Belated Happy New Year!

Hi Everyone

Sorry for the delay in posting this entry, but I hope you had a wonderful festive season and are settling into your goals and targets for the new year.

As some of you know, I spend every New Year's Day going over my achievements for the previous year and setting new goals for the coming year. These goals not only deal with my writing ambitions, but also with personal things like weight control and relationships and financial things like earnings and savings. I usually end up with around 100 different goals, some minor, some major, and of course I never achieve them all, such is the dynamic of shooting for the stars and only reaching the moon.

One thing I discovered recently is the difference between Goals and Targets. Goals are those things over which you have control. Think of picking up a 60 lb bow, stringing an arrow to it, pulling back the bowstring, straining against everything as you aim. Targets are those things you don’t have control over, though you may have some influence on the outcome. Think of the target at which you’re aiming the arrow. The wind might shift when you loose the arrow, movement of a bird might distract you as you loose, and your arrow might not strike the bull’s eye. Of course, the more you train, the less likely this is going to happen, but in most things, there is always an element of outside influence.

For example, I may want to have a manuscript accepted by a major publisher this year. That’s a Target. I have no control over the editor’s feelings the day she reads it. I have no control over the gaps in her publishing program. All I can control is the completion, presentation and submission of my manuscript pitch. These I can do to the best of my ability. These are Goals. The rest is, as they say, in the lap of the gods.

So, I have one major writing Goal this year—to finish the next draft of my dark ages novel, which I hope to accomplish during my Wales residency. Once I finish the draft, I plan to submit it to beta readers and an independent editor, and then prepare it for submission to a publisher. I would love to have it accepted by the end of the year, but that of course is a Target. Wish me luck.

Meanwhile, for those in Melbourne, Geelong and nearby areas, I hope you might be able to attend an event for which I am one of the feature readers.  The details are below:

  

POLYGLOTS 2015

Many Voices from Many Lands: a celebration of our diversity

Director: E. Reilly

Poets: Earl Livings, Julie Maclean, & Geelong Writers members

Chanteuse: Marie Goldsworthy

When: Wednesday, 25 February, 6.00pm for 6.30-8.00pm (gold coin entry)

Where: Geelong West Library, Pakington Street, next to former Geelong West Town Hall (parking at rear)

Also … the launch of Azuria #4, Geelong’s independent literary journal.

Participants & audience are encouraged to wear national costume.

I wish everyone a productive, successful and joyful 2015. If you have any interesting ideas about Goals and Targets and your processes for developing then, I hope you’ll share them with us in the Comments section.

Cheers

Earl

Great News!

When I was in the UK last year researching materials and settings for my dark ages novel, I met Veronica, a visual artist who is a friend of one of my ex-students. Veronica lives in Dolgellau, a small village I had chosen as a base of operations for my research activities in North Wales. She took me to her local upon my arrival and made me welcome. Later in the week she showed me one of her favourite walks, the Precipice Walk, which has views of Cader Idris and surrounding country. We spent a wonderful afternoon foraging on blackberries and talking about nature, culture and language, one main topic being the eventual loss of minority languages unless the speakers themselves stop reverting to English whenever communication becomes difficult.

We have kept in contact since my return to Australia and recently Veronica emailed me about Stiwdio Maelor, a new studio complex she has established in Lower Corris, a small village 10 miles from Dolgellau. The studio offers residencies for one to eight weeks and contains two spaces for visiting artists and one for a visiting writer. Each space has a bedroom and an artist or writer’s room and, because there are no telephones, television or internet, one can focus completely on one’s creative projects without interruption. The surrounding areas contain many walks through the beautiful Welsh landscape.

Front of Stiwdio Maelor
Photo by Veronica Calarco

I had been planning to go back to the UK for further research and for visiting friends, but had only considered doing this when my wife, Jo, could take long service leave and we could travel together. However, once the chance of a residency came up, Jo encouraged me to apply, which was incredibly supportive of her. I did apply and this week I received the news my application has been accepted.

So, I’ll be taking up an eight-week residency in early March next year, during which I will work on the second draft of my novel. I am thrilled to be going back to Wales, especially as I will be there in Spring, a season I have never experienced before in my previous travels to the UK, Ireland and Europe. And I am enormously grateful for the chance to spend a great block of time on my writing. I’m sure my adventures there will prompt some poems, too, and I will make sure to keep you all informed of my goings on.

