Writer in Residence

Some people write to music, some people don’t. Sometimes I do, but if I’m revising or concentrating really hard on a really impossible scene (usually an action scene, since they are the devil) I tend to talk out loud as I write, and music just gets in the way.

But for all the other things I do as part of my writing life, like answering emails or writing blog posts or washing dishes while waiting for my backbrain to work on sticking points, I need music.

Lately, for reasons that have nothing to do with outside circumstances and everything to do with the pile of hyperactive hamsters that live in my brain, I have been in need of something familiar and reliably mood-uplifting. Basically, I needed Meat Loaf.

I mentioned that I had been listening to the Loaf non-stop for a week to writing friends, and one of them compacted her face into a black hole of distaste. “WHY?” she demanded, before revealing that she had spent the last week listening to the audiobook of Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels. That is an incredible book, deserving of all the honours showered upon it, but it’s not exactly a cheering tale. If I had to listen to Tender Morsels right now, I think all the brain-hamsters would scrabble out of my ears and run run run for the sea.

Nope. Gotta be Meat Loaf.

Meat Loaf is all bombast and performance and crazy over-the-topness, it is true! But he is so SINCERE about it. Yes, all the songs are about pretty much the same thing - a boy who wants a girl to sit behind him as he drives a motorcycle like a bat out of hell down a road lit by the full moon in the middle of a hot summer’s night. I am totally okay with that. That is the American dream. And even non-Americans can yearn for the impossible romance and possibility of a rebellious youth on a motorbike, swapping genders as appropriate.

Top Five Meat Loaf Songs Ever

5. Everything Louder Than Everything Else

A number of nice basic statements of the Meat Loaf creed:

• “If the thrill is gone, then it’s time to take it back”
• “A wasted youth is better by far than a wise and productive old age”
• “There’s a party raging somewhere in the world”
• “I like my music like I like my life: everything louder than everything else”

It’s like… anti-Zen. It also features a really awesome intro about the narrator killing a boy with a Fender guitar.

Yes, the long version.

4. Out of the Frying Pan (And Into The Fire)

I defy anyone who’s ever lived through a disgusting summer’s day to deny the kinship they feel to these lyrics:

It’s never been this hot
And I’ve never been this bored
And breathing’s just no fun anymore.

The solution to this boredom is a girl who looks restless and reckless and lost, who he invited into his house: “Come on, come on, and there’ll be no turning back / You were only killing time, and it’ll kill you right back.”

He describes her going into the house and lying down on the bed and then tells her that he wants to take her out of the frying pan and into the fire. I think this means that he is going to make her extra-crispy bacon!

And for those who think that all the genius of Meat Loaf is attributable to songwriter Jim Steinman - who is a genius - I advise listening to this version, by Steinman. Steinman has the words; Meat Loaf has the voice.

3. You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night)

On a hot summer night would I offer up my throat to the wolf with the red roses? Probably not. But thanks for asking! Nice song!

I love that they are all acting out the words, even on stage. That is how I do it with my hairbrush!

2. I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)

This is the Meat Loaf song with the best video, where it’s all about a hounded motorcycle-riding Beast who meets a Beauty bathing in a forest glade and then she sings on a flying couch. It is AWESOME, no lie. If you haven’t been clicking on these videos, you have to watch this one:

And here’s the Literal Video Version (warning for more explicit sexual content plus slurs against women. Bad show, LVV peeps!):

People complain that he never reveals what he won’t do for love. DUH, he means that he won’t cheat on her! These people just don’t care enough to listen to the 12 minute version. Lightweights.

1. Bat Out Of Hell

This is the song I’m going to die to in the Zombie Apocalyse, as I lay waste to the living dead in a valiant effort to make an escape route for the city’s last survivors.

What? It’s important to plan ahead.

And thus concludes my manifesto. If you’re not convinced, I just don’t know what to tell you. Perhaps you need some Bananarama?

I am 28, writing books about 16 and 17 year olds. I am 28, writing a blog read by people younger than that. Something that has interested me recently has been the question of what I can ethically write.

