Glenda Larke

My husband went off to work this morning with all the gate and front door keys, leaving me locked inside. Well, I could get out of the backdoor, but not out of the yard, not unless I climbed over the front gate – and left without the car. When he came home, much abashed, I accused him of doing a Taliban. Lucky I still have a sense of humour…

On the up-side, I received a copy of The Aware from my publishers. A peek inside, and I see why – it’s their way of telling me it has gone to a fifth printing. Yay!

Also nice was an email from my wonderful agent, telling me she thought Book 2 of The Mirage Makers was ‘unputdownable’ and lots of other nice things. She also remarked that it was a wonderful title for a wonderful book (the selection of that title gave me endless trouble, you may remember!). The MS has now been delivered and has entered the process towards publication. Whew.

Out in the garden a couple of Plantain Squirrels have been doing repeated circuits, one chasing the other: across the verandah, up the mango tree to the rambutan, down the bamboo and through the gingers, up the avocado, down the other side of the house under the longan tree, and back to verandah – all done at the pace of a cheetah on a double dose of speed and amphetamines. I suspect it was all about sex and being macho…it usually is. For pix see here.

Dennis (the birder) and I once had a strange experience with this species in the Johor mangroves. We were in a small open boat, investigating the birdlife of some of the tangle of hidden waterways, quietly paddling along, when we heard the subdued chatter of squirrels. Not one or two, but dozens and dozens of them. They came through the trees like long lines of soldier ants, one following close behind another. No squabbling, no racing, just squirrels wherever you looked. They crossed the waterway we were on by following the network of branches overhead. We counted thirty-five – but they were just the ones we saw. There was chattering all around us, as others unseen passed through the trees. After a while, they all came back again.

It was eerie. I was reminded of that children’s song: Don’t go out in the woods today…for every bear there ever was will gather there for certain, Today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic...

Just substitute squirrel for teddy bear, and there you are. As a child I always thought there was something creepy about that song, and now I know why. The picnic was probably an orgy.

Heart of the Mirage is available in Australia – at least from some bookshops – as early next week.

The story of this book resonated with me from the moment I first started to build it up from the foundations of the idea, but I’m not going to talk about that. I’m going to talk about where the ideas came from, the ideas that fuelled the story…
It started when we were living in Vienna, Austria. I turned on the TV one Easter, and they were showing a made-for-TV film in Italian (which I do not speak) with subtitles in German (of which I understood about half because I tend to read a foreign language too slowly). So I was a bit hampered linguistically, but as far as I could tell, it told the story of a Roman official sent by Rome around 1 AD to find out why a man they thought they had crucified was being reported as having been miraculously seen after death. Sounds like a fantasy, I thought, and my mind was off and running.

I was at the time writing The Aware, so I never did anything about the idea just then.

In the years before and after I had been becoming acquainted with the Romans ruins around Europe – walking sites as far apart as Hadrian’s Wall and Roman roads in the UK to Nîmes in France, to the bits and pieces under Vienna itself, to so many major ruins of Italy (all heady stuff for someone from Australia where ruins go back 200 years if you are lucky).

I remember catching the last bus of the day with my sister, and getting off on a cold March evening under a louring sky so that we could walk and see the aqueduct at the Pont du Gard. Magnificent arches looped across a river valley. There was no one around, no traffic, just this ancient edifice of stone, the rushing water and the promise of rain in a dark sky in the late evening. This was the stuff of stories.

Then we moved to live in Tunis. There was a base of a genuine Roman column in our garden. Digging in the rose bed could unearth pieces of Roman tiles. My study where I did my writing had a window that looked out towards the Mediterranean. I could see the ruins of Carthage in one direction, and the Jebel Bou Kornine – the sacred double-horned mountain of Carthage – in the other. The Punic civilization that was Carthage was obliterated by Roman in 146 BC. More stuff of stories.

I have always loved the Australian inland. The colours, the savagely aged landscape, the stark and yet beautiful brutality of a land that has too little water and too much sun. My mother told me stories of dust storms she faced as a young wife on a lonely farm, stirring my imagination. In Tunisia and Algeria I saw a different desert. I felt the heat of the winds that blew out of the desert and dumped its sand onto our doorstep in summer. More stories.

During this time in my life, my children were suddenly growing up and going off to university, coming home in a rush and filling the house with friends and then gone again, so confident and busy and independent. They were a joy in my life, and I considered those mothers who had not had that joy – stories had emerged in the 1970s and 80s as my children grew, of Aboriginal children, the stolen generation, taken forcibly from their families to be raised among strangers in a strange culture for reasons we cannot now fathom.

Further away from home, in Argentina, there were other perhaps even more tragic, heartbreaking tales – stories of brutality, rape and murder – where a military junta took newborn babies away from women they then murdered, sometimes apparently by pushing them out of planes over the sea while still alive. Those who murdered the parents raised the children, steeping them in the very ideas the parents had fought against and died to resist. Tragic stories that resonated. That grieved me, as a mother.

