About Me
- Satima Flavell
- Perth, Western Australia, Australia
- I am based in Perth, Western Australia. You might enjoy my books - The Dagger of Dresnia, the first book of the Talismans Trilogy, is available at all good online book shops as is Book two, The Cloak of Challiver. Book three, The Seer of Syland, is in preparation. I trained in piano and singing at the NSW Conservatorium of Music. I also trained in dance (Scully-Borovansky, WAAPA) and drama (NIDA). Since 1987 I have been writing reviews of performances in all genres for a variety of publications, including Music Maker, ArtsWest, Dance Australia, The Australian and others. Now semi-retired, I still write occasionally for the ArtsHub website.
My books
Buy The Talismans
The Dagger of Dresnia
The Cloak of Challiver, Book two of The Talismans
Mythic Resonance
Follow me on Twitter
Share a link on Twitter
For Readers, Writers & Editors
- A dilemma about characters
- Adelaide Writers Week, 2009
- Adjectives, commas and confusion
- An artist's conflict
- An editor's role
- Authorial voice, passive writing and the passive voice
- Common misuses: common expressions
- Common misuses: confusing words
- Common misuses: pronouns - subject and object
- Conversations with a character
- Critiquing Groups
- Does length matter?
- Dont sweat the small stuff: formatting
- Free help for writers
- How much magic is too much?
- Know your characters via astrology
- Like to be an editor?
- Modern Writing Techniques
- My best reads of 2007
- My best reads of 2008
- My favourite dead authors
- My favourite modern authors
- My influential authors
- Planning and Flimmering
- Planning vs Flimmering again
- Psychological Spec-Fic
- Readers' pet hates
- Reading, 2009
- Reality check: so you want to be a writer?
- Sensory detail is important!
- Speculative Fiction - what is it?
- Spelling reform?
- Substantive or linking verbs
- The creative cycle
- The promiscuous artist
- The revenge of omni rampant
- The value of "how-to" lists for writers
- Write a decent synopsis
- Write a review worth reading
- Writers block 1
- Writers block 2
- Writers block 3
- Writers need editors!
- Writers, Depression and Addiction
- Writing in dialect, accent or register
- Writing it Right: notes for apprentice authors
Interviews with authors
My Blog List
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In Praise of Episodic Enthusiasm - Do you worry, as I do, that you’ve frittered away your best years and are coming to your real work too late? If so, consider the examples of two nineteen...52 minutes ago
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How to cowrite a book 3,000 miles apart: In Dialogue with Dickens [long read] - How to cowrite a book 3,000 miles apart: In Dialogue with Dickens [long read] RB lives outside Boston in the United States, PD across the Mersey...2 hours ago
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My Season for Scandal by Julie Anne Long - I sit here stunned. Yes, I have written this review twice. The first version was too overwrought because I was entirely overcome by this book. This is such...3 hours ago
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Medieval Coins with Rory Naismith - This week on The Medieval Podcast, Danièle speaks with Rory Naismith about the complex world of medieval coins.6 hours ago
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A To Z Blogging Challenge 2024 - Villains! - V Is For Voldemort - Voldemort, known to his followers as the Dark Lord, is the main villain of the Harry Potter series. The people of the wizarding community call him “...11 hours ago
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Attending Salar’s April Wine Dinner - I tend to write about restaurants I like, so it’s funny to me that I have never written about my actual favorite restaurant. It’s a Peruvian restaurant in ...12 hours ago
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Samantha M. Bailey - Samantha M. Bailey is the USA Today, Amazon Charts, and #1 international bestselling author of Woman on the Edge, Watch Out for Her, and A Friend in the Da...15 hours ago
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Jaclyn Moriarty books… - More of the Moriarty sister’s wonderful work. This is a book I bought at Somerset and started reading immediately. Wonderful writers create colourful world...19 hours ago
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Plotting 101: Top 10 Tips For Crafting Compelling Stories - Plotting Like a Pro One of the most searched-for terms on this blog is ‘help with plotting’. Plot – aka structure if you’re a screenwriter – can be a tri...3 days ago
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The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 14: Lords And Ladies - After the colossal success of Small Gods, you might think that Terry Pratchett might have wanted to try out some other new ideas. However, given the way th...4 days ago
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Ada Lovelace - by Sue Purkiss - On a recent stay on Exmoor, I came across an article about someone called Ada Lovelace. I had vaguely heard of her, but if you'd asked me why, I wouldn'...6 days ago
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5 Common Problems With Beginnings - *By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy* *If your beginning isn't working, no one will get to the ending.* A novel’s beginning is under a lot of pressure. It has...1 week ago
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I promised photos from the trip - I feel like a slacker but I have been busy. There’s so much going on, so much to write about. We’ve been back six weeks. It feels like a short time and a l...1 week ago
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I promised photos from the trip - I feel like a slacker but I have been busy. There’s so much going on, so much to write about. We’ve been back six weeks. It feels like a short time and a l...1 week ago
