Jerry Jarvis' Wig

A Musical Recipe by Erik Satie (1866 - 1925)

2008-09-03T21:40:00.003+09:30

Cefalophones

2 flutes with keys (F sharp)
1 alto overcoat (C)
1 duckbill (E)
2 stroke clarinets (G flat)
1 siphon in C
3 keyboard trombones (D flat)
1 bass in leather (C)
Chromatic tub in H

Instruments belonging to the remarkable group cefalophones, with 30 octaves extent, completely unperformable. An amateur in Vienna tried in 1875 to handle the siphone in C; after having jared with a piercing drill, the instrument burst, broke the spine on the executor and scalped him completely. Since then no one has dared to concern oneself with the powerful assets that cefalophones contain and the state has forbidden all schools teaching the instruments.

Remix Live!

2008-08-25T14:44:00.003+09:30

For the last few months, Wigger Lee Battersby (he's the Red Wigger) has been involved in the Remix My Lit project, where authors of the calibre of Kim Wilkins and Cate Kennedy have made available works to be recut and posted by members of the public. The Remix My Lit project climaxes in August with a live remixing event as part of the Festival of Melbourne.

Guests at the festival have been invited to bring their laptop or mobile phone and be part of a live multimedia remix event at Federation Square, where they can freely remix your work.

Remixers will find copies of the stories on the day or can access them in advance at the Remix My Lit Website - they can re-imagine and remix them - and then send the remixed short story to a mobile phone number. Using the Fed Sq SMS TV system the RML team will be publishing this flash fiction on the big screen at Federation Square as part of a live A/V set by ".M."

Readings of the stories have also been recorded by .M. and will be incorporated into her set, including video images inspired by the original stories.

All works created on the day will be posted to the Remix My Lit website and considered for publication in an accompanying print anthology.

If you are going to be in Melbourne for the festival we would love to see you at the event:

Date: Saturday 30 August 2008
Time: 3.30pm - 4.30pm
Venue: Federation Square - The Big Screen in the Plaza

For more info visit the official MWF program:
http://www.mwf.com.au/2008/content/mwf_2008_events.asp?name=3099

The Art of the Double Suck-in

2008-08-22T19:30:00.003+09:30

Paul Haines hit Geoffrey Maloney the other day with an email that made him realise that he might be falling into a pattern of not just telling silly stories for creative purposes, but telling silly old fart stories to anybody who will listen. The Art of the Double Suck-in is one of those stories:

Paul, your email reminds me of practical jokes we used to play at high school generally known as the "suck in" -- basically trying to convince someone of something that wasn't true, and once convinced the cry of "sucked in" would ring loud in the air. The height of this art was reached with the "double suck in" -- a very difficult thing to do. It involved the original victim of the suck-in (would it be suck-in-ee ?) turning the tables by adding additional information which lead to the suck-in-or believing that their lie was an actual truth at which the cry "Double suck-in" would go up. Sometimes this involved very subtle nuances and relied a lot on the personalities of the people involved to pull it off. Here's an obvious example complete with usual schoolboy obsessions.

The suck-in

Randy schoolboy 1:"Hey, guess what Mr Hardcox got caught by the headmaster rooting Miss Truelove in the sports storeroom."

Randy schoolboy 2: "Shit, man, I would never have guessed. He's such a creep and she's so fucking cute."

Randy schoolboy 1: "Sucked-in!"

The double suck-in:

Randy schoolboy 1: "Hey, guess what Mr Hardcox got caught by the headmaster rooting Miss Truelove in the sports storeroom."

Randy schoolboy 2: "Man, I knew they were gonna get caught one day. I saw them going at it after school last Tuesday, down behind the toilet block. It was disgusting. He's such a creep and she's so fucking cute."

Randy schoolboy 1: "You really saw them?"

Randy schoolboy 2: "Going at it like a couple of dogs."

Randy schoolboy 1: "Shit, wish I'd been there."

Randy schoolboy 2: "Sucked-in!"

As you can see a double suck-in is a far more complex play. It takes imagination, a quick brain and good verbal skills:) Whereas the single suck-in could be set-up well in advance even by the slow-witted. There is no record of a triple suck-in ever having succeeded.

Six Silly Stories

2008-08-22T18:56:00.003+09:30

"Six Silly Stories", an absurd collection of fantastical stories by Geoffrey Maloney and artwork by Diana Maloney, is shortly to be released from Elastic Press in the UK. Here's the author shot that Diana carefully constructed.

