VERITY SPARKS: TAGGED WITH A MEME

Verity SparksCover

I have been tagged with a meme. Actually, I was tagged with a meme quite a few weeks ago, but since I didn’t understand what it meant, I conveniently forgot about it, even though it was just a harmless-seeming list of questions about my work. But it was my writer friend Simmone Howell* who sent me the email, and when I saw her in a cafe last week, she reminded me. I still don’t actually understand what it means, but here it is.

(1) What is the working title of your next book?

The working title was The Trouble with Verity Sparks, but the trouble with that title, according to the marketing department, was that it was too close to The Truth About Verity Sparks. Apparently they didn’t even realise that it was a different book. Hmmm. Like Kath (of Kath and Kim fame), I say, “Interesting, but I don’t agree.” After a few tries, I came up with Verity Sparks, Lost and Found. I don’ t like it as much, but I do like it.

(2) Where did the idea for the book come from?

It’s the second book about Verity Sparks – maybe in a trilogy or even a series, for goodness sake! – so what happened to Verity in the last pages gave me the starting point. She, with Papa Savinov and the Plush family (minus the Professor) was about to sail to Australia. I started looking at photographs of Melbourne in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and somehow the settings (the city of Melbourne, the seaside suburb St Kilda, the mountain retreat Mount Macedon) made it all tumble into place.

(3) What genre does your book fall under?

Junior fiction. And, I’ve been told, “gaslamp” – which means Victorian, I think.

(4) Which actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I’m not sure, but they would have to be English, of course, with English teeth, not even-sized gleaming American ones. Verity herself is small, neat, with light brown hair and a pointed little face. Her eyes are grey and very shrewd and observant. I was at a birthday party for a friend the year before last, and sitting at my table was Verity. She’s the daughter of an acquaintance of mine, fourteen years old at the time, and I hadn’t seen her for a few years. It gave me quite a turn!

(5) What is a one sentence synopsis of your book?

Verity vanquishes boarding-school snobs and manipulative murderesses, and gets her gift back.

(6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It’s published by Walker Books in May; I’m represented by the Drummond Agency.

(7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the ms?

It took me five months to write the first draft, but it needed a radical overhaul – in fact, a new second half – so add a couple more months on to that.

(8) What other books would you compare this story to in this genre?

I’m not sure how to answer that one. Readers who liked the Sally Lockhart mysteries might like Verity. And readers who like Joan Aiken (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase) might like it too.

 

(9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Walker Books asked for another title about Verity. And I had extra adventures for Verity up my sleeve (I still do, just in case).

(10) What else about this book might pique the reader’s interest?

Boarding school bitchiness, fraud and impersonation gives way to hypnotism, shipwrecks, drug use and spirit photography. There are characters with hidden pasts who are not what they seem. But don’t worry! It all ends just as it should.

* Simmones’s new book, Girl Defective, is released in March and I’m itching to read it. A few years ago Simmone (Notes from the Teenage Underground, Everything Beautiful), Lee Fox (Other People’s Country, Ella Kazoo Will Not Brush Her Hair and four other picture story books), (Saltwater Moons and many published short stories) and I used to meet once a month to read our works in progress and get some of writerly support. We heard a lot of Girl Defective as a work in progress, but never got to know how it ended. So now at last I will.

 

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THE VERITY SPARKS TIME MACHINE


 “Only though freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed and still kept within the bounds on reason.”
Mihaly Csikszentmilalyi

About time…why does it stretch and shrink the way it does? For most of this year, I’ve been writing the new Verity Sparks. I’ve started off my writing sessions in various moods – I’ve felt dutiful, exasperated, desperate, competent, hopeless, hopeful, contented and even happy, to name a few. Sometimes it’s taken a little while to settle. But I have a note to myself up on the pinboard – TEMPERAMENT IS FOR AMATEURSand                   Edward Bawden’s stern unbending words did the trick most days. Once I settled down to write, it was like closing a door behind me.  I entered into a different zone.  When I stopped and looked up, it was always a surprise to see the clock and realise that two or three hours had gone in what seemed like no time at all. Often I was suddenly aware that my shoulders were aching, or that I was busting for the toilet and a cup of tea. Not to mention ravenously hungry. I always get ravishing, as Sharon would say, when I’m writing. I’ve been told that using your brain takes lots of energy. A good excuse, because I find I very often need cake.

All this is nothing new. After all, everyone know that time flies when you’re having fun. But what I’ve been doing – for the last week, especially – isn’t exactly what I’d call fun. It’s work, especially at the draggingly pedantic stage of writing which happens at the very end. It’s a mixture of copy editing and smoothing out of rough edges and making sure no small (please, no large!) mistakes have got through all the gatekeepers. But still, once I’m through that door, I enter into the time machine. Somewhere I read that it’s called “flow”.

Now, where did I read that? A quick flick onto Wiki, and I realise it’s probably from one of the books on positive psychology by Martin Seligman. However, the person who’s done the most work on flow is a Hungarian psychology professor with the wonderful name of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He calls it “optimal experience” and a “holistic experience that people feel when they act with total involvement”.

Since I pressed the send button on Friday, and Verity went winging off to editor Mary Verney at Walker Books in Sydney, my days have been oddly different. At first, there was a sense of relief. I told myself, “You’re nearly finished! This book – which has caused you so much trouble – is almost done at last.” But then, after a cup of tea and a walk around the park with the dog, I had to decide what to do with myself for the rest of the day.      I’ve been officially on holidays all January, but even when there’s been no Verity work to do, there’s been the awareness of Verity work needing to be done. Sort of like having a load of homework constantly lurking in the background. I’m used to that load, and having it gone feels strange. Relax, I told myself. Now, you can relax.

