up the Sagrada Familia, St Pauls, the Eiffel Tower and a bunch of other tall buildings in Europe. I was fine every time, if a bit shaky.

12. Although I didn't make it quite to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

13. The thing that I really REALLY don't like about heights actually is the thought of somehow dropping something from a great height. All you have to do to make me flip out if we're up the top of a high building together is to dangle some random object over the edge of a balcony where it could fall a long way and break and KILL SOMEONE. My brain seriously cannot handle that.

14. I love gourmet burgers with an intensity no one ever understands, including me. Especially if they come from Murder Burger, or Burger Fuel, or the handmade place in Kingsland. Get me dinner from one of those places and I will walk into burning buildings to retrieve your dental floss and be your best friend FOR LIFE.

15. The only thing that beats my burger obsession is my coffee obsession.

16. I work in Ponsonby.

17. Ponsonby is a VERY EXPENSIVE place for me to work. (See 15.)

18. I'm going to learn to drive this year, because I have to. Otherwise life in Auckland is too inconveniant.

19. I would really rather not learn to drive. I hate driving. It makes me stressed and swearwordy and it is bad for the planet. If I lived in London or somewhere like that, I would totally just catch trains everywhere and not bother with cars at all.

20. 'Discombobulate' is one of my favourite words. It somehow sounds like someone is being hit on the head in the middle.

21. My favourite seasons are autumn and spring. Strong temperatures aren't really my thing.

22. I'm skinny and I get cold at the drop of a hat (which probably explains 10). However, because of this I actually find cold a lot easier to deal with. I just put on another layer of clothing and get on with things. Extreme heat just makes me grumpy and tired and worldhating and uncomfortable. I'm really not enjoying Auckland's weather at the moment.

23. I seriously love old houses. I think most architecture post-WWII is pretty overrated.

24. I like alcohol but it tends to make me go to sleep and then wake up craving eggs.

25. I write, and would love it if I could one day earn a living from it. I mostly write novels with magicians, dystopias, painters, psychics and people with dark mysterious pasts. I don't know whether an audience for random Leila-style speculative fiction actually exists, but I guess I'll find out.

Proper posts to come! I promise! In case you want to keep track, I've added a feature for that which should actually WORK. There's an option to become a follower of my blog on the left below the archive and links.

Various things of a various nature

2009-01-18T20:50:00.004+13:00

- My computer has been feeling out of sorts. It has been begging me for more RAM, to the point of shutting The Sims down mid-game to remind me. And then I went to download some photos on it only to have it dramatically refuse because my hard drive is full. It won't even take an incredibly thin wafer mint.

Actually, I am really sick of computers being all impertinent on me. Microsoft Word has suddenly started refusing to have more than one document open at once, I think because of the fullness of my hard drive. And it sometimes tantrums on me and refuses to respond to instructions. I end up with that big white nothing screen where Word should be, I quit, and then a window pops up to ask me if I want to tell Microsoft about it in an error report. Oh, Microsoft! Now I know that you care I feel so much better!

I also have an ongoing war with Microsoft Word in that it is insisting on the US version of everything. You know, it insists on putting a z in surprise and emphasise and various other things. I used to not care about this and just let it be as it may, as long as I was consistent; then I decided that I am a New Zealander, dammit, not an American, and I wasn't going to have any more of this American spelling of everything. I have nothing against it, if you're from the US. However, NZ grammar and spelling has direct roots to UK grammar and spelling, and I feel like it's basically my duty, as a non-American, to use my native rules, rather than the ones Microsoft likes best.

But MY GOD does it not like this. I have done what you're meant to do, by going into the tools option and telling it I want UK English as my default dictionary (I have distrusted the NZ dictionary on Word ever since it failed to recognise 'kia ora' when I tried it a few years ago, although I've been told it has improved since then). But what does Microsoft Word go and do? It goes and reverts to US English every single time I create a new document, so I have to go into the menu and change it again after discovering that it is automatically inserting another 'z' where no 'z' should go. While I respect US English, I think it is pretty damn arrogant that Microsoft seems to have decided to make it so impossible to make a computer stay on anything else. My friend's family got someone to go into the inner workings of the files on their computer to switch it out of US English, but it was back on US English within days. Microsoft! For goodness' sake! Quit it with your language imperialism! Not cool!

To be fair, Safari is annoying as well. (I'm probably totally jinxing myself typing this.) I'm using Safari because Blogger and my normal browser Opera don't seem to play well together, and Safari keeps trying to correct my spelling. It started by underlining my email address as a spelling error when I typed it in (excuse me Safari but I KNOW my email address), and when I typed in recognise in the previous paragraph, it got all uppity on me and underlined that in red too. (Again with this assuming that I'm American. Gah!) I would really like my technology to leave me alone. If I want help with spelling, I will ask for it. It doesn't need to assume like that. It's actually very patronising. (To which Safari responded by underlining patronising as a spelling error. God, just SHUT UP ALREADY.)

