On ‘happy’ birthdays

The older I get, the more I suspect happiness is linked to low expectations.

I expected nothing from yesterday’s birthday, had planned nothing in the aftermath of floods and other dramas, and yet 24 hours later I’m still aglow from the unexpected pleasures it brought.

A romantic dinner with hubby the night before… Great Italian with the kids last night. A call from an old pal – celebrating a 43 year friendship that’s still going strong. Another from my brother – hearing his voice on the phone after a tracheotomy tube had prevented him from speaking for a week was the most joyful of birthday presents.

All six of my brothers remembered, even the one on night shift in cyclone-torn Central Queensland. Such great blokes, and lord knows, they all had more important things on their minds.

The 42 people evacuated by helicopter from flood-devastated Jambin included one brother, his wife, their daughter and granddaughter, and another nephew and niece.

Water surrounded my family’s homes in Biloela and Jambin, but didn’t make it inside, thank the high heavens. Chooks and dogs survived, but not the four black snakes my brother killed while clearing debris from around his front steps.

A neighbour across from my Mum admitted panicking as the rising waters turned the surrounding streets into canals. ‘Oh, I wasn’t worried,’ said my 84 year old mother. ‘I’ve been through this before.’ And she has. More times than most. Despite power failures and unreliable telephone coverage, she somehow managed to send me a beautiful bunch of flowers, bless her.

The floods of the 1970s made an enormous impression on me as a teenager and decades later featured in my first novel Dust: ‘Silently, like a thief, the flood had crept up on us, stealing our land, our paddocks, the path to our back door, our bottom step.’ This year, the flood waters made it two steps higher.

Back in the 70s, I was a Suzi Quatro-obsessed teen.

And in a strange twist of fate, as the flood waters recede yet again in Central Queensland and the indomitable folk begin yet another clean up, I’ll be reliving that teenaged obsession.

A good friend has surprised me with tickets to Suzi Quatro for my birthday – and try as I might to keep my expectations low, they keep bubbling up.

Can the Can, baby, we’ll be Devil Gate Driving tonight!

The Calm before the Storm

This is the blog post I had to have before the year launches itself onto my unsuspecting back and goes crazy.

Not bad-crazy, or Spock-when-you-insult-his-mother-crazy, but GOOD-CRAZY. 

It’s chockablock with writing workshops, mentorships, school visits and Festivals – and even my first-ever trip to the Big Apple, yay! (Please feel free to let your NYC agent and publisher know that I’ll be in town; I’m sure Intruder would go down a treat with a bagel and lox.) :)

For those who love to know such things, click here for a complete run-down of what 2015 has in store for me.  For the rest of you, here are the highlights to date:

17-20 March  Somerset Celebration of Literature | Gold Coast

15-30 May: Washington and New York, New York (so excited, I had to say it twice!)

15-18 July: Whitsunday Voices Literature Festival

29 July-2 August: Townsville Writer-in-Residency

22-28 August: Book Week

2-6 September: Brisbane Writers Festival

14 September: StoryArts Festival Ipswich

I’m also pleased to be taking on the role of Mentor for the Qld Literary Awards Emerging Author Manuscript Awards in 2015. In recent years, I’ve provided short mentoring sessions as part of QWC’s Writer’s Surgery so it’s fantastic to have the opportunity to work with a single author over the course of the year on the development of her manuscript.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s back to my work-in-progress before the madness begins!

The long and the short of it

One of my nine sisters-in-law once rang on a Sunday night, to share a snippet she’d found in the Weekend Shopper classifieds. It read:

‘For Sale: Size 22 wedding dress. Never worn.’

Just eight little words and an entire story ballooned out . . . But what that story meant depended on the reader.

For her, the main character was overweight, jilted before her big day, perhaps consoling herself with great slabs of wedding cake, while an over-sized gown hung unworn on the cupboard door behind her.

For me, there was an alternative, more optimistic, reading. In my version of the story, the protagonist had lost 36 kilos before her big day – the dress no longer fitted!

My point is that readers complete stories that writers begin – whether our stories are novel-length, with months if not years, separating writer and reader, or short, like the one I finished today (which hopefully makes the cut for an anthology coming out later in the year).

Stories are needy things – they demand to be written and they demand to be read. Only then are they truly finished.

So, wish me luck finishing today’s short story. It has been written. It has been flensed. Now it needs first readers, and all going well, a publisher, editor and proof reader. When it finally makes it into the hands of its readers, it will be ready. When they finish reading it and decide what it means to them, my story will be complete.

Making reading and writing dangerous

You know that feeling when you’re about to step backwards off the edge of a cliff?

The terrifying thrill of adrenalin? The not-knowing what’s going to happen next?

That’s how I feel whenever I walk into the spotlight, when I start writing a new scene, or send off a story that hasn’t been seen by any eyes but my own.

And it’s how I feel right now, packing for Melbourne and the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English State Conference.

I’m giving my final workshop of the year – Making Reading and Writing Dangerous for Kids – and I’m equal parts excited (because I love talking to teachers) and nervous (because hey, they’re teachers, what if they give me a bad grade?)

