Gettin'... Swampy

Wow. The Writers 4 Queensland auction I wrote about in my last blog raised AUD $20,000 for flood relief. Thank you to the sweet people who bid on Burnt Snow, as all proceeds went into a very deserving pot. Poor Queensland - first floods, now cyclones - they need all the help they can get. It was an honour to take part. Muchos kudos to the magnificent organisers.

This woman is a spy.

Now, a little more news. While White Rain, the Burnt Snow sequel, races towards its TOTALLY SPOOKY climax with snakes, bad guys, knives, even more snakes, magic rocks, shapeshifting, demons, snakes and some more snakes along the way, something VERY GOOD has happened to me.

I have been writing a play for the fantastic Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, USA. I have been writing this damn play for FIVE YEARS because it is about Valerie Plame, the American CIA agent who was outed as a spy by the Bush Administration in order to discredit claims that there were no reasons to go to war in Iraq. Remember that? That Iraq thing?

Well, when I started the play in 2006, the "truth" of what happened in Iraq was a very different thing to what the truth turned out to be. So over five years, the play has changed form, story, characters, content... until last year the dramaturg flew out from Philadelphia and the Finborough Theatre in London gave me some actors and a director and I forced this nutty CIA-agent play called Swamplands into the world. We did a reading as part of the Finborough's annual Vibrant! season... and then I hid under my blanket for a while.

Anyway, I've done some more work on the play, and now a NEW director and a NEW group of actors is going to set to work making it beautiful as part of the National Play Festival 2011 in my home town of Sydney, Australia. Whoohoo! It's a big honour for me to be selected for the festival, and if you're in Sydney in March, it would be GREAT if you could make it along to one of the two public rehearsed readings the actors are going to do on March 16 (4pm) or 18 (7pm). 

You can read all about Swamplands at #NPF11 here... and I sure hope I see you there.

Do it for Queensland!

Hi there. Remember me? I used to be your friendly neighbourhood blogger - but then I went into Deadline Mode for my new book, White Rain, and then I got swine flu. AGAIN.

It is no longer a family secret that my parents' nickname for me is 'Piglet'

So, I've been quiet for a while. But, then, a tragedy overtook all of my concerns about stressing about my new book or spending all my time in a stripy dressing-gown, greeting the postman with swollen eyeballs. Stuck here in London, I've been incredibly distressed to read about everything that's happening in flooded Queensland.

This was how high and violent the floodwaters got. That's a RUBBISH BIN in a POWERLINE.

Now, I really like Queensland. I spent a wonderful few days at the Brisbane Writers' Festival last year and it was fantastic. I've got some incredible friends who live there, and Brisbane in particular is a city I associate with fabulous food and youthfully wild times. The image of it with BINS IN POWERLINES breaks my heart.
Fortunately, some amazing writers who also love Brisbane had the brilliant idea of finding a way for writers (not exactly a group one first thinks of as coming to the rescue when the front lawn has washed away) to help the relief effort.
What Queensland needs to combat a disaster that has affected an area THE SIZE OF FRANCE AND GERMANY COMBINED is money. It needs lots and lots of money to rebuild, actually, everything. That's when writers Kate Gordon, Katrina Germein, Emily Gale and Fleur McDonald had the idea that what writers could do to help was auction their wares to raise money. You can read about them here, in this press release in the Tasmanian Times.
So I, like a GAZILLION writers from around the world, are giving what I can for flood relief. I am auctioning two specially-signed copies of Burnt Snow with original hand-drawn-by-me book plates, as well as a day-long script clinic for anyone out there who has written a play and wants to make it fabulous/maximise its chances of getting a production (I'm very good at this, I'm a theatre Literary Manager - I should point out if you love someone who writes plays, my expertise makes a GREAT PRESENT). Bids start at $0, and you bid just by signing up on the website.

You can start your bidding here.

