Forgive me, reader, it's almost two weeks since I last blogged.

It's not that I've been stuck on a desert island or anything, although I did have the plague for a few days and last weekend was spent (most excellently) in Melbourne. No, what it is, I think, is that the part of my brain which writes has been solidly engaged on Number Three - not to the exclusion of all else, but certainly to the exclusion of haunting Blogdom.  Usually, writing a post or two is a welcome distraction, but of late it's become a distraction I could do without.

That doesn't mean I haven't kept my ear to the ground, and I was interested to read an article by Linda Morris in The Age entitled Writers are authoring their own destinies online.  Through interviewing 'authorpreneur' Hazel Edwards and bestselling author Tony Park, Morris explores the "philosophical conflict" some authors feel about having to promote themselves and their work, and the benefits of this.  There was nothing I disagreed with in the article, but it did reinforce for me how difficult it is for the vast majority of authors, who don't make a living from their writing, to juggle bread-and-butter employment with maintaining an online presence to promote their published work while carrying on writing. Bugger the lack of financial remuneration, being time-poor doesn't help.

On another issue, it was good to hear that not all is doom-and-gloom in the publishing industry - although I don't doubt some publishers will be the last to admit as much (not least because it'd mean that the less scrupulous ones would no longer have an excuse not to pay their authors). Recently released Records of Earnings indicate that publishers are doing well out of digital sales - despite dire warnings from many that e-sales would sink them.  In The Business Rusch: How Traditional Publishers Are Making Money, Kristine Kathryn Rusch explores how publishers are indeed capitalising on this.  It's an interesting article and well worth a read.  (Thanks to Louise Cusack for the link.)

As for Melbourne, did some catching up, managed to fit in a visit to the flicks (Another Earth), a trip to the National Gallery of Victoria (The Mad Square exhibition), and had some delicious food experiences (Brunetti in Carlton, Grigons & Orr Corner Store in North Melbourne).  But more on that later.  I'll be back soon.  Promise.

We have a certain responsibility to these kids

We are into the first birth cycle of Japanese children since 4 reactors at Fukushima disintegrated in March 2011, promising to change life as we know it for most of the Northern Hemisphere over time.

The truth of what happened will become harder and harder to ignore as the cycle extends into the future leaving behind a trail of children with chronic and acute physical issues known as the Fukushima Syndrome - at least among the medical staff who will have to deal with these children far from the public eye.

Let us help you become addicted

It was one of those radio ads which you wish you could rewind just to make sure you heard correctly, to make sure it wasn't some spoof put on for your amusement.

The gist of the advertisement was, "If you are not on medication, and have never been on medication, contact us to test a range of free medications."

If nothing else, barring the spoof potential, this proves an old suspicion of mine. Pharmaceutical companies promote addiction.

I say this, because my ancestors lived into their 90s without ever taking a pill or managing their diets. Their children smoked profusely but managed to survive into their 80s despite the hacking coughs and patently bad lifestyles encouraged by the early 20th century. Even for them, pills were a rarity. Subsequent generations became enslaved to a bucket load of pills and did not do so well. Mortality rates, in some instances, dropped by twenty years.

On a more pertinent note, this was poor advertising copy. I understand exactly what the intent was, but the manner in which it was expressed reflected badly on the client because highly cynical listeners like me make toast of the content.

Cute or catchy doesn't make good copy. All writers fall victim to their inner stupidity, but this should not happen when someone else is paying the bill.

Teach your daughters to sing in silence

In her vision the old woman saw armies ranked against her Mistress, marching in lines one beside, one behind the other. Her heart faltered, stopped and beat again.

Her Mistress bent over her saying:
Daughter, my star is setting.  I too have dreamed your dream and felt the sun upon my limbs at midday.  But even in my decline I am powerful.

Teach your daughters to sing in silence.  Teach them to look for me beneath the waves at sunset so that when my star rises they shall be ready.

I will join you on the sands and offer prayers of praise for your souls, the keepers of my name, the faithful who have returned to the great waters.

From The Sybil
This allegory comes from A Woman's Book Of Allegory and uses goddess mythology to alert women to the fact that the destructive present can be overcome by inner song. 
When I speak of goddess mythology I mean that literally, not the so-called goddess mythology invented by the cosmetic industry. The allegory is written for all women who feel silenced by the destructive energies of our time, and tells the story of the last oracle of a dying priestess.
I use the concept of singing in silence not as being mute, but as singing regardless of being heard or not, because all song is universal resonance. Nor do I differentiate between songs. That is the choice of the individual woman.
Sing of trees, if you must. Sing of seas. Sing of injustice or in naive ignorance. Just find a song and sing. This is the message of the allegory.

Around the traps

By way of recommendation, here are some writerly pieces I've enjoyed of late:

• Cam Rogers' site is in full-swing again. 7 Things I've Learned About Writing For Kids is a fine nutshell-article.
• In Walk, Jay Kristoff tackles rejection slips, and how to respond to the critters.
• Louise Cusack debates the role of the writer online, and authenticity vs spin.
• Patrick O'Duffy gives his embryonic novella The Obituarist an ultra-sound - even traces the moment of conception - and promises to deliver the thing within a couple of months.
• Alan Baxter discusses Writers as bitches and the investment of readers.
• And over at The View From Here, literary agent Simon Trewin rounds off his posts from the International Festival of Authors in Toronto with a short piece about Project Bookmark Canada. 