And as soon as that thought popped into my head, I heard the ghost of Mr Rainie, my Grade Eight English teacher repeating the words he said to me when I was twelve: ‘Why don’t you just try being the best that you can be, Christine, and see where that takes you?’

Well Mr Rainie, I am trying, but you didn’t warn me how dangerous that journey would be. Or how brave I’d need to be. Reporting from plane crashes, reading the ABC TV News in a borrowed shirt and half-slip, and walking naked (with all my talents and limits clearly on display), every time I publish a new book.

But I want you to know that I am still trying, Mr Rainie. And I’ll keep a special place for you at tomorrow’s workshop, just in case you’d like to come along and check on my progress. :)

 

 

 

My house hates me

Fifteen years we’ve been together and finally my house has turned on me.

I blame myself. I’m a disinterested cleaner (no Nana, not everyone shifts the furniture to vacuum) and denial works for a surprisingly long time where home maintenance is concerned.

It worked for me. Right up to the morning I parked my feet under my desk and paddled in something wet.

I immediately accused the dog – which offended him greatly – and then realised that the sodden pool of carpet was too large and fresh-smelling to be blamed on my fastidiously continent beagle.

Intrigued, I tracked the puddle to the wall, under it, and on to the real culprit – my en suite shower next door.

‘Your waterproofing’s failed,’ said Mick the plumber, hitching up his duds. ‘Big job fixing that.’

I thanked him, filed his advice in my too-hard basket, and informed Hubba Hubby that we could no longer use our shower.

But that’s okay, I assured him, because we could always use the decrepit bathroom on the back verandah. Which is what we did – right through the coldest months of the year.

Now, Brisbane isn’t Winterfell, but showering on the back verandah of an old Queenslander is exactly like standing outside naked in the middle of winter. But we figured we could tough it out, because we’re Brisvegans, and hey, summer is coming!

But long before the mercury hit anywhere near yesterday’s 40 degrees, the decrepit bathroom on the back verandah gave out under the unexpected and unrelenting pressure of daily use.

So for the last two months, we’ve been deep in the throes of not one, but two bathroom renovations.

All manner of tradesmen have trapsed through our house while the scream of tile-cutters filled the dust-clogged air, causing what I can only assume was an inexplicable neural spasm because, in the midst of reigning chaos, I decided to order new curtains. After all, they’d been in the house since we bought it, fifteen years seemed a fair innings, and how much extra chaos could new curtains cause anyway?

A fair bit apparently. Because yes, Nana, I did shift the bedroom furniture to vacuum (so that the curtain man wouldn’t think I was a grub). And that’s how I discovered the plague of carpet moth munching its way through the woollen carpets in my bedroom.

So now the beagle and I are holed up in my office (which thank the high heavens has lovely acrylic carpet, albeit slightly water-marked in that large stained area under my desk) while Wayne, the nicest pest man in the world mass-murders carpet moths in the main bedroom.

Swear to God, I should have left well enough alone.

Once you start paying these old girls a bit of attention, they get so dang demanding…

But to be fair, they also scrub up pretty well, don’t you think?

Dear Santa

I’m good (or at least not on the naughty list yet), how are you? Snowed under, I bet. So I thought you’d appreciate my wish list before this year buries us all under an avalanche of to-dos, not-dones, and oh-well-maybe-next-years.

Normally I like to keep it simple: something I want, something I need, something to eat and something to read. This year, I just want and need to eat up some great reads. Specifically these…

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty: Suburban noir meets brilliantly wicked take on ex-husbands and second wives – sounds like me. Also gotta love a Sydney girl making the New York Times bestseller list (and if you’re handing out any of those treats this Christmas, Santa, count me in!)

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart: What the… a big break-out YA-novel-of -the-year and I haven’t read it yet – how could this have happened?? (And Santa, if you happen to be passing before December 25, my stocking is ready and waiting for you on the floor of the hall cupboard next to the flippers).

When the Night Comes by Favel Parrett: I just loved her powerful and moving debut novel Past the Shallows and am dying to read this next one.

Which is also pretty much how I feel about The Incredible Adventures of Cinnamon Girl by Melissa Keil.

Her last offering, Life in Outer Space, was one of my favourite YA reads last year, and I am expecting incredible things from her new heroine, the comic-loving Cinnamon Girl (which ticks all my boxes given my comic obsessed past).

And seriously Santa, wouldn’t everyone be wanting one of these on their shelves for the cover art alone?

So tell me, what’s on everyone else’s wish list this Christmas?

 

 

A twinkling of brides

Collective nouns aren’t normally associated with brides, what with only one usually in a room at a time (South Korean mass weddings notwithstanding).

But oh my lordy, we needed a compendium of collective nouns to describe the bevy of bridal treats that turned up for our 20th wedding anniversary party on the weekend.

Dozens of my nearest and dearest slipped, shoe-horned and shimmied their way back into their wedding finery to celebrate with hubba hubby and me.

A train of brides chugalugging on champers. A bouquet of bridesmaids blessing us with their fragrant presence. A gabble of groomsmen that could be heard a suburb away.

Oh, and for some unexplained reason, hubba hubby chose to wear a safari suit, but each to his own.

I love him dearly and when it comes to wedding parties, no-one cares what the blokes wear, do they?