Philip Pullman on Lewis and Tolkien

Tolkien was a Catholic, for whom the basic issues of life were not in question, because the Church had all the answers. So nowhere in 'The Lord of the Rings' is there a moment's doubt about those big questions. No-one is in any doubt about what's good or bad; everyone knows where the good is, and what to do about the bad. Enormous as it is, TLOTR is consequently trivial. Narnia, on the other hand, is the work of a Protestant - and an Ulster Protestant at that, for whom the individual interaction with the Bible and with God was a matter of daily struggle and endless moral questioning. That's the Protestant tradition. So in Narnia the big questions are urgent and compelling and vital: is there a God? Who is it? How can I recognise him? What must I do to be good? I profoundly disagree with the answers that Lewis offers - in fact, as I say, I detest them - but Narnia is a work of serious religious engagement in a way that TLOTR could never be.

From an oldish interview here.

Juvenilia

My agent recently shared some of her teen writing, and as it's my birthday and you're not allowed to be too mean to me, I'm going to be brave and do the same.

Between the ages of 10 and 14, I wrote a novel. It's about 65 000 words long, and every one of them is crap. Looking through it for a suitably embarrassing passage to share, I was struck by how totally and thoroughly I stole from other books. It's like a list of my teenaged reading:

(Cold Comfort Farm)
The gateman closed one eye in speculation, and scratched his head. “Wull,” he said in his simple countryman's accent. “If ye follow this 'ere road, down over th' bridge, then it's th' first buildin' on yer roight.”
“Thank you,” said Nellwyn, and they turned away.
“'Ere!” said the man, waving at them. “Y' mun stay on this road, an' down't stray int' th' back-streets, loike, for there be some nasty characters about.”

(Lord of the Rings)
The next evening, Nellwyn came down reporting bad news, he had not seen the explosions because of the high mountain peaks, but he had seen a gigantic flock of evil-looking crows flying in their direction.
“Crows?” said Flontale, looking up from where he was sitting cross-legged by their campfire. “What could crows do to us?”
“These aren't just a few crows,” Nellwyn said, frowning at the thought Flontale might be braver than one of the best fighters in the village. “They're huge! Each one has a wingspan of about three feet, and their eyes - ugh.” He shuddered.
“How many?” asked Dadoe, reaching for his axe and testing the point with his thumb. Dadoe was never one to mince words.
“I don't know. They were stretching off over the top of the mountain beyond my line of vision.”
Dadoe put down the axe carefully. “Ah. Maybe fighting them wouldn't be such a good idea.”


(Chronicles of Prydain)
“You cannot treat me this way!” cried Dylarn, “I am ill!”
“And I'm the great God Tefflar!” snapped Leyha, “Stop whining and get on with the packing!”
“But I am ill!”
“I know, you said it before.” She turned to the others, “And he says that he's a warrior, hmph!”


(Alanna series)
The Third of the Yswin reached into the three's minds.
He projected images of home, of death, of killing, all three saw Leyha burying a black sword with a yellow jewel embedded in the hilt into Sul's chest....


(David Eddings)
He sighed, and called for Elondwar. He hadn't really wanted to become a God. Of course it was nice having the power to make the kingliest of kings bow down to Him, but a lot of hardships came with being a God.
“You called, Divine One?”
He looked up, “Entertain me, Elondwar.” He said wearily.
She grinned mirthlessly, showing her long, blood-red fangs.
“I think I can manage that.”

(Anne Rice)
He leapt, catlike over a fence, and slid in the window of a peasants house. Inside, four peasants were asleep. Tel crept over to one of them, and raised their wrist to his lips. Ari saw him bite down hard, and the peasant jolted in pain, but slept on. As Tel drank, the colour came back into his face, and he straightened, sliding a gold coin into the still-sleeping peasant's clenched fist.

Rant. Women. Writing. Chicklit.

So there's been a bit in the media lately about women writers and some other related bits and pieces. And I know this is a soapbox that I've jumped up and down on before, but I'm going to have to keep jumping for now.

First, there's an article in the Telegraph about the Orange Prize, a literary award for women writers:

Given that women have won five out of the last six Whitbread/Costas, does the level of injustice remain enough to justify the Orange?

Women are predominant, in terms of numbers and power, in most of the major publishing houses and agencies. They sell most of the books, into a market that largely comprises women readers. They are favoured by what is overwhelmingly the most important publishing prize (the Richard and Judy list), and comprise most of the reading groups that drive sales. Girls in schools are more literate than boys, and pupils are taught reading mainly by female teachers promoting mainly female writers.

Well. A few points, if I may.

• Six out of the last 20 Booker Prize Winners have been women.
• Two out of the last 20 Booker Prize Winners have had a female protagonist. That's 10%.
• Publisher's Weekly's Best Books of 2010 list are all by men.
• Our own Miles Franklin longlist features 3 women and 9 men.
  
• There are more women working in publishing than men, more women write books and more women read books. This is all true. Yet capital-L-literary awards are undeniably skewed towards men.
• There are more female teachers because teaching continues to be a low pay, low status job.
• Despite this, the vast majority of class texts are by men, and feature male protagonists.
• In VCE this year, there are 9 texts available by women, and 27 by men.
  
• I know of a local private girls' school where, from Years 7-10, not one text is studied featuring a female protagonist. NOT. ONE.

What this is telling us, and the message we are sending to young people (both male and female) is this: despite the fact that the majority of people involved in the publishing industry are women, our society as a whole deems women's stories as unimportant (at least as far as capital-L-literature is concerned). Female authors only get recognised when they write about men. And I am not in ANY way blaming men for this. It's something we're all doing together. As a whole literary culture. Here's Lizzie Skurnick:

"I just want to say," I said as the meeting closed, "that we have sat here and consistently called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric, and we are giving awards to books I think are actually kind of amateur and sloppy compared to others, and I think it's disgusting."
Our default is that women are small, men are universal.

