Heavy metal (type)writers

It's two years since I began this blog. I intended it to be a personal notebook about the peculiar personal process of aging. Blame my mother, who died absurdly young, almost-but-not-quite on purpose. 

Well, I'm over it. Had to do it. Over it. The deadline for Hamletting has passed. Now let's get cracking on the new stuff. New books to read and new books to write.

Here's a photo of an "old writer" by Rebecca Basden. 

Those antique typewriters are icons for people who write. Every second writer's blog flaunts a photo of one of the old pedal machines.

I've never used one in my life. I began with a Hermes Baby: brute force was required and it squeaked when I hit the keys. Cute, but nostalgia? Zero. Give me a MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air any day.

Writing process: the novel as patchwork skirt

The novel I'm writing this year began as 26 colourful patches, otherwise perceived as short stories.

My other novels were, of course, written from scratch. The writing process is always a hard muscly battle between structure and story, with myself as a bewildered but ambitious adjudicator. 

With my first novel, The Limits of Green, I just jumped on the elephant of the story and held on like grim death when it bolted. Then I tried to impose structure as an afterthought. 

With more experience, I became more of a sumo wrestler than a novice arm-wrestler, but neither is a match for an elephant. Writers always attempt to prod, cajole or even programme the elephant to follow a structured path, and to some extent writers will always fail, because story must win. It's a fun fight although there is much at stake.

As I was foolish enough to reveal my current project, some friends inevitably ask, "How's it going? How much have you written so far?" 

I can't blame them, because I also announced my game plan prematurely: to write at least some words every day. Word count and duration are irrelevant: 100 words or 1,000 words, 15 minutes or 4 hours—I don't care. I just write something and the novel grows.

This book didn't start as a blank page: it started with 45,000 words—26 stories that must now be sprinkled evenly through the narrative. The stories are like multi-coloured patches that I have roughly pinned on a canvas skirt template. 

The main narrative begins as 26 bits and pieces of cloth. Right now, the narrative pieces are small, pale and shapeless. As I write, fabric will be removed and replaced and destroyed and shifted and shaped and stretched until the entire canvas is covered and the skirt as a whole emerges. 

I cannot predict what the general impression will be—bright or sombre, short or long, bristly or smooth, A-shaped or O-shaped, flat or textured. (It won't be frilly.) However, after the battle of structure and story, bones and colour is over, I hope to find something coherent, graceful and astonishing. 

I'm over real-life patchwork skirts, but in my youth I created a couple of beauties. One was constructed in tiers: that was so easy it was virtually cheating. The other was sleek and subtle, cut on the cross and featherstitched. 

Photo of a vintage patchwork skirt: found on e-Bay

New Year writing and the Google novelist trap

Hello there, new year. You always make me feel a tiny bit inadequate. I believe it's normal to be able to sum up the old year in a nice little bundle. To figure where you've been and where you're going. Make resolutions, I suppose.

But life is messy, and my mature brain is a network of fibres hopelessly tangled by some metaphysical kitten. (An escapee from Schrodinger's cat-box, no doubt.) Every thought is connected to every other thought, if you follow Ariadne's thread far enough into the maze.

See what I mean? Away they go...

This week my beloved brain's wanderlust has been more obvious than usual. I'm writing a novel (yay!) and I make reasonable progress in the morning. Afternoons, not so much. In mid-sentence I tend to slide into Googleworld in search of, for example:

• the meaning of Libertia Peregrinas (or is it Peregrinans?)
• a biography of Anne-Marie Libert, 19th century Belgian botanist
• photos of shearers' quarters on Canterbury farms
• the difference between golf carts, ATVs and quad bikes
• earthquake damage in Rangiora.

None of this information is necessary for me to write a perfectly good draft chapter, but I just can't resist. Research is a tunnel—an enticing tunnel, crammed with would-be novelists blundering around in the dark.

And so is blogging.

Why the New Zealand native longfin eel (tuna) should be the official symbol for the Year of the Snake: see my business blog.

Photo: Inside Lyttelton Tunnel (c) FishnChips on VirtualTourist.com.

Hor d'oeuvre of dry roasted biro

The other night a friend and I demolished a small roast of beef, getting into training for Christmas.

An unexpected addition to the menu was dry roasted biro.

For one dread moment I wondered whether I was the woman who mistook her pen for an aubergine.

But in a flash I solved the mystery. (Applause for Madame Sherlock.) A stray pen could easily be swept up in a tea-towel doubling as oven mitt and deposited in the oven along with a dish of vegetables, couldn't it? So it was served as an hors d'oeuvre with a soupçon of Dijon mustard and a garnish of Moore Wilson semi-dried tomatoes.

Modestly I claim the biro was a success. Tough and dry, I'll grant you that. But an impressive indigo colour and an acerbic literary flavour made it a fine culinary innovation. Recommended.

Wedding song

Wedding song

So you are the hunter

and I am the gatherer

and you are the gardener

and I am the traveller

and I am the dancer

and you are the dance.

And I am the dreamer

and you are the harbour

and you are the future

and I am the farmer

and you are the juggler

and I am the clown.

I see you—I know you—

I love you—I see—

that you are the builder

and I am the weaver

and you are the mover

and I am the mender

and you are the mountain,

and I am the cloud.

And you are the lover

and I am the lover

and we are a twosome

and you are the one.

by Rachel McAlpine, 1996

I originally wrote this wedding poem for friends.
Later I realised that it also fitted another bride and groom: my daughter and her husband.
Eventually the truth dawned: the concepts in this wedding song may make good sense to almost any two people in love and about to marry.

You may share Wedding Song freely, but please include my name as writer.

Fingertip information on glass: here now, enjoy.

Will people in their 70s and 80s live to see a world where intuitive glass displays replace computer screens? Of course. It's here already—just not in my home, yet.


Sure, it's an advertisement, for which I apologise. I have no connection with Corning's Glass. But their videos are a mind-goggling glimpse of the near future.

Isn't life great, with such adventures just around the corner?

View all the Day Made of Glass videos.

72 is the new 30—I beg your pardon?

Salon.com poses the burning question:

"Is 72 the new 30?"

No wonder we get confused about who we are and how to live.