Still on deadline (3 novels due like NOW… and I keep getting distracted by some film scripts and graphic novels that I’m always adding to), so haven’t done much but sit and write. This is what I’ve been listening to — pretty random mix, no special order, and I’ll often hear an artist in here and then decide to put their entire album on instead.
Use Somebody Kings of Leon
All I need Air
Clair de lune Debussy
Guaranteed Eddie Vedder
Paparazzi Lady GaGa
Sex On Fire Kings of Leon
High and Dry Radiohead
No Surprises Marissa Nadler
Best Friends Amy Winehouse
Bittersweet Symphany The Verve
We Are The People Empire Of The Sun
New York Eskimo Joe
Ragoo Kings of Leon
Till I Collapse Eminem
Foolish Games Jewel
Who Knew Pink
No Surprises Radiohead
Cry Me A River Michael Buble
Gloomy Sunday Heather Nova
Mr. Pitiful Matt Costa
9 Crimes Damien Rice
How To Save A Life The Fray
All I Need Radiohead
Breathe Me Sia
Electric Feel MGMT
Running up that Hill Placebo
Good Life (ft. T-Pain) Kanye West
sinnerman (felix da housecat mix) Nina Simone
Paranoid Android Sia
Beware Of The Boys (ft. Punjabi MC) Jay-Z
On Call Kings of Leon
Shadow Of The Day Linkin Park
Videotape Radiohead
Home (feat. Jay-Z) Kanye West
Falling Slowly Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová
One U2
Love Stoned Justin Timberlake
Watch Over Me Bernard Fanning
Aint No Love Jay Z
I Want You Kings of Leon
The Last Day On Earth Kate Miller-Heidke
Elephant Damien Rice
Lucky Man The Verve
Somewhere Over The Rainbow Norah Jones
Night Drive Gotye
Let The Drummer Kick Citizen Cope
I Don’t Like Mondays Tori Amos
Nobody Sees Powderfinger
Everybody Hurts R.E.M
Walking On A Dream Empire Of The Sun
Blackout Muse
The Drugs Don’t Work The Verve
Breathe Me (Fourtet Remix) Sia
Every you every me(Single Mix) Placebo
Dream catch me Newton Faulkner
Signal Fire Snow Patrol
Heartbeats Jose González
Take A Bow Muse
Black Eyed Dog Nick Drake
Pruit Igoe & Prophecies The Philip Glass Ensemble
Last Request Paolo Nutini
Butterflies and Hurricanes Muse
Judas The Verve
I’m Yours Jason Mraz
blackbird Sarah McLachlan
Hallelujah Jeff Buckley
chocolate Snow Patrol
Time After Time (Acoustic) Norah Jones
Times They Are a Changing Bob Dylan
Pure Morning Placebo
The Sounds of Silence Simon and Garfunkel
In The House - In A Heartbeat John Murphy
99 Luft Balloons Nena
All I Wanna Do Is ‘Bang Bang’ And Take Your Moneys MIA
Mad World Gary Jules
Fix You Coldplay
The Metre Powderfinger
Fake Plastic Trees Radiohead
Rob Dougan - Clubbed To Death Rob Dougan
I’ll be in Newcastle over the next few days for the NYWF, speaking on a range of topics. Fox more info go to:
www.youngwritersfestival.org
It’s been a while since I’ve written here and there’s good reason - I’ve been VERY busy.
I was recently a guest at the Perth Writer’s Festival, where the stand out moment for me was a panel discussion I shared with Dame Stella Rimington, the former Director of MI5 turned thriller writer. It was one of those panels that really entertained the crowd — something so many novelists and festival programers seem to shy away from. So, thank you Stella for a wonderful time!
While there, I spoke with Robert Baer, former CIA case officer turned author of some great books on the Mid East. Bob seemed like a good guy, and he’s insightful as hell on what’s going down in and around his old sand pit. I admit, I expected him to look a little more like George Clooney, who’d played him in “Syriana”, but hey, I guess there can’t be two guys in the world as good looking as Clooney.
Anyway, be sure to go check out both Stella and Bob’s books, they’re all good reading.
The next Fox book is done!
