That question akin to asking, ‘Who am I?’  (Answer: How the bleep do I know?) I’m different in different circumstances. I change, I adapt, I filter, I use different language, I act differently, depending on what I’m doing and who I’m with – child, adult, work colleague, client, neighbour, shop-assistant-who-can’t-be-bothered-to-stop-gossiping-on-the-phone-and-serve-you, or [...]]]>

This emu has a kind of I-am-what-I-am, in-your-face kind of style, don't you think?

So, what is my writing style?

That question akin to asking, ‘Who am I?’  (Answer: How the bleep do I know?) I’m different in different circumstances. I change, I adapt, I filter, I use different language, I act differently, depending on what I’m doing and who I’m with – child, adult, work colleague, client, neighbour, shop-assistant-who-can’t-be-bothered-to-stop-gossiping-on-the-phone-and-serve-you, or by myself.

What I do and how I do it might change from year to year.

Yes, people can have a distinctive writing style.  If they write in the same style, on the same subject matters, they can be easy to spot.  Such as Stephen King’s horror novels. But styles are not always easy to pick. There have been hoaxes, where people send in the writing of famous authors to agents/publishers – only to have those stories rejected.

You can’t always pick ‘em.

And if someone writes for both the middle grade market and the young adult market, they are obviously going to choose a different style for each. You cannot use the same sentence structures, word choices, themes etc for different age groups.

I have read a much-published author say that her ‘voice’ changes to suit the book.  That makes a lot of sense. If you were writing a series of mystery books, your books might well carry the same style, voice and tone. But if you write in different genres, or in the POV (point of view) of different characters, the ‘voice’ of the book may change to suit.

Room, Emma Donaghue

For example, in the book, ROOM, by Emma Donaghue, a five year old boy tells the story and it is his voice that comes across clearly in the story. The language is very simple.  The boy even calls the furniture in the room by name.

Ma leans out of Bed to switch on Lamp, he makes everything light up whoosh.

The knife of never letting go, Patrick Ness

Similarly, The knife of never letting go, by Patrick Ness , also written in the POV of a young boy (though older than the boy in ROOM) is written in a style that could only work for a book like this.

The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got much to say. About anything.

As a teenager, I almost always wrote in third-person. And weird stories, seriously weird. I saw a few of them again recently – and yanno, they weren’t all that bad. Not anywhere near as good as the stories of the teens at inkpop though. If you read some of their stuff without looking first at their ages – you’ll be amazed. (You might even feel like stabbing yourself in the eye when you see how well thirteen-year-olds write these days.)

Check Winter Child out, by a thirteen year old inkpopper.

When I feel like typing out some of my old stuff, I might post it here. (Yeah, my stuff’s from back in the days when if you wrote something, you wrote it on paper, else battled the typewriter with the dinky ‘A’ key and zero editing capability.) But not today. Can’t be arsed to tell you the truth.

Anyway, I rarely wrote from the teen years to well, recent years.

I did write a short story around ten years back – which I sent to a magazine here in Australia. To my great shock, they took it and paid me for it. But at that time, fiction writing wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to become a social worker at that stage.  And so I studied for a diploma in social work. (I still am passionate about the social issue here and around the world. But I figured out that the hours I’d be working just weren’t compatible with being a single mother with two young children. The kids being my priority, I couldn’t continue that path.)

I started writing for a parenting website, learning SEO and copywriting. And I loved it.

But an article I read while researching a story for Essential Baby put an idea in my mind that refused to go away.  I first wanted to write an insightful report – but later decided to explore the idea in a fiction format. But it was such a far-reaching set of issues, that it was hard to pin down. It was important that the story come first, above the idea.

How should I write it?

Here are some writing samples:

ONE

Heat opened on the swamps like a cracked egg – once it broke there was no going back. The stink of mud and mosquito spray thickened in my nostrils. A spindly child nestled into the soft ground on her stomach, no older than six or seven. The metal bolts and fork of her slingshot glinted red in the first light of the sun. She drew back the rubber of the slingshot and fired a rock. A  thin screech of a swamp rat scratched the air. The girl hastened towards her catch, dress clinging around her knees.

