Yet another writing project!

Because I never seem to be...quite...busy...enough, I've taken on yet another new project. There's a competition for short (that is, 10-minute) plays in Sydney, and applications close on September 15. I've got what I (at least) think is a shriekingly funny idea, and a couple of minutes' worth written already. Interestingly, if the play did get selected for performance, and I did end up getting into Clarion South, I would have the happy dilemma of whether to take a day off Clarion South to fly back down to Sydney for the performance....

The short-play competition is here.

I've just tested for green belt.

Another belt test. I've got my green belt from my new school (as in, Margaret and I have been training there since late January). I don't feel particularly elated, unfortunately. It's complicated: I really, really, really miss my DC school (not to mention my family and friends, and all the things about my home country that I enjoy). And I really miss being good at karate. And I'm really dissatisfied with how slowly my skills are coming back. (At least they are coming back, I suppose.) Also, I feel like I don't have a proper grounding in the techniques of this new school, because I've whizzed through the beginner ranks at a speed I consider to have been rashly fast. So this test is just one big metaphor for all my inner demons. (Or Inner Muggers, if you prefer.)

Another blog to visit

I think my friends are all really cool people. So I have no problems pointing you to their blogs. Here's one posted by the always interesting (and intriguingly named) Chard Nelson. Chard makes something of a habit of placing in apposition the seemingly disparate. He doesn't always wrestle the seemingly disparate into reconciliation, but it's fun to watch him work.

A reciprocal link

My long-term buddy Tyce was kind enough to link to my blog, so here's a link to his blog.

Tyce and I have seen each other through many of life's adventures, including working for the worst manager at the World Bank (this claim can be substantiated by objective documents such as a Bank-wide employee-satisfaction survey in which our work group came in dead last of every single work group in the Bank).

Imagine my surprise and joy when Tyce moved to Australia!

So check out his blog and enjoy his insights and irrepressible 'tude.

What my kid said

On Friday Margaret (age 10) refereed some of the soccer matches in an inter-school competition. For some reason, she ended up slated to ref all boys' games. Before the games started, one of the boys said, "Who's reffing?"

"I am," said Margaret.

The boy gave a few ostentatious coughs designed to communicate his scorn, while his mates snickered. "Are you okay?" Margaret asked coolly.

"Oh, uh, yeah, I just got a frog in my throat." More snickering.

"Next time maybe you should let the frog do the talking."

I think my kid is terrific.

For the writer, nothing is wasted.

One of the things I really, really love about being a writer is that no matter what you're doing, no matter what job you're working at to earn the rent, no matter who you're talking to, it always feeds into your own hoard (or perhaps horde) of writing fodder.

My main gig for the past year or so has been editing project documents at a coal-mining company. I now know many, many, many things that I never thought I would know. And I've made friends I never, ever would have met otherwise. For someone who hungers for meaning and purpose (such as like what I am), it is profoundly comforting to know that even if I can't see why something is happening in a certain way in my life, at least I can use it in a story.

Update on Clarion South: Good News, Bad News

The bad news is that I haven't actually been selected for Clarion South. BUT! I have not yet despaired. For this is what the selection committee wrote to me:

"...your work was judged to be of a very high standard and we believe
you would get a lot out of a workshop such as Clarion South. For that
reason, we would like to keep you as a 'reserve participant.'"

Which means that there's still a chance I might be able to go. People have to reserve their spots by September, so if any of them decide that their schedule or finances don't permit, I've still got a shot at it. I'm optimistic about that. And I'm especially thrilled that my work was judged to be of a very high standard. I keep saying it to myself: "Very high standard. Very high standard. Your work was judged to be of a very high standard." Hey, everyone, hey, guess what -- my work was judged to be of a very high standard!

External validation of the quality of one's writing is extremely hard to come by. So I'm ludicrously excited and heartened by this bit of encouragement.

A big weekend

Friday night I went to karate class and played at slicing invisible enemies with a wooden sword. I love that sort of thing!

