Category: writing

The Blue Djinn’s Wish – reviewed!

On By leiossIn New story!, Review, writingLeave a comment

I had a really long day today. Up at 5 am to head off to Sydney for work; long day full of meetings; back on a plane at 6 p to fly home. Then, once the plane landed, we sat on the tarmac for ages waiting to taxi back to the airport. Fortunately, they let us turn our phones back on, so I jumped on FaceBook to while away the time.

And look what I saw!

Use Only As Directed

A link to a new review of Use Only As Directed by Melbourne writer and astrophysicist Tsana Dolichva; and look what she has to say about the antho and  my story!

There is a wide variety of stories contained within; every story sticks to the theme, but there are a lot of very different interpretations. I appreciate the lack of homogeneity and the novelty of getting something completely different each time I picked up the anthology.

My favourite stories were “The Blue Djinn’s Wish” by Leife Shallcross, “Future Perfect” by Janeen Webb and “Home Sick” by M Darusha Wehm.

She goes on to say of The Blue Djinn’s Wish

Easily the best genie story I’ve ever read. The princess who finds the magic bottle is happy and already has everything she could wish for, but will that last?

Now obviously this blog is where I blow my own trumpet, so to speak. But I’ve gotta say a big thank you to Tsana for taking the time to review UOAD and saying such lovely things about my story. I’m still kinda new at this, but the thrill of hearing that someone has enjoyed one of my stories is something I don’t think will ever get old.

Thanks, Tsana!

The fear of not being original

On By leiossIn community, ideas, inspiration, writing7 Comments

On Wednesday night, at the monthly Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild general meeting, we had a fascinating presentation from author Russell Kirkpatrick. I’m gonna say it was about story shape, because that’s what he said it was about. But that’s kind of like saying Lord of the Rings is about hobbits.*

Somehow Russell talked us through sculpting the shape of a story using an analysis of wave files from his extensive and eclectic music collection, with a particular focus on prog rock. I’ll just leave that there.

One thing that really jumped out at me, though, was a point he made at the very beginning of his talk. This was: don’t let the fear of not being original stop you writing your story. He illustrated this with clever 1 second grabs from three wildly different songs. This showed how a particular element that has current, on-trend appeal might get picked up and used, not just in different songs, but across a range of music genres, either because it is currently looping in the common creative consciousness, or, if you’re more cynical, to deliberately broaden the appeal of a song. Probably even both. And what’s more, they get resurrected, as samples, years later for new works, by new artists in new genres that didn’t exist back then.

This struck a chord with me (see what I did there?), because earlier that day I had been thinking about an online news headline I’d seen. This is it, complete with the pic that accompanied the story:

A curious Ohio boy who sneaked into an abandoned house over the weekend discovered a mummified corpse hanging inside a closet, unnoticed for nearly five years

A curious Ohio boy who sneaked into an abandoned house over the weekend discovered a mummified corpse hanging inside a closet, unnoticed for nearly five years.

You can see the appeal, can’t you? There is story there. Layers of it. I spent my entire ride, both to and from work yesterday, immersed in it.

Imagining the boy: a bundle of trepidation and curiosity, creeping through the dusty, creaking, damp-ridden dark; peering into empty rooms, lit only by murky shafts of light leaking through boarded-up windows. Seeing the cupboard, wondering if there was anything interesting inside…

Or thinking on the story behind the guy who died – a homeless man who had bought the house for cash after inheriting a sum of money from his mother. What was it about finally owning a place to live that drove him to such despair that he took his own life?

And that’s just based on what was in the news article. There are endless possibilities for making stuff up from there. What about the police officer who had to attend the property after the call from the boy’s mother? Did she see something off-kilter that lodged in her mind and had her waking up in the middle of the night months later, wondering about the verdict of suicide?

Or…is there something else entirely? Something lurking under the floorboards of the house, scuttling through the roof space. Something bitter and steeped in spite that talks to you in your sleep and leaches the peace from your waking hours. Or perhaps it is the house itself. What happened there that sank into the fabric of the peeling wallpaper? That spreads across the sagging ceilings like black mould, and taints the very air with a grief you breathe from the moment you step inside?

The scope is endless!

But, it’s hardly original, is it?

Despite the fact that this one actually happened, I reckon you could probably find a dozen crime novels built around the premise of “Curious Kid Discovers Body In Abandoned House” without trying too hard. And probably another dozen each of psychological thrillers, horror stories, kid’s adventures and paranormal romances to boot.

