Author Talks: P A Swanborough – The House with the Dragon Tattoo: Episode One

By P A Swanborough.
pamswanborough.com

Cue the intro music! [This week, Eric Satie: Gymnopedie #1]

Hi. My name is Pam. I publish as P A Swanborough; if I used my full name, the covers would have to be laid out in landscape. Or I suppose I could put my name in smaller font… 

Lol no I couldn’t.

I’m a writer living in Western Vic, and a member of Geelong Writers for several years now. I started writing in 2019 when I retired from paid employment, won a nice prize with my second-ever story, and felt it might be useful if I attended the RMIT ‘Professional Writing and Editing’ course in Melbourne, even though I was living at the time on Golden Plains. I specifically wanted to sit in a room with other writerly types and chat over our ideas. I wanted real people and live connection.

That was in February 2020. 

Oh well, we all learnt to zoom. Quite quickly, all things considered. 

My first novel came out in 2024, and my latest publication – a miscellaneous collection of urban microfiction, short story and various pencil-based or wordy doodles – was launched at GW’s June meeting. 

The novel, Red Gifts in the Garden of Stones, is a literary fiction in the magical realism style and has been described in one review as ‘the loveliest book I have ever read’ which is awesome and humbling. The miscellany, Things with Teeth by Moonlight, has prompted a text message: ‘Adoring your brutal book by the way. Stunning. Sipping it like a bottle of absinth’. Which is also awesome because (1) that’s exactly what I had in mind, and (2) the sender is a lecturer in writing …

But therein lies my dilemma as an author: lovely, brutal, and a range of responses in between. Because? 

Because I’ve been reading voraciously for over half a century. I have a head full of styles, themes, genres and tropes. And words: so many words and all of them clamouring to be given an outing. I currently have several WIPs in various stages of gestation: a sequel to Red Gifts…(magic realism); an absurdist political intrigue; a zombie sci-fi noir gay comedy romance (it’ll be fine, trust me); and a narrative non-fiction that I may not be able to finish because it’s too close. And then there’s all these faerie tales I’ve tinkered with. And a YA planned, forgotten, planned again … The very idea of building a marketing umbrella to cover even two of these errant babies is daunting.

If I were twenty years younger there’d be no problem. The whole idea of career development is to feel your way through whatever interests you and as you find your own voice and an audience, work into that. Take time. Learn, experiment, grow in skill and endeavour… hmmm. 

There’s a very interesting phenomenon called ‘Ten Years of Silence’ which was developed by a cognitive psychologist named John Hayes researching the great classical composers; he found that all of them composed their first masterpiece about ten years after they finished their training/apprenticeship. Hence ‘silence.’ Further research shows the same applies to writers and visual artists. Weird/cool, huh? 

But also: obvious. It takes time to develop, find your feet and really apply what you have learned, before getting fully into stride. If you have a masterpiece inside you, it’s brewing slowly.

But. Ten years? At my age? Oh well. Here I am with whatever time may be available. I better get a move on. Focus.

Focus. Yes, that. Did I focus this week? Did I write anything this week? No. No of course I didn’t. I did a pile of paid and unpaid work, then drove to Warrnambool.

I drove to Warrnambool on an unfamiliar road. I drove after having a coffee with a new friend who had asked me ‘how do you write?’ and ‘when do you write?’

On that drive to Warrnambool, I considered:

• How do I feel being in an unfamiliar landscape. What if I were running from something frightening or beloved? Running toward something wonderful or terrifyingly unavoidable? If I had to seek shelter immediately, or if I needed to hide, where would I go?
• What was the story behind that strange building, this once-beautiful homestead, those clusters of European trees in a flat grassy plain?
• I talked to myself about the cut of the horizon, the colour shift from sunlight to rain, the way ocean and creeks looked when glimpsed through trees.
• I listened to a mother love-scolding her adult son, a sad old man talking to himself, the café staff giving each other encouragement; I listened to birds and the news and wind in the pine trees (for which the word is ‘psithurism’ if you need to know). 
• I sank into the wording of a text that a friend, anxious about forthcoming surgery, had just sent. And I probed the many ways a lost friendship has upset my balance, months after the event, much as I believe one feels the space where a body part had once been that has now been amputated.
• On the way home, the sunset burnt in my rear-view mirror as the sky ahead was greying, darkening.

But no. No, I haven’t written anything this week. 

You can read some of what I have done here: http://www.pamswanborough.com 

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PS: The house with the dragon tattoo? When the previous owners, expert in DIY-By-Sledgehammer but very little else, tore down the wallpaper in my house they discovered a charcoal drawing on the wall: a dragon with the word ‘cave’ (Latin for ‘beware’) written above him, and the date ‘Aug 6 1905’ written below him. I have no problem admitting that I bought this derelict delight largely because of that dragon tattoo. Some noodnik drew in chalk on it in 1980 but, well, even the Colosseum has 2000-year-old graffiti.