- Does your oven have at least one umlat in its name? If not, you’re some kind of prole.
- Chefs refer to table salt as “shit salt”. Behind your back, they probably refer to you as “shit customers”.
- Three glasses of white wine – also known to chefs as “bitch diesel” – will aid your fine motor skills as you chop onions.
- Cous cous was invented by the Nazis as a cheap, barely edible alternative to rice.
- Chef: “You’ve touched worse things than that.”
You: “My God … how does he know? He is some kind of SORCERER.” - No, it is not just like a TV cooking show, apart from the comparable levels of shame, fear and ostracism.
- Your “hilarious” gluten jokes will die a horrible death when someone says they’re coeliac.
- When someone says your spring rolls are “fatty boom-bahs”, remember to scream “Don’t you fat-shame me!”
- Have you added pine nuts to everything? Go back and add pine nuts to everything.
- No matter how many movies you’ve seen featuring buxom Tuscan peasant women blissfully serving elaborate, time-consuming meals to grateful hordes, no meal tastes better if you’ve cooked it yourself.
In fact, they taste worse.Laugh at any of these jokes? Go on and buy my ebook military thriller The Spartan.
I know you probably won’t but I always ask anyway.
game of thrones
Inspired by the excellent story in The Guardian about how Wyl Menmuir wrote his first, Booker-longlisted novel, The Many, I offer you the uncensored diary of writing my own, unpublished, second novel, The Last Newspaper On Earth.
Enjoy.
Day one: Bursting with ideas. This will be the best book ever!
Day two: Put in a killer second sentence: “And then the murders began.”
Day three: Drink four coffees in quick succession. Manage to pound out 2000 words. And they said Graham Greene only wrote 500 words a day. Slacker!
Day four: Reduce the 2000 words I wrote yesterday to 500 as the rest are mostly caffeine-infused gibberish. Wonder if Greene had it right all along, seeing how he wrote Brighton Rock, The End Of The Affair and The Quiet American.
Day seven: Ask a friend to act as my editor. He says he’d be honoured, as long as it doesn’t take up too much time and that I know how to take criticism. “I’ll show YOU criticism,” I mutter to myself, an instant ball of rage.
Day 10: Wonder about padding out the plot with copy from 19th-century horror novels out of copyright. Laugh like a maniac. “This secret will remain between you and me, Bram Stoker,” I cackle as I hit control “c” and “v”.
Day 11: Friend/editor wonders whether aristocratic vampires have any place in a tale about the decline of newspaper publishing. “Of course they do,” I reply.
Day 20: Read a story, possibly apocryphal, about an author who shot himself in the foot so he would be forced to finish his novel. I stare down at my foot, wondering where would be the least painful place to shoot myself. Also wonder where I could get the least-painful gun.
Day 40: Friend/editor says the main character isn’t likeable.
“Is he based on you?” he asks impertinently.
Day 50: Spice up a dull scene where journalists are sitting around a table at a news conference with a sudden explosion.
Day 55: Make my character visit an orphanage so he will seem more likeable. Friend/editor loves it.
Day 60: Filled with sadness as I glance at the Amazon ranking of my last book. Is this new effort also destined to end on the scrapheap, next to the biographies of sporting heroes who have fallen out of favour due to sex scandals?
Day 61: My main character interviews a sporting hero who has suddenly fallen out of favour due to a sex scandal.
Day 65: Up to 20,000 words. Celebrate by throwing in a spicy sex scene for my unlikeable main character.
Day 75: Reward myself with a digestive biscuit.
Day 80: Wonder if Tolstoy also had days where he thought everything he wrote was crap. Day 85: Friend offers to install a social media blocker on my computer to remove distractions. “Hemingway never would have agreed to that,” I tell him.
Days 90: Wonder if it’s too late to change it into a children’s book. Anyone can write those! Just look at all the celebs who do it.
Day 125: Editing a particularly dense piece of text, my friend/editor says: “You should consider the reader’s point of view.” “Why would I want to do that?” I reply.
Day 145: In my novel, the internet is starting to affect newspaper sales. The fictional newspaper editor shows the staff a website that is eating into our classified sales. “As the editor hits ‘return’, the computer suddenly explodes,” I type.