Firstly, thanks to all who read BLOOD OIL and took the time to write to me via the contact page at this website and via my publishers. The response has been bigger than the previous books, and I’m thrilled at that. So many people found the journey of Fox in BLOOD OIL to be not just entertaining rewarding and insightful, which is somewhat humbling.
Likewise, many were happy to surmise the parallels of his personal journey and our own national journey of revenge in this War on Terror. While I never aim to use a sledgehammer in getting such points across, I was a little more direct with this kind parable than I’d been with the themes in FOX HUNT and PATRIOT ACT, and I’m glad that it was so well appreciated. It’s always a very fine line between what an author spells out and what to leave up to the reader to make their own story, and this was something that I felt maybe I’d done a bit too obviously. Not didactic as such, just not exactly subtle! Anyway, thanks again for buying, reading, and writing in.
So, my next Fox book is in with the publishers, titled LIQUID GOLD, and scheduled for release in Australia this August. I’m really happy with it, just about to do the edits. It takes place just a few months after BLOOD OIL and takes up some previous storylines. Takes the best of what worked in the first three books, and while it’s longer in word-count and page length than what has preceded it, it’s the shortest in terms of the book’s time-line and it rips along with constant action as the story in this one is a strong, fast, highly-tuned engine (just like Fox’s new motorbike). It’s perhaps a little less subversive that the previous books, and it’s a direct set up to Fox 5 which will be published August 2010… a book that is set just minutes after this one ends!
Writing the Fox books means I usually have a very busy summer, and I squeeze in going to the cricket and the odd day at the beach to recharge. Before this summer, I completed another project…
ALONE. I wrote this un-contracted, and I loved every minute of the writing process. ALONE is the first novel in a teenage series, to be published sometime next year. I’ll be doing a book a year in this series concurrent with my book a year in the Fox universe, for the next couple of years at least. I had been hoping that by the time I turned 30 (not long to go now!) I’d be slowing down, eg maybe a book every 2 years, but I’ve figured that while I have the time and energy to burn, why not get a few more things achieved?
THE COPPER BRACELET. This is a secret project that I will blog here about at a later date (sorry, not my rules!). Suffice to say, it’s a thriller, it’s big, and it will rock.
PICTURE THIS. A Pearson short story collection for schools, published… soon. My story will be a tie-in to the characters I created in ALONE.
LITERATI 2. I’m nearing the end of my PhD, about 3 years in the making so far, and I can’t wait to be on the other end of it. I’ll miss university, where I’ve been attending in some form or other for 12 years now, as for all its bureaucratic, back-scratching crap the payoff is that academic life is mostly a buzzing beehive of literate activity. A defining characteristic of the university is that is a place where people read, write, exchange and respond to a dizzying variety of texts in the context of disciplinary or interdisciplinary study. So, while I’m happy to be contributing to the wider field of learning via my PhD, and finishing will be bitter sweet, I definitely need a break from it prior to going back to do any teaching.
I’ll post another blog soon about what I’ve been reading and watching and listening too.
Cheers,
JP.
Double Lives
James Phelan and Stella Rimington’s characters inhabit worlds full of political intrigue, secrets and non stop action; they discuss their gripping new thrillers.
Chair: John Harman
Sat 28 Feb, 9.30 – 10.30am
The University Club Theatre
Stepping off the Page
Leigh Hobbs, Andrew Nicoll and James Phelan contemplate the ingredients required for good characterisation and how they make their characters come alive.
Chair: Danae Gibson
Sat 28 Feb, 12.30 – 1.30pm
Fox Theatre
James Phelan - Story
Writing Workshop
Sun 1 Mar, 10am -1pm
I’ve had a lot of recent emails, and comments via this website, concerned about me and these bushfires in my home state of Victoria. I’m fine. Frustrated and angry - but fine.
Sadly, these fires that are ripping through Victoria have claimed far too many lives - close on 200 now. I hate to mention a number, because every life lost is a tragedy, not a statistic.
Most of the fire-fighters are Country Fire Authority volunteers. I used to be in the CFA, and it taught me many things about fighting fires and saving lives, but one thing has stayed with me above all else: respect fire.