I decided I’m not very good at relaxing. I pottered, which is an activity I usually find very soothing, but every time I looked at the clock, it seemed scarcely to have moved. I even double-checked with my phone, wondering if the battery was running down. Reading, I decided, was the go. It’s absorbing and relaxing. So over the past three days, I’ve read. I’ve read a lot. No fiction; I decided it was time to concentrate on the real world, so I finished a book on depression by Gary Greenberg, Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease and a book of essays, Living, Thinking, Looking by Siri Hustvedt, and I continued with the very beautiful but dense and rich The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane. But reading seemed too close to writing, making my mind work away feverishly – think, think, think! – and besides, there’s been much too much sitting down, so I decided to make a dress.

I don’t think I’ve made a dress for over eight years. I know why. I am crap at it. Hours passed, but did not flow. They unravelled crabbily, with lots of kinks and knots and breakages. I was in what, in The Big Liebowski, they call “a world of pain”. The details of my dressmaking mistakes would be tedious, so I won’t go into them here; it’s enough to say that I made a few basic errors with my measurements, and it all went downhill from there. Making a dress was a way of filling in time, but not in a good way. I left it on a hanger with its botched lapels and too-small front bodice waiting some bolt of inspiration. Can this dress be saved? Not at this particular point in time. I am an definitely an amateur.

Better was gardening – it flowed beautifully. My mind was both soothed and stimulated by the dappled light flickering through the leaves onto the paving stones, the raucous white cockies flying around overhead, the feel of leaf litter and twigs in my hands, the pleasant bending and stretching and the weight of the wheelbarrow. Only the heat and the sensation of UV rays layering through layers of skin brought me in from outside.

Later that evening, after a session pulling and pinning and unpicking and staring without inspiration at that rotten dress, I had another experience of flow, but I don’t think it’s what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi had in mind. I Googled “What should I do about my dress?” (as if over the internet the ghost of my high-school needlework teacher would come and tell me what to do) and got Pinterest.                                                                          It was a sort of “what dress should  I wear today?” page, and I found a lovely 1950s-styled dress, red-and-white gingham with big red buttons, just the thing I wished I’d made instead of a misshapen Butterick shirt-dress. So then I typed in “1950s dress patterns” and nearly bought one from a site in America. It was only (only!) $18 but I was saved from buying it by the $58 postage.  So I tried the same sort of search in Australia, and yes, there are sites. Page after page flashed up, and how I wished I’d kept all the patterns I’d bought in Op Shops over the years. I’d have a handy little earner. Dresses with square necks and sweetheart necklines and shawl collars and cap sleeves and slim skirts and full skirts and six gores and…

And it was nearly midnight. Time, which has been dragging for the last few days, had got away from me. Was it “flow”? No. I think it’s what’s called “time-wasting.”

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dress2

 

 

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HOT DAY READING

 

It’s a hot day. Stinking hot. We’re going to reach 38 degrees according to the Bureau of Meteorology, but it sounds even hotter in Farenheit – 100. So after a stint of early gardening, I am lying low for the day and devoting myself to paperwork, reading and maybe a DVD in the afternoon.

lady-oracle-margaret-atwood

The paperwork is completing applications for passports. We (self, husband, son) are going to Canada for three weeks in May. Right now in Toronto, it’s 2 degrees (but brrr! according the website, it feels like -4) and there are scattered flurries. That would be snow, I guess. Would they like to swap?                                                                 I have been to Canada before. When I arrived in Montreal in late March 1991, I thought I had never been so cold in my life, and I promised never to complain about Castlemaine’s winters ever again. It was Spring, so I thought it would be spring-like there – but no, there was still snow lying around in dirty drifts in the city, and out in the country there were Christmas-card landscapes and frozen lakes and rivers with great chunks of ice breaking up and slowly drifting along. I remember I had an odd, anxious feeling as we drove through the bare blackened forests and it was only when I realised that they reminded me of the aftermath of fires that I understood why.                                                  I travelled right across the country from Maritime Provinces Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island in the east to Vancouver on the Pacific coast; through the Rockies, into the prairies, up to the frozen sea of Hudson’s Bay and to the Queen Charlotte Islands close to Alaska – in fact, I’ve probably seen more of Canada than I have of Australia. Why Canada? In 1991 I was at a bit of a loose end. I had some money, I wanted to go overseas and I had a friend I could stay with in Montreal.

And I’d had a big crush on Canadian literature since the later 1970s. It started when I picked up a hardcover copy of Lady Oracle by Margaret Attwood on sale in Readings in Carlton. I was entranced. After that, I read everything of hers that I could get my hands on – including her criticism and her poetry. We fit together like a hook and eye. A fish hook. An open eye is still stuck there uncomfortably in my mind and I can’t get it out.                                                 I really was a fan –  I even went to an Age Literary Lunch at one of the posh Melbourne hotels in the late 1980’s. She was a tiny, frizzy haired lady with a soft and drawling voice…how could someone so nice manufacture such grenades from words? I don’t buy everything she writes any more – I think Alias Grace was the last I read with great pleasure – but reading Margaret Attwood was certainly one of the formative writerly experiences.

More Canadians. A bit later I was introduced to the short stories of Alice Munro and really fell in love. Under the spell of Lives of Girls and Women and The Beggar-Maid I wrote a highly imitative suite of stories about growing up in a small country town. Reading, writing; that’s the way I learned to write. I don’t think it’s a bad way. It’s like the way art students used to copy the masters. I still read the odd Munro short story; she’s the master, still. Though I can’t read too many at the one time without feeling that alife is just intolerably sad.