Day 150: Break the 50,000 word mark. Huzzah!
Day 170: Friend/editor whittles the 50,000 words down to 40,000. Leave an anonymous one-star review of his own book on Amazon, accusing him of being a “pulpy hack”.
Day 171: Friend accuses me of writing the one-star review. I deny it. When the review is mysteriously deleted, we both mutually agree to never bring it up again.
Day 180: My character is disturbed by the number of redundancies in the newspaper industry. I go down to the harbour and stare moodily at the sea for a few hours.
Day 200: Italicise the name of a book, but don’t bother unitalicising the comma next to it. No one will notice it – or the gaping holes in the plot.
Day 201: Friend/editor notices the gaping holes in plot.
Day 210: My character has an Aaron Sorkin moment, standing up on a table in the newsroom and lamenting what will happen to the world if quality journalism continues to decline. Pathos!
Day 220: Up to 80,000 words! Friend says more needs to be cut. I remind him of a story from my days in magazines where a company actually sold their magazines by weight. “Is that what you plan to do?” he asks, incredulous. “Sell your books by weight?” “Why not?” I reply. “It works for chocolate.”
Day 250: Near the end. I wonder if I really need an end. Can’t it just end abruptly, like in The Sopranos? Maybe even mid-sentence? Or with an explosion?
Day 265: Hurrah! I finish the final sentence. Light a Cuban cigar, then choke as I remember I hate smoking.
Day 270: Friend/editor yet to get back to me. Does he love the ending? Or hate it? I can’t bear the almost Hitchcockian suspense.
Days 277: Friend hates the ending. “It’s simply not believable that our ‘hero’ goes back in time, destroys the internet from ever being created, and thus ensures the survival of newspapers forever.” “That sort of thing works for Doctor Who,” I reply meekly.
Days 278: Friend gets back to me. “I know how to rewrite your ending – and realistically save newspaper journalism forever!” he says. The simplicity and brilliance of his subsequent idea astounds me. I wonder why no one ever thought of it before.
My ebook military thriller The Spartan is out now on Amazon.
It used to be a cake shop.
In the years Before Gluten (BG), in the years Before Gentrification (B$), long before the median price for a Sydney home was $1 million, it used to serve the type of giant, triple-decker desserts and pastries that would’ve made the Country Women’s Association proud.
There was only type of bread (white), the type of wonderbread our ancestors fought and won two world wars with. Kids also ate the crusts because otherwise you’d grow up with curly (or even possibly ginger) hair.
There was only type of sugar (also white).
There was only one type of coffee (unknown).
And everything was packed with glutens.
Later, in a nod to the times, it started serving sandwiches along with cakes, scones, lamingtons and Chiko rolls. If you ordered a salad sandwich, it only came with lettuce (not “cos” – cos didn’t exist yet), onion and beetroot. No one wanted the beetroot, but it was reassuring to know it was there. It was a touchstone of cultural consistency every bit as valid and reassuring as the gherkin in the Big Mac. Sure, no one wanted to eat the gherkin either, but somehow, it was important that it was there.
It was the sort of unpretentious place beloved by tradies and sparkies and labourers and mums with their kids: more school tuckshop or canteen that sophisticated café.
A simple place harkening back to a simpler time before iPhones and property portfolios and MasterChef teaching five-year-olds to expect penne alla arrabbiata in their school lunchbox.
A place that had perfected the bacon-and-egg roll and large coffee as its signature takeaway dish.
A Café for Old Men.
It was the bottle of pink Himalayan salt that first alerted me to the irrevocable changes in my Old Man Café. It rested on a metal table that looked like it had been crafted out of the wing of a Boeing 787.
Looking up, I realised that my Old Man Café has irrevocably morphed into a Middle Class Café.
Gone were the tuck-shop types, replaced by younger, better-looking waitstaff.
The menu was partially in Italian and full of dishes I barely understood.
For instance, the Caesar salad had become a “Contemporary Caesar Salad”, as if Caesar, former ruler of Rome and conqueror of Gaul, no longer cut it in a world where Asian slaw was served on cement slabs and watermelon juice came in mason jars.
