One Year On

It seems peculiarly apt that, a year to the day I flew back home, I will be moving out of Sister’s and into my own place.  I will have to get a divorce from the coffee machine.  This is heartbreaking. It has been a haphazard year.  Every second that could be spared — from thesis corrections and conference presentations; finding a job and enough money to stay afloat while writing; babysitting, cooking and cleaning; making new friends and flirting; cycling, running and swimming; travelling up and down the East coast to home, to Bundaberg, to Canberra and Sydney — was spent on my novel.

The patchiness showed in the text, my agent said, as she found it hard to figure out who the characters were and what was going on.  It jumped around a great deal.  I had been jumping around a great deal also.  So I battened down the hatches and did another draft, and I will have to finish it amidst the move, surrounded by boxes.

Despite my unsettlement, it has been heavenly to start life again in Brisbane.  There has been much good coffee; Turkish Delight and Oriental lilies from the markets on Saturdays; my sister and her captivating children; bookclubs at Avid Reader and dance classes; drinks with clever people on Friday nights; a fluffy puppy that sits at my feet as I write and runs with me in the afternoons; old acquaintances who have become good friends; babies to play with and hold; a river to ride along; lush vegetation and, above all, the gorgeous, abundant, glorious sunlight.

Even though I still often get tired, I think of how miserable I was for years in London, and I count my blessings.  For now I am as happy as I was when I was a little girl, running madly along the verandah before the summer storms.

On Fictocriticism

M. asked me to talk for a bit about the process involved in writing my Ph.D. thesis at the London Consortium, for her class on practice-led research.  As a creative writer, I found it impossible to produce a conventional piece of literary criticism for the thesis because I can never write anything without making stuff up, so I found fictocriticism (a combination of fiction and criticism) an indispensable vehicle.  I ended up putting myself into the text as a character, then using first person narrative to write about my three subjects - Georgiana Molloy, Rosa Praed and myself.  This then tied neatly into the concept of the writing self being divided into two selves - the self which exists, and the self which writes about that existence - as described by Margaret Atwood in Negotiating with the Dead. I also discuss the impact my deafness had on my style, in that because I can't hear everything, I make the rest up, so what I write will invariably be made up of both truth and fiction.

Wordpress didn't like my video (and I am not technologically literate enough to work out why) so I put it on YouTube instead of here, but then they only accept files 10 mins long so I had to break it into 2 bits.  The first section is mostly an extract from my final chapter, and after that there's a discussion of my writing practice, which in this instance was motivated by a need to complete a process of mourning.

Easter Shenanigans

Easter was a wonderful escape from the stress and confines of Bris Vegas.  I was liberated by J1&S at 6.15am on Thursday morning when I was far from compos mentis, but it was a very pleasant and relaxing trip to Coonabarabran. The baby went to sleep, and so did I.  Then I read some of my book and watched the scenery. Outside Moree we stopped in a park and the baby sat on the grass and S went off to find booze.  On his return, he said that he’d just heard Tony Abbott had been stepped down for possession of steroids to help him run his marathons.  I was beside myself with joy: I resent Abbott’s patriarchal attitudes & his antagonism towards gay people & how he thinks he’s hot in his budgie smugglers when he’s really an ugly mutt, not least because of his personality.  Then S explained it was an April Fools’ joke and my balloon was pricked.  Sometimes being the most gullible individual in the universe has its drawbacks.

L&F’s property was just gorgeous, especially because the country was so similar to the country in which I had grown up.  I helped S collect firewood (I picked up 3 pieces), then drove the quadrunner, which I haven’t done since I was 15, and S directed me to the top of the hill to watch the sun go down.  The end of the day, when the light was long and low, was always my favourite, and the dusk with its soft purples and pinks was the same as on our property, and as in the watercolours my father painted.

The next morning I went for a run and scratched my legs in the long grass and infested my socks with grass seeds.  The smell of the bush, wet with dew, was just as I remembered it, and the sky was the same shocking blue above the low hills.  I ran among the native pines as I had on our property, until I ran into a spider’s web, saw the size of the spider, had a minor freak out and galloped back to the road.

E&R turned up before lunch so we had a glass of champers, then lunched outdoors in L’s beautiful garden.  Then L took E and I to a dam for a dip.  I had buggered my bikini in another dam on Australia Day and hadn’t yet got a new set, so I was reduced to my pink Bonds undies and my sports bra.  It was warm on the surface but bitterly cold beneath and we didn’t stay in for long.

