Something else two writers of epic fantasy have in common…

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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I have mentioned before that one of my ancestors, Richard Pickersgill, was on board His Majesty’s Bark (sic) Endeavour when it sailed into Botany Bay under Captain Cook in 1770. Richard, just 19 years old, had been hand-picked by Cook, because he already had several years experience — sailing around the world on board another vessel.
The modern Endeavour…
The mess deck of the Endeavour
Richard was appointed Master’s Mate, and later became Master, of the Endeavour.
18 miles of rope, 28 sails, 127′ mast

Cook had a high opinion of Lieutenant Richard Pickersgill’s surveying skills, often sending him off exploring and mapping coastal areas. Cook also admired his skills at handling native peoples, and even used him as an ambassador, because of his skill at dealing with dignitaries at European colonies on route! Not bad for a Yorkshireman who was only 22 when they returned to Britain in 1771.

The firehearth, the height of modernity in 1768 …

Family legend had previously told me that Richard was renowned for his drinking and
his life had ended when he fell between a ship and the wharf back home
in Britain. Family legend also said that it was his tales of Botany Bay
that led to my great grandfather migrating to Australia in the 1840s.

When I was in Sydney earlier on this year, these stories alone gave me the incentive to visit Endeavour
replica, now moored in Sydney Harbour. This ship, commenced in 1988,
and finished in 1994 in Fremantle, Western Australia, recreated part of
the original Endeavour‘s journey in the 1990s.

The Mess Hall, home to 60 men

I did have another reason to want to look around a replica of the
eighteenth century sailing ship; it would be invaluable research for my
upcoming trilogy, part of which is about the European trade to the
spice islands, set in a period vaguely resembling the 1750s.

Officer’s cabin

For this reason, I dragged my pal and fellow writer, Karen
Miller off to the Maritime Museum. Actually, I didn’t have to drag her at all, because––guess
what––Karen also had an ancestor who sailed aboard the original Endeavour. In fact, he was a senior officer, and outranked poor Richard who didn’t get a cabin, but had to mess with the seven midshipmen — until he replaced the Master who died on the way home.

Karen’s ancestor was Second Lieutenant Hicks, who died of TB in Batavia. His moment of fame? He was the first person to sight the Australian coast!

And here’s me looking at a replica of a chart of Queensland, surveying and drawing done by Richard.

The Great Cabin, with Joseph Banks’ desk.
Another of Richard Pickersgill’s charts

And so, there you have it. Two Australian fantasy writers go to see the Endeavour and thereby discover that they’d both had members of their families aboard. Mine made it back to Britain; Karen’s, alas, did not. For a moment, we could imagine what it would have been like to be part of the crew of the Endeavour; and we could marvel at the fact that Richard Pickersgill and Zachary Hicks knew one another 240 years before Karen and I ever met…

What I’ve been reading….

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Sub-title:


If you totally lost your memory, and never regained it back, are you (the previous you) dead?

 I have been reading quite a few things lately.
Asymmetry by the Thoraiya Dyer.
Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig.
The Man Who Forgot His Wife by John O’Farrell.
The Rook by Daniel O’Malley.

Asymmetry is a — tantalisingly short — collection of short stories by a talented writer which left me with a strong desire to read any novel written by Dyer in the future. (She recently won an Aurealis Award for a short story.) Keep an eye on her — this lady can write.

Blackbirds is a brutal novel in the urban fantasy genre, lots of blood and gore and an intriguing dilemma for the main (female) character–which kept me glued to the page until I’d finished.

Which brings me to The Man Who Forgot His Wife and The Rook. On the surface, they appear to be very different stories. The first is a literary novel, set in London of the present day, part comedy and part a telling look at a modern marriage. It’s a wonderful read and I highly recommend it. The Rook, by Daniel O’Malley, won the best SF novel of 2012 in the recent Aurealis Awards. Although it is arguably a fantasy rather than science fiction, I shan’t quibble over that. In fact, I’ll say that it deserved a win, because it’s a great read. It’s also a book with no real male hero, but with several fabulous female characters and a gamut of extraordinary minor players.

What then do those two books have in common?

They both deal with main characters who have lost their memory.

