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Month: May 2009

5am Melbourne – After the Emerging Writers Festival

5am Melbourne – After the Emerging Writers Festival

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The Emerging Writers Festival is over. I had a rocking good time. Met some lovely people. Had the brain juices stimulated, challenged, soothed and had some of my wackier ideas encouraged! Beware.

As always, I didn’t attend most of the panels I intended to go to. Instead I wandered from interesting thing to interesting thing and like a jellyfish followed the currents that found me. There were times when I was juiced up on the best drug of all (ideas), mind and mouth rambling and brain sparking off in all directions from good company.

There were some times when I was asked some really hard questions about my own work, discovered some deep emotions and subtext to my graphic novel script that I had never realised. I felt confused, sad, struggling, lost and around my own writing – going back to my hotel with a laptop full of mud… And built a bridge, got over it and wrote important words. There is still some difficult work to be done (and dusted before Clarion), but I’ve made an important breakthrough… now I just have to hold on to it.

If I do something with 10% of the ideas I’ve had at the festival it shall be a good year. I got up at 5am this morning, with three articles bubbling in my head. Dragging myself up before the morning light I ignored those concepts completely and wrote a comic script instead. I thought it would be a good fun fluff piece (if slightly disturbing) for Tango’s new anthology Love and War. But as I wrote it, dammit, I realised it had a deep and meaningful subtext directly relevant to the theme of the anthology. Ben Hutchings would be the perfect artist for it if he’s available and willing. The working title of the comic? Love and Spandex.

Numbers, Ankles and Visas

Numbers, Ankles and Visas

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It’s been a full few weeks. Here’s a little by the numbers.

  • 6 whole days until I leave Canberra
  • 4 whole days to pack up most of the house and prepare an awesome farewell
  • 3 torn ligaments in my right ankle
  • 3 visits to the physiotherapist and 1 ankle brace
  • 1 set of x-rays showing no bones broken
  • 2 Visas, one for Mike(y), one for me. America here we come!
  • 1 night of rockband, singstar and pata pata pata pon until 3am with friends
  • 1 night of Eurovision and friends
  • boundless, the sensation of blessedness around the good people I have in my life.

And here’s a picture of my bruised ankle from a few days ago. Since then the migration of bruising to my toes has contined in a black textured manner, the swelling has gone down further and the bruising over the ankle has faded. This happened shortly after my last post on accident prone lizness… the pen really is mightier than the sword. Owwww!

Lizs purple bruised ankle
Liz's purple bruised ankle

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Little liz – the accident prone years

Little liz – the accident prone years

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… no the accident prone years would mean just about any year. I am writing this with a strapped finger after getting a deep slash in my finger while examining suitcases.

I wrote up this anecdote to share with my Co-Clarionaters, we’re getting to know each other and Mr Nicholas Bede Stenner suggested we share funny (which to me means embarrassing) stories. I shall share it with you as well.

The scene. Midnight, an eight year old Liz is cutting up a chocolate syrup bottle with stanley knife (box cutter). The plastic is really hard and I am tired and impatient and get careless. The stanley knife suddenly swishes really smoothly through plastic and over one of my fingers.

There’s a lot of blood. Everyone is sleeping and I know I shouldn’t be up and I don’t want to bother anyone and I don’t want to get into trouble so I stifle any kind of sound and try to apply first aid.

My parents, woken by random sounds and movements late at night find a bathroom with blood splats and a messy pile of bandaids that keep floating off.

My parents say “What’s going on?” with some urgency.

I hide my hand behind my back and say “nothing” convinced I am going to be in the biggest trouble ever for being so stupid with a knife.

I don’t get into trouble at all and am whisked off to hospital where I get a tetanus shot, many local anesthetic injections and get two stitches. I watch with fascination as the thread passes through my flesh and somewhere in the back of my head I’m thinking “Wow this will make a great story.”

I’m particularly pleased that I will remember this as I’m still cross that I don’t remember breaking my leg when I was three ’cause that was really cool and my leg bent at a funny angle. It’s very unfair I don’t remember breaking my leg especially because my brother says that when you break a limb it heals to be stronger and so my chances of ever having a broken leg again have been reduced by 50%.

I get a day off school to recover and I traumatise my little sister for years and years with slow graphic descriptions of watching needle and thread go through flesh.

Even at eight everything was material to observe and absorb to use for later and my technique for any kind of trauma or scary thing is “this will be useful material”.