I'm just a bit knackered

Yesterday, I spent 12-plus hours working my way through the final designs of this book.  It won't be out until next May, but I think it's going to go rather well.  Maybe not as well as its prequel which was CBCA Eve Pownall book-of-the-year for 2010, but I hope it will shape a few minds and get them excited.

The idiots who say we don't need books (or libraries {or librarians}) any more, because everything is on the web need to get their hands dirty, doing an actual book or five, so that they know what they are talking about.

This one has been two years in the making, and most of that time, the production team and I have been hard at it. The publisher is the National Library of Australia, and we wanted to reflect and showcase the Library's collections, but we also wanted reliable pictures, and I took most of the extras that were needed.

That was the most fun I have had in years, but I also has a lot of fun going out and spending my publisher's advance on extra equipment. I replaced my camera (twice), I bought new microscopes, new USB cameras, containers, tubes and more stuff.

But what I want to talk about today is the cheapest of the items I bought. I got it from Aldi on special, it was $50. In essence, it is a USB camera that sits on a stand, and has lenses that deliver x10, x60 and x200 images, 1280 x 1024.  I think it also does movies, but I didn't need those, so I haven't tried them yet.

In the lower shot, you can see one of the two light sources: there's another one under the stage for times when you want to look at slides and stuff.

The third shot shows you the sort of thing I prefer to do.  I have a preserved mygalomorph spider sitting in a Petri dish on the stage, lit from above, abd you can see that the image, even on 10x, is quite impressive.

This isn't a funnelweb but a brown trapdoor spider, and it has bleached after many, many years of marinating in preserving fluids, but the fangs remain spectacular.

Of course, I wasn't thinking, so I didn't capture the image you can see there on the screen, so I did the next best thing. I went to the original shot and cropped out the small portion of the picture I had of the screen (so this next shot is necessarily degraded.  Here it is: Not bad, huh?

Now I had also bought a $500 USB attachment that delivered a 640x480 image of what I could see down my professional-standard microscopes, but it was seriously hard to use, and in the end, I used the $50 toy for preference.

Mind you, I did a fair amount of tweaking.  In particular, I got around the focal plane issue by using some neat open-source software from the National Institutes of Health or NIH.  You can download this software, ImageJ, from http://rsbweb.nih.gov/ij/ but be aware that you need to have your wits about you: this is one of those times when the geeks have come out to play, and they have developed stuff that is good for them.  Anyhow, I was able to get a lovely image of a housefly by combining the toy and ImageJ. It looks like this:

All of that effort was to get the haltere, a vestigial wing that characterises flies.  Look one third down, one third of the way in from the right and find a small light bit sticking up, slightly inclined to the right, looking a bit like a fly-swatter or a brandished frying-pan.  That's the haltere.

By the way, the Traveler people have a site at www.traveler-service.com/au which actually redirects, and the site shows two microscopes like mine, but they only offer 640 x 480 images.  My model is SU1071, and they say they have an Australian helpline at 1800 623 432.  The microscope comes with software on a CD and you need to make a note of the serial number on the envelope that the CD comes in.

In the end, we decided not to put microscopy in the book, so the next few blogs that I put in here are likely to be about simple home microscopy.

Breaking the silence

August-September is a busy month for writers, because there are all sorts of things happening around children's book week.  I actually see myself as a writer for adults who occasionally gets the inspiration that allows him to write for children, but as an old teacher, I enjoy putting something back into a profession that has brought me a lot of joy over the years.

There are, of course, those who think that if you aren't much good, you can always write for children. Fergie, Duchess of Toesuck wrote a naff book for kids, and Martin Amis, earlier this year infamously opined that "If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book."

To be fair to the man who is quite a competent writer, you really need to see that in context. I don't feel much like being fair to him, but the link is there.  It also offers some delightful invective from some of my peers and betters.

Amis' vapid observation was mentioned at one workshop, and somebody said they'd like to spit in his face. Another writer asserted that this would be impossible.  We asked why, and he explained that Amis' face was attached to his head, and that was firmly inserted in a place that made the face unreachable. Collapse of assorted stout parties.

Anyhow, I have been talking to a lot of children and a lot of teachers, and one of those has made me decide to hang around for another dozen years or so.  I met this 12-year-old at a children's writing workshop run by a local school, and the quality of her writing leads me to believe that she will be winning prizes before she is 25.

I'm busy still.  I have finished one book since I got home, but I haven't sold it, I am deep in the final revisions for design on a children's book, I'm working on the illustrations for a general market (code for non-X-rated adult) book, reading one that was published a few years back because a reprint is coming up, and I am gathering data for a social history for big people that sees me flying west tomorrow to poke around the goldfields.  The topic is secret, but that might give you a hint.  There's another hint in the fact that I was recently in Spain, at Las Medulas, as described in an earlier post. It was a gold mine as well.  Are you getting there, yet?

I could say more, but I'm still shaping the project, so I'll stay quiet for a bit, but yes, gold, gold rushes and the immense costs we have paid as a species because of our hunger for a rather useless metal.

Northern California, near Placerville. The ruins left from "hydraulicking" that ended back in the 1870s. Curiously, Australians seem to think our gold was all won by panning in streams or by hard-rock mining, but we had quite a history of using high-pressure water to flush hillsides down.

Back in a bit.

I must be nuts

Well, I got everything back in the end, after my 'crash', which was a power supply failure, combined with a scrambled BIOS and a few other things.