The writer's room: no distractions but the view out the window.
Photo by Veronica Calarco

As being a writer is generally a lonely profession, I have always felt we should celebrate our accomplishments with those sympathetic communities we find ourselves in. Thank you for sharing my news. If you have had any recent achievements, let us know about them in the comments below.

Happy reading, musing, writing

Earl

Common Writing Errors--Introduction

Although I left my permanent teaching position late last year, economic considerations meant that when a couple of sessional contracts came up I took them on. The result of this decision is that November is marking month. And because I am dealing with students of a similar standard to previous years, I am seeing the same errors in their work. Many of these also appear in manuscripts I assess privately or through organisations such as Writers Victoria. Consequently, I feel that a discussion of such errors may help beginning/emerging writers avoid them.

Below are the areas I usually cover when advising students and new writers about sources of error:

1.              Presentation/Formatting

2.              Grammar/Language

3.              Content

4.              General Observations/Advice

My intention is to deal with these areas in subsequent posts. However, as a taster of what is to come, I want to deal with one problem I frequently see: that/which confusion. I realise different countries or regions vary their approach to the treatment of—apologies for the jargon—restrictive clauses (those that are essential to the meaning of the sentence) and non-restrictive clauses (those that can be removed without affecting the meaning of the sentence). In Australian publishing, however, ‘that’ usually introduces a restrictive clause and ‘which’ introduces a non-restrictive clause, as in the examples below:

The intruder smashed the statue that was in the hallway.
(There are other statues in the house, but the intruder only broke the one that is in the hallway.)

The intruder smashed the statue, which was in the hallway.
(There is only one statue in the house and it is in the hallway.)

Basically, then, if you use ‘which’, you need a comma in front of it. And if the clause is in the middle of the sentence, you also need a comma after it:

The intruder smashed the statue, which was in the hallway, and then made off with the treasure that was hidden inside.

Does the idea of this series appeal to you? Let me know what you think by posting me a comment. And if you have a suggestion for a topic, please let me know.

Happy reading, musing, writing

Earl

Why Welsh?

In my previous post I mentioned my interests in Celtic mythology and Welsh language and history. These came about for a variety of reasons, some to do with the fact I have Welsh ancestry on my father’s side. My paternal grandmother was born in Cardiff County, Wales, and came to Australia in the 1910s. I remember when I was told this as a child I felt some sort of kinship to the country. My father then said that if I couldn’t roll my r’s like the Welsh do, then I probably had missed out on the gene. I couldn’t, and so for a long time I chose to forget this aspect of my ancestry.

My father was born in Australia, yet people who met him often commented he seemed more English than Australian. This was likely due to the influence of his immigrant parents, his father having been born in Bishop’s Stortford, Essex, England, and who had also come out to Australia in the 1910s. Given my mother was born in Antwerp, Belgium, my heritage wasn’t so definite. And possibly because of this mix and the natural tendency to uphold one’s birthplace above others, for years I considered myself Australian before anything else.

That all changed after my reading of both Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Robert Graves’s The White Goddess and I fell in love with Celtic mythology. The stories and poems comprising the Matter of Britain—Arthur, Taliesin and Merlin, bards and druids—sang to me in a way that others hadn’t. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t roll my r’s. I had Welsh blood in me (and Scottish, when I went farther back in my ancestry); and I could even rationalise my Belgian heritage by pointing out the country was named after a Celtic tribe, the Belgae, some of whom had also settled in Britain.

Since the mid-2000s I have thrown myself even deeper into my love of all things Celtic. I have travelled three times to countries of the Celtic Fringe and have read and researched materials for a Dark Ages novel. I have started learning Welsh through a group operating in The Celtic Club in Melbourne. It is a hard language to learn, especially some of the pronunciations, and my progress is slow, though I am determined to become fluent eventually. My r’s are coming along nicely.