I don’t mean in the sense of “what is the best way to ethically write about queer teenagers when I am straight?” which is another topic altogether, but in the sense of, “should I write about this topic/link to this other post/include this phrase? Is it inappropriate? Is it too adult?”

I know YA authors who have been told they shouldn’t write about certain things in their personal blogs. They should not talk about sex, for example, or about drinking alcohol or smoking. They shouldn’t curse. They shouldn’t talk about politics, or what they think about sex education in schools, or racism, or violence. This advice comes from various people - agents, publishers, fellow authors, concerned parents, librarians, and young people.

I disagree with almost all of it, but lately I have been thinking about how to balance the fact that I am an adult, with an adult life, and the fact that I am writing for teenagers, who have teenage lives, and are not legally or socially permitted to do many of the things I can. I have been contemplating where I draw the line on keeping things from the eyes of the Children.

You know who the Children are. The Children are always called upon by those wanting to keep sex education out of schools, or get racy TV off our screens, or censor internet sites. “Just think of the Children!” they cry. “We must protect the Children!”

They are (mostly) coming from a good place, where they think that young people are on the whole more vulnerable than adults (true) and need special protection because of that vulnerability (also true). But I think that condensing all young people into the form of the Children and attempting to install, through legislation or social pressure, a giant bubble wrap ball that will protect the Children from everything that might upset them or cause them to think about adult topics is a bad idea.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about teenagers, and how I want to portray them, and what I want to say to them through my books and my blog. “Don’t think about adult topics!” is NOT a thing I want to say. Young people frequently have to think about adult things because they are already happening when they are young. Often they want to think about them in advance of being adults, so that they can be prepared when they are adults, and ready to do them. Fiction is one way to encounter or mull over adult situations without having to be there in the flesh; blogs are another.

And to be quite honest, if my blog is a partial accounting of myself, it is also an advertisement for my work, and to exclude those things would be false advertising. There are six occurrences of “fuck” in Guardian of the Dead, y’all. (There used to be eighteen. Eighteen was very lazy writing.) There are also instances of drinking, sexual harassment, some truly gruesome violence, and speeding, all committed by or against teenagers. I thought carefully about including those things, and then I went ahead and did it. If you don’t like it in the blog, you probably won’t like it in the books. Best to be warned!

A few months ago, I came up with these rules for myself:

• I won’t talk about personally having sex in my blog, because that’s disrespectful to other parties. But I will talk about sex itself.
• I drink, and will mention drinking. (I also vote, and will mention voting.)
• I will cut down on the cursing - on the grounds that it’s lazy writing, not because I think cursing is bad.
• I’ll warn for violent content and nudity in my own blog, and when linking to others.

But I won’t avoid these topics altogether. I’ll handle them with caution. I’ll think about the presentation, and proceed with the aims of causing least harm and most good. And I will not ever make the insulting mistake of thinking my teen readers must be protected from everything that might upset them or confront them or make them think.

Because I write for teenagers, who are becoming adults. I don’t write for the Children.

At 2.45pm on Saturday afternoon I was heading home from a plotting-a-novel date with a friend at the State Library. I caught my train west from Flinders Street Station, making faces at the heavy stickiness of the air, and out of pique, tweeted the following just as we went into a tunnel:

kehealey: Come on Melbourne, stop being oppressive and humid and start with the rain!

When we came out of the tunnel, hailstones hammered on the carriage roof and the world outside the window had gone white with the sheer volume of water in the air.

I tweeted again:

kehealey: Melbourne I take it back! Less rain! Less rain!

TOO LATE, SELF.

Melbourne, I am so sorry that I wished that supercell storm of the century right on you. I am sorry about the floods down Elizabeth and Chapel streets. I am sorry about the Southern Cross station roof breaking and dumping water and ice onto the platform below. I am sorry about the multiple injuries, abandoned cars, and damaged homes and workplaces. I am REALLY sorry about the State Library springing leaks.

Usually I like rain - not the crazy dangerous rain! The calmer, more moderate rain we’ve been getting for the last two days. Because there is no sound I like more than that of rain on a roof. (A whole, undamaged roof.) I love going to sleep to that sound. I like waking up to it (on days I don’t have to go anywhere, which is most of them). I adore curling up on the upstairs couch revisiting a book read so often that it is an old familiar friend while the steady patter soothes and calms.

