Getting Serious
Posted on March 31, 2007
This is probably the most indulgent writing thing I have ever done - I’m going up to chill out and finish my manuscript in Byron Bay for a few days on my ownsome. Back for my Easter eggs.
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Update
Posted on March 30, 2007
I heard on the news this morning that the poor woman I wrote about yesterday who collided with a bus queue has not been able to answer police questions and has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital where she is under sedation.
I’m not a religious person but you can only hope she finds something spiritual to help her through her dark days.
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A Momentary Lapse
Posted on March 29, 2007
What a heartrending story in the papers yesterday of the learner driver who hit the accelerator instead of the brake and ran into a queue of people on the pavement waiting for a bus. One woman dead and ten injured including children.
Apparently the driver was 42 and the mother of seven children. Her husband had died recently and she had asked a 60 year old neighbour to teach her to drive. A witness said that in the aftermath of the accident she was banging her head on the road and wanting to die. And who could blame her.
One moment of panic and so much damage.
How will she ever recover from that experience and the knowledge of the pain that mistake has cost others? With seven children to care for she has to go on but what a dreadful thing to have to live with.
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Wots in a Name
Posted on March 27, 2007
Been slack on the bloggin but putting extra effort into writing productivity, pumping out some 7,000 words last week and head down today refining them which is very much slower. Spent a healthy six hours revising about 10 pages today.
I have a heap of characters in this book, about 40 at last count, although many of them are minor characters I have to keep a big map of them and how they are related and their first nad surnames and any other relevant details. Which brings me to the sticky question of naming characters.
Some minor charcacters don’t need too much thought, just an identifying name, and a phone book is extremely handy, otherwise you end up naming them from the spines on your book shelf and they end up having names like Austen and Solzhenitsyn - which is a bit obvious.
I’m a big fan of the name that enhances the character’s character. In my previous book I had a sort of maternal salt of the earth type I called Joy Oldfield, each part of the name having a good feel about it. I know it seems a bit bleeding obvious when you see it like that but actually in the context it’s not so obvious (trust me).
I wanted my main character to have a very stiff, inflexible name that couldn’t be shortened and called her Adrienne. Her mother was quite an aloof character so I called her Isabelle but her sister was more emotional and tempestuous, so I called her Rosanna, which to me is more robust and rosy.
The main male character was very Australian and as it was set in the 1950’s I called him Jack. I decided at some point Jack was a cliche and changed it to James for a few weeks but it just didn’t work, he simply wasn’t a James, he was a Jack.
Seems to happen quite often with characters as the layers build, they either fit a name or they change it themselves.
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A Wee Problem
Posted on March 22, 2007
For anyone who has not had the experience of having a small boy in the house, one of the side-effects is that the hinges on your toilet seat rust up very quickly. Ours have irritated me for ages and during a cleaning frenzy last week I decided to dismantle the seat and lid and get new hinges.
Why does everything have to be so difficult?
The dismantling was simple. I took the hinges into the plumbing place and they looked blank. Told me to bring the lid and seat in. So I did that the next day and drew another blank. So then they said to have a look for a brand name on the toilet. I did that and rang the place and they then told me where to get them. I honestly thought a hinge was a hinge.
So anyway found the place and the part was duly ordered. But the next hitch was that I couldn’t get one of the screws out. The man at the plumbing place tried umpteen screwdrivers while I tried to keep up a witty banter to keep him on the job. Then he started consulting the tattooed men in the back room who looked like they could do some collateral damage with a screwdriver. But no go.
So then they told me to go to an engineering shop where they had special tools and equipment. So I put that off for three days. Anyway today I had 20 minutes to spare, made the decision to give up a really good parking spot near where the school bus stops and set out to find the engineering place.
Some days it just flows doesn’t it? Found the place first time, it was full of huge greasy machinery - looked like the start of the industrial revolution - and helpful men with HEAPS of tools they couldn’t wait to put to good use. The screw was removed and blow me down if I wasn’t back in that fab parking spot only 15 minutes later. It’s these small successes that really cheer you up I think.
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