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Mastering Blog Post Creation: 10 Essential Steps to Enhance Your Writing Process - The post Mastering Blog Post Creation: 10 Essential Steps to Enhance Your Writing Process appeared first on ProBlogger. It hits you like a TON of BRICKS!...1 week ago
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Newsletter 16th April 2024 - Here’s a copy of my newsletter from April 16th, 2024. Sign up via my website to get newsletters directly to your inbox (and remember to check your Spam f...1 week ago
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'The Tic-Toc Boy of Constantinople' in the revered The Conversation as one of five "Australian literary works of particular relevance to national conversations about AI" - I've always respected and admired *The Conversation, *so it is a humbling privilege to have 'The Tic-Toc Boy of Constantinople' written about in *The Con...2 weeks ago
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Ourselves: 100 Micro Memoirs - I am lucky enough to have a non-fiction piece, ‘Helicopter Parents’, in this new release from Night Parrot Press, Ourselves: 100 Micro Memoirs. This is the...2 weeks ago
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The Dead Boys Detective Agency. It is a very silly name. But accurate. - April 25th. DEAD BOY DETECTIVES. It's really good -- it's funny, it's smart, it's scary, and it even has a few familiar faces... (And no, you won...3 weeks ago
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#3 WEP GET TOGETHER - APRIL 2024 - IT'S THE A - Z CHALLENGE! - Hi WEPpers and friends! Already time for out third Get Together. Life is flashing by! Hit us with your news, writerly or personal. We'd love to hear fro...3 weeks ago
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Henry of Lancaster and His Children - The close bonds which Edward II's cousin Henry of Lancaster, earl of Lancaster and Leicester, forged with his children have fascinated me for a long time...3 weeks ago
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Urbenville Adventure - Wow, Urbenville, what an adventure! An approach so tough I nearly threw up. Climbs so hard I’m still hurting. Plants so vicious, one grass-spike tore my co...3 weeks ago
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Researching the birth of the first domestic violence refuge - Read a researcher's journey exploring the first few years of Chiswick Women's Aid. The post Researching the birth of the first domestic violence refuge ...5 weeks ago
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Trip to Brazil 2024 - Landing in the Megalopolis of Sao Paulo On February 7th I flew to Sao Paulo, Brazil to start a 17 day teachi...1 month ago
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Photo Parade 2023 - A bit of fun at the beginning of the new year. I’m following several German travel blogs, and that way came across the annual Photo Parade (Fotoparade) on ...3 months ago
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Happy Public Domain Day 2024, the end of copyright for 1928 works - My annual reminder that January 1st is Public Domain Day, and this year copyright has ended for books, movies, and music first published in the U.S. in 192...3 months ago
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The White Horse Band - Live Blues/Rock - 31 March 2023 Hi All, Time for some LIVE Video Music from me… (as opposed to my original stuff)…. I got into a blues/rock band for a one off gig at ...4 months ago
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Konrath Thanksgiving - Black Friday - Cyber Monday Kindle Bundle Sale - *Get all of my ebook box sets on Amazon Kindle for 99 cents each, November 23 - 28.* *THAT'S 33¢ PER BOOK!* Almost my entire backlist of fifty-four ebooks...5 months ago
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Questions from year 9 students - Recently – actually, not very recently but I somehow forgot to write this sooner – I did what has become an annual online Q&A with the Year 9 girls at Bedf...5 months ago
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On Ohio, and the novels, and the new class - Just small news here. The new class is finished in first draft, and I’m now (and for the first time ever) doing the complete course bug-hunt and clean-up B...6 months ago
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Big disruption hit book publishing before AI showed up - Publishers Weekly recently hosted a stimulating and smart online session about AI and publishing, thanks to the organizing and moderating skills of Peter...6 months ago
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Flogometer 1180 for Christian—will you be moved to turn the page? - Submissions sought. Get fresh eyes on your opening page. Submission directions below. The Flogometer challenge: can you craft a first page that compels me ...8 months ago
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Storny Weather - I've just been out fixing up the damage from last night's storm. This is pretty much the first time I've been able to spend much time outside and do any...8 months ago
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#347 - I've been querying agents for the last 6-months and have over 50 rejections. I'm not sure if my novel isn't very interesting/sellable or if my query let...8 months ago
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Parody - The other day, for the first time in a very long time, I heard the Barbie Song. So, being me, I decided to parody it, in hour of Alianore Audley and *The...9 months ago
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Parody - The other day, for the first time in a very long time, I heard the Barbie Song. So, being me, I decided to write a parody. Hope you like it! *Hiya, Ali...9 months ago
