See this? Proof positive that I’m turning into my mother. Popping on lippy before heading out to the shops. Cleaning up before the visitors arrive.

Half an hour ago, my writing desk was buried under its usual sedimentary layers of bills, paperwork, notebooks, half-drunk cups laced with coffee scuzz, dog poo bags (unused), hair ties, change (glad I found that), and three different types of hand cream.

I now smell damn good thanks to the marshmallow body butter and have transferred all the mess to the dining room table, which is now truly terrifying (apart from that tidy corner in the centre bottom of the photo).

Real visitors to our house will marvel at my unprecedentedly tidy desk which sits in the front corner of the lounge/dining room. They may wonder why I have transferred its surface detritus to the dining room table (or maybe not, given that real visitors are used to my haphazard house keeping habits).

However if you are a virtual visitor swinging past as part of The Qld Writers Centre’s Blog Tour of writer’s work spaces, please note that I have indeed made my mother proud. I have tidied up AND popped on lippy (not to mention hand cream) just for you.

Welcome to my writer’s work space. (So glad you made it here before I slipped back into something more comfortable.) 

‘The desire to write grows with writing.’ Desiderius Erasmus

Is it a sin to love your blog? Somedays, more than your work-in-progress? Is it weak to fall into the arms of the less demanding taskmaster, the one that never asks more from you than you can give?

A stolen hour. A few hundred words. Just enough to catapult you out of that lonely writer’s chair and into cyberspace where the hit-o-metre confirms that someone, somewhere, is reading your words, and that, oh my giddy aunt, they actually care enough to respond…

Meanwhile the jilted w-i-p glowers at you from a dark corner of the desktop. Silent and resentful.

‘So. Expecting to curl up with me tonight?’ it asks coldly. ‘After ignoring me all day?”

‘Uh, yeah,’ you mutter, risking a quick glance at its stalled word count. ‘If that’s OK. Thought we could, you know, work on that scene. Uh, the one that’s not really going anywhere …’

‘And I suppose that’s my fault?’

‘No, of course not. Not at all,’ you stammer. ‘Look, it’s not you, it’s me. I’ve been-’

‘Wasting your time on that blog again?’ The snooty tone is a warning that things could get ugly.

‘-distracted,’ you finish carefully. ‘Honestly, I’ve hardly touched the blog in weeks. I’ve just had my hands full. What with the holidays, the kids. It’s just taking me a bit longer to get back in the groove than I’d hoped-’

‘Hmmm-’

You sense a thaw, an opening. ‘Tonight-’ You swallow, mouth suddenly dry. ‘Just the two of us. I promise. Internet off.’

The w-i-p squints, gimlet-eyed, then nods. Brace yourself Mary, for a gird-your-loins evening.

It’s enough to send you scurrying back into the comforting arms of your blog.

]

1. Heated toilet seats – after two weeks in snowy Niseko and near-freezing Tokyo and Kyoto, I discovered my toosh is one of the extremities that goes numb in the cold. I humbly bow to a nation that heats public toilet seats in restaurants, stations, and other haunts of the itinerant.

Niseko

2. The mesmerising dance of snow flakes in Niseko, floating in eddies, locking into crystalline embraces, then disappearing into drifts as light as suds.

3. The hidden night life of the Gion. Fleet-footed geishas disappearing into wooden tea-houses; slatted screens offering tantalising glimpses of a secret world, an empty room, and three giant capsicums the size of watermelons.

4. The immaculate dignity of the shuudoushi monks begging for alms, courteously deflecting photographers who would document their shame.

5. The extravagant fashions of Tokyo’s Harajuku district and its Lavazza coffee house – sadly the only good coffee we found anywhere in the land.

6. The nightly broiling in the onsen – why doesn’t my bathroom at home come with a hot spring overlooking the snowfields?

7. The trains, omigod, the trains – setting watches to schedules, then enjoying spotlessly clean, silent travel where talking on mobile phones is unthinkable.

8. The Nozomi – fastest of the Shinkansen bullet trains. Next Christmas, I’m asking Santa for one: at 300 kilometres per hour, I could do Brisbane to Biloela in under two hours.

