日本に行くことになりました！

Hey, my blog speaks Japanese!

If you can read the title of this post, come and  meet me in Japan, because that's where I'll be very soon.

Over the last few months I've used various euphemisms to allude to this news: "something else exciting, yet to be announced"; "a forthcoming writing-related trip"; "a bunch of other bits and pieces"; "other news on the horizon which is the current source of both excitement and blind panic".

It is still all of those things, the last one most acutely. But now there has been a formal announcement, so I can at least spill the edamame:

I am thrilled to be the recipient of an Asialink Literature Residency and will be spending three months in Nagoya from April-July.

Here's an excerpt from my official bio which explains what I'll be up to:

During her residency at Aichi Shukutoku University, McKinlay will bring together her academic and creative interests, researching and developing a novel for adults centering on Australian-Japanese cross-cultural negotiations against the backdrop of the Second World War. She will also establish links with Japanese poets and children’s writers.

And if you'd like to learn about Asialink and the various programs on offer, you can visit their website here.

I am indebted to the WA Department of Culture and the Arts and the Australia-Japan Foundation for making my residency possible.

Tales From Inner Libraria

Although I work at home a lot, I don't always work at home. Sometimes I take my laptop down to Fremantle and park myself in a cafe. Sometimes I head up to my local library. It helps to have a change of scenery, to avoid the many demands of an insistent house, and there's something satisfying about writing surrounded by books and readers.

Because my house is currently an inviting combination of bomb-site, dust bowl and storage facility, I've been doing this more often lately. And because I've been doing it more, I've broadened my reach. In the last couple of months, I've sampled over a dozen libraries. And I can't help noticing that although some features are common to most - from the expected (books!) to the less-expected (flat-screen TV!) - each also has its own idiosyncrasies, its own particular culture.

So I bring you the first in an occasional series: "Tales from Inner Libraria*". Reading these entries, perhaps you'll nod, because you recognise your library here. Perhaps you'll shake your head because you think I'm making it up. I won't be.

Today's library is a small establishment, south of the river. Despite its small stature, it has not been left behind in the flat-screen television arms race (and honestly - is it just me? Why do we need TV of any description in the library? I guess the argument is that they're a library gateway drug of sorts, a drawcard for kids, who will then somehow absorb the reading bug just by virtue of being near the books? Or perhaps that they are simply alternative sources of information/education, though the one at my local library is in the YA section, conveniently positioned near a vending machine from which teenagers may purchase bags of chips to scoff on the overstuffed couches, and appears to play only sport or cartoons. When it first appeared and I asked whether there had been some debate over the merits of its installation, I was met with a blank stare).

But I digress. Back to today's library.

At today's library, the flat-screen television was so large relative to the library itself, and positioned so high on the wall that it was like a kind of altar, overseeing everything. And it was on, loudly so, playing some sort of obnoxious morning tabloid program peppered with infomercials for ab-crunching devices and toxins for the skin. As is my wont, I approached it with the intent of turning it off, but the controls were cunningly sealed inside a locked cabinet. So I approached the desk. "I wonder," I said mildly, "if that could be turned off?"

The librarian raised her eyebrows. "Off?" She tasted the word as if it were some kind of strange foreign fruit. "What if someone wants to watch it?"

"There's no-one else here," I said. And it's a library, I did not add. "Only me."

"Someone might come," she said. "And want to watch it."

"Then you could turn it back on," I suggested.

She shook her head. "We always have it on."

This, of course, is not really an argument. I raised my own eyebrows, by way of pointing this out.

The librarian sighed heavily. "Well, I suppose I could turn it down."

She turned it down. It was a compromise. Such things are good. I returned to my table.

Then the librarian picked up the phone. She called a friend. And proceeded to discuss at great length and volume a recent trip to the doctor and the results of various intimate medical tests.

I worked at my table, raising my head only slightly from time to time to offer a bemused smile, to remind her there were people here, in the library. And I wrote for two hours/1683 words. Not bad.

I like that library. It has a nice, community feel to it. I may go back next week and toy with the librarian. Plus I'm keen to find out whether the antibiotics do the trick. 

* with apologies to Shaun Tan

None of Your Business

Well, I did warn you this would be the title of my next post. It's prompted by an email I received recently from a writing friend, with the subject line "Business". And by the last couple of months, which seem to have been incredibly busy somehow with a bunch of things which, while writing-related, are not actually writing itself.

A couple of weeks ago, frustrated with my slow progress through the various WIPs, I decided to take a good hard look at where my days are going. Of course there is a slew of other bits and pieces crammed into my day - house, family, exercise and so on - but here is the graph that represents how the time I had available for work was divided over a two-week period.

A little alarming, no?