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To Live and Love - To live and love for the both of us Ten years ago today I made that vow I've struggled in the decade since Not always knowing exactly how Ten years you've...9 months ago
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“It’s Random” – a random scribble - “Why am I even here? It’s random. No Divine Thing. No actual “purpose” except what we make of it. I haven’t made anything of it except to be restless, to a...9 months ago
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#MemorialDay, remembering a female patriot ancestor - *© 2022 Christy K Robinson* We are taught stories about heroic men who gave their lives to bring independence and liberty to their families, friends--and...10 months ago
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A tale of two titles - I have done something notably foolish. Which is perhaps nothing new, though the circumstances on this occasion are unusual. To whit, I am publishing two bo...1 year ago
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Poem: If Wishes were horses - A team of horses racing toward me Brown like the uniforms of soldiers fortressing me around Speckled like a found family, salt of the earth Whit...1 year ago
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another review for the Christmas Maze - *The Christmas Maze by Danny Fahey – a Review by David Collis* Why do we seek to be good, to make the world a better place? Why do we seek to be ethi...1 year ago
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Children’s Rights QLD Ambassador - Children’s Rights QLD appointed Karen Tyrrell (me) Ambassador for Logan City, ahead of Children’s Week, 24-29 Oct 2022. I’m an award-winning child-empowe...1 year ago
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ANWERING THE CALL: LESSONS FROM THE THRESHOLD - NEXT STORY SANCTUARY "Anwering the Call: Lessons from the Threshold" Sept. 20, 7 pm eastern $30 Online Whether you're starting a project, a school year, ...1 year ago
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The Green House, Chapters 1-4 (Revised) - [Dear Reader: Having refined my intentions for this novel based on a lot of recent thinking about life and art, I have restructured and revised the first f...1 year ago
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Publishing Contracts 101: Beware Internal Contradications - It should probably go without saying that you don't want your publishing contract to include clauses that contradict one another. Beyond any potential l...1 year ago
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Tara Sharp is back and in audio book - SHARP IS BACK! Marianne Delacourt and Twelfth Planet Press are delighted to announce the fifth Tara Sharp story, a novella entitled RAZOR SHARP, will be ...1 year ago
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Website Update - My website www.stephendedman.com has been updated, with details of my latest books; please check it out!2 years ago
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Non-Binary Authors To Read: July 2021 - Non-Binary Authors To Read is a regular column from A.C. Wise highlighting non-binary authors of speculative fiction and recommending a starting place fo...2 years ago
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ATTENTION: YOU CAN’T LOG IN HERE - Hey YOU! This isn’t the forum. You’re trying to login to the Web site. THE FORUMS ARE HERE: CLICK THIS The post ATTENTION: YOU CAN’T LOG IN HERE a...2 years ago
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I'M INSIDE A SHORT STORY!! - Ok everyone, you have to read this very short short story. Firstly because it is good, (check out the Bligh story within it too), but also because I'm ...2 years ago
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Grandmother Dragon Forever - It feels like centuries since the last time I wrote something for the Dragon Cave. Only something of great importance would drag me out of my retirement...3 years ago
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What communicates power? - Well, I have to say, I wasn't expecting to get this far behind on my reports on the show, but the launch month was very busy, and then the next month turne...4 years ago
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The Legendary Game Pac-Man Has No Meaning. - [image: The Legendary Game Pac-Man Has No Meaning.] The Legendary Game Pac-Man Has No Meaning. Let's take a look at how this word came about. Actually, P...4 years ago
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Readers Notice and They Care - Readers care about story details and they care about characters. Both last night and this afternoon I had conversations with readers upset about the way au...4 years ago
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Review of Verdi's MacBeth (WA Opera) - *Our president, Frances Dharmalingham, has written a critique of a recent visit to the opera: Verdi’s ‘Macbeth’.* At Christmas 2018, my family’s gift to ...4 years ago
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Breakout 3: tips for engaging your audience - Tips for engaging your audience: how to improve presentation, public speaking confidence and presence on stage, no matter how small the stage is. Present...4 years ago
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The Trains Don't Stop Here - It's been a long, long time since my last blog post. One of the main reasons for this – apart from life being way too busy in general – is that, in my dwin...4 years ago
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Portrait of a first generation freed African American family - Sanford Huggins (c.1844–1889) and Mary Ellen Pryor (c.1851–1889), his wife, passed the early years of their lives in Woodford County, Kentucky, and later...4 years ago
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Revisiting the Comma Splice - One of the difficulties as an editor, particularly when working with fiction, is to know when to be a stickler for the rules. For some people this is not a...4 years ago
