I guess the locals made the most of the pun and introduced every liquidambar, Japanese maple, golden poplar and other ruby-toned, golden-hued, russet coloured exotic they could lay their hands on, and it worked. Come to the Alps in the autumn, pretty place, Bright.

Jamballs all hot with squishy raspberry filling that burns your chin as it spills down? Icing donuts with sprinkles and that kind of hard icing that cracks under your bite  and is wonderfully gritty between your teeth? Big pineapply donuts for a Norman Gunston treat?

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When I was a kid and in my teen years, every Christmas Nana would give me a diary. I loved my diaries. Nana got a little bored with giving them to me towards the end, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. The last thing I did at night was write my diary. A profound ritual of growing through those difficult years of adolescence. And what did I put in them? Day after day of went to school. Took dog for a walk. Rode bike. Went to shops. Seriously. No intrigue, no deep insights into the mind of a girl growing up in the seventies, just day after day of went to school and once a week, detailed description of whatever happened in my favourite TV show.

It’s been rather a lot of years since I kept a diary. I look back and think that I should have kept one when the kids were little, celebrating each achievement, detailing the little things that happened before I got stuck in the took kids to school. Did shopping that my life became, with details of the latest episode of X-Files or Dr Who. Very little has changed, but this blog is not about how boring my life is because let’s face it, boring I might be, but I am also safe and well cared for and loved, which is more than most people in the world have going for them. No, this is a blog about how despite the fact that I am not a work of fiction (as far as I can discern) I feel that in the past few days I have completed a story arc.

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, f… actually, no. Thirty five years ago in this galaxy, right here, there was a science fiction convention. It was called Aussiecon and it was held at the Southern Cross hotel in Melbourne and I went to it. I was seventeen and I went alone because maybe my friends were interested but it never actually occurred to me to ask them. I don’t even know how I found out about the convention, or where I got the money from to attend (and to pay the $26 taxi fare going home at night) but I did. It was fun and it was scary. I made no friends but I hung around with some people and wished I could be cool like them and I went to panels and I smiled at Forrest J Ackerman and I watched Ursula leGuin smoke her pipe and to this day I regret that I didn’t get their autographs.

But that’s not what this blog is about. This blog is about how Aussiecon was the start of something. You see, one of those cool, cool guys mentioned a book that he had read. It was called The Green Rain. I misheard him, and had this image of a pulsating green brain, but he straightened me out. The rain was green, or at least it turned everybody who it touched green and there was peace in the world because how can you have a race war when everybody is green? It sounded kind of interesting so I said I’d look out for it. I never did find it at Merv Binns’s Space Age Book Shop and then life got in the way, so I wasn’t that fazed.

The annoying thing about this book is that I can’t tell you how I got it. It was only quite recently, within the past five or so years, but I don’t remember the exact circumstances. Maybe I found it in the box of books from when my sister in law was clearing out her late-brother’s flat. Maybe I found it in an op-shop or at a stall in a market. I can tell you that somebody paid 20c for it, but whether it was me or not I can’t say, I only remember that I saw it and got all excited. Here it was, so many years later, and I’d found the copy of this book that my sort-of friend at Aussiecon had spoken of so reverently. It became mine in all its battered glory.

What the photo doesn’t adequately convey is that all of the glue has turned to dust so that when you open it the pages spill into your hands. It’s an old book; first printing June 1961.

I took it home and started to read. A lot of things have changed since June 1961. One of them was that I wasn’t reading so much science fiction at the time. Another one is the way that people write. Another one is the way I read things. I got as far as Miss Madge McMamie, Sydney’s Sugar Cane Queen and I’m afraid I went all “WTF???” on the story. Since when does Sydney, captial of New South Wales, have a sugar cane festival? I read on, but not very far. Madge’s dialogue was so American, I couldn’t stand it. For me, dialogue is the make or break of a character and hers was straight out of Noo Yawk. I put the book down. I lost it in the stacks beside my bed, in the piles of dusty tomes that migrate from shelf to shelf around the house, sometimes given to Mum to hand on to her friends, sometimes bundled into bags and pushed through the openings of op-shop bins. The book was lost and gone and I didn’t care, I had new, shiny ones to read instead.

It’s just over two years ago, now, that I was accepted into the 2009 Clarion South science fiction writers’ workshop. I was elated and terrified. What did I know about scifi? I hardly even read it any more. Maybe they would discover I was really a fraud and chuck me out of the workshop before I got there. Didn’t happen.