Here's a (relatively mild) comment from that article about the Orange Prize:

I am a life long reader and have read thousands of books, however I have read probably less than 20 books written by women. Women write differently from men and I feel their efforts appeal mostly to other women.

Which brings me to our friend Nicholas Sparks. Nicholas is the author of The Notebook, Nights in Rodanthe and Dear John, among others. First, I have to admit that I've never read any of his books, nor seen any of the film adaptations. But I've seen the previews, and that was enough to know that it isn't really my thing. On the whole, I prefer my rom to also include com.

So Nicholas recently gave an interview*.

If you look for me, I'm in the fiction section. Romance has its own section... I don't write romance novels. Love stories — it's a very different genre. I would be rejected if I submitted any of my novels as romance novels...
There's a difference between drama and melodrama; evoking genuine emotion, or manipulating emotion. It's a very fine eye-of-the-needle to thread. And it's very rare that it works. That's why I tend to dominate this particular genre. There is this fine line. And I do not verge into melodrama. It's all drama...
I write in a genre that was not defined by me. The examples were not set out by me. They were set out 2,000 years ago by Aeschylus, Sophoclies and Euripides.
A romance novel is supposed to make you escape into a fantasy of romance. What is the purpose of what I do? These are love stories. They went from (Greek tragedies), to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, then Jane Austen did it, put a new human twist on it. Hemingway did it with A Farewell to Arms.
There are no authors in my genre. No one is doing what I do.

Apart from, hmm, I don't know. A WHOLE BUNCH OF WOMEN.

Hmph.

Thanks to Karen Healey, Meanjin and Bookslut for bringing all these articles to my attention.
__________________________________
*Did I mention that the interview was a joint one? With Miley Cyrus?

Leaping from project to project

I have handed in the first draft of my mystery novel. *chews nails*

It turns out that writing a mystery novel is really hard. Especially as I've never been a big reader of detective or mystery fiction. I had this list of truly excellent clues that I planted at the beginning, and as I crawled to the finish line, I kept thinking I must figure out how those clues fit in. And then I got to the end and realised I hadn't, and had to go back and try and retrofit them. Or delete them.

Anyway, it is done now, and I have taken the weekend off before leaping back into the story I wrote for NaNoWriMo. I'm just reading it at the moment. I don't really remember much about it at all, because it was written so fast. There are some good bits, though. Sporadic, but present.

JaFeNoWriMo

I have a deadline. It involves finishing my work in progress by the end of February, which basically boils down to 35 000 words in 35 days. A challenge, but a not insurmountable one. January and February are not particularly busy times of the year for me, at work or socially. Basically, they're no November. So I apologise for the lack of bloggery. I beg forgiveness and offer the first snippet from the work in progress as a teaser. I think I've already put the first line up before, but here's the entire first BIT.

On entering the taxidermy laboratory in Melbourne Natural History Museum’s department of Preparation on the morning of January 18th, at approximately 9:25, Beatrice May Ross noticed six unusual things, all of which turned out to be of utmost significance. The things (in no particular order) were:

a. The clock on the wall was running three minutes fast, putting the time at 9:28.

b. On the third shelf from the right (four shelves down), a jar marked “Eyes, mammal, XL” was missing a lid.

c. Gus, the head taxidermist, was eating a wholemeal sandwich containing roast chicken, mayonnaise, alfalfa sprouts, plastic cheese, tomato and beetroot.

d. The beetroot was about to make a desperate bid for freedom and head for the relative safety of the front of Gus’s bottle green Natural History Museum hoodie.

e. Gus didn’t seem to be particularly concerned that Bee was running 25 minutes late (or 28 if you believed the clock on the wall).

and

f. Someone else was in the laboratory. A young man, probably a couple of years older than Bee. He had artfully messy dark brown hair, black plastic framed glasses and a glint in his eye that Bee found simultaneously alluring and deeply irritating.

Voiceworks, The Words We Found + a COMPETITION

A lot of people ask me how I first got published.

It happened when I was twelve. My mum bought me a copy of Voiceworks magazine. Voiceworks (in case you are unfortunate enough not to know) is Australia's literary journal for under 25s, published by Express Media. It's awesome.

Well, I wrote a poem and sent it off to Voiceworks, and to my utter joy it was accepted, and soon afterwards I received a cheque for $40 and a shining copy of the magazine. My first publication.

That was in 1994 (I think). I had an opportunity to revisit that poem recently, and let me tell you - it isn't very good. It's bloody awful, actually.

2009 is Voicework's 21st birthday, and I'm totally excited to still be involved (I'm on the management committee of Express Media). Voiceworks gave me my start, and 5 published books under my belt, I couldn't be more grateful or admiring of the work it does.

Happy Birthday, Voiceworks!

Now...

Do you want to read that terrible first poem I wrote? Here's your opportunity. To celebrate the 21st, Express Media has published The Words We Found, an anthology of Voiceworks' best writing by young people (edited by Lisa Dempster).
To WIN a copy of this anthology, leave a comment on this post. A winner will be picked at random on Monday 29/11/09.

And wondering what to get a budding young writer for Christmas?
Buy a copy of The Words We Found.
Subscribe to Voiceworks.

NaNoWriMo: Half way

So yesterday was the half-way mark for NaNoWriMo.

I'm on track, with 27 000 words under my belt. It's certainly the most I've ever written in such a short time. I'm not sure if any of it's any good, but I think some of it will be salvagable. I'll need to put it in a drawer for a month or so and then spend some serious time reworking it, but as I always say, it's much easier to turn a crappy story into a great story than it is to turn a blank page into a great story.

But I have to say I'm kind of enjoying the pressure. I like only having to write a small amount each day (1667 words). I like being able to compare my progress with other people (I am a competetive little monster). I like the idea of a REAL deadline, no extensions allowed.

