Fire!

I’ve been watching the news from home and it’s all incredibly grim.

Here I am, camped out in a country where the biggest concern is lots of cold in conjuction with lots of cold wet stuff, looking back at my nation where heat is destroying entire swathes of the countryside.

In the time since I have been here, the temperature in southern Australia has been above 40 degrees celsius – I believe that is around 106 degrees Farenheit.

Train rails have buckled in the heat, the power grid has shut down in places from sheer demand and fires have been burning everywhere.

Today 108 people are dead in Victoria alone and entire towns have been reduced to ash. It’s truly awful.

It seems somehow worse that I am here trying to write a novel in which the main event is a raging bushfire. My first instinct is to stop immediately and come up with some other catastrophe – it all feels rather like I am exploiting someone else’s misery and misfortune.

This is despite the fact that Australia is a country designed to burn. Many of our native plant species have adapted so much to its incidence that they cannot germinate without fire. The trees have bark filled with flammable oils, bark designed to shed easily and blow away when alight to spark further fires many miles away.

Fire is part of the national profile and one that is going to become more common as climate change continues and our weather patterns become drier still.

Is it wrong to use this as part of a story line or is it realistic to do so? Am I being exploitative or simply facing facts?

Mind you, the story isn’t written yet and it’s hardly going to hurt anyone in that state, is it?

I live in a town which was hit badly by bushfire 5 years ago. In many ways it’s still in a state of shock.

I wish everyone back home well.

S.

And in the next exciting episode …

Life is an amazing experience, isn’t it?

So full of twists and turns and very few warning signs like, “steep drop ahead” or “slow down, hairpin bend.”

My trip is back on, although to a very different part of America for now. I’m waiting to hear from a friend in Ohio as to how soon I may darken her doorstep, occupy her spare room and turn into a dark and brooding, quasi-artistic presence in her home.

I’ve been watching the weather forecast for the area and, mercifully, it’s quite a bit cooler than here. Although there is no snow on the horizon. Anything cooler than Australia in mid-summer is good as far as I am concerned. And we’re having a cool summer too.

I think I may be turning into one of the world’s first international climate refugees.

Preparations proceed apace. (What a concise sentence, and in such multi-syllabic pretension too..)

I have finished my tax stuff (Yay!) for the business, my reading pile is diminishing and I have a stack of suitcases with things in them on my sofa bed. I say they have “things in them” because, while they are not empty, they are certainly not packed.

There is no order to the contents. I simply think of something I really should take with me, open the lid of the nearest case, and pop it in. I’m not quite sure what one should pack for a 6 month sojourn in foreign climes, so I’m making it up as I go along. Neatness and method can come closer to my departure date – whatever that may be.

In the meantime, my book wants to be written. I find I have little screenplays running in my head whenever I take a moment to actually listen to what I am thinking. I am so tempted to sit down and start NOW, but that would be silly. It would leave things undone here and then I would fret about those the whole time I am away.

Those and the cat.

More later.

S.

Of mice and men …

I have been lax – I know.

I’ve neglected you (and my blog) for far too long.

My website is frozen in time and my writing has sorely needed to be saddled up and taken for a brisk trot in the crisp morning air; or any air, really.

I have been unwell. My life has been in turmoil. I have been searching for the meaning of life and a purpose thereto…

The figurative dog ate my homework.

I have decided to put my business on hold for a while and chase a dream. I am going to write my novel.

It may not be the next big thing – and probably won’t be – but at least I will have given it a go.

I have been mulling over this book for some 2 years now and it is demanding to be written. I am dreaming scenes and waking up with dialogue on my tongue.

I’m sure this isn’t healthy.

So, I had planned to go to America for six months and work on it there. I have a dear friend in San Antonio who would support me if my MS flared up. I had visions of a sparse bedsit somewhere in the city environs, scattered with piles of paper and other writerly detritus, interspersed with voyages out into the strange world of Texas.

Why Texas? Because it is far away from all the demands on me here, and will be the closest I ever get to living on another planet. I figured that, by the time I got back to Oz, I’d have enough material for a second book.

I was due to leave on 17 January 2009. Was. This has now been put on hold while we wait to see if my friend is to be caught up in the U.S. surge to Afghanistan. We won’t know until mid-February at the earliest.

Sigh. Mope.

In the meantime, my characters are not happy (neither is the housesitter I had lined up) and are demanding the right to speak.

My plans for now? To continue my schedule as before: to tidy up all the paperwork associated with the business; to round off work for clients; and to get my flat ready for someone else to live in for 6 months – including eating as much as I can of the contents of my storecupboard. (This latter would make a post all of its own…)

Then I will start to write on the 17th of January. I don’t need to be elsewhere to do this, but it would certainly help. However, “them’s the breaks” as they say in the talking picture shows.

Is this my first taste of artistic suffering?

Could this actually be the bright side?

Oh dear.

TTFN,

S.