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New releases - SFFBookBonanza - StoryOrigin - SciFi and Fantasy Book Sale - New Releases – Jul 2019 The latest and greatest new releases in Science Fiction and Fantasy books! New releases July 2019 99 cent sale - July 22nd - 28t...4 years ago
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Assassin’s Apprentice Read Along - This month, in preparation for the October release of the Illustrated 25th Anniversary edition of Assassin’s Apprentice, with interior art by Magali Villan...4 years ago
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STOLEN PICTURE OPTIONS TELEVISION RIGHTS TO BEN AARONOVITCH’S RIVERS OF LONDON - *STOLEN PICTURE OPTIONS TELEVISION RIGHTS TO BEN AARONOVITCH’S * *RIVERS OF LONDON* *London, UK: 29April 2019*: Nick Frost and Simon Pegg’s UK-based ...4 years ago
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A Movie That No Writer Should See Alone - Really. REALLY. Trust me on this. particularly since this film, ‘Can you ever forgive me?’, is based on a ‘True story’ – and too many writers will see too...5 years ago
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Review: Trace: who killed Maria James? - [image: Trace: who killed Maria James?] Trace: who killed Maria James? by Rachael Brown My rating: 5 of 5 stars Absolutely jaw-dropping, compelling readin...5 years ago
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Dance Photo Shoots - Photo Session Planning & Preparation Have you ever wanted to do a photo shoot for dance but have been a little unsure about how and what really happens? ...5 years ago
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On Indefinite Hiatus - (Which I pretty much have been from this site for a while already, but for real now.) You can find most archive content through the On Writing page, and li...6 years ago
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2017 Ditmar Winners Announced - Over the Queen’s Birthday weekend, spec fic fans gathered for Continuum 13: Triskaidekaphilia. Continuum is always a great convention, and this year it was...6 years ago
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Writing about the Crusades and talking about a "meddlesome priest" - The Middle Ages are in the news again, so here is a roundup of recent news articles. We start with three good reads from historians talking about the crusa...6 years ago
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The One and the Many – every Sunday - My first serious girlfriend came from good Roman Catholic stock. Having tried (and failed) to be raised as a Christian child and finding nothing but lifele...6 years ago
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A Shameless Plug Ian Likes: Bibliorati.com - A little-known fact is that I once had a gig reviewing books for five years. It was for a now-defunct website known as The Specusphere. It was awesome fun:...7 years ago
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Book Review - Nobody by Threasa Meads - Available from BooktopiaThe subtitle for this work is *A Liminal Autobiography*. Liminal: 1. relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process. 2...7 years ago
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A whole 'nother year-and-a-bit - Well, we have let this blog slip, haven't we? I guess Facebook has taken over from blogs to a very large degree, but I think there is still a need for blo...7 years ago
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2017 Potential Bee Calendar – & ladybirds and butterflies - Bees on flowers – all sorts of flowers (& bees) – and lady birds and butterflies. There were hundreds (literally) of photos to choose from. This is a small...7 years ago
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What is dyslexia? - *" **The bottob line it thit it doet exitt, no bitter whit nibe teottle give it(i.e ttecific lierning ditibility, etc) iccording to Thilly Thiywitz ( 2003)...8 years ago
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Rai stones - *(Paraphrased from Wikipedia)*: Rai stones were, and in some cases are still, the currency of the island once called Yap. *They are stone coins which at th...10 years ago
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Cherries In The Snow - This recipe is delicious and can also be made as a diet dessert by using fat and/or sugar free ingredients. It’s delicious and guests will think it took ...11 years ago
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Al Milgrom’s connection to “Iron Man” - Via the Ann Arbor online newspaper - I felt it was worth repeating as a great example of Marvel doing the right thing by a former employee and without the ...13 years ago
Favourite Sites
- Alan Baxter
- Andrew McKiernan
- Bren McDibble
- Celestine Lyons
- Guy Gavriel Kay
- Hal Spacejock (Simon Haynes)
- Inventing Reality
- Jacqueline Carey
- Jennifer Fallon
- Jessica Rydill
- Jessica Vivien
- Joel Fagin
- Juliet Marillier
- KA Bedford
- Karen Miller
- KSP Writers Centre
- Lynn Flewelling
- Marianne de Pierres
- Phill Berrie
- Ryan Flavell
- Satima's Professional Editing Services
- SF Novelists' Blog
- SF Signal
- Shane Jiraiya Cummings
- Society of Editors, WA
- Stephen Thompson
- Yellow wallpaper
Blog Archive
Places I've lived: Manchester, UK
Places I've lived: Gippsland, Australia
Places I've lived: Geelong, Australia
Places I've lived: Tamworth, NSW
Places I've Lived - Sydney
Places I've lived: Auckland, NZ
Places I've Lived: Mount Gambier
Places I've lived: Adelaide, SA
Places I've Lived: Perth by Day
Places I've lived: High View, WV
Places I've lived: Lynton, Devon, UK
Places I've lived: Braemar, Scotland
Places I've lived: Barre, MA, USA
Places I've Lived: Perth by Night
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What is Success?