L was a wonderful cook and catered for my various food allergies, which was amazing, not least because she cooked for 16 other people that night too (they didn’t have allergies fortunately).  I drank too much sav blanc and woke up disgruntled the next morning.  I went for another run, keeping to the road this time.  Milo, the Jack Russell, belted ahead of me and wouldn’t go home when I told him to.  His little feet skittered along, he picked up a rock for me to throw, and seemed to be having a marvellous time.  Then F came on the quadrunner looking for him - they’d been wondering where he was – and scooped him up.

‘Do you want a lift too?’ he asked me, concerned by my sweating and red-faced visage.  I shook my head, intent on seeing it through, and it was worth it because the endorphins made me more civil.

At lunch time we headed to the gorge, stopping en route for clay pigeon shooting.  I didn’t participate as I don’t like violence, weapons or shooting, except for that done with a lens, and I shot accordingly.  The gorge was green and lush, with a creek running through it.  I opened more champers and chatted with N, who had turned up with her husband for the day.  Then the neighbour M2 made some extremely potent cosmopolitans and served them to us in aluminium mugs.  I liked that (I like pink drinks in whatever form), but I was somewhat overwhelmed by the alcohol content, and after I’d said goodbye to N I had a have a little power nap in the car with the baby.  The latter woke me up with his vigorous vocalisations, though I’d turned my hearing aid off.  I ignored it for a bit, then staggered out.

‘You’ll make a great mother,’ S said dryly, tending to the baby.

‘Oh well, my husband will just have to get up to look after the child when it’s screaming, won’t he,’ I returned.  And my conservative relatives wonder why I’m still single.  I like to tell them I’m a lesbian and that I’ve written a novel to prove it.

J1 also expressed her disgust that there was a plethora of available men circulating and yet I had failed to make a move on any of them.  I explained that I wasn’t a fast worker and I was very particular, although I was by no means ungrateful for her efforts.  She still didn’t look very impressed.

Towards the end of the evening, after the boys had exerted their manhood and made a bonfire and E and I were drunk and giggling hysterically, the way we always have since school, E. unveiled some butterscotch schnapps.

‘You wanted something sweet, Jess, here we have it.’

‘Butterscotch?  I’m allergic to dairy!’

‘No, you can still drink it, I’m sure you can.’

‘What are the ingredients?’  I stumbled to fire, the only source of light available, to read the ingredients, but it had nothing listed.

There being no satellite connection available to consult the Oracle, I tried the next best thing.

‘P1, where are you?’ I yelled.  ‘P….1!’

I located him in the darkness and explained, with great eloquence and significant pointing, that there were no ingredients listed on the bottle.  Unfortunately however, P1’s reading had not yet extended to the distillation process of butterscotch schnapps.  Defeated, I returned to E.

‘I’ll pass out!’ I warned her.

‘Well, you’re going to do that anyway.  Just drink it.’

As it happened, I was fine, if exceedingly drunk.  I listened to some ghost stories the boys told, filed one away for a future story, and then conferred with E&R and decided it was time to go home.  I was stuck in the back of the ute and R negotiated us with great care over the rocky landscape.

I woke up at 7 feeling sorry for myself, and staggered out in my hot pink flannel PJs.

'You're not going for a run today?' Fred asked.

'I've got a hangover, Fred.'

'You're getting soft!' he scolded, trying not to smile.

After a cup of tea I managed to clothe myself and accompany M1 into town to get bread for 17 people, whereupon I made various hungover quips about Jesus feeding the 5000 with loaves.

The rest of the morning we passed playing Cranium.  R was my partner and I was most impressed that he accurately detected my rendition of Shakira.  As we played, P1 assiduously cleaned up the kitchen, brought things in from the utes and put them away, then attacked the edge of the table with a cloth, rubbing it furiously.

‘Do you think it’s clean enough?’ I teased him merrily.

Then my poor, long-suffering father picked me up at midday and we drove back home, stopping en route to visit grandma in the nursing home and BabyW, a new addition to CousinA’s family.  He had pretty blue eyes.

For the past five days I’ve been writing, and now I am thoroughly sick of it.  Mum is in NZ visiting rellies so dad and I have been conducting our small rebellions: leaving the door open so the sunlight gets in (and the flies), not cleaning things up immediately, leaving the coffee grinds in the sink … Mum would have a hernia.  However it is always lovely to come home and find your favourite Bushells Extra Strong teabags in the cupboard and a bottle of Malborough sav blanc in the fridge … frankly, life could be a lot worse.

