Realistic romances

Over on Romancing the Blog today, Sandy Oakes asks:
Do authors back away from making their romances too realistic?

I suspect that part of the problem comes from the publishers wanting to back commercially viable fiction, and not being prepared to take 'risks', and consequent pressures withing the writing community to keep romance 'romancey'. Which is crazy, because there is a *huge* audience out there for a wide diversity of romance - from the lightest, fluffiest sugar-coated romance to dark, gutsy, confronting romance. Heck, there are 50 million romance readers in the US alone, and they aren't all going to like the same thing ;-)

Not all publishers are like this, however. I write at the grittier, realistic end of the scale and have had two full mss requested by NY publishers; in one ms, there's the body of a child on page 1. In another, the heroine is executed in the prologue.

If (when?) they're ever published, readers of the lighter kind of romance, looking for escape, probably won't read my books - but that's fine. Other writers target that sector of the audience, and my books will target another sector. There's plenty enough audience to go round ;-)

I write what I like to read - stories which are affirming because they acknowledge the darkness and problems in the world, yet also acknowledge the strengths and courage that exist within us.

While my stories have a very definite focus on the relationship between the hero and heroine, they're not what I think of as 'pink' books - Romance with a capital R. Mine are more a rich, dark red. I aim to ground my stories in reality, and reality is not always comfortable or happy or easy.

However, since part of the reality in which I believe includes the reality of love as a powerful emotion, (I blogged about this at The Belfry Collective the other day), then my stories do have emotionally satisfying endings - just don't expect pink frilly bows ;-)

Belfry blog day

Today's my day to blog over at The Belfry Collective.

A room of her own - with a view

A friend called on Friday night to ask if he and his 3 kids could come and stay on Monday night, on their way up to the Gold Coast.

No problems, of course - I'm looking forward to seeing them. However, given that life has been busy and I've only been doing the absolute bare essentials of housework, I was glad we had a few days' notice!

Since last time we had guests, I'd moved my desk into the guest room, but things were somewhat cramped, with the queen bed shoved over almost to the wall and my desk squeezed in so that I felt a little claustrophic. It's not that it's a tiny room, but an alcove at one end (where a piano will ultimately go) was chock-a-block full of boxes, cane baskets etc - fabrics, fleeces, papers, and old clothes I was sentimental about (and hoped to one day fit again!)

I've sorted through it all today, turfed out a heap of stuff (including clothes that don't fit), tidied away other things, moved my desk into the empty space, moved DH's old bookshelf in, and moved the bed back across so that there's space on both sides for guests.

And it's wonderful! I'm really glad I finally took the time and energy to sort it out and make the room more workable. The bookshelf has space for books and research papers. I don't feel cramped at my desk - immediately to my left is a window that looks out into the bushland around our place. To the right, I can see down the passage and out the french doors of our bedroom. It feels light and airy instead of cramped and cluttered.

I'm going to enjoy writing here now - although I won't be doing much until the rest of the housework gets done to prepare for our guests!

Piratical things for fun

I found this one on Claire's journal and am posting it here just for Kate, even though I'm a few days late for Talk Like a Pirate Day. (And she might already know about it, anyway.)

Go to:
http://adactio.com/extras/talklikeapirate/
and put in a web address, and it will translate the page into pirate talk.

Arrr, me hearties!

Cairns trip

I arrived home from Cairns around 8.30 last night. The trip was reasonably good, although unfortunately the conference wasn't the most rivetting! (Maybe because it wasn't a writing conference ;-) )

I did catch up with a cousin I haven't seen for many years, and met her husband and children, which was great. They met me at the airport and took me to their home - a beautiful Queenslander styler house - for dinner. So we had a wonderful relaxed meal outside in the balmy tropical evening, caught up on family news, and watched the cane toads hop across the lawn. (I declined the offer to play golf with the toads. Toads are noxious pests, and Queenslanders try everything to get rid of them.)

The only blight on the evening was that when I went to carry some of the plates up stairs, I stumbled and fell heavily, smashing two out of the three plates I was carrying and doing minor damage to assorted portions of my anatomy. I don't bounce like I used to, but I guess it could have been a lot worse.

