Best books - top 3 of the year

"As a woman commits adultery on her living room sofa, the Arsenal-Chelsea football match on the television in front of her suddenly explodes into a ball of flames... Her husband and son are amongst those killed in this horrific terrorist attack, which changes both her and London forever."
Incendiary by Chris Cleave completes my trio of top books for 2009.
As a man writing from a woman's voice he doesn't always get it right (we don't even understand ourselves half the time so how can we expect a bloke to?) but the narrator's voice is what swept me through this book in one sitting. It's not a long book - perfect for a cold and rainy day with a glass of red.
Eerily Incendiary, which reads as a letter to Osama Bin Laden about the impact a terrorist attack had on innocent people, was published on 7 July 2005...the day of the London bombings.
How would I describe it? A satirical look at an indulgent society; loaded with black humour as well as tenderness; bleak with a mother's suffering through guilt, devastation, loss; relentless action and an eloquent portrayal of simple lives.
Guys don't let the female perspective put you off, there's plenty of testosterone in the mix, trust me. If he read books, my brother T would say 'it's bloody good!'
So there it is - my three best books of the year: 
The Lives of Beryl Markham, The Elegance of the Hedgehog and Incendiary. 
They're all pretty different but that's what I love about them. What are your top picks?

Best books - a French delicacy

My Top Three books of the year are in no particular order but today's choice is a French story that crept up on me and quietly captured my imagination, then held me hostage right through to the unexpected and macabre but hilarious ending.
It's The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. 
Set in a très ooh la la apartment block in Paris, the story is told through the eyes of the humble concierge who witnesses all the comings and goings of the elite residents, while concealing from them a fascinating intellect and a surprising private self.
It's a great character study as well as a quirky story, told as only the French can - with an exterior seriousness but an underlying, kooky humour that cracked me up. 
I love the 12-year-old kid who forges a bond with the concierge, she reminds me of Hank's daughter in the TV series Californication with her premature darkness, insight and deadpan honesty.
This book made me laugh out loud.
For that, for the original voices of its characters, and for its unpredictable plot, it was always going straight to my Top Three.

Best books countdown - an aviatrix and a seductress

Christmas rain is fantastic for two reasons. 
Because our great, thirsty land desperately needs it. And it's the perfect excuse for enjoying a post-Christmas cook-up repose with a new book straight out of Santa's sack.
With only three (!!) days left of 2009, I've come up with my three best books of the year... 
Today's choice is a brilliant biography which I've loved for years but it gets a mention because I re-read it this year and it was no less gripping. Sign of a true classic I say.
The book is The Lives of Beryl Markham, by Errol Trzebinski and the front cover tags her as 'Out of Africa's hidden seductress'. (Try a secondhand bookstore - it was first published in 1993.)
Beryl Markham grew up in Kenya and throughout her tough, primitive, glamorous and often amoral life she stirred the feathers of the colonial elite in East Africa, courting fame and admiration across the globe. As well as a fair dose of scandal.
In 1936 Beryl was the first woman to fly solo west across the Atlantic. 
She was also a champion horse breeder and, on earning her wings, ran the first airmail runs across Africa in the days when pilots still repaired their own aircraft on the fly and the plains of the Serengeti were blanketed by magnificent herds of wildlife roaming free from the scourge of poaching and land-grabbing.
This is the story of someone who took life by the horns and rode it to the edge of the earth, constantly challenging herself and those she influenced to seek out new horizons both internally and externally.
In a captivating twist, one of the great loves of her life was safari hunter Denys Finch-Hatton, famously portrayed by Robert Redford in the film Out Of Africa. It appears Karen Blixen was not Denys' only mistress...
If you like a great bio and are looking for something un-put-downable - this is it!

Merry merry ho ho ho!

Yay it's Christmas - a time of storytelling and magic and all things delicious! 
I don't think Christmas Day features in my story... but if it did at least one of the characters would get right into wrapping and gluing and sticking and making sparkly cards in a big puddle of crazy, happy mess. 
And there'd probably be another character who didn't have a clue that each ribbon and bow had been tied with extra special attention and care - ruthlessly ripping through layers of bubbles and fluff in their haste to recover the bounty. 
But what the ho, as long as someone's thinking of you, all's fair in love and gifting right?! 
No matter what you do or who you spend it with, I bet everyone will have a Christmas story to tell that together would cover every genre...comedy, family, adventure, drama, mystery, romance, tragedy, psycho thriller... What will yours be?
Happy happy :) x