And – this is where I go from the sublime to the ridiculous – we come to Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery. When I was in the Maritimes,  I simply had to do the Prince Edward Island pilgrimage along with a whole lot of sentimental middle aged ladies (mainly American) and a gaggle of Japanese girls. I’d seen the TV series starring Colleen Dewhurst as Marilla and as Anne, the excellent Megan Follows, so I expected the the island to be very beautiful, and it was. In fact, I went so far as to go on the Anne of Green Gables bus tour; just me and the driver and three giggly Japanese girls. But Anne of Green Gables: The Musical was a step too far. The children and teenagers were not played by juveniles but by adults so a cast of particularly short actors had been assembled. The effect was oddly creepy. Actually, very creepy, with these short but mature actors all being so determinedly cutesy and child-like. There was a bomb scare mid-performance, a perfect opportunity to slip away, but I sat it out.                                                The Anne books aren’t on my regular roster of comfort books but I have re-read from time to time another of her series, the Emily books. I think I read somewhere that L. M. Montgomery actually preferred Emily. Both Emily and Anne were aspiring writers, but Montogomery let Emily really get to be a famous author, whereas she made Anne unselfishly realise she was no genius, marry Gilbert and have heaps of children.                                        My favourite Montgomerys are not in either of these series. They are both tear-jerkers of the first magnitude – I dare anyone to read A Tangled Web (for example: uncle kills kitten belonging to orphan; orphan found by lonely spinster sobbing on his mother’s grave etc etc) without blubbing. And The Blue Castle has it all – plain spinster with terminal illness breaks out of her stultifying family circle, nurses local bad girl till she dies, then marries fascinating mystery man who lives in a (very nice) shack in the woods… and lives happily ever after! It turns out she’s not ill and he’s rich. Wonderful.  And actually, with its pine woods and lakes and mountain breezes, The Blue Castle might be  good hot day reading. I’ll give it a go.images-1

 

 

 

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VERITY SPARKS AGAIN

This morning I’m off to the Steiner School in Castlemaine to talk about Verity Sparks again. Recently I’ve also given a talk to students at the Castlemaine Secondary College and at the Library. And last week Peta Anderson, a member of Walker Book’s publicity department who was visiting Melbourne from Sydney, asked me lots of questions about Verities #1 and #2 and filmed the interview.

Though I get a bit anxious beforehand, it does help with the nerves that I know a lot about the subject. I usually tell an audience a little about my history as a writer, and then speak about Verity – how the character came to be, how the story developed, my research and the things that helped me create the story. People are often interested in how a writer writes, too. So I talk about my routine of four to six hours on writing days; my small but full-of-books study with no internet connection (very important to stop procrastination); my A3 colour copies of paintings, illustrations or photos that help with my book; and the motto that’s stuck up on my pinboard. It’s from Edward Bawden, a brilliant English illustrator and designer – Temperament is for amateurs.

It’s there to remind me that I mustn’t wait around for inspiration or to feel like writing – I’ve just got to do it. I think in some ways writing’s like a muscle. It needs to be used in order to get strong. All of which sounds very good and professional, doesn’t it? Well, the other side of the story is that, earlier in the year, going full steam ahead with Verity #2, I wrote about 25000 words of the wrong book. That’s about 2 months hard work; half the novel.

By ‘wrong book’, I mean it just didn’t fit. It wasn’t the Verity of the The Truth About Verity Sparks – somehow she was a bit muted and subdued. Certainly, she wasn’t as active or funny or brave, and they were some of her most endearing qualities. Besides, the adventure wasn’t as adventurous, and the suspense almost wasn’t there at all. I could have tried to re-write it, but in the end, I decided to relocate the action, change some of the characters, make up a new climax and…

Well, that was where I briefly went “aarrghhh!” and tore my hair out, but then with a nod to Edward Bawden, I got on with it. My editor at Walker Books likes the revision, thank goodness, though it’s had a change of title. Originally it was going to be The Trouble with Verity Sparks but Walker thought it was too close to The Truth About Verity Sparks. Now it’s Verity Sparks, Lost and Found.

I have just seen the rough for the cover. Like the last one, it’s by illustrator Lisa Coutts, and it’s lovely. Verity’s in the foreground holding a book (books are vital clues in the plot this time). In the background is a rambling house with verandahs and balconies, roughly based on Government Cottage on Mount Macedon. And beside her is a gum tree, and up in the gum tree is a sulphur-crested cockatoo. A cocky called Lucifer is an important character in the story. Lisa has done a wonderful job at capturing the feel of the novel – with just a few lines and strokes of colour; how clever is that? – and the expression on Verity’s face is just lovely. I’m really looking forward to seeing the finished artwork.

And I suppose Walker are looking forward to seeing the finished book! I am expecting the marked-up manuscript early this week, and there will be no time for temperament.

No time for reading, either. Most of this year I’ve been working on Anything Worth Keeping, my adult novel that’s doing the rounds of publishers, and the second Verity. So there’s not been a lot of room in my head for heavy reading. The last few weeks I’ve done the rounds of comfort books. I re-read one from my grandmother’s bookshelf, a romance from the early 1930’s called Jemima Rides by Anne Hepple. Then a couple of Barbara Pyms, Excellent Women and Jane and Prudence, and the Damerosehay Trilogy by Elisabeth Goudge.

These last are the ultimate in comfort reading for me – and for other readers as well, as I find out on the internet. There’s an online community called Librarything, where you can list your books and find out who else reads and loves them. You can read reviews and lovesongs and  comments and rants. Sort of idle but fascinating. The Elisabeth Goudge website was worth a look too. I found out that she suffered from depression and had a few nervous breakdowns in her life. She also cared for her sick elderly mother for many years. Which explain the understanding way she deals with old people, and the sensitive treatment of anxiety and depression and fear in her novels. But she was no heavyweight literary novelist. In her day, she was a best-seller. Green Dolphin Country, an early adult novel, won MGM’s Annual Novel Award in 1944 and was turned into a film.  Her 1946 children’s novel The Little White Horse won the  Carnegie Medal for Literature and gained a bit of publicity lately when J K Rowling said it was one of her favourite childhood books.

