#jane rawson

[okwallace]

i am reading about the pokemom dhelmise and let me tell you if you like this guy you'll love the novel from the wreck by jane rawson

[bookjotter6865]

Winding Up the Week #420

An end of week recap “Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.” –  Richard Hughes (born 19th April 1900) Warm Eastertide greetings to those celebrating the Christian festival, or a simple ‘enjoy those chocolate eggs’ if you plan a secular day of indulgence tomorrow. I hope the Eostre Hare (Bilby in Australia) refills your empty book…

Winding Up the Week #420

[a-reading-journal]

And there, just a speck of it, was a planet, formed in the perfect spot in a vast, cold universe. Spinning through the black he watched it shift and change- rock planet, ice planet, ocean planet, land planet and then in a haze of clouds and under the eye of one warm star it became ocean, land and sky. Just right. There were creatures - tiny, so many - a swarm of them struggling and fighting and out of them came babies and blood and all the heat of that one warm star turned to grass and to muscle and to life. Teeth tearing throats. The guts of a rabbit are the eyes of a newborn dingo pup are the food that fuels the towering termite nest are the shade where a small skink rests. In a river, in a pond, in the shifting desert sand, in mountain rock and the cold ice of glaciers and in one yard of earth. The disease that devoured one and passed over another. The rat’s little body all thick with ants. The apple cores food for worms. All of it, life. The great joyous throb of it. 134-135

[edumatters]

A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists

A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists

A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists by Jane Rawson

Synopsis: It is 1997 in San Francisco and Simon and Sarah have been sent on a quest to see America: they must stand at least once in every 25-foot square of the country. Decades later, in an Australian city that has fallen on hard times, Caddy is camped by the Maribyrnong River, living on small change from odd jobs, ersatz vodka and…

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[sciencebookaday]

A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists

A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists

A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists by Jane Rawson

Synopsis: It is 1997 in San Francisco and Simon and Sarah have been sent on a quest to see America: they must stand at least once in every 25-foot square of the country. Decades later, in an Australian city that has fallen on hard times, Caddy is camped by the Maribyrnong River, living on small change from odd jobs, ersatz vodka and…

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[tsanasreads]

Formaldehyde by Jane Rawson

Formaldehyde by Jane Rawson is a weird book. I picked it up at Continuum because I've heard lots of good things about the author and because I was unlikely to see it in paperback form again any time soon. I have A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists in my TBR but haven't gotten around to it, so this was my first experience of Rawson's work.

Lives are turned upside down by a bureaucratic error in this Kafkaesque work of neo-absurdism.

This was, as I have already said, a weird book. I have to admit, I was expecting more speculative fiction than I got, but there wasn't zero. The story follows four people, two each twenty-two years apart, and some of the ways in which their lives intersect. There's Paul, whom one could call the main character, although the story doesn't really revolve around him. Paul's story starts when he finds himself declared dead although he clearly isn't (actually, this confused me for a little and had me thinking he might be a ghost or something), and leads him to embark upon trying to get the paperwork fixed so that he can exist again. Along the way, he meets a girl called Benjamin and has a brief fling with her. The other two characters, whose stories are mostly told twenty-two years earlier, are Paul's parents, Derek and Amy. The two women have the most speculative elements in their stories, surrounding Amy's pregnancy and Benjamin's age, but I probably shouldn't say more than that. The book masterfully ties the lives of four people together in unexpected ways. Although this is not quite the kind of book I would normally read, I enjoyed it. I am definitely interested in reading more of the author's work, although I imagine I will lean more towards more speculative stories than this one. Meanwhile, I recommend Formaldehyde to fans of absurdist or Kafkaesque stories. 4 / 5 stars

First published: 2015, Seizure Series: No. Format read: Paperback! Source: Purchased at Continuum from Slow Glass Books Challenges: Australian Women Writers Challenge Content imported from Blogger http://ift.tt/28PTjgF. If you would like to leave a comment, please do so at the aforementioned link.