Iris Blue Iris

Iris, blue iris,

Like the sky of profound wish

- Eternal spring bliss

        Peter S Quinn


I'm thinking about the grandmother of one of my characters and the role she played in his life. This little haiku makes me smile and think of mine...
Part of the fun of writing is drawing from others to create the people and personalities that populate your story.
Speaking at a Literary Feast bookclub meeting recently, the author Charlotte Wood said that whenever a new book or piece of her writing is published, she has to remind her family - as they frantically scan through the pages trying to identify themselves - that it's not always about herself and her relatives. It's fiction!
I like the idea that the people who colour our lives may all figure as a piece of the writer's patchwork - but exactly who, where, when, why and how much they feature... that's the writer's little secret ;-)

Secrets to sleuthing - part 2

Thanks to a great mate, let's call her my friend Flicka, I found an answer to my question from a previous post, 'how do I sleuth (ie. conduct research) without being cast as a voyeur?'
Preparing to venture over the Bridge on a research mission to check out the fictional boyhood home of my male lead character, she volunteered to come along as a decoy. 
Genius!
What is it about the power of company that gives one a sense of permission and liberty to do something, which, to do alone might make one feel slightly weird (even though it's not, of course). Maybe it's just comfort in knowing there'll always be a witness, one who can also double as your bail-poster if need be?
So off we went to the inner West to explore his stomping ground and I'm happy to report a most successful adventure. 
Street: ideal.
House: perfect, and yes Hills Hoist confirmed.
Park: I could almost taste the icy cold Sunny Boys and feel the zinc cream on my nose imagining the neighbourhood kids playing cricket in the hot blanket of summer, then tearing home on their BMXs in the half light of dusk.
Foreshore: suitably mangrove-y and home to an aquatic menagerie of curious creatures just waiting to be picked at by grubby, inquisitive fingers.
The mind is now full of inspiration from which to grow my character. And as back up, the camera is stocked with photos (featuring said decoy) from our little expedition as visual reference.
There's something about being in the surrounds of your character that helps to tap into their presence and find their voice. Would this be the writer's equivalent of method acting I wonder?
So for this stage of research, Mission Accomplished. And, thanks to my friend Flicka, accomplished without interrogation. Phew.

Art therapy...

I had a breakthrough earlier this week - drawing my story instead of trying to write it.

The story that has been in my head for so long - years - for some reason just wasn't gelling. I couldn't make it sit right or make any headway every time I sat down to tackle it.
So I followed the advice of my wise old friend in Africa, put the pen down for a few days and let it mull away in my unconscious mind.
And then it came to me, my story. It's quite different, but not entirely, from my original direction - so goodbye perplexion and hello excitement!
The ideas came as imagery rather than exact words, so to capture my muddle of thoughts before they evaporated, I got out the textas and mapped out my characters through pictures.
And it's coming together, albeit in bits and pieces. I'm figuring out how the characters are connected and the way they interact through mapping their personalities in pictures. When I get stuck on structure or credibility, I go back to the pictures and it starts making sense again. It starts to flow.
See mum and dad - maybe all that mess I made as a kid with pens and paints and oil pastels will be worth it after all!

Surprise post...!

Is there anything more exciting than getting a big fat parcel in the mail? 

OK maybe a few things, but I was so happy to see what the postman delivered this morning! A big bag of books I ordered weeks ago finally found its way from a bookshelf somewhere in the States, via slow boat to Oz, to my doorstep. 

Now I can't give away what's inside because you never know... Christmas bells are ringing and perhaps one of these precious gems is destined to turn up under your tree...

Tell me - if you could wish for any books, which ones would you love to unwrap this Christmas?

Crooks with a crock or crusaders with a cause?

The media buzz about climate change and the Copenhagen conference evaporating into thin air got me thinking about this term that's bandied about so relentlessly and has wangled its way into our vernacular. 

'Climate change' - What does it mean? 

Depends how you look at it really.

If you flip the letters around a little you get:

'Chemical Agent' (conspiracy theorists will be delighted)

or

'Technical Game' (...possibly)

and

'Chalice Magnet' (driving everyone to drink?)

As well as my two favourites: 

'Cheating Camel' and 'A Camel Etching' 

(both of which, it appears, would be as useful as said conference).

With so much conjecture about what on earth climate change is or means, none of these options could be dismissed as ridiculous.

PS. I'm not that clever. Impress your friends.

One man's Bad Sex...

If there's one thing that makes a wannabee writer feel better about one's fledgling authoring efforts, it's knowing that even the proud and published can have a bad day.
Having collected two major literary awards in France for his novel The Kindly Ones, American/French writer Jonathan Littell has just bagged a third: The Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award 2009.
Not surprisingly, the British journal's annual award is one of the most highly anticipated yet least desirable gongs going around.
Originally written in French and having reportedly sold over a million copies, at last count The Kindly Ones had been translated into 17 languages. But Littell can't blame the translators for this doozy.
The judging panel declared: 
"It is in part a work of genius. However, a mythologically inspired passage and lines such as 'I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg' clinched the award for The Kindly Ones. We hope he takes it in good humour."
Others shortlisted for the win include our own Nick Cave for The Death of Bunny Monroe (which, at the very, very least, is a somewhat backhanded plug for pilates) and travel fiction writer Paul Theroux for A Dead Hand, which is exactly what he deserves for this Muppets-do-the-Karma-Sutra vomit.
We the ever-hopefuls secretly love this kind of reassurance. It sets the bar at a far more graspable height (low?) to know that writing so cringe-worthy can still prove to be a publishing 'success'.
But even so, for all the times I've read something and thought to myself 'I wish I'd written that', this is one time I'm thrilled that I didn't. 