All the archival stuff is now backed up on the external HDD, and I have adopted the policy of regular postings to Dropbox of the current files, at least twice a day.

This is August and Book Week us upon us, so I have a few functions to get around, including one in Melbourne that will see us down there for three days, including dropping in at the newly-opened Embiggen Books in Little Lonsdale Street, where I will have to nag them about getting their web site up-to-date.

I also have a school visit and a function/luncheon for local school-children, both close to where I live.  In short, I'm busy.

That aside, I have final edits coming in from one book (Australian Backyard Naturalist), I have another away being edited (Curious Minds), I have a first draft (The Shark Suit, the Shoe-gun and the Short-shanked Sheep, working title)marinating before I take to it with a chain saw.

Shark Suit etc. is the one that might have been partially lost in the "crash"—I had taken it from completed research to a 56,000-word draft in a month (that makes it sound easy, but there was three year's worth of research at the back, and I had a lot of scraps of text already written).  I have submitted that one, and I am waiting.

Right now, I am in between the scoping stage and the shaping stage on a serious social history of gold rushes past and present, and the havoc created when people get gold fever (working title Gold Lust— and that will definitely change).  That is also the final piece of research for another project that has been in the pipeline for six years (code name Cornish Boy), one which requires a better mastery of the technicalities of assaying and such.  Right now, I have a lot of the shaping done: this alerts me to the gaps in the story, and the gaps in my research, so that when I start, I know where I am going.

On the side, I am doing some fun stuff for younger readers (code name Young Henry), but I'm not talking about that just yet.  Not on the record, anyhow.

Anyhow, in summary, I now have five books in the air at once, possibly more, because Young Henry may be several shorter works or one long one.  I must be nuts!

There is, however, light at the end of the tunnel: I am in a four-year run-down program, at the end of which time I plan to hang up my pen and read.  There are so many good books out there to read, like those on this NPR top 100 F-SF list that I saw today.

Crashes and thumps

One essential for a professional writer: back up, then back up again and back up some more, and do it often.

I had a fright yesterday, when my computer died.  I followed that up by a piece of totally amateur over-reaction.  I should have known better.

To explain, I have been messing about with computers since 1963, so I was ahead of the curve when the first home computers emerged 30 years ago, and after a while, I got regularly assailed bloody amateurs who would wail at me in the 1990s:

This computer's got a virus!  Come and fix it!

Me: How do you know it's got a virus?

It won't load my file!

(Patiently) What was the file created in?

(Impatiently, with the tone of saying "Der!") Microsoft!

The amateur doesn't state that there is a problem, the amateur presents a diagnosis, in much the way that many patients barge into a doctor's surgery, shouting that they have a cold (i.e., a virus) and demanding an antibiotic (which doesn't work on viruses).

You can try to educate them, but it doesn't usually work.  Well, in this case, the educator showed his lack of schooling, because I assumed the worst, a hard disc crash, when I had been working flat out, and hadn't dropped the latest iterations onto Dropbox for several days.  the computer had died, therefore it was a disc crash.

Luckily for me, Eddy the Techie at Hibiz has been helping me out for more than 20 years. He is a gentle and courteous man, and he took my diagnosis with a grain of salt, though it wasn't quite as simple as he had hoped.  In the end, he took the machine away and I am working on the MacBook.

While I was waiting for him, I redid one of the two jobs, an urgent analysis of the location of some 300 images for Curious Minds, and as the fault appears to be either a fritzed CPU or a dodgy power supply (or both), he had no trouble extracting the draft ms of the book-in-progress.  So far, so good, and the disc drive seems to be in good condition.

But, while I have an external HDD, and this week, I actually found a place for it on the desk, it holds nothing as yet.  No music, no photos, no reference PDFs that I need to read for the book, nothing.  I can (and do) burn CDs, but I haven't done so lately.  I transfer copies of many files to the travelling netbook and the MacBook, but not of late.

I also park copies of a few key files, over the network, on my wife's computer, but not lately.  Works-in-progress are regularly uploaded to my Dropbox account, but between the last upload on Monday afternoon and the early Friday morning crash, I had written about 10,000 words of first draft, mainly because I was taking smaller bits of text, already written, and assembling them into a whole.

In short, I had been a double-amateur.  I had offered a diagnosis when I should have stated symptoms, no harm done there, but I had made the effects of the disease far worse by getting too busy working when I should have been doing some basic house-keeping.

I hope to find that I have escaped the worst, but I will certainly be taking more care in the future.

Thallium and hirsute pursuits

I am closing out the first draft of 'Misplaced Ingenuity'.  The final chapter is written, and I am most of the way through the two preceding chapters. Today, I am dealing with some strange thallium tales.


I knew about thallium first as a small boy in the 1950s, reading newspaper stories about thallium poisoners and being shushed when I asked questions.  Anyhow, I knew that thallium poisoning makes the hair fall out, and I even know why now, though this is not the place for technicalities. More recently (well, in 1978), I found this:

Thallium acetate was first given therapeutically to terminal tuberculosis cases to suppress 'night sweats'.  We shall never know whether the tests were successful because the side-effects of the treatment were much more noticeable — the patients' hair fell out.   The future of the drug obviously lay in its depilatory action. . . the chief dermatologist at the St Louis Hospital in Paris introduced it in 1898 as a pre-treatment for ringworm of the scalp, and after the First World War, it was extremely popular for this purpose.
— John Emsley, 'The trouble with thallium', New Scientist 10 August 1978, p. 393-394.