The character in The Rook is aware from the beginning of that she is going to lose her memory and she will never get it back. The character in The Man Who Forgot His Wife, on the other hand, has a normal chance of regaining his memory, and in fact the story deals with this process. However, it’s not all smooth sailing. His personality — before and after — plays a large role.

I don’t want to say any more about either of the books for fear of spoiling two wonderful plots. If you can, read both books.

They both left me thinking about what we are –- are we more than our memory of our life? If you lose your memory (retaining only your learning and factual knowledge) what is left? Would life still be worth living? What makes personality? What would it be like to know you’re going to lose your memory and never regain it? What would you do if you knew you were going to lose all your memory of your life and the people you’ve loved?

If you totally lost your memory, and never regained it back, are you (the previous you) dead?

What do you think?

Another reason to like this place…

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Just out of the back gate of the village I’m living in is the Len Howard Conservation Area.  And as those of you who know me know… that is exactly the kind of place I like. 
It has BIRDS!
And boardwalks!
And GORGEOUS scenery!
And I can take my exercise in places like this!
Every day!
Peel Estuary
Inland Thornbill
Black ducks, and if you look carefully, a Black Swan…

Yellow-rumped Thornbill
New Holland Honeyeater on a Banksia
Paperbarks

Our New Place….

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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This is the village… with a rotunda…
One of the streets
And this is our house. Still a bit bare looking…
This is our street, our house towards the end on the left

The village is what is known as a lifestyle village, aimed at people who want to downsize their living space, live more communally yet still be independent. It is quiet (wonderfully so after where I was living!) and as an environmentalist, I appreciate the green living — the catchment of water off the roof, feeding sunlight back into the grid, recycling, scraps to the chooks, and so on.

I was wondering if I’d find the house too small after our last place. But no, it’s just right and so easy to look after. It will look better once the garden grows; I look forward to the flowering of the grevilleas  in our yard. I wake in the morning to the sound of the ravens and the parrots; dusk comes with the flocks of galahs crying their way to their roosts and the silent ibis vees cutting across the sky. I go to sleep with the sound of the Moaning Frog in the garden.

The Lascar’s Dagger

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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I made this big announcement at Conflux, the Australian National Convention, and I believe the news has also been sent to Locus, so I am making it public.

I have sold another trilogy, the name of which has yet to be determined.
The first book is called
THE LASCAR’S DAGGER
To be published worldwide by Orbit early next year
———————–
“Lascar” is not a made-up word. It has Persian/Bengali origins, where it means “soldier”, but in English it came to mean a sailor from one of the southern or south-east Asian countries who worked on European-owned ships.*
So is the trilogy about a lascar? 
No, not really, although he’s part of the story. It’s about the spice trade between two countries (evocative of the Netherlands and Britain of the 18th century) and the spice islands (evocative of the eastern archipelago of Indonesia during that same period). 
It’s about great wickedness and enormous sacrifice and amazing bravery. And love. And unique magic systems, both evil and good, of a kind you won’t have read before.
It’s also the story of a clash of cultures…
 

____________________

*And if you think there weren’t all that many of them, you’re dead wrong. By 1660, the
number of lascar seamen employed on British ships was so great that a
new law required 75% of the crew of a
British ship carrying Asian goods to Europe must be British! Lascars
often settled in England, and were thus the first wave of Asian
immigrants to Britain.

Conflux

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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I am hanging out with Karen Miller at the SF/F convention in Canberra, Conflux.

If you are here and want to chat, I’m available if you can catch me between panels, kaffeklatches, signings, and so forth.

And Karen, bless her, solved a writing problem for me at 5 a.m. by a suggestion that was awesome…

Swancon 2013

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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I intend to drop by Swancon 2013 in Perth on Saturday or (and?) Sunday next.

If you see me around, please feel free to come and say hi! Look forward to seeing old friends, making new friends, and chatting to readers and writers.

As I will only have day membership, I won’t be on any of the programmes.

The poignancy of goodbye

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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As most readers of this blog know, I am relocating to Australia. After Wednesday I won’t be living in Malaysia on a permanent basis. Which means saying goodbye to much that has meant a lot to me over very many years.

I came to Malaysia in 1970, and here it is forty-three years further on and I have no idea where the time has flown. There is so much that I will miss, and of course I expect to be back often, especially as my husband is remaining behind to complete his contract and the selling of our house.