TWO

The knife’s blade was sharp in my hand as I tugged it from my pocket.  My friends waited motionless in the river. Only their eyes were alive, expectant. In the moonlight they looked like dead trees, their hair tangled around their bodies in ropey vines. I drew the knife across my palm, pressing hard to make the cut. It stung like crazy – I guess  you need to cut deeper for you not to feel it. I held my fist in the air. A thin trail of blood zigzagged down my arm. Ezzy looked over with fierce eyes, giving a quick nod. Somehow I knew she’d be the first to take the knife after me.  Her frizzy dark hair skimmed the surface of the water as she ran the blade over her hand.

THREE

The deep orange sky was closing around the barge as it cruised across to Fraser Island. We sat on the jetty, willing captives of the surreal, syrupy light. We ruminated and raked over our favourite topic; camping at Fraser for a couple of weeks during the summer holidays. Nine fifteen and sixteen year olds; feral; free.  A dark breeze whipped out from under the jetty, buffeting our hair, whiffs of the brackish ocean mingling with the moist, spicy scents coming off our hot chips and sauce. I pulled my jumper over my hands. The last of the whale watching boats were leisurely pulling towards the jetty.  Jumping to my feet, I waved everyone a quick goodbye. I heard a chorus of  “Bye Ro” as I walked away. Night was settling into the streets ahead. My foot kicked a solid object on the footpath. I glanced down to see a stiffened magpie, staring glassy-eyed upwards at the sky.

FOUR

Every time  he sees the girl, that greasy, abundant summer squeezes through the pores of his skin. That summer. The end of ’37, sprawled in back seat of a Greenways bus, banging out some Jack Johnson and Xavier Rudd from two decades ago; songs that tasted like freedom; warm beer dribbling down his chin every time a wheel hit a pothole, his head swelled as big as a prize watermelon, desperately trying to look like his senses weren’t jamming every time she glanced his way. She, in singlet and mini-skirt, ignores the dark blood filling his brain, carelessly swinging her long untanned legs over the seat opposite, Botticelli hair catching a halo of light as she leans her head back against the window.

What is sad is that the above are all beginnings of the same book.

Still, it’s the idea underpinning that is the most important to me. The last sample is the first time I sat down to wrestle the idea into a story. The idea remains important to me, and seriously, I don’t mind how long it takes.

I also realised that I didn’t have to find a writing style. I just needed to find the style that suited the story.  If it meant changing from third-person to -first-person, so be it. It was uncomfortable at first, writing in first. I find third much easier.

At the same time, since putting the first chapters of the book online in 2009 (as a short story) a year later there’s been books coming out (about to come out – in early 2011) with similar themes. So while I say it’s good to take your time with a book – if you have a good idea, go for it (and don’t put it online! At least, don’t put any important ideas of your book online) Am happy the say ‘the main idea’ has not yet been explored in any YA book or other book I’ve yet seen or heard of.

I thought I’d finished, but realised over Easter I’d taken the world of my book a little too far. So I’m taking it back a few shades, not quite as far back as the world of the book was when I first started, but just a little further back. I want the world to be realistic and convincing.

My writing style?

Meh, it changes.

It’s taken me this long to realise that I have a real problem.

A year or so ago, I decided to look up why I have so much trouble recognising faces. My eyesight is good and I genuinely want to remember people.  To my surprise, I found other people who have the same [...]]]>

It’s taken me this long to realise that I have a real problem.

A year or so ago, I decided to look up why I have so much trouble recognising faces. My eyesight is good and I genuinely want to remember people.  To my surprise, I found other people who have the same problem, to different degrees. It’s called face blindness. If someone has a severe case of it, they’ll fail to recognise their own family. It’s formally called, prosopagnosia.

I have it only very slightly. I may not recognise you if you:

change your hairstyle

change your hair colour

are somewhere I don’t expect you to be

are with a group of people I don’t expect you to be with

are wearing different clothes than you normally wear

are in a crowd

And sometimes, I just won’t recognise you even if you look exactly the same as last time I saw you and you’re in exactly the same place. I do recognise people I know well, in any situation. (Although not always.)