Instead I had six weeks of insanity in Brisbane with weather that was like some part of an experiment in sensory deprivation and it was six solid weeks of write, read, crit, write, read, crit, every weekday and my doubts about myself grew and grew and my stories became more and more ridiculous so that they started off with a story about people being herded into ghettos on account of the drought, moved to one about disappearing children, floundered on with a story about people being used as the raw materials for making fabulous animals, had my main character finish up in a poultry macerator in the next one and finished up with a cheery little tale, told in first person, of a man being vivsected. When I think about it, this was really a description of my mental state.

Menopause is a foreign country. They do things differently there. I came back home and managed to disenfranchise myself from a group of good friends. I clung to my Clarion buddies though because despite the frank oddness of my stories not fitting in (I didn’t write about zombies, not once, or vampires or pirates or even robots) we had still been through six weeks together and we were family. I waited for their emails and followed them on Facebook and occasionally we would get together, those of us in Melbourne, or here for a visit.

Then one of the tutors happened to mention that he’d come across a copy of The Green Rain in his travels. How hilarious and wonderful. I, too, had a copy. If I could find it. If it still existed. If I hadn’t chucked it out or given it away. I just had to find it. I searched in the clutter of books beside my bed, took them down and dusted them off and found another bookcase to shove them onto, but it wasn’t there. I searched the bookcase in the bedroom, its plastic shelves distorted by the weight of words they carried. I found some likely looking yellowed pages, but not the ones I was searching for. I stood at the door of the “study” (actually more of a junk room) and wondered if there would ever be a time when I could get close enough to the bookshelves in there to see if I still had my copy of The Green Rain. Seemed unlikely. There was a great big frame with a boxing heavy bag hanging off it and bags and boxes and piles of stuff that mostly belonged to Radio Boy. Stuff that had made it from his place in Bega, as far as our place in Selby and no further. I wondered if the book was still there or if I’d been guilty of not caring enough about this scifi gem.

Things have changed in our house in the past year. Radio Boy moved out, well, more than a year ago, and then BF moved in, sort of, with Poss. They would spend a few days here and then a few days at his parents’ place. A nomadic couple searching for somewhere to settle and frustrated in their plans by lack of employment, but it all came good for them and they found a place to live. Earlier this year BF bought a flat and he and Poss moved in, giving Beloved and me a great big house with all these spare rooms.

We finished the loft and stacked stuff in there. The heavy bag went in and so did most of Radio Boy’s stuff (there will be a whole lot more room in the loft once that boy settles down.) Poss’s old bedroom became the study, and very nice it is, having everything here, my dictionaries within easy reach and a place where all of the printers can live in peace and harmony. I painted the walls of Radio Boy’s old bedroom and we dubbed it the library. Some day there will be shelves and all of our books will roam free in the knowledge of their safety. First, though, they had to be moved from the old study/junk room, soon to be known as the craft room.

As I moved those stacks of books, I kept wondering if I would find The Green Rain. Okay, so there isn’t much suspense in this story really, because I’ve got the photo up there and you do know that I found it. It had fallen down the back of a shelf, so I didn’t find it till right at the end, when I was looking under stuff and behind stuff, just to make sure that no book would be forgotten. But I found it. It’s sitting on my desk with me now, and in a few minutes, when I finish this blog, I will take it to its new home, the library, which will someday be less messy than it is now.

But I found it and I held it and did a little dance. I had found it. I carried it to my bedroom and put it on the stack beside the bed. I read the book this time, because I was so happy to have it “home” with me again, because it meant something to me in terms of writing and science fiction and a connection that I’d made with a group of people who were wonderful and because it felt like the right thing to do. I got past Miss Madge McMamie’s accent and maybe there’s someplace called Sydney in the USA where they have a Sugar Cane Queen. Doesn’t matter. I liked the way the story ended and I suddenly began to realise a whole lot more about the genre and what I was trying to do.

Now, to bring the story full circle, last week I went to Aussiecon 4. Every year there is a world science fiction convention. This was the fourth time it had been in Australia and once again I was lucky enough to have it right here in Melbourne.

So I paid for my ticket and hopped on the back of Beloved’s bike and rode into town to go to the convention and to reconnect. I connected with much of my Clarion family. Sadly, not everyone was able to make it, but there were hugs all round for those who did, and they were good and true hugs. The hugs you give to the people who know your best and your worst and who still love you.

None of us dressed as wizards or wore pointy ears like Mr Spock’s. I wore my cats-in-rockets t-shirts, my Clarion South 2009 Wonder Junkie t-shirt and my Robbie the robot and B-9 robot t-shirt, but that was my concession to nerdiness. That and the jokes I laughed at and the truckloads of books I bought.