Skipping over the the alleged and almost certainly mythical CIA plan to poison Fidel Castro with sub-lethal doses of thallium, just enough to make his beard fall out, I looked at other therapeutic and non-therapeutic uses, back to William Crookes original; discovery. Then I found a great story at the National Library's Trove web site. It was a 1933 story about quacks and the like.


I think I have got what I need for the morning. Mind you, I need to scrutinise the way in which Crookes got involved with a spiritualists and attended séances with her.  Could it be, as some scurrilous types suggest, that he was having it off with her?  Or was he slightly batty on account of thallium poisoning, as some kind people suggest?


We can probably come to a conclusion on that. The man had a beard, it never fell out.  Gossipmongers defeated Kindly 1-0.

Textbooks on e-readers

Although I have officially retired, as an old educator, I still keep an eye on the flickering pulse of education.  Not a finger, just a benign eye, but occasionally, I am moved to play again, as recently, when somebody expressed horror at the idea that school texts might find their way into Kindles, Nooks, e-readers or iPads.  I took a contrary view, and here's an edited form of it:

Emerging briefly with my elderly writer's hat on:

One of the problems with textbooks is that they tend to recycle and regurgitate what the other, older textbooks say.  This is not an original statement: Thomas Kuhn made it almost 50 years ago in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, though he was talking about the absence of real-time physics in the stuff read by physics undergraduates.

Eyre and Wylie as they would have been originally shown.

Eyre and Wylie, as they are usually shown.

The result, especially at the school level is textbooks full of stodge.  And errors, like references to Zinjanthropus (30 years after the name was dropped!), or an iconic picture of Eyre and Wylie, trudging across the sands towards Albany, an image that leaves out the horses they still had--and more importantly, is nearly always mirror-reversed, so that the shadows and position of the sea make it clear that they are heading EAST! 

You can, in fact, put a lot of activities into a book, which is something I tend to do when writing for the young (in the e-mail, I wasn't explicit, but here, let me state that I was referring to Australian Backyard Explorer, which was, after all, the CBCA Eve Pownall Book of the Year for information books in 2010). (OK, that book isn't a textbook, but it goes well beyond the bounds of a "normal" book.  All of the variations that I used there could be applied to make textbook readers sit up and pay attention—and when did you last see a mere-smear textbook that did that?)

But as I write, I find myself continually chafing and wishing I could do the sorts of things I could do on a screen, if only at the level of branching, hypertext and the occasional animation. It would be good to launch into a sideliner on the art of engraving, and how this commonly generates mirror images, stuff like that. (I have another classic example in two 18th century engravings of James Cook's Endeavour, hauled up on the shore in northern Queensland, which are mirror images, and quite a few botanical engraving pairs, where it only matters if you have the two side-by-side.)

I'm sure there are many more bells and whistles that I have missed, but that's where I would start.  The thing is: every time somebody finds a new trick, a few clever-clogses will take it a step further, and in no time it all, it catches on with the mob.  That's how Gutenberg's method for producing bibles 180 times as fast suddenly changed many other things. 

As people begin to work in a new medium (dating myself, my own new medium, way back when, was the overhead projector), they begin to gather together a set of methods and techniques.  I worked with and in a workshop gang (less the guilty escape blame, the others were Peter Robinson, Ken Jones and Rex Meyer) who used swivels made from drawing-pins, staples and slightly modified press-studs, so we could get animation on a flat screen. 

Before long, we would look at a new and puzzling task and somebody would say "you could press-stud that", and on we would go.  Or one of us would find a wrinkle using rubber bands or resin-cored solder or whatever. Each of these would then be applied to the next problem, or used as a further launch-point. 

I have faith in the new creators who will be coming along.  I confidently predict that if textbooks go onto the screen, they will still be textbooks, Jim, but not as we know them--or if they are, it won't be so for long. 

Bushnell's 'Turtle'.

Today, I am putting together a short piece on primitive submarines, going back to Cornelius Drebbels' 1620 vessel which may or may not have navigated the Thames.  It was based on a 1578 design with a hull of leather stretched over a timber frame.  I wouldn't judge present or future submersibles on that, and I don't think we should damn future textbooks, based on the paucity of intelligence, verve, intellectual honesty or creativity that we see in so many of today's crop. 

We should just be looking, shaking our heads, and planning to do better. 

Now I will get on with the tale of Bushnell's 'Turtle', which went to sea with a 70 kg clockwork bomb ticking away, a bomb that had to be affixed to a hull before it went off.  Definitely not a good reference point for predicting the future, that one.

A small afterthought added in late 2011: I think we haven't even scratched the surface yet on e-books, and I have a few ideas about what we might explore: try clicking this link.

Water has been passing under the bridge

Well, I got home, settled in, finished off Curious Minds, thought for a day or two, and then moved onto the largely-researched and long-planned book on wild inventions. Looking into the noted, I was reminded that I have actually been doing first draft stuff, so I now have around 20,000 words in the bag.  I am hoping to limit the text to 50,000 words, given the heavy load of illustrations, so that's going well.

At this point, I have Curious Minds in editing, Australian Backyard Naturalist edits are coming back to me, and I am moving into the spring offensive, the time when writers get out and about is upon me, so there may not be much more appearing here.