The following day we all went down to Babinda, an hour or so south of Cairns, and wandered through the rain forest where a river carves through the hills, with waterfalls, boulders, etc. Very beautiful! I also saw Ulysses butterflies for the first time - a gorgeous large brilliant blue butterfly. Then back to Cairns and the Botanic Gardens, where many tropical flowers were in full bloom and I walked around gaping in wonder.

The conference took up the next couple of days, but I did manage a few strolls around the city area of Cairns, which is a very short distance from the water, and wandered along the Esplanade and the laggon area. Yesterday I had a lazy morning and brunch at an open air cafe while trying to replot a novel before heading to the airport and my lunchtime flight. And then back to the real world and work...

still here - I think

Life's a bit mad right now. I've got major projects happening at work, consuming time and brain space, there's a lot to do at home (I haven't done housework for way too long), there's writing to be done, and I go away again on Saturday.

But the following pleasant things have occurred:

1. The DH and I went out for afternoon tea at the local art museum on Sunday, and after we came home we went for a walk. Together. It's nice to take a little time now and then to stop and smell the roses umm... fresh air?? - together. We've had some rain, the dams are the fullest they've been in ages, spring is here and the wattles are blooming, and we were keeping an eye out, on our walk, for any sign of the orchids that come out this time of year, if there's been rain.

2. I merged two versions of chapter one together and am (almost) happy with the result. I can actually see this novel, which has had ninety gazillion versions, actually being finally finished very soon.

3. After a long day at work yesterday, I think the workshop that I'm developing to run tomorrow is getting near ready. It's a challenging topic, for a an intelligent, critical group, so I'm feeling a little nervous about it. But I think (hope!) I'm on the right track.

Once tomorrow is over, my evenings will be back to writing - although I go to Cairns on Saturday for a work conference, so I suppose I'll have to find some summer clothes and pack for that, too :-)

Growing characters

One of the most enjoyable parts of writing, for me, is developing characters. I love the process of thinking about, mulling over, characters, and developing them over time.

My stories are often born as the result of a dream. I dream a lot, and most of it is just crazy, jumbled up stuff (if anyone tried to analyse my dreams, I'd probably be locked up). But every now and then, I have a clear, short dream in which an incident takes place, and I get a *very* powerful sense of emotion from at least one of the characters - emotion that is still with me when I wake up.

So, often the character comes from the emotion. Who is the character? How did they get in that situation? Why did they feel that emotion? How are they going to respond to it? A number of my stories have begun in just this way - that powerful, instigating incident has become the prologue, or the opening of the first chapter.

Other characters grow a little differently, but I do seem to get some sense of who they are from the moment I start writing them, even if I don't know much about them then.

After I've done a little writing, playing around with scenes, maybe drafting a first chapter, I then usually start a somewhat informal character sheet. The character sheet I use is adapted from several that I found on the web, but I use it as a prompt for thinking, rather than as a form that has to have every space filled in. Sometimes things just simply aren't relevant to the story or to the character. But pondering the various things on the list does help me to flesh out and understand the character better - even if some things may not appear in the final story.

For example, one of the items on the sheet is 'most treasured possession.' When I was pondering this in relation to my character Gil Gillespie, I realised that if you asked him what his most treasured possession is, he'd scowl and say he doesn't have emotional attachments to things - or people. But I know that he did most of the renovations of his pub himself, that he has some woodworking tools, and that he finds it strangely peaceful, an oasis in a busy, demanding life, when he's working timber with his hands. So, thinking about just that one point on the list gave me a whole lot more to Gil. And, although he still won't get emotionally attached to things, he's going to fight a losing battle in trying not to become emotionally attached to people ;-)

Being Batty

Me? Shy, staid, respectable?

Obviously not.

(For the non-Bats reading this, I'm part of an online writer's group called the Bat Cave. Valerie Parv - aka known as Valkyrie, Bard from the Cave - gave me these Bat ears/antennae last year. So, of course I had to wear them to the breakfast gathering of Australian Bats at the Melbourne conference.)

(And thanks to Bronwyn Jameson for the photo!)

Back from Melbourne

I arrived home from Melbourne last night. Had a fantastic week away, and really enjoyed the conference. It was also great to have the time with my mother.

