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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Despite all the aggro and craziness, my little patch of ticket box was an oasis of neatness. Rubbish: in the bin. Vouchers: stamped and in their cubby. Refunds: written up, stapled together and stacked. 3D glasses in their box and ready to go. Voucher tub: organised. I even bring my own stationery (everybody likes my stapler) because I’m that kind of grl. Organised.

This is not a new thing. I have always loved neatness. Not everyone might agree with this, but neatness and order are able to co-exist quite happily with cobwebs and dust bunnies.

One of my favourite times of year as a kid was in primary school at the beginning of the year, just before we went back to school and Mum would get in all our new books. Each exercise book and new reference book had to be covered. Mum would cut brown paper to cover them and glue it down with Clag.

It used to come in a glass bottle with a cork top and a metal thingy that you poked the wood-handled brush through.

The important part of the book-covering was choosing the labels. Back in those days, the Australian Women’s Weekly magazine came out once a week (who’d have thought!) and in the week or so before school went back they would do a whole liftout of wonderful book labels that mums all over the country could cut out and paste onto their kids’ books. Did I want a pony in a field of daisies on my dictionary, a ginger kitten on my English exercise book, a fluffy duckling to cheer me up through maths, a puppy with floppy ears on the front of my science book? You bet I did! Just choosing those labels put me into a world of schoolie joy.

Why, yes, I was a nerd and teacher’s pet. Can’t imagine how you figured that out.

But there’s more. Mum wrote my name on every crayon in the new box of oil pastels. Sakura.Year after year of Sakura oil pastels in their packs of twelve with their new little blunt heads stacked against the top of their cardboard packet, waiting for me.

Then there were the coloured pencils. I didn’t get new ones every year, we couldn’t afford that, and I  never had Derwents. Not in primary school, anyway. I would gaze enviously at the kids who created masterpieces with their Derwents. For me it was a pack of twelve Lakeland by Cumberland, each one with a slice made in the end by Mum’s carving knife and my first initial and surname written there so that I would never lose one. And I never did.

I was a neat kid. Inside my desk, my textbooks were stacked according to size and my exercise books, since they were all identical in size and shape, were stacked according to how much I liked the subject. With the dictionary on top, because I liked that the most. Other kids needed to open their desks and rummage through squashed bananas, bits of scrunched paper and notes from their friends. I didn’t have to do this. My desk was so tidy, I could just reach under there and lay my hand exactly on the book I needed.

Also my friends didn’t pass me notes. Okay, one time I was asked to pass a note on, but it was from R to S and I was in between the two of them. I might well have passed it on, but R and I were having a fight at the time and she had written nit on it, just for me to read while I passed it along. This level of insult was not going to go unpunished. I could, of course, have turned the whole thing over to the teacher and got them a detention for passing notes in class, but I was a goody-two-shoes, not a complete sociopath, so instead I just ate the note. Later, R and I made up and we were friends for the next 35 years or so.

But neatness. Yes, it could well be my middle name, and as I write this, my house becomes neater by the minute. Well, sort of.

The library is almost finished. All of the books are now off the floor and we have space for 3 more shelves. Magazines are taking up an enormous amount of space, but that’s okay. I’m going to go through them and get them sorted, too. We have a room divider between the kitchen and loungeroom. It is one of these:

and the truly great thing about it is that you can get boxes and drawers and little cupboards that fit into those openings. I have two cupboards, three little drawers and five boxes. I have a neatgasm every time I walk past it. It is also exactly the right height for the magazine holders that I get from Typo (which is pretty much my favourite stationery shop).

I’ve got my cookery books in there as well as a bunch of Easter Bunnies and my knitting. I’d always planned for my cookery books to go into the pantry, but they do look lovely on the shelves. Especially the cool, retro ones from frankie magazine.

The pantry is still not finished. It’s almost finished, but not completely. This is going to be a big weekend for the pantry (I hope). Beloved has made the shelf for the long side. It’s a large box, so it’s actually two shelves and I’ve spent the week painting it. He’s also made the benchtop for the sink and the shelf for under the sink, and I’ve painted them, too. Tomorrow it’s back to the wonderful world of IKEA, or Neatnessland, as I like to call it, where we will get a sink for the pantry. Then the shelves can go on the walls and the sink can get installed and there will still be a few shelves to go.

