Three more days of this

Three more days of this. 159 pages to go and I can't renew it because there's reservations and I can't stand library fines so I'm sorry, I don't think I can go to the movies tonight and I might not make yoga in the morning which is funny because I can't even say that I'm loving it. I'm on p. 562 and I don't want to return it unfinished but there have been plenty of times, particularly in the last 150 pages or so, when I've thought Okay, okay I know this, I've either worked it out or you've already told me and yet I'm compelled to read it. Not because it's a Classic that I Should read, not because of the In Conversation with Hanya Yanagihara and Jason Steger in a couple of weeks or because my best friend nodded her head very slowly and pointed her right index finger at her copy and then at me when I said that I was reading A Little Life. I can't wait to talk to you about it she said and I want to but I feel like the further into it I get the more my comments might head along the lines of it could have been half as long which is an awful thing to think and reminds me of how I can almost try to ruin things for other people when I feel really strongly - like when I interrupted Empire of the Sun so much a friend hit pause after 27 minutes and we made tea and talked on the verandah until I was tired and wanted to go to bed; like when I shut down a friend who has introduced me to so much great music but somehow is a fierce Ryan Adams fan - so now while I'm reading I'm also trying to reflect on the positives of the book. Because it is an incredible feat. Sometimes, when we're given another ream of minutiae about an art installation/movie script and setting/architectural design/litigation proceeding I think wow can you imagine the walls of post-its she must have just to keep track of who works where for what client, of the streets and states they've lived and holidayed in and whose Anglo/Asian names should be nicknames or initials and apart from the protagonist, whose name is almost too convenient, even though that itself is explained and validated, what was the process for selecting the names for all of these characters? Which isn't really something that I would be thinking about in the middle of reading a book - when I'm on my bike or the tram or reading the paper maybe, but not while I'm actually open book in hands.
Three more days of this and I might be the 33,213rd person to rate the book on Goodreads but I'm not sure what my star count will end up at. According to My Books I've written 78 reviews and rated 154 books with an average of 3.68 stars and it's interesting to see that apparently in the 133 days of 2016 I haven't read a single book which isn't true because I can tell you that I devoured Everywhere I Look (Helen Garner) and A Loving, Faithful Animal (Josephine Rowe) and they were only published recently so My Books just shows that I haven't bothered to track any of the reading that I've done this year but it will soon. I'll make my small contribution to the (now it's already 33,214 ratings that have A Little Life at 4.26 stars) in just three more days.




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Written in response to the 'Story Is a State of Mind School' Story Dare: 8th May

When P is not for Politics

I love doing writing prompts when I have a coffee in the morning, but at the moment most of them aren't working for me because I don't know what I'm working on. With so many stories in different stages it's hard to respond to a prompt like 'write about what's in your character's pockets.'
But a list is always a great way to get working, and here's my 10 minute list of things that start with the letter 'p' -

Procrastinate	Proof	Peat	Plain
Perambulate	Pooch	Pyre	Prescribe
Purpose	Pouch	Plume	Perform
Profile	Plead	Perfume	Preach
Prolific	Ply	Product	Pleat
Probable	Perfect	Placement	Pliable
Post	Peach	Place	Pitch
Perky	Prefect	Pylon	Pretend
Probe	Preface	Pile	Purr
Problem	Prior	Pale	Prove
Person	Priory	Plod	Pick

I hadn't thought of the 'pattern' word as I wrote, but when I'd finished I started looking for some in my 44 words.
There's only 10 adjectives in there, and 9 of the words can be more than one word class. Though I started out with a couple of complex words I simplified things quickly, and favoured nouns over verbs.
I can see some influence of my surrounds, sitting at a table in the street, but am surprised at others that dropped in - preface? pliable?
Product then placement is the sort of logic I'd expect to see when you're just spilling words, similarly priory after prior, but there's plenty of randomness, which pleases me. I would hate to be too predictable.
And for some reason though it's impossible to avoid it anywhere you look or listen at the moment, I'm pretty chuffed that I didn't even think of politics.


Do you use lists to help when you're writing?


Written in response to Sarah Selecky writing prompt (30th Jan 2015)

Ugly words

Write a list of 10 words that you dislike for their ugliness 

I haven't been doing daily prompts for a while now, but liked the look of this one. Well actually I thought, I can't do that. I'm a word lover. Language is everything - when I write I have no plot and I struggle with dialogue. I need to be able to use EVERY word available. That's what I thought and sat down with a bit of I'll-show-you there's no such thing as ugly words.

1. Flux. Just arrived, straight away. Don't know why.
2. Khaki. But I like olive. Maybe the issue is more sound than sight.
3. Winningest. It's just wrong. I might be old-fashioned and a bit slow to take up new lingo but if it's good, I'm all for it. I was so excited about folktronica I had to share it. But this one? Unattractive. Unsightly. Disrespectful. For many reasons it is indeed Hideous.
4. Presenteeism. Yes, another new-ish addition that is a visual insult.
But enough of the new vernacular.
5. Stakeholder. My eyes well up when they see this. Of course, writing CVs for a living I do actually use it, a lot, but it hurts. And don't even get me started on "touch base" as an expression.
6. Experiential. I misspelt that when I typed it. Enough said. Actually misspelt isn't pretty either.
7. Fugitive. Don't think I like that "fug" is pronounced "fuge". Too trickster.
8. Umbrage. Can't remember ever using it.
9. Cutthroat. Doesn't look right as one word, and loses the impact of its meaning when it's rammed together.
10. Glut. Because they can't all be long words.