Appearances scheduled as of now:

July 5, State Library, Scholarly Musings;

July 12: Forestville Library, morning tea with primary children;

August 25: Zart Art, Box Hill, Melbourne: Illustration for Information;

September 2: St Kieran's Manly Vale: workshops;

September 6: St Patrick's College Manly: Lunch With the Stars.

Enough to keep me active!

Back in the saddle

I have been home four days, and in that time, I have finished a fifth draft of Curious Minds. Now all I have to do is use software to convert the text to mp3 files, listen to it while following the text on-screen, and I will be done with it.


Now about the travels: 


We seem to have a remarkable affinity for popping in on places with Royals: UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Thailand, Japan, Denmark, Sweden and I think one or two others.  We still have Norway and Tonga to collect, but this trip saw us sauntering through Chicago (architecture, museums and galleries and a visit to the Indiana Dunes, where the notion of plant succession was first conceived), then San Antonio Texas and on to an emu farm in Burnet Texas, back to SA and on to Boston (history, museums, foods, opera).

Then via Madrid to Morocco, where we had a few days in Casablanca before spiralling around Morocco.  During our time in Casablanca, we got to Rick's Cafe--perhaps a bit touristy, a remake of the film set but with great food and drink.  There were a few demos in the streets but they were mild: the king is a decent bloke, his wife is committed to women's rights, and some time this month, there is to be a big speech, outlining the way forward. Morocco has literacy levels of 40%, so it will take a while (and this is a matter that I will probably come back to at some stage, if only in relation to the influence of dams on literacy in an arid landscape).

Then Barcelona for a week (looking at architecture, galleries, concerts) before heading off to Bilbao (the highlight was the Guggenheim) on the Camino de Santiago, once a pilgrim's track but now a regular hike for hippies, hairies and such.  There's a great yarn, cooked up in the 9th century, about how St James (Santiago in Spanish) was buried there, and naughty people were set the task of a pilgrimage or Rome or Santiago de Compostella at times when Jerusalem was on the tourist danger list.  I don't think anybody takes it too seriously now, not among the walkers.

The camino is loved almost to death by cyclists, people speaking all sorts of language and bound by the twin greetings: "Holá!" (g'day) and "Buen camino" (good track), good mountain walking, good beer, great wine, cheap olives, excellent sausage, brilliant bread, stuff like that.

I was doing a bit of research for two books and spent some time on the sight of an old Roman gold mine near Las Medulas (see the post before this) where they used primitive hydraulic mining to collapse a whole mountain and extract the gold from it.  I also "collected" (with the camera) an immense number of fences and walls, one or two of which may emerge in a book that is on the back burner.

We came home via Singapore, where we had a two-day stopover to start the mind-healing process after eight weeks, five continents, four seasons and using up two jars of Vegemite.  The next 16 days will be fearfully busy.


And now I need to get back to business.

I Aitn't Dead Yet

I am in Las Medulas, northern Spain (Castilla y Leon), close to the site of some extremely old Roman gold mining.  They used a hydraulic method, like that used in California in the mid-19th century.  I will learn more over the next two days, especially about the environmental damage it caused, which is still visible, I am told.

The Romans called their mining process "ruin the mountain", and 1800 years later, you can still see the scars.

This is going to be seriously useful stuff!

Dateline: Essaouira, Morocco

I am coming to the end of a 16-day visit to Morocco, where I have seen many delightful walls, and met many delightful people. I have been gathering ideas and material in a big way, but there has been no actual writing going on.   It is Thursday now, and after a flying visit to Marrakech, we head for Spain on Sunday.

A thought on proofing

I use TextAloud to convert what I write to mp3 files, so I can listen to them for checking.   Reading involves seeing what is there and guessing some of the gaps, which is what makes proofing do hard.


So here I am in Chicago, where things are not always what you expect.  This is why I always take the Goodman Theater to be the Goddamn Theatre, and the DuSable Bridge to be the Disabled Bridge, or  that's my theory, anyway.

Dedication OR I wish I had written that

William J. Lines is (or was?) a West Australian, a writer of lovely history, and I have just been mining his tale of Georgiana Molloy, called An All Consuming Passion, for a short piece in a more general book.  Because I had already done a fairly extensive coverage, he filled out the picture for me and clarified a few oddities and misconceptions, but without offering any extra meat that I could use—but he provided a delightful read.


All the way through, I admired and enjoyed his prose, and then I came upon this gem:

"I also wish to thank the archivists at the Cumbria Record Office, Carlisle, England, whose institution epitomises the very best Anglo-Saxon traditions of openness, access, and cooperation. Despite a decade and more of ignoble Thatcherite economic rationalism, which attempted to rob public life of its purpose and community of its bonds, the spirit and means of free enquiry endure."

Bravo, Mr. Lines!!


It's a book well worth finding and reading, even before you get to that on pages 335-6.

The age of the short put-down is not dead

I do not like thee, Dr. Fell,

The reason why, I cannot tell—

But this I know, and know full well:

I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.

Legend hath that poet Tom Brown was set to translate a Martial epigram from Latin, by the Dean of Christchurch who was later Bishop of Oxford. You can read about it here.


Someone I know very well (no names, no pack-drill) once engraved a quatrain on a bench in the Chemistry lecture theatre, a celebration of Joe Broe, our lecturer and a very dry but thorough old stick. It read:

J. J. Broe

Never said no

That is of course unless

He'd plainly first said yes.