Saturday morning Houston and I drove up to where our horses are boarded and got them seen to by the horsey dentist. (Gads, the tools they use to file the horses' teeth are intimidating in the extreme.) Then we rushed back in time to get Margaret to her Saturday drama class, and I dropped off Act II Sc. 1 for the teenagers to look at that afternoon. I'm still having a hell of a time ending the scene, but maybe the kids will have a good idea.

As soon as drama was done, we drove up to Sydney. We started off doing a bookstore crawl (there's a neighborhood of a few square blocks that has tons of really cool bookstores). We went to the ABC Shop (NOT the same as the ABC stores in Hawaii!!), where Margaret, with her own money, bought the first season of Black Books on DVD. I'm so proud of my little geek child. Then we went to Galaxy, a specialist speculative-fiction bookstore, then Abbey Books, an extremely high-quality independent bookstore. We finished up at Kinokuniya, a megabookstore (I gather it's a branch of a Japanese chain of megabookstores). And, of course, whenever anyone leaves a bookstore empty-handed, Baby Jesus cries, and we can't have that.

Next, we ate a truly phenomenal dinner at Redoak Boutique Beer Cafe. Fascinating varieties of beer, unbeLIEVable food, excellent desserts, pleasant enough service, nice surroundings. It has become our new "we need to celebrate something" place. Alas, rather pricey, but it was worth it. We were, in fact, having an early celebration of a world premier of a new piece by noted composer Houston Dunleavy scheduled for the next day. We returned to the car, distended with good food and drink, and drove to the Peggy Glanville-Hicks Composers' House, where we stayed for the night by the generosity of a friend and composer, Tom Fitzgerald.

The next morning we went to mass at St. Mary's Cathedral in Sydney, where they have a solemn sung mass at 10:30 on Sundays. The ordinaries were from the Palestrina Missa Papae Marcelli (Pope Marcellus Mass), and the homily was by Archbishop George Pell, for what that's worth. I confess I don't find him a very compelling speaker, and spent much of the sermon thinking about other things.

After mass and lunch back at the PGH House, we went over to the concert venue, a Uniting Church with the pews all ripped out and absolutely the worst religious art I have ever seen in my life on the walls. And I've seen a lot. Clearly someone is still a slave to the 70s (flexible worship space, "relevant" religious art). However, the acoustics were very good, and the concert went very well. Houston's piece is a four-movement duet for violin and cello; each movement is based on one of the places that he found particularly memorable -- for good (Grand Canyon, Chicago, New York) or for ill (Los Angeles) -- on our trip home last year. The Chicago movement in particular went over very well (I heard at least two people come up to Houston and said "You must have really enjoyed Chicago").

Back home to Thirroul in the evening, to collapse into blissful sleep.

We are not a normal family....

Latest on the play

Had a meeting with the director/producer this afternoon. I was consumed with trepidation, but all is well -- the kids are really enjoying the play, and they're increasing their own acting skills by workshopping it and giving me their feedback. (Which, of course, was part of the point.) I am desperately relieved that the things they identify as not working are actually quite fixable (rather than along the lines of "Would you consider scrapping Act I entirely and rewriting it?").

I'm enjoying playwriting far more than I thought I would -- in its way, it's more fun than working on the novel or writing poetry. I'm pretty sure this will not be my last play.... (Alas, though, the producers of Doctor Who are not accepting scripts from the slush pile.)

No Internet at home!

Aaack! Our landline at home has been non-functioning for a couple of days now, and we're too cheap to get broadband cable, so I've been unable to dash to the computer and check on this or that fact, or check my email at home, or entertain myself reading mugglenet.com or Doctor Who fan sites. The Internet is...like...water, or electricity. It's a utility without which home is a good deal less comfortable. And yet I'm old enough to remember when things were very different. (I even remember the days before Yahoo had its own domain name, and the number of web sites in the world was fewer than 10,000. Fewer than 5,000, actually.)

