Where the Honey Meets the Air

The following story "Where the Honey Meets the Air" appears in Australian Love Stories (Inkerman and Blunt) and also in my forthcoming collection (August 2015 - Spineless Wonders) 

My Hearts Are Your Hearts.

"Where the Honey Meets the Air"

I call her Honey-Hannah and she calls me Sugar-Sam. It’s pretty sweet at our place.

And you know how it is with honey.

I hope you do.

Otherwise we’re not going to be on the same page for a while here.

Follow…ME.

You see it there in the bowl, pot, with the honeybee embossed – is that the word – on the side that curves and fits in the palm of your hand – and you take the silver spoon they gave you when you were born – that was a while ago now wasn’t it – maybe your were actually born with it in your mouth (joke) – and you dig into the viscous – I think that’s what it is, viscous, sounds good – viscous semi-liquid – it doesn’t resist – down goes the soft sharp side of the silver spoon (Shakespeare – joke) and you hold it just above your toast all buttery and gleaming in the light of the conservatory, and you let that honey run drip dribble flow manifest down onto the butter, the toast – and it glides and pools and glows, positively literally glows as if lit from within – and you think of a word and in the beginning it was, and the word was ‘meniscus’ and you wonder, there at the late morning breakfast table, if honey can be said to do meniscus, so you whip out the iPad (to tell the truth is was already there, whipped, all along) and off you go to Wikipedia and you’re a little bit the wiser because now you kind of know that the ‘meniscus’, plural menisci, from the Greek ‘crescent’, is the curve in the upper surface of a liquid close to the surface of the container, caused by the surface tension, and depending on the liquid and the surface’ – oh blah blah there’s lots more but that’s enough of that kind of talk really, for now – and I conclude that meniscus wasn’t what I was looking for was it – I’m just thinking of the skin of the honey aren’t I – the part where the honey meets the air and where it kind of resists something – pressure? moisture? distant laughter? – in the air, so that faint striations (OMG the old vocabulary is choofing along this morning) of heavenly pale butter beginning ever so delicately to marble (too heavy, this marble word) the envelope of the honey, and it is nearly time (tick tock/ ayers rock/silver slippers/ brighton rock – Shakespeare again) to put the spoon somewhere – where – not back in the honey, surely – oh bugger it, put it back in the honey and hang it all if some butter or a crumb of toast or the vestige of the dry wing of a dead moth happens to land in there – or an ant, what about an ant? have signals gone out to the bloody ants letting them know that the honey pot – pot or bowl? jar? – oh English it so devilish isn’t it – now if this were French the honey would be, I imagine, simply in a compotier de miel or some such and be done with it, unless some froggy whiz had siphoned it onto a soucoupe (yes I tried to look it up but if I faff around in the French/English, English/French for much longer we’ll be here all day and never get to put the toast and honey into anybody’s mouth, let alone mine) – but the funny thing was that not far from ‘miel’ there lay a squashed and dessicated ant caught in the pages of the big Larousse, and highlighting the word ‘mignarder’ which apparently is Frog for to pat, to caress, to fondle – I liked the sound of that – and it goes on to explain that if you do this thing called ‘mignarder son style’ (yes I too thought we had wandered into porno there, patting the stylus, but no) you are being finical – I could leave you to look up finical in your Shorter Oxford (get real, mister – look it up on google) but to save time I will tell you it means to be affectedly fastidious or precise in one’s use of language, and to engage in mincing metaphors (OMG!! – ‘mincing metaphors’!!!! exclamation mark – think of the dead ant – a metaphor, but is it mincing?) and I feel a figure of speech coming on in any case because the wing of the moth (imaginary) set me thinking that the honey is quite similar to amber, isn’t it, and what do you know – we called our baby daughter Amber, yes indeed we did – to Hannah and Sam, a baby girl – her eyes are as brown (simile alert) as – as what – oh you fill in the blanks – and her lips are as red as – oh no! – blood – some old fairy tale, I imagine it’s Snow White, is crossing wires with me and a witch or wicked queen or step-mother is planning to hook our baby (she’s now nearly two years old BTW and is partial to a spot of toast and honey herself, pat pat, caress, caress) up with a prince from some minor kingdom by the sea in the distant or not so distant future of the planet, supposing the poor old planet has a future which maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t, all things considered, what with the morphing climate and the disappearing bees (bee motif) and the way the sea is rising up like King Neptune reclaiming his rights whatever they were, and the way the sun is a dying star (have I got that right – oh sometimes I