I looked enviously at the kids’ menu – which served all the delicious things that were once on the adults menu like fish and chips and spaghetti and meatballs – knowing I could now never order off of it.
I imagined there was some kind of detector at the door that loudly went off if it detected anything with glutens in it.
I stared around at the young, hip types enjoying what I assumed were Bonsoy cappuccinos.
This was clearly a suburb in the throes of gentrification.
The mothers with their kids now wore activewear and lived in million-dollar houses and drove 4WDs.
The men were younger, bearded, aspirational, one eye on their dining partners, the other on the iDevices upon which they were furiously tapping.
The well-behaved children nursing babycinos were probably in Advanced Reading Classes and knew the difference between a tortoise and a turtle.
It was no longer a Café For Old Men.
I imagined all the tuck-shop-volunteer mums, the labourers in King Gees and checkshirts and even the roving pigeons and ibises all being bussed away to a less-salubrious suburbs to make way for the new customers.
I couldn’t fault the food and the service. But this café was no longer for me. Yet another sanctuary of my youth was no more.
This Old Man’s Café was heading the way of the Old Man’s Pub.
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” I muttered.
But there was no longer anyone old enough – or interested enough – to understand what I was saying.
My ebook military thriller The Spartan is out now on Amazon.
“I feel so numb.”
“I had to call in sick today I’m so traumatised.”
“I’ll never love or trust anyone again.”
“NOOOOOOO!”
The Twittersphere is up in arms over the fate of a certain character in last night’s The Walking Dead.
Not even TWD producer Gregory Nicotero’s warning about how brutal the season 7 premiere was could prepare us for its shocking events.
It was that disturbing. And hundreds of thousands of tweets about it can’t be wrong.
Which raises the question: what do we do when someone whose adventures we have followed for years – devoting precious hours and binge-marathons to – is suddenly killed off?
There is a certain amount of trauma involved when heroes and heroines we’ve invited into our living rooms – and spent many a rainy day or long afternoon getting to know – disappear from our TV screens.
These characters become more than mere pixels on the screen: they become real in a way. At least, the emotions they evoke are real. And we, in turn, become invested in their fates.
We know from long experience not to get too close to any character from The Walking Dead or Game Of Thrones. Go to one Red or Purple Wedding and you know someone is going to cop a crossbow bolt/knife to the throat/poisoned chalice. Sometimes it’s King Joffrey (yay!). And other times it’s Robb and Catelyn Stark (why, George RR, why?).
Still, the heart wants what the heart wants. We can’t help but hope for the best and love them anyway.
So when they end up at the business end of Negan’s bat we still feel all the feels. (Am I being perverse by loving Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Negan – even if I condemn his monstrous cruelty?)
And it’s not like there’s a club for Survivors Of Unexpected Major Character Deaths or anything.
The only therapy we have is venting with our fellow netizens online.
Yet perhaps such emotions are not such a bad thing. When a major character dies, it just goes to show the stakes involved … that this is serious, people. As serious as real life. To believe that fictional characters never die is perhaps to believe in the prolonging of adolescence: to put off the grim realities of adulthood, to believe that Lassie or Skippy or Flipper or the Lone Ranger always arrive in the nick of time to save the day.
If our appetite for the grittier series and boxsets has proved anything, it is that we as an audience are ready and hungry for more adult drama.
All of the top tier shows – The Sopranos, Game Of Thrones, True Blood – feature major character deaths. And we still love them anyway.
To be fair, the writers usually do their best to soften the emotional blow. After all, they’re emotionally invested in the characters, too.
As a fellow writer, I understand how writers can become attached to their creations. In a way, their lives become our lives. We imagine what they say and do, their words and actions coming to us at all hours of the day. They become our friends and confidantes. Fictional characters can sometimes occupy as much headspace as a treasured friend.
And no one wants to kill a treasured friend.
Personally I think the best way to end a TV show that potentially features the death of major characters is to be ambiguous. For example, I love the much-derided ending of The Sopranos. Now I can go back and watch the whole series again, believing that Tony lives at the end.
Then again, I also like to believe Thelma and Louise and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid survived at the end of their respective movies.
After all, you don’t actually see them die – there’s that little wiggle room in the imagination for other outcomes.