It seems appropriate that on my last weekend here I should attend a family gathering, in which a close relative sealed her engagement to a longtime friend. Over the years, attending such functions — and recognising the beauty of a rich cultural life and strong family ties — has become part of my life.

Senior members of my Malaysian family

The decorative tent (for lunch) in the garden of the house

 And so I will share with you these photos. For those of you from other cultures,  this engagement ceremony may seem unusual because it is not a private moment between  two people exchanging a ring; it is a family ceremony, in which the man’s family arrives at the house of the prospective fiancee bearing gifts, delivered on an uneven number of trays. In return, they too are given gifts.

The dais for the ring ceremony
Bringing in the gifts

These presents can include things like fruit and chocolates, flowers and items of clothing.

The patriarch of our family negotiates with the head of the other family over terms of the engagement

 The bride price and the length of the engagement are discussed, the date of the wedding is agreed upon. (Nowadays the prospective bride and groom have doubtless settled this first with each other beforehand!) This coming wedding will also mean the union of different Malay cultures, (our family follows the matriarchal adat berpatih customs), so some attention was given to this as well today.

After all is agreed upon, the engagement ring is placed on the woman’s hand, not by her prospective
husband, but by one of his married female relatives, in this case, his
mother.

In fact, at another family engagement some years
ago, I was the one to slip an engagement ring onto the hand of another
woman. Traditionally, the respective bridegroom does not attend!

The bestowing of the ring by the groom-to-be’s mother
Proud mother of the bride shares a photo moment just afterwards…
The gifts are beautifully decorated
Me and members of my Malaysian family with the now-engaged woman

Of course, this being Malaysia, food plays an important role, and everyone goes home well fed.

Thoughts on Head-hopping PoVs.

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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If there is one writing “fact” that comes up again and again on blogs on writing and in writing groups and writing courses, it is this:

Don’t head-hop in a single scene.

Or to put the matter another way: stay with your point-of-view (PoV) character. Get inside their skull and stay there. See and hear and experience everything through their eyes and ears and thoughts.

Why?

Reasons to maintain a single PoV:

Because that’s how you make the character real to the reader. Because that’s the way you make the reader care about your hero — or hate your villain. You share the scene with a single person’s PoV, just as you experience in real life.

If you head-hop, intimacy is lost. Besides, it confuses the reader about who is thinking what, or who knows what. It can bewilder as well as annoy, because you often end up with an omniscient PoV, the author as god, inserting themselves into the story too much.

For example:

Take a scene like this: Character A walks into a room full of men, men experienced in her chosen career. She’s a novice photographer in a strange country at war. You are inside her head, experiencing her bravado, her nervousness. Then without warning you are in Character B’s (macho male) head, looking at her and assessing her and wondering how long she’ll last. Then the omniscient author tells you a bit about Character B, things Character A couldn’t possibly know. Then you’re inside Character C, proprietary male half in love with her who brought her there, and who is now worrying that was a mistake. Then you are back with character A and her embarrassment when she tries to deal with all the things going on. All in the space of a page, and the head-hopping continues..

Poor writing, right? Hmm. One would think so, and yet…

And yet:
 
What prompted me into wondering about this is the book I am reading at the moment: Tatjana Soli’s bestselling debut novel, The Lotus Eaters, winner of the James Tait
Black Prize for 2010,  and a New York Times Notable Book for 2010. It was also a finalist
for the LA Times Book Award. It had good reviews from top review sites. Over on Goodreads it has a huge number of ratings with 66% giving it either 4 or 5 stars, and only 7% giving it 1 or 2 stars. And Goodread readers are much harder in their ratings than, say, Amazon.

Must be a good book that really resonated with readers, right?

I’m about halfway through and I will definitely read it to the end. It’s a page turner, a poignant realistic love story, yet a book that deals with some really heavy issues. There are some heart-rendingly beautiful passages.

And the author head-hops all the time in a single scene. Which does annoy me. But I am wondering why it annoys me. Is it simply because I’ve been told so many times that it is bad writing? If I hadn’t been told, would I have even noticed? Or would I just caught up in the story?

Is head-hopping really so bad — or is it just another way of writing which, in the hands of a skilled narrator, becomes an asset?

What do you think?