just write

A little bit of something for today. It's a Saturday morning and I'm about to start some writing... thought I would warm up with a blogpost. Or does this count as procrastination?

I'm going to sit down with my gargantuan cup of coffee and work on my current WIP, Molly - we know how brilliant I am at coming up with titles. A few weeks ago, it was just a wee scrap titled Chick lit with promise. When on holiday in NZ, I found it in my folder of writing, and really enjoyed re-reading it. So I've picked it back up and am now running around all over the show with it. The main character, Molly, is kind of irrestible and I'm having all sorts of fun with dialogue.

It's become a paranormal romance, because it is impossible for me not to inject some kind of speculative element into my stories. The 'element' is Tom, who is challenging to think about, because I've upturned the tragic box on his life. In 1940, as a 23 year old, he was called up for WW2. He had a spell cast on him to protect him, so that he would survive the war and come home to marry his sweetheart. Only he came home to find his sweetheart had killed herself... and that the spell was twisted and meant he would never grow old or die. Be careful what you wish for.

So at the point in the story when Molly and Tom meet, she is heartbroken after her boyfriend has broken up with her, and Tom is the kind of lonely I find it hard to describe. The word 'lonely' doesn't even touch the sides. Imagine a lifetime where everyone you ever loved or loved you in return is dead. You look 23 years old but you were born in 1917. You are nearing the end of a normal human lifespan without having lived or enjoyed everything we take for granted – growing older, finding a partner, getting married, having children, having grandchildren.

I'm not sure where the story is going, but I'm really loving thinking about it and writing it, and that's essentially my goal this year – just enjoy the writing. Don't worry about audience or sellability or wordcount or publishing. Just write.

So I better.

The advances of plastic surgery in WWI

Nothing to do with writing, but this has been distracting me recently -

While I was in NZ, I read a fascinating article in the Listener about Sir Harold Gillies, a New Zealand-born surgeon who is credited as the 'father of plastic surgery'. Gillies worked during WWI at Queen Mary's Hospital in Sidcup, south-east London. His patients were servicemen with horrific injuries to their faces and hands - burns, gunshot and grenade wounds - from across the Allied forces including NZers. The Gillies Archive website includes an online portfolio of watercolour paintings of patients. The paintings, along with other records, were located in NZ and donated to the Gillies Archive in 1989.

Queen Mary's Hospital, Gillies seated at right.

His surgery techniques were revolutionary at the time, although crude by today's standards. They gave his patients a quality of life that otherwise they may not have had, but the reconstructions took place over months - even years - and during that time, it surely must have been hard to bear not only the injuries, but the in-between surgeries which caused even more destruction to foster the reconstruction.

He was one of the first surgeons in the world to discover and use the 'pedicle tube' - a method of skin-grafting where the new skin would be taken from, say, the chest, stitched into a tube and then the end applied to the area requiring the skin, to ensure blood flow in the grafted skin - this was a time before antibiotics and microsurgery and the ability to attach blood vessels together. Gillies used pedicle tubes, over months and months of surgery and treatment, sometimes 'walking' them up a soldier's body from stomach to wrist to face.

Following WW2, Gillies and his colleagues were also involved in pioneering gender-reassignment surgery, both female-to-male and male-to-female.

Artist/researcher Paddy Hartley has created Project Facade in response to Gillies work. He has looked at case studies of some of Gillies' patients and then created these amazing works of art, using army uniforms, to reflect each man, his history and treatment. The Project Facade site is really fascinating - not just for the artwork that Paddy has created, but also to read the individual stories about the men who were involved with all this groundbreaking surgery. It can be quite heartbreaking.

One of Hartley's case studies was William M Spreckley - you can see here the progression from admittance to the hospital through to a photo taken later in his life.

From the BBC: Spreckley was hugely grateful to Gillies and even named his son Michael Gillies in his honour.

Nevertheless, he was psychologically scarred, and his grand-daughter Alexandra Kingman says,

"He must have felt like a freak when it happened. All his life he still thought he looked hideous."

all about books

I've decided to keep track of the books I read this year:

a) so I can look back at the end of 2009, and remember and review, and pick favourites

b) to make sure I keep reading

In 2008, my bestest book was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It made my insides cave in, filled my head up with ash and despair. I read that so fast, consumed by it, I don't even know how much I actually read. I have since learned from an Empire magazine that it has been made in to a movie, with Viggo Mortensen as the lead. I'm not sure about this. The book is intense, especially with what isn't spoken, and so grey. Ashen. I will be interested to see how that translates to film. (if you go to IMDB.com and look it up, the character names give away so much of the most awful parts of the story, the parts as a reader that are sprung on you. Especially the role played by "Mark Tierno". If you haven't read the book, don't visit IMDB and read about the movie until you have).