And I really like updating my word count at Nanowrimo.org and seeing the blue line get a little longer each day.

NaNoWriMo

When I was in the UK I read an article in one of the Sunday magazines. And like the very best lazy-Sunday morning reads, I thought - that'd make a great book.

So I've put the murder-mystery-in-a-natural-history-museum on hold for a month, and am delving into NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50 000 word first draft in the month of November - 1667 words per day.

So Michael (who has also signed up) and I headed down to the Great Ocean Road for a few days to get some serious, internet-free, no-distractions writing done.

pretty place makes pretty writing?

I know there're some days this month where I won't be able to get any writing done at all, so I wanted to get a good head start. So this is the morning of Day 5 and I'm sitting on 10 715 words. Not very good words, I admit.

Back to it!

Angel Fish

Hate to sound like a broken record, but I have another book out. Angel Fish is out now with Black Dog Books. It's about the Children's Crusade and here's Chapter One:

A boy has come to Machery.
I think he might be an angel.
When he speaks, even the birds stop singing to listen. When he speaks, his eyes shine with a light that I know cannot come from dirt and skin. When he speaks, my head whirls round and round with strange thoughts, and my heart goes patter patter patter.
I first saw him two days ago. I was fetching water for Maman. The pails were heavy, but Maman tells me carrying them will help me to grow and be stronger. I am not strong, and not very tall. The other boys in Machery say I am a sparrow that will never grow to be a cock.
Maman says I must grow strong, because I will never be very smart, and a man needs to be one or the other. This is why she makes me eat so much cabbage. She says it will make me strong. I hate cabbage.
When I carry the water pails, I like to pretend I am in another place. It is very hot this summer, so I was pretending that I was lying by a cool stream on a soft bed of clover. Sometimes I pretend I am a silvery fish dancing in the stream. Or a white bird flying low over the water.
I was pretending all this very hard so I closed my eyes. Machery is all brown and dusty at the moment, and it is hard to imagine you are a dancing silvery fish when your eyes are full of brown and dust.
With my eyes closed, I didn’t see him at first. I only heard the shh, shh, shh of bare feet walking on the dusty road. With my eyes still closed, I pretended that it was the shh, shh, shh of branches bending over so leaves could kiss the water of the stream. I pretended that the leaves were tickling my silvery fishy skin as I danced below the surface.
As the shh, shh, shh came closer, I opened my eyes.
For a moment I was confused. I looked into eyes that were as blue as the stream in which I’d been swimming. I blinked, and then the eyes were attached to a person.
He was very tall and thin, with brown hair that was thick and bushy, like a sheep. He looked to be a few years older than me. Maybe fifteen?
His skin was dirty. It was hard to tell which brown bits were freckles and which bits were dirt. He had no shoes, and was dressed in rags.
And his eyes. Blue like the sky. Blue like an arrow. Blue like when someone hits you in the stomach and for a moment you can’t breathe.
He smiled at me, and the arrow-blue eyes crinkled at the edges.
‘Hello, friend,’ he said.
I wondered how he knew he was my friend. I didn’t think I’d ever had a friend before. But when he said it, I knew it was true. I knew it all the way deep down inside me, in my darkest and most secret places.
‘I am Stephan.’ He reached out a hand and I took it.
‘I’m Gabby,’ I told him. ‘Gabriel.’
The boy nodded approvingly. ‘Gabriel is one of the very greatest and most sacred Angels.’
I shrugged. I don’t really know Angels.
The boy’s lip curled in another smile. ‘Your pails look heavy, Gabriel,’ he said.
And they were, but I had forgotten.
‘I will let you get home,’ he said. ‘But we will see each other again. Very soon.’
I nodded. We would. I would see my friend again soon.

The next day was Sunday, so no work.
I went to mass in the morning with Maman and Papa. I have no brothers or sisters. Maman has tried to birth me a sister four times, but each time it has been no more than a wet and red thing. Papa thinks she is cursed. Maman says she cannot be cursed, because she birthed me. Papa replies that I am cursed too, because I don’t remember important things and am very small and find many things hard to understand.
One of the things I find difficult to understand is Father Sebastian. He reads to us every Sunday from the Holy Book in a tongue that Maman says is called Latin. Everyone else in the church nods and purses their lips when Father Sebastian speaks in the tongue that is called Latin, but I don’t understand any of it. And when I ask Maman or Papa, they get angry and tell me to hush. Once I thought that maybe they don’t understand it either and are just pretending, but when I told this to Maman she said that it was a wicked thought and I must never think it again.
When Father Sebastian speaks in a tongue I do understand, it doesn’t make much more sense. He uses lots of names of people that I don’t know. I think they must be Saints or Angels, but it is all very confusing because there are so many of them and it is hard to remember which ones are good and which ones are not.
Most of the time Father Sebastian reads to us or speaks in a voice that is all the same and very boring. But sometimes he gets excited and bangs his fist on the wooden stand and shakes his head so his cheeks wobble from side to side. Sometimes he gets so excited that I see sweat on his forehead. Or a tear slide from the corner of his eye and wriggle down his cheek.
After Father Sebastian talks, we all sing. This is my favourite part. I don’t know what any of the words mean, but I make up the meanings in my head. There is one that goes gloria gloria gloria and then some words I don’t know. It is the very best song. I think that Gloria is a land where nothing is brown and dusty, and the streams are clear and full of silvery dancing fish.
When I sang the gloria song on Sunday, I pretended that the streams were the colour of my new friend’s eyes. Blue as an arrow.
After the singing, we all line up and eat some bread and swallow some wine. Then we can go. Usually Maman and Papa want to talk to other people about boring things like rain and crops and bread, so I go and stand in the sun.
On Sunday though, Father Sebastian called me over to him.
‘There is a boy,’ he said. ‘A boy who has come to Machery.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, Father.’
‘You have seen him?’
I nodded again.
Father Sebastian shook his head so his cheeks wobbled. ‘You must not speak to him,’ he said. ‘He is from the Fiery Pit. His words are lies.’
I felt hot and angry inside. The boy was my friend. But I nodded again.
‘Do you understand? Do not listen to him. He is a child-stealer. He will take you and sell you to the Saracen.’
‘Yes, Father.’