Another post copied over from my old WordPress blog.
Over at her Year in America blog, my friend Fiona Leonard posed the question, “If you knew you could not fail, what would you do?”
I thought for quite a while about this before posting a comment, trying to identify how I define success and what anchors me in my undertakings. I came to the conclusion that it’s not the lure of success that motivates me, but my passion for the thing I’m doing.
I’ve had many interests over the course of my life: in fact, in a post about a year ago I described myself as being “artistically promiscuous” as a girl, since I loved so many things. I studied piano, singing, speech and drama and several forms of dance as well as a full trencher of school subjects and all the peripherals that go with being a music student – theory, harmony, aural training, history and form of music…my days were full from wake-up time at 6.00am until I collapsed into bed at about 9.30pm. I loved all those activities (or at least most of them, most of the time!) and did not want to give any of them up.
Until, of course, they became too difficult. This happened first with piano. I was a student at Sydney Conservatorium, and I was well aware that although I had above average ability in music, I was never going to be much better at it than I was then. It had become a hard grind. I pushed myself through the required two hours of practice each day, but each session was a struggle. My teacher, Raymond Fischer, told me I was at least three years away from being ready to sit even the simplest diploma exam, and I realised I just didn’t have the enthusiasm to last the distance. Possibly, with a lot of effort, I could have done what my parents hoped and expected I would do – go on to Teachers’ College and become a specialist music teacher in a high school. But the prospect of having to face four or five classes a day for the rest of my life, trying to interest a mob of teenagers in a subject that had already lost its juice for me, was utterly unthinkable.
After a year of Arts at Sydney University, I took a year off study to work in the public service and make a rather unfortunate early marriage. It didn’t take long for me to realise that working in an office environment was not my thing, either, and in 1962 I entered the National Institute of Dramatic Art to try my hand at acting. However, during that year I had my first baby and in those days there were no creches at universities, and as I couldn’t find suitable child care, I had to give up my scholarship and quit the course. I was sad, but not devastated, because at heart I’d already realised that this was not my path, either. I loved Shakespeare, but opportunities for specialist Shakesperean actors in Australia were virtually nil at that time, and the thought of spending my time preparing for auditions for TV commercials didn’t exactly fill me with enthusiasm. Several of my fellow students did indeed become professional actors — two of them, John Bell and Anna Volska, even became specialist Shakespereans! — but many more became bartenders, teachers and insurance agents.
I continued to be involved in amateur theatre and to teach dance for another twenty years, while rearing my five children. Along the way I furthered an interest in astrology that had started in my teens, and tried my hand at farming, even gaining a Certificate in Rural Studies to give myself a theoretical base for milking cows, drenching sheep and mucking out pig pens. Actually this was one of the happiest times of my life in many ways, and not the least happy-making part was watching my children growing up close to nature, seeing first-hand the cycles of life that as urban dwellers we see only dimly, as when someone has a baby or an elderly relative dies. In farm animals these cycles play themselves out far more quickly.
Dance was the one thing that never lost its appeal for me, despite my short legs and hockey-player’s build that rendered me unsuited to classical ballet. In my forties I returned to study at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, where I completed an Associate Diploma in Performing Arts (Dance) with the intention of “updating my expertise” so that I could catch up with the latest doings in the dance world, especially in teaching. My forty-odd-year-old body complained terribly and it took three years for me to complete the two year course, but complete it I did, and I was quite proud when I walked across the platform to receive my scroll. Concurrently, I’d started a BA in Religious Studies, which I loved. I complemented it by converting my Associate Diploma to a Dance minor, and also started another BA in Languages. This was in those heady days of the 1980s when all tertiary education was free, so I was merrily undertaking units in French, Italian, English Literature, Linguistics, Psychology and Journalism. However, when I was part-way through this second BA, my second marrriage broke down and fees for university courses came back, so I could not afford to finish it, much less go on to do the masters in Religious Studies that I’d hoped to do. Of course, none of those transcripts actually qualified me to do anything, and I was getting older and becoming less and less employable in a country that has always valued youth above almost everything else. So I turned to my other interests to put bread on the table, and these are the things I still do today – writing, editing, astrology and meditation. And I still love all of them.