Who wants to play magnetic poetry?!...

This is for my friend Crabbs who celebrated a big birthday in Africa this weekend. 

It's inspired by recent reminiscence over a weekend gone bush with the gang in northern KwaZulu Natal years ago. Specifically, a night of magnetic poetry around the campfire (it took some convincing I might add) that produced some surprisingly impressive works.

Luckily (!) our efforts were recorded for posterity and are treasured in the Rubyfire vault... 

Magnetic poetry doesn't just have to be a drinking game. 

Think of it as throwing an aerosol into the bonfire of your imagination and fanning the flames of your creativity. Whooshka!

The rules go like this:

1. Pick a handful of words out of the magnetic word bag.

2. Create a poem out of them.

3. Don't worry if it doesn't make sense. That's what poetic license is for.

In defence of our Sobhengu anthology - which, should it ever see the light of day, might be displayed in the 'bawdy and purile with flashes of self-proclaimed brilliance' section of the poetry aisle - it's more difficult than you think. So today's effort is certainly no Pulitzer Prize contender...but at least it's clean.

The undiscovered road...

Took time out from writing today to refresh the brain...spent some time in a little indie bookshop by the beach and brought home two finds. 
The Songlines is a famous and hotly disputed text by Bruce Chatwin, recommended to me by a very wise old friend in Africa. 
"The songlines are the invisible pathways that criss-cross Australia, ancient tracks connecting communities and following age-old boundaries. Along these lines Aboriginals passed the songs which revealed the creation of the land and the secrets of its past..."
I'm told it's an absolute essential, and I believe it. Though I suspect I may need a couple of reads to grasp it properly.

The second one is Nikki Gemmell's new book, Why You Are Australian, a letter to her children, being raised in London, to instill in them the wonders of growing up across the sea in our wide, free land and what it means to be Australian right now.
Flicking through the hardback volume, a quote by Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri caught my eye and snagged my unconscious mind... I didn't have a pen to write it down on the spot so I had to buy the book.
In the context of writing, tapping into the imagination and accessing the story within, it seems like good advice:
'Learn to free yourself from all things
That have moulded you
And which limit your secret and
undiscovered road.'
I like the idea of an undiscovered road in each of us. Where do you think yours might lead...?

A milkshake, French Fries and a meatball walk into a bar...

Season 4, Episode 5: Frylock makes a new dog called 'Handbanana' for Meat Wad using Make Your Own Dog 1.0. 
Season 4, Episode 4: After winning a contest, Carl fears getting his penis cut off and taken by a group of dicks, so Frylock turns him into a woman.
Season 2, Episode 16: Shake uncovers a delicious, demoniacally possessed submarine sandwich in his front yard. A voice tells him if he eats the whole thing he will be killed.


People who can look at the monumentally ordinary and out of it dream up imaginary worlds that fascinate and delight others, are amazing.
Case in point. Right now I'm watching a cartoon series about a milkshake, a packet of French Fries and a meatball who live in a ghetto. Aqua Teen Hunger Force is, like junk food, addictive. 
Master Shake, Frylock and Meat Wad are detectives whose nemesis is the evil Dr Weird and whose escapades see them pitted against characters like a giant rabbit robot with a spray gun full of hair-growth hormone perfume, brain-burning leprechauns with a penchant for rainbows, and a piece of mould that comes to life in a greasy kitchen (and turns out to be a really nice guy). 
With episode descriptors like 'a Pink Man sets out to destroy the moon but can't find anyone to help him', its surreal morbid humour and total lack of continuity between each 12-minute story (at times even within storylines) is completely bizarre. The show has a cult following in America and I can see why. It's ridiculously funny! 
But as a result I'm having a crisis of confidence in my own imagination...
How do people come up with this stuff? 
Will my story be even remotely interesting? 
Why does it feel incredibly difficult to write with an original voice?
Argh - this writing gig is so hard!

Secret ingredients...

Short and contemplative today.

Vladimir Nabokov, famous for writing Lolita, believed the three attributes essential in a writer are:

- storyteller

- teacher

- enchanter...

Is there anything he's missed?

Bookcases to kill for...

If 'bibliophilia' is a love of books - what is a love of bookshelves? 

