I See A Pattern Forming
I’ve been working on and off on a collaboration with fine art photographer Bronwen Hyde that we have called I See A Pattern Forming.
The premise of the project is simple. Bronwen and I find individual works—visual and text—that work together. Sometimes we will use previously created pieces; sometimes they will be newly minted. Sometimes the link between the two will be obvious; sometimes it won’t. It’s going to be a lot of fun seeing how things progress.
Though it begins life as a blog, we have an eye on a options to take it into the real world later on.
Bronwen created the cover image for the first series of ‘mini-shots’, a single-short-story magazine from Vignette Press, which included the gorgeous shot for Coda you can see here.
Click through to I See A Pattern Forming.
Keep checking back with the site regularly for updates. We hope you like it.
Read MorePatience and Here Today
My first novel took a long time to write. The original idea occurred to me way back in the last century, but I took a long time to gear myself up for the task. Various needlessly elaborate plans were made, I’m sure, in that time. I began writing in earnest somewhere around 2002. I estimate the time from idea to first words was about five years. I finished (at least I thought I had) in 2006 when the complete novel was shortlisted in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards for an Emerging Queensland Author.
It wasn’t finished. Not by a long shot.
Everyone from editors, agents, readers, and anyone else with a passing interest in it offered advice on how to improve it. Predictably, some of the advice was contradictory, but much of it was beneficial. With the benefit of advancing years I’ve figured out how to listen to such advice. Usually the best advice is the kind you deep down already knew.
Another two years of tinkering took place with the novel finally completed in 2008. By my calculation that’s around eleven years from idea to text.
Here Today began as a series of discrete stories centred around disability and set in Brisbane. Literary types would call the form a ‘discontinuous narrative’; to me it was an easy way to break a daunting task like a novel down into manageable size chunks. It also meant that, while I took ages to write the manuscript as a whole, I could polish individual stories and offer them up for publication. With a few, I succeeded, which was encouraging. In 2004, the first story from Here Today, ‘Heavens’ made it into print in the Australian journal Overland. Leith made it out into the world the following year when ‘Blackdrifts’ was published in Island. Eventually, I realised I would have to link the individual stories with some kind of overarching narrative. As the novel progressed, the individual short stories became more tightly woven, which meant that a story like ‘Frangipani’ had to be radically redrafted (and retitled) before it could be published in Meanjin as ‘Twelve Years, One Month and Thirteen Days’. Some other stories like ‘Battle’ or ‘Sixpence’ now seem far too dependent on the main story to carry them. It would have been nice to see those published alone, but they make far better sense within the novel. One that disappointed me was ‘Rosaries’. I would have loved to see that in print and I would rate it as the best short I’ve every written. But it is kind of long and the really good stuff happens right at the end.
Nevertheless I enjoyed seeing at least a few of the characters entering the world while I still worked on the bulk of the story. It’s a great way to keep yourself motivated when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.
I was once told by a far more experienced editor that young writers frequently attempt to pour too much into their stories. I think the Grand Structure of my first novel speaks volumes. Is it a flaw? That’s up to you, but if it is, it’s a flaw I can live with.
Here Today is now available in both print and digital.
Read MoreNew story published: Polysomnogram
The kind editors at Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k) have once again confirmed their taste and style, choosing to publish my story Polysomnogram in their august electronic pages.
A polysomnogram is a test performed on people with suspected sleeping disorders; in this case narcolepsy.
Polysomnogram is an exploration of the ideas and techniques I would use for my second novel, None of the Other Flies Follow My Crooked Lines. Juggling work and a young family, I found my writing hours relegated to the hours of eleven and three. I suspect stories about sleep disorders were a natural consequence.
Whenever I told people I was working on a story whose main character has narcolepsy, people often assumed I was writing a comedy. Although the story has what I hope are amusing moments, Ryan’s narcolepsy is never played for laughs, though it is a handy device to rely on when your scene runs out of steam and you need a quick transition to the next.
So? What are you waiting for?
Read Polysomnogram (should be a permanent link).
Enjoy the rest of Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k).
Read MoreSaccades: short stories delivered…
A newly compiled and polished edition of my short story collection Saccades is now available in both print and digital editions. It’s the first of two releases from the web site over the next few months leading up to Off the Record‘s launch in October.
Best of all, for the bargain hunters out there, the digital editions of Saccades are free. If you like the stories, feel free to share the love with others.
Enjoy.
Saccades has existed, in one form or another, for close on ten years. Originally a simple collection of short stories I wrote back in 2000 and 2001, the collection was refined and sharpened into a thematic collection grouped around a fictional building in inner-city Brisbane. Two years of frustrations and delays with publishers saw the collection fall apart and individual stories redrafted and tightened back into individual pieces. By 2005, a few of the stories lobbed up on this here web site as digital downloads. It was still early days for digital publishing and more than a few readers didn’t quite make head nor tails of stories offered up like iTunes tracks, though a few stories—Hemmingway and Lucky January for example—found a few fans. In the meantime, I busied myself with writing novels.
By the end of the decade, digital publishing had moved into a new high gear and I renewed my love of short stories with a few new published pieces. So Saccades was dusted off, gutted, and reconstituted as a collection again. Many stories from the original manuscript were dropped altogether, many more new stories were added. Some of those that remained were radically redrafted. Really, apart from the title and a handful of relatively untouched stories, the collections at either end of the decade are different books.
That’s okay. Things change.
Read MoreHollow Edge Published
A new story, Hollow Edge, is now published and online at Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k). The story is a nice companion to some of my more recently written and published short stories, especially White. But, unlike those stories, Hollow Edge has a long and troubled past.
Hollow Edge began life as a very different story around 1999 or maybe 2000 and was titled Heuristic. I was really into one-word titles back then. At the time, I was working on a short story collection that, although meticulously planned, never quite eventuated into print. Looking back at that collection, Heuristic was more than a little out of place.
The story was inspired by the drive between Brisbane and Bundaberg where I worked for a time back in 1997. Somewhere on the highway, in one of the blip towns, was a small housing estate. Evidently a parcel of farm land had been developed into an estate, flanked with billboards, draped with bunting, and offered to the public at bargain prices. One house had been built there. Construction had started on another. By the time I had finished my Bundaberg tenure, the second house had been completed, though a third had stalled partially completed. The billboard images had faded and the edges were peeling. The bunting hung from the street lamps, limp and sad. A failed estate is truly a sad place to see, even from the window of a speeding car.
From there, Hollow Edge took shape as the failed estate to end all failed estates.
I tried a few times to interest various magazines and journals in Heuristic, but, despite a few enthusiastic responses, no one took it on. I tried a tighter redraft about five years ago. Still, little response. So the story languished.
I picked it up again at the end of last year and immediately identified what had been going wrong with the story: superfluous crap. You know when they make three-hour movies with some kind of present-day top and tail scenes (think Titanic or The Green Mile)? Superfluous crap (although The Green Mile was otherwise a great film). So it was with Hollow Edge. Half the word count concerned itself with a rambling account of how the narrator got himself in the middle of nowhere. It didn’t pass the so what test, so it was excised along with a great number of awkward words and phrases, the kind of howlers that make me embarrassed I ever offer the story up to an editor.
The resulting story was clipped and tight. Lovely. Off to Poor Mojo with you.
So, if you want to read it, here it is, in glorious black and white. Hope you like it.
This link takes to the story’s perpetual link. Enjoy.
Read MoreThe Books
