All posts tagged: Walk

Clearing out the dead notes

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Found: forgotten phone notes for Blue Hour (once Blue Mountain) Found: photographs I took on small walks (things I told myself would be useful for the novel) Found: old ideas became new ideas became whole chapters became rejected edits became rewritten paragraphs Found: the smallest thoughts that completed a manuscript Found: my head, my dreams, things I don’t remember thinking Found: memories of notes I’m positive have been erased and aired and erased again but keep coming back every time I open archived digital folders. Found: this is a way you can write a novel when you think you have nothing inside you

Windows, Light, Memory #1

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Tonight I was supposed to be spending time with the third project but I could only think of the novel-in-progress, of one character in particular who keeps reinventing himself every time I want to write something new. All his ways of speaking, his voice the only thing I’m capable of writing at the moment. He never leaves me. Better to leave words before they get you down. There was only one thing to do: I went into the night, went to find the things the corner of my eye might hold onto the longest, hoped some pattern would emerge so I could find my way back to the project/task at hand, tune into a voice I hadn’t been able to find for a few weeks. After 30 minutes, a pattern: light and window, people living just beyond eyesight. The way dark leads you to memory and repetition. That’s when I heard the woman’s voice, the character that has evaded me for weeks. She was back. And she was thinking in memory, was living in them, …

Walk With Me

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Another night of tracing paths for my characters: They walk, I walk. They live in shadows, I follow. And so. Here are the walks that are building a novel. Some are based in Melbourne, other scenes are character ‘memories’ of European cities. I don’t always like to give away too much of the interior of a work-in-progress but these are some of the images I’ve been staring at every day. Melbourne: 8:35 pm, Monday 19 February 2018 Prague: 3pm, 12 January 2018 Leipzig: 5 pm, January 2018 Berlin: close to 3:30 pm, January 2018 Berlin: the day before, 10 am. January 2018 Leipzig: 10 am, 2 January 2018 Melbourne: late afternoon, September 2017 Melbourne: mid morning, June 2017 Melbourne: late night, my house. Probably June, 2017 Melbourne: early morning, storm warning. My house, approx June 2017 On the way to Canberra, toward a mountain: probably noon, early January 2017. And this road. This road is Eleanor

Look Up

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My mind is a rush. For weeks I’ve divided days into categories: See What I Have Done and Blue Mountain. I find it difficult to generate new scenes or ideas for Blue Mountain on any day I need to deal with Lizzie. It’s emotionally and mentally tiring to have to deal with all those characters while they congregate in the same place. Which is frustrating because right now I need to be working on both.  I moved on from See What I Have Done around August last year. Although I was knee deep in edits and still had proof reads to look forward to, I’d fallen in love with a new novel that germinated from a strange dream I’d had years before and which had been waiting for me to come back to it when Lizzie was done (yes, I’m aware I’m beginning to hang a lot of respsonbility on dreaming for writing but whatever). Suffice to say, I got shitty when the Bordens interrupted my dates with Blue Mountain. But on we’d go and …

How Not To Kill Your Darlings

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In the lead-up to my child’s birth, I’d set myself the task to finish yet another draft of my manuscript and send it out to a publisher. I had already written five, six or more drafts over seven years about the Lizzie Borden case. Now that I was pregnant the current drafting felt different, urgent: I had convinced myself that if I didn’t finish it then and there I never would. Writer friends who were parents warned me that once the baby came, I’d have no time for anything else. The brain would no longer have the capacity to move beyond itself. I may not even know who I was.

Paying Attention, Shifting Perspective: the Borden’s get another visit and I go walking

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There’s been another draft. I won’t go into the specifics (not just yet anyway) but let it be known that I’m really beginning to tire of this novel. There’s a small part of me that feels that I could potentially write this novel for another ten years, that I could keep drilling down, write about the Borden’s all the way back to their genesis, write the code of their DNA  and still discover something new about them. To keep my mind focussed I’ve gone on some amazing walks lately. Nothing exceptional – just keeping in my immediate neighbourhood – but these walks have been a crystal time: the onset of winter in Melbourne has produced so many different species of fungus, that I’ve been reminded that there is always something new to be found along well worn paths. And so with that (minus photos of fungus):  

You have no choice but to take the Bordens with you

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Over the Christmas/New Year break I took some extra time off work so I could begin and complete the latest draft of See what I have done.  To make things more interesting, I took the Bordens with me to Tasmania with the hope that distance from my usual writing places would allow me to discover a few more things about them. I get sea sick. I remembered this as soon as I stepped onto the Spirit of Tasmania. Needless to say I was ill prepared for the night journey out at sea. As we rocked over waves and my stomach swam toward my chest,  I remembered that Bridget and Lizzie had taken ships to and from Europe. Here was a moment to transpose my experience into the book. I clung to the railing, looked down into depth and tried to see the ocean from their point of view. I wish I could tell you something profound happened. I managed to take this photo of the sun setting over Bass Strait before I was defeated by the sea: So things continued. …

Hello, Bridget: redrafting the first project.

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In April I put Lizzie Borden in the drawer. After 10 years with her and her family, it was time to take a long break and begin work on something new. The distance between us was easy breathing. For the first time in a long time I stopped dreaming of Lizzie, stopped thinking about the way she might move around her house, stopped wondering if she talked in her sleep. I had lost a shadow. I started sleeping in to 7 am. Around 3 years ago, I began searching for my next project. It was exciting to think about what it might feel like to experience new characters and expand on the themes that I was exploring in the current project. That’s when the recurring dream started. A single image: a woman driving to the Blue Mountains with a decomposing child in the back seat. I knew immediately this was the next book. The instinct was there, the way it sat in my body and hooked. It had been that way with Lizzie. Now the feeling was …

The Return of a Memory: Sarah Island, 2010

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I remembered: the cold on my hands, wrinkle skin and dry. I aim the camera. There was something in the air, something in the quiet water. Something that felt like decimation. After taking this photo ideas began to form. Ideas belonging to the dream I had had a few months prior about the woman in a car and her child. Then this. I wrote them down. Who knows where that notebook is now (I suspect somewhere at the bottom of a box in the garage) but I have remembered this photo and now I have a visualisation. The photo has reappeared at the right time for the second project. Now I am thinking about those lost feelings again, the way they will tie back to the characters that are forming, the way they will tie to the projects different forms of decimation, different forms of trauma. The new project is slowly worming its way out from abstract ideas into something that will boom my blood. I should stop calling it the second project and begin to …

Burn + Clear

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Lunch time. April. I walk the path, head straight. I dodge swooping birds, step over Ute tracks left by the SES workers the day before.  And now the smell of burning.