How fantastic are these modern interpretations of the humble bookcase! 

This delicious reading chair from Fishbol Design Atelier is crying out to be sitting in my lounge - love love love! OK it needs a cushion and it does come with various options in felt.

Imagine a Kartell bookworm curling and unfurling along your hallway....sigh

And I love the organised chaos of this Cyrill Drummerson design.

Check out this metal coffee table Nar Bookcase by Omer Unal. 

At first glance I wasn't sure whether I could subject my beloved volumes to the wire bisection of its suspension storage design...but on reflection it's ingenious! The hanging arrangement doubles as a bookmark and, as an added bonus, protects the books from dust.

And I couldn't leave out this little gem...Flying Vee. The stark and simple L and V shaped metal shelves let the booklover design the space according to their own whim - brilliant!

These two are for my friend G who giggled at, but appreciated, the thought that went into colour coding my bookcase ;)

I'm starting a thread on other peoples' bookshelves - what does yours look like? I'd love to make a photo montage - please send in a pic!

The outlaw was a lady...

'Born to be called a lady
Born to die like a tramp
Born to charm society
Born to the outlaw's camp.'


In the (slightly dusty) wake of a cowboys and indians shindig, I've been reading up on the biggest, baddest outlaws in the Old West. And they make for some cracking stories.
Today's inspiration comes from Belle Starr, a 19th century crack shot from Missouri with a strong sense of style. Belle rode side saddle dressed in a tight black jacket, velvet skirt, high-topped boots, a man's Stetson complete with ostrich plume, twin holstered pistols and a cartridge belt across her hip.
Now Belle (Myra Maybelle Shirley) was a well-bred lass, educated at a high fallutin' ladies academy where she excelled in reading, spelling, grammar, arithmetic and deportment, and loved to play piano.
Growing up with Jesse James and the Younger brothers as childhood friends, the infamous outlaws would later hideout in the impressionable young Belle's family home.
It wasn't long before Belle got hitched to one of their posse, Jim Reed, and two years later along came bouncing bub, Rosie Lee (Pearl) amid speculation that the real daddy was gangster Cole Younger.
Belle packed a lot into her short, audacious life.
After Jim, on the run for murder and a stagecoach robbery, was shot and killed, she was rumoured to have married another Younger brother, Bruce. That union lasted three weeks, when she married Sam Starr, a Cherokee Indian from an outlaw family. They settled in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where Belle immersed herself in outlawry, organising and fencing for rustlers, horse thieves and bootleggers and harbouring them from the law. If she didn't have enough coin in the kitty to buy off the lawmen when caught, Belle would seduce them into turning the other cheek.
Finally unable to elude the police any longer, Belle and Sam were found guilty of horse theft and incarcerated for six months. She was a model prisoner, but on her release was unrepentant and immediately returned to her villainous ways. 
"I am a friend to any brave and gallant outlaw", she told a Dallas newspaper reporter.
Legend has it Belle spent much of her time in saloons, drinking and gambling at dice, roulette and cards. She'd ride her horse through town shooting off her pistols, and she took many lovers, including Jim July (a relative of her husband Sam), Blue Duck, Jack Spaniard and Jim French. 
Belle's life came to a violent end just days before her 41st birthday when she was ambushed and fatally shot on her way home from a shopping trip.
There was a healthy list of suspects:
- Edward Watson, with whom she'd been feuding over tennancy of her land;
- her lover, Jim July, with whom she'd recently quarreled;
- her son, Ed, with whom she had a strained relationship and had recently beaten for mistreating her horse;
- and her daughter, Pearl, whose prospective husband Belle had frightened off to marry another.
No one was ever convicted. 
Belle, the 'Bandit Queen', was buried at Youngers Bend, a sleepy spot by the Canadian River where she often lived. Pearl later erected a headstone there, engraved with a horse, a bell and a star, purchased with her earnings from a brothel.
The gravestone reads:
'Shed not for her the bitter tear,
Nor give the heart to vain regret
Tis but the casket that lies here,
The gem that filled it sparkles yet."

Take a load off...

Thinking about the pet dog of one of my characters this morning led me to take a dip into Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. 
I read his tale about camels to kickstart my imagination. 
How did the camel get his hump? Then, how did the whale get his throat? And what was the sing-song of old man kangaroo? Kipling's answers are fantastical accounts that never lose their magic.
The next book I picked up was the Literary Pocket Companion. It covers every kind of fact about literature you'd ever care to know, plus many more. I like to flip it open to a random page and start reading. 
The page I opened to today happened to tell an enlightening tale about the 400 camels of Abdul Kassem Ismael of Persia.
"This tenth century scholarly Grand Vizier never left home without his personal library of 117,000 books, and to ensure any of his librarians could locate any book almost immediately, his camels were taught to walk in alphabetical order.
"It all sheds new light on Rudyard Kipling's description of how the camel got his hump - because he spent his days saying 'humph'."
I have never thought much about camels. But I have a new respect for them, knowing how hard Mr Ismael's camels humphed and puffed, lugging his beloved library back and forth across the desert. 
Amazon is flogging its new, super-duper 'wireless reading device' (with 360,000 books to download in a matter of seconds) across the globe this Christmas. 
They should have called it the Camel, not the Kindle.

