Because I’m still dealing with you know what I thought I’d share a couple more flowers from my parent’s place. I don’t know about you but they make me smile:
Gingerplant flower (photo by John Bern)
Gumnut flower (photo by John Bern)
Photos and news from home really make my day.
I would bake a pavlova. And it would be covered in passionfruit and strawberries.
Homesick? Me? Don’t know what you’re talking about.
Exhibit A:
All she can see is the horror.
Exhibit B:
Her laptop is now bigger than she is. It threatens to eat her.
It’s now minus six. Or twenty-one in that crazy Fahrenheit talk.
Help me!
I dies.
I think I’m going to have to learn Fahrenheit cause 31 sounds lovely to me while -1 makes me want to cry.
I have not been outside today. Partly due to the dread evil deadlines and partly because it’s -1 out there! Bits of me could freeze and fall off!
How am I going to make it to the end of January?
Aaargghh!!!
I so wish I was back home right now. I’d get to follow the cricket and the election. It would be warm. The sun wouldn’t be setting just a few hours after it rose. No one would be asking me about my accent. People would know that Errol Flynn is Australian. I’m sick of being a foreignor. Back home I don’t have to explain myself nearly so often. I can’t tell you how tiring it gets.
If I was in Sydney right now I would go for a long walk. I’d hear flying foxes in the trees. I’d smell all the night flowering plants. I’d watch the light sparkling on the harbour. I’d be HOME. And I’d go to Forbes & Burton for breakfast. I miss you, Adrian! I miss all my friends and family back home.
Where do you wish you were right now?
My desk is not so small as you all think. It has two levels. Two! Look closely at this photo:
See the stuff below? It’s not on the floor it’s the second level of the desk.
I’m now curious about your working spaces. If you feel so inclined take a photo and link to it in the comments.
It has come to this. I have the final round of edits on the Fairy book. They are in manuscript form. However, there is no room on my desk to put the manuscript. The towering piles of crap cannot stand any further weight, not even one small piece of paper, definitely not 264 manuscript pages. I know because I tried and there was much toppling of crap to the floor. It is now dumped back on the desk.
The desk must be cleaned in order for me to work.
I am afraid of it. It is now more like an archaeological dig than mere cleaning. I fear what I might find: I did clean away all uneaten food, didn’t I? I fear what I won’t find: All those things I’ve been looking for and not found could be buried somewhere in those many layers. But what if they’re not?
And what am I going to do with the stuff on the desk that must be kept? It’s not like there’s anywhere else to put it.
The cleaning of my desk fills my heart with despair.
Perhaps I could work on the floor in the front room? Or on the kitchen table? Or at someone else’s kitchen table?
No. I must be brave. I must delve into those hidden depths and make them go away.
Wish me luck. Pray that I do not get buried alive in an avalanche of old catalogues and magazines and receipts and envelopes and wine labels and dead electronic bits and letters and business cards and books and pens that don’t work and postcards and head phones and empty water bottles and note books and hair clips and lens cloths and post-its and lip balm and all the stuff I can’t actually see. Or eaten by the cockroaches, rats and scorpions that may emerge from the bottom layer.
If I do not post again remember me kindly.
Why is it often such a nightmare trying to come up with the right title? Why can’t I just call my next article “Article no. 25,” my next short story “Short Story no. 3,” and my next novel “Fourth Novel,” and the one after that “Fifth Novel”?
Don’t you think that has a ring to it? Sixth Novel by Justine Larbalestier.
Or, better still: Two Hundredth and Twenty Seventh Novel by Justine Larbalestier.
Or, how about: Just read it, already! by Justine Larbalestier.
Or, It’s a Book, Stupid. What did you think it was? by Justine Larbalestier.
Stupid titles. I kick them all.
Nope.
Books are products.
That’s not all they are, but it’s a pretty bloody important aspect, especially for those of us who are trying to make a living writing (or editing or selling) them.