Walking out of the church in summer is always lovely. The church is cold and dark, and stepping out is like being lifted up into the arms of the sun. It was so bright I had to close my eyes. I turned my face up to the light and let it soak in. In a few minutes I would be too hot again, but for now the hot was delicious.
I could hear him talking.
I opened my eyes.
He stood balanced on a watering-trough outside the church. A small crowd was listening —Maistre Eudes the smith and his wife, Maistre Mathieu and his three pretty daughters, Maistresse Claudette and Maistresse Abrial, their heads bent close together, and Monsieur Rotrou from the big farm on the hill.
Stephan spoke in a tongue I understood. He spoke of things I had never heard of before, but he spoke of them with such strength, such lightness, that I could see them before my eyes.
He spoke of the Holy Land. Father Sebastian had talked about the Holy Land. It sounded important, but so very very far away from Machery that I had never really listened.
But when Stephan spoke of it, I understood that it was the most important place in the world. A Paradise, he said. A real Paradise.
I wondered what a real Paradise would be like.
It would have streams with silvery fish, I decided. Like in the gloria song. But the streams would be apple-cider, bubbling and fizzing and fresh. And the trees would hang low with the sweetest fruits, all year round, so nobody had to pick and store them. Cows would milk themselves, and it would be the sweetest, creamiest milk you’ve ever tasted.
In the Holy Land, cabbages would have honey-cakes at their hearts, instead of more cabbage.
And then, best of all, Our Lord lives in the Holy Land.
Father Sebastian is always talking about Our Lord. Except the Our Lord that he talks about is mean. He’s always watching to see if we’re being wicked, and punishing us for things that we haven’t done, or things that we just think about. I don’t see how you can stop thinking about things, even if they are wicked. Things are just there to be thought. I can’t stop that, so I don’t know why I should be punished.
But Stephan’s Our Lord is different. He is wise and kind.
I imagined that he is fat and jolly, like a King. He has a big black beard and laughs all the time. The only work to be done in the Holy Land is to sit at the feet of Our Lord and sing the gloria song to him. He loves singing. And dancing. And honey-cakes and apple cider.
When Our Lord walks through the soft green grass of the Holy Land, sparkly jewels and sweet-smelling flowers spring from under his feet.
I wanted to go there. I wanted to go there so bad I thought I might break apart like a dandelion and go floating off into the sky.
But then Stephan’s face fell, and the world came to pieces and fell down as well with a horrible thundering crash!
‘But,’ he said. ‘But.’
No. No but. I didn’t want to hear the but. I just wanted to hear more about the Holy Land and Our Lord and the honey-cakes and silvery dancing fish.
‘The Saracen,’ said Stephan.
I shuddered. Father Sebastian has spoken of the Saracen. I thought of the stories of monsters that the boys in the village try to scare each other with. I thought of red, glowing eyes and horns and snake-pointed tongues and sharp hooves. I thought of them above me, with whips in their hands and steam blowing from their noses. I thought of the smell of burning meat.
‘The Saracen,’ said Stephan, and I wanted to cry. ‘The Saracen is in the Holy Land.’
I felt a hand around my heart, squeezing. I gasped.
‘The Saracen is in the Holy Land, and the Paradise has withered away.’
The trees. The streams. The silvery fish. All gone. All burned and choked and ruined. I wanted to throw myself into the dusty dirt and cry. Who could rescue the Holy Land?
Stephan looked at me and smiled. It was like he could hear what I was thinking inside my head.
‘Soldiers cannot save the Holy Land,’ he said. ‘Nor Knights. Nor Kings. Nor priests.’
Who, then? Who?
‘You,’ he said, still looking at me. ‘You.’
Me? I was small and not very good at thinking. I couldn’t fight even one Saracen.
‘The only thing that can save us is the purity and innocence of children,’ said Stephan. ‘There is no adult in the world who is untainted by wickedness. Only children are truly pure. And when the children of Our Lord step onto the soil of the Holy Land, the Saracen will crumble into dust, and once again it will be a Paradise.’
The crowd started to make soft, angry noises.
‘You can’t take our children,’ said Maistresse Claudette. ‘You’re crazy.’
Stephan looked at me. ‘Will you join with me?’ he asked.
Maistre Eudes’s wife yelled at Stephan, her cheeks red and shiny as apples and her eyes all closed-up. Someone threw a rock at him, but Stephen didn’t look away. His eyes arrowed into mine.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes. Yes.’

Pink!

I was overseas when my new book PINK came out! But it's out and some people have said some very nice things about it, but I'll let you make up your own mind.

Over at Allen & Unwin, you can see me talking about it in a video, read my answers to some questions from teachers, librarians and teenagers, and download your very own PINK wallpaper!

And here's Chapter One!

(for USian readers, it'll be out early next year)

‘You’re leaving?’

Chloe dropped my hand.

‘I know, it sucks,’ I lied. ‘My parents think I’ll get better marks at a new school.’ Another lie. ‘The fascists,’ said Chloe, which was kind of hilarious given that my parents met at the Feminist-Socialist- Anarchist Collective at university.

‘It’ll be okay,’ I said. ‘Billy Hughes is a really good school.’

‘What’s wrong with our school? They’re all the same, anyway. All institutionalised learning designed to turn you into a robot.’
I shook my head. ‘Billy Hughes is really progressive,’ I told her. ‘The school motto is Independence of Learning.’

Chloe narrowed her eyes. ‘You don’t want to go there, do you?’
Of course I did.

‘I don’t want to leave you.’