Story magic...

A little piece of Emily Dickinson today - a poem for lovers of books and stories and words... :) With a picture of a dancing bear...just because.

He ate and

drank the

precious Words - 

His Spirit grew

robust -

He knew no more

that he was poor;

Nor that his

frame was

Dust - 

He danced 

along the dingy

Days

And this bequest

of Wings

Was but a Book - 

What Liberty

A loosened Spirit

  brings 

Sleuthing or stalking..?

Today's question: where is the line between conducting pure research and invading the privacy of complete strangers? 
While some may call it research, others (those living innocently at the end of the sleuth's trail) may call the police. Would they accept my poetic licence as proof of literary integrity?
I am inventing a childhood for my male lead character. Simply, he grew up in Sydney's inner West. I google mapped the suburb looking for a street with two criteria: 

• must be within 15 minutes walking distance of the water (for boyhood mucking about in boats), and 
• must be near or bordering a park. 

Found the perfect street and, serendipitously, it has the same name as my maternal grandfather. 
The beauty (scariness?!) of google maps is streetview. I zeroed in on number 29, situated at the cul de sac end and backing onto a park, hoping against hope the house hadn't morphed into a McMansion with no trace of lives once lived there. 
Happily, it's a single story red brick bungalow with a long concrete driveway up the side and, although I couldn't see around the back, I am certain there once proudly stood a Hills Hoist complete with plastic peg bucket in the centre of the grassy yard.
So now I need to go and see it for myself. 
I need to follow his fictitious footsteps to the patch of harbour where he kept his battered wooden dinghy in the bushes above the shoreline. And I need to imprint his home into my imagination so I can grow him up with credibility.
Have camera, have notebook, have comfy thongs and a curious mind. I'm ready to rock 'n roll. 
But what's acceptable? How do I do this without being cast as a weirdo voyeur...?
If you were the occupant of said house, and you, peering through the white venetians, saw me slide up in my car, snap away and take notes, what would you do??

Catch me if you can...

This may look like any old wardrobe to you, but it's a 50 x 150cm piece of local apartheid cultural history in South Africa.

This is my friend Taryn's wardrobe and it has a wonderful story.

Recently restoring her beautiful home in the affluent and leafy suburb of Greenside, Johannesburg, she discovered the bricks and mortar hold many a secret, including this one... Deep within the quiet darkness where her husband Andy's denims now hang, this wardrobe frequently gave shelter to Oliver Tambo and various of his ANC comrades, hiding their tracks from authorities.

O.R. Tambo, along with Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, was a founding member of the ANC Youth League in 1943. He became Deputy President of the ANC in 1958 and a year later was banned by the government from political activity for five years.

During this time he'd meet his comrades in secret at Taryn's house, which was regularly visited by the cops trying to sniff him out. In response, the ANC sent Tambo to London to rally support for the anti-apartheid cause from his safehouse abroad. Like many others, there he stayed virtually in exile until returning to his homeland and the promise of freedom in 1990.

Did you notice the window? Strange to put a cupboard in front of a window you may think. Not really, when one needs to beat a hasty escape from a handy hideout into the dark night.

When you stand in front of it and touch the windowsill, you can almost smell the sweat of fear and feel the adrenalin of thumping hearts, crammed into the closet while police inquisition the hosts downstairs.

To have been a fly on the wall during those meetings, among that furious and driven brotherhood of men, would be a storyteller's dream. I love the mystery and history of this hiding spot... but the hellishness of having to take cover, among the trousers and shirt tails of others, in real fear for one's life gives me goosebumps.

The art of procrastination...

"Only Robinson Crusoe had everything done by Friday." Anon.
Today is the perfect day for writing - blustery and cantankerous outside - ideal for unleashing the mind and letting the words spill out onto my stark, white (empty) page. 
Alas, I am suffering from a severe dose of procrastination. Argh!
I had such high hopes for the day...until the procrastination monster snuck up on me and sucked up all the precious minutes and hours: 

• Got up this morning and went for a two hour walk with G. But that couldn't have been procrastination, that was exercise which is essential to good health.
• Went to the shops to buy zippers. These I need for making cushions, which are essential to sitting comfortably on the lounge. I would hate for my visitors to lack lumbar support.
• Sent an email to the property manager requesting a new shower head. This is necessary to ensure cleanliness and hygiene and again, good health. I am fast becoming a shower gymnast, which could be dangerous. With the water spurting out backwards through a huge hole in the connection I have to twist my body in a 280 degree loop to position myself under the wayward jet. 
• Phoned around getting RSVPs for a party and talked to my friend Legend for ages. This was essential for two reasons. First, as any good host will attest, numbers are critical for catering purposes. Heaven forbid we should run out of chilli cabanossi bites before the stragglers roll in, or worse - an excess of prawn cocktails turns limp and greenish in the afternoon sun. Second, I like talking to Legend, the sun always shines a little more brightly after our conversations. But therein lies another curse of procrastination. It's catching, and, like a virus latching onto an accommodating host it spreads. Sorry L.