We had ample early warning about last Saturday’s weather conditions, and a week before that day, having seen the forecast, I started telling friends and family to bug out of the bush. Most stayed put. Most said they had “fireplans”, which is little more than a plan to delay death. Every fire-fighter in the country working around the clock could not put out bushfires burning in over 350,000 hectares of dry, drought-stricken land. They know it’s about containment, it’s about fire breaks, and it’s about minimising losses. For the average citizen, they should do the same calculation, and that’s what I told people I was concerned about: minimise your losses - get out with your lives.
We need better planning. We need better controlled burns done before bushfire season. Every person living outside major urban centres should be education in fire safety. I was four when the Ash Wednesday fires came through this state - and as a country kid, it’s always been a part of my life, entrenched in my psyche much like the stories of Gallipoli my great grandfather told me - a part of my life and a reminder of the horrors of reality. We live in a land shaped by fire, and this country will always burn; as long as we have people living in the bush, bushfire will always claim life.
Yet we have greater predictions and forecasts and communications than ever before. As I said, current fire-plans are bullshit because the people who make them are gambling with something that they do not comprehend. Fires like we had been warned about are unstoppable to all but the best prepared pros. So many of my family and friends stayed in their homes despite being ringed by fuel that has been baking through the worst drought in our history. It’s like we knew an invasion was coming and most people stood there, garden hose in hand, ready to repel. I understand people treasure their homes and possessions but everything but a soul can be remade.
There is a Royal Commission into this fire. I hope to see several things come out of it, including:
- The populace must be better educated - whether that’s through compulsory education at school or CFA involvement; if you live in the bush you must know about fire, just like to drive a car you know about road laws and sit a test.
- We need a disaster relief agency like the US’s FEMA, to oversee the efforts of multiple agencies and has federal resources on hand to field ASAP.
- The State and Federal government must provide cash to families and individuals who decide to leave their homes ahead of the fire warnings, to pay for relocation - I hate to think any innocent children lost their lives in these fires because their parents are living hand-to-mouth like so many Australians, parents who weighed their situation up and decided the risk was low enough not to warrant borrowing money from someone to stay in a hotel for a few days. This cash grant is a better allocation of tax-payer money than having state and federal employes searching from the air or on the ground through smoking rubble for lives lost. And that’s just the money side (because I know I will get emails saying ‘who will pay for such a move?’ And to these people, I point out that for every life that is taken, whether by fire or a car accident or health issue, that’s on average a million dollars of lost tax revenue that that person will not provide).
The physiological scars that touches all those involved in this would be minimised with every death that is averted, and like every Victorian I have been personally affected by these fires, affected more than I expected with all the warnings we had.
It’s the 21st century, and it seems so many of my fellow Victorians are ignorant of the dangers inherent with living in the bush. The media is showing much of this tragedy, through nation-wide coverage. Will we learn? Will we be better prepared? Will Australians wake up and do something about this, or will we sit on our butts and watch TV? I had hoped that we’d recently entered a new age were empathy is the norm - I still have hope, but I hope I’m not alone.
Cooked a seafood paella with chorizo - probably not kosher but hey, whaddya gonna do. Red onions, garlic, chili, green capsicum, basmati rice, bottle of dry white wine, litre of chicken stock, green beans, peas, sliced chorizo (cooked first in the pan - the juices with some e.v.o. acting as a cooking base) raw tiger prawns, strips of filleted rockling, salt, pepper, chili flakes (mmm… chili), saffron, spring onions, tomatoes, and parsley. I think that was everything. Could have added some beans but it was already a mighty carb festival in its own right.
Shaved. Did some writing of Fox 4. Bit of reading of a thriller serial novel that I’m contributing to. Bit of thinking and note making about future projects. Teaching, study, answering emails. Nice chat with my publisher about Fox 5 and the novel after that (may or may not be a Fox novel).
Launching BLOOD OIL at Scotch College tomorrow, should be good - and supposedly getting new tyres on the thirsty Merc… better coordinate those two activities actually. Damn. Charity event Saturday night. Awarding some short story winners and place getters down at Phillip Island on Sunday, with my friend Christine Darcas, catch up with mum wile I’m down there. Heading to NSW next week, bit of a rural trip, should be some good drivin’ involved. Then home to more of the same.