don’t seem to know what I am talking about) – and anyhow we were living together for a yonk, me and Honey-Hannah, and happy as two little bees in lavender (that didn’t really work, did it – never mind) when one day HH who had not sighted blood as red as blood for a while came out of the ensuite with a funny look on her face and a funny thing in her hand and said she thought she might be pregnant and she was of course and so we thought we’d zip off to the registry office and tie the knot – something that went out of fashion for a few years, but has come back with a vengeance in the form of the Wedding Industry of which more a bit later – when Her Family swept in and tied us up in knots, ribbons, bows and a certain amount of barbed wire, and whirled us up the aisle of St Francis in the Jolly Old Fields with a huge reception at Quoile, the (her) family home in the rolling hills (have I got that right, Family?) behind Kyneton in Central Victoria, Quoile being named after an old old castle in County Down where the Family had its Elizabethan roots (joke) – we are the Gunns of Quoile Castle – yes she is Hannah-Margot Gunn of Gunn’s Constructions (not to mention Gunns Wedding Bells, Gunns Hardware and Gunns Honey, and not to forget Wishart, Perpendicular and Gunn, Barristers and Solicitors) – I should have warned you about how this narrative will tie itself up in the knots of several metaphors and coincidences and things – but Honey-Hannah is unlike most members of the Family – unlike particularly in the matter of issue – her mad sister has no children (not a hope in hell) – her brother’s mad wife will have no children (although the brother, Fabian, has probably fathered a bastard or two but they would not count as your proper Gunns or Quoiles) and so when HH put forward the idea of the coming of Baby Amber there was much joyful to-do among the constructors and wedding-meisters and hardware handlers and apiarists (at last a real word) and barristers and solicitors, and we were propelled together into the floral archways of matrimony until death did us part (relax, we are still buzzing along nicely in the real world) unlike – oh-oh, here it comes, the fly in the ointment, the snake in the grass, the ant in the honey, the startled grasshopper in the amber – who’s divorced, who’s dead around here? who got together and then got parted by something other than death? – well, in fact it was death – this is why I’m actually at home in the conservatory thinking about honey on toast instead of going to the office I occupy in Gunns Constructions where I hold a very responsible position and where I spend a hell of a lot of my time writing plays – wha-at? – yes, that’s what I do as I sit at my vast mahogany desk-a-rama, I tap away at my plays, some of which (hem-hem) have had readings at places such as the Court House and Fifty-Five Downstairs, while Sheba my personal secretary takes calls and takes care of all stuff such as email and – well – business – Sheba’s the real thing, I just draw the salary and look good – I should explain that I am generally considered to be very presentable, a fucking asset to the whole shebang (ha ha – look at that will you – Sheba runs the whole Shebang – I just thought of that – I had occasion to text her just now to tell her I’ll be late and she texts back saying – you’ll like this I think – saying Take Your Time Solomon, Sheba Runs the Show) you  will have seen pics of HH and me around the place – at the opera, at the races, at the charity fashion thingie, at the opening of the super awful reception for minor lovely royalty etc etc – we get around – and the great thing is we get around together as a genuine social item, an item in every way – HH and SS and their adorable Baby Amber – unlike, as I have intimated just now, unlike Patrick my best friend from school so long ago, unlike Patrick who has – not to put too fine a point on it – who has – um – quite recently murdered his wife Cressida – wh-at? oh yes, he did it allright – and if you don’t know the story I should briefly fill you in – I warn you – it’s ugly – and it’s probably just as well you’ve got me with my finical phrasing – I will caress you as we go – pat pat, mincing metaphor notwithstanding – I will tell you the tale of Patrick and Cressida, one of whom lies at the bottom of the pool with her dead lover, and one of whom lies very much alive, telling himself long lies, just along the hallway, in my bedroom, watching who knows what on TV and drinking scotch and waiting for me to bring him toast and honey and good news as he waits for Deke Perpendicular to arrive with advice and the good oil and the loophole in the noose (I think my mincing metaphor has sidled off somewhere – and anyway we don’t do the noose or any other form of capital punishment in our light and enlightened social system) – look his name isn’t really Perpendicular but it’s something weirdly Greek and I can’t think it or spell it and so I am writing Perpendicular, emphasis on the ‘dic’ because in fact he is one in many ways, but in the matter or getting people out of situations as sticky as that in which Patrick finds himself, he’s almost magic – so, for