I'll do a bit of a conference summary later, but in the meantime here's a pic:



L to R, Alexis Fleming, Jennie Adams, me, and Valerie Parv - at the conference dinner on Saturday night, which was good fun.

On Monday, Mum and I went out to visit my aunt in an outer suburb, and two of my cousins were also there, so it was great to catch up with them. Stephen is a wildlife artist - to see some great paintings, check out his website.

Sad and happy

I heard this morning that a guy I know slightly hung himself on Sunday night. He was only 32 years old, a nice guy and a highly-regarded academic; what a tragic waste. I saw him just a few days ago - we smiled and exchanged a greeting in passing, as we normally did. We were only acquaintances, but it still hits hard. I keep picturing his face in my mind, and knowing that I'll never see it again keeps coming as a shock. I gather from the grapevine that a long-term, long-distance relationship he'd been in had recently ended, and it makes me very sad that, while men do care deeply about relationships, they far too often don't have the opportunity or the vocabulary that is meaningful to them to talk about the challenges and the pain.

On a lighter note, tomorrow morning I fly off to Melbourne, to attend the Romance Writers of Australia conference. I'm looking forward to it. I haven't been to Melbourne for years, and I haven't been to an RWAus conference before. I'm going a couple of days early, and my Mum is travelling down from Canberra to Melbourne tomorrow, too. She's not going to the conference (other than the Awards dinner on Saturday night) but we're sharing the hotel room and will do some things together in the non-conf time. As well as the conference, I'm looking forward to some quality time with her. My Mum is one special lady.

I'm doing a full-day workshop with Donald Maass on Friday, and three other workshops on the weekend - one on writing suspense, one on undercover cops, and one on historical romances for the UK market. Me? Excited?

I won't have much internet access for the next week - unless I find a handy internet cafe - so this blog is likely to be quiet. But I'll probably make up for it when I get back!

British top 100

The top 100 films in America has recently been doing the rounds, but I'd seen so few of them I didn't want to admit to it ;-) However This! Christine has just posted the British Film Institute's Top 100 films, and hey, I can bold a few of those! Mind you, there's a few that I saw on long-ago school holidays when our ABC used to show old movies at lunchtime, and I really can't remember much about them, but I'm sure I did actually watch them.

British Top 100 List

1. The Third Man (1949)

2. Brief Encounter (1945)

3. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

4. The 39 Steps (1935)

5. Great Expectations (1946)

6. Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

7. Kes (1969) Good movie, better book, but not up there to see if you're already feeling depressed.

8. Don't Look Now (1973)

9. The Red Shoes (1948)

10. Trainspotting (1996)

11. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

12. If... (1968)

13. The Ladykillers (1955)

14. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)

15. Brighton Rock (1947)

16. Get Carter (1971)

17. The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)

18. Henry V (1944)

19. Chariots of Fire (1981)

20. A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

21. The Long Good Friday (1980)

22. The Servant (1963)

23. Four Weddings And A Funeral (1994) First movie I saw with Hugh in it, before I realised he plays Hugh in everything.

24. Whisky Galore! (1949) Good fun

25. The Full Monty (1997) More good fun

26. The Crying Game (1992)

27. Doctor Zhivago (1965)

28. Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) We're all individuals!!

29. Withnail and I (1987) Saw it in a movie theatre when it first came out, and I'm sure half the audience was smoking 'herbal' cigarettes. But it was one of those movies - and fun, it a weird, twisted kind of way.

30. Gregory's Girl (1980)

31. Zulu (1964)

32. Room at the Top (1958)

33. Alfie (1966)

34. Gandhi (1982)

35. The Lady Vanishes (1938)

36. The Italian Job (1969)

37. Local Hero (1983) Enjoyed - and the music was great

38. The Commitments (1991)

39. A Fish Called Wanda (1988) Brilliant. The whole cast were just perfect.

40. Secrets & Lies (1995)

41. Dr. No (1962)

42. The Madness of King George (1994)

43. A Man For All Seasons (1966)

44. Black Narcissus (1947)

45. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) Good.