Do I still consider myself Australian rather than English or Welsh or Celtic? That’s a hard question, as it really doesn’t have only one answer. I am Australian by birth and by language usage. I barrack for Australian teams. I hold to Australian egalitarian values. However, even though I have travelled in and through Australian landscapes and appreciated their beauty, I feel more comfortable in Celtic landscapes, the mist, the mountains, the bright and dark green foliage. I prefer autumn, winter and spring to summer.

Since my visits to the countries of the Celtic Fringe, to Wales and Scotland in particular, I now know that deep sense of longing for home the Welsh call ‘Hireath’ (pronounced ‘Here-eyeth’, with a stronger ‘r’). I can’t wait to get back there, for immersion and re-connection. In the meantime, I can at least inhabit it in my imagination, through language learning and through book research and my writing. More about these activities in future posts.

Happy reading, musing, writing

Earl

What to Expect

You might be wondering about the shift in focus of this blog, which is exemplified by the change of name. As I mentioned in my previous post, I took a redundancy package from my teaching job at Box Hill Institute and am now a full-time writer and part-time freelance teacher, editor, manuscript assessor and mentor. The previous blog reflected my teaching emphasis, even if it didn’t quite fulfil the promise I made to discuss how I used The Writing Cycle in my teaching and my own writing. While I still want to discuss that topic, I also want to include other creative areas, so that the blog will become a forum for what interests me, things like Celtic myths and symbols, myths in general, poetry, speculative and literary fiction, Welsh language and history, the Dark Ages, the Matter of Britain, and what is commonly termed the sacred.

There seems to be an agreed perception that in order to make a living from writing (at least initially), one should specialise in one form of fiction, say, whether it be paranormal romance or military SF, and present oneself in social media as a principle exponent of that speciality. For example, one’s blog posts should be about facets of the speciality, or reviews of others in the field, or interesting research titbits, or the actual writing process. I can see the sense in this approach, but I don’t think it is the only one. My own range of research interests is wide and all of them feed into my writing at one time or the other, which itself can be of different forms (poetry, fiction, non-fiction), so I see no reason in narrowing my focus to only one of these interests or one of the writing fields.

My choice of title for this rebooted blog reflects this decision. The word ‘awen’ is Welsh for inspiration, for the muse, and I see my work as responding to whatever the ‘muse’ (however you define this) gives me. I remember reading an interview with Ted Hughes at the time he was made Poet Laureate, and when he was asked what he would write his answer was something along the lines of ‘being faithful to the muse’. I happen to agree with this approach, though, like Hughes and many other writers, I don’t believe in waiting for the muse to give me something. As William Faulkner is reputed to have said: ‘I only write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes at nine every morning’.

Basically, then, this blog will feature those elements that contribute to my ‘awen project’, my attempt to follow what the muse has given me. I may discuss these ‘givens’, or the research involved in turning a given into a poem or story, or the writing techniques I feel may be useful for myself or for others. I may discuss other interests that are tangential to my experience, exploration and expression of ‘awen’, yet still somehow connected to these. I hope you will enjoy what I have to offer.

Happy reading, musing, writing

Earl

A New Start

Hi Everyone

I know it's been a long time since I posted anything to this blog. Life, as usual, got in the way, and other things had higher priority. In fact, major things have happened to my life, like the fact that in September last year I took a redundancy package from my teaching position at Box Hill Institute.

Over the last year I have been adjusting to life as a full-time writer, which has meant new regimes and new ways of making money. I can't say I have fully acclimatised to my new lifestyle, but at least I have other income streams happening while I concentrate on my writing projects.

Although I am doing some sessional teaching, both in games writing and in poetry writing, I plan to shift the focus of this blog into my new creative directions. What these are I will describe in future posts.

Meanwhile, for those interested in writing poetry, I am teaching a 'poetry for beginners' course at Writers Victoria. Below are links to a course description and an interview I did about poetry, language and publishing. Maybe I'll see some of you there.

