Saturday, November 24, 2012

Meeting people for the first time on the worst day of their lives.

That's something I often say to people when they ask me why I left the police force.

This week I wrote about that and expanded on it for The Drum in a piece that I submitted, not really sure if it worked or it didn't.

I couldn't even come up with a title. The editors at The Drum called it: Giving up the licence to kill.

I was a bit unprepared for how it spread. The following afternoon I found myself talking with Richard Glover about it on ABC702 Drive. I've been fortunate to have had the opportunity to chat on regional radio when The Old School came out, but this was different. When you talk about your book you have that distance, they're characters, it's fiction, but this was personal, it touched on real people and real tragedies and I was terribly nervous.

I walked out knowing I'd been talking for close to twenty minutes but, rather like when you walk out of a job interview you're not entirely sure of what you've been saying.

The piece was a response to the number of incidents involving the police and the use of both deadly force and alternatives to deadly force that have ended badly in recent times. Even today, as I write this, the news is full of discussion about another incident.

There's one thing which I didn't address in The Drum piece which I might add here. When police do use their firearm, people have often asked me why it is they don't just shoot to wound someone. Wing them. Shoot their arm so they can't stab. Or their hand so they drop their gun. Or their leg so they can't escape.

There's a very good reason.

An arm, or a hand, is a few inches wide. In the sort of circumstances where police use their weapons people are generally not standing stock still. Their movements are frantic. The police involved are probably shaking with adrenaline as well. The kind of sharp shooting that involves hitting a small moving target with pinpoint precision in a frantic scenario isn't even seen in Olympic sharp shooting competitions. And cops are not Olympic level shooters and they are not shooting in Olympic controlled conditions.

There's a basic brutal reason police are taught to aim and shoot at the body mass. It's because it's the biggest thing. It's to maximize the likelihood of hitting the target and the target alone, not anybody else because, as I explain in The Drum, if a police officer takes out their firearm, a really specific set of circumstances have to exist. It's not there to scare, to warn, or to wound, but to stop someone.

Today is another day I'm glad the most stressful things I had to do was give a talk at a library, write a blog entry or two, and prepare a lecture for tomorrow. And I have the good fortune to know that if I stuff up any of them no one is going to die.

Not at all stalkery ... no, really.

Last Thursday I had the great pleasure of being in the question asking chair and having Ian Rankin in the question answering chair at a great event for Shearers Bookshop. Leichhardt Council generously hosted the event at the Town Hall, for free, with added wine and nibbles and around three hundred people duly turned up.



It was a lot of fun doing the research to prepare for the event. Took me back to my MA exegesis and the conference papers I wrote one of which, Crime Fiction and The Politics of Place: The Post 9/11 Sense of Place in Sara Partesky and Ian Rankin ended up as a chapter in The Millennial Detective.

I finally found some clips of Ian Rankin's Evil Thoughts, as it's not made it to OZ. I highly recommend the scene of Mr Rankin being exorcised by a sad-eyed old priest at the Vatican.

It was a marvelous atmosphere, and Ian Rankin was an engaging and generous interviewee, particularly as I had attended his event the previous day at Stanton Library where I was directed to fill up a front seat and proceeded to slightly freak the poor man out by taking copious notes. No, not at all stalkery. 

The good people at Shearers have blogged a round up of the night - so if you missed it, you can catch up on all the news about Rebus. He's baaaaaaaaaaaack!!!!!!

And in today's Sydney Morning Herald, my review of Standing in Another Man's Grave.
"Whatever the future holds, Rebus is back and there's likely to be a bit more rage before the dying of his light."
Whatever the future holds, Rebus is back and there's likely to be a bit more rage before the dying of his light.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/standing-in-another-mans-grave-20121123-29yik.html#ixzz2D7p6NR8g
Whatever the future holds, Rebus is back and there's likely to be a bit more rage before the dying of his light.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/standing-in-another-mans-grave-20121123-29yik.html#ixzz2D7p6NR8g
Whatever the future holds, Rebus is back and there's likely to be a bit more rage before the dying of his light.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/standing-in-another-mans-grave-20121123-29yik.html#ixzz2D7p6NR8g

Whatever the future holds, Rebus is back and there's likely to be a bit more rage before the dying of his light.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/standing-in-another-mans-grave-20121123-29yik.html#ixzz2D7p6NR8g
Whatever the future holds, Rebus is back and there's likely to be a bit more rage before the dying of his light.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/standing-in-another-mans-grave-20121123-29yik.html#ixzz2D7p6NR8g
Whatever the future holds, Rebus is back and there's likely to be a bit more rage before the dying of his light.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/standing-in-another-mans-grave-20121123-29yik.html#ixzz2D7p6NR8g
Whatever the future holds, Rebus is back and there's likely to be a bit more rage before the dying of his light.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/standing-in-another-mans-grave-20121123-29yik.html#ixzz2D7p6NR8g

Playing catch up - with GenreCon 2012 and Faber Academy



The end of the year is hurtling towards me and I’m not sure whether to duck, dodge, or weave. It feels like the last few weeks have been a full on mix of completing a structural edit of Book 2, teaching, talking and researching and preparing for the aforementioned teaching and talking.
A few weekends ago I was very lucky and very happy to be a special guest at the inaugural Genre Con

It was very exciting to feel part of an event, which is, I’m certain, going to be a permanent fixture on the Australian writing calendar - an event that is only going to get bigger.
Congratulations to Australian Writers’ Marketplace and Queensland Writers’ Centre for having the insight and initiative to recognise that genre writers and readers are a tribe, a tribe who needed an event to meet, share experiences, talk about the craft and learn about each other’s story telling.
It was a stroke of genius to run the workshops and talks in mixed genres rather than as streams. So I shared panels with Anna Campbell, a romance writer, Joe Abercrombie, a fantasy writer, Simon Higgins, a crime, sci-fi and children’s writer and Charlotte Nash Stewart, a romantic suspense writer. And it meant our audiences were drawn from across the genre divides as well.
If you weren’t there then check out the AWM’s blog and the links to a whole range of wrap ups.
I also had the pleasure a few weeks back, of teaching a day course for the Faber Academy in Sydney – Troubleshooting Crime

It was a small class and gave us the absolute luxury of spending the day intensively working on the students’ projects. 
Some classes consist of picking apart the pieces of writing crime – the genre conventions and how to break the rules, the significance of writing place, what makes a plot work, how to create a character that steps from the page and into your life. 
And then occasionally you have the opportunity to teach a class that allows you to roll your sleeves up and work on the particular rather than the abstract; to talk plot in respect of the students’ own plots, character as it applies to the cast they have assembled, to wrestle with issues of structure and tone – it’s a rare treat.