Things That Make Me Smile

Things have been kind of overwhelming lately, and I’ve been getting very little writing done which in turn makes everything worse.  I find the best way of dealing with it is just to let things go, but to retain my sense of humour.  So I’ve been thinking of things that make me smile.  Here is my list so far: A birthday card from H, titled, ‘You are EXTRAORDINARY (and a bit moody).’

Nephew running down the stairs to say, ‘Hello, Auntie Jess’ whenever I come home on my bicycle.

A blank Penguin notebook from C in England, titled ‘Men and Pearls’, by Louis Kornitzer.  I laughed when I unwrapped it.

‘What’s so funny?’ Sister asked.  ‘I don’t get it.’

‘It’s ‘cause I like both of them.’

How the puppy gets frisky when we’re running over grass and tries to bite his lead, tripping me up.  And how he lies on my feet under the dinner table, or under my desk.

The cockatiel that sits on the shoulder of the man who mends my shoes.

How Niece curls up against me when she’s tired and plays with my hair.

P1’s quips.

Nephew shouting from the bath, ‘Mummy, can you please come and scratch my back!’ and his mother yelling in return, ‘What did your last slave die of?’

On Possums

As the life of a writer is frequently very dull and lonely (hence my addiction to Facebook, where I can have contact, however virtual, with other people), I am often grateful to have company during the day, even if comes in the form of surreptitious scratchings in the roof.

I speak of possums, of which I think there are about three resident.  They used to move about more freely and make much more noise, but now they have to do battle with the newly-installed insulation which hopefully will not swoop them into a conflagration and leave us with a residue of burnt possum fur, or worse.

Most of my stories about possums revolve around my sister, as she is the one who hears them in the night and relates their activities to me in the morning.  Her affinity with possums began at an early age. When she a girl and we were living on the farm, she woke up one night to find a possum sitting at the end of her bed, looking at her.  I don’t know how it got in, unless it found a hole in the gauze windows.  She went and woke Mum up, who woke Dad up, who chased it outside.

More recently, Sister has been doing battle with a persistent and insistent fellow who jumps from the tree outside the kitchen window onto the ledge and rattles the blinds in an attempt to get in.

One day his ingress was successful, and he made so much noise he woke her up.  She found him on the kitchen bench and hissed at him, and then the dog barked, and the children got up.  I must have rolled in my sleep because I heard the noise, but I thought it was someone across the road having an argument and went back to sleep.

When I got up the next morning, she insisted on giving me an account of what had happened, even though it takes me a good hour to wake up and I hadn’t at that point reached a level of functioning consciousness.  However one doesn’t need to lipread Sister in the morning; she makes herself heard.

‘I learned that possum!’ she cried.  ‘I showed him who’s boss around here.’

‘I don’t doubt that,’ I mumbled, concentrating on assembling my breakfast and on not encouraging any further penetrating narratives.

At other times, a year ago, she would be woken a whomp at 3am precisely, presumably when the possum had finished its night time activities and dropped back inside the roof for a sleep.

And sometimes, while eating dinner, we would drop our cutlery when there was an almighty screech, which again would set the dogs off.

‘What the hell was that?’ I asked, unable to tell what or where the sound had come from.

‘The possums.’

‘Having a scrag fight?’

‘Yes.  Above the fridge.  They always fight above the fridge.’

‘There must be special possum territory above the fridge.’

Possums were introduced to New Zealand in the 1800s in an attempt to create a fur trade, but its numbers have escalated to the point where it is now a pest and culled for its fur (so the fur trade part definitely worked).  While I was living in London, my NZ grandmother sent me some gloves made from a blend of possum fur and merino wool and they were brilliantly warm in the winter cold.  To stir, I used to tell the Poms I was wearing dead possum, to which they invariably replied, ‘What’s a possum?’

Other things that I like about possums are their allegorical qualities.  ‘I’m so tired the bags under my eyes could sleep possums,’ a worn-out doctor friend once told me.  And one of my favourite phrases, ‘bright-eyed and bushy tailed’, seems to pertain more accurately to possums than to the cats or squirrels to which it originally refers.

Finally, they are very Australian creatures.  Who can forget Dame Edna Everage cooing, ‘Hello possums!’ as s/he glided onstage, or Mem Fox’s wonderful Possum Magic which, with its beautifully illustrated accounts of possums, pavlovas and Australian capital cities, is utterly charming.  Yes, possums might wake other people up and chew all the fruit and decimate the basil in the pots outside, but I like having them around.

