Glenda Larke

Remember this?

Well, Dennis dropped by yesterday and we all had dinner together in a restaurant on the edge of the sea as the sun went down. Not that we could see much – the haze has arrived with a vengeance in this part of the world.

As usual, Indonesia says its not their fault, and Malaysia says it’s not our fault as open burning is against the law and of course Malaysians don’t do that sort of thing. Hah. Not even the photographic evidence bestirs a single Malaysian regulatory body into actually stopping anyone, let alone arresting them and charging them…year after hazy year after hazy year. Asthma patients die, cancers start as everyone breathes in tiny burnt particles so small you cannot see them. And it’s nobody’s fault. We are all smoking a pack a day at the moment…like it or not. And nobody is responsible. One if these days they’ll catch this guy Nobody. In the meantime Malaysians ignore the problem with a shrug, indifferent even to the health of their children.

Anyway, back to Dennis. He has just seen his 501st Malaysian bird species for the year – a Barred Eagle Owl – and today he was off after the Blue-naped Parrot at Tanjung Rhu. Fantastic!

Sometimes I get some intimation of what people think about writers – and it’s not quite what one may expect.

Here’s a question from a poster on a Message Board about sff:

is everyone a potentual writer?

Is it jus me or r there many would-be writers out there, it occuered to me that many people could think up a good story and be a good enouth writer to get it published but many do not have the connexions needed am I right.

And here is part of my somewhat acerbic reply:

I am an Australian, but I have lived most of my adult life (since I was 24) in Malaysia, which has no sff publishers, or fan clubs, or spec fic writing classes. I never went to a sff con. I never met another fiction writer, editor, publisher, I hardly ever met someone who read sff! I wasn’t on the internet and exchanged no emails, nor read webpages by any of those people. In fact, I was a real innocent abroad. I never even attended a course on how to write.

All I did was read and write and hone my skills. ALOT. The book that got me an agent was about number seven or eight, I think. ONE MILLION WRITTEN WORDS LATER. At least. (I started at 13, after all)

And finally I sent off my work. I had no idea how to write a query letter or what one should say when one submitted work. But I do know how to be polite, and I had enough common sense to know what is relevant and what is not. And I READ ALOT of the kind of books I was writing – fantasy.

I got a copy of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, ran my finger down the pages of agents, came to the first one that said they took fantasy, and wrote a letter.

I don’t have the letter in front of me, but it said something along the lines of: “I enclose the first 3 chapters of a fantasy novel entitled X, of Y number of words. If you are interested in reading the remainder with a view to representing me, the book is already complete and I would be delighted to send the whole MS. I have only had non-fiction articles published prior to this. ” (I did not send samples of these articles, or say what they were or where they were published. They were irrelevant.)

I sent it off and waited. And in due course the agent read the whole MS and took me on.

Contacts? Connections? What contacts? What connections? I had none!

Do you tell your doctor – “well, anyone can be a doctor, can’t they? We just don’t all have the contacts to get into Medical School.” Have I got news for you. The ability to stick a bandaid on a cut does not mean you have the potential to be a doctor. The ability to write a few words on paper doesn’t give you the potential to be a published novelist.

Maybe I am being silly, but if someone were to say to my face – “Well, you are only published because you had connections! Anyone at all can do what you do.” – I would feel insulted and be very very rude to such a person. How dare they say – or even think – that the years and years of work I put into learning my trade, into writing and reading and learning, before I was finally published, didn’t count for anything? That ‘anyone’ can do this? That all you need to get published are ‘connections’.

——————-
Was I a bit hard on the poor fellow? As I say, it is extraordinary how many people think writing is easy, and there is some kind of conspiracy that keeps all but those “in the know” from being published.

Someone asked on the comments section a couple of days ago: what’s the criteria for a work to be classed as “young adult”?

I know pretty much zilch about the subject, but I suspect there is no precise criteria. Rather, an editor – or an author – will make a decision, and if the marketing people agree, then that’s the way it will go. I suspect that there are times when everyone is caught out by what happens next. I mean, they had to put out “an adult edition” of Harry Potter! Huh? It had a different cover – so adults wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen reading it?