Each time I re-read a novel, I notice something new and different. This time round in the Damerosehay books I noticed the food and the dogs. Elizabeth Goudge must have adored dogs. Pooh-bah the chow, Mary the Pekinese and furry mongrel the Bastard are each characters in their own  right. As was the beautiful but vain King Charles spaniel Wiggins in The Little White Horse. EG obviously had a thing for dogs. And children. The inner lives of the child characters are taken very seriously. For some people (though not for me)there are probably too many long passages of lyrical description of the natural world. She is also a very Christian writer and her themes of spiritual growth and redemption through discipline, duty and sacrifice are firmly stated and perhaps some readers would find all that rather preachy.  I read them as enjoyable ‘family saga’ style stories of love and marriage and family life. Perhaps that vanished sense of sure and certain values is part of the comfort, along with the gardens and sunsets, the dogs and the feather-light pastry.

But I can’t exist on comfort books alone, and Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel is just terrific. How that woman can write! It’s so immediate and in your face that I’m finding I can’t read too much at the one time. But I’ve got to get on with it and finish this weekend because until the New Year I’m working on Verity again and I can predict that my brain with be mush and it will be back to comfort. I haven’t read Sense and Sensibility for years, and it’s probably time to give Emma a whirl. And there’s also the long forgotten bestsellers from my grandmother’s shelf. Margaret Yorke by Kathleen Norris is a top favourite. However constant re-reading did show me that Norris must have written at speed; there’s a character called Lee Galvin who’s both a man and a woman (interesting?) and the wife of a man who runs off with a teenage flirt is variously totally devastated and humorously brave. I don’t think those books were meant for close critical reading.

By the way, Verity Sparks, Lost and Found will be out in May 2013.

 

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IN BARBARA PYM TERRITORY

pot of tea

I went to Melbourne last week, on the train. The purpose of the outing was ostensibly (isn’t this a great word? I had to look it up to make sure it meant what I thought it did – and it did) to take my son and his friend, both 15-year-olds, to watch the Grand Final Parade. But it was rainy and cold, the players would have been inside cars, and the boys couldn’t be bothered so they went off to look in shops. As did I. Into the Bourke Street mall, and the big department stores. If ever I actively enjoyed shopping, I don’t any more. Almost immediately, the whole exercise began to take on a nightmarish quality.  The ground floor cosmetics section was pumping. Lights, mirrors, reflections, signage; thumping music; myriad separate counters and kiosks each with their own uniformed staff spruiking; a constant stream of women moving through the vast space broken up with signage and partitions and shimmering displays of packaged magic.

Up the escalator, and here also were the female hordes moving through the various departments, on their way from here to somewhere else, and the areas set aside for the young and cool were crowded, but in amongst the middle-aged clothes, in the depths, there were only a few browsers hunting and pecking amongst the racks and tables… The clothes seemed be clumped together without logic, packed closely so you had to struggle to remove an item, and then once removed, not what I thought they were. I tried on a shirtdress, because I had some idea in my head that the shirtdress might be It, the style, a solution, a possible uniform for middle-aged me. The shop assistants, two of them, were at the counter bitching about one of their supervisors, and scarcely broke off to acknowledge me. The shirtdress had a strange asymmetric hemline (why?), and in the strange lighting of the dressing-rooms, looked not a cheerful cinnamon brown but a murky cowpat tone. Still hopeful, I thought that perhaps there might be others out there, with normal hems and in less trying shades. The shop assistants were still hot on the topic of the supervisor, so I continued the search but found only bizarre tunics stitched from an assortment of warring fabrics, shifts and sheaths, synthetics with the feel of shower curtains and a really lovely grey wool winter coat reduced by 50% to $200. I gave up. To the twee-sounding ‘Intimate Apparel’.

Who would have thought there are so many variations on the basic bra? Acres of racks and tables, amongst which I could not find what I was looking for; all the bras were the same but different and of course the style I was after had been discontinued, or had never been made. I began to feel that it was all obscurely my fault. After all, every other woman wanted push-up underwire and padded. I picked out a near-approximation. It was in ‘nude’, which is a sallow beige colour.

‘Does it come in black?’ I asked saleslady.
‘If it does, we don’t have it.’
‘Is there anything similar in black?’                                                                                                   ‘You’ll have to speak to the fitter.’

But the fitter had her back to me and was engaged in a long conversation with two old friends – or perhaps colleagues, for they were enumerating the illnesses of retired salesladies. I waited, while the saleslady briskly served three or four younger women with sports bras and moulded T-shirt bras and assertive balconettes. The fitter prattled on. I looked down at my unworthy item of apparel. It was flaccid and nude. I gazed around at the breastplates on display; hundred of paired cups hung expectantly, awaiting animation from splendid young and perky bosoms… Demoralised and defeated, I placed the bra on the counter and left the store. And I realised that I was in Barbara Pym territory.

This is from ‘Excellent Women’.

I had a feeling that I must escape and longed to be lost in a crowd of busy women shopping, which was why I followed blindly the crowd that surged in through the swinging doors of a large store. Some were hurrying, making for this or that department or counter, but others like myself seemed bewildered and aimless, pushed and buffeted as we stood not knowing which way to turn. I strolled through a grove of dress materials and found myself at a counter piled with jars of face-cream and lipsticks…There was a mirror on the counter and I caught sight of my own face, colourless and worried-looking, the eyes large and rather frightened, the lips too pale. I did not feel that I could ever acquire a smooth apricot complexion but I could at least buy a new lipstick, I thought, consulting the shade-card. The colours had such peculiar names but at last I found one that seemed right and began to turn over a pile of lipsticks in a bowl in an effort to find it. But the colour I had chosen was either very elusive or not there at all, and the girl behind the counter, who had been watching my scrabblings in a disinterested way, said at last, ‘What shade was it you wanted, dear?’

I was a little annoyed at being called ‘dear’, though it was perhaps more friendly than ‘madam’, suggesting as it did that I lacked the years and poise to merit the more dignified title.

‘It’s called Hawaiian Fire’, I mumbled, feeling rather foolish, for it had not occurred to me that I should have to say it out loud.

‘Oh, Hawaiian Fire. It’s rather an orange red, dear,’ she said doubtfully, scrutinising my face. ‘I shouldn’t have thought it was quite your colour. Still, I think I’ve got one here.’ She took a box from behind the counter and began to look in it.