Australian Story - She's Not There

2008-07-14T20:27:00.003+09:30

I've been trying to get this published on the ABC site tonight but The Moderator appears to have difficulty in releasing it. I may have used the wrong words, but I suspect that I took the wrong angle that the ABC wanted me to take. So I'm realeasing it here. It won't make any sense unless you saw their god awful show.

What a tragic tale of bitchiness. How incredibly ugly it was to see those woman moaning about about their team who collapsed during the games and not one word of sympathy or empathy for what must have happened to their rowing partner during that horrible day. What horrible horrible people they are and they still can't get over and still don't care. Congratulations I guess to the ABC for getting these women to talk, but it would have been better if we didn't know about about them. Ugly, ugly people who are justifying themselves on the basis that win at all costs counts more than anything else.

Their joy at the end about Sally not making it to the Beijing olympics was simply disgusting.

Sam's Town - The Killers

2008-07-13T19:32:00.002+09:30

The Killers with their very first album burst onto the scene with iconclastic rock and pop. The very best of the Brit and US rock at the time. Great songs, great voice and a wonderful production.

I've spent the close to the last 12 months trying to make sense out of their second CD. But the production is now totally all pumped up guitars, the voice is lost and because of that that stories the songs might have told as well. The production is awful.

And there you have The Killers on the back of the album - a full on B&W photograph of these guys, dressed in black and wearing beards. Like they will be the American icons. Somebody got them and captured them and they went with it. Sad. It turned their specks of gold to specks of shit.

2008-07-01T11:37:00.000+09:30

GEORGE CARLIN

Goddamn, it’s been a year for losing genius’. Now George Carlin is dead, aged 71. Truth be told, he was never going to outlive George Burns, not with his lifestyle, but still, he was arguably one of the best three or four stand up comedians of the 20th century, and his passing represents a real loss to anybody who appreciates hard-bitten, precise observation. His wasn’t the fluffy nothingness of a Jerry Seinfeld, or the cozy reinforcement of a Tim Allen or Jeff Foxworthy. Carlin trod the same path as the likes of Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, and Billy Connolly, challenging the perceptions of his audiences and the structural status quo of the culture around him. He was, by turns, savage, acerbic, loving, and radio-friendly, and yet managed to maintain his rage and sense of damnation through forty years and something like 20-odd albums. And he transcended age: my boys knew him from his appearances in movies like Dogma, Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, and the Bill & Ted movies, and now they want to know more, to hear what he was all about.

I don’t own enough of his work: my predilection for collecting comedy albums on the original vinyl is shown up by Perth’s distance from anywhere meaningful for such endeavours. But what I have is brilliant indeed, and among my list of stuff to be rescued from house fires.

If you’ve not experienced his work before, there are lists of quotes all about. Here’s a couple for starters: here and here

On Chesil Beach

2008-06-30T21:33:00.002+09:30

Ian McEwan, the greatest novelist in the English language of all time? I suspect so. In terms of history McEwan's work will be remember. As he spans two centuries he might be be up for grabs in either one. Who knows?

Everything McEwan has written up to now has been brilliant. We might quibble about "Amsterdam" being a more minor work even though it won the Booker, but it was exceptionally clever. Certainly "Child in Time", "Enduring Love" and "Atonement" are all monumental works, spectacular in their pacing structure and far beyond, in terms of literary merit, than "Amsterdam" could ever aspire too. "Black Dogs" is a favourite of many.

So "On Chesil Beach" : As with most McEwan novels it's painful to read. This is what makes his work a delight and horror at the same time. He captures people in their most vulnerable moments like no one else. This he does wonderfully time and time again.

No plot synopsis with this one; you can get that anywhere on the internet. I'm more interested in character and structure with this book, and pacing too and it fails on all three.

Firstly the characters are rather boring. They didn't give McEwan enough space to work with. They were far too tight and British. This was exactly what he wanted but still his characters weren't working for him. As a result, he couldn't get his pacing to work, and then there was no real structure to the story that was worth mentioning.

The ending is tragic of course. It would not be a McEwan novel if it wasn't. But the greatest tragedy was the irresponsible and lazy ending where paragraph by paragraph he counts down the years of his main character. At age forty, Edward was like this. At age fifty he was like this. At age sixty he was like this. A great big fucking yawn.