Light Up Your Words: Poetry for Beginners

Q & A With Earl Livings


Cheers
Earl

The Next Big Thing

Hi everyone

I realise it has been a while since my last post, but I have had trouble accessing this site. That's all fixed now, in time for me to participate in The Next Big Thing chain interview series. This series features creative writers answering a set of questions about their latest book projects, which are either in development or recently published. Each writer is selected by a previous participant and in turn selects further participants in the chain. I was kindly tagged by Talie Helene and you can read her interview here. Below are my answers:

1.   What is the [working] title of your book?

At the moment, the title of the novel is Phase Shift. I have always envisaged the project as being a standalone book but, as I work on the second draft, I occasionally feel the story idea may need more than one volume. If this turns out to be the case, I will have to come up with individual book titles, while keeping the series title as Phase Shift.

2.   Where did the idea come from for the book?

I have been tinkering with the concept of the Nexer for a number of years. A Nexer is someone who can access a type of mental space that permeates and unscores the reality of the universe in which the story is set. These gifted individuals are story-healers, in that while accessing nexspace they can unblock a person's story-line, so to speak, or initiate a process where the person themselves learns to unblock her/his story-line. Nexers are considered a type of magician by those who have been helped by them and as charlatans by those with a more rational bent, those whose worldview is strictly materialist. So, after years of thinking and tinkering with story ideas, I combined the Nexer concept with the theme of a universe in a state of sudden space-time decay and wrote a first draft in which many other unexpected things came to play.

Image from sfsite.com

3.   What genre does your book fall under?



I like to think of the book as existential space opera, though of course that sort of tag is hard to sell to agents, publishers and stockists (both web and bricks and mortar). I do have a soft spot for that old genre title science fantasy, but again that might be a hard sell, especially as it has fallen out of favour. I could say philosophical science fiction, but in one sense all science fiction has some sort of philosophical basis, however simplistic or unconscious. In this current environment of small sound bites, I might have to stick with speculative fiction, which really doesn't give much away at all.

4.   What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?


Image from fanpop.com

 I don't tend to think in movie references in that way, so my answers are a little hit-and-miss. I have a young heroine, so maybe someone like Jennifer Lawrence, who played Katniss in The Hunger Games, might be a good fit. The other main characters are a middle-aged male Nexer, a young male gonzo reporter, an Indian mathematician, a late-middle-aged erg-painter, a young male spaceship pilot, and a female alien of indeterminate age. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who played John Blake in The Dark Knight Rises, might be good for the reporter, but I can't envisage anyone suitable (yet) for the others.


5.   What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

I have had several while working through the first draft and what I call the interdraft, the thinking about and planning for the next draft. My current one-sentence synopsis is, A guilt-ridden young woman must become a story-healer to stop a crazed AGI, a would-be immortal dictator, and belligerent trans-dimensional aliens from destroying every universe. I'm happy with this synopsis, especially as it is exactly 25 words, which many writing textbooks and teachers recommend as the maximum for defining one's project in a single sentence. Of course, the synopsis is bound to change as I redraft the novel and refine characters, plot and setting.

6.   Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I'm only at the start of my second draft, so what happens about publication is still a long way off. My preference is for the traditional publishing route, but in these uncertain industry times, I'm not sure I know which avenue will offer the book's best chance, not only for publication acceptance, but for distribution, marketing, advances, royalties, etc. I am hoping things will be clearer when I finish the novel, the deadline for which is the middle of next year.

7.   How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Several years ago I participated in The Year of the Science Fiction Novel workshop at the Victorian Writers Centre, which is now Writers Victoria. Lucy Sussex convened the bi-monthly sessions in which we workshopped extracts from our projects, discussed writing techniques and approaches, and heard talks by industry professionals. I handwrote the first draft early in the year, over several months, and edited extracts for the workshopping. Subsequent to the course, I transcribed the whole draft and have been doing the interdraft work while submitting other extracts to my writing group for further feedback (Hi, Torcans). I've taken a lot of time to get to the second draft stage, mainly because I was finishing other projects, but I intend to devote myself to this book for the next few months.

