I started thinking about the number of series written by one author which have later turned out to be a pseudonym for multiple people. In the case of the Ellery Queen mysteries they were originally written by two cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manning Lee, who kept a tight rein on their writing and eventually allowed other writers to use the name as the author but not as the character. What? Ellery Queen was both the author and the character, he was much loved and many of these works were put on the radio and the television, Helene Hanff (of 84, Charing Cross Road fame) wrote some of the scripts. They started a mystery magazine in 1941 which is still being published to this day.

Other series which have one name on them but were actually written by several different authors are The Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, but not Enid Blyton, she wrote all her own books.

The questions are as follows:

• What do you read?
• Why do you read?
• Do you read for work or for pleasure and is there any difference between the two?
• Do you read to your kids or to someone else’s kids?
• Can you do the Safety Dance while reading?
• Are you a rabid Discworld/Twilight/Harry Potter fan and would you attend a flash mob dressed as your favourite character?
• Include bio with links to one or two sites.

I don’t make a big deal of my religion online as that’s just a small part of who I am but last Saturday saw the culmination of weeks and weeks of hard work and I chanted Torah. To many people this doesn’t sound like a big deal and to a lot of Jews it isn’t as they have good skills and they do it every week, for me, it’s a very big thing. Let me give you some more details.

Hebrew is a very old language and was, and in some places still is, used only for prayers and other ritual purposes, at one time Aramaic was the local language. As a spoken language, Hebrew was revived towards the end of the 19th century and into the 20th. It is written from right to left so is much easier for lefthanded people.

This webpage gives some good information about the language. When learning to chant Torah it’s much easier to take a photocopy of the pages from the Tikkun. This is a lovely book with two columns of Torah. The column on the right has all the consonants, vowels, punctuation and cantillation symbols (musical notation, predating the stave we currently use), the column on the left has only the consonants. The system I’ve just learned assigns colours to the most used clauses as shown by the cantillation symbols so I took my photocopy and highlighted those clauses. Then I sat down to learn the Hebrew, then the clauses before putting them both together. This bit is challenging but is nothing compared to memorising the whole lot. It’s rather like learning lines for a play or songs for a musical except you do have the consonants as a reminder.

It’s been a big challenge for me. I first learnt it about 10 years ago so it should have been easy but we’re learning a different nusach or system so the tunes sound different and I’ve been trying to forget the old one and learn the new one. I must have been hard to live with and even harder to teach as I’ve complained a lot. Finally three weeks ago a fellow classmate made a little suggestion which turned the whole thing on its head and all of a sudden it worked. I was having trouble joining two clauses, the tunes were similar and it just wouldn’t work. He suggested instead of trying to join the whole of both clauses I should take the second one, learn it well then add the last word of the first clause. It worked, all of a sudden I could do that little bit and the whole lot fell into place.

I wasn’t perfect on Saturday but I was good and if I can just get to that point a couple of weeks earlier I will be perfect on the day. It’s something very close to my heart and I do intend to do it again.

The Astonishing Hypothesis by Francis Crick. Not necessarily an interesting book but certainly an interesting author. Francis Crick collaborated with James D. Watson in the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, they received a Nobel Prize in 1962 for this research.

Dinosaurs of Darkness by Thomas H. Rich and Patricia Vickers-Rich. This book is a review copy and looks completely unread. Rich and Vickers-Rich are very well known in the Dinosaur field, they were friends with my aunt many years ago.

 The Human Brain: A Guided Tour by Susan Greenfield. Many books about the human brain are written with a lot of jargon and aimed at the professional, this one is not, it’s readable and understandable by the lay person. Professor Greenfield has been on The Science Show on a number of occasions. I also have Tomorrow’s People by the same author.

If you’ve been watching the number of chemicals used today you’ll want this book: Our Stolen Future – Theo Colborn, John Peterson Myers, Dianne Dumanosk. It talks about how man-made chemicals are threatening our fertility, intelligence and survival.

The last one for today is The Woman Who Can’t Forget by Jill Price with Bart Davis. This lady has a phenomenal memory, she can remember names, dates, events, basically everything that’s happened to her or that she’s heard of. She can go backwards and forwards through her memory as if it were a home movie. She can look at particular dates and go forward through the years just using those dates. I don’t want to have her particular memory but I am in total awe of her, to have gone so much of her life without being driven mad by not being able to forget things.