Oh, DVD’s worth watching: THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE - I’m a big fan of Benicio and here he reminded me of James Dean in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. Also, THE PAINTED VEIL was a nice surprise - seemed ho-hum and predictable but progressed and came together to end in a pretty good little film.
Well, been a while since I’ve done any sort of diary-type entry, so here goes:
Did a bit of a tour for BLOOD OIL, which I’ve told you about I’m sure. Did a gig at Inverloch library to a lovely (and surprisingly large, and not just because my step dad was there – he looks a bit like Peter Jackson you see, circa LOTR filming) crowd. Anyway, hello Inverloch people! I judged a short story comp for which I’ll be attending an awards ceremony next weekend, and I don’t have much to say about the entries other than kids can write and most adults can’t. Caught up with John Birmingham and some of his blog buddies – Burgers to those in the know. Birmo has a new novel out, WITHOUT WARNING, which is kinda like every novel I’ve written wrapped between two covers – it’s huge, and it’s good. I’ll read it in the new year when I can dedicate that kinda time and headspace. Been having a Radiohead revival lately, lately my iPod seems to play nothing but, and IN RAINBOWS is particularly good. Cleaned my office, put all my papers in neat piles which I might go through one day but doubt it, got some big fruit trees for my balcony (two pear, two orange), watched a few DVD’s but nothing stand-out, re-reading (nice and slow) TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Each year I auction off a couple character’s names in Fox books, for charity, and this year both are going to the Cancer Foundation. One sold a couple weeks ago, the other auction/charity event is this weekend, and I’ll do a blog post later in the year with these character’s names and their roles in the books (basically, the more they pay at the charity auction, the longer their character lives). Doing a launch at Scotch College this Friday, which I guess I’ll shave for – did I mention I’ve grown a beard? I’ve had not much else to do lately, so I’ve been learning piano and growing a beard, both activities that I can do at home with minimal fuss. Later this month I am talking at the Balwyn Library, and Box Hill TAFE, the latter with my mate Andrew Hutchinson who’ll be crashing here so I really should sort out the spare room (it’s something of a music, papers, and yoga-ball room at the mo and has not benefited from my cleaning mood). Oh, and a week or so ago I gave a six-hour class to a group of young teenagers at the Queensland Writer’s Centre – it was brilliant, the kids were far smarter than most adults I’ve met and the day flashed by at warp speed, certainly faster than Virgin took off from the airport on the way home (I mean really, did we need to turn around and go back just because the weather computer was out? Look out the window. And really, can’t a fifty million dollar jet fly through any and all Australian clouds???). Anyway, hello Queensland kids if you’re reading this – you are all stars.
And with kids in mind, my new book ALONE has been read by a few pro-readers and the response has been better than expected. Two of them said it’s the best book I’ve written, which is a bit worrisome as it took me 16 days to write compared to 3 months to write BLOOD OIL but then it is a very different book: it’s aimed at teenage readers but these two adults (Tony and Em, if you must know) enjoyed it as much as they’ve enjoyed pretty much any book, and they read more books than most people I know (funny, typing that then I was thinking about how Harper’s Scout speaks – it’s been great to go back into that world, those summer’s making fun with Jem). Anyway, I’m still waiting to hear from a select few teenage readers, then I’ll make any changes in a month or so and get it in to the publishers as a good, solid first book in a series. Meantime, I’m tapping away at Fox 4, and I’m very happy to tell you all that my writing has really moved along since writing this kids book (yes mum, you were right). Watch out for more info coming here soon…
Oh, and for readers in Sydney who saw a Sun Herald profile on me a couple weeks back, the journo got quite a lot wrong, which is not unusual with any profile piece – I might make a perpetual list here one day of all the wrong stuff they’ve written about me over the years. Anyway, it happens to us all and the stuff-ups are only getting bigger and worse as journalists are getting lazier and more time-poor - I’ll leave you with a little snippet from Ricky Gervais’ blog:
During an interview in America recently the subject came up about me ad libbing in all my film roles and what it’s like for me not being in charge as usually I write and direct myself.