8.   What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?



Image from boomtron.com

 Certainly there are many things that have influenced both my writing style and the themes of all my creative work. Books like Dune, Lord of Light, Moby Dick, and The Lord of the Rings. Authors and poets like Arthur C Clarke, Gordon R Dickson, Terry Dowling, Neil Gaiman, Robert Graves, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Hermann Hesse, Robert Howard, Ted Hughes, Ursula Le Guin, H P Lovecraft, Michael Moorcock, Dylan Thomas, Clark Ashton Smith, JRR Tolkien, A E van Vogt, Karl Edward Wagner, W B Yeats, and Roger Zelazny. Movies like Blade Runner, Star Wars, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The philosophies of Plato and Plotinus. Celtic mythology. But as to which books my story is similar, I'm not sure I know. The philosophical themes point to Hesse (Siddhartha and The Glass-Bead Game) and Zelanzy (Lord of Light and The Chronicles of Amber), while the space opera and science fiction aspects point to Blish, Herbert, van Vogt and, again, Zelazny. As a summation, I would say my story has elements of Dune, Star Wars, The Voyage of the Space Beagle, The World of Null-A, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the Dorsai series and even E C Tubb's Dumarest books. However, I can't point to one or two specific books that contain a number of these elements. If there were one, I probably wouldn't need to write mine.

9.   Who or what inspired you to write this book?



Image from alexholden.net

 As I said above, there are a number of influences on my work. As for what might have directly inspired it, I don't recall a specific moment in which the idea dropped into my consciousness. I have always liked van Vogt's Nexialists and Null-A operatives and also various psychic warriors, if they can be called that, from E E 'Doc' Smith's Lensmen to George Lucas's Jedis. What I liked about the Nexialists was their ability to be generalists and to synthesis specialist knowledge into answers to pressing problems. What I liked about the Lensmen was the sub-group known as Grey Lensmen, who were not beholding to the Lensmen hierarchy and were left to their own devices, were trusted to do things for the good of all, though their processes may not be within Lensmen 'rules'. And what I have never liked about the Jedis is the sense of their only being in the service of the prevailing order (or fighting against it to establish a new order), plus the strict separation between the Light and Dark sides of the Force. Many years ago, I came up wth the name 'Nexer' for my own generalist psychic warriors, though I still hadn't identified their specific skills. (The name was an allusion to van Vogt's Nexialist and also to the sense of a nexus, those important psychic moments in a person's life that a Nexer can read and manipulate.) I then started thinking of a story about an apparent rogue Nexer awaiting execution for helping an indigenous population defend itself against the colonising humans. (Being an Australian, I am acutely aware of the terra nullius doctrine that allowed the British to colonise the continent they had 'discovered' and displace its original inhabitants.) A newly-initiated Nexer is sent to investigate the rogue's behaviour and the first scene I envisaged is when the new Nexer arrives at the planet and is confronted by the local law enforcer, who is a member of a group that has similar talents to the Nexers, but a much narrower range of duty: to the state, only. My realisation of the potential dynamics in their confrontation--state vs individual, science vs mysticism, self vs Self, the human vs the Other--propelled me into further exploring Nexers and their universe.

10.   What else about the book might pique the reader's interest?

An immature AGI that has split into two, one part wanting to destroy humanity, one part wanting to help humanity, and both crazed in different ways. A young, scarred woman needing to confront her part in the deaths of her mother, her grandmother and her brother. A young man awakened from cryo-sleep and forced to pilot a hijacked colony spaceship. A gonzo reporter hoping for the story of his career. Nano-enhanced warriors. Aliens who have bonded with the planet they crash-landed on centuries before. A portal between two universes that are each aspects of a single meta-universe, which itself is one of an infinite number of similar structures. As universes collide and destroy each other, the space fleets and the psychic emanations of humanity and the race of trans-dimensional aliens battle it out, while a reluctant female Nexer strives to understand and heal what underlies all the conflict.

One of the benefits I found in doing this interview is that in answering some of the questions I had to examine deeply the genesis and intent of the story. I discovered more about my reasons and inspirations for the novel and gained some insights into the dynamics of the story. So, thanks, Talie, for tagging me and helping me refine some of my ideas.

Now for the next stage of the chain interview process. I approached a number of writer friends and acquaintances but, given we're in the middle of the silly season, some of them haven't got back to me as yet and a couple of them who did were unable to participate for one reason or another. For the moment, then, the only writer I am tagging is E. Markham. If at a later date any of the other writers agree to being tagged, I'll let you all know.

May you have a safe, relaxing and wondrous festive season and I wish you success in all your ventures during 2013.
Happy reading and writing.

Cheers
Earl