Glenda Larke

A fellow writer once asked me, what would you prefer? To be acclaimed by your peers or by the reading public? By peers, he meant fellow writers, editors, reviewers, people somehow involved in the industry or the critiquing of it.

He caught me off balance because I actually hadn’t thought much about it. I can’t remember what I replied; doubtless it was something glib about wanting it all. Rich, famous AND loved – hey, why not?

But I have given a lot of thought to it since. And I am still not sure. At one time I think I would have replied, ‘Oh, my peers.’ There is a wonderful feeling about being nominated for an Aurealis. Even though your common sense tells you it’s only the decision of three judges, and people who have judged these things often say the actual winner is a compromise because no one could agree on the “best”. But hey, these are people who KNOW books, my kind of books. Who read widely, can recognise a plot hole or a cliche when they see one. They know enough to recognise the something special. And they like MY work. That’s a pretty good feeling.

But that reply contains a certain amount of arrogance too.

What is a writer if he or she is not read?
I was a secret writer for many years.
And no matter how much you enjoy the creative process, there is something missing if no one ever reads it. There is an incompleteness to that process. That’s not to say it is wasted, or not worth it. Just that it’s not quite…complete.
A writer needs an audience to go from being a shade self-indulgent to being an artist sharing a creation.

But that begs the question. How big does the audience have to be before the process is ‘complete’? Is your mother and Great-uncle Bruce sufficient? Your ‘peers’? Or does it have to be the average book reader who pops into the bookstore because Aunt Amy recommended your book as a great read?

I dunno. I guess I still want it all.

And there another tricky question here too. Just how much do you sacrifice to be a bestseller? Nothing – (if they like it, great, if they don’t, that’s their loss?)
Everything – (they liked my first vampire book so I am going to churn them out ad infinitum, all with variations of the same plot, and laugh all the way to the bank…)

[Of course, it’s not so easy to decide what you have to do to be popular anyway. Think about a runaway bestseller by any relatively unknown author. If you had read it before its popularity, would you have predicted it?]

But writers all make choices of some sort, and it would be a pretty strange author who doesn’t, on some visceral level, want to please the unknown reader, the person who just picks up a book in the local store. In fact, many of us agonise over it. Should we kill of the hero? Won’t the fans be upset? I have made a decision not to write in the first person, even though I know I do it well, because so many people have told me they won’t read books written in the first person.

The only thing I do know is that I have to please myself first. There is no way I could write to please only other people, even if I knew the secret formula to being a runaway success.

So what do you do when you go to see the Petronas /Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur for the first time? Do you ooo and aaah over how high they are? Go shop for brand names that sell so much cheaper than in other cities? Reflect on those other Twin Towers that are no more?

Nope, not if you are two.

You stare at Bob the Builder. Or go sit on Thomas the Tank Engine.

You investigate the Teletubbies (and beg Mum to put more money in to make it move).
You stick your hand in every fountain you can find.
You make a beeline into the heart of the playground outside.
And then dash into the paddling pool, ignoring the towers soaring beyond it.

Oh, to be two, and have absolutely no idea what happened to the other Twin Towers, or the hell that incident led the whole world towards because our political leaders sought revenge and votes, not wisdom and vision…

Me: (as I drive the car out of our driveway) Got your passports? Tickets?
Him: Yes. (to wife, referring to their son) Have you got Dylan’s passport?
Her: (checking) Yes. All here.
Me: (to him, because he is an American and they are on their way to Australia): Got your visa?
Him: (Long silence.) Um. Do I need one?
Me: Did you check?
Him: Er….no.

Guess what? Americans need visas for Australia.

Oops.

Fortunately we discovered that visas can be got online, even on Sunday evenings when you are already at the airport. But believe me, that 45 minute drive to the airport – wondering all the while if father and son would be able to go at all – was fuelled not by petrol, but by high octane stress levels.

P.S. This whole passport/visa/immigration/travel problem thingy is known as the Noramly Family Syndrome, or NFS for short. It is highly contagious between family members and can be dangerous. Anyone marrying into the family should take suitable precautions.

Related symptoms include:

• luggage lag In this case both parties arrived in Malaysia without their bags even though they were travelling on different flights from different destinations. It was a fact, well-known to UN employees when Noramly was working for the IAEA, that if you accompanied him, you would arrive at your destination without your bags.
• the triggering of airline strikes or airport chaos The BA strike of some years ago is still talked about as the Holiday to Hell by Noramly family members all arriving from different countries on British Airways. Never again. The recent terrorist-liquid chaos in UK caught up two members of the Noramly clan travelling in opposite directions who had arranged to meet at Heathrow, and instead spent the 4 hour layover queuing up at different Heathrow terminals and missed each other altogether.
• the possibility of regime overthrow The past downfall of governments in Albania, Czechoslovakia and Poland, and the overturning of elections in Algeria, have all been connected to the presence of Noramly and wife (i.e. me) at the crucial time. The only governments they don’t seem to have been able to topple despite repeated attempts (i.e.visits) are those of the Bush/Blair/Howard administrations.