And each story provided an idea that would become part of the base on which I built my own story, The Mirage Makers trilogy.

I had my ideas, and I began to plot the tale, my tale. It’s not a Roman story. Or a Punic one. It’s not that TV show, or the Australian desert, or the Sahara, or the Argentinian military junta. It’s my very own world, my very own tale. A tale of betrayal and war and love and courage, set in an empire called the Exaltarchy – an empire ruled by legions, based on slavery, and about to be torn apart by rebellion.

Read it. You can buy it online through Australian bookshops

I watched – with appalled fascination – some of the early trials for American Idol. It was eye-opening to see so many thousands of young people with impossible dreams: all wanted to be stars. There were so many of them that, if all succeeded, there would be no one left to listen. No audience for tens of thousands of singers…

And some of them were beyond terrible, yet didn’t seem to know it. Some were devastated when they were weeded out, as if life was now over. It was both pathetic and frightening. Rather like reading about the poll they did of British school kids some time back, asking them what they wanted to be. By far the most common answer was “popstar” or similar; even, with delicious vagueness, “celebrity”.

That was the sum total of their ambition? Do they have any idea of what they are asking for? Any idea that it’s not the fame that’s important, but the love of music? Any idea of the hard work it normally takes to be that successful? Maybe that’s one of the attractions of American Idol or similar shows – it seems like such a shortcut. Add water and stir: instant fame, without the hard stuff. Unhappily, there are also a lot of writers out there with unrealistic expectations too. Who want the fame without the work.

So, if you want to be a writer, should you hold on to that dream? Because here’s the first unpleasant truth: not all of you out there dreaming are going to make it. Not even those of you who work damn hard. Not even those of you who have talent. Not even one in five thousand of you.

There’s nothing wrong with dreaming. But there is something else that is even more important, and you should never forget it: it doesn’t matter if the dream doesn’t come true. Why not? Because you are loving the journey. Because what really matters is the love of writing. If you don’t have that, then you shouldn’t be doing this. You’ll be like one of those young singers, dreaming not of the song, but of the celebrity.

So how can you make the dream come true?

Here’s step one and it’s the simplest one of all, and the most fun, and yet it is also the most important:

Buy New Books. Read. Teach your kids to read. Read to them at bedtime every night. Buy books for your grandkids. Give books as gifts to your friends and family. Ask for books as presents for yourself. Raise generations of readers.

Huh?
Yeah, that’s right. Publishers are in a business. If they don’t make lots of money, they won’t sign up lots of new authors – of which you might be one. So that’s the first step you can take down the road to being an author.

Told you it was simple.

My husband – that’s him there without the feathers – has just accepted a 6 month contract to be a Visiting Professor at the University of Malaysia Sabah (UMS), at the Institute of Tropical Biology & Conservation.

What, you may ask, is an ex Deputy Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna doing messing around with conservation in North Borneo? Well, he’s a man of many parts…

He’s particularly interested in beetles, moths, gingers and fungus. And teaching. And field biology, expeditions…you name it.

What does this mean for us? Well, in between visiting my daughter in the US, and doing some environmental work for the Malaysian Nature Society here in Kuala Lumpur on the mainland, I will also be living part-time in Kota Kinabalu on the island of Borneo. And oh, yes, there’s a little thing of writing another 100,000 words of my latest book before the end of July. And going through the copy-edit and proofing of the one I just completed as well, sometime in this period.

And Malaysians retire at 56. Are they insane?

My husband is looking forward to being back in Academia, occupying that office with his name on the door, and I know that what my mother said to me when I told her I was marrying this guy is absolutely true: “You’ll never be bored.”

She was obviously psychic.

Surely one of the most startling of the flurry of new findings made during the spread of H5N1 avian influenza has been the discovery of the Tooth Fairy Bird – which we believe is the first bird species to have been initially described by virologists, and is remarkable for being able to survive and sustain and spread H5N1. Here, we present a review of information on this intriguing taxon.

Perhaps a single existing bird species, perhaps a closely or remotely related grouping of bird species, the Tooth Fairy Bird has never been certainly recorded, but like esoteric sub-atomic particles its existence has been inferred through a variety of indirect means. By drawing on reports from virologists, agriculture and health officials and journalists – though as yet, alas, not ornithologists and birders – it is possible to describe the behaviour of this unusual bird, whose Latin name is yet to be settled upon, though suggestions include Robwebsters petnotionas, Vectorius (mythicus) invisiblus, and Anas stealthbomberensis.

In brief, the Tooth Fairy Bird is capable of both surviving infection by a strain of H5N1 that is otherwise highly lethal to all species it infects, and of flying long distances, efficiently spreading the virus at only few places it visits. Curiously, rather than follow major migration timings and flyways, it often flies long distances when many birds are not migrating, and has a strong tendency to follow railway lines and roads. Further, once the Tooth Fairy Bird has introduced the virus to a new area, it then plays little or no role in spreading the virus there; indeed, it may quickly vanish altogether

For the full text, click here.
And my apologies to Dr Williams. In the initial post, I gave him a new first name…