Well that was pretty easy. There's clearly a range of attributes that make a word ugly, to me, and I'm a little disheartened that I could keep going here. But I won't.

I'll restore my love of language with my favourite word. I remember reading it for the first time in a David Malouf novel. It must have been about 30 years ago, and I didn't know what it meant but I loved the sound of it, and when I looked it up in the dictionary, I knew it was the one. Indelible.

Dare I ask - do you have any ugly words? I'm starting to think that a good list will be valuable. Not as words to avoid, but a vault of expressions for the unlikeable characters in our stories.

Response to Sarah Selecky daily prompt - 24th July.

Day One - Barreiro

A few weeks ago I wrote about a fabulous week that fired me up to prepare a To Do list for the next week.

To be fair a lot of that was achieved, but some items have carried over for my stay in one of the First Impression apartments in Barreiro, Lisbon to focus on writing for a week.



Here I've set myself a fairly aggressive target. Oh hell, let's get it out there:

I want to get to 25k of short stories finished by Friday night. 

I haven't checked my spreadsheet to know how far away from that I am, but given that many of my pieces are 1k - 2.5k, and there's not that many of them I consider finished, it's safe to say that's a pretty challenging goal.

One of my daily breaks will be to post an update on here, writing, reading, random thoughts, the fabulous local wine. Who knows.

I didn't start yesterday but to catch you up the content would have included: travel day, 4.20am start, little brain space for anything other than wow, weather. wow, apartment. wow, a whole week here. wow, I'm very tired.

So here's how today went.

9am-ish

I woke up thinking I was on a beach. The sun through the glass had strength and I read in bed listening to the square below waking up. The sounds of unstacking chairs around tables, welcoming locals for coffee, families with grandchildren meeting up.

For my next Reading To Write class I need to write a scene where one of my characters wants something from another one. I'm surprised at what I wrote for that this morning. Perhaps I was influenced by 'In The Cut' by Susanna Moore that I started reading this morning.
Maybe it was the Sarah Selecky daily exercise I did early: Write five sentences by an author you admire over and over for at least 10 minutes. Mine, from 'In a Strange room' by Damon Galgut, were:

"Why is violence always so easy to imagine but tenderness stays locked in words for me…Maybe horror is felt more easily from home…If your own pain is interesting to you, how much more detached will you be from someone else's pain…He has the air of someone holding his breath…Committed to a situation of which the outcome is unknown, travel and love have this much in common."

After writing them twice I knew them word for word and felt a strange power as I repeated them without thinking of the words but of all the paths these ideas could take in their own story.

Lunchtime-ish

At 13:09 I took off my watch. Everything here will happen on body time.

Now

And now, almost time to turn on lights, I can reflect: I've done my "homework", a couple of writing prompt exercises, another draft of a story I've been working on for years, and wrote up my notes about a new one.



Soon I'm meeting the other two guests at the restaurant downstairs, and tomorrow I get to do it all over again.

Touched

Fruit for sale on the roadside in Surat Thani, the rows and rows rows and rows of black and white portraits in the Tol Sleng museum, rough floorboards underneath hammocks by the Mekong, paper serviette holders on the tables in Nha Trang, the drug dealers' ziplock pouches a quiet man in Jaiselmer slips our silver jewellery into.

The rockers of an empty chair on a front porch in Cuba.

Things that are dusty: teeth hair socks boots fingernails, hiking on the Australian Alps Walking Track until you get to the YHA in Thredbo three weeks later and wear your dirty thongs to the communal showers. You talk about the colour of the water going down the drain, about walls. There's no view like the wild brumbies as you bathe, no trangia to light, no billy to boil, no tent poles to click or spiders to keep out or sleeping and waking by the moon and the sun, climbing tree trunks that have collapsed across your path, banging your stick to get a long thick snake lazing in the sun's heavy heat to move out of your way. No more climbing a mountain to get a signal and check if anyone has left a warning message about the fires you can smell.

Almost city clean. Fresh clothes that were saved in a plastic bag at the bottom of your pack. A man behind a bar in an ironed shirt, two beers, two plates of fresh food, the noise of people ordering more drinks, talking about photos, weather, where they're going next. Talking about showers that aren't hot enough, steak that's undercooked, wine that's too dry, what they're children said today. Looking forward to the drive tomorrow.

And us. Creased and coloured despite the sunscreen we rubbed in with our filthy hands. Familiar aching in our lower backs, our calves, our thighs. Our toes wriggling in their freedom, knowing back in the room, beside our packs, the settled achievement of our boots' latest layer of dust.



Response to Sarah Selecky writing prompt to write a list titled: Things that are dusty.