If any member of the Noramly clan travels your way, watch out.

My younger daughter is at the moment travelling between Scotland UK and Perth Australia, via USA. So far she has only had her credit cards pick-pocketed in London.

I won’t even begin to describe the stress levels we hit today. Let’s just say that it concerned a passport, belonging to someone booked on an overseas trip on the 17th December, which was suddenly discovered to be unusable even though it doesn’t expire for another 3 years, which in turn led to another problem…

It all ended well, due to some wonderful people, but until it was all resolved – after an incredible amount of running around – stress levels were sufficient to power a reactor.

Probably didn’t help that last night I went to a talk on the wildlife trade, which was unbelievably distressing. Why do people buy exotic pets? Don’t they know that for every pet delivered to a doting owner, there are tens, or more probably hundreds, that die horribly, miserably, within the trade? Buyers of exotic pets fuel the trade with their money. Because they buy, wild animals are captured and caged and die shockingly in the most vile of conditions, millions upon millions of them, each year.
Pet owners – yes, especially in the USA which is one of the two largest consumers – are a major cause of the slaughter and this torture of the defenseless. And if they have a “certificate” showing that the pet is captive-bred or otherwise “legal”, and we are not talking about say, budgerigars, then they are kidding themselves. They may as well have gone out into the wilds of the source country and blasted a few hundred animals of the same species, because their buying had the same effect.

Why are supposedly respectable, law-abiding agencies in countries that pride themselves on their Asian values of decency and compassion, turning a blind eye – even condoning the use of their international airport and and their international airline to “launder” and transport endangered species?

Why does Malaysian law enable a endangered species of reptile or tortoise/turtle – caught illegally in its country of origin and smuggled illegally into this country – to be openly and legally sold on the streets and in the pet shops? Why does that not seem to a cause for shame to Malaysia?

On a more pleasant note: I always get a kick out of having one of my non-fiction papers being cited, and this week both my husband and I had articles cited, in different papers, in the same scientific journal. Nice.

Our house is twenty-five years old, and in the tropics, that means major overhaul time.

I have a large bucket under the leak in the dining room ceiling.
None of the huge sliding doors will slide any more; to open them requires the kind of muscles you only get after six months of weightlifting.
There are civets living in the roof.
Paint is pealing.
All the pipes to the bathrooms are partially blocked, and water is hard to come by.
The trees in the garden have grown so large that if it’s cloudy at noon, you need the lights on. The kitchen cabinet doors have just disintegrated into sawdust.

With so many things to choose from, and so little money, I chose to have the kitchen cabinet doors replaced – the local workers did a good job, but do not accept credit cards. Which has left me broke.
Husband is somewhere in the heart of Borneo – Long Pasia to be exact, and incommunicado for a week.
The only credit card I have was declined when I tried to use it today, dunno why.
Last month I was supposed to receive the first payment for my project job – which I have been working on for almost two months – but nothing has arrived.
I have a payment arriving from via my agent from UK, but it takes 6 weeks to clear the cheque. Yep, that’s right. In this day and age of electronic transfers, it still takes 6 weeks to clear a cheque.

So here I am, with a car that desparately needs servicing, a service centre that won’t take Amex, grocery shopping that needs doing.

So I was scrambling around the house looking for all the money I could find.
$US121 left over from my trip to see my daughter;
20 pounds sterling left over from trip to see other daughter;
20 Austrian schillings which no money changer here will look at;
a savings bankbook with rm 175 in it (that’s 50 USD);
and a heap of coins…
I changed the money at the local cambio, but alas, he turned down the 10 Scottish pound note. Damn.
I send the car to servicing. He says it needs new brake linings and timing belts and names a sum that turns my face green. “Minor service only, please,” says I, counting out some cash. (It’s my husband’s car; mine is in Kota Kinabalu.)
And there are people out there who think writers make money?

Forty years ago today I got married. We had no money – we were students after all. What’s changed? Nothing much that I can see. Well, one thing, I guess, my husband did turn up forty years ago. Today for the anniversary he’s in Borneo and I’m in Kuala Lumpur.

Sometime in the next week or two my sixth book hits the bookshop shelves. In just over an hour my daughter arrives from Virginia with my grandson.

Forty years further on, and life is good.