In my mind there is a special little shelf for the food dehydrator and the bread machine and the slow cooker, as well as bookshelves, but I’m looking forward to hanging up my cute little bird shaped hooks and putting my pictures on the walls and organising my shelves and doing stuff in there. Bunches of herbs hanging from the ceiling and soap curing on the shelves. A secret place for kitchen magic from all this neatness.

But last week, Beloved put me in my place about being tidy. ‘Neatness,’ he said, ‘is entropy. All of this order from chaos is just the heat-death of the universe.’ Is this the reason why he’s been so slow to get the shelves done? Is my need for neat just bringing about the slow, cold end of everything?

Time is measured in the ticking of atoms and at the end, when everything has dispersed and there is no light and the temperature is a uniform 0.000001ºKelvin, then the universe will have achieved the ultimate level of neatness.

Possibly by then my pantry shelves will also be finished, but I’m not holding my breath.

*Is that what it’s called? You know the thing I mean. The scrolly text thingy up above ticket box that tells you what movies are on and what times they are on.

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This is my friend Perry Huntsman. He is the “good” kind of Huntsman. Easy-going, friendly, happy, creative, has four limbs. I include Perry and all of his family and in fact any other human with the surname “Huntsman” in my category of “good” Huntsmans.

The problem with huntsmans is that there are two kinds. The human kind are good. The spider kind, not so much.

Now, I’m a long way from being an arachnophobe. In fact, I may well be less scared of spiders than average, as I found out the hard way at nephew #1′s birthday party last week. Group of teenage boys (well, technically nephew #1 has just stopped being a teenager) were sitting around on the back porch and we came out to sing happy birthday to him.

Just as we were about to get to the exciting bit (the cake), a spider (the regular kind) launched itself from the rafters and came gliding down on its web. It wasn’t a particularly large or scary spider (in my opinion) and I leaned forward over one of nephew’s guests to pluck it out of the air and put it on the garden. At that moment I was nearly run over by an out of control chair as nephew’s friend slammed it back into me in his panic to get away from the sssssppiiiiiiiiiiider!!!!!

I scooped it off his back and put it down on a plant. Poor little thing.

So there you go. That’s me, less scared of spiders than gangly young man.

That is, unless we’re talking about huntsmans (the lower-case kind).

This, my dears, is the bad kind of huntsman.

No, this picture is not life size. The real spiders are bigger.

Much bigger.

Waaaaaaay bigger.

Say the word “spider” in Melbourne and you will immediately start a long conversation full of ridiculous stories about the size, attitude and scariness of these monsters. You will also get nutbags (such as my mum) who say they eat bugs and will give them a name and let them live in the house. They will also say things such as “It’s more scared of you than you are of it” which is complete rubbish, because if the spider is scared of me, why in hell has it come INTO MY HOUSE?????

They say “Oh, I never kill them, I just pick them up and put them outside” – SO THAT THEY CAN COME BACK IN AND BRING A FRIEND AS WELL.

Did I describe these people as “nutbags” just then? I take that back. These unkillers of huntsmans (the bad kind) are SOCIOPATHS.

And at this time of year the spiders come into houses. Oh yes they do. Summer’s over, Easter’s coming, they know it’s getting colder outside so they pack their figurative bags and move on in.

Like everyone in this part of the world I have many stories of my battles with these spiders. This is just one of them. It happened to me this week.

So picture me, all sweet and innocent of the world, I’m about to go on my treadmill. Beloved bought me a cute little wall-TV last week, to encourage me to go on the tready. It’s fun to watch shows and makes the time go faster and I don’t get bored. As I’m about to step on the tready I see a dust-bunny next to it.

I’m moderately annoyed by this because I’d acted completely out of character the day before and actually cleaned the house. I’d swept. I’d swept the floors and the walls and I’d swept under stuff and around stuff and behind doors and in tight places and I’d done a good job, or so I thought.

Then, after the sweeping, I’d mopped. Kitchen, lounge, poorly-named sunroom, where the tready and offending dustbunny were, hallway and bathroom. It was mopped. It was mopped to within an inch of its life.

I cursed the dog for her furry behaviour and wondered if I should get the broom AGAIN and do more sweeping, but I knew I shouldn’t do that. If I started on more sweeping it would just be me procrastinating instead of getting on the tready and watching something fabulous and doing a bit of exercise.