And you know what? They’ll all be different. Some will be great. There will be memorable characters, sadness that stays with you and killer twists. And some will be pretty ho hum.

But at the core of each of them is that same identical 26 word hook (or one-second sound grab). Because the potential for story here is just so immense.

So, yeah. Maybe there’s a thing in your story that’s not so original. Write it anyway. Make it good. If it’s good enough, it probably won’t matter that we’ve seen it before. We can just lose ourselves in it all over again. The frisson of familiarity might even be what makes it for us.

Madonna’s Express Yourself v Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, anyone?

 

*Russell is from New Zealand. I kind of had to mention hobbits.

Parsley tongue

On By leiossIn castle-in-the-air, inspiration, words, writing, writing goalsLeave a comment

So today I went to add “parsley” to the shopping list on my phone, and autocorrect (or “Auto Percy” as it apparently likes to be called – another autocorrect, um, correction) changed it to “parseltongue”.

So now I have another castle-in-the-air writing goal: to one day have one of my made up words enter popular usage to the point where it is added to a mobile phone autocorrect (sorry, Auto Percy) dictionary.

Parsley
Image courtesy of Simon Howden/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Unpicking the seems

On By leiossIn editing, mechanics, novels, polishing, writingLeave a comment

260 pages in to a final polish edit before sending novel project #1 out into the big wide world, and I have already removed 63 instances of variations of the word “seems”. Seemingly, I seem to use it a lot, it seems.

Ugh, the shame.

*Update: from 552 pages & 118,000 words, I deleted 152 instances of variations of the word ‘seems’. I had no idea. An example, if ever there was one, of the value of beta readers. Thank you Jane Ainslie.

Gems of wisdom from the Conflux Writers Day 2014

On By leiossIn writingLeave a comment

On Saturday I attended the inaugural Conflux Writers Day, a professional development day targeted at spec fic writers leading up to the Aurealis Awards ceremony that evening. It was such an overwhelming overload of amazing information, I had to go into my writer’s cave for a while to think about it all.

The lineup of panellists was outstanding, and the plenary speakers particularly so. I took some gem of knowledge away from every session I attended, whether it was a new revelation, or a different perspective on an old truth. Here’s a selection of my faves:

Joanne Anderton (on creating stories from weird ideas): What if…? So what…? Rinse. Repeat.

Kaaron Warren: Inspiration is an indulgence. Your first spark is your inspiration. The rest is hard work.

Kaaron Warren: Time to write and inspiration – don’t wait for them. Write anyway.

Laura E Goodin (on performance writing): Your job is to suggest, not to portray. Your words are only a scaffold for the genius of others.

Cat Sparks: Write about what you want to know.

Cat Sparks: Most stories are boring rather than bad.

Russell Kirkpatrick: The world you build must be relevant to the characters and the story.

Kaaron Warren: Your head is your special place.

And that last from a multi-award winning horror writer…

9837-Conflux-writers_blk-1024x530

Success! I think… Oh God..

On By leiossIn short stories, stories, writingLeave a comment

23 Goats Who Cannot Believe They're Really Goats

This is me, yesterday, after receiving an email about a short story I subbed a few weeks ago. I didn’t respond to the email straight away, because I knew I’d say something breathless and idiotic and completely unprofessional. Instead, I went out and bought a bottle of something with bubbles, because this would be my first sale outside the token market.

When I got home, I checked out the website for the publication and saw the names of some of the other contributors. There were names on that list I recognised. I have their books on my shelves. They’ve won serious awards. I spent about 2 seconds completely flipping out.

Then came the crash. Do they really want my story? I re-checked the email. Yep. The phrase ‘loved it’ appears three times. Really?  Instead of going back into happy baby goat mode, my traitor brain started throwing up scenarios where the editors ask for changes and I completely fail to come up with the goods, instead becoming mired in an inescapable swamp of trite cliches and substandard prose. Or where they re-read it in the sober light of day and realise, actually, just…no. Instead of feeling empowered and validated, I started picturing myself as a wide-eyed, amateurish wannabe, lost in a wilderness of unrealistic expectations and about to walk unsuspectingly over the precipice of crushing disappointment.

And I think that’s the thing. The disappointment of a standard rejection letter is one thing to deal with. Every writer pretty much steels themselves for that each and every time they send out a story or a query letter. But to be rejected from something like this opportunity, after having success dangled so tantalisingly in front of me… That would be disappointment levelled up some.