- I am working full time at the bookshop now, so in the near future when I have more time, there will be bookshop anecdotes! Huzzah! I've spent lots of time getting to know some stunning books, most recently The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman. Ah, the awesomeness. Both versions are beautifully done (with the Chris Riddell illustrations and the Dave McKean illustrations), you should go buy it. It's about a boy, orphaned as a baby, who is brought up in a graveyard by the ghosts who reside there. It is wonderfully written; I always forget just how good Neil Gaiman is. For some reason he's always especially amazing in the final quarter or so of everything that he writes. Towards the end of The Graveyard Book, I have to admit I was actually silently urging my customers to leave me alone, couldn't they see I was reading Neil Gaiman, something which no polite human being should ever interrupt?

- I had the mother of all writing breakthroughs over the Christmas break. I seriously haven't had a breakthrough so stunning for years. I'd convinced myself that I'd kind of lost my touch with that sort of thing but had been struggling on anyway, writing my story, feeling uncertain but figuring that something was better than nothing. There's an E. L. Doctorow quote that I live by, about how writing novels is like driving a car at night. You can see no further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. So I was going by that, making what progress I could, figuring that maybe in few years I might possibly finally have an extremely vague idea of what I was doing.

Then one night I had this dream about two people who turned out to be my two main characters, and realised that they weren't quite who I thought they were, or where I thought they should be. I struggled over trying to get them to fit into the old version of the story, then decided, screw it, I will fling the previous version aside and try writing the story from the dream. And my god, it worked like nothing else. I could suddenly see them, their difficult pasts, the strange bond gradually forming between them and the world they had to survive in. I seriously think that if I nail the defining relationship of a story, the one that makes everything tick, everything else flows from there. At least, that seems to be my experience.

I've been busy mastering the art of writing in spare moments, like tea breaks and while I am waiting for the bus. I figure it's an essential life skill. And I already seem to have produced at least as much as I had for the old version of the story. Some of the best writing advice I have ever been given was simply persevere, from John Marsden, when I told him I wanted to write. It's particularly relevant to me, with my monkey brain, going in ten wrong directions for months on end until I finally get a sign of some sort or another and retrace my steps and chase a story home.

And chasing stories home makes me realise again why I'm alive.

- It is late, and I have a lounge full of pieces of beautiful fans that my flatmate is putting together, two sleeping cats (one on a couch, one on the piano), fascinating tv about New Zealand art history (WHY is this stuff never on at a decent hour?) and a boyfriend trying to convince me to go to bed now because we have to get up early tomorrow and catch a bus.

Time to stop. Hopefully it won't be so long next time.

Mending the world

2006-11-02T16:34:00.000+13:00

I’m sitting in the arts lab again. There’s the hum of unused computers, a few people typing, and a smell like old cheeseburger. I’ve been trying to work out where it’s coming from, but I’m not succeeding. I glance at the other people, but I can’t glance too long, of course. Because then they’d notice and want to know why, and I don’t want to end up saying, I’m trying to work out whether you’re the cheeseburger person. Because then I’d look even worse than someone who goes around smelling like old cheeseburger, if that’s possible.

I’m meant to be studying, but I felt the sudden need to write a post. Not even necessarily a post about anything much. Possibly even a post about what I’m studying, because it’s more fun to post about what you’re studying than to actually study it. I’m studying the tv series Dark Angel at the moment, which means that I can go to the Short Loan and borrow the dvd and spend a couple of hours just sitting around watching it – and this still counts as studying. (Leila says, now that’s what studying should be like.)

I never watched that much Dark Angel when it was on tv, but I remember being intrigued by it. I’m always intrigued by things where there’s someone with special powers and they have to cover them up and survive; they are hidden and magical and separate and mysterious. They are the sort of person I pretend to be when no one’s looking.

A vain part of my brain says, oh, that’s because you’ve always been a writer, and to be a writer is always a hidden power. You sit slightly separate to things a lot, because part of your head is already writing them. Sometimes the real world is slightly too fictional, and things happen and you can’t believe them. You can pour anyone who hurts you into words, and they can’t do anything about it. You can transform things; you can make things happen.

But in a way, being a writer isn’t really the same. You don’t get to do the cool scenes where your characters are in a dark city, flying from building to building; you don’t necessarily get the happy endings, even if you write them. I remember as a kid trying to write stories where I was a character in the story, where I could change things, significant things. Well, significant to me, anyway. There was one story where a girl arrived at my school who had been orphaned by a major earthquake in Wellington, and she became my best friend. She wore a blue dress and her name was Hope. She was the main character. (I was usually the main character’s best friend, as opposed to the main character, I’m not sure why). And having her as a best friend made it stop mattering that my best friend Katherine had abandoned me and the intense, addictive make-believe we used to play, because she’d rather spend lunchtimes with Miriam, who hated me. In the story, I had Hope, and it stopped being agony. (Being a ten year old girl abandoned by her best friend is always complete agony. Trust me.)

