Editor Bashing

I have been witnessing lately, in a few discussion forums, some fairly bitter attacks on editors. Many writers have clearly had what they perceive to be bad experiences with editors. Obviously I cannot comment on the quality of those editors’ work. No doubt there are many editors out there who don’t do very good work, as is true in any profession.

I have read many books by self-published authors who thank the editor in their acknowledgements; but I can see no evidence that their work has been seriously or competently edited. Is this because the editor did a poor job? Or is it because the author did not accept the editor’s advice? It’s impossible to say. I have also been approached to edit books which the author has already paid another editor to edit. They are not happy with the result. Perhaps the editor did a poor job. Or perhaps the author simply didn’t like what the editor had to say. Again, who knows?

Sometimes authors do not like what editors suggest, or what they try to do to their work. Is the editor wrong, or is the author too emotionally involved in the work to accept any changes or criticisms? My first novel, Maybe they’ll remember me, which I self-published more than two years ago, has recently been accepted for publication with a small, independent publishing house. They will want to edit it, I’m sure. Because I wrote and published that book more than two years ago, I have no illusions about its quality. I think I am a better writer now than I was then, and I have no doubt that the book can be improved. Perhaps it takes this long, and several subsequently completed novels, to become sufficiently detached from my own work. On the other hand, if my most recent novel is accepted by a publisher, I accept it will need to be edited. I have no doubt there are elements that can be improved, and which I have overlooked. That’s not to say, of course, that I will automatically agree with everything the editor says. No one should!

The only reason I don’t have my own novels professionally edited (and as both an editor and a writer I know that I should) is that I can’t afford it. That is one of the great things about being published in the traditional way: I don’t have to pay for editing!

I know what it means as a struggling author to have to pay for cover design, editing, book promotion. With no guarantee of any financial return on my investment. I try to offer people an affordable editing service; but, even so, I know that some writers cannot afford it. I also realise that I cannot always make the author happy, particularly in the manuscript assessment/structural editing phase of the process. I cannot force people to accept my advice. And not even the very best editor can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

My ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’

I’m fascinated with how writing works for me; and I’m not saying it has to work this way for anyone else. I’m so fascinated by it, in fact, that it sometimes becomes the theme of my writing itself. And not just in a blog like this. It is one of the main themes in the novel I have just completed, although I have transferred the ideas to painting.

I should say something about the genesis of this novel. Over the last two years or so, I have completed four novels. None of my novels are epics. The first was the longest, coming in at around eighty thousand words. The second and third come in at between fifty and sixty thousand words; the fourth is just about sixty thousand. Size doesn’t bother me. I usually have something to say, and when I’ve said it, that’s it.

These first four novels all seemed to flow fairly easily. Not that there wasn’t struggle and heartache along the way! There always is. But I never became completely stuck. But the fifth… the fifth was a different matter. Before I finished this fifth novel, I started four others. Some of them struggled into the high twenty-thousands before grinding to a painful halt. I was stuck, with nowhere to go. Stuck on all four fronts. I didn’t start all four at once. It was only when I became well and truly mired that I would start the next… and become stuck again.

This went on for months. Weeks would go by when I added nothing to any of them. Then I might add a chapter—or a paragraph—to one of them, and grind to a halt again.

Three of these proto-novels all contained thoughts, plotlines and ideas that I have been playing with for years, even before I completed my first. Some of them were even going to be in the first, until that took on a life of its own and went in a completely different direction. One of these novels began as a fictionalised biography, beginning with my childhood. Some of the chapters reflected real events, others were completely fictitious. I had no idea where this story would go beyond those early childhood years. My own life isn’t really that interesting. I didn’t have a story that would interest anyone else. The second of these proto-novels tried to deal with my years in theological college. As far as I have moved from that scenario, it seemed to me that there were still things that needed to be said. Again, though, I doubted that anyone would be interested in what actually happened. I did not have a story in which anyone else would be interested. The third of these aborted novels tackled the theme I have in mind here, namely, how a novel—or, in fact, a painting—comes into being. In this version, a kind of future, older version of me would be the protagonist.