46. Oliver Twist (1948)

47. I'm All Right Jack (1959)

48. Performance (1970)

49. Shakespeare in Love (1998)

50. My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) Meh

51. Tom Jones (1963)

52. 'This Sporting Life' (1963)

53. 'My Left Foot' (1989)

54. 'Brazil' (1985)

55. 'The English Patient (1996)

56. 'A Taste of Honey' (1961)

57. 'The Go-Between' (1970)

58. 'The Man in the White Suit' (1951)

59. 'The Ipcress File' (1965)

60. 'Blow-Up' (1966)

61. 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner' (1962)

62. 'Sense and Sensibility' (1995)

63. 'Passport to Pimlico' (1949)

64. 'The Remains of the Day' (1993)

65. 'Sunday, Bloody Sunday' (1971)

66. 'The Railway Children' (1970)

67. 'Mona Lisa (1986)

68. 'The Dam Busters' (1955)

69. 'Hamlet" (1948)

70. 'Goldfinger' (1964)

71. 'Elizabeth' (1998)

72. 'Goodbye, Mr. Chips' (1939)

73. 'A Room with a View' (1985) I took my mother, hoping to persuade her to send me on a finishing tour to Italy - I even have a spinster cousin who would have been happy to chaperone ;-) Alas, it was not to be.

74. 'The Day of the Jackal' (1973)

75. 'The Cruel Sea' (1952)

76. 'Billy Liar' (1963)

77. 'Oliver!' (1968) Musical Version

78. 'Peeping Tom' (1960)

79. 'Far From the Madding Crowd' (1967)

80. 'The Draughtsman's Contract' (1982)

81. 'A Clockwork Orange' (1971)

82. 'Distant Voices Still Lives' (1988)

83. 'Darling' (1965)

84. 'Educating Rita' (1983) Excellent

85. 'Brassed Off' (1996)

86. 'Genevieve' (1953)

87. 'Women In Love' (1969)

88. 'A Hard Day's Night' (1964)

89. 'Fires Were Started' (1943)

90. 'Hope and Glory' (1987)

91. 'My Name Is Joe' (1998)

92. 'In Which We Serve' (1942)

93. 'Caravaggio' (1986)

94. 'The Belles of St. Trinian's' (1954)

95. 'Life Is Sweet' (1990)

96. 'The Wicker Man' (1973)

97. 'Nil by Mouth' (1997)

98. 'Small Faces' (1995)

99. 'Carry On Up The Khyber' (1968)

100. 'The Killing Fields' (1984) Remind me never to say that my life is tough.

cruising

The dinner cruise out of Darwin harbour was wonderful - perfect evening, sunset and close to full moon, and superb, freshly cooked seafood.





It's a tough life, but somebody has to do it ;-)

Darwin

I'm in Darwin. It's warm. Can't believe I'm wearing a short-sleeved shirt in August. There's a US Navy ship in port, and the town is booked out - lots of tired looking young men around this morning, and lots of raucous ones last night.

I have the whole day to fill in as my plane doesn't leave until 1.30am. This evening I'm going on a dinner cruise on the harbor in a sailing ship - one of the other women here for the meeting I went to is coming with me.

I did look at day tours but as we're talking Northern Territoy and vast distances, most of the interesting (Kakadu, Katherine) ones left at 6.30am. I rarely do 6.30am, and definitely not after only having 5 hours sleep the night before. (Plane times from Sydney to Darwin are mad - plane didn't get in until 11.30pm, and of course my luggage was the last off.)

The sun is shining, the weather is beautiful, and I'm heading off to do some sailor-watching sight-seeing research.

Fwapping away again

At 3.30 this afternoon, the boss asked if I could go to Darwin tomorrow. He was supposed to go but now can't, and none of the other team members can go. So, I'm flying off tomorrow lunchtime.

For those who don't know their Australian geography, Darwin is half a continent away. Next door to Crocodile Dundee country. It's also hot. They have two seasons - hot and dry, and hot and wet. I'll be going from one of the coldest places in Australia to one of the hottest.

I'll have a whole two days in Darwin - one taken up with meetings, the other one free to wander around (assuming I've recovered enough from late night flights).