But back to last night’s shocker.
Perhaps George R.R. Martin was right when he wrote “valar morghulis”.
All men must die.
And occasionally major characters must die, too.
And perhaps that’s how it should be in the world of adult drama.
My ebook military thriller The Spartan is out now on Amazon.
Jean-Paul Sartre once said: “Hell is other people.”
But of course what he meant to say was “hell is moving house” – because whether you’re moving into a new house, rental flat or hobbit shack by the beach, the act of sorting, packing, editing, binning, transporting and rearranging all your belongings is a devilish endeavour that should be rarely attempted in one lifetime.
And it doesn’t matter what gender you are: packing your gear and moving stumps is no less than a referendum on your past achievements, hopes and future ambitions, box-sized parcels of dreams held precariously in the hands of clumsy student removalists.
First of course comes the cleaning. It is amazing how much filth one house can contain (surely the claim that dust is actually human skin must be a myth?).
And just where do all those 5c pieces come from? They’re everywhere, breeding like tribbles from Star Trek, getting into the bottom of cabinets, drawers and even shoes.
The spiders in the house immediately arc up once your bring the vacuum cleaner up to their corners on the ceiling: “What are you doing? I come in peace, human. I mean you no harm. I … I … argh!”
Like counting tree rings or carbon dating peasants found in peat bogs, you can measure the time line of your own archaeological dig by the detritus you find on the ground.
If you find old K-Tel products (such as the classic album, Difficult To Strip To Hits), a slinky, a fondue pot, a Rubik’s cube or a shoulder pad, you truly are a long-term couple. Chocolate bars gone out of fashion (Texan Bar, Space Food Sticks or Scorched Peanut Bar) similarly mark your progress.
Perhaps you’ll find a Tang label affixed to the kitchen floor and crushed can of Tab behind the fridge. Maybe a tribble trapped in the washing machine. Old TV guides with Big Brother circled and later crossed out mark your evolving taste in entertainment. You could even find an old tape with Austen Tayshus performing Australiana and wonder how you ever found it amusing.
But the real test of the relationship is deciding what, to paraphrase Elaine from Seinfeld, is “packworthy”. Here you might find your opinions differ wildly from your partner.
You might think that giant stone mortar and pestle is a waste of space, but your wife insists on keeping in just in case the in-laws visit and want some specially ground black pepper … perhaps followed by an after-dinner board game of Risk given to you as a Christmas present (and gathering dust untouched in the bottom of a cupboard for years).
But you can’t object too much, because you have to argue about the merits of keeping that giant pig club from your trip to Vanuatu, the Wii console you never opened but suddenly can’t bear to part with, the croquet set you never used or the leather pants from four sizes and two decades ago that you still dream of fitting into. (Menfolk, it is pointless arguing that you only need one set of dishes: every well-breed person knows that you need both your daily dishes and the good china, just in case the Queen decides to visit.)
Once most of the grunt work is done, the vacuuming is complete (destroying civilisations of bacteria mere generations away from becoming sentient), the packing boxes purchased and the essential items packed away, the nostalgia phase sets in.
One of you will inevitably find an old photo album. You’ll sit down and cast your mind back to your youth. Didn’t you look so glowing and optimistic back then, despite the hint of teenage acne, King Gee boots and bad ’80s hair? What would your younger self think of you now, your achievements, your progress in life?
Would they pat you on the back and say, “Well done, sir/madam”? Or would they regard you like one of those unhealthier doubles from those creepy health care ads and wonder, “What the fuck happened to you, man?”
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Here is your chance to edit your life according to your new beginning. You have a chance to keep the memories you want and the objects that reflect them. The bins will fill up and new life will spring up in the freed-up spaces. You will have room to conjure new memories together.
Just remember to keep enough tokens of your best youthful dreams. And choose your battles over space wisely. Because maybe keeping that lifesized Bruce Lee statue or pair of jousting sticks in the living room is a battle best lost.
And no relationship is worth jeopardising over those old K-Tel records.
My ebook military thriller, The Spartan, is out now on Amazon.
Moral compass No one uses compasses any more. Replace with “moral GPS”.
