Sunday, August 29, 2010
Gone Fishin'
The Leviathan has gone fishin' and for the next few weeks will be baiting hooks and reeling in her first draft...
Friday, August 13, 2010
Perfume
"In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages."
Patrick Suskind in "Perfume"
Patrick Suskind in "Perfume"
The Tangent Machine
My Call Me Ishmael Syndrome has made me a sufficient enough invalid that I feel I am well within my rights to begin my blog post with...
Where to begin?
(I suspect this will be something of an odd post. Particularly considering that I am sitting here with a jumbo glass of Berocca and a double strength latte. As the great bard says, pew pew!)
I have been staring at a computer screen for the last few days editing my short story for the QUT Postgraduate Writing Prize. It is now done, printed, sent. I gave it to a few of my very bright and talented co-workers last night (including my head honcho) and all the feedback was good. It was funny though as most of these peeps had already read my first draft (The Seagull) some time ago and while they all read it dutifully and handed it back uncrumpled I could read the lack luster disappointment on their faces. I could hear their minds screaming, but what is the point! You just seem obsessed with the beach, and whales, and shells and sand (which in my first draft I used 27 times in 1, 500 words). But this time around everyone came frisking back over to me, faces lit and hands outstretched.
"This girl holds the fire" they chimed in unison.
In the last few weeks work has been so mental that I have had to miss a week of class (even my Novel and Genre class which I fecking love) and work over forty hours in one week. I know what you are probably thinking, old Gen Y Leviathan, thinks forty hours is a big deal. Well I’m from farm stock, my friend! (I’m also from, like, three generations of jockeys and my Dad still wonders why my brother and I are short).
Tangent machine.
The only other person in Brisbane who seems to be busier and more frazzled than me is my good mate Barr Fletcher. Seems they have upped his hours of teaching at university (because he is a hero) and he is now a blur of tartan zooming its way around the city in a blur. He rang me throughout the day in four and a half minute bursts in between meeting with students and teaching. It was perhaps the oddest feedback I have ever received simply due to its delivery.
"Leviathan?" (imagine this in a thick Sterling accent)
"Yes, Barr." (imagine this in a scrawny, mangrovey sounding Aussie accent)
"Got ya story. Just read the first page. I’ve never been so fucking busy in my entire life, eh. I have all these students to see today and last week I lost my USB stick and I’ve just got four minutes spare and read the first page. So do you want feedback? How the hell are you anyway?"
In fact his campus life is beginning to sound more like the final scene in Perfume where Jean-Baptiste Grenouille gets ripped to shreds... minus the other bits... ahem (tangent machine).
Anyway, lovely friend that I am I sent him my short story again yesterday (as if he doesn’t have enough to do) begging him to unleash his lead penciled saber over my prose. Turns out, not much was needed however he did inform me that he now thought of me as a writer (to which I sent several expletives his way only to have another friend remind me that I was sitting beside a well stocked playground) and that he has been showing this blog in his classes.
Say what, Barr?!
I don’t know if anyone else has noticed but I am about as good at this writing caper as Paris Hilton is proficient in the ways of the hipster.
I have been in an abject panic since he told me, poised over my qwerty keyboard, sweating. Literally tens of tens of the city’s impressionable youth will be perusing my blog, combing over my prose while holding aloft a copy of Catcher in The Rye or The Bell Jar, giggling over my spelling mistakes and applying pop-psychology overviews to any post about my parents!
Oh Jesus! It's like being in highschool again when my year eleven short story got published in the yearbook and no one told me (or asked me). So on the day when the yearbook came out (I was too cool for yearbooks, joining anything... making friends etc)people kept coming up to me all day either complimenting me or asking if I was okay. I had no idea what the hell was going on till my fiend showed me my story (which was a futuristic piece about the possible death of my own brother) printed alongside a painting of a cheery group of half clad anime girls.
Tangent machine.
It's pretty sick, but! Thanks Barr... preciate the kudos.
After writing this blog I think there may be something in this tangent machine theory. Perhaps my inability to pen perfect first lines (or even okay ones)is more to do with the way my mind leaps, unbridled from one topic to the next. Who am I, Helen Razer? You just can't be a tirading tangent monkey these days. That was all left in the nineties with flannelet shirts, baby doll dresses, Winona Ryder and the ability to buy American Psycho in a bookshop. These days people need fixed, dignified prose with elegant, properly air brushed authors poised on wind swept cliff tops talking about how they write their books in between caring for Nicaraguan orphans and baking aubergines.