I can’t picture a face in my mind – not even my own.

I have trouble following a movie if there are two female actors with the same colour hair and hairstyle (which  happens more often than you’d think) or when there are lots of men (men generally have short hair in a similar style.)

I love it when people are easily recognisable – such as a distinctive hair colour or hairstyle. If you have a distinctive look, for the love of prosopagnosia, don’t change it! Or, as Billy Joel sings, I love you just the way you are. Don’t go trying some new fashion, Don’t change the color of your hair … Oooooh … ooooh … (Video below ) I really do love you just the way you are.

Recently, a childcare worker at my child’s preschool came back after a long holiday. I had talked with her often. But on the day I saw her again, I didn’t know who she was. But my four-year-old did.

I’ll almost never notice someone I know in a crowd. I just won’t see them. They have to come up to me and say hello first. It’s hard, because there’s no quick explanation you can give  for ‘ignoring someone’ that’s easily understood.  And if you said you had prosopagnosia, they’d probably think you made up  a disease that doesn’t exist.

I can get anxious in a social situation where it’s polite to remember people.

I used to work in promotions – which was great – I could work within school hours and the pay was at entertainers rates. But parts of the job drove me nuts.

This is me (far left) at work on Oktoberfest. (Twelve years ago.) As part of my job, when it was either the ‘spin the barrel’ or ‘bingo’ games, I had to take a prize to a person in a hall of 300-odd people. I’d seen the person that won, but by the time I went to collect the prize and hand it to the person, I’d completely forgotten their face.

I learned to take note of the clothes they were wearing and the exact position of the table they were at.

Previously, when I failed to recognise someone I knew, I put it down to not trying hard enough. If I tried harder at memorising people’s features, I wouldn’t have this problem.

And I tried. I’m sure at times people thought I was staring weirdly at them. Or perhaps they thought I needed my eyesight checked.

It’s actually not just faces. It’s also cars and places. I have trouble recognising cars and I get lost walking around the corner.

I admire people who can meet a group of people for the first time and remember their names and faces right off the bat. There are mothers of children in my son’s class, who know every child’s name and face.

It’s a skill I struggle with.

I love the internet – it was made for people like me. People online are where you expect them to be and they look the same everyday (Except when they update a photo – and then it’s just a matter of getting used to a new one.)

They might be on Facebook, Twitter and forums with the same photo. Yeah!

So, if someone you’ve met doesn’t recognise you the next time they see you – don’t immediately think that person didn’t think you worthy of being remembered.

They might remember YOU well (the person who are you are), just not what you look like.

Hey, Billy Joel wrote a song for people with face blindness

Don’t go changing, to try and please me
You never let me down before
Don’t imagine you’re too familiar
And I don’t see you anymore
I wouldn’t leave you in times of trouble
We never could have come this far
I took the good times, I’ll take the bad times
I’ll take you just the way you are

Don’t go trying some new fashion
Don’t change the color of your hair
You always have my unspoken passion
Although I might not seem to care

I don’t want clever conversation
I never want to work that hard
I just want someone that I can talk to
I want you just the way you are.

I need to know that you will always be
The same old someone that I knew
What will it take till you believe in me
The way that I believe in you.

I said I love you and that’s forever
And this I promise from the heart
I could not love you any better
I love you just the way you are.

In the past couple of weeks, there have been heated discussions on this theme.

The issue I have with it is – whether anyone likes it or not, women [...]]]>

Two Female Soldiers Repair a Fuel Cell on a F-16 Fighting Falcon.

It’s hard to believe that in 2011, the debate over whether women belong in war zones – whether as soldiers or journalists – is still raging.

In the past couple of weeks, there have been heated discussions on this theme.

The issue I have with it is – whether anyone likes it or not, women ARE in war zones. In various parts of the world, at different times, they’ve lived in them. As much as some would like to believe that women are generally kept protected, it is just not true.

Some think women don’t belong on the front line and don’t belong in war – but there’s really only one way that kind of thinking can head: Women should be protected to the point they must stay in their homes and not occupy public spaces.