Highway robbery When was the last time some Dick Turpin-type stuck a blunderbuss through the open window of your horse-drawn carriage and demanded “all your jewellery and gold doubloons, sir, if you value your life”? I thought so. We’re in the 21st century now, people. Replace with “internet highway robbery”.
Drop of a hat Is there a direct correlation between the decline of Western civilisation and the decline in hat wearing? I like to think so. Still, no one wears hats any more. Best avoid.
Legend As one wise scribess once commented, “King Arthur was a legend … not some meathead who kicked a field goal in the last five minutes of a game.” Remove “legend” and replace with “top bloke” or female equivalent.
Hero Once upon a time you had to defeat the French at the Battle Of Trafalgar to earn the title “hero”. Now it seems anyone can be a hero (why, maybe even you, dear reader!). Still, I can’t help think that Lord Nelson would be rolling in his grave to be described in the same company as the maker of Sydney’s best cappuccino, for example.
Litmus test As a child I thought the greatest thing in the world was watching magnesium burn in chemistry class … closely matched by the magic of testing for acidity with litmus paper. But we’re not children any more, candy doesn’t taste as good, life has crushed our spirits and the wizardry of chemistry has long been replaced by more adult endeavours.
Enfant terrible A favourite expression employed by arts writers to describe “dramaturges” who “modernise” Shakespeare by casting cross-dressing dwarves who hurl sex toys at audiences. Replace with “DOCS child”.
Dramaturge I’ve never meet anyone in the theatre who has given me a convincing explanation of what a dramaturge is. Maybe Cate Blanchett is one – she virtually IS Sydney’s theatre industry – but who knows? For that reason, I will never call anyone a dramaturge, in print or otherwise, even as a form of insult. Or an “auteur” for that matter (although I have used “auteur” as an insult).
Bellwether Apparently bellwether “refers to the practice of placing a bell around the neck of a castrated ram (a wether) leading his flock of sheep”. References to castrated rams have no place in respected periodicals. Avoid.
Bun fight I’ve never seen anyone fight with buns. Have you? I’ve seen people fight with live crabs, but that’s another story. (Note to self: NEVER tell that story in public.)
My ebook military thriller The Spartan is out now on Amazon.
In honour of Arya Stark’s epic chase scene with The Waif in the latest episode of Game Of Thrones, here are our 10 rules for chase scenes everywhere.
A fruit cart must be overturned Because we have no sympathy for small businessmen just trying to make a living.
It can be a vegetable cart, too Any food that comically rolls on the ground, really.
Or cardboard boxes Wooden crates full of live chickens are hilarious, too.
We must see the horrified reaction of the fruit cart owner when his wares are destroyed Why are we laughing at his pain? What’s wrong with us?
We will never know the back story of the fruit cart owner Does he have 10 kids to feed? Is he studying to become a lawyer at night school? Is he a political refugee from his home country? Don’t pretend that you care.
Pedestrians can double as fruit carts They should add comments like “hey”, “woah”, “look out” and “he’s crazy”.
The authorities are powerless to act Apart from shaking a fist at them as they pass.
At least one melon must explode Or a sheet of glass being comically carried by two men.
There must be at least one detour down a small alley A convenient escape from the scene of the crime. Meanwhile, the fruit cart owner must face the daunting task of explaining to his family why they won’t be eating tonight.
At no point will the hero or heroine express any remorse for destroying another person’s livelihood They won’t even look back at the weeping fruit cart owner as they pass. Do you still want to pin up their poster on your wall? Of course you do.
My ebook military thriller, The Spartan, is out now on Amazon.
Kings. Queens. Noble houses at war. Brother against brother. True love thwarted. Villains celebrated. An audience spanning much of the known civilised world.
All written by an author whose fame exceeds almost all others.
Shakespeare, the greatest writer of antiquity, was known for all this and more.
In fact, he sounds a lot like Game Of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, who also lists Britain’s War of the Roses as his main inspiration for GOT. Both the Bard and Martin thus drank from the same well and achieved all-encompassing fame in their lifetimes.
Which brings me to ask: is George R.R. Martin the Shakespeare of the modern world?
I would argue … yes.
What other author has won over the rich and poor, young and old alike?
Who else embraces the grand scope of themes favoured by the Bard?
