Brendan D Carson’s fiction

Hail,
Hope everyone likes the new font.  I will try to write (or at least format) in more bite-sized chunks.  And expect photographs of more photogenic people than me soon. 

Now, I was going to use this post to write about how writers feel when they read stuff by other writers, but instead I am going to confess to a killing. 

It’s true.  It was the early hours of Saturday morning.  The silent study of an old house, a small country town, only me and the victim awake.  It was quick, and almost silent, but it was not without a struggle. 

Yes, I’ve got ink on my hands.  I’ve murdered nine thousand of my darlings. 

Specifically, nine thousand words of my novel.  Deleted.  Elided.  Cut out and cast away.  Nine thousand words which, through no fault of their own, took a wrong turn two or three months back and ended up in a very bad place - a dead end.

I’m shovelling the dirt into the shallow grave as we speak.

Nine thousand freaking words. Two bloody months.

But I had to do it.  I have a character called Wulfric.  He’s fairly important.  When I first pictured him he was an oblate, a novice monk.  I liked the idea of someone who would choose that kind of life.  I liked the idea of mediaeval monasteries, the way they were part library, part school, part spiritual power station, the way the monks were seen as soldiers and the monasteries vast fortified towers in a war against things we don’t even beleive in anymore.  I needed a male intellectual in my party to balance out my increasingly remarkable heroine. 

So we had Wulfric.  He turns up in chapter two.  By chapter five I’ve got him and his mentor riding up to the gates of Saint Walpurg’s so that he can apply to enter the monastery.   

And… it’s… all… been… crap. 

It does not work.  It will not fly (or ride, or walk, or whatever).  There is no reason why the kind of person he has turned out to be would do this. 

He’s young. 
He’s just fallen in love with someone who despises him. 
He’s urbane. 
He loves life and learning. 
His mentor (Echthstan* - see below) is returning to Rhiem, the city Wulfric loves most - Wulfric is expected to go with him, he has passage booked to France. 
His only previous experience of monastic life was the three horrible months after his parents died, before Echthstan came and saved him. 

He has problems, but I cannot see how he could see that any of them would be solved by a lifetime vow of poverty, chastity and obedience, by abstinence and seclusion in a strange land. 

But narrative inertia or plotline fundamentalism or whatever is a terrible thing.  You set your eyes on a location, like a distant mountaintop, and you set out, and you trudge on and on, never letting your eye wander, never seeing the new paths that have opened up around you, never thinking there are other places you could go, never even noticing how the very ground has altered beneath your feet. 

Late Friday night I looked at Wulfric,  lying on a narrow pallet in Walpurg’s, tonsured and tortured, fevered and alone, wasted with what they call Stranger’s Fever.  A small-framed monk with bright green eyes sat by his bed and asked him what the hell he was doing there. 

And I realised I had no remotely believable answers. 

So - nine thousand words back into the aether.  Because if I want my book to have a plot where people act like human beings would actually act - and try and get themselves in and out of situations in ways that would benefit themselves and what they believe in, rather than proceed as previously arranged - then it’s got to be this way.

The good thing is I know it’s not wasted effort**.

And I know a lot of other people have written off more - entire novels and so forth.

And I know I’m a lot further forward today now I’ve made that decision than if I had kept grinding mindlessly on, trying to herd my characters past a pre-arranged series of plot points like sheep.

(Maybe that sounds like a cliche.  I want something that gives the same sense of external control, of harried mindlessness.  Maybe I should change “sheep” to lemmings. 

Or maybe robots.

Say robot lemming-sheep. 

Yes, herded like robot lemming-sheep. 

Much better.)

Sigh.  Nine thousand words. 

Anyhow.  Time to ring up my “suspiciously alarming and resourceful in these kind of matters” mate for an alibi.  From what I now recall, I was with him at the time.  Funeral on Friday, wreaths and donations to the “Writers Who Will Maybe Face Facts A Little Sooner Next Time” Foundation.

Thanks for listening,
BDC

* Note to those considering setting any work of fiction in 990 AD England.  Choose carefully.  Many of the names are frankly indigestible, and pretty soon you end up with characters called Echthstan, Wuffa, Odo and Grychthnych.  Plus you also have to work out what to do with Saint Sexburga. 

**  It’s what we used to call in medicine a VLE, or valuable learning experience.  Of course, it differs from the traditional medical VLE, which was you standing looking pale and miserable, the consultant jabbing his/her finger at something in the notes, and in the background the resuscitation entering its fortieth minute. 

Hail,
And I am typing this from work, where things are different.  Basic physical constants like the conductivity of copper, or perhaps the stickiness of electrons are altered, so that I type something and there is a lag time of several heartbeats before it appears on the screen.  I tend to type looking at the screen and what happens here is I type and I look up and what is written on the screen suggests that someone from the spirit world is trying to communicate with me. 