The fourth of this—quaternity?—won’t get much of a mention here. It is still out there on its own, out on a limb. Maybe one day…

The breakthrough came when I suddenly realised that these three proto-novels were all, in fact, part of the same novel. Neither would tell a complete story on its own, but woven together in just this way, adding that here and leaving this out there, there just might be a novel here. Something that others might actually find interesting. Much to my surprise, there even re-emerged some elements that were going to be in my first novel, but which were abandoned long ago.

So there it is, finished. It is always possible that I may be deluding myself about whether it works. The stitches where I have joined these pieces together may still show. Perhaps what I have created is some kind of Frankenstein’s monster. It will take another, more objective eye to determine this.

I have been putting a few ‘final’ touches to this novel over the last few days, before leaving it to—what do they say about a roast?—relax for a while. And today, I suddenly had an idea for the next novel. And I am even beginning to see how the fourth, abandoned novel might, just possibly, contribute to its development.

What often happens is that I get an idea, nothing more than a germ of an idea. The idea that prompted me to start was this: Let’s suppose for a moment that what some people believe is actually true, and that we each have lived many past lives. Then, what if…? And that’s all you’ll get from me today. I have this idea, but I have no plot, no story, no characters. Nevertheless, I wrote the introductory paragraphs today. I have never planned a novel. I think a mother might emerge as a main character here, and she may take over the development of the story for a while. She may let me in on the secret. I have an image in my mind from an old science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein—Stranger in a Strange Land—which may influence the plot. But that’s about it. I have a rather irrational faith that the elements of this novel will eventually emerge. And if not…well there is still this fourth novel of the quaternity. I also have an idea for…

Angel's Harp: An Extract

I don't do this often, but I thought I would present today an extract from my novel Angel's Harp. I describe this as a novel in four movements. I hope you enjoy this tiny taste.

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There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.

– Pythagoras

Birth or Death? There was Birth, certainly

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

– T. S. Eliot, The Journey of the Magi

*

It was an indulgence, perhaps. A scattering to the wind of money he might well have dispensed more wisely. But it had evolved into far more than a holiday. It had become a kind of pilgrimage, a journey into healing. Or so he hoped. He might almost be able to believe in something again. In what wasn’t yet clear. In humanity? In God? In himself?

He had seen all that he had hoped to see, and more. Stonehenge at dawn on the summer solstice, listening to Sonnenaufgang from Also Sprach Zarathustra. The Starry Night in Amsterdam, in the Van Gogh Museum, when by sheer chance it happened to be on loan from New York for a few months. Holbein’s dead, so very dead, Christ at the Kunstmuseum in Basel. The magnificent Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica. This and much, much more. And so it was that he arrived at last in Florence, the final leg of his trip before returning to Rome and flying from Fiumicino back to Australia. Already, that morning, he had stood in awe before Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in the Uffizi. Now, the Accademia.

He had not expected it, turning the corner. Of course he had expected to see the statue, the magnificent David, but he had not expected this. Even from this distance, before it loomed above him, before he saw the echoes of light on the smooth marble curves. Before he became aware of the oddly small penis and the too-large head. Even from back here, seeing it framed by the narrowing perspective of the gallery walls, he felt the tug, the gut-wrenching tug. An enormous hand, perhaps the statue’s own overlarge hand, had seized his sinews and begun to pluck, to pluck a melody in which beauty and pain were one. It terrified him. Each vibration killed him, brought him to life, and killed him again. Life and death were just two halves of the same oscillation.

When Alan Carter finally boarded the flight back to Australia, he was hopeful—not certain, but hopeful—that he was again in the lifeward phase of the oscillation. Except that it was no longer quite so easy to tell them apart, life and death.

*

First Movement

1

From the first, as a child, Alan had believed in everything. Unicorns, fairies, goblins, Martians, wizards, ghosts, daleks, platypuses. Six-legged fire-breathing giraffes. Why not? He would draw one if you asked him to.

The house in Dauntsey Rd., his kingdom, had been Alan’s home for as long as he could remember, although he was born in a rented apartment in the western suburbs, while his parents were trying to save a deposit for a house. He was born on the fourth of October, 1957, the same day, his father later told him, that the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1.

‘We’ll be living on Mars by the time you’re all grown up,’ his father was fond of saying.