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter really,’ I said quickly. ‘Perhaps another colour. What would you recommend?’

‘Well, dear, I don’t know, really.’ She looked at me blankly, as if no shade could really do anything for me. ‘Jungle Red is very popular – or Sea Coral, that’s a pretty shade, quite pale, you know.’

‘Thank you, but I think I will have Hawaiian Fire, I said obstinately, savouring the ludicrous words and the full depths of my shame.

Back in the department store, I was desperate for tea. Another Pym situation. There were in-house cafes. But they were brightly lit and exposed, where you would perch amongst the endlessly flowing traffic of shoppers. Worse, you would not be served. No-one would look after you. You’d  have to go up to the counter yourself when the wait-staff called your name. No. I was looking for somewhere quiet, a burrow, a refuge. Was there somewhere an ideal, dream-café where elderly waitresses in black with white aprons would walk on carpet to my dimly-lit corner with bolstering tea leaf in a pot, and extra hot water, and a plate of toasted tomato sandwiches…

In the Melbourne of my childhood and even young adulthood, there were such places. Though coffee culture was burgeoning, the expresso machine wasn’t ubiquitous. Melbourne was still had a tea-drinking town. When I went shopping with my mother in the early sixties, there was a choice of tea-shop bolt-holes. I remember one one downstairs, where each booth had dinky little lamps on the walls but the rest of the place was practically dark. Was it called Raine’s? The waitresses knew us; I would always order a toasted ham sandwich and an orange juice. There were several more in Collins and Little Collins, and they were all dim, quiet, restful, a respite from shopping, where ladies could ease off their stilettos under the tables and slump their corseted bodies back against the padded seat-backs. But here in 2012, eventually I stumbled across the mall, through a couple of arcades – and passing by many crowded noisy cafes – to Dymocks downstairs in Collins Street, and there at last was able to sit out of the foot traffic and have a pot of tea. Pot of tea. Words of comfort and cheer. Even though the tea was in a bag, and far too weak, and there were no toasted sandwiches but a sawdusty muffin, the idea of ‘pot of tea’ and all it stands for was there…

This obsession with tea is also of course classic Pym territory.   I shall have to go to the bookshelf and do a ‘tea’ search. Perhaps when I have  some spare time, I can Google ‘Tea in English Literature.’ But right now, the kettle is whistling and the pot is waiting.  

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A Writerly Week

What a very writerly week I’ve had. On Thursday I went down to Melbourne to the opening night of the Melbourne Writer’s Festival. What forced me out into the rain, wind, hail and cold was the pleasure of meeting up with two writer friends, fellow Varuna-ites Anne Myers and Andrea Gillum. And then going off to the Town Hall to see (and hear, obviously) Simon Callow talking about ‘Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World.’

Well. Wonderful, is all I can say. He spoke about how Dickens, reading from his work, absolutely mesmerised his Victorian audiences. People would laugh, cry, and even faint, such was the drama and intensity of Dicken’s performance…and I can see how ably Callow would reproduce those readings, for he was pretty spell-binding, too. No notes, and even his answers to questions after the talk were polished and witty. Apparently Dickens was addicted to the ‘fix’ of that emotional and almost spiritual bond that forms between audience and actor. I’ve been lucky enough to experience that a few times, and it is a deep, real, moving and absolutely real feeling.

I think I felt it first when the Royal Shakespeare Company came out to Australia in the 1970’s and my parents took me to see Judi Dench in ‘A Winter’s Tale’ and ‘Twelfth Night’. And another Shakespeare occasion was only a couple of years ago, with the Bell Shakespeare ‘Twelfth Night’. At the end of the play we were all (or it felt like ‘all’) clapping and smiling and some of us – it couldn’t have just been me – were teary as well. It was the wisdom and beauty and encircling joy of the whole thing; the creaky story, Shakespeare’s characters and wonderful words, the actors themselves. I thought as I applauded, how wonderful it must feel to have those waves of emotion flowing towards you on the stage from the invisible people in their seats in the dark. You could feel the love.

But enough of that; Simon Callow certainly communicated his passion for Dickens, and his warmth and humour and wit filled the big hall.

The other writerly-ness was the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year awards ceremony in Adelaide. My The Truth About Verity Sparks was awarded (along with Jackie French’s Nanbery) Honour Book in the Younger Readers category. It was like winning silver. Since being shortlisted felt like winning gold to me, this was the cup running (almost) over. Wonderful. It was especially lovely to talk to some of the CBC members and judges, to hear their kind and enthusiastic comments about my book, and to realise the passion they feel for children’s literature. Since the judges had to read around 300 books, it was truly a labour of love. The awards were presented by the Federal Member for Adelaide, Kate Ellis. She is the tall, model-esque one with the long hair. She is also Minister for Childcare and Early Childhood. She spoke about the importance of books and reading not just for those measurable outcomes such as language acquisition and literacy. She recalled her young self under the sheets with a torch, reading after the lights were out, and talked about how books can transport you to other places, indentities, experiences; how they enrich and expand your world, nourish your imagination and your sympathies; help you to grow. Hear, hear! Congratulations to the other award and Honour Book winners (my pick for the Younger Readers was Kate Constable’s Crow Country and I was right) and to those on the shortlist and list of notable books.

I also had lunch with my wonderful editor Mary Verney and the other Walker Books prize-winner, Bob Graham. His ‘A Bus Called Heaven’ was the Picture Book of the Year. I told Bob that in Castlemaine a month or so ago, I had seen a mini-bus with ‘Heaven’ painted on the front; how funny, I said, they must have got the idea from your book.

“No, that was the bus,” Bob said. It was a real bus. Bob saw it in Melbourne while walking his grand-daughter to school and his lovely story with those warm and funny illustrations was born.

Small world, eh?

 

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FURTHER ADVENTURES OF VERITY SPARKS

Verity Sparks is about to have a very big adventure. She’s on the Children’s Book Council shortlist. The awards will be announced in Adelaide on August 17th, and she’s going to be there.