We had meals together and we bumped into each other throughout the course of the day, the allure of this or that panel dragging us apart and the brownian motion of crowd drawing us in again. It was the warmth, though. It was the honest love that I felt that meant the most to me. As if after thirty-five years I had finally come home. That maybe I was over my post-Clarion haze and could write again. People talk about “finding themselves” all the time but I think I had to truly get lost in order to find myself.

I’ll probably regret that I didn’t get China Mieville’s autograph, or Kim Stanley Robinson’s or Richard Harlan’s, and there were even more books that I wish I’d bought and didn’t, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I feel as if I’ve found my way through a story arc that’s taken thirty-five years to complete and that maybe, just a little bit, I know what I should be doing, and that it’s not too late to start now, and that even if I don’t, there are still a whole bunch of people who will always be my Clarion Family.

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This morning as I was getting breakfast ready, Beloved was looking at me, just looking at me with this funny smile on his face. When I asked what he was thinking about, he said how much weight I’d lost and that I do look thinner, especically my bum. Honestly, the man is made from solid gold.

Hasn’t been a great week for me, mood-wise. Last weekend was the writing group’s retreat which I of course did not go on and it was tempting to mope (especially since the retreats had been my idea in the first place.) So on Friday, as I was having a bit of a sook about it all, Beloved said I should come into town and meet him for lunch. Melbourne is a wonderful city, full of fabulous little arcades tucked away all over the place, and we had lunch at this nice little Italian place, but after lunch. Oh wow. After lunch: Koko Black.

I LOVE Koko Black. That’s a chili hot chocolate right there, and although the photo isn’t the best resolution or focus, up real close you can see these little orange dots floating in the bubbles of chocolate and they are pure chili. Just the best, hottest thing on a cold Melbourne day. And yes, we did have a serve of wonderful choccies to go with the drinks because, well, because you just do, don’t you?

Now I know that out of pure dedication to knowledge you will want to know more, so here’s a link to the website. Oh yes, it’s well worth a visit, but the shop is even more worth a visit.

Well, after all of that chocolatiness, Beloved had to go back to work for the afternoon and I had a bit more of a wander around the city. I had to pick up my old iPod, which had got itself a battery transplant. The man at the battery shop was hilarious. I asked how much for a new battery for my phone as well. ‘Twenty dollars for you.’ And how much for one of those nifty iPod pouches? ‘Ten dollars for you.’ I wondered how much if it hadn’t been me, but it was cute and funny and I did get a new battery for my phone, but not a pouch for my pod because they were the wrong size for my geriatric old nano.

Then there were clothes shops. I love looking at the shops. Seven Angels, which I’m sure I remember from when I was a kid (well, a 20-something kid) and could walk into places like that and put on fairy clothes that fitted me. Instead I just looked. And looked. And dreamed. Then I found another shop, a factory outlet with clothes I really liked and dammit I have lost weight and I can sometimes pick up stuff from the “normal” sizes and I really, really wanted the jumper that was made of something so soft that I wanted it against my skin for the rest of my life and I wanted the dress with the cats on it and they were size XL, I checked on the label and I am size XL and they were cheap and I took them to the counter.

‘Did you try them on?’ the lady said.

‘No.’

‘You should try them on. The…neck is…big.’

So I tried them on. Sort of. It was kind of the lady not to just say “you delusional old trout, there’s no way you’re going to squeeze your lardy, porky arse into these, these have been made for normal human beings”. I hate mirrors. I hate what I saw in that tiny little dressing room – arms like marble slabs of salted meat. Honestly, half the girls I work with have thighs that are slimmer than my arms. The bulging fat belly and saggy, droopy arse. I know how hard I have worked and the pain I have honestly gone through to get this far, but at moments like this it seems so utterly futile. I gathered up the angel soft jumper and totally cute kitty dress and left them on the counter. The lady was not there to see me go. It was nice of her to spare me the humiliation.

The weekend was a frenzy of Doing Stuff. Upstairs there are 2 bedrooms. Poss has sort of taken over Radio Boy’s room, with Mum’s old double bed there which she shared with BF, and a trestle table loaded with 2 sewing machines and an overlocker, plus stuff that Radio Boy couldn’t possibly bear to part with but wasn’t interested enough to take with him. Things like old school books.