I explained that I’m usually taken on with that remit and I said that directors usually hire me knowing that I will bring something to the role. I said, “If they wanted someone to stand where they’re told and just say the lines as they’re written in the script then they should chose any other actor to do that.”
Obviously that was taken out of context by an english news site. i wont embarrass them as they are going to right the wrong, but this is the headline they went with. “Gervais admits he is the worst actor in Hollywood” Gervais admits he is the worst actor in Hollywood Brilliant. The thing that annoys me is this. They know exactly what they are doing. It’s not a mistake. It’s deliberate. The world would be a different place if things had always been like this.
Martin Luther King - “I have a dream.”
TheDailyShit.com - “Lazy black man always sleeping”
Jesus Christ - “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
WeeklyRumour.co.uk - “Scruffy Jew starts riot”
Elizabeth I - “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.”
InternetCuntWhoCan’tGetArealJob.Net - “Scrawny cannibal lezzer eats own father”
Can’t wait for tomorrow’s headlines… Gervais says he’s as misunderstood as Dr. King. Virgin Queen and Son Of God.
It’s been a busy few weeks for me. The third Lachlan Fox novel, BLOOD OIL, came out late August. I’ve toured for it and I’m happy with the final product and the feedback from readers is so far, so good. Other than that, I started another novel late August, and finished it mid-September. It’s outside the Fox series and it has 15 year-old protagonists, so I guess it’s a teenage-audience book, but I like to think that all ages will read it as it’s an archetypal story of identity and survival told in a way I’ve never seen or heard. I wrote it un-contracted and it will be interesting to see what publishers think of it.
Highlights from what I’ve been reading…
James Frey’s BRIGHT SHINY MORNING. He’s described it as a love letter to LA, only the kind of letter you’d write to a lover you’ve been with for ten years. It’s that and more. I caught up with Frey when he was in Melbourne and he mentioned that he’s very much carrying the torch of Norman Mailer which was nice to hear because that’s exactly how I think of Frey’s writing: he works in prose but he’s essentially, like Mailer, an essayist and chronicler of the self and the times around him. His best subject has been himself, much like Mailer, a man I never met Mailer and it’s a regret because I sense that he, the artist, the observer, was the most interesting part of his fictional creation. Mailer never really had the big novel that I’m sure he’d hoped for, certainly not as big as his precursor Hemingway. Much of his best work are now period pieces, which is not a bad thing in itself and they were important and current and immediate reads at the time I’m sure (AN AMERICAN DREAM, and WHY ARE WE IN VIETNAM?). In this regard he was closer to Orwell, who was an essayist better than a prose writer and his books lacked any real future importance. Frey mentioned that in a discussion he had when dear old Mailer was still alive, that the man said to him and I may paraphrase: “You’re it now. It was Hemingway and then me and now it’s you.” I think that anxiety of influence crippled whatever real originality Mailer might have developed, as it did to Hemingway with his artistic competition to Tolstoy. Hemingway’s greatness was his short stories, which rival any other master of that form, Joyce, Chekhov, Babel, and he’s certainly the best short story writer we’ve seen since Joyce’s DUBLINERS (although my readers will know I have an affinity for Proulx and Winton as modern virtuosos of the sublime). Hemingway was the master of ellipses and his longer works, particularly THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, misses this virtue of aesthetic economy. William Faulkner praised this book as Hemingway’s best but then his taste was a little off some of the time. It’s at once a Christian parable and a work of sentimentality and it’s far too much for the novel to bear. To Frey’s credit he has none of that. I’d not say Frey’s strongest point of writing is his brevity for he details his prose as a painter might paint a canvas and apply stroke after stroke to built a picture that’s as rich as it is intriguing but what he achieved as a writer of literature is develop a parataxis that is at the forefront of achievement of 21C writers. I have no doubt that one day in the not too distant future, should Frey tackle an issue that strikes a chord with a time or generation, such as Mailer did with his VIETNAM etc, then he will receive the recognition that he deserves and strives for. He will be studied at universities, they will no doubt incorrectly read his work, but he will be appreciated as a poet observer beyond the limited view we have of Mailer, because he’s capable of better writing. Frey has written about his writing process that he approaches the page and task much like a method actor, to really get into the mindset that the given scene requires. I’ve tried that with some of my works but have found it to be too self-destructive and dangerous to everything around me. I do hope, and I trust, that Frey will get to write a canonical novel beyond the immediate that will last the ages and place him in his country’s best writers, to make them, as he says, insignificant. The danger, if he does not achieve this, as I believe that Hemingway realized he had not produced a novel to beat Tolstoy (THE SUN ALSO RISES came closest, but even it was beaten by Hemingway’s own short work, seen in much of the FIRST FORTY-NINE STORIES). In a letter to his publisher Charles Scribner, Hemingway wrote: “Am a man without any ambition, except to be champion of the world, I wouldn’t fight Dr. Tolstoy in a 20 round bout because I know he would knock my ears off. … If I can live to 60 I can beat him. (MAYBE).” Hemingway’s suicide at 61 had its reasons beyond anything hereditary and more than any sickness, like we saw only a few years ago in Dr Gonzo, another genius journalist-writer. Sadly, that door in the psyche is still an option for too many talented, ambitious artists, particularly and usually young men, which I might discuss in detail another day.