Not long after his birth, his parents had bought this house, a little closer to the city. His father generally preferred to work an afternoon shift at the factory, starting around three in the afternoon. When Alan was around two and a half years old his mother returned to work, covering mornings as a receptionist at a local medical practice. So Alan himself was brought up in shifts, belonging in the mornings to his father, and in the afternoons and evenings to his mother. Each shaped the world for him in their own fashion. They overlapped for an hour or two around lunchtime, and generally on weekends, unless his father worked overtime. He had no brothers or sisters with whom to compete for attention.

Alan had a large back garden in which to play out his life, a space over which he gradually established dominion during the years, giving to each corner and each feature a particular significance. In the mornings his father would often work a vegetable patch that occupied the upper left hand corner, on raised beds. Depending on the time of year, there would be corn, tomatoes, broccoli, potatoes, beans, peas, carrots, and occasionally something a little more exotic, such as artichokes or bok choy, pushing up through the soil. Alan eagerly awaited the emergence of beanstalks, but none, so far, had lived up to his expectations. As he grew older, his father would encourage him to take responsibility for a particular vegetable.

‘You look after these peas, Son,’ he might say. And together they would dig the furrows and push in the seeds. Alan would check them daily, and his mother or father, whosever shift it was at the time, would patiently allow themselves to be led by the hand to witness the first shoots pushing through the soil, and often every shoot that followed. They would make a celebration of the first harvest, shelling the peas together and making them part of a special meal, a Sunday roast lunch, perhaps—those that survived the shelling process without being eaten, that is.

Other parts of the garden were Alan’s private domain. The large rainwater tank served sometimes as a fortress that he defended valiantly, sometimes as a rocketship that he rode bravely to the moon. The clump of fruit trees in the corner, apricot, peach, almond, became a magical woodland where adventures were played out with his friends. His story book friends, that is. Sometimes he would be Robin Hood, but occasionally he preferred the role of Little John. Sometimes it was Peter Pan who climbed, ever so bravely, into the lower branches. Tinker Bell would flitter in and out of the foliage as the sun caught the surface of the shivering leaves. At other times he would be Bilbo Baggins hiding from the goblins that were always just out of sight behind one of the other trees. His world was peopled with an assortment of potential allies or enemies.

These creatures came to inhabit his garden thanks to his mother and father, who would read to him before bed every night, and who gradually taught him to recognise the words for himself. Or they would make up stories of their own. He particularly enjoyed the weekends, when his father would bring the characters to life with his range of voices, sometimes declaiming with extravagant gestures as he strode up and down the room. Long after he could read himself, he continued to enjoy these performances.

He often shared the garden with his other main friends, the family cat, Trisha and the family dog, Shep. These friends went through various incarnations over the years, but always bore the same names. In his earliest memories, Trisha was a ginger and Shep a border collie. He wrote roles for them in his adventures, roles they sometimes, reluctantly, agreed to play. When they diverged from the script he would rewrite it around them. The world was nothing if not malleable.

Until his school days, his physical world was largely delineated by that tall, grey wooden fence, bordering the garden on three sides. There were gaps between the flat wooden planks, through which he would glimpse other worlds, some of which he longed to enter, some of which he feared. The world on the left hand side was inhabited by a man and a woman, older than his parents, and therefore ancient, who spoke with a funny accent. He would sometimes spy on the man working in his vegetable patch, but then run away quickly, heart pounding, for fear of being seen. The world at the back of the garden was the domain of a whole tribe of people who worked all the time on the stripped down carcasses of cars. From there would emanate sounds of music and shouting and laughter, and sometimes the roar of resurrected engines. The precise composition of this tribe seemed quite fluid, although Alan could rarely identify individual faces. Sometimes they became the goblins from which it was necessary to flee.

On the right hand side he glimpsed something entirely different. It looked to him like a wild world, a jungle, and he would sometimes think that strange animals were crawling through the undergrowth towards him. One of these strange creatures, it turned out, was Melanie.

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If you enjoyed this, why not consider buying a copy. Click on the book cover and this will take you to a page with information about where to purchase a print copy or an eBook.

Review: The Green Storm, by Bud Santora

There are some very creative and original ideas in this sci-fi/fantasy novel. I would classify it more as sci-fi than fantasy, because the author seeks to provide a real world, pseudo-scientific explanation for the strange events that occur in the story. This is very much our world, without magical elements.