But this time you have betrayed me, rain. I refuse to be comforted by your soft whispering wiles. You have a lot of making up to do.

Yesterday I got an email from my American editor at Little, Brown, the excellent Alvina Ling. She had for me the reviews of the Hip Scouts, the program at Little Brown which gives young readers a chance to request ARCs and then report back on them. They had read the American version of Guardian of the Dead, and they had Things to Say!

I found the results illuminating, and I thought you might too. I have reproduced some of them below.

(NB: For the sake of science I must mention that these samples are not evenly weighted, for reasons that will become apparent at the end of the post. I did not include quotes from every reviewer, and some I quoted twice. One, three times!)

Characterisation:

The protagonist, Ellie, was strong and likeable. (Allie, 16)

I did not find Ellie Spencer, the narrator, extremely likeable. (Deirdre, 16)

Ellie was such a fun character to read about and easy to relate to. (Codi, 22)

[I]t might be difficult to relate to her situation, relating to her emotions and self-consciousness. (Kristin, 20)

I’ve never read a book that prominently featured someone who was asexual, and I felt like Karen Healey did a good job with Kevin. (Jen, 19)

Ms. Healey tried to add aspects to the story that people could relate to such as being “asexual” … but I think she added those points just to have them. (Erica, 15)

All the characters were … nicely developed and fun to read about. (Adrienne, 16)

I found the characters to be rather bland. (Laura, 17)

Plot and Pacing:

The plot twists and turns in a way that keeps the reader glued to the page. (Gaylen, 16)

The plot was interesting however I just felt it was a little substandard. (Laura, 17)

The beginning was really good, and I liked how it was written. (Adrienne, 16)

The beginning was very slow and frustrating at parts. (Joanna, 20)

The middle section where all the action happens is my favorite part. (Marisa, 19)

The middle was a little boring and confusing (Adrienne, 16)

I … thought the ending completed the book well. (Erica, 15)

[A]n abrupt ending that didn’t really feel complete or thought out. (Marisa, 19)

Cover:

The cover intrigued me because I wanted to know what the mask represented in context with the book. This book would definitely catch my attention in a book store. (Courtney, 18)

[T]his cover is just very bland and doesn’t really fit the rich storyline. The mask looks cheap. … If I saw this book in the bookstore, I probably [wouldn't] even pick it up long enough to read the blurb. (Amanda 18)

Expectations:

Before I started reading the book, I read the quotes all over the cover, along with a few reviews online. I assumed that, like mostly newly released books, there was more “hype” than good. I was wrong. (Meg)

I wanted to love this book since I first heard of it last year, but I am just disappointed at the final product. (Yan, 17)

Overall Impressions:

I LOVED this book. (Amanda, 18)

I can’t say I loved the book. (Erica, 15)

If this book doesn’t make the best sellers I’ll be shocked in a million different ways. (Christina, 17)

I found this story only ok. (Kimi, 17)

[U]nlike anything I’ve ever read, completely fresh and innovative. (Allie, 16)

Had I not studied the Maori culture, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed this book whatsoever. (Joanna, 20)

This book is an amazing page turner. (Sarah, 18)

I found the novel as a whole tedious. (Yan, 17)

Isn’t that fascinating? I read these grinning. Not only did these readers put a lot of effort into coming up with thoughtful, in-depth reviews, but they provided a wonderful reminder of something very important; someone can love something in my work that the next person will hate. The same thing, in the same work, can provoke wildly disparate reactions, and I have no control over that.

Which I already knew, of course, but until I saw these reviews, it wasn’t quite this clear. Best object lesson ever!

Something else interesting that I discovered as I worked through these to find the selections, was that my writerly ego, which had decided that the reviews were overall about half-positive, half-negative, was completely off-base. There are thirty-two reviews in all. Nine were either overall negative, or felt the book was just okay. Twenty-three were overwhelmingly positive.

And yet despite the disparity in numbers, my brain had seen that as about half-and-half. Oh, writerly ego, why must you accentuate the negative, eliminate the positive, and in other ways make Bing Crosby sad?