She? I have to admit that by now I think of Verity as a real person. I don’t feel as if I made her up. Perhaps she’s my alter ego – though she’s a lot braver and more sensible than I was at 13.

I’ve just finished the sequel. It’s called ‘The Trouble with Verity Sparks’, and I sent it off to my editor at Walker Books on Friday. I always have very mixed feelings when I finish a book. In this case, I’m relieved that I got it done on time. What with one thing and another, I only had about five months to write it in, so the house is full of cobwebs and dust; my garden is full of weeds and feeling neglected; and my friends have just about given up on inviting me out for a coffee. On the other hand, I’m also feeling a bit sad. I miss Verity. And reading about and researching Verity’s world – which in this novel is Melbourne in the late 1870’s – was fascinating and full of surprises. I got the initial idea for ‘The Truth About Verity Sparks’ when walking around in Melbourne looking at all the Victorian (as in reign of Queen Victoria, not State of Victoria – confusing!) buildings and imagining what it might have felt like to be a young girl, running about the streets on errands, with these massive columns and stone walls looming over you. As it turned out, I ended up setting ‘The Truth About Verity Sparks’ in London, and now that she’s in Melbourne, she’s no longer an apprentice milliner running here and there delivering hats. She and Papa Savinov live in a rented mansion on the Esplanade in St Kilda… But I can’t say too much. Soon I won’t be missing Verity, I’ll be working hard with the editor polishing bits, changing bits, tightening  it up and fixing all those little clunky sentences and tiny (I hope they’re tiny!) mistakes that have crept in to the manuscript.

And in the meantime, I’m reading some of the books that are on the CBC shortlist. I just finished Kate Constable’s ‘Crow Country’. It’s a time-shift novel with a mystery at its heart. I’m not going to give an spoilers, but the way Kate Constable weaves past and present and myth together is moving, clever and very absorbing. Now I’m part way through Jackie French’s ‘Nanbery: Black Brother White’. Jackie French is amazing. I don’t know how she writes so many good books. History is obviously her passion, and she brings to life how mystifying the first English settlers must have seemed to the original inhabitants of our country. She is especially good with smells, and I loved  the description of the English sailors as as ‘poor strange creatures, small and hunched over, with pale pinched faces’.

I’ve still got Emily Rodda’s ‘The Silver Door’ and John Flanagan’s ‘Brotherband; The Outcasts’ to go. Verity is in good company.  I really do feel as if I’ve won already, by being shortlisted. But it’s sobering to work in a bookshop, as I do, and see that there are just so many good books being published all the time.  So many books are published, and even really good ones can sink without making much a splash, so I know how lucky I am that Verity has been noticed, read and enjoyed.

And speaking of enjoyment, I was the lunch guest of the Ballarat High School Junior Book Club on Friday.  It was without a doubt the nicest school visit I have ever done. The students prepared for my visit by setting the scene with posters, a special chair, a lamp with a fancy fringed shade and a bunch of violets (my favourite – who knew?) on a small table piled with copies of my book.

I was so impressed with my hosts. Not only were they lovely young people, they were smart, funny, interested, articulate – and they made this writer feel very pampered and appreciated. Many thanks to the Book Clubbers and the librarians for the special efforts that made my visit so enjoyable.

 

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SPECTACLES TWINKLING FIERCELY

 

It’s winter and so of course it should come as no surprise that it’s cold – but it’s really cold. Last night, with the gas heater chugging away as hard as it could, we were still rugged up and feeling draughts of frigid air from the ill-fitting casement and louvre windows and glass doors in our charming old house. I’m sick of charm.  At the moment, I feel that a warm brick bunker would do me. But the days have been sunny and the big freeze doesn’t start till near dark; besides, I’ve just had an email from my brother in New York where it’s breathlessly hot and steamy. So much for complaining about the weather.

Except to say that, cold weather and knitting going together as they do, I’m on the front of my first cable experiment.

I read somewhere that, when deep in the rhythm of plain and purl, the knitter’s brain- waves resemble those of a meditator. Perhaps that’s why I love knitting so. And probably why what I love most is knitting scarves. You don’t have to think. The long straight parts of a jumper or cardigan are fine, too, but all those decreases to make arm-holes and shoulders are troublesome.  This cable pattern looks lovely, but what you don’t see is that I’ve pulled it out and re-knitted about half a dozen times. This is not what I knit for! However – as I know from the bin at my closest Op Shop, where unwanted hand-knitted scarves multiply like multi-coloured rabbits – there are only so many scarves a person needs.

When this cardigan is done, I will look forward to my nightly collapse on the couch with some nice plain knitting. And for a special treat, on Sunday afternoons, as the evening draws in, there can be (this is me in Barbara Pym mode) knitting, a book, a cup of tea and some McVities Digestive biscuits.  Not all at once, of course.

Knitting and reading aren’t really similar, but re-reading is a little like plain knitting. Soothing, with no real surprises, but with much enjoyment. I have just re-read a  children’s novel called Mistress Masham’s Repose by TH White. I haven’t read it since I was twelve or thirteen, but it was hugely influential in making me into the writer I am. I was hesitant, at first, to re-read in case I didn’t like it – in case it wasn’t all I’d cracked it up to be – in case it’d lost its charm. But – amazingly – no.

Mistress Masham’s Repose was given to me as an 8th birthday present by a friend of my eldest brother’s. He was a teenager, and he worked at the local bookshop – Stonemans Bookroom – where I work now. How he came to choose this one for me, I don’t know, but re-reading it, I’m surprised that he chose it and that I loved it.

Because, on the face of it, it’s quite a difficult book. Briefly – Maria lives in an almost-ruined great house called Malplaquet in the wilds of Northhamptonshire. She discovers the descendants of a band of escaped Lilliputians on an island; makes friends with them; battles her malicious governess Miss Brown and the unscrupulous Vicar, Mr Hater, in order to prevent them from kidnapping the People (they plan to sell them to circuses); and with the help of the cook, Mrs Noakes, an ancient Professor and the dotty Lord Lieutenant, she foils the plans of the evil pair and comes into her inheritance.