Trudi Canavan’s “The Black Magician” trilogy was not really marketed as a YA in the beginning, but once the book hit High Street in UK, it was obvious that it was having huge success among the slightly younger reader. A YA edition was brought out – exactly the same text, but with a different cover, and pushed to bookshops as YA, which would probably place it in a different section of the store.

So what is it about a story that makes it YA, not adult?

Perhaps YA authors can comment! But here are some of my guesses:

1. Language – not too much of the more vivid curses
2. Age of main protagonist(s) – not quite adult
3. Plot not X rated – if there is any graphic sex, it will be more of the “this is the first time for me too” variety.
4. Probably deals with at least a few “coming of age” issues, if only in passing. Such issues are often the main concern of the book.

And what’s the difference between children’s literature and YA?

1. Age of main protagonist(s) is younger
2. Language even more circumspect
3. No sex and probably not too much kissing either!
4. Issues will be the kind of thing that is of interest to the targeted age group.

Of course, when I was a highschool teacher, way back when, the kids could run rings around me in their knowledge of graphic swear words, not to mention slang for every conceivable part of the anatomy and the variable uses the said anatomy could be put to, and what you called it when you did…

But even so, YA books are unlikely to be raunchy. Young Adults have to be protected from that kind of thing, after all.

When I lived in Vienna, I was always amused by the way the Austrians – and I guess German society in general – loved titles and used them liberally whenever possible. Professor Doctor X…or was it Doctor Professor X? Can’t remember now. Wives even took the titles of their husbands. My own doctor was married to a doctor, and her nameplate proudly proclaimed Doktor Frau Doktor…

Anyway, I dunno what they would now make of the disreputable fellow in this photo taken last weekend at Mesilau, hugging a pitcher plant Nepenthes raja, (which looks like a small toilet with lid, for an elf with pretensions). He didn’t pick it by the way!

He is a Professor.
He has a (well-earned) Ph.D. in chemistry.
He has a title awarded by the state (Dato’).
He has an honorary D.Litt. awarded by his alma mater in Australia for services to internationalism (he was the Deputy-Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency for a number of years).
He has another honorary doctorate from the National University of Malaysia (UKM) for his services to the nation and to that university.

And now we have just learned he is about to be awarded a third honorary doctorate, from University Malaysia Sabah (UMS) at the beginning of next month for, I guess, his services in setting up the first campus here in Sabah many years ago.

Syabas, Noramly. I am proud of you.

A friend emailed yesterday. She had been telling me for ages how hard she was finding the writing of her new contracted book – it was coming along far too slowly and each page had to be wrung out of her. Where, she asked, had all the joy in writing gone? In addition she was often unwell with a chronic health problem.

Enough to have many writers toss the keyboard across the room and moan that they have writer’s block and can’t write any more…and some do just that. Othes stop writing because they are scared of failure, particularly if they have had a phenomenal success and don’t think they can repeat it.

But my friend is 100% professional. She kept on writing. Struggling every inch of the way – but she did it, hoping that in the end what she produced would be good.

Yesterday she wrote to say that she had an epiphany – saw where she had been going wrong and how to correct it. The zest returned, the joy was back. And with it the speed of production…

I know how she felt. I’ve been there too. I’ve thought at times that a book I was working on was crap, that nothing was going right, that the flatness of my prose would be obvious to a reader – but I ploughed on. Because that’s what you do when you are professional about your work, whatever your work may be.

And sooner or later, it all comes right – the joy returns, the mistakes are corrected, the plot zings. That would never have happened if I’d stuck the book in a drawer and packed the computer away.

Are there times when you should give up on a particular work? Probably, if you are still learning your trade. The novice wood carver who ruins his piece of wood has to throw it away, after all.

But for someone with a proven track record to say they have writer’s block is a different thing altogether. It’s the job of a professional to work until you get it right. A professional should have the tools to do that, to take the synopsis and rework it into something different if the first approach didn’t come out right. To take that flat, lifeless chapter and turn it sentence by sentence into something that sings.

Writing is more than just a brilliant idea. It’s work, just like any other job.
Writer’s block? I have no time to think about it.