So, university! I guess a bunch of you are starting on that right now, which I have divined by hitting campus and going WHOA. UNDERGRADS. In MY library.

I’m not possessive, I’m just saying.

Also, y’all make me feel old, with your fresh skin and shiny hair. Hey, pro tip on getting older: you will look at pictures of yourself and think, “Although I am pretty awesome now and would not want to go back, I wish I had appreciated how gorgeous I was! Because I was!”

I tell you this in the hope that you will realise you are great, but it is a futile hope because no one in the history of ever has listened to the advice of an older person telling them to appreciate their youth. And in some ways, that is quite correct, because the other thing about getting older is that you romanticise your youth and forget that time you stayed up all night writing an essay and eating carrots because that was all the food you had and then you got up at 8am, having slept for an hour, and you were so tired. So very tired. And then you went to sleep in the library and the security guard was very nice about that, but you had dribbled orange goo all over your shirt and you were SO ashamed.

For all values of “you” in the above, replace with “I”.

Okay, so I started university in 2000, and I am there now. (I took two years off in the middle, but you never know, I might still make it to a decade.) I did a BA Hons, an MA, and now I am doing a PhD. So, with the benefit of my VAST experience, I am happy to give the new uni-goers among you some tips:

Go to lectures (unless there’s something more interesting happening).

It is a big day when you realise that you don’t have to turn up. Unless your lectures have attendance requirements. And even then, no truancy officer is going to care. No one is going to call your parents. You are responsible only to yourself and you are free to sleep in!

But you should probably still go, she said hypocritically. I estimate I went to about half to two-thirds of my undergrad lectures, and got that up to around three-quarters of my honours year seminars. I got away with this shocking laziness for three reasons:

1: I read very fast and take in visual information much better than I do audio (my lecture notes all turned into aimless scribbles about half an hour in anyway).
2: I was in book-heavy courses where a lot of vital information was in the critical reading rather than as explained by the lecturer.
3: I didn’t actually get away with this for Japanese. I failed Japanese. Let that be a lesson!

What I did instead (as well as sleep) was hang out in the university theatre, and that was another education in itself. I learned a lot about organising people, dealing with emergencies swiftly, and story-telling, much of which I put to use in my writing, and all of which I think was more valuable than a lecture on Pound’s Cantos. And I was only paying $5 a year! On the other hand, the failed Japanese course cost me a number much higher than that.

Eat healthy (unless you don’t feel like it).

A little while ago I made a post in my regular journal asking about horrible food choices people had made in their early university years. Because I spent a semester having a Snickers bar and a bottle of Coke for breakfast every morning.

The results were not at all surprising, though I think the prize goes to Sarah Rees Brennan’s homemade energy drink, which was tea, with a milk chocolate bar and a white chocolate bar melted into it.

The thing is, you can probably get away with terrible eating habits for a while. But it will take a toll. If you are on your second straight week of eating nothing but apples, because you bought a big bag of them cheap and you need that money for beer, it is time to consider other options.

Read for pleasure.

If you are looking at this site, I imagine you are a reader. If you are taking book-heavy courses - literature, cinema studies, cultural studies, history, psychology - basically, any of the arts and humanities and a number of the sciences, you are going to be reading a LOT. Some of this will be an awful slog, a lesson you may have picked up from high school.

I liked almost everything I read in high school, and so the set translation of Aristotle in my philosophy course came as a terrible shock.

But no matter how many words you have to feed through your eyes in a given week, keep some time for pleasure reading. Ideally, read something not connected to your courses - if you’re doing Modern Novel, then you might want to escape into Shaun Tan’s lovely illustrated books. If you’re doing Victorian Literature, Justina Chen Headley’s novels about delightful modern girls may be just the thing. But do read. It will rest your brains. And you need those suckers!

That is the sum total of my wisdom, gleaned from my precious years as an undergrad, which I did not properly appreciate. Possibly because I was in a very old flat where the floor sloped in alarming ways and had to sleep with my feet raised above my head, but still. Have fun, y’all!

