Category Archives: Book locations

Writing journey side trip

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Billabong Flats: The Big Race – Story and images by Ria Loader, copyright 2016

As we write, sometimes the journey sometimes takes a bit of a side trip; that happened to me about three months ago. I was writing the ‘how to kindle’ book and got side tracked by a creative adventure. It started when I was writing the chapter on formatting for kindle. I wanted to show the difference between unformatted text, and how it looks when you add a bit of structure such as Chapter Heading, first paragraph with no indent and subsequent body copy. It happened that I needed a couple paragraphs of story to use for that section. Out of nowhere, the start of a children’s story sprang to mind and I scribbled it down. That began a side journey that has involved a lot of steps.

Unformatted text
The Big Race
The wild bush animals gathered at Billabong Flats, a place where everyone has fun.They met in the shade of the big gum trees.They would race to the big hill and back. Emu was there, along with Magpie and Kangaroo. Wallaby and Cockatoo, Possum and Flying Fox were there too.
End of unformatted text

Didn’t mean to procrastinate finishing the kindle book, though that’s been on hold while I’ve been caught up in a whirlwind. Finishing the story fragment above has led to learning about kids books, taking up drawing again, and writing a dozen kids stories. Sometimes, as an author, it feels like you are just along for the ride.

The place?
Billabong Flats, an imaginary place in the Australian Bush.

The characters?
Australian animal friends – Kookaburra, Koala, Kangaroo, Echidna, Cockatoo and Flying Fox, Dingo and Brolga and all the critters that run, swim, jump and fly.

The idea?
A place where everyone gets along and has fun.

The challenges?
Those of friendship everywhere. Things are lost and found, curiosity leads to new discoveries, new homes need to be found, visitors become neighbors and scary monsters are avoided or defeated, friends are supported in times of loss, and adventures and fun is had along the way.

The images?
After searching through thousands of photographs, it came down to around 200 images as inspiration. From that. pen and ink drawings were embellished with watercolor and digital brush work.

The web site?
It felt like the stories needed their own web site, so I started one at BillabongFlats.com. When friends said they wanted images of the characters, I began to set up some materials for Billabong Flats Art on Cafepress. The first image, of KoalaDreaming is ready. I’ll be asking folks who join the Billabong Flats mailing list to vote on which story and which character I put up next on cafe press. I have images of many of the animals ready to go.

The first illustrated children’s book?
It is called Billabong Flats: The Big Race. It will be out on amazon in a couple of weeks.

Creating fantasy fiction worlds – there are worlds inside

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From the moment I decided to concentrate on fiction, my fantasy world started coming together. With every piece of writing in the world, the places became characters in the stories. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that the places started taking on a life of their own; they were not quite the Seattle I live in, nor the San Juan islands I’ve sailed through on weekends. The Australian outback is subtly different to actual places I’ve been, or more properly, the places are an amalgam of more than one single place, tinted by memory and overlaid with a magical patina that is their very own. The Suzzalo annex in downtown Seattle is a place that might be, an organic outgrowth of the very real Suzzalo Library at the University of Washington with which I am so familiar. I wonder if all magical worlds start off that way? Do they come to live in the intersections between the real and the imaginary, taking on the nature of something that is rooted in the world?

There are places I’ve visited in books by favorite authors that are as real to me as cities I’ve traveled to physically. The London of Sherlock Holmes is not quite the London of my visit in 2006, nor yet the London of Phileas Fogg, Mary Poppins, nor yet even the London of 007. They rug shoulders like restless cats, overlapping like a puzzle, yet each version of London remains its own unique world. Our urban fantasy worlds begin with the world we can touch. As it should be. And then they depart for places unknown and as yet undiscovered.

In building a whole ‘world’, it helps to have the bones of the familiar to act as a bridge. The magical systems need to be grounded in the familiar everyday things, with rules that are internally consistent. Traveling from one place to another may be via walking, public transport, a vehicle or by stepping through a doorway between places in this world or between separate pocket universes, each world behaving with its own rules. The covenant with readers is to make the worlds internally consistent, predictable in some sense, and imbued with the magic that advances the sense of place and the journey of the characters who move through the spaces in that particular world.

In the Storybook tales with living libraries and pocket universes, the City of Seattle is in the World of Form, with rules or conventions that prevent casual magic coming to the attention of people or the authorities. Our magical beings are flying ‘under the radar’ and if luck should accrue to these ‘Others’ more often that most people experience, then that magic might be overlooked. Yet we do see our characters zipping about through portals, avoiding planes and customs officials. The magic to deflect attention is well developed, as is the magic of illusion and manipulation. The ‘Others’ are shape shifters, though not in an obvious fashion. No horror movie transformations in the world where humans live – as an author, I chose to constrict that ability in this world, at least where people are looking. The rules will, of course, be broken. There will be challenges to order. Chaos will enter in. Our characters may be revealed to a select few, or discovered by sinister government agencies as dictated by the story. That’s one of the things that makes urban fantasy so interesting, that we do not know what may happen next. The fantastical blends with the normal in delightful ways.

