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.
Saturday, November 24, 2012
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.
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#ixzz2D7p6NR8gWhatever 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
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
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
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
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)