What’s difficult – and wonderful  – is the language. All through the book, TH White plays with words.  Here, on the very first page, he has fun with 18th century military history, poetry, architecture, and vocabulary;

It had been built by one of her ducal ancestors who had been a friend of the poet Pope, and it was surrounded by Vistas, Obelisks, Pyramids, Columns, Temples, Rotundas and Palladian Bridges, which had been built in honour of General Wolfe, Admiral Byng, the Princess Amelia and others of the same kidney.

I don’t need to pick apart how and why that is difficult for an 8-year-old reader. I can’t imagine that I truly understood much of that. But I kept in reading, and there was more history, more pastiche, lots of humour along with some sadness, lessons in love and respect for Maria who had taken to treating the tiny people as pets (Her apology reads; I am young but tall. You are old but short. I am sorry and will be better), some jokes around Latin and antiquarian book lore, a gallery of English stock types of the 19th and early 20th century – Vicar, governess, faithful retainer, dotty Professor, loopy aristocrat, doughty but dopey policeman – and a lot of swooningly beautiful nature writing. Like this;

Under her nose, she watched the mare’s-tail and other flora of the ocean floor, as the prow edged its way between the water lilies. Dragonflies, like blue needles, and damsel-flies, like ruby ones – the husband keeping his wife in order by gripping her tightly round the neck with a special pair of pincers on the end of his tail – hovered over the surface. By going gently, she could sometimes pass over a flight of perch without disturbing them. Or rather, they would raise their spiky fins, blush out the dark anger of their bars and make mouths at her. Once or twice, she passed a pike, only six inches long, basking under the flat green leaves, and once she came close to the meeting place of the tench – who made themselves scarce with a loud plop. They had been lazily scratching their backs on the lilies, like a school of elephants.

 The whole thing ends happily after an extended comic set-piece of the Professor trying to convince the hunt-mad Lord Lieutenant that Maria has been imprisoned in the dungeons. It’s almost all dialogue – a script –

‘Here, have a cigar. We keep them in this filly here, for parties. Look, you just press her tail down, like this, and the cigar comes out of her mouth, like that, oh, I’m sorry, and at the same moment her nostrils burst into flame, so you can light it. Neat, isn’t it?’

The poor Professor is waylaid with an array of ingenious musical devices shaped like horses which spout cigars, chocolates, coffee and cigarettes – and I was on the train laughing helplessly and out loud.

How I made any sense of it at 8, I don’t know. Was I just the most amazingly precocious reader or what? Well, I was stopped in my child-genius tracks when I looked on-line to see that other readers had made of it – and found legions of devoted American fans. They would, I thought, be even less likely than me to get the so-English jokes and references.

Re-reading, I was surprised to find of the source of my writing. Some of it, at any rate. My sense of humour, my love of pastiche, my tendency towards (hopefully) nail-biting pile-ups of suspense and action; red herrings, historical oddities, Capitals, made-up book titles; a semi-delirious swoon of words… I only have to look glancingly at The Truth About Verity Sparks to see a bit, here and there, of Mistress Masham’s Repose.

One last odd thing about re-reading Mistress Masham’s Repose. I found that I had remembered, since I was a young girl, a particular phrase from the book. Maria, pretending to be a pirate, has paddled her boat out to an island in the middle of an ornamental lake. ‘She boarded the tree bole, brandishing her cutlass, and swarmed ashore with the battle cry of a Maria, her spectacles twinkling fiercely in the sun.’

How I love that. How I loved re-reading that. It’s a kind of key-stone – spectacles, twinkling, fiercely – there’s laughter and affection, imagination and reality, a building-up and cutting back down to size. Why, of all the words in the book – many of them wonderful, long and obscure – those are the ones that encapsulate for me it’s delight, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s because, in its own way, ‘spectacles twinkling fiercely’ is simply perfect.

 

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THE GIRL THAT BOOKS BUILT

Recently I was invited to give a short talk at the Castlemaine Word Mine (have a look at castlemainewordmine.wordpress.com/ to see what it’s all about). I got the title of my talk from a book (of course). The Child That Books Built by Francis Spufford is a hybrid of, amongst other things, memoir, literary history and criticism and biography, and a record of the children’s books that ‘grew’ the author.*

I began my talk with the key books of my early childhood. When I was four I began school and encountered  John and Betty (the Victorian Schools 1st reader). In grade 2, I started to read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Yes, I did. No, I was not a child genius. I’ll explain.

All sorts of things grow a person. There are the real experiences and events, the rock-like solid structure of your life – your family; where you live; how you live.  Rock-like? Solid? I only have to talk to my siblings to find out that there are many subtle and some gross differences in the way we experienced those. And then there are the unreal experiences – the dreams and nightmares, the fears and fantasies. I can probably point the finger of blame at my father for the fact that I’m still scared of the dark. It wasn’t the Hobyahs for  me – it was the Swarbies. The Hobyahs came out of the bush but we lived by the sea-side and the Swarbies, according to Dad, lived in the nearby Carrum Swamp. I vaguely remember that they had pointy heads and were bluish-greenish and rustled in the reeds and rushes. The moral of the tale was and has always been  – little child, don’t wander off and get lost or drowned or stolen.