‘They’ll break you, Ava!’ said Chloe, her eyebrows drawing together in concern. ‘It’ll be all rules and homework and standardised testing. No creative freedom. There’ll probably be cadets.’

I shrugged. How could I explain to Chloe that I wanted rules and homework and standardised testing? I wanted to be challenged. I wanted to be around people who cared about maths and structure and results. Not so much the cadets, though. The truth was, I’d begged my parents to let me change to a private school. I wrote letters and sat a scholarship exam and when I got the acceptance form halfway through first term, I danced around my room like a lunatic.
‘It’s not like I’m going to another country,’ I said. ‘We can still hang out after school and on weekends.’
Chloe lit up a cigarette and took a long drag. ‘Whatever,’ she sighed, exhaling.

Chloe was the coolest person I’d ever met. She was tall and thin and had elegant long fingers and pointy elbows like those pictures on women’s dress patterns. Today she was wearing a black pencil skirt with fishnet stockings and hot-librarian shoes, which she’d kicked off beside my bed. She had a black shirt on under a dark tweedy fitted jacket. Her dyed black hair was short and spiky and elfin. Two silver studs glittered in her nose, and four in each ear. Her fingernails were painted a very dark plum.
The only lightness about her was her porcelain skin, and her white cigarette.
Chloe read battered Penguin Classics she found in op shops and at garage sales. They were all by people like Anaïs Nin and Simone de Beauvoir and made her look totally intellectual, particularly when she was wearing her elegant horn-rimmed glasses. Chloe didn’t really care about school. She said most of the teachers were fascists, and sometimes even cryptofascists, whatever that meant. She said that our education system made us docile and stupid, and that true educa- tion could only come from art, philosophy, and life itself. Chloe would rather sit on the low stone wall just outside our school and smoke cigarettes and talk about Existentialism and Life and make out with me.
She was wonderful, and I was pretty sure I was in love with her.
So how come I wanted to leave so badly?

When I first told my parents I was a lesbian, they threw me a coming-out party. Seriously. We had champagne and everything. It was the most embarrassing thing that’d ever happened to me.
They loved Chloe – possibly even more than I did. When Chloe came over, she usually ended up poring over some Ann Sexton book with Pat, or listening to Bob Dylan on vinyl with David. Ostensibly, I was there too. But I didn’t really care for washed-out poetry about wombs, and I thought Bob Dylan was kind of overrated. So I just sat there politely like I was at someone else’s house, until the phone rang or something, and I could finally drag Chloe away to my room. Then there would be less talk about feminism, and Chloe would read to me from my favourite book of Jorge Luis Borges short stories, and I would make her laugh by doing impressions of Mrs Moss, our septuagenarian English teacher. Making Chloe’s lips curve upwards in a smile, or her eyes crinkle with laugh- ter, made me happier than just about anything else in the world.
When it was finally time for Chloe to go home, she’d smooth her hair and rearrange her clothes, and we’d troop back out to the kitchen. Pat and David would always look so crestfallen that she was leaving.

‘So soon?’ Pat would say. ‘But we’ve hardly had a chance to chat!’
Sometimes I thought my parents wished Chloe was their daughter.

I got home and said hi to Pat and David and then went into my room and shut the door. I wished I had a lock, but there was no way my parents would approve of that. It would imply that I had something to hide, and they’re the most liberal and accepting parents in the world – so what would I possibly want to hide from them?
If only they knew.
I went to my wardrobe and dug through my old jelly-sandals and mouldy runners until I was practically in Narnia. And I pulled out a bag. It was one of those pale- blue shiny shopping bags with a ribbon handle. It was the kind of bag that people on TV have fifty of when they’re on a shopping spree that could fund a starving African nation.
In the bag there was a bundle wrapped in thin lemon-yellow tissue paper, sealed with a pale-blue oval sticker with gold lettering on it. Holding my breath, I gently prised the sticker away from the tissue paper, and unwrapped the bundle, listening carefully for the sound of Pat or David busting in to offer me an espresso or a lecture on post-structuralism.
At the centre of the bundle there was a jumper. A pink argyle cashmere jumper, to be exact. It was pretty much the softest thing ever, the pink and cream diamonds snuggling up against each other like soul mates.
I rubbed the soft wool against my cheek, and then stood in front of the mirror, holding the jumper against my body. I didn’t need to put it on – I knew it fit perfectly. I knew because I’d tried it on at the shop. And it was so beautiful, so soft, so ... pink. I just had to buy it. Even though I knew I couldn’t wear it, because Chloe would laugh herself silly.
I never wore pink. Pink wasn’t cool. Pink wasn’t existential. Pink was for princesses and ballet shoes and glittery fairies.
When I was five, I only wore pink. Pink everything, from my undies to my socks to my little frilly dresses to my Flik Flak watch. I refused to wear any other colour – much to the dismay of my parents, who were itching to dress me in miniature Che Guevara T-shirts and black
berets. All my toys were pink. I only used pink pencils. I insisted on having my bedroom painted pink. Not now. Now my bedroom was painted a sombre pale grey, with charcoal skirting boards and architraves. Now, there was no trace of pink in my room. No more unicorn posters on the walls – instead there were black-and-white art prints. My parents must have been so proud. There wasn’t even so much as a rainbow flag; as Chloe said, we weren’t that sort of lesbian.
As I’d grown older, Pat and David had worn me down. They explained to me that pink was an empty signifier of femininity, and pointed out that none of the other little girls at my Steiner school wore pink dresses under their art smocks. They showed me magazine articles about Britney Spears before she went off the rails, and shook their heads sadly.
By the end of primary school, they were victorious. The pendulum had swung all the way over to black. Now, you’d be lucky to find me in a skirt, and at the end of Year Ten I’d thrown out my last pair of non-black undies. My hair was dyed black, and usually caught up in a messy bun. I wore a reasonably unchanging wardrobe of black jeans and black tops – black singlets in summer, and a grandpa cardigan in winter. Sometimes I wished I could dress crazy and eclectic and feminine like Chloe, but I knew she would always outshine me, so I stuck to what I knew.
So now the pink jumper was practically glowing in my grey bedroom. It was like a tiny bit of Dorothy’s Oz in boring old black-and-white Kansas.
I carefully folded it up, and rewrapped it in the yellow tissue paper.
Pink was for girls.
Girly girls who wore flavoured lip gloss and read maga- zines and talked on the phone lying on their perfect, lacy bedspreads with their feet in the air. Girls who spent six months looking for the perfect dress to wear to the school formal.
Girls who liked boys.