It didn't stop there. Oh no no no.
Then I spent 25 minutes googling quotes on 'Procrastination' to try and inspire action. The best I came up with was the Crusoe line. It didn't make me feel guilty and lazy like all the others. ("You may delay but time will not." Blah. "Tomorrow is the day when idlers work and fools reform." Snore...)
Ooh, but this one I like:
"Procrastination is the thief of time."
Now there's a thought. I'm outta here. Got to go down to the cop shop and report a robbery.

An Aussie calypso summer...

Still on the theme of sport and stories, I came across another inspirational tale this week watching a documentary that you may think sounds geeky but is actually very, very cool.

It follows the epic West Indies cricket tour of Australia in the summer of 1960/61 and has all the ingredients of a great adventure story: characters that captured the hearts of the nation, high drama, sportsmanship, history-making events (the Brisbane Test resulted in the first ever tie in 83 years of Test cricket), controversy (Australians were enamoured of the touring team and its black Captain, Frank Worrell, during the era of the White Australia policy), courage, fierce competition, romance (where there are fans there's fire in the hearts) and heart-stirring friendship (500,000 Aussies celebrated the Windies at a farewell ticker-tape parade even though they lost the series).
Calypso Summer tells the tale through the eyes of the players, with real life legends like Garfield Sobers and Richie Benaud telling anecdotes about each other with signature understatement that makes you laugh out loud.
But isn't it peculiar how we make assumptions about people based on first level dimensions - things that are obvious to the naked eye like colour or gender. 
Listening from the kitchen to a lilting, musical accent, I glanced at the TV expecting to see a long, tall West Indian like Wes Hall or Alf Valentine reminiscing, but to my surprise it was a middle aged white man with a pink weathered nose whose name, Gerry Alexander, is as Pommy-sounding as his skin is fair. But Alexander is a true-blue Jamaican - wickie for the Windies on the tour. 
It took a minute or two to reconcile the accent coming out of his mouth with the visual because my brain was programmed to expect an English brogue. And I had to give myself a rocket for my lack of imagination.
It's liberating to know that in creating characters, the writer has licence to imbue each one with whatever traits and quirks we choose. 
In this world where truth is usually stranger than fiction, I doubt one could ever invent a character that is truly in-credible.
There was a kid in my primary school who used to catch daddy-long-legs spiders, rip the legs off them and eat the body. Right in front of us. 
You can't make that stuff up. 
Do you know anyone with a truly unusual, quirky bent that sets them apart from the rest? Tell me!

Global village goes GaGa...!

Song of South Africa trip 09 - this is what everyone is dancing to sub-Sahara. Love this global village we live in, makes me feel close to my African friends...turn it up LOUD!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdpSmNMg1is

Poetry and sport...'don't think, just play'

At last, back on line after an unplanned absence, a metaphorical twist in the tale.

Even the best laid plans (plots?) go astray and this prolonged diversion lent me hours of TV time devouring old movies on M-Net including, fabulously, a formative film from my youth about two of my favourite things: poetry and sport.

Bull Durham. I LOVE this story!

Who’d have thought a late-’80s movie about baseball with a kooky cast of characters and some seriously bad hairstyles would have introduced me to a lifetime’s fascination with the work of William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman?

Opening with a soliloquy on the soul that is pure gold by Susan Sarandon’s character, Annie, in the vein of the metaphysical poets at first it sounds outlandish but makes perfect sense. This story never fails to reach into my imagination and switch on the floodlights.

Annie is disarming, fiery and tender, choosing between her self-imposed role of mentor and ‘life’-coach to young thunderbolt ‘Nuke’ - Ebbie Calvin LaLoosh - and the magnetic pull of catcher Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) whose wit matches hers in pace and intellect, and whose skills with the glove are tested off field in Annie’s Edith Piaf inspired candlelit boudoir.

Now, as proven time and again by my mates, there seems to be a gene built into the male DNA that enables guys to recite movie lines on demand and ad nauseum. How do they do that? I can’t even remember a one-line joke.

Besides Grease (standard for any self respecting child of the ’80s), Bull Durham is the only movie I can recite.