Yep, in the battle between exercise and housework, exercise wins. It’s a close one, but I guess I just hate housework that little bit more. And I had to admit that I’d been walking past the dust-bunny all day. It wasn’t going anywhere.

Not going anywhere. Huh. Stupid, stupid me. Naïve and foolish me. Dust-bunny not going anywhere. Where did I think it had come from???

Anyway, as I got closer to the dust-bunny I realised that it wasn’t as innocent as I had thought. There was something else in there and it had [insert dramatic chords here] LEGS.

Yes. Ravelled up inside the dust-bunny was a huntsman.

The bad kind.

I looked closely at it. Well, as closely as you do when on of those bastards is down there on the floor threatening you like that, and I decided it was dead. There had been some sort of epic battle with the dust-bunny, and the dust-bunny had won.

I could safely get on my tready and do some ks and watch my wall TV.

But I kept checking

Because you never know.

Just because it’s dead doesn’t mean it doesn’t still want to GET me.

I watched Mythbusters (yay Mythbusters)

and I checked

I watched Family Guy

and I checked

I watched American Dad

and I checked

and when I say I watched these things and I checked, don’t think I mean I checked every half hour. Oh no. I wasn’t going to risk my sanity for that amount of time. I checked to make sure it hadn’t moved about every five seconds or so. Those things are bloody fast you know. Even dead.

Well, at the end of all that walking and TV watching I was pretty happy with myself. I’d done exercise and Beloved could take care of the spider when he got back from his motorcycle club meeting. I went to put my shoes away and I came back to see this:

Yes. It had moved. It had moved in the totally “Hah! I’m not dead, I’ve just been lying here WATCHING you for the past hour and a half. In a NON-DEAD way!”

And that leg was reaching out towards the treadmill.

Not away from, which is what it would have been doing if nutbag-sociopaths were right and the bad kind of huntsmans really are more scared of me than I am of them, TOWARDS.

So, being the sensible kind of person I am, I immediately got the biggest can of insecticide I could find and pretty much drowned/froze the bastard.

About three-tenths of a second after Beloved walked through the door, I demanded that he take the offending carcasse far, far away. He was dismayed. He is of the “I’ll put it outside” ilk.

So anyway, the bad kind of huntsman was gone, having traumatised me for a goodly part of the evening, but it could have been worse. If it hadn’t been in the epic battle with the dust-bunny who knows what kind of shenanigans it might have got up to.

So be assured that ridiculously large spiders are not welcome in my house, but dust-bunnies are okay.

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The first book I’ve had published – hah. That makes me sound accomplished, doesn’t it? The first book I’ve had published. Yes, I’ve had more than one book published. I’ve had two books published. Hey, that’s nearly three!

They’re both school readers.

Anyway, the first one was this one. Thylacine Dreaming. It’s about a group on a bushwalk and one boy who is obsessed with all sorts of nerdy thoughts (did I hear someone say “biographical”?) and daydreams his way through the forest. He spends a lot of time trying to bring back Thylacines with his mind.

When his uncle and cousin go off to find firewood, he sees an actual Thylacine. The boy joins the Thylancine conspiracy by hiding its footprints.

My mum was three years old when the last known Thylacine, a female named Benjamin, died.

Despite there being no physical evidence of the continued survival of the species, there are hundreds and hundreds of people who claim to have seen them. I have a friend (ex-science teacher, very down-to-earth lady who is a dedicated animal lover and doesn’t make foolish mistakes) who claims to have seen one. I mean recently and not dead. I have a friend who I work with, (a mutual friend of ex-science teacher who lives not far from her, and isn’t such a dedicated animal-phile,) who claims to have seen two (or maybe the same one twice). Neither of these women are interested in self-aggrandisement or making up ridiculous lies about extinct animals. I have another friend who lives in a different place and claims to have seen one. There are groups of campers and bushwalkers and taxi-drivers and forest rangers and farmers and people with broken-down cars and people who don’t care and people who do care and cops and greenies and foresters and smart people and dumb people who claim to have seen them.

I even believe I may have seen one. Twenty or so years ago and only three minutes’ drive from where I am sitting now. It was dusk and I only saw the hindquarters of the animal as it vanished into the shrubbery at the side of a house. I can’t tell you for sure what this animal was, but I can tell you that it had stripes on its hindquarters and an odd-looking tail. I can absolutely tell you that it was not a dog or a cat and that it was too big to be a numbat (the only other stripy animal I can think of)*.