Publishing is an industry. Part of what it’s about—and has always been about—is making money. For most of its history most of that money has been made by people other than writers.1 That’s still the case. Sure, some writers do just fine. As it happens—at this moment in time—I’m one of them. I don’t make a tonne of money, but I’m finally making more than I did as a research fellow.2
But the fact that my career’s toddling along okay (right now) is not why I read articles about “books as product” without blanching. That’s not why it doesn’t bother me to walk into a hall big enough for a city of dinosaurs that’s entirely full of books. I love books! I’m thrilled there are so many of them. And that there are so many people busily bringing them into existence.
Long before I sold so much as a haiku I was fascinated by the industry. By how it operates from the booksellers to the sales reps to the publicists to the editors and agents and writers right through to the execs at the top of the multi-media conglomerates that own most of the big publishing companies in the world. I’m fascinated by the economics of small presses and medium-sized presses too. I want to know everything there is to know. One of the coolest parts of going with Scott on his book tour was meeting so many sales reps and booksellers and media escorts and gossiping about the industry and learning new stuff I hadn’t known.3
I subscribe to Publishers Weekly and Publishers Lunch. I read a tonne of different publishing and bookish blogs by agents and editors and booksellers and librarians. Most of the conversations I have with fellow writers and with agents and editors and sales reps and other publishing types quickly turns into gossip about the industry. Who’s making the big deals? Which house is going after what kinds of books and why? Are the Twilight books the new Harry Potter?
I’m not saying I think publishing today is all roses. It’s not. But it never was. I spent more than a year of my life reading through the letters of Judith Merril and other science fiction writers of the 40s and 50s. Their struggles to make a living are very familiar.
Like Carole Cadwalladr I’m depressed by how few foreign-language titles are translated into English. By the books I think are hideously bad that do incredibly well4. But I remind myself that it was ever thus. The Pilgrim’s Progress is possibly the most boring book ever written. Twas a bestseller in its day. Crappy books have done well in the past; they’ll do well in the future. But there are always wonderful books flying off the shelves too.
There are more books being published than ever before. There are more readers than ever before. I think that’s fabulous.
I’d be depressed if we could no longer fill the halls of the Frankfurt Book Fair. If people weren’t excited about the latest books or by Doris Lessing winning the Nobel or by the latest crazy book deal.
I guess I’m a publishing geek.
Someone just wrote to ask me what to do when the writing is not going well. Fortunately, Diana Peterfreund has just written on this because I have no useful answer.
I suspect my own struggles with sentences that crumble as I type, with plot and character and meaning twisting out of my control, are at least partly because I’m very early on in my career. Old timers are much smarter about this stuff. Fer instance, my parents heard Thomas Kenneally interviewed the other day and he said that the writing got easier as he got older. After having written for more than forty years and having produced a bazillion gazillion novels (or, you know, thirty odd) he knows his own process and what to expect.
I don’t.
Not really. I’ve only written six novels and the writing of each one was different. I’ve been a freelancer writer for four years. I still have no idea how long it takes me to write a book. I can tell you how long the last one took, but not how long the next one will.
When you’re starting out you don’t know what to expect. You don’t know what you’re capable of. When the crappy writing days hit you—it’s a shock and you don’t know how to handle them.
Even super disciplined writers, like my old man, have days of words dissolving into puddles of putrescence, when they can’t focuss, and can barely squeeze out five words let alone a thousand.
What he does is keep writing. That’s where the discipline comes in. The act of getting yourself into the chair and typing—even if the words you’re producing make William McGonagall look like a genius—can be enough to get you past the crap and into the good.
Or not.
Sometimes people just need a break.
And only the writer can figure out which it is.
Personally, I’m pretty much always convinced that I need a break. Preferably in a place where there’s plentiful cricket coverage (alas, poor England), the food is fabulous, and the wine even better.
Sadly, my deadlines say otherwise . . .
What is wrong with this benighted country? It’s snowing! It’s April. Spring in this poxy hemisphere. It’s warmer back home in Sydney where it’s Autumn. I hates it! Snow!!! Aaaargghh!!!!!!
In other news John Green is silly with his friends over here. I knew they didn’t get any actual writing done when they got together. Now there’s proof.
I’m interviewed by E. Lockhart and reveal that I cannot write song lyrics.
And, um, it’s still snowing. I’m going back to bed. Wake me when the snow’s gone.