The whole thing appears like it should have been a much longer work in the making. Lives that could have been traced out in much more detail. But he didn't do it. Couldn't do it with the characters he chose, I suspect. They were deadly boring from the start and had no more to tell.

That said it is an incredibly tragic love story, and a very tragic novel because he never really finished it. The ending was rushed and totally unexpected for McEwan's work.

Even more strangely he adds at the end "The characters in this novel are inventions and bear no resemblance to people who are living or dead."

Now I could add that to every single story I have ever written. Why would someone like McEwan bother unless the story was true.

In which case we might ask what he is doing with this book. Because I don't know. Here is the best writer in the English language with a huge unfinished mess on his hands and he handed it over to be published. What he was thinking? What the fuck was he doing?

Ian McEwan is a great novelist. If you have never read his writing before read "Child in Time" first or his wonderful short stories "Between the Sheets" then "Enduring Love". Then read "Atonment" suffer it's first forty pages of too much Englishness and weep for the next 200 pages. It's that good. "On Chesil Beach" is an exercise in writing by comparison.

2008-06-11T10:40:00.001+09:30

TO LEE BATTERSBY, THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNPUBLISHED 18 YEAR OLD, BEST WISHES AND GOOD LUCK, ALGIS BUDRYS

Back in 1989, I did a couple of things in quick succession: read Algis Budrys’ novel Michaelmas and discovered the Writers Of The Future contest, which Budrys was co-ordinating. In those pre-net days (how did we ever survive?) you had to write in to get details of the competition. So I did- a gushing half-query, half-fan letter in which I signed myself off as ‘the world’s greatest unpublished 18 year old’.

Shaddup. I was young, okay?

In due course, back came the guidelines sheet. But also: a copy of the latest Writers Of The Future anthology, with an inscription inside— the title of this post.

Was I inspired? I had a story in the mail within a fortnight. It didn’t win, it didn’t even place. But the fuse was lit. Over the next 19 years I’ve written and performed stand-up comedy and one-act plays; published poetry, cartoons, reviews, interviews and short stories; completed my first novel; written a feature film and a TV series pitch; and on and on and so forth. The whole of my bibliography, set into motion by an act of kindness.

In 2001, after several years away doing other things, I entered the Writers of the Future competition for the second time, and became the first Western Australian to win. In August of 2002, I flew to LA as part of my prize, where I was going to be able to meet Budrys and tell him, face to face, what he’d inspired in me. To make things even better, before I flew out, I sold and saw published a reworked version of that story I’d originally written back in 89 (there’s a hint, kids. Never throw anything out….). It’s still archived: you can read it here. Sadly, Budrys fell ill, and so we never met, but I was able to tell the story, and have it relayed to him.

Last night, as reported over at Ed Gorman’s blog amongst others, Algis Budrys died of cancer, aged 77. We never did get to meet, but he was, and always will be, a central figure in my karass. He was a writer of important works: Michaelmas is a major SF novel and unarguably one of the major precursors of cyberpunk, and Who? is an astonishingly humanist reworking of the cold war/spy thriller. But more than that—he was an inspirational and kindly figure who will be remembered by a generation of writers for the hand he held out to them along the way.

Vale.

2008-05-02T15:31:00.000+09:30

FRANK WOODLEY: POSSESSED (A REVIEW OF SORTS)

When Luscious and I were in Adelaide recently, we had the fabulous opportunity to get out and catch some theatre, something we'd been unable to do for far too long. Frank Woodley's new solo show Possessed was on, and I was keen, but Lyn professed to being not a great fan of Lano & Woodley, so we passed. Instead, we bought tickets to a show that was cancelled ten minutes before we were due to take our seats when a crew member electrocuted themselves and blew out every fuse in the hotel where the show was being staged. So it goes.

Tuesday night, thanks to the miracles of teen babysitter and free tickets from my work's social club, we got a second chance. And this time, we went.

Woodley's always been a fantastic performer, combining an amazing physical elasticity with a talent for drawing pathos and sympathy from an audience with subtle changes in stance. And yet, and yet....