The story is told in two main streams, a present day stream, in which we find the Guillory family and their close associates living in their island home off the New England coast, and a past stream, beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, telling of their forebears. This latter stream tells of William Guillory and his family and the founding of a carnival on the island, with the aid of Pompey Wright and his carnival troupe and family. We learn of the tragedy that strikes William’s family, and of the friendships and even romances that develop among these people. There are some lovely, warm, romantic touches in the human element of this story. This stream of the story is also peppered with delightfully eccentric minor characters. The era is recreated beautifully. The contemporary story tells of strange meteorological events occurring, of the strange transformation taking place on the planet, and their effect on William’s present day descendants, Mike and his family. I did not become as attached to these people, although the family dogs are endearing. At times, the story is told from their point of view (you will understand how and why when you read the book). The descriptions of the transformation taking place in the world, and of the creatures populating this new eco-system, are carried out with considerable imagination and flair. The author was able to paint a very vivid picture. The scenario also has a certain internal plausibility, given the parameters.

About the sci-fi element of the plot I cannot say too much without giving the plot away. However, I will say that it is here that I find the main flaw in the novel. The plot involves an underwater civilisation of merfolk. This is not giving too much away, since it can be read in the blurb about the paperback edition. However, there are, in my mind, two sci-fi plots here, the second of which ultimately subsumes the first and makes this first plot virtually irrelevant. This second sci-fi plot, introduced in Chapter 27, is sufficient to account for the events that occur in the present, without any reference at all to the earlier events. It would be possible to read the present day events, plus Chapter 27, without any need at all to refer to these earlier events. What occurs to William’s wife Emily and other members of his family has no connection with what later happens to Mike and his family. The fate of these earlier characters is also dealt with rather callously. Others may disagree with this interpretation of the plot, or may be prepared to overlook this perceived discontinuity.

I’m not sure why the author decided to structure the sci-fi plot in this way. In my opinion, the story would have worked perfectly well with just one of these two plots. The future events could easily have been made to occur without the event described in Chapter 27, based just on what had happened prior to this. Alternatively, the events in Chapter 27 could have been made to predate the story. Both of these options would have also made it possible to deal with the earlier characters more kindly, and create a stronger emotional link between the characters of the past and those of the present. I could envisage a meeting between Mike and his great grandmother, Emily... I see this as a missed opportunity.

I have a few other minor issues. At times the author has to resort to an omniscient ‘Orson Welles’ type narration to tell the story of the transformation of the world. This doesn’t quite work for me. Otherwise the point of view tends to jump around from character to character even within a single chapter, and the writing would have benefited from more discipline and control. The author also sometimes resorts to dialogue between characters to impart information to the reader, which makes these conversations awkward and unnatural. There are also a couple of anachronisms in the early narrative stream: while both radio and telephone had been invented by 1919, the island was extremely unlikely to have a telephone line, and radio did not begin widespread broadcasting as early as this. Finally, vinyl wasn’t in use for making records until much later.

For the originality of the plot(s), for the vividness with which this new world is created, and for the warm, romantic elements of the earlier narrative, I give this book three stars.

Toys for the Boys

It sickens me that even during this so-called ‘budget crisis’ in Australia, we can always, somehow, find money to spend on toys for the boys: 12.4 billion dollars on fifty-eight new fighter planes.

We are told that, in the upcoming budget, there will be cuts across the board, that everyone will have to pull their weight. Not defence though, apparently. Oh no, not defence. And you can probably include our various spy organisations in that too. We have to be prepared, apparently, to defend ourselves against possible future hostile actions from all of our great ‘friends’ in the region.

We have to cut back on our foreign aid; but oh no, not defence. Never mind that increasing our foreign aid in the region would probably be a much better investment and, in the long term, a much better form of defence. But pictures of our Prime Minister beside a newly dug well are not nearly as impressive as pictures of our Prime Minister sitting in the cockpit of a fighter plane.

Defence, apparently, is more important than health, education, social services, disability support and the environment. Defence, apparently, is more important than the lifestyle, wellbeing, and values we are supposedly defending.

Never give up! Really?

Every so often on this blog I launch an attack on a popular saying or sentiment. Why? Because these are often repeated without any real thought or understanding of their implications. Because they are often said in lieu of actually saying anything at all. ‘Never give up’ is one of these.