Please do it for Queensland. If you love books, do it for Queensland - so many libraries and bookstores have been destroyed it is even more painful than having swine flu. And, trust me, that's saying something. Oink! Oink!

And, meanwhile, back in the Valley of Death...

As I've previously mentioned, I work at the Finborough Theatre in London. We are currently having a new writing festival, called Vibrant. We have programmed 30 playwrights to stage work over 30 days. My own show is part of the festival on June 10. It is called Swamplands. It is not actually about swamps.




I haven't slept since April. You can probably tell that from the video.

Simultaneously, the final proofs for my book have arrived - these are the typeset pages, as they'll actually look when book comes out. It would be really exciting if I didn't have to read them again.

My next book club for ABC 666 Canberra (that is never going to stop being funny) is on June 1. We'll be discussing Margaret Atwood's fantastic dystopian fantasy, The Handmaid's Tale - a wonderful, wonderful book.

There will be a proper blog post soon. It will be about writing and fairies and Glastonbury Tor and all the wonderful things in the world that you can remember if you actually get a whole night's sleep. Promise.

Out of the Blanket, but Still in the Bed

Hi there. I'm alive. Sorta.

This is my bed.

This is also where I've set myself up with a mountain of yoghurt, endless cups of tea, a large clock, a mobile, a laptop and a filing system that makes use of the mouldability of duvets.

There's rather a lot going on. I wish it was about the wonders of May Day, which is fast approaching. I wish it was about Beltane, jumping over fires and fertility rituals.

Instead, it's about editing notes, new plays and my other projects. Anyone who thinks that being a working writer begins and ends with some divine bolt of inspiration, a clean room in a Mediterranean villa and an Olivetti typewriter has been watching the wrong kinds of movies. I am not Ernest Hemingway. You are not Ernest Hemingway. Not even Ernest Hemingway was Ernest Hemingway, hence the gunshot in the final act.

The 5 Things That Are Making Me So Busy I am Not Leaving This Bed

1. My novel, Burnt Snow. It comes out in September, in Australia. There will be a launch in Sydney, and some other cities. All of that stuff is being planned now, and I'm coming back to Australia in August to prepare for the launch, do media interviews, run workshops, appear at festivals. OK, so it's a totally fun and awesome (if exhausting) prospect.

What is NOT awesome is having to go through all the editing notes. I lied when I said in an earlier post that there were 450 pages to go through - there are 800. The editing process of my book has gone like this:

- I wrote 50,000 words
- I went around meeting heaps of publishers
- I got a book deal
- I finished writing the book (200,000 words)
- the publishers read the book, we had a meeting about it, they gave me some notes
- I incorporated these notes into a redraft
- the publishers wrote back to me with more notes
- I did another redraft
- the copy editor has worked through the manuscript, suggesting cuts and making scribbles about punctuation, word choice, grammar and some content/meaning suggestions on every page. And I don't mean one or two squiggles. I mean 20-40. Per page.
- after receiving the paper manuscript with her notes from FedEx, I have been approving all of her corrections and making counter-suggestions where necessary, as well as cuts.
- I've FedExed back the first 200 pages, which are being edited ahead of schedule for a super-duper first-part-only advanced chunk of book that is going to book industry media to look at
- the honcho editor (different to the copy editor) is working through my rewrites of the copy editor's suggestions, and making her own counter-counter-suggestions. Then I write back with counter-counter-counter-suggestions. Then she writes back.
- ... meanwhile, I'm working through the next 650 pages.

To give you an example of the correspondence that's being exchanged, this is a sample. My notes are in red. From the Editor:

“Her neck-length hair was burgundy in the low light.”

Van, you queried why the copy-editor changed this to ‘shoulder-length’, wondering what was wrong with ‘neck-length’. I think ‘neck-length’ is a little ambiguous as a vertical guide; readers might wonder whether you mean the top, middle or bottom of the neck. Perhaps ‘chin-length’ might be more what you were thinking of, rather than ‘shoulder-length’?

