Blogging a novel: The journey so far

I followed a link on Twitter yesterday to a blog piece called "Should You Blog Your Novel?" Given that I am, in fact, blogging my novel, I thought this would be an interesting and pertinent read for me.

As I expected, the article and its comments were pretty solidly in the NO camp on this one. Some of the identified downsides are ones I also have reservations about - such as the irritation to readers in having to read episodically and read backwards; and the restriction it places on wholesale revision-as-you-go or major plot rectconning. Both of these issues have already reared their heads in the month I have been posting to my novel blog, and there's no doubt they represent real problems with the blog-novel model.

However, the main reason most of the commenters were anti-novel-on-blog was that once a work is published on a blog, it's *published* - out there in the freeverse, and therefore not attractive to commercial publishers unless you have some epic number of readers / followers and can show an existing, ready-made market (and maybe not even then).

This is no doubt true, and I think if you are aiming at mainstream publication, you'd be ill advised to do what I'm doing with The Ark at the End of the World. I respect the argument that blog published = published; legally, practically and ethically, it absolutely does. While I don't see myself as a fiction writer primarily, and have no ambitions towards a fulltime career in that direction, I do on occasion have a shot at competitions or publication, usually for short pieces (poems and short stories); those pieces are never blogged, or even blogged about, until I have determined that traditional publication is unlikely to occur.

However, I have said all along, and still maintain, I never saw traditional publication as the end game for The Ark. It's a heart project for me, not a wallet one, and it's more than partly about trying to find my own way into a writing mode that suits me. I still intend to offer the completed work as a PDF for free download from here once it's finished, and to decommission the blog at that time. I have a vague idea for a sequel; if I pursue that, in due course, I may opt to write that one offline and self-pub an ebook for either free or very cheap. But that's a future goal and I still don't see it as being primarily about income.

I am, let's face it, a dilettante with my fiction and poetry writing. I can afford to be; my career and my income is elsewhere (although utilising a linked skillset - I'm a technical and policy writer by trade). I write fiction because I want to, and because I think I have stories to tell. I very much want to be read, but I'd be happy to be read for free forever. That would be OK with me, and it liberates me from having to worry overmuch about the commercial implications of blogging my novel.

As to the mechanics of it, I'm finding the episodic character of blog posts quite helpful in chunking my story. It suits the cadence of my writing, which tends to come to several small peaks within each chapter (which I'm breaking down into 4 blog posts). I'm finding that it's much more achievable, and less intimidating, to tell myself that I'm going to write an instalment (typically 600-800 words) rather than a chapter or more in one sitting. On that level, it's working beautifully for me.

I have an (offline) plot sketch now, which helps to guide each instalment as I know the broad outlines of the events that need to occur and when certain characters are introduced. However, I am tending to let the characters guide the interactions and the dialogue. I've been surprised by a few things - a character I had intended to be very rough and folksy has turned out to be smooth, cynical and highly intelligent, and has resisted every effort I've made to drag him back to the idea I had of him. Characters who I thought were going to be central currently aren't, while background characters are a lot mouthier than I'd intended. I'm finding this quite interesting as a process, and enjoying seeing it unfold.

Probably the biggest drawback I've found is the inability to go back and change bits that aren't quite right without driving my kind readers (there are a few! I get emails!) batshit insane. This means The Ark, when finished, is going to need a savage edit before being offered as a PDF download. That's OK, though; I said I was going to do this out loud, mess and all, and I can live with my cringey bits hanging out there.

For me - a blogger for so long - novelling on a blog works. It motivates me and shapes my work in ways that I find productive and useful. It would not be this way for everyone, and I sure wouldn't do this if I had ambitions to traditionally publish this work. But as a creative exercise, as a learning process, as a platform - I like it, for this story.

Two score (A poem)

so when I was ten, I thought that by the time I was forty
I would have done deeds of greatness, and changed the world
(also that I would be old and heading for the checkout, so to speak).

by the time I was twenty the grand visions were a bit faded, but I was still looking
down the barrel of a brilliant (and sequential) career, I thought.
by forty, I'd be a established, successful, something-or-other.
(and still old, although not quite as close to death as I'd once supposed).