Who else has created such an intimately relatable world? Whose works do we so eagerly await?
Who else is not afraid to make tragedies of our heroes and heroines?
Who else makes us care so much?
I just hope one day scholars recognise the same grand themes in Martin’s writings as they do in Shakespeare’s … and make students study Martin in school.
Just take a look at some of Shakespeare’s most famous quotes – paired with the best quotes from Game Of Thrones – and see if you don’t agree.
To be, or not to be: that is the question. (Hamlet)
What do we say to the Lord of Death? Not today.
Now is the winter of our discontent. (Richard III)
Winter is coming.
Off with his head! (Richard III)
The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.
Get thee to a nunnery. (Hamlet)
Shame! Shame! Shame!
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child! (King Lear)
You’re no son of mine.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. (Henry V)
For the Watch.
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. (As You Like it)
When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods/They kill us for their sport. (King Lear)
Why are all the gods such vicious *****? Where is the god of tits and wine?
The course of true love never did run smooth. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
The things I do for love.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. (Hamlet)
You know nothing, Jon Snow.
Et tu, Brute? (Julius Caesar)
The Lannisters send their regards.
What’s in a name? A rose by any name would smell as sweet. (Romeo and Juliet)
Is a girl truly No One?
My ebook military thriller, Game Of Killers, is out now on Amazon.
I have a confession to make – I am a biblioholic.
I am addicted to bibliohol.
Actually, I’m addicted to books.
And my habit is getting out of control.
My house is now full of books that I have only partially read or begun to read. And despite having enough books to erect my own paper Roman fort in my living room, I just keep adding to the pile. Like the Sorcerer’s apprentice, as soon as I finish a book two more spring up in its place, because I can’t stop collecting them.
It doesn’t matter what the genre is, either … my thirst knows no bounds. Herodotus’s Histories, bought after I saw The English Patient? Sun Tzu’s Art Of War? Thomas Piketty’s Capital In The 21st Century? The unauthorised story of Motley Crue? Errol Flynn’s My Wicked, Wicked Ways? Sci-fi? Zen? Game Of Thrones? Inspirational bios by dudes with no legs?
From the finest bibliographic burgundy to cut-price goon, there’s all lying around, waiting to be imbibed.
And I never seem to ever get the pile down. I’ve thrown out more books from the great Western literary canon than you’ve had hot dinners. I’ve turfed out more Australian political leaders in a fit of pique than either Labor or the Libs.
Yet more books keep coming, mostly because I have trouble walking past a bookshop without stopping to peruse its wares (why, sometimes you can find me there at 9am as soon as they open).
Part of me knows I’m never going to read a 700-page opus on the ills of modern capitalism. Part of me realises that I’m never going to go back to The Lord Of The Rings, read Wolf Hall, Stephen King’s IT or I Am Pilgrim again or peruse The Slap once more. And I have as much a chance of reading The Iliad in the original Greek as I do of taking up the violin in homage to my childhood hero, Sherlock Holmes.
But it’s just so hard to know where to begin the cull. As soon as you pick up a book to throw out, they seem to fight for their lives. They tease you that you might just read them again one day, even though wading through that last Antony Beevor war book seemed to go on longer than D-Day. So you hang onto them, in the oft-chance you will wake up one morning and be in the mood for Harry Potter, High Fidelity, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance or How To Avoid Huge Ships.
Sometimes I feel pangs of shame at my choice of material. I once devoured The 4-Hour Work Week like a four-dollar bottle of wine. And I read the Country Women’s Association Cook Book in a dentist’s office because I just HAD to read something.
Why, once when I was at the airport, I read The Da Vinci Code – and ENJOYED IT.
When you start buying books at airports, perhaps it’s time to admit that you have a problem.
OK, so maybe reading lots of books – some of dubious quality – isn’t such a bad problem to have. Maybe I just need a literary intervention, for someone to come in and throw out the old to make way for the new.
And maybe The Iliad is a good place to start the cull. Or The Slap.
Because I’ve already seen them on TV.
But I will always hang onto my copy of How To Survive A Garden Gnome Attack.
My ebook military thriller, The Spartan, is out now on Amazon.
charlespurcellblog 