Now this was in the mould of the clerihew, a form developed by E. C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley. These usually featured some nonsense, but also reflected on the career of the subject:

Sir Humphry Davy

Abominated gravy

Because he lived under the odium

Of having discovered sodium.

Then W. H. Auden offered his set of 61 clerihews now collected as 'Academic Graffiti', and one of the three slips of paper in my Collected Auden allows me to open up there.  Here's one:

Mr. Robert Liston

Used the saw like a piston

He was that elated

When he amputated.

There are some more here.


But nobody writes clerihews any more. Mine My friend's in the lecture theatre was one of the last of its kind. But the short put-down lives on, even in apocryphal ones like the exchange between Margot Asquith and Jean Harlowe, when Harlow supposedly called Asquith Mah-got, and was corrected with a frosty observation that "the t is silent—as in Harlowe".


The short put-down has emerged again.  I recently discovered the Green Tea Party blog, which is a hoot.  Today, came a "tweet of the day" from a comedian whom I have hitherto not rated highly, Will Ferrell. It reads:


Dear scissors, I feel your pain . . . . Nobody wants to run with me either.  Sincerely, Sarah Palin.


Like all innovations, Twitter has been loudly slammed by those who don't understand it and don't want to understand it.  I don't really understand Twitter either, but I'm waiting for Twitter and its users to determine what it is.


Recall that the Internet was seen as a way of sharing scientific data and not what it is now, and one version has Bell inventing the telephone to deliver sermons to multiple churches.  New technology rarely ends up being what the inventors thought it would be: the users decide that.


Users like Mr. Ferrell are now making the key decisions about Twitter by the ways they use it.  Come back to this thought in 2020, and see if I was evidencing any sort of 2020 vision—or if I got it wrong like Sir William Preece, who thought (allegedly) that messenger boys were better than telephones. 


And I think I will need to re-assess Mr. Ferrell.

Some brilliant news for Adele K. Thomas

When we set out to do The Monster Maintenance Manual, we had a competition for a new (that is to say, unpublished) illustrator. Pier 9 spotted about a dozen others who will end up getting a gig, one way or another, but a few really stood out, and one of them was Adele K. Thomas.  We made an excellent choice!

Adele's version of the Sinking Goose.

In the excitement of the short lists announcement the other day, it didn't occur to me to look at the short list for the Crichton Awards, mainly because I didn't know much about them, because pictures aren't really my thing.


Well, if you haven't already looked, and you happen to be solid teak from the neck up, you may not have guessed yet about the joyous discovery I made today: Adele K. Thomas is on the short list!


I know something of three of the other books that are there, so the competition will be intense, but in my estimation, Adele is in there with a good chance.


Brava, Adele!


And good luck!

Another piece of tsunami wisdom

I am always on the look-out for parables, and Al Lee passed on to me a link to an AP report about the Japanese tsunami. There's more to it than what I am extracting here, but there was one aspect: tablets which say "Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point."


Now there's a curious twist to this, as the report points out. If any of the tablets have been placed too low, then sooner or later a tsunami will carry them away, and the surviving ones will stand as testaments to the safety of their locales.


It's a savage form, but the parallel to the rather more subtle odds-shading of Darwinian evolution are pretty obvious.  I can work with that at some point, if only in a radio essay. As that link reveals, I do those as well.

From the Frascati-Rome train, 2010.

Sometimes the wisdom of past generations is complete rubbish (think phlogiston, the impossibility of heavier-than-air flight or bad smells causing disease), but as a rule, even those approximations have a message for us, if we squint and look at them the right way.  Whatever the past generations believed, it didn't kill them outright, and it may well have contributed to their survival, even if it was for all the wrong reasons.

French colonial hospital, Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Take these Eucalyptus trees, snapped from the train while travelling from Frascati to Rome. Baron Sir Ferdinand von Mueller, KCMG was an Australian botanist who features in Curious Minds.


I have long known that Eucalyptus trees were exported for their disease-fighting powers to quell malaria by their nice smell, while the reality is that these thirsty trees lowered the water table and dried up the swamps and marshes where mosquitoes bred.  I have snapped these trees in Cambodia, and on Kefalonia and and Cyprus, playing the same role.

Mature river red gum, Argostoli, Kefalonia

It was only last week that I found that the chief distributor of seeds around the world was Baron Sir Ferdinand von Mueller, KCMG.  You hunt down the bits for long enough, and in the end, they fall into place.


That is how my parable of the Japanese stone tablets will eventually find a home. A bit like those unbiquitous eucalypts.

A quick one: two links that fascinated me.

Lava flow on Kilauea, in the dusk.

Some years ago, I headed off to Ole Miss, the university at Oxford, Mississippi, for a conference.  Because the haul from Sydney to Mississippi is quite a long trip eastwards (always the worst for jet lag), I decided to break the trip in Hawaii, and slipped over to Hilo, so I could have a look at the lava flows on Kilauea, and the observatories on Mauna Kea.

Me, my hat and the lava flow.  It was close
enough to frizzle the hairs on my legs.

Then I discovered that the Pacific Tsunami Museum was located there, and spent a couple of useful hours there.  I had always found tsunamis interesting, but I came away finding them awe-inspiring and fascinating.  That said, I don't really want to be close to one.  But if ever I need to write about one, I know the sort of stuff I will draw on, thanks to my friend Robin posting a link today to a personal account of the Japanese tsunami.


The author is an American who has been living in Japan as a teacher of English, but look, just read it, OK?