I don't remember a great deal about thirty that doesn't involve nappies,
leaky boobs, tears, snuggles and being dragged under by a king tide of love and hormones
in fact, that might as well go for the five years that followed as well;
my brood mare years, if you like.
If I thought about forty at all, and I don't recollect that I did,
I expect I thought of it as a distant beach, somewhere beyond the ocean of babies
where a person might scramble ashore, with books, a job of some sort, and a quiet half hour or two
to reflect and recover.
(and be old. be very, very old).

and now, ask not for whom the bell tolls
as I wake on my fortieth birthday, very much as I did yesterday
when I was thirty-nine and still technically young-to-middlin'.

standing at the likely midpoint of my life, I have no grand observations to make, but this -
turns out, you're not on the way out the door at forty!
luckily, not being Paleolithic, and possessing lives neither nasty, brutish, nor short
we don't live just long enough to pass on our genes, then peg out
(at least most of us don't).

so I think that I might take my shot at doing something, in the next forty years
being a something-or-other, whatever that turns out to be
being part of the lives of the children I birthed, and raise in love
writing, because why not? why shouldn't I, if I want to?
poems and stories and blog and what-have-you
writing on the world I walk, naming it,
for the next forty years
(until I am old, and tired, and full of sleep)

now that I am forty, and ready
to not care about being old anymore
but just to revel in being here at all.

- Kathy, 19/6/13 (Yes, it is my 40th birthday today)

Reading Notes: Hugo Award short story nominees

This post is part of my commitment to read and review as many nominated works in the Hugo Awards (Science Fiction Awards) as possible before the prize announcements in early September. 

I've read the three Hugo short story nominees now: Aliette de Bodard's Immersion, Kij Johnson's Mantis Wives and Mono no Aware by Ken Liu. Having only the three to get through made this a light evening's reading, as I'd expected. I'm still a little puzzled as to why there are only three - seriously? there were no other sci fi shorts worthy of a nod this year? but having read them, I can't argue with the appropriateness of them being shortlisted. These are three very different stories but all of them are excellent.

I started with Aliette de Bodard's Immersion, purely because I've recently read, reviewed and loved her novella, On a Red Station, Drifting (which is also nominated for a Hugo in the novella category). Immersion is set within the same universe / master plot established in On a Red Station, Drifting, and deals with the same sort of humanity / addiction / technology interface issues.

de Bodard's frame is a spacegoing, space-dwelling advanced human population that has developed from a Vietnamese base, with some influences from Chinese culture (the Dai Viet Empire). As I remarked in my review of On a Red Station, Drifting, it's immensely enjoyable to see a beautifully realised future world that is not remotely Anglo-Celtic / American in its ideology, culture or frame of reference. There is no reason why the future will be a technologically-hyped version of 21st century America; in fact, there are many reasons to suppose it won't be at all. de Bodard is able, in both novella and short story, to deliver a universe founded on cultural assumptions, norms and behaviours that are not grown from the usual triumphalist US seed, and that in itself is awesome.

Immersion takes on the story of a woman trapped by a technology designed to assist, but with the strangling potential to subsume the personality; and the curious, mould-breaking hope represented by a pair of sisters who don't want to conform and embrace the tech. It's not a completely easy story to get around, switching as it does between the second-person narration of the trapped woman, Agnes, and the buoyant third-person view of the two sisters. Once the penny drops as to the relationship between the two narratives, though, it's an incredibly poignant little story, underlining in thick black ink the dangers of any tech (or, it's implied, any practice) that works by suppressing the soul.

Kij Johnson's Mantis Wives is the shortest of these stories, and manages to be both the most creepy and the most "alien" in its brief journey across the page. The premise is extremely simple - Johnson is imagining a culture that either is praying mantises or is extremely like them (not clear which, and it doesn't matter anyway). She's then unpicking what it means for the way that society operates that the females kill and consume their mates.