First Lines

This is a meme that's been doing the rounds. First lines from published works and WIPs.

Published books

Scatterheart

The turnkey pushed Hannah into the cell, and clanged the door shut behind her.

Joan of Arc

Today they burn the witch.

The (Not Quite) Perfect Boyfriend

Sometimes I wish I could just grow down and go back to primary school.

Forthcoming books

Pink

'You're leaving?' Chloe dropped my hand.

Angel Fish

A boy has come to Machery. I think he might be an angel.

Work in progress

(as yet untitled)

On entering the Melbourne Natural History Museum's department of Preparation on the morning of January 18, at approximately 9:25, Beatrice May Ross noticed six unusual things, all of which turned out to be of utmost significance.

Angel Fish

I have two books coming out this year - Pink in August, and Angel Fish in September.

I've been working on Angel Fish for a couple of years now. It's about the Children's Crusade, which happened (maybe) in 1212, where a shepherd boy called Stephen decided that the only thing that would liberate Jerusalem from the Infidel was the purity and innocence of Children. He raised an army of 10 000 children, marched over the Swiss Alps (where a bunch of them died, due to a lack of important cold-weather gear like, um, shoes), and got to Genoa, where he said the ocean would part before him and they would walk across the ocean floor to the Holy Land.

This was problematic for two reasons: a) Greece was in the way; and b) it didn't work.

But two nice men called William the Iron and Hugh the Pig turned up and said that they were rich merchants who TOTALLY believed in the children's cause, and that would charter a bunch of ships to take the kids to the Holy Land. And Stephen said "well, of course that's exactly what I meant when I said the ocean would part." And off they went.

Except William and Hugh weren't merchants at all. They were PIRATES, and sold all the kids into slavery.

It's a feel-good kind of novel. I'll be posting the cover and an excerpt in weeks to come.

Mind Rain

Fans of Scott Westerfeld rejoice! For there is a book of essays about the Uglies series, and the first one is by me!

The book is called Mind Rain.

In Extras, the last book in Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series, Aya tells us that when Tally Youngblood made the mind-rain fall, it cured all the pretties and changed the world forever. But Tally and her friends did more than change their world; they changed ours too.

Mind-Rain continues what Tally started, with startling, funny and insightful essays on the world, characters and ideas of the Uglies series, plus the short story that inspired Westerfeld to write the books in the first place.

Think you know everything about Tally’s world? After Mind-Rain, you'll never look at the Uglies series the same way again.

With Pieces From …

• Lili Wilkinson
• Robin Wasserman
• Diana Peterfreund
• Sarah Beth Durst
• Gail Sidonie Sobat
• Rosemary Clement-Moore
• J. Fitzgerald McCurdy
• Janette Rallison
• Linda Gerber
• Charles Beaumont
• Ted Chiang
• Will Shetterly
• Jennifer Lynn Barnes
• Delia Sherman

You can read an excerpt here.

The Great Name Change

I realised the other day that, with three of the four novels I've written, a character's name gets changed during the editing stage. In fact, it's the same character, in every book. It's the "appropriate mate" character, or the character that the protagonist thinks she wants (whether or not she ends up getting him differs from story to story). And each change has been for a different reason.

In Scatterheart, the character of James was originally Jack, and he was the ship's carpenter. But it turned out it's really hard to make a humble tradesperson unlikeable, so he became new-money-aristocracy instead (much easier to dislike). Jack felt like too honest a name, and James was the logical alternative.

In The Not Quite Perfect Boyfriend, Ben was originally Steven. He was Steven because when I was thirteen and made up an imaginary British boyfriend, that's what his name was. But then I started writing Angel Fish, my book about the Children's Crusade, and one of the main characters in that is Stephan. And he really existed (well, maybe), so I couldn't change his name. Except a name-change for Steven was very complicated, because I had this whole word-play thing going on with his initials spelling out SOW and SLOW. And at first I thought I'd just replace Steven with another S name. But there was already a Sam and a Spence in PINK, and what with Stephan in Angel Fish as well it all seemed a bit much. So Steven became Ben, after the first boy I ever had a proper crush on, and I changed the initials thing to BOW and BLOW.

The name-change in PINK was much more straightforward. It turns out there is already a Spence in Penni Russon's next book, which comes out before mine. So I tried to think of another preppy-jock-name, and came up with Nathan, Ryan, Dylan, Logan, and finally Ethan. I don't know why I find -an names preppy/jocky. I just do. But Ethan he is.

PS. You want some wacky name fun? Let me introduce you to Barkevious Mingo, Calamity McEntire and Taco Vandervelde, over at Name of the Year.

Ada Lovelace Day

Let me tell you a story.

It starts with philosophy, and then moves through feminism, politics, graveyards, literature, monsters real and imagined, syphilis and ends up with, of all things, the humble computer. And it’s ALL TRUE.

So there was this guy, right? William Godwin. He was a political philosopher and novelist in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. He wrote a book called Things as They Are or The Adventures of Caleb Williams, which is said to be the first mystery novel.