Possessed is the story of Louie, a lonely borderline agarophobe who spends his days collecting sailing ship memorabilia and building model ships to hang around his tiny basement apartment. When he is possessed by the ghost of Phoebe O'Leary, an Irish girl who drowned whilst stowing away on the ship whose model he is currently building, it leads them both to question their relationship, their choices, and whether to stay locked up within their own personal purgatories or take the chance on actions that may liberate or damn them.And much like the Jim Carrey movie The Cable Guy, what could (should?) have been a startlingly good example of one type of story (in the case of the movie, a black comedy. In the case of the play, a heartbreaking and ultimately sweet and hopeful love story) is cut off at the knees by the need to insert 'signature' aspects of the main performers style of comedy. Put more bluntly, there was far too much falling down stairs and not enough character in this one-person tour de force for it to be successful.

Don't get me wrong: Woodley still is, and will remain for some time, a masterful physical performer. But he's not so capable of character acting that I ever quite believed in his ability to transform from male to female mannerisms. His turns as Phoebe feel like just that: comic turns, a chance to mince and flap in a burlesque manner, rather than the assumption of a true alter ego. And, ultimately, the story of Phoebe's fate, and the journey she must take, are so well written and genuinely sad that they outweigh the bulk of the performace: Woodley's stock-in-trade physical buffoonery as the cross-lobed Louie is at odds with the tragedy that unfolds behind him.

The end result is neither wholly one thing or another, and left me wondering what the play could have been if performed by a genuine character actor, played straight, or at least, with a greater balance between the sadness and a gentler form of melancholy humour.

2008-05-01T15:58:00.002+09:30

BECAUSE YOU REALLY WANT TO ENTER THIS

The Katharine Susannah Prichard Speculative Fiction Awards 2008

Closing date: 5pm Friday May 30, 2008
Words: Minimum 1500, maximum 3500.

All forms of Speculative Fiction welcome.

2 Sections:
OPEN and the
Shire of Mundaring National Young Writers Awards (20 years and under)

PRIZES

OPEN: First $200 Second $50
Young Writers Awards: First $75 Second $25
Highly Commended and Commended Certificates will also be awarded.

Awards announced and presented at KSP Writers’ Centre, Sun August 17, 2008.
No entry form required

CONDITIONS OF ENTRY

1. Entry fees: Open - $7.50 per story, to be paid by cheque or money order only Young Writers Awards – no entry fee

2. Work to be original, unpublished, not received an award in another competition and not under consideration elsewhere from the time of entry in these awards until the official announcement of winners.

3. Limit of three stories per author. Individual stories cannot be entered in more than one section

4. Entries to be typewritten, double-spaced on one side only of A4 white paper, with pages numbered, a wide left-hand margin, and story title on each page. A good photocopy is acceptable. Post in an A4 size envelope.

5. To ensure anonymity NO WRITERS’ NAMES TO APPEAR ON MANUSCRIPT (MS). Please attach a COVER SHEET with name of story, word count, section entered, and age if Young Writer

6. On a SEPARATE SHEET please attach form below

7. MSs will only be returned if adequately stamped self-addressed envelope (SSAE) of sufficient size is included. Other manuscripts will be destroyed after the competition, so keep a copy of your work.

8. Include a business-sized SSAE if you would like only a results sheet

9. Award winners will be notified by phone or mail prior to announcement, when those able to attend will be invited to read excerpts from their stories

10. Members of the KSP Foundation Management Committee are not allowed to enter

11. The judges’ decisions are final, and no correspondence will be entered into

12. The KSP Foundation Inc. reserves the right to publish the winning entry or entries in a publication related to KSP should the opportunity occur, in consultation with the author

Send entries to:
KSP Speculative Fiction Awards
11 Old York Road
GREENMOUNT WA 6056

Entries which do not reflect the stated conditions, or are postmarked later than 5pm May 30, may be disqualified without notice and the fee/s forfeited.

So get on your bikes!

Pictures at an Exhibition

2008-03-15T17:39:00.011+09:30

Last night The Kiln at Paddington (Brisbane) held its opening night for its "Wonderland: Inspired by childhood" exhibition. Someone by the name of Diana who is very close to my heart had six of her latest major paintings hanging on the walls. Kind of awesome really, even though I'm biased. Now that really is a beehive hairdo. And I get to see them in creation as the blank canvas emerges into something wonderful. Layers and layers of paint in the hands of an artist become things of weird beauty.

