Express Media – We're here for young writers

So something came up as a sponsored ad on the columns email and for once it wasn't about shyster agents, self publishing for a squillion dollars, or novel writing software that 'does all the work for you guaranteed'. It was actually about the nerdiest/possibly best book site I've seen in a while and an opportunity for serious book nerds like us to win some cash and possibly get job. So this new site called Book Drum aims to 'enhance' books by supplementing them with all sorts of information available on the internet. They basically go through a book, bookmark a whole bunch of quotes and random references and then find more information on them, or audio, videos and photos that complement the text ie. a youtube video of kite running in Afghanistan for The Kite Runner, an explanation of Carl Jung's experiments with alchemy for The Alchemist, or the music Captain Corelli is listening to in Captain Corelli's Mandolin. They're running a competition for people to do the same for their favourite book with first prize of 1000 pounds and a job interview.

The Prime Minister's Literary Awards are open again, now with two new categories for Young Adult fiction and Children's fiction. Totally down with them getting some recognition, but still nothing about poetry. Deets. The winner of each of the four categories gets $100,000. Seriously. No doubt some of them deserve the award and maybe even the money (some don't deserve either), but hot damn that is a lot of scratch. My head spins at the amount of stuff that could be done with almost half a million dollars invested across lots and lots of projects and writers. What do we think about all those zeroes?

For most of my life, up until about two weeks ago, I had the unshakeable conviction that the word ‘desiccated’ meant ‘shredded’. This is because I only ever came across the word in reference to coconut. When baking the thing that struck me most about the coconut was not the fact it had been dried but the fact it was shredded into thousands of little white strips. I recently discovered my error when a friend used ‘desiccated’ in a sentence that had nothing to do with coconut and in which ‘shredded’ made absolutely no sense. Yes, it was quite embarrassing but I’m pretty sure everyone can relate. It got me thinking about an alternate reality in which I never learnt the truth about ‘desiccated’ and died with that adamant, false belief. It probably wouldn’t matter so much. Words feel different to different people and shape the way we view and understand the world. I’m trying to re-program my brain to accept ‘desiccated’ as ‘dried’ but it’s proving very difficult. Just quietly, I think I’ll continue with ‘shredded’ but keep it to myself.

I think everyone likes to think of themselves as an insomniac at some point. It makes us feel less irresponsible about our lack of self-discipline when it comes to staying up late when you know it's not good for you. My bad sleeping habits came and hit me in the face today when I discovered that I couldn't hold a word in my head long enough to tell my hand to write it down. It was really scary. I had always prided myself on being able to function like a sane person whilst others were zombified without their eight hours. But this morning I rolled out of bed and faced the inevitable crash that all my mates had made infamous. Nothing worked for me. My toothpaste tasted weird and my breakfast wasn't toasted and I tripped over my dog twice trying to get out of my room (she bit me in thanks). When I got to the train station and spied a storyline across the train tracks I grabbed my notebook to write it down but as soon as my pen was out I was completely lost. I really had no idea what I had meant to write. It freaked me out. So I ended up trying to catch some sleep wherever I could find it (which earned my a pencil case print along my forehead and a sore neck) and have been seeking out sleeping tips from anyone who cares to listen. So please, what gets you to sleep on restless nights?

Some friends and I were discussing writer’s block a couple of weeks ago, and at some point in the conversation pens were drawn and paper was attacked with literary vigour. We began playing ‘Exquisite Corpse’, a game – if it can even be called that – invented by the Surrealists whereby a collaborative work is produced without each participant being aware of what the others have contributed. There are many versions of the game, but in our case we divided a piece of paper into three and folded it equally, with each person writing on his/her respective sections of the page. To create linking triggers, each person wrote a single word (or, if unavoidable, phrase) on the next person’s section of the page and passed it on to him/her to continue. We repeated this several times and ended up with the following:

It was overcoat weather on 4th avenue, turned a corner and saw a tree, leaves falling, wind. The bracken crunched underfoot. He looked into the puddle. In his gumboots, one leg pulsating, and I fought my way, the loose change fell without supporting itself with the thin people who always watch. A young boy walked past crying, whoring his emotions as though wild pathos lifted in a soup dish spilled across the table and drenched in non-existent, bitter tears. I wanted for nothing less, but still: the chair, Isabelle’s hair and the square bear. They hold hands waltzing, plain as a tin drum bouncing down the stairs, landed upon the doorstep. The bear's paws muddied, flaps of flogged planks endlessly tearing apart the thought of all the things he needed to do tomorrow.

