blog2

  National Novel Writing Month. As many writers will be aware, National Novel Writing Month starts next Thursday. The idea is to write 50,000 words of a novel in a month. I did it last year along with 256,618 writers. Officially, 36,843 wrote the 50,000 words. But there may have been a few like me who did not upload their 50,000 words and officially verifying them. After I typed my 50,000 th word my brain was too tired to figure out the verification process. I had hoped to finish the novel I am writing long ago so I could do NaNoWriMo again this year, but illnesses, life and less than stellar motivation have conspired against my writing efforts. But then I thought maybe I could use this year’s NaNoWriMo to finish the novel. I hopefully checked the rules, but they say the novel has to be from scratch. So I could join NaNoWriMo and pretend I am writing the novel from scratch or I could not join and just write the 50,000 words in a month anyway. I have chosen to do the...

  A few weeks back I saw Tony Birch speak about his Miles Franklin nominated novel Blood. I bought a copy of the novel due to Tony being part-indigenous (I have an evolving interest in novels written by Indigenous Australian or with indigenous characters in them) and also out of a sense of obligation for him coming all the way to Wangaratta to give his free talk to a one-third full room. I am so glad I felt both the need and obligation to buy it. Blood is an excellent novel that tells a tragic but hopeful story, with a main character who is so real, his voice so authentic.   The novel is narrated by a Jesse a thirteen-year-old part-Indigenous Australian. The entire book is written in very simple language, the language a thirteen-year-old would view   the world in. For example, instead of elaborate descriptions of his world, Jesse describes a room as dirty, or the scenery around a road as having a few pine trees. Jesse is aware that his mother has sex with ...

Bottomless River by Anthony J. Langford My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Bottomless River begins in a small town in rural Australia. Three mates, Danny, Tom and Jen, regularly get together at a river bank for harmless fun and banter. But their carefree world is poisoned when they get drunk one night. Danny cannot forgive himself for what he has done. He no longer trusts himself and leaves town. But he finds the events of that night can’t be drowned under more alcohol. Like Danny, readers yearn to find out what has happened to the two friends he deserted. The novella is an excellently written depiction of small-town Australia. The author comes up with plenty of original similes as he explores guilt and regret. And the dialogue is as natural as the river the teenagers meet by. The Bottomless River has an emotional punch thrown by believable characters. Danny’s inner turmoil seems so realistic that many readers will ask whether the author is writing from experience. If he is, then h...

  I have recently seen two very good movies in my two favourite science fiction tropes apocalypse and time-travel.   Both were vastly different in ambition and scope. Looper is an action adventure time-travel film while Melancholia is a quiet drama about the end of the world. Looper In Looper time-travel is used by future criminal syndicates to send their victims back to our near future where they are killed by hired assassins called Loopers.   We are told at the start of the movie that victims have to be sent back in time because it is impossible to secretly dispose of their bodies in the future. Once I accepted that, I had no other problems with the film’s mythology. A condition of becoming a Looper is that the criminal syndicate will track down your future self and send it back for you to kill, and close the loop. But when a Looper is confronted with his future self, he fails to kill him and his future self escapes.   The syndicate is not ...

  Indigenous Writing. A few months ago I wrote a post about the lack of indigenous characters in Australian fiction. I determined then to read more novels with Indigenous Australians in them that were hopefully written by Indigenous Australians. I have just finished Peter Docker’s The Waterboys. Peter Docker is not an Indigenous Australia, but according to notes in the book he had a lot of help from Indigenous Australians in writing the novel and he grew up on a station near Esperance in WA. The main character in the Waterboys is not Indigenous Australian, but he has adopted their culture. His best mate and second main character is an Indigenous Australian, and so are many of the other characters. The novel is an alternative history, where only the eastern states of Australia have been colonised. The reason WA was not colonised is that Captain Freemantle fell in love with the indigenous culture and decided he did not want it to be devastated by English rul...