(no subject)

I am normal now, which is a great pity. I work hard all my life to be different and one night's sleep reduces me to normality.

Only 22 books to read before September if I stick to my original bookcount. Given I've already read three books not on that original list and just have discovered I need to add another four books to the list, I am pondering giving up sleeping and breathing in order to make time for reading. I shall conquer!

Also, by the end of this doctorate I shall be educated. If I'm not, then I have to go back and read the books again.

To Say Nothing of the Dog (Connie Willis) was one of the day before yesterday's books and one day I'm going to write an essay that talks about it and Lavie Tidhar's Bookman. They use the same underlying construct: a universe based on favourite literature. I started out that way for Illuminations, to be honest, but soon moved away from the Medieval literature I was embedded in. This is probably just as well. Twelfth and thirteenth century literary values are different to modern and a novel that homages it the way Willis does homage to Sayers and Jerome (Jerome K Jerome - not the Bible-Translating guy) and Christie and etc (etc was a particularly good writer, I thought) would have been really hard to read.

Willis and Tidhar got me thinking about how using literature to build a sense of history works for readers. It's the sense of play thing that sartorias was talking about ages back. This gives me something else for my list of things to consider*. Is one of the reasons people take history lessons from novels where they may not want to take them from other written sources simply because play gives them more interaction and maybe more sense of control?

Should I explore this idea, or just leave it for the minute? It might make a fun essay, to examine fictional history as educational play. it might also totally secure my doom. All my historical fiction writer friends will sneak into my place at 3 am, suffocate me, and then claim the butler did it.




* I have a list of things - and my 6x4 paper and a notebook and an excerise book for more notes and I still have big sheets of paper lining my doors, for inspiration to strike - I'm a sad case

A Baggage interview - meet Lucy Sussex

I wanted to start this post by saying that if you haven't read anything by Lucy Sussex then you probably ought to rethink your reading, but then I reflected that most people have read her work and just want to know what she has to say. She has written some extraordinary fiction and has been quietly working away on a large project, which is about to see light of day. In between all this (and teaching and reviewing) she wrote me a story for Baggage and answered some questions I had.

1/ What do readers most need to know about you?
I’m an Antipodean (born New Zealand, of Australian parentage and ancestry). I’ve got an enquiring mind, which can take me in curious but fun directions. I’m a student of the nineteenth century, its writers and crime fiction. I love to research, and make fiction from my findings. And I’m proud to be a feminist.

2/ Can you tell us something about the story you wrote for Baggage and the path you travelled in writing it?
When I lived in the South Island of New Zealand, we never went to see the glaciers. Going to Franz Josef was a new experience, especially on a day when, walking below the glacier in the middle of a storm, we were equally at risk of being drowned or struck by lightning. I had the opening paragraph of the story not long after, but had to read around to get the rest of the story. The story of Ötzi provided useful information, and I very nearly got side-tracked in another direction by the sheer inventiveness of glacial language. The writer George Turner once said that after global warming would come another ice-age. So I express the wish and belief at the end of the story that the glaciers will return.

3/ How closely do you own your work, emotionally?
Not much. I’m interested when I’m working on them, but afterwards it’s as if another person wrote them. The exception is if cack-handed editing is being inflicted upon them, because that’s when my claws come out and the fur starts flying. However, that only happened once—and I won the stoush.

4/ What writers have most influenced you? Can you tell us something of what their work has meant and why it’s important?
I think every writer I have read has influenced me, and as I’m a reviewer, that’s a lot! I love the writer Nicholas Stuart Gray, for his fantastic inventions and bloody-minded characters. I love James Tiptree Junior for her exuberance with language. The C19th writer Mary Fortune, whom I began to research when my first three books were sold, taught me how important it was that a writer should have an iron will to survive. I needed that knowledge—none of those three sales were uncomplicated, but I never gave up.

5/ What other projects do you have on? Where is your writing currently taking you?
A very long-standing project is my herstory of the mothers of crime fiction: Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth Century Crime Writing, out from Palgrave-Macmillan (UK) in August. That same month a delayed project, Saltwater in the Ink; Voices from the Australian Seas, will be launched at the Melbourne Writers Festival. It comprises a collection of diarists and letter-writers describing the emigration experience: shipwrecks, secret romances, births, deaths, suicide and gossip. I went for people with interesting stories to tell, and rather unexpectedly found the contributors included my great-grandmother Nancy Wardman Sussex, who was lucky to survive the first white colony in the Kimberleys, West Australia. I’m also over a third into a novel about C19th detection, shapeshifting, and quantum mechanics.

6/ Is there one style issue you’d love new writers to sort out before you read their work?
Grammar!

7/ What Australian writers do you think we should be reading now?
Reading Australian writing from the nineteenth century, particularly ghost stories, can tell you a lot about the national psyche. Try James Doig’s anthologies. Of the classic writers, Barbara Baynton, Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead (whom I met several times). John Harwood, for modern ghost stories. If you gave me more space I could come up with a very long list….

8/ Of your own work, what are your favourite pieces? Why?
‘Matricide’ was my best, but only Ellen Datlow agreed. And ‘Duchess’ was a hoot to write, because I could indulge my fashionista tendencies.