However, the computer itself still works, and I was up VERY late last night struggling to finish Act II Sc 1 of the play. I can't find its ending!! I added another minute and a half onto the scene, in an effort to force it to end. Once I look at last night's work in the glaring light of an Australian day, I may realise that that minute and a half was pathetic floundering. Or I may say, "Good work, Laura, that sure needed to be there." And yet...how to end it? I've been wrestling with this question all week. Maybe I'll be all post-modern and just have the actors walk offstage for no reason whatsoever.

Writing is a family affair (or is that just my family?).

I needed to write a fight scene into the play I'm working on. Ordinarily it would be left to the director to decide how a fight goes, but I need to be quite specific, as it reveals a few details about the characters involved.

Due to many years of indulging in my peculiar habit of martial arts, I can visualize a fight fairly well, but I just wanted to make doubly sure that a particular move would work. So I set Houston and Margaret up in a lovely tableau (she was throttling him), and I took my wooden sword to simulate a walking stick and used it to wedge the choke off Houston's neck. I was quite happy to see that it worked very effectively (details on request).

How nice to have such enthusiastic (not to mention corporeal) support from my husband and child in my literary endeavors!

In theory, I have two more weeks to wait.

A while back, I applied to attend the prestigious Clarion South residency for writers of speculative fiction. They're supposed to let applicants know by the middle of August. I'm surprised to find out how nervous I am. Application is by story (sort of an audition on paper, really), so if they reject me, they've rejected my story.

People often tell writers (and other artists), "Don't take rejection personally." Frankly, I think this is crap advice. Anyone who writes knows that it is much less painful to be insulted regarding one's person than it is to bear insults to one's writing.

Every writer I've ever talked to fights the spectre of "not good enough". And it has nothing to do with feelings of self-worth. One can be utterly convinced of one's own intrinsic goodness and importance as a human being, and still suffer agonies of "not good enough" when it comes to the writing.

So if I don't get into Clarion South I will not be taking it personally. No, it will be far worse than that.

Research is an amazing thing

When I was deciding when to set the play I'm writing, I sort of arbitrarily chose the summer (i.e., January) of 1910. It was about the right time for the Australia of the day to be not TOO dissimilar to the Australia I know, yet different enough that I could make use of things like the very studied mannerisms of the time, the wannabe-English leanings, and the class differences, which were stronger then than they are now.

One of the major plot points is a massive, multi-day rainstorm. Because I'm a volunteer with the State Emergency Service, the lead agency for dealing with floods and storms in New South Wales, I'm very, very well acquainted with the characteristics of what's called an "East Coast Low" -- a depression that sits just off the coast and spins. As it spins, it picks up moisture from the ocean and dumps it on the land. Around and around and around, for days and days. Things can get VERY wet on the coast of New South Wales.

Imagine my surprise when I was reading issues of the Illawarra Mercury, the paper of record for well over a century here in Wollongong, and I noticed that starting January 10, 1910, an East Coast Low had developed just off the coast and was doing what they do today: hunkering down to rain. And rain. And rain. Classic. I got to January 14 by the time I had to leave the library (and go to SES training, somewhat ironically), and it was still raining in 1910.

I also found out that there was a miners' strike that had already been going on for over two months by the time my play opens. This gives me a number of possibilities for plot twists: I've already set it up in Act I that two of my characters are moving to the Wollongong area to set up a general store for the miners -- why would they do that, if the miners are on strike, have been for long enough that the characters could have found out about it before they left their original home, and show no signs of going back to work anytime soon?

In some interesting but, alas, unrelated sidebars, I found out that a shark had gotten into Lake Illawarra, much annoying those trying to fish, and that the new conductor of the community band was threatening not to take up the position after all unless the band committee agreed to find him a day job as well, "although the committee was not willing to shoulder that responsibility".

Newspapers in 1910 were completely different phenomena from their current form.