Posts made in July, 2009

Parallel Export

Posted by The Author on 30 Jul, 2009 in Stuff That Happens | 8 comments

I’ve been sitting on this post for some time, unsure whether I should hit that publish button or not. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing, it’s that one should not put words together in anger.

I don’t have much of a temper, but I’m a natural born shit stirrer. When I realised our own government was prepared to sell its own writers out to keep the great and mighty supermarket duopoly happy (Sorry, Dymocks, despite all your huffing and puffing no one gives a shit about you), instead of burning effigies, I wondered what writers could do to push this as far as it can go. If the lift on the parallel import restrictions goes ahead (I don’t really believe anyone will stop the cash-swallowing behemoth now, if we ever could), I’d love to see this plan actually begin to happen and watch the clowns who started it fall all over each other stop the loss of Australia’s authors and its identity.

I can dream, can’t I?

Let’s see where we’re at with this.

Coles and Woolies (and Dymocks) want more money than they already have. They’ve hatched a plan to import remaindered books from overseas for a pittance so they can undercut everyone else locally by a few cents. The consumer is able to consume their book for fifty cents cheaper and the retailers make 90% of the shelf price. Everybody wins, right?

Everyone except the Australian publisher who is at the moment making a higher quality edition, one re-edited into Australian English. They can’t compete with the crappy import because Coles and Woolies (and Dymocks) can keep undercutting. They’ll have the fat to do it.

Until now, that Australian publisher made money from those local editions of overseas books. They used that money to publish new Australian authors. People like me.

Coles and Woolies (and Dymocks) do a pretty good job of bamboozling the public. They pay money to opinion whores to peddle a pre-written script: a promise of golden fields of cheap books and an Australian wonderland where everyone is in a book club discussing the latest titles.

What they don’t mention is that those titles won’t be Australian anymore.

Seriously, when was the last time a politician, even a former one, told anything vaguely resembling truth? The argument emerging from the duopoly (and their agreeable appendage) lobby is nothing but smoke and mirrors designed to further line the pockets of already wealthy corporate executives, lobbyists, and of course said opinion whores themselves. Their game never changes: tell everyone what you think they want to hear.

But it strikes me that they haven’t thought this through, if they are capable of doing so. If there’s one thing I’ve learned through various publishing industry panics over the years, it’s that there is one constant in publishing that no panic can ever kill off: readers need writers.

That got me thinking. How do we, as writers, take control back? After all, we’re the engine of this industry. What can we do to direct the conversation where it needs to go?

If Australian publishers can’t afford new Australian writers anymore, we as writers have a simple solution at our disposal, one I never considered before, but which now looks increasingly viable.

If the Australian government doesn’t value Australian stories, then let’s stop telling them. Let’s write American ones instead.

Think about it, if your favorite waterhole dries up, what do you do? You move on. Time to start putting those zees in words like ‘commercialize‘, time to ‘write US agents and publishers’, time to get ourselves a US postal address, time finally to drop that ‘u’ in color.

But don’t get caught up thinking this is about spelling, as important as that is. Writing American means thinking American and encouraging others to do the same. It means chasing the American dream and glorifying its nuances and contradictions.

Sydney can become an exotic international locale, perhaps with an obligatory side trip to Uluru, giving the impression the rock is only an hour’s drive from the Harbor Bridge. Actually, better not. Leave Australia to the people who don’t live here. They’ll make it sound better. Everywhere else in Australia should disappear anyway. That novel you’re working on that’s set in Brisbane? Time to learn some street names in San Diego. It’s easy now. You can use Google Maps and Street View.

Best of all, we can finally stop arguing with our computer spellcheckers.

It won’t be easy to ignore our own back yard, but it’s something we need to start considering. It’s time Australian writers claimed their place as bona fide citizens of the fifty-first state. Let’s take control back of our own work and parallel export it out of Australia altogether.