Thylacines are one of those animals that hang in the grey fog of extinction. We can still look at their skin and their bones, just as we can with dodos and passenger pigeons and wooly mammoths. We can still talk to people who have seen an touched real, live Thylacines. There is such a charged belief in them that it seems almost impossible that they can’t still be alive, that like the pup (joey?)** in the jar, they are just a breath away from reality.

There is a kind of Zeitgeist around Thylacines that reached a head a few years ago when it was discovered that they joey in the jar had been preserved in alcohol, which meant that that its DNA was still intact. Could it, like Dolly, be cloned? I’m not unmoved by the irony built into this thought. Part of the reason that Thylacines are officially extinct is that they were scapegoated for the death of sheep. It would, in my opinion, bring karma right back into balance if we were able to clone them back into the world.

Nothing’s come of the whole idea though. There have been arguments about whose pouch the joeys might go into, and a bunch of ethical shirt-rending about the social lives of Thylacines and how they’d grow up all confused and stuff if they thought their mum was a wallaby or a Tassie Devil. Basically I think the reason nothing’s been done is we’re still not all that flash at cloning and a lot of animals died rather horribly so that Dolly could be born and really, lovely as sheep are, we didn’t need to spend that amount of money just on making another one. So the whole cloning thing has been put on the back burner for the time being and maybe, well, maybe it will get its turn. I hope so. I do love the idea of having them back.

I like the idea that our mistakes can be erased, at least in one little way. I like the idea that we can fix what we broke, even if it’s only a little thing. I like the idea that an awesomely cool animal might one day walk the Earth again. Apparently, if nothing else, they do make very good pets, they are social, tractable animals.

I know. It’s all a big fantasy, but that’s what I do. I’m a writer. I indulge myself in these fantasies. And I’m not the only one.

I’m absolutely delighted to have had a story accepted into this anthology. As you’ve probably figured by now, mine does have Thylacines in it. And it’s not the only Thylacine story )

This is the first story I’ve had published since my weeks at Clarion, just over two years ago now. For a while I thought I was broken and that I’d never write again, but I’ve dragged myself, hand-over-hand (in a figurative sort of way) and been carried by the love and encouragement of some truly wonderful writing friends.

My story, Last Seen, was a Clarion story and I feel an enormous relief to have had it accepted, to know that I am an acceptable writer.

The e-book will be available soon and I’ll have details here, on my facebook page, and by email as soon as it’s ready to go.

For the time being I’m just happy knowing that I am not extinct as a writer.

*Oh, all right. Tiger, zebra, angel fish, okapi, tabby cat, brindle dog, etc etc etc there are lots of stripy animals I can think of. What I really meant was that it was the only other small-medium-sized quadrupedal mammal with a tail that lives (or lived) in Australia and might be hanging around this particular part of Melbourne (even if it is supposed to be extinct) that I could think of. Except that I’m not that pedantic.

All right. I am that pedantic.

**I often see the young of the Thylacine descrbed as pups, I guess because they are fairly dog-looking animals. Is that right? I don’t know. Aren’t young marsupials called joeys?

I learnt an amazing amount of stuff about Thylacines reading this brilliant book by Robert Paddle. It’s wonderfully well researched  and you do get a sense of the real animal by reading it. The thing that got to me the most was reading about how the trappers would go to where the wild Thylacines had been caught in traps and could put a rope around the animal’s neck and have it walk alongside him back to camp, tame as any dog.

I know this sounds unlikely, but there is a lot of unlikeliness in wild animals. I once went snow camping to Wallace’s Hut. Standing by the entrance to the hut with a couple of friends who I’d skiied up with, I noticed a little animal by Peter’s foot. I told him to be careful and not stand on the mouse and then, being me, I picked it up.

A close look revealed that it wasn’t a mouse that had been sitting calmly beside his foot, but a Burramys, the Pygmy Mountain Possum, a mouse-sized marsupial that was believed to have been extinct until 1966 when a thriving colony was discovered. This wild animal sat placidly on my hand and washed its face and then decided it was time to go, so I popped it onto the ground and it strolled off.