On Socialising

If January was spent working like a dog to get the first draft of my novel done and losing weight because I was so stressed I stopped eating, February by contrast was about overintoxication, catching up with friends and meeting all kinds of new and interesting people. With the novel in the post to my agent, I got on the plane to Sydney for a week of hedonism.  First stop was lunch with my old uni friend K in Kingsford.  I was surprised by how much coming back to the area around UNSW felt like coming home, having lived for two years in Randwick in an art deco apartment.  An old, white-haired man named Neville lived downstairs.  Neville had Xmas cards stuck on his door, Christian platitudes on little pieces of paper on his walls, and a habit of accosting one beside the recycling bins and talking at great speed.  He was, however, as sharp as a tack and picked up straightaway that he had to talk clearly because I was deaf.  Which meant that I had to listen to most of his rambling, most of which centred around the necessity of recycling, with which I was in complete agreeance and which, therefore, was redundant.

I digress.  Lunch with K was in one of the plethora of Asian restaurants lining Anzac Parade and I had an excellent laksa and good conversation, then proceeded to the Rupert Bunny exhibition.  I loved the abundant femininity of his early work, overflowing with women with flowers in their hair, lavish frocks with lace and bows and sumptuous fair skin, and of course anything to do with Paris makes me swoon.  His work had such an enviable air of wealth, indolence and indulgence which you could never find in the 21st century.  Later, his style became Modernist, with the flat planes and colours of the Fauves.  Although it was technically very good it didn’t move me in the same way.  Before I left I reacquainted myself, as I always do, with the paintings in my favourite room of 19thC Australian art: the stunning blue skies of Tom Roberts’ Fire’s On (Laptsone Tunnel), Elioth Gruner’s Spring Frost, donated to the gallery by my great-grandfather, and Sydney Long’s romantic paintings.

I dined with the lovely I., with whom I’d lived in the art deco apartment with H.  She was the perfect flatmate and we never fought once while we were living together, and it’s always just so lovely to catch up with her again.  We had a posh dinner in the city and I put on a black and red wrap dress with my red heels, but it was bucketing with rain so I looked like a drowned rat when I arrived rather than the sophisticated young lady who had stepped out the door, which was most unfortunate.

I decamped from the Eastern to the Western suburbs for a night, staying with E. and, the next morning watched So You Think You Can Dance? until 2 in the afternoon.  I am subsequently addicted to this program and blame E. for my conversion to trash.  Then it was lunch with B. and second cousin D. in Danks Street, which was not far from where B. and I had lived in Surry Hills.  It was full of wankers but there was a very pretty Parisian café which I frequented the next day, and sat on a brocade couch beneath chandeliers, watched the people on the verandah outside and read my book.

I also caught up with people from my Masters writing course whom I hadn’t seen in about eight years.  That was wonderful, especially spending an afternoon with S., who had moved to Malabar and showed me around the area and the work she’d been doing with Indigenous people there.  Before we went to the airport we picked up her little girl from day care.  She’d had her face painted and I asked if she had this done every day.

‘Yes,’ she said shyly.

‘Well!  I should come along!’ I exclaimed.  She looked at bit unsure about that, but later asked her mum if I could come to the beach.  Mum replied that unfortunately we were off to the airport.  She was an adorable kid.

Back in Bris Vegas there were lots of new people to meet, courtesy of my friend J1. who has been very good at getting me out and about since I’ve been here.  There were drinks with various people, including P. and J2., by the river.  The former was exposed to my dancing proclivities, which emerge after the consumption of too many cocktails and, to my delight, I found he could masterfully swing a woman about the dance floor.  I also accidentally stepped on the foot of a man behind me with my red stilettos and was horrified to find him hobbling in pain for a good few minutes.  I hovered anxiously until he burst into a smile; he was teasing and I’d been my usual gullible self.

There was also a V-Day promo on that night, and P. wandered from girl to girl, handing out skewers crammed with marshmallows and strawberries and drizzled in chocolate.

‘Uhm,’ I said when he handed me one, ‘I can only eat the strawberries.’  I was allergic to the gluten in the marshmallows.

He returned with a skewer of strawberries and chocolate.

‘Uhm,’ I said again, ‘I can’t actually eat the chocolate.’  I was allergic to the dairy in the chocolate.

He returned with a skewer of halved strawberries.  The strawberries were delicious and I was, by this stage, utterly charmed.

The following week I went out again and met a boy who danced jive, a girl who was decoding the DNA of the liver (or it may have been the kidneys) and another girl who worked with creeks.  We contemplated a cosmopolitan sitting unclaimed on the table before us, bought by one of the boys in a round of drinks.  Not being able to resist anything pink, I naturally had to drink it.