The story is creepy insomuch as it's entirely about death, killing and cannibalism, but is also chillingly insightful, and quite beautiful, in its delicate treatment of what such killing might mean for both the females and the males. Johnson is able to construct a web of artifice and ceremony around the culture of death that is at once mesmerising and repulsive. While I wouldn't go so far as to accuse her of outright equivalence, I caught a hint a few times of a gesture towards war and violence in human culture (the reification of death, the sense of ultimate purpose that is really nothing but a shade over the reality of lots of dead bodies).

As for the ending of the story, I won't spoil it for you, but if you read it (and you should), and if you are a sci fi fan, tell me if you agree that it has strong resonances of Ursula Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.

My favourite story of the three, though, is Ken Liu's Mono no Aware. It is, in many ways, the most "straight" of the three - a recognisable earth-destruction small-group-of--spacegoing-survivors plot, that has been explored many times by many different writers. But Liu, in his protagonist, delivers a character who is both relatable and incredibly affecting. The plot is not twisty or tricky, running in a straight line to its (anticipatable) end. I think it's all the stronger for this lack of artifice; it amplifies the strong sense of sadness and sacrifice that permeates the plot and raises the ending to the level of true pathos. I had tears in my eyes as I finished this one, which is a high compliment as I am often a bit cynical about weepy stories generally.

So if I was the judge, I'd give it to Mono no Aware, but really none of the three would be a disappointing winner; they are all great stories, and all well worth your time.

The three stories can all be read for free online. This post from Worlds Without End provides links to find the free copies.

Reading Notes: Destination Saigon

I have a mostly happy relationship with travel writing, although I would not describe myself as an avid reader of the genre. I've read many of the modern, and older, superstar writers - everyone from Mary Wollstonecraft, Jonathan Swift and Isabella Bird to Bill Bryson, Tahir Shah, Paul Theroux and the problematic (for me) Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat, Pray, Love fame.

Come to think of it, I'd even count writers like the inimitable David Sedaris as partially travel writers - much of Sedaris's humour comes from place, language and culture, and he mines every new location with panache to create his unique result.

I generally enjoy travel books, provided they are not one of three things:

1. A catalogue of train stations and bus stops, vistas and coffee shops, without any reflective or narrative engine. I call these books "hopped-up travel guides" and I don't really like them. Travel guides per se can be useful, but it's not what I'm looking for when I read a travel book.

2. Patronising, sneering or contemptuous of the places and cultures they come into contact with. I have no time for what I like to call "the tourism of superiority"; it sets my teeth on edge and I immediately question how reliable is any observation such a blinkered writer would make.

3. Trying to be funny, but not actually funny. As Walter Mason, the author of the book I'm reviewing today, pointed out in a talk at the Emerging Writers Festival, humour is a tricky beast in travel writing. Unless the writer is very skilled (and very funny!), and has a genuine affection for the places and people about whom they write, it often falls flat or comes off as shallow, cheap shots. Some writers pull it off - Bill Bryson is a particularly masterful example - but when it's done badly, it's a very negative thing.

I came to Destination Saigon predisposed to like it, both because I had the privilege of hearing Walter speak at EWF and chatting to him, and also because it is about Vietnam, a country I have visited and to which I have family ties through my grandfather, who lived there for over a decade.

I expected this to be a whimsical, insightful book, and indeed it is - Mason's style is gentle, self-deprecating and conversational, while being artfully underpinned with historical and cultural detail. What I hadn't fully expected, and what makes this book such a lovely read, is the depth of the affection, respect, understanding and beauty that Mason brings to his subject. It's captured in the very first line of the introduction, where Mason reveals the path that brought him to Vietnam: "I fell in love with Vietnam, because I'd fallen in love. I suppose you could say love followed love." Mason's life partner is Australian-Vietnamese, and through this relationship, Mason came to know the incredible place that is Vietnam, in all its diversity, and became fluent in not just Vietnamese language but Vietnamese culture and spiritual practice as well.

The book doesn't have what I'd describe as a plot arc or a journey motif - like Mason's writing style, it ambles gently, seemingly at random, around Vietnam, visiting all the major (and lots of minor) cities and towns in a way that looks, at first, rather haphazard. As I read further in, though, a kind of meta-structure revealed itself, or perhaps a guiding theme might be a more appropriate way to describe it. This book is an exploration, through place, people, friendship, food, and language, of the value and role of spirituality in not just Vietnamese life but in human life.