The second link came from the same email list.  I need to explain here that I am a social climber: I hang out with librarians. That means I have a few rudiments of what cataloguing is about: not enough to qualify me as a shelver's second deputy assistant, but I have a sense for it. I suspect that even without it, you would enjoy this contribution from Lois. It is a blog entry called 'A digression on literary categories' at the blog Making Light. A word of advice: read the 200+ comments, because they are severely hilarious.
Go on! What are you waiting for? There's nothing to see here!

Wherein I get a small award

Today, the Children's Book Council of Australia presented its Notable Books list. My The Monster Maintenance Manual was listed as one of the notable books of 2010 for Younger Readers. It was always going to be difficult to get even that far, given that I didn't really fit the categories, and there was an excellent field, so that was as far as I got, but at least the publishers get to affix a sticker to the book.
 
During the day, I came up with an excellent new theory: dragons hate chocolate.  Consider: every person I know loves chocolate, and none of them has ever been attacked by a dragon.  It follows that all the chocolate haters have been eaten by dragons, which shy off at the mere hint of the cocoa bean.  Nobody alive has ever seen a dragon, because since the chocolate haters have been eliminated, there has been no food for dragons, and they have all moved to another planet.

Don't stop eating the chocolate, because if they come back, you will be dragon droppings, quicker than you can say "brown bread!"
 
This is what I mean about where ideas come from.  I estimate that if I can come up with 31 other theories like this, I can have an entertaining book.  If I don't think of any others, I will write a popular diet book about the central role of theobromine as an antidraconic agent.

This will reap me a fortune, because it tells people to eat something they like, but dresses the advice up in New Age gibberish.


Note: the above text is entirely fictitious, and any similarity to any existing dietary manuals is purely coincidental.

Where do the ideas come from? part 2

There are probably three main aspects for me when a book is emerging, brewing or developing.


The first is having a temporary obsession that leads me to burrow after information.  Robyn Williams once described me as a "fact-fossicker", a term that I have proudly claimed as my own. Recently, I even fossicked the origins of that quintessentially Australian term, working through the marvellous source of historical newspapers that is to be found at TROVE. As one of the Trove volunteers (there must be thousands of us), I play a part by correcting the OCR renditions of digital images of articles, and adding tags to help other searches.


As of today, I have tagged 133 articles as <early use of language>, with a further tag to indicate which Australian word or term I was targeting: you will find bushranger, sheoak, damper, bandicoot, cobber, bodgie, widgie, dinky di, on the wallaby, bonzer, gibber, death adder (a corruption of the Biblical 'deaf adder', and not the other way around), swag, squatter, bludger, billy and kookaburra all marked—but it all began with 'fossick'.  (You can see all of these, by the way, just by searching in Trove for the phrase "early use of language", like that, inside double quotation marks.)

One of my lucky finds.

Right now, I have no direct plans to use any of my finds about early Australian language, though it will be handy if/when I get into the Cornish Boy (mentioned elsewhere), and I have placed the information in the public domain so that others can also gain from it, but at any stage, something I find might start off from some of that.  That's how temporary obsessions get to have life breathed into them, but the original plan was just to keep an eye out for early uses while digging for other stuff.

You can never tell which bits will prove to be not just amusing, like the "rat guillotine" above, so the only sensible solution is to store it in some machine-searchable way.

I'm also a member of Project Wombat, a group of people who like to solve "stumpers", difficult questions.  Burrowing for information is deep in my genes.  My (currently stalled) plan to do a book an misplaced genius and mad inventions just emerged from having the sort of ratbag mind that enjoyed digging up oddities. Even though there are no immediate plans for that one, I keep spotting and noting ideas that might improve it.


The second aspect is storing useful information in such a way that I can track it back to source, later.  I mainly use spreadsheets, which all take the same formatting, but I'll come back to the wild and woolly ways I use spreadsheets some other time. Suffice it to say that the people who wrote Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3 would never have expected the antics I get up to.


Still, it's people finding new ways to use technology that pushes it forward. Mr. Bell never expected people to hook up the descendants of Babbage's Difference Engine with his telephone wires, any more than Time Berners-Lee could have anticipated that I will be doing an electronic check-in for my flight next week, using the internet—or that I would have booked my hotel online.


The third involves building up logically—and keeping all the bits.


Being logical first: I was "taught writing" by English teachers who manifestly were not practitioners, but they all loved to drum into us the stuff that had been drummed into them at university, about the motivation of characters and the flow of the action.  Coming from talking marionettes, these wooden words meant little, but I can see now that in their inarticulate way, they were on the money. A story only works if there is a clear logic to it.  This applies to both fiction and non-fiction.


This morning, I have taken time off from the story of a part-eater called Bitz who keeps losing weight, and in the end, her friends Kilimanjaro (a troll) and Papagena (a calculator imp) solve her problem. She has been using all the bits and parts in her pantry to make things, and so Bitz has forgotten to eat. I use logic there at all points: these little stories have 17 parts, and I write the first eight or so, based on notes, then I write the conclusion (one or two parts) and then join the ends by filling in the blanks. Right now, I have five blank frames to go, and notes enough to fill about nine or ten, so some pruning will be needed.


These short stories are, in a Dodgsonian sense, high-grade nonsense, but there is a total sense to the structure and to the names: all imps take their names from operatic heroines (and Papagena may be Brunhilde before this sees the light of day—and an editor may tell me it's all too fluffy and to drop all the high-art stuff). That's how I work.