Barren Worlds

2008-03-12T20:00:00.003+09:30

Eric Reynolds has announced the table of contents for the Barren Worlds anthology. It's a biggie:

Drew Arrants "Man Alone"
Adele Cosgrove-Bray "Project"
Geraint D'Arcy "The Sound of Sun Rising"
Lawrence R. Dagstine "Living Amongst the Lizards"
Tristan Davenport "Elysium"
Graham Fielding "Rats"
Ginny Gilroy "The Secret Life of Jane Gray"
C.E. Grayson "This Abandoned Sky"
Rob Haines "He Would Have Given Them Wings"
Jasmine Hammer "Cleveland"
Erin Hartshorn "Winterset"
Martin Hayes "Something Out of Nothing"
Geoffrey Maloney "The Secret Life of Mars"
Mary Ellen Martin "Tiger’s Eye View"
Tracie McBride "After The Storm"
Ken McConnell "Ocherva"
Kevin James Miller "A Small Show on Double Gamma 3"
Shane Nelson "Alone On This Chance Planet"
Michael H. Obilade "Fallout"
Sue Penkivech "Saying Goodbye"
Shauna Roberts "Elessa the Restless"
Lawrence M. Schoen "Gift Time"
Ted Stetson "Blue Dome of Sky"
Gene Stewart "Bad People"
David Tallerman "Allotment"
Andrew Tisbert "Candhiga’s Corpse and the Birds at the Edge of the Sea"
Geoffrey Thorne "Antiope in Black"
William Blake Vogel III "Otsego Undead" Christopher Woods "Moon and Bones and Birds"

Further details here: http://www.hadleyrillebooks.com/

Eric has been one of those dream-to -die-for editors to work with. Keeps all the writers informed of where things are up to all of the time, sends cover options out for comment, and gives you a publication schedule. And pays prior to publication.

Eric, it's been an absolute pleasure. I'm really looking forward to the anthology coming out.

Check out Eric's live journal here: http://ericreynolds.livejournal.com/

Four Corners of Japan

2008-01-15T18:21:00.001+09:30

Fellow writer and Brisbanite, Chris Lynch (one of the many stars of The Devil in Brisbane) is in Japan preparing for a most wondrous, exciting and feel-good 2008. Envy, envy, envy. A few of us received this email from him last night.

"Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu: Happy New Year from the Land of theRising Sun. I hope you're well, and finding time for the important things in life.

As many of you know, I'm walking the length of Japan this year, some3300km over six months. I'm walking South-North, starting in March in the tiny jungle isle of Iriomote-jima, where I'll be trying to spot the elusive yamaneko, or Iriomote Wildcat. My friend Ian is walking East-West, starting in the four-metre spring snows of remote Hokkaido,where he'll be trying to stay alive. We're meeting somewhere in the middle of Honshu - hopefully near a bar.

We're both writing about our adventures on our expedition website: Four Corners of Japan.

I've been looking forward to 2008 for three years now. It's been said that I never get excited, but I'm excited about this - and slightly intimidated. Hopefully the inevitable disasters that befall us along the way will make for good reading - though personally I'll be happy if I never write about pressing the red button on my satellite distress beacon.

To help convince ourselves we're not completely crazy, we're raising money for the Fred Hollows Foundation. FHF eradicates preventable blindness in the developing world, as well as among indigenous Australians. As far as"practical reconciliation" goes, you can't get more practical than helping someone see.

So, if you enjoy reading about my adventures, please consider restoring the sight of another reader by making a donation. Twenty five dollars (or about $0.008 for every kilometre we walk), will pay for a 20 minute operation to restore the sight of one person, but even a few dollars will ease the pain of the daily 25km slog. Donating is easy - see how at fourcornersofjapan.net/donate/.

Feel free to forward this email. Also, if you know someone we should meet along the way, or if there's an interesting festival or place in Japan you've always wanted to visit, let me know and we'll see if we can add a stop to the list. And, of course, you're more than welcome to track me down in Japan and share a 100km or two...The world is small, and big.

Have a good 2008, and keep working away on those dreams.

Ja ne, ~Chris

Sci Phi Journal

2007-12-31T11:41:00.000+09:30

Sci Phi is a new journal aimed at readers who like science fiction but want to think about its implications a little more.

Each issue of Sci Phi will contain short stories and articles which look at various philosophical ideas through the lens of science fiction.

Issue #1 contains stories and articles by Matt Wallace, Paul S. Jenkins, Lee Battersby, Jason Pomerantz, Geoffrey Maloney, Michael Spence, Stephen Dedman, Ben Goertzel and Stephan Vladimir Bugaj, Ryan Nichols, and Jason Rennie.