There have also been various attempts to watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s with N. and J1., aborted first by a downpour and then by a defective DVD, so attempt #3 is in the pipeline.  These lovely ladies also came to dinner last night with their Plus Ones and I didn’t even have much of a hangover today, which was good as these have been proving most disruptive to my writing schedule.  I did, however, have a virus from Sister which turned out to be almost as bad.

And now March is almost upon us, and I have only a month to get another draft done, and yet my calendar is still booked every week, which can only mean one thing: guilt.  Well, it will have to be mastered.

The Attrition of Heat

In London, the worst months of the year were January and February.  The excitement and bright lights of Christmas and New Year were over, it was bitterly cold and it was grey.  If the sun made an appearance, it was only for a few brief, shocking hours, and I was usually indoors, working at the library or studying at my desk.  There was nothing to look forward to but the long drag into spring, which happened so slowly it seemed as if the days would never become light again.  I would check the sunrise and sunset times obsessively, calculating how long it would be before I walked into the courtyard of UCL after work and found it gleaming in a weak dusk. Strangely, it seems that the worst days of this year in Brisbane have been in the same months, again because of the weather.  At first the heat was a novelty: it necessitated the purchase of light, silky frocks because my wardrobe was still geared towards winter, the balmy evenings were gorgeous, and Christmas was back to normal, with the opening of presents with the windows down and cicadas droning, the crispy meringue of pavlovas, and fresh grapes and stone fruit.

But now I find the heat so consistently overbearing that I can neither sleep nor eat.  It’s too warm to think, which means I am imprisoned in an air conditioned room for half the day while I write, and I hate not having natural airflow.  I am irritable, losing weight, and am attacked by a plethora of mosquitoes that live beneath the house and come into my room for dinner.

It seems the only thing to do, when the day finally cools, is to escape the claustrophobia of my room and get on my bicycle.  I ride to the river, where I sit on a bench beneath a flowering wisteria vine, eat an orange and watch the sun go down.

On Deadlines

In keeping with the subject matter of this post, it is apt that I started it some six months ago and that I’m only just getting around to finishing it. If I’d had a deadline it would be written by now. Deadlines are a good thing for a writer, in that they make one write. Hence for my current novel, I have a self-imposed deadline of the end of January, when the publisher of my previous novel returns from maternity leave and might be interested in reading a draft. For my thesis, I know there is another academic who will shortly be publishing on similar material, so I need to get it into the public domain soon. I also enter literary competitions to force myself to polish my stories and essays. If they don’t get anywhere in the competition, they should then be ready to send to literary journals.

However, there is another deadline altogether which has meant that I cannot slow down in my output any time soon: children.

At the beginning of the year, a friend referred me to The Divided Heart, by Rachel Power, a book of interviews with artists who had become mothers. Power’s cogent introduction confirmed my fears:

The psychic transformation that occurs with motherhood arrives simultaneously with the cruellest of constraints on a woman’s time and freedom to create … Art demands what a mother’s routine does not permit: a concentration of self, the liberty to make use of the artistic impulse when it arrives (p. 1, Red Dog Books, 2008).

In other words, it’s a constant war between being selfish and selfless, between being on your own, thinking, and tending to the needs, thoughts and knowledge of others. Realistically speaking, the children come first, and your time for your art suffers.

As I write this, I hear Andrew Marvell’s classic lines from ‘To his Coy Mistress’: ‘At my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near’. He was talking about getting a woman into bed, but I’m talking about getting my next five works (two novels, two novellas and my thesis) to a publisher before a kid comes along and eats up all my time.

The problem is, as Nikki Gemmell put it in The Bride Stripped Bare, ‘Your heart will now tighten whenever you see the imprint of a friend in her child’s face. It’s something that’s in danger of overtaking your life, the want’ (p. 38). I understood this perfectly when I saw my cousin’s daughter at Christmas. She was so like her mother in appearance and charm that it was impossible not to be moved. Your body begins to clamour, to become insistent; it melts when it holds a friend’s baby. You pay attention to children when before they were just irritants. You begin to conceptualise what it would be like to be pregnant, an idea that had previously been anathema to you.

‘Oh, you’re only 32,’ people say to me, ‘you’ve got plenty of time.’ But I haven’t. A friend with whom I was living in Sydney who, after a struggle, became pregnant at 43 told me, ‘Don’t leave it too late,’ and older women say to me, ‘Get cracking’. Also, I don’t believe in IVF; I think there are enough kiddies out there who need mothers through adoption than trying to make more through such an invasive process.