We’re writers. We have big imaginations. We gird our loins against rejection, but we can’t help ourselves imagining the success. I saw the names on the contributors list, and for a small, flashing moment, I saw my name in a TOC alongside them. Then my imagination did a total reverse, and started constructing a scenario where I wind up looking at an email saying “We appreciate all your effort, but we’ve decided it’s not going to work out.” After I’ve invested all this energy imagining that awesome TOC.

So I’m giving myself a stern pep-talk. They loved my story. That’s a good thing. They want it for this project, alongside a bunch of certified, genuine, awesome authors. They think it will stand up OK against their work. That’s a good  thing. And if, for some reason, it doesn’t work out? That’s actually OK too, because I will still have a solid story I can sub elsewhere. And let’s face it, when I subbed this one, I’d pretty much set my top expectation (wild imaginings aside) at maybe a nice rejection saying, “Not this time, but we’d like to see more.”

Deep breath. I can do this. Time to release my inner super-happy baby goat.

Making up words

On By leiossIn creative process, inspiration, what not to do, words, writing2 Comments
Want made up words? Lewis Carroll got made up words!
Want made up words? Lewis Carroll got made up words!

In 2011, when I decided to ‘get serious’ about my writing, one of the first things I did was book myself into a Year of the Novel course with the very knowledgeable and generous Craig Cormick, through the ACT Writers Centre. One of the very first exercises he got us to do, was describe our favourite kitchen appliance in one sentence, without mentioning what it is. I came up with:

When it’s packed, the mess is gone, and I can go and write.

(Can you guess?) Then, of course, we had to condense it down to one word. One word? The man is crazy, I thought. Then he uttered the magic phrase… “If there isn’t a word, you can make one up.” (Or something like that.) Awesome. It came to me almost straight away.

Squared-awayness.

Now, I could have gone with ‘neat’ or ‘clean’ or something like that . But none of those words conveyed the sense of satisfaction I have at achieving a kitchen that doesn’t have dirty plates and used saucepans scattered over every surface. For some reason, if my kitchen is messy, I feel like my mind is cluttered. Words like ‘tidy’ give you a sense of the end product, but they don’t describe the journey. My word conveys (to me, anyway) a sense of my active participation in achieving that state. And there’s the rub.

If you’re going to go making up words, you run the risk of creating something that’s meaningless to other people.

Words like ‘squared-awayness’ probably don’t carry that kind of risk, because I’ve picked something that already carries meaning and just levered it into a grammatical convention that makes it one word instead of two. But, especially if you write speculative fiction like me, which often involves making up worlds and cultures, you might want to make up new words, just coz they sound cool, or there isn’t quite the right word to convey what you want. In this case, you’re going to have to rely heavily on context to get across your meaning, or you can leverage off existing words that sound similar. ‘Frack’ as a pseudo-swear word is a good example of this, although thanks to the Australian coal-seam gas mining industry, that word now has a boring and slightly depressing, well-understood technical meaning.

So there’s your second risk. You might end up with a word that means something different to other people, to what it means to you. Here’s a couple of examples from one of my works in progress. This has a late-medieval-ish setting and a lot of the characters are peasants, or common household or forest-dwelling fairies loosely based on various bits of British folklore. I’ve tried to create a kind of vernacular for the story to give it a certain feel. But, here are two of the inadvertent missteps I’ve made along the way.

Lumpen

What I meant: a variant of lumpy, but with a more colloquial sound to it.

What it actually means:  (according to Dictionary.com) of or pertaining to disenfranchised and uprooted individuals or groups, especially those that have lost status. It can also mean stupid or unthinking (how’s that for irony?) and comes from the German word for vagabond.

Welkin

What I meant: something daft or stupid. I totally made this up. I just liked the sound. I think I derived it from whelk, which is a hilarious-sounding shellfish. (I don’t think you get whelks in forests, though.)

What it actually means: the sky. From the Old English welcn and related to the German word Wolke, which means cloud. Who knew?

Well, one of my sharp-eyed, German-speaking beta readers, that’s who.

Obviously, I should have done a bit more due-diligence. I remember reading about J K Rowling Googling the term ‘Horcrux’ when writing the 6th Harry Potter book.  (Now there’s a woman who’s great with made-up words.) She says she was so relieved to find no Google matches on it at the time, because she really liked the word and desperately wanted to use it. (Try Googling it now!)

So the moral of this story is: be creative! Make words up. But you might want to double check to make sure you’re using something that, well, means what you think it means.