I'm looking forward to it - I enjoy travelling, and I've only been to Darwin once before, about 17 years ago. I haven't currently got any ideas for novels set in Darwin, but I'm sure I'll come up with one or two while I'm there ;-)

I won't be taking the laptop, though - just the good old fashioned paper and pen - so this blog will be quiet for a few days. Unless you all decide to have a party in the comments while I'm gone ;-)

The Belfry Collective blog

My amazing critique group, The Belfry Collective, has started a group blog, and today was my turn to post.

So, hie on over to the Belfry Blog

Sentimental blokes

"An-wilt-yer-take-this-woman-fer-to-be-
Yer-weddid-wife?" ... O, strike me! Will I wot?
Take 'er? Doreeen? 'E stans there arstin me!
As if 'e thort per'aps I'd rather not!
...
"I will," I sez. An' tho' a joyful shout
Come from me bustin' 'eart - I know it did -
Me voice got sorter mangled comin' out,
An makes me whisper like a frightened kid.
"I will," I squeaks...

Lying in bed this morning in the relaxed, cosy, dreamy state of an unhurried Saturday morning, I was thinking about male writers and romantic themes and I realised that, for all the rough, tough, laconic image of Australian males, there are some wonderful romantic stories written by them that have happy endings.

The quote above is from CJ Dennis' The Sentimental Bloke, a story in verse first published in 1915. The narrator of the book is a larrikin, a rough young man from the back streets of Melbourne, hovering, at times, on the edge of the law (his best mate, Ginger Mick has frequent 'stoushes' with the cops.) And then he meets Doreen... They're wonderful poems, written by a man about a bloke who falls head over heels, and have been popular for ninety years. I have fond memories of my Dad, when we were young, reciting the poem above, 'Hitched'. He can probably still recite it, word for word ;-)

D'Arcy Niland's Call Me When the Cross Turns Over (1957) is another book with a strong romantic theme and a positive ending. Barbie Cazabon 'was brought up in a man's world. She was dug out of this country and she'd be dug into it.' Jack 'Fascinatin' Kippilaw is a fighter, and the Human Buckjumper. The 'Cross' of the title is the Southern Cross, the constellation of stars, vivid in the night sky of the Outback in which Barbie travels. It's a great book, written by a man who spent years himself working and travelling in the Outback and the rural regions of Australia.

Then there's Jill and Guy Hamilton in Christopher Koch's The Year of Living Dangerously. And Neville Shute's A Town Like Alice, where prisoner-of-war Joe almost gets killed for stealing a chicken for the wandering group of women prisoners in Malaysia, and later goes halfway across the world to find Jean Paget when he discovers, years later, that his 'Mrs Boong' was never married, as he'd believed.

To be honest I haven't read a lot of more contemporary male Australian authors (Patrick White, Thomas Keneally, Tim Winton etc haven't really appealed to me), but certainly in the 50s and 60s Australian mainstream fiction, romantic themes, and male writers seemed to get along just fine.

(And I did mention that I managed to write this post without rereading the entirety of Call Me When the Cross Turns Over - but only just ;-) Did I mention it's a great book?)

Long weekend

It's Friday night, and I'm having Monday off, so that means I've got three whole days ahead of me to write.

Okay, so it won't actually be three whole days - tomorrow morning the DH and I are going to Guyra, about 60km away. Guyra's a much smaller town than ours, but it has a wonderful wool shop, and our town no longer has one. I need some circular knitting needles for a jacket I'm knitting, and a ball of yarn to use as contrast heel and toes on some socks I'm knitting.

This is, however, writing related, because strange though it may seem, knitting socks helps me write. Yes, yes, I know it's crazy, but I don't write fast, I write thoughtfully, and giving my hands something to do while I'm staring at the screen occupies the bit of the mind that wants to be 'busy' and stops my fingers from clicking on the web browser, or the email, or anything that takes me away from the wip. I can only knit plain things while writing, and socks are perfect - plus I get bonus hand knitted (and often handspun) socks, which I luurrve. The current socks are a variegated commercial yarn, but there are two balls of handspun merino that are telling me to hurry up and free up the needles.

So, a trip in the countryside up to Guyra, lunch with the DH in the cafe there, and then home to write. And knit. For three days.

Yee-haa.

I worked out how to do pictures...

Jaffa, The Princess Dog, was looking particularly cute last night.