The scriptwriting is hilarious and sharp. No superfluous words. And for all its surface fluff, its message about inner-belief, courage and remaining true to one’s self is universal.

So my unexpected detour threw me a curveball and presented me with soul food and a change in direction for my own story. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, a taste of Bull Durham that always makes me giggle:

Tim Robbins’ ‘Nuke’, caught yawning in the change room after a late night with Annie and assumed by his team mates to have gotten lucky.

“Nah man, she read me poetry all night. That’s way more tiring than sex.”

A wonderfully whiffy tale...

'Did you do a poo on Mole's head. Well if not - then who?' The 'favourite characters' conversation has generated some lively discussion in Africa. My nine-year-old friend Josh presented a fabulous fictional character to his class in an English oral assignment recently.
The brief was to discuss his favourite animal character in a story. Without hesitation he chose Mole, from The Story Of The Little Mole Who Knew It Was None Of His Business, by Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch.
It's a book I had given him for his third birthday, a cheeky tale of a mole trying to identify which of nature's beasts was responsible for pooping on him by investigating a myriad of spoor samples from the animal kingdom. Mole's story delighted Josh then as much as it does today.
Apparently it's a topic of hilarity and endless fascination among his cohort - poo.
His mother was worried his choice of character might kick up a stink but according to the teacher, Josh's speech brought the house down and he earned his best English grade ever.
Today's reading recommendation is enthusiastically endorsed by Grade 3 at DPHS Prep...!

Creating characters...

The question I'm grappling with is: What makes a character resonate with the reader so that the reader cares about what happens to them?
If you don't care what happens to the characters the story is pretty much dead in the water, no matter how promising the plot.
As I develop my characters in Africa, surrounded by old and inspiring friends who may well, unbeknownst to them, lend their own attributes to my fictional friends, I'm thinking about characters in fiction that have moved me. Either to adore them to the point where I haven't wanted to finish the book because to remain present in their literary lives is far better than to feel bereft in their absence. Or to react to a character with such disdain that the book is flung impatiently aside and abandoned.
In my childhood, Anne (of Green Gables) was prissy and boring. Fling.
Pippi Longstocking, on the other hand, captured my imagination with her stripey tights and her pluck, dashing off on endless adventures with her motley crew of mates, orange plaits agape in her wake.
In high school, inspired by the heroine Tess (she of the D'Urbervilles), it frustrated me no end that Thomas Hardy should pair such a treasure with the limp, insipid, gormless Angel. Pfft.
The only reason I watched the entire movie Alfie (the Jude Law remake) was because I was trapped on an aeroplane with a TV screen two inches from my nose and couldn't walk out or turn it off. His title character was vile. He started out as an arrogant arse, played with peoples' emotions, flung them recklessly aside until they were fractured shadows of their former selves, then went on to have a miserable life. End of story. Huh? What's the point?
If the characters have no substance, there's no reason for the reader to empathise with them or become emotionally engaged.
Some of my all-time favourites from fiction whose appeal I'm contemplating are:

• Atticus Finch and Scout La Rue, To Kill A Mockingbird
• Troubled but gutsy Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye
• The cast of country characters island-bound during WWII in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
• Grotesque and depraved but strangely sensitive and fragile, Grenouille, from Perfume
• All time gun-slinging, quick-drawing Annie Oakley, the wildest cowgirl in the West, who burst into the testosterone world of cowboys and Indians, matching them on her horse and confounding them with her femine wiles and sweet-girl glamour

How to pinpoint the X-factor in characters that reel us in and keep us turning pages? Keeping them real enough to be credible, admirable enough to raise our expectations but whose failings don't repulse us to the point of rejection.
I'd love to know what you think. Who are the characters that have stuck in your heart and mind, and why?

In Africa...

Just arrived in Africa and stepping off the plane in Durban, South Africa, after a thumpy-bumpy flight through an early summer Kwa-Zulu Natal thunderstorm, the words that came to mind were:
"Ah but your land is beautiful..."
A quick reading recommendation, the third novel of renowned South African author Alan Paton, Ah But Your Land Is Beautiful.
Paton's more famous novel, Cry, The Beloved Country achieved international acclaim during the apartheid years. Both worth a read for anyone interested in a writer who speaks from the heart and with an intrinsic knowledge of his land and its people, that resonates even with those who have never set foot on the great continent of Africa.

How not to bet on the horses...

I’m back. The internal thermostat has at last righted itself and I lost again on the Melbourne Cup. Life has clearly returned to normal. And not without a lesson learned:

When making your once annual flutter on the GGs, find a friend who has a clue and take your tips from them. 

Good advice. Thanks. I’ll do that next time.

I picked my winner because I liked his story. So while my brain shifts back into writing gear, I’d like to share it with you.