We all went into the hut to make a big fire and cook our dinner. Apparently the Burramys were living in the big stone chimney and we warmed them up. One of them came to join in dinner with us. It climbed onto Peter and sat happily on his chest, nibbling the crumbs he’d spilt there.

A clear case of extinction not being forever.

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This odd building is in the middle of the city. I don’t know its name or what it’s all about. I was having a day in the city just before Christmas and pretty much stopped in the middle of Elizabeth Street when I came across this. I stood on the corner for quite a few minutes, taking photos, waiting for the lights to change so that I could get back into the middle of the road for a better angle, just staring up and wondering about it. The wonderful, whimsical architecture. When was it built? Is it owned by witches and wizards? Are there fairies living in secret gardens around it? Is it protected by gargoyles?

Will I ever find it again, or is this one of those mysteries that arise in cities? A building that arrives and stays, just for long enough to gather a few souls, and then vanishes back into its magical realm, robbing those who have seen it of some tiny essence of themselves. And if so, have I then changed some essential, secret part of it, by taking its photo? Is this new world, where everyone has cameras with them all the time a place that such magic can no longer inhabit?

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And happy new year to you, too. It was a big step for Beloved and me last night. We actually went and did something on New Year’s Eve. Occasionally we get invited to a party, sit quietly and then run home at two minutes after midnight, but not this year. I was supposed to work until 8 last night but the movie-going public was a little off its game yesterday and my shift was cut. Not that I minded.

So a little after 9, Beloved and I hopped on the bike and rode into town. It was a way better idea than taking a car, which we’d never have found a parking spot for, and I would not even entertain the notion of using what we laughingly refer to as “public transport” in this city. It was hot yesterday, 40º in what’s been a mostly cool and laid-back sort of summer. Beloved worked from home because it was a Total Fire Ban day, our first for the season. It’s an amazingly green year.

It was still warm when we got to the city, but very pleasant in the dusk by the river. We watched kids playing with lightsticks and we messed around with our cameras while we waited for midnight. I don’t drink alcohol, but we’d brought along a bottle of grape juice to drink, both thirsty; perhaps a little dehydrated from the heat of the day.

This was my favourite picture of the night, well, taken on my camera, (and not of Beloved)  anyway. My camera’s one of those little ones that will fit into your pocket. It takes an 8mp photo and has an optical zoom, but it just doesn’t have the grunt even of one of those bridge cameras, let alone an SLR. Still, I have a lot of fun with it. Heh, as you can guess, I don’t have a tripod, either, so just propped my elbows on my knees to take these wonky, funny photos. There was a path between where we were sitting and the river, and we watched a constant array of people walking up and down the river. This photo tracks a family with a baby in a pram. The baby is holding a roundfan* with glowsticks on its fins, which is what gives the wonderful twirly effect.

*Roundfan is one of those “family” words invented by Radioboy when he was a tot. He loved watching things that twirled, anything from windmills to ceiling fans to these kids’ toys, pinwheels. We still call them “roundfans”.

Anyway, I hope this year is good for you. I’m having a shot at writing a “small stone” every day this month, a thought that puts me into the moment.

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Thank you )

Yes. Yes, I did have a good day. In fact I had a good week. Lunch with friends from work. Lunch with writing buddies. Awesome poetry workshop. On my actual birthday, Beloved took the day off. We had pancakes for breakfast and we went to the shops and we had a movie in Gold Class with lunch and we had dinner with the kids and with Ribs and her hubby. The restaurant we went to was pretty ordinary (no soap or anything to dry hands on in the toilet = ordinary) and the whole day finished off with chocolate. So much to love about all of that.

Beloved and Poss got together and gave me a present that matched my Mothers’ Day gift: it was a pasta maker, noodle extruder (just say that out loud and enjoy the vowels. Go on. Noodle extruder. Noooooooodle extruuuuuuuder. Good, isn’t it?) and a jigger for making ravioli.

Check this out. It was my first go at noodle extrusion and I’m pretty happy with how the whole thing turned out:

how awesome is that! Check the perfect curliness of that noodle. Happy? Oh yeah. On the second day I made spinach macaroni and put it in a salad. It’s fabulous. Each batch makes so many noodles that we get more than enough for a meal, plus a whole lot left over for another time. They dry quickly enough and I can store them in an airtight with container with boring shop noodles which I need never buy again. It’s also a good way to use up eggs, which are more than plentiful at this time of year.