want of anything better to do, and as a displacement activity, and because this is how I think in a crisis – OMG but is this a crisis!! – I’m watching honey running slowly off the spoon while Patrick is in my bedroom, as I said, and I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I’m actually trying to distract myself from thinking about how Cressida was having this hot affair with Damien Bliss (I know, I know, but that was the name) who was the hot topic that looked after their indoor pool (heated) and everybody knew except Patrick and guess what there comes a time when Patrick arrives home in the middle of the day because he suffers from asthma (mild) and he was suffering from it, and – look I apologize for the banality of all this – but this is why Patrick is lying in the comfort of my bedroom waiting for his toast and honey and short black – so he was feeling pretty seedy and he goes in the front door and what does he see but the naked Cressida and the naked Damien hotly engaged in a soixante-neuf on the dark and wonderful Turkish rug just inside the front door – that was apparently, according to Patrick, what got to him – and the shock did wonders for the asthma – it was the location you see that got to him, and so to cut a long story short he loses it and he grabs Cress by her long chestnut locks with such sudden force that he breaks her neck, and then he king hits dazed Damien who cracks his stupid head on something or other (Patrick isn’t yet clear on this) and he doesn’t get up either – and so what does Patrick do then – you’d wonder, wouldn’t you – well he drags them one by one across the floor leaving trails of blood and stuff – and chucks them in the pool – incredible, mad, but you never know how these things will take you – I said they were on the bottom but I don’t really know do I – maybe they’re floating around like blow-up toys – I don’t know how long the various processes take, what with the body and the water and the air and Archimedes’ Principal and so on – what Patrick did was pretty amazing when you think about it – just goes to show what rage can do – then he rings me – of course he does – and I ring Perpendicular, and Patrick makes what is probably a mistake – even I can see that – he gets back in his car and comes around here where I’m getting ready to go to the office for a late morning meeting, and where I put him to bed and give him the scotch and start making toast – and so far nobody has called the police, but anyhow Perpendicular can work all that out and what I’m really waiting for is for Patrick to have his toast and get the hell out of here and then I’m going to message Sheba again and tell her I’m really going to be late-late, like not coming in until tomorrow week, and I’m going to go and get HH from her mad sister’s where she’s making quince and elderberry something or other (a quaint lot, the Quoile Gunns) and I’m going to collect Amber from Brighton Bambini and we’ll drive out to Quoile and stay for a few days because in spite of anything I might have said, if there is one place I can feel safe and sound and silver-plated it’s behind the great iron gates and up the winding tree-lined drive of the Family Home where Hannah’s mama and also old nanny will enfold us in an incredibly stilling and sticky form of love – yes love – and nothing can ever disturb the knot of us – where no Mr Bliss can ever come, where – wait for it – here comes a rushing wave of somewhat mincing metaphors – we will be enfolded in the sweetieness of our own slow flowing honey, and we will live happily, ever after, in love and eternal ease – OMG what dismal dismal bullshit all this is – because I know, and Patrick knows, and Perpendicular knows, and the police are going to know, and even you know – what has happened to Patrick (has it happened to Patrick, is that it? or has Patrick done it – this remains to be sorted out by lawyer and police and jury and judge etc, not to mention the merry media, social and anti-social) could conceivably happen to anybody, and when you say anybody you could mean me – it could happen to me – I could come home one day and find HH in the arms (so to speak – I can’t go further than that) of, say, Deke Perpendicular (laughter), and I could lose it and I could, say, shoot them with some handy gun or other and there I would be, rushing off to somebody’s conservatory for scotch and toast and honey – oh yes, honey – and I could dip the spoon into the honey and I could lift up the spoon (silver, remember) and I could watch as the honey slowly falls and makes its way down onto the golden and buttery toast and I could think about bees and ants and I could wonder about the surface of the honey and I could ask a kind of question about what happens in the universe (picking up some crossed wires from Hannah’s mad bad sister of the quince and elderberry concoction who has a habit of saying – oooh – everything happens to everybody in the end you know – everybody dies in the end) what happens in the universe when the honey meets the air, or you could say when the shit hits the fan – I prefer to meditate on the honey – what happens when the honey meets the air.