Each issue comes in various ebook formats, as well as all of the stories and articles in mp3 format for your listening pleasure.

Cost is $7 per issue, available from http://sciphijournal.com/

Lee Battersby's story, "You Pretty Thing" deals with brain/body transplants, immortality, and what it might take to prove it's still you in the future. My own "The Oracle in The Red Limousine" considers issues of fate and whether knowledge of the future can help you avoid it.

Enchanted - No Spoilers (as they say)

2007-12-24T20:48:00.000+09:30

I wasn't expecting much out of this movie. I'd heard it was a story about a princess who turns up in New York and tries to convince everybody she is a princess, but my three daughters were keen on seeing it and it seemed a great way to entertain them on Christmas eve. So we booked into the very first screening in Brisbane at 6:15 tonight.

It's been a long time since I've sat in an audience where everybody has laughed so much, including myself. It's funny, it really is, and funny in a way that's not about set piece jokes. As with all good writing, the laughs come out of the interaction of the characters, and the marvellous juxtaposition that's created.

It's a Disney movie and it 's Disney sending itself up, pulling everything out of the closet and playing it for laughs. It starts off as an absolutely charming Disney cartoon. Pure animation in that traditional gushy Disney style. Almost a direct steal from Cindarella and Sleeping Beauty. But the evil cartoon Queen decides to get rid of the wonderfully happy cartoon Giselle, the would-be princess, by sending her down a wormhole to New York city, where she becomes a flesh and blood person.

And this is where the real fun starts. We have a Disney cartoon princess suddenly made real but only equipped with the emotions and knowledge that a Disney cartoon princess would have.

In true post-modern fashion all the cliches are pulled out of all the fairy tale books and put back together in a totally mashed-up fashion. But the fact that it ends in a totally traditional Disney way shouldn't surprise anyone. It is, after all, what the movie is all about. Disney re-doing Disney, and being very clever about it. The writers who worked on this movie did a great job.

Amy Adams who plays Giselle, and who I'd never heard off before, is amazing. Straight comedy is one of the most difficult things to do, in my book, and she does it brilliantly. There's quite a bit of singing and dancing as well, and those moments are hilarious or simply great fun, depending on your take on the whole thing.

Merry Christmas to all the JJ Wiggers, and to all of you who bother to read this blog occasionally. Looking forward to 2008 and a speedy recovery for our friend and colleague, Paul.

The Lost Bronte Brother

2007-11-21T19:14:00.000+09:30

Lee Battersby, quite correctly, asked me how I managed to forget about Peter Bronte when I posted the death stats for the Bronte family.

In my defence all I can say is I was identifying too much with the rest of the Brontes. No one knows much about Peter except he left his family before they become famous. Here's how the story goes.

Peter was the eldest of the Bronte children. He was seven years old when he ran away from home, leaving a poem that describe the life of tedious boredom he anticipated. He signed on as a cabin boy on the British merchant ship, Loyal Wolf, and was later kidnapped by pirates in the Caribbean. It is said that after many years of rum, sodomy and the lash, he became the fearsome pirate known as Pegleg Pete, who would treat his men to his poetry when the sails had failed in the doldrums. He lived to 84 and died in the arms of a whore. Well, at least, that's the epitaph on his gravestone in Jamaica.

The Bronte family, even the Byronesque Branwell, denied there was an elder brother. Such was the shame of having a pirate in the family in those days.

The Brontes

2007-11-20T21:02:00.001+09:30

We'll we all know about the Bronte kids. Charolotte wrote "Jayne Ayre", Emily wrote "Wuthering Heights" and Anne wrote "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall". And Branwell was something of a poet and a painter who appears to have spent most of his time just being Branwell, and living his life as a tragic Byronesque character, although I'm sure he had no intention of doing that. That was the sum and total of the amazing Bronte kids as far as I was concerned, but there were two others: Maria and Elizabeth, who never got a chance to reach an age where they could write. Did we lose two important books with their deaths? Perhaps, but they all died young. Here's the stats:

Maria, born 1814, died 1825, of TB -- age 11
Elizabeth, born 1815, died 1825, of TB -- age 10
Charlotte, born 1816, died 1855, of TB -- age 39
Branwell, born 1817, died 1848, of TB -- age 31
Emily, born 1818, died 1848, of TB -- age 30
Anne, born 1820, died 1849, of TB -- age 29

There's a couple of trends here, isn't there? TB was virulent back in those days but to have taken out every kid in the family, all at relatively young ages, suggests, I guess, that the Bronte kids were more than usally susceptible to it. Bad genes? Maybe. But it's also clear from these stats that Mum Bronte pumped out six kids in seven years. What happened to her?