Butterflies get involved with Squid Ink

Squid Ink knows about being different, he must, there aren’t many Squids who draw. I think he identified with the theme of being different to society. A theme Adam Hills explored in Gordon St last night. Maybe Squid Ink should get together with Kurt Fearnley and discuss differences?

This week is the launch of the National Year of Reading. If you go to the website you can, hopefully, watch William McInnes with a video about reading. It didn’t work for me, but that might be the addons I have. It’s probably a good thing as I’d waste time watching it again, and again, and again…anyone would think I like William McInnes. I’d point to his books I have for sale except I’m keeping them.

There are so many events across Australia planned for the year. Check out the event calendar to see what your library or local bookshop has planned. Check out Alison Lester, the Reading Ambassador for this week. Lester is the author of children’s book, Are We There Yet. Readers under 12 can enter the competition.

I was thinking of highlighting some of the books I’ve been listing as they’re rather interesting but I only have time for a few words while I drink my coffee.

I’ll see you all on the other side of my meeting.

Spain is a nation poised to suffer its worst internal strife in a thousand years. Certain well-place Spanish diplomats sense it. Op-Centre’s intelligence corroborates it. All the United States and Spain have to do is find a way to avert it.

Before they can, an Op-Centre representative is assassinated in Madrid on her way to a top-secret diplomatic meeting. Now all fears are confirmed. Someone very powerful wants another Spanish civil war – no matter what the cost.

I enjoy the Tom Clancy novels, whether they’re specifically written for young adults or for adults. This one is no different. It has all the elements we’ve come to expect from a Tom Clancy novel: politics; thrill; excitement and psychology. I notice from the description of the authors that Steve Pieczenik is a Harvard trained psychiatrist with a PhD in International Relations. This gives him the edge with the psychology and explains why it’s all written into the book.

One thing I thought about with this novel (and I’m sure it’s taught in writing classes, one day I’ll take one of these classes and learn stuff proper like) was how an author has to put in more than just the story line in order to have a good book. They have to put in motivation and stuff to describe their characters and background stuff like.

Our lead character is Paul Hood, he heads Op-Centre, the National Crisis Management Centre which deals with both international and domestic crises. Hood is currently caught between two worlds, he’s very good at his job but this calls him away from home a lot and his wife is trying to keep him home more often so he can be part of the family, it’s a problem many people can identify with. One of the things that makes this book good is how Clancy and Pieczenik examine this from both sides, we see Hood and wife discussing it on the phone getting more and more angry with each other, then we see each of them thinking about it and understanding the situation more.

There are more examples of this throughout the book with different scenarios and different people. Another Op-Centre representative was present at the assassination, her feelings are examined at the time and then later on, we’re given a good understanding of how she’s coping with the whole scenario. If the book was just a straight line from the assassination to the conclusion then it’d be fairly boring, but with all these little asides fleshing out the characters and the situations, making us understand how people work things change dramatically and the book comes alive.

Start off by describing some characters. Take them one at a time and write them down. Put in as much detail as you can:

• their body build
• are they flighty
• are they steady
• how brainy they are
• do they think things through a lot or do they just react
• their race and how this will affect their character
• their gender
• have they had a good childhood
• do they have a good memory
• do they have amnesia

Then, take one of those people and put them in bed next to ‘x’, have them wake up, suddenly or slowly and come to the realisation that ‘x’ is next to them. How do they react? As this is a writing exercise rinse and repeat with each of your characters, if you want to be sensible you could give them all names appropriate to their race, if you don’t want to be sensible just give them numbers.

By the end of the exercise you should have several totally different scenarios, if you haven’t and all your people react the same way have a closer look at their personalities and add in more detail. Take two with added detail and see where that takes you. Try adding in more detail about their surroundings, describe the bed, the room, the sounds, time of day, just add lots more stuff.

Best of luck with the wilder personalities, don’t try to tame them just go along for the ride.

I’m prepared to bet this is in some writing course somewhere, I didn’t pinch it from them it was just an idea I had this morning.

Squid Ink meets the Bottersnikes

Bottersnikes and Gumbles is the first of four books, a lovely set of Australian writing. S. A. Wakefield wrote these four books and Captain Deadlight’s Treasure and that’s all I’ve been able to find on him.

Bottersnikes are well known for squashing Gumbles into jam tins, I have great pity for Squid Ink, he’s following the Gumble tradition; it can’t be comfortable in that jam tin.