This weekend I’m building some new environments for my world, a few new villains, some allies whose worlds are not yet known to my protagonist. Should be loads of fun. My first step is to scrapbook images that look and feel like the places. Pencil sketches, word sketches, montages from imagination.

Writing process – top 10 ways of finding grammar errors

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Grammar errors are one of the most pesky things to eradicate in the writing process. Scrivener doesn’t find grammar mistakes, and while MS Word is pretty good at finding normal passive errors, it fails to recognize idiom. Language is changing. Sentences can and often do start with ‘and, but, or, though’ in colloquial use.wordsForBooks

If you’re like me, when you write the first draft you don’t pay any attention to the rules. Well, truth to tell, rules are hardly ever my best thing. I tend to think in fragments; that means some of my characters share this trait. Enough said.

Even in a blog, the sentence construction is not a slave to the Oxford English way of writing. Be a bit boring if it was. However, the unintentional grammar error is the bane of a writer’s existence. It’s just fine to break rules on purpose, so long as you know your purpose. Richard Morgan stood the grammar rules on their collective head in Altered Carbon. His more stream-of-consciousness writing included sentence fragments much of the time. None of that made it difficult to read. Instead, it made his protagonist much more sympathetic. So how do I find those errors in the editing process? I have a few tips and tricks to share.

  1. Walk away from the writing for a couple of days to give yourself some distance
  2. Print it out and keep a highlighting pen handy to mark the pieces to come back to
  3. Read it out loud to a friend. The tongue will trip over phrases that aren’t quite right
  4. Do an editing pass with track-changes on
  5. Try turning it upside down – for those of us who can read that way, the comma and grammar errors jump out
  6. Do an editing pass just for dialog.
  7. Use Find / Replace to fix issues like quote plus period (“. wrong) rather than period plus quote (.” correct)
  8. Write with a manual of style handy – look up stuff that you know you get wrong
  9. Replace instances of passive voice (often uses words that end in y) with active voice (often ends in ‘ed’)
  10. Relax about it. No matter how many times you edit, someone will disagree with your choices

I hope some of these prove helpful. Please share the tips and tricks you have found work for you.

Norman’s pool – a magical place

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normansPoolOne of the sites visited by our protagonist Mira Abrose Argent in Library of Time was Norman’s Pool at the Norman Lindsay Gallery. It is an amazing place all on its own and I wanted to share a little more about the location. It is the former home of artist Norman Lindsay, a multi-talented Australian artist.

When I lived in Sydney, I visited the gallery every couple of years. It is one of those places that rekindles a sense of wonder and child-like enjoyment. Norman’s talent ran all the way from illustrating children’s books, writing novels, model ship building, painting in oil and watercolor, sculpting and sketching. His lithographs are multi-layered exemplars of the art. His work was one of the reasons I studied print-making in art school; I wanted to experiment with the techniques he pioneered. It ought to be noted that it was his wife, Rose Lindsay, who did most of the print runs. She was pretty amazing as a person, a model and an artist.

th3DG401AVHowever, it is the grounds of the place that are the most evocative to the would-be artist. Life-sized statues of nymphs, fauns and satyrs romp through the grounds, sculpted hastily from chicken wire and concrete that seems to linger on beyond their ephemeral materials; their sly smiles and sidewise glances provoke smiles from the visitors to the gallery. It is clear that the spirits that the artist saw animating nature did not remain elusive to his maker’s hands.

An Artist is a kind of magician I’ve always thought, making something from nothing and giving the viewer a sense of connection with what the artist sees of the numinous or hidden world of spirit.

Vision and the sight are recurring themes in the current set of novels. What happens if you look too deeply and see too much? How can true sight be a gift and a burden at the same time? Does knowledge equal power, or does it show too clearly the hidden cost of wielding magical power and mundane power in the world. All good food for thought, and Norman Lindsay saw and revealed many hypocritical attitudes in the early half of the twentieth century. His clear vision got him into a different kind of trouble than my characters experience, however, it was fun to add the place to the story. It stars as a meeting place where almost anyone or any otherworldly being might just drop by for a visit.

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I remember the place fondly for the art, the statues, and for the half-glimpsed view of the world of the artist who lived there. It is a place that has inspired more than one artist and author over the years and I am pleased count myself among them.

If you caught the film ‘Sirens’ a while back, that is set in the same location. It stars Ella McPherson, Hugh Grant and Sam Neil. It may not be a spectacularly good bio-pic but it does the grounds and the mores of the time justice. A fun romp of a movie, it is quite naughty in juxtaposing the bohemian ways of the artist and the models with the more straight-laced morals of the preacher who thinks himself rather ‘modern’ in his views. It is a quirky send-up, though fairly gentle in its humor. I found it charming.

As a place, Norman’s pool is now empty of water for most of the year; you’ll have to imagine what it would have been like with water lilies. In the hot Australian summer, it would have been a favorite place to get some relief from the heat. The surrounding bush is beautiful, resinous and fragrant with Eucalyptus. The surrounding walks are private and a little wild and the calls of the birds could be the laughter of women or dryads calling from the bush. Quite a magical place, and a great day-trip from Sydney. I recommend it highly.