I'm about to crash, but...

Okay, so I need to finish THE NOVEL some time next month. To do this I'm going to have to "crash" in the Kazuo Ishiguro sense.

As Alan Hollinghurst explains it:

“He [Ishiguro] takes a lot of time to prepare a novel, just thinking about it, and then he draws a line through his diary for three or four weeks. He just writes for 10 hours a day, and at the end he has a novel.”

Well, my crash isn't quite like that. I mean, I've already written 85,000 words. But I need a couple more in places, a couple less in others. I need to make one character appear in an earlier chapter because I've said he was there in a later one. And once I've got everything "in", I have to make it sound not sound like writing. 

So in a week or two I'm going to stop blogging until THE NOVEL is put to bed.

But before I hit 'snooze', I've got to post my thoughts on the two Jim Shepard short story collections I've read (once I've written those reflections, of course).

And I just bought the new poetry collections from Geoff Cochrane and James Brown, and Jenny Pattrick's new novel Skylark.

I'm excited about all three, but nothing can quite compare to the excitement of having a new volume of Geoff Cochrane in your hands.

The closest thing I can compare it to is when I was in my early teens and I'd just brought a new CD and you can't do anything until you've listened to it. We didn't have a CD player in our car, so sometimes I had to make do with reading the liner notes on the way home. Some times, OK Computer for example, the art and the lyrics were a good place to start. Other times, something by The Stone Temple Pilots say, reading the lyrics let a little of the air out of an album.

So when I jumped on the bus today after spending all my allowance on books, I just had to start reading The Bengal Engine's Mango Afterglow.


It's good. How can it not be? But I'm going to take my time, read it alongside Warm Auditorium and then post something thoughtful when I return from my crash.

Until then, you can pass the time by reading my take on Cochrane's previous collection, The Worm in the Tequila. (NB: I totally picked that 'The Lich-gate' would make it into Best NZ Poems 2010)

₰

While I'm posting photos of books on the spare bed in my office, here's my copy of The Warwick Review's NZ issue which arrived in the mail about ten days ago.

It features cover boy Vincent O'Sullivan, Fiona Kidman, Elizabeth Smither, Greg O'Brien, CK Stead, Chris Price, Diana Bridge, Patrick Evans and my short story, 'The Cuddies', which begins the night before Valentine's Day:

In the last few hours before sunrise, Dave Cuddie took the opportunity to visit old friends. He walked along the rows, directing his flashlight at the plaques and nodding his greeting to Hot Chocolate, Dusky Dancer, Racy Lady -- names that had lost their humorous tingle in this his seventh year patrolling Mrs Bonaventure's rose garden.

If you want to read the whole story and you're not in the UK (or can't wrangle a copy of WR), you'll just have to wait until a kind publisher lets me release another collection of short fiction (and hope 'The Cuddies' makes the cut). So, 2021 maybe?

What Writers Can Learn From Young (Wannabe) Rock Stars

[via Perpetual Folly]

Over at The Review Review, Dan Chaon has some advice to young writers: "if you want to be rock stars, you have to read."

Occasionally, I have students who want to be rock stars... Without fail, these kids know everything there is to know about new music. They are listening all the time—they can discourse on Bob Dylan as easily as they can talk about the new e.p. from a new band from Little Rock, Arkansas, or wherever, and they have a whole hard drive full of demos from obscure artists that they have downloaded from the internet.


I wish that my students who want to be fiction writers were similarly engaged.

Chaon rallies against the "lame-o people who want to be published in journals even though they don’t read the magazines that they want to be published in."

I'd add a few more reasons why writers and readers should support their literary magazines. For one, lit mags give writers a chance to showcase their small (in terms of length) triumphs without having to worry about amassing a book’s worth of triumphs and convincing a publisher to pony up with the money to get it out there.

For readers, a good lit mag is a chance to find new-to-you writers and spot new-to-the-scene writers who may go on to make waves.

There’s also something to be learnt from individual pieces. Just because Joe Poet never got it together long enough to publish his own collection, doesn’t mean ‘Upland Road, November 1994’ can’t be the greatest poem ever written in your opinion (just as rock star wannabes are wont to proclaim b-sides by CBGB scenesters as the greatest song of all time); or Jenny Prose’s story written in the second person plural won’t open your eyes to a new way of approaching a story.

The number and variety of literary magazines in New Zealand is less than in the States, but per head of population we probably do quite well. In print there are the stalwarts like Landfall, Sport, JAAM and Takahe, and new comers like Hue & Cry and Enamel. Some Australian publications like Etchings encourage NZ contributors. There are enough opportunities out there to get published without being swamped with reading material. Us writers should all subscribe to as many lit mags as we can.

I wonder how a subscription to Landfall would go down as a secret santa present?