Mason's profound interest in the spiritual content of life informs this whole book and the way in which he navigates being a large Western man in Vietnam. His friendships, and study, with Buddhist monks, his curiosity about Cao Dai, his unpicking of the ways in which spiritual understanding suffuses daily life in an ostensibly secularised Communist county - all these things are constant concerns and referrents, giving the book a shape that suits its reflective style. It's apparent that spirituality is a core concern of Mason's, and his interest in it never reads as voyeuristic or shallow. Rather, he's able to convey, in this book, all that Vietnam has provided to him as a spiritual person, all the gifts he's received at the hands of this beautiful country. That's a very precious thing to be able to convey to the reader.

As an introduction to Vietnam, I think this book would be accessible and enjoyable to most people. It has lots (surprisingly lots) of detail, which would help those with no knowledge of the country acquire some, but it's essentially a highly readable personal memoir, with Mason as the relatable narrator, which makes it a lot easier to read than straight historical texts. In fact, I've now added this to my list of books that I'd give to people who are travelling to Vietnam for the first time, along with Duong Thu Huong's Paradise of the Blind, Robert Olen Butler's A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and Grahame Greene's The Quiet American.

All in all, a very highly recommended travel book. I look forward to the next one, which will be set in Cambodia.

On the not-recession and how it is playing out, down our way

I keep reading that Australia is doing well economically. That we weren't bashed up by the GFC in the way that the US and much of Europe was; that our dollar is strong (clearly!), our GDP has not declined (OK); and that, overall, inflation is restrained at a manageable level. Our economy is considered credit-worthy and stable, and this is undoubtedly a good thing, and the result of a steady hand on the monetary and economic policy tiller over the past 5 years (all hand-wringing and mud-slinging to the contrary).

However.

We may not be, technically and by the books, in a recession - GDP hasn't declined in any serious sense, and that's the gold standard for recesssion measurement. But for a lot of people around here, an increasing number in fact, it's starting to *feel* awfully like a recession. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then what other kind of waterfowl is it?

In the past six weeks alone, I know of 15 people just within my personal circles who have been laid off or had hours of work or salary reduced. Payrises are a thing of the past in many industries, and small businesses are struggling. Cost of living continues to rise, and every mortgagee is living in fear of interest rate rises, and hoping they won't gallop like they did in the notorious 80s. Tenants are getting squeezed by rent increases, insurers are putting up premiums, etc etc etc.

By far the best explanation of why it feels recession-y, even though it isn't, is provided by Greg Jericho at The Drum. Basically, he argues that GDP might be the measure that economists use to determine if we are in recession, but for most people, employment trends is a more realistic and useful measure. (As he writes, "you don't pay your bills with GDP"). He shows, with quite compelling evidence, that when you look at labour market participation, the downward trend is palpable and painful. In fact, "the decline in the percentage of adults in employment is now worse than that experienced in the 1980s recession" - which makes it a lot less surprising to hear that more and more people are struggling with their circumstances.

The thing that Jericho doesn't even discuss, but that I'd identify as another massive structural reason for the *feeling* of harder times, is underemployment. While I do have three friends and two acquaintances who have been made redundant (lost jobs altogether), the more common story around here is of people having hours cut, pay reduced, or failing to get much work if they are casuals or contractors. All of these people - myself included - do not appear in unemployment figures, but that does not mean that a large number of them are working either to their capacity or to a level to support their needs and commitments.

No-one is immune to the effects of this kind of labour-recession. Sure, lots of people still have fulltime jobs - indeed, a majority of those jobs will survive, depending on your industry. But as more people have less disposable income, doesn't this imply a slowing of the economy, and soon, with all the knock on effects this has?

So yeah, we're not in recession, technically. We've been carefully husbanded past the worst dangers of the GFC, and the regulation of our financial market has protected us from the horrors of subprime and all its dismal children. But for a lot of people, especially non-professional people and those without permanent fulltime positions, it is feeling a lot like recession, as we all tighten belts a bit harder.