Yes, I could wonder about that.

MY HEARTS ARE YOUR HEARTS - new short story collection 2015

MY HEARTS ARE YOUR HEARTS

Is a collection of nineteen of my new stories, and it includes an essay discussing how the stories were written.

It will be published in 2015 by Spineless Wonders.

The cover image is by Griff Clemens.

The cover design is by Sandy Cull.

COMMENTS ON THE COLLECTION

 ‘Intimate and witty, romantic and ironic, and, above all, compassionate, Carmel Bird’s extraordinary stories do more than take you in — they abduct you.’      Robert Drewe

….

‘These stories tell whole lives, but—like a bowerbird—Carmel has caught up the very brightest bits and piled them into a glittering trove. Her witty, sharp-eyed narrators never fail to tell you what you really want to know about love, sex, death, art—and the heart, in all its many guises.’  Danielle Wood

….

'Delicious and disturbing stories from a great Australian storyteller.'  Brenda Walker

Penguin Classics - November 2014

The paperback Penguin Classics, with their nostalgic old Penguin covers, are now very familiar to book-buyers. Perhaps less familiar are the hardback ‘keepsake’ collectibles which have included Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom, Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. The hardbacks are also recognizable as a family of books, their cloth cover designs by Adam Laszczuk done in a spare, bold fashion that is reminiscent of magazine illustration of the fifties. The colours also are distinctive – flat areas of black or grey or lemon playing against flat simple images in blocks of contrast. The edges of the pages are dyed to match the dominant colour of the book. Neat. 

Now, in time for the Christmas market, Penguin have added four more of ‘Australia’s Favourite Books’: The Bodysurfers (Robert Drewe), A Fortunate Life (Albert Facey), The Tall Man (Chloe Hooper) and Cloudstreet (Tim Winton). All these books, three fiction, one non-fiction, are key parts of the literary landscape of Australia. Again the covers are very much part of the package.  Particularly striking is the silhouette of the man carrying his horse on his back on the cover of A Fortunate Life. Irresistible is the teeny orange bikini top hanging from the white deck chair on The Bodysurfers.

If you are lucky enough to get all four in your stocking, be careful because they are likely to weight the stocking down, as the paper and binding are pretty heavy. But you won’t be taking them to the beach will you – these are collectible treasures to line up on the bookshelf and remind you to take your e-reader or your old battered copies out with you for joyful reading under the umbrella.

Writers and Technology – Now and Then

(A talk given at a meeting of the Australian Society of Authors in Castlemaine, October 25, 2014)

The crime writer Val Mcdermid said at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival that publishing today is so very different from what it was twenty years ago that if she had been starting out now she reckons would not have had a career as a writer. Why? Because today a writer really has to have a big success with the first book. Otherwise there won’t be a second book. Game over. There is no sense, as there once was, of a writer having time to build skills with experience. She described it as ‘hitting the ground running’ – that’s what you have to do now. In other words, if you don’t prove yourself marketable on Bookscan to begin with, you won’t get another contract. There was a time when publishers were the nurturers of writers. Perhaps they have handed that responsibility over to writing courses.