Women should have the freedom to travel any public space without fear of attack due to their gender.

Recently, journalist Lara Logan suffered an attack by a mob of between 200 and 300 men – an attack that continued for 40 minutes. The male bodyguard and male cameramen who were with her were not attacked (and were also not able to save Lara, due to the there being so many men involved.) She was set upon for the mere fact of being female.

Ms. Logan, a CBS News correspondent, was in the square preparing a report for “60 Minutes” on Feb. 11 when the celebratory mood suddenly turned threatening. She was ripped away from her producer and bodyguard by a group of men who tore at her clothes and groped and beat her body. “For an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands,” Ms. Logan said in an interview with The New York Times. She estimated that the attack involved 200 to 300 men.

Before the assault, Ms. Logan said, she did not know about the levels of harassment and abuse that women in Egypt and other countries regularly experienced. “I would have paid more attention to it if I had had any sense of it,” she said. “When women are harassed and subjected to this in society, they’re denied an equal place in that society. Public spaces don’t belong to them. Men control it. It reaffirms the oppressive role of men in the society.”

CBS reporter recounts a ‘merciless’ assault

But it isn’t the case that if women stay protected and out of public places, they will not be assaulted.

War and systemetic attacks come to women and children, regardless.

During the Liberian civil war, “it was the men who inflicted harm on women, and most of the time the sufferers were women and children,” said Annie Abraham, 45, the commanding officer of the Indian unit that just finished its rotation and was replaced by new recruits. “When you have male peacekeepers, you get the feeling that the women are more intimidated. Women aren’t as aggressive as the men. Women don’t speak as loudly as the men.”

Article

In an interesting move by the United Nations, women are being  trained as peace keepers – for their female attributes. There is an all-female United Nations police unit from India.

A female approach to peacekeeping

When female soldiers are present, the situation is closer to real life, and as a result the men tend to behave,” said Gerard J. DeGroot, a history professor at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who has written books about women in the military. “Any conflict where you have an all-male army, it’s like a holiday from reality. If you inject women into that situation, they do have a civilizing effect.

It’s an interesting concept, where the state of being female is a valuable asset in a war zone or place ravaged by war.

Recently, the Australian show, Insight, posed the question, do women belong in the armed forces? And should women be on the front line, in hand-to-hand combat situations? Former  captain, Israeli army, Ted Lapkin, called it ’lunacy’.

TED LAPKIN:  This is a debate that has been raging for some years now. I have never heard one of the exponents of the ‘women in combat’ side of the argument say that somehow, this is going to enhance the war fighting side of the military. It’s an institution that is unique and separate and apart from any other facit of human society – It’s a killing machine. In the military you receive medals and promotions for doing things that would earn you a cell with your name on it in civilian life – killing people. Therefore the entire institution is organised according to a much more rigorous set of behavioural expectations, regulations in order to prepare it so it can function on the battlefield, which is very brutal. I would argue that the principles of equal opportunity that are valid and quite applicable at the NAB or in ‘city street’, in a civilian work place are not applicable in the military.

news.sbs.com.au

 I understand his thought pattern – that women have the wrong ‘mindset’ for battle. He’s saying women are softer, are nuturers, and shouldn’t be expected to become killing machines. So, for a woman to fight must be ‘against her nature’ – women can only be victims, they must never fight back or be the aggressors. But why then, do so many women want to join the armed forces? If it truly was against their nature to defend and fight, why would any woman sign up for it?

It’s true that if you pit a women against a man in hand-to-hand combat, most times, the woman would lose. But as it was pointed out in the show, hand-to-hand combat situations are not as frequent as they were in the first two world wars.

Lapkin says, ‘I have never heard one of the exponents of the ‘women in combat’ side of the argument say that somehow, this is going to enhance the war fighting side of the military.’

But as I posted above, Gerard J. DeGroot, a history professor who has researched women in war, says, ‘Any conflict where you have an all-male army, it’s like a holiday from reality.’ Perhaps it is true that men and women balance each other and we need both in conflict.

In Mexico, (Ciadid Jaurez) and Guatemala, there’s a culture of violence against women who step outside their homes. Hundreds of young girls and women have been taken, tortured and murdered – then tossed into fields and garbage heaps as a warning to others.

