The Sign of the Red Rat

This week I finished writing my first television pilot – an adaptation of Ambit and Snarl. Well, the first part of it, anyway. I’ve sent it off to my agent. A friend suggested it could make a good animated series, and I agree. Let’s see what happens!

I’ve also recently had another tattoo applied; the largest and most detailed one yet. Here’s a picture of it – not a great one, but I’ve found it’s pretty hard to photograph your own shoulder in the mirror.

The Red Rat

Why, yes. Yes, it did hurt. A lot.

 

Can anyone guess what it is?

No? Well, okay, it’s pretty obscure. In The Dark Griffin, Arren and Bran meet up at a tavern called the Sign of the Red Rat. This is the tavern’s sign, which I designed. It was then redesigned by the tattooist, a cool guy with a very impressive beard. I thought he did a great job. In any case, this tattoo combines two things I love: rats and beer! It also symbolises something.

The line just above it is a comet. The Red Rat is from the beginning of the series – the place where it all began. The comet appears in the very final trilogy, and is seen by some as an omen of the end of the world. So this tattoo is a symbol of both endings and beginnings.

Plus it involves rats, beer and pub signs, and the tattooist added a couple of swords, so it’s just plain cool even if the symbolism is a tad esoteric.

~KJT, gearing up to write another novel, and trying to obey the instruction to not scratch her shoulder

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Rememer, Remember

…the fifth of November!

Why do I remember it? Because it’s my parents’ wedding anniversary! This year is their 30th. Yes, of course Dad is giving Mum pearls. I even helped him pick them out. In a nice little coincidence, they were married in the same year as the school where I now work was founded, having met at the university just over the road. It’s funny how these things come around.

Tomorrow I shall be throwing my first ever party in my new home. Yes, of course we’ll be watching V for Vendetta.

On Friday I’m going to get back to some serious work on the writing, and will be starting work on my first television pilot. Stay tuned! No pun intended, of course.

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Lights, Camera… Action?

Today I watched Thor: The Dark World and loved it. I highly recommend it. Yes, in 3D – I’m one of those people who actually likes 3D. That higher framerate thing didn’t do it for me when I watched the first hour of The Hobbit, though.

 

Well, it’s been a while since I had any serious news to share here, but today is the day to end the dry spell.

I recently went to Sydney, where I had a meeting with my Australian agent, Tara. She had something rather interesting to say, and it’s ultimately changed my focus as a writer somewhat.

Everyone who’s ever tried to get published knows that it’s very hard. It always has been, but recently, with book sales down by 30% across the board, it’s become even harder. So at this meeting Tara asked me if I would consider going into screenwriting.

As it happens I majored in screenwriting at university, and as regular readers will know I go to the cinema almost constantly. It’s one of my favourite things to do, and I adore film in general. And though I don’t watch much television I’ve recently started getting into various series on DVD – Sherlock and Breaking Bad are two favourites (I swear, not knowing what really happened at the end of Season Two of Sherlock is driving me mad). I had played around with scriptwriting in the past but had never seriously considered it as an option. But when Tara said she thought I might be suited for it, I decided to give it a shot. I’ve now written a film adaptation of The Dark Griffin, and was surprised to find that the format actually did suit me quite well. Next I’m going to try my hand at writing a television pilot, and though there are no guarantees the whole thing has me very excited.

One of the best ways to make your life worthwhile is to find a dream and chase it. I once had a dream to publish a novel, and I managed to make that dream become a reality. But I have always dreamed of something else as well: that one day I would see something I wrote on the screen. Previously I assumed that one of my books would eventually be picked up and adapted, but now it might be that I’ll be writing the script myself. It begins here, with a notebook full of scrawled handwriting, but it could end in Hollywood.

I’m aware all this sounds a tad grandiose. But if you aim high you’ll try harder. Before you can do something, you have to dream it.

Wish me luck! I’ll post further developments here, naturally.

~KJT, dreaming grand dreams and sporting a horrible sunburn

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A Panel at the UC

A couple of weeks ago I was given the honour of introducing a discussion panel involving no less a pair of fellow authors than Garth Nix and Morris Gleitzman, both of whom are very big names here in Australia. The panel moderator was an ABC radio personality named Genevieve Jacobs, and she and the two authors were joined by four highschoolers – one of whom I already knew from my old job (hence my comment about “a very different red shirt” – I wore a uniform for that job).

