Lately I’ve been…

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Reading

  • Swordspoint and The Privilege of the Sword, by Ellen Kushner. Mannerpunk novels with lots of swordfights. Swordspoint, in particular, is delicious. And I get to claim I’m reading them for research, too.
  • Opera, or The Undoing of Women, by Catherine Clément – gorgeous critical writing.
  • The Slap. Finally. And I don’t know why it’s so compelling either, but it just is.
  • Occasional Writings, by Margaret Atwood. I meant to save it for my holiday but couldn’t.

So instead I’m taking to the beach:

  • Timepieces – Drusilla Modjeska on writing
  • The Lacuna – Barbara Kingsolver, about which I’ve heard mixed reports, but I know it isn’t The Poisonwood Bible, so I’m prepared for anything
  • The Red Shoe – Ursula Dubosarsky
  • Notes from the Teenage Underground – Simmone Howell 
  • And Bleak House. Just because.

Watching

  • Teddy Tahu Rhodes in The Marriage of Figaro
  • Firefly on DVD
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1) about which I feel better as the distance between us grows. 

The sixth HP film was always going to be slightly problematic, since it is largely about the trio and their quest/conflicts, without the usual ensemble, and all the big battles will be in the final instalment. But it really does work, not least because the three main actors are now so much better than they were when they were younger.
I’ve heard numerous stories of small children sobbing in the cinema. It’s not a little kids’ film by any stretch of the imagination – please, if your kid is not old enough to read the book without help, don’t take them to the movie.

Writing
Of course I’m writing my PhD novel. But also making scribbles for a sort of fantasy something.
And doing last minute proofing things to Act of Faith, which is now coming out in July.

Proof of life

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Proofreading’s all done on Act of Faith.

Those sharp eyes at HarperCollins spotted a few howlers, thank God. That’s what happens when you chop and change, which you inevitably do. You lose track of whether you are just before dawn or just after dawn and make your characters do a bit of time travel – not a good thing when it’s not science fiction or fantasy. Or you move a sentence and then find it swinging in the breeze, alone and without meaning. Anyway, I hope we caught them all.

That’s what editing’s for.

I love being edited. As someone who is also in the business of publishing other people’s content (albeit online), and often trains people to write for the web, I’m always astonished when people say “Don’t change a word”. Meaning, “I don’t want my pearl-like prose to be touched by some talentless hack”. Don’t you mess with my text. You’ll ruin it.

Madness.

This book has been well edited and I’m very pleased with both the process and the result. Other people see things you simply cannot see – you stop seeing – especially words or phrases you use too often. Other people ask sensible questions like “Did you mean for that to happen?”. It all goes to make the reading experience as smooth as possible. Don’t you hate it when you’re caught up in an adventure or an argument and your mind trips over a typo or a logical gap?

Of course, we all make mistakes and sometimes editors do too. Have you ever seen those websites where people dissect in minute detail any bloopers in the Harry Potter books? Well, life’s too short to spend time documenting them, but they are all good fun – just the other day I was reading Deathly Hallows and was stopped yet again by the fact that Dean has no father on one page and parents a few chapters later. It’s easy enough to do, especially with that many characters and details.No doubt there will be something, even with all this wonderful editing, in Act of Faith. I will find it the day after it comes back from the printers.

But never you mind. Which is one of those phrases I used far too often in it.

Ink on paper

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Sneak preview of the new book: opening paras. All typeset and loverly. Though you can’t tell that from here – sorry. But anyway…

My first love was a book.
It was a tiny thing, made by my father’s hand to fit into my own; inscribed in his strong, sloping letters and with a title page illustrated by him for me, with sketches of angels, horses bearing knights and red banners, roses and snowdrops and holly, and, in the centre, a unicorn.
I believed then that it was a picture of the whole world.
I remember every line of that book – even the creases in the pages – though it is many years since I held it. The year 1640, it must have been, or thereabouts.
‘In the beginning was the Word,’ he’d written on the cover and, inside, the first few words of Psalm 100: ‘Make a joyful noise.’
That’s all. You can read the rest in August.

History/fiction

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History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time which returns everything, changes everything.
~ Jeanette Winterson

/ Kelly Gardiner / Leave a comment

I write novels, short fiction and poems for adults, young adults and young readers.

My new book is Act of Faith and it’s in the shops now.

Here you can read about my books, including sneak previews of some works in progress.

I’m also a journalist and editor who has worked on newspapers, magazine and websites, and my poetry has appeared in leading literary journals. You can read some of my travel writing, feature articles and poems.

Or you can read my blogs:

From the Hudson River to the Kapiti Coast

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I never quite expected the words “Camus” and “Paraparaumu” to appear in the same story, but trust Bookslut to get there first.
An interesting post from Elizabeth Bachner on being transported by the legendary Margaret Mahy all the way from Manhattan to Paraparaumu, as an adult reader of a young adult novel. Margaret Mahy can do that to you.
Bachner has been scouring The Ultimate Teen Book Guide: More than 700 Great Books, and spends some time discussing the nature of best books – the books to which you return, no matter what age you were when you read them:

It makes me expect some new book [which will] thrill me, and heal me, and mutually love me, and make me safe. It reminds me that being full-grown doesn’t mean I have to be stolid, untransformable, bored, or dead. Beginning and ending things does not have to be teenage.

She touches on the question of whether the YA novel’s success in a crossover market is because it allows time travel by the reader back to their own adolescence or simply across genre. Or simply about finding a bloody good read.
I was wondering the same thing this morning, as it happens, having downloaded the new Scott Westerfeld, Behemoth, a ripping steampunk yarn set in World War One. Sure, I can put it down as research of my own, but the truth is that the first book in the trilogy, Leviathan, sucked me in good and proper as a reader of any age, so that I felt I had to get the ebook immediately instead of waiting to be able to locate a hardback in the shops.
My critical author brain reads it out of one eye, my breathless twelve year-old self reads it with the other.
I don’t even pretend when reading some books – for example, Harry Potter. If I think about the words on the page too much, I wish for a more heavy-handed editor. So I don’t think about it. It’s not hard. The story and characters inevitably carry me away from my adult self.
Mind you, my adolescent self largely had to get by without young adult novels and spent a great deal of time angsting with Camus too.
So maybe we’re just catching up on lost opportunities.