Savagely tortured and murdered in 2001, Esmeralda is among nearly 500 teenagers and young women — factory workers, shop clerks, prostitutes — who have been murdered here since 1993. Hundreds more have simply vanished.

For years, Mexican authorities have promised an end to the slaughter and the disappearances. Movies have been filmed about the butchery, books and countless articles written, protest marches marched. Under intense public pressure, police investigations were launched, task forces formed, suspects arrested.

It’s all been nearly for naught.

The tortured women of Mexico

Femicide is a war against women. Thousands are killed, raped, tortured because they are women – especially if they are women out in the domain of men (public spaces). In Guatemala, authorities do little about this femicide. It isn’t seen as war by many, because it isn’t being faught on a battlefield, or doesn’t involve men against men.

Franco described typical cases, in which, women may first be abducted, subjected to severe beatings, rape, sexual mutilation, perverse torture, or dismemberment then killed and subsequently deposited in public areas. “These are young women who don’t fit a traditional mold. They are mothers working to support their children, young girls putting themselves through school and many of them, professional and independent” she told The Raritan Journal, later adding, “Because they assert themselves into public spaces, they’re specifically being targeted.”

Guatemalan Women’s Activist Rallies Support

I don’t think you can separate women and war. War doesn’t happen on some far off planet, fought by men against men. Women and children do not always stay protected. Women do not not always want to stay protected – some wish to fight. And women can bring qualities to the armed forces – a balance.  I believe we need women in all areas – especially as leaders in the fight for peace, alongside men. And hopefully, there’s better ways than wars to restore peace.

On the TV show, How I Met Your Mother, Lily (Alyson Hannigan) hates the word moist. She finds it unbearable when spoken.

Okay, I don’t have [...]]]> Almost everyone has words they hate.*  Innocent words – but words that grind down your spine or render you practically catatonic until the offending word isn’t being spoken anymore.

On the TV show, How I Met Your Mother, Lily (Alyson Hannigan) hates the word moist. She finds it unbearable when spoken.

Okay, I don’t have any words like that.

Except for panties.

Ugh, shudder. For some reason, I see panties as something a little girl would say and wear, and when that word is used to describe women’s underwear in a sexy way, it seems, er, wrong.

And words ending in … is.

Words ending in is are icky.

Proboscis

Diagnosis

Halitosis

Cyanosis

Mastitis (And a host of medical conditions all ending with ‘is’)

Piss

I’m pretty sure the yuck factor for me comes from a few words that are the names for intimate body parts (which I won’t list in case that kicks me off the safe sites internet filter )

How juvenile of me.

I do like:

Oasis

Photosynthesis

Metropolis

So I guess is words are not all bad

What does this have to do with writing?

Well, I find myself using words other than those I don’t like. Which is a good thing for me, but not in general.

And I can’t avoid the is in this now can I?

*I base the statement ‘Almost everyone has words they hate’ on zero research.  Because I like throwing unsubstantiated figures out there

The only news or views you could read came via a newspaper or magazine. If you wanted to write articles, you become a journalist or  professional writer.

Now, blogs are online in the millions. You can publish your thoughts, interviews, journal, [...]]]> The commercially printed word has, up until very recent times, been controlled by a few.

The only news or views you could read came via a newspaper or magazine. If you wanted to write articles, you become a journalist or  professional writer.

Now, blogs are online in the millions. You can publish your thoughts, interviews, journal, opinion – just about anything at all – for anyone to read. Children, stay-at-home-mothers, homeschoolers, hobbyists, artists, amateur artists and photographers, religious groups – and last but not least – people who just want to rant, can have their writing out there.

And it was previously the same with books – if you wanted to write a book and have it published, you had to pass through a gatekeeper. I have to admit that I LOVE it that people are now free to publish what they choose. It’s like the blogging revolution all over again. Self-published (indie) books are on the rise – as traditional paper books or ebooks.

Therefore, I enjoyed reading this post by Jenny Bent of The Bent Agency.