William married a lady called Mary. Mary Wollstonecraft, to be precise. You may have heard of her. She is one of the pioneers of modern feminism, and wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, where she argues that women aren’t inferior to men at all, they are just not as well educated. And wouldn’t it be nice, if everyone were treated as rational people and our social order was founded on reason.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary had a few children (some illegitimately), but we’re going to focus on her namesake, Mary Godwin. Mary Wollstonecraft died when baby Mary was only ten days old, so little Mary was brought up by her father and given a somewhat eccentric education. The story goes that William Godwin taught her to read by tracing her little pudgy fingers over the letters on her mother’s tombstone. He said, of Mary:

“She is singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible.”

Mary Shelley

Mary, it seemed, was destined for great things. And here’s where it gets interesting.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was estranged from his aristocratic family and his pregnant wife, because of his interest in radicalism. He was drawn to William Godwin’s political theory, and offered to pay off Godwin’s debts. Then he met Mary, who was seventeen at the time (Shelley was 22). They began secretly seeing each other. When William Godwin found out, he was mightily annoyed (especially since the debt-paying-off never eventuated), and Mary and Percy ran away together to live in sin.

A few years and a miscarriage later, Mary and Percy found themselves in Geneva with their friend Lord Byron, who was having an affair with Mary’s stepsister, Claire.

They rented the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, and basically just hung out writing, boating and talking late into the night. Also there was John William Polidori, a romantic novelist.

One particularly wet and rainy afternoon, Byron suggested they all write a supernatural story to entertain each other. Polidori wrote a short story that is basically the reason why teenage girls go weak at the knees at the mention of Edward Cullen – the story, Vampyre, is acknowledged to be the beginning of the vampire genre.

Mary also started what she thought would be a short story, but ended up being Frankenstein.

We’re going to follow this story on a slightly different path now, for the final chapter. Lord Byron had two daughters. The second was with Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s stepsister. This illegitimate daughter, Allegra, died aged 5.

The other daughter was Ada, also known as The Hon. Augusta Ada Byron, or, later, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, or, now, Ada Lovelace.

Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace is perhaps best known as being the first computer programmer. Well, sort of. She worked with Charles Babbage on a sort of theoretical predecessor to the modern computer. She also recongised that computers were capable of much more than just calculating numbers, which was something that no one (including Babbage) had ever considered.

Ada’s mother was very worried that her daughter might succumb to the madness of her father (you know, the syphilis, incest, sexual promiscuity that Byron is famed for), so she had Ada privately tutored in science and mathematics for a young age (the best way to stave off madness, as I’m sure you all know, is quadratic equations).

She was good mates with Charles Dickens, and also with Babbage, who said this about her:

Forget this world and all its troubles and if
possible its multitudinous Charlatans — every thing
in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.

So here we are, at the end of our story. Or the beginning. Today is Ada Lovelace Day, and I have pledged to blog about women in science. Although I ended up blogging about women in political science and science fiction, as well as the ordinary kind of science.

I think perhaps one day I will write a novel about this strange dynasty of women. But in the meantime, if you want to hang out in Ada's world a little more, I can recommend Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine.

The Story Machine

So I just had this really interesting meeting at the Australian Children's Television Foundation. And it got me thinking about stories, and narrative. And the way we consume those things.

There was an article in the New York Times that I meant to blog about a couple of months ago. It was one of those OH NOES kids don’t read anymore articles. The kind that seem to be written entirely with the purpose of pissing people like me off.

One of my favourite bits was this:

“Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media,” Dana Gioia, the chairman of the N.E.A., wrote in the report’s introduction, “they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.”

This is the kind of ridiculous truism that really gets my hackles up. No, electronic media doesn’t provide the same kind of intellectual and personal development as reading does. But neither does watching TV/ getting plenty of fresh air and exercise/ eating leafy vegetables/ being good to your mother. BECAUSE THEY ARE DIFFERENT THINGS.

Nobody (outside the sensationalising of journalists) is saying that one should replace the other. And there are plenty of benefits sustained from engaging in electronic media that are not sustained from frequent reading.  

I spend a lot of time talking to teachers and librarians about technology, and why it’s important to use it in their classrooms (and why writing up an essay using Microsoft Word isn’t using technology any more than using a pencil is). I also spend a lot of time talking to teachers about how to foster a love of reading and books in the classroom.

The other day someone asked me if I thought there was an inherent contradiction there.

And I laughed.

Back to this New York Times article. It mentions a teenager called Nadia, who got really attached to a Holocaust memoir, and her enthusiastic parent tried giving her a fantasy novel (because that’s OBVIOUSLY the next step), and she didn’t like it.

Despite these efforts, Nadia never became a big reader. Instead, she became obsessed with Japanese anime cartoons on television and comics like “Sailor Moon.” Then, when she was in the sixth grade, the family bought its first computer. When a friend introduced Nadia to fanfiction.net, she turned off the television and started reading online. Now she regularly reads stories that run as long as 45 Web pages. 

Okay. So she didn’t like the fantasy novel, and that experience turned her off reading novels. That’s sad. But she reads manga, and online fanfic, often. Voraciously, even. So exactly what part of this demonstrates that she is not a big reader? None of it. Nadia is a big reader. She spends a significant amount of her leisure time reading comic books, and reading online.

As do I.

The article goes on to say that Nadia writes her own fanfic as well, but then spends several paragraphs pointing out that some fanfic has lots of spelling mistakes.

Way to bury the lede, New York Times.

Can we go back for a minute? Past all the doom-and-gloom-kids-today bullshit and just rethink this?

This girl, Nadia, loves story.

She loves it so much that consuming it isn’t enough. She wants to spend more time with her favourite characters. She wants to push them into situations beyond the ones they experience in canon.

And every time Nadia reads or writes or watches or hears a story, it feeds her own story machine. It deepens her understanding of the way narrative works. And this understanding of story, of the mechanics of story, makes her love story even more.

Every time you read a book, an article, a piece of fanfic, watch TV, go to the cinema, you are feeding your story machine. It’s like breathing in.