In the end, a number of the notes scribbled around the story frame will end up not being used. Word-plays will miss the cut, plot-lines will be dropped, but when I take the draft and paste it into the final collection, the left-overs will be saved.


I have a bad habit of scribbling notes on scrap paper, the backs of bills or envelopes, and then later, dropping those into the recycling.  As a rule, it may be six months before I recall that there was something in my logic structure that needs revision. So anything that isn't in a spreadsheet is in a notebook, with dates to show what was when.


This makes me sound amazingly organised, but that is only because I am extremely disorganised, but savvy enough to see that this is so.

Where do the ideas come from?

I was asked the other day where my ideas come from, and it struck me that there isn't a single answer to that, because some of them leap on me out of the blue, some are long-term temporary obsessions, others are thrust upon me.


Let's take the way I started writing adult/general non-fiction, the genre known as narrative non-fiction, which one of my favourite second-hand bookshops calls "History of Things".


I had a call, sometime in 2000 from Ian Bowring, who had been my publisher at Longman-Cheshire. He had moved to Allen and Unwin and was casting around for somebody who could write in that genre.

My first book for Big People.

"We'd like you to do a book about malaria, scurvy or sugar," he said. I gave him good reasons why malaria and scurvy might not be good ideas to tackle (I was effectively a full-time science journalist in those days, and knew what was happening in the research world).


But I did have a curious riddle, posed by a line in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, and I told him I had found the answer, and could hang a book on it.


Other books are commissions. A freelance editor I had worked with passed my name on to another publisher, and they asked if I could whip up a treatment on "Lawn".  An outline and a sample chapter, they said, cash money to be paid, and a contract if they managed to sell the idea.


It was only years later that I twigged that all the odd editors who came offering "fixer" work, which I always took, knew each other.  I had, without realising it, got a bit of a name for being reliable.  It paid off!


So I did the work on The Lawn, got the pay, and nothing happened. The chap who asked me to do the work left the companyOther works came and went, then out of the blue, they sold the idea to an overseas publisher and it was a goer.
Now for the odd part. I always do interviews on radio when asked, and I did a promo for the book in a hook-up to New Zealand.


When that went to air, I had an email from a New Zealand lady who explained that she had the paperwork to prove that she was nuts (I think she meant she was bipolar, but no matter, she had and interesting idea, and she presented it in a sensible way).


Having only heard an interview and read a review, she said that if I could do a social history of the lawn, I ought to do one on fences.
My first reaction: "daft idea".  My second: "Hmmm". My third (this was over a couple of weeks): "Naah, it doesn't have legs."

Australia's 5000-km "Dog Fence",
near Lake Eyre

Now I'm fairly certain it would work. If I expand "fences" to barriers of all sorts, so I can add the Great Wall of China, the walls of Istanbul, the Maginot Line, the Berliner Mauer, Hadrian's Wall, the dog-proof fence, the rabbit-proof fence, barriers in Israel/Palestine and the southern USA, slip-rails and the fencing requirements placed on squatters and selectors, dry-stone walls, the effects of barbed wire, stuff like that, there may be something in it. Along the way, I plan to visit the world's only barbed wire museum. Not this trip, though.

Hill End, New South Wales, visited in relation to my planned study of gold rushes. No rails, no nails, just posts, palings and wire.

Right now, 'Fences' is an idea that I'm toying with, but it's on my list of eight major books (and 26 booklets) that I want to do before I hang up my pen.  I'm visiting places, taking notes, gathering pictures and ideas, just in case—and even when I'm after something else, I keep an eye out for interesting barriers.


Next time, I'll say something about finding out, but here is where I list my favourite research sources.

And at last, a post for 2011!

March 29, 2011


As I have said before: when I fall silent here, it's because I'm working. I have completed a book (Curious Minds) to third draft stage in the past four months, and I have also been in New Zealand's North Island (we have grandchildren there).

Sunset, Paihia on the Bay of Islands. Charles Darwin came here, so did James Cook, and so did my Cornish Boy. most probably. Nice place, but I had to see it to see what would work.

And we needed to look at thermal areas. This one (Orakei Kotako) was visited by Ferdinand von Hochstetter, an Austrian geologist who was in Australia and New Zealand in 1858-9.

These Austrians get around. Frederick Hundertwasser had a holiday home near Kawakawa, and offered to design their new toilet block, probably the most-photographed in the world.

In the past four months, I have written additional material for Australian Backyard Naturalist, and most importantly, I have finally dragged my old journal into a modern blog format.  It's not very adventurous as yet, though you will find links further down to several audio clips and also to three clips on Youtube.
The stuff below this is a bit of a mess, because I just hacked the old journal up, pasted it into Word,  cleaned up the links a bit and dropped it in here. I think this resulted in some rogue legacy formatting.  Sorry about that, but it wasn't a core activity.

Some of the links may be dodgy, so I will leave the  original version online for now.  You can get to it here.  If you want to see what else I have written without ploughing through all of this, the portal to my writing site is here. That also has a number of pointers to other areas of interest.

I hope to find the time to go back and retrofit a few more pics, but I'm in the calm before travelling: we will leave our younger son to sit the house and the plants while we head off to the USA, Morocco and Spain for about seven weeks.

As well as completing a major book for adults, with the working title Curious Minds, I have been working on some spin-offs from The Monster Maintenance Manual. Some of those are the subject of negotiations, the other is a rather wild account of the later life of Count Henry Blenkinsop, seen here, bearing a remarkable resemblance to me.