Writing fiction, however, is just as heartbreaking as music, dance and acting. The chances of any individual “succeeding” at it are very low indeed. For every thousand manuscripts that are started by hopeful would-be authors, only one or two, at best, will eventually be published by one of the major commercial publishing houses. I frequently become discouraged, and talking to my fellow writers, I realise most of them do, too.
Nevertheless, I will keep up the battle until writing loses its juice for me. And when might that be? If my past experience is any guide, it will be when I know that I’ve reached the limits of my ability, which to me isn’t failure; it’s just a fact of life. I have the good fortune to have better-than-average talents in a lot of directions, but I have never proved to be outstanding at any of them.
But is this a bad thing?
I think not. If it were, I wouldn’t have had the chance to do so many wonderful things because I would have spent my life focussing on the prospect of success in just one of the things I love. I worship all the muses, and while, perhaps, none of them loves me quite as much as she loves her dedicated votaries who have just one talent in abundance, I can nonetheless bathe in all their sacred pools and come away refreshed. And that may be the best gift of all.
Once I thought I'd like to be an editor
Here's another post recycled from my old WordPress blog.
As I wrote the title to this post, I thought it sounded vaguely familiar. Then I remembered a silly little song my father taught me when I was five years old, which began, “Once I thought I’d like to be a cricketer”. I can still remember the words, so just for fun I put them up here.
But this post is not about cricketers, but editors. How does one become an editor?
I suppose it’s not unlike the way one becomes a cricketer or anything else: you watch other people doing it, then maybe you get someone to teach you a few things, and from then on its practice, practice, practice. That’s certainly the way I learnt, but that was twenty years ago. Things are a bit different now, in that there are tertiary courses devoted to editing and publishing and the Institute of Professional Editors has set up a qualifying examination. But a lot of people, even today, just fall into it, as I did.
I was at Edith Cowan University and had just started to write for Music Maker Magazine, in which I had my own column. Fellow students, therefore, thought I might be some kind of expert and they would often ask me to check their work for spelling and grammatical errors before they passed it in. I soon realised I was, in fact, not bad at copyediting. After all, I come from a generation that had the Rules drummed into them from an early age. It horrified me a bit to realise that in my French classes there were young people fresh out of school who literally did not know a noun from a verb. The lecturer was in despair. ‘How can I teach them French grammar,’ she asked, ‘when they don’t even know the rules in English?’ I sympathised completely, and I felt sorry for the students, who had never had chance to learn the beautiful intricacies of our language.
If our own young people cannot understand English grammar, what hope does a foreigner have? So when a few years later a student from Nepal asked me to help him learn to speak and write better English, I was happy to help. Jaganath (who has since become a friend) somehow persuaded his university that they should pay for his English lessons. The university responded by sending me more students, and it didn’t take me long to realise that they didn’t want conversation practice nearly as much as they wanted help with their assignments.
In some countries, styles of writing differ considerably from the linear point-to-point-to-conclusion logic that we are used to in English. Rather, scholars there prefer a rather more circuitous approach. This difference puzzles a lot of students for whom English is not their mother tongue.
What’s more, academic English, especially in the sciences, still prefers a formal style with a preponderance of Latinate words rather than plain Saxon-based ones. Formal written English is almost a different language. Naturally, lot of students, not all of them foreign, find this really confusing. Formal English uses Latinate words for historical reasons – after the Norman invasion of 1066, the ruling classes, who made and enforced the laws, for several centuries did not speak the same language as the predominately Anglo-Celtic people they had conquered. When I explain this to students it’s a joy to see comprehension dawn in their eyes, and some of them get the hang of the different “feel” of the two forms of English very quickly.
And so it was that I fell into editing quite by chance. As more and more students were awarded their degrees, so my confidence grew. By this time I had become interested in writing fiction, and other writers would ask me to critique their work. At first, I would only copyedit their offerings, but here, too, I gradually became bolder and more confident and as my expertise grew I took on more and more complex editing jobs and felt I could charge a reasonable fee for my work.
If you feel drawn to editing and would like to learn more, find your state’s society of editors (There’s a list on the Society of Editors WA website.) If you live outside Australia, try an internet search for society+editors+Antarctica, or whatever other country you live in. The internet is full of wonders and you’re sure to turn up something!
Of course, if you’re young enough to want to make this your career, you can enrol in a formal course either in journalism or editing and publishing. But a lot of freelance editors are older people like me, who learnt formal English in school and who may have some journalistic or teaching experience; who have read widely and taken appropriate workshops when they’ve had the opportunity, and who are willing to go on learning.