There are ways around this of course, but it’s basically true, and I think it’s probably what drives publishing today. The values are different from what they were. It is a different industry.

We can discuss the various avenues to publishing today – you will probably know things that I don’t know. But I understand that audiences like to hear the personal stories of writers’ histories of writing and publishing. So that’s what I will talk about.

Somebody asked me recently how many of my books are still in print. I hadn’t thought about that for a while, but when I did, I realized that out of the thirty books I have written, nine are in print. On paper, between covers. I wonder if that’s good or bad. There are some ebooks – I’ve lost track, and also some audiobooks. Yes, I have lost track. Of course I shouldn’t have lost track, should I? Am I unprofessional or just bewildered by the rush of change in the publishing industry over the past ten years?

Much of what I will say here amounts to a reflection on how things are as against how things used to be. I realise that is probably just an old person’s way of looking at life, but I also think that in the matter of writing fiction and so on, it’s possibly a quite interesting and revealing way to go. We’ll see.

Maybe writing fiction is a bit like knitting in that the basic stitches remain the same no matter what the technology does, and no matter how the patterns change. Am I being too fanciful?

Anway, when anyone thinks about writing and publishing these days they probably think about technology. I realise they also think about writing courses and agents and publishers and festivals and prizes and grants. Or they should. And about plots and characters and so forth. But mostly I think the mind flies to the possibilities of the computer, the internet, the blogs, the ipad, the iphone – and swiftly to social media – how facebook and twitter and all the rest will work in the service of the publication of whatever it is you write. Sometimes it looks as if the paper book might be in the service of the social media. Rather than the other way round. The Australian Society of Authors figures in this too – they are an important part of the background (or is it the foreground?) for writers in Australia today.

Before I wrote a word of this talk, I tweeted about it. So before the fact of the thing, before it even existed on my screen, I let people know when and where it would be delivered. If I tweet about it, it must be true. You think? With the help of twitter and my imagination, all this came into being.

You will have noticed that in my lists of things people think about when they think about writing, I have really said almost nothing about writing and nothing at all about reading. Do they matter? I think they do. Maybe they don't. They used to. Bear with me – I’m a little bit old-fashioned. I love reading and I love writing – it’s just personal.

Children today have a fairly clear idea of how books come into being. As a child, I needed to figure it out, because I had an ambition to write books. I wrote a lot with a pencil in spiral bound books, until, for my seventeenth birthday I got a typewriter. The latest technology – a red Olivetti letter writer. I don’t have it any more, but I have its successor which is a grey-green Olivetti letter writer in a carry case. I think the same model was used in the movie of The Talented Mr Ripley which was set in the late 1950s. I taught myself to type from Pitman’s Business Typewriting. I don’t know how I found the time, really. I was on holidays from university, working in an ice cream factory by day and a café by night. Yet every day I worked on my typing. No social life. No apps.

Today children learn to use a keyboard and all the rest around the age of two.

There’s an exhibition at the State Library – Mirror of the World – where you can explore the evolution of books and printing – from cuneiform writing onwards – from clay tablets to vellum to paper. There’s a bookshop in Dorset where people can leave reviews on a typewriter. Yes, it’s a second hand bookshop, Wild and Homeless Books. And in Toronto The Monkey’s Paw – also a second hand bookshop – sells typewriters as well as books.