[nanowrimo]

I Published My NaNoWriMo Novel! Jane Rawson on Busting Writing Blues and Deadly Flora

Australian Jane Rawson took part in her first NaNoWriMo back in 2000, when she was living in Oakland, California. Jane now lives in Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne, and works as an editor at the cool news site The Conversation. One of her NaNoWriMo manuscripts, A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, was just published. NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty pestered Jane to find out more about the book and her native land. 

Soon it will be Week 4 and this will be nothing but a horrible memory. And then you'll realise how much you miss it. You know how old parents tell new parents who haven't slept for six weeks because their horrible baby keeps screaming that they should enjoy this time because "they grow up so fast"? Well, that. But your screaming baby is your implausible plot and interchangeable characters.

What's the thing that surprised you most about the process of having your book published?

Getting the email saying that Transit Lounge wanted to publish my book. I really had to read it three times because I was thinking "this is a weird way to write a rejection letter." 

So, in one sentence, what is A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists about?

How memories and imaginary futures can be more important than so-called real life. 

Ooh. I like it. What's the premise of the story?

Caddy lives in a big western city in 2030. It's hot all the time, and only the wealthy have reliable water, power, housing and work. Caddy has lost her house and husband in an industrial accident, and is struggling to get by. Her friend Ray gets hold of some maps that let him travel into washed-up memories and imaginings.

He and Caddy mess around with them, and meet up with two kids Caddy made up; she wrote a short story set in 2007 where they were set a task to see all of America, 25' square by 25' square. When the kids discover that they and their quest are imaginary, they're understandably pretty pissed off.

If you were to use the time-honored Hollywood formula of "It's ____ meets ____" to pitch your book, how would you fill in those blanks?

Technically, it was "big glass of wine meets approaching deadline." 

Inspiration-wise, it's James Gleeson meets travel snobbery. But none of that would fly in a pitch meeting, so let's say it's Riddley Walker meets The Golden Compass but with a bit less grimness (have you read Riddley Walker? That thing is grim), more words you can understand, the same amount of drinking, and far fewer armoured bears. 

You are known primarily as an environmental journalist. How did your work covering the environment there in Melbourne, Australia seep into your novel?

It seems logical that my work on climate change would have informed my novel set in a climate-changed Melbourne but I wrote the book before I had this job. Let's say that my obsession with catastrophe has influenced both my writing and the work I choose to do.

You were one of the 140 people who took part in NaNoWriMo in 2000, and you attended the first-ever Thank God It's Over party. What are your favorite memories of those prehistoric days?

At the TGIO party, everyone had a section of their story strung up on a washing line so other people could read it. Actually, that might be all I remember. There was dancing! I remember there was some excellent dancing. Other than that, all I can say is that it was way cooler back then that it is now. (Actually, that's a total lie. I couldn't be more pleased that NaNo has grown to be a massive success. It's heartily deserved.)

Have you started on your next book? What's it about? And is it also a NaNoWriMo novel?

I have. I wrote the first 50,000 words of my 'current' novel in NaNo 2011. It's pretty much the opposite of Unmade Lists. It's set in Port Adelaide, Australia, in the late 19th century and is based on the life of my great, great grandfather, who was stuck on a shipwreck for 8 days without food or water. He was one of a small handful of survivors. I wanted to explore what it would be like living with post traumatic stress disorder before it had even been invented.

Is it true that every plant in Australia can be fashioned into a weapon?

I just tried to research this, and I cut myself.

[Interviewer's note: Right after sending me her answers, Jane went on a trip to Tasmania, where she was jabbed by a plant that ended up causing her finger to become infected. She blames the interviewer for this.]

[mary-journal-blog]

Don’t be too interested in material possessions; all your friends will earn more than you. If you want to write you just have to write, quite a lot, and find out if you actually like it (or are any good at it). Don’t use work or other obligations as an excuse not to write: cram writing into any spaces in your life you can find, don’t wait til you have time to ‘be a writer’. (I am terribly bad at following this advice.) For editors, read a lot of good writing: learn what it is you’re striving for and pay attention to the tricks that will get you there. And learn what passive voice is and why you want to avoid it.

Jane Rawson

More here.