There’s room for all kinds of editors. Few freelancers make a full living from their editing activities, but that’s not a bad thing. Many people today depend on a portfolio of skills for their livelihood . If you love language and enjoy helping people, why not make editing one of yours?
Genealogy in a multicultural world
When I was a child, ethnicity was a relatively simple matter. England was full of English people, Chinese people lived in China and in the south sea islands there were people who wore grass skirts and possibly ate missionaries. Of course, it wasn't really quite as simple as that, but that was how it appeared to me at three or four years of age.
I remember Mother calling me to the window one day, saying, "Look, there's a Chinaman!" I leaned over the windowsill and gazed down at the street below, but all I could see was the back of the man's head as he hurried along like everyone else in the bustling crowd, heading for a bus stop, his workplace or the shops. (I should explain that we were between houses and at this stage were living in a flat over a butcher's shop. It was at 26 King St, Stretford, Manchester, if you'd care to consult Google Earth!)
My illusions were shattered! The man wasn't even wearing a long robe like the mandarins in my picture book.
The world was already changing. The end of World War II left millions of people displaced, and they often ended up somewhere far from their place of birth. Other emigrations involved young women from Japan and Germany who had married soldiers from the UK, America, Australia and other countries. My own eldest sister married a refugee from Serbia and our house was often filled with his friends, many of whom spoke little or no English. And when we emigrated to Australia in 1952, we already found the beginnings of a multicultural society.
It was largely European multiculturalism, of course, for at that time the White Australia policy was in force. It suited the authorities to forget the Aboriginal people their ancestors had displaced, the Chinese adventurers who had settled here during the Gold Rush of the mid-C19, the Kanakas from the south seas islands who had been kidnapped and brought to Queensland as slave labour, the Afghan camel-drivers of Australia's Red Heart and the Japanese divers who worked in Broome's pearling industry. No, Australia was White, and White it was going to stay.
But Australia was flourishing and people all over the world were on the move. Laws had to change to bring in much-needed labour. Young people of the developed nations discovered the joys of travel, and many of them brought home foreign partners or settled in other countries. Students began to attend universities in lands other than their own, and by the 1960s countries that had been reasonably homogeneous, population-wise, found themselves turning into melting pots. Multiculturalism had arrived.
Now we have second and third generations of children whose parents or grandparents came from other lands. In some families, the immigration took place long ago, as in the the case of the Chinese gold-diggers' descendants. Some time ago, I met a girl from Broome whose four grandparents were Japanese, Aboriginal, Afghan and Irish. She was, I might add, extraordinarily attractive!
Two of my children descend from a part-African slave trader from Jamaica, who brought his family to Australia in the mid C19 when that terrible trade failed. Two more of my children are part-German. I have nieces and nephews of two generations who are part-Serbian, part-Greek or part-Polish, and step-grandchildren who are part-Italian.
All this has made for some interesting research in my family tree! I have not attempted to follow the Italian, Serbian, Greek and Polish laterals, leaving those for closer relatives to investigate, but I have found out a great deal about the ex-pat Jamaican line and that of my German children. Family historians are incredibly generous in sharing their research, and in fact my German cousin-by-marriage, Elfriede, came to visit me with her husband, who is Indian, a few years ago and I was fortunate enough to visit their lovely home in the Rhine Valley in 2006.
The ever-increasing mixture of nationalities must surely strengthen the gene pool, although it might create problems for genetically-based medicine in the future. Already we occasionally hear of someone who cannot find a tissue match because of their unusual bloodlines. But as genealogists, we face our own challenges. We are very lucky today in having access to so much information from all over the world. Not all of it is readily accessible, but even so, many of us can trace our ancestry back for at least a couple of centuries if we are determined enough. But who knows how long this happy state of affairs will continue? Borders alter, governments fall, mass migrations of people can happen almost overnight, especially in the event of war or natural disaster. All these things can mean gaps in the records. Anyone with any sense of history, anyone with any feeling of family pride, anyone with any sense of curiousity and wonder, wants to know about their ancestry. It is of vital importance, therefore, that this lucky generation of family historians should collect and preserve all the records they can for their multicultural, multi-coloured descendants! Write down everything you can remember of the stories your parents and grandparents told you about life in the old country, and their difficulties in learning to live in a new culture. Don't throw out those old photos, documents and letters Opa Jan, Aunt Mary, Uncle Ngobo or Cousin Takeko left in the garage. Rather, preserve them in archival quality folders and albums. Your great-grandchildren may well thank you for it.