Today, Poss came round so that Beloved could help her revamp her website and blog (which is what’s inspired me to get onto the keyboard and do something useful here) and so I of course had to get some noodly action for lunch. I made some small wholemeal macaroni which I served up with garlic butter and chopped up parsley. It was delicious and plentiful. The chooks are going to have garlic breath, because I’m giving the leftovers to them.

All of this noodly goodness is of course a spiritual journey for the pastafarians among us. Which Poss is (I’m proud to say). I find the whole concept of the FSM rather wonderful because, really, who doesn’t like spaghetti? And who doesn’t like pirates? And the idea of putting the two of them together is completely brilliant.

Poss did a collection of pirate clothing for her course this year. I like that she turned up today wearing the frilly pantaloons and clockwork-looking t-shirt.

Pirate steampunk? I think there’s something for all of us in that.

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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 picture is a spoiler space. It’s my daughter’s late kitten, Java. He was a ragdoll, and the most beautiful and loved little cat. He died last night. Only 6 or so months old. I was at Poss’s place on Saturday and she was playing with Java. She came over to me and showed me that he’d just lost one of his baby teeth. She held it on the end of her finger. Then they went back to playing. Chasey and hunt the mouse. He cuddled up on my knee for a nap. We had afternoon tea and he demanded bits of scone. He’d gone from being healthy and happy to dead in one day and we don’t know why. He was up to date with all his vaccinations, had been desexed a few weeks ago, and was a total indoor cat. Yesterday morning he didn’t want his breakfast and then he started having trouble breathing. They took him to the vet at 7. There was no temperature so guessing the vet decided it wasn’t an infection. Gave him some cortisone to open up his airways. Poss called us after 9 but by the time we got there, he was gone. His lungs had filled with fluid. We took him home because there is nowhere to bury him at Poss and BF’s place. It was midnight and raining as Beloved dug the grave and I stood by, holding Java wrapped in an old Christmas tea towel that I had given to Poss as part of her kitchen setup. A faded tea towel with Christmas fairies on it. I put yellow rosebuds on his grave and planted it with the white hyacinths I’d been growing on my kitchen windowsill. A small tragedy in my safe, suburban existence.

The nuts and bolts of this blog, however, is the big M. Menopause. This week I am celebrating my cronedom as it is now 12 months since the end of my last period.

For some people, menopause is nothing. It passes in the blink of an eye and they suddenly realise they haven’t been pestered by periods for how long?… and isn’t that great. For me, it was months of depression bordering on paranoia. Not because I miss my periods, please don’t think that for a second. I have to say, from my very first period I was appalled! I hated having them so much. They disgusted me. They caused pain and embarrassment and inconvenience.

I got my first period on new year’s day, 1971. Sissy and I had spent the night at Nana’s place and lay in our sleeping bags the next morning, only to get a visit from Nana’s pervert boyfriend who came in to “put his cold hands* on our backs**”

*it was the middle of summer. His hands were not cold.

**that was not my back.

Anyway, I didn’t know how to tell Mum. I mean that I had my period. I knew that I just wanted to keep away from pervert boyfriend. And I did, but that is for another blog.

So the next morning, I hear Mum going to the toilet. I know she has her period because she always takes newspaper to wrap her used pad in, and I can hear the rustle of the paper. As she comes out of the loo (which is just next to my bedroom) I say ‘Want to see something funny?’ and I show her my bloodstained knickers.

‘You’ve got it!’ she says.

She gives me a packet of Modess and a belt thingy. I immediately hate the whole situation. The way Mum had acted as if I have some terrible illness. That it is never spoken of beyond that.

I get a pair of pants that are possibly worse than the belt thingy. They have a plastic liner in them and little metal attachments for the ends of the pad to hook into. Despite the plastic liner, I still manage to get the pants all bloodstained. Blood soaks into the elastic around the legholes and despite my hours in the laundry, stays there. My sister makes fun of them as they hang on the line. Each day, as I walk to school, I feel the blood seeping out of me. By the time I get to school, the pants, and my knickers over them, are bloody. I suffer the most awful cramps. I sit in the school library at lunchtime, feeling as if I have ice running through my kidneys. I do not speak to anyone about this. Not my mum, not my sister, not any of my friends.