Maria Branwell who was the Bronte kids' mum was born in 1785. She died at age 38 in 1821, the year after Anne was born. Some say it was TB, others that it was uterine cancer. At the time the Bronte kids' mum died:

Maria was 7 years old
Elizabeth was 6
Charlotte was 5
Branwell was 4
Emily was 3, and
Anne was 1 year old.

It's tragic any which way you look at it. It seems to mean something, but what that something is I have no idea. Maybe it explains why Charlotte and Branwell retreated into an inner world and created a fantasy kingdom to rival the one created by Emily and Anne as children. But does it also explain why Charlotte, Emily and Anne grew up to be significent literary figures despite their short lifespans? I wish I knew.

Publishing Update

2007-11-09T10:11:00.000+09:30

About time we let people know what the writers here have been up to this year. Here's the recent stories that are out from the Wig's writers:

Lyn Battersby, The Memory of Breathing, ASIM Best of Horror
Lyn Battersby, Born of Woman, Daikaiju 3
Lee Battersby, Father Muerte and the Joy of Warfare, Aurealis 37
Lee Battersby, Father Muerte and the Flesh, Year's Best Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy
Lee Battersby, The Hobbyist, ASIM Best of Horror
Lee Battersby, Through the Window Merilee Dances, ASIM Best of Fantasy
Lee Battersby, Eight for Working (poem), ASIM Best of Fantasy
Lee Battersby, Murderworld, ASIM Best of Science Fiction
Lee Battersby, Beached, Daikaiju 3
Paul Haines, Inducing, Orb 7
Paul Haines, Where is Brisbane? Fantastical Journeys to Brisbane
Paul Haines, Hamlyn, ASIM Best of Horror
Geoffrey Maloney, When the World is Flat, Year's Best Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy
Geoffrey Maloney, P for Power Station, Fantastic Wonder Stories
Geoffrey Maloney, Blonde on Blonde (An American Fable), Albedo One
Geoffrey Maloney, The Catherine Wheel, New Writings in the Fantastic

In the next few days I'll post a list of what's on the horizon for each of us.

Green-Keeping

2007-11-06T18:06:00.000+09:30

Samuel was floating in the sky, his eyes staring at the roof of his house. It was a beautiful Sunday morning. He had been out mowing the lawn, thinking how much he liked the smell of fresh cut grass when everything went black. When he came to he found himself a good fifty feet up in the sky.

He had heard about the Rapture from religious tracts that were dropped in his letterbox. Alien abduction he knew about from countless TV shows, and out-of-the-body experiences he had read about in a magazine in an idle moment. But none of these things were happening: he had not continued to rise up into the sky until he had reached some heavenly abode -- certainly there were no angels hovering by his side. Nor were there any whirring sounds or bright shiny objects to suggest that an alien space craft was within his vicinity, and he could not see his body lying next to the lawnmower on the neatly cut grass beneath him.

After some experimentation, he found that he could move his neck slightly to gain a view into his neighbour's yard. She too was floating in the sky and he took strange comfort in this; he was not alone. The thought struck him that this had happened to everyone, that right now, across the face of the whole planet, billions of people were hovering in the sky just as he was. It was an absurd idea, he thought reassuringly, somebody will come to rescue us. But as the day dwindled and the long shadows of the afternoon crept over the back yard, a sudden rescue seemed increasingly unlikely.

When the stars fired their light into the night sky, a natural calmness descended upon him, as if the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders. It was a seductive feeling, a wonderful feeling and he felt that he had nothing to complain about, nothing to worry about. He almost felt excited about his predicament. Something very different was happening and he was part of it.

He fell asleep at his usual hour, around ten at night and when he woke he saw that the roof of his house had caved in, that most of the walls had collapsed and the grass and bushes in his backyard had grown into a small jungle. He tried to move his neck, but found it very stiff as if he had grown hard and wooden throughout the long night. He was not surprised to see the tendrils that now grew from his stomach and snaked their way back towards the earth, nor the greenery that sprouted from his neighbour's back when he finally forced his neck to twist and bend.