Today, I am somewhat gleefully celebrating the fact that electronic publishing is really blowing apart the thinking that we in publishing somehow know better and have better taste than the average reader.

When I read Twilight, I found it a little flowery and purple – but – I knew I would have loved it if I’d read it as a teenager.  I would probably have been thrilled by the sparkliness of Edward. I thought the story had a fresh take on the vampire theme.  Of course, at this age, my jaded heart couldn’t thrill to Twilight. I can imagine why so many agents knocked it back. But I’m not the reading public and I’m not millions of teenage girls and my opinion of Twilight matters naught.

But then, as Jessica Faust at Bookends said in a post in January 09, certain books land at the virtual doorsteps of agents and are shaped into the books that become bestsellers (and may not have been bestsellers without the extra oompf.)

What I think all readers need to know is that what one agent and one editor could do for a book another might not. In other words, just because a book was a bestseller doesn’t mean it would be a bestseller had it landed in the hands of another agent or another publishing house. Part of what makes that happen is the publisher’s enthusiasm and vision for the book. Another publisher might have had another vision (a different cover, a different marketing strategy, a different position on the list, etc).

So could Twilight have turned out much differently in the hands of a different agent/publisher and not been a bestseller? Interesting to ponder!

At this point in time, self-publishing a book is still frowned about by many as a ‘shortcut’.  I believe it to be simply part of the ‘inevitable’.  People can self-publish, easily and cheaply these days, and so they will. Just like blogging. (Though not exactly like blogging. After all, anyone can whip up a blog in minutes. A full-length novel or non-fiction book takes much time and effort. Many (most?) people who start a book will never finish it.)

It isn’t just indie authors who are saying positive things about self-publishing – it’s also quite a few agents and people within the publishing business.

In the short time I’ve been reading about self-publishing, it seems that the reasons people self-publish are extremely varied. Certainly, many don’t see it as a shortcut – the reasons I’ve seen so far include:

• as a business venture
• as a creative outlet
• because they were unhappy with decisions their current agent or publisher made with their career/books
• because their agent has been unsucessful in finding a publisher for their book
• to publish a backlist of books (the books’ rights having reverted to them.)
• because they believe they can make more money self-publishing with their particular book/s
• because they want to retain a greater percentage of royalties for their ebooks
• because traditional paths to publication didn’t work
• for their families or children

Of course, at the moment, if someone decides to self-publish a book, they will invariably be asked ‘why’. But no one would ask a blogger why they started up a blog – they are more likely to simply say, ‘good for you’.

Everyone has seen a blog with incorrect (or even terrible) grammar and spelling. Everyone has a seen a blog with information so poor you’d swear they wrote it upsidedown on the nose of an aeroplane in a snowstorm. Will we see self-published books that are the equaivalent of those blogs? Most probably. But do you spend time reading sub-standard blogs? No? I’m assuming that the sub-standard books will be filtered out just the same. You can read samples of a book online and decide whether to buy or not.

Blogging is an established, indie past time – and for some, a source of income. The self-publishing of books is gaining ground and becoming more familiar – and likely to rapidly change over the coming couple of years.

I admit to liking the thought of a book being through the traditional process of a publisher – with all the editing (structural edit, line edit, spell and grammar check etc etc) included. A blog seems informal and book on the other hand, is something I’m hopefully going to be invested in for the time I’m reading it. I want it to be without distraction.

I haven’t read a lot of self-published books, but I have see those without errors, so it certainly isn’t the case that all are full of errors. I have to mention here that it’s often pointed out that Amanda Hocking’s self-published Young Adult books are full of errors and still sold like hotcakes. Her stories obviously trumped.

Perhaps new models will emerge for indie authors. It will be interesting to see where the indie/self-publishing rage goes from here.

I only just watched the movie, Slumdog Millionaire during the Easter break. No idea how I missed seeing this before.

At the end I watched the special features, which included the director etc talking about the making of the film. One thing that was said ruined a pretty important aspect of the movie [...]]]>

I only just watched the movie, Slumdog Millionaire during the Easter break. No idea how I missed seeing this before.

At the end I watched the special features, which included the director etc talking about the making of the film. One thing that was said ruined a pretty important aspect of the movie for me.