And making up a story didn’t fix anything, but I still hadn’t totally learnt where the line was between the story world and the real world, even though the logical part of my head knew. I sat in class and waited for her to turn up one morning, in her blue dress, and my teacher would say, Leila, can you show Hope around? And then the story would begin, and it would be like I imagined it. I waited and waited but she never came. The story stayed in my head for a while though. It was beautiful, and it tidied up the world in a way that I couldn’t manage. (In the end, Katherine and I ended up friends again, because make-believe with anyone else wasn’t quite the same.)

There was another story where I was the main character’s best friend again, but I had a golden pen which I wore on a string around my neck, and everything I wrote with it would be in golden ink, and everything I wrote with it would come true. The metaphor was totally unconscious, believe it or not. I never noticed that I was really the character in control of events, or that to have a pen which controlled things showed that even when I was a character in my own story, I was still its writer. Blame my subconscious. It’s responsible for all the interesting stuff.

But often, I think we come up with fantasy because we want to transform the world, which is what Sartre argues. We can turn the world darker, more messed up. We can make earthquakes happen in Wellington; we can turn the US into a third world country with a terrorist attack from an electromagnetic pulse. But we can also turn ourselves into the people who save it. The main character of Dark Angel, Max, has been transformed into the being she is by a sinister organisation who have changed her genetics; but at the same time, she transforms herself all the time. She puts on a disguise and slips past security to save people. And when things go wrong, she can always fly through the air and beat everyone up. Who hasn’t wanted to be like that at some point? Who hasn’t wanted to be the person who is magical and fixes everything?

There are always a thousand things wrong with the world, it seems, and people often argue that fantasy exists because we want to escape from them. I think that the opposite is the case. Fantasy is a way of mending things, even if it is only a make-believe way. A fantasy world only works because we hold it up next to our own world, because, in a way, it is part of our own world. The things we make up can affect our lives just as much as the real things. We write our problems into fantasy, and we solve them. And the solution is often simple and beautiful, because it is the magic we want but can’t have. In the world of Dark Angel, a girl really can sneak past armed guards and rescue a child who is being held hostage, and fight off almost anyone who attacks her.

The world I live in is a more comfortable one, most of the time. If a sensible person chose, they wouldn't choose to live in a dangerous world unless they were particularly brave. But even so, that wouldn't necessarily stop them from wanting it. Even if I had a choice, I wouldn’t put myself in that much danger because I am not a tv character, so I can't be sure that I’d survive it. Afterall, I don’t have any magic tricks other than words. But I want magic all the same, even though I'll never really get it. I suspect I always will.

That bloody llama thing (a pretend post)

2006-10-29T12:24:00.000+13:00

In twelve days' time, my exams will be over and I can be human again. Yay! Although that's assuming I survive that long. Anyway. Because Leila is totally snowed under with theatre stuff, you will notice that this is not a real post. (A real post has ranting and complicatedness and detail. Well, If it's a real Leila-post it does. Other people possess the magical ability to be succinct.)

I wrote this a while ago now and it works best as a performance poem, but it expresses my mood perfectly.

Llama

Sometimes, I want to replace my life with a llama.
You feed it; it stares at you with big eyes,
and grows long silver wool.
And you don’t have to think about things.
When people want to deal with you,
you tell them you have to feed your llama.
You feed it and it grows strong and healthy.
It stands in front of you and chews:
your own llama.
Then you get inspired, and write poetry
about sunlight hitting blades of grass in meadows
and farmer boys with wide gazing llama eyes
and whatever dreams you had last night.
No worries, no advertising, and lots and lots of wool.
The llama life. Seriously. Think about it.

Soliloquy

2006-08-28T15:04:00.000+12:00

We don't really do the soliloquy thing anymore, except in Days of Our Lives. You know, it's the thing where a character turns around and rants at the audience for a while without worrying about looking crazy. No one writes plays that do that, because people have different means of expressing themselves crazily these days. I think blogs are one of them. You write and write and write, and you don't really know who's listening. So anyway, this is my blog, and it's about books and writing and life, because those things all merge into each other for me. This is my attempt at a good soliloquy.

Beginning

2006-08-23T09:24:00.000+12:00

So this is how blogs start? Not with a bang, but with confusion and a glowing screen and things to click on. And a desire to say something no matter who hears it. You have to leave a mark on the world somewhere, I suppose. Why not cyberspace?

About Leila

2006-08-04T22:29:00.006+12:00

Leila is pronounced Lee-la and is a twenty-something child masquerading as an adult. (She probably has an inner adult buried somewhere, maybe underneath something in her bedroom.) Leila lives in Auckland, New Zealand, and is currently on extended maternity leave from her job in a children's bookshop. She has one handsome fiancé, one baby girl, one stepdaughter, and two manic cats. Also, Leila is a writer. She mostly writes YA fantasy with lots of magic and angst and descriptions of shadows. So writing is probably what a lot of her blogging will be about. And life. They're not really separable.

Leila also blogs at YA Highway.

Need to talk with Leila about anything? Email her at leila.e.austin[at]gmail.com.