Well, I got in there and cleaned and I chucked stuff out. I seriously chucked stuff out, but also put stuff into plastic boxes. Plastic boxes are an absolute boon at this place. I packed up Radio Boy’s old single bed, too. And I washed and swept and tidied and moved the bookshelves so that at the end of it, the room contained one double bed, one old kitchen table moved from the kitchen, and one single mattress, laid on its side so that it wouldn’t take up too much space. The shelves had just Poss’s stuff on them and the sewing machines were all on the table.

Then the exciting stuff. Beloved and I went and bought flooring for the attic-space. Yeah, it has a name now. I always wanted to live in an attic when i was a kid. One of those attics with the little pointy windows where the first rays of the sun shine in, early on summer’s mornings. Where you lie awake on summer nights with the windows open to the sound of cricket and the crystal brilliance of the stars shining through. Where you hide under your blanket against the whistle of the wind on a cold winter night, and get up in the grey gloom of the day to see that there’s a crust of snow on the window-sill and the tiny footprints of birds dotted in the pure white that’s silently spread itself all across the roof of the house below you.

A secret, wonderful spot where you write in your diary every night and feed crumbs to a pigeon or a mouse that comes to visit you in your loneliness. A place of quiet contemplation where dreams of wonder and magic take shape.

Yeah, well, our attic is going to be nothing like that. No windows, no mice or pigeons (unless the cats are very bad), no wonder or magic, just my simple dreams of tidiness coming true. We got two big long boards to be the floor of the laundry half of the attic space, and then just need to get two slightly shorter boards to be the floor of the pantry half of the attic space. Those boards were heavy and it took quite a bit of work getting them up there. I couldn’t even help Beloved get the heavier one onto the trolley at the shop, we had to ask one of the shop men to help instead.

Luckily when we got home, Poss and BF were still there. They live a rather nomadic existence between our place and his parents’ place. It’s part of the reason why I wanted to clean up Radio Boy’s room, so that they would have a bit more space to call their own here. They do seem to prefer it at BF’s parents’ place though,  I guess because it’s closer to TAFE for Poss. At least I hope that’s the only reason.

Anyway, it was good having the extra pairs of hands to help, because those boards had to be manouvered through the laundry door and up between the rafters/floor joists and there’s no way I could have done that. Not even slightly. Thanks to BF’s musclepower though, it got done.

Yeah, baby, it got done! Beloved, squatting on top of the clothes dryer lifted it up and BF pushed and Poss guided and dammit, I stood there and did the vitally important part of taking photos!

Don’t look too closely at the laundry walls, you’ll see if you do that the hot water tap for the washing machine is broken and there’s some appaling stain on the wall where an aerosol can exploded and left a horrible rust mark. I only thought it, but it was Beloved who admitted this work will never be over because we’ll have to renovate the laundry next. I NEVER SAID IT (I only thought it.)

But next on the list is to get the other half of that floor into place and put in some stairs. Beloved has also had the utterly brilliant and totally cute idea of turning the attic door into a bookshelf so that in true gothic style we can have a secret room. He’s even going to figure out how to turn a book into a latch. I totally love this idea.

Meantime, all of those plastic boxes with Radio Boy’s stuff in them are now residing in the new hemi-attic. And in his old room, beside the table bearing two sewing machines and an overlocker, there is now space to locate Poss’s utterly scary industrial sewing machine, which is presently in the loungeroom.

There’s still more tidying up to be done in Radio Boy’s old room. And patching. Much patching. I’m not even going to describe my feelings, after the hours I spent working on that room helping with the plastering and renovating and doing pretty much all of the painting, to find that Radio Boy likes to keep his posters nice and secure by hammering 3″ nails into the wall. And he had a lot of posters and stuff on his walls. CDs and records and chains and pictures of cats and plastic skeletons all nailed nicely into place. Sheeeeeesh! And I remember the way my dad nearly murdlized me for sticking up a poster with a bit of sticky tape (and it was important. I HAD to have that poster of the captain of my footy team on my wall).

Anyway, things are good. The rest of the floor, the door, the plastering. I’ll be the painter on this job, and then the shelves and things in the pantry. I don’t know what we’re going to do about a floor covering in there. At this stage, I’m just happy that it’s not a dirt floor. Really.

But a place for everything. That’s what I want. That’s what I want to see. That’s what I yearn for. Did you know that clutter can be physically distressing? It sure is for me. I was the kind of kid who had her school books so totally organised, I could find which out of 5 identical exericse books I needed simply by knowing what order they were in. I never had to lift the lid of my desk.

Yeah. I know. You don’t have to say it. But it’s just the way I am.

Now I’m having a quiet and happy daydream about how awesome it’s going to be to have my Christmas things all stored neatly away in the attic.

mmmmmmm

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