And when you write a story, or blog, or draw a picture, or tell someone a lurid anecdote about what your crazy aunt got you for your birthday, or make a video, or write a song… you are also feeding your story machine. You breathe out.

And everyone who loves stories does this. Even if it’s just telling someone about a great book you read. 

It’s all breathing in, breathing out. 

Feeding the story machine.

(for a good way to feed your own story machine, check out the Inkys Creative Reading Prize)

Also, I write books

It has been brought to my attention that I haven't been posting much about my actual writing of books. So I present an interview with Lili Wilkinson, Author. By me. About what I'm writing.

Self: So. Lili. How's the writing going?

Lili: Very well, thank you.

Self: Are you working on a book at the moment?

Lili: Actually, I'm working on two books at the moment.

Self: (mutters) Overachiever.

Lili: (modest cough)

Self: So what are these books about?

Lili: Hmm. They are about (in no particular order): love, high school, bisexuality, belief, obsession, silvery fish, musical theatre, the Holy Land, stage crew, Isaac Newton, pirates and pink cashmere jumpers.

Self: I'm not sure that was a very helpful answer.

Lili: Fine. One of the books is about bisexuality, stage crew and high school musicals. The other is about the Children's Crusade.

Self: The what?

Lili: In 1212, an army of 10 000 kids marched through France and Italy to save Jerusalem from the Infidel.

Self: Wow! Really?

Lili: Probably not, actually, given that there are no contemporary records of it. But it's a great story nonetheless.

Self: Did they get there? To Jerusalem?

Lili: No. They were kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery.

Self: A feel-good kind of story, then.

Lili: It's your average boy-meets-spiritual-guru-and-follows-blindly-into- mortal-peril romcom. Think Stand By Me meets Ten Things I Hate About You meets John 6:5-15, with just a whiff of The God Delusion for good measure.

Self: Right. And the other one? The musical theatre one?

Lili: It's about a lesbian who secretly thinks she might like boys.

Self: A going-back-into-the-closet story?

Lili: Sort of. It's supposed to be my response to this.

Self: Is it just me, or are both these books a little... controversial?

Lili: Pfft. I'm just getting started.

Self: Do either of these books have a title?

Lili: The stage crew one is currently called Pink is for Girls, although that may well change. The Children's Crusade one has no title, and I shall pay cold hard cash for a good one. Anybody? Anybody?

Self: Well, it's good to see you've been keeping busy.

Lili: Thank you. Can I get back to it now? I haven't met today's deadline yet.

Self: Right, of course. Carry on.

Juicy Writing

We ran a writing workshop today at the Library with Brigid Lowry (most marvellous author of Juicy Writing and the PLA shortlisted Tomorrow Everything Will Be Beautiful), and It Was Good.

I joined in, and here is one of the pieces I scribbled out:

My shoe is made of leather and iron and eyelashes.
My shoe leaps skyscrapers in a single bound, and travels seven leagues in one step.
Every night, I wear my shoe out from dancing, and every morning it is born fresh and smelling of shoe polish.
My shoe taps against the ground, impatient.
It is red, silver, glass, frustration.
My shoe is as heavy as a breath, as light as an eyebrow raise.
It traps me under cold gemstones and lifts me up to dance on stars.
Is my shoe enjoying its freedom?
Or does it miss being one of a pair?

Melbourne Writers Festival

I'm kind of in the process of writing something longer and more profound about this whole City of Literature thing, but suffice to say - ftw!

Anyway. Participate in the City of Literature by coming to see me at the Melbourne Writers Festival!

Featuring me:

DIY Culture: blogging isn't writing is it? 26 August 2008

Learn from Lili Wilkinson and Margo Lanagan, two experts from the blogosphere!

Writers who read, readers who write 27 August 2008

Join John Marsden, Margo Lanagan and Lili Wilkinson as they speak about the books they’ve loved over the years. 

Chaired by me:

Invisible Cities: writing about home 25 August 2008

Rachel Cohn and Simmone Howell discuss how they made their cities and suburbs come alive in their writing.

Bringing the past to life 26 August 2008

The books of both David Metzenthen and Elizabeth Fensham have mixed the past with the present to best tell their story. Find out how they do this and why in this engaging session.

Back to Anthony McGowan

Remember this post about Anthony McGowan's opinions on Pink Books?

Well the post received an anonymous comment that implies it's from McGowan. If it isn't, I sincerely apologise to Mr McGowan. If it is, he should maybe think about being a little less anonymous.

Anyway. I thought I'd just copy the anonymous comment, and my response. FYI*.

Here's what he originally said:

The leathery-skinned hacks who churn out the Pink books present a vision of young people as self-obsessed, shallow, blind automata, swilling about in a moronic inferno. Reading these books will leave your soul as shrivelled as one of those pistachios you sometimes find, blackened, in the bottom of the bag. Teenage girls, read the Brontës, read Elizabeth Gaskell, read George Eliot, read anything else - even Jane Austen - but keep the pink off your shelves.

And here are his response, and my response:

Anonymous said...

In case you didn't notice, all the authors i recommended were women, so cut the white man bullshit. And the author i had in mind was Louise Rennison - read three of her books, as a judge in various competitions. I can't deny there was little of the wind up about the blog, but I'd still stand by every word.

lili said...

Hi "Anonymous",

I would much rather the youth of today read Louise Rennison than anything by the Brontës (the very definition of "self-obsessed, shallow, blind automata, swilling about in a moronic inferno", in my opinion).

And it's a bit rich to dismiss a whole genre based on one author's work. There are some amazing Pink books out there that are challenging, thought-provoking and empowering - Meg Cabot's Ready or Not is an example that springs to mind.

Can you say the same things about your books? Are The Bare Bum Gang books challenging, thought-provoking and empowering for their young readers?

I haven't read them, so I can't say.

Best,

Lili Wilkinson.

_________________________________
*Why does this always happen to me? First Frank Cottrell Boyce, now Anthony McGowan.