I’m terribly proud of my friend Ana Kokkinos’s new film of The Book of Revelation. Actually, I haven’t seen it yet, because it hasn’t arrived in NZ, but it has been invited to Toronto Film Festival and premiered in Melbourne Film Fest last month. I’m proud anyway – of her.
It was always going to be a tough and dark film, challenging audiences and critics, as did Rupert Thomson’s novel. She’s a brave, thoughtful and insightful film-maker.
But I delight most in the fact that she made herself into a film-maker, at a ripe old age (I can’t remember, exactly, it seems so long ago – in her late 30s, I suppose) after years as a lawyer, and her partner Mira also leaped from paid work tilting at windmills to starving in a writers’ garret. Well, almost. They both took a risk, and began to do what they most wanted to do.
It would be enough if they were making a living and producing anything – that they are both writing, and in Ana’s case directing, varied and remarkable films is a wonderful, inspiring thing. But then they are both wonderful inspiring things, and always have been.
Salute.

You can watch a few clips and an interview with Ana from the ABC’s At The Movies show here.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant.
The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.
~ Winston Churchill

Here are the dates of the launches for book two in the Swashbuckler trilogy:

Auckland
Thursday 28 September, 6pm, Jabberwocky Bookshop, 202 Dominion Road, Mt Eden.

Melbourne
Wednesday 18 October, 6.30pm, Readings Books, 253 Bay Street, Port Melbourne (my spiritual home).
You’re all welcome.

What an odd week.
I read The Pirate’s Revenge, hot off the press, and although I’ve read it a million times since I finished writing it, it has had a strange effect.
There are a couple of flabby sentences in the first half that I wish were better, and the feeling is a little like looking back in time to a moment when I was just making it up as I went along and hoping the writing would work. Of course it’s a very different set of words to those I originally wrote, and I’ve edited it several times since then.
But I read it now and realise how much there is still to learn and know, how much more disciplined I’ve grown over the last year with all the editing and writing – so different in fiction than in journalism. I’m so hard on myself and others when I edit the magazine, and I have to learn all over again how to be my own harshest critic in fiction.
But perhaps other critics will be more harsh – we’ll see in a few weeks when it hits the shops and the media.
It’s paying off in my work on an old manuscript this week, as I pore over it word by word, and realise how much more there is to do and how much time one paragraph can and should take.
And also, I realise now that I’ve always believed my life would change irrevocably once I’d written a novel and somebody had actually published it; but now, as my second book rolls off the drydock, life is much the same, although it contains more work and a little more to worry about.

How To Be a Poet
(to remind myself)

by Wendell Berry

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill — more of each
than you have — inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgement.
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
There are only sacred places
And desecrated places.

from Given: New Poems, Shoemaker & Hoard, Washington DC, 2006 (but I read it on Miss Snark)

The other morning my better half was sitting at my desk plucking her eyebrows or some such thing and as I passed she said: “You know, you’re not really like other people’s girlfriends.”
After I finished staring blankly, she pointed out the scribble on the otherwise empty page of my notebook:
Actual maggots.
Made perfect sense to me.
I’m rewriting a story about a World War One ambulance driver. There must be maggots. I have hinted at maggots. I have mentioned maggots in passing. But so far there have been no actual maggots. Never let it be said that there was telling about maggots rather than showing of maggots.
In those two words lies an entire rewrite and rethink on a manuscript that’s been haunting me for years now. It’s not actually about maggots at all, but about voice and tense and representation of action.
Granted, a maggot or two may eventually make an appearance, but that’s beside the point.
Anyway, I have just now finished my final assignment in one of my college subjects (oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen) so I can now get to grips with those maggots.
Which reminds me, when you use maggots as bait you call them “gentles”. Wish I understood the etymology of that. I imagine it’s one of those marvellous British inversions, or simply because they are white and soft – like gentlemen rather than poachers?
They’re very good for trout (Izaak Walton recommends them for barbel, but we don’t much see their kind abouts these parts).
So instead of fishing on this fine spring afternoon, I’ve got plenty of gentles to be going on with.

First of September. Never mind Spring and all that. It is, as we Melburnians say, the business end of the footy season.
We’ll draw a kindly veil over my own team’s performance this season, but I would like to share with you my favourite passage of sport-related writing, which also happens to be, for my money,the most perfectly rendered colloquial strine (that’s Australian) since The Sentimental Bloke:

‘If I’ve arksed youse boys once I’ve arksed youse a thousand times, don’t buggerise with the bloody ball on them flanks, kick the bugger up the bloody centre.’

Cracks me up, every time. That’s from Phillip Gwynne’s young adult novel, Deadly Unna?
My grandfather used to shout something similar at almost every match: “Don’t handball it, son – kick it up the bloody middle!”
I’ve been known to yell it once or twice myself, at the telly.

My advance copies of The Pirate’s Revenge have just arrived from the publisher.
I picked one up and it felt like it had nothing to do with me at all, something only strangely and vaguely familiar, instead of something I wrote and rewrote and edited and proofed and re-read a million times.
Now it’s turned into a book. How odd.
I suppose I’ll have to sit down and read it now.
I wonder what happens in the end?

Bloody Sarah Waters.
I’m in the middle of rewriting an old manuscript of mine set on the Somme in World War One – about a woman ambulance driver.
Now I’ve just stupidly read Waters’ The Night Watch, which is in part about a woman ambulance driver in London during the Blitz and it’s done my head in.
Mind you, I’m very glad I read it. I was putting it off for fear it wouldn’t be as brilliant as Fingersmith, and it is indeed very different but equally compelling.
I’ve read a few unkind or at least unsure reviews but, by God, the woman’s a chameleon. Fingersmith is a perfect rendering of the sensational Victorian novels – think Wilkie Collins or perhaps Mrs Henry Wood – as well as the erotica of the era. (I was less convinced by Tipping the Velvet, which felt too predictably like Rubyfruit Jungle in costume.)
Now she has switched eras and perfectly captured the feel, sombre mood and even the syntax of the novels written by women during or about the War. One feels almost as if it’s a novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard or Elizabeth Taylor, except of course there’s that modern courage about issues of sexuality and politics that Howard in particular never quite summoned (understandably – if only Howard’s Sid had run into Waters’ Kay, life might have been rather different for the Cazalets).
Waters has chosen to unravel a narrative backwards from 1947 to 1941. I heard her speak here a few months ago, and she explained that she wanted to reveal her characters gradually, just as you find out about people when you first meet. But even though their pasts, and specific events, are made quite clear during the narrative I was still profoundly shocked at the climax. Not by the fact of the event, but as a result of her precise prose.
The Night Watch will stay with me for some time.
I started reading Kevin Baker’s Paradise Alley straight away, to take my mind off it, but now I’m stuck in the Potato Famine and it’s too horrible to read late at night. I might have to flee to Jane Austen or something calming.

The books are the best of me. When people ask me why I write I tell them it’s what I’m for. It really is as simple as that.
~ Jeanette Winterson