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For editors, writers, teachers and students of English grammar, and wordsmiths all … WORKING WORDS is a collection of ‘chats’ about aspects of editing and writing for dipping into – it’s not a textbook but a companion to books on grammar, style, punctuation, plain English, editing practice, and the business of being a freelance editor. This full revision updates the text to reflect current editing and writing practice.
The chats are based on articles written for “The Canberra Editor” over a period of ten years. Many of these happened as a direct result of requests from working editors, would-be editors and people who didn’t learn the why’s and wherefores of English grammar at school. The book is written in a chatty style, with a few fun pieces along the way – ‘itchypencils’.
A philosopher, a psychologist, and an extraterrestrial walk into a chocolate bar …
Spike, a psychologist and activist, and Jane, a philosopher and writer, leave their dead-end temping jobs in Toronto and head for Paris – in their lunch break – by car, stopping frequently to stock up on chocolate.
En route they pick up X, an extraterrestrial from a planet where chocolate is one of the major food groups and testosterone is a prohibited substance. X is cosmically, galactically lost in Earth’s backwardly gendered society.
Jane and Spike decide to take a detour and help X find astronomers and physicists who know the space–time coordinates for Earth, starting with America’s top universities in Boston before trying NASA and CalTech. The more they travel, the further they seem to be from a solution to X’s problem – and from Paris.
This out-of-the-ordinary road trip is chock-full of social, political and environmental commentary, feminist insights, and plenty of laughs.
Melt
Summer Wright organises her life down to the minute. And when boyfriend Adrian proposes marriage – on schedule – she will reach the peak of The Cone of Certainty. At least, that’s the plan – until adventure-show queen Cougar Gale intervenes. Suddenly Summer is impersonating Cougar in Antarctica: learning climate science on the fly, building an igloo, improvising scripts based on Dynasty, and above all trying not to be revealed as an impostor. But Summer finds it particularly hard to fool climate scientist Lucas Nilsson. Can Summer use her extreme project management skills to get Project Adrian back on track and make a success of “Cougar on Ice”? And what is The Krill Question anyway?
The Styx
Sophie can’t walk or talk, but behind her disability hides a keen intelligence. Living on The Styx River cattle station with her father and a nanny, Sophie is acutely aware that she is a non-person. She feels as voiceless and isolated as the wallabies of The Wall, an eerie wilderness of basalt lava tubes forming a natural stone labyrinth that protects its remote lushness from anyone foolish enough to wander in.
Sophie’s mother Rose, as The Wall’s indigenous custodian, taught Sophie its secrets. When a bitter divorce forces Rose to leave, Sophie is powerless to stop her grazier father from taking custody of both Sophie and The Wall.
Advances in computer technology enable Sophie to communicate, a fact she keeps secret from her father and his “cronies”. In Sophie’s presence, unaware she understands everything, they plot to develop a multi-million dollar tourist resort in The Wall. The development will only go ahead if the rare wallabies are already extinct, so they hire roo shooters to help nature along.
In desperation Sophie writes Silent Scream, an anonymous blog that reveals the threat. When an environmental study team commissioned to find the wallabies goes missing, the rescuers appeal to Silent Scream for help. Raising awareness is one thing, but how can one impossibly disabled girl who can’t help herself, help save the lives of others?
Playing Lady Gaga, Being Nan Pau
Mya is caught up in Yangon’s Saffron Revolution and flees to Karen State, near the Thai border, where she believes her mother has taken refuge. Military Intelligence agents, human traffickers, landmines and venomous snakes are among the dangers Mya faces in her journey. To survive, she takes on many roles – bar-girl, novice nun, military porter, translator, teacher – some by choice, others forced on her. While playing Lady Gaga in a Thai nightclub, an accident involving some Australians brings Mya the opportunity she’s been waiting for.
Sweeties
Abel Jackson Marvin is in a coma reliving his life’s traumas and triumphs – bushfires, family breakups, heroic rescues, disabling accidents, marriage and fatherhood – amid two constants: his granny’s sweeties ‘to balance out life’s nasties’ and his love for his pinball-playing best friends, Roma and George. Abel must decide whether to keep playing the pinball game of life, with its bumps and ricochets, or let the ball drain away: game over.
The Dragon's Skin
“David Edge is a Chinese Whisper.” So Constable Carol Porter learns while digging into one of Edge’s cold cases, unsure if she’s investigating the crime, the crim or the ex-cop. But to petty thief Ben Bovell, Edge is his only friend, his hero, and the one person he can trust – to keep the promise he extracts from Edge when Ben walks into his daughter’s day-care centre wearing a bomb. In the aftermath, a cast of cops, crims, muscle for hire, sex workers, street kids and bystanders encounter Edge as he too delves into a past he’d prefer was undisturbed. Who is the real David Edge? David Edge is a Chinese whisper …
The Orchid Nursery
The Fifteens of Stone House have reached Attainment: the day a girlie may Beseech for the privilege of serving as a Perfected womanidol in the Orchid Nursery. When vivacious, irreverent Pearl goes missing, pious Mica hopes fervently that her friend has been chosen for Perfection and has not, as she fears, absconded from the State. Mica feels bound by love and duty to seek Pearl – to save her from punishment if she is caught by the Ecumen or, worse, if she has left Civilisation.
Mica’s search will take her into a frightening physical and moral terrain where insurgents and outcasts are still fighting a strategic war against the clerical regime. But first Mica must bring herself to violate the secret–sacred space that is the Orchid Nursery.
Through its youthful protagonists The Orchid Nursery explores sexual politics and the co-opting of religion to perpetrate extremes of misogyny, violence, control and obliteration of the cultural and historical record. It also sees the possibility of hope emerging from the worst kind of dystopia.
Cycle of Learning
After backpacking around Asia, Anne Fitzpatrick spent three months volunteering in rural India. Inspired by the program, she returned to Australia determined to raise funds for the education of young people in Kodaikanal, by cycling around Australia – despite having no experience of either cycling or fundraising.
"Cycle of Learning" is Anne's story about her journey and the people she meets across urban and rural Australia – at Australian schools and church groups where Anne arranged to speak, among the cycling community she found on the road, and the family, friends and total strangers who assisted her.
It is also the story of the people in India involved in the education program for which she was raising funds, as children when she first met them and as young adults when she returns nearly ten years later.
"Cycle of Learning" is a highly readable, funny and inspiring true story.
Darling, impossible!
They say the past is another country but for Australian-born Lily the past is another language: Hungarian, the language of her migrant family, the language of secrets …
But Lily’s family secrets hold the key to her father’s death from a mysterious illness she may have inherited. Just when any conversation becomes interesting, it trails off into Hungarian – a language Lily was never taught. If there’s one thing that Lily’s mother and grandmother agree on, it’s that Hungarian is impossible to learn.
A chance encounter with Eva, the family’s nemesis, leads to illicit Hungarian lessons in Eva’s coffee shop. Between mouthfuls of black forest cake and Hungarian poetry, Lily learns more than she signed up for. Developing feelings for Nixon, the Hungarian but non-Jewish waiter, is a complication she doesn’t need.
Can Lily keep her meetings with Eva and relationship with Nixon a secret long enough to unlock the past and possibly save her own life?