Exactly this time last year I was talking to the man who bred 2008 Melbourne Cup winner, Viewed, and asked him how he came up with the future champion’s name.

While your average punter may not question it, a significant amount of cryptic consideration went into its choosing.

The story goes that Viewed was sired by Scenic out of Lovers Knot.

The first three letters of the word Viewed spell the French word for ‘life’ and the second three spell ‘wed’.

Wed for life – Lovers Knot. Scenic. Viewed.

Aah, love a good play on words. Pity he only ran seventh this year.

The people of Africa believe that a name is not simply a random sound applied to a person, animal or thing. To indigenous Africans your name is your soul. Your symbol. And it possesses magical qualities that are bestowed upon you the moment you are named.

Hmmm… anyone got the inside tip on how this year’s winner got his name? 

On absence...

Rubyfire is temporarily incapacitated by an evil fever. Please drop in again shortly :)

Saturday night fever...

An extended episode of fever this week, while thoroughly mundane and inconvenient, presented the intriguing possibility that I might access an as yet untapped state of the subconscious that would illuminate my writing. Bouts of delirium springing forth untold sapience and literary genius. Rather like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lolling about under his lime tree bower in 1797, conjuring up poetry that lives and breathes in line and verse today. Although his ingenuity was possibly induced more frequently by opium than febrile disease.
Whether it was partly due to professional hazard (years of rejection, self-imposed seclusion, substance abuse, complex and clandestine personal relationships - some of those dudes make contemporary man look saintly) or they were just plain unlucky, it's curious how many poets through the ages have met an entirely hapless end. I made a list once.

• Euripides, the Greek playwright, was mauled to death by a pack of wild dogs in 406BC.
• According to Pliny the Elder, Athenian poet Aeschylus was killed by a falling tortoise dropped by an eagle in 456BC.
• Italian poet Dante Alighieri fell ill and died just as he completed The Divine Comedy in 1321. Doh.
• Christopher Marlow, rumoured to be an Elizabethan secret agent, was killed in a pub brawl in 1593.
• Sir Francis Bacon died in 1626 of suffocation caused by a severe chill, after stuffing a chicken with snow to test his theory of refrigeration.
• Having given away his entire fortune, Leo Tolstoy froze to death in a railway station in 1910.
• WS Gilbert drowned in an English lake trying to save a damsel in distress in 1911.
• In 1932 Hart Crane, a 'pederastic alcoholic' in love with a Danish merchant mariner, drowned himself by jumping off a steamboat into the Gulf of Mexico.
• William Burroughs accidentally killed his wife when he tried to shoot an apple off her head in Mexico in 1951.
• Hilaire Belloc died in 1953 from burns he sustained after stumbling into a fireplace.
• American Surrealist poet Frank O'Hara was killed by an errant beach buggy in 1966.
• Playwright Tennessee Williams was at home in New York when he choked to death on a bottle cap in 1983.

I'm sorry to say this persistent bout of fever has not conceived anything close to a blinding flash of brilliance. All it's produced so far is sweaty hair, a clammy glow and endless spontaneous rounds of rug-up-strip-off-rug-up-strip-off. 
And a frustratingly lean word count for this week.

Cautionary Tales for Children by Hilaire Belloc. Hmmm. "Don't stand too close to the flame" ?

Pondering Le Pétomane...

Last night on Spicks and Specks there was a question about a famous 19^th century French performer with a most unique skill set.

It made me think how true it is that fact is so often stranger than fiction, and that drawing from real life characters can bring colour and life to novel writing. Had history not proven this story true, one could be accused of conjuring up a ridiculous - albeit imaginative - outlandish tale.

French flatulist Josef Pujol (yes that’s his real name) was born in Marseilles. In the 1890s he became the star attraction at the Moulin Rouge, known by his stage name as Le Pétomane, translation: ‘fart maniac’.

As a schoolboy, Pujol discovered an extraordinary talent for contracting his abdominal muscles and expelling air in musical tones that rivalled the finest of wind instruments.

In adulthood, casting aside his job as a baker, Fujol took his fantastical talent to the stage. Some of the highlights of his act included sound effects of cannon fire and thunderstorms, and even the sound of a dressmaker tearing two yards of calico – a full 10 second rip. He played ‘O Sole Mio and La Marseillaise on an ocarina connected by a rubber tube to his bum. He could blow out a candle from a distance of several yards. And his audience included Edward, Prince of Wales, King Leopold II of Belgium and Sigmund Freud.

Le Pétomane became one the highest grossing acts at the Moulin Rouge, raking in around 20,000 francs for each performance, well above the 8,000 francs famed stage actress Sarah Bernhardt regularly brought in at the peak of her career there.

Who would’ve thought it? Le Pétomane proves that everyone is a star and can shine in their own right, and everyone has a story to tell. And that’s what I love about people.