If we look at 20C American literature Nathaniel West’s MISS LONELYHEARTS rates right up there. Pynchon couldn’t touch him, only Faulkner holds the higher title. Of living writers, McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN ranks, as does DeLillo’s UNDERWORLD. Steinbeck was crippled by the shadow of Hemingway, as I believe Mailer was crippled to produce a work of sublime aesthetic achievement by Mailer himself, a Mailer constantly sparring with both himself and Hemingway. I mention these writers because of this: Faulkner’s AS I LAY DYING, West’s MISS LONELYHEARTS, Pynchon’s GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, and BLOOD MERIDIAN, UNDERWORLD, etc, go on through time to prove to us what literature can do, and these works go on harming and teaching and killing us with every read.
I don’t think that such a canonical work is beyond his reach of Frey and it’s certainly within the scope of his ambition. He has the ambition to be heavyweight champion of the literature world, to obliterate the others - if there are any remaining with similar ambitions - into obscurity, and I love him for it. The best I can hope to muster would be to muscle up and fight these guys, as Hemingway did against Stevens - which I’ve written about here before - and I like to think I’d be able to rank pretty high in those stakes. Sure, it’s been tempting to me as it is for so many young writers to write something of such worth and greatest that it will be remembered through all time as something of the finest aesthetic beauty, and maybe one day I’ll dedicate the time to do that but maybe I’ll just keep at my thing, whatever that is. At any rate, Frey’s proved with his third novel that he has reach beyond himself, and produced something that isn’t too restricted to time and place, which is a reach greater than Mailer could ever muster as he placed himself too near events time and time again. Frey’s A MILLION LITTLE PIECES is Mailer’s ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF and BRIGHT SHINY MORNING could well be THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG. Mailer was his own best fiction complete with every nuance New Journalism brought along. Frey was there and now he’s broken the mould and stretched his wings. Mailer wrote in ADVERTISEMENTS: “…I pointed to the farthest fence and said within ten years I would try to hit the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air of our American letters. For if I have one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoyevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner ad even old moldering Hemingway might have come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way.” Hemingway characterized ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF, in a letter to George Plimpton, “as a sort of ragtag assembly of his rewrites, second thoughts and ramblings shot through with occasional brilliance.” It’s easy to read Frey and say that he might share much with Mailer, much more than we may ever realize. Mailer as described by Richard Poirier: “…insists on living at the divide, living on the divide, between the world of recorded reality and the world of omens, spirits, and powers, only that his presence may blur the distinction. He seals and obliterates the gap that he finds, like a sacrificial warrior or, as he would probably prefer, like a Christ who brings not peace but a sword, not forgiveness for past sins but an example of the pains necessary to secure a future.”
Over the coming years I’m excited to watch just how far the reach of James Frey can go, and I look forward to him carrying the torch another leg of this great relay, to hit the ball out of the park and show the world what literature can still achieve.