Books so far in 2008:

Does This Make Sense to You by Renee
- I love how Renee writes humour into sad or tragic situations. She has a gift. I was rooting for the main character the whole way. A Kiwi author, one of our tutors at Whitireia, an inspiration.

Stiff by Mary Roach
- I've started this before but didn't finish. This time I got to the end. A good non-fic read about the 'lives' of cadavers.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson
- Love her writing, one of my newer discoveries. I think the first one of hers I read is still my fave though, Case Histories.

Tales from the Town of Widows by James Canon
- Reminds me a lot of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which seems inevitable. Everyone will make that comparison. This, though, I found more accessible. I devoured it at the bach in Tata, got sand in the spine.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt
- Picked this out of the bookshelf at the bach at Tata. It wasn't what I expected, yet now after finishing it, I'm not sure what I did expect from this book (something more like Zadie Smith?). This book made me feel... unsmart, and I know there was more to it than I was getting.

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
- Cheat entry, as did not complete. Got bored. Tried very hard and some parts were great, but then it would skip to a character who was uninteresting. Had a feeling she killed off the best character in the first few pages. Won the Pulitzer Prize in 95. I really wanted to like this one.

Mr Pip by Lloyd Jones
- I'm cheating a little bit with this one too, because I read this on the plane to NZ (e.g., 2008), but as it kicked off my holiday reading, I'm still counting it. I haven't read Great Expectations. I feel I should! Kiwi author, nominated for the 07 Booker.

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
- A fantastic collection of short stories. I like the one, god I can't even remember the title now, of the kid being babysat by the Indian woman learning to drive, and the one with the woman having an affair.

Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood
- Mum gave this book to me for Christmas. I love Atwood. The stories in this book feel kind of autobiographical and I'm curious how much of it mirrors her life.

And currently.... The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd.

Lords of Dogtown

I saw Lords of Dogtown yesterday, finally. It's been sitting on my laptop for a while. I got it solely because of this beautiful version of 'Wish You Were Here' by Sparklehorse, which plays throughout. That's one gawguss song.

Years ago when I was working at the ice-cream shop at Rialto, I saw the doco Dogtown & the Z-Boys when it played there, so it was interesting to see the theatrical version.

But, er, you sure could tell this one was written by Stacy Peralta. On account of how in the movie the character of Stacy Peralta is the 'good guy'... without the faults that grace the other characters. Hence, he is the most boring one on screen. I certainly get that he seemed the one with the most screwed-on business-mind, which is probably why his name is the one I recognise the most - and also why this film is now here. If he wasn't that guy, we'd not have the movie nor the documentary (that Peralta was also behind yet didn't seem to have that skew). Still, the other characters were more interesting.

Heath Ledger was amazing as Skip. He's a real chameleon, one of those actors that becomes. I wanted to shake him and tell him to work it out, dude. Emile Hirsch is delightful in that scrummy-isn't-he-pretty-and-pouty way. All that long blond-tipped hair; boy was I sad to see him shave that off (en passant I love it when actors actually shave their heads on film - particularly women, go Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta). And I'm not saying he was bad at all, in fact I liked the arc his character took the best. The moment where he dances around Kathy Alva made me grin. The moment where he walks away from skateboarding - he literally does.

There's some beautiful imagery. The sun setting behind the crumbling and broken black facade of the old Atlantic pier - dead ferris wheel against the luminous grey morning sky. Surfers catching waves between the pilings. Wind in blond hair as Hirsch skates slow and lazy curves down sloped tarmac streets.

There is an awesome cameo by Tony Hawke as an astronaut who tries to ride a skateboard and he falls off and gets up and says "it's harder than it looks" - hehe.

Directed by Catherine Hardwicke - who did Thirteen and has just done the teenybopper vampire flick, Twilight.

I want to see the doco again now.

one cool lady

Farewell Bettie Page! You were one hot lady.

Bettie Page, one of the most famous US pin-up models of the 1950s, has died in Los Angeles, aged 85. Her provocative poses - often in bikinis - made her a cult figure and she was one of the first models to appear in Playboy magazine.

The man on our $100 note

This is a really cool profile of Lord Rutherford, legendary Kiwi physicist -

100 years since Rutherford's Nobel Prize

"Today marks one hundred years since New Zealand's greatest scientist was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry..."

poem translation, from end-july 05

We were given a poem in Cyrillic. This is what I think it said. I have no idea what it really said.

Rocks

this creamy
wandering trail
krumbles
forward

But I realised
hope is out for me
backpacking over
a bitumen path

this
rolling over road
never breaking bones honeypot
should take clovering

no oncology
cancer
overhand connections
seven

So road onwards I
no path
no curving under over
no building there trees
a little track
prophet for me
pandering me
shoving me
forward