Needless to say, the problem of how to fit in the kids is one that rarely afflicts male artists, as it has usually been the woman who, cooking, cleaning and child-rearing, allows the man to get on with his work, a situation which I find highly unjust.

The many other difficulties facing the female artist were famously addressed by Linda Nochlin in her 1971 work Why Are There No Women Artists?, while in an Australian context, they are beautifully articulated by Drusilla Modjeska in Stravinsky’s Lunch. I also found a recent expression of it in The Broken Book by Susan Johnson, an Australian writer whom I admire, now living in England. Although it was a novel of broken narrative and broken dreams that never quite came together to deliver a punch, it illuminated well the quandary of the writer who is a mother:

‘You’ll never write anything if you expect perfection,’ he said.  ‘Better to have something on the page than nothing at all.’

I lost my temper: David has always written with effortless grace, words flow from him uninterrupted; I have always had to hunt down every word as if armed with a knife.  ‘That’s all right for you to say!  I can’t hold an uninterrupted conversation, let alone finish a book.’

‘Nothing stops a true artist,’ he said, ‘not war, not poverty, not the state. “The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything other than his art.” George Bernard Shaw.’

I glared at him.  ‘What if the artist happens to be the mother?’

He smiled.  ‘Darling, wet nurses are thick on the ground if you only care to look.’

I left the room.

(Allen and Unwin, 2004, pp. 144-145).

A nanny is always an option, of course, but only if you have money. The couple in Johnson’s book didn’t, and it was easy for the male writer to make this glib, dismissive comment, because he didn’t have to look after the kids.

What Johnson also expresses here is the difficulty of extracting yourself from your children. They interrupt, they demand attention and, of course, you feel bad for sending them away. Even I feel this when Niece and Nephew come into my room and crawl under the mosquito net, wanting to play.

‘Auntie Jess is working,’ I tell them (it has to be sternly, to make them go) and reluctantly they leave. I have to shrug off the guilt and go back to my neurotic doctor with her brooding love interest.

On that note, a female doctor friend once said to me, ‘It isn’t that I don’t want children, it’s that I have to be careful of wanting them too much, because it might not happen.’ Sadly, I feel the same: there is the danger that you might not meet the right man, or, if you do, you find you’re just too busy to make it work, or your partner isn’t prepared to put in the hard yards and help, so why get your hopes up? Although, being the most organised person on the planet, of course I have a backup plan, and intend to adopt if the first holds true. I also have a sense (possibly superstitious, possibly not) that if you give in to the craving, it takes over your life, which is a dangerous situation for a single woman to be in. As a person who values love so highly, I don’t want my choice in a man to be ruled by my ovaries.

So I find myself pushing the longing to the back of my mind, and as I write I silently beg my body not to pack it in yet, but to hold on and stay healthy for a little while longer.

And if I got up the duff and my carefully laid creative plans were thrown awry? Well, being that master of organisation, and being driven and ambitious, I would find a way to make it work. In addition, as my boss (a hard-working researcher who is not remotely creative) pointed out, the experience of having children is so amazing you would be insane not to do it. This is also what many of the women in The Divided Heart described: that, in terms of material, it changes you, and your art, fundamentally. From a creative point of view, it lends richness, depth and understanding to your craft.

Of course, to hold my own child in my arms would be the most gorgeous reward for so many years of hard work and waiting, but until then, I’m writing as fast as I can.

On Running and Avatars

After the lugubrious navel-gazing of my former post (this is what happens to writers when they spend too much time on their own; they go mad), I thought it would be nice to inject some jollity into this blog and begin with a joke. Apologies to my married, male heterosexual readers, for this is at your expense: Q: Why are married women heavier than single women?

A: Single women come home, see what's in the fridge and go to bed. Married women come home, see what's in bed and go to the fridge.

O it made me laugh. I love clever jokes. I love all things and all people that make me laugh. When I’m happy (which is often, these days), I sometimes laugh myself to sleep.

Sister returned this week, with dogs but sans children. Sister can talk the leg off an iron pot, and after two weeks in solitude this was something of a shock. However, I’m relieved that she’s back as now I have someone to cook for and will eat properly again.