The pointy-headed Swarbies, Rat and Mole and Mr Badger, Snow White, Orlando the Marmalade Cat, Max and the Wild Things, Little Red Riding Hood…before I could read, I was already enmeshed in the world of story. Not only was I was read to, but I was  allowed to free-range on the bookshelf.  I spent hours with art books, looking at reproductions. Before I was five, I had a favourite dying saint – Saint Sebastian; my adult self sees him as  kinkily homo-erotic, bound to his post not very well-covered with gauzy cloth, six-pack and multiple piercings –  but more to the point, I had images of heroes and heroines galore from secular portraits of the great and glorious; from paintings of history and myth and legend; from the many juicy Old Testament tableaux (head on a platter, anyone?) plus of course the pietas and annunciations and nativities… My imagination seethed with details – jewel-encrusted sleeves, a ferret bright eyed in a woman’s arms, billows and folds of silken cloth, men with pointed ears and goat’s legs, winged babies with fat pink bottoms…so it’s perhaps no wonder that, after all the wonder and magic and splendour and excitement of that world, to be thrown into the cold water of ‘learning to read’ John and Betty at Bonbeach State School with Miss Benson came as a bit of a shock.

 John and Betty. It was a kind of torture. I didn’t get it. Perhaps I didn’t want to get it. John can jump and Betty can jump went on and on and on, miserably, bewilderingly, like the school day itself with its Cuisenaire blocks and folk dancing to scratchy records and finger painting and those powerful, unknowable runes on the blackboard.  Just looking at it, with its orange cover and illustrations of disturbingly bland fifties suburban conformity, gives me the chills to this day. I started school at four, and was far too immature and dreamy for the whole project. I wasn’t a bright child bored. I was a dopey child mystified.

But…when finally I could read, I could read ANYTHING. This time I free-ranged the novels in my parents’ bookshelf, trying Ulysses and Oblomov, understanding some of the words but not penetrating much beyond a page or two. Then I picked up Orlando. I think I must have read twenty pages. Again, without understanding much but – and I remember this clearly – finding words that skimmed, hummed, glittered and shone.  I discovered delight in words. I fell in love with language.

But, not being a child genius, I couldn’t go on. And thank goodness, not long after that, my mother gave me The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett to read. And followed it with Seven Little Australians and the Edith Nesbits and the Laura Ingalls Wilders and The Phantom Tollbooth and Alice in Wonderland. School libraries gave me the Billabong books and the Secret Seven mysteries. I was immersed in Children’s literature from classics to crap. None of what I read  had quite the brilliant humming-bird language of Orlando ( I had to wait till Form 6 Literature and The Leopard for that) but some of it approached it… and by the way,  bless you, Saint Enid, for the bliss and balm of Popular Fiction.

I was launched and running, back on track, reading as if my life depended on it. John and Betty and Orlando were the starting points, and and I have never looked back.

*One of the Castlemaine Word Miners has loaned me a great little UK publication called Slightly Foxed which deals with people and their Significant Books. It’s great fun.

 

 

 

 

 

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GOODBYE AND HELLO

I did promise myself that I’d be a more frequent blogger this year, but now into the third month of the year, and with only one post to my credit, it seems that I was misleading myself. I have, however, finished the novel I have been writing for the past three years.

It’s called Anything Worth Keeping. What’s it about? The short answer is; Oh, the usual thing, a dysfunctional family. A slightly longer answer is a little story. Four or five years ago, a friend told me about her stepmother. Not long after he was widowed, her father met an Englishwoman on board a ship. They married. The stepmother was a difficult person; the children, still grieving for their mother, resented her; it was not Happy Families when they settled back in Melbourne. My friend’s father died first, and when the stepmother died, she was intestate, which meant that her father’s money went to the stepmother’s nephew. The family contested this settlement, and won. There was a small detail that fascinated me. The family knew practically nothing about the stepmother except this one thing – she had been the mistress of a high-ranking British diplomat or politician.

So. I hatched a story. It was about the children and how their lives had been all but ruined by this Evil Stepmother. But something happened as I began to write this story – the stepmother took over and I fell in love with her. Her name was Bliss. She hijacked the story and at times I felt she was almost it. Her story – and why she never told it – form the centre of the novel.

So, for three and a bit years I’ve been living for a lot of the time with Bliss. And with the children Paula, Anne, Tom and the ghost of Caroline, with Alec, her last husband and a few husbands and lovers in between, and with Rob and Judith, her  good friends who…but that would be giving the whole thing away. I have been living in London in the early 1950’s – it was still Austerity Britain then, with the city slowly being re-built after the ravages of the Blitz, and some items of food still on the ration, but nevertheless London was a magnet for young Australian artists and writers eager to expand their horizons, to explore art and culture and history, and of course to take off into Europe, to France and Italy and beyond. I’ve been mentally dressing in New Look suits and frocks with their wide skirts, tiny waists and strenuous corsetry; I’ve been eating reconstituted eggs and drooling over Elizabeth David’s inspirational cookery books; I’ve been dreaming on the top of double-decker buses and stuck in the smelly Tube. I’ve been living in 1950’s Australian suburbia, too, and incidentally re-living some of my own personal history, my growing-up days in one of Melbourne’s beach-side suburbs. But that’s all over now Time to call it a day because I can’t go on revising forever. Time to call it quits, write The End. Time to say goodbye.

Ah. (That’s a big sigh) A relieved sigh, a sad sigh, a somewhat exhausted sigh… Yesterday afternoon I went into my workroom and tidied my desk. I put all the books about 1950’s art, fashion, politics, social history and literature up onto a high shelf. Printouts of the various drafts I stacked up neatly to recycle. The sheaves of handwritten notes to myself went into the bin, and a few photocopied references about odd subjects (the Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works being one) I filed away just in case I need to verify some date or fact… The decks are cleared, ready to start the next book, which is a sequel to The Truth About Verity Sparks. I’m keen to get going on it, I’ve got lots ideas and Verity is a feisty girl who just about writes her own lines. And she may need to, since my deadline is 1st August.

But still. And yet. Not really ready to let go. One door closes and another – Yes, I know all of that. If I didn’t have Verity to get on with, I’d probably spend a lot of time moping and moving commas around, so it’s probably just as well. It feels a lot like moving house. You know – emptying it of furniture, cleaning up, closing the windows and doors on the echoing and empty rooms for one last time, and finally, knowing you can never really go back again, saying goodbye.

 

 

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