Anyway, the whole thing was videoed and is now on YouTube for all to see. You can also see a speech given by my mentor Belle Alderman, who trained me in the noble art of archiving and who was the one who asked me to get involved in the event. It was a fantastic evening all round.

~KJT, feeling a little self-conscious but proud

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“F*ck Destiny”

Early in September I got some very bad news. Just what that was won’t be discussed here, but what’s important is that it was the kind of bad news that makes you very angry. And, unfortunately, it was that particularly bad kind of anger where I wasn’t angry with anyone or anything – I was just angry. Undirected anger is the worst because there’s no-one you can really take it out on without being a jerk.

Fortunately, once I had fumed and sulked for a while, a new idea popped into my head, and I took a liking to it. In a very pig-headed, surly mood, I sat down and channeled my anger into doing something useful: in other words, I wrote a book.

Yesterday I finished that book and sent it off to my agents. The new book is completely unrelated to the griffin series, or anything else I’ve written before. Given the state of mind I was in when I wrote it, it is unsurprisingly a satire. While writing it I made a point of not doing any research, not thinking anything through any further than was absolutely necessary, and generally just going for broke. At one point I actually flipped a coin to decide what would happen next.

All that must sound horribly self-indulgent, and in a way it is, but only up to a point. Long experience has taught me that not trying very hard often produces the best results. Even if I’m wrong in this case, at least I enjoyed the process.

Anyway, the new book is called Ambit and Snarl, and the tagline is “F*ck destiny” – without the censoring, of course. I try and avoid using curse words here since kids visit this site. But it must already be obvious that Ambit and Snarl is not a children’s book. I certainly wasn’t in the mood for pandering to anyone when I wrote it, and by gods it was liberating.

~KJT, who is quite visibly going grey at 27, but managed to be mistaken for a 14-year-old last week.

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1940s Insight

During my recent holiday in Parkes I visited one of my favourite places to go: a used bookshop. As someone who loves books and is naturally inclined to collect things, I always jump at the chance to come across anything rare or unusual.

This particular used bookshop turned out to be well worth the visit: I bought two books, both of which were ultimately very rewarding purchases. The first was a trashy-looking book about Jeffery Dahmer, which I thought would provide some low quality entertainment on my holiday. Instead it turned out to be a very insightful, fascinating examination of a very diseased mind, and I’ve already read it twice with fascination.

The other book I bought was a slim hardcover volume – a book from the 1940s called The Writer’s Responsibility, which I bought on an impulse because I thought it would look cool on my shelf. However, I’ve now started reading it and have found it to be a very good book; an intelligent look at the way people wrote during the author’s time, and a discussion of his views on what makes a good novel. It’s particularly interesting because when it was written people like Earnest Hemingway were still alive and working, and the author talks about them without any of the baggage we have today since their books hadn’t been labelled “classics” at the time and were just the latest novels from popular authors.

Anyway, I have a feeling it would be hard for anyone else to find a copy of this book for themselves, so I thought I’d transcribe a passage from it which I liked. I’ve found I agree with pretty much everything the author says, but this part here finally made me see why (aside from natural prudishness) I’ve never felt the need to write a sex scene in any of my books:

If you are writing about a bore – a teller, let us say, of interminable and pointless stories – you defeat your purpose of you bring to your portrait of him a complete and literal transcription of his talk; you yourself become a bore… In all descriptive writing, whether of travel or people or food or sex, there is so much which the reader can supply himself, or which does does concern him, that a certain amount of selection and suggestion strengthens the picture and brings it into sharper focus; otherwise it is weakened and blurred by an excessive amount of detail.

“That is why the insistence of some writers upon the reader’s presence whenever one of their characters feels the need to perform a natural bodily function becomes so tiresome. We are all aware of Nature’s little imperatives, and the writer does not need to labour them; we are not all so pompous as the judge whose brother said of him that he should always have, in plain view beside him on the bench, a roll of toiled paper, to remind him that he was a man like any other“.

~J Donald Adams, The Writer’s Responsibility, 1946

The book has all kinds of interesting insights like this one, and I’m enjoying it a lot. It’s also entertaining that the author doesn’t shy away from calling books like Finnegan’s Wake a waste of time and talent (specifically, he says that there was absolutely no point in making it unreadable – Joyce was just stroking his own ego. It’s nice to know at least one contemporary felt the same way about that sort of thing as I do).

~KJT, just over halfway through writing a novel with an unprintable tagline

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