(If she was a heroine in one of my stories, she'd have to be a Princess. Her sister, on the other hand, would be a Bombshell heroine.)

Reading characters

It no longer surprises me how two people can read the same book and come away with two totally different views of it. Because of this, I rarely take much notice of book reviews. If there's one thing that I've learned over the years, it's that reading is a very subjective process and that we bring our own interpretations to everything.

For about ten years, I ran a lot (well over a hundred) of selection skills workshops for a number of organisations - mostly two-day workshops. Before I seriously turned my hand to writing novels, I created characters for the practical exercises in these workshops and wrote detailed job applications based on those characters. Workshop participants, in groups, considered a set of three applications and had to decide which applicants they would invite to interview - and justify their decisions in terms of the selection criteria for the job.

Easy, right? Each group is considering the same set of information, using the same criteria.

Um.... no. In just about every single workshop, each group of 3 or 4 people came up with entirely different choices. And not just for one set of applications. I created others, for different characters, for different positions - and the same thing happened. Individuals and groups interpreted exactly the same information in VERY different ways. Administrative assistants, scientists, managers, academics: no matter what the position, one group would think applicant A was the most brilliant, perfect applicant - and another group in the same room would think that Applicant A wasn't worth the three seconds taken to discount them. And so on for each applicant.

Granted, I'd carefully created each character and application so that there were both strengths and weaknesses, but the interpretations and assumptions that were made about the applicants were amazing. They were always very effective exercises, of course, because they DID demonstrate very clearly that our reading of such things is incredibly subjective - and I used that to then teach techniques to make the selection process less subjective.

I learned a lot from those exercises myself. Firstly, that I enjoyed creating characters and was good at it - it was wonderful to see, time and again, senior managers and university academics (NOT the world's most excitable people!) getting excited about characters I'd written, and thoroughly enjoying the exercises. That really gave me the encouragement to seriously try writing. But secondly, I learned that no matter how much you give people, things will always be open to interpretation, and that often people will 'see' your characters quite differently to how you envisaged them.

Yes, it's true that there's a lot more scope in a novel to reveal your character than there is in a job application, but you only have to read a range of reviews of the same novel to see that the truth still holds - the reader will always interpret through their own lenses of assumption, preference, and experience.

Canberra bushfire legacy

I'm back from Canberra - tired, but glad I went. It was good to have some time with the family.

Canberra is a beautiful city, known as the 'Bush capital' because it is surrounded by wild space including the huge wilderness area of Namadgi National Park to the west of the city. Just on the edge of the city were large (non-native) pine plantations. I grew up there, spending much time in the national park, at the Cotter River reserve, visiting the Observatory at Mt Stromlo, and walking in the extensive pine forests.

In January, 2003, a huge bushfire swept through Namadgi, then through the pine forests - on a day that was so hot and dry and windy that the firestorm raced through 15 kilometres of bush and pine forest in about 20 minutes - and then destroyed 500 homes not far from where my parents live and where I grew up. I wasn't there at the time, but I spoke on the phone to my parents as they were preparing the house in case of flyng embers, when fires were only 2 streets away. Fortunately, the wind was blowing those particular flames away from them - but embers from the fires destroying homes (including my cousins' and some friends) a suburb away were dropping all around them.

I've been down to Canberra a few times since, and I can't get used to the changed landscape. It's hard to describe to those who have never seen the city, because its design is unique, but in the areas I travel most, from my parent's place to the city, or to the northern suburbs, you travel around the edge of the city - through what were once pine forests. And now there's nothing but wide empty space, and tiny fledgling seedlings. In the bush areas, the gum trees (eucalypts) are regenerating, but it's not the same as it was - and the mountains to the west, which I always loved catching glimpses of, you can now see more often - except they look grayer and... different. When I was down there last year, I went into Namadgi National Part, and walked around for a while, and although there was new leaf growth on the trees, many hadn't survived the intense heat, and the new growth on those that had was close to the main trunks, with ghostly, dead outer branches. And it was very, very quiet - the wildlife populations were drastically affected by the blaze and the destruction of habitat and food.

I love those areas, the way it was, and I feel the loss of them. I can't get used to the strangeness of it. The land will recover - is recovering - but it will take time, and some places will be forever changed.