The category "Writing-related-but-not-actually-writing" covers a grab bag of bits and pieces, including:

* preparing talks for industry events

* preparing workshops and presentations for school/library visits and residencies

* liaising with schools and libraries on admin/technical details for same

* managing the SCBWI mailing list, dealing with enquiries, attending meetings etc

* attending various launches and other industry events

* writing letters of support for other writers' grant applications and the like

* filling out questionnaires from my publisher for my forthcoming books

* working on final edits/jacket copy/teaching notes for same

* updating my website so my new work is represented there

* trying to learn website-design software so I can fix my broken website

* starting advance promo for the new books - sending information to places like SCBWI/Varuna

* ordering books from my publisher for my own use at school visits etc

* answering correspondence from readers

* designing and ordering new flyers and business cards

* organising head shots and seventy-five different versions of my bio for various purposes

* booking flights and insurance, planning itinerary and making contacts for a forthcoming writing-related trip

* doing poetry readings

* selling my poetry book

* preparing and sending submissions

* dealing with things like the Google Book Settlement, PLR/ELR, CAL and various other potentially income-generating acronyms

* keeping up with industry newsletters, review magazines and other channels of information

Ah, so that's why I wasn't getting much writing done!

People warned me about this before my first novel was published, in much the same way they admonish expectant mothers to "make the most of this time, before the baby comes. It will never be like this again". And in much the same vein, you never believe them. Because you've been waiting what feels like forever for this and you just want your baby to hurry up and be born already. So you think what do they know? It'll be fine! I'm going to love it!

And you do love it, of course. This is not intended to be a litany of complaint. I know how very very fortunate I am to be in this position. I once dreamed of going to launches and writing blurbs and doing promotion and school visits. I love all of it. And I know that in my struggling-to-get- my-foot-in-the-door days, if I'd I heard a writer complaining about the terrible toll having these many books published was taking on their writing, I would have had to resist the urge to smack them firmly upside the head. In a writing sense, these fall very squarely under the category of what we at our house like to refer to as "first-world problems".

But they're real, nonetheless. And I guess what I'm saying is that I need to be aware of all this and of the very real chunk it does take out of my writing time. And move to mitigate that if necessary. Which it may well be. Because the writing is the point, first and foremost, and when it gets squeezed into the cracks of the "business" side of things, there's something rather topsy turvy about that.

Of course, I'm thinking about all this and how I really need a night at home to try and get some words in on the WIP, when all of a sudden two delightful gentlemen announce that they've scored a new book contract and are getting together that same evening to celebrate and would I perchance like to come along? And of course I would, because this is the absolute best stuff of all and what it's all about, in the end, and sitting at the Windsor on a balmy Perth evening eating pizza and drinking champagne and grinning broadly from ear to ear has absolutely nothing at all to do with business when you really think about it.

Congratulations, boys!

In closing, I leave you with my favourite pie graph of all time, altogether more satisfying than my own.

* I'm not sure where this image originated, but I've taken this version from Boing Boing.

Back From the Moon (and the stars)

Yes, I've re-entered the atmosphere.

Last weekend, I read at the Moon Cafe. I scrambled to stitch together some poems that had been lying in pieces for far too long - one a day for the eight days leading up to the reading was my goal, but in the end I managed seven. Which is pretty good, I think. What's that old saying - "Reach for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars?" Lately, I have been feeling rather more like the more recent re-working - "Reach for the stairs; they're closer" - but either way, I got seven new poems out of it, so I am very happy.

It was a lovely afternoon - stinking hot on the Moon but I like the heat. I like the weather, actually, and do not like the way we seem to increasingly avoid it via the so-called necessities of air-con and so forth. I do like it when the air is moving, though. An oscillating fan will do me most of the time. It was almost tropical at the Moon, with the humidity and the closeness and the overhead fans and the languid couches, and I loved it. And I think there might be a poem in there somewhere - "Give Me Weather"? Perhaps I'll scratch that down shortly.

For now, seven poems. I teased you last week with a couple of opening lines. One of those openers turned into a more complicated poem than I was able to finish in time and will have to percolate a while longer. But for now, here are the opening lines of the ones I did complete:

They're renovating in the oncology clinic                                

Tonight, the room is thick/with the smell of boy                       

It's how we were raised, on the logic/of gold                            

     

Above all, you must remain/with the vehicle                            

You can't tell/from the outside what the flesh/will reveal

In the waiting room, my daughter plays/with transparent syringes

When I ask for seventy cents/worth of suburbs                        

While I was getting these poems ready, I realised many of them have something in common: there are lots of knives, blades, cutting, that sort of thing. And when I think about it, I have more fragments that share similar qualities. It makes sense, if you know me well. Which I do. And I love the way life's undercurrents sneak into poetry unbidden. I love the way a poem lets you know what it is that's on your mind, or perhaps just underneath it.

So that was the Moon. And last night was the stars. There were no knives there, at least not that I recall. And no poetry either. I'm fairly sure I would have noticed that. Jon Doust was there, though, and I promised him a Cat in the Hat sock for his fence installation. There's a kind of poetry in that, I reckon.

That's all for now. The WIP beckons, and the editing job, and a bunch of other bits and pieces I probably shouldn't continue to ignore. My next post will be none of your business.