There won’t be any more Australian stories told, but so what? Remember, Australia will turn into a wondrous book reading wonderland where everyone reads loads and loads of cheap books and we’ll all be able to recite the pledge of allegiance. Some of us might even hold a hand over our heart when we do.

Do you like the sound of that future? Yes? Good for you! No? Then maybe you should tell someone. Start with the Prime Minister. He’s not listening to writers. Maybe readers should have a crack. In the meantime, I’ll keep looking up some San Diego landmarks.

Twelves Part Three – The Beatles

Posted by The Author on 27 Jul, 2009 in Stuff That Happens | 2 comments

Anyone who knows me will have seen this post coming, possibly for years. I would say that what I don’t know about the Beatles isn’t worth knowing, but in fact I already know quite a few things that aren’t worth knowing.

I spent a lot of time as a teenager listening to records. I spent a lot of time in second hand record shops in the hope that some idiot would have placed a Butcher Cover on sale for under ten dollars.

So it should come as no surprise that this is the list of twelve that has been given the most careful consideration and thought. I’ve been through a lot of drafts and worried about things I have no business worrying about: should I include more early Fabs?, is there too much Lennon?, too much White Album?, have I got enough light and shade?, is it too obscure at the expense of deserved classics? should I include covers?

The last question was a curly one and much of the reason this list starts at 1965, but I really couldn’t justify Kansas City or even Twist and Shout, not at the expense of Blackbird or Helter Skelter.

It’s my problem. I’ll deal with it.

Anyway, here’s the list.

• I’m Down
• Taxman
• A Day In The Life
• I Am The Walrus
• Strawberry Fields Forever
• Happiness Is A Warm Gun
• Blackbird
• Helter Skelter
• Hey Bulldog
• Don’t Let Me Down
• Come Together
• You Never Give Me Your Money

Anything unexpected in there? Too many B-sides? Anything I must be a monster for having left out? Where’s Hey Jude? Who the hell includes You Never Give Me Your Money anyway? It didn’t even turn up on the 1967 – 1970, right? Well sod you. This was as good as I could get it. And number thirteen was probably Why Don’t We Do It In The Road.

Twelves Part Two – Songs (Not Beatles)

Posted by The Author on 26 Jul, 2009 in Stuff That Happens | Comments Off

Okay, so this is where you live and die by your twelves. I was a music tragic long before being a literature tragic, so this was a hard list to compile, especially when iTunes can now summarily describe your music collection as 16 days and 14 hours in total running time. And that discounts some of my more unfortunate CDs buried deep in old nappy boxes (I’m sure the single of that Chumbawumba song is still there somewhere, hey I bought it for my wife!).

Anyway, here’s the list, ordered chronologically apparently. So my musical taste begins in 1970. That of course leaves out the Beatles. My first entry in this list was a Beatles song, then they claimed second spot. By the time I got to five, all of them Fabs, I hived that list off onto its own twelve and concentrated on everyone else. Even then, I had to limit each artist to one song, so Mercy Street pipped Family Snapshot (and about half a dozen others), Train In Vain only just edged out English Civil War, and so on.

Before you hang shit on me for including Jethro Tull, any song that skewers school and religion has already started ahead: ‘I don’t believe you, you had the whole damn thing all wrong, He’s not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays.’ Brilliant!

Oh and Bedford might seem an odd choice, but that song gets the added bonus of having been seen live at the RNA showgrounds on New Year’s Eve 1991 on a bill that included the Sharp. Sigh.

Another strange thing is that the list ends in 2000. Why? I guess songs have to go through a longevity test before they make the twelve. It means I’ve had to cut out some more recent efforts from Radiohead or the Eels. It also means the Flaming Lips miss out altogether since their best stuff is only three years old.

I was also pleased that there’s only one premature death by suicide in there. The Hottest 100 had two suicides and one premature death by accident just in the top five. I’m pretty partial to Nirvana, but seriously, people, get over it. Elliott Smith would have still made the list, even without his horrific end and why he didn’t make the said Hottest 100 I’ll never know. How quickly we forget.