Golden Pavillion, Kyoto

9. The world-heritage-listed temples, shrines and gardens maintained for a thousand years or more in ancient Kyoto. Sunlight shafting through the snow flakes to strike Kinkakuji, the Golden Pavillion, in a dazzling burst of light.

10. The courtesy and helpfulness we encountered everywhere – a lesson I have committed to heart for when next I encounter a bewildered visitor struggling with an unfamiliar language.

Arigato gozaimasu Japan, for making our Griswold family vacation one of wonder and joy. We bow to you from the waist and hope to return your favours whenever your countrymen and women venture our way.

‘The end of a story is not the point of a story… but you have to get to the end to understand the point of the story.’ Veny Armanno, Year-of-the-Novel, QWC 2007

New Year’s Eve always feels more like a beginning than an ending. I’m usually running on a full tank after Christmas, eager to hit the road, and discover what’s dancing on the shimmering horizon. I have to force myself to slow down, pull over for a minute, ponder where I’ve been, before plotting a new course. The horizon shimmers in every direction; it doesn’t help to fix your eyes on a mirage…

The past twelve months has been a white-knuckle roller-coaster ride. My first manuscript became my first novel halfway through the year; and two months later I sold my publisher a novel I hadn’t yet written, based on three chapters and a synopsis.

Twelve months ago, I would have lacked the confidence to contemplate such madness. Sometimes I still wonder if it was ignorance or arrogance that led me to take the chance on myself, to believe that I could deliver an entire manuscript, fifty-thousand-odd words, to someone else’s deadline. But in moments of peace, I like to believe that I’ve learned to trust myself and my writing instincts. 

Whichever is the case, Henry Hoey Hobson met his deadline, rose to a new level through revisions, survived the rigours of the copy edit, and is now with the typesetters and cover artists. Like my firstborn Dust, he will be released on July 1st, to make its own way through the world of reviewers, booksellers, teacher-librarian networks, and into the hands of his readers.

It has been a mighty year and I can’t help but feel grateful to all those who helped turn my wildest wish-fulfillment fantasies into reality. My gorgeous husband and children, treasured family and friends, my wonderful publisher Leonie Tyle, editor Sarah Hazelton, publicist Yae Morton, and all the booksellers, teachers, librarians, and readers whose support has been both gratifying and humbling over the past year. Thank you, and may the new year fulfill its promises to you all.

PS. I do have a new year’s resolution: I will finish The Lonely Dead in 2010. That is my promise to myself and to you all. Hold me to it. And Happy New Year.

I learned to shoot and drive when still in primary school, but now need smelling salts at the thought of my own children accessing the same opportunities.

This Christmas is a big Bongers Fest at my brother’s property outside Biloela. A forty-strong gathering of the clan complete with cold room, camper trailors, and you guessed it, guns. ‘Slug guns,’ my brother clarified after a moment of dead air on the phone line. ‘For the kids.’

And his twelve-year-old wants to teach our ten, twelve and seventeen-year-olds to drive. Good grief, when did I become such a scaredy-cat?

My brothers are jaw-droppingly competent. If they want a tennis court, they will excavate, laser-level, underlay, bitumenise, fence and illuminate an obscure corner of central Queensland to rival centre-court Wimbledon. When they shoot a black snake, a crater in the parched earth is the only evidence of its passing.  When they do a job, they do it properly.

No doubt they have passed on competence and high-level skills in vehicular control and the safe discharge of firearms to the next generation. I can’t claim to have done the same.

Thirty years in the city has made me soft. I now solve problems with a mobile phone, a keyboard and a credit card. I probably couldn’t hit a barn door, let alone an icecream bucket, with a slug gun. But I have  inherited the determination that made my father pull his finger out of the dykes and carve out a corner of a hard land half a world away from his own.

Come Christmas-time, I am happy to relearn the lessons of my youth and teach my kids, if that’s what they want.  But, if they want to stay in the pool, or watch the Boxing Day cricket, that’s fine by me too.

