TellerOfJade

Steampunk or horseriding. Instead, I'm in Palestine.

I've come back to deviantART after quite some time of inactivity... Since I've been away I've finished my degree in creative writing, travelled to the middle east, and spent several years as a full-time activist. Now I'm working and planning travelling again in the near future. Look forward to more photography and possibly some poetry

So, as part of my attempts to get myself writing more, I've decided to get a blog, and to type up some uber short stories straight out, rather than anguish over each word for six months on everything. Leave the anguish for the big things And, as a stopgap measure, I've decided to use this devart journal as a blog until I actually get a wordpress or livejournal or whatever. So, in the spirit of doing things as part of other things, I bring you: The Accident.



He'd only had it a year before the accident.

Terry had been filling his Barina's tank up when he noticed an advert sitting on the bowser. "Buy a 1.25 litre coke and you can win one of six Ford Utes!" it promised. He went inside to pay for the petrol, and, on a whim, grabbed a bottle out of the fridge. The ute was delivered a month later; two photographers watched as a PR rep handed over the keys.

It was a sleek black ute, with speakers the size of his old car's tyres and enough room in the tray for four people to lie down. He put a blanket and pillow next to his tools, and, at a party a few weeks later, talked a girl into sneaking off with him to christen his prize. He hauled beer and surfboards around, and the engine purred and thrummed without strain. It took his mates two months to talk him into letting one of them drive; by then he had washed it a dozen times. In the depths of summer, the cool water felt good on his broad shoulders. He drove it to the beach, to the gym, to work, to the movies; alone and with company. The girls never seemed to last for more than a few weeks, but he never minded. The ute was his companion.

When the accident happened, he had two cases of beer in the tray; they smashed through the rear windscreen, and one flying bottle tore open his arm from shoulder to wrist. The scar would never go away. He ran into the side of a turning car; he'd gunned the engine and closed the gap before the other driver could do anything. He'd been on his way to a party, in a good mood, and loving his life. The police report said that speed was probably a factor in the cause of the accident, and charged him with dangerous driving occasioning death.

I'm still having trouble changing the little emote off unf (not that I'm feeling less unf than ever, it's not the worst in the world...), so the title shall be my mood. Also, my "e" key has something stuck underneath it, so I keep skipping. It's not my fault. I'm not sure if you can just rip a key off a keyboard or not, I'm not game to try...

I hadn't done my reading for extended prose this week, which kinda sucked since Shady tested me on having read it first. Apparently I wasn't in a minority, though. But the sucky thing is not not having done readings (boy, I think there's whole subjects I've scraped through on pure rhetoric) or even being called up on it, but the fact that it'll probably really help me with the Cronulla story. The lecture was on setting, and the readings were Jane Eyre (bleah), and Wide Sargasso Sea, a highly politicised reinterpretation of it. And one of the key components of WSS is setting (at least, according to Shady), which sucks, because that's something Shady rightly identified as being critical to a work about Australian nationalism and asserting control over a beach or the land in general. The suck is now I feel like I only got half as much out of this crucial lecture as I could have. Also I was tired...

But I still had a brainwave in the tutorial (sorry Carina and Kate, I was only half paying attention to your outlines after halfway through since I was scribbling furious notes... furiously... not that either of you are reading this) about how I can, and need to, make setting work in this novel to express the idea that i'm trying to, without being indoctrination, while still holding onto the political and allegorical quality I'm aiming for.

And rewatching Atonement (illegally downloaded, ooh) has got me thinking about how I can make point of view work for me as well. It's kinda complicated, and involves a central character who is a mining engineer living in Roxby Downs (like a cousin-in-law-ish of mine). I've realised that, to introduce the Aboriginal perspective and bring up the issue of land rights and assertion of control over land, the narrator character will/can be a native man living in Roxby Downs, watching the mining town grow around him. That way, he can come to stand for the aboriginal perspective on the modern Australian nation.

Plot I've already partially taken care of, just needs reworking. And I think I know how the characters need to be set up, since they will be standing for bigger things than themselves.

Now, all I need is a title... I was going with "Untitled", which confused some people... I need something critical, something which sums up Cronulla and the riots, as well as the displacement of indigenous Australians, the connections between these things and Australian nationalism...

Hmm.

I've never had a really bad experience with workshopping, but today was probably the worst. I don't know if it's because it was a novel outline, and I haven't realised all the things I normally would actually trying to turn ideas into words (guess that applies to everyone, though, since we are all workshopping outlines), but I got slagged pretty heavily. There was only a few people in there who I felt were actually trying to help me. People weren't exactly being negative (with one exception), but they weren't trying to help so much as trying to take me down a notch... or two... or ten...

For those who don't know, the setting of my novel is the Cronulla race riots, and the hook is viewing the modern Australian nation and Australian nationalism from an indigenous-centric perspective. So, obviously, pretty political. I'm trying to write is as objectively as possible, but I've obviously got liberal leanings when I'm attempting an idea like this, and a lot of people were mixing their own politics and own beliefs up with their criticism of my idea.

So, I'm somewhat pissed off, but I'm more determined than ever to make this work. I've started reading the book which is the seed of inspiration for this - Terry Pratchett's "The Last Continent" (very, very, very wierd seed of inspiration to have for such a political thing, I know). Just to try and get my headspace back where it was, channel the energy I was looking for. Right now I'm angry... and have to go to work. Gah.