Authorial voice, passive writing and the passive voice
I've decided to import some old posts from the WordPress blog that I no longer use, and as Blogger won't let me import the lot in date order, I shall copy and paste them one by one. Here's one I posted in March of this year:
On sites that offer writing advice one sometimes reads instruction that confuses “passive writing” with “passive voice”. We see this among critiquers in writing groups as well, and it’s a source not just of confusion but also of misinformation.
I think there are two sources for this confusion. We often read that a writer needs to develop his or her own “Voice”. (I’ll capitalise this hereafter, to distinguish it from the other meaning of the word, which I’ll deal with farther down.)
“Voice” in this context really refers to those distinctive elements of a writer’s style that remind us of who is writing. If we look at authors of bygone days, Voice is not hard to see. Charles Dickens, for instance, had a distinctive Voice. So did Rudyard Kipling and DH Lawrence. In fact, pick up a work by any well-known author active before about 1980 and if you’ve read a few of that author’s books you will probably recognise the Voice straight away, because it did not vary much from book to book within that author’s oeuvre.
Few authors today have that kind of truly distinctive Voice. This is, I think, because of the popularity of the so-called “deep third” (AKA tight third or close third) Point-of-View (POV). It is currently fashionable for authors to hide behind their characters, giving the reader a seamless experience in which the author almost “channels” the POV character. In speculative fiction, two authors who demonstrate remarkable mastery of the deep third are Joe Abercrombie and Margo Lanagan. It is easy to lose oneself in their characters; to feel the character’s sensations and emotions and even to feel as if one is thinking that character’s thoughts. The author’s Voice and the voice of the POV character become one.
Some other authors use the close third only for moments of high tension and drama, retaining their own voice for narrative passages. Guy Gavriel Kay’s work is largely written in this style.
That more obvious, capital-V voice found in authors of past decades is easily confused with another sense of voice – passive writing. If a writer employs a lot of unnecessary auxiliary verbs (forms of “to be” and “to have” as part of an action, such as “He was running”) and constantly uses weak verbs such as walk and go (or went) people say the writing is passive. It’s only a short step from here to thinking that the writer has a “passive” Voice, and here’s where the trouble really starts, because the expression “passive voice” has a clearly defined grammatical meaning.
The “passive voice” as opposed to the “active voice” means using a verb without close reference to the doer of the action, as in, for example, “The ball was thrown by John” instead of “John threw the ball”. The giveaway is that little word “by”. A verb in the passive voice is followed by a preposition, most commonly “by” or “to” (as in “The award was given to Jenny”).
Let's look at examples of the three matters under discussion here – authorial voice, passive writing and the passive voice:
1. An author’s voice (I'll stop capitalising it now you 've got the picture!)
Here is Dickens’s famous opening of A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
The opening gives us an excellent feel for Dickens’s very distinctive (authorial) voice.
2. Passive writing
Here’s a passage I’ve just made up:
I was walking along the road, having just been to the dentist, when I was hit from behind by a cricket ball that had been thrown by a schoolboy. I had been intending to go to visit my mother, but the blow to my head gave me such a migraine that I found myself thinking that perhaps I should be going straight home to lie down.
That is passive writing. We don’t get any feel for the action or for the character’s feelings and sensations because we are separated from them by wases and –ing words – and one example of the passive voice! Can you see where it is?
3. The passive voice
Yup, that’s right: “I was hit from behind by a cricket ball” is in the passive voice, grammatically speaking. The passive voice is best avoided in fiction writing because it is frequently found as an element of passive writing.
But don’t get the terms mixed up. Passive writing is not always in the passive voice. Passive writing, as I’ve said above, is characterised by too many auxiliary verbs, weak verbs and probably weak nouns as well. It may or may not include use of the passive voice.
And not all writing that uses auxiliary verbs is passive, either. For instance “The pretty girl was dancing when I first saw her” uses the auxiliary “was” to indicate the past continuous tense. Some critiquers might try to persuade you to replace it with the simple past – “The pretty girl danced when I first saw her”. They would be wrong, because the simple past tense in that case would be incorrect and somewhat ambiguous. It might suggest, for example, that the pretty girl started to dance because I saw her!
What I’m trying to get across here is don't confuse authorial voice with the passive voice and especially don't confuse passive writing with the passive voice. “The pretty girl was dancing when I first saw her”, and, for instance, “The pretty girl will be dancing next time I see her” are certainly not in the passive voice, and, used correctly, are not necessarily examples of passive writing, either. They are perfectly legitimate uses of continuous forms of the verb “to dance”.
We are fortunate in having so many ways to express things in English, and the continuous tenses have their place. The skill lies in knowing when you can get away without using them, rather than making blanket statements about "passive writing" or worse, confusing them with the passive voice.