I’m still here! Still in lockdown. I miss other people’s houses.
I’m working on my structural edits for A Hunger of Thorns. It amazes me that I’ve been working on this book for so long - have written so many different versions - and I still love it. There are still things to discover. This new revision feels tighter and more streamlined - and also more poignant. I can’t wait for you to read it!
So in my last newsletter I told you about Henry Darger, who was in Thorns for a long time (long before it was called A Hunger of Thorns), and ultimately didn’t make it. But Henry reactivated my fascination with lost girls. It’s a subject I’ve always returned to creatively, even though there are things I dislike about it (why do lost girls in literature just want to go home, when lost boys want to have adventures?) And yet I still love those girls - Dorothy, Wendy, Susan, Miranda, Alice - especially Alice. I decided that this book would be a love letter to those lost girls. That my protagonist would stumble into a magical land where all the lost girls of literature lived.
I was lucky enough to be granted a State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship, which gave me a little office at the Library where I could work. It couldn’t have come at a better time. Banjo was two, and I was desperate to carve out some time and space for writing. I love the Library - I worked there for eight years at the now sadly defunct Centre for Youth Literature. I went down a research rabbit hole reading about all the lost girls, with an interesting detour learning about the classic (and often problematic) Australian trope of children lost in the bush.
I really wanted my protagonist (I think her name was Emily at this point) to meet these lost girls. I wanted them to be recognisable as themselves, but darker and funnier with more depth. But it didn’t work. I tried really hard. I had different combinations of girls. I had them know who they were. I had them not know. I made it more subtle, then more obvious. And in the end I let them go. But if you read very carefully, you will be able to recognise at least one of those lost girls in Thorns.
After that, I had a good hard look at myself, and what I was trying to do. And I went back to my own history of lost girls, of which I’ll talk more about in the next newsletter.
Read
My bookclub is reading Earthlings by Sayaka Murata. It is very weird and not at all for the fainthearted, but I loved it. We’re also listening to Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem in podcast format, one chapter each week and then discussing on Slack, which is a fun change for us.
Play
I’m playing Baldo on Switch and it is infuriating - soooo hard, I die constantly. But the Ghibliesque art and clever puzzles is keeping me from quitting entirely.
Make
Our one remaining chicken, Esme, still lays four eggs a week despite being five years old. Such a good chicken. This Nigella recipe for Turkish Eggs is mind-blowingly good. The creamy poached egg. The salty, garlicky yogurt. The nutty brown butter.
Hatch!
I’m taking delivery of a dozen fertile eggs this week, and Banjo and I will try to hatch them in an incubator as our school holiday project! I have obsessively researched breeds, humidity, temperature settings and incubator placement. I don’t expect all twelve to hatch, and some of them will be roosters, but we are hoping to keep two or three hens! (if anyone wants some roosters, hit me up) I’ll be detailing our hatching adventures on my Instagram. I really hope it isn’t a total disaster!