a propos of nada except that I keep filing this in strange places and then wasting time looking for it

Kurt Vonnegut’s eight rules for writing short stories:

  1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
  2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
  3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
  4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
  5. Start as close to the end as possible.
  6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
  7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
  8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

I can’t remember where they were originally published, I’ve just got them on a scrap of paper here with me now.

Do you have any suggestions?

Reviewing isn’t one of my special skills, but I do like to do it. If nothing else, it sharpens your reading and helps you to see the flaws of your own work.

Added to this is my propensity for entering competitions (I never do win, but that seems not to stop me).

In the continuing spirit of entering every competition open to me (except Miss Universe, I’m not going in that this year – and no, no amount of pressure will convince me otherwise) I’m thinking of entering the ABR reviewing competiton this year.

Only thing is, the book you choose to review must have been published since January 2006. I haven’t read much recent stuff this last year or so. I’ve been reading a lot and a lot, but not so much recent stuff.

So, what’s something you think I could write intelligently about? Fiction or non-fiction.

PS I did think of entering this competition a few years ago so that I could write a review of All Things Bri**t and Beauti**l written about Adelaide by a former citizen of Adelaide. A more superficial and insulting book it has never been my misfortune to read. So there you go. That’s pretty much all I wanted to say about that book anyway.

PPS Please not The Gathering. I did read that, but I do not wish to review it.

PPSS Now that you know I’m going in it, you might want to consider entering – it’s quite good being in competitions with me, because you’ve got a good chance of winning.

Even Boston Legal didn’t cheer me up

blah blah blah Monday nights blah blah rhythm of my life blah blah my night to read to children, introduce them to new book, they always complain but by the end are snuggled around me blah blah blah dreaming of evening to self blah blah blah bake lunchbox muffins or cake thinking lovely thoughts of completeness of life all the while going to the kitchen door every now and then to yell down the passage ‘if I have to come down there’ later reinforced with ‘if I have to say this one more time’ blah blah wipe down table blah blah blah thinking of knitting or cross stitch to be done blah blah bladedy blah

when I get to 9.30, sit down with piece of aforementioned muffin or cake, cup of tea (and can I just say that last night’s allspice muffins washed down with chai went down a treat) and watch Enough Rope. Unless he is doing a ‘celebrity’ interview – such as Antonio Banderas, Rod Stewart, certain cricketers, Russell Crowe – all those and more were totally shit interviews where he seems to get starstruck or something and I just channell surf idly until it is time for Boston Legal to begin (I love James Spader, did I mention that?).

When he is at his best, Denton’s interviews are excellent. I very often cry. And last night’s footballer interview surely made me do that. There were positives, and there is hope woven in and out of that family. There has to be. But it’s all the unsaid stuff that’s stayed with me. So much sadness across so many lives. And all of last night, and into this morning, and probably into this afternoon, I am being followed around by the mother’s story and of how it is to watch your baby’s life unfold.

a meme

I’ve been tagged by David and Ariel to do this random things meme – though one was for five and one was for eight. Since I’ve got another 200 pages of proofreading to do, I will do this meme right now. They are supposed to be a mix of random and weird. I don’t know how to judge either randomness or weirdness, so here’s 5 – 8 things:

1. I really wanted to have three children, and after conceiving two pretty much on-demand I was gobsmacked to find that we could not conceive a third. I was even more gobsmacked to discover that There Are Reasons. The unconceived child has made me deeply sad, although also somewhat grateful that the first two did indeed come along. I know that I am coming to terms with the missing child, because I have taken Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child down from the shelf and intend to read it again. Of which more later.

2. I really want to do a PhD, but I can not justify the expense.

3. Last year, on the day I turned 38 we were all walking on the beach at Kangaroo Island and I was trying to convince myself that I was going in the direction I wanted to go, and the mister said ‘well, what would you need to achieve in order to be happy’ (or words to that effect). I said ‘a novel’.

4. The Scientoligists once told the mister he should be a social worker. He had no idea, as he scoffed at them, that living with me he would become one. This one seems like it’s about the mister, but really it’s about me.