Anyway.  Brief bio.  I live in
South Australia.  I work as a doctor – mostly in a niche part of psychiatry specializing in addiction.  Before that I worked in an Emergency Department, which is lots of stories but lots of shift-work.  I used to do kung fu, now I train at home, hitting and being hit by a variety of punching bags and stuff.  I grow chillies and oregano in old water-tanks.  I vote as left-wing as I can and still make my vote count, and I will do so until I or those other bastards die.  I have worked in a piggery, as a door to door ‘person who shrieks about Jesus’, a lemon-picker and a guy who sold circuit breakers door to door.  I started training for seminary. 

I have a wife who makes all this possible.  She is the core of everything I do.  Despite being incredibly intelligent and perceptive, she has stayed with me for close on ten years.  She is a cyborg (two hip replacements by the age of thirty seven, also laser-sharpened eyes) who breeds remarkable looking cats.  If you are nice and meet her stringent criteria, she will email you a kitten. 

I’ve written from as far back as I can remember.  I don’t know exactly how much I have had published, but that’s not because it’s a lot, it’s because I have frighteningly poor memory and organizational skills for this sort of thing.  So far it’s all been in Australia - I was in Altair, I am going to be in Aurealis, I had a few stories in a regrettably extinct publication called Harbinger, that sort of thing.  A few years back I was in Years Best Australian SF and Fantasy. 

I am a not even a minnow in the speculative writing ocean, in fact, I’m krill, or at best a juvenile hagfish.  If writing was Australian Rules football, and people like Tuttle and Dick and James are the Matthew Pavlich’s of this world, I am the stumpy wheezing guy who trundles around the mud on the weekends with the rest of the guys who can’t get into K-grade.  I am yet to make a mark.

The plan – and nowadays there is a plan, previously it was all looking languid and clutching a pomace of lavender and murmuring “Oh, Muse, why hast thou forsaken me?” – the plan is finish the novel by December 2009, get four short stories published, including two in sizeable Australian publications or one in a big US one, and maybe a few free ones which I fondly imagine will “get my name out there”.  And write this, so that people read it, with the hope that they will say “This is truly life-changing stuff here, let me go forth and buy his book”.     

Anyway, off to heal the sick.  Next post will be about how one of my very good friends has just got his book published, and why I hate him. 

Thanks for listening,

BDC

Hail!
I’ve made this blog to write about what’s been going on.  I write - a mixture of speculative (fantasy, science fiction, horror) and mainstream stuff.  I’ve done it all my life - short stories, poetry, uncompleted novels, a truly embarrassing linked series of juvenile stories about Shangar the Black, (the iron-thewed barbarian swordsman of some place with a lot of consonants).  I write about what interests me - mediaeval theology, the last fifty centuries of poetry, experiences of different cultures, love and lobsters. 

Well, in two months I am going to be getting on a plane to Queensland for Clarion South. 

Clarion South, as far as I can work out, is six weeks in the tropical jungle with other budding science fiction and fantasy writers.   In keeping with the horticultural metaphor, we are hothoused so we will put down strong roots and flower, producing the heady and intoxicating fruit of new sf/fantasy/horror literature.   We are watered with constructive criticism, bathed in the sunlight of professional mentoring, and once a week some guy comes around with the literary equivalent of an aphid gun and sprays us all in our sleep. 

Well, if nothing else I can generate my own fertiliser. 

Seriously, Clarion is incredibly exciting news.  They take seventeen people every two years, they reject a hell of a lot more.   I got the phonecall from one of the convenors and the next scene was of my wife, beautiful and long-suffering, gazing up at me as I ran back and forth across the ceiling squeaking very fast in a very high pitched voice, while she tried to lure me back down with a sausage on a stick. 

So:  Six weeks. 
Queensland. 
Hothousing. 
Professional mentorship from award-winning, respect-winning, money-earning authors. 
The chance to finally do what I’ve been telling people I’ve wanted to do for the last four decades. 

Yes, it’s an unmitigated disaster. 

See, what this means is that my last excuse not to write and get stuff published has gone.  I have all my limbs.  I can read and write.  I have moved out to the wilds of South Australia where I am essentially undisturbed if I so desire.  I have a job.  I have all the writerly accoutrements that writers write about when they write about their life - work as a swineherd and a travelling salesman, the requisite amount of madness, the lot.  My wife has supplied me with cats.  I have supportive family, friends who have published, I have every possible advantage.  Previously I could pick up a book like “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly” and say “well, it’s easy for this guy, he had all the advantages, it’s not like someone’s offered me six weeks intensive training in Queensland or anything”. 

And now the bastards have.  Now my last excuse has gone.  It is time, (strong language ahead), to crap or get off the pot (as an aside, in the recent US elections, I heard a Republican urging someone to “paint or get off the ladder” - this kind of drek is what happens when bowdlerisers are allowed to vote.   I hope to live and die without hearing the superficially closely related phrase “crap or get off the ladder”).   

Anyway, next post is a brief author’s bio, me worrying about writers block, and working out how to get one of my characters out of the bath in which she has been sitting for about three weeks now. 

Thanks for listening,
Brendan D Carson