Recently I read this 20,000 word essay by the late David Foster Wallace. It's called "Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise" and it was published in Harper's Magazine in 1996. I'm thinking man this is some good writing and I'm also thinking it doesn't look that hard to do but then a few jiffies after this thought I am reintroduced to that anchor-like part of my mind that is sensible and serious, and it says of course it's hard to do, otherwise everyone would be doing it, maybe even you, although I doubt it because you never get around to doing anything except following link after link on that dang computer of yours printing off 20,000 word essays and then reading and re-reading them with a pen to underline your favourite sentences and obscure words you don't know and won't even be bothered looking up in the dictionary right next to you. This kind of piece by Foster Wallace is creative nonfiction. It is factual, and it is told with artistic nous. Creative nonfiction is quite commonly attempted, and sometimes it is better than bad, although the gurus of this sort of writing are few and far between. There are melancholic masters like Sebald and trauma-inducing tellers like Augusten Burroughs and there are harebrained, drug-veined gonzo purveyors like Thompson and even local Australian writers like Giggs and Law have published creative nonfiction pieces that are as enjoyable a read as the best chapter in that novel you're reading now. But it is still that magical land, that sort of limbo dimension between fact and fiction. A lot of writers are wary of it without being able to pinpoint why, which is silly and stupid, as readers love and cry out for this type of writing. All you scribblers out there: why so scared, huh?

The launch of Virgule has got us totally overexcited and before we come to our senses we are going to give away some prizes! We're going to pick the five best comments on any post between now and April 8th, and they'll each win a copy of the upcoming issue of Voiceworks, Missionary. Knowing our tastes, 'best' probably means any of: most insightful, most interesting or funniest. Happy commenting!

If you were hit by a truck and you were lying out in that gutter dying, and you had time to sing one song, one song people would remember before you're dirt, one song that would let God know what you felt about your time here on earth, one song that would sum you up, you telling me that's the song you'd sing? That same Jimmie Davis tune we hear on the radio all day? About your peace within and how it's real and how you're gonna shout it? Or would you sing something different? Something real, something you felt? Because I'm telling you right now: that's the kind of song people want to hear. That's the kind of song that truly saves people. It ain't got nothing to do within believing in God, Mr Cash. It has to do with believing in yourself.

It's unsettling reading Patti Smith's poetry on the Internet. Written longhand or by typewriter, her words feel out-of-place against the empty white background of a computer screen, and the ease of copying or printing or saving her words even more so. http://www.oceanstar.com/patti/poetry.htm 'jag-arr of the jungle', to choose one of a dozen of brilliant, impressionistic prose poems where the past feels better than the present, follows Smith's obsession with the Rolling Stones from childhood to Brian Jones' death. It's long, but each sentence couldn't exist without the one before it. It's a poem about coming into being that develops as you read it. "I went home to America and threw up on my fathers bed. / I was antique. He had returned to light and I was holding baby hair." It's her voice that does it. Not her voice per se, but the voices that she draws up unawares from the depths of rock'n'roll speak (repetition and simple language), pop culture ("a morbid foto-recall of the past"), and every fictive swaggering hero or villain, it doesn't matter which, who makes up things on the spot and therefore believes in them above everything else, in things "shaped like an eleven-year-old girl with colorless eyes".

The quotation on the front of the book proclaims The Graveyard Book to be the best book Neil Gaiman has ever written. But is it? The story centres around Nobody Owens, Bod for short, who is merely a baby when the sinister man Jack enters his house and ruthlessly kills his parents and sister. Bod, who is an intrepid child for one so young, escapes and finds his way to a nearby graveyard when he taken in by the ghostly inhabitants. Gaiman obviously had much fun creating the various characters, Bod’s reserved vampire guardian and mentor Silas; Miss Lupescu the strict werewolf; a sometimes jealous witch named Liza Hempstock in an unmarked grave and the mysterious and chilling underground creature the Sleer.  Bod’s world  is not all gravestones and cheery ghosts however, the man Jack is still out there somewhere, threatening to finish the job he started. Neil Gaiman’s writing is simple without being simplistic, his characters are recognizable without being clichéd and story of finding your place in the world will be accessible to all. The ending allows nicely for a sequel and frankly, I can’t wait! The Graveyard Book is a delightful and playful mixture of the fantastical and the every day, something Gaiman excels at.