My name is Karen Healey, and yesterday I had this conversation*:

THE FABULOUS LILI WILKINSON: Karen, would you like to be the Writer in Residence for Inside a Dog this March?
ME: Yes!
THE FABULOUS LILI: Great! You start tomorrow.
ME: Oh my goodness, what an opportunity! I can write my thoughts and put them on the internet!
SULLY MONSTER, MY FAITHFUL COMPANION: You have been doing that for nearly ten years.
ME: But never on Inside a Dog, Sully Monster. Let us have a moment to appreciate this honour. Perhaps I should write about lofty topics. The Nature of Youth. The Meaning of Art.
SULLY MONSTER: Or you could write about how you never went to lectures at uni, how you construct character voice by killing adverbs, how much you love Meat Loaf and Roxette, your favourite Creme Egg flavour, and how the first draft of your forthcoming novel was terrible.
ME: Oh, it so was. I could inflict examples upon readers!
SULLY MONSTER: Another triumph for lofty topics.

Hello, friendly victims. You look very nice, by the way. A sort of haze of virtue surrounds you. I bet you have done something awesome recently! I myself am terribly happy because the first box of author copies of my YA novel, Guardian of the Dead, just arrived at my house.

I especially like this because they are in a box, just as copies will arrive in stores at the end of this month.

This is my first novel, and I am super-stoked about it. It is a contemporary fantasy set in New Zealand – whence I hail - that follows the adventures of seventeen-year-old black belt Ellie as she copes with the horrible Christchurch winter, choreographing fight scenes for a uni production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, her attraction to the red-haired loner in her Classics class, her burgeoning magical powers, and an ancient threat to humanity from the Maori mythology she thought wasn’t real. You know. Normal teen stuff.

I will doubtless blog about this a lot, because it has been my main topic of conversation for, oh, three years. I promise to write about other things also, like my adventures in airports.

For now, that awesome thing you did recently! Tell me about it?

February has managed to run away even more quickly than I expected, and now it is March, and I am holding up the next guest blogger at Inside a Dog.

It’s been fun to blog here, and I hope my meandering thoughts have proved of some interest.

I’ll leave you with a parting link, courtesy of a reader who brought it to my attention. One of the nice things about writing books is that sometimes they help inspire other art. People often worry about copyright and so on when they do artworks from books, or write fan fiction etc, but usually as long as it not for any commercial purpose (i.e. you aren’t trying to sell the works, or make money from them) and you are not misrepresenting the work as authorised, then it should be OK.

Anyway, an artist by the name of Kali Ciesemier is doing some lovely illustrations inspired by SABRIEL which I think are well worth looking at, and you can find them here.

Thank you once again to everyone who has read the blog, and to my hosts here at Inside a Dog. You can keep up with what I’m up at via Facebook, where I am happy to friend readers.

P.S. I couldn’t quite decide whether the headline for this post should be from ‘The Sound of Music’ or the line “See you on the highway, skag” from the film ‘Mad Max’. I guess this is what it means to have eclectic tastes.

Writers Festivals are curious gatherings, temporary communities of authors that come together for a few days, perhaps a week at most, and then spin off into the ether until the next time. If you have been published for long enough, and have been going to festivals for a while, then inevitably you meet many of the same people every second, third or tenth festival. Thus there are often conversations like “Oh, hello, haven’t seen you since Edinburgh, was it three . . . no must have been four years ago . . .” going on all around the hotel lobby on the first day.

Of course, when you start out as a writer, you rarely get invited to any festivals. I certainly didn’t, for quite a few years. Then a few invitations came, and I must have performed reasonably well (for all the festival directors talk to each other) and then a few more, and then about ten years into my career as a published writer, the invitations started to come with great regularity and have continued, at least up to the present.

One common theme of writers festivals is that invariably most of the writers have writing work they need to do, in between events. On the shuttle bus to the hotel from the festival location, when you ask your neighbour in the next seat what they are up to next, the answer is very often “Got to go back to my room and write.”