Here's an illustration.  It is because it is.  Some things just are.

It must be Friday

I spent a while today trying to delete a full stop that had found its way between two.words of a Word document.

Every time I placed the cursor and pressed Backspace, though, I deleted one of the characters either side of it, instead of the full stop itself.

It took several attempts before I thought to scratch the fly shit or spider shit off the screen.

This sort of thing will happen when insects defecate in Times New Roman.

Down at the Factory of the Imagination in October

Word-wise it may have been a slow couple of months, but idea-wise it's been pretty rich, and October in particular has seen a few new layers added to Number Three.  This is the part I really like about writing novels.  Some ideas have grown directly out of the process of editing, which is coming along well, but some have simply grown from chewing the fat with friends (about nothing and everything), from a bit of reading, listening to music, looking at paintings, eating and drinking and dreaming - living, thinking, gazing at my navel.  Number Three is now at 67,000 words and I feel like I'm on the home stretch, even though all this thinking may have added another couple of months to getting the bloody thing finished.  Except it's no longer a 'bloody thing' and I'm enjoying it again.  Out of the doldrums.  Full sail ahead!

Mixed metaphors for this report as usual.  My bad.

Recent Reads: The Ascent of Isaac Steward by Mike French

Be warned: this review might contain spoilers. 

Before I say anything about Mike French's debut novel, The Ascent of Isaac Steward, other than to say it took Amazon and Fishpond three months and three attempts between them to deliver me a copy, let me say that Mike French is a friend and that I get an acknowledgement at the beginning of the book (very cool), so my opinion of it might be considered biased.  That said, if I didn't like the book and didn't feel I could recommend it, then I'd probably say nothing here, but I do and I am.

To validate the sincerity of my comments though, I'll begin with a negative (and then maybe you'll accept my ultimate recommendation to read it for yourself).  My biggest gripe about this novel is that Cauliay Publishing's copy editor might have spent more time... well, copy editing.   Every author wishes to see their work published with as few typos/errors as possible, even though a few always slip through, dammit - and I have a recent edition of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four that still hasn't yet shrugged off a sixty-year-old typo or two - but there's the sense that Cauliay might have rushed this in a few places.  That aside, the font and print, the paper, the cover - all those other finishing elements - are lovely.  (It may be my imagination, but there's something about the cover paper that gives it a fantastic 'rubberised' feel, and I found myself regularly running my hand across it, just to confirm and reconfirm this.  Hmm, I'll have to get that checked out.)

But to the novel itself.  The Ascent of Isaac Steward is accompanied by some fine endorsements, and this one by author R.N.Morris (A Razor Wrapped in Silk) has been much referred to in various reviews:

"Reminiscent of the surrealist literary experiments of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake but blessedly readable.  The Ascent of Isaac Steward is insanely ambitious, startlingly odd, boldly conceived, and executed with tremendous confidence.  One of the most extraordinary novels I have ever read."

I have no trouble agreeing with anything R.N.Morris has written here - he hasn't put a word wrong as far as I'm concerned - although I have to admit that my knowledge of Finnegan's Wake is based on a brief glance rather than a sound reading.  However, it does allow me to reassure prospective readers that, unlike Finnegan's Wake, the prose in Ascent is comprehensible and indeed "blessedly readable".  That aside, because Mike has created a novel which is wonderfully unique and experimental, it's probably normal (and useful) to have such a reference point against which to compare and contrast it, in order to clarify one's thoughts.

If I were to liken it to any book I've read before, it would be to Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman (yes, let's keep this with the Irish, even though Mike French is English, and not Irish... or French).  To my mind, The Ascent of Isaac Steward, like The Third Policeman, and William Golding's Pincher Martin even, explores the nether world between the ending of a life and the recognition of death.  It's fertile, surreal ground because we have no idea what dying and death is like, so almost anything goes.

There were times when I found it hard to keep track of the characters and their alter-egos, and to map out the hierarchy of worlds that Isaac and his cohort journey through, as I did with elements of The Third Policeman, but I found it a very satisfying book when I stopped worrying about this and allowed the crucial elements to reveal themselves.


Indeed, because it's such a startlingly original book, and subverts the reader's expectations at a number of points, I found myself approaching the narrative in a different way to usual.  Instead of attempting to carefully understand each twist and turn, I grabbed hold of the characters' coat tails and let them take me where they would.  In this manner, I went along for the helter-skelter ride, enjoying the spectacle of each scene, and adding one impression to another rather than needing to make absolute sense of every event as they happened.

Ultimately, it occurred to me that reading The Ascent of Isaac Steward is somewhat like engaging with a semi-abstract painting: it comprises a number of intriguing and bizarre images that are familiar, but slightly distorted, in the way that a dream might distort them, and, in the process, it creates a mythological world of its own.  There are images from the bible, from Punch and Judy, from shoot-'em-up computer games, from underwater prisons... all of which, when you stand back and look at the whole picture, present an intriguing and entertaining story about a man battling with his memories and journeying through an underworld that is, to a large extent, his own nightmarish creation.

What I particularly like about this novel (and appreciate about Cauliay's investment in it) is that it takes risks.  It is abstract, experimental and entertaining.  So don't get hung up on understanding every single detail, but kick back and enjoy the helter-skelter ride yourself.


Mike French's blog.
The Ascent of Isaac Steward at Amazon.com