My periods managed to embarrass me for most of my life. Heavy spills of blood that leaked onto clothes and onto my sheets. During the heavy days I had to wear a super tampon and a super pad and change both every hour or so. I had to give up being a blood donor because my iron count got so low, my doctor thought I had cancer. I guess I got two good things out of having periods though:

and

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But that was long ago. Poss will be 22 next month and Radio Boy will be 24 in October and I’ve been feeling that all those periods have been pretty-much redundant since Poss’s birth. I just put up with them because women, foolishly, do. I never really believed all that stuff about them being natural. In pre-industrial societies it was natural to be either pregnant or lactating for most of your childbearing years, so having periods wasn’t such a huge part of life. Aside from that, I don’t always buy into that whole “natural” thing. Death is natural and I plan to put it off for as long as I possibly can.

Mum went through her menopause in her mid 40s and Sissy was only 40 when she had hers. When I was 8 I had all of the “facts of life” explained to me when Mum put a little book into my hands. It had all the stuff about puppies and kittens and babies and where they came from. It was a little vague on detail though. It just said that when a man and woman got very close, the sperm entered the woman’s body. I imagined the man and woman sitting together on the sofa, watching TV. In my mind, I made them very close by putting the man’s arm around the woman’s shoulders. A tiny, enterprising sperm pops out of the man’s pants. It is so small, it can fit between the weave of his clothing. It swims in its own bubble of spermy juice-stuff and I marvel at how it navigates the expanse of laps and finds its way through the maze of the woman’s clothing in order to impregnate her.

At this point I stop. Naïve I may be, foolish I am not. The idea of that sperm, that microscopically small tadpole, being able to go all that distance and find its way through all those layers of clothing just didn’t make sense. They had obviously left some vital piece of the story out of my book.

Well, the book went on to say that I could expect my period to begin when I was “about thirteen” and to continue until I was “about fifty-two.” I turned thirteen in November 1970 and had my first period on 1st January 1971. I had my last period in August last year and will be 53 in November. Sheesh. Talk about doing it by the book.

Pretty sure my kids weren’t conceived while sitting on the sofa watching TV fully clothed, though.

So now I have reached the third age of womanhood. No longer the maiden/warrior, no longer the mother/protector, I am now the crone, the teacher and keeper of mysteries. I look into the mirror and see my nana’s face. I see the blotches of old-age which, typically, since I’m a boomer, I try to deny. I see the wrinkles and spots that are the embarrassment of this reverse-adolescence.

Stray whiskers grow on my chin and I pluck them out. Yesterday as I was peering at my reflection (what a masochistic passtime!) I noticed a mustache.

The hair on my head is mouse-brown. Oh, alright. Mouse-grey, but I was blonde as a kid. I don’t have much body-hair and what little of it there is, is blonde and hard to spot. Which is I guess why I hadn’t noticed this mustache before. Hard to spot plus it means looking at myself in the mirror. But there it was. The hairy upper lip that frankly belonged on a walrus.

So I bagged on down to Priceline and got myself some facial waxing strips because I can put up with hairy legs (as I said, they’re not that hairy and they’re blonde, so you have to get real close to see them and nobody gets that close to my shins) and I don’t give a rats about my hairy pits (last shaved in 1998 for Sissy’s wedding, due to stupid comment from Mum that almost spoiled Sissy’s special day) and my eyebrows are partial at best and pretty well invisible (one of the signs of thyroid disorder is lack of eyebrows) but I will not put up with a mustache.

So I’m doing away with tampons and pads. No more secret stashes in the glove-box, in my locker at work, in every single bag I own, in the pockets of coats and my wardrobe and a whole drawer in the bathroom devoted to them. Instead, I will have the little box of waxing papers and rip those hairs off my face and tweezer out all the nana-whiskers, too. It will take up a lot less space in my bathroom drawer and in my life, too.

No more periods.

I won’t miss them at all.

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There were times during the judging when I really wished that I could talk to the people who’d sent those stories, though, and it wasn’t always to tell them how much I loved their stories. To this end, there are a few things I’d like to say to anyone who is thinking of submitting a story to a competition and who is maybe feeling a little worried about what to send in, or a little miffed because they’ve sent in lots of stories and never won.

First of all, bear in mind that this is a competition and there are rules. These rules are not just a rough idea of what to do. They are the rules. This is a competition for the best (in the judge’s opinion) short story, so give yourself all of the best chances to win.