What I’ve been writing…
My newest novel, titled ALONE.
I’ve read a heap of “Young Adult” fiction because I’ve just written my first, a little break in-between writing Fox novels. I read like 50 or so, from Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl (a couple of my childhood favs) to Robert Muchamore and Matthew Reilly. The older books still hold up, even Marsden’s TOMORROW Series reads well, so does OSC’s ENDERS GAME. I flinch at a lot of Blyton, as I’ve done with other period pieces of fiction that I’ve re-read as an adult like LORD OF THE FLIES and KING SOLOMON’S MINES, and while there’s still something to like in them they never live up to the memories of the first read when I was full of youthful ignorance and ready to be carried away. Contemporary YA fiction, with the exception of perhaps Jasper Fforde (if you’d call his stuff YA) is so utterly boring. It’s action and thrills but it’s hollow and doesn’t say much about anything. Golding’s first novel in LORD OF THE FLIES is relevant today but only if you are a teenage private school boy, likely an English one at that, who identifies with those weak characters; that’s all those characters were, private English school boys, and that’s all they ever will be, products of an author who had been through that system and continued a similar one by serving in the Navy and further residing in that system in teaching. I just now re-read Huck Finn, and yes, again I flinch at the language that we now know to be very non-PC, but Huck has so much more depth than any of Golding’s characters. Huck has irony, not seen in Ralph et al, and Golding’s “creations” are no more than humourless names with embarrassingly small views and ridiculously limited minds. There’s nothing universal about LORD OF THE FLIES, it certainly is not an allegory of moral depravity, it’s nothing more than a story of a few cardboard private school boys continuing their existence in a situation that a mature writer would have explored and mined for richness beyond the literal and expected, making names on a page resonate through the ages.
Now that books are marketed to kids like never before we need some bright shiny voices and stories available that are beyond the ordinary. We need the KIM and HUCK of today. So, I’ve created Jesse, in my first YA novel, ALONE. It’s McCarthy’s THE ROAD but set during the apocalyptic event rather than years after, with four teenagers at the centre as seen through Jesse’s eyes and without the overt writerly influences that hampers McCarthy’s effort. ALONE is a product of today and written for today’s readers and like THE ROAD, LIFE OF PI, THE BOOK THEIF, THE ALCHEMIST, ENDERS GAME, THE HOBBIT, THE LITTLE PRINCE, and SIDDHARTHA, I can see it will be read by adults as well as teenagers as well as advanced kids, and I hope they all identify with the archetypal qualities in the story. We follow four teenagers for three weeks and we see how they cope and survive in a city that has been attacked, and through it Jesse struggles with his identity and ego and self as much as his friends’. It holds no punches. It’s raw and it’s real and it will be interesting to see what publishers think of it. Clearly I’m biased - but I’ve admitted on many occasions to not liking my previous work when I’m working on the next project - and this has not happened with ALONE. I’m writing FOX 4 and 5 back-to-back, as the storyline and through-arcs carry through them both and I figure it’s smart to mine this creative zone that I’m in while it lasts. But when I think back about those four lonely characters in ALONE, I still love them and I love their story and it was a great month of writing. I’ve never looked back and felt that way about anything I’ve ever written. Usually I’m glad the writing ordeal is over and the world I’d created and lived in for months on end is behind me.
What I’ve been watching…
A few DVD’s.
GONG BABY GONE. Enjoyed it about as much as the book. The twists still worked, even though I expected what was coming. Ben Affleck did a great job of directing. The only thing I had issues with was the small jump cuts in the scene where they were in the house of the mother - they worked fine, but it seemed out of place as a device and the first couple jarred until I was used to it. Still, it’s a little thing, like the little things I pointed out with Tony Gilroy’s first effort in MICHAEL CLAYTON. Make no mistake, both these guys can direct better than most, it’s just my super-critical eye because I expected so much. What pleased me the most with both their efforts is that they have such a minimal, old-school approach that is not reliant on any visual gimmickry.