5. I do not let my children watch television during the week. Unless I feel like watching Deal or No Deal.

6. I think that the 1000 people going to the 2020 summit sound like a marvellously interesting bunch. And I don’t know why people are scoffing about Hugh Jackman, Cate Blanchett and Claudia Karvan as if they can’t be interesting, intelligent and visionary people just because they’re actors.

7. I have been trying to do something, but it is not sitting well with my conscience, and I will not be able to follow through.

8. I know that my children are up in the room with the door closed because they are playing their electronic games without having asked me. I couldn’t be fucked going up there and dealing with it.

You’re supposed to tag people here. Tag.
PS Bonus thing: I know the full evolve of Pikachu

In which she writes a post of more than 50 words

It is clear from the way I am wandering around both figuratively, metaphorically, virtually and literally that I need to debrief the Fringe. Perfect use for a blog, so please excuse me while I indulge (insert bloggers are narcissists quip).

Performing night after night for a couple of weeks, and sometimes twice in one night, I really did learn ‘a lot and a lot’ (as my Littlest Boy would say). Like more than I’ve learnt in such a concentrated time for many, many years.

My Dad rang one day to see how things were going and I said ‘well, Samela Harris saw me the first night and wrote that I was ‘desperately funny’, and then the second night we had close to full house and I hardly raised a laugh.’

‘Ha!’ (that’s a rather loud guffaw) ‘How good is that?’ he said.

‘erm…not at all?’ That’s a small and weary voice.

‘But there you go, doesn’t it show that you can’t always control it?’

Somewhere in there is the biggest lesson I learnt which meant that at last, I let it sink in and I was able to finally and properly let go of being afraid of going on stage. By the time of that conversation, I’d had a couple of really good sets, an okay one, and a not good one. Same set, same stage(s), different reactions. So, if I were going to go on, I may as well just enjoy myself, because that is the one thing in my control. And really, if I wasn’t going to enjoy it, why do it. With two boys and a beagle and everything else that is involved in getting through life, it’s so hard getting out of the house night after night with a finished, well-rehearsed set in your brain that there really is no point doing it if you’re not going to have fun.

So. I was still nervous. But all of sudden I wasn’t scared. I say ‘all of a sudden’ but obviously it’s taken eighteen months of various lessons in various ways to get to this point where I say I’m not scared and I’m really not.

One of the things contributing to my fear is the very big difference between publishing and standing-up your words. As I have said to the mister perhaps more than once, that when you publish something you are presenting it as you want it to be presented. When I see something that I’ve written in its published form, it is (more or less) how I wanted it to be (this is not to say that I can’t see where improvements could be made, but that’s a different thing). Of course, people will make of it what they will, but that doesn’t worry me either, because I know that I’ve presented it how I want it to be presented and I like that different people will react to it differently.

On stage, there are no such presentation guarantees. I rehearse and I prepare, but I might stumble over a crucial word, forget a joke, get distracted by the person behind the bar. The uncertainties are many, my jokes are few, I can’t afford mistakes.

However, having made the decision – in word and in fact – that I will not be afraid, that I will enjoy myself, things really started to happen. I could hear myself. I could hear the audience. I could hear the words do their work. It was fun. And it was one of those things, the more fun it was, the more fun I had, the more fun it was and so on.

I also really came to terms with the fact that not everyone will think I’m funny. I already knew this in my brain, but now I know it in all other ways too. If people don’t laugh, it means they don’t think I’m funny. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that if they don’t think I’m funny then I’m not funny at all (although that possibility always remains). This was solidified on my second-to-last night, when I did my set three times over the course of the night. Ranging from totally rocking it to barely a snigger.

‘Ha!’ That’s the guffaw of a friend of mine right after my final set of the night when I was downing a beer as fast as I could and reminding myself that tomorrow I would be reflecting philosophically on my experiences, and focusing on my successes rather than my failures. ‘You’ve gotta love comedy.’

The things is, as I’ve told the mister perhaps more than once, making people laugh means tapping into a universal truth. But truly universal truths are few. That’s why Venn diagrams work.

China

These are three of my not unrelated opinions:

China’s human rights record is appalling.

Sport is not free of politics.

Words matter.

International PEN is holding a Poem Relay for free expression in China (this last is not an opinion, it’s an event, but you’ve worked that out, haven’t you).