An occasional blog...

November 2020
The world has changed since I last wrote in March, when the global Covid pandemic was just beginning. No need to chronicle it here---we are all too aware of it, though here in South Australia we have been more fortunate than most. So are we straining to hold up our heads and heavy hearts? Or are we holding tight to love and living? Or both? In the book of Deuteronomy we are powerfully encouraged to choose life. This image has particular resonance for me at the moment, becasuse, after years of suffering the effects of dilated cardiomyopathy, I was recently listed for a heart transplant; a heart that will offer new possibilities for life and living. Such a gift!!! Heartfelt thanks to all those who have made the difficult decision to release a loved one’s organs for donation. In the midst of your pain you offer others life and hope. Meanwhile another draft of The Tiger Game, joyous and easy now becase of good advice from a writing friend.
March 2020
A friend sent me this quote: And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed. ~Kitty O’Meara
February 2020
This has been the month of learning to read again, and listening to audio books. I was out of the habit, allowing myself to be distracted and delayed by unimportant trivial. I started with Doris Brett, Eating the Underworld, and ironed with Os Guiness, Carpe Diem Redeemed, then it was on to Lisa Genova's Still Alice. I have begun Helen Garner's This House of Grief after a long delay. Meanwhile an early Mandy Sayer sits by the bed, and recent issues of the Australian Book Review float around the kitchen. Reading. I had forgotten what a necessity it is for a writer. A luxurious delight and highly nutritious.
January 2020
Like Noah's dove The Tiger Game flies around the world looking for a place to land. No definitive news yet. Meanwhile it's a new year. New possibilites. New blank paper/screen. Old ideas that have been simmering for years--a house with a red roof; caves; dormant volcanoes; a troubled family; spinning and knitting; a child who draws. Will it grow into a novel? Maybe. Or there's that housy diary-kind of book about gardens and fruit trees, making sour dough, growing dye plants, spinning wool and knitting. About living more and consuming less. About chooks and plums and home made vinegar, our friends the magpies who sit on our doorstep chortling, those fruit-raiding possums and other people's cats.
December 2019
The Tiger Game (cont) But is it? Hopefully this is the last blog of this stage of the writing process, though one never really knows. Next week I will be sending the ms off to see if it can make its way in the world. After fourteen years of writing, it's the fourth major draft, stripped down, tidied up, tenses and POVs changed. I have read the whole thing aloud more than once, a good technique for showing up gremlins. Writing is a dumb job. Will it get published? Will it be paid for? Will anyone actually read it? Time will tell. (Uh oh, cliche!)
November 2019
The Tiger Game (cont) I think it was Kerryn Goldworthy who once wrote that some writers write the way a bowerbird collects, piling up disparate items and ideas and hoping that the parts will eventually cohere towards a new creative work. I found these two old medical texts at a market in about 2005, about the time I began writing The Tiger Game; The Ladies' Handbook, originally published in 1912 but my edition reprinted in 1947, and Modern Medical Counsellor, published in 1957. Vera, one of the main characters of The Tiger Game, reads these two volumes in 1959, and discovers more about the mysterious workings of her own anatomy. If I hadn't found these books for Vera she might have stayed dangerously ignorant.
October 2019
The Tiger Game (cont) On the home stretch... After fourteen years and various adventures I'm now into the fourth major draft of The Tiger Game, Part 4 of a 4-part novel. In the last couple of months I have stripped out 30,000 words, changed points of view, changed tenses, dreamed of finishing by Christmas and presenting myself wtih an uncluttered work place. I'd post a before-photo but it's too embarrasing.
September 2019
The Tiger Game (cont) This is a photo of the water tower at Karoonda, South Australia, a place I knew well in my childhood, and which I have reinvented as the pivotal geographical point for the plot of The Tiger Game. The Tiger Game is entirely fictitious, though I have used the layout of Karoonda for the invented town of Harveston.
August 2019
Work continues on the new novel, The Tiger Game, The title is based on the Indian game Puli Joodham, also known as Lambs and Tigers. The story opens in 1959 and follows the lives of three women through several decades.