May you all enjoy a bang-up Christmas, wherever that may be, with all the peace and blessings of the festive season

Chris xx

For those whose tastes run to the literary, the crime novel to die for this Christmas is Peter Temple’s Truth. The fictional underbelly of the Victorian police, dry as the crackle of eucalypt leaves in the moment before the fireball hits.

A stripped-down, elegant and elliptical story of hard men and violence on both sides of the law, where Truth is a lovely little grey who “won at her second start, won three from twelve, always game, never gave up. She sickened and died in hours, buckled and lay, her sweet eyes forgave them their stupid inability to save her.” This writer, this book, my favourite for 2009.

Fantasy lovers aged from twelve to eleventy-seven will bask in the gorgeous glow of Karen Brooks’ Tallow: “In a world of  darkness, there is one who will bring light.”

In a canel-laced city, a stolen child, the heir to extraordinary powers, is hidden and abused in the candle-maker’s quarter until her emerging powers betray her to those who would use her in their machiavellian games.  Karen Brooks cannot deliver the next in this trilogy fast enough for me.

As a reward for surviving girl schoolyard politics for another year, pamper your teenage miss with the latest Luxe novel by Anna Godbersen. Set in 1899 Manhatten, this is Gossip Girl  in crinolines, replete with bounders and cads,  and sumptuous with scandal and setting.

Then rocket her back into the 21st century with Justine Larbalestier’s Liar … what happens when a compulsive liar decides to tell the truth… or does she? You decide. Guaranteed to keep you up all night reading. And awake the next. Wondering….

Lure teenage boys away from the X-box with Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games and Catching Fire. Post-apocolyptic vision of a world where reality television is an annual kill-or-be-killed event.

My pre-teens will want the latest Emily Rodda, The Battle for Rondo, so I’m not going to fight it. I don’t even want to referee. They’ve read the first two and going by their previous attempts to read the same book at the same time, it could get ugly.

Perhaps I can separate them with a peace offering: Bigands MC, the latest in Robert Muchamore’s Cherub series for the boy-child; and for my girl-child who is about to graduate from primary school, Glenda Millard’s A small free kiss in the dark.

Finally, my non-fiction recommendation for those Dads who stubbornly prefer real life to the inventive pleasures of the novel : Australians by master story teller Thomas Keneally. The first of a three-volume history of Australia with people always centre-stage.

Which books are on your Christmas list this year?

I’m at a loose end. Pull it and I’ll start to unravel.

The revisions are done, the publishing Gods temporarily appeased after taking my second-born.

Henry Hoey Hobson has left home, whisked away on secret publisher’s business to an unknown location, a brutal boot camp where a merciless editor will whip his scrawny arse into shape.

He’ll come back eventually, bulging in a tough bag, splattered with copy editor squiggles. Sporting black marks on his once-spotless pages. Missing adverbs I didn’t even know that he had…

I’ll miss him, I do already; my head’s been in HHH-time for months. But it’s time to reset the clock for crime.

The post-deadline clean-up has cleared the decks to make way for the next one, my adult murder book, The Lonely Dead.

Under the detritus on my desk, I have finally located my dog-eared copy of the Crime Scene Investigation manual (along with an unbanked cheque, two overdue birthday cards,  bills that I’ve paid, and filing I have binned).

Voices that have been simmering on the back burner for months are now rattling their lids.

It is time to make the shift. To find a new register. To drop it down a gear and begin the uphill climb. A new story mountain needs to be conquered.

Most aspiring novelists are advised to write about what they know. Which isn’t all that helpful when your protagonist is spread-eagled on an inter-stellar operating table about to be dissected by a laser-driven hive mind.

So in the interests of being helpful, let me offer this small piece of advice.

Write about what you love.

This is not based on sentiment. The only thing that keeps most of us going in the knock-down, drawn-out, occasionally exhilirating, often frustrating, seemingly endless roller-coaster ride that is novel writing is a passion for what we do. Without it, this torturous exercise in delayed gratification would defeat us.

Whether it’s sci fi, literary, high fantasy, blockbuster, childrens’ or bodice-ripper, it’s got to be what you love reading and writing.  Novel writing is an ultra-marathon. You are in it for the long haul and if you don’t love it, you just ain’t going to make the distance.