Many people believe that Blenkinsop died after being pursued over the Reichenbach Falls, by some of the monsters he created, on the night of May 4, 1891, it has since been shown that he was rescued by an Englishman wearing a deerstalker cap who happened to be in the vicinity.  This man, who called himself Doyle, accompanied Blenkinsop to Australia, where he devoted himself to developing a high explosive derived from eucalyptus oil.


Blenkinsop was unaware that the great powers of Europe were well aware of him and a large number of well-known people visited him at different times.  I have acquired the papers he left behind, and the story is absolutely astounding.

I have three books I want to write for the adult market (as previously noted, Gold, Ingenuity (mad inventions) and one other, still under wraps, and the Cornish Boy project is still in my mental list of things to do, now to be a set of four solid books for the teen/YA market, historical fiction much closer to the truth than the Blenkinsop yarn, and set in the mid-19th century.  I plan to give some thought to these ideas while bouncing around the Sahara and along the Camino de Santiago in Spain. (Note to burglars: the children are minding the house.  Sorry about that!)


(FREE PLUG: We use Explore Worldwide quite a lot, because they are low enough in budget to make spoilt and pretentious whingers shy away, they have an itinerary and they manage logistics, the guides know what they are doing and we have somebody to rely on if things go pear-shaped, plus lots of walking. Mostly Brits, Australians, Kiwis, a few north Americans, but delightful company.)

All of the entries for 2010

November 3, 2010

I have finished all the trimming of text, the polishing of words, the honing of discourse, and I have attended to all of the dreary administrivia of photography and art work. Writing is fun, but there's always hack work to do. Still, Australian Backyard Naturalist is near as can be to done. Two hours before I signed off on the text, with 24 hours of picture-shovelling to go, I had the go-ahead on a new book.

That, however, stays under wraps for now. Suffice it to say that it bears some relationship to other books I have done, and it's for adults—though some of the sorts of children I write for would enjoy it as well. More later. 

October 27, 2010

The long gap means I have been busy. Australian Backyard Naturalist turned out to be twice as long as I had planned, so I have just done major surgery on it. Now I am listening to machine-generated MP3 files of the chapters as the final stage in the process, so I can have it out of the way before The Monster Maintenance Manual comes out next Monday. I listen to all my books as one of the final stages, because listening makes most of the editing slips that I have made show up. Then I get Chris to read it. 

The next book? Two possibilities at this stage, one for older readers, one for younger readers. I will do them both, Real Soon Now, but which comes first? Even I don't know. And there are several possible dark horses that may leap out of the shadows and seize the lead.

August 21, 2010

I am back from New Zealand, coming back via Brisbane, where I was lucky enough to pick up the Children's Book Council of Australia 2010 Eve Pownall award for Information Book of the Year! Next up, catching up on stuff before I head for the Flinders Ranges and Lake Eyre. I managed to almost tie up the loose ends in Backyard Naturalist while I was in New Zealand, and I gathered some excellent material on gold in New Zealand, but the next book is still a matter for some thought. The South Australian trip may decide it for me. 

Who's that with the GG?  Can't be Macinnis—he's wearing a tie. AND a suit!

Note that I said "lucky enough". That wasn't false modesty, that was an honest assessment. I was very lucky with the editor, designer and other support staff at the National Library of Australia. It was a good book, I always knew it would be, but you need a publisher with vision to come up with the idea, and then you need a support team. 

July 31, 2010

Well, it's been a while between drinks, as they say. I'm just back from seven weeks in Britain and Italy, gathering material for several possible books, and I am into a major recasting of Australian Backyard Naturalist, splitting most of the chapters and getting the wording just right. August will see me in New Zealand, Brisbane and the Flinders Ranges, so I'm afraid my carbon footprint this year is a big one. I still haven't decided which book will come next, but I am making progress on several of them. 

 I managed to pick up a copy of the German '100 Discoveries' while passing through Zurich. We got on the Eurostar in cool London, emerged into a heat wave in Paris, changed trains after two hours, got to Zurich with half an hour to go and I got lost with the wheels falling apart on our cases, but we made it to the hotel, scurried to the bookshop and made it with 10 minutes to spare.

March 30, 2010

I was present today at a function in Sydney when the short list was announced, and my Australian Backyard Explorer is in the 2010 Eve Pownall short list. Results will be announced on August 20. 

The large gap since my last post reflects a busy time. I have been working through drafts 3, 4, 5 and 6 of Australian Backyard Naturalist, as well as checking the page proofs of the Monster Maintenance Manual. I am now doing background reading for a history of gold: it appears that I will need to read or dip into some 300 books and probably read twice that number of research articles, some of them going back into the 17th century. 

Hydraulic miners in California used nozzles like this to direct water and bring hills down so they could extract gold from the wash.

This will be a social history of gold and its effects, as filtered through the mind of a science writer. Our friends Theta and Gerry Brentnall took Chris and I to see the damage done by alluvial miners in northern California in the 19th century, and made me aware that this damage led, in the end to the world's first environmental legislation. I'm going to take my time with this one, but given that gold has been taking on a more key role in the plot lines of the Cornish Boy project, I expect to either start work on that again, in parallel, or launch straight into it when Gold (that's a working title only) is done. 

Coming soon: news of a publication date for the Monster Maintenance Manual.