STREET KINGS. I like David Ayer and I expected so much from this film and it didn’t deliver. TRAINING DAY was a deceptively good script and well acted and executed. In fact, I didn’t love it that much on the first run through but after reading the script and re-watching I got so much more from it, but perhaps that’s either me not being in the mood in the first instance to take it all in, or they filmmakers didn’t do a good enough job putting the script to screen. I suspect a bit of both. HARSH TIMES remains my favourite Ayer film and it’s small-budget genius. Chris Bale and Freddy Rodriguez were perfect; Bale’s character was utterly riveting and frightening and most importantly incredibly empathetic, which cemented Bale in my mind as one of the best actors around. Anyway, STREET KINGS could have been the story that I wanted to write, and when I’d read early news about it I was disappointed that I’d never get to write a similar novel that I’ve been kicking around in my head for a while, the third of a cop trilogy. But, I will write that novel one day soon, about a cop who’s hard and tough as can be because of the two novels before it (both storylines of which came to me in separate dreams with the same cop characters – go figure), because STREET KINGS and its ridiculous cast did not deliver.
This week I’ve given two talks at very different schools, one in Melbourne, and one in country Victoria. Both audiences where great, and eager to know about BLOOD OIL. Well, we’re two weeks from publication and the first review is in. Also, I’ve done my first press interview, for Sydney’s Sun Herald. Both the review (pasted below) and the interviewer from SH liked the book, so I now feel somewhat vindicated in thinking that this novel is my best by far - you know, third time lucky and all that. Having finished BLOOD OIL this past February, then having a couple months of edits, it’s always a nice feeling when objective feedback starts trickling in from the media and my readers. Meanwhile, I’ve been tapping away at FOX 4… better get back to it.
The first review for BLOOD OIL, from Bookseller & Publisher Magazine, August 2008.
BLOOD OIL – Four Stars/an excellent book.
Melbourne-based author James Phelan continues to redefine the often stale and cliché-ridden political thriller genre. The setting of this third novel is present day Nigeria. Australian journalist Lachlan Fox is assigned to cover a devastating terrorist attack on an oil refinery, and the resulting turmoil on oil markets. The trail leads to a plot to overthrow the Nigerian government, take over the oil reserves, and eventually destabilise America. Although BLOOD OIL relies on conventional ingredients – Arab terrorists, corrupt politicians, ruthless Russian businessmen, a maverick ex-CIA agent, a gutsy hero, and an action climax – the author refreshingly re-invigorates them without resorting to the predictable political agenda of writers such as Tom Clancy and Vince Flynn. Because Phelan’s hero is an investigative journalist rather than a gung-ho Rambo type, the author seamlessly integrates factual background without interrupting the narrative flow, and injects a serious moral component usually missing in most thrillers. The genre is in safe hands – Phelan proves again that “intelligent thriller” is not an oxymoron.
MIFF starts any day now. Don’t know which quote I like more:
“If I’ve learned anything from big budget action movies it’s that complicated global problems are best solved by one lonely guy.” - documentary filmmaker, Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me)
OR
“I hope your balls turn to bicycle wheels and backpedal up your arse!” - Barry McKenzie
What I’ve been up to. Last week:
Total hours alive: 168
Awake, maybe 100. At least 80, or maybe 70 something…
Teaching: 2 hours
Writing secret project: 5 hours
Studying/reading: 51 hrs
Reading all 4,000 lines of Hamlet aloud: maybe next week.
DVD viewing: 10 hrs.
Cooking: 3 hrs
Sitting at the cafe: 2 hrs
Thinking: 5-10 minutes.
Driving little brother to an audition/waiting in the car reading Shakespeare: 2 hrs.
Sport: 2 mins (20 push ups). Hey, at least I’m honest.
That’s about it. Received a dozen paperback copies of PATRIOT ACT: awesome. Found a typo in the unedited ’sneak peak’ of BLOOD OIL in the back pages, fuuuuuuck. Invited to Dolly Teen Choice Awards: WTF? That could only end badly. Had a laugh with a courier who delivered a carton of beer to my building: watched him punch in my apartment number… sweet. “Free” slab of VB from Fosters who are sponsoring some book event I’m doing later in the year: very niiiice. Although I’ve still given them about $170k over the past 14 years of hard drinking.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: if there’s an occupational hazard to writing, it’s drinking.
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