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January 08, 2007

Little Known (and Largely Absent) Author's Third Novel Scores Third Aurealis Award Shortlisting

Hey folks--

Look here. HYDROGEN STEEL, my third novel, is now a finalist for the Best Australian Science Fiction Novel Aurealis Award for 2006.

So far I'm three for three, in that ORBITAL BURN and ECLIPSE were also finalists in the same category in their respective years. ECLIPSE, last year, actually won the big shiny award, much to my gobsmackedness. And here it could happen again, though I'm not optimistic.

The astute reader, who will have gone forth and checked out the Aurealis Awards website, will note that the shortlists in the various categories were announced some days ago. Such a reader might even wonder: why would an author wait such a long time to publicly mention such a great development?

Well, things have been pretty dismal here at Chez Bedford in recent times. My grandfather, John Fletcher, passed away in November, after a long illness. He was a top bloke, colourful, passionate, a vivid personality. When I was a kid, learning about writing novels, etc, he was a great source of encouragement, and read an awful lot of the utter drivel I'd been banging out.

His death hit me hard. It came at a time when I was feeling deeply disillusioned with writing. I was very depressed already over the failure of my most recent novel project, UMBRA, which, no matter what the hell I did or tried, continued resolutely sucking. I spent most of last year busting my arse over that thing, and in the end it was all for nought. I spent several weeks late last year trying to whomp up a rewrite plan, and got 30 pages of notes, but still could not muster an iota of enthusiasm for the thing. The whole time I felt like a very frustrated Dr Frankenstein, with a carefully stitched-together thing lying on the slab, waiting for a thunderstorm that never came. All you end up with is a big mess of rotting, stinky meat

The best thing that happened during this period was my psychiatrist telling me to stop waiting for the thunderstorm and just let the whole sorry thing go. For a couple of days after that, I felt pretty good, relieved, the proverbial weight had been lifted from the proverbial shoulders. And within a few days of that moment of liberation, I'd come up with an idea for a new book (more about that anon). The feeling of relief did not last. Even though I had an idea for a new book, and even though I felt actual excitement over it (something I never felt about the UMBRA rewrite project), the misery and gloom did not fully go away.

And of course, headaches. I get lots of headaches. They never quite go away. The pattern at the moment is for at least part of the day to be mostly okay, but then the headache kicks in around sunset, and just builds and builds during the evening. Sometimes it's still there in the morning, or turns up a bit later, as if it had just ducked out to get some coffee. Right now, at 9:20pm, it's here, in my head, grinding steadily away at me. I've just about given up taking painkillers, which rarely did anything to help anyway, and which, if you take enough of them, result in all kinds of wretched side-effects of their own, including depression!

At the moment my leading hypothesis about the cause of these headaches is side-effects of the antidepressant medication I take. I take these meds around 9-ish in the evening. They help me sleep, too, which is good. I'm wondering, though, if during the course of the day the level of the active ingredients in my blood drops, so that the headaches could be a sort of reaction against that. The only onion in the ointment, as far as this hypothesis goes, is that taking my meds at night when I've got a headache doesn't fix the headaches. Also, I do, about 50% of the time, wake up in the morning with the headache still going full-blast. I'm planning on changing my psych meds asap. See if that helps lift my overall dreadful mood.

Another miserable side-effects of the constant headaches: greatly reduced interest in reading books (and likewise most websites I used to read avidly). I've read, and I've counted to make sure, just three novels since August. The most recent was Clifford Simak's novel CITY (I loved the idea of an advanced dog-based civilisation in the far future). It's a top read, but it took me weeks and weeks to finish it. This is a wretched feeling. I love reading novels; it's one of the reasons I took up writing them in the first place. But when your head hurts every night just when you might otherwise pick up a bit of bedtime reading, it's easier to just turn the light off and watch TV.

Meanwhile, Christmas wasn't so good. To cut a long story short, my grandmother is currently in hospital after a health emergency that kicked in over Christmas. This involved my parents moving down to my grandmother's house to look after the place, and me moving into my parents' house to look after their place, and their two dogs. Michelle was left here, minding our place, and our dog and cockatiel. It was complicated. The whole Christmas period was very upsetting for the whole family, with everything going on. Currently it looks as though my grandmother will be okay, thankfully.

So what with everything going on, I've not been up to much, and certainly didn't feel like blogging about everything going on.

One real highlight in the midst of all this? SBS here in Oz has started showing brilliant Canadian comedy series, CORNER GAS. It's set in rural Saskatchewan, Canada, and even features that famous gag about the farmer watching his dog run away for three days, because it's so damn flat there--in the theme song! :) When Michelle and I visited Saskatchewan in '04, we heard that joke a lot from various people, including the ticket agent at Calgary Airport who heard we were heading for Saskatoon. Anyway, I don't know if it's because we've actually been there or what, but I'm getting a lot of enjoyment out of CORNER GAS. Must get a Dog River hockey jersey. Hmm.

Anyway, getting back to the Aurealis Awards: there's a big party being planned in Brisbane on 27 January. We can't justify what it would cost to go over there for the night of nights, so I expect I'll instead spend the evening the way I've spent the previous years' awards nights: checking email about once every minute or two.

Wish me luck!

Posted by adrian at January 8, 2007 07:36 PM

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