Giving up is sometimes the most appropriate response in a given set of circumstances… Unless you are absolutely convinced that bashing your head against that wall will eventually knock down that wall, rather than turn your head into pulp. Sometimes what we are trying to do is not a good idea. Sometimes we are not very good at what we are trying to achieve. Sometimes the cost of continuing is far greater than the benefits that might accrue from ‘success’.

‘Never give up’ is the cry of the gambling addict. It is always possible that the next press of that button—or whatever it is you do on those infernal machines—will be the winning press. If I stop now I will be tormented for the rest of my life. Just one more press and I might have won millions! Just one more bash of my head and the wall might have come tumbling down. The next publisher could be THE ONE!

Even those who have succeeded after never giving up—and, who knows, they might have been just one bash short of giving up—may have been better off giving up. Maybe JK Rowling might have written something better if she had not expended so much energy on promoting Harry whatsisname. Or maybe she would have written nothing, become a Nobel prize winning physicist, and invented time travel.

If we decide to give up, if we decide to make a strategic retreat and cut our losses, there will always be that nagging doubt that we might have succeeded if... Those (few) who appear to have persisted and ultimately succeeded—and we never hear, of course, about those who died still trying—will always be there to urge you on. Give up, and there will always be that nagging doubt. Deal with it.

Finally, don’t let the never-give-uppers convince you that to give up is to fail. It’s actually a very profound and courageous form of success. To give up is to realise that I am not, after all, particularly well-suited to that particular pursuit. I’m not, after all, quite cut out to break the fifteen hundred metres freestyle record. I’m probably not going to invent that time machine. Maybe I’m not quite as good a writer as I thought I was. Giving up sets you free to follow other pursuits, to find that thing you really are good at. And maybe it gives you the freedom to live in the here and now, rather than in the unrealised—and possibly unrealisable—dream.

What to do next...

At the end of the novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey (as also in the movie), we are left with an image of the Starchild, the super-evolved new form of Dave Bowman, astronaut, hovering above the earth and wondering what to do next. That, to me, has long symbolised the challenge, not just of being a super-evolved human, but of being an ordinary, everyday human. What do I do next?

Traditional religion has often posed the question: Why am I here? Personally, I don’t believe that I have been brought into this world for some kind of secret (or obvious) purpose. Human beings came into existence through an entirely natural and wonderful process of evolution. Evolution has no plan. It doesn’t think ahead. Natural selection responds to existing conditions, and sometimes it leads to useless dead ends. So I am not here for a purpose, as a result of some divine or natural plan. Nevertheless I am here; and the question that always faces me is: What do I do next?

I wouldn’t claim that we are the only creatures on this planet, let alone in the wide universe, who face this question. Nevertheless, we do seem to depend less on instinct and more on conscious decision-making than most other animals. Almost certainly we are driven by instinct more often than we care to admit. But much of what I do has to be decided. It doesn’t really matter whether other creatures also face this dilemma. It doesn’t even matter whether you do. I know that I do.

When we are younger, particularly in our teenage years, we battle for our freedom. We don’t like being told what to do by those in authority. We rebel! And spend the rest of our lives looking for someone or something that will tell us what to do next. Whether they are political leaders, great philosophers, religious leaders, or pop stars, we look for someone to lift from us this terrible burden of decision-making. No wonder neither religion nor totalitarianism ever quite go away. We want what we so detested in our parents: someone to tell us what to do next.

It can be tiring, this decision-making, this unending process of self-motivation. One of the characters in the novel I am currently working on has these thoughts:

He wanted to be a bee or an ant, or some other creature that was simply what it was, and didn’t have to decide what to be, or feel guilty about what it was or wasn’t. He doubted that an ant or a bee experienced guilt.

No doubt someone will want to argue that it’s possible that ants and bees feel guilt. Fine. Let them. All I know is that decision-making inevitably involves guilt. When faced with a choice, it is always possible that I will make the wrong choice. And, of course, in the real world there is never a simple ‘right or wrong’ choice. Every choice I make will have good and bad consequences, to a lesser or greater degree. There’s always room to feel guilty about the bad ones.

So, every day—every moment—I feel like that Starchild, looking at the world around me and wondering what I will do next. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not all bad, by any means. It’s also wildly exhilarating! Possibility is both frightening and exciting, like the best rides in a theme park. With all the burdens that come with this freedom to do, I would never again swap it for the security of the State or the comfort of Religion.