He slept for a long time after that and woke many years later. Stretching his great limbs up into the sky and deep down into the earth, he looked around him and realised that he couldn't see the forest for the trees. His leaves rustled, chuckling at the humour of it.

Poinciana Time

2007-11-06T14:11:00.000+09:30

Out and about in the wilds of Ashgrove today I spotted an early blooming Poinciana. This little beauty lives a few streets away. Hopefully the Poinciana in the backyard will look this good when it finally flowers.

The Sparx Manifesto

2007-11-02T19:20:00.000+09:30

It's about time that we had something like a manifesto for Australian spec fic and Cat Sparks has delivered one with her article for the ACT Writers' Centre October Newsletter. You can also read it on her blog. http://catsparx.livejournal.com/49624.html

It's a good article and it pretty much matches my own history with trying to get stories published over the years. But.. but...but...as much as I agree with what Cat wrote I wonder if it might be read as just us older folks saying "It's not easy. We did the hard yards; you need to do them as well."

Why bother? I think might be a likely response. Why not get published by somebody who wants to publish you anywhere, anytime. You could even publish it on your own blog or your friend's. It's what everybody does. Your 700 Myspace friends will read it (that's more readers than I've ever had). And you've probably read those reviews of the latest Australian anthologies and magazines and most of them say the writing is pretty crappy, and the stories are no good, so why should you bother. It's not like getting publish in one of them is going to do much good, and there's no money in it either.

So while I agree with what Cat wrote, because it reinforces my worldview, and I wish it was totally true, I'm a little worried that the world has shifted on its axis and all the things we worked so hard to achieve, don't really matter that much anymore.

This post was not about jacarandas. If you are a jacaranda fan, I apologise. The next trees that come in to bloom in Brisbane are the poincianas. Pictures coming soon.

Purple Rain

2007-10-27T09:02:00.000+09:30

A big thunderstorm in Brisbane yesterday afternoon precipitated an early Jacaranda fall. The streets and parks are covered in a splendid carpet of purple.

The Glass Jeweller

2007-10-23T17:43:00.000+09:30

How long had they known each other? Not long, but still his interest in her had waned. There was nothing more to know ; she no longer excited him. Heartless, but he did not feel that way. He was not brave enough to hurt her, not brave enough to withstand the tears he felt would come. But each word he spoke to her now, he handled delicately as if it was a piece of broken glass, requiring careful wrapping in old newspapers, to conceal the dangerous jagged edges of what he really wished to say.

His manner towards her had changed, she realised this. Still - she was masochistic - she took each of his carefully crafted words and roughly ripped them apart, a confetti of newsprint fluttering about her, as she exposed the jagged shards of glass. These she plunged into her body, piercing her warm flesh until rivulets of blood flowed. She felt she was daring him to speak the truth, to tell her what she did not wish to hear. Yet still she hoped it was not true, that he would realise the pain she was in, that he would wish to ease her suffering.

On the last occasion they met, after he had finished speaking - it was good while it lasted, but we have outgrown each other - she began to cry, her tears crystallising to hard little sparkling stones that fell from her cheeks, tinkling to the floor.

She heard him sigh. It was over. It was done with. He felt relieved.

She did not think she would hit him but she did; with a closed fist that smashed his cheek. And before he could think, before he could stop the muscles working his arm, the back of his hand crashed across her face. There was the sound of breaking glass as she shattered beneath the force of his blow. So brittle and fragile.

He crouched close to the floor, fingertips gingerly searching among the pieces of glass for her precious diamond tears. They remained wrapped in a piece of black velvet for many years. He had never wanted to be the keeper of such precious things and he vowed he would never love again.

But time moved on and he met another woman, a woman slightly older, a woman slightly richer, who took a fancy to him, a woman whom he loved like he had never loved before. He took his precious diamonds to a jeweller and had them fashion into a necklet which he duly presented to his new love. But over the months that followed, through means both ordinary and diverse, her excuses and her indifference delivered what he had hoped not to hear. He took her message to his heart and drifted away.

Much later he read in a newspaper that she had been found dead at the bottom of her stairs, her throat cut by the shards of glass on the unusual necklet she wore.

More Purple Haze

2007-10-23T17:20:00.000+09:30

Visited my favourite jacarandas in the quaint old suburb of Bardon today. There's two trees growing close together here, but their canopies have merged over the years. It hasn't been a great year for jacarandas, but these two are splendid and have been year after year.