But more about that later.

The film is wonderfully done. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a movie about the eighteen year old Jamal who is a contestant on the show ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’. (Indian version)

Jamal and his brother, Salim, were orphaned on the streets near their home when rightwing Hindus rushed from a train to kill the Muslims. They meet another street child – Latika – and Jamal wants her to be the ‘third musketeer’ in their group. They endure terrible hardships and witness shocking things. They are children of the ‘slums’ and no one believes that eighteen year old Jamal could possibly know the answers on the game show – and he is tortured to tell how he knows the answers.

Slumdog Millionaire is also the love story – against impossible odds – between Jamal and Latika.

I especially liked how the construct of the ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ show allowed the story to be told in flashbacks. Jamal knows the answer to each question because the answer is burned into his memory.

The film is intense and gripping – child prostitutes and child street beggars populate the cities of the film – and we follow Jamal as he grows from child to teenager and attempts to hold onto everything that makes him human. There’s an authentic feel about the sets and characters. We want Jamal to succeed and find what he calls his destiny.

After the film, I watched the features. Fascinating hearing how the crew would be filming a scene in a location, only to come back the next day to finish the scene and find that walls had been constructed or torn down. The pace of building in India is apparently frenetic.

They spoke of casting Jamal. They were shown pictures of muscle-bound Indian men but they were not right for the part of Jamal. He had to be ordinary. And I liked that.

Then they began talking about Latika (Freida Pinto) and how she was cast. In so many words, they said it was important that she be heart-stoppingly beautiful, a woman you’d cross the oceans to find.

That’s when my jaw dropped. My thinking was that Jamal would have searched for Latika because of the bond and love forged when they were street children in the slums. They endured hell together.

Wouldn’t you think it be important that Latika be an ordinary girl too?

Come to think of it, Jamal and Salim’s mother was also beautiful.

It all just seemed out of place in this very raw, intense and authentic film. It doesn’t tarnish for me what was an incredible film – but I couldn’t see it again without thinking of the notion that physical beauty for women equals a higher value.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy is the story a man and his son, escaping the wintry north in a post-apocalyptic world.

The world is dying in all possible ways – the land, the animals,  the people and the humanity of people. How can the man and his [...]]]> Saw the movie, had to read the book.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy is the story a man and his son, escaping the wintry north in a post-apocalyptic world.

The world is dying in all possible ways – the land, the animals,  the people and the humanity of people. How can the man and his son survive and keep their humanity at the same time? With nothing left to eat, many people are driven to use other people to use as food stocks. It’s easy to imagine this really happening in the same circumstances.

I was interested to see how the book managed to portray the depth of the bond between the father and son and also the bleak, eerie landscape.

The film was shot with different lenses to make the world hazy, dark and desolate – which deftly shows the horrific emptiness.

In the book, the man and boy are referred to as simply that – man and boy. They could be any parent and child.

They went back up the hill and made their camp in the dry dirt under the rocks and the man sat with his arms around the boy trying to warm him. Wrapped in the blankets, watching the nameless dark come to enshroud them.

The writing lends a deceptively simple rhythm to the story – sparse but intense. There is nothing good left in the world – just destroyed forests and a smoky sky, and people who will sacrifice anything to survive another day. The dark is ‘nameless’, just as the boy and man are nameless in the story. The world has changed – has lost its names and streets and cities. The trees are ‘charred and limbless’. The shape of a city ‘stood in grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste.’

The man and boy speak little. They’re on a journey and the risks and hardships are enormous. When the father speaks in the beginning, it’s very short and to the point – ‘Yes, he said. I can’ and ‘Yes, the man said. I know.’ But at the same time, the fondness for the boy are in the words.

The father keeps going for the son.  The boy is his only hope and light in the darkness. He says of the boy, ‘If he is not the word of God God never spoke.’ It’s a beautiful line that expresses how the father sees the boy.

With these images and ideas, McCarthy has described the world and story that became the bleakly atmospheric film. It’s all there in the book and the film followed it faithfully.

I loved both the film and the book – very much modern classics.