I was devastated to find the puppy greatly changed: he’d had all his beautiful fur cut off because it was matted with dreadlocks. His pelt was pretty much the reason why I loved him, because he was like a big, soft Persian cat that bit my ankles and escaped with pieces of underwear from my room. Proving that I am not a fickle creature, however, and compensating for fewer cuddles, I have made him my running partner. I used to run with our kelpie when we moved into town and she couldn’t chase sheep or rabbits anymore and went a bit bonkers, and I realised how much I’d missed running with a dog. I said to Sister that I didn’t know what I’d do when the puppy’s fur grew back; I’d look like an idiot running with a fluffy cocker spaniel instead of the lean, bare-faced pointer that he currently is. Anyhow, he loves it, and gallops along with his tongue hanging out, still a dumb blonde despite his manly haircut.

Running also has its uses in that AFL season has begun and the boys are training again. This, naturally, necessitates the use of the route past the oval by the fruit bat colony, which allows for the most marvellous vistas, in tandem with the anxiety of being attacked by bats gone mad from the lyssavirus.

Enjoying our child-free freedom, Sister and I went to see Avatar at Hawthorne. Not having had a 3D experience since Expo 88 when we wore cardboard glasses with blue and red cellophane lenses, we were a little unsure how the new versions worked.

‘I can’t see properly. Does yours have a black spot in it?’ I asked Sister.

‘Yes, I took mine off to clean them.’

‘I don’t think the 3D bit can have started yet.’

While we waited for the movie, Sister bailed up the manager and asked why there were no hearing facilities, as I was too tired for a fight. His contention was that, as it was a cinema that showed blockbusters which were incredibly loud, the hearing impaired didn’t need any special equipment to hear. I would have told him that this was a lazy excuse; for most hearing impaired people it isn’t loudness that helps you hear, but clarity.

As it happened, the dialogue was so bad that it didn’t bother me that I missed half of it, although trying to work out what was going on from the context was a bit difficult. I was also irritated that the subtitled translations of the Na’vi language were clichéd. Surely if you go to the effort of creating a new language, you can render its translations a little more subtly than some kind of colonial pidgin?

That aside, I loved the film. I loved that it was so visually gorgeous, that the female characters were capable and graceful, that the interaction between the Na’vi and their surroundings was evocative of Indigenous Australians. I loved the slippage between dream and reality, and that after a while you couldn’t tell which world you were in. It reminded me of Blade Runner (one of my favourite films), where Decker tells the android with whom he falls in love that she isn’t human, as she believes she is, that her memories are constructs, and that the world she’s in isn’t real to her the way it is to him (presuming that he isn’t a android himself, an enduring question).

I also liked the theme of connections – not just between the Na’vi and the natural world but between humans and the Na’vi. The way their hair curled into a plant or animal echoed Case in William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, ‘jacking in’ to cyberspace and into another consciousness — which is of course what happened when the humans became avatars, jacking in to another world. The way the Na’vi’s eyes widened when accessing the consciousness of other creatures also made me think of the shock of connection during sex which, in essence, was what the film seemed to be about: the fight to survive, to reproduce, to sustain a way of life.

When the lights came up Sister and I blinked rapidly, our eyes sore. Sister pointed out that the 3D screen was how her world appeared when she didn’t have her driving glasses on. I mumbled a reply, concentrating on getting out the door which is always difficult in darkness with poor balance, and brightened when I saw that the glasses could be recycled.

I was starting work the next day and it was imperative that I sleep. Of course, after my heart pounding for three hours, I didn’t. I could have done with a run to get rid of the adrenalin in my body, or a good laugh.

On Tedium

Until I reached this stretch of holidays set aside to finish the first draft of my novel, I realised I’d forgotten just how insanely boring writing can be. I get up at about 8am, or earlier if I can (it’s hard work becoming sentient when you are most definitely not a morning person), check my emails, occasionally do some yoga, eat breakfast and make a coffee, then sit at my desk.  Sometimes, if something interesting has happened in my life (which isn’t often), I write in my journal.  Then I think of a scene and start to write.  Then I check Facebook.  I write some more.  I make another coffee and look at clothes on birdsnest.com.au.  I write a bit more and have lunch.  After lunch I usually have a nap.  Then I make a cup of tea.  I look at Facebook again.  Then I write another scene or two.  Then I look at spencerandrutherford.com.au to see what’s in the sales (I mean, what did writers do before the internet?).  Then I push myself to write the few final pages to reach my quota of ten pages of longhand.  Released from my shackles, I go for a run past the bat colony where the fruit bats are waking, squealing like stuck pigs.  Or I ride to the pool and swim laps, enjoying the sensation of the water on my skin, and the relief of having a completely empty mind.