Crap... tangent machine.
Where to begin?
(I suspect this will be something of an odd post. Particularly considering that I am sitting here with a jumbo glass of Berocca and a double strength latte. As the great bard says, pew pew!)
I have been staring at a computer screen for the last few days editing my short story for the QUT Postgraduate Writing Prize. It is now done, printed, sent. I gave it to a few of my very bright and talented co-workers last night (including my head honcho) and all the feedback was good. It was funny though as most of these peeps had already read my first draft (The Seagull) some time ago and while they all read it dutifully and handed it back uncrumpled I could read the lack luster disappointment on their faces. I could hear their minds screaming, but what is the point! You just seem obsessed with the beach, and whales, and shells and sand (which in my first draft I used 27 times in 1, 500 words). But this time around everyone came frisking back over to me, faces lit and hands outstretched.
"This girl holds the fire" they chimed in unison.
In the last few weeks work has been so mental that I have had to miss a week of class (even my Novel and Genre class which I fecking love) and work over forty hours in one week. I know what you are probably thinking, old Gen Y Leviathan, thinks forty hours is a big deal. Well I’m from farm stock, my friend! (I’m also from, like, three generations of jockeys and my Dad still wonders why my brother and I are short).
Tangent machine.
The only other person in Brisbane who seems to be busier and more frazzled than me is my good mate Barr Fletcher. Seems they have upped his hours of teaching at university (because he is a hero) and he is now a blur of tartan zooming its way around the city in a blur. He rang me throughout the day in four and a half minute bursts in between meeting with students and teaching. It was perhaps the oddest feedback I have ever received simply due to its delivery.
"Leviathan?" (imagine this in a thick Sterling accent)
"Yes, Barr." (imagine this in a scrawny, mangrovey sounding Aussie accent)
"Got ya story. Just read the first page. I’ve never been so fucking busy in my entire life, eh. I have all these students to see today and last week I lost my USB stick and I’ve just got four minutes spare and read the first page. So do you want feedback? How the hell are you anyway?"
In fact his campus life is beginning to sound more like the final scene in Perfume where Jean-Baptiste Grenouille gets ripped to shreds... minus the other bits... ahem (tangent machine).
Anyway, lovely friend that I am I sent him my short story again yesterday (as if he doesn’t have enough to do) begging him to unleash his lead penciled saber over my prose. Turns out, not much was needed however he did inform me that he now thought of me as a writer (to which I sent several expletives his way only to have another friend remind me that I was sitting beside a well stocked playground) and that he has been showing this blog in his classes.
Say what, Barr?!
I don’t know if anyone else has noticed but I am about as good at this writing caper as Paris Hilton is proficient in the ways of the hipster.
I have been in an abject panic since he told me, poised over my qwerty keyboard, sweating. Literally tens of tens of the city’s impressionable youth will be perusing my blog, combing over my prose while holding aloft a copy of Catcher in The Rye or The Bell Jar, giggling over my spelling mistakes and applying pop-psychology overviews to any post about my parents!
Oh Jesus! It's like being in highschool again when my year eleven short story got published in the yearbook and no one told me (or asked me). So on the day when the yearbook came out (I was too cool for yearbooks, joining anything... making friends etc)people kept coming up to me all day either complimenting me or asking if I was okay. I had no idea what the hell was going on till my fiend showed me my story (which was a futuristic piece about the possible death of my own brother) printed alongside a painting of a cheery group of half clad anime girls.
Tangent machine.
It's pretty sick, but! Thanks Barr... preciate the kudos.
After writing this blog I think there may be something in this tangent machine theory. Perhaps my inability to pen perfect first lines (or even okay ones)is more to do with the way my mind leaps, unbridled from one topic to the next. Who am I, Helen Razer? You just can't be a tirading tangent monkey these days. That was all left in the nineties with flannelet shirts, baby doll dresses, Winona Ryder and the ability to buy American Psycho in a bookshop. These days people need fixed, dignified prose with elegant, properly air brushed authors poised on wind swept cliff tops talking about how they write their books in between caring for Nicaraguan orphans and baking aubergines.
Crap... tangent machine.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