You have to love the training, the thousands of hours spent reading till your eyes bleed, the daily ritual of writing, something, anything, even when you don’t feel like it. Especially when you don’t feel like it.

Those who wait for inspiration are waiting for Godot.  Inspiration comes after you start writing. Trust me, there is no writing problem that cannot be solved by writing your way through it.

Writing about what you love isn’t confined to genre. The characters must speak to you. How else could you bear to spend months, if not years, in their company? They must have hidden depths that fascinate, intrigue, madden and delight. You have to feel their pain, laugh with them, cry for them, even want to slap them, or worse. But you have to feel them moving and talking inside you.

If your characters are not real to you, they won’t be real to your readers.  If your story doesn’t keep you up at nights, it won’t keep anyone else up either.

It takes courage to commit to what you love.  So, if you think you can give up writing, then maybe you should, because clearly you don’t love it enough.

“The chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage. And if he has none, he is more than a coward. He is a sellout and a fink and a heretic, because writing is a holy chore.” Harlan Ellison

When I took my first baby steps as a writer of fiction, it was the good folk at the Qld Writers Centre who held my hand and picked me up when I stumbled and fell.

They encouraged me to walk unassisted, and then to run. They clapped when I did cartwheels over my first book contract, and my second.

So what do you say to an organisation that has been with you every step of your writing journey?

You say, thanks. Publicly. You urge anyone with an interest in writing to do themselves a favour and join the QWC. And when that organisation asks if you’d like to be part of their blog tour, you say Hell, yeah.

QWC: Where do your words come from?

I’m tempted to say out of my fingertips, because no matter how much I plan my writing, what sprouts from the ends of my fingers when I settle at the keyboard always manages to surprise me.

For me, writing is a numinous blend of art (evoking the subconscious) and craft (using conscious intent derived from a lifetime in skills training).  As a kid, I would have read brown paper if there was nothing else to read. I could have read for Australia if they ever made it an Olympic sport.  I wrote for a living for twenty years before I turned to writing fiction.

For me, American poet Hart Crane nails it: “One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.”

QWC: Where did you grow up and where do you live now?

I grew up on an farm outside a railway siding called Jambin, just up the road from Biloela, Central Queensland. I left there to go to Uni and have lived in Brisbane pretty much ever since.

But that’s just geography. I really grew up in a marriage that brought with it two pre-schoolers as part of an excellent package deal. Seven years later, I still had two preschoolers underfoot – my life was ground hog day – and it taught me everything I needed to know to start writing fiction.

QWC: What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work?

I’ve just finished writing a children’s novel about a kid called Henry Hoey Hobson who is the only boy in Year Seven.  It starts like this:

‘She was waiting with a gaggle of mates, blocking the steps leading back down from our classroom. Golden in the sunlight, with that curious blend of stealth and grace that marked out the queens of the jungle. I lumbered towards the all-female pride, a wildebeest, hellbent on his own destruction.‘

QWC: What piece of writing do you wish you had written?

I actually said ‘I wish I’d written that’ when I read Karen Foxlee’s The Anatomy of Wings. A wonderful novel, beautifully written, that resonated with my own experience of growing up on the fringes of a mining town.

But the one passage that gives me goose bumps every time I read it is Shakespeare’s St Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. It is everything I aspire to in my writing.

QWC: What are you currently working towards?

My dream is to publish a novel a year, and so far, with exactly one published novel under my belt (Dust 2009), I am right on target.

However I am keeping the dream alive with Henry Hoey Hobson due out in July 2010, and a work-in-progress, The Lonely Dead (an adult crime novel), my big hope for 2011 .

QWC: Complete this sentence: The future of the book is…

…in good stories, well told. The packaging is not my central concern. E-books will have their way with the willing. There will always be people, like me, who are seduced by the crack of a virgin spine, the scent wafting up from the riffle of pages, the shiver of anticipation on reading the dedication and turning to Chapter 1…

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening October to December 2009. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog The Empty Page.

Hyperlink: http://www.qwc.asn.au/Resources/TheEmptyPageBlog.aspx