Ooooo, Harrison Ford or Richard Gere? Well I choose both and add Bruce Willis, James Woods, Rob lowe, Bon Jovi, Tim Mathieson, Bruce Springsteen and of course the beautiful bald black guy from Weeds – not to mention the beautiful bald black guy from Dexter. I didn’t plan on adding younger men but those last two just popped into my old head so it can’t be helped; there are tons of luscious young men out there but I don’t want to be slavering over them – that would be unseemly.

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Years ago Phillip Parker King stood on a hill near his property Dunheved. I imagine he felt very pleased with himself, his success and the building project that was about to take place. A small church was about to be built on the hill, a church that would fulfil the wish of his mother, Anna Josepha King. The land had been set aside some time ago and now, at long last, building had commenced. The resulting church was named, Church of St Mary Magdalene, consecrated in April 1840. It still stands today in a suburb of Sydney, St Marys, on South Creek near Parramatta.

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A fairly quiet day at work today as we’re all waiting for the non-Fresher students to arrive back next week – though I have been tackling the horrors of filling in my annual review form. Groan. How I hate work reviews. I have to polish up my professional head specially for the purpose and, believe me, a high shine doesn’t sit well on it. I am also slightly flummoxed by the note that tells me I must complete said review form whilst taking the University’s six strategic imperatives into account. Now there’s a truly dehumanising phrase if ever I heard one. I feel quite weak at the thought, m’dears. I was further flummoxed when I briefly glanced to see what these great tenets are: Quality; International impact; Distinctiveness; Collegiality; Professionalism; Sustainability. All very worthy, I'm sure, but: eh??!!? Lord save us, really I’m none the wiser. Neither am I convinced that my international impact stretches that far here in the administrative backwaters. I think I might have to lie down for several hours and have another Starbucks. Maybe two ...


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So Tania, tell us about the book.

Well, it's my first collection, it's called The White Road and Other Stories, and it's published by Salt Publishing, a wonderful small press in the UK where “small” actually means dynamic, innovative, great lovers of writers and writing. It contains 27 stories, half of them “flash fiction”, less than 500 words long, and half of them “science-inspired” meaning that they took as their inspiration articles from New Scientist, the UK science magazine (see below for more about this).

It was published on September 1st. As of the time of writing this, I haven't seen a copy yet, since I live in Israel and the postal service is appalling, but the publication date was, nevertheless, wonderful, a dream come true.

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I was reminded today of something my great-aunt, the artist Gwen Raverat, once wrote which is just the kind of counter-intuitive idea which I love:

"The whole of a long life is spent learning to see, to know what one is looking at with one’s inner mind: not in gaining experience, but in losing it."

It is counter-intuitive, isn't it, the idea that experience makes you see less well, but I think there's something in it. I know that to take photographs well I need to clear my head out, shed preconceptions, words and analysis. Really seeing the way light falls and finding the way to show it means letting go of your preconception of what shape a house is or what's important about it, and you can't see the play of a hundred colours across a rippling surface if you're thinking, 'nasty, rusty corrugated iron'. My experience of people and writing is working flat out when I'm working, but perhaps the writerly equivalent of having my photography head on is more in the receptiveness which - at my best - I try to have to everything that's going on around me.

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My guest article, What We Talk About When We Talk About Short Stories, is now up on the fabulous Vulpes Libris book blog, with a gorgeous illustration. Thank you to Vulpes Libris for inviting me to rant about short stories, my favourite topic!
To give you a taster:
I would like to tell you what I will not be talking about. I won’t be:
1. Talking about the short story collection as the victim of the narrow-minded publishing industry, how sad it all is, if only they could all wise up etc…etc..
....

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From the fetid, rank, depressing confines of a sci-fi convention in Nuneaton appears a young woman of stunning beauty. Relatively.

She’s actually about my age, perhaps older, and glamorous rather than beautiful, but she bursts through the cloud cover of black Metallica and Warhammer t-shirts like a Supernova localised in the Travelodge cafeteria. When I recover from the shock I go back to flicking through the rail of seventies movie posters that I have no intention of purchasing but I have another four hours to fill before my reading and Q&A session. I have been given a small amount of cash by Mavis at Harper Collins to get ‘tanked up’ before I take the makeshift plywood stage at ten pm.

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A really miserable day today – certainly in terms of rain. Summer (ho ho) is most definitely over and autumn has its claws in us for sure. I even turned the heating on last night and this morning, though I do have a bit of a cold right now, so I have an excuse. Lord H doesn’t like the heating on till at least January, you see, but if I look pathetic enough he usually relents around about November. But hey now it’s on, I might try to keep it that way …

Meanwhile at work, the tension is really beginning to mount in terms of the new academic year (Gawd bless it). People are usually snippety the week before Freshers’ Week until the week after it, so we all get tearful then. Unfortunately they appear to be getting rather snippety now, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the month, dammit. In fact, one of the emails I received today was so snippety that the Marketing department rang up to sympathise. They obviously don’t know that we’re blamed for everything here at the campus coalface … Mind you, they were impressed with my reply to the aforementioned rudery, which (to my mind) was witty but firm. Anyway, I sorted out the problem, so hopefully the twig-beating that is no doubt lined up for me will be lighter than expected. Still, it’s all so upsetting though. Sigh ...


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Please click the link below to go to my blog page...

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I've been thinking about long sentences. The prevailing orthodoxy, it seems, among many of my fellows - not to mention writing teachers and students - is that short sentences, specially with the simple syntax which they're also likely to have, are 'punchier'. They're striking. Listen! They seem urgent, forceful. They demand to be heard. Readers notice them. Long sentences, on the other hand, go slowly, take too long, bog readers down, bore them.

Really? I think it's nowhere near as simple as that. Let's go up a step or two in scale, for a moment.

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