Please join Alan Brough at a celebration at the State Library on Friday 20 March, 4 - 5pm when he announces the the top five books, as voted by Victorian readers in the State Library of Victoria’s Summer Read program 2008-9, and voter’s prizes.

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State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston Street, Melbourne

RSVP by Wednesday 17 March 2009

Telephone                   8664 7555
email                          learning@slv.vic.gov.au
book online                summerreadawards.eventbrite.com

About to call it a day. (By that I mean stop writing and do the little tasks such as having-a-life.

I once wrote an article called “A Few Keys to the Kingdom” for Writers Digest, which was directed to budding writers. It has been reprinted quite a bit, and I thought it might be of interest to some of you who are contemplating taking on the masochistic mantle of ‘writer’. <Grin>

Here are some of those “keys”:

(“A Few Keys to the Kingdom: Thoughts on Getting Published, and on Being the Best Writer You Can Be,” by Jack Dann. Copyright © 1989 by Writer’s Digest. First published in Writer’s Digest, January 1989. All rights reserved by the author.)

1. You must begin. Every day you must write, no matter what.

2. Give the best part of every day to your writing. Get up early and write if you can. If you can’t, read or put your desk in order or do research. It’s important to establish the habit of working every day.

3. Make appointments with yourself to write. Make yourself feel as guilty as possible. Do whatever you must to get to the computer.

4. Copy! Don’t plagiarise, but find writers you admire, and read and reread their best work. Dissect their prose sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph. Memorise passages if you have to, but get into the weave of the writer’s work. It will give an unconscious form and balance to your own work. Don’t worry, no one else will know. You will put these unconscious “forms” through your own sensorium.

5. Read constantly and widely.

6. Be prepared to be surprised and upset by what you write.

7. Don’t try to be a critic while you’re writing. The first stages of writing are often intuitive, right-brained work. But once you have a draft, or you become blocked on a story, you must rethink and rework.

8. If you’re having trouble with a sentence or a passage or a plot twist, ask yourself if something doesn’t need to be cut. If you have an especially elegant sentence that just isn’t working with the rest of your humdrum prose, cut out the sentence. It’s probably purple, anyway.

9. If you find yourself blocked, take a break and read and take notes and read and take more notes. Being blocked is natural. It’s your unconscious asking for more information.

10. Rewrite everything until you feel that what you have on paper corresponds as closely as possible to that wonderful image you originally had in your mind.

11. Keep working toward making clear sentences and building solid story structures. Style is really only transparency of thought and idea. Writing well is a result of clear thinking. Cut out everything that sounds nice but doesn’t convey the specific meaning you want. Find the exact word to express your thought: that’s what Roget made his Thesaurus for. The particular way you think, the way you experience and perceive the world, will become your “style”.

12. Read Strunk and White’s =The Elements of Style=.

13. Send your work out to editors!

Thought I’d just blog as if keeping a diary. I’ve been trying to follow my own advice these last few months, and that is to write first, and then take care of everything else.  It’s really easy to get up, then tell yourself, “Well, I’d better just take a grocery run, pick up the Fin Review, see a sick friend,” and so it goes, every day…do the taxes, take care of accounting, ah, there’s that ever-increasing stack of e-mail.

So I spent four hours at the computer, and then went out for groceries and visited a sick friend.

I’ve just started a new novel, first of what I believe will be a longer sequence. The series will be called Dark Companions, and the first book is titled Shadows in the Stone.  It’s a fantasy that takes place during the Renaissance (among other times!), and I’ve spent the past six months studying Enochian magic, the Gnostic Gospels, John Dee, Agrippa, to name a few off the top of my head. I’ve got one of the few extant 2nd editions of Dee’s A True & Faithful Relation of What paffed for many Years Between John Dee (a Mathematician of Great Fame in Q. Eliz. and King James their Reignes) and Some Spirits. And that’s not even the whole title!

Sorry, boring…

My favorite character (in the novel), so far!, is the angel Gabriel.

And tonight I’m going to read short novels for Australian Legends of Fantasy, an original anthology I’m co-editing with Jonathan Strahan. It is a collection of original short novels by major, bestselling Australian fantasists. The novels will either take place in the authors’ popular magical worlds or will feature new universes that the authors will be setting new novels and series.

And then I’ve got to revise a short story.

Oh, and go to sleep!

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…

Dreaming Again is full of wonderful stories, which have put Dreaming Again on the 2008 Locus Recommended Reading List in the anthologies category… and Terry Dowling and Margo Lanagan’s stories have been selected for the Locus Recommended Reading List in the short story category.

Dreaming Again has been short-listed for the Aurealis Award, and Simon Brown and Margo Lanagan have been short-listed in the Best Science Fiction Short Story category… Kim Westwood has been short-listed in the Best Fantasy Short Story category…and Lee Battersby has been short-listed in the Best Horror Short Story category and … Simon Brown has won an Aurealis Award!

Richard Harland and Kim Wilkins stories have been selected by David Hartwell for his Best-of-the-year collection.

… and just in: The short-list for the Australian Horror Writers Association Shadows Award includes Sara Douglass’s “This Way to the Exit” and Christopher Green’s “Lakeside.”

Well done all!

Thanks Margo for your many lovely hints on writing. Alan Garner’s Strandloper has been added to my list.

As part of the free Summer Read events across Victoria, a panel of three Dreaming Again authors will join Dreaming Again editor Jack Dann at:
Nunawading Library, 379 Whitehorse Road Nunawading on Wednesday 18 February, 2009 7.00 – 8.30 pm
For more information phone Nunawading Library 9873 5638 or book online at http://summerread37.eventbrite.com

Vote for Dreaming Again or SMS DREAMING to 13 46 88

These are snips and snails from the notebook I carry around with me. These particular notes are from last November.

24/11/08

In a Christmas shop window—no, on it, transferred onto it: ‘my true love gave to me’

Woman on Lewisham St[atio]n reading the new/old orange-and-cream Penguin ed[itio]n of Love in the Time of Cholera.

Peter’s dentist—a forensic dentist. Always hard to get an appointment with him after a big accident/bombing because he’d be off ID’ing bodies from dental records.

27/11

Today all the men in the office, it seemed, wore pale-blue and white patterned shirts—stripes or checks.

You sit at the back of the train [carriage] so that no one can sit behind you and, feeling that they have found a corner, use that privacy to make a long banal phone call.

Stepping out the other day, how the wind was everywhere; I went from a weatherless stillness to a place of breath, a live world.

The year, dying in our arms, dying in our hands. Shake it. ‘Don’t go!’

‘No attempt is made to exalt, intensify or mystify these exact observations through far-fetched comparison or surprising metaphor. Pizer’s straightforwardness allows the goanna an unforced dignity—it is as if the animal is coming to its own, unknown terms with the situation.’

Quieter than it’s been all day—St James Railway Station

Stars Without Make-up.

A blue cloth cap, skinny black jeans and sneakers, a fruit juice, a cigarette, big black sunglasses, a dark jacket, and a book to read: Postmodernism.

A moth, flying around our feet on the crowded train. Two of the fluoro tubes on the blink. The world gone all shuddery and fluttery.

Leaves, flying in the sky, green and silver-edged. One brushes another as they fly, with a quick sound, rarely heard, and if heard almost never listened to.