The only other thing worth saying about this list is how pleased I am that the word ‘motherfucker’ is in it, and I didn’t have to resort to ‘Dance Motherfucker Dance’ by the Violent Femmes (as good as that song is).

• Trouble – Cat Stevens
• Wind Up – Jethro Tull
• Misty Mountain Hop – Led Zeppelin
• Train In Vain – The Clash
• Mercy Street – Peter Gabriel
• Bedford – Custard
• Birdhouse In Your Soul – They Might Be Giants
• Paranoid Android – Radiohead
• Black Bugs – Regurgitator
• Waltz #2 (XO) – Elliott Smith
• Owen’s Lament – Augie March
• It’s a Motherfucker – The Eels

So there it is sans Beatles. Can you guess what’s coming?

Twelves Part One – Books

Posted by The Author on 24 Jul, 2009 in He Writes | 3 comments

Oh man, have I been procrastinating today or what? I’ve not long finished reading High Fidelity and it led me to start compiling an all time top ten.

I couldn’t do it, so it turned into twelves.

The first list was Books. Easy? Sort of. What criteria do you use? The books that are important or the ones that mean something to you, even if everyone else thinks they’re not the finest examples of English literature?

I plumbed for something down the middle. So this is my list of books that all mean something pretty significant to me, some of which are generally considered great.

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams
• Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
• The Tax Inspector – Peter Carey
• Slapstick or Lonesome No More – Kurt Vonnegut
• Romeo of the Underworld – Venero Armanno
• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – Italo Calvino
• To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest  – Ken Kesey
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – Jean-Dominique Bauby
• Disgrace – JM Coetzee

I can safely say that, without Hitchhiker’s and Slapstick, I wouldn’t be a writer at all. Those books hit me at just the right age and at my most susceptible to the idea that I could imitate these guys.

Ditto The Tax Inspector, which is why it only just slightly knocked The Fat Man In History out.

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of those books I can pick up from any page and orient myself within a sentence or two. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve read it now.

Some of the classics in the list are pretty self-explanatory. The Diving Bell is one I didn’t discover until I was half way through my first novel, which explores some of the same territory. I was bummed until I read it. I’m surprised I was able to keep going with mine.

Disgrace made it to the list, despite the fact I only finished first reading it six weeks ago. It’s that good. I have no idea how he did that. I’ll rot in hell before I see the movie, same goes for the Diving Bell.

Collaborate

Posted by The Author on 21 Jul, 2009 in He Writes | 2 comments

Among the ridiculous number of simultaneous projects I currently have on the go, a quick thought on collaborations.

I used to play in a band. A duo really, but we wrote a lot of music together, always collaboratively. Sometimes we split the music and lyrics (I rarely wrote lyrics by the way, I’m very much a prose writer), but usually we collaborated on everything. One of us would come to a rehearsal with an idea and we’d piece the song together bit by bit. Usually we came up with something that sounded better than if we had worked alone. I depend on that sounding board to write music and one of the reasons I don’t any more is because I don’t have a collaborator.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot of late because I’ve just completed work on my first collaborative piece of fiction with my brother Darren.

We have tried collaboration before a few times. We tried taking alternate chapters. We tried taking on different characters. Nothing really worked and I consigned the whole endeavour to the ‘revisit one of these days’ file. Little did I know Darren was hatching his own variation on the concept.

Despite its prevalence in other arts, collaboration is an unusual idea in fiction. I can’t think of more than a handful of collaborative novels. And yet all writing is a collaboration to some extent, even if it’s just a writer-editor effort.

What we eventually hit on was taking alternate drafts. The result was similar to writer-editor only with the editor taking a far more active role adding character layers and additional narrative. Our model was less ’50 per cent text each’ and something more like what Joel and Ethan Cohen do: share the writing credits where one or the other might take the lead on any individual project. Seems to work well for them. Why not us? We are already brothers after all.

Darren is spruiking ‘Concentrate’: the debut novel for young readers by the Brothers Groth over on his site so check it out.