At the moment, I have no one to talk to, which is just as well or my concentration would be completely broken.  Sister is still at Parental Unit’s with the children and dogs, so I don’t have the puppy to play with.  It is tedious.  The stuff I’m writing is crap, with too much sex and melodrama.  I worry that it won’t be good enough for my agent to read at the end of January.

But then, but then.  After days of procrastination, I hit a seam and follow it, and the writing that comes out is as sharp and delicate as opal.  At other times the pressure of doing nothing builds up and is released like a storm, so that the writing, whether good or bad, gushes onto the page.  When it’s going really well, it’s like a drug.  Social invitations (not that there tend to be many in a writer’s life) are cancelled, because it’s preferable to be with characters than friends.  I feel distressed and irritable when I’m away from it for too long.  However, it takes a long time to get to even these small highs.

There is no money in writing.  It’s boring, except for the few exciting moments writing sex and melodrama, which I usually cut out when I edit, and it’s lonely.  The process of reworking a novel and playing with the language is immensely satisfying, but that doesn’t come until later.  The launch and publicity are thrilling, but short-lived.

I’m no longer at the stage of wondering why I bother, as it’s so much a part of me that to not write would be like killing myself.  So it’s heartening to listen to writers such as Kate Grenville, speaking at the Melbourne Festival of Ideas, in which she discusses the usefulness of writers, particularly in a time of change.

Grenville, on reading up on our reactions on climate change, likened the inaction of even intelligent people to changing their lifestyles to reduce carbon, to her attitude in her youth towards smoking.  She knew and believed all the science about why smoking was bad for her, but she still couldn’t give it up.  It was only when she lit up without thinking before a man she fancied, and saw the disgust in his face, that she was compelled to throw away the cigs and start running instead.

The key to changing her behaviour was empathy.  As she said, ‘I watched myself through his eyes.  I felt myself as disgusting, because I felt his disgust as my own.’

This, Grenville explains, is why writers are important: they help to translate other people’s lives and emotions into a form that compels readers to think differently.  Referring to Kafka’s comment that ‘a book is an axe for the frozen sea within us’, she maintains that the job of an artists is ‘to break the ice pack to create a different kind of response, one that’s beyond the oppositional positions of the intellect, the “yes it is, no it isn’t kind of debate’ … Art offers a way beyond those deadlocks of the reason and the intellect.  It creates a climate, so to speak, in which things can be understood in another way.’

And this is precisely why I write.  It’s all-consuming, ambitious and fervid desire to tell stories that force readers to step into other worlds, particularly the worlds of those that might be less fortunate than their own, and to see what it would be like, and how it would feel, to be that person.  In my eyes, the measure of my success isn’t how many copies I’ve sold, but how many readers I have persuaded to stop and think about why, for example, an Aboriginal person might be forced into drunkenness and violence, or why lesbians couldn’t be seen in the nineteenth century, or how even the most well-meaning members of a community can harbour the venom of racism.

The trick, however, is not to proselytise, because that turns a reader off.  Virginia Woolf put it elegantly when writing about Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre.  Describing a scene in which Jane, standing on a rooftop and staring over the paddocks, realised she was not free, Woolf says:

if one reads [Charlotte Bronte’s words] over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire.  Her books will be deformed and twisted.  She will write in a rage where she should write calmly.  She will write foolishly where she should write wisely.  She will write of herself where she should write of her characters.  She is at war with her lot (A Room of One's Own, p. 81, Penguin, 2004).

Charlotte Bronte has lost her audience, Woolf is saying, because anger distorts her text.  Grenville also had a sweet way of putting it: we ought to provoke our readers and discomfort them, but in a way that is ‘sugared with the pill of such beauty or narrative force that they keep on reading’.

Often working outside, or on the edges of society (after all, we rarely put on a suit and go to work, except for our day jobs), Grenville also argues that writers think and problem solve in different ways.  She refers to the example of having lost one’s car keys, and you bang around the house in increasing fury trying to find them.  Eventually, to get your blood pressure down, you do the dishes.  And as you place the plate on the rack, dripping with suds, it springs into your head that you put the keys on top of the fridge.

It’s not an analytical way of thinking.  It’s intuitive, stemming from the unconscious, and writers tend to think in this manner.  This is part of the reason why, she says, we are more receptive to changes that are happening in society, and are well-placed to articulate them.

After listening to Grenville speak, I feel a thousand times better about the tedium and loneliness of my days.  Yes, writing for me is dull, pockmarked with procrastination, and never delivers enough money for frocks, but it’s not an entirely useless profession.  Besides, it's literally impossible for me to do anything else.