Today’s readers take paperback books for granted, as they take ebooks too for granted – and then there’s a distinct movement today towards producing books as works of art. The latest novel by Ian McEwan (The Children Act) was produced in a limited edition (as well as a regular edition) and I thought the advertisement for it in the London Review of Books read like an hilarious parody from a novel about novels (of which there are many). It goes like this:

‘This is a special limited edition of the Children Act signed by the author before publication, comprising 100 copies only, printed in Logan Book Wove 150gsm paper. Seventy-five are quarter-bound in Kaduna Green Nigerian Goatskin, the sides letter-press printed on Passport Sage Felt with a design by Edward Bawden and numbered one to 75. Twenty-five copies, numbered 1 to 25, are fully bound in the same leather and contain 3 facsimile pages of notebook manuscript and one page of hand corrected typescript from an early draft of the novel. All copies have head and tail bands, coloured tops and endpapers, and are contained in a suedel-lined slipcase, also featuring the Bawden design.’

The full leather ones had already sold out by the time the advertisement appeared. Suedel, by the way, is imitation suede.

It’s a long way from an ebook – which is of course also available. Forget the Kaduna Green Nigerian Goatskin to put in your glass fronted bookcase or atmosphere controlled safe. Just swipe the screen like everybody else.

From the high high hilarious end of today’s publishing – back to the girl in the ice cream factory learning to type and continuing to read.

Of course there was no such thing as a Young Adult Book when I was a young adult. Young adults were just people who might be reading Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice and so on. P.G. Wodehouse and Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling and Agatha Christie and James Thurber. Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Graham, Enid Blyton of course. Richmal Crompton. The Brothers Grimm. So writers such as those were my models and inspiration, more or less. Meanjin existed but I didn’t know. Australian fiction – well I remember reading Thomas Keneally and Patrick White and Ernestine Hill and Ruth Park. Before all that I read Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland and the William books. I didn’t have Australian children’s books for some reason. Imagine, no Snugglepot or Cuddlepie. I lived in Tasmania – it was I think more connected to England than to Australia. Also, my family used to get the Saturday Evening Post from America – as well as the Illustrated London News.

I had a few short stories published in places such as the Herald Sun (true) and the Women’s Weekly. But it wasn’t until the late eighties, (still using typewriters and paper and carbon copies) when publishing in Australia was graced by the presence of McPheeGribble, that I had a collection of stories published. Also, writing by women was being taken more seriously, and there was miraculous support from the Federal Labor Government there for a while.

There were no university courses in writing, really nowhere that one could look for guidance. There were small societies of writers – but I didn't really get into any of that. I just did whatever I thought might work. Enter competitions, submit to magazines. Work it out for yourself. Hope for the best. The ASA has existed since 1963, but I didn’t know that then.

What has happened since then is that writing fiction in Australia – which is mainly what I do – has become an industry. Adelaide Writers’ Week began in 1960 – a kind of marker, I think, for a certain leap forward in Australian literature. The Australia Council for the Arts was founded in 1967. Manning Clark published the first of his six volume History of Australia in 1962.

You can see then that the 1960s were a time of great significance for literature in this country. The Miles Franklin Prize was first awarded in 1957. Awards also are a marker in the history of writing and publishing. Nowadays there are too many awards to count. Is that good or bad? I don’t know.

Personally, I was really just working away and stumbling along until the publication of my collection of stories with McPhee Gribble in 1987, when I really began to be aware of what was possible. That’s nearly thirty years ago.

Some of the things I observed and was affected by in that time – in 1990 I was sent by the Australia Council to do a college residency in Florida. There I learned to use bitnet, a primitive form of the internet, in order to keep in touch with a friend in Melbourne. This meant I had to learn really quickly how to use a computer. The computers were in a basement room at the university. They were large clumsy things, and my conversations via bitnet did not come up on the screen, they were printed out on continuous sheets of paper. Here are some. They went on for miles. When I got them out of the filing cabinet, I had a horrible feeling they might have faded like old faxes, but lo and behold, they haven’t.

I did learn how to use a computer.

I have assembled, along with the Florida emails, a very little museum of technology for you. It emphasizes the physicality of things.

Here is my old typewriter.

Here are the covers of some of my books.

Here is a book that had to be torn up (more of that later)

Here is a typewritten manuscript.