Hmm.  This is difficult. “Chin-length” would be something like a bob, like Posh Spice. I guess it’s okay, though.

Every book you read (unless it's vanity published) goes through this process, this level of detail. Why? Because it matters. It matters that you, dear reader, know whether Taika's hair reaches to her jawline, mid-neck or higher-collarbone. This level of detail is required to make the fictional world believable, else fuzzy descriptions, cliches and poorly-worded sentences cause the literary equivalent of molten magma to ravage your villages.

Do not even get me started on the maps and houseplans I have had to draw.

2. My play, Swamplands. This play is NOT like Burnt Snow. It is not about witches. It is about the CIA and American spy scandals. I am writing it for this theatre company in America, the wonderful Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. When I am not editing my manuscript, I am reading books about the CIA and working on scenes. Which is just as well given that the play is starting rehearsal very soon, for a one-night only preview performance in the Vibrant Festival of New Writing at the Finborough Theatre in London. It is being directed by Ben Kidd, who is very good.

If you want to come along, it's on June 10, at 9pm, and you can book tickets here, and it's only £4. In London, that's actually cheaper than getting punched in the face.

3. The Classics Book Club I co-host on ABC Canberra Radio. Once a month I do something marvellous with communications technology and I chat 20th Century classic books with Genevieve Jacobs while I'm in London and she's in Canberra. Our last book was White Noise by Don Dellilo. If you want to hear the last show, you can follow this link, here.

Our next book, which I have to reread for our bookclub on May 4 (at 1pm EST, ABC Canberra 666) is my favourite book ever, Brideshead Revisted
by Evelyn Waugh. So if you want to talk "the operations of divine grace on a disparate group of characters", tune in, or catch the blogcast: details are here.

Do I sound busy enough yet? How about we throw in a full-time job?

4. Literary Management at the Finborough Theatre, London. I am very lucky to work for this prestigious new writing theatre in London. What I do is: read scripts we are considering for production, have script meetings with writers whose work we are developing or programming, maintain relationships with new writing programmes in London and new writing theatres across the world, scout writers, directors, actors and designers by attending a lot of productions and run development workshops of new scripts. Those of you who may have noticed that I am also having my show performed there for one night in June please note that this was programmed BEFORE I took over the job. Swear.

If you are a writer who has had the play in them removed, you may wish to consider sending it to our theatre. We've championed writers like Mark Ravenhill, Anthony Neilson, Susan Grochala, Joy Wilkinson, Laura Wade, Nicholas de Jongh, David Eldridge and James Graham, and you can aspire to their ranks by following the directions here. We accept plays from all around the world.

Upcoming fun business at the Finborough includes not only my play, but me "In Conversation With" the fabulous playwright Mark Ravenhill as part of the Vibrant Festival, at 9pm on May 29. To be in the audience for Mark's fabulousness, you can book here.

5. My play, Black Hands / Dead Section in Queensland. Actually, the wonderfulness of this event is that I don't have to write or read anything - I wrote the play five years ago, it won some nice awards and finally, finally, it's getting a production in my home country. It's the debut production in the new Geoffrey Rush Theatre at the University of Queensland, and it's about the Baader-Meinhof Gang and urban left-wing terrorism in 1970s West Germany. It's got lots of guns and pretty young people, and if you can get to Brisbane on May 19-22nd at 7.30pm you can see it for between AUD $5-$12.

The booking number is +61 7 3365 2552. You can read about it here. They get the name of the show wrong, but they get the name of the theatre RIGHT, which is always the most important thing.

... in addition to this, I'm working on the next book, and the screenplays of three films, and a TV series and pitching 4 large-cast plays to a theatre company. Because I am dealing with all of those next week... Well, let's just say I am NOT GETTING OUT OF THIS BED.

Back to the witch-world soon, I swear it.

xx Van