This Perth festival, I have been one of those authors, and have spent quite a bit of time retiring to my room to work on various things. One of them was correcting the page proofs for my Old Kingdom story “To Hold the Bridge”, which will appear in (title may vary) LEGENDS OF AUSTRALIAN FANTASY edited by Jonathan Strahan and Jack Dann, which is out in June 2010.

Here is the beginning of that story:

Morghan stood under the arch of the aqueduct and watched the main gate of the Bridge Company’s legation, across the way. The tall, twin leaves of the gate were open, so he could see into the courtyard, and the front of the grand house beyond. There was great bustle and activity going on, with nine long wagons being loaded, and a tenth having a new iron-bound wheel shipped. People were dashing about in all directions, panting as they wheeled laden wheelbarrows, singing as they rolled barrels, and arguing over the order in which to load all manner of boxes, bales, sacks, chests, hides, tents and even a very large and over-stuffed chair of mahogany and scarlet cloth that was being carefully strapped atop one of the wagons and covered with a purpose-made canvas hood.

The name of the company was carved into the stone above the gate: ‘The Worshipful Company of the Greenwash & Field Market Bridge’. That same name was written on the outside of the old and many-times folded paper that Morghan held in his hand. The paper, like the company, was much older than the young man. He had seen only twenty years, but the paper was a share certificate in an enterprise that had been founded in his great-grandfather’s time, some eighty-seven years ago.

I am in Perth for the Writers Festival. It was 42 degrees yesterday, and I was able to observe the effect of the heat not just on myself but on visiting British writers who had flown in from a snowy winter only days before. While the heat was not pleasant, it did give me an idea for a story — or rather, observing how I and others reacted and coped with it gave me an idea for a story. Not about hot weather, as such, but how the environment can rapidly change how people think and behave. It’s a kind of transformative effect, and there are lots of other examples. Like the increased agitation of disturbed people in asylums when the wind is strong, or the moon is full (hence the term lunatics).

I often get ideas for stories out of such relatively simple interactions with the world. There is a part of my mind that is always observing, storing things up, and then some other part adds in the catalyst “What if?” and a story is begun. For example, what if the transformative environmental effect was something familiar to the people who lived in a certain city or country, but very strange to others, even more so than going from a cold Northern hemisphere to a 42 degree day? What if that environmental effect was sorcerous or magical in nature, and for example, changed the way words were seen and heard?

I may never write this story, of course. I have notebooks full of story ideas, fragments of stories, and notes. My computer backups include thousands of words of half-finished stories, opening chapters for novels and so forth. But every now and then I will remember something I have started, or have some notes about, and I will bring it up and finish it. Sometimes this happens many years after the initial thought, sometimes only days. Every story seems to find its own time to be made complete.

I’m back from an excellent but hot weekend in Melbourne, where I signed lots of books, talked to readers, and tried to sound intelligent answering questions from Lili Wilkinson and the audience at the Centre for Youth Literature event on Sunday. That latter event will be podcast here at inside a dog, I believe, in due course. So you will be able to judge for yourself whether my answers sounded intelligent or not. You would think that when most of the questions are about my own books I should be able to answer them clearly and concisely, but it is interesting how often I have not thought about why I do particular things, or how I came to write what I did, and so have to puzzle through to some kind of unsatisfactory answer.

Often, particularly for questions about why I wrote something in a particular way, or had a character do something, the answer is simply “instinct” or more accurately “story instinct”. I didn’t think it through, I just followed my story instinct and it worked. Coupled with this is my sense of euphony and rhythm in language: words and phrases either sound and feel right or they don’t. But I wasn’t just born with a good instinct for story and a reasonable ear for how to tell that story, I think I trained myself in both areas by reading, and by reading very widely, so I was exposed from a young age to many different ways to construct stories and many different prose styles. Reading aloud is also a very good way to both learn about how to write well, and also to discover the weaknesses in your own prose so you can revise it, to make it serve the story better and also to sound more pleasing to mind or ear. Of course, you can never make it perfect. At least I can’t!

Perhaps I should try to think up some better answers now that I am home for two days, before I head off again. This time to the Perth Writers Festival, where I will be on panels discussing publishing, and about science fiction and fantasy, and of course will also have sessions talking about my own books. You can find out the details here.