Here is an audio book – this one is on tapes – imagine – but I do also have them on discs.

I planned to bring a CD-Rom that accompanied my novel Red Shoes in 1998. I couldn’t find a copy of the CD-Rom. It no longer works in any machine anyway. Although the novel is out of print, it is of course still possible to read the book. That is one of the beauties of the old technology of print on paper. Bits of the CD are still on my old website.

You can go to my current website if you like and click on a line that says: click here to go to the older site content. There you will find my old website – a primitive thing – that went up in 1998. I believe it was the first website of an Australian fiction writer. And of course now just having a website is so yesterday.

This brings me to the thing about books in print.

The one that has the most interesting history, I think, is Dear Writer.

This manual for writers was first published by McPhee Gribble in 1988. In 2013 it was out of print but people kept asking me where they could get it. So I decided to turn it into an ebook.

How naïve I was.

I will give you the short version of the story.

The file of the original proofs had not survived the various transfers from one computer to another. I realised I would first need to scan the text. It so happened that I had only one copy in my possession. If I tore it apart for the purpose of scanning, I would end up with no copies at all. It seemed wrong not to have at least one copy of my own book. You’d think that I could find one somewhere, at least online, but no. Although there were plenty of copies in Indonesian. So I persuaded a friend to relinquish her copy. The process of scanning, while being perhaps elegant and astonishing, was tedious. As the book on my left shrank page by page and the pile of loose pages on my right grew, the data on my laptop lay in between the two.

But that was only the beginning really. I had then to convert the scanned pages into a Word file. I am not gifted or practised in the use of the technology. But I got a program and set about the conversion, and I nearly went mad with frustration and despair. It was all TOO HARD.

Yet somehow, I actually did it. I don’t really understand how.

When the scanned pages at last became a file, I began an exhaustive revision of the text. While the basics of writing fiction remain constant, the vast and rapid changes and developments in technology, publishing, and teaching had to be acknowledged, reflected and addressed in the new version of the book. After all, today people write novels on twitter. The notion of writing letters is now quaint in its formality, but to abandon it would mean losing the tone of the book, and it was this tone that students and readers found particularly helpful and engaging. I say ‘readers’ because this is a book that can be read as a piece of fiction as well as a manual of instruction. It isn’t simply a matter of tone; Dear Writer is an enactment of its own principles. Interestingly, people frequently refer to Dear Writer as Dear Reader. I assume they feel the text speaks to them, that they, the readers, are the writer being addressed.

There are two characters in this book: Writer and Virginia. Writer is a middle-aged woman living somewhere in rural Australia and writing short stories which she sends to Virginia for assessment. The readers of Dear Writer never see the script of the story under review, but must build it up in their imaginations. There are no letters from Writer. Only letters from Virginia to Writer. Because the characters are of their time, which was long ago in 1988, they think about the virtues of writing with pens compared with working on a typewriter, and then on a computer. I remember being resistant to the image of the old Royal typewriter on the cover of one edition of the book, because I thought it was suggesting the text was nostalgic and ossified. Yet people said they loved the image. The cover of another version was never admired by anyone I ever heard of; it suggests, with its blood red woman at a typewriter, that writing fiction is something to do with menstruation.

You can see some of the problems that changes in technology have introduced to the revision and re-presentation of a book like this. Often when I see the phrase ‘changes in technology’, the image of Tess of the d’Urbervilles comes to mind; that tragic emblem of a young woman trapped in social revolution, destroyed. Writing, revising takes courage; I am brave enough to do this.

I had a sense, as I worked on Dear Writer Revisited, that something dramatic and revolutionary was happening to books generally, and that ‘publication’ was not a term that served the purpose.

I considered the fact that most of the students of writing today are very young, that they use social media, that they are probably keen to by-pass traditional publishing, that traditional publishing is also morphing even I sat here at my laptop, that those young students of writing were probably writing novels with their forefingers and thumbs on their iPhones, that possibly anything Virginia might say to Writer about, say, the agreement of a verb with its subject, was not going to matter to anybody much.

