she's got herself some standards

 journal  2 Responses »
Mar 282011
 
IMG_2807_550

Yesterday I met Nova.

Nova is a lyrebird, named for their lyre-shaped tail feathers but, in an astounding display of synchronicity (that works only in English), better known for being liars. Go figure.

When I say I met him, I mean I watched him attempting to woo his lady lyrebird. I've never seen a lyrebird in the flesh before, so I was ready to be impressed simply by his presence and his pretty, pretty tail. But his courtship ritual displayed that this brown bird is, at least in personality, adorably and laughably vibrant.

It's early in the breeding season, so his lady lyrebird was blithely, determinedly oblivious to him, forcing him to ever grander and more desperate measures to attract her attention. It started with him scratching up some lovely nesting material for her, since that's what she was concentrating on — but she simply ignored or accepted said material as the whim took her, and went on with her own foraging.

Throughout it all he tried every single noise in his repertoire — including kookaburras laughing (always three at once), the call of a whipbird and a bellbird, something that sounded remarkably akin to a young child crying "Wow!", and a noise I can only describe as the sound effects of Space Invaders.1

But lady lyrebird was less impressed by his vocal abilities than the small crowd of humans, so in the end he resorted to fanning out his tail, jumping on top of tree stump (still no reaction) and finally, tail still fanned out and an astonishing array of space invaders noises coming from his throat, literally dashing in dizzying laps around her.

The photo above is of him running, around and around and around, calling Look at me! Look at me! in every way he knew how.

Poor Nova. She didn't even glance up once. Boy's got to do more than sing for his supper, apparently.

  1. The keeper said this noise was, as far as they could work out — it's hard to be sure with a bird known for its mimicry — not mimicry at all but possibly his natural call. [↩]

er, would you believe … narrative genius?

 journal  Comments Off
Mar 222011
 
spawnstory

It's not her handwriting, but this is the story Spawn dictated over the weekend.

She then promptly refused to show the story to Nanna, because it would make said Nanna too sad, being reminded that Spawn lived so very far away.

I think I need to teach her about non sequiturs, and guns on the mantel.

it's alive!

 journal, the wages of honey, writing life  2 Responses »
Mar 132011
 

You guys, I've done it: I've finished the thorn girls short story.

And by short I mean 9,156 / 10,750 words (depending on whether you count by human rules or printer's rule), so, um, yeah, not exactly short. In fact, it's what I affectionately like to call one of those unsellable lengths between a short story and a novel.

And by finished I mean I have a working first draft that I'm not ashamed to show people, and will doubtless need more work but I'm pretty sure said work, from this point on, will be polishing only, not structural. (Please, please, please let it not need any more structural work. This story has been taken apart and put back into exactly the same shape only different so many times I've lost count. Not to mention numerous brain cells in the process.)

This poor little frankenstein of a story was first started halfway through 2007, which takes a bit of believing even for me. I always forget that writing a short story is no quicker for me than writing a novel — in fact sometimes it's slower. Although in all honesty a great deal of the slowness in this case had to do with the story being constantly temporarily abandoned in favour of higher priorities, such as the editing passes on Shadow Queen and Shadow Bound.

There's something heady about the moment you know you have an actual draft, a "finished" draft. Somewhat akin to the moment you pull your hands back from adding the final card to a house of cards, holding your breath for fear of triggering the collapse and realising no, it's steady.

If I had the means on hand, I would totally be getting celebratorily drunk right now.

your mission for sunday: stare at the screen

 journal, the wages of honey  11 Responses »
Mar 062011
 

Today I am full of yearning.

It's been too long since I travelled; I've forgotten the feel of an open sky. There are plans … not in place, but at least taking shape, for the next trip; but they won't come to fruition for months. MONTHS. All I can do is flick through my pictures of Mongolia and Bhutan and promise/remind myself there will be mountains before the year's end.

(I love Melbourne, but I must admit to missing hills. Australia doesn't really do mountains, not by a world scale, but Melbourne takes that to ridiculous extremes and while that can be great for walking everywhere it's not great for getting my lungs somewhere they can feel swept clean of cobwebs.)

The next trip is going to be Switzerland — or rather, it shall start in Switzerland. That part has been set by a friend's wedding. The rest, though, is yet to be determined. I'm tempted to head east to Vienna, then south to Croatia through Slovenia. What do you recommend, my better-travelled blog people? Have you been over that way? What should I know about, so I don't miss it?

In the meantime, my weekends will consist of the usual staring contest between my and my brain.

thorn girls: a battle of wills, wordcount, and attrition

two months down? already?

 the wages of honey, writing life  Comments Off
Mar 032011
 

I'm behind in my blogging (as usual), and partly that's because I'm this close to wrapping up the thorn girls short story. I am tempted to indulge in the cliche so close I can taste it, but really that would only be attractive if finishing were, say, a peanut butter sandwich. With fresh white bread. Yum.

Last night I got the structure all but nailed down (albeit with an awful lot of white space in the manuscript which is nothing more than the note GET HIM OUTSIDE NOW, or some other such crossing-the-room instruction); tonight I get to trawl through and put in all those room-crossings and transitions.

Normally when I write my first draft, I put the transitions in — but in a tricky first draft, such as this one, which I got half-written and then threw at Tess in desperation, and sulked until she came back with the suggestion to rip it to pieces (which was more helpful than it sounds, given she told me which pieces I needed to keep) and thus required significant structural edits at the same time as trying to write the rest of the story … well. In those cases I tend to skip the transitions. Mostly because I find I'll spend hours agonising over the one sentence that will impel the character across the room, only to find that character now needs to not be in the scene at all. Structural edits never progress linearly, for me. Heck, nothing about my story-writing process is linear. Let's be honest.

So, because listening to me opine about editing is bound to be a little dry, I'll point you instead to Gillian's blog, where there is a piece up by me in honour of Women's History Month, where I talk about my dayjob:

…my favourite subjects were mathematics and chemistry. …I could go on at length about the appeal of science and engineering — the way it takes hard physical evidence and observable, reproducible phenomena, and strings theorems and hypotheses between them to create stories of why the leaves are green and the sky is blue. That, just like writing, it's about past experiences, a shared history, imagination, and daring to dream. The fact that the entire discipline is built on a premise of being collaborative and rigorously open, encouraging invention and innovation, like a global remix project centred around numbers and factoids. I like that language is immaterial, that the stars speak to us through chemicals and fractals and ratios.

In the end, it comes down to the fact that I crave answers, yes, but more than anything, I want space and the chance to both be curious and to indulge that curiosity.

ETA: Oops! Link was borked. Fixt.