Use a font that’s easy to read and a point size that makes it legible. I’m talking a serif font in at least 12 points. If you don’t know what a serif font is, well you should. You’re a writer. If you really don’t know, then use your dictionary (and don’t tell me you don’t have one of them if you’re a writer because to me that is like a carpenter who doesn’t bother with a hammer). If you’re not a writer and you’re reading this, well a serif is the little burl thingy that you see on the end of letters. The point of the serif is that it leads the eye along and makes the words easier to read. Go with Times New Roman or Courier.

Again with the rules: if the word limit is 3000 words (a very common word limit in Australian lit competitions) then do not make your story longer than 3000 words. Trust me, the judge is not going to get carried away with the brilliance of your prose and, wiping tears of joy from her/his eyes, award your masterpiece first prize. More likely, she/he is going to take one look at your twenty-seven pages, compared with everyone else’s twelve and not even bother to read the first paragraph. It is always going to be possible to surgically extract a few extra words from a story and 99 times out of a hundred the story will be improved. If it really needs to be that long, find a competiton it will fit into. Don’t enter a horse into a dog-show.

In some competitions, you are allowed multiple entries. Now here’s something I have long suspected as an entrant, and proved to myself as a judge: you can tell when one person has submitted three stories because they all look the same. Before even reading them, I note that their headings are all in the same bold font, or that they all have the page number on the bottom left-hand corner and the name of the story on the top right-hand corner, or they all have line breaks instead of indentations and cute little curly things in the paragraph breaks. Try to make your stories look a little different, to give them an individual edge. Now I’m not talking here about using paper with bunnies on it or putting a floral border around it and using some fancy script for the font. Just a subtle thing. A different font for the heading, slightly wider margins, 6 spaces for your paragraph indents instead of 5.

More difficult is your choice in theme. For many of us, writing can be a kind of therapy and we need to write the same thing over and over, to explore our options and our understanding of how the whole damn cosmos works. Thing is, if you do happen to send three stories about the same thing – say, something along the lines of two neighbours who both grow giant pumpkins for the local show and one has a dog and the other has a cat and they both pretend to hate each other but when one pumpkin fails then they begin to work together and we (the readers) know that we have seen the beginning of a wonderful relationship – then the judge is probably going to pick that all three have been written by the same person. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, there are probably a lot of pumpkin fans out there, just sayin’ is all. You might want to take a really critical look at your stories, pick out your best pumpkin story and then submit something else that’s not about pumpkins at all.

I was utterly bewildered by more than one entrant who had apparently submitted their proofed story instead of the edited version. Seriously. I’m there reading and there’s a word crossed out, an underline, an insertion. I’m trying to read a story through editor’s marks. Are you kidding me? Who does that? Look, the Royal Melbourne Show is coming up next month. Go and take a walk around the animals. Check the ones that have blue ribbons on their stalls or cages. They’ll be the neatest correct entries, not the ones that have been owned by somebody who couldn’t be arsed giving them a proper bath. I’ve seen what they do with chooks. First, they have a bath. That’s right. A chook in a bath. Gently washed in warm water and then rinsed so that all the soap is gone. They get their toenails clipped and their combs and wattles (if they have any) spruced up. They get dried in the sun, on a nice grassy spot and sometimes there’s even a bit of hairdryer action so that they get nice and fluffy and at the end of it all every feather is in place and they look fabulous. Now, please use this chook metaphor for your story. Do edit it and proofread it, then send the corrected version to the competition because the judge is not going to put a blue ribbon on a story full of editor’s marks.

Don’t write notes to the judge on your story. Bribes should be submitted in a plain, brown envelope, or an esky with an ice pack, if it’s a hot day (chocolate bribes are less acceptable when they are all melty). If you are not sure about which words you want in your story, then you need to go back and re-read the story and make that decision.

Okay, now that I’ve had my whinge-n-bitch session, I will say that at the end I felt so sad at having to cut some stories off my shortlist. I wished I could have spoken to those writers to tell them how good their stories were, that just a tweak here or there would have put them over the line, and to keep writing and to keep entering competitions.

As for the stories that did make it, well, you blew me away. All of you. It was very close and I had to think carefully about my reasons for choosing the way I did. This year’s Page Seventeen is going to be awesomer than ever.

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