Yet I know that it does matter, and that it will continue to matter. I am not talking about rigidity and inflexibility and fossilisation, but about clarity and freedom. The more you know about how language behaves, the better equipped you are to use it, the more power you have over your own thoughts and ideas. Not so long ago I was teaching a university course. At the end of the second session I asked the students what areas of writing they would like me to cover in the course. They asked me to teach them grammar. In the early nineties when I was at the college in Florida, the students wrote all their work, including their journals, on computers. A group of them came to me after class and said they were going to England for a semester and would have to write their journals by hand – this being long before the development of the laptop etc. They asked me to teach them how to do that. I know, and not just from those examples, that the things Virginia and Writer are able to convey are still important to people learning to write fiction, and I was keen to re-fashion the book in such a way that the original flavour would be preserved, while the nature of the world into which it would go continued to change.

The challenges I faced in the making the ebook were not just those presented by the current technologies, or by the changes in publishing, or the changes in hardware and software, but the changes in the whole climate and make-up of readers and students and writers themselves.

I thought that by the time the ebook was done, ebooks might be obsolete, might be the luxury houses built on the edge of the cliff, only to disappear beneath the waves as the level of the sea rises in the heat of the blazing sun.

Anyway, now I was ready to meet the technology of the ebook. Ready, it turns out, but not really quite able. I had to admit that I could not do this alone, and searched for support and help. There are websites offering methods and varying levels of support, but it was clear to me that they were not going to be my thing. There are of course people who can just get in and take up the challenge of the technology and produce their own ebooks. I was not one of those.

With the conversion to scans and then into Word, I think I did quite well for someone who didn’t know what they were doing.

Ebook help eventually came in the form of Bronwyn Mehan who is the publisher of Spineless Wonders, a publisher dedicated to, among other things, the production of ebooks, or books without paper, books without spines. Bronwyn offered to take over the making of the ebook – but then she pointed out something I had been trying not to think: she said a book such as Dear Writer is a book that many readers and students of writing like to hold in their hand, to consult in the old-fashioned way, to use the Index for quick reference, to keep on the bookshelf. This was obviously true, because I had found it impossible to get hold of a copy of Dear Writer until a fellow writer volunteered to let me have hers. So Bronwyn’s suggestion was that before she produced the ebook, maybe she could produce the paperback. The new title would be Dear Writer Revisited.

We would proceed from the paperback version to the ebook version, the ebook requiring its own specific layout and other elements needed for electronic delivery. How to manage an index in an ebook? Such matters would impact on the text. Quite.

Having told you how I felt about the covers of some of the editions, I can now rejoice to tell you that I designed the cover of Dear Writer Revisited myself. So I love it. The friend who gave me her copy of Dear Writer was children’s author Glenda Millard. We mocked up the cover at her house, using books we bought from the local charity shop and tore up into little bits. Another friend, Susan Bassett, did most of the work on the title and author on the front cover.

So that’s the story of one of the nine books that are in print.

I think I feel quite exhausted by it all.

Before you ask more questions, there are just two things that come to mind – the other day I drove past the vast hole in the ground at the corner of Lonsdale and Spencer Streets. There were a few smashed pillars of old concrete jutting from the rubble, twisted wires sprouting from them like dry wisteria in a drawing by Arthur Rackham. Big hoses were spraying water in wide arcs across the desolate landscape. It was the site of a new development of apartments – it was the site where The Age building used to be. Goodbye newspapers.

Actually, Rachel Buchanan published an interesting book Stop Press last year, giving her insider’s perspective on the rise and fall of the printed newspaper.

Change is in the air – newspapers, cheques, landlines, books are disappearing, sliding into obscurity  - the weather – the weather is changing.

So that was one thing – newspapers.

The other thing is a new book by one